Whose byline is it anyway?
On decimated newspaper circulations, Britain's population density, and one way "the media" could stop appearing to be an undifferentiated mass
A gallery of the editors-in-chief at Britain's eighteen "national" newspapers highlights the huge difference between the apparent influence of Britain's papers and what remains of those in America. The US doesn't even have a half-dozen papers that even aspire to be considered "national" in nature: The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New York Times, and (maybe) the Washington Post.
■ The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune both contracted their aspirations long ago, and further down the metro population rankings, they don't grow any more ambitious: The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, and Arizona Republic don't look much beyond their own turf for influence. By contrast with the UK's eighteen "national" publications, the #18 newspaper in the US circulates to fewer than 50,000 print subscribers.
■ Britain's much greater population density probably gave it a lot more of a natural market for a newspaper-heavy culture: Back when newspapers had to be delivered by hand, having nearly ten times as many people per square mile was certainly an advantage. But now that daily publications can be delivered digitally, it's remarkable that America's incumbent newspaper institutions haven't tried harder to stake out more significant influence beyond their physical turf.
■ Even the New York Times, which shamelessly appeals to its readers' high sense of self-regard, now reaches more people through its games than its news content. Why aren't there more efforts to appeal to psychographic identity, particularly now that so much news is already homogenized nationally?
■ We can look to a lot of reasons why it may be outdated to even constrain ourselves to an examination of "newspapers", per se, but the fact remains that newsgathering and editorial operations that have in many cases been around for more than 100 years offer at least some kind of institutional memory and ought to at least try to distinguish themselves in recognizable ways. Perhaps paradoxically, blanket criticisms of "the media" might find a little more resistance if individual outlets retained more distinctive personalities.
■ "Personality" in an editorial outlet doesn't have to mean "political identity" any more than it does for a human being; in fact, both individuals and newspapers are generally better off when politics are far down the list of identifying characteristics. A publication can stand out for its writing style, its heroes, its features, its special beats, its witty commentary, its peculiar hobby horses, its imagined audiences, its imaginary friends, or the unusual things that interest its writers. All of those things should easily make a market for at least two dozen recognizable "national" outlets in the United States, by virtue of our enormous size alone.