First Draft

Nobody Ever Wants Less

Scout sends this over:

In London, the Saturday editions plop on your porch with the weight of a white paper on Afghanistan, except that they're full of color magazines and free offers.  You think: Did I drink too much Friday night and sleep all through Saturday?  They look like American Sunday papers, fat and overstuffed, even with news.  Then Sunday comes around, and it all happens again, more heft, more color magazines, more scary stories saved up for brunchtime.

The UK newspapers have maintained a quaint tradition of competition between the daily and Sunday editions of the same nameplates, under the same owners. 

Shearer goes on to say there's no UK version of HuffPo, but ... again, I don't think that's why people still read. I think people still read because newspapers provide information they want. I don't think it's harder than that. People will go anywhere and do anything for something they want. People didn't start looking for news on the Internet because it was free or even cheaper (erm, TV, radio, etc), they started looking for news on the Internet because there was news on the Internet they wanted.

You don't win more by doing less, giving less, and doing it publicly, bitching about how you used to be this colossus but because of your sucky readership not readin' no more you can't give them anything to read (oh, and your profit margin's better than WAL-MART, which you also tell everybody, because you lost the ability to listen to yourself years ago).

A.

Can I Get a HELL YEAH?

This is one of the best, most sensible things I've read about the newspaper "crisis" in months. Way to be, Post-Tribune. Fight for what's yours.

In Gary, it's inspirational. "Can a newspaper work as an ESOP?" asks a FAQ on the new Web site buytheposttribune.com, then answers, "Yes it can," and points to the Blethen ESOP as evidence.

To get Post-Tribune employees behind an ESOP bid, the guild reminds them they have nothing to lose. "How much worse can it get?" Grimm asks. He tells me the working assumption is that sometime this fall "we'll have a new owner and the company [the Sun-Times Media Group] will cease to exist—that's what we're told. And that new owner will come in and things will change around here. Whatever we can do to have a say in who that owner is, or to have that owner be us, we're going to do it."

A.

Monetizing News

If only newspapers still made money. If only there was a business model that would work. Like printing the news on paper and bringing it to people's homes via some kind of delivery system.

Good thing they laid all those people off.

A.

Happy Kerry Photo: Deserved Payback Edition

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

This was the story, way back before there was dirt, that convinced me that blogging could be completely AWESOME. Bankruptcy couldn't be happening to a nicer bunch of folks. Suck on karma's 14-inch strap-on, boys.

A.

Again? This Stupid Country.

Sometimes, you just want to choke the assholes in the media who get the vapors whenever people use unauthorized language.  You know, the same dipshits who read the Starr Report and salivated over every salacious detail, but who think that it's The End Of Western Civilization if you use the word "blowjob" instead of "oral encounter."  Behold:

Oh, dear me.  Look, I can see the Huns approaching!

Bonus points for whoever gets the title reference.

UPDATE:  At the end of the video, Shuster apologizes, and refers to the broadcast as a "daytime, family-oriented" program.  Right.  'Cause you just know all the kids who are out of school for the summer are sitting indoors, watching cable news.  This is just like that time Mr. Rogers had that unfortunate attack of Tourette's.

Pageview Bonuses

So what, seriously?

Paying for pageviews adds on obvious, if controversial, incentive for writers to create popular content, but in our IM conversation, Denton described the move as “a way to reward young and highly productive writers who might have come in at a low rate that doesn’t reflect their real value.” He said that even without paying bonuses, his bloggers have felt an incentive to perform because Gawker Media displays pageview statistics alongside every post and on a page that breaks down the stats by writer.

This is yet another case of print pretending it's pure and that the Internet is filthy. Newspapers adjust their coverage all the time based on where their readers are and how many readers there are. A frequent refrain at my last paper was "We don't have any readers there!" whenever somebody wanted to spend time covering a big story in a small town which was, more often than not, very poor. "Go out and get some readers there," was apparently not the response they were looking for, but really. These kinds of economic decisions get made all the time. All the Internet has done is made it a little more obvious.

A.

Could You Run a Newspaper on $237 Million?

I'm pretty sure you could. Hell, I'm pretty sure Puck and Riot could. If they had thumbs.

Instead of being happy with their $237 million, which may or may not be the total across multiple newspapers but STILL, the Times wants to alienate its online readership with a stupid, counterproductive $5-per-month online subscription charge that is so small as to convey to those who pay it that said content is only worth $5 per month so why bother.

Which move would likely drive current page counts down through the basement all the way to at least the second circle of Hell, and as a consequence alienate the very online advertisers presently providing that $237 million in an effort to reach the Times' readership.

I used to think the problem with our current newspaper conversation was that the people talking had no idea how the Internet worked. In the past six months I've come to understand that they don't know how newspapers work. You use the size of your audience to sell people on reaching that audience. The bigger your audience, the more you can charge people for access to it. Publishers are pimps, that's all. All the changes in technical whatsits have not altered this formula one bit.

In conclusion this is total DUMBASSERY:

New York Times Co. spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed in a telephone interview that the Times had sent the survey, but said no timetable has been set for a decision and no decisions have been made about online pricing. 

The survey reads: "The New York Times website, nytimes.com, is considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia. All of this content is currently available for free.

"When answering the following questions, please think about whether you would be willing to pay for continued unlimited access to nytimes.com.

"How likely would you be to pay a $2.50 monthly fee -- which would be a 50% discount for home delivery subscribers -- for continued, unlimited access to nytimes.com?"

"The one thing I advise people on this is that we've got a very large [online] revenue stream," Mathis said. "We looked at 30 different companies -- Weight Watchers, ESPN, Consumer Reports -- to see how much money is being generated from Web sites. What we saw is that we're doing a pretty good job monetizing content with advertising."

Of $352 million in digital revenue reported by the Times Co. in 2008, about $237 million was generated by its newspaper sites.

So WHAT'S THE FUCKING PROBLEM you have to charge to SOLVE? I'm sorry to shout, but honest to God, if First Draft had $237 million per year we would have bureaus in every country that you could legally buy alcohol in and some where you couldn't and we'd pay to smuggle in cases of Stoli. We'd be reporting from the top of Mount Everest and the International Space Station for no other reason than that we fucking COULD. Not only would we buy that blogger compound in New Orleans that Scout and I keep talking about setting up and run nine separate news sites out of there, we'd buy the Great Orange Satan and pay interns in solid gold ducats to throw virtual spitballs at people who wank about their user IDs. And these people have the nerve to BITCH.

(And yes, I know the answer to this question is that $237 million may pay for a lot of reporters and journalism and presses and shit but it can't pay for the Sulzbergers' dinner drinks, but I want for once in this miserable life to hear somebody in one of these stories just come right out and SAY IT so we can have a conversation about real stuff instead of tying our shoelaces together, falling down, and proclaiming walking an impossibility.)

She noted that the Times previously generated $10 million in annual revenues for Times Select. 

And THAT was deemed such a miserable failure that it had to be discontinued and people had to moan in public about how nobody appreciates the genius that is David Brooks and whatever.

A.

Shutdown Bonuses

Killing journalism: It pays, apparently!

In issuing his ruling Tuesday afternoon, Judge Allan L. Gropper (pictured coming out of the courthouse late last month) overruled objections to a plan to pay about $1.3 million to managers in exchange for duties including firing scores of employees, closing newspapers (referred to as “shutdown bonuses”) and remaining with the company.

Anybody want to give me a million-dollar bonus for closing the blog down?

Via Romenesko.

A.

FroomkinWatch

Apparently Arianna Huffington is no dummy.  Either that, or she read my post from last week on the former WaPo journalist whose name is oh, so fun to say.  (If so, Hi, Arianna!  You should hire Mr. BuggyQ next.  If Froomkin's going to be exposing all those naked emperors I talked about, you'll want pictures, and Mr. BuggyQ does fantastic fine art nude photos. Srsly.)

To all you who were tempted to take me up on my bet as to whether Froomkin would end up at a new media outpost, your mamas didn't raise no stupid children.

Let's hope this frees up Froomkin to tell us how he REALLY feels about the Washington cocktail weenie circuit.

It's So Rude to Care

NPR:

Amazingly, a caller asked Shepard about the advent of blogs and how it has diversified commentary, and in replying, Shepard put on her most condescending and self-glorifying voice to say this:

I think, um, we're now at a stage where the debate is between dialogue and diatribe, and I wish there was more dialogue.  I think there's more diatribe.

