I believe the competition the corporate newspaper industry is facing is a healthy turn of events in the business of covering news. As an added bonus I also believe it is a shot in the arm for democracy.
Here’s why:
Print newspapers are a one-way conversation. They print, we read. They choose which letters to the editor to run, they determine when the conversation is over and they determine the subject of the next conversation. In short, to a large degree, they tell us what to think.
This is not to say that a newspaper is the sole provider of content or the single source of information, but with particularly complex issues such as political elections or foreign policy, newspapers influence public opinion and public opinion influences political decisions. Newspapers have become very powerful corporations. Historically, that power has brought great wealth.
In Al Gore’s book, The Assault on Reason , he says about corporations, “It is the incestuous coupling of wealth and power that poses the deadliest threat to democracy.”
By their very nature, large corporate publicly traded companies have a never-ending need for ever-greater profits. That’s capitalism. We all know the drill.
But when a relatively small number of people in the news industry are trusted to protect the public’s access to information and they are part of the corporate profit machine, conflicts of interest are bound to happen. Without checks and balances we’ve seen what’s happened to the banking and investment industries. There is a lot more at stake with media corporations.
So now the good news. The Internet. Websites are popping up all over the country challenging the corporate media companies’ monopoly on access to information. Free at last, free at last. Without being constrained by corporate politics, shareholders’ greed or a relatively small group with a built-in conflict of interest, we the public are the beneficiaries of a broad, open, interactive dialog.
Virtually every print newspaper has an online component. I welcome them with open arms. But the big money needed to maintain the corporate hierarchy is not there and the readers can easily click to the next information resource if they choose. The long held power and wealth in the news industry is fading.
Most Journalists will continue to ply their craft with skill and integrity. Professionals will still write about their respective fields of expertise, fringe thinkers will still publish works that test our patience. Anyone with an opinion can blog, Facebook, Twitter, text or comment and we, the public, will do what we’ve always done. We’ll sort through the information we have available and make what we believe are our best decisions based on that information.
The sky is not falling.
The difference is now there is the potential for substantially more information to be available and the conversation goes two ways. Those in the position of wealth and power will find it more difficult to control the conversation.
That, in my opinion, is cause for celebration.
Bruce Greenberg is business manager of A News Cafe. By trade he’s an artisan woodworker, creating handcrafted, one-of-a-kind furniture for homes and commercial spaces. He is married to Doni Greenberg.
