“Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008342.php talks about the hostility that many journalists have towards bloggers.
bq. It’s really astonishing the amount of self-pity and silliness one hears along these lines today. Not long ago, for instance, I sat down for an interview with a particularly disagreeable interviewer who seemed to want to catch me out and pin me down on every conceivably problematic point about blogs. At one point he suggested that the blogs were pulling away or threatening to pull away the ad revenue streams necessary to support the reportings staffs required for a quality news outlet. Agreed — I didn’t know quite what to make of that one either. I’m happy with my life. And my company is able to pay three salaries and benefits in addition to mine. But to say that we’re more than a financial fleck in the eye of even the smallest mainstream news organization is a really a grand understatement.
This reminded me of one of the weirder undercurrents at the National Press Club bloggers-meet-journalists “event”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/29/bloggers-and-journalists/ that I was at a couple of months ago. Halfway during the lunch, someone asked a question about the problems that newspapers face given budget cuts, lack of interest in funding investigative reporting etc etc, and the organizer (an ex-media type from the Shorenstein center) and other journalists jumped onto this, and made it the main topic of the second half of discussion, despite the fact that it was precisely irrelevant to the purported purpose of the lunch – a conversation about the relationship between blogging and journalism. This really struck me as something quite strange. My best interpretation of this was that journalists feel under threat on the one hand from the collapse in advertising revenues (which is about Craigslist and monster.com, not bloggers), and on the other hand from bloggers (who don’t threaten their revenues, but certainly threaten their professional prestige) and that they’ve got a tendency to blur these two quite different threats together into one because they’re both Internet phenomena. I don’t have much contact with journalists, so this impression may fly well wide of the mark – but given Marshall’s interviewer, it seems to me to be at least plausible as an explanation for the weird comments that some journalists have made about bloggers and blogging.
{ 25 comments }
Barry 05.02.06 at 4:29 pm
It’s like working for IBM as it went downhill – your treasured (and hard-earned) career is in tatters. Meanwhile, the PC/Mac youngsters are having a prosperous and fun time, never hesitating to tell an employer to f*ck off, if they feel the mood.
Martin 05.02.06 at 4:34 pm
I don’t think the journalist paranoia about blogging is totally inexplicable. Reading blogs to some extent substitutes for reading newpapers or watching TV news. A blog reader might well feel that (a) he or she has picked up the highlights of the daily news via references and links and (b) he or she has used up (wasted?) some or all of the time of day available for inputting news on blogs and has to do the dishes, grading, etc. rather than get to the newspapers. Assuming substitution effects are not outweighed by such things as increased overall interest in current events, they could, either now or in the future have some impact on the economics of the mainstream new sources.
P O'Neill 05.02.06 at 4:34 pm
You might remember the Washington Post article about the supposed rage of “angry left” bloggers a few weeks ago. In the post mortem it was established that the WaPo journalist who wrote it “had never been to a blog before.” This is 2006, the dude has a computer sitting on his desk, he works for a Big Media organisation — and had never read a blog. But still launched right into writing an article about the sociology of it. So I think some of the weirdness that Henry & JMM describe is just what happens when you try to reason with hacks.
Seth Finkelstein 05.02.06 at 4:50 pm
While you’re correct that there’s multiple threats, I think you’re missing some very important other journalistic pressures, and then being too hard on people who aren’t giving precise and nuanced dissections.
“My best interpretation of this was that journalists feel under threat on the one hand from the collapse in advertising revenues (which is about Craigslist and monster.com, not bloggers), and on the other hand from bloggers (who don’t threaten their revenues, but certainly threaten their professional prestige)”
Here, for example, you don’t distinguish between the threat to the journalism business in general (from the collapse in advertising revenues), and the threat to the livelihood of individual journalists (from bloggers). There’s a major thread of blog evangelism which runs approximately: “Yay! We don’t need to pay professional journalists anymore! We can replace them all with UNPAID FREELANCERS, I mean citizen journalists, who will work for nothing, or banner-ad beer money”. And there’s another thread which runs “Who needs professional journalists anyway? Reporting is boring. We can replace it all with entertaining ranters, I mean news is a conversation“. Yet another thread is “Destroy the nonpartisan model, it’s disguised bias. We can replace it with propaganda, partisan hackery, and political operatives”.
All these threads are very directly aimed at the working journalist, and promoted (with less sarcastic phrasing) as to why bloggers will supplant them. It’s understandable if it creates a backlash.
