Djelloul Marbrook

If you’d like to look at the changing face of news, consider your own Google home page. Savor its interactivity. You can organize your news, weather maps, solar systems, art exegesis, you name it, and the list of “gadgets” grows almost daily. You can design your own newspaper.

But it’s no longer a paper, it’s news from the ether, and it’s being updated and reedited around the clock. More than all the words about the demise of the newspaper, your home page can tell the story. You can do with your cursor what it costs a paper-and-ink newsroom big bucks to do.

The economies of the Internet news organization are inarguable. No ever more costly paper, no delivery trucks, no rush hours, no huge printing plants and pricey real estate.

What remains to be seen is whether business models evolve that will make Internet news operations hot properties sought after by investors. Equally uncertain is whether the cost efficiencies will eventually translate into staffs large enough and skilled enough to do a better job reporting the news than newspapers are doing. Or will the cost efficiencies put money in the pockets of investors while shortchanging the public, as is the case now?

There has never been a searchable newspaper. What the editors put into the news hole the night before is what you get in the morning. But the Internet newspaper is searchable because each link leads to a dozen or more other links: the information net keeps casting itself wider and wider. In theory, readers can go as deeply into a subject as they choose,and along the way will encounter many writing styles and viewpoints. No newspaper can match this.

But the picture isn’t entirely rosy. So far Internet news operations tend to be poorly written and edited, nor is there any indication that they will redress the newspaper’s abdication of its responsibilities to fully inform the citizenry. Analysts have given this unpromising picture a pass, because they know that profitable business models are still evolving. But the worrisome possibility exists that Internet news will never rise to the quality or commitment of the golden age of American newspapering, which I would put between in the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.

We’ll see. The burgeoning Internet news industry is running out of free passes. It’s time to attend to literacy, journalistic excellence and commitment to breadth and depth. While I’ve been a staunch advocate of the Internet news organization I find it less than reassuring that the industry has chosen to call editors content managers. Reporting, editing and presenting the news is not like choosing the right cans, produce or books on shelves; it’s much more than that. Or it should be.

In the 1950s it wasn’t uncommon to find regional newspapers, like The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Baltimore Sun, The Providence Journal, The Kansas City Star, and many more that were almost as literate as The New York Times, almost as successful in adhering to standards of excellence commitment to community. But today those newspapers are pale shadows of what they were, thanks to absentee corporate greed that shrank from the challenges confronting newspapers and instead chose to maintain profitability by reducing staff and supplanting genuine reportage with pretty packaging.

The fault is not with the journalists. Even today the reporters and editors of most newspapers strive valiantly to uphold the standards of old, but they have been betrayed by lackluster ownership. Even when they decide to quicken their transition to the Internet they are still being betrayed by a lack of resources and vision from the top.         —DM