12 August, 2008

The Facts Matter: An Interview With Bill Lueders

Newspapers here in America have fallen on hard times. (Although they are apparently doing very well in India.) Here in Madison, The Capital Times ceased daily publication this past spring and just last month the Daily Telegram in Superior did the same. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is "downsizing" both the staff and the paper itself. Presumably this means that lengthy pieces such as the ones MJS reporters did on the chemical Bisphenol A which garnered the attention of Bill Moyers will be fewer and further between. The pain is also being felt by weekly papers with Madison's Isthmus losing three people.

Isthmus News Editor Bill Lueders is none too pleased with this state of affairs and he expressed his anger last month in an opinion piece called "For the love of newspapers" in which he decried the decline of the newspaper. As I read it, I alternated between nodding in agreement and feeling that I had to defend the "new media". Wanting to know more, I asked him if he'd submit to an interview over e-mail and he kindly agreed.


(Photo from Mr. Lueders' website.)


FS: What was the impetus for your opinion piece, "For the love of newspapers"? Did one event set you off or was this a long time in coming?

BL: Two things. One was the talk I gave at the east side rotary (mentioned in the piece); the other was a conversation I had with the mayor about newspapers. Plus I needed a column topic, which is always a motivator.

FS: In your piece, you express anger that newspapers are "falling into disrepute". How is this fall measured – by circulation? Why do you think they are increasingly getting a bad name?

BL: I thought I addressed this in the piece. Papers are losing readership and revenue and are seen as anachronistic by stockholders. Worse, people now blithely assert that newspapers are not to be trusted. I dispute this; I think newspapers are far more reliable than some other media. I think many of the people saying this are just making excuses for being too damn lazy to read the paper.

FS: I asked because I was hoping that you'd have some polls results or the like to backup the assertion that newspapers are falling into disrepute. It was an opinion piece and not an exposé so I wasn't expecting it to be full of statistics. You've got the anecdote of the gentleman at the Rotary Club but, from my experience, he is in a minority. (Did the whole audience nod in ascent to his comment? Or did you perhaps detect disagreement?) While most of my friends and I generally do not read the paper version of newspapers, we do read the online versions. Sure, we are critical of some things, but I wouldn't say that newspapers in general have fallen into disrepute with us. Furthermore, as a blogger, I certainly owe a debt to newspapers as I often cite them. I can understand the drop in circulation and the effect that might have on shareholders, but, anecdotally, I don't see a great number of people saying that newspapers are not trustworthy.

BL: Good point. I think the lack of trust issue is a minority view but the decline in circulation and profitability is a fact. As I said, I think the complaints about lack of trust is a façade for people who don’t read papers because they just don’t think it’s important to stay informed.

FS: Do the papers themselves have some culpability in this? I ask because I'm one of those people who feels that newspapers (and much of the news media, generally) deserve opprobrium. That's not to say I dispute your assertions that newspapers get "an amazing number of things right", as you wrote, and that reporters do a lot of work. But when the New York Times issues a mea culpa for its reporting about the lead up to the Iraq War, which was mirrored in other papers, I think that some criticism is due. This wasn't an incorrect date of a press conference or the attribution of a home run to the wrong player at a baseball game – this was the build-up to war.

BL: Yep, the media, especially at the national level, tend to be lamentably unskeptical regarding the official version of events. And yes, the NY Times allowed itself to be used to make the case for war. But the Scripps-Howard news service did seminal reporting debunking the case for WMDs; Newsweek reported that Saddam Hussein had suspended his weapons program. Not everyone was duped. And reporting on this level has very little to do with what reporters like myself do day after day and week after week. If anything, we’re maybe too quick to criticize people in power.

FS: In the first half of the piece, I got the impression that you lamented the decline of the newspaper as a thing made of wood pulp. Is that fair to say? If so, what it is about the medium of newsprint that is valuable and not available in electronic versions of the same material? i.e. - is it a big deal if people get their news from the online counterpart to a paper instead of the print version?

BL: I personally think that having a paper in hand allows for better absorption of content than looking at stories online. I think people read faster and grasp less online. But the bigger and more immediate problem is that a paper is something you have to pay for and there is not yet an economic model that allows newspapers to succeed online. Thus reporters are losing their jobs.

