The Press and the Wrecking Ball
KANFER, STEFAN
Culture Watching The Press and the Wrecking Ball By Stefan Kanfer NEW YORK Times reporter David Carr describes himself as a reader with “the attention span of a gnat.” And in a recent...
...The carping about the surge in Iraq is all very well, but the outrage grows weary after the 10th repetition...
...The Hillary vs...
...Under the new generation of bottom-lining managers, this kind of long-term probing is implausible and, if current conditions prevail, will soon become impossible...
...Isn’t the news valuable to anyone anymore...
...In the decades I spent writing and editing in that field, I seldom encountered a cigar smoker, never met an overweight publisher, heard the sound of galluses being snapped, or saw any of the gestures more common to the Yiddish theater than to major league journalism...
...In this millennium print is threatened as never before and, save for nostalgia buffs, there is no going back...
...ONTHE ROAD to the White House in 2008, the hysterical coverage of minor candidates like Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul and Fred Thompson added heat but precious little light to the colloquy...
...Stories take time to develop...
...What they can no longer do is dumb down the content, or coopt bloggers in a race to the bottom...
...There are many ways newspapers and magazines can get back in the game...
...At the Washington Post, the Watergate scandal started slowly...
...Next came informed, original commentary from overseas and Beltway bureaus...
...Barack Obama was the favorite now...
...Gradually, the tone of anonymous omniscience was abandoned, replaced by signed political columns...
...Au contraire...
...THE FATE of Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station provides a chilling example...
...They include serious local coverage and, most important, refreshing the front page and trading perception for furor in editorial columns...
...It is one of the most inefficient businesses in the history of the world...
...By contrast, the vaulted ceilings and marble walls of Grand Central Station have become statements of enduring elegance...
...The place is now a landmark, protected forever from their strategies...
...Then the New Yo r ker, Time, Newsweek, Look, Esquire, Harper’s, the Reporter (and for that matter The New Leader), as well as scores of other popular American periodicals, enlivened the national conversation...
...Some are valid: the Internet’s growing influence...
...Global warming is a subject that requires scientific examination, not a compilation of quotes and pictures of melting icecaps that everyone has already seen over and over again...
...A characteristic sample from The Week: “‘Lindsay Lohan sure knows how to pick ’em,’ said Jen McDonnell in the blog Dose...
...He likes to point out that The Week gets by with only 12 editors worldwide, culling from online “pajama media,” such prominent publications as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and fading ones like U. S. News and the New Republic...
...Or the New York Times snafu that prompted an embarrassing clarification: “A front page article yesterday rendered incorrectly a word in a quotation from Valerie Jarrett, a friend of the Obamas who commented on their decision that he would run...
...he and he alone had charisma...
...But editor Ben Bradlee backed the investigations of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, allowing them weeks and months to gather the information that would one day topple the Richard M. Nixon Administration and alter the course of American history...
...That’s Felix Dennis’ territory...
...Isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity...
...In its place rose a demoralizing, claustrophobic arena...
...And in a recent article he pointed out that while many other newsmagazines are in decline, The Week has enjoyed double-digit growth over the last eight reporting periods of the Audit Bureau of Circulations...
...The big weeklies have allowed their franchise to slip away because “they forgot the reader...
...As for lying about circulation, the numbers are independently audited and publicly listed...
...it has become one of the salient characteristics of their audience...
...the interminable series, manifestly aimed at winning a Pulitzer—even though no one but the judges ever reads them...
...Publishers got fat with their cigar-smoking, suspender-snapping, breast-beating, with the huge lunches and all of the lying about their circulation...
...I was at Time when many of those changes took place...
...Although self-promotion takes up much of the Briton’s day, he is never too busy to criticize the American magazine industry: “It has been massively overstaffed for years and years...
...The two statements, I think, are yoked...
...Its British publisher, Felix Dennis, who says he has taken up the fallen banner of Henry R. Luce, insists that the American magazine mogul would have been delighted with The Week because his “original idea was offering readers a précis of what was happening around the world in a given week...
...the rise of talk radio...
...Meanwhile, Dennis was busy dropping out of school, publishing the counterculture magazine Oz, getting prosecuted for obscenity (his partners were given jail terms...
...These include the exhaustive coverage of celebrities like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, which simultaneously sneers and exalts...
...the rushed, error-filled stories and captions like one in the Houston Chronicle: “When Redding, a longtime scout for Playboy, discovered Anna Nicole Smith, the model could barely right [sic] a sentence...
...Since 2004, the market value of American newspapers has fallen by 42 per cent—a sum of $23 billion...
...But the hour grows late, and the gnats are swarming...
...all too often, columnists make a few calls to Wall Street gur us whose opinions jibe with their own, then treat the reader to a laundry list of bull and bear prophecies...
...They eventually prevailed, and in 1963 the grand Beaux Arts building that housed the station became a victim of the wrecking ball...
...The city courthouse went uncovered for almost a year at one point...
...Or were we kidding ourselves...
...Barack dustup on the subject of race was yet another inflation of trivia, one of those “youguys-fight, I’ll-hold-your-coats” moments...
...After a long shakedown cruise he realized that Time would have to do more than produce a red-bordered Reader’s Digest every seven days...
...journalists had become handicappers, abetting the bookies and odds-makers...
...Not really...
...The Luce I knew would surely have been dismayed by this latest venture in superficiality...
...Today’s developers can only look on enviously...
...The skirmish between preservationists and predators translates easily to the arena of print media...
...Too many periodicals have abandoned the elements that put them on the map decades ago: acumen and surprise...
