A long time ago I wrote about this subject, and I might even have used some of the same Weegee pictures to illustrate it. If so, don't worry because I have a lot more to say about the subject now, and I don't think anyone will be bored. The subject is newspapers.
The question I want to ask today is, who killed the newspapers? Did the internet do it? Everybody seems to think so, but surprisingly the answer is no, it didn't. The short explanation is that newspapers were dying before the internet got anywhere near as big as it is now. What killed newspapers was TV news, which offered news in film clips for free, and which was more current in its updates. Advertisers who could afford it simply moved to TV.
What short memories we all have! This problem was much discussed at the time. I could say more about this, but I have bigger fish to fry here. Remember, this was the short explanation. There's a longer and much more interesting one.
What really killed the newspaper was its inability to adapt to changing times. When the whole population moved to a counter-culture, "Rolling Stone" sensibility in the 1970s, the newspapers retained the same stolid feel that they had in the Civil War. I'm no supporter of the counter-culture, and I almost admire editors for resisting it, but change was in the air and the newspaper people seemed to be clueless about it. Where previous generations could rely on newspapers to reflect some of the sensibility on the street, the 70s generation turned to magazines to do that, and used papers only for the hard news and sports.
I know what you're thinking. It was the fragmentation of America, the lack of consensus, that drove people to the magazines, but that's only partly true. There's no reason why newspapers couldn't have have offered articles catering to different ideas in the same volume. Actually they eventually did that, and it wasn't uncommon to see liberal and conservative columnists on the same editorial page. Really, the whole problem was bigger than simple political diversity. It had to do with the feel of the paper.
Newspapers felt irrelevant. While magazines were talking about The Playboy Philosophy, radical politics, libertarianism, rock and roll, sex & drugs, flying saucers, Small Is Beautiful, talking to the dolphins, the new conservatism, levitating gurus, Black Power, hippie pads, high and low fashion, underground comics, science fiction, the New Journalism, feminism, caricatures, gossip about movie stars, etc., etc....newspapers simply fell back on hard news and sports. What a disconnect! The times were interesting but the newspapers weren't.
You don't have to be sympathetic to any of these new ideas in order to talk about them, but you'd have hardly known they existed if your only source had been the newspapers. And the format...people after the 60s wanted more intimacy, more pictures. Where were the pictures?
Clearly by the mid-seventies the newspapers suffered from a severe lack of imagination. Actually the rest of society did too, but we're talking about newspapers here. Did the unions kill the papers by making it difficult to take on new blood? Did dwindling circulations make them timid about experiment? Were newspapers increasingly owned and run by committees? Were the editors too hidebound? How about tax and corporation laws that put boards in charge of companies that were previously run by one risk-taking individual? Did lawyers deliver the deathblow by suing over everything in the paper? Were their human resource departments weeding out aggressive and gifted people who didn't happen to have college degrees? What accounts for the shocking lack of imagination in this field, a field that once included some of the best minds of their generation? Somebody in the know should attempt to answer this.
The pictures I put up here are by a famous newspaper photographer of the 40s and 50s named Weegee. A lot of them were rejected by the papers so he put them in books. You can see how stupid the newspapers were for rejecting these. This kind of intimate material was exactly what newspaper readers craved, but could only find in magazines. All the newspapers had to do was pay attention to what the magazines were doing to please the public, but they stubbornly refused. Would this have diluted the news? Not in the least! It's possible to have serious news on page 20 and gossip about movie stars on page 30. There's no contadiction.
Newspapers killed themselves. It was a case of unnecessary death from severe lack of imagination.