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Archive for February, 2009

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@media armistice, please?

In Media on February 13, 2009 at 5:48 pm

This made me giggle:

picture-11

And I would like to go on record as calling twitter the Second Life of 2009. Do you remember the last time every single publication had to not only write articles about but be present in some sort of online sphere that a very small percentage of the population were actually using? Second Life. Twitter’s lame hype has reached Second Life proportions. And I like twitter. Which makes me sad that THE MEDIA IS GOING TO KILL IT. ‘Cause all the cool kids are gonna have to move somewhere else now, you know. Or they’ll get too many followers, and find the service diminishing in utility. That’s how it goes.

Long Day’s Journey for the Right

In Self-Promotion on February 13, 2009 at 12:41 pm

My article about young conservatives in DC searching for work is up on Doublethink Online right now:

It seems the old saw about Washington being recession-proof has gone the way of the conservative majority. For the city’s conservative job seekers, the legendarily insulated District could not have picked a worse time to mirror ‘Real America’s’ trends.

In Washington, of course, every election cycle brings a certain amount of job turnover, of politicos and policy wonks reeling and rallying with the re-entrenchment of the warring parties. This year, however, the assault on conservatives seems to be particularly strong.

I wrote the majority of the article months ago, because it was slated for the Doublethink quarterly print edition, so it needed a long lead time. But—in a twist of recession fate much like those I highlight in the piece—America’s Future Foundation has opted to cease print-publishing Doublethink, effective immediately. Anyway, I worry that it seems a little outdated—did you know McCain staffers are out of jobs?!—but hopefully I’ve updated enough (and the wonderful Cheryl Miller has edited enough) that it doesn’t read that way. It’s not all about outgoing politicos. See?

At the American Enterprise Institute, cost-cutting measures are already underway, according to a source there. The organization is converting its magazine, The American, from a bi-monthly print publication to an online-only rag. At least one full-time editorial staff member will be cut, along with the out-of-house designers and marketing people who worked on the publication. Other full-time staff cuts remain uncertain.

Because the magazine is sponsored by AEI and doesn’t rely on ad sales and subscriptions, the decision had less to do with the general print media malaise than with an overall organizational “pressure to cut back,” the source, who asked to remain unnamed, says. “My sense is that AEI is making pretty dramatic budget cuts all over.”

Etc.

Overall, Community Newspapers Doing Well?

In Media on February 13, 2009 at 12:00 pm

Conor’s latest post about newspapers sparked my interest in finding out how local and community newspapers in my home state (Ohio) are faring.

[I'm totally guilty of thinking about "the failing newspaper business" and whatnot only in terms of the major papers—even though every time I go home, my dad (a daily Cincinnati Enquirer subscriber for ages) talks about how much worse the paper is getting, how much more sparse. And the Enquirer is still a major city daily; what about papers like The Lima News? Or the business papers? Or the suburban weeklies? They're still around, and sometimes they post jobs on journalismjobs.com, so I guess I just always assumed they're doing fine. But are they? And do we only think no one is talking about these kinds of papers because we're too busy reading about the NYT and Chicago Tribune? Are there, perhaps, blog posts and articles all over Ohio (and Tennessee and Nebraska and Wisconsin and ...) discussing local newspaper hardships?]

I did some googling.

Try as I might (which, admittedly, was not very hard—but the quest will continue) I couldn’t find much about how newspapers in Ohio specifically are faring. But I did find a blog about community newspapers overall. A post from yesterday reports “Journal Register Closes Dozens of Newspapers:”

.. the company said Wednesday that it is closing eight weekly newspapers in upstate New York … The company is also closing several other upstate weeklies …

It goes on to list closings in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Connecticut as well. But a post from Jan. 29 notes that “overall, community newspapers performed well in 2008 despite the challenging economy.” According to Suburban Newspapers of America and the National Newspaper Association:

Financial results for community newspapers were tracked quarterly last year for the first time ever, in an attempt to measure this segment of the industry … Community newspapers are not experiencing the massive ad revenue declines that are being felt by some others in the industry nor are they experiencing massive layoffs.

Data collected in 2008 showed a 1.7% decline in advertising for the third quarter, 2.4% in the second quarter and 2.7% in the first quarter (all were measured against the same reporting period from the prior year.) Fourth quarter results will be available in late February. These results compare to industry-wide double-digit declines of 18.1% (third quarter 2008), 15.1% second quarter 2008, and 12.8% (first quarter 2008), as reported by Newspaper Association of America.

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The Curse of Malcolm Gladwell

In Books on February 13, 2009 at 11:46 am

I just began reading Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms and Economic Anxiety by New York University chair of sociology Dalton Conley. It’s quite interesting so far, and I’ll probably have more to say about after I’ve read a bit more (I’m only on chapter 2). But at this point, what strikes me most is Conley’s tendency to pause in the middle an otherwise perfectly legitimate observation and give it a buzzword. Combining work and leisure becomes “weisure.” The “rocky marriage of consumption and investment” is needlessly termed “convestment.” It totally takes you out of the flow of ideas and makes you want to scrowbodo (scream and throw book down). Why is this necessary these days? Can you imagine if previous generations of sociologist writers had done this? ‘Yeah, I just finished reading Prethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber’s stuff about the numopar is totally rad.’

