Yes, Ted Rall IS hopeful about print media

In fact, and perhaps surprisingly after the first two parts of his series on print’s status today,, he’s actually kind of bullish:

some types of papers are prospering and growing. I believe that the business of printing news on dead trees will emerge from the current shakeout more profitable than ever. This will be thanks to three emerging trends:
• Big National Newspapers
• More Small Local Papers
• Freebie Dailies

At present, the biggest 50 dailies (“A” papers, in industry jargon) dominate the landscape. Below them is a swath of dailies in midsize cities (Akron, Austin, Albuquerque). Small town, suburban and rural dailies, weeklies and bi-weeklies, whose focus is highly localized (“New Stop Sign Stirs Controversy”) —the “C”s — bring up the rear.

During the 20th century, most newspaper profits were generated by "B" papers. This is the market segment that has been hit hardest by the Web. Free online classifieds has decimated advertising revenues. Neither beast nor fowl, the midsize dailies’ attempt to balance local, national and international coverage pleases no one in an environment where highly customized news consumption is available to readers online--for free. (Publishers were idiots for giving away their content, but that's another column.) MyYahoo feeds me the latest headlines from Itar-Tass and Agence France-Press every morning; how could the Dayton Daily News, the paper of my childhood, do as well for this half-Frenchman with a Central Asia obsession?

Rall expects the future American newspaper market to look a lot more like Europe and Japan — a smaller group of definite “A” or even “Super-A” papers, and then a bunch of “C”, or maybe, in my view “B-lite,” papers. A two-tiered, not a three-tiered, market.
The Wall Street Journal and USA Today already print multiple national issues. In the era of “Super-A” papers, sure, you could see a few others joining them, and perhaps co-opting some of the traditional “B” papers with new versions of old-time joint operating agreements (Detroit News/Free Press, Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle and Salt Lake City papers are among those that have JOAs).

But, will this be a good thing?

Well, there, the answer is No, according to Rall:

None of this will improve the quality of journalism. “Ultimately [free dailies] will breed in people the idea that news shouldn't cost anything, even that news is cheap,” points out media commentator Roy Greenslade. “But in fact, news, done well and properly, requires investment and money. They will no doubt tell us what happened —but news should also tell us how and why things happen. I fear that approach will be lost.”

It will. It’s a trend that began decades ago, when newspapers closed overseas news bureaus and eliminated long-term investigative journalism to cut costs, and started embracing elites rather than exposing them. And it’s terrible for our society, culture and politics. Government and business will face even less accountability than they do today. Democracy will lie in ruins. The print newspaper business, however, will be going gangbusters.

I don’t doubt Rall is right. That said, I found this third part of his series a letdown, in several ways.

First, he’s by no means the only columnist to analyze the shakeout of the news business in a similar way.

Second, after talking about how the Internet would affect privacy issues in the future, and how this might affect media, in parts 1 and 2, we didn’t hear a single thing about that in this third part.

Ted, you can do better than that… that’s not like you to start an idea and let it dangle.

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Ted Rall on the future of online news, Part II

Notthere posted a link in comments today to this, but, as I blogged about Part I of Rall’s three-part series last week, I wanted to tackle Part II now.

Would you pay for Mapquest? I’d pay a quarter or a dollar for reliable directions from the airport to my hotel in a new city. Sometimes, while researching this column, I encounter a link to an archived newspaper article that I could use, but it charges a $2 or $3 download fee. The cost isn’t the problem — it’s a miniscule, and in my case tax deductible, expense to make my work better. But I don’t bother. I don’t pay for Mapquest, either.

I don’t care about the money. I just can’t stand filling out all those fields.

Each website requires you to enter personal data — your name, address, credit card number, expiration date, that stupid security code next to the signature on your card, and the billing address (as opposed to the shipping address). Frequently, website interfaces are buggy; make a mistake and you have to start all over again. I’ll suffer through the ordeal if it's a site, like Amazon or Expedia, that I’ll use repeatedly. But an archived article? Ain’t worth my time to figure out how to get them my two bucks.

There is a solution to the online payment problem, says Simson Garfinkel, a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Research on Computation and Society and the author of “Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century.” (Disclosure: We’re friends.)

“If content is appropriately priced, of an appropriately high quality, and easy to access, people will pay for it,” asserts Garfinkel. “What is required is a system that is easy to use and licensing terms that are not onerous.”

