If America Wont Buy Quality Newspapers - Road to the Middle Class

HERE IT comes. It was inevitable, really. We can thank Steven Rattner for giving us a heads-up on it, an early warning so we can head it off at the pass.

Rattner takes a look at the delicate state of the newspaper business today.

The Washington Post has lost 14 percent of its circulation since 2000. And newspapers have lost half of their young readers.

Perhaps most worrisome is the loss of young readers, who have drifted away steadily since the early 1970s, long before there was an Internet, when more than 70% of 18- to 34-year-old Americans read a daily newspaper. Last year that figure stood at 35%.

Guess where the growth in the newspaper is coming from?

Only two newspapers in the top 25—the two New York tabloids—grew circulation during this period, a statement in itself.

Yes. That really is nasty. Americans are turning away from quality newspapers, and what are they reading instead? Tabloids!

Of course newspaper reading on the Internet is up. But most people get their news from the big on-line portals,

which means that they are mostly consuming a bland porridge of wire service stories.

Things are getting so bad that the market soon may not support true quality newspapers. It is time for action.

[W]e can�t expect the objectives of enterprises that were organized around a for-profit interest to necessarily intersect with the societal value of quality journalism. So perhaps it�s time to think about new models for the news business.

Ah yes. Why newspapers might be just like the New York subways, a vital service that nobody wants to pay for.

We could create a pool of money (possibly from a license fee similar to how the BBC is funded). News organizations with an expensive but important project in mind could apply for funding, much the way producers in the public television world have for the last 40 years.

Oh innocent, how reasonable it sounds.

Over my cold, dead body.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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