Below the Fold

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.

Every Journalist Should Try Blogging -- That Goes for PR, Too

Via Leonard Witt, read the following passage from an interview with Howard Owens, the Director of Digital Publishing at Gatehouse Media, owner of more than 400 community newspapers (empahsis added):

Every student journalist should spend at least six months totally immersed in blogging. Start a blog and try to draw an audience. Do the things that bloggers need to do, read other blogs, create a blog roll, link to other blogs, post frequently on topics relevant to the audience you're trying to reach (and read those blogs in that category), comment on other blogs. Learn to be a participant. That's my advice to pro journalists, too: if you want to learn this culture, become a participant in it. It will totally change the way you think about media and online publishing.

I couldn’t agree more – and I would add that public relations and other professional communicators do the same, especially students. While it’s certainly possible to do media relations without having worked as a journalist, I believe it’s far more difficult to engage with the blogosphere and “learn the culture,” as Owens says, without experiencing it firsthand.

Newspapers Need New Role Models

Newspapers – online as well as in print – look too much toward television as their savior. Many papers today embrace technology instead of story, catering to the national short-attention pandemic through videos, flashy graphics and slide shows. Newspapers are in a sprint when they should be running a marathon, a race in which endurance and fortitude are most valued.

Yes, newspapers need to change – but they need to stop remaking themselves in television’s image. Instead, they should look at magazines and the community weekly as their role models.

Magazines typically cater to smaller but enthusiastic or dedicated audiences (the national news weeklies, which have their own problems, are catering to smaller audiences than they would like.) Weeklies – the ones that are still independent, not those that are part of bigger chains – have reporters on the ground. They know the community, live in the community and are part of the community. They cover the news you can’t get online or in your Google Alerts.

Interactivity, social tools and multimedia are now staples at most major papers. And they should be – moreover, the lessons of online engagement and influence of a media created by the masses, rather than a media created for the masses, must permeate today’s newsrooms and course through journalism’s 21^st Century veins.

But while these advances are essential to the industry’s survival, there is more to flying above the clouds than putting on new wings. Remember what happened to Icarus when he ignored his father and flew too close to the sun.

Newspapers need to fight the battles they can win. This means getting niche and local, like magazines and weeklies. It means letting your online product be the “AM” edition, with the latest breaking news, and letting your print version be the “PM” edition, with the context, analysis and opinion readers can’t get anywhere else. And it means getting back to telling stories that matter, stories that engage and involve audiences.

In today’s age of the ever-shrinking news hole, words are a precious commodity. Newspapers need to make every word count.

Social Media Tools and Modern Technology Only Tell Part of the Story

The Riverside Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., requires its entry-level reporters to shoot video of their stories in addition to the written versions. The directive is optional for older or more established reporters, but the message is clear: Get with the future or get out.

There is some truth and I’m sure even noble purpose to this obvious attempt to remain relevant. And the Press-Enterprise is hardly alone – these are trying times for the soul of newspapers everywhere, and 2007 will be different only in terms of magnitude.

Newspapers are not dead; the traditional newspaper is. But technology itself is not enough to resuscitate the dying patient that is today’s printed press.

What newspapers lack is not video or blogs, podcasts or RSS feeds, avatars or consumer/citizen/user/customer/whoever-generated content. Newspapers no longer tell us stories – especially those stories we need to hear.

We get snippets, digests and broad strokes. We get opinion without context, commentary without research and sound bite upon sound bite upon sound bite. Like almost every other form of media, the newspaper has been “Tivoed” and revamped to address our mass cultural Attention Deficit Disorder, so much so that we know more about Tom and Katie than Shiite and Sunni (and care more about the former as well.)

Nevertheless, there is still a thirst for story that newspapers can quench. While the Internet version of news excels at the short pass, the print version needs to go long with stories that awaken people’s emotions, not their modems. In fact, this approach is not just for print but for the online newspaper as well. With an unlimited amount of space, there is plenty of room for good storytelling.

And yes, these stories, when warranted or possible, will need to include video and graphics, and audience engagement via commenting and other social media norms, among other things. All media is multimedia, and that goes for newspapers, too.

But rather than shoot video for video’s sake, tomorrow’s journalists need to learn how to be visual and audio storytellers. Just using the technology doesn’t make you relevant or hip – you can shoot all the video you want, but if it doesn’t tell a story, then you are wasting the audience’s time.

When I was in journalism school I had to choose whether to study print or broadcast journalism. But today there are no print journalists, TV journalists, radio journalists or Internet journalists. There are just journalists reporting across all mediums, in all forms, and in real time. The main universal thread is story, which should be every journalism student’s major and every professional’s focus.

This is where we are headed in 2007 – a world without a mass media, without a common tongue to tell our human tales. What we have instead is a world with many mediums, affording countless opportunities to reach more people in more ways than ever before.

This is our great challenge as communicators – and our greatest hope for a meaningful future.

