Samuel Levin Economics Award Speech
March 27, 2012
McGregor Center, Wayne State University
“No Reason for Tears: The End of the Newspaper’s Golden Age”
Thanks so much for honoring me with the invitation to speak today. It is an especially grand occasion, the 50th anniversary of the awarding of Samuel M. Levin Economics Award.
As you may have guessed, the reason for this invitation had nothing to do with the last name of the man who this award was named after – the same last name as mine – a distinguished scholar who served Wayne State and its predecessor for 43 years, and was the first chairman of the economics department.
What I can tell you is that my late grandfather’s name was Samuel Levin, a man I was fortunate to know. He, of course, would have been very proud today that his grandson was asked to choose a topic of economic interest and speak about it to you.
Though my grandfather didn’t have much formal education, he did live long enough to see me finish university and gain the benefits of studying history, science, language and, yes, economics. A small part of what this education gave me was a richer understanding of the forces that led Sam Levin, my Sam Levin, to seek a new life in South Africa after growing up in Lithuania.
By the time he died the world had changed remarkably from the one into which he was born. Like so many others looking for opportunity, he arrived in Capetown, South Africa as a young man by steamship, which dominated global transportation. To the day he died he preferred the steamship and made numerous ocean crossings. He did live long enough to experience the jet airliner – but for him nothing could compare to the experience of a week or two aboard ship, taking in the salt air, dining with the captain and ship’s officers.
In his early days in South Africa he made his living near the diamond mines, selling dry goods to the workers. Then he went to work as a butcher, waking before dawn every morning to carve huge carcasses. Finally he and my late grandmother, a fancy woman from London, opened a dress shop. They managed it together and enjoyed their trips to Paris, London and New York to shop for fashions.
The reason for telling you about Sam Levin, my grandfather, is to point out that while I’m pretty sure he knew nothing about subjects like economics or the evolution of technology, he surely understood that his world in South Africa – with modern advances like the motor car – would have been inconceivable to his parents – just as he no doubt realized that a world lay somewhere in the future for his children and grandchildren, one that would be unrecognizable to him.
I know this from his visits to our family and from the letters we exchanged. I became a newspaper reporter, concentrating on business and economics, after he was gone.
Having seen so much change himself, I’m sure he would have appreciated the signs I noticed as a young man that were portents of change in my chosen profession. Today those portents have proven largely valid in what has become a revolution in the news business, one that has thoroughly reshaped – and will further transform – the way in which news is delivered and consumed.
In 1977, after completing a graduate program in journalism at Columbia University in New York, I was fortunate to be hired in St. Petersburg, Florida as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, a regional newspaper with a fine reputation, well known for high journalistic standards, as well as for embracing the latest technologies in printing and newsgathering.
Until my employment in St. Petersburg, I had used manual typewriters exclusively in my classes at school and whenever I was lucky enough to snag a free-lance assignment for some publication.
The St. Pete Times was renowned in the late 1970s as a newspaper that favored innovation. The publisher was especially proud of a costly computerized color separation machine, developed in Europe, that transformed color photography through a special process resulting in remarkably crisp, clear resolution on paper. Readers loved the big, color pictures, which often appeared on the front page. The newspaper reaped attractive revenue and profit from color advertisements, which commanded a premium price.
Another innovation was a terminal containing a basic computer and cathode ray tube that reporters could use to write their stories. These were basic “dumb” terminals, possessing very little computational ability, the precursor of what you see in almost every office and place of business. The editing functions of that terminal were rudimentary compared to the programs that come standard on today’s computers from Apple and Microsoft.
As this new terminal began to displace the typewriter, we reporters no longer had to type stories, then edit by hand with pencil and then paste paper sheets together to be delivered to an editor and finally to the composing room by a copy boy or girl. We reporters could send our stories electronically to an editor’s terminal. The edited story then was sent to the composing room to be set into type.
Basic, yes. But it wasn’t difficult, using a bit of imagination, to see where this innovation was headed. A senior editor at the St. Pete Times commissioned me to write a story about emerging newspaper technology for a professional journal. In the course of researching this story I learned about an experiment under way at Knight-Ridder – the once great owner of the Detroit Free-Press – called Viewtron.
Viewtron was also a small terminal, designed for the home and connected to computers by telephone lines. Viewtron allowed those participating in the experiment to gather information from their homes such as weather reports and news stories – and to shop.
Imagine that! The ability to shop on line without leaving the house, searching for a parking spot, lugging parcels or fumbling for credit cards in wallet or purse. A fairly radical idea for the late 1970s.
After substantial research, Viewtron was discontinued. Knight-Ridder pulled the plug on the experiment, but it was on the right track. The newspaper company had a glimpse of how digital technology could be exploited to do amazing things. And the potential was even more promising for moneymaking applications like shopping rather than for news.
