This sort of story makes me really queasy:
After the latest round of cuts, a newsroom that had more than 420 employees a decade ago now has just 140. At the beginning of the Bush administration, The (Baltimore) Sun had 11 staffers in Washington. It has one today. Having previously shuttered bureaus in London, Beijing, and Moscow, the paper in the last few months closed local bureaus, including the one in Annapolis – Maryland’s state capital.
[….]In 2006, Sun reporters Fred Schulte and June Arney spent months reporting a four-part series on “ground rents, a colonial law that allowed ownership of the ground under a house — and a peculiar loophole that let such owners begin seizing properties during the real estate boom.
The series involved extensive reporting and database maintenance that no reporter churning out daily (or hourly) content would able to do.
“That was the kind of thing that only the Baltimore Sun could have done,” said Schulte, who took a buyout last fall. But it’s unclear if they still could do it: The four-person investigative team at the Sun when Schulte started in 2004 is now down to one reporter.
The “ground rents” series was a finalist for a Pulitzer, got a nod on “The Wire” and — most important – prompted the government to take action. Martin O’Malley, in his first act as governor, signed a bill reforming the centuries-old law.
There all kinds of problems with newspapers — institutional arrogance, a costly editorial structure that dates from the Mesozoic era, editorial boards that regurgitate right-wing misinformation through some combination of stupidity, senility, and cowardice. My own local paper is so bad that my friend Rottenchester — who knows more about these things than I do — is convinced that we’ll all be better off when it goes under. And local television reporters (who aren’t in the same danger as newspaper reporters) are a lot better than anyone gives them credit for.
All of that said, who the hell is going to do six-part series on problems with arcane rental laws when the newspapers are gone? I’m not sure people realize how important this stuff is. In every city in the country, there are crazy injustices being done that will probably only see the light of day if some intrepid newspaper reporter investigates it.
And I’d feel more confident about the papers not all disappearing if their advocates could come up with better better business models than this one.
Cain
The market will provide?
cain
Bill E Pilgrim
Yeah the NYTs failed attempt at firewalling their columnists should pretty much bring home the point that detaching from the Intertubes right now is the last thing you want to do.
Lifting copy from bloggers would seem to be a bad strategy also of course. Gotta strike that middle ground.
Rosali
Obligatory ‘The Wire’ mention
DougJ
I’m not going to touch that. My infatuation with the show is unhealthy.
Peter J
How much would the NY Times save by cutting Dowd? Does anyone know if her contract got a ‘Jayson Blair’ clause?
rabid liberal
If newspapers were more interested in supporting these ‘intrepid reporters’ than the spineless stenographers they all too often employ they’d be in much, much better shape.
Brian Griffin
nonprofits, like this one, I’d guess:
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/
seems like a lot of these papers would be fine if they hadn’t been so badly overleveraged by their buyers. and if they’d been set up as nonprofits could still be chugging along.
seriously, check out the link and see if your own local paper is that good. I bet it’s not even close.
kid bitzer
yeah, i think this is a really good and important point.
the trouble is that in retrospect, we can now see that there was always a disconnect between the really valuable product that newspapers (sometimes) produced, and the way they made their money.
they made their money running ads, whether classifieds or glossy inserts.
they sometimes did really good investigative journalism.
but the two really are not connected, at all. the investigative journalism was almost more like pro bono work than like an essential part of the business model.
it was a weird business model. imagine that your local trash-hauling contractor decided to beautify a city park by planting a lot of flowers. they make money hauling trash. they contribute to the city by planting flowers. but there’s really nothing that ties the two activities together.
quality journalism paid for by ad revenue was an accidental combination that worked for a while. but that business model is dead, and i don’t think there’s any way to put it back together again.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Peter J:
‘Jayson Blair’ clause?
That’s the one who brings you counterfeit toys?
rikyrah
I know what you mean. Just this weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times broke a story about another scandal of King Richard Daley II. How a ‘ regentryfied’ area was SUPPOSED to have so much of the development for AFFORDABLE HOUSING – you know, for a certain percentage of the folks who were being kicked out. INSTEAD, the ‘affordable housing’ went to yuppies that just used it as an ‘ investment’, flipping those places to OTHER yuppies, and shutting out those who had lived in the neighborhood for decades. It was a straight up scam, and the taxpayers are on the hook (via supposed ‘breaks’ for those who got those ‘ affordable housing units’ to the tune of 75 MILLION. Without the local papers disclosing the CORRUPTION of King Richard, it would stay under wraps.
