David Simon and the death of newspapers

Esquire magazine long since slid into irrelevancy, but David Simon’s article in the March edition (and online) could practically double as my manifesto:

At the very edge of being rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Internet — at the precise moment when their very product would be threatened by technology — newspapers will not be intent on increasing and deepening their coverage of their cities, their nation, the world. They will be instead in the hands of out-of-town moneymen offering unfeeling and unequivocal fealty to stockholders and the share price.

And more, which is what I observed from Corporate newspapers in at least two of my hometowns:

I don’t yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city … and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee.

… Or worse, to try to fool readers into thinking we would actually, you know, “cover” your community. Instead they’d offer these tiny little neighborhood pages and throw out a local blow-out package once a year “filled with the hope that more people will subscribe to a newspaper that manages now and then to run a photo of someone’s kid at the county fair” — as Simon said in the Washington Post about a failed zoned insert from the Baltimore Sun but applicable to my old haunt — and then go back to ignoring you on a daily basis — since it was, um, a daily paper.

Journos: Fiddling, Rome burning

Lot of backlash against David Simon’s vision of the Baltimore Sun in the final season of The Wire. A lot of it is because of Simon’s now very public hatred of two of his former editors. Both of these editors are considered sacred cows among many of today’s working journalists. But these jorunos’ defense of these two editors, and their backlash against Simon and The Wire, is playing exactly into The Wire’s viewpoint, which is: what are We paying attention to?

I’m sure that during the first seasons of The Wire, every police in Baltimore spent time trying to figure out which real-life cop McNulty was based upon, who was the real-life police commissioner, the deputy commissioner, etc. The difference is that police generally don’t have the podium of either column inches or online news sites and name-brand blogs at their disposal to vent or offer personality corrections. I’m wondering if they have the same competitive streak that drives most journos to go out and prove they are better, smarter and more prolific than every other journo — in reality, that, and not the pursuit of truth, is what drives most journalists.

As Slate’s critics finally realized (post No. 17 in the Slate discussion), today’s journalists are fiddling while Rome burns. What I’ve read in the last few weeks (the Atlantic, Slate, etc.) proves to me the exact Problem with Reporters and Editors today — their obsession with gossip rather than news.