That's from the same person who refuses to "dialogue" about her views outside of NPR-affiliated confines.

Well, and also, wouldn't it all be better if we just didn't raise our voices so much? I agree that what you call a thing matters, I just don't believe for a minute that torture isn't torture if you lower your voice. I'm sorry it upsets some people that here on the Internets we say fuck, and treason, and talk about the most apt karmic bitchslap for those who ran this country for the past eight years. But I'm also sorry about ALL THE DEAD PEOPLE, and somehow that never spurs a discussion about how uncouth it is to fuck up two wars and let a city drown and turn America into an international punchline.

A.

'Pimp On, Madam'

Katharine Weymouth apologizes for making the price tag so big and shiny:

We have canceled the planned dinner. While I do believe there is a legitimate way to hold such events, to the extent that we hold events in the future, large or small, we will review the guidelines for them with The Post's top editors and make sure those guidelines are strictly followed. Further, any conferences or similar events The Post sponsors will be on the record.

The commenters aren't buying it:

Trust is not at all like baseball; You only get one strike.

---

Your ombudsman referred to this incident a "PR disaster". I wonder what he would consider a real disaster.

---

Promote Dan Froomkin to Editor-in-Chief and maybe I'll re-subscribe some day.

A.

Even Bankrupt Newspapers: Still Profitable

Despite my best efforts:

Tribune doesn’t report profit, but a Crain’s analysis of cash flow shows the company had an 8% profit margin for the first few months of the year, which is less than half the 19% margin it boasted in the first half of 2008.

Tribune is “still profitable, but significantly less so than last year,” Mr. Corbett said.

[snip]

Instead of revenue, the company reports operating receipts, which were down 14% from the beginning of the year to $1.36 billion as of May 31. Despite the drop in operating receipts, the company took in $112 million more in cash than it spent between January and the end of May, bankruptcy filings show.

Okay, I know in Wall Street World this is an epic disaster, but in my world you don't get sympathy when you make $112 million more than you had to spend, in the shittiest economy in 30 years.

If only we could come up with a way to monetize content! If only people would pay for the news!

A.

Up the Post

Having actually looked at the flier, oy. To hear the Post describe it, this was a thing the third intern from the back made up in MS Paint and posted in the local Starbucks, and the problem was that he used Comic Sans instead of Rage Italic and that was what all the fuss was about. Like they were doing a piece on kittens and ran a photo of puppies instead. Like this was a packaging issue. As you can see, this clearly wasn't made in an hour and not by an intern, either. Multiple people saw this and nobody said, "Um, hell to the no?" How hard is this shit?

(Confession: I would have posted this earlier but I'm kind of fuzzy around the edges from a migraine. Because I have ethics and standards and shit, I'm disclosing that to you. Mostly in hopes of staving off the many e-mails about my typos.)

The problem: The Post often decries those who charge for access to public officials. This raised the specter of a money-losing newspaper doing the same thing -- and charging for access to its own reporters and editors as well.

No, kitten, it raised the actuality of you hosting something you un-ironically named a "salon" and were telling people was an off-the-record chance to snuggle with the powerful once they'd put some dough in the kitty. I'm not naive, really. I understand the desire for the head of a newspaper to be not only a person doing a job in the newsroom but also a figurehead to represent the paper publicly in important discussions about the issues of the day. I just don't think hosting "salons" is what that job ought to be.

For example, if I might offer an alternative, there are about a gazillion opportunities every single day to call out some conservative dickhead autowittering on about how the Post sucks and newspapers suck and reporters suck and your mom sucks, such that a person could keep very busy defending journalists and journalism and get nice and famous that way. I hear these dudes keep a running list of scary journalistic shit in which you could get involved, if you feel the need to talk to senators and policymakers to feel important.

See, the emphasis on a fancy pay-for-play party to talk about how fucked poor people are offends me more than the money itself. Mostly because the pay-for-play in this case is just a little more blatant than it is usually. Do you think I could walk into the office of Katharine Weymouth in my Salvation Army dress and Target shoes and get a moment to talk about health care or the rule of law or how John Kerry should have been president? Fuck no. But if I had some numerals after my name and a huge checkbook and carried a Kate Spade bag, that would be different, and it's the way it was before Politico worked up a head of steam about the actual price tag being out there for us to read.

Granted, I thought it would be a higher price than $25,000, to get in a room with Katie, but the fact is that there was a price tag on access to the elite of our punditry yesterday, and there will be one tomorrow, even if there's no flier out there with the number on it for all to see.

A.

Broder

Makes me want to just lie down on the floor next to Puck and take a nap:

In the voting rights case decided on June 22, Chief Justice John Roberts signaled that he thinks time has run out on the remedy that Congress concocted in 1965 to overcome the historical pattern of denying blacks access to the ballot box in much of the South. A central provision of the Voting Rights Act, passed originally for five years and repeatedly extended, requires covered jurisdictions to get approval from Washington for any change, no matter how trivial, to its voting procedures.

As Roberts wrote in his opinion, "the historic accomplishments of the Voting Rights Act are undeniable. [But] things have changed in the South. Voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels."

Right! Everything's fine now! A hyper-conservative justice says it's all right, so no more thought is required!

And let's talk about Roberts' point in itself: Once discrimination isn't blatant, it's okay. Once X number of minorities are elected to X number of offices, the problem goes away. Could this be more of a textbook conservative point? "I didn't say the N-word, so what's the problem with some watermelon jokes?" Jesus.

A.

Today on Athenae's Obsession with the Wonkette Comments: Journalism

It's a shame the Internet keeps killing it:

it is unfortunate that rowdy man interrupted such an important news story.

A.

'May Have Discovered a Business Strategy'

The world began when I opened my eyes this morning:

SAN JUAN -- At news conferences, Puerto Rico Daily Sun news photographer Miguel ''Micky'' Ríos is a 60-year-old veteran shooter with the skimpiest gear.

''I have just a camera, two lenses and one flash,'' Ríos said. ``But I'm an owner, and that's OK.''

Ríos was laid off last year from the San Juan Daily Star, a Pulitzer Prize-winning paper that closed last summer after 40 years. Afterward, its reporters, editors and other union members launched The Daily Sun, a cooperative newspaper project that became the island's only English-language daily.

With its break-even economic model and a mission no greater than to employ people, its managers say Puerto Rico's newest media venture may have discovered a business strategy to keep newspaper journalism alive: no profits.

Sigh. I guess the newspaper where I learned what a lede was and how to do paste-up 15 years ago was imaginary, since nonprofit newspapers were invented in San Juan the other day.

That being said, this is exceedingly cool:

As newspapers across America shut down, cut back and lay off employees, The Daily Sun has taken a gamble. With each of its 85 employees making an $800 investment, employee-owners bought computers, rented space and began publishing a print-only newspaper with no website and few ads.

[snip]

''It's the cheapest way to set up a media enterprise. I know in the U.S. it sounds like socialism, but in this part of the Caribbean, cooperatives are a lifesaver,'' Rafael Matos said. ``If we can keep this paper alive, we are a success.

``All we need is to break even.''

Damn right. Too much of the OMG NEWSPAPERS ARE DOOMED conversation is about how wild profitability is doomed. If the goal was to keep the newspaper alive, even if the goal was for the newspaper to make money, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all.

More, please.

via Romenesko.

A.

On The End of the Froomkin Era at WaPo

(Apologies to the divine Ms. A for tromping on her turf)

I'm not sure how many times I can say this, but...

Dear Fred Hiatt:  You blew it.  Again.  I had hoped that maybe given the outrage over the announcement that you were dropping Dan Froomkin's White House Watch blog from the Washington Post.com editorial pages, you might change your mind.  (I know, I know, fool me once...etc.)  But no, Froomkin's officially gone from the WaPo as of last Friday, and you have managed to retain your title as the dumbest editorial page editor in the history of journalism (narrowly edging out the NY Times--Ross Douthat?  Really?--and my local paper, which for years published letters to the editor on a weekly basis from a woman named Lillian whose letters were a series of incoherent riffs on "Get off my lawn!")  Congratulations.  You just took one more step towards making what used to be a great newspaper into something I wouldn't use to line my birdcage (yes, I know, it was the online WaPo.  Call it my virtual birdie.)

