Tag Archives: Journalism

How to fix newspapers: Prelude

Posted on February 17, 2008 | 5 comments

(Also see Parts I, II, III, and IV.)

In the discussions about what has happened to the newspaper business, several usual suspects always seem to pop up. (No, not Fenster.) Readers don’t have enough time. There’s too much competition from other media. Young people don’t care about the news or don’t read newspapers. People only care about Britney Spears nowadays.

All of those may be true to some degree. But something always seems to be missing from the discussion: the role of newspapers and the news within. In other words, maybe we need to stop blaming readers for ignoring newspapers and start thinking about our responsibility: what it is we put in papers that doesn’t attract or actually repels readers. Or, as Howard Owens puts it in the title of this conversation-starting blog post, “Maybe it’s journalism itself that is the problem.”

Owens writes:

The issue is, the current way important news is gathered, reported and written isn’t working. It hasn’t been working for several decades. It’s only now becoming a crisis, thanks to the likes of Craig Newmark, Realtor.com, AutoTrader.com and Monster.com. …

Discovering a journalism that does what journalism should do — match the needs of society rather than dictate to society what people should want from journalism — will be real hard work, and it will challenge assumptions and afflict comfortable mind sets.

Over the course of the next few posts, I’d like to offer up some of the ideas I’ve developed over the past couple of years while working for a forward-thinking publication. Because Owens is right on both counts: the news isn’t working, and it’s going to be hard figuring out first how to fix it and then how to change the mindset of an entire industry.

Some background: For the past two years I have been a news editor at tbt*-Tampa Bay Times, a free daily tabloid published by the St. Petersburg Times that’s aimed at “younger” readers. tbt* began in fall 2004 as a free weekly tabloid, mostly covering local entertainment, lifestyle stories, and other weekend guide-type material. Like other free tabs, the stories were shorter than a broadsheet’s, the headlines were edgier, and there was a heavy use of “alt-form” design.

A daily version launched in March 2006, applying much of the tone and look of the weekly section to the full range of news covered by a daily. (tbt* has no Web site to speak of, but you can view an “e-edition” of the paper here.) There’s one gossip page per day; some lifestyle columns about pets, relationships, and the like; a couple non-gossip entertainment pages (for stories like this one); four to six sports pages; and the rest is news: five to eight local pages, three to five national/world pages, a consumer page or two, and several pages for the “News Talk” pages, which essentially function as a combination opinion page and print aggregator of good stuff from the Web. There’s also a 1.5- to 2-page color photo spread with often-witty headlines and cutlines that covers news photos, wacky photos, and just plain beautiful photos that you don’t normally see in a newspaper; this is the paper’s most popular feature.

The paper doesn’t just take the same old stories and cut them down to 5 inches. tbt* has turned out to be a unique experiment in rethinking traditional approaches to news judgment, story selection, and the very notion of the newspaper reader, in an attempt to be smart and engaging as well as a quick read. The approach has worked: the five-day-a-week tbt* has gone from a total weekly circulation of 150,000 to north of 350,000 in less than two years — this in a two-city metro market with two longtime daily papers and no mass transit system. The price tag is undoubtedly a big factor, but I think there’s more to it than that.

The following posts reflect some of the lessons I’ve learned at tbt*, and may provide a partial answer to Howard Owens’ challenge. (Disclaimer: All these posts are my views alone and are in no way endorsed by, spit on by, or otherwise related to anyone else at tbt* or the St. Petersburg Times.)

(UPDATE: I changed the title of the post from “How to fix journalism,” both to be slightly less presumptuous and also because Owens’ focus really seems to be on newspapers. Or at least I want to focus on the newspaper aspect of his challenge.)

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David Broder’s meaningless centrism

Posted on February 14, 2008 | 1 comment

Washington Post columnist David Broder is at this point basically a joke among serious political writers and bloggers. To them, he represents the pointlessness and shallowness of a certain kind of mainstream newspaper political coverage: A mindset that fetishizes objectivity and even-handedness to the point of prizing, above all else, “bipartisanship” for the sake of bipartisanship regardless of the policies involved.

