Chris Boese's Weblog

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.

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.

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.

J.D. Lasica rebuts Seth Godin superbly on the real economics of newspapers

Link: Social Media: If newspapers disappear, will it matter?.

Another salvo in the economic restructuring of news, print and otherwise. It is possible to be a strong advocate for online forms of journalism and still recognize that what is going on right now in the newspaper business, and in journalism in general, is a travesty.

Lasica points out precisely why that is, and what we could lose if this continues, a loss that should be fought by everyone who cares about the role of a free press in society. I've followed his writings for years, and am thankful he is jumping in on this debate too. I just had to pull out his strongest points, to make sure they hit home.

If newspapers disappear, will it matter?

By J.D. Lasica

Author and marketer extraordinaire Seth Godin has a provocative new post: When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?

As regular readers know, I worked in print newsrooms for the better part of 20 years before transitioning to the online medium, and I've been harsh in my criticism of news organizations for not embracing the digital medium faster and smarter. But I can't agree with Seth's bottom line, and here's why:

Comics are even better online, and I don't think we'll run out of those.

We won't run out of comics, but we will run out of the most talented comics, who will choose to do something else rather than draw for an audience of thousands rather than millions, especially when they'll have to do it for free rather than as a career.

[...]

But the truth is that the flash and trash of dumbed-down coverage is what we're already getting in spades on the Web, and it's not fair to lump the hundreds and thousands of quality, solidly reported local stories and dozens of in-depth pieces, national stories and investigative reports with the fluffy stories that make all of this go down easier.

Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we'll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it's a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.)

Here's where I think Seth's argument is seriously off-base. The reality is that this kind of public-interest journalism has never been supported by the public. The investigative reporting and in-depth reports produced in the modern era (from Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame reports right up to modern coverage) have been loss leaders for news networks and newspapers, which is why they have been the first thing cut in recent years as media consolidation works in favor of shareholders' returns rather than the public interest.

We won't pay for it, because we never have.

[HEAR HEAR! All I hear these days are "non-profit models" for "real" journalism, and foundations this and foundations that. Respected people are all of a sudden advocating this non-profit model like it is the salvation of journalism, just because NPR has successfully harnessed its periodic beg-fests into a serious revenue stream. BUT NPR IS ACTUALLY GOOD AND UNIQUE AND A TREASURE. And the percentage that a non-profit sector can contribute to the overall boots-on-the-ground journalistic enterprise is really probably less than 10% of even today's vastly scaled-back and lay-off driven "reporters in the field" force.

Many advocates for restructuring in the field are suggesting things such as the entire L.A. market can be adequately covered by 35 people tops, and that that somehow is a kind of "new reality" of journalism, and we should just take this medicine and we should like it, and not be utterly outraged at what it would mean for coverage.  

I am not implying that those who embrace the restructuring speak with identical voices, advocate the same things, or even advocate this specific thing. They are just the leading voices for this structural revisioning of journalism that to me seems like a lot of rationalization of things I can't stomach, especially in terms of its ramifications for what the public will get to know about the functioning of its biggest institutions. The disappearance of the already disappearing watchdog. That is my lament. I don't disagree that certain interactive structures and content distribution channels are changing drastically, and largely to get lagging old media in line with the new media forms.

I just don't see why this means an 80% reduction in the total set of reporter eyeballs in the field.

That, to me, is not economic restructuring. That is a political pogrom under the guise of economic restructuring, to specifically REMOVE reporter eyeballs from the field. Somebody, a whole lot of somebodies, specifically wants a greater cloak of darkness over activities that affect our civil society and the public good.

The people who glibly embrace this restructuring of the field strike me as making the same kinds of arguments that were made in the Reagan years, when the U.S. manufacturing base vaporized from our so-called "Rust Belt."

At the time, it was treated like an economic imperative, like a structural economic change, like economic determinism. But now, years later, with all the regrets of our current, fluff-driven "service economy" and "financial economy" and "consumer economy," I want to look back to that movement, and the assumptions of University of Chicago "free trade" and globalism advocates and say, "Almost all of their basic assumptions, under which the U.S. manufacturing base was deliberately sacrificed, have been completely and fully disproven, and we are all right now paying the price in this economic collapse for the idiotic short-sightedness of it."

