Page 25 - Delaware Lawyer - Fall 2023

my iPhone for baseball scores, news bulletins and favored opinion writers. Ink-on-paper is too inconvenient and slow, and, increasingly, hard to get.
“Newspapers,” of course, do not equal “journalism.” Likewise, news- paper newsrooms are more than ink- on-paper. There are plenty of talented, informed journalists working on the surviving newspapers and their online counterparts. Good journalists can be found on the radio and on television. Enterprising journalists have created online startups to supply news.
I admire their courage and energy. Yet, something is missing.
And that, I think, poses a problem for our community life.
The Loss of Journalism’s Local Role
Over the last few decades, the “go- to-leaders” in many of our towns and cities have disappeared. Few cities have the equivalent of a DuPont Company to turn to when trouble pops up. Con- solidation has overtaken many indus- tries. The big banks in town fly national logos. Many big law firms are branches of a national entity. Church leaders have a hard time getting people’s attention. The biggest employers tend to be gov- ernments and they rarely rise or fall with the local economy.
Newspapers, more so than other news media, were local institutions. They kept an eye on elected officials. They publicized votes in the General Assembly, noting winners and losers. They stirred interest in local affairs and helped people follow elected officials. Oddly enough, this lowered the heat on the partisanship that national news organizations fire up today.
The newspapers of old — good, bad, indifferent — reigned as institutions in their towns and cities. They often had personalities. When they had compe- tition, readers picked their favorites. Readers followed their favorite colum- nists, sportswriters or comic strips even
when the newspapers were monopolies. Newspaper editorials could be dull and boring, but the best ones spoke to the interest of the community. Inves- tigative pieces sometimes tripped over their own breathless sensationalism, but the results often made life in town a little better. Politicians griped about political reporters, but those news ac- counts helped keep the elected officials and bureaucrats on their toes. Readers could talk back to the newspaper or publicly address the mayor or governor in a letter to the editor. And everyone could follow the playing field exploits of the community’s young athletes in the
sports pages.
In other words, a mass audience had
some idea of what was going on around them. A community of sorts.
The Jacksonville, NC, Daily News summed up all of this in its old motto: “The Only Newspaper in the World That Gives a Damn About Jacksonville, N.C.”
No matter how dedicated or talented the journalists in other news organiza- tions are, they are not likely to play that big a role in their local community.
They do not have the bundle that at- tracts crowds.
Newspapers: A Disintegrating Bundle of Treats
Newspapers of old never really sold themselves as civic-minded, hard-nose investigators. That would not sell.
Instead, from the beginning, mod- ern newspapers tried to be all things to all people. No matter what the news- paper’s politics, the publisher offered readers a bundle of treats. Newspapers had news, crime, recipes, Dear Abby, sports, features, weather, daily bridge columns, local photos, columnists, clas- sified ads, department store sales, enter- tainment, gossip, stock listings, cross- word puzzles, comics, dress patterns, an occasional investigation of wrong- doing, and, for a 10-year-old me, base- ball box scores. The box scores are an
especially interesting case. They often took a full page or more with esoteric numbers and letters arrayed in columns of a minuscule typeface. Most readers ignored them. Yet, the newspaper never told the readers how to read them. The reader had to learn that on his own. The dedicated baseball fan devoured them.
What a bundle!
Every newspaper had one goal: To make money. And the bundle raked it in.
Specifically, it delivered an audience to advertisers.
A number of historians claim it was the department store that tamed the penny press of the 19th century. As de- partment stores developed in America’s downtowns, their owners wanted to attract the growing middle class. The newly respectable frowned on the party press of the 19th century and the penny press of crime and sex. A new conven- tional wisdom emerged: To get depart- ment store advertising, drop the tawdry news and shun political party affilia- tions.
Newspapers and other news media were in the business of delivering “eye- balls” to the retailers and manufacturers. How important is the “who” in that au- dience? A few years ago, The National Post profiled Rupert Murdoch and re- counted that in 1976, when Murdoch bought the tabloid New York Post, he wondered why his paper did not at- tract ads from the top-line department stores. The chairman of Bloomingdale’s told him: “Rupert, your readers are my shoplifters.”
But by then, the bundle was already coming apart.
The Beginning of Newspapers’ End
First, the G.I. Bill disrupted the de- livery system. Veterans and others start- ed moving to the suburbs. Afternoon newspapers had the biggest circula- tions, but television started eating into the evening edition.
FALL 2023 DELAWARE LAWYER 23