Democracy and Newspapers — revisited

Considerable discussion has been prompted by a recent City Club forum on whether the impending death of newspapers threatens the survival of democracy.

After an initial post on the topic here on the Red Electric, I threw another log on the fire in my current Southwest Community Connection column, HERE. Its most trenchant points are these:

1. Even when newspapers were thriving, American democracy had (and has) serious problems — poor voter turn-out, lobbyist manipulation, trivializing TV ads, vulnerable voting machines, money calling the shots. The list goes on and on....

2. The Internet's "micro-journalism" will invigorate democracy at the neighborhood level. Look for less "big city" government and demands for more local autonomy. Portland is ripe for this kind of localism and reform.

3. With more people practicing on-line journalism, there's a greater need for accredited journalism education in the schools or on-line. I don't mention it in the column, but we might even grant a registered certificate to those who have been through an on-line journalism course. Also, we'll need a large pack of on-line media watchdogs to keep an eye on on-line media.

Newspapers may be dying, but journalism is flourishing! That can only help democracy.

The Daily Us

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times wrote a column ("The Daily Me") last Thursday advancing the thesis that as newspapers disappear, we will be on our own to pick and choose among news stories on the web.

He goes on to cite and agree with several studies that indicate we will choose to read only articles that re-enforce our biases. And we will ignore those that challenge our prejudices.

Kristof laments that the change will mean greater and greater polarization in a nation that can ill-afford it.

Perhaps, but for decades main-stream news media (newspapers, news magazines and TV) have provided us ideologically narrow choices. Rupert's choice and Gannett's and the New York Times', and CBS's and PBS's and The Oregonian's. With few exceptions (Bill Moyers, Ralph Nader and Ron Paul come to mind) mainstream American political discourse runs the gamut from "A" to "B."

By contrast, the Internet’s raging, howling cacophony give us a wild and refreshing range of political voices.

For 70 years, media myopia, extending in the narrow band from conservative Republican to liberal Democrat, has cramped our view of the world and our options.

The Internet has the potential to blow open awareness. Not just pushing out the boundaries on the political Left and Right, but lifting Up and pulling Down and exploring In and extending Out.

For example, I wonder whether the New Populism would have been amplified as it is being if it weren’t for the Internet and the millions of soapboxes that allowed the public to express its outrage over the AIG bonuses. Interestingly, that outrage has come from both Left and Right — and who knows where else.

Where’s the polarization? Where's "The Daily Me"?

What we have in the Internet is a Vox Populi. Not everyone may hear it, but it is always just a click away. And we can add our voices to it without paying a cent.

Before the Internet you had to go to some obscure storefront and purchase a screed to learn real alternatives. Now such opinion is free and on your desk top.

This is the stuff of pre-revolutionary pamphleteering that arose when owning a printing press was not limited to the wealthy. That widespread “power of the press” gave the American colonies the revolutionary “Common Sense” and hundreds of opinionated and, yes, biased pamphlets.

The Internet could fuel the equivalent to Thomas Paine’s persuasive prose, and before you know it we might be exposed to real choices. The economy might not be restored to its dependence on the old, destructive consumerist values; it might be fundamentally changed by a new set of values, as it desperately needs to be.

No, I don’t think the demise of tightly edited and narrowly circumscribed newspapers will give us “The Daily Me.”

I suspect it will give us “The Daily Us.” In fact it already has, and, unlike Kristof, I believe we are better for it.

Some uninvited advice for The Oregonian

The Oregonian is shrinking again.

The way it is going about its slow disappearing act — and that’s what it is — says something about why it will continue to fade to nothing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a newspaper guy and I want to see a major news presence of Oregonian-proportions survive.

Notice that I didn’t say a major “newspaper.” That may not be possible.

But I do want a financially viable Portland news organization to emerge from the turmoil that has hit the industry. It may take some combining of resources and an entirely new methods of funding.

It will certainly take new ways of thinking.

It’s about time. For instance, it’s time for the news to be free of advertising pressures and compromises.

It may also mean the end of petty, cheap-shot competition. Journalism and journalists should have one share, and even cooperative, purpose: informing the public.

Call me crazy, but I believe The Oregonian could be the locus around which this new journalism emerges. Other journalistic “partners” could be Willamette Week, Community Newspapers and OPB.

But The Oregonian, as the big dog, is critical. And if the big dog is dying, things could fall apart quickly.

So what can The Oregonian do short-term to survive?

Here are seven recommendations.

The most recent evidence of the paper’s decline is subsuming the “Business” section into the front news section. The change says, in effect, that the “Business” section isn’t worthy of the reader’s separate consideration. Unlike, for instance, the “Sports” section, which remains very much its own entity. The message is that sports is more important than business.

Hello!

Part of the problem is in the old section’s name, “Business.” The “Business” section has evolved, or should, from being strictly about business to being about the economy. It ought to be “The Economy” section.

