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September 18, 2015

Vacating the Tower of Truth

We all know too well how the technology-driven disruption of the news business has led newspapers to slash their staffs—nearly 23,500 jobs (out of 56,400) at U.S. daily newspapers since 2001. David Uberti has a neat follow-up piece in the September/October 2015 Columbia Journalism Review—on the demise of America’s great newspaper buildings. (See a related piece by Tim Adams in the Guardian.)

Some of the landmark edifices were actually destroyed once journalists had been re-located to less expensive digs—One Herald Plaza, the Miami Herald headquarters on Biscayne Bay since 1963, pictured here, was torn down last year by the property’s new owner, a Malaysian casino operator. The art deco Inquirer Building, home to the Philadelphia Inquirer for 87 years, nicknamed the “Tower of Truth,” was purchased in 2011 by a property developer who wants to turn it into a hotel. Symbolizing the struggles of the Inky, which had been sold five times in six years, the remaining staff moved to smaller premises a year later. Other papers that vacated historic sites in recent years include the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, and Chicago Sun-Times, among others.

Uberti’s CJR cover story nicely captures the nostalgia for the pre-digital newspaper trade. He quotes the late journalist Al Martinez’s 2007 reflection on his old Oakland Tribune newsroom:

We were a brotherhood of young lions back then, working hard through a half-dozen deadlines a day and drinking hard. We did it, we told ourselves, for the people’s right to know, and affixed it like a knight’s pennant to the end of a spear.

But Uberti’s piece, headlined “Why the sale of old newspaper buildings isn’t all bad,” points out that the fading businesses can use the cash to pay down debt or reinvest in new products. And there’s more. He writes:

After the Inquirer departed the Tower of Truth, Inga Saffron, the newspaper’s architecture critic, was optimistic that it could forge a new identity elsewhere. “Making our home in a newspaper building froze us psychologically in history, and kept us from interacting physically in the city,” she wrote in a 2012 Inquirer column. “The future for all media is an interactive one.” In that environment, she added the next year in a New Republic piece, “the most valuable real estate is online.”

Such new offices certainly won’t solve newspaper companies’ long-term financial problems. But they’re a symbolic step forward into the unknown, an acknowledgement that there’s no going back to what came before, however glorious it was. The resulting psychological benefits can’t be overstated, especially for the younger generation on whose shoulders the fate of journalism rests. If the companies that formerly produced only newspapers have any chance of survival, they will need that energy—not the baggage that accompanied vaunted historical headquarters.

This job isn’t as noble as it seems, most journalists would admit, but it’s as noble as any job is going to get. The real reason it’s so difficult to let go to of aging buildings is that they’re relics of an era in which journalism was simply a calling, not a struggling business with corporate ownership, quarterly earnings reports, not enough money coming in, and too many journalists going out. The physical structures remind us of a time when those in our profession felt in control of their own destiny.

—Scott MacLeod

September 7, 2015

Innovating at the New York Times

In March 2014, the New York Times produced a report titled “Innovation,” a fascinating internal study of the American news business in general and the Times in particular. The study (soon leaked on the Internet—download it here) candidly admitted that the paper’s readership was falling—including its audience online and on smartphone apps—and something needed to be done about it as a matter of urgency.

The fate of the New York Times is a concern for all of us. Whatever its flaws, the Times is the best newspaper in the world—if we judge it on the basis of the depth, breadth, and excellence of its reporting and commentary. Countless successful online media organizations are what they are today because they aggregate or pinch New York Times journalism. American democracy is suffering from the demise of legacy media institutions, and the fall of the Times would be an unbearable blow—an end to quality journalism as Americans know it.

The Innovation report made various recommendations to Times executives under the headings of “Growing Our Audience” and “Strengthening Our Newsroom.” One of the recommendations was for a belated but nonetheless revolutionary step: “Map a strategy to make the newsroom a truly digital-first organization.” Note the words: Digital-First.

Lately, some observers have been assessing how the Times is doing since the Innovation report was issued. A few views: here, here and here.

The consensus seems to be that the paper is taking the recommendations very seriously. Arthur Gregg Sultzburger, who led the Innovation team and is the son of the Times’ publisher, has spent the past year heading the Newsroom Strategy team on digital transformation. He has now been promoted to associate editor of the Times.

—Scott MacLeod

August 25, 2015

Digital Riptide Continues

The report from the Shorenstein Center on the transformation of the American news media was aptly titled “Riptide: What Really Happened to the News Business.”

The oral history published in 2013 is still worth a read (and a listen—see below), especially considering the inside knowledge of the report’s authors. John Huey was editor-in-chief of Time Inc. from 2006-2012 during years of digital upheaval in the Time Inc. stable of publications. Paul Sagan was president and editor of new media at Time Inc. from 1995-1997 when American media first started catching on to the threat/opportunity of digital. Martin Nisenholtz was the founding leader of nytimes.com in 1995 and chief executive of New York Times Digital from 1995-2005.

But Riptide is not a static report, it is an ongoing project based on the website www.digitalriptide.org. The website is an amazing repository of information, including videos and transcripts of interviews done for the project and documents such as internal memos about the digital transition written by industry leaders.

An excerpt from Riptide’s Introduction is below, but download the 2013 full report here.

