There are plenty of arguments one could make both for and against government offering a bailout to newspapers.

And the arguments, at least in America, would probably fall on deaf ears, as the White House seems to have already made up its mind:

With the Boston Globe just the latest big-city newspaper teetering on the edge of shutdown, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs brushed aside a question about whether the federal government will consider stepping in to help save newspapers, as it has with so many other industries.

“I don’t know what, in all honesty, government can do about it,” Gibbs told reporters.

Well … what, in all honesty, government could do about it is the same damn thing government has done for every other failing industry — throw buckets of cash at the problem.

I acknowledge that, as CNN goes on to paraphrase Gibbs, there would certainly be hurdles and questions involved in bailing out an industry that (at least theoretically) lists “examination and criticism of government” as one of its top priorities.

However, I would imagine there are ways around that problem. In the grand scheme of things, withholding bailout money from a traditional industry because part of their job involves interacting with government and reporting about it to the people smacks of either pettiness … or resignation. Or, of course, pragmatic politics.

While President Obama’s superhero shine may have dimmed somewhat in the eyes of leftists as he has moved towards the centre since his inauguration, most of us would still have a tough time believing that he’d be unable to find some cash to keep newspapers afloat while still managing to allow them to report independently about his administration.

If it was a priority to keep newspapers afloat, believe me, they’d find a way.

But in brushing off the question, Gibbs goes for the quick shot, implying that there are issues of coverage and objectivity in play:

“You guys didn’t think $100 million meant a lot a few weeks ago,” Gibbs said. “But looking at some of the balance sheets, $100 million seems to mean a lot.” Ouch.

That’s nothing more than a glib way — and kind of funny — way to duck a real explanation. And I would speculate that the reason for the dodge is because, if the White House has considered a bailout for newspapers at all in the middle of all of this, it’s been flatly rejected because there’s no point in throwing good money after bad.

So long as network television news, CNN and their cable news buddies, mainstream magazines like Time and Newsweek and newsradio from all sides of the political spectrum are going strong … why would the White House step into save newspapers, really?

There are the altruistic motives, sure, about the fourth estate and all that … but really? Aside from journalists themselves and their ever-shrinking cadre of True Believers, who cares about that?

In the minds of many more people, tossing $100 million at the quickly fossilizing newspaper industry would be tantamount to propping up the failed status quo in order to keep the market from evolving into its next iteration — and that would be a fairly un-capitalist stance for a White House already hearing the ceaseless yap of retarded talk radio DJs with a special case of “Socialist!” Tourette’s.

Add to that the Republican-manufactured image of an election given to Obama by the mainstream media — we all remember how “in the tank” became part of the political lexicon for those six months, right? — and you’re just poking the Right with a stick a few short weeks after the saner elements of the party finally began to climb on board.

A government bailout for American newspapers can’t happen right now. Not only is it probably a waste of money, but the political optics are terrible and the industry as we know it is well past the point where a $100-million injection could really “save” anything.

It is not hard to rip on the future of newspapers. If it is easy to kick someone while they’re down, it is even easier to punch them in the face while they lie on their deathbed. When it comes to fishwrap, I’ve done both. Sometimes gleefully. Sometimes while bemoaning the future of a world where free dailies and blogs halfheartedly attempt to duplicate the real work that newspapers do.

I also pick on the Toronto Star a lot. Once again, it’s easy. I worked there, I know the culture and I can still predict, with startling accuracy, the angle and lead they will use on any given story. That doesn’t make them a bad newspaper, just an easy target.

Regardless, I wanted to share this fantastic investigative piece by Kevin Donovan. It’s a all-too-rare reminder of what real investigative reporting can uncover. This wouldn’t happen in your favourite free daily — nowhere near enough staff, or space, to get it done. It wouldn’t happen online. Bloggers don’t have the credentials, the time to devote to the project or — for the most part — the years of experience required to navigate something like this.

It’s a good ol’ fashioned newspaper expose-a-crook yarn, and you should read it with your feet up, a big cup of coffee in your hand and then reflect on the fact that there are still a few good reasons we kill millions of trees every week.

Sex and chairty: James Arion profits from both

Job well done.

Soon we will return to juvenile rants about why the Detroit Red Wings are God’s gift to hockey. And whooo boy, they sure look the part these days.

It is, after all, springtime, and this is what we do every Spring.

But first, I read something today that helped clarify an idea I’d been wrestling with — and since it’s about preserving the very fabric of the industry that employs me … I figured the hockey could wait.

Before we begin, a shout out to an excellent blog penned a by a friend who puts forward an idea that is fascinating, if unwieldy, and — apologies for the bluntness, but it’s how we do things here — would kill the damn beast faster than just lining copy editors up against the wall and shooting them in the head.

(But it’s totally a gloriously creative new idea, and well worth a look, so go take one so we’re all on the same page here.)

“What it really means is that newspapers are spending far, far too much money on far, far too many people producing far, far too many stories on far, far too many pages.”

As a senior editor at a free daily newspaper that publishes in five markets with a staff of, roughly, 17 … I could have told you that without all the math.

And I’d argue with both Gerson and LaPoint to say that it’s not unused content in the form of totally unread stories on pages that people just  don’t read — it’s the final 400+ words of EVERY story that go consistently unread because less than 5% of the population really wants to read all 800 damn words some daily reporter lugged back from a city hall debate about garbage. I’d argue that readers have no problem reading 24 pages, or 24 stories, if those stories don’t take them five minutes or more apiece to read.