JL
MoDo’s excuse according to Huffington Post
In other words, a friend helped to write the column and not only did I not give credit to the friend, I didn’t know the friend plagiarized.
geg6
Newspapers, especially at the local level, are already dead. The best local reporting is being done by local tv and community based bloggers. Perfect examples being Mudflats in Alaska and WTAE-Pgh’s investigative team. The Pgh. Post-Gazette is a shadow of its former self, with few in-depth scoops on important local stories, a glaring contrast to their tv counterparts at WTAE. I don’t even read the Beaver County Times any more, despite the fact that I have professional and personal ties to it. It has no real news, no local government coverage, nothing worth wasting my money on. And the biggest of the mighty print dailies, like the Post and the Times, have lost all credibility over the last 15 years. The whole story is summed up by the Maureen Dowd story tonight. She plagiarized just like all the other plagiarizers and reporters just making shit up who’ve been uncovered the last few years. But she has really stepped in it. ‘Coz she, a Villager of the highestrize winningest order, rippred off a DFH blogger. As I said in the previous thread, say it ain’t so, MoDo!
flounder
My “local” paper (in AZ) is owned as part of a statewide, small-town monopoly by a down-state, Bircher, friends of Goldwater family. I am convinced that they actually enable more local corruption and graft via their cheerleading for far right developers and general cronyism.
I only hope that when they go down the rest of their evil empire goes with them.
Bill E Pilgrim
@JL:
Exactly. And the friend “talks” in sentences that are exact matches for written phrases online, and MD “weaves” ideas into her column by transcribing word for word what the friend “said”…
Yeesh. She should have just said “Ack. Okay someone sent me an e-mail and I used it. I didn’t realize it was a paragraph from TPM. My bad”.
DougJ
@Brian Griffin
I’m fascinated. Could you tell me more about VoicesOfSanDiego, how it started, how it is edited, and so on?
DougJ
That may be true. But who else is supporting “intrepid reporting” at all? Seriously.
DougJ
Well put.
Peter J
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Toys? Not sure what you mean.
Jayson Blair, plagiarist and former NY Times employee.
PeakVT
All of that said, who the hell is going to do six-part series on problems with arcane rental laws when the newspapers are gone?
Either grant-funded journalists or nobody. I don’t see what the business model for local print reporting might be in the long run. I think enough people will pay for national and international news so that there will always be many outlets in several different formats. Semi-pro citizen journalists or bloggers who for some reason can afford to vastly undervalue their time (meaning they might take home a few hundred dollars per month after hosting fees) will fill in some of the gap at the local level, but without a “legitimate” media outlet backing them they won’t get the access needed for certain types of stories.
Added: What kid bitzer said.
JL
@Bill E Pilgrim: This is what MoDo said about Nancy Pelosi in the same ariticle
Bill E Pilgrim
@Peter J:
Jayson Blair Clause. The guy at Christmas who..
…eh never mind. It tired here and I’m getting late, failed attempt.
Bill E Pilgrim
@JL:
If that means I don’t have to, then I’m all for the idea.
The Saff
I still read Maureen Dowd but, to me, she seems to phone in most of her columns.
kid bitzer
#17–
dougj plaziarized my proze without creditz!
next he’s going to tell us he heard it from a friend….
Peter J
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Now I get it :)
sorry :)
geg6
DougJ: I believe that much of what we used read about local issues and investigative pieces will be pursued and written by community bloggers and non-profits. I’m less worried about local journalism than I am about good, in-depth international stories. But the Intertoobz and international tv like BBC and even al Jazeera will fill that gap, most likely. I actually find the changes exciting and exhilarating, harkening back to the free for all atmosphere among the media at the very start of our great republic. The Federalist Papers were really just a blog. And Thomas Paine was the original DFH.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Peter J:
np.
3 am here, night all.
West of the Cascades
Yeah, the D&C is mostly lousy, but it has better Bills coverage than the Buffalo News (this from a long-suffering Bills fan in exile on the west coast).
Martin
Pro Publica, TPM, etc. The only problem with newspapers is the paper, and the need to relocate themselves around the world. Get rid of the paper and find a way to rely on and syndicate local content, organize it, and change the funding model (which isn’t really a change, since papers were largely ad funded anyway, as are most of the replacements) and you end up with the same product in a different package.
eemom
The post is spot on. And IMO, facile dismissals of the point like “oh, the bloggers’ll pick it up,” and “oh, newspapers suck anyway, just look at MoDo’s latest,” do us all a major disservice.
