First off, go read a newspaper. Better yet, buy one. I'll be right here.
Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed the feel of the flattened wood pulp in your hands and the distinct smell that wafts out from each opened page. I hope you got some ink on your fingers.
Truth be told, the days of the newspaper as a standard vehicle of journalism may well be numbered. Today it's all computers, tablets, phones and the like. Digital signals are winning a war of attrition to replace Linotype shelves and presses everywhere.
That being said, there might be a reason they're lining up to be on the right side of writing history.
Take, for example, a pair of bloggers on the vanguard of the blossoming industry's effort to rule the writing land.
Jared Eng, the 28-year-old writer of the extremely popular Just Jared. Eng's is a site that focuses exclusively on the lives of the rich and famous. But it's not just any fan site. A recent New York Times article chronicled just how successful Eng's blog has become. Personal, intimate access to Hollywood princes and debutants and a typically friendly (read: very little gossip) feel netted the site 3.3 million individual viewers in December. 3.3 million viewers for a five-man operation.
What happens when you combine millions of followers with the minimal overhead required by a blog?
“We’ve grown this into a real, viable business,” said Jason, Jared's oldest brother and the manager of the site's finances. “This year we’re easily going to gross seven figures.”
Meanwhile, Daniel Cavanaugh, 26, has been capturing the hyper local coverage that newspapers cling to as their last bastion to ward off the big scary internet since 2006. Cavanaugh's site covers the neighborhood of Gerritsen Beach, a 5,000-resident New York burrow southeast of Brooklyn that spans less than a mile in any direction, and reportedly gets more than 900 page hits per day.
Cavanaugh works with a degree of transparency that even newspapers will sometimes shy away from. He uses hidden cameras, never identifies himself as a reporter, and grants no port of harbor for "off the record" fliers. It's risky, and often dangerous, but readers soak it in.
He claims not to be a reporter, but really, Cavanaugh may be more of a reporter than most that dot the payrolls of newspapers around the country.
Thing is, the success of these blogsters and so many others like them may be more of a road map than a death knell.
Think, millions upon millions of readers gaining access in an instant. No more gathering today's news to tell the world tomorrow. Imagine if the New York Times or Chicago Tribune transitioned to an online-exclusive method. Say they had access to their already-present pool of readers, plus a few here and there that will access their publication now because of an enhanced online identity.
"But don't they already have that?"
Yes, and in some sense, that's the beauty of it; the infrastructure is already there.
"So why would this change anything?"
Here's an interesting little fact: The New York Times spends roughly $644 million per year on production and delivery costs. That's more than three times what the publication spends on salary and benefits for its writers, editors and so forth.
Say the Times were to take some of that freed-up capital and invest in a more attractive, more feature-rich online component, and absorb the rest as profit.
So, the Times, and for the sake of argument, any newspaper, could move to a system of online subscriptions and micro-transactions ($20 per month for unlimited access, or fifty cents for a given article or page). Yes, there would be growing pains, and the model would likely only see its greatest potential fulfilled if several, perhaps all, major papers adopted a similar model, but it could be the solution. It could even solve the age old issue of newspapers being forced to rely exclusively on ad revenue for sustenance.
So could the antidote for sick newspapers be found at the very same source as the poison? Could bloggers be using a shadow of the future model of journalism?
Newspapers today may not be struggling to survive the longest; they may be in a race to grow up the slowest.
1/25/11
Ailing Angelenos
I can't really tell what's worse.
The Los Angeles Times, a prestigious, if struggling, fixture of the journalism world has continued to offer exactly what it was tasked with offering. A once-in-a-lifetime storyline of mass misappropriation of California's already anemic budget was handled brilliantly. Every angle, from the misdeeds and wrongdoers to the collateral damage dealt to the everyman, was was covered with equal aplomb.
Resulting from the successful coverage is status as front-runner for a handful of Pulitzer awards, and continuing disdain from local readers.
In a recent New York Times article, one Edie Frère, a stationary store owner in the city’s Larchmont Village section, lamented the fall of the publication's once great socialite section.
“We need a paper that’s more, and this is less,” said Ms. Frère, 66. “I think it’s just not a world-class paper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world-class paper.”
Little did we all know that what separates a world-class paper is indeed not what happens in the world, but rather what happens in Lindsey Lohan's bedroom.
Frère is apparently not alone. Readership of the Los Angeles Times has plummeted at an even faster rate than what's expected of a major metropolitan newspaper. In the last decade, the Times' circulation, and in turn its staff, have been halved.
Again, I can't tell what's worse. That such a wonderful publication has had to survive through such staff-thinning and revenue-evaporating straights, or that its constituents, whose minds have apparently become as plastic as the rest of their husk-like bodies, haven't noticed.
The Los Angeles Times, a prestigious, if struggling, fixture of the journalism world has continued to offer exactly what it was tasked with offering. A once-in-a-lifetime storyline of mass misappropriation of California's already anemic budget was handled brilliantly. Every angle, from the misdeeds and wrongdoers to the collateral damage dealt to the everyman, was was covered with equal aplomb.
Resulting from the successful coverage is status as front-runner for a handful of Pulitzer awards, and continuing disdain from local readers.
