Editorial: I’m pulling for a Philly newspaper strike
Steve Safran November 29th, 2006
BY STEVE SAFRAN
MANAGING EDITOR
LOST REMOTE
I want to see the Philadelphia newspaper strike happen. Not out of solidarity with the unions or sympathy with the struggling owners of a dated medium. No, I want the strike to happen because of the fascinating possibility that the newsroom will continue to publish the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News online in some form. Ironically, both the union and the ownership would win.
Since they won’t disclose the URL*, let’s call the new online entity PhillyStrikeout.com. Immediately, the Union has one thing wrong – they say they are going to continue to publish the newspapers online. They’re not. They’re publishing the news online. Just as they should be.
No longer constrained by the artificial deadlines of the newspaper world, they are free to publish news as it happens, where it happens. Free from the shackles of column inches, reporters can take as much space as they need to tell a story properly. Because the paper won’t be laying out big travel expense checks, the world and nation reporters will be around to tell all the great stories in Philadelphia instead. Sports reporters won’t have to follow around the pro teams to get the same silly quotes from the same overpaid crybabies, either. They can just stick around the city and find terrific local stories about hard-working, hard-playing, inspirational athletes. Photographers who have taken more than one picture to tell a great story can now have a photo essay every day. Heck – they can have several photo essays every day.
PhillyStrikeout.com will never be “overtaken by events,” either. Unlike the newspapers, it won’t have those embarrassing days when a major news event has happened right after the trucks have rolled, thus making the day’s paper irrelevant even as it arrives at the doorstep. The editor will just have to roll out of bed, make a few changes on his laptop, and go right back to sleep.
Because the web provides for video and audio, the reporters are free to experiment at PhillyStrikeout.com, too. If they want to record their interviews and post those recordings, they can go right ahead. If the still photographers want to post a little video, they’re free to do so as well. It all adds to the understanding of the story, so I say “good for them.”
It’s going to be a little tough to do all of this and run a classifieds department, too. So just let people post classifieds for free. Why not? No, it won’t be as succinct as “Queen PT Mat Set (Coil) $159 New in plastic, warr. Can del. 215-7xx-xxxx” (an actual ad online today) but giving people unlimited free space to talk about what they’re selling will invite a community to read your other stuff.
All in all, it would be a big win for the strikers. They would learn an awful lot about the new realities of news and they may even come to like what they see. So how does the other side win, too?
Because PhillyStrikeout.com isn’t going to make any money.
The strikers are going to see how hard it is to run the business and support all those jobs. The strikers are going to see that the ease of production of PhillyStrikeout.com means that anyone can do it. Giant presses no longer roam the Earth, making their masters the overlords. They will see, after a week, that they have put out a terrific publication that hasn’t brought in a dime. All of a sudden, the PhillyStrikeout.com journalists will have to dirty their hands with money. They’ll find out what we all need to understand: journalism is a business. And in business, tough decisions need to be made and we don’t always like those decisions. Shareholders have a say in the companies in which they invest. An entity, once it brings in money, has a lot of parties interested in keeping it profitable. And it’s just not up to the employees to decide how profitable is profitable enough.
Still, it’s not all smug victory for the paper owners. They, too, will see how easy it is for good journalists to put together an excellent online publication without their help. The owners will look at PhillyStrikeout.com, and they’ll have to think “How did they do that without all our memos, meetings and instructions?” The owners are going to look at PhillyStrikeout.com and think “Good thing they don’t have a sales force, or we’d be screwed.”
Newspaper owners are trying to hold on to dated models of subscriptions, classifieds and ads. Newspaper employees are trying to hold on to dated contracts. So while PhillyStrikeout.com may result in a win for both sides educationally, there’s only one both sides actually win financially: by realizing they’re not in the newspaper business.
(*UPDATE: This was written prior to the announcement that the strike site URL will be at philapapers.com. And thanks to LR Commenter Tim Windsor for telling me. That they are calling it philapapers reinforces point of the editorial, but I’m not about to go in and rewrite it. ALSO: Corrected error that had me incorrectly refer to the Daily News as the Daily Star. Thanks to LR Commenter Chris Krewson for noting that. LR readers are the best editors around.)
