Bankruptcy. Buyouts. Political scandal. It’s been a rough week, to say the least, for the Tribune Company. But just as necessity can be the mother of invention, adversity can be the mother of innovation. As the always enthusiastic Lee Abrams wrote about newspapers in a memo yesterday to Trib staff, “We need to figure out how to deliver this invaluable daily icon on today’s terms. Holding nothing sacred…. We’re all hoping the economy makes a sudden rebound and everything is just wonderful again. That would be nice, but I doubt that’ll happen. We need to adapt. The culture…the product and the focus need to get in sync regardless of how painful.”
How can we expect the Tribune Company’s newspapers to adapt—for better and for worse?
Every Tuesday, CJR outlines a news-related question and opens the floor for debate. For previous News Meeting topics, click here.
Some of the developments we'll likely see, to varying degrees and very generally, from an editorial perspective: beat restructuring; increased reliance on the Web for newsgathering; increased use of crowdsourcing; more buyouts; more layoffs; more sensationalism; more consolidations; more movement toward Web-based and interactive storytelling; more branding of individual reporters, editors, and opinion writers via podcasts, photo narration, Web chats, etc.; an increased blurring of lines between hard-news and editorial journalism; an increased fascination with technological bells and whistles that do little to forward journalism in the long term, but are good for grabbing eyeballs in the short; innovations that take advantage of technology; innovations that have nothing to do with technology; smart solutions; dumb solutions; creative solutions.
But, in addition to all that, I also think we'll see continued--and perhaps even renewed--emphasis on the traditional values of newsgathering. The more things change, etc. The editorial the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune-owned paper, published yesterday--headlined, simply, "Chapter 11"--is, I think, telling in this respect:
"Within an hour of this unsettling news [of Tribune's bankruptcy filing], the men and women who work at The Sun were at their desks, on the phones and back on the street doing what they do every day with commitment and conviction - putting out this newspaper, updating the news of the day on our Web site, baltimoresun.com, and reporting on the people and communities of Maryland....
"We're moving forward because regardless of the financial circumstances at play in Chicago, governments were open for business yesterday, police patrolled the streets, students from Hagerstown to Ocean City attended classes, hospitals cared for patients, ships called at the Port of Baltimore and businesses went about their business. We are Maryland's newspaper."
That, I'd say, is the spirit.
Posted by Megan Garber on Wed 10 Dec 2008 at 09:41 AM
The sentiment expressed in the Sun's editorial is nice, but the fact is that Zell has, since day one, displayed utter disdain for the mission of journalism. The most recent evidence of that is his comment about not being able to monetize Pulitzer Prizes. If I were an editor at the Sun--or any other Tribune paper--my hope would be that my paper is sold in the restructuring. Tribune's papers will never thrive, journalistically, under Zell and Abrams.
Posted by Brent Cunningham on Wed 10 Dec 2008 at 10:18 AM
It's been brought to my attention that my comment above reads like I'm advocating more layoffs and buyouts among the Trib papers. Which: no! Not at all! To clarify, I was taking the question posed above -- "How can we expect the Tribune Company’s newspapers to adapt?" -- quite literally in my response to it. I expect that, in addition to developing lemonade-out-of-lemons innovations that will ultimately prove beneficial to their journalistic mission, Trib staff will also be forced to endure more layoffs and buyouts before their papers right themselves.
I sincerely hope to be proven wrong in that expectation.
Posted by Megan Garber on Wed 10 Dec 2008 at 11:38 AM
Sam Zell's dumb gambles with other people's money is one thing. His apparent contempt for serious journalism is quite another. The idea that people who he pushed out the door with buyouts, people who labored for Tribune for years, now must line up with other creditors for their severance is close to vile. I expect though, that the people who work for Tribune are telling themselves, accurately, that they don't work on his behalf. They work for their colleagues, for their readers, and for themselves.
Posted by mike hoyt on Wed 10 Dec 2008 at 11:39 AM
The best thing for Tribune's papers would be to see them sold to local owners, who are willing to forgo the unrealistic revenues that Zell's debt loaded deal over-optimistically demanded.
Failing that, it's hard for me to see how well see anything different than what Zell's already started, and what is happening all over--more layoffs, sexed up news, soft service journalism, etc.
I don't know if that course--and the other prospective changes Megan laid out--is a recipe for financial success. Then again, I'm not sure there is one for most papers, at least as we know them today.
Posted by Clint Hendler on Wed 10 Dec 2008 at 12:00 PM
I'd say the spirit of "moving forward ... regardless of the financial circumstances at play" is largely what got newspapers into their dilemma in the first place. They should care more about their finances. Without them in good order, all the altruistic intentions in the world won't add up to keeping the lights on and creditors away.
Posted by Josh Young on Thu 11 Dec 2008 at 03:16 PM
I wouldn't expect it to happen, but any news organisation needs to restructure and repurpose itself to find the best way to deliver quantifiable value to it's users in a way that the revenue beats costs.
Inevitably that will mean embracing the idea that anyone can contribute something of value, and the role of editorial staff will become more about filtering the information online and less about actual news gathering.
It's not about losing the core principles of journalism - but realising that the mission of journalism can be achieved by someone self-publishing, or by someone aggregating content and putting it into a context, rather than by clinging to the idea of printed newspapers and 'proper journalists' as being anywhere close to the solution.
The problem is that unless you can offer something exclusive such as economic data and research that people are almost forced to pay for to obtain, you've got to start finding more effective ways to monetise than just going after the easy print and display advertising or the classifieds.
Posted by Dan Thornton on Thu 11 Dec 2008 at 06:35 PM
How can you save the Trib? You can't.
Close it down, take the severance, and start two newspapers that compete with each other. They'll find different places in the market and serve a wider readership than was possible with a single paper. And they'll have lean staffing.
Posted by Charles on Thu 11 Dec 2008 at 06:37 PM
It's pretty apparent that Zell has little clue of what he's up against. Otherwise, his first act as CEO a year ago would have been building a new web-focused revenue model keyed on more aggressive (and better-informed) ad sales strategy and intelligent audience aggregation.
Judging by the improvements at LATimes.com (home page of my long-ago former employer) they've taken intelligent steps on the second point by shaping their array of blogs, training their newsroom in multimedia production and all-too-slowly enabling user-comments as a method of building interactive community.
It's a step better than straphanging numbly on the pedagogic we-own-the-info-stream subway ride to hell on which so many other yet-to-get-clued papers are riding. But it's too little and too late.
Two words: Ad. Sales. Until someone can educate advertisers to just what a bargain they're getting online - and begin charging them for what this audience is really worth - we're going to see a lot more great papers fold and, with them, a lot of shoe-leather journalism that OCG communities - by and large - are not yet supporting.
Posted by Mack Reed on Thu 11 Dec 2008 at 06:39 PM
Here's the reality: the banks, not Zell, for all intense and purposes own Tribune. The pieces will be sold off individually because the assets are now worth half of the total debt Zell piled on. There are no benevolen buyers, and even if there was one that person couldn't sustain the losses newspapers with high fixed costs and declining revenue brings. Some may close, and the survivors become much smaller papers without major aspirations.
Posted by GeorgeRZ on Fri 12 Dec 2008 at 04:17 AM
Mack - ad sales is half the game. You need more than unfiltered eyeballs per page. New organizations need to engage readership, collect demographic data, and market to people who're looking for both CPA and branding campaigns, and deliver aggressive results. And finally, they need to link in with ad buying agencies who'll provide them with income, and small businesses.
Posted by Josh Jasper on Sat 13 Dec 2008 at 10:52 AM