I think this is a big deal: LA Times editor Russ Stanton said the paper will “train all editorial employees in new skills in every medium in which we work (print/web/TV/mobile/radio).” I hope that also means training everyone in new opportunities: collaboration, networks, opening up the process… (By the way, I was honored to be included in Stanton’s reading list.)
“I don’t want to hire single-platform journalists anymore,” said Paul Horrocks, editor of the Manchester Evening News, in a good report on the paper’s omnimedia conversation in the Editors’ Weblog. (Disclosure: I’m heading to speaking at the offiste for the MEN’s parent, Guardian Media Group.)
I was shocked by the willful naivete of yesterday’s New York Times editorial decrying media deregulation. Engrave this line on their tombstone:
The strategic challenge for newspapers is not cutting costs, but how to attract a larger share of online advertising and make money off the millions of people who read them free online.
They wish.
That has long been the cry of editors of papers including the Times: preserving their newsrooms as they operate now, protecting their ways. But they keep ignoring the obvious fact that most newspapers operated as uniquely profitable media monopolies but those days are clearly over. The internet is a highly competitive market where prices and margins simply will not match print — though audience size is greater. They also keep ignoring the obvious opportunities presented by the networked internet to operate more efficiently and also more broadly (start here and here as well as here). Finally, they keep ignoring the opportunities of crossing media, which leads to the next red herring from the Times as it argues against merging local newspapers and broadcasters:
For all the technological advances that have shaken American media over the last 30 years, remarkably little has changed about who produces the local news. Internet outlets repurpose and comment on the news. A few cable channels provide national news. But in many small and even medium-sized cities there are only two entities that put money into local news-gathering: the local newspapers and the TV stations.
Oh, come on. Local TV stations may put money into local news — and pull money out of it — but they don’t put real reporting into it. Newspapers like the Times used to sniff at local TV news the way they sniff today at blogs: They have long been repurposers, recyclers; they’re not even commenters. Imagine the possibilities of a print newsroom that follows the Rosenblum method of empowering every reporter to shoot video stories — and shoot them in new ways. What if that became the basis of the local TV news? What if instead of four crews on the ground in with expensive satellite trucks you had the hundred reporters of a formerly print newsroom all gathering news across media with small and inexpensive cameras? What if you had real reporting, real stories, not just reading out loud on cold streetcorners (‘police this morning are….’)? I’d start watching local TV news again (oh, it’s on in my house, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything to watch). There’s a benefit of combining, of finding new ways to do things, a benefit for the newspaper, the broadcaster, and the public. Oh, yes, and they can do all these things on the internet, too, proving that it is more than a place to repurpose and comment.
Here’s another herring in this barrel:
But you don’t get one healthy media company by combining two sick ones.
Really? Mergers are, of course, a way to create stronger companies out of weaker ones, otherwise no one would merge or acquire; old companies would just die. Certainly adding a healthy P&L to a struggling one is one way to help the struggling company. Why else did the Times buy About.com, which is just about the only bright spot in its P&L. (Disclosure: I used to consult at About.) But I guess the Times knows what it’s talking about here: It’ learned from the company’s purchase of the ever-sicklier Boston Globe. Not all acquisitions need to be so dumb, though.
One more bullet, one more fish:
Mr. Martin’s plan, moreover, could dangerously reduce media diversity. Not only would the mergers allowed under the rule change eliminate independent voices, but they also might crowd rivals out of the news business. A study of F.C.C. data by consumer groups indicated that less news is broadcast in cities where companies have been granted waivers to the rules to allow them to own both newspapers and broadcasters.
Diversity of voices? What, happy talk voices? There’s no perspective from the community on the 5 p.m. news; the people reading it all came from elsewhere on their way to elsewhere. I could well imagine how that show could have more voices — start with giving some of those cheap cameras out to people in that community. But today, there’s no media diversity because media are homogenized, purposely bland, cherishing sameness, dreading change. You want diversity? Go to that dreaded internet thing, there you’ll find more diversity than the Times can bear.
