When the News is Bad About the News Business

If you've been feeling a bit sorry for the newspaper executives who are in charge of a business that has fallen on hard times, you're in sync with the idea behind most of the industry's coverage of its own financial downturn.

A recent New York Times article, on the front of the paper's business section, appeared under a headline that moaned: "Shrinking Advertising and Falling Profits Imperil an Industry."

The doom and gloom is coming from board rooms that for several decades were accustomed to extraordinarily high rates of return. Now that the profit margins have fallen to Earth, all too many media conglomerates have rushed to bury what made newspapers endearing — or at least worth reading — for so many people.

"The talk of newspapers' demise is older than some of the reporters who write about it," the Times reported, "but what is happening now is something new, something more serious than anyone has experienced in generations. Last year started badly and ended worse, with shrinking profits and tumbling stock prices, and 2008 is shaping up as more of the same, prompting louder talk about a dark turning point."

The Feb. 7 article laid out figures on a plunge in ad revenues: "Advertising, the source of more than 80 percent of newspaper revenue, traditionally rose and fell with the overall economy. But in the last 12 to 18 months, that link has been broken, and executives do not expect to be able to repair it completely anytime soon. In 2007, combined print and online ad revenue fell about 7 percent."

To a large extent, the Internet gets blamed. While online readership of newspapers has soared, ad revenue from cyberspace lags way behind. Given the costs of putting out a physical newspaper, it adds up to a long-term financial morass — to the point that some industry analysts are wondering whether a big broadsheet newspaper is well on its way to becoming a dinosaur.

Leaving aside the aesthetic value of reading words and seeing images on a printed page instead of via pixels on a screen, the digital momentum seems to be redefining the logic of what people expect from news organizations — even when the main medium of coverage is still words rather than visual images.

The acculturation is largely generational.

You don't hear many people in their teens or twenties bemoaning the loss of primacy of printed newspapers in the media world. Those younger people are too busy trying to keep up with the Internet via its ever-changing technical advances.

One of the most fascinating — and least remarked upon — aspects of the routine news stories about the beleaguered newspaper industry is how overwhelmingly the stakes are presented in financial terms. With few exceptions, the profit picture dominates the discourse — in keeping with the trend that has redefined financial news as general-interest news over the past three decades.

In all the concerns that rise to the top of media coverage about the sinking fortunes of newspaper investors, there doesn't seem to be much room for worries about the implications for democracy. It's easy to measure financial profits and chart their trend lines. What's less tangible — and ultimately far more profound — is the impact on how our society learns, shares information, debates and shapes the future.

News media have been headed away from concerns about democracy — perhaps most of all on cable television. The financial channels are heavy-hitters, and the general "news" channels rarely seem capable of providing a sustained discussion about how concentrations of economic power really threaten prospects for genuine democracy.

Headlines such as "Shrinking Discourse and Falling Debates Imperil a Democracy" are not part of the mass-media landscape. And we've become so attuned to the corporate-driven winds that we may not even realize what we're missing.

Norman Solomon's is the author of "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State." For information about Norman Solomon, go to www.normansolomon.com, or visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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