Black Friday at the Dallas Morning News

Rod,

I've been a subscriber for several years now. I know I complained when the subscription rates increased, but I also know that you guys didn't have much choice.

I'm also lamenting the loss of the Quick. It was great for reading on the DART light rail on my way into work. At least I'll still have my copy of the DMN for that.

I'm glad you didn't lose your job, and my prayers go out to those who did. Layoffs are never fun, and unfortunately the DMN always seems the worse for it afterwards. I still miss Danielle D's articles in the Business section. I always looked forward to her missives.

Rod,
I also love newspapers, and hate to see them go down. As you say it's inevitable. It's also happening prematurely. The Right has been screaming for decades now about how biased and liberal the MSM is. Well, congratulations, you turned off about 1/2 the potential audience. Maybe if you layed off that tired out meme, the slide wouldn't be quite so steep.

hattio says:

"The Right has been screaming for decades now about how biased and liberal the MSM is. Well, congratulations, you turned off about 1/2 the potential audience. Maybe if you layed off that tired out meme, the slide wouldn't be quite so steep."

That's a bit like shooting the messenger is it not? In the past 20 years, I have lived in about a dozen metropolitan areas. All but one (that's right, a single one) of the local newspapers was leftist. To say they were "biased" gives them too much credit - they were unashamedly and completely leftist. These were Midwestern and southern cities (Charlotte NC, Louisville KY, etc. etc.), NOT San Francisco.

Mr Dreher, while you lament for your friend have you considered how she put herself in this position? She choose of her own free will to work in an industry that is unapologetic about it's leftist politics, as well as (for the technological and cultural reasons you cite) in decline? It is hard for me to sympathize, given the reality. Why did she (and yourself) not choose some other living that does not have the political baggage that you KNOW FULL WELL will affect your "beautiful" stories as well as your living?

I also like newspapers. That is why I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. I put up with it's Rockefeller bias and preponderance of financial stories simply so I can read about the significant events of the day without my Marxist handbook.

I'm not crowing over the demise of newspapers. However, over the years I've noticed some of the papers I read have moved more and more towards "fluff" or human-interest pieces, and have been falling away from investigative journalism. Personally, I'm not going to subscribe for just fluff.

I guess hard-hitting investigative articles are "boring" - they require background knowledge and patience to sit through complicated explanations of complex situations. But the kind of analysis you used to get is hard to replicate on the internet with blogging.

Even here in Idaho which is about the reddest state that I have ever lived in has a left leaning newspaper in Boise. You would think that considering their audience that they would at least try to be middle of the road and not alienate 80% of their potential readers. I'm in sales and marketing and the last thing you want to do is irritate your pool of potential customers. The only reason that I continue to subscribe to the paper is to have a vague idea of what is going on in the community so I have something to talk about on sales calls.

I live in Idaho which has to be the reddest state I have ever lived in and the main newspaper in Boise leans to the left. You would think that they would at least try to be moderate and not alienate 80% of their potential customer base. I'm in sales and marketing and the last thing you want to do is irritate your pool of customers. The only reason I continue to subscribe to the paper is so I have a vague idea of what is going on in my community and have something to talk about on sales calls.

prayers for you and all involved. We've been through our share of hard, hopeless times and as awful as they are, there can be something freeing about realizing that the thing you feared most has happened and you didn't die. It helps teach us to hold onto things lightly and take risks because we just don't have guarantees anyhow. But right in the thick of it, it can be pure misery. So lots of prayers being sent that way.

