Chris Waddle, director of the Knight Community Journalism Fellows, surveys the media landscape and discovers the monopoly is dead. The key to survival, he writes, is for old media is to reconnect with communities.SAN ANTONIO — News junkies debate the future of the information business from Anniston to Texas and, frankly, all over America like never before.
Readers, listeners, viewers, publishers, broadcasters, editors, writers, anchors, Web casters all find themselves in a tidal media change.
Is it for better or worse? Some of both, maybe. But there’s a lot of gloom over journalism as we’ve known it.
So attention focuses on The Anniston Star, home of the Knight Community Journalism Fellows. The University of Alabama will offer a master’s degree to students inside the paper after this year. By extension people want to know what’s going to happen to heartland journalism.
The largest journalist-scholar conference of them all — the American Educators of Journalism and Mass Communication — brought the naysayers and hopefuls together this month on the cypress-lined banks of the downtown river in San Antone.
Local voices of grassroots democracy and of hometown journalism suffer jeopardy in two important ways — change of ownership and change of culture.
Reap what you sow
They are apt to be “harvested.” That’s Wall Street’s term for profits to be raked up by the next-to-last investor of properties in a fading industry. The trick is not becoming the ultimate owner when the light of the last printed newspaper winks out.Sometimes publishers even harvest from their own properties for capital to stave off what they see as greater threats to the franchise.
Consider the history of obituaries. They once connected every paper with every family Bible and taught green reporters accuracy and empathy for real people. Then clerks took over the task, which a sophisticated generation of journalists considered a distasteful chore. New, space-saving rules disguised as egalitarian conformity limited the rights of bereaved families to express their feelings. Finally, papers began charging for the space, which meant they were cashing in their stored-up capital known as goodwill.
The result was the passing of an important part of community Americana and a disconnect between publisher and people. Ultimately a newspaper only has its influence and goodwill with a community to fall back on. Every drain on the relationship hurts.
The scholar-journalist Philip Meyer explains the influence decline better than most in his book, “The Vanishing Newspaper.” We’re so used to social crises, the one facing journalism is hard to get a good swing at, like trying to hit a changeup from a veteran baseball pitcher. Or that decades-long transformation of the death notice from item of esteem to profit center.
Meyer compares the big, long slide in newspaper journalism with the aboriginal migration of Asian peoples into North America over the Bering land bridge. The gradual process took so long “that no person who was a part of it realized there was a migration at all.”
Numbers tell the media story better.
Daily newspaper circulation was 62.3 million in 1990 and 55.1 million in 2003.
The number of daily papers shrank from 1,611 to 1,456 in those years.
Sixty percent of people age 60 and older read newspapers but only 23 percent of the 18 to 29 age group do. Young people from the age of 8 to 18 spend 43 minutes a day with some kind of print media but 6 hours and 21 minutes on media of all types, notably electronic outlets.
The figures come from the Newspaper Association of America, by the way, and other sources cited in The Wilson Quarterly. The Quarterly reports that principally the Big Media are collapsing from influential status to the irrelevant.
That’s precisely the loss of social capital Philip Meyer warns about in “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age.” He doesn’t mean people won’t peddle news. But new info-merchants may not have civic truth and the public’s well-being in mind as today’s pros like to think they do.
Crossing the divide
Surely people and press now realize something big is happening. The separation between both was never so wide. Quality of life in our self-governing nation figures in. Estrangement could get to be so bad, there’ll be no return over the Bering Strait of our informed democracy. The Annenberg Public Policy Center found 65 percent of people believe most news organizations try to hide their own mistakes. The poll showed 79 percent believe a media company would pull its reporting punches to protect its own revenue.
This polarized nation is an even bigger problem, according to Richard A. Posner. He’s a federal appellate judge and essayist who wrote “Bad News” in The New York Times Book Review recently. Polarized? Republicans see the media as too critical of government and Democrats as not critical enough.
With Web logs it doesn’t matter. Bloggers can be as outrageous as they want to be and amass readers with similar viewpoints or jettison opponents without the economic consequences a newspaper endures. Wilson Quarterly reports there are 6.8 million active blogs. The Pew Foundation’s Internet and American Life Project discovered 27 percent of all Internet users are blogging.
