Below the Fold

Tim Russert: Citizen Journalist

“Feels like the country’s biggest game is about to be played without the referee.” – Elizabeth Wilner, posted on the “Missing Russert” Facebook group.

 

AS MODERN JOURNALISM LAY near death, with its entertainment-driven news, pomp and punditry, Tim Russert was its life support. Now, with Russert gone, we can only wonder how long journalism can go on.

Russert’s ability to hold an entire profession together was never fully noticed or appreciated. But as reporters, broadcasters, colleagues and competitors flooded the airwaves in the hours after Russert’s death from a heart attack, the void left by Buffalo’s favorite son was painfully obvious.

There was Keith Olbermann, the antithesis of objective journalism, talking to his partner in polemics Chris Matthews about Russert’s objectivity and dedication to his craft.

There was Wolf Blitzer and Larry King from CNN, saying all the right things but looking lost, as if without Russert the nation would have to turn its lonely eyes to them for its political coverage – the thought of which scared them to death.

Certainly Russert can never be replaced, but there’s no one left in television news that is even in the same league. It was as if Paul McCartney had died, and the only people left to deliver the eulogies were Miley Cyrus and Right Said Fred.

Olbermann’s tribute was beautiful and heartfelt to be sure, but the real proof of Russert’s impact will come when Olbermann tapes his next edition of “Countdown.” Will he, as Russert did, learn everything he can about his guests’ positions and then take the other side? Will he use his obvious intellect to inform us or just keep us pissed off?

And will Matthews, on his next “Hardball,” let his guests finish a complete sentence? Will he, as Russert did, force politicians to go beyond their well-practiced sound bites?

Will anyone – can anyone – remember Russert through their actions and not their words? Or with Russert’s passing has the plug been pulled on journalism, on objectivity and discourse forever.

I want to say yes to the latter. I want to just give up on a profession that, save for a few serious journalists, gave up on itself a long time ago.

But that wouldn’t befit Tim. This was a Bills fan after all – he was a man who always believed in the next play, the next game, the next season.

Russert was the true definition of a citizen journalist. His questions were ours, and he never forgot for whom he worked. His authenticity, unlike that of so many of his contemporaries, was unimpeachable.

Journalism changed and Russert survived. The question now is whether journalism will survive without the likes of Tim Russert.

Journalism's Next 100 Years

I got a call from the University of Missouri Journalism School, my alma mater, reminding me of the 100th anniversary celebration this year. Founded in 1908, Missouri was the world’s first journalism school and is still regarded as one of the best.

Yet while overall it was a great first hundred years for American journalism, it’s the next 100 I worry about. Or in the prescient phrase uttered by ABC News anchorman Charles Gibson at Pennsylvania’s recent Democratic presidential debate, “the crowd is turning” on how professionals report the news.

History is the art of hindsight, so writing about an event before the ink dries and the digital bits settle is at best unfair. Nevertheless, you don’t need Galileo’s vision to see that the Pennsylvania debate marked another in series of dark turning points for the news business.

The financial pain we’ve known for while – as this year’s State of the News Media study revealed, advertising revenue is still going down, as are pre-tax earnings, profit margins and stock values. Even online newspaper advertising, while up 20 percent in 2007, is growing slower than online advertising as a whole, and is 10 percent lower than last year.

Newspaper owners answered with widespread staff layoffs, leading to less local reporting and therefore fewer readers which – you guessed it – resulted in less revenue. It’s also meant narrower reporting, with issues like Iraq and the presidential elections representing the majority of coverage. And it’s meant an unhealthy attraction to transient stories that are the equivalent of chewing gum, the media smacking its lips long after the gum has lost its taste.

All this came to a head in Pennsylvania. What should have been a debate about the future of the country became a Fox-style reality show about flag lapel pins. And the people responded, with boos in the audience and thousands of comments on ABC’s web site. The media itself became the story – a story prompted by ordinary people now with extraordinary access to the once powerful press.

Last year’s YouTube debates will be remembered for authentic questions about real-life issues from a mosaic of American culture. The ABC debate will be remembered as the day modern journalism died in a cacophony of tabloid-style interrogations, punctuated by the nervous laughter of a once proud newsman, gasping to stay afloat in a sea of discontent.

