Page 26 - Delaware Lawyer - Fall 2023

FEATURE | THE DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS
As traffic increased on the highways surrounding cities, it became harder to reach suburban homes with timely edi- tions of the paper. Papers began switch- ing from evenings to mornings to stay ahead of the change. Popular specula- tion in the 1980s had it that the Phila- delphia Evening Bulletin, which “nearly everybody read,” would kill off the less popular morning Philadelphia Inquirer. The Bulletin was printed at 30th and Market streets in Philadelphia. To get out of the city in time for a home deliv- ery by 4 p.m., the Bulletin went to press before 10 a.m. By then, the news was old and stale. The Inquirer, by contrast, hit half-empty streets in the middle of the night, when traffic was light and news was fresh. The Inquirer won the suburbs, and the Bulletin stopped its presses.
Then the internet came. Classified ads went to Craigslist. Sports scores ar- rived on your computer screen before the game action stopped. Then adver- tising came directly at you, tailored to your buying habits. Advertisers now
knew exactly who would buy their product. Goodbye mass market. Hello niche!
Ink-on-paper could not keep up. Newspaper companies started shedding employees. Newsroom budgets were first cut, then slashed. Features, like col- umnists or puzzles, disappeared. Then newspapers began closing around the country. Layoffs of reporters were so widespread, survivors were forced to re- arrange desks to cover the open spaces in the newsroom. Fewer reporters mean less news. Crime stories about your neighborhood vanished. Statehouse reporters were turned out, but feature reporters were turned loose on vital subjects like Taylor Swift and beach life.
Local government, so important to a republic like ours, slipped out of sight. Politicians and campaign ex- perts learned the methods of niche marketing. They knew their likely cus- tomers. They learned to tailor their message to hates and fears of a select few likely voters. The political system turned into a bunch of angry people
shouting at each other. Candidates for office are mostly self-nominated. All they have to do is raise the money to win a primary. Once they won office, they were more beholden to donors than ever.
On the local level, barely anyone was watching them.
Advocacy Creeps into Newsrooms
It gets worse.
The journalists themselves have be- gun turning into advocates. Political opinions show up in supposed news stories. Journalism schools foster ad- vocacy. The worst example is from The New York Times. During the sometimes-violent demonstrations against the killing of George Floyd, the conservative Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas submitted an opinion piece to the Times that advocated putting the National Guard on the streets. It appeared online, not in print. But the staff — yes, the staff — felt so “violated” by Cotton’s essay that they demanded it be withdrawn.
24 DELAWARE LAWYER FALL 2023