how to save newspapers vs why to save newspapers

Two views on the future of newsapers: First, from the Nation, John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney reprise their argument for public support of journalism:

In moments of crisis, our wisest leaders have always recognized the indispensible role of journalism in democracy. We are in such a crisis now. It is the character of the crisis, and the urgency of the moment, that should make Americans impatient with blanket condemnations of subsidies. State support is vital to higher education; on rare occasions professors have been harassed by governors or legislators over the content of their research or lectures. But only an extreme libertarian or a nihilist would argue to end all public support of higher education to eliminate the threat of this kind of government abuse. Likewise, the government does not tax church property or income, which is in effect a massive subsidy of organized religion. Yet the government has not favored particular religions or required people to hold religious views.

And now, for the other side, an oldie but goodie by Slate's Jack Shafer, who took on the McChesney-Nichols argument almost a year ago. (As an aside, look what happened to government-subsidize entities such as NEA and PBS):

Big love for newspapers has also been flowing in from academy/activist circles, a very unlikely source. Many in this orbit blame the press for not spotting our current financial predicament early enough and also believe that every reporter outside of the old Knight Ridder Washington bureau was complicit in the criminal conspiracy that made George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq possible. Bill Moyers encapsulated their view two years ago when he argued against the notion "that the dominant institutions of the press are guardians of democracy. They actually work to keep reality from us, whether it's the truth of money in politics, the social costs of 'free trade,' growing inequality, the resegregation of our public schools, or the devastating onward march of environmental deregulation."

Yet now, as newspapers attrite and collapse, some scholars are telling us that newspapers are a necessary component of democracy. Princeton University scholars Samuel Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido recently linked the Dec. 31, 2007, closure of the Cincinnati Post (circulation 27,000) to a local decline in vote turnout and office seekers, even though the Cincinnati Enquirer (circulation 200,000) survives. Media consolidation critics Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, who asked "Who'll Unplug the Big Media?" in The Nation a year ago, are back this week lamenting the demise of big newspaper journalism. They're calling for "tax policies, credit policies and explicit subsidies to convert the remains of old media into independent, stable institutions." I can't wait to hear the duo's pitch for a government subsidy to keep Rupert Murdoch's New York Post alive.

Shafer ends his piece with this: "All this lovey-dovey about how essential newspapers are to civic life and the political process makes me nostalgic for the days, not all that long ago, when everybody hated them." For the record, McChesney was one of them. bk

slow liquidation

Slate's Jack Shafer writes about the possible demise of the Boston Globe and other big city dailies, here.

He references Phillip Meyer, who first recognized the potential demise of the newspaper industry in The Vanishing Newspaper and again addressed the subject last year in AJR. A newspaper's monetary worth is largely measured in good will, he theorizes. And when the newspaper engages in a process of slow liquidation (the late Molly Ivins had it so right), well, that good will erodes along with the advertising revenue. I call it hesitation cuts.

From Shafer's post:

"Slow liquidation" shows up in the winnowing process at many local and regional dailies today: fewer reporters, fewer comics, fewer sections, fewer features, smaller pages, smaller news hole, and higher home delivery and newsstand prices.

Writing again last year in AJR, Meyer plotted an "elite newspaper" strategy for the slow liquidators. His plan is no resurrection prayer for dying dailies, but it makes more sense than running a newspaper down, down, down until it has one subscriber paying $5 million for home delivery, and then he dies.

Meyer thinks newspapers should accept that their mass audience is drifting away. (In the most recent reporting period, Globe circulation was down almost 14 percent over the previous year.) They should accept that non-news readers have stopped reading dailies, accept that newspapers can no longer satisfy everybody all the time with an "all-you-can-eat" buffet, and concentrate on publishing content of higher value. And they should "peel back" to their core functions of news, investigation, analysis, and interpretation "in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web."

quick linx for a sultry monday night

Quick hits:

Ana Marie Cox in the WaPo on the Washington Press briefing room as the place "where news goes to die."

Jack Shafer on Slate re Steve Brill's plan to charge for news content -- and why it won't work.

Something interesting in Seattle: Just as the Seattle PI went all-digital (at 12 percent capacity) several of the former staffers came online with the Seattle PostGlobe, with many of the former PI staffers volunteering their time and expertise in collaboration with both a local TV station and an alt-weekly . What I find cool is not only the entrepreneurial spirit, but also the drive to keep news from the riverbanks alive and well.

Here's a note from one of the writers. I'd post the link, but damn. I can' find it anymore.

