newspapers

Writing for OJR.com, Robert Niles argues: “There's no need for professional reporters to fear user-generated content. Someone needs to lead the Web's content communities, and journalists make the ideal candidates.”

While I agree wholeheartedly that newspaper journalists should engage as leaders in the community conversation, I think it would be a mistake to overlook the shortcomings and handicaps we inherit from our past.

So here’s a counterpoint to Niles’ essay.

It doesn’t start with your source list

One of the reasons newspaper readership has been declining for decades is that the news values and news definitions of print journalism are out of sync with society.

It’s hard to see this from the inside, but the beat structures, source lists and organizational priorities of the average daily newspaper reflect a mid-20th-century worldview. Sources, journalists and audience are neatly organized and carefully segregated. Institutions and processes are the stars. Just look at political coverage: organizational strategy and horse-race poll reportage eclipses any discussion of issues that people care about.

A healthy Web community leverages the passions of individuals and activists and chaotic self-organizers, and that’s a completely different world than you’re going to find reflected in your source list.

You can go through institutions (clubs and organizations, for example) to find your “seed corn” community leaders, but they're often not the people running those organizations. You’re going to have to get out of the office and in front of a lot of people, explaining your goals and your mission, and asking for their help. Prepare to be surprised by the ones who step up.

Journalists don’t know how to ask questions

It seems counterintuitive to say that a reporter isn’t good at asking questions, but you have to consider the context.

Print reporters ask questions all the time: quietly, one-to-one, in the corner, but rarely in the spotlight. Sometimes you have to ask dumb questions to get smart answers.

When it comes to writing, the reporter shifts gears. The goal becomes : Tell the right story. Most newspaper writing has an authoritative voice, and to many people it seems authoritarian. This is a great irritation to many people in print and can be a genuine offense online.

There’s a real cultural chasm here that you shouldn’t underestimate. Some reporters will take to the online conversation like ducks to water, and some will need a lot of coaching. From the editor? The most painful transitions can be those of an editor, whose entire DNA is focused on avoidance of error, a distrust of sources, and in many cases a “command and control” approach to the workplace.

Journalists don’t know how to promote

TV is shameless about promotion (to the degree that it takes up 20 percent of some newscasts) but print journalists suck at promotion. The kind of promotion a participative website needs is promotion that sells, not promotion that merely tells. In a business where “pandering” and “sensationalism” are high insults, promotion just doesn’t come naturally.

This is a place where some coaching from the marketing department can help ... if you have a marketing department. Most newspapers do not have a marketing department, and most reporters don’t know the difference between a marketing department and ad sales.

Be afraid, but do it anyway

You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to struggle. People will post items that are wrong, mean-spirited or intentionally misleading. Politicians will astroturf and spammers will make your life hell. You’re going to have a day when you wonder whether any of it is worth the effort.

But if you persist, if you humble yourself and stay focused on building, leadership and (most importantly) learning from the community, you have an opportunity to reconnect with real people’s lives. You’ll discover issues that have become lost and you’ll begin the long, slow process of rebuilding the machinery of your reporting. You may even have an epiphany and declare that everything you’ve been doing for a decade has been all wrong. It won’t be painless. It will be worth it.

Jump in.

On the day of 60 "early retirements" from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, columnist Bill McClellan feels like a dinosaur witnessing the end of his era, and he points to two meteoric events. One is the arrival of the Internet. The other is corporate ownership.

That's probably a popular viewpoint in most newsrooms these days. And there is some truth to it. But in the big picture it's wrong.

Newspapers, particularly the flagship major metros, aren't in trouble because of the Internet and corporate ownership. They're in trouble for a whole lot of reasons that all too often get overlooked. They include:

