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FOR NEWSPAPERS
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Are we actually watching
the end of an industry?
of TheColumnists.com
Remember Alvin Toffler? He’s the guy who, back in 1970, came up with the term “Future Shock.” I was a working newspaperman then, completely unaware just how much that term (and Toffler’s book) would apply to me.
I guess I was lucky. I managed to complete a newspaper career just before “Future Shock” began its attack on the newspaper business. That attack may still be in its early stages, but everywhere I can see the bodies piled up. Holding onto a job has now become the prime achievement of the journalist class. But even the survivors never know what the next day may bring.
At The San Jose Mercury News, from which I retired some years back, a group of reporters and editors returned from vacation recently to learn that they had nothing to return to. Their jobs were now on a buy-out list or just gone.
But the same is true at Newsday in New York where I spent many years, and The Cleveland Press where I started. Well, that newspaper is gone. The Boston Herald American, another old home, where the broadsheet became a tabloid called The Herald, staffers keep leaving and maybe the paper will. And so on.
I was watching a sad little tale on PBS a couple of days ago about The Los Angeles Times which is down to about 50 per cent of its staff. There, a former real estate guy named Zell, who also bought Newsday, has decimated the staff and circulation and hopes to turn it all into a paper of about 500,000 readers where it once had 1,200,000. And of course the paper’s reputation, once a challenge to The New York Times and the definitive voice of West Coast America, is sinking rapidly. Talk about future shock.
I really don’t know if we are going through a phase, brought on by that most futuristic of changes, the computer, or we are saying goodbye to an entire industry.
Just how sad is it? Well, we are certainly not saying goodbye to news. The Internet has a lot of it and delivered much more rapidly than I could have imagined in my early newspaper days. But who is going to gather all the news we used to chase. When I go to the Internet now, much of what I’m reading is coming from newspapers. I check The New York Times first. But should the Times itself begin laying off large numbers of staff, that will resound on the Internet, too.
There are many new outlets created for the Internet only, but how reliable are they and can the writers and editors earn a living? Blogs are something new. TheColumnists.com is one such. It’s nice to have around, along with the Huffington Post—which both blogs and reports-- and so many others. But who is gathering the news? Who is doing investigative journalism? Is the future of the written word going in the direction of TV’s talking head shows: lots of opinion, little reporting .
Out here in Silicon Valley, I hear that
lots of former Mercury News folk have found work at the computer
companies, which is fitting. But I was never a tech whiz and
Apple does not specialize in column-writing or the other stuff
I used to do.
The Mercury News is a thin paper most days now and many
of its staffers are interns, I’m told. Back East Newsday
staffers I used to know still gather at times to remember the
good old days and bewail the change in the landscape.
I know if I had been born some year later than I was and was hunting for a career out of college, I don’t think I would give newspapers much consideration. Even those who are employed earn salaries at the low end of the spectrum. Just combine low salaries with the lack of job security and see where that gets you.
Of course, newspapers were not the only career that interested me when I got out of college. I had another possibility--writing Broadway musicals. Alas, that field has not held up well either. In the ‘60s, there were 40-50 new musicals a year. Now there are two or three and most fail quickly.
Well, then, all that’s left would be selling real estate, going into banking, or maybe shoeing horses. Given the price of gas these days, horses may well be ready for a comeback.
©2008 by Murry
Frymer. The Murry Frymer caricature is
©2000 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips
Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506,
USA. This column first posted Aug. 11, 2008.
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