The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
Thomas Jefferson
Letter to Edward Carrington
January 16, 1787
What I didn't say, being discreet before my eager and innocent audiences, was that there will always be journalists because there will always be jerks out there who must be irritated as part of nature's plan. Moreover, all humanity will be reduced if rumpled, soup-stained persons armed with adjectives aren't running the ridges in pursuit of facts to wake up the public in this age of amnesia.
Reg Henry
Deseret Morning News
Newspapers may fold, but the profession won't die
April 30, 2007
A year and a half ago we published this Robyn Blumner article: "A chilling vision of a world without newspapers". Ms. Blumner's article did not paint a rosy picture for the traditional print media, in our "modern" age of lagging hard-copy subscriptions, bean counter-driven content, and general broadcast/cable media shallowness.
This morning's Reg Henry Deseret News Op-Ed piece (via the Pittsburg Post-Gazette) is decidedly more optimistic, from the viewpoint of the journalistic profession, at least.
The worry I shared ..., as one who loves newspapers and whose father was a war correspondent with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, is that the economics of the newspaper industry no longer work. Just this week brought news that the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times are reducing their staffs.Your ever-humble blogmeister of course does not consider himself to be a "member of the jerk community and assorted bloggers (who) cheer for the death of newspapers." As a matter of fact, we admit we are highly dependant upon our local newspapers' usually competent news reporting and editorial opinions for our ongoing blog discussions. Moreover, we number ourself among the ancient and dwindling demographic for whom wandering out onto the front porch (or thereabouts) to retrieve our Standard-Examiner hard-copy edition in the pre-dawn hours is an important daily ritual.
Across the nation, newspapers are becoming leaner. But as this process unfolds, they are converting their brand names into reliable and professional information centers on the Internet highway. This is the hope, anyway.
And to our younger readers we say this: Why not spring for a subscription to your local newspaper? A Std-Ex daily subscription is only eleven-and-a-half bucks. Internet-addicted readers of course receive free access to the excellent "Digital Edition" Std-Ex version, along with their home-delivered print edition. Frankly, we can't think of a greater bargain.
Have at it, gentle readers. Who else wants to help our beloved home-town newspaper "convert its brand name into a reliable, professional" (and profitable) "information center on the Internet highway"... at the very least?
And NO! Don Porter did not put us up to this.
Update 5/1/07 8:02 a.m. MT: Don't miss yesterday's timely and on-topic SLTrib op-ed piece by Greg Palast, (via the LA Times): U.S. media haven't the will to dig deep.
Update 5/5/07 10:38 a.m. MT: The Std-Ex toots its own horn this morning with this story, which also clarifies the strategy re its excellent Digital Edition paid site.
24 comments:
The fee for the Standard is worth the price of the crossword puzzles alone.
And the Grondahl cartoons are the best in the country. Saal cracks me up at times and Trentleman is doing better and better columns.
" Personally, I like bold sincerity in communications, even if I disagree with the message. For that reason, I love the editorials in The Wall Street Journal, because they read like they have been dictated by a bunch of businessmen standing on a street corner outside a merchant bank, swinging their briefcases and yelling "Nyaah, nyahh" at the passing parade. Long may they survive."
Loved it!
I am an SE subscriber and an avid reader of the national press, as well. My complaint with both (often mentioned re: the SE and its coverage of City Hall) is that neither seems to do a good of job of INVESTIGATING. The point of having newspapers is not to tell the people what their government wants them to hear, but rather to investigate what government is doing and report that to the people. Too often the SE is Godfrey's mouthpiece, just as the national press is the mouthpiece of Presidents - simply reporting what is said, not investigatig if what is said is actually valid.
Jeeze Rudy, why don't you just give your readers a link to the DNews and Tribune web sites, along with the address of the Suits of Sandusky. Then we can get the real Ogden news presented in an unbiased and competent manner, and the Suits can get the money directly without having to pay that numb skull Schlepke?
Porter's editorials are sometime very good, and some time they just stink.
Trentelman is always great, same with Grondahl.
The rest of them are just a bunch of so so Obit writers.
Not to mention that daily papers are, sometimes, packed with absolutely hilarious stuff to read. For example, this from Utah's Daily Herald. [Is that the Provo paper?]
No way the writers for the Daily Show could compete with that.
