Read it here second

We hear a lot about the travails of newspapers, but this article in The New Republic details a fast-growing crisis. If enough majors collapse – the Los Angeles Times has halved, the mighty New York Times faces a debt crisis – we could be deprived, not only of the printed article, but the skills, experience and institutional strengths on which real news depends.

‘Real news’? Isn’t it all just a medium of social control? Ever hear of the Web? To which there are easy answers: yes, it’s real. For example, over 200 people died in the Victorian bushfires. But don’t take it from the press: go count. No it’s not just a medium of social control unless, like John Pilger and Noam Chomsky and most arts graduates from the 1980s, you regard the entire society, including all its opposed elements, as one gigantic and malevolent System. As for the Web, I’ve yet to encounter a convincing, comprehensive news site unconnected with a newspaper. Drudge, the Huffington Report etc are parasitic on the grunt-work of trained, full-time journalists and editors.

Here’s a chunk of the New Republic piece.

These reactions fail to take into account the immediate realities and the full ramifications of the crisis threatening newspaper journalism. This is no time for Internet triumphalism: the stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and–particularly at the metropolitan, regional, and state levels–the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country. Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny. Other than news aggregators such as Google News–which link to articles from publications that still derive most of their revenue from print–the most successful news sites are oriented to specialized audiences. No online enterprise has yet generated a stream of revenue to support original reporting for the general public comparable to the revenue stream that newspapers have generated in print.

Whether the Internet will ever support general-interest journalism at a level comparable to newspapers, it would be foolish to predict.

The situation in Australia is a little better, but the decline is here, too.