FS: You are critical of "blowhards on cable TV and the bloviators of the blogosphere" but isn't comparing them to newspaper reporters unfair? The blowhards and bloviators don't practice reporting, they purvey opinions just like people such as John Nichols and William Safire do via newspapers in print.

BL: Maybe I AM being unfair. Write a post about me. The bloviators rehash what reporters dig up; as less news is generated they become more of a mob and an echo chamber. And the perceived need for scintillating content distorts that significance of certain sensational stories. Look at the story about John Edwards’ extramarital affair. It ran in most papers as an inside story, or two, along with dozens of more important stories. But (I’m guessing at this because I’ve been gone for a week) I bet it dominated the cable news channels and blogosphere.

FS: I thought it was unfair of you to essentially portray the denizens of the Internet as bloviators or "idiot(s) with Internet access". To be sure, there are plenty of those, but isn't it a tad disingenuous to take some of the worst of what the Internet has on offer and contrast it with the what print gives us?

BL: I think that in compacting my sentence you are distorting my meaning. Not everyone who posts online is an idiot. I didn’t say or mean that. But the idiots have just as large a presence as more thoughtful and responsible commentators. It matters that newspaper costs money and people have historically been choosey about what they print as a result. Online the only filter is whether on not a person has access to a computer.

That said, it’s probably true that better writers cultivate larger audiences; there is some sifting and winnowing going on. But when you consider that a sizable portion of the American public believes Obama is a Moslem because they read this online, it’s clear something is wrong.

FS: I wasn't trying to distort your meaning and perhaps I inferred something I shouldn't have. Sorry about that. My point was that you refer to the Internet three times in the piece: "bloviators of the blogosphere", "idiot(s) with Internet access", and "go all viral spreading ridiculous lies". (At least I take this last one as a reference to the Internet.) And by omitting anything positive the Internet has to offer, you're stacking the deck.

BL: Okay. Let me say that I use the Internet and like it. But it is a much less reliable source of information than newspapers. Don’t believe me? Do a Google search for common misspellings and you’ll get hundreds or thousands of hits.

FS: There have been several books lately which argue that Americans, especially young Americans, are "stupider", i.e. – more interested in pop culture than more "serious" pursuits and have no mind to examine things in-depth. A lot of the blame is laid at the door of the Internet. I'm thinking here of Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason and The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein as well as Nicholas Carr's piece for The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". (See here: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/08/2008080101c.htm.) Do you buy these arguments? Are newspapers in decline because we're becoming more intellectually shallow?

BL: Yes. No doubt about it. That’s also why our political system is being corrupted by special interests. Politicians need money to run commercials because a huge and decisive share of the public is so shallow it actually decides how to vote based on TV ads. That gives specials interests an “in” to control the process.

FS: I'll cop to being one of those idiots with an Internet connection but don't you see anything positive about the Web, bloviators aside?

BL: I see much that it positive about the web, just that I see much that is positive about cable TV news. All forms of media outlets add to the vitality of the flow of information. But the decline of newspapers is an ominous thing.

FS: What about the Web is positive to you? Has it made your job any easier or enabled you to do it better/quicker/more efficiently?

BL: Yes, it is much easier to find information of all sorts. When I began as a reporter, I spent many an hour going to the library to find stories on microfilm. I still have to do that on rare occasion, but pretty much everything written in the last decade and a half is available online. The Web and other technological improvements have made reporters much more productive, which makes it all the more unfair that they must work even harder and fight for their jobs.

FS: The Rubicon has been crossed and there's no going back. The Internet is here and it's not going anywhere. Do you see any hope for newspapers? Is there anything they can do to help stave the wound that they're not currently doing?

BL: Yes, I think newspapers will recover once people realize that there is value to the quality of information they provide. I don’t care if it’s online or in print but there is a place for trained and seasoned observers. There is a place for professional standards. The facts matter. Good reporting matters. Someone has to uncover the stories that set the blogosphere ablaze.

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In researching this post, I came across Fading to Black, a blog which links to articles about the decline of the newspaper industry, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in this topic.

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