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Climate News Reporting Routinely Draws Big, Loud Pushback
John Wihbey, Yale Climate Media Forum
Publish a climate change-related news story, and be ready for pointed attacks, long knives, and brutal dismissals. And expect accusations of political bias and conspiracy.
That’s still the rule for the nation’s veteran environmental and science reporters, despite changing attitudes on climate change from the public at large.
Like many other communicators, reporters often find that when they think they’ve thrown a boulder in to a pond, it generates nary a ripple of response, a near-deafening silence. That isn’t the case, however, when their reporting, even routine straight-news reporting, involves climate change or “global warming.”
Lots of response, lots of ripples.
Take for example an article by Perry Beeman, environmental reporter for The Des Moines Register in Iowa. His recent straight news story on Ames city hall and its attempts to reduce carbon emissions seemed innocuous enough. It didn’t even focus on climate science; it just catalogued a growing trend among municipal officials in Iowa and beyond who are trying to curb their carbon footprints.
The response, at least in his Web comments section, was overwhelming.
(18 December 2008)
On Reading in an Age of Depression
Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch
The Axe, the Book, and the Ad
… [A friend was fired] during what publishing people are calling “Black Wednesday.” On that day, 35 people were axed by publisher Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS), while two key figures at Random House (owned by the German multimedia giant Bertelsmann), who headed two of its largest groups “resigned” as part of a “reorganization” — a vague word that covers a multitude of sins. This will undoubtedly result in further head-rolling in the weeks or months to come.
… Then, of course, there was Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. … [Its owner] made publishing history by instituting a “freeze” on the acquisition of new books. If you’re not in the tiny world of publishing, that may not ring too weirdly, but what is a publishing house except a staff, a backlist (those books already published and still in circulation), a set of books being published (that is, a catalogue), and those signed on for the future? Without future books, there is no publishing.
… A friend (and author) called me recently after visiting a large bookstore in Northern California and, his voice suitably hushed, told me that, on a weekday, he had been the only customer in sight. That’s typical of the nightmarish tales about traffic in bookstores and book sales now ripping through my world as 2008 ends.
So it goes, the late Kurt Vonnegut might have said.
Publishing houses are certainly bleeding and those that haven’t yet started to take staff and books out to the woodshed, axe in hand, are going after end-of-the-year bonuses, raises, and who knows what else, while management girds its loins for “the inevitable.”
… Chemicals, cars, finances, even post-its. That’s major stuff. Books? They’re such modest (and, at best, modestly profitable) objects, even if the book has the remarkable ability to teleport readers into worlds not their own. I mean, if you really want to talk about the destruction of companies in the reading game, then try a business where it’s been hell on Earth for years: newspapers.
Talk about collapsing worlds, newspapers were a disaster area long before the greatest downturn “since the Great Depression” hit.
… In my career as an editor, a mere few decades, I’ve seen publishing transformed from the equivalent of a cottage industry — the term “publishing house,” of course, once implied a freestanding entity — to the subbasement of giant entertainment conglomerates. I’ve watched those conglomerates swallow up houses large and small, creating book companies filled to the rafters with various publishing groups, divisions, imprints, and boutique operations.
All of this happened as bookstores, too, morphed from largely independent cottage operations into giant chains that kept expanding their vast book emporiums into ever newer territory.
… It was well known in the business that, during the Great Depression, books, like movies, had done splendidly. They were an inexpensive bit of entertainment and distraction, consumable at home, at a time when not much else pleasurable was going on in a rugged world. Ergo, books would be no less recession-proof in the next big downturn.
There was no reason to believe otherwise… unless you happened to focus on just how many dazzling entertainment options had, in the interim, entered the American home at prices more than competitive with the book. After all, most Americans can now read endlessly on the Internet, play video games, download music, watch movies, and even write their own novels without stepping outside; and keep in mind that the $27.95 hardcover and the $15.95 paperback on the shelves of that mall store, once you drive there, aren’t exactly the inexpensive objects of yore.
