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Newspaper dinosaur

ANOTHER NEWSPAPER FAILS TO COME TO GRIPS WITH THE END OF TRADITIONAL MEDIA

By The Cournalist, Citizen Journalists of Santa Cruz, CA, USA, February 21, 2009
Some people just never learn.

In an editorial this past week, the Chicago Sun-Times touted its unraveling of Sen. Roland Burris’s shadowy fund raising for ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich as proof that traditional newspapers will endure.

The facts report a much different story. Newspapers in their current form are dangerously close to extinction. A perfect storm of paralyzed housing and car markets and a volatile economy have destroyed advertising revenue for papers across the country. The wild success of Internet companies like Ebay and Craigslist have only contributed to the mess. Newspaper ad revenue fell 14 percent in the first half of 2008, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Future outlooks aren’t so optimistic.

In response to this disaster, papers have been forced into massive editorial layoffs, required furloughs for those remaining and other cutbacks. Many cities that have traditionally housed two dailies now have one. Some of these cities fear they’ll soon have zero.

Here in Santa Cruz, the storm has been just as visible over the last few years. The Sentinel has scrapped its printing press, relocated to Scotts Valley and slashed its editorial staff. Because of these cutbacks, Editor Don Miller recently found himself trumpeting the paper’s first investigative piece “in a few years.”

Still, the Chicago Sun-Times thought it reasonable to attack the emergence of alternative news sources like nonprofit papers, blogs and citizen journals.

“No army of bloggers, no TV or radio station, no nonprofit journalism collective, no foundation-supported task force of political and government reporters will ever do the job so well,” they wrote.

Maybe so. But that same army of “bloggers in pajamas” — as the paper later referred to them —broke news that the head of NASA had lied on his resume, banking lobbyists were trying to payoff members of Congress and the police chief in San Diego was lying about crime statistics to cover up the city’s failing police department.

In reality, these fresh news sources are necessary to fill a growing void. That’s not to say professional journalists have no role in the future reporting of news. To the contrary, trained writers are essential to deciphering the nuances of the country’s daily news. But there’s no question that as the void grows we’ll need new and innovative ways to cover the news.

The Chicago Sun-Times and other media dinosaurs must face these facts. The age of the traditional newspaper is coming to an end, and the dawn of a more diversified media is at hand. The papers who accept this fact will survive and the ones who don’t will be lamenting the good ole’ years over unemployment.

Ironically, the Chicago Sun-Times said it best when it wrote, “Competition brings out the best in everybody.” Surely they’re not afraid of a little competition from the people who have previously been confined to reading the papers.

In reality, I sense these graying dinosaurs are finally coming to grips with the fact that they might one day be the “bloggers in pajamas,” they so dubiously referred too. My advice to the editors of the Chicago Sun-Times: Best hit the local Wal-Mart for a new onesie before they’ve sold out!