I received an email that cuts are happening at the New York Times.  Reporters are being quietly told that they should look for new jobs now, because they won’t have jobs come next spring.  At the same time, cost-cutting at all levels has become the rule, with delivery to more distant places discontinued.  After all, who needs to deliver a newspaper when there’s nothing left in it but an editorial and some supermarket advertisements.

The cost of paper has skyrocketed.  Energy costs are through the roof.  And the people who go out and investigate and report on the news still need to get paid.  If you keep them on.  If you don’t, then there’s a huge savings.  It just means that there won’t be any news in the newspaper.

This is bad.  Technology combined with spiraling costs spells huge changes for the “dead trees” media.  If the FCC would let it happen, television news would be replaced with Survivor #47 in a flash.  While readers view the press as a right, media owners have to remember that they’re a business, and they have to make enough money to pay the bills. 

Already, changes in newspapers are happening, though slow enough to escape notice of most people.  Not those who work there, who are painfully aware that the Woodward/Bernstein days are mere nostalgia, but those of us who read their product.  Fewer articles amidst the pages of advertising.  And the advertisers know it too, as they realize they can target their audience much easier on the internet, and at far lower cost. 

This is bad.  While readers (like me) enjoy the ready availability of free access to news across the spectrum on demand, there’s no business model that makes it work for the producers of news.  I read at will, and there’s nothing in it for them.  These media websites have ads, but at far less benefit then a quarter page in the paper, and they compete with ads on everyone else’s websites, making newspapers’ websites one of many competing for advertisers’ dollars.

The problem is that we need these guys to do their job.  We need newspapers and TV news to stay in business.  We need them to thrive.  Their reporters are the ones who go out on the street and collect the news.  Their camera people take the pictures that we look at so intently.  Blogs may do a decent job of explaining or editorializing on events, but we need to know about the events themselves or we have nothing to explain. 

We can’t force the Sulzbergers, Zuckermans, Murdochs to keep publishing.  No matter how important information is to society, to democracy, they need a viable business model to keep revenues flowing and pay the paper bills, the reporters’ salaries, even the kid on the bicycle who tosses the paper on your front porch.  There was a time when every home received a newspaper delivery.  Of course, there was a time when every home had a telephone land line.  Things change.

Newspapers are too smart to print a story about their plight on the front page, above the fold.  Announcements of impending demise tend to turn people off.  Especially advertising people.  But it is most assuredly happening right before our noses. 

We need the media, whether we like them or not.  They may annoy and disappoint us.  They may fall short of fulfilling our expectations on a regular basis.  But consider life in America without them.  Worse yet, consider life in America where the only access to information available is USA Today, with the depth of a sheet of copy paper and the breadth of a media mogul’s greasy fingertips. 

This is bad.

Update:  As pointed out by my ever-prescient hinterlands correspondent, it’s not like this state of affairs comes as a surprise to newspapers.  It’s been coming for years, since the 80s actually, as smaller papers were purchased, consolidated or folded.  They began to realize back then that the model was getting old, and lack of competition made them fat and lazy, even though change was inevitable.

So what did newspapers do about it?  Nothing.  No adaptation.  Smug in their necessity and self-importance, they stood there, editors with their arms folded across their chest, and did absolutely nothing.  No accomodation for changing circumstances.  No preparation for the coming storm.  They believed (and still do) that there can be no world without newspapers, and they would hold their breath and wait for the reading public to come running back with open arms and show them the love and respect they deserved.

Also a little addendum to my latest note about our younger, oft-times tattooed, friends. They don’t read the newspaper.  They don’t subscribe to the newspaper.  That’s for old fogies.  They get the news off their iPhones.