I recently read an article by Matthew Ingram that comments on Hal Varian's examination of newspapers' positions today. In it, Ingram agrees with Varian that newspapers are to blame for going out of business and not the Internet as so many say. He believes that they do not engage their readers enough, leaving their readers uninterested and distanced from the stories reported. They are a simple bare-bones account of facts with little to no emotion behind them, making them incredibly boring. Also, he thinks that newspapers do not pay enough attention to what their readers want to read. Therefore, newspapers bury themselves for not generating enough interest.
However, Ingram has ignored the inner workings of newspapers and journalism in general in his assessment of them. Journalism and newspapers are run by conventions, which are such widely used techniques in a field that they seem to become rules and constraints. One such convention in the field of journalism is the idea of objectivity in reporting. Objectivity, according to the text Media/Society, is the separation of fact and value. Most every reader of newspapers expects this objectivity, making it difficult for any paper to function without it. After all, it's only annoying when reporters are blatantly biased on an issue they are reporting, as this bias can obviously effect how they write their piece and exactly what it says.
Objectivity is expected, no matter what Ingram may think about the level of engagement in newspapers, and therefore the facts-only approach to reporting is necessary.
Well, so what? Maybe objectivity is key, but the newspapers could at least report about what their readers want to read, right? Ingram hit the mark on that one, didn't he? Well, no, I don't think he did. News papers are not magazines. Journalists aren't supposed to report what people want to hear so much as what is happening; they inform. They don't entertain. If they did, the entertainment and lifestyle sections of newspapers would probably be a lot thicker. Newspapers aren't supposed to cater to their readers needs as magazines do, after all. Their readers buy the papers for information, not entertainment.
But so what? Why does any of this matter? It's just newspapers, after all. News will still be reported online if they disappear, right? Maybe. But, what if that news changes? If news becomes more about engaging readers than it is about informing readers of the few events they do choose to report on, what will we be reading about? Imagine three point shots made in last night's Sixer's game or Johnny Depp's new haircut making the front page of major newspapers. Is that what we want news to become--more engaging entertainment? I sure hope not; no one would ever know what was happening in the world around them.
What do you think?
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