And I would make an almost identical argument about the sacrifice of family farms and the rural landscape to government policies that literally made industrial agriculture, one of the biggest travesties ever visited on the U.S. landscape, appear to be some kind of "inevitability." Michael Pollan and others have exposed this policy-driven social engineering of farming to be just as short-sighted, and not a structural shift at all. It was policy-based outcome, not a market-driven outcome.

And now people want to make the same sort of arguments about the enterprise of journalism, when the vitality of this enterprise, from the yellow press and earlier, has always generated revenue, has always fed a thirsty demand when the stories were REAL and affected PEOPLE'S LIVES, and the revenues really only started declining sharply when monopolies and public corporations started dominating the entire communications enterprise, interestingly enough, with the claim that audiences are no longer interested enough in stories that are REAL and affect THEIR LIVES.

Like with Pravda, that's what some entities appear to want you to think. I think there IS a declining audience for the self-censored stories that fit into the current narrow definition of journalistic content that is subsidized by publicly-traded corporations and fits their definition of "acceptable." Like they say, money talks, and bullshit walks. I think there's been a gradual adjustment of our news thermostat, the exchange of ideas, and audiences, perhaps not consciously, react to being fed a steady diet of fluff while being told it is meat.

But back to the great and important points Lasica is also calling BS on (not in so many words).]

Nor is it cheap. Investigative and enterprise reporting are the most expensive forms of journalism in almost any newsroom, column inch for column inch, because the projects require weeks or months of sustained reporting and result in a single splash or a short-lived series.

Ask any journalist who's done in-depth or investigative reporting about budget cuts, and the kinds of stories that are going uncovered, and you'll get an earful, I promise you. And this doesn't even take into account the closing of foreign news bureaus.

[EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read that last paragraph again. Memorize it.]

[...]

But the truth is that the flash and trash of dumbed-down coverage is what we're already getting in spades on the Web, and it's not fair to lump the hundreds and thousands of quality, solidly reported local stories and dozens of in-depth pieces, national stories and investigative reports with the fluffy stories that make all of this go down easier.

Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we'll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it's a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.)

Here's where I think Seth's argument is seriously off-base.

[Dude, you are being way too kind. How could anybody involved in the communications business think that part of journalism is relatively cheap? Corporate chain ventures have been trying to find ways to cut costs all over, and this is the FIRST thing cut, because it actually takes experience, and critical thinking, and brains, and a massive legal department, and oh yeah, legal GUTS to back up your people. I could go on and on. Automaton journalism, assembly line wire copy rewrites, this is NOT.]

The reality is that this kind of public-interest journalism has never been supported by the public. The investigative reporting and in-depth reports produced in the modern era (from Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame reports right up to modern coverage) have been loss leaders for news networks and newspapers, which is why they have been the first thing cut in recent years as media consolidation works in favor of shareholders' returns rather than the public interest.

We won't pay for it, because we never have.

Nor is it cheap. Investigative and enterprise reporting are the most expensive forms of journalism in almost any newsroom, column inch for column inch, because the projects require weeks or months of sustained reporting and result in a single splash or a short-lived series.

Ask any journalist who's done in-depth or investigative reporting about budget cuts, and the kinds of stories that are going uncovered, and you'll get an earful, I promise you. And this doesn't even take into account the closing of foreign news bureaus.

I will give a witness. But thankfully, Lasica has said it far better than I could, so I won't blather on any further.

BTW, I will grant Godin another point, this one from his post, here:

Link: Seth's Blog: When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?.

The web has excelled at breaking the world into the tiniest independent parts. We don't use this to support that online. Things support themselves. The food blog isn't a loss leader for the gardening blog. They're separate, usually run by separate people or organizations.

This part of the economic model does need examining. The idea of loss leaders, of subsidizing good and important things with frivolous and unrelated things. I think the basic concept itself will be lost in the Long Tail. People should not have to conned into paying for something they don't want. Like loss leaders in the front of mall bookstores, those overhyped best-sellers that pay the real estate for the mid-list books that fill up the back of the store.

