by Joe Fitzgerald
Two recent signs of the deterioration of journalism. One is this comment from President Biden to a gaggle of reporters:
I hear some of you guys saying is, ‘Why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is?’ Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote? You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.
The second is this, from Harrisonburg Patch, a news aggregator:
A 33-year-old teacher at James Madison Middle School has been accused of soliciting inappropriate pictures from a student, leading to criminal charges against him. The alleged incident involved the teacher requesting pictures from a student at the school where he was employed, according to the police. The teacher has been arrested.
The first is obvious. Biden mocked the press corps for its reporting skills, and the press corps reported it as a Biden idiosyncrasy instead of as a failing on their part. The second, a little less so. The algorithm saw James Madison and thought Harrisonburg, even though the school is in Maryland. And it showed up in my email as a local story, which is a little jarring considering my wife, Deb, chairs the School Board.
What the stories have in common is that they point out the pointlessly top-heavy nature of journalism. The Biden quote and story don’t say how many cameras, journalists, and Fox personnel were following the president at the time. One would have done it. Yet dozens follow him around, jockeying to see who can first tweet what he said and who can write the longest thumb-sucking column about what he meant. “The president said he had eggs for breakfast, raising concerns in the pancake industry and inviting questions about his cholesterol levels.”
Local news, meanwhile is left to a bot. The Daily News-Record, once a local paper, leads today’s email with news of library books in Warren County, which we learn is also building a new fire station. It’s not the fault of the reporters; they don’t exist. The disappearance of local journalism is nobody’s fault, meaning nobody has a responsibility to do anything about it.
One obvious treatment for the problem locally — I’m reluctant to call it a solution or answer — would be the sharing of journalistic resources. What could The Breeze possibly contribute to a Harrisonburg City Council story that the Citizen hasn’t already reported? And what could that Breeze reporter be covering if he or she were not spending time on the council story?
How this sharing might work isn’t really an issue, because nobody is likely to try it. The Breeze, the Daily News Record, and WHSV are competing for eyes and clicks, and nobody’s coming to the DNR website for a story that says “click here for Breeze story.” The necessary level of cooperation will never be reached by the people making local news decisions. First, they’re not local. A West Virginia firm owns the newspaper and an Atlanta corporation owns the TV station. The largest local news operation, The Breeze, is run by people not old enough to rent a car. Second, the TV and newspaper decision-makers are old enough to have learned the business of news under a defunct model. There are people involved who are young enough to point out that the emperor has no classified revenue, but by the time they’re in decision-making roles, the business may be gone.
Anyone with even surface knowledge of the advertising and journalism model knows how unlikely change is. It’s not accurate to say it has worked too long to stop. Tenses matter. It did work. There was enough advertising to pay for enough journalism to sell papers and draw eyes and ears. Journalism drew enough audience to make it worthwhile to advertise. Existing on different floors or in different worlds, they needed one another and often hated one another. The relationship was a snake eating its own tail, and nobody can admit it swallowed.
The kind of cooperation that would make journalism survive is unlikely to ever happen. For it to occur, media outlets would have to abandon the business models that have lasted for generations. The way to get there is to acknowledge that those models have abandoned them.
Like Jimmy Buffett’s pirate looking at 40, journalists have heard the call. But too many of the people running the news business haven’t realized they need to switch from sail to steam.
Joe Fitzgerald is a former mayor of Harrisonburg. This column is republished with permission from his blog, Still Not Sleeping.
