Force break: Why I still have hope for the crumbling news industry

I could see the temblors everywhere. Bankruptcies, layoffs and a poisonous economy have thinned newspapers to the core, both in physical size and in substance. But I still felt reasonably insulated, since my little hometown newspaper dodged the bullet every time a new round of company-wide layoffs slashed through newsrooms. That’s the newspaper I used to work for full-time, and I still pop in now and again on a per-needed basis.

Up until now, I felt like I would always have a role to play there, like they would always want — and even need — me, and there would usually be some way to make it happen during my breaks from school and from my Public Press internship. 

But Jan. 14 was the first day I felt everything crack.

‘Good old times’

I’ve been studying journalism at San Jose State for a couple of semesters, despite warnings from doom-and-gloom prophets who tell me I need to change my major. I’ve also been a volunteer and intern for The Public Press, a new ad-free newspaper model, despite warnings from doom-and-gloom prophets who tell me print is dead. Call me stupid for all I care, but the experience has been incredible so far in both cases, affording me the opportunity to dive deeper into the theories and practicalities of the craft while simultaneously renewing my hope that somehow, somewhere, journalism will survive, and with it, democracy.

At the end of December I returned home for my winter break to work at my hometown paper, the same Gannett-owned operation where I worked for three years before I decided to quit and finish my degree. It just so happens that this winter there was a need for someone to fill in while the copy desk trained with new software, and I just so happened to be home at the right time. 

There was a bit more paperwork to process this time around, but overall things have been just like the good old times. Same old jokes from the same old personalities that banter about terrible puns and if-I-wrote-this-for-The-Onion headline suggestions. I had been able to put my head down and just work, temporarily able to forget all these economic woe stories I was plucking from the wire and placing in the paper were actually, technically, about me.

And then yesterday, I arrived to work and walked in to a ghost town.

It was only the first of several signs that something was wrong.

Furloughs

"They’re all in a meeting," the last remaining editor in the room said. "It’s about the furloughs."

Oh. Oh no.

"I had read about that," I said, shaking my head.

"Wait, you knew about that already? From where, Romenesko?"

"No," I said, "from Twitter."

Uttering that sentence made me take a long look at myself and how I get news. I didn’t know whether the tweet I came across referenced Romenesko or the Gannett blog or God knows what other source. All I knew is that the Twitter-er summed up in 140 characters what the original article took way too long to explain.

I don’t make any apologies for getting news this way. This is the way it is for millions of others, so you better get used to the idea. But I’m not in the least bit anti-print, nor am I anti-long articles. In fact, this very morning I got up to a nice cup of tea and a read-through of my newspaper lying on the breakfast table. If only the newspaper covered its own industry, I wouldn’t have to rely on pesky things like blogs and tweets to get me the information I wanted. But newspapers don’t, and for that I am thankful.

I knew what furloughing was about. I read it in an article I placed in the paper. (Or wait, was it a blog post I passed along on Delicious?) It’s a forced break with no pay, and practically every Gannett employee must take five days off between now and the end of March. It would have been much harder to make every employee write a personal check to Gannett for a week’s wages, which is essentially what they’re doing, but this furlough business is (to believe the words of the wise Craig Dubow) much better than layoffs.

And it is, to his credit. Alan Mutter estimates it may have saved 600 jobs. Though there had been some staffing cuts at my paper, we had been spared the catastrophic gutting that other newsrooms across the nation have been suffering. In fact, we were even hiring, believe it or not.

But the reason we were hiring: Another Gannett paper in the state had laid off its entire copy editing staff and is in the process of moving their copy desk to my paper 200 miles away. None of the original editors wanted to move that far, and no one could blame them.

The one bright light at the end of this tunnel: We’re hiring another copy editor who is far, far too qualified for this position. I’d hate to think we’re the *only* gig around hiring — JournalismJobs.com says we are not. There must be some other reason she’s coming here. She says she’s settling down.

The problem with ads

The meeting ended and the copy editors gathered to the roost, hovering around their computer stations and trying to make calm little jokes to take the harsh edge off. The pages get assigned, the work begins, and then prepress comes in.

"We have another ad kill," she said to the news editor.

"Are you serious?" the news editor asked. "Again?"

"I don’t get it with these last-minute ad cancellations," the prepress operator said. "We should have a deadline, or charge 50 percent or something."

This isn’t the first ad kill of the day. The layout people will now have to fill the big gaping hole left behind. The half-good news is that, since the news-to-advertising ratio has already been slashed in a cost-cutting measure, we barely had any newshole to work with anyway, and the disappearing ad meant we could cram in a little more news from the wire. It was a busy news day out there; we needed the wiggle room.

Ironically, our big front-page news centerpiece focused on how one of our paper’s biggest advertisers was declaring bankruptcy. Say what you want about advertisers’ influence on editorial content here, but the truth of the matter is, they paid my paycheck. We existed because of them. And without them, newspapers as we know them are dead.

There is something wrong in that very concept, and I’m not the only one who thinks that. As noble as many journalists think newspapers are, they have always existed to move eyeballs to ads. Journalism only played the part of giving someone a reason to pick it up.

I’m not against advertising at all — businesses need to get their name known in order to make money. I just don’t think journalism and advertising should have ever been married in the first place, ideologically speaking. But on the other hand, some advertising, like classifieds and coupons, performed a service readers wanted. People buy the Thanksgiving editions for the ads that tell them where the deals are, not because of the great in-depth reporting of breaking Thanksgiving Day news in their community, of which (if you ask any journalist who had to work on Thanksgiving) there is precious little.