By Kery Murakami PostGlobe The last you saw of us, we had the stunned look of many people in this economy -- suddenly jobless, our futures and our careers uncertain. Many of us were in tears. We became the subject of news ourselves, on TV, in the papers, in the blogosphere, as the pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer died. It's been almost a month. But we haven't left. Today, we -- former P-I journalists -- are embarking on a new stage in our careers, hoping to fulfill our life's mission in a different way. We want to keep letting you know what's really going on in this city. At first, we're doing this as volunteers. But what you'll find on this Web site is a story much larger than ours. As in Denver, where the journalists of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News also are starting their own news site, we're forging on because we believe newspaper-quality journalism needs to continue even as newspapers close. We're relying on you -- the community -- to keep us going. The possibilities are exciting, because we're resurfacing with new friends: KCTS public television and the Seattle Weekly. We'll begin by bringing the work of former P-I journalists to our site. We're planning next to work with public television, and possibly public radio journalists, on stories and special projects, combining the best of our approaches. Ultimately, we're exploring creating a combined news organization based on the idea that distributing information should be not just for profit. Our venture with the Weekly means we'll be able to bring to you the longer-form journalism and daily posts from its site. From a business standpoint, the Weekly's national ad staff will be selling advertising for this site. And of course, we'll offer some of the best journalists of the old P-I you miss. Kathy Mulady will be going back to patrolling the corridors of City Hall. Mike Lewis will return to the city's streets to tell you the stories only he can. Art Thiel will write for this site as well as others. Joe Copeland, who wrote for the P-I editorial board, and Larry Johnson, a veteran P-I foreign correspondent, will bring you commentary on Seattle and the world. And our site will have the professional photojournalism of former P-I photographers Grant Haller, Mike Kane and others. Please bear with us because this is just the beginning. Coming soon will be a way to comment on our stories. Hopefully, as our colleagues pick themselves up, more of them will be back with us doing their jobs. Yes, the P-I we knew is gone. But we're still here with our notebooks and computers. Now it's up to you. We'd especially like to thank KCTS President and CEO Moss Bresnahan for his support, and Rennie Sawade, of WashTech, and former P-I designer Elana Winsberg for putting in countless hours to develop our Web site. Kery Murakami can be reached at kerymurakami@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . To support his work and allow stories like these to continue, please go to our donation page

blodder fog

In a somewhat refreshing, if not just a little bit cranky, twist, Slate's Jack Shafer proposes that it's time to lose the idea that newspapers are "essential for democracy". He also points out the irony in the fact that, suddenly, newspapers' impassioned champions are some of the same folks who formerly wrung their hands in despair over the industry's failings. He writes:

The insistence on coupling newspapering to democracy irritates me not just because it overstates the quality and urgency of most of the work done by newspapers but because it inflates the capacity of newspapers to make us better citizens, wiser voters, and more enlightened taxpayers. I love news on newsprint, believe me, I do. But I hate seeing newspapers reduced to a compulsory cheat sheet for democracy. All this lovey-dovey about how essential newspapers are to civic life and the political process makes me nostalgic for the days, not all that long ago, when everybody hated them.

And, somewhat related, but not really: Today's Chron has a review, by Saul Austerlitz, of a collection of pieces by the late A. J. Leibling, who wrote for The New Yorker for several decades. Austerlitz finds Liebling's "The Wayward Press" columns especially timely right now. From the review (yep, the Chron still prints them...):

Astute readers will find much to enjoy here, but it is "The Press," Liebling's collection of pieces written for the New Yorker's "Wayward Press" column between the late 1940s and early 1960s, that is of the utmost interest in this time of media uncertainty. "The Press" is a reminder, above all, that the purported Golden Age of journalism was never all that golden. Liebling bemoans the state of his profession, ridden with money-hungry publishers, newspapers providing everything except news, and journalists living in mortal fear of losing their jobs. (If any of this sounds remotely familiar, by all means stop me.) Publishers, in Liebling's estimation, are like saloon-keepers, thinking of news as "a costly and uneconomic frill, like the free lunch that saloons used to furnish to induce customers to buy beer."

Ever the master of the pungent metaphor, Liebling cunningly defines the media as an industry poised halfway between the gleaming future and the creaky past. "The American press makes me think of a gigantic, super-modern fish cannery, a hundred floors high, capitalized at eleven billion dollars, and with tens of thousands of workers standing ready at the canning machines, but relying for its raw material on an inadequate number of handline fishermen in leaky rowboats."

Today, the fish cannery has been repossessed, and the machines are every bit as leaky as the rowboats, but the fundamental principle remains the same. Newspapers - the media - are our first resource, and our last line of defense.

"A large number of competing newspapers," Liebling observes, "permitting representation of various shades of thought, are a country's best defense against being stampeded into barbarism." Having only recently returned from covering the North African front, where American soldiers fought Nazis, Liebling did not use the term "barbarism" lightly.

the future of journalism, circa 2009

We can all mock the folks with bad hair and what they saw as the future of news back in 1982. Now, however, the discussion has ramped up to a somber debate more along the lines of the survival of news. It's all encompassing, and to be honest, exhausting, if not exhaustive.

