I CAME ACROSS THIS VERY INTERESTING AND INSIGHTFUL PIECE ON ROGERBLACK.COM BY ROGER BLACK.....
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE of the paper, there’s no confusion about who the paper belongs to. Not the editors who built it, not the reporters who fill it with articles, but the men who bought and paid for it. - David Carr
This was the killer graph of David Carr’s mournful recent column,
“At the Journal, the Words Not Spoken.” There are two big assertions here—ones that helped cause the great slide in the newspaper business. First, Carr implies newspapers are for the newsroom, not for the readers. And second, he suggests that there’s something wrong with the owners of a paper actually running it.
These are wrong ideas, ones that have tripped up journalism over the last 50 years, setting a fluid, dynamic business like concrete, into a stiff, unresponsive institution. J-school defined the methodology; the unions dictated the job descriptions; and the big chains, with their organization charts and greed did the rest.
Reporters, led by The Newspaper Guild, acted on the assumption that their profession was as permanent as that of doctors and lawyers, and as such, could survive all kinds of specialization, never mind featherbedding. More than a profession, the newsroom was convinced that journalism was a public trust, which implies that the public was somehow complicit in this. Journalists believed that they had deserved this trust. The business was so good that the permanence of their social institution was taken for granted.
Of course the public was involved in the deal, but not in the way journalists came to think. People bought the newspapers, not so much because they needed them, but because they liked them. Newspapers were useful, yes, and even necessary during wars and recessions, but people paid money for them because they were interesting and sometimes fun.
The 1920s-style, general-assignment reporter (cf., The Front Page) who could cover anything and write it up beautifully, all the while drinking heavily, was actually interested in selling newspapers. He (and it was mostly male in those days, notwithstanding His Girl Friday, the remake of The Front Page, starring Rosalind Russell) took delight in a zesty mix of cranks, crackpots, clowns and crooked politicians. Newspapers ran the photo of plane crashes, the maps of battles, the profiles of movie queens and breakaway baseball players and random escaped zoo animals. There were not a lot of correspondents down at the city hall waiting for press releases.
They had competition at the beginning, but it was with other newspapers that might have writers who would occasionally be guilty of juicing up a quote to make a better read. Or worse. This underpaid hack was gradually replaced by a better-trained, more responsible specialist who turned in less copy. The rewrite desk, with wordsmiths in the “slot,” was abolished. By the time I started working on newspapers in school, the daily had become a boring update on minor changes to the social status quo, crime and traffic stories, and an occasional big “enterprise” piece that reminded you of a chapter in your social studies textbook.
Radio, TV and then the Internet carved away the assumed franchise and started to sap the great profits that the newspaper owners had gotten used to. In the last quarter, the newspaper decline seems to have taken a steeper dive, and some senior news executives doubt that they’ll be able to pull up before the revenue line crashes below the expenses line.
As with the federal government, it won’t help to keep doing more of the things that aren’t working. It won’t work to keep cheapening the product. To use Gordon Bethune’s line about a similar problem in the airline business: “You can take so much cheese off the pizza that nobody will eat it.”
A New York Times employee told me this weekend that an editor at NYTimes.com can’t put copy on the web site. Only a “producer” can do that. This is a perfect example of running newspapers like they were permanent fixtures on the landscape that could be loaded with all kinds of redundant job descriptions and still stand up. The designer who told me this probably has a better idea of what to do to turn around the paper than does Arthur Sulzberger, along with all of his sisters and his cousins and his aunts.
What is needed is a fundamental restructuring of the newspaper business. And it has gotten too late to expect the inmates to redesign the asylum. It’s going to have to be done by the proprietors. Willful, single-minded, near-genius proprietors like the ones who built the business. Sam Zell may not be the man to do it. He has not reduced the insanity at the Tribune Company no matter how many have quit or been laid off or fired. But he’s in a better position to fix the problem than the McCormick and Chandler heirs, or the stagnant old managers, or the stultified newsrooms in L.A. or Chicago (unionized or not).
Newspapers have about a year to get rid of all the people who can’t pull their own weight and to redeploy all the smart energetic journalists who can find the great stories and push them out to print, web and video. Some papers still have lots of talent, but they must push it to the front so readers can find it and find that they like it. Papers which continue to bury the smart people (or have already driven them away) will not make the cut. With the current recession, if newspapers don't move quickly, the market will crush them.
Rupert Murdoch knows something about markets and about restructuring (e.g., The Wapping dispute, 1986). He has a better chance of saving The Wall Street Journal than the Bancroft heirs did. Taking a page or two out of the Hearst or Pulitzer or Thomson books, Murdoch can work quickly and instinctively to change the paper. He already has by putting in more non-business news. Whether he is on the right track, time will tell. But I wouldn’t bet against him. Nor would I assume that “the Dirty Digger,” as they called him when he arrived in London, doesn’t understand good journalism. He is a born journalist. He takes great risks and will support great reporting, even when the establishment is pushing against him and the lawyers are lined up at the gate. (I was at the old New West when they did a piece on Jim Jones, whose legacy is the horrible “drinking the Kool Aid.” Murdoch owned New York and New West then, and when a number of California big wigs tried to get the magazine to stop the investigation, Murdoch said, “If you’ve got the goods, print the story. I’ll back you up.”) That’s what sells papers.
Whether the Times will counter by out-reporting and out-writing the Journalon its own turf—business—is unlikely, but that would be an easier goal than Murdoch’s. This competition might save both papers’ business propositions.
The reporters and editors of The Wall Street Journal, of all papers, should know this, and know about the value and rights of private property. If they had been truly watching the markets, they would have known that the newspaper business is in a tailspin, and unlikely to pull out of it. They should have been ready for the crash.
ABOUT ROGER BLACK IN HIS OWN WORDS.....
SINCE 1970, I’ve been involved in the design of the content-based media (as distinguished from entertainment or advertising). I’ve lead redesigns at Newsweek, Esquire and even the Reader’s Digest. Some still bear evidence of that effort. Others have moved on. As Lloyd Ziff once put it, “a design is like the sifting sands of the Sahara.”
For the first 15 years I was a staffer, and had the great fortune to work for the best and smartest people in the business—Jann Wenner, Lou Silverstein, Abe Rosenthal and Rick Smith.
Since going out on my own in 1989, I’ve been hired by a number of brilliant clients—Terry McDonell, John Carroll, and Matt Winkler, among them. I was able to work on early important web sites, like MSNBC.com, Discovery.com, and @Home. I’ve designed newspapers in Houston, Zurich and Singapore, and was present at the launch at Fast Company, Smart Money and Rove.
This experience has provided some stimulating cross-pollination for me. I’ve learned something about what works, and which direction things are going. Right at the moment, it seems to be attracting a number of very interesting assignments, and my work has never been challenging or more fun.
