Response to Crosbie articles

After reading the first two parts of Vin Crosbie’s “Transforming American Newspapers,” I felt myself sweating a little bit. Seeing as how it is my final year at the University and I am clearly locked in this journalistic career path, I could not help but think to myself that I might have chosen a future that potentially has a dead end. The first part of Crosbie’s piece really hit home when he mentioned the Goldman Sachs equity analyst Peter Appert who talked about covering the deterioration of the newspaper industry: "If I covered only the newspaper industry, first of all I would have been fired a long time ago; secondly, I would have had to kill myself." Not only does this make me feel like my chances of a career in journalism are dying but also that the field is simply not interesting to the public anymore, which to me is even more upsetting. What surprised me most in the first article was that some online editions of newspapers are read even less frequently than the print versions because until I read Crosbie’s piece, I fell into the category of people that believed print journalism was dying because an online option was available. Although the first part of “Transforming American Newspapers” was filled with statistics that helped me understand just how much newspapers were struggling, I found the second article much more intriguing. In my Journ 405 History of Journalism class, we are currently studying Johannes Gutenberg’s invention the printing press since it allowed for what we know today as mass communication. It took people out of the Middle Ages and gave them the opportunity to communicate with their neighbors for the first time without being scared that the nobility would be knocking at their doorstep soon to come and be-head them. It was quite the shock, therefore, to hear from Crosbie how sticking to the technique developed by Gutenberg is what is actually destroying the newspaper industry just after learning about how it lead to communication in the modern world. Despite how highly I regarded Gutenberg and his ground-breaking invention, I still found myself nodding along with Crosbie as I read that the problem with the newspaper industry is that like in Gutenberg’s time, newspapers are still printing an over supply of a product that is the same for everyone. Of course the internet is more popular, people can get the exact news and information they want at the click of a mouse. But then I stopped myself. Although most mainstream newspapers that I have read are very general, there are also many special topic magazines that can be found right next to these papers at the news stand. Why would print circulation go down if people can get the general, important news from the mainstream papers and then just grab a special topics magazine to go along with it? Well as I read along with Crosbie in part two, I thought to myself, well duh. I forgot about the most important part of the internet: It is free. Of course people are not going to pay for a general newspaper subscription and then also a special topics magazine when they can get it all faster and cheaper online. After finding myself agreeing with Crosbie throughout almost his whole second piece, I felt like the article came to a disappointing ending. He ends with his opinion that there is now not a need for completeness and accuracy in journalism: who cares if a story is edited and factually correct and complete if it is not the first piece out there? With the internet up 24 hours a day, it is now a race to be first rather than the best. This left me again feeling grim about the credibility of my future career. Will anyone take me seriously when I say that I am a journalist? Because even though I went to college for four years and have a degree in the field, a man can sit and publish things online at home in his underwear. I also felt like Crosbie left a main question unanswered in this piece: How? OK, I agree with him that he may have uncovered the root of newspapers’ problems, but he does not say how they can actually shift into publishing more specific topics. Perhaps that will be in the third part of “Transforming American Newspapers,” but until he writes it, I think his argument is missing a key piece. Personally, I hope he does write about a cure so in ten years I won’t be blogging from my basement about what my career could have been.