Here's what is turning out to be a short syllabus of a few of the most recent ruminations, some of it new, some not so much. Which is maybe the root of the problem.

Start with Eric Alterman in the current issue of the Nation, who writes cogently about saving the news, not the newspaper, via philanthropy:

"But as New York Times executive editor Bill Keller pointed out in an Internet Q&A, we are losing the kind of journalism that, 'however imperfect, labors hard to be trustworthy, to supply you with the information you need to be an engaged citizen.' Alas, nobody wants to sell soap alongside a story of an IED killing a dozen US soldiers in Kabul or Karbala. Along these lines, Joel Kramer, former publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, suggests the creation of a philanthropic endowment that will match donations to nonprofit enterprises doing public-affairs journalism. Indeed, plenty of people would love to provide this kind of reporting; journalism schools are filled with young people educating themselves for a profession that they are taught is about to become economically obsolete. They aren't there to get rich; they're there in the hopes of offering their fellow citizens what Walter Lippmann, writing in 1920, called 'Liberty and the News.' If history is any guide, you can't have one without the other."

Others, assuming that print is dead -- or soon will be -- advocate making the pay-per-click method work to subsidize the news we get for free. Here's what Jack Shafer had to say this week on Slate.com, where he suggested that news orgs look "outside the browser":

"Every successful paid site competes with free sites, and as often as not, competes with itself by offering its own free content. The free stuff is used to upsell the customer to the paid varieties. The extreme application of this model is giving away 99 percent of the product and selling 1 percent—it's called "freemium," and Wired editor Chris Anderson talks about it in this interview and on his blog."

In "MSM, RIP", the editors of The New Republic, in a short and sweet editorial, remind us what we lose if we lose the press:

"Many venerable newspapers and magazines will close in the coming weeks and months; the ones that remain will be attenuated. But the old ideals embodied in these institutions must not be permitted to join the carnage."

Meanwhile, there was an interview on the Charlie Rose Show, between the eponymous host and Walter Isaacson of "Time," Robert Thomson of "Wall Street Journal" and Mort Zuckerman of "The New York Daily News", about revamping the current business model; a couple of weeks ago the NYTimes posted an online discussion among several media heavyweights who, among other things, advocate abandoning the "culture of free;" and last week, the WaPo's Howard Kurtz weighed in on different ways to finance what we know as the news.

But the best of the bunch, clearly, is a long essay by Gary Kamiya (one of the founding editors of salon-- one of the first online journals in the country -- and former editor at the San Francisco Examiner) on salon.com, where he reflects on what we can expect if the death of the newspaper means the death of reporting:

"What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers and the related rise of online media is reporting -- on-the-ground reporting by trained journalists who know the subject, have developed sources on all sides, strive for objectivity and are working with editors who check their facts, steer them in the right direction and are a further check against unwarranted assumptions, sloppy thinking and reporting, and conscious or unconscious bias.

"If newspapers die, so does reporting. That's because the majority of reporting originates at newspapers. Online journalism is essentially parasitic. Like most TV news, it derives or follows up on stories that first appeared in print. Former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll has estimated that 80 percent of all online news originates in print. As a longtime editor of an online journal who has taken part in hundreds of editorial meetings in which story ideas are generated from pieces that appeared in print, that figure strikes me as low.

"There's no reason to believe this is going to change. Currently there is no business model that makes online reporting financially viable. From a business perspective, reporting is a loser. There are good financial reasons why the biggest content-driven Web business success story of the last few years, the Huffington Post, does very little original reporting. Reported pieces take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, require specialized skills and don't usually generate as much traffic as an Op-Ed screed, preferably by a celebrity. It takes a facile writer an hour to write an 800-word rant. Very seldom can the best daily reporters and editors produce copy that fast."

Despite the above, he writes that the issue is still complicated: there are digital news sites that do in fact produce in-depth reporting, and that thanks to the internet, we now have more information, literally, at our fingertips than ever before. Still, he cautions:

"Finally, the death of reporting will dangerously erode the ideal of objectivity. Newspapers embrace the institutional mission of objectivity: Their goal is to find out and report the truth about a given subject, no matter what that truth is. They are not supposed to go in looking for an answer, or holding preconceived beliefs. Of course, the distinction between fact and interpretation is only absolute in the simplest cases -- it breaks down as soon as the event being covered acquires the least complexity or controversy. Reporters, like all human beings who are trying to make sense of complex experiences, must constantly make judgments that go beyond the mere facts. And the he-said, she-said approach mandated by objectivity can be ridiculously stupid. If Joe says the sky is blue and Jack, who is widely known to be a delusional psychotic who has just taken two tabs of acid, says it's purple with pink polka-dots, is it really necessary to report what Jack says?

