{"id":126512,"date":"2019-01-28T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=126512"},"modified":"2019-01-24T08:45:10","modified_gmt":"2019-01-24T08:45:10","slug":"does-journalism-have-a-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/01\/does-journalism-have-a-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Journalism Have a Future?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an era of social media and fake news, journalists who have survived the print plunge have new foes to face.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The more desperately the press chases readers, the more it resembles our politics.
Illustration by Erik Carter<\/p><\/div>\n

28 Jan 2019 – <\/em>The wood-panelled tailgate of the 1972 Oldsmobile station wagon dangled open like a broken jaw, making a wobbly bench on which four kids could sit, eight legs swinging. Every Sunday morning, long before dawn, we\u2019d get yanked out of bed to stuff the car\u2019s way-back with stacks of twine-tied newspapers, clamber onto the tailgate, cut the twine with my mother\u2019s sewing scissors, and ride around town, bouncing along on that bench, while my father shouted out orders from the driver\u2019s seat. \u201cWatch out for the dog!\u201d he\u2019d holler between draws on his pipe. \u201cInside the screen door!\u201d \u201cMailbox!\u201d As the car crept along, never stopping, we\u2019d each grab a paper and dash in the dark across icy driveways or dew-drunk grass, crashing, seasonally, into unexpected snowmen. \u201cBack porch!\u201d \u201cMoney under the mat!\u201d He kept a list, scrawled on the back of an envelope, taped to the dashboard: the Accounts. \u201cThey owe three weeks!\u201d He didn\u2019t need to remind us. We knew each Doberman and every debt. We\u2019d deliver our papers\u2014Worcester Sunday Telegrams<\/em>\u2014and then run back to the car and scramble onto the tailgate, dropping the coins we\u2019d collected into empty Briggs tobacco tins as we bumped along to the next turn, the newspaper route our Sabbath.<\/p>\n

The Worcester Sunday Telegram<\/em> was founded in 1884, when a telegram meant something fast. Two years later, it became a daily. It was never a great paper but it was always a pretty good paper: useful, gossipy, and resolute. It cultivated talent. The poet Stanley Kunitz was a staff writer for the Telegram<\/em> in the nineteen-twenties. The New York Times<\/em><\/a> reporter Douglas Kneeland, who covered Kent State and Charles Manson, began his career there in the nineteen-fifties. Joe McGinniss reported for the Telegram<\/em> in the nineteen-sixties before writing \u201cThe Selling of the President.\u201d From bushy-bearded nineteenth-century politicians to baby-faced George W. Bush, the paper was steadfastly Republican, if mainly concerned with scandals and mustachioed villains close to home: overdue repairs to the main branch of the public library, police raids on illegal betting establishments\u2014\u201cWorcester Dog Chases Worcester Cat Over Worcester Fence<\/em>,\u201d as the old Washington press-corps joke about a typical headline in a local paper goes. Its pages rolled off giant, thrumming presses in a four-story building that overlooked City Hall the way every city paper used to look out over every city hall, the Bat-Signal over Gotham.<\/p>\n

Most newspapers like that haven\u2019t lasted. Between 1970 and 2016, the year the American Society of News Editors quit counting, five hundred or so dailies went out of business; the rest cut news coverage, or shrank the paper\u2019s size, or stopped producing a print edition, or did all of that, and it still wasn\u2019t enough. The newspaper mortality rate is old news, and nostalgia for dead papers is itself pitiful at this point, even though, I still say, there\u2019s a principle involved. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t weep about a shoe factory or a branch-line railroad shutting down,\u201d Heywood Broun, the founder of the American Newspaper Guild, said when the New York World<\/em> went out of business, in 1931. \u201cBut newspapers are different.\u201d And the bleeding hasn\u2019t stopped. Between January, 2017, and April, 2018, a third of the nation\u2019s largest newspapers, including the Denver Post<\/em> and the San Jose Mercury News<\/em>, reported layoffs. In a newer trend, so did about a quarter of digital-native news sites. BuzzFeed News laid off a hundred people in 2017; speculation is that BuzzFeed is trying to dump it. The Huffington Post paid most of its writers nothing for years, upping that recently to just above nothing, and yet, despite taking in tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue in 2018, it failed to turn a profit.<\/p>\n

Even veterans of august and still thriving papers are worried, especially about the fake news that\u2019s risen from the ashes of the dead news. \u201cWe are, for the first time in modern history, facing the prospect of how societies would exist without reliable news,\u201d Alan Rusbridger, for twenty years the editor-in-chief of the Guardian<\/em>, writes in \u201cBreaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now<\/a>.\u201d \u201cThere are not that many places left that do quality news well or even aim to do it at all,\u201d Jill Abramson<\/a>, a former executive editor of the New York Times<\/em>, writes in \u201cMerchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.\u201d Like most big-paper reporters and editors who write about the crisis of journalism, Rusbridger and Abramson are interested in national and international news organizations. The local story is worse.<\/p>\n

