NYT: Testing, testing…”buddy, can ya spare a dime?”

Clark Hoyt provides yet more grist for the paradigm mill. In his Sunday, July 19, column, “One Newspaper, Many Checkbooks,” The New York Times public editor discusses how the paper is exploring new funding mechanisms for newsgathering beyond the legacy media method of advertising subsidies. Oh, ethical mechanisms, I should add. Mr. Hoyt makes it clear that immediately after The Times learned of The Washington Post’s latest gaff, which is now being predictably tagged with the mummified and geographically inappropriate toponym, salongate, the Times went into overdrive to insure all its news initiatives were ethically pure.

What Mr. Hoyt did not make perfectly clear, however, is whether they have taken advantage of a flap about whether their freelance policy leans toward the predatory side on occasion to test the water on alternative methods of paying for news. He admits the paper is actively looking, “searching for new streams of money” to pay the reportorial bills, even considering partnerships and alliances outside the old paradigm of legacy media.

But in a phone interview with Bill Mitchell at PoynterOnline published last Friday, July 17, Craig Whitney, an assistant managing editor who acts also as a standards editor, told Mitchell top editors have discussed it starting last year around The Times linkup with  ProPublica for some partnered stories. But the tone of both pieces is “nothing, repeat nothing official.” The Times appears to want the full argument about maintaining editorial integrity debated before any new checks are written.

The new media business formula: Sell the birthright

Krikey! Here I am worried about a little interpretive inaccuracy at the NYT when we have Katharine Weymouth selling influence at the Washington Post.

Publisher Weymouth with Exec Ed Marcus Brachli need to check the air conditioning in their respective offices because bad air must be coming in. It is certainly going out. The idea was to get journalists, “lawmakers, administration officials, think tank experts, business leaders and the heads of associations” – yes, I know the list is right there in Andrew Alexander’s Post article I just linked to above. But I just had to write it out for myself. Try it, you’ll see what I mean.

A so-called sponsor would be blessed with the opportunity to pay 25 or 250 Gs (depending on your source) for the Post’s power to fill chairs with these special folks in the same room at the same time. They were going to call them “salons.” (Just down another alley I want to meet whoever came up with that.) Salons about important stuff, one assumes, moderated by no lesser lights than Post reporters – although the reporters hadn’t been told how all this would actually work yet.  By the way, just to make things perfectly clear, the doors were to be closed on or to these salons. This kind of “spirited but civil dialogue” was to be off-the-record.

Well all that makes perfect sense. Or it must to some of these people. I, however, join the throngs of the flabbergasted.

The press, and dear God, THE POST, has busted its butt cracking open this kind of bushwa for 30-plus years. We’ve tried to shed sunlight on such conversations, not sponsor them off the record for crying out loud. Or if you aren’t crying out loud you better be huddled in a corner somewhere coughing out your best Kurtzian whisper, “The horror. The horror.”

Pain in the slush pile of inaccuracy

The media try hard to maintain accuracy. It is the first leg of the tripodal stool of news journalism’s ABCs – accuracy, brevity, clarity. But as an earlier post here testified (AA: Accuracy and audience, June 10, 2009) , complete accuracy continues to elude even the best practitioners. And admit it, the nature of media news gathering makes certain that will always be true.

That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s pursuit should, or will be abandoned, of course. Or that blips and blurs need not be scoped and prodded.

Here is a recent example of a more subtle level of inaccuracy that over time kicks the legs out of credibility.

Adam Liptak had a page 1 story in the New York Times on Sunday (7/12/09) headlined, “Path to Court: Speak Capably But Say Little.” The lead grafs were as follows:

WASHINGTON — On his first day at the Justice Department in 1981, a 26-year-old lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. was handed a high-profile assignment: to help prepare Sandra Day O’Connor, then an Arizona judge, for her Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
“The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court,” Mr. Roberts wrote later that year in a report to a Justice Department supervisor, “but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments.”
That advice — sound as if you know what you are talking about but avoid saying anything — has been followed pretty faithfully by every nominee since, including the report’s author, who is now chief justice of the United States. And it may well be followed by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings are scheduled to begin Monday.

For my purposes I’m not going to smmarize the rest of the article. I will say that I have read many of Mr. Liptak’s pieces in the NYT and have no reason to think what happened here happens often or on purpose. I should also admit up front that the inconsistency I am pointing out could likely be an editing error done to make the lead-in copy more closely parallel the headline.

That said, we are looking at the first three graphs heading into the page jump, the fork where the majority of readers abandon the story. So to those readers any clarification further down in the story will be lost anyway.

So, does the copy in green accurately summarize the copy in red? No, it does not. What if you mitigate the red copy with the copy in blue? Still no, and readers not exercising an unbounded confirmation bias will flinch. I think this is a case where even those who want to believe the implication of the green copy will stumble here, and then rush on to more inviting, and smoother, copy.

