Entertainment For Lively Minds
David Simon on the decline of journalism
Posted by Simon Ford on 5 March 2009 - 8:16am.
Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere here, but here's an article by David Simon on how he witnessed a police shooting of an unarmed 61 year-old. When he followed it up, he realised he was the only one doing so.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR200902...
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Very interesting
You should quote that next time people say "I don't buy papers because I read them for free on the web." You get the papers for free on the web because they once hoped they could make money out of it. They're starting to realise that's not easy. In America right now major regional dailies are closing down with extraordinary speed. Presumably their web sites will go with them and then where will people get their news?
Not just in America either
One of the guys I share a train journey with works for Northcliffe Newspapers, and they've just been told that the Leicester, Nottingham and Derby newspaper operations are to be amalgamated in a single site with a considerably reduced staff, on both creative and production sides of the fence.
How long before the East Midlands has just one regional paper?
Not long, suspects my friend, and he tells me a similar process is happening to the rest of the group nationally.
I'm no fan of the Northcliffe newspapers particularly, but imagine a world where the Metro is the only newspaper available...
It will be a sad day indeed
when there is only one weekly music paper left...
Oh.
Economics
The economics of newspaper web publishing work something like this:
1) A New York Times article written by a calibre writer will cost the newspaper between $1000 - $10,000.
2) At these prices, bearing in mind how much web advertising sells for, that single article will need to be viewed up to 100,000,000 times to break even.
3) The New York Times website generates 200,000,000 page impressions a month across its entire site, i.e. enough to pay for two articles.
4) Articles written by calibre writers on the web simply do not generate that kind of traffic. Videos of monkeys riding bicycles do that.
5) As a result, standards decline. Less quality writing, more monkey videos.
That presupposes
that calibre writers do not choose to write Web-only copy for the hell of it, and although most don't, some certainly do. They fall into two - perhaps three - camps.
First, the "primarily paper hacks", like Marina Hyde, whose Lost in Showbiz blog entries are always as good as - and sometimes even superior to - the three pieces she writes for the paper every week, presumably to earn her salary. (And she's not even averse to getting into the thick of the fray in the comments box.)
Second, there are the top bloggers. One of my favourites is Joe Cannon, who writes as well as pretty much any "pro" political commentator on any major newspaper, specialising in making big pictures by joining small dots that the mainstream media are too busy regurgitating press releases to pay any attention to (as David Simon notes). Another is Daniel Hopsicker, an investigative journalist who sticks to what he knows - spooked-up-to-the-gills Florida sleaze - yet has turned up lots of stuff that, had it been uncovered by Sy Hersh in The New Yorker rather than on a one-man blog site and in self-published books, would almost certainly have been big-time international scandals.
And perhaps third, former newspaper people who have turned to the Web either because they've given up print journalism as a lost cause or because it's given up on them. A good example of the latter is Jerry Capeci, for many years a crime reporter on the New York Daily News, who specialises in all things Mob. Having apparently lost his job, he has turned his website into a paid-subscription service. Only time will tell whether he can generate sufficient income from it. I love my Gambino gossip as much as the next man, but I can live without it if I have to type in my credit-card number to get it.
(I'm not arguing against Dave or Fraser's viewpoints; I agree with both of them, but I just wanted to point out that we aren't facing quite such a clear-cut "Real Journalism Is Print Journalism...Or Was" situation as David Simon would have us believe.)
But
What you're talking about here is serious crime, sleaze, scandal - hard hitting news. But this taks up only a small amount of your average newspaper, especially your average local paper. Can you really see former newspaper journalists turning to the web to publish objective incisive copy on local council decisions, residents association petitions, petty crime, school fetes, local bands and road closures? Add in the fact that ITV are scaling back their local news coverage and the BBC have abandoned their plan for a network of local news websites and you have something of a crisis brewing.
Plus how do you know if someone posting a blog online is telling the whole story? Journalists on newspapers and at TV stations get sacked or demoted if they file biased or incorrect stories - but there's no factcheckers, producers, subs or news editors on the web.
