Newspapers Are Dead. What's Next?

Anyone who still bothers to keep track of our nation's mainstream media sources is well aware that these are dark days for newspapers and those who write for them. Here in the Cities, both of our so-called major dailies have been sold at a deep discount in recent years, and seen their news staffs and budgets decimated by cuts made in the name of preserving profitability.

The story is the same in nearly every city in America, and as the number of people reading the print editions continues to dwindle (which it unquestionably will,) and as the mega-corporations that own most of the papers continue to labor under the delusion that the answer is to either cut their way back to profitability (which doesn't work, in any industry, ever - ask any economist,) or find some magic formula to drag us all kicking and screaming back to getting a paper dropped on our doorstep every day when the same stories are available for free online, the big question seems to have become not whether, but when the first raft of big-city newspapers shuts down entirely.

You could do worse than to bet on Minneapolis-St. Paul to be a part of that first wave of disappearing papers, and a lot of us in town wouldn't even feel much of a void if it happened. Aside from sports coverage, which is still plentiful and of relatively high quality, neither the Strib nor the PiPress bears any real resemblance to a true big-city daily at this point, at least in their print editions. Furthermore, the best journalism going on in Minnesota these days seems to be happening online, at sites like MinnPost, the Minnesota Independent, and Politics in Minnesota, which are staffed by professional journos and are slowly but surely developing the kind of business model that may sustain the serious news business beyond the demise of print media.

Arts journalists - classical music critics in particular - have been hit especially hard by the changes in newspapering. Just as schools tend to be very quick to label the arts as a frill whenever tough budget decisions have to be made, newspapers have increasingly labeled serious cultural coverage as elitist and of no interest to the broader public, and instead converted the arts section into something like what used to be called a "women's section" back in the day - a few recipes, some lifestyle trend stories, a bit of fashion advice, and a whole lot of syndicated advice columns. And if there's space, they might go ahead and throw in a reprint of a semi-serious arts story from one of the wire services, so long as it's not too long and doesn't use any big words.

There's a lot of hand-wringing about newspapers' cultural abandonment in the orchestra world, as well, which is a bit surprising to me, since orchestras have largely been beaten bloody by newspaper critics for the better part of the last half-century. Sure, the weekly reviews (which almost no one reads) might compliment us on the way we played this week's concert, but larger analytical pieces are as likely as not to reflexively refer to classical music as a dinosaur, posit (generally without any real substantive evidence) that the entire business model of a symphony orchestra is outdated and unworkable in a modern economy, or to bemoan the local band's insistence on continuing to play Beethoven and Brahms when there's a whole raft of thorny stuff by Stockhausen that we could be torturing the audience with. Why we feel that our continued success as musicians is dependant on more of this nonsense is beyond me.

Actually, it's not quite beyond me. The concern emanating from orchestras and other large arts groups over the decline of mainstream coverage is directly related to the fact that the best way we know to get out the word about an upcoming concert or play or musical or whatever is to get one of the local scribes interested in writing a puff piece about it, and running it in the paper at roughly exactly the moment that we want ticket sales to spike. Traditional newspapers are remarkably accomodating about doing this, in a way that new media isn't. (At least, not yet.)

Still, as sad as it makes me that those who work in journalism are facing such dark and uncertain times just because the guys who write the checks have ceased to care about anything but the bottom line and lack the creativity to see the transitional path to online profitability, I don't see that it's really going to hurt those of us on the receiving end of traditional coverage that much when the whole newspaper ship finally sinks beneath the waves. Justin Davidson, formerly the outstanding classical critic for Newsday put it quite well in this piece on Musical America's web site: "The disabilities of the old business model are so profound that trying to remedy them by tweaking (or ravaging) the content is like spitting into a volcano: pointless and self-destructive."

Justin also has one of the more innovative ideas I've seen for the future of cultural criticism, and it's the only one I've read that actually proposes to weave together traditional journalism and user-generated content in a meaningful way. Check out his piece if you're interested, and chime in below in our comments section with your thoughts on newspapers, the arts, and Justin's modest proposal...