Newspaper Days
Good news. The Newspaper Association of America is holding its career day Oct. 6, and will give publishers around the country a chance to highlight "the many career opportunities available in the industry."
"This is a time of dramatic change in the media," says John F. Sturm, the group's president and CEO with no apparent drang, "and a very exciting time to work in the newspaper industry."
This comes as a welcome tonic here at The Inquirer and The Daily News, where just Tuesday we learned the company seeks to trim the two newsrooms by 100 positions, or about 16 percent. Same day the New York Times announced it would cut 500 positions across its properties, including 45 journo jobs at the flagship and another 35 at The Boston Globe.
And the reaction in the blogosphere, which often plants its sword in the mainstream media's sagging flanks?
Surprisingly wistful.
Well, not all wistful. "PNI To Chop 100 From Staff; Dead Weight Sure to Remain," is how Philebrity headlined its post.
Others , like Phillyist, got in their digs.
But in a piece titled "Black Tuesday," Karl Martino at Philly Future ladled a little blogger love on the ole MSM, digging through the archives to post prescient words from Dan Gillmor, the former San Jose Mercury News columnist who has launched a citizen's journalism project around San Francisco called Bayosphere, and Jay Rosen, an NYU journalism professor who blogs at Press Think.
First Gillmor predicted that : ...if newspaper companies don't start working right now ... profits will dwindle to a point where Wall Street demands higher profits (or kills the stock price, making even a good newspaper company vulnerable to takeover by one of the real sharks out there). This will set off a death spiral of firing staff, losing readers and advertisers, firing more staff and so on. It will not be a slow process once it starts.
Now Rosen:
...getting newspaper journalism across the divide means a big investment now in the Net and its emerging forms. It requires a wave of Research & Development. It means re-training your people, and taking on "newsroom cultures that discourage innovation, don't reward risk-taking and drive out many of the best and brightest younger journalists, all of whom entered the profession aware of the paltry pay scale." (The quotation is from Tim Porter, who writes First Draft and used to edit the San Francisco Examiner.)
At Classical Values, right-of-left blogger and lawyer Eric Scheie pays the Inquirer some respect, and not even begrudgingly.
While I often disagree with its editorial views, I'm sorry to see the Inquirer falling on hard times. I can't speak for "the Internet," but I have been a much more avid reader of the Inquirer since I took up blogging, and I couldn't estimate the number of times I've linked to their stories. It's provided regular fuel for this blog. Much to the Inquirer's credit, it has been a very blog-friendly newspaper. Not only does it run a regular column about blogs called "Blog Cabin" but the Inquirer has its own blog called Blinq. (I've been linked by both, and that's despite the fact that my political philosophy is poles apart from the editorial staff.)
He goes on to dispel any thinking that the burgeoning blog world can claim newspapers as a pelt.
In the case of the Inquirer I don't think their problems have much to do with parasitic bloggers (like me, I guess) nit-picking stories to death. If anything, blogger attention would be good for business. Not that anything I'd write would cause many people to run right out and buy a copy the Inquirer, but it wouldn't cause them to cancel their subscriptions, either. Reading and linking to a daily newspaper is a good way to keep informed, and I'd like to think that the more blogs talk about a paper, the more attention is paid to it, and the more sales would improve. (Obviously, the bigger the blog, the more attention the paper gets.) Furthermore, there are now at least as many bloggers who'd agree with the Inquirer's editorial philosophy as who'd oppose it, and thus blog discussions would drive sales from "friendly" readers as well as readers best categorized as "critical."
His bottom line:
Even if the blogosphere consisted entirely of raving right wing news parasites, it is not in the interest of any parasite to have its host die....
I'm somewhat guilty of being a parasite of the newspapers, but I'm still glad they're there. The loss of them would represent a loss -- not a transformation -- of culture. (Dare I speak of "death"?)
This isn't a left wing/right wing issue, nor is it a newspapers-versus-the-blogosphere issue. I think it's a national shame.
I wish there was something I could do to help.
Back to Philebrity. The cyber-pea-shooter aims at the real impact of sending 100 newsies into the real world - a glut of unemployed bloggers.
Some of the Typepad urls he believes will be taken include my favorite:
whatisablogandwhydontihaveajobanymore.com
Inquirer reader Aaron Finestone shows about as much sympathy. Weekday mornings, he buys an Inquirer at Broad and Erie, scans obits, devours the Thursday food section, then attacks the freebie sheets. He goes without weekend papers. On his Babaganouj blog he writes:
I have come to rely on the wealth of news on the Internet. On a typical day, I browse online through the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, PoliticsPA, Los Angeles Times, Drudge, Jewish World Review and the CBC. I get all the liberal and conservative comment I want. Why waste trees?
Compare that take with that of Frank Bell at From Pine View Farm, who blames readers, not papers.
The bleeding started long ago. It's people who don't read. Some of whom don't read at all. And, in some kind of wierd turnabout, these same people will believe anything they see at a website, but refuse to believe anything they see in the paper.
I'm gratified that my son, from time to time, picks up the paper. But, when I grew up, the Paper was not an option; it was a necessity.
You read your local paper every day. No question.
I'm not going to theorize why. There are lots of theorist out there. But it is distressing that MacNews is beating out steak and eggs.
Let's give Gillmor the last word. While he writes of the pain felt watching his old business "commit slow suicide," as he puts it, he doesn't pine for newspapers themselves; he's unsentimental enough to realize that another business model will emerge.
There will be a serious loss to society if daily newspapers -- or at least the community watchdog function they still fulfill, despite their well-chronicled flaws -- were to disappear or be disrupted while a new business model emerges. I don't know if we need newspapers (though I still read them avidly). We damn well need what newspapers do.
Amen.
I only subscribe to the Sunday Inq. b/c of the coupons. I find most of the analysis and editorials to inane and unoriginal. It has nothing to do with being left-of-center. In regards to news, it offers me very little that I haven't received a thousand times over in the daily news cycle for free. If you could do micro-payments for an article (sports analysis from Bill Conlin for instance) I would gladly pay a cent or two for an article. I will not pay a ton of money for a few articles I want to read. If that's the case, Bill Conlin should start his own website and rake in the money. Craigslist and things along those lines have really hurt your revenue streams on top of that. You guys have a big problem on your hands. I wish you well.
Celebrating the demise of the two PNI papers (The White one and the Black and Blue one) is just too easy,..kinda like shooting fish in a barrel. That said,...Michael Smerconish lost a few points with me over this story, bemoaning the loss of the Inkwaster's investigative journalism. WHAT investigative journalism?? Heaven forbid the (st)Inky investigated some of the people at City Hall. That would be the old "one finger pointing at them is four pointing at you" scenario. That is to say, the PNI papers endorsed these Democratic losers, and got caught with their pants down again. The (potential) loss of either paper should be a wake-up call to Knight-Ridder to start pulling your birdcage liners back towards the middle again.
The day after the debut of TimesSelect, The New York Times announced that it would cut 500 jobs from its papers, including 45 newsroom jobs at the NYT, and 35 at The Boston Globe. This news followed an announcement in Philadelphia of a buyout plan th...