I've been a newspaper person for as long as I can remember. When I was very young, Sundays consisted of church, meals, and going through not one, not two, but three newspapers: the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Newspapers did more to educate me about what was going on around me than school ever did, in part because newspapers were far more entertaining than school ever was (apologies to all but a handful of my teachers). When I was in school, I worked on student newspapers, even having a column in one of them. When I moved to New York, I purchased all three of the city's daily papers, and sometimes some of its more specialized publications. I continued to read at least the Times, as well as the Sun, when I moved back to Maryland, and have done so well into the Internet age.
Ah, the Internet.
It's been no friend to newspapers, certainly not as we have traditionally imagined them to be. In the Net's early days, newspapers published sites on the Web along with their hard-copy editions. The limits of technology were such that an online presence could peacefully co-exist with a businesses' bricks-and-mortar operation peacefully and profitably. But, as those limits started disappearing, the convenience of getting everything online for free (except for ads) began to outweigh the value of getting news as a physical product, just as online shopping began to wear out the personal value of going to a store to shop.
Unfortunately, while people were willing to pay for online shopping, they weren't willing to pay for online news quite so much. They got used to the idea of "free news online," and most attempts to establish paywalls for online access ended in failure. And so, slowly but surely, newspapers have largely disappeared from the landscape, or were bought by large, physically remote corporations that economize by using syndicated content and freelance writers. The few career journalists that remain are often reduced to begging in social media for their followers to buy newspapers, reminding me of the dark days of Broadway attendance when marquees frequently advertised a show called "Just for the fun of it … SEE A BROADWAY SHOW!"
Now, as a preservationist, I'm as sympathetic to appeals to tradition as anyone can be. But, likewise as a preservationist, I also know that saving the past, or the past way of doing things, often requires some degree of adaptation to changing circumstances. And there are reasons why newspapers, particularly the ones in major cities, might not be well-equipped to be adaptable.
Ever heard of the expression "freedom of the press belongs to the person that owns one"? Well, it has always been true. Freedom of the press is the only right guaranteed by the First Amendment that also is, to some degree, a property right. You can't have a newspaper without the means to print one, as well as to gather and write stories. In consequence, as the nation grew and its cities along with it, owning and publishing a newspaper became an increasingly expensive proposition. By the turn of the previous century, if not before, newspapers were for the most part published by large, well-heeled corporations--corporations that tended toward the kind of politics that protects those with money: conservatism.
And the conservative people who run these corporations don't take kindly to being accused of promoting liberalism. This, however, has been the bane of American journalism for the past half-century--to be accused of "liberal bias" by political operatives who understand that the only way conservatism can win in the United States is by "working the referees." In this case, that means accusing all of American journalism of representing a brand of politics that could only be ascribed at best to three sources of journalism: the Times, the Post, and CBS News. And, because of the endless repetition of this argument, combined with the fear of being seen as "unfair," the argument eventually achieved its desired effect. Even the three "liberal" sources of news just mentioned began chasing their tails to achieve the conservative brand of "fairness," meaning 100% favorable coverage of conservatives and 100% negative coverage of liberals. Along came Fox News in the 1990s, and that was the last nail in the coffin of liberal journalism.
Speaking of 100%, I am 100% convinced that, more than any other single factor, this neutering of the press in the performance of what should always be its real job: telling the truth, and letting the public weigh the question of "fairness" for itself, rather than having it resolved exclusively by conservatives has led American politics in a straight line of corruption, from bad to worse to totally off the scales, from Reagan to the Bush family to T****. Faced with 40 years of corrupt behavior by Trump, where the due diligence practically does itself, and endlessly exaggerating the seriousness of Hillary Clinton's use as Secretary of State of a private server for her e-mail, what does the press do? Focus on the e-mail! Which has just been established by T****'s own State Department to have been a non-story in the first place.
Nearly three years of unrelenting corruption by T**** and company, the American press has, to some degree, shaken off the fear of being tagged as "biased" by self-interested wingers who don't care in the first instance about the proper role of the press in a free society. But that hasn't done enough to reverse the downward trend in hard-copy circulation. And online advertising, while it provides a revenue stream, doesn't provide enough of one to sustain what I believe would do the most to promote journalism, offline or on: a return to publishing the unvarnished truth about events in the world and at home, without fear or favor.
So, whither a free press?
Perhaps the answer can be found here, in the trend of college newspapers to pick up the slack of local coverage when the general-circulation newspapers in their towns fold. Maybe this could be the start of a new, non-profit business model for newspapers, one that would allow them to be supported by donations (with transparency about the identities of donors). Perhaps that would enable newspapers to not merely survive, but to flourish and to, above all, be completely free to publish not what some of us think we should know, but what all of us need to know.
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