The fact is that the intense, in-depth reporting required to break stories like the Baltimore rent one can’t be done without resources — i.e., $$ — committed professionals — who need to be paid $$, just like anybody else, and contacts, which require resources, time, and professionalism to develop. The blogosphere has yet to come up with anything remotely resembling a consistent model for achieving those results.
And believe me, no one could detest MoDo and her ilk more than I do — but to lump their bullshit in with the essential reporting function that newspapers historically have provided and still continue to provide is just ridiculous.
srv
Wasn’t here someone talked about the St. Petersburg paper being non-profit, and Geffen wants to buy the NYT and convert it?
Also the comment somewhere that we will enter a new era of corruption – city, county, MUD, state board meetings/politics will just not get covered. Ideally, there should be a rise of local bloggers, but it won’t work unless real reporters (trained, fulltime) go blog only. Investigative blogs like that Tennessee group that obsessively covers state politics probably have more out-of-state viewers than in-state.
I just don’t see locals hunting out local news sources when the markets major paper goes away. Those of us who do, yes, we’ll get better coverage than the major (probably in bed with the city gov’t), but it will be a smaller pie.
asiangrrlMN
I don’t read MoDo, and it seems for a good reason. I don’t want newspapers to fold solely because I believe in real journalism. However, I have no idea how they are going to be viable in an internet market. My local papers are shells of their former selves, and the writing is pretty egregious these days. I don’t know what the alternative is.
Josh Hueco
The Waco Tribune-Herald, my hometown paper, prints Sunday columns by Ted Nugent. I don’t think it can get any worse anywhere else.
eemom
“In every city in the country, there are crazy injustices being done that will probably only see the light of day if some intrepid newspaper reporter investigates it.”
Again, absolutely right. Sure, it’s uber-cool these days to diss the NYT and WaPo as bird-cage liner, and I do it myself, but the value of the publication as a whole is infinitely more complicated than just the eye-rolling disgust at the editorial pages — and even THAT, as as has been noted here even in the last day (re Frank Rich, Jim Hoagland), is NOT the consistent response.
Recently, for example, the WaPo broke a story about a local funeral parlor chain that was desecrating the remains of war veterans destined for burial at Arlington. Ghoulish and semi-sensationalist, maybe — but wasn’t that something that needed to be reported? And what blogger would — or could — have done that?
srv
Geffen’s idea to buy the NYT just seems a little crazy to me. For a lot less money, you could endow all the major political, financial and sports writers in every major US market. Honestly, I don’t know what Gates, Buffet and all those folks are going to do with their money that perpetuate a long-lasting institution.
Jason
+1 The Trib here is an insult, but some Erie news stations provide a real service.
Journalism is a response to some cultural or social exigence, so there’s no perfect, enduring market model in any media environment. Just because papers are losing money doesn’t mean that bloggers are making money or web-based byline-heavy producers are making news; I think TPM is a good example of what contemporary journalism can do, the media purpose blending well with (but not dependent upon) the media form. And that’s part of the point – JMM seemed more concerned with a model of journalism than a web-monetization scheme. If, say, the Daily Beast fails, I think it has less to do with the media form than with Tina Brown and the product. Fail is platform-independent; if you publish political commentary by Nora Ephron and John Cusack, you’ve got a gimmick for any media.
geg6
Nope. Sorry. I have a lot of history in the world of journalism and I think people are getting way too hung up on the mode of delivery and the economic model. Journalism can’t and won’t die; it’s a natural human impulse to want to know and seek out ways to be in the know. It’s always there, whether as a big business or as individual crusading practitioners. It’s simply adjusting to a new and more diverse way of disseminating the information and how people seek out the information they need. It’s also going to mean a change from monolithic corporate media to more entrepreneurial models. I think it’s, on the whole, a good thing for an industry so moribund that it glorifies stenography and plagiarism and is largely in trouble economically because it believed it’s own pr. Between the crumbling of the corrupt elitist MSM and the total collective psychosis of the GOP, these are exciting times and I, for one, am eager and excited to see it play out.
Martin
And the same was surely said after kings and bishops stopped funding art two centuries ago.
What we haven’t yet seen, except at a handful of places like Pro Publica is real investigative journalists setting up operations that are designed to function exclusively on the internet. That’s not bloggers picking up the slack, but the individuals that are experienced at doing this setting up new business models. Everyone is arguing that none of the existing models will work if papers go away, and that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that new models won’t develop.
