News in Neglect

In a New York Times blog post here, National Book Award winner Timothy Egan stops shy of asking subsidy to buoy the newspaper industry. Instead he appeals to Americans’ sentimentality. “My lament this Fourth of July is to ask readers to see newspapers as not just another casualty in the churn of business,” he says. No? Should we see newspapers as the industry that gave superhero aliases a day job? Though an emotional plea, Egan doesn’t ask us to save the newspaper industry. He asks something more important: to inform ourselves wisely.

In the piece he warns of specious centralized news gathering. Centralized wire services, like AP or Reuters, attract many blogs, but are stiff and threaten local reporting, Egan says. “Web info-slingers will find that you can’t produce journalism without journalists, and a search engine is no replacement for a curious reporter,” he says. Furthermore, bloggers won’t work for free for indefinitely.

Blogs might depend on news wires, and in turn readers link to local newspaper Web sites. Despite greater electronic distribution reaching larger audiences, even affluent cities can’t keep a profitable newspaper, Egan writes. Though everyone wants the news, no one wants to pay for it.

Newspaper casualties signal that kind of disconnect. The loss of newspapers follows our economic system’s tendency to allow bridges, levees, schools, and other infrastructure to verge on collapse while favoring the latest trends in riches. Without wholesale re-evaluation and action regarding where we invest our interests, we are eventually, all of us, casualties in the churn of business.

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