Saturday, December 27, 2008
This In a Nutshell is Why Newspapers are Going Extinct.
This is an opinion column in today's Wall St. Journal. The author writes for the Newark Star Ledger. His hopeless and clueless arguments and lack of knowledge of the subject matter upon which he writes show far more about how irrelevant the old media is than he can possibly fathom.
By PAUL MULSHINE
Newark, N.J.
When my colleague at the Newark Star-Ledger John Farmer started off in journalism more than five decades ago, things were very different. After covering a political event, he'd hop on the campaign bus, pull out a typewriter, and start banging out copy. As the bus would pull into a town, he'd ball up a finished page and toss it out the window. There a runner would scoop it up and rush it off to a telegraph station where it would be blasted back to the home office.
[Cross Country] AP
At the time, reporters thought this method was high-tech. Now, thanks to the Internet, a writer can file a story instantly from anywhere. It's incredibly convenient, but that same technology is killing old-fashioned newspapers. Some tell us that that's a good thing. I disagree and believe that the public will miss us once we're gone.
Yes some people will miss you the way people miss a horse and carriage ride, train travel, 8 trak music players and disco.
Mr. Farmer, who is now the Star-Ledger's editorial page editor, retold his experience of the old days a short while ago at a wake of sorts for departing colleagues. The paper has been losing money and might have had to shut its doors sometime early next year. So the drivers' and mailers' unions made contract concessions, and about 150 nonunion editorial staff took buyouts as part of an effort by the publisher to save the paper.
The Star-Ledger is among the 15 largest newspapers in America, and it circulates in some of the most prosperous suburbs of New York City. We are perhaps alone among the major papers in devoting extensive coverage to small-town news and sports. We routinely get scoops on what the Steinbrenners are thinking about the Yankees. And in 2005, the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for its sober coverage of Democrat Gov. Jim McGreevey's resignation after his admission to an adulterous affair with another man.
The problem is that printing a hard copy of a publication packed with solid, interesting reporting isn't a guarantee of economic success in the age of instant news.
Or maybe, among other things, the problem is one does not need a newspaper for instant news. In fact one cannot get instant news from a newspaper.
Blogger Glenn Reynolds of "Instapundit" fame seems to be pleased at this. In his book, "An Army of Davids," Mr. Reynolds heralds an era in which "[m]illions of Americans who were in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff."
No, they can't. Millions of American can't even pronounce "pundit," or spell it for that matter. On the Internet and on the other form of "alternative media," talk radio, a disliked pundit has roughly a 50-50 chance of being derided as a "pundint," if my eyes and ears are any indication.
The type of person who can't even keep track of the number of times the letter "N" appears in a two-syllable word is not the type of person who is going to offer great insight into complex issues. But the democratic urge expressed by Mr. Reynolds is not new. Someone is always heralding the rise of "the intellectual declaration of independence of the American people," as H.L. Mencken once put it.
Got that dummees. We kant not spell write so we kant do what the author does. The aforementioned Mr. Reynolds is a professor of law. He can do anything a newspaper writer can do. Unquestionably, if he wished to, he could do it much better.
In his 1920 essay "The National Letters," Mencken traced this sentiment back to the early days of our democracy. He noted how first Ralph Waldo Emerson and then Walt Whitman prophesized the rise of what Whitman termed "a class of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known." Mencken was pessimistic about this prospect thanks to what he termed "the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes."
So a brainy snob like HL Mencken looks down at the masses and so does Mr. Mulshine. Yet Mr. Mulshine uses the lowest common denominator to prove his point. That's right sir. The people taking business away from newspapers are inferior. If I'm not mistaken, that's the GE business model. No wonder that company has thrived for so long.
I share that pessimism. Every time a new medium arises, a new group of avatars arises with it, assuring us of the wondrous effects it will produce for our democracy.
I encountered this back in the early 1970s in my communications classes at Rutgers. Cheap, portable video cameras had just been invented, and I was assured by the bearded professors and grad students that these cameras would lead to a rebirth of democracy. The citizenry would start recording public meetings and the result would be a revolution.
