All together now…

US newspapers are on the demise because of the appalling lack of substance and actual content in their pages, not because of smart ass, punk kids trying to steal daddy’s newspaper.

I love David Simon and The wire, but he is dead wrong about blogs and their ability to inform. Maybe we should invite him over for a chat?

Good idea… and good post, PW.

Ten years ago, the Baltmore Sun won a Pulitizer prize for its six part series on shipbreaking. This type of reporting takes time, money and professionalism IMHO. There is no blog that I’m aware of that could duplicate this type of reporting. The Sun’s current editor has proclaimed that the days of the six-part series are over. I can’t see where this is a good thing for any of us. Mr. Simon chose a poor example (the zoning board hearing) but the underlying point, I think, is still true.

Why is Kerry wasting time on this anyway? Is some legislation designed to protect traditional media in the offing?

I’m old enough to have some affection for newspapers but no amount of crying and hand-wringing will save them, like the big automakers, they failed to adapt to changes in the marketplace.

Well, I don’t own a laptop . . . so the only reason I continue my subscription to the LAT is because it’s easy to read on the crapper than dragging my monitor, CPU and DSL thingy into the john. But, FWIW the Times has declined (like a safe falling out a window) in the quality of writing, editing, printing and even the paper itself is folded where it should be flat and flat where it should be folded. Oy! (:>

When I first read about the hearing a few days ago… I thought it was snark.

More David Simon, from Bill Moyers’ Journal:

DAVID SIMON: Yes, we [newspaper reporters] were doing our job. Making the world safe for democracy. And all of a sudden, terra firma shifted, new technology. Who knew that the Internet was going to overwhelm us? I would buy that if I wasn’t in journalism for the years that immediately preceded the Internet because I took the third buyout from the “Baltimore Sun.” I was about reporter number 80 or 90 who left, in 1995. Long before the Internet had had its impact. I left at a time– those buyouts happened when the “Baltimore Sun” was earning 37 percent profits.

You know, we now know this because it’s in bankruptcy and the books are open. 37 percent profits. All that R&D money that was supposed to go in to make newspapers more essential, more viable, more able to explain the complexities of the world. It went to shareholders in the Tribune Company. Or the L.A. Times Mirror Company before that. And ultimately, when the Internet did hit, they had an inferior product– that was not essential enough that they could charge online for it.

While there are exceptions, generally speaking online journalism doesn’t have the sort of resources that print journalism once did – fact checkers, editors who were concerned with the quality of the copy, etc. We’ve occasionally noted here how things like the Duke Cunningham scandal were first developed by local reporters who knew their territory and made the connections. We can do that online, too, but unless it’s some place like HuffPo, it’s not all that likely to get noticed.

You can take one little statement that might, at some remove, be untrue and paint the guy as a lunatic, or you can pay attention and learn.

The hearing is about 20 years late. Investigative journalism in tradmed has been waning since media owners decided back in the ’80s that what the public really wanted was infotainment.

If you want to understand why newspapers seem to lack content nowadays, read former Sun reporter David Ettlin’s blog about how the staff massacre at the Sun was recently handled.

DAVID SIMON: Yes, we [newspaper reporters] were doing our job. Making the world safe for democracy

now there’s a guy really needs to do some work on improving his self-image…

For me, it seems like the dam broke during Nightline’s daily assault on reason during the Iran hostage crisis.

question:

prior to me asking the question, how many people commenting on david simon’s testimony have read or listened to his opening statement?

There is no blog that I’m aware of that could duplicate this type of reporting.

Indeed.

I haven’t. I assume the link is at Jane’s earlier post this morning?
FunnyDiva

Have you noticed the Fund Raiser thermostat in top of the right hand column of FDL? Trying to raise $150K so that Marcy Wheeler (and two assistants) can do the exact type of in-depth reporting you are talking about?

Hmmm, and we are so upset why?

nope. that was also a link to milbank’s crappy article at wapo.

You’re right. I just spent the last 5 min finding that out for myself.
So…do you have such a link? Or did you call Jane on it and ask for it in her post?

I tried to get there from the .pdf of Arianna’s remarks, but haven’t gotten to a webpage yet. And I can’t get to page 1 of Milbank’s screed without registering at WaPoo.

