The Century Foundation’s senior media fellow Peter Osnos has posted a column about the need for assuaging the panic sweeping newsrooms. Here’s an excerpt:
This is the prize season for newspapers, and the work being honored is an annual affirmation of the profound effect newspapers at their best have on the nation. Reporters do what no one else can in documenting wrongdoing and negligence. By definition, what they choose to write about is what becomes news and determines how the rest of us are informed. If advertising and circulation will not support reporting in the years ahead, other ways to do it will have to be found; think of publicly supported radio, no longer dependent on the federal government because of underwriting and individual contributors.
The launch of ProPublica, the investigative project funded mainly by philanthropists Herb and Marion Sandler and led by Paul Steiger, is a start. So is Global News Enterprises, a Web start-up based in Boston that will have stringers around the world and has financing from people who seem to know what they are doing. According to PEJ, there are a variety of locally based startups emphasizing community news. The tradition of entrepreneurship in the news business is strong.
In the meantime though, the idea that newspapers are in inexorable decline really hurts. The people in the newsrooms and the constituencies they serve need to be persuaded that this crisis will end. A respected elected state official whose capitol newspaper has eliminated its environmental and legal beats, among others, asked me the other day whether newspapers will be around in ten years, with the underlying assumption of the question being that they will not be, at least not in their present form. The question is not really about the format—the paper they are printed on—but rather about the indispensable role they play in our society.
The crisis is real.
