June 4, 2009

On newspapers and paywalls

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The other day, I got into a discussion on Facebook over whether newspapers should charge for content on the web. My interlocutors were newspaper types, and they were enthusiastic about charging. To them, it was self-evident that if newspapers spent money generating valuable and socially relevant content, readers (and Google, and aggregators such as the Huffington Post) ought to pony up. Speaking from personal interest, I disagree. As a journalist I want to maximize the number of eyes on, and discussion of, my work. Put a paywall around it and you can pretty much say goodbye to those goals. No chance of “going viral.” As Gawker’s Nick Denton said the other day, “We are egomaniacs. We like to get out in the public eye.” So I found it kind of odd that newspaper journalists seemed so intent on making people pay – setting aside the question of what business model might work, if you’re a reporter, what difference does it make to you if your work is subsidized by advertising or a paywall?

Then I read the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Economic Action Plan. It’s the same point of view I ran into on Facebook, only systematized and turned into a business strategy. The problem with this “we produce something of value and should be paid for it” attitude, though, is that it is just an attitude, one shaped by a sense of grievance and a gut feeling about what is – must be – right and just. This is a terrible way to formulate any kind of complex strategy – George W. Bush made decisions the same way. In this case, the API ignores the real world conditions of journalism, the Internet and e-commerce. Thus this strategy, if pursued, is unlikely to turn out well. I’m a former newspaper reporter – I want newspapers & journalism to survive and thrive. And I’m not against charging for some content if it’s done right. But even I can see this is crazy.

Start with the API’s first recommendation: “Establish a true value for news content online by charging for it.” This is a strange formulation. In a market, prices are set by supply and demand, not dictated by producers. The declaration has an anachronistic, command-and-control, almost Marxist feel to it: we control the means of production, we will set the prices. It assumes a kind of monopolistic position that newspapers no longer hold, as much as they might want to. If your starting point is the assumption your product has “value,” you’d be wise to take a hard look at exactly what that value is on the open market. But the API evidently has not conducted that kind of clear-eyed self-assessment. It sees the economic value of newspaper content as self-evident, of a piece with its perceived social value, and something that must be preserved first, improved upon later.

But the truth is that newspaper journalism has a relatively low market value and its social relevance is in decline. It’s still important – we need eyes on government at all levels, investigations, a space for local and national community discussions to play out. But the form of the newspaper story is stale, and the package it comes in – the selection of the day’s news, calendar, arts, classifieds, etc. – is something many people no longer really need because they can get most of it elsewhere. Meanwhile the relative social importance of newspaper stories – as a forum for political debates, say – has also declined due to ever-fragmenting attention, competition, and a loss of credibility that’s partly self-inflicted.

The API’s answer to this is to double down on existing, loyal newspaper fans: “The real value to newspapers comes from serving … ‘core loyalists,’ the group of heavy users who visit a news site about 18 days a month, two to three times a day. They contribute 85 percent of the page views and user sessions.” But surely this base is already in decline, unlikely to replaced by younger readers.

These problems are severe. The obvious solution to them is to make a better product – leverage the advantages you have, innovate, create something people really want, and thus make yourself important again – and figure out how to sell it. The marketplace of the open web is the ideal forum to test this out. (I acknowledge that many or most such tests will result in failure.) The API report makes some gestures toward innovation – but only after enumerating ways to monetize content. Its basic approach is, we’ve already got a golden goose here, people are stealing our eggs, and we want them back.

That’s the other principal problem – the report urges a crackdown on the cribbing of content by Google, aggregators and others: they should pay or cease and desist. There is plenty of abuse of “fair use,” and original content is endlessly atomized. Perhaps there are ways to police the egregious cases better and/or generate revenue from “republishing” if all are amenable. But is this really a wise foundation for a future-of-newspapers strategy? Here’s how the report envisions the politics:

Many citizens and policy makers regard newspapers as an essential part of the American democracy as evidenced by a recent congressional hearing and a spate of conferences. The sustainability of journalism is important to Americans, and thus, there is a public imperative to ensure, and monetize, the survival of professional news organizations in some form.

