Goodbye News Media: Don't Forget to Write

Traditional news media is about to write its own obituary. In the last few months Time cut 600 employees, US News & World Report, and Christian Science Monitor went online. Hearst, Conde Nast, McGraw Hill, all recorded deficits. CBS posted an 11.8 Billion dollar loss this quarter, CNBC announced a 10% budget cut and NBC Universal is cutting their budget by $500 Million dollars, ABC has a hiring freeze and the list goes on and on and on. I would like to look at the decline of traditional news media, what are we doing with new media, a look at embracing the audience and how this affects democracy.

News organizations are tied to the very life blood of democracy and the economy. Is it possible to have a democracy bailout? Many would say democracy suffers under a declining news media but with new media, new horizons for citizen journalists open everyday and a chance for a new democracy. Robert W. McChesney argues in Rich Media, Poor Democracy a new democracy is not possible without a corporate media explosion and a corresponding implosion of public life (McChesney 3). At this time we are facing a corporate media explosion due to the failed economy and looming depression. If you read any media blogs they are inundated with media “deaths” every day. The grim reaper of the magazine industry has its own blog. It is an entire site dedicated to the demise of the medium titled magazinedeathpool.com. Spend five minutes on the site and it makes you ill but provides a pretty good indication of the state of advertising and what is to come. More death.

The Old Media obituaries have already been written most notable by Marshall McLuhan predicting the electronic age and supplying us with the tetrad in the book posthumanously published by his son; Laws of Media: The New Science . If we look at these four questions he poses with new media in mind, one question of which asks “what is pushed aside or obsolesced by new media?” We can see that it is Television and Print.

NEWSPAPER DECLINE: THE BLAME GAME

In his book Super Media, Charlie Beckett quotes a study by Shakeup Media, for every one percent of broadband growth, newspaper circulation goes down two percent. At this rate, newspaper would be dead by 2090 with no more advances (Beckett 21). Technological advances come every day and it only eats away at that 2090 number. My prediction is newspaper won’t last until 2010. This gives newspapers 2009 to get their act together.

In the wake of an economic collapse, fingers come out and are pointing everywhere. According to an article from the American Journalism Review “Don’t Blame the Journalism” Paul Farhi writes newspaper are not declining because they aren’t adapting to new media and better journalism, but because of the newspaper business. Farhi says 50 million Americans buy one everyday and nearly 117 million read one. Secondly, newspaper readers are more affluent than TV news viewers citing Mediamark Research. Thirdly, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, ratings are lower for local TV newscasts. They took a dive this past year that marks a faster decline than newspapers. Farhi argues if it isn’t readership that is declining or undesirable ones it is advertising that is killing it. Classified ads make up more than 50 percent of newspapers profits. They have declined 25 percent in the first half of 2008 and erased $1.8 billion in revenue according to NAA research. Newspapers desperate last ditch effort to move online in the past few years is now flat lining. Farhi says web revenue is down. Sales at newspaper Web sites fell 2.4 percent in the second Quarter of 2008. Farhi who writes for the Washington Post argues the demise of newspapers is inevitable but it’s not the journalists fault and it’s not the readers, it’s the business and the economy (Farhi).

Jeff Javis of Buzzmachine.com has taken a lot of fire these past few months for claiming the decline of journalism is their fault. The journalists are to blame. A former television critic, columnist, creator of Entertainment Weekly, and associate publisher of the New York Daily News and now professor turned blogger, says journalists, including himself, did not see the change coming soon enough, readied their craft and exploit the relationships new media provided with the public. He also blames journalists for not taking back journalism. It was just left to the dogs or as Jarvis says “business people” (Jarvis). “It is our fault that we lost readers and squandered trust. It is our fault that we sat back and expected to be supported in the manner to which we had become accustomed by some unknown princely patron. Responsibility and blame are indeed ours” (Jarvis). In response Adrian Monck, a popular British Media critic and author of Truth or Lies: Can You Trust the Media said in his blog “the crops did not fail because we offended the gods” (Monck). He also claims that if we start blaming the journalist and the journalist start blaming themselves, then the public loses trust which is the very cornerstone of readership and democracy. I agree, but I think the journalists need to recognize their failures as well. The point of a journalist is to listen to the public and the public made a very large battle cry for online news this year, most evidenced by the Obama campaign who capitalized on New Media and when I say capitalize I don’t only mean campaign contributions but I mean bodies, viewership, expanding the electorate. Newspapers have to do the same thing, they have to expand their electorate and according to my prediction it may be too late.

