Jim Gogek

What Journalism was meant to be: "News" by Isamu Noguchi, at the old Associated Press building in Rockefeller Center (where I started as a copy boy)

What we need now is a bailout for newspapers. Not a blank check to soften the cushion for the likes of Sam Zell. No, let’s do it just like we’re doing it for the auto industry, and for the same reason. We must help newspaper journalism survive because it is vital to the Republic. But, only those newspaper companies that can develop a workable plan to quickly transport themselves into the digital age should be eligible for this bailout. And, the money should strictly go toward helping newspapers to stop killing trees and start being Internet only.

Newspapers – or at least newspaper reporters and editors – are critical to our society and democracy. If newspapers start collapsing and closing down, we will lose a public service that’s more valuable than many branches of government. There will be almost nobody to keep government and industry honest without newspaper reporters. The pronouncements of special interests will go unchallenged. People will not know what to believe.

Perhaps the greatest danger to a democratic system is the public’s feeling that things are beyond control, that the individual is powerless to affect the march of history. Among the mass media that connect the individual to the world, the newspaper has the unique ability to provoke reflection, to view with alarm what might otherwise be accepted complacently, to create issues for debate and to offer plans for positive action. Thus it offers links between people’s own individual and private interests and those they share with the rest of society.

Leo Bogart in “Press and Public,” 1989

TV and radio reporters only tell you what happened (NPR does a little more but its story count is very limited.) Bloggers (like me) tell you what they think happened, often with no facts to back it up. Newspaper reporters and editors tell you not only exactly what happened but they tell you why it happened. Only in newspapers does the public get enough information to decide the truth for themselves.  TV, radio and blogs still get most of their information from newspaper and wire service reporters.

Unfortunately, people who work at newspapers have been deluding themselves over the past ten years that they could somehow survive in the dead tree business. They were living in the past and ignoring reality. But the avalanche of bad news cannot be denied. Many newspapers may have only a few years to live. Some will not survive the recession. We will soon see major cities with no newspaper. That’s far worse than a shame. It’s a threat to society. It’s a threat to democracy.

Newspapers can survive, but only if they race as fast as possible to the paperless future. They won’t do it on their own; they need some enticement or coercion. A bailout of newspapers won’t cost anywhere near what it costs to bail out Detroit or Citibank. And if the government wants some equity stake as collateral, I’m fine with that. It works with NPR and BBC. So let’s get on with it. If newspapers can come up with a plan to go wholly digital, taxpayers who love democracy should help them out. Newspapers have certainly bailed out taxpayers often enough.

… Were it left to me to decide whether we should have government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Thomas Jefferson in letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, Jan. 16, 1787