Tough Times
Taipei, Taiwan
Tuesday Night
It's late Tuesday night here where I will remain until Friday morning. I have one more formal session to go in the conference titled Renewing Journalism.
We're lucky the confab ends this week, because if it lasted any longer there might not be anymore Old Media Journalism left out there.
It has been with a great sense of irony as I have sat through a number of panels this past week which for the most part have been titled toward lauding "newspapers" and "reporting" as opposed to "New Media" and "blogging." I will admit to not so discretely surfing the Web with a handheld Blackberry during some of the panels. And as I repeatedly heard from the dais that good, old-fashioned reporting was so much morally superior to lazy-ass blogging, I kept reading the breaking news:
The L.A. Times and The Chicaco Tribune in bankruptcy.
The New York Times mortgaging its building.
The Miami Herald being put on the auction block.
NBC cutting back on production.
One of my colleagues here from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune telling me his paper is to declare its own bankruptcy within weeks.
Most striking in all this is the Chapter 11 filing by the parent company of my hometown paper, The Los Angeles Times.
I wish I were a better writer so I could more vividly describe my feelings about this. But isn't there something just revoltingly fascinating about all this? The so-called Grave Dancer, Sam Zell comes in, pisses all over the journalism and the journalists, fires half the staff, brings in a nattering clown like Lee Abrams as "innovation guru," all in the name of improving business -- but only then to drive the paper into bankruptcy court!
Which by anybody's standard would mean that Sam Zell, on top of eveything, is a shitty businessman in addition to being a very disagreeable human being.
Among the other horrors entwined with this latest sordid chapter in the life -- or death-- of the Times is that reporters and workers recently laid off who have been receiving severance payments will now see their payouts indefinitely suspended by the bankruptcy filing.
Perhaps innovation genius Abrams can now fire off one of his trademark mumbo-jumbo memos suggesting some innovative ways for those affected to pay their bills and feed their kids.
Maybe he could give things a start by resigning and donating his paycheck toward those who just found themselves in the lurch. What say, Lee?
December 9th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Zell and Abrams are symptoms, not the disease, which is an obsolete business model.
December 9th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Here, here BW.
Old economic paradigm crashes which means the corporations that supported big broadsheets with their advertising lucre are crashing as well…not to mention the thousands of smaller advertisers who can’t lay out the dough.
I am still waiting for those to whom this matters to come up with an innovative business model.
So far no Kumbaya among journalists or newspaper folk…
Waiting. Tick, tock.
BB will be right. having to pay for an internet subscription to get quality reporting may be the way. Then there will be news cafe’s where people come, sit and share the print outs.
December 9th, 2008 at 8:44 am
and hey presto a sense of community is born.
December 9th, 2008 at 9:13 am
“BB will be right. having to pay for an internet subscription to get quality reporting may be the way. ”
I’d willingly pay for, for example, the NY Times overseas coverage. The old model worked because the broadsheet satisfied so many discrete appetites. (A gets the sports, B gets the op-eds, C gets the classifieds, and D gets comics.) For each user, 90% went unused.
December 9th, 2008 at 9:19 am
There is no “irony” in the precarious position of some of our journalistic heavyweights. It is the free market doing its pitiful job. Cutting the fat, except in this case the fat is what holds together the old bones of American democracy. Bloggers rejoice! Who needs lectures about morality when you have the market to decide, right?
Times workers denied their severance pay ought to take over their building, like the courageous folk at Republic Windows and Doors… though the issue is a bit different as it is up to the Courts in this case.
December 9th, 2008 at 11:23 am
We are getting a report on a conference in Taiwan, and all without the Times (either one) sending somebody to file copy. And we are getting it for free. In this sense there is a business model, but it is not friendly to the career aspirations of today’s cub reporters: Marc reports and editorializes from a distant location and anybody in the world can read it for the price of an internet connection. I can get access to the web sites of hundreds of newspapers all around the world, not to mention sites for organizations, governments, libraries, film archives — the list gets longer everyday.
Any model in which thousands of players are doing their best to give their product away is a model which doesn’t make for lots of income outside of advertising. It is also a model which makes for lesser advertising income for all but the heaviest hitters, because when you are making absolutely no income and have hundreds of competitors, you are more likely to take whatever you can get, and the bidding war points in a downward direction rather than upward.
December 9th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
^Bob Gelfand gets it.
Anna doesn’t:
“BB will be right. having to pay for an internet subscription to get quality reporting may be the way. Then there will be news cafe’s where people come, sit and share the print outs.”
Printed out on dot-matrix printers, no doubt. And then duplicated with carbon paper by teams of laborers, funded by a Luddite-sponsored job creation program.
In other words, you’re comically deluded.
Here’s a better description of what has just ended, and what is to come. Key phrase: “unlimited perfect copyability, with global reach and at zero marginal cost”. Newspapers are history, and so is the cost of disseminating information.
December 9th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Uh, Samuel. If your idea of the future is a bunch of hunch backed, half blind geeks spending all day searching for news items…you are comically deluded.
The point of a paper is the sensual quality of being able to sit anywhere, feel human, and be able to browse a wide variety of sections for interest.
Your lack of a sense of humor in making a literal degradation of what already exists in most hip urban milieus…minus sharing print outs of an online quality journal.
The idea is actually sane. Reduces carbon footprint. User end does the printing if wanted. Greener print protocols and paper will be developed.
Printing and distribution huge part of newspapers’ cost.
Mountain can come to Mohammed now.
Advertiser still can reach the marketplace and with the advantage of dynamic rather than static copy—and when a particular section is up or being downloaded or printed it will trigger appropriate (if ever that demographically targeted crap was true) ads of any sort.
THE POINT is to not be shuffling around the internet, but be able to ENJOY reading something.
What there isnt yet is an aggregator of the best journalism that one can suscribe to and can be printed on a daily basis.
Now there is a business for an internet start up. I suspect there would be subscribers and a good deal of advertizers.
Someone au fait with what is out there NOW…solicits to get regular copy of the best journalists and advertisers and subscribers are in fact investing in making it fly.
I think I used to spend about a dollar day 4 years ago on the Guardian…( I think it was 50p. can’t remember)
December 9th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
“The point of a paper is the sensual quality of being able to sit anywhere…”
That’s the only reason I still subscribe to the LAT- to have something to read while doing my business in the bathroom.
December 9th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Hey, if the LA Times works as a laxative, BP reducer, meditation protocol…then its worth something. Smiley face back to ya. ( I have not figured out how to do those things in the comments. I have a Mac, too. How the hell are you guys making italics and inserting emoticons?)
December 9th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
By the way, do you line the hamster cage with it when you’re done?
December 10th, 2008 at 9:30 am
“I have not figured out how to do those things in the comments”
TYpe :, followed by ) =
“By the way, do you line the hamster cage with it when you’re done?”
The bird cage gets some (always the front page) and the rest is recycled.
December 11th, 2008 at 8:29 am
:,) jolly good
December 11th, 2008 at 8:30 am
I followed your instructions. you see the result.
maybe its just
December 11th, 2008 at 8:31 am
I stupidly put in the comma, too.