7/11/08: Newshounds: It's time to embrace the Internet

Le Monde, the French newspaper of record, went on strike April 14, and did not publish a Tuesday edition, in response to planned staff cuts.

The New York Times cut its staff by more than 100 earlier this year.

The Los Angeles Times just cut 150 editorial staff.

The Hartford Courant cut 50 newsroom positions.

The Boston Globe is making cuts, and the Boston Herald has said it plans to eliminate 130 to 160 jobs this summer. The industry as a whole lost 1,000 jobs in a week.

Most newspapers can’t resist publishing editorials on their own cutbacks. The Hartford Advocate published an editorial by Alan Bisbort when it made cuts from its staff in April. The New York Times published word of its own layoffs. The World Association of Newspapers wrote about nationwide cuts in a series of blog entries. [For example.]

The whole industry is navel-gazing at this point.

Small wonder, considering how little guarantee there is that reporters and editors will be able to keep their bellies full over the next few, likely severe, rounds of cutbacks.

But it’s the wrong approach. The right one is to get back to work.

I say good riddance to Le Monde if its reporters have such a deep sense of entitlement that they assume they are invulnerable. Stopping the presses, after all, only works if people actually miss the paper when you do.

It’s not the same as the New York City transit strike. People needed to get to work. People needed to cross the Brooklyn Bridge.

It’s not like the Writers Guild of America strike that left us Christmas-episode-less and almost finale-less. We’re addicted to television. We need our fix of "House" or "The Office" or "Lost."

How long will people continue to need print newspapers, though? And how many are addicted to newspaper-format information?

It’s not newspapers’ fault that the format may be becoming obsolete, and it’s not out of line for seasoned reporters, editors, publishers and readers to be upset with the still-nebulous changes appearing to be forced on the industry. A thousand jobs lost in one week is nothing to sneeze at.

But it doesn’t seem like anything to strike at, either.

Imagine if oil-industry workers on the verge of losing their jobs to a new technology — solar power, let’s say — responded by going on strike. People would pay attention, true; they would complain; then they would speed up the transition to nonfossil-fuel power. A strike would have the opposite of the intended effect.

Those workers would be better off building on the expertise they already had, learning the ins and outs of the new technology and marketing themselves as advocates for change.

Newspapers, and more particularly the human elements making up newspapers — the reporters and editors and people who "do" newspapers — need to do the same thing.

The industry isn’t dying; it’s in transition. The change won’t happen overnight, and it will require some major adjustments, but out of the ashes of print-version papers should come something innovative and incisive, cutting to the quick of what people want from their information.

There’s so much to be done online — the lack of organization is staggering — and who would be better equipped to do that work than people who have been presenting us with information since "Common Sense" hit the presses?

Even if reporting and editing became freelance endeavors, we’d still need them. We still need gatekeepers, and we’ll need them exponentially more as our dependence on the Internet increases exponentially.

So let’s get going. Leave the husk of the old ways behind, Le Monde, and be a part of forming the new ones.