These facts suggest that American auto manufacturers are not the only industry to seriously misjudge its customers. Newspaper readers, like car shoppers, are rejecting the latest products and looking elsewhere. And newspapers, like Detroit auto companies, seem to be at a loss for what to do about it, vainly studying the latest reader surveys and focus group reports for clues. There are of course as many answers to that question as there are disenchanted news consumers. But there are some rather clear patterns at work.
Many observers point to the widening rift between newspaper profitability and good journalism.
Eighty percent of the nation's newspapers are now controlled by a handful of newspaper chains, they note, a figure which has nearly doubled in the last three decades. The franchising of America's newspaper industry has also robbed many papers of a meaningful connection with their local communities. A growing body of literature tackles the vaunted objectivity ethic at the heart of American journalism. Today's journalists are often seen as rude and arrogant representatives of the establishment rather than as champions of the people. This fact was forcefully illustrated in a 1991 Kettering Foundation study called Citizens and Politics which found that the media is partly to blame for the gap that has developed between the citizenry and our nation's political leadership.