Paper Cuts

I confess--I'm a killer. Not the really bad kind of killer, I hasten to add. I've never killed another person. I am, however, complicit in the death of a whole industry, specifically the newspaper biz.

My first semester at UNC, I got myself a subscription to the New York Times. It wasn't done out of love for the Gray Lady, though. One of our professors wanted us to read the NYT everyday so we could become "more cultured." If that wasn't incentive enough, we also had to write a paper on an article we found.

My subscription has long since run out. Now, I only see an actual newspaper, in the paper-y sense, when I come home. The NYT is always worth reading--I'm getting "more cultured," after all--but the local Raleigh News & Observer is a little less...quality. The only culture you get from reading the N&O involves NASCAR. I'm no elitist snot. But I can't help thinking that if the N&O put as much effort into the front page as they did the sports page, their articles might be a little more readable.

There's my dilemma. I'm of two minds on this whole "crisis of newspaper issue." Part of me sneers, "You want more readers? Then make a better product!" This nasty side believes that the papers only have themselves to blame. They got fat and complacent, started losing readers to the internet, and only now are beginning to realize their mistake.

My other half is a little more sympathetic. That part of me recognizes that even high-quality newspapers like the NYT and the Washington Post are struggling. It's not just the local penny-savers that are going under; it's journalistic institutions like the Rocky Mountain News.

Newspapers do play an important role in our society, though maybe not an absolutely irreplaceable one. Critics of the business say that papers are dinosaurs, that we can get all our news off of the web. But in most cases, the best internet reporting is provided by...the websites of the papers themselves. If the papers die, their sites fold with them.

So my nicer half wins out. We need to keep newspapers around. They provide well-written articles--the good papers do, at least--and a little extra. They add a little flavor to life. Forgive the pretentiousness of the following statement, but I can't imagine a Sunday morning with a thoroughly disemboweled NYT spread out over the kitchen table. It'd be like going to a circus and not seeing any elephants. Yeah, you don't need the elephants, but they're part of the experience.

How to save newspapers, then? Over at Reason, Cathy Young proposes a few solutions. Surprisingly, given Reason's libertarian bent, she offers more than "kill 'em all and let the free market sort 'em out." I'm not sure about this whole "news by the slice" concept, but I wasn't sold on iTunes either. And look how that worked out.