By Joel Thurtell
I’m not the only crank who thinks newspapers have screwed themselves into the rut they’re now vociferously complaining about, giving a disproportionate amount of ink to their own woes rather than recording the financial grievances of others..
Jack Shafer in Slate wonders why we don’t hear more about the woes of other industries “typhooned” by what he calls “the digital slay-ride”.
He lists extinct jobs and businesses from telephone operators to typesetters, bookstores, travel agencies, record stores — why, even pimps have been pre-empted by cell phones and the Internet.
For newspapers, much of the trouble has been self-inflicted, a combination of chutzpah and hubris. Why, for instance, did the New York Times think it needed a stylish skyscraper to put out what is, after all, just a newspaper?
The answer, I think, is bubble thinking. We had a real estate bubble. Brokers, bankers and lots of fee-charging lawyers, accountants, securities raters and such were making megabucks.
We didn’t all make big bucks, but to some degree, we all got infected. Why did my hometown church decide it needed to build a fancy new building when its once-million-dollar endowment was nearing zero? Now the congregation is scrambling to meet its mortgage payment.
Mania.
We thought the law of gravity had been suspended.
Panics are propelled by the same manic furies.
But they go the wrong way.
Shafer wonders why newspapers, many of which still make respectable profits, didn’t bankroll research into ways to monetize the Web for their industry.
Why do the hard thinking when you can pocket cash?
In his 1987 book “The Reckoning” about the demise of Detroit’s automakers, David Halberstam described how Ford Motor Company elevated whiz kids like Robert McNamara to prime status and demoted its engineering and manufacturing arms. It got so Detroit car-makers could recruit Harvard MBAs for their high-status finance departments, but no scientist or engineer from a top school would want to work for the Big Three when they demeaned manufacturing as if that wasn’t their life’s blood.
Anyway, NASA and the space program beckoned.
Well, nobody has accused newspaper magnates of being rocket scientists. Shafer describes newspapers wantonly slashing quality, yet expected customers to keep paying for their substandard products.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize what the papers are hawking is getting worse every minute.
It takes chutzpah, or is it hubris, to think people will keep buying it.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
Young people never have been voracious readers of newspapers. They’re too into their immediate social lives–texting, the opposite (or same) sex, sporting contests, etc. It’s when they become entrenched in a community and have to pay taxes and have kids in school they start to care about news. So, wouldn’t newspapers cater to that demographic, which, presumably, has more discretionary income than teenagers? Plus, many full-time workers spend all day at a computer anyway, so why would they want to spend more time in front of one reading news when they could sit on the sofa, throne or whatever and devour their news that way? But hey, I’m old (almost 50).