Chris Boese's Weblog

Note to Self: Avoid "stenographers to liars." Dan Froomkin's final WashPo column

Link: White House Watch - White House Watched.

In his final column for the Washington Post, Dan Froomkins gives us fair warning of what to watch out for, and a fine shout-out to people who were NOT "stenographers to liars," journalists and political writers who made a difference.

So I just had to echo the shout. Some of my very favorite writers are on Froomkin's good list. Yay them! Boo, "stenographers to liars."

[...]

And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don't know. 

Now, a little over five months after Bush left office, Barack Obama's presidency is shaping up to be in large part about coming to terms with the Bush era, and fixing all the things that were broken. In most cases, Obama is approaching this task enthusiastically – although in some cases, he is doing so only under great pressure, and in a few cases, not at all . I think part of Obama's abiding popularity with the public stems from what a contrast he is from his predecessor -- and in particular his willingness to take on problems. But he certainly has a lot of balls in the air at one time. And I predict that his growing penchant for secrecy – especially but not only when it comes to the Bush legacy of torture and lawbreaking – will end up serving him poorly, unless he renounces it soon.

Obama is nowhere in Bush's league when it comes to issues of credibility, but his every action nevertheless needs to be carefully scrutinized by the media, and he must be held accountable. We should be holding him to the highest standards – and there are plenty of places where we should be pushing back. Just for starters, there are a lot of hugely important but unanswered questions about his Afghanistan policy, his financial rescue plans, and his turnaround on transparency.

[...]

I love what Dan Froomkin is laying out here...

Link: Dan Froomkin: Why “playing it safe” is killing American newspapers | Nieman Journalism Lab.

It is outrageous that this man was just let go from the Washington Post, and I am expecting further outrage to continue to roll around the Nets on this topic.

But in the meantime, this series he did for the Nieman Journalism Lab is just pure gold, and I want to think hard about it.

For now, here's just a few quotes that grabbed me from part one (emphasis below is mine).

I hope to add more on this and his other topics in the next few days, including perhaps some reflections on my own journey to these same conclusions in a year that for some reason kept popping up in my mind today: 1989. Geez, was that really 20 years ago? It was when I had my own personal moment of truth about how I would continue to practice journalism in my life, as a quest, a mission, an avocation, nearly a religion, as Froomkin describes in the paragraph I have bolded below.

Series:Dan Froomkin on news’ future

Dan Froomkin: Why “playing it safe” is killing American newspapers

By Dan Froomkin /  May 26  /  8 a.m. 

We’re all in a state of despair these days over our inability to monetize our journalism online the way we’ve been used to doing in print.

[...]

Our reporters and editors are curious, passionate, and voracious discoverers and devourers of information; talented storytellers; and smart people with excellent bullshit detectors. As long as human beings are curious about each other and clamor for trusted information, there’s a place for us out there. The Internet hasn’t changed that. In fact it’s increased the market for what we’ve got: The Internet highly values people who know things, who can find things out, who can distinguish between what’s important and what’s not, who can distinguish between what’s true and what’s not, and who can communicate succinctly and effectively.

But we’re hiding much of our newsrooms’ value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations. While the dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story still has some marginal utility, it’s mostly a throwback at this point — a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community. (For instance, it’s the daily delivery cycle of our print product that led us to focus on yesterday’s news. And it’s the focus on maximizing newspaper circulation that drove us to create the notion of “objectivity” — thereby removing opinion and voice from news stories — for fear of alienating any segment of potential subscribers.)

The Internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice. There’s a reason why opinion writing tends to dominate the most-read lists on our “news” sites. Indeed, what we’ve seen is that Internet communities tend to form around voices — informed, passionate, authoritative voices in particular. (No one wants to read a bored blogger, I always say.)

[...]

The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.

[...]

Photo by J.D. Lasica used under a Creative Commons license.

I feel like it's the 80s all over again

It's not a good thing, but not wholly a bad thing either. The terrible tragedy of the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas is bringing a lot of old relics out of the attic, and as the far right wingnuts brush the cobwebs off their terrorist tactics, something else is happening.

Some of the old style 70s feminists and other pro-choice activists who have been largely silent and inactive for the past 30 years are coming out of the woodwork too, speaking up and speaking out against what, if done by a Muslim in the United States, would have inspired a change in the National Terror Alert Level and anti-terrorist scare tactics of "Katie bar the door."