I remember back in the day when I worked retail at an old fashioned camera store as it was undergoing a significant transition. I was a professional photographer. I sold serious equipment to serious shooters and hobbyists (and got an employee discount on my own gear!). I sold darkroom equipment and chemicals. This stuff did not exactly fly off the shelves. Was a time when that was considered OK in retail, like with old fashioned hardware stores too. Was a time when the credibility of one's stock and one's staff made one store better than another store. It was called competition.

But by the time I was in that world, gray market mail order camera equipment forced us to sell our most expensive cameras at cost, no mark-up. And the only thing filling up the till every night was film and print processing-- Photomat stuff. This was even before the day of the 1-hour mall photo place, although I later worked at those too.

So shelf space started shifting. The front of the store filled up with photo albums, frames, mats. Inventory of serious cameras declined. Darkroom equipment disappeared entirely, long before Photoshop was ever a gleam in Adobe's eye. I saw this as a sad day.

Now camera stores are full of inventory again, and the cameras are far more expensive than the film SLRs I used to sell. People I could not convince to spend any kind of money on a film camera are dropping three times that amount on digital cameras and related software and gear.

Assumptions. Sometimes I think everything is a judgment call, and imperatives are only imperatives because some "authority" with a checkbook just arbitrarily decides it is.

A great research tool for journalists?

Link: if:book: social networking in reverse.

Forget Big Brother. This is Little Sis, billed as an involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans," but my first thought was, "What a terrific tool for journalists researching stories and profiles of big shots!

Check it out!

Link: LittleSis: Profiling the Powers That Be.

From the if:book site:

a project of the Public Accountability Initiative funded by the Sunlight Foundation. It's something like a networked telephone book of the rich and powerful: LittleSis aggregates publicly available information about America's officials, both public and private. If you go to, for example, John McCain's page, you can see information about the positions he's served in, political fundraising committees that have raised money for him, and individuals who have given him money. Clicking on the names of any of those organizations will go to the LittleSis page about them, so one can see, for example, with whom McCain sits on the Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee. All of this information has been automatically gathered, but links to sources are given on all pages - the McCain information, for example, comes from GovTrack.us, watchdog.net, Project Vote Smart, the Congressional Biographical Directory, and FEC Disclosure Reports. Nor is it limited to politicians: one can learn that Steve Jobs was a Friend of Rahm Emanuel in 2004.

PR Response Flow Chart: How the Air Force Responds to Blogs

Great cheat sheet to remind one of the most effective ways of managing blog/social media mentions of your brand, product, or service.

If this were my job, I'd print it out and laminate, keep at my desk. It's the sort of quick check that reminds you not to respond emotionally or feed the trolls. It also reminds you to be proactive rather than strictly reactive. I like that.

Link: Diagram: How the Air Force Response to Blogs.

Thanks for the find to Jeremiah Owyang. He credits:

Joey DeVilla for posting this, who learned of this from David Meerman Scott who was in contact with Capt. Faggard who’s involved with the Airforce’s social media team:  Twitter, and a blogspot blog.

Steve Smith: Still A Newspaperman A holiday wish…and reminder

I am still struggling with the current decimation and carnage in the field of journalism, and it will never sit well with me. I've mourned the decline of this field since I was first released from J-School with my undergrad degree, right into the world of Reagan media ownership deregulation, the beginning of the end.

Historic 100-year-old papers started closing back then, in the late 1980s, bought up by chains, multiple-paper cities turned into media monopolies overnight. The Clear Channeling of the rural U.S., where I'd come from, was beginning, and it has taken all this time to penetrate to the biggest metropolitan news-gathering organizations in the country.

For a time, some things ran counter to the trend, idiosyncratic things. USAToday was founded, as if to thumb its nose at the decline, yet its modular design spread virally, literally vaporizing page real estate set aside for the work I did best: full page and double-truck photo essays and stories. I fled to grad school, fully aware I was being put out of business.

And Ted Turner, whom I got to meet in 1986, dared to open international bureaus, to populate the landscape with MORE news-gatherers while chain consolidation was reducing them. Fate favored Turner in the form of the Gulf War of 1991, vindicating his international coverage. Before then, people laughed at his staff-heavy spending as an indulgent whim of a boy-man who liked to race sailboats.

