All News Must Stand On Its Own

Encyclopedia Britannica kicks off a “Newspapers & the Net Forum” with an excerpt from Nick Carr’s new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.He states what publishers have known for some time: the shift from print to online delivery changes the product entirely. No longer can high-margin classified ads support expensive investigative reporting. In today’s world, every item of content is an island and must stand on its own merit. Advertisers want contextual adjacency. This creates pressure to publish stories about high-definition TVs instead of stories about Iraq.

Among the more than two dozen comments is one that notes “I have a copy of Newsweek with a cover story entitled, if I am recalling correctly, “Are Newspapers Dead?” The magazine is from around 1965. So this debate has been going on a long time.” True, but this is the first time those predictions really appear to be coming true.

The Forum goes on all week with some other provocative topics that I promise to get around to reading. Here’s the index page.

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Rethinking the Value of News

Tom Abate thinks newspaper publishers could learn a few things from the airline industry. In other words, figure out how to charge different prices for the same product. As he sees it, the background notes that a reporter collects, which would never be of interest to a mainstream newspaper audience, could be a gold mine to businesses that specialized in that area. Use a blog to publish those notes and attract those special-interest readers and then sell ads to businesses that will pay top dollar to reach those people.

Abate laments all the attention being paid to Fark.com, a snarky linklog with a juvenile sense of humor. Newspapers shouldn’t be trying to out-Fark Fark, he says (although, if you look at Fark, it sends a lot of traffic to newspaper websites), but should focus on attracting the highly engaged readers who appreciate depth and context. There’s sensible thinking behind his comments, although the airline industry isn’t exactly the gold standard of business models and the devil would be in the details.

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Abate would probably find a soul mate in Ted Gup, a journalism professor at Case Western. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he laments his students’ appalling ignorance of basic current events.

Quoting:”Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn’t pretty.”

In his view, we’re raising a generation of kids who are so distracted and self-absorbed that they’ve tuned out the rest of the world. And part of the problem is that the don’t read newspapers or watch serious television.

Confidence in the Future

The publisher of the LA Times says the company is getting it together. In a memo to employees published on Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20 Year Club, David Hiller talks of adding 400 new regional advertising accounts, expanding Spanish language products and topping 100 million page views online the last two months running. There’s a new organization, new management and a commitment to build a vision and financial model that is sustainable for the long term. He also mentions in passing that there will only be merit raises this year and that they’ll be three months late. The Pressmen tap dance on that news. More to come during an April 30 town meeting.

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Meanwhile, the Albany Times Union believes in the future of print. The company’s about to spend $55 million to enlarge its headquarters and install a new printing press that will print color on all pages. The additional 70,000 sq. ft. faciliity is also intended to position the Times Union as a printer for other publications in the region.

Silver Linings in Pink Slips

Slate’s Jack Shafer sees some goodness in the latest wave of buyouts: a chance to bring new blood into the organization. The boomers who sit atop the editorial pyramids at all the big publications are too invested in the way things have always been done, he says. Get some whippernsappers in there for whom experimentation is a way of life.

Quoting: “‘There goes our institutional memory,’ somebody usually laments whenever a graybeard leaves a news organization. The speaker is usually another graybeard who, if pressed, couldn’t tell you what is so vital about the institutional memory wheeling out the door.”

Buyouts can mean rebirth for those taking the buyout, too, Shafer says. Longtime Washington Post political reporter Thomas B. Edsall is now at Huffington Post, where he says seeing his work appear without the meddling of a dozen editors is a rebirth.

And Finally

Leave it to Canada to buck the North American trend. Newspapers are actually doing pretty well up there, says Editors Weblog: “Total 2007 revenues, including online operations, slipped only 0.8%, with print advertising decreasing 2.4%. In contrast, online revenue grew 29% over 2006. Newspaper circulation as well took a very minor fall in 2007, decreasing 1.2% after a 3.8% rise the previous year.”

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A Racepoint Group blogger saw some value in my opinions and interviewed me about the future of newspapers. The fellow is a regular NDW reader, which makes the whole thing rather incestuous. Or perhaps circular. In any case, I blather.

Meet Ben Popken. Attention, newspaper executives: this guy is going to mess you up.

Ben is 26 years old and sits atop the editorial pyramid at the blog Consumerist.com. In conventional media terms, that pyramid isn’t very big – only seven people – but Consumerist’s reach far outweighs its small staff. The site gets 15 million unique visitors per month. Maybe more importantly, it’s closely watched by mainstream media outlets, which frequently pick up on its best stuff and broadcast it to a global audience.

