US Media: Rising from the Ashes

Is the current economic crisis sparking the demise of print media as we know it? Some 28,000 journalism jobs in the United States were lost last year; the Tribune Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, has filed for bankruptcy, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will close or will follow in the footsteps of The Christian Science Monitor and The Detroit Free Press and go digital-only if no buyer for the 145-year-old title is found within 60 days.

Concern is now focusing on the future of The New York Times. "…as the industry gears up for an even worse year, even the New York Times has become the subject of panicked speculation," reports Paul Harris in today's The Observer. Like the rest of the US media, The New York Times suffers from reduced advertising and competition from the Internet at a time that the United States is weathering a deep recession. Writing in The Atlantic, Michael Hirshorn wonders whether the Times and journalism as such can survive the death of newsprint. He warns that America's paper of record may default on $400 billion in debt this May.

Crisis produces opportunity and that is true for the news business too. The struggle for survival is likely to be the catalyst for the media to do what it should have done 10 years ago: adapt to the paradigm shift produced by technological advance. In an industry in which print and distribution often accounts for 50% of total cost, going digital only makes perfect sense. It allows print media to reach out to a much broader local and global audience and to move to the forefront of technological advance and the change in reader preference involved. It would also fuel hardware manufacturers to advance screen technology as Amazon did with the Kindle and could force them to develop more affordable A3 printers for readers who would like to print the paper at home or in the office. In effect, the cost of print and distribution is shifted to the reader.

The print media have been slow to adapt to technology. With the exception of The Wall Street Journal, which successfully refused from the beginning to offer its content for free online, most newspapers initially thought all they needed to was put what is in the newspaper online for free and garner revenue from advertisement. The model failed. Like with the switch that many papers made from broadsheet to tabloid, newspapers failed to recognize that form dictates content. In addition, readers grew used to demanding free content, foiling attempts to move away from an advertisement-driven model to one in which readers pay for content. The current media industry crisis may enable papers to finally make that switch.

It may also force them to think creatively and come up with new models, products and market segmentation. A fountain of ideas is being developed by The Nieman Foundation's Nieman Reports. "Today's obsession with saving newspapers has meant that, for the most part, media companies have failed to plan adequately for tomorrow's digital future. The economic downturn has added to the urgent need for a change of direction," says Edward Roussel, digital editor of the Telegraph Media Group (TMG), in a Nieman Report entitled To Prepare for the Future, Skip the Present, in which he suggests 10 ways the media can make the paradigm shift, including: invest in premium content rather than trying to be everything to everyone, build alliances and networks to provide coverage of areas in which one's own capability is weak, adopt the 24/7 model instead of old media deadlines and have the guts to experiment.

Predicting that The New York Times if it goes digital only, may have to initially lay off 80 percent of its staff, many of whom would leave journalism, Hirshorn argues that there is a silver lining. "…over the long run, a world in which journalism is no longer weighed down by the need to fold an omnibus news product into a larger lifestyle-tastic package might turn out to be one in which actual reportage could make the case for why it matters, and why it might even be worth paying for. The best journalists will survive, and eventually thrive. Some will be snapped up by an expanding HuffPo (which is raising millions while its print competitors tank) and by the inevitable competitors that will spring up to imitate its business model, or even by smaller outlets, like Talking Points Memo, which have found that keeping their overhead low allows them to profit from high-quality journalism. And some will succeed as independent operators. Figures like Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Andrew Ross Sorkin (the editor of the DealBook business blog, which has been a cash cow for The Times) would be worth a great deal on the open market. For them and others, the bracing experience of becoming 'brands of one' could prove intoxicating, and perhaps more profitable than fighting as part of a union for an extra percentage-point raise in their next contract,@ Hirshorn writes.

For now, its uncharted waters. It all makes sense at first glance. Peter Preston, also writing in The Observer, points to the success of the four-year old Huffington Post: Eight million unique users, a 448% annual growth rate and awards showering down, a valuation of $100m. “Here's one sort of journalism that can shrug off recession, surely? Tina Brown with her ultra-competitive, somewhat derivative, Daily Beast is already turning a wheeze into a formula. And that formula - from Arianna Huffington to Lady Harry Evans - seems suitably promising. No more tons of newsprint and heavy lorries; no more futile costs. Here's the web standing proud and unencumbered, giving you the basic news you need in a neat, edited package that moves swiftly into blogged opinion. Huffington calls this her search for truth. Jaundiced readers of American newspapers would call it a long overdue reaction to too many po-faced balancing acts in monopoly papers afraid to express any opinion,” Preston says.

