The HR department needed the signed pay raise forms, but suddenly they were gone.
“I gave them to you,” the business manager told the editor-in-chief.
“But I don’t have them,” the editor replied, frantically pawing through the scraps of papers strewn about her desk. “I don’t remember seeing them.”
“They were in a large manila envelope. I put them on your chair so you wouldn’t miss them. The signed papers need to go to the HR office right away.”
She tore through the papers on the desk again, then stood and shrugged.
“You must not have given them to me,” the editor said.
But there, still on the chair where they had been placed hours earlier, sat the envelope. The editor, quite literally, had been sitting on the tiny raises authorized by the paperwork contained therein.
Editors and publishers of newspapers often don’t know what else they’re sitting on when it comes to the talent in their newsrooms and other departments. In some ways, they unwittingly sit on the proverbial “gold mine” of ideas, talent and energy, a wealth of knowledge begging to be tapped. In others, hidebound and conformist, insecure and distrustful, these editors and publishers purposely sit on the most enthusiastic, well-connected employees in their company, stifling their rough-and-tumble creativity.
Over the last few years of my two-decade newspaper career, I’ve watched both happen with dismay. And while I’m certain some newspaper publishing companies will emerge from the current gloom, I walked away from newspapers this year harboring serious doubts about the likelihood most newspaper executives will successfully transform their horse-and-buggy businesses into 21st century news and information leaders.
Even after the layoffs, consolidated operations and dramatically smaller editions (Hey, where did my crossword puzzle go?!), much will need to change if newspaper companies are to find their way into the future.
Who will risk a game-changing play? Don’t bet on newspaper publishers.
You’re fired (and so are you, you and you, etc.)
I saw Harold Evans tout his new autobiography, My Paper Chase, on television recently, reflecting on his firing at the hands of Rupert Murdoch.
After 15 years as editor of London’s Sunday Times, pushing an aggressive agenda of public service journalism, he moved on to helm The Times, the daily national paper owned by Murdoch. After a year, Evans was sacked.
He tells the story of attending a society event sometime thereafter where he was introduced to a group of people. His wife implored him, “But tell them who you were …”
Today, Evans laughs and offers this wisdom, “You have to forget about all that. Leave it in the past.”
A lot of journalists now face a similar painful dilemma. Just about everyone – well, everyone who hasn’t gotten their hands on government bailout money – is hurting in this economy. But journalists, whether Pulitzer Prize winners or guys who took a bullet for their craft, are being pushed out of jobs at a rate three times that of the general population.
Suddenly unemployed, forced to compose a resume and pursue a new gig, it’s hard not to think of “who you were.” Ideally, that resume is a menu of your skills, but it’s also built on the idea of “who you were” and “what you’ve done.” And someone decided that, in this battle to save newspapers, they could do without you.
Evans reinvented himself as a travel magazine editor and then a book publisher.
Not only does the sinking newspaper business need to reinvent itself, the journalists thrown overboard by the dead-enders clinging desperately to the old business model must reinvent themselves, too. I’ve become one of those journalists.
I’m convinced we’ll have an easier time of it.
Lewis Dworkin, founder of True/Slant and a journalist whose career took him through the New York Times, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, tells journalists “you’ll need a vastly different set of skills to be successful in the digital era.”
At True/Slant, when we talk about change we talk about 'Entrepreneurial Journalists.' So, what does that mean? You self publish. You help market yourself. You build your own brand. You attract your own audience. And when you start to build your audience, that means you seek approval from consumers, not the editor, at least not the editor as we know the role to be today … Being an 'Entrepreneurial Journalist' also means building a multi-faceted media career that is not necessarily dependent on one employer, or more aptly put, a single revenue stream."
Judy Sims, formerly the digital chief for the Toronto Star until she lost her job in the Great Media Migration of 2009, echoes that view on SimsBlog.
I think in the future, being a paid journalist will require becoming a brand of your own. Twitter, blogs and books will lead to more lucrative speaking engagements, and paid assignments with not just one, but a variety of content sites. ... So, will you get paid as a journalist? I think in the long-run, yes. But only if you are passionate, dedicated and very good at what you do. And if you are all those things, not only will you get paid, but you will have the privilege of being one of the pioneers of the new journalism.
Here’s to the success of ‘every man’
Writing in The Atlantic in September, journalist Mark Bowden analyzed how news today comes together too often by the hand of partisans eager to feed stories to understaffed news organizations. A byproduct of newsroom cutbacks, Bowden contends those stories are published without the necessary legwork to add context and depth. Within the piece, Bowden composes an elegy to the change in the newspaper business, wherein he also sees an existential threat to the craft of written journalism itself.
… the great press critic A.J. Liebling, noting the squeeze on his profession, fretted about the emergence of the one-newspaper town:
The worst of it is that each newspaper disappearing below the horizon carries with it, if not a point of view, at least a potential emplacement for one. A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.
Liebling, who died in 1963, was spared the looming prospect of the no-newspaper town. There is, of course, the Internet, which he could not have imagined. Its enthusiasts rightly point out that digital media are in nearly every way superior to paper and ink, and represent, in essence, an upgrade in technology. But those giant presses and barrels of ink and fleets of delivery trucks were never what made newspapers invaluable. What gave newspapers their value was the mission and promise of journalism—the hope that someone was getting paid to wade into the daily tide of manure, sort through its deliberate lies and cunning half-truths, and tell a story straight …
We liked our newsmen to be Everymen — shoe-leather intellectuals, cynical, suspicious, and streetwise … The Internet is now replacing Everyman with every man. Anyone with a keyboard or cell phone can report, analyze, and pull a chair up to the national debate. If freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, today that is everyone. The city with one eye (glass or no) has been replaced by the city with a million eyes. This is wonderful on many levels, and is why the tyrants of the world are struggling, with only partial success, to control the new medium. But while the Internet may be the ultimate democratic tool, it is also demolishing the business model that long sustained newspapers and TV’s network-news organizations. Unless someone quickly finds a way to make disinterested reporting pay, to compensate the modern equivalent of the ink-stained wretch (the carpal-tunnel curmudgeon?), the Web may yet bury Liebling’s cherished profession.
