Where's the Paper?

WHERE'S THE PAPER?
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Robert W. McChesney]
[Commentary] The legendary journalist Ben Badgikian has argued for 25 years that the smartest newspaper publishers would upgrade their commitment to local journalism, downgrade the silly stuff the marketing people promoted, and suffer smaller profits in the near-term to guarantee a growing market down the road. Recent research at the University of Missouri provides supporting evidence for this analysis. Instead, many papers go the opposite route -- gut serious journalism because that costs money (and can antagonize powerful people in their community) and their marketing people tell them the desirable youth demographics (and major advertisers) want sports and entertainment and business and lifestyle news, which is far less expensive to produce. In the near term that equals higher profits. Younger readers over time find they can get this type of information faster and better on line and stop reading daily newspapers. By this time they have less of an understanding of what good local journalism is because they have not been exposed to it. So newspapers find themselves painted into a corner, producing less of the product that makes them distinct and not having nurtured a market for quality local news. But it will be a huge loss if American cities in the digital era do not have multiple newsrooms of well paid journalists competing to cover their communities. It is imperative that we develop policies to make certain we end up there, regardless of what happens to newspapers per se. In the near-term, policies to preserve and promote local (and possibly worker or community) ownership of daily newspapers would be a good start, and then these institutions could be our bridge to the paperless digital newsroom of the future. If we allow our newspapers to continue their downward spiral, and have nothing there to replace them, it will be a tragedy of epic proportions.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-dustup9may09,0,7652881.story?coll=la-opinion-center
(requires registration)

* Can't anyone here play this game?
Glenn Harlan Reynolds responds to McChesney.