making money online?

AP reports that bunch of newspaper execs got together in Chicago yesterday to try to figure out how to make money off online content as a way to save newspapers. Possibly, that ship has sailed. Another vision is called for, maybe?

Perhaps the better question would be, should have been, how do we save journalism in the event that we can't save newspapers?

James Warren, former Managing Editor of the Chicago Tribune blogs about the meeting -- he wasn't there -- on the Atlantic's website. (Be sure to read the comments.) From his post:

Now, more than ever, is a time for creativity and nerve, not just hunkering down and crossing fingers that safe harbor will appear on the horizon. [Newspapers are a] wonderful and important product, vital to American communities. Unlike a lot of jobs, you can look yourself in the mirror and know you're doing some good. Many newsrooms remain filled with a sense of mission even amid the looming dread.

At the behest of new corporate superiors (yes, some from radio), I helped oversee the painful layoffs of about 100 in the Chicago Tribune newsroom last year, before being dispatched by someone the Marlon Brando character in "Apocalypse Now" might characterize as "an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill."

Fine. It was now their company. I just wish that what would have ensued might have been a strategy beyond a rather pedestrian one, rife with talk of "relevance" and "utility," with a multitude of lists, consumer reporting and de facto aping of local television; all the while needlessly undermining the loyalty of tried-and-true older readers while chasing after youth. It's less what the late philosopher Hannah Arendt tagged the banality of evil than it is the evil of banality.

Free market editting?

AP reports that 55 reporters and editors at the ailing Chicago Tribune have sent an email to the bosses, asking why the paper was allowing the marketing department to survey subscribers to find out their opinions on stories BEFORE they were published. Ugh.

Those who signed the email cited a number of problems with the practice, including ethical ones. I guess.

From the AP story:

"It is a fundamental principle of journalism that we do not give people outside the newspaper the option of deciding whether or not we should publish a story, whether they be advertisers, politicians or just regular readers," the e-mail read. "Focus grouping as done in the past is one thing. But this appears to break the bond between reporters and editors in a fundamental way."

The reporters and editors also said many have become uncomfortable that the marketing department appeared to be playing an undefined role in the newsroom.

No one will say what stories were under consideration or whether reader response shaped editorial decisions. Still. Scary practice that is unlikely to end well: It's like measuring news value by the click. bk

now it begins?

Multiple sources are reporting this morning that the Tribune Co. -- which owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, two of the largest newspapers in the country -- is considering filing for bankruptcy. Read all abut it here, here and here.

Whether or not owner Sam Zell, a real estate magnate who also owns the Chicago Cubs, can pull his company through his current financial crisis is not as important in the big picture as what the impending Chapter 11 says about the future of daily journalism. If nothing else, it points to the urgency of coming up with a new financial model for supporting the daily press -- whether it comes to us on paper, the net or Blackberry.

Maybe the journalism industry needs a hit of that bail-out money. Seriously. At the very least, we could use a cash infusion to support some smart folks to think through a new way of doing business -- before the whole business implodes.

This quarter, I had my intro students come up with blueprints for the news organization of the future, based on the principles outlined in Kovach and Rosenstiel's Elements of Journalism. One group came up with an idealistic financial model: support the news organization through something similar to a university endowment, based on donations from the community itself, which has the most interest in a vital daily press, and keeping the funds in a blind trust so that the donors could not influence the news.

I was once asked by a student what it would take to encourage more students to go into journalism rather than, say, public relations -- given the disparities of starting salaries. Caught off-guard, I shot off my mouth, suggesting that maybe there should be some sort of government program that offers student loan forgiveness (similar to the Peace Corps) to those kids who are willing move to the the middle of the country to work for small papers for slave wages.

Mark I. Pinsky, writing in The New Republic, has this idea: Barack Obama should resurrect the Federal Writers Project (one of FDR's programs during the Great Depression) and bail out laid-off journalists, paying them to document, among other things, "the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media. At the same time, the multimedia fruits of this research would be open-sourced to all media, as well as to academics."

He also writes: "Like Detroit's troubled Big Three automakers, federal intervention to save the newspaper and magazine industries are highly problematic, at best. Ink-on-paper periodicals are never coming back, and it may be some time before the web can provide well-paying jobs with health benefits--if it ever will. Until then, providing some way to provide young journalists a way to get started, or displaced media workers a way to transition to new occupations, or to retirement, might help--and serve the nation in the process."

More ideas later. (Maybe the first one ought to be to delete "newspaper" from the discussion and use "press" as a generic, rather than a specific, so the conversation can focus on journalism rather than modes of delivery.) Stay tuned. bk

P.S. More dismal news. According to the New York Times, McClatchy has put the Miami Herald, once Knight-Ridder's flagship paper, up for sale.