Since when is the economics of newspaper publishing a political issue?

December 7, 2005 4:38 PM

MoveOn wanders off the reservation?An arm of MoveOn tries to "confront" Tribune Co. CEO today to present him with 45,000 signatures protesting deep staff cuts at the Tribune newspapers, claiming they undermine newspapers' vital watchdog role. New West's Jonathan Weber, former editor in chief of The Industry Standard, says "Most newspapers are businesses and it's silly to make a political cause out of what in this case is a highly routine business decision." Since it seems MeFites almost universally are fans of the emerging "citizen journalism," as well as ardent advocates for journalism's watchdog role, what do we think of MoveOn's effort here? And yes, my title and tags for this post indicate that I agree with Weber, not MoveOn.
posted by twsf (44 comments total)

"claiming they undermine newspapers' vital watchdog role"

Better undermined than non-existant, the latter being the case if the paper goes under.
posted by mischief at 4:41 PM on December 7, 2005

Um.. there are no tags.
posted by Balisong at 4:43 PM on December 7, 2005

That said, I didn't know you could petition layoffs to change anyone's mind about anything, non-political.

Has that boycott on France even worked?
posted by Balisong at 4:46 PM on December 7, 2005

Newspapers lost their "vital watchdog role" in the 80s. Of course, they had only discovered it in the early 70s. Who seriously believes corporate media makes a day-to-day difference? A few reporters luck onto serious stories, but no media empire really wants to rock the boat anymore. MoveOn would be better going after the laws that allowed media corps to gobble up everything in sight.
posted by ?! at 4:48 PM on December 7, 2005

They can petition whoever they want. The newspaper can layoff whoever they hire.
posted by furtive at 4:50 PM on December 7, 2005

The problem isn't greedy media corporations, it's Craigslist!
posted by brain_drain at 4:52 PM on December 7, 2005

The fact that a business decision is routine doesn't mean that it should be accepted without resistance. I'm sure that none of us find anything "silly" about the 40 hour work week or the fact that our children are no longer allowed to work in factories. Maybe MoveOn has better things to do than than shake their fists at Tribune Co. but I support their right to make it an issue.
posted by quadog at 4:52 PM on December 7, 2005

Furtive nailed it.
posted by my sock puppet account at 4:53 PM on December 7, 2005

"Since when is the economics of newspaper publishing a political issue"

As we know economics and politics have nothing to do with each other. If I have to milk old ladies out of their retirement money for economics, that's just free capitalism right? If a corporation does something for profit, then it's okay. As long as it's for profit.
posted by destro at 4:55 PM on December 7, 2005

Anyone who uses the term "Citizen-Journalist" in a non-ironic way deserves to be locked in a box with this woman, and have their hyphenation privileges revoked.

It's almost as bad as saying "anti-idiotarian"...
posted by SweetJesus at 4:58 PM on December 7, 2005

Printing out an online petition doesn't make it worthwhile.
posted by smackfu at 5:01 PM on December 7, 2005

MoveOn is off base on this. The danger for MoveOn is that they will put off some supporters through this kind of action.

Business is business...you do what you have to do in order to make a profit, including reducing staff when necessary...
posted by HuronBob at 5:03 PM on December 7, 2005

This profit, It vibrates?

(As a sole proprieter small buisiness owner, I jest. Of course profit vibrates.)
posted by Balisong at 5:10 PM on December 7, 2005

The major newspapers are caught in a rut of their old business model. It is no longer viable. Most of their news is provided through heavily censored and edited newswires, and is two days behind the Internet, and one day behind broadcast news.

To start with, they need to create enormous, Internet-based syndicates of original news and opinion providers from around the world, based on the open source model, not the closed service provided by the wire services today.

Think of it as a thousand websites and blogs feeding in to a central wire service, providers rated by the quality of the news they provide by members, much like on ebay. Their byline is their URL.

Instead of a "six-article" front page, there might be thirty stories in brief, like the center column of the WSJ. Even the article format would trim the bottom half from the 'pyrimid' style of writing.

The idea is to a higher density of news in an abbreviated format.

Local news is a similar concept, except news reports are provided by local people, via email, the telephone, or fax, in exchange for a nominal payment via PayPal. Again rated for credibility. A far smaller staff of reporters act both to confirm and enlarge stories and to edit writing. The volume and quality of local news would skyrocket.
posted by kablam at 5:13 PM on December 7, 2005

Perhaps I am just not up to speed on MoveOn.org, but "wanders off the reservation"? Seems like MoveOn.org hasn't been anywhere near the reservation for quite some time. They appear to exist almost solely for the purpose of giving conservatives a straw man to burn, just as PETA is a great straw man for anyone who's against animal rights.

