MediaNews killing messengers of democracy
February 25, 2008
Killing the messenger with a BANG
By Pat Keeble
Editor, contracostainsider.com
I wonder if Dean Lesher, for whom I worked for 27 years, would understand what’s going on at the Contra Costa Times and its sister papers, which he started and owned for so long. He would do lay-offs every two or three years or so.
We’d say, “he must need money” and in due time he’d announce he was building a new printing plant in North Concord or buying into the Walnut Creek Regional Arts Center. And in a year or so we’d be back up to strength.
But he never gutted the paper. It was a matter of saving a little money, and at the same time maybe let the editors delete a few of the lesser staff. We didn’t have a union so we had no protection whatsoever from economic cutbacks. But it always came back.
What’s going on now, combined with what else is going on in the newspaper business, is a comparative slaughterhouse. With the News Media merger, gobbling up Bay Area papers and adding to numerous mergers around the country in recent years, the news window is narrowing. Fewer newspapers, featuring “combined” coverage by fewer reporters, are not replacing today’s news with better news. It’s eliminating news, particularly local news, that is not being replaced by other media.
The new organization has invited the employees of all the papers to apply for a buy-out or risk being fired. In such cases, the experienced (and higher paid) journalists are the first to go. Coverage gets “combined” as newspapers merge. Fewer voices are presented.
One wonders where the future’s trained, professional journalists will come from and how they will be paid. Recently a newspaper editor reported on his discussion with a college journalism class. He and they thought the web was the future of news. But the students also thought, vehemently, that the web should be free to readers. Advertising pays the costs of putting out a print paper, but only an average of 3-5 percent of newspaper websites. Yet these students expected to make a living working for webpapers.
Newspapers are losing readers and money hand-over-fist. The web is where it’s at, they say. Then they wonder why newspapers’ websites don’t take off.
Because it’s not the same thing. The websites haven’t been able to make the ad money that the newspapers can make, no matter how many flashing pop-up ads they put on.
Newspapers will survive in some form or another, for awhile, anyway. New readers will be found as they rediscover this thing that doesn’t need batteries and the hard drive never gets knocked out. One can spread out a page and see lots of things, including an ad that might catch the eye even though it doesn’t jump around all over the page.
News is essential to a living, breathing, supportive democracy. As much as people complain about the news media, we cannot do without it. When have you read about a merger where it says “we’re going to do a better job of protecting our freedoms” as opposed to “we have to cut costs”?
Reporters are the messengers of democracy, and we’re killing them off, merger by merger.
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Pat Keeble is former Political Editor of Lesher Newspapers, Inc., now known as Contra Costa Newspapers, and is editor and publisher of her own online news site Contra Costa Insider.
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8 Responses to “MediaNews killing messengers of democracy”
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I have to laugh when I hear current or ex-journalists blather on about how they are the protectors of democracy. Please stop.
Is the partisan poison published by the New York Times—the blessed newspaper of record for the country—what we are to rely on to protect our democracy?
I’m sorry, Pat, but citizens must be the protectors of their own democracy. The so-called free press is just another self-centered power player to keep an eye on. And the journalists who slave for them, especially the ones that think they are going to change the world thru better journalism, are tragically mistaken.
You mean I could make a little money doing this?
Gosh!
English Major, I hardly know where to begin.
Yes, citizens must be the protectors of their own democracy, but where will they get the information they need to make the right choices? Knowledge is power.
If you don’t trust the New York Times, that’s fine — read the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times and (hopefully) your local paper too. Read a diversity of viewpoints, and weigh each as you will, and come to your own conclusions. But as Pat says, those voices are disappearing rapidly. When you’re left with just one news outlet covering a story, you’re a lot poorer than when you had three. Yet that’s EXACTLY what the Bay Area layoffs, buyouts and consolidations have brought about.
I don’t want to change the world. I just want to provide readers with the information THEY need to change their world, be it in a presidential election or in a neighborhood watch. And if you think there’s no value in that, then go ahead and scan your partisan blogs and entertainment rags in peace, but don’t expect to protect or participate in democracy with anything approaching informed consent.
Josh Richman
Politics & Legal Affairs Reporter
Oakland Tribune/Bay Area News Group-East Bay
“I just want to provide readers with the information THEY need to change their world…”
Gosh, Josh…don’t you think that’s just a tad presumptive?
What non-partisan oracle that is neutral on matters of what is right and wrong and what the “good life” is tells only journalists like you what I need to know to change the world?
I’d like to see that.
Do you pray or make sacrifice to this omniscient source of neutral knowledge (if there is such a thing)?
You’re going to tell me it’s reason and science, aren’t you.
bgr
I have always believed, even in bad times, that my work as a journalist mattered. I didn’t matter like creating a cure for cancer mattered or mattered at the same level that a firefighter who pulled someone from a burning building mattered.
But I thought of myself as an integral part of the evolution of information and decision-making in the communities where I worked. I didn’t have all the answers and I didn’t always get the right answers but I set out each day, with each story, to bring information together that would lead to a greater understanding of some matter in some small or large way.
I never thought of myself as an oracle. I think of myself as someone who gets paid to understand a broad array of issues and translate that information into words that others may use in their own pursuit of knowledge.
