A week without a virtual newspaper
By Kevin Uhrich 02/19/2009
There’s an interesting idea floating around the Web to “pull the plug” for a week on Internet news reporting.
TJ Sullivan, an award-winning news writer and contributor to a number of major newspapers, including the once-mighty LA Times — now hemorrhaging money and axing top reporters, editors and its local news section — believes America would learn a thing or two about the value of its daily papers if Internet giants like Yahoo! News, Google News and others were deprived of the opportunity to rip off their content and run it online.
As the editor of a pretty popular weekly paper with a reasonably popular Web site (pasadenaweekly.com), I say go for it. In fact, stop posting news stories for a month. Better yet, just take those sites down altogether. Go ahead; give up.
But as a former daily journalist who shares Sullivan’s deep concern about the future of the printed word, I would approach with extreme caution any ideas of quitting anything at this time.
Is intellectual property pilfering really the biggest problem facing daily newspapers? Apparently not, considering Sullivan made his plea to boycott the Internet on the ubiquitous Internet itself (laobserved.com/intell/2009/02/what_if_newspapers_didnt_exist.php), and not in any of the newspapers that he’s trying to protect. The truth is daily newspapers in general have many problems — from devaluation of people and talent, to low pay, to failure to properly invest in their product, to the ongoing trivialization of news, to selfish and shoddy stewardship, to being absolutely no fun at all — quite aside from the Web.
For that matter, though, is this really anything new? Is the Internet the only other medium to pose such a monumental threat to America’s top news institutions — one great enough to compel those papers to do what amounts to quitting their jobs for an entire week, beginning at midnight Independence Day, in order to make a point about not being appreciated by a fickle public?
The answer to these questions is an emphatic no. In fact, in another era, if television and radio presented such threats — and they did and still do, only now they are also being overshadowed by the Internet — chances are Sullivan, if he had the money, would be making his plea there, where he could reach more people more quickly, much like the ostensibly free World Wide Web.
That’s because Sullivan knows the best cure for threatening speech — in this case life’s-work-threatening speech appearing 24-seven on the computer at your desk — is more speech, not less. If anything, daily papers need to be working harder at restoring public confidence in their products and intelligently and profitably integrating them into the world’s rapidly evolving media landscape.
I’m just a simple editor, not a soothsayer or a miracle worker. I don’t know what all the answers are or what the future holds. I do know, however, that the Internet is now more than ever a very big part of everything we do and we absolutely must find ways to make that tool work for newspapers as it does for Yahoo!, Google, the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, which, as Sullivan points out, all routinely lift news from major papers.
I also know, as a citizen, that paper products in their present form hurt the Earth and we simply cannot continue landfilling all those discarded newspapers very much longer. If they are going to continue, newspapers must not only become more important and exciting, but also smaller, sleeker, better organized and much more Web- and eco-friendly.
I also know, this time as a consumer, that at least in the case of the Times, it can only hurt an already ailing product to raise its street price from 50 to 75 cents, all while its chief competitor — the Web — remains waste-free and, like the Weekly, cost-free.
I also know, as a journalist, that the answer, in the case of the Times, can’t be continually chipping away at the core of the paper’s very essence — Pulitzer Prize-winning staff members — until what’s left is a handful of veterans mentoring kids fresh out of school or from some smaller paper with no sense of history about the place they are covering.
What I don’t know is if this is the right time to make a potentially self-wounding statement by shutting down Web sites — no matter how true, important and necessary that statement may be.
If you have any feelings about all this, please feel free to contact us at kevinu@pasadenaweekly.com, because, well, that’s what we do, what they are all supposed to do — listen to you, our readers.
To read more or get involved, visit Sullivan’s blog at tjsullivanla.com/blog.html.
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