I’m afraid I don’t accept your central thesis, i.e. that journalists themselves are the (or a) primary cause of the demise of print reportage. Transformations in information delivery have been so swift, so prevalent and so multi-dimensional that the objective, double-sourced, narrowly focused product of the journalist has had to compete with the opinion-laced, secondarily-sourced, provocatively worded opinion pieces that many people confuse with shoeleather journalism. Ironically, the very thing that is capsizing traditional journalism – the rise of blogging – gets the grist for its mill from the very journalists that provide it with source content.
But let’s sift that grist for a bit. I think we need to draw some distinctions. I don’t know anyone who believes that the NYT is going to go away anytime soon. That’s because it’s a “national” paper, that only ancillarily has Gotham as its local beat. It has money and the resources to maintain foreign bureaus, and it can compete toe to toe with the wire services.
No, the real problem is more with local print-based journalism. It’s suffering because people now really can get most of the info they need locally online, for the first time ever. As recently as five years ago, this wasn’t the case. If you wanted to know what nightclub or opera was hot in, say, Syracuse, NY or Altoona, PA, you had to pick up either the local paper or the alternative weekly, if it existed. Now, however, nearly any sort of info about nearly any kind of entertainment can be found online. That’s because the venues now advertise themselves online, without the medium of the newspaper. Or they piggyback on one of those “Altoona at Nite” local happenings websites. Cheaper, and they get to control the content more. You just google the name of the club, opera or gardening event, and you get a website.
So how come online papers haven’t worked? This is a surprisingly complex problem, and has to do with behavior differences in the public and the history of the internet, among other things.
The net began with the idea that things would be freely shared, and that seems to have cultivated in the consumer a reluctance to pay for anything if he doesn’t absolutely have to. Both the NYT and the Wall Street Journal have flirted with subscriptions, with very, very limited success. Right now, all NYT content is free, and much of WSJ content is.
Another issue is that we may believe (at our core, biologically -whatever) that we should always pay for something that physically exists, like a paper. But something that’s just pixels on a screen? Nah. Remember, it took cable a long time to convince people to pay for content that they could get with their rabbit ears for free. And the internet gets better reception than rabbit ears OR cable.
Throw in the incredible ease and anonymity with which people can share the rantings and non sequiturs they call opinions (newspapers almost always require name and address for letters to the editor, so as to avoid such irresponsible opinion-mongering) and you have a recipe for a great, inky black and white newshole, disappearing before our very eyes.
Lurking amid all of the above is that snarky little disciplinarian, objectivity. Journalism is supposed to be about the facts, but the net and its denizens care little for this value, and this disadvantages journalists. Mr. Jarvis, you appear to be saying that journalists failed to “sex up” their coverage, to link to everything, give a bit of opinion in the soupcon, follow a story beyond its newsworthiness, etc. Maybe you’re right. But at some point, the journalism you would be talking about wouldn’t be journalism.
I haven’t even talked about how Hollywood, for some reason, nearly always lampoons journalists in its fictional pieces. They are portrayed as self-absorbed sleazemeisters after the next juicy tidbit. Absent always from such musings is the role of the public in desiring this fare.
Nope, newspapers were doomed no matter what journalists did. The world has begun to demand divertment and leisure with its accounting of facts. Some of us, who teach our students to revere the gathering of facts, are having trouble prostrating before the new gods, Gossip and Rumour.

J. Patrick McGrail
Dept. of Communication
Jacksonville State University
Jacksonville, AL 36265

“A Gallup survey says 52 percent of Americans do not trust news media, up from 30 percent in 1972.”

Gee, let’s see, half the population thinks you’re brazen liars. Okay? You with me? Then the internet comes along to provide an alternative. Still following? Now guess what happens next.

Yea guess. I realize you’re just journalists but I can’t spoon feed you all day. Go ahead and guess.

If you still can’t figure it out try scratching your head while concentrating real hard.

Media is a powerful tool to educate/prepare the public to wage the real war against terrorism at the grassroots level.

I believe that the demise of real print journalism began in the newsrooms where the authority of the NEWS EDITOR, and sub editors, was taken away. The unsupervised reporters began to call the shots and we can see the results.

The reason for the demise of NEWS EDITOR are many. But it helped the newspaper owners/management to smuggle in what is described as advertorials. The free mixing of opinions/manipulations in hard news led to the fall of credibility of the newspapers.

NEWS EDITOR used to be the “Sergeant Major” directly in touch with the ground realities and leading the charge. He had to manage the juniors under him and resist the machinations of the Editor and the newspaper owners/management.

Neutralizing of the NEWS EDITOR has led to major aberrations in the newspaper industry.

Now readers find it difficult to differentiate between opinions, news or advertisements. Earlier the newspapers ensured that a particular section of the newspaper would carry objective news, the other section would carry opinions and the place for advertisements was fixed too.

However, I do not share the doom and gloom prophecy for newspapers. They have survived for over 200 years…and would do so even now, although in a quite a different incarnation.

My post on the subject appears here… http://themoderatevoice.com/media/newspapers/24557/journalism-a-last-roll-of-the-dice/

SEE ALSO: Lefsetz, Bob; irrelevant; tired; old; geriatric; fading; mind-thuddingly insignificant in any serious Internet journalism-related discussion; chicken broth, ancient addled mind cured in; dead horse on the information superhighway; rusted buzz; list of Time Warner employees who consider ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY among their accomplishments even though they were fired from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY long before ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY culturally mattered.

Well-said. I know many journalists who have remained true to their craft and who are relatively blameless for journalism’s demise. Others, not so much.

The death of newspapers is as much a fault of the journalists as it is the business side. I blame it on these four factors:

–Media bias. Many examples are listed above. Read “Bias” by Bernard Goldberg, the best book written on this topic.

–An obsession by the business side to keep investors happy, instead of readers.

–Lousy customers service, from the circulation department to the newsroom.

–An inability to embrace change and alter the business model. On the advertising side, newspapers have let Craigslist take away millions of dollars in classified ad revenue. On the news side, the Oct. 13 issue of PR Week says “The social media craze has exploded so rapidly that many press outlets are still developing their strategies for covering it.”