What 'the collapse of journalism' means

In The Nation, Robert McChesney and John Nichols call the fading of great American newspapers "the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States."

(Meanwhile, Forbes reports today that journalism is still a popular college major, despite diminished job prospects. Maybe those grads hope to find a new way to be the Fourth Estate online, if not on paper. It has some faculty feeling existential.)

Nichols and McChesney have a book coming out in the fall, titled Saving Journalism: The Soul of Democracy, but they give away good chunks of their argument in The Nation article.

While enthusiastic about ProPublica, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post and regional online journalism projects with non-profit funding, they call those "mere triage strategies."

Instead, they argue that newspapers' corporate owners carry much of the blame for the demise of professional journalism, and call for fourth-estate funding by the other three estates:

"Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism... Fortunately, the rude calculus that says government intervention equals government control is inaccurate and does not reflect our past or present, or what enlightened policies and subsidies could entail."

Among those subsidies would be funds for community and public broadcasting and for high school and college papers, along with free postage for publications that limit their ad revenue to 20 percent of the budget. Such journals (hmm, like The Nation?), they note, often do "investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism."

I'm going to read more of that article later... maybe even buy their book and revive my Nation subscription. But I won't hold my breath about the chance of getting that batch of subsidies through Congress in any big hurry.

Surviving in Roanoke

Meanwhile, back in the cold world of capitalist free-enterprise journalism, here's a business-watcher with a list of 10 Newspapers That Will Survive The Apocalypse

Nicholas Carlson, who covers media and advertising for Silicon Alley Insider, says "his guy" in the newspaper-investment biz has the Roanoke Times on his survivor list.

I guess that's good news for the unwrapped fish of the New River Valley, even if Carlson does use an anonymous source and spell the name of the city "Roanake" at one point:

Our guy likes almost all of Landmark Communications papers in Virginia. They're in isolated, steady markets without a lot of overlap. The Roanoke Times is a 'good product,' a "community type paper.' Roanake is the kind of place where if the car dealers start selling cars again, they'll start taking out ads in the local paper again.

On the story's opening page, Carlson says:

Our guy is convinced that underneath the mess, there are plenty of local newspapers that, after cutting newsroom bloat and R&D costs, would be plenty profitable. He says these local newspapers just need to stop "spending on trying to find their way out" and 'instead run their current good business.'
"What does our source think of newspapers on the Web? Not much. He says local papers should have a Web site run by two people that links to international and national news and keeps all local content behind a pay wall or off the Internet entirely.

Speaking of surviving the apocalypse, Tim Thornton, an award-winning environmental journalist and the first Roanoke Times reporter I've had as a guest speaker in class, just got the ax... a bit mysteriously.

The many words of support in comments on those two NewRiverVoice stories about his departure, and elsewhere, should make Tim feel at least a tiny bit better.

The comments also include links to last fall's item on the paper in the Columbia Journalism Review. It ran with the provocative headline "Something's Rotten in Roanoke." CJR's story had several readers leaping to the paper's defense; so far none of the comments I've read about Thornton's case have taken the newspaper managers' side.

New research on "Missing the newspaper"

Time magazine for March 22 has the first summary I've seen of a Princeton study of voter behavior after the demise of a local newspaper, putting a new twist on the phrase "people could care less."

In What Happens When a Town Loses Its Newspaper?, Time notes that the study is, well, timely, given the recent closing of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (Time ran a list of "the 10 Most Endangered Newspapers" and summarized the latest Pew State of the Media report earlier this month.)

It's too soon to read the impact of the most recent closings on their communities, so the smaller-scale report by Princeton's Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido looked at communities affected by the closing of the Cincinnati Post at the end of 2007. (A full text of the report is linked to the Time article, but I haven't read it yet.)

One troubling conclusion Time mentions (emphasis added):

"...in towns the Post regularly covered, voter turnout dropped, fewer people ran for office and more incumbents were reelected. That is, when there were fewer stories about a given town, its inhabitants seemed to care less about how they're being governed."

Smaller towns seemed to be less affected by the closure than larger ones, which Time called the report's "the only possible hint of a bright spot."

Imagining Hartford without its daily

Even though my media history class was discussing "What 'missing the newspaper' means," I missed David Folkenflik's NPR piece last month that used my alma mater, The Hartford Courant, as a "what if?" example of just that topic. I'm glad I stumbled on it today. And, thanks to NPR's use of the Web, a transcript and the original audio are online...

See Imagining A City Without Its Daily Newspaper. As Folkenflik mentions, the Courant is the nation's oldest continuously published newspaper, as well as being the main source of news in the capital city of one of the wealthiest states in the union.

