The extraordinarily anachronistic Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times — a guy writing about media, newspapers even, while on the staff of a daily newspaper — has a particularly interesting piece up today. It’s about several things all adding up to what news consumers really want out of an on-line newspaper, supposedly the creature evolving to either hammer the last nail in the coffin of print or to offer print a last chance for survival.
Rutten gets off several good lines, like the one where, in trying to describe the specific type of anger that drives CNN Headline’s Nancy Grace, he comes up with, “crypto-fascist anger”. (Shades of Gore Vidal v. William Buckley). And by the way, what was Grace ranting on last night? Some derelict mother who fed cocaine to her toddler? Why is that ever a national news story? Rutten’s point is that cable TV’s strategy for driving viewership is based on a wretch-inducing combination of near lunatic anger, junk news and hype, not exactly a recipe for journalistic credibility.
He also notes a Pew study on the matter of “media bias” that 71% of Republicans who rely on Fox News as their main news source — and damn, aren’t they a fun crowd? — “hold an unfavorable opinion of major national newspapers”, as opposed to 52% of Republicans who get news from somewhere else and only (?) 33% of non-Republicans. In other words the more you turn your brain over to Fox News the angrier you get with the New York Times and the Washington Post for not reporting the good news from Iraq, the hoax of global warming, the in-depth, investigated truth about John Edwards $400 haircut and how the Clintons murdered Vince Foster.
Point being, screw ’em. You pander to that fringe at your own peril.
But eventually Rutten gets around to wondering what news consumers want, (as opposed to what embittered ideologues need).
If an on-line newspaper is going to be different than its shriveling, compromised dead tree cousin, how different and in what ways?
“The honest answer,” Rutten writes, “is that nobody knows for certain, but the odds are it will be a hybrid publication in which an online edition that’s focused mainly on breaking news and service works in tandem with a print edition whose staples are analysis, context and opinion. The former almost surely will have a lot more video and interactivity than it does today; the latter will have to be much more thoughtful and far more intensely and carefully edited.”
Rutten, like other veteran newspaper types seems to believe that news consumers will demand some kind of continuation of a print edition well into the future. I’m not so sure at all.
Last Friday night former Strib food and ethics writer turned Rake blogger and TC Daily Planet guiding force, Jeremy Iggers, invited me down to a class he’s teaching at the new Minneapolis Central Library. I was flattered he had an interest in my deep thoughts on what is happening to daily papers, and arrived full of half-prepared bloviation and bogus factoids. I was going to wow ’em, I tell ya’. Then the Strib’s Mike Meyers showed up. Mike is a smart and funny guy, and, well hell, why lie? He big-footed all over me. Not that I put up much of a fight. Who could? When Mike gets on a roll he is damned entertaining, and Iggers’ class ate it up. Besides Meyers and I pretty much agree. Pretty much. So what’s to fight?
Meyers, who takes a kind of pragmatic capitalist view of things up to the point of condoning rampant, short-sighted stupidity, such as he sees going down at the Star Tribune and elsewhere in the newspaper biz, also believes the dead tree version will linger. I don’t. I think five years from now the thing they’re leveling forests and burning boat loads of gas to truck to your door every morning will be a quaint memory.
In my scenario, the greed of the Avista Capital Partners private equity/hedge fund crowd now gobbling up every molecule of value at the Star Tribune will soon give way to them blowing out of town and leaving behind the journalistic equivalent of a fake Hollywood stage set standing at 425 Portland. The Strib will be a fraction of a fraction of its former size and by that time everything the Strib, and other major papers, used to provide, will be available, albeit scattered in a thousand different places on the web. But also by that time … advertisers will have grown comfortable enough with the best of local news/analysis sites to have begun moving money toward them. Then, I say, all that’s left to spike consumer interest and appeal is an ergonomically comfortable device that allows avid information consumers to replicate their favorite habit of reading the “paper” anywhere they want with a cup of coffee and a delicious custard-filled bismark. (Oh wait, that wasn’t supposed to be in my out-loud voice.)
A device based on technology from something like this would pretty much fill the bill.
I mention the ergonomics because I hear that a lot, especially from older readers, the crowd Strib research famously referred to as being so loyal, “we couldn’t beat them off with a stick.” People like holding a newspaper. They don’t like hunching over a computer. Everyone understands that. This ergonomic issue came up again at Iggers’ class.
I tried to explain the dawn of gizmos that will radically shift the thinking of long time newspaper reading adults. But that f**king Meyers was being so amusing and on-point all I got were a lot of glazey-eyed stares. (Meyers nodded when I repeated the market assumption that the purchase price of a personal, fold-away, eminently portable computer screen would probably be heavily underwritten by on-line content purveyors, much like cellphone companies who more or less give the phones away and then stab you with monthly fees.)
But back to Rutten’s concern over the proper separation of classical news reporting and analysis. Frankly, I don’t see why the two can’t co-exist on the same web-site. Anything you can do in print you do more of and better on line. In something like the I-35W bridge collapse what staff there was, and presumably an established collection of stringers/community journalists, most with cameras, would rush down and do what reporters always do. But then, as the search for explanations expanded, reporting, by professionals, could mix with analysis in ways that would not set off bias sirens in anyone other than the most hardened Fox News-o-holic, not many of whom I’m betting will have much interest in news from any source other than Sean Hannity’s butt.
I mean, read a newsweekly and tell me where the “straight” news ends and analysis kicks in? Smart readers — the only folks who’ll BUY into an on-line paper — know bias when they read it. Bias is when the facts don’t match the reality.
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