May 17, 2009
Correct to a Point
When you hear a newspaper executive claiming that his industry is an essential bulwark of society and that it stands threatened by a new technology that is, as of yet, unready to shoulder the same responsibility, you may be inclined to empathize. And indeed, that much is true enough as it goes.
But when that same newspaper executive then goes on to claim that this predicament has occurred through no fault on the industry’s part, that they have merely been undone by new technologies, feel free to kick out his teeth. At that point, he’s as fraudulent as the most self-aggrandized blogger.
Anyone listening carefully may have noted that I was bought out of my reporting position in 1995. That’s fourteen years ago. That’s well before the internet ever began to seriously threaten any aspect of the industry. That’s well before Craig’s List and department-store consolidation gutted the ad base. Well before any of the current economic conditions applied.
In fact, when newspaper chains began cutting personnel and content, their industry was one of the most profitable yet discovered by Wall Street money. We know now – because bankruptcy has opened the books – that the Baltimore Sun was eliminating its afternoon edition and trimming nearly 100 editors and reporters in an era when the paper was achieving 37 percent profits. In the years before the internet deluge, the men and women who might have made The Sun a more essential vehicle for news and commentary – something so strong that it might have charged for its product online – they were being ushered out the door so that Wall Street could command short-term profits in the extreme.
Such short-sighted arrogance rivals that of Detroit in the 1970s, when automakers – confident that American consumers were mere captives – offered up Chevy Vegas, and Pacers and Gremlins without the slightest worry that mediocrity would be challenged by better-made cars from Germany or Japan.
In short, my industry butchered itself and we did so at the behest of Wall Street and the same unfettered, free-market logic that has proved so disastrous for so many American industries. And the original sin of American newspapering lies, indeed, in going to Wall Street in the first place.
When locally-based, family-owned newspapers like The Sun were consolidated into publicly-owned newspaper chains, an essential dynamic, an essential trust between journalism and the communities served by that journalism was betrayed.
Economically, the disconnect is now obvious. What do newspaper executives in Los Angeles or Chicago care whether or not readers in Baltimore have a better newspaper, especially when you can make more putting out a mediocre paper than a worthy one? The profit margin was all. And so, where family ownership might have been content with 10 or 15 percent profit, the chains demanded double that and more, and the cutting began – long before the threat of new technology was ever sensed.
But editorially? The newspaper chains brought an ugly disconnect to the newsroom, and by extension, to the community as well. A few years after the A.S. Abell Family sold The Sun to the Times-Mirror newspaper chain, fresh editors arrived from out of town to take over the reins of the paper.
They looked upon Baltimore not as essential terrain to be covered with consistency, to be explained in all its complexity year in and year out for readers who had and would live their lives in Baltimore. Why would they? They had arrived from somewhere else, and if they could win a prize or two, they would be moving on to bigger and better opportunities within the chain.
So goes David Simon’s prepared remarks before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet Hearing on the Future of Journalism, May 6, 2009. What is telling is that he clearly points out that its is not so much that reporters stopped producing a good product (though there is a case to be made here too. But that’s another post.) but that the Suits sitting the boardroom shifted from being concerned about journalism and more concerned about the results required to satisfy the Wall Street institutions.
Let me tell you, the man has a case. Nor is Journalism the only industry to fall prey to this. I worked in telecom for 30 years. You can see the shift in the old headquarters of the regional Bells and independents. Paintings of the CEO’s of those firms on the wall with a small plaque with their name and educational attainment. Picture after picture with names like MIT, Princeton, Georgia Tech, Cal Tech, Worcester Technical, engineering schools all. As you get to the present day the paintings turn to pictures. But something else changes too. The schools are Northwestern, SMU, U of Penna, Harvard, Ball State, business schools all.
That transition marks a change from being concerned about the product you deliver to the profitability that can be obtained, usually at any expense to customer service and product quality. We are poorer for it. But don’t blame the companies, they are just reacting to consumer demand for better - cheaper. Sadly the cheaper is delivered but the better ends up lost in the soup of corporate dysfunctional desires.
But the prescription is probably not workable either —
But a non-profit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally-based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything that government can do in the way of creating non-profit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued. And further, anything that can be done to create financial or tax-based incentives for bankrupt and near-bankrupt newspaper chains to transfer or even donate unprofitable publications to locally-based non-profits should also be considered.
Lastly, I would urge Congress to consider relaxing certain anti-trust prohibitions with regard to the newspaper industry, so that the Washington Post, the New York Times and various other newspapers can sit down and openly discuss protecting their copyright from aggregators and plan an industry wide transition to a paid, online subscriber base. Whatever money comes will prove essential to the task of hiring back some of the talent, commitment, and institutional memory that has been squandered.