That said, I don't think the business case for the layoffs is so self-evident that we can just say, "hey, that's business." MoveOn suggests that the newspaper owners are making huge profits and so shouldn't need to lay people off; Weber says it's more like the difference between survival and bankruptcy. I'm inclined to think Weber is right; the audience for print media is shrinking rapidly and the advertising market, while better than it was just after September 11th, still isn't the gangbusters business it once was. But I don't know how qualified either one of them is to judge the business case of the Tribune papers.
posted by chrominance at 5:22 PM on December 7, 2005

Like MoveOn was ever on the reservation? Perhaps you mean a reservation to compare President Bush with Hitler? They already showed up for that one.
posted by ParisParamus at 5:25 PM on December 7, 2005

Hitler in 16 posts...

Nice.
posted by SweetJesus at 5:28 PM on December 7, 2005

Perhaps you mean a reservation to compare President Bush with Hitler?
posted by ParisParamus at 5:25 PM PST on December 7 [!]

Hitting the bottle early tonight?
posted by Balisong at 5:31 PM on December 7, 2005

I got a spam from a MoveOn PR person about this a couple days ago and it read as really stupid, and I'm usually on their side. Why on earth is MoveOn protesting basic business practices?

Numbskulls.
posted by mathowie at 5:32 PM on December 7, 2005

I don't know anything about MoveOn's position on this, but Weber is wrong; newspapers are meant to be public services, not businesses. It's a little more clear-cut with t.v. news, because they are allowed to use our airwaves and cable infrastructure in exchange for providing the service of useful, accurate, factual news reporting. Newspapers are different, but just like with medicine, education, or churches, running a newspaper like a business ultimately means that the newspaper is no longer able to function as an objective news source, because, as with all our millionaire pundits and reporters, who aren't so much biased toward the left or the right as they are biased toward furthering thier own careers and biased because they're part of the uber-rich class, the entire industry's function is no longer to give factual reporting that informs the citizenry and holds the government and corporations accountable to the people but instead to make money. Those two aims are incompatible.
posted by eustacescrubb at 5:33 PM on December 7, 2005

It's silly to routinely make business decisions without taking account of the political consequences.

When a profitable business cuts staff or wages - which they all try to do, in order to increase profits, not just to survive - they should expect to meet organized resistance, not only from their own workers, but from all the world's workers, acting in solidarity. If MoveOn is taking part in that movement, then good for them.

Also, when a newspaper cuts staff, you have to ask which staff. What they usually try to do is to sack investigative, independent-minded, or left-leaning journalists, while retaining their stock of Christopher Hitchens clones and other rightwing sycophants.

Boycotts, petitions, strikes, and, above all, honest publicity are the best ways to fight it. Thanks twsf, good post.
posted by cleardawn at 5:49 PM on December 7, 2005

Here's the MoveOn article, which also mentions the substantial profits being made by the corporation concerned.
posted by cleardawn at 6:01 PM on December 7, 2005

Numbskulls indeed, protesting basic business practices.

If nobody protested basic business practices, we'd still be living in an absolute monarchy.
posted by cleardawn at 6:03 PM on December 7, 2005

Tags are not for commentary. tia.
posted by delmoi at 6:04 PM on December 7, 2005

Yeah, move on is pretty bad, almost as bad as Swift Boat Veterans For Truth going by their TV ads.
posted by delmoi at 6:08 PM on December 7, 2005

It isn't just the Los Angeles Times with its large staff (and very large newshole to fill.) It's all the Tribune papers, where people, like secretaries, clerks, mailroom workers and technicians, not to mention reporters, copy editors, photographers and designers, have been chopped with little or no warning. A colleague last week saw a secretary with 22 years service and an exemplary work record be cut on the spot and told her health benefits were ending that day. Ditto for 70 others at just that one newspaper. Very middle class workers, mostly women with families to support, have lost their jobs, their positions outsourced to a local company that hires at, of course, much lower pay and no benefits. Another Tribune paper cut its mailroom and told the workers they could reapply for their jobs, again for less money.

