State of the News Media and my blog

Big (HUGE) brands of news media

Last month’s release of the State of the News Media 2009 from the PEW Project for Excellence in Journalism made me realize that I have reached a landmark in my experiment in blogging on the transition taking place in the news world.

It has been more than a year since I first conjectured to “heat up the debate between old and new media”. I laugh looking back. I cringe at the thought of reading through posts from this period of naiveté! What a simplistic view of the growing pains being felt by an entire institution of society, the decline and fall of the great empires of the fourth estate, the inevitable loss of power as described by Ibn Khaldun.

During this year, the economy has collapsed, several newspapers have moved to online-only publications, legacy news organizations have threatened to close, and I wasn’t admitted into the Ph.D. program through which I wanted to study this crisis of journalism culture. If you think that’s hard not to take personally, just consider that the San Francisco Chronicle, where I did my internship, might shutter its doors after losing US$one million a week in 2008, and The San Diego Union-Tribune, where I had my first job, was sold to some private equity firm!?

But what has shocked me most is that the discourse on which direction news media should move does not seem to be based on any particular principles, forget a coherent conceptual framework for discussion and action! This is unacceptable for a social institution meant to mirror the processes of the advancement of civilization.

Speaking of action, in truth it is with deeds not words that industry leaders will be able to learn what economic model and structure of values will carry journalism into the future. Incessant and fruitless debate has done nothing for the fields of philosophy, governance and development, and it has paralyzed the news industry as well.

Perhaps we as news women and men are too afraid of making a mistake. That paranoia is so deeply ingrained into our being as reporters and editors–once you make an error, you can’t take it back; one small mistake can cost you your career–that it has crippled our ability to learn. How else can an industry in such dire need of change evolve and mature if a degree of mistakes are not tolerated? We need to challenge this fundamental assumption in our professional ideology.

This blog is about rooting out and examining this and other assumptions. A year into recording my thoughts on the future of journalism, I feel I finally have something to offer to this discourse. I hope there will be readers and feedback.

20% profit margin is enormous…and won’t last much longer

Another draft I never finished, or even developed past note form.

Basically I recall being angry with some news industry story that conveyed the same gist as this piece (although it was likely more recent). This one begins as follows:

“Contrary to popular belief, newspapers aren’t dying. Newspapers are making tons of money.”

– MARK CUBAN

The Tycoons Are Rushing to Make a Deal

When the Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, went on the block, it was another response to stockholders’ insatiable demand for rising returns, even for papers with loyal readership and steady ad support. But now that a bevy of bigwig buyers are itching to own prestigious dailies, newspapers in key markets may benefit from a return to private ownership..

These were my thoughts basically in bullet-points. Note the last one. Still makes my blood boil to think that’s why many of my friends have been losing their jobs.

• Newspapers dug their own graves and now they are being buried by the outcomes of greed. Rebellion against the notion of the “gate-keepers” of news has, well, opened the flood gates. What’s been unleashed are essentially the many expressions of defiance for everything that represents traditional media… even for those principles which worked.
• Because of this, even professional media Web sites are taking their cues from participatory, grassroots media, abandoning the journalistic values which transcend the medium.
• *Idea that shareholders are taking advantage of the option to cut overhead (journalists on payroll) rather than dip below the monstrous 20% profit margin

Flirting with abandon… of journalism

I discovered a slough of unpublished post drafts, which I hope aren’t too incomplete and abrupt to hoist on my blog now, especially since some, like this one in particular, explain why I’m pursuing study of the media.

The idea to blog about the media “meltdown” nudged me when I read the news that the New York Times was planning 100 newsroom job cuts. Blogging, it dawned on me, would deepen my understanding of both the birth pangs of digital news and the simultaneous decay of journalism’s traditional practices, from which even the Times is not safe. The legendary paper, in its story on the downsizing, wrote about the on-line takeover,

There were scattered buyouts and job eliminations in The Times’ newsroom in recent years, but the overall number continued to rise, largely because of the growth of its Internet operations.

Having worked in newsrooms struggling with similar circumstances, I’ve also experienced rounds of buyouts, hiring freezes and restructurings that were necessitated on the print side by new positions created for the Web team.

When I was re-assigned from reporting community sports for a major daily paper to the parent company’s experimental five-days-a-week advertisement rag, I decided to cut my losses and run for it. I’d go back to school for a Master’s degree and wipe away that undergrad in print journalism. A prestigious copy-desk internship wouldn’t count against me and work experience is work experience for potential employers, so I knew a career shift wouldn’t be a difficult transition.

My plans to pursue international business lasted for less than two months. Very quickly I realized that I not only wanted to continue practicing journalism, but to help save it as well.