 I need to strongly qualify that last paragraph. There were some feminists and pro-choice activists, compassionate doctors, nurses, rape crisis advocates, suspected child abuse and neglect social workers, and many others WHO DID NOT go silently into that good night of feminist movement forgetfulness of the past 30 years. They have stayed on the job, day in and day out, and, as we see in the article below, risking their lives more fully every day, especially when there is a Democrat or pro-choice president in the White House.

 The medical professionals and social workers, the ones that kept working, like Dr. Tiller, the ones who are now speaking out nightly on MSNBC, these are people who didn't go away or shut down just because the movement politics had waned. They are true heroes.

For the rest of us, maybe we will remember our old activist selves. Maybe we'll remember what it was like to regularly staff the counter-protests at the clinics on Friday afternoons.

Maybe we'll remember what it was like to organize and stand up for what we believe in, as if it were the norm, and not something forgotten, in an old scrapbook.

Watch Rachel Maddow on MSNB in the evenings, and it makes you, makes me, remember the old days, of staffing the pro-choice tables in the student union on campus, bringing the speakers in, of marching and raising hell and pestering those folks with the oddly arched eyebrows and permanently angry faces protesting outside of clinics on Friday afternoons.

Maybe we forgot to be those people because the clinics disappeared, so we didn't see the protesters, forgot we still needed to fight back. I don't know why. I didn't stop being that feminist. But we sure did stop getting riled up over travesties that should have kept us riled up.

Some paragraphs in the article below just blew me away, so much so I have to bold them, call them out. Read them once. Then read them again.

Link: Cristina Page: The Murder of Dr. Tiller, a Foreshadowing.

Cristina Page

Author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America

Posted: May 31, 2009 09:36 PM

The Murder of Dr. Tiller, a Foreshadowing

For those who would like to think today's murder in church of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, is an isolated incident, here's the horrifying news: You are wrong. The pattern is clear and frightening.

In March 1993, three months into the administration of our first pro-choice president, Bill Clinton, abortion provider Dr. David Gunn was murdered in Pensacola, Florida. That was the beginning of what would become a five-fold increase in violence against abortion providers throughout the Clinton years.

Today's assassination of Dr. George Tiller comes 5 months into the term of our second pro-choice president. For anyone who would like to believe that this is a statistical anomaly, a coincidence that doesn't portend anything, again, you are wrong.

During the entire Bush administration, from 2000-2008 there were no murders.

During the Clinton era, between 1994-2000 there were 6 abortion providers and clinic staff murdered, and 17 attempted murders of abortion providers. There were 12 bombings or arsons during the Clinton years.

During the Bush administration, not only were there no murders, there were no attempted murders. There was one clinic bombing during the Bush years.

One can only conclude that like terrorist sleeper cells, these extremists have now been set in motion. Indeed the evidence is already there. The chatter, the threats, the hate-filled rhetoric are abundant.

In the last year of the Bush administration there were 396 harassing calls to abortion clinics. In just the first four months of the Obama administration that number has jumped to 1401.

[...]

Battered women are at greatest danger of being killed by their abusers when they are most strong -- that is, when they muster the courage to leave. The same phenomenon may be true in the abusive political abortion debate. The pro-choice movement, specifically our abortion providers, are in the greatest danger of violence when we take power. When the anti-abortion movement loses power, their most extreme elements appear to move to the fore and take control. The murder of Dr. Tiller suggests that violence against abortion providers may be far more linked to the power, or lack thereof, anti-abortion groups have politically than to laws designed to increase penalties against such acts.

History has another disturbing lesson for us. The escalation of anti-abortion rhetoric plays a direct role in instigating violence. When anti-abortion groups ratchet up the rhetoric, they know exactly what they're doing and the results it will have.

[...]

Eleanor Bader, co-author of Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism, in an article in March for RHRealityCheck.org about clinics bracing for an uptick in violence after the election of Obama wrote, "immediately after Obama's election, Douglas Johnson, Legislative Director of the National Right to Life Committee, called him a "hardcore pro-abortion president." The American Life League dubbed him "one of the most radical pro-abortion politicians ever," and Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life warned that Obama will "force Americans to pay for the killing of innocents." Americans United for Life, the Family Research Council and Operation Save America quickly joined the chorus."

[...]

Many in the pro-choice movement believed that the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) law, passed in 1994 in response to Gunn's murder, was responsible for reigning in violence against abortion providers. Clearly that is not the case. Based on statistics on violence against abortion providers compiled by the National Abortion Federation, even after the passage of FACE in 1994, there was still considerable violence and threats against clinic personnel, including six murders. As appears clear, the pro-choice movement has looked through rose-colored glasses, assuming or hoping that legalities can restrain terrorists.