It's arrogant and uninformed to assume that everyone working for newspapers is wealthy or that it's somehow okay to do this to people when the company is making obscene amounts of money, or paying former executives thousands of dollars to do absolutely nothing. Worse, the Trib's idea of good journalism is to fill its papers' pages with junk, cheap features written for those in Chicago and somehow supposed to be of value to readers of papers in cities around the country. If you have the misfortune to live in an area served by one of these papers, watch out. It's only going to get worse as the Tribune tries to exceed Gannett's profit margins. When these papers lose their Washington bureaus,their science writers, their business writers, local readers will suffer. You can sneer at the mainstream press if you want to, but worse is coming as long as these corporate owners get away with doing what other industries have been doing since the 1980s--crapping on workers and taking home outrageous bonuses for doing so. And do not think it's an accident that some of these very Republican-run businesses are going after newspapers that have at least occasionally tried to nail the Bush crowd for its lies. There are few papers like the Toledo Blade that are independent of these corporate bloodsuckers and thus able to report freely. Now, many of these papers' coverage may not measure up to what you expect but really, what are your alternatives? The New York Post or the Washington Times? Nancy Grace? Larry King? Katie Couric? Bill O'Reilly? C'mon, folks, all the bloggers who depend on the MSM will miss it when it's gone because very few blog sites are doing any real reporting, instead primarily commenting on the admittedly many failings of the press.

I actually think that MoveOn has done something smart here--side with the newsroom people who just might be inclined to look on MoveOn with some favor in the future.
posted by etaoin at 6:24 PM on December 7, 2005

what eustacescrubb said.
posted by mr.marx at 6:28 PM on December 7, 2005

eustacescrubb points out a major problem with media ownership in North America: there's a disconnect between the media as public service and the media as private enterprise. The two goals aren't fundamentally at odds with each other, but that's often how it plays out. What incentive is there for, say, a major network or a chain of newspapers to maintain award-winning journalism departments when the news is often perceived as a loss leader, i.e. unprofitable? In the free market, the advantages to having things like foreign investigative bureaus are often tangential.

I'm not sayin MoveOn's heart isn't in the right place, but if you really want to maintain a high standard of news reporting, there needs to be a discussion about where government regulation fits into all this. Should there be state support or regulation of the news media? Can the inevitable influence of government under such a system be stymied? The ability of news outlets like the BBC and the CBC to report accurately on controversial stories suggests it's possible.
posted by chrominance at 6:40 PM on December 7, 2005

I don't know anything about MoveOn's position on this, but Weber is wrong; newspapers are meant to be public services, not businesses. -- eustacescrubb

what eustacescrubb said.

Oh, whatever. meant to be by whom? The Grand Meaner? Sounds like a fun job.
posted by delmoi at 6:41 PM on December 7, 2005

Japanese businesses used to routinely offer jobs-for-life with high wages. The result was that Japan had the world's most successful economy ... up until the late 1980s.

That's when the heads of Japanese companies decided that they could increase profits by sacking workers and reducing wages. This is the result.
posted by cleardawn at 6:48 PM on December 7, 2005

meant to be by whom? The Grand Meaner? Sounds like a fun job.

It's up to you to ascribe meaning to your experiences of reality, delmoi. It is, indeed, a fun job, if you're doing it right. In the meantime, are you seriously arguing that you prefer corporate PR mags to public-service investigative journalism?
posted by cleardawn at 6:56 PM on December 7, 2005

