A dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month. Only nineteen percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.
Taking its place is the Internet which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for the post-literate society of American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. According to "Abandoning the News," published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine percent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight percent said that they would rely on a newspaper.
Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two percent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter. Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newpaper business have.
Public trust in newspapers has been slipping at least as quickly as the bottom line. A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty percent of Americans said they could believe "all or most" media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven percent just five years ago.
"Less than one in five believe what they read in print," the 2007 "State of the News Media" report, issued by the Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded. Vastly more Americans believe in flying saucers and 9/11 conspiracy theories than believe in the notion of balanced mainstream news media.
Today's consumers "want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened...And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community--to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet people who think about the world in similar or different ways," said Rupert Murdoch, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in April 2005.
The birth of the blogosphere, with its ability to bypass the big media institutions and conduct conversations within a like-minded community, represents a genuinely democratic discourse. The Web provides a powerful platform that enables the creation of communities; distribution is frictionless, swift and cheap. All that's necessary is a decent Internet connection.
The Internet offers bloggers immediate information about which stories interest readers, provoke comments, are shared with friends and generate the greatest number of Web searches. An Internet-based blog is alive in a way that is impossible for paper and ink. Beyond the publication of the occasional letter to the editor, the role of the newspaper reader was defined as purely passive.
Bloggers link to whatever they believe to be the best story on a given topic. Then they repurpose the story with catchy, often a liberal-leaning headline and provide a comment section beneath it, where readers can chime in. Blogs are less about information and more about conversation; the ability to discuss, deliberate on and debate various perspectives in a manner that moves the conversation toward consensus.
Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as "a nation talking to itself." Today, it is not unusual for a short blog post to inspire a thousand posts from readers--posts that go off in their own directions unrelated to the topic that inspired them. The blogosphere relies on its readership for quality control.
Yet, coarse user comments are a fact of life on the Web. In the rough-and-tumble blogosphere, conversations on even mundane topics can quickly spiral into vituperation and personal attacks. Despite this, businesses and politicans have embraced blogging as a way to engage the public on everything from policy to products and services. While official corporate blogs typically display the names of contributors, anonymous commentary is widespread on the Web. The cloak of an Internet handle may free writers and readers to air controversial opinions. "I think there's very much a tendency to be reckless when you're posting anonymously--and to be more biased than you normally would be," says Dennis D. Crouch, a law professor at the University of Missouri.
Today, almost all serious newspapers are scrambling to adapt themselves to the technological and community-building opportunities offered by digital news delivery, including individual blogs, video reports and "chat" opportunities for readers. Some will likely survive this moment of technological transformation in different form, cutting staff while increasing their depth and presence online. However, the key question to be asked and answered is:
How do you plan to get your "news" tomorrow?
Source: Out of Print, The New Yorker, March 31, 2008
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