Below The Beltway

The WaPo’s Howard Kurtz has sour grapes over the fact that the newspaper industry is being forced to change:

Let’s not bury the lead: This is a rough time for the newspaper business, a rough time for The Washington Post and a rough time for me.

No one need shed any tears for the people leaving this building. The more than 100 journalists who have just taken early-retirement packages are voluntarily accepting a generous offer as the company trims its payroll — a situation far better than at newspapers that have resorted to layoffs.

But it is painful to watch from the inside. The talented reporters, editors and photographers walking out the door are part of the heart and soul of a living, breathing organism. How do you replace a Tom Ricks, one of the best Pentagon reporters ever? Or a Sue Schmidt, the investigative reporter who revealed Jack Abramoff’s dirty dealings? Or Robin Wright, who’s covered the Middle East for a quarter-century? What about battle-scarred editors with deep knowledge and a light touch?

Well, I for one am not going to feel all that bad for Ricks, Schmidt, Wright, David Broder or any of the other Post reporters who are leaving. They weren’t fired, they received rather lucrative buyout deals. Unlike some Americans, they aren’t going to lose their homes because of this. They’ll do just fine, I think, and I’m betting it won’t be long before we see guys like Tom Ricks showing up on CNN, MSNBC and Fox as “consultants.”

But it’s not his fellow Post employees that Kurtz is mourning, it’s that supposed epitome of journalistic excellence; the dead tree newspaper:

I know, I know. The future is digital. The Web is a cornucopia of fast-moving video and blogs and bulletins and gossip, while newspapers are old, slow and less than hip. That’s why The Post (and every other paper on the planet) is beefing up its online presence and why I write a daily blog for the Web site.

But — and stop me if you’ve heard this one — newspapers matter. There isn’t a Web site around that can produce the probing work, such as the exposé of shoddy conditions at the Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center, that won The Post six Pulitzer Prizes this year. The economics of the Web, for now, won’t support a staff that can hold public officials accountable across the region and still cover every Nationals game. So I cling to an old-fashioned, almost mystical belief in the power of ink on paper.

This is where Kurtz, and other defenders of the dead-tree media get it wrong.

Who says that there has to be one source for everything, and that it has to come in the form of a messy big brick of paper that leaves ink on your hands ?

When you think about it, newspapers are somewhat analogous to RSS readers and news aggregators. They take information from a variety of sources, some of it internal, but much of it, such as the score of that Nationals game on the West Coast, external.

For a very, very long time, paper and newsprint were the most efficient ways to deliver information like this, but times have changed. I can, and have, put widgets on my Google homepage that give me the score to every Major League Baseball game played the day before, and a link to the box score for the game. I can bring in information from The Weather Channel, CNN, CNN/Money, and a whole host of providers.

That’s why I really don’t read a print newspaper anymore because I don’t need to.

Yes, we still subscribe to The Washington Post on a daily basis, but that’s mostly because it’s so cheap and because it gives us access to ads and coupons. Once grocery stores figure out a way around paying for that big color insert in the Sunday paper (and to some extent they have with club cards), then the newspaper business will take another big hit.

Kurtz, meanwhile, continues to live in the Walter Winchell era:

Maybe newspapers got overstaffed during the fat years, and the departure of some age-50-and-over staffers (those eligible for the Post buyout) will clear the way for the hiring of younger (and cheaper) employees. But we are working harder than ever, in part because of the round-the-clock demands of the Web; Post campaign reporters are constantly writing online items for The Trail column in addition to their daily stories. So to suggest that a shrinkage of the Post newsroom from the equivalent of 780 full-time employees to 680 — offset by perhaps 20 new hires — won’t affect the range and quality of what we do is simply unrealistic. (Another 100 work in the washingtonpost.com newsroom.) And, following a peak of 900 employees, this is the third round of buyouts in five years.

Hey, Howard, what would you think if I told you that running a “newspaper” (and geez that’s gonna be a meaningless term in about 20 years) with 680 employees is, given current technology, incredibly wasteful ?

I suspect that his response would be something like this:

The ticking time bomb here is the wholesale abandonment of newspapers by younger people who grew up with a point-and-click mentality. When I was speaking at Harvard recently, a smug graduate student said, “I get everything I need from YouTube. What are you going to do about it?”

“What are you going to do about it?” I shot back. If people want to tune out the news, no one can compel them to change their habits. We can be smarter, faster and jazzier in providing information, but we can’t force-feed the stuff. If newspapers wither and die, it will be in part because the next generation blew us off in favor of Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods. Network news faces the same erosion. Maybe, in the end, we get the media we deserve.

Because, you know, if you don’t get a big freaking brick of paper delivered to your front door every Sunday, you just don’t give a crap about the future of the world.