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Randy Cassingham's BlogHistorical Details and Author's Notes from This is True®
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The Future of Newspapers
When I started True back in 1994, there weren't too many people online -- especially compared to now. Once I quit my Day Job to pursue online publishing full time, I was constantly looking for peers -- people to talk with that would understand what it was I was doing. It was hard going at first, but I eventually found several communities of people using e-mail discussion lists to communicate. I joined several, and was able to find a number of interesting people to help keep me stimulated and learning new things.
Free Weird Newsletter
One of those lists was called "Online News", which was started by a pioneer in the field, Steve Outing, who since 1995 has written a column on online topics for the industry rag Editor & Publisher. (I still keep in touch with Steve after all these years; he has found my business model fascinating, and has written about it several times.)
It also helped that the Online News list dealt heavily with the future of newspapers in the face of "new media". After all, I get most of the news for True -- a news commentary column -- from newspapers, so I have personal and professional interest in their survival.
It was a good fit for me, since after all I was doing news stuff online. It even led to me being invited to speak at industry meetings, like the Online News Summit in Washington D.C. in 1998. The attendees at that one, which included participants from CNN, ABC, El Universal Digital, MSNBC, The Jerusalem Post, the MIT Media Lab, NANDO.net, Associated Press, UPI, Reuters New Media, AFP, The Irish Times, and many others, listened politely -- and dismissed me as an anomaly; certainly few others could do such a thing with their classic journalism education! (The term "blogger" hadn't been coined yet....)
So I started to realize that even the journalists that were savvy enough to join an online discussion list called "Online News" weren't necessarily "getting" the amazing changes that were coming to the journalism business. What really sealed it for me was a Washington Post editor who complained on the list that he could not find any "hotshots" to work for him. He wanted people who could write, code web pages, do Shockwave, run servers, guide online strategies, and hand-hold the old-guard reporters into the Information Age. It's no wonder he was having trouble finding a "hotshot": at the time, a typical beginning reporter's salary was about $19K a year. I told him there are plenty of "hotshots" out here, but we're already making one hell of a lot more than $19K/year running our own publications. He didn't reply.
I dropped off the Online News list and started my own discussion list, hand-picking people who really understood the changes coming to a world where anyone could have "the power of the press" -- by publishing online.
The Online News list sadly died after Steve Outing himself moved on to become a senior editor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, where in addition to blogging (hah!), he conducted research on the role of the Internet in the news business, including an eyetrack study of how people interacted with news sites. I'm sure he was frustrated too, to see the list die out; it would have been useful as newspapers really started to have problems in 2007-2008.
But in 2008, someone who really wanted to see the list pick up again did what was needed: run it himself. He sent notes to people he remembered from the old list and asked them to get onboard again. I was flattered to get an invitation to the new discussion list, this time named "News Online".
Sadly, not much had changed, attitude-wise, in the 10 years since.
Get Him! He Doesn't Conform to Our Old Models!
Last week Paul, a journalist, wrote to the list with the subject "Chasing a Meme for Profit":
I'm wondering if any other journalists have tried to go after an Internet meme like [this example]. Not as in a story in the main product about it, but a separate satellite site -- a cash cow in the field so to speak? This [example site] may be a little racy for me even (I may "flip it" for profit...), but I'm thinking there may be other popular national memes that could be built out.It's not pure journalism, but it could be, I think. I'm sure someone has done something like this -- where are the success stories?
Well, as it happens, I have done just that: I replied that I created a mini-site about Janet Jackson's 2004 Super Bowl "flash" -- the infamous "wardrobe malfunction" (JanetJacksonFlash.com). I noted it made more money than what it cost me to set it up but, more importantly, it brought me more readers (subscribers) to my main product which, of course, brought more income over time. (It gets another surge of traffic each Super Bowl, and people still use the subscribe form there to sign up for True.)
In answering the question Paul raised, and providing an example "success story" as he requested, I sure didn't expect to get attacked, but David, who works for Agence France Press, the French news agency, came out swinging, replying to my post:
So *this* is what it's come to!If this kind of crap is supposed to have anything to do with the future of journalism, "meme" or no "meme", I want nothing to do with it.
And if I had used such methods to attract traffic to my site, I wouldn't be boasting about it.
A world in which every individual becomes their own little capitalistic enterprise, stooping ever lower to attract vicarious attention to their own twittering and fluttering, is a world which is doomed.
And he was serious! Doomed! We're all doomed! Not just newspapers, but the entire world! Oh, woe to all of us! Boo hoo hoo....
So I went back and explained in more detail what I was doing with the Janet Jackson site:
I very quickly 1) proved fairly conclusively that Janet Jackson's event -- a major news story -- was no accident, and 2) made fun of the event, rather than treat it seriously as most other American media did. And you think I have something to apologize for? Please. The hysteria over 2 seconds of televised boobage was ridiculous. Really: Senate hearings?!? It's journalism's job to put things in perspective, and the mainstream media utterly failed in the Janet Jackson case. I'm not ashamed at standing up to say "This is stupid," I'm proud of it. And if you were part of the media hysteria, which I would call "crap", then I point the finger right back at you.