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“And the world will know!” *

In Media on February 10, 2009 at 4:16 pm

Dara Lind at The American Scene:

TJ Sullivan, independent journalist and LA Observed blogger, has a modest proposal for saving journalism and by extension “American Democracy” (his caps): Take to the barricades firewalls. He wants all newspapers and magazines to shut down their Web content for a week and force Americans to pick up the dead-tree copies instead.

His proposed start date for the shutdown is July 4th, which should indicate how steeped his manifesto is in the defense-of-democracy argument. To bolster his case he uses a passage from Thomas Jefferson’s personal correspondence as a recurring motif.

Rad experiment. But the Jefferson business? I’m with Dara:

The press is only necessary to democracy insofar as it produces an informed populace. Once the “curmudgeons” (to crib a term from Jay Rosen) start thinking of journalism as something that comes on paper, they’re barking up the wrong dead tree.

Sullivan writes:

Pulling the plug is perhaps the only way to make people outside of journalism sit up and take notice that this isn’t about jobs in journalism, but American Democracy.

He seems to be suggesting printed newspapers mean the exact same thing to democracy today as they did in the 1700s. With so many other (arguably more convenient and cheaper) ways for The Populace to get information, the idea of newspapers as the only bastions of government watchdoggery—and their profitability the screw on which the very definition of a free press turns—is silly.

Also—well, I’m beginning to think Sullivan’s experiment is flawed not just on premise but on execution. For one, what difference would a week make? People who are used to reading news online aren’t going to have time (or inclination) to get a paper subscription, or find where to pick up a daily copy. They’re not going to alter their reading-the-news-in-the-morning-from-their-work-computers routine because it’s been disrupted for a mere 7 days. And, besides, you can’t just shut down the Internet for a week. If daily papers went “print only” for that time period, TV-news Web sites, Web magazines like Salon and Slate and other Web-only publications would just pick up the slack. Heck, bloggers would probably sludge away from their laptops to pick up hard-copy papers at their local corner stores and simply type up the quotes they want to quote instead of control-c and v-ing. But the news would still be available online, and most people would still be going there to get it.

Time’s Walter Isaacson last week suggests a much more pragmatic (or radical?) approach:

Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula “morally abhorrent” and also “economically self-defeating.” That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication’s primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse.

[...] I am hoping that this year will see the dawn of a bold, old idea that will provide yet another option that some news organizations might choose: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce.

Go read about his proposed business model—micropayments and subscriptions and EZ-Pay, oh my!—because it’s kind of awesome.

[*From the greatest movie musical about the newspaper industry ever]

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Recession-Career Musical Chairs

In Media on February 10, 2009 at 10:29 am

Last night, I learned that because of These Trying Times, a milliner acquaintance of mine is giving up the biz to become a bartender. This is good—clearing up space in the haberdasheries for when we journalists are forced out of writing by the dental hygienists.

In the future, all dental hygienists will become journalists, all journalists will become hat-makers, all hat-makers will become bartenders, and all bartenders … will become dental hygienists? Or maybe they’ll just start pulling people’s teeth out after plying them with whiskey, like in the good old days.

[Yes. Maybe I will only post nonsense from now on.]

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Fending off the dental hygienists …

In Ephemera, Media on February 9, 2009 at 10:18 pm

Singing in this nation is almost 100 percent volunteer. That’s what will happen to newspapers. In the future, a dental hygienist will take two days off, travel to Berkeley to interview the latest Nobel Prize winner, write an article, then return to her job. [...]

[Former journalists] will get ordinary jobs: in bowling alleys, Wal-Marts, hat shops.

I’ve seen a lot of crackpot theories about the future of journalism, but this may be the silliest. Well, aside from the hat shop part. In the New Depression, I could see a lot of journalists picking up extra cash in the haberdasherial arts, sure.

[Fun fact about haberdashers from Wikipedia: I am using the word wrong. "A haberdasher is a person who sells small articles for sewing, such as buttons, ribbons and zippers. In U.S. English, haberdasher is another term for a men's outfitter. Obsolete meanings of the term "haberdasher" refer to a "dealer in, or maker of, hats and caps."]

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Things That Make Me Want to Live in a Cabin in Kentucky:

In Media on February 9, 2009 at 5:45 pm

Facebook’s 25-things meme spawns articles-about-25-things-meme which spawn meta-articles about articles about 25-things-meme which spawns a Gakwer post incredulous about said articles, meta-articles and 25-things-meme (and which has now spawned me meta-posting incredulously about the Gawker post).

Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan concludes: Soon we will all be dead. I think that is about the only appropriate response.

