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March 12, 2009 in Opinion
Our View: If newspapers disappeared, who would fill role?
Next week is Sunshine Week, an event that heralds open government and open records. But it will be much darker in Seattle, because it looks as if the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will no longer be publishing a newspaper. Hearst Publications was unable to find a buyer and the purchasing deadline has passed.
Last year, a survey by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University reported that 75 percent of American adults view the federal government as secretive, up from 62 percent in 2006. Yet, as public concern grows, the number of newspapers that battle secrecy continues to dwindle. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver closed last month. Hearst is also talking about closing the San Francisco Chronicle. It probably won’t be the last major newspaper to fold.
The explosion of the Internet and the inability of newspapers to capture enough money from this information revolution have imperiled the entire newspaper industry. The challenge is far more daunting than previous ones posed by radio and television.
So as newspapers die, it’s worth considering the effects on society. Who will tell the people what their institutions are doing? Who will ferret out the corruption? Who will fend off the legal challenges to public information? If no viable alternative emerges, what does that mean for our representative democracy?
In Spokane, who would have battled the school district to learn more about the peanut allergy death of a student and the district’s policies? Who would have forced into the open the video showing the police confrontation with Otto Zehm? Who would have unearthed the activities of a mayor that led to his recall?
In Seattle, who would have revealed the inhumane smuggling of Chinese immigrants into the country in shipping containers?
In Portland, who would have shined a light on the pattern of abuse and neglect inside an overcrowded state mental hospital?
And who would have broken the Watergate scandal?
The number of Web sites and bloggers has ballooned. Some of them work at covering national and international issues, but few, if any, cover school boards, city councils, county governments, police departments, courts and state legislatures. Even if they did, they would have difficulty reaching a broad audience, and unless the purveyors are independently wealthy, they wouldn’t be able to sustain drawn-out legal battles for public information.
To borrow business parlance, newspapers have not been able to monetize the Internet. The New York Times’ Web site gets an astounding 19.5 million unique visits a month, but the old ink-on-paper product still brings in most of the cash. Newspapers may be able to charge a limited audience for online information, but who will inform the masses?
The demise of newspapers goes beyond the sadness of journalists losing their jobs. It darkens democracy.
Don’t fudge fish standard 
IHike4Fun on March 12 at 4:02 p.m.
It seems to me that with the Seattle PI the main issue is that it has become so biased over time that it is no longer relevant. It has ceased to be news and has become just propaganda. People want unbiased reporting. They have a brain. They can draw their own conclusions when presented with unbiased facts. Somewhere along the line (and for the PI it has been way more than a decade) reporters have stopped reporting and have opted to writing editorials and opinion pieces. The PI has been wearisome for many years now. It doesn’t really matter whether the bias is to the right or to the left. It is the continual ranting that makes people gag. People are hungry for unbiased reporting. It isn’t so much the internet that has killed the PI. The PI did it to itself.
Ottawa_Mike on March 12 at 4:36 p.m.
You forgot to ask who would have reported the River Park Square fraud perpetrated by the Cowles Co.
The answer is Shook, Connor, and Laddon at Camasmagazine, certainly not the Spokesman Review. They ate your lunch.
The Spokesman-Review does a passable job of reporting most news, however when the news could affect Cowles Co., the Spokesman-Review becomes news manipulators, not news reporters.
polistra on March 16 at 7:53 p.m.
Let’s look at these questions.
“If no viable alternative emerges, what does that mean for our representative democracy?”
We already have viable alternatives. We have weeklies and blogs,
which cover a much wider range of stories than newspapers.
“Who would have forced into the open the video showing the police confrontation with Otto Zehm?”
Maybe nobody, and that’s fine. Forcing this into the open and
turning it into a scandal has made all of us a little LESS SAFE, because it made the police more hesitant to stop violent offenders.
“Who would have unearthed the activities of a mayor that led to his recall?” Probably one of the alternative weeklies, as happened recently with Portland mayor Sam Adams. The Spokesman was never bothered by the activities of earlier mayors, because you
owned them.
“And who would have broken the Watergate scandal?” Maybe nobody, and it wouldn’t have mattered. JFK and LBJ had
done EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS, and no newspaper found it
interesting. They only found it scandalous when Nixon, a
non-Party member, DARED to use normal Democrat tactics.
Overall, we’ll be better off without newspapers, because
newspapers have turned into an arrogant and stupid
aristocracy that benefits only their fellow aristocrats.
It wasn’t always that way. At one time, newspapers
were in fact competitive and smart.
That’s the real tragedy.