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Newspapers’ Self-Inflicted Wounds

David Sirota is the best-selling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future.

Writing on truthdig.com in "Newspapers’ Self-Inflicted Wounds" he analyses how it is that newspapers have ended up in the parlous state they have - or disappeared altogether in some cities.

"First, financially strapped newspapers undermined their comparative advantage by replacing audience-attracting local exclusives with cheaper national content. Then, the providers of that national content diverted resources from tough-to-report investigative journalism that builds loyal readership and into paparazzi-like birdcage liner that unconvincingly portrays politicians, CEOs and their minions as celebrities.

“In place of comprehensive, complex and idiosyncratic coverage, readers of even the most serious newspapers were offered celebrity and scandal, humor and light provocation,” says journalist-turned-director David Simon, whose HBO series “The Wire” examined this trend.

The most preventable tragedy was the deterioration of quality. Downsized local publications were all but forced to rely on more national content, but that content didn’t have to become so vapid.

Beltway scribes didn’t have to miss the lies about the Iraq war or the predictive signs of the Wall Street meltdown. Election correspondents weren’t compelled to devote four times the coverage to the tactical insignifica of campaigns than to candidates’ positions and records, as the Project for Excellence in Journalism found. Business reporters didn’t need to give corporate spokespeople twice the space in articles as they did workers and unions, as a Center for American Progress report documents. National editors weren’t obligated to focus on “elevat[ing] the most banal doings” in the White House to “breaking news,” as The New York Times recently noted.

But that’s what happened. Rather than investing in the valuable steel and concrete of hard reporting, national news outlets began printing the most worthless kind of commercial paper—rumors, personality profiles and other such speculative derivatives that consumers could find elsewhere. News, in short, mimicked finance: Just as Wall Street made bets on bets with credit default swaps and then watched investors bolt, print journalism mass-produced gossip about gossip, and now sees its audience flee."

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