In reading Athenae's many righteous rants on journalism in the last several years, there's one theme that keeps sticking in my mind about journalism, and I do include editorials in that category (and Froomkin especially, since his was a cross between editorial and investigative journalism).  In my opinion, good journalism makes the reader--and often the subject--uncomfortable.  A good journalist will ask the questions that people aren't willing to ask for themselves, or might never have the opportunity to ask (I'm looking at you, Dana Millbank, you dick).  A good journalist doesn't just let the politicians spout their talking points or hand out a press release for transcription.  A good journalist finds the stuff the politician or the businessman doesn't want people to know.

Froomkin did all that for the WaPo, particularly with regard to the Bush administration, which I'm sure made many people uncomfortable.  But here's the thing--he was still doing it over the last five months with the Obama administration, too.  And that's the thing that infuriates me most about Hiatt.  All the anticipation of blogger fury over this seemed to focus on the idea that we'd be pissed because Froomkin had been so good at exposing the Bush era lunacies.  But I'm pissed because I don't think any president deserves a free pass from the press, and Froomkin still seemed to be one of the better voices in the MSM in pointing out where Obama wasn't all that and a bag of chips.

Fred, honey, lambchop, love crumpet, I don't care if the Washington Post is right, center, left, up, down, strange or charmed.  I want you to do your frakking job.  And when it comes to the editorial pages, online or off, that means publishing the people who keep the folks in charge honest by calling them on their bullshit honestly.  It does nobody any good at all to have people like Krauthammer and Will saying Obama sucks, because we know that's like Neil deGrasse Tyson saying space is cool, just as it didn't really do us that much good to have Huffington or Schultz saying Bush sucked.  What does do us good is when people like Krugman or Waas or Hersh or Marshall and Co. or Wheeler or, yes, Froomkin, say Bush or Obama suck.  Why?  Because they have the goods to back it up.

There's a certain level of cognitive dissonance in the right.  On the one hand, they believe in small government, that government is dangerous and we should always remain vigilant to keep it from sucking out our babies' brains with a straw.  But the right also seems obsessed with shutting down people like Froomkin.  If you believe premise A, why wouldn't you want Froomkin saying, "Hey, that guy's going to suck out your baby's braaaaaiiiiinnnnn!!!!"

Seriously, Fred.  It doesn't matter if the emperor is liberal or conservative if he's naked.  And as long as you keep saying the emperor's a latte-drinking liberal because he's wearing Armani, I'm going to keep calling you frakking stupid.

Meanwhile, I'm keeping my eye on Dan Froomkin.  I'm sure somebody's going to end up hiring him to keep doing White House Watch.  Who wants to take bets on whether it'll be old media or new media?

Make It Stop

The willful denial of reality burns us, precious:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

The Romenesko commenters have at him:

And one way to reduce CO2 emissions...
Posted by Thomas Lilleston 6/29/2009 12:17:14 PM

...is to stop breathing, and that'll probably work about as well as the No-Link Theory.

...is to stop breathing, and that'll probably work about as well as the No-Link TheoryHowever, the dumbest part of the piece isn't actually the one about which most people are doing the bitching:

Newspaper ad revenues fell by almost 8 percent in 2007, a surprising drop in a non-recession year (the current economic downturn began in the late fall of that year), and by almost 23 percent the following year, and accelerated this year. In the first quarter of 2009 newspaper ad revenues fell 30 percent from their level in the first quarter of 2008. This fall in revenue, amplified by drops in print circulation (about 5 percent last year, and running at 7 percent this year--and readership is declining in all age groups, not just the young), have precipitated bankruptcies of major newspaper companies and, more important, the disappearance of a number of newspapers, including major ones, such as the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Falling revenues have led to layoffs of some 20,000 employees of the remaining newspapers. Print journalism has come to be regarded as a dying profession. Online viewership and revenues have grown but not nearly enough to offset the decline in ad revenues. Even the most prestigious newspapers, such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and USA Today, have experienced staggering losses.

You know what someone writing one of these interminable oh God oh God we're all gonna die pieces has yet to tell me? If "less money than we had before" and "not enough money to live on" are the same damn thing. Every time I ask this question I get people telling me I'm oversimplifying the situation and that's exactly my point. I am oversimplifying the situation. I'm doing it on purpose. Is there enough money in any given big-city newspaper today to fund the newsgathering operations we are told are so critical to the survival of life as we know it?

My educated guess based on reading I kid you not everything on the planet about this for the past five years is hell yeah, and there'd be plenty left over, too. And if that's the case, then this is no longer an advertising crisis or a free vs. paid content crisis or a you kids suck crisis. Then this is a WHERE THE HELL IS ALL THE MONEY crisis, and I think we might need to hold another congressional hearing and instead of letting David Simon bitch about HuffPo, we could subpoena Dennis FitzSimons.

News, as well the other information found in newspapers, is available online for nothing, including at the websites of the newspapers themselves, who thus are giving away content. The fact that online viewing is rising as print circulation is falling indicates a shift of consumers from the paid to the free medium.

Not necessarily. It could also be that through nefarious means, like LINKS, people are finding your content and thus your numbers are increasing.

A.

Remember the New Serious Journalism? `

In which we weren't going to be captivated by triviality and celebrity nonsense and poring over every detail of some scandal that had nothing to do with the lives of ordinary Americans?

A.

Another First Draft Reader-Supported Project Gets Off the Ground

Our resident Freepaholic, Tommy, asked you some time back to join in supporting a journalism project to help make tomorrow's media. In just a day you had that one handled the way you'd handled the two I asked about the week prior, and here are the results:

The teacher involved writes:

Dear Tommy,

Once again, I would like to thank you all very much for supporting both my Journalism and my Grammar&Composition classes!

I had originally anticipated that the LCD projector would be most beneficial to my senior Journalism students because we do a lot of PowerPoint lessons, surfing the net, and blogging as part of the class; however, I discovered that my freshmen Grammar & Composition classes also excelled in phrases, clauses, and sentence types with the use of projected and interactive lessons. In fact, the freshmen were disappointed that I didn't think of them when I wrote the proposal. They were pleased to reap the rewards of having it in the classroom though!

I cannot begin to explain what a boon the LCD projector has been to all of my students. It has allowed my Journalism students to critique layouts of both professional and student newspapers as a large group. It has helped me show my students how to avoid plagiarism by navigating websites that show proper citation and sticky situations to avoid. It has reminded my students that there are people, unrelated to education in a direct way, that want them to succeed and are willing to facilitate that success.

Thank you so much for your generous donations. My students and I very much appreciate your help.

With gratitude,
Ms. D.

I love that it's being used to teach not just ooh shiny toy but basic skills, because the skill set — communicating clearly and intelligently — crosses platforms and will apply to journalistic tools the kids may have to use that aren't in wide circulation yet. I also love that the lesson they're learning is that they as future journalists and future media consumers are important and that we care.

Well done, everybody.

A.

Today in 'What Total Assholes Who Should Be in Chains Are Up To'

We have the man who gutted and skullfucked the Tribune Company, not missing a meal:

They always land on their feet, don't they?

Dennis FitzSimons, the former CEO of the Tribune Company who walked out the door with $41 million after engineering the disastrous sale of the company to Sam Zell, has just joined the board of directors of Media General.

The board seat was created just for him.

“'Dennis FitzSimons is a proven and innovative business leader who led a premier media company through times of outstanding growth and tough challenges,' said Marshall N. Morton, Media General’s president and chief executive officer, in a filing with the Securites and Exchange Commission," according to the Tampa Bay Business Journal. "'His industry knowledge and experience with the changing media landscape and the synergies of print, broadcast and online platforms will bring a valuable perspective to the Media General board’s deliberations'."

So in case that $41 million wasn't gonna last him:

"Outside directors to the Media General board receive an annual retainer of $116,000 for all scheduled meetings as well as an additional $1,750 for each unscheduled board meeting and each committee meeting attended beyond the two included in the retainer, according to SEC filings," TBBJ reports.

The Internet just keeps sucking money away from newspapers. Why, I don't know how print could ever possibly pay for itself. We should just give up and put everything on iPhones. Print is dead. Nobody reads anymore anyway. Twitter is the future.

