Two Things ..

I'll hopefully comment more tonight, when I have time, but I thought I'd throw both of these out there: 1. Time wonders if Kindle can save newspapers. 2. CNN says the future of online news is hyperlocal. Discuss!

How To Save Your Newspaper

On Time.com today, Walter Isaacson has an interesting piece on the state of the newspaper biz. His take? Sooner or later, newspapers are going to have to ask their online readers to pay for content. And he validly points out that naysayers should think about other industries that have managed to get their users used to paying for online content - for instance, Apple.

He says: In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it's made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply.

Its an intriguing idea, I think. Isaacson goes on to talk about the fact that newspapers could likely charge a nickle per article, or even a slightly higher fee for all-day access, or a whole newspaper's worth of articles. So what do you think? Would you be willing to pay for something like what Isaacson describes?

Can I Have Four Beers?

Over on Poynter Online, Amy Gahran talks about Leonard Witt's question on PJNet, which was evidently sparked by a discussion panel. I'm pretty sure that by linking to Amy's post that links to Leonard's post which is essentially from another discussion, I'm going to unleash some journalistic seventh circle of hell, but here goes. Witt's question?

"Here, I believe, is the ultimate ethical question: If the American public does not want to pay for journalism -- in other words, doesn't find value in what we as journalists do -- should we simply stop doing it?"

Gahran and I pretty much agree - this question operates under the fallacy that subscribers (aka, the public) pay for their journalism. Advertisers pay for the production of the newspaper - the subscriptions just barely pay for the costs to deliver the product. True, without subscribers or some kind of definitive way to quantify how much of the public is reading your product, you can't get many advertisers, but strictly speaking, the American public does not pay for its journalism - nor has it ever, really. Not to mention, journalism does not have a static delivery system - by that meaning it is tied to one medium to get delivered. Maybe in days past, sure, but nowadays, people can get their information fix from a variety of places - television, newspaper, radio, the Internet - and Witt's question, I think, assumes that the only real way to receive that information is through the traditional print. And that may be a large part of the reason we see newspapers stuck in such a quagmire. It's not just, as I've opined before, that the industry failed largely to plan for the Internet and become early adopters of the tool - it's wholesale snobbery and head-in-the-sandedness that allows them to continue to think that the journalistic world is flat, and it drops off sharply at its newspaper-bereft edges. Information (think town criers of days of old) has a long and storied tradition of being free - hence the public's aversion to paying for it. True, that town crier still had to be paid, but it wasn't a townsperson that walked up and tossed a shilling at him, either. As Gahran said, the better questions are:

How can society continue to receive the benefits of journalism, given the current media environment? Also, which players might provide those benefits, and how?

And I agree - it won't come solely from traditional sources. As information and sourcing becomes easier and easier thanks to the Internet, the American public will have even more choices for their journalism. And likely none of them will require payment before reading.

How To Save Your Local Newspaper

This morning comes the news that A.H. Belo will shed an additional 500 jobs - this on top of the hundreds already cut in the past five, six years or so. What does this mean for Dallas' Only Daily? Less people working there, of course. And you can be willing to bet they won't be this guy, this guy, this guy or this guy. And today, on various and assorted city blogs, there's been plenty of "why do we even have this liberal-commie-pinko-conservative-republicanloving-anti-American newspaper anyway?" posts, but none that are really all that helpful. How do you save a large metro daily that, much like Baby Jane, refuses to come to grips with reality and instead totters toward some horrific collapse? You forget ego. This isn't New York. It's not Time magazine. You're going to have to figure out what readers want, and then do it - even if it means giving up what you think is all the bright and shiny stuff. Which leads me to this: You know what newspapers are having a decent time of it? Community newspapers. Know why? They're local, local, local. And not in some half-assed way. They're all in, and their readers enjoy it. It's the reason why you can still see People Newspapers, Star Newspapers, and Today Newspapers still going strong. People want to read about what's going on where they are. NeighborsGo was a decent first start. But to stop there is like Josh Hamilton seizing up midswing. It's not going to produce anything - as I'm sure we've all noticed. Sure it's popular, but when you go from it to the Metro section, that's when you get your miss. There are simply not enough Metro reporters, and the Metro section is too small. People want to know stories about their communities. There are over a million people in Dallas alone, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, and I wager 1/3 of them at least have interesting stories to tell. That being said, yes, people do want their national news. But in this day and age, people are turning to other sources for that - primarily because they can get it faster than TDMN can print it. How do you cover state and national news? Again - make it local. A national wire story that runs now - all 15 inches of it - in the A section could be pared down to a simple sidebar, and instead that subject gets a local spin. If it's a new state law, then how is that going to affect the Dallas area? If it's a story about Hurricane Dolly, then how is the local Red Cross finding gas prices affecting its ability to help respond in situations like that? Yes, to a certain extent stories like that are being done - but hyperlocal means 15-25 percent wire, not 50 or 75. The Dallas Morning News can survive - but it has to be relevant to its readers. It can't do that with columns about doodads on street lights, stories by Wayne Slater that I read already in Time or the Wall Street Journal two days ago by someone else, or by letting people like Ed Bark go. In short, you need more Levinthal, and less um, other stuff.