Let me bring that green copy down here

sound as if you know what you are talking about but avoid saying anything

and match it to the headline

Path to Court: Speak Capably But Say Little

We have a closer match here. The two phrases are at least parallel in form if not exact meaning. But

speak capably = +/- sound as if yo know what you are talking about

but

say little ≠ avoid saying anything

Now that’s a nice little math exercise but would linguists agree? After all, say little would be accurate if there was an implied word following avoid saying anything as in avoid saying anything important, or large or meaningful or specific that would get you in trouble, which is what we assume is implied.

The spin damage here is to show the then Justice Department lawyer, now Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts, was counseling then Supreme Court nominee O’Connor to be vague and evasive in all her answers to legislators’ questions during her confirmation hearing.

But that isn’t what Mr. Roberts, by his own words was doing at all, was he?

“The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court,” Mr. Roberts wrote later that year in a report to a Justice Department supervisor, “but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments.

Connecting the matching parts the meaning is

The approach was [to demonstrate] a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments [without] giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court.

As I opined earlier, readers get it. And a contrary writing of the meaning just means another perception of inaccurate reporting.

Windex on the World

K.R. Passey | Book Review

The Post-American World

By Fareed Zakaria

292 pp. W.W. Norton & Company

Writing a book about the sweep of world events and the disposition of cultures is always a risky proposition. First, it is impossible for the writer to give the topic full justice within the covers of a book that can be lifted. Second, the complexity of detail would require footnotes triple the size of the text. The reader of such a work must take up the project with the non-fiction equivalent of a willing suspension of disbelief: the willing suspension of thick description.[1] Third, the world and its nations move on, and changing events have a way of discrediting even the most perspicacious of analyzes.

Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and host of Fareed Zakaria GPS for CNN, manages, however, to illuminate current world history fairly well in this book. His style flows quickly but not too quickly from summaries to evidence and back again. Unlike Thomas Friedman,[2] Zakaria does not strain at a contrived metaphor. He appends his title with an inside-the-book textual theme that explores “the rise of the rest.” American decline then, and the post-American era, is defined by the American role in the rise of other countries, notably Brazil, Russia, India and China, Jim O’Neill’s BRICs[3] of the new world economy, with particular focus on the latter two. Zakaria’s most recent edition also contains a new 20-page preface that updates readers on the worldwide economic distress of the current day. The preface deals with the changes wrought by time and segues to the major themes he introduces in the rest of the book.

Those themes are several. He attributes America’s current place in the world order as sole superpower to three forces: politics, economics, and technology, and examines how the three powers play out in the post-American era. This power tripartite may seem obvious unless you just finished reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond lists one-celled micro-organisms and natural resources in his power trinity.[4] Both authors include technology.

Another of Zakaria’s post-American themes is that the rising of the “others” need not dictate a decline of American power and influence, and certainly not the disintegration of American society. America may instead seize a powerful new role of leadership as a non-hegemonic builder of conversation and consensus in a multi-polar world order. Zakaria moves away from a Clintonian model and puts forward the example of George the First. G.H.W. Bush, he says, set a precedent in the way he gleaned global cooperation and built international will and military force to stop the aggression of Saddam Hussein. Bush I set up (through Colin Powell) exemplary management of combined military forces, and stayed within the operational parameters of the agreement, and successfully executed the exit strategy.

Zakaria has no praise for George the Second, however, and places a delineated load of blame on the son and his administration lackeys for not just undoing the good work of the father but adding immeasurably to future American foreign policy challenges by his arrogant display of unilateral aggressive force in Iraq and unilateral attitude in decision-making .

One is tempted to bring in Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations for a round of compare-and-contrast but Zakaria has only two bantamweight references to the conservative icon of culture wars and in both he agrees with Huntington’s points. The first is the accuracy of the ungainly “uni-multipolarity” term Huntington used to describe one super-power (the U.S.) among many powers (BRIC, Europe, Japan and a growing list of others)[5]. The second is the apparent agreement with Huntington’s argument that modernization and Westernization are wholly distinct with the latter solidifying circa A.D. 700-800 and the former not accomplished until the 1700s.[6] These two points might be straw dogs, however, because it is not clear who would argue either.

However, it is very clear that Zakaria disagrees with Huntington on almost everything else, even if the conservative’s name s not invoked. Huntington’s idea that religious ideology is a major dividing line for humanity and the highly probably source for future discord and war is one example. Zakaria acknowledges the existence of religious tensions and that they will play a role in world strife. He also, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, believes in a “global political awakening” that results in renewed pride of nationhood in the rising others. Economic success, higher education levels, growing transparency of government and a recently acquired, more accurate version of history feed that pride.[7] Zakaria observes that the resultant awakening produces positive elements of nationalism but that an uglier side fraught with pent-up frustrations may also emerge. A less dogmatic, more consultive U.S. approach that also recognizes the parts of its own foreign policy rife with hypocrisy, he asserts, can assuage the uglier parts of nationalism. The preachy approach of subtle or obvious proselytizing to ideology must go.

