9 Comments Add your own

• 1. Rod Overton  |  September 3rd, 2008 at 11:22 pm

  For the life of me, I can’t figure out what is so “sad” about this.

  Yes, people facing unemployment is sad.

  But, when you have newspapers — and their middle to upper management (that is the key) — continuing to make such bad decisions this is what happens.

  Step 1: Do not enter any more “Journalism” contests. NONE. I don’t care what it is.

  Step 2: Do not hire any more “Journalists” based only on how great their clips are.

  Step 3: Act like television and tell your print reporters what stories they will do — not what stories they want to do (so they can further what is left of their careers). It’s time to act like TV and have management decide what stories will be done so that the product appeals to the intended audience.

  Step 4: Give up on the “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” motto that is left over from socalism in the 70s. In effect, you are taking aim at what should be your most desirable customers and telling them they are evil and “afflicting” them.

  Step 5: Centralize story-making decisions and filter everything through an assignment desk — just like TV. Too many chiefs run too many little “desks” and hold stories, bake stories, polish stories and over-do stories. Get the darn things out the door and onto the web and then in print. But, have a key group decide what is going to be done everywhere.

  Until you do all that — and a few more things — please quit your darn crying.

  I am sick and tired of having seen it from the inside. Newspapers need to learn from TV about how to market and make their product. “Journalists” are the problem.

  I’ve worked head-to-head with the awful News and Observer and every day — even on the web — I saw their fatal flaws. It was a joke and we beat them 2-1 just by doing MORE of what people actually want.

  And, full disclosure: I’ve interviewed at the N&O and you could not imagine a more dysfunctional, egg-headed group of editors — most still trying to appeal to the smart people in J-school at UNC. (The reporters are also always aiming for page 1 or the latest NC Press award or trying to climb their way up the ladder to the Washington Post with their “dazzling” — only to other Journalist — clips.)

  TV folks who try to do the same thing at least do so because their pieces are based on the fundamentals of trying to attract an audience. Newspaper people could care less how many people read their stories — they want the next hiring editor to be impressed.

  Until this whole way of thinking changes I can’t feel too sorry for the newspaper industry.

  Oh, and how is this for taking the cake: the Charleston Post and Courier (which recently suffered some layoffs) just can’t learn. They updated a hurricane story twice on the web yesterday — and never updated it after 1 p.m. In fact, the story did not have links to track the story or an updated tracking map in the story.

  The fundamentals are broken. Whose job is it anymore? The web people blame the print newsroom and the print newsroom won’t do the “dirty work” or stories that won’t win them awards.

  With job losses like this when are people going to roll up their sleeves and really try to fix it? Really?

  Instead we get more boring webcasts from newspapers among other awful ideas.. wow…

• 2. Erica Smith  |  September 4th, 2008 at 12:39 am

  To clarify, the News & Observer has offered buyouts to 320 people, including everyone in the newsroom. Not everyone will apply for a buyout, and if they did I’m sure they wouldn’t all be accepted. Leaders at the paper didn’t say what their target number is. The paper already cut 70 jobs in June and another 16 in January.

• 3. tdc  |  September 4th, 2008 at 7:38 am

  “kent chapline”

  welcome!

  at such an interesting time in the demise of old media, i have been wondering what the hell happened to those who used to use this place to toot their own horn.

• 4. discreet_chaos  |  September 4th, 2008 at 8:09 am

  I’m really glad Ms. Smith jumped in here to clarify because offering voluntary buyouts with no real target number (except maybe an upper limit on those allowed to accept) is a big difference to a wholesale gutting of a newsroom.

• 5. Kent Chapline  |  September 4th, 2008 at 9:06 am

  Re: Clarification: Fair enough, Erica & discreet. I have edited the original post for clarity.

• 6. wtf  |  September 5th, 2008 at 11:21 am

  this is just the media industry having to catch up rapidly for not transforming itself appropriately over the last few years.

  Because immediate hits didn’t come hard and fast enough to their pocketbooks with the Internet boom, they slowly bled to death over the course of the last 5 years.

  Then one day they woke up and everything was gone.

  Now their organizations aren’t built for the web and none of the upper management have any clue what to do besides try to get more out of fewer and fewer people.

  Newspapers are done for. While I’m a long time skeptic, I never thought they would actually sit by and die. But they are just too scared to step out and take risks, and since they are 150 year old monopolies, they don’t know how to compete and have NOTHING to offer to the web personnel who might actually be able to save them.

  (Why hasn’t the media industry hired folks from yahoo, google, etc…? OH, because they don’t have MEDIA experience, I forget….)

• 7. Rod Overton  |  September 5th, 2008 at 11:49 am

  Good points wtf…

  I’d say they don’t hire people from Yahoo, Google, etc because — mainly — the middle managers (who have a big influence on hiring) feel threatened.

  Newspaper “Journalists” drift — and climb — through their careers not being measured by anything except by how smooth they can talk their way into their next job (and the clips, which have nothing to do with audience growth)

  But, nothing — NOTHING — they do is actually measured.

  So, they build feifdoms and assert their personalities to steer the way things “go.” If it doesn’t work how they envision then they perform revisionist history and just re-make it all.

  It’s all about faking it — because there is NO measuring.

  So, they create fake reasons not to hire anyone smarter than them. In fact, people who know more than them TERRIFY them.

  The real problem facing newspapers now is that with all the layoffs, many print middle and upper managers are now faking that they know the Internet and moving over to the web — where they (again) talk a good game, but don’t have any idea what they are doing. This time, things will be measured, however. So the clock is ticking.

  A key example of how the print people are weakening the web product is to see the “growth” in web traffic to newspaper sites. They are nearly dead thanks to this infusion of “talent.”

  I had a 25 year print veteran become my boss at the Miami Herald. He had no previous experience except going to college and working at the Herald — for 25 years. He was also over the TV partnership and radio partnership.

  Why?

  Because he could talk a good game.

  He had no idea what to do, but that did not stop him from dictating bad ideas — and not listening to anything anyone told him.

  That was 4 1/2 years ago. It’s only getting worse as more print people are looking to “get into” web endeavors to save themselves.

• 8. wtf  |  September 7th, 2008 at 11:54 am

  Wow, nailed it:
  “So, they build feifdoms and assert their personalities to steer the way things “go.” If it doesn’t work how they envision then they perform revisionist history and just re-make it all.”

  Threatened is one way of saying it. Guys from real internet companies would laugh media execs out of the room, especially if they actually spent 2-3 months in a media organization and saw our systems, our politics, and our facilities.

• 9. Anonymous  |  September 8th, 2008 at 7:54 pm

  I don’t see why you are complaining, Ken. You ought to focus harder on making CBS the top outlet in D/FW instead of being a socialist yourself, as somebody else just complained about, worrying about this and that with some phony grief.

  Life CHANGES! Serve your audience.

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