For example, The New York Times has referenced Consumerist 381 times, The Wall Street Journal 114 times and BusinessWeek 37 times. Consumerist stuff gets picked up on Digg.com constantly – 34,000 citations and counting. Popken was recently featured in a cover story in BusinessWeek and wrote a 2,300-word article for Reader’s Digest. All without a day of formal journalism training.

Ben Popken isn’t a professional journalist, at least not as that role is traditionally defined. In fact, prior to joining Consumerist two years ago, he had never worked at a newspaper, TV station or in radio. His career during and after college consisted of a variety of entrepreneurial sales ventures and odd jobs. He worked as a delivery man not long before joining Consumerist. He only got the job because the previous editor’s mother read his blog.

Consumerist gets about 100 e-mails a day from consumers talking about their horrible encounters with businesses of all kinds. Big box retailers, banks, cell phone providers, cable companies and airlines are popular targets. Consumerist editors read and respond to each and every e-mail (how many of you editors at major metropolitan dailies have a policy like that?) and write up about 30 of those submissions a day for the site.

New Style of Journalism

They don’t fact-check what they post and they don’t call the companies in question for comment. The mission of the site is “to empower consumers by informing and entertaining them about the top consumer issues of the day,” Popken says. “We give them a voice by directly publishing their tips and e-mails and then following up on them as warranted.”

A lot of journalists shudder when they read words like these. “Directly publishing their tips and e-mails?” With no editorial oversight? It sounds like an invitation to disaster. But it works. If the story is wrong, the editors take it down. So far, the lack of fact-checking hasn’t been a problem. Consumerist gets the occasional legal threat, but it’s never amounted to much. The cease-and-desist letters have almost stopped, Popken told me.

What is changing is that consumer-facing companies are beginning to revisit their customer service operations and remove the walls that have separated them from the public, walls that are relentlessly beaten upon by consumer advocacy sites. Like this one A few have even asked Consumerist for advice, although not as many as you might think.

With no formal journalism training, no years spent covering city council meetings for a small daily and no editorial oversight, Ben Popken is becoming one of the most powerful voices in consumer journalism. And what’s funny is that if you ask him about the secret of Consumerist’s success, he’ll use the same words that any good editor would use: “The secret is to be reader-centric in a fundamental way. The content is driven by the readers and reacted to by the readers. We’re really just a curator of consumer-generated content.”

A lot of newspaper editors dismiss citizen journalism because they know that good journalism could never be done by an amateur. Could it be that journalism isn’t really all that mysterious? Or that the way we’ve done things for the last 100 years isn’t necessarily the only way to practice the craft? Ben Popken doesn’t care what the old rules are, and so far he’s doing just fine.

John Duncan analyzes the recent decision by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) to allow publishers to declare as paid circulation copies of their products that sell for as little as a penny and sees this as the beginning of an expensive and mutually destructive price war. Previously, publications couldn’t claim as paid any copies sold below 25% of the cover price. The urge to discount will now be irresisitible, Duncan believes. Newspapers will launch money-losing promotions to drive up circ, but advertisers won’t buy that the circ has any quality. In the end, newspaper costs will increase while ad revenues won’t. Everyone’s a loser. Except, of course, the consumers who get their newspapers for one cent. Incidentally, E&P reports that a share of Journal Register Co. (JRC) closed last week below the price of a single copy of the Lorain, Ohio Morning Journal. We don’t think the Morning Journal has anything to fear, though, as JRC stock doesn’t include a sports section.

Steve Outing, whose Editor & Publisher columns are always worth reading, is canceling his daily newspaper subscription. You wouldn’t expect a 51-year-old writer who specializes in the newspaper industry to take such a step, but Outing explains in rather exhaustive detail why his daily newspaper no longer plays an important role in his information needs. Quoting: “We’re flooded with information — most of it free — from the Web, e-mail, RSS feeds, podcasts, phone alerts, TV and radio news. Most of the information that comes in the daily print edition is not new to me.” He proposes a model to reinvent newspapers as community resources, an interesting idea that also sounds very difficult to pull off. And he suggests a “fremium” newsletter model might actually generate some subscription income.

E&P readers share their reactions in prose that is at times frightfully twisted for a publishing audience. Most are just pissed at Outing for abandoning the cause, although none offers a convincing counter-argument to the columnist’s reasoning. The letter-writers are hung up on how to get people to pay for online news, which isn’t even an argument any more. Like it or not, that concept simply hasn’t worked. Recovering Journalist has the most cogent commentary we read, noting that the editor and publisher of the newspaper Outing canceled were given a chance to comment and declined to do so. It must be nice to have the luxury of being so cavalier about losing a prominent subscriber, Mark Potts notes.