In fact, it didn't abate after FACE, as we've seen. It was not until a comforting anti-abortion president did they calm down and stop the murder, bombing and harassment spree.

As a result of Bush's policies, recent reportings from clinics suggest that we may be seeing a surge in abortions. That has failed to inspire introspection from anti-abortion groups. That Clinton presided over the most dramatic decline in abortion rates in the recorded history of our country left them unmoved. That Obama has assigned his senior-most staff to the task of finding ways to reduce the need for abortion has not protected clinics nor providers nor Obama. Holder and his Justice Department should take note of the chatter and move aggressively against this form of domestic terrorism. The hate-filled rhetoric against Obama from the anti-abortion movement is at unprecedented levels, even for this reflexively inflammatory group. They refer to him as the "Most Pro-Abortion President Ever" ignoring the fact that he is the first to extend an olive branch in hopes that together we can make abortion more rare.

[...]

Steve Yelvington frames a tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages)

Link: A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages) | yelvington.com.

Great post here, and an interesting frame for thinking about these issues. Not many mention the CNN.com topic pages (which came out with the redesign launched in 2007)... maybe folks aren't thinking about them because they are less well executed (I don't know if they are or are not, this is a newer genre that owes more to blog "carnivals" than anything else), or because they appeared BEFORE all this talk about topic pages caught fire...)

Anyway, it means approaching the informational side of journalism from OUTSIDE the frame of the inverted pyramid and more actually as technical writers. Isn't that interesting?! Summaries that give context. Unbound, decontextualized content that assumes the hypertextual link is the norm, rather than linear thinking and reading and linking. Fascinating!

What I think we may really, finally be seeing is the true modification of journalism and journalistic discourse for the Web medium, rather than doing the horseless carriage jive, the way early TV looked so much like an old time radio program, only with pictures.

Marshall McLuhan would be proud.

Arizona's 'Tucson Citizen' Reporters: Seeking answers to the paper's closure

Link: Our Opinion: Seeking answers? | Editorial.

You know it's bad when things get this grim. The losses of more than five dozen well-paying journalism jobs sort of pale in comparison to what a community loses in the form of its collective memory of itself and its history.

And as The Wire's David Simon has been pointing out to the Senate and to anyone else who will listen (Bill Moyers, Bill Maher), we are about to enter an inglorious boom-time for corruption, from the small town petty kind (how big the automatic kickback for the building permit or zoning change?) to the massive scale Enron- and Maddoff-style fleecing of civil society on a level folks right now probably can't begin to imagine.

Simon is also refreshing for pointing out (as I would also) that this gutting, this hollowing out of the journalistic endeavor began in the late 1980s and reached a kind of height in the flush, 30% corporate journalism profit days of the 1990s, when the corporate coffers were overflowing with carpet-bagger cash, and journalists still faced low salaries and almost constant rounds of layoffs. As they have since. You can set your watch by them.

Apparently the corporate media monopolies have deliberately set out to kill their journalistic audience/community-voice host.

 I've stopped posting on the topic as much because there is really little left to say, beyond rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic or "Thinking the Unthinkable" with Clay Shirky. Once you get there, you can rage, rage against the dying of the light all you want, but journalism as we know it is going going going into that good night.

Maybe I still have a little rage left in me, for the Kabuki Play of public relations material winkingly packaged as "journalism" that the hollowed out remnants of newspapers and other supposedly fourth estate enterprises will become, or perhaps have already become.

Chris Stomps Her Foot and Shakes Fist!

There. I feel better. For about 10 minutes.

Link: Our Opinion: Seeking answers? | Editorial.

Editorial

Our Opinion: Seeking answers?

Published: 05.16.2009

For those of you looking to this space for perspective on the Citizen's demise, for those looking for What It All Means - you are looking in the wrong place.

Excuse us, but we're a little too close to the situation right now.

Do you ask someone how it feels when a relative dies after a long bout with cancer? After all, we knew the end was coming for months.

But here's a revelation: When death comes, even if it's not supposed to be a shock . . . it's still a shock.

[...]

Those of us who have explored Tucson's, uh, challenging employment environment know we won't be making anywhere near the money we make now. Bottom line for Tucson: More than five dozen well-paying jobs lost.

But a newspaper isn't just any company. It's a repository of the city's collective memory and of our aspirations and hopes.

Healthy journalism equates with a vibrant city. A dead paper is analogous to the city's libraries closing - a chilling prospect.