...That was when Time’ s “back of the book” began to expand the definition of the mass magazine, eventually running bylined reviews of art, theater, music, cinema, the press, and books...
...he demands...
...Still, it’s not Dennis’ ignorant look backward that worries me...
...In a city where half the adult black males are unemployed,” he wrote, “where the unions have been busted, and crime and poverty have overwhelmed one neighborhood after the next, the daily newspaper no longer maintains a poverty beat or a labor beat...
...One wonders how Dennis obtained this information...
...They argued that the place was obsolete and overstaffed, that air rights should be sold off and the building demolished to make way for a more efficient, less wasteful terminal, in which every cubic foot of space could be used for profit...
...NOT LONG AGO David Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun with no axe to grind (he is currently a richly remunerated television writer), took stock of his former employer in a Washington Post memoir...
...Indeed, shrinking readership and plummeting ad lineage has afflicted a great deal more than the three main newsmagazines...
...he received a light sentence, because the judge thought him “very much less intelligent”) and, through producing Cozmic Comics plus film-oriented periodicals, amassing a bloody fortune...
...the power of 24-hour cable news networks...
...and the indifference of the young, who seem to be losing the habit of reading daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines...
...Picking through the ashes of last night’s dinner of goat...
...Back in the late 1950s, developers attacked its “profligate dimensions...
...No wonder so many readers turned away, repelled not only by the unreasonable length of the Presidential campaign but by the banal stories it spawned...
...The same thing is true of the economy...
...Apocalyptic pronouncements reigned supreme: A single loss in Iowa, and the junior Senator from New York was finished...
...To this day it remains a monument to avarice...
...Yet there was no relief to be found when the papers turned to other subjects...
...But there is another reason for the decline of print journalism, and few managers have the wit to acknowledge it...
...She said in a telephone interview, ‘Barack and Michelle thought long and hard about this decision before they made it’—not they ‘fought’ long and hard...
...It’s his vision of the future, because American journalism is ripe for plucking by the moral equivalent of a three-card monte dealer...
...Abe Rosenthal, the late New York Times executive editor, told me he took almost as much pride in the stories that did not work out as in the ones that made the front page, because “they showed how thorough we are...
...One victory in New Hampshire, and John McCain was the GOP version of the Comeback Kid...
...As the MBAs slash budgets and shrink staffs, they cite all sorts of rationales...
...Exhibit A: the thin, chatty, picture-heavy, highly successful publication mentioned above...
...Nervously Eyes Gov’t Stats “Thought Phone Call Was Joke,” Says Nobel Prizewinner Casino Transforms Life For Western Tribe It is, of course, impossible to return to the era of the great newspaper wars or the heyday of magazines...
...It was just a few days ago that ‘her exboyfriend sold their dirty, dirty secrets to a British tabloid,’ and now ‘her latest pelvic partner has come forward to kiss and tell.’ It almost makes us ‘miss the good ol’ days, when the world was more concerned with what was in Lindsay’s coke pants, rather than who.’” Surely the mainstream print media can do better than that...
...Apparently he watched DVDs of The Best of Everything, The Devil Wears Prada and other hyperthyroid films about the magazine biz and took them to be documentaries...
...the country was suddenly tired of the Clintons and all they represented...
...the now formulaic human interest leads (“Mbkei is hungry...
...There is, however, a going forward...
...To give readers a sense of what is really transpiring in the world, bureaus have to be fully staffed and good reporters need leeway...
...Given these conditions, advertisers may well be impressed with Dennis’ line about overstaffing and inefficiency...
...This year as last, reading from the front page to the Op-Ed is to experience the same blast of hot air, day after day, week after week...
...Those who believe in the value of true news coverage, as opposed to the 10-second sound bite, know that a certain amount of waste goes with the territory...
...For a brief attention span is no longer confined to mainstream print journalists...
...The former is a worthy avocation, the latter a cringemaking indulgence, varying from acerbic couplets to Hallmark-card treacle (“An old dog is the best dog,/ A dog with rheumy eyes;/ An old dog is the best dog/A dog grown sad and wise...
...In his off-hours these days, Dennis, who is 60, devotes himself to reforestation and poetry...
...The last time a reporter was assigned to monitor a burgeoning prison system, I was a kid working the night desk...
...If monthlies, weeklies and dailies are to survive, that means discarding all the weary devices that no longer work...
...In fact, this kind of lean-and-mean business philosophy tends to rip off and destroy rather than inform and educate...
...The headlines appeared with the regularity of a metronome: POPE DECRIES VIOLENCE PLAGUE OF OBESITY HITS AMERICA EARLY HOMINID OLDER THAN ORIGINALLY THOUGHT POOR GET INFERIOR MEDICAL CARE, STUDY FINDS ROCK STAR IN REHAB AFTER OVERDOSE RETIREMENT “A PERIOD OF STRESS,” SAY PSYCHOLOGISTS MEN, WOMEN THINK DIFFERENTLY, SURVEY SUGGESTS SHARPTON ACCUSES POLICE OF RACISM Woman’s House Contained 96 Cats, Dogs Genes, Diet, Exercise Keys To Longevity Hamas Vows Revenge Wall St...
...According to Alan D. Mutter, a veteran media executive who keeps track of news-gathering companies, “Wall Street’s vigorous repudiation of newspaper stocks reflects a deep, and arguably growing, concern that publishers don’t know how to arrest three years of mounting declines in audience, sales and profitability...
Vol. 91 • January 2008 • No. 1
