I picked up the Washington Post this morning and got a pretty in-your-face reminder of how bullshit the current explanation for the death of printed news is. Any old school newspaper sympathizer will tell you that the reporting industry sold its soul to the devil the second Al Gore invented the internet because now lightning-fast resources allow stories to spread instantly while nobody cares enough to read more than a headline before slapping it onto a twitter feed and moving on to the next story about someone's recent haircut or break up or boob job. Or some presidential candidate's recent family outing or $1000 shirt which is really just as relevant.
Well, to the post and every other printed paper, I'm calling out this cop-out excuse. The truth is, if newspapers spent half the money and resources on reporting news that they do on faux-artsy editorials, their market demographic might expand once again to something more than retired liberal arts professors and nerds like me. This morning, the post dedicated a front page headline and 3-page spread not to a breaking story about Pakistan reopening its border crossings (aka the freaking news), but to a photojournalism editorial called "Liberty through the Lens." In this story, the post interviewed 12 random women from "all walks of life" in Virginia to share their thoughts on the upcoming presidential election, while publishing 5 obscenely humongous random images of of the state (and someone's lime green shoes) that looked like an aspiring photography major's art portfolio. Cute, but seriously what the fuck? One small reality check the Washington Post: people (myself included) tend to spend their lives avoiding the half-assed and usually idiotic political opinions of their peers, not paying to read them. One big relevant reality check to the newspaper industry: Nobody cares about your desire to be arsty. Instead, report the news, and do it well. People know quality when they see it.
