Monday, July 21st, 2008
Name calling isn’t going to get us anywhere
The discussion on how to save newspapers - or I would say newspaper-style reporting regardless of the platform - is getting bogged down in mutual recriminations and some good old-fashioned name-calling. Journalists are blaming management, saying that ‘they’ didn’t change quickly enough as if journalists bear no responsibility in the slow pace of change in the industry. ‘Curmudgeons’ and ‘dinosaurs‘ are fighting with ‘young journalists‘, digital enthusiasts and digital pioneers.
I agree with John Zhu that “stereotypes, labels, and close-mindedness” don’t produce a constructive debate. We know that we need get past this and get to work building a multi-platform business that will support quality journalism. However, I started hearing John’s argument in various forms about a year ago which run along the lines that digital pioneers can be as close-minded as the ‘curmudgeons’ that they rail against. A journalism professor put it to me that digital pioneers had been part of a start-up culture and now were resisting integration as much as the ‘curmudgeons’ were resisting a digital future.
I think something more complicated is going on, and I feel a false sense of objectivity and balance in John’s post. I think it obscures the political conflict taking place in newspapers as they struggle towards integration. As Steve Yelvington said to me last year, the people with the most digital experience have the least political capital in their organisations. As I’ve argued, real integration can’t be about traditional editors just folding digital divisions into their empires. That’s not to say that digital editors should be atop the org chart either. Multiple-platform journalism requires a different editorial organisation, and that is bound to create political conflict. Some of the conflict spilling out onto journalism blogs reflects these wrenching changes that news organisations are going through. You can see it in the recent ‘axing’ of three digital executives at the San-Diego Union Tribune.
Also, although John spends more time and slightly more emphasis on comments directed towards ‘curmudgeons’, I would say that the abuse that he saw hurled toward Jessica da Silva by veteran journalists isn’t isolated to comments on blogs. The commenter Robert Knilands (aka Wenalway) may seem your run-of-the-mill troll, but he expresses a virulent form of prejudice too frequently directed towards online and young journalists by some - and I stress, only some - print journalists. Robert Knilands says:
It can’t survive, though, as long as young journos are getting opportunities they are unqualified for and posting ignorant blog entries. All that does is destroy the present and the future.
We’re not going to get anywhere by eating our young. But seriously, I’ve heard this myself through the years in various forms implicit and explicit. I recently had a senior figure in British journalism ask me whether I was a production person or a ‘techie’ as if I couldn’t be both technically proficient and a competent journalist. If the ‘dinosaur’ label is used in anger, it has a context and a history. Sometimes it is used in the form of return of fire, not just a snipe coming out of nowhere.
Having said that, I agree with John. Name-calling only delays achieving the change that we need to prevent more newspapers from failing.
My best work has come in collaboration with print, radio and television journalists, and we collaborated well because we approached the work from a position of mutual respect. Let’s bury the hatchet and move on to the future together.
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July 23rd, 2008 at 4:38 am
Kum Bay Yah, Kev and all that but trolls are best ignored, not served wine at your fine table, sir.
If you make unprovoked personal attacks on colleagues then you deserve to be banned, or lampooned, or harpooned. Better yet, all three.
If more blogs granted readers the ability to flag objectionable comments, more of these discussions could be better organized by the consumers of the blog and not hijacked by trolls.
July 25th, 2008 at 5:02 am
Kevin, thanks for linking to and discussing my post on the subject. A couple points I would like to add/clarify:
– My post really wasn’t trying to go for objectivity/balance/”he said she said”, though some in this debate have accused me of that. I know that “objectivity” is the new “bad” word for some circles of journalists, but my life experience has taught me that few things in life are actually absolute truths. Heck, I spent the first 10 years of my life in a communist country being taught in school about how people in capitalist societies suffer, then spent the last 19 years in America hearing about how people in communist societies suffer. That’s why I have issues with people who are too ingrained in one school of thought or another and don’t re-examine their own dogma, and that was what I was trying to get across in my post. It wasn’t that I wasn’t taking a side in the debate; I just took a third side where most only saw two.
– I won’t exactly use Kniland’s comments as representative of anybody’s views but his own. I’m no stranger to his particular brand of wrath, and it leaves even most “old-school” journalists shaking their heads (and believe me, it goes beyond just his blog comments).
– I may not be a member of the Millennial generation of journalists, but I’m no stranger to coming up against skepticism about my ability as a journalist. When I was a newspaper designer, I had to prove to some veteran writers that “Hey, I’m not an idiot with words. I know what to do with your stories. I don’t just draw boxes in Quark.” Resistance, stereotypes, and the status quo are hardly things the new generation has a monopoly over (though the present situation is more dire and that tends to radicalize opposing sides). That’s one sentiment I’ve noticed that does rub me the wrong way — the idea that newsrooms haven’t changed since the 70s and that the people who’ve worked in newspapers in the last 3 decades have been content to do things the same way they were done for the last 100 years. Umm … in a word: WRONG.