Old-style editors dismiss blogging as an activity of the under-30 age group that doesn’t read print anyway. Hm-m-m-m. Think so? A company called blogads.com took a survey of 17,159 bloggers to find 60 percent are over 30; 75 percent earn $45,000 a year; 46 percent call themselves “opinion makers”; and 79 percent are male. And do they read? Twenty-one percent like The New Yorker while 15 percent read The Economist or Newsweek.
Why do they blog? Eighty percent say information they want is not available anywhere else. Couple those information-hungry bloggers with young non-readers who use the Internet for entertainment. Then you see newspapers’ problem coming in the not-too-distant future.
Electrons set in motion on so many computer keyboards drive the cultural business threat to American journalism. Let’s be blunt. The business of journalism is a business. So the problem isn’t just the touchy-feely philosophy of American civic life. Journalism needs a reconnection with community for its own survival against market forces. Social benefit will follow.
Harvest home
Publishers who bare their necks to the harvester compound the problem of community newspapering.Just last month one of the oldest family-owned newspaper companies in New England was sold to the conglomerate controlled ultimately by the state pension fund of Alabama. Usual platitudes were stated about retaining local decision-making at the papers. But it’s fair to say startled New Englanders likely reacted to the surprise announcement with the same cold comfort as would Alabamians if they awoke one morning to discover Massachusetts pensioners now controlled The Anniston Star.
Such a prospect explains why Anniston Star management, the University of Alabama and the Knight Foundation turned The Star into a teaching newspaper. The graduate journalism degree program they started inside the paper creates a future purpose for retaining an independent community information company regardless of what may happen to printed products at date uncertain.
We could teach the replacement generation of journalists the ways and means of doing things as we’ve always done them.
Or we can show them how to reach out to the replacement generation of readers — ahem, that is, non-readers — with civic and participatory journalism, using new technology.
We’ll need to retain the best of journalism traditions — thorough reporting, clear writing, responsible use of sources and careful fact-checking. Accuracy drives credibility, according to “Vanishing’s” Meyer. He sees the influence derived from respect for our version of the news as journalism’s last and best line of defense.
The ultimate threat
No one completely can hold back the market forces changing the news business out from under newspapers of all size. And as the numerous writers of gloom in the industry point out, editors typically are slow to respond.Yet change is here. Change is now.
How here? How now?
My wife and I recently installed Wi-Fi technology in our home. We can sit on our patio, in our easy chairs, at our backyard gazebo and gambol on the Worldwide Web. News flows to our laptops from anywhere at electronic speed.
When the cable guy came to replace some old wiring that feeds our high-speed home network, I casually asked if he had many calls to install the necessary modems. I had foolishly imagined we were among the few.
Actually, he said, the local cable company is installing more high-speed computer lines in Anniston now than cable television hook-ups.
What? Sound the alarm! That’s a tipping point.
Converging with the future
The ’Net is nothing without content, some editors reading this will say. And where’s the threat to any local newspaper’s territorial franchise going to come from?Yes, well, do you remember reading recently about Anniston cable TV-24 WJXS deciding to move to larger offices? That expansion in a media environment of convergence is another local tipping point. The market chooses between different ways to sell news. Consumers have more choices in where to find information.
The station’s promo line, interestingly, is “Where we’re making a difference in our community...” And here’s an irony: TV-24’s local print competition got the call letters wrong in its story about the move.
When local cable news providers can stream programs onto computers, cell phones and iPods, look out print journalism! Reporting and editing lapses will count more in the face of competition.
Newspapers mostly meet the Internet challenge by transferring their printed products onto their own Web sites. That’s called “substitute technology.” The idea is to pick up younger customers who don’t buy the paper.
What’s really happening, though, is that Americans below age 30 aren’t getting their news from the computer either. The remaining, older audience for news is dying off in those obits the newspapers charge for.
Wired for doom
The true success models for expanding the consumer base are coming up with ever greater threats to conventional community newspapers which don’t climb on board. The threat to journalism and to American civic life is that anyone can compete. Bloggers, Webmasters and ’Net jockeys don’t need the supposed standards of ethics and performance that keep editors and reporters on the payroll now. Besides, the public perceives fewer ethical standards and less professionalism in the press than journalists do anyway.The monopoly is dead. Because the economic capital to buy a highly expensive press is no longer needed to gather and distribute information. It’s simply no longer true as The New Yorker’s newspaper critic A.J. Liebling once famously said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
We are witnessing the rise of the journalistic entrepreneur. He may or may not be a journalist. But he sure knows how to make money that might otherwise have gone to print newspapers.