• To all those bloggers and "citizen journalists" who, if you believe the Internet, are this close to reinventing the industry, here's your opportunity.

Now is your chance to cover never-ending board meetings, make Freedom of Information Act requests to dislodge facts from public officials, call sources - you have cultivated sources, right? - and otherwise do what we in our dying industry like to call "reporting."

To do it right, you'll have to work eight to 10 hours a day, five to six days a week.

If it sounds like a job, not a hobby, it is. But don't expect to get paid; apparently, that business model has been discredited.

We're rooting for you. Public officials need vigilant scrutiny if our dollars are to be wisely spent and public policies are to be sane and progressive. So good luck with that.

[...]

The "Great Wall" in journalism is not to blame for the decline of newspapers

Link: Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business - Lost Remote TV Blog.

I recently posted a longish comment on a post on the Lost Remote blog (I don't think it is strictly a TV blog anymore, as the masthead says "local media and the battle for the web"). Like many of us have, Lost Remote has engaged in a lot of soul-searching about what went wrong and what factors are to blame for this major shakeout in the Fourth Estate and the forced removal of what have to be thousands of veteran journalists from commercial participation in the profession (most blogs they are moving to are not yet commercially-viable).

At this point in my life, I've watched such shakeouts happen far too often, from my first days out of Journalism School in the mid-80s, although nothing as bad as what we see now.

I watched Radio majors graduating a few years after me immediately abandon their careers because of Reagan deregulation that allowed massive media chains to consolidate and automate radio properties on a scale that made that profession virtually disappear, just as print journalism is very likely equally hopeless for new journalism grads in the pipeline right now.

I watched 2-newspaper cities and towns become 1-newspaper monopolies, with the staff of one of those papers all let go (no matter what those bogus joint-operating-agreements stated). I was utterly demoralized then, yet that was nothing compared to what is happening now.

Much later, after teaching college for many years, I returned to journalism, this time in cable TV news, and again watched television newsrooms go through rounds of layoffs so regularly you'd think management was dosing on Ex-Lax.

These weren't Howard Beale-style layoffs made by cut-throat Faye Dunaways looking to corrupt the product (although there were those as well). Also rolling through TV and newspaper newsrooms were the deliberate purging of age and experience (where age became a liability in TV once you were over 30-- not on air, in the newsroom-- and over 40 in print) BECAUSE too much journalism experience meant you were more likely to protest at the full-on abandonment of journalistic standards and the embrace of presenting PR-created material as "news."

All small potatoes compared to what is happening now. Entire metropolitan areas may find themselves with NO newspaper of record very soon. This isn't just a convulsion in the field. It is a death rattle. I'm even following a Twitter feed called "Newspaper Death Watch."

So into this conversation comes analysis and blame, and the folks who are ready to pile on and claim traditional journalism was too hidebound and principled and worked itself into an anachronism (this argument is in alignment with the management philosophies that practiced illegal age discrimination in newsrooms, for its most crass purpose, because 20-somethings can be so green and easily intimidated as to abandon journalistic principles in ways that most veteran journalists are not).

So much of the blame centers around bizarre wrong-headedness in how to handle companion web ventures for newspapers, a primo opportunity that most newspapers missed out of sheer blindness to the media shift. Perhaps that is all that is happening now, paying the piper for believing the web was nothing more than a "horseless carriage," rather than a serious competitor for print, TV, and radio.

But with all the blame to go around, some go after the so-called "Great Wall" erected in the U.S. press between business/advertising and editorial content, a means to ensure that editorial stories were not being influenced by interested parties with axes to grind (a more than respectable purpose, and one I take a lot of comfort in, even though it may be, as Shakespeare put it, "more honor'd in the breach than in the observance."

There are many voices today arguing, "Tear down that wall!" They want to unleash journalism online and unite it with "pay-per-post" and sweetheart deals with advertisers, "creative" entrepreneurial solutions that will maximize SEO and online distribution systems with social media (the latter generally a good thing), while taking a pencil eraser to some seriously enshrined principles of journalistic ethics, even when only honored in the breach, because those things can serve to distinguish journalism from interested public relations and bald-faced marketing copy masquerading as editorial content.

I am not a fan of "objectivity" in journalism (pseudo-objectivity), a fiction which really only holds court in the U.S. press, and is dealt with far more sanely in international journalism. Removing point of view from reporting created a fiction, a lie, a form of posturing that hurts basic U.S. journalism to this day. All observations have perspectives, and good journalists will OWN and CLAIM their perspectives (as bloggers do), rather than pretend their eyeballs do not reside within their own heads. U.S. journalists are  usually forced to adopt a floating disembodied deity perspective, WHICH IS A LIE.

