Posts about journalism

Splitting newsrooms and hairs

December 13, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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Deborah Howell (with whom I used to work at Advance) writes an ombudsman column for the Washington Post that illustrates, in its quotes from editors at the paper, the kind of clueless, destructive, and snobbish territoriality between print and online that is killing newspapers.

Political reporters at The Post don’t like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin’s “White House Briefing,” which is highly opinionated and liberal. They’re afraid that some readers think that Froomkin is a Post White House reporter.

John Harris, national political editor at the print Post, said, “The title invites confusion. It dilutes our only asset — our credibility” as objective news reporters.

I have to stop there. What a terrible insult and slap at a colleague who writes a very good, respected, and journalistic column for online. What a slap from a newsroom snot. But that is what newsrooms are like.

Howell continues:

Froomkin writes the kind of column “that we would never allow a White House reporter to write. I wish it could be done with a different title and display.”

Harris is right; some readers do think Froomkin is a White House reporter. But Froomkin works only for the Web site and is very popular — and [web site executive editor Jim] Brady is not going to fool with that, though he is considering changing the column title and supplementing it with a conservative blogger.

So we acknowledge that Froomkin’s column is popular with readers… but not with print editors. What does that tell us?

And the solution this reputed problem is to play the dumb cable “balance” game, journalism as a Chinese menu? No, the solution is for Dan to be very transparent about his views and for readers to judge him and what he says in that context; clearly, that is working with readers. The public we serve is too smart to fall for this balance game. Crossfire’s dead, folks. Howell continues:

Froomkin said he is “happy to consider other ways to telegraph to people that I’m not a Post White House reporter. I do think that what I’m doing, namely scrutinizing the White House’s every move — with an attitude — is in the best traditions of American and Washington Post journalism.”

On the other hand, Chris Cillizza, a washingtonpost.com political reporter, appears in The Post frequently. When he writes for the paper, he works for Harris, who is happy to have him.

Which is to say: It’s petty and personal. Newsrooms are.

Some Post reporters don’t appreciate that links are put on the Web site to what bloggers are saying about this or that story — especially when the bloggers are highly negative.

And what does that say? Post print reporters don’t like anyone else having a say; they don’t like dialogue; they don’t like listening. And they wonder why readers don’t respect them? Because they don’t respect readers.

Metro reporters think the Web site ignores their good work and doesn’t display it well. “My concern is that we have this rich, deep, robust local coverage which is not fully displayed, but I know the site is working to fix that,” said Robert McCartney, assistant managing editor for metropolitan news. McCartney is a great ally of the Web site and was assistant managing editor of continuous news for two years before he became Metro’s top editor.

Oh, I heard that argument from every paper I worked with in my last job. It is code for: We want online to be just like the paper we produce and we want to be in charge of online. It’s about power and territory. Newsrooms are about power and territory.

Howell concludes that the web is good for what newspaper editors have wished it was good for: supplements to their print prose:

The Web is a wonderful place for The Post to put newsprint-eating texts and documents, such as presidential speeches, and other information, such as congressional votes, that readers want.

That is so 1995. No, friend, it’s just the opposite. The web is the rich medium; the paper is the thinner, less dynamic, staler, one-way, one-size-fits-all supplement.
Howell ends with one more slap at Froomkin:

But I agree with The Post’s political writers here; the Web site should remove the “White House Briefing” label from Froomkin’s column.

The Washington Post and its site are among the best in newspapering, yet we see this kind of trivial and destructive sniping between the two even there even as newspapering struggles to survive.

This is why I left that battleground.

: Froomkin rises above the playground rivalries in a most gracious post on the Post’s blog — and his readers come in to give him amazing support:

There is undeniably a certain irreverence to the column. But I do not advocate policy, liberal or otherwise. My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to easily withstand that scrutiny. I was prepared to take the same approach with John Kerry, had he become president.

This column’s advocacy is in defense of the public’s right to know what its leader is doing and why. To that end, it calls attention to times when reasonable, important questions are ducked; when disingenuous talking points are substituted for honest explanations; and when the president won’t confront his critics — or their criticisms — head on.