• Journalistic arrogance, the dark side of the professionalization that took place in the 20th century. The arrogant authoritarianism of newspaper journalism set us up for a fall. A lot of people just plain don't like us.
• Big changes in consumer retailing. Local department stores like St. Louis' Famous, Barr & Co. and Stix, Baer & Fuller are no longer around to buy those big full-age ads on A3 featuring women in their underwear. We shop now at suburban malls, Wal-Mart and Best Buy. National chain-store branding and physical location have displaced local merchandise advertising as a primary marketing tool. Much of the retail advertising that newspapers still get has moved from high-dollar ROP to low-dollar inserts.
• Explosive growth in broadcast and cable TV. Sometime in the 1990s, newspapers lost their grip on the morning, replaced by television, just as newspapers lost their grip on the evenings in the 1970s. As the eyeballs have migrated from print to TV to cable, so has a lot of small-business advertising. Pretty much every cable carrier has a sales force (or is contracted with one) that's out calling on sole-proprietor businesses in strip malls and shopping centers. A lot of those folks never see a newspaper ad salesperson.
• A long, slow slide toward irrelevancy through the loss of readership driven by generational change. Using General Social Survey data, Philip Meyer has documented the decline of newspaper readership since 1970, and it's easy to see that something other than the Internet is at work. Even if the Internet had never happened, newspapers -- especially big-city papers -- have long been headed for a dangerous inflection point at which their market penetration would not be sufficient to sustain a mass-media business model.
• The iPod, the Xbox, the DVD player and every other electronic toy and gizmo that sucks up time and attention, ultimately competing with the act of reading and the very concept of being involved in
  local civic life.
• Market fluctuations. I'm the first person to point at longterm trends and ignore the short-term cycles, but in this case we're experiencing both climate change and very nasty weather. There is a deep malaise in the American economy right now, and it's much worse than any of the spinners in Washington will admit. Maybe if we hadn't wasted $455 billion in a fit of neocon world-domination arrogance, we wouldn't be facing a wrecked economy.
• The Internet, and the corporate ownership model. I don't want to let them off the hook entirely. I just want to point out that it's not one or two meteoric events that have put us where we are today.

(Note: I worked in St. Louis in the 1970s and 1980s at the Globe-Democrat, which went out of business in 1986.)

The new accord between Google and the wire services -- Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Press Association (UK) and Canadian Press -- has been met with a range of reaction from ho-hum to what-were-they-thinking.

My old boss Tim McGuire is in the latter camp: "The first question is how much money is at stake here? I’m guessing newspapers still provide a LOT more of APs revenues than do partners like Yahoo and Google. Which leads to the second question, where are the angry newspaper people with their fiery pitchforks and nooses? I’m more than a little surprised newspaper executives aren’t up in arms over this partnership."

It reminds me of something I heard McGuire say many years ago: "Tactically smart and strategically dumb." You could apply that label to a whole series of decisions made by the AP, and the newspaper-dominated AP board, over the years.

But I'm in the ho-hum camp, for a couple of reasons.

Reason #1 is that AP's goose has been in the oven for years. The association came into being in 1846 to fix a problem that no longer exists. Technology and the market have moved on.

Habits are changing. People who are interested in news have the whole world at their fingertips, and routinely consume news from multiple sources. People with less interest rely on word of mouth, which also has been amplified and accelerated by the Internet. As a result, the value of AP news to newspapers is dropping rapidly.

Only an aging minority still relies on print for global news. There is nothing AP can do to change that.

Reason #2 is that there is little or no impact on local media online revenues. Most local media websites get their revenues from local advertising, which is targeted and naturally sells at a premium relative to "junk inventory" network advertising. Random traffic referrals from Google News have no value in that model, so losing them is no big deal.

But beyond that, traffic to wire content on most local websites is not significant to begin with. Some local websites have already pulled the plug on wire news; many never had it in the first place.

Local news websites are under tremendous pressure to build audience. Having generic AP content isn't an effective way to do that, so they're turning to blogging, photo galleries, social networking tools and databases of local information.

At some point, wire copy is not merely of low value, it's of negative value. Local sites are drowing their users with too much stuff, too many links. As Jakob Nielsen has said, every added link subtracts from the prominence of every other link. A cleanup is in order.

I'm not celebrating any of this. It just is.

In an op-ed for the big paper on the left coast, journalism professor Michael Skube complains that "the blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined."

"One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more," he writes.

One does? Perhaps one gets such an uneasy sense from not reading the blogs about which one is opining. Or from not writing what actually gets published.

I have to wonder whether the Los Angeles Times is playing the troll or the fool in this little operetta. I'm not sure which is worse. We all would be best served by journalism that aims to provide light and not merely heat, and that applies to the op-ed page.

See also:

Jay Rosen
Dan Gillmor
Ed Cone, from 2005
Paul "the Real Paul" Jones

Update: A couple of midafternoon additions move this forward a bit. CBS Public Eye's Matthew Felling points out Skube's "selective quoting'; The Telegraph's Shane Richmond defends Jay Rosen's stiletto jab at Skube, and Jay Rosen launches a crowdsourced effort to create a response aimed at educating the readers of LATimes.com, and maybe even a journalism professor here and there.

Fascinating and fast-moving.