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Carr’s “iTunes for news” already exists

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David Carr is looking for a new business model for news, and says it needs an iTunes. Part of what he wants is to charge for the articles, and, you know, good luck with that. (Times Select, RIP.) But part of what he wants is simply the elusive new online revenue stream that will pay for the newsroom.

Well, it already exists. It’s called Google text ads. It’s ad revenue tailored specifically for the Web environment. It works, and it’s already bringing considerable sums in to many Web sites. It lets little guys and big guys play on the same field.

The problem is, it doesn’t bring in as much cash as newspapers want, or have traditionally expected. And of course, from the music companies’ perspective, neither does iTunes.

The news industry knows how to make money online, just like everybody else. It just doesn’t know how to make as much money as it used to offline. Carr’s piece is strangely silent on this obvious observation. For someone who is trying to think out loud about this situation, he is displaying a peculiar blind spot.

Unfortunately, as a result, his musing simply prolongs the day of reckoning for the industry. He continues to hold out hope for some elusive profit-generating magic formula, instead of helping the business face the reality of a new world in which there’s simply far less money to be made.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis’s comment: “The real fallacy in Carr’s delusion is that a news story or an opinion, like a song, is unique—that you can’t get it somewhere else and so you have to buy the original.”

Why second newspapers (used to) matter

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I worked for a decade at the SF Examiner, a newspaper that was in a very similar position to the Seattle P-I, whose probable death-knell was sounded today when Hearst announced it would shut down the paper if it can’t sell it. The Examiner, too, was owned by Hearst, and it, too, was the “number two” paper in its community, and it, too, was perennially in financial distress, despite being part of the legal monopoly known as a Joint Operating Agreement. JOAs were the product of a Federal law called the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 that was intended to save “number two” newspapers from disappearing and leaving monopolies in their wake.

JOAs couldn’t really change the long-term dynamic of the news industry (lobbiers for the ludicrous idea of a federal newspaper bailout, take note!), but they saved some jobs and kept some troubled papers on artificial life support for a few decades. The main thing they accomplished was to preserve editorial competition. Two papers meant that there wasn’t just one person covering city hall but two. There wasn’t just one sportswriter covering the hometown team’s ups and downs but two. There wasn’t just one daily-paper theater critic at opening night, but (at least for the big shows) two.

San Francisco became a one-paper town nearly a decade ago when the Examiner basically disappeared. (There is still an Examiner in SF but it’s a freebie that makes little pretense to the sort of comprehensive coverage real old-fashioned papers aimed at. For example, as far as I can see its idea of entertainment coverage does not include local theater at all.) And I think the Chronicle, the surviving paper (now owned by the same Hearst Corp. that used to own the Examiner and that’s about to shut down the P-I), is the worse for being a monopoly.

In the competitive sport of journalism as in the competitive market of business, two is qualitatively different from one. When there’s just one person covering anything, human nature kicks in. It’s easy to cut corners and rest on your laurels. Once there’s someone breathing down your neck, everything’s different: You’ve got something to prove. If you screw up, it’s far more likely to come out.

Competition doesn’t always keep people honest. (In my era, there was the case of the Chronicle dance critic who filed a review of a performance panning a particular dancer who, it turned out, had gotten sick and never appeared onstage that evening. As I recall, even the Newspaper Guild couldn’t save that guy’s job.) But it greatly improves the likelihood of journalistic diligence.

Plainly, the long-fading era of any metropolis supporting more than one newspaper is drawing to its final close. Are we then going to face an onslaught of the lazy mediocrity of monopoly journalism? I think we might. But the climate today is wildly different from the late ’80s and early ’90s of my newsroom stint.

Sure, most reporters today have far fewer peers to compete against. But on the Web, their work is subjected to much wider, faster and closer scrutiny than ever before. The monopoly that newspapers are winning by surviving in one city, they’re losing all over again online. Whether it’s the national correspondent whose work can be instantly compared with that of every other publication’s coverage, or the local restaurant critic whose goofs are immediately pointed out by legions of foodie experts on the paper’s website or their own blogs, the local paper’s contributors can’t get away with the sort of coasting that monopolies used to allow. And that’s a relief.