The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so — not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do.

Amen, brother.

Some quotes of support for Froomkind, which should be printed on paper and handed out in the newsroom:

I am old enough to have read Woodstein word-for-word during Watergate. I recall the Post in that era with enduring respect and even fondness. Katherine Graham, Bill Bradlee, Woodward and Bernstein – they made the Post the best newspaper this side of the moon; as integral to my day as that first cup of coffee.

I walked away in the early 80′s. It was a tip from a friend about Dan Froomkin’s “White House Briefing” that brought me back to the Post over a year ago. Through him, I have come to admire Walter Pincus, Dana Priest, and even the right-leaning Kurtz.

* * *

The only way to balance Dan Froomkin’s reporting would be to counter him with a complete liar.

* * *

view Dan Froomkin as a true reporter. He connects the dots in a very basic fashion. Rather than imposing a narrative on what is now called the “news”, the column juxtaposes raw source material with reporting, opinion and comment from elsewhere in a fashion that illuminates connections between events, and drives sensible debate. This makes the occasional irreverent observation all the more enjoyable.

I don’t think it makes any sense at all to say Froomkin is overly “liberal”. Modern America is psychotic with its need to divide the world into two groups, however, so whatever.

But even if he was — Why on earth would you lose a strong columnist because he has an ideology?

* * *

The WPs new Ombudsman would do well to use Dan Froomkin’s methods. Simply stating that WP reporters find his reporting highly opinionated and bias and calling him a liberal is not reporting. It is spin. Why not list and investigate specific claims instead of acting like the White House press secretary.

* * *

Froomkin turned me on to looking in all sorts of spots for my info. I’ve read and watched transcripts of press briefings, read articles by journalists with whom I was not familiar, found sources of info that were unknown to me because of links and things I’ve read in Froomkin’s column. Sending people to many different sources for their information and pointing out when the media is unable to get real answers to important questions is the opposite of bias.

* * *

Why would the credibility of the Post be endangered by a column that is largely populated by links to and discussion of stories filed in the print edition of the Post?

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I applaud his approach and wish more reporters, print and media, would follow it. Keep it up Mr. Froomkin.

* * *

Where do I go to file a complaint about the ombudsman herself?

Froomkin is a must-read for me. I can’t imagine there are people who think it’s factual reporting — anyone savvy enough to read his fascinating column is surely savvy enough to differentiate between opinion and fact.

* * *

Too many other reporters–including those at the Post–seem just to repeat what they are told. Froomkin does that openly, with links to his original materials, but in addition he has the guts, and integrity, to check the statements of his sources. If that is liberal bias I’m all for it.

* * *

How can anyone who reads the column equate accountability with liberalism? The quintessential Froomkin column ran a few days ago; it was called “Fact Checking the President”. It was composed almost exclusively of links to news stories in which the reporter noted discrepancies between Bush’s picture of Iraq and more disturbing pictures of Iraq provided by people who are actually there.

* * *

The rest of the Post’s White House team should read the last year of Froomkin’s column to see what real reporting and analysis are. Froomkin has usually been way ahead of the curve of the “establishment” media, pointing out Bush’s increasing unpopularity, for instance, long before it became acceptable in conventional media to talk about Bush’s high rate of disapproval.

* * *

I often rely on Froomkin and Kurtz combined to get a grasp on many of the stories of the day, and the integrity of the reporting involved.

* * *

Froomkin’s “White House Briefing” is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand 1. what is going on behind the headlines and 2. the greater context in which ongoing news stories play out.

The media guru Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, bemoaned the degradation of American discourse into a world of decontextualized information — thanks largely to the rise of television as our predominant medium for communication.

What the Internet does best is to subvert the packaging of news that television has led to — and Froomkin, by compiling the day’s news — from all sources online — with links to the stories themselves, subverts that decontextualization.

And on and on. To paraphrase my friend Jay Rosen, here’s the message in that to Post print people: The readers are writing. Are you reading?