In a recent New York Times article, one Edie Frère, a stationary store owner in the city’s Larchmont Village section, lamented the fall of the publication's once great socialite section.
“We need a paper that’s more, and this is less,” said Ms. Frère, 66. “I think it’s just not a world-class paper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world-class paper.”
Little did we all know that what separates a world-class paper is indeed not what happens in the world, but rather what happens in Lindsey Lohan's bedroom.
Frère is apparently not alone. Readership of the Los Angeles Times has plummeted at an even faster rate than what's expected of a major metropolitan newspaper. In the last decade, the Times' circulation, and in turn its staff, have been halved.
Again, I can't tell what's worse. That such a wonderful publication has had to survive through such staff-thinning and revenue-evaporating straights, or that its constituents, whose minds have apparently become as plastic as the rest of their husk-like bodies, haven't noticed.
1/24/11
On Editorializing
There is a shunned practice in news writing. Truly, there are several, but there is one in particular, the avoidance of which is among the most fundamental policies in the ethical reporter's cavern-thick rulebook. That forbidden practice is known as editorializing.
In essence, to editorialize is to insert oneself into the story.
"The City Council members submitted an insightful plan."
The plan was insightful? Says who, you?
A journalist is chronicler, not lecturer. A journalist leaves interpretation up to the reader. A journalist deals in transparency, not perspective. A journalist offers fact, not truth.
Much to the chagrin of this particular journalist, yours truly, who is charged with clinging to industry principles, editorializing is not just accepted in the blogosphere. It's commonplace. It's encouraged. Oh, what fun.
So what's a journalist to do? Years of conditioning have all but eliminated editorializing from reporters' bags of tricks while bloggers have instilled disdain in newsrooms for their freedom to wax opinion from one side of the mouth while enjoying food from reporters' plates in the other.
Personally, I figure it's time to get mine. Sure, sure, I'll still be Pavlov for my own staff, slowly stripping their writing of its opinion, but here, in this space, I'll deal in truths. I'll offer perspective. Maybe I'll have fun.
In essence, to editorialize is to insert oneself into the story.
"The City Council members submitted an insightful plan."
The plan was insightful? Says who, you?
A journalist is chronicler, not lecturer. A journalist leaves interpretation up to the reader. A journalist deals in transparency, not perspective. A journalist offers fact, not truth.
Much to the chagrin of this particular journalist, yours truly, who is charged with clinging to industry principles, editorializing is not just accepted in the blogosphere. It's commonplace. It's encouraged. Oh, what fun.
So what's a journalist to do? Years of conditioning have all but eliminated editorializing from reporters' bags of tricks while bloggers have instilled disdain in newsrooms for their freedom to wax opinion from one side of the mouth while enjoying food from reporters' plates in the other.
Personally, I figure it's time to get mine. Sure, sure, I'll still be Pavlov for my own staff, slowly stripping their writing of its opinion, but here, in this space, I'll deal in truths. I'll offer perspective. Maybe I'll have fun.
1/18/11
This is What We Do
The few, equipped with the sufficient abundance of both hubris and hutzpah, sacrifice the good life of the fret-free college student in favor of hours and days in a collegiate newsroom. The few who do too damn much for too damn little with only the hopes of standing out a nose more to an employer come judgement day. The few who listen to countless sources whose disdain for their newspaper often spills out in equal portion to the perspective they were sought to share in the first place.
It's my job to make that few do their job. And sometimes to make it harder.
Fact is, it's not easy to do what they do. Stress begets panic, panic begets hilarity, and boy, do they panic. What is easy is picking the parts of the day that err on the comedic side of tragedy and poking fun at them, or finding the heroism, or the frustration. That's what I do here, mostly at the expense of everyone but myself.
Any given deadline day, ads dance from page to page, stories come in late or just don't bother, and countless digital prayers in the form of text messages and e-mails go unanswered.
It's not a lazy day's work. It's not for the faint of heart. It steals hours upon hours of sleep. It ages you.
But something comes out of all that anguish. Herding a staff of so many intellectuals into the intimate confines of an editor's desk and dropping immense pressure on the group creates a trove of clever, angry and sometimes unabashedly honest nuggets that are beyond duplication. It's a twice-a-week experience that begs to be chronicled.
And so it shall be.
It's my job to make that few do their job. And sometimes to make it harder.
Fact is, it's not easy to do what they do. Stress begets panic, panic begets hilarity, and boy, do they panic. What is easy is picking the parts of the day that err on the comedic side of tragedy and poking fun at them, or finding the heroism, or the frustration. That's what I do here, mostly at the expense of everyone but myself.
Any given deadline day, ads dance from page to page, stories come in late or just don't bother, and countless digital prayers in the form of text messages and e-mails go unanswered.
It's not a lazy day's work. It's not for the faint of heart. It steals hours upon hours of sleep. It ages you.
But something comes out of all that anguish. Herding a staff of so many intellectuals into the intimate confines of an editor's desk and dropping immense pressure on the group creates a trove of clever, angry and sometimes unabashedly honest nuggets that are beyond duplication. It's a twice-a-week experience that begs to be chronicled.
And so it shall be.
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