If I have to read about Trump's many misdeeds in one my thin local daily newspapers — this one owned by private equity and which I pay way too much money for — I wish it could at least give me headlines that don't have obvious typos.
In this case, there's a flagrant error in both the main headline and the deck just below it:
Both involving the word "to." Such a difficult one to keep track of.
Clearly they have a thin to nonexistent set of copy editors.
I try not to make myself sick, but sometimes...
Today I learned of the existence of Atherton, California — a suburb of Palo Alto — from a tweet that showed this:
I frowned at it in consternation, not sure what it was. At a glance…maybe a racist magazine from the South? A magazine for grown up sorority gals? I read the headlines and small type (click to enlarge for readability) and realized what the words said.
I looked up the name Atherton, California, and found this on Google Maps:
Atherton is an incorporated town in San Mateo County, California, United States. Its population was 7,188 as of 2020. The town's zoning regulations permit only one single-family home per acre, and prohibit sidewalks. Atherton is known for its wealth.... In 2023, the Atherton ZIP Code had the highest median home prices in the United States, at $7,950,000.
On its Wikipedia page, I was informed that its government has been involved in blocking California's efforts to implement high-speed rail and electrification of Caltrain. There is no commercial zoning in Atheron, so it has no restaurants or places to shop for anything, meaning people have to drive for anything they need.
The 7,000 or so people in this town are so rich that someone thinks it's worth it to sell ads targeted at them and print a four-color glossy magazine just for them. Meanwhile, real newspapers and magazines across the country go out of business.
The publisher's website describes the audience for its handful of magazinges as "billioniares and legacy heirs, the 1% of the 1%."
There I was, innocently reading the newspaper on a Sunday when I flipped to the back page and my eye fell on this:
I did a double take, wondering for just a second if those were dismembered body parts. What the hell was all that?
It's part of this larger photo, used to dominate most of the back page of the Star Tribune's Variety section in the Sunday Taste section:
Those are sushi rolls (pleasant surprises!). And I'm sure the featured restaurant is not thrilled to have its food portrayed like this.
The photo was taken by the restaurant reviewer, I assume using his smartphone during dinner in the available room light. Food should never be shot that way, especially for reproduction on dull newsprint, and I would say especially sushi.
That the Star Tribune cannot afford to have a photographer shoot a large food photo for its Sunday edition is an indication of the newspaper diaspora. And I feel bad for that restaurant.
Bad news from a couple of days ago, via cartoonist Ward Sutton:
Terrible news today from the sadly shrinking world of Editorial Cartooning: 3 very talented, PulitzerPrize-winning cartoonists, Jack Ohman, Joel Pett, and Kevin Siers, were all laid off by the McClatchy chain of newspapers for "no cause."
Some examples of their work:
McClatchy said, "We made this decision based on changing reader habits + relentless focus on providing the communities we serve with (content) they can’t get elsewhere."
So their "relentless focus" to "serve" communities amounts to ... eradicating editorial cartoons.
Ohman was at the Sacramento Bee, Siers at the Charlotte Observer, and Pett was a freelancer at the Lexington Herald-Leader, according to the Washington Post. Ohman is the current president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.
Jack Ohman is from Saint Paul, and got his start at the Minnesota Daily, the student paper at the University of Minnesota before quickly moving to the big time without finishing school (he was nationally syndicated at age 19). Kevin Siers is also from Minnesota, and also worked at the Daily, before Ohman.
Joel Pett, I confess, was not a name I remembered hearing before, but I recognized this cartoon of his, which is why his drawing style looked familiar:
Meanwhile, the Star Tribune has saddled itself with the head-shakingly bad Mike Thompson, when these three talents have just become available.
Talk about bad timing!
About 10 days ago, a local Twitter user answered this question from Dan Froomkin of Press Watch:
There are so many wonderful journalists out there. Why don't they ever get to run the most wonderful newsrooms?
She said:
I quit journalism for a number of reasons, including threats/abuse from right-wing dudes and also....because I had one editor who called all stories "products" and another editor who tried to recruit me who wanted me to write "sexier." News organizations hire editors who want "sexy products."
News organizations don't want editors who will challenge the status quo. They want editors who will help them use "products" to sell more ads. Sex up those "products" for them.
Yesterday, as you may have heard, the Department of Justice announced the results of its pattern and practice inquiry of the Minneapolis Police Department. They will be developing a consent decree with the City of Minneapolis. (Full report here.)