So Tax the Bastards!

Ex-Washington Post editor Craig Stoltz proposes that newspapers that continue to run stock tables should have to pay a “tax” that subsidizes nonprofit journalism foundations. His reasoning: anyone who actively trades stocks is online already. The only people served by stock tables are a small group of cantankerous old pensioners who make a lot of noise but who don’t represent the reader base. He suggests that the reason papers keep this practice is that they’re afraid of offending this boisterous constituency. Josh Korr adds that this is much the same thinking that keeps unfunny comic strips running in perpetuity.

And Foolishly…

The Raleigh Chronicle celebrates April 1 with news that the editor is leaving his newspaper job to become an arctic explorer. “The hours will probably be better and the pay is certainly higher,” says R. Gregg.

Last night I had the chance to moderate a panel discussion in front of about 150 college marketing majors in Boston, so I took the opportunity to ask them about newspapers. When I asked how many students in the room regularly read a newspaper, about half of the hands went up. This was more than I expected, so I followed up: “How many of you read the Boston Globe or Boston Herald regularly?” Only about 15 hands. “So if you aren’t reading the Globe or Herald, what the heck are you reading?”

A number of names were shouted out, but the one I heard most was Metro, the “free daily newspaper written and designed for young and ambitious professionals” and intended to be read in about 15 minutes. Metro is now distributed in more than 100 cities and seems to be hitting a mark. Although I’ve referred to Metro as “McPaper for local markets,” the fact is that the it’s winning a demographic group that major dailies have tried and failed to court for years. Maybe there are some ideas there. In any case, college kids do read the newspaper, as Kevin Maney notes…

There Are Some Newspapers That College Students Actually DO Read

Former USA Today reporter Kevin Maney agrees that the young audience isn’t a lost cause. He raises an interesting question: If young people supposedly don’t read newspapers, then how do you explain the success of college newspapers, which nearly half of college students read twice a week? Maney suggests it’s because college papers are feisty, local and community-driven, or all the things that big city dailies aren’t. Maney also suggests that newspapers’ focus on appealing to young readers may be misguided. Instead, they should go after the older readers – where at least they have a chance – and try to figure out strategies to get youngsters to change their reading habits later in life.

Good News – But No Links – in Raleigh

The Executive Editor of the Raleigh News & Observer writes a stirring column about the growth of the newspaper’s overall print and online circulation. It’s clear that this editor understands the importance of the online product and readership trends in that direction. In that vein, he cites several online sources, but doesn’t link to any of them. More than a decade after newspapers went online, many still don’t provide this simple functionality, which is so intrinsic to the Web. Whether the issues are technical or human, the lack of links on some newspaper websites is a growing embarrassment, particularly in a column like this one.

Rethinking the Value of Editors

Washington Post Managing Editor Phil Bennett and Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. think there are too many editors in the news reporting process and that a few should be thrown overboard. Reporters are better writers today than their predecessors were and don’t need as much line editing. They also cite the quality of the lightly edited stuff the Post runs online as an example that journalists can police themselves. Slate’s media critic says, “Yay!”

TechCrunch Gets it 70% Right

As the debate sharpens over the role of bloggers and journalists in news reporting, TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld writes from the perspective of one who has been both. In many ways, blogging is harder than reporting, he says. It’s a 24/7 obsession and speed is everything. This is one of the reasons TechCrunch has been so successful; it never stops posting new material. He makes an interesting on accuracy. Readers “are our copy editors and fact checkers…Our philosophy is that it is better to get 70 percent of a story up fast and get the basic facts right than to wait another hour (or a day) to get the remaining 30 percent. We can always update the post or do another one as new information comes in.” This approach to reporting is anathema to print journalists but very common online, where the changeability of the medium is considered to be part of the copy-editing process.

Short Takes

Author, professor and media expert Robert Picard posts an upbeat account of the state of traditional media industries on his blog. The way he sees it, media industries are changing and change difficult to handle, but the need for robust mainstream media will exist for a long time, the economic picture isn’t nearly as dire as many people think and we all have reason to be optimistic.

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The American Journalism Review remarks on the opening of the revamped and refurbished Newseum in Washington. Reading this account, you can’t help but be touched by the courage that journalists have shown over the years by placing themselves in the line of fire. Apparently, the museum reminds us in stark terms that journalism can be a dangerous and even heroic profession.