From Village Voice to blogosphere

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Louis Menand’s account of the early history of the Village Voice in this week’s New Yorker concludes with the following observation:

More than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the Internet does now long before there was an Internet. The Voice was the blogosphere — whose motto might be “Every man his own Norman Mailer” — and Craigslist fifty years before their time. The Voice also helped to create the romance of the journalistic vocation by making journalism seem a calling, a means of self-expression, a creative medium.

Menand has it about half-right, I’d say. What was blogospheric about the Voice? For one thing, the way its writers were free to speak their minds, and to squabble with each other in public, in the pages of their own publication. These spats were part of the theater of the thing, and other publications looked down their noses at them. Also, decades before the term “MSM” had been coined, the Voice (in its Press Clips column) pioneered the sort of aggressive take-down of conventional journalism’s missteps that’s a blogging staple today.

But the Voice plainly wasn’t the blogosphere. It was too small, for one thing, too parochial. It did only a tiny bit of “what the Internet does” today, in terms of both quantity and variety. It was a newspaper: Its writers got paid, and there were editors, and you had to send them clips and a resume if you wanted your stuff published.

That’s what I did. As a young freelance journalist fresh out of college, I got my first break, my first pro byline, from M. Mark at the Voice’s book review section. She liked a piece I submitted — not well enough to run it, but enough to toss me a book to review. It was an experience I remain thankful for. But it had absolutely no similarity to what I’d do if I were 22 today, with the opportunity to publish open in my browser.

Menand is right, though, about the romance part. The belief that the form of journalism could stretch to contain a far wider spectrum of creative self-expression than the newsroom oldtimers were attempting incubated at the Voice. I inherited it from my college-newspaper mentors and carried it through my career. In the 1970s and ’80s this approach still had a renegade quality; today it is pretty much the norm, from blogs to the New York Times.

Can conservatives report?

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Interesting exchange this weekend which we might title, “Why can’t conservative bloggers report?”
It starts with Matthew Yglesias responding to a Michael Goldfarb item about Greg Sargent leaving Talking Points Memo for a new Washington Post website. Goldfarb says the GOP has no equivalent to TPM — no website with a cadre of muckrakers. Yglesias responds:

What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job. The one time I can recall the conservosphere leading the charge on a legitimate story, the thing with Dan Rather and the national guard memos, they got tons of traffic and attention. And lord knows the conservative media has lots of money and plenty of staff. But almost none of that stuff is going to people who report competently. Instead, you get a lot of wild conspiracy theories and a lot of commentary. The progressive blogosphere involves plenty of commentary, of course, and relies a decent amount on reporting done by the non-ideological media. But the right, for all its loathing of the allegedly liberal MSM, is actually entirely dependent on it and the cable-Drudge nexus to advance stories.

I think there’s more reporting happening in the conservative blogosphere than Yglesias allows. (Michelle Malkin goes nuts here with a long list that includes some legitimate links mixed in with lots of ringers — but she has a point.)

But I’d argue that the real reason you find deeper and more effective muckraking on the left is that it’s in the ideological genes. There’s more of a tradition of independent investigative journalism — it goes back to I.F. Stone and beyond, to the original muckrakers of the Progressive era. This is because the progressive ideal is rooted in a belief that government has a key role to play in the modern state and its economy. You dig for stories about corruption and bad behavior in government because you believe it has a job to do and needs to do it right. If you believe, as most on the right do, that the best government is the weakest and smallest government — if you dream of “drowning it in the bathtub,” as the ideologues who ran the country for the last eight years did — then why waste your time trying to expose its malfunctions? Why develop a tradition of trying to shame government into living up to its ideals when you don’t share them?

Goldfarb, and doubtless many others on the right, think that TPM and other Democratic-friendly investigative journalism outlets will wither away during an Obama administration because they won’t want to criticize their pals. That assumes the only motivation for investigative reporting is partisanship. My experience at Salon, which has always done its share of exposes on right and left and which thrived under the Clinton administration, tells me he’s wrong.

UPDATE: Simon Owens picks apart Malkin’s roster of conservative scoopery.