Ideology can be a tool for looking at history that helps splice together story lines and untie cultural knots, like the sailor’s marlinespike, used shipboard to splice lines and untie knots. But Zakaria’s take on China’s ideology is new for me. Today’s China, he argues, has no ideology, which grows from the fact that the country is largely a subscriber to Confucianism – also non-ideological and certainly, as practiced in China, non-religious. Those who have successfully stirred up a healthy Sino-scare in my soul neglected to elaborate on this piece of information. As a result, I was relieved to get this perspective.

Zakaria sees a pragmatic China, with its own peculiar brand of Communist/socialistic politics, wedded to centrally planned capitalism. Beijing has the advantage of extremely long-term planning that aims at relentlessly solving its problems – but gradually, all the while maintaining economic growth and internal stability. The Chinese autocracy is primarily interested in those two outcomes. China is not now and has rarely been in its past a zealous missionary for any ideology, and it views with distain those who are. China has no designs on running the rest of the world. Its massive military expenditures (though dwarfed into second place by U.S. military spending) have no aggressive purpose outside its own traditional boundaries, excepting a nod to policing its own trade routes, coastline and waterways.

Zakaria’s China point is in sharp contrast to more conservative thinkers like Robert Kagan.[8] Kagan argues that autocracy itself is an ideology and one that China will inevitably be pushing forward as part of the natural progression of power. While I find this argument somewhat compelling, I choke on Kagan’s idea, pushed regularly by former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, that the U.S. should gather a “league of democracies” to combat what will be China’s more inevitable push of its autocracy-cum-ideology. India is part of the reason for my swallowing difficulty here, and my final point, one done well by native son Zakaria.

India, he believes, has two distinct advantages over China that could modify China’s impact on world economy and power. The first is the fact that the messy and long-term erratic growth of democratic India and its current 1 billion citizens is settling day-by-day into more predictable parameters. Secondly, India has a leg up on China with regard to maintaining a growing population of workers. Whereas China’s one-child policy has given it an oversupply of male children and problematic internal growth rates, India continues to produce a more average male-female ratio, the sort that eventually becomes critical in sustaining market growth. Aging populations draw heavily on economic reserves and spell future trouble. The European Union also suffers from declining populations of working citizens. High internal birthrates spare India from the problem.

Unfortunately, the other side of this benefit is overpopulation and overcrowding. Zakaria, beyond a too-brief exploration of agrarian reform, does not resolve this contradiction. He does only slightly better with his assertion that the U.S. will, or could, be saved from stagnation by immigration but there is a problem.

This brings us full circle to Zakaria’s worries about immigration and about why America might not stay ahead of “the rest” for much longer. He maintains that our political system’s polarizing tendencies are among our biggest weaknesses. For the past two or three decades we have not shown a sustained ability to solve our problems and move ahead using the mandatory democratic tools of compromise and non-partisan consensus. That tendency toward polarity and partisanship bodes ill for the sort of consultive, cooperative, compromise consensus approach it will take to lead the world in Zakaria’s post-American world.

Except for this and a few other streaks, Fareed Zarakia is viewing the world through mostly clean glass. Time will show us whether it is tinted.

---

[1] Clifford Geertz’s term for social sciences’ nuanced and heavily detailed analysis of cultures, that expands on anomalies and exceptions. Geertz, Clifford. (1973). Thick description: Toward an interpretative theory of culture. In C. Geertz, The interpretation of cultures (pp. 3–30). NY: Basic Books.

[2] Friedman picked the backward-looking flat earth metaphor. The effort of forcing his data and examples into a convoluted conformity troubled the reader throughout the book and its sequels. See Friedman, Thomas L. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

[3] O’Neill, head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs, used the acronym in two influential papers, Dreaming with BRICs? (No. 99), and How Solid are the BRICs, (No. 134).

[4] Diamond, a California professor of physiology, does not endeavor to capture the current state of world affairs but argues convincingly by way of anthropology, behavioral ecology, linguistics, and epidemiology that how cultures and nations developed toward their status is an extrapolation of economics and politics on “guns, germs, and steel.”

[5] These interlocking topics are an important part of Huntington’s discussion and occupy two sub-sections (“The West and Modernization,” and “Responses to the West and Modernization,” in his book). See Huntington, Samuel P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. (pps. 68-78). NY: Simon and Schuster.

[6] Op. cit.

[7] Brzezinski, Zbigniew (2005). “The dilemma of the last sovereign.” American Interest1. No. 1, in The Post-American World, (pps. 33-34).

[8] Kagan is nothing if not credentialed. He is a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a columnist for the Washington Post and is syndicated by the New York Times Syndicate. He is a contributing editor at both The New Republic and the Weekly Standard, and has written for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, World Affairs, and Policy Review. His book, Of Paradise and Power, was a national and international bestseller and has been translated into 25 languages. His book, Dangerous Nation, won the 2007 Lepgold Prize from Georgetown University. He is listed by Foreign Policy and Prospect as one of the world’s “Top 100 Public Intellectuals.” He was a foreign policy advisor to John McCain, the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States in the 2008 election. See also Kagan, Robert (2008). The return of history and the end of dreams. NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

Newspaper decline tied to community decline?