NETWORK DECLINE:

Where do we get our news? Not at the Network. Television news is suffocating under the banner of the networks. The old network model is suffering in an ad deficiency affecting programs across the board. The relationship between the affiliates and the network is strained with low ratings and declining ad sales. As Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in “A Propaganda Model,” for a television network, an audience gain or loss of one percentage point in the Nielsen ratings translates into a change in advertising revenue of from $80 to $100 million a year (Chomsky 268). Ratings are dropping across the board and this is an anomaly year with the election and the Olympics. As Michael Schneider from Variety points out “It’s D-Day for the Broadcast Networks” saying they have been living on borrowed time for the better part of two decades (Schneider). Already hit with the writers strike earlier in the year and now the economy slump, Schneider points out a few possibilities: when desperate times call for desperate measures. One of the big three could drop an hour of primetime. But that would mean giving up prime real estate to the affiliates. In a network first, FOX having two hours of Saturday programming to be sold for infomercials. Schneider also says networks might just dump out of the old network model completely and turn themselves into a cable station (Schneider). Another possibility is selling off TV stations and getting out of the TV news business. He proposes NBC and ABC both got out of radio, why not Local TV? Schneider cites many network execs who think they are a long way off from extinction (Schneider). They claim to have bored through the tough times and they will bear through this. I disagree. I think Schneider points out some good alternatives but it isn’t going to stop the Internet or Youtube or Hula or Netflix or DVR’s. If Networks think they can grin and bear it. I think they have another thing coming. Charlie Beckett credits this fragmentation and loss of audience to an “explosion” of choice (Beckett 25). This could be the same “explosion” Robert McChesney was calling for back in 1999, leading to a more stable democracy.

Joe Trippi vehemently writes in his book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, TV is the cause of the declining democracy. News is not being reported. Political ads are distorted and over his lifetime he has seen, working as a campaign advisors for decades, television’s mind numbing effects. In 2004, he wrote a very compelling argument for democracies salvation. The answer is the Internet. Trippi worked on the Howard Dean presidential campaign of ’04. He passionately describes his experience of politics and technology, “they are about to converge, to crash together and reverse 50 years of political cynicism in one glorious explosion of civic re-engagement (Tripppi xix)” He watched as his grass-roots campaign created what he calls a “dot-com” miracle. Dean was born out of the internet and died under the network. Everyone remembers the clip played over and over and over again of him screaming which states he would take next. Trippi’s argument seems not only for the revolution of the internet but rabid denouncement of television. In the past four years he has been writing a lot about open sourcing and was the senior campaign advisor on John Edward’s campaign. The campaign failed but it’s interesting to note he then became a CBS News Consultant converging both his blog and analysis on-air. He was making an argument against television but now he is finding a wider audience due to television.

JUST SHOOT THE MESSENGER:

I wouldn’t stray too far from Trippi’s views when I look at Herman and Chomsky’s “Propaganda Model” it provokes me to say, “shoot the messenger.” They describe five filters for news where worthy victims are humanized portrayed prominently and dramatically where unworthy victims will be dehumanized and merit slight detail (Chomsky 282). Everything is done politically ??? and serves domestic power interests. This just adds to the argument of moving away from corporate news sources. The citizens don’t want their news filtered for them. In the most sickening way Chomsky points out our anti-communism filters as a control mechanism of the past (278). “It is the mass media who point into the limelight a Joe McCarthy, Arkady Shevchenko, and Claire Sterling”(278). This article was written in 1988 and it would be sad to say this type of radical filtering is still alive today with the fear mongering exposure of William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Reverend Wright and ACORN.

Nick Davies writes in his book Flat Earth News, there’s no real reporting about reporting, dog doesn’t eat dog (Davies 1). This is a problem with the business in general. There are no watchdogs of the media, only the grassroots kind that have there very beginnings online. Dan Rather, taken down by the blogosphere is the prime example of this. Davies demands in the future media products should be treated like food products which would require them to reveal their contents. He refers to a study done at Cardiff University that shows the most respectable news institutions are recycling unchecked material. I notice this in my own work at CBS News, where we routinely use wire copy that seems to be the all be all when it comes to content. We also use APTN video without even thinking twice. The study found 69 percent of stories were whole or mainly wire copy and only 1 percent admitting the source (52-53). They also found a staggering 70 percent relied on a statement of fact that had not been checked. Davies sites a study done by the Columbia Journalism Review on the Wall Street Journal that found more than half of their news stories “were based solely on press releases. They were reprinted verbatim or in paraphrase” with a WSJ byline (97).