But Ted didn't work hard enough to fend off Time Warner, the chains bought up everything, profits rolled in at 20-30% for shareholders in those newly-public corporations, and the shareholders came to regard those kind of margins as a guarantee.

Much is made of the current debate about the newspaper numbers trending to zero. Much more of the debate between Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and traditional journalists (on Christmas Eve, Jarvis proclaims: "No Hope").

[Pissing Match Links: Ron Rosenbaum Slate Salvo, Jeff Jarvis Snark Return]

I'm not surprised at the debate, just at its intensity. Clay Shirky reminds us that he predicted this vaporizing industry in the late 1990s. I was on the World Wide Web Artists Coalition listserv with Clay back at that time, and remember well when he was first making those arguments.

I did not dispute him then because of what I saw happening to photojournalism at that time: the value of my work, of most photographers' work, was trending to absolute zero, which also happens to be the value of poetry, another field in which I have a degree. Royalty-free CDs had already forced me to realize my copyright-based stock photos had just become worthless, because it cost me more to make the images than the market would pay, ever.

To paraphrase a familiar quotation: They came for the Image People, and the Word People said nothing. They were happy to let us fade away. More space in print for words (the more important bits, was their unspoken righteous assumption).

The Word People didn't want to see their own end coming. They didn't want to think that same trend would ever apply to them. But I was certain at the time that it would.

And then, in the early 2000s, the blog and citizen journalism movement arose, and I enthusiastically championed it, participated in it, and would again in a heartbeat. It was overdue. It was necessary. The gatekeepers HAD become drunk on their own power, not sloppy drunk, just too used to holding the keys to the kingdom. Ironically, I was by then working at CNN, covering another war in the Persian Gulf (from Atlanta), and building blogs for unembedded journalists on the ground in Kurdistan.

Now, the unthinkable is happening right before my eyes, the thing I have been preparing for for the last 25 years, and my heart just aches. I DO NOT WANT THIS FUTURE.

It was some of my J-School students at University of Montana who turned me on to The Spokesman-Review as a paper with an online site I really admired, ESPECIALLY because of the way it integrated photojournalism the way I remembered it, before images morphed off into newsprint postage stamps, like it used to be.  I often linked to original reporting from there, once I started following the paper. It reminded me of the old Detroit Free-Press, had that same feeling in the online edition.

So I knew the name Steve Smith before encountering this story, just as I knew Clay Shirky online when he was making his prophecies. But it is Steve Smith who reminds me below why I am so heartsick, and why I will continue to fight against this watchdog-less future.

Smith's sad post below reminds me of why this will always be my life's work, no matter what I end up doing for a living. Go read the unexcerpted original, especially if this is or was your field too. 

Link: Still A Newspaperman | A holiday wish…and reminder.

A holiday wish…and reminder

Good morning,

For all of the years I worked as a senior editor, I tried to end each calendar year with a memo to my staff thanking them for their hard work, reminding them of the good journalism we had accomplished and wishing them well for the coming year.

I have been struggling in recent days trying to craft a note from my voluntary exile, something appropriate for my former staff and, maybe, appropriate for others who follow this blog.

And I’m finding the words are not coming easily. Maybe it’s the bleak, snowy landscape in Spokane that has left me feeling so inadequate to the task. Or the knowledge that this holiday season has found so many of my former colleagues unemployed and struggling, sitting on the sidelines while our industry stuggles for survival.

[...]

But I am not, by nature, melancholy and certainly not so when I think about the profession to which i have devoted my life. I remain an optimist, if not about the future of newspapers, certainly about the future of journalism.

In struggling to find words for this post, I went back to a speech I gave some years ago to a convention of college journalists. I excerpted a portion of that speech for my farewell note to the staff of The Statesman Journal in 2002. As I re-read that excerpt this morning, I found it still conveys my core beliefs. It expresses my optimism as well as anything I could write today. And so I am going to plagiarize myself for this year’s holiday note.

