Chris Boese's Weblog

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."

Frank Rich exposes the limits of Beltway insularity, and the pundits who eat their own dogfood

Link: Frank Rich - They Sure Showed That Obama - NYTimes.com.

Rich gloats a little, perhaps presumes too much schadenfreude over what was neither a major fail whale NOR a big victory, but in the first month of a new administration, everything tends to get blown out of proportion.

Sort of like how the first year's grades for college freshmen cause such large swings and swoons in the old GPA.

But I enjoyed reading this too much not to pull out my favorite and most pithy bits. Rich surely does have a nice turn of the phrase. My most fav bits are in bold, emphasis mine.

Op-Ed Columnist

They Sure Showed That Obama

By FRANK RICH

Published: February 14, 2009

AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”

Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

[Yeah, there's that schadenfreude dance... naaaah nah-nah boo-boo. Nothing like a little taunting between friends.]

[...]

“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” [campaign manager David Axelrod] said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself.

[...]

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

[After living steeped in a world bent on underestimating and condescending to the broader audience of American people-- TV's cable news lowest common denominator programming-- can I just say the fact that someone would actually SAY this out loud is such a wonderful breath of fresh air, I almost don't know what to say! I mean, I tried to say such things to editorial managers and in editorial meetings, and was almost universally dismissed out of hand as someone whose credibility and expertise was in question for even suggesting such a thing. The conventional wisdom was that no one ever lost ratings or got fired for UNDER-estimating the intelligence and discernment of broader audiences.

What does it mean, if, at the highest levels of this president's administration, they are NOT assuming Americans are stupid "Joe Six-Paks," or even "Joe the Plumbers"? Wow. This is a massively radical shift on so many levels. If it is more than lip service (and we have also seen the first prime time presidential news conference where the first question asked gets a 7-minute response, a response that not only consisted of complete sentences, complex sentences, but also PARAGRAPHS. Hey, I've been an English teacher, so I can go a step further. They were well-developed and crafted paragraphs! I wrote about it in a previous post on this blog: BRAINS ARE BACK!) then the American people are being "called into" (think Louis Althusser) higher engagement and intellectual processing, right at the time when we need their smart engagement most.

Somebody needs to be noticing what a radical change this is, a change in faith, in belief, not just in democracy (small-d), but in ordinary people. Rachel Maddow has been going around talking about not talking down to audiences too, in interviews. It goes against mass comm theory, against programming wisdom, against years of Nielsen Ratings, and yet, they are saying it. Must be nice to be a big enough 800-pound gorilla that you don't get snarked out of editorial meetings for saying and believing something that goes against decades of conventional lowest common denominator programming wisdom. YO! Let's change these damn theories! Let's prove those wags WRONG! Let's actually RESPECT audiences!]

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s.

[...]

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.

[The guffaws should have been widespread with that last number. It is the most bizarre kind of historical revisionism of the non-reality-based universe to even attempt to bring off such a claim, let alone to fan out and spread the word to the freepers and astro-turfers with a straight face. I'm not one to trust the American school system quite that much (having taught writing to college students, and knowing what they can readily pull out of their heads and what they can't), to assume that FDR's New Deal turnaround is common wisdom and an authoritative trope. I believe in Americans and their brains, I most certainly do, but I also know school systems at all levels have failed them, and badly, as well as universities where I have worked.

Obi Wan Kenobi may be our only hope, but it is the brains of ordinary people which will have to bring us back from this brink.

So the black-is-white, up-is-down crowd is out chattering on teevee as if the rules of the game had not changed, as if talking points revisionism could change reality just like in the old days, so why the hell not try to spin out the con job that the New Deal CAUSED the Great Depression?! Yeah, there's the ticket!

What was it Hitler's (whoops, stumbling on Godwin's Law) propaganda minister said? That little lies can't be counted on to get the job done. What you needed was the "Big Lie." Yeah, I'd say claiming FDR's New Deal CAUSED the Great Depression certainly qualifies as a "Big Lie."

Funniest thing to come out this past week, while the Stimulus was passing despite the GOP obliviousness was a web site called the GOP Problem Solver. Go type your problems in there! Try it. Too much fun.

