WASHINGTON -- Members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, convening here this week, heard what may be the most critical question they face in the age of the Internet-generated information explosion:
How can the fundamental purpose of the newspaper be maintained and you still make enough money to stay afloat?Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the question is that it wasn't posed in one of the ASNE numerous panels and workshops but by the group's Thursday luncheon speaker: President Clinton.
Nor was it part of the Clinton's planned speech. It came in a somewhat off-the-point answer to what struck me as a less serious question from the floor: What constructive criticism would Clinton make of America's newspapers?
The president, seldom willing to offer a short response when a longer one is available, made a joke or two, then moved to the heart of the matter: "I think it's hard to run a newspaper today in an environment in which you're competing with television news, Internet news sources, radio news, and entertainment which abuts on the news, and all the lines are being blurred -- both the technological lines and the categorical lines.
"But I think there is a special role for the old-fashioned newspaper in daily life."
What role? To help readers sort out not just truth from falsehood but the trivial from the important, the fleeting from the significant, the merely entertaining from the things that matter. "The thing I worry most about is that people will have all the information in the world but they won't have any way of evaluating it . . . how to put it in proper perspective. That's what I consider to be the single most significant challenge present to all of you by the explosion of media outlets and competitive alternatives in the information age."
He offered an example: "When the full sequencing of the human genome is announced in a few months, how much will it cost you to run a long series on exactly what that is, what its implications might be, how it came to be, and where we're going from here? And how many people have to read it for it to have been worth the investment?"
It's a critically important question for those of us who make our living newspapering. We aren't sure, we tell ourselves privately, that newspapers as we know them can survive. We've long since understood that fewer people turn to newspapers to learn who won yesterday's election or last night's game, but we've consoled ourselves that we can offer more details on such events than, say, our TV counterparts.
But nowadays, even the details are available, via the Internet, and some of us have started to worry that newspaper reading may not survive the present generation of newspaper readers.
Clinton, who told me afterward that it's a subject to which he's been giving a lot of thought, thinks we're underestimating the true value of what newspapers can do. The information explosion, he understands, is only just beginning. We now have access to information that was beyond our ability even to desire -- overseas stock market reports, foreign news, speeches, technical reports, even books. In no time at all it will be possible to get same-day, even same-hour information on military adventures, political crises, ethnic confrontations and natural disasters in countries whose names we hardly know. Not just information, but pictures and sound.
And what we will need then more than ever is someone to play the editor's function: to sort it out, tell us what truly matters, what the trends seem to be. And that's what newspapers are uniquely situated to provide.
In a way, it's like the role of newspaper columnists. Their
interpretations may not all be correct, but even three conflicting interpretations are more helpful than none at all. And, as with columnists, one learns over time which interpreters to trust, which ones are prone to exaggeration for political ends, whose biases to be aware of. It is an individual version of what news organizations call "branding." The information is judged in the context of the "brand name" that brings it to you. Traditional newspapers, whatever else they are, are brand names.
"People need more than facts," Clinton told his rapt (and, I dare say, surprised) audience. "They need to know the facts are accurate, and they need to have some perspective about what it means and where it's all going."
William Raspberry's e-mail address is willrasp@washpost.com. Washington Post Writers Group