Tag: Journalism

Posted on By Richard T. Kaplar

More on Newspapers and Aggregators

If newspapers ultimately survive, they might owe a debt of gratitude not only to Rupert Murdoch (as Patrick Maines suggested here recently), but also to two brothers who have combined their expertise in economics and the law to analyze the problem and come up with a potential solution.

As I wrote here earlier this month, online aggregators quite possibly could kill off newspapers by pirating the papers’ original news content.   Among the industry watchers who have studied this phenomenon are Daniel Marburger, Ph.D., a professor of economics at Arkansas State University, and his brother David Marburger, Esq., a partner at the Baker Hostetler law firm in Cleveland.   

The brothers have conducted an extensive analysis of both the economic and legal frameworks of the newspaper industry (print and online), and how these frameworks intertwine in the digital age.  In a number of papers and articles, the Marburgers have gone beyond the usual observations in two important ways: (1) They draw a distinction between “pure aggregators” and “parasitic aggregators”; and (2) they suggest a way of closing a loophole in copyright law that would seriously curtail the so-called parasites.

“Pure aggregators,” they say, use only a headline and maybe a sentence from the original news source, and then link back to that source (i.e., a newspaper website).  Pure aggregators are economically good for papers on balance because they drive readers to the newspapers’ websites.

“Parasitic aggregators,” on the other hand, take content from newspaper sites, rewrite it a bit, and then pass it off on their own sites.  These parasitic aggregators are bad because they retain readers rather than drive them to the newspapers’ sites.

In the Marburgers’ longest paper on the economic viability of newspapers, two section titles sum up the problem and its effect: “The federal copyright act allows parasitic aggregators to ‘free-ride’ on others’ substantial journalistic investments”; and “If the law does not change, newspapers continually will diminish their journalistic resources until they can subsist only by underproducing news or until they go out of business.”

The Marburgers’ solution would allow newspapers to seek redress for unfair competition under state statutory or common-law remedies for unjust enrichment – remedies that federal copyright law has in effect precluded since 1976.  They’re not suggesting a new law – just an amendment to Section 301 of the Copyright Act.

In this short space I am oversimplifying the Marburgers’ excellent analysis and recommendations – but I hope I can help draw attention to a thoughtful paper that is worthy of serious consideration and widespread recognition.   

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Rupert Murdoch and the Future of Journalism

It’s reported that Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., pledged last week that his company has plans to charge for the online news content of all its newspapers and television channels.  Though the announcement came with few details as to when the charges will commence or how they will be structured, the fact that it is Murdoch who is leading this campaign is hugely important.

This, because nobody is better equipped– by background, influence, knowledge, or constitution–to attempt such a move.

One of the most telling examples of Murdoch’s shrewdness and tenacity was put on display in 1986 when, as chronicled by his biographer, William Shawcross, he broke the Fleet Street print unions that went on strike against his plans to modernize his newspapers’ printing processes.  Against all odds the striking union members, 6,000 strong, were obliged to surrender a year later after it transpired that the company had built and secretly equipped a new printing plant for all of its British newspapers in the London district of Wapping.

If News Corp.’s plans fail it will send shock waves throughout the industry, but if it succeeds — that is, if its titles can generate sufficient revenue from access fees and advertising — Murdoch will be owed an enormous debt by newspaper publishers here and abroad.  They won’t pay that debt, and some, like The New York Times, are unlikely even to acknowledge it, but it is certain that many will follow his lead, as Murdoch himself claims.

That he is very much on their minds even now is shown in a remarkable story published yesterday (Sunday) in The Observer, sister paper of The Guardian in the UK, one of Murdoch’s biggest political and business adversaries.

The lead paragraph sums things up nicely: "Rupert  Murdoch is often cast as the villain of the newspaper trade, but having revitalized the Wall Street Journal and with his radical plans to charge for access to online papers, he could be the unlikely saviour of the beleaguered industry."

And what a relief that would be!  Because if professional journalism is to survive it will have to be paid for, and paid for handsomely.  And the only way to do that is by putting together a business plan that features at least two revenue streams.

