Newspapers used to make economic sense. In the age of mass production of uniform product, they were an efficient ay to transmit timely information. Additional copies were cheap compared to the fixed costs associated with printing, so it made sense to include everything in order to appeal to the the widest readership possible, which spread the relatively large fixed costs over the widest possible subscribership. The inefficiency of having much, if not most, of the paper no of interest to a particular reader was made up by spreading the fixed costs over as many people as possible. The two big advertisers – department stores and classified – also wanted as large an audience as possible. In the age of mass communication the newspapers had advantage over competitors – first radio, then TV. The first is that reading is much faster than listening. Second, people can access the information in a newspaper on their terms – TV and radio require you to sit through the broadcast to hear what you are interest in. So in the one size fits all world of mass communications newspapers ruled.

The economy of scale also drove to monopoly. Only a few of the largest cities kept more than 1 mass circulation daily newspaper. When I was a kid the St. Louis Post Dispatch became the St. Louis’s only daily newspaper when the Globe Democrat owners decided it would be more profitable to run the printing presses fo the Post than it was to print and distribute the Globe. Two attempts were made later to create a second newspaper: first a revival of the Globe, and then the brand new Sun. Both were failures. With the monopolies came a drop off in quality. The Post was never a better paper in my lifetime than when it was tying to fend off The Sun. Quality all across new media has fallen as a result. But poor quality isn’t the biggest problem facing newspapers.

The problem for newspapers is that with the advent of the internet, newspapers are no longer an efficient way to distribute information. Instead of pushing out the same universal product to every customer, consumers can pull only what they want when they want it via the internet. The problem for newspapers is that everything they know about the newspaper business, as opposed to the news gathering business, hurts them in this new model. The internal power structure is set up all wrong for the new model. The culture of the newspaper is geared to putting out the product every 24 hours and providing as little product support as possible once the newspaper is in your hands. Didn’t get your copy – they are only too happy to get a copy in your hands as fast as possible. Provide corrections, clarifications, or follow up once you have it in your hands – not so much. So the typical newspaper website is just like the newspaper, although they have been adding more interactivity and faster updates with time.

Now newspaper advertising is drying up, never to come back. What they are going through is not a downturn but the end of the mass circulation metropolitan daily. The classified ads are going to Craigslist (once you’ve used Craigslist, you’ll never buy another newspaper classified ad) or Monster for jobs. All that’s left are car ads and the car companies are having their problems, just like the department stores. Every advertiser has to be pondering the high cost of untargeted advertising – the same revolution in universal push versus targeted pull.

Technology created newspapers; technology is what is killing them.

So I’m perusing the post election results at Instapundit when I come across his link to a NYT story – kids are safest under grandparents care – and I have to take a look. The key:

The study is important because grandparents are a growing source of child care for working and single parents. Some health researchers speculated that grandparents may be out of touch with modern safety practices, and as a result, they worried that children being cared for by grandparents might be at higher risk for injury.

But the opposite appears to be true. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health analyzed caregiving and injury data from the National Evaluation of the Healthy Steps for Young Children Program. The program includes information about 5,500 newborns in 15 United States cities during 1996 and 1997, with follow-up over the next three years.

The analysis showed that having grandparents as caregivers cut the risk of childhood injury by about half. Compared to organized day care, care by other relatives, or even care by a mother who doesn’t work outside the home, children who were cared for by a grandmother were less likely to be injured.

When I read this, of course my first thought is “You go, Grandma”.

But I noticed how drably they wrote this. They would have willingly thrown grandma under the bus had the results been what I daresay they were hoping for, with a headline like “Killer Grandmothers” or “Grandparents – the hidden peril”, or even “Grandparents: We knew they lost their touch when they let the grandkids eat in the living room!”. And they buried a couple of other things, two. Like just how good are these “modern safety practices”, anyway. My generation rode bikes without helmets, rode in cars without seat belts, and those of us who survived into crabby middle age are just fine. And you have to go to the primary source to discover that single moms are a menace, OK, show a higher rate of injury.

So I’m at Google News about to search for an article to link for the entry I want to write and I have to read about the flooding in Cedar Rapids – last summer when we went to Northern Tier a good chunk of the drive through Iowa was along the Cedar River – and I come across this:

Most of downtown Cedar Rapids was underwater. That includes City Hall, the county courthouse and jail, all of which, in acts of civic hubris, were built on an island in the middle of the river.

Um, so “in acts of civic hubris” is part of a straight news story now? And from the New York Times, which is located on Manhattan, which is an island in the middle of tworivers. Funny, did the New York Times call New Orleans an act of civic hubris, seeing as how the parts of it that flooded from Katrina are below the river they are right next to? I just want to know what the standard is for civic hubris.

In a recent post , I highlighted the following claim about journalism:

The breakdown of journalistic conventions about point of view. In an earlier era these standards — favoring austere, stoical language conveying voice-of-God authority — were designed in part to ensure that stories betrayed no hint of the writer’s real feelings.

But the convention was a pretense. There is a generally laudable move toward more conversational — and more candid — language in stories. This shift allows a respected pro like the Associated Press’s Ron Fournier to unsheathe a knife and write this sentence earlier this year about Mitt Romney: “The former Massachusetts governor pandered to voters, distorted his opponents’ record and continued to show why he’s the most malleable — and least credible — major presidential candidate.”