As one who "hates the MSM", I'd say my ire is directed more towards cable news and broadcast news than it is newspapers (save the NYT). Newspapers allow the reader to proceed at her own pace, to pause, reflect, accept, reject, etc. They also provide more information in a more rational and logical manner, because you're dealing with printed words. Television news, by contrast, controls the viewer more than print and provides less meat, so to speak. (Simply find a transcript of a news program and see just how few words in absolute terms there are and, beyond that, see how few words of substance there are.) Part of the demise of newspapers has little to do with bias or slant and much more to do with the death of print culture. And it is a pity.

ha. Funny- CPA's post wasn't up when I wrote. Please feel free to see my post as a counter to what CPA wrote. From someone who has been there more times than I care to remember. It's the transition (often aided by terrible circumstances) from one perspective to another that sucks. But that doesn't mean that the new perspective isn't worth getting too.

I read all my newspapers online. So I guess I'm part of the problem.

Why do I do that? Well, I'm in the San Francisco area, so getting the NYT delivered here costs an arm and a leg. Yeh, I know it's a pinko rag, but it's also a pretty good newspaper. LA has a middling good paper, but again, much more sensible to read it online.

The San Francisco Chronicle, our local metro, is junk, fishwrap, always has been. It's actually getting worse, if you can imagine that. I can't figure out why anyone would subscribe to it, or what we're supposed to do with all that newsprint afterwards (when we run out of fish and birdcages).

I even pay the WSJ so I can read them online. I can't stand their politics either ("money is the highest good, and the rich are the most virtuous of the peoples") but again, otherwise a pretty good newspaper, if a little narrow.

So.....does the survival of the newspaper depend on me actually getting a hunk of newsprint on my driveway in the morning (90% of it car and supermarket ads) for me to wonder how to get rid of later? Or could we re-think this thing?

As someone who worked for Lucent during its dive from 1999 - 2004, I can sympathize and add my prayers not only for the good folks at the DMN but the good folks in the newspaper business.
They are selfish prayers because I relish my cup of coffee with the paper in the morning, dogs at my feet.

And if I didn't have the NYT opinion page to tell me what to think I don't know what I'd do ;0

Seriously, hope you hang in there and find grace amidst the random acts of corporations.

Every industry has to change to keep up with developments in its field and the newspaper industry is no different. But, ISTM that this adjustment is being done in a non-sensical way. The print media is trying to compete with TV/internet media by being flashier and more pleasing to the eye. Stories are shorter. The page layout is more cartoony and has more pictures. This is like Christians trying to compete for the teen "audience" by being hipper and flashier than MTV. Christians will never be able to outcompete on the "enemy's" turf and print media will never be able to outcompete their competition on the turf of those with short attention spans.

I used to love reading the paper, but it just simply isn't worth it anymore. Why would I get a newspaper to tell me exactly what Wolf Blitzer told me in exactly the same way but in a less eye-catching and less informative way? My suggestion would be to play to your own strengths, not the competition's strengths.

Economic crisis? Take the data that everyone already knows from CNN/MSNBC/Fox/Powerline and take it to the streets of Dallas. Talk to a local investment banker, mortgage lender, and house flipper.
How does it impact local school investments, retirement accounts, local industries, etc.
When abortion becomes an issue, talk to local crisis pregnancy center workers, abortion clinic workers, and the like. Weave a story using the CNN/NBC/CBS background with local material to make a value added product.
If a story has no local angle, you could still add value to the AP feed by scanning blogs and other available media for additional info. Why local media thinks it can't report on Barney Frank's shenanigans in the housing crisis simply because the AP doesn't want to include it is beyond me. This would be a very easy thing to do and wouldn't be as expensive as traditional shoe-leather investigative journalism is.

This might still be too expensive to do and produce an affordable newspaper, but I think it is the only approach that has a chance of saving your industry because you simply can't compete against the national MSM if you simply regurgitate the wirefeeds as if we haven't been marinating in the AP story for 24 hours by the time your paper hits our doorstep.

If our local paper did this, I would resubscribe.