Whatever the outcome, Murdoch’s plan provides a stark contrast with the naive and corrosive idea, entertained by some, that journalism can survive on a diet of investigative news stories issuing from nonprofits, "citizen journalism," and greater funding for public media.

Posted on By Richard T. Kaplar

Aggregating Newspapers Into Extinction

Hardly a day goes by without another reminder that the demise of newspapers is in full swing.
    
In the Outlook section of yesterday’s Washington Post (Sun., Aug. 2) came the latest, an anecdotal example by Post reporter Ian Shapira titled “How Gawker Ripped Off My Story & Why It’s Destroying Journalism.”  The title pretty much sums things up.
    
Gawker is, in Shapira’s words, “the snarky New York culture and media Web site.”  More importantly, it is a news aggregator, and it had written about and heavily excerpted an earlier story Shapira had written for the Post.
    
At first Shapira was glad for the recognition, until his editor reminded him that he, and the Post, had been ripped off.  Shapira had spent several days researching and writing his original story (and getting paid by the Post to do so).  Gawker repackaged his story in no more than an hour and posted it on its site – for free (or close to it, if you count the time of the poorly paid 29-year-old “independent contractor” who did it).
    
And therein lies the worst-case scenario for the destruction of journalism – which is to say, original reporting.  Newspapers are already being decimated financially by online media sites and blogs.  To the extent that any of these sites offers serious journalism, that journalism frequently consists of stories that have been ripped off, er, “aggregated,” from established newspapers.
    
But here’s the rub: As online aggregators continue to strangle the newspaper industry, they are killing the geese that have been laying their golden eggs – original reporting.  Once the newspapers are dead (or knocked senseless), from where will high-quality journalism originate?  How many online outlets will be able to pay real reporters the way newspapers did?  What will pass for journalism?
    
It’s already happening.  Buyouts have emptied newsrooms of many of their most experienced and knowledgeable reporters, leaving things in the hands of novices.  (A small example: An inexperienced reporter at the Post refers to the Obama inauguration train’s observation car as a “caboose,” and the editor doesn’t know the difference.)
    
Sadly, even the august New York Times is not immune.  A piece by the Times’ Public Editor Clark Hoyt on Aug 1. described how the paper of record’s appraisal of Walter Cronkite contained seven factual errors – something of a record, no doubt, and a feat unimaginable in an earlier era.
    
Yesterday I was sitting with a group of friends and one of them was reading the Sunday New York Times.  He asked me if I wanted to see it, and proffered a selection of unmistakably slim sections.  He added apologetically: “The Times isn’t what it used to be.”  No, my friend, it isn’t.  But neither are the rest of them.
    
I don’t know where all of this is going to end, but I do know that we’re well on the way.   

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Dan Rather Has an Idea

According to stories in the Aspen Daily News and the Aspen Times, newspapers of record for the nation’s elite snowboarders, Dan Rather gave a speech at the Aspen Institute on Tuesday, asking that President Obama create a national commission to “save journalism.”

As one of the papers put it, without a skosh of irony, “Rather told an Aspen audience that journalism has declined to such a point that it is time for the government to intervene.”

Attributing the decline of "great American journalism" to “corporatization, politicization, and trivialization of the news,” Rather suggested that the commission “ought to make recommendations on saving journalism jobs and creating new business models to keep news organizations alive.”

"If we do nothing more than stand back and hope that innovation alone will solve this crisis," he said, "then our best-trained journalists will lose their jobs."

It’s not every day that one encounters such a rich vein of stuff.  Puts one in mind of the children’s illustrations that ask the question, what’s wrong with this picture?  So many upside-down daffodils and trees growing carrots.

First, you know, there’s the problem that some consider the author of this scheme himself to be a disgraced figure in the world of journalism, having lost his job at CBS for the role he played in the airing of a bogus report about President Bush.

Then there’s the (unintentionally) droll picture he conjures up of a presidential commission as a kind of jobs program for the rescue of threadbare journalists, and the linking of the employment status of some of them with the very survival of journalism itself.  

