OK, geeking out time: I grew up on the Washington Post, either as the Post (when we were stateside) or back when it was one-half of the now much-inferior International Herald-Tribune. Even today, thousands of miles away from the Post, I still read it regularly, and when some other site points to an article there, I always check it out.
Despite what nationally syndicated infotainers might tell you, the paper that everyone reads in the Washington area is the Post, whoever you are and even if you’re waaaay out in the suburbs. (The biggest competition for the Potomac News wasn’t one of the myrid of other local papers surrounding the Beltway, it was the 800-pound gorilla of the Post.)
So when Post reporter Frank Ahrens calls the Star to apparently do a follow-up on a previous article on the future of local newspapers (a topic I’ve written about here before, more than once), I get as giddy as a schoolgirl. (No costume changes, though, sorry.) He talked to Peter and to our publisher, Stephan Wingert.
Allegedly he might be talking to me about the Star’s more aggressive push online, but really, given that he’s already talked to Peter and Stephan, I doubt he’s going to need anything from me. But still, cool.
When the article is posted, I’ll link to it here.
Former Daily Press Editor in Chief Don Ray has a five-part series about homelessness in the High Desert online that are, I think, reprints from the Daily Press.
A more modern take on the same subject was offered earlier this month by the DP’s Tatiana Prophet.
If you’re thinking that I found these in Google while doing some research for a story for the Hesperia Star next week, you’d be right.
So, as you may have heard, The Los Angeles Times has hauled itself onto the auction block and is trying to entice a wealthy zillionaire to buy the ailing newspaper. Its buyout at the end of the dotcom era by the Chicago Tribune hasn’t worked out well, to put it mildly, and the paper has been losing readers faster than its LA rivals and the paper just lost its editor in a major squabble between wings of the newspaper empire.
I didn’t grow up with the LA Times as “the paper” — as my family’s orbit swung us in around DC multiple times over the years, the Washington Post holds that role in my life — but I can understand how people would feel frustrated at what they see is a degradation of the paper they grew up reading.
I worked at the LA Times Syndicate when Tribune Media bought the Times, and merged the syndicate into the Tribune Media Syndicate and even then, it was obvious Chicago wasn’t entirely interested in what would be the best strategies for the newly merged company.
At the time, I was working in the LATS’ Internet services division, repackaging print content that we had the rights to (like Sydney Omarr’s horoscope) as products that could be placed on the Web sites of small newspapers, giving them high-end content that even small papers could afford. (In other words, what syndicates do for newspapers, just online.) We were a small division, with four people initially, later growing to five once Shylo came on board in her footy pajamas. At the division’s peak, we had maybe eight or nine products, including movie reviews, horoscopes, golf news, relationship advice and a few products I’m forgetting.
Chicago also had such a division, after a fashion. It was two or three times as big, staff-wise, but it had fewer products and we were beating the pants off them, making something like two or three times as much money as them. So, we figured, when the divisions merge, we’ll be OK. Clearly the smart play is to combine the product offerings and lay off (or reassign) the folks in the less-profitable division.
That would have been the logical way to go. Unfortunately, the head of the merged Internet division had his kids in private school in Chicago and didn’t want to uproot them to LA. So, instead, the folks who hadn’t been able to compete with a larger staff came in, learned what we were doing, and set about serving the clients for the rest of their contracts, at which time they’d be pushed towards Chicago’s already-failed products or let go. I was actually the last person in the division to be let go (other than the head man, who bounced over to another upper middle management position, in the way of upper middle managers everywhere). The top floor of the LA Times Building on Spring Street was practically a ghost town by this point, as most of the others had been laid off or left months before.
About a year after I left the LATS (or it left me), I looked online and none of the products, from LA or Chicago, were even available any more. Chicago had decided to stick with their losers for reasons the shareholders would have screamed about, had they known, and had promptly run the whole shebang into the ground.
Now, it wasn’t like things were going wonderfully prior to that, which seems to be getting lost in the current hubbub: Shortly before the buyout, the Staples Center scandal broke, where advertising turned out to not just be calling the shots in the LAT newsroom, it was so enmeshed, it was impossible to tell where one stopped and the other began. Reporters and editors quit in droves: I’d ride the elevator down to the ground floor and share it with a seemingly endless procession of journalists with their worldly possessions in a photocopy paper box. The journalists were furious at the black eye the paper had gotten and weren’t going to stick around to deal with the damage that had been done.
That said, if it’s true that the LA Times staff is resenting the notion that, first and foremost, they need to be a really good local paper, they’re screwed. As unpolitic as it may be to say to their faces, the truth is, most readers do prefer to get their international news from the Internet nowadays. The Times has unparalleled access to local news in the nation’s second-largest city, one of the world’s most important cities. To not leverage that is to doom themselves to increasing irrelevance.
As Tip O’Neill might say, in the Internet era, all news is local.
Well, this is interesting. I’m not a fan of a lot of moves that Gannett has made over the years — USAToday is arguably everything wrong with newspapers, and its success has dragged more papers down that same path that will eventually, in my opinion, lead to ruin — but their new change in direction sounds very, very good and forward-thinking:
Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.”
The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.
As I’ve said before, local news is king. This is the 21st century, and breaking news, particularly regional, national or international, is covered by a myriad of outlets and, more importantly, readers/customers/whatever have so many options available to them, starting with radio and ending with the Internet, that it’s foolish to assume that they’ll sit around and wait to hear about non-local news from your outlet. The media needs to concentrate on what it has a near-monopoly on: local news.
Newspapers aren’t going away, if one (quite reasonably) broadens the definition to include the Internet. The piece of paper with that soy-based ink that rubs off on your fingers might be in trouble, but newspaper printing presses already print other products anyway. Spin off the printing presses into a separate company and have the news outfit just be one of their many customers. There will always be a market for news, even if the medium changes.
Still, it’s going to be a bumpy road leading to the future:
Above and beyond pink-slip considerations, crowdsourcing journalism raises many other thorny issues, said Korte. The paper recently asked the crowd to weigh in on the grisly murder of a 3-year-old foster child.
“All that water-cooler speculation moved online,” said Korte. The readers were convicting the foster parents before charges were even filed. “We wound up having to close down the message boards until an indictment came down. It’s very hard to separate fact from fiction online, and some people expect that whatever’s on our site undergoes the same degree of scrutiny as what appears in the paper.”
Still, it’s good to see one of the major players making a bold step in what I think history will prove was the right direction.
The politicos tell me that the weekend before the election is when the vast majority of non-absentee voters make up their minds about whom to vote for, and I have no reason to doubt them.
Of course, we are coming out on Election Day, so not putting a voters’ guide in the November 7 edition seems irresponsible to me. (If nothing else, I know a fair number of people who make their final decisions on Election Day.)
That said, for those making up their minds this weekend, check out the Hesperia Star site. We’re putting up voters’ guides online in time for weekend decision-making and I’ve added a few modest (circa 1999) HTML bells and whistles to the proceedings.
The city council and school board voters guides are up now, and I’m working on the park board one next. And keep an eye on the Daily Press this weekend for more campaign coverage, including an interview with the elusive Elena Campos.
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