Hmmm.

FunnyD

That line was sarcasm. You can get the context at the link I provided, though frankly, I think it’s obvious from the quote I used.

Why David Simon was Wrong From the NYT Opinionater. This helped me “get it”.

in case anyone, who hasn’t already, would actually like to know what david simon had to say – or at least more than the out of context snippets provided by wapo and milbank, here are a few links:

an extended bit of simon’s opening statement from democracy now! this morning:

http://www.democracynow.org/20…..laimed_hbo

the link to the pdf of simon’s prepared statement at the committee hearing website:

http://commerce.senate.gov/pub…..f86597c540

archve of the entire hearing video webstream provided at the committee hearing website:

http://commerce.senate.gov/pub…..AudioVideo

oops. getting hard to tell.

new word:

Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

OK, got it.

http://commerce.senate.gov/pub…..nalism.pdf

I had to break it down to http://commerce.senate.gov/public
Then went through the “hearings” button and went from there about 3 more clicks.

Back to read.

FunnyDiva

Wow even theTelegraph UK jumped ugly on his ass

But what puzzles me is Simon’s antipathy to the notion of amateur journalists. After all, he’s an amateur television producer. He wasn’t trained in the medium, didn’t work his way up from being a tea boy. Nor did his co-writer and co-producer Ed Burns. Burns was a policeman and teacher. Together they used their experience to craft a television show which explored the worlds in which they had worked. Their backgrounds were far more important than their training in the medium.

They crafted a show using writers who were mostly novelists, not television writers. Likewise, The Wire used lots of amateur actors. Despite their lack of training these people brought an air of authenticity to the show. Felicia ‘Snoop’ Pearson even played herself, or at least a version of herself, in the programme.

By making a television show in this way, Simon created something that has resonated with a lot of people in a way that no other show ever has. Something that reached a truth that few ‘professional’ television shows have managed.

Why is he so closed to the possibility of a new kind of journalism being built in a similar way?

Yay!
Thanks for that, JayT!
FunnyD

As to content, maybe; certainly Nightline was a kind of watershed in which a feeling of immediacy began to take precedence over other aspects of covering a story.

But a big problem with print predates the 80s, in that the civic society in which print flourished gradually died off after WWII. When there was no TV with its insatiable appetite for advertising, and when every city had 00s of 000s or more residents who picked up a paper every day at the newsstand by the bus stop, commuter train, or subway station on the way to work —and might have repeated the action again headed home in the evening— it was possible for cities to have several morning and evening citywide papers. And market competition forced a certain amount of news to get covered, among other competitive strategies.

That model of access to news in the course of one’s spatial activities broke down with the spreading out and isolating of those activities into cars and expressway suburbs. Then you get as coup de grace mayors like Chicago’s RMD who believe in citizen-calming measures; one of his earlier acts in tidying up the cityscape was to eliminate nearly every corner newsstand from downtown (in particular one of the busiest at Mich&Randolph).

Is that yours? That’s really good!

To some extent, Baltimore and Oakland are very different cities. Oakland is much younger, at least in any form that you would recognize today. I used to live near a city of 80k people, Bethlehem, PA. It had its own daily newspaper until the ’80s. It also had a real downtown. It had a huge industry nearby. There were two other daily newspapers that also covered the area.

I now live in another city of 80K on the other coast – Federal Way, WA. While it does have two neighboring newspapers that cover us occasionally, there is only a weekly paper here that’s at least three-quarters advertising. There is no downtown, and no industry to speak of. Out here, blogs tend to cover things better because newspapers never got much of a start here. Oakland is older and larger, but it probably resembles a West Coast town more than it does an East Coast one.

It’s interesting, we have our own paper in Athens and the Atlanta Journal just stopped home delivery here and we are just 60 miles away.

Wow, the Telegraph doesn’t seem to know how to read an IMDB entry. Simon was a writer for Homicide for several seasons before he took over as a producer. He learned on the job, as many people do in many lines of work, from his bosses and coworkers. That counts as training, too.

As for the rest, showing an exception doesn’t disprove a rule. Training counts. Even those amateur actors had directors.

