Last Updated: July 28, 2000
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On newspapers
Clinton delivers an earful to editors
By William Raspberry
Members of ASNE convening in April, heard what may be the most critical
question they face in the age of the Internet-generated information explosion:
How can the fundamental purpose of the newspaper be maintained and still
make enough money to stay afloat?
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the question is that it wasn’t
posed in one of the numerous ASNE panels and workshops but by the luncheon
speaker: President Clinton.
Nor was it part of the Clinton’s planned speech. It came in a somewhat
off-the-point answer to what struck me as a less-serious question from
the floor: What constructive criticism would Clinton make of America’s
newspapers?
The president, seldom willing to offer a short response when a longer
one is available, made a joke or two, then moved to the heart of the matter:
“I think it’s hard to run a newspaper today in an environment in which
you’re competing with television news, Internet news sources, radio news
and entertainment, which abuts on the news, and all the lines are being
blurred — both the technological lines and the categorical lines.
“But I think there is a special role for the old-fashioned newspaper
in daily life.”
That role? To help readers sort out not just truth from falsehood but
the trivial from the important, the fleeting from the significant, the
merely entertaining from the things that matter.
“The thing I worry most about is that people will have all the information
in the world but won’t have any way of evaluating it ... how to put it
in proper perspective. That’s what I consider to be the single most significant
challenge present to all of you by the explosion of media outlets and competitive
alternatives in the Information Age.”
He offered an example:
“When the full sequencing of the human genome is announced in a few
months, how much will it cost you to run a long series on exactly what
that is, what its implications might be, how it came to be and where we’re
going from here? And how many people have to read it for it to have been
worth the investment?”
It’s an important question for those of us who make our living newspapering.
We aren’t sure, we tell ourselves privately, that newspapers as we know
them can survive. We’ve long since understood that fewer people turn to
newspapers to learn who won yesterday’s election or last night’s game,
but we’ve consoled ourselves that we can offer more details on such events
than, say, our TV counterparts.
But nowadays, even the details are available, via the Internet, and
some of us have started to worry that newspaper reading may not survive
the present generation of newspaper readers.
Clinton, who told me afterward that it’s a subject to which he’s been
giving a lot of thought, thinks we’re underestimating the true value of
what newspapers can do. The information explosion, he understands, is only
just beginning. We now have access to information that was beyond our ability
even to desire — overseas stock market reports, foreign news, speeches,
technical reports, even books. In no time at all, it will be possible to
get same-day — even same-hour — information on military adventures, political
crises, ethnic confrontations and natural disasters in countries whose
names we hardly know. Not just information but also pictures and sound.
And what we will need then more than ever is someone to play the editor’s
function: to sort it out, tell us what truly matters, what the trends seem
to be. And that’s what newspapers are uniquely situated to provide.
In a way, it’s like the role of newspaper columnists. Their interpretations
may not all be correct, but even three conflicting interpretations are
more helpful than none at all. And as with columnists, one learns over
time which interpreters to trust, which ones are prone to exaggeration
for political ends, whose biases to be aware of. It is an individual version
of what news organizations call “branding.” The information is judged in
the context of the “brand name” that brings it to you. Traditional newspapers,
whatever else they are, are brand names.
“People need more than facts,” Clinton told his rapt (and, I dare say,
surprised) audience. “They need to know the facts are accurate, and they
need to have some perspective about what it means and where it’s all going.”
©2000 Washington Post Writer’s Group
Raspberrry is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington
Post Writers Group.
