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Surviving a dying profession
Published August 19, 2007
Apparently, I am in a dying profession.
In a conversation with my father the other day, he commented about the falling tide of print journalism and the decreasing cultural cache of the newspaper. It seems like my job might disappear into the ether at any second, leaving me without profession, purpose or extra cash for comic books.
Gee, thanks a lot Dad, that was a real uplifting father-son moment.
Still, his doomsday prophesy is not unusual these days, as pundits and analysts try to outdo each other on how doomed they can predict the fate of newspapers to be. We’ll be gone in the next 50 years, or is that 20, or 10, or five or perhaps next week? I’m still waiting for an analyst to announce newspapers ceased to exist three years ago and everything since then has been a mass hallucination (including the very page you’re reading right now! Spooky!).
While I don’t have any credentials as an analyst (i.e., person who gets paid to guess) and I haven’t seen any burning bushes lately, I’m not quite as worried about the eventual fate of newspapers. It’s true that rack sales are down for many prominent papers, subscriptions are dropping around the country and advertisers are abandoning our pages, but I don’t think we’re in too much trouble...yet.
Newspapers have faced predicted extinction before: radio was going to kill us, TV was going to kill us, now the Internet is going to kill us, but we’re hung on so far. Part of the reason for our continued existence is simply entrenchment; we were already here, so we simply rode out the storm until things calmed down again.
The other reason, in my humble opinion, is we still do this journalism thing better than our myriad competitors.
While TV newscasts are seen as THE news by many people and Internet bloggers continue to try and take over the print reporter’s role, newspaper journalism is still the most extensive, in depth coverage of the majority of news stories, especially on local issues.
After all, CNN can cover a national tragedy faster and more often than The New York Times can, but the average newspaper story generally contains twice as much information as a three- to five-minute TV news brief. And CNN, or for that matter the small Atlanta stations, doesn’t bother to cover local school board meetings, or report on the tax rate for the next year or tell you that Foster’s granddaughter just graduated from college.
It’s true that newspapers around the country are scrambling to ride out this wave of supposed obsolescence. Most papers are on the Internet, striving to find a revenue stream on the Web to make the wired experiment work for them. Newspapers are continually striving to find new readers and keep the old ones (BUY THE WALTON TRIBUNE!) through subtle means.
My profession might be on shaky ground right now, as large papers cut staff positions and work to lower costs, but in the long run, newspapers will survive in some form, if only because the need will always be there.
After all, you don’t want to be stuck with just Fox News, do you?
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