Geneva Overholser: Moving Beyond the Lament: The Villains — and Us
Posted at 5:04 pm, November 9th, 2006
Dean Baquet’s departure from the Los Angeles Times is sad and worrisome — and all the more so because we’re likely to misdirect the passion it stirs in us.
We’ll conclude, quite logically, that the Tribune Co., the paper’s corporate owner, is the villain in Baquet’s story, as it was in the John Carroll story before this.
There are so many villains these days. In Philadelphia, the villains are the local folks who bought the paper from the long-time favored villain company Knight Ridder.
I don’t mean to sound dismissive; I get this deep in my gut. My villain, in my editor days, was Gannett. They bought a national-class newspaper and applied business practices that inevitably (and dramatically) diminished it. I railed against that then, and I join in the lament now. But the lament isn’t going to move us forward, and forward is where we need to be.
Maybe there was a time when imaginative leaders — instead of the often uninspired men who have more typically led newspaper companies — could have done something to change what looks, in retrospect, like an inevitable decline. What we saw instead was slow death by our own hands: a decision here to save $30,000 (and infuriate prime readership) by delivering the paper at the end of the driveway; a decision there to cede the online needs of the thousands of media-savvy and information hungry farmers to the family-owned newspaper across the state. If the return on investment didn’t look like at least what — 30 or 40 percent? — it wasn’t for us. As John Morton wrote recently, many of our wounds have been self-inflicted.
In any case, we’ve surely reached now a tipping point where the old hopes — if only the profit margins demanded were lower? If only the CEO would keep the newsroom numbers up? — are not the ones to bet on. If Tony Ridder had followed the wishes of those of us who pressed him to avoid newsroom cuts, would he have avoided the shareholder disgruntlement that eventually ended the company’s life — or would he have hastened it? When the Boston Globe loses money, we can be sure that those yearning for more modest profit margins will see their hopes met all too soon — but not to the newsroom’s benefit.
The truth is that the business model of traditional media is collapsing around us. That doesn’t mean none of our fine papers will survive. The Washington Post, thanks in large part to its non-newspaper Kaplan holdings, has been enjoying strong financial reports.
Meanwhile, individual journalists can make a difference by embracing a different-looking future. The digital world that so many fear (or scoff) is rich with tools to enable us to do ever better journalism. As we linger behind, lamenting the passing of what has been, our lunch is being eaten by the more imaginative. Worse, we fail to pursue the rich opportunities to translate journalistic principles into the digital world as avidly as we should.
On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change is my effort to reach my fellow journalists (and others concerned about the future of news) with this notion of focusing on what is possible. Here is its discussion forum; here is its wiki.
Dean Baquet’s departure from the LA Times is sad, worrisome and deeply honorable. We must use the passion it stirs in us to move to the front of the effort to usher good public-service journalism into its next incarnation. I hope you’ll join me in these discussions.
November 10th, 2006 at 2:34 am |
Mrs. Overholser,
I read with great interest your “On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change.”
Beautifully written, loftily phrased –sort of like a political speech which poses a lot of questions but gives no answers. I’m sure it is no great surprise to the world of print journalism that things must change.
You did have some suggestions and one, at least, was concrete: page one ads. Good.
I would add some other revenue earners: How about charging interest groups, academics, “experts,” politicians and their ilk to appear on Op-Ed Pages. Now they get their messages on free and probably, in most cases, get paid for them. Pollsters should be charged to get their findings in print. This might make them disappear, too — which would not be a bad thing. Also how much do newspapers shell out for an array of wire services? I don’t think they can be eliminated completely but at least cut back. Hiring a couple of reporters to scour the web and turn out “locally produced” stories would probably be cheaper and better.
I realized these suggestions are heretical, even quixotic, but thanks for a chance to curmudgeon ( I know it’s not a verb but it should be).
Jack Breibart — San Francisco
November 10th, 2006 at 10:51 am |
I have spent more than 25 years associated with newspapers, the majority of that time on the business side. The difficulties facing the industry today, in my experience, are the result of an organizational structure that prevents newspapers, in particular, from functioning like other successful businesses. This structure is responsible for the terms, “business side” and “editorial side.”
This same structure is also handicapping the industry as it searches for a solution. Don’t get me wrong. I understand why the business interests of a newspaper can never influence the content that its editors produce. However, unless the individuals from both sides of the organization have a seat at the table when laying out a strategy for the future, the future is likely to be bleak.
This may sound like an obvious notion. But I wonder how often, in practice, it actually occurs. For instance, the group assembled to produce the “Manifesto for Change” is a distinguished group. However, there does not seem to be equal representation from the “business side” of media.
There are some highly successful people from media’s “business side” who understand that strict editorial independence creates “product differentiation”, forming “barriers to entry” and supporting “premium pricing.” Michael Bloomberg, for instance, comes to mind. (Bloomberg, current mayor of New York City, founded Bloomberg, LLP in 1981.)
Aren’t there such people in the newspaper industry today? If there are such people, why aren’t they at the table when devising a strategy for the future? If there are not such people in the newspaper industry today, can someone explain, in sufficiently rigorous terms, why not?
November 10th, 2006 at 2:01 pm |
Geneva:
Your thoughts on putting the focus on possibilities instead of running around shouting “the sky is falling” are refreshing. One possiblity that comes to mind is the powers that be might focus on the massive and embarrassing failure of newspapers to aggressively market their product. It seems we encourage the entire business world to advertise but when comes to our business –strangely, some still won’t concede it’s a business – we exhibit unexplainable restraint.
Companies that make cheese present their cheese to the world in colorful, sometimes entertaining commercials across the media spectrum. They understand the importance of building an image, of branding, or as one my reporting colleagues used to say, “putting the hay where the goats can get at it.”
Yet, something as important as a newspaper, something citizens should rely upon to make intelligent decisions about critical issues rarely, if ever, gets that kind of exposure. No wonder most high school and college students don’t read newspapers unless under duress for a class assignment.
We can build dozens of efficient business models, trim profit margins and use technology to gain ground in Internet World, but it seems until we regain our footing in the public mind as a necessary part of their life it will just be a numbers game that has too many racing into mediocrity.
We need to tell our story and compete with all other products for hearts, minds and above all, time. What about it? Can we drum up enough dollars to at least get on par with cheese?
November 13th, 2006 at 4:06 pm |
Thanks to all of you for the three comments above. It’s striking to me that each of you focuses on the business side — at least to a degree. I think we do indeed need to bring smart people from the business side of the table into these discussions. The efforts to do that into the past have often tended to run aground on the basis of differing views, but we are now faced with such challenges that I have a feeling the discussions could be richer. I would love to tap the thoughts of some of the former CEOs — like Tony Ridder or Tom Curley. Finally, I absolutely agree that one of our many business mistakes was to cut our marketing budgets so drastically.
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:41 am |
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