Right to exist

This is my rant for the week.

In Seattle, where the Post-Intelligencer is about to get the permanent axe, “Save the Newspapers” seems to be a rising battle-cry for journalists and civic-minded citizens. The problem is that saving the newspapers is the last thing we really want to do.

There are those who believe that they should get a free pass. That because democracy for so long has relied on the fourth estate to police the government, that newspapers simply have a right to exist, and that damnit, if nobody’s going to buy them anymore then we’d better create a tax structure so that they can sit around and lose money.

Guess what? It’s not true. Newspapers are not exempt from the universal rule of all products: you have to not suck.

The US Postal Service is a money losing proposition. It’s a service to democracy, and it’s one of the reasons that the United States functioned for the first century and a half of its existence.

But it would have been no good if it sucked. The USPS doesn’t suck; mail gets places, almost every single package almost every single time. It justifies its existence by being worth using, even with competition from companies like FedEx.

Newspapers are the same way. Sure, you could roll newspapers into the government structure; tax people, pay journalists, print paper, and ship it around town free of charge to the community. But it’s only valuable if it’s a good product.

The community has spoken: “we don’t want to pay for your paper product. It’s old news when it hits my doorstep, and it’s mostly fluff anyway.”

“Very well,” you say, “we’ll shove this crap down your throat for free.”

A newspaper that nobody wants to read isn’t going to do any good for democracy. If nobody reads the paper, and everybody knows it, what kind of a check on rampant power is that?

The newspaper does not have a right to exist. The newspaper has a right to not suck, and if your newspaper doesn’t suck, then it will find a way to survive, because people will still want to read it.

At the core of this is really one key distinction: there is a difference between newspapers and journalism. Instead of “saving newspapers,” we ought to be “spreading journalism.”

A newspaper does not have a right to exist simply because it has always practiced journalism.

Journalism has a right to exist.

That’s all there is to it.

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