Internet news sites such as the Huffington Post have long heralded the death of the American newspaper in the online era, and a thought-provoking piece in the New Yorker claims that its death knell is a-clanging as we speak. But unsurprisingly, its author, Eric Altman, is apprehensive about the implications of that prospect.

In Out of Print, Altman gives a thorough synopsis of the grim financial state of the Newspaper industry,

Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain [...]. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. The New York Times Company has seen its stock decline by fifty-four per cent since the end of 2004, with much of the loss coming in the past year; in late February, an analyst at Deutsche Bank recommended that clients sell off their Times stock.

The dirge continues, with Altman noting that “Philip Meyer, in his book The Vanishing Newspaper (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043.”

The flipside of this sobering trend is the ascent of online news sources, and in particular, the liberal counterpart of the ferociously right-wing Drudge Report:

The owners of the Huffington Post had discovered a formula that capitalized on the problems confronting newspapers in the Internet era, and they are convinced that they are ready to reinvent the American newspaper. “Early on, we saw that the key to this enterprise was not aping Drudge,” [Kenneth] Lerer recalls. “It was taking advantage of our community. And the key was to think of what we were doing through the community’s eyes.”

What are the implications for news reporting in the age of the blogger? Oddly enough, Altman reckons that it will constitute a form of regression rather than the inevitable progress so often trumpeted by blogging proselytisers - namely, that news sources will (and in many cases already do) resemble the partisan newspapers of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America, renowned for their political and social campaigns, and their tradition of muck-raking.

Also intriguing are Altman’s investigation of two theories of the press in a democracy: one put forth by Walter Lippmann, and the other (largely formulated as a response) by the great American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The comparative model is helpful for considering the role of the press in public debate. Altman argues that Lipman’s conception of an “intelligence bureau” basically won in the end, and that the “objective” standards practised by leading American newspapers in the twentieth century closely match Lipman’s vision of an elite knowledge trust that evaluated events for public consumption and reaction. The Deweyan conception of a porous newspaper open to (and a stimulus for) public debate receded. However, Altman posits that a Deweyan backlash of sorts emerged in the right wing “shock jock” phenomenon of the 70s and 80s, and more recently, in the liberal wing of the blogosphere.

However, Altman is really focusing on national debate in American newspapers. And curiously, that’s not what truly excited Dewey. In an obscure 1920 article called “Americanism and Localism,” published in the famous literary journal The Dial, Dewey celebrated the local news, and complained that “the very style of the national news reminds one of his childhood text-book in history.” By comparison, the local news is treated “with chuckle and relish.” For Dewey, the American newspaper “is the only genuinely popular form of literature we have achieved [because it] hasn’t been ashamed of localism.” Why is this important? Well, I think that the concept of localism and community-based reporting has major implications for the blogging generation.

I’m butchering Altman’s piece by rendering it to these bitesized excepts and distillations (what can I say, I feel compelled collude with his points about the parasitic nature of bloggers…), but let’s flash forward to his conclusion:

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.

I disagree. Altman seems blind to the light pumping out of the underpowered flashbulbs and video cams of the millions - the billions - of hand-held, pocket-sized devices wielded by people all around the world. We’re not only becoming our own reporters, but our own photojournalists and videographers, as online publishing gets easier and easier. This is a new phenomenon and it’s being driven by communities, organising in specific localities, and around specific interests, in towns and cities around the globe. I think that the notion of localised community action “writ large” online has the combined power to expose, and even prevent terrible things. Mobile phones and digital image & sound recorders may or may not be an instrument of democracy in the Deweyan sense - the signs are encouraging, but we don’t really know yet; however, the indications are, at the very least, that by allowing regular people to bear witness to events and broadcast them around the globe, these tools are the enemy of totalitarianism, which thrives in isolated information vaccuums.

The local digital militia is augmenting (and possibly replacing) the national “armies of reporters and photographers” around the world, and in the best Deweyan tradition, I want to see how that happens…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 by Eric White and is filed under Buzz, Community. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.