But I remain a supporter of keeping advertising and business interests separate from editorial interests, and working hard at keeping editorial copy, no matter what form of delivery it takes, from morphing into primarily marketing copy, essentially pissing away journalistic credibility in the process. Newsrooms and editorial filters don't create that credibility (and they've already lost a lot of it). It is earned every day with readers/listeners/watchers/co-creators.

So I say, "Don't Tear Down That Wall!" And here is my response posted to the Lost Remote blog post (sorry about the length, but I care too much about this topic to not carry on about it). I'll also quote some bits from Cory Bergman's original article to set some of the context.

Link: Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business - Lost Remote TV Blog.

Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business

Cory Bergman February 26th, 2009

With the Seattle Post-Intelligencer likely in its final days, I’ve been attending a few of the many panel discussions and meetups in town about the future of journalism. Here in Seattle, the home of Microsoft and hundreds of other technology companies, surely we can figure out a way to bring journalism back from the brink. Right?

But nearly every one of these discussions, attended mostly by journalists and academics, downgrades into a frustrating and largely meaningless exchange of ideas. The problem: journalists wash their hands of the business side of the equation. That’s the business guys’ problem, said one newspaper journalist. But it’s not. It’s everyone’s problem. And the “Great Wall” separating news and the business side has expedited newspapers’ decline.

Now, I’m not proposing using journalism to influence business decisions, directly or indirectly. I’m proposing leveraging a community through technology to help people make better decisions about their lives — including decisions to buy products and services — which dramatically increases revenue potential. Does Yelp violate journalism ethics by allowing a community to self-organize around business information? Of course not. Does it help serve the user? Absolutely. How about Zvents, a popular social events calendar? Same thing. Can the “business guy” build this all by himself, without the help of journalists, the people arguably closest to the user?

By splitting journalism and business into two buckets separated by a longstanding cultural divide, the two groups fail to collaborate on ideas that tap the strengths of both.

[...]

This level of collaboration and organization-wide commitment has been painfully missing in local media companies. Journalists want to do traditional news, which is repurposed online. Sales folks want to do traditional reach advertising, which is repurposed online. And technology folks, well, they’re usually understaffed and misinterpreted as the “IT folks.”

[...]

Some really great comments available at the original post as well, comments as valuable as the posting. Go read them.

Meanwhile,

Here's my response to Bergman and his commenters:

(I've tweaked my grammar a bit for clarity)

I personally find it extremely hard to believe there is a working journalist who doesn't know that the newspaper's costs are not covered by subscriptions and single copy sales.

This is a core principle of Journalism 101, and every possessor of a journalism degree (I can't vouch for the others) would have had to DITCH quite a lot of classes to have missed that key principle that is instilled in every budding young journalist from day 1.

And if not then, they hear it very quickly on the job, the first time they propose doing a story that has ANYTHING to do with a supermarket, which, as we all know, are TABOO simply because for most small newspapers, they are the biggest advertisers.

I patently disbelieve the problems facing this industry right now have anything to do with the so-called "Great Wall," which in and of itself has become so corrupted over the years by supermarkets and other big advertisers (back to school "special sections," anyone?) as fully as it has by the euphemism of "video press releases" and other similar "interested content suppliers" to newsrooms.

Holding the "Great Wall" to blame is nothing but a rationalizing scapegoat, a paper tiger, a straw man, and journalists are right to defend the little corner of that wall that is left.

Remove the wall, put the column inches up for sale (online or off) and you might as well forget about even calling it journalism, and let it all blur into the amorphous PR that is the REAL corporate agenda behind all this transitional cost-cutting. Hell, let's make them all look like the annual report dittoheads and fluff they will become (worse than it is already).

Whatever you do, don't blame corporate management for carrying too much debt, for sucking up too many papers into their massive behemoths, or for making these overly thick monsters into a giant red herring for the nuggets of real journalism that one has to look to find between all the fodder inserted for the advertiser and not the reader. It sure is awfully convenient for media conglomerate management to blame working journalists and throw us off the real trail.

Now, I will grant you this one primary point: journalists have become too disconnected from their communities, too isolated, too much in a bubble. That is their own fault, but it is also the fault of being part of a massive carpet-bagging corporate newspaper chain (as most of them are), parachuting into distant communities, with management brought in from outside and journalists encouraged to climb climb climb to ever distant metropolises.