Here's one telling scene:

"In the State House press room, unopened mail was piled high on the desk set aside for The New York Times on a recent day. The Times stopped covering Hartford altogether last year. Some in-state dailies no longer send reporters either. The retreat by other news organizations makes even the diminished Courant more relevant than ever."

Folkenflik's follow-up story discusses the nonprofit model for newspapers, and one of his examples is another Connecticut publication, the online-only New Haven Independent, started a few years ago by former newspaperman Paul Bass.

Note: "What 'Missing the newspaper' means" is a classic study by Bernard Berelson, conducted during a newspaper delivery strike in New York City more than 50 years ago. For a good summary, and a follow-up, see "No newspaper is no fun--even five decades later," by my friend Clyde Bentley.

Related stories:

• The New Hybrids: Why the debate about financing journalism misses the point (Slate)
• As cities go from two newspapers to one, talk of zero (NYTimes)
• Yesterday's links here
  

Business journalism and lines it sometimes blurs

Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review provides a Jon Stewart clip with his column, The Daily Show Eviscerates Santelli and CNBC:

"But what makes this so interesting is what Stewart does to pierce the CNBC bubble on several different things that make the network so disliked by business journalists generally:
"Its lack of a line between opinion and reporting (and lack of disclosure about who’s a reporter and who’s not). Its Siamese-twin closeness to Wall Street. Its rah-rah rooting for the stock markets. Its inanity in interviews that too often veers into sycophancy.
"On the other hand, if there is a discomfort among the business reporters with CNBC, it might be because the network’s bad practices are only extreme manifestations of wider cultural problems in their profession.

USA Today's report on the same Stewart episode has drawn more than 80 comments already.

New York Times business columist Joe Nocera, who was also on the show, posted a clip of his own interview, but the discussion thread includes both segments.

"You should be a financial columnist. You've got the whole thing figured out," Nocera says to Stewart... then catches himself using Stewart's analytical language, referring to the financial industry's "crappy loans." He also joked that Stewart's analysis of the financial industry would give him his Saturday column.

So here's Nocera's Saturday column, actually not based on the Stewart interview, but focused on G.E., which (coincidentally?) owns CNBC. I'll recommend it to my students when we talk about thorough business journalism, versus the kind that blurs those lines between billionaire-celebrity-chat, opinion pieces and real "You're mother says she loves you, but check it out" reporting.

(Students also might be interested in discussing the interplay between Nocera's blog at nytimes.com and his column in The New York Times.)

Practicing 'theft superior'

I've alerted the keeper of the W.T. Stead Resource Site, a collection of writings by an influential 19th century U.K. newspaper editor, to what I take to be a wonderful typographical (or digital scanning) error that stumbles into a larger truth.

The essay in question is
W.T. Stead, "The Future of Journalism" (The Contemporary Review, 1886). The passage that caught my eye is this one, with a great opening (emphasis added):

"A man without a newspaper is half-clad, and imperfectly furnished for the battle of life. From being persecuted and then contemptuously tolerated, it has become the rival of organized governments. Will it become theft superior? The future of journalism depends entirely upon the journalist."

True either way, especially that last sentence, but I think "theft superior" is a bad scan of the word "their."

The ironic question today is whether corporate publishers with their eye on profit margins and stock quotes have been distracted by such "theft superior" and have led to the demise of the vigorous public-service newspaper journalism that might fulfill its promise as a democratic force.

(Stead wrote about that, too. See his "Government by Journalism.")

This week's end-of-semester question: Can some new online media financial model, community-funded (spot.us) or non-profit journalistic enterprises and bloggers fill the blank if newspapers are knocked out of Stead's opening line?

"A man without [a blog | Google | numerous RSS feeds | Facebook | Fox News | MSNBC] is half-clad, and imperfectly furnished for the battle of life."

Reporter's notes on writing a profile

...and profile subject's response

Constance Loizos got interested in Halsey Minor when she read a Virginia newspaper story saying he was interested in running for governor. She wondered what part his Silicon Valley reputation might play.

Here's her interview about reporting the story...

And here's the story, CNET Founder Halsey Minor Profile - Executive Articles - Portfolio.com:
"The Baddest Boy in Silicon Valley"

C.E.O. Halsey Minor is a successful entrepreneur with a lovely family. So why do so many of his former tech-world colleagues revile him?"

Minor, who 15 years ago founded the tech-news company CNET, the first Web-content company to go public, was interviewed in Charlottesville, where he still has a home.

Bonus: After you read the article, don't miss the comments -- including a critique signed "Halsey Minor."

I ought to read "Portfolio" more often... Luckily, I got to this issue via Waldo Jaquith's blog after starting out with his RSS tips, which I got to from richmondsunlight.com while looking for sites about public information in Virginia. I'm always relieved when my hypertext-r-us linking around leads to something timely for one of my classes... and both public records and profile writing are on the agenda this month.