While the powers that be at the Star Tribune mull who among their employees to keep and who to kick on to “new opportunities”, I talked to my former competitor, Deborah Caulfield Rybak, about one of the stranger ironies of the Strib and so many newspapers’ “hyper-local” business stratagem. (I say “business” because it has everything to do with short-term business and almost nothing to do with relevant journalism, and “stratagem” because it is more contrivance than well-considered “strategy.”) Namely, the irony of desperate newspaper managers with a tin ear for what core readers are interested in reading.
This may sound more than a little self-serving, since both Rybak — who decided Friday to take the latest Star Tribune buy-out (after the paper eliminated the media reporting job) — and myself worked the media beat for daily newspapers. But I assert relevance in the context of “localism” and readership — factors that allegedly matter, even within the “right-sizing” template Par Ridder has now dropped on both papers here in the Twin Cities.
Our beef: Rybak and I were well aware (and proud) of the traffic our work generated for our papers’ website. According to the geeks in IT, traffic is good. To some extent it connotes readership, and readership is supposedly still important, even amid The Great Newspaper Revenue Collapse. Moreover, all those “hits” are the only regular, reliable accounting of traffic either of us, or management, could ever grab on to.
Nevertheless, both Rybak and I have now experienced the, uh, “sobering” experience of getting the word that contrary to all that “traffic” and “readership” numbers jibberish, local (and national) media coverage is all but entirely expendable when managers need to sling a few bodies overboard. What gives?
I know. Poor, poor pitiful us. If we ever get a real job you’ll cry for us.
A seasoned reporter long before coming to the Star Tribune — she worked at the LA Times and had a successful free-lance career for almost a decade before landing at the Strib — Rybak migrated into media reporting from the Strib’s business desk, and her business reporting sensibility was the hook to her coverage of the usual shenanigans of local TV and radio stations, i.e. Minnesota’s local “celebrities”.
Pre-Ridder and Avista her primary internal conflict was with gossip columnist Cheryl Johnson, a.k.a. CJ, whose beat is at least 40% dependent on telling tales out of local newsrooms. Rather than resolve the conflict in the overlap of the two beats sensibly — let CJ cover after hours hijinx and Rybak the on-the-job stuff — the Strib’s managers let it fester in CJ’s favor. CJ retained her columnist’s license, while Rybak was pointedly told there would be no column and no undue attitude in her stories.
It was not exactly an acute reading of where “celebrity”-oriented journalism was going. Sports is an entertainment business and no one would ever think of printing a paper without a sports columnist making merry with the hometown team.
Says Rybak, “That was Anders (Gyllenhaal, the Strib’s editor at the time until leaving his past February for the Miami Herald). Anders did not want any more columnists. Columnists meant opinions and opinions meant conflict for him, and Anders hated conflict.”
Conflict aversion has become my best explanation for why so many newspapers avoid local media reporting entirely. (In most newsrooms a TV critic — basically a movie reviewer for TV — suffices). Those papers that do cover local media keep a very tight rein on the amount of voice and analysis their reporters are allowed. Why? Clearly there is readership for the plucking in the aggressive pursuit of the locally famous.
Back in the Pleistocene Era Nick Coleman wrote a local media column for the Star Tribune. (That’s a joke.) It was great stuff, with Nick, never mistaken for being reverential to fame, goosing up solid reporting with frequently and hilariously acid wordplay describing the craven, anything-for-a-buck grandstanding of local TV “stars.” (It got worse/better when he’d go out to L.A. and slash up Michael Landon, aka “Jesus of Malibu”.)
“Yeah, but one reason I walked away from it,” he says today, “is because I could feel my editors pulling back their support for me. If you’re doing it the way it is supposed to be done, [reporting and analyzing editorial decision-making in radio and TV], quite often what you’re writing is also reflecting badly on them. Chickenshit is chickenshit. So what makes it worse is that at the same time this stuff is reflecting badly on them they’re also taking shit from the people they think of as peers. There’s a kind of class distinction issue involved.”
In other words, almost as a professional courtesy, media managers understand to keep their minions under control. Only “facts”, the drier the better, please. Never mind that a straight report of some station’s cratering ratings without informed analysis is arguably misinformative.
Among these obvious ironies — the steady supply of “local” coverage along with easily-proven reader appeal — the shame about the Strib whacking media reporting, (someone may yet get tossed the occasional ratings or anchor-hit-by-bus story), and losing Rybak, is that the Strib is shuffling out an extraordinarily well-networked and aggressive reporter, someone with deep memory of this market and plenty residual memory from her previous work covering Hollywood and straight business.
Of course, the same claim could be made for a dozen or more Stribbers getting pushed toward the door.
But my point here is that Rybak’s value in an a less-fettered, interactive on-line environment, toward which newspapers will evolve sooner or later, is immediately obvious. Put simply, she gets the electronic “thing”.
The value just isn’t obvious to current Strib management, which, as I’ve said before, seems to be pursuing the same uninspired reorganizational template that daddy Ridder applied across the country through the late Nineties, and young Par dropped on the PiPress during his brief stopever/training-wheels assignment there. It is a moribund template that offers no vision for enhancing brand value.
One argument, espoused by former Strib publisher Joel Kramer, is that the fundamental newspaper business model has already passed the tipping point and is plunging rapidly toward unsustainability. Interviewed on TPT’s “Almanac” Friday night, Kramer disclosed his interest in creating an on-line newspaper here in the Twin Cities, an all-electronic entity without the gruesome overhead of print media.
We’ll see what he decides after he finishes doing all the math. But if Kramer, or someone, is prepared to suck up a little editorial risk — and let established, well-sourced reporters write the kind of stories a public, (maybe not the Great Mass public) wants to read — they will probably find revenue following readership.
Anyone who tries will have an ample talent pool from which to choose and substantial readership prepared to take it for a test drive.
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