Jo Anne Killeen is a general assignment reporter for two Wisconsin suburban weeklies and a fellow grad student at the University of Missouri.

By Jo Anne Killeen

I’m a newspaper journalist, so much of what I took away from the [2009 State of the Media] report has to do with newspapers. To narrow the takeaways down to two is quite a challenge. There are many important items to take away from the entire report.

I wasn’t so much surprised as saddened to read that newsrooms were divesting – at a catastrophic rate – their interests in the state capitols and Washington, D.C. I’d heard it before; I just didn’t think it was so widespread. Dorroh, in “Statehouse Exodus ” reported the mass exodus, a 32 percent drop in full-time reporters in the halls of power.

This decline shows newspapers abdicating their role as a community megaphone – as editor of the Orlando Sentinel Charlotte Hall describes it. “…We’re the megaphone in the community,” she is quoted by Rachel Smolkin as saying in “Cities Without Newspapers.” “The power of newspapers still is their ability to aggregate audience and reach many people, particularly the opinion makers in a town or community.”

As Rachel Smolkin writes, “For newspapers’ survival to matter, though, the core of the new models must remain the same as the old: the dedication to illuminating stories and rich storytelling, the commitment to serving democracy.”

I think part of the problem that we journalists have propagated is more talk on politics than on policy and readers are tired of it. As the PEW research shows, media spent more time on the “horse race” of the election campaign than substantive discussion on policies of the candidates. Of course, politicians hold policy details quite close to their vest. But journalists have not done a good job of holding candidates feet to the fire to expound on their policies or of telling the American public why policy matters.

The second takeaway for me, since my employer is suffering with this problem, is the toll from the heavy debt on the balance sheet. Lee Enterprises has almost suffocated itself under the weight of its purchase of the Pulitzer. Its inability to restructure that debt almost sent the company down the tubes this last six months. That, I believe, has to do with the economic/credit crisis.

The 2009 State of the News Media report succinctly captured my employer’s problems. To quote the Pew report, Lee, because of its debt load, “has neither the profits nor the access to capital to finance rapid business transformation.” The debt load is preventing the organization from investing time and resources desperately needed in seeking new revenue streams. Therefore, it is forced to be reactive and follow the same path as it has before, despite what it wants to do.

If it had a lighter debt load it could follow some of the more interesting technological gadgets such as e-readers. I’m not so sure Kindle in its current form is palatable, but the new e-reader from Plastic Logic primed to hit the market in January 2010 seems to be gaining interest. If that, or further iterations of it, could capture on-time news no matter where I took it, I think I would buy it.

My third takeaway is that newspapers aren’t dead. The Pew research shows most are profitable. True, they are not as profitable as the good old days, but profitable nonetheless. The problems, as Paul Farhi points out, aren’t in journalism, It’s the decoupling of advertising and the indebtedness.

Farhad Manjoo highlights an important aspect of the newspaper over today’s gadgets (even though he canceled his subscription to the New York Times.) “There’s no better way to get a full picture of what’s happened around the world than by reading a newspaper. The paper is portable, easy to find, easy to use, and, best of all, skimmable. …But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspaper such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design.”

When the e-readers of tomorrow capture the graphic design capabilities other than list after list of headlines, and newspapers can get their brand recognition onto these devices, the industry will have found a revenue stream.

But newspapers also have to target their audience better, and I’m not talking about the gazillion niche publications it produces. We haven’t done a good job of impressing our readers. We’ve been trying to attract young readers with all our lifestyle stories and cool geo-caching stories, fashion, music, bars and getting ourselves caught up in these niches trying to bring in young readers. In the meantime, we’ve alienated our core readership, the 30 to 60 year-olds as the Pew research showed.

Instead, core newspaper readers are now going to the publications like, surprisingly, The Economist.  Grudgingly giving some credit to the increasing subscriptions to that magazine, Hirschorn derides Newsweek and Time for playing to the wrong audience and trying too hard online to be all things to all people. “It is a general-interest magazine for an ever-increasing audience, the self-styled global elite, at a time when general-interest anything is having a hard time interesting anybody. … The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues tometastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.”

New York Times blogger writer and blogger David Carr, agrees, saying: “As an intellectual accessory it is a signifier of far-flung interests, suggesting that the reader is a person of the world.”

Another view of J-school relevancy

Jeni Donlon is City Editor at The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee. She will soon join the Indiana University School of Journalism as an adjunct lecturer. Ms. Donlon has 22 years of experience with Scripps newspapers and is currently also a fellow grad student at the University of Missouri.

This is a report covering the Indiana School of Journalism Teaching Fellows Workshop written for classwork at MU.