Even with that weight, my friends over the years have mostly stayed rooted in communities, been part of them, stayed at single papers far longer than I could have. And do you know what they have faced? Constant corporate cutbacks on local coverage and reporters, CONSTANT, 20 years worth of constant. They fight to get inches for local stories around the AP copy used like so much filler, like so many Ann Landers columns or syndicated comics pages.

Section fronts, in some small towns, are all you get for local from the corporate chains. And barely the staff to fill section fronts. Inside those section fronts, it is worse than fishwrap. These papers in many cases were 100-year institutions and participants in community life, BEFORE the carpet-baggers moved in in order to build a pipeline to syphon local ad revenue out of communities and back into the coffers, or the corporate debt service so they could buy and gut more small town papers.

Journalists not knowing that subscriptions and single copy sales don't pay the bills? Get real. They are reminded of that fact every day that they go out into their communities and attempt to cover stories.

The bigger problem is that by letting advertising drive the bus (and I do support the ad model over a paid subscription model online) is that the advertisers became the REAL audience for the paper. Journalists who stubbornly refused to believe this are a dying breed, especially if they still wrote for communities and readers instead of winning awards and striving for their next step up the corporate chain ladder.

But the bulk of that 66% ad-supported content was as throwaway for readers as you could imagine. The ONLY reason many of those stories even existed was for the advertisers to read and file.

That's the disconnect that the online model will solve, with massive structural changes in the field. Just like women's magazines that place how-to put on make-up stories across from a make-up ad, newspapers allowed their relationships with advertisers to corrupt the papers to the point that their product became too irrelevant for real readers.

Journalism has to court readers again, to be sure, and teach advertisers that readers have more power than the advertisers' push model arrogantly denies them.

Some sure do like thinking turning journalists into entrepreneurs will save the world, and I seriously doubt that. Journalists getting even more cozy in bed with the people (advertisers) that drove their audience away will not bring the audience back.

Another Great Picture of the Day

Link: dshort.com: Perspectives on the Dow.

Great explanation (and perspective [grin]) at the link above, if you don't know why you should be looking at this chart.

 

Signs of a new appetite for skewering Far Right Talk Radio bloviators?

Link: What Letterman (and His Ilk) Get That Couric (and Her Ilk) Do Not. - Lambert to the Slaughter | Brian Lambert on Media and Culture | Mpls.St.Paul Magazine mspmag.com.

Brian Lambert writes a great column laying out what might be a true bottom for the end of the uncontested, logically-challenged, reign of the Talk Radio dictators over the minds of the witless.

See, it always bugged me, how karma never seemed to come back on these people, how they committed outrages against reason, logic, propriety, and even the English language and never paid a price for broadcasting their stupidity for so many to hear.

I mean, sheesh, I went around worrying about accidentally saying something stupid in front of a class of 28 college freshmen. I'm like most people, in that an ill-chosen extemporaneous word or phrase can keep me up all night, fuming, "Why did I say that THAT way?"

Not these folks, apparently. All the stupidity, and all the calling out of the stupidity, had no effect on their righteous obliviousness. They didn't even have the sense to be embarrassed, nor were the listeners parsing the logic all that actively either. Libel mattered little to them.

But now the "worm may be turning" on these folks, in the words of Brian Lambert.

We can only hope. But I like the way Lambert puts it best. (and for the record, I watched Rahm Emanuel frame the Limbaugh position on Meet the Press Sunday and came to the exact same conclusion Lambert and others did: it was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel for a guy like Emanuel, who is such a hilarious chess player, I just love to watch him work. I swear he must be a Scorpio.)

What Letterman (and His Ilk) Get That Couric (and Her Ilk) Do Not.

By Brian Lambert

One of the classic admonitions of political warfare says that when the other guy is doing a perfectly fine job of mounting the scaffold and hanging himself, you don't go mess up a good thing by warning him about the trap door.

Still ... this Rush Limbaugh as "Leader of the Republican Party" thing, with Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee offering a groveling apology to Limbaugh barely two days after asserting that he and not Limbaugh, a radio entertainer, was the "de facto leader" ... is beyond anything someone like me could ever hope for. (The only thing better was being live on KTLK a couple years ago when Limbaugh was brought in on his dope bust.)

