Insomniactive

Via Newspaperdeathwatch, this from a guy called Eric Alterman last spring in The New Yorker and more recently in The Nation. If only all the participants in the recent blogo-debate over non-profit journalism (including yours truly) would have read his stuff first!

I’d also commend to anyone who is interested Jay Rosen’s great summary of the Lipmann/Dewey debate in the first part of What Are Journalists For?

Some especially trenchant Alterman snippets:

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.” N.B. A friend of mine who is an alumna of The Washington Post puts the mood there more succinctly: “It’s like theyre grieving a dying relative.”

Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.” That may help explain why the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself.”

The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.” (“Business up front, party in the back” is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) “User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,” Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.”

Dewey also criticized Lippmann’s trust in knowledge-based élites. “A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge,” he argued. “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”

In “Imagined Communities” (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” It is at least partially through the “imagined community” of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged

In today’s NYT, Holland Carter has what I guess you’d call a meditation on the relationship between economic cycles and artistic epistemology. Definitely worth a read:

The contemporary art market, with its abiding reputation for foggy deals and puffy values, is a vulnerable organism, traditionally hit early and hard by economic malaise. That’s what’s happening now. Sales are vaporizing. Careers are leaking air. Chelsea rents are due. The boom that was is no more.

Anyone with memories of recessions in the early 1970s and late ’80s knows that we’ve been here before, though not exactly here. There are reasons to think that the present crisis is of a different magnitude: broader and deeper, a global black hole. Yet the same memories will lend a hopeful spin to that thought: as has been true before, a financial scouring can only be good for American art, which during the present decade has become a diminished thing.

Say what you will about the editorial direction of the Wall Street Journal since its purchase by Rupert Murdoch. You’ll be in good company, as your fellow readers (present company included) have already said plenty. Plenty about the paper’s yet-further rightward shift in tone. Plenty about the risky strategy of positioning the paper as a “first-read” competitor to the New York Times, rather than the business person’s secondary “must-read.” Plenty about the eclectic content of the paper’s newish Saturday edition.

And it’s on a Saturday that, having had the rare leisure to read the paper from front to back, I had the following thought: the Saturday WSJ now equals or even surpasses the Sunday NYTin thoughtfulness and relevance on matters political and economic. Political point-of-view aside, today’s paper prompted me to do the damndest thing: actually to think about the thematic connections between the stories inside.

Consider this. One of the highlights of my highlights of my life was less than a month ago as I sat with a million or so frozen-toed compatriots and listened to our new President invoke the Apostle Paul in exhorting America to “put away childish things.” Or somewhat less poetically, “to grow the hell up.” This was the beginning, I was sure, of what I’d wanted from my President since beforeI rang doorbells for him in Sioux City last January: a new rhetoric of straightforward responsibility and tough choices. An outright repudiation of the Cheney Doctrine, that “the American way of life is non-negotiable.” An acknowledgement, as Jeb Bush put it in his WSJ interview with Fred Barnes, of the importance of such rhetoric to real leadership. Sounding quite wonkish, with a book about the Swedish education system tucked under this arm:

As Mr. Bush explains it, an exhausting strategy is required. “You have to have an aspirational goal, and you have to communicate it over and over and over. You have to have the humility to recognize that people aren’t watching your every word. . . . You have to be constantly adding to the reforms. You have to take the risk of measuring the success or lack of it. You have to be held accountable . . . Sometimes it’s not fun.”

One is left understanding Barbara Bush’s bemusement that George and not Jeb was anointed to extend the Bush dynasty, given that President Bush 43 most closely associated “wonk” with the sound made when an ax collides with a cedar tree. But I digress.

Disappointingly, there’s been little room for “grow the hell up” rhetoric in the first few weeks of the Obama administration. First, there’s been the need for an economic stimulus package to unstick the economy. And as Bradley Schiller points out, the passage of that package has required from the adminstration a quantum of alarmism, together with the defection of the Senators Collins, Snow, and Specter. And second, there’s been the not very adult behavior of a whole host of erstwhile Obama acolytes who whose corner-cutting cost them their roles and Obama a great measure of credibility.

But this morning, on A4 of the WSJ, hope!

With a $787 billion stimulus package in hand, President Barack Obama will pivot quickly to address a budget deficit that could now approach $2 trillion this year.

Speaking Friday to business leaders at the White House, the president defended the surge of spending in the stimulus plan, but he made sure to add: “It’s important for us to think in the midterm and long term. And over that midterm and long term, we’re going to have to have fiscal discipline. We are not going to be able to perpetually finance the levels of debt that the federal government is currently carrying.”

Along those lines, White House budget director Peter R. Orszag has committed to instituting tougher budget-discipline rules — once the economy turns around. Those include a mandate that any “nonemergency” spending increases be offset by equal spending cuts or tax increases.

Officials say the budget blueprint to be released this month will also attempt to make public the full extent of the dire fiscal situation, by not repeating some of the accounting used in crafting President George W. Bush’s budgets. Recent budget blueprints excluded from deficit projections the long-term costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those budgets also didn’t include the cost of preventing the alternative minimum tax — instituted in 1969 to ensure the rich didn’t escape taxation — from hitting the middle class.

In other words, grown ups-acknowledge that a hamburger today has a real cost in terms of hamburgers available tomorrow. That we are talking about almost three times the deficit level that we were mere months ago, when I was freaking out about that number. Such is the stuff of rhetoric requisite of Presidential leadership.

And, such is the stuff of a very interesting newspaper read.