You can read this two ways. Either the newspaper industry has civic obligation to charge for content, or society itself must recognize the importance of newspaper content and compel politicians to protect it. The first idea is tendentious, the second naive. The public isn’t particularly sympathetic to tougher copyright enforcement. The lobbying clout of newspaper publishers and media companies is declining with their corporate valuations. Google has lots of money to spend on its own lobbyists. And the current copyright regime is outdated. When it’s reformed, who knows what will happen?

It’s not like the API report contains no good ideas. No doubt there are ways to charge for premium content as it suggests, for example. But your average small or medium-sized paper doesn’t have much (or any) of that, nor does the API give any examples of it. And if your strategy is shaped by an inflexible set of beliefs and an attitude of entitlement, it’s not a recipe for innovation or success. After reading this, I’m more pessimistic than ever about the future of newspapers.

 

May 12, 2009

The Philadelphia Inquirer and John Yoo

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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s decision to give a monthly column to John Yoo – author of several “torture memos” offering legal rationales for the Bush administration’s abusive interrogations – is (pick your term): Tone-deaf? Crazy? Morally dubious? Newspapers have made a lot of questionable decisions in recent years, some perhaps unavoidable, some true whoppers. But this is just flat-out wrong.

Many newspapers and other traditional media outlets, fearful of the “liberal bias” charge and watching their audience disappear, have spent the past decade trying to build their credibility with conservatives. There’s nothing wrong with that per se –  they are run mostly by liberals, and we need conservative voices in the political debate. But those efforts went awry during the Bush administration. Confronted by an White House that was wildly overreaching on presidential power, surveillance, torture and the politicization of basic governance, most media lost their bearings. They treated these things as normal, if controversial, activities of government.

Fortunately, the political system self-corrected. But the media’s problems remain. Here is part of of editorial page editor Harold Jackson’s explanation for Yoo’s hiring:

He’s a Philadelphian, and very knowledgeable about the legal subjects he discusses in his commentaries. Our readers have been able to get directly from Mr. Yoo his thoughts on a number of subjects concerning law and the courts, including measures taken by the White House post-9/11. That has promoted further discourse, which is the objective of newspaper commentary.

But other providing a valuable forum for self-justification, I don’t understand what the op-ed page gains with Yoo. There are plenty of talented conservative writers out there. Yoo’s debut column is undistinguished conservative boilerplate.

The only reason Yoo is prominent enough to write a column in the Inquirer is because of his work in the White House Office of Legal Counsel. Hiring him is thus is an implicit endorsement of the legitimacy the legal opinions he crafted there. But those opinions are legally suspect and morally repugnant. Yoo is an advocate of a questionable legal theory of nearly unlimited presidential power, and his memos were instrumental in providing legal cover for techniques that were, by any commonsense interpretation of the word, torture.

Yoo might be a war criminal. At the very least, Inquirer editors should engage that issue directly. Simply hiring him says: we don’t think so. This is an assent to the dangerous notion that if the U.S. government did it, no matter how reprehensible it might be, it must have some legitimacy. That’s sad – and not part of the American journalistic tradition I know.

Update: Wednesday’s New York Times story on this quotes Harold Jackson confirming that Yoo’s hiring was indeed an attempt to address the liberal bias perception: “‘There was a conscious effort on our part to counter some of the criticism of The Inquirer as being a knee-jerk liberal publication,’ Mr. Jackson said. ‘We made a conscious effort to add some conservative voices to our mix.’”

 

April 29, 2009

100 news cycles later

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During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama made clear his distaste of the news cycle and its trivial obsessions. Skeptics said this would hurt his chances: that to win, a candidate must dominate the news day-by-day, minute-by-minute, with attacks that keep the opposition off-balance. Yet the Obama campaign managed to win by emphasizing a longer-term strategy over the hair-trigger approach.

