Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Best Southwest Citizen on the decline of the newspaper

By Brian Allen of Best Southwest Citizen

Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger has an interesting column about the impact blogs are having on newspapers. He acknowledges how much harder the Internet is making the job of all newspaper journalists. But he feels that “bloggers” will never replace “real newspaper journalists.”

I recommend you read it at the link I’ve provided, but Mulshine has missed one important point. A number of displaced newspaper journalists like myself are entering the blogosphere and taking our readers with us. When you combine us with the numerous citizen journalists out there, it’s really easy to start blowing holes in a newspaper industry that is traditionally slow to embrace change. The ink still runs through our veins, even if we’re no longer using ink to produce our creative works.

We’re not doing it because we expect to make tons of money, that’s a dream we gave up a long time ago. We’re doing it because God help us, we’ve developed an unhealthy love of meetings. We’re doing it because it’s what we’ve done for years and because people have asked us to.

It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is suffering from hard economic times like everyone is. When the Dallas Morning News is caught fudging their numbers, you know things are bad. The recession has led to a lot of veteran reporters losing jobs that aren’t coming back. It’s sad because these reporters are the best commodity their papers have and they won’t be replaced. They can’t be replaced. The bean counters making these decisions think readers are so naive they won’t notice the resulting dip in quality at these papers.

I can’t wait to see what we can do while not worrying about what an advertiser will think about a story, whether there will be layoffs or any of the other thousand concerns that have crept into journalism that don’t belong there.

And don’t even get me started on how many “real newspaper journalists” have gotten caught plagarizing or just plain making up details in stories. I can think of about 200 bloggers I trust way more than I trust Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass.

Contrary to what Mulshine and many other newspaper types would have you to believe, everyone at the helm of a blog is not an uninformed idiot. Nor is everyone at a newspaper desk a genius. If they were, the industry wouldn’t be in the shape it currently is.

That’s not to say I won’t be sad to see the newspaper industry go away or at least have its role drastically diminished. And I really don’t ever expect to see the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or even the Dallas Morning News go completely away. The Sporting News, Hollywood Reporter and numerous other papers are delivering “digital editions” to their readers right now, preparing for the day when no one has the time or desire to read through a daily paper. But the irony here is that when that day comes, it won’t be bloggers that killed the newspaper industry. When the newspapers undertake that murder investigation, many will need to look no further than their own masthead to find the culprit.

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