As I listened to the DOJ's press conference on Friday and the coverage afterward, I kept thinking that it sounded correct in its finding of extensive systemic problems, but I wondered how it would be possible to make any change with the existing police union and other structures that are in place.
In the 2021 city election, the voters of Minneapolis were asked to address the structures that would have begun to take on the level of change needed, but scare campaigns from monied interests — aligned with the mayor and centrist to right-leaning Democrats — fought back and those initiatives were defeated. The mayor was also reelected, and given even more power.
Now here we are with the DOJ report, which follows an even more scathing report from the state's Department of Human Rights. So of course the New York Times swooped in for a story on why "efforts to defund the police" failed in Minneapolis.
And what did they do? They talked to, but did not quote or even seem to understand, one of the abolitionists they talked to. According to D.A. Bullock, he talked to the reporter for a half hour, who had a preset idea of the framing:
His questions went like "why did it fail?" "what did you all do wrong?" "what would you change if you had to do it over" - I presented a more accurate story of community rising to meet the moment, organizing and doing something extraordinary... 44,000 Minneapolis neighbors voted to remove the Minneapolis Police from the city charter, something a scant few of them had even considered or would have voted for just a year prior. An incredible testament to the voice of the community.
That 44,000 votes was more than [Mayor] Jacob Frey's 1st ballot top ranked votes. I don't know if it was the journalist or the editor in charge who decided on the frame of failure before the story was written, it is just sad that kind of slop would come from the NY Times.
I don't know that Bullock's critique coheres perfectly with that of the former journalist I started this post with, but I see them as related. Both are aspects of media and editors seeing their jobs as something other than trying to speak truth to power.
The lack of thorough national attention to what happened in Minneapolis after 2020, given the city's role in the upheaval across the country, is disappointing but all too typical of our coastally biased media landscape.
Because the owner of our preeminent local newspaper, the Star Tribune, is part of the monied interests I mentioned, that paper is not much help in getting at the nuance of what happened. Our small independents, like the Minnesota Reformer and Sahan Journal, have done great work, but they're not read but as much of the public, and have almost no national profile.
It's odd living somewhere and knowing what happened on a topic of national interest when just about no one outside the area knows because it hasn't been covered in an accurate or meaningful way.
I'm not sure why I was reading the newspaper story about some Utah woman who probably killed her husband and then milked it for sympathy and money, but while I was, I came across this bizarre usage error:
She knelt her head?
Writers are just making things up now! And copy editors (outsourced, or replaced by software, or maybe nonexistent) are not noticing it.
I spent about 10 years in a graduate mass communication program, which was called journalism for the undergrads. It was well on its way even at the time — 30 years ago — to domination by advertising and public relations majors. To this day I have structural knowledge of how the institutions of media work that most people don't have, while still maintaining illusions of how things used to be, and "should" be.
This thread on Twitter may have busted my illusions for the last time. Its writer acknowledges at the end that, of course, "not all journalists." But he's pointing out the way things work in the main these days, and given the state of covid and climate coverage, I have to say he makes a pretty convincing argument:
If I hadn’t spent the last 15 years working in media and public relations, I too would interpret the media silence around covid and new covid research/science as a sign that there is nothing to worry about. But I have. So here are some things you should know.
More than 95% of all stories you read in the mass media start as a press release. I don't know if this is a dirty little secret of the media industry or widely known by people, but it's how it goes. Which is like this: A press release gets written for a client, it gets sent out to a big list of journalists, the PR agent (or in-house person) phones around the journalists in whatever sector they’re working in to try and get them to look at the story, offering interviews with the key players.
Sometimes the PR agent might not send out a release en-masse but “sell in” the story as an exclusive to just one outlet. When you read that something is an exclusive, it usually doesn't mean a journalist cracked a story, it means the PR agent gave it only to them. The bigger the PR agency, the more likely you are to get a journalist to bite on your story. And this is a major problem. Because the bigger the agency = the more expensive the agency.
So the biggest, richest clients hire the biggest, richest agencies with the most brand recognition and media connections, and these agencies are responded to most favourably by editors and reporters. And the bigger the agency, the bigger the budget you have to entertain journalists, go out for lunches/dinners, which enables the fostering of human connections that mean the journalist will respond favourably to your next press release/call pitching a client story.
