David Simon and the death of newspapers
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Esquire magazine long since slid into irrelevancy, but David Simon's article in the March edition (and online) could practically double as my manifesto:
At the very edge of being rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Internet — at the precise moment when their very product would be threatened by technology — newspapers will not be intent on increasing and deepening their coverage of their cities, their nation, the world. They will be instead in the hands of out-of-town moneymen offering unfeeling and unequivocal fealty to stockholders and the share price.And more, which is what I observed from Corporate newspapers in at least two of my hometowns:
I don’t yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city … and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee.… Or worse, to try to fool readers into thinking we would actually, you know, "cover" your community. Instead they'd offer these tiny little neighborhood pages and throw out a local blow-out package once a year "filled with the hope that more people will subscribe to a newspaper that manages now and then to run a photo of someone's kid at the county fair" — as Simon said in the Washington Post about a failed zoned insert from the Baltimore Sun but applicable to my old haunt — and then go back to ignoring you on a daily basis — since it was, um, a daily paper.
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