Allow change to beat down its barriers

There is an impulse within most of us that wants to root for newspapers. There is cascading news about the retreat that institution is mounting. "Retreat" means that someone is cleaning your clock. And these things happen for a reason in our economy of "creative destruction."
An author was on Book TV (C-Span 2) Saturday discussing his book about how the traditional music/recording industry is being uprooted just like newspapers. If these institutions are struggling it must be for a reason.
I feel that people are discovering, however slowly, that newspapers were never really about journalism. Newspapers have never been built around "selling the news." The primary aim of newspapers is to sell print advertising. And they develop their online product only to the extent that it helps their bottom line.
I dare say newspaper owners almost consider their journalistic obligation to be a nagging distraction, as with kids having broccoli put in front of them. They are insincere when they proclaim that journalism is their fundamental mission. Our so-called "great newspapers" didn't get that way because of journalism. They became household words because of achieving monopolies in their distribution areas.
The journalism mission was a far easier sell for newspaper owners when people lacked alternatives for getting information. Now that people have myriad and ever growing alternatives (thanks to the world wide web), the ink-stained moguls are back on their heels, defensively propping up their product while the bottom line fades.
Their old feeling of entitlement looks pathetic now. These people may be in denial publicly about what's going on, but behind closed doors many of them know what's going on. Most of them are engaged in what I would call "harvesting." Instead of trying to be innovative or to adapt, they're riding the old business model into the ground.
There's still some good money to be made, for a while, if you just cut like crazy and bleed your "legacy" customers. Advertisers have old habits and mindsets and the loyal readers are an aging demographic. I should add that this parallels what's happening in the old music/recording industry. It was affirmed by that fellow on Book TV.
The public denial of what's happening in the media is expressed not only by the self-interested professionals. It's felt by many people over age 50, "boomers" who have always prided themselves on their rapier-like analysis but who have trouble seeing what's happening in this instance.
They might also decry reduced "service" by the U.S. Postal Service. Well, let me advise you people: New generations come along, sans blinders, with insights you never dreamt of. It takes time for a young generation to apply its principles and insights because they lack power until they reach middle age.
The boomers have been through this. We saw the terrible flaws in the Viet Nam War, lack of environmental stewardship and poky civil rights progress, We screamed out but we lacked true leverage until we got older. The young generation of today readily sees the waste and defects in the legacy print media and maybe even in traditional book publishing - do we even need textbooks for kids? - and they might also laugh at the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Service is as much of a dinosaur as the newspaper industry's monopoly pricing structure for advertising.
The Postal Service is begging for dramatic restructuring. Older people, though, can be disturbed by dramatic change of this type. People over the age of 50 in academics are inclined to be protective about newspapers. They plead that papers have had "such an important role in our democracy" and other sheep dip.
Newspapers are watchdogs? Apply your brain. Local government everywhere is trying to find ways to put their legal notices online, for no cost, which is pretty darn tempting as opposed to paying newspapers to print it. You can find updates on this struggle all the time if you just Google the subject. Nearly all observers feel it's just a matter of time before local government can escape these archaic shackles.
What newspaper in its right mind, in this kind of climate, would try to be a "watchdog" and alienate the very people with whom they're trying to curry favor for these legal notices? Back when newspapers had some of the privileges of monopolies, they could easily "rock the boat."
As for Watergate, it was a total aberration. We're talking about the Beltway culture here which could just as easily be on Mars. It's no more useful to teach young journalists about Watergate than it is to try to get all college art students to paint like Jackson Pollack.
The real heroes of Watergate may have been the faceless employees in the Washington Post classified ad department. All the coin the Post raked in with its monopolistic ad leverage gave those testosterone-fueled young reporters the slack to do their thing and puff up the ego of the paper's owner. Today, online journalism would have Richard Nixon for lunch.
Paul Gillin of Newspaper Death Watch maintains that Watergate was a terrible thing for American journalism because it instilled a feeling of celebrity in writers. Writers deserve no such mantle.
I have read that the newspaper newsrooms of today are scared and meek places. Retrenchment looms every single day. It's no environment for trying to "speak truth to power."
Our newspaper here in Morris, owned by a Fargo company, comes out only once a week now and it seems more like a wrapper for an irritating pile of ad circulars, several from out of the area.
I suspect that the owner, which has made regular retrenchment moves, is "harvesting." The people at the top know "the jig is up" but that profits can still be made by cutting and playing many of their customers, I feel, for suckers.
But wait until that new generation comes up.
-Brian Williams - Morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com