First came conglomeration. Worcester, Massachusetts, the second-largest city in New England, used to have four dailies: the Telegram<\/em>, in the morning, and the Gazette<\/em>, in the evening (under the same ownership), the Spy<\/em>, and the Post<\/em>. Now it has one. The last great laying waste to American newspapers came in the early decades of the twentieth century, mainly owing to (a) radio and (b) the Depression; the number of dailies fell from 2,042 in 1920 to 1,754 in 1944, leaving 1,103 cities with only one paper. Newspaper circulation rose between 1940 and 1990, but likely only because more people were reading fewer papers, and, as A. J. Liebling once observed, nothing is crummier than a one-paper town. In 1949, after yet another New York daily closed its doors, Liebling predicted, \u201cIf the trend continues, New York will be a one- or two-paper town by about 1975.\u201d He wasn\u2019t that far off. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, as Christopher B. Daly reports in \u201cCovering America: A Narrative History of the Nation\u2019s Journalism<\/a>,\u201d \u201cthe big kept getting bigger.\u201d Conglomeration can be good for business, but it has generally been bad for journalism. Media companies that want to get bigger tend to swallow up other media companies, suppressing competition and taking on debt, which makes publishers cowards. In 1986, the publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle<\/em> bought the Worcester Telegram<\/em> and the Evening<\/em> Gazette<\/em>, and, three years later, right about when Time and Warner became Time Warner, the Telegram<\/em> and the Gazette<\/em> became the Telegram & Gazette<\/em>, or the T&G<\/em>, smaller fries but the same potato.<\/p>\n

Next came the dot-coms. Craigslist went online in the Bay Area in 1996 and spread across the continent like a weed, choking off local newspapers\u2019 most reliable source of revenue: classified ads. The T&G<\/em> tried to hold on to its classified-advertising section by wading into the shallow waters of the Internet, at telegram.com, where it was called, acronymically, and not a little desperately, \u201cTANGO<\/em>!\u201d Then began yet another round of corporate buyouts, deeply leveraged deals conducted by executives answerable to stockholders seeking higher dividends, not better papers. In 1999, the New York Times Company bought the T&G<\/em> for nearly three hundred million dollars. By 2000, only three hundred and fifty of the fifteen hundred daily newspapers left in the United States were independently owned. And only one out of every hundred American cities that had a daily newspaper was anything other than a one-paper town.<\/p>\n

Then came the fall, when papers all over the country, shackled to mammoth corporations and a lumbering, century-old business model, found themselves unable to compete with the upstarts\u2014online news aggregators like the Huffington Post (est. 2005) and Breitbart News<\/a> (est. 2007), which were, to readers, free. News aggregators also drew display advertisers away from print; Facebook and Google swallowed advertising accounts whole. Big papers found ways to adapt; smaller papers mainly folded. Between 1994 and 2016, years when the population of Worcester County rose by more than a hundred thousand, daily home delivery of the T&G<\/em> declined from more than a hundred and twenty thousand to barely thirty thousand. In one year alone, circulation fell by twenty-nine per cent. In 2012, after another round of layoffs, the T&G<\/em> left its building, its much reduced staff small enough to fit into two floors of an office building nearby. The next year, the owner of the Boston Red Sox bought the newspaper, along with the Boston Globe<\/em>, from the New York Times Company for seventy million dollars, only to unload the T&G<\/em> less than a year later, for seventeen million dollars, to Halifax Media Group, which held it for only half a year before Halifax itself was bought, flea-market style, by an entity that calls itself, unironically, the New Media Investment Group.<\/p>\n

The numbers mask an uglier story. In the past half century, and especially in the past two decades, journalism itself\u2014the way news is covered, reported, written, and edited\u2014has changed, including in ways that have made possible the rise of fake news, and not only because of mergers and acquisitions, and corporate ownership, and job losses, and Google Search, and Facebook<\/a> and BuzzFeed<\/a>. There\u2019s no shortage of amazing journalists at work, clear-eyed and courageous, broad-minded and brilliant, and no end of fascinating innovation in matters of form, especially in visual storytelling. Still, journalism, as a field, is as addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted, and twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless. It\u2019s faster than it used to be, so fast. It\u2019s also edgier, and needier, and angrier. It wants and it wants and it wants. But what does it need?<\/p>\n