Brett Bellmore 05.02.06 at 5:09 pm
And you have to remember that the journalists have gotten used to thinking that the 1st amendment press protections are their own private property. Then here come the bloggers, with the nerve to reclaim the right of freedom of press for everyday people. That’s seen as a bit of affrontery.
Alan Green 05.02.06 at 6:24 pm
Interesting story about the National Press Club, and I think I see a more direct connection between loss of ad revenue and the bad attitude some journalists have toward bloggers.
With pressures on their revenue streams, media organisations are cuttting costs. Opinion pieces are cheaper than reporting, but still not too bad for ratings. Journalists are therefore finding themselves writing less fact and more opinion. This puts them in direct competition with bloggers, who can (as a group) produce opinion almost as well as the media companies.
Tyrone Slothrop 05.02.06 at 6:32 pm
Not only can bloggers produce opinion at times as well as the media companies, as alan green says in #6, but they can do it without jumping through the various hoops (a/k/a barriers to entry) that privilege journalists — academic credentials, time spent covering school board meetings, etc. My journalist friends are more hostile to blogs than I would have expected, and I think it’s out of a combination of rivalry and superiority.
Dæn 05.02.06 at 6:39 pm
All this carping about how blogs are draining the profession of journalism of its credibility or stealing its ad revenue or whatever amounts to nothing more than frantic scapegoating of the easiest, most visible target. Truth is, newspaper staff sizes have been decreasing since the 70s for reasons including but not limited to: corporate consolidation, the rising cost of newsprint, ad-revenue competition from Craiglist and Google as Henry cited, and—most troublingly—the simple fact that people just plain have more ways to spend their free time today than they did 20 years ago. Newspapers are competing against not only political blogs but the entire Internet, cell phones, Tivo, satellite radio, and the cable news channels for an ever-shrinking slice of the American attention span. And if that weren’t enough, reporters and editors have to deal with the fact that their primary consumer base has grown so polarized that the ideal of “objective” journalism (as agreed upon by a substantial majority) has all but collapsed as a tractable goal (if it ever existed in the first place). The entire industry is in turmoil; it’s small wonder its affiliates are lashing out irrationally.
Laura 05.02.06 at 6:46 pm
I don’t know, Henry. I’m not sure that Marshall’s interviewee was typical. I really do think the media and bloggers have a love/hate relationship. Look at the new Times redesign. They have a section on articles that are blogged about. And every time I write a post on one of their columnists, they put me on the bottom of the page. This sends in a lot of traffic, so I keep doing it. This week I made fun of a Brooks column, and they still put me on the bottom of the web page. Brooks may not like me, but for some reason, an intern at the paper does. I’m not complaining and am rather flattered.
Tim Worstall 05.03.06 at 5:02 am
“My best interpretation of this was that journalists feel under threat on the one hand from the collapse in advertising revenues (which is about Craigslist and monster.com, not bloggers), and on the other hand from bloggers (who don’t threaten their revenues, but certainly threaten their professional prestige) and that they’ve got a tendency to blur these two quite different threats together into one because they’re both Internet phenomena.”
I think you’re onto something there. Saying to a US newspaper “I’m a blogger and I’d like to write for you” doesn’t actually get you very far. In the UK it does (well, at least sometimes). If you’re right that in the US the journos are conflating the two quite separate challenges from the net then this would make sense.
The UK national papers tend not to run classifieds sections (well, sorta, but nowhere near as important to their financing as it is in the US) as they aren’t the one city monopolies that most US papers are. Thus much less of their ad revenue is being taken by Craig’s etc. Thus less hostility to the other side, the bloggers.
Not sure I’d quite want to bet money on this analysis (if that isn’t too grand a word to describe it) but I’ve certainly found that a lot of UK journos see blogs as an adjunct or complement, not a threat as in the US.
Ray 05.03.06 at 7:13 am
I have a blog, but what’s the matter with covering school board meetings? That’s a “barrier to entry?” It would be great if punditry bloggers (and I presume that’s what we’re talking about here when going on about the evangelizing–blogs predate them, as a medium) would actually go out and watch government at work at the lowest levels. Then they wouldn’t be talking out of their hineys so much.
But herein lies the problem: Who wants to cover a city council meeting when you don’t get paid anything for doing it?
