Futurology 3

Traditional American newspapers will die—none too fast for the next generation of information proprietors. From the once high-flying Tribunes, Posts, and Chronicles to the galactic Suns and Stars, iconic Inquirers, and relatively quotidian Timeses and Newses, newspapers around the country are heavily scaling back, folding, or borrowing from tycoons foreign and domestic.

No one would bat an eye for these victims of the marketplace, of course, were it not for their perceived importance in the healthy functioning of American civic life. This reputation, couched in the irreproachable quotations of Founding Fathers from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Franklin, has directly led to desperate calls by otherwise cool-headed individuals to save a business model that successfully marketed itself as the sole producer of reliable truth in an otherwise highly competitive and vibrant economy.

A recent op-ed in The New York Times by Yale chief investment officer David Swensen and his associate Michael Schmidt encouraged turning newspapers into “nonprofit, endowed institutions—like colleges and universities… [to enhance] autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down.” This is incredibly foolish, not to mention expensive: The last thing we need populating the news business is hundreds of lumbering, immortal white elephants sucking the talent out of the business of economically reporting news. Most damagingly, newspaper bailouts, endowments, and other artificial life support would crowd out human capital from being invested efficiently in modern journalism. It is time to come to grips with the death of the newspaper and educate ourselves in distilling truth and analysis from the sundry other news media that populate modern life.

The fourth estate—and its newspaper wing in particular—is no priesthood of truth tellers. Scandals at the most venerable broadsheets are regular enough to set your clock by, and the printing of Friday night football scores in every hamlet across the land is in no guise the highest form of civic duty. The newspaper industry certainly was, however, one of the plumpest cash cows in the landscape of American business for numerous decades. As local newspapers survived on classified advertising, the economics of the industry invariably led to a monopoly paper emerging in literally every local market as the strong got stronger. Warren Buffett compared owning the resulting enterprise to owning slot machines.

Now, these positions have been eroded as advertisers find more efficient distribution mechanisms, and the cash cows have arrived at the stockyard, burdened with all the inefficiencies that usually plague the once-plump. Newspaper dynasties, as aristocratic a lot as can be found on this continent, extracted generous dividends for generations and set up dual-class shareholding structures that let them enjoy all the trappings of press barony without the requisite skin in the game. Let us eulogize them respectfully and free up journalistic talent for sustainable models of news creation.

In the future, information will be more valuable than ever. Knowledge and technology are the new capital and labor of the American economy. I have no doubt that there are phenomenal profits to be made in the information industry. The relentless losses of newspapers are undoubtedly testament to their almost unique ineptitude in catering to the needs of the modern citizen or business. The richest man in New York—Michael Bloomberg—is not a Wall Streeter, but tellingly a man who sold news and information to Wall Street, despite the highly entrenched business media that already existed. The two 35-year-olds who run Google—the largest distributor of advertising in the world—own a business that aims to do nothing less than “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It can be tremendously profitable to be a creator of content—even of costly content (think: Pixar).

There is no reason, whether out of nostalgia or fear of change, why newspapers should bear anything less than the full court press that Internet news outlets, search engines, and other new competitors are able to apply. The future of reporting the news appears in all likelihood to be an exciting and modern tale, complete with a rich vocabulary teeming with the neologisms of a new age: Blogs, wikis, feeds, and tweets come readily to mind.

This destruction and rebirth in the news business is not the tragic passing of a golden era, the frightening end of high-quality journalistic output, or the downright terrifying onset of an epoch of public corruption unchecked by an active press. The talent that enters the industry will be the very same; their desire to build reputation and trust will continue. Their principles and standards of conduct, never perfect and always human, will carry over into the new economy. Even the customers of the news—citizens desirous of being well informed or requiring certain information—will stay constant. Only the format will change. To the young people who discover those formats: Cheers!—you earned it. To the Gazettes, Heralds, and Registers who could not keep up and are assuredly not playing Monopoly anymore: Do not collect $200 as you pass Go.


Kiran R. Pendri ’11 is a chemical and physical biology concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.