: The real lesson for Posties should be this: As Howell herself points out, the Post’s site is a helluva lot bigger than the Post’s paper:

Its circulation, as reported in September, is 671,322 daily and 965,920 Sunday. The Web site’s reach is huge — 8 million unique visitors a month, about 1.3 million of them local.

Perhaps that should tell the paper’s editors that they should be learning from online, rather than trying to lecture to it with haughty bravura. That, too, is what newsrooms are about. But the audience has clearly shown its support for the online Post over the printed one; the only reason online is not as successful is because advertisers are even more behind than newspaper editors. And the audience has clearly shown Froomkin their support. Perhaps the paper should be doing more of what he does. Did you ever think of that, o, vaunted newspaper editors?

: And perhaps the Post print people should read what their boss and owner had to say about the future of print. The day of the last presses is approaching. Are you ready, print people?

: LATER: Jay DeFoore at E&P covers the kerfluffle.

: LATER STILL: Jay Rosen interviews the Post’s political editor, online editor, and columnist in a fascinating exchange.

What interests me first are the atmospherics. The online folks are bending over backwards to be deferential to the print people. The print person is spitting lines like “pompous” and “total bullshit.” Not a happy camp, there. Once more: Newsrooms are like that.

Second, what interests me is that I think we are seeing the Japanese monster movie of journalism … or perhaps a more timely allusion would be King Kong: Dinosaurs v. the overgrown ape. The print people (you can guess at my casting; either that or Godzilla would be loaded) are holding onto their beliefs in objectivity for dear life. The online people have moved onto a new world. And Dan holds firm saying that he’s not a liberal columnist or even an opinion columnist, though he has taken on the latter label; he says — and I agree — that these days, tracking media and those who would spin it is reporting. In my book, that is sometimes more like reporting than what some reporters do when they dutifully report what the powerful spin. But it all fits in the big tent of journalism, if those who think they own that tent will allow it. Jay quotes an internal memo from the print editor to the online editor:

It’s not an overstatement to say that our generation of reporters and editors is trying vindicate the entire tradition of ideologically neutral news in a web-driven age in which most information is presented through argument. Certainly the Bush White House would be happy to have this tradition die–it makes it easier for them to dismiss all reporting they don’t like as the work of liberal critics.

A tall order. But the contrary arguments that are made are first that no one is ideologically neutral and that transparency is needed and second that not all information online is presented through argument but argument does not invalidate information.

Newspapers as a right

December 12, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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One thing I forgot to say in all the posts about newspapers and business below:

Newspapers have neither a constitutional nor a God-given right to exist. They exist if they serve their communities well and are supported by those communities in one way or another.

Journalism.biz

December 12, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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Rebecca MacKinnon says that journalism schools need to teach students to be more entrepreneurial. I agree that that’s why I added an entrepreneurial course that I will teach to the curriculum of CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism (you won’t find it online; it’s new).

The idea is that students need to create a new journalistic product. These could be businesses the students start when they graduate (and because they may have the next Google in mind, this will be the one course I won’t webcast) or a product they could start in an existing media company (because they are all woefully short on R&D) or even a charitable endeavor (but even in this case, they need to show why people would give money to make it work).

Says Rebecca:

American journalism is in crisis. What a wonderful opportunity we now have to rethink the whole industry. The question is: Even if journalism schools do train the future’s journalists to innovate and think outside the box, will today’s news organizations be prepared or willing to take advantage of their fresh ideas?

I find it pleasantly ironic that while some in journalism wish it weren’t a business, others want to train journalists to be better at business. Count me in the second camp and see my other posts on the topic today.

News: The new order

December 10, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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Susan Crawford, bearer of one of the most dazzling brains online, has perfect advice for the old-media people who think search is an enemy. European publishers complained about Google making money off “their content” when the truth is that Google is sending prospective members to “their” communities if only they were ready to welcome them. Susan says:

What Google does is respond to search queries by providing snippets — thumbnail pictures and a line of text here, a line from a page there, a headline — and helping people get to where those things were posted. That’s pointing, not copying, and it’s a key element of Web 2.0.

