If You Love Your Country, Pay For Content

As newspapers struggle to find a financial model to replace display and classified ads, they've had to cut editorial staffs to the bone. Some stories aren't getting covered as well as before or covered at all. Believing the prevailing digital ethos, readers think they're entitled to get the news for free, as though good reporting sprang immaculately from Google's servers or gifted journalists would get themselves trained and then risk their lives in Kabul strictly as volunteers. It's also the fault of publishers failing to anticipate the change and of the old model itself, where revenue from department store ads was used to underwrite coverage of city hall, the Supreme Court, and power shifts in Beijing.

Someday internet advertising may generate the same revenue that print did. Until then, the responsible reading citizen must learn to pay for the production of professional editorial content the same way she pays for dry cleaning, groceries, and legal advice. Without trained reporters and editors, we're guaranteed to suffer more abuses of power. Cable TV zealots and the Starbucks-based hackosphere will fill the vacuum left by facts with twice their weight in opinions. Our media will be deaf, blind, and insufferably loud.

One recent example of the indispensability of old-fashioned journalism. At 9 a.m. this morning in New York City, someone opened fire. I heard about it on the radio and checked Huffington Post, but there were few details. So I went to the New York Times on my iPhone (for which I gladly pay a monthly fee) and found this article, posted within four hours of the event. Written with precision and terse eloquence, it's a masterpiece of team reporting, an everyday example of the fine but dying art of good newspapering, painstaking and often dangerous work that no one will or should have to do for free:

[The suspect] lived on the third floor of a six-story walk-up on East 82nd Street for about 18 months, said Guillermo Suarez, 72, the super of the building.

Every morning he had the same routine. He would leave the apartment between 7:30 and 8 a.m., say good morning and head to the McDonald’s on Third Avenue and 84th Street.

After about 20 minutes, he would come back carrying a McDonald’s bag. He would nearly always wear the same thing — a tannish brown suit, sometimes with a tie. Then he would generally stay in the apartment the rest of the day.

He did the same thing on Friday morning, but this time he did not come back.

If you love your country, and if you really want to know what's going on in the world, pay for content.

Higher Powers, In And Out Of The Newsroom

David Carr is media columnist for the New York Times and author of a harrowing drug addiction memoir, Night Of The Gun. On Dec. 28 NPR rebroadcast an October Carr interview by "Fresh Air"'s Terry Gross. Re-listening to a Carr interview is almost as good as a repeat of "Dexter." While his voice, injured by smoking, radiation treatments, and possibly exposure to toxins while he covered the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a little rough, he speaks about my parents' beloved business in smooth, graceful cadences. Transcript here, podcast here.

Excerpt one, on the omniscient and indispensable elite editorial intelligence behind daily newspapers:

When I wake up in the morning and the gun goes off, I'm checking Twitter. I'm checking RSS feeds, and I get four newspapers at my house every day. I get the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Star Ledger - because I live in New Jersey - and, of course, the New York Times.

And the reason I do is because the day before this, all this stuff has gone whizzing past me, and I seem to know a lot. But I don't really know what part of it is important. And I used to think it was so silly that newspapers would - like, I'd go to our page one meeting, and they'd be organizing the hierarchy of the six or seven most important stories in Western civilization. Meanwhile, the Web is above them, pivoting and eliding, and all these stories are morphing and changing. And I thought: Well, how silly is this?

But you know what? I came to want that resting place, where someone yelled "stop" and decided, "Look, this is stuff you need to know about going forward." Newspapers have become a kind of magazine experience for me, where they're - where it's a way to look back at what has happened.

And on his faith life and the great mystery of altruism:

I am a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of - it's good to stand with my family. It's good that I didn't have to come up with my own creation myth for my children.

It's a wonderful group of people that I go to church with, and it's community. It's not really where I find God. And sort of what the accommodation I've reached is a very jerry-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in recovery, I've been helped - without getting into the names of specific groups - by all of these strangers, you know, who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life.

And one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. And not only is that not a general human impulse, but it's not an impulse of mine. And yet I found myself doing that over and over again.

So, am I underneath all things, just a really wonderful, giving person? Or is there a force greater than myself that is leading me to act in ways that are altruistic and not self-interested and lead to the greater good?

