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.

 

Angry Journalists

A co-worker who got laid off recently pointed me to a site called AngryJournalist.com, a clever WordPress blog that lets journalists vent anonymously about the incredible challenges they face in these times. The t-shirts I found there were funny. My favorite was “print is dead”… certainly feels that way.

A rebuttal

Well, there’s quite a lively discussion going on in the Brittanica blog.

In fact, I so don’t think so that I am waiting for the moment for someone with some passion and some money to suggest it is time to start a newspaper. The cost of entry isn’t very great, the technology makes us all look brilliant and one might create a beast that has feet in the print and online world at the same time, from scratch, avoiding the ankle breaking bumps that plague “old media” when it tries to become “new media.”

It might be so local you can’t imagine how it would feel, but it would be a newspaper and it would tell people what happened that touches on their lives.

It would be free. It would be distributed to very rich demographic areas and it would be very smart about how it approached news and events. It’s staff would expand based on revenue, which would not come until distribution was wide enough to point to a solid audience. So people would have to live on gruel for a while.

It would do some interesting things. If you were getting married, for example, it might create a whole media production of it for a price, like a little commercial arm of the local news empire. You would get a video, a coffee table book full of pictures and text, goodies. It would cost, say, a couple of thousand dollars. Very high quality and very dependable.It might do the same thing with the local high school football, basketball or soccer team. It might track the efforts of your choir. I do believe those kinds of things would produce revenue, mainly because most people don’t have the time to learn how to do them. Does that present an ethical challenge? Wait and see. I don’t think it’s inherent. Anyhow, it would be no more of an ethical challenge than building your business on used car ads and then telling everyone as often as you can how great it is to have a car!

…Having read my own paper, and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for years, I must admit, sadly, that they don’t present a very clear picture of what actually is happening in the lives of common people. That’s too bad because that is where journalism’s connection should come from.