A universal single-click payment system won't work, he says, because it would be vulnerable to hackers. We could overlay a national ID card or credit card system over the existing Internet. One of several competing micropayment systems may become dominant, creating a market-based solution. You'd register your debit or credit card info at one place. Then, when you wanted to download a song or read an electronic book or order shoes, you’d go to the vendor's website and click one button: “Buy.”

Amazon sort of does this. After you’ve registered, you can buy a book by clicking one button. Just like that, it’s on its way. We need something similar for vendors we’ve never dealt with before.

That said, Rall is still optimistic newspapers will muddle through, if not more. Now, that said, as should be evident by the title of Garfinkel’s book, he thinks notions of online privacy will have to change for that to happen.

Newspaper editors and publishers could reverse their decline by agreeing, en masse, to charge a substantial fee for their online editions — at least as much as for print. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Avoidance of long-term thinking is what’s gotten the news biz where it is today.

In the long run, despite their suicidal tendencies, I suspect newspapers will survive, and even thrive, after the current shakeout. When radio was introduced in the 1930s, many analysts predicted the death of the record industry. Instead, radio promotion increased record sales. When television became popular in the 1950s, people said radio was doomed. The radio business is bigger than ever. The Internet was supposed to kill TV.

The newspaper business will change. Three major trends ensure that. They will also make it bigger than ever.

Next Week: The bright (sic!) future of newspapers.

Stay tuned!

I posted in comments to Newspapers and the Age of McNugget Journalism a bit about the industry. I’ll add more.

Weeklies and semiweeklies, especially, not being AP members, have suffered less from the Internet. Their news is available from that newspaper, or that newspaper’s website, if it has one, and that’s it. That said, too many weeklies launched websites in the last five years or so without thinking about charging for subscriptions. They believed what the major dailies were already trying to brainwash themselves into believing, that an ad-based model would pay the bills.

For small-town dailies, the situation is somewhat the same.

That said, these papers tend to be even more conservative than the seven-day daily MSM. They are conservative in the Main Street/Chamber of Commerce, good-for-business sense, in one respect of conservativism. And, in much of the South and Midwest, it’s going to be small-town Babbitt-type religious conservativism, too.

There is one option, in larger cities: the alt-weekly. These papers are usually progressive to some, if not a fairly large degree, especially in a libertarian sense on social issues. They’re still weeklies, and especially with their long-form journalism as well, wouldn’t have a big desire to be AP members anyway.

But, they’re being affected by the Internet, too.

Alt-weeklies, like Internet sites, generally run on an ad-only model. And, personal ads of the sort that don’t appear in traditional daily papers make up a fair chunk of both classified and display ads there.

But, Craigslist is gutting alt-weekly classifieds in these areas. Personals websites are doing some of the damage, too.

Anyway, Rall is always thought-provoking to me, even when I disagree with him. I’m interested in what Part III will say.

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How today’s Web journalism world still makes no financial sense

Ted Rall sis right as usual. Double of nothing (doubling your online visitors even as Internet ad rates stay near zero) doesn’t make sense.

And, it’s “liberal” blogs as well as “conservative” traditional media that aren’t getting it.

Wanna blog for Huffington Post? As Rall points out, they’ll pay you plenty of prestige, but zero dollars.

And, as long as you the publicity-hungry blogger make that sucker’s bet, Huff Post, including its charming Dragon First Lady, Ms. Arianna herself, will continue to double down on you. Like Rall says, try using "prestige" to pay the mortgage.

End result, says Rall:

Print media is dragging content providers into the abyss. First comes downsizing. Writers, cartoonists, and photographers are losing their jobs to peers willing to do the work for less or, in the case of readers invited to submit their comments and images for the thrill of appearing in the local rag, nothing. Then they squeeze those who remain for pay cuts. A cartoon that runs today in Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times or The Washington Post — the most prestigious and widely disseminated forums in the United States — brings its creator less than The Village Voice would have paid for it in the 1980s. Some print venues offer no payment at all.

What happens if we don’t do anything?

Unless something changes soon, deprofessionalization will further erode journalistic quality. The resulting dumbing down of our politics and culture will accelerate. We can’t get the toothpaste back into the tube. The Internet is here to stay. Unfortunately, the best way to make it more profitable — to stimulate all e-commerce, not just journalism--will require us to give up something dear to our rugged individualist American hearts: the illusion of Internet privacy.