The Rahm Emanuel strategy (his MO and prints are all over this one) of squeezing hapless Republicans into the position of either accepting Limbaugh, an unabashed cynic, as their "leader" or face an avalanche of "dittoheads" melting down their phone lines and e-mail is diabolically brilliant. Of course it wouldn't work if the Republican party weren't still a captive of its most hidebound and reactionary elements, the crowd with a near religious attraction to Limbaugh that has had its hands around the neck of actual conservatives for the last 25 years and is now preparing to yank back the lever that drops the party through the trap door.

[...]

Jon Stewart nearly wet himself with all the clips the 4% Republican "base" served up.

Frankly, after 20 years and hundreds of columns/blog posts about the bizarre hold talk radio entertainers have over their astonishingly credulous audiences and the fear they strike into the hearts of the mainstream press, I'm at a loss to flog it all over again. But the worm in this long-running act has turned. In a media universe where 5% of the total audience keeps you rich as Croesus, Limbaugh and other big name radio performers have a rock solid base from which to ride out the "deep recession". But good lord, look what makes up that base!

At least two things have changed dramatically: 1: Newer, fresher, funnier alternate-alternate media on TV (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert) and all over the internet has succeeded in drawing a dark red margin around these characters that no one in media dared in their uncontested glory years during the Clinton administration. And 2: The "conservative ethos" that Limbaugh continues to defend as though it were handed to him from God himself, has exploded in everyone's' face.

[...]

What Couric (and her ilk) avoid saying is that Limbaugh's act has always been nakedly cynical. For people in the accuracy business they've never had the stomach to point out that he is flat out wrong about ... well, damned near everything. But now, as the "Limbaugh base" has been reduced to shrieking for Joe the Plumber in a ballroom of rabid acolytes, it is a bit like Joe McCarthy post-Army hearings. The rest of the country -- supposedly Couric's primary audience -- has been bitch-slapped by reality and is struggling to find a way out from under the slag heap of mismanagement and corruption that has overwhelmed them.

Couric can demure out of fear of offending Limbaugh (who she might bump into at an upscale Manhattan restaurant) and incurring the wrath of his  minions, but all she does is reaffirm in the minds of a healthy majority of viewers that she, like Michael Steele and those truly pathetic Republican congressmen who plead for Limbaugh's forgiveness, that she can not dare to speak candidly and truthfully.

This is a classic dilemma for journalism in the internet age. How assiduously to you stick to "objectivity" when one party in a story not only has been proven wrong, emphatically, and is constantly being deconstructed as frauds and fools by alternate "news" sources that are eating your lunch? In an appearance industry "objective journalism" suffers from a truth deficit. That is a competitive liability.

Letterman lives and dies by ratings as much as Couric, but has the guts/common sense/business acumen to reassert what is now a cultural meme. Namely, that the "principled, true conservatism" shtick of Rush Limbaugh has been revealed to be a sick joke. A profitable one for Limbaugh to be sure, and nothing that needs to be regulated out of business, but a cynical shtick and little more.

Grim Day for Rocky Mountain News

Link: Rocky Mountain News to close, publish final edition Friday

And the journalists are Twittering their final edition:
Link: Twitter / RMN_Newsroom.

Isn't this just a bummer? It reminds me of scenes from the late 80s, when two newspaper cities suddenly became one-newspaper cities, or else the papers got joint-operating agreements that made them essentially one, except with separate editorial staffs.

Except back then, the papers were being shuttered because shareholder profits were falling below 20%, and now its happening because their corporate parents are holding too much debt and the papers are forced to pay the price.

I still don't believe this enterprise has suddenly become "unprofitable." I think it's been run into the ground by greedy corporate mismanagement ready to exceed subscription revenue by pandering endlessly to advertisers, so unbalancing to the equation that the over-thick behemoths were produced more for the advertisers than the readers.

Now we are at the fulcrum point, beyond which, there is no going back. It won't just be the Rocky Mountain News, a fine and award-winning paper. Entire mid-size cities will soon find themselves without any newspaper, and they'll learn to live with it. The Philadelphia Inquirer's owner is filing bankruptcy, and how much longer will many of these papers last? Some even wonder if the NYTimes is strong enough to fight off an acquisition attempt from Rupert Murdoch.

Link: On The Media: Transcript of "Stopping the Press" (February 20, 2009).

I was listening to On the Media from last weekend, which did a segment on the dying newspapers (I am reminded of the classic George Orwell short story, "Shooting an Elephant," and how long it took the elephant to die), and one of the alternative models that caught my attention was not the non-profit endowment idea (bleh) nor the drastic staff reduction model (can you say "Thrifty Nickel?).

