Sam Zell, owner of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, has figured out that some reporters write more than others. He figures that he might as well fire the ones who write the least.
Logically this means favoring reporters who inflate their prose with filler phrases and who write stories that don’t require research so they can be completed quickly. Using this method the Los Angeles Times plans to reduce its news content by 83 pages a week, according to a story in The New York Times. Randy Michaels, chief operating officer for Zell’s company, said that readers don’t really like words anyway. What they want is “maps, graphics, lists, ranking and stats,” he said.
A reporter’s fondness for words, it turns out, is a professional disadvantage at a Zell newspaper.
On a personal note, one of my first ambitions in life was to be a journalist. I never expected that the nation’s great newspapers would deconstruct themselves in my life time. I’m actually aging better than they are.
This does raise the question of the future of journalism, and I think all the possible outcomes are highly speculative at this point. Newspapers have always been in a precarious state searching for stability among advertising revenues (and relationships with advertisers), editorial agendas, reader acceptance as expressed by the size of the subscriber base, and that great abstraction called journalistic quality. The decline in advertising revenue has set the whole shebang into freefall. I will bet a box of doughnuts that newspapers will not recover.
In the old days the newspaper provided a few key services to the reader.
· It delivered its content onto our porch or driveway everyday. We don’t need that any more because we have computer screens.
· It chunked an avalanche of information into seemingly manageable categories such as want ads, sports, and stories about foreign places.
· It imposed some standards on its employees that gave the reader a rough measure of the credibility of the stories.
· It drove hard through resistance to uncover information people didn’t want readers to have
Today newspapers also have some important disadvantages.
· It is difficult to connect the dots among stories separated by time or topic. News is considered perishable, and the industry isn’t looking for any fresh perspectives on that. There is little accumulated value to be derived from a newspaper’s own history.
· Newspapers, like airlines, don’t cooperate much with each other, even when it would help the reader.
· Attempts to involve the reader by inviting them to comment have mostly just added layers of junk and it just draws attention to the industry’s own neediness.
· Internet access to newspapers means that the reader sees the same Associated Press story all over the place. Why doesn’t the AP just become its own newspaper?
· Newspapers take unexplained flyers with the Seattle Times writing about New York City, and The New York Times writing about restaurants in Portland, Oregon. These seem to be random acts motivated primarily by where reporters go when they are on vacation.
What does all of this mean?
I can’t resist looking into my hazy crystal ball to speculate on what the future might look like. I begin listing the things I would like to have in my daily news.
· Modernize news categories to include: Credible (not day-dreamy) efforts to promote world peace; a talent-scout type summary of emerging players in various fields to tell me who to pay attention to; a view of the state of business that doesn’t obsess on A) crises B) executive treachery C) the stock market D) layoff statistics.
· I want to be able to trace a story through the history of news. How do I find the first story ever written about Barack Obama, or Madonna, for that matter? And I don’t want to pay extra for it.
· I want hyperlinks among online newspaper articles. If the Los Angeles Times carries a story about a tornado in Kansas, I want to be able to link from it to a Kansas newspaper that tells that same story in more detail.
I would also like to see a new approach to advertising. One way that appeals to me is that a “subscriber” to online versions of a newspaper would agree to view advertising from a certain number of companies chosen by the reader. The reader could identify, say, 20 companies whose advertisements he is willing to see, and the newspaper would have an option of choosing, say, five more. I would readily accept seeing advertisements from companies whose products and services interest me, and it would provide an excellent service to advertisers who could effectively target their campaigns.
That’s my take on the state of newspapers.
Do other people share my interests? I would like to learn about yours, whether they are the same as mine or not. And if you haven’t read a great newspaper lately, and you want to, you had better hurry!