As for those who are so down on the SE's less-than-stellar current record in investigative reporting --- in not having a corps of soup-stained disheveled reporters grubbing around the underside of Ogden and Weber County government and public affairs --- well, I'd say just recall that old story about the inveterate gambler who arrived in a new town late one afternoon. He asked the bellhop in his hotel where he could find a high stakes poker game in town, and was told there was one, back of the bar on Main Street, but, the bell hop added, "the game is fixed. The dealer for the house cheats."
And so the bellhop was surprised later that night when he got off to find the gambler heading through the bar to the back room where the poker game was. He asked the gambler why, since he knew the game was fixed. And the gambler replied: "I know it's a crooked game, but it's the only game in town."
However unhappy you may be with the SE, it's the only game in town. It is, like it or not, for better or for worse, Ogden's home town paper. It's what we have. And to keep up on Ogden affairs day by day, it's a must read.
Thanks, Curm, for the delightful link to the Provo Herald.
I always enjoyed that paper when I lived in UT County.
My gosh....that sure ain't the Republican Party I knew twenty years ago!
But, I have to applaud the P.H. for quoting all that nonsense, even though I cringed, and KNEW Curm was enjoying it waaaay too much!
It was downright em bar a sin!
I'll donate a cup of soup if that will encourage Schwebke to snoop after spilling the soup.
Not entirely un-related to the Herald piece linked above is an op-ed piece in today's SE [link here ] by Steve Olsen. He was the Democratic candidate for the first congressional district [running against Bobble Head Rob Bishop], and is now the Vice-Chair of the Weber County Democrats.
Makes a nice contrast I thought with the rabid rantings of the Utah County Republican convention. I don't entirely agree with all Mr. Olsen has to say in the essay, but it's a reasoned argument and one that he and I can discuss on the merits --- that in fact anyone can discuss with him on the merits --- and is a good example of what public debate on public issues ought to look like [regardless of which particular point you are arguing]. SE op - ed pages not infrequently carry essays like Olsen's [from both sides of the political divide].
Sadly, of course, sometimes the SE runs an arrogant factless screed as well. The SE board does not serve its readers well when it does that.Happily, it doesn't do it often.
What is just as bad as not having a local new paper is one that is a puppet for the local politicians. If the local news paper is having finical problems they need to look at the root of the problem of why the readers are not reading the paper. It is because there is a corruption that is general knowledge that is failed to be reported, or failed to prosecute. It has once been said why is the local newspaper like a religion? The answer is “To give comfort to the disturbed and to disturbed the comfortable”. It is also very interesting that when you go to small towns they have small town papers which are read faithfully by the local residents and you very rarely hear of those news papers ever having finical troubles.
If the Standard Examiner is having finical troubles they themselves need to look at themselves and figure out why they are having the problem. If they have become too blinded to the point they still cannot figure it out then it is time for them to bring in a proficiency expert to help open their eyes so they can see and understand what they are doing wrong.
Council Agenda Items for Tonight's meeting:
Just a heads up for those who may be interested. The following items are on the agenda for tonight's council meeting and following work session:
From the Common Consent Agenda:
d. Mixed Use Development Zone. Proposed Ordinance 2007-17 amending Section 15-3-1 to establish a Mixed Use Zone (MU); and amending Title 15 by adopting a new Chapter 39 applicable to Mixed Use Zoning. (Adopt ordinance)
From the regular business agenda:
8. Administration Reports:
a. Fiscal Year 2008 Proposed City Budget. Presentation of the Ogden City Fiscal Year 2008 Proposed Budget.
And the following reminder appears on the Council's agenda, following "Adjournment" on the agenda:
REMINDER: THERE WILL BE A WORK SESSION IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE REGULAR COUNCIL MEETING TO DISCUSS THE PROPOSED FY 2008 BUDGET AND COUNCIL BUSINESS.
Concern:
I don't have more recent info than a year ago, but the SE people told me then that the SE was one of the few dailies in the US with rising circulation rather than falling circulation. Another thing to keep in mind is that most of the SE's circulation and readership comes not from within Ogden City, but from Davis County and Weber County outside the city limits. This necessarily affects the kind of coverage the paper does. I imagine the mix of news would be substantially different if the SE drew the major portion of its circulation from within the city limits.
That said, I agree the SE has often fallen down on the job when it comes to investigative muckraking journalism. [It was Republican president Teddy Roosevelt who, I think, gave journalists the title of "muckrakers." He meant it I'm pretty sure as criticsim, but it's since become an acolade. David Halberstam, for example, was a muckraker of the highest order. "We, the people" will miss him and his work.]
