Gannett – Page 20 – Media Nation

How public should public gun records be?

There is public information, and there is public information.

If someone makes publicly available data about sex offenders more readily accessible, that might help protect children. But it could also make it more difficult for offenders who have finished paying their debt to society to get on with their lives — theoretically increasing the risk that they will reoffend.

If the names and addresses of people who signed a petition in opposition to same-sex marriage are posted online, it may expose the tactics of anti-marriage activists who fooled people into thinking they were signing something else. But it could also expose sincere gay-marriage opponents to ridicule or worse for simply exercising their democratic rights.

It’s a discussion I’ve had with my students on several occasions, and now the dilemma has spread to guns. The Journal News, a Gannett paper that covers the affluent suburbs of Westchester County, N.Y., and beyond, has put together a map showing the names and addresses of people who hold permits for handguns, which it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“About 44,000 people in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam — one out of every 23 adults — are licensed to own a handgun,” writes Dwight R. Worley of The Journal News.

As with the examples I cited up top, this is public information. The Journal News has every legal right to do this. But it has prompted an outcry from gun owners and others who say the information ought to be private. One critic has responded by posting the names, home addresses and personal information of every Journal News employee he can find, reports Patrick Clark of The New York Observer.

Greg Mitchell has a detailed report at The Nation, and J. David Goodman recaps the story at The New York Times.

Personally, I’m not sure what to make of this. I’ve been trying to think of a journalistic or social good that has been accomplished by publishing this, and I’m having a hard time thinking of one. I guess if I had a neighbor who behaved erratically, I’d want to know if he might have a legally obtained gun. But that seems like a stretch.

Before The Journal News put together its map, the information fell into a gray area — public, yes, but not easily accessible. Is there a reason for some types of information to be public but also hard to get? Is there anything we can or should do about that in the age of the Internet?

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.

Good jobs at good wages

Context is everything. Yesterday, I wrote about the compensation packages of GateHouse Media’s top two officials, chief executive Michael Reed and the just-promoted president and chief operating officer, Kirk Davis.

What I wrote was accurate, but I failed to consider what top executives might be making at other newspaper companies. As it turns out, there’s nothing special about Reed’s salary ($925,000 in 2007) or Davis’ (about $461,000). Reed’s 2006 compensation, $6.4 million, included a lot of stock, the value of which has presumably all but disappeared.

With 2007 revenues of $589 million, GateHouse is on the smaller end of the publicly traded newspaper companies I looked at this morning. But its challenges are as great or greater than those of much larger companies — it’s staggering under a debt load of $1.2 billion, and its stock price has fallen so much that it was delisted this fall by the New York Stock Exchange.

Anyway, here’s a quick cruise around a few other newspaper companies and what they paid their top managers in 2007, ranked by 2007 revenues.

Gannett Co. ($7.4 billion)

Craig Dubow, chairman, president and chief executive officer: salary, $1.2 million; total compensation, $7,546,710
Gracia Martore, chief financial officer, executive vice president: salary, $700,000; total compensation, $3,026,985
Susan Clark-Johnson, chairwoman of U.S. community publishing: salary, $735,000; total compensation, $3,145,339
Not-so-fun fact: Employees have been told to take a one-week unpaid furlough during the first quarter of 2009
Financials from WSJ.com

New York Times Co. ($3.2 billion)

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman: salary, $1,087,000; total compensation, $3,439,280
Janet Robinson, chief executive officer: salary, $1 million; total compensation, $4,142,410
Michael Golden, vice chairman: salary, $1 million; total compensation, $1,706,579
James Follo, chief financial officer and senior vice president: salary, $480,000; total compensation, $859,273
Not-so-fun fact: A recent, widely disputed essay in the Atlantic speculates that the flagshap New York Times could cease publishing as early as this May
Financials from WSJ.com

McClatchy Co. ($2.3 billion)

Gary Pruitt, chairman and CEO: salary, $1.1 million; total compensation, $4,635,355
Patrick Talamantes, chief financial officer and vice president for finance: salary, $500,000; total compensation, $938,970
Three vice presidents of operations are paid salaries in the range of $500,000 to $600,000; total compensation is around $1.1 million apiece
Not-so-fun fact: The debt-burdened chain is trying to sell the Miami Herald, but can’t find any takers
Financials from WSJ.com

