The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern.
With the news announced last week that the Chicago Sun Times will be laying off 20% of its newsroom staff in order to cut costs (this in addition to reducing the physical size of the newspaper to pay less for paper), many are saying that the fate of the paper reflects the fate of the industry, hurt by shrinking ad dollars and declining readership. A story in competitor paper the Chicago Tribune even goes so far to (conveniently) end on the idea that Chicago may become a one-newspaper town.
It's a brutal story, to be sure. Nearly 40 jobs will be lost, a level of cutting that can not help but affect the quality of the paper significantly. And it's a story that's following the same narrative we hear everywhere--the Internet is killing newspapers--so then why is it that veteran Sun Times critic Roger Ebert blames not the Internet, but instead says this:
"I hope everyone who is a victim of this triage receives handwritten apologies from Conrad Black and David Radler"
Remember, the Sun Times was part off the massive scandal surrounding Hollinger International, where Black was reported to have embezzled 97% of the media chain's profits. (A scandal, by the way, that prompted Ebert to write a series of incredible letters to Black at the time)
How much of the Sun Times current fiscal crisis is linked to the destruction that Black leveled on the paper? How much of many newspapers' current state of affairs is linked not to the changes brought about by the Internet, but instead by the hole dug by deep mismanagement from their media conglomerate owners?
we're used to seeing well-loved offerings on commercial media dumped if they don't pull enough people -- or enough of the right people - to keep advertisers satisfied. That's how network TV works.
Still, although network executives re-jigger their Tuesday prime time lineup to please advertisers, editors aren't supposed to redraw their Tuesday front page for the same reason. The journalism business has been different. Although news and commentary offer a setting both for public discourse and sales pitches, traditional ad-supported journalism has worked despite that disharmony, as long as editorial content is passably free of corruption.
There are, of course, great things about being able to track content in the ways that technologies like Google Analytics allow, but certainly it's a sword with two edges and the power that it allows can certainly be used in all the wrong ways.
This argument is echoed in Kira Wisniewski's great essay, "Yellow Journalism 2.0", where she says:
Maybe at this point we’re not quite there just yet, but just like how Hearst and Pulitzer drummed up newspaper circulation in the late nineteenth century by sensationalizing the news, it’s only a matter of time before a new dawn is upon us once traditional news organizations take notice of what’s getting the most hits.
So how can these new ways of understanding readership help journalism instead of hurt it? By looking beyond the simple numbers. The depth and sophistication available in web-page analytics allows for an understanding of who's visiting your site far beyond any previous system for analyzing readers. Those numbers, however, still need interpretation by people that are willing to give them the time.
For instance, a hot story about a celebrity dogfight may bring in a lot of readers, but are those readers valuable? They'll pop in to see the one story, but how many stick around? Dig further into your analytics and you can see the numbers of truly dedicated readers and what they're reading. Dig further still and you can see where they're coming from--universities? other countries? Still further you can discover just how much time they're spending on your site and how many pages they're looking at.
All of these pieces of data mean much more than a simple spike a single story's readers and need to be taken seriously. If you base your decisions on simple hype spikes, you've turned your editorial over to mob rule--and lost your real readers in the process.
(Wasserman piece via Romanesko)
This is the year that the journalists who will embrace the challenge of transforming journalism for the digital age will be separated from those who are waiting to take the buyout. This year will break the back of the old newsroom culture that was supported by monopoly distribution economics, which have been destroyed.
It's a good read throughout, with tons of great links to others bright ideas.
When you’ve flown that far from Gutenberg, the only place to travel is back.