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R.S. McCain Chastises Us Whippersnappers …

In Media on February 3, 2009 at 1:44 pm

… and rightly so, I think. The man may, overall, be marginally despicable, but he makes some good points in the comments to this League of Ordinary Gentleman post:

When I was your age . . .If you’re under 26, I was working as a nightclub DJ or driving a forklift or playing in rock-and-roll bands. At 26, I got a $4.50-an-hour job as a staff writer for a tiny weekly tabloid in Austell, Ga. After another 18 months of job changes, in fall 1987, I landed a job as sports editor of a twice-weekly paper in Calhoun, Ga. By June 1989, I was 29 years old, married, with a newborn daughter.McCain

So I was closing in on 30 and considered myself doing well to make $300 a week covering prep sports in North Georgia. I was 38 years old when I was hired in November 1997 by The Washington Times.

Now, try to see all this from my perspective, will you? I don’t give a hoot in hell what your SAT Verbal scores were, some of you youngersters appear mighty doggone ridiculous trying to run before you’ve even crawled. As someone even more grizzled than myself said in an email yesterday, self-publishing software has made it very easy to think of yourself as a writer.

Prior to the widespread availability of the Internet (mid-1990s), your choices at age 23 would have been (a) take an entry-level staff gig at a newspaper/magazine, or (b) dwell in that sleazy semi-pro twilight of doing record reviews for crappy weekly “alternative” tabloid or maybe Xeroxing your own crappy “zine.”

Well, hello, WordPress and now, without benefit of filling out an application or sending “over-the-transom” submissions to publications, you get that short feedback loop: Megan McArdle linked me! or: Did you see my exchange with Larison?

Think, dear boys, how ludicrously vain you appear to a 49-year-old who worked his way up through the trenches of local straight journalism to arrive in Washington at age 38. In short, I am insanely jealous to think what might have been if, when I was a senior in college, it might have been possible so much as to send an e-mail to a magazine editor.

So I see you young ‘uns with these infinite opportunities, and doing so damned little with them, and watching you fritter away your time makes me angry at the idiotic waste of it all.

E.D. Kain mocks:

Did you know, back in my day before the printing press we had to shout our thoughts from atop a large boulder! Now you damned vainglorious youngsters can actually participate in the conversation! And you don’t even have to walk seven miles through the snow to do it… You damn kids should be working in, er, journalism with all those great journalism jobs being created each year….because 2009 is just exactly the same as previous pre-internet decades when people actually still read newspapers.

While that’s some mighty fine snarking there (and I—unlike Sonny Bunch and others in the pissing contest discussion that spawned the post on which McCain was commenting—am a fan of well-used snark), I don’t think McCain was suggesting that all bloggers/young writers should have to go pay their dues for five years at the Lima Daily News or something. Rather, I think he was making a good-faith effort to explain the complicated relationship he has to watching today’s young writers or would-be writers and the ridiculous advantages we have over previous bright young things (and disadvantages, as E.D. mentions); the ways we capitalize on them and the ways we squander them; and the sense of ‘what if’ that must pervade many in the older generation of writers who came about things a different way.

By the by, I’m sure we are all aware that there are plenty of young journalists who still get their starts at small, daily papers (hey, I went through, uh, a year of journalism boot camp at a daily Ohio paper) and work their ways up there the old fashioned way (I sometimes think I should have stayed longer. These are (and I mean this neutrally) just entirely different creatures than the majority of species Blogger.

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More on women, fashion, writing …

In Feminism, Media on February 2, 2009 at 12:34 pm

My friend Melanie is offended by my post on women journalists. She writes:

“Love Liz, but I find her response really condescending. Good fashion writing is not “fluff stuff.” Need proof? Washington Post Fashion Editor Robin Givhan won a Pulitzer for her work in 2006. While I agree fashion is not a “serious” issue, that doesn’t make it unimportant or render fashion writers second-class journalists. I follow politics, but I don’t have an interest in writing about it. My ability to grasp “‘real’ political issues, like military endeavors, campaigns, taxes, etc.” has nothing to do with it.”

So—for the record—I never meant to imply I think all fashion (or fitness or celebrity or beauty or relationship) writing is fluff (nor that all business or news writing is non-fluff, for that matter). But I think we can all agree “5 Ways to Get Beach Hair” or “14 Ways to Surprise Your Valentine Feb. 14″ is. And that’s the kind of stuff there’s a bigger freelance market for than the type of fashion-writing that wins Pulitzers. That said, I also never meant to imply that it doesn’t take a certain skill to write even the fluff (sometimes writing short can be sooo much tougher than writing long), nor that the writers of said fluff were writing it because they weren’t capable of grasping more serious stuff. All I was saying is that because women journalists have the option of writing—and getting paid for—this stuff, less of them may tackle military endeavors, campaigns and taxes.

This conversation was somewhat spawned by Phoebe’s post here (“I still think there’s something to the idea that fashion-as-shallowness is a sexist construction”), and she’s on about fashion again today, asking ‘What makes good fashion writing?‘ Meanwhile, I just read today (via Joanne McNeil) that “1/3 of U.S. women recently surveyed by America’s Research Group said they plan no clothing purchases–none–in 2009.“