A MEDIA PORTENT?

By Chris Daly

There's a story by the AP today that may point toward one path to a new future for news. It reports that the Capital Times of Madison, Wisc., is abandoning its print version and going mainly on-line instead. An excerpt:


MADISON, Wis. - The Capital Times, the feisty afternoon newspaper that helped define this city and championed a unique brand of Midwestern progressivism, publishes its final daily today after a colorful 90-year history.
The paper that battled Joseph McCarthy, former senator of Wisconsin, and crusaded for decades to build a Frank Lloyd Wright convention center could no longer survive after decades of circulation losses.
But the self-described champion of the little guy isn't ready to quit. Next week, the paper starts publishing two weekly tabloids and transitions its daily coverage to the Internet with a smaller staff in a first-of-its-kind move being watched closely in the industry.


Despite the gloomy, elegiac tone of the piece [who says the AP is always neutral about the news?] and its heavy reliance on quotes from readers in their 80s and 90s, the real news is that this newspaper is finding a way to survive by going entirely on-line.

As I have argued before, newspapers are at a crossroads. Part of their legacy from the 19th Century is manufacturing. Almost every newspaper is committed to manufacturing (and distributing!) a product every day. This is a giant anchor they are dragging into the 21st Century.
Newspapers are also, of course, in the information industry. In that field, almost all the work and profits are digital.

Newspapers are like the emblematic case of the folks who used to make buggy-whips for people to use in driving horses for carriages. Those buggy-whip makers never realized that they were in the transportation business. Instead, they thought they were in the horse business, and they went the way of the farrier.

NEW HISTORY

By Chris Daly

The departing managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, Paul Steiger, has written a noteworthy piece about the last few decades in the newspaper business. The piece is written from his perspective as a major executive at an incredibly prosperous, somewhat specialized news operation.
I wish he had paid more attention to the much longer history of news in America (see chapters elsewhere on this page), which would suggest that this current crisis in the business model is not the first.
Still, there are some notable highlights in Steiger's piece. He draws attention to the crucial business changes taking place in the 1960s and 70s (local monopolization, selling stock to the public) that created the conditions for what now appears to have been a brief period of exceptionalism in American journalism.
Plus, he offers some hilarious inside testimony about just how flush those times were. He writes:

Around the time of the 1980 slump, L.A. Times editors were told they needed to impose modest spending restraints. I figured out I could meet my target just by eliminating first-class travel on my group's reporting trips, then allowed on flights of more than three hours or so. I was quite proud of myself until the next day, when the top editor of the entire paper, who only occasionally visited our floor, strode straight to my desk. "I like flying first class," he said with a grin. "You're setting a bad example." I found another way to reach my goal.
In the mid-1980s, when I was a deputy managing editor at the Journal, the Dow Jones CEO almost apologetically imposed limits on our then-ample spending, in the face of cyclical advertising cutbacks by financial firms. As the CEO quipped, referring to then-managing-editor Norman Pearlstine, "We gave Norm an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it."

One remarkable oversight: Steiger makes no mention of one of the biggest holes in the bucket of U.S. newspapers -- Craigslist. I guess the WSJ never derived a whole lot of revenue from readers trying to sell their used boats or extra puppies.

Should news be interesting?

Of course, it should.

Here is a piece in the Atlantic that I find fairly suggestive. Basically, the author, Michael Hirschorn, took a sample of front pages over a period of time from the serious MSM and compared the editors' selections to the people's choices, as indicated by the articles that readers chose to e-mail.

The nut graf:
"What unites the most–e-mailed list (and granted, it’s hard to draw a single thread through stories about parrots, nuns, and Dumpster-diving foodies) is uniqueness. These stories, as they say in marketing, offer a “value add,” something that’s not available on the vaguely Soviet-seeming syndication-fed news pages of AOL, Yahoo, or Google. The real value now lies in non-commodifiable virtues like deep reporting, strong narrative, distinct point of view, and sharp analysis, which even in the blogger era (or especially in the blogger era) is available only piecemeal."

Turns out, editors of serious MSM newspapers are far more likely than their readers to highlight stories that dwell on depressing news, process stories about legislation, and "results" stories whose content reaches those interested constituencies much faster through some other means. And it turns out that the editors of MSM newspapers hide really cool, interesting stories all over the paper.


(I thought the Atlantic article, alas, could have been sharper: it should be tighter; it should state its point sooner and more forcefully; and it is crying out for a graphic presentation of the data.)