The other bizarre thing to come out this week, tucked away in an obscure CSPAN Congressional interview, a legislator revealed while talking about something else that the U.S. had been just 3 hours from total economic collapse on September 15, 2008, when the shit was hitting the fan. Somehow, these two things go together. Go bookmark both of them, and ponder deeply during your yoga or meditation session or whatever.]

[...]

Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.

[...]

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.”

[...]

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.”

[That was one of the most HILARIOUS TV clips of the week, I have to say. Steele may well turn out to be another one of those gifts to late night comedians.

I gotta add my own shot here, at the peculiar drama with Sen. Judd Greg (R-NH) pulling out on Commerce Secretary, even as the Obama administration claims he was the one who threw his hat in the ring. What was up with that?! SOMETHING was going on behind the scenes, I feel certain of it. He surely didn't think he'd be allowed to gerrymander the Census to lock up Republican districts or something, did he? I mean, eight years of stupid doesn't mean you assume stupid is the rule, and Obama was not born yesterday and clearly his grandmomma didn't raise no fools.

What was up with Greg? My guess? The GOP goose-step organizers shifted hard obstructionist in the past two weeks, even since Greg put his hat in, and they had something on him and forced him, not only to back out, but to promise not to run again in New Hampshire (a friend in NH tells me he had already been making those noises, tho). So Crist wouldn't cave to the top-down GOP organization, nor would those three GOP senators willing to vote for the stimulus, but Sen. Arlen Spector (R-PA) admitted that more senators would have come over, but that some HARD orders appear to have come down from on GOP high. I'm thinking those hard orders reached Greg too.

The scorched earth Republicans, the K-Street whips, the our-way-or-the-highway types, are stepping up party discipline, to their own clueless detriment, as Rich so eloquently points out. But what are they using for leverage? They don't have the patronage goodies to pass out anymore. Their pay-to-play system is unhinged with a new sheriff. All they have are their banker cronies, and those folks WANT the bailouts, so long as they are as crooked and full of loopholes as they can keep them.

I'll have to revisit these questions again, as they are worth pondering, as it all plays out. Rich meanwhile is taking his own shots below, and they hit the target bull's eye, so I'll let him play us out. This is really one of his best editorials.]

[...]

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets.

[...]

But, as he [Pres. Obama] said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

Picture of the Year, so far this year

Should J-Schools plunge into the land of critical thinking Gen Ed Requirements?

Dan Gillmor poses the question, but having come from the land of departments with HEAVY "service" loads to institutions (English, Composition, Rhetoric), I'd sure add a MASSIVE caveat to this idea.

I mean, it is a great idea in principle. I support it fully, especially as Dan enunciates it below. However, in U.S. post-secondary institutions, what such an endeavor would probably bring with it (besides a TON of adjunct teaching jobs for newly-laid off veteran journalists, as keepers of the anachronistic journalistic tea service, as it were) is the purely EVIL specter of a TON of adjunct teaching positions, flooding the permanent academic ghetto underclass with even more second-class humanities teachers with no hope of ever entering the tenured ranks.

It would have to be done smartly and with foresight, with protections for faculty who could easily within a few budget years, morph into an army of opportunistic-administration classroom fodder, just as so many composition teachers are now. Something should be learned by the humanities evil experiments with its permanent adjunct underclass in the first-year composition general education requirements, requirements that at many institutions into first-year experience courses, beyond writing to learn, to embrace more critical thinking and reading goals.

What I'd want to know, Dan, is how these proposals are different from the existing programs, the existing service requirements, because these very ideas, including media literacy and cultural literacy readings, have long been part of first-year composition programs, and first-year experience programs, as well as honors seminars and the like.

And those programs are already being taught by faculty members in other disciplines, faculty enriched with a deeper disciplinary reading background in cultural studies and critical theory than most journalism faculty currently have. There is already a rich set of media criticism and popular culture course readers that attempt to do just what Dan proposes, and these courses are already being taught, albeit not by people with any background as working journalists.

How do we know this idea isn't the same thing in different clothes?

I'm guessing what Dan wants to see, in this particular moment for citizen and participatory social media, are better results from the critical media courses that are taught.

