But where, exactly? Very interesting. Jay Fitzgerald mocks the pay ($30,000 to $35,000 for an editor, $25,000 to $27,000 for a reporter). But there are plenty of community newspapers that pay worse than that for all except their most senior people.
Month: August 2009
Take two and call me in the morning
These two pieces really need to be read together. In today’s New York Times, media columnist David Carr takes a look at Gannett’s Journal News, in Westchester County, which has essentially fired the whole staff and invited everyone to reapply.
It sounds brutal — OK, it is brutal — but with the business model irretrievably broken, it makes perfect sense to blow everything up and start over. If it’s inevitable that the paper is going to end up with a much smaller staff, then it’s vital that the right people get to keep their jobs.
The second piece is a blog post by Howard Owens, the former GateHouse digital-publishing director who’s now publisher of the Batavian, a community news site covering the area between Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y.
Although much of Owens’ post is about why it makes sense for newspaper companies to separate print and online news operations, the heart of it is that since online advertising can only grow so much, the proper response is to cut expenses in order to reach break-even. He writes:
In a market where the newspaper newsroom might cost $10 million, I knew how to make $1 million online, or even $2 million, but I didn’t know — and still don’t — how to make $10 million.
So if I can make a million online, why do I need operate a $10 million newsroom, especially given the greater efficiencies of online publishing?
It’s possible to make money in online journalism. What may not be possible is for large, legacy news organizations — especially newspapers — to survive unless their executives are willing to rethink everything they do.
Richard Egan’s tragic end
EMC co-founder Richard Egan, battling cancer, died on Friday. From there, stories in the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald diverge considerably — it appears that Egan committed suicide, which the Herald had on Saturday, but which the Globe didn’t have until Sunday. John Carroll explains here and here.
Kindergarten hell
It has nothing to do with Ted Kennedy’s funeral or the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. But the most important piece of reporting I read this weekend was Patti Hartigan’s article in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine on government mandates that are turning kindergarten — kindergarten — into a high-stakes hell.
The future of investigative reporting?
If you looked closely, you may have noticed that the cover story of the New York Times Magazine yesterday — a long, harrowing examination of accusations that the staff of a New Orleans hospital euthanized several patients following Hurricane Katrina — was a collaboration with ProPublica, a non-profit investigative-reporting foundation.
According to Zachary Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab, the 13,000-word story may have cost as much as $400,000 (perhaps a bit of an exaggeration) to produce — a huge chunk for the Times, but in this case the paper spent nothing: a grant from the Kaiser Foundation paid for much of the reporting. It’s the sort of alternative funding model that may help to ensure the future of investigative journalism.
The story, by ProPublica’s Sheri Fink, is available not only on the Times’ Web site, but also at ProPublica.org. And starting Sept. 29, anyone can run it for free as long as proper attribution is provided.
Fink’s investigation centers on Dr. Anna Pou, a cancer specialist who may have killed several patients who, in her judgment, were near the end of their lives and could not be rescued. As with much good investigative reporting, the story is inconclusive, yet absolutely riveting in describing the despair that had settled over Memorial Medical Center — sweltering, without power and all but abandoned.
Implicit is that regardless of Pou’s actions, the real blame should be laid at the feet of incompetent government officials who abandoned New Orleans to its fate for days on end.
Reminder: Bloggers unite for Monti Scholars
The radio talk show “Pundit Review,” on WRKO (AM 680), will devote the 8 p.m. hour tonight to raise money for a scholarship fund in honor of SFC Jared C. Monti, killed while trying to save his comrades in Afghanistan. You can donate now by clicking here, or on the small graphic in the upper-right-hand corner of this blog. Here’s my earlier item explaining what it’s all about.
Monday update: Kevin Whalen, the host of “Pundit Review,” reports that the effort raised nearly $3,000. You can still give.
She’s changing the climate. Ask her how!
Greta Browne is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister who’s traveling the country in hopes of raising public awareness about global warming. By her own telling, the unconvinced remain unconvinced. And though she calls her journey a walk (OK, there is some walking involved), her actual mode of transportation is what she calls “a disgusting gas guzzler.”
I have some advice for Browne: Go home. And stay there.