The problem is that this ad-supported business model is breaking apart before our eyes. Some journalism ideologues are even saying that this is a good thing, because it causes everyone to stop, rethink and change their game plan. I can’t tell you layoffs are a great thing, but innovation is, and innovation comes only when there’s something terribly broken that must be fixed.

The argument for print

For one, I am excited I have been able to work on this nonprofit project,  The Public Press. The goal is to eschew advertising altogether and try the PBS or Consumer Reports model for a quality, in-depth newspaper. Yes, that means print. Because the digital divide is still very real, and there is still a market out there for print.

Print also has the unmatched function of geographic penetration. The Web is fantastic about reaching audiences worldwide, but if a local site reaches 1 percent of its local audience, it’s considered a rousing success. Newspapers are considered weak if they reach anything shy of 30 percent of its local audience.

These are valid arguments for print and shouldn’t be dismissed so easily. I ain’t no curmudgeon, and neither are the amazing folks behind The Public Press. I’m always open to change, and if 20 years from now I’m working as a Web programmer-slash-journalist, so be it. I will definitely be prepared and ready to go. But here, now, in 2009, there are just still too many who are not wired. They’re not getting any sort of in-depth news, even (and especially) if they watch the 6-o’clock news. Newspapers are the outlets that are supposed to provide that depth, but they are faced with challenges on all fronts: 1. Less staff, less time and less resources, and 2. Management is increasingly pushing for articles that target the upper-income readers. It’s what they have to do to survive, because that’s where the most lucrative *advertising* comes.

That, right there, is the problem.

We have an entire swath of lower-income people not getting informed about the world around them, left *intentionally* behind by the media companies. They’re the ones who need to be informed the most.

This is why I still have hope for print, even though I am an online, Twittering, blogging, RSS-news kind of fool. Print still serves the public, there is still a niche to fill, there is still a need for quality information distributed without electrons. There are still things print can do that online just can’t, and until the day comes when e-paper becomes so affordable that news organizations will just buy one for each household in their entire metropolitan area, there will be uninformed people out there, purposefully left out by news organizations who frankly have bigger fish to fry and more money to make elsewhere.

Perhaps it’s not the print model that’s dead; perhaps it’s the advertising model. And instead of news organizations behaving like a business, maybe it’s time we behaved like a service.

The nonprofit model

I am hoping that The Public Press is one of many solutions to this problem. As a nonprofit, it has a few benefits. Any money that’s generated above expenses must be recycled back into the organization’s operation, not divvied out among demanding shareholders or lining the pockets of the CEOs. Nonprofits are also eligible for grants and charitable donations, like these startup nonprofit news organizations. The Public Press’ vision is to get a donor, sponsor or grant to provide the lower-income areas with free copies of the paper while offering subscriptions to those who can afford and simply prefer the printed word.

Will it work? I don’t know yet. Anyone who says they know for sure is lying. But we’re working our asses off in hopes that it does. We are paving the way forward, building trust from the ground up, getting involved in the community on a grassroots level, and reconstructing journalism as it always should have been. The industry’s collapse is the perfect opportunity to do so.

Innovate or die

Back in the newsroom, a startling coincidence: I was at an editor’s desk looking for a spare red pen when I spied an open copy of Presstime, the magazine for the Newspaper Association of America. (Why it’s a magazine and not a newspaper is probably the funniest thing in the universe.)

It was opened to an article entitled "Web Site Asks Public to Fund Journalism." And then I realized — hey, that’s my good friend David Cohn!

David is an innovator. A pusher. A worker. I met him first via Twitter, then in person at a journalism conference, and then yet again when I found his Spot.Us organization was working closely with The Public Press.

Spot.Us allows journalists to pitch a story and asks the public to donate small amounts toward their freelance fees. The Public Press hopes to both pitch stories and publish other stories that are funded this way. (In fact, The Public Press has already published on its Web site several stories Spot.Us has produced so far.)

To know that this Presstime article about Spot.Us was being read in the brick-and-mortar caves of this newsroom makes me hope. Maybe there is room for innovation even from within this decaying institution of newspapers.

Then I flip through the rest of the NAA magazine, and among advertisements for the 2009 NAA convention (which promises to be the most depressing $3,150 you’ll ever spend), I see picture after picture of white men in suits — and one token white woman in a suit — next to labels like "innovators" and "industry leaders." And my hope dims.

I agree with Dave: there is simply too much bureaucracy here for the flexibility that tomorrow’s news needs. If 2009 will be the year the newspaper industry collapses, it had better also be the year that journalism learns to thrive without it.

To quote Lisa Williams: Journalism will survive the death of its institutions. And we need 10,000 innovators here in order to invent those new institutions. Sure, 9,998 will probably fail, but it’s those two or three that will grow into tomorrow’s replicable business models.

This is why this blog post has earned its title, "Force break." We need to force something to break here. When I, on my "forced break" from school (that’s good), had to witness my colleagues get issued their forced unpaid break from work (that’s bad), I know it’s just a matter of time before those unpleasant furloughs turn into more permanent forced breaks from employment (that’s very, very bad).

But "force break" is also a typographical term. When my printouts are handed back to me with the letters FB in red ink, it means I need to kick a word to the next line without starting a new paragraph.

The news industry not only needs to start a new paragraph, but they need to start a new paradigm. Forced breaks aren’t enough. We need to reboot.

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