Truth Will Prevail: An earlier age of media alarmism

For those depressed by the impending demise of our local newspapers, I found this flyer from the1930s criticizing the consolidation of the Daily News with the Dispatch-Pioneer Press should provide some long-range context, if not comfort.

I got the image while doing research on the Farmer-Labor Party at the Minnesota Historical Society. Best place ever! No coffee allowed.

New World from the Shell of the Old: Imagining a model to preserve journalism

Damn. The Star Tribune is in bankruptcy, the Christian Science Monitor ended its print versions, and online media struggles to break even through ad revenue (an understatement), or scraps with social service organizations for non-profit funding.

It's really just time for me to announce my plan to preserve journalism to my audience of dozens.

Number One: Newspapers are a format.
They're failing because another format, the internet, makes them redundant or difficult for people to justify as a separate purchase. That's o.k. They waste trees and pollute anyway.

Number Two: Journalism isn't about newspapers.
The idea behind journalism, although mixed with years of gossip and TV junk, is that it holds authorities accountable to people. That's the only purpose to justify shitty puff pieces about American Idol (looking at you: every fucking paper in the world!). I don't think all journalism needs to be high-minded, but without that enterprise reporting the people lose an important voice.
If journalism has fallen in the public esteem in recent years, I'd attribute it to the fact that the powerful media interests were shown to be too often in the pockets of the wealthy or powerful.
Somewhere I read that the American press differed from any other in it's origins because it took this responsibility to inform the public to heart. Newspapers here were named things like The Spokesman and The People's Defender and The Liberator. Let's get back to those roots and away from names like the Tribune Press Herald Daily that speak of corporate consolidation.

Number Three: Online isn't the problem
Media online competes with blogs, commercials, and official areas of information. Even good media, for instance Minnpost here or the Voice of San Diego, have trouble thriving in this information deluge. Not to mention that they compete for hard-fought and temporary non-profit dollars. They certainly can't hope to compete with porn or blogs that update a million times a day for commercial dollars brought in by ads. It doesn't matter. The internet could serve as a teaser for what I'm imagining.

Number Four: Journalism's I-Pod
People like newspapers and magazines. They like the portability and the self-enclosed format.
There are already the stirrings of this idea in Amazon.com's Kindle. The Kindle is, however, still bulky compared to a magazine.
The future, and I can't believe it's that far, will be flexible e-paper that automatically downloads a complete local package every day -- like a daily magazine. Maybe it would have to start by downloading from a dock every morning and afternoon (Yes! Afternoon and evening papers again!). Take it on the bus, take it to the cafe. I imagine the technology would develop. The readable format could be relatively cheap, while the dock was the expensive component. Who knows, but the I-Pod has shown that platforms can be important. Rather than going to high-functioning bulk, why not go towards low-functioning accessibility, meaning no video or trying to be the internet?
Look at this or this and tell me you're not excited.

Number Five: Money is Filth
True, but as I said before, reporters need to be employed full-time in order to serve our public good and get into all the nefarious schemes our authorities have their fingers in. The business model could be based on newspapers' local monopolies, or it could employ freelancers in local areas and just consolidate the content. We need editors though, and we need reporters. I would like a decentralized and fiercely independent co-op model to take journalism away from the Masters programs and unhealthy relationships with the powerful; Why not give it a shot? This imagined model could use ads in its format and give the e-paper away for free, or it could be based on subscription or a hybrid model.

That's it: Maybe there's not much reality to this imagined scheme. I am writing this on an empty stomach before a long workday, but it seems like journalism needs some new developments to avoid worrying itself to the grave so I'm happy to throw something into the interweb and see if it sticks.
This would appeal to me, and I read newspapers. You?

The newspapers dug their own graves: A response to "An Open Letter to Craigslist"

Steve Outing, of Reinventing Classifieds dot com, published an "open letter" to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark last week. The gist of his well-intentioned argument is that Craigslist should share classified ad resources with the newspapers industry in order to preserve journalism.

The plea of Outing's letter, which is what it amounts to, is based on the premise that Craigslist took advertisers from newspapers, which sunk them in the troubled times the industry is currently weeping about-- which will no doubt intensify into outright caterwauling due to the resignation of evil cost-cutting publisher David Hiller from the L.A. Times this week. Even he, who seemed to revel in the do-more-with-less bullshit, couldn't stand more cuts.

