Newspapers

The other day I caught a few moments of a radio exchange between a caller and the host. The host was saying that newspapers are essential (and blogs are full of nothing but plagiarism and opinion). I don’t even remember what the caller thought, but he was equally wrong.

Newspapers, by which I mean businesses that use petroleum-based ink to print time-limited information on dead trees, are not essential. Much of the content of newspapers has been and is essential to our politics, economy, enlightenment and entertainment. But all of that content can now be distributed by other means.

Newspapers began to die when radio was born. Television compounded the problem. (Many, many papers died or consolidated in the 1950s and 1960s.) Cable TV news compounded it yet again. And the internet was fatal, Craigslist perhaps most of all (annual classified advertising revenue is now less than half of what it was). The current recession is simply the pneumonia that threatens the life of a body weakened by many other system failures.

We don’t need newspapers. We do need for the providers of newspaper-like content to receive revenue so that they can continue producing that content. I’d suggest that there are many ways this can be done, and that the search for one solution — or the search for a way to subsidize newspapers — is not the answer.

This is, of course, not an attack on newspaper people. Many times I wish I had chosen a career in journalism. I still think the images of large presses running are romantic. And for most of my adult life I have subscribed to the paper.

But it’s past time to recognize that newspapers (ink on paper distributed by trucks) are a 100-year old industrial technology inappropriate in an energy-conscious, environmentally threatened information age.