Frankly, if it wasn’t part of my job to see who put what in which story … I’d only read the first seven grafs of 80% of a newspaper’s content. And I love to read, but I know I’m not alone.

An 80 page newspaper costs a lot of money to print, especially now that it won’t be close to paid-for by advertising revenue … but if you chop the last half off of almost every story (we’ll say, for the sake of maintaining some sort of journalistic integrity here, that we’ll leave a few Important stories, as well as most of the columnists, alone) you can go from an 80-page paper to a 45-50 page paper and, I promise you, nobody except the writers and other journalists would care.

But the central idea in the Gerson’s post is one I want to talk about. There’s more to it than I’m quoting (because it’s easier to make my point that way, of course), so go read it already, but here’s the gist. She thinks that focusing on giving people exactly what they want is one way for newspapers to maintain some profitability:

“Why not divide the product up, sell it separately and publish according to readership? So, you maybe have a 10-page, quality news section in tabloid format that comes out daily for free. Your sports is the next big money maker, but your readership and game schedules means it makes sense to publish it only on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, for example. Charge 25 cents for each of those. Sell the arts sections once or twice a week for $1 a pop. Then offer a high quality weekly newsmagazine on weekends that sums up the week’s news and contextualizes in long-form, combined with features. You could charge $1.50 to $5.00 on that alone. Then take your fashion and lifestyle sections, put them into a monthly glossy magazine format and sell them on magazine newsstands at standard magazine rates.”

See what I mean? Now that is some ambitious shit. It takes an idea I’ve had for a while — that newspapers should not be afraid to change their style to focus on what they do best — and takes it to the sort of extreme that would send the industry over a cliff instead of slowly walking down the other side of the hill and off into the sunset. I love the spirit of the idea, but it would never work.

Newspapers  don’t do niches, which is essentially what this is. They can’t. Here’s why in three reasons.

1. The Internet exists. The biggest niche marketer in the history of humanity has cornered the market on that kind of stuff. In the quest to save newspapers from the Online Demons, a lot of people seem to come up with ideas that involve newspapers turning into some sort of World-Wide-Web-on-Paper. It can’t happen like that. The reason newspapers are still read at all in this age when info is everywhere and I can find the answer to any question you might want to ask me in 3.5 seconds is because some people want a simple island that has a little bit of everything they need for (intellectual) life without them having to risk the spooky forest to forage for it. That — and by this point, it’s pretty much ONLY that — is the advantage a daily newspaper has over the ‘net. It’s simple. It’s all here. It’s in one place, and you don’t have to hunt for a news site once you’re done with the sports site and then navigate yourself over to a site that has entertainment listings and then on to weather.ca. Just turn the page. But if I want just sports, or just arts listings or just politics … then I already know where to find as much of a specific subject as I want. I’ve got ‘em bookmarked.

2. Reporters aren’t experts, and neither are columnists. They’re good writers, adept at turning things around quickly, cleanly and spinning a tale about something they knew nothing about eight hours ago. Those are real skills, but with the exception of the shrinking club of beat reporters who haven’t been long ago stripped of their daily beats for budgetary reasons, they’re Just. Not. Experts. They can’t do as thorough a job covering those niches as the people I already go to for my “focused” coverage.

I’m not going to drop a buck to read a thrice-weekly from a bunch of writers from the Toronto Star sports section when there are publications like The Hockey News or Baseball Digest that already go way beyond what The Star is doing and focus entirely on the niche I really want — ie, all hockey, no baseball or basketball. Similarly, I’m not going to pay magazine prices for content that belongs in a newspaper lifestyle section. Why the hell wouldn’t I just buy Vanity Fair or Chatelaine or even Maxim? Pay $1 for a newspaper Arts section once a week?! How about I just grab Now — who do pretty much nothing but Arts and Life — every week for free? Drop $5 for a newsmagazine written by newspaper reporters? Ummm … naw, thanks. I already have Time or MacLean’s for that, and they’ve been dropping weekly newsmagazines since back in the days when people were actually paying $0.50 for a big ol’ newspaper.

3. This plan doesn’t save newspapers, anyway. It breaks them down to their basic components and puts them on the auction block, hoping in desperation for some bids. It’s like a contents sale at the home of a recently deceased person who died intestate. Newspapers, for good or ill, are what they are: A collection of stories that range from news and crime to lifestyle, and arts to sports and politics, and fashion to terrible advice columnists that make me want to throw my coffee against the nearest wall. I’m not trying to romanticize newspapers here, I’m just defining them. That’s what they are. Even our crummy little free daily newspaper has the same basic newspaper elements that you get when you purchase the New York Times.

I’m not saying this idea is without merit. For one thing, nobody is trying to think of things like this, and even though cynics like me love to throw darts, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth using here.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve often thought that newspapers should focus on what they do best, and include the other stuff behind it. Focused marketing, if you will, instead of straight up chopping it all up and going straight for the niches. For instance — and this is the example I always use — the Toronto Sun should make itself a Sports newspaper. Do it now, while people still recognize it as Canada’s best sports section. Throw the remaining money into sports. Make the cover a sports cover unless something so huge it can’t be ignored happens. Make sports the first section in your paper, then crime, then the Sunshine Girl, then everything else. That’s what Sun readers want, anyway. But the key thing is that everything else has to be there — because that’s what newspapers are, a collection of everything that happened yesterday.

You change that, even to help them survive, and you’ve killed them. And the seedlings you grow from the fertilizer provided by the corpse will die shortly thereafter — because while people are increasingly less willing to cough up a buck for a paper, they’d be even more hesitant to cough up a buck for a bastard publication that looks like a newspaper but only has one section.