Modern media advocates from the American Press Institute love to stump newspaper executives by asking if they can identify Craig Newmark. Few can. Too bad. He’s the inventor of craigslist.org, the highly successful classified ad alternative spreading like a virus on the Internet. When editors asked the head of Knight Ridder newspapers what keeps him awake at night, he answered “online advertising.”
It’s not just the loss of revenue. Buying stuff online is a major activity of the young, non-readers of newspapers. Ads are news too. So attract the youthful pocketbook and you’ve got a new customer for a virtual information community.
Most newspapers try to please existing readers instead of potential ones, according to journalist and scholar, David T. Z. Mindich in “Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News.”
Seeking different readers is why multiculturalism is so important in the newsroom.
No community newspaper exists in only a single community. Every audience is a community of communities. The multitudes define themselves by the old geographic lines, sure, but also by age, gender, faith, race, ethnicity and especially by class.
When a news organization consists of white people speaking to white people about black people, as an example, its influence on public affairs such as school reform may diminish in a multi-cultural community of communities. Economic influence with advertisers may diminish if ads don’t reach young consumers.
The generational shift means editors can no longer talk down to readers or define news without consulting readers. No more lectures. Only conversations.
Alejandro Junco de la Vega is a tough, corruption-fighting Mexican publisher who declared, “We need to make our country information-rich for the construction of our democracy.” The community journalism technique of his Monterrey, Guadalajara and Mexico City conglomerate is the creation of citizen councils. They meet and advise his editorial staff to create a working relationship between newspaper and audience — a partnership.
“Relational journalism” is my term when I’m challenged for a single phrase to describe the new ways. The counter-culture I belonged to used to say, “I can relate to that” when hearing a story we agreed with. Yeah, I’m dated. I also admit the market overemphasizes youth culture. But, hey, that’s the hand publishers got dealt.
To keep the community influence publishers crave, they have to learn new ways to relate. Their communities need the leadership and will be better off if familiar news organizations evolve for success. For the time being advertisers need the old media too. But how long can that last if publishers keep passing on costs through ad rates but delivering fewer young consumers, the target market?
Conversant with competition
The audience that wants news faster, conveniently on demand, socially democratic, entertaining but not pandering, fair but not necessarily objective in a phony way, journalistically unpretentious and sympathetic to a youthful outlook can get it. And ink doesn’t rub off on the hands. Expect more competition for the printed press, right down to the small community level.
Dan Gillmor is one of those entrepreneurs. He wrote an influential, syndicated techno column from Silicon Valley for The San Jose Mercury News. Did. Now he’s developing Web-based community journalism — local newspapers without press, ink and paper.
His book “We the Media” advocates grassroots journalism by the people and for the people. Bye-bye, A.J. Liebling.
The development of participatory news in the civic interest forces community journalism to adapt. Or else. Gillmor knows it’s going to happen. For a while longer it would be easier for current publishers to deploy their resources in new ways than for start-ups to compete.
As blogs, listserves, email and the rest morph into a craigslist.org for news and find a business plan, the old forms of American journalism will decline further, faster. Oh, there’s life in the old model yet. Remember the slow-paced Bering Migration. But there’s a “tipping point” out there where on some not-yet-known day the old economics of print journalism could collapse with a startling suddenness.
Bad news bearers
When the University of Alabama and The Anniston Star and the Knight Foundation started negotiating to create the teaching newspaper, their premise was graduates might not retire from a printed newspaper. Change is so swift now, the first students might only work at one of the Web-based community news operations springing up. Starting salaries of Web journalists have been higher than for print journalists. Presstime quotes Ken Sands, online publisher of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., who says the choice is simple: “We either become part of the conversation or get left out of the conversation.”