I think products like the Kindle are a necessary part of this shift. They create the opportunity for a new market to develop which is subscription driven but has no per-unit costs to the publisher. This is what Apple effectively did with the iPod and iPhone that allowed a number of new markets and technological shifts to take place.
I’m not convinced that the Kindle quite has it right. It’s close, but it still lacks a certain something that I can’t put my finger on, and I’m not convinced that the publication model that the papers are determined to hold onto have it right. But somewhere the combination will come together and a new system will be established. We just need to give it some time to sort out.
whetstone
Amen. Take a look at the three-part series this weekend in the Chicago Sun-Times about how the city’s tax-increment-finance program helped single 20-something condo flippers: they bought condos with city subsidies because they fell under income requirements, despite already owning other condos, then immediately turned around and sold them to wealthy families at tens of thousands of dollars in profit, even though the intention of the subsidies was to help lower-income *families.*
Basically, my tax dollars helped people my age, who make *more* than I do, more than double their income in a year.
I’m in the business, at an alt-weekly that does the sort of work you’re lamenting might go away (we just broke a story that Chicago probably screwed itself when it leased the city parking meters for 99 years… long, ugly story). As a blogger/blog-reader, I watch people like Marcy Wheeler and think that you *could* crowdsource a lot of those types of stories – 10 or 15 smart, dedicated amateurs could do the work of a couple full-time, experienced reporters on document-heavy stories… I hope. (I don’t think there’s a substitute on certain beats.)
To be clear: All I’m saying is that it’s not wholly implausible. I have friends who do this sort of work, and they amaze me, and I hope they stay employed, and I hope I do to. Amateurs (and I don’t mean that as a pejorative, just in the sense that they aren’t paid) can and have done the same sort of work, even in the pre-blog era, but for the blogosphere to take on more of that burden would require a shift in the culture. Again: not implausible, but perhaps tricky and difficult.
DougJ
I really hope the endowment model works for newspapers. It certainly works for museums and universities.
DougJ
I hope you’re right. My own experience doing quasi-journalistic things at a local blog made me realize that: (a) amateurs can do journalism if they set their mind to it but (b) they tend to lack the necessary respect for the journalistic process.
gwangung
Patronage style funding still dominates a lot of art, particularly visual arts, theatre and classical music.
When something artistic escapes Hollywood and the record labels, it’s more of an accident than anything else. Is that satisfactory for you?
gwangung
Um. Training? Could be a lot of re-invention of the wheel…
DougJ
Yup. In this sense we should be glad that 19th and 20th century industrialists and bankers were wealthier than the kings of the past.
DougJ
I hope so. But how would you train autism-vaccine conspiracy theorists? (I hope none of my old comrades are reading this right now.)
Mr Furious
Just ran across this item at PhillyMag.com:
Mr Furious
Sorry about that—for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to handle a multiple ’graph blockquote…
Jason
@geg6: Was that to me or someone else? B/c I am in agreement; I think we’re saying the same thing.
Brian Griffin
@DougJ:
I don’t really know a lot about the voice of sandiego, I only ran across recently it while doing some background research on a project my company was pursuing out there. almost every article I found that was relevant came from it. It was only later that I noticed it was a nonprofit, and found out it was fairly new and recently heard it mentioned on npr.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102851849
it’s nonprofit, online, small, and appears to kick ass. seems to be small and flexible enough to allow their reporters to spend the time it takes to actually research a story, and get to the good stuff.
I believe there are a lot of good old-school reporters out there that haven’t been able to get out do the real work they’d love to be doing. this kind of setup could let them do it.
Yutsano
–
I think that’s the rub right there. It’s not the papers themselves per se, it’s the material. It’s utter and total cwap. Journalism is not stenography. Journalism is not taking two sides and treating them with equal weight (one side is right, the other is wrong, and making a value judgment on that is the job of journalism). If someone in the public sphere tells a blatant lie but no one calls them on it for some sense of maintaining their access to that official or for some sense of “balance”, that is a failure in journalism.
–
There are two issues I see with newspapers (separating them from journalism as a profession for the moment). One is the recession is of course killing advertisers and therefore advertising revenue. That pain is more acute for an advertising-sensitive industry as the newspaper industry is. The second is the Internet can provide for free what newspapers charge a premium for. That is simply a model they can’t compete with in the long term. The problem is I don’t see any viable solutions out there.
–
Having said that, I have to say something potentially heretical. Blogging is not journalism. It is great, it can be very informative, and it is often accurate. But bloggers aren’t known for fact checking and contacting the principals involved to get any holes filled in their stories. That is what journalists (are supposed to) do. If the two end up blending together to continue to inform the populace, that cannot be a bad thing. I think, however, the metamorphosis is still ongoing.
