Sportswriter Jay Mariotti, who quit the
Chicago Sun-Times and then told a local television station that "newspapers are dead," raised the ire of many in the news industry including (former) colleague Roger Ebert. In a not-so-private
open letter to the Sun-Times staff, Ebert called Mariotti "a rat" and, in essence, a coward for leaving the newspaper business during troubled times.
Mariotti is of course entitled to his opinion and his career choices, even if his opinion makes him look like a childish jerk. Nevertheless, he is making the same mistake and suffers from the same misperceptions that most non-journalists have about newspapers.
Newspapers aren't dead, they are not even dying. They are, in fact, changing, which is not a bad thing.
Change doesn't come easy, and yes, change means that some papers won't survive. But newspapers were never about the "paper" or print - they are about storytelling, and storytellers, and ideas. What is really changing - and why all media is going through a kind of metamorphosis - is the definition of news, both in terms or what constitutes a news story as well as what are "legitimate" sources of news and forms of delivery.
My nine-year-old daughter doesn't read a newspaper and may never, but she reads news headlines delivered via our Wii game system. I read the New York Times on my mobile phone. Contrary to the name of my blog, nothing today is "below the fold" because our media universe is one big front page that we control.
According to a recent
Pew Report on changing news habits, young people are losing interest in news - 34 percent of those under 25 years old get "no news" in a typical day, up from 25 percent 10 years ago. But Poynter's
Amy Gahran challenges the findings, noting that the study perhaps didn't investigate "social" avenues to news and information or the impact of search engines or mobile technology.
News, like most all other forms of communication today, is both accidental and on-demand. We often get news online when we aren't looking for it, and we also get news when and how we want it (we also seem to get only the news we want to hear, but that's another issue for another day.)
So let's not confuse the changes news is going through with its impact. News still matters, even if the news itself is not always recognizable based on long-held perceptions.
And the Chicago Sun-Times? I predict it will still be around in some form ten years from now. And Jay Mariotti, the latest member of the Dead Newspapers Society, will still be talking - after all, if you ever read his stuff, you would know that talking is the only thing he's good at.