This is what I wrote in 2002. I re-dedicate it to the staff of The Spokesman-Review, which is doing such good work during the current weather crisis, to my professional friends and colleagues and to the countless students with whom I have worked in the last year.

[...]

Several years ago, Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University penned a book titled “What are journalists for?”

What a terrific question that is.

Here’s my take:

Journalists exist to serve – not ourselves, not our bosses, not our friends, boosters, advertisers or benefactors.

We exist to serve citizens in the exercise of their citizenship.

Let me say that again…we exist to serve citizens in the exercise of their citizenship.

And in serving citizens we adhere to certain core values:

Values of community
The marketplace of ideas
The First Amendment
Honesty and truth-telling journalism
Voice to the voiceless
Defense of the defenseless
And in all of this, we are fearless.

That is our calling.

And it is a calling – I believe that with all my heart - a call to service.

If you pursue this calling, this is what you can expect:

Long hours

Low pay

Disappointed parents and frustrated lovers

Generally primitive working conditions in buildings you hate in cities where you’d never want to live.

Your friends will be people just like you, except there won’t be too many of them.

Public officials will distrust and despise you. But, not to worry, many of your loyal readers or viewers will distrust and despise you, too.

A good day will be one in which no one calls to scream in your ear – except that’s a bad day, too, because you obviously haven’t written anything important enough to arouse anyone.

Your spouse will wonder why you don’t know the meaning of a 40-hour, five-day workweek.

And your kids, should you be in a meaningful relationship long enough to have any, will describe you as a “writer” during their show and tell in the hopes classmates will think you do something respectable, like writing pornographic romance novels.

Statistics say you will experience divorce, alcoholism and heart disease at rates higher than the norm. You’ll probably smoke – or wish you could.

You won’t retire to a beach house in Florida. Hell, you probably won’t live to retirement.

But even knowing this in advance, some of you in this room, most of you I hope, are going to pursue the call to service. Already, you can’t imagine doing anything else.

And I am so grateful for that.

I am grateful for the people just like you who work in my newsroom. They are our best and brightest and I am proud every day to be their editor.

They have brains. They have heart. The have the fire in the belly and the courage of their convictions. They bring guts to the party. They work harder than sane people should work and then, on the day when something happens in our world that could change everything, when history hangs in the balance, they are there to write the story.

[...]

And by following in their footsteps, no matter the challenges, you are sustained, whether you work for The New York Times or the Statesman Journal or The Oregon Daily Emerald. You are part of a great tradition that stretches back 250 years. And while we are humbled daily in the practice of that tradition, we must also be proud and honored and steadfast as its stewards.

Ad Age says news-oriented websites have a future, but only if they colonize interactive media in the name of one-to-many MASS media content and push a dying ad model on a rejecting audience

Warning: Highly opinionated rant follows. Blah.

Link: Report: News-oriented Websites Have a Future - Advertising Age - MediaWorks.

This article from Advertising Age is purely E-VILE, so I say. It lives deep in horseless carriage-land, or as another version of "Give a mass media-paradigm-biased analyst a hammer and he suddenly decides everything needs pounding."

The advertising model is dying, and THAT MODEL itself is what's killing newspapers, but what does this analyst call for but MORE PUSH ADVERTISING TO MASS AUDIENCES OF BILLIONS?

Adage.com benevolently decides that there's still hope for the dying newspaper industry, but only if it forces the one-to-many broadcast model to more fully colonize the interactive, many-to-many online ecosystems that are rejecting the ad-supported content model in the first place through time-shifted, ad-skipped viewing, social media interfaces, and unbound content feeds.

But nooooo, what AdAge says newspapers need to do to become more profitable and viable online (and to pay actual quality reporters) is to go back to that Old Time Religion.

The challenge for all sites is garnering enough traffic and creating a discernable enough brand to make advertisers seek them out.

"Based on our research, the conversation [with advertisers] gets interesting at 200 million page views plus a month, but much more so around 800 million," Ms. Fine writes.

Those ambitious numbers, she continues, show how hard it is for local news sites to be really profitable, and underscore "why local papers will have trouble offsetting traditional media declines" with revenue from their websites.

