Michael Hoover

“Newspapers should be fun and it should be fun to work at one.” –Phillip Bennett, Assistant Managing Editor for Foreign News , soon to be Managing Editor, The Washington Post

The above quotation is the closing line in a story headlined “Post Discusses Circulation, Diversity” by reporter Frank Ahrens in last Friday’s Washington Post. The story, curiously appearing on page C3 of the Style section, focused on a staff change at the newspaper’s highest levels and reactions to that change as well as concerns about diversity among the newspaper’s top editors. The story also explored how the Post was going to address its declining circulation, currently at 709,500 daily, “down 10 percent over the past two years.”

Ahrens’s story said that to attract new readers “Post reporters will be required to write shorter stories” and that the “copy editors will be given more authority to make room for more photographs and graphics.” A picture is worth a thousand words, don’t forget. Does that mean that we can expect that The Washington Post will begin to look more and more like USA Today, the paper with the nation’s largest circulation (at least among those with aspirations to be a legitimate newspaper), built on easy-to-read short stories and colorful graphics?

Is The Washington Post, certifiably one of this nation’s great newspapers, going to succumb to the dumbing down of its journalistic integrity?

Every day of the school year, the Post drops off over 200 copies of its paper at George Mason High School. These newspapers, remarkably, are free. Also remarkably, they disappear within an hour. The Post makes its newspapers available to interested schools as part of its program to entice young readers into the great readers’ fold of those who actually care about what’s going on in the world. As a journalism teacher I am indebted to the Post for its munificence and before the Post makes drastic changes in its design and coverage, I wish they’d send their editors out to Mason to watch what happens each morning when the students are actually given time to explore the newspaper.

In the journalism course, we sometimes begin the class with 15 minutes of undisturbed reading time of the Post. The students are often so absorbed in what they are reading that I add an extra few minutes because I can’t bear to tear them away from such avid reading. And they are decidedly not only reading the comics or the sports pages, but are often engaged in the second or even third page continuum of an in-depth front page story.

While really good newspapers like the Post are devoted to serious reporting of important issues, they are also, bottom line, businesses that have to evolve and search for ways to maintain the money flow in the face of a nationwide decline of newspaper readers. Newspapers across the nation are threatened by the much faster moving television medium, hundreds of new cable channels, thousands of bloggers, and an overall decline in readers who will actually make the effort to challenge themselves with genuine ideas. Newspapers are also facing a generation of people for whom reading is viewed as too time consuming and too burdensome a task. Lastly, newspapers are going up against a plethora of people who simply don’t care about what is happening outside of the sphere that immediately impacts their lives.

Ironically, decades ago when television was in its infancy, there were gloom-and-doom prophecies that TV would be the end of newspapers. Everyone would get their news quickly and easily from their black and white screens and newspapers would go the way of clay tablets. However, it turned out that the evening news snippets simply whetted the appetites of those who were seriously interested in news and seduced readers into buying newspapers so that they could explore all the details and even nuances of the story behind the story. For a good while, newspapers and television worked in tandem.

However, that was during a time when reading and keeping informed were considered civic responsibilities. Consequently, newspapers rose to the challenge and delivered stories that were in-depth, going beyond the five W’s of who, what, when, where and why, and served up a healthy dose of “how” as well. If newspapers start catering to lazy readers by ordering their reporters to write shorter stories peppered with more and more pictures, the first casualties of truth will be the “why” and the “how.” Once these are gone, it won’t be only the stories that are diminished; it will be the readers’ understanding.

The world, in spite of those who want to pretend to simplify it and deceive us in the process, is a complex vortex of conflicting ideas and interpretations of those ideas. The media has a responsibility to pursue those ideas to the utmost. “The devil is in the details,” they say. So be it. Don’t spare us the details; that devil needs to be confronted, now more than ever.