ABC should have known better. It should have known that news in the next 100 years will be more “service” that product, something that people will look to for intellectual guidance. News is a conversation, or as the BBC’s Richard Sambrook has said, a partnership – and in this sense, ABC failed its partners miserably.

Consider this: When asked about his debate performance, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos said, “The questions we asked…are being debated around the political world every day.” A commenter on ABC’s web site said, “"Some of us actually live in the real world and care much more about real issues like food and gas prices.”

This is where we need to start the next 100 years of American journalism – in the real world. The crowd is turning, indeed.

                           

I got a call from the University of Missouri Journalism School, my alma mater, reminding me of the 100th anniversary celebration this year. Founded in 1908, Missouri was the world’s first journalism school and is still regarded as one of the best.

Yet while overall it was a great first hundred years for American journalism, it’s the next 100 I worry about. Or in the prescient phrase uttered by ABC News anchorman Charles Gibson at Pennsylvania’s recent Democratic presidential debate, “the crowd is turning” on how professionals report the news.

History is the art of hindsight, so writing about an event before the ink dries and the digital bits settle is at best unfair. Nevertheless, you don’t need Galileo’s vision to see that the Pennsylvania debate marked another in series of dark turning points for the news business.

The financial pain we’ve known for while – as this year’s State of the News Media study revealed, advertising revenue is still going down, as are pre-tax earnings, profit margins and stock values. Even online newspaper advertising, while up 20 percent in 2007, is growing slower than online advertising as a whole, and is 10 percent lower than last year.

Newspaper owners answered with widespread staff layoffs, leading to less local reporting and therefore fewer readers which – you guessed it – resulted in less revenue. It’s also meant narrower reporting, with issues like Iraq and the presidential elections representing the majority of coverage. And it’s meant an unhealthy attraction to transient stories that are the equivalent of chewing gum, the media smacking its lips long after the gum has lost its taste.

All this came to a head in Pennsylvania. What should have been a debate about the future of the country became a Fox-style reality show about flag lapel pins. And the people responded, with boos in the audience and thousands of comments on ABC’s web site. The media itself became the story – a story prompted by ordinary people now with extraordinary access to the once powerful press.

Last year’s YouTube debates will be remembered for authentic questions about real-life issues from a mosaic of American culture. The ABC debate will be remembered as the day modern journalism died in a cacophony of tabloid-style interrogations, punctuated by the nervous laughter of a once proud newsman, gasping to stay afloat in a sea of discontent.

ABC should have known better. It should have known that news in the next 100 years will be more “service” that product, something that people will look to for intellectual guidance. News is a conversation, or as the BBC’s Richard Sambrook has said, a partnership – and in this sense, ABC failed its partners miserably.

Consider this: When asked about his debate performance, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos said, “The questions we asked…are being debated around the political world every day.” A commenter on ABC’s web site said, “"Some of us actually live in the real world and care much more about real issues like food and gas prices.”

This is where we need to start the next 100 years of American journalism – in the real world. The crowd is turning, indeed.

                           

Making Newspapers Matter: The Tragic Value of Content

“Hey Gary: After a year of unanswered emails to the editor of the Portland, Maine, Press Herald pleading for better local reporting and editing...I started a blog a month ago…” T.C. Munjoy, Pressing the Herald (http://pressingtheherald.blogspot.com/)

ONE MORE BLOG IN THE WORLD is not the end of traditional journalism. Even the target of Mr. Munjoy’s citizen reporting, the Press Herald of Portland, Maine, will unlikely feel any pain, at least in the short term. But what Mr. Munjoy and countless others have done by starting blogs for the purpose of either enhancing or supplanting local news is nothing less than apocalyptic.

Consider this one simple fact: Mr. Munjoy distributes his product on a platform he uses for free. If he ever decides to charge a fee, it will be for his blog’s content, not its distribution.

And herein lays the Achilles Heel of newspapers: their costs are all in the distribution, not the content. In fact, contrary to what newspaper executives may want you to believe, newspapers have never charged for their content – which is why the newspaper industry is, and for the foreseeable future will be, in serious trouble.