A cynic writes
If experience over the last decade is any indication, journalists on newspapers who file biased or incorrect stories get Pulitzer Prizes or at least no more than a tut-tut - cf. season five of The Wire or, as mentioned the other day here, Kelvin McKenzie's "Savage Scousers Wee On Brave Bobbies" moment.
Maybe on the Sun
But not on any of the papers I've ever worked on. However it is worth mentioning that Kelvin Macenzie was forced to make humiliating public apologies for what happened after Hillsborough and he will be known for his mistakes for the rest of his sorry career. I lived in Liverpool for three years and round where I lived the newsagents didn't even bother stocking The Sun because not a single person would buy it.
Also worth checking out the Wikipedia entries for Jayson Blair, James Forlong and Stephen Glass. And he may have successfully reinvented himself but Peirs Morgan got the chop for his decision to print faked pictures.
Poor Piers
Whatever happened to him?
I thought he got the chop for.....
....a variant on allowing insider dealing with his City Slickers?
No
It was the publication of some fake pictures from Iraq.
Yes, but
The MoD told us they were fake without offering any convincing evidence to stand up their assertion.
A local hack's eye view
This is a story about journalistic standards in a city where people regularly get shot by police officers, so it's quite a different ball game to most local papers in the UK where such juicy stories come by once in a blue moon.
However a similar decline is painfully noticeable over here and it's almost all down to staffing levels and plunging profits. The first paper I worked on, a free weekly rag struggling to compete with a paid for daily, went under last year - it may be a telling sign of the times that I only became aware of it when a Facebook page was set up in its memory. When I started there as a reporter eight or nine years ago they (Trinity Mirror) were paying me a salary of £8,500, below the minimum wage that came in a year or so later. I could only survive because I was living with my sister who paid most of the rent.
Friends of mine on local papers and magazines have been made redundant with increasing regularity in recent months - one from the very industry journal whose job it is to report on all these upheavals.
Casting my eye around the newspaper office I’m now sitting in there are empty desks everywhere I look and each month brings another grim announcement about some desperate new 'restructuring' plan.
Me and my wife recently started a family and it became pretty clear to me that this industry is not one that anyone can afford to rely on when they have mouths to feed, so I'm off. Next week I'll be leaving journalism behind to do what many of my journalist friends have done in recent years - become a press officer. The money is better, the prospects are better, there's considerably less stress and your job is much safer.
I have heard so many theories as to why the newspaper industry is in decline and even more about what will happen in the future but I've given up having any firm opinions on it. Three things I do know are that the National Union of Journalists have sat back on their well paid behinds doing little or nothing meaningful to help those who are losing their jobs left right and centre, citizen journalism is a myth and local papers will be sorely missed when they're gone.
But right now I'm getting out and I have no regrets whatsoever about doing so.
Good luck
to you Niks.
In my neck of the woods, I finally stopped buying my local paper when the news was so late. The Bolton Evening News became the Bolton News and, basically, the paper we would have read in an evening was delivered the following day at any old time, with the previous days news.
This was sadly bourne out when local-lad-made-good Alan Ball passed away. Well documented nationally and in the Manchester Evening News but not in his hometown rag. Remember the days of the Buff or the Pink on Saturday evening when football matches were covered within hours of the final whistle? Nostalgia is not what it was once.
But where does it begin?
The staffing cuts are in response to the plunging profits which are plunging because for the last few years people have been happy to get their news on the web. That news has been provided for free by the very people who are now having to lay people off and, in some cases, close the papers. The view of the advertisers is that since people clearly don't care enough about the "content" to pay for it, they won't bother advertising alongside it. Hence you've got circ going down at the same time as ad revenue and the great learning of the last couple of years is that there is no pot of gold at the end of the internet rainbow for newspapers. As the consultants put it, they are exchanging off-line dollars for on-line cents.
