Newspapers and declining readership

Why newspapers are losing readers from a former editor.

You've all seen them, especially around the holidays. Editors seem to think this activity is the essence of American life. Except for the advertising, a newspaper reader from another planet would never know there was a private sector. Editorial content is skewed heavily toward the activities of the welfare state because that's the sector that reporters and editors identify with.

The reason why?

One has only to look at election results and national opinion polls to see how out of phase journalists are in their thinking as compared to the bulk of their readers. It is as if daily newspapers are being produced by people living in an alternative universe, oblivious to what really concerns and interests their dwindling numbers of readers.

There was a time when reporters came from the streets and neighborhoods they covered. They didn’t go to Ivy League schools or even college. Their journalism school was a cigar-chomping city editor who would throw their copy back in their face if it was boring or smelled of elitism. Nowadays this would be called a “hostile working environment.”

A few decades ago reporters began coming out of journalism schools and liberal arts colleges. The job was “professionalized.” Because colleges were where you found journalism talent, most cities and towns soon had newspapers staffed by reporters and editors whose first experience with the town in which they were working was a job interview.

Because most had been immersed in the new culture of professional journalism in college, their worldviews were amazingly similar. They wanted to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” They wanted to “change the world,” not just report on it.

To that end, newspapers began preaching rather than reporting. They began to promote those programs that they felt were actually helping “change the world.” It is the omnipresent coverage of these multiplying programs, and the concomitant lack of coverage of things that actually matter to most readers, that has turned readers away from daily newspapers.

It might also be noted that newspapers and the government they purport to counterbalance are increasingly interchangeable. The shift from Congressional aide to MSNBC (Chris Matthews) and from Democrat consultant to CNN anchor and contributor (Bob Bechler) and political staffer for Robert Kennedy and John Lindsay to CBS News then ABC reporting (Jeff Greenberg) political advisor to ABC Anchor (George Stephanopoulous).
It goes on an on and on.