If a majority of all our news is coming from wire or PR services, how healthy do they look right now considering the economy? In an interesting move this last week of November, the News Media Guild, the Associated Press’ largest union, sent out a press release saying more than 500 employees of the AP have signed a petition urging the AP to reverse course in contract talks with the NMG, saying the AP’s bargaining stance threatens quality journalism. First reported in an article in Editor & Publisher, Joe Strupp published the letter from the petitioners to NMG. The new contract proposed by the AP has a wage freeze, weakened job security, eliminated overtime and reduction of sick leave for new mothers (Strupp). This is terrible news for journalists. It’s providing evidence of stagnant talks of previous negotiations and proving the AP is, in fact, struggling. If a news organization of this magnitude and located in all 50 states and around the world are making cut backs you can only imaging how this is effecting smaller news organizations. This bad news comes on the heels of a much heated battle between Newspapers and the AP over their high rates forcing some to drop the AP all together. This has opened doors for other news services hoping to jump in the market. CNN recently announced its cheaper wire services to lure newspapers away from the AP. They are also holding a “CNN Newspaper Summit” ( Arango). CNN the Newspaper?? This would mark a major convergence between television and newspapers. It is interesting move on their part to not be investing more on the new media side rather in a dying medium.

With a bigger news hole to fill and a lack of wire services, tighter deadlines and even tighter budgets newspapers may go for it, but who is fact checking CNN. Davies suggests a parallel news organizations that would sample the output of each newspaper and broadcaster, check it for mistakes and then produce a rolling average of their accuracy and make it mandatory to be displayed by them (393). Davies says the most dangerous thing about the internet is news organizations are using it to cut costs but not giving that money back to journalism. (394)

NETWORKED JOURNALISM:

If we do shoot the messenger, pull the plug on Evening News and cancel the Gray Lady, what are the implications of a disappearing conventional media? Charlie Beckett estimates in his book, Super Media: Saving Journalism So it Can Save the World, we have five years –perhaps ten- to save journalism (Beckett 5). “In the short term, news businesses will survive if they make the right decision about staffing and marketing, but in the long term …They have to know what kind of journalism is wanted and needed and how to deliver it” (12). He suggests the only way to do it is by what he is calling “Networked Journalism”. A term used to describe what his “Super Media” will do. The need for networked journalism is a concept of connecting journalists to the public to contribute facts, fact check, link stories, post blogs. The stories are always green and continue on. The Journalist is the facilitator not the gatekeeper (52). A form of this is being done at new news websites such as VoiceofSanDiego.org. It’s a web-based news organization that is rising as a Watchdog in San Diego uncovering many different scandals. At this point they are nonprofit like ProPublica but it’s catching on in other places and the public is interacting with them (Perez-Pena).

Beckett argues it’s impossible to separate the old media from the new media and in fact there is a growing need for the way journalists can filter and package information (Beckett 19). Beckett presents the old media problems such as unresponsive, expensive, deadlines, linear, to new media solutions like interactive, cheap and multi-dimensional (47). There will still be uses for the broadcast and print in the future. It has to be integrated into another model. In Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog he creates a “Model for the 21st Century Newsroom.” In this newsroom all medium come into play. First, an alert is sent out via text or Twitter or Facebook feed, showing ownership of the story and speed of information. Next a draft is written this comes as a blog and can spread the word. Next, is a tangible article or package, this shows editorial decision. Next is reflection and interactivity. This goes back to blogging and live chats. The final stage is customization. This is a subscription or database driving journalism (Bradshaw). This is a great model but it doesn’t explain the profit of it. How do you make money off of this model? There are also editorial problems with this because it doesn’t explain how the original information is received and what would be deemed rumor worthy and who would be at fault for a speed vs. accuracy dilemmas.

