Newspeak

We're all sorry to see newspapers leave the scene, even as we admire and hope that journalism flourishes in the future toward which we hurtle.

I am moved to write this entry by one of those odd eddies that a venerable profession can find itself in. The Associated Press, clearly one of the leading journalism providers of our time, appears to be systematic in its misuse of the language.

First, the New York Times decided in the 1960s that "people" meant only what Chairman Mao said it meant--the people of a country. They invented "persons" to mean more than one person. This annoying decree has thankfully faded over the decades, but now we have other assaults.

"Three troops were killed in Iraq." A troop is a group of soldiers (or Boy Scouts) according to Webster's. Troop is not a synonym for soldier. In fact, in the U. S. Army, a troop refers to 70 to 200 persons...uh, people. "Two troops were attacked today, but fortunately only one troop died." "Soldier, pick up that troop's helmet, will you?"

The AP Stylebook says "when [troops] appears with a large number, it is understood to mean individuals: There were an estimated 150,000 troops in Iraq. But not: Three troops were injured." So, for you keeping score at home, that's Stylebook 1, AP usage 0.

"The car bomb in Peshawar killed 105, making it the deadliest attack since 2007." An attack that kills someone is a deadly attack. One attack cannot be deadlier than another, because a person cannot be deader than another. We're told, likewise, that a day can be the deadliest in memory. It can't.

As journalism leaves newspapers like a spirit floating skyward from a corpse, I hope the lack of central office dicta will spare us from this irrational newspeak. There will be ignorant abuse of language as the profession democratizes, of course, but somehow I find that preferable.

Online Newspapers

It is useful to me to have these links all in one place:

ABC News Abilene Reporter - black bg Akron Beacon Journal Atlanta Journal Constitution The Baltimore Sun Bangor Daily News Baton Rouge Today BBC News - Webby nom. Boston Globe CBS News Chicago Tribune Christian Science Monitor Cinncinnati Enquirer CNN The Daily Beast - Webby nom. Denver Post Detroit Free Press The Guardian - Webby nom. Houston Chronicle Indianapolis Star Kansas City Star

Las Vegas Sun London Independent - Webby nom. London Times - grid Los Angeles Daily News Los Angeles Times Memphis Commercial Appeal MSNBC New West The New York Observer - Webby nom. New York Times - grid The Oregonian Orlando Sentinel Phoenix New Times Philadelphia Inquirer Sacramento Bee San Diego Union-Tribune San Francisco Chronicle San Jose Mercury News Santa Barbara News-Press Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sydney Morning Herald Washington Post The Washington Times

Other sites:

The Huffington Post

The Onion - grid

Salon

SFStation - I like Kyu Kyung's design style

Think Journalism, Not Newspapers

I enjoyed an interesting panel this evening, assembled by Saratoga News columnist Carl F. Heintze and three other former San Jose Mercury News employees. Larry Jinks, currently on the board of McClatchy Newspapers, was editor 1977-81 and publisher 1989-94. Lou Calvert joined the Mercury News in 1967 and figures he spent 50 years in the newspaper business. And Ed Pope was 40 years at the Mercury, including a stint as city editor.


Lou Calvert, left, and Carl Heintze

"We're not dead yet," Calvert said in response to a man in the audience of less than three dozen who urged them to admit that print news was history. Jinks asked who in the audience read a print newspaper every day and nearly all hands went up, including young librarian Heidi Long. Jinks said that while there was no going back to the heyday, newspapers would still be around as long as there was a market.

Jinks quickly became my favorite of the group because he seemed the most realistic about just how dead the dead-tree newspaper industry truly is. Calvert, on the other hand, read a quote from Scott Bosley, executive director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors to the effect that "We'll continue to have newspapers in print because people appreciate the way they're organized and the tactile experience."

Larry Jinks

"Instead of asking what's going to happen to newspapers," Jinks said, "I think a better question is to ask what's going to happen to journalism." He said that he's always loved journalism, and that that subject just happened to overlap with newspapers for a while. This is a smart man. He retired, by the way, in 1994, the year the World Wide Web broke big.

"I can't imagine a world without newspapers," Ed Pope said, "so, in my mind, they have to survive."