Absent this basic and belated acknowledgment that content has value — if indeed it still does after so many destructive buyouts and layoffs – and that content is what ultimately matters, I don’t think anything else can save high-end, professional journalism.
Problem one is the legacy news orgs need to ditch the millstone that is the printing press. It is an albatross of capital absorption that has lived past its time. Better to provide a subscription - Kindle model similar to what telecom does with cell phones (as much as I hate it, its viable.)
Problem two is ditch this mindset of the ‘professional’. I have seen some of the results of J-school grads — Incomplete sentences, bad grammar, improper references. That’s before we even get to the Jayson Blair level incompetence. Fact is anyone with a better than average command of the English language and a flair for a specific interest will be a damn sight better reporter on a topic than the professional will. Where is it written that a paper can’t give a byline to an open source subject matter expert? It worked for Carl Sagan.
Problem three is ditch the public corporate ownership. If you need it, make it local/regional private placement. Release your dependence on continual quarterly revenue reviews. Fact if a press organization attempts to progress to Problem four, they will have to ditch the publicly traded securities model.
Problem four. The non-profit model shall not save ye. First it is doubtful you can make the transition. The current investor class will abandon your stock. They want their returns and will look elsewhere to get it if not from your firm. A publicly held profit, non-profit? First I have never heard of such a beast and the tax code would have a heart attack trying to adapt to it. Once codified every company with a CFO who has a brain would be amending their charters for the same benefit. So goes the tax base.
No. For Journalism to save itself it must first burn its bridge. Pitch the printing press. Go online, your readers are already there. Develop a digital subscription model for your content. Give free away but make it two days old when you do it. Find the ‘experts’ in your community that are subject matter specialists. If you can’t find them that is an indication of how out of touch you are. But be judicious and recognize the difference between an SME and an advocate. Your permanent staff will be smaller. Your editors more crucial to your operations. The content more organic and focused. Till you fulfill all these missions the newspaper industry will continue to flounder.
Filed under Content, competition, ecommerce, news by Dr. Dog
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Comments on Correct to a Point »
You misrepresent his testimony:
1) Problem one is no problem. Simon agrees that printing the paper is anachronistic and a digitized product is the only way to go. He has a line in there about cutting down trees and delivering them to doorsteps is anachronistic. You omitted that.
2) Problem two is a fundamental disagreement. Simon argues for professional and fulltime pay for professional journalism. Your anecdotal condemnation of all working journalists based on what misspelling you have found and Jason Blair is indulgent ad hominem thinking, and an argument could be made in more dramatic fashion using how much mediocre journalism and commentary is available on the internet. The best people will do a job for pay, not for free. That’s why major league baseball is the best athletic practice of the sport and a sandlot game, however delightful, is still a sandlot game.
3) Problem three. Simon again argued that public corporate ownership is a failed model and Simon urged Congress to create tax incentives so that bankrupt or near-bankrupt public companies might be induced to dump non-saleable, non-profitable newspapers to non-profits, locally-owned enterprises that have tax-exempt status.
4) Problem four. Huh? If you get as far as Problem three, then you establish locally owned and operated entities which create an online product using subscription revenue to pay for reporting on a state and local level that isn’t being done anywhere else.
Mr. Bigart,
1) Its no problem to Simon whether I agree or not. The issue is will the news organizations take the medicine. The jury is still out, but I suspect they will not be able to afford the write down the presses represent.
2) The amount of laughable content on the internet is legend, on that I won’t disagree. However that does not blunt the argument as posted. For someone to be a professional journalist/reporter and NOT have command of the Kings English, their stock in trade, is equivalent to using substandard materials in home construction. The fact that I used Jayson Blair as an example is not an ad hominem attack. Not when there is an admission of stories where the time, place or events were fictitious.
“The best people will do a job for pay…”. Oh please. Life if rife with those that do something for free for the exact pleasure they derive from it. That is the drive that takes someone from good to excellent in an endeavor, not a paycheck.
The problem with Journalism is journalism itself. The J-schools teach the process of how to gather and deliver a story and the tools used to deliver it. Nothing wrong with that. But what is missing is the subject itself. How can a reporter deliver a story on Google, a Michigan State assembly session, or the inside of the next shuttle launch with insight? They can’t. That knowledge is locked up in a Project Lead, State staffer, mission specialist specifically. The reporter can give the standard press pitch on each but that is not solid reporting. The best reporting is done by someone with deep knowledge of the subject as they practice it, command of language an a tinge of showmanship. To deny that there are individuals with these combination of skills is embodied solely in a professional reporting guild is to short shrift that which has built this country for 2 and half centuries and damn elitist I might add.
