Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Does anyone have observations of a business model for a healthy news
organization that seems plausible for the current and near future?

How much money does it take to fund a healthy (local?) news organization,
and what sources of income are realistic?
  

    
THank you for <49>, John.
  

    
Tex, as fast as copy editors worked, we were simply a structural
impediment to the immediacy required by online news and social
media. The NYT fired a ton of theirs, and their headlines show the
resulting loss of artistry.
  

    
It does indeed show.

I once suggested to the Chronicle that they offer fact-checking as a
paid-for service to bloggers and other entities that routinely make
less-than-accurate pronouncements.  I think instead they downsized. 
Again, what is it that a newsroom does that can be protected?

One more item I could use less of is "narrative journalism" which is
different from the classic who-what-where-when-how style of old.
Instead it starts with a story about some person and what they are
going through as a way to illustrate the central point of the story,
which may or may not be found some paragraphs later.

And I suspect that the 'Net is responsible because ad-driven sites
need not just page views, but scrolling so all of the ads may be
seen.  Thus, "stickiness" seems to be where you string the reader
out as much as possible.  That's fine for "human interest" stories,
but not in the A section.

When we did SF Gate in the 90s, we assumed people were busy and
might not even have enough time to read a whole story, esp back then
when page loading was often slower.  So, we made sure our headlines
gave away the gist of what the story was about.  And we made the
headlines a kind of entertainment.  That was controversial and I
think contributed to my not gaining any traction in the online news
business in general.  But when my daughter worked in DC for
Congressman George Miller, she said SF Gate was by far the most
popular site for Congressional staffers because of those headlines
that also happened to point to what was then the most comprehensive
offering of news on any site anywhere, with the Chronicle, Examiner,
KRON, the entire AP feed and a lot of original content.  That
approach didn't square up with where the news business wanted to go.
But while it was seen as irreverent, it was actually respecting the
reader's time and their understanding of the world around them. And
we punched way above our weight.  Yes in 2000 the NYT site had 4
times the traffic we had, but they spent 20 times the money to do
it.

One thing about SF Gate, when Hearst took it over my plan was to
spin it off and have it run its own newsroom.  The Hearst brass
rejected that. But that is what SF Gate does now.
  

    
love the insider info about sfgate...
  

    
I should also say that I think the current SF Chronicle is pretty
good and I read it daily.  

One reason SF Gate got off to a good start in 1994/5 was our focus
on the sports section.  Coming from the WELL, I had assumed that
people on the Internet didn't like sports. But we got our web server
up and running so early (March 1994) because Sun Microsystems, which
wanted to propagate the WWW and especially their new program they
called "Live Oak" but was renamed "Java" as what they called
"executable content", set it up for us.  The guy doing the setup
work told us he was on a Sun hockey team, that there was a tech
industry hockey league, and the tech world was loaded with sports
fans.  The Chronicle had, and still has, one of the best sports
sections in the country, so we featured it heavily in those early
days, which got us a ton of loyal readers working for tech
companies.

One stat I learned from Chronicle market research is that 2/3 of the
public don't care about sports, or don't care much.  But 1/3 do care
and that adds up to a lot of readers.

In 2007 I interviewed for a job at the MIT Media Lab.  They had me
give a presentation to the students.  In it I said the greatest
challenge was going to be determining what is true.  I think today
that challenge is even greater than I had imagined.

In a world awash with BS, news orgs need to be beacons of reliably
true statements.  That said, I also think that everyone has a bias
and it is most honest to admit that bias. I think the Guardian does
a good job of this.  The NYT and WaPo A sections do not.
  

    
I am a fan (and sometime practitioner) of the more narrative form of
journalism and will rise to its defense. It actually has its own
Pulitzer category. It's usually NOT about a daily topic, more commonly a
trend or unrecognized trend, so I don't think readers lose anything from it.
They can read it, or not. But it is largely confined to national or at least
big city organizations. Not sure smaller local news outlets can afford the
reporter's time. They are time-intensive stories.

Best current practitioner, IMO: Eli Zaslow. Who has won several of those
Pulitzers. It was a big loss to the WashPost when he left for the NYT. One
of my recent favorites:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/31/us/israel-gaza-war-integrated-refugee-
immigrant-services.html
  

    
As for the programs at Columbia, our newish dean Jelani Cobb has an
initiative (which he fundraised for; that's what deans largely do) to
forgive the student loans for our grads who go to work in nonprofit
newsrooms. As an increasing number do, even without that incentive. They are
the ones hiring these days.
And aside from some national efforts like The Marshall Project, they are
local and regional. Houston. Hawaii. A couple in Texas. South Carolina. One
in my town of Montclair NJ. Who knows whether they can hang in there long
term, but for now it's a pretty vibrant area.

