In the black

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In this week’s New Yorker, Eric Alterman presents a brief history of the American newspaper; its life, death and possible afterlife on the Internet. Starting with James Franklin’s mid-18th century New England Courant, Alterman tracks the progress of the daily newspaper up to the present day, and also examines how and why Ariana Huffington’s eponymous online newspaper came to be.

The article looks at the decline in sales of dead-tree newspapers, what this means for publically-traded companies like the New York Times Company and the Washington Post Company — and what’s they’re planning on doing to avoid financial ruin. Alterman argues that the transition from a print-based culture, wherein everyone reads the same newspaper every morning, to a collaborative, discursive online culture will “engender serious losses”; namely, he says, the loss in variation between stories. No longer will we read widely about issues of global importance, but rather the Internet will create a tight-knit, insular network of information about only local issues. Furthermore, the author doesn’t believe that citizen journalism can ever adequately take the place of “[the] armies of [staff]” in newsrooms across the world.

“People do awful things to each other,” the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in “Night and Day,” Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play about foreign correspondents. “But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.” Ever since James Franklin’s New England Courant started coming off the presses, the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept out of “the dark.” Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of “light” that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey’s tradition may not wish to see answered.

» Read “Out of Print“…

~ by Hugh on March 26, 2008.