19 Comments Add your own
1. thephiladelphiachannel | November 29th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
never happen.
the owners will get some sort of an injunction.
i hope i’m wrong… i’d love to see your scenario play out.
2. Media Blog | November 29th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
You’re too kind and too optimistic.
Metro reporters are going to be too arrogant to understand the lessons, let along modify their behavior. They’ll still write their one or two stories a week as if on a print deadline and some editor will do the nightly update so the site is fresh with the morning coffee. They won’t stop thinking of it as just a digital newspaper.
They won’t shoot video.
They won’t blog.
They won’t be transparent.
They will probably expect people to pay for the content.
And they will have endless meetings trying to figure out how to make it more like the newspaper.
And if any of the Philly reporters read this and don’t like my take on it, fine, prove me wrong. Go make a real community news site. And reach out to those of us who have been doing it for a while and ask for our advice. We’ll help.
Here’s my first tip: Just blog.
3. Eric | November 29th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
So the spam filter blocked my prior comment because of a URL (is this a new feature)
Here it is again, with much less useful information.
—-
Didn’t this already happen in Seattle? The union was on strike against the Seattle Times and Seattle Post Intelligencer in 2000.
The striking membership published local news online at dub dub dub dot union record dot com (Now defunct)
4. Steve Safran | November 29th, 2006 at 8:04 pm
Yes - sorry about blocking you that first time, Eric. You should see the 11,000+ spam comments in our filter right now. They overhwhelmingly push people to porn and gambling sites.
So we have the note you see above that tells people to leave the URLs out. It’s a pain, and it keeps us all from easily sharing good info with each other.
Apologies for your inconvenience.
5. Dan | November 29th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
Media blog is, unfortunately, probably correct.
Even with the opportunity right under their noses
to control their own destiny, they have been conditioned otherwise. Hope I’m wrong.
Love your scenario Steve S.
Of course the question all journalists should ask is,
why not just do this in any city where we live?
Who needs the big, outdated print machines anymore.
But they need to re-read these comments to start to
open their eyes to the possibilities too.
Interesting to see what happens over the next few years.
And one final thing…
either content is important ( I think quality writing and
reporting is important) or is isn’t. There is a bit of
schizophrenia on this site regarding that point.
Some say just digital data, pixels or whatnot,
is all that’s important…. just a bunch of stuff between
the ads. I hope they are wrong about that.
Dan
6. Eric | November 29th, 2006 at 8:14 pm
No prob. I missed the URL note but I see it now. Considered a login for established users so we can post links but block some of the auto-spam?
7. Tim Windsor | November 29th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Steve,
Well, they announced the URL of the site - philapapers.com.
That’s right. Papers.
So I wouldn’t hold my breath on this being particularly groundbreaking.
8. Media Blog | November 29th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
Dan … thanks … and why haven’t we done it? It’s the economics of the thing. Those of us who are supposed to figure out how to support online journalism to the degree newspapers do it through online revenue haven’t figured it out yet (hope you can figure out my run-on sentence).
9. Steve Safran | November 29th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
Tim: Thanks for the tip. I’ve added a note at the end of my editorial. I would go in and change the whole thing but, that wouldn’t be transparent. (Translation: I don’t want to.)
Plus, I like that it reinforces what you all commented on before the announcement.
10. thedetroitchannel | November 30th, 2006 at 6:14 am
how can we weed out those pesky gambling sites yet get the links to porn???
11. thedetroitchannel | November 30th, 2006 at 6:22 am
howard-
“just blog”???
use the link lr provided in their previous post on this (local-10dotcom) and read the “open letter” dated nov. 18th…
about 1/2 way thru the body of the story you’ll find the obligatory swipe at the unwashed; something about “living room blogs”. and it ain’t positive either.
ahhh, well… we can dream.
12. thephiladelphiachannel | November 30th, 2006 at 6:31 am
there’s a whole lotta space left empty on the philapapers homepage!
you’d think some entreprenuering, union supporter-types would have ponied up some change to at least give the impression there would be hell to pay if these guys walk.
missed opportunity.