And so that's - that's sort of as far as I've gotten with a higher power thing, is I'm - you know, I'm kind of a pirate, kind of a thug. I mean, I've done a bunch of terrible things, and yet I'm able to, for the most part, be a decent person. How is that? Do I have some inner strength of character? I think not. I think something else is working on me.

You know, I think it's okay to sort of like have a superstitious belief in God and not really have thought it through. I think it's okay to just - I think there's freedom in allowing for the possibility of it. Like, I don't have a presence. I don't have some idea in my mind of a woman or a man figure or anything like that.

But I find the spaces between people, whether I'm making a newspaper with them or in recovery or living with them as family or friends or - I find something really godly in that. I don't have trouble acknowledging that.

God Said, "I Sent You A Kindle, Nook, and iPad"

E-readers such as the Kindle are making reading books more fashionable with children. Too bad newspapers never figured out how to get on board.

"It's A Mess/Meets The Test"

Thanks to the good people at "Paste," whose print edition is struggling along with almost everyone else's, ten songs about print journalism, including a snippet of "The Newspaperman" as performed by Pete Seeger.

While he's at it, playlist compiler and journalist Mark Kemp sings this discouraging tune:

Today, journalism is a skeleton of its once-authoritative self. Newspapers have laid off all but a few copy-pushers and overworked editors who want complex information reduced to concise (and don’t forget, entertaining!) capsules. And the “reading” public doesn’t ask for more than that. Americans seem blissfully content getting their information from the pundits—those TV talking heads who shout angry diatribes and smirk out witty one-liners in lieu of facts—or from Internet pseudo-journalists who offer up wild conspiracy fantasies on websites run by potential Unibombers.

Cable News. Not.

Hat tip to my Facebook buddy David Schwartz for this Washington Post op-ed by Ted Koppel, who bemoans the rise of TV niche journalism (much of which, isn't). David learned about it from our fellow former Andover journalist Gary Lee. Two excerpts:

Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

And:

The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. Legions of new media present a vista of unrelenting competition. Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from abroad. This is felicitous, since covering overseas news is very expensive. On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they say, is cheap.

As Koppel makes clear, because they make relatively little (if any) money, news divisions have always had a tenuous hold on the loyalty of network executives. So it probably should've been predictable that network news would be further eroded when someone figured out how to make money offering news (or "news") on cable.

There's an imperfect analogy with our dying newspapers, whose display and classified ad revenues have been sapped by the Internet, which in turn still offers most newspapers' hard-won and well-reported content for free. That can't be sustained much longer. How much does it cost the New York Times to keep a bureau in Beijing? A million dollars a year? More? And they'll pay for that with my free page views of the coverage? Not for long. After that, for fact-based insights about what the word's newest superpower is up to, we'll be relying on the Hackosphere, whose own overhead has been dramatically reduced thanks to free wireless at Starbucks.

Koppel argues that the market is now in control of the news business. If that's the case, I'd bet that three-quarters of the American people still want, and may even be willing to pay for, solid, unbiased, well-reported journalism. So there's some hope. On the other hand, we also want pragmatic politicians.

Grey Lady's Deathbed

The New York Times is slashing newsroom jobs again -- 8% this time.

Newspaperpeople's Inky Hearts Beat Faster...

...as the Washington Post's print edition's redesign goes retro.

Barely Registering

Freedom Communications and the Orange County Register are reportedly about to file for bankruptcy.

Propheteer

Tycoon and publisher Rupert Murdoch was once among the most despised men in journalism. Now his company bids to lead his whole industry back from the brink of financial disaster by helping publishers and editors understand that that they can only survive by charging for editorial content:

As newspapers across the country struggle with declining readership and advertising revenue, News Corp. executives have been meeting in recent weeks with publishers about forming a consortium that would charge for news distributed online and on portable devices -- and potentially stem the rising tide of red ink.

Newspaper Future

The Kindle DX

Daily Travails

Layoffs underway at the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Amazon's Newspaper Industry Recycler

Newspapers will sell you the new, bigger Kindle at a discounted price if you buy a long-term subscription. Bingo!

White House To Newspapers: Drop Dead

No bailout for print.

