Dark Ages

(Feb. 5, 2009) In the information infrastructure, newspapers represent the outmoded grid. But if you tear down the grid without having a replacement in place you will find yourself in the dark.

Think about that as we prepare to spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure projects meant to shore up our collapsed economy. We spent $700 billion to save our banks. We will spend tens of billions to save the auto industry. Both are central to our economy.

Not so the hundreds of thousands of workers in the news industry. The newspaper is never the top employer in a town. Its collapse does not create a chain effect on suppliers across the country and world. As the deliverer of bad news, many people might find it a relief to not have it on their doorsteps. So saving the journalism industry from collapse is not part of the Obama agenda.

Maybe it should be. To get a sense of the scope of the problem check out the site http://graphicdesignr.net/papercuts. There you will find an interactive map that plots out the more than 15,000 jobs lost last year. It counts another 2,000 this year. Small papers are shutting down and some very big ones are on the verge.

Now, I won’t argue that the government should bail out newspapers. But saving the industry should be part of the national discussion. Because it will be hard to have any national discussion without them.

Newspapers are a thing of the past, no doubt about that. It makes little sense when you have electronic communication to have information go from the mouth of a source to a notepad to a computer to a printing press to a truck to a driveway to a kitchen table, with multiple reporters, photographers, editors, designers and delivery people involved in the process.

But just because you ditch the newsprint doesn’t mean that you ditch what’s on it. Trucks replaced the stagecoach a long time ago, but that didn’t change the need to transport goods from one place to another. And you still needed people to make the goods in the first place.

Last month Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group, based in Denver, told its 3,300 workers in California to take a week off without pay. That means that come spring break, you might see some of the reporters at the Times-Standard around town sans notebook. It won’t likely be in Starbucks. Most of these people live paycheck to paycheck and one of those paychecks will be half the size they need. In the boom times, owner Dean Singleton didn’t hand out hefty bonuses to these workers. But in bad times, they are expected to share in the pain.

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