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Can Newspapers Not Suck?

By Roy Peter Clark

I did not argue last week that it was the journalist's duty to "buy" the paper, only to "read" it.  Anyone who has ever sat on a subway or in an airport lounge knows that you can read a newspaper -- several, in fact  -- without spending a penny.  So "buy American" if you want.  It's just that the future of journalism will depend less on a financial commitment and more on the journalist's spiritual and emotional connection to the cursed and blessed rag.

My essay exposed (to me) a fault line between those who love and those who hate the paper.  My young colleague Steve Myers said it best: 

Here are some of the arguments posed against newspapers:

1. More and more people seem to prefer their news online, an irreversible trend that will lead in the end to no paper or a different kind of paper than we have now.
2. If this is the case, it is foolish to prop up the paper.  The sooner it can be radically disrupted, from inside or outside the paper, the better.
3. In a post-modern world, traditional authority and objectivity must be challenged.  People have stopped godding up their doctors.  And the editors of newspapers can no longer claim status as high priests of news judgment.
4. This is a democracy, right?  The Internet has ripped legitimacy from the hands of the tree-killing news bureaucrats and returned it to the people!
5. Newspapers suck.  They have not earned the right to survive.
   

Here is a bill of indictment against newspapers for their suckiness:  Wall Street or greedy owners have drained their news capacity dry; traditional journalists and their leaders have been slow to change;  they have not invested in the research and development required to revitalize a failing industry;  they are biased (to the right or the left); they produce work that is dull and disconnected from the interests of many potential readers.

I'd like to spend a moment responding by asking this question:  Is it possible for a newspaper not to suck?  In my opinion, the newspapers I most often read not only do not suck, but are better than they have ever been:  I'm thinking Atlanta, St. Pete, New Orleans, Portland (Oregon), Newark, Seattle, Fort Lauderdale, Raleigh, just to name a few.  Others, of course, have suffered from the loss of talented personnel and news capacity, so they may be becoming suckier.  And then there are those places where the papers really do suck, where, in the words of the great Gene Roberts, you can throw the paper up in the air and read it before it hits the ground.

A lot of journalists and former journalists and bloggers seem to hate their newspapers because of some vague psychic or moral sensibility, as if some great social contract has been breached. The newspaper was supposed to represent some Rockwellian expression of American idealism and democratic life along with a devotion to craft.  Instead, it became a place where the sounds of cash registers were louder than the roar of the presses; where any spark of creativity was watered with a fire hose; where literary rebels were chained by the next corporate formula to come down the pike.

I could put out the best newspaper that ever existed, using a corps of journalists who have recently left the business.  But would anybody buy it?  And who would pay the costs for great journalism in the public interest?

[Can you think of ways for newspapers not to suck?  What difference would it make to their ultimate fate?]

Full post as published by Writing Tools on October 16, 2007 (boomark / email).