I’ve found that the only way to defeat the resistance and win over the skeptics is to keep at them and continuing to engage them. Can it be frustrating as hell? Yes! Does it always work? Of course not! But it works more often than if you just give up. Treating skeptics as your enemies will in fact turn them into enemies. Add to it the fact that all this “techies” vs. “curmudgeons” online rhetoric doesn’t make any practical contribution toward giving young journalists more political capital in the newsroom (and in fact might lead to radicalization that would harm that cause), I see even less value in engaging in them.
July 27th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Well, I won’t waste much time with you if you can’t start showing some intelligence.
First of all, dolt, “Kevin Anderson” is a fairly common name. And if I were to start scanning tablets, I’d need to know what year I’m looking for.
I think I’ve already offered some explanation, but now you’re claiming you haven’t seen any comments, so I guess we’ll do this yet again. My issue is that young journos are being hired not because they are so much smarter, but rather because they can be paid less. I have links at my site where people admit this; perhaps you should do some homework next time.
Of course, newspapers won’t admit to doing that, so they feed the myth of today’s young journos “saving journalism.” To compound the problem, many of these people (like you) are ultrasensitive to any opposing viewpoint. They simply want a sugar cookie and a pat on the head, even if those things are not
deserved.
They also (like you) have a somewhat faulty grasp of history. In 1999 and 2000, we were supposed to believe retailers, etc., were all “going online.” That drive failed, for the most part, even though those industries had a way to make a profit. Now we’re supposed to believe that media/newspapers should all be “wired”/online even though there are few models for this sort of thing being profitable?
To summarize, today’s young journos are not going to solve the problem. If anything, they are a big part of it. I simply have no patience for a large group of people who refuse to look at the facts, can’t handle opposing viewpoints, and who run around claiming they’re going to save an industry that already has fooled that group into the previous misconceptions.
Again, if you had bothered to do any homework, you might have discovered some of this on your own. Thus, I tend to be skeptical of your claim of being familiar with the “US market.” I don’t listen to people who rely on concoct-and-chant; I listen to people who have facts. And you don’t have them.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:21 am
A little background for the above comment. Mr Knilands and I have been having a ‘discussion’ via e-mail. He claims that I have been moderating his comments, which I haven’t. Most people will know Mr Knilands better as Wenalway. I posted his comment because I felt it fair to allow him to make his points.
Let’s leave your attack on young journalists aside for a moment and deal with your assertions about the current state of journalism.
Mr Knilands, your assertion that online media isn’t profitable is an overly simplistic view of current reality. Several online divisions of newspapers have been profitable for the past four or five years. However, the increase in online revenue has not been enough to offset the decline in print advertising revenue, especially in the US as the economic downturn bites. Also, it is fair to say that the online divisions do not bear the costs of newsgathering and have been subsidised by the print side in terms of content.
There are models for “this sort of things being profitable”, but they exist outside of newspapers. The blogs TechCrunch, BoingBoing and ReadWriteWeb are all profitable, and they do create original content, but they are coming from a completely different cost base.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/09/01/8384325/index.htm
And technology isn’t the only vertical where people are making money with online content.
Also, in the UK, if it weren’t for online advertising, media advertising would be in recession and not simply due to the softening economy but due to a shift from traditional media to online media:
http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/iabadspend2006.mxs
Online advertising growth is slowing, but it’s still posting double digit growth:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/18/AR2008061800216.html
Now, newspaper online ad growth is less healthy, but it’s still growing while print revenue is slowing:
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-hard-times-for-newspapers-gets-harder-as-q1-online-ad-growth-stalls-at-/
Growth rates aside, the print side still brings in more revenue than online in real money terms, and while we develop compelling online journalism models, we still need to support the print side. It is still the profit centre.
The reality is complex and troubling, much more complex than you try to portray it. There aren’t any easy answers, and in terms of villains and victims, young journalists are as much victims of this. It’s very difficult for young journalists to make a living.
You say that you listen to people who have facts. I’ve provided some of mine, with links so that people can see them. I’ve listened and responded to your ‘opposing viewpoints’. I guess I’ll have to wait for your next volley to hear some of your ‘facts’.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:48 am
John,
Thanks for the response, and, for both in your comment and in your original post, trying to increase the civility of the debate.
