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Archive for May 10th, 2009

May 10

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Thank you Town Talk!

So I thought I would add my bit to today’s Town Talk editorial opinion piece by Cynthia Jardon:

Now, I don’t find it odd that Ms. Jardon reads CenLamar. We do, after all, read the TT, opposing blogs, agreeing blogs, local, national, and international publications, and all sorts of other online sources. It’s how you know what’s going on and how you learn what others are thinking — whether you agree with them or not.

I personally think that CenLamar, particularly under Lamar’s guidance, has been quite careful not to criticize The Town Talk (in general) and, in particular, Cynthia Jardon (personally) too heavily because she and the paper’s staff do have to answer to the corporate giant that owns The Town Talk. I know he’s personally encouraged me not to be too hard on her in the past.

However, today, The Town Talk did two interesting things. First, they attempted to defend their right-leaning position by pointing out that only the “Our View” section is the Paper’s Editorial and thus the opinion of record. Yet that “Our View,” often authored by Jardon, has, for the past several years, been almost universally conservative and right-leaning in its slant. In addition to “Our View,” the paper often includes editorials by Mr. Carty — the TT’s Editor in Chief. Now I must ask, when the Editor of the paper uses a page of copy to express his personal views, is that not also an editorial or official opinion of the paper?

Adding to this, the paper selects syndicated columnists to provide opinionated input, as well as opinions from other regions. These are almost always very conservative. And, rarely do they focus on local issues.

Now is there anything wrong with presenting conservative opinions or opinion pieces that some readers may find too far right-leaning for their liking? No. Not at all.

However, the standard for Op/Ed sections for most of the modern journalistic era has been that opinions and editorials are presented as opposing pairs. A view for an issue is generally mated with an opposing view against that issue, leaving the reader to use their own brain to determine the best of the two.

The Town Talk did this at one time, sometimes they even included opposing editorials from among their own staff — fiery debates from informed journalists with the integrity to present both sides of an issue.

Prior to The Town Talk‘s purchase by Gannett, the paper was also officially politically independent. Of course these days, The Town Talk very ardently selects their candidate of choice, slants its reporting toward that candidate, and eventually (long after it becomes obvious) endorses that candidate. Their track record of late has been amazing: Bobby Jindal for his “ethics,” Mike Slocum for his “track record,” and John McCain. Here we are 6 months after the election, and they are still politicking for McCain by disparaging much of Obama presents as bad for the people of CenLa (with no opposing view).

A second thing that has increasingly annoyed me in recent years has been Ms. Jardon’s selection of “Your View” letters for print.  One would hope that The Town Talk receives far more letters from readers than they have room to print.  But the fact that they have given near syndication to the extremist views of ultra-rightwing contributors such as Ruth Barden and Francis Elliot makes the reader wonder what opinions The Town Talk is truly interested in; what is the difference between being a serial (published) letter writer and a columnist?  Along with this, they have printed article after article with certain views, but only a fraction opposing those views.  Some would surely argue that our community is simply that much more conservative than the rest of the country on these issues, but our demographics and reader responses on The Town Talk‘s own forums tell us otherwise.  During the recent presidential election, The Town Talk even chose to publish numerous “Your View” pieces from contributors in completely different parts of the country.  I find it hard to believe that people in small towns in Iowa and North Carolina just happen to be such avid readers of  The Town Talk that they felt the need to express their political views in a Central Louisiana paper.  What’s even more amazing is that every single one of these “views” were always very conservative in nature.  This sort of pattern is alarming.

Interestingly, Ms. Jardon failed to defend The Town Talk‘s integrity or neutrality in her piece. Instead, she used her most valuable weekly printed real estate — her Sunday column, to personally attack Lamar and this blog and blogging in general. Perhaps the tone of Lamar’s three paragraphs about the TT being shut out of the awards was a bit snarky. But for the opinion editor of the local paper of record to use her most important weekly column to discuss and disparage this blog is an incredible response.

First, Ms. Jardon fails to recognize the pride that a community (this blog’s writers included) have for their local newspaper. Choosing not to even enter award’s competitions robs the community of a major piece of local pride.

The Town Talk did another thing today. Enmeshed in Ms. Jardon’s semi-personal, semi-attacks of Lamar, the paper of record for Central Louisiana gave official recognition to what many would consider the blog of record for our region.

It leaves me to ask, if blogs are the minor player, the amateur non-journalists that the newspaper industry argues they are, then why did a major regional publication owned and controlled by one of the nation’s biggest media companies spend their editorial resources of the week telling everyone in Cenla about one?

So thank you Town Talk for recognizing the competition…

May 10

Gannett Blog: Could Shreveport Be Louisiana’s Regional Hub?

Gannett Blog is owned and operated by Jim Hopkins, who describes himself and the project as follows:

I’m a former USA Today editor and reporter, writing about the digital transition of Gannett Co., the nation’s biggest newspaper publisher, and one of its largest private employers (about 42,000 workers). Gannett Blog gets more than 100,000 monthly page views, ranking it in the top 8% of all blogs, according to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008.

From a post dated April 20, 2009:

A tipster says a regional page production desk for the five Louisiana newspapers is moving forward, and could be based at The Times of Shreveport. I’ve asked Publisher Pete Zanmiller for comment.

An anonymous response:

Your buddy is at work again, Jim.

We’ve been speculating about the Louisiana hub for a couple of weeks. Heard it was supposed to roll out in May.

Shreveport is still without an executive editor. The last word from the previous EE was that Shreveport met budget goals in Q1 ’09 by cutting expenses, although revenue was down.

This letter, published on Gannett Blog on April 2, 2009, from Ann Clark, a general executive in the Gannett News division, may shed some light on what this could mean for those of us in Alexandria (bold mine):

Following is Corporate’s memo outlining a plan to consolidate newspaper page production at a series of new “production hubs.” Note: Ann Clark is a general executive in the News Department. Also, I don’t know who got this e-mail; in the version provided to me, the “to” line of recipient names and addresses wasn’t included.

From: Clark, Ann
Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2009 7:18 PM

Friends:

This note is to give you a heads up on an important project that we have launched.

As you probably know, Bob Dickey pulled together a group of folks a few weeks ago to discuss ways that we can streamline our work to result in significant savings. Concepts related to how we could be more efficient were central to the conversation.

A major result of those discussions is a project that focuses on workflow standardization issues. The feeling among editors in the group was that we needed to take a look at how our copy/production desks were structured and streamline ways to be more efficient with this work. That idea resulted in a plan to develop production hubs. A production hub located at one site would produce the pages from another site.

The local site would handle copy editing and story placement.

We identified possible production hub setups based on regional compatibility and system compatibility. Some of you may already be working on this based on conversations with your publisher or group president.

If not, this note is to let you know that you will be hearing from members of the team on this project in the next few days.

We are developing a wide range of material that will help get these production hubs up and running as easily as possible. We are working on communication issues, training needs, system compatibility issues, the possibility of common content/pages, etc.

The group is moving forward quickly on this. Members will reach out to you to get specific details on your operation.

The goal is to have these production hubs in place as early as possible in the last six months of the year. We know we don’t have a lot of time.

As always, I am available to discuss any aspects of this.

Thanks for your support.

Ann

May 10

1 Comment

Timely

Frank Rich’s column in today’s New York Times, “The American Press on Suicide Watch” (bold mine):

Newspaper circulations and revenues are in free fall. Legendary brands from The Los Angeles Times to The Philadelphia Inquirer are teetering. The New York Times Company threatened to close The Boston Globe if its employees didn’t make substantial sacrifices in salaries and benefits. Other papers have died. The reporting ranks on network and local news alike are shriveling. You know it’s bad when the Senate is moved, as it was last week, to weigh in with hearings on “The Future of Journalism.”

By way of context, from a recent AdAge report:

U.S. media employment in December fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry.

Back to Frank Rich:

Such news gathering is not to be confused with opinion writing or bloviating — including that practiced here. Opinions can be stimulating and, for the audiences at Fox News and MSNBC, cathartic. We can spend hours surfing the posts of bloggers we like or despise, some of them gems, even as we might be moved to write our own blogs about local restaurants or the government documents we obsessively study online.

But opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive. Some of it — monitoring the local school board, say — can and is being done by voluntary “citizen journalists” with time on their hands, integrity and a Web site. But we can’t have serious opinions about America’s role in combating the Taliban in Pakistan unless brave and knowledgeable correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time what is actually going on there. We can’t know what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts are digging night and day. Those reporters have to eat and pay rent, whether they work for print, a TV network, a Web operation or some new bottom-up news organism we can’t yet imagine.

That’s really the core of the problem: News is expensive. I first began blogging about my opinions three years ago, and since then, I have made exactly $0 from this enterprise. Opinions are cheap.

Another recent report from ARTicles, the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program titled “Who Put These Guys In Charge: Why Newspapers Are Failing” explores the issue in greater detail:

  1. The back end digital news production structure at most newspapers is a mess.
  2. Many papers still bizarrely consider their online and paper versions separate operations.
  3. High-paid editors who ought to be spending their time on content spend their days snarled up in uploading jpegs and other technical mazes.
  4. Reporters and editors are pressed to add digital duties – blogs, podcasts etc – as add-ons to their “regular” jobs instead of incorporating the digital world as essential tools that should make their ability to gather and tell stories and interact with their communities easier. This shouldn’t add to the work load (but always seems to). Instead, these things ought to make reporting easier.
  5. Most web operations are seriously understaffed and technically deficient, making what should be even basic tasks difficult to impossible.

And all that lip service about how newspapers want to listen to their readers? Not really true. Sure, comments sections have given readers places to vent, but what newspapers are actually treating their readers as communities to be interacted with rather than loud voices demanding to be heard? What’s interesting about that?

The combination of these things (and many more) have combined to poison the business. Meanwhile social networks have amassed millions of users, prominent bloggers have begun making so much money they’re madly hiring editors and reporters, and winning awards. Some “small” editorial operations now have more daily readers than the New York Times.

More:

Slate’s “How the Newspaper Industry Tried to Invent the Web, But Failed.”

Gannett Blog’s “Fire Sale: Gannett Values, Then And Now.”

Brand Republic’s “New York Times Cuts Sections and Gannett Profits Fall 60%.”

Paul Ouberjuerge’s “How Gannett Newspapers Got Into This Fix.” Quoting (bold mine):

The moral crime of newspaper chains such as Gannett is how much profit it deemed necessary.

People go nuts when Exxon or other oil companies report billions of dollars of profit. But that profit almost always is 10 percent or under. The profit itself is huge because the numbers are so big.

Gannett papers worked on smaller scales, but the percentage of what was taken out of each of its communities and sent off to Arlington (and, later, Reston) was staggering. Not even the oil companies expect, ever, 40 percent profit.

There is this, too: At some point, Gannett should have remembered it was a media company, a newspaper company, with all the First Amendment privileges and responsibilities that brings. It could have and should have spent more on its newspaper products and tried to scrape by on, oh, 20-25 percent profit.

Thus, when the crisis came — and we are in it now — Gannett papers had not progressed as they should have in new technologies. They are not as deeply enmeshed in their newspapers’ communities as they could have been and should be. They have not established a standard for competence and the accompanying reputation (as, say, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have) for such … and in times of crisis Gannett papers’ readership felt marginal loyalty to the hometown paper and is just walking away.

Remember, too, the Gannett model was based on a sort of advertising tyranny. Gannett preferred medium-sized papers in markets with little or no local TV, with little or no print competition — so it could set advertising prices higher than they should have been because advertisers had no real options for communicating information.