Just to put this in perspective, the amount of money Dennis Fitzsimmons will make for going to meetings is more than I made as a reporter any three years I worked. Until there is a panel discussion on the best kind of feathers to cover these people with after they've been dunked in hot tar, I hereby exempt myself from attending any more smug bullshit sessions about how unwashed hippies online don't have to pay for their kids' college or something like Real American Grown-Ups.

Seriously, what is it going to take for us to talk about this truthfully? How many more people have to lose their jobs, how many more desperate places have to remain unwatched by any watchdogs, how much more of our national conversation — which is really all a good newspaper is, a city talking to itself — has to be silenced before we start seriously asking why profitable businesses are being deemed unprofitable and productive work is being flushed down the drain so that professional receptacles like Dennis Fitzsimmons can draw six figures for sitting around a conference table once a month. With an added bonus of four figures if he has to come in on a weekend or something.

Jesus tits.

A.

Message Managed

Okay, look. Here's how it happened, according to my understanding: The White House called up Nico Pitney at HuffPo, who has been covering (aggregating, blogging, collecting info from all over and processing it, whatever you want to call it, he's doing a job at least as hard as that of any nightly news producer or rewrite desk, so just calm down, son) the sitch in Iran apparently very admirably and well. The White House calls and says, "Hey, come to the news conference, you might get called on, ask a question from an Iranian." It's all over the Internet for hours that Iranians and anybody, really, can ask the president something through Pitney.

Pitney goes, gets called on, asks a pretty damn tough question (though it was certainly no "Mr. President, should we pray?") and the reaction among the Washington Press Corps is not, "Hey, this guy's making us look dumb, and maybe we should think of this stuff in advance instead of just losing it and having to bug Obama about his smoking." Instead it's OMG STAGE-MANAGING DISHONESTY BLOGGERZ HALP WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE OH GOD.

So I had to cast back into our archives for this, which Holden highlighted:

It was then, more than a year and a half ago, that Pfeiffer received an e-mail from someone claiming to be a citizen of South Dakota, wanting to know the Daschle campaign's reaction to a story by "Jeff Gannon."

The concerned "citizen of South Dakota" turned out to be Gannon himself, as the Daschle campaign quickly uncovered by tracking the e-mail account from which the query had been sent, "jdg17@aol.com." That e-mail address led Daschle campaign staffers to Gannon's AOL website, at which point the entire campaign became instantly aware that Gannon, then a White House correspondent for "Talon News," had attempted to deceive them. This incident, combined with Gannon's "reporting" of the 2004 general election in South Dakota and the sheer oddity of his website, prompted the Daschle campaign to conclude Gannon was not a legitimate reporter.

In fact, said Pfeiffer, in the summer of 2003 there was "not a single minute" the campaign thought Gannon was a real journalist.

Nor did the campaign keep this information to themselves.

According to Pfeiffer, the campaign sent Gannon's website address and news of his attempted deceit of the Daschle camp to several reporters.

They couldn't have cared less. Why is that? Is it just because the idea of a professional, erm, escort in the White House briefing room was so outlandish nobody believed it? Or is that they just didn't care that much back then? If there's one thing that consistently bugs the shit out of me about the news organizations that like to crow about setting our national democratic standards and dictating the political agenda, it's how they pretend not to have anything to do with anything once a question of their actual words and deeds comes up.

In what you choose to cover and not cover, you are managing the message just as much as Obama, by calling on or not calling on someone, is. To pretend otherwise and get all Like A Virgin about it is just stupid. Just sack up and admit that you make the choices, you and no one else. Deciding what you want people to focus on is what you're supposed to be doing, and it's what Obama's supposed to be doing, and for that matter it's what Republicans are supposed to be doing. This is kind of how it's always worked.

You made a choice when you sat on the Gannon story because WE'RE AT WAR and POPULAR WARTIME PREZNIT and such, and you're making a big deal of Pitney because you fucking feel like it. I may not agree with you but at least that way I'll respect your honesty.

A.

The Internet Strikes Back

Clearly this poll is the fault of bloggers and their pitiful sourcing.

A.

If You Read Nothing Else Today

Read this.

Whenever I talk about why people like the Interwebs and dislike newspapers, I talk about the mealy-mouthed word-mincing of privileged columnists, about the disappearance of righteous outrage on behalf of the powerless, about the idea that's somehow crept in in the past decade that it's uncouth to actually get angry about what's happening. So when something like that comes along, I feel the need to yell to the world at large THIS THIS IS WHAT WE WANT FROM OUR JOURNALISM THIS IS WHAT WE NEED FROM OUR JOURNALISTS THIS RIGHT HERE.

A.

Well, YES, For Chrissakes

Journalists should do journalism!

The earnest Washington audience — lobbyists, policy types, writers, etc. — picked up on the conventional wisdom that the comics have become the go-to source for America’s news. They kept asking about it in different ways for an hour. The comics took the questions seriously at first, but then they grew more and more uncomfortable with what was starting to sound like a growing social responsibility.

As the crowd marveled at the comics’ ability to skewer the very people those in the audience spent their days courting or covering, the comics essentially said, while shrugging their collective shoulders: “Hey, we’re just doing our jobs. We’re just trying to make people laugh. Sure, we try to be accurate and not make up facts, but that’s as far as it goes. We don’t want people to use us for their main source of news.”

Then it hit me that the people in the audience thought the comics led a glamorous life and the people wanted the comics to bring that glamor to news. But the comics made it clear they work hard at their jobs, similar to journalists perhaps, but they’re not journalists. Their job title is “comic” and they report to their offices early each day with enough on their plates for chrissakes, and that usually entails keeping up with what journalists are reporting.

Well, no. They're not journalists. And a lot of people look at Those Kids Today getting their news from That Jon Stewart Fella as evidence that there's something wrong with the Kids Today and not something wrong with the people who can't seem to hold the interest of anybody but themselves. Is this my Catholicism talking, or something, where if I couldn't keep my audience I'd assume something was wrong with me, and not them? Are these the same people that, when you break up with them, assume it's because you're unworthy of their greatness?

I've been talking about this with various smart people in the wake of Chicago Media Future, this idea that I wouldn't mind so much newspaper folks bagging on new media ideas as all trivial and stupid and fake if they were doing their own jobs well. Like, don't come to me bitching I'm not making enough money to be credible or producing enough original content when by your own admission you've got to ask your staff to cut their own salaries in order to make your owners happy; clearly what you got going on ain't burning the barn down, slick.

Just do your own jobs. Just do journalism well. Isn't that a tall enough order? Why witter around about what Jon Stewart and Colbert are doing? If you think they can teach you something, then learn from them the way you'd learn from anybody and get back to doing your job better. But all this, "He's not a journalist" and "you aren't going to be able to pay your writers" and other nonsense that goes on is just noisy carping. Doing journalism well is hard. That should be enough work without monitoring every comic on the planet making sure nobody's taking them too seriously.

Via Romenesko.

A.

One of the Few Times I Will Ever Say This Without Irony

AMERICA. FUCK YEAH.

A.

Others Getting Into the Act

Now North Decoder is helping to kill journalism.

A.

TV News Anchors Discuss Reality Programming: Tonight on Channel 3000 Works for YOU!

I wonder if TV news twinks ever watch this stuff and realize they're being made fun of:


In The Know: Are Reality Shows Setting Unrealistic Standards For Skanks?

To wit:



A.

On Meaningful Distinctions

Okay. Via the Crack Den, this:

If folks didn't see this clip from Monday night, it's a beaut. Not only does the reliable O'Reilly backstop Juan Williams eagerly assure the host that he was right to attack Salon editor Joan Walsh for having "blood on her hands" for defending murdered abortion provider Dr. George Tiller (don't ask), but Williams also managed to liken anti-abortion crusaders with civil rights protesters from the 1950's. (Because how many civil rights marchers were ever charged with murdering their political opponents Juan?)

In fact, this is precisely why NPR bosses informed Williams in February that he was not allowed to be identified as an NPR contributor when making his O'Reilly appearances. They did it because Williams was embarrassing NPR, plain and simple.

But that's bullshit and half a loaf, and maybe I should have raised this in February but I was busy with important LOLCAT-related program activities or eating Indian food or something BUT: Would Juan Williams be on O'Reilly to offer his opinions on politics if he hadn't become a political source in connection with his work on NPR? That's what makes him someone worth talking to. Without his NPR job he's Juan Williams, Dude With An Opinion, so telling him he can't say three letters of the alphabet doesn't really make any sense.