I wonder if news consumers have been living in a false paradise for the last few years as newspapers and broadcasters continued to invest in editorial at the same time as giving that editorial away for free on the web. In the future there will be less papers and less original editorial and less web sites giving it away for free. At the moment you've got an over-supply of news. Very soon that may not be the case. The big sites in the USA - Huffington Post, Gawker etc - are linking to and commenting on stories that other people have come up with. What are they going to do when they have nothing to link to?
Exclusive! Read all about it - here or anywhere else
Given that any news story will be linked to within minutes by dozens of web sites, any exclusiveness is also lost within minutes. It's not "the Guardian's story" any more if most people learn about it from the breaking-news banner when they go to Yahoo! to check their e-mail.
And that means that advertisers don't know where they should be advertising, so they don't. Papers go under and the whole concept of news will be - if it isn't already - reduced to agencies distributing press releases. If the agencies can survive, of course.
Online
Putting privacy issues aside for a moment, the web allows advertisers to know exactly who they should be advertising to, however. These days technology allows Sony, for instance, to advertise the new Bob Dylan album on the Guardian website to people who've previously visited bobdylan.com, and not to any other people. I have a friend in marketing who's shifted all his budgets from print to online simply because he can target people much better. He figures he can spend much less money much more effectively than before.
At the top of this page
I can see an advert for an album by someone called Ane Brun. Is everyone else seeing something different or is Word not quite as cutting edge as the Grauniad yet?
I've never heard of her, but if I knew that I was being targetted by advertisers who are pointing me in her direction because she sounds like, say, Kate Rusby and they know that I recently downloaded a Kate Rusby album off itunes then perhaps I'd be more inclined to click through. Or maybe I'd feel intruded upon - I can't decide.
Ads
We don't run those kinds of targeted campaigns on The Word. Everyone sees the same ads.
Ah but
When I use Spotify I get adverts for The Word popping up at the side of the interface. Since I regulalry listen to the likes of Word freindy types such as RT, Fairport, John Martyn, etc on Spotify I am clearly being targetted here am I not?
No
You'd still get those ads if you were listening to non-Word-friendly music. As far as I know, that ad shows at random.
Ane Brun
Has a song on the latest Word compilation cd - I can't get the tune out of my head, and that ad at the top of the page reminds me that I really must buy it - so it works for (or on) me.
But Fraser, how does he measure effectiveness?
Is he just assuming that better targeting = more effective expenditure or can he empirically prove effectiveness?
How does he know that we're not all 'Adblocking' his stuff anyway - or just ignoring it as 'noise' down the side of the webpage?
I would also argue that the people who visit bobdylan.com are the last people who Sony need to advertise the new album to (as they'll know anyway) - or am I missing the point somewhere?
Because...
Every click is tracked.
I just made the Sony example up to demonstrate how it works. In reality it's way more complicated: algorithms that try and assess what kind of shopper you are based on on your browsing behaviour: if you're the type of person who visits sites A, B, C & D then you'll be shown products 1, 2 and 3 because the tracking software shows that previous visitors from those sites clicked on these adverts and not 4, 5 & 6. With lots of checks and balances thrown in.
Fascinating stuff...
...thanks.
Not foolproof I guess - because I bought a lot of Christmas presents via Amazon last year, it's "you bought this, so you'll like this" algorithms are throwing up loads of stuff I (personally) have precisely zero interest in.
At least that's my excuse.
You can stop that
Where it says "Recommended because you said you owned [name of item] and more (Fix this)", click on Fix This and you can remove whatever it is it's used to decide you'd like "Sonia's Greatest Hits" etc.
I once ordered some books by Dennis Cooper via Amazon
... for about two years afterwards the stuff recommended for me was pretty blooming hair raising. I felt like I should be donning a dirty old mac every time a looked a book or a cd up...
Newspapers DIY
If you're relying on newspapers for truth, of whatever flavour or persuasion, then forget it. Were they all to go bust, together with their wannabe websites, we'd all be far better off. And they can take their Hetro and London Shite with them...