Where Are The Watchdogs?

Although we have been living through decades of decline in local news gathering, 2008 has been a particularly bad year. The Connecticut media landscape is losing reporters, beats and newspapers at an alarming rate. The downsizing of the Hartford Courant, no matter how the nation’s oldest continuously publishing paper spins it, is not a positive development.

The move away from news — printed on paper and delivered to your door every morning — is not the major concern. Getting your news from television or the Internet — instead of newsprint — is not a threat to our way of life. The threat is the continuing loss of the people and resources needed to deliver the content that makes a publication worth reading or a newscast worth watching.

Having lived through the death of a local news gathering organization (WPOP Newsradio 14 — Hartford) in the mid 1990s, I can attest that the malignant cancer begins with a loss of staff. When you can no longer field a news team, you can’t fill the news hole, no matter the medium you are working in.

Profits Prevail

Sooner or later the audience begins to notice that even though you are calling it news — it’s not. The depth, context and analysis all suffer and your product ends up looking more like stenography than reporting. People stop listening, reading, watching.

For the past several decades, as media companies have tried to increase the profit they make from news, their most reliable tool has been downsizing. Under this business model, local papers like the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press (both facing possible closure), have become not much more than advertising flyers with a few local news articles squeezed in between the ads as cover. If the people of Bristol and New Britain have less and less a clue what their local government is up to, that’s not a problem the papers’ ownership concerns itself with. The news product is only the veil the sales force hides behind.

Let’s not glorify the old days. The original media entrepreneurs were in it for the money too. But their bargain was news, information and entertainment in exchange for a subscription, and they kept their end of the deal.

Those concerned about journalism and public affairs hope that this is a passing trend, but the economic reality of news gathering may mean we are heading first into a transition period that will be viewed as a dark age — especially at the local level.

The owners of the means of news production — printing presses, transmitter towers and the personnel to run them — are reluctant to abandon their massive capital investments in favor of purely electronic publishing. And a large part of the audience is still not fully capable of receiving news by the Internet and e-mail alone.

Downward Cycle

It may take the complete loss of the audience for traditional means of news delivery before Internet publishing can be made universally profitable and there can be a rebuilding of the army needed to gather news. We can only hope that profitable Internet news sites will view re-investment in human resources as good business.

Until then, we are stuck it a downward cycle. The loss of qualified journalists to watchdog the local planning and zoning commission, the Connecticut Supreme Court, legislative hearings and a long list of other vital institutions means we, as citizens, must find our own way to stay informed, or live in ignorance about local and state issues. This is a dangerous trend in a system that relies on an informed population to be part of the decision making process.

Dean Pagani is a former gubernatorial advisor. He is V.P. of Public Affairs for Cashman and Katz Integrated Communications in Glastonbury.