The audience was salted with print news lovers. I spoke with Toni Blackstock before the panel and she mentioned how delightfully robust the Times of London is in print at 90-some-odd pages. Dale Hill rose in defense of print news during the question-and-answer portion and said, as I heard it, that newspapers would always be around because she likes them and they've always been around. That's a little unfair to Dale, but only a little. Then Dale said, "A newspaper is a communal thing. You read it and say, 'Oh, look what they're saying about so-and-so.'"

A man in the audience told the panel that he is 52 (me, too) and that he simply can't imagine a world without newspapers. But he held up his phone and said he looks at the Mercury News these days for local news, high school sports, but "for the world--I'd rather get it on my Blackberry." He said if he wants his son to read an article, he has to e-mail it or his son won't find the time.

A lot of the notes I took from the panelists discussing who put the Mercury online (and who decided that information wants to be free), apparently a man named Bob Ingle, along with specific numbers showing the decline in revenue, readers, and editorial staff, I found (online) in a two-year-old Business Week article.

Ed Pope told a good story about Mercury News publisher Joe Ridder pushing to develop every square foot of the valley in order to grow his business. Someone asked Ridder if he was sad to see all the orchards go, and supposedly he replied, "Trees don't read newspapers."

If anyone who attended the intimate panel should happen to see this report, please note that my observations were available worldwide within two hours of the evening's conclusion. I would also point out that these experienced newsmen failed to attract anyone from the Mercury News (or perhaps I didn't recognize them). Columnist Mary Ann Cook from the Weekly Times was there, but editor Dick Sparrer and reporter Judy Peterson were not. Silicon Valley Community Newspapers Executive Editor Dale Bryant wasn't there, nor was Metro Publisher Dan Pulcrano or his editor, Eric Johnson. They apparently have nothing to learn from a combined 200 years of 20th-century newspaper experience.

Things Are Bad For Newspapers

We subscribe to the Wall Street Journal (it's changed under News Corp.; we don't plan to renew) and our carrier just outright gives us the San Jose Mercury News every so often. I don't know if it's an articulated prime-the-pump marketing ploy or it's just easier for the carrier not to have to keep careful track, or something else.

But the Mercury News is pathetic compared to its former bulk. It's tiny--Saturday, October 17, 2009 was 61 pages in six sections: Local, 8 pages; Sports, 7 pages; Business, 5 pages.

Clay Shirky is back--he spoke at the Shorenstein Center September 22nd on the subject of newspapers. He considered various strategies for funding local reporting. The full transcript includes some very smart observations, as usual.

He talks about Craigslist and Monster, et. al., cutting into newspaper's ad model. His point is that you need to see it from the consumer's perspective, not the newspaper's. "If you want to list a job or sell a bike, you don't go to the place that's printing news from Antananarivo and the crossword puzzle. You go to the place that's good for listing jobs and selling bikes."

He predicts worse times ahead for newspapers before things get better. He said:

Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption. Without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they're shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.

I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.

Shirky describes the features of a "journalistic ecosystem" in order to achieve the kind of "accountability journalism" that we've grown accustomed to in the new world order.

The coherence of newspapers is not intellectual, it’s industrial. Which is to say, if you’re running a website and somebody’s on your website and they've just done a crossword puzzle and they seem to really like it, what’s the next thing you’re gonna show them? Is it news from Tegucigalpa? No. It’s another crossword puzzle, because that’s the only thing you can.

Shirky explains that this means, essentially, that "the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is [now] made by the consumer and...not by the producer." The problem is that everyone may choose to receive only things they already know that they agree with--Nicholas Negroponte's The Daily Me--and it devolves into an echo chamber. Shirky observes that it seems that readers get this concept and value expert editorial judgment and are interested in serendipity. But they are not buying into the idea of a single omnibus publication any longer.

"You don't go to the [New York] Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. ...the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience."

Shirky also says that "Syndication makes no sense in a world of URLs." (He knows how to coin a phrase, doesn't he?) Why should I sell you my content so you can build an audience for your site when I can more easily host my own content and build my own audience?

