I've been a news junkie for pretty much my entire life. My mother has told me of seeing the logo of the Progressive Conservative Party in the Ottawa Citizen (which was the newspaper my parents subscribed to) and saying "Joe Clark. Government." Given the short time he was prime minister, I would have been three years old at the time.
My first political memory would be watching the coverage of the 1984 Canadian election. Elections were fun, because they had so many numbers! But I would go on from there to actually pay attention to the news and to the House of Commons.
But news has always been something that's been important to me. But I've been noticing that newspapers aren't as important to me as they used to be.
When I was younger, newspapers were "the world". Maybe more accurately, they were the world in my living room. For TV news, there was CNN or there was the evening news. I remember watching excitedly for the launch of CBC Newsworld in 1999. But with TV news, you only saw what the producers thought was most important at the time. And if you wanted to get more detail on a story, the best way was usually to wait for the next morning's newspaper.
But the Internet has changed things. I go to TV news often. It's a great way to find out what's going on in the world right now. And "right now" holds its own attraction to me. But I know not to count on them for the detail I want on the news that most interests me. For that, I turn to the Internet.
RSS feeds have been great for that. I subscribe to a number of CBC news feeds and receive email alerts and newsletters from CNN, the New York Times, and Washington Post. In the past few months, I've added blogs into that mix as I've found ones whose interests match my own. (I am envious of Kady O'Malley's opportunity to be paid for live-blogging parliamentary committee meetings...at least, I assume that Maclean's magazine pays her for her Inside the Queensway blog.)
The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has an interesting reflection on newspapers the other morning, in the wake of a round of buyouts at that newspaper. His bedrock: newspapers are too important to lose:
I know, I know. The future is digital. The Web is a cornucopia of fast-moving video and blogs and bulletins and gossip, while newspapers are old, slow and less than hip. That's why The Post (and every other paper on the planet) is beefing up its online presence and why I write a daily blog for the Web site.
But -- and stop me if you've heard this one -- newspapers matter. There isn't a Web site around that can produce the probing work, such as the exposé of shoddy conditions at the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center, that won The Post six Pulitzer Prizes this year. The economics of the Web, for now, won't support a staff that can hold public officials accountable across the region and still cover every Nationals game. So I cling to an old-fashioned, almost mystical belief in the power of ink on paper.
For myself, I think Kurtz has inadvertently put his finger on one of the problems with newspapers. They attempt to be all things to all people. They probably have to be to be able to survive financially. I want public officials held accountable, but I don't care if they cover every Ottawa Senators game. I can see those for myself on television, I can listen to them on radio. And I can probably find several blogs who will tell me a lot about about the team and its play.
A web site doesn't need to be able to do both things. I don't need (or particularly want) all my information about the world to be delivered from the same place. The question of whether or not a web site can afford to devote itself to the types of investigations that hold public officials accountable is an important one. Maybe. Maybe not.
But newspapers need to give me a reason to pick them up. Right now, the most common one for me is to have something interesting to read while I'm eating alone. But if I'm at home, it feels like I'm paying to read what I could find online for free. A wire service story in a newspaper is of no value to me, because I can get that for free online in a version that isn't hours out of date. In most cases, editorials are useless to me, especially unsigned ones.
So why should I pay good money for something I don't make time to read, which has a lot of content I may not want to read? Maybe the future of the newspaper business needs to be in working with the abilities online opens up. What do they need to do to make their service something people would be willing to spend money on? Maybe they have to realize that people tend to want specific types of news.
I come at this as somebody who lives 45 minutes from the nearest city. So their "local" news tends to be a little remote to me. Local news is great, and so my local news needs are met by the local weekly newspaper. The city's local news? Not what I need. But I really appreciate their sports coverage of my favorite hockey team.
I'd also want good coverage of politics and government in both Canada and the United States. And a good source of basic world news. But I don't need one source for that. But how to specialize and provide a service that people will pay for. If I had the answer to that, I'd probably be richer than I am now!