The report also looks at whether the Times could ever succeed as a web-only product, and concludes that it could -- once NYT.com starts generating 1.3 billion page views a month.

Another sign of the short-sightedness of this approach:

Yahoo, AOL at billion mark
Ms. Fine said sites such as Yahoo News and AOL News already get in the neighborhood of a billion page views a month, and it's not out of the question that NYT.com could too.

"The fact that there are sites out there that are already achieving that suggests that this could work," she said in an interview.

Yahoo and AOL are diverse and INTERACTIVE portals, not finely honed and researched creators of quality content.

In other words, Yahoo and AOL may feature internally-generated content, but it sprawls across a virtual destination that is not fixed or funneled into a narrow set of editorial standards. To compare the NYTimes and its communication model to Yahoo and AOL (which easily pipe out the same AP and Reuters wire content as NYTimes does, but deliver nothing like the same content) is to reveal the lack of understanding of both the content model AND the communications model by people with an inherent MASS media, PUSH ADS, passive consumption bias.

It's like the very idea of Long Tail interactivity patterns never even entered into this analysis, which is based entirely on economies of scale in mass form only.

What's happening to journalism and journalists right now

You hear the news of the layoffs across the board, hitting the big papers, the big TV stations, the big chain media conglomerates (Gannett, Time Warner, Tribune Co).

But it doesn't really sink in until you understand an ENTIRE GENERATION of experienced journalistic talent is being lost. Yes, that was also lost in the late 1980s (I remember 800 people laid off in a fell swoop when the two Little Rock, AR newspapers merged, because that town wasn't big enough for the two of them, according to Gannett. That was repeated in Tulsa, repeated in Anchorage, AK, repeated everywhere). 

But the current purge is making the Reagan media deregulation, which ushered in the era of media monoculture monopoly, the anti-thesis of the "penny press" which, like the blogosphere, let a thousand journalistic flowers bloom, look like child's play.

Instead, the consolidation of the Reagan years left the media ecosystem INTENSELY vulnerable to a single attack of a bark beetle that seems to be wiping out dead tree media, among other things. And that was all in the name of protecting 20-30% shareholder profit margins in the 80s (not exactly an easy PR move to make, to tell all those people you were depriving of their livelihood that it was all in the name of profit margins that retailers and manufacturers haven't seen in decades).

The excuse now is that the gaping pie hole of the Internet isn't sucking up enough of the costs of print media, so to old media monopoly barons that means CONTENT CREATORS have to go. Because no one on the Internet craves news content and analysis, or topical or beat coverage at all, nuh-uh.

You don't think this is screwing up our world? Read the story below, and cry, not for this resilient laid-off reporter. Cry for yourselves, because we will all be deprived of ready access to his and other talented writers' work.

Except for that profitless, frictionless, RSS distribution system that is the Blogosphere.

All Hail the Long Tail!

Link: Gannett reporter made "independent" by noon: Former Gannett environmental reporter becomes "independent" by noon.

Former Gannett environmental reporter becomes "independent" by noon

By Bruce Richie

I started out this morning as a reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat. I ended the work day as an "independent journalist."

At 8:45 I headed over to Marpan Recycling to work on a story about the state's goal of achieving 75 percent recycling by 2020. That was the goal spelled out earlier this year in a comprehensive state energy bill. And the goal is about three times as much as the state is recycling now.

At Marpan, they're recycling about 2/3 of the construction waste that comes in. Concrete, metal, cardboard and wood are the main products that are sold to recyclers along with mulch.

Marpan's Kim Williams said the state could boost recycling if people purchased more products from recycled materials to boost markets. Starting in January, all construction waste now going to Leon County's landfill will go through Marpan first for recycling.

Upon heading into the office shortly after 10, I was called into the office of Executive Editor Bob Gabordi. I knew what was coming, especially when I saw managing editor Africa Price there.

I was being laid off, Bob explained, and he asked if I had any questions. I could have responded more politely but frankly I was annoyed. My job had already been changed three times this year, and now I was being put out of work. But we shook hands, they offered to help me and I offered to help them in the future. There was a modest severance package.

   Then I went home. I checked my e-mails. I returned a few phone calls. And I didn't know what to do next.

