Black and white and read less and less
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Tim is quite right that newspapers aren't the same thing as journalism. The former can die even as the latter thrives. He is also right that there's been an explosion of Online news outlets, though to be fair many of them cannibalize the reportorial content of newspapers, itself paid for by print advertising.
I happen to prefer magazine writing and blogs to most, though not all, newspaper articles. And I am confident that national news, international news and commentary is going to get written whether newspapers survive or not.
But I am less sanguine about another part of the newspaper bundle: the part dedicated to local news.
As I've mentioned before, I got my start at an 80,000 circulation newspaper in Southern California that covered a dozen or so municipalities: Claremont, La Verne, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga, Fontanna, Chino, Chino Hills, Pomona, Diamond Bar, Norco, Ontario, Montclair and a few adjoining cities on occasion. One beat reporter was assigned to each municipality. My beat, Rancho Cucamonga, included 130,000 residents, a half dozen school districts, the Cucamonga Water District, a municipal redevelopment agency, a community college, assorted San Bernardino County government offices, a huge construction industry presence, etc.
Obviously I couldn't provide adequate oversight of all those different subsections of local government. It took quite awhile even to sift through all the campaign finance disclosure forms for members of the City Council, figure out various alliances and allegiances, understand which developers with business before the planning commission had funneled campaign contributions through shell limited liability corporations in order to confuse me...
The stuff I saw city officials do knowing that I was a particularly dedicated reporter watching them closely convinced me that during the many times when no one was watching -- for months before I got hired at that newspaper and months after I left, for example -- they were serving the public even less well.
I shudder to think what went on at the many government agencies I never had time to investigate in even the most cursory way.
Now that the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin has been ravaged by budget cuts some cities aren't getting covered nearly as well as the uneven treatment they got back in 2002 when I started. In its coverage area, there is a gang problem, transportation planning is a mess, political corruption is common -- it's the kind of place where a dedicated reporter can be guaranteed of helping to advance federal prosecutions, as my friend Will Matthews did, or prompting a recall effort against elected officials for breaking open meeting laws, as I did.
I understand that there are hyper-local blogs run by gadflies who can cover some of this stuff. But the institutional support of a newspaper, while not technically necessary for local coverage to thrive, is nevertheless very important. A financially healthy newspaper has some institutional memory, so that when the lone hyper-local blogger goes on vacation, or moves to a new neighborhood, or gets paid off by the local developer, someone is there to continue important coverage.
A healthy newspaper has an attorney on retainer so that when a powerful local threatens a frivolous liable suit if a controversial story runs, the story gets run -- I've known local news bloggers who uniformly didn't publish such stories when confronted, though they were in the right, because who wants to get sued over their blogging hobby?
A healthy newspaper bundles content that people want to read, like the score of last night's Lakers game, with content that few want to read -- the complicated story about the conflict of interest the city attorney has as he negotiates the retirement compensation of the fire union members, for example -- but that is useful to have in the newspaper because it forces elected officials to be more accountable.
Finally, no matter how dedicated a reporter you are, it isn't fun to sift through a 400 page planning commission agenda or search through an archive of property deeds 50 miles away at the county seat. People do these mundane tasks for pay, not as a hobby. One or two local blogs might attract enough advertising to support a half-time reporter, but none can support anything approaching the staff of a healthy newspaper.
As newspapers continue to lose money and layoff employees, the loss of local government watchdogs is what concerns me. I've been worried about this for awhile.
Because without local watchdogs you end up with this.
Guarding the guardians
Dan Drezner links a possible relative writing about going on an AIPAC-funded trip to Israel:
I've found myself picking over the question: how much has my opinion on Israel been moved?
It's not hard for me to acknowledge that I'm much more sympathetic to the predicament of Israel than I was before I saw the place so extensively with my own eyes. Traveling the countryside has given me a much clearer picture of its precarious state, with a mere 9 miles separating the West Bank from Tel Aviv - less than from Boston to Concord, and easy distance for rockets. You can certainly see why Israel wouldn't give up the West Bank until it has a partner it can trust. Its existence - and the lives of the people we met - are at risk.
Before the junket, I would have described myself as admiring of Israel but increasingly disturbed by its human rights violations.
Now I would say I find myself aligned with a growing group of former Israeli leftists, those who once believed a peaceful solution was imminent but after the debacle of Gaza have, with heavy hearts, lost their bearings and moved toward the center.
Is this a seismic shift? No. But I also have no way of knowing where I would stand had I paid for the trip with my own money, organized my own interviews, and gotten equal access to the Palestinian point of view.