My initial reaction was to dig up factoids about the newspaper industry: Wall Street's insistence on maintaining margins in the upper 20 and 3o percents, the gutting of news departments, how newspapers sunk themselves under speculative debt loads, and the failures of mainstream info-tainment to add to the public discourse. Better people than myself have argued these points factually: Molly Ivins, Jack Shafer of Slate, and, well, me a couple months back (I had a better haircut then).

Private profit or public interest?

Any liability for the health of the newspaper industry by Craigslist would have to be based on the premise that newspapers in their current form serve the public interest. As consolidation has increased under fewer companies since the 1996 telecommunications act which-- for those with short memories, was enacted under a Democrat named Clinton-- the mania towards profit has geared them away from real news. It just cost too much.

The Legacy of all this cost-cutting and consolidation?

The mainstream failed horrifically after September 11th, cowed by pressure from authorities, and a seemingly jingoistic public. For that failure, we have illegal internment camps, unregulated telecommunications companies spying on people, two wars in faraway lands with thousands dead, oh, and record profits for the oil industry. The newspapers may still do human interest pieces, resembling TV fluff more every day, but they (the publishers and decision-makers) mostly missed the mark on important issues where it took bravery and a willingness to be unpopular.

Anyway, would Craigslist's support even matter to journalism?

Outing makes the relevant point that journalism is necessary for a democratic society. Right. But, how would it realistically help journalism if Craigslist propped the profit margins of these media conglomerates back up at 30 percent? If they saw a way to make money without in-depth news, would they really rush to fill the newsrooms back up? Wall Street just doesn't work like that.

Outing is right when he says that the public needs full-time professional journalists to do real investigative work, but it will likely take a different form than the archaic, top-heavy newspapers. Anyway, Craigslist's efforts would be better spent in real journalism projects, non-profits like Pro-Publica that aren't so sullied by scrabbling for stockholders. Dare I suggest it: Cooperatives.

Shafer argues that Wall Street will eventually move on, leaving newspaper companies divested of most infrastructure and much of their reputations, only then, he says, will newspapers return to local ownership.

But in an increasingly online world, there's not much point in resurrecting newspapers. They should, as Shafer terms it, be liquidated. When they neglected the public trust for short-term profit it just happened to be during the biggest technological revolution since the printing press; they dug their own graves.

Thoughts on the current state of the media: Part 1

Being a journalism student this year, after having experienced almost ten years in the workforce, has brought me to some interesting conclusions about the current state of journalism. For those who don't know, the newspaper industry is having a panic attack. Publishers and analysts decry dropping circulations, the cost of investigative reporting, plummeting profit margins (Oh no! Down to 35%!) and, of course, the internet. Today I want to talk about the drop in classified revenue.

For years, your local newspaper controlled the rates of classified advertising and made a substantial profit that subsidized things like cheap newsstand prices. For the first six or seven years that the internet was popular, newspapers maintained this dominance. But as people developed online classified systems that cost less for sellers and buyers, for instance monster.com for jobs, newspapers' classified share began to erode.

At first, things like monster.com weren't too much of a threat because they were still profit-based and usually charged for services. But when craigslist.org started to gain popularity on the mostly-free model, (that has really been the model of the internet age after all), newspapers didn't react.

The fact is, the consolidation of the industry under very few owners and their obsession with profit margins, made it impossible for the industry to react creatively. Newspaper owners were making money hand over fist. They didn't want to lose that. They already had dominance in the local classifieds, had they switched to a less costly model, say, even a dollar an ad, or god-forbid, free, they would have been able to beat off any threat from craigslist, instead they stuck to their old models, and slowly became obsolete.

Now publishers accuse craigslist of killing the newspaper industry in order to justify huge cuts in newsroom staff and talent. Jon Stewart recently brought this issue up in an interview with craigslist founder, Craig Newmark. His response:

"An even bigger threat is the pressure from Wall Street to get like 10 or 20 percent profit margins. Maybe papers should focus on better Web sites, delivering the news better through the Net."

Essentially, newspapers are sticking to that old logic. They cut quality, pander to the lowest common denominators and most simplistic ideologies, with the result being that they're no longer fulfilling the public need for critical, investigative, journalism. And they're surprised when the public starts to act like they're not relevant. Because of corporate consolidation, (thanks Clinton circa 1996), everything is lowered to the logic of profit margins, thus the industry doesn't have the flexibility to react when threatened by new technology or changing situations.

Craigslist isn't killing newspapers; newspapers' greed is killing newspapers.