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Week Of February 5, 2007 - Mon / Wed / Fri
February 5, 2007
This Thing We Do…
Part II think a lot about journalism these days. Of course, I live in the world of entertainment journalism, so there is a skewed perspective. That said, we are kind of the porno of the journalism game… the most disrespected, but still the canary in the mineshaft. It doesn't really matter that entertainment journalism is rarely journalism at all. What matters is that it draws a crowd that includes both the serious-minded folks who like to talk about how above it they are yet know all about Britney's underpants, as well as those who really do care whether Ashton and Demi are happy this month.
Big Time Journalism is, no matter how good and honorable the intentions, a business. Like any business, things change quite a bit as the infrastructure grows. In many ways, the infrastructure is what makes Traditional Media different from New Media.
It's not unlike the movie business. Why can't a studio seem to make a down and dirty comedy for less than $40 million when there are just a handful of movies in the entire history of non-US cinema that cost that much to produce? An MPAA studio has a lot of overhead. They have large permanent staffs and development departments and real estate and overhead deals and incredibly expensive execs (who have to be highly paid because most of them could easily go out and make more as producers but stay because they like being on the "buying" side and they get big paychecks and bonuses).
Print journalists are not terribly well paid, considering the celebrity of many of them. But they are paid pretty well by the standards of Joe Average. And a daily newspaper or weekly magazine has a lot of journalists delivering a lot of content every day/week. The traditions of the industry have demanded that the "major" papers do a lot of the work for themselves, as opposed to filling the majority of their pages with pieces from wire services or even from their own syndicate of papers.
USA Today was really the first national newspaper, though the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both had some level of national distribution before "McPaper" was launched. And ironically, after that paper was derided for many years as lightweight, the thinking behind the paper understood what the future would look like long before the future happened. USA Today was a niche paper before niche was cool… much the way the Wall Street Journal has always been a niche, servicing business readers. What was unique about USA Today was that the niche was ubiquity. It was the daily digest of all the news, not very deep, not very long stories, but enough to catch you up. And the paper focused from the beginning on what could not be easily gotten in local papers… a national view of sports and a magazine style look at entertainment.
Since USA Today launched, there have been winners and losers in similar space to theirs. The National was a great daily sports paper that used a network of reporters from local papers all over the country, much as ESPN.com does now. But the expense of a daily operation and the resistance back then to a rack price of 50 cents killed the enterprise. After all, USA Today could give you much of the same basic content plus three other sections for the same price. Meanwhile, Entertainment Weekly has been hugely successful and the next level of entertainment journalism completeness, never competing directly with USA Today on either price or feel.
The New York Times and The Washington Post competed for decades as the two "serious" newspapers, WSJ being serious but in a different niche. Somehow, a decade after Watergate, The New York Times took on a level of clear dominance by expanding as a national paper. I don't know how things played out. I just know the result. That left America with three truly national papers, each of which really owned its own space.
This didn't mean that there weren't a lot of great newspapers out there, often doing superior work in their arena of specialty, whether The Miami Herald covering Latin and South America or The Los Angeles Times on The Company Town beat or The Chicago Tribune, muscularly speaking to America's middle, which the coasts often seem to forget exist and yet drives much of American culture. Of course, each of these papers was primarily servicing local constituencies and each was (and is) very competitive about being the very best they can be. The idea that giving up part of the workload to a wire service or other papers in their syndicate was (and is) seen as a failure of quality.
The internet changed everything long before the battle between internet journalists/pundits (always referred to as "bloggers" by the dismissive) and traditional print journalists began. The idea that information was not something proprietary to the fourth estate "gate keepers," but was, in fact, greater than the people packaging it for consumption is still not, in my opinion, fully appreciated by Traditional Media.
The wave of opinion as news, represented by "The Bloggers," is real and a part of the discussion that should be taken a lot more seriously than it has been, both by the old and the new. Like any other democratic medium, the cream is not necessarily what rises. And while many Traditional Media-ists find some favorites to embrace, support, and promote, we still have the NY and LA Times regularly referring to me and others as "internet bloggers" with no site accreditation or the respect of the basic staple of journalism, the phone call, before claiming insight into our positions.
At the same time, The New York Times' Oscar blogger, veteran media writer David Carr, has embraced a wide swath of internet sites and personalities, sometimes kindly and sometimes with a sharp keypoard. But he is given the freedom to determine how to value untraditional media in association with The Paper of Record. Being a fair reporter, if he decides to give space to any kind of writer, he gives fair credit. We don't always agree on what he should be giving an extended voice to, but The Bagger certainly gets full credit for consistency, unlike the print/web version of his paper.
But one of the horrors I have encountered lately is the notion, by the New Media side, that the fact that anyone can have a website is, somehow, an indicator that all things are equal. They are not. Nor should they be.
Things are not equal for all newspapers either. A great reporter may be at, for instance, The Salt Lake Tribune, while the paper itself doesn't have the resources to compete on national stories with the majors. The greatest thing about the internet is that any one great story can compete, in a real way, with The New York Times, whether that story is from a Traditional Media source or an online source. Popularity does not necessarily define quality. But whatever reason there is for popularity is earned on the web.
And this seems to be very troubling for a lot of Traditional Media because the role of gatekeeper is sliding daily. There is no reason why the New York or Los Angeles Times should not be able to compete. They hire experienced, smart, skilled journalists. But the popularity we all seek - because popularity equals eyeballs equals advertising revenue equals the mortgage - is being challenged by more voices - online and off - than ever before. And the competition is not necessarily fair.
Roger Ebert has drawn, by far, the most traffic to the Chicago Sun-Times website. Page Six is surely read by many multiples of the number of people who read the rest of the New York Post. The gossipy Gawker and Defamer are clearly the most popular of all the Gawker Media sites, most of which are far more specifically and intelligently informational.
Of course, the whipping boys for Traditional Media are going to be New Media, not The Brethren of other print outlets. When Bill Keller of The New York Times acknowledges publicly that he feels he can easily cherrypick the talent at The Los Angeles Times with impunity, that is a big news story. When Patrick Goldstein does his regular "I hate The Bloggers" schtick, it's just boys being boys.
Still, Traditional Media is right to be suspect of blogs and websites. What has long been presumed about the integrity of Traditional Media is based on standards that have no been established for all websites. Any schmuck really can have a site. But as we have learned in recent years, and learn more every day, the assumptive integrity of Traditional Media is as flawed as the assumptive integrity of politicians, pre-Watergate.
Okay… perhaps that goes too far. Traditional Media has more integrity than politicians. But you get the comparison…
The standards in web-based media vary more dramatically than they do in Traditional Media. However, quality is quality. And standards can be judged fairly (and unfairly) over time. But the time in which Traditional Media attempts to dismiss New Media by putting all sites/blogs in one pile or by pretending that web-based journalism doesn't exist is finally turning the corner so that TM will be more embarrassed every time they pull that stunt.
But much more significantly, TM is so busy raging against the web growing, become more traditional, more responsible, and more respected in many quarters that "it" is missing the bigger picture. The competition may be on the web. But it is even more likely to be across the country or across the globe. The Guardian, in London, is a much bigger problem for The Los Angeles Times' film coverage than is any single web-based outlet.
The niche ownerships of USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times will be challenged by ongoing changes in the media world. But all three have such significant headstarts in establishing their positions that they will be hard to overcome. Print will remain an important part of all of their futures, just as the broadcast television networks have something of value that is different than the rest of the 500 channel universe. The nets will not look the same in a decade. But they are in a strong position to survive and thrive delivering what they know so well how to deliver.
On Wednesday, the challenge of finding a shared language between old and new media.
E Me.
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