Publishing executives weren’t lying awake at night in those days, worrying how digital technology might destroy the newspaper’s dominant role in communication. But if someone did see the future – and was worried about it – that person probably worked in the advertising department, not the newsroom.
Understand: the business and economic model of newspapers was quite unlike what many of us writers, reporters and editors imagined it to be. We presumed that readers bought the paper – avidly – to read our stories, to discover why taxes were raised and who had been arrested; to gain deep political insights from the state capitol – baseball box scores, casserole recipes, a crossword puzzle, movie reviews. And let’s not forget Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
We were quite proud of our daily report. We were convinced that our editorial judgments were correct. Sure, some of our stories were boring and esoteric: But we knew them to be important for readers. We had the journalism awards to prove it. And in case anyone didn’t understand how important our political endorsements were – we printed a dotted line around them so they could be easily cut from the paper and carried to the voting booth.
Every so often a reader would tell me she just mainly bought the newspaper to find out what groceries were on special at Pantry Pride. And the mayor of the small Florida town of Palmetto liked to introduce me as the reporter who worked for the “mullet wrapper.” I fielded more than a few telephone calls to the newsroom from readers who complained about the ink that bled from our pages onto their hands.
The comments didn’t bother me.
Most of my peers regarded journalism as a sacred calling. We regarded much of what we reported and wrote as vital to the democratic process. After all, how could anyone understand whether the mayor and city council were discharging their responsibilities if we didn’t bring them the facts?
Where else would curious citizens find out about the nation’s space program, U.S. foreign policy, advances in medical science?
We were living in a Golden Age for journalism, an era of profit for the newspapers, influence and glamor for reporters and editors.
The high water mark of this era was August 8, 1974. That was the day that President Richard Nixon resigned. Nixon was brought down by the Watergate Scandal that was simultaneously a triumph for the mass media, the Washington Post and, in particular, two newspaper reporters by the names of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. (Sorry: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.)
Lacking clairvoyance, we couldn’t see that Watergate was the point from which the influence of American newspapers would go no higher. As journalists we didn’t fully appreciate the business dynamic that gripped newspapers, namely that a smaller and smaller segment of a growing American public was relying on our daily smorgasbord of news, features and entertainment.
Newspaper owners weren’t ignorant, nor were they sitting still. To the extent circulation and advertising were stagnant, newspapers formed chains and bought out independents. Publishers made hard decisions, closing afternoon newspapers because readers more and more were reading in the morning and watching TV in the evening. Newspapers raised their advertising rates and pushed revenue higher, forcing smaller advertisers to look for alternatives like direct mail.
Looking back on the post-War period, what we learn is that consolidation and monopolies brought newspapers unprecedented influence and wealth, which owners and publishers used to expand and invest in related communications assets, such as radio and television stations.
And, then, in the 1990s a little thing called the Internet appeared on center stage. The Internet posed the same threat to the economics of physically delivering information on paper that the Wright Brothers posed in their day to railroads and steamship lines.
Yet few alarms were sounded. Would newspapers get smaller? Probably. Would they vanish altogether? Never!
In the past decade, the wreckage has been substantial. Here in Detroit, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News have been forced to curtail daily home delivery. The chain that once owned the Detroit Free Press, Knight-Ridder, sold out to McClatchy in 2005 for $6.5 billion. McClatchy’s value subsequently plummeted by 98 percent. Even the august New York Times was forced to borrow at high rates from billionaire Carlos Slim, which it never would have considered unless it was facing an existential crisis. The New York Times Company recently sold its own chain of regional newspapers and currently has hired a headhunter for find a new CEO.
How could these companies, once so wealthy and powerful, have failed to adapt and to defend themselves against the winds of change?
What we are learning today in our academic study of business organizations – not just newspapers but all organizations – is that when new technologies threaten the status quo, it’s very difficult – and, often, impossible – to comprehend and adjust to what is unfolding in front of us.
(From an academic standpoint, General Motors clearly understood the industry-changing manufacturing innovations introduced by Toyota in the 1990s. Adapting to those innovations quickly and effectively proved to be quite another matter.)
During my own newspaper career I was regularly able to question publishing executives about the Internet. Frequently I heard reassuring opinions that “people will never agree to read on screens” or that an “on-line story can never replace the experience of savoring the Sunday New York Times with coffee and a bagel?”
I’m sure there are some, maybe even some in this audience, who once held these opinions. Though they weren’t entirely unreasonable, they no have been refuted and rendered irrelevant.
The decline of print-on-paper and the demise of some great newspaper properties is unfolding before our eyes. We have new questions before us: What will take its place?
Can the Drudge Report, Huffington Post, Daily Beast or Politico truly serve readers who once relied on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune?