   So I ate my lunch and went to work.

   I went to the same state hearing that I had been planning on going to. But now I wasn't a Tallahassee Democrat reporter.

[...]

About 100 people attended, many of them from county recycling programs. Speakers chimed in with ideas about how the state could better educate residents to recycle or how it needs to create new markets for recyclable materials.

It seemed like news to me, but I was the only reporter there to cover it. And I wasn't even a newspaper reporter any more. Perhaps the other media were at the Environmental Regulation Commission meeting across town, where an important vote was scheduled on whether to adopt California's auto emissions. Or maybe they were not there either.

Earlier this year I would have covered the ERC instead. But my environmental reporting job got axed on Aug. 1 and I was reassigned to cover Leon County. Since recycling is inherently local, I figured I could at least cover the interesting concept of recycling 75 percent of our waste.

In this age of change, I feel certain there is a place for me to report on the important issues in Florida's Capital. Maybe I'll become a blogger, combined with some freelancing, combined with being on welfare. The reality hasn't really set in yet.

[...]

Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free

Link: Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free | The Blog Herald.

Link: TypePad - Why Blog - Journalist Bailout Program.

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program

Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay your bills.

Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We're Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.

We're a company founded by bloggers, and we've supported online journalism from the beginning. During a time when so many great journalists are worrried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we've put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence.

Wow, this is wild. I knew there were many reasons I've always got on so well with the folks over at Six Apart, since back in the early days, but here's something amazing. Turns out my old acquaintance Anil Dash is behind it. I love his post about the rationale behind it, here.

As demoralizing as all the newspaper, magazine, and media layoffs are, and despite Tina Brown over at The Daily Beast trying to scoop up all the laid off journalism talent she can snag away from Arianna Huffington over at Huffington Post (What, are Daily Beast and HuffPo going to become like the Elephants' Graveyard, the place where old journalists go to die?), good old Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, Typepad, Vox (and do they still own LiveJournal?) is opening the door to journalistic self-publishing.

What a relief! The problem I had with using Typepad with the sometimes technophobic journalists that I built blogs for (not all) is that they often have trouble setting them up in the first place, putting up the basic design. On the other hand, Typepad usability is the best (I think) for handholding noobs, and its interface still after all these years FEELS the most friendly.

When I was teaching my journalism seminar at the University of Montana, I could have gone with a free service, like Blogger (WordPress wasn't really a player yet at that time), but I forced the students to use the paid Typepad service, and because of it, got them up and running in the shortest time possible.

And the moral of this story, imho, is never underestimate the amount of handholding new users may need.

And at the same time (from Typepad's POV) it may also attempt to hang on to a professional user base that is being increasingly lured away to module, online magazine-style themes that are increasingly becoming popular on WordPress.

I'm looking forward to a new slew of journalists taking control of their profession from the corporate publishing interests, dictating better story selection, sounding off about the state of the field, with this terrific move from Six Apart for Typepad!

Link: Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free | The Blog Herald.

Six Apart Gives Journalists TypePad Pro Accounts for Free

by Thord Daniel Hedengren

Six Apart has a clever “program” up to get recently laid off journalists to start blogging. They’re calling it the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. Basically, it gives journalists these things for free:

• A TypePad Pro account for free. Usually costs $14,95/month.
• Enrollment in the Six Apart Media advertising program, to get the ad dollars rolling.
• An extra push on blogs.com.

They also offer support and whatnot, all for free. The only thing the journos need to do is send a link to their last piece for a newspaper or similar. And according to the post, there’s been an overwhelming interest in this, so they’re lagging a bit behind on setting the accounts up, but no word on closing the program.

You know what? This is brilliant!

My hat’s off to whoever on Six Apart that came up with this idea. It’s a great way to get journalists blogging, since most of them (or us, in some cases) just need an economic incentive and a set platform to get started. The pure notion that you’ve got everything set up, and ads rolling right away, well, that’s bound to attract a lot of people.

Me included, actually. I’m a bit curious to this, but since I haven’t been sacked from any of my writing gigs yet, I don’t think I can apply. Too bad.

Great work, Six Apart, and a great PR stunt as well!