By Jeni Donlon

I just spent a week at the Indiana University School of Journalism Teaching Fellows Workshop, where a group of newly minted professors and professional journalists making the switch to higher education did some big thinking with seasoned professors about teaching in general and teaching journalism students in particular.

We spent a great deal of time talking about the philosophy of teaching, how to teach and engage our classes, and how to design a syllabus that would head off any potential behavior problems, but we also talked about what to teach, how to incorporate advances in professional and social media and, yes, how to be more relevant in a world where the words “layoffs” and “furlough” have become common vocabulary.

The members of the group had various backgrounds — newspapers, TV, radio, PR, academia — but we all agreed that journalism schools are more important than ever in preparing students for their various fields, and not just for teaching the nuts-and-bolts skills. There was also agreement with the professors’ emphasis on creating citizens of the world, of helping to develop whole journalists, teaching the student to be aware of what’s going on in the world, to be open-minded and to think critically — something many grassroots bloggers or citizen journalists don’t do.

(I was heartened to read in the Pew report that the majority of those who seek news online still get it from established news organizations, indicating a certain trust factor with professional journalists. I know the trust factor is just above lawyers and car salesmen, but apparently not as low as non-professionals or unknown news site writers/bloggers.)

So how do journalism schools stay relevant?

Principles, broad and specific: Knowledge, skills, values and behavior. Those are the basic principles journalism schools should be concerned with teaching their students, says former IU J-school dean Trevor Brown, who also works with the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. Specifically, those core values and competencies should produce, according to the ACEJMC, graduates who can:

• understand and apply the principles and laws of freedom of speech and press, including the right to dissent, to monitor and criticize power, and to assemble and petition for redress of grievances;
• demonstrate an understanding of the history and role of professionals and institutions in shaping communications;
• demonstrate an understanding of the diversity of groups in a global society in relation to communications;
• understand concepts and apply theories in the use and presentation of images and information;
• demonstrate an understanding of professional ethical principles and work ethically in the pursuit of truth, accuracy, fairness and diversity;
• think critically, creatively and independently;
• conduct research and evaluate information by methods appropriate to the communications professions in which they work;
• write correctly and clearly in forms and styles appropriate for the communications professions, audiences and purposes they serve;
• critically evaluate their own work and that of others for accuracy and fairness, clarity, appropriate style and grammatical correctness;
• apply basic numerical and statistical concepts;
• apply tools and technologies appropriate for the communications professions in which they work.

You’ll notice that the nuts-and-bolts part of journalism is only a small part of these values and competencies, although extremely important and greatly transferable, as [another classmate] points out in her post and as Brown has shown using the following example in his class, which invariably has a student who thinks he or she doesn’t need to learn to write well because they’re not going to be a print journalist. Brown gives his students resumes of two equally qualified candidates for a job in another industry, such as the health care field or engineering. Everyone agrees that both of these candidates would be great for the job. Then he gives them the cover letters, one of which is poorly written. Without hesitation, every student says they’d choose the candidate with the well-written cover letter. Do you have to be a trained journalist to write a good cover letter? No, but the skills you learn as a journalist are valued in many careers.

A larger part of the list concerns legal and ethical values and behaviors, which are arguably harder to teach and learn, but, as [another classmate] points out, can give practicing journalists a leg up in the legal, political and ethical realm.

Technology: While many J-schools rushed to add online classes to their curricula, the trend now is to incorporate many platforms and disciplines into the core classes, just as [another classmate] suggests in her post. For example, when teaching about press releases, you might also talk about how to alter the information for a Facebook or Twitter post, and then talk about the best ways to cover the event — audio, video, blogs, printed word, or a combination of those platforms.

While the principles and uses of new technology are incorporated into class, Dr. Amy Reynolds, associate dean at the IU J-school, said it’s impossible to teach all of the specific programs/software because the technology keeps changing. For example, she was teaching a Visual Communications class in which she wanted to teach design using Quark because that’s what the newspaper design classes and student newspaper were using. She spent hundreds of hours learning and perfecting her use of Quark, something that did not come easy to her. Two weeks before classes were to begin, the J-school decided to switch to InDesign.

Brown said the area of technology is where the students have to bring some of their own initiative to the table. He said teaching is a distribution of responsibilities among I, You and We — the professor can teach the basic principles of print or web design and have the students execute these with programs they know or choose to learn through hands-on activity or peer learning. This also underlies [another classmate's] point about using your own initiative. There are plenty of opportunities to help yourself, but it’s unreasonable to require journalism schools to teach all of the software available when it changes every few months.

Experiential learning: Many opportunities fall under experiential learning. There is a bigger emphasis now on getting students out in the world to see and do things. The Missouri Method has always emphasized this through student media, but now the trend is to take it off campus.

