peter martin

OK, let me preface this by saying I appreciate where Cardin is coming from. His goal is to preserve the segment of the newspaper industry focused on providing information and coverage to the average citizen, ie, the local and regional papers. He states pretty clearly that this isn’t designed to provide aid to the conglomerates and national chains, though I wonder how they would differentiate.

Ignoring the obvious questions about local newspapers that are overtly political being granted 501(c)(3) status (and local newspapers are certainly NOT immune to partisanship, in some cases outFoxing Fox News), I just have to ask the obvious question: why are newspapers so important?

For a little background, I’m not exactly asking this question out of the blue. I worked for a regional newspaper in college, considered making a career out of journalism afterwards, and worked on the other side of the table in corporate communications for a global financial firm. I’m not discounting the very real contributions that under-appreciated journalists do on a daily basis; in fact, I’ve been railing for years about the hidden purges of copy editors and other back-room staff at profit-conscious newspapers. An average article in a NATIONAL paper contains a half-dozen errors that a decent copy editor would catch, yet they’ve been shuttled into early retirement or worse by publishers conscious of the low reading comprehension of the average customer. Newspapers should be improving our grammar, vocabulary, and usage, not dumbing it down - but again, that’s another debate.

No, what I’m asking here is something much simpler: why are we focusing on the distribution network (printed paper deliveries/newstand) rather than the content creators? The best-case scenario for the papers in any of these proposals is propping them up for another few years before they’re completely overtaken by digital delivery. Isn’t it time to let demand dictate the survival of the delivery network?

This would allow us to focus more energy and attention on the truly invaluable resource here, the journalists. Marginalized, under-appreciated, and forgotten, these are the men and women doing the actual work that is so valuable and necessary. Every year their numbers dwindle and the quality of the new blood diminishes as intelligent candidates take stock of a dying industry and go elsewhere. Shouldn’t we be more worried about the overall health and quality of this eternal resource than a dying business model?

Newspapers will eventually be as dead as the telegraph or the town crier. I just hope that there is still some shared journalistic knowledge to pass down by the time they are completely gone.