The daily newspaper is the taproot of modern journalism. Dailies mainly date to the eighteen-thirties, the decade in which the word \u201cjournalism\u201d was coined, meaning daily reporting, the jour<\/em> in journalism. Early dailies depended on subscribers to pay the bills. The press was partisan, readers were voters, and the news was meant to persuade (and voter turnout was high). But by 1900 advertising made up more than two-thirds of the revenue at most of the nation\u2019s eighteen thousand newspapers, and readers were consumers (and voter turnout began its long fall). \u201cThe newspaper is not a missionary or a charitable institution, but a business that collects and publishes news which the people want and are willing to buy,\u201d one Missouri editor said in 1892. Newspapers stopped rousing the rabble so much because businesses wanted readers, no matter their politics. \u201cThere is a sentiment gaining ground to the effect that the public wants its politics \u2018straight,\u2019\u00a0\u201d a journalist wrote the following year. Reporters pledged themselves to \u201cfacts, facts, and more facts,\u201d and, as the press got less partisan and more ad-based, newspapers sorted themselves out not by their readers\u2019 political leanings but by their incomes. If you had a lot of money to spend, you read the St. Paul Pioneer Press;<\/em> if you didn\u2019t have very much, you read the St. Paul Dispatch<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, critics soon began writing big books, usually indictments, about the relationship between business and journalism. \u201cWhen you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda?\u201d Upton Sinclair asked on the jacket of \u201cThe Brass Check<\/a>,\u201d in 1919. In \u201cThe Disappearing Daily<\/a>,\u201d in 1944, Oswald Garrison Villard mourned \u201cwhat was once a profession but is now a business.\u201d The big book that inspired Jill Abramson to become a journalist was David Halberstam\u2019s \u201cThe Powers That Be<\/a>,\u201d from 1979, a history of the rise of the modern, corporate-based media in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting from Vietnam for the New York Times<\/em>, took up his story more or less where Villard left off. He began with F.D.R. and CBS radio; added the Los Angeles Times<\/em>, Time Inc., and CBS television; and reached his story\u2019s climax with the Washington Post<\/em> and the New York Times<\/em> and the publication of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971.<\/p>\n

Halberstam argued that between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies radio and television brought a new immediacy to reporting, while the resources provided by corporate owners and the demands made by an increasingly sophisticated national audience led to harder-hitting, investigative, adversarial reporting, the kind that could end a war and bring down a President. Richard Rovere summed it up best: \u201cWhat The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Time and CBS have in common is that, under pressures generated internally and externally, they moved from venality or parochialism or mediocrity or all three to something approaching journalistic excellence and responsibility.\u201d That move came at a price. \u201cWatergate, like Vietnam, had obscured one of the central new facts about the role of journalism in America,\u201d Halberstam wrote. \u201cOnly very rich, very powerful corporate institutions like these had the impact, the reach, and above all the resources to challenge the President of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s reach, and then there\u2019s reach. When I was growing up, in the nineteen-seventies, nobody I knew read the New York Times<\/em>, the Washington Post<\/em>, or the Wall Street Journal<\/em>. Nobody I knew even read the Boston Globe<\/em>, a paper that used to have a rule that no piece should ever be so critical of anyone that its \u201cwriter could not shake hands the next day with the man about whom he had written.\u201d After journalism put up its dukes, my father only ever referred to the Globe<\/em> as \u201cthat Communist rag,\u201d not least because, in 1967, it became the first major paper in the United States to come out against the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

The view of the new journalism held by people like my father escaped Halberstam\u2019s notice. In 1969, Nixon\u2019s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, delivered a speech drafted by the Nixon aide Pat Buchanan accusing the press of liberal bias. It\u2019s \u201cgood politics for us to kick the press around,\u201d Nixon is said to have told his staff. The press, Agnew said, represents \u201ca concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history,\u201d consisting of men who \u201cread the same newspapers\u201d and \u201ctalk constantly to one another.\u201d How dare they. Halberstam waved this aside as so much P.R. hooey, but, as has since become clear, Agnew reached a ready audience, especially in houses like mine.<\/p>\n

Spiro who? \u201cThe press regarded Agnew with uncontrolled hilarity,\u201d Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed in 1970, but \u201cno one can question the force of Spiro T. Agnew\u2019s personality, nor the impact of his speeches.\u201d No scholar of journalism can afford to ignore Agnew anymore. In \u201cOn Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News<\/a>,\u201d the historian Matthew Pressman argues that any understanding of the crisis of journalism in the twenty-first century has to begin by vanquishing the ghost of Spiro T. Agnew.<\/p>\n

For Pressman, the pivotal period for the modern newsroom is what Abramson calls \u201cHalberstam\u2019s Golden Age,\u201d between 1960 and 1980, and its signal feature was the adoption not of a liberal bias but of liberal values: \u201cInterpretation replaced transmission, and adversarialism replaced deference.\u201d In 1960, nine out of every ten articles in the Times<\/em> about the Presidential election were descriptive; by 1976, more than half were interpretative. This turn was partly a consequence of television\u2014people who simply wanted to find out what happened could watch television, so newspapers had to offer something else\u2014and partly a consequence of McCarthyism<\/a>. \u201cThe rise of McCarthy has compelled newspapers of integrity to develop a form of reporting which puts into context what men like McCarthy have to say,\u201d the radio commentator Elmer Davis said in 1953. Five years later, the Times<\/em> added \u201cNews Analysis\u201d as a story category. \u201cOnce upon a time, news stories were like tape recorders,\u201d the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors<\/em> commented in 1963. \u201cNo more. A whole generation of events had taught us better\u2014Hitler and Goebbels, Stalin and McCarthy, automation and analog computers and missiles.\u201d<\/p>\n

