How Opera Explains the Decline of Your Local Newspaper
Chisholm, Minnesota was founded by a man named Archie Chisholm, a Scot who came from Ontario, Canada.
—Shoeless Joe. W.P. Kinsella. 1982.
“Local Facebook groups have supplanted local newspapers,” wrote Jim Waterson in Britain’s The Guardian yesterday, June 15th. The article described a study conducted by an outfit called the Charitable Journalism Project, which found that “local audiences [have] increasingly turned to online community groups” as sources of news, rather than the neighborhood newspaper. According to Waterson’s story, one reason given by the CJP study for the decline of local papers was the use of “increasingly provocative headlines” and “‘flashing adverts.’” But while it’s easy enough to blame the papers themselves for their decline, it seems rather more likely that the movement away from professionally produced local news has rather more to do with forces working at a larger scale than it does anything to do with the enticements of social media over the sins of contemporary journalism. By ignoring that possibility stories like Waterson’s may be even worse than not covering the story at all, because they fail to allow for the possibility that anything can be done about it — a possibility that’s opened up by considering the issue through the lens of mathematics and science, not through the lens of journalism. What may be killing journalism, in other words, is precisely the sort of inattention to reality that real journalists used to disdain.
In order to get there however requires quite a detour through fields seemingly far from journalism: opera. “Consider the fate of Giaccomo,” writes statistician Nassim Taleb, in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, “an opera singer at the end of the nineteenth century, before sound recording was invented.” This (invented) Giaccomo lives in “a small and remote town in central Italy,” far away from the superstars at La Scala in Milan. The big stars of the opera world don’t want to travel to Giaccomo’s town — they only want to go to the very biggest venues, where they can reap the greatest revenue. As a result, our man Giaccomo can make a living singing to people who want to hear good singing, but aren’t willing or able to travel all the way to Milan to get it.
It’s unnecessary to think solely about opera singers in that regard, certainly. Take a look, for example, at the opening lines of the novel — Shoeless Joe — that became the Hollywood film, Field of Dreams: “My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name.” The book is about the ghost of one Joseph Jackson, “Shoeless Joe,” a great player of the Chicago White Sox who was banned, along with seven teammates, for throwing the 1919 World Series. But while the novel is about memories, and crime, and the relations of fathers and sons, one of the underlying contexts is about how there were, once, “tenth-rate” baseball leagues in little towns in the Carolinas that could give an arena even to washed-up stars like Joe Jackson, who were shunned everywhere else.
That, after all, is one of the buried contexts surrounding the subplot of “Moonlight” Graham in Kinsella’s novel. More properly, “Moonlight” is Archibald Wright Graham, a ballplayer who appeared in exactly one inning of one game for the 1905 New York Giants — and never got to appear at the plate, ready to hit. I won’t reiterate the plot of the novel, but I will point out that, incidentally, it includes an investigation conducted at the Chisholm Free Press, the newspaper of record for the town in which Archibald Graham lived his post-baseball life, and where he died in 1965.
Kinsella mentions that Chisholm Free Press is published by one Veda Ponikvar, a “highly decorated Democrat” who “has traveled the world as part of State Department delegations to international trade conferences and state funerals.” And he goes on to point out that Graham got his chance with the Giants because, when he was a young man, every farm town in Iowa, and indeed all over the Midwest, had their baseball team. That is to say, both Graham and Ponikvar were kinds of Giaccomos: people who maybe didn’t have the talents of Christy Mathewson or Ring Lardner, but who nevertheless did have talents, and were allowed to express those talents.
Those teams have mostly gone away, now. Even the official minor league teams recently have contracted: as Joan Niesen noted for Global Sports Matters in late 2021, after “the Professional Baseball Agreement between Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball expired” on September 1st, 2020, the Major Leagues decided to contract the number of official minor league franchises “from 162 teams to 120.” The effect means that there are now fewer opportunities for potential major league players — and therefore, fewer Moonlight Grahams.
For the major league teams, of course, that’s all to the good: clearly Graham wasn’t a good enough player to become a regular with the Giants, and so the roster spot he briefly occupied would have been better given to someone else. Some might point out that Graham likely only got the shot that he did at all because the major leagues were segregated at the time — who knows what talented player from the Negro Leagues could have done with that chance. But such an argument, I think, misses the main point in just the way that Waterson’s story, or indeed the original study from the Charitable Journalism Project, does. That point is revealed by really studying the work of Taleb — or more significantly, the work of his mentor, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.