In addition to this, many PR agency bosses, especially of the largest agencies, will be members of the same private members clubs as the media bosses, with a lot of informal “work” done during these evenings.
So how does this relate to covid? Covid doesn’t have a PR agency, and most studies come out of niche research labs or universities that have very limited or non-existent PR teams/agency support.
And even when it’s coming out of a big university, the media teams at these unis are spread thin and often don’t see the humdrum science research as something to prioritise when it comes to media. It doesn't raise money, it's not sexy etc.
Unless it’s a breakthrough piece of research, you’re unlikely to see it. It’s no surprise that when you do see a covid story it’s been published in a high-profile medical journal like The Lancet that has a bigger media team and more connected PR officers.
You might be thinking: but what are you going on about, covid was all over the news for 18 months. Yes. But this is because there was no denying we were in a genuine global emergency/event. Governments led and media had to respond. It was, for a time, the only game in town.
All the media outlets put their journalists onto covid, looking for sector-specific angles. The health reporter, the science reporter, the travel reporter, the food reporter, obviously the politics team, were all covid all the time.
For those first 12-18 months the whole ecosystem flipped. Journalists will have been asking agencies for their stories around covid, and agencies will have been crafting every story into something covid-appropriate for all their clients.
But over time, and especially as the vaccines began to be rolled out, the messaging from political offices and the media shifted explicitly and implicitly — the emergency is over and it’s time to get back to normal. It would have gone something like this: The press officers for No.10, the White House or any head of state office would have talked editors about the need to move away from the emergency framing to transition back to normal. Country leaders themselves would have talked to newspaper owners to encourage this shift.
And these political offices and leaders will have been making this push to media off the back of their own conversations with 'business' about the need to get back to normal. The push to return to a pre-pandemic mode will have been coordinated between the highest political and media offices, with business CEOs well in the mix, if not the originating node, of this push.
This is the broad context for the media silence on covid. It’s over, and we the media helped make it over. And if something’s over, how can it be news?
The dynamic has shifted a little for the climate crisis, with some coverage (in recognition of an ongoing event) and the omissions are subtler, primarily around failing to platform research and experts who advocate solutions that do not conform to an economic growth agenda.
The latest batch of stories was a good example: article after article telling us we’re going to breach 1.5C but without any decent critique of why this is happening and how we can stop it, beyond “reduce emissions.”
The current mass media ecosystem exists largely to propagate specific agendas that tend to consolidate business-as-usual, rather than to inform people of threats to their health, livelihoods or futures.
Which is why Twitter is still somewhat useful as a means to push against a media culture weighted heavily in favour of the biggest, richest businesses and PR agencies.
All of this made me remember the most recent alumni magazine from my "journalism" school, which told me that some ungodly high percentage of the undergraduate majors are in what's now called "strategic communication."
I haven't mentioned this in a while, but in the early years of this blog, I frequently posted about ads in the Star Tribune from a Canton, Ohio-based company selling a variety of questionable products. They inspired my Sucker Born Every Minute category, in fact, and my interest in remaining incognito, since their attorney sent me a few cease-and-desist notices at the time. The first ad sold a card pretending to be health insurance. Others were for Amish heaters, phones, computers, antennas, and air conditioners. There were also a few for currency-related products: uncut $2 bills, coins after Obama was elected, and coins after Ted Kennedy died.
It all came back to me when I saw that Corinne Colbert, the editor of the Athens News (in Athens, Ohio), was fired from her job because she tweeted this on February 23:
The Athens News and other regional papers recently have run ads for companies that claim to sell high-value collectible coins. Several readers have told us that the companies took their money but never delivered, which is consistent with online reports about them.
If you responded to these ads and did not receive a product, or if the product you received was not as advertised, please let us know.
Although the newsroom has no control over advertising, we know that you rely on us to be truthful in all matters. Please accept my deepest apologies for this breach of your trust.
She was fired two days later. The Athens News is owned by Adams Publishing Group, and the reason she was given was that she violated the company's social media policy. She described the situation this way:
APG epitomizes EVERYTHING that is wrong in American journalism today. It’s run by people who do not understand—or do not care about—journalism. Instead of serving the public and renting readers’ attention to advertisers, APG serves money.
Yes, a newspaper needs money to function. But making money is not its primary function. Newspapers exist to bring readers truthful, accurate and relevant information about their world.