Journal Register Co. ($463 million)

James Hall, chairman and chief executive officer: salary, $394,750; total compensation, 411,233
Scott Wright, president and chief operating officer: salary, $201,923; total compensation, $231,040
Julie Beck, executive vice president and chief financial officer: salary, $337,500; total compensation, $431,510
Robert Jelenic, former chairman and chief executive officer: salary, $945,396; total compensation, $6,318,394 (Jelenic died last month)
Not-so-fun fact: The deeply troubled company is closing some of its papers and selling off others
Financials from the company’s 2008 proxy statement (PDF)

What’s the takeaway? Top executives at newspaper companies, like top executives everywhere, make a lot of money. We tend not to notice when times are good. But with the newspaper business under siege, such lavish compensation packages seem out of sync, both symbolically and substantively.

On the other hand, if any of these well-paid folks can find a way out of the current morass, they will be worth every cent.

Conversation versus competition

One of the more interesting news-of-the-future experiments taking place right now is at the Gannett newspaper chain. As Wired reported last November, Gannett’s 90-plus papers, which include the ubiquitous but unloved USA Today, have embraced the conversational model of news, encouraging readers to become citizen journalists by contributing stories and by lending a hand in certain types of investigations.

Trouble is, Gannett, with its lust for high profit margins, is not necessarily the ideal avatar of journalistic innovation. A recent Washington Post article portrayed online mobile journalists — “mojos” — at Gannett’s News-Press of Fort Myers, Fla., as little more than cheap content providers working for an editor who gets antsy if no one has posted anything in the last 15 minutes.

Now comes Lisa Williams of Placeblogger, who reports that, in Muncie, Ind., Gannett wants to play the game but is refusing to abide by the rules.

Let me back up for a moment. Within the news media, as in many businesses, there are two ways of dealing with competition: you ignore it or you denigrate it. Thus the Herald does not recommend stories in the Globe, Channel 5 does not tell you to turn to Channel 4 for more details and WRKO Radio (AM 680) does not suggest that you switch to Paul Sullivan on WBZ (AM 1030) in order to get away from the loathsome Michael Savage.

In the news-is-a-conversation model, though, you’re supposed to link to anyone and everyone. The idea is that competition is an outmoded concept, and the more content you can bring together, the better it is for everyone: bigger audience, richer conversation and maybe, someday, more money. (Someone, after all, has to pay for all this stuff, even if finances are usually left out of the equation.)

Gannett, according to Williams, is trying to have it both ways — embracing the new conversational model while sticking with the old competition model. The citizen-journalism site of Gannett’s Star Press of Muncie does not allow linking to the Muncie Free Press, an independent Web site. The guy who runs the Free Press says he’s been told the only way his site will get a mention in the Star-Press is if he buys an ad.

Williams writes:

Refusing to link to local blogs that aren’t hosted by the paper cuts off a newspaper-based community from valuable sources of new readers — and it means that while the paper may stay the paper of record for their community, they’ll never be the website of record for their community.

One of the fundamental things to understand about the net is that it’s possible to grow the pie — linking to people doesn’t mean you have fewer readers; in the long run it may mean that you have more.

Now, I’m not going to pull a Jeff Jarvis and start ranting that the Star Press folks are a bunch of clueless slugs who don’t get it. I understand the instinct. To the Star Press, the Free Press is competition. Why help it out?

Still, I think that if Gannett is going to try the news-is-a-conversation model, it ought to go all the way. As it stands, Gannett is trying to open itself up and wall itself off at the same time. Company officials want readers to contribute content, yet they won’t allow anyone to call attention to other content. They want to take, but they won’t give back. That’s repugnant, in my view.

Granted, Gannett officials can’t lose sight of its dual missions, which are to report the news and to make money. But given that they’ve made a bet-the-company gamble on experimentation, they might as well see it through. If it’s not working, they can always adjust later on.