Where's the Reader Headed?

There's a lot of talk about the dark future of the newspaper. The story goes that old duffers who read the newspaper are dying off and youngsters are not replacing them. The Nation says we have the same number of subscribers now as in 1950 though we now have twice as many reading citizens. In spite of newspaper profits being much better than other kinds of large corporations, many pundits predict a fall-off in circulation as management pares staff and readers stop their subscriptions even before they die off. The problem is that no one I've read talks about what has always been wrong with newspapers, since long before the Internet. Newspapers are one-way streets.

True, newspapers speak out to us. But till lately readers could not talk back in large numbers. Letters-to-the-editor have always been filtered by staff with agendas. The result was two or three paragraphs from a half dozen subscribers sampling a readership of tens or hundreds of thousands. Yet the Internet has shown us with blogs and you-tubes that news and opinion can be fed back into the media stew by independent citizens at a rate that must make elder newsfolk's heads spin. If newspapers are on the wane it is perhaps because readers have found a voice, can talk back, and will not have to wait for the clerk in charge of the op-ed page to filter what's coming in. Newspapers like Kafka's Castle cannot accomodate feedback, while the Internet can. That's why these days newspapers add a slug to nearly every article that identifies a website and often a staff member's email address.

It's also true that the Web gives voice to many with less authority, to scribblers with few credentials. Why, they may only be voters. As a result of the amateur's ascendance, it's more work staying informed. We have to sift and filter for ourselves. This reminds us that liberty is hard to live with. But it's time to declare that newspapers and internets offer remarkably different chances for the individual to matter. We may see not only a better informed public when search engines roam oceans of opinion, but also a better informed government by an electorate that votes with its words long before November.