A few years ago IU’s J-school created a program for experiential learning that includes four international travel courses, a summer honors program in London, and numerous domestic class and extracurricular experiences. The international classes include one on the Footsteps of Ernie Pyle, in which the students travel to London, Normandy and Paris to the various sites from which Pyle wrote his war dispatches. Another group of students just got back from Chile, where they visited CNN Chile and learned more about the culture and the news media there. The students make documentaries of their trips, blog daily, create photo slide shows and create other projects using their journalism skills. Jessica Gall, who created and directed the program, talked about how the students learn more about the world around them and come back with a new level of confidence and an appetite to learn more.

She stressed you don’t have to go halfway around the world to achieve those benefits. After Hurricane Katrina, the school chartered buses and sent students to New Orleans to practice their skills, for example. Or students could attend a city council meeting or “cover” a guest speaker or panel discussion for class. The point is to reinforce what they are learning in the classroom, to broaden the students’ minds and give them confidence for the real world.

Citizens of the world: Almost every speaker at the conference lamented the state of today’s undergraduate student. Apparently the majority of them know nothing about what’s going on in the world and even less about geography, even though technology makes it easier than ever to learn about other countries and cultures. Forget about classic literature or the arts, too. So there is a real effort among the professors to at least introduce students to a broader world as part of their curriculum.

National Geographic photographer-turned-professor Steve Raymer starts his class off  almost daily with a news report from the BBC and sometimes clips from Al Jazeera to show how other media report about what’s happening in the United States. He calls up maps online when discussing conflicts in other regions of the world, and shows behind-the-scenes video of American journalists working in other countries so students can see the hurdles they must overcome.

Professor emeritus Peter Jacobi might start a magazine-writing class by dissecting a poem or giving props to a well-written description in a clothing catalog. He teaches using dialogue from “Madea” or “NYPD Blue” or even children’s books to show good writing can be found anywhere. Along the way, he exposes his students to Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, Chekhov. He has his students write magazine articles on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Black Sox scandal, an opera called “Salome.”

The business of journalism: Many of you mentioned this in your essays, and you’ll be happy to know there are discussions about partnering with the business school to create some classes on entrepreneurial journalism and journalism as a business. The professors recognized they may not be sending graduates off to established broadcast studios or print newspapers, but to lives as freelancers or niche journalists.

Traditional instruction has typically glossed over the business end of the industry — I think my brief encounter with it came by way of my ethics class, and I was probably loathe to pay attention with my head filled with the romance of championing causes and the people’s right to know — but there is a widening thought that journalists need to understand more about the industry’s finances and business models since these things directly affect how we do our jobs.

Whew! Sorry for the length, but I do want you to know that J-schools are consciously and conscientiously reviewing their courses and encouraging professors to stay current, not only in teaching, but also in their craft.

As an aside, if you are planning to teach at the college level, I would highly recommend this workshop. Applications are taken in the spring. You can find out more here: http://journalism.indiana.edu/programs/teaching_fellows/

2009 State of the Media – takeaways

Patrick Howe is the managing editor of an alternative weekly in San Luis Obispo, CA, an instructor at the local community college, and a fellow grad student at the University of Missouri

By Patrick Howe

The Pew Center’s State of The News Media Reports are stunning in their depth and clarity. I’ve read several of the recent editions either for requirements for classes I’m taking, classes I’m teaching, or simply professional curiosity. They only get more thorough. One could be a reader of the daily business pages and still rightly profess to be surprised by much of what happened to cause the broader financial meltdown. I don’t think, however, that one could be a regular reader of these reports and complain that the problems facing journalism were a surprise.

In the past, I’ve tended to focus more of my attention on the executive summary and sections dealing specifically with newspapers. It was eye-opening to read the entire 2009 report and understand that, with few exceptions, the same sort of digital challenges that are facing newspapers are also facing all mediums—print and broadcast alike.

The requirement for this entry is to focus on the two “most important” takeaways. I’m not sure if I’ll be following that direction precisely. Rather, I’ll focus on those that most surprised me and challenged what I thought I knew. The two areas I’ll focus on are the problems with internet advertising and the intriguing observation that the time of day one consumes the news, whether via radio, cable, network or local television, or via the Internet, changes the news one consumes.

Takeaway 1: Internet advertising

Newspapers don’t have so much of an audience problem as they do an advertising problem. In the section on newspapers, the report notes that traffic to newspaper websites is growing, now adding 8.4 percent to the average newspaper’s readership. Unfortunately, this hasn’t made up all of the print audience decline. Again on the positive side, the report says unique visitors overall are up, but still, online ads dropped for the first time in recent years. The report attributes this decline to an overabundance of supply.

Even still, much of the industry remains profitable, if barely so, with 45 million papers sold daily and $38 billion in ad revenues. The revenue problem has people looking to many solutions, ranging from a transition to reading newspapers via electronic devices such as the Amazon Kindle, to seeking payments from the giant news aggregating websites such as Yahoo and Google. But there are real problems with these efforts. As Tim Rutten writes in a recent L.A. Times column: “The problem is that newspapers can’t begin charging for online content or licensing their journalism to search engines unless all the English-speaking papers do it at once. That’s currently illegal under laws barring collusion and price-fixing.”