Now, Marshall and Co. are doing some real reporting, although too much of the TMP Cafe material is just more punditry (from Ivy League law school grads and whatnot–it’s the New Republic model transferred to the Internet). We’re awash in punditry, drowning in it. But who’s going to pay you to cover the less sexy stuff? Where will you get non-DC material for a blog if a newspaper doesn’t cover it?
jim 05.03.06 at 7:38 am
My theory is that the business model for the 20th century newspaper has come apart. It’s not just the loss of advertising revenue. It’s the whole raison d’etre. The newspaper exists to bundle and distribute streams of content which could not economically be distributed individually: news, opinion, gossip, entertainment listings, reviews, comics, advertisements, sports predictions and results, Wall Street closing prices and more. Which of these streams motivates an individual purchaser to buy the newspaper is idiosyncratic to the purchaser, but in aggregate the collection motivates enough people to make the newspaper economically viable.
But these streams have now become separable. News has been viably separately distributed for a while now; in fact most people get their news from television rather than newspapers; Fox and CNN are profitable entities. ESPN has taken over sports. The net, largely, the rest. Different parts of the net, different streams: craigslist, ebay and monster.com advertisements, political bloggers political opinion, mommy-bloggers (if you’ll forgive the expression) women’s page opinion, “features.”
So demand for the bundle is shrinking. Perhaps only partly due to blogs. And newspaper employees are aware that shrinking demand means newsroom layoffs. So naturally they’re upset.
Ginger Yellow 05.03.06 at 8:50 am
There may be something to your theory, Tim. On the other hand political blogging is nowhere near as big in the UK as it is in the States, so there’s much less ostensible threat. Also British newspapers tend not to be as stuck in the mud and full of themselves as the big American ones.
Tim Worstall 05.03.06 at 9:56 am
Ginger: Having lived in both countries (as well as others) I’d say that that last sentence applies to many more things than just newspapers.
Neil Sroka 05.03.06 at 11:32 am
Yeah, I’m not sure I agree with Henry on this one either. As Martin and others intimated early on, the fact remains that the vast majority of those under 25 can’t fathom the idea of picking up a print copy of a newspaper (let alone purchasing a subscription to one), meaning that most news consumed by this group is electronic and typically of the free, digital variety. Moreover with the high overhead of paying reporters and all that capital locked up in ugly, physical things like printing presses and newsprint, there’s really no way a newspaper is ever going to be able to recoup the costs of distributing their product on the WWW and, given the miserable reaction to the Times Select push, there doesn’t seem to be much room in the pay-to-view online newspaper category either.
While there probably aren’t any simple answers and bloggers certainly aren’t solely to blame for this predicament, I think its probably wrong to say that bloggers are only responsible, if they are at all, for the loss of the power and prestige of newspapers and newspaper writing. Blogs, as one the latest in electronic alternatives, have necessarily taken way the eye balls and ink-covered hands that made newspapers profitable and thus also bare (some of the) responsibility for the real problems facing the newspaper industry.
abb1 05.03.06 at 11:34 am
Raison d’etre of a newspaper is to distribute advertisements and nothing else. They would gladly deliver your newspaper to you for free, but the advertizers insist that you pay a subscribtion to prove that you actually want this newspaper and not just paper to start your fireplace. Everything else: news, opinion, gossip, naked pictures, etc. is nothing but bait. If this kind of bait is not working, then they’ll have to find some other bait; hide free scratch lottery tickets inside or something.
axiom 05.03.06 at 12:16 pm
axiom 05.03.06 at 12:29 pm
Sorry, the first one got away from me.
Posted by abb1 • May 3rd, 2006 at 11:34 am
Well, they could try the truth, and standing up for what is just and right as well as the wellbeing of their country.
I never read the papers anymore or watch TV News except for Oberman, because it is all cheerleading, soft-pedaling of the issues and flat out blatant lies.
In my eyes and others as well, they have become complicit in the crimes off the Bush administration.
They could not have pulled this fiasco of a presidency, or war off with out the presses assistance, so they are as guilty as bush IMHO, and think they should also be tried if we ever get down to some serious prosecution of these dangerous clowns.
I think Bush threatening them with imprisonment for telling the truth and divulging the crimes of this administration does not wake them up then nothing will.
Ginger Yellow 05.03.06 at 12:30 pm
Neil, how do you explain the Guardian’s approach then? They’ve just spent £80m on new full colour presses and yet they’ve also got probably the best, definitely the most interactive (ie blogesque) and the most visited newspaper website in Britain, if not the world. It has 25 times more internet readers than paper readers. Now they don’t have the same shareholder pressures that other newspapers have, but they clearly think there’s a future involving both print and the internet.
Grand Moff Texan 05.03.06 at 1:11 pm
mments that some journalists have made about bloggers and blogging.
Oh, just go ahead and say it: they’re just not very bright, as a rule.