Touching, stirring words.
I don’t wish for the demise of any newspaper, but I’m not convinced losing them is as great a threat as some contend. Will the Web bury journalism? On the contrary, the Web offers us the best chance to improve journalism, particularly the written form. On the Web, you can offer stories and commentary with immediacy, depth and substance, rich with links to related content and complemented by the ability to engage in a dialogue with the reporters and writers directly.
But it’s just not in the newspaper company DNA to evolve this way.
You’ve got your Huffington Post and True/Slant and Web-based non-profits such as Pro Publica and Voice of San Diego, and hundreds of others, each pursuing its own new and better way to make money by gathering readers via quality content and selling access to them. And we need each and every one of them out there, trying and failing and trying again. Some will live, some will die. Thomas Edison made several thousand different versions of the light bulb before he found the one that worked, remember.
Publishers lament the loss of revenue. Some delude themselves the cash will return.
Contrary to disingenuous happy talk from industry leaders, the third quarter brought absolutely no relief to the relentless dive in newspaper advertising, as total sales fell $2.5 billion to bring the year-to-date decline to nearly $7.9 billion. With three months to go in the worst year ever for newspapers, the drop in sales in the first three quarters of 2009 is roughly equal to the combined revenues for the last 12 months of Gannett and McClatchy Co. In other words, it’s as though two of the largest publicly owned publishers in the land just fell off the face of the earth.
But even in this crummy economy, newspaper companies remain the best-funded purveyors of news. And instead of reorganizing their businesses to find capital to launch their own entrepreneurial endeavors, most shrink before the challenge. Worse yet, they appear to be ignoring or driving away the creative thinkers within their own ranks, stamping out the mutations in their own DNA that may help them survive.
Newspaper companies themselves are doing more to condemn journalism to the grave than anyone else.
We put the ‘no’ in innovation
When they’re not cutting staff to stay alive or create the appearance of profit, they’re blaming Google or focused intently on holding together the crumbling foundations of their current business model. Just two years ago, a publishing executive in the company for which I toiled told me he thought he could get auto advertising to bounce back. He spent a lot of time tweaking classified sections in a futile search for revenue. Did he just not understand the game had changed? Those ad dollars clearly had other, better places to go. Much time and resources were wasted.
About five years ago, at a journalism conference conducted by a new media entrepreneur, I sat at a table with a newspaper GM, a publisher, an executive editor and a lawyer. In a brainstorming exercise, we conceived of a low-cost, highly interactive, narrowly focused niche topic Web endeavor. We identified a distinct commercial base. If designed and promoted properly, this would be a delightfully fun place for local folks to visit. Could this experiment deliver boatloads of revenue? None of us thought we had a “cash cow.” But a worthwhile cash flow? You betcha, and one worth having given that the operating costs could be kept extraordinarily low. One such idea begets another and another, and a bevy of such new, low-cost revenue streams might offer newspapers a glimmer of hope.
And yet such ideas couldn't get a hearing at our company. My most recent editor-in-chief openly mocked the notion (even as newspapers have started warming to such ideas), saying “we make our money in print.” But all we were doing was losing money in print, cutting back on print and vastly diminishing the value (and quantity) of what we put in print.
Today, such delightful, interactive niche topics are the heart and soul of social media.
Ask yourself this, too. Cell phones, iPhones, Blackberries. We’re all tethered to one now. And we love apps. But how many newspaper companies, still rich with local information-gathering ability, are developing useful mobile apps for their local customers?
For years, we heard execs say folks in the newsroom were slow to embrace change and digital innovation. That’s not true, generally, and it wasn’t the case in my newsroom, either. With a few exceptions, I didn’t see such reluctance among the newsgatherers. Rather, I witnessed a disdainful unwillingness to hear out young staffers who’ve spent their entire lives steeped in digital technology and social media.
And worse than the risk-averse fraidycats in the publisher suites are the clueless poseurs.
If you’re a newspaper exec, you can’t just put on a Rolling Stones t-shirt and an iPod and stand in front of a newsroom and proclaim, “I’m one of you. I get it.” Not when the only things you have to give are obsolete digital technology, the slowest metro newspaper web site in North America and the back of your hand.
Outmatched and soon outnumbered
Sims puts it best in "Top 10 Lies Newspaper Execs are Telling Themselves."
Lie #10: I can compete with the best digital leaders/thinkers/creators in the world without becoming an active member of the online community.
No you can’t.
Until you have a blog, a Twitter feed and a Facebook account and until you are reading most of your news online and commenting on what you read, until you are all over Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, iGoogle, Netvibes and the like, until you can actually explain to me how online CPM-based advertising works, until you can explain how SEO and SEM work, until you know what “pwnd” means, until you know the significance of the 3 Wolf Moon or 3 Cat Keyboard t-shirt, you don’t know what you don’t know.
You are competing with the very people who created the Internet. Increasingly, you are competing with the generation who grew up online. How can you possibly be so arrogant that you think you can compete in that world without becoming a part of it?
Stop that navel gazing and look around. You are outmatched.
Outmatched, indeed.
My wager is that newspapers are putting another nail in their own coffin by jettisoning so many good journalists. Every one of those people who embarks on a journey of reinvention may emerge as an inspired competitor, in small markets and large, each a champion for a new idea about journalism and publishing.
I like those odds.