NEW MEDIA, NO MONEY:

In regards to making this new media model work, Paul Farhi wrote in the American Journalism Review about “Online Salvation.” Newspapers that think they can make it work online need to think again. Farhi states Nielsen’s Net Ratings show an audience plateau and the ones that are visiting these sites aren’t staying around for long. The average view time of the nytimes.com was 68 seconds per day. Local newspapers are the most at risk for failure. But even if some of these disappear and the newspaper industry continued to lose about 8 percent of its print ad revenue and online revenue continued to grow at 20 percent a year, Fahri points out it would take more than a decade for online revenue to catch up to print. Another problem with online news is the ability to steal it and call it your own, even if you source it, you are still getting the web traffic. This leads advertisers to stray away from online ads on news sites. Rupert Murdoch is making subscribers pay for the journal. It’s also being done in some local newspapers around the country. Eventually somebody has to pay for the journalism. If the ad revenue can’t keep up it will be the people.

Craig Newmark of Craigslist.com says paper is a luxury item, Craigslist, the online classified advertising giant, taking blame for failed profits at Newspapers, chimed into the debate last month. Newmark visited the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times for a meeting with its editors and writers. The LA Times posted the partial transcript online in an article entitled “Paper or Pixels”. Newmark calls himself a “community organizer.” Newmark says he feels that way on a local level and in the future newspapers will be either very local or very national. He mentions this because he recently subscribed to the New York Times, because he thinks people want to have a connection to a national newspaper for big stories they want to read more about (Newmark). A professor of mine posed the question to our class the other day, if the Times decided to make customers pay for their material online would you subscribe. The answer was a resounding yes. Young people would PAY for the Times online. The newspaper of record is still the newspaper of record and its content is not something you can get anywhere else. If I had a choice between being better informed and slightly poorer or less informed and richer. I would choose poorer. Do people out across the country value the Times and its content? Would they pay? Newmark says yes but for the upper middle class and above. He also thinks we will turn to the sponsorship model that we saw in the 50’s and 60’s. We will also see the public service model and philanthropy model (Newmark). The public service model much like the VoiceofSandiego.org mentioned earlier, or one of my personal favorites devoted to polls and projections FiveThirtyEight.com who recently looked at the retention percentage of political Web sites. TheAtlantic, Drudge, Huffington are all over 100 percent (Silver).

DEMOCRACY DOUBTS:

What does it all mean? Robert W. McChesney writes in Rich Media, Poor Democracy people are more intoned to media then ever before. They are not jumping ship to go to another medium they are just consuming more media. But, he argues, media have become a significant antideomocratic force in the US and it’s due in-part to the corporate media explosion. McChesney argues, “behind the lustrous glow of new technologies and electronic jargon, the media system has become increasingly concentrated and conglomerated into a relative handful of corporate hands” (McChesney 3). He says we must restructure the media and reconnect with citizens (3). He proposes a media system that promotes democratic rule which means creating a nonprofit and non-commercial component. This is opposite of Schneider’s model but similar to Beckett.

McChesney wants to reenlist the public in the debate over media issues. I find this problem in our own society to be the most daunting. The only ones talking about the decline of the media are the people in the media. McChesney explains in his book the need to organize politically to enact structural media reform. He argues the only way to do it is by an “emergence of a broad-based democratic left that makes media reform one of the core elements of its platform.” (11) I challenge this notion of a “left.” This term today is very vague. He speaks about media radicalism and the downfall of neo-liberalism. I don’t think you have to be a contender for the left to challenge the media. I think websites even like FiveThirtyEight are challenging the media. They are providing a product that others aren’t. I beg the question: is Obama left enough? Will he have the platform that changes the corporate media today? He has already established his new media presence and has created the White House Daily Briefing Channel on Youtube. He wants to move his conferences online and speak to the public with feedback. I argue he is already contributing to McChesney’s media reform. In The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest. David Croteau and William Hoynes’ call to action is to exercise choice, and to engage in civic activities. There are many forms of content on many different mediums and with that an opportunity to branch out from the corporations. The authors conclude media overshadows other important social institutions integral to our democracy. The decline of church groups, labor unions, consumer organizations has lead to a more consumerist society. They advise the revitalization of civic life will not occur from the restructuring of media but through a renewal of civic culture (Croteau 258).

The project I want to do is chart the decline of the news media in this economic crisis. Will this be the year conventional media died? I would like to create a website that follows the daily battles of TV News, just like mediadeathpool. There seems to be a lot of literature about print but not as much on the broadcast decline. One thing I have noticed in my own research is there is exhausting amount of research on the media in general and journalists are not afraid to write about journalism. The more books I looked at closer to this date the longer their works cited pages were, citing lectures, websites, blogs, packages, print articles, books, soon we will be quoting Twitter comments in our works cited pages. The information is overwhelming and infinite and I find it hard to weed through it all. It only adds to the argument that journalist or “community organizers” or “networkers” are essential in this movement. By the time I have finished writing this sentence media will have changed and 10 new blogs will have been created. It’s impossible to keep up.