Fittingly enough, I was at a funeral home last night for a wake, and chanced to meet a friend of my late father (who was newsman for both the old Boston Herald Traveler and the Boston Globe) and we talked about how 'the way it used to be' in the news and local politics--meaning the way my father grew into the business:not just writing about and reporting on politics, but actually getting to know many pols, even (gasp) befriending more than a few and networking--well, that way is no more. The Boston Globe no longer has many home grown boys and girls from Boston who grew up here, know the different neighborhoods and figure out how to get to the root of a real local story.Many if not most of the Globe staffers now are imports. Got their little journalism degrees and haven't a clue how to go about digging into the judges, the courts, the legislatures, etc, to get at what's really going on.

Which frankly does make them much more expendable in an industry like it is now....

That's why 'polls' are news. It's easier to take a poll and write about it then to do legwork....

Rod, I know how sad it is to watch coworkers laid off. I've seen it up close, and it stinks.

However, news reporting isn't going away. What IS going away are the monopolies on news reporting that newspapers and broadcast news currently have. The technology is now there to get news from trusted sources (and all trust is "local," i.e., tied to individuals) directly, without the media filter. It's good and bad, but mostly good. Why should people pay money to get reporting that's biased to point where it can be fairly called inimical to the readers' positions?

Sadly, the people covering the local, human interest stories are going to be collateral damage.

It seems to me that the only way the big newspapers are going to live is by moving to a syndication/collaborative subscription model, where people get access to entire group of newspapers for a fee. Unfortunately, there will be a lot of newspapers that will go under entirely before the survivors face the reality that giving all their coverage away for free on the web is not a workable business model.

We subscribe to the nearest daily newspaper, the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald. It's still something we like, but I'd estimate that since Knight-Ridder bought it (I think I have that right), the content has dropped such that there's only about two thirds or a half of what you used to get. When we first started reading it, about 19 years ago, the paper often included interesting feature stories on people, businesses, etc. Now, not so much. Honestly, though, part of that may be that people are more homogenized than they were then! Don't you find that often the people with the most interesting things to talk about, whether from personal experience or not, are middle-aged or older? Younger people have had more of a standardized life, it seems, growing up suckling technology. Thus one reason papers may have fewer good human interest stories is that there are just not so many people who have interesting things to say. Anyone care to confirm that or suggest I'm mistaken?

Newspapers brought themselves down. I subscribed to the Spokane paper for a few years, but gave up. Not so much the bias ... I can read around that ... but the constant disrespect toward ordinary people and lack of actual local news. The paper is written by, for, and about the uppercrust.

I don't give a hoot about the soirees of Mrs. J. Fotheringham Hoity-Toity; I just want to know where all those sirens were going yesterday, or why the power went out this morning. The paper wasn't telling me those things, so I didn't see any reason to pay for it.

Reap what you sow. The right get their real news from Fox and the Limbaughs and Hannity's of the world. It is almost impossible for newspapers to maintain that degree of extreme bias. Hence, as noted above, even newspapers in ultra-red states trying to be conservative, will be branded liberal. You have certainly seen it here, where any dissent from the established party line and talking points, means you are not a true conservative.

Steve

Ex-journalist here, currently in nursing school. I saw the handwriting on the wall years ago.

The demise of the newspaper industry is a very sad thing. Where I live, you only see folks middle-aged and up reading a paper. I go to a small college in upstate NY which has a newspaper kiosk offering the local paper for free. There is a sign over the kiosk that indicates that the papers are "for students only," but in reality it's only the faculty and other adults who are reading them. Meanwhile, the students bustle right by, cellphones in hand, texting each other constantly.

I'm glad you survived this round of layoffs, Rod.

As a current newspaperwoman, I cringe at what has happened in our industry. To those above who say we have brought it on ourselves because of our bias, that's absurd, and to be frank shows very little understanding of what actually goes on in the news business and probably no actual knowledge of an actual newsperson.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, tells me what to report in the local news pages of my newspaper. Not our editorial board, not our advertisers...If I find it and its news, it's in. Without newspapers, which by and large do NOT cater to the Entertainment Tonight-type journalism, we will have the society we deserve. Most of our local bloggers, as much as they like to tout themselves as the "new" media by and large still get their information from the "old" media, lifting it whole cloth from our websites. They do not have sources, they do not report, they merely rip-off and opine.