Here, let me lay out the gist of Dan's ideas. I'm putting BOLD on my favorite bits below.

Link: Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community – Center for Citizen Media.

Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community

Feb 7th, 2009

by Dan Gillmor.

Accepting an award from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably “the best general education that an American citizen can get” today.

[...]

It’s open to question largely because the employment pipeline of the past, a progression leading from school to jobs in media and related industries, is (at best) in jeopardy. Yet journalism education could and should have a long and even prosperous life ahead — if its practitioners make some fundamental shifts.

Some of the shifts are already under way, especially in how journalism educators do their jobs. The Cronkite School, where I’m teaching, is one of many journalism programs aiming to be part of the 21st Century. The school understands at its core that digital technology has transformed the practice, though we hope not the principles, of the craft. This is welcome, if overdue; if newspapers have adapted fitfully to the collision of technology and media, journalism schools as a group may have been even slower.

But that recognition, while valuable, isn’t nearly enough. Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.

We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers — by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.

In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.

For media consumers:

• Be Skeptical
• Exercise Judgement
• Open Your Mind
• Keep Asking Questions
• Learn Media Techniques

For media creators (after incorporating the above):

• Be Thorough
• Get it Right
• Insist on Fairness
• Think Independently
• Be Transparent, Demand Transparency

(See this recent paper, part of the Media Re:public project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where I’m a Fellow, for a fairly lengthy description of the principles and an explanation of why I believe they’re important.)

[...]

This applies not just to students studying the practice of journalism. The same issues are roiling public relations and advertising, the teaching of which is often housed in schools of journalism and communications. Not surprisingly, because modern commerce has been so much about selling things, those industries have been considerably more innovative, in the professional ranks, than journalism in recent years. Key leaders in advertising and PR are surely making their needs clear to educators, and one suspects getting results.

As noted above, journalism schools are starting to embrace digital technologies in their work with students who plan to enter traditional media. Too few are helping students understand that they may well have to invent their own jobs, however, much less helping them do so.

[...]

But I keep coming back to the issue(s) that should trouble anyone who cares about the future of self-governed societies. We’re not turning out the critical thinkers we need in a time when that skill has never been so important, particularly when the avalanche of data — some of it bogus and much of it irrelevant — has never been so difficult to handle.

One experiment, at State University of New York’s Stony Book campus, is notable. Howard Schneider is leading another foundation-funded program (so many of these are, raising an interesting question that I won’t go into here) that aims to make better news consumers and critical thinkers of all students, not just those enrolled in journalism courses. This goes only part of the way to what I’d like to see in journalism education, but it’s a very useful start.

Where would I take it, if I ran a journalism school? I’d start, again, with the principles listed above, and rework the how-to part of the curriculum to be more digital (that is, media-agnostic) and entrepreneurially focused.

[...]

Then, tackling the media activism challenge, my colleagues and I would:

• •  Persuade the president of the university that every student on the campus should learn them before graduating, preferably during freshman year.
• •  Create a program for people in the broader community, starting with teachers. We should be seeing every student take a basic media activist course at every level of education — not just college, but also grade, middle, and high school.
• •  Offer that program to concerned parents who feel overwhelmed by the media deluge themselves. Children especially need to learn to be independent thinkers and not take for granted that what they see, hear, or read is necessarily true or real.
• •  Provide for-fee training to communicators who work in major local institutions, such as PR and marketing folks from private companies, governmental organizations and others. If they could be persuaded that the principles matter, they might offer the public less BS and more reality, and they’d be better off for the exercise.
• •  Try to enlist another vital player in this effort: local media. The traditional journalism organizations should be making this a core part of their missions, but haven’t yet realized why, namely that their own trust in the community would almost certainly rise if they helped people understand these principles — not to mention the enormous value of truly engaging the audience in the journalism itself. New media entrants would benefit, too, if they embraced the principles of media activism to produce higher quality work and deepen their own conversations with their communities of geography and interest.

All this suggests a considerably broader mission for journalism schools and programs than the one they’ve had in the past. We’re not the only ones who can do this, but we may be among the best equipped. If we don’t, someone else will.