He says that any kind of paywall, micropayment, or pay per view scheme would make it "a violation of contract to make use of the news." You have to prevent the audience's ability to act as a publisher in order for that business model to work.

Shirky introduced the idea of people coming together for their own good, like open source software, rather than as a business at all. "Things in the market are created when revenues can reliably exceed expenses."

He ended his talk by agreeing with me :-). He said: "We should really be transferring our concern to the production of lots and lots of smaller, overlapping models of accountability journalism, knowing that we won’t get it right in the beginning and not knowing which experiments are going to pan out."

Dinosaur Publishers Have It All Wrong

The Wall Street Journal stands out among online news sites because it has a viable business model. Some articles are free on wsj.com, but others are only available to subscribers. The non-free articles sit behind a so-called "paywall."

Peter R. Kann, the former chairman of Dow Jones & Co. takes credit for the paywall. "Virtually alone, we chose to charge for our online content," Kann writes in "Quality Reporting Doesn't Come Cheap," an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal's Sept. 26-27, 2009 issue. I read this article in the print edition, and I learned that I disagree with Mr. Kann. Based on this one essay, I feel that Mr. Kann could symbolize the stupid, arrogant, unhelpful attitude of most news publishers. I'll elaborate.

Calling the decline of newspapers "a tragedy for democracy," Kann pins the blame on newspaper proprietors who failed to realize that customers "should be expected to pay for both" online and print news. He feels the "downward spiral" predated the Internet by decades and that it was wrong for publishers to rely on advertisers to subsidize readers. The readers should have to pay more, in his opinion. "While consumers expected to pay $1.50 or $2 (or more at Starbucks) for a mediocre cup of coffee, they were offered a quality newspaper for 50 cents, or sometimes even less."

Where I disagree most strongly with Mr. Kann and other traditional publishers is not that customers should pay for value received. The disconnect is whether an unwieldy, black and white, unsearchable jumble of yesterday's news that is 70% or more advertising offers any value to a busy consumer. Kann covers a lot of ground in his article--listing journalistic flaws such as "elitism" and "flea-like attention spans"--but he never discusses what consumers need.

In our hectic, wired environment, consumers need news integrated with other information flows. They need to stay informed by tweet, by SMS alert, and by web page. They need to be able to forward stories to others, to Digg them, to gather a set of links as part of research. Increasingly, holding the newsprint in your hand has become like lighting a wood fire in a fireplace or taking a horseback ride--nostalgic; a good change of pace, which is to say much slower.

Kann says that it was a mistake for publishers to give "young Web disciples" license to take their "preciously-crafted product" and "repackage it with all manner of bells and whistles from interactivity to instant updates to historical archives." The only mistake he sees is lack of profit, by the way, and he apparently sees no irony in calling dumb, dead-tree newspapers "preciously crafted."

His analysis of the Internet is hysterical. Noting that there are "hundreds upon hundreds" of online sites and blogs that "claim to provide news," he concludes that "virtually none of them even pretend to pursue the traditional news role of newspapers." The mission, in Kann's mind, is for professionals to "cover, analyze, and only then comment on, events."

As an aside, Kann observes that a Martian business analyst "logically might question why an unwieldy newsprint product, stale as soon as it rolls off the press and not updated till another sun rises, should not be free whereas the new Internet product, offering all the same news plus more and evolving as does the news around the clock, should not be worth a pretty price?" So, he glimpses how the Internet may offer a better future, but he quickly returns to his main focus--how businessmen can return to charging for their product.

"The decision to charge for an online edition was less courageous than it was consistent," he writes of his bold insistence on pay-for-play over ten years ago. "Why should we give all our valuable content and more away for free in some new distribution channel while charging several hundred dollars a year for it in another?"

There is the problem for dinosaurs like Mr. Kann--they think online is simply a new distribution channel. And "the online editions with growing audiences...rely on the poor print editions for almost all the news they give away. Sadly, there is less and less of that, and the ultimate loser, of course, is the public."

Yes, without journalists to "cover, analyze and only then comment on, events," we might have to rely on access to the actual documents, video of the newsmaker actually speaking, and the combined wisdom of crowds of commentators. It'll be a "tragedy for democracy."