–
Feel free to tear me to pieces over any and all of this.
geg6
Jason: We are saying the same thing. I was speaking generally to all those who are doomsayers regarding how somehow if newspapers die, no one will cover the sewage authority scandals. We are in a transition in how news is transmitted and how the economic models under which it is gathered and disseminated. The vacuum the doomsayers fear will be filled. It already is in many ways and in many places. Which ends up as the new model remains to be seen (and perhaps yet to invented), but that there will be a new model should not be in doubt.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Nope, no tearing into you from me. I agree that most bloggers are not journalist, as it stands. You touched on an issue dear to me, though. As much as I love paper and books and newspaper, I am perfectly willing to let them go as long as journalism continues in one form or another.
I actually think you’ve hit on something with the blogger/reporter hybrid idea. If columnists can blog, so can journalists, I think. At any rate, it will have to be something we explore because newspapers are not going to survive in their current incantation for very long.
geg6, yeah, I agree. There will be growing pains in the meantime, though. There always are.
DougJ
I agree except for the fact checking part. Bloggers — good bloggers anyway — are pretty good about that.
phillygirl
As a former reporter for several now-withering big-time newspapers, I hear incessant blubbering about the disappearance of “investigative” reporting, whatever that it. And sure, it’s sad to see the three-part, prize-winning series die. But the future holds much worse. The real loss is the state house reporting, the city hall reporting, and all the drip-drip-drip stories that alert us to the stupid, cruel, spendthrift, corrupt, and otherwise freaking outrageous things that our public officials do. And they would do worse if it weren’t for newspaper reporters sitting at the council meeting or calling the prosecutor’s office or schmoozing the sources who might let something slip. Even a terrible journalist can prevent bad things by making a few phone calls. But people have to be paid to do this. It won’t be done by bloggers and “citizen journalists” (what kind of wacko dilettante spends hours every day following state legislators around for free?) or by attractive TV reporters with a couple hours between house fires and drug busts. Wonder what’s gonna happen in Annapolis when it’s nobody’s job to keep track.
Mike P
Conor Friedersdorf has one of the better takes on what a good newspaper can do when it commits itself to doing quality local reporting.
From the post:
pdbuttons
local news u use…
weather?/local vote totals?
and sexy pictures!
DPirate
The best will go into business for themselves via the internet. The worst will fade away, and the mediocre will whine for a bailout.
DougJ
I know people who would do this.
superdestroyer
How can a newspaper like the Baltimore Sun survive when the Baltimore City schools are turning out so few people who are capable of actually reading a newspaper? The market for newspapers has declines as the demographics in Baltimore changed to the point that few residents are cappable and interested in reading a newspaper.
RSA
That’s true, but it’s a different kind of art that’s produced today. One of my favorite cathedrals, the Sagrada Familia, began construction in 1882 and isn’t scheduled to be finished for another 15 years or so. Some medieval cathedrals might have taken even longer to build, but they were also a lot more labor intensive… and I suspect we simply couldn’t muster the resources to reproduce them today, even with modern machines.
This might seem off-topic, but I do think that movement toward amateur pro-bono journalism, in addition to relying on a different business model, is likely to produce a different kind of result, for the most part.
Mark
“And local television reporters (who aren’t in the same danger as newspaper reporters) are a lot better than anyone gives them credit for.”
You’re wrong twice. Local TV affiliates have been hit almost as hard as newspapers by the advertising recession. TV stations across the country are cutting – and sometimes even eliminating – local news. You didn’t know this because, unlike newspaper, TV news never reports on its own troubles.
And while TV news occasionally does fine work, the vast majority of the story ideas on every local newscast are cribbed from the local daily newspaper.
Johnny Pez
@superdestroyer:
yah them darkies caint read no good nohow so how they gonna keep a paper in bidness?
JD
What Mark said in comment 61. Local TV news depends on advertising. Advertising has dried up. Therefore, local TV news is dying.
superdestroyer
Blacks are actually more likely to subscribe to a newspaper than Hispanics or Asians. Asian-Americans, as a group, are the least likely to subscribe to the newspaper.
But then again, how can a newspaper survive in a town where barely 50% of the entering freshman ever finish high school?
Nathanael
“All of that said, who the hell is going to do six-part series on problems with arcane rental laws when the newspapers are gone?”
Talkingpointsmemo.com? And the equivalents?