A Newsweekly Claims, Without Irony, That Newspapers Are Irrelevant

Oh, the irony.  It takes cajones for a newsweekly to put out a column--online or otherwise--proclaiming that we should let print newspapers die because they are no longer relevant.  Yep, you heard that right.  A writer for Newsweek says that print newspapers have lost their usefulness.

I will not argue with Daniel Lyons' idea in "Don't Bail Out Newspapers--Let Them Die and Get Out of the Way" that newspapers are facing extinction.  But the only thing deader than the newspaper on my doorstep is the Newsweek in my dentist's office, so Lyons' call in Newsweek is hilariously ironic.  The only thing less relevant than a newspaper is a newsweekly.

If you teach writing in any form on any level, Lyons' piece is ideal, made-for-classroom material.  Have your students read this piece and spend a class session discussing how to refute the opposition by poking holes in logical fallacies.  It's not that of Lyons' claims are that outrageous; it's just that the support he gives is so flimsy.  Among the claims cited by Lyons:

• "Now, new companies with names like Politico and Huffington Post and The Daily Beast and Gawker are beating newspapers at their own game. The new guys are faster, and often better. They're leading, with newspapers chasing behind." Gawker?  In my best John McEnroe voice: You cannot be serious!  Gawker is a gossip site, and while the others are slowly coming around with original reporting, they still have a fair amount of aggregation from print media news sites.  

• "But I recently canceled my two morning papers—The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without even looking at them. Fact is, I only care about a tiny percentage of what those papers publish, and I can read them on my computer or my iPhone. And I can rely on blogs and Twitter to steer me to articles worth reading." Newspapers should die because Lyons got tired of carrying them, and sometimes put them right in the recycle bin without opening them?  If Lyons is relying on blogs to steer him to the articles worth reading, isn't he still spending time looking at blogs to tell him what to read?  Is that any faster than just reading the paper?

• "As for all the hand-wringing about the great "in-depth" information that only a newspaper can provide, let's be honest: the typical daily newspaper does a lousy job. It tries to provide a little bit of everything—politics, sports, business, celebrity stuff—and as a result it doesn't do anything particularly well. Ask anyone who's an expert in anything—whether it's bicycle racing or brain surgery—what they think when they read a newspaper article about their field. Chances are they cringe, because the material is so dumbed-down, and because it's so clear that whoever wrote the article has no real expertise on this topic." Newspapers still provide unparalleled investigative journalism.  And their job is to "provide a little bit of everything." If you want more in-depth coverage, find a specialty magazine or journal. Brain surgeons don't read newspaper articles on brain surgery for insight into their field--but everyone else does.  Brain surgeons read medical journals.  The other 99.9% of us read articles on brain surgery because we need access to a topic about which we have little knowledge. 
  

• "And plenty of countries that don't have democracy do have newspapers."  Maybe, but how many of those non-democratic countries have independent newspapers free from government control?

• "Frankly, a lot of newspapers just stink. People worry about the fate of the San Francisco Chronicle, but that paper has been an embarrassment for decades. The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press are in trouble, but they deserve it: for one thing, they spawned  Mitch Albom; for another, they're both pretty awful. The Boston Globe, my current hometown paper, is smug and provincial, and the writing is embarrassingly bad. Much of the Globe reads like a college newspaper. Would any of us really be worse off if these crusty, crappy old relics suddenly disappeared?"  Nothing but broad, unsupported generalizations here (something called "evidence" or "support" would be nice). And while I am no Mitch Albom fan, this is a silly reason.  What does Lyons mean by smug? How is the SF Chronicle an embarrassment?    
  

Again, I agree that newspapers will be lucky to see another ten years.  But blather like this ironically illustrates just why newspapers are still relevant--because anyone can post anything on the internet and call it "journalism," even without a shred of what real journalists call "facts." 

Comments

[Diane Q]

Oh lovely...another 'journalist' whining about the end of print media due to irrelevance. That sort hypocritical whining reminds me of the post-modern hypertext fiends, who thought that the 'death of the novel' was a good thing because it was replaced with flashy internet pages and links. Mr Lyons ought to be more thoughtful. If the newspaper is on its way to obsolescence, its replacement won't be the glossy Newsweek: it will be a screen shot on a PDA or screen, replete with nauseating adds, and flashing icons.

Perhaps the reason readership is down is because true journalistic authorship is down?