NYU prof and Press Thinker Jay Rosen has had it with what he calls “replaceniks”—those who throw out the red herring of people saying bloggers will replace newspaper journalists, an assertion that’s rarely backed up with a quote of anyone actually saying that.
What got Rosen going here is an interview with The Wire creator and former Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon, who told the Guardian:
He scoffs at the notion that amateur “citizen journalism”, or new online-only outlets, might take the place of newspaper reporters: “The internet does froth and commentary very well, but you don’t meet many internet reporters down at the courthouse.”
To which Rosen replies (via Twitter):
So here’s my idea: let’s start counting the number of homegrown stories our newspapers run that we need to… replace
And:
Take your daily. Look at every page. Count homegrown public service news stories. Post the results.
Sports don’t count.
I’ll say that it’s often hard for me to find stuff to criticize in the metro dailies. The business coverage is often very thin. Which is why I need your help, dear reader, when something great or terrible pops out. With the ongoing crisis, I’ve had to focus more on the big boys just to keep up, and it’s impossible to keep up on even the top fifty papers consistently (This is me in a small way trying to take advantage of crowdsourcing).
Please don’t get me wrong: The metro dailies are still doing top-notch journalism, often heroically and under intense and intensifying pressure.
As Rosen points out to me via Twitter:
Just looking for numbers, @ryanchittum Because I agree: its going to be hard to replace. And citizen journalism as we know cannot replace.
But this is interesting because if we’re going to figure out the next model we need to know what exactly we’re “replacing”—to use that term. I love newspapers as much as anybody, but many are ghosts of their former selves, and becoming more spectral seemingly every day. It’s getting less and less difficult to “replace” them.
I will say that I agree with Simon on the need to charge for content—or to find some other source of revenue like donations. I’ve yet to see a hint of a sustainable, scalable model based on Internet ads. But while this is a no-brainer for The New York Times or the Washington Post, say, I suspect it’s too late for most other papers that have gutted their newsrooms and just don’t have the capital to reinvest.
I’m lucky to live in a city (Washington) that still has a paper with a large and irreplaceable newsroom, despite cuts. But it will be interesting to see answers to Rosen’s question from across the country.
A couple so far: Twenty-two original non-sports stories in the Austin American-Statesman, including just two in the front section, according to Sheila Scarborough. Twenty-six in the Baltimore Sun, according to another twitterer. No word on how many are rewritten press releases.
By the way, you can find me on Twitter here.
ADDING:
Check out Rosen’s post at the MediaShift Idea Lab, where readers are tallying up their local papers’ stories.
The consolidators, the corpoRats who bought up all the press properties in the country, did not do so out of a spirit of altruism.
They bought'em up, then methodically, over a number of years, they stripped 'em of resources, reduced, first,the news hole, then the size of the paper, and the news staff, trivialized 'em, neutered 'em, and now, as the typical urban daily approaches the relevance of a throw-away shopper, they're gonna sell 'em off.
It's not an accident that it happened that way, friends...CorpoRats are no friends of the Press, which in its halcyon days, tried to hold corpoRat feet to the fires of ethicl bidness and community welfare.
#1 Posted by Woody, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 02:06 PM
ps: In order to test Rosen's hypothesis, I'd have to go out and buy a copy of the Albuquerue Journal (The Urinal, to its intimates), and I simply won't.
I stopped buying the paper when Scripps-Howard folded their paper here last year and, incidentally, put paid, finally, to the "Albuquerque Plan."
#2 Posted by Woody, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 02:10 PM
A couple thoughts on this:
1. Many newsrooms are definitely a shell of their former selves. While number of local news stories is one of the barometers of what we would need to "replace", the number alone doesn't tell the story. I know some papers where the barebones staff is under such ridiculous quotas that one of the things they've had to resort to doing is splitting what would've been one story into two. Also, the quotas also push many to go for the easy-to-get stories, reducing the amount of investigative reporting being done.
2. While this is an interesting study, I don't think it would be the correct, or desirable, approach to use the findings from this as the barometer for what a new model needs to replace. After all, as has been pointed out, with all their cuts, newspapers are becoming easier and easier to "replace". So if you're looking at inventing a new model, your goal shouldn't be making it meet the productivity of an existing product that has been acknowledged as being inferior compared to its former glory. The question shouldn't be "how do we replace the amount of journalism that newspapers are able to do", but rather "how do we do the amount of journalism we need".
#3 Posted by John Zhu, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 02:12 PM
pps: somebody suggested papers could re-organize as 501-c3s.
As non-profits, they'd have to eschew political endorsements. But I don't see that as being that much of a sacrifice, or much of a loss, either, especially in one-paper towns, which almost all of aMurka now is, the biggest cities notwithstanding, since the remaining papers are almost all the property of wealthy, local reactionaries anyway...
#4 Posted by Woody, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 02:15 PM
First, can we distinguish the decline of _newspapers_ with the -- completely different problem for completely different reasons -- decline of journalism itself? If you don't get the problem right, you are less likely to arrive at a workable solution.
Secondly, you actually _do_ have online journalists do local stuff -- crime, elections, local issues, etc. Sitting in city council meetings? Well, they are often televised so the demand for that is less. Interested people have been able to watch those meetings for years. And do you really need a professional journalist to go down to the police station every day and copy down the arrest sheet of the day?
Third, my own newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, is near dead, but it wasn't Craigslist that killed it, it was Tribune, who bought out the Chandlers when the LAT was one of the great newspapers. Tribune proceeded to dismantle the paper to a shell of its former self, and the new owner is fixing to shoot the wounded carcass in the head. And this, long before Craigslist. So, decline in quality and usefulness is, I think, a part of the problem that no one is talking about.
Woody's right. Companies like Hearst, McClatchy, Cox, Tribune went around buying up most of the privately-owned local newspapers, gutted them of local content and flavor, and proceeded to mismanage them and bleed them dry. Same thing happened with radio. Clear Channel, the radio conglomerate, is in trouble these days because people are tired of their playlist. Can't blame that on Craigslist.
#5 Posted by Tom, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 03:58 PM
Excellent points, John.
Certainly this is a crude measure at best but one that can still be interesting I think. I noted that a story count doesn't consider how many are press release rewrites.
Word count would be helpful. But a closer critical accounting would be so subjective as to be pretty useless I think unless done by the same person or with the same standards somehow.
Woody, I agree losing endorsements would be no real loss.
Tom, I agree with everything you say. Papers were bled long before craigslist. And there is less need for high journalist headcount than there was 15 years ago-because of technology. Our concern is making sure we have enough to cover the minimum at least no matter the outlet
#6 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 04:20 PM
Thanks, Ryan. I really regret that regional journos are taking the brunt of the massive restructuring of newspaper journalism. Although quality is of course uneven, I have generally found regional journos to be highly ethical and conscientious professionals, and their editors to be responsive to the concerns of their audience. As you well know, I do not hold that opinion about the nationals. I can't speak to their business coverage, of course.
I see that Prof Rosen found 56 local items in my newspaper. (I hope they aren't counting wire stories.) This in a newspaper that serves 10 million Los Angeles residents, plus Ventura County, San Bernardino County, Riverside County and Orange County. The adjoining counties used to have their very own Section B every single day. The San Fernando Valley used to have it's very own Section B.) So, while 56 local stories might be great for the Austin-American Statesman (I don't know that it is), it's pretty pathetic for my home town paper, may it rest in peace.
#7 Posted by Tom, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 04:51 PM