I’m now told that the business model under which I have earned a living for the past several decades will enter the equivalent of hospice care very soon unless it invents a new circulatory system, one that provides what people want in the form they want it and in a way that advertisers will pay sufficient sums to keep the news business financially viable.
I sincerely hope that we, those of us who love working as journalists, are up to the challenge. I’m not ready to give up yet.
Lisa v.
Well, admin/bgr, someone has to do the job of gathering and disseminating the news, as I don’t see the average Joe and Mary Public running out to every government meeting, every court session, every public-records archive, etc. to get the news first-hand for themselves. I don’t pretend to be devoid of opinions, but I strive to keep them out of my work, which is the most I think one can demand of a journalist.
As for how and why you might want to change the world, that’s up to you, but I assure you it won’t happen solely by denigrating your community’s professional journalists.
Honestly, I don’t understand how readers such as yourself began equating the work of journalism to intellectual arrogance; I don’t understand the hostility you harbor toward hard-working people who’ve dedicated their careers to serving communities with crucial, interesting information, even as their employers jettison that dedication in favor of maintaining a better bottom line.
I and most of my colleagues came to the job because we are “news junkies” who grew up wanting to know as much as we could about what’s happening in the community, nation and world around us; some of us sought formal academic training in the methods and ethics of journalism, some did not, but all of us have spent years trying to find and tell the stories our communities will find most vital, important, moving. Clearly we’re not in it for money or fame; we do this because we love it, and it pains us to see it circling the drain.
So how, then, does that become fodder for snarky blog comments?
Josh my Gosh,
have you followed the decline of the NY Times, the blessed paper of record and the twisted political slant they offer as “professional journalism”?
The only hostility I “harbor” is when journalists pretend they are neutral observers but push their perspective into a story so they can pull it out as gospel.
I published a tech magazine for 2.5 years and know the business. I wrote my news according to what readers wanted to help their business. I asked. I don’t think most dailies do.
That said, I am very concerned for the future careers of the great people I know that work(ed) at the Times. The business model of turning the Times into a wrap for Fry’s advertising and classified ads is not a good one for Times employees or the community it used to serve.
At least I am open about my perspective and people know pretty much what they’re in for, as opposed to journalists that try to hide behind some mythic veil of “professional journalism.” I am blogging about topics I care about and know it is not journalism.
I focus on local issues because there are too many knuckleheads blogging about national and state issues they know nothing about nor have a hope of affecting. My hope is to learn to articulate my perspective effecively on issues in my own back yard that I can actually impact.
It’s the same reason why I rescue Brittany’s… I know I cannot save every dog in the pound so I picked Brittanys.
Hope this was snarky enough for you.
bgr
Just snarky enough, Bill! No offense intended.
I guess by your standard, “professional journalism” can’t exist because nobody can ever be trusted to try to present the news in a neutral way. I guess thousands of ink-stained wretches have toiled for decades (and continue to do so) in vain.
Who, then, should write the newspapers in which you try to place your PR clients’ messages? Seems ironic you’re sounding the death knell for an industry on which your industry seems to depend.
Should we let several newspapers get merged into one, and let that newspaper eventually be reduced in quality to a shopper where the stories are nothing more than rewritten news releases filling the spaces between the ads, all without sounding the alarm?
Getting back to the gist of the article on which we’re commenting: Even if I were to accept your premise that most (all?) professional journalists harbor biases rendering their work untrustable, wouldn’t it be better at least to have a diversity of those voices out there covering the news from lots of different angles and viewpoints, so that readers could see them all and piece them together into a more complete picture of what’s going on?
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BGR says I am going to append my comment to this rather than having it get lost amongst the other coming over the transom.
Professional Journalism does exist, look at the sports pages where every sentence is a paragraph and the homers freely express their bias, and we love it or not. I can hear you groaning. At least there’s a box score. George A’s business news is top shelf, BTW. He’s worked hard. And Borenstein is kicking major ass right now, most people agree.
I think guys like Robert Novak, not unknown to have sufficient conservative bona fides, is an example (of many) who have done well over most of his career in balancing perspective with demands of reportage that commands respect. It’s not impossible; and I did not intend to imply that it was. That twas your own hypberole, me thinks.
Heaven forbid a blogger tell a professional journalist what to do, but I’d rather see “journalists” be more honest about the axe they are grinding, that’s all. And diversity is always better than monoculture, whether it’s making sure there are alternatives to domination of Microsoft, to diverse gene pools, or news sources to maintain healthy selection and ultimately survival and growth.
The PR business is changing indeed as you suggest. Especially with fewer faces. That’s why I have invested a lot in becoming an expert in search-engine optimization of press releases to make sure journos and consumers searching for stories or flipping thru Profnet find my news. But that’s not to say it doesn’t hurt to have a David Pogue at NY Times, or Uncle Walt at WSJ mention a client’s name because the rest of the papers will pick it up from the syndication wires anyways. Used to be that way with the Merc, too.
And besides, ask any “journalist” who’s worked with me and they’ll tell ya, my press releases get published verbatim not because they are lazy journalists, but because I right them so well. (g)