Woe news day

On the “Technology & Media with Reuters” page of the International Herald Tribune, these were today’s headlines:

• Now not the news: War gets short shrift
• U.S. papers face worst year for ad revenue
• NYT and IHT study Web merger
• Google seeks to define its news site (jump from front business page, where headline reads, Acceptance, not dominance, for Google News)

The industry’s a-changin’,

and like any revolution,

it’s messy and violent…

but whose coup d’état is this?

Off the record: the decay of old-world journalism

Defending legacy news organizations by pointing out the shortcomings of new media outlets is like an an old farmer trying to justify his failing crops by comparing his harvest to the first plant of the young city folk who moved in down the road: the old farmer has had longer to try to get it right.

Legacies such as the New York Times and Washington Post should know better by now, and yet, they—like journalists from lesser-famed news sources and just as bloggers (both pajama-wearing and office-attired)—don’t seem to have a compass of journalism principles to guide them.

Perhaps this is the Decline and Fall of 20th-Century Journalism, and we’ve just been experiencing media decadence, which will hasten the end of old-world journalism and usher in the dawn of a new era of information sharing.

Look no further than the past week to see the evidence of old-journalism decay:

• There was, of course, Charlotte Allen’s editorial in the Washington Post on her distaste for certain women—as horrifying as it was error-riddled.
• Little defense has been offered against the accusation that American journalists tend to protect rather than expose the secrets of powerful people, a sharp contrast to The Scotsman printing the “monster” remark by Obama’s aide, even though she tried to strike it from the record after saying it. MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson magnified the apparent US media weakness when he had The Scotsman reporter on his show.
• Buy-out bids at the New York Times were due last week, but if those staff members who opted were too few to fill up the 100 newsroom cuts announced in late February, then the paper will have to resort to lay-offs. As one long-running writer at the Times put it, “People here are used to the idea that that doesn’t happen here.”
• Add to all of that the dubious media coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential nomination race, the frequent short-comings of the American press in international news, and not to mention the incessant celebrity gossip.

As the Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland put it in his worthy piece, Long Winter for the Media,

Access to the Internet gives the generations living today the choice to be the best-informed, or the worst-informed, human beings in history — but we will never be able to claim that we were the least-informed. Celebrity, slime and crude polemics pour from the electronic faucets as easily as high-minded exegeses.

Where are the leaders of the information and media revolution to guide the straying generations living today to ethical, interesting and correct information?

Survey says: more people get their news online, especially journalists

  If almost all journalists go online daily to find news and nearly half of the rest of us do the same, then media professionals should again find themselves with news expertise to offer readers.

• Many sources such as news wires and press releases, which were once exclusively available to journalists, are now open directly to citizens. However, while journalists collect and process this information for a living, other professionals don’t have all day to wade through everything.  
• Here may be where the ideas of link journalism and networked link journalism would come into play. As they do their research and investigating, reporters could then compile their reference and source links for readers who would otherwise spend hours clicking around on search engines to find the complete story.
• With such disclosure, journalists could regain the trust of their “audience”, not only letting the sources speak for themselves, but being helpful at the same time.
• The recent We Media/Zogby Interactive survey reminded the newspaper industry that it is not only facing a crisis in declining circulation and advertisement revenue, but also in declining credibility and quality.
• Now that readers can check the facts for themselves by following links in the news they read on the Internet, it is no wonder the poll found that online news has a greater share of the people’s trust, as stated in the 27 February 2008 press release on the Zogby Web site:

The survey finds the Internet not only outweighs television, radio, and newspapers as the most frequently used and important source for news and information, but Web sites were also cited as more trustworthy than more traditional media sources – nearly a third (32%) said Internet sites are their most trusted source for news and information, followed by newspapers (22%), television (21%) and radio (15%).

  Another important reminder that the survey gives the media is that traditional journalism has lost touch with its local reader.

  As more people gain access to international and national news on the Internet, they rely less on their local newspaper or TV station to learn what’s going on “out there”. The study affirms that citizens feel they’re lacking community news about what’s going on “right here.”

  No longer does every paper in the U.S. need a Washington bureau and a Middle East correspondent. Local papers can now redouble their focus and resources on local news and give the people what they really want. Of course, they will want to provide this news on their Web sites.

Other findings from the survey include:

• Although the vast majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism (64%), overall satisfaction with journalism has increased to 35% in this survey from 27% who said the same in 2007.
• Both traditional and new media are viewed as important for the future of journalism – 87% believe professional journalism has a vital role to play in journalism’s future, although citizen journalism (77%) and blogging (59%) are also seen as significant by most Americans.
• Very few Americans (1%) consider blogs their most trusted source of news, or their primary source of news (1%).
• Three in four (75%) believe the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.
• 69% believe media companies are becoming too large and powerful to allow for competition, while 17% believe they are the right size to adequately compete.