You guys are so funny with your ideas on how media works. And that applies to both MoveOn, Webber and the commenters here.
Right now, and since the 80s, two types of newspapers have been incredibly profitable: The small-town single/family owned newspapers and the large syndicate newspapers. They've increased their profits by enormous sums, at one point averaging about 25% annual profit growth average for the whole industry (which is insanely huge for any industry). All this despite the bogeyman of decreasing circulation and ad revnues. Things took a big hit after 9/11, but average profitability still went up. (And, to be clear, this is a very different situation from the alternative weeklies that Craigslist is putting a hurt on).
The secret? Massive staff layoffs. The reason? The personal computer. There used to be eight-hour shifts of ten guys to do one section's layout and setting. When I started working, admittedly at the tail end of the trend (though our magazine was terminally behind the times), I had an eight hour day of burnishing photographs and ads down on print pages that were sent off to be photostatted (which, again, is weird considering that I'm 26 and most people that have had to burnish are now at least 50). Editing and revisions took hours. Transcription took hours. Syndicating content took hours.
The journalism industry has been hemoraging workers at an incredible (and unsustainable) pace since the '80s, and this is just another wave of it.
But Webber's "Poor Newspapers! It's this or bankruptcy!" is bullshit, as much as MoveOn's bizarro left-field protest is. The media market, at least in terms of what people will pay to consume, is still way oversaturated, even if that means that it provides a generally high level of quality. The complaints about the "mainstream media" are usually pretty laughable around here when you take a look at the institutions that constrain them and the high quality stuff that's still out there. (Oh, and the thought of having a bucket brigade of citizen reporters on a blog model is also pretty glaringly farcical when you think about the actual amount of editing and reporting that goes into something like, say, a court story. While the model might be economically viable, it would almost certainly produce really terrible journalism. Editorial departments are pretty damn efficient, generally, and do a good job of covering things that wouldn't necessarily get the level of expertise they deserve if left open to the general population. And this is coming from someone who's part of a well-respected community journalism site).
posted by klangklangston at 8:04 PM on December 7, 2005

"In the meantime, are you seriously arguing that you prefer corporate PR mags to public-service investigative journalism?"

Yeah, that's clearly what he meant, Cap'n Disingenuous.
Count me with Toqueville in thinking that the best model is for incredibly rich people to fund these public goods as prestige vehicles (even though that means they'd have problems reporting on their masters).
posted by klangklangston at 8:07 PM on December 7, 2005

Hell, they had to find some way to pay for Juan Pierre
posted by Bighappyfunhouse at 8:22 PM on December 7, 2005

"I actually think that MoveOn has done something smart here--side with the newsroom people who just might be inclined to look on MoveOn with some favor* in the future.
posted by etaoin at 9:24 PM EST on December 7 [!]"

You mean *even more so...
posted by ParisParamus at 8:26 PM on December 7, 2005

Japanese businesses used to routinely offer jobs-for-life with high wages. The result was that Japan had the world's most successful economy ... up until the late 1980s.

That's when the heads of Japanese companies decided that they could increase profits by sacking workers and reducing wages. This is the result.

Yes, as we all know national economies are driven by single issues. The fact that one thing changed along with the economy is proof beyond any doubt that that thing was, in fact, the driver of the economy.

Fortunetly we havn't had jobs for life in the US for a long time, so that's not our issues. I wonder what is?
posted by delmoi at 8:38 PM on December 7, 2005

Hey... maybe MoveOn has a point here though. Certainly, as citizens, they have the right to be upset to see serious reporting disappear from newspapers.

Also, before you say that Newsday / Tribune is a financial basketcase, it might be worth checking their latest numbers, which, all things considered, aren't bad.

Sure, their last quarter performance was seen as disappointing, because they only made "$21.9 million, or 7 cents per share" as compared to "$119.6 million, or 37 cents per share", in the same quarter last year... but that was after a one-time $150 million charge.

If you take that into account, that's $171.9 million for the quarter, up 43% from last year.

"Excluding those items, Tribune said operating earnings were 50 cents per share, or 2 cents higher than the consensus estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial."
posted by insomnia_lj at 10:06 PM on December 7, 2005

The battle for public-service journalism was lost the day some newspaper somewhere accepted its first penny. At that point the paper ceased to be about reporting the news and began to be about gaining subscribers or delivering them to advertisers, depending on the individual paper's revenue model. It could only go downhill from there.

MoveOn should be advocating that its supporters buy shares of the newspapers and syndicates through their retirement accounts and proxy their votes to MoveOn. Then they might gain some actual leverage. A bloc representing a few hundred thousand shares would probably get the attention of the board of most newspapers.
posted by kindall at 12:33 AM on December 8, 2005

klangklangston: You were in the Long Tail end. In the mid-80s I was using Sun stations to create ads and copy for a major daily. We had maybe 10-12 persons doing "pasteup" for the whole paper in that 8-hour shift. We weren't quite to full-page creation when I left in '89, but it wasn't much longer after that.

I remember why Gannett bought our paper. They realized how much more profit they would make than the previous owners. All they had to do was stop the silly things: too many reporters, too many benefits, too few ads, too much money returned to the paper, and so on.