To your baseball metaphor, there was a time in the MLB when being a baseball player was a good part time job and that was all it was. For every Mantle or Cobb there were 10 guys that when the season ended went back to their normal routines. Having also grown up in Florida as a kid, I can tell you farm league ball in many cases was on par with MLB.
3) To dump a failing enterprise to a non-profit is to just take the tax liability away. That won’t save the enterprises. Many of the majors are millions, some a billion in debt. Nor does non-profit solve my core point that of investor flight. As soon as the investors find out about the shift they will dump the stock faster than the enterprise can shift tax status. You go from failing to bankrupt in a day.
4) The legacy media’s problem is they cannot make the transition to non-profit as a exchange listed entity. They could do so as a privately held concern. They need to get there first. There are no guarantee either. You look at a great many papers, they are locally owned, and still failing. NYT, as an example is totally controlled by the family by classed stock holdings even though it is a publicly held concern. The exclusive family control has not saved it, it has done the exact opposite.
But I will grant you this. You might be short on facts but you have flair. Being as the name you used, Homer Bigart, was the name of a NYT reporter, long since deceased. I think there is a parable there you might consider.
Not to be subtle but here is what goes for ‘professional’ by one ‘journalist’. Link. We amateurs here at ThirdPipe provide more attribution to our stories than Maureen Dowd applied to either Josh Marshall or her ‘friend’ who was the source.
We are professional paid specialists with 4 layers of fact checking editors to back up our accuracy. — The MSM
Sigh….
Bigart had much more than flair. He exemplified what professional reporters can do on a beat that they cover day in and day out and for which they are paid a wage that allows to so construct a career.
You might want to look up Simon’s piece in the Washington Post outlook section in late February in which he depicted a precise circumstance in which bloggers or citizen journalists would be at a loss and for which the once-healthy newspaper was built.
That journalism has destroyed itself is only one half of the equation. Nothing about the performance of the internet and new media thus far suggests that they are capable of covering American institutions on a cohensive and consistent basis — of taking the place of healthy professional, paid, fulltime reporting. Certainly not your anecdotes about whatever weak sister can’t spell or talented ballplaying farmboys. Or if anecdotal argument is the currency on which you insist, argue against the anecdotal evidence of the Post piece, perhaps.
‘Bigart had much more than flair. He exemplified what professional reporters can do on a beat that they cover day in and day out and for which they are paid a wage that allows to so construct a career.’
That was then, this is now. Most news gathers today do not have a ‘beat’. They are given coverage assignments that are far afield and far ranging in scope. Little chance to do much more than superficially cover an assignment. Which has given rise to the term “Drive-by Media”.
“You might want to look up Simon’s piece in the Washington Post outlook section in late February in which he depicted a precise circumstance in which bloggers or citizen journalists would be at a loss and for which the once-healthy newspaper was built.”
Your close of the paragraph is a clear tip off. The current state of journalism can’t do it either. And to quote from Simon on the matter, in the article you reference — “I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. …” The current crop of papers ARE NOT DOING IT NOW. So don’t lay the chimera of that problem off on bloggers. The press abandoned their posts on that score long before the bloggers showed up. You can quote Simon on that too.
I also notice in the article that the judge in that piece was much more instrumental in facilitating the dissemination of information than Simon was. Simon just happened to be the catcher of the judges pitch. Which Simon admits in the same article contemporaneously.
“Nothing about the performance of the internet and new media thus far suggests that they are capable of covering American institutions on a cohensive and consistent basis — of taking the place of healthy professional, paid, fulltime reporting.”
Hate to tell you neither is the current press capable of covering institutions in a cohesive and consistent basis. (By the way, if you are a J-school grad, you misspelled cohesive. This IS a ad hominem attack so you know the difference.) Then, before you discount whether hard hitting reporting can not be done you might read this. You are pining for a present or future that will not come in its current structure. Get over it. Worse it totally goes over your head that a professional, paid, fulltime reporter is caught in an oversight of not providing appropriate attribution to a source. That is as unprofessional as it can get.
As to my anecdotes, that is your opinion of their worth and veracity. But when was the last time you went to a professional minor league game?
Hey guys, I don’t claim to be a “professional journalist” although I completed the obligatory Jr. college coursework. Anyone who is denial that journalism cooked it’s own goose is either completely delusional or still employed in the industry. The “impartial” view point of “journalists” has become so slanted by an that they fail to recognize the intelligence of the common sense of a “farm boy”. When the Internet became pervasive, “journalists” were no longer in charge of the information we received. Farm boys know bullshit when they see it and there’s already enough down on the farm without more from the self proclaimed elites who seek to brainwash rather than inform. Welcome to a Third Pipe world where the unwashed masses have alternatives to the elitist spin.
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