And where do Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn fit? Can they assume the role that newspapers played in a civil society, informing us about issues and policymakers?
As a former newspaperman I’m optimistic. I view all of the digital and social media ventures as being in a very early stage of development, struggling to find their place.
The incumbent news organizations, which have now glimpsed their own mortality, finally are focused and serious about innovation. The New York Times is a fine example. Slow to understand the revolution that was unfolding around it, the Times dutifully rolled out a website in the 1990s. Today the newspaper has a mobile application for Smartphones and is tinkering with a so-called “pay wall,” a device that allows you to sample Times stories to a limited extent before you have to pay.
The challenge in front of news organizations is immense. As advertising continues to erode from the print edition, the amount of ad spending for the online edition doesn’t come close to covering what’s lost. Where can the company find the resources to maintain a news organization that will be able to cover an Iraq war and support a bureau in Beijing while paying a reporter to travel with the New York Giants and keeping abreast of breakthroughs in science?
No easy answer comes to mind. The Times may be forced to narrow its focus and stop covering some topics. Perhaps it can learn from enterprises like Groupon, which are reinventing advertising and marketing in a way that has attracted millions of new Smartphone users.
Here in Detroit a sizable number of online digital publications have sprung up, some devoted to the arts scene, to politics, to gardening. Some are broader in scope.
What’s clear is that mainstream newspaper and media outlets will never occupy the positions of wealth, influence and authority they once did.
One lesson to be learned from the passing of newspapers and the rise of digital is that readers – particularly young readers – demand interactivity.
The Internet gives access to everyone who wants it: journalists, CEOs public officials, prison inmates – everyone.
Whereas newspaper editors once decided what you read on the front page and projected opinions from the editorial age – the newest technologies allow readers to customize what they want to see, according to subject, as well as to comment and participate.
Once upon a time editors published a few letters for each edition. Today the discussion of current events is lively and as lengthy as you wish it to be.
Consider the stories from the mass media that friends share with one another on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. The very process of choosing and posting stories suggests an implicit “vote” that the story is worth reading, even if only for the purpose of disagreeing with what it says. Advanced software calculates which comments are most liked by readers and rank them.
When I do read mainstream newspapers I now prefer the on-line edition, where each story may be followed by scores, and sometimes hundreds, of comments. Often the comments are as revealing and interesting as the stories, and sometimes more so.
What once was one-way communication – projected from the Olympian perch of the newspaper editor –has turned into a multi-directional conversation among readers, journalists, experts and even public officials.
In short, media oligopoly has been transformed – at least temporarily – into a free-for-all. The Drudge Report fights the Washington Post for reader attention. As the Encyclopedia Britannica closes its print edition and the U.S. Postal Service cuts its delivery services, we citizens are relying more and more on iPads, Smartphones and other electronic devices to bring us a wealth of information choice.
The next time you are on a flight or on a commuter train, pay attention to how many Kindles, iPads, Nooks and other digital appliances are in the hands of travelers, versus conventional books, newspapers and magazines.
Yet I wonder….
Though we are watching the latest technologies unfold that will bring us news and information – who will fill the role of journalist? And will tomorrow’s journalists adequately inform us of the critical issues so that we citizens can make correct judgments?
The conventional pathway to journalism almost always started at a small newspaper. Read the professional biographies of the great journalists of the Twentieth Century and they mostly begin with a job at a small-town newspaper covering police, courts and high-school football games.
The veterans taught the rookies. Talented and ambitious writers moved up the food chain from small cities to large ones. The very best often landed in Washington or on the front lines in Normandy, Vietnam or the Congo.
Today’s world has been turned upside down. The veterans are being forced to the sidelines because the rookies know how to use digital to interview, discover information and transmit photography, as well as to create blogs and other on-line publications.
But do the rookies know how to interview? Can they smell a good story? Do they know how to “follow the buck” to its source?
The answer is a qualified “yes” for many of them.
Even as newspapers have struggled, I have read and continue to read perceptive, skilled journalism amid the half-baked variety. And I think the instincts to tell the truth fairly, coherently, passionately and objectively are human and can be found in many of us, even those without professional credentials.
I don’t worry much about the fate of participatory democracy in the U.S. because I know that more people than ever are gaining access to – and will use skillfully – communications technology once restricted to an elite minority.
I know that many of us are profoundly sad at the fading of newspapers. And I say: Don’t be.
Newspapers laid the foundation of a society that surely isn’t perfect but is great in its achievements. What lies in front of us can only constitute an improvement, in terms of access to reliable information, in terms of immediacy and in terms of the analytic powers that held us make great judgments.
To those who choose a career in journalism – a great ride awaits you, with more opportunities and fewer barriers than any of my generation could ever dream.
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