The demise of newspapers
Just catching up on all my online reading about the death of newspapers (hey, who has the time with that Twitter bell going off every three seconds and my 700 TweetLater links I get every 4 hours?….).
I have to say that the essay that lays part of the blame at the late Ed Arnold’s feet by John Walter (http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=160817), former executive editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a founding editor at USA TODAY, is patently unfair and, I think, wrong.
I knew Ed well for many years, as I was charged with “replacing” him as the design professor when he retired from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1983. (No one could “replace” Ed. I merely followed in his footsteps, which I never, of course, quite filled.) We had regular chats about newspaper design at his beautiful home in the Ginter Park district of Richmond, and I was at many meetings and conferences with him.
Ed may have been involved with introducing a different approach to pages, as Walter lamented, but (a) Ed wasn’t the only person involved in re-thinking newspaper design and (b) Ed’s focus was always in making the newspaper easier to read, not necessarily “prettier.” I can recall numerous blusters at those 12-inch high eggplant photo pages with 10 inches of copy that seemed to win the awards.
I think that when newspaper design really began to get away from its roots was in the early 1980s, with the creation of the Society for News(paper) Design and USA TODAY.
For all the good that SND has accomplished in drawing attention to the fact that news and information is better when one considers its presentation, I think it also has caused damage by seducing newspapers away from their core mission: reporting the news. When newspapers began having art directors and day-long fashion photo shoots of three models, with two photographers, two assistants, the photo editor and maybe an AME for Visuals on site, the core focus – and budget – was truly lost. But those were the pages that won awards, so that’s the direction newspapers went in.
Today, SND helps papers by providing information about design, but it gives away nearly 1,000 awards (!) each year and relatively few are for effective presentation of the news. None are for inside pages, which constitute most of the pages newsworkers have to lay out. Many look like magazine pages, the good and bad of which is a discussion for another post. But I don’t think they say “News.”
USA TODAY, with all its color and its 8-inch stories, sparked a slew of less talented local newspaper imitators who were trying to create a similar look without considering the losses in journalistic integrity.
I think we should spend more time constructively talking about the problems than pointing fingers at scapegoats. I have been writing about these issues for 20 years, and many newspapers are still hesitant to adopt new technologies and new business models. This is where the problems lie. Work is yet to be done.
Finally, I do agree that much of the blame can be laid at the feet of Gannett and other publicly traded companies that were more focused on making shareholders happy than in doing good journalism. Gannett, in particular, was well-known for overseeing a decline in quality of the “properties,” it took over as it grew into a behemoth newspaper company.
Many newspapers today make a decent profit margin – more than a lot of companies – but because they decided that advertisers and shareholders were more important than readers and because newspapers failed to address the problems brought about by the Internet – which they were aware of — we have ended up where we are today.
Next, I am going to take on the “paywall” issue: should newspapers charge for content?
The discussion in the blogosphere is heated. Here are a few good links worth reading:
http://burden.ca/blog/2009/02/20/paywall-madness-dec-2008-feb-2009
http://ow.ly/1Ah5