13. thephiladelphiachannel | November 30th, 2006 at 7:06 am
“loose lips sinks spirits” is also a must read over at local-10 .
talks about eating their young. not a good way to evoke sympathy from the general public.
and who the hell uses the word “lavender” anymore? (except after sitting on the throne reading the paper… as in “now where is that spray can of fresh lavender scented stuff, i’ve guest coming by!”
14. Chris Krewson | November 30th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
No. 1, it’s the Daily News.
No. 2, I’m also fascinated by the possibility — 200 journalists working solely for online. That’s a first in the state — off the cuff, can anyone think of an online-only operation with that much staff? And this would by HYPER-local — no AP or Reuters in sight. (Salon, Slate, etc. are smaller, I believe. CNN, MSNBC.com, NYT.com, WSJ.com don’t count for the obvs. reasons.)
No. 3: The site they set up is infinitely easier to use than the one their newspaper maintains.
No. 4: The strikers were set to include advertising people, who would have sold ads. A story posted today on Romenesko says that union extended talks till Dec. 9. Presumably that settles that.
15. Safran | November 30th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Chris: Noted on all counts. Changed Daily Star to Daily News.
And I did know the ad people were striking. But it’s my contention that there’s simply no way they would sell enough ads to support a staff of that size. I see exactly one advertiser on Philly.com, one on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s homepage none on the Daily News front page and none on internal pages. (Not even Google Ads?) I’m fairly sure that’s not going to support a staff of hundreds.
That’s not to pick on their ad department. Just doin’ the math.
16. flotsam | November 30th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
this is the second time i have posted and not within 15 minutes or even a couple of days and gotten the “slow down cowboy message.”
you have a problem with this system that is off putting in the extreme.
17. apostate scallops, etc | December 1st, 2006 at 11:22 pm
Media blog writes: “Metro reporters are going to be too arrogant to understand the lessons, let along modify their behavior. They’ll still write their one or two stories a week as if on a print deadline … They won’t shoot video …. They won’t blog.”
Uh, Media blog guy, have you stopped to notice that tons of newspaper reporters are ALREADY blogging, shooting video and writing the news as it happens? Hell, any reporter who’s ever worked for a wire service has plenty of experience with 24/7 deadlines. As for “one or two stories a week,” what color is the sky on your media planet?
I’m speaking as a newspaper reporter who carries a digital recorder everywhere I go so I can put soundbites online; I maintain a blog, regularly post stories on the Web minutes after they happen, do radio spots and have written the same story both print and TV. I’m not at one of the Philly papers, but I can see from reading Philly.com that their staffs are doing these things too: blogs, podcasts, etc. Steve, why do you seem to imagine that these journalists are going to be staggering out of 400 N. Broad St., blinking at the world around them and exclaiming, “Wow, these newfangled Internets are amazing!”
Newspapers began moving online in the mid-90s, and I would argue they’ve been way more forward-looking than other types of media companies (much unlike the recording industry, and unlike Infinity Radio’s old no-streaming-allowed policy). With one or two exceptions, none of them have ever charged for content.
The industry’s woes have not occurred for any lack of frantically shoveling content online. The major shortcoming has been in finding any way to make enough money to pay for these enormous newsgathering operations, especially with something like 40% of the revenue coming from classified ads. (Or perhaps the woes have come from the owners insisting on monolopy-style 25% profit margins even though the Net has abolished the monopoly. But that’s the owners’ old thinking, not the journalists’.)
As for the swipe at the name “PhilaPapers,” I presume the journalists are aware that an online news site isn’t made of any pulped wood product. But what that name does is take advantage of their major advantage over other forms of local news — namely, a substantial staff of experienced journalists with years/decades of skill in seeking out, sifting and reporting the news. “Living room bloggers” have their place in the ecosystem too, but it only makes sense for the newspapers’ staff to leverage the hell out of what they’ve got.
I wish them the best of luck, no matter how this strike talk turns out.
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