These changes weren\u2019t ideologically driven, Pressman insists, but they had ideological consequences. At the start, leading conservatives approved. \u201cTo keep a reporter\u2019s prejudices out of a story is commendable,\u201d Irving Kristol wrote in 1967. \u201cTo keep his judgment out of a story is to guarantee that the truth will be emasculated.\u201d After the Times<\/em> and the Post<\/em> published the Pentagon Papers, Kristol changed his spots. Journalists, he complained in 1972, were now \u201cengaged in a perpetual confrontation with the social and political order (the \u2018establishment,\u2019 as they say).\u201d By 1975, after Watergate, Kristol was insisting that \u201cmost journalists today\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. are \u2018liberals.\u2019\u00a0\u201d With that, the conservative attack on the press was off and running, all the way to Trumpism\u2014\u201cthe failing New York Times,\u201d \u201cCNN is fake news,\u201d the press is \u201cthe true enemy of the people\u201d\u2014and, in a revolution-devouring-its-elders sort of way, the shutting down of William Kristol\u2019s Weekly Standard<\/em>, in December. \u201cThe pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. is flat broke and out of business,\u201d Trump tweeted. \u201cMay it rest in peace!\u201d<\/p>\n

What McCarthy and television were for journalism in the nineteen-fifties, Trump and social media would be in the twenty-tens: license to change the rules. Halberstam\u2019s Golden Age, or what he called \u201cjournalism\u2019s high-water mark,\u201d ended about 1980. Abramson\u2019s analysis in \u201cMerchants of Truth\u201d begins with journalism\u2019s low-water mark, in 2007, the year after Facebook launched its News Feed, \u201cthe year everything began to fall apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMerchants of Truth<\/a>\u201d isn\u2019t just inspired by \u201cThe Powers That Be\u201d; it\u2019s modelled on it. Abramson\u2019s book follows Halberstam\u2019s structure and mimics its style, chronicling the history of a handful of nationally prominent media organizations\u2014in her case, BuzzFeed, Vice, the Times<\/em>, and the Washington Post<\/em>\u2014in alternating chapters that are driven by character sketches and reported scenes. The book is saturated with a lot of gossip and glitz, including details about the restaurants the powers that be frequent, and what they wear (\u201cSulzberger\u201d\u2014the Times<\/em>\u2019 publisher\u2014\u201cdressed in suits from Bloomingdale\u2019s, stylish without being ostentatiously bespoke, and wore suspenders before they went out of fashion\u201d), alongside crucial insights about structural transformations, like how Web and social-media publishing \u201cunbundled\u201d the newspaper, so that readers who used to find a fat newspaper on their front porch could, on their phones, look, instead, at only one story. \u201cEach individual article now lived on its own page, where it had a unique URL and could be shared, and spread virally,\u201d Abramson observes. \u201cThis put stories, rather than papers, in competition with one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

This history is a chronicle of missed opportunities, missteps, and lessons learned the hard way. As long ago as 1992, an internal report at the Washington Post<\/em> urged the mounting of an \u201celectronic product\u201d: \u201cThe Post<\/em> ought to be in the forefront of this.\u201d Early on, the Guardian<\/em> started a New Media lab, which struck a lot of people as frivolous, Rusbridger writes, because, at the time, \u201conly 3 per cent of households owned a PC and a modem,\u201d a situation not unlike that at the Guardian\u2019s<\/em> own offices, where \u201cit was rumored that downstairs a bloke called Paul in IT had a Mac connected to the internet.\u201d A 1996 business plan for the Guardian<\/em> concluded that the priority was print, and the London Times<\/em> editor Simon Jenkins predicted, \u201cThe Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of the lesser media.\u201d In 2005, the Post<\/em> lost a chance at a ten-per-cent investment in Facebook, whose returns, as Abramson points out, would have floated the newspaper for decades. The C.E.O. of the Washington Post Company, Don Graham, and Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> shook hands over the deal, making a verbal contract, but, when Zuckerberg weaseled out of it to take a better offer, Graham, out of kindness to a young fella just starting out, simply let him walk away. The next year, the Post<\/em> shrugged off a proposal from two of its star political reporters to start a spinoff Web site; they went on to found Politico. The Times<\/em>, Abramson writes, declined an early chance to invest in Google, and was left to throw the kitchen sink at its failing business model, including adding a Thursday Style section to attract more high-end advertising revenue. Bill Keller, then the newspaper\u2019s editor, said, \u201cIf luxury porn is what saves the Baghdad bureau, so be it.\u201d<\/p>\n

More alarming than what the Times<\/em> and the Post<\/em> failed to do was how so much of what they did do was determined less by their own editors than by executives at Facebook and BuzzFeed. If journalism has been reinvented during the past two decades, it has, in the main, been reinvented not by reporters and editors but by tech companies, in a sequence of events that, in Abramson\u2019s harrowing telling, resemble a series of puerile stunts more than acts of public service.<\/p>\n

