Newspaper endorsements

Well, hopefully, your editorial board/decisions are made autonomously from the newsroom. That would be the difference.

 

The Press-Register in Mobile once said something along the lines of "We won't endorse a candidate in the Sheriff's race, but we do propose voting for anyone other than the incumbent."

That wasn't the exact wording, but I found it pretty hilarious.

 

I would rather see newspapers get out of the opinion business altogether, including endorsements, because opinion is rampant (at no charge) on the Internet.

But I disagree with the original point. No newspaper is immune to the current conditions, and you can't seriously be arguing that means that every newspaper is in that situation because the current publisher is incompetent. That's a bit simplistic and would be an extraordinary coincidence, involving not just the hiring of idiots all at once but the holdover publishers from better times all losing their fastball in the same year.

 

The current economic conditions are providing great cover for the incompetent publishers, making it hard to tell them from the competent ones. Just like near-monopoly conditions provided cover in the other direction back in the day, floating the incompetents' boats right along with the competents'.

But it sure would be nice if we could identify just a half dozen newspaper publishers, out of the whole lot of them, who actually have some inspiration and new ideas to pursue -- ideas that don't entail crushing a number of their journalists' careers and producing a lesser product for lower revenues.

 

Well, it's like when some people say that newspapers are going down the drain because they're too liberal and people are rejecting the newspapers for that reason. And then you point out that conservative newspapers are doing as poorly, and sometimes even worse, financially. So it isn't that simple.

The publisher may sit on the editorial board, may even dictate who gets endorsed. But the person on the opinion staff who's writing the endorsement not only has nothing to do with the paper's business side, he or she likely has no input in the newsroom because usually the editorial page is a distinct entity, independent from the newsroom, and thus no more responsible that any other worker bee for the paper's financial difficulties.

Some great newspapers with multiple Pulitzers died in the 1960s-1990s, and some crappy ones lived on. I don't think a paper's financial situation qualifies it or disqualifies it from competently analyzing a political race. The two are separate.

 

Endorsements don't mean shit, and they give critics fuel for their, "See, you're against my candidate" arguments.

 

Well, there's another myopic stance. If we stopped coverage to curb opposing views or sentiments, well, what would we do? Isn't that kind of the gig?

 

Endorsements aren't coverage.

 

Pure institutional ego matched with pure institutional inertia.
Nothing more.
Although the ChiTrib going D in a presidential is kind of noteworrthy.
They didn't even go for homeboy Adlai.

 

So, the very first time these papers mentioned these candidates was to give an endorsement? I see where this is going.

 

I guess I just find an irony in that our business seems to know how everybody else should run their business -- from athletic teams to governments -- but we can't figure out how to make our own business operate.