And One You Just Have to Read

Salon tells how to get full access to The Wall Street Journal for free instead of paying $79 annually. If you know the story or topic you want, the technique is simple and guilt-free. If you truly want to end-run the Journal’s firewall, you have to install a Firefox plug-in and basically pretend to be somebody you’re not. The ethical question is up to you. We just report the news.

We have a stack of good news about the reinvention of journalism that we really, really will get to you ASAP. It’s just that this depressing stuff keeps coming up.

2007 Newspaper Ad Plunge Was Worst in a Half Century

You’ve got to admire John Sturm, the CEO of the Newspaper Association of America. Here’s his quote in Editor & Publisher, commenting on news that the newspaper industry experienced its worst one-year drop in advertising revenue in 50 years in 2007: “Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms.”

You get the sense that John is the kind of guy who could find a silver lining behind any cloud. In this case, it’s the news that online revenue now represents 7.5% of overall newspaper ad revenue, up from 5.7% the previous year. The “near-term challenges” are that print ad revenue plunged 9.4%. Run the numbers, and you can attribute at least half of the gains in online revenue to the fact that the whole pie is getting smaller.

Newsweek Cuts 111, Including Many Top Critics

Newsweek is buying out 111 staffers, reports Radar, and a lot of institutional memory is going out the door. Quoting: “Among those leaving are some of the magazine’s best-known, most-admired and longest-service critics, including David Gates, David Ansen and Cathleen McGuigan. Harold Shain…All of the chief researchers are also leaving, including Nancy Stadtman, Ray Sawhill and Ray Anello, and their positions may be eliminated.” The report doesn’t say what percentage of the total staff this represents, but the cuts were probably inevitable in light of the recent 16% decline in newsstand sales.

Cuts aren’t just in print

Online technology publisher CNet has laid off 120 people, or about 10% of its workforce. The cuts were announced suddenly and were immediate, with no grace period. International Business Times has the details and the corporatese memo from the CEO. CNet is suffering from an overall downturn in tech ad spending, the result of consolidation and lack of new startup activity in the IT market. It’s also being pecked to death by ducks, as bloggers steal traffic in dribs and drabs. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington remarks on this phenomenon, but suggests that bloggers will have to band together to form a significant media entity. He says it’s going to happen, though.

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Malaise is apparently spreading into local broadcast media. U.S. New’ Liz Wolgemuth reports that TV stations in Miami, Denver and Sacramento have laid off staff. A commenter says it happened in Dallas, too.

Short Takes

One of the few newspaper chains to resist the recent write-down frenzy, Lee Enterprises, finally swallowed the bitter pill, taking $500 million to $700 million in lost goodwill charges for the first quarter. A defiant management statement said the current stock price undervalues the company.

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LA Observed has assembled some of the parting e-mails sent by laid-off staffers at the LA Times. Several take shots at TribCo owner Sam Zell. “You want people to ‘Talk to Sam’ but not to ‘Talkback to Sam,'” says one.

As If You Didn’t Know, “The State of the News Media Is Troubled”

If you don’t have time to read the voluminous (180,000-word) State of the Media Report, J.D. Lasica gives a pretty fine overview here. Summarizing his summary: The old “destination” model is dead. The job of the news organization today is as much to direct people to information as to tell stories. The big-brand news organizations may have even more throw weight online than they do in print. The vast democratization of news that was expected isn’t occurring. In the age of search, every story is a home page (we liked this one). More reporting will consist of incremental updates, some even being simple e-mail or Twitter messages.

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of Newspaper Death Watch, a blog I started on a whim but which has built enough readership to merit several hours of my time each week. In posting more than 150 entries over the last year and reading many times that many articles, I’ve learned a few things that I thought I’d share on this anniversary.

The catalyst for this blog was an essay I wrote nearly two years ago in which I predicted that the newspaper industry was about to undergo a business implosion that would be stunning in its speed and scope. I wasn’t by any means the first person to predict the collapse of the industry, but I was probably one of the few to foresee how fast it would occur.

That’s because I’ve followed the high tech industry for more than 20 years and repeatedly seen successful, stable businesses come apart at the seams when their environment changed: Digital Equipment, Compaq, Novell, WordPerfect, Wang Laboratories, Cullinet Software, Lotus, Silicon Graphics, and many others. It wasn’t a stretch to see two years ago that the same pattern was occurring in the newspaper business. The environment for publishers was changing in ways that would make their value proposition irrelevant very quickly. Demographic trends all pointed in that direction.

