Let’s start with an assertion:
Digital news is better than print.
Think of the daily newspaper, the Morning Miracle as Dave Kindredcalled it. Think of the daily print edition of The New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal (just so we don’t get bogged down in critiques of a given outlet).
Whichever one you’re thinking of, that paper is the pinnacle of American daily journalism. It’s got the best reporters, editors, photographers, designers. It’s got nearly unlimited resources. It’s got scope and ambition and legitimacy in the eyes of the public.
And by the time you read that printed newspaper, the news is (at best) six hours old.
Stories can’t be easily shared. They can’t be updated. If there’s a typo, it’s there forever. If there’s a mistake, it can’t be erased, only corrected the next day.
Just for the moment, let’s put the vital business and societal issues on the back burner. For readers, digital news is better.
Digital news has also become … well, just news. There’s not the bifurcation between “digital” and “print” that a generation of us lived through. Print circulation has been dropping for decades. News is digital, and it has been since the early 2000s.
The announcement was seen as shocking, as a great loss. But why? Think about it. When was the last time you used a print newspaper to check a box score, or see what was on TV? It’s been years, right? So realistically, practically, we’re not losing anything we’ve been using.
But at the same time … yeah, it did feel sad and wrong.
Why?
Because something was lost.
In 1912, French sociologist Emile Durkheim published “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,” one of the canonical works in modern sociology.
The book is the result of Durkheim’s ethnographic study of indigenous tribes in Australia. For our purposes here, his discussion of totems and totemism is most salient.
You probably know totems through their association with the poles used by some Indigenous tribes in the U.S. More broadly, a totem is any item that has spiritual significance for a group or tribe. Durkheim wrote:
The totem is not simply a name; it is an emblem, a true coat of arms.
One example Durkheim describes are wooden objects called churingas, viewed as totems by a tribe in central Australia. “The collective fate of the entire clan is bound up with theirs. Losing them is a disaster, the greatest misfortune that can befall the group.”
Speaking of another tribe and its totem, Durkheim writes:
It is a material representation of the clan.
In grad school, I did an independent study on organizational sociology with an emphasis on institutionalism. Put simply and broadly, institutionalism is the study of the practices, attitudes, and beliefs that have become a part of an organization's culture. Whenever you hear the phrase “that’s just the way we’ve always done things,” that’s institutionalism.
The goal of institutions, according to institutional theory, is stability. An organization's goal is to be as stable as possible, in order to extend its own life. To be stable, an organization needs to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the public, so the idea of "legitimacy" becomes key here.
In their groundbreaking paper that introduced new institutional theory, John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan wrote that organizations accept and build formal myths into their structure and their culture not necessarily because they are rational, efficient, or best help them reach their goals. They are adopted to satisfy external beliefs and expectations.
Meyer and Rowan hypothesized that organizations that adopt the formal myths of a given industry are seen as more legitimate externally and therefore grow bigger and are more likely to succeed.
The tl;dr version: Legitimacy is the goal of organizations.
My sociology advisor, the wonderful Dr. Steve Brechin, also introduced me to the idea of the symbolic structure. A symbolic structure is an element of an institution or an organization that holds great symbolic power more than rational or economic power.
Dr. Brechin used the college library as an example.
In a lot of ways, a library is not an economic or financial asset to a university. The costs to maintain a library far outweigh what it brings in. In the digital age, when all students walk around with the entirety of human knowledge accessible in their backpacks and pockets, is there a need for a gigantic building on campus with miles of stacks of dusty old books that no one has opened in decades?
Of course there is, right?
Because the value of everything can’t be quantified.
A college library is, in many ways, a symbolic structure. It adds legitimacy to a college campus, to the point where no traditional university would have a campus without one. That legitimacy, institutional theory holds, is more important to the school than a rational model would indicate.
The notion of symbolic structure is closely related to Durkheim’s notion of the totem, in which it serves as a name and an emblem for a tribe or group It is what gives a people an identity and a connection to something greater than themselves.
Colleges have libraries.
And journalists have newspapers.
Print newspapers.
The print newspaper is the symbolic structure of American journalism. It is the totem of American journalism. It is, to use Durkheim’s words, the coat of arms, the emblem of a journalist, the material representation of the clan.
It is the source from which the professionals within the organization draw their power and prestige and legitimacy.
And legitimacy is the goal of all organizations.
That’s why its loss hurts so much, even though digital news is better for readers.
Even if we don’t read the print newspaper anymore, it still feels like a loss when a community’s paper stops printing. That’s why the L.A. Times’ decision feels so brutal, even if none of us read the print edition any more.
Symbolic structures have real power. And when they disappear, the legitimacy they carried goes with it.
Let’s apply this to last week’s stunning news about The New York Times’ sports section.
You can make the argument that disbanding the sports desk in favor of The Athletic makes a certain amount of logical sense. Why duplicate efforts? You’ve got an established sports section with excellent journalists writing under your corporate umbrella, there’s an economic logic to doing away with your sports desk.
(For my purposes here, I’m staying away from the union-busting angle of this story, but Dave Zirin wrote beautifully about it here.)
Except that it just feels wrong.
Because this is the sports department of Red Smith, Dave Anderson, Gay Talese, Robert Lipsyte, George Vecsey, Tyler Kepner, John Branch and so many more. Only three sports columnists have ever won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, and two of them were at The Times (Smith and Anderson).
This is the flagship paper of American Journalism doing away with a core section of the paper. Michael Schur made this point on BlueSky: There is no one working for The New York Times whose job it is to cover the New York Yankees.
The Times is eliminating one of its symbolic structures. A material representation of who we are and what we do.
A totem.
“Losing them is a disaster, the greatest misfortune that can befall the group.”