News and the City

While it seems every MSM outlet on the planet was pontificating on the adventures of Carrie and her girlfriends from “Sex and The City” in stories about the movie about the television series, real news was happening around the globe. But the space was there for the girls from New York.

OK, I went to the opening night showing of the ultimate smart woman who likes fashion flick, but I acknowledge that it wasn’t real news. Even if the television crews were waiting outside the theater when four of us friends dressed as Carrie and Charlotte and ourselves emerged from the 7 p.m. show.

The night before the opening I had a book disscussion and signing at the River Forest Public Library, where about 20 people interested in where the news had gone in the newspaper wanted to air their views. Some were young journalists wondering what the future holds, some were older readers wondering what the future holds and some were older journalists who wanted to talk about the past. Two were my sons who wanted to help sell books.

There was a bigger crowd at the Lake Theater in Oak Park the following night. With better shoes.

Sam Zell and CableVision’s $650 million plan

     I was a guest on Chicago Public Radio’s 848 show on newspapers this morning. The interview with Ashley Gross followed a business piece by Diantha Parker on the future of the Chicago Tribune, recently bought by real estate giant Sam Zell. Also in the news today is the deal for New York-Based Cablevison Systems to buy Newsday from Tribune Co. for $650 million.
     

No, newspapers are not dead.

      It has become very popular to talk about the death of print media and how everyone in the future will get their news from the Internet, or a Blackberry, or a phone, or a message in a bottle. No, wait, that’s the old way. We discuss this at length at the Medill School of Journalism, where I teach mostly freshmen in the basic skills courses. Some students are depressed because all they hear is bad news about the future of media. Others can see the future and that they are it.

I think the times have never been better– or less predictable.  

What I see is an evolution and a profession in emergence. This is as exciting a time in media as the turn of the last century, when cities had multiple newspapers, weeklies and niche publications to satisfy their informational needs. News has no doubt become more democratic. Sourcing and content is accessible in real time and all the time. The lines between consumer of news and producer of news have fallen and in many cases disappeared.

I think all these outlets need content. And I believe strongly that well-reported and well-written content that is vetted, reliable, accurate and compelling will never die. It is just the question of how it gets to you that will change. Chances are that won’t be with a thud on your doorstep. Or in a floating bottle that washes up near your shores.     

I will be talking about my new book and all these issues on Thursday, May 29 at the  River Forest Public Library at 7:30 p.m. I w ill also be at the Printers Row Book Fair  Sunday, June 8 from noon to 5 p.m. at the Illinois Press Woman’s Association booth. Come by and let’s talk about what you see happening in the news.  

 

French Fried Green Beans, Mac & Cheese and A Crystal Ball

I was in Milwaukee recently as a speaker for a newsmaker event for the Society for Professional Journalists at the Newsroom Pub. First off, the pub did not resemble a newsroom, and Teddy Roosevlet’s signature was on a glass-encased, framed chalkboard on the wall, along with hundreds of other signatures. They didn’t ask me for  mine. The front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that day offered a story on the paper’s Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. It was a good day for journalism in Beer Town.

   As I chomped on the french fried green beans, portabello mushrooms, chicken strips and batter-dipped, deep fried macaroni and cheese (this was a first) before my presentation, I was struck by the students and working journalists who wanted definitive answers. Politely, of course.

Is there a correlation between media outlets that have a democractic approach to news gathering with a more open sourcing, narrative style and value-added content and their circulation? No, you can’t say A leads to B. Because so many different factors go into a paper’s success.  

    Outside it was pouring rain and inside we had an energetic discussion on what this all means; several students wanted to know more. It’s a disruptive time for media, but there will always be a need for content. Where and how that content arrives as the best option for the audience is not clear. I was sure of one thing: its takes a lot of nerve and oil to french fry green beans.   