.
blogenfreude 05.03.06 at 1:29 pm
At Agitprop, we’re asking a slightly different question – what in the hell does the left blogosphere have to do to get some respect? (and to be as effective as the right-wing noise machine?)
gmoke 05.03.06 at 4:20 pm
I spend most Tuesday mornings at the Shorenstein Center for their “brown bag lunches” with major journos and minor academics and I’ve been doing it for years. The way things work at the Shorenstein is that a name journo loses a job (Connie Chung leaves CBS, Walter Shapiro loses his column at USA Today, Rick Kaplan is booted from ABc/NBC/CBS/CNN…) and they head to the Shorenstein for a three month fellowship and write a paper or do a study. Retired journos like Marvin Kalb and Alex Jones become the dean and everything is very intradig and clubby, donchaknow.
There is real fear at the slow motion implosion of the newspaper world and will be more fear as the network television world also begins to implode. There is jealousy and fear of bloggers as they are perceived as piggy-backing upon the work of REAL reporters and throwing mud at working journos like Judy Miller (well, maybe not Judy Miller anymore but let’s not admit that the bloggers may have got that right). There’s fear and disgust that readers can reach out and criticize working reporters and columnists (Daniel Okrent who named a supposedly abusive reader in print as the public editor at the NYTimes was a fellow at the Shorenstein this Spring).
These folks are living within their bubble, although it’s getting a little tight, and look out beyond that comfort zone only with a massive push. They don’t understand the technology, the culture, or the new rules and are shocked that these new kids on the block are not conforming to their ideas of courtesy and commity.
Doyle McManus of the LA Times spoke at the Shorenstein recently and said that the current business model of newspapers has maybe another 20 years of life left in it. I was astonished. By my estimation, newspapers as currently constituted have five or ten years at most. Ellen Hume, ex-Wall Street Journal now teaching at UMass Boston, is one who is looking around for the next wave but she is one of the few. These days, I buy only a Sunday paper and that’s mostly for the coupons and the comics.
BTW, Craig of Craig’s List is starting a news service. Yahoo has hired at least one accredited reporter. Jimmy Wales of wikipedia is developing an online model for wikinews in a variety of languages. Others around and about are developing other models of collaborative journalism. Joshua Micah Marshall is actually making money doing online news with the Talking Points Memo sites (tpmcafe and tpmmuckraker). Whether anybody at the Shorenstein is paying attention is highly debatable even though folks down the street at the Berkman Center of Harvard Law School are doing citizen journalism on a world-wide basis.
Hell, when I mention Riverbend or John Robb’s Global Guerrillas at the Shorenstein, there are people who reach for their pens because they haven’t heard those names before. But they sure have comfortable cocktail parties.
For my money, the most interesting development is dailykos and the flourishing activist community there. I doubt anyone at the Shorenstein is paying attention or can understand just what Kos has done. Look at the way the mainline journos misconstrued the Dean’s internet campaign. They ain’t larned nothing since.
Fade 05.03.06 at 4:22 pm
Newspapers should be scared of bloggers. Blogs and the Net are why I cancelled my subscriptions even to magazines like Newsweek. Newspapers are full of irrelevant, sedate, watered down horseshit, much like Fox news. If I want a Corporate sponsors dictating the news to me, I will pick up a paper. If I want to know whats going on- I will hit the net. End of story. Who needs Newspapers and their increasingly error-filled and outright incorrect AP stories? Not me.
cfk 05.03.06 at 9:33 pm
In case anyone from the press is reading this…and I am sorry to have come so late to the discussion…my three adult married children who are college graduates (2) and still taking classes (1) do not read or subscribe to newspapers.
They are intelligent people, but they are trying to earn enough money to stay alive, have a home and raise a child. They don’t even have time for TV. The corporate world should think about this when they put out advertising. Sadly, they don’t have time for blogging, either.
My husband and I still buy the local papers for local news and columnists. (I stopped watching TV a long time ago.)
My hometown paper, The Flint Journal,(Michigan) has a lot of different views expressed by columnists, cartoons, letters to the editor and unsigned small letters from readers. I appreciate this very much.
Tim Worstall 05.04.06 at 4:23 am
Ginger: Re The Guardian. They recently announced that Guardian Unlimited is actually profitable (although quite how they are allocating costs is another matter).
Take away the costs of newsprint, presses and distribution (distribution costs are huge. Very little of the cover price makes its way back to the bottom line) and it might (might, please) be possible to maintain a 500 strong crew on the back of the internet advertising alone. But that would require that they manage to keep the current print style ad rates, not the $1 per 000 internet ones.
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