… Small independent publishers, which often have trouble surviving even in good times, are nonetheless more agile, more experimental, and closer to the Internet revolution than the big houses. They are capable of turning on a dime, while the conglomerates — with their long lead times (often 8 months to a year to put a book in the store) — probably can’t turn on anything, which leaves them losers in an Internet world in which yesterday’s news might as well be last year’s.
Think of that old image of shrew-like mammals scooting around among the feet of the soon-to-be-extinct dinosaurs. For instance, Chelsea Green, a small publisher in Vermont [is] having its best year ever…
(17 December 2008)
Besides running TomDispatch, author Tom Engelhardt has “edited and put into circulation several hundred books.”
Is anyone else interested in the fate of books and newspapers? I think they are critical in a time like ours, when we need new ideas to make sense of things. -BA
Writing’s on the Wall for Newspapers
Stephen Foley, Seattle Post Intelligencer
“Will old media survive the ‘perfect storm’?” wondered the Chicago Tribune, the day after its parent company filed for bankruptcy. “Tribune’s collapse rings alarm bells for newspapers,” rang out the headline in London’s Evening Standard. For The Wall Street Journal — which denies it has become more “tabloid-y” under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership — it was a moment to wallow in the “Media industry’s trials and Tribune-ations.”
The headlines were black. These are dark times for newspapers everywhere in the developed world, after all, as the slow ebb of circulation figures has been suddenly and shockingly compounded by a collapse in advertising revenue brought on by the recession. The spectacular bankruptcy of the Tribune group — owner of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, two of the top 10 best-selling papers in the U.S. — and the humbling of Sam Zell, the billionaire property tycoon whose ego is as famously large as he is famously short — provided an irresistible hook for another traipse around these grim subjects.
…Across the U.S., more than 30 papers are up for sale, but there are no buyers.
…”Only newspapers are economically organized to collect massive amounts of information. No one else is organized to do it. There is still a demand for that information. The question is how ‘newspapers’ are going to deliver it. Gradually newspapers will become Web sites,” Morton says. “The worry is that by cutting back on staff, on space and on their services to readers, this is affecting the standing of papers and damaging their brand. They could be eroding the things that must stay strong if they are to succeed in competition with Internet news sources when the effects of the economic tsunami have passed.”
(18 December 2008)
The Death of News?
Benjamin Adair, Weekend America
Newspapers have been under siege for a long time. There were the challenges brought by the pamphlet and broadside industries back in the 1700s. Later there were the telegraph and telephone monopolies. Not to mention radio and TV. Those were really going to be the death of newspapers. And now, 50 years later, the Internet is finally going to do it, right?
“No, that’s not true at all,” says John Morton. Morton analyzes the newspaper industry and helps newspaper publishers figure out how to make money in this new economy. Myth number one about the current state of newspapers is the idea that they don’t make any money.
“For the first nine months of this year,” explains Morton, “the average operating profit margin was 11 percent. There are some industries that can’t ever hope to get that high of a profit margin.”
… Myth number two: The Internet wants newspapers to fail. Does Google want to kill all newspapers?
“No, we don’t,” says Josh Cohen. He’s responsible for news.google.com, and he says that contrary to popular belief, aggregator sites like his depend on daily newspapers and really want them to succeed and be profitable so they can keep covering their local communities. Because, to be honest, if daily newspapers die, Google news will also die.
…Which brings us to myth number three. If newspapers are dying, that means journalism is dying.
“Journalism is very much still still alive,” says Neil Henry. He’s the dean of the journalism school at the University of California Berkeley. Not only is it still very much alive, Henry says it might be “at the dawn of a tremendous rebirth.” Newspaper newsrooms can be very sad and depressing these days, Henry says, but he tells his students that times of great tumult have always meant really good things for journalism.
(13 December 2008)
