On Thursday, the publisher of the New Orleans Times-Picayune announced that the 175-year-old newspaper, the only daily paper in that historic city, will only print three days a week starting this fall. On Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays you'll be able to get your New Orleans news on the street. Every other day, you'll have to go online.
I'm a writer for a tech website now, but my roots are in newspapers. I spent the first six years of my career helping to bring old newspapers online: the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, and The Guardian in the U.K.
Moving PCMag to the Web was logical, smart, and ultimately pretty glorious. But ditching a city's only daily source of print news, in a nation where many people don't have Internet access, is worse than a mistake. It's actually bad for America.
Why Going Online is Good
Around here, going all-digital was purely positive.
Don't compare the current PCMag to the 400-page, biweekly PC Magazine of old. Compare it to the slim, ailing little magazine we had in 2008. Our readership and advertising were both moving online. Our readers are looking for tech products, so they're likely to be online. They want to compare prices, which is done best online. They want to search our library of reviews, which is easier to do online. We want to compete with up-to-the-minute news sources, also easier to do online.
All signs were pointing online. And since we went all-digital, we've added staff, bought other websites, and dramatically expanded our number of reviews. Our readers are online. Our advertisers are online. The products we cover are almost all connected to the Internet themselves. The Internet is PCMag's natural medium.
Way back in Issue 2 of PC Magazine , in 1982, a letter-writer opined that it was a little odd to have a print magazine covering networked computer technology, because networked computer technology was going to run our print magazine out of business. He was right, just about 20 years early.
Why Going Online is Bad
But a daily newspaper isn't a technology magazine.
News organizations aren't just businesses. They bind communities together. They make sure we know about what's going on around us. Newspapers and written online publications almost always handle complex topics better than TV and radio, which are usually extremely limited in their word count per story.
Without high-quality news, we're limited to what we see in our neighborhoods and rumors we hear from others. That's a poor way to run a democracy. Since news is key to a democracy, news must be available to everyone.
And the digital divide means that many Americans aren't online. According to the New York Times, only 40 percent of households with incomes under $25,000 per year have wired Internet at home, and 30 percent of all Americans have no Internet access at all. And that isn't always because they don't want it; as we've said many times on this site, the U.S. has some of the least amount of broadband competition and highest Internet prices in the developed world.
If you're shopping for a new Android phone, you're probably determined enough to go to the library to get Internet access and read my reviews. But that shouldn't be a requirement to learn the basic news about your community. Newspapers are uniquely universally available, distributed nearly everywhere at an extremely low cost. Of course, that's also part of what's killing them.
You can see where I'm going here, and it's against the trend of American society. Even if people aren't reading newspapers, they need some way to get the in-depth news and perspectives that help them actually become informed operators of our democracy, beyond "weather on the 1's" and the latest campaign soundbite.
(Let me interject that I absolutely love radio news. I listen to 1010 WINS, my local news station, for at least 22 minutes every day. But it's mostly a teaser - it gives me stories to look up more about later.)
Ushering In The Idiocracy
We live in a society where profitability is all, and the market dictates winners and losers. If you can't make money on it, it's hard to argue for doing it. There's little room in this for a purely public good, like a low-cost way to become an informed voter and stay involved with your community.
The danger is idiocracy: a democracy of the uninformed, voting and acting based on rumor, prejudice, and speculation. At PCMag, we can serve the readers who seek us out, but for democracy to operate, in-depth news actually has to get to everyone. Without a daily newspaper and with 30 percent of Americans off the Internet, that becomes a lot harder.
There are some potential solutions out there: publicly funded media, like the BBC? Donation-funded nonprofits, like ProPublica? Or just free or low-cost municipal broadband, which we at PCMag have championed but which existing ISPs successfully killed in most places? As our newspapers die, the urgency increases: it's time to bring everyone online, or to give up on this democratic republic.