I’m not really sure they were amateurs anyway. He had three real recon Marines in Generation Kill but the rest of the cast were pros.

sorry i didn’t include the links earlier.

As much as I love what Marcie, Jane and others do (and the original reporting on the Libby trial was groundbreaking) there is no way I can envision FDL or any other blog doing the in depth and overseas reporting along the lines of the shipbreaking story I mentioned earlier.

Nearly all of the papers are getting smaller. Seattle just lost one. It’s online now, but that may not last, either. The other two papers, the Tacoma News Tribune, and the Seattle Times, are both getting smaller every month, it seems.

One thing you have to keep in mind about what Simon is saying is that he left reporting back in the ’90s. The newspapers were being bled dry by greedy owners even then. The olden days of real editing, fact checking, and research were already becoming a thing of the past. Now that’s becoming true even at the largest papers. Near as I can tell, nothing is replacing that function on the scale the newspapers once existed. I think this is a horrible thing for our society.

If you don’t think that’s true, look at the upper right hand corner of this page. FDL is still less than halfway to getting Marcy Wheeler the kind of support newspapers used to give their reporters. This is one of the big blogs. Very few of us are getting paid at all out here, much less having access to researchers and editors. While we also have a few advantages, it’s not the same.

Plus, a good director (or AD) can often help an inexperienced actor work on his craft. If you’ve ever been involved in making amateur theatre, this is nothing more than stating the obvious. ;)

heheheheeheee…

Yes, it really is. First time I read it, I didn’t notice the ‘h’…

I heard Simon on Democracy Now this morning. If you think he was critical of bloggers, you should have heard what he said about newspapers.

He states that newspapers sold their souls for bigger profits by dumping reporters and cutting coverage of local issues BEFORE the internet cut into their business. He blames Wall Street for buying up papers and cutting content to maximize profits.

Don’t let someone take a few of his comments out of context. While he may not think bloggers are as good as reporters, he blames the demise of the newspapers on newpaper owners for killing the golden goose they had. Listen to him yourself.

fwiw, i agree.

i see news as more of an ecosystem. the more diverse the better (and that includes other forms of alternative media that are routinely ignored not just by the msm, but also the progressive blogosphere). the apparent desire for a monoculture (”we’re great and they suck”) strikes me as profoundly self-defeating. blogging does, in part, rely on the msm – and the msm is enriched by reporting done by others.

ymmv. but i take no pleasure in watching the continued destruction of what is good about traditional newspaper reporting.

Concur completely Cujo; that jane got to post at Huffington the same column as here says a lot about the ‘wagons being circled’ by those who missed Simon’s point.

Bottomline is that invesigative reporting costs money; whether it’s Marcy or GlennG or Greg Palast or msm and because those that own newspapers aren’t able to keep the 20+ per cent profits they had been used to having is the reason such reporting was cut and why the newspapers are ending. Simple greed.

Even the FL St. Petersberg non-profit newspaper only has a DC reporter that covers issues/items that relate solely to local issues.

amen. well said.

i disagreed with several things simon said, but i also thought he had some v interesting insights worth discussing and thinking about.

and milbank’s article did take simon out of context – which should not be surprising to anyone who reads fdl. that’s why i was so surprised to see two posts on simon’s statement which only referenced milbank’s crappy article.

I’m sure you have read about the crazy murder of three of our community theater folks two weeks ago?

I didn’t hear him on Democracy now but his point is absolutely spot on IMHO. Everyone rushing to defend blogs and the Huffington Post seem to be missing the larger point. I’ll make it a challenge for someone to show me a blog capable of doing this.

All together now…

US newspapers are on the demise because of the appalling lack of substance and actual content in their pages, not because of smart ass, punk kids trying to steal daddy’s newspaper.

DING DING DING!

I’ve been listening to the “death of journalism” blather for about 15 years by going to brown bag lunch lectures at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School. For all that time, it has been the same hand-wringing self-righteousness and little or no understanding at all of the possibilities of the Internet. At the same time, there has also been almost palpable contempt for the readers in the way they ignore us all.

