There’s so much wrong with this story I’m resorting to a bleg.Help me out, here:
customers can’t be found to support these news-gathering institutions
if they are so vital to our “democratic constitutional system” (Coll)
and “our democracy” (Swensen and Schmidt). The implication seems to be
that political coverage, foreign dispatches, and investigative work are
inherently noncommercial. If that’s the case, has the publication of
thousands of foreign, political, and investigative news stories
(“quality coverage,” to put it in shorthand) over the decades been an
act of philanthropy by newspapers?
Basically yes. See, you know, all of history ever.
Next question?
than others, and some continued to pay for quality longer after the big
advertising wave receded. But many of our notions of what a quality
newspaper ought to contain are based on memories of recent decades,
when many newspapers were printing money and had no trouble saying yes
to proposals for new foreign bureaus, new national bureaus, new
suburban bureaus, and new sections.
So it was an act of charity? Or a decision to use money based on something other than a radical vending machine notion of the newspaper: this much money goes in, this much “quality” comes out? I’m confused.
Also, can anyone name for me when the golden age of journalism supposedly was? People have always been bitching that there aren’t enough resources. Businesses have always expanded when there was enough money or room to grow. If there’s one thing I want to get across to the assholes who are our press financial decision-makers these days, it’s that by running around acting like the sky is presently falling in a way it’s never fallen before they are making themselves look ridiculous.
For more on this, just read theNewsosaur’s excellent series on print vs. online advertising dollars, which reinforce the entirely correct notion that just as with supposedly bankrupt Social Security, there is no crisis beyond a bunch of whiny, lying assholes laying good people off to preseve their fat dividend checks, lying assholes about whose financial problems you could not pay me in solid gold covered in chocolate to care. So go read that, would you? Then come back so we can talk about Shafer’s bullshit some more:
freeze newspaper newsroom size at its high watermark. There’s also
something disconcerting about wanting to divorce the newspaper from
market pressures. (If I wanted that sort of news product, I’d watchThe NewsHour.)
Without some market discipline, how will a newspaper know whether it is
succeeding or not, an idea Jonathan Weber explored yesterday inThe Big Money. And it’s not as though endowments are “insulation against hard economic times,” either, asTimesExecutive EditorBill Keller put it yesterday. “Just ask universities,” Keller continued. BloggerHoward Weaver calls foundation fans people “who wish some billionaire would endow newsrooms so they don’t have to change.”
Speaking only for myself, as a “foundation fan” whose newsroom benefited from the nonprofit model immensely, I’d like someone to point out the utter idiocy of conflating “stability of income and absence of people cutting where no cuts need to be made” with “no change NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER.” Is theSt. Pete Times the same size, covering the same things, as it was last year or the year before or the year before that? Are any number of college newspapers working under this model? No? Why, then, kindly shut up until you find something to talk about you can support with actual facts.
Even if someone did establish a foundation-funded, nonprofit newsroom as large as theTimes‘ or thePost‘s,
I’d still have misgivings about it. Who would appoint the directors of
the foundation? To whom would the foundation be accountable? To whom
would the editors and reporters ultimately report—the foundation
directors or the readers? Under the current arrangement, you can blame
the Graham family if you dislike thePost, the Ochs-Sulzbergers if you’re peeved about theTimes, Sam Zell if you hate theLos Angeles Timesor theChicago Tribune, orgenocidal tyrantRupert Murdoch if theWall Street Journallets you down.
You see what I mean about there being too much fail here for one small girl to handle?
This is the problem? That you don’t know who to yell at? Well, okay, let’s see if I can break that down for you. Nonprofit organizations still have presidents. And CEOs. They may have boards of directors but those boards are, you know, made up of people. One of whom will certainly be appointed as or appoint an editor, at whom you can direct your instructions on how best to present the crossword puzzle, or what syndicated columns to purchase. Problem solved. I truly do not understand the bogeyman he’s attempting to invoke here. Can someone fluent in horseshit step in?
The stupid has made me so tired. Can’t I just lay down now?
No?
laudable one, and it’s almost sensible if you can do it with other
people’s money. But the foundation ploy ignores the reasons why
big-city dailies have been dying a slow and profitable death since the
advent of AM radio: wave after wave of new competition (TV, FM, cable,
the Internet, smartphones, et al.), changes in commuting habits,
changes in reader habits, changes in advertising strategies, changes in
entertainment habits, the decline of the department store (an
advertising mainstay), and the erosion of the classified market. As if
that isn’t bad enough, in the current downturn many car dealers, car
makers, members of the real estate/finance complex, and
banks—advertising pillars all—have stopped buying column inches.
Emphasis mine. A profitable death? What is that? By Shafer’s glorious free-market standards, profit is life. Profit means you don’t need to “stroke billionaires” (I refuse to quote that portion on the presumption that someone, somewhere, is stupidly letting his kid read this blog) for “their” money.
And not for nothing, but if a charitable foundation comes up with the scratch to buy a paper then that foundation becomes like every other newspaper owner on the planet: the owner of a newspaper. What Shafer’s really afraid of is a wave of publicly traded newspaper companies being taken private and subject to more realistic standards of profitability and he’s conflating ownership with management. As I’ve said a number of times, I’m not so much convinced this is the right way to go as leaning that way because a) what we got now ain’t exactly tearing up the NASDAQ and b) anything that causes this many sheltered, oblivious idiots to wank this much can’t be that bad.
Also when did this conversation become just about the Post and the Times? Last I checked there were more than two newspapers in this country. Maybe some of them have thoughts they’d like to share on the topic. Maybe we should be worried about them, instead of just about the newspapers academia’s finer morons can name off the tops of their heads.
Please have at the rest of it, commenters. I need to go make myself a STIFF drink.
A.