Better to say, "Bitch, you already HAVE a job, and it is on NPR, and if you feel the need to mouth off on O'Reilly's show (or even Rachel Maddow's) you should go get paid for doing that and take your salary off our books because in case you haven't noticed we're hurting for money along with the rest of the world. You want to be on right-wing gasbag TV? Go be on that TV. But don't come around all pretending to be a serious journalist Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then pull this shit Tuesday and Thursday. It's classless. Do you not earn enough money working for us? Would you like a raise? How about you stop sucking so much and we'll talk."

A.

Can't Stop the Signal

People under duress have always found ways to get information out. Always. When you want something to be known, badly enough, when you have something you must say to the world, you'll do whatever you have to do with the voice you possess. All day I've been reading stories and tweets about Iran cracking down on text messaging, cell phone videos, but the pictures are getting out anyway.

People who deplore "citizen journalism" and talk about how awful it is that anyone with a cell phone camera can be a journalist should be paying attention right now, because at its most basic, this is what journalism is: getting the signal out, any way you have to, any way you can.



A.

My Washington Post Chat Will Be Next Week

Howie Kurtz, whose entire column is full of dumbassery today:

Delmar, N.Y.: Why is the Post giving a forum to Glenn Beck? I am certainly against censorship, and Mr. Beck has the First Amendment right to say anything he wants, but not everyone has the right to have a platform on The Washington Post and the degree of legitimacy that such a forum confers. Mr. Beck is not a person to be taken seriously. I know Mr. Beck has a large audience on his Fox show and has the means to have his views widely disseminated. Is the Post that desperate to appease Mr. Beck's followers? I can understand the Washington Times doing this but the Post?

Howard Kurtz: Beck is doing a one-hour chat online, as many other folks have done. That hardly constitutes a major platform.

A.

Trivializing Serious Journalism

The Internet strikes again.

A.

This is How It's Supposed to Work

New and old media on Iran:

The screenshots tell a tale more nuanced than the provocative “new media beats old media” narrative. Rather, they show that while Twitter (), Flickr (), YouTube () and other social media sites are both a source of unfiltered information and a venue for public discussion, we still look to CNN, the BBC and their ilk to add context and meaning to this flood of data. And when they fail us, we demand more of them.

This is actually an example, not of the Internet killing journalism, but of people using the Internet's tools and traditional media working out to create a picture. You know, I go nuts every time somebody opines that new technology makes us lazy because if anything I think it makes us work twice as hard for our info. Instead of me sitting back and opening the paper and trusting that it's going to give me all the info I could ever need on Iran, I now read the paper, surf around the blogs, check actual Tehran-area Twitter feeds, look at Flickr photos, and watch the BBC America newscast on cable, all in order to attempt to understand what the unholy blue fuck is going on over there.

A lot of people probably resent that, and wish the newspaper was all they needed, or that they could learn everything they needed to know from the local news. A lot of people probably think they can learn everything they need to know from the local news, which in Chicago particularly scares the living shit out of me. Granted, it can seem sometimes like there's too much to keep up with, but on balance, I'd much rather too much information than too little.

Via Gawker.

A.

On the General Sucktardedness of Late-Night 'Comedy'

What Chet said. I've never found these shows to be anything but cringe-inducing even on their best nights, when I was shamefacedly enjoying their mockery of people I dislike. Old joke is old, for the most part. Once it hits Conan and like a mall somewhere, it's pretty much over.

Plus, you know, so long as we're on unfunny late-night, regarding Letterman and Palin. I'm not particularly crazy about her dragging her kids around to every political event on the planet and shoving them in front of the cameras. But they are HER kids, and why they don't feel free to tell her to shove it once they come of age is on them and on her.

Letterman, on the other hand. I'm not particularly crazy about what he said, either. Mostly because I feel we should leave politicians' kids, no matter their ages, the hell alone. And yes, I said this about the Bush twins, too, in that if every stupid thing I did in my twenties was on CNN I'd be in jail or grounded until I was 53. Sarah Palin is a target-rich environment all on her own, there's no need to extend it to the children.

My larger problem with this is twofold. 1. Whether the joke was about Bristol or Willow it still wasn't funny. If you're going to be offensive, make it count. Don't make some cheap joke about how Sarah Palin's daughter's a skank, because first of all, we've been hearing that all over the Internets for nearly a solid year now. And wow, Alex Rodriguez is a manwhore? I never would have thought. For God's sake, you have a staff of writers, Dave, try to come up with something that hasn't been on Wonkette for eight months.

2. The amount of attention given two celebrities having a bitchy little slapfight that will harm or impoverish no one far eclipses that given the Iranian elections, health care reform, any number of pressing political concerns, etc. The outrage I feel at that is much greater than whatever I might feel about Letterman, Palin or anyone else who won't be missing a meal anytime soon.

A.

Nobody Knows What To Do

That's primarily what I took away from Chicago Media Future this afternoon, that and a dislike of Patrick Spain of Newser.com, who spent his entire time on the afternoon panel making the following assertions:

1. Nobody with fewer than 5 million hits daily is making any money online.

2. Politico has replaced the Washington Post as a source of good political information.

3. HuffPo will replace the New York Times.

4. The New York Times will not exist one year from today.

There's not enough bish please in the whole world for #1, like, tell it to Dooce and the Fug Girls and Nate Silver. If #2 is true I weep for the future because Politico, let's not forget, are the sharp-dressed men who opined that Hurricane Gustav would offer the GOP a "do-over" after Katrina. #3 is unrealistic blogospheric breast-beating. I've been hearing variations of #4 since I was 19 years old and it has yet to come to pass, so I'm posting it in hopes that in a year I can e-mail this post to him and demand an explanation.

I don't want to spend a whole post about the event bitching about some things one guy said (he also mentioned that the Tribune's bankruptcy is proof that print is over, which ... readers of this blog and occupants of that space known as reality know not to be true in the slightest, though it is proof that running your business with your head up your own ass is not advisable) because by and large the thing was kind of fun in that lots of questions were asked to which the answers of the experts was universally, "... erm, fuck if we know."

Which is as it should be. We all just got here. In the lifetime of a new medium we are freaking larval. For people who've been in newspapers for decades to come up and puff out their chests and be all, "Oh yeah, what kind of money do you make, punk?!" is a bit premature. Not to mention which, on balance, the answer is as likely to be "as much as you do, and how are the layoffs treating you?" as it is, "not much, sir, I'm very sorry for existing." If we all had a foolproof way of magically growing money and cotton candy and ponies in our back yards, wouldn't it be kind of creepy? I'm not trying to pass off confusion as some kind of authenticity, I'm saying, give us a minute to collect our belongings.

Dan Sinker of Columbia College made my freaking day by talking a lot about how local papers in Chicago gave up on local news in large parts of the city years ago and that local coverage in the Trib and Sun-Times peaked in 1994, according to this Community Media Workshop study about which I'll probably have a separate post later. And, really. You can claim to be the guardians of our democracy but the argument only works if you actually, you know, do it. Otherwise you're just stroking yourself and while I'm sure it feels nice I'm not particularly interested in listening. I could have stood up and kissed Sinker, too, when he said that any time a new tool is introduced, going all the way back to the radio, people have always panicked about the implications, so everybody calm down.

As the panelists talked about innovation, about making your own site what you want local news to be, someone behind me kept shouting out, "Who pays you while you do it? Who pays the rent?" and it's not that some of the blithe "You just have to work for the love of the story and wait tables if you have to in the meantime until somebody hires you" didn't come off as romanticizing the poverty-stricken artist's life as one somehow more noble than any other. But what I think the panelists were trying to say was something we say around here all the time: If you want things to stop sucking you have to go make them not suck. You can't wait until somebody just hands you a giant platter of not-suck and tells you it's all yours.

You can't just sit back and complain, as we knock on the conservative punditry for doing all the time, that the world doesn't offer you the choices that allow you to be who you want to be. I'm not advocating poverty for anyone. I'm not arguing it's great that for some reason people aren't flinging money at those I know to be talented writers and good solid reporters. What I am saying is that eventually, when you continue to ask that something happen and it doesn't, you either change your strategy or you shut the hell up. Who pays the rent while you figure your shit out? I don't know. And nobody should be asking anyone else to answer that question for them.