According to this mindset, the havoc wreaked by tax cuts, cronyism, and Republicans’ turning K Street into another arm of government were not the result of deliberate policies and practices by one party, but rather occurred because of “partisan gridlock,” because “Washington is broken.” Thus bipartisan action is always good, regardless of whether the legislation produced by such action is sound. (The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait is one of the best critics of this view, and his book The Big Con is a must-read for anyone interested in this sort of thing.)

Broder’s column Thursday about the recently enacted economic stimulus package is an almost comically perfect example of this shallow strain of argument. Continue reading →

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Why does the Baltimore Sun only have 5 reporters?

Posted on February 13, 2008 | Comments Off on Why does the Baltimore Sun only have 5 reporters?

Once again, Slate’s TV Club does a nice job of cataloging the absurdities in this week’s Wire episode: McNutty’s ridiculous kidnap-the-homeless-man scheme; Omar surviving a five-story fall with only broken legs, which he can soon walk on; the editors’ successfully checking out a homeless Marine vet’s story in a couple of hours; etc.

But one thing they didn’t mention that annoyed me is how the show’s fictional Baltimore Sun apparently has the smallest reporting staff of any major metro paper in the country.

Remind me if I’ve missed any, but in six episodes we’ve been introduced to: the oily Stephen Glass wannabe; the hungry idealist (who we’re supposed to feel sorry for, for example, when she’s rebuffed yelling a question to police officers while they’re working a murder scene); the young black reporter who seems generally normal; the state courts reporter upset that there’s no federal courts reporter; and the bearded, well-meaning but average City Council/education reporter. (Also the smarter-than-Batman cops reporter-turned-editor who was fired or took a buyout.) At first I attributed this narrow focus to the limits of narrative television; they can focus on only so many characters before the story gets unwieldy.

But in this week’s episode, when the evil editor — who you can tell is horrible because, like Stalin, he wears hoity-toity suspenders — declares that all their resources will henceforth be devoted to The Homeless Problem, the saintly city editor is upset because he has to reassign … the oily dude, the idealist, the courts guy, and the ed reporter (the black reporter seemingly can continue covering other things, because he brings in a tip from another story that’ll probably end up trapping the fabulist). That is all.

First of all, no editor — even one who has as much sanctimony as he lacks a clue — would reassign his entire staff to one subject short of a 9/11 type catastrophe. But beyond that, a few episodes ago we learned that the Sun is closing down its foreign bureaus. Are we supposed to believe that a big metro paper that recently had its own foreign staff now has fewer reporters than the 20,000-circulation paper in New Hampshire where I had my first job? Is there really no one left to cover education or anything else after these four or five reporters have been reassigned?

Also, David Simon has complained about how newspapers don’t do a good job of covering society’s systemic problems, or simply can’t cover issues with such scope. Intent and method of coverage aside, is it so bad that the evil editor wants to cover the homeless more? Isn’t a major American city’s chronic homelessness a systemic social problem worth examining? Obviously throwing resources at a made-up story about a made-up serial killer isn’t the right way to do that, but the topic itself is presented as frivolous (e.g. Mayor Carcetti latching on because it’ll help him become governor). Seems like something worth covering along with, if not as much as, the problems in the school system.

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About those "failing" newspapers…

Posted on February 9, 2008 | Comments Off on About those "failing" newspapers…

A couple of things jumped out at me in this New York Times story about the sorry state of newspapers. Richard Perez-Pena makes the case that while things have been bad for a while,

what is happening now is something new, something more serious than anyone has experienced in generations. Last year started badly and ended worse, with shrinking profits and tumbling stock prices, and 2008 is shaping up as more of the same, prompting louder talk about a dark turning point.

Most of the evidence is nothing new: circulation keeps dropping; print advertising is falling (especially real estate ads) and online advertising both doesn’t make up for that loss and isn’t growing as quickly as it was; “Job cuts have become all but universal.”

But then there’s this, about three-quarters of the way through:

Newspaper profits remain healthy, but they are dropping fast. For example, the newspapers of Media General, a large Southern chain, had a 17 percent operating profit margin last year, but the dollar amount fell 23 percent from the year before. The Gannett Company’s newspaper division, the nation’s largest chain, had a 21 percent margin, but a 10 percent decline.

