-30-: the collapse of the great American newspaper

Abstract

-30-: The Collapse of Great American Newspaper, edited and with an introduction by Charles M. Madigan (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007) 256 pages, $26 (hardcover).The title is promising, and even first selection of this book boded well that here we have a collection with staying power that will be greater than sum of its parts and offer insights into dire straits newspaper industry in America now finds itself in. Certainly, there is a sore need for such a book because path to solving any complex crisis is first understanding both its causes and effects. But soon, reader is disappointed because this compendium of essays and articles fails in so many ways.For one, there is a certain level of failure inherent in a collection that employs contemporaneous commentaries and reports that have long moved past events being discussed. Many of these, of course, were of interest at time-I recall having read many of them when first published. But collecting them between covers of a book is like dressing them up with no place to go. One representative example of this is Rachel Smolkin's Company: Synergy's Broken Promise, which was published at beginning of 2007. Other than fact this is one more anecdote that puts lie to notion of synergy as panacea, this article built on Tribune company's purchase of Los Angeles Times already reads as stale. The same complaint about staleness can be lodged against Ken Auletta's Can Los Angeles Times Survive Its Owners? In addition, because it comes later in book, it reads as duplicative as it treads over much of same ground.However, Smolkin's piece does make one lasting impression that anyone who has worked in newspapers will recognize, and that is pushback from hidebound journalists who will not adapt to change that has nothing to do with debasing ideals of journalism. There, in that subsidiary theme, is grist for an exploratory essay that looks at fixtures of failure embedded in newspaper industry.Similarly, another disappointment of this collection is lack of any one article that explores failure of industry's publishers and editors in past two decades to look around corner, to adapt to change, and to innovate. There is much talk throughout this collection about inroads connected computer has made into readership. But no discussion pointedly deals with how industry-clinging to its traditions-sat by and watched itself being devoured from bottom line up. The one article that comes closest is Jack Shafer's Embracing Extinction: The 1970s and Newspaper Decline, which traces problems of industry back to 1970s when first signs of trouble began to be noticed. Near end of his essay, Shafer observes that while newspaper readership is down, the appetite for news is growing. And that, it seems to me, is a wedge for exploring another facet of travails of newspaper industry.That is not to say this collection fails to reference some contemporary attempts to innovate. One example is Michael Shapiro's excellent exegesis of rise and demise of a great newspaper in Heartbreak on Wheels: The Philadelphia Inquirer. But even here, we see seeds of industry's failure in a contemporary example of executive vision without articulation, which would again warrant further exploration.Several of these articles deal to one degree or another with exorbitant profit expectations of Wall Street and its analysts and effect this has had on journalism quality and newspaper industry as a whole. The best of these is promising first essay by Elizabeth M. Neiva. In a succinct eight pages, Money, Technology, Tax Law, and Trouble, first published in Business and Economic History in 1995, essay follows source of industry's problems from transition from labor-intensive Linotype machines to photocomposition machines operated by low-paid clerks, to revamp in newspaperlabor relations, to much higher profits, to subsequent changes in way newspapers were taxed from book value to market value, to subsequent wave of sell-offs and consolidation because of estate taxes, to demands of Wall Street for growth, which led to expansion into ancillary media areas and decline of quality journalism. …