Yet, the picture is not all that rosy. The underlying figures do not support the perception of success? “A TNS Media Intelligence analysis quoted in Advertising Age last week puts Huffington Post revenue between January and August last year at a mere $302,000 or so. It's no secret that, at best, Huffington's enterprise was only occasionally profitable, in an election year during which US liberals flocked to the site,” Preston says, arguing that digital only news and opinion providers confront the same dilemma as traditional media: they can't turn what they have into worthwhile money.

A closer look at what the backbone is of the Huffington Post or The Daily Beast’s source list, which includes an impressive roll call of bloggers, remains far more conventionally: some 40 traditional mainstream newspapers and broadcasting stations. “Dig a little deeper among individual strands, moreover, and you wonder how on earth either Huff or Beast could get by without the Associated Press and New York Times. And there's the rub. The Huffington Post has around 50 staff, most of them technical and production hands. It would like more reporters of its own, of course, but (unlike Brown's Beast) doesn't attempt to pay its big bloggers a cent. Honor and glory stand in for a check. As CP Scott never said (in schoolboy parody): Comment is free, but facts are expensive,” Preston writes.

Covering God

In my journalism book, one reports what one knows to be true and shies away from assumptions. Analysis gives a journalist the opportunity to put events into context and to map out scenarios. Vincent Carroll, editorial page editor of the Rocky Mountain News, violates that rule in his otherwise excellent Wall Street Journal review of 'Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion,' entitled 'God Is A Problem, Sources Say.'

Carroll writes: "In a jarring misreading of the Islamist mentality, the New York Times last month described a Jewish center in Mumbai, India, as the 'unlikely target' of the terrorists who attacked various locations there. 'It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen," the Times went on to declare, "or if it was an accidental hostage scene.'

As a writer of editorials Carroll enjoys the freedom to make opinion the driver of his writing. A reporter doesn't. Initially, during the Mumbai attacks, it remained unclear who the perpetrators were. Jihadis were obviously the first suspects that came to mind but at least in the public domain that remained initially unconfirmed. Similarly, the degree of coordination and determination of the perpetrators emerged only gradually during and after the attacks. As the story unfolded, reporters did not know for certain whether the perpetrators were Jihadis and therefore the Jewish center would have constituted a target for them, and even if it had been confirmed that they were Jihadis, whether the center had been part of the plan or something they stumbled on in the course of events. The perpetrators made no demands which would have suggested who they were; the statement to a news agency by the hitherto unknown Deecan Mujahedeen, remained unverified at the time. Certainly, the New York Times reporter's description of the center as an "unlikely target" should have been questioned by an editor since 'unlikely' presumes knowledge of the perpetrators.

Carroll's is a fair review and a legitimate criticism of the way Western journalists cover stories with a religious component. He quotes Blind Spot co-editor Paul Marshall as saying that some journalists are reluctant to accept the "fundamental religious dimension" of jihadist motives and concentrate instead on "terrorist statements that might fit into secular Western preconceptions about oppression, economics, freedom and progress." Mr. Marshall's statement goes to the heart of what is an unresolved debate: Are perpetrators inspired by their religion or do they gravitate because of social, economic and political circumstance to extreme interpretations of religion? Mr. Marshall apparently supports the first school of thought.

The second of school of thought is vividly illustrated in Young Jordanians rebel, embracing conservative Islam by Michael Slackman in today's New York Times, which portrays student members of Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood. They opt for conservative and strict forms of Islam as a protest because they are "angry, alienated and deprived of opportunity…. It is their rock 'n' roll, their long hair and love beads". Slackman continues: "As a high school student, Fawaz, 20, had dreamed of earning a scholarship to study abroad. But that was impossible, he said, because he did not have a 'wasta,' or connection. In Jordan, connections are seen as essential for advancement and the wasta system is routinely cited by young people as their primary grievance with their country. So Fawaz decided to rebel. He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanor of an Islamic activist… 'I find there is justice in the Islamic movement,' Fawaz said one day as he walked beneath the towering cypress trees at Jordan University. 'I can express myself. There is no wasta needed.'" Granted the students in Slackman's portrayal have opted for peaceful protest but joined an organization that supports the use of violence in Palestine. Yet religion is for them a tool to achieve political change and social justice, what religion means to them as they mature as did the 1960s rebels of Paris, Berlin and Berkley remains an open question.

