Farewell to the printed P-I

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything to this blog. It’s just that the news is so depressing.

Saying goodbye at the end of a long relationship can be strained and awkward.

But it didn’t feel that way at all at a quickly organized tribute outside The Seattle Post-Intelligencer last Monday, the day its staff was writing their newspaper’s obituary. P-I reporter Carol Smith has written a lovely obituary that catalogs the newspaper’s origins, achievements, and mournful end. The P-I was the oldest newspaper in Washington state, even predating statehood (1889). After more than 145 years, the newspaper – owned by New York-based Hearst Corp. – bowed to overwhelming economic pressures that are shoving newspapers across the land into history’s dustbin.

There were several tributes and memorials to the newspaper. The editors of Columbia Journalism Review invited P-I staff to submit their reflections. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, which owes its existence to P-I workers, lamented its passing. The alternative weekly, The Stranger, chronicled the last day at the P-I. Two minority journalism groups (one of which I am co-president of) issued a joint statement. Even the P-I’s cross-town rival, The Seattle Times Co., issued a statement.

And in a confessional video, some P-I staffers shared their own reflections with their readers.

As P-I Publisher Roger Oglesby told the staff, “the bloodline will live on,” referring to Hearst’s re-launch of seattlepi.com as an online-only publication. But the website will have a staff of about 20, a fraction of the printed P-I’s workforce, which numbered close to 170.

But you can’t keep a newsroom full of journalists down. Former P-I staff plan to get together and drink later this week, and some are talking about raising money to launch their own online-only website, taking a page from the former staff of the Denver Rocky Mountain News, which published its final edition (and a tear-jerking documentary-style video obituary). Some of the Rocky’s staff have launched InDenverTimes.com.

There are hard times for all media, but especially traditional media. Today, the family-owned Ann Arbor News announced it will stop publishing a printed edition later this year. We need creative minds to test new business models and philanthropists to offer their support to journalists willing to try something radically new. We also need to support the surviving newspapers in our cities, so they have the chance to make the transition to this new world we are hurtling towards.

If democracy is an engine, journalism is its lubricant. Without journalists to verify information and assertions, will our civic sphere descend into partisan screed? Without trained professionals to investigate waste, corruption and abuse in business and government, what happens to the balance of power?

President Thomas Jefferson, who was often the subject of savage criticism in the press, had this to say: “If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”

My fingers are crossed for all of us.

It’s not newspapers’ fault, Slate writer says

In a recent column headlined “What’s Really Killing Newspapers,” Slate.com’s media writer, Jack Shafer, blames a changing world, not journalism, for the ailing health of newspapers. The newspaper once was an ATM machine for owners because it provided people with the social currency needed to build relationships, lubricate conversations and generally appear well informed.

Here’s one graf Shafer wrote that I especially liked:

The social networking that takes place via instant messaging, microblogging, or e-mail further steals from newspapers the mindshare they once owned. You no longer need to rely on a paper for the social currency that a weather report, movie listings, classified ads, shopping bargains, sports info, stock listings, television listings, gossip, or entertainment news provide.

Sure, more people have more places to go to get their hit. While I do appreciate Shafer’s point, I do think newspapers have contributed a great deal to their present woes: a failure to invest a decade ago in creating innovative products and new streams of revenue (hello, Kaplan?), a sluggish improvement in diversifying their newsrooms and story-mix to appeal to a wider audience (most newsrooms are still overwhelmingly white), and owners’ greed in maximizing profits (which once rivaled those of pharmaceutical companies) at the expense of investing in staff and training (one of the lowest rates among all industries). 

Reporters, designers, photographers, and a few editors are paying the price now for those bad business decisions by executives. As I’ve written here before, last year was perhaps the worst in recent memory for layoffs of journalists. I fear we are poorer as a profession from losing so much talent so quickly.

Some papers will survive this period, but there will be some that do not. We are still in the early phase of a massive shift in advertising dollars to other media platforms, such as Facebook, e-mail and mobile. Ad revenue for newspapers will continue to decline, but it’s hard to say if and when the ad revenue will totally disappear. The truth is that advertisers covet a wrapper that people want to read.

Some interesting stuff in today’s blogosphere

In our national policy debates on education, health care, public safety and a variety of other goods deemed to be in the public interest, it’s widely accepted that there are minimum provider ratios (providers per 1,000 people) that must be honored to preserve a decent product or service.  We have designated “shortage areas” where federal incentives are offered to doctors willing to practice there. We have best practices for the teacher-student ratio in classrooms.

Should we be concerned about the falling ratio of professional journalists to citizens in a community?

There’s an interesting blog post about how the latest wave of cutbacks at newspapers violates a longstanding norm: “The unwritten but widely honored rule of thumb in the industry always has been that a newspaper should employ one journalist for every 1,000 in daily circulation,” writes media analyst Alan Mutter in a post today. 

In response to the layoffs and fiscal problems besetting the newspaper industry, there’s a web site, TreeHouse Media Project, that’s gotten buzz for its promise of helping journalists become their own publishers. The headline is catchy, but it misses the mark. Google is here to stay, and we’re better off if we use it to help our fortunes rather than try to stop it.

