How years of monopoly undermined newspapers
Chapter three of the cover story of the new edition of Columbia Journalism Review on The Philadelphia Inquirer is titled “Curse of the Golden Age,” referring to a period that, for the Inquirer, came in two stages during the seventies and eighties. First the Inky became a bold and creative insurgent newspaper under the legendary editor Gene Roberts. Then it killed off its afternoon competitor, the Bulletin, and embarked on what Roberts called the Alpha Plan. It set out to become a great regional paper of record, covering city and suburb, nation and world, with depth and flair. The Inquirer no longer has the resources for that kind of newspaper-of-record journalism and halfway measures don’t work. So editor Amanda Bennett, even as she waits to learn just what kind of owner will replace Knight Ridder, is trying something new. Or maybe something old, since she is reaching back to the early Roberts premonopoly version of the Inquirer for ideas.
The chapter is specific to the Inky’s situation, which is complex. But the notion of a curse from the golden days of the sixties, seventies, and eighties resonates beyond that newspaper. As we all know, trends in those years turned newspapers into economic powerhouses. The rise of the computer brought enormous labor savings, for example, while the fall of the afternoon dailies in city after city created lucrative advertising and readership monopolies. Consolidating newspaper chains saw the opportunities and went public, pulling in new money from investors. Ample profits and rising investment meant rising editorial ambitions in some places and fat, lazy days for others. Either way, the trends also created investor expectations of very high profit margins in the newspaper business, which would turn out to be a quite a curse indeed when those margins dipped.
That history is familiar. But another facet of the age of news monopoly gets less attention in newspaper circles: How much did the condition of editorial monopoly quietly undermine the journalism?
Source: Columbia Journalism Review
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time Please go to http://forum.newspaperindex.com.