Yesterday I went to another of these meetings and spoke afterward with a former LA Times editor who’d I’d seen on local TV talking about the Boston Globe negotiations. I told him that the trouble with newspapers is part of a wider problem. It isn’t the death of journalism. It’s the death of mass market advertising and all the media that depends upon it. Newspapers and magazines and broadcast TV and everything else that is supported by mass advertising is dying because mass advertising is going away. That’s the wider perspective and I told him I wish somebody would start talking about it. I think after awhile he saw my point.

Simon is right about the failure of the publishers though. Reading Donella Meadows’ _Thinking in Systems_ I came across a description of the situation he’s described. It’s a common systems trap

The Trap: Drift to Low Performance
Allowing performance standards to be influenced by past performance, especially if there is a negative bias in perceiving past performance, sets up a reinforcing feedback loop of eroding goals that sets a system drifting toward low performance.

The Way Out
Keep performance standards absolute. Even better, let standards be enhanced by the best actual performances instead of being discouraged by the worst. Use the same structure to set up a drift toward high performance!

That’s what’s happened with journalism since Watergate and the collective business establishment is too blinkered to figure it out.

BTW, I don’t believe that anybody at Harvard knows that Cambridge City Council and School Committee meetings have been covered by one blogger (http://www.rwinters.com/) more thoroughly than any Cambridge or Boston paper or remembers that http://home.wickedlocal.com/ has been so effective at covering greater Boston’s cities and towns that they had to threaten to sue to get the Globe to stop stealing their content.

BTW, I met the reporters who broke the Duke Cunningham story. They found that story because they were suspicious about the sale price for Duke’s old house and followed the threads from there.

I don’t want to see the newspapers or journalism die. But after spending 15 years listening to big names with great careers miss the point, I’ve lost patience. These guys don’t deserve to continue. They’ve lost that privilege.

However, Walter Pincus has just published a piece which shows that he understands what’s going on.

if you’re going to say simon is wrong, you might want to address what his statement actually said. here is a small bit:

Anyone listening carefully may have noted that I was bought out of my reporting position in 1995. That’s fourteen years ago. That’s well before the internet ever began to seriously threaten any aspect of the industry. That’s well before Craig’s List and department-store consolidation gutted the ad base. Well before any of the current economic conditions applied.

In fact, when newspaper chains began cutting personnel and content, their industry was one of the most profitable yet discovered by Wall Street money . We know now – because bankruptcy has opened the books – that the Baltimore Sun was eliminating its afternoon edition and trimming nearly 100 editors and reporters in an era when the paper was achieving 37 percent profits. In the years before the internet deluge, the men and women who might have made The Sun a more essential vehicle for news and commentary – something so strong that it might have charged for its product online – they were being ushered out the door so that Wall Street could command short-term profits in the extreme.

Such short-sighted arrogance rivals that of Detroit in the 1970s, when automakers – confident that American consumers were mere captives – offered up Chevy Vegas, and Pacers and Gremlins without the slightest worry that mediocrity would be challenged by better-made cars from Germany or Japan.

In short, my industry butchered itself and we did so at the behest of Wall Street and the same unfettered, free-market logic that has proved so disastrous for so many American industries. And the original sin of American newspapering lies, indeed, in going to Wall Street in the first place.

When locally-based, family-owned newspapers like The Sun were consolidated into publicly-owned newspaper chains, an essential dynamic, an essential trust between journalism and the communities served by that journalism was betrayed.

Economically, the disconnect is now obvious. What do newspaper executives in Los Angeles or Chicago care whether or not readers in Baltimore have a better newspaper, especially when you can make more putting out a mediocre paper than a worthy one? The profit margin was all. And so, where family ownership might have been content with 10 or 15 percent profit, the chains demanded double that and more, and the cutting began -long before the threat of new technology was ever sensed.

But editorially? The newspaper chains brought an ugly disconnect to the newsroom, and by extension, to the community as well.

A few years after the A.S. Abell Family sold The Sun to the Times-Mirror newspaper chain, fresh editors arrived from out of town to take over the reins of the paper.

They looked upon Baltimore not as essential terrain to be covered with consistency, to be explained in all its complexity year in and year out for readers who had and would live their lives in Baltimore. Why would they? They had arrived from somewhere else, and if they could win a prize or two, they would be moving on to bigger and better opportunities within the chain.