Who even are these people? \u201cMerchants of Truth\u201d has been charged with factual errors, including by people Abramson interviewed, especially younger journalists. She can also be maddeningly condescending. She doffs her cap at Sulzberger, with his natty suspenders, but dismisses younger reporters at places like Vice as notable mainly for being \u201cimpossibly hip, with interesting hair.\u201d This is distracting, and too bad, because there is a changing of the guard worth noting, and it\u2019s not incidental: it\u2019s critical. All the way through to the nineteen-eighties, all sorts of journalists, including magazine, radio, and television reporters, got their start working on daily papers, learning the ropes and the rules. Rusbridger started out in 1976 as a reporter at the Cambridge Evening News<\/em>, which covered stories that included a petition about a pedestrian crossing and a root vegetable that looked like Winston Churchill. In the U.K., a reporter who wanted to go to Fleet Street had first to work for three years on a provincial newspaper, pounding the pavement. Much the same applied in the U.S., where a cub reporter did time at the Des Moines Register<\/em>, or the Worcester Telegram<\/em>, before moving up to the New York Times<\/em> or the Herald Tribune.<\/em> Beat reporting, however, is not the backstory of the people who, beginning in the nineteen-nineties, built the New Media.<\/p>\n

Jonah Peretti started out soaking up postmodern theory at U.C. Santa Cruz in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and later published a scholarly journal article about the scrambled, disjointed, and incoherent way of thinking produced by accelerated visual experiences under late capitalism. Or something like that. Imagine an article written by that American Studies professor in Don DeLillo\u2019s \u201cWhite Noise<\/a>.\u201d Peretti thought that watching a lot of MTV can mess with your head\u2014\u201cThe rapid fire succession of signifiers in MTV style media erodes the viewer\u2019s sense of temporal continuity\u201d\u2014leaving you confused, stupid, and lonely. \u201cCapitalism needs schizophrenia, but it also needs egos,\u201d Peretti wrote. \u201cThe contradiction is resolved through the acceleration of the temporal rhythm of late capitalist visual culture. This type of acceleration encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily.\u201d Voil\u00e0, a business plan!<\/p>\n

Peretti\u2019s career in viral content began in 2001, with a prank involving e-mail and Nike sneakers while he was a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab. (Peretti ordered custom sneakers embroidered with the word \u201csweatshop\u201d and then circulated Nike\u2019s reply.) In 2005, a year the New York Times Company laid off five hundred employees and the Post<\/em> began paying people to retire early, Peretti joined Andrew Breitbart, a Matt Drudge acolyte, and Ken Lerer, a former P.R. guy at AOL Time Warner, in helping Arianna Huffington, a millionaire and a former anti-feminist polemicist, launch the Huffington Post. Peretti was in charge of innovations that included a click-o-meter. Within a couple of years, the Huffington Post had more Web traffic than the Los Angeles Times<\/em>, the Washington Post<\/em>, and the Wall Street Journal<\/em>. Its business was banditry. Abramson writes that when the Times<\/em> published a deeply reported exclusive story about WikiLeaks, which took months of investigative work and a great deal of money, the Huffington Post published its own version of the story, using the same headline\u2014and beat out the Times<\/em> story in Google rankings. \u201cWe were learning that the internet behaved like a clattering of jackdaws,\u201d Rusbridger writes. \u201cNothing remained exclusive for more than two minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pretty soon, there were jackdaws all over the place, with their schizophrenic late-capitalist accelerated signifiers. Breitbart left the Huffington Post and started Breitbart News around the same time that Peretti left to focus on his own company, Contagious Media, from which he launched BuzzFeed, where he tested the limits of virality with offerings like the seven best links about gay penguins and \u201cYouTube Porn Hacks.\u201d He explained his methods in a pitch to venture capitalists: \u201cRaw buzz is automatically published the moment it is detected by our algorithm,\u201d and \u201cthe future of the industry is advertising as content.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facebook launched its News Feed in 2006. In 2008, Peretti mused on Facebook, \u201cThinking about the economics of the news business.\u201d The company added its Like button in 2009. Peretti set likability as BuzzFeed\u2019s goal, and, to perfect the instruments for measuring it, he enlisted partners, including the Times<\/em> and the Guardian<\/em>, to share their data with him in exchange for his reports on their metrics. Lists were liked. Hating people was liked. And it turned out that news, which is full of people who hate other people, can be crammed into lists.<\/p>\n

Chartbeat, a \u201ccontent intelligence\u201d company founded in 2009, launched a feature called Newsbeat in 2011. Chartbeat offers real-time Web analytics, displaying a constantly updated report on Web traffic that tells editors what stories people are reading and what stories they\u2019re skipping. The Post<\/em> winnowed out reporters based on their Chartbeat numbers. At the offices of Gawker, the Chartbeat dashboard was displayed on a giant screen.<\/p>\n