On your first point, I’m not one of those journalists for whom objectivity is unfashionable, but I do believe that sometimes the goal of objectivity can lead to giving equal weight to competing viewpoints as if those viewpoints are equally supported by the evidence. I’m not saying that sceptics are always wrong and the digital natives are always right, or vice versa, but I’m with Jeff Jarvis in believing that we need to move on to constructive discussions. To that end, these discussions need to be based on evidence and not simply assertions from all sides. See my recent post on Vickey Williams’ review of the Bakersfield Californian and the success of their community. The facts will help us develop successful strategies.
I started to respond to you point-by-point, but then I realised that it wasn’t all that constructive. It doesn’t really matter whether Kniland’s comments are representative of himself or broader sentiment in the industry. Suffice to say that most digital journalists I know can relate a story or several of being confronted by a Kniland, self-appointed Defenders of Journalism, during their career and suffering professional disrespect or even abuse.
Like you, I’m not a Millennial, and I don’t really see this as a young versus older journalists. And I don’t even see this as sceptics versus digital natives conflict. Journalists are all to some extent paid sceptics. I see this as a problem with obstructionists. Sceptics usually have a level of respect for other viewpoints, but obstructionists don’t. Sceptics are usually open to sound arguments backed by evidence. Obstructionists aren’t. Sceptics can be engaged. Obstructionists can’t. Sceptics minds are open and curious. Obstructionists aren’t, and they cling fiercely and fight fiercely to retain their received wisdom and to maintain the status quo. A lot of newspapers don’t have the luxury of humouring the obstructionists anymore. The challenge is not to treat the sceptics like obstructionists.
To be honest, I guess the challenge of engagement is that digital staff are calling for change, both cultural and organisational. That’s difficult in the best of times, and often, digital staff have to display greater patience and make more effort to engage than the sceptics we’re trying to engage. If there was a moment where I stopped short reading your post, it was because I felt it was a call for digital staff to keep putting out more effort to engage than sceptics. Yes, it’s still the reality we live in, but it’s not a fair or realistic expectation for digital staff to be more magnanimous, especially when we’re often in the weaker political position in our organisations.
John, as I said in the post, I agree with where you’re coming from. We’ve got to get past the less constructive discussions and sometimes downright poisonous arguments that have been happening recently. A lot of this is down to economic anxiety, and I completely understand that. I watched most of my friends in online journalism get wiped out during the dot.com crash.
The future of journalism belongs to those who manage to bring the best qualities of traditional journalism and marry them with the opportunities provided by digital journalism. That’s where we need to be moving. I’ve still got a lot to learn from my journalism elders, and I’ve been most successful when I’ve worked with more experienced journalists to bring their expertise to new audiences with new technology. Thanks for increasing the civility of the discussion.
July 27th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Well, let’s try this again. First, Kevin, you must have a different definition of profitable than the rest of the business community. I’d say that using other resources to subsidize one segment that doesn’t bring in the same revenue as another one is a fast sign of a less-than-profitable segment. Of course, there are gray areas here, such as the loss-leader or name recognition concepts, but you’ve proved you’re not interested in coloring with anything other than absolute tones.
Also, it’s “Knilands.” A real journalist would get this right.
And if you think I’m some sort of defender of the status quo or the current method of journalism, then I have to laugh.
(One last thing: My reference to “tablets” stems from Kevvy trying to sound smart by saying he’s on a Bronze Tablet at my alma mater. No one really cares, though, other than Kevvy.)
July 27th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Kevin. I think you make a good distinction between skeptics and obstructionists. Criticism doesn’t equal wanting you to fail or unwilling to consider a plan. To me, useful criticism, made in the spirit of improving the plan, is more useful than a “good job” or “great idea”. I think how one reacts to criticism plays a big role in determining how the ensuing conversation will go. For instance, when someone says “Hyperlocal doesn’t work. It’s been tried before and failed,” one can either react to it by drawing battle lines, as happened on the Tampa intern’s blog, or one can say, “OK, you’re right. Some of the places that have tried it haven’t made it work. So let’s look at why those tries failed and figure out what we can do differently in our case.”
I agree that it’s unfair to say the digital staff should keep putting forth more effort to engage skeptics. Unfortunately, “what should be” or what’s “fair” often doesn’t come to pass. For instance, part of my job right now involves revamping my employer’s Web site, and to that end, I’ve had to do some tasks (mostly on the technical end) that aren’t in my job description, that ideally shouldn’t be my responsibility. However, if I were to just wait until they found the money to hire a contractor to do those things, the work likely would not get done at all, and while we wait, the site languishes, to everyone’s detriment. It’s not “fair” for me to take on those tasks (voluntarily), but it’s what needs to be done to achieve my goal. To apply it back to newspapers, if you can reach your goal without further engagement, then yes, you shouldn’t spend more time trying to engage skeptics. However, if you can’t reach your goal without more engagement, it really doesn’t leave you a whole lot of choices. We can either sit at an impasse talking over what’s fair, or we can do what needs to be done, whether that be more attempts at engagement or taking other actions that would make engagement no longer necessary.
