The News on the News
I've got to admit that I'm reveling in the set-to unfolding around "The Wire" creator David Simon's full-media blitz for 2008. Simon started the year by bizarrely responding to almost anything written about him and the show on the Internet. Then, as he takes on the media with the fifth and final season of "The Wire," he has turned his attention to the declining state of the newspaper industry in a long piece published Sunday in the Washington Post.
Yesterday, the Post ran a rebuttal from Sara Libby defending the newspaper reader and the journalists of today.
Did Libby even read what Simon wrote? Did the editors of the op-ed page read Simon's piece before running Libby's? Simon wondered if there was an elegy awaiting the newswriters inspired by the crusading journalism of the 60s and 70s who found themselves in a world where writing for a newspaper was mostly working for a corporation. He lamented the state of the business. He detailed the departure of the quality editors and crusading writers to wave after wave of management-driven cost-cutting budget cuts. He wondered aloud if anyone even cared about having a great newspaper to read. He wrote:
Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?It's hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity -- indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic -- was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.
When I came to work at the GII, I was struggling with this same quandary. Even in the years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there wasn't a strong sense that Americans cared about the important things -- either geopolitical shifts in faraway nations or a new highway in their own hometown -- that I felt should really matter. I had been working in a communications department for a partisan organization and was consistently hollering at reporters about something that -- politics aside -- should have been a big deal, and was feeling like Americans were missing our nation was slipping over some precipice.
I didn't feel for a second that there was something wrong with the people in the newsrooms. They tried to cover the news they could cover, but they told me point blank that our issues required more explanation, education and exposition than they could commit in the current media and political landscape. Global issues fall into this category. These are the ones that are so easily dominated by fear and hopelessness and the ones that require an explanation, not a slideshow of devastation. A great newspaper would make the investment.
Simon is going after the profiteers, not the journalists. But Libby ignores Simon's rhetorical broadside against the profit-taking shareholders and penny-pinching publishers and leaps to the defense of young journalists such as herself. She writes that Simon "suggests not only that the era of eager, dedicated journalists is over, but that nobody even cares about the news anymore." Simon may fear -- as I do -- that American's don't appreciate the value of thoughtful news reporting. But he didn't suggest that the era of good journalism was over. He said he believed that the era of great newspapers was over, and that the cause was greed over quality.
I have a lot of respect for David Simon, but I know he's a little bit of a jerk, in that he feels like he is alone in a world where everyone else goes along with terrible things happening and David Simon is the only one who can stop it. I don't know Sara Libby from Adam, but she appears to be a prolific if bland LA-based writer. Whatever. David Simon's argument was compelling to me, because a long time ago, I was one of those people who thought they could be a journalist. I wanted to go into that business for all the reasons Simon discusses. I believed we could do something, make a change, protect those less fortunate, put those in power in their place. My college paper closely chronicled a Godfather-esque putsch by our university president to purge his enemies including a high-profile dismissal of a beloved official while he lay convalescing in a hospital bed after a major auto accident. Soon after graduation, I learned that success in journalism in the 90s had little to do with your interest in doing good (and even less to do with your talent).
Simon decries the fact that it seems today our society is accepting a redefinition of the very idea of "the news" not as a public good, but as a commercial product to be packaged, advertised and profit-maximized. Simon argues that the inspired, motivated-by-the-public-interest journalist of yesteryear can find no place in the media of today. His assertion is borne out by the facts. The era of a talented beat reporter getting to know the inhabitants of his or her beat is over. Corporate newspapers can't afford and won't indulge a reporter becoming an expert whose coverage gives a reader the story behind the story precisely because there is such a depth-of-knowledge and an institution willing to make that investment. There's no time, and no room in the budget.
Simon's own Baltimore Sun -- a paper he has a justifiable axe to grind with -- couldn't find a way to justify a Russia bureau, choosing to close the office late last year.
The question Simon asks stands, but deserves more nuance, none of which is added by Libby's comments. Here's my take: Newspapering has always been a business and nobody operates a newspaper at a loss except Reverend Moon. Somewhere along the way, though, the balance of the public good inside the newspaper against the cost of doing business was upset.
Today, publishers and corporate overseers cite the Internet, mostly in the form of Craigslist, as the primary reason why they must continue to slash costs and, by most accounts not emanating from a publisher's desk, reduce the quality of the paper itself. That assessment is borne out by the assessment of many Americans, who say they can't trust the media and who find coverage of presidential elections focuses on the wrong issues (though they love their hometown papers).
So newspapers make more money for investors by cutting costs, reducing the quality of the paper which could well drive down circulation, threatening profits, leading to more cuts, and on and on. The reversal of Simon's theory, then, would be that more robust investment in newsrooms could lead to a higher quality product, and a product more people are willing to pay for, which could increase profits allowing a newspaper to further invest, increasing circulation again, and on and on. Surely, someone has tested this, right?
Yes. In a piece published last year, my old friend Robert MacMillan (who worked on that same college paper with me) tells of a study by the University of Missouri-Columbia showing that "news quality affects profit more than spending on circulation, advertising and other parts of the business."
“If you invest in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes,” Esther Thorson, an advertising professor and associate dean for graduate studies at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, said in a statement.“If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money,” she said.
The researchers developed a mathematical model that showed how newspapers could rearrange their spending on distribution and circulation, advertising and newsrooms to achieve a higher profit, Thorson said in an interview.
U.S. publishers have been eliminating jobs at many newspapers as part of larger efforts to trim expenses amid falling profit margins and, in the case of publicly traded chains, declining stock prices.
[snip]
“Until recently, people have been doing it because the results looked good to investors on Wall Street, but it’s… ignoring the long-term aspects,” said marketing professor and study co-author Murali Mantrala.
[snip]
“I am delighted to see them post proof that quality precedes profit,” Philip Meyer, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the book “The Vanishing Newspaper,” said of the study.
“I don’t share the authors’ confidence that the industry will appreciate the importance of their result and act on it,” he added. “Too many owners are more interested in harvesting than investing.”