Forces beyond anyone's control

Felix Salmon, in a discussion of Andrew Ross Sorkin's new Wall Street history of the crash, says it's true that individual decisions made by real people had a lot to do with what happened, both good and bad. But:

I think that what's missing in this book is a sense of the much larger global forces at play, and a feeling for how some kind of reckoning--even if not this particular one--was inevitable. And I miss that perspective because a lot of those larger global forces haven't gone away; if anything, they've gotten worse. America's twin deficits have grown; too-big-to-fail banks have become even more laden with moral hazard; the desire for "safe" investments--a desire that, paradoxically, makes those very investments unsafe--has gotten stronger, rather than weaker.

And so I fear that by concentrating on the personalities, we'll get the impression that somehow if only the right people had behaved like grown-ups, all of this could have been averted. And if we believe that, there's a very good chance that Sorkin will be writing the sequel to this book much sooner than any of us might expect.

Funny, but this made me think about the newspaper industry, which appears to be rounding its final bend. For the longest time, conservatives like me thought that liberal bias was holding papers back, and if newspapers would just be more conservative, they'd pick up readership. Look at Fox News! we'd say.

But look: the newspaper with the worst circulation falloff in the country, the San Francisco Chronicle (which lost 25 percent of its readers since the last reporting period), is a liberal newspaper in a liberal city. The ailing Boston Globe, ditto. This doesn't mean newspapers aren't biased to the left, but it does mean that there's something else going on here. Enlightened editors could have hired a good contingent of conservative-leaning journalists, and it probably wouldn't have made much of a difference.

In newsrooms for the past few years, there have been lots of discussions about what editors and journalism executives should have done to prevent what's happened today. Much of the criticism is correct. I, for one, would have liked to have seen a greater focus on the quality of writing in American newspapers, which generally lack style, voice and personality, and are run as if its editors saw their proper role as the conveying information, like a public utility delivers power, water and gas. But that's my personal tic. Everybody's got a coulda woulda shoulda theory.

The truth is, I don't know that the most brilliant and enlightened publisher with a staff of geniuses could have figured out how to make a daily newspaper survive the advent of the Internet. I think about the small corner of the newspaper world that's my bailiwick, the editorial and op-ed pages. I grew up reading whoever was on the op-ed page that day for insight and analysis into issues and current events. Now, I mostly read blogs, because it's easier for me to find the kind of information I'm interested in, and it's often written in a more lively, engaging style, frequently by people who, unlike columnists like me, are not generalists. How can a print newspaper, which has a finite amount of space, and which has to cater to a broad audience, hope to compete with that? I've tried to do something with the Dallas Morning News online op-ed page, to run it like a blog/aggregator site, but that hasn't really caught on like I'd hoped it would.

When the history of the decline and fall of newspapers is written -- and wouldn't it be grand if some genius came up with something to save us all! -- there will be lots of blame assigned to complacent journalism executives. But I hope people understand that there were huge technology-driven social forces at work that couldn't have been turned back by anyone.

UPDATE: Newsosaur points out that decline started long before the Internet was a gleam in Al Gore's eye. Excerpt:

Notably, the drop in newspaper penetration began well before the commercial debut of the Internet in the mid-1990s. The move away from newspapers was prompted by the rising popularity of television and other pre-web electronic distractions, plus growing work, commuting and family demands that attenuated the time and attention people could spend reading newspapers.

Forces beyond anyone's control. But oh, what a dismal picture for newspapers today. Newsosaur, again:

Daily newspaper circulation fell a record 10.6% in the six months ended in September to an average of 39.1 million copies, representing a 38% drop from an all-time peak of 63.3 million in 1984. Circulation now is lower than it was prior to World War II.

Because the nation's population has more than doubled in the post-war era, the percentage of households buying newspapers has plunged. Newspapers today are purchased on average in only 33 out of every 100 American households, as compared with 98 homes in 1970 and 53 households as recently as 2000.

Did 98 percent of all households in 1970s really have someone in them who purchased a daily newspaper? I find that hard to believe, but maybe it's true.