It’s Not the Medium, It’s the Content

The new tax break passed by Washington state for print newspapers has taken a lot of flak, and I’d like to do my part to pile on by riffing off Danny Sullivan’s excellent post:

That makes no sense. You’re not trying to save the communication medium — you’re trying to save the messages. You don’t care whether the messages gets out through dots-and-dashes on a telegraph or by voice through a telephone. You just care that messages still can get through in the most efficient, most desired manner.

The tax break is fairly criticized as a political and largely symbolic stunt, which will in practice save a minimal amount of jobs and probably fail to save the newspapers themselves. However the larger point is exactly as Danny points out – it completely misses the point. Newspapers are in the content business, using presumably valuable content focusing on news and commentary of local or national importance to drive ad sales. They just so happen to deliver that content by printing it up on large roll sheets of paper and dropping it on your doorstep.

Other organizations, such as the new SeattlePI.com, Huffington Post, and countless other national, local, and niche Web sites, provide similar content, they just use a new and radically different means of getting it to the reader. Yet those organizations don’t qualify for the tax break.

Why? That old bullshit about quality, standards, and accountability.

Todd Bishop of TechFlash interviews Washington House majority leader Lynn Kessler:

“Anybody who’s blogging, God love ‘em, they can say and do whatever they want, because they have no liability or responsibility for what they say, because they are not held to any standard, and they shouldn’t be — they’re just individuals editorializing, if you will,” she said.

“The actual newspaper reporting is meant to be — and I know people argue about whether it’s biased or not biased — but it’s meant to get information to the public, and to make sure that our government is held accountable for decisions that government makes, and that the stories that are written are accurate, and they can get this information out to a broad section of our community,” she said.

This is simply a rehash of the cliched dismissal of people who use blogging as their communication medium as unemployable nuts who pound keyboards from their mom’s basement. I honestly thought we had begun to work past that, both with the rise in high quality and professional online operations and the many examples of how simply dropping something in a print newspaper does not automatically ensure accuracy, professionalism, or lack of bias. But as newspapers continue to flail economically it’s being trotted out again and again as an argument for why print publications serve a public need that online publications cannot.

I don’t want to be unnecessarily harsh on print newspapers, and certainly not on the many great journalists plying their trade via that medium. I grew up on a daily diet of the NY Times and the San Jose Mercury News, with the Sunday tradition of papers spread around the kitchen table, the whole family grabbing a section. They are part of the cultural lore, which in part explains why so many people refuse to recognize the reality that print newspapers are on the short end of a technology and business model revolution.

The business of packaging content on inky paper and dropping it suburban doorsteps may be dying, but journalism is alive and thriving. It’s just doing it online. Legislative efforts like this one may satisfy a sense of civic responsibility and tap into some nostalgic longing, but they ignore that plain and simple reality.