Yes, it is an eye-opener, if disconcerting in a way, to hear Rall, an ardent civil libertarian, say that. But, between spyware that is logging keystrokes on infected computers to ISP providers being leaky sieves to the government even before 9/11, Net privacy, in many ways, went the way of the dodo long ago. Besides, your financial information went even more the way of the dodo even earlier, every time you zipped a debit card at the grocery store.

This is the first of a three-part series by Rall. I’m interested in hearing what he offers in the way of a solution.

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Are we journalists? We strive to be.

While everyone frets over whether or not bloggers are journalists, I know that my Republican Senator’s staff regards our enterprise here as such.

Today Senator Kit Bond’s office sent a letter to his colleagues asking them to add their signatures to another letter, this one to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, demanding that the issue of the 5-13 discharge be investigated and obvious abuses set right. (apologies to the senators office. I had problems with the .pdf and the google docs are not nearly as pretty.)

The abuse of the 5-13 Discharge is an issue because bloggers made it such (examples here and here) after a piece in The Nation, How Specialist Towne Lost His Benefits. We seized on the issue, as we had the larger mental health issues for returning GI’s and the understaffing of Vet Centers. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here). We kept bringing it up until it gained traction, even though the mainstream media largely ignored the issue, and continues to do so.

“Bloggers have helped bring the necessary scrutiny to this important issue.” Said Shana Marchio, Communications Director for Senator Kit Bond (R-MO). “Bloggers offer folks a new medium to get their information and news. Their importance in the debating and sharing of ideas should not be discounted. At the same time, the relationship between bloggers and members of Congress and their spokespeople is an evolving one. Both sides are learning who to trust and how to interact. As a part of the Fourth Estate, it is essential that professional bloggers adhere to the ethics and professional conduct standards that traditional members of the media follow as their role in information sharing continues to grow. Also, I do believe that bloggers will only be come more important in coming elections and it’s important to start a dialogue.”

This is all new territory for everyone. But I think I know why the best source I have in Washington is the Communications Director for my Republican Senator. She is 30 years old. Where blogs and the internet are concerned, she instinctively “gets” it because she grew up with technology. I may have policy disagreements with my Republican Senator – but credit where credit is due. He was smart enough to hire a young person with that innate sense for press second six years ago, and promote to communications director from within.

On the trust issue, everyone has to be prepared to get burned once or twice. But getting burned is part of the bargain when you blaze a trail. So we move forward cautiously. The importance of the free exchange of information is only going to gain in importance. As it does, the issues will work themselves out.

Bloggers do not have the immediate access that reporters working the Washington bureaus have, nor do we have the resources to do a lot of original reporting. All we really have are our wits and our words...and our word. Because that is the irrefutable dynamic, the blogs represent a truly new, and meretricious, form of media, and we will earn exactly the amount of credibility and respect that we deserve.

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In The Era of Citizen Journalism James Macpherson Wants to Outsource Reporting To India?

Josh Marshall has just posted a link to a bizarre news story about the news business. It seems James Macpherson of the Website Pasadena Now wants to outsource coverage of local Pasadena city government news to a journalist based in India.

But he said it can be done from afar now that weekly Pasadena City Council meetings can be watched over the Internet. And he said the idea makes business sense because of India's lower labor costs.

"I think it could be a significant way to increase the quality of journalism on the local level without the expense that is a major problem for local publications," said the 51-year-old Pasadena native. "Whether you're at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in Mumbai, you're still just a phone call or e-mail away from the interview."

The first articles, some of which will carry bylines, are slated to appear Friday.

Bryce Nelson, a University of Southern California journalism professor and Pasadena resident thinks "Nobody in their right mind would trust the reporting of people who not only don't know the institutions but aren't even there to witness the events and nuances. This is a truly sad picture of what American journalism could become."

CNN.com also interviewed Uday Karmarkar, a UCLA professor of technology and strategy who outsources copy editing and graphics work to Indian businesses. In his opinion, if the goal is sophisticated reporting Macpherson could end up spending more time editing than the labor savings are worth.

With all of the journalism students and all the retired journalists who would love a chance to write an occasional article living in Southern California you would think MacPhereson would be able to find somebody who would actually cover city council meetings cheap, maybe even for free.

In any event somebody needs to remind MacPhereson that journalism isn't stenography. Journalism involves knowing your beat which comes from talking to people face to face, taking notes, asking the right questions, and all the other "stuff." The kind of stuff Diane Silver, Blue Girl and some of the others do around here.

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