In 2011, Peretti launched BuzzFeed News, hiring a thirty-five-year-old Politico journalist, Ben Smith, as its editor-in-chief. Smith asked for a \u201cscoop-a-day\u201d from his reporters, who, he told Abramson, had little interest in the rules of journalism: \u201cThey didn\u2019t even know what rules they were breaking.\u201d In 2012, BuzzFeed introduced three new one-click ways for readers to respond to stories, beyond \u201cliking\u201d them\u2014LOL, OMG, and WTF\u2014and ran lists like \u201c10 Reasons Everyone Should Be Furious About Trayvon Martin\u2019s Murder,\u201d in which, as Abramson explains, BuzzFeed \u201csimply lifted what it needed from reports published elsewhere, repackaged the information, and presented it in a way that emphasized sentiment and celebrity.\u201d BuzzFeed makes a distinction between BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News, just as newspapers and magazines draw distinctions between their print and their digital editions. These distinctions are lost on most readers. BuzzFeed News covered the Trayvon Martin<\/a> story, but its information, like BuzzFeed\u2019s, came from Reuters and the Associated Press.<\/p>\n

Even as news organizations were pruning reporters and editors, Facebook was pruning its users\u2019 news, with the commercially appealing but ethically indefensible idea that people should see only the news they want to see. In 2013, Silicon Valley began reading its own online newspaper, the Information, its high-priced subscription peddled to the information \u00e9lite, following the motto \u201cQuality stories breed quality subscribers.\u201d Facebook\u2019s goal, Zuckerberg explained in 2014, was to \u201cbuild the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world.\u201d Ripples at Facebook create tsunamis in newsrooms. The ambitious news site Mic relied on Facebook to reach an audience through a video program called Mic Dispatch, on Facebook Watch; last fall, after Facebook suggested that it would drop the program, Mic collapsed. Every time Facebook News tweaks its algorithm\u2014tweaks made for commercial, not editorial, reasons\u2014news organizations drown in the undertow. An automated Facebook feature called Trending Topics, introduced in 2014, turned out to mainly identify junk as trends, and so \u201cnews curators,\u201d who tended to be recent college graduates, were given a new, manual mandate, \u201cmassage the algorithm,\u201d which meant deciding, themselves, which stories mattered. The fake news that roiled the 2016 election? A lot of that was stuff on Trending Topics. (Last year, Facebook discontinued the feature.)<\/p>\n

BuzzFeed surpassed the Times<\/em> Web site in reader traffic in 2013. BuzzFeed News is subsidized by BuzzFeed, which, like many Web sites\u2014including, at this point, those of most major news organizations\u2014makes money by way of \u201cnative advertising,\u201d ads that look like articles. In some publications, these fake stories are easy to spot; in others, they\u2019re not. At BuzzFeed, they\u2019re in the same font as every other story. BuzzFeed\u2019s native-advertising bounty meant that BuzzFeed News had money to pay reporters and editors, and it began producing some very good and very serious reporting, real news having become something of a luxury good. By 2014, BuzzFeed employed a hundred and fifty journalists, including many foreign correspondents. It was obsessed with Donald Trump\u2019s rumored Presidential bid, and followed him on what it called the \u201cfake campaign trail\u201d as early as January, 2014. \u201cIt used to be the New York Times<\/em>, now it\u2019s BuzzFeed,\u201d Trump said, wistfully. \u201cThe world has changed.\u201d At the time, Steve Bannon was stumping for Trump on Breitbart. Left or right, a Trump Presidency was just the sort of story that could rack up the LOLs, OMGs, and WTFs. It still is.<\/p>\n

In March, 2014, the Times<\/em> produced an Innovation Report, announcing that the newspaper had fallen behind in \u201cthe art and science of getting our journalism to readers,\u201d a field led by BuzzFeed. That May, Sulzberger fired Abramson, who had been less than all-in about the Times<\/em> doing things like running native ads. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed purged from its Web site more than four thousand of its early stories. \u201cIt\u2019s stuff made at a time when people were really not thinking of themselves as doing journalism,\u201d Ben Smith explained. Not long afterward, the Times<\/em> began running more lists, from book recommendations to fitness tips to takeaways from Presidential debates.<\/p>\n

