Today, like many other media enthusiasts in Kansas City, we read with great interest the list of newly axed Star employees, courtesy of Bottomline’s excellent coverage. The list reads like a who’s who of local journalism, with sports columnist Jeffrey Flanagan, bold-facer Hearne Christopher Jr., political cartoonist Lee Judge, and columnist Laura Scott among those asked to kindly leave — along with 46 or so others. This is a stunning turn of events for the once-great paper, and a day of reckoning for those employed in traditional media. We’re pretty hard on the Star and its various publications around here, but only because we lament the decline of Hemingway’s former employer. But this is a day for empathy and consideration, not criticism.
No one likes to see anyone get fired. It’s a traumatic experience for the person involved and for friends and family on the periphery, who have to support the person during a tough time. This country appears to be reaping a harvest of decline — the result of years of industry sowing the seeds of immediate gain at the expense of long-term planning — and layoffs are hitting every sector of the economy. Traditional journalism, though, is taking things especially hard. Readership is plummeting, profits are down, and we seem to hear daily eulogies for the mainstream media.
Exactly zero of us are journalists by trade or training, but we are all devout readers of newspapers and magazines as well as blogs and online sources, and it depresses us to see so many media companies fail to find a profitable means of traditional operation. When a newspaper like the Star sheds some of its most famous names, it isn’t just a blow to that venerable publication — it’s a blow to all of us who appreciate a well-informed society.
There’s a lot of talk about the decline and fall of the American intellect, a downward spiral exacerbated by rapidly growing technology and the decrease in cultivation of genuine news sources and knowledge. It’s easy to be skeptical of things like The Atlantic’s recent melodramatic cover story — until you realize that it’s probably true. One of the reasons I still subscribe to a daily newspaper is because, when I stick with reading the paper online, my learning decreases. I miss less prominent articles, or I find myself merely scanning headlines instead of reading full articles. In order to be truly informed, one needs to invest some time in media, books, films, etc. Sure, one can have a working understanding of global culture by scanning the WSJ’s headlines once a day — but is this true understanding?
What we’ve seen, to our great chagrin, is the rise of a proud and especially defiant anti-intellectualism embodied by figures like Gov. Sarah Palin, who proudly boasts of her lack of educational credentials while railing against some mythical elite that allegedly suppresses the Great American Masses. A hostility to education and reasoning has arisen, and is encouraged by the reduction of news into ever-smaller blurbs and captions, the simplification of understanding into dichotomous, Malthusian choices, and the devolution of national conversation into talking points shouted by cable news bloviators.
There are two ways to respond to this. One is to take the path chosen by publications like The New Yorker and Harper’s: to burrow even deeper into proud, semi-snobbish intellectualism — exemplified by pages and pages of pure text — while prizing your status as an alpha consumer publication and leveraging those readers into increased ad rates. Or you can take the path chosen by papers like the Star: bigger photos, bigger captions, bigger headlines — all at the expense of text, discussion, and true information. The Star chose a lowest common denominator approach, compounded by an undeniably chaotic web format, and it didn’t work.
No one knows for sure how to keep print media alive, if an option even exists. But we know with equal certainty that sticking with online news sources will not provide the kind of fundamental and worldly cultural education that the next generation so sorely needs. At the risk of channeling our inner Lee Siegel, we have to admit as a society that the web is so far eluding our goals of universal education and open-access learning. Instead of being exposed to all schools of thought, we’ve engaged in a society-wide cognitive dissonance, gathering those sources that speak to our existing beliefs and shunning those which threaten our ideals. Your SOTL staff is not exempt from this; we may read Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo every day, but how often do we check out InstaPundit or Powerline Blog? Rarely, if ever — because they don’t align with what we already believe.
We have a lot of work to do as a society. We need to determine how much emphasis we place on cultural literacy and true learning, and whether we’ll allow news organizations to fail as we seek smaller and smaller units of information, all orchestrated by a mindset which blocks viewpoints we find disagreeable. It’s a shame that 50 or so employees of the Star had to fall victim to our collective delay in making this determination. We extend our sympathy and best wishes to them today.
[...] 18, 2008 by benton Now, we know the Star is cutting reporting staff left and right, essentially transforming the paper into a mere repository for AP stories, but [...]