Swartz: Newspapers need to do more to innovate. “Is Steve Jobs the only innovative person in this country?”Swartz to newsroom: “Do you have a blog? … It’s more work but it’s also another outlet for our creativity.”Swartz is a big fan of social media.Swartz on why we increased subscription rates: In the past “we’ve been pricing our paper for people who didn’t want it.”Swartz likes the NY Times idea of “metering” online content.
Deborah Nelson
How best to get at the cost for society, for journalism and for journalists of the loss of thousands of jobs at American newspapers? This series tries to do it by asking journalists who have shown themselves capable of producing work of the highest caliber – winners of the Pulitzer Prize who are no longer at a newspaper – for their reflections on what happened to them, what it’s meant and how they view the future.
He interviewed Deborah Nelson, who won a Pulitzer in 1997 with Eric Nalder and Alex Tizon for their stories about abuses in a federal Indian-housing program. She left the news business to teach.
Deborah says:
Where did the news business go wrong? I’d start with the growing obsession over the past couple decades with short-term earnings, and a corresponding neglect of the long view. I remember feeling unsettled back in the early 1990s with how near-sighted the corporate financial model had become. I didn’t have a business degree, but anyone with a driver’s license knows the importance of keeping one eye on what lies ahead.
Eric Nalder wrote this great lede on the Seattle Times’ Pulitzer series on oil tanker safety after the Exxon Valdez disaster. He described standing on the deck of an oil tanker “as long as three football fields” with the lone crew member assigned to watch the distant horizon for small boats and icebergs – and discovering that the guy couldn’t see, that he suffered from double vision. That kind of describes the last 20 years of the newspaper industry. The iceberg was in view long before we hit it, but no one with any real vision was looking that far ahead.
Gotta love this letter to the editor by engineer Wendell Peters published today in the San Antonio Express-News:
After an explosion at one of our power plants, CPS Energy urged us to conserve power. I was curious to see how much power is used by the digital billboards gracing our highways. The CPS meter is at the base of the sign, so anyone can read it. …
Peters found the controversial billboards set up by Clear Channel Communications suck up enough juice to power scores of homes.
You can agree or disagree with his proposal to turn off the billboards. But I liked how Peters’ curiosity and ingenuity led him to new information. That’s journalism at its best.
I learned two things from my yard sale this weekend:
A new cause for Sally Struthers. I love the shot of the copy editor eating ramen.
It seemed like every section of today’s paper had a story that grabbed me and surprised me and told me something about the world I didn’t know before.
I”ve always thought one of the problems facing newspapers is that they have to go to press every day — even when there’s no engrossing stories to tell. There have been times when I “read” a paper in minutes because nothing grabbed me. Nothing made me think, “Wow, I didn’t know that.”
It sure was a pleasure to sit down with a steaming cup of coffee this morning and simply get lost in some compelling stories.
Gotta love this news story. Watching it, I realized not much has changed when it comes to the media and the Internet. True, it doesn’t take two hours to download the newspaper anymore. But on the other hand, we’re still figuring out how to make money off this whole Internet thing ….
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.
The same week the San Antonio Express-News cut nearly a third of its newsroom, one of Denver’s daily newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News, closed its doors forever.
You might ask, as some readers have, so what?
Newspapers are far from perfect. But I’ll let Laura Frank, an investigative reporter for the Rocky, explain why the death of a newspaper matters:
Since Scripps announced in December that it would close the Rocky Mountain News if a buyer couldn’t be found, I had spent a lot of time thinking about what the last day would be like. But I wasn’t prepared for what would happen at the end of the day.
I am—I was—an investigative reporter at the Rocky. I had finished everything I needed to do for the day. The story I’d spent the week working on was scheduled to publish Saturday. But there would be no Saturday Rocky. There was no reason for me to stay. But I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want the day to end. I didn’t want the Rocky to end.
Just that day, I had received a voice mail message from a reader who planned to contact a government official after reading a story I wrote. I opened a letter from another reader who wanted me to investigate something that concerned her. I read an email from someone in another state who read my stories online, and thanked me for covering something that was important to him.The final edition of the Rocky Mountain News
There were so many stories still to write, and no Rocky left to publish them.
As hard as it was to finally walk out the door that night, I realized the more awful moment was still to come: Saturday morning, when no Rocky arrived on the driveways and porch steps of its readers.
Here’s what we had ready to go for that day’s paper: Stories about what had happened to Colorado’s energy boom and what it meant to the state, how a government agency had allegedly misused public money, and how children in state custody were being abused.
That’s just what Coloradans will be missing on the first day the Rocky is gone. Who can say what they’ll miss the next week or the next year?
A great watchdog is dead. And more are dying across the nation. More stories will go untold. In a democracy that depends on an informed citizenry, a dead watchdog is a dangerous thing.
Amen.
When Rob Huesca saw me last night at Liberty Bar, where I had just finished my weekly dose of tasty lamb burger for the evening, he announced he had figured out this whole “how to save newspapers” quandary that has gripped the media industry for the last few decades or so.
By the end of our conversation, I halfway believed him.
Rob is a communications professor at Trinity University, and he said newspapers could learn a lot from radio.
When you hear a song on radio, the artist gets paid for it. Radio stations pay licensing fees to entities like Broadcast Music Inc. Every time a radio station plays a song from, say, Kidd Rock, BMI pays Kidd Rock.
For the Internet, what if newspapers and magazines formed their own version of BMI? This consortium would collect a modest monthly subscription fee from readers — Rob threw out a random figure of $12. Readers who subscribe to this service can read any article in any publication anywhere in the country that signs up with the consortium. And for every web hit, the consortium pays a little bit of money to the publication.
Right now, most newspapers are giving away their Web content for free, which is in keeping with the spirit of the Internet, but the ad revenue from newspaper Web sites isn’t enough to pay for fully staffed newsrooms. So there’s been all kinds of talk about how the media can successfully charge for online content, leading to debates about things like micropayments, online subscriptions, and voluntary donations.
Rob might be on to something but to make his idea work a lot of newspapers would have to agree to participate. Otherwise, readers would simply gravitate to the free publications. It’d also be nice if people who subscribe to the paper-version of the publication could get a discount or even free subscription to the Internet version. It would give people a reason to subscribe to their physical newspaper, at a time when newspapers are shrinking and there are fewer and fewer reasons to subscribe.
A BMI model might encourage newspapers to aim for the lowest common denominator to drive up Web traffic, and we could end up with more celebrity stories about people like — heaven forbid — Kidd Rock.
Or maybe Rob is right and this would be a convenient, relatively painless way for readers to continue getting news from anywhere in the country, while at the same time helping to pay for the expense of reporting the news.
