How to Save Newspapers
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Ted Rall
Ten years ago, the shuttering of The Tampa Tribune shocked Media World. Last month, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette disappeared, turning western Pennsylvania into a news desert. Now The Washington Post is entering a death spiral. Hell, D.C. never got over the Washington Star.
We remember what we lost recently, not what we lost in total. When Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013 (with promises not to do what I’m about to describe), his newsroom employed 2,500 people. Last week, there were 800. Thanks to Bezos, they’re down to 500.
The print newspaper model that drives American journalism has been in crisis all my life. I was born in 1963, the year when daily newspaper circulation peaked. It’s been all decline ever since — first due to television, then corporatization, and competition from the now-defunct alternative weeklies, bean counters’ obsession with short-term profits over long-term investment, and now the internet.
This is a problem, partly because “democracy dies in darkness,” and also because dead-tree papers generate most of the original local reporting that gets picked up online and by broadcast outlets. No print, no news. No news, and people die because they don’t get tornado warnings, and businesses die because they can’t rely on accurate information when they make decisions.
So — what to do?
Most journalists devote their careers to one or two aspects of our profession. I have watched the collapse from more front-row seats than perhaps anyone else: reporter, pundit, spot illustrator, syndicated cartoonist and columnist, art director, newspaper editor, magazine editor, syndicate executive, radio and television commentator.
Everyone who works in and cares about journalism has thought long and hard about what they’d do differently (better) than the publishers and editors who’ve proven themselves unable or unwilling to steer the business of selling news, opinion and features through the shoals of the online era into the calm seas of profitability. Many of those observers are smarter than me. Few have the insight you can only acquire from having observed a situation from many different perspectives, as I have.
One of my unusual journalistic experiences was my role as plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit against a major newspaper. Cynical from birth, I was nevertheless shocked by the depth of institutional corruption I encountered at the Los Angeles Times.
In brief: I was the Times’ cartoonist. Broke and desperate for cash, the Times’ parent company sold a controlling interest in itself to the LAPD police union’s multibillion-dollar pension fund. The police chief — effectively the boss, even though most of us at the Times didn’t know that yet — took umbrage at my cartoons about him, which portrayed him as a corrupt, mustachioed lout, which he was, and ordered the paper to fire me. They did, and tried to smear me so I couldn’t work elsewhere. I sued.
When this mess hit the headlines, one prescient commentator observed that the story was at least as much about the meltdown of print media as it was about corruption. Had the Times been profitable, he pointed out, they wouldn’t have literally sold out to the cops. Money corrupts; poverty corrupts absolutely.
Rall v. Times was a rollercoaster. All the experts said getting past the cesspool of intertwined political interests in the LA courts would be tough, but if I won, I’d be awarded millions. Maybe tens of millions.
One judge advised them to settle because “the damage award could be catastrophic.”
“Define ‘catastrophic,’ your honor,” their lawyer asked.
“Requiring dissolution.”
During one of the high points of my battle, my team entertained what they considered a possibility: that, like Hulk Hogan and Gawker, I might get a jury verdict so massive that the Times would go bankrupt — and I would wind up owning the fourth-biggest paper in the country.
I didn’t want the paper; I wanted justice. But this scenario did force me to consider, more thoughtfully than a random media nerd musing over drinks, how to save a print dinosaur.
One of my Big Ideas was unique to the Times. If The New York Times was the national newspaper of news and culture, The Washington Post was the national newspaper of politics, and The Wall Street Journal was the national newspaper of finance, the Los Angeles Times should be the national newspaper of entertainment. Movies, obviously, but also music and the gaming industry. Entertainment, along with war, is what America still does best.
My other Big Ideas apply to just about any major legacy paper, including LA and, the outfit currently and most disturbingly on the ropes, the Post.
Print pays newspaper owners many times more per subscriber than online, yet legacy publishers refuse to give their best customers a premium product. If you’re enough of a news junkie to still subscribe to print, you keep up with all the breaking news as it pops up on your phone — and you usually get the online edition included for free. Stupidly, tomorrow’s print edition is today’s online paper — basically word for word.
No! Not a single article should be duplicated between digital and print. Online news should only be for breaking news — what just happened. Print newspapers should only be for long-form explainers and analysis — why what happened yesterday and last week matters and what it means. Print and online are two different media products that serve entirely discrete purposes. Your cellphone is perfectly suited for short bursts of information. When it’s time for a 5,000-word essay about the civil war in Sudan, readers prefer paper they can take to the bath.
Why don’t press barons give the people what they want? In my experience, there are people with money and people with brains, and they are rarely the same. Bezos figured out how to scale a delivery business from his garage to a transnational multibillion corporation, but he couldn’t figure out how to transition a legacy institution like the Post into the 21st century, beginning by resisting the urge to interfere with its editorial alignment.
Some papers have moved from noble old Art Deco palaces to modest boxes in the suburbs, but I ask: Why must a newspaper have an office at all? Production can be done in the suburbs. Reporters can write from homes and cafes and wherever their stories are; use the saved funds to hire foreign correspondents and regional reporters.
Newspapers have been grappling with newsroom diversity (or lack thereof) for decades. They’re missing the perspective of the working class, which is why they were stunned at Donald Trump’s win and still don’t understand their own readers in their own country. Readers cancel publications they can’t relate to culturally. Newsflash: A Black graduate of Harvard typically has more in common with a white classmate than with a Black high school dropout.
I’d stop requiring that new reporters have a master’s degree from top journalism schools that give little financial aid and only attract children of the wealthy, and work on socioeconomic diversity that truly reflects the demographics of the community. This may mean laying off some rich kids, but hey, they’ve got trust funds to fall back upon.
I’d learn from the internet. It’s opinionated, profane, wild, unrestrained, because that’s where the clicks — the people — are. The hoary conceit of the “family newspaper” where you can’t print an F-bomb, even when the president says it, is embarrassing; worse, it conveys to everyone under age 75 that your publication is not for or about their real lives.
About opinion: Social media proves that readers engage with strident, abrasive, loud, controversial expression. As if to disabuse us of any possibility that papers aren’t run by idiots, newspapers are getting rid of their opinion sections entirely, judging them to be too much for our tender little souls.
Which is why publishers won’t read this.