Shrinking profits, shrinking newspapers and a disappearing role

The walls are closing in on us.

Or maybe it’s just the margins.

Following a national trend, the pages of The Post— the independent student daily at Ohio University where I work as editor— are shrinking by about half an inch in width.

Sounds like a small hit, half an inch does, but the resulting loss of area on which the newspaper can print is about 10 column-inches, or a typical meeting coverage story.

The financial woes of newspapers nationwide aren’t just shrinking staffs and newsprint width, though. It’s effectively killing the role newspapers play as the establishment’s watchdog.

Sure, the big boys in New York and Washington D.C. can still throw throngs of reporters on the accountability journalism beat, but newspapers are shifting largely to providing more “infotainment” than investigation.

And who can blame them? The explosion of entertainment news and the public’s ability to find it easily on the Internet has shifted the ideas about what news consumers want. And to stay afloat, newspapers have to shift the balance between giving readers what they want and what they need.

That scale has traditionally tipped toward the media role as government watch dog, a role the public needs the media to play. But how can newspapers continue to play this under-paying role in the face of diminishing profits? I would argue it can’t forever, and that role will eventually die out.

With more entertainment news, maybe more people pick up the paper. With more people picking up the newspaper, maybe ad revenue takes an upswing. And maybe, someday, the news industry banks enough money to buy back all those half inches they cut from the newspaper’s width.

But I wonder, by then, if all of that will be enough to restore the public faith in a newspaper’s ability to actively hold the establishment accountable.