The Powers That Were

In 1979, at the pinnacle of the once great era when print media dominated news, opinion and advertising, the late author and journalist David Halberstam published, “The Powers That Be,” a thick book that featured profiles of the nation’s five media titans in the last half of the 20^th century.

These five men – one would later be replaced by a woman – and their powerful media empires provided the news and opinion that informed the nation and contributed, at times significantly, to shaping political agendas and directing the course of government policy.  

They could afford talented editors and journalists whose beat and investigative reporting was extraordinary, from exposing corruption in the White House that led to President Richard Nixon’s resigning office in 1974 to revealing failed policies that shifted public opinion against America’s military involvement in Vietnam.

They were Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger of “The New York Times, William S. Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of “Time” magazine, Otis Chandler of the “Los Angeles Times” and Phil Graham of “The Washington Post.” Graham’s wife, Katharine, would assume the paper’s helm in 1963, after he shot himself in their Virginia home.

Not only were they the king keepers at the information gates, their media empires made vast fortunes, providing them resources to pay for talent and bureaus. As late as 1992, they still held dominion, but like an earthquake under the ocean, a tsunami was coming, and none of the men and women running these institutions of journalism appeared prepared for understanding what it could mean to their business models.

Twenty years later, the empires are shadows of what they once were, struggling to right their ships, which have been battered by giant waves of technology, innovation and competition. The titans have all passed away – Luce, born in 1898, died in 1967; Paley in 1990; Katherine Graham in 2001; Chandler in 2006; and Sulzberger in 2012.

Under Graham’s son, Donald, “The Washington Post,” once valued at more than $1 billion, sold this summer at a fire-sale price, $250 million, according to the Post. It went to one of the 21^st century’s media titans, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. Three years ago, in 2010, the Post sold one of its signature properties, 80-year-old “Newsweek" magazine, to audio pioneer Sidney Harman for $1. He also assumed the magazine's financial liabilities.

Harman would die a year later, signaling, as if any more signaling was needed, the growing turmoil in the world of print news publications. The Internet continues to explode with news and information sites, legitimate and non-legitimate, and the innovative, all-consuming social media. Digital technology appears to never lack for invention and innovation.

 
Technology has effectively shattered into millions of small pieces the once enormously profitable adverting market that little more than 20 yeas ago the five titans could once count, collectively, as practically their own.

Within 18 months after “Newsweek” was sold, the magazin had merged with The Daily Beast, a news and opinon website, dropped its print version in December 2012, and went digital. It’s delivered via e-mail once a week. For print readers, and journalists who built their careers on print, “Newsweek’s” decision was akin to raising the flag of surrender to a still unproven delivery platform.

It was the same response when the smaller dailies such as those in the Newhouse chain, including my local paper, The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, took the printed versions of their daily newspapers from seven days to three days a week in what appears to be an eventual move to eliminating print. Yet, delivery platform isn’t the problem. As long as the “platform” is accessible – whether print, tablet, iPad, laptop, etc. The problem is how to develop a new business model that was as lucrative as the old one.

“Newsweek’s” competitor, “Time,” remains in print with an online version. Yet, it too struggles with a 20^th century business model in the high-tech, digitized, 21^st century, and as a result has been reducing staff significantly, according to Time.

The newsroom at CBS has fared better because of its medium, but it no longer has the influence it once did. CBS was once referred to as the “Tiffany Network” because in 1950 it was the first to embrace new technology, color television. It was home to broadcast news pioneers Edward R. Murrow, William Shirer and Walter Cronkite, names unknown to most people under 40 today.

The last decade has been nothing but upheaval at the “Los Angeles Times” – change of ownership, a rapid succession of editors, declines in circulation, and bankruptcy, according to the Times. 

The New York Times newsroom, 1942

 

In 2009, “The NewYork Times,” which has gone through a series of layoffs that have reduced newsroom staff, went to Carlos Slim, Mexican telecommunications magnate, to help finance its news business with an initial injection of a quarter billion dollars. Slim now owns a significant stake in the company. The Times has sold off media properties, such as “The Boston Globe,” which the company sold this year to Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry for $70 million, also a fire-sale deal, according to the two newspapers. 

While journalism’s former power-houses have adapted to 21^st century change – websites, apps and social media tools from Twitter to Tumbler – the are still symbolically and culturally, “old media.”

It’s not just technology, but it’s how technology is changing how people read – consume – news and information. It’s changing how information is collected and it’s changing how news is written and disseminated. Where print reporters once just needed a pen and a notebook to gather news and a keyboard to tell the story, they now need a video camera, a smart phone and a graphic artist.  

Today, information on a global scale is so accessible and so immediate, and by so many for so many, that little news appears on the front pages of morning papers that already hasn’t been posted online or broadcast hours earlier.

While I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s with the broad-sheet newspapers of the Washington Post and New York Times hitting the porch every morning and finding them wondrous inventions of the modern age, in 2013 they look like relics of a bygone era.

The Internet and rapidly advancing technology such as iPhones and iPads has effectively made it a reality for anyone to custom-make what news and information they want to read and see when they want to see and read it.

The individual now has the power the five titans once had. The reader or news consumer can shape the news and information they want to receive; select from an enormous menu of websites and cable channels for the information they believe they need to understand issues and events in order to form opinions.

Whether another era can occur when a small group of media titans control the flow of information seems doubtful. (Even the international media titan, Rupert Murdoch, has struggled with technological change – phone hacking scandals at his London newspaper, News of the World, forced him to close the paper and split his media empire into two entities that separated the multinational’s entertainment and publishing properties.)

It’s unclear exactly what the future will hold for American journalism. For the moment, news websites like Huffington Post, Politico and BuzzFeed appear to be re-defining journalism and news, which is not unlike what Henry Luce did with Time magazine more than 80 years ago.

“His greatest influence may have been in broadening American culture, in involving millions of middlebrow Americans in the arts, in theater, in religion and education,” Halberstam wrote of Luce. “He had a powerful sense of what people should read, what was good for them to read and an essential belief worthy of the best journalist, that any subject of importance could be made interesting.”

The difference today is, thanks to technology, people can choose to have their own sense of what to read by selecting from a multitude of media instead of relying on just a few.