But the most grievous error — that aspect of the Jabberwocky that fairly leaps off the page — is the very suggestion that government is the solution to what ails the media today.  Make no mistake, there are governmental policies that could, and should, be changed (like, for instance, an end to the newspaper/broadcast cross ownership rules), but there is no need for a presidential commission or “media czar” for the purpose.

One would think that a former network anchorman would understand the peril inherent in any intervention by the government into the affairs of the press.  It is this, after all, that is the primary concern of the Speech Clause of the First Amendment.  What are the chances, for instance, that any such commission would use its mandate, and the media’s genuine agony, as cover to advance content regulations that parallel the commissioners’ political beliefs?

Speaking of his idea, Rather said that he was “throwing it out there for what it’s worth.”  Since the Aspen Institute charged $15 per ticket to this event, we know what they think it was worth, but I think admission should have been free.  It wouldn’t have improved the speech but the price would have been right.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

With Friends Like These

Signs of institutional meltdown are everywhere apparent.  Wall Street and Detroit are obvious examples, as are the states of New York and California.  But nowhere is the collapse of standards and credibility more alarming than among journalists and their profession.

Evidence of journalism’s implosion is seen not only in the declining readership and viewership of the MSM, and in public opinion polls, but also in the recent antics of journalists themselves and of those grant-giving foundations that support journalism programs.

A lamentably good example of the latter was provided last week by the Knight Foundation — the largest provider of funding for such programs at universities and nonprofit organizations — and by the Associated Press.

In a release dated June 15, the AP announced that it was launching a project “to distribute watchdog and investigative journalism from nonprofit organizations to its 1,500 member newspapers.”  Two days earlier, the Knight Foundation announced a new $15-million program of grants to several investigative news organizations.  Among them are two that the AP plans to include in its distribution, the Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica.

These two announcements herald the birth of what would have been unthinkable in better times, the spectacle of an established news organization like AP accepting and distributing handouts from third parties.

Such an arrangement is, and would be, objectionable even if the “investigative news” organizations in question possessed the qualities of balance and objectivity.  But these don’t, and you don’t need to be an investigative reporter to figure that out.

Take, for example, the best funded of them, ProPublica.  From their own website comes this revealing statement about their mission: “Our work,” they say, “focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with ‘moral force.’  We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.”

What this suggests, of course, is that ProPublica is likely to have little or no interest in some of the worst aspects of public policy in the USA.  Things like the disastrous dependency on government, forged after decades of welfare programs, in America’s inner-city neighborhoods.  Or like the ruinous role played by public employees and their unions on state and municipal finance.  Or the impact on the cost and provision of health care by ambulance-chasing trial lawyers.

Just by their mission statement it’s clear that ProPublica’s heart wouldn’t be in doing these kinds of stories.  But that’s not the only evidence of the organization’s unfitness for the role being given it by the AP.  There’s also the small matter of its founder and largest benefactor.

Billionaire Herbert Sandler and his wife, Marion (they’re always mentioned together because of the role each played in the founding of Golden West Financial), have painted, through their contributions to Democratic and leftist organizations like the Center for American Progress and Acorn, an unmistakable ideological profile, leavened with a fair amount of hypocrisy.

As Jack Shafer of Slate put it, in a piece published shortly after the Sandlers founded ProPublica in 2007: “What do the Sandlers want for their millions?  Perhaps to return us to the days of the partisan press … ProPublica’s Web site vows that its investigations will be conducted in a ‘non-partisan and non-ideological manner, adhering to the strictest standards of journalistic impartiality.’  But philanthropists, especially those who earned the fortune they’re giving away, tend not to distribute their money with a blind eye to the results.  How happy will they be if ProPublica gores their sacred Democratic cows?  Or takes the ‘wrong’ position on their pet projects: health, the environment, and civil liberties?”

Providing an almost comic dimension to the Sandlers’ ambitions is the fact that earlier this year Time magazine named them to their list of the “25 people responsible for the financial crisis,” and "SNL" did a skit in ’08 in which it was suggested that they should be shot.