Also, there's Report for America. I just finished writing recommendations
for two of our alums. RFA frames itself as a service project: It partners
with local newsrooms (broadcast, print, digital) to place young reporters
where they're needed, and foots half the cost of their salaries. The news
orgs pay a chunk and local donors do, too. The reporters stay for a year;
most stay for two.
https://www.reportforamerica.org/

I don't see either of these efforts solving the news desert problem, venture
capitalism and consolidation being bigger forces than the good guys can
muster, but they are lights in the wilderness.
  

    

> I said the greatest challenge was going to be determining what is true.  I
> think today that challenge is even greater than I had imagined.

For sure.
  

    
Here in the East Bay we have Berkeleyside and its younger sibling
Oaklandside. I support them with cash donations, and I read Oaklandside
regularly.
  

    
yes i know i am always so full of good cheer --- but a question:
there is that horrid wellknown phenom of some disturbing correlation
between 'as a profession becomes more feminized it becomes
devalued'. it's never been clear if 'because women are  entering the
field it becomes devalued' or 'because it's become devalued the
barriers to entry are lower'. or some mix of the two...

has that been happening here?
  

    
I used to be a fan of narrative journalism, but it was a solution to
a different crisis in the news business: How to compete with
television.

Now I am AWASH in stories about individual people’s lives, and if I
ak going to pay for journalism, I prefer it to be data driven, big
picture, long term: The stuff the amateurs can't deliver.
  

    
Does this esteemed panel think that some high-profile news orgs skew
their appearance of bias (because they may not actually have that
bias  or then again, they might) in a way that is more acceptable to
conservative/GOP views because they don't want to be labeled as
"liberal" or "woke"? 
  

    

   Institutional caution is pretty common, John, but I don't think major
news organizations are trying to be more conservative to avoid accusations
of bias. I see a number of poorly crafted headlines that are held up as
examples, but headlines online are written quickly and change throughout the
day.The problem has a lot to do with having too few people to carefully do
that work, in an environment in which many readers are hypersensitive to
nuance in heds.

    Or so it seems to me.
  

    
Also: Headlines that convey clearly to the reader what the story’s
about tend to get clicked more often.
  

    
I don't see that bias either.

But  yeah, whatever the exact dynamic, you do see more women than ever in
our very battered field.
Like nursing, like teaching, like secretarial work. All once male
professions.
And like medicine, to a degree. Though journalism was never a well-paid
prestige profession except at TV networks.
  

    

   Good headlines are good! I wish there were more of them. I wish headline
writers didn't have to factor in things like SEO, which help bring reaaders
to stories via search but which make it harder to write with elegance and
nuance. And I feel for anyone who has to keep writing heds for a story that
will be 5 different widths and sizes thorughout the day as the various
stories change position to accommodate breaking news and other design
requirements. Heds that worked in the print age, with sly literary
references or smart interpretations, don't work as well in the online world.
   And don't get me started on the decisions of so many news organizations
to slash their copydesks to save money in ways that doesn't undercut
reporting. It makes it even harder.
   It's as if the world conspired to make headlines suck. And I'm amazed at
how many good ones there still are.
  

    
yeah, i recall admiring the work of the old-school headline
writers...and less dramatic, but same same with copyeditors too.
  

    <scribbled by af Tue 6 Feb 24 11:42>
  

    
At the papers for which I worked, heads were written by copy
editors, some of whom were also designing pages. I use that term
loosely because so many sections were highly templated, with fewer
design choices to make every night. So they also wrote heads and
corrected misspellings and checked math and the million and one tiny
important things that copy editors were born to fix.

It’s fun and rewarding work - a different kind of fun than reporting
and writing are — but I enjoy doing it and mourn its decline. 
  

    <scribbled by lisa Thu 1 Feb 24 19:03>
  

    
Tex is right that classifieds used to keep the rest of the paper
financially afloat, and Craigslist was a factor in their
disappearance, but I think the bigger factor was improvement in
search and the resulting search-based dotcoms. 

The biggest categories in classifieds were housing, vehicles and
jobs, all areas where online search provided an improved user
experience. 
  

    
Yes sure. Search was the engine behind almost all of it. I remember
the day Google went live.  Talk about a game changer.  At SF Gate we
used the WAIS search engine developed by Brewster Kahle mainly when
he was still at MIT.  It was designed to be adaptable so it could go
to various sources and round them all up.  Google was still some
years away and the other search engines did a lousy job as the web
grew like gangbusters daily.   
  

    
I’m old enough to remember looking for jobs with the Sunday help
wanted section and a red Flair pen. 
  

    
Oh, yeah.  Trying to move up to SF from LA, sitting in the commons
area in the Y going through the classifieds for someplace to rent
and someplace to work ... and one of two guys sitting there asked me
timidly if they could have the Sports section when I was done with
the paper.  "You can have it right now..."