There is no "best" model as far as I'm concerned. The big stories will always be broken by reporters with luck and nerve. The rest of the media will filter the story according to their handlers. I believe the "media" is transforming into a two-headed monster - corporations who report the basic and safe news and citizens who resemble the pamphleteers of the early press.
posted by ?! at 6:08 AM on December 8, 2005

"The battle for public-service journalism was lost the day some newspaper somewhere accepted its first penny. At that point the paper ceased to be about reporting the news and began to be about gaining subscribers or delivering them to advertisers, depending on the individual paper's revenue model. It could only go downhill from there."

HA! Would that be with the Currents of the 1600s? The daily Journals (bilingual redundancy) of France in the 1700s? The shipping news in England in the 1700s? The colonial presses?
Ok. Since you obviously have no idea what the history of journalism looks like, here's a brief on the financial underpinnings that HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED.
The first periodical publications came out around the late 1500s, early 1600s, and were produced mainly on church mandate. The first daily newspaper came out in the early 1600s in London, and is thought to have been started by a widow who inhereted a press. Subscription was the only way to get the paper, and subscriptions were exhorbitantly priced. This model continued through the colonies. The model changed somewhat around the 1700s to include broadsheets and journals that were the organs for political and economic groups. This model carried further in Europe than it did in America, and in Europe the newspapers are tend to be more openly partisan (and many political parties still run their own). The advent of new printing technology in the 1800s brought the price down somewhat, and that was when the idea of selling advertising in papers in order to increase the ability to reach a broader audience was hatched. Even then, papers were more expensive to produce than the price on their cover. And as the audience grew broader and broader (mostly due to urban commuters), the idea of "objectivity" crept in (Albert Ochs). That's been the dominant model for years (despite the whingings of ParisParamus), and only recently have places like Fox News openly challenged it. The "liberal bias" tends to be one that's pro-rich liberals and business. But there's probably more future in biased accounts of everything peddled to people who already agree and wish to have their views confirmed, and are willing to pay for it.
But the thought that there was some halcyon day of "public journalism" is fucking farcical and should be trounced immediately.
posted by klangklangston at 6:52 AM on December 8, 2005

Yes. Assuming that wasn't just bullshit even then: cf. Hearst's "Remember the Maine!" and Woodward's "Deep Throat".

Then too MoveOn is just a shill-front for the U.S. Democratic Party, owned as it is by corporate interests, so this "controversy" is just a minor family squabble among the ruling class. That is, Alex Warbucks is miffed that his brother Jason isn't serving his interests too. "But Jay, I make money by sounding all 'liberal' and shit!"
posted by davy at 8:52 AM on December 8, 2005

HA! Would that be with the Currents of the 1600s? The daily Journals (bilingual redundancy) of France in the 1700s? The shipping news in England in the 1700s? The colonial presses?

Well, obviously, since 1600 < 1700, I'm talking about the 1600s. That's when journalism all started going to shit.
posted by kindall at 12:13 PM on December 8, 2005

And I said what I said not because I'm ignorant about the history of journalism, though admittedly I'm no expert, but because I know that once you get money mixed up in something, anything, it inevitably takes over.

400 years is a pretty good run, admittedly, but it's over now.
posted by kindall at 12:15 PM on December 8, 2005

It says something about America, about how defeated and beaten and servile Americans are - even the middle-class, well-educated Americans who populate MeFi - that when a profitable corporation cuts staff and wages, and a leftwing political group protests against it, there are howls of protest here not against the corporation, but against MoveOn.org.

Lots of Americans have swallowed the Right's propaganda to such an extent that they get all steamed up when anyone even protests against it. That doesn't change the fact that it's wrong.

Employees and consumers are the same thing. What we're talking about really is the Tragedy of the Commons, with the workers/consumers being a resource shared by the corporations. Each corporation would like to have well-paid consumers for their products. But each corporation would also like to cut wages and sack staff.

If the corporations are left to their own devices, wages will fall, unemployment will rise, and there will be less demand for their own products, leading to a constant recession and deflationary cycle, as in the Japanese example.

If Unions and other leftwing groups can put a brake on this process, it gives time for other factors, such as increased efficiency due to new technology, to offset the greed of the rich, so that we all continue to have enough to eat. Ideally, the profits from the new technologies would all be shared out equally to everyone, not just given to the rich, but that's a different question.

Perhaps we'll never be able to completely prevent the greedy rich diverting funds from public service aspects of their businesses into their own pockets. But we certainly can, and should, support every attempt to do so, including this campaign by MoveOn.org.
posted by cleardawn at 8:16 AM on December 10, 2005