Looming over the whole of the Knight/AP exercise is the elephant in the room that is the public’s growing lack of trust in the media.  A piece written last month by Melik Kaylan for Forbes.com summarized that distrust as follows:

“The Reagan years also ushered in the distrust of the Eastern-seaboard intellectual elites.  President Reagan understood and exploited the great divide between the heartland and custodians of news, who were chiefly in New York.  The two sides saw two different Americas.  Journalists and the institutions that formed their ideas saw a country composed largely of wronged minorities with fascinating grievances.  Much of the country saw itself as a unified coherent nation with its traditions under siege from insular power blocs who were back-scratching each other all the way up and down the seaboards.  Out of that disconnect grew the success of Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter, Fox News, the blogosphere and the great decentralizing force of the alternative media."

By an ironic coincidence, on the same day that the AP came out with its announcement, the Gallup organization released the results of a new poll of Americans’ ideological attitudes.  It found that conservatives outnumber liberals by a margin of 2 to 1.  More importantly it revealed that only 5 percent of the people consider themselves "very liberal," a designation that accurately describes the investigative nonprofits the AP and the Knight Foundation have now embraced.

Leave it to them to explain, as the media continue their march toward oblivion, how such a biased and shabby program will improve the public’s trust in the mainstream media or in journalism.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Whither Journalism? Part II

If journalism of a satisfactory depth, independence, and scale is going to survive, it will have to be produced by professional journalists employed by profit-making organizations.  As such it will require revenue streams that are sufficient for the purpose.  As a practical matter this means that newspapers will have to find ways of getting paid for access to their online content.  Advertising by itself will not do the trick.

But given the growing number of bloggers, citizen journalists, and news aggregating sites who specialize in opinion pieces (RealClearPolitics, Huffington Post, Drudge) there is a real question of how professional journalists can distinguish themselves from the rest of their online competition.

The view from here is that the question answers itself.  Professional news organizations, newspapers especially, should rid their online news pages of opinion and concentrate instead on the production of news and feature stories that run deep and straight down the middle.

Unfortunately this is the precise opposite of what is in vogue today, with media organizations like Newsweek and even the Associated Press moving in the direction of more rather than less opinion in their news stories.  It’s a mistake.

Opinion is the cheapest commodity in the world, precisely because everybody has one.  No need for inside or expert sources, for special expertise in the subject matter, or even for any real writing ability.  Opinion gains recognition in direct proportion to the extravagance of its expression.  As such, opinion is the “killer app” not of newspapers but of the blogosphere, which is why a site as undistinguished as Daily Kos attracts such a large number of visitors.

The problem for newspapers is compounded when the opinions they express in their news and editorial pages are too one-sided politically.  To give one example, the New York Times, which is losing paid circulation at a ferocious pace, reads these days very much like a house organ in its support of the Democratic party and policies.

To believe that this is not spotted, and resented, by people who are, say, Republicans or conservatives, is an exercise in self-delusion.  Even if one wants to argue that Republicans and conservatives are not in the majority today, they represent a very large minority for any business needing to sell itself to the public at large.

In any case, the main point is that newspapers and other professional news organizations should concentrate on doing those things, like in-depth and objective coverage of domestic and foreign affairs, which neither the news aggregators nor the bloggers have the talent or resources to do themselves.

Whatever their future revenue streams — from advertising and micropayments or walled content — it’s going to be necessary for the “mainstream media” to finds ways of distinguishing themselves from their online competitors.  One way of doing that would be to practice first-rate journalism and rigorous objectivity in the reporting and analysis of the news.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Whither Journalism? Part I

As evidenced by recent hearings in the House and Senate, the future of journalism is attracting a lot of attention these days.  And why not?  Hardly a week goes by without news of the shutdown, bankruptcy reorganization, or downsizing of a daily newspaper somewhere.  And pretty much everyone seems to agree that newspapers are the “gold standard” among journalism organizations.

Journalists themselves have been dedicating large quantities of ink to the subject.  But like the witnesses at the congressional hearings, the prescriptions of journalists are as notable for what they don’t recommend as for what they do.

