Connecting The Links In The News Food Chain
Ah, woe is the newspaper industry. Yes, there’s been quite a bit of huffing and puffing about the decline of the newspaper industry lately. We’ve already mentioned columnist Georgie Ann Geyer’s lament that no one has any idea what’s going on in the world anymore because they don’t read newspapers enough. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Tanya Barrientos chimed in recently too, wondering if the days of young reporters being inspired by the likes of Woodward and Bernstein were over, as newspaper journalism is now encumbered by a market that “demands budget cuts, and layoffs, and corporate takeovers.”
But amid all this talk of a seeming newspaper apocalypse, there was one voice that seemed to inject an interesting bit of reasoning about the realities of the news food chain. While it was that of an obviously biased source – the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee – one of his quotes in an interview with Editor & Publisher seemed particularly relevant betwixt a deluge of newspaper death knells (and it fit quite nicely into the purview of Public Eye.) E&P writes that Bradlee “claims newspapers are not dying, as many have predicted for decades”… “He points out that the newspaper ‘has been and will continue to be the main source of news for television, if you really study it. They process newspapers until they get their own reporters into the story.’”
To examine that maxim, let’s take the trajectory of one story that has been getting plenty of attention lately – the (somewhat odd) side-effects that appear to be associated with the country’s best-selling prescription sleeping pill, Ambien. If you haven’t heard the terms “Ambien driver” and “sleep-eating,” you haven’t been watching, reading or listening to much news lately. While you’ve probably heard about either phenomenon on television, radio, online or even in a newspaper (probably not -- nobody reads that crap anymore), you might not know where the story broke. Well, actually it was in that doomed and useless of all mediums—the newspaper (The New York Times, to be exact.)
But amid all this talk of a seeming newspaper apocalypse, there was one voice that seemed to inject an interesting bit of reasoning about the realities of the news food chain. While it was that of an obviously biased source – the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee – one of his quotes in an interview with Editor & Publisher seemed particularly relevant betwixt a deluge of newspaper death knells (and it fit quite nicely into the purview of Public Eye.) E&P writes that Bradlee “claims newspapers are not dying, as many have predicted for decades”… “He points out that the newspaper ‘has been and will continue to be the main source of news for television, if you really study it. They process newspapers until they get their own reporters into the story.’”
To examine that maxim, let’s take the trajectory of one story that has been getting plenty of attention lately – the (somewhat odd) side-effects that appear to be associated with the country’s best-selling prescription sleeping pill, Ambien. If you haven’t heard the terms “Ambien driver” and “sleep-eating,” you haven’t been watching, reading or listening to much news lately. While you’ve probably heard about either phenomenon on television, radio, online or even in a newspaper (probably not -- nobody reads that crap anymore), you might not know where the story broke. Well, actually it was in that doomed and useless of all mediums—the newspaper (The New York Times, to be exact.)
