Phase One of the Stupidity Epidemic: Curiosity Killed The Cat, And Digital Media Killed Curiosity

Dave Copeland
Aug 9, 2017 · 4 min read

Another excerpt from “The Stupidity Epidemic” draft. As previously mentioned, please feel free to leave constructive edits, comments and criticisms on this post.

It didn’t really dawn on me that the general interest newspaper was on the endangered species list until 2003, when I was working as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in what was, even then, one of the country’s last two newspaper towns (1). There was a newsstand in downtown Pittsburgh where you could buy magazines, cigarettes, candy, gum, soda, chewing tobacco, rolling papers, cheap cigars in lieu of rolling papers and — oh yeah — newspapers. Walking by the newsstand one morning on the way to Pittsburgh’s City-County Building, I noticed something odd: the trash can in front of the newsstand was full of discarded copies of the day’s edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, our competitor.

I noticed this a few more times before I started picking up on patterns. There were more papers in the bin on Mondays and Fridays, and more copies in the fall than in any other season. It was months before I actually got curious enough to reach in and grab one of the discarded copies of what seemed like a perfectly good newspaper.

And the copy I grabbed was perfectly good, with one exception: it was missing the sports page. I grabbed another and another, and those were also missing the sports page. In sports-obsessed Pittsburgh, enough readers had decided it A) wasn’t worth buying the paper everyday and B) that once you bought it, it was only worth keeping the section you planned to read. Mondays were such a busy day in the fall because people wanted to read coverage of the previous day’s Steelers game. In the middle of the summer (before NFL training camp started) there were fewer copies. The forever .500 Pirates just didn’t seem worth buying a newspaper over.

Meanwhile, the blogging revolution was well underway. Blogs went mainstream following the September 11 terrorist attack when a lot of people in a lot of numbed corners of the world were trying to make sense of the what was happening and were craving insight on what other people were feeling and thinking. People wanted different interpretations of the news, and that was only exacerbated in 2003 when the U.S. started its newer war in Iraq. There was a sense of distrust building for the traditional media that helped fuel interest in blogs: why am I going to trust reporters who have agreed to embed with U.S. military units to give me an unadulterated account of what is happening when an Iraqi named Salam Pax is blogging about his day-to-day life in occupied Iraq?

In 2003, news-focused blogs were still largely seen as a compliment to — not a replacement for mainstream news coverage. Blogs had actually been around for several years at that point, but they had mostly been used by computer geeks to document what they were working on. Late 2001 and early 2002 showed blogs could be used for far more than that, with the first wave of bloggers (including myself, having jumped on the bandwagon in May 20022) documenting what they were reading and thinking, and how they were interpreting the news and media they were consuming.

There were also early hints that blogging could be profitable. Gawker was launched in January 2003 and would go on to spawn an empire of targeted blogs. Andrew Sullivan was starting his own blogging empire on AndrewSullivan.com by providing mostly-conservative commentary on current events. But, by being gay, HIV-positive and Catholic, Sullivan offered an angle that defied the mainstream media’s definition of what a conservative should think, look like, and act like.

Which led me to this great brain-fart of an idea several years later, and several years too late. It was an idea that would have been even better and had the chance of making me fabulously wealthy if I had it right there in 2003 as I pulled discarded newspapers from a trashcan as people heading to work walked past me: What if those people throwing out the sports page really only cared about the Steelers, and have to read around the Penguins, Pirates and University of Pittsburgh sports news? What if they were gamblers who really just wanted the latest lines, or fantasy football players who wanted to see whether that big hit Jerome Bettis took in yesterday’s fourth quarter was going to keep him out of the next week’s game? What if they were sports agents looking for coverage on proposed changes to baseball’s salary cap?

If there was a publication, or a series of publications, that could appeal to these people and give them the increasingly specific information they were looking for, they would stop reading the newspaper altogether. And blogs were making it easier for anyone to start offering that very specialized information.

I didn’t realize it then, but there was a huge shift in the media underway. And newspapers were going to be one of the last in the legacy media industries to realize a key fact about the new media landscape: In their effort to try and appeal to everyone, newspapers would end up appealing to no one.

(1) The Trib’s Pittsburgh edition went online-only in 2016, making Pittsburgh a one-paper city. At this writing, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Fort Wayne, Ind., Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. are the only cities with populations over 100,000 served by two, daily print newspapers.

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Recovering journalist, author, communication studies professor. 617-433-7851 htp://copewrites.com

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