Journalists are too naive to news business pressures, say panelists at UA forum | Ink By the Byte
Banner, Ink By the Byte, Opinion — By Christopher Spencer on November 7, 2009 at 4:05 AM
Gordon Witkin, managing editor at the Center for Public Integrity, speaks Thursday at "The Fog of New Media" discussion. The discussion was hosted by the University of Arkansas' journalism department.
[Disclosure: I originally conceived of this as a straight news story, but soon realized that I'm not capable of writing an objective account of this meeting since local online news sites like Ozarks Unbound are part of this discussion of new media. So, I present it as an Ink By the Byte column.]
Listen to a raw audio copy of the panel here. My apologies that the first 15 minutes is missing. I arrived late to the discussion.
By Christopher Spencer
Ozarks Unbound
For decades, newspapers created information monopolies throughout most of the country.
New challenges and challengers on the Internet are tearing into newspaper’s financial bottom lines and competing as news sources, destroying those old monopolies, said Gordon Witkin, managing editor at the Center for Public Integrity.
Witkin served on a panel Thursday titled “The Fog of New Media” exploring the current state of news media and what the future means with the growing prominence of online forms of journalism. The panel was hosted by the University of Arkansas’ journalism department.
The long-standing divide between business realities and newsroom concerns created naivete among journalists in the business of news. That naivete leaves news gatherers in a position where they now struggle with how to support themselves with their skills, said panelist Matt Waite
Waite is a news technologist at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida and co-founder of a media consulting company called Hot Type. He started his journalism career more than a decade ago at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Newspapers struggle with dropping circulation numbers and dwindling advertising revenue, Witkin said. It’s time for journalists to better understand the market realities of making journalism pay.
“The underlying problem here is that those of us who are ‘Capital J’ journalists, we can’t really ignore the business aspects of any of this anymore. We were really, for decades, lulled into a false sense of security because newspapers were virtual monopolies and that meant that good journalism … good journalism made a lot of money, unbelievable amounts of money,” said Witkin.
“Truckloads of it,” interjected Waite.
Witkin continued.
“So we fooled ourselves into thinking that the corporations that owned these outlets were really interested in good journalism. In many cases, they weren’t. In many cases today, they are not. They’re businessmen. They believe that what they have is akin to a widget company. And if they are making a lot money, great. If they are not, then lay off 50 reporters.
“So we can’t ignore that anymore, we have to find ways to make this pay if the way we want to come at this business is going to survive.”
Newspapers and online news sources are still struggling with how to make the Internet pay enough to support quality journalism, Waite said.
These groups must learn to correctly value and define their audience and deliver that audience to advertisers.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette chose to pull its content behind a pay wall and requires readers to pay a subscription fee mainly as a defensive gesture to protect their print newspapers, said panelist Conan Gallaty, online director for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The Northwest Arkansas edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas, along with other WEHCO Media and Stephens Media properties merged into Northwest Arkansas Newspapers on Sunday.
The Stephens Media news properties are expected to require a paid subscription online by Dec. 1.
Gallaty said the second part of the company’s online policy is to provide original and different products online. Unique sites such as 501pets.com, a Web site geared toward pet owners in central Arkansas, is an example of this.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s central Arkansas Web site is arkansasonline.com and Northwest Arkansas Newspapers are found at nwanews.com. Gallaty praised the efforts at both of his company’s sites.
“There’s a ton of free original content on that site and on arkansasonline, breaking news, photos. There’s a lot of reasons to go there beyond paid content from the paper,” he said.
One student asked the panel whether it’s still worthwhile to pursue a journalism degree.
“It’s a wonderful and a terrible time to be pursuing a journalism education,” Waite answered.
“It’s wonderful time because this proliferation of choice might also indicate a proliferation of employment opportunities. You don’t have to look at the newspaper industry and think ‘Oh boy, the newspaper industry is in deep trouble.’”
“They are just one of many now doing journalism on the web, in print, in magazines. The road is far far far more wide open for you than it was for me I graduated in 1997. My choices were pretty much the papers or find something else to do.”
The 40-hour-a-week job is quickly disappearing. The new journalism jobs reward flexibility, aggressiveness and an entrepreneurial bent, Waite said.
“If you are fighter, this is a great time. You will have a job.”
Witkin added that the number of skills that needed by a young reporter are now more broad than they were. It used to be mainly a language field with writing and editing courses dominating.
Now, web design, graphics, video production and computer science are much-needed skills, he said
Journalism professor Katherine Shurlds told the panelists that herself and others in the Baby Boomer generation came up in newspapers at a time when journalists reported the news and didn’t care anything about advertisers.