The higher ups at APG talk about maintaining/increasing revenue to protect jobs. But they have cut the editorial and production staff of their southeast Ohio papers to the bare minimum. Every issue is a struggle to produce quality journalism with no resources or support.
Mark Cohen, who oversees 6 newspapers in southeastern/southern Ohio, lives in Columbus. The ad folks for the News and the Messenger live in Jackson County, not Athens County. Decisions about local journalism are made by people who are not local.
Local journalism thrives when the people in charge of it are personally invested in the community — and when those people understand that good journalism speaks truth to power regardless of who holds it.
Colbert has set up a donation campaign to raise money to start an independent media source for Athens, and so far it's more than two-thirds of the way to the initial goal.
Adams Publishing Group is based in Tennessee and owns 127 newspapers in all, including more than 50 small-city papers in Minnesota and almost two dozen in Wisconsin. It's been on a company-buying rampage since 2014.
Usually when we, the readers of daily newspapers, see evidence of the degradation of our dailies, it's in the stories: Headlines with glaring errors, copy-editing mistakes that leave you shaking your head, people misidentified in photos. The shrinking — or disappearance — of the sections, as with the Pioneer Press, is another form it takes. And, of course, reporters assigned to too many beats, but that's harder to see, though of course it's most important of all.
Artwork is another example, as I've written before in the case of the PiPress. It's not usually as noticeable in the Star Tribune, which still regularly hires talented freelancers to help with feature section fronts, in lieu of the illustrators they employed in the past. The freelancers seem to be brought in on Strib-written stories, rather than on reprints from other papers. I'm sure this is a combination of short deadlines and budget limitations.
They didn't hire a freelancer on a recent Variety cover that featured a reprinted Washington Post story called "Is there really such a thing as mommy brain?", opting instead for an istock illustration:
What may be hard to tell (unless you click to enlarge the photo of the page) is that they cheaped-out on the istock illustration, opting for too low a resolution, so that when it was enlarged the edges of the curving lines became pixellated:
Those tell-tale pixels also reveal, in comparison, that the brain drawing wasn't part of the original illustration: those lines are nice and smooth, indicating they were added by someone at the Strib, using a resolution-independent vector drawing program like Adobe Illustrator:
Why that same person didn't also redraw the rest of the illustration, tracing the istock illustration, I don't know. Maybe they didn't have time. I hate to think it's because they don't understand how resolution works, but I suppose that's also possible.
For whatever reason, it ended up making a sad display of lack of quality all over the front of the feature section of this country's fourth-largest-circulation newspaper. (Yes, that's right, did you know that about the Star Tribune's ranking among big-city dailies? Another shocking fact about the state of daily newspapers today.)
I don't want to read too much into that lack of quality, symbolically, but it makes me sad.
I recommend McKay Coppins' Atlantic article on the way Alden Global Capital is destroying local newspapers. If you can't get past the paywall, Cory Doctorow gives a thorough summary on his blog.
One of the MSNBC shows (I can't remember which one) did a good job of crystalizing a couple of points that I hadn't remembered from the story, since there are so many other outrages to distract you there:
While the stories of the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun dominate Coppins' article, our local angle on the destructive Alden juggernaut is their liquidation of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. The details about selling off historic buildings and making single reporters cover more and more beats were all too familiar, as was the bit about jacking up the subscription rate as the paper gets thinner and thinner.
I've also heard that you can't cancel your subscription to the Pioneer Press. That is, you can say you want to stop the automatic payment you've set up (which is required now for home delivery), but it won't stop. I haven't tested this rumor yet because until I read the Atlantic article, I've been hanging on as a subscriber to support the remaining reporters.
But now that I know even more clearly than I already did that my money is going into the pockets of such evil people, even if a tiny amount of it also supports a few good people... I'm not sure it's worth it. They're playing us for fools.
Reading this and looking back over these summary numbers made me think of what the solution could be or could have been. Why is one company allowed to own so many newspapers? Gannett is no great shakes either, though compared to Alden it's fine. In the days of the Fairness Doctrine, television station ownership was limited to a very small number of markets, though that never applied to newspapers because of First Amendment case law.
It seems to me that the idea of the First Amendment applying to ownership is a form of money equaling speech, and I do not agree with that. I think there must be a way to restrict ownership concentration without infringing on true press freedom. That freedom does not require the freedom of one person or one company to own the mechanisms of the press everywhere.
