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In these precarious days for the newspaper business, I've been thinking a lot about a movie made in 2004 that has little to do with newspapers."A Day Without a Mexican" is based on the premise that residents of California wake up one morning to find that all the Latinos have vanished from the state. It's not a very good movie. In fact, the 1998 short (by the same director, Sergio Arau) is much sharper and funnier. But the idea of removing a large chunk of one's daily reality is intriguing. Who feels the loss, and how?
So I have to wonder: What if newspapers disappeared?
Admittedly, it might not be as dramatic as the mass chaos that ensues when 14 million people disappear into a pink mist and the streets fill with garbage. But I think it would be bad.
The first folks to notice would obviously be the newsprint junkies (myself included) who can't start the day without at least two papers at the breakfast table. Whether we read them for hard-hitting investigative reporting or Sudoku and Dear Abby, that would be a major loss.
The loss to the rest of the population would be subtler, but no less severe.
It's a not very well-kept secret that radio, TV and bloggers rely on newspapers to do a lot of their heavy lifting, especially when it comes to investigative reporting. When I watch the local evening news, I see stories pulled from press releases (I get those same releases), blood-and-guts stuff from the police scanner (ditto) and a rehash of the morning's front page.
I don't listen to local radio, but I hear some Frederick stations are also beholden to our front page for their top stories. The NPR station in Baltimore is gracious enough to give us credit when they repeat what they've seen in the News-Post, but repeat they do.
Most bloggers use daily newspapers as a springboard to voice their opinions. That's interesting, but where would they be without the red meat we throw them?
So even non-newspaper junkies might see some information shrink.
But it's even more insidious that that.
An article by Paul Starr in the March 4 issue of The New Republic titled "Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)" points out the danger of reduced news coverage to governmental integrity.
"It is not just a speculative proposition that corruption is more likely to flourish when those in power have less reason to fear exposure," Starr writes.
He cites a study published in The Oxford Journals' October 2003 Journal of Law, Economics and Organization that finds a strong association between corruption and lack of daily newspaper circulation: "the lower the free circulation of newspapers in a country, the higher it stands on the corruption index."
In the March 16 edition of his blog "Reflections of a Newsosaur," Alan Mutter describes a Princeton University study done after the Cincinnati Post shut down at the end of 2007, leaving only one paper in what had been a two-newspaper town. The study found that "fewer people voted in subsequent elections, fewer candidates ran in opposition to the incumbents and that, as a result, the incumbents had a better chance of being returned to office," he wrote.
Here at the News-Post, our city editor, Rob Walters, always stresses that among our main goals are "break the kind of news others follow" and "tell truth to power." Historically, no other media has been better suited to these aims than newspapers. Even in an age of shrinking resources, we soldier on -- confronting officials, demanding explanations and information, waiting for bureaucrats to return our phone calls.
Tomorrow's front page will offer examples of the fruits of that labor.
Government salaries are, by definition, matters of public record. A couple of websites, ours included, present the raw data for your view. That can be useful, particularly if you want to know how much your child's teacher makes, or your community deputy.
A newspaper does more than that. The Frederick News-Post has put all the salary information into a database and sorted it. Our reporters have crunched the numbers to find out not only who makes the most money, but also how those numbers compare with those of past years and neighboring counties. They've also made some interesting discoveries about overtime.
Anyone could do this work. It's not rocket science. But few people have the time or inclination or sheer bullheadedness to do it. Instead, they rely on newspapers.
We don't mind. If we did, we'd be in another business. We just want folks to realize that if newspapers disappear -- and that's not as far-fetched a notion as it once was -- the world will have some holes in it.
