On "Transforming American Newspapers"

Vin Crosbie gets just about gets it. Indeed, better than most. He successfully spots the elephant in the middle of the newsroom again and again, and often with eloquent, emotional language, the sort of thing that moves the soul (or moves you to use Mr. Crosbie's consulting firm, terrific!). The miasma of lethargy emanating from American papers is quite pungent, and he rightly calls it out: “{they} have long been too financially impatient to submit themselves to anything but ostensibly quick cures and they've even longer been too conceptually myopic to perceive the real reasons for their declines.”

As a cheerfully disaffected youth who has come of age with the Internet – I had a part in what you'd call a group blog in 9th grade or so – I have wrung my hands as I learn more about journalism in our age, and just how out of touch news organizations are, just look at the stocks Crosbie lists.

I agree with Crosbie when he says that advertisers' flight from print is a symptom and not the disease. I agree with him when he says that most all regional papers will evaporate. However, he gets a little beyond himself when he says that the big nationals – USA Today, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – are all going to fold or otherwise be unrecognizable. While I lack the depth of research of Crosbie, I am inclined to comment that people have some sort of attachment to the printed word. It might be useful to go straight to the horse's mouth, the exec ed of the Times, Bill Keller, from a talk to the newsroom Q&A.

“What makes a newspaper is not the paper. It's resources and values. It's reporters and editors. It's the difficult and expensive and sometimes dangerous business of deploying talented people to witness events, ferret out information wherever it is buried, and try to make sense of it. It's a rigorous set of standards, enforced by experienced editors.”

I'll have to defer to Keller for the moment. But maybe he and Crosbie are in agreement.