By Sheldon Greaves

For a long time we’ve heard about how newspapers are disappearing; even back in the Seventies I heard speculation that computers would give us all our news. The election of Donald Trump saw a surge in subscriptions to major newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times which along with other major newspapers are still in the business of informing and debating the issues of the day. This is a good thing.

Cable news and the internet reign supreme as sources of news for most Americans according to journalism.com. Cable TV accounts for 57%, with online sources at 38%. Radio comes in third at 25%, and newspapers dead last at 20%, despite their recent revival.

This is unfortunate, because newspapers are better at something I call “long news.” They can deliver far more information than a cable or radio newscast, or a blog. It’s simply a matter of verbiage. I’d say that for cable news, the Rachel Maddow Show is one of the very best news programs on cable. A densely-packed hour of factual, well-researched journalism with no fluff that clutters so many other news programs. I went to the page on the MSNBC web site where you can download transcripts of each show, and selected the one for 05 December. I copied the entire transcript and pasted it into a Word document, and did a word count: 8,081 words.

Next, I looked up the word count for a daily edition of the New York Times. A Quora answer that matches what I’ve read elsewhere gives a figure of 150,000 words for each daily print edition of the Times. Just for the sake of comparison, a 400-page novel runs about 100,000 words.

Obviously, not everyone can read every word of the Times every day, but that’s not the point. The point is that the format offered by a daily newspaper provides far greater scope, more room for more stories. It also gives newspapers a crucial advantage over other media: they are better able to follow a story well past the average news cycle. When I started doing post-graduate work at Berkeley, I found myself in a lively (to put it mildly) political arena, and it was during my years there that my politics coalesced into something more deliberate. A major part of that process was when I made a decision to read papers, carefully and regularly. As part of that experiment, I discovered that if one followed a story for a while, it would soon become clear who had it right, who had it wrong, and some sense of outcome. Was the decision a good one or a bad one? Was a case handled well or bungled? Was someone not being truthful? Who swallowed the lies and who didn’t? Who issued corrections or acknowledged their mistakes?

Gradually, I built up a body of evidence to guide my politics and activism. I learned the political lay of the land, and which sources I could trust. It gave me a better nose for bullshit (Fox News began broadcasting the year I graduated. It didn’t take me long to see them for what they were, even then).

That kind of experiment is harder to do now, because there is long-term analysis at sites like Medium or The Conversation and others, but it’s much easier if it’s all in one place. The Times carries the same amount of information as the print edition, or so it appears, but once again, the format gets in the way. The character density of a screen just can’t display as much as an old-school printed newspaper page. It’s harder to scan and pick out things that might be important unless someone puts them front and center. One can search for things, but that assumes you know to look for something in the first place.

In an environment increasingly dominated by sound bites and short-term reporting with less time for verification and hardly any for deeper analysis. The traditional, slower news sources will always bear watching.