Newspapers as an endangered species

"-30-: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper"

edited by Charles M. Madigan

Ivan R. Dee, 245 pp., $26

This is a book you should read soon.

"-30-: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper" is a collection of articles previously published, mostly in newspapers and magazines. As anyone in the news business will tell you, articles often have a short shelf life; they go "sour."

Some of the articles in this collection seem to have already slipped past their pull dates. The velocity of the decline of the U.S. newspaper business is mostly to blame for this. Most of the articles editor Charles M. Madigan chose for the book were published within the past two years, and they were on top of the dire situation at the time. They told of the struggles of Knight-Ridder Newspapers, and of the Chicago-Los Angeles schism in the Tribune Co. But both companies have changed hands since these articles appeared, and the use of editor's notes in an attempt to keep them abreast of the changing situation falls short.

Nonetheless, there is value in this book for anyone seeking to understand the upheaval in the newspaper industry today and why it seems headed for "-30-" the traditional ending typed at the bottom of a newspaper story. For one thing, most of what has happened recently concerning newspapers seems likely to keep happening until someone comes up with a new business model to replace the money engine — display and classified advertising — that powered newspapers until the Internet and other factors spiked their fuel.

"Money, Technology, Tax Law, and Trouble," the opening chapter by Elizabeth M. Neiva and the article with the earliest copyright (1995), anchors the unlikely start of the trouble in the development of photocomposition after World War II. That allowed publishers to negotiate unionized printers out the door, to be replaced by lower paid typists.

Huge profits followed, turning newspapers into takeover targets.

Those publishers doing the taking raised capital by selling public shares, ushering through the door stockholders and Wall Street analysts who put expectations of steadily growing profits above journalistic standards and responsibilities to the community.

Joseph Epstein's 2006 article, "Trapped in Transition," adds to the sense that newspapers — and broadcasters, too — are in a large part responsible for their own potential demise. Epstein marches that notion right into the newsrooms, finding the content they churn out at best uninspiring, predictable and frivolous (news, opinion and arts sections) and at worst paranoid and harmful (investigative reporters and Dan Rather). And besides, he says, none of it plays very well on the Internet, which is seen as the route for newspaper journalism's survival.

From article to article, there is an echo of depressing statistics about the newspaper business: 44,000 news-industry employees lost their jobs in the past five years, pre-tax earnings at newspapers were off 8.4 percent in 2006 over the previous year, 200 papers closed in the past 25 years. Overall newspaper circulation was down 10 percent, as the population went up 12 percent, since the mid to late 1990s.

Occasionally someone ventures a positive note about the 50 million people who still buy papers and the 120 million who still read them on an average day. And as Rick Edmonds writes in "Fighting the Vortex," newspapers are still the "pre-eminent source of news, recycled by (Internet) aggregators and blog commentators."

The book also laments many of the publishers' responses to the problems facing the industry, questioning if cutting staff, reducing the space allotted news, closing foreign bureaus and whatever else can be done to trim costs and meet demands for profit won't further reduce the value of papers to readers.

There is a stab or two at solutions, most of which seem to involve government intervention, and none very promising. That may be another reason to move this one to the top of your reading list, before it is classified with books on dinosaurs and buggy whips.

John B. Saul, former deputy Metro editor at The Seattle Times, took early retirement in 2005. He currently teaches journalism at the University of Montana.