Living with less international news
July 23, 2008
A study on the changing newspaper industry released this week by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that most papers today were cutting back significantly on not only the tangibles like staff and total pages, but that many were sacrificing international and national news for local and community news.
The Baltimore Sun and other major dailies announced such transformations this summer.
Not that covering more of where you live is a bad thing but is raises two questions with me. One, what’s going to happen to the little guys — those weekly or biweekly papers who used to be the sole champions of community coverage? Having interned for such a paper I know firsthand that those publications pride themselves on being the ones that parents scour to see their kid’s sports achievements in print or act as a platform for small town activists to voice their issues.
If the major dailies start horning in on the community coverage, what’s left for the smaller publications to call their own and justify their existence?
Another point of concern is this turning away from covering the global community. Being an American history buff, I of course have to point out the similarities between this notion and the isolationist 1920s when post-war fatigue and an increased focus on the material world were abruptly followed by the Great Depression in 1929 and World War II ten years later.
Now, I’m not trying to say that isolationism caused WWII, but in this day and age the world is much smaller and it helps to know what the guy on the other side of the pond thinks of you. Or at least have an idea of what they’re up to.
International news may not be as widely read as the sports section but it’s still a big part of what’s going on in our world today. Do you think it’s a newspaper’s duty to cover what’s going on in other countries, or to just print what’s popular with readers?
LIZ FARMER, Business Writer
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Newspapers will cater to their clientele. The unwashed masses prefer knowing the scores in last night’s baseball game to what’s going on in Iraq. There will always be news outlets that cater to a higher level of intellectual scrutiny and curiosity and readers who actually care about real news will go there.