The Tragic Death of the Newspaper?

It isn’t news to anybody that news desks across the country are cutting their numbers. My hometown paper, the Rocky Mountain News, said goodbye to its role as the “other side” news source in Colorado this past Friday.

It’s a tough business, for sure. It’s hard to charge people for information because of ease of access, but there certainly have to be some costs to produce it. (It’s Xavier’s Time Inconsistency problem with a public good playing itself out on a national scale!)
When a reporter travels across the country to cover a basketball game and writes up a recap, the story can get picked up by the blogosphere in minutes and plagiarized ad nauseam. There’s no need to reimburse the reporter for his or her work. Ultimately, the score of the game has become public knowledge, despite any costs to make it that way.

Some papers have tried to solve this problem. Some Hearst-published papers are going to start charging to view online content—worries about budgets and solvency have made news sources beholden to subscribers again. Hearst is by no means the be-all, end-all publishing source for the nation’s news, so I wonder if they’ll see the profits they’re hoping for.

If it’s become harder to access the news, then pursuing journalistic ambition has become that much more difficult. There is a hiring freeze at most magazines in the city, and newspaper jobs are dissolving. A friend of mine who had a job offer from a newspaper received an updated offer stipulating that she could be laid off at any time, for any reason. It’s a small consolation that at least her offer was not rescinded completely.

All these economic ramifications at big news desks are significant, but small publications are suffering even more. Your precious Spectator, for example, relies heavily on local businesses to place ads in the paper in order to fund its publication in print. It’s no surprise that advertisers are reluctant to pay for ads in a print newspaper with such a small circulation when they are struggling to turn a profit themselves.

The student journalists are also feeling the impact. At the Sports section, we’re being put in a position to consider whether we can go to cover away games for football and basketball. If we do, we will probably have to cut the number of people who go from three to two—a single writer and photographer. Given that there are at least four stories each week about each football game, that means that some of the stories will be written by someone who never saw the game at all.

Is it insincere journalism to report something without having actually been witness to it?

We’d apologize, but we’re too busy trying to figure out how to upgrade the ancient, slow computers and replace the broken or stolen equipment. The photo department, in the effort to provide photographers with high-quality equipment and the Sports section with beautiful photos, loans out cameras and lenses every night. When you loan out equipment and don’t hold anything valuable as collateral, it’s always questionable whether you’ll get it back. But without loaning the equipment, there wouldn’t be enough people with high quality cameras of their own to cover all the news that’s fit to print. You’re damned if you do... (In an effort to retain the equipment, all photographers now have bar codes to “check out” cameras. I would be interested to see how this affects the reporting, tracking, and repair of broken equipment over the next few years.)

I’d like to think that newspapers will bounce back. I would love to think that some noble billionaire would pour money into newspapers for the sake of providing an important service to the public. But realistically, how likely is it? Recessions are seen as times to “trim the fat” from existing businesses in order to make them operate more cost-efficiently. Newspapers, then, must be like bacon—when you cut the fat, there’s practically nothing left.

That’s why the Spec is so dependent upon advertisers in the first place—Spec is considered to be financially independent of Columbia. They don’t exactly write us a check to help us do what we do. We like it this way because we are under the impression that financial freedom gives us liberty to be critical of the university. But when Columbia is practically the only business that buys ad space in the paper and is our landlord, it’s practically as good as taking a handout. Except, of course, that Columbia can stop that generosity at any time (go all Manhattanville on us?), and leave Spec struggling to continue print publication. So much for sticking to our guns, I suppose. I can’t envision true freedom of the press and taking handouts at the same time. It’s a contradiction in terms.

I think we’ll be lucky to see Spectator’s printed counterpart survive the next five years without some divine being coming and bringing us manna from heaven (in the form of permanent, daily full-page color advertisements).

It’s an interesting time to be an economics major. But it’s also an interesting (and frightening) time to be in journalism. The future of free news is at stake, and so is the future of the Spec. As a consumer, you’re expressing your values with your dollars. Good luck!

Lisa Lewis is a Barnard College junior majoring in economics. Sports@columbiaspectator.com