A June 19 column by Steve Outing on Editor & Publisher’s website argues that there is a sizable audience of readers who want to pay for online content, whether they’re required to or not. This would be of the guilt-induced, NPR-style, but enabled by technology that will make it nearly effortless for the reader to contribute perhaps 10 cents to read an intriguing article. Another model is the “freemium” idea, where users pay more for a better package of what would otherwise be free. It sounds similar to the ASCAP model of how radio divides license payments by radio stations to people who hold the copyrights to songs. None of these are large-scale solutions, at least not yet.

So, at the core, the problem is an advertising one. A new PricewaterhouseCoopers report, according to the Associated Press, finds that Internet advertising has dropped 5 percent in the first quarter of 2009. The report put much of the blame on Google’s Doubleclick, an ad server used by many newspapers. People simply aren’t clicking through at the rates they once were. And while this fact might be more easily lost in other advertising mediums, it’s too easy to track in an online environment to be ignored. What’s more, the State of the News Media report suggests there isn’t a lot of attention being paid to the problem, at least not by newspapers advertising executives themselves who, for example, haven’t moved much to allow advertisers to create their own ads online.

So if the problem is an advertising one, then the solution is an advertising one as well. The options are many. Readers could be forced to sit through commercial-style ads before they get to the content. Searches, which are garnering the bulk of advertising dollars, could somehow be embedded into content.

Perhaps it’s simply a matter of attention. This user has noted that most of the ads that accompany articles—many of them computer-generated—aren’t good matches for the content. A recent story on an act of racism that included a Confederate flag, for example, was accompanied by Google ads that sold … Confederate flags. I’m doubtful that that was a successful strategy. What if ads were paired with articles by a human instead? Much of the Internet is run by RSS feeds in a sort of autopilot. Perhaps autopilot isn’t good enough when we’re talking about the future of the industry?

Takeaway 2: Morning news/ evening news

One of the most surprising things I learned in the report was the vast differences in what sorts of news people consume depending on the time of day people consume the news. This might have seemed self evident in television, where one would have expected a softer approach on, say Good Morning America, than on the nightly news. As the report noted: The real contrasts emerge between the morning and evening news shows. There was significantly more election coverage in the morning than at night and more coverage of such things as Iraq and Afghanistan in the evening. Crime was significantly bigger in the morning, whereas education and health were much more prevalent in the evening.

But it was interesting to learn from the content analysis’ done in the report that it extends to online news readers, who consume far more foreign news if they read in the morning. Overall, there was more diversity on online news, particularly that consumed by the large aggregaters, than on other mediums. This suggests that some of the promised democratic nature of the Internet is extending to news consumption as well.

The implications are fascinating. What we know about the world might, in the end, depend on whether we’re morning people or night people. So much is written in the journalism academic journals focusing on micro-specific looks at the content of specific works, such as a single daily newspaper. But I’ve never heard of work looking at this macro trend. Do you see the world differently if you log on early than if you log on late?

I think there’s a lot to explore here.

Putting a price on legacy news – really

Several classmates noted the Pew report finds the decoupling of advertising from news is at the core of the painful transition that all news media are experiencing. One noted that the Pew report attaches the problem to all news media, even new media utilizing Internet advertising. Another focused on how newspapers are tied into this problem. Her lucid summary included the proposition that any newspaper valuation discussion should measure storytelling excellence, coverage depth in the market area, and other journalistic performance levels.

My analysis also focused on the decoupling of advertising from news. The report clearly states that this fundamental tear in the business model is the underlying problem for revenue declines.

For decades the news business has been one of those rare for-profit symbiotic enterprises that is paid for what it produces with money from clients who are not its primary targeted customers: advertisers rather than readers. It charges advertisers for the privilege of “riding along” with the core product. News consumers form a mass market for those advertisers. The news media came to depend on advertisers and advertisers valued the mass markets the news media provided.

That is changing. Advertising is paying less and less of news media’s bills, even, according to the Pew report, those of Internet news media.

Clark Hoyt, the New York Times public editor, touched on one aspect of the problem in his Sunday, June 22, 2009, column is titled “Putting a Price on News.” But his approach is more about values and newsroom staff sizes than the real nitty-gritty of price. And it entirely ignored the problem that pops up everywhere in the Pew report about where the money always came from to pay for high value news content that those superior newsrooms produced.

It seems to me that if we really want to put a price on news we should start by asking how much it costs to produce without advertising subsidies.

So I thought I’d do a simple country-boy calculation based on my own (at least formerly my own) newspapers, based on some basic facts and accounting. I figured I should be able to calculate how much producing an all-news/no advertising newspaper costs by subtracting all the expenses associated with advertising from the total expenses. I used annualized numbers for my two weekly Washington community newspapers from 2006. Since I don’t own theses newspapers anymore I will use percentages to report my model but they are derived from actual P & L numbers. Anyone who has access to Inland Press numbers could do the same thing across much larger groups.