I'm going to do that thing where I cheat and refer to a Twitter thread, but the Twitter user (Alec MacGillis from ProPublica) was quoting a New York Review of Books article called Can Journalism Be Saved? that discussed more than a dozen books on the topic. The article was written by Nicholas Lemann, a professor at and former dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism:
"By 2016 Google was making about four times the advertising revenue of the entire American newspaper industry."The full article is worth reading. I especially appreciated the quotes from Michael Schudson's book Why Journalism Still Matters, pointing out that what I tend to think of as journalism's proper role in American society was only with us for a fairly short period of time in the 20th century in a particular set of economic circumstances. I also welcome the suggested solutions, at the end of the article, to fund some level of original reporting.
This article by Nicholas Lemann may be the best summary I've read of the present crisis in local/metro journalism so I'm gonna quote a bunch from it.
"Employment in newspaper newsrooms decreased by 60 percent from 1990 to 2016. Circulation has declined from 62.5 million in 1968 to 34.7 million in 2016, while the population was increasing by 50 percent. Between 2007 and 2016, ad revenue declined from $45.4 billion to $18.3 billion."
"The Baltimore Sun has reduced its editorial staff from a peak of *400 in the late 1990s to 80 today*. [emphasis mine] The Boston Globe has reduced its staff from more than 500 to fewer than 285. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is down from more than 530 to fewer than 150."
"A full-page print ad in [the LA Times] cost about $50K; a digital ad that reached an equivalent audience cost about $7,000; a Google-generated ad that appeared on the Times’s website—auctioned to the advertiser through a Google system the Times had joined—might bring the paper $20."
"As a company the New York Times generates profit margins of just below 10 percent, compared to Facebook’s nearly 40 percent (the Times’s annual net income in 2018 was $126 million, versus Facebook’s $22 billion)."
Read the whole article. It's nuanced and candid about the glory days of journalism and it offers a possible way forward.
Meanwhile, I'll leave you with this coda: Jeff Bezos (whose company is now also profiting hugely off ad revenue) just paid more for two properties in southern California ($255 million) than he did for the entire Washington Post.
The news came out through Twitter a week or so ago: Pacific Standard was being killed by its owner.
Today is the final day, so this appeared in my email:
The magazine had already stopped publishing on its usual schedule, opting instead for an annual printed round-up and a full complement of web-based content. At the time of that announcment, I thought that didn't bode well for its future, but things seemed to be going ahead as promised.
The magazine was started in 2008, originally under a different name, with funding from a philanthropist who has the controlling interest in SAGE Publications Inc., publisher of academic journals and books. I have always described its purpose as translating (and sometimes synthesizing) academic work in the social sciences into good writing so it can reach a broader audience.
The philanthropist's Social Justice Foundation supported Pacific Standard consistently since its founding, and the foundation's board had recently approved the editor's 10-year plan to increase investigative reporting and had encouraged him to hire more full-time journalists. New people were hired as recently as three weeks ago, according to the Daily Beast.
The editor is looking for a new wealthy benefactor, contacting people like Oprah Winfrey and Tom Steyer. Its $3 million annual budget would be a clichéd drop in the bucket to either of them.
Again according to quotes in the Daily Beast story, it sounds as though the foundation itself is being shut down by SAGE, which "needs to focus investment on its core business of academic and professional publishing." Wah wah wah, SAGE — which gets almost all of the content it publishes for free because of the nature of publish-or-perish in academia — wants to keep more of its profits to itself. There's more going on here that's not being said.
The number of people employed in newspaper newsrooms dropped in half between 2008 and 2017, according to the Pew Research Center:
Newspapers are where local news gets covered in any depth, and local news is often about local government, right? Who is it that goes to city council meetings, committee meetings, and court cases? TV reporters? I don't think so.
Well, it turns out that loss of journalists and newspapers has financial effects on taxpayers. As described on this Hidden Brain podcast, municipal borrowing costs went up significantly in cities that lost a daily newspaper. "Overall, [the] results indicate that local newspapers hold their
governments accountable, keeping municipal borrowing costs low and
ultimately saving local taxpayers money."
It's been a busy day, and maybe the federal lockout is over for at least the short term, but it's 10:30 p.m. and I don't have time to say or think much. Another thing that happened yesterday was large layoffs at multiple media organizations, so I thought I'd share a series of tweets on that topic by Lehigh University journalism professor Jeremy Littau:
For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or think “it’s the internet!” or “people don’t pay to subscribe,” there’s a lot more going on. Though that is part of that. Here’s a cliffs notes version — not exhaustive but it hits the highlights:Our local version of this new model is MinnPost, and to some extent Minnesota Public Radio. Neither is perfect, but at least they are locally funded for the most part and not owned by hedge funds.
