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Less Is Not More
- Why do newspapers alienate their most loyal readers?
- The American Media Misdiagnosis
- Save the Press
Lisa Anderson, Columbia Journalism Review
Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Will Shapira
When my son’s first college roommate turned out to be from Chicago, I was delighted. His family had long subscribed to the Chicago Tribune, where I worked. I thought it gave us an immediate connection. Less than two months later, they unsubscribed. This was shortly after a drastic redesign at the paper in September 2008. The roommate’s family said there was nothing in the Tribune to read anymore.
That wasn’t quite true. There was still plenty of information in the paper. But there were fewer stories, produced by fewer reporters. The stories were relentlessly local and, increasingly, came in the form of charts, graphs, maps, statistics, large fonts, and large photos—a sort of newspaper-Internet-TV amalgam that seemed more like something to be absorbed than read. For the roommate’s family—professional people who wanted sophisticated stories that included the world beyond Chicago—it wasn’t enough.
Related:
The American Media Misdiagnosis, Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com
It’s widely agreed that there are a number of factors dragging down American newspapers, but a reason rarely mentioned is that the national news media failed in its most important job – to serve as a watchdog for the people.
Save the Press, Timothy Egan, New York Times | NY
Those who revel in the life-threatening trauma that newspapers are going through miss the point. People are not deserting these complex and contradictory summaries of our collective existence. It's the business model that needs to be figured out.
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