Dealing with an existential crisis

I’ve been facing an existential crisis.

But this is no ordinary crisis about the purpose or value or meaning of life (Susan Wolf already covered that). I have been grappling with the purpose or value — or perhaps lack thereof — of newspaper column writing.

This pseudo-crisis was spurred by a tangential discussion that I had in my journalism class when the question of the use of opinion in journalism was posed. I held my breath. Even as the discussion continued vigorously, I could not bring myself to mutter anything. How could people question the place that opinions held in journalistic writing, a place that it has long occupied? Does what I write have any bearing?

Newspapers have been publishing editorial pages for centuries. The modern op-ed page, which features opinions from people not working for the paper, appeared in 1970 in The New York Times under John Oakes, the editorial page editor at the time. This one page would revolutionize journalism, opening both print and online journalism to a broader array of perspectives and backgrounds.

Op-eds seem to be flourishing to this day. Last year, The New York Times innovation report, a 96-page internal document, was leaked. Led by Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the publisher’s son and presumably heir to the organization, it examines the changes needed in the newsroom in order to maintain high readership levels. If anything, though, the report implies the continued, if not rising, popularity of the opinion section. In an effort to expand user-generated content, the Times is looking to “expand products around opinion” and expand the base of people from which they attract op-eds from, as analyzed by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

However, according to the Pew Research Center, print newspapers are leaving less space for opinion, cutting opinion pieces from publication and personnel. From 2006 to 2013, membership in the Association of Opinion Journalists, the organization that represents editorial writers and columnists, dropped by over 50 percent.

Based on this trend, newspaper columns, despite their popularity, are disappearing. Many attribute the demise of opinion to financial reasons, but the role of objectivity in journalism seems to play a role as well. When people seek hard news stories, they seek straight facts, not the opinions of random people who deem themselves qualified enough to opine in the first place. After all, we come from a media age with a deep-rooted tradition of hard-cut reporting.

Nonetheless, younger generations do not particularly find appeal in traditional news, as affirmed by Pew surveys according to the Poynter Institute for journalism. Furthermore, complete objectivity is near impossible to achieve in writing. As pointed out by the Pew Research Center, “The method is objective, not the journalist.” And with the goals of democratizing discourse among regular people from diverse backgrounds and influencing public opinion, we cannot forget about the role that subjectivity plays in journalism. There has been a greater recognition of subjectivity in journalism ever since the turn of the 20th century, according to the American Press Institute, when the concept of “realism,” or the sole reporting of facts, as opposed to objectivity, came into focus. As the journalist, editor and journalism professor Victor S. Navasky points out in his book, we need more than just events that are objectively reported; we need “critical opinion.” The goal of a publication should be to “to explain the underlying meaning of the news … unrestrained by the demands of objectivity.”

What journalism needs is not objectivity, but rather accuracy and honesty. We need the facts, but we also need analysis. And we need opinion — the opinions of not exclusively the columnists hired by the paper in question. Journalism may also be facing an existential crisis in this respect, but opinion will always have a place in journalism, more particularly in newspapers.

Returning to the questions I posed earlier, I cannot say whether what I write here even matters because frankly, it doesn’t. But we’ve entered a new era in which plurality is valued over straight objectivity, and hopefully from a plurality in perspective and opinion can we foster more multilateral, diverse discussion.

Sarah Sakha is a freshman from Scottsdale, Ariz. She can be reached at ssakha@princeton.edu.