The Sun-Times concludes — accurately, in my view — that people don’t pay a lot of attention to newspaper endorsements anymore, that there are lots of other sources of information available to voters now, and that many people just view endorsements as a tangible sign of claimed bias.  The newspaper will continue to publish news articles about the races, as well as the candidates’ responses to questionnaires and video of the newspaper’s interviews of the candidates.

This development shouldn’t come as a surprise; the Sun-Times is just ahead of the curve.  Newspaper endorsements used to be crucial to election campaigns and were touted in campaign advertising and pamphlets.  But in the golden era of newspaper endorsements, there was no internet, there were no cable TV and political news channels filled with opinionated talking heads, and there weren’t thousands of bloggers and “fact-checkers” and political websites.  In the modern media world, newspaper endorsements have been lost in the din.  Indeed, the stodgy, sober, platform-based appraisals of the competing candidates that tend to characterize newspaper endorsements are at a decided disadvantage in an age when people seem to crave loud, shouting, over-the-top praise and denunciation.

I’d rather see print journalism stop endorsements altogether than try to compete in the shrillness department with the likes of MSNBC and Fox News commentators.

Because I don’t get the Dispatch anymore I was surprised when I picked up the firm’s copy recently. It seems so small, both in its dimensions and in its bulk.  The front section and the local news section have shrunk considerably.  It appears that the paper is more focused on sports coverage and content — like articles on food preparation, comics, how-to and popular culture features, and opinion columns — that have more staying power than a transitory news item that could become cold in the blink of an eye.  No doubt this is an economic response to shriveled subscriptions and dropping ad revenues as well as a reflection of what readership surveys are saying.  My guess is that the Dispatch is no different from every other daily newspaper in America in this regard.

The days of a thick newspaper landing on your doorstep with a satisfying thwack, and when a leisurely review of the newspaper would take a good chunk of Sunday morning, are long gone, never to return.  The only question is whether metropolitan daily newspapers, delivered in paper form, will survive in any form, or will soon go the way of the buggy whip.  Unfortunately, if I had to bet, I think the latter scenario is more likely.

I was struck by the explanation of the Reuters spokesman quoted in the linked article.  The spokesman is quoted as saying:  “Reuters has an obligation to its clients to publish news and information that could move financial markets, and this story had the potential to do that.”  My old professor at the Ohio State University School of Journalism, Marty Brian, must be rolling in her grave at that one!  Consider that the quote from the Reuters spokesman equates an admitted hoax with “news and information” and suggests that Reuters’ paramount obligation is to publish whatever comes its way, without doing anything to determine its veracity first.  That concept is antithetical to true professional journalism, which values accuracy above speed and insists upon sourcing and careful fact-checking — particularly of a story that reports that a vocal opponent of legislation has abruptly and inexplicably changed its position.  Doesn’t anyone at CNBC and Reuters have a reporter’s gut instinct, or at least a willingness to take a moment to check the Chamber of Commerce website to see if the press release even is posted there?

Normally I would decry the efforts of the hoaxers, but I have come to believe that they probably are performing a salutary function for the world at large.  Why attach credibility to what you read from the news media if they don’t even bother to check press releases before publishing them?

I like stories like this, where they report the facts that the reporter perceives and really leave it up to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about what it all means, as opposed to articles that rely heavily on armchair experts who presume to tell you what it all means. When I read this story, I draw the conclusion that we are making progress in Iraq, but still have a long way to go.

As a former reporter, and a journalism major in college, I have mixed emotions about the decline of the daily metropolitan newspaper. In our history, crusading journalists and muckraking newspapers have played an important role in keeping government, big business, unions, and other institutions honest. Newspapers also have played an important role in creating senses of community and in providing a forum for communications to broad segments of the citizenry. In addition, some of my friends still hold jobs as reporters and editors, and I hope they can keep those jobs.

At the same time, the decline of print newspapers is inevitable. Economically, they simply cannot compete with the internet or television. A method of communication that requires a commercial entity to buy newsprint and ink, to buy, maintain and operate printing presses, bailing machines, and computer terminals for reporters and editors, to pay people to report and edit the news, sell ads, run and maintain printing presses, and then deliver the finished product, obviously cannot compete with internet sites or TV stations that have few, if any, of those fixed costs.

I am sorry about the death spiral of newspapers, but in a sense I feel like newspapers died a long time ago. The tradition of objective journalism that used to be a hallmark of American newspapers and wire services, and that was the focus of my journalism education, has been thrown overboard in favor of an approach that writes from a “point of view” — which means from a particular political or social perspective. The former, rigid separation between the news reporting staff and the editorial pages first was blurred and now seems to have been erased entirely. As a result, the American public often seems to be suspicious about whether a particular story is really a truthful presentation of the news, or a politically motivated hatchet job. Newspapers seem to lost credibility at about the same rate they have lost circulation.

If newspapers die, what will replace them? I am not sure that anything will, really, and if so that will be a shame. Half-hour or even hour-long TV news shows can’t possibly provide the kind of detailed, ongoing coverage that newspapers have provided, and in many communities TV stations don’t spend much time reporting the “news” — as opposed to showing interesting video about curiosities from other places, the weather, and sports. Internet sites don’t really seem to have either “beat” reporters who routinely follow police activities, or City Hall, or the workings of state government, or editors who carefully review articles, challenge sourcing, and tighten and clarify the writing. If we become a society where there is no independent scrutiny by institutions like newspapers, we all will suffer for it.

I am sad about the slow decline of newspapers for another reason: I felt that the training we received in the OSU Journalism School was extremely useful and good preparation for a career in the law or other fields. We were taught to be skeptical (some might say cynical), to write clearly and succinctly, to identify and present the “lead” (through use of the “inverted pyramid” approach), to answer the “5 Ws and an H,” and to make sure we had adequate support for what we wrote. We learned a bit about human nature, about how to find and question sources, and about how to find information that is available of public record. If print journalism dies, and as a result that kind of journalism training dies with it, it will be a sad day indeed.