Try to have a free society without a free press. The only industry coming close right now is newspapers. And as advertising dollars shrink and subscribers vanish into the wind or onto the web, we lose money to cover those small-town board meetings where you may have had an opportunity to weigh on whether your sewer bill should go up, we aren't able to spend a lot of time getting into the campaign finance reports of the smaller races in our communities so we don't know who's paying for your elections.

I believe I can say this, having read older newspapers and studied the medium, we try to do this, as reporters, as objectively as we can. Sometimes we even get it right.

Sorry, end of rant.

Beaker says:

"No one, and I mean NO ONE, tells me what to report in the local news pages of my newspaper. "

Exactly Beaker - newspaper "persons" {to be gender neutral - I know you are sensitive to that) are a subculture of leftists. I recall vividly in college the journalist majors. They were the most activist, coherently leftists of the whole darn school. No one "told" them anything, for they already had all the answers.

Your words about your alleged role in "free society" is just a bunch of self-important nonsense. Yes, a free press is important, but you have enslaved it to an ideology most Americans (thank God) do not share. Your no more "free" than any other source of propaganda. Thankfully, in a free society I can choose to get my truly free press from other places than my local liberal rag.

The local paper is dead. Good riddance...

I too am glad you were spared, Rod.

But the news business has changed a lot. Now we only take the Sunday paper, mainly for the sports, TV guide and the local grocery ad inserts. The news we get from radio, TV and online. We shop a lot online too, especially for price comparisons.

For conservative columnists, www.jewishworldreview.com is a very useful "aggregator". And to get a liberal point of view without the foul language and hateful expression, there is CrunchyCons.

Hey, Christopher--You don't know me and you don't know my politics.

And you and PB don't know much about much do you? Try to be informed about what is going on in your community, I mean REALLY going on, without a newspaper. Are you going to the city council meetings? Are you going to the school board meetings? Are you pouring through campaign finance reports? Sitting through trials? Reading crime data and trying to HONESTLY figure out what it means? I got into this business because as a conservative Christian I saw a need to make sure that those committed to truth-telling were in a position to do so. And you know what I found--for every left wing nut on an editorial board, there was at least two reporters trying to get information to the public in a timely and accurate fashion. Some of them were liberal. Some of them were conservative. The majority of us cared about the community in which we live and weren't getting paid much to do so. This is journalism in the middle-American cities where most of the US lives. And I've worked at more than one paper, in more than one town and it's been consistent throughout.

What's truly frustrating is knowing what is important, what is going on in a community, what stories need to be told but can't be for lack of money and physical resources. What adds insults to injury is this belief that you can have a solid government without an informed citizenry and that that informed citizenry just pops up like mushrooms, apparently, without any access to ACTUAL INFORMATION.

What's the first thing to go when a society becomes less free? What's the first thing to show up when true democracy is taking root?

"And you and PB don't know much about much do you? "

HOW are you different from the ideologues (that already had all the answers) that infested the journalism department?

"This is journalism in the middle-American cities where most of the US lives. "

Not in my experience. In the dozen midwest and southern metro areas I have lived in the last 20 years 1 (one - not a typo) the local paper was NOT biased - it was pure propaganda. Even in local "crime" stories, the angle, the subject matter, everything was from a left wing perspective.

"What adds insults to injury is this belief that you can have a solid government without an informed citizenry"

I agree with this. I just don't agree that the left wing tripe you are a part of in any way provides "an informed citizenry". On the contrary, it hurts this cause.

By the way, the self importance you displayed in your first post is probably topped by your second post. Imagine, if you will, a universe where the local paper was not the savior of democracy as we know it...try to think of that John Lennon song...;)

What's the first thing to go when a society becomes less free?
Not all forms of tyranny must be totalitarian or autocratic. So what suffers first? The question does not admit of an easy generalization, except for those who have bought the party-line on what "democracy" is about.