Except maybe Patrick Spain. The New York Times' death date is 6/13/10. Somebody should send them a memo, maybe warn them what's coming.

A.

ps. I got kind of annoyed at the end of the thing, because I keep going to these things expecting them to be the Throw The Thieving Bastards in Prison Panel, the You Killed Newspapers On Purpose You Fuckers Symposium, a shame-the-greedy-corporate-assholes party that never really materializes. I think maybe I'm gonna have to host that panel some day, preferably out back of a tavern, with some feathers and a nice hot barrel of tar.

*I* Know Enough Not To Get Taken, But You Morons Might Not

Last night I actually met that rare creature: A journalism academic who likes the Internet and seems to have fun with it.

My experience with the UW Journalism School's forays into exploring new media hasn't been good. At their centennial in 2005 they hosted a panel on blogging that included no bloggers, and featured Owen Ullman of USA Today trash-talking bloggers only to admit to me afterward that he read no blogs at all. So I went into this event fully expecting it to be a festival of whining about those filthy hippies thinking they can presume to put words down and have them read by people. I mean, I never.

Now, there was the usual generality of why the Internet sucks: You can destroy reputations very quickly (as if a story in the New York Times or a spot on Hard Copy doesn't do that for you), accuracy no longer matters (no examples given at all, we just presume this to be true), correcting something on the Internet happens after publication (erm, the corrections I had to write as a reporter would argue this is not that different and that a larger problem instead is the editing of posts without noting corrections are made at all, which happens mostly ... at newspaper web sites), and transparency is the new objectivity and that might not be a good thing (at which point I gave up on my vow not to drink on school nights and started glugging the chardonnay).

But by and large, this was a guy who liked the Internet and used it for what it was meant to be used for, and wasn't talking about how journalism is doomed. He even dared raise the question of whether we're all just needing to calm down a bit about the death of newspapers, given the profitability of many. I about set off fireworks, I was so happy to hear the topic raised, as well as to hear discussion of the changes in advertising (raised by Mr. A and others) and business ethics. All the journalism ethics in the world are useless if the bosses are stealing things, as you all well know.

A couple of things that struck me, though, not from Ward's talk but from the comments of others in the audience. Over and over I heard people in the audience say that though they, personally, knew that Wikipedia was not a reliable source of ironclad truth, other people, gullible people who are not them, might not be able to be trusted to figure that out. Young people, also not them, might have a harder time in the future because they are not as media-literate as the speaker presumed him- or herself to be.

More Blogger Ethics

The fuss for weeks was about what tourists and radio traffic announcers will call it, not how much it cost:

"Now publicly traded, Willis asked for and received $3.8 million in tax-increment financing from the city to redevelop the Sears Tower space."

Why isn't this the story? Why are Chicago taxpayers subsidizing a British insurance company?

"It's going to cost us about $17 million," said Plumeri. "We're bringing jobs into the city, and hopefully in the next couple of years it'll be 600, 700 jobs because we expect our business to grow rather strongly in the next three years."

Hopefully. But if we're paying for those jobs, shouldn't we just put those workers in the city payroll?

I'd also like Mr. Plumeri to describe how those negotiations went with the mayor. Very well, apparently. The Trib apparently didn't ask.

"Willis will consider spending money on marketing to help the Willis Tower name stick, but Plumeri knows it will take time. 'They can call it whatever they want, even The Big Willie,' said Plumeri, who turns 66 next month. 'All I know is that the day we announced that this building would be named Willis Tower, everybody in America knew who Willis was'."

Then why would you have to spend money on marketing to make it stick?

And really, The Big Willie? Are you a dick?

"Willis doubled its North American revenues in 2008 with its $2.1 billion acquisition of Hilb Rogal & Hobbs. It was the brokerage sector's biggest deal in a decade, Willis said."

Then why do they need a taxpayer subsidy? Maybe they should be giving us a subsidy to keep the damn city running.

"One of Willis' chief rivals is Chicago-based Aon Corp., which has about 2,500 Chicago-area workers and occupies one of the city's other big towers."

It would have been nice to have someone from Aon comment on how they feel about a big competitor getting a city subsidy.

But no. We'll just stick with The Big Willie.

We saw the same halfbright lightweight fuckery when Macy's renamed Marshall Field's on State Street. Days and days and days of coverage, "man on the street" reactions to the name change, opinions, memories of how things used to be, etc. None of which acknowledged that nobody would be richer or smarter (or dumber or poorer, for that matter) because of the change to a sign on the outside of a store in which the majority of city residents could not afford to spend very much money no matter what it was called. The amount of coverage devoted to bullshit like this as opposed to actual substantive issues is just one example I like to bring up when people want to cant to me about how journalism in the hands of television and newspaper reporters is sober and serious and all the Internet has to offer is video of cats flushing toilets.

A.

The Internet Wars

Sigh. Never underestimate the ability of management to change the subject to who should be posting what on their fucking Facebook pages while the world burns down.

Granted, there is an argument to be made here. I don't blog about my day job and I think anyone who does either has a remarkable lack of self-preservation or a screw loose somewhere. I don't bitch about my bosses or my colleagues or write about things I cover for other publications (though I will link). A) None of it's really that interesting in the context of what happens here and b) none of it's really that interesting, period. My last paper didn't have any rules about blogging, but that was like four years ago, by now, I hope they do, because nothing I said online back then could have gotten me fired, not on paper, anyway. (The being a huge pain in the ass could have gotten me fired many times, and I'm often mystified why it didn't, but that's another post about how sometimes your bosses are more fucked up than you are.)

Still, looking at Richtmyer's comment, I can only agree with it heartily, and argue further that this is not at all like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. This is like polishing one fork in a drawer in a stateroom on one level of the Titanic. I hope it made the AP's higher-ups feel good because certainly it served no other purpose.

A.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!!!??!

That sound you just heard? That wet, kind of thwack-thud sound?

No big thing. Just my head hitting a brick wall, over and over and over:

(Crain’s) — Sun-Times Media Group Inc., which has been slashing jobs and closing down newspapers to cut costs, wants to pay 20 employees up to $1.8 million in bonuses if the company is sold for a certain amount.

The owner of the Chicago Sun-Times and dozens of suburban papers recently filed the request in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 31, becoming the city’s second media company to do so. Tribune Co. sought Chapter 11 protection from its creditors in December.

The same day that Sun-Times Media asked for permission to pay the bonuses, it also asked the court to allow it to file under seal a version of the request that discloses the amount it hopes to fetch in a sale, as well as who would get the bonuses and how much each would stand to gain if it were to get that sale price or more.

The Chicago-based company claims in its request that publicizing that “sensitive information” would put it at a disadvantage in seeking buyers.

It would also put it at a disadvantage in, you know, existing in the real world as we know it, too. It puts it at a disadvantage in not looking like it's currently run by a bunch of politically tone-deaf moral dyslexics who not only don't know which way the wind is blowing but are disavowing the existence of oxygen altogether. I mean, what the bloody blue fuck goes through your head, people? That doesn't sound like a lot, for 20 people, when it comes to executive bonuses, but keep in mind that $100,000 is three reporters.

Once again, the Internet kills journalism. I wonder if the AP has thought about suing over this.

A.

It's Always Their Fault

Okay, seriously, I think we've reached peak moron:

KOGO Radio's morning man, Chip Franklin, has been arguing with me for over a decade. I wait for his producer's call every Monday morning, never quite sure where we're going to go.

We were wrapping up today's show, talking about shows that jumped the shark, when I abruptly changed the subject to the sentencing of Euna Lee and Laura Ling overnight to 12 years of hard labor by a North Korea court.

As I tried to express my outrage at their sentencing, Chip interrupted to say that Ling and Lee were "irresponsible" and had "put 300 million people ... at risk" by daring to go anywhere near Kim Jong-Il country.

You know, there is no injustice to which people are subjected that radio talk show nutballs cannot explain away by smugly asserting that it was simple dumbassery that got them screwed over. I'm not even arguing the facts of this case, simply noticing the pattern: Something shitty happens, and clearly whatever it is, it's the fault of the person it happened to.

I'm surprised somebody hasn't suggested Lee and Ling sell some bling to buy their way out of prison.

A.