“I think that the implosion of the news print business model has shown us that maybe the complete separation of advertising and, not so much reporting, but journalism, was maybe naive and ultimately harmful. It is naive to think that you can completely isolate the people who pay the bills from the product and still survive. And that we were able to pull it off for as long as we did may be a historical accident of monopoly pricing and power,” Waite said.
That doesn’t mean writing ad copy for advertisers, he added. But editorial staff should be aware when news content draws a specific audience and learn to market that, he said.
The wall between editorial choice and advertisers shouldn’t be breached, but being more sophisticated in marketing content is necessary, he said.
Ink By the Byte is an occasional media criticism column.
A video interview with Matt Waite
SIMILAR POSTS
- UA forum will address New Media | CF at 1:14 PM on October 27, 2009
- All eyes on Little Rock for potential newspaper model at 5:48 PM on August 23, 2009
- Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: NWA newspaper merger shakes only at the bottom | Ink By the Byte at 3:57 AM on November 1, 2009
- Wehco and Stephens marry as Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC. is formed Friday | Ink By the Byte at 12:24 PM on October 24, 2009
- Newspaper survey shows online subscriber numbers for Democrat-Gazette | CF at 9:06 AM on January 13, 2010
Subscribe
5 Comments
Shurlds’ comments touch on one of my great frustrations about my J-school experience and my time in the newspaper / magazine industry. Depending on the professor, I felt that any instruction on reporting explicitly or implicitly warned us against paying attention to the ad-sales side of our company (the idea being that the less we paid attention to it, the less we would second-guess our reporting or let company biases come into play, I suppose.) Looking back, I think there was such a concern over this that it bred a certain amount of ignorance among journalism students over how their publication was put together from start to finish — we learned how to become one piece of the puzzle, one cog in the works, and were discouraged from spending too much time wondering what went on in the offices on the other side of the building.
This continued in the actual newspaper setting, too. Granted, I worked at a paper that had several offices and bureaus, so there wasn’t always an opportunity to encounter anyone other than reporters, editors, and photographers. But I don’t recall any instance in a full staff meeting in which the advertising or circulation people came in and explained HOW they did their jobs, just for the sake of our understanding. (Likewise, I don’t think any reporters were giving the ad and circ folks a primer on the editorial side, either.) All I remember hearing in full staff meetings were ABC numbers spun around until they were meaningless. And being a cub reporter, I always felt that my direct superiors viewed a lot of the non-editorial elements of the paper as completely irrelevant to the editorial staff — “cover your beat and let the adults handle this,” essentially.
Did this hamper my ability to be a reporter? Did I need weekly or monthly reports on revenue or a running list of advertisers? Not at all. But being a person who likes to know how his company functions, and who likes to have some context so that he knows how he fits into the bigger picture, I often found the “need-to-know basis” approach frustrating.
Had I stayed longer and grown to feel more comfortable discussing these things casually, I’m sure I would have learned more and gained a better understanding of the company and its audience. Still, I think I would have had to be the one to seek out that information, because I doubt the people up the totem pole had much interest in starting that kind of discussion.
Thanks for your comments, Statesman. I also remember feeling at newspapers that sentiment of “You kids don’t need to worry about the business side. Just write the best you can.”
This bubble created in me an ignorance about how the industry worked.
I bought into that for years because as long as publishers/owners were pulling double digit returns on their newspaper properties, the system rolled right along.
As the economy struggled and people’s news habits changed and profit dried up, it’s become clear that those of us who make the newspaper product need to take more control of our own destiny.
We can no longer depend on management to make the proper decisions. Too often, they view newspapers as ad-delivery devices.
I’ve thought about this issue a fair amount as well – the proper role of marketing in the news room.
I agree with Waite in thinking that this purest ideal that some in news rooms hold up where editorial and advertising never touch, has created a class of content producers who know nothing about how to make a living off their content and skills independent of the business that distributes their labor for them.
I don’t think news content should be for sale. Stories should always be written from a Truth First perspective, but the new breed of journalist needs to be savvy about market pressures and keep a strong eye on the financial bottom line as well as their reputation for honesty and transparency.
No discussion here of the demise of investigative journalism, something never talked about anymore. Where newspapers at one time and can in the future really add value is in poking their noses into the BS behind, for example, what’s really happening at City Hall. Never happens, but if it did, people would have a real incentive to buy the rag or pay to get behind the pay wall. Rewriting official press releases and covering accidents and openings is essentially the crap we get from today’s local papers and its not worth paying for, especially since its free from TV stations who give you a quick once over and then go onto sports and weather.
Personally, I think investigative reporting is probably the form of journalism that could best operate in a nonprofit context. It would be great to have more local nonprofit watchdog groups specifically keeping an eye on city and county governments. I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen at Springdale FOI, but I’d like for the site’s creators to be public about who they are.