CRESS: An industry in crisis

By MATT CRESS
Matthew.Cress@newsandtribune.com

May 15, 2008 12:42 am

— In this space last Sunday, Mike Hutsell wrote a piece about how bloggers and the new-school sports media and running headlong into the old guard, and how the results are sometimes explosive.
He landed somewhere in the middle, but at 27 years old, I still have my car parked to that old bandwagon and have had a hard time embracing this new style of getting news.
My biggest issue is that these bloggers are giving the appearance of “winning.” The powers that be at papers all across the country have bought into the notion that their industry is dying, and therefore have begun adjusting their tactics to suit. A good example of this was the recent apology made by the Boston Herald — a prestigious name, to be sure — for putting out incorrect information on the New England Patriots “Spygate” scandal.
I’m never one for tradition. I spend far more time looking for my iPod than I do trying on my fedora and smoking cigars while I’m out looking for stories. Heck, most of the stories come to me in this age (and that’s a good use for new technology).
But if newspapers abandon their principals — checking sources, investigating thoroughly, being as impartial as human emotion allows — they simply become blogs with a long lead time for publishing. It’s playing the sort of game that the industry can’t win.
This isn’t a national newspaper. It doesn’t even cover a whole state. What it does do is allow complete transparency. You’re likely to see me at the gas station, at the movies, standing on Spring Street in Jeffersonville and dreaming about a simpler life. If you do, come say something.
That’s the thing I’ll always love about this newspaper, the one I grew up reading. If you need something, we’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen. You want your kid in the paper? We’ll find a way to make it work. And you can’t hang a blog post on the wall.
It bothers me to think I spent time in my college classes learning a time-honored code, only to have it erased by a band of people who never considered it in the first place. It bothers me that the industry in which I work is allowing it to change what made it grow in the first place.
So what about you guys? That’s the most important thing. Do you guys still get your news from the paper? Do you get it from the Internet? Do you follow blogs?
At the risk of sounding old, jaded and embittered, I simply wonder if we aren’t living in a world where truth no longer matters. Where every opinion on every controversy has its matching Web site, and the middle ground gets buried under a sea of spin.
Maybe it’s not this way. You tell me. This is one of the more interesting things we’ll see in our lifetimes. To see if new and old can agree on a new world, or splinter off until one side’s supporters wear out and vanish.
I’ll tackle this again in a few weeks. Send me your comments at matthew.cress@newsandtribune.com. I’ll print a few that I like, and I’ll print a few that I don’t.
And that’s what makes the aging newspaper industry more important now than ever.
Contact Matthew Cress at matthew.cress@newsandtribune.com

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