Howie Kurtz:
Newspapers are probably dying as a mass medium, except perhaps for elite or specialized audiences. Cutting down forests, printing the product and trucking it across the region no longer make economic sense. What is lost is the sense of community when everyone read the daily rag.
Groan. This "sense of community" bullcrap has been also spouted about the rise of good television. You see, in the 60s, 80 percent of Americans watched one of the three networks' nightly news. I mean it was just the three -- ABC, CBS, and NBC. It was a world in which Walter Conkrite could turn on the war in Vietnam, and the rest of the country would follow suit. If you're a media type, that's the ideal -- unparalleled influence and access to a vast national audience.
But cable TV, and then satellite TV, became hugely popular because people weren't happy with the limited crap provided by those three networks. Now you have hundreds of channels, most focused on narrow niche topics that were otherwise ignored in years past. For example, as I type this I'm watching coverage of the Giro d' Italia on Universal Sports -- a network focused on less popular but niche-y sports like diving, international hockey, sailing, track and field, mountain biking and cycling. It's the first time I've ever been able to watch the second most important cycling event in the world on television, and all because of the creation of yet another niche network. So the more the merrier!
Same thing has happened in print, with niche media proliferating on the web, and people unhappy with their local coverage splintering off to read about the stuff they are most interest in. So that "sense of community" thing? It never existed. Newspapers have always served the wealthiest members of their communities -- the people that will buy the stuff that advertisers were peddling. So ethnic communities have always been underserved. In San Francisco, Asians make up over a third of the population -- the largest single ethnic group in the city -- yet the San Francisco Chronicle doesn't have a single Asian columnist in its stable. Do you think the Asian community sees the Chronicle as a member of its community? Of course not. And given they were traditionally a relatively poor immigrant community, the Chron had little interest in engaging that part of the city.
All around the country, you see the major metro dailies completely ignore entire chunks of their cities. Why do you think the New York Times writes story after story after story talking about those poor unemployed Wall Street types no longer able to buy caviar or $800 doll houses for their daughters?
The reason alternate media has taken off was because the traditional media didn't deliver a product people wanted. If people felt a "sense of community" from their newspaper, perhaps they may have stuck with the product. But they don't, hence it's easy to toss it aside for the countless alternatives at the public's disposal.
And these new niche publications online are a community of their own, based not on geographic proximity, but on shared interests.
So I have no idea what Kurtz is talking about when he decries the lose of "sense of community". I have found far more community online than I ever did in those dark, pre-internet days.