Christopher Baxter | Journalist

AN ASIDE
(with best wishes for your group project):

Call me silly, but one of the symptoms of the Old Gray Lady’s demise was the appearance of color on her front page. When the NYT decided to splash living Technicolor onto the front page, they were, admittedly, not the first but nearly the last of the major metro newspapers to take the leap. The stewards of the NYT were following a trend that increased the sales of major competitors in a rough time for paper dailies in what was then the fledgling Age of Techno-Media. The problem was that they were following competitors like the Daily News, the NYPost and USA Today (this last being the template for McNews, thriving on the Golden Rule of The New Journalism: “No Article Shalt Be Longer that Can Be Read During the Average Visit to the Bathroom.”) Now, call it a hunch, but when the first dazzling reds and yellows mingled cheerfully with the dulcet blues and deep greens on the front page of the NYT some years ago, I sensed the Old Gray Lady was a gonner. Of course, she was more than the blast of color on her front page, and continued to be for a few years, but the slow slide to meet the bar which had been lowered by USA Today et al. was unstoppable. Color was merely the bright flag of the Enemy of Good Journalism planting itself firmly on the field of battle.

But what exactly is the Enemy of Good Journalism, and where does it get its force to conquer the Paper of Record for the USA? The Enemy, as I see it, is the systematic lowering of professional standards in print journalism in order to maintain an audience by appealing to the lowest common denominator of that audience, the great public thirst for the sensational, the dramatic, and the prurient. The effectiveness of such an Enemy to bring the Mighty low derives from two principle components: first, the critical need to score advertizing dollars through good circulation numbers in order to self-sustain; second, the equally critical need to distinguish the old gray mares of news dailies in an ever-more-crowded field of Techno-Media “info-tainment.”

Instant news online, hourly updates on TV, 24-hour ‘live as it happens’ media coverage of pointless car chases, gubernatorial philanderings and Texas executions, all but bury the static Printed Word on its flat, featureless, lackluster platform. Talk around the watercooler is not about print-based stories, but about MSN’s homepage headlines. In light of this, perhaps color on the front page was not the first faltering breath but the last desperate gasp for the Old Gray Lady in a vastly enlarged field of news and information (and yes, info-tainment) that she could never foresee.

And the readers? What of her circulation amidst the Great American Masses? Well, in truth–and for reasons too numerous to get into here–those masses have grown stupid and complacent. The reading public has discovered the little Newshound within them that chooses the path of least resistance and follows, much like a bored dog, the strongest stink to the tastiest pile of garbage. Critical thinking, a process that requires careful and thoughtful analysis of (one hopes) well-chosen words, has yielded to forgone conclusions launched in ten-second sound-bites by media personalities. In short, why should the news-consumers think when someone else can do it for them? The very need for carefully chosen words in a paper of record like the NYT is no longer necessary. To her readers (or former readers) the Old Gray Lady is as remote in time as Queen Victoria.

So, call me silly, but when the NYT put color on the front page, the fully-functioning, critically-thinking reader within me felt a sudden chill. I sensed it was the beginning of the end. As it happens, I may have been wrong–it may have been the end–and not just for the NYT, but all the dailies. The stage the NYT, the Hartford Courant, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, et al. commanded for so long doesn’t exist anymore. And, I fear, something darker, colder looms in the offing in its absence. Just as the coming of autumn color signals the change of season from summer to winter, so the appearance of color in the NYT. So, in memory of thinking readers as much as for all the daily papers they once enjoyed, I offer the faded strains of poet Wallace Stevens autumnal invocation: “Farewell to an idea…”