The Big Mistake
Five cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, 50 cents…whatever the cost of your daily paper, that cost goes to pay for the means of distribution. Paper, ink, presses, gasoline, tires, vending machines and so on – all means of distribution. The same goes for advertising – the more ads you can sell, the more pages you can print, the more there is to distribute.

Obviously some of this revenue goes to pay for reporters and editors, but in a purely business sense, the content they produce merely allows the company to distribute a product. And as I said, that’s how newspapers make money, by distributing their product.

This worked fine until the Internet Age. Newspapers made the mistake of looking at the Internet as simply another means of distribution, assuming that people would come to their web sites and read the news, and more importantly read the ads that helped pay for the web servers and Net access fees.

But search trumped any vision of people reading the news only at a newspaper’s web site. Now they could read the news on Google, Yahoo, MSN or via RSS feeds straight to their computer desktops. The new media companies like Google saw value in the content, not the distribution, and traditional newspapers have been trying to catch up ever since.

Some newspapers tried to charge for content, but having not placed any value there before it was difficult to make that case now (there is, however, a legitimate argument over whether news aggregators can publish copyrighted material without permission.) Niche publications did better than mass market ones, but with the free content genie out of the bottle and more and more information available from more and more sources, content itself became commoditized.

As the public turned more selective, news turned more subjective. After all, if you want people to value content, you have to make it stand out. But in trying to save their business model, newspapers have injured journalism.

Where we are Today
Television had its role in this tragedy as well. In the Golden Age of TV news, daily broadcasts were not expected to make money. News was seen as a loss leader, its existence seen as nothing less than fulfilling a sacred public trust.

But television was also a business, and as profits rose from the entertainment side of the house, pressure mounted on the news divisions to earn some of that valuable ad revenue. So television news, because it came into people’s homes for free, looked to its content to attract viewers – to entertain them if not inform.

And this is where we are now, in print, on the airwaves and online – a journalism where placing value on news content means a world of infotainment and hyperbole, of diversion and distraction.

There is plenty of good work to be sure, but how long will it last? How long will newspapers focus efforts on the “paper” part of their monikers instead of the “news” – on supporting an obsolete distribution infrastructure rather than new business models that place value on content that is truly valuable?

We don’t have the answers yet – but like any good journalist, getting to the answers starts with asking the right questions. Let’s hope there are some good journalists left to ask them.

Good luck, Mr. Munjoy. The future of quality journalism may someday turn its lonely eyes to you.

In CNN’s Hands, YouTube Loses its Voice

As a former newspaper reporter, I never had much respect for television news. More style than substance, more sound bite than serious, TV journalism was media junk food. I preferred a good steak and still do.

There were exceptions – Walter Cronkite, Jim Lehrer and, going way back, Ed Murrow (though he served up his share of sugary snacks as well.) And in the early ‘90s, there was a decade-old network called CNN that, with its blog-like first person coverage of the Gulf War, showed that television and journalism could indeed coexist and add reason to public discourse.

But that was, as they say, then – and this, unfortunately for our country and its conscience, is now.

I accepted CNN’s financial need to compete with Fox and MSNBC by taking a side – not conservative like Fox or liberal like MSNBC, but a kind of neo populism characterized by anchor-driven “mad as hell” histrionics. I looked away when the “maddest” of the bunch, Lou Dobbs, made illegal immigration his clarion call.

Then last week, CNN went too far. The network, which hosted the Republican “YouTube Debate,” went from ranting about the election to attempting to rig it.

CNN is no longer a news organization; it is a political action committee. It has gone off the deep end not in search of ratings, but rather in an obsequious bow to Dobbs, his quest for book sales and a possible third-party Presidential bid.

Consider this: the first one-third of the debate centered on immigration, Dobbs one-trick pony, despite national polls showing that only six percent of Americans believe immigration is an important issue in the 2008 election. What are the top issues? Iraq, the economy, healthcare and energy costs. What other topics did CNN producers cull from the 5,000 YouTube submissions? They chose gun control, the Confederate flag and whether the Bible is the true word of God.

