January 14, 2009
Posted at 2:43 PM in Ink-Stained Wretches
I am often dismayed by the news about the news these days. If you care about newspapers and what they do--and you should--it's terrible to watch as reporters and editors get laid off and coverage of such frivolities as foreign affairs and culture shrinks. Every morning, when I open the front door to collect the Post from the doormat (yes, our paper carrier is that good), I wonder how much longer I'll be able to indulge in that particular ritual.
Even if I have to give up the print paper someday (sooner than I expect, maybe), I don't believe that journalism will die. It can't--we need it too much. Delivery systems change and die; the hunger for news lives on.
My friend and former editor Richard Byrne makes a resounding historical case for print journalism's resilience in "Ranters and Corantos," an essay in the Nation, inspired by "Breaking News," an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Renaissance journalism and the birth of the newspaper. Both the essay and the exhibit are fascinating glimpses into the struggles between the early modern press and the government, and reminders that print journalism has managed to roll with the punches for four centuries.
As Rich makes clear, it has always been a messy, imperfect, lurid, opinionated, and risky business. There's comfort in being reminded that the public's desire to know has remained strong since the first "corantos" (single-sheet folios) and pamphlets brought news of the world to British readers almost 400 years ago:
...the exhibit traces the profession that has satisfied that need from the gossipy manuscript letters passed from hand to hand in the late sixteenth century to the press's emergence as an economically viable force in politics and culture in the early eighteenth century. The exhibit's curators, Chris Kyle (a historian at Syracuse University) and Jason Peacey (a historian at University College, London), delight in making the more immediate connections between past and present. The 1613 pamphlet "The Wonders of This Windie Winter" is an early example of today's disaster journalism. And then there are the seventeenth-century entries in the true-crime genre: pamphlets describing deaths, "great and bloudy" murders or "barbarous and most cruell" beheadings, illustrated by rough woodcuts of the mayhem. But Kyle and Peacey also tease out larger issues lurking in the mass of early journalism they have culled from the Folger's holdings. In doing so, they provide a useful history of a complex interplay between government and the press at the industry's birth, and a valuable window into how journalism coped with (and survived) its early encounters with roadblocks and with transformative change.
If you're in D.C., you can catch "Breaking News" at the Folger through January 31. At his blog Quick Study, Scott McLemee (my predecessor on the humanities beat at the Chronicle) reads Rich's essay and adds a C.L.R. James twist to the conversation.
December 10, 2008
Posted at 1:53 PM in Ink-Stained Wretches
From the NY Observer:
The Washington Post's publisher Katharine Weymouth sent out an email to her staff this morning declaring that the business model for the paper would have to undergo a "fundamental change." First, they're going hyper-local! Washingtonpost.com is going to be recast itself as a local news and information site for people who live in or near the Beltway.
From Weymouth's memo, as reported by the NYO
The three pillars of our strategy are:
--Being about Washington, for Washingtonians, and those affected by it
--Providing utility, engagement, and convenience for our local readers
--Extending our brand with new products and new platforms
My first reaction? I live in Washington, and I want my local paper to do more than just give me the local news. Nothing against "utility, engagement, and convenience," but I wonder what this kind of journalistic locavorism will do to the Post, one of the few major U.S. papers still standing. Is going local the only way papers (not necessarily in print form) will survive?
October 29, 2008
Posted at 2:13 PM in Ink-Stained Wretches
The global economy's collapsing, we're closing in on a historic presidential election, and lord knows what the world's rogue nuclear states are up to. (Maybe the IAEA does. I do like the idea of an "Atoms for Peace" agency.)
Here's what's been happening in my world in the last week: On Saturday, I attended an all-day marathon reading of Paradise Lost at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. (It's Milton's 400th anniversary this year.) Sunday I flew back to D.C. and finished up a big story about a new edition of Frankenstein that gives us Mary Shelley's original draft, or probably as close to it as we're going to get. Yesterday I wrote up the news that Google has reached a settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, who had sued the company--sorry, I think "Internet behemoth" is the phrase du jour--over its Book Search program.
I'll post more about Milton and Frankenstein later. The Dow may plummet, but scholarship moves on.
August 22, 2008
Posted at 10:00 AM in Ink-Stained Wretches
As a working journalist (for the time being, anyway), I haven't said much about the seeming death spiral of the newspaper industry: the hemorrhage in subscriptions and ad revenue, the to-the-marrow cuts in newsrooms. (In management parlance, this is sometimes referred to as "rightsizing.") If I had a brilliant idea about how to save the biz, I'd be angling for Katherine Weymouth's job. What I can do is write stories that are useful and/or interesting to someone, beginning with me. Many of the journos I know, the good ones anyway, operate according to a philosophy that's half egotism, half altruism.
The folks over at the Columbia Journalism Review have launched a bittersweet new feature called "Parting Thoughts," in which they invite ex-journos to talk about what's wrong and what's right about what we do, and to share their accumulated wisdom (or bitterness). In the latest installment, Chris Ison, a former Minneapolis Star Tribune staffer who won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting in 1990, points out something that 1) nails the mindset and 2) should be read by the top editors at every paper that's still standing:
Many of the best journalists I know are driven in large part by ego. They claim an independent streak, but they'll do anything to please a boss who talks their language and challenges them to be great. They are energized by top editors who'll stop by their desk and talk about stories—not to fulfill an MBO, but passionately and informally. They want to be empowered to find the best story, not told what the story is by a manager who hasn't reported on the street in years. If reporters push deadlines to improve quality, they want to be seen as committed, not disruptive to the planning process.
In other words, they want leaders who share their values. Without that, more good journalists will go.
Management, please note this too: The workers have shown they'll change how they do the work; they just don't want to change what the work is for.
