It is impossible for most of us to imagine a world without newspapers. For more than two centuries, newspapers have been the backbone of American democracy, providing a daily flow of news and other information essential to an informed society. Without newspapers, government at all levels never could have been held accountable to the people — the very crux of democracy.
But no longer can we take the daily newspaper for granted. The historic business model on which the newspaper industry was built is no longer viable. Advertisers, who in the past provided most of the revenue for a typical daily, are spending much of their resources elsewhere in increasingly fragmented media markets.
This is a tremendous challenge, to be sure. In recent months the Seattle Post-Intelligencer shifted to online publishing only, and the Rocky Mountain News closed its doors, both after about a century and a half of publishing. Many other metropolitan dailies have chopped their staffs to save money, and such venerable journals as The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle are in jeopardy of folding.
This broad newspaper retrenchment is occurring at a moment when the broadcast media, which always have employed but a tiny fraction of the number of journalists working for newspapers, are also reducing their news-gathering staffs.
Internet bloggers are growing, yet much of what they produce is not news but rather unsubstantiated rumor and bias, with no pretense of objectivity. Online news services also are sprouting up, but most are not profitable and therefore are of questionable sustainability. Even if they last, their news-gathering staffs are minuscule and no substitute for daily papers deploying hundreds of journalists to cover the news at city hall, the statehouse and beyond.
In the last century, columnist Walter Lippmann called newspapers "the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct." The truth is, there is absolutely no replacement for a strong, financially independent newspaper beholden to no special interests or the government in power. Which is why the transformation of newspapers is so critical to the future of democracy.
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