If We Fly Blind, Geese Are the Least of It

PARIS - Navigating today's world is like flying an airliner in the proximity of geese. If we don't notice seemingly small realities ahead, something is certain to flock up our jets. Sully the pilot had a lifetime of training and lots of fancy instruments. We, the superpower people, have only a dwindling little band of foreign correspondents and guesswork.That is why we bumbled into Iraq, caused a half million deaths, filled terrorist ranks, and squandered trillions that hungry people everywhere could use about now. It is why savage storms and unprecedented droughts devastate food crops, threatening shortfalls too fearsome to contemplate.

For those familiar with my running screed, I sound like a broken record (a round black thing that plays music, if you've never seen one). But records are a good case in point. The music industry understands people want fast, techie delivery of new tunes. It also knows that artists who rise above inchoate cacophony need to be paid. YouTube leads us to new talent. But for an Inauguration, say, we prefer Yo-Yo Ma to some unknown citizen cellist. As times change, music executives find new ways to compensate their raw material, whether Yo-Yo Ma or the Smashing Artichokes.

However important musicians may be, we need reporters more.

Now there is intelligent life in the White House. But besides South Asia and Iraq, Barack Obama faces lots of wars, like one with France over Roquefort cheese. He needs our help.

Any democracy, let alone one that steers an unruly planet, depends on clued-in citizens to elect competent people at all levels and make sure they do the right thing. If you could do it over again, wouldn't you want to reread those pre-invasion dispatches from the few correspondents in Iraq who most people ignored? Reporters in Beijing and Brussels warned of global economic collapse but their critical mass was too meager.

We badly need newspapers worthy of the name that faithfully reflect today's world and also inspire young readers who must fashion a smarter one for tomorrow. Electrons can replace words on paper, but we still need reporters on the spot. Real news, intelligence to keep fowl out of our turbines, costs money just like food or a place to live.

The French get this. Nicolas Sarkozy is doubling state ads in newspapers, easing their taxes, and giving 18-year-olds a year's subscription to any paper they choose. Many papers have been gutted by greed or bad management. In the end, this is a market response. Too few people are willing to pay for substance.

To put things right, we should understand what went wrong.

As a kid in the 1950s, I was school reporter at the family-owned Tucson Citizen. Its urbane proprietor made money while also serving the public. Then I reported for the Arizona Daily Star, owned by a cantankerous ex-correspondent who also made money yet believed fiercely that newspapers were more than businesses. After a dark passage under Gannett, the Citizen is folding. The Star, having been owned and abandoned by the Pulitzer family of prize fame, is struggling. Tucson has grown beyond all recognition. Yet it does not have enough citizens willing to spend pennies a day to support newspapers that thrived when it was a tiny cow town.

Look anywhere, nationwide, at blood on newsroom floors and shrinking stacks at newsstands. This is beyond dangerous.

I write an occasional op-ed for the New York Times, and I must confess to some satisfaction. With all its failings, it is a very good newspaper. Online, the Times gives away brave, smart reporting from world capitals and remote sinkholes. But the real thing, which underwrites this, earns far too little on circulation and ads.

We don't have much time. The Los Angeles Times is a shadow of its former self. Big papers plan to pool coverage, blunting the competition that makes good reporters get better. The old faithful Associated Press, rather than filling the gaps left in crucial yet dark parts of the world, now focuses more on flashy scoops and sideshow coverage.

New ventures offer hope.

Some, like ProPublica, are funded by philanthropy. Though noble and useful, they are not nearly enough. On a very large planet, most big stories start small in remote places. An ambitious new online agency, GlobalPost, is a business. Its "content" is solid as stone, edited by Charles Sennott, a star correspondent who gave up on the Boston Globe.

GlobalPost provides fresh news to papers and multimedia coverage to anyone who takes the trouble to log on. It relies on ads, syndication, and a paid membership for extra features.
That is how it must be. Long-distance guesswork and travelogues are cheap enough. But for real news, we can't get what we don't pay for. It is as simple as that.

Subscribe to newspapers. That costs less than a dollar a day. Write thoughtfully to editors. If they ignore real news, cancel and tell them why. Get friends to wake up and weigh in.
If we don't start realizing soon that "the media" we moan about is only what we make of it, we had better get used to goose feathers in our teeth.

Comments

[InofTouch]

I love some of the arguments around here because at best they don't add up

First the argument that it just yesturday news is pointless since every what is posted or printed was yesturday to being with. From television and the internet, you get the same old story...heck the media section around here still has old news as you move down and anything new is most about five story that happen the day before and five editorals or more from the side bar depending on the big news moments

Second your still destoring the enviorment either with newspaper and trees to online and electrcityand what is electrcity made of...depends but is mostly coal and even with new techonology it will take up less what it should that people want.

Old media is dying by Convenience

[durant]

Newspapers devour forests, waste enormous amounts of energy, and end up in the trash or recycling bin within 24 hours. In the Internet era, when anyone can read the first edition of tomorrow's NEW YORK TIMES or WASHINGTON POST before going to bed, the typical newspaper is also out of date by the time it appears on a subscriber's doorstep or front porch.

Instead of trying to preserve newspapers (which is like trying to preserve the telegraph or the icebox), people need to focus on keeping the news product that goes onto the pages of newspapers--i.e., the output of professional journalists--alive. How can that be done? I don't pretend to have the answer, but at least the question is more sensible than "How can we save a medium that no longer makes sense economically or environmentally?"

[dzoner]

I am 59 years old and a lifelong information junkie. I have read thousands of books and newspapers and magazines. I have not read a newspaper for 2 years and the last copy of my last magazine subscription arrived in the mail last week. I do still read the occasional book.

Paper newspapers are dead dinosaurs walking. The 'kindle', blackberry and cell phone models are the futureof portable media. Obama's plan to get broadband into every household and keeping an open, uncensored one tier internet and publicly accessable governmental databases are the key to an informed public.

In any case, paper medis doomed in a broadband internet age. And think of the millions of trees the will be saved DAILY.

[davidwayneosedach]

Or read your news on internet sites like the Huffington Post. Let the Dinosaurs fight the inevitable.

[Mort Rosenblum - Huffpost Blogger]

Thanks for these comments and, of course, you're right. It doesn't really matter whether we chip the news on stone tablets or flash it onto the insides of our eyelids. I love trees, (You can,actually, farm forests which absorb C02, but I digress). The point is who pays to collect news? I've spent 40 years as a foreign correspondent getting close to real news, always discovering that it looks different when you see it, smell it, and touch it. That cost someone a lot of jet fuel. Real reporters put in a lot of hard time for which they need to be compensated so they can fund the families they occasionally come home to visit. Even if they work for free, someone must cover their expenses. If you pay for your paper, or your preferred news medium, online, that should do it.