Updates on Front Page Data March 2008

After a few of my recent discussions and book signings, readers asked if I had updated the material since I launched the project. So I decided to take one day, March 4, 2008, and do a simple content analysis, counting the number of stories on the front page, with the number of features. As you can see below, three newspapers– Louisville Courier Journal, San Antonio Express News and the Seattle Times– had all news stories on the front page, with two large newspapers, Chicago Tribune and New York Times showing 80 percent of stories on the front page as features. The trend continues with most papers having a large percentage of stories on the front page, with some only three having no features at all.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Mile High and On The Air

A few weeks ago I was a guest of the Society of Professional  Journalists in Denver to speak at the Denver Press Club about my new book. The audience of journalists from the Rocky Mountain News, http://www.rockymountainnews.com/ , Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/ and other local publications asked a lot of good questions and made me rethink much of what I have been researching and speaking about – how newspapers have changed and what may happen to newspapers in the future.

It’s not just theory. It’s about keeping jobs and it’s about the projected viability of a profession in disruption. Is this brand of everyman news the salvo for newspapers? What if editors don’t buy into the audience preference for anecdotal, featurized news? What if readers decide they don’t really want them?

So many economic and behavioral factors contribute to a newspaper’s success. The business model of ads supporting the editorial has been blown up and readjusted by everything from craig’slist to pop up ads. The reason readers migrate from newspapers is not just about getting news on the Internet instead, it’s about a lack of time to absorb the almost limitless number of outlets offering information, opinion, commentary, entertainment and distraction.

The Denver reporters asked a lot of hard questions.

• What if I don’t write the everyman narrative? Will I lose my job?
• What if my editors don’t like us or allow us to do the everyman narrative, will my paper fold?
• By letting bloggers and citizen journalists participate, are we lessening the brand of a distinguished, reliable newspaper?
• Our stories are getting shorter, not longer; is that wrong?
• When the front page is only one story, is that wrong?
• What will happen to investigative journalism?
• What if I don’t turn to multimedia, am I doomed?
• Does anyone want to read the traditional newspaper anymore?
• I have all these multimedia tools and not a clue what to do with them, now what?
• Is the trend continuing of increased features, feature approaches and unofficial sources?

That sent me back to work. I covered the same 20 newspapers in the original study and took March 4 as a sample day. I counted features and news on the front pages and I counted feature approaches vs. hard news approaches on all the stories. The verdict is the trend is continuing and widening.

 Shortly after I returned from Denver, I was a guest on Rick Kogan’s “Sunday Papers” show on WGN-AM raido in Chicago. We talked on air about what this means and whether or not the softening of news is a good thing for journalism. A few days later I was on the Milt Rosenberg Show on WGN-AM, a two-hour live chat that was nerve-wracking and exciting.

Milt may well be the smartest man in the universe and his other guests included Bill Parker, the front page editor of the Chicago Tribune, and former Tribune managing editor and author F. Richard Ciccone.

 We talked about the future of news and how people still want to get the paper on the doorstep promptly every morning, even if they are hybrid consumers of news gathering sources from online, radio, television and print.

Even though I have been a guest on  a number of radio shows over the last 10 years, I relearned that live radio is a lot harder than sitting at my laptop and typing. I also am reassured that I have a very nasal Chicago accent.      

    

Not afraid of change

I spoke before a group of fabulous women journalists, writers, authors and marketing creatives Saturday and it lifted me up. The Illinois Women’s Press Association is a cross-generational collection of women who keep reinventing themselves and keep pushing forward at a time of great tumultuous disruption in the media.

We talked about staying relevant and telling engaging stories before a fickle and fleeting audience. Some women have written so many books it was dizzying. Some quilt together a career in writing after they get home from their day jobs as attorneys and engineers.

We talked about the state of the media and the state of the world, how to use our energy for change and how our voices matter. I saw a woman I had not seen in more than 10 years; we met at a Journalism & Women Symposium in Napa Valley in 1997. A former student came with her mother, both of them writers and both of them looking to find ways to stay relevant.

Most Saturdays I am watching wrestling matches in hot high school gyms across the Chicago suburban landscape, screaming my son’s name in encourgament. I knew when I booked this speech it was at the end of the season, and I would not need to be in a gym that day. 

But the few hours at the IWPA event were well-spent. The creativity, congeniality and genius in that room were inspiring. Next Saturday I can do the laundry and grocery shop. This Saturday I was happy to be in the company of women who want to move mountains one word at a time.  

