Every so often a comment rolls in too ripe for response to bury in a link. So I’m dragging a couple recent shots across my bow out in the full light of day. (How many metaphors is that?)
The first, upset with my “ranking” of local TV newsrooms, says:
“Lambert, you love taking swipes at KMSP.
And no doubt there are a few clunkers at every station. But ‘CCO’s reporting staff has been decimated. I wouldn’t trust most of them to cover a house fire. KSTP’s staff is just strange. And KARE’s are exceptionally strong story tellers, but I don’t think you’ll see them breaking much news.
“KMSP slightly back,” doesn’t wash. That’s not analysis Brian, it’s a cheap shot.”
I hope this came from a loyal KMSP staffer, otherwise some simple viewer has way too much emotional involvement in the local news game for his/her own good.
I of course deny “loving” to rake swipes at KMSP. Yeah, I did write this back last spring, but otherwise it’s been live and let live. Still, I stand by my off-handed ranking, with the caveat that “slightly” means exactly that. “Slightly”. As in just a bit off the pace.
I’m arguing that the number and quality of reporters/photographers obviously matters. Less is not more. Every TV news shop undergoes regular churn, losing career-climbers to better jobs, sloughing off the gold-brickers and screw-ups all while continuing to benefit from the established, reliable dogs who can always be counted on to bring back something worth running, whether a story about a house fire or a cat beheading. (Actually, I think the Strib owned the cat story.)
But as big a factor as the talent pool out there in the newsroom is how they are deployed, what news strategy/vision they operate under. For my taste … cheap shot or otherwise … KMSP’s hour-long 9 o’clock news show is too heavily stocked with instantly disposable eye and ear candy. I get the strategy. It’s “Fox-y”. Celebrities, attitude, hip. Definitely … not your Mom and Dad’s news-with-a-hot-cocoa show. Differentiation. Young and younger. But trivia is trivia. More to the point, it’s shameless and not particularly imaginative. (I suppose I should give KMSP points for being “shameless”.)
I’ve followed this stuff too long to blow (another) gasket over low common denominator pandering. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t what it is. I continue to believe “average news consumers” need both spot news reporting AND informed analysis … badly. Make that “very badly”. Avid news consumers will take care of themselves just fine — although KMSP and everybody else had better lose sleep over that avid, and often up-scale news crowd drifting away from the local TV news habit because the stuff is so generic, predictable and insistently middle-brow.
To reiterate my essential point … everyone, KMSP, KSTP, KARE and WCCO needs more feet and cameras on the street. Last time I checked the population of the Twin Cities and the region was increasing, i.e. there are more stories out there, not fewer.
The next rip comes from “The Frogman of Grant”, commenting on media reporter Deborah Rybak leaving the Strib:
“I’m getting lost here. Prisoner? Gulag? Man, that media beat is a bitch! And remind me again why we are obsessing about who’s in or out at the Strib. It sounds like we should give Ms. Caulfield Rybak a round of applause and a warm blanket. Surely, she’ll press charges. Meanwhile, I don’t think I’ll sleep a wink until I know which fledgling online recycler of aging local journalists signs her up for one of those coveted $100-a-story contracts.
“But if things are so bad down at 425 Portland, why all the hand-wringing about its undoing? And who is to blame for Caulfield Rybak’s torment….the “dicking” as you have it…Avista or her colleagues now carrying water for Avista? Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think you can have it both ways. Is the Strib a corrupt, venal insitution beyond redemption…or a noble element of the Fourth Estate we should be pulling for? Maybe we could get Dick Cheney to pronounce the Strib officially in its “last throes.”
What I’ve been trying to get across these past few months — poorly, no doubt — is that, A: Good journalism matters, maybe more right now than in anytime since I was born, what with the country’s reputation and sense of purpose reeling from an unprecedented number of staggering frauds and blunders. And that B:, The “strip and flip” ethos of pirate “entrepreneurs” like Avista Capital Partners is making the process of relevant journalism more difficult, not less.
Fundamentally, journalism is a tough business to force into a strict profit/loss model. The stuff we all need to know most can take time/money to ferret out, often makes people angry and isn’t nearly as sexy/salable as schlock — which describes not just celebrity foo-foo but timid business and political “stenography” reporting as well.
So yeah, the steady, inexorable depletion of an entity like the Strib is worth wringing hands over, and its harvester/executioner, Avista is worth denouncing.
Personally, I’m pulling for anyone who can apply a reliable supply of intelligence, guts and imagination to the noble profession of news reporting, commentary and analysis. If Avista has little or no interest in honestly incentivizing its staff to do that, I’ll root for whoever can re-invent the game.
I do agree, completely, that that re-invention will cost a lot more than $100 a story.
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