Coming Soon – A World Without News

OK, I lost my newspaper job after 33 years in the business. Many of my fellow journalist friends are also out of work. This is not about that. Not really.
What this is about is the fact that the newspaper industry, nationwide, is on a death spiral. I read that it is predicted the last newspaper will be printed in 2040. Then what?
In my area, not only did my own weekly paper close, but also a weekly freebie paper has reduced staff to a skeleton crew. The three daily papers that I read have all cut staff and are steadily becoming slimmer and slimmer. One has gone from two 16-page sections a day to four 6-page sections in a vain attempt to fool the readers into thinking there is more there than there is.
People like me who read several papers notice that the same exact stories appear in each one. All the papers are filled with news off the wires and reporters are being shared. None of this is good.
I realize that people are getting their news off the TV and Internet. But is that really news? TV news is given to us in tiny bites by attractive “news readers” that don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time. Where is Walter Cronkite when we need him?
Internet news is often quite suspect, with as much opinion as facts. The non-discriminating Internet news searcher is just as likely to blunder into a blog as a legitimate news source. And where do people think Internet comes from anyway? At some point some actual person, an actual reporter, has to go out and observe and talk and ask questions and get a story that can later be opinioned and blogged into something that may or may not resemble the truth.
I think part of the problem is that people value their own personal opinions so much that often the truth just gets in the way and who wants that anyway?
As an aside, I recently attended, by accident as it turned out, a talk by a photographer who was supposed to speak on minor breeds of livestock. Since that’s my thing (I raise minor breeds of sheep, cattle and chickens) I thought it would be interesting.
After 27 years of studying and raising minor breeds I think I know something about them, but I would not presume to be an expert and give a talk. Turns out the speaker had spent a few days with the animals and much of his information was conjecture on his part and flat out incorrect.
Truth is relative and because he was the speaker, his words appeared to be the truth to the audience. Not to cynical me.
Back to newspapers. I have heard over and over in the four months since my paper was absorbed into another, that people just don’t know what’s going on - with town finances, building projects, school issues. Without reporters at meetings no one is ever going to know. Ironically, the very people who used to be reported on - town and school officials, etc., - who you might think would be relieved to meet without reporters hanging about, now worry that they have no way of getting important information out to the people.
Western Massachusetts is but a microcosm of the rest of the country. It’s still possible to find out what’s happening in Washington, D.C. and the state capitals, but for how much longer?
Even the nation’s largest papers are starting to share reporters with their rivals. This is not a good thing. Different reporters ask different questions and pick up on different details. Reporters and their editors can slant the news, on purpose or by mistake. Reading different accounts of the same event has always been a good way of getting the real story.
Granted, I’m a news hound as well as a news junkie, but this all bothers me and makes me fear for the future. The Fourth Estate has been around for centuries; I hope the 21st is not its last.