  

Putting It Out There

   I get this. I have been publishing since I had my own newspaper when I was 10, The Juvenile Journal.  So I understand the risk you take when you put your words out into the universe. You have to expect to get feedback, both positive and negative. Not every one loves you as much as your mother does. And not every one respects your words. The wish is that they do.

   Journalists should be able to have a reasonable expectation that if they do a diligent job reporting and researching, writing and attempting to be accurate, fair, balanced and forthright, the reader/consumer/user of their content will respect it. But that is not always the case. Bloggers, consumers and readers can attack with a level of vitriol that seems as if it is aimed at the barbarians who pillaged the village, not the writer who misspelled the expert’s last name.

A person at one of my book signings for my new book, “Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page,” recently said she was terrified of making a mistake  so she got out of journalism, even though we both had been trained at the same journalism school. I said anyone in any profession could have that kind of fear– a lawyer afraid he or she will say the wrong thing in court and hurt the client, not help. A dentist afraid he will damage a nerve, a doctor afraid he won’t diagnose a severe  illness in time. Heck, even a teacher can be afraid he or she will give the  wrong impression to a student on a topic and that impression will stick, false or not.

       But you try anyway. You write the story, you try your absolute damndest to genuinely convey what it is like to be in a certain place at a certain moment, with access to this person, that event, those words, that news. And while you are doing the reporting and the typing or the  recording on video or audio, you are attempting to tame if not silence  the monster that is your ego in order to perfectly articulate a truth. Even a small truth, making careful notation of the color of the chair, the number of people on the parade float, the amount spent on the healthcare program.   

       I tell my students you start the process with a respect for the sancitity of your own byline. Not a worship of it, but a respect that what goes under your byline better be right. And it better be your best work. As much as I love to see my name on the spines of books or on scores of search pages on google, I also acknowledge the possible weight of having something assoicated with my byline that is inaccurate, a misrepresentation, a misstated truth.

I have made a few mistakes in my work in almost 30 professional years writing for newspapers, magazines, websites, books and radio. But they were mostly minor. My worst mistake was when I was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald and in a feature I said a woman had a glass eye, when all she had was blindness in one eye. I had read a clip about her accident, observed that her one eye did not move with the other and had a flatness to it, unlike the sparkle in her other eye. So I thought I verified when I asked, “So tell me about the accident with your eye.” And she did, and I wrote it down. But I somehow thought that because she lost her sight, she had her eye replaced. It wasn’t intentional, it wasn’t malicious, but she sure made my editors know I was wrong. I was just plain stupid. And I never forgot how humbling it was and how completely ridiculous  I felt.

I have this new book out, and the reviews are starting to come in. Mostly they are very positive, but a few have lines that sting.

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4463
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/arts/content/gen/ap/entertainment/Reviews/Book_Review_Everyman_News.html

   I guess it’s because I have never spent more time on a single project than on this book. It was also intellectually and creatively my most challenging work– aside from parenting. But I also know that I did it, I wrote it and I put it out there. Sometimes I feel like writing and publishing is like wearing a huge target on your back. I tell students in my writing workshop that it is worth it to take that risk. That your voice matters, that what you have to say is worth the effort. That you put it out there and wait for the push back, if it comes at all.

And that you keep trying and keep writing and keep publishing because your byline is sacred.

  

Ink on paper vs. ideas anywhere

I live in the Chicago area where two newspaper dramas are playing out with different scenarios. At the Chicago Sun-Times, a nearly 20 percent staff cut was proposed in an effort to save $51 million. At the Chicago Tribune, new owner Sam Zell (who paid $8.2 billion for the deal) is trying to convince staffers he is “a direct agent of change” who will not interfere with content. Is that possible?

The buzz in local media is that this will be a one-newspaper town soon (not fun, I was part of the Dallas Times Herald before it bit the dust), but I think such premature projections miss the point. This is an opportunity fo the Sun-Times to reinvent itself, taking the best of the brand and making the content the commodity in a new delivery mode.

