Held to answer

In the 1990’s, I was so busy as a newspaper reporter in California I didn’t notice that men like my father were losing their work in the Oregon sawmills.

When I came home on vacation one summer, I saw a bumper sticker on my dad’s pickup truck: “Save a logger, eat an owl.”

I’d heard about the efforts to save the northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest. Because I loved the outdoors and spent my college summers working in the forests where I had seen owls, I was inclined to be sympathetic to the birds.

I joked to my mother that I was going to get a “Save the Spotted Owl” bumper sticker and put it on my rental car while I was home.

“No, don’t!” my mother said. “Your dad won’t think it’s funny. He’ll get mad.”

I didn’t realize how bad it was until years later, on another trip home, I revisited the Umpqua National Forest, one of the forests where I had worked during my college summers. I stopped at a recreation center that had once been staffed with college students earning good summer salaries. Now it was run by volunteers, most of them senior citizens.

By then, my father had retired. The dismantling of the timber industry was well under way, helped along by the Clinton Administration’s Northwest Forest Plan to save the northern spotted owl and old growth timber.

My dad died before the decline of newspapers took hold. He would not have gloated to me: “What goes around, comes around.”

He had an 8th-grade education, but he loved to read. When I was growing up, my parents at one point subscribed to both the Medford Mail-Tribune and The Oregonian.

The world is so interconnected that what my father thought was bad news – saving the spotted owl – turned out to be not entirely good news for his opponents, either. People who wanted to save the spotted owl did not foresee what the loss in timber revenue and jobs would later do to Oregon’s schools and public infrastructure.

And all those high-tech jobs that were going to be the state’s salvation?

In Portland, The Oregonian newspaper recently announced it would cease daily delivery in September and rely more on its Website. At the same time it will lay off about 100 employees, roughly half of them in the newsroom. Some will be replaced with less-experienced employees primarily skilled at SEO and social media.

I’ve gone through newspaper downsizings, and the reactions to The Oregonian’s announcement were predictable – but with a Portland twist. This is a city that likes to read and is proud of having one of the largest, independently owned bookstores in the country. People of all ages, not just baby boomers, still enjoy the pleasure of reading print on paper.

Through previous layoffs and buyouts, though, The Oregonian is already a poor imitation of what it once was.  So there was another typical reaction: Who cares? Newspapers have nobody to blame but themselves; they should have seen this coming years ago when advertisers moved online.

To those people I say: Where do you work, and what does your future hold? What about your children?

All institutions with large, entrenched layers of management – not just newspapers – are slow to change. Look at higher education. The costs of college continue to climb to outrageous heights, while the job market for many degree-holders has not kept pace.

“Is College Worth It?” is the title of a book by William J. Bennett, secretary of education under President Reagan, and liberal arts grad David Wilezol. In a review of that book and another by a very different author –  “College (Un)bound” by Jeffrey J. Selingo, an editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education – reviewer Andrew Delbanco found “their views are grimly consistent.”

Writing in The New York Times, Delbanco, director of American Studies at Columbia University, concluded:

“Private institutions will retreat from their commitment to discounting tuition for needy students and will serve mainly the affluent, while public colleges, in order to cut costs, will rely more on technology and part-time faculty.”

In “Laptop U” writer Nathan Heller describes in the New Yorker magazine how massive open online courses – MOOCs – have academicians worried that online classes could reduce a tenured professor to being “a glorified teaching assistant.”

Could college professors go the way of newspaper reporters, editors and photographers?

Think of the money that colleges could save by not paying full-time salaries, benefits and sabbaticals to tenured faculty. (Unfortunately, the acronym MOOC lends itself to a new pejorative. Can’t you hear a parent bragging, “My kid got into a real college, his kid’s just a MOOC.”)

Consider also the effect of online technology on lower-end jobs. In “Death of the Salesmen,” in the June 2013 Atlantic magazine, Derek Thompson asks, “Should we mourn the death of retail?”

As more people browse and buy online, the personal shopping experience is disappearing.

“A cursory glance at the fastest-growing sectors suggests that as retail declines, its workers will simply stream into menial health-care and food-service jobs,” Thompson writes. “Yet there is a worse scenario, in which the squeeze in retail work intensifies competition for other low-skill jobs, pushing down wages at the bottom and pushing some people out of the labor force entirely.”

This is not the future that techies bragged about 20 years ago. They delighted in author Michael Crichton’s vision outlined in a speech he gave to the National Press Club in 1993 (and reprinted in Wired under the title “Mediasaurus”).

Crichton predicted the mass media would be gone within 10 years.

“Along with many other American industries, the American media produce a product of very poor quality. Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk. So people have begun to stop buying it.”

I can’t disagree with his criticism. But the problems my coworkers and I used to complain about when I worked in newspapers – corporate management and their marketing ploys, the never-ending readership surveys, the drive to increase profits even when many papers were cash cows – haven’t gone away because of technology (except newspapers are no longer guaranteed moneymakers).

Crichton envisioned an end to “junk-food journalism” to be replaced by a high-quality information service, “in which all the facts were true, the quotes weren’t piped, the statistics were presented by someone who knew something about statistics.”

He looked to “innovations” like CNN and leaders like Al Gore to make it happen. Crichton did not imagine Buzzfeed, TMZ and Huffington Post.

When Crichton died in 2008, critics revisited his “Mediasaurus” and generally said his prediction was right, but his timing was wrong.

Typical of what Crichton did not foresee was a story in the New York Observer about his death: Following his obituary are seven comments, most of them spam – somebody selling something.

“We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies,” said Marshall McLuhan before Crichton became a famous author.

Nobody wants to look like a high-tech Neanderthal (nothing ages a person more), so we don’t question the superiority of technology.

What if the solutions we are chasing are not found online?

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Journalism’s Agony and Ecstasy