An interview with Dean Baquet, found among coverage of the industry's struggles

2muchcoffeeman · Apr 14, 2007

As part of its March/April issue, Mother Jones has a very good package on the state of newspapers today.

Now, I know one or two of you are saying, "Mother Jones?!? That's a heathen liberal rag!!!" Bear with me, please. Anyone in the newspaper industry will find this package interesting reading.

The main feature, Breaking The News, is here (3 pages).

One of the sidebars deals with the demise of Dean Baquet at the Los Angeles Times, a topic which has been revisited in this forum repeatedly. The sidebar itself is excellent, and the magazine went the unusual extra step of posting the entire Baquet interview online here. (It should be noted that the interview took place last December, long before the recent Trib buyout.)

Saw some great quotes in there ...

DB: Early on, there were some cuts that John and I made that we understood. Everybody was cutting. I'm not radical in saying that newspapers shouldn't be realistic and cut, but my issue was that there was no plan and it was just constant. It wasn't going to end.

DB: You just get the sense that a lot of newspapers are cutting without any plan. There are not enough people saying, "Okay, well maybe we can cut here so we can build on the web." Some people have criticized me for not saying, "Let's cut here and move resources to the web." The reality was that's not true. That's exactly what I proposed. I proposed that we build up more resources on the web.

MJ: When did you propose that?

DB: A year ago. But I think the reality is that newspapers are in a panic. The cutting is not part of anything. It's not moving towards anything. It's not part of a plan. It's to prop up margins that maybe can't be propped up at the same level.

What was untenable were the specific ownership demands being made of me and specific cuts being asked of me. It didn't become obvious to me until they started asking for cuts several months ago. I had done, along with John, significant cutting in the paper. We had cut 25 percent of the staff or more, from the newsroom, between layoffs, buyouts, and attrition. When they came back for more, I thought it was untenable. I said, "This is at the point now when it is going to hurt the paper." I don't know how you can keep leading a newsroom when you have an annual bloodletting.
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Another sidebar is an op-ed by somebody who writes a BLOG! He says the mainstream newspaper has to be saved because ... well, because it fills a role that TV news has no interest in:

Kevin Drum said:

In fact, blogs and the msm are symbiotic. Blogs at their best improve on msm reporting both by holding reporters to account and by latching onto complex topics and talking about them in a conversational style that professional reporters just can't match. But the blogosphere would shrivel and die without a steady diet of news reporting from paid professionals.

Which leads us to the dirty little secret of newsgathering: Serious, daily, national reporting is overwhelmingly the preserve of a tiny handful of big-city newspapers with large staffs and worldwide bureaus. Of these, the Los Angeles Times is under pressure to downsize by its parent company, as is the Washington Post. Knight Ridder was recently purchased by McClatchy. And every big-metro daily in the country, including the still-independent New York Times, is under relentless pressure from deteriorating circulation, poor demographics, loss of classified ad revenue to the Internet, and the decline of urban department stores—storms that private owners might have weathered but institutional investors have no stomach for.

When these dailies succumb, there's really nothing to replace them. Television news does very little in-depth daily reporting, most radio is hopeless, and blogs simply don't have the resources. Magazines do some good work but come out only weekly or monthly. So while the raw numbers of media consolidation may be the most dramatic symptom of the problem, it's the small number of national dailies at the core of today's msm that ought to be the biggest cause for concern. And when they go? For the most part, blogs will go with them. Enjoy them while you can.
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There was also this Baquet comment:

MJ: How did you feel about the Chicago Cubs giving Alfonso Soriano a billion dollars after the Tribune had asked so much of you in terms of cuts?

DB: I'll pass on that one.
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fishwrapper · Apr 14, 2007

Dean -- one can see -- looks into the mirror and his eyes are able to see Superman.
Others don't see the same reflection.

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An interview with Dean Baquet, found among coverage of the industry's struggles

2muchcoffeeman Well-Known Member

fishwrapper Active Member

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An interview with Dean Baquet, found among coverage of the industry's struggles

2muchcoffeeman Well-Known Member

fishwrapper Active Member

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