What is considered The Golden Age of Newspapers ended around the late ’80s. Subscriptions began dropping in the ’70s year over year, but not enough to show cracks.
Newspapers spent most of the 20th century consolidating into chains, but in the latter half of the century they became part of conglomerates and were publicly traded. Profit margins for companies like Gannett and Knight Ridder were commonly around 30–40%.
That’s an insane margin. For comparison, your local supermarket (which arguably is more necessary for you to live) is lucky to clear in the low single digits. Anyhow, most of those profits went to shareholders, who came to expect them over time.
Because of that, newspapers became, as the joke goes, a license to print money. So chains started gobbling up papers all over the country in the ’80s and ’90s. They took on debt to do this because with 40% margins, there wasn’t much downside in that model.
Then the Internet came along and the bill for short-sighted, quarter-to-quarter thinking came due. During the golden era, newsrooms didn’t invest in innovating their news product very much. They invested in technology to make it easier and require less hands.
So they were caught flat-footed. But not immediately. I remember as a college student in the ’90s attending a journalism conference and hearing publishers boast that newspapers were here to stay. They believed their product (not the news, the physical object) was essential.
So by the mid-’90s you had chains saddled with MASSIVE debt and already had readership shrinking year over year. Easy self-publishing on the Internet took a bit to come to fruition and required technical skill. Blogger was invented in the late ’90s and that was your sea change.
Suddenly, publishers who weren’t used to competition and didn’t invest in innovation were competing with more than their crosstown newspaper rival (if they had one anymore …. consolidations and mergers killed those too).
Circulation levels continue to drop, and the trend accelerated in the early part of last decade. With less readership and huge debt service commitments, it became a vicious spiral that required more cuts to meet debt goals and satisfy shareholders who were used to big profits.
And less quality meant fewer people found value in the product, and so they subscribed less. This is what Phil Meyer famously called the Death Spiral. Newspapers ate their own seed corn during bumper crop days and then had no resources when it got tough.
Fewer subscribers didn’t just mean less subscription money. By early 2000 about 75–80% of a typical newspaper’s revenue came from display and classified ads. And while subscriptions only account for 10-15% of revenue, a loss of subscribers means less ad revenue. Basically, advertisers will pay a lot if you deliver them a lot of eyeballs, and they’ll pay less if you deliver them less. Loss in subscriptions and rack sales were a double whammy.
And then came free classified ads on Craigslist (among others). People have said Craig Newmark killed newspapers, but that is nonsense. I’m surprised it took people that long to invent free classifieds, to be honest. SOMEBODY was going to do it. At least Newmark cares about news.
Classified ads were a damn boondoggle. $500 in a mid-metro to place a car ad. The more expensive your item, the more you got charged. No wonder people rebelled the minute they were offered the ability to do it for free. Newmark didn’t kill classifieds; news publisher greed did.
Anyhow, by 2006 the storms were gathered. Readership dropping, which meant less subscription/sale revenue and fewer display ads, classified ads as a business were decimated. And all the while, that debt service from the buying spree years was hanging like the Sword of Damocles.
This is a great illustration of it. I call it the Oh My God graphic in my intro course:
OMG graphic
So within 10 years, the industry lost about 2/3 of its revenue. And so that Death Spiral accelerated. More cuts, less quality, fewer readers, more cuts, less quality, etc....
But advertisers weren’t spending less. They were redirecting it. The hope was they’d invest in digital, specifically newspaper websites. And while that did happen to some extent, the numbers never came close to matching display ads because how we get news online is way different.
First, social media changed distribution. A print newspaper controlled content and the way you got that content because it controlled distribution. You were basically paying it to point you to the best news. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s what Google and Facebook do now.
The value proposition for advertisers is in showing you the way. Consumers value curators. The newspaper was curatorial, it’s just we didn’t realize it because they had a monopoly on the content process from end to end.
So let’s go back to Oh My God, with revisions:
OMG FB graphic
There is money out there. Google and Facebook have something print newspapers used to have: a reliable, captive audience. That’s what advertisers will pay for, because they know people will be there.
