Vignettes from the field

Our RSS reader picks up occasional commentary by newspaper readers and former journalists that provide a glimpse into how the newspaper industry collapse is affecting ordinary people:

• A Bay Area book enthusiast laments the Chron’s decision to fold its stand-alone book review section into the weekly news analysis pages.
• A Twin Cities consultant lists the reasons he’s canceling his newspaper subscription. There are several. Like many readers, he simply doesn’t see much value any more. As newspapers slash costs and staff, the devaluation spiral continues. The product gets worse, which gives readers less inclination to read it.
• Mark Hamilton remarks wryly on the dubious value of incessant political polling
• Finally, the head of global public relations for Disney Parks & Resorts issues the most pessimistic forecast for the newspaper industry that we’ve heard anywhere. At about 10:20 in this podcast interview Eric Schwartzman, Disney’s Duncan Wardle states, “The printed newspaper industry has three to five years to live.” We hope his staff heard that!

Business sections feel the blow

Newspaper business sections have been hard hit by the ad downturn,

Glimmers of digital hope

The U.S. political campaign has apparently given a lift to newspaper websites, according to Media Post. Quoting: “The week ending February 23 saw visits to Web sites in Hitwise’s news and media category increase 22% compared to the same week in 2007. The upswing especially benefited Web sites for print publications, including online portals for magazines and newspapers. The New York Times Web site was the winner in the print category, taking 5% of total visits–a 50% increase in visits over last year. It was followed by People.com, with 3%, and The Washington Post, with 2%.”

Vignettes from the field

Our RSS reader picks up occasional commentary by newspaper readers and former journalists that provide a glimpse into how the newspaper industry collapse is affecting ordinary people:

• A Bay Area book enthusiast laments the Chron’s decision to fold its stand-alone book review section into the weekly news analysis pages.
• A Twin Cities consultant lists the reasons he’s canceling his newspaper subscription. There are several. Like many readers, he simply doesn’t see much value any more. As newspapers slash costs and staff, the devaluation spiral continues. The product gets worse, which gives readers less inclination to read it.
• Mark Hamilton remarks wryly on the dubious value of incessant political polling
• Finally, the head of global public relations for Disney Parks & Resorts issues the most pessimistic forecast for the newspaper industry that we’ve heard anywhere. At about 10:20 in this podcast interview Eric Schwartzman, Disney’s Duncan Wardle states, “The printed newspaper industry has three to five years to live.” We hope his staff heard that!

Business sections feel the blow

Newspaper business sections have been hard hit by the ad downturn,

Glimmers of digital hope

The U.S. political campaign has apparently given a lift to newspaper websites, according to Media Post. Quoting: “The week ending February 23 saw visits to Web sites in Hitwise’s news and media category increase 22% compared to the same week in 2007. The upswing especially benefited Web sites for print publications, including online portals for magazines and newspapers. The New York Times Web site was the winner in the print category, taking 5% of total visits–a 50% increase in visits over last year. It was followed by People.com, with 3%, and The Washington Post, with 2%.”

Did The New York Times do a disservice to investigative journalism by alleging that Sen. John McCain had a romantic relationship with a lobbyist? It certainly didn’t help the cause any. The article that caused all the fuss is actually well done, for the most part. The Times went to great lengths to document irregularities in the Senator’s relationship with lobbyists, and those inconsistencies are presented with appropriate sourcing and response. Had the paper let it go at that, this would have been good journalism.

What’s incomprehensible is that the editors chose to include allegations of an affair without any incriminating evidence whatsoever, other than comments by two disenfranchised former aides who never said they had any evidence, either. Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt upbraids Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, for running with such skimpy information and then trying to trivialize the topic as tangential to the piece. He calls the affair allegation, “the scarlet elephant in the room.” I’ll bet Hoyt and Keller aren’t going to be seen sitting together in the Times lunchroom any time soon.

Meanwhile, LA Times columnist Tim Rutten describes how the McCain campaign brilliantly turned the Times story into a PR coup. The McCain campaign said it had its best online fund-raising day ever the day after the piece ran. The outraged reaction by right-wing talk show hosts actually seems to have helped McCain mend some fences on the right.

In an interesting piece from down under, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul Sheehan dissects the Times story sentence by sentence, showing how choice of words can influence the tone of a story without ever stating an opinion directly. It’s a clever and original analysis.

Mother Jones has another one of those opinion pieces by a journalist who is outraged - outraged, I tell you! - over the loose editing and poor fact-checking of citizen journalism. In this case, the villain is the Tallahassee Democrat, which published a popular blog by a local PR person whose topics sometimes touched upon issues that related to her clients. In one anecdote highlighted in the piece, the blogger supported a proposal to build a Wal-Mart near town while her firm was doing PR for Wal-Mart.

Well, shame on the Tallahassee Democrat, and shame on the blogger, but please no shame on citizen journalism. The problem here is that the newspaper chose to feature prominently someone whose profession should have raised warning flags and then didn’t fact-check her work. In a true citizen journalism environment, the blogger would be subject to community fact-checking, which would have quickly identified her conflicts of interest. She also wouldn’t have enjoyed the unfair advantage of the newspaper bully pulpit. She’d have to earn respect and trust on her own instead.

In attempting to trash citizen journalism, this article actually does the opposite. It highlights the risks of the hybrid models now being tried by mainstream newspapers as they desperately seek a viable business model. Take the newspaper out of this story and there’s, well, no story.

Update

Adam Weinstein, author of the Mother Jones article, responded to my comments via e-mail:

“Read your comments about my Mother Jones piece, both on their site and your own blog, and I just wanted to say: I couldn’t agree more. If I had it to write again, I would want to stress that the problem is not with citizen journalism, but with one particularly offensive media corporation’s attempt to co-opt it. They were less interested with understanding the open system, or with improving their responsiveness to community issues, than with cutting corners every step of the way.

“My gut says that print organizations can partner with citizen media and better use the Web, but that might require a greater degree of editorial vigilance, a tough pill to swallow for both (justly) free-spirited bloggers and (unjustly) penny-pinching newspaper publishers. But there’s a whole lot more Stacey N. Getzes out there, and until the mainstream media and readers grow to understand exactly how citizen journalism polices itself, a lot of Stacy Getzes are going to give bad names to both the ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs.’”