I'm not married to the paper model, which largely served advertisers and killed trees unnecessarily. I actually read better online, because of transmitted light vs. reflected light viewing (damn these over-40 eyes!). Not enough contrast for me on print anymore.

But maybe there is something to be said for the splintering of the delivery medium into micro-publications dispersed through various online distribution mechanisms. I still believe in an ad-supported model, but one built on the readers' ecosystem, not an advertiser's manipulation of that ecosystem. Screw them. Imagine, an actual reader-centered publication! What a radical idea!

Micropayments or whatever you want to call them create walls and lock content out of the Commons, out of the currency of ideas open for discussion. Screw that too. I don't care who is advocating it. Unless they can implement micropayments like Kachingle, without walls, it's a dead model in my book.

But advertisers can extract great value from reader-centered publications, because rather than hardened arteries of traditional media buys on a wing and a prayer, the advertisers can actually pay for eyeball exposure with solid tracking and measurable results. They just have to learn how to live with the long tail, and learn how to price it appropriately (and viably, so the publication can stay in business).

And publishers, big publishers, have to learn better how to preserve their own long tails! No more destroying your own permalinks every time you do a redesign, people! Practice some REAL SEO one of these days, how about it?

But today is not a day for lectures. It is a day to be sad for the Rocky Mountain News, and for all the bright and curious and aggressive journalists who have to now find other careers, because this 20th century anomaly, the morphing of the broadsheet and the penny press into some massive and debt-ridden enterprise, is over. R.I.P.

But please, let's keep investigating, keep asking uncomfortable questions, keep casting our words out on the waters for those who have the ears to hear them.

The newspaper is dead. Long live the newspaper!

Rocky Mountain News to close, publish final edition Friday

  By Rocky Mountain News

Originally published 12:01 p.m., February 26, 2009
Updated 03:37 p.m., February 26, 2009

The Rocky Mountain News publishes its last paper tomorrow.

Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Rocky-owner Scripps, broke the news to the staff at noon today, ending nearly three months of speculation over the paper's future.

"People are in grief," Editor John Temple said at a news conference later.

Boehne told staffers that the Rocky was the victim of a terrible economy and an upheaval in the newspaper industry.

"Denver can't support two newspapers any longer," Boehne told staffers, some of whom cried at the news. "It's certainly not good news for you, and it's certainly not good news for Denver."

Reaction came from across the nation and around the block.

"The Rocky Mountain News has chronicled the storied, and at times tumultuous, history of Colorado for nearly 150 years. I am deeply saddened by this news, and my heart goes out to all the talented men and women at the Rocky," U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet said in a statement. "I am grateful for their hard work and dedication to not only their profession, but the people of Colorado as well."

[...]

On Dec. 4, Boehne announced that Scripps was looking for a buyer for the Rocky and its 50 percent interest in the Denver Newspaper Agency, the company that handles business matters for the papers. The move came because of financial losses in Denver, including $16 million in 2008.

"This moment is nothing like any experience any of us have had," Boehne said. "The industry is in serious, serious trouble."

At a news conference later, Editor John Temple said he was optimistic about the future of journalism but added that newspapers would be "radically different" in the future. He said he had no plans for his own future, although Boehne said Temple has a job with Scripps if he wants it.

Boehne said there was an out-of-state nibble from only one potential buyer, who withdrew after realizing that it would cost as much as $100 million "just to stay in the game."

[...]

The closure of the Rocky will mean Denver will have just one major newspaper, like the vast majority of American cities today.

"I certainly feel that all of (us) did what we could to make this paper successful, and I want to thank you for that," Editor John Temple told the staff. "To me, this is the very sad end of a beautiful thing."

Scripps said it will now offer for sale the masthead, archives and Web site of the Rocky, separate from its interest in the newspaper agency.

[...]

Today's announcement comes as metropolitan newspapers and major newspaper companies find themselves reeling, with plummeting advertising revenues and dramatically diminished share prices. Just this week, Hearst, owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, announced that unless it was able to make immediate and steep expense cuts it would put the paper up for sale and possibly close it. Two other papers in JOAs, one in Seattle and the other in Tucson, are facing closure in coming weeks.

[...]

In the past decade, the Rocky has won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than all but a handful of American papers. Its sports section was named one of the 10 best in the nation this week. Its business section was cited by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers as one of the best in the country last year. And its photo staff is regularly listed among the best in the nation when the top 10 photo newspapers are judged.

Staffers were told to come in Friday to collect personal effects.

"I could say stupid things like 'I know how you feel.' I don't," Boehne said. "We are just deeply sorry. I hope you will accept that."