Blogs? Fox News? Karl Rove? Lee High graduate David Wessel (pictured) — now the deputy chief of the Wall Street Journal‘s D.C. bureau — returned to his New Haven hometown Tuesday afternoon to say he’s not scared of those threats to the future of mainstream corporate papers like his. Well, not too scared.
Wessel delivered a talk at the Yale School of Management entitled, “Can Newspaper Journalism Survive Blogs, Fox News, and Karl Rove?” His answer: Pretty much yes, at least in some form.
Underlying Wessel’s point was an assumption that the modern “objective” Big Media is a credible, fair, independent news source worth preserving from competition by new “pseudo-news outlets.”
Wessel is 52, a 1971 graduate of New Haven’s Lee High School, and a Pulitzer Prize-winner. His evolution at the Journal symbolizes how the life of a leading “newspaper” reporter has changed: Wessel writes a weekly Capitol column in the print edition of the paper, answers questions from readers in the Journal‘s online edition, and appears regularly as a commentator on both TV (CNBC) and radio (NPR).
We all — even local reporters — are all “multimedia” now, or will be soon.
Wessel’s concern Tuesday had less to do with the future of articles appearing on newsprint than with the future of respected mainstream big daily news operations like the Journal.
Three factors have cut into their readership and profits, he reported. Blogs and other websites have drawn readers and ads. “Manipulative politicians” (that’s the “Rove” part of his talk’s title) can go over nonpartisan media’s head directly to new partisan sources, like Fox News. And the increasing polarization of U.S. society is drawing people to seek news from narrow biased news sources that confirm their point of view rather than from papers like his that put independent, intelligent fact-gathering first.
“Could newspapers die,” he asked aloud, “before I’m ready to retire?”
He noted that while the Journal has had to offer subscriber discounts to keep its print circulation at 1.75 million, its paid circulation jumped 8 percent last year alone, to 750,000 paid subscribers. However, advertisers have leapfrogged over the Journal‘s website to lower-cost sites that reach their desired audience just fine.
Ultimately, the Internet threat doesn’t scare him, Wessel said. A new business model will emerge that enables legitimate big news operations like the Journal to make money online. He didn’t guess what that model will be. (Some guesses from this corner: not-for-profit sites on the “All Things Considered“ model; an ever-changing sea of profitable small sites either selling advertising as a large group and/or relying on subscriptions; for-profit “editor” sites that weed intelligently through thousands of newspaper websites, blogs, and government and corporate web sites to tailor RSS-style individualized news pages to customers.)
Whatever the model, Wessel said he’s sure smart people in the business will figure it out. He took heart from the story of radio’s adaptability. Radio began as a person-to-person communication medium; users paid to reach each other. When it moved to public airwaves, builders of radio sets themselves funded the programming in order to sell the hardware. Then came general-interest advertising. TV’s emergence threatend to kill off radio.
“It didn’t occur to anyone when radio was invented that people would be trapped in their cars traveling to work” and listening, Wessel noted. Now satellite radio companies are developing yet another business model.
Similarly, Wessel said he doesn’t utlimately worry too much about media manipulation by, say, the Bush administration. Even if the big mainstream media wanted to hide a story to protect the president, it no longer can, he noted. “Some blog will put it out. Everyone will be talking about it.”
“George Bush,” he added, “hasn’t been able to convince everybody that Iraq is a success.”
“I really do worry,” Wessel said, about the country’s political polarization. “What if the public stops patronizing those of us” who try not to take one side on a story in favor of weeding out facts fairly and independently? He noted Fox News’ ratings success with in-your-face right-wing coverage, and the dilemma CNN faces in responding. (Go more sensational? More liberal as a counterbalance?) Wessel worried aloud about a country where people seek the news that reinforces their biases, where “you have the right watching Fox News and the left reading The New York Times, and both convinced they’re getting the right story.”
He offered some steps journalists like himself can take to fight back. Chief among his suggestions: bringing true “diversity” to newsrooms by finding reporters who can understand and talk with people who hunt, got to fundamentalist churches, participate in power struggles on the right, or even … gasp … vote for George Bush. Diversity can’t mean just “making the photograph of the newsroom look like a Unicef greeting card.”
Other Perspectives
Until asked by one audience member, Randall Beach of the New Haven Register, Wessel didn’t address another theory many media-watchers have for the decline of big dailies: greed. In the face of competition from the Internet, publicly owned newspaper corporation have been holding out for double-digit profit margins to which they’ve been accustomed, profit margins often double those of other leading American corporations. So rather than invest in making their product better to meet the competition, they’ve cut their newsrooms to the bone, offering readers less and less reason to pick up their newspapers.
Wessel said he sees a “chicken and egg” dilemma here. On the one hand, newspapers bringing in less revenue have to cut costs. But they risk continuing the slide in readership by cutting quality. He praised The New York Times’ decision to remove stock tables from the newsprint edition, since most people get results from the web; the paper can devote its expensive newsprint space to more original and in-depth news reporting instead.
The same day Wessel spoke, an editorial writer in The Times offered a different view from his of the emergence of so many independent online voices. These blogs may be more openly biased than traditional media, the writer’s column argued. But they may offer intelligent readers a wider range of views — and more access ultimately to the truth — than newspapers published by big media companies which promote the outlook of the wealthy.
Could it be that the changes afoot in American journalism will improve, not jeopardize, news reporting?
Wessel said he’s skeptical of that optimistic vision. He doesn’t envision typical readers wading through a lot of websites every day and then weighing their accuracy in order to obtain a more complete picture of the news.
Another audience member at Wessel’s talk, SOM prof Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (at right in top photo), offered a different theory for the decline of big dailies: Boredom. Roger Ailes didn’t make money for Fox News by making it right-wing he argued; other right-wing news outlets, like the Weekly Standard, bleed money. Rather Ailes did for Fox what he did for the less ideological CNBC: He made it interesting.