John C. O'Connell
Of course, that's good for me and my colleagues who work for the Herald. You probably also read a daily newspaper or two. And that's good for the folks who work for those newspapers, too.
Many people like a real newspaper, something you can hold, read where you want, when you want, even when you don't have WiFi. Lots of people, many millions, enjoy turning the pages, not following links or having to stare at a screen to find out what's happening.
But your convenience and my continued employment, frankly, aren't the best reasons to mourn the death or downsizing of so many great newspapers around the country. The Rocky Mountain News is gone. The paper version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is, too, and the parent company of the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune has filed for bankruptcy. Layoffs at The New York Times, Newsday and other local dailies affect the amount, depth and quality of the stories being reported. And who knows what stories aren't being reported?
Without newspapers to pay their salaries, it's not likely that reporters would be unearthing important stories. Absent their scoops and investigative reporting work through the years, augmented by the growth of TV journalism, history would have been different. Would President Nixon have resigned if Woodward and Bernstein not uncovered Watergate? Without the Pentagon Papers story, how much longer would the Vietnam War have continued?
Google, Drudge, AOL, Yahoo and other online sites only aggregate the work newspaper and TV reporters are doing around the world. Some of those reporters are in jail or have died or been injured in the line of their duty to find the truth and report it. Reporters feed the news-collection Web sites with their content. Do you think Google wants fewer newspapers?
Good reporters supply the unbiased content - the truth - that makes readers want to buy good newspapers. That in turn makes companies want to buy advertising space on newspapers' pages to sell their products and services. What's happening now, in these economic hard times, is that advertisers have less money to spend because fewer people are spending. So newspapers have less money to pay expenses, including salaries, benefits and the high cost of paper. So they either go out of business or cut back on the reporting staff and other employees.
What stories won't get reported in newspapers that don't exist by reporters who aren't employed? Do you think we'll get the same reporting of facts from Web sites? Do you think an unedited local blogger who is passionate about an issue in your community will report fairly the side of that issue he disagrees with? Do you think any vote-no-on-the-school-budget opinions will appear on the school district's Web site or the teachers union publication?
Here's a little secret: Few Web sites make money. None make enough to pay a professional newsroom staff to do investigative or community journalism. As newspapers continue to cut back or go under, I predict that the void will appear to be filled by the growth of non-newspaper Web sites. I repeat, appear. Savvy readers will soon see that almost all of what they get from non-newspaper-supported online sites is opinion - not factual reporting, not truth-telling, not objectively researched reporting, not reporting that's undergone the demands of a good editor. In other words, not journalism.
Not that what we get online is bad. I love reading commentary, blogs and columns because I like to know how smart, articulate people see the issues that are important to me. Well-written, reasoned, thoughtful, inspiring editorials and op-ed pieces make terrific reads. They are important to me, adding value and information to my reading so I can make up my own mind about things. I have nothing against opinions. I'm full of them.
But real reporting is fact-based, not opinion-based. Journalism is the ethical reporting of what really happened, what the issue is, who said what, what the impact is and why we should care. True journalism answers questions that you and I have and gives trustworthy context to what politicians, bureaucrats, business leaders, public relations execs, school administrators, union organizers and other agenda-driven people say. There's no "I" in reporter, or at least there shouldn't be. Without balanced stories, filled with facts we can rely on, how can our opinions be properly informed?
So when I hear people say newspapers are dispensable because we can get the same content online, I need to say I doubt that very much. Immature consumers may be content with nicely written entertainment and clueless rants. People who seek understanding based on facts enjoy a good newspaper.
John O'Connell is the executive editor of the Heralds. Comments? joconnell@liherald.com
