If you wanted to pick the moment when the American news business went on suicide watch, it was almost three years ago. That’s when Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with murder (or at least the war in Iraq). To prove the point, the partying journalists in the Washington Hilton ballroom could be seen fawning over government potentates—in some cases the very “sources” who had fed all those fictional sightings of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
Colbert’s routine did not kill. The Washington Post reported that it “fell flat”. The New York Times initially did not even mention it. But to the Beltway’s bafflement, Colbert’s riff went viral overnight, ultimately to have a marathon run as the most popular video on iTunes. The cultural disconnect between the journalism establishment and the public it aspires to serve could not have been more vividly dramatized.
The bad news about the news business has accelerated ever since. Newspaper circulations and revenues are in free fall. Legendary brands from the Los Angeles Times to The Philadelphia Inquirer are teetering. The New York Times Co. threatened to close The Boston Globe if its employees didn’t make substantial sacrifices in salaries and benefits. Other papers have died. The reporting ranks on network and local news alike are shrivelling. The causes of journalism’s downfall—some self-inflicted, some beyond anyone’s control (a worldwide economic meltdown)—are well known. To time-travel back to the dawn of the technological strand of the disaster, search YouTube for “1981 primitive Internet report on KRON”. What you’ll find is a 28-year-old local television news piece from San Francisco about a “far-fetched,” pre-Web experiment by the city’s two papers, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, to distribute their wares to readers with home computers via primitive phone modems. Though there were at most 3,000 people in the Bay Area with PCs then, some 500 mailed in coupons for the service to the Chronicle alone. But, as the anchorwoman assures us at the end, with a two-hour download time, “the new telepaper won’t be much competition for the 20-cent street edition”.
The rest is irreversible history. This far-fetched newspaper experiment soon faded, even in San Francisco, the gateway to Silicon Valley. Today the Examiner exists in name only, as a flimsy giveaway. The Chronicle is under threat of closure.