Since the middle part of last decade, newspapers and media companies in general have accelerated their investment in innovation. There are some GOOD, profitable examples of new companies doing this well. What they have is no debt service millstone tied around their neck.
They own newspapers big and small all over the country. This is the real crisis right here. Most of those small newsrooms have already been cut to the bone repeatedly the past 20 years. We’re way beyond trimming fat. This is a stab to the heart of democratic accountability.
And the crux of this thread is that’s the real worry. I’m less concerned about the national players or a lot of the digital-first operations. We are on the cusp of a country full of news deserts, medium and small communities with no newspaper to watch those in power.
And it’s not going to be solved by subscriptions alone, although that can help in big ways. The news model needs to be completely reinvented. Paywalls don’t work for local media.
And who’s moving in right now to pick through the scraps? Hedge funds. They’ve destroyed several papers, and are working their way through some biggies like the Denver Post. [I note: the same hedge fund that wants to buy Gannett owns and has destroyed the Pioneer Press.] When hedge funds are in the game, you’re being stripped for parts to sell off. They have no interest in growing the paper or finding a sustainable model. That’s not what they exist for.
And there’s a demographic bomb out there waiting to go off. The print product is still bringing in large amounts of revenue relative to digital. And guess who reads the print version? Old people (by and large).
But this isn’t something that perpetuates. That is, as people like me age up, our likelihood of subscribing to print doesn’t go up. For each successive generation, it’s diminishing returns. So to put it crassly, what happens when that generation of loyal subscribers dies?
And so there’s a limited window before that bomb goes off. But in truth? A healthy product likely would have solved some of this by now. I am resigned to the fear that existing small/medium newspapers are out of time and are simply playing out the string.
So, all that said, what can you do? First, we need to realize the greedy publishers that didn’t invest aren’t going to realize their mistake and plow money into the business now. So guess who needs to step up? US. If we value accountable democracy, that is.
Subscriptions, yes, but look for opportunities to support things like foundation journalism (what ProPublica is doing, for example) and moonshot ideas like what Civil tried to do. As community members and citizens, we need to look at investments as things that might fail but also might succeed, as investments often do. But we need to invest for the sake of our communities and our democracy.
What I’d implore you to do, though, is look for ways to invest in local news because that is where it matters most. Good god, you think Washington is corrupt? Try City Hall. Some of the worst stuff I saw as a reporter happened there.
Your local paper might be toast or dying. So who’s stepping up, needs help creating a new way to do local/regional accountability. I’m seeing more of these than I used to. Ralston Reports is one example. Some of these are laid-off reporters that go it alone. They’re good at this.
The people in industry, those still there and even those getting laid off, are trying like hell. They really are. But it’s not their fault. It’s not their bias, or mistakes, or them being bad. The seeds were planted decades ago by greedy, short-sighted owners.
Another Sunday, another illustration credited to Mary Hilleren / Special to the Pioneer Press on the front of the Life section (here's my post about the earlier ones).
The good news first: It's not completely lacking in charm. The human figure near the top is kind of cute and has some style, unlike her earlier efforts. The color use is also better: you can tell where one thing ends and another starts, at least.
And maybe the concept is okay: a ice-fishing child is petting a fish, while under the ice there's a world of gifts waiting to be caught. It's kind of complicated, but I suppose it could work.
Except that it doesn't. First, there's no indication that the bottom two-thirds of the spatially complex image is supposed to be under water, other than the fact that there are fish flying or floating around. It doesn't look like water. And this begins to get at the biggest general problem with the illustration: what is figure and what is ground? After peering at it for a while, I realized the top third is supposed to be ice (note the arcs of an ice-skater's blade), while the green squiggly line is somehow the edge of the ice. The child is sitting with their feet... in the icy water? Is the fish's nose supposed to be out of the water? And down below the ice, what is that medium-blue blob behind the Christmas tree? Is it supposed to be a cave or something in the ice wall that comes up to the edge of the ice where the child sits?
Then there are the details that are amiss. I think the illustrator got some photos of aquarium plants or ocean plants for reference. There's nothing growing on a Minnesota lake bottom that looks like the tropical plant at middle right or the coral-like growths near bottom left.
Oh, and probably most glaringly wrong among the details: the "hole" in the ice is drawn with its shading inverted, so it looks like a disk sitting on top of the ice, rather than a hole into the ice. It's a really basic thing that anyone could see. Does it look like a hole? No, it goes up instead of down.