Times trips over COBRA

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This morning I read the New York Times’ front-page piece about Obama’s stimulus plan, and nearly spat out my coffee as I read this passage near the top of the piece:

Other policy changes would subsidize employers’ expenses for temporarily continuing health insurance coverage to laid-off and retired workers and their dependents, as mandated under a 22-year-old federal law known as Cobra.

I first learned about COBRA as an editor/manager over the last decade, and learned all about it from the other side more recently, as one of the large number of Americans who have resorted to it over the past year. I guess the article’s authors, Jackie Calmes and Carl Hulse, have never had to deal with COBRA up close themselves. If they did, they’d know that employers don’t have many expenses associated with COBRA. COBRA simply allows employees who have lost their health insurance coverage (because they were laid off or they no longer qualify because, say, their hours were cut back) to keep their existing insurance for up to 18 months. All they have to do is pay the entire cost of the health insurance themselves — whatever portion they used to pay themselves, and the (typically) larger portion that their employers used to pay.

So what kind of assistance do employers need to cover COBRA costs? Maybe they have some minor administrative overhead. But surely they’re not the parties who need help in this situation.

There are two possible explanations here: Either the Obama team has suddenly lost all of its marbles, or the Times reporters mangled their description of the Obama plan — which, perhaps, might involve covering the employees’ costs for the COBRA insurance (possibly by paying into the employers’ plan, which might explain the confusion).

I checked the Times site at the end of the day, expecting to find a correction on the article, but there’s none there as I write this.

Holman Jenkins: “lost decade” or lost mind?

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I continue to read the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and columnists in a “know thy enemy” mode. As the recent economic crises have pretty much razed the paper’s entire stable of totems, it has been fun to watch the rhetorical writhings. Mostly, they speak for themselves. But I think I cannot let this Christmas-eve gem from Holman Jenkins pass without comment. I think it will prove representative of the sort of hilarity we can expect to read from unrepentant free-marketeers over the coming year.

Here’s a shorter Jenkins:

(1) Since we only had one Great Depression, we can’t really draw any lessons from it, because we never got to run the experiment twice. We have no evidence that government spending helped end the Depression, or that more spending would have ended it faster.

(2) Despite said inability to draw lessons from the Great Depression, we do know — thanks to “plenty of evidence from history” — that “actions hostile to business tend to be related to an absence of prosperity.” Therefore people who argue that in the 1930s the “government did not do enough to restore business confidence, or did too much to damage it, piling on taxes, regulation and labor unions” are on “firmer ground” than advocates of government spending.

(3) But never mind these lessons from the Great Depression, because we live in a democracy, and democracies in general can’t be trusted with something as important as an economy. Give the people power and they will inevitably make bad policy.

(4) Sometimes democracies somehow stumble into periods of prosperity anyway, and when they do, this prosperity is “self-reinforcing” because “powerful interests” become powerful enough to resist all that bad policy that a democracy might wish to promulgate.

(5) These periods of prosperity do not last forever, and “once prosperity blows up” the same “self-reinforcing cycle” becomes “an unvirtuous one,” and instead of “powerful [business] interests” promoting prosperity, we get democratic governments promoting “costly or vindictive wish lists.”

(6) Government bailouts and the Federal Reserve’s extreme measures “may in retrospect be seen as just the right medicine. At the moment, no rational investor or business manager looks upon such doings with confidence in our economic future.”

(7) “Bottom line: Politics is in charge — in a way that makes a lost decade of subpar prosperity more likely than not.”

Jenkins’ account of recent events displays the sort of hermetic reality avoidance once only observable in unreconstructed Stalinists. Government must keep its hands off business! We can only trust the unfettered corporation to maintain a virtuous cycle of prosperity! When prosperity “blows up,” we can only trust the same “powerful” business interests to restore it! Don’t ever sully your analysis by asking how it was that your business-driven prosperity “blew up” in the first place. And once the blow-up happens, and people start asking why government didn’t restrain business from wrecking the economy in the first place, turn around and hold government responsible for the coming “lost decade.”

