No Bailout for Newspapers: Dinosaurs, Meet Capitalism and the First Amendment
Reader Comments
No bailout for newspapers
The beauty of America and the system of free enterprise is that, while you're free to succeed beyond your wildest dreams, you're also free to fail.
In the 200 plus years of our existence, this will not have been the first failure of a business, and it won't be the last. We'll be all right.
Seen it coming.
I expect to see most dailies expire with a whimper. Weeklies will replace them, mostly for local advertising. Most will not be good examples of journalism. There may be an opportunity for a few national papers to flourish.
Deep investigative journalism is in serious trouble, actually has been for some time.
Ronald J. Riley,
Speaking only on my own behalf.
Affiliations:
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Executive Director - www.InventorEd.org - RJR at InvEd.org
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President - Alliance for American Innovation
Caretaker of Intellectual Property Creators on behalf of deceased founder Paul Heckel
Washington, DC
Direct (810) 597-0194 / (202) 318-1595 - 9 am to 8 pm EST.
looming opportunity
When/if a big city newspaper closes, a golden opportunity will appear.
One of the seldom-mentioned but most important consumers of newspaper services is the local business person. Advertising in a good, community-focused newspaper works great.
An enthusiastic group of newspaper people who love their community and are dedicated to helping local business people succeed can do very well publishing a newspaper. Just ask the publishers of the locally owned newspapers in communities across the country. Most of them are doing just fine (a livelier economy certainly wouldn't hurt).
These newspapers are not just serving the business community. They are keeping their citizens informed about what is going on with their city government and in their schools and neighborhoods. They are doing their jobs as journalists while making money, capitalism's golden rule.
It doesn't take a big city newspaper to "do journalism." Newspapers in smaller cities and towns all over the country prove that every day and every week.
Now, if they all will stop giving away their product on the internet, they've got a bright future.
There would be no point of having newspapers
if they were subsidized by government. That would be bad practice AND destroy the news. But, as a society, we will miss the newspapers if they go down as predicted by some.
The trouble is that what's likely to go down is the best of investigative reporting and editorial opinion (the expensive part) while we KEEP tabloid-like stories, the informercial-like ads for silly stuff and the sports pages. There will still be some ink on some paper, most of it making us dumber, I'm afraid.
The first ammendment
This guy writes as though there still was a first ammendment. It went (as far as newspapers go) the way of the buggy whip quite some time ago. If there is anyone out there who can make a credible case for the objectivity of The New York Times, or the Boston Globe, I would like to meet him. More than anything else that has happened, the abandonment of journalistic principles in reporting news has contributed to the downfall of newspapers. Yes the internet has had an impact, but TV had an impact on Radio. Radio found what it did best and stuck with it to keep its importance in our lives. Rather than do that, these idealogically slanted,(slanted hell,cliffed) organs of opinion ignored the demise of their economic power, thinking that "it couldn't happen to them".
Penny Press?
The beauty of the Penny Press, was that we didn't have to be wealthy, to have our papers printed, but advertisers could print them for us. Now, anyone can publish to the Internet, without the costs that advertisers would help with, but we're left with the question, of how to tell which journalists are worth reading, if any can justify publishing.
What function is there, for the proffessional writer, or the tavern bard?