What went wrong

The inevitability of the industry’s self-destruction seems clear now, so there’s no news in that. But how could a business that was so stable and profitable for 150 years go into such a rapid tailspin? Two stories from the past year offered great insight into that question: Outgoing Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger’s farewell piece from the end of 2007 and Eric Alterman’s thoughtful analysis from the March 31, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.

Steiger’s piece was memorable for the stories it told about the excesses of the post-Watergate period. He remembers, for example, how one top editor put the kibosh on a proposal to tighten the belt by eliminating first-class travel for reporters. “I like flying first class,” Steiger quotes the man as saying with a smile. “You’re setting a bad example.” He also recounts internal struggles that occurred when newspapers went online, struggles that no doubt held back these papers from making the bold moves they needed to insure their survival. Steiger’s piece makes it clear that newspapers fumbled the opportunity to get out front of the Internet by focusing too much on protecting their print franchises.

Alterman notes the changes that occurred around the time of Watergate, when papers began to shed their partisan past and reposition themselves as impartial (read: bland) recorders of history. The scramble to win Pulitzers and duplicate the Washington Post‘s Watergate success resulted in millions of dollars being flushed on large Washington bureaus and expensive overseas correspondents. Basically, newspapers lost touch with their local constituencies and began writing for other journalists more so than for their readers.

Alterman also documents another ominous trend that began in the 1970s: the rise of the “insider journalist.” As reporters gained celebrity, their access to the great and powerful became a status symbol amongst their peers. Powerful people knew this, and they learned to exploit their access to leading journalists for their own gain as well. Readers weren’t served by any of this, and as the journalism world became clubbier during the 1980s and 1990s, the reading public lost interest.

This culminated in embarrassments like the Jayson Blair scandal and subsequent fallout in which a number of high-profile columnists at newspapers around the country lost their jobs. It was the low point of modern journalism: the profession had sunk so far that facts no longer mattered; if a reporter said something was true, then it must be true. Who had time to fact-check, anyway? There were gala dinners to attend and golf dates with a CEO.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Meanwhile, newspaper executives knew full well what was going on around them. Circulation began sliding in the mid 1980s and demographic trends made it clear that young people didn’t read newspapers. A few papers saw catastrophe coming and made the leap to national circulation. They will survive the carnage.

The rest were addicted to the healthy and predictable profit margins of their business. Executives knew they were over-exposed to advertising from the shrinking department store industry and that their classified ad franchises were horribly vulnerable to online competitors. But why do anything? Their investors were fat and happy and there was no need to rock the boat.

This complacency is common in industries on the brink of collapse. IBM averaged $8 billion in annual profits during the decade before it lost $8 billion and nearly went out of business. Big companies often enjoy their most profitable years just before the undertow of market change sucks them under.

Watergate’s sad legacy

It’s too late for the newspaper industry to save itself. The average regular newspaper reader is 55 years old. Fewer than one in five people under the age of 25 ever reads a newspaper. They’re not going to start reading one now.

Reading accounts of the industry’s mistakes, I’ve become increasingly convinced that Watergate was the worst thing that ever happened to the newspaper industry. It transformed the role of the reporter from anonymous scribe to media celebrity. It distracted editors from the needs of their readers and diverted investment from productive local channels into wasteful global folly. For almost 30 years, the industry got away with these mistakes because it was the only game in town. Had executives acted a decade ago to dominate the online age, they might have saved themselves. But in this day of blogs, Wikipedia and Craigslist, newspapers don’t have a compelling value proposition.

Sure, online traffic is growing and online dollars are inching upward, but the top line is falling too fast. The union contracts negotiated two decades ago can’t be easily changed, the presses still need to be maintained and delivery truck drivers need to be paid. At some point during the next two years, the revenue and expense lines will cross, but there will be little left to cut without turning major metro dailies into expensive supermarket advertisers. There will be massive consolidation and a lot more layoffs.

I’ll continue to chronicle the sad decline of an American institution on this blog, but I’ll also write about some of the exciting experiments that are transforming journalism across multiple media. I firmly believe a new kind of journalism that embraces blogs, camera phones, Twitter, wikis, hyperlinks, search engines and millions of ordinary citizens will be far richer and more vibrant than the one that preceded it. We just have to clean up an ugly mess first.

The New Yorker devotes 6,600 meticulously edited words to the impending death of newspapers, examining objectively the promise and perils of a new-media world which writer Eric Alterman sees embodied in the Huffington Post. Drawing on sources ranging from Walter Lippman to The Simpsons, Alterman concludes:

• That the death of newspapers is inevitable;
• That the model that will emerge to replace them looks strikingly like that of the newspapers of 200 years ago; and
• That our democracy is probably better off for this trend, although the plight of people in “the dark” is worse.

