They’re not. The vast majority of them are awful, and have been for years. From lazy journalists rewording vested-interests’ press releases as news, to openly biased one-sided reporting (on all sides of politics), to dangerous levels of sensationalism to whip up reader interest, to simply getting it wrong, the current crop of papers stinks to high heaven, and I believe this is true world-wide. It is certainly the case where I live in Australia.

When the newspapers were the only game in town, they abused the trust of their readers. They lost that trust, and now that they’re not the only game in town, most of their former readers couldn’t care less about their demise.

My prediction; the industry will become so poor that they won’t be able to fund foreign correspondents properly, at which point people will realise that the root of all news bounced around by bloggers and other ‘new media’ was the large news organisation correspondents. The amount of actual reported facts on which to base articles will decrease. It is at this point that people will become willing to pay for news again.

But we came across another problem. Investigative journalists operating in a print environment seemed psychologically unable to drag themselves into the new model presented by online in which information could be presented under conditions of real time updating, constant correction and interactivity. And where the journalist, instead of being Editorial and we Management, could join a team without such distinctions in a common enterprise. And where high standards need not be cover for lack of scrutiny and efficiency. What was going on?

Well, in the end, we deduced that many older print journalists had just had their brains wired by their training into practices that simply could not transfer to the new environment. It was like trying to get a monk to speed up and drop the hand-painted scrolling of something that happened two thousand years ago so that you could get woodcut illustrations and a story about the current religious controversy out into the market through the printed pamphlet. The hand-painted illustration had become a value in itself and society was expected to subsidise it for that reason. So it is with ‘quality journalism’.

We haven’t given up hope but it is interesting that the only organisations funding significant investigative activity are the big US Foundations, the security state and corporations involved in litigation (which are pre-presented as dossiers to the media nowadays), and NGOs like (say) Global Witness collaborating with human rights or similar lawyers.

All this material could just as easily appear on the internet. It has virtually died within local and national democracy – unless you count the egregious sting on various Members of the House of Lords by the Sunday Times recently. In effect, investigations are now not undertaken on their own merit as a service to the public and democracy (the hand-painted scroll), they are undertaken as a tool in political warfare programmes by ideologues and special interests.

The requirement is for ‘true’ investigative journalism to adapt to the new media in response to this and this seems to require compromises that they are just not prepared to make – I just think they are scared of change.

I still subscribe to my local paper, but it is becoming increasingly obsolete, with many of the best features available On-line. It’s interesting to note that when I called to cancel my subscription, I was offered a pay-in-advance annual price that was cheaper than buying the Sunday edition at the local liquor store, so I signed up for another year.

This is an indication of the desperation to maintain enough subscribers to run their presses!

The saddest part of this decline is the growing irrelevance of good investigative journalists. I recently attended a meeting of the L-A Press Club where I sat next to Pulitzer Prize winning writers who are now collecting unemployment.

This raises some serious questions:
Who has the ability to spend 60-days on an investigative story these days? Who’s watching the taxpayers’ backs? If Deep Throat calls the Washington Post, is anyone there to answer the phone?

**http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1151/state-of-the-news-media-2009

In fact, much of the material we read in the newspapers is often opinionated, unreliable and derived from special interest sources with continued errors of fact and interpretation. The public know this and are right to consider average print journalism not better than what is available on the internet to the educated reader who is able to use the search function efficiently.

I could refer to Nick Davies’ devastating analysis of the effect of diminished resources on investigative, indeed all forms of journalism, in ‘Flat Earth News’ but I think the issue is much more fundamental than this.

Journalists have assumed that they can do something better than a lot of their readers can do when, in fact, a lot of their readers can do parts of things that journalists do as well or better than most journalists. And others are prepared to do the whole in selected areas for free out of special interest, passion or love.

The new technology permits the parts to be expressed and then reshuffled as a new ‘whole’ that completely undercuts the original business model on which ‘professional’ journalism relies. Journalists are not well resourced or even educated enough to compete with their own readerships ‘en masse’ in terms of either fact-finding or reasonableness of argument. There is always someone out there who knows a bit more unless a newspaper is prepared to resource individuals who are closer to Professors of Contemporary History than the jobbing writers that most journalists now are.

A distinction has to be drawn between: writing to entertain; writing to inform; writing to share an opinion. For example, the ‘writing to entertain’ is now fully extended beyond small classes of scriptwriters, journalists and novelists to a vast public able to enter the market and expectant of much less reward than the professionals.

