If it sounds like I'm dancing on the grave of the newspaper industry, you may be right. But while the industry isn't quite dead yet, the Dallas Morning News is shoving it in its own coffin.I saw a News York Times article which tells how some of the Dallas newspaper's editors are now reporting to the advertising department.
It's something I hoped I'd never live to see.
Old-line newsmen who are still slogging out the deadlines may be wondering what they're still doing in the business, and old journalists who got out of the racket -- like I did some years ago -- are merely watching and sagely nodding their heads.
Maybe I'd better explain why this is so signfiicant before I go on. For a long time, newspapers had the strangest, most conflict-ridden business model imaginable in a free-enterprise society.
Understand, advertising pays the freight, keeps the presses running, and keps the newsmen fed. But except for the weekend coupon clippers, no one buys a newspaper to look at the display ads. Your readers want to know the news in your town, or at the very least, who got caught.
And to accomplish the "real" job of a newspaper -- to keep the readers informed of the world around them -- it is necessary to keep a great gulf between the advertising and editorial staffs. I've always preferred stringing some razor wire between the two departments and electrifying it. An effective editor keeps the advertising sales crew out of the newsroom, and not always nicely.
Here's a purely hypothetical f'rinstance. Let's say you're a reporter, and you catch the mayor of your town with his hand in the cookie jar. Or maybe he makes some decision that is clearly not in the public's best interest. You report it, right?
Now let's mix up the equation a little. Your mayor has a construction company or a pet store (I almost said a cat house, but let's keep this clean). And his business is your newspaper's biggest advertiser. And maybe he's a friend of your publisher, you know, the guy who signs your paycheck.
What would you, the reporter, do?
Guaranteed, your advertising department will swarm the newsroom, begging you to kill that story, reminding you that they are the ones who pay your salary. And you sure won't get any backing from the publisher.
OK, that's a bigger example, but not at all farfetched. I've faced this moral dilemma more than once, which probably explains why I moved from newspaper to newspaper a lot. A likelier scenario is that a potential advertiser may want some incentive to buy ad space -- can you sweeten the pot a little by running a story on my business?
As I got older and more cynical in the business, I'd consent to have the pot-sweetening story run -- as long as the advertising representative writes it and his name goes on it. But one time a funny thing happened -- the ad rep turned out to be a decent writer with good news instincts. So I stole him. Our ad depatment lost a below-average salesman, and I gained a better-than-average reporter. But that was extremely rare back then -- the mindset of a reporter and that of an ad geek were polar opposites. As it should be now.
For the most part, though, a newspaper that pays more attention to the bottom line will lose all its credibility. That's a promise. A real newspaper is independent, and there's no real difference whether this independence is broken by political or financial pressure. And credibility is a funny thing. It's something that takes a long time and much effort to build, but a mere perception can shatter it.
So you can already see my frosty outlook when I saw the Media Bistro article. I shot it over to my old managing editor, Charlie Hand. Now, it's been 21 years since I've worked with Charlie, but he clearly made an impression on me. He, along with the late Verne Peyser, were my mentors. Both preached things like integrity, honesty, accuracy, objectivity -- all those things your grandpappy might have told you about. Values that were the news industry's modus operandi as recently as a generation ago.
Anyway, Charlie fired off a response within the hour, and you can tell he wasn't pleased. He's still in the business, with a small newspaper in southern California. I don't know how he'd do in one of the larger newsrooms today -- probably would be in the way if he wasn't such a good newspaperman. And I shudder to think what Verne Peyser would say about the Dallas Morning News. Even under the most pleasant of circumstances, drunken longshoremen and truckers would complain about Verne's language.
Now, as I see the shape of the newspaper industry, there's not much credibility. You saw how obvious that was in the recent presidential election, though that had nothing to do with whether the writers were liberal or conservative. No, this lack of credibility has everything to do with its honesty, accuracy, objectivity, and independence. There isn't any.
While this is going on, Rep. Henry Waxman (a Democrat from the People's Republic of California) is saying the government should help the newspapers stay viable. "The newspapers my generation has taken for granted are facing a structural threat to the business model that has sustained them," he said.
OK. Let's connect some dots here. The only kind of "help" the government knows how to give is either through regulation, or a financial bailout. The smart money is on the latter, but as soon as the government feels it has a financial stake in the media, the newspapers will be as honest, forthright, and independent as Pravda, the house organ of the old Soviet Union.
I don't know about you, but a government-run press -- or even a press that's subsidized by the government, which is exactly the same thing -- scares the dog squeeze out of me. So much for a wide-open society where people can make informed decisions from relatively untainted information.
Meanwhile, here is a sampling of headlines from the last few days, outlining the state of the media:
Washington Times Cutting Staff Up to 40 Percent (Media Bistro, Dec. 3, from Politico).
Congressman: Struggling Media Will Need Government Help (Media Bistro, Dec. 3, from AFP).
NYT Regional Media Group Pay Cuts to Stay in Effect in 2010 (Media Bistro, Dec. 3, from Poynter).
FTC Examines Possible Support of News Organizations (Media Bistro, Dec. 2, from the Wall Street Journal).
As Times Staff Shrinks, Blogs Will Be 'Pruned' (Media Bistro, Dec. 2, from The Observer).
New Round of Cutbacks Coming at Gannett Newspapers (Media Bistro, Dec. 2, from AP). We're talking a newsroom staff cut of five percent here.
Tribune Gets More Time to File Reorganization Plan (Media Bistro, Dec. 2, from LA Times).
Had enough? So have I. And that's just two days.
So, there's no great surprise that the new cyber-media -- mainstream news sites. alt-news sites, and blogs are cutting today's newspapers into cat food. And as much as I hate to say it about an industry I've had a stormy love affair with, will someone please put it out of its misery?
So as I sit in my living room late Sunday night, pounding away on my laptop, putting together this blog, I am forced to reassess my position.
Yes, I AM dancing on the grave of the newspaper industry.
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