Photo of Browne’s “gypsy wagon” is taken from her blog, For All the Grandchildren.
The Krauthammer compromise
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, a physician, suggests what sounds to me (admittedly no expert on this phenomenally complex subject) like a reasonable compromise that would deliver to President Obama the universal health-care bill he wants while overcoming most of the objections.
Here’s the problem. Krauthammer does not acknowledge the very real possibility that Republican leaders have settled on defeating health-care reform as a strategy for politically wounding Obama — the details be damned. I suspect that Obama could embrace the Krauthammer ideas in total, only to see the GOP move the goal posts on him. (Via Jay Fitzgerald.)
Optimism amid the newspaper gloom
Two pieces of news prompt this post. First, the Associated Press reports that newspaper advertising was down 29 percent in the second quarter of 2009, a devastating decline that is sure to renew questions as to how much longer the traditional newspaper business can hang on. Second, the Boston Globe’s main football writer, Mike Reiss, is leaving for a new ESPN Web site to be called ESPNBoston.
What do these two events have in common? They are further evidence that media organizations whose business models are relatively healthy have an opportunity to invade the turf traditionally occupied by newspapers. That doesn’t offer much hope for newspaper publishers. But it’s certainly cause for optimism among those who want to see journalism survive — and something worried journalism students should take solace from as well.
ESPNBoston, which has not yet launched, is not to be confused with the radio station of the same name — an also-ran with two bad signals, now reduced to spectator status in the sports-talk battle between WEEI (AM 850) and WBZ-FM (98.5). ESPNBoston, writes the Globe’s Chad Finn, is part of a strategy by the parent company to launch regional Web sites in the most sports-crazed parts of the country.
Disney-owned ESPN, among other things, operates wildly successful cable channels, publishes a magazine and produces a Web site that, according to Quantcast.com, attracts between 14 million and 20 million unique visitors each month. I don’t pretend to know what ESPN’s business strategy is for the new local sites, but it seems logical that company executives would be willing to subsidize them for quite a while if they help cement brand loyalty.
Reiss is not the only local sports reporter to leave for sites operated by non-newspaper companies. Previously, the Boston Herald lost Rob Bradford to WEEI.com, and Globe baseball writer Gordon Edes decamped to Yahoo. The Globe and the Herald have always had good sports sections, and their coverage has helped drive a lot of circulation. Their sports sections are still good, but now they must compete with online coverage produced by companies with fewer financial problems than the newspaper business is experiencing.
And sports is just one example. Tom Palmer retired from the development beat at the Globe last year and kept right on doing his thing for McDermott Ventures, a public-relations firm — a relationship that may raise eyebrows among journalism ethicists, but that is sure to becoming increasingly common.
Also in 2008, Boston.com political blogger James Pindell left to head a national network of state political sites called Politicker.com. The project was ahead of its time, and it folded in the midst of last fall’s economic crisis. But the idea lives on: Pindell is now trying a similar project on his own in New Hampshire.
Finally, and not to repeat myself, but one of the more interesting projects under way right now is the redesigned WBUR.org, published by Boston’s public-radio powerhouse, WBUR (90.9 FM); the site combines local and NPR news into a quality online newspaper. Public radio has not been immune from having to make recession-related cuts. But, unlike newspapers, both its distribution model (commuters stuck in their cars) and its business model (listener contributions, corporate underwriting and grants, supplemented with a small amount of taxpayer money) remain intact.
If the next owner of the Globe keeps on cutting, it’s easy to imagine WBUR.org morphing into a real alternative. And, of course, there’s nothing to stop the city’s television news operations from pumping up their Web sites, though they, like the newspaper business, are experiencing tough economic times.
We often hear that if newspapers die, there will be nothing left but amateur citizen-media sites that, for all their strengths, lack the capacity to do the sort of public-interest journalism a democracy needs to thrive. In fact, there is reason to be a lot more optimistic than that. I hope newspaper companies can find a way of combining their print and online operations so they can thrive for years to come. But if they can’t, it won’t be the end of journalism.
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk
There’s an entertaining if pedantic review in today’s New York Times of the Stoogeum, a museum in suburban Philadelphia that’s dedicated to the legacy of the Three Stooges. The next time I get to Philly, I’ll make sure to stop by.