It is entirely possible that we are headed for a “lost decade of subpar prosperity.” But if that is the case, it is hardly excessive government meddling that is at fault, but rather the very philosophy that Jenkins espouses — of leaving our prosperity in the hands of powerful business interests unchecked by effective public oversight.

The good news is that people like Jenkins have next to no influence in the new administration. The bad news is they still have a platform in one of the nation’s two most influential newspapers.

Disappearing DC bureaus? Boo-hoo!

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Front page NY Times piece today laments the general downsizing of Washington bureaus by papers and chains. On the one hand, any time some writer loses a job, it’s a shame. But we can acknowledge that human price and still question the assumptions behind the more general professional garment-rending.

Before we worried about the rising tide of unemployed journalists, we had a word for the sort of journalism too many of the folks inside the old DC bureaus did: pack journalism. This was not a term of endearment. The pack members mostly asked the same questions, arrived at a general consensus, and shook their heads in sync when somebody broke ranks. It was this same pack that went nuts over the Lewinsky story and failed to understand that the American people did not want to see their president impeached for a peccadillo, and never did. It was this same pack that served (with a handful of honorable exceptions) as stenographers for the Bush administration’s faulty intelligence and accomplices in the rush into a misbegotten war in Iraq.

In the Times piece, Andy Alexander, the retiring chief of Cox’s DC bureau, which is being eliminated, says, “I think the cop is leaving the beat here.” Too often, alas, the cop was either asleep or on the take.

I do not think it is coincidental that the old DC bureaus are being downsized at the same time that we are welcoming a new presidential administration that, as this Times magazine piece reports, does not feel obligated to give interviews to reporters simply because those reporters show up at cocktail parties. A cocktail-party invitation should not be the entree to asking questions of the government. Maybe paying to keep reporters in the capital so they can go to cocktail parties is not a good use of dwindling journalistic resources. If the DC cocktail party circuit is dead — and I doubt that’s actually the case — it can only mean good things for our democracy.

Of course we need reporters in the capital to dig into complex stories and ask hard questions. But do we need hundreds of them all doing the same job, covering the same stories? How many times do we need reporters to repeat the same question, like “Why haven’t you released your internal report on contacts with Blagojevich?” when the question has already been reasonably answered? If many of these bureaus are being replaced by coverage from niche publications that have more specialized focuses, maybe that is something to cheer — a more sensible division of labor.

Henry Blodget isn’t shedding tears, either. But he does acknowledge that the elimination of local papers’ DC bureaus might reduce coverage of the local communities’ concerns and representatives in the capital.

I think we probably will have a gap there for a while, and that’s not good. But it’s not a national disaster. Eventually, the local Web sites will pick up the slack. They may not be able to send reporters fulltime to DC. They’ll miss the cocktail parties. But they’ll still be able to cover the stories that matter to them.

UPDATE: John McQuaid suggests Blodget’s being cavalier, wonders who will dig through all the new data Obama’s “transparency” promise will provide.

Friends’ books: Laura Miller, Mike Sragow tomes

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I want to note new books released by two friends and former colleagues, both of which are just out, neither of which I have yet read, both of which I am fully expecting to delight in.

Readers of Salon and the New York Times Book Review know Laura Miller’s critical writing by its wisdom, range, power and clarity. Her new book, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, is her first (she also edited Salon’s Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors). It’s an unusual combination of personal memoir and literary criticism that is about, among other things, Narnia, childhood imagination, memory and the power of stories. I was always more of a Tolkien guy than a Narnian; I think by the time I got to Lewis’s books their Christian subtexts did not look “sub” at all to me, and I found the whole thing an exercise in crude allegory. But if anyone can make me understand their power, I imagine it will be Laura. If you read this excerpt from the book recently posted at Salon, you’ll see why. (Here’s Laura’s website for the book.)

My professional path has crossed multiple times with Mike Sragow’s: He’s now the movie critic for the Baltimore Sun. When I met him he was the movie critic and editor for the Boston Phoenix, where he encouraged me to write about movies (I’d limited myself to theater and books). Then we worked together at the SF Examiner, and again at Salon. For me, he has always been the best kind of mentor; for his readers, he has always been an incisive, insightful and deeply knowledgeable critic.