The publishers, and the news agencies, are having trouble with this evolution — heck, they had enough trouble with Web 1.0, much less the groupness we’re seeing now– and are relying on incumbent laws (like copyright law) to protect their ability to charge for content.

But there’s a great opportunity here that shouldn’t be missed: news companies can become not only providers of great stories (well-researched, well-written, unlike blog posts) but also sources of order. There is so much information now — we need help! We need priority, and sense of impact, and sense of global connections. We need visualizations, and links, and commentary. All of these things are valuable. We’ll pay — with our attention, our loyalty to the brand, and maybe even with money if the reporters’ own personalities are allowed out to play.

A search engine, alone, can’t provide this kind of judgment. Not even Google can say which story is likely to have an important impact on our collective future. There is a Web 2.0 model for publishers, and they can only get there by letting go.

I think it’s about order and also about relationships, about connecting people to information and each other.

Next: A Pulitzer-prize-winning blog?

December 7, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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The Pulitzer committee finally will allow online submissions in breaking news and breaking-news photography; in other categories, online has be go hand-in-hand with print. It’s a wimpy step but at least it’s a step. And I wonder whether the Times-Picayune’s blogs could win the Pulitzer. Rex Hammock and I said they should.

It’ll be on the final

December 6, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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The syllabus for the digital journalism course Howard Rheingold is teaching at Stanford is just great. Word file here.

The last presses

December 5, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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Last month, I went to Europe for a session at the Guardian’s management offsite. They were just about finished converting the Guardian and the Observer print editions to the Berliner format (halfway between a broadsheet and a tabloid) at great effort and expense and at no small risk. It has been a success so far, but this meeting was not a celebration. Instead, wisely, they came together to start figuring out what their products and businesses would have to become next, now that we have crossed over into the digital age. I won’t recount what happened; this was their meeting. I’ll just say that they had me in — as a few other media companies and organizations have done lately — as the scary guy: Blogboy does his bugga-bugga about the distributed, post-scarcity, small-is-the-new-big, paperless, unplatform era of citizen control of media. I apparently have found my proper role in life: frightening people. But in this case, I was the one who was intimidated, because the Guardian is the most forward-thinking print organization I know and I was all the more impressed after watching their culture in action. And I was all the more cowed when, over drinks the night before meeting, Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger went years past where I planned to time-travel the next day. Talking about the presses they’d just spent tens of millions of pounds buying, he shrugged and said:

“They may be the last presses we ever own.”

Presses are good for only a few decades.

That same day, I picked up the International Herald Tribune and read Thomas Crampton’s interview with another forward-thinking publisher, Germany’s Hubert Burda, who created one of my favorite print properties, the newsmagazine Focus. Crampton (of Joi.Ito.com fame) wrote:

…Burda has spent the past few years zealously pushing his media company into everything digital, even insisting that he will never open a printing plant again….

The grease and machinery of the printing press have almost become a sideline to the tool that Burda sees as central to the next generation of publication: social software. This encompasses everything from Web logs to community-building Web sites that let readers create their own content through reviews and comments.

“Printing will not go away, but I do not plan to open a single new printing plant,” Burda said. “We now concentrate on using social software to build closer relations with the communities of readers around our magazines.”

On the way home, I picked up Business Week and read about Random House, owned by another German media company, Bertelsmann, under the headline, “Digital Is Our Destiny.”

* * *

Then I landed back home in the U.S., where too many of the newspaper editors and publishers I know of still hold dear to their identities as publishers — proprietors of presses, printers on paper, owners of content, controllers of distribution, beneficiaries of monopolies. Publishers, damnit. Newspaper publishers.

The contrast struck me as deadly.

Today, the news about newspapers in America is not good: more layoffs (despite MoveOn’s whining), more competition, more fear, less revenue, lower stocks. The time that many hoped was a long way off may be upon us already. Newspapers are going to start to die.

