By John Brummett
It’s so bad for newspapers that U.S. Sen. John Kerry assembled senators last week to hold a hearing on the problem.
Newspapers are supposed to be fiercely independent of the politicians, skeptical antagonists of them, not pitiful wards of them and their taxpayer-borrowed prominence.
That’s probably why real working reporters didn’t show up to testify. You don’t go cry on the shoulder of the comfortable ones you’re supposed to afflict.
Publishers and former publishers testified, of course, to tell of their martyrdom in holding on as long as they had. So did new-media types like Arianna Huffington to explain that newspapers are horses and buggies and that Web sites are motor cars.
The working newspaperman testimony came from a single source, a former working newspaperman.
David Simon was a reporter with the Baltimore Sun for years until taking one of those dreaded buy-outs. After that he created “The Wire,” a gritty and unparalleled HBO series about life in Baltimore from the perspective of the newsroom, the police department, City Hall, and the streets.
Perhaps he spoke with too much sentiment, nostalgia and romanticism.
Newspapers brought some of this on themselves, as Simon said. But as an old newsroom hound, I thought he ventured bravely into the near-periphery of truth on the basic issue of newspaper reporting as a trained and vital profession.
So I’d like to quote his prepared testimony at unusual length to provide as much context and continuity as possible. He said:
“From those speaking on behalf of new media, Weblogs and that which goes Twitter, you will be treated to assurances that American journalism has a perfectly fine future online and that a great democratization in newspapering is taking place …
“[But] high-end journalism is dying in America and, unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the Web or anywhere else.
“The Internet is a marvelous tool and clearly it is the informational delivery system of the future. But thus far it does not deliver much first-generation reporting. Instead it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth …
“Understand that I am not making a Luddite argument against the Internet and all that it offers. But … you do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at City Hall or in courthouse hallways or at the bars and union halls where police officers gather. You do not see them consistently nurturing and then pressing sources. You do not see them holding institutions accountable on a daily basis.
“Why? Because high-end journalism — that which acquires essential information about our government and society in the first place — is a profession. It requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending.”
We have a few entertaining and sometimes informative news bloggers in Little Rock. Two that got cited for prominence recently by The Washington Post are operated by brash and sullen youngsters who have other day jobs and who boast, practically, that they don’t want to go anywhere near the state Capitol during a legislative session.
That’s quite all right as long as someone from the newspaper goes there every day and gleans vital and insightful information about prospective laws on which the bloggers can choose to comment.
If we don’t have newspapers and their on-site reporting professionals, we’ll need their online successors to find ways to support themselves as they go to the Capitol and other government seats and learn three things: how the place works, how to report on how the place works and how to disseminate the information broadly enough to keep responsible people informed and nervous politicians accountable.
It will all work itself out or it won’t. If it doesn’t, government will become less accountable at every level, but most direly at the state and lower levels.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to be solely dependent for state legislative news on House Speaker Robbie Wills’ blog.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
