The End of "The World"

Le Monde, the French newspaper of record, went on strike Monday, April 14, and did not publish a Tuesday edition of the paper the next day, in response to planned staff cuts.

The New York Times cut its staff by a hundred earlier this year.

The L.A. Times just cut 150 editorial staff.

The Hartford Courant, Connecticut's closest thing to a newspaper of record, just recorded an interview for NPR on photojournalist and reporter cuts. The Courant plans to fill its coverage gaps with user-generated content -- in other words, free writing from citizens.

The Courant's parent company, The Tribune Co., also owns The Baltimore Sun, which is making similar cuts, The Boston Globe is making cuts, and The Boston Herald has said it plans to eliminate 130 to 160 jobs this summer.

Most newspapers can't resist publishing editorials on their own cutbacks. The Hartford Advocate published an editorial by Alan Bisbort when they made cuts from their staff (resulting in the subsequent joblessness, I hope relieved by now, of Jennifer Abel). The New York Times published word of its own de-staffing. The World Association of Newspapers wrote up many of these fact in a weblog entry.

The whole industry is navel-gazing at this point.

Small wonder, considering how little guarantee there is that reporters and editors will be able to keep their bellies full over the next few, likely severe, rounds of cutbacks.

But it's the wrong approach.

Simon, French national and friend, says good riddance to Le Monde if its reporters feel a sense of entitlement so strong that they consider themselves more important than their functions at the newspaper -- stopping the presses, after all, only works if people miss the paper when you do. And people only miss you if they're not already busy resenting you for your interruption of their daily routine.

It's not the same as the NYC transit strike. People needed to get to work. People needed to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. People needed that strike to end.

It's not like the Writer's Guild of America strike that lasted all those months, leaving us Christmas-episode-less and almost finale-less. We're addicted to television. We need our fix of "House" or "The Office" or "Lost."

How many people need newspapers anymore, though? And how many are actually addicted to newspaper-format information anymore?

It's not newspapers' fault that the format may be becoming obsolete (though there's plenty of evidence that it's not -- look at Timothy Egan's "look on the bright side" thoughts on the industry's reach), and it's not out of line for seasoned reporters, editors, publishers and readers to be upset with the still-nebulous changes appearing to be forced on the industry. A thousand jobs lost in one week, in any industry, is nothing to sneeze at.

But it doesn't seem like anything to strike at, either.

Imagine if oil-industry workers on the verge of losing their jobs to a new technology -- solar-power, let's say, for the sake of whimsy -- responded by going on strike. People would pay attention; they would complain; they would speed up the transition to non-fossil-fuel power. A strike would have the opposite of the intended effect.

Newspapers, and more particularly the human elements making up newspapers -- the reporters and editors and people who do newspapers -- need to make themselves indispensible before we dispense with them. Out of the ashes of print-version, corporate-sponsored papers should come something innovative and incisive, cutting to the quick of what people want from their information.

There's so much to be done online -- the lack of organization is staggering -- and who would be better equipped to do that work than people who have been presenting us with information since the pamphlet hit the printing press?

Even if reporting and editing became freelance endeavors, even if what organization came down to was selecting for and copying stories from their sources, we'd still need them. We still need gatekeepers, and we'll need them exponentially more as our dependence on the Internet increases exponentially.

So let's get going. Leave the husk of the old ways behind, Le Monde, and get to work on cracking new stories and presenting them so we take notice.

It's the end of that old world. Start building the new one.