Internet age could pulp newspapers
Laura Lippman believes it is only now dawning on people that newspapers may not be around forever. (The 7:30 Report)
Crime novelist Laura Lippman is in Australia for the Sydney Writers' Festival, she also worked as a reporter for 12 years at the Baltimore Sun. She spoke with the 7.30 Report's Thea Dikeos about the demise of American newspapers in the internet age and witnessing a well-respected paper struggling to survive.
Laura Lippman is passionate about her home town of Baltimore and newspapers.
"I like the paper newspaper I grew up with it. You'll have to pry it from my cold dead hand," she says.
Ms Lippman worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun for 12 years. She says, at its peak, the Sun was a well-respected newspaper with foreign correspondents around the world.
"At its height it had nine foreign bureaus. It was a tough newspaper to get hired by," she said.
"It took me, I think, almost 10 years of trying after I left school to get hired by the Baltimore Sun, because they didn't hire people who didn't have a lot of experience. It was not a place where many people came out of college and started."
In the United States, mastheads that have published the news for more than a century are falling into bankruptcy, going online or closing down altogether.
Ms Lippman believes it is only now dawning on people that newspapers may not be around forever.
"It's only been in the past two years that people came to terms with the fact that the industry could die," she said.
While the global financial meltdown has hit newspapers hard, some argue the rise of the internet and the subsequent collapse of classified ad revenue poses a fundamental threat to the viability of the business model which has sustained big-city newspapers for centuries.
"One of the things that made newspapers so attractive back in the 80s when families everywhere were selling them to corporations was they were making an immense amount of money. American newspapers were used to profits margins of 20 per cent. The average grocery store is lucky to return a profit of one to two per cent," she said.
And Ms Lippman does not think you can rely on citizen journalists and bloggers to keep the institutions of power in a democracy accountable.
"What's going to happen in cities across America is somebody is going to wake up one morning and there will be a big neon sign across the street and it will be a strip club. Well, how did that happen? Because no one covers city hall much less going to the zoning meeting."
Ms Lippman's husband David Simon was also a reporter at the Baltimore Sun and is the creator of the critically acclaimed series The Wire.
He recently gave testimony at the US Senate committee inquiry into the future of journalism.
"You do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at city hall, or in the courthouse hallways, or in the bars where police officers gather," he said.
"You don't see them consistently nurturing and then pressing sources. You don't see them holding institutions accountable on a daily basis. Why? Because high-end journalism is a profession. It requires daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in day out."
He suggested that newspapers should charge for internet copyright and favours a non-profit model to fund the kind of journalism that was once the preserve of big city newspapers.