Our guides, to their credit, showed us the separation wall at its most formidable and depressing. But what life is like on the other side of that wall - whether families are eating olives and grilled fish, what their hopes and dreams for the future are, whether they dream of a nonviolent resolution to the conflict - of this, I have no personal experience.
It's only anecdotal, but the one journalist I've known who went on an Israel junket that included both Israel and the Palestinian territories did not return with an improved opinion of Israel.
My personal feeling is that no journalist, or Congressman, should go on any junket sponsored by a group with as clear an agenda as AIPAC has. Information gathered in person, with vivid technicolor skies overhanging the ancient landscape, feels much realer than something you read in a stupid book. That means you tend to overweight it. A skilled gatekeeper can easily sway your opinions, even while putting a patina of balance over the thing with carefully chosen "negative" exhibits.
Pay or play
So the Times has decided to end Times Select. I wonder if they're refunding the money to those who recently paid for a full year subscription?
Felix Salmon thinks they were undone by the search engines:
Everybody knows that Google has won the search-engine war. But what's much more important is that Google has won the search war – and the latest casualty is TimesSelect. The subscriber firewalls at the WSJ and the FT will be the next to go.
Until Google came along, most content-based websites had a similar business model: users would come to the site's home page, search for what they were looking for, and then find it. So if you wanted a NYT story, you'd first go to nytimes.com, and then search. If you wanted a Wikipedia article, you'd first go to wikipedia.org, and then search.
No longer.
When I want to find one of my old blog entries on portfolio.com, I just type the search terms into the Google window in my browser. When I want to find a Wikipedia entry, I do the same thing, in the knowledge that Wikipedia's PageRank will guarantee that entry a top-two spot. Google's even very good at finding books on Amazon.
But Google is very bad at pointing people to anything behind a subscriber firewall – and rightfully so.
Perhaps. But color me skeptical. Internet advertising is still sufficiently problematic that anyone who can charge for a web subscription will probably be better off than getting a lot of low-quality eyeballs from search engines. Low-quality, that is, in terms of ad rates--no apersions on my googling readers.
Advertisers will pay more to reach Businessweek's readers than they will to reach the readers of, say, Time because Businessweek's readers are a much more attractive demographic to sell into. Free publications are the worst: who knows who's picking it up, or why? That's why classifieds and personal ads from people looking to meet other poor people tend to dominate the revenue stream of free weeklies. As far as advertisers are concerned, most google searchers are closer to the guy who picks up the Pennysaver, than to someone you'd deliberately buy an ad to reach. Google overcomes this by targeting ads to the search, but that's so far not a viable strategy for any major paper; the news costs too much to gather.
The problem with Times Select was not, IMHO, that they weren't getting enough web search; it was that they weren't getting enough subscribers to make it worth the effort of maintaining a complex two-tier system; indeed, subscriptions fell slightly this year from already underwhelming numbers. Which is unsurprising, at least to me. As I argued over a year ago:
That's why I was so surprised by the New York Times' TimesSelect strategy. It seemed unbelievably ass-backwards to me. The Times has always had a distinctly mediocre editorial page (at least since I've been a reader), populated largely by household names whose schtick had already begun to wear a little thin when they joined the page. Its news gathering organisation, on the other hand, is probably the biggest and best in the world, with the exception of the wire services and the BBC. So it decided to give its content away for free in the one area where it has a serious competitive advantage over its rivals, and put a pay barrier in front of its opinion journalism.
But it seems to me that with the possible exceptions of Paul Krugman and David Brooks, people read the columnists because they are in the nation's most widely circulated paper, not the other way around. The NYT confused what people read and email each other, with what they will pay for. If those two things were the same, poems about Jesus and pictures of animals dressed up in costumes would have displaced porn and gambling as the internet's biggest industries.
The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, has nearly a million web subscribers according to Wikipedia, or roughly half their subscription base, paying only a slight discount from the print rate. People subscribe to the Wall Street Journal because it offers the most detailed, in depth daily coverage of American business. If you are at a certain level in American business, you have to have it to know what is going on; therefore, you will pay for it. (Likewise the FT in Britain). Moreover, the fact that you will pay for it makes you more valuable to the publisher as advertiser bait.
I expect that the pay barriers at the Wall Street Journal will therefore remain erect for quite some time. Though possible disconfirming evidence: my old employer has taken down their pay barrier for current content. Though the archives still seem to be behind the wall.
