News of their death

In the January-February edition of the Atlantic Michael Hirschhorn presents a brief but bleak picture of the print news business. He raises the specter that the Gray Lady (NYT) could fail in the coming months based on a declining subscriber base and ad revenue that seem to have fallen off a cliff. The announcement yesterday that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim had lent the NYT a couple of hundred million dollars only reinforces the issues raised in Hirschhorn's piece.

Two things come to mind here. First, about a decade ago, I was at a Monetary Conference in Guanajuato, Mexico where Robert Bartley the Editor of the WSJ was also present. One afternoon as we were going to lunch I sat next to him and commented that I found the electronic edition of the paper invaluable. I asked him whether the electronic edition had cut into the print revenues.
He replied by asking whether I had dropped my print subscription. When I replied no he said "So we are making an extra $40 a year off you that we did not make before." This year I dropped my print subscription and kept the electronic one. I find increasingly that I get my financial news from the net and not from the print edition of papers.

Second comment, at a dinner I recently sat next to the Publisher of the Sacramento Bee, our local paper which is facing similarly bleak times. I expressed strong appreciation for many of the things that the Bee does for the local community and for the community of policy wonks who are interested in Sacramento. We need to think of ways to monetize the value of key columnists who have helped all of us think in new ways not about the immediate news but of the broader issues facing the state. One columnist in particular has been especially insightful about state policy and it would be tragic to miss his insights.

Clearly, the print media is going through an adjustment. Some of that adjustment has been self inflicted. At least two of the Times (NYT and LAT) moved increasingly to doctrinaire reporting in recent years and many readers were turned off by this kind of advocacy journalism. But a good measure of the problems have come about as a result of technological changes of which the print media had very little control. I have been a critic of the ideological drift of many news organizations and yet I recognize the genuine value that good reporting and analysis brings to the discourse in our society. Hirschhorn's piece is a sobering reminder of the stakes of both of these changes could have on the American system.