But on Jan. 20, for all intents and purposes President Obama became the news cycle. His ambitions for toning down Washington’s nasty partisan warfare – and with that, creating better prospects for his agenda – depend on his ability to nudge the news cycle away from the cable network- and Drudge-driven obsession with transient panics and cultural outrages. (An obsession that the Bush administration, with its focus on divisive electoral politics, actively cultivated.) On that front, he’s been only partially successful so far. But far more so than most of us would have thought going in.

The media love nothing more than scandal, failure and disaster. But so far Obama has declined to provide them. The White House’s frenzy of activity during the first 100 days – much of it politically and substantively successful, with the opposition in disarray – more or less requires that news about him focus on relaying facts. It’s hard to stick with “who’s up, who’s down” when there’s only one player on the field.

And as Dan Kennedy notes, Obama has been a boon to the media business. It’s more fun and better for ratings to cover a glamorous new president than an unpopular old one. The camera loves Obama, his family, even his dog. His professorial cool is a stark contrast to the at-sea press conference performances of his predecessor. We’re also facing various alarming crises, so for various reasons – information, reassurance – people want to hear what Obama has to say: his prime time press conferences draw an impressive number of viewers. Robert Gibbs’s White House press office, meanwhile, has been strategically smart. It has sat Obama down with conservative and liberal columnists and bloggers, and had the president give non-traditional media (including the Huffington Post) a turn at press conferences. Not surprisingly, these are explicit choices to bypass the insular White House press corps in the shaping of public opinion.

Obama has lagged on the transparency front — the creation of a friendly interface that will allow journalists, bloggers – and everyone else – full access to information and data from the White House and rest of the government.. But the technical obstacles are formidable, so this will take time.

Where is all this going? We probably won’t know until Obama makes his first big stumble and has to fend off the wolves. But a Lewinksy or Rovian gambit seems unlikely from this White House, so that’s progress in itself.

 

March 16, 2009

The revolution is real

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Printing press ca. 1811

Printing press ca. 1811

Human beings are afflicted with a certain bias about the world: we don’t expect it to change, at least not radically. When things are going well, this bias is amplified. Blessed with prosperity and stability in America over the past couple of generations, we’ve trained ourselves to expect a certain level of technological progress. We expect that living standards will gradually rise over time. We don’t expect revolutions. (And even when they occur in the political world, things often settle back down to a semblance of how they were before. Meet the new boss, et al.)

But complete revolutionary transformations do occur with some regularity in history. And when they do, we’re gobsmacked.

Old structures – the way people organize their lives – are swept away. Something very different emerges and consolidates over decades or centuries. Think: the invention of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution. The printing press. It’s this final example that Clay Shirky focuses on in this cogent essay. The invention of the printing press and the emergence of printed books altered reading habits, literacy, politics, religion, the whole shape of society. They were used to things being one way. That way was dissolving around them. The “new way” had not yet taken shape. So people couldn’t really comprehend what was going on:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Indeed, “what’s the new business model for news?” is almost always a conversation stopper, not a starter. It’s usually meant as a bitter rejoinder from old-school journalists to innovators and dreamers touting unproven, and probably not profitable, news technologies. But let’s face it: “unproven and probably not profitable” is far better than “disastrously unworkable,” which is the state of the newspaper model today. As Shirky notes, nobody knows what’s going to “work” ultimately. We are not going to “replace newspapers.” Instead, we’re going to keep doing journalism using the increasingly powerful, proliferating tools at our disposal and see what happens. That’s all we can do. And we live in a vital, freewheeling democracy. Something will happen.

I also like the ecosystem metaphor Steven Johnson employs in this SXSW speech (indeed, I’ve used something similar myself). Newspapers used to be culturally important because they filled an information void. Now that void has been filled to overflowing. It is true that traditional, dead-tree investigative and foreign reporting are both needed and uniquely difficult to replace. But nothing so far has stopped the relentless effusion of rich content in (as Johnson notes) technology and politics. That trend is likely to spread and unlikely to simply, or ever, stop.

