The Death of the Newspaper

The newspaper industry is dying and media moguls are blaming the wrong people—everyone else.

My father read several newspapers every morning, sometimes while smoking his pipe. He was an Air Force veteran, hobbyist carpenter, military boxer, and doting husband. I therefore grew up believing these were the manners of manhood and from a young age, I learned to measure and mark a board, pack a pipe, and slip a jab. I learned the love that a good man has for family and the respect he holds for the uniforms that guard you while you sleep, as Kipling put it. What’s more, I learned to love a good broadsheet. In some homes, the paraphernalia of masculinity might include a MIG welder or cherry picker. In others, maybe an old chisel plow or combine in the barn. In ours, it included a 16 oz. hammer, heavy bag and gloves, and the morning paper. But the paper was more than just the news. It was a sign of one’s desire to know the world and therefore just holding one open seemed to say something good about the nature of a man.

Or at least, that’s how I saw things as a boy. I joined the school newspaper staff when I was 11 years old. I have since turned in work for various papers around the world. I wrote my opinion for The Wall Street Journal. I was the national editor and sports editor for the sister paper of The New York Times in South Korea. I sat on the editorial board of The Seattle Times. I still enjoy the pulpy feel of newsprint, the crackle of turning pages, the classic look of serif font, the heft of the Sunday edition and the checkered layout of the page. I like the logic of news grammar, the little ritual of folding each section, the art of the headline. I love to see a grabby lede, a chewy nutgraf, and a punchy kicker. I have written style guides, designed layouts, edited stories, written stories, taken pictures for stories. The thing about a newspaper article is, it’s not an art form so much as an amalgam of art forms, from the typeface to the reporter’s voice, all working in concert to tell you what matters most in the world right now.

I suppose my love for the printed paper will never die, even if the business of making papers itself is fading away. No doubt, we are witnessing the death of the newspaper in the United States. As a former newspaper man myself, I view this with some dismay. But my dismay is over the dying of newspapers as they were, the thing my father held in his hands as he sat in a kitchen suffused with the smell of pipe tobacco and hot coffee, and that is arguably something that died long ago. What is crumbling now is not the Fourth Estate in all its edifying honor, but the propagandistic corporate instrument that has taken its place, an instrument that churns out fear porn for the political right and shame porn for the political left. So to some degree, what we are seeing is the death of something that ought to die, and my dismay is over the fact that it will not be replaced by that elegant education that came before.

Key West Citizen press room, 1964, picture by Don Pinder

They say that the term “fourth estate” came from the godfather of political conservatism, Edmund Burke, though it was the historian Thomas Carlyle who first told the story. The British press was given access to the House of Commons for the first time in 1771, and Burke remarked that there were now four estates—clergy, nobles, commoners, and, he added, “in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they all.” Today we might rephrase this in terms of branches of government rather than estates, and as every school kid knows, the purpose of having separation of powers is to provide a system of checks and balances, with the fourth estate providing the greatest check of all—that of the Truth. This is why people read papers, because they offer facts and analysis as a means of conveying the truth. Or at least, that’s the idea. But just as our faith in the first two estates, the clergy and nobles, faded once we realized they cannot be trusted, so too has our faith in the fourth.

This week, the Los Angeles Times announced that it has laid off at least 115 people, or more than 20% of its newsroom. They did it via Zoom, took no questions, and gave no answers. Jared Servantez, assistant editor of breaking news at the paper, said a colleague told him, “that was like a drive-by.” The L.A. Times is the 5th largest daily in the nation after The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post. This is cataclysmic, not just because of what it will do to the L.A. Times or the breadth and depth of news coverage in the City of Angels, but because of what it heralds for the newspaper industry more generally. There is a pale rider darkening the door of American newsrooms. Why is this happening? Let me explain.