Let's Give Up in Advance

Then we can kick back and say it was impossible all along, and nobody will have to do anything that's going to put them out one inch, and we can all watch Diagnosis Murder re-runs and organize our fucking recipe boxes. Jesus Bugfuck Elvis CHRIST:

The choice is emblematic of the challenges facing many news organizations across the US. They're coping with the recession at the same time that readers and advertisers are migrating to the Internet – where, fair or not, there's an expectation that what you read should be free.

The vote at the Globe is also complicated by resentment at what some employees call the "bullying tactics" of The New York Times Co., which bought the Globe in 1993. There's also some outright anger that, according to the union, management has not been asked to make comparable sacrifices. That's led some media analysts to conclude that union members will ultimately decide against management's offer, risking a more uncertain future.

But hovering over the debate is a larger question: Is there a future for a traditional, major metropolitan newspaper?

"Certainly, there's nobody in the union who thinks, 'OK, if we approve this deal, we make the sacrifices now, but we're guaranteeing our survival and there's smooth sailing,' " says Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington. He's also a former ombudsman at the Globe. "What we're seeing here is that: 'Even if we accept this offer, what is the future of the paper?' That's the big unknown that's hovering over this."

[snip]

But staff members in favor of the concessions say they don't see the reasoning behind a no vote when, in the long run, it could lead to the closure of the paper.

But that's the point, isn't it? If you don't threaten closure, if you don't act as if there is no other choice, how on earth are you supposed to get concessions in the first place? Oh, readers and advertisers are migrating to the Internet. Sure. Okay. I'm not kidding, is it only readers here who are paying attention to the fact that in spite of this not-so-great migration, newspapers are making money hand over fist? That their profit margins are bigger than Wal-Mart's? 

The established reality in journalism is that newspapers are dead, over, finished, the Internet is the new hotness and we're all just waiting for Steve Jobs to come along and make a thing that will make it all better. It's so ingrained in people's minds that arguing the point at all gets you the kind of looks people give UFO enthusiasts and the more rabid fandoms of the obscure Star Trek franchises. It is literally like arguing with Bush supporters from 2003 all over again: You're telling them about reality and they're staring at you like, "Take it back, and fuck you for mentioning it at all!"

It seems, finally, that the Guild has found something it won't roll over for, though, so that's a welcome sign.

A.

ChicagoNow. Get it? It's NOW! Hip. Happening. Interwebs. Stuff. Things.

Looking over the list of blogs in the Tribune's new "hey, we have a network of local blogs" venture that is in beta right now, my only reaction is ... lots of sports and shopping. Yes, there's other great stuff in there (love the CTA Tattler) but it's lighter on news than it is on consumer/fan content. Exactly how much coverage of the Cubs does one city need? It's not like the papers and TV and radio and plenty of blogs already aren't acting like it's the Second Coming every time a game takes place.

Though I have to say, Joe the Cop is certainly filling a void in the information world:

If you're meeting a prostitute at a local motel, it's probably a good idea to check behind the closed bathroom door when you first arrive.  That way, once you get naked and the prostitute starts sucking on your fingers while you pleasure yourself with your free hand, you won't be surprised when a strange man jumps out of the bathroom to rob you.  On your back, nude, with your fingers in a prostitute's mouth is not a good way to confront a robber.

I'm sorry, no sarcasm, that's AWESOME.

A.

Newspapers: Still Making SO MUCH Money

So maybe not so much with the "everybody's abandoning us because they no longer love democracy and America" bullshit, please:

But, of course, charts only tell half the story. Here’s the other half:

$37.8 billion vs $21.1 billion

Want to take a guess at which one is newspapers’ ad revenue from 2008 and which one is Google’s?

Believe it or not, the bigger number–the one a healthy $16.7 billion higher is the newspaper industry’s. That’s right: Google’s bringing in just over half what the newspapers haul in on print advertising alone. Which makes the current publisher anger towards Google more than a little disingenuous. Sure, Google’s share is growing and newspapers’ is shrinking, blah blah blah. Five years ago, Google’s entire revenue was a scant $3 billion. Newspapers’ print ad sales for 2004? $48.2 billion.

Print: far from dead.

Here's the root of the problem, really:

Newspaper execs talk with exasperation, as if they’ve tried everything they can. But they define “everything” so narrowly that it renders the word almost meaningless. In reality, as they watch their massive river of money slowly shrink away, they’ve tried almost nothing. They had a couple hundred year head start on Google, and yet they collapse in a heap here at the dawn of a new age.

They didn't want to fight for it. As if you get what you want any other way.

I am so looking forward to this conference on Saturday.

A.

Your Regularly Scheduled Post About How It's Not Really Funny

A couple things today that happened:

Twitter shoved in front of my face the tasty morsel that WGNTV was going to be having a bikini fashion show coming up, and I proceeded to snark on it, and WGN proceeded to get snitty back that they do good things as well as this crap.

Which, yes. I will freely stipulate that a bikini show is not all that you are. The point of my snarking wasn't that you're just trivial peddlers of bullshit. The point is that for going on five years now I've sat and listened to one self-satisfied butthead after another tell me that the world used to be good until the Internet kids and all their blogging made it suck, while anyone publishing or broadcasting anything prior to 2003 had Ultimate Authority Points that could beat a Super Nintendo Warlord Dungeonmaster thing. And so I went on a campaign — if you can call lackadaisically linking to stuff I find hilarious a campaign — of pointing out every time one of the Sacred Guardians of Our Democracy did something that could just as easily have been done at Wonkette or, for that matter, on 4chan or Fandom Wank. To point out that GENERALIZATIONS ARE RIDICULOUS.

And whet asked, in comments to the Burris puppet post:

This might sound dumb, but not really sure what the fuss is about - seems like a not-funny op-ed cartoon married to a poorly-conceived stunt. Newspapers are almost exclusively unfunny these days, so I guess I'm not super surprised? It's a drop in the bucket compared to Maureen Dowd? Happy to be corrected if I'm missing something.

I don't think you're missing something. My point is that it was not funny, trivial, dumb, and bullshit. (Not only that but it doesn't even make sense. Whose puppet is Burris? Whose hand is up his paper ass? Why a puppet and not a marionnette? Why a puppet and not a stuffed animal? Most of the criticism I've seen of Burris comes down to his megalomania and his inability to shut up, two characteristics that make him the best client in the world if you're a lawyer late on his rent but don't necessarily add up to "puppet.") It's just lame and sad and full of fail, and that is the deeper meaning.

We keep acting like this is a new problem. In ANY medium, there are and have always been trivial peddlers of bullshit and the bullshit they peddle. There is no golden age of newspaper authority, the phrase "don't believe everything you read in the papers" was not invented around the same time Facebook came to be, and radio and television have been killing journalism for years and years and years now yet here we all are, tapping away on our keyboards, yelling into the phone that we just found out something amazing and have to tell the whole world.

There's always one example of horrifying stupidity you can point to, on any day ending in Y, in every medium you can think of including sidewalk chalking, and one example of shining greatness so profound it makes you want to believe in God. Fer chrissakes, I got into political blogging in the first place to defend good journalism, not to kill it. Though that's a side benefit. (NOTE TO WGN, THAT IS A JOKE.)

The sooner we all come to terms with the idea that no tool magically makes you above reproach, the sooner we can all get on with fixing things instead of just wanking about them all day long on panels. Because the longer people who do the work carry on bitching at each other over who sucks more, the more it benefits the same people who really are killing journalism. The people who are shoveling money out the back door into trucks while we're distracted.

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The Internet

Will it never stop destroying journalism?

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Lookit What You Did

Sheesh, it's been a depressing week. How about some good news? The student journalists you supported (one of several projects adopted by First Draft readers here and here) are already taking photos with the camera you helped them to get:

You've all made a wise investment – and one that I admire and appreciate. I'm excited to have begun advising the student newspaper here this year, and I'm blown away by the student-staff's accomplishments thus far. Our lone stumbling block has been finding funding to provide the a visually-appealing, photo-enhanced product. In a district that I believe inspires success in students despite being at a disadvantage economically, your financial support helps me make sure we aren't bound by our tax base.

Specifically, your donation provided for our first high-caliber camera, a Nikon D-60. In a digital age where students are inundated with thousand of images on a daily basis, it's crucial for a student newspaper to provide outstanding imagery in order to draw readers into the writing. By improving our visual appeal, we're increasing our readership. When students know that their words are read by a growing readership, their work becomes more important, and the benefits they reap become more substantial.

