Reporting lives even if newspapers don't

So, in your opinion, only the most talented fraction of the current crop of professional reporters is needed to maintain reporting as we know it in this country?

 

No I didn't say anything like that. Please work on your reading comprehension. I don't know what percentage of current newspaper journalists will make the transition nor would I be willing to make a guess beyond that it certainly won't be everybody.

 

Again, we seem to be talking on the margins here. Consider a middle product such as the Seattle P-I -- bright (and mostly growing) readership base, JOA challenges, OK competitor, economic boom and still-going bust. When it stopped losing money, or when Hearst decided it wasn't making enough money (and the real answer is irrelevant), it cut its editorial staff by almost 90 percent when it went online. Was each person cut a star? Of course not. But it was a reasonable job in an attractive place to live. Some startups will work, and some online operations might become gangbusters. But those nearly normal jobs are not coming back to the majority of journalists. And that's not being pessimistic; it's the reality for thousands of people who don't want to cobble three gigs and get paid $10 for a blog post to make ends meet.

 

Well, if you aren't willing to make a guess, then you aren't really disputing my estimate, which is that we're looking at roughly 15% of the total jobs we had in 2006, and most of those will be filled with steady turnover of j-school grads who think $22k/year is plenty.

If someone wants to analyze the situation and come up with their own estimate, then we can respectfully disagree. If someone just wants to say "I'm sure it'll all be fine" without doing any real analysis, I can still respectfully disagree, but I'm going to paint their argument that way if that's what it is.

 

Dug up and posted for Flatirons' benefit...

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/43742/

FYI: You can specifically check the origins of "Looser" there, but there's lots of other fun and interesting "inside" information, too.

 

What "real" analysis have you done? You just whine about the lack of strong online revenue models and suggesting (hysterically) that because your market hasn't figured one out yet that it cannot ever be done; that somehow as of March 2009 we've exhausted all entrepreneurial ingenuity. Others of us, backed with a grasp economic history, believe that innovation will ultimately rule the day and that news can resurrect itself as a growth industry.

Nobody except the stupid, greedy, short-sighted publishers who fucked themselves over with their blind pursuit of margin over quality should care if newspaper companies take part in that resurrection. Anyone hitching their career to their local newspaper in the current economic climate is taking a big risk.

And re: the steady stream of j-school grads who accept low compensation, that's been the case for about 40 years now in newspaper journalism (you may have been first hired that way yourself) and a big part of the downward spiral of news products in general.

 

If you are going to use words like "whiny" and "hysterical," then I'm going to have to counter with "desperate self-delusion," because that's all your "grasp of economic history" is. It's a blind faith that because you want a certain outcome, the market will find a way to make it happen. Markets don't work that way.

Yes, in 2009, fifteen years after the web first made a mark on the national scene, the entrepreneurial options for making reporting work on a large scale on the web are pretty much exhausted. The fact that no one is coming up with any new ideas, even in the death throes of the industry, is as strong an evidence that anyone who doesn't have a crystal ball can provide.

I respect your opinion in the sense that rational people can look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions, but I'm not going to let it go unchallenged.

 

You probably don't remember what TV was like in 1955, but that's the place on on television's time line comparable to the current period on the Internet. It's a medium we're just beginning to understand and, meanwhile, commerce isn't standing still. So, yes, I'm crazy optimistic that American businesspeople will find better ways to monetize all content, including hard news. I don't care whether newspaper publishers and their established brands take part or not.

 

Television was quite profitable by the 1950s, with a strong business model already in place (advertising agencies produced television shows as essentially large commercials for their clients).

 

Actually very little changed in the television business model the first 15 years. It was essentially the same sponsorship model transferred over from radio programming. The greatest innovations would take place over the next 20 years, driven by increased competition.

 

Sort of. The innovations came when televisions became pervasive enough that there was more money to be made in larger-scale operations that reached all those new eyes.

Since the eyes are already here in the internet era, that's a bad parallel.

 

Audience size for television was already tremendous in 1955 but, unlike the Web, its audience was concentrated (more captive) because of the higher cost of entry and that really didn't begin to change until cable became widespread in the '80s.

What hasn't been determined on the Web is how to make those eyeballs pay for what they see because early innovators (for some valid reasons) valued audience size (captured traffic) and brand development over immediate revenue opportunities within a highly splintered medium.

Most newspaper publishers, which had much to gain, failed to embrace the Web and wasted far too much time and money fighting the inevitable. They didn't foresee brands like Craig's List coming along and stealing their lunch money.

But because there's money to be made there will be more and more local news brands on the Web that will require more local news reporting. They may or may not be carried over from a newspaper brand but in the end that doesn't matter at all as long as the products meet the needs of the consumer.

I know this sounds crazy optimistic to you but your scenario that there will be no demand for local news and local news reporting will cease to exist just doesn't make sense.