Recommendation #1 is to call it “The Economy” and include news about labor and personal finance as well as about business. People are talking a whole lot more about the economy these days than, say, about The Blazers. Which brings us to….

Recommendation #2. If “Sports” is worthy of its own section and massive column inches (a doubtful assumption), “The Economy” certainly is equally deserving. Its substance is nothing less than our livelihood, our well being, our savings, our sense of security.

Come to think of it, “The Economy” increasingly determines “How We Live,” (HWL) which happens to be the name of another section.

Recommendation #3. Call “How We Live” something else like “Time Out” or “The Rest of the Story” (thank you, Paul Harvey) or “UpBeat” but don’t change its content. One exception: move any HWL economy story to the new “The Economy” section.

As it turns out, I spend more time with “HWL” than any other section. That’s because of its daily publication of games. The time-sink for me is Sudoku. The reason: It’s inter-active — like the Internet, which competes for the rest of my time.

Recommendation #4. Keep the “HWL” format but consider using interactive features in other parts of the paper.

Recommendation #5. Put “Sports” at the back of “How We Live.” Clearly sports are an attraction for many folks, mostly hairy chested ones who form symbiotic relationships with sports figures.

The above recommendations likely will do little more than buy the newspaper time to create a new journalism institution. Which leads us to....

Recommendation #6. Start talking with other news organizations and institutions about the future of Portland journalism. Get over bruised or inflated egos and start to put together a plan for serving the public. Consider a quasi-public service, non-profit organization called “The Portland News Consortium.”

Recommendation #7. Challenge your readers and your own old assumptions and habits by dropping useless baggage. It can be as far-reaching as cooperating and converging with other news organizations and media, or as simple, but ethical, as announcing that the paper will cease referring to the University of Oregon/Oregon State rivalry as a war — specifically a "Civil War."

The Tribune's tricky transition

Trick question time.

The Portland Tribune has:

A) gone from publishing twice a week to being a weekly (published on Thursdays)

B) become a daily

Tribune publisher and president Steve Clark wants us to believe both A) and B) are true.

Last Friday, Clark, top executive of Robert Pamplin Jr’s Portland Tribune and Community Newspapers, wrote a front-page article titled “Tribune announces changes.”

As it appeared on the page, readers might have mistaken it for a news story, but fully the first half turned out to be corporate puffery. Clark’s by-line came at the end. The piece should have been labeled “Publisher’s note,” “To our readers” or some such.

The news describing the “changes” mentioned in the headline appeared in the seventh paragraph after the jump inside the paper.

Moreover, Clark seemed on the defensive. Why else would he take bloggers to task for being prone to “vitriolic negativity” about the Tribune? Why would he feel compelled to anticipate the Willamette Week would “throw stones”?

That said, beyond my critique of the slant and tone of his announcement, Clark won’t find any “negativity” from me, vitriolic or otherwise.

(Disclosure time: You need to know that I am paid by Clark’s Community Newspapers for a column I write in the monthly Southwest Community Connection. I founded The Connection but sold it to Clark nine years ago.)

I agree with Clark that the Tribune has become a valued journalistic asset to Portland. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it has all the virtues he attributes to it in his announcement. It certainly has many of them.

Clark and Pamplin, like so many in the newspaper business, are migrating to the Web, by degrees. Friday’s announcement marks a major leg in the baggage-laden journey. Part of the baggage is the vocabulary of journalism. A key and burdensome word is “daily.” Is an on-line website that tracks breaking news really a “daily”?

It is, but only if readers turn to it each day, as nearly every literate adult once turned to daily newspapers.

Reading habits aren’t so easily transferable from print to computer. For one thing, the competition for attention on-line is intense and wildly distracting. Moreover, the entire on-line medium is in flux. Is a newspaper site going to become a portal to video images and audio feeds? Will moving images simply overwhelm the printed word? What happens to “journalistic objectivity” in the process? (Look to cable TV news for one answer — it tanks. Cue the celebrities! Roll the violent footage! Run the gotcha sound bite!)

The other question mark is revenue. Clark’s decision to drop the Tribune's Tuesday edition cuts distribution and printing costs. But producing an on-line daily, by rights, should increase editorial costs. All Clark says in his announcement is “…we will employ fewer people in some departments.”

He had the chance to say which departments, but he conspicuously didn’t. Specifically, is he cutting editorial? If he were adding reporters — as he should to fill the news hole — he has every reason to tell us.

Reading between the lines we can conclude that the cost cutting on the production/distribution side isn’t going to free up enough revenue to bolster news coverage. The decline in advertising revenue in print isn’t offset by an increase of on-line ad revenue.

That’s the problem plaguing the industry — and journalism in general.

The question we as citizen-readers need to ask is whether the changes will leave us better or worse informed about the world around us.

I believe that, taken as a whole, the changes have the potential to leave us far better off, but only if — and it is a big “if” — we, as readers, take responsibility for seeking out the best, most trustworthy information available.

The journalist’s job is to make it available — and get paid a living wage for the work.