There seems to be some sort of informal contest going on to see who can come up with the most preposterous and reactionary proposal to save newspapers. I thought the American Press Institute pretty much had it in the bag with its action plan and cart-before-the-horse declaration that papers should establish the economic value of their content by charging for it.

Now the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi seems to be out to top the API. His piece in AJR, Build That Pay Wall High, isn’t obtuse like the API report. It’s a provocative, contrarian take, arguing that newspapers should abandon the web and go all-in on print. This sounds crazy, but Farhi makes a real argument, attempting to anticipate and rebut potential objections.

But I think the result is essentially the same as the others – this is not a credible solution. Like everyone else who has looked at this issue, Farhi finds almost no good news for newspapers. Their print ad revenue is declining and online ad revenue can’t begin to take its place. The web is an ocean of content, so it’s going to be hard if not impossible to raise much money via micropayments or the various other paywall ideas that have been proposed to monetize news content. So far so good – we don’t get the economically nonsensical “journalism costs money so people should pay” argument. Instead, Farhi says papers should simply double down on the one thing that has paid the bills consistently – print. Put up paywalls, cut off incoming links from the open web, revitalize the printed product, and basically pray that people will rediscover the virtue of the printed page.

There are dozens of reasons this is a counterproductive idea, most of which you’ve heard before. So I’ll mention only two.

1. The news cycle is now continuous. A printed paper is not. Here’s the experience of one ex-newspaper reporter: I used to buy a paper to read at lunch. Since I’ve had a phone with web access, I’m doing that less. And even when I do, my attention always wanders back to the phone, which tells me what’s going on right now. The influence of Farhi’s own publication in national politics would rapidly decline if it pursued a print-only strategy. It would become a high-end niche publication like the National Journal or CQ Weekly, with a small yet influential Washington-based audience. That’s not nothing, but by any measure it would be a major, historic retreat for a paper like the Washington Post.

2. Farhi is essentially saying that newspapers ought to become more like newsmagazines:

Going print-only implies that newspapers will have to evolve into something they’re not right now. To compensate for the loss of immediacy, they would have to be distinctive and singular, offering something that no Internet competitor could. They would have to differentiate themselves with exclusive information – all fresh, all local – compelling photography and courageous commentary. They’d still have to cover the news, but in a way that offered additional perspective, beyond the broad outlines available elsewhere. Even more than telling readers something they don’t already know, newspapers will need tons of hustle and enterprise and a unique personality.

This is both the nub and the weakest part of Farhi’s argument. Newsmagazines aren’t much better off than newspapers in redefining themselves, and newspaper quality has been in decline. More vague prescriptions to “offer additional perspective” aren’t going to do them any good.

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.

Did Maureen Dowd commit a firing offense by, she says, inadvertently lifting a paragraph from Talking Points Memo? I don’t think so, but what happens hardly reflects well on Dowd or her column.

To recap: Dowd’s Sunday column on the debate over torture contained a paragraph taken nearly word-for-word from a post by Josh Marshall. When a TPMCafe blogger pointed this out, Dowd quickly admitted error and properly attributed the relevant paragraph. The Times ran a correction.

End of story? Surely that’s what the Times and Dowd want, and in all probability their quick response – far superior to the grudging, circle-the-wagons responses to similar problems in the past – will be effective.

But the response raised more questions than it answers. Critics are focusing on the fact of Marshall’s words showing up in Dowd’s column. But in some sense that’s irrelevant. If she had known that paragraph came from TPM, it’s unlikely she would have reprinted it without attribution. (On Imus today, Frank Rich cited this as a reason in her defense.)

But assuming her explanation is true, and she’s soliciting input from friends and cutting-and-pasting it into columns, that’s worse in some ways than cribbing from published work. It meets the dictionary definition of plagiarism: “a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work.” It’s also lazy, shoddy journalism. And it’s virtually undetectable.

Last year Dowd got into hot water for not attributing the reporting work of her assistant. Sunday’s incident gives us an additional window on the slapdash way a MoDo column is assembled. Dowd could be using the vast resources and reach of the Times and her substantial writer’s gifts to produce a great column. That’s the whole idea, right? Instead, it’s like the faux-juice drinks your kids are drinking – perhaps 50% real Maureen Dowd, 50% other ingredients.

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.’”

Today George Will takes on the scourge of denim, which apparently has some connection to the TARP and the number of Batman movies in the ongoing ruination of America – I won’t summarize it further. The fact that Will considers the popularity of comfortable clothes to be a greater threat to society than climate change is certifiably crazy.

The problem here, though, is not just Will’s idle musings but the form and institution of the newspaper column. It’s long been clear that writing one year after year makes people stupid. It’s not merely the repetition and monotony of the 600-word form, which would challenge the most talented writer’s creativity and freshness. (Will did manage some fine, astringent columns on the Bush administration’s own problems with empiricism.) It’s that the column writer develops his/her own set of cliches and tropes that end up being repeated over and over, taking up more and more space as the column ages. This is one reason columns rarely feature genuinely thoughtful arguments. Another reason is linked to the newspaper itself. Columnists are trying to appeal to a mass audience that doesn’t really exist anymore. And if you’re a conservative columnist, you are not only burdened with your own personal cliches but the husk of a whole movement in decline and transition.

So the tendency, as when Will twists science to deny climate change in one breath and attacks jeans in the next, is to resort to provocation, the simplest way to get attention. Nothing wrong with being provocative, but provocative nonsense is still nonsense.

When defenders of the traditional newspaper say “bloggers can’t replace journalists!” they overlook the fact that in Hollywood they already have. I don’t know much about the entertainment industry, but I know a lot more than I did a year ago thanks to Nikki Finke, whose Deadline Hollywood Daily blog is a fascinating window into that subculture.

Obviously, a one-person operation can’t cover the entire entertainment industry. But Finke has still managed to turn her site into a major information node. What’s interesting in the future of news debate is that Finke is thriving while the trade publications she competes with – Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, the LA Times – are in deep trouble. Tellingly, the two trades are subscription-only publications, with swaths of their websites behind pay walls. So as one model erodes, another is filling the void, and even having an impact on how business is done. (Another entertainment site, Sharon Waxman’s The Wrap, recently debuted.) Newspapers’ claim to uniqueness stemmed partly from the breadth of their coverage – local news, business, sports packaged together. Niche publications are saddled with a business model based on newsprint, display ads, and, sometimes, pricey subscriptions. In a clubby, information-driven field like entertainment, they are particularly vulnerable to competition from well-sourced upstarts, whether independent journalists or experts who blog.

And the legacy media doesn’t like this one bit. Variety talked with Finke about buying her site. When the talks broke down, they published a belittling piece about her and other Hollywood bloggers.

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.

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.

The Times-Picayune’s Angus Lind has a great column recapping the career of Walt Philbin, the TP’s talented and endlessly colorful cops reporter, who just retired. When I went to work for the TP in the 1980s, Walt – who was in his early 40s at the time and had only been there about a decade – looked like something out of an earlier era, or, more precisely, one man’s cockeyed interpretation of the way things had been 30 or 40 years earlier. In a newsroom with more than its share of eccentrics, he stood out for his sense of style (rumpled, yes, but inimitable) his gentleness and sense of humor, and his uncanny talent at working sources at the most appalling crime scenes imaginable. If you went anywhere with Walt, his beeper – on the loudest possible setting – was constantly going off, and he’d whip it off his belt in a near-frenzy. Sometimes it was a source. But two thirds of the time, it was one of his relatives checking in.

Lind recalls an iconic Philbin anecdote, a deadline situation with editor Billy Rainey:

On one infamous occasion, Philbin came back into the newsroom very animated after covering some story andRainey asked him, “Whatcha got, Walt?” Philbin pulled out a notebook, looked down at his illegible chicken scratch, began to stammer and stutter and was running all the facts together in his inimitable stream-of-consciousness, free-flow, out-of-order sequence.

So Rainey, ever resourceful, took a drag on his cigarette and shouted at him: “Philbin, go back to your desk and pick up the phone!”

“No,” Walt continued, “but you know, and then, but after, but before, I mean, this is what happened, and then they . . .”

“Philbin, dammit, get back to your desk and pick up the (bleeping) phone!” Rainey shouted.

Philbin dutifully headed back to his desk, mumbling and muttering the whole way. When he got to his desk, he picked up the phone.

Rainey shouted across the newsroom, “Now call me!”

Which is what Philbin did. Back then, we were all much more comfortable dictating from the field, and he was much better on the phone. The words flowed, he had his facts, the best rewrite guy put it into a story, and the two miraculously met another tough deadline amid a loud, raucous and sometimes tense newsroom — where people smoked cigars and cigarettes, cussed and yelled, and laughed and drank together after work . . . and sometimes during.

By the time Walt Philbin started out, this world was already fading, and now it’s long gone, the stuff of old movies. But for some reason, he never seemed out of place as journalism changed around him.

(Times-Picayune photo)

I recently finished a piece for a magazine. In the last days before the January issue went to bed, there was the usual frenzy last-minute updating, fact-checking, sudden forehead-smacking questions coming up, caption-writing, et al. There is, in short, a very high ratio of man-hours to the amount of content in a monthly magazine piece. Speaking as a writer and a reader, this was well worth it – the final product is a very good one.

From an economic point of view, though, who knows? Magazines as we know them may not be around in 10 years. But then again, the glossy, highly-edited general-interest publication probably has some staying power as a cultural object because the content it serves up is not just interesting, but well-crafted. It struck me during the editing process that journalistic content – or, more broadly, the written word – is stratifying in interesting ways. At one end, you have books and high-end magazines. Both operate with small editorial staffs. They produce well-crafted content. In the case of magazines, that content has a still-convenient physical form, but also takes to the web in interesting ways.

On the other end you have the burgeoning world of blogs and news sites, where immediacy is king. Here you can have good writing and editing, but speed and brevity and linking (with the capacity to jump out of a piece/post and then back in, or continue on elsewhere) mean that you don’t get much long-form stuff that develops a deeper argument or a truly three-dimensional picture of something in one space. This is the dichotomy the Nicholas Carr wrote about, from the reader’s perspective, in his Is Google Making Us Stoopid? piece for the Atlantic.

Who’s the odd man out here? Newspapers, of course. They used to occupy a middle ground – well crafted and immediate! – but that ground is falling out from beneath their feet. They are neither.

The old-fashioned physical newspaper is outdated the moment it’s printed. And (with exceptions, of course) it’s not finely crafted. It’s worth waiting for this week’s New Yorker. Not so the morning paper, anymore. The problem here goes beyond the newsprint issue. Newspapers (still) have large bureaucracies of editors, copy editors, photo editors, et al who are trapped by their own habits and prejudices. The traditional newspaper voice is outmoded, weirdly opaque. (I was reading a recent NYTimes story for research today, and was having trouble getting through it because I couldn’t tell what the reporter really thought amid the dutiful quoting of various sources and bland NYT-style declarations). And the content itself, as papers shrink, will get weaker.

The answer, I think, is obvious. The “daily” part of newspaper journalism has become a trap. It’s too slow for today’s readers, not slow enough for good in-depth journalism. Get rid of “daily” obligations, the filing for tomorrow. Focus on immediacy. Liberate reporters’ voices. But: devote some resources to long form and craft.

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