The Times<\/em> remains unrivalled. It staffs bureaus all over the globe and sends reporters to some of the world\u2019s most dangerous places. It has more than a dozen reporters in China alone. Nevertheless, BuzzFeed News became more like the Times<\/em>, and the Times<\/em> became more like BuzzFeed, because readers, as Chartbeat announced on its endlessly flickering dashboards, wanted lists, and luxury porn, and people to hate.<\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/em>, founded as the Manchester Guardian<\/em> in 1821, has been held by a philanthropic trust since 1936, which somewhat insulates it from market forces, just as Jeff Bezos\u2019s ownership now does something similar for the Post<\/em>. By investing in digital-readership research from the time Rusbridger took charge, in 1995, the Guardian<\/em> became, for a while, the online market leader in the U.K. By 2006, two-thirds of its digital readers were outside the U.K. In 2007, the Guardian<\/em> undertook what Rusbridger calls \u201cthe Great Integration,\u201d pulling its Web and print parts together into a single news organization, with the same editorial management. It also developed a theory about the relationship between print and digital, deciding, in 2011, to be a \u201cdigital-first organization\u201d and to \u201cmake print a slower, more reflective read which would not aspire to cover the entire waterfront in news.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rusbridger explains, with a palpable grief, his dawning realization that the rise of social media meant that \u201cchaotic information was free: good information was expensive,\u201d which meant, in turn, that \u201cgood information was increasingly for smaller elites\u201d and that \u201cit was harder for good information to compete on equal terms with bad.\u201d He takes these circumstances as something of a dare: \u201cOur generation had been handed the challenge of rethinking almost everything societies had, for centuries, taken for granted about journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Has that challenge been met? The Guardian\u2019s<\/em> own success is mixed. As of 2018, it was in the black, partly by relying on philanthropy, especially in the U.S. \u201cReader revenue,\u201d in the form of donations marked not as subscriptions but as voluntary \u201cmemberships,\u201d is expected to overtake advertising revenue before long. Raising money from people who care about journalism has allowed the Guardian<\/em> to keep the Web site free. It\u2019s also broken some big stories, from the Murdoch-papers phone-hacking scoop to the saga of Edward Snowden, and provided riveting coverage of ongoing and urgent stories, especially climate change. But, for all its fine reporting and substantive \u201cLong Reads,\u201d the paper consists disproportionately of ideologically unvarying opinion essays. By some measures, journalism entered a new, Trumpian, gold-plated age during the 2016 campaign, with the Trump bump, when news organizations found that the more they featured Trump the better their Chartbeat numbers, which, arguably, is a lot of what got him elected. The bump swelled into a lump and, later, a malignant tumor, a carcinoma the size of Cleveland. Within three weeks of the election, the Times<\/em> added a hundred and thirty-two thousand new subscribers. (This effect hasn\u2019t extended to local papers.) News organizations all over the world now advertise their services as the remedy to Trumpism, and to fake news; fighting Voldemort and his Dark Arts is a good way to rake in readers. And scrutiny of the Administration has produced excellent work, the very best of journalism. \u201cHow President Trump Is Saving Journalism<\/a>,\u201d a 2017 post on Forbes.com, marked Trump as the Nixon to today\u2019s rising generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins. Superb investigative reporting is published every day, by news organizations both old and new, including BuzzFeed News.<\/p>\n

By the what-doesn\u2019t-kill-you line of argument, the more forcefully Trump attacks the press, the stronger the press becomes. Unfortunately, that\u2019s not the full story. All kinds of editorial decisions are now outsourced to Facebook\u2019s News Feed, Chartbeat, or other forms of editorial automation, while the hands of many flesh-and-blood editors are tied to so many algorithms. For one reason and another, including twenty-first-century journalism\u2019s breakneck pace, stories now routinely appear that might not have been published a generation ago, prompting contention within the reportorial ranks. In 2016, when BuzzFeed News released<\/a> the Steele dossier, many journalists disapproved, including CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper, who got his start as a reporter for the Washington City Paper<\/em>. \u201cIt is irresponsible to put uncorroborated information on the Internet,\u201d Tapper said. \u201cIt\u2019s why we did not publish it, and why we did not detail any specifics from it, because it was uncorroborated, and that\u2019s not what we do.\u201d The Times<\/em> veered from its normal practices when it published an anonymous opinion essay<\/a> by a senior official in the Trump Administration. And The New Yorker<\/em> posted a story<\/a> online about Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s behavior when he was an undergraduate at Yale, which Republicans in the Senate pointed to as evidence of a liberal conspiracy against the nominee.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s plenty of room to argue over these matters of editorial judgment. Reasonable people disagree. Occasionally, those disagreements fall along a generational divide. Younger journalists often chafe against editorial restraint, not least because their cohort is far more likely than senior newsroom staff to include people from groups that have been explicitly and viciously targeted by Trump and the policies of his Administration, a long and growing list that includes people of color, women, immigrants, Muslims, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and anyone with family in Haiti or any of the other countries Trump deems \u201cshitholes.\u201d Sometimes younger people are courageous and sometimes they are heedless and sometimes those two things are the same. \u201cThe more \u2018woke\u2019 staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures,\u201d Abramson writes, and that \u201cthe dangers of Trump\u2019s presidency obviated the old standards.\u201d Still, by no means is the divide always or even usually generational. Abramson, for instance, sided with BuzzFeed News about the Steele dossier, just as she approves of the use of the word \u201clie\u201d to refer to Trump\u2019s lies, which, by the Post\u2019s<\/em> reckoning, came at the rate of more than a dozen a day in 2018.<\/p>\n