 

January 23, 2009

Managing the media

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Kevin Drum responds to my previous post with an interesting suggestion for President Obama:

So how does he work to change things? McQuaid warns that tightly controlling media access the way George Bush did isn’t the answer, and I agree. Instead, I’d say that he should send a consistent message about the value of serious journalism by providing the best access to the most serious journalists. Not the ones who are the most famous, or have the biggest audiences, or who agree with him the most often, but the ones who have written or aired the sharpest, liveliest, most substantive, most penetrating critiques of what he and his administration are doing. He should spar with them, he should engage with them, he should take their ideas seriously. Eventually, others will start to get the message: if you want to get presidential attention, you need to say something smart. It’s too late to for this to have any effect on media buffoons like Maureen Dowd or Chris Matthews, but you never know. It might encourage a few of the others to grow up. It’s worth a try, anyway.

I’d love to see Obama set up regular bull sessions with insightful journalists. It would offer a window on his thinking and also just be interesting and fun to watch. But since the problem exists in the broader media culture, not just Washington salons, this probably wouldn’t help all that much.

But two things offer hope on this front. First, the country faces grave crises, so serious news tends to crowd out trivial, character-driven stories. If Tim Geithner had been nominated during the Clinton administration, he likely would not have survived TurboTaxgate. (How many attorney general nominees did Clinton go through before settling on scandal-free Janet Reno?) But because we need competent, skilled leadership to forestall a second Great Depression, Geithner’s confirmation has never been in doubt. Of course, we have always needed competent, skilled leadership; too bad it takes terrible news to keep the psuedo-scandals at bay.

Second, Obama himself is good at breaking the rhythm of a feeding frenzy, either by starving it or by reframing the entire discussion. Last spring, for example, as damaging revelations about Rev. Jeremiah Wright poured forth, talking heads were urging Obama to publicly repudiate his former pastor — to take part in a crass, familiar ritual to appease and silence the media gods. He rejected that premise and instead gave his excellent speech on race, which both gobsmacked and impressed the establishment media.

The White House press corps is not going to stop asking gotcha questions. Talking heads are going to keep spouting speculative nonsense. But between the doom and gloom, major structural changes in government and a president who will occasionally talk substance, the media may be forced to set aside some of its trivial obsessions.

 

January 22, 2009

Obama and the media

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Barack Obama deserves kudos for his newly-announced policies on the Freedom of Information Act and other transparency-related issues. Of course, it will take some time for presidential directives to work their way down through the vast government bureaucracy, where they will encounter resistance due to habit, laziness, and limited resources. But Obama has clearly broken with the past — in the only way that makes any sense in the information age. The question now is: what are we, the people, going to do with all this information our government is making available?

But it’s interesting that, at least on the surface, Obama’s approach to the establishment media – the TV and radio networks, wire services, newspapers and magazines that still cover the White House – doesn’t differ all that much from George W. Bush’s. As in, their correspondents are not getting much access. They are tightly managed. The White House press office doesn’t say very much, and what it says isn’t very revealing. What’s more, it’s signaling that past press rituals will not necessarily be observed. The Obama team declined to give the New York Times a pre-inauguration interview. Yesterday, the White House didn’t even let press photographers in to get some shots of Obama working in the Oval Office, provoking an AP announcement that it would not distribute what amounted to “visual press releases.”

Bush and Cheney viewed themselves in a manichean struggle with the forces arrayed against them, a list that includes not jihadists but the federal bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, reality itself! — and the media. As Jay Rosen has pointed out, they attempted to “de-certify” the media by strangling its access to information and using a variety of alternative, propagandistic avenues to get its message across. This proved disastrous.

Like Bush, Obama appears to view the media agenda in fundamental conflict with his own. But now, the perceived difference isn’t ideological. It’s programmatic. Obama (correctly, I think) sees the press representing two things that are clear obstacles to his ambitious plans: official Washington and a trivia-obsessed media culture.

First, the official Washington view: There’s a certain, Broderesque way of doing things. Be centrist, bipartisan – especially if you’re a Democratic president. Listen to the conservative talking heads who dominate Sunday talk shows, who will advise you to be … conservative. This world, shaped by the rise of conservative media since the Reagan era, remains several steps behind where the country is, or is ready to be, on politics and policy.

Second, the media culture: The cable maw must be fed with transient panics. Feeding frenzies and micro-scandals dominate. They fuel the chat shows, opinion columns and blogs. These faux crises and dramas, which usually pass with little consequence, can knock a presidential agenda off-stride or even destroy it.

These phenomena reflect the growing insularity of the establishment press over the past generation. They are obstacles both to good journalism and to the kind of bold political reforms Obama is pursuing.  He is right to be wary of them. But this doesn’t diminish the importance of openness. As a journalist and a citizen, I’d like to see more give-and-take between reporters and the president – and I expect we will see that. And I want insights on what’s happening in the West Wing and OEOB from experienced journalists. What we ultimately get depends not just on Obama’s willingness to engage, but on the media’s ability to break free of its own outmoded habits and prejudices.

 

January 15, 2009

The media ecosphere & the government

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Once, the media could unilaterally shape the political debate – a legacy of the (short-lived) postwar political consensus and the media’s monolithic dominance of airwaves, newsprint, etc. Jay Rosen has mapped out the arbitrary ways this consensus-generating machine worked, and why it’s now breaking down:

Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.

It’s good to have a million voices calling BS on big media’s persistent, strange, Reagan-era take on American politics. I wonder, though, what effects the combination of declining cultural relevance and the implosion of the media business will have on the relationship between media and government. One virtue of having big media institutions is that, sometimes, their clout and claim to represent a consensus view could be brought to bear on serious government transgressions – the classic examples being Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and more recently, the New York Times’s exposure of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program.

Obviously, you can’t turn back the clock. You can’t leverage authority that no longer exists. A new configuration of old/new media is still taking shape. So: will a vastly more diverse but also more diffuse media ecosystem still have the ability (via individual media outlet, or via a swarm) to bring pressure to bear on the upper levels of government?

 

December 18, 2008

The DC bureau’s disappearance, continued

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A little late to the party, today’s New York Times bemoans the mass closings of Washington news bureaus. There’s not much new here, except updated numbers. And not much insight into the underlying problems afflicting Washington journalism, or speculation on what might fill the information breach left by all that vanished reportorial power.

For instance, the incoming Obama administration promises a veritable revolution in government openness, and there are already a number of organizations in place that plan to build on that. Bloggers and citizen journalists are also in this picture. What will this transparency really mean for understanding how government works? After all, government is still government. Which means it will spend a lot of time covering its a**, no matter how much raw data it puts out there. There are a lot of rich questions here. Alas, the folks at the Gridiron Club are still in mourning, and probably will be for some time.

On the other hand, this response by Henry Blodget gives new meaning to the word “cavalier.” Most DC coverage is/was duplicative and thus unnecessary, he writes. In general terms, of course he’s right. But by Blodget’s standards, the McClatchy bureau’s distinctive, path-breaking coverage of Iraq and other issues — in substantive terms, not duplicative at all — clearly falls into this category, and thus belongs on the chopping block with no second thoughts.

Here’s what he says about regional/local bureaus:

One area where coverage may actually suffer is that of the Washington-based activities of state senators and Congress-people: New Yorkers may not care much about how much pork, say, Wayne Allard of Colorado is stuffing into the latest bill, but folks in Aspen might (might–although if it is really tasty pork, we expect Wayne himself will rush to tell them about it). 

Even this lament, however, is misplaced: If there is truly a need or hunger for news about the Washington-based activities of local representatives, it can and will be filled by Politico or some other organization that has some economies of scale. Then local newspapers can reprint or aggregate it.

OK, let’s let Politico handle it. Problem solved!

Seriously, the relationship between citizens and government has been sorely strained over the past eight years, and most of the real business of government goes on at precisely this regional or local level, below the radar of the Politico or the Washington Post. Blodget obviously doubts it, but I do think there is “truly a need or hunger” for this type of information that must be satisfied somehow, by organizations that a) exist and/or b) have real plans to pursue it.

 

December 17, 2008

The media party like it’s 1997

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Looking over the media’s political coverage of the past week,  a casual observer might think s/he was back in the 1990s. There’s a big scandal  involving the Democratic governor of Illinois trying to sell the president-elect’s senate seat. Will it hurt the party? The incoming administration? Caroline Kennedy wants to be the next junior senator from New York. Are the Democrats embracing dynastic politics? The president-elect gives a press conference announcing the new secretary of education – in which he dodges questions and bores reporters present – just like his obfuscating predecessors!

I sympathize with the media. The fact is, there isn’t much political news right now, though there’s a great hunger for it. Obama is not yet president. He’s making appointments, but those people aren’t actually doing anything yet. Bush is making dog videos. And Congress has adjourned after deadlocking on the auto bailout.

But what we see here is more than just an attempt to fill space. The media is falling back into old habits perfected during the vaporous Clinton scandals of the 1990s. The not-so-subliminal message in this coverage: You thought things would be different with Obama. But they’re not. Politics as usual. Scandals. Spin. Coverups! And, if we’re lucky, a feeding frenzy!

Drill down a little, and most of these questions turn out to be off-base. Take Dana Milbank’s piece on Obama’s press conference. Is it reasonable to expect a press conference announcing the new education secretary to be anything but deadly dull? Is it reasonable to expect Obama to step into the state-level political tempest over how to choose his replacement in the Senate? Or to opine on an investigation in which he is at best very tangentially involved? When Clinton or Bush “dodged questions” about investigations, they (or their subordinates) were the ones being investigated.

Enormous changes are brewing in the country and in government itself. Big Government is back – and it may be the only thing that can save us. This has tremendous implications for American politics.  The political media, however, doesn’t seem to get this. It’s bad at covering the actual workings of government, the nexus of politics and policy. In a pinch, it always returns to a set of commonly-held tropes and cliches forged during the Clinton scandals of the 1990s. Proven cable chat-generators, these focus heavily on the habitual hypocrisy of politicians, the always-disjointed relationship between their words and actions – but not on the substance of the actions themselves.

This is both predictable and comforting – all the more reason we’re seeing it now, when no one knows what the hell is going to happen. But not promising.

 

December 5, 2008

The New Yorker edges onto the web

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Yesterday I wrote that some magazines still occupy a revered cultural space, something that might let them survive the Internet revolution. Many “high quality” magazines lose money anyway, but somehow go on year after year, supported by family largesse, foundations, and more profitable sister publications.

The New Yorker would have to be number one on this list. However, like many dead-tree publications it still hoards its subscriber-only, print-centric exclusivity. It has been improving: more of the weekly magazine’s content is being made available online, and some of its best writers, including Hendrik Hertzberg and George Packer, now blog. Huzzah! If you want the whole New Yorker experience online, with the benefits of the Internet (such as links) you’re still out of luck. I discovered this when I tried to find a great piece by Ian Frazier in this week’s (Dec. 8 ) edition. Frazier profiles Derrick Parker, an ex-NYPD detective known as the “hip-hop cop.” For many years, he was the department’s reigning expert on the world of hip-hop. Now a security consultant, Parker is one of the great profile subjects – colorful, talkative, with an entree to a fascinating subculture.

In one vivid and hilarious scene, Frazier accompanies Parker as he vets would-be attendees at a birthday party for a rapper at an exclusive club. Now, I’d like to quote this briefly and link to it, but alas, no dice. The piece is not available to non-subscribers online. It is available to subscribers of the magazine’s “digital edition,” which is a kind of glorified pdf reader that reproduces the physical magazine on your screen. Here’s the link to the piece, if you’re a subscriber. Navigation is cumbersome, requiring zooming in and scrolling around to get through the columns/photos/pages – which, of course, are not designed for a computer screen in the first place.

Some magazines, such as the Atlantic, have embraced the Internet and leveraged their cultural cachet effectively in the new arena. The New Yorker still has a ways to go.

 

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