As if to emphasize Bill’s take on the fate of newspapers, Leonard Downie has just announced he’s moving on from his editor’s desk at the Washington Post.
The Times article talks about Downie’s unassuming leadership and the 27 Pulitzers the paper’s garnered during his tenure, six of those in the most recent competition. But, as the Times says,
Mr. Downie oversaw a period of expansion — especially in The Post’s local and suburban news coverage — followed by one of contraction. In recent years, he has presided over cutbacks reducing the news staff by more than one-quarter, to about 700 people, including significant reductions in its overseas staff. Last month, more than 100 newsroom employees accepted a buyout offer, including some well-known reporters.Like all major newspapers, The Post is struggling with declining circulation and ad revenue, even as it draws record numbers of readers online. The Post’s weekday circulation, which was over 800,000 early in this decade, averaged 673,000 in the six months ended March 31, the seventh-highest in the country. It has more than nine million Internet readers each month, according to Nielsen online, behind The New York Times and USA Today. Like the rest of the industry, it has found it hard to turn its digital audience into significant revenue.
The loss of the medium of newspapers is a sad thing for a couple of reasons. The most poignant is that we’ll probably never see them again; there’ll be paper distributions, but anything above small-town backwater newspapers will grow increasingly harder to find, if only because of the resources needed to transmit information through ink on paper.
But part of that poignancy is the fear of losing the sense of community. In the town of 30,000 I grew up in, there was one paper and everyone read it; if you wrote a letter to the editor, your neighbors would comment on it unprompted. As we move to the internet, the community becomes more abstract. At the same time, it increases geometrically in size because it overcomes the need for nearness in physical space.
Some of that feeling of community might survive the transition to bits.
