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News You Can Lose
James Surowiecki, New Yorker
… There’s no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up. In the third quarter alone, it dropped eighteen per cent, or almost two billion dollars, from last year. For most of the past decade, newspaper companies had profit margins that were the envy of other industries. This year, they have been happy just to stay in the black. Many traditional advertisers, like big department stores, are struggling, and the bursting of the housing bubble has devastated real-estate advertising. Even online ads, which were supposed to rescue the business, have declined lately, and they are, in any case, nowhere near as lucrative as their print counterparts. Papers’ attempts to deal with the new environment by cutting costs haven’t helped: trimming staff and reducing coverage make newspapers less appealing to readers and advertisers. It may be no coincidence that papers that have avoided the steepest cutbacks, like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, have done a better job of holding onto readers.
Newspaper readership has been slowly dropping for decades—as a percentage of the population, newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago—but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout. Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century—a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology.
… And while the flood of online information has made the job of aggregation and filtering tremendously valuable, none of the important aggregation sites, to say nothing of Google News, are run by a paper. Even now, papers often display a “not invented here” mentality, treating their sites as walled gardens, devoid of links to other news outlets. From a print perspective, that’s understandable: why would you advertise good work that’s being done elsewhere? But it’s an approach that makes no sense on the Web.
These mistakes have been undeniably costly, but they’re not the whole story. The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance.
… Does that mean newspapers are doomed? Not necessarily. There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby the deep-pocketed patron.
(22 December 2008 issue)
A media meltdown threatens the Great Lakes
David Poulson, The Great Lakes Town Hall
When a sewer fails, water suffers. Level a forest and the critters flee. A purple loosestrife invasion chokes a wetland in weeks.
But what’s the impact on the Great Lakes environment of a failing system of news and information?
Huge.
Reporters dig out stories about the environment that we may never otherwise consider. I hadn’t thought much about how the tar sands of Alberta threaten the quality of Lake Superior until Dan Egan reported it Dec. 6 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel here:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/35664859.html
Thank heaven Dan is hanging in there.
Not many reporters are. Who knows what else is out there that you and I need to know about the Great Lakes environment – but don’t know enough to know we’re missing it?
Of course it’s not just our region that suffers when newspaper watchdogs lose teeth. Would anyone have calculated the air quality around the nation’s schools if USAToday hadn’t done it here: …
David Poulson is the associate director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. He teaches environmental, investigative and computer-assisted reporting to graduate and undergraduate students.
(15 December 2008)
More by David Poulson:
Environmental news as community organizer
State will lose if news ‘infrastructure’ crumbles
Energy Bulletin: Journalism is dead, long live the new journalism!
Bart Anderson, Energy Bulletin
An environmental journalist once suggested disguising stories as a business stories. This (realistic) advice sounded to me like journalists behind the Iron Curtain talking about how to get around the censors.
It sums up why I have trouble seeing the mainstream media as fair, objective or complete. Down deep, journalists know which viewpoints are permissible, what stories will be supported. Environmental stories (especially ones that DARE to show some commitment) are low on the list.
The downsizing of the corporate media is a tragedy for employees and communities. On the other hand, I look forward to a more diverse range of voices from the emerging media.
As a commenter “tidal” said at Gristmill
**Where is America’s Monbiot?**
Anyway, it has become a rare thing to see a deeply knowledgeable journalist really pushing a public figure. Where is America’s Monbiot?
Andy Revkin has all the knowledge and credibility and profile to play this role, but opts not to. Studiously takes a more “balanced” approach. He makes an enormously valuable contribution as it is, but it could be so much, much more. Sad.
The comment is in response to hard-hitting coverage of the IEA’s report on energy supplies (http://energybulletin.net/node/47471) . The report has been covered by the UK Guardian, but is largely ignored by the American media (LAT, NYT, WaPo).
(17 December 2008)
Citizen journalism will shape the new face of the Oakland Press
Glenn Gilbert, Oakland Press
… What is citizen journalism?
New York University Journalism Prof. Jay Rosen has probably come up with the best definition.
“When the people, formerly known as the audience, employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism,” Rosen says on his Web site, Pressthink (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/press think).
… Citizen journalism, also known as “participatory journalism,” or “people journalism,” is the act of citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information,” according to the seminal report “We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information,” by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. They say, “The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.
Some have called it networked journalism, open source journalism and citizen media. Communication has changed greatly with the advent of the Internet. The Internet has enabled citizens to contribute to journalism without professional training, according to NationMaster.com.
(14 December 2008)
How long can newspapers keep delivering the news?
James Rainey, Los Angeles Times
This might go down as the week that they took paper out of the newspaper business.
Detroit’s two daily newspapers announced Tuesday that they plan to reduce home delivery to just three days a week. And the trade organization for newspaper editors scheduled an April vote on whether to drop “paper” from its name.
The idea in both cases is to fully embrace the shift of many readers and advertisers to the Internet, where many news executives believe the business must stake its future, and to finally begin to break away from a 400-year-old delivery system.
(17 December 2008)
Related: Newspaper Deadpool.
