Very interesting to hear that your mother launched the LA Times’s book review section, John!

I have a gut feeling, unsupported by empirical data, that aside from the rise of the web, newspapers are suffering in part because people have become accustomed to cherry picking news sources to look for ones that best fit their various needs. As I’ve said before, many no longer turn to the same newspaper as most of their neighbors or gather in the evening to watch CBS or NBC broadcast to the nation their look at the daily news. Footage from Bloody Sunday in Selma in 1965 would not form a shared viewing experience for Republicans and Democrats alike in the same way it did 44 years ago.

These days, you’re more likely to find people arguing about the source of a news story than about the underlying issues in the story. Very often, people decide which sources they will follow and shut their minds to anything else. Sometimes that is based on general disagreement, sometimes on particular knowledge of something. I had to fight the urge to cut out a source of news myself, when the Washington Times opined and reported on some issues related to the National Archives and Presidential records in 1994.

Until those stories appeared in 1994, I had been a regular reader of the WT. My disappointment in how the newspaper handled stories about an area in which I had worked led me to stop reading anything in that newspaper for a while. Although I continued to buy it for others in my family to read, it took me a few years before I started leafing through the WT again. In 1994, the WT declined to publish any of the letters to the editor I submitted. To its credit, the WT did publish on November 16, 2007 a letter on Presidential records that I sent in years later.

Just recently, in a records managers’ forum, someone posted about an op ed that the NYT had published about White House records. No real discussion of the issues ensued. But there was a lot of venting in that forum (one to which I do not subscribe) by those who believed the NYT just tilts against the political party they support. No one stood up to say, “well, you may not like its editorial stances or the way it plays some stories, but this newspaper *has* done good work on some of its stories. And there are real issues here. We do need to stop and think about what they are.” It looks to me that there has been much more noise in the blogosphere condemning newspapers than defending them.

For a number of reasons, I think there is a danger in people being acculturated away entirely from turning to national newspapers. More and more, people seem to turn to niche outlets and even to echo chambers. For those who want more than echo chambers, it is possible to follow some issues from right and left perspectives on the Internet, if you are inclined to look at how things play on both sides. But, as you point out, leafing through a newspaper has a different payoff — including the discovery of stories about topics you never might search out on the web. On the other hand, searching Yahoo news enabled me to find the nice article about Karl Weissenbach, Ike, and Camp David published January 16,2009 by the Abilene Reflector-Chronicle.

Maarja