I don’t mind the YouTube format – in fact I love its raw sense of immediacy. But don’t for one minute think that the format makes the debate any more real; CNN took care of that, manipulating the event to serve its own puerile purposes.

CNN not only crossed the line, it went into uncharted waters. It used the electoral process, hardly free of abuse itself, to serve its hunger for relevance and ratings. CNN has gone from being an inspiration to journalism to being its enemy – a voice beyond mere bias now bent on Machiavellian power.

Hyperbole? Perhaps. CNN is, after all, just a network – just a business. As I said before, I never had much respect for television news, so maybe I should go eat my steak and shut up. Just sit back, relax and listen -- the news is on.

Looking Ahead: Content is Where You Are

AS BOTH A CHILD OF and practitioner in the modern “we’ve got you surrounded” age of media, nothing should surprise me. I’m used to message bombardment, from traditional sources like television and radio to more non-traditional sources like shopping cart handles, airport security trays and strategically placed tattoos. Even O.J. Simpson getting arrested again isn’t enough to make me blink.

But as the picture here demonstrates, there is always a new way to reach consumers who long ago either tuned out traditional media, or are so inundated by advertising that they tune it all out.

Advertising paradise has been paved and put into a parking lot. It’s as clear as the lines on the asphalt asking us to watch Desperate Housewives on ABC – these are desperate times for television as well.

But this isn’t about TV or anything else being “dead.” It’s about media companies continuing to change and adjust to a modern world that isn’t going away. It’s about embracing people’s busy lives and reaching them where they are, rather than making an appointment and hoping people show up. Unlike its much older media colleague – newspapers – TV is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

ABC has been especially adept at understanding the New Web Order, that your web presence is more important than your web site. As one ABC exec put it, “ABC.com is a platform – and that platform can be distributed anywhere.”

And it is, on mobile phones and iPods (we’re waiting for the inevitable Facebook app, too.) ABC also cracked the code of co-creation, using its Lost message boards to help develop plotlines with the audience.

This is in contrast to NBC’s latest move to remove its shows from Apple’s dominant iTunes store, opting instead to make shows available for free on its web site. The catch? The free shows have commercials while the iTunes shows you pay for are commercial free.

No question NBC’s decision has more to do with money than content distribution. And plenty of people will go to NBC and watch shows for free rather than pay a few dollars not to see car ad after car ad.

I just wonder how long this can last. Ultimately people don’t want to be on your web site, they want to be on their web site, blog, social network, phone, iPod or PDA. The web site is a creature of the ‘90s and is quickly becoming an endangered species, but that’s a topic for another day.

More and more, content today is wherever people are – not where anyone else, including the TV networks, wants them to be.

Intolerance, Not Technology, is Small Newspaper’s Greatest Threat to Survival

"He was trying to teach his two young daughters not to be afraid to buy a newspaper in America." – Peter Katz, Vietnam veteran and small business owner in Little Saigon, Orange County, Calif.

We forget – some of us – that while we lament the decline of news readership or embrace technology and prepare for new roads ahead, that the greatest threat to a free press are people, not computers.

The above example is from an incident not in the Middle East, Russiaor Asia, but in Orange County, Calif., where a small Vietnamese-language weekly paper is fighting for its life. When the above-mentioned man bought a copy from Mr. Katz’s store with his two young children, he had to be escorted back to his car because protesters confronted and berated him.

The Viet Weekly is an alternative news source in a conservative area where freedom of speech is accepted as long as you say the right things.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the weekly is the target of regular protests from demonstrators who accuse the paper of supporting Vietnam’s Communist government and publishing an editorial critical of U.S. foreign policy – in other words, opinions you can find almost every day in any newspaper in America.

Whether the arguments are valid doesn’t matter – nor do the protests, which is also a right protected by the Constitution. What does matter is the growing and disturbing inability for people to accept and respect points of view that diverge from their own.

Perhaps blogs and new media have had some effect. We can funnel our news sources down to content that we already agree with. We don’t need to be bothered with different opinions. We can use e-mail and anonymity as shields for our intolerance.