Here are some excerpts. Everything is elliptical:

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.”

The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.

Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago, Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the Sacred Heart study, say that the media consciously seek to influence public policies, though they disagree about whether the bias is liberal or conservative.

Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

[Huffington Post] is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between six and ten million dollars annually, according to estimates from Nielsen NetRatings and comScore, the Huffington Post is more popular than all but eight newspaper sites.

The blogosphere relies on its readership, €”its community, €”for quality control.

Most posts inside the [Huffington] site, however, go up before an editor sees them.

Journalism works well, [Walter] Lippmann wrote, when “it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch.” But where the situation is more complicated, journalism “causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.”

When Lippmann was writing, many newspapers remained committed to the partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press, in which editors and publishers viewed themselves as appendages of one or another political power or patronage machine and slanted their news offerings accordingly.

The twentieth-century model, in which newspapers strive for political independence and attempt to act as referees between competing parties on behalf of what they perceive to be the public interest, was, in Lippmann’s time, in its infancy.

[The piece goes into an analysis of a 1920s debate between Lippman and rival John Dewey over the nature and methods of democratic discourse.]

As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected, top reporters, anchors, and editors naturally rose in status to the point where some came to be considered the social equals of the senators, [P]olitics increasingly became a business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed

The Huffington Post was hardly the first Web site to stumble on the technique of leveraging the knowledge of its readers to challenge the mainstream media narrative. For example, conservative bloggers at sites like Little Green Footballs took pleasure in helping to bring down Dan Rather after he broadcast dubious documents allegedly showing that George W. Bush had received special treatment during his service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Talking Points Memo “was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil,” a scandal that ultimately ended with the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a George Polk Award for Marshall, the first ever for a blogger.

During the Katrina crisis, for example, [Talking Points Memo] discovered that some of [its] readers worked in the federal government’s climate-and-weather-tracking infrastructure. They provided the site with reliable reporting available nowhere else.

Traditional newspaper men and women tend to be unimpressed by the style of journalism practiced at the political Web sites, Real reporting, especially the investigative kind, is expensive, they remind us. Aggregation and opinion are cheap.

In October, 2005, at an advertisers’ conference in Phoenix, Bill Keller complained that bloggers merely “recycle and chew on the news,” contrasting that with the Times‘ emphasis on what he called “a ‘journalism of verification,’ ” rather than mere “assertion.”

“Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out,” Arianna Huffington protested, “In the run-up to the Iraq war, many in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, lost their veneer of unassailable trustworthiness for many readers and viewers.”

Newspaper editors now say that they “get it.” Yet traditional journalists are blinkered by their emotional investment in their Lippmann-like status as insiders. They tend to dismiss not only most blogosphere-based criticisms but also the messy democratic ferment from which these criticisms emanate. The Chicago Tribune recently felt compelled to shut down comment boards [because they] “were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots.”

[Huffington] predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism, €”wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting, A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom, €”with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times.”

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.

Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

In “Imagined Communities” (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” It is at least partially through the “imagined community” of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged.

 

Newsday in Play: Media Moguls Salivate

The New York Times has more details on Sam Zell’s interest in selling Newsday. In addition to the previously reported interest by Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman, it now appears that Cablevision also wants to get in on the bidding. Unless Cablevision wins, the most likely outcome is that Newsday’s production facilities will be combined either with Zuckerman’s Daily News or Murdoch’s New York Post, thereby putting heavy pressure on the loser. It’s been questionable for some time whether New York City could support three tabloids and this may decide the issue. For Zell, the sale of Newsday must be a defeat. As the Times points out, the deal “illustrates the paradox Tribune faces: The best way to raise cash to meet short-term demands is to sell the very same properties the company would want to keep in the long run because they generate healthy profits.”

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Variety analyzes the first few months of Zell’s Tribune ownership and concludes that the real estate magnate got more than he bargained for. The 15% decline in revenues was unexpected, insiders say, and that’s why extreme measures like layoffs and asset sales are on the table. Zell has tried to bring in managers who question everything, but the problems at Tribune Co. run deeper than a calcified corporate structure. The industry is imploding and that’s not good when there’s a $13 billion debt to service.