Prnt Media Face Hard Times in Developing Countries Too

For much of this year, and certainly amid the accelerated global economic crisis, it looked like the media was experiencing two contradictory trends: Western media, hard hit by drops in advertising and grappling with the impact of new technology, were shrinking news rooms and seeking to fend off bankruptcy. By contrast media in the developing markets of the Middle East and Asia were booming, print was on the rise and unemployed Western journalists were scouring the region for jobs.

That picture may slowly be unraveling. The Guardian’s media commentator Roy Greenslade notes on his blog today that hard times are hitting the Indian print media too. A report in India’s Business Standard quotes various media executives as saying India’s print media is experiencing difficult times with newsprint prices rising sharply and advertising revenue falling sharply. The Standard quotes an ad tracking firm as saying that ad revenue in November had dropped by 45% compared to October and 20% on a year-on year basis. In response, Indian papers are cutting their number of pages, laying off staff, shelving expansion plans, eliminating editions and/or raising prices. Sound familiar?

Could We Uncover Watergate Today?

The answer, perhaps surprisingly is yes, despite Western media suffering a near existential transition and crisis. Two prominent journalists, one addressing the question directly in the wake of the death of Mark Felt, best known as Deep Throat, the source that helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unravel Watergate and force President Nixon out of office. The other, Hesham Melham, a veteran Washington-based correspondent for Arab media, speaking days before Felt’s death in a very different context, a panel discussion on whether the US media are biased against Arabs and Muslims.

Former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr used the question as the title of his contribution to today’s Outlook section of the Post. "In an age when the media have been turned upside-down by the biggest shifts in audience and economic models since the advent of television, my two biggest questions about whether we could still pursue a story like Watergate center on resources and verification…. In today's cacophonous media world, in which news, rumor, opinion and infotainment from every kind of source are jumbled together and often presented indiscriminately, how would such an improbable-sounding story ever get verified? As newsrooms rapidly shrink, will they still have the resources, steadily amassed by newspapers since Watergate, for investigative reporting that takes months and even years of sustained work?

These questions are not just about holding leaders and senior officials accountable but can also affect the lives of ordinary citizens. With other words investment bankers may be the only ones to enjoy poorer public ratings than journalists, yet the public has as stake in the media being able to maintain its roles as the fourth estate. The Post’s investigative reporting, Downie notes, ensured that care for US military personnel wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan has improved significantly at Washington’s Walter Reed Hospital.

In fact, if the Watergate story would have broken today, it would have led to a much quicker downfall of a Nixon, who in 1972 was re-elected five months after his Republican agents broke into the Democratic Party’s Watergate offices. Whistle blowers like Felt exist today in democratic societies in far greater numbers than they did in back in the early 1970s and they enjoy far greater legal protection than they did then. Whistle blowers also have a much larger choice of media and investigative journalists to approach.

In effect, Melham, looking at the US media from a very different perspective comes to the same conclusion. He like Downie points in a discussion organized by the National Council on US-Arab Relations among other stories to the Washington Posts’ disclosure of the CIA's secret interrogation sites for terrorist suspects. “The American media covered the Shabra and Shatila massacres in a more dignified professional way than all the Arab media put together. Make no mistake,” Melham said referring to the killing of hundreds of men, women and children in two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut by Lebanese Christian militiamen as Israeli troops stood idly by. “It was the American media that uncovered (US abuse of Iraqi prisoners in) Abu Ghraib. The New Yorker and CBS…. It was the media that uncovered the National Security Agency's involvement in listening probably some of our conversations overseas. That was the New York Times. It was the media that uncovered certain massacres in Iraq, such as Haditha. This was Time magazine.

This is the American media which I criticized during the run up of the Iraq war because they did not engage in the usual cynical questioning of authority and they did engage later on, a few months afterward, when we found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction and all that nonsense and there was no relationship between Al Qaeda and that awful regime of Saddam Hussein. They did engage in their own version of self-flagellation and mea culpa. I've always said and I will continue to say that the American media always get the story right. The problem with the American media is that they do not get the story right at the right time, sometimes,” Melham said.

If anything, Downie argues, new technology has worked in favor of hard-hitting investigative reporting. The Internet allows for searching of records and other information. Contacting sources on pre-paid cell phones gives sources whose identity has to be guarded greater protections. And a Woodward and Bernstein would not be reporting in isolation as they did at the time of Watergate when other media were slow to join the chase. Reporters and bloggers today would be all over the story on the Internet and opinion polls would be gauging public reaction to the story.

That is good news. The key however is to ensure that the current crisis in the Western media constitutes a transition to a stronger and better fourth estate rather than its demise.