I’m picking fights over at Pith that I really have no business picking. But, god damn it, they half-assedly brought me in and now I feel half-assedly loyal to them.
And I’m broken-hearted for the people who have lost their jobs at The Tennessean.
Basically, anything business that puts out a product that is words is in dire shape. It’d be bad enough if it were just a shitty economy. But the whole business model is shifting completely from something that is first print-based but maybe archived digitally to something that is first digital and maybe archived in paper. No one yet knows how to make money doing that. And there are a lot of people who need to make money if they’re going to do the kind of work that needs to get done if you want a functioning democracy.
But none of these problems just erupted out of the ether two years ago, either.
And I still believe that there is an important and prominent place for local news and reporting in a community and I don’t believe that it can be done well by hobby-bloggers (and I don’t mean that term derisively, and I would include myself in those numbers) alone.
But I would put the emphasis on local.
Which brings me to “Ask a Mexican.”
Why is “Ask a Mexican” in any local paper in this city?
Because it’s cheaper to pay for a syndicated column than it is to find someone local.
But what does “Ask a Mexican” tell me about what it means to be Mexican in Nashville?
Nothing.
Again, I’m not trying to pick on anyone. The media industry in this town is filled with people I dearly love.
I’m just saying that, when I want to hear stories about real Nashvillians, to know what’s going on in the lives of the people in my city, my first thought is not to pick up any of the local papers. It’s to turn on my computer.
I don’t think I’m alone.
And that’s the new reality.
Filed under: About Town
A light went on for me when Rex Hammock blogged about this a couple of months ago.
He said that he blamed corporate greed for the death of newspapers and I was all “wha????”
He went on to explain about how there was a period of time–in the 80s, I think–where Newspapers got the idea to join syndicates like Knight-Ridder and Gannett. Those syndicates put the same columns in every paper under their masthead, shifting stories away from local news.
I was a kid back then and didn’t care diddly-shit about the overall business models.
But I was a kid who was addicted to newspapers. I started reading them when I was 6 and was so avid about them my parents bought me my own subscription for my birthday when I was 11 so that I could read them and cut up the stories I wanted to keep. I had notebooks full of my favourite articles and cartoons.
The family that owned our paper–the Foelingers–were like royalty in Ft. Wayne. They underwrote the library; they contributed money to build an ampitheatre in one of the parks.
They used another lawyer at my dad’s law firm and I got to meet Helene Foelinger, the matriarch of the paper, when I was 11. Then she died a few years later and her kids didn’t want to run a newspaper. They wanted to chill out on yachts and do rich-kid stuff so they sold our local paper to Knight Ridder. I felt really betrayed, because before that the paper had been “mine”. I knew reporters’ names, I lived for the stories about my town and the people in it I knew. (that’s a story for another time….)
After Knight Ridder took over it started to look like a black and white version of People magazine. I cancelled my subscription and moved on with life.
I hadn’t thought about all that in the context of What Is Wrong With The Newspaper Business until Rex pointed it out from a grown-up point of view. And I realised that that was about the most sensical thing I’d heard.
Greed has killed newspapers.
As a person who wants to make a living by words, I’m sometimes very sad that the opportunities for doing so are dwindling. Other times I’m very glad, because if we play our cards right we can decide how the future pays us. I hope.
And after all that rambling, I have to say that I hate the Ask A Mexican column with every fibre of my being. I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t think it’s well-written. It’s snide and talks down to its readers.
Kat, excellent commentary. Greed did play a role as did mismanagement from the bottom line not being about the news but ad revenues. Ad sales are needed, but it went more into doing “special” sections than concentrating on news.
The blogosphere to a large degree took over that as well as other alternative outlets which did start eating away at news years ago.
As Aunt B. wrote, this problem has been going on for years. As for Ask-A-Mexican, I only read it for the first time this morning after B. linked to it. I wasn’t very impressed in the least.
A couple of points. First, it’s not just word-based products that are in trouble; music-based products are going through the same crisis, for some of the same reasons and some different ones.
Second, the problem isn’t primarily the rise of newspaper conglomerates and chains (or music label consolidation, or whatever). They’re just the enablers of the problem. The real problem is that the chains and conglomerates are owned and run by people who are in it for the money, not for the news. Because, you know, the Foelingers could have hired some newsfollks to run their papers and just turn the money over to them, or they could have sold to Rupert Murdoch,* and it would still be functioning as a newspaper ought to. Now, even people who care about the news would be affected by the disappearance of advertising revenues, the rise of the internet, and all that. But the chances are that because they would be thinking in terms of continuing to be able to get the news out there, instead of in terms of maximizing profits only, they would have been able to find some ways to use the internet to keep going, instead of treating it as the enemy.
*Rupert Murdoch has politics that I hate. But he owns a bunch of different newpapers and TV networks that don’t share content, and where he leaves editorial policy alone (his Australian newspapers are considerably more lefty than the norm over there, just as his US papers are considerably more righty than the norm) — because he wants to make money running a bunch of news outlets, not just make money.
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I don’t know if it’s “greed” I fault. It’s the false premise on which the roll-up of newspapers were based. Greed (the Gordon Gecko kind) certainly was at its core. But there were also lots of BS about synergy and redundancies and efficiencies and whatever that made the greedy stuff sound palpable to investors. The only folks who got rich were those who engineered the deals (the executives, lawyers, the families who sold their companies). Those institutions who invested for the long term have been wiped out — Gannett is selling for something like 10¢ on the dollar of what it used to. The debt incurred has straddled these companies to the point where to survive, they’ll likely all go through some type of bankruptcy, wiping out completely the investors.
The tragic thing, as I pointed out in my first post, is that the premise of these deals included certain efficiencies that have killed the golden goose of local media — they destroyed the “local” — the only thing left on which these newspapers can compete.
I could go on and on about this topic, but I’ll stop there.
It sucks. I’m sure there are lots of good people at the Tennessean.
While I have little hope for the organization they work for, I think that one day when we get on the other side of this transition, we’ll have something better — and they’ll probably be a part of creating it.
Or not.
Those institutions who invested for the long term have been wiped out — Gannett is selling for something like 10¢ on the dollar of what it used to. The debt incurred has straddled these companies to the point where to survive, they’ll likely all go through some type of bankruptcy, wiping out completely the investors.
I grew up in one of the cities who’d been a Gannett property for years, and it had prospered. My dad worked there from beat reporter, to photographer, to section editor. This place had their own composing and offset facilities (4 color press was a huge deal when it came out), darkroom, they hosted their own printing press. Doesn’t sound like a huge deal until you realize that this was in a town of less than 40,000.
The turning point for Gannett was Al Neuharth and his vision for a national paper — USA Today.
Nothing was quite the same for them after that.
If newspapers would figure out that they need to focus on local news and do a better job of local classified ads than craigslist and monster and cars.com or whatever, they could stay in business. But, unfortunately, there’s no happy medium between newspaper person and businessperson to recognize this. Newspaper people don’t know enough about business and businesspeople don’t know enough about newspapers.
And I hate “Ask A Mexican.” I can only imagine that Village Voice requires the Scene to carry it. If you’ll notice, even the Scene’s comments are on the laweekly server. Or some portion. I think Helter Shelter is the same way. I like my buddies at the Scene and I enjoy the blogs, but the paper itself just doesn’t add up to my beloved Memphis Flyer.