Yet that logic only goes so far. Someone who watches Fox News, for example, is not going to be swayed by watching CNN or reading the New York Times. People have always surrounded themselves with opinions that make them comfortable; the only difference is now they have a lot more choices.

No, this is about just one thing: Fear.

Why else would the Little Saigon protesters be pressuring local business owners to stop carrying the newspaper? Why are they phoning paper’s landlord telling him to “evict the Communists?” Why are they confronting fathers and kids for the sheer act of buying a newspaper in a free country?

Speaking up and speaking your mind are fine, even honorable – but forcing your beliefs onto others is, well, something Communists would do.

The State of the News Media: True or False?

So here’s where we stand in the world of journalism:

• A fake news organization sends a fake reporter to cover a real war

• A real local television station in Texas hires a fake anchorwoman as part of a reality TV show

• A real American newspaper is bought by an Australian media magnate, who also owns a real American TV news network that reports fake news, as well as a real American newspaper --  though only in the sense that the newspaper is printed on actual paper, and is distributed in America

• That same media magnate also owns another American TV network which broadcasts the aforementioned reality TV show about the fake anchorwoman

• The Canadian Broadcasting Company doesn’t allow it’s real reporters to post real information about themselves on a social networking site

• Google News allows subjects of news stories who feel their quotes were faked to post real corrections, though the corrections are not independently verified as true or false

And people think bloggers are the ones who can’t be trusted?

Media Must Learn to Think Beyond the Medium

Newspaper reporter – those two words, inexorably linked in my consciousness, once formed the basis for my identity.

TV reporters stared into cameras, radio reporters spoke into microphones. I communicated with a keyboard, producing stories that lived in words and only in words. Nothing more was expected of me. Nothing more was possible.

That’s all changed. There are no more newspaper reporters, TV reporters or radio reporters. There are just reporters, period. Journalism has become medium agnostic and story centric. This is good for us, the public, but not so good for some journalists who now must carry a camera as well as a pen.

Journalism today is layered, not linear. This requires a new kind of storytelling, one that presents information in multiple angles and formats.

Free from the constraints of edges and airtime, stories now have endless sidebars. Our news is in three dimensions – a 360-degree narrative that is sometimes shared and altered by people who never went to journalism school or had a byline. And yet that new, altered version of the story exists forever online as news.

News is smaller and moves faster. Journalists don’t tell stories as much as give them life, leaving the telling for others. This is a much different kind of identity, a shift from the medium that you work in to the stories that you work on.

And here lies the challenge for today’s reporter: Forget the infrastructure and focus on the news.

You don’t work for a newspaper; you work in the news business, using any tools at your disposal necessary to do your job. A print reporter may shoot video if that helps tell the story. A TV journalist can write a blog or a radio journalist can post photos to illustrate a story on his podcast.

I witnessed this struggle first hand during a recent “new media” workshop for travel writers. These were print people worried about what cameras to buy, how long a podcast should be and whether they could manage this new approach to storytelling. All they knew for sure was there was no choice but to learn and evolve.

This is not threatening but rather freeing – without conventional constraints, reporters can be more engaging and thorough. It also secures a place for print as a needed piece of the multimedia pie, instead of becoming a faded, stubborn relic screaming for dominance in a media world gone forever flat.

 

Beware the Flying Cars of Progress

"If you invest more in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes. If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money." -- Esther Thorson, Director of Research, Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, which for me is especially disturbing since I only post a few times a month anyway. This would be worse, of course, if I actually had readers – so no harm, no foul.

Nevertheless, the guilt of these blogless days weighed heavy upon my soul. So many stories have come and gone, passing me by faster than Sanjaya Malakar’s fame. Yet the demands of Powerpoint presentations, conference calls, travel and listening to Gomes go on and on about Linux left no time for me to add another grain of digital sand on the endless of beach of Person Created Content (PCP for short – hmmm, on second thought, that’s perhaps not the best acronym.)

I thought about writing a long essay about the future of journalism, or a 140 character Haiku about Twitter, or a witty satire about a social media something. But the first option would take too long, the second required too much creativity, and the last almost certainly would have been taken too seriously by Shel Holtz. In the end, I decided to write about flying cars.