Mike’s new book, his first (he also edited a couple of anthologies for the National Society of Film Critics), is Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master — a biography of the director of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, whose reputation and swashbuckling life story have long been neglected. Here’s a Wall Street Journal review by Peter Bogdanovich, who calls the book “evocative, layered, engaged, graceful and compelling”; here’s another review of it from today’s N.Y. Times.

I can’t wait to read both of these books — soon as I’m done poring over edits on my own…

Journal steps in Net neutrality hornet’s nest

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One of the reasons I’ve proposed MediaBugs as my project in the Knight News Challenge is that professional news organizations don’t have a very good record of transparency and responsiveness when it comes to fixing errors. Today’s tempest over the Wall Street Journal’s front page story on Net neutrality offers a nice illustration of what I mean.

The hook of the Journal piece was a report of documents that showed Google, long considered a staunch supporter of Net neutrality, was “quietly” changing its tune by “approaching major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content.” In addition, the article said, “prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject.” The only scholar discussed in any detail was Lawrence Lessig.

Admittedly, the Net neutrality issue is complex, both technically and as a legal/policy matter. But it’s precisely the sort of topic that the Wall Street Journal is supposed to get right. And both key subjects of the story, Google and Lessig, have now stepped forward to say that the story is simply wrong.

Google posted a response saying that what it’s proposing is a species of caching of Web content to speed its delivery; the service provider wouldn’t be deciding which content gets treated better. (David Weinberger explains this in more and better detail.) The Journal story did not provide readers with any hint of an understanding of that aspect of the issue.

The Journal Web site offered a roundup of critical response to the story this morning. But it’s interesting to note the tone and substance of this roundup: Its lead says that the article “certainly got a rise out of the blogosphere.” It goes on to list a variety of responses to the piece, without ever dealing with the heart of the issue, which is that the key players in the story say that the story is wrong.

The Journal roundup describes Lessig as “critical of the story” but fails to say why. What Lessig says is that the original WSJ piece claimed that he had shifted his position on the issue, and he has not done so: unlike some others in the Net neutrality camp, he has consistently supported the idea of “fast lanes” on the Web as long as everyone has equal access to them.

Net neutrality isn’t easy to explain. But the Journal story had more room than most to try to do so. Even if the writers believe that Google’s explanation of its position is somehow deceptive or insincere, they owe it to their readers to include that argument. The initial story’s failures are only compounded by the follow-up roundup, which purports to cover the bases of Web reactions but leaves out the most importance responses.

This happens all the time: A newspaper does a shoddy job of covering a complex issue; then, when people raise questions about the story’s accuracy, the paper views their criticism as sour grapes, and never bothers to deal with the substance of the complaints.

Here, Google and Lessig aren’t saying merely, “this was a bad story.” They’re both saying, “We are principals to this story, and the story got our position wrong, and then used that error as a news peg.” I’ll be curious to see whether the Journal follows up further with these complaints. Its readers deserve better.

Link backlog catchup: Denton doom, Facebook futures, Time’s cyberporn past

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  • Doom-mongering: A 2009 Internet Media Plan: Last month Nick Denton predicted a 40 percent decline in the online ad market. Nick is gloomy even in the best of times, so I’m hardly surprised, but this time around? The pessimists keep winning their bets. 40 percent drop in ad revenue for ad-supported businesses is not a decline, it’s a cataclysm. If it’s right, we’re just at the start of a cycle that will be even worse for this industry than the 2000-2001 downturn.
  • Peter Schwartz: Facebook's Face Plant: The Poverty of Social Networks and the Death of Web 2.0: Web 2.0 will die. Facebook is all trivia, and it will go the way of AOL. I agree with about 1/2 of this. Let’s forget about whatever “Web 2.0” is and talk about Facebook. FB’s effort to cut the difference between walled garden and open platform will work in the short run, probably help it keep growing and even figure out how to make some money through the downturn; but long term I don’t see how it keeps the most engaged users from jumping ship to truly open versions of its services, which will take maybe 5-10 years to go truly mainstream, but Will Happen, most definitely. See previous examination of these issues in previous examination of these issues in Technology Review from last summer.