Miniaturization Has Met Its Match

Amazon and other companies are racing to come out with a super-Kindle that really could save newspapers. The New York Times:

Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

There Are No Bloggers Available To Help Cover The Swine Flu Story, Since The Vice President Said To Stay Away From Crowded Places Like Starbucks

What if they gave an epidemic and no one covered it?

Hat tip to Tracy Wood

Kindling

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has figured out how to save journalism -- only one of 26 papers in the country so far. Kindle on!

Monopoly On Reporting

Bill O'Reilly says the New York Times is failing financially because it's left wing. If so, you'd think it would've happened 40 years ago. Since there are scores of papers doing as bad or worse, radically changing media markets and not ideology are obviously 90% of the problem.

In his column, O'Reilly does acknowledge that the Times has journalistic talent. I'd go him one better. It and our best papers, their political leanings aside, have a journalistic monopoly. If they go, and no other media step in to do quality reporting, then Bill O'Reilly, Katie Couric, and all the bloggers sitting in Starbucks and living rooms spewing their opinions will be as blind as bats.

Ink-Stained Saviors

I can't write about "State of Play," the last of the great newspapers movies, without giving away the last scene: Reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) and blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) striding together through the darkened (hadn't they paid the light bill?) newsroom of the Washington Globe after filing their big story. From behind, they might as well be Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in "His Girl Friday." The image evokes the hope that solid reporting will persist even though printed newspapers are dematerializing. Fat chance.

When we first meet Cal and Della, he's eating Cheetos and working on a 16-year-old computer in a cubicle piled high with junk, while she's sipping Perrier and perching delicately in front of her flat-screen monitor -- although failing, along with her colleagues on the "on-line side" of the operation, to repay the Globe's investment in their superior equipment by providing sufficient financial energy to save the dying newspaper from being sold to "Mediacorp." Their hard-nosed editor, played by Helen Mirren, ink still pumping in her veins although somewhat anemically, lets them collaborate on a story about a greedy, menacing company called "Pointcorp," aka Blackwater. Cal teaches Della how to pound the pavement, break the law in pursuit of the truth, and drink Jack Daniels, while she...Actually, she doesn't teach him anything. In this movie, if nowhere else, print trumps pixels. "This is such a big story," she says to him with a smile, explaining why she won't be blogging about it, "that people probably need to get ink on their hands when they read it." It's like when Christina Applegate hands the microphone back to Will Farrell at the end of "Anchorman," except it's serious.

Based on a BBC miniseries, "State of Play" is seriously in love with the newspaper business. It brims with quotations from "All the President's Men" -- a suspenseful scene in a parking garage, three (count 'em) references to the Watergate office building and even a visit to one of its suites, and the Globe newsroom itself, though it's drab and dark compared to Alan J. Pakula's recreation of the 1972-era Post. The end credits roll over images of the Globe's rolling presses as we listen to Creedence's "Long As I Can See The Light." The idea is that we'll be lost in the dark without old-school reporters like Cal who have the training and tenacity to follow stories about corporate and congressional crooks and their $50 billion private armies.

Throughout the movie, we see black helicopters crisscrossing the Washington sky. None of them lands or plays any other role in the story. You just assume it's Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld flying around, destroying democracy. The anti-Bush resonances end up being of secondary importance. In another movie making the same good points about the indispensability of well-reported journalism and the threat posed to it by radically changing media markets, the dangerous chopper passengers could just as well be a big-spending President and Speaker of the House -- not that anyone in Hollywood would probably want to make it.

Burying The Lead On The Kindle's Value

At the end of a long reflection on how the Kindle may change the way we buy books, read, write, think, grow vegetables, and say the mass (I can sympathize: He's still in the throes of his Kindle krush), Steven Johnson gets to the all-important save-journalism part at the very end of his Wall Street Journal article:

If the Kindle payment architecture takes off, it may ultimately lead the way toward the standardized micropayment system whose nonexistence has caused so much turmoil in the news business -- a system many people wish had been built into the Web's original architecture, along with those standardized page locations.

We all know the story of how the information-wants-to-be-free ethos of the Web threatened the newspapers with extinction. Wouldn't it be ironic if books turned out to be their savior?

China Circulation Rising

In the U.S., newspapers are folding, whereas China just started one.