Newspapers and Democracy

“It may not be essential to save or promote any particular news medium, including printed newspapers. What is paramount is preserving independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is popular or profitable, and regardless of the medium in which it appears.”

LEONARD DOWNIE AND MICHAEL SCHUDSON

Of all mass media, newspapers have played the leading role in sustaining democracy and championing freedom. Over the years, newspapers have fought heroic battles in places that had little tolerance for differing points of view. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), from 1992 through July 2013, 995 reporters from around the world were killed while doing their jobs. Of those, more than 600 were murdered, more than 150 were killed in combat assignments and war reporting, and another 100 were killed while performing “dangerous assignments.”60 In the first half of 2013, 28 reporters had died, including 13 in Syria and 4 in Pakistan. Many deaths in the 2000s reported by the CPJ came from the war in Iraq. From 2003 to 2011, 225 reporters, media workers, and support staff died in Iraq. For comparison, 63 reporters were killed while covering the Vietnam War; 17 died covering the Korean War; and 69 were killed during World War II.61 Our nation is dependent on journalists who are willing to do this very dangerous reporting in order to keep us informed about what is going on around the world.

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In addition to the physical danger, newsroom cutbacks, and the closing of foreign bureaus, a number of smaller concerns remain as we consider the future of newspapers. For instance, some charge that newspapers have become so formulaic in their design and reporting styles that they may actually discourage new approaches to telling stories and reporting news. Another criticism is that in many one-newspaper cities, only issues and events of interest to middle-and upper-middle-class readers are covered, resulting in the underreporting of the experiences and events that affect poorer and working-class citizens. In addition, given the rise of newspaper chains, the likelihood of including new opinions, ideas, and information in mainstream daily papers may be diminishing. Moreover, chain ownership tends to discourage watchdog journalism and the crusading traditions of newspapers. Like other business managers, many news executives have preferred not to offend investors or outrage potential advertisers by running too many investigative reports—especially business probes. This may be most evident in the fact that reporters have generally not reported adequately on the business and ownership arrangements in their own industry.

“The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.”

BILL KOVACH AND TOM ROSENSTIEL, THE ELEMENTS OF JOURNALISM, 2007

Finally, as print journalism shifts to digital culture, the greatest challenge is the upheaval of print journalism’s business model. Most economists say that newspapers need new business models, but some observers think that local papers, ones that are not part of big overleveraged chains, will survive on the basis of local ads and coupons or “big sale” inserts. Increasingly, independent online firms will help bolster national reporting through special projects. In 2009, the Associated Press wire service initiated an experiment to distribute investigative reports from several nonprofit groups—including the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica—to its fifteen hundred members as a news source for struggling papers that have cut back on staff. Also in 2009, the news aggregator Huffington Post hired a team of reporters to cover the economic crisis. And by 2011, AOL (which purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million) had more than thirteen hundred reporters—most of them for Patch.com, its hyperlocal news initiative with over eight hundred separate editorial units serving small to midsize towns and cities across the United States. This initiative hopes to restore local news coverage to areas that have been neglected due to newsroom cutbacks.62

ProPublica, for example, has published more than a hundred investigative stories a year, often teaming up with traditional newspapers or public radio stations from around the country. They then offer these reports to traditional news outlets for free. In 2010, one story won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Regional examples of this kind of public service news include the Voice of San Diego and MinnPost, both nonprofit online news ventures that feature news about the San Diego and the Twin Cities areas, respectively. Many of these news services have tried to provide reports for news outlets that have downsized and no longer have the reporting resources to do some kinds of major investigations.

As print journalism loses readers and advertisers to digital culture, what will become of newspapers, which do most of the nation’s primary journalistic work? John Carroll presided over thirteen Pulitzer Prize–winning reports at the Los Angeles Times as editor from 2000 to 2005, but he left the paper to protest deep corporate cuts to the newsroom. He has lamented the future of newspapers and their unique role: “Newspapers are doing the reporting in this country. Google and Yahoo! and those people aren’t putting reporters on the street in any numbers at all. Blogs can’t afford it. Network television is taking reporters off the street. Commercial radio is almost nonexistent. And newspapers are the last ones standing, and newspapers are threatened. And reporting is absolutely an essential thing for democratic self-government. Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to pay for the news? If newspapers fall by the wayside, what will we know?”63 In the end, there will be no returning to any golden age of newspapers; the Internet is transforming journalism and relocating where we get our news. The print era is passing the news baton to the digital age. image