The broader problem is that the depravity, mendacity, vulgarity, and menace of the Trump Administration have put a lot of people, including reporters and editors, off their stride. The present crisis, which is nothing less than a derangement of American life, has caused many people in journalism to make decisions they regret, or might yet. In the age of Facebook, Chartbeat, and Trump, legacy news organizations, hardly less than startups, have violated or changed their editorial standards in ways that have contributed to political chaos and epistemological mayhem. Do editors sit in a room on Monday morning, twirl the globe, and decide what stories are most important? Or do they watch Trump\u2019s Twitter feed and let him decide? It often feels like the latter. Sometimes what doesn\u2019t kill you doesn\u2019t make you stronger; it makes everyone sick. The more adversarial the press, the more loyal Trump\u2019s followers, the more broken American public life. The more desperately the press chases readers, the more our press resembles our politics.<\/p>\n

The problems are well understood, the solutions harder to see. Good reporting is expensive, but readers don\u2019t want to pay for it. The donation-funded ProPublica, \u201can independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,\u201d employs more than seventy-five journalists. Good reporting is slow, good stories unfold, and most stories that need telling don\u2019t involve the White House. The Correspondent, an English-language version of the Dutch Web site De Correspondent, is trying to \u201cunbreak the news.\u201d It won\u2019t run ads. It won\u2019t collect data (or, at least, not much). It won\u2019t have subscribers. Like NPR, it will be free for everyone, supported by members, who pay what they can. \u201cWe want to radically change what news is about, how it is made, and how it is funded,\u201d its founders state. Push-notifications-on news is bad for you, they say, \u201cbecause it pays more attention to the sensational, exceptional, negative, recent, and incidental, thereby losing sight of the ordinary, usual, positive, historical, and systematic.\u201d What will the Correspondent look like? It will stay above the fray. It might sometimes be funny. It\u2019s slated to d\u00e9but sometime in 2019. Aside from the thing about ads, it sounds a lot like a magazine, when magazines came in the mail.<\/p>\n

After we\u2019d shoved the last, fat Worcester Sunday Telegram<\/em> inside the last, unlatched screen door, we\u2019d head home, my father taking turns a little too fast, so that we\u2019d have to clutch at one another and at the lip of the tailgate, to keep from falling off. \u201cDad, slow down!\u201d we\u2019d squeal, not meaning it. Then he\u2019d make breakfast, hot chocolate with marshmallows in the winter, orange juice from a can of frozen concentrate in the summer, and on my plate I\u2019d make wedges of cantaloupe into Viking ships sailing across a sea of maple syrup from the Coast of Bacon to Pancake Island. After breakfast, we\u2019d dump the money from the tobacco tins onto the kitchen table and count coins, stacking quarters and nickels and dimes into wrappers from the Worcester County Institution for Savings, while my father updated the Accounts, and made the Collection List.<\/p>\n

Going collecting was a drag. You had to knock on people\u2019s doors and ask your neighbors for money\u2014\u201cTelegram!<\/em> Collecting!\u201d\u2014and it was embarrassing, and, half the time, they\u2019d ask you in, and before you knew it you\u2019d be helping out, and it would take all day. \u201cSo long as you\u2019re here, could you hold the baby while I take a quick shower?\u201d \u201cHoney, after this, could you bring my mail down to the post office on that cute little bike of yours?\u201d I came to understand that the people who didn\u2019t leave the money under the mat hadn\u2019t forgotten to. They just liked having a kid visit on Sunday afternoon.<\/p>\n

The death of a newspaper is sometimes like other deaths. The Mrs. and the Miss, a very, very old woman and her very old daughter, lived in a crooked green house on top of a rise and wore matching housecoats and slippers. The Miss followed the Mrs. around like a puppy, and, if you found them in the parlor reading the paper, the Mrs. would be poring over the opinion pages while the Miss cut pictures out of the funnies. \u201cThe Miss can\u2019t think straight,\u201d my father said. \u201cHer head\u2019s scrambled. So be gentle with her. Nothing to be afraid of. Be sure to help them out.\u201d Once when I biked over there, the Miss was standing, keening, noise without words, sound without sense. The Mrs. wasn\u2019t moving, and she wasn\u2019t ever going to move again. I called for help and held the Miss\u2019s hand, waiting for the wail of sirens. I didn\u2019t know what else to do.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Jill Lepore, a staff writer, has been contributing to\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0since 2005. Her books include <\/em>The Name of War<\/a>, which won the Bancroft Prize;<\/em> New York Burning<\/a>, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history; <\/em>The Story of America<\/a>, which was short-listed for the <\/em>PEN<\/em>\u00a0Literary Award for the Art of the Essay; <\/em>Book of Ages<\/a>, a finalist for the National Book Award; and <\/em>The Secret History of Wonder Woman<\/a>. Her latest book, <\/em>These Truths: A History of the United States<\/a>, \u00a0came out in September, 2018. Lepore received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1995 and is the David Woods Kemper \u201941 Professor of American History at Harvard University. In 2012, she was named a Harvard College Professor, in recognition of distinction in undergraduate teaching.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article appears in the print edition of the January 28, 2019, issue, with the headline \u201cHard News.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

An earlier version of this story misstated the subtitle of Christopher B. Daly\u2019s book \u201cCovering America.\u201d It also misstated the Huffington Post\u2019s advertising revenue.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 newyorker.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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