A post-P-I, PostGlobe Misstep
The relationship between reporters and editors often is about as smooth and stable as a ride on Splash Mountain. A lot of reporters tend to regard editors as people who attend meetings, place casual utterances onto a budget and ask for stories never truly envisioned, or ruin the “voice” in a story, among other things. Editors generally are, through the eyes of many reporters, nuisances or do-nothings — or both.
Pieces still missing.
With my reporter’s hat on, I cry, “Woo Hoo!” But, my editor’s or consumer’s hat pulled tightly over my eyes, I whisper, “Disaster … “
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Seattlepi.com’s Ghost Town
Those eager for Hearst’s splashy debut of its great online experiment, seattlepi.com, are in for a big letdown. It’s Wednesday, March 18, the first day of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s digital age, and the Web site looks, well, like everyone who wasn’t staying packed up and left, and the few who were coming back are still hung over from the Monday-Tuesday wake. The content model appears to be: We’re making this up as we go along.
I was going to lean on my nearly three decades of experience as a sportswriter, columnist and editor, both print and online, to offer some insights on how seattlepi.com was going to approach sports. Clicking on the “Sports” section from the main navigation bar is like being transformed into Robert Neville, the Charlton Heston character in “The Omega Man” (or Will Smith in “I Am Legend,” for you more contemporary fans of post-apocalyptic movie fare). The place is a ghost town and you know there are digital mutants lurking about, but they have yet to reveal themselves.
The lead and only story on the Sports page is a remnant from the day before, ”Can the ‘Zags Go All the Way?”. Thank goodness, there are TV/radio listings, but, oops, they are from Monday, March 16, and Tuesday, March 17, as if sports on the airwaves died along with the P-I print edition.
The Place and People I Hated to Love
For a good 12 out of my 17 years at The Seattle Times, I felt total hatred for our arch-enemies, the Post-Intelligencer. It was, I admit, my way of generating the competitive juices to engage in the daily dance of newspaper journalism and, I understand, it is not rare for the industry. I took that competitive hatred to new levels, however, generally refusing to socialize with my colleagues on the road, the way it was done in city after city across the country.
P-I's Go 2 Guy
If Jim’s colleagues were people I loved to hate, he was the exception that I hated to love.
Seattle’s Past-Intelligencer
If it walks like a duck, but barks like a dog, it’s a … what? Likewise, if it’s called SeattlePI.com, but staffed by only 20 or so people with the skill set to produce a portal with an attitude, isn’t it really just branding on the cheap?
And branding to what end?
The SeattleP.com
Reading between the lines, parent company Hearst offered either Guild (union) exempt personnel (editors and online producers) or younger reporters whom they believed would be so desperate to stay in journalism, they’d agree to slashed salaries, lower benefits, zero severance and zero vacation accrual. Many newspapers, including the P-I’s competitor, The Seattle Times, already have been making a move to cheaper, online and non-union staffing instead of training and shifting current staffers to now-generation, multimedia mode. Enlightened national publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post, of course, have spent considerable time and resources in both retraining and consolidating its print and digital newsrooms.
Journalism on the Brink (Part II)
It bears repeating that it is not journalism that’s necessarily on the brink. It’s the newspaper business model that isn’t just on the brink, but hurtling back through time to the penny press days.
Yes, the Web makes it way cheaper to present content. And, yes, there are fewer barriers to entry to both content providers and technology. But one plus the other does not equal profits, or even sustaining revenue.
A lot of the discussion at “Journalism on the Brink” at the University of Washington last week (see Part One) focused on how the Web was changing journalism. Seattle’s two daily newspapers, the Times and the soon-to-be-gone Post-Intelligencer, both were represented by non-traditional content providers who reflected the kind of wrong thinking that has doomed the U.S. newspaper industry into a certain shakedown, if not extinction. That is, that news on the Internet should be free, that newspapers need to be everything to everyone, and that aggregation and what I call “celebrity presentation” (folks such as the P-I’s Monica Guzman not reporting on anything, but snarking and Tweeting about what already exists on the Web).
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Journalism on the Brink (Part I)
The nightmare, worst-case scenario for U.S. journalism finally began to unfold in earnest today, as the Rocky Mountain News became the first of the expected congo line of major daily city newspapers to publish its final edition and cease operations. The tabloid format Rocky was the plucky counter-voice to the somewhat stodgier Post. At least Denver has a voice left, but how long before it, too, is silenced?
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.
This of course is the question being posed in every city, even nationally and internationally, and the discourse over which recently has gone into overdrive. In Seattle, which is facing a similar scenario with the Post-Intelligencer within the next three weeks, the Communication Department at the University of Washington and Online News Association (ONA) hosted on Wednesday a panel discussion, “Journalism on the Brink,” that provided ample illumination, but scant little positive news for the newspaper industry.
Newspapers, murder-suicides and the Kindle 2
Few, if anything, in life is more irrational than a murder-suicide. I always think, “It was his problem; why didn’t he (it’s usually a “he,” isn’t it?) just do himself and spare everyone else?” I mean, if you are going off the deep end, go alone.
I think the same thing about the massively unenlightened newspaper executives around the country. They have, after all, lined up time, technology and new ideas, and shot them in the head. Now, one by one, they are swallowing the poison — gutting their staffs and their products — that makes the death of newspapers almost a fait accompli.
Yes, I am saying the death of newspapers is a murder-suicide. I’ve thought a lot about this subject, of course. It not only involves my former professional life, but is really in our faces in Seattle these days with the imminent passing of the Post-Intelligencer and the slower, but just-as-ugly and almost just-as-certain demise of my old newspaper, The Times.
