Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

In the recent edition of The Nation, Eric Alterman has a story entitled “I Read the News Today…Oh Boy.” The thrust of Alterman’s story is that newspapers are in serious decline, and the newspaper industry can’t figure out a way to stop the bleeding.

Here’s how he sums it up:

The dearth of decent ideas designed to save newspapers–or reinvent them for the digital age in ways that preserve their crucial democratic functions–is curious and depressing. It’s curious because some of the smartest, most ambitious and most civic-minded people in America are deeply engaged with the problem. It is depressing because the only ones with the self-confidence to undertake radical measures appear to be completely off their respective rockers.

Alterman then goes on to list a bunch of ideas that various newspaper editors have come up with to get more people reading newspapers, including giving copies away to college kids (but even this doesn’t work since college kids have better things to do than read newspapers, even free ones).

In the end, Alterman admits that — even though the stakes are sky-high — that even he can’t come up with any good ideas for how to save newspapers:

I don’t have a better idea, except to repeat, again, the following: the loss of daily newspapers is a significant threat to the future of our democracy. It is far too important to be left in the hands of a bunch of clueless media moguls and their “chief innovation officers.”

Alterman here seems to be paraphrasing Clemenceau’s famous phrase “War’s too important to be left to the generals” (with Alterman’s version being, I guess, “Newspapers are too important to be left to the moguls”). And yet, in this case, the real problem is how important Alterman is making newspapers. I mean, is he serious when we says that “the loss of daily newspapers is a significant threat to the future of our democracy”? Because that is ridiculous.

Democracy does not rely on newspapers. Democracy relies on honest journalism and reporting (or, at the very least, freedom of the press, which is an idea all its own). Because if the content that appears on Fox News were distributed via a newspaper instead of a cable channel, and it was the only newspaper we had, it would surely be a bad thing for our democracy.

Anyway, Alterman’s forgetting the first real tenet of the democracy he seems so intent on saving: this is a government for the people, by the people. And the people, if they choose an alternate way of getting their news and information (such as websites and blogs) will have made their decision. The point shouldn’t be to just shove a newspaper into someone’s hand, but rather to instill in that person the curiosity to find out the truth in the first place.