The SE's major investigative piece this morning, on the front page, about meth on the Wind River Reservation, is an AP wire-service story, for example. It was not done by a soup-stained disheveled SE reporter digging up stories on his [or her] own.
I don't have current info, but
I wish the paper did more digging, and fell closer in the older tradition of many papers [though not all or even most; older papers were often in the pocket --- literally and figuratively --- of urban bosses and poltical machines] who saw it as their role, a matter of public service, to question all statements by those in power, to check their claims against the evidence, and to highlight claims that were not sustainable on the evidence. It's that role the SE seems, too often, to have walked away from in favor of happy-news and feel-good feature stories. Nothing whatever wrong with such stories. I've enjoyed many of them myself over the years. But a paper top heavy on fuzzy-bunny stories, and a day late and a dollar short a lot of the time on investigative journalism [especially involving government and public officials] is not meeting its responsibilities to the public... also known as its readers... as it should.
The Deseret news has a timely story on that issue this morning, Curm.
The Std-Ex's circulation is reportedly up 2%.
Rudy:
Thanks. I don't read the DN every day and hadn't seen the story.
Good news for Utah papers, most of which seem on the uptick [SL Trib excepted.] But down in the article I came across this chilling comment from one of the forth estate's national association gurus:
"The challenge for newspapers is being able to monetize those audiences," Kimball said. "And that's really what Wall Street seems to be looking for from the newspaper community."
Ah, I can see it now. We pop into our time machine, and go back to eavesdrop on, say, William Allen White, legendary Republican newspaper editor of Kansas [and author of one of the most famous editorials in American press history, "What's the Matter with Kansas?] Can't you just see him, hunched over a typewriter, agonizing over how to "monitize" his "audience."
Jaysus, what have we come to when editors spend their times worrying about "monitizing" their "audience" instead of informing their readers?
Some council meetings ago, Mr. Schwebke accused me of watching too many re-runs of "The Front Page." I suspect he's right. But then Ben Hecht's characters didn't spend a lot of time worrying about montizing their audience. And neither, I suspect, did he.
Rudi:
The more I chew over that "monetize" their "audience" quote, the more it bugs me. Audiences are thing that go to movies and shows. What you want to do with audiences, your primary goal [if you want to succeed] is to entertain them. What you want to do with newspaper readers, your primary goal if you want to succeed as a newspaper, is to inform them.
You'd think that someone in the mullet-wrapper business would understand the importance of language, of words, and understand how they shape perceptions. [Any successful elected politico knows that if you can shape the debate by getting the press and public to use your terms to describe that debate, you're more than halfway home to victory.] Seems to me if you are a newspaper editor and you begin thinking of your readers as an "audience," you're more or less inevitably going to start thinking your primary job is to entertain them. And once you start down that road, you're not editing a paper anymore, you doing a daily local edition of People magaine.
Or worse.
Monitize our audience.
Jaysus....
Exactly right, Curm.
American print media are being transformed from the Fourth Estate to the the Entertainment Estate... or the Spinmeister Estate, as Reg Henry might possibly put it...
The bottom line is that the news paper industry has always had a big part of it about the bottom line.
As long as there have been newspapers, there have been news paper wars - for readers which equal money!
Traditionally the money making side has been isolated from the news and editorial side. Although in reality they have always conflicted and cooperated with each other.
Just like any other "intertainment" game, (and yes newspapers have always had that as one of their main functions) the great news paper people learned that the talent and quality of their product is the cornerstone to big financial success. So they went for the best reporters and editors they could find. Once you had them they get out of their way and let them ply their craft and "inform" the people in the great news man traditions.
Now the newspapers are in their declining years and the bean counters are scrambling for ways to "Monetize" their dwindling audience. Once the bean counters replace the news paper barons it promotes the decline of the end product. They hire as cheaply as they can, thus explaining our so called local reporter and others in our local paper. Cheap hired help usually gives you cheap product. Not too complicated of an idea!
The movie and TV business has learned this lesson on numerous occasions. Once the bean counters take over the front office and start making creative decisions, the movies go to hell and the audience leaves for better shows. It is very cyclic thing in the "entertainment" game, or any business with lots of money flowing.
So monetizing the readership isn't anything new. Maybe the word, but not the reality.
Oz:
Well, of course newspapers are supposed to be money making operations. [Except maybe for the Christian Science Monitor, and even its resources are now running out.] But there have always been distinctions, as you note, between the good ones, which competed for readers on quality, and the rags, which competed for readers with schlock [all togerther now, say New York Post and San Antonio Light.]