Actually, journalists aren’t recommending much of anything.  For the most part they content themselves with finger-wagging diatribes under headlines that read like draft obituaries.  Stories, for instance, like Howard Kurtz’s in the Washington Post (The Death of Print?) in which it’s argued that the blame belongs with the Internet and unimaginative and slow-footed management.  Or Frank Rich in the New York Times (The American Press on Suicide Watch), whose villain is an ungrateful public which “thinks nothing of spending money for texting or pornography” but is unwilling to shell out for … the opinions of Frank Rich?

And then, of course, there are the ideological opportunists, like John Nichols of The Nation (David Simon, Arianna Huffington and the Future of Journalism) who, true to his “class warrior” conceits, sums things up this way: “There will be time for the debate about solutions.  For now, it is not just useful but necessary to be clear about the cause of the crisis in journalism….  It wasn’t the Internet.  It wasn’t the current economic downturn.  It was a lousy ownership model that saw civic and democratic values replaced by the rapacious greed and commercial calculations of big media companies.”

Well, enough of this.  Let’s consider some solutions, and one very bad idea that is being offered up as a solution.

To take the bad idea first, the granting of nonprofit status to newspaper publishers makes no sense from either a journalistic or a business point of view.  Looked at journalistically, such a development would lead inexorably to challenges of these companies’ nonprofit status by governmental or private parties who would allege political partisanship.  Sooner or later these challenges would find traction, either in the courts, Congress, or in media boardrooms, thereby compromising the papers’ very reason for being.

As a business proposition, nonprofit status seems even more bizarre.  After all, the papers that are most notably failing today aren’t the work of mom-and-pop organizations.  They’re the products of the biggest companies in the industry, like Hearst, McClatchy, Gannett, and the Tribune Company — all of which are not only private, for-profit companies, but publicly owned companies (save for Tribune) at that.  How would the shareholders (or creditors) of any of them fare in such an arrangement?

Posted on By Richard T. Kaplar

Blaming the messenger, and why not?

 

A program held at Rockefeller University last week—an Oxford-style debate on the subject of the financial crisis—inspires and dismays. It inspires because it demonstrates how much can be learned when knowledgeable people communicate honestly and intelligently, even where they disagree. It dismays because it contrasts so sharply with the quality of the stuff being served up on the subject by so much of the news media, political reporters in particular.

With funding from the Rosenkranz Foundation, the debate was sponsored by Intelligence Squared US, the stateside companion to a similar program in London, and featured six debaters, three on each side of the motion: “Blame Washington more than Wall Street for the financial crisis.”

Arguing in favor of the motion were Niall Ferguson, of Harvard; John Gordon Steele, of NPR; and Nouiriel Roubini, aka Dr.Doom. Arguing against the motion were Alex Berenson, of The New York Times; Jim Chanos, of Kynikos Associates; and attorney Nell Minow.

Not to put too fine a point on it, it is a better and more enlightening discussion of the “political economics” of our financial crisis than anything I have read in any of the news, Op-Ed, or feature stories produced by the Washington press corps. More than this, mirabile dictu, one comes away from the debate not only feeling better informed, but with a certain measure of affection for all the debaters! But don’t take my word for it, read the transcript here.

In a recent blog I lamented the report that Newsweek magazine was planning to become more of an opinion journal, thereby officially abandoning the journalistic concept of objectivity. For my pains I received an email from the head of a major Washington think tank, who wrote mockingly of the idea that this was something new. His point being that Newsweek had always practiced opinion journalism. In my reply I said that he might be right, but that there was a difference between giving lip service to an ideal, and abandoning it altogether.

I’m reminded of that exchange, and mention it here, because it shines a light on yet another dimension of our journalistic impoverishment. Our financial and economic crises are being poorly reported not just because so many political reporters know nothing about finance or economics, but because, in an age and an industry where opinion trumps fact, they don’t have to. They just have to put on display the right kind of opinions.

 

Posted on By Ashley Messenger, Esq.

Truth Is No Longer Absolute Libel Defense

By guest blogger ASHLEY MESSENGER, Editorial Counsel to U.S. News & World Report, L.P., Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit recently ruled in Noonan v. Staples, Inc. that truth is not necessarily a defense to a libel claim.  This is a troubling holding, as libel is generally defined as a false, defamatory statement.  