Continuing the Conversation Here, So I Don't Hog Space

On Frontburner today, D Magazine publisher Wick Allison posted this item about the possible death of newspapers. A lot was said, and one commenter insisted that there was there was a liberal bias in all media, effectively tarring us all with the same brush. It's not a complaint unfamiliar to those of us who have been journalists for any length of time. As I shot back today, for every five letters a publication gets complaining that there is a liberal bias, it gets five more insisting the paper favors conservatives. It's not a pat answer, either. I used to keep a clipping book of stories about Democrats and stories about Republicans for one paper I edited - on purpose. Inevitably, I'd get someone that would come in and insist I favored one over the other, and I'd pull the book out, and have them count. Hard to argue with such concrete evidence. I'm never surprised that those who've never stepped foot inside a newsroom would believe that a journalist could not keep his or her personal politics out of a story. But what surprised me was what a fellow journalist said there:

While very few would cop to it, it’s a ’60s-throwback, baby-boomer world-view that you could sum up like this: Government action good; greedy businesspeople bad; guns bad; abortion not good, but not really that bad; religious people scary, and on and on. I mean, look at all the polls showing 80% or 90% of newspeople are Democrats. This mentality affects the stories that are chosen and the way they’re written, and it’s part of the reason readers are leaving.

According to Fair and Accurateness in Reporting, most journalists are actually more centerist in their politics, and even lean more conservatively on some things than the general public. Yes, those numbers are from 1998, but I doubt the numbers have changed that drastically in 10 years. Yes, there is a more recent Pew study that says journalists identify themselves as liberals, but I'm with Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, who wrote as NPR Ombudsman that he hoped Pew would try the study again - for the reasons he mentioned, and with perhaps a bigger pool of participants. Yes, it is true that a 1996 American Society of Newspaper Editors survey said more journalists say they're Democrats than Republicans. What I found most interesting was that a separate section of that same survey said editorial writers (who are usually the subject of the most vitriol and accusations of liberal bias) statistically, are more likely to be independent or conservative than elsewhere in the newsroom. "The writers of opinion are more diverse and balanced in their ideologies than the newsroom staff, " the survey said. If a journalist personally identifies himself or herself as liberally-leaning, does it mean that he or she cannot write a fair and balanced story? If so, does it meant that only astronauts should write about space, that only someone who has never held a baby should write about cases such as, say Dena Schlosser? There are all kinds of things that can taint - if allowed - our reporting. It's our training and ethics that prevents such a thing from happening. Most journalists I know - and I have had the pleasure of even meeting several at this city's paper of record as well - are deeply invested in presenting the fairest account of the day possible. Even the op-ed page is a delicate balance of what I like to think of as averages of opinions. They are completely aware that veering too far to the left or the right will cost them not only readers but credibility. Many have various stances on this. I know some that even refuse to vote at all - I even knew an ethics prof at the University of Arkansas J-school who actively advocated that very thing. My first editor felt you could, but who you voted for shouldn't be discussed in the newsroom. Yard signs, buttons and bumper stickers, of course, were verboten, as was fraternizing with campaign workers. Me? I always thought that as long as neither side could really figure out where I was leaning, then my job was done - even if it meant driving to a Republican fish fry at one end of Fannin County, staying as long as humanly possible and then burning rubber on 30 miles of bad road to get to a Democratic barbecue at the other end of the county on time. And I do agree with some of the commenters - every paper of size does need an ombudsman. I, for one, love how Clark Hoyt keeps the Grey Lady honest on a regular basis. So do I think that the "liberal" media caused the demise of newspapers? No. Because if that were the case, television would be turned off, too, or Fox would be experiencing record ratings. What is making newspapers an endangered species, then? Two words: Poor planning. Five more: Newspapers thought they were invincible. As I said today in the conversation on Frontburner, newspapers were not as a whole quick to anticipate and hop on to the possibilities involving the Internet. Marketing strategies that should’ve been in place years ago to attract and assure advertisers that they could get a return on investment on the Web and the print product just didn’t happen. Bottom line, we didn’t get consumers and advertisers to become early adopters of a fully-integrated online/print advertising strategy because we weren’t early adopters. I know this thing is hellaciously long, but I drove home tonight still thinking about what was said today. There are so many hard-working reporters - the rank and file - out there who get up every morning thinking of how they're going to inform, and go home at night hoping they did just that. That is their sole agenda - with no skew involved. If you're a journalist who can't keep your politics out of your reporting, that's fine and well. But do the rest of us a favor - don't throw us under the bus when you cop to it.