Save Our Press

In a recent column headlined “What’s Really Killing Newspapers,” Slate.com’s media writer, Jack Shafer, blames a changing world, not journalism, for the ailing health of newspapers. The newspaper once was an ATM machine for owners because it provided people with the social currency needed to build relationships, lubricate conversations and generally appear well informed.

Here’s one graf Shafer wrote that I especially liked:

The social networking that takes place via instant messaging, microblogging, or e-mail further steals from newspapers the mindshare they once owned. You no longer need to rely on a paper for the social currency that a weather report, movie listings, classified ads, shopping bargains, sports info, stock listings, television listings, gossip, or entertainment news provide.

Sure, more people have more places to go to get their hit. While I do appreciate Shafer’s point, I do think newspapers have contributed a great deal to their present woes: a failure to invest a decade ago in creating innovative products and new streams of revenue (hello, Kaplan?), a sluggish improvement in diversifying their newsrooms and story-mix to appeal to a wider audience (most newsrooms are still overwhelmingly white), and owners’ greed in maximizing profits (which once rivaled those of pharmaceutical companies) at the expense of investing in staff and training (one of the lowest rates among all industries). 

Reporters, designers, photographers, and a few editors are paying the price now for those bad business decisions by executives. As I’ve written here before, last year was perhaps the worst in recent memory for layoffs of journalists. I fear we are poorer as a profession from losing so much talent so quickly.

Some papers will survive this period, but there will be some that do not. We are still in the early phase of a massive shift in advertising dollars to other media platforms, such as Facebook, e-mail and mobile. Ad revenue for newspapers will continue to decline, but it’s hard to say if and when the ad revenue will totally disappear. The truth is that advertisers covet a wrapper that people want to read.

In our national policy debates on education, health care, public safety and a variety of other goods deemed to be in the public interest, it’s widely accepted that there are minimum provider ratios (providers per 1,000 people) that must be honored to preserve a decent product or service.  We have designated “shortage areas” where federal incentives are offered to doctors willing to practice there. We have best practices for the teacher-student ratio in classrooms.

Should we be concerned about the falling ratio of professional journalists to citizens in a community?

There’s an interesting blog post about how the latest wave of cutbacks at newspapers violates a longstanding norm: “The unwritten but widely honored rule of thumb in the industry always has been that a newspaper should employ one journalist for every 1,000 in daily circulation,” writes media analyst Alan Mutter in a post today. 

In response to the layoffs and fiscal problems besetting the newspaper industry, there’s a web site, TreeHouse Media Project, that’s gotten buzz for its promise of helping journalists become their own publishers. The headline is catchy, but it misses the mark. Google is here to stay, and we’re better off if we use it to help our fortunes rather than try to stop it.

I was stunned by the statistic on the TreeHouse Media home page:

“One in four newspaper jobs have disappeared since 1990 — more than 10,000 in 2007 alone.”

Anyone know where that statistic comes from?

According to Mark Potts, a media consultant and former Washington Post editor, this past week has been especially brutal for newspaper employees across the nation.

In a recent blog entry on recoveringjournalist.com, Potts lays out the bloodbath that took place over several days. One of the announcements touched a soft spot for me: The Palm Beach Post, a newspaper I spent nearly six years at in my 20s, is eliminating 300 jobs across all departments, including about 130 in the newsroom. According to my sources at the newspaper, that amounts to about a 40-50% cutback in the newsroom, an unprecedented rollback.

There is no question that the papers must slash their expenses with urgency to adjust to the stormy economic seas they are in now. We’re all trying to survive a tsunami of economic forces that will definitely leave some communities without newspapers before it’s over.

Potts rightly points out that newspapers aren’t innocent bystanders in this tragedy. The executives who run many of the big chain papers, Potts says, were too smug and slow to recognize the need for change, to act with urgency, and to diversify their revenue streams, among other things.

I hope to raise more public awareness with a documentary on an industry in the grips of a crisis. Won’t you join me?

Newspapers are likely to become free and place greater emphasis on comment and opinion in the future, according to a survey of the world’s editors. According to 704 senior news executives polled, the greatest threat to the industry is the declining number of young people who read newspapers. Nearly two-thirds also believe that some traditional editorial functions will be outsourced in the future.

Read the survey results.

A co-worker who got laid off recently pointed me to a site called AngryJournalist.com, a clever WordPress blog that lets journalists vent anonymously about the incredible challenges they face in these times. The t-shirts I found there were funny. My favorite was “print is dead”… certainly feels that way.

Well, there’s quite a lively discussion going on in the Brittanica blog.

In fact, I so don’t think so that I am waiting for the moment for someone with some passion and some money to suggest it is time to start a newspaper. The cost of entry isn’t very great, the technology makes us all look brilliant and one might create a beast that has feet in the print and online world at the same time, from scratch, avoiding the ankle breaking bumps that plague “old media” when it tries to become “new media.”

It might be so local you can’t imagine how it would feel, but it would be a newspaper and it would tell people what happened that touches on their lives.

It would be free. It would be distributed to very rich demographic areas and it would be very smart about how it approached news and events. It’s staff would expand based on revenue, which would not come until distribution was wide enough to point to a solid audience. So people would have to live on gruel for a while.

It would do some interesting things. If you were getting married, for example, it might create a whole media production of it for a price, like a little commercial arm of the local news empire. You would get a video, a coffee table book full of pictures and text, goodies. It would cost, say, a couple of thousand dollars. Very high quality and very dependable.It might do the same thing with the local high school football, basketball or soccer team. It might track the efforts of your choir. I do believe those kinds of things would produce revenue, mainly because most people don’t have the time to learn how to do them. Does that present an ethical challenge? Wait and see. I don’t think it’s inherent. Anyhow, it would be no more of an ethical challenge than building your business on used car ads and then telling everyone as often as you can how great it is to have a car!

…Having read my own paper, and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for years, I must admit, sadly, that they don’t present a very clear picture of what actually is happening in the lives of common people. That’s too bad because that is where journalism’s connection should come from.

I stumbled upon two interesting posts on the IFRA website.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/the-great-unbundling-newspapers-the-net/

While it’s painful to hear, I think the writer has hit upon a truth:

In a 2005 interview, the Rocky Mountain News asked Craig Newmark what he’d do if he ran a newspaper that was losing its classifieds to sites like Craigslist. “I’d be moving to the Web faster,” he replied, and “hiring more investigative journalists.” It’s a happy thought, but it ignores the economics of online publishing. As soon as a newspaper is unbundled, an intricate and, until now, largely invisible system of subsidization quickly unravels. Classified ads, for instance, can no longer help to underwrite the salaries of investigative journalists or overseas correspondents. Each piece of content has to compete separately, consuming costs and generating revenues in isolation. So if you’re a beleaguered publisher, losing readers and money and facing Wall Street’s wrath, what are you going do as you shift your content online? Hire more investigative journalists? Or publish more articles about consumer electronics? It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.

Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times’s Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: “How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”

The answer may turn out to be equally simple:  We don’t.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/what-newspapers-and-journalism-need-now-experimentation-not-nostalgia/