By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL – Journalism is in trouble in the United States, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Philip Meyer hopes to do something about it.

Meyer, who holds the Knight chair at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, has written a new book being published this month by the University of Missouri Press. The Vanishing Newspaper, subtitled Saving Journalism in the Information Age, is something of a guidebook for industry leaders.

"Newspaper people are my friends," Meyer wrote. "The message in these pages is an attempt to warn and empower them. I pray that it helps."

Among the reasons he undertook the book was that he has loved newspapers since delivering them by bicycle at age 13, winter and summer, through the poorest part of Clay Center, Kan. A more important reason was that he saw good journalism as a cornerstone of both American democracy and shared American values.

In The Vanishing Newspaper, Meyer describes the serious and growing challenges to the newspaper business and suggests how it needs to adapt if it hopes to survive.

"Newspaper publishers might believe that the abnormally high profit margins that they enjoyed relative to other business in the 20^th century are their birthright, but they are not," Meyer said. "They were the result of a condition that no longer exists: their near-monopoly control over retailers’ access to their customers."

That monopoly was natural because of the high cost of a printing press, he wrote. Technology such as radio, television and now the Internet, which creates cheaper means of distributing information, has disrupted it and likely will continue to do so.

"The most interesting of the new technologies are being invented by non-journalists, and often they are ignorant of the culture of truth-telling and fairness that enabled the best news givers to prevail," he said. "That’s not an insurmountable problem as long as there is enough varied experimentation going on to allow truth to prevail."

Another challenge is that newspapers are increasingly owned by media chains linked to Wall Street, he said. Almost gone are the days when wealthy families owned and ran newspaper and often took great pride in both their quality and independence. Investors chiefly interested in quarterly profits create an incentive for publishers to cut costs by reducing staff, which in many cases also cuts quality. Meyer sees that as a false economy.

"High-quality journalism will still be economically feasible, but it won’t be as profitable," Meyer said. "The problem is not one of maintaining the old profitability. That can’t be done in a sustainable way. The real problem is adjusting to profit levels that are normal for competitive markets."

The first two chapters describe how newspaper journalism can survive as advertiser-supported and socially responsible. Subsequent chapters show how advertisers are responding to the new technologies and present Meyer’s evidence that quality in journalism remains good business.

Later, he recounts the history of investors’ increasing influence on newspapers and offers suggestions about how the newer disruptive technologies can be harnessed to traditional values.

"The final chapter is an appeal for solidarity among the men and women who do the day-to-day work of journalism and on whom the maintenance of its standards ultimately depends," he wrote.

Meyer, who once turned down the deanship of the Columbia University School of Journalism, has been a UNC faculty member since 1981. A former reporter, he also was a long-time employee of Knight-Ridder and is both a past consultant and current contributor to USA Today. Pioneering studies he conducted in Detroit after the riots there in 1967 resulted in part of the coverage that earned a Pulitzer Prize for the staff of the Detroit Free Press.

He received the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement at the association’s annual meeting in 2000.

"The reporting of public opinion in the media is commonplace because of the commitment that (Meyer) made to precision journalism more than 30 years ago," said the award citation. "While journalists’ reports of public opinion and media polls seem second nature to us now, it is the widespread adoption of his prescripts that began a movement to change the face of a segment of the news business.

"He began with the simple premise that ‘journalists would be wrong less often if they adopted some of the research tools of the social scientists,’ and he altered the course of a segment of journalism education for the next generation."

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Note: Meyer can be reached at (919) 962-4085.

Contact: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596.