Excuise me? I baking powder? Profits are healthy, Gannett has a 21 percent margin — and the fuss is about what now? You want real economic doldrums? Check out the auto industry. Ford lost $2.7 billion in 2007 and $12.6 billion the year before — and those aren’t just losses in market capitalization (that was probably a heck of a lot more), but $15 billion in actual money down the drain. Think they wouldn’t kill for that 21 percent margin? (Their 2007 margin: minus-6.8 percent.) Continue reading →

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The irrelevancy of the nightly news

Posted on February 5, 2008 | 1 comment

Caitlin Flanagan has a nice essay in the latest Atlantic about Katie Couric, the Today Show, and Couric’s failure as the CBS Evening News anchor. Flanagan does a good job of explaining why the fluffy-unwatchable morning shows actually mean a lot to a lot of people, and why Couric was so perfect for that role (the piece is ostensibly a review of a part-hit-job Couric biography). But the best part is Flanagan’s tidy put-down of the evening news:

That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very questions being asked. … No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon.

That CBS and Couric didn’t realize this — and that newspapers have wasted so much ink (also see: Dan Rather’s fall from grace, Tom Brokaw’s retirement, etc.) discussing an irrelevant institution that few under age, say 58, care about — is as devastating an indictment of the news media as any stock-price or circulation drop.

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David Simon as journalism’s Rip Van Winkle

Posted on February 4, 2008 | 1 comment

I’ll have more to say about this season of The Wire, its misdiagnoses of journalism’s problems, and David Simon’s recent nostalgic column in the Washington Post. But for now I wanted to give my general response to Season 5’s Baltimore Sun storyline.

At Slate’s TV Club conversation about Season 5, David Plotz annoyed David Simon by referencing brief conversations they’d had at parties in which Simon bitched about the Baltimore Sun. Simon criticized Plotz’s post, concluding: “The Wire’s depiction of the multitude of problems facing newspapers and high-end journalism will either stand or fall on what happens on screen, not on the back-hallway debate over the past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities of those who create it.” This is what I wrote to Plotz in a solidarity e-mail after Episode 2 or 3:

Fair enough. But so far his “multitude of problems” are a) Too many Stephen Glasses, b) Pompous idiot editors too dim to see the clearly telegraphed Stephen Glasses and disinterested in getting at the root of social problems, and at a distant third c) Corporate cost-cutting. That is all.

Forget that a plague of fabulists isn’t (to my knowledge) currently destroying journalism from within, and that the problem with real fabulists is they aren’t usually transparent fakers right from the start. This is his grand diagnosis of the ills of modern journalism?

How about, I don’t know, the Internet? Or hemorrhaging ad sales and circulation (partly or largely because of the Internet). Or figuring out how newspapers can appeal to readers and stay relevant in this new competitive-media world. Newspapers are going through their most dire period of upheaval in decades and he thinks the issue is too many fabulists?

The problem with his portrayal isn’t just that Simon’s fictional newsroom seems like a caricature of a mid-90s newsroom. It’s that, despite his response to Plotz’s TV Club post, he so clearly framed his fictional view based on his “past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities.” What a coincidence that his grand statement, via The Wire, on modern journalism’s failures happens to exactly coincide with his oft–stated feelings about his former editors and how they dealt with (or didn’t deal with) a fabulist and stories about social issues at the Baltimore Sun 15 years ago.

Jeffrey Goldberg voices similar frustrations in his TV Club post today:

We were meant to be getting a sophisticated look at the demise of daily journalism, besieged by the Internet and by venal media companies. Well, what we’ve got is a newspaper edited by a pair of impossibly shmucky editors who seem, in 2008, unaware of the existence of the World Wide Web and who have in their employ a reporter who is doing something no fabricator, to the best of my knowledge, has ever done: manufacturing information about an ongoing homicide investigation. Put aside, please, the fact that said investigation is a sham as well; the reporter, Templeton, doesn’t know that. Is this what David Simon really wants his viewers to believe happens at major newspapers? Is he that blinded by hate for the Baltimore Sun?

For such a supposedly brilliant guy and show, it’s depressing that the answers to the last two questions seem to be yes, and yes.

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