A Whole New World
Sep 26th, 2005 at 9:29 am by Susie
Bad news last week for the moneyed media - 500 layoffs at the New York Times - 50 from the newsroom, 35 from the Boston Globe; 75 at the Philadelphia Inquirer, 25 at the Philadelphia Daily News and the entire news operation at the local Inquirer-affiliated WPHL-17 news station. Fifty-two newsroom jobs to be slashed at the San Jose Mercury-News, 120 being offered buyouts at the San Francisco Chronicle and rumors of more layoffs at the L.A. Times.
Like most bloggers, I don’t want the traditional news media to go away. I only want them to do their jobs instead of writing self-important, fawning pieces about those so blatantly abusing their power.
However, as I was saying to someone the other day, their very corporate structures make it close to impossible that they can serve as the civic watchdogs they’re meant to be - the function thought to be so important by our Founders, they made sure to give them special protection under the Constitution.
Understand: most news operations aren’t folding because they’re not profitable. They’re being cut because they’re not profitable enough, or because their profit margins aren’t increasing fast enough to please their corporate leadership. This is about pleasing the Wall Street analysts.
The New York Times can’t remain the force they are with 500 layoffs. I know the Inquirer is suffering and the Daily News is already cut to the bone. And yet, their ownership continues to hack and slice, insisting they will still maintain quality.
They remind me of the Black Knight in “The Search for the Holy Grail” after losing his arms and legs: “It’s just a flesh wound.”
Make no mistake: As little as the corporate media has done to put the needs of the country before their financial interests, they’re all the protection we have against the criminal excesses of this administration and their backers.
It’s always a little amusing to me, that so many members of the conventional media hate bloggers. Personally, I think we’re their best advertisements. As the big-money interests continue to shrink the news corps, newspapers have so few resources to do the kind of enterprise reporting we need.
But when they do that reporting, we’re the people who comb through their efforts and bring their best work to the attention of the entire country.
I haven’t heard it in a while now, but after last year’s election, it was all the rage for mainstream journalists to confront bloggers with this empty accusation, meant to stop us in our tracks: “Where’s the accountability?”
Now, if you’ve been reading me for any length, you already know my standard response. I’d reply, “When we get something wrong, we print a correction. Where’s Judy Miller’s accountability? We went to war based on her lies. As far as I know, no bloggers have been responsible for anyone’s death.”
Where’s the accountability, my ass.
I still know a few working journalists, and they mostly fall on one side or another. Either they get what we’re doing (confiding that they see present-day news operations as dinosaurs) or they’re so fixated on self-justification, they have nothing but scorn for bloggers - or act like we’re some kind of creature in the zoo.
Part of the problem is, they’re still steeped in that “on the other hand” journalism culture. No, blogs like mine and Duncan’s and Jerilyn’s and Eric’s and Dave’s and Mark’s and Josh’s and Max’s (and countless other liberal blogs) are not equivalent to the right-wing blogosphere. Those bloggers, God bless ‘em, are steeped in the same values of “win at any cost” as their political puppet masters.
Liberal bloggers don’t have political masters. While it may make us less effective politically than we might be, it’s why we’re closer to the values of traditional journalism. We’re a lot more invested in being accurate than the online disciples of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, and I get tired of being tarred with the Powerline brush.
While there are times I do miss the adrenaline high of the newsroom, those days are fewer and farther between. Mostly, I have the same feeling I had when shocked friends said they couldn’t believe I was leaving journalism for a sales job: “If I’m going to be a corporate whore, I’d rather do it out in the open,” I’d tell them. I meant it. I was tired of stories being modified or even spiked because of the timidity of the management. I was tired of the cutbacks aimed at maintaining the corporation’s brutal 38% profit margin - like when they informed us we had to start paying for the water cooler.
Or when they told us we now had to pay our own entry fees for the prestigious journalism awards they so loved to advertise. (I was at this particular paper for eight years. I won something every year I entered, but I only entered when they paid for it.)
What’s left for journalists? I don’t know, but I suspect it isn’t such a bright future. Because in addition to the corporate obstacles, they also face an entrenched newsroom culture that rewards mediocrity. (For instance, columnists are almost always promoted from within, and it often has more to do with seniority and ass-kissing than actual talent. Who cares whether they attract, you know, readers? It was their turn! )
Newsroom managers also don’t seem to understand that economic diversity is a tad more relevant to their hiring practices than signing black Yale graduates. Readers simply don’t relate to the same concerns of the investor class; their problems aren’t as high up on Maslow’s triangle.
A lot of the problem comes from the idea that only people with prestigious journalism degrees can handle the complexities of modern issues. (Journalists are such snobs.) Yet hundreds of competent journalists graduated from the now-defunct Charles Morris Price School of Advertising and Journalism, right here in Philadelphia.
Anyway, it will eventually be moot. The torch will eventually be passed to the online media, and God only knows how that turns out.
