I finally managed to find a way to link to this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece — which several kind folks have brought to my attention — that I think will work. Let me know if you have trouble with it, in which case I’ll go back to the drawing board.
While I’m at it, though, I might as well point out that this is another example of the sort of analysis of Knight Ridder’s situation that shows the writer knows not of what he speaks.
I’m not so much quibbling with his calling Knight Ridder a group of "second-rate newspapers." I can’t, because he doesn’t state by what standard he is rating them. Personally, I believe The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are probably the two best papers in the country. Note that I say "probably," because unlike the author of the op-ed piece, I do not regard myself as omniscient. One would have to read every paper in the country every day, and come up with some way of standardizing judgments of them, to state authoritatively which papers are the best in the nation.
Anyway, after those two, I’m not sure where to go next. The Chicago Tribune? The L.A. Times? The Washington Post? I don’t know even what I think on that score. So let’s say the Times and the Journal are first-rate, no doubt about it. Do you cut it off there? Does that make the Trib, the LAT and the WashPost second-rate? If so, that’s fine company to be in.
I suspect that Mr. Ellis is drawing the line somewhat below that level, but I don’t know; he doesn’t explain. So we’ll let that go.
But when he repeatedly refers to Knight Ridder papers as "second-rate information providers," saying that it is unsurprising that broadband-enabled consumers would abandon them, I have to say, Hold on. This is where he’s showing the sort of ignorance that is typical among analysts who keep pronouncing ex cathedra from Wall Street that newspapers are doomed to disappear.
I don’t know (or care that much) about other Knight Ridder newspapers, but I would like Mr. Ellis to cite a source of news and analysis about South Carolina that is clearly superior to The State. Oh, I suppose the Greenville and Charleston papers have their fans who would argue that they are better on that score, but I’d disagree with them. And I don’t think anyone could make any kind of a case that there is a better source of information on the Midlands than my own newspaper.
If he could cite just one such source, I would be amazed. I’m quite confident that he can’t.
See, this is where the understanding of folks who view the newspaper industry from New York or Boston or Washington often goes awry. They misunderstand what this business is about. It’s about communities. Sure, you can go online and find many better and more complete sources about the recent tsunami, or British politics or the situation in the Mideast. But most newspapers exist to tell people what’s going on right where they live. And they have no serious competition in this endeavor.
If all newspapers (and I use "newspapers" to include their Web incarnations; I’m by no means wedded to dead trees) disappeared tomorrow, someone would start up a new one in every good-sized community in the nation. Why? Because there’s a market for the information that only newspapers provide — however they deliver that information to you.
Yes, newspapers (while remaining profitable, a fact that Wall Street willfully overlooks) are still stumbling around trying to find a way to make enough money to support their news-gathering operations on the Internet. One of the things holding us back is that there is still a market for the dead-tree version. Otherwise, we could ditch that altogether and eliminate more than half our cost, making it much easier to compete on-line.
But I believe we’ll work it out eventually. In the meantime, newspapers remain the first-rate providers of local news, by virtue of the fact that there’s nothing better.
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Brad,
The WSJ online is subscription-only, so the link isn’t going to work for those of us who don’t subscribe. You might find a reprint of the piece somewhere else on the internet and link to it that way.
Sorry about that. Try this one.
Brad:
While I read the NY Times online every morning, I still think the St. Pete Times (St. Petersburg, Florida) is in the top 10 papers in the nation. It has won many Pulitzer Prizes and has wonderful writers, not to mention what a visually beautiful paper it is. Check it out. Can’t believe you didn’t mention it.
The New York Times is a second-tier newspaper, only larger than The State. It doesn’t hold a candle to the WSJ, and doesn’t even try to do so. Most newspapers are too bound by ideology to provide the in-depth coverage that literate people want. Most stories are written to a template, with facts chosen to fit the story, or the facts are replaced by opinion in the form of reporting the fact of someone’s opinion, usually someone ignorant.
I think that Private Capital Management LP, the folks that told Knight Ridder to go sell itself, was hoping that some stock prices might rise if a bidding war were to break out. Alas, they’ll have to go back to making money the hard way.
But the rather dismissive WSJ article does display an ignorance of the value of newspapers to consumers. I subscribe to both the dead-tree and online versions of the WSJ; I subscribe to the dead-tee The State and read parts of it on-line too. In this internet age, there are a lot of things one can do with a newspaper that one can’t with the on-line version:
The fact is that the Knight-Ridder papers provide local reporting, find the state or local angle to national stories, support community events, and so forth. The nationals — New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, and the rest — can’t and don’t. They often miss interesting national and foreign stories when they run out of space on a given day, or have one of their smart aleck reporters like Dana Milbank miss the point entirely.
So what is a second-rate newspaper? Like beauty I suppose it’s in the eye of the beholder. One blogger has gained national attention by taking on the bias and incompetence he sees in the LA Times. Some folks don’t like the Washington Times because of who owns it. Colorful columnist Mike Royko left the Chicago Sun-Times in 1984
The one newspaper I never cared for was the Minneapolis Star Tribune where editorial option often found its way into the reporting. But that doesn’t mean that they’re second-rate.
Second-tier does not mean second rate.
Smaller market newspapers would be derelict if they failed to provide good coverage of local events. Where most of them fall down is in covering the state, national and world events accurately and completely. Given the time they have to prepare articles, it is unforgivable that most do no more than serve up what television has already delivered, which isn’t much.