Investing in journalism

Speaking with CNN’s Howard Kurtz recently, former LA Times Editor Jim O’Shea explained why he wouldn’t let any more reporters or editors go in order to balance budgets. A veteran newsman from Chicago, O’Shea said he was no shrinking violet when it came to canning people. But enough was enough, he told his bosses — who then told him to hit the bricks.

Before leaving the building, though, O’Shea told the boys upstairs one last thing: Stop cutting and “invest in journalism.”

That was really saying something, because newspapers — the actual source of what little bit of news is crammed into the general blather of television, radio and the Internet — are today little more than novelties or nuisances or afterthoughts to most folks under 30.

This is the much-sought-after Generation Y — or so say TV and movies and Web sites that are all pretty much owned by the same corporate media chiefs who are currently pandering to those young people while competing with newspapers for their ad dollars — that can have all of its Britney, Paris, Glenn Beck and South Park needs met in one dizzying instant.

With competition like that — vapid infotainment relentlessly shoveled into our heads and passed off as somehow more important than, say, the real number of Iraqis killed or wounded by our soldiers or even what actually happened at the City Council meeting — what chance do mere newspapers have?

None, or so says the industry’s own corporate hierarchy. “The public” doesn’t seem to be responding to the often “bad” news that newspapers have been traditionally expected to report. It appears that “the public” may say it wants to know what’s going on, but it really doesn’t, not if all the advertising revenue that newspapers are losing each quarter is any indicator. In fact, sometimes “the public” flat out rejects what it considers bad news — again, our TV masters tell us — whether it’s about war, the economy, the pervasive corruption and collusion of media moguls and government officials and agencies, the sexual peccadilloes of given political figures or our deteriorating environment.

Fluff it up or die seems to be the message that’s being sent back from “the public” to newspaper publishers, who are clearly watching too much TV while looking for ways to survive in the poison-ice-cream environment that’s been created by broadcast media.

One of the limitations that newspapers have is they can’t scream “It’s raining!” at readers while it’s actually raining, like many TV newscasters can and do without fail. One would think “the public” could just look out the window. Is “the public” really satisfied with that?

What newspapers can do is provide depth, context, background and history to any given story. What newspapers can do is be a responsible part of a community and explain to its readers what’s really going on at City Hall, the courthouse and the police station.

Unfortunately, however, all of that effort may well just be wasted, mainly because the flipside of this tortured relationship requires a commitment to reading, something that “the public” is doing less and less of all the time, or so says — you guessed it — the man on TV with the dazzling smile.

Much like their broadcast counterparts, newspapers today are consolidating resources and cutting staff while at the same time trying to improve their looks and Web sites in order to capture all that elusive advertising revenue. In a nutshell, some have been successful, but more have not, with many now literally teetering on the brink of extinction.

Yes, extinction. As all this has been happening — and right here in our own backyard with the ongoing downsizing of the Pasadena Star-News by its corporate bosses at Denver-based MediaNews Inc. — the names of reporters have been falling from the mastheads of all MediaNews publications, as well as other newspapers, including the Times and the Daily News of Los Angeles.

It’s pretty clear daily papers are not buying O’Shea’s advice. Will “the public?”

We’d really hate to have to tune in or log on to find out.

For more on the state of media, attend the Local Media, Democracy and Justice seminar beginning at 1 p.m. Saturday at Caltech’s Beckman Institute Auditorium. The event is sponsored by Common Cause and features a keynote address by Federal Communications Commission member Jonathan Adelstein, an opponent of further media consolidation. For more information, see our Upfront section on page 8.