National research in May, however, showed “depressingly little progress” on Web sites of 300 newspapers sampled in the 10,000 to 600,000 circulation size. University of Alabama Associate Professor Wilson Lowrey found 82 percent had no Web logs or links to blogs. The lack of interactivity is a bummer for attracting new users.
Judge Posner concludes in “Bad News” that all this technological and economic change plaguing the news media may not be so much to fret about by-and-by. Easy for him to say with his constitutionally lifetime judicial appointment!
Actually, I agree, as long as American journalism rows to the top of the wave instead of letting it crash down on our heads. That means throwing over the resistance to change and herd mentality of repeating old mistakes made by everyone else in the profession. We need originality place-by-place-by-place instead of “organizational mimicry.”
The 10,000-circulation Daily Home of Talladega, Ala., really cheered me up journalistically one day last month. The top story showed Editor-Publisher Carol Pappas exhorting a leadership gathering to come together for the progress of the community. She co-founded the task force “Community Conversation.”
Forget the old rules dictating that journalists should report the news, not make it. Community IS news. Carol was telling her community’s story to itself in person and in print. Her heart was with the people and the paper.
She’s also a journalist people stop on the street to thank for tough investigative stories cleaning up the public water authority by going to court to wrest documents out of the corroded bureaucracy. Who said community journalists have to be soft?
Come to terms
Civic journalism means seeing ourselves as members of the community and part of the problem-solving rather than pseudo-objective finger pointers lurking outside the social circle.Participatory journalism means developing new ways for the public to gather news and to post it online instead of mailing it in to wait until editors get around to printing it. That means readers get to define news too, something editors thought was their own, exclusive prerogative.
Community journalism recognizes the community of communities and spreads its influence by inclusion. It’s the relational journalism I talked about.
Technology liberates journalism from heavy metal Gutenberg-like inventions so we — and our competitors — can fly with the speed and the light of electrons.
We community journalists who master civic and participatory journalism in the computer age need never vanish.
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Community journalism by degrees
It’s the talk of journalism circles: Newer and higher journalism education opens in Anniston a year from now.The American Educators of Journalism and Mass Communications learned more about the program in AEJMC’s San Antonio meeting this month.
Six graduate students of the University of Alabama will start their year’s study at The Anniston Star in 2006. A grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation makes possible the Knight Fellows in Community Journalism— Com-J for short.
After academic courses taught by UA professors and after rubbing shoulders with Star community journalists for two semesters, the inaugural class will perform work projects. They’ll receive the first-ever master’s degree in community journalism after 12 months.
University faculty and managers of The Anniston Star have held series of meetings to plan. A UA research project is expected to support a National Community Journalism Conference in February with information scientifically arrived at.
Both academic and professional journalists write increasingly of a downward slide of the news business. Increasing numbers of ways to get news in the information age create more competition, and they challenge the established press to find new ways to reach new audiences.
Community journalism in an expanded meaning holds promise for the industry, which will have a new source for hiring when the teaching newspaper opens next year at The Star.
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Sources for this critical essay
• “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age” by Philip Meyer; The University of Missouri Press, 2004• “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” by Dan Gillmor, O’Reilley Media, 2004
• “Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News” by David T. Z. Mindich; Oxford University Press, 2005
• “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century” by Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005
• “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” by Robert D. Putnam; Simon & Schuster, 2000
• “Calling All Luddites” by Thomas L. Friedman, OpEd, The New York Times, Aug. 3, 2005
• “1 Landline + 1 Cellphone = 1 handset” by David Pogue, Business Day, The New York Times, Aug. 4, 2005
• “Handing Readers the Reins” by A. S. Berman, Presstime, August, 2005
• “Bad News” by Richard A. Posner, Book Review, The New York Times, July 31, 2005
• “Starting Over” by Terry Eastland, The Wilson Quarterly, Spring, 2005
• “The Young and the Restless” by David T. Z. Mindich, The Wilson Quarterly, Spring, 2005
• “Seven Steps to Salvation” by William Powers, The Wilson Quarterly, Spring, 2005
• “Community Conversation: Moving county forward” by Graham Hadley, The Daily Home, July 19, 2005
• “Adam Clayton Powell, III and Reinventing Local News” on NPR, Morning Edition, Aug. 8, 2005
• Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Blogosphere, www.pewinternet.org
• Blogads, www.blogads.com