So, well before the arrival of the internet, as veteran reporters and homegrown editors took buyouts, newsbeats were dropped and less and less of Baltimore and central Maryland were covered with rigor or complexity.

In a city in which half the adult black males are without consistent work, the poverty and social services beat was abandoned. In a town where the unions were imploding and the working class eviscerated, where the bankruptcy of a huge steel manufacturer meant thousands were losing medical benefits and pensions, there was no longer a labor reporter. And though it is one of the most violent cities in America, the Baltimore courthouse went uncovered for more than a year and the declining quality of criminal casework in the state’s attorney’s office went largely ignored.

I’m going to sound like a broken record but if there aren’t newspapers around to do year-long investigations like this, who else is going to do it? The problem with newspapers isn’t the reporters and editors – its their stockholders and by extension their boards of directors IMHO.

I’m not a Manichaean on this either. It does cost a lot of money to do investigative reporting — hence the fund drive here for Marcy. But a big chunk of newspaper expenses have nothing to do with reporting. They have physical plants to maintain, delivery trucks to run, and paper carriers to pay. When they lost their classified ad revenues to Craigslist, that sent them from being very profitable entities (despite their immense overheads) to teetering on the brink of oblivion. (However, there is a ray of hope for them, but only if they’re willing to pick up the slack if Craigslist is eventually forced to drop adult and erotic advertising in the wake of the hyped-up “Craigslist killer” incidents.)

In addition, Simon, as I and Jane both noted, used a bogus comparison as the basis for his argument. He’s dissing HuffPost for not having a local focus when USA Today, the NYT, and the WSJ don’t exactly cover neighborhood zoning meetings themselves. Furthermore, he ignores the existence of local Baltimore blogs like Blogtimore (which has been around since 2005) and The Dagger — and the latter blog is most definitely interested in covering Baltimore zoning meetings.

See gmoke @ 46:

BTW, I don’t believe that anybody at Harvard knows that Cambridge City Council and School Committee meetings have been covered by one blogger (http://www.rwinters.com/) more thoroughly than any Cambridge or Boston paper or remembers that http://home.wickedlocal.com/ has been so effective at covering greater Boston’s cities and towns that they had to threaten to sue to get the Globe to stop stealing their content.

Oh, and go check out The Dagger, for Baltimore news.

As for other media outfits: Have you seen the Center for Independent Media’s various local sites nationwide? Our own Attackerman, Spencer Ackerman, writes for the Washington Independent as well as for us. He’s even traveled to the Middle East to report on America’s role there.

You should also check out the work done by The UpTake, which does lots of local video shoots of the sort of local news Simon says blogs don’t do.

Mr. Simon’s “bogus comparison” (which I agree is inappropriate) seems to be getting more attention than the bigger issue that needs to be addressed. Even if Marcy had a $100,000, could a story equivalent to this be produced here (or by someone else with equivalent resources in the blogosphere)?

(I apologize for using the same example but it’s just because I have it bookmarked. I’m sure there are plenty of others.)

And we’ve been giving you example after example (such as the ones gmoke provided) that show that such coverage is indeed possible. Remember how we covered the Libby case, for starters? That’s what brought FDL to the notice of the wider world.

And speaking of covering big stories over a long period of time — a high-school kid is the go-to reporter on the Haditha massacre and the years-long fallout therefrom, fallout that resulted today in a conviction for the rapist/murderer.

um. did you actually read simon’s statement (or watch the hearing)?

because if you had, i don’t think you would be writing about craigslist – you would know that he specifically said he was addressing what happened to newspapers before there was a craigslist. and you would know that his concern for the lack of local coverage was first about what happened at the sun – not usa today, the nyt and the wsj.

the points he made were, imo, important and transend the issue of online vs dead tree news. my impression was that he was concerned about how journalists (on line or off line) were going to get paid a living wage and be able to do the best journalism. he addressed the systemic issues as he sees them. none of that is diminished by his ignorance of balitimore blogs.

also, there was plenty i disagreed with. but i haven’t listened to the whole hearing, so i don’t know if my impression is correct or if he later provided any clarification to the points raised in what i did listen to.