"But if perfect objectivity is impossible, that doesn't mean that it should not be the goal. The reporter's predisposition toward fact and fairness serves as a kind of ballast, a corrective to her natural instinct to make up her mind prematurely. And those who have not been trained and inculcated in an institution dedicated to objectivity are less likely to be able to do this. Institutions matter. And traditional journalistic institutions, newspapers in particular, are weighted toward fairness and objectivity. The Internet is not. Of course, bloggers or untrained writers are capable of being fair; indeed, the better bloggers are precisely those who fully and fairly engage with those who disagree with them. But the blogging ethos as a whole runs in the opposite direction. Being a reporter does not come naturally to bloggers.

"No one can predict what the new information age will look like, and my version may be excessively dystopian. But one thing is indisputable: Reporting must be kept alive. With all its limitations and faults, it is a light that illuminates the world outside ourselves. And in an increasingly virtual and solipsistic age, that light is needed more than ever."

non-profit journalism: the other side

The debate continues in Romenesko's column today. Slate's Jack Shafer votes no. From yesterday's piece:

"The plans to "save" the [New York] Times and [Washington]Post by rescuing their newsrooms from commercial pressure by sticking them inside protective domes strike me as conservative and futile. The market for news—and for ads—is trying to tell them it wants them to transmogrify into something new or, in the worst-case scenario, something gone. Turning any newspaper over to rich historic preservationists only postpones solving the problem of what newspapers need to be in the 21^st century."

L.A. Times columnist Tim Ruttan also votes no on what he calls a "government funded National Public Newspaper." Along with other media-watchers, he agrees that newspapers have destroyed themselves by giving the news away for free online. As remedy, he calls for an antitrust exemption so that news organizations can agree on a price to charge for online content. From his piece, which ran today:

"Two major newspapers -- the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times -- charge readers tiered fees to view their online journalism. The rest of the industry has decided there's more money to be made in charging advertisers for the larger audiences that free content attracts than in selling online subscriptions.

"That's wrong, in my view, but it's hard to argue with as long as some major newspapers are giving their online journalism away; until they stop, nobody can risk charging for theirs. That's where the antitrust exemption would come in: It would allow all U.S. newspaper companies -- and others in the English-speaking world, as well as popular broadcast-based sites such as CNN.com -- to sit down and negotiate an agreement on how to scale prices and, then, to begin imposing them simultaneously.

"That, in turn, would set the stage for tackling the other leg of this problem -- how to extract reasonable fees from aggregators like Google and Yahoo, which currently use their search engines to link to news that newspapers and broadcasters pay to gather. As veteran journalist and book publisher Peter Osnos said this week, newspapers and magazines 'have to start demanding payment for use of their material or they will disappear.'"

Not sure I completely agree in either case, but clearly, the plot is thickening. Too little, too late? You have to wonder why we let the advances in technology outpace our ability to think about them. Too dazzled by the wow factors to think about business? bk

two linx

Jack Shafer got it right on Slate yesterday, outlining in quick form why digital news is eating the heart out of news papers. He also has a long list of all the jobs -- from pimps to travel agents -- that have been rendered obsolete by the growing ability to do just about everything online. He calls it a "digital slay-ride."

But just because print is terminally ill -- he doesn't give up on news. Nor should we.

Which leads to number two: Politico's Michael Calderone reports that the ASNE (The American Society of Newspaper Editors) is debating taking "paper" out of its name. Which puts the focus where it should be -- on the news itself, rather than the way it's delivered. It's a symbolic move, but optimistic in its own way, possibly shifting the debate to what really matters: journalism, in all its many forms.

Whaddya think? bk

Running against the press, redux

Ever since the RNC closed up shop on Thursday, one of the prime players in the inchoate campaign continues to be the "elite media". Check these links, and let me know what you think. bk

Jack Shafer writes about the way Sarah Palin will run against the press.

Howard Kurtz writes that Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews are out as news anchors for live political events at MSNBC because of their lack of neutrality.

Marketwatch's Jon Friedman interviews CNN's Campbell Brown on the aftermath of her questioning of Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for McCain's campaign, about Palin's qualifications shorty after McCain chose her to be his running mate.

Finally, in a public editor column in the New York Times, Clark Hoyt defends and explains much of the media vetting of Sarah Palin. He writes:

"The drip-drip-drip of these stories seems like partisanship to Palin’s partisans. But they fill out the picture of who she is, and they represent a free press doing its job, investigating a candidate who might one day be the leader of the Free World."