| News as community builder Despite such problems, both Butler and Brady see a future in which news publishing and community building go hand in hand. Brady expects the news to one day spur relationships that outlive the day’s headlines. “As opposed to everyone being voyeurs and coming in and reading an article here and there,” he says, “let’s take those people who are all coming to read this same article and figure out how to have them interact with each other based on this common interest.” Yet even as mainstream media become more willing to share and host the conversation, rather than just shape it themselves, standards like old-fashioned journalistic objectivity seem likely to thrive in spite, or even because, of the surrounding chatter. Though some worry that the bloggers’ penchants for spin, partisanship, and plain old ranting will push news toward opinion, Butler and Brady have a different take. “What we are finding . . . is that, as there are more and more sources of information available, it is the traditional sources of news and information [that] are all of a sudden the most highly prized, precisely because people feel that they can trust them—that we’re at least going to try to get things right,” says Butler, who expects the increasing prominence of amateur, opinion-based reporting to have a “strengthening effect” on the standards that separate news from commentary. “Whether we live up to it or not, we try, and people know that we try. And that’s going to continue to be important.” Newspaper's death greatly exaggerated? So then what about these dying newspapers? For Butler and Brady, at least, it looks like it’s far too early to start planning the funeral. Though both forecast a continued decline in the circulation and expect that Web sites will have to find a way to shoulder more of the reporting costs, they agree that readers preferring newsprint-stained fingers to monitor-weary eyes are likely to keep the traditional format around for some time. The Post Company, in fact, is betting on it. “Eight years ago,” says Butler. “We spent 250 million to build a whole new set of printing presses on the expectation that there was at least another generation of people who would want the newspaper in the traditional way.” And if history is any indication, the “traditional way” seems likely to stick around even beyond that generation. “Nothing in the media business ever gets completely replaced,” says Butler. “The history of the business instead has been that newspapers and magazines are not replaced by radio, but radio builds on them; television builds on radio; the Internet builds on newspaper, television, and radio; and now you have iPods, and who knows what else will build on what else?” top << BACK |
