The Red and Black

Issue date: 7/20/08 Section: Opinions

CHRIS CHIEGO

Barnett's Newsstand just closed its doors after 65 years of business. You may have walked past it before on College Avenue - a few of you may have even ventured inside on occasion. Despite being a self-professed news junkie, for my first three years in Athens, I never went inside until I heard of Barnett's impending closure last May.

Though I had always justified not buying a newspaper or magazine there by assuming I could find the same information online, I was unwittingly furthering the decline of print journalism as a whole. The rise of the Internet has coincided with falls in circulation and profits in print journalism, threatening the entire business model of our primary source for reliable and accurate news.

Newspapers and magazines need to emphasize hard news and high ethical standards to stay competitive in the Internet age, but even with the best efforts of the most talented journalists, the print media industry faces a difficult future.

Media consumption habits have already changed, thanks to the advent of the Internet. Buying a physical paper gives you a sense of ownership, an obligation to get your money's worth and read as much as possible. In contrast, the average visitor to a newspaper Web site spends about 45 minutes per month on it. That's a minute-and-a-half each day, barely enough time to glance over the headlines and get past the first paragraph in a story.

With readers devoting less time to printed papers, print advertising revenue has fallen nearly 20 percent since 2000, according to a New York Times article. Newspapers are cutting staff, reducing the amount of hard news, even closing shop in some small markets. This is bad news for quality journalism.

Although the Internet and blogosphere have risen to take up some of the slack, the highest quality reporting and strongest editorials still come from established newspapers and magazines. But the quality of some newspapers has declined as papers cut international and national staff in favor of local human-interest and entertainment stories.

When competing with the Internet as a source of information, newspapers and magazines should focus on in-depth investigations and trenchant reporting in order to exploit their advantage in resources over increasingly resourceful Internet users. Instead, we have papers such as The Red & Black eschewing legitimate news in favor of sanctimonious finger-wagging at underage drinkers. If I wanted a morality lecture on alcohol, I would read President Adams' press releases, not a supposedly student-oriented newspaper.

Although The Red & Black and some local papers enjoy a near-monopoly over specific news niches, they still face the challenges of dealing with declining readership and need to maintain high journalistic standards.

Smart newspapers and magazines have utilized their most valuable resources - expertise and trust - on Web sites that feature discussion sessions with staff members and regularly updated blogs. I visit these sites more often than regular news sections or unaffiliated blogs since they combine the knowledge and high standards of expert journalists with the immediacy and personalization of the blogosphere.

But banners and pop-ups are not nearly as profitable as print advertisements, and unless a more viable method of generating revenue online can be found, few papers will be left standing when circulation and advertising numbers bottom out. Thus, the old forms of information dissemination like Barnett's Newsstand will continue to disappear, being replaced by gateway blogs and daily e-mail news round-ups.

In a final nostalgic gesture on my one visit to Barnett's, I bought a full $20-worth of printed material. Then, I went home to get the latest news - online.

- Chris Chiego is a senior from Memphis, Tenn. majoring in international affairs and history.

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