Here’s one of the mysteries of the media world: Newspaper chains routinely make profits that Fortune 500 companies only dream of—we’re talking 20% plus here—and yet everyone says newspapers are about to go the way of the horse and buggy. What’s up with that? As Eric Klinenberg explains in “Breaking the News,” in our current issue, there’s actually no disconnect between fat profits and the demise of the great American newspaper. In fact, the cutting back on reporting and content to wring more money from newspapers is what’s killing them. Nope, the Internet isn’t to blame. (Though newspapers—and magazines [ahem]—still have a thing or two to learn about making money online.) Klinenberg, the author of the just-published Fighting for Air, takes a close look at the ongoing Los Angeles Times debacle, a case study in how to turn a world-class newspaper into a shadow of its former self, all in the name of satisfying shareholders and equity-chasing investors.
Klinenberg’s article is worth checking out even if your fingers haven’t been smudged with newsprint for years. Because even if you’re an online-only, blog-reading, indy media type, you still need newspapers whether you realize it or not. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re doing the kind of reporting that blogs can’t. Or as Kevin Drum explains in his companion piece, “Why Bloggers Need the MSM”:
In fact, blogs and the MSM [mainstream media] are symbiotic. Blogs at their best improve on MSM reporting both by holding reporters to account and by latching onto complex topics and talking about them in a conversational style that professional reporters just can’t match. But the blogosphere would shrivel and die without a steady diet of news reporting from paid professionals.
Even if newspapers printed on dead trees disappear, we’re still going to have to get our daily news somewhere. Back to Klinenberg:
“What’s really at risk here is not the future of newspapers but of the news itself. While our democratic culture could survive the loss of the daily paper as we know it, it would be endangered without the kinds of reporting that it provides. It’s the journalism, not the newsprint, that matters.”
These stories are just part of a larger package that includes Sridhar Pappu’s look at the implosion of the LA Times, plus an interview with former LAT editor Dean Baquet, and a nifty chart [PDF] of media mergers and acquisitions from AOL-TimeWarner to Google-YouTube. Check it all out here.
