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What Does the Web Mean for Newspapers?

By Jack M. Balkin

JB has graciously invited me to try my hand at blogging on information society issues. His invitation to blog follows on the publication of my book, Copyright's Paradox. So like many of you, I enter the blogosphere to discuss, elucidate, and (let's be honest) promote work produced in that venerable paradigm of old media, a hardcover book.

The interplay of digital and old media is a central theme of Copyright's Paradox. Copyright law serves as the field of major battles between digital and traditional media. In those copyright battles, Google is both a prime deep-pocket target of the old and able defender of the new. Newspapers have sued the multi-billion dollar upstart over Google News, book publishers have sued over Google Book Search, movie studios over Google?s YouTube, and, yes, adult magazines over Google Image Search. The outcomes will profoundly impact the shape of the media, how we receive and impart information, news, and opinion, and what types of speech are most salient to the public. Depending on how copyright law is configured, the new media may supplant the old or the traditional incumbents may stifle the new. Copyright is thus no less a part of national media and information policy than are the Telecommunications Act and the First Amendment.

I will expand upon copyright's role in a later post. Here I want to focus on newspapers and ask whether we should care about their demise. In a recent article in The New Yorker, Eric Alterman surveys the evidence and concludes that "it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America's last genuine newspaper." As he demonstrates, a primary cause for newspapers' rapid decline in advertising, readers, market value, and, indeed, sense of mission is the Internet.
The Internet makes the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive. Young people in particular (only 19 percent of Americans under 34 even claim to look at a daily newspaper) prefer to surf the Web and log in to social network sites for up-to-date, easily digestible news bites. Even aside from lost readership, the Internet erodes newspaper advertising revenue. Craigslist has wiped out classified advertising. Online news aggregators, like Google News, usurp much other advertising. And for newspapers, moving online is no panacea; newspaper Web sites benefit from the growth of online advertising, but not nearly enough to replace revenue losses from circulation and print ads. Madison, Wisconsin's The Capital Times is but the first big city daily to abandon printing and move entirely online. That move is unlikely to stave off extinction.

Not all bemoan newspapers' demise. Many news bloggers and other self-styled online journalists trumpet their superiority over the mass media. Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post "Internet Newspaper," has been particularly relentless in attacking the mainstream news media for its lackluster reporting and prolonged servile acceptance of the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq and domestic war on terror. And in his seminal book, The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler argues that peer reporting from a multitude of online speakers does better than traditional news media both at bringing information and opinion to the fore and engendering an activist, autonomous citizenry.

Peer reporting and opinion no doubt form an invaluable component of public discourse, both in and of themselves and for calling traditional news media to brook for its failings. But blogs do not and cannot substitute for institutional news media in performing the still vital Fourth Estate function. As studies show, the blogosphere is largely parasitic on media coverage. Blogs from the Huffington Post on down engage in little original reporting and link to stories from the mainstream press far more than to other blogs. Online opinion also appears to be highly fractured and balkanized (with a lower case "b"). Conservative and liberal bloggers, for example, rarely link to blogs across the political divide?and even when they do, views from opposing camps can generally be found only by following a link; unlike newspaper op-eds and letters to the editor, they are not interspersed side by side. Bloggers also lack the financial resources for investigative reporting and fact-checking that mass media enjoy. Nor do they have the institutional commitment to accuracy. Indeed, stories have already surfaced of political and corporate operatives putting bloggers on their payroll or even masquerading as nonpartisan, objective bloggers themselves (present company excepted, of course!!).

Whatever their many foibles, in short, newspapers (or their online equivalent) are worth saving -- not at the expense of peer reporting but as cornerstones of investigative reporting, representing public opinion, and providing an exchange of view, on which democratic governance depends. How copyright law might enter into that equation, I save for a later post.

Full post as published by Balkinization on April 29, 2008 (boomark / email).