Through grounded projects such as this newspaper, students have actually demonstrated an interest in their class and their school, and in improving their own communication skills. I feel confident that it is those skills that will help them as they pursue varied life goals after high school. And you should feel confident that you were an integral part of the plan.

The students here are very aware of and reflective about their educations, because as a school, we ask them to think about this process regularly.

Click through to the link above to see the full slideshow, it's awesome. The one in the middle is a photo the new camera took for their school paper:











Photos and updates from the other projects as we get them. Well done, all.

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Continuing Today's Theme of Doing People's Research For Them

Hey Graydon:

“Youthing” down a paper to attract 21-year-olds isn’t the answer: the only way you’re ever going to get the average 21-year-old to read a daily newspaper is to wait 9 years until he’s 30.

Sigh. Or, you know, give him a paper right now that is HIS and he feels invested in and wants to read each day. This stat really can't be repeated often enough:

The study found that more than three-quarters, or 76 percent, of college students surveyed had read their college newspaper in the past month. Readership was highest at campuses with daily papers, where 92 percent had read a student newspaper in the previous month. By comparison, just over one-third of students reported reading their daily community paper at least weekly.

(Yes, it's a survey for a college newspaper marketing firm. Does anybody BUT newspaper marketing firms give a damn if people are reading newspapers anymore?)

And you know what? I got this same line of bullshit from so-called adults when I was 21 and had been working a daily paper for three years. "Your generation doesn't read." Well, okay, now you've made me not want to read your paper since you obviously have a HUGE amount of respect for me, and I read three newspapers every day so fuck you, basically. This kind of crap always comes up in discussions with college journalism kids and I don't know where you get by busting on the next generation as being shit, I really don't. It makes me crazy.

I don't want to rag Carter too much, though, because after a recounting of this thoroughly excellent series the Telegraph has going on, he makes this point:

As this column goes to press, the Telegraph had already devoted 120 broadsheet pages to the story, in a little more than two weeks. And although the paper broke the stories on its Web site, then fed them into the next morning’s print edition, sales of the actual paper exploded. On the Friday the story broke in print, the Telegraph sold out. Since then, the paper has sold an extra 600,000 copies. According to the paper, it was the biggest sales uptick for a non-conflict-related story since World War II. More letters poured in from readers than at any other time in the Telegraph’s history. The story was so compelling that competing papers were grudgingly forced to illustrate their reports on the affair with shots of the Telegraph’s banner headlines. There is now talk of a knighthood for Lewis for his part in uncovering the scandal.

And they say newspapers are dead.

And had he ended with YOU MUST CHILL I HAVE HIDDEN YOUR KEYS or JESUS TITS or SCHMUCKS I'd be forced to declare I couldn't have said it better myself.

Hat tip, though technically as a blogger I'm supposed to just steal without crediting, to reader DR.

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May Lee Enterprises Rot In Hell, Too

Demanding reporters take a 23 percent pay cut:

Lee Enterprises wants Newspaper Guild-represented employees at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to take a 23% pay cut over the course of a new three-year contract, according to the union.

In an article posted on its Web site, the St. Louis Newspaper Guild says the management proposal would cut wages 15% the first year, followed by smaller cuts in each of the next two years. Lee as a matter of policy does not comment on labor negotiations.

"The company also proposed contract changes that would allow them to lay off employees for any reason and without regard to seniority," the article stated. "The company wants the right to suspend employees for up to three days without 'just cause' or recourse through the grievance procedure."

Those are among the most dramatic of the sweeping contractual changes Lee is seeking, according to the Guild.

In addition, the management proposal would eliminate paid maternal leave, and limit unpaid maternal leave to a maximum of 12 weeks, half the current maximum. Photographers would lose a share of the sale of reprints, and access to company vehicles, according to union. Lee is also asking the union to agree that a person on sick leave can be fired after three months. The current contract gives management that right after 18 months.

Because of the Internet, right? RIGHT???!!

While Lee is in a distinctly unpleasant position with respect to its shareholders and lenders, it is important to note that the business generated $207.2 million in operating profits last year on sales of a bit more than $1 billion. Its operating margin of 20.1% surpasses that of Exxon Mobil Corp., which generated a 19.1% margin in the last 12 months. And Lee’s profitability positively blows away Wal-Mart, the largest Fortune 500 company, whose margins were only 7.4% in the prior 12 months.

God almighty. The dishonesty of this conversation is staggering. Next week I'm going to two conferences/panels on the future of journalism, one here and one here [yes, I know the link to their own journalism survival discussion is broken, we've notified them, I include it as illustration], and hopefully they won't both make my head explode.

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Well, If You NEED the Money ...

Dan posted this in comments yesterday but I was up to my ass in work and then a shrieking migraine so nothing except mocking that wingnut happened last night. Here's the AP, being really stupid:

As for AP, though, bloggers may want to prepare themselves for what is coming, whatever exactly that is. "We're going to be learning more ourselves about exactly how the technology is going to work" in about two weeks, Bridis said.

But about this he is sure. "You can't just taken an entire AP wire feed or even an entire AP story, or even half of an AP story, necessarily, and republish it or repurpose it," he said. "We need the money. The industry is falling apart."

Dan:

Well then by all means start filing lawsuits! We had no idea you needed the money! That clears everything up! Just think of all the troubled indistries that have sued their way to profitability!

You need money. Well, go get some. Raise the rates you're charging. Make the case to your member papers and to the public that international news is worth paying for. Sack Ron Fournier and Nedra Pickler. Do whatever it is you need to do to make money. But stop acting like suing Google and HuffPo is going to fix this. It isn't. GO MAKE MONEY.

Let's be clear about this: A lawsuit, which will doubtless be lengthy because Google don't play, will enrich no one besides the lawyers arguing it in court. Everybody will look stupid, and those impoverished reporters risking their lives sending dispatches from unholy shitholes around the world, about whom the AP pretends to be so concerned, won't see a damn dime of any windfall that comes. Because by the time this thing is resolved a few dozen more newspapers will have been murdered, and a few more will figure out that while local journalism is priceless, yes, the Internet is a source for national and international news so why pay through the nose for AP wire copy?

By the way, as someone who saw her leads nearly word-for-word repeated on the wire, hearing the AP canting about stealing and repurposing content is a little rich and a lot hilarious. Doc once famously described them as a "car theft chop-shop without the pesky ethical quandries." Yet now they want to lecture the Internet. I'd suggest they LURK MOAR.

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Kathleen Parker Blames Blogs for TV Sins

Also blames dinosaurs, meteors, Puck, the elves who live in her head ...

Within minutes, a dozen other e-mails tumbled through the hatch enumerating all the reasons Sotomayor was a terrible pick: affirmative action, identity politics, the Ricci case, double standards, racism, sexism. Boom shacka-lacka-lacka . . .

You could practically hear the clattering of bullet points ricocheting through the blogosphere.

Actually the first clichéd, pre-packaged idiocy I encountered was on the pages of the New Republic, Katykins, and that was BEFORE the announcement was made. TNR, you know, the magazine thing. Then, once the announcement was made, Gloria Borger was on CNN proudly announcing that she had just received the Republican talking points, and here they are for your edification! Ain't neither of those things blogs, last time I checked, so maybe not so much for you with the wanking.

So while we're racking things up, let's blame the blogosphere and its ricocheting bullet points (GAH, get me rewrite!) once we're done blaming TV and Jeffrey Rosen. I am so sick of how "the blogosphere" has become a quick way to excuse publication/broadcast of things the publishers/broadcasters know to be crap.

"It was a phenomenon ... on the INTERNET," they intone, as if that makes it better that they got sucked into this nonsense. At least when I read 43 comment threads about Barack and Michelle's hot NY date night over at ONTD, I know I'm doing it and don't blame that comm for contributing to the downfall of Western Civilization.

I think part of the problem mainstream media commentators have with the web is that most of them don't seem to like it much. Either they're not seeing the vastly good uses to which it can be put or they're simply not having enough fun in show business. This is one of those times when I think coming to the semi-pro political internet through the fandom internet was beneficial, because I freaking LOVE the internet, even the scary parts of it, because even though I'm terrified, somehow, knowing it's all there is so much better than just suspecting it's worse than I thought.

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