Here, in summary, is what I learned:

Total sales-related expenses as a % of total costs

Employee costs – 19.47 percent
Production costs – 7.18 percent
G & A costs – 6.48 percent
TOTAL – 33.13 percent

Some of these percentages are based on weighting certain expense line items, like web press, postage and delivery costs using the advertising to editorial ratio we usually run. These aren’t down-to-the-penny calculations but they are pretty reasoned estimates. If they error they error on the low side of costs. I double-checked these calculations on two of my other weekly papers in another state that have different overall cost numbers, page counts and paid subscribers, and came up with all sales-related expenses at 31.96 percent of total costs, so the numbers seem to be in the ballpark.

This means for these papers the actual cost of producing and delivering news only (no advertising costs whatsoever) was about 66 percent of what it cost with advertising added. Keep in mind that I am ignoring the revenue side here.

Dividing the dollar amount that 66 percent represents by the number of paid subscribers, then factoring in the number of editions gave me the following:

Actual gross cost per edition per subscriber $6.83
Annual gross cost for 52 weekly editions per subscriber $355.29
Annual projected gross cost for 365 daily editions per subscriber $2,493.85

That is my best country-boy guess on what news produced via legacy newspaper modalities (web press, newsprint, postal delivery, etc.) actually cost us. Now don’t think I equate those weeklies one-to-one with the New York Times. All I’m saying is that it is possible to roughly calculate the cost of news as we have traditionally produced it by subtracting the costs associated with the advertising side of things. Other legacy news media can do the same.

Putting a price on that actual cost, Mr. Hoyt’s column headline promise, would simply require adding a markup. Choose one. A 20-percent markup takes the price to $8.20 per copy, $426.35 for an annual weekly subscription, and a whopping $2,992.62 outlay for an equivalent daily annual subscription.

Putting a fact-based cost on news gives us a much truer idea of its real value in society. Will society be willing to pay that unsubsidized price? In his Times column, Mr. Hoyt quotes a subscriber, Michael Norris, saying “Count us in for whatever rate you decide to be necessary to ensure the continued survival of The Times.” But can we really count on Mr. Norris when the minimum starts at a minimum of $3,000 a year? And remember, that is for one news source.

Moving to WordPress

I needed to push myself into new realms so I’ve decided to move 20 CENTS: NEWS PARADIGMS before I get too many posts put up. I will be movin the early posts over here and lower casing the title. I also hope to have a little more design flexibility. The result of this is that a flood of posts will appear in short order here and then should start to space out to six a week. That’s the plan anyway. So, here is No. 1 with more to follow.

A word on dates. WordPress, I found, allows redating of posts. After I posted this originally I went to Blogspot and just brought over bunches of the 20 cent essays in two sittings. The dates were all wrong and the essays were clustered in the wrong order. Ever anal about such things I went back and put the original post dates on the essays so that date accompanies them now in WordPress.

Gnawing on old bones

The Pew 2009 State of the Media Report has been out long enough that it has elicited more than a few comments. But I continue to gnaw over parts of it like a one bone junkyard dog. And whatever juice emerges just seems to nourish my contrarian ideas.

That is really not the direction I intended and still intend to take most of the time here. I intended to turn my mental pockets inside-out and empty all my portentous thinking about new paradigms of news on the community table. But I read stuff and keep wondering two things:

1. Are we really just at the bottom of the continuing, ever-present cycle of demassification instead of in the void between paradigms?
2. Did we try hard enough to sell the long list of benefits of legacy media?

I have put forward a hyperbole of incompetence for media’s self-promotion efforts. And it is just that, hyperbole. I know there have been brilliant branding and self-promotions done by newspapers and other legacy media large and small.

I have criticized the lack of internal R&D departments with yet another broad brush of totality with equal unfairness.

Yet here we are, pretty much a failed state of media, with refugees running to the camps of academia or public relations jobs and strange new media lords populate the unexplored corners of our geography.

Could we have fought harder? More effectively? Smarter?

Herb MacLean, who was definitely the boss of me in my pre-journalistic years in sin working for his ad agency, would get out his yellow legal pad and start a list of benefits.

It’s a no-bull, full truth, tightly specific list. If I started the list in a creative conference he would cross out most of it. Then he would start us making similar lists for our client’s competitors. Then we tried to sell each of the products to Herb. Now that was war.

But you came away from that battle with a damn sharp copy writing pen and illustration brushes sopped with color. You could craft a subtle approach or a full out, head on, point-by-point compare and contrast.

I read stuff from the Pew report like “In 2008, audience gains at sites offering legacy news were far larger than those for new media” and “The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem. It is a revenue problem–the decoupling of advertising from news.”

And I have a sneaky suspicion that maybe we forgot to sell and keep selling how legacy news media has powerful benefits that these upstart media lords and their jibbering conversations not only don’t have, but won’t and can’t ever have.

If only it’s not too late.