By now you likely know the story, perhaps you’ve seen it reported on TV:
Daily newspapers throughout the country are approaching the precipice of extinction. In an age of techno immediacy and diminished daily reading habits (beyond text messaging), newspapers face double doom – increased operating costs while losing circulation, ad money and staff at a rapid rate.
But what we’re not hearing from TV in reporting this story is that it’s also an enormous television story. Without newspapers, from where will local TV newscasts procure the news they daily report?
Most local newscasts have for years taken much or most of their hard news from newspapers. The freshest genuine news that local TV newscasts now provide are weather forecasts, unless you count updates and previews of “American Idol,” “Survivor” and “Dancing With The Stars.”
Furthermore, the hiring of trained and aggressive news people by local TV news departments has became optional. Looking good on camera has surpassed one’s ability to investigate and deliver news.
One could arrive for the TV job interview fully trained and prepared to be the best damned reporter ever known to local TV. But if you’re unattractive . . . Ugly newspaper reporters have never been at such a disadvantage.
TV’s news directors increasingly are men and women assigned to sell primetime goods, to cross-promote, to serve the interests of the network’s corporate Fatherland. If they happened to arrive as real-deal newsmen, they can no longer serve as such.
Recently, I had a chat on this issue with a 20-plus year vet of a nightly local TV newscast:
“When I began, you had to have some street smarts, some news sense. You had to know how to dig, where to dig, develop contacts and sources. Even if the story was lifted from a newspaper, you were expected to add something to it, not just repeat it.
“Today? There are reporters I work with who just want to be on TV. They’d be game-show hosts. It doesn’t matter to them. The only original stories we report these days is what [bleep] to watch on the network, that night. It’s depressing.”
The diminishing existence of newspapers and the diminished inclination or inability of local newscasts to gather and report news should be causing a nationwide fright – except to bad guys who can expect to operate with fewer questions asked, less to fear.
With newspapers on the fade, are local TV stations going to open and staff bureaus in Albany and Trenton? Are city halls, police stations and court houses, big and small, going to find TV reporters where once newspaper reporters appeared? Not a chance.
State and local political corruption investigations – long-term examinations of every taxpayer funded institution in the habit of producing stink – have long been first revealed in newspapers. Are local TV stations armed with the money, desire and personnel to assume that responsibility? Not a chance.
Where will TV take those stories from? Blogs? Chat rooms? Internet “newspapers”? Or will such stories no longer be pursued, thus no longer reported?
TV newsmen and newswomen begin their work days by reading newspapers. And for good reason.
Will local TV stations devote the money to hire the scores of beat reporters that newspapers can no longer afford, those to cover education, transportation, crime, government, sports? Not a chance.
Watch a local newscast today. What hard news, beyond the latest weather forecast and the day’s sports scores, couldn’t be found in a newspaper that was published half-a-day or more earlier?
It’s frightening stuff. The decline of newspapers is far more than a story about newspapers. It’s a huge TV story, an encouraging trend for the corrupt and a development that should scare the daylights out of everyone else.