Alright, no more point-for-point responses. To move the conversation forward, I’ll share an experience I had in implementing some changes at my former paper. It’s not as drastic as the shift to online, but I think some of the lessons learned could be useful:
During college football season, our sports section often ran into space issues. Our three college reporters went out to their respective schools’ practices/press conferences every day and filed something most days, but the sports desk usually had no idea what that something would be or how long it was until the stories are filed. From the reporters’ perspective, it’s difficult to say since most of their stuff was generated live from what happened at practice/the weekly press conference. So we would have days where we got three 25-inch player features — usually generated from interviews with the one or two players the schools made available during their press conferences, and then the next day we would struggle to fill the section with three short notebooks. It also created problems design-wise since we often would get a pretty solid feature, but have no art because we didn’t know in advance we were getting that story, or be forced to trim that story or downplay it due to space crunch. So we often ended up burying great stories one day and making chicken salad the next.
My idea to change that was to designate a day of the week when we would get a feature from reporter A, but only small notebooks/news nuggets from B and C, and it would rotate each day so all three schools got equal play while helping to even out the amount of copy we got from day to day. It would also steer our writers away from the press conference-generated player features — writing the same story that everybody else there would write — and encourage them to plan features in advance and use the press conference and practice to gather information for that story. The pre-planning would lead to a deeper, better-researched story and better communication with the desk about story ideas, making sure we had the art and the space to do a story justice. The actual plan was even more intricate than what I just laid out, but it’s hard to explain it without rambling.
The idea involved doing some things that writers generally don’t like, such as being told when to write something, how much to write (and namely, writing less on some days), and of course there’s the “you can’t plan news” mentality. So, before I even pitched the idea to anybody, I talked casually with the reporters, usually just in passing, asking them about their daily routines during football season, what kind of stuff they usually get out of press conferences and practices, etc. We all came to the agreement that most of the time there’s really little significant news coming out of the daily practices, which means my plan would be practical since a lot of the content involved is not time-sensitive. Then I would casually float out a couple suggestions from my plan as “what if we did this?” and got their feedback. This, along with the fact that I had been there for a couple years, really helped me gain an in-depth understanding of why the writers did some of the things they did and what concerns were most important to them.
I then revised the plan so that it makes the significant changes and yet allows writers to keep some parts of their routine and still addresses their top needs/concerns. I even drew up a very detailed week-by-week plan for the whole season, making adjustments for big games and how they impact our coverage/routine. After successfully pitching it to the sports editor, we then unveiled the plan to the staff and presented it in a “why this benefits you” manner. Instead of talking about how it would make things easier for the desk (the desk was already on board with it), I focused on the fact that this plan would help the writers get better play for their features by eliminating days with major space crunch and ensuring better art, help them plan out their workload for the week by injecting a little more structure, help them plan when to do a big story by giving them a better idea of what other people on the staff are doing on particular days, and help free them from feeling like they have to write a feature on the player the school trotted out that day just because all the other papers would write about that player.
The writers bought into it, and with a little tweaking along the way, we made it work pretty well, both for the writers and the desk. Lessons I learned from that experience:
– Become intimately familiar with the processes that you are trying to change before changing them.
– Be sure to get input from the people who will be most affected by the changes you’re considering.
– Do your homework on your plan. The more detailed, the better. Vague pronouncements tend to draw more skepticism for being impractical. Play the role of the skeptic and assault your plan for all its shortcomings so you can anticipate some of the criticism and devise solutions/responses.
– As much as possible, pitch your plan from the perspective of how it will benefit the people who will have to change their routines to make it work. The biggest motivation anyone has for changing their routine is how it will help him/herself (aside from the “do this or your job is in jeopardy” thing, which is a threat, not a benefit). Your plan’s main goal may not be to benefit those people, but as long as it gets their support, who cares?!
– Be willing to make some compromises as long as they don’t jeopardize the major goals of what your plan is trying to do.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:48 am
We’re going to try this info until Kevvy can figure out how to let comments through.
Anyway, John, you sink your lengthy argument with this sentence: “Unfortunately, “what should be” or what’s “fair” often doesn’t come to pass.”
I see your point, but newsrooms have destroyed themselves with the unspoken mission of: “Well, it SHOULD be this way!” At some point, people need to look at what IS and then go from there.
Also, the “what SHOULD be” often consists of people who simply want lower standards. That was the problem with the Tampa situation; the managing editor expected everyone simply to buy into her lollipop fantasies about what would work.