I was stunned by the statistic on the TreeHouse Media home page:

“One in four newspaper jobs have disappeared since 1990 — more than 10,000 in 2007 alone.”

Anyone know where that statistic comes from?

Newspaper stocks are cheap!

This may be the year that we see a major metro newspaper file for bankruptcy. According to the Newsosaur blog, newspaper shares have slid $23 billion in 6 months.

These stocks are so cheap that it’s a perfect opportunity for an angel investor – a technology guru, perhaps – to buy these companies and take them private. The days of 25 percent profit margins in the newspaper industry are long gone and aren’t coming back.

Paging Craig Newmark…

More than 900 newspaper jobs lost last week

According to Mark Potts, a media consultant and former Washington Post editor, this past week has been especially brutal for newspaper employees across the nation.

In a recent blog entry on recoveringjournalist.com, Potts lays out the bloodbath that took place over several days. One of the announcements touched a soft spot for me: The Palm Beach Post, a newspaper I spent nearly six years at in my 20s, is eliminating 300 jobs across all departments, including about 130 in the newsroom. According to my sources at the newspaper, that amounts to about a 40-50% cutback in the newsroom, an unprecedented rollback.

There is no question that the papers must slash their expenses with urgency to adjust to the stormy economic seas they are in now. We’re all trying to survive a tsunami of economic forces that will definitely leave some communities without newspapers before it’s over.

Potts rightly points out that newspapers aren’t innocent bystanders in this tragedy. The executives who run many of the big chain papers, Potts says, were too smug and slow to recognize the need for change, to act with urgency, and to diversify their revenue streams, among other things.

I hope to raise more public awareness with a documentary on an industry in the grips of a crisis. Won’t you join me?

Study: Op-ed pages not very diverse

Even as we see newspapers shrinking across the country, we know that minority journalists are being laid off and making a shortage of diversity in newsrooms even worse.

Op-ed pages are no different, apparently, according to a Rutgers University study.

Bravo to Erica

Erica Smith, a graphic designer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is mapping all the recent layoffs in journalism. The map says it best.

Giving away the news

From Poynter’s Romenesko:

Newspapers are likely to become free and place greater emphasis on comment and opinion in the future, according to a survey of the world’s editors. According to 704 senior news executives polled, the greatest threat to the industry is the declining number of young people who read newspapers. Nearly two-thirds also believe that some traditional editorial functions will be outsourced in the future.

Read the survey results.

 

Carpe diem, baby!

On a day that offered fresh evidence of plummeting circulation at many major metros (Sunday Denver Post’s sales dropped nearly 15% in the year ended March 31), Poynter’s Amy Gahran offers a testy take on the resistance of news managers to change their mindsets and adapt to the new reality wrought by economic and technological forces.

Gahran strikes the most optimistic note I’ve heard in a while about this moment in our profession:

“…right now is a time of immense opportunity for journalism and journalists to take on a broader and even more vital role in society. It’s a chance for journalists to not only continue doing good work, but maybe also to have more impact than ever before. If they can make this progress within updated, adapted news organizations, fine. But if not, they can find ways to do it independently, collaboratively, or by founding new supporting institutions or businesses.”

Even though I consider myself anxious about the changes sweeping our profession and craft, I share Gahran’s excitement about the potential, the sense that a new journalism is being born, one that is more fragmented, open to contribution and weakened by shorter and shorter attention spans. Gahran identifies several attitudes that are toxic to the evolve-or-die imperative. I shall paraphrase and condense them.

Toxic attitudes in a newsroom today:

1. Traditional, mainstream journalism is the only legitimate source of news, and society is ethically obligated to support us traditional journalists for that reason. Good journalism doesn’t change much.

2. Real journalists do only journalism. They don’t lead a public conversation, they don’t consider ways to extend the reach of their work, they don’t learn new tools.

“There’s a common problem with all these assumptions: They directly cut off options from consideration. This severely limits the ability of journalists and journalism to adapt and thrive.”

What do you think?

News & Observer slashing one-fifth of payroll

Another quality newspaper is making deep cuts. Here’s the latest from the N&O:

In an effort to streamline its operations, The News & Observer Publishing Co. will offer voluntary buyout packages to some employees today. The package will be offered to 204 of the newspaper’s roughly 900 employees, though only a small percentage of those people are expected to accept and leave the company.

Publisher Orage Quarles III said the decision to trim the company’s staff came following a period of declining revenues and other factors such as the rising cost of newsprint and gas.

“It’s almost a perfect storm of factors,” he said. “We’ve got to get the organization to a size that supports the revenue.”

Those who accept the offer will leave the company on May 23.

I remember when the News & Observer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for “Boss Hog,” its exhaustive coverage of the environmental and health risks posed by the waste disposal practices of the state’s powerful hog industry. That was when newspapers were fielding foreign bureaus, juiced by dot-com advertising and exploring the startling power of mapping and database mining at your desktop.

Now it feels like we’re the ones who are wallowing in stuff that’s not good for us right now – nostalgia, despair, and fear. Can we muster the entrepreneurial creativity to rescue ourselves? Send me your comments.