We all know about Hurst and Pulitzer and the Yellow Press. Which one was it that supposedly made the quip to a photog he was sending to Cuba before the battleship Maine blue up, to "cover the war." And the photog asked him "what war?" And he supposedly replied: "You supply the pictures. I'll supply the war." [Though whichever one it was claimed the story was apocryphal.] We're always going to have Hursts and Pulitzers and Murdochs with us as long as a buck is a buck.
So to some extent I share your lament about the bean counters now driving the content to [I'd say] an extent they did not in the fifties. Look what's happened, e.g. to CBS News. The News Division's independence has been long dead. It's run as an entertainment division [by bean counters] now. Hell, look who just became managing editor of the Deseret News --- a guy with so far as I understand it, exactly zero newspaper experience.
But there have also been, in the darkest of press times, good editors, good papers, good reporters. And I figure there is no reason Ogden can't have the best possible small city regional paper between the coasts. No. Reason. And, as you note, if the paper ties to compete with E! and People, it won't much be a newspaper. It'll be [god help us], The New York Post West.
Then of course there's the crime [and it is a crime] of thinking that "monetize" is verb. It is so only to the tin-eared and the badly brought up. That someone in the mullet-wrapper business thinks it's a word suitable for use in civilized company is appalling.
Case in point: tonight's ABC evening news with Charles Gibson omitted all coverage of today's events in Iraq so they could focus on Ronald Reagan's diaries.
This country is in denial.
Nice catch, schnozz....
As an example of why we ought to take the health of the daily press as a serious matter of public interest, I offer this from Jimmy Madison, reputed to have played some significant role in the founding of the American republic:
A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.
– James Madison in a letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822
Somehow, I don't think Glen Beck and his ilk is what he had in mind....
And what is CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS contributing to stave off "Tragedy"?
Don't let your pitiful allegiance to the Democrats continue to make a fool of you.
An intelligent person can easliy discern the undermining of American values, our standing in
the world, and the demoralization of our soldiers by this disgrace of a party.
We all know that smoking kills. A person acts on that knowledge to preserve his health, or not.
Any person of even average intelligence can see that the Democrats in Congress and their rabid moneyed supporters are not only ruining the Democratic party, but are hell bent on ruining this country.
You can continue to defend them, but it makes you look mighty foolish.
Any Republican who criticizes someone else's party for having "moneyed supporters" is not to be taken seriously. And anyone [either party or none] who thinks those who disagree with him about policy are "hell bent on ruining the country" is not someone, seems to me, interested in taking part in a reasoned discussion of public affairs. The equivalent would be me claiming that Bush and Company intended to turn the US from the world's most admired nation in the third world to one of the least admired, that they intended to involve us in a hellishly expensive [in both blood and treasure] four year war with no visible end in sight by attacking a nation that had not attacked us. And so on.
Those were the consequences of the choices they made, and I can [I did then and do now] argue that those choices were ill-informed and would have bad consequences for the nation [as it turns out they did]. But at no time was I or most of the Democrats I know so gone in partisan rancor as to argue that that was their intent, that they intended to bungle the occupation that followed the invasion of Iraq.
Madison, Jefferson, Washington and the rest hoped [expected would be too strong a term] that an electorate [composed at that time largely of adult while property-owning men] would take the time to become informed on public matters, would discuss them seriously [and passionately at times], and vote accordingly. None of what passes for discussion on the likes of the Glen Beck show or their ilk comes close to the serious discussion of public affairs the founders thought the establishment and survival of the Republic depended on.
If you cannot see any substantive difference between, say "Meet The Press" or "Face the Nation" [major network news interview shows] and the Sean Hannity or Glen Beck shows, then, True Republican, there's not really much to discuss between us.
Curmudgeon
Did you sharpen the cutlery for that last post, or did you just grab a knife off the table?
Too bad you are casting your pearls before such political swine as we have in power here in Zion. Carve them up all you want, but these pretenders to the party of Lincoln and Reagan won't feel a thing, they are clueless as to how clueless you point them out to be!
If I ever get in a knife fight with you I'm bringing my Smith & Wesson!
Hey Demo Curm,
Ahhhh, take the knife from between my shoulder blades!
Sounds to me like you listen to Glen Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly and their'ilk' an awful lot to be able to diss them so boldly.
Did you know Cavuto is on radio now, too?
Sorry, True. I listen to none of them regularly. Catch excerpts on You Tube and other websites now and then and the odd segment of five or ten minutes at a stretch when channel surfing now and then.
Who is Cavuto?
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