-- Posted Wednesday, 1 August 2012 | | Disqus
How did Stockton, California get mired so deeply in muck, stuck with paying an estimated $417 million over the next 30 years to provide free lifetime healthcare to its pampered workers? The short answer is that voters were too busy to care about such things. Indeed, if they’d attended city council meetings or kept up with the minutes from those meetings, they’d have realized a decade ago that the city was on a path to financial disaster. Instead, irresponsible and too lazy to be bothered, they paid little attention to how their tax dollars were allocated by a city government that turns out to have been either grossly incompetent, recklessly negligent or a combination of both. Now Stockton and its workers are in a full-tilt battle over whether the latter will ultimately receive all of the absurdly generous retirement benefits they were promised.
It needn’t have ended so badly for Stockton, which, with a population of 292,000 ranks as California’s thirteenth largest city. All it would have taken to avert the downward spiral that’s coming is the diligent attention of one or two civic-minded gadflies and a local newspaper that cared. In bygone days, the alliance between them has proven highly effective in rooting out fiscal excesses and raising the awareness level and constructive ire of taxpayers. These days, unfortunately, the local gadfly has all but disappeared from civic life. After all, who has time to attend city council meetings any more, or to ride herd on local decision-makers? Like most of us, erstwhile gadflies are too busy trying to make ends meet to have the time or energy for haggling with local pols over line-items in the budget. As for the newspapers, they are fighting for their lives, too strapped for cash to cover local government diligently — but also too timid to muck-rake, lest they be perceived as anti-business or anti-government. (As an aside, it must be noted that these very same factors helped bring about the appalling decline of America’s schools.)
A Double Whammy
Hard times have always taken a heavy toll on newspapers, but never moreso than now, as papers both big and small struggle to survive the double whammy of The Great Recession and withering competition for advertising dollars from the Internet. Although we often hear about the growing financial problems of newspapers, the editorial side of their sad decline has for obvious reasons gotten relatively little ink. The fact is, news itself is dying – or at least, the tradition of covering local news thoroughly enough to help readers vote wisely. Is there a newspaper still around that can afford to do this job well? Okay, there’s the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But even their hard-news coverage has slipped at the expense of expanded style sections that rarely challenge readers to face the issues of the day. More and more, it’s pander rather than ponder – which is why hip-hop “artists” and the latest trends in handbags get featured treatment on outside pages.
Unfortunately, brick-and-mortar newspapers will have to die before news coverage can be resurrected online in far nimbler form. The process is inexorable because – and here’s the good news — although traditional papers are headed toward oblivion, the demand for news, particularly about local sports and politics, is as strong as ever. In the meantime, it can only grow more costly to disseminate the news in physical — as opposed to virtual – form. Tons and tons of newsprint must be hauled to regional printing facilities; then, inked with the day’s events, papers are distributed by truck fleets to retail sellers and door-to-door carriers. Putting aside the exorbitant costs of doing this ceaselessly, by the time the morning edition hits suburban driveways, the news it contains is already stale from exposure on the Internet. Sad but true.
The Virtual Newsroom
However, if you rescale newspapers to take advantage of online economics, it becomes possible to provide superb coverage of local news on a shoestring budget. Just one crackerjack reporter for every 15,000-20,000 of population is all that it would take. With one of them doubling as a managing editor and another as news editor, a newspaper could cover a city of 70,000 on a budget of under $300,000. A central office would be unnecessary, ads would be sold on a commission basis, and layout and graphics, including display ads, would be outsourced. Even some the news could be crowd-sourced, since it’s possible for an editor to gather tidbits at the household level that would be of interest to many readers. Putting out a paper this way could probably be done for less than a third of what it costs a brick-and-mortar publisher.
Meanwhile, the creative destruction of traditional newspapers will go more smoothly if journalism schools die the quick death they deserve. Good riddance to them all! These ossified institutions are anti-capitalist and all but inured to entrepreneurial ideas. Still worse is that their graduates are indoctrinated by left-tilting faculty to believe their mission lies in saving us all from ourselves. Pursuing a degree in journalism is a waste of time and money, since a reporter need only possess insatiable curiosity and a reasonably good command of the English language to do his job well.
With bankruptcies like Stockton’s about to metastasize across California – and, presumably, across the USA — we can only hope that the resurrection of local news coverage comes quickly enough to allow voters to guide America’s financial reorganization wisely. (Full disclosure: Equipped with a B.A. in English, your editor’s first job out of college was as a reporter, then state editor, for The Atlantic City Press, from 1971-78.)
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-- Posted Wednesday, 1 August 2012 | Digg This Article
| Source: GoldSeek.com
