 The first few winners of 2006 SPJ Excellence in Journalism award winners have begun to be announced over on the SPJ message board. Bill Norris has begun to publish the names as they come in from the judges.
As usual, the Riverside Press-Enterprise has seemingly half the awards to themselves, but the Hesperia Star, Daily Press and Desert Dispatch have staff members who have picked up awards as well, and no doubt more folks’ names will be added to the list in the next week or two as well.
Oops.
As journalistic windfalls go this is about as good as it gets. There I was writing a story about how Microsoft is on the cutting edge of using the Internet to become more transparent, and there in front of me are the briefing documents they are using to manage the story. The timing was so fortuitous that I wondered whether it was intentional. When I told Microsoft about it, they convincingly told me it was not.
But after I was done reading all 5,500 words I no longer felt elated at the prospect of an interesting scoop. I felt downright peculiar. I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years and always assumed that the people I interview do as much homework on me as I do on them. So the existence of a document like this didn’t surprise me. But that still didn’t make it any easier to read lines like, “It takes him a bit to get his point across so try to be patient.” I know my long-windedness drives my wife nuts occasionally. I didn’t know it had become an issue for Microsoft’s pr machine too.
I’d be scared to see such a dossier on me. I’d read it, of course. I’d just have sweaty palms while doing so.
A while back, the Washington Post called Peter to talk to him about working at small newspapers. At long last, the article is online:
The combined circulation of all U.S. newspapers in the six months ended Sept. 30 was down 2.8 percent from the comparable period in 2005, according to the Newspaper Association of America. By comparison, the combined circulation in the small-newspaper group was down 2.1 percent.
If that seems like cold comfort at best, consider this: Of the 413 papers in the small-newspaper group, 105 of them — 25 percent — gained circulation over the year, faring better than any other circulation group.
Lee Enterprises, based in Davenport, Iowa, for example, owns 56 daily papers and more than 300 small weeklies and other publications. Three of its papers have a circulation of more than 100,000 — including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch — but the rest of its dailies are much smaller, averaging about 26,000 each.
Over the past five years, the circulation gains at Lee papers have outpaced the industry average; some of the gains came from acquisitions, but much came from the growth of the group’s existing papers. Over the past two decades, the company’s stock price has likewise gone in the opposite direction of large-newspaper stock, climbing steadily from less than $10 a share in 1988 to more than $30 a share today.
“We’re largely in markets . . . that have pretty good local economies, a strong sense of place and strong newspaper readership,” said Mary E. Junck, Lee’s chairman and chief executive. Another advantage: “Many of our markets are pretty homogenous and tightknit,” she said, making it easier to pin down and target readership.
The small-newspaper division of Freedom Communications generated a 30 percent profit in 2006, up 5 percent from 2005. By comparison, a very successful large newspaper typically returns about 20 percent annually.
“In many of our smaller communities, we are the only game in town if you want to reach targeted households,” said Freedom chief executive Scott N. Flanders.
No quotes from Peter, alas, but an article well worth a read despite that.
 Well, we’re at the 11th hour before launching the new site.
Today, I sent in the final list of show-stopping bugs to the Irvine development folks. Two of them (comments and ratings not working), I’m told, will be fixed automagically when the address switches over late Sunday night. A third bug — the send-an-email form on the contact page — now works. Now that the Irvine folks have gone home, another bug has naturally cropped up — links to outside the Web site have vanished from stories, a bug that was fixed earlier this week. That’s not a show-stopper, of course, and should be fixed Monday.
There’s apparently a chance that something awful will happen which I’m not sure I can wrap my head around, and neither can anyone else I’ve talked to, so I’m not going to worry about it and just figure things will work out, since I can’t do anything about it anyway. And if it all goes kaboom, Sharon and I will spend the day frantically shoveling old content into the new site all over again.
See you Monday.
And it’s not pretty. The Columbia Journalism Review hypothesizes, based on the PEJ report:
First, it seems there will be more opportunities for journalists who can be one-person brands and buzz machines. Scores of these openings extend from what the report calls journalism’s “reduced ambition.” As media companies redefine their appeal, they are looking for narrow “franchise” areas of coverage, delivered by distinctive anchors, columnists, and reporters — all the better to build an audience around, explains the report. Evidence of this shift abounds. According to one young staffer at a news magazine, competency is hardly enough. “The way to advance around here is to write for other places. You have to make a name for yourself on the outside to be promoted on the inside.” Meanwhile, current recruitment posters for the Miami Herald tout the “Big Names” on staff and promise prospective interns that they will be treated like “the next Big Name.” Last fall, the New York Times altered its layout so keynote bylines in Arts, Business and Sports could fluoresce in capital letters about as large as drop-headlines on the front page. And last Friday, Time magazine unveiled its own redesign with the names of its columnists in what the New York Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye called “World War II size type — the better to brand with.”
Second, and related to the revved-up branding process, it seems more journalists will be asked to peddle naked opinions and ready-to-consume ideas. Driving this demand, according to the report, are cable news programs that will increasingly drop the pretense of objectivity as “Argument Culture” gives way to a new phenomena called “Answer Culture.” This trend, epitomized by the death of CNN’s debate show Crossfire and the birth of its lecture-esque show Lou Dobbs Tonight, is defined by a slew of shows offering “solutions, crusades, certainty and the impression of putting all the blur of information in clear order for people.”
Finally, and perhaps most troubling, it seems future journalists will have to navigate an insanely competitive job market. Though PEJ does not run the calculations, the math is chillingly simple: as the industry cuts an unprecedented number of jobs, journalism schools produce a record number of graduates. According to a study led by sociologist David Weaver, 6,000 print and broadcast jobs were slashed between 1992 and 2002, while enrollment in journalism schools jumped for the twelfth consecutive year, up to more than 210,000 students, according to 2006 figures from the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism. (PEJ predicts job cuts will deepen across media but especially in the newspaper business until the industry finds a way to make money online. It estimates that newspapers axed another 1,000 editorial employees in 2006, with more cuts likely in 2007.)
This is what the Chinese meant about living in interesting times.
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