Newspapers

David Warren's new column in the Ottawa ( Canada) newspaper. I like this guy!

It wasn’t the dinosaurs’ fault the asteroid hit them.

Okay, let’s back up a bit. I am alluding to an hypothesis, first advanced by Luis Alvarez and son, that a large asteroid hit the earth, causing the mass die-off of dinosaur and many other species, at what we used to call “the K-T boundary” (the end of the Cretaceous geological period) about 65 million years ago. This was proposed in 1980, and given apparent confirmation by the discovery of traces of a huge impact crater in the Yucatan around 1990.

It then quickly became al-gorey “settled science” -- before being challenged with increasing confidence from many different angles.I have no axe to grind on that one. Really. I’m just using it as a metaphor.It wasn’t the newspaper’s fault that it was hit first by radio, then by television, then by the massive and continuing sub-literacy engendered by “progressive” education reforms, and finally by the Internet. I doubt even cockroaches could survive being successively hit by four asteroids.

Back to the dinosaurs. While it might easily be imagined that they were helped to extinction, it might also be imagined, even surmised, that various dinosaur species contributed materially to their own eclipse, if, as the Darwinists suggest, they were too big and stupid to compete. I don’t buy this, myself, but my reader is always welcome to accept any hypothesis that is superficially plausible, even if I think it is, like Darwinism itself, unnecessarily big and stupid.

Like many other things, evolution happens, and the fact that it has happened is beyond human remedy. There is (for better or worse) no magic wand that will restore the age of the dinosaurs, or turn back the clock to the heyday of newspapers a century ago.

Over the weekend, reports began to appear (in the deadtree New York Post, but mostly on the Internet) about the impending bankruptcy of one of North America’s major metropolitan dailies, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, known affectionately as the “Strib.” And in my postal mailbox this morning, the parrot-sheet of the union of which I am involuntarily a member, informs me in its headline that, “Newspaper biz, like icebergs, is cracking up.”

This is by no means an exhaustive survey of the evidence that daily print journalism (and most other forms of print journalism), are on deathwatch. I have been noticing the industry-wide relaxation of paid circulation and advertising revenues with morbid fascination for some time.

Verily, it is more than 15 years since I was myself first invited to speak to an audience about “the decline of the daily newspaper,” and asked to predict its future.Big newspapers have gone bust before; but the interesting thing about the Strib is that it’s the last big newspaper in a big town. It has been sold twice in the last decade, the second sale for half the price of the first, and now its principle creditors are hovering. The idea of a major city without even one major newspaper (of course, Minneapolis still has little papers) remains so unthinkable, that people assume Credit Suisse will find a way to keep the thing afloat.

The age of the great sailing ships was also prolonged by such optimism.Well-managed newspapers -- and there are a few, contrary to popular belief -- have been in the “adapt or die” mode for years. Many have moved audaciously and cleverly into the Internet, trading on their infrastructural strengths while shedding as much as possible of the overheads associated with a huge printing plant and distribution network -- “reducing their carbon footprint,” as it were. The physical paper itself gets thinner, and harder to find, but the enterprise becomes increasingly visible on laptops.

In my view (the view that always prevails in this column), our future need not be so grim. The idea of the news sheet remains essentially sound, judging by the success of the nasty little rags with which commuters are now scattershot in urban transit systems across the Western world. People still want something to read, that is portable and companionable and requires no technological savvy whatever.But those who can read want something to read, i.e. something intrinsically lively, informative, interesting, and even reliable and trustworthy and aesthetically satisfying.

This is where the decline in journalism itself is most felt, not only in newspapers but throughout big media. The content has become diffuse, predictable, boring. In particular, with the triumph of “professional” journalism schools, and the credentialism that followed, “mainstream” journalists have come to represent a single, tedious class.

Newspapers are now editorially staffed, overwhelmingly, by members of this one class, who think and sound like sociology majors, and express themselves in a jargon stream of pompous, preachy, preening, vaguely leftist and reptilian drivel.My suspicion is that an asteroid has now hit this class, and we await the emergence of something more lean, clean, warm-blooded, and mammalian.