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POSSIBLE MAP OF CYBERSPACE AFTER NEWSPAPERS DRY UP AND BLOW AWAY:  |
As newspapers shrivel up,
websites and blogs flower
of TheColumnists.com
Blame it on the Web.
Howard Kurtz, the estimable media writer for The Washington Post, recently reported on the “reinvention” of The San Jose Mercury News. Some might argue with the term “reinvention.” They’d prefer “near-demise” or “horrible fate.”
For those of you not from Northern California, the Merc was once a Big Deal, boasting of such luminaries as nationally syndicated television critic Ron Miller, beloved and widely read hometown columnist Murry Frymer and prizewinning cartoonist Jim Hummel. It was a physically large newspaper, groaning with advertising.
But times change. The Merc’s 400 editorial employees are now down to 200, with more layoffs coming. A major portion of its efforts will henceforth be devoted to a website. What’s left of the newspaper may evolve into something devoted to Silicon Valley business news, period.
There’s nothing terribly new about this. All major newspapers now have websites, and the trend appears to be that more and more of them are devoting more and more of their editorial resources to those websites. What’s happened to the Mercury-News is but an extra-dramatic example.
An organization called Netcraft that covers
the web world reports that a little more than 10 years ago, in
April of 1997, there were one million websites. Their November
2006 survey showed the number of websites worldwide at more than
100 million and counting.
Another estimate puts the total number of blogs worldwide at
200 million, including blogs in all languages and blogs that
are no longer active. A separate survey puts the number of currently
active blogs in English or the Romance languages at 5.5 million,
and a third estimate says there are 22 million blogs, with an
additional 60,000 going up every day. No one knows for sure.
Whatever. The number of blogs and websites is increasing exponentially while newspaper circulation figures are plunging. That means that news media are fragmenting into thinner and thinner slices directed at more and more specialized interests.
What does that mean to all of us?
I think two interrelated things will happen:
1. There will be a further hardening of attitudes on political and cultural matters.
It is pretty well established by now that whatever the issue, most people will mostly go to the websites that agree with them, thereby reinforcing the opinions they already hold. If you’re a fan of hip-hop, there’s not much chance you’re going to wind up at the New York Philharmonic’s website; if you’re in love with John McCain, you’re not going to look up Hillary Clinton’s site. It’s become a series of echo chambers in cyberspace. People did that with magazines and newspapers, but now it’s easier, quicker, and with less of an admixture of contrary material.
2. At a time when more sources of information are available than ever before in history, ignorance will increase; the longtime chasm between knowledge haves and have-nots will become wider and deeper.
Anyone can report the “news” just about any way he or she wants. While newspapers and other members of the Mainstream Media have websites that are convenient and authoritative, they are far outnumbered by blogs and websites that are ill-researched, blatantly wrong, unfair or loony.
Not as high a percentage of people today get the mixture of news and entertainment they received daily in their newspaper. Ironically, news organizations are putting more and more material online, so you can learn as much as you want about, say, political candidates' proposals on just about anything. But few people will. It will be much more common to crawl into one’s own little cyber cubbyhole of blogs or websites that one agrees with, and let the rest of the world go by.
If you want only fluffy news, it’s right at your fingertips anytime, in the comfort of your own home. You don’t have to wade through a bunch of stuff on foreign policy to get to the latest on Brad and Angelina. You don’t even have to be in the checkout line of your local supermarket.
You may argue that it’s always been that way--people have always buried themselves in favored media. You’d be right. But it’s more widespread today because of that convenience.
I haven’t done exhaustive research on this. It’s mostly a gut feeling. But to me, it’s beyond clear that the nourishing diet we were fed by editors back when newspapers reigned supreme was better for the commonweal than is the blogged, fragmented, everyone-do-their-own-thing media toward which we now seem to be headed.
It would be nice if I were wrong.
©2007 by Charles M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon, augmented by our staff, is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Dec. 3, 2007.
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