Corporate Profit Motive is Destroying Newspapers

Former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon delivered a harsh indictment of corporate-owned newspapers during a Senate hearing yesterday on the future of newspapers. Here is a link to the video and full text of his testimony.

He belied the argument that bloggers and citizen journalists can replace traditional reporters and newspapers, then thoroughly explained why unrealistic profit expectations did more to kill journalism than the Internet and other new media.

HBO fans will recognize David Simon's name from his TV show, "The Wire," but he doesn't just produce great fictional news stories. He knows the real news industry from the inside as a long-serving, acclaimed reporter. Print journalism, he said, became a money-making tool for national corporations and slowly surrendered its ability to do important, expensive investigative reporting.

"Where family ownership might have been content with ten or 15 percent profit, the chains demanded double that and more," he said. "And the cutting began, long before the threat of new technology was ever sensed."

He said what I have been saying for years about the state of journalism, and made arguments about local journalism that mirror my arguments in this piece about the Rocky Mountain News.

Traditional journalism costs a lot of time and money, and newspapers are the only way news is thoroughly covered in most cities. Buy your local newspaper, then watch local news the same day. I predict most TV stories were already covered in the newspaper, with the exception of crimes or accidents the station picked up on a scanner.

To be sure, I am glad the Senate gave Simon and others a forum to talk about newspapers, but the hearings might imply government intervention in the private news industry. Government ownership or control of newspapers is not acceptable, and Simon argues for a non-profit model and a way for surviving newspapers and wire services to charge news aggregators for content. Both can be accomplished without government intervention.

Of course, bloggers have already offered counterattacks to Simon's criticism of citizen journalists. They offer examples of bloggers working on firsthand, investigative reporting. However, they are the exception, and they don't cover every city. I am trying to start some first-hand reporting on local stories here in Fort Collins, but I need more steady freelance income before I can afford to "donate" more of my time as a citizen journalist.

Even bloggers who do firsthand reporting typically come from a slanted perspective. Arguably, newspapers also slant the news, but they also cover more of it. A newspaper is expected to cover all the local government discussions and decisions that affect the community. Bloggers are more likely to pick and choose issues that fit their niches.