Faltering Economics

Alan Mutter comments on the potential impact of bond rating downgrades on the newspaper industry. In a helpful tutorial on the workings of the bond market, he explains why the near-junk status of Belo, GateHouse Media, McClatchy, Media General, MediaNews Group, Morris and Tribune increases their debt burden at a time when they can least afford it. Paying off bonds is simply a matter of growing the business faster than the debt burden, but newspapers are unable to do that right now. Lenders don’t want to run newspapers, so they’ll do what they can to right the business, but that usually means vicious cost cuts. In a worst-case scenario, the defaulting borrower’s assets are chopped up and the company shut down.

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On top of everything else, the price of newsprint is up over 10% in the last six months. The increases are offsetting many of the savings publishers had hoped to realize from resizing initiatives. Dow Jones spent $30 million to retrofit presses and manufacturing operations when it shrunk the Wall Street Journal a year ago. Those expenses may have done little more than stave off the impact of the rise in paper prices for a while.

 

Three From the Coast

Pasadena Weekly attempts to total up the newspaper layoffs in the Los Angeles area. It comes up with 70, including 31 pressroom workes at the LA Times, 22 at the LA Daily News and 10 in Pasadena (where there are now five reporters left to cover a dozen communities). The epicenter (‘scuse the reference) of coverage is LA Observed, which journalists are reportedly checking every half hour for more bad news.

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That’s the Press, Baby! proposes a novel explanation for the San Jose Mercury News’ implosion: geography. The author proposes that in a high-cost area like the South Bay, the Merc had to expand or be pecked to death by free local papers in the bedroom communities crowded into the narrow corridor between the bay and the mountains. There was simply nowhere to expand.

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Finally, the Los Angeles Times has an interesting new example of grassroots journalism. The Homicide Report blog, written by a reporter and one contributor, documents every homicide in Los Angeles County (which adds up to 165 as of this writing). It’s the type of reporting that only a professional news organization could do and it dramatizes that real people are affected by homicide, a topic that is often treated matter-of-factly by the news media.

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Hapless Sun-Times May Be Next Big Downturn Victim

Could the Chicago Sun-Times be the next big city daily to shut down? Read this BusinessWeek profile and you’ll probably come to that conclusion. Once a hard-hitting scourge of local politicians, the Sun-Times has been slammed by a combination of the industry downturn and management misdeeds that landed two former executives in jail. Having hacked away at costs in an effort to stabilize the ship, the paper that once won seven Pulitzers in one 20-year stretch is now reduced to haranguing rival Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell while also outsourcing its delivery to him. Concludes BW: “it’s hard to see how the Sun-Times will be around much past its 61st birthday next year.”

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Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) reported a dismal fourth quarter 2007 net loss of $59.1 million, up from $34.6 million a year earlier. Editor & Publisher notes that “STMG, which publishes about 100 dailies and non-dailies in the Chicago market, is in the midst of a study of ‘strategic alternatives,’ including a sale of all or part of the company.”And to highlight how bad things are, “STMG launched a plan to reduce operating costs by $50 million by June 30, 2008. Among the measures the company undertook was outsourcing distribution to the rival Chicago Tribune, outsourcing ad production, newsroom and management layoffs, and folding some newspapers.” Can you imagine outsourcing distribution to your competitor?

Profitless in Seattle

Wanna buy a newspaper? Or three of them, actually. The Seattle Times. Co. is trying to unwind its ill-advised 1998 decision to go into debt to buy three newspapers in Maine. Apparently, the purchase was homage to the paper’s founder, who hailed from the Pine Tree State. However, the cash-strapped company can no longer afford such folly and is looking to dump the Portland Press Herald, Waterville Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. There’s even talk that Portland’s newspaper union might buy the local rag. Perhaps that’d be a way to restore the 27 jobs the paper recently cut.

Dow Jones Surveys the Damage

Regular NDW readers won’t find much new in this Dow Jones story about the perilous state of the U.S. newspaper industry, but it is a good wrap-up of recent events. It’s generous to the industry in recounting why newspapers didn’t invest more aggressively online a few years ago. Quoting:

“For one, many newspapers were scared away from online ventures when the dot- com boom turned to a bust in 2000. In order to fully nip online competition in the bud, however, newspapers would have needed to invest heavily in burgeoning Web ventures before those entities got too expensive. For many newspapers, that kind of investment was not within their means.”

Not within their means. That’s like driving a car on bald tires because new ones are not within your means. Newspapers have had gross profit margins of more than 20% for decades. There were plenty of “means” to invest if owners had simply seen the bullet train that was heading at them. The post-bubble period was the best time in a decade to buy into the Internet. So why didn’t any newspaper companies do that?

The best quote in the story comes from McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt, who told a December conference that a “significant portion” of the current troubles the industry faces are “cyclical.” Right. So is global warming.