Mainstream media pandered to hysteria, while I wanted readers who pronounced the hysteria ridiculous. And that site helped me get them. David seems to think I should be ashamed of wanting that kind of reader. I'm not. I absolutely do want readers to think and to be critical of groupthink, and the Jackson microsite brought me scores of them. It was a perfect example of what Paul was looking for. It was well worth the small investment of time and money, which has helped my site attract readers who think, while the media that counseled hysteria has been whacked by bankruptcy. And David just can't see a lesson in that. Huh.
But the best part? While no one on the new "News Online" list wanted to get into the fight (and David, true to form like the first clueless guy, didn't respond), I got several new subscribers -- members of the News Online list. Maybe there's a bit of hope for mainstream journalism after all.
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Most Recent Comments
Posted by Keira, Australia Sydney on August 23, 2009:
I totally agree about media hysteria. Here in Australia for two weeks we've had a case (I'm not even sure if it's finished yet, it still seems to pop up from time to time) where a radio breakfast show stunt went totally wrong.
They had this segment called The Lie Detector where they had a person strapped to a lie detector and a friend or relative would ask questions to find the truth about something. Usually it was couples who wanted to find out if their partners were cheating, but this time it was a mother who had an out of control 14 yr old daughter, that had snuck out of the house and had been brought home at 2am by police, so she wanted to know what her daughter had been doing, and the mother asked her daughter if she had had sex and the daughter responded that she had been raped when she was twelve.
Now I had actually heard the stunt live on air when it happened, and I heard the stunned silence, nobody knew what to do and the male host (and I understand his actions being in media myself) went back to basic interview technique of "getting back to the question" so to speak and said "and was that the only time?" Immediately everyone came back to their senses and the female host shut the stunt down.
Now yes admittedly the question the male host asked was stupid but it was an honest mistake, a reflex motion, but the media took it and turned into some sort of story about these two malicious hosts taking advantage of a young girl and emotionally torturing her. It became completely sensationalised and the media was starting rumours that it was fake or that the host knew about the rape beforehand and wanted more ratings and it was all based on that one question the male host had ask which was a stupid mistake but the media had turned it into some sort of premeditated attack.
And to me it was really tragic because here was a girl who had brought to light a fundamental flaw in the system where this mother had be given no place to turn to, to help her deal with her daughter being a rape victim (the mother admitted she knew of the rape but didn't tell the radio show and it didn't come up in the evaluation). The daughter had refused counselling (though after the incident she accepted the offered counsel service) but the mother had been given no counsel or support as to how she could help her daughter and had to resort to a radio stunt because the government had provided no services to the parents of rape victims, but instead the media ran with hysteria, and soon it became a hypocritical argument were the media was demanding why a 14yr old girl was being asked about sex when a government funded TV channel (in Australia we have two government funded channels, one fully funded one half funded) got a bunch of 13 yr old kids and asked them about sex, drugs and alcohol. It was just so overblown and stupid and I'm glad it's finally dying down. It was just a tragic situation, seeing all the media following the same repeated line; it was a waste of airtime, print and even digital media. There wasn't even a debate about the incident it was all one line of thinking and to me it there is something very "Doomed" about media when the debating is gone and everyone falls in line like a row of dominos.
Posted by Drew, Cleveland on August 26, 2009:
Patricia wrote: "My point is that today's newspapers are not worth the paper they are written on."
The problem is that the whole industry is focused on the "paper" instead of the "news". They need to stop trying to protect the printing presses, and instead figure out how to evaluate journalistic "authority" in the online world.
Posted by Ed, Hopewell Jct, NY on August 29, 2009:
I contend the primary reason for the decline of newspaper writing is the "Journalism Major". Reporters don't know anything anymore - no history, literature, geography, biography, economics, science, math or current events. They can't absorb and think about what they see and are told, put it in context, understand how or if it makes sense and then formulate questions.
The answers to questions help clarify the issues and promote clarity in reporting.
The statement "This change will not raise taxes for the majority of Americans" is not the same as "This change will not raise taxes for the majority of taxpayers." I believe it's a reporter's job to point this out - otherwise the press release runs and the newspaper is an extension of the political public relations unit.
Of course, the public is also to blame because the average person doesn't want read more than two or three paragraphs about anything. Instant gratification dominates.
This could lead to a discussion of fulfilling a customer desire versus boring the reader but in the past the papers were able to get the cogent points in the first three paragraphs and flesh out the story in the rest of the piece.
Now more space is given to the results of a reality TV show then the rampant AIDS epidemic in Africa.