(And now I grumble to myself all the same thoughts I had about the Pioneer Press at the end of the previous post about this illustrator.)
I used to write about a wonderful illustrator who worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Kirk Lyttle. (My past posts can be seen here.) He made subscribing to the paper worth it, all on his own.
Kirk took the buyout a number of years ago, and as with most other things at the PiPress since it was sold to extractive capital, the design and illustration have gone down hill (if not off a cliff).
Case in point, the illustration on the front of the Life section this Sunday:
The story is about stage blood and how to do it right (a Halloween topic). Unfortunately, the illustration does it all wrong.
From today's Science & Health section of the Star Tribune, two stories on research into ways we can do less and have a better outcome.
First, from AP, less may be more in trauma treatment. Medical researchers in Philadelphia are about to start a large, randomized (but not double-blind) experiment into whether providing less emergency treatment to people with gunshot or stab wounds results in better outcomes. The treatments that will be withheld are IV fluids and intubation. The hypothesis is that for "victims who are bleeding through an open wound, these procedures may cause an increase in blood pressure that can accelerate blood loss and death."
Starting this fall and over the next five years (or until a thousands subjects have been studied), anyone in Philadelphia who's shot or stabbed will have an even chance of receiving or not receiving these treatments from EMTs. People are allowed to opt out of the experiment by wearing a bracelet saying they want the current standard treatment.
Researchers are visiting lots of people in the lead-up to the study to explain all of this. Given the history of experimentation without consent, especially in black communities (everything from Henrietta Lacks to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments), the researchers face a fair amount of skepticism.
People wonder if the researchers aren't sacrificing people's lives to test a theory. However, it appears from the data so far that the real sacrifice may be among people who receive the current treatment:
Retrospective studies...have shown that gunshot and stabbing victims given basic life support — such as an oxygen mask, CPR or immobilization — had an 18 percentage-point survival advantage over those given advanced procedures, such as intubation, in an ambulance.The plan is to stop the study early if, part way through, the researchers are finding disproportionately adverse outcomes for patients who don't get intubation and IV fluids.
Someone is tired over at the Star Tribune. Check out this large illustration from the front page of the business section:
The story is about the former Mithun ad agency as its name changes to that of its parent company, McCann. So to illustrate that, someone at the Strib thought, "Let's use light bulbs. That's never been done before."
Even worse, the headline says that McCann needs new ideas. So the illustrator took the tired light bulb idea and made it worse by using ultra-old-fashioned-looking light bulbs. Maybe the one in the foreground could have been different from the others somehow, as if it represented a different way to make light, rather than just being lit up. But no. Clearly, that would have been too hard.
Not surprisingly, the illustration (which dominates the page) is credited to "staff illustration." Whoever did it was too embarrassed to sign it.
Yet another example of how much nicer it is when one of our daily newspapers hires an illustrator who knows what she's doing:
If you're going to design a page where the art dominates completely, you'd better commission something to put there that's worth looking at.
Thanks to Ali Douglass, "special to the Star Tribune." Her work is special to me, too.
The misuse of "hone" for "home" in the phrase "home in" has been going on for a long time, at least since the early 1990s, according to Bryan Garner (who gives it a Stage 3 rating, meaning it has become commonplace but is still avoided in careful usage). "Hone" was the subject of one of my earliest posts.
But recently I saw a new variant that's even worse:
This story from the Washington Post was reprinted in both of my local newspapers (in fact, it made it into the Star Tribune twice — once in this shortened form on December 31 and again at full length on January 3). That means it got past the few remaining copy editors at least four times (counting the original from the WaPo).
I have a feeling that "zone in" is a rhyming eggcorn for "hone in." (An eggcorn is a homophonic substitution that makes sense to the listener or reader.)
Here's where I think the sub came from and why it makes a twisted kind of sense: You know how cop dramas and science fiction generally like to show a technician zooming into a screen image to see details of a crime or other surveillance footage? The investigator standing over the tech's shoulder says, "Can you show more detail there?" and the tech drags the cursor cross-hairs over a small zone of the picture, magically enlarging it with lots more resolution to reveal "the truth" or at least a significant clue.
The tech picked a zone and zoomed in ("zone" and "zoom" are also almost homophones). So now we have home —> hone —> zone (zoom).
While "zone in" may make sense in a way, it's still obvious the copy editors have zoned out rather than in.
