Alex Pareene is practically reading my mind when he questions whether The Politico makes any money. This has actually been on my mind for the last few weeks, in the wake of Eric Alterman's piece on newspapers in The New Yorker and some of the commentary that resulted.
Ezra Klein, for instance, wrote:
It may be that the economics of home delivery newspapers don't work, but the economics of something like The Politico -- which is a massive newsroom powering an online newspaper that also produces a smaller, narrowly distributed print edition -- work just fine. Or at least don't work in a somewhat less spectacular, more manageable, fashion. But the question of whether you're preserving news or preserving newspapers is an important one in these arguments. Preserving the former requires less money, fewer advertisers, and fewer classified ads. Preserving the latter, at least in its current form, requires an economic model that's already dead.
This is a curious claim when you consider that home delivery is still profitable -- very profitable, in fact, more so than the internet side of papers -- and that The Politico may not be profitable at all. The crucial difference appears to be that in the case of most newspapers, you have shareholders who are willing to cut and downsize their way to maintain stock prices, or private owners doing the same in order to maintain high profit margins; and, in the case of The Politico, you have someone willing to possibly lose money for some reason or another. And Albritton may not be willing to do that forever.
That said, it's true that it's a serious error to conflate newspapers with the news. But careful observers don't do this, and Alterman certainly didn't. I'm beginning to find it odd, in fact, that you even see pushback against claims like those Alterman made. The central argument -- that the poor economic circumstances of good newspapers will mean the loss of some solid news coverage -- is really quite modest, self-evident even. Maybe we'll see some version of The Politico survive over the long term in a financially viable way, but for the time being, there is no great web-only product like The Politico that could, for instance, replace the work that Lydia Polgreen, Carlotta Gall, or Jeffrey Gettleman do.
Folks like Alterman and myself (if you will) are hardly Chicken Littles. The sky is not falling. But newspapers have been the driving force behind The News for the last half-century, and their newsgathering functions are eroding at a rate that is not being offset by the gains in other media -- however great you think NPR is. Yes, their dominance was due largely to the existence of conditions that made it easy to run an effective monopoly, but the reality was the reality all the same.
Now, if you want to talk about an error that people commonly make, it's an elision like the one I've used in the paragraphs above. When we talk about the dwindling fortunes of newspapers, people often treat every paper like it's the Times. When I visit new cities, I get a kick out of reading local newspapers, and, well, most papers aren't the Times. Many could easily cease to exist in their current form without any appreciable effect on the lives of internet-savvy readers. A good number of those will adapt by becoming more localized products that offer things to their communities that can't be seen elsewhere, but the fate of our democracy does not hinge on your ability to read a review of the latest show at your community Shakespeare theater.
The country could stand to lose a few newspapers, but all newspapers are not equal, and some of the losses will be, and probably have been, felt. Perhaps more disturbing than that prospect is this unfortunate epistemological fact: when you lose great news coverage, there's really no way to know it.
Photo courtesy of GiantsFanatic
I'm always a bit intrigued by what little I know of the British model - and what little I know could well be very wrong - of having an industry dominated a relatively small number of national newspapers, each having known strengths and ideological leanings, rather than each city having one or two papers imagining they're just as good as the nationals.
I've never really been to New York, but I am a great admirer and reader of the New York Times. The local papers I've known tend to be distinctly inferior; most actually do a lousy job of covering local issues, which you would think would be their strength and selling point.
I don't know how local news would be delivered if we had the national newspaper system I envision (nor do I know what is done in Britain). Still, at least we might manage to have a few genuinely national newspapers each providing somewhat different coverage. At present I do not believe that the Washington Post, the LA Times, or especially the Boston Globe are truly national papers; and I see the Wall Street Journal and USA Today as not being full-service newspapers (each in a very different way from the other). I would argue that we effectively have only one national newspaper, and that is not a good thing.
Posted by: Warren Terra | April 11, 2008 at 04:31 PM