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.

more (links and discussion) on pw’s thread of the same topic:

http://firedoglake.com/2009/05…..nt-1894855

p.s. depending on wapo’s milbank to accurately report on what simon had to say was imo probably a mistake. but trying to work through the logic of a blog post critical of the msm while depending on the msm’s flawed reporting to make some of the key points is just too weird for me to try to think through right now.

question: I understand that Kerry had 50 million dollars in campaign money left after he lost that election. (don’t know if this is true or not)

If true, what happens to the fifty million, anyone know?

The problem for newspapers is that they are never going to have the local monopolies on access to eyeballs that they once could offer. That monopoly is gone forever and, with it, their ability to pedal their twisted spin on their readers’ perception of the world. Good riddance.

Technology has, like so many things, left ‘old’ school behind-

Sort of like our Big 3~car companies!

Good journalists will be wanted- they just need to figure out their venue.

Now, the technology has changed suddenly, and almost everyone one that wants one has his or her own press. Fifteen years ago or so, I went from editing, printing, and distributing a lovingly produced but necessarily minimalist journal four times a year for someone else to publishing my own full color monthly for less than postage needed to mail one issue of the print publication. I could distribute for free and not have to hire a billing manager to keep us breaking even. My circulation was 10X greater and the articles were all on subjects I was interested in.

For the MSM, the dreary fact is that information is suddenly too cheap to bill. Their elaborately constructed monopoly falls apart just when it should be paying off big. In fact, the canny moves that built the monopoly–the political ads and product placement masquerading as news, the cozy relationships with the rich and powerful, the methodical elimination of diversity and controversy–turn out to be cutting their own throats. They no longer have the content that the readers want, they no longer have the readers that the advertisers want, and charging the reader is not a real option (running a periodical on subscriptions alone–as my print journal did–was never really viable anyway). The comparatively well paid professional TV anchor or big-city newspaper editor is becoming a thing of the past, like the steel worker, the key-punch operator, or the gas-station mechanic.

So the mainstream media types are mad and are lashing out. This wasn’t supposed to happen to them, because they played the game of the last 30 years “right”, according to the “rules” that they read in business and journalism schools. Like auto workers, they are asking, “How could this happen?” And the answer is, of course, that it just did, helped along by their own short-sighted self-interest and their readiness to play with con men just a little smarter than themselves.

Now, to be fair, I saw David Simon on Moyer and he is pretty impressive. He railed against the monopolization of the media. He treated the subject splendidly in the Wire (which I love), and he put the blame closer to home than he did in any remarks about bloggers: captive newspaper markets, corporate greed, and a star mentality among reporters. All good stuff. But nobody likes to see something they loved from the old days wither away, especially in a place like Baltimore. It makes people irritable. I can’t blame him, and I wouldn’t take it personally.

The bottomline is that the legitimacy of the free online press is established by what it has done and continues to do. Being thin-skinned about the remarks of those who don’t understand it and resenting lack of recognition by “real journalists” just makes the MSM point seem more plausible. Give credit where due, fight any extension of spurious “intellectual property rights,” and ignore the rest.

Journalism is becoming a humbler, more distributed activity, with fewer stars and less credit given. Madam Wheel is our star of the moment–and rightly so–but she is, if anything, a sign of the times. As near as I know, she did not achieve her successes by risking life and limb on foreign battlefields or by getting a scoop from an explorer in some equatorial jungle or by broadcasting from London or Bagdad during this or that Blitz (forgive my ignorance if I’m wrong on this). She wasn’t the face of a wire service’s Paris bureau for 20 years. She “just” read the material available, used her mind and her memory, drew the conclusions and unravelled the threads that led to truth that no one would have found with a Paris bureau. That’s what the MSM has trouble grasping.