But Massachusetts has a law that allows a true statement to be the basis of a libel claim if the statement is made with “actual malice,” which the First Circuit interpreted as “ill will.”  The ruling appears to be predicated on the fact that the plaintiff, Alan Noonan, is a “private person” and the statement was not a “matter of public concern.”

It is undisputed that Alan Noonan was fired from Staples for violating the company’s expense policies.  A vice president sent an e-mail to Staples employees stating that Noonan was fired for failure to comply with expense policies and reminding employees of the importance of compliance.  The court allowed his claim to go forward to let a jury decide whether the statements were made with “ill will.”

But if a private person can sue for libel when a true statement is made with ill will, the courts will be flooded with victims of petty gossip and spiteful ex’s.  A cheating spouse, for example, would now have a libel claim if the aggrieved spouse vents to friends about the betrayal with “ill will.”

In addition, there is the policy matter of permitting a person to recover damages when their reputation is damaged with good cause.  If a spouse cheats and that true fact is disclosed, his or her reputation may be damaged, but justifiably damaged.  Do we truly want to permit people to be compensated for their own bad behavior?

Finally, there is a problem with the increasingly false distinction between matters of “public concern” and “private” things.  The value of hearing truthful information is the same reason reporters use anecdotes in newspaper stories.  It makes a situation more real when you can associate a name and specific event to an issue rather than relying on vague assertions of what might or might not have happened.  

In fact, if a reporter had used Noonan’s story as anecdotal evidence of why it is important to comply with company policies, it should have been deemed a matter of public concern.  The correct result, whether it’s a company or a reporter, is that all speakers should be protected by the First Amendment.

This post is adapted from a Media Institute  Perspectives issue paper by Ashley Messenger on this topic.  View the full paper here.

Ashley Messenger is Editorial Counsel to U.S. News & World Report, L.P., and an adjunct faculty member at American University School of Communication in Washington, D.C.  The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not of these institutions.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

What Do Political Reporters Know?

One of the differences between, say, your everyday community organizers on the one hand, and investors on the other, is that while both have opinions, the investors have money.  Not only do they have some money, in a very practical sense they have all the money. 

This is an important thing to know these days because, as measured by the relative value of every asset class — from common stock to collectibles, real estate to commodities — investors of all sorts are making it clear by their actions that they are deeply worried about the future, and growing more so.

Many people, perhaps most, know this already.  They know it because they are among those who have already lost their jobs, or fear they soon will.  Or because they have seen the value of their 401K plans cut by half.  Or because they own houses whose value has declined so much they no longer have any equity in them.

Or perhaps they know it because they are avid consumers of the financial and business press; media outlets like Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, the Economist, IBD, CNBC.

If, however, they are among the lucky few who have not been personally wounded by the current crisis, and get their news of the nation not from financial journalists but from political reporters online or off, stories reaching them of investor angst may seem like a kind of nasty and unwelcome rumor, like the warmongering of a distant and unimportant country.

And why wouldn’t it seem that way to someone munching solely on the crudites served up by our political journos?  Instead of digging into the facts of what the markets are saying, they offer up one story after another sourced by a political pollster or partisan strategist.

Rather than write about the substantive aspects of our financial and economic problems, they write about which party or politician is pulling from the gloom the greater number of political points.  In other words, they write about opinions — their own, those of the political class, and those of what are said to be the people.

One of the most durable sayings in the world of finance is that money goes where it’s treated best.  This isn’t a political statement, or an opinion, or a matter of manners and morals.  It’s a physical law, like gravity.

And where is money going right now?  It’s going into gold that costs more than $1,000 per ounce, and into short-term Treasuries that are paying less than inflation.  And what is that telling us?  It’s telling us that investors — professionals and amateurs, Republicans and Democrats — are scared to death and doubt, given what they know now, that our government is pursuing strategies that will help.

But don’t expect political reporters to tell you much about any of this.  They didn’t do so last fall, when the economy might have been carefully examined in the context of the national elections, so why would they do so now?  They’ve got too many opinions to spin to get bogged down with something as dreary as facts.