When my sister was young – a long, long, long time ago – a teacher told her that by time she was old enough to drive, everyone would have a flying car. She did get a Ford Cobra II, but every time she tried to fly the California Highway Patrol brought her back to Earth.

I heard the same thing when I was young, but my Chevy Cavalier often never moved, much less flew. And just the other day, a friend’s eight-year-old daughter echoed the generational promise: “When I get older, everyone will have a flying car.”

There’s nothing wrong with dreams – but if your head is always in the clouds it become hard to see the way forward. Put another way, I’m all for chasing the next new thing, whether it’s viral video, micro blogging, widget mania or any number of technological advances that are the “flying cars” of the social media age. But none of these tools replace the need for intelligent storytelling, critical thinking or core communications skills.

For example, in many newsrooms today, reporters are now required to shoot video or maintain blogs as part of their reporting duties. Yet shooting video alone doesn’t necessarily make for better journalism. In fact, a study out of the University of Missouri shows that investing in well-trained journalists increases newspaper circulation – I’m not sure the same would be true for investing in DV cams.

So beware the flying cars of progress. Don’t let the promises of the future betray your responsibilities to the present. Technology can’t help you if you don’t have anything to say.

Journalism’s Sleeping Giant Wakes Up to the Web – Finally

"As a news organization, we are not Web-savvy. If anything, we are Web-stupid." – excerpt from L.A. Times internal committee report.

DRIVING IN LOS ANGELES is as much an exercise in patience as it is a windshield-eye view on a Third World. Every turn brings a dichotomy of culture, every street a display of economic stratification, and every stoplight a glimmer of hope for a way forward, or a way out.

Yet within the diversity – amidst the multi-everything and everywhere and everyone – there is order. There is purpose. There are people with more in common than they realize. And it is this sameness that makes L.A. hum, that allows this Third World on the edge of the continent to survive.

So, why does this matter in the world of media? What makes Los Angeles special?

Simple: If a newspaper reflects the community it covers, then the Los Angeles Times is the ultimate mirror (no pun intended toward the Times’ former owner, the Times-Mirror Company.)

The Times is as fractious and fragile as L.A. itself, as diverse and as divided. Layoffs, careless leadership, and ignorance of new horizontal media structures left The Times in the journalism Dark Ages. While other papers braced for battle and embraced the future, The Times cowered in its Spring Street cave like an injured animal.

Nevertheless, year after year The Times managed to instill hope in the face of little else. And now, finally, this Rip Van Winkle of print journalism is waking up.

Times Editor James E. O'Shea announced that the paper will – like the New York Times and so many others – combine its print and online news operations. There will be one newspaper, with the online enterprise in the pole position.

Of course, by now, this is more “dog bites man” than newsworthy. The Times is late to the party, and who’s to say either continued financial pressure from Tribune ownership in Chicago or a new ownership group won’t force this intrepid journey into more troubled waters. The Times has tried rearranging its deck chairs before, only to sink further.

The difference now, however, is the coming tide of journalistic change is raising all boats. After all, this is not a course The Times decided to take, but rather a decision it had to make.

As part of the move to web-centric journalism, O’Shea said all reporters would take an “Internet 101” course to teach them how to be “savvy multimedia journalists” and improve their response to breaking news. Business Editor Russ Stanton will be the paper’s first “innovation” editor, charged with molding the editorial staff into podcasters and videographers (disclaimer: I know Russ from my reporting days, and I have no doubt he will do a great job.)

WHETHER THIS SHIFT WILL give reporters more job security and help bring The Times into the 21st Century is a question we will see answered in public – or as the tired cliché goes, in “real time” (as opposed to what, fake time?) We will see the triumphs and the failures, the true innovations and, I hope, the leadership I expect from a newspaper that needs to convince itself there are more days ahead than behind.

Don’t forget, this is still Los Angeles – the place where dreams and determination dance on the boundary between myth and reality. In such a place, it’s easy for a newspaper to believe it can catch up and even lead.

To this I say good luck – and look out. In Los Angeles, the Third World is always just around the corner.