Not With A Bang But A Whimper

The Cutting Edge of Journalistic Technology

I went with Thing Two (he survived his face plant off the roof of the car just fine, thank you) to the local fishwrap/newspaper's offices as part of his Cub Scout stuff.

We got a tour of the building, which was the old regional headquarters of the New Haven Railway.  It was a beautiful building, mostly brick with some Italian tilework on the ceiling and a massive clock tower that looms over the city.

In the lobby is a replica of the Pulitzer Prize they won for uncovering a scandal back in 1939.  There is another prize for coverage of a scandal in the early '80s.  There were no prizes for the scandals of the '90s or '00s.  John Rowland was not uncovered by the paper.  And the sordid sex scandals surrounding Giordano apparently weren't broken by the paper.

Or, maybe, it was because Rowland and Giordano were part of the Republican machine in the city and the paper was a reliable organ of the GOP - and still is.  You read the editorial page at your peril.  There is not a lot of diversity of opinion when the "liberal" columnist is probably George Will.  But this is one of the more reliably Republican areas in Connecticut, so it's probably not a surprise that the paper would reflect that.

What I found more interesting was the milieu of the place.  It seemed sad and sickly.  Despite the beauty of the architecture, the space felt old and tired.  Yellowed like an old page of newsprint.  I saw a few computers that seemed to date back before the millennium, though most seemed only a little out of date.

I realize a lot has been said about the death of the newspaper industry, and I can't say that my visit did anything to dissuade me that newspapers - as they currently exist - are doomed.

But I also can't figure out what will replace them.

Our town paper comes out once a week and is put together in a little storefront on Main Street, and it's a piece of garbage.  The writing is atrocious, usually achieving confusion when clarity is needed.  The lede is often buried, the important information left out and the quotes mangled.  We have a fairly dysfunctional government in our town, where the budget is voted on by 20% of the voters, most of whom are ancient and inclined to defund the school system.  I can't help but believe that the incredible incompetence of the town paper contributes to the maladies of town governance.

Which is my way of saying that good reporting and good journalism are essential to a functioning democratic society.  As Jefferson put it (I'm paraphrasing poorly), "I would rather have news papers without government than government without newspapers."

So, how do we preserve the important role that newspapers play while acknowledging that the old way of running a paper is dying?

While waiting in a health clinic this past Saturday I had hard copy of the Times, which I usually don't read. It was a wonderful experience to leaf through the paper, better than opening the Times homepage and seeing their headlines, I could flip through the pages and articles I might have missed would catch my eye.

There is going to be something lost when papers are wholly online.  In many ways we are going to lose the generality of the paper and replace it with the specificity of the Internet.  We will reinforce the echo chamber.

But then again, the local daily paper really isn't engaging in debate either.  They run columns by Mona Charen, Thomas Sowell, Sean Hannity and Cal Thomas, just like they always have, and their readership - increasingly minority in a minority dominated city - tunes them out.  Newspapers weren't murdered and didn't commit suicide in an act of integrity.  They died a Darwinian death from their own myopia and incompetence.

The local rag hasn't won a Pulitzer in a long, long time.

I don't know where we go from here, or what sort of system we will have when it is all said and done.

But walking through the dingy, yellowed offices yesterday made me sad, and I don't even like the paper.

What a waste.