All That Glitters
How years of monopoly undermined newspapers
Chapter three of our cover story on The Philadelphia Inquirer is titled “Curse of the Golden Age,” referring to a period that, for the Inquirer, came in two stages during the seventies and eighties. First the Inky became a bold and creative insurgent newspaper under the legendary editor Gene Roberts. Then it killed off its afternoon competitor, the Bulletin, and embarked on what Roberts called the Alpha Plan. It set out to become a great regional paper of record, covering city and suburb, nation and world, with depth and flair. The Inquirer no longer has the resources for that kind of newspaper-of-record journalism and halfway measures don’t work. So editor Amanda Bennett, even as she waits to learn just what kind of owner will replace Knight Ridder, is trying something new. Or maybe something old, since she is reaching back to the early Roberts premonopoly version of the Inquirer for ideas.
The chapter is specific to the Inky’s situation, which is complex. But the notion of a curse from the golden days of the sixties, seventies, and eighties resonates beyond that newspaper. As we all know, trends in those years turned newspapers into economic powerhouses. The rise of the computer brought enormous labor savings, for example, while the fall of the afternoon dailies in city after city created lucrative advertising and readership monopolies. Consolidating newspaper chains saw the opportunities and went public, pulling in new money from investors. Ample profits and rising investment meant rising editorial ambitions in some places and fat, lazy days for others. Either way, the trends also created investor expectations of very high profit margins in the newspaper business, which would turn out to be a quite a curse indeed when those margins dipped.
That history is familiar. But another facet of the age of news monopoly gets less attention in newspaper circles: How much did the condition of editorial monopoly quietly undermine the journalism?
Competition is good, remember. It nourishes aggressive reporting and distinctive, creative approaches. With a lack of competition in the local news and information business, too many papers, even some of the more ambitious ones, allowed their voices and personalities to wither. Too many editorial pages toned it down and slid into the inoffensive and boring. Too few embarked on crusades. Corporate owners, too, encouraged a play-it-safe culture. Too many newspapers rounded off their ragged edges, but lost the spark. When the advertising and readership began to recede, so did resources, and those weak habits and attitudes began to reveal themselves like the fish on the beach before the tsunami.
Whether editors used it well or wasted it, the golden age of monopoly is gone. Newspapers are in competition with everything now, and they have fewer troops to deploy. Editors know this. But it’s not yet clear at some papers that they know it deeply enough to try to lift those troops to levels of creativity that this loss of a news monopoly requires, to help time-pressed reporters make sharper choices, and to remind them over and over that they have qualities that few bloggers or radio jabbermouths or cable talkers come close to supplying: a visceral knowledge of the turf and an ability to report deeply and write with both voice and authority, given time and a little encouragement.
Readers have all kinds of choices now. But whether they read the news on the Web or on paper they are still thirsting for that magic elixir of personality and expertise. To tweak a line from Samuel Gompers, they want better. Along with support from their owners, newspapers need a creative response to that need. And maybe, over time, that’s a good thing.
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