Envisioning the Future of Journalism

The Editors Weblog interviews Jim Brady, Executive Editor of Washingtonpost.com, who provides sensible insight on the future of journalism. Newspapers aren’t going away, he says, but many smaller papers are finding that the economies of scale of online publishing make it a more sensible route that newsprint. Journalism itself will also evolve to include more reader interaction, with readers doing more of the legwork. “Iif journalists allow readers, not to investigate for them, but to help them flag and acquire easily accessible information, it makes investigative journalism easier to do than it was fifteen years ago, when the journalists had to make dozens of phone calls and go down to the public library.”

Online Media Baron’s Advice: Blow It All Up

Billionaire entrepeneur and former AOL top executive Ted Leonsis has a 10-point plan to rescue the newspaper business. It basically comes down to blowing up the existing model, going entirely online and distributing through every available channel. Oh, and search-optimizing. Veteran journalists will love this suggestion:”Get rid of senior editors. Turn them into algorithmic managers…Knowing statistically what content gets the best click through across all media is a key deliverable. Newspapers need math majors running big swaths of the organization…There are too many English majors in key positions.”

Milestone Award for New-Media Publisher

A landmark event in online journalism occurred in late February, when Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for its coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. This New York Times account points to the difference between the new breed of online reporting and traditional print journalism. Chief among them is the involvement of readers in the process. “There are thousands who have contributed some information over the last year,” the paper quotes Talking Point’s Joshua Micah Marshall as saying. Marshall has even been known to give “assignments” to his readers, asking them to comb through official documents. His journalism also mixes original reporting with generous links to other information online. It’s very Wikipedia-like. And it’s working. The reader- and advertising-funded site gets about 400,000 page views a day and has about 750,000 unique visitors a month.

Gannett CEO’s fine, even if his company isn’t

Gannett Blog tap dances on Gannett CEO Craig Dubow‘s substantial 2007 pay package, pointing out the absurdity of Dubow earning nearly $3 million in 2007 despite turning in the second world stock performance among major newspaper companies. Lots of anonymous angry comments follow Jim Hopkins’ description.

They’re doing something right in Canada

• The newspaper malaise in the U.S. may be mainly a U.S. phenomenon for now. The Toronto Globe and Mail reports on research by Newspaper Audience Databank that shows that Canada’s two national papers both saw a slight increase in weekday readership last year. The Globe and Mail’s weekday readership increased 3.9 per cent to a shade over 910,000, while The National Post’s weekday readership grew 2% to 538,400. Both papers’ Saturday circulation declined. The story goes on to say that the business picture is holding up somewhat better in Canada than in the U.S., although it’s far from good.
• Meanwhile, Marketing Charts reports that 61% of Canadians say that they’d rather look at the ads in a newspaper than watch them on TV, according to a national survey by Ipsos Reid for the Canadian Newspaper Association. What’s more, an astronishing number of Canadians read newspapers mainly for the ads, scan pages looking for advertising or consult newspapers looking for holiday sales promotions. What do people know in Canada that those in the lower 48 don’t?

A very funny takeoff at Tribune Co.

Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20 Year Club pointed to this very funny video by WGN Morning News sports anchor Pat Tomasulo spoofing Sam Zell’s exhortation to Tribune Co. staffers that “You Own This Place.” Watch till the end as weatherman Tom Skilling to steals the show.

The uneasy transition to online

Billionaire sports fan Mark Cuban weighs in on newspaper bloggers. Responding to a local newspaper’s protest over the exclusion of its staff blogger from the Dallas Mavericks’ locker room (Cuban owns the Mavs), Cuban criticizes newspaper blogging as “probably the worst marketing and branding move a newspaper can make…By taking on the branding, standard and posting habits of the blogosphere, newspapers have worked their way down to the least common denominator of publishing in what appears to be an effort to troll for page views.”

Cuban says that treating bloggers like mainstream media should be an all-or-nothing proposition. You must either admit or exclude everyone, but don’t play favorites because a blogger has a mainstream media business card. Some 20 commenters largely agree. Cuban’s position has kicked up quite a storm of debate, with some people saying he’s simply trying to get back at a reporter he doesn’t like.

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An award-winning newspaper reporter talks about how she made the leap to online media and how other ink-stained wretches can do the same thing. Michele Nicolosi comments, “In the very near future, we will all be online journalists…The outlook for online journalists — those that play well, learn about and care about the online publication as much as we all cared about the paper 15 years ago — is much, much better than it is for people who are dragging their feet, refusing to change the way they work to accommodate the new needs of the online product.”