The New Yorker on the history and future of newspapers and blogs

The New Yorker's March 31, 2008 issue (currently online) includes a long piece by Eric Alterman on "The death and life of the American newspaper".

Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money.

Not anymore.

Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.

It seems that all pieces on the future of newspapers contain a passage like this one: (emphasis added)

Among the most significant aspects of the transition from “dead tree” newspapers to a world of digital information lies in the nature of “news” itself. The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity.

Insert "theoretical" or "claimed (but not actually followed)" before "commitment" and we might agree.

Moving on to the future of news, Alterman provides some interesting background and details on the Huffington Post.

Surrounding the news articles are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers—more than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid.

Michael Gay of the Lost Remote TV Blog points out that Wikipedia lists many of the site's famous contributors.

Co-Founder and Chairman Kenneth Lerer explains their goals: (commas removed for clarity)

this new way of thinking about and presenting the news is transforming news as much as CNN did thirty years ago.

Alterman's reply:

It's an almost comically audacious ambition for an operation with only forty-six full-time employees—many of whom are barely old enough to rent a car. But, with about eleven million dollars at its disposal, the site is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between six and ten million dollars annually.

Rafat Ali of paidContent.org corrects the misleading $11 million "at its disposal":

that’s the amount it has raised [to] date, and probably spent a big chunk of...

Alterman provides a useful comparison of staff levels:

Even after the latest round of new cutbacks and buyouts are carried out, the [New York] Times will retain a core of more than twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees each. The Times’ Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars a year to maintain. And while the Huffington Post shares the benefit of these investments, it shoulders none of the costs.

Milbloggers (military bloggers) might reply that reader-supported individuals such as Michael Yon have provided far better reporting than the entire Baghdad bureau.

Alterman pinpoints one niche the Huffington Post has carved out:

the Huffington Post has successfully positioned itself as the place where progressive politicians and Hollywood liberal luminaries post their anti-Bush Administration sentiments

(Though I would say "a place" not "the place".)

I've only covered about half the article, so follow the link below for more on:

• some history of "the partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press"
• changes advocated by Walter Lippmann & John Dewey beginning in the 1920s
• the rise of conservative alternatives
• liberals like blogger Duncan Black ("atrios") who reject "the myth of the liberal media"
• conservative bloggers who helped to bring down Dan Rather
• Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo on the fired U.S. Attorneys
• big picture: what's next for news?