I also would like to look at online social networking sites and if they are causing a decline in audience to news and journalism. My generation spends a great deal of time on these sites rather than watching news or picking up a paper or reading the times online and some of my research suggests network journalist will use these sites to research stories gather comments and network with other journalists on information. If people had to pay for facebook and Myspace would they still use them? They have built up such a user base, I argue they would. Can these be turned into news sites? If they are used as news sites is there a way to monitize the content. Adage.com says "That's perhaps summed up best by Ted McConnell, Procter & Gamble's interactive guru: "What in heaven's name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?" (adage.com).

A lot of research out there is lacking the business perspective. This utopian belief that we can start up some Networked Journalism and all move online and have this perfect news media, non profit journalism is just that: utopian. The news media has to make money just like everybody else. I think where this comes down to is free. We as a society feel so entitled to everything for free. Yes it is a “free” press but that doesn’t make it FOR free. If advertising is failing we have to turn to subscription based programming/print and online content. Yes, media conglomerate corporations will fail that base everything on big time advertising but smaller media companies that employ real journalists will succeed. Isn’t that what we want, a poor media, rich democracy?

Works Cited:

Arango, Tim. ""CNN Pitches a Cheaper Wire Service to Newspapers"" New York Times. 30 Nov. 2008.New York Times.Nov. 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/business/media/01cnn.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business>.

Beckett, Charlie. SUPERMEDIA SuperMedia : Saving Journalism So It Can Save the World. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2008.

Bradshaw, Paul. ""A Model for the 21st Century Newsroom"" Weblog post. Online Journalism Blog. 17 Sept. 2007. Nov. 2008 <http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2007/09/17/a-model-for-the-21st-century-newsroom-pt1-the-news-diamond/>.

Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. "" The Propaganda Model"" Manufaturing Consent. Pantheon Books, 1988.

Croteau, David, and William Hoynes. The Business of Media : Corporate Media and the Public Interest. New York: Pine Forge P, 2005.

Davies, Nick. Flat Earth News : An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media. London: Chatto & Windus, 2008.

Farhi, Paul. ""Don't Blame Journalism"" Nov. 2008. American Journalism Review. Nov. 2008 <http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4623>.

Farhi, Paul. ""Online Salvation"" Jan. 2008. American Journalism Review. Nov. 2008 <http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4427>.

Jarvis, Jeff. ""It Is Our Fault"" Weblog post. BuzzMachine. 8 Oct. 2008. Nov. 2008 <http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/10/08/it-is-our-fault/>.

McChesney, Robert W. Rich Media, Poor Democracy : Communication Politics in Dubious Times. New York: New P, The, 2000.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media : The New Science. New York: University of Toronto P, 1992.

Monck, Adrian. ""The Decline of Newspapers - Nothing to Do with Journalism"" Weblog post. Can You Trust The Media? 17 Feb. 2008. Nov. 2008 <http://adrianmonck.com/2008/02/the-decline-of-newspapers-nothing-to-do-with-journalism/>.

Newmark, Craig. ""Paper or Pixels?"" Interview. Los Angeles Times. 25 Nov. 2008. Los Angeles Times. Nov. 2008 <http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-newmark-ps25-2008nov25,0,1635100.story?page=1>.

Perez-Pena, Richard. ""Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs." New York Times. 17 Nov. 2008.New York Times.Nov. 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/business/media/18voice.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp>.

Schneider, Michael. ""Needed: Network bailout?"" 23 Nov. 2008. Variety. Nov. 2008 <http://www.variety.com/vr1117996347.html>.

Silver, Nate. ""Friday eCommerce Interlude"" FiveThirtyEight. 21 Nov. 2008. FiveThirtyEight. Nov. 2008 <http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/friday-ecommerce-interlude.html>.

Strupp, Joe. ""Guild Claims 500 AP Staffers Signed Petition Against Contract Proposal"" Editor & Publisher. 25 Nov. 2008.Nielsen Business Media.Nov. 2008 <http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003915997>.

Trippi, Joe. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything. New York: ReganBooks, 2004.