With land grants encouraging their expansion, and with the laissez-faire capitalism of the post-Civil War era, railroads were vast sources of wealth—enriching, among others, Vanderbilts, Harrimans and Hills. (James J. Hill, the “empire builder,” built the Great Northern Railway from Minnesota to Washington. Amtrak still calls its train on this route the Empire Builder.)
There were also monopolistic abuses taking advantage of farmers at a time of falling commodity prices. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 created the Interstate Commerce Commission mainly to rein in the railroads. By the time the ICC was legislatively euthanized in 1995, it had destroyed the private passenger railroad and severely delimited freight railroads. Fares, routes, rates, schedules and work rules were subject to Lilliputian regulation. Railroads found the only way to eliminate unprofitable routes was to make the service so bad no one would use it, and the ICC would consent to abandonment.
Railroads thus could never freely adapt to the challenges of the airplane and the automobile, as radio successfully adapted to television. I believe we are seeing something similar in the newspaper business. Anti-trust busybodies are present in the form of making it difficult for newspapers to share technology and from diversifying into other media. But this cannot be compared to the controls railroads suffered under for 90 years.
Instead, newspapers have made the mistake they, of all institutions, ought to have been wise to: believing their bad press. Shallow analysis has decided that newspapers are going the way of the sanitary gatherers who followed horses before horse power became horsepower.
Newspapers have stopped believing in their own product. As railroads did, they are diminishing the quality of their product in a self-fulfilling prophecy that for some is going to assure their doom.
According to former Boston Globe columnist David Warsh, the major metropolitan dailies that have traditionally been the intellectual currency of our great cities are dumbing down their newspapers in favor of experimental attempts to imitate Matt Drudge, craigslist, “Hot Russian women,” and downhill thence into a mire. It is their La Brea Tar Pits (my term, Mr. Warsh’s idea).
Some newspaper executives don’t know how to run a business, period. An example may be GateHouse Media, owner of 97 dailies, 198 paid weeklies and many free publications. The company acquired so many papers so fast its stock share price dropped from $12.82 a year ago to 29 cents last month. Its future—along with The Brockton Enterprise, the Herald News of Fall River, The Taunton Daily Gazette and The Patriot Ledger—is uncertain.
Other executives know how to run a business but not a newspaper. A classic case is Edward P. Johnson III—at 78, still resident sage at Fidelity Investments. The story is that, irritated by The Boston Globe, he bought 96 Massachusetts newspapers, mostly local weeklies. He hired the late David Brudnoy as movie critic, but did not understand that people don’t buy their local paper to read a movie critic, they buy it for local news. He did not succeed, and in 2001 sold to The Boston Herald, which in 2006 sold to GateHouse Media.
Still other executives may know how to put out a newspaper technically, but don’t what a newspaper is. These are the ones Mr. Warsh says are running down their lifelines—their paper editions. “The paper-and-ink version is easy to read, easy to share, comforting in its corporeality, reassuring in its permanence: it has a durable market niche. … Many readers will be satisfied with the inferior information they can get free anytime from the Web. But many will
continue to prefer the real thing.”
David Warsh is a quirky genius who has gone against the herd since I first met him as a freshman at Harvard in 1962. Newspaper managements won’t admit it, but many of them no longer believe content matters; and they do not believe paper editions have a future. The Boston Globe has reduced the number of papers distributed to stores—presumably to save the cost of picking up unsold copies. I would call it suicide.
You would think newspapers would be democratic: “Here are my clips. Judge me accordingly!” In fact, large newspapers are hierarchical bishoprics in which power takes a long time to acquire and is jealously guarded. De-ossifying antiquated stratification, not gutting content, is the correct imperative.
This newspaper [The Journal], like many others, runs three-inch ads stuck on the front page above the fold. We were sorely criticized in 2006, when a political ad of this genre ran on election day. A candidate had outsmarted his rivals. What would they have said if we had censored the ad? The critics missed the more revealing point that the literally tacky ad eclipsed the news headline and a logo commemorating The Journal’s 175 years of service to Rhode Island and the nation.
This will be my final Journal column. My grandfather, Henry Manchester Boss, was raised on Broad Street in Providence by a devout Baptist. When he was more-or-less water-boarded during his baptism at age six he left church-going forever. He did not believe in God; rather, he worshiped The Providence Journal. He would be overjoyed that I ran in The Journal for 11 years.