Oh, and by the way, does New York have less news because it has cross-ownership (and doesn’t the Times Company have a dog in that fight, one it doesn’t mention in the editorial: The NY Post and its WYNY, not to mention the Times’ WQXR)? Does Chicago? Did San Francisco?
Now I happen to agree with the Times about the point of its editorial: FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s plans for media consolidation are half-assed. We just disagree about what should be done about it. I say he should open up the media marketplace. But, of course, the Times doesn’t want that. It wants protection. It wants sameness. It wants to preserve its ways.
Remember that the editorial page at the Times reports not to the newsroom but to the publisher’s office and then consider this a window onto its strategy or lack thereof. If I owned Times stock and if I hadn’t sold ages ago, I’d be selling now.
LATER: I’ve thought better of that last night. It was wrong and unproductive — to much the old us-v-them mindset. So I retract and apologize for it. Journalism and Times journalism are worth investment. I hope the investment is spent wisely. We need that.
In a lighter American equivalent to the union kerfuffle here in the London over the digital future of the news union, Time Magazine TV columnist James Poniewozik notes similar issues affecting both the TV writers’ union, which has voted to strike, and his own magazine, where union members are, incredibly, not required to work on the web (though note the union response in the comments to that post). Says James:
As somebody who gets paid to produce content, i.e., write, I can’t pretend to be unbiased. If content is platform-agnostic in this brave new media world, then money should be platform-agnostic too. (That’s not to say I agree with the WGA in every detail, not being privy to the negotiations, but I hear them on general principle.)
This kind of argument is playing out in many workplaces–mine, for instance. You may notice that you are reading this article not in a print magazine but on an electronic computing box, serviced by an Internet hose. Writers and production staff at Time Inc. are covered by a union, which just finished a drawn-out contract renegotiation. (I’m covered by the union but not a member; Time Inc. is an open shop, meaning membership is optional.) A big point of contention between the union and management has been the fact the website’s editors and production staffs are not covered by the union–although union-covered magazine staff, like me, do work for the websites as well.
The deal the company and union reached: magazine staff (like me) can’t be compelled to work for the websites, and the company will not extend union coverage to the website staff. To me–and, for instance, Jeff Jarvis–it’s a worst-of-both-worlds settlement. Instead of treating the ever-more-important websites as if they were ever more important, the magazine staffers get the right to abstain from working for them, and the company gets to avoid, God forbid, having more unionized employees. . .
His colleague Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, who covers the workplace, chimes in on the Time rule with both background and spot-on perspective:
Huh?! On the one hand, we’re told, in so many words, that our futures as content creators depend upon our ability to master the digital realm. On the other, corporate claims our digital future is still made of ether, and therefore our digital contribution can’t be quantified (and compensated).
Here’s a simple start to what’s likely to become a complicated solution. Why not write up new job descriptions for us? When I was hired as a staff writer at this company 10 years ago, the web was not even mentioned. Today, it’s a large part of my job, mainly by dint of my blog. I embrace my web duties; it’s unquestionably more work than just churning out for the magazine, but I recognize my own and my industry’s future lies here, on this blinking, electronic page. Yet I’m still getting mixed messages. One editor told me I shouldn’t “waste” more than 10 minutes a day on the blog. “The magazine comes first,” the editor told me. “It’s what pays you.”
Fine. So quantifying our web contributions remains a management puzzle, perhaps one for those high-priced McKinsey drones to figure out. But legitimize our work online by redefining our jobs. We’re all web writers now.
Yes, but avoiding new job descriptions is the goal of some in this and sidestepping the issues raised by them is the goal of others — when everyone’s goal should be to grab these new opportunities and figure them out.
Here‘s a piece I wrote for the American Society of Newspaper Editors magazine. To any reader here, there’s nothing new in it; it’s notable only that I got to say it to America’s editors.
