Read All About It?

I had lunch today with a friend who is still in my old racket of newspapers (same amendment that protects the line of work I'm in now, but a different clause), and like middle-aged guys will sometimes do, we lamented the loss of some things we thought were important. Among them was, surprise, the vanishing newspaper. I'm still a person who believes that in order to be an informed citizen of our fine republic, the verb to describe the method by which I consume that information must, most of the time, be "read." Maybe online, maybe not, but I do not believe those for whom that verb is "watch" are ever going to be informed.

And then later that day I read the nearby city paper. It's not been good for a long time, although some of its badnesses have changed over the years. But in it was the story of a tiny Oklahoma town that had been audited and whose city council had been found to be a wee bit lackadaisical in some of its record-keeping -- since 1977 -- and compliance with the state's open meeting law.

No TV station covered this item, nor did any national news outlet. Had it not been for a state newspaper, this little problem might have gone unremarked upon by anybody beyond the town limits. Sure, the audit will go a long way towards helping that town clean up some of the rough spots, but what about other small towns that might have similar issues? Without the newspaper story, they would have had less of a chance of knowing they had an avenue open to them if their own town governments had been involved in similar problems or worse shenanigans.

Blow-dried newsmuppets don't waste their time at city budget meetings; there are important live standup shots to do in front of the courthouse (five hours after it closes) to talk about some arrest or other, or shady contractors to chase into their offices on camera. Snarky bloggers who want to be the TMZ of the oil patch are too busy posting cheesecake photos and aggregating Tweets to investigate much more than local pseudo-celebrity gossip (And bloggers who like to play like they're Mike Royko keep posting reviews of Bollywood movies and airport novels...mea culpa).

The industry's inability to cope with change and unwillingness to see that change coming via modem and wi-fi hotspot is its own fault, of course. Whether it was arrogance or shortsightedness or something else entirely doesn't matter -- the Chicxulub meteor's already hit and the important question isn't whether to stop being a sauropod, it's how.

Newspapers may survive the internet age in a radically different form than they have now, of course. Or they may not survive them at all, and we'll get our infotainment from TelePrompTer readers who are one Turing test away from being replaced by animatronic androids who'll work for an occasional WD-40 fix.

And if that happens, who'll keep an eye on the people who need eyes kept on them?