The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

So goes the jab from Nelson on the Simpsons toward a print journalist sitting on a discussion panel. It’s pretty funny.

But the trials and travails of print journalism – specifically newspapers – are quite real. This New Yorker article examines the issue in depth. Eric Alterman has written a broad review of print journalism’s difficulties throughout history, beginning in the 1920s, and projecting into the future.

Marshall’s [Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo] undeniable achievement notwithstanding, traditional newspaper men and women tend to be unimpressed by the style of journalism practiced at the political Web sites. Operating on the basis of a Lippmann-like reverence for inside knowledge and contempt for those who lack it, many view these sites the way serious fiction authors might view the “novels” tapped out by Japanese commuters on their cell phones. Real reporting, especially the investigative kind, is expensive, they remind us. Aggregation and opinion are cheap.

And it is true: no Web site spends anything remotely like what the best newspapers do on reporting. Even after the latest round of new cutbacks and buyouts are carried out, the Times will retain a core of more than twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees each. The Times’ Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars a year to maintain.

This, of course, is true. Doesn’t it seem likely that what will happen, in the end, will be a kind of merging of the print newspaper into the Web format, like what is already happening with the New York Times?

People love to talk about the end of print, but won’t it simply be replaced by something like the tablet PC, the Sony Reader, or the Amazon Kindle?

The complaint, then, is that the reader loses the opportunity to see news he may not have been looking for. I subscribed the Times for a while, and I can attest to the fact that I often found interesting stories I wasn’t looking for. But I also found a lot of crap that was of no interest to me. Ultimately, the ratio of crap to serendipity was weighted too heavily to the crap side. I canceled the subscription.

What’s interesting, though, and is ignored by the article and the commentary I’ve heard about it, is that serendipity on the Web abounds. The possibilities of stumbling onto unlooked-for and interesting news on the Web are ever-present. They’re called “links.” If you use the Web the way it was designed to be used, you can quickly move from whatever start page you use to a news site to a blog that might have you searching on Google for more information on some topic that will often lead you to a Wikipedia entry that might reference a website you’d never have heard of, otherwise.

It is only when you try to take the Webness out of websites (sites that only link within their own pages, users who streamline their Web reading with news readers) that you lose serendipity.

Be optimistic. Humanity adapts.