March 19, 2009
R.I.P., Post-Intelligencer; At Least the
Detroit News Will Probably Be Next
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has
breathed its last – at least in the
ink-on-paper form that its dwindling but
avid readership had grown accustomed to. A
few days ago, one of the United States’ few
remaining two-newspaper towns suddenly
became a one-newspaper town when the P-I’s
parent corporate megalith, Hearst, pulled
the plug on the Pacific Northwest’s
146-year-old standard bearer for quality
traditional journalism, leaving the
thoroughly revolting Seattle Times as
that city’s sole printed daily source for
“news” – if it can be called that anymore.
It hardly comes as a surprise. Newspapers,
as beloved a tradition as they are, are on
the fast track to oblivion in an era where
“information” can be delivered
instantaneously in a stream of electrons
rather than by a flotilla of trucks carrying
the folded corpses of thousands of trees.
The typesetter and the beat reporter are
destined to join the cooper, the alchemist
and the blacksmith in irrelevancy, and by
and large America will be the worse off for
it.
It is too convenient, however, to blame the
decline of the American newspaper solely
upon the inexorable advance of
communications technology. Historically, the
emergence of new mediums has seldom resulted
in the wholesale demise of their forebears
(the fate of the telegraph notwithstanding).
Cinema was supposed to have killed theater.
Radio was supposed to have killed cinema. TV
was supposed to have killed both radio and
cinema, and videotapes were supposed to have
killed TV. Generally speaking, it didn’t
work out that way, although legacy media
were forced to adapt in order to survive.
This time, though, things stand to be a bit
different.
Newspapers have failed to adapt – and when
they’ve attempted to do so, they’ve
generally done spectacularly poorly. Case in
point: The Detroit News, likely the
next metropolitan daily to follow the
Post-Intelligencer to the gallows.
As newspapers go, the News has been a
pale also-ran for most of its existence –
the downscale, right-wing, subliterate
stepsister of the marginally more
sophisticated Free Press. A
perennially-shrinking page count and
circulation have been the News’s
reward for a primordial editorial worldview
and a propensity to both underestimate
readers’ intelligence and overestimate their
gullibility and appetite for inanities.
Like the majority of floundering dailies,
the News’s malaise stems from a
decades-long addiction to “market research”:
“Focus groups” comprised of bored halfwits –
the only strata of humanity who can be
coaxed to sit around for an afternoon and
answer inane market researchers’ questions –
told the News and the other papers
that they wanted more local news about their
neighborhoods, more celebrity gossip, more
saccharine special-interest drivel and fewer
boring stories about complicated issues,
distant events or scary foreign peoples –
especially if these couldn’t be readily
illustrated with four-color photographs and
cartoony illustrations.
The News happily obliged.
The result is the sad excuse for birdcage
liner delivered to Detroit gas stations and
convenience stores daily – a paper bereft of
global perspective, virtually void of
enterprise reporting, which seems to exist
solely to reinforce the prejudices and
presuppositions of a shrinking class of
suburban robots fixated upon football, movie
stars and sensationalism. At the News,
yesterday’s paper is also tomorrow’s, is
also last week’s and next month’s – a
mouldering mélange of Britney Spears
sightings, sports team bombast, auto
industry propaganda and ads for “male
enhancement” medications. In short, a
crushing bore.
The News, like so many failed and
failing papers before it, forgot that
regardless of what the focus group inmates
might report, people rely on newspapers to
tell them what they don’t know, not what
they do. The steady drumbeat of relentless
familiarity offered by the focus group
press, while perhaps reassuring at first,
quickly grows boring. The steady stream of
predigested celebrity and business press
releases that pass for stories and the
relentless lost-puppy localization in place
of relevant reportage on significant events
makes for a thin, unsatisfying gruel that
will eventually leave even the dullest minds
unsatisfied.
The News web site has lately been
including a little box warning of coming
changes, ostensibly to bring the paper into
the 21st Century through a
greater reliance on online delivery while
maintaining what promises to be a downsized
print publication. Similarly, the plucky
Post-Intelligencer is still maintaining
at least the pretense of continuing on as an
online-only publication. Only unbridled
optimism could afford either venture a
long-term survival prospect exceeding that
of a snowman in the Sahara. The struggle to
save the dimetrodon dailies is akin to
bailing out the Titanic with a teacup, and
whether warranted (News) or tragic (Post-Intelligencer),
the inevitable outcome remains inevitable.
Hasta la vista, babies.
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2009 North Star Writers Group. May not
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