The remuneration model has thus shifted so that instead of a closed group of a middling sort (the classic ‘professional’) we have a few writing stars are at one end and vast masses happily trying to break through at the other (much like sport or any other walk of life in a free market economy).

The typical journalist is seeing his resources and his own conditions driven down to the level of the talented amateur who may o’ereach him with that single great concept or idea that the marketeers might like (Twilight, Harry Potter, nonsense like 1421). Fantasy and wild surmise are now culturally more rewarding because sufficient fact is available for free and can be tested more easily through one’s own research. Fantasy relates directly to the limbic.

A counter-testing of reality via blogs and other freely available sources has almost completely unravelled the ‘spin’ culture of the mid-1990s. The typical journalist increasingly looks ‘spun’ and the punter takes a view for himself, separating out ‘facts’ from facts.

There is a history to this. With limited sources of information, of entertainment (no easy visual media) and opinion in the past, a closed circle of writers and of newspapers could fill the gap in demand. A class of scribblers or wordsmiths created the ‘profession’ of journalism to ensure standards of style and of content that employers and public could relate to. They also could collar ‘sources’ so that they were the only intermediaries between power and the powerless. This process was a progressive one from the free-booting and defamatory eighteenth century until the high point of journalism from the mid-nineteenth century through to a few years ago.

Things have now changed dramatically and quickly. Texting mentality has diminished style in favour of instant expression. You will see now how the internet generally tolerates grammatical and spelling error in favour of speed. Content availability is massive and the need is for either ‘now’ news that is not really assumed to be correct or deep analysis which can come later. People can be their own researchers and enjoy the experience. And no journalist’s opinion appears any more reliable than an informed blogger, while the political class spews out more directly its guff to its target market. The intermediary – the print journalist and his newspaper – is increasingly surplus to requirements.

The issue is cash. Where does the punter really need to hand over cash to the journalist. The price of a paper was like a general subscription to somebody’s else club organisation. If you don’t need the club, you don’t pay the subscription. The advertiser or the oligarch might keep something going that is free to the public but it soon slips into the category of entertainment to fill a gap (like a freesheet on a train journey) that is not taken seriously or only as unreliable material from a special interest.

If the newspaper is to get the cash of the punter direct, it has to be very entertaining indeed and not much more (and that usually means a portable specialist magazine or tabloid striving to get news stories that are easily available on the internet) or it has to be a source of information that is to be found nowhere else (but this is really market intelligence and will be handled more easily online with hard copy as mere back-up) or an opinion that someone actually wants to pay for. How many people would actually pay to read Polly Toynbee and just Polly Toynbee. The idea of star writers with their own paid-for blogs is unproven and unlikely – why pay for opinion in a world where punters no longer look up to others as better informed enough that they can reliably improve their lives.

There seem to be only two ways for ‘newspapers’ to survive – by creating a brand in which jobbing information and opinion is presented as useful information and entertainment for information grazers and then re-issued through social networks (where the business model is advertising based and the story carries the advertisement as it travels) or the concentration of useful and timely specialist knowledge behind subscription barrier walls, often information of an extremely specialist nature disconnected from ‘opinion’.

Or else, a last category which fits into your WSJ model, a few opinion-former (not so much reporter) vehicles linked to power elites who might survive as the outward expression of inward power – like the Financial Times. Yet these will be of little value in any truly deep analysis because they are stuck in ‘group-think’.

Enough people are likely to share the ‘group-think’ in such cases that the newspaper can survive but that will be about the limit of it. Even these journals will partly degenerate into occasional analyses and reports of highly specific zones of interest of equally specific interest to their readership basis which will just have to pay more to access the service.

The total number of print readers and of newspapers must fall and fall dramatically because internet broadcasting, social media and internet sources will combine to strip out the bulk of casual readers, divert advertising revenue and make the cost of distribution channel management (such as newsagents) comparatively prohibitive. Print newspapers just do not make sense any more until they can be downloaded to portable readers that everyone wants and can carry easily – and that still does not deal with why I should buy what will be free through my mobile in any case.

Whichever way you look at it a world of a few largely online brands (purporting to be newspapers), specialised subscription journals and ideological or special interest propaganda sheets in all but intention is scarcely going to compete with online broadcasting and self-generated social network news flows.

I don’t read newspapers (excepting the Financial Times) now and rely 90% on the internet and personal contact (including social network contact) for which I pay nothing except the hardware and the broadband access. I think that this is becoming increasingly typical. Newspapers are not doomed entirely but they are becoming culturally irrelevant – and so, increasingly, are journalists.