Newspapers’ Civil Wars

Newspapers in Los Angeles, like newspapers in most other large U.S. cities, once measured themselves against their competition. Getting a “scoop” was the journalistic equivalent of a knockout in boxing. And news – at least within the newsroom – was sport as much as anything else. Being first mattered as much as being right, and if you couldn’t be sure of the latter then the former would almost always suffice.

Newspapers were at war with each other. They fought with massive presses and ink barrels. They enlisted young recruits hungry for battle and invested time and resources to get to the top and then stay there.

Today, for the most part, the competition wars are over. Cities like Los Angeles are now one-newspaper towns. Today newspapers fight not for supremacy, but for survival. They are still at war – but this time, the fighting is internal.

Individual newspapers are embroiled in their own civil wars, pitting reporters against management and shareholders against owners. The community is caught in perpetual crossfire from drive-by decision making such as staff reductions, content overhauls and consolidation. Newspapers are killing themselves and they don’t seem to care if they take the rest of us down with them.

Technology is part of the equation – we are living through unprecedented change and we must expect and even welcome transition, especially when it comes to us via transformation and a public’s desire for participation. But for newspapers to blame technology for all their problems is like blaming cell phones for causing you to rear-end someone on the freeway. The issue is not with the technology but with how you choose to use it, and in this regard newspapers, with some notable exceptions like the Washington Post and the Houston Chronicle, have failed.

I’m all for private local ownership, especially here in Southern California, where the Los Angeles Times has become a symbol of all that’s wrong with the newspaper business – editors fighting with owners (and losing), staff fighting with editors and an online presence with neither strategy nor soul. But I’m not sure private local ownership alone will stem the tide of red ink. What the Times needs is competition, not from the Internet or television, but from other local newspapers.

This, of course, will likely never happen. The current civil war at the Los Angeles Times is mere denouement to a Newspaper Age that is all but over.  Newspapers, I believe, will always be with us in some form, but there will not be any new print-on-paper publications launching, at least in the United States. Reporters would be crazy to work for them and investors would be even crazier to fund them.

So instead, we are left with countless civil wars that stand to leave communities and the papers that serve them in shards. I used to read the Times as if I were looking out a window to the world – now, I am looking at a ghost, a casualty from self-inflicted wounds, and a painful harbinger of what is yet to come.

Plenty of Shame to Go Around in Latest O.J. Simpson Drama

(Note: see update below about Fox's decision to pull the O.J. program.)

In 1994, I wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in which I said O.J. Simpson would not get the death penalty because he was rich – and rich people, especially rich celebrities, don’t get executed.

Turns out I was right. Nevertheless, while O.J. didn’t go to Death Row, I was shocked he wasn’t convicted. So, apparently, were millions of Americans and others around the world. Perhaps no one was more surprised at the outcome than The Juice himself.

Guilt weighs heavy on the human heart – the greater the guilt, the greater the weight. For more than 12 years, O.J Simpson has carried an anvil on his chest, which is why I believe he wrote the book that everyone is talking about.

But O.J., remember, is a celebrity, and celebrities confess in public. And celebrities can’t confess in public if they don’t have the cooperation of the news media -- if the confession comes during a ratings sweeps period, as O.J.’s does, all the better. Fox was more than happy to oblige, and is planning to air a two-part “interview” with O.J. and his publisher, Judith Regan, later this month.

Whether this is journalism is not worth debating – obviously it’s not. The issue is whether Fox should air this blatant publicity grab from a man whose lack of respect for the dead, for the victims’ families, and for his own children is self evident.

Nine Fox affiliates have decided not to air the shows (though most of the 200 company-owned stations will.) Some booksellers have refused to carry the title, while others say they will donate all profits to charity. I applaud them.

But I think Fox should air the program if it chooses. It’s sick, it’s stupid, and it’s insulting, but it’s also Fox’s right. The only censorship should come in the form or our actions – in other words, the public should turn away and not watch.

That’s the best way to hurt Fox. Protests and complaints only give more exposure to the show. What Fox needs to see is that the public has finally had enough of the "news-entertainment complex."

Will it happen? Of course not – we like train wrecks, especially when celebrity and murder is involved. We created Fox and now they are giving us what we asked for.

It’s not just Fox that’s to blame, either. Say “O.J.” to a journalist and the mouth starts to water in a Pavlovian frenzy. Larry King, CBS News, the New York Times and all the rest see O.J. as the Holy Grail of reader and viewership – and time after time we oblige.

Shame on O.J., shame on Fox – and shame on us.

A final, personal note: In my former life I interviewed dozens of murderers. I got to know several of them, and through our talks discovered the difference between sadistic and sad.

I never interviewed O.J. personally but I can tell you this – he is both.

UPDATE: News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch announced Monday that it has cancelled the O.J. book and television special (the book publisher is an imprint owned by News Corp., which also owns Fox.) “I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” Murdoch said. “We are sorry for any pain that his has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson."