bob tarantino

"some skepticism"

If you're looking for a decent explanation of why the newspaper industry is in such bad shape, you could do much worse than reading this lengthy piece in Maclean's about the Globe and Mail - it is an account of a group of people with an astoundingly solipsistic approach to their task, nattering on (and on and on) about "platforms" and "real change" and "brands" and "affluent demographics".  Then, near the end, you get a single anecdote, a perfect encapsulation of why so many people are unwilling to pay a single cent for the product, of why so many are so very deeply cynical about and contemptuous of the ability of the news media to perform its most basic roles:

Last week, a senior official in the PMO marvelled that a Globe reporter called to check a fact, noting: “That has never happened before.”

How Not to Argue in Favour of 2-for-1 (Cuatro)

(updated below)

Join me again, won't you, for another harangue about the two-for-one sentencing coverage (previously here, here, here and here).  This post isn't about the merits (or lack thereof) of the pro-credit position (I'm assuming we're all a little tired of that by now) - this is about something almost as important: the media coverage of the proposals.  Specifically, this is about how atrocious that coverage has been.  I think this all has something to say about the troubles in which news media outlets currently find themselves.

I'm going to pick, again, on Christie Blatchford and Dan Gardner.  Not because what they've provided has been worse than the other coverage, but because they're better than this.  Both are intelligent, popular, well-respected and award-winning journalists and commentators.  Certainly I enjoy reading both of them and respect their work for its insight and the new information and perspectives it provides.  But the coverage and commentary on this issue has just been staggering.  The uniform awfulness of it is indicative not of individual failings, but systemic failure.  Blatchford and Gardner write under the imprimaturs of major Canadian newspapers (the Globe and Mail and Ottawa Citizen, respectively) which are supposed to be indicators of accuracy and objectivity - but clearly are not.  Neither Blatchford nor Gardner seem to have much stomach for defending two-for-one sentencing credits on their own terms (since there's hardly anything there with which to support them), so they rely on second-order arguments - mostly about how awful the Conservatives are.  They pivot into a discussion about how nobody (but particularly the Conservatives) is doing anything to address the clogged court system.

Blatchford: "The extra-credits practice is just a symptom of what everyone who works in the courts knows very well is the real problem - the egregiously glacial pace of Canadian justice - but which no one much wants to discuss, let alone fix."

Gardner (in his column): "So why aren't the Conservatives talking about how to unclog the arteries of the justice system and make it work better? Because that's administrative reform."

Gardner (in comments at this blog): "If a federal government is upset by sentence discounts, they can bring the provinces together to identify the sources of administrative congestion and work together to resolve them. Simple, pragmatic, sensible. But not politically sexy in the least, which might explain why the feds aren't doing it."

It's difficult to overstate just how absolutely, incontrovertibly, undeniably incorrect those statements are.  Does Blatchford honestly believe that "no one wants to discuss, let alone fix" slow criminal trials?  Is she honestly not aware of the numerous federal and provincial initiatives which have taken place in order to address this very issue?  Is Gardner seriously saying that the Canadian federal government has never "[brought] the provinces together to identify the sources of administrative congestion and work together to resolve them"?  Really?  Really?  So when the federal government convened a meeting of all attorneys general across Canada (in September 2008, no less) to discuss this very issue, and announced new funding and programs to tackle this very issue, and then put out a press release about it, what exactly was that all about?  When provincial governments across Canada implemented programs (see Ontario's here) to address this very issue, how did it get missed?  How did that not get taken account of in either the straight news coverage or the commentary about it?  I have not seen a single news item or comment on this matter which acknowledges, at all, that the provincial attorneys general, of every political stripe, agreed in 2008 to support the elimination of the two-for-one credit as one component in a package of comprehensive reforms which aimed at speeding up trials, under the tutelage and with the additional funding provided by the federal government.  Worse, the commentary has ignored that and accused the government of doing the opposite.  We're not talking about uninformed screeching on partisan blogs.  We're talking about professional journalists, who write about this topic constantly, evidently not knowing basic information on the matter which a few seconds of Google searching would have turned up.  How is this possible?  We're not talking here about a mistake, like getting a date wrong - we're talking about negligence.

Please, anyone who's interested in the answer to that bolded question, please read Nick Davies' Flat Earth News.  These are systemic problems.  Too few reporters, too many "commentators", too much demand for content being produced under too-short deadlines.  It would be really, really nice if either of Blatchford or Gardner would revise their accusations about the federal (and provincial) governments "not talking about" this issue, or "doing nothing" about this issue, but I think that, regrettably, won't happen.  Which is a shame.  Because the cynicism that such failure breeds, the resentment about the product which is being produced, does nobody any favours.  Many political problems seem so intractable simply because the arena of public discourse is flooded with so much misinformation that as much time is spent wading through the morass as is spent engaging the actual issues.  And when professional journalists are contributing to the problem, we all, journalist and reader, are rendered the poorer for it.

Update - In the comments, Dan Gardner has objected to the last sentence of the second-to-last paragraph, which he deems a "scuzzy slur".  Having re-read the paragraph, I'm inclined to agree with him - so I apologize to Dan and to anyone else who I offended.  When I wrote the paragraph, I was hoping to convey my judgment that the news industry as a whole, by virtue of its cutbacks, shortsightedness and general emphasis on "punchy" news delivery rather than indepth analysis was producing coverage which is less than accurate, to the detriment of public discourse.  The argument goes something like this: the news industry has a duty to provide accurate coverage, they fail to carry out that duty by means of reasonable efforts, ergo they are negligent.  Whether that argument is accurate or not, it is certainly not fair, absent much more compelling evidence, to level that charge at an individual journalist, which my language certainly did.  Again, my apologies.

Media 03.25.09

There are funnier things out there than watching journalists comment on the collapse of the newspaper industry and media bias, but I can't thing of them off the top of my head.

Here's Jonathan Kay:

CNN has no discernible bias I can detect -- but I stopped watching it when it turned itself into the all-anthrax channel in late-2001, boosting ratings by convincing millions of Americans they were about to play the role of extras in a Stephen King bio-apocalypse novel.

Uhm... right.  Yes, I suppose the only way one could possibly conclude that "CNN has no discernible bias" is by, say, not having watched them for, oh, the last seven or so years.

Oh, and the next time a journalist patiently explains to you that the "problem" facing journalism is a "decoupling of advertising from news", ask them to explain how "decoupling advertising from news" results in the utter collapse of trust in the press as evidenced here (ht: Douthat).

Entertainment, Media and IP Law 03.15.09

New techniques: A couple of interesting stories this past week about emerging Canadian talent - David and Ian Purchase used YouTube to get noticed by Hollywood, and one-eyed Toronto filmmaker Rob Spence is planning on using a camera embedded in a fake eye to film a documentary about "the rise of global surveillance" (also here).

Flashpoint opens the door: One of the funny things about Hollywood is the herd mentality - if something works once for one guy, everybody's got to follow suit.  Thankfully, this time the trend is working in favour of Canadian film and television producers.

Defamed today, defamed forever: An interesting discussion over at slaw about whether the time period for launching a defamation action over an online publication should begin running from the first time it was placed online or whether it should start afresh every time the online publication is accessed regardless of how long that is after initial publication (in England, the answer is evidently the latter; in the US, the former).

New Media Fund? Meh: Concerns are expressed about the newly constituted Canada Media Fund and conflicts of interest.

Backstage blogging: Gordon P. Firemark muses on the dangers of letting talent talk about their work experiences while still on the job.

Fairey Use?  More discussion on the AP/Richard Fairey copyright dispute here (Knopf) and here (Wired).

ImageStamper: Plagiarism Today provides some in-depth coverage on an interesting new service which "stamps" a Creative Commons license onto digital images.

Inaccurate sales figures? Surely you jest: Clive Cussler ordered to pay nearly US$14 million to production company over misrepresentation of the number of copies his novels had sold.

The children are our future: Fascinating interview with Terry McBride of Nettwerk Music Group here.

Media 03.15.09

There have been a number of articles and posts written in the last few days about the impending collapse of the newspaper industry as we have come to know it (see, f'rinstance, Clay Shirky here and the Globe and Mail here).  The litany is the same: technological change, the collapse of ad revenue, etc.  There is, unfortunately, one minor factor almost all of the recent commentary has overlooked.

Anyone interested in the future of the news media and journalism absolutely must read Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, an award-winning Guardian reporter.  Davies provides an absolutely mind-boggling chronicle of the lies, inaccuracies, bias, lack of accountability and general incompetence which inform so much of the newspaper coverage with which we are provided.  Some of the stories which Davies provides simply beggar belief.  You want to know why a fairly significant chunk of people are no longer willing to pay for news content?  It's because, over the last decade or so, it has been demonstrated to us, over and over again, just how awful some of the provision of that content is.  The news media has made it abundantly clear that they deserve neither our loyalty nor any particular amount of deference or respect - least of all our dollars.  Maybe there's a "business model" which will work when a significant amount of your potential customer base thinks you're shoveling slanted garbage at them, but so far no one seems to have stumbled across it, oddly enough.

Mark Evans, a former tech reporter for outlets such as the National Post and the Globe and Mail, commenting on the Globe story linked to above, offers this thought:

It’s the kind of journalism that newspapers need to do because it offers insight and perspective (aka tell me what it means) about an issue that’s been attracting a lot of news coverage recently.

To which my immediate response was, "Oh, dear god, please, Mr Newspaper Maker, don't offer me your insight or your perspective".  Please, please, please just report the news in as objective a manner as possible.  That's all we want from you.  Really.  Don't provide me with "opinions" or "insight" into "what this really means" - I can get all of that for free, and in many cases of higher quality, on the internet.  Just get your facts straight.  It's really not that hard.  Don't spend money on your opinion columnists, or your restaurant reviewer, or your music critic - save all that money and plough it into paying journalists to report the news.  Period.  Full stop.  And, for the love of all that is holy, please fact check the stuff you print.  Please?  Three paragraphs into that aforementioned Globe and Mail piece and there's already mistakes:

San Francisco is accustomed to firsts, but usually they are more hopeful ones: It's where hippies congregated for the Summer of Love, where students spearheaded anti-Vietnam rallies and where Harvey Milk became the first openly gay political candidate elected to office.

*sigh*.  Look, I understand that Sean Penn just came out with a fine movie in which he rendered a fine performance and we're all very excited about it.  But it's really fairly simple: Harvey Milk was not the first openly gay political candidate elected to office.  Harvey Milk was elected in 1977.  Allan Spear was a closeted gay man when he was elected to the Minnesota legislature in 1972.  Spear came out of the closet in 1974.  He was re-elected in November 1976, a year prior to Milk.  Elaine Noble came out in 1974 and was elected to the Massachusetts legislature that same year - four years prior to Milk.  You know how long it took me to find that out?  About 14 seconds.  Couple that with the fact that one of the "hopeful historic firsts" which these reporters attribute to San Francisco is the Summer of Love and not, say, the signing of the United Nations Charter, and it becomes clear rather quickly that any purported "insight" or "perspective" which is on offer from the Globe and its vaunted stable of professional reporters and editors is of negligible value.  And the industry expects people to pay for this sort of stuff?  Please.

"we ran out of gas"

This column (ht: Gardner), by a former Rocky Mountain News reporter mulling over the collapse of her newspaper is fascinating, but probably not for the reasons the writer intended (try to avoid rolling your eyes when she pines that the reason she got into journalism was because of... wait for it... Watergate - that in itself probably explains more about why "journalism" is "collapsing" (according to journalists) than anything else).  Here's the bit I found really interesting:

Friday, the Rocky, with a daily circulation of 210,000 and 457,000 on Saturdays, became the nation's largest newspaper to cease publication in an economic recession that already has sent the Chicago Tribune and both of Philadelphia's daily papers running for bankruptcy cover, among others, and put a For Sale sign on the Miami Herald.

I'm happy to admit that I've never run a business more complicated than a table at a garage sale, but I think I can speak with a certain level of confidence in concluding that if you've got more than 200,000 people a day who are willing to pay for your "product" and you still can't figure out a way to manage an operation which takes in as much as it spends, then perhaps that's an indication that there's nothing wrong with "journalism", or "the industry" or "the internet" or anything else except the idiots who are running the business.

"a perhaps hypertrophied sense of its own importance"

Because he's bunches smarter than me, Paul Wells rather nicely articulates what I've been yammering on about when it comes to newspapers and magazines:

In a lot of cases, I think retrenchment makes good sense: while it may once have been possible to put out a bit-of-everything product that everyone in your market area would pay to read occasionally, in many cases those days are simply gone and they are really not coming back. It’s actually safer (sometimes!) to abandon most of your readers because they have already abandoned you, and fall back to a defensible niche where you can provide unique value to a smaller group that takes a more active interest in a narrower set of topics.

Yes.  As an aside, can I ask who else thinks that Newsweek's plan to re-tool itself so that it has "more photos and opinion" (a story first reported two months ago in the WSJ and then, bizarrely, just picked up this week by the NYT) is completely suicidal?  In what world are you living that it constitutes a logical business plan to think "hey! you know what we should do? compete with all the free opinions and images out there by... wait for it... printing more of it and... wait... steady... charging for it!  guys?"

Taken from the Times story, if this doesn't perfectly encapsulate what is wrong with the people running Newsweek, nothing possibly could:

Editorially, Newsweek’s plan calls for moving in the direction it was already headed — toward not just analysis and commentary, but an opinionated, prescriptive or offbeat take on events.

Nice.  So, watching it's circulation and ad numbers collapse, Newsweek looks at what it's been doing (i.e., offering "an opinionated, prescriptive or offbeat take") and decides that it needs to do more of it.

The Decoupling of Journalism Pt 2

A few days ago I wrote this post which argued that, apropos of the current conversation about "the future of the news [delivery industry]", there will likely be a "decoupling" of "journalism", news and the other components of what currently constitutes the "newspaper" (i.e., if you're interested in "news", do you really need a "gardens" or "cars" section delivered to your door?).  Mathew Ingram points to people who are much smarter than me making a somewhat similar point:

As mass journalism markets unbundle and become niche markets, news operations, if they are to survive, will have to join the niche movement rather than fight it. Rather than think in terms of a circulation of, let’s say, 100,000, they should think in terms of 100 niche markets of 1,000 each and form membership communities around those niches.

Mathew also had a nice "link-a-thon" post which collects arguments from all different sides of the discussion (including Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, Stephen Brill, Walter Isaacson and David Carr), here.  I left the following comment which I'd like to reiterate here:

In reading all of the various arguments, it seems that people are misconstruing what they are actually arguing about - or, perhaps the comment is better rendered as "what they should be arguing about". Kinsley comes close to articulating it, but Shirky is right on when he says in an aside that "if small payment systems won’t save existing publishers in their current form, there might not be a way to save existing publishers in their current form" - unfortunately, he doesn't really follow the point up.

Despite their protestations, one side of the discussion is not arguing in favour of saving "the news", they are arguing in favour of saving "the existing mechanisms by which the news is delivered". Those are two entirely separate arguments. There might be a cogent argument which shows that the "existing mechanisms for delivery" are the only way to provide "the news", but I haven't seen that - instead it's just an unquestioned (if latent) assumption.

As Matthew Gertner plaintively asks, "Can you imagine a world without the well-crafted prose of the Economist or New York Times, without the type of informed journalism that depends on the deployment of trained professionals across the globe? I certainly can’t." Which perfectly illustrates the mindset I'm talking about: why is it that "informed journalism" necessarily requires the Economist or New York Times, with their respective massive cash-eating organizations and physical footprints? If the "news" industry *really* can't imagine a world without them and, to take an example, a giant Times Square headquarters, then it will expire not just because of a creaking infrastructure, but because of a failure of imagination.

"I get my news from the Internet"

Dave Kopel, writing in the Rocky Mountain News, ponders the future of a world "without traditional newspapers".  Based on his review of online coverage of a recent Colorado Avalanche hockey game as compared against the coverage provided by the (presumably) paper edition of the local newspapers, Kopel concludes that, absent newspapers, there will be a reduction of the availability of such content and all that will remain are the bland "official" offerings of the hockey organization itself and the less-informative writings of enthusiast amateurs.  Which may well be true, if the assumptions of Kopel's argument hold - but there's reason to think that they don't.

It is somewhat difficult to determine the precise contours of the assumptions behind Kopel's narrative, but they seem to be at least this: without paper editions of "newspapers", "newspapers" as a news delivery mechanism will cease to exist, which will lead to the collapse of the wire services (since no one will be around to purchase their content), which will lead to a collapse of "hard news" being reported since there will be no one around to pay the reporters.  But the first step in that argument is either manifestly incorrect or hasn't yet been proved to satisfaction.

Let's take the Christian Science Monitor, which is about to replace its print edition with an online edition - strictly speaking, it is moving to an "online first" model, where the daily print edition is being replaced not only by an online edition which is updated daily, but also a limited-run weekly print edition.  If I had to bet, it strikes me that that is the model which we will be seeing used most for publications of all kinds, from newspapers to periodicals.  It's just not immediately clear that there is either the need, the demand or the financial wherewithal to retain daily print editions for newspapers.  But abandoning daily print editions doesn't mean "a world without traditional newspapers", it just means a "world without traditional newspapers being printed on paper every day".  Will newspapers need to downsize editorial staff?  Yes.  Will the content they offer be significantly different from their paper edition forebears?  Probably, but as I described here, that's probably a good thing.  But will newspapers as a mechanism for news delivery "disappear"?  No - but their format will be different; not radically different, mind you, since we've been seeing this trend for at least a decade now.  The move towards a more focused approach to the delivery of "hard news" and "Journalism" will be better for those concerned about news and Journalism, and for readers, though of course it will be life-changing for those elements of the traditional newspaper which are ancillary to those core purposes (such as, to take a dumb example, restaurant reviews).

The Decoupling of Journalism

Walter Issacson has written a piece in Time entitled "How to Save Your Newspaper" (ht: Gardner).  It is one more in a long, long, long series of articles from numerous different outlets bemoaning the fate of journalism.  Or, more properly, Journalism (being, for the sake of argument, "groundbreaking investigative projects, searing features, hard-hitting crusades and biting editorials").  It also involves a bit of a bait-and-switch, encapsulated in the first paragraph of the story and also in its larger structure.  Here's the first paragraph:

During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.

As noted above, the title of the article implicitly talks about the need to save your local newspaper; but once you get to the final paragraph of the article, you end up with this:

I say this, too, because I love journalism. I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value. I suspect we will find that this necessity is actually liberating. The need to be valued by readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true to what journalism should always be about.

What's my point?  That Issacson keeps mistakenly eliding the difference between newspapers and Journalism.  We're used to conflating the two because for a long period of history newspapers were the primary medium via which Journalism was communicated.  But to the extent it was ever true that newspapers = Journalism, that era has long since passed into that good night.  Journalism comes at us from many sources: television, periodicals, the internet.  And anyone who thinks a newspaper is Journalism clearly hasn't purchased one recently: your average edition is a gnarly mish-mash of news, op-eds, entertainment reviews, comic strips, product reviews, real estate listings and a dozen other unrelated components with Journalism thrown in occasionally. 

Which isn't a bad thing, of course - I rather liked newspapers, but they just increasingly service a need which is disappearing, namely, a single source provider of all these different things.  What conceivable reason would there be for buying a newspaper to get a sense of what their "entertainment reporter" thinks about the latest release from U2 or last night's concert by Bruce Springsteen?  Anyone can find dozens, even hundreds, of specialized outlets offering the exact same content.  If I want to know what's happening Thursday night next week in my town, why would I check the newspaper?  If I need a review of the latest Toyota, in what possible way is the newspaper necessary to provide me with something that I can't get elsewwhere?

Which means that the newspaper form is likely, at some point, to become obsolete - but its constituent parts will certainly live on via other mechanisms.  It's not that people don't want or need what newspapers offer, it's that they don't want or need to get them in newspapers.  Journalists have been bemoaning the impending doom of investigative journalism (ie Journalism) since at least the late 1970s, and it hasn't gone anywhere - and it's unlikely that it will go away anytime soon.  But it strikes me that the need/desire for "investigative journalism" to be bundled next to the food section which is beside the auto section which is across the page from the sports section and all of which is backed by, say, [insert your favourite useless op-ed columnist here]'s idiotic scribblings, will likely expire rather rapidly.

