The experience of news as we knew it: a personal perspective

[scarlettina]

People who don't live in Seattle may only just now be hearing about the demise of one of the city's two local daily newspapers, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's the lede in the New York Times' coverage of the decline of newspapers in general. I've been following the news partly because my brother is in the business (he does event marketing for Newsday). He tells me that he still has a job--for now. But I digress. The direction in which news is going in Seattle is a little alarming. Just ask varina8, the professional journalist, and she'll give you an earful.

I remember reading Newsday every single day, growing up on Long Island. As a kid, I didn't read much hard news, but all of the stuff in Part II--a combination of Living, Style, and Entertainment--was must-read stuff for me. (I didn't go a day, growing up, without Peanuts, B.C., Ziggy, and Ann Landers.) I came to hard news later, living in NYC and reading The New York Times every day with some Newsday on the side.

When I moved to Seattle, I was astonished to find that the local papers didn't really cover national news much. It seemed a little Mickey Mouse to me. And the locals I met early on disparaged both the Seattle Times (a shill for conservatives) and the P-I (referred to by some as the Seattle Public Insult). All of this lead me to continue using the NYT as my primary news source, with smatterings of news from The Stranger (one of our two local weeklies--the reporting is occasionally excellent but, with a few notable exceptions, often unreliable due to bias). It's only been the last five years that I've really started paying attention to the Times and the P-I. True, the Times is more conservative than the P-I, but each offers value and together they make a pretty good source for local news.

And now we're losing the P-I. The idea that the city will have only one local news source in print--and that, we're told, will rely mostly on AP reports and news from other aggregators as well--is just bizarre to me. It's alien in the way that being in a foreign country and stumbling onto some completely new and ferociously unappealing custom is alien. It flies in the face of everything I've ever learned or thought about monopoly and competition in the marketplace, the value of multiple viewpoints, the value of local news and more. And if the Times does rely on aggregators, then our only mainstream source of local news will be broadcast, The Stranger, and the Seattle Weekly, which I stopped reading quite some time ago--which should make things, um, interesting. I think it's a bad idea.

Now, I totally admit that I haven't done much of anything to support my local papers. I only read the paper versions occasionally. I've become much more dependent on the Web for getting my news. My bad. But there's the part of me that grew up on newspapers, commuted to work with newspapers and then had to wash my hands when I got to the office because they were so dusted and darkened with ink, that just rebels against the idea of losing newspapers altogether. For me, a lot of this--I admit--is as much about losing the experience of reading a newspaper as it is about the value of multiple news sources, the importance of local reporting and so on. It was a piece of growing up that I'm sorry to see diminish and that I fear disappearing. But times, they are a-changin', it's been coming for a while, and I've adapted to new media with nary a thought to what it's replacing.

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?

Comments

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

For the most part, I definitely agree with you, though I will say that broadcast is inherently inferior to print (whether that's pixels or picas) because it doesn't have nearly the same available space and time in which to tell in-depth stories. Also, broadcast reporters don't usually have nearly the same level of journalism education that print reporters do. (Especially the most recent generations. They're all trying to be Nancy Grace instead of Edward R. Murrow.)

I was interning at the Kitsap Sun in the summer of 2006, when they decided to rebook (change the order of the sections) their paper, and lead with local news instead of national/international.

I thought at the time that that was a brilliant idea. They knew that their readers were undoubtedly getting broader-scale news from other sources, and that their much-smaller paper was in no way going to be able to compete on that level. So they revised their focus to be on items of local interest to their specific readership--going in-depth on Kitsap County news in a way that no one else was.

Unfortunately, their haphazard (at the time) embrace of Web tech still put them behind, but I still think they did the right thing in terms of editorial decisions. (And it's a darn shame my living situation doesn't allow me to work there, because I'd go back in a heartbeat. Damn good people there.)

It's a shame that so little of that is happening elsewhere. Everyone else is trying to be the WaPo or LA Times or something, instead of just stripping down and doing what their reporters do best: What's happening HERE.

[mysticalforest.livejournal.com]

I should clarify: I don't watch any broadcast source for news for the reasons you state. Also, by the time they air the story's already old. I suppose the closest would be The Daily Show and The Colbert Report but that's only because news stories leak into their skits.

For NWCN, I just use their email bulletins and accompanying print (well, web) stories.

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

Makes sense. And yes, they are a unique resource, which I think is great.