As research, I’ve been following a GoogleNews search for “newspapers” and this weekend alone was revealing as I heard a chorus of newspaper people singing in harmony but in a minor key: defensive, depressed, desperate, and sometimes downright dizzy. Here’s a sampling of what everyone’s saying:
Jon Talton in the Seattle Times echoes Jack Shafer in Slate (or is it Salon?) to remind us that out of all our sturm and drang about journos’ jobs it’s not often that empathy emerges about many other jobs and workers suffering now. Said Shafer:
The misery of a laid-off or bought-out journalist isn’t greater than that of a sacked bond trader, a RIF-ed clerk, or a fired autoworker. The only reason we’re so well-informed about journalists’ suffering is they have easy access to a megaphone. The underlying cause of their grief can be traced to the same force that has destroyed other professions and industries: digital technology….
Before we get too weepy about lost journalistic jobs and folded publications, let’s ask how often reporters lamented the decline of other industries, products, and services swamped by Rossetto’s digital typhoon.
Talton recalls cavalierly writing about the fate of steelworkers overtaken by technology and globalization:
Twenty years ago, no doubt with the hubris of youth, I wrote an analysis of the U.S. steel industry’s troubles. The next day, I got a call from one of some 600,000 steelworkers who were about to lose their jobs in that wrenching restructuring. The jobs were largely replaced with those that paid less, offering fewer benefits and no security.
“You people in the press would write differently if it was happening to you,” he said. “Someday you’ll get yours.”
If he’s still around, this reader and countless others sharing the same sentiments can take comfort. We’ve gotten ours….
Like the 1970s steel industry, much of the newspaper world is a victim of self-inflicted wounds. Monopolies and cartels tend to commit suicide, partly because they become complacent, partly because they grow an inward-looking groupthink. Like Big Steel, newspapers in the 1990s failed to aggressively address the rise of low-cost competitors and much of the industry failed to invest for the future.
Read Jeff Jarvis’ full article on www.seekingalpha.com