I think you’re probably right about the eventual demise of the print news media. As to the accountability of the blogosphere: I’ve notice since throwing my hat in that it’s pretty easy to sort out bias and opinion from “news” and “fact.” Nobody’s really trying to hide their partialities, and very few folks try to sneak by on “fuzzy facts.” (And when they do, it’s fairly transparent.)
My $.02.
Jeff
I think the problem most journalists have with bloggers is that bloggers are viewed as the modern version of the gadfly or the yahoo. Every town has the guy or gal who attends every City Council meeting, sits in the audience, and then writes or calls the next day complaining that the story doesn’t have the right focus, or that it is biased because the reporter didn’t reveal the mayor’s secret, unspoken agenda or write about the adultery or drinking problem the City Council member has.
These people always have a conspiracy theory they are pushing and ascribe black motives to the journalist who doesn’t write about their personal pet peeve. Young reporters may try to follow up on these theories because, hey, it IS a great story if the mayor has a secret agenda involving payoffs to the local construction firm and the tri-lateral commission.
But these theories always, ALWAYS, end up being a constantly changing stream of half-baked ideas with loosely strung together, non-linear points and no paper trail, no sources, no verification.
So when the bloggers start writing in, using the same tone and the same keywords, but also bringing in thousands of OTHER letters, e-mails and phone calls, well, it is easier to write them off as gadflys and yahoos, than to accept there is a new paradigm. And when you get 1,000 e-mails on the same subject with the same take on it, all referenceing gadfly.whateverblog.com, then it is much easier to push the delete button.
I mean, blogging looks an awful lot like the gadflies, to someone who doesn’t have a lot of time to devote to it. The obsessive story parsing? Check. The drawing of links and cross referencing? Check. The ascribing of motive and divining of intent? Check.
It doesn’t help that the right-wing bloggers are so obviously paid shills of the GOP political machine.
Well, I’m sure some bloggers do. What can you expect, when there’s so many? But I can’t think of any top-ranked liberal bloggers who would fit that gadfly label.
Very nicely done.
If they are displaced and in need of training, I would happy to have them in my classes; afterall, I teach Introductory material, and have a great deal of experience teaching the braindead..
But that is the problem Susie. That there are so many bloggers. And there is no internal structure to weed out the good from the bad, the paid political hack from the citizen activist, the crazy from the sane.
I think old-school journalists view the blogosphere like a single online publication. When you open up a newspaper you know that everything in it, good or bad, accurate or inaccurate, is the responsibility of and carries the credibility of the newspaper itself. When they ask about accountability, what they are asking is who takes responsibility for all this stuff? Who stakes their credibility on the information they put out?
And let’s be honest, the vast majority of the blogosphere is people writing a lot of stuff about stuff they are interested in. Pages and pages of poorly written, poorly spellchecked, unedited, stream-of-consciousness dreck about bunnies or R2-D2 collecting or the Mets season. And lots of abortive efforts at “Dear Diary” entries that stop after six weeks. LOTS of Dear Diary stuff.
Well, maybe we should only be talking about the political bloggers. To a journalist the politics blogs look like thousands of mini editorial pages, written by people who can’t spell or who are really attached to swearing, and who like to level lots of unsupportable accusations at politicias.
But maybe we should be only talking about the “elite” blogs. Is LGF an elite blog? How about Kos? Instapundit? Atrios? Powerline? Which of these are reputable news sources? Which do their own reporting?
Just try to picture your opinion of blogs if you spent a day reading the top-rated blogs.
I think the layoffs have a lot to do with the across-the-board ad pull from Federated Department Stores. If you’re the NYT, LA Times, Post, Inquirer, etc., you could be losing up to $50K A DAY in ad revenue. Also, rising gas prices impact paper prices … which is the single biggest expense at a newspaper.
As astute as the blog world is, many, as here, don’t catch on.
In my little corner of the world a big Cal winery bought up an ancient winery near my home. Those with brains as advanced as salamanders knew why.
The big Cal winery insisted on repeating that pathetic saw, “no company that buys another wants that company to fail”. Do you smell that?
One more dead winery one more piece of the market.
They made it look good it took maybe three years to gut and butcher. It’s gone now.
So I ask you. What corporation is interested in actual news. Why did corps buy the news in the first place?
Profit is tangential. An stupid public is sublime.
Yeah, Rox, but PNI owns its own paper suppliers - which it then blames for the rising costs of paper. Neat trick, that.
While getting ready for work this morning (the News Director/morning personality/General Manager/ Sales Rep for a small radio station, Charles Morris School of Journalism etc. came to mind. I think of it periodically but never so intensely as this morning.
So I “Googled” and found a reference and link to you with the notation “now defunct” Charles Morris Price etc. Please fill me in if you can. I graduated from there in 1968. It was a great school and what I learned there has helped me throughout my career even though, after a stint at Chilton Company, I decided to return home. If you could provide information about what happened to the school and when, I would appreciate it.