Naysayers say printed newspapers will soon all be extinct. Ink on paper is ancient. True. But saying there will no physical product is like saying because there is air travel available, no one will take the train. Or the bus. Or drive. Sure they will. According to journalism.org, 51 million people buy the newspaper everyday, and more than 124 million read it every day. (Must be people picking up all those leftover copies in Starbucks.)

As journalists and as consumers, the future is about cooperating with each other and looking to see what the audience wants when and why, not just blindly producing a product and hoping to God someone buys it and reads it. Can the Sun-Times evolve into the best informational news site locally? Can it drop walls between consumer and journalist and allow more citizen journalism locally and more long-form, invetsigative and enterprise work done by talented staff? 

We have to think of newspaper identities as brands of content. We no longer think of National Public Radio as just a radio outlet. There are photo slideshows, video and text on the website. The New York Times is no longer just a text newspaper arriving with a thud on your doortsep Sundays. They offer consumers video, audio, blogs, photos, slideshows, the whole multimedia mix.

The myopic view of a newspaper company as only able to fit into one business model of a printed commodity with accompanying ads is not just old school, but all wrong. People don’t buy a newspaper to find out the score to the game anymore. They already know it by the time the paper is printed. Consumers look to the brand of a newspaper for its content and its style. So why not think about how that brand identity could  migrate to another delivery mode or many delivery modes  and be successful? Can we imagine newspapers as something other than ink on paper, and brainstorm for new ideas?         

What is news and what is just words?

  I teach the freshmen in  my 201-1 Reporting & Writing classes at Northwestern University about the traditional definitions of newsworthiness and the judgment calls that help reporters and editors decide what they should cover when, where, how and why . Lately I am thinking I should throw these rules out the window. Because as the media landscape gets more and more crowded and the audience have more options of places to retrieve information from, it feels as if so many of us from mainstream media to citizen journalists and bloggers are flying by the seat of our pants.

It seems as if the filters are gone. The outtakes are viral. The personal observations you would have left in your notebook a few years ago are now the front page story. Everything goes. Grab a camera, a recorder, shoot a video, make a slideshow, blog your impressions. No discernment. Do anything and everything you can. Just do it. POst it now. No need to polish it for later. When anyone can have an audience on a social network site, why work all day to gather and vet the info for 10 inches of printed text in a newspaper?

As the lines between audience and media have become porous and each sector has grandly influenced the style, content and sourcing of the other, there is the possibility that all we end up with is chaos. The worst case scenario heeds what I call “Chicken Little Journalism,” when rumor and third-hand anecdotes become urban myth legitimized by their ubiquity and repitition. News can become like a printed or digital version of the childhood game of telephone. The best case is that stories become deepened by inclusion of sources and what we end up with is  a democratization of news that truly informs all, and is less top-down than all-around.   

I am amazed by how much time some bloggers spend sending out information and commentary and I wonder when they do the rest of their lives. And then I remember what it is like to work on a newspaper and spend days and weeks on a story and have it either shift completely in focus or be killed. Sometimes it really did feel like an editor killed a story. The possibility of creating a narrative from nothing had died. So having an outlet for all that legwork would be great.   

All I know is that I am in the fortunate position of having seen thousands of talented and  inspired writers and reporters at the beginnings of their careers, instructing them in claases on how best to tell a story, how best to harness that creativity with accurate information and how to move past just typing words to creating a product that makes an impact.

As the elements of newsworthiness change and how we tell stories becomes more layered with the introduction of more tools across more platforms, we have to keep asking what is news and what is just words. Or images. Or audio. We have to keep asking why we focus on reportting and writing on this trend and not that, and why interview this person and not her. Because in the end it is not just about filling up time and space and airwaves with content of any kind. It is about filling up time and space and airwaves with content that is worth our time.           

Welcome to Everywoman News

As an assistant journalism professor at the Medill School of Northwestern University, I will post regular comments about events in the media landscape that affect the lives of women. I am an author, journalist, workshop instructor, keynote speaker and mother. I look forward to your comments in this space. To learn more about me, please visit my website.