Look at Knight Ridder: There’s talk that there may be buyers for the old gray gals — namely, private equity firms. David Sanderson of Bain said at the Reuters media summit that buyers could finance the purchases on cash flow … and then hope they will get the same multiples in five years. Yeah, sure. What’s unsaid is that these cash cows will have been milked dry and that there is no growth left in them. That makes me wonder whether these buyout firms will really want to buy papers now, knowing that they will have to put in tremendous strategic work to utterly change the nature of the companies. So what if no one will buy them?

Well, some papers will die sooner or later. Papers like the Philadelphia Daily News may die sooner. There are efforts to save that paper and I’m really looking forward to discussions scheduled to begin early next year in Philadelphia about the right strategy to do that … if the paper survives that long. But I have to ask whether that is the right crusade at all. Save the paper? No, it’s not about saving paper. Sorry, but it’s not even about saving jobs.

* * *

It’s not about saving anything. Instead, this is about seizing the opportunity of the internet and whatever that brings.

The people here who are trying to save papers are concentrating on the wrong assets. Listen to Dr. Burda again: He’s not saving paper and presses or even content and creators. He’s growing in new spheres:

We now concentrate on using social software to build closer relations with the communities of readers around our magazines.

I’ll say it again: Distribution is not king. Content is not king. Conversation is the kingdom. It’s about relationships. Burda gets it. That’s what my conversations in Europe were about.

Rupert Murdoch gets it, too. Note well that he did not buy a content company or a distribution company with producers or presses when he acquired MySpace. He bought a relationships company.

This means changing the very essence of what a newspaper is. It’s not about scarcity. It’s not even about news as mere news. Dr. Burda again (echoing VC Vinod Khosla at Web 2.0):

News has now become a commodity, thanks to the Internet, so we must differentiate ourselves in other ways. Content alone can no longer win. You must build and interact with audiences.

It’s also not about power anymore. After Murdoch gave a rare interview Murdoch gave to the UK Press Gazette, Emily Bell, editor of Guardian Unlimited (note well the name of that site; it’s about the Guardian no longer being limited), noted that one man, Murdoch, is no longer in the position to singlehandedly change the industry of news and media in Great Britain. That power is now distributed, just like content. Bell writes:

But what we once took from Murdoch, as an industry and as media journalists, was his ability to provide a shockingly radical lead: he was the disruptive technology which now is itself being disrupted. [Bill] Gates, who is arguably Murdoch’s only peer in terms of original insight and business success, has, it seems, stepped away from his business too, accepting that the next wave of thinking will inevitably come from elsewhere….

As a media journalist it is impossible to study the evolution of News Corp and not admire the sheer brilliance of vision and the perfection of execution….

A lengthy interview with Rupert Murdoch feels like an obituary for an era – the sound of a nail being put into a coffin. And just as Murdoch symbolised the mainstream media industry at the peak of its power and used its influence so deftly, so his decline in relevance is a sharp reminder that the media establishment is all in the same boat. The only difference being that Murdoch’s boat is considerably bigger.

I think Murdoch would agree. Listen to him from that interview:

Does he feel now that his internet strategy is fully formed? “It’ll never be fully formed. The internet is changing, very disruptive technology and there are new inventions coming along every month. One has to stay awake and race to stay up with it, or if you get enough brilliant people around maybe you can get ahead of it.”

“The point is the ease of entry. If someone has a good idea on the net the cost of entry is zero. We’re going to have many, many more voices….”

There’s vision left in the old guy yet.

* * *

Now hear Murdoch on the state of journalism and newspapers… in America:

Given all this activity, how fearful does he think traditional journalists have to be for their futures?

“Not at all,” he says. “Just become better journalists. Great journalism will always be needed, but the product of their work may not always be on paper – it may ultimately just be electronically transmitted. But for many, many, many years to come it will be disseminated on both.

“There will always be room for good journalism and good reporting. And a need for it, to get the truth out.”

In Britain he thinks journalism is in as healthy a state as it has ever been. “Maybe better, there’s some great writing taking place, certainly in our newspapers – Times, Sun, Sunday Times – and we don’t have a monopoly on it. There is good writing all over the place….