"W[h]ither serious print journalism?"

John Honderich, former publisher of the Toronto Star, wrote a piece on the future of journalism which discusses five options for funding, to borrow his phrase, "serious print journalism".  This matter is very important, fulminates Honderich.  Why, nothing less than the future of democracy rests on it:

In order for all of us to live meaningfully and participate in our community, we must be appropriately informed.

In this regard, the quality of public debate, if not the very quality of life in any community, is a direct function of the quality of media that serve it. Indeed, the functioning of a healthy democracy is predicated on a well-informed populace.

He's right, of course.  The dissemination of accurate information is one of the principal functions of the news media, and the functioning of a healthy democracy is indeed predicated on a well-informed populace.  Which is why I found it so very interesting to read this, also, by chance, published in the Toronto Star on the very same day as Honderich's op-ed column.  "This" is a column written by Gillian Steward, a "Calgary writer and journalist" whose column appears every other week in the Star.  It contained the following statements:

Some of them are political science and economics professors at the University of Calgary, an incubator of sorts for the Reform-style conservatism. And then, of course, there's Preston Manning, the original Reform leader who took the message on the road and came very close to becoming leader of the official opposition. So close that in the 1990s he and his Reformers managed to swing the governing Liberals so far right that they happily slashed social programs to balance the federal books.

... It seems the Harper Conservatives have come full circle since the days Reform angrily took on the Mulroney Conservatives accusing them of being more like Liberals than real conservatives. Not only are they running huge deficits à la Mulroney, they have recognized Quebec as a nation, appointed senators, and scrapped a fixed election date.

Notice anything?  No?  Let's run those paragraphs again:

Some of them are political science and economics professors at the University of Calgary, an incubator of sorts for the Reform-style conservatism. And then, of course, there's Preston Manning, the original Reform leader who took the message on the road and came very close to becoming leader of the official opposition. So close that in the 1990s he and his Reformers managed to swing the governing Liberals so far right that they happily slashed social programs to balance the federal books.

... It seems the Harper Conservatives have come full circle since the days Reform angrily took on the Mulroney Conservatives accusing them of being more like Liberals than real conservatives. Not only are they running huge deficits à la Mulroney, they have recognized Quebec as a nation, appointed senators, and scrapped a fixed election date.

How about now?

Here's some hints:

• Preston Manning didn't just come "very close" to being leader of the official opposition.  He in fact came so very very very close that he was Leader of the Official Opposition from 1997 to 2000.  Among easily-accessible sources which could have been found on the internet to demonstrate this fact one can count this, this or even this.

• Neither the Harper Conservatives nor any other party in the history of Canada have passed a parliamentary motion which "recognized Quebec as a nation".  Steward has, wittingly or un-, confused "Quebec" and "Quebecois".  This is hardly a trivial semantic distinction.  In November 2006 the Parliament of Canada passed a motion which stated "That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada."  The motion itself specifically used the term "Quebecois" - an ethnocultural term - and not the term "Quebec" - a description of a political administrative unit within the state of Canada.  Stephane Dion, at the time leader of the Official Opposition (see how this all nicely ties together?) specifically stated in the House of Commons that the reason he, a long-time champion of Canadian federalism, would be voting for the motion in good conscience was because it used the term "Quebecois" instead of "Quebec".

These elementary points of recent Canadian history passed by both the writer of the column and her editor.

I read precisely two pieces from the Sunday, February 1, 2009 edition of the Toronto Star.  The first extolled not just the virtue but the necessity of the media providing its audience with accurate information.  The second contained two glaring errors of fact.  What the dozens of other pieces published in that edition contained will remain forever the subject of sheerest speculation.

The former publisher of the Toronto Star seems, rhetorically at least, to understand the importance of publishing accurate information - why doesn't the current one?

[I should note that I sent an email to the public editor of the Star noting the two errors identified in this post and providing references for the correct information.  More than twelve hours later I have not received a response and the online version of the column has not been corrected - presumably they have more important things to do than respond to cranky bloggers.  I will update this post in the event I receive a response or it comes to my attention that the paper published a correction.]