Well the reporting for that series was done in Baltimore (Maryland), Brownsville (Texas), and Alang (India). This was not local reporting but it was done by a regional newspaper. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t see a blog being able to support a couple of reporters doing this sort of thing.

to my knowledge it hasn’t been done yet.

but rather than make this about blogs vs newspapers – my concern, especially after thinking about some of what simon had to say, is how is anyone (blog, newspaper, etc) going to be able to afford to do the kind and amount of reporting we need to be an informed citizenry?

no easy answers that i can see.

I’m with ya.

All together now…
Newspapers are going out of business because people can get news easily and for free online.
It has nothing to do with the quality or content of newspapers.
You can’t compete with free, as the music industry has learned, and the publishing industry is learning now.
Did people stop buying cds because popular music wasn’t popular any more or because they could get whatever they wanted for free? Sure ,some pay for downloads, just as some will pay to subscribe to blogs. But most won’t.
Music is not seen as having value any more, young people see it as kind of foolish to spend a lot on music. This article is taking the same approach to news gathering, devaluing it.
Books will be the next thing to be devalued, as Kindles etc become more popular it will be easy to download bootleg copies of whatever book you want for free.
Information wants to be free right?

This is my worry, too. That’s why I referred to the example of Marcy’s fund drive here. Newspapers could afford to hire staffs and pay reporters. They didn’t have to worry about having jobs to support themselves, as many bloggers do. Until we solve that problem, newspapers will be irreplaceable.

That’s what Simon was saying. It doesn’t mean shit if he doesn’t know who the bloggers were at the zoning meetings. How many people read that blog, anyway? Probably a small fraction of the people who read the Sun, even now. In a way, Simon’s ignorance of the work that blog is doing symbolizes the problem. For a population to be informed, there have to be people both willing and able to report the news. Then they have to know where to read it.

Couldn’t resist posting this link to The Onion.

That’s my question on The Dagger. Are they employing a paid staff or are they volunteer? Some of those headings haven’t been updated in weeks or months.

I applaud their efforts and believe this would be noble community work for retirees, especially those with some journalism background, but this will not substitute for the newspapers, large and small, that fall.

This is a problem with no answer that I can see. I think Simon was correct to raise it. Marcy is an uncommonly good reporter. I would like her views on how much more difficult it would be to do her job well if there were no mainstream sources, like the AP. As much as we condemn their laziness (and often with good reason) that very criticism can lead to a huge story well-reported.

Let’s say Marcie can produce 20 in-depth astounding stories annually. Then ask yourself how many topics are covered on this site in a single day. It is an ominous task.

It’s interesting that in the discussion of the financial distress of the auto companies, a lot of people in the media were very quick to point to incompetent managers and overpaid workers. Don’t seem to hear much of this with the newspapers….do you suppose….

Emerson, Marcy’s not the only person who writes for FDL. (And she wasn’t the only person working the Plame/Libby beat for FDL, either.)

But speaking of Marcy: She just caught ABC in a big fat lie.

That’s why we have blog aggregators — and it’s why the smarter newspapers (like the St. Paul Pioneer Press) are working with local bloggers such as The UpTake instead of spitting on them.

EXACTLY.

I’ll point to the work of another Center for Independent Media reporter, Eartha Jane Melzer; her coverage of a privatized security contractor received an honorable mention for the Hume Award from the National Press Club in 2008, and was based on more than 6 months of reporting and a series of features culminating in a 2800-word opus.

Marcy’s work on the Plame leak and the Libby trial meets and exceeds the kind of reporting brownandserve points to; here’s a person who has several related beats, is an acknowledged subject matter expert on them, has published a book covering the subject of one beat. As far as I can tell, the only reason brownandserve can’t see Marcy’s work for what it is is that she’s a dirty fucking hippie blogger. (Never mind Marcy’s credentials as an instructor with a doctorate in dissent literature, which is a lot more than many so-called journalists bring to the table.)

There’s also the work of ePluribus Media, which has sustained investigative reporting on Mike Connell and his role as IT service provider to the Republican Party and Bush Administration. Again, no acknowledgment of their years of work on the topic. Nearly uncompensated work as well since there are very few ads on their site; what they’ve earned probably doesn’t make a dent in their expenses.

The work of investigative can be done online by bloggers; only the method by which it’s compensated which is in question.