In what are becoming famous lines, at least as far the mathematical literature goes, Mandelbrot once pointed out (in The Fractal Geometry of Nature) that “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” What he meant was that nature does not follow the regular patterns of ideal shapes like squares or cones. Instead reality is “irregular and fragmented,” or as he put it, rough. But while in the past scientists and others threw up their hands at that irregularity, Mandelbrot sought ways to quantify it — asking questions like, how rough is it? Is it “rougher” than some other thing? Mandelbrot, in short, would not have been satisfied by noting that Giaccomo’s singing wasn’t equal to the chief tenor’s at La Scala, nor that Moonlight Graham’s ability wasn’t equal to that of Christy Mathewson’s. Instead, Mandelbrot found ways to measure inequality.
Among those ways, and likely the chief of them, is what is known as the power law distribution: a mathematical description of observations. Power law distributions describe situations in which things are highly unequal, where one observation is likely to be vastly greater (or less) than another; as one source has put it, where the “average is dominated by rare, extreme outcomes and is quite far above the most probable outcome.” Visually, they appear like this:
Take a roomful of people, one of whom is Bill Gates. When talking about the average height of the people in the room, in other words, Gates is not especially noteworthy. But if we are talking about the average income of the people in the room, then whether Gates is present or not will have a huge effect. So power law distributions help to measure how much a single observation can affect the total — and hence, how irregular, or rough, it is.
Still, while that’s interesting enough in its own right, that isn’t why power law distributions may be so significant in relation to the problem of local newspapers. The real point is that power law distributions are some of what are known as “contagious” distributions, or in other words “situations where the occurrence of a number of events enhances the probability of the occurrence of a further event,” as mathematicians Daley and Vere-Jones once described the point. Power law distributions, in other words, describe situations in which there’s a higher likelihood of seeing something far from the ordinary: if Bill Gates is in the room, then there’s a higher likelihood that Jeff Bezos is there too. In this way, power distributions describe occasions that “sensitive to initial conditions” — i.e., where outcomes can be vastly changed by a single observation. Hence, if a set of observations are describable with a power law distribution, then we can conclude that that phenomena is one that is much more vulnerable to slight changes than one that isn’t.
Perhaps unfortunately for the news business, circulation figures for publications have always been describable in terms of power law distributions. Here, for example, is a graph of the circulation of most widely-distributed newspapers in the United States in 2007:
And just in case you might think this is something that’s limited to the English-language press, here’s the circulation of the top magazines in the Dutch language:
The point is then may be that the journalism business is one that is remarkably fragile: a single instance can greatly change the results. But if so, then — as Mandelbrot’s work shows — it may be possible to quantify just how vulnerable the news business really is by researching the circulation figures of the journals in question.
To some, of course, such a line of research would be fairly foolish: if journalism really is such a will-o-the-wisp kind of industry, then it would be ridiculous to think that an investigation of sales would tell you anything about how to get people to read it. Yet, such an argument is itself pretty silly: by researching circulation figures and getting a sense of the “roughness” of the journalism landscape, it might be possible to determine how much of an area is required to support a certain size of newspaper. One of the founding papers in power law research, for example — “The Relation Between the Number of Species and the Number of Individuals in a Random Sample of an Animal Population,” from 1943 — determined how large an area a biologist had to search in so as to find a species of a given rareness. Similar sorts of research might be able to determine how many reporters, editors, and so forth a given village might be able to support.
That sort of research, however, is just the sort of thing that working journalists like Jim Waterson have little time for, to be sure. What’s sad, however, is that people who should know better — people, that is, who are at least passingly familiar with the work of Benoit Mandelbrot and other scientists that could be applied to issues like this one — are largely loathe to do that kind of work. And what’s worse, aren’t willing to support those who — if they were only aware of the possibility — could. Today — as Waterson’s piece implicitly says — we’re only interested in the Christy Mathewsons and the Ring Lardners of the world, hardly caring about the Moonlight Grahams or Veda Ponikvars. Until we have the tools to measure the ratios between the two, however, it’s entirely possible that there won’t be any of the latter — which, necessarily, means fewer and fewer of the former.
