He rests his case with Edwards.

AuthorGearino, G.D.
PositionFINEPRINT

I never meant for there to be a sequel to my August column about the newspaper business. But after John Edwards and Rielle Hunter teamed up not only to make whoopee (as well as a baby, allegedly) but also to make my point for me, that previous piece is worth revisiting. What you witnessed as the Edwards saga unfolded was the unprecedented sight of a monopoly business stepping meekly aside in the face of unorganized, leaderless competition. The newspaper industry took the opportunity of Edwards' philandering to tacitly demonstarte, once and for all, that it understands its new role in the digital age--that of a boutique information source, just one among many.

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My August column made the case that technology's greatest blow to the newspaper industry was that it revealed journalism as something any reasonably intelligent amateur could master. The resulting explosion of independent news sources vaporized billions of dollars of newspaper companies' market value. The industry's reaction to that paradigm shift has been puzzling. Its strategy has been to (1) try to convince the public that newspapers are the only truly reliable and comprehensive source of news and (2) give readers a daily report that often is neither reliable nor comprehensive. The Edwards saga put those conflicting instincts on full display, with editors letting a significant story be brought to the public by the very channels they have encouraged us to ignore and, afterward, wringing their hands and bleating endlessly about why they hadn't reported it themselves. (That the leader of the journalism pack was the National Enquirer was an irony too farcical for even a sitcom writer to dream up.)

That's no way to run a business. Then again, the newspaper industry has a business model rivaled for strangeness only by the Zimbabwean tactic of fighting inflation by printing more money. Underlying both is the apparent belief that it doesn't matter what you do as long as you own the press. During the decades when newspapers enjoyed their monopolies, the steady and easy profits led the industry to develop bad habits, some bordering on bipolar. Newspapers rarely had to fight for circulation and became disdainful of the desires of many of their readers. They developed a fetishistic worship of "objectivity" but couldn't get out of the way of their institutional biases. They emulated the worst traits of popular culture--an attitude-heavy writing style, for instance--but...

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