For most of the 20^th century, any list of America’s wealthiest families would include quite a few publishers generally considered to be in the “news business”: the Hearsts, the Pulitzers, the Sulzbergers, the Grahams, the Chandlers, the Coxes, the Knights, the Ridders, the Luces, the Bancrofts—a tribute to the fabulous business model that once delivered the country its news. While many of those families remain wealthy today, their historic core businesses are in steep decline (or worse), and their position at the top of the wealth builders has long since been eclipsed by people with other names: Gates, Page and Brin and Schmidt, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Case, and Jobs—builders of digital platforms that, while not specifically targeted at the “news business,” have nonetheless severely disrupted it.

Reasonable people can—and do—debate whether the replacement of legacy media by new forms of information gathering and distribution—including citizen journalism and smartphone photojournalism, crowdsourcing, universal access to data and, of course, a world awash in Twitter feeds—makes democracy more or less vulnerable. Usually the argument is reduced to a couple of symbolic questions: Who’s going to pay for the Baghdad bureau? Who’s going to replace the watchdog function at city hall traditionally provided by healthy metro newspapers?

Not everybody is a fan of the study. Some critics complained that the insider perspective of the authors blinded them to some realities of the digital revolution. For example, they noted that of the 61 movers and shakers initially interviewed for the study, five were (white) women, two were men of color, and zero were women of color.

The authors retort that their study is a work in progress, that 20 new interviews have been added (there are now 12 women listed as interviewees), and that they welcome suggestions for further voices or topics. Email: shorenstein_center@hks.harvard.edu.

—Scott MacLeod

August 19, 2015

Superheroes to the Rescue

To see a brighter future for journalism, there are two people you should know: Christopher Callahan and Eric Newton.

Callahan is the visionary dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In the last 10 years he’s turned Cronkite into perhaps the best journalism program in the United States. His record of achievement is mind-blowing, but here are just a few highlights from his ASU biography:

Callahan has brought to the Cronkite School the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, the Carnegie-Knight News21 digital journalism initiative, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship program for international journalists.

He spearheaded the creation of Cronkite News Service, (a daily statewide news service providing content on all platforms to news organizations), the New Media Innovation Lab (a research and development lab), Cronkite NewsWatch (a nightly newscast that reaches more than 1 million households on PBS), the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship (where students develop their own digital media products), Cronkite News (a daily news website focusing on statewide issues) and the Cronkite New Media Academy (which provides multimedia training to professional journalists).

Now Newton has joined Callahan’s team as the Cronkite school’s innovation chief. According to ASU’s announcement, Newton “will work closely with the school’s leadership to drive new, cutting-edge ideas and initiatives at Cronkite News, the school’s multiplatform daily news operation. Cronkite News will serve as a test bed for news industry innovations and experimentation while providing critical content to news consumers in Arizona and across the country.”

Newton comes to Cronkite after an illustrious journalism career including the last 15 years at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where he pioneered efforts to, among other things, reform journalism education and bring it into the digital age. His work led to the 2011 Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, an effort to advance journalism by reinvigorating journalism schools and programs.

Newton knows his stuff. Before joining Knight, he was the founding managing editor of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and before that was city editor, assistant managing editor and managing editor of the Oakland Tribune. He memorably pinpointed the challenges we face in journalism and journalism education in a talk about the Carnegie-Knight initiative at Middle Tennessee State University in 2013:

We had entered the digital age, and it was a time of plenty and of paradox. More readers, less advertising revenue. More writing, less journalism. More information, less meaning. More opportunity, less predictability.

One point was clear. All institutions, including academia, suddenly were out of date. That created more questions than we had answers. Could universities embrace continuous change? Might journalism and mass communication education have a new role to play in the future of news?

Seven years later, I can tell you the answer is yes. Universities can help lead the way through the era of “creative destruction.” But only if they are willing to destroy and recreate themselves.

And that’s the way it is (sorry, couldn’t resist the Uncle Walter pun), a duo battling like superheros against the odds so that journalism (and journalism education) may live to see another day.

—Scott MacLeod

August 16, 2015

The Journalists’ Bard

It’s a grand, grand caper. You get to leave, go talk to strangers, ask them anything, come back, type up their stories, edit the tape. That’s not gonna retire your loans as quickly as it should, and it’s not going to turn you into a person who’s worried about what kind of car they should buy, but that’s kind of as it should be. I mean, it beats working.

—David Carr (1956-2015)

That’s from David Carr’s commencement address in 2014 at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, a paean to his profession that manages to be sentimental and hard-boiled at the same time. As the Media Equation columnist and culture writer for the New York Times, Carr captured the zeitgeist of a world turned upside down by the Internet better than anyone.

“David was a bard for journalists because he figured out how to connect our past with our present,” David Leonhardt wrote in an appreciation in the Times. “He venerated old-fashioned reporting and yet described today as a ‘golden age’ for journalists.”

Carr collapsed in the Times’ newsroom and later died of complications from lung cancer last February, at age 58. He lives on; for example, here in the video of his Berkeley commencement address, as well as in Page One, Andrew Rossi’s great 2011 documentary about the New York Times struggling with the transformation of the news business.

—Scott MacLeod

Category: American media