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Played by Clark Johnson, The Wire's Gus Haynes is the epitome of old school journalism

GUS Haynes is old school. A product of what is known this side of the Atlantic as court and council reporting, he assiduously built his contacts, broke stories, and eventually but deservedly promoted to city desk editor on the Baltimore Sun.

Here, however, he became ever more despairing as his familiar day, usually spent poring over reporters’ copy to ensure it all stood up, is gradually eroded through a series of staff cuts and a management-initiated refocusing towards stories that favoured a “Dickensian” sweep.

Fictitious though this account of how the Sun is subjected to the commercial requirements of modern day news corporations may be, as it was told in the fifth series of The Wire, it nonetheless reflected the experiences of vast numbers of US reporters and editors, with newspapers there shedding close to 25,000 editorial staff in 2008 and 2009 so far.

David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun crime beat reporter with 13 years’ experience before going on to create The Wire, appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee in Washington this month to put forward his views on how it all went so wrong for the country’s newspaper industry. Not known for pulling his punches, what Simon had to say left journalists’ forums buzzing with excitement, executives shifting uncomfortably in their suits, and an online news community spluttering with outrage.

No one was spared in his testimony. “High-end journalism is dying in America and unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else. The internet … leeches reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.

“I was (made redundant) in 1995, well before the internet began to seriously threaten. The Baltimore Sun was eliminating its afternoon edition and trimming nearly 100 editors and reporters when the paper was achieving 37% profits. The money required to make a great newspaper – including the R&D funding that might have anticipated and planned for the internet revolution – all went back to Wall Street.

“Our ambitions … were not betrayed by the internet. We had trashed them on our own, years before. And now, having made ourselves less essential, less comprehensive and less able to offer a product that people might purchase online, we pretend to an undeserved martyrdom at the hands of new technology.

“The industry is going to have to find a way to charge for online content. Yes, I have heard the post-modern rallying cry that information wants to be free. But information isn’t. It costs money to send reporters to London, Fallujah and Capitol Hill. It costs money to do the finest kind of journalism.”

Simon testified alongside Steve Coll, a Pullitzer Prize winner and former managing editor of The Washington Post. Blaming technological change, its impact on advertising markets, and the recession for current US newspaper industry woes far more than on its business models, Coll added: “The crisis in journalism is not fundamentally a crisis in readership – it is a crisis of profitable readership.”

Unlike Detroit car makers, American journalism remains uneasy about “reducing the distance” between government and its media inspectorate, but Coll is calling for tax breaks to allow failing newspapers that are converted to non-profit status – something that is more widely spoken of. Essentially, this would mean that these new organisations would enjoy charitable status along with existing public broadcasters.

However, Coll has his doubts about the viability of such enterprises. “This approach certainly is no panacea. There are dozens of newspapers with large circulations threatened by changing technology and the bad economy; even in the best case, very few of them can be expected to make this transition to non-profit strategies.” However, he does believe that Capitol Hill would make any switch easier with a relaxing of taxation.

Simon’s strident testimony predictably drew fire from the blogosphere. Its champion, Arianna Huffington, whose site The Huffington Post was singled out by The Wire creator as typical of new standards, riposted: “The discussion needs to move from ‘How do we save newspapers?’ to ‘How do we strengthen journalism—via whatever platform it is delivered?’ We must never forget that our current media culture led to the widespread failure to serve the public interest by accurately covering two of the biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the war in Iraq and the financial meltdown.”

The involvement of two star names has elevated this debate into the public arena. It also comes as the American Customer Satisfaction Index has recorded a third successive fall for newspapers, with just 63% of buyers happy with they find on their newsstands. This is in spite of circulation climbs, albeit quite slight, for all of the major publishers.

And while those same media corporations are facing falls in advertising of as much as 30%, creating huge alarm across the industry, newspaper groups in the UK are faring even worse. It is perhaps a measure of the desperate situation that Trinity Mirror, Wales’ largest publisher, is reported in recent research as being able to take “some comfort” from “nascent advertising stability” that saw its most recent advertising revenues down 36% for its regional divisions, as opposed to down 37% for the first two months of 2009.

But John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate committee that heard from Simon, Coll and Huffington, says that this is only the beginning. “Just looking at the erosion of newspapers is not the full picture; it’s just one casualty of a completely shifting and churning information landscape. Most experts believe that what we are seeing happen to newspapers is just the beginning—soon, perhaps in a matter of a few years, television and radio will experience what newspapers are experiencing now.”