I’d like to pick up a couple of threads from this – one is the generally laudable move toward more conversational and more candid language. Is this a top down or bottom up move? I’ll argue that it is a bottom up move, as journalists first push and then find that editors will let pass more and more conversational and candid language in stores. Of course, by candid I mean biased. i.e. representing the candid views of the journalist. At first you read stories where the reporters voice would be cloaked by euphamisms such as “experts say” – without ever naming a single expert who said any such thing. Now you just read the reporter in so called objective news stories not just unsheathing the knife, but sticking it in and then twisting it. So let’s be honest about the new honesty, you aren’t reading factual coverage anymore, you’re reading opinion from cover to cover. And editors let this pass because it conforms to their own prejudices.

And on to the second thread – why did objective journalism sicken and die when it did? Objective journalism was good for the business of journalism. Our new candid journalism has been terrible for the business of journalism but has done wonders for the egos of journalists.

But why can you pick up a newspaper today and find editorializing in every news story where 30 years ago you would find straight news?

I’d say first liberals within the media, just like at universities, became predominant by first making the environment chilly for conservatives and then flat out not hiring them. Now that we have an overwhelmingly liberal media, why not drop objectivity? It’s not like a conservative AP writer is going to be able to unsheath the knife, let alone stick it in a twist it because they don’t exist. Nor is there a conservative editor or fellow journalist to privately dispute the liberal view in newsrooms. There is simply no hope of a group that is overwhelming composed of individual liberals to produce a product that is anything other than overwhelming liberal. The old convention didn’t break down because it didn’t suit the consumers of news, it broke down because it didn’t suit the producers of news.

The move to objective journalism was driven by concern for the bottom line – an objective AP could sell stores to any newspaper, an objective newspaper could sell itself to any subscriber. The move away seems to be driven by demographics within the profession itself.

I read this story, Obama’s Secret Weapon: The Media the other day and I was struck by a couple of thoughts (thankfully, not too hard).

The first, most obvious is that the media isn’t Obama’s Secret weapon, it’s his Obvious weapon. I mean, come one, the media long ago shed any shred of objectivity, and the open rooting for and gushing over Saint Barry has been clear to anyone who isn’t Obama Girl. Who’s being arrogant and condescending here – does the media really think (1) we’re not biased, and (2) the public doesn’t notice? How clueless can one be?

And on to the second thought. The story touched on it only the briefest way:

The response was itself a warning about a huge challenge for reporters in the 2008 cycle: preserving professional detachment in a race that will likely feature two nominees, Obama and John McCain, who so far have been beneficiaries of media cheerleading.

Unlike the stock market, I think past media performance is a pretty reliable indicator of future media performance, so I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that McCain will be covered like all other Republicans before him – with dislike. What Clinton has had to face in the primaries is what every Republican in the last 40 years has had to face in national elections – a media that prefers, or much prefers the other guy. The only reason Hillary Clinton gets any sympathy, or at least a fair shake, in this article is because she’s a Democrat and there actually are Hillary partisans within the ranks. McCain benefits from media cheerleading only when he is acting in concert with the Democrats, something he does routinely (and which allows him to claim with far greater effectiveness the position of uniter and bridge to the other side than Saint Barry).

But the authors can’t actually face that truth, and instead we get this:

The breakdown of journalistic conventions about point of view. In an earlier era these standards — favoring austere, stoical language conveying voice-of-God authority — were designed in part to ensure that stories betrayed no hint of the writer’s real feelings.

But the convention was a pretense. There is a generally laudable move toward more conversational — and more candid — language in stories. This shift allows a respected pro like the Associated Press’s Ron Fournier to unsheathe a knife and write this sentence earlier this year about Mitt Romney: “The former Massachusetts governor pandered to voters, distorted his opponents’ record and continued to show why he’s the most malleable — and least credible — major presidential candidate.”

Ron Fournier is respected by whom exactly? Adam Clymer? I laud the move to partisans within the press coming out into the open, but I don’t laud the press for having so many liberal Democrat partisans. Why not pour the cup full – if there is no way reporters can hold in check their real feelings – which is a central thrust of this story, and an accurate one, how then can Americans rely on them for accurate, unbiased information? If it’s opinions I want, I’d much rather talk to friends than listen to strangers with no particular ability or knowledge beyond the ability to write to length and deadline.

We’re into syllogism land. Liberal Democrats clearly prefer liberal politicians from the Democratic Party — that’s what makes them liberal Democrats. The press is overloaded with liberal Demorats; consequently the press prefers liberal politicians from the Democratic Party. The coverage of national politics is partisan, and hopelessly so. Reading the New York Times, or watching a national news broadcast doesn’t inform aobut what happened, it informs you about what liberal Democrats think about what happened.

This article is just a part of the press groping their way to this conclusion, but they haven’t even begun to contemplate the ramifications of that truth – only part of which is that their audience is only a third to a quarter of the nation, not the whole nation as they expect. Another is that they don’t speak truth to power and never did – they speak the liberal Democratic party line to the faithful. These are hard truths and I don’t expect most of them to ever come to grips with them. I wouldn’t.

I hate to tell Steve, but newspapers don’t control the national conversation anymore – they’re still stuck in national lecture mode. At this point, they just hope to remain a part of the national conversation.