Newspapers will survive Internet, editor says

Its demise has been predicted for decades, but the newspaper industry will survive even the Internet, the editor of the Deseret Morning News said Tuesday.

The challenge will be not only to meet the demands of instantaneous news, but to guard against ethical breaches that can come from trying to be fast and first, John Hughes told the Rotary Club at its weekly luncheon.

"Because news is transmitted instantly, the consequences of getting it wrong are more serious, and the responsibility of getting it right is much greater," he said. Unlike reporting during the Vietnam War, for example, when anything but the most dramatic stories took several days to be transmitted, today's rapid news means that "the role of the reporter and editor to get the news right is even more critical."

Recent journalistic lapses have included stories by reporters guilty of "inventing or manipulating or overstating or misrepresenting the facts," he noted. Add to that the "tasteless intrusions" of reporters who stick microphones in the face of grieving people.

Intense competition today "generates an excess of ambitious zeal among some reporters," Hughes said, adding that "the problem is that the errors of the few are used by critics to impugn all journalists."

"But the outlook is not all bleak," he said. "The good news is that when the guys who don't get it straight or get it truthfully are discovered, and they've been found to have betrayed their profession, they are fired."

Salt Lake City is fortunate to have "two pretty gutsy newspapers," he said, adding that the Deseret Morning News and Salt Lake Tribune, although they share circulation and advertising personnel, are required by law to be "fiercely separate and fiercely competitive."

Hughes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, as well as former associate director of the U.S. Information Agency and assistant secretary of state for public affairs during the Reagan administration. He cautioned that anyone can "report" online but "there is no news on the Internet unless there's a news organization behind it, and that's generally a newspaper."

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com