“And it doesn’t matter because there are so many to choose from. I think the people of Britain are uniquely lucky to have such a great choice of newspapers and news, whereas in America you don’t.

“Outside New York, it’s all monopoly newspapers.

“Some have good work in them, but it tends to be overwritten, boring and elitist, not a reflection of the general mood in the public. And I think you’re going to find their circulations falling more than they already have. With their business models, because they’ve already stripped all the costs out, now they have to depend on advertising. And that is certainly under threat.”

I doubt he’ll be buying Knight Ridder. Too bad. He might be the one guy who’d know how to save the Philly Daily News as a tab, as a paper. But I don’t want to fall back into that trap again: the trap of thinking that our task is to save something from the past, to look back when we should be looking forward.

Our task is to stop seeing old failings everywhere and start seeing all the new opportunities before us, to exploit the future and expand news — to exhibit a passion about the possibilities, as Rafat Ali told the Online News Association. And we must accept the reality of the marketplace and stop wishing it wouldn’t change.

To summarize some of my own pontification on the topic from this blog…

From an editorial perspective, this means we can’t start with a goal of saving the newsrooms we now have. We have to find new efficiencies (how much do we spend on commodity news?) and new ways to help the public gather and share news (see hyperlocal citizens media) and concentrate on our real value: reporting. We need to think in terms of relationships, sharing training, information, promotion, and trust. How can we use online and the join with our public to grow bigger and share more information more quickly? That must be our goal.

From a business perspective, we need to stop whining about readers moving online. If that’s what they want to do, then go with them, damnit! The biggest challenge is to train advertisers that online is more valuable than print because more people are there and they are more engaged in getting what they want, and so advertising there is more efficient and should be worth more. The Online Publishers Association is taking steps to do that nationally; local sites need help, too (oh, for NCN). The next challenge is to find new ways to serve new advertisers, and maybe that’s not on content we own but on much larger and more targeted networks of citizens’ media. I believe we will, sooner than we know, start seeing print as an added cost burden maintained primarily becuase advertisers value it more than readers . I also believe that print will shift to become value added to online. It only stands to reason: If the people are online, that is where the advertisers will be. The publisher with balls will drive toward that inevitability, killing stock tables and even whole sections to encourage readers to go online. As for arguments that newspapers have high profit margins today: Well, yes. But once again, they’re not going to grow as papers. And once again, beware the cash cow in the coal mine that can blind you to your strategic imperitive to change.

The first step is to change the way we think. We have to stop thinking of ourselves on paper. Stop thinking one-way and start thinking two-way. Stop thinking centralized and start thinking distributed. Stop thinking about holding trust and power and start thinking about earning and sharing both. Stop thinking we make money by creating friction and owning scarcity and start thinking about how we can make and share money by enabling people to do what they want to do. Stop thinking of what we produce as paper. We need to stop thinking of newspapers as things.

So how do we think? This weekend, I quoted a blogger about owning media and came away thinking that life and the internet are about verbs and so should media be: What do people want to do?

I also love quoting Hugh MacLeod, who told me to share this wisdom with the Online News Association two years ago: Hugh said that rather than thinking of a newspaper as a thing, we should start thinking of it as a place, “a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things.” Whatever we do, we have to break out of our old assumptions and old ways of looking at newspapers and journalism.

And that is what struck me so much about the contrast I saw between Europe and America. Here, we are talking about saving newspapers and hanging onto the past for dear life. There, they are talking about what comes next and they’re in a mad dash to get there.

The idea that the presses we own may be our last is not cause for mourning but for invention and investment. We have no choice.

* * * * *

: Here are a few ways to break out of the old ways of thinking. Robin Miller has a great piece on lessons for newspapers he has gained from working at Slashdot’s parent company. Here is Dave Winer’s prescription.

: Full disclosures: I write a column for Media Guardian. They paid my way to the meeting but not a fee (who flunked that business test?). I agreed that the meeting was off-the-record but I did ask Rusbridger whether I could blog his quote. And I want to disclose that I’m sorry for writing such a long post.

How-to

December 4, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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Der Spiegel is running an online journalism course.