Lies, damn lies and internet "journalism"

In what I assume is a column (have you ever noticed it's hard to tell on the internet what is supposed to pass as hard news and what is opinion?) referring to the oft-discussed switch to non-profit newspapering in the Internet "magazine" Slate we find these as the first seven words:

Now that newspapers have stopped generating profits

Hmm. Let's see. In a fourth-quarter that should see a net loss for the S&P 500 companies, Gannett reported operating earnings of $158 million. New York Times Company reported $27.6 million in earnings. These are just the big boys. Most community newspapers don't report earnings because they are often privately held, but I doubt many posted operating losses. It's just that they don't get the routine 20 percent margin they are used to. Yes the big boys are swimming in debt they accumulated from buying up papers (and making the former newspaper-owning families rich), but so what? If GM were posting operating profits and merely needing time to refinance debt Detroit would be ecstatic. Where is the earnings statement of the internet only news operations? The truth is, most internet companies from Twitter to Facebook are losing money. But everyone wants to give them millions because "they're the future." Newspapers MAKE MONEY, but its cool to diss them, so let's celebrate their destruction, or mock those who are trying to figure out how to survive the onslaught.
I guess real journalism involves making up "facts" on the fly and editorializing out of your sphincter.

Hubris alert

The Jeff Jarvis ego train rolls along. Here's the latest prediction.

Newspapers will die this year and there’ll be silence before successors emerge.

Note, he did not say some newspapers will die. He didn't say American newspapers will die. He said newspapers will die. So if just one of the tens of thousands of papers worldwide survives 2009, we win. Does he really think even a majority of American newspapers will fold?

The Triple -J?

I'm starting to consider renaming my blog Jeff Jarvis is a Jerk (the triple J?)
What is offensive about Jarvis and his ivory tower assertions (it figures that one of the media's chief journalism biz pundits hails from academia) is not that he heralds the end of print. If that's your opinion (and it's a common one) that's fair. What's insulting to journalists everywhere is his criticism of the profession. Note this statement in a recent posting criticizing those who say Google should pay newspaper for posting, in total, the work journalists produce in small newspapers that gets picked up by the Associated Press

* Make Google pay. This one assumes that newspapers have a God-given right to the income they used to get from advertising and that Google (and craigslist and eBay and papers’ own customers with their own, free web sites, for that matter) stole it from the papers and thus are starving journalism. Show me where that commandment is written. Others competed with lazy, monopolistic newspapers, giving the marketplace a better service. Google and the rest owe them nothing. Indeed, newspapers should be paying Google for its distribution and promotion, as Google is the new newsstand and content gains value with links.

Shame on us for assuming that well-researched news stories that are vital to an informed public have intrinsic value. And newspapers are "lazy," while others competed, giving the marketplace a better service. How? When a bunch of computer geeks build an better Internet mouse trap to repackage the work of real journalists while doing absolutely NO original reporting, that's industrious competition??? And shame on us for thinking they should pay.
Jarvis' rejoinder, no doubt, is that his criticism is aimed at the business institutions behind newspapers and not the individual journalists. But journalists know we can't ply our trade covering one beat on one blog. Some sort of organization is needed. In the past, newspapers have provided that organization. In a newspaperless future, some Internet organization will provide that organization. The consumer loves the elegant simplicity that clearinghouses provide. If Google is that clearinghouse, fine. But I doubt Google has much interest in paying me to cover my city council. How lazy and monopolistic is that?

With friends like these, who needs enemies

Just when I was about to give Paul Gillin the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the future of newspapers, he comes out with this, lambasting NPR's David Folkenflik for suggesting that city's might be worse off without printed newspapers (what an NPR Luddite). Gillin suggests that if newspapers disappear, the vacuum of civic journalism will be filled elsewhere and decries Folkenflik's suggestion that a Connecticut governor's malfeasance would not have been exposed had the Hartford Courant not paid a journalist to expose it. Gillin just assumes that someone else would have put in the legwork. He offers no examples that the Web, now well over a decade old in ubiquitous usage, could do the same thing. He merely states it could be as a conclusion obvious to those not quite imbecilic. I've been pointed to one or two attempts at investigative journalism on the Web, such as ProPublica. It seems to be focusing its still meager resources on federal issues and linking extensively (surprise, surprise) to REAL newspapers He also mentions Talking Points Memo as "an emerging breed of online news organization." I went there. I found links to ABC and Reuters news stories, an interview with Robert Reich who seems to give interviews to anyone with a lens, and editorializing that was not clearly labeled as such.
If you see a blogger at your local city government meeting, please let me know. I'd be stunned. If you see a blog that involves in-person reporting at a city council, I'd be even more stunned. I do know there are fewer newspaper reporters at those meetings. The only ones happy about that are politicians, because smart bloggers know it means they have fewer links to underpin their editorializing.


By the way. If you want to see the final stages of Web-driven egomania, take look at what BuzzMachine has become. I don't think L.Ron Hubbard was as enamored with Dianetics as Jeff Jarvis seems to be with "What Would Google Do?"

Let the ideas come

I think there is a synergy going on among journalists across the country. No sooner had I thought about iTunes type downloads. Then it occurs to me that the Net could be a base for tapping the slice of society, and it is a big slice, that still loves newsPAPERS.

Try this out

Go to Yahoo! and enter the name of a city -- any city -- into the search box without hitting return. Picking at random I entered Alamogordo. The first suggestion offered by "search assist" is Alamogordo Daily News. That suggestion is followed by nm, new mexico, county and high school. I tried this pulling various and sundry city names out of my head. Invariably, the newspaper was in the top 5. Actually, the only city that didn't suggest a newspaper is Brunswick.
Paul Gillin tells of a Boston Globe online group meeting in which it was asked:

Is brand important? Maybe The New York Times brand is, but does the Boston Globe’s brand strike enough of a chord in people’s minds to distinguish its value? Brand may be the only thing newspapers have left in the long run, so that’s a critical question.

This little experiment, if it is, like the Yahoo site claims, based on actual searches, tells me people are looking for newspapers when searching a city.

Self-aggrandizement

One can never be 100 percent sure, but I believe I may have merited a mention in Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine. Note the comment that

I am accused by some of dancing on the graves of journalists’ jobs, of being happy that papers are dying.

That accusation may have been leveled elsewhere, which would underscore may impression of Jarvis. He, of course, denies the fact. But what he does admit is blaming journalists alongside business managers for the newspaper depression.

If I have an emotion associated with newspapers’ fall - and I’m not sure I do - it’s anger and disappointment at what Shafer describes as papers’ failure to think past a world seen in their own image, to bring news into the future and give it adequate stewardship.

Mr. Jarvis writes as if resistance to turning a newspaper into just another silly blog is ego. It's not ego, it's principle. It's what we were taught for decades in journalism schools. Those principles may no longer be profitable, but they are no less valuable. By his own standard, why is he using the term "adequate stewardship?" The Net, by it's nature, has no individual, only a collective stewardship. And the blogosphere, for all its popularity, is neither a place where much real journalism nor much profit goes on. Lots of news Web sites are popular, but not many of them, not even, as far as I can tell, HuffingtonPost, make money.