the audit

The Biz Pages: Bedtime Reading

November 17, 2005

The staff at CJR Daily really isn’t a bunch of misanthropic curmudgeons bent on making journalists feel bad. Indeed, we fully intended to kick off the Audit’s newly expanded coverage of the business press on a positive note, and spent most of last week scouring the major rags for some deft piece of journalistic artistry that would help us prove, once and for all, that the business pages are not the most boring part of the paper.

The results? Well, I can still hear the hollow thump of human heads hitting desks. And we’ve ordered extra towels to mop up the drool.

Message to business editors: You are putting your readers to sleep. Your reporters are talented and, for the most part, meticulous, but their stories are (with notable exceptions) simplistic, timid, mechanical, misinformed, and uninformative. And far too often, they are just plain “old news.”

Among last week’s many snoozers, the coverage of Big Oil’s reluctant visit to Washington was particularly disappointing. This was an important, drama-filled event and it ignited chattering everywhere — from barstools to business schools. Yet it failed to yield the sort of stand-out story that tackles the big questions, lends substance to all the chatter, and potentially moves the debate forward.

Instead, newspapers across the nation — including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post (which had four correspondents on the case) — published perfunctory accounts that told us essentially the following:

1) The Senate summoned representatives of five big oil companies to Washington to explain why their prices are so high.
2) The oilmen said that market forces, not companies, determine the price of gas.
3) Disgruntled consumers are pressuring senators to pass legislation.

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Chances are, you were aware of the basic story, but you don’t have the slightest idea where you heard it. It just trundled down the information highway and off-ramped into your brain, courtesy of the dozens of faceless reporters who dutifully watched the events on Capitol Hill and then proceeded to file exactly the same story. Reporting as stenography.

This is one reason of many that newspaper publishers refer to “inefficiencies” before they set about reducing the headcount in their newsrooms with all the discrimination of a bulldozer. Editors are correct to howl that layoffs are eroding their product. But their argument might be more convincing if they had asked (or allowed) their reporters to file stories that displayed unique insight and made their papers stand out from the pack.

The oil issue has been on the burner for some time now. Many of the reporters who covered the story no doubt know more then they told us. And so, plenty of questions were left unanswered. Do market forces alone really determine prices — or are the oil companies powerful enough to manipulate the markets? Dozens of political action groups, a large percentage of the public, and grandstanding senators seem to think the oil companies are price gauging. Are these people misinformed? If so, what’s being done to educate them? Who are the key players involved and what are they discussing in the conference room?

And why, exactly, is gas and heating fuel so damn expensive?

To its credit, the Washington Post followed up on the story, making room for a serviceable, if one-sided, column by Steven Pearlstein. The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune published editorials, with the Tribune predictably singing the virtues of the market and the Times predictably calling for more taxes on exorbitant prices.

But the story we were waiting for — the one that would give us the definitive explanation of how the oil markets really work — never appeared. Most papers let the story fade. Others posted the odd AP file on their Web sites, presenting us with bits and pieces of information.

Typical of these stories was one in which AP reporter George Jahn informed us that crude oil is plentiful, so any upward pressure on prices will come from more people buying heating oil in cold weather. He elaborated as follows:

Accuweather.com said Friday that warmer air from the south would move as far north as the Great Lakes this weekend but it predicted that “the cold air that has been building in Canada’s Arctic will finally begin its push south early next week, moving into the Upper Midwest on Monday. By midweek it will bring near freezing temperatures and the possibility of snow to the Great Lakes and New England.

So it’s going to be cold this week. Is that the definitive word on oil prices? Isn’t there an organization called OPEC? We’ve heard the Chinese are using a lot of gas. Is that causing prices to rise?

Which brings us to last week’s other big business story: the decline of the newspaper. Virtually every broadsheet in the country reported on the new statistics showing dramatic declines in newspaper circulation. Some of this coverage certainly astounded. For example, in a story titled “Herald’s Circulation Declines,” the Boston Globe stooped to a new low by providing a long and detailed account of the 4 percent drop in circulation suffered by its competitor, the Boston Herald — before remembering to mention that the Globe itself fared far worse, losing 8 percent of its readers.

On the whole, though, the accounts of the news industry’s tribulations were no more arresting then those of the oil industry’s wealth. We were fed the bare numbers. And we got the familiar news that some weird thing called the Internet is stealing readers from the print media.

What we didn’t get is an answer to the million-dollar question: Could it be that the dead-tree press is losing readers because its stories–and especially its business stories — don’t pass muster?

No self-respecting newspaper would say so. It might make the journalists feel bad.

Mark R. Mitchell wrote the The Audit column in 2006.