Tom Levenson: Why Newspapers are Dying: George Will Has Reached His Sell-By Date edition

Why Newspapers are Dying: George Will Has Reached His Sell-By Date edition « The Inverse Square Blog: Some of the problems faced by traditional newspapers (the MSM, dead tree dept.) are imposed from without.  It’s not anyone in particular’s fault that the emergence of the intertubes and related digital developments is destroying most of the economic pillars on which newspapers have prospered for a long time.

But there are plenty of wounds that are self inflicted.  No one has forced newspapers to emphasize, say, style at the expense of reporting, especially the kind of gasbag opinionizing that dare not speak its name.  See this latest via Balloon Juice for just one small instance of major media deciding to render themselves irrelevant.

And most bizarrely, no one has forced folks to create a star system of punditry, despite the fact that the only unique advantage major media possesses over the digital wild west is a knowledge of journalistic craft and the institutional infrastructure that supports sustained inquiry and local and or investigative reporting.

But that’s a disastrous miscalculation.  Training up an institution to do real reporting well is hard — and would provide one distinctive competitive advantage over independent knights of the keyboard. Opinion writing does not.  Anyone, even yours truly, can take a whack at it; over time big, fixed cost dinosaurs can compete on neither quality nor quantity  (or, as we say in my house — both Rock and Roll.)

And if, for example, that house organ to the powerful, The Washington Post has to rely on work like  that George Will eructates to lay claim to a distinctive place in our media culture…well, on the evidence of his latest, the end can’t be far off now.

In fact, if I were Fred Hiatt (what a horrible thought…really for Fred or me….) I’d demand my money back.  There truly is nothing there, no actual facts, no analysis, no thoughts.  It’s got some of the Will trademarks — the mandarin disdain; the cocktail-party level faux sophistication (look at me! I look at paintings! the pretentious anglophilia); the relentless projection (I’m not really a sneering asshole;  YOU are!); but at bottom, this is just Will finally going alll Norma Desmond on us.  From top to bottom this reads as an almost pitiable cri de coeur:   “pay attention to me; I used to be somebody!”

Comments

[low-tech cyclist]

I started to read that column, just for shits and giggles, but realized by the end of the second paragraph that I couldn't bring myself to care enough to keep reading.

And that anyone who cared enough to *write* that column was in pretty sad shape. The end really can't be that far off for Will. He makes Robert J. Samuelson look good, and that's really saying something.

But Levenson's larger point is important, and the fact that the WaPo hasn't grasped it shows why their crashing and burning is inevitable.

Opinion, even quality opinion, is a free and abundant resource these days. Paying serious money for opinionators - and especially for truly lousy opinionators - is an incredible waste of money.

When a daily newspaper in a financial tailspin wastes money in this fashion, at the same time as they're cutting actual reporting - their actual competitive advantage - right and left, there's really no reason to believe that they'll get a clue in time to save themselves.

Besides, it seems clear that the WaPo's sense of self-worth is wrapped up in trying to persuade policymakers of the correctness of its royalist view of the world. They'll keep on spending their money on that until they have no money left to spend.

That is why the Washington Post will die.