VOICES
Newspapers
Careening toward extinction with salvation firmly
in hand
The newspaper business often seems willfully headed toward extinction. It’s not simply a question of not knowing any better — though it’s true we know woefully little about ourselves, eschewing the research-and-development function other industries avidly pursue. The thing is, we even ignore what we do know.
Take, for example, that time-honored journalism staple: big events in regular people’s lives. The much-discussed readership research by Northwestern University’s Media Management Center ranked “opportunities by their potential to get people to actually read the newspaper more,” and placed “community announcements, obituaries, ordinary people” right at the top. That’s no shock. The New York Times won the nation’s heart — and the Pulitzer gold medal for public service — in large part with exactly that menu of items. What were its “Portraits of Grief” if not a new rendering of “news about ordinary people” and obits rolled into one? Online advisers counsel editors to create community by including wedding announcements, obits, birth announcements and the like. All these elements regularly rank high in readership surveys. And so, no doubt, does the Sunday Times’s “Vows” feature — a deliciously sentimental love-story wedding announcement writ large. So what have newspapers been doing with these gold mines of reader attraction? Reducing them to yet another revenue-producer, dry little ads that wring yet another few bucks out of the community. About 87 percent of large and mid-size dailies now charge for obits, according to an estimate by the International Association of Obituarists.
Or, take training. In the average business — even for those with (supposedly) much less commitment to social responsibility — training is a given, says a report prepared earlier this year by the Council of Presidents of National Journalism Organizations and the Knight Foundation. The Fortune magazine list of “The 100 Best Companies to Work For” cites company offerings of from fifty-two hours to 132 hours of training per year per employee. The American Society for Training and Development says that the 367 non-journalism companies it tracks predicted a 37 percent increase in training spending between 2000 and 2001 — and reported preliminary estimates showing that even in the face of economic recession, spending on training increased 10 percent. Even more interesting, you’d think, to our profit-hungry industry, is this fact: “Year after year we find a strong relationship between an organization’s investments in training and its performance,” said the ASTD.
So how do newspapers do on this subject? Two-thirds of the nation’s journalists receive no regular skills training at all, the COP/ Knight survey indicated. Newspaper budgets for training are notoriously small — and quick to vanish entirely whenever quarterly reports disappoint. No wonder, then, that at last April’s American Society of Newspaper Editors convention, an interesting fact emerged. American journalists rank “a lack of training” as their top source of job dissatisfaction — above pay and benefits. In the newspaper world, one editor noted, training “is still too often thought of as an isolated frill.”
Or, how about credibility? Study after study calls it a principal key to reader satisfaction. Frustration over errors large and small is legendary. We declare ourselves desperate to win and keep readers, and articles like “Raise credibility and you’ll boost reader connection,” from ASNE’s American Editor, confirm that taking care of errors and inaccuracies offers substantial hope.
So how have we been proceeding? By reducing our capacity to address the errors. Pagination has required copy editors to add to their schedules the work previously done in composing rooms, reducing the time available for their own critically important work as newspapers’ last (and best) stand against error. A University of Oregon study concluded that a medium-size paper paginating fifty pages a day would need to add more than one shift daily to handle the work. Yet a survey by University of Iowa researchers found that only eleven of forty-six papers had increased their staff at all. Thus did savings improve the bottom line — at the cost of further undermining newspapers’ credibility. A University of Minnesota survey asked news organizations if they have a method for routinely checking the accuracy of news stories after publication — by using ombudsmen, for example, or content audits, or callbacks to sources. Sixty-seven percent said no. And about half said copy editors “have less time to spend checking the quality and accuracy of information in news stories” than they did just two years ago.
All this forms a rather discouraging body of evidence that we simply don’t want to know how to help ourselves.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