What's the first thing to show up when true democracy is taking root? Ask the Athenians.

What ensures freedom? A vigilant citizenry, and a proper size to the state. Once the state becomes too big, the press inevitably becomes part of the system, if it wasn't a part of it to begin with.

I suspected this might become another right wing-left wing skirmish. I wish it hadnt, but I guess it was unavoidable.

The passing of local newspapers is a loss to our communities, as well as to the men and women who are journalists or support staff by profession. I grew up in the business, so to speak. My Dad worked in journalism from his first enlistment in the Army to his last days on earth. He loved it. It wasn't the craft of writing that did it for him, it was the sense of connection in the community, the great and real people he got to rub noses with on a daily basis. It never paid much. We moved constantly. I attended twelve schools thanks to his work, and only four of those transfers were while he was still in the Army. But he taught me to write clearly and concisely, and taught me to value human beings with all their quirks and strengths and weaknesses. That second lesson I think will take a lifetime to master, at least.

AnotherBeliever--That is exactly what's important.

Christopher--I didn't study in any ideological journalism department. I received a good, solid liberal arts degree at a good, solid midwestern Christian college. Then I went out and learned journalism the old-fashioned way--in newsrooms from practitioners. At its best, journalism is a craft and a trade. I learned from small town editors at a CONSERVATIVE paper. I learned from conservative editors at a larger, more liberal-editorial paper. I'm sure you and PB don't need newspapers. It's clear from your posts your heads are filled with FOX-fueled drivel.

Carry on.

"it's not being met at the local level."

I should say it's not being met for conservatives and those who'd rather not see ads for prostitutes...

Rod, I'm sorry to hear about the layoffs at the DMN, but glad you weren't one of the victims, at least for now. I'm sure there will be more.

As for the decline of newspapers, there's enough blame to go around. Certainly the loss of advertising to online competitors is a major component, but the consolidation of the industry has had something to do with it, as well as good old-fashioned greed.

When I was a kid, we had a local newspaper, owned by the Scripps chain, and a choice of two L.A. papers, the Times in the morning and the late, lamented Herald-Examiner in the afternoon. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Scripps decided to consolidate the local paper with every other local paper in the county, renaming all of them and thereby killing off several locally valuable brands. The new paper, which is still around, has never covered local news as well as its various predecessors (not surprising given that it has not maintained an editorial presence in each community) and is hopeless for national and international news. Meanwhile, the Herald-Examiner went under in L.A., which effectively reduced the number of L.A. papers to one and killed competition, the misnamed Los Angeles Daily News being largely confined to the San Fernando Valley and of markedly inferior quality.

This has left the Times as the only quality paper in the area, which would be fine except that it no longer has any real competitors in the newspaper field (although the NY Times is now available in selected areas). In addition, the Chandler family sold its stake to the Tribune Co., resulting in out-of-town ownership that appeared largely focused on maximizing profits at the expense of all else. Note well: it's not that the Times wasn't profitable, it just wasn't making enough money to suit the Tribune.

As a result, we have seen the paper nickel-and-dimed to death, with multiple sections eliminated or consolidated with others, the Sunday magazine handed over to the advertising staff (something you will not find noted anywhere on the masthead), and the whole works ultimately sold to Sam Zell, who had no previous newspaper experience and who appears to excel mainly at alienating the editorial staff.

I love newspapers as much as anyone, but at this point I'm not left with many good options locally. We still take the L.A. Times, mainly because my wife is still fond of it and it's nice to have something to look at over coffee on Sunday morning, but it's a shadow of its former self. During the week, I get my news from the same variety of sources that I'm sure many other readers of this blog do: Google News, the BBC website, blogs read in Google Reader, and morning radio during my drive to work. I also get the NY Times on my Kindle, because it's very convenient and more affordable than home delivery. I tried the LