AS journalists, we spend our lives communicating basic facts to the public, yet somehow we’ve done a poor job of communicating the basics of journalism itself. Its values. What news is and isn’t. Why journalism matters to the broader good. Why it’s the quality of journalism, not necessarily the quantity, that matters most — a notion that journalists have had a hard time communicating even to the executives of their own publicly held companies.
Rarely will you see displays of this divide more vivid than in James O’Shea’s new book, “The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers” (PublicAffairs, $28.99).
The subtitle seems misleading, as do so many these days. Mr. O’Shea, a onetime top editor at both The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, tells the story of these two papers’ magnificently botched corporate marriage — a fine tale, though from the subtitle it would appear that his publisher didn’t want to market it as such, perhaps thinking that no one much cared.
But it wasn’t investment bankers, no matter how irksome their behavior, who caused newspapers’ woes. It was, by and large, newspapers themselves, especially their managements, as Mr. O’Shea makes abundantly clear. The subtitle seems misleading, as do so many these days. Mr. O’Shea, a onetime top editor at both The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, tells the story of these two papers’ magnificently botched corporate marriage — a fine tale, though from the subtitle it would appear that his publisher didn’t want to market it as such, perhaps thinking that no one much cared.
The abysmal state of newspapers today has largely been precipitated by the loss of classified advertising to Craigslist and other online sites; by the mass migration of readers to free online news sites; and, to a degree I hadn’t appreciated, the scandals in the early 2000s that revealed how thoroughly some newspapers had been misstating circulation numbers for years. Once those papers had to issue correct numbers, official circulations fell sharply, with a corresponding loss of credibility among major advertisers.
Mr. O’Shea argues that what’s killing newspapers isn’t the Internet and other forces, but rather the way newspaper executives responded to those forces: “The lack of investment, the greed, incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public’s are responsible for the state of the newspaper industry today.” Strong stuff, but Mr. O’Shea can back it up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/business/26shelf.html?_r=1
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