parting thoughts

Parting Thoughts: John Flowers

Whither the money men?
July 31, 2008

Redefining policy—as one is wont to do when suffering an existential crisis—starts with asking the right questions. An alcoholic, for instance, who asks himself, “Does alcohol have a problem with me?” probably isn’t going to get the help he needs. Ditto journalists.

We’ve been asking ourselves the wrong question about the future of our industry for years now. It’s not “How do journalists fix their business?” It’s “How does business fix journalism?” This is a question of revenue, after all—“How do you give away a product for free and yet turn a profit?”—and a question of revenue is the purview of the men who install marble fire places on their yachts, not the ones trying to get another 20,000 miles out of their Subarus.

If this were simply a matter of hemorrhaging readers, then the policy would be simple: “Everyone, fire your editors.” But it’s not. We have readers. Tons and tons of ’em. They may not like to pay for what they get, but there are a lot of them getting it nonetheless. No, what we need now is wholesale change, and that means we stop convincing ourselves that the familiar levers that a Katharine Graham or a Henry Luce could pull to right the ship still apply. Rather, we need to let radical change, in the form of a Sam Zell or Rupert Murdoch, take a swing at things (full disclosure: I worked for six months at Murdoch’s Dow Jones Newswires, with two of those months during the old regime, but I’m far from qualified to give an insider’s perspective).

Now, I know we don’t like hearing those two names—in fact, “loathe” may be a more apt word—but those are the kinds of people the industry needs to start attracting, people whose money gives them clout, if we’re to replace or complement the old economic formula with something new. If you’re an industry player (and if you’re in journalism, you certainly like to think you are), the job now isn’t so much attracting readers, per se, it’s attracting money men willing to bet—and bet big—on the industry.

Unfortunately, Wall Street is mostly missing from this debate. The reason is simple and rather self-fulfilling: if you have money, you want to make sure that you continue to have money. Probably the best thing a Wall Street analyst would have to say about the newspaper industry is that it’s so well-spoken. Zell, salty language and all, is the true exception among financial types, Murdoch having bought himself a financial news company (big surprise). What Zell sees in us I haven’t the foggiest, but if the industry is to get back on its feet, more Wall Street players need to be persuaded that the difference between a “fixer-upper” and a “crack house” is the neighborhood. And one way we do that is to talk shop about how solid are the fundamentals of our neighborhood:

–This isn’t an industry that suffers bubbles, like some we could mention.

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–While the profit margins that await the conquering hero will be slimmer than in some industries, they will be steady and they will be predictable.

–We’ve got something that Wall Street likes in its investments: cash flow. The money that publications earn is typically up front; no one buys a paper on credit and no one extends credit to an advertiser who can’t document how he’s going to pay.

–Foreign competition isn’t the issue that it is in most other industries; if anything, it’s more in spirit than substance.

–We reach every demographic every day, and a steak dinner to the executive from another industry who can honestly say the same.

–It also might be worth pointing out that ours is the one industry that won’t suffer government regulation, even when it makes colossal mistakes.

–And if all that fails, appeal to their vanity: H.L. Hunt may have been the richest man in America in 1941, but Orson Welles made “Citizen Kane” about William Randolph Hearst.

The Warbucks won’t be stepping into this situation totally cold, either. Blogs like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post have started the conversation, pointing the direction toward a model that someone with a lot of money to invest and a historical reputation to secure could perfect on a “WAR ENDS IN EUROPE” basis (assuming, of course, the blogs don’t themselves do it first).

Of course, this all is going to mean a lot of clenched teeth on the part of journalists. A few businessmen—if they ever do arrive in the numbers we need them—are bound to louse things up worse than they are now. Others will reach profitability at the expense of words like “integrity” and “Judeo-Christian.” In the meantime, dyed-in-the-wool journalists will be like the poor people below deck on the Titanic: at the mercy of someone else’s fate.

But times change, and we need to stop feigning shock that they do. We must admit to the sort of change that is needed as well as the fact that that change isn’t coming internally through tactical decisions; that we need a fresh view, an outside view, and a healthy dose of reality (and plenty of chalk) to figure out how to right our ship.

Hell, if anything, we should consider ourselves lucky that time (and the Internet) changed things as quickly as they did. Had we been a frog in a water come slowly to a boil, we’d have taken no notice of our own demise until it was too late and all we could do was prove T.S. Eliot wrong—that it ends with a “ribbit.”

One final note: a constant gripe from reporters is that if all you chase is money, money, money, you only end up reporting on puppies, puppies, puppies. And if that’s the case, and that all people really do want are puppy stories, then give them puppy stories: about how many bomb-sniffing dogs are dying in Iraq; or about how much the average pet owner spends on his vet bill versus his prescription drug bill; or about what happens to the family dog after a foreclosure.

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The steady drip of layoffs and buyouts, slowly desiccating once-vibrant newsrooms around the country, has also produced a reservoir of anger, sadness, fear, uncertainty—even some cautious optimism here and there—among reporters and editors who invested years, decades in some cases, of their lives to print journalism. We’ve asked anyone so inclined to channel these emotions, not into rant—although there will be a bit of that—but rather into reflection on what went wrong, and where we might go from here. We will publish one per day, under the headline “Parting Thoughts.” All of the letters we publish will be collected here.

John Flowers served seven and a half years as a News Desk Editor at Time magazine before downsizing claimed his job in 2007. After that he worked at Dow Jones Newswires and is currently looking for a job.