Now see, this is brilliant thinking and we are fortunate to have it shared with us. A trained professional journalist just told us that "the revolution will not be televised".
Equally inane is the premise that a bunch of elitist lefty thinking 60's rejects told their willing lapdogs that will lead to a revolution. There's always a revolution a comin at places like Rutgers school of journalism. I'm sure said school was filled with people with different political views too. People that don't want a revolution don't go to journalism school.
Now we're hearing the same thing about the blogosphere. "When enough bloggers take the leap, and start reporting on the statehouse, city council, courts, etc. firsthand, full-time, then the Big Media will take notice and the avalanche will begin," Mr. Reynolds quotes another blogger as saying. If this avalanche ever occurs, a lot of bloggers will be found gasping for breath under piles of pure ennui. There is nothing more tedious than a public meeting.
After I got out of Rutgers, I began as a reporter at a newspaper in Ocean County, N.J. If the Toms River Regional Board of Education had not offered free coffee, I fear that I might have been found the next day curled up on the floor in the back of the room like Rip Van Winkle. As it was, I only made it through the endless stream of resolutions and speeches by employing trance-inducing techniques learned in my youth during religion class at St. Joseph's school up the street.
The common thread here, whether the subject is foreign, national or local, is that the writer in question is performing a valuable task for the reader -- one that no sane man would perform for free. He is assembling what in the business world is termed the "executive summary." Anyone can duplicate a long and tedious report. And anyone can highlight one passage from that report and either praise or denounce it. But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader.
Talent and willpower. Big value. The low end totem pole jamoke who covers these types of meetings or events is paid what 25k a year? Give our author a Nobel in economics too. Any solid college student writer (granted those are few and far between) can cover a city council meeting for ten bucks an hour. Oh one other thing sharp guy, nobody reads that shit in the newspapers. That's why it's buried in the section with all the rapes and murders but on page seven of that section.
This highlights the real flaw in the thinking of those who herald the era of citizen journalism. They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren't doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they're under pressure is much more mundane. The Internet can carry ads more cheaply, particularly help-wanted and automotive ads.
Yes, Craigslist and Ebay and Monster.com have hurt newspapers. Newsflash, btw how come people who cover the news are so likely to miss it, there used to be multiple newspapers in most cities. When I was a kid in Chicago, we had four. Two am and two pm. I'm not going to research this but I'm pretty sure Craigslist wasn't around when our two afternoon papers disappeared circa 1976.
The reason newspapers are under pressure is because they don't provide "news". Do we need a paper to get a stock quote anymore? The weather? The boxscore of yesterday's game?
So if you want a car or a job, go to the Internet. But don't expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up.
As I said earlier, nobody gives a rat's ass about your town council coverage.
Soon, newspapers won't be able to do it either.
This could be the line that says it all. There is no 25 year old journalism punk that knows more about why our taxes going up than the rest of us do. The VAST majority actually think there's a good civic reason for raising taxes if it's to provide social services or whatnot. Newspapers cannot explain why our taxes are going up because the people writing about the reason have no knowledge, training or experience in why our taxes are going up.
Over the past few weeks, I've watched a parade of top-notch reporters leave the Star-Ledger for the last time. The old model for compensating journalists is as obsolete as the telegraph. If anyone out there in the blogosphere can tell me what the new model is, I will pronounce him the first genius I've ever encountered on the Internet.
I don't profess to know what the new model is. However, I do know this. The new model will not include going through gobs of paper, printing with toxic inks, driving that paper and ink in big trucks to various locales, and having a bunch of information that we could have received on our computer 12-24 hours earlier. I know this much too, if somebody can find a way to receive revenue paying a student to go cover city council meetings and write a summary, it will be done. No doubt for less cost and with better work product than occurs in the Newark Star- Ledger now. Having now had to read and discuss the sanctimony of the author and his lack of critical thinking, I feel a need to sanitize myself.
Mr. Mulshine is an opinion columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger.
This is an opinion column in today's Wall St. Journal. The author writes for the Newark Star Ledger. His hopeless and clueless arguments and lack of knowledge of the subject matter upon which he writes show far more about how irrelevant the old media is than he can possibly fathom.
By PAUL MULSHINE
Newark, N.J.
When my colleague at the Newark Star-Ledger John Farmer started off in journalism more than five decades ago, things were very different. After covering a political event, he'd hop on the campaign bus, pull out a typewriter, and start banging out copy. As the bus would pull into a town, he'd ball up a finished page and toss it out the window. There a runner would scoop it up and rush it off to a telegraph station where it would be blasted back to the home office.
[Cross Country] AP
At the time, reporters thought this method was high-tech. Now, thanks to the Internet, a writer can file a story instantly from anywhere. It's incredibly convenient, but that same technology is killing old-fashioned newspapers. Some tell us that that's a good thing. I disagree and believe that the public will miss us once we're gone.
Yes some people will miss you the way people miss a horse and carriage ride, train travel, 8 trak music players and disco.
Mr. Farmer, who is now the Star-Ledger's editorial page editor, retold his experience of the old days a short while ago at a wake of sorts for departing colleagues. The paper has been losing money and might have had to shut its doors sometime early next year. So the drivers' and mailers' unions made contract concessions, and about 150 nonunion editorial staff took buyouts as part of an effort by the publisher to save the paper.
The Star-Ledger is among the 15 largest newspapers in America, and it circulates in some of the most prosperous suburbs of New York City. We are perhaps alone among the major papers in devoting extensive coverage to small-town news and sports. We routinely get scoops on what the Steinbrenners are thinking about the Yankees. And in 2005, the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for its sober coverage of Democrat Gov. Jim McGreevey's resignation after his admission to an adulterous affair with another man.
The problem is that printing a hard copy of a publication packed with solid, interesting reporting isn't a guarantee of economic success in the age of instant news.
Or maybe, among other things, the problem is one does not need a newspaper for instant news. In fact one cannot get instant news from a newspaper.
Blogger Glenn Reynolds of "Instapundit" fame seems to be pleased at this. In his book, "An Army of Davids," Mr. Reynolds heralds an era in which "[m]illions of Americans who were in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff."
No, they can't. Millions of American can't even pronounce "pundit," or spell it for that matter. On the Internet and on the other form of "alternative media," talk radio, a disliked pundit has roughly a 50-50 chance of being derided as a "pundint," if my eyes and ears are any indication.
The type of person who can't even keep track of the number of times the letter "N" appears in a two-syllable word is not the type of person who is going to offer great insight into complex issues. But the democratic urge expressed by Mr. Reynolds is not new. Someone is always heralding the rise of "the intellectual declaration of independence of the American people," as H.L. Mencken once put it.
Got that dummees. We kant not spell write so we kant do what the author does. The aforementioned Mr. Reynolds is a professor of law. He can do anything a newspaper writer can do. Unquestionably, if he wished to, he could do it much better.
In his 1920 essay "The National Letters," Mencken traced this sentiment back to the early days of our democracy. He noted how first Ralph Waldo Emerson and then Walt Whitman prophesized the rise of what Whitman termed "a class of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known." Mencken was pessimistic about this prospect thanks to what he termed "the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes."
So a brainy snob like HL Mencken looks down at the masses and so does Mr. Mulshine. Yet Mr. Mulshine uses the lowest common denominator to prove his point. That's right sir. The people taking business away from newspapers are inferior. If I'm not mistaken, that's the GE business model. No wonder that company has thrived for so long.
I share that pessimism. Every time a new medium arises, a new group of avatars arises with it, assuring us of the wondrous effects it will produce for our democracy.
I encountered this back in the early 1970s in my communications classes at Rutgers. Cheap, portable video cameras had just been invented, and I was assured by the bearded professors and grad students that these cameras would lead to a rebirth of democracy. The citizenry would start recording public meetings and the result would be a revolution.
Now see, this is brilliant thinking and we are fortunate to have it shared with us. A trained professional journalist just told us that "the revolution will not be televised".
Equally inane is the premise that a bunch of elitist lefty thinking 60's rejects told their willing lapdogs that will lead to a revolution. There's always a revolution a comin at places like Rutgers school of journalism. I'm sure said school was filled with people with different political views too. People that don't want a revolution don't go to journalism school.
Now we're hearing the same thing about the blogosphere. "When enough bloggers take the leap, and start reporting on the statehouse, city council, courts, etc. firsthand, full-time, then the Big Media will take notice and the avalanche will begin," Mr. Reynolds quotes another blogger as saying. If this avalanche ever occurs, a lot of bloggers will be found gasping for breath under piles of pure ennui. There is nothing more tedious than a public meeting.
After I got out of Rutgers, I began as a reporter at a newspaper in Ocean County, N.J. If the Toms River Regional Board of Education had not offered free coffee, I fear that I might have been found the next day curled up on the floor in the back of the room like Rip Van Winkle. As it was, I only made it through the endless stream of resolutions and speeches by employing trance-inducing techniques learned in my youth during religion class at St. Joseph's school up the street.
The common thread here, whether the subject is foreign, national or local, is that the writer in question is performing a valuable task for the reader -- one that no sane man would perform for free. He is assembling what in the business world is termed the "executive summary." Anyone can duplicate a long and tedious report. And anyone can highlight one passage from that report and either praise or denounce it. But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader.
Talent and willpower. Big value. The low end totem pole jamoke who covers these types of meetings or events is paid what 25k a year? Give our author a Nobel in economics too. Any solid college student writer (granted those are few and far between) can cover a city council meeting for ten bucks an hour. Oh one other thing sharp guy, nobody reads that shit in the newspapers. That's why it's buried in the section with all the rapes and murders but on page seven of that section.
This highlights the real flaw in the thinking of those who herald the era of citizen journalism. They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren't doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they're under pressure is much more mundane. The Internet can carry ads more cheaply, particularly help-wanted and automotive ads.
Yes, Craigslist and Ebay and Monster.com have hurt newspapers. Newsflash, btw how come people who cover the news are so likely to miss it, there used to be multiple newspapers in most cities. When I was a kid in Chicago, we had four. Two am and two pm. I'm not going to research this but I'm pretty sure Craigslist wasn't around when our two afternoon papers disappeared circa 1976.
The reason newspapers are under pressure is because they don't provide "news". Do we need a paper to get a stock quote anymore? The weather? The boxscore of yesterday's game?
So if you want a car or a job, go to the Internet. But don't expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up.
As I said earlier, nobody gives a rat's ass about your town council coverage.
Soon, newspapers won't be able to do it either.
This could be the line that says it all. There is no 25 year old journalism punk that knows more about why our taxes going up than the rest of us do. The VAST majority actually think there's a good civic reason for raising taxes if it's to provide social services or whatnot. Newspapers cannot explain why our taxes are going up because the people writing about the reason have no knowledge, training or experience in why our taxes are going up.
Over the past few weeks, I've watched a parade of top-notch reporters leave the Star-Ledger for the last time. The old model for compensating journalists is as obsolete as the telegraph. If anyone out there in the blogosphere can tell me what the new model is, I will pronounce him the first genius I've ever encountered on the Internet.
I don't profess to know what the new model is. However, I do know this. The new model will not include going through gobs of paper, printing with toxic inks, driving that paper and ink in big trucks to various locales, and having a bunch of information that we could have received on our computer 12-24 hours earlier. I know this much too, if somebody can find a way to receive revenue paying a student to go cover city council meetings and write a summary, it will be done. No doubt for less cost and with better work product than occurs in the Newark Star- Ledger now. Having now had to read and discuss the sanctimony of the author and his lack of critical thinking, I feel a need to sanitize myself.
Mr. Mulshine is an opinion columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger.
# posted by Jay @ 2:16 PM 
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