The Internet, its boosters like to say, is the principal instrument of an era that is redefining human relations on a global scale. It has toppled walls between nations and languages, created vast communications networks across continents and oceans, and transformed “virtual” into a word that suggests possibilities rather than limitations. Almost incidentally, it is also destroying a principal instrument of local community. Across the United States, daily newspapers that have been central to local identity for generations, the soil in which community was rooted and maintained, are teetering on the edge of oblivion. Many, including the celebrated Rocky Mountain News in Colorado, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the Ann Arbor News in Michigan (which published my own first story almost 40 years ago) have already shut their doors forever or been reduced to online shadows.
There are grounds for cautious optimism on the future of national and international news. Decisive constituencies in business and government depend on a consistent flow of reliable global information. Media software and hardware advances, from Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad to their inevitable progeny and competitors, make a top-end news renaissance technologically feasible.
But none of these factors seem likely to restore the devastated landscape of America’s daily printed press – the de facto village green of every town and city in the country for 150 years.
No influential constituency depends upon them at its bottom line, and many powerbrokers will privately welcome the demise of publications that once followed their every move and subjected them to public scrutiny.
The death of city and regional newspapers will be mourned at a higher level: its implications for America’s decentralized version of democracy.
THE WAY IT WAS
The San Francisco Bay Area offers a classic example of how daily newspapers served as village greens.
A couple of decades ago, one of the region’s most ubiquitous advertising images pictured a breakfast table, equipped with a cup of coffee and a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle, above the words “This is how people start the day around here.”
It was pretty much the truth. When I moved to the Bay Area from Michigan in 1977, the Chronicle reached an estimated 40 percent of the metropolitan region’s 5 million people every day. In the city itself, the proportion of Chronicle readers to overall population was even higher.
What appeared in the Chronicle each morning throughout the 1980s and 1990s – notably in the influential columns of Herb Caen or Art Hoppe – was food for thought by lunchtime and conventional wisdom by dinner.
Today the Chronicle’s print circulation, in a region that has grown to almost 8 million residents, has dropped to 250,000, a fall of 50 percent since 1980. Two out of five Bay Area residents read the paper then; the current figure is roughly one in 16.
In the first six months of 2009 alone, Chronicle sales plummeted by almost 26 percent, the steepest drop in the U.S. newspaper industry – although not much worse than the slides recorded by the Newark Star-Ledger and the Dallas Morning News (-22 percent). Such longtime media titans as the Chicago Sun-Times, the Arizona Republic, the Houston Chronicle, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today also lost between 12 and 20 percent of their readers in that disastrous half year.
Given the Internet’s heavy dependence on print sources for original reporting, the availability of crucial information is clearly at risk in this decline – not only in the realm of breaking news events and the investigative reporting that kept tabs on politicians and wheeler-dealers, but also in sports, local business, leisure activities and the arts.
From City Hall, Candlestick Park and the Opera, to a complex infrastructure of neighborhood groups, theaters, restaurants and cafes, San Francisco institutions were knitted into an ever-changing social tapestry by Chronicle reporters and their counterparts at the Examiner and elsewhere in the Bay Area. Most have relentlessly lost subscribers and advertisers since 2000 and are now threatened with bankruptcy.
Something more intangible is also at stake. Every true community draws its identity from a collective narrative, a half-real and half-mythic story that proclaims “this is who we are” and “this is what we do.” The lives and deeds of its principal characters – villains and heroes alike – bring color to a city’s streets and provide its citizens with an insider’s sense of connection to its secrets.
The daily newspaper told that story. Without the old Chronicle and its rogue’s gallery of columnists and reporters, the mythic force of San Francisco, its wonderfully eccentric personality, would never have congealed. Without the Daily News, the Post and the Times, New York would never have come to know itself as the Big Apple.
One of the saddest recent developments in my annual visits to San Francisco is that all but a few of my closest acquaintances there have abandoned what remains of the local press. They don’t discuss the city’s secrets over dinner anymore. They seldom mention the challenges it faces or the office-holders who will address its vital issues.
Most of my San Francisco friends are as out of touch with their city as I am, an expatriate settled on another continent.
NOT THERE YET
One way or another, some of print’s traditional functions will migrate successfully to the web. Those big constituencies will see to it that reliable reporting at the upper levels of national and international news is once again made available, probably thanks to Apple or Amazon. Several of the newspaper’s practical tasks – restaurant and theater reviews, for instance – have taken hold in some fashion at local versions of such national online operations as Yelp and Citysearch.
The hope is that with time, local sites like CBS5’s – where this column appears and where veteran Chronicle reporter Phil Matier still monitors the political class – will manage to reinvent the community wheel.
But we aren’t there yet. For one thing, there are too many suitors struggling for too few regular readers and a pittance in advertising dollars. The appearance of wide choice is not always a measure of robust health. In one of the incomprehensible paradoxes of modern life, the army of local news reporters on the ground has shrunk to a demoralized fraction of its troop strength in the print epoch, at the same time that endless ranks of new media sites crowd the web.
Their circulation is measured in “daily unique visitors,” the number of individuals who connect to each site in an average 24-hour period. With just over 400,000 such visitors per day, the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com boasts the region’s largest online new audience. But it represents less than 13 percent of the 3 million estimated readers who perused the combined Sunday edition of The San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner as recently as the 1990s.
More important, those readers were all local and prone to surveying much of an entire issue. The website “circulation” numbers, by contrast, register anyone on the planet who conducts a Google or Yahoo search that leads to a single article posted by Bay Area media on the net. This says a great deal about the electronic media’s global reach, but does little to halt the erosion of local identity.
In community terms, a chief consequence of the web’s explosive growth remains fragmentation, the shattering of a unifying vision that married place
and populace. Increasingly, it has given way to that nebulous phenomenon “virtual community,” an amalgam of distant, often anonymous contacts, linked by narrow interests.
Myth-making – the essential and immeasurable forging of truly local community bonds at which cranky old newspapers excelled – is all but entirely absent.
The rich local narrative that distinguishes great cities like San Francisco or New York hasn’t moved to the Internet. And there isn’t enough evidence out there yet to believe that it will.
Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5
