One More Way You Can Help Your Country

During those weeks we were mostly internet-less at my house, I saw an article in the New York Times about how precipitously newspaper circulation is falling in the United States. Almost all the newspapers reported declines in circulation. Newspaper circulation has been on a long decline, at a rate of about 2% per year, but the rate picked up in 2007 and was even higher during the period just reported. From April to September 2008, weekday circulation was down 4.6% and Sunday circulation down 4.8%. Among the large metropolitan daily papers, weekday circulation of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was down the most, at 13.6%. The New York Times was down 3.6% and the the Washington Post 1.9%. And of course all this was before papers felt the full brunt of the current economic crisis, when almost everyone has stopped buying almost everything.

The AJC has been rapidly retrenching, with whole sections disappearing and layoffs in the newsroom. The risk of course is as the paper gets smaller, there is less reason to subscribe to it, and pretty soon there is no paper at all. And this, I would contend, would be a very bad thing (not that I am all that enamored with the AJC, but that's a separate discussion).

Certainly one of the factors in the decline of newspapers is the rise of the internet (why buy the newspaper if you can read it on line for free?) as well as the proliferation of other media. First it was all-news-all-the-time television and now it is the web, with instant access to almost everything. But our newspapers are at risk, until someone figures out a business model that will make it possible for the a great paper to survive in this new era, and if our papers are at risk, so is our country.

The internet is great - everybody's a publisher, thanks to blogger.com, and occasionally some "citizen journalist" really does break a big story. But even then, it needs the amplification and credibility of a major news organization to make it matter, and no one does that better than our newspapers. Television - even our 24/7 news channels - have too short an attention span and kept talking about whether or not that baby was John Edwards' while the Russian tanks were rolling into the Republic of Georgia. It's the newspapers - and especially our great national papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times - that can invest the staff time on a regular basis on stories that really matter, stories that otherwise would never be told, stories that hold leaders accountable. This is a critical function in democracy, and we really do need our newspapers to do it.

Of course the big news about newspapers this week was the run on Wednesday morning's paper. Everyone wanted a copy to keep, to remember the historic headlines announcing that Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. The AJC ended up selling 16,000 copies in their lobby, and they usually don't sell papers there at all. Even with larger-than-usual runs, newspapers sold out and now copies of Wednesday's paper are selling on Craigslist and ebay for more than a hundred dollars.

Of course, for around $50 a month you can get the New York Times delivered to your house - your very own copy, every day! - and the AJC is substantially less. No need to buy a single copy on ebay. If you don't subscribe to a daily newspaper - any paper, pick your own favorite - do it today. Do it to stay informed. Do it to learn things you didn't even know you didn't know. But most importantly, do it for the good of our country, which at the moment needs all the help it can get.