Donna Trussell

Newspapers may be disappearing, the thinking goes, but journalism is healthier than ever. We’re just trading dead trees for pixels.

Oh, if only.

Cartoon by Robert & Donna Trussell © 2009

Like the elderly wife of a man who got sick and passed away, I fear journalism will soon follow newspapers to the graveyard. No doubt something will emerge to take their place, but we don’t know what or when. We can no more imagine it than the town crier could predict the World Wide Web.

For years my interest in media’s evolution was tepid at best. Until now. As Samuel Johnson noted, hanging at dawn tends to focus the mind. My husband, a journalist at The Kansas City Star since 1977, was just cut to part time.

What do you do if, after 32 years on the job, your industry suddenly starts to crater? Do you accept the part-time offer? Leave? Call a lawyer? Launch your own website?

For guidance I turned to the Internet.

It didn’t take long to find experts who were calculating journalism’s future, notably Alan Mutter on Newsosaur, Mark Potts on Recovering Journalist and Paul Gillin on Newspaper Death Watch.

Each had his own recommendations on how to make news media relevant and profitable in the digital age. All three linked to other blogs and articles with still more insights. The comment sections chimed in too.

Every time I thought I had a handle on the subject, more was revealed. It was almost as though information was … infinite.

Indeed.

Economics 101 is the law of demand and supply. Advertising revenues could fund journalism as long as ad space was scarce or at least finite. But the Internet brought advertisers a limitless supply and the Great Recession brought demand to an abrupt halt.

Allow me to summarize the arguments of the newspaper optimists.

But our newspaper has been publishing for 150 years.

The last few months — hell, the last few weeks — prove longevity does not correlate to survival. Check out Paper Cuts.

Journalism is essential to our democracy. It can’t die.

Markets are ruthless. They don’t care.

Local philanthropists will buy the paper.

They just might. But something tells me they’ll want influence over content, such as flattering profiles of their friends and perhaps a feature on the boutique just opened by a niece.

There was a time when wealthy publishers didn’t mind losing money on newspapers. Perhaps deference from politicians, society matrons and captains of industry made up for the red ink. Regardless, today such publishers are a vanishing breed.

Information wants to be free.

Kittens want to be adopted. Charities serving the homeless want to be well funded and fully staffed. Actors (and now journalists) want to be employed.

You don’t hear pundits insist that toasters and cars want to be free, as Advertising Age writer Bob Garfield points out in his chilling analysis Future May Be Brighter, But It’s Apocalypse Now.

Citizen journalists will tell us what we need to know. Bloggers are ubiquitous.

Citizen journalists are fine if they happen to be hanging around with a camera phone just as a plane lands in the Hudson River.

Ask that same “citizen journalist” to return the next day, set up an office in the library and begin work on a blog about aviation safety. If you don’t get laughed at, you’ll be waved away with the excuse that such work is for qualified individuals with time on their hands. (How many people do you know who are educated and motivated but have nothing to do?)

Whip out your DVD of All the President’s Men and fast forward to the scene in the library. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein thumbing through a mountain of library cards — that’s journalism.

So is playing phone tag, transcribing interviews and filing Freedom of Information Act requests.

Nevertheless, some bloggers have worked hard for little or no pay. Ben Jones of Arizona called the housing bubble in December 2004, long before mainstream media reported the story. Brooklyn history professor K.C. Johnson was such a fountain of information that his blog Durham-in-Wonderland was required reading every night for the defense team of three accused students in the Duke rape hoax, a case which ended in the disbarment of a corrupt district attorney.

But those bloggers are the exception. Most people avoid volunteering for endless fact-checking and other clerical duties.

Aggregator sites like Drudge Report and Huffington Post depend on the labor of paid reporters and editors. As for blogs, almost all of them are opinion, a commodity that has been free for thousands of years in chat rooms, at barn dances on the prairie and in the streets of ancient Rome.

Newspapers will die, but journalism will live on, thanks to Internet advertising and social networking.

So simple, so beautiful.

Sonia Arrison attempts to make the case in Why It’s OK for Newspapers to Die in Tech News World. But before you get carried away with euphoria, read the comment section.

And then read the Tech Crunch article Why Advertising Is Failing On the Internet by Eric Clemons. Newspapers aren’t alone. All forms of media are in a world of hurt. People don’t want, need or trust advertising.

Remember the last time you bought a household appliance? Online brochures and ads might have attracted a glance, but you’d no more believe the spin than you would a lover who breaks it off because you’re “too good” for him.

Reading unbiased reviews, often by consumers like yourself, is how most of us decide what to buy and where to buy it.

If websites produce quality content, they can charge subscribers.

Ah, the “walled garden.” Wall Street Journal! And what about iTunes and micro-payments?

Clay Shirky addresses this fantasy in his much-discussed post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

So does Steven Berlin Johnson in his recent speech Old Growth Media and the Future of News at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival.

In a nutshell: We’re living a media revolution. In revolutions old stuff gets broken before new stuff can replace it. One would hope for an orderly, decade-long transition, but that’s not what we’ve got.

Celebrity interviews are cheap. Talking heads are cheap. Feel-good stories are cheap. Rewritten press releases are cheap. Photographs of grand openings are cheap. Columns that read like teen journals are cheap (or they ought to be).

If citizens want better journalism than that, they must come up with a way to pay the salaries of people who produce it.

Nonprofits like NPR and PBS will fill the gap.

This, I believe, is a ray of hope. Universities might play a part too. Think Innocence Project, only for journalists.

Another clue to the future could be Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Legend has it only the court jester could speak the truth to the king.

Dan Rather Reports, launched on HD Net in 2006, and the long-running PBS investigative journalism show Frontline both do excellent work.

Huffington Post has announced an investigative journalism fund.

Prophet Motives: What Can Be Done? by Mark Fitzgerald suggests a hybrid nonprofit — half private, half public — for media that aren’t making money but are contributing to the common good. (For years Harper’s has been published by a foundation.)

Some believe the in-depth reporting will come in the form of books. Philip Meyer argues that the “elite newspaper” of the future will be smaller and published less often, but will be “packed with analysis and investigative reporting aimed at well-educated news junkies.”

John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney propose tax credits for advertisers and subscribers. In The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers they make the case that newspapers have been declining since the 1970s.

The toll is daunting. As former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and Post associate editor Robert Kaiser have observed, “A great news organization is difficult to build and tragically easy to disassemble.”

Down to the Wire by Dave Krieger suggests newspapers stop running wire stories from Associated Press, “the biggest aggregator of them all,” and begin defending their own copyrighted work in court. “What would they have to lose?” Krieger asks. He’s got a point.

How Newspapers Must Change to Survive by Michael S. Malone says papers should:

Accept the inevitable. A revenue model will emerge for the Web, so take your lumps now, shrink to 10 to 20 percent of your original size, sell the buildings and presses, move exclusively to the Web. … Forget computers. Newspapers have already lost that battle. Instead, move on — and target the next platform. My gut tells me that the future of news delivery is to e-Books, like Kindle, and, even more, Smart Phones.

So we’ve got e-Books, copyright lawsuits, tax credits, niche publications, philanthropy, gutsy cable TV, universities and politically-minded comics. Journalism of the next decade is beginning to look like a crazy quilt.

Maybe that would be OK if it weren’t for the demise of local beat reporting.

I cover the press conference.

Any news industry overhaul will take time. At present we should prepare for chaos. We’re going to get a lot of it.

One reporter dryly noted, “I guess we will have to assume our governments, business leaders, public bodies and foundations will all be on their best behavior during the next span of time.”

And look how those institutions behaved when we had a robust press!

Some observers have compared top-heavy newspapers to the twilight years of the Soviet Union. Decades of monopolies have enriched newspaper owners, but degraded the products and punished innovators.

What Went Wrong pegs the beginning of the end of the Flint Journal to a December day in 2000. The publisher decided not to publish because of heavy snow. Reporters who’d shown up for work despite the difficult conditions were sent home. Why waste resources?

We backed away from hard news stories like a robbery victim from a man with a gun. Lawyers took over the newsroom and mediocrity ruled the day… [The] middle management editor … believed the salvation of the newspaper lay in such mundane features as “Making a Difference” and “Golden Apples.”

One reply noted that the “touchy-feely, community-boosterism crap started 20 years ago, and has only intensified through the years.” Someone added: “And don’t forget the man-on-the-street commentary to even the most technical story.”

Newspapers were trading news and detailed analysis for consumer guides, tip boxes and government declarations.

If you don’t feel like wading through Mark Bowden’s long Vanity Fair profile of New York Times chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. just read this nugget from the Paul Gillin summary of Bowden’s piece:

[Sulzberger] is a fan of pop psychology team-building exercises, even though they make his hard-bitten managers groan. And he is prone to risk avoidance. Bowden describes one management offsite exercise in which executives played a game that challenged them to decide between safe choices and higher risk but potentially more rewarding long shots. An employee who had witnessed many groups play the game observed, “This is the most conservative group I have ever seen.”

Kinda makes you want to watch the gritty 1933 film I Cover the Waterfront, doesn’t it?

Journalism blogs — which are multiplying like pink slips — often convey a sense of reporters just wanting to do their jobs.

There was a time before focus groups and endless planning meetings, a time when, a reporter writes, “my editor turned me loose and asked that I find out everything newsworthy on my beat. It really was that simple.”

A comment on one blog:

Here’s a wild idea: Before last month’s purge, my paper’s newsroom was extremely close to a 1-to-1 ratio of managers to reporters. Would it not have been better to have gotten more people out in the field, and perhaps covered things of some substance? People still want journalism. I get approached by readers all the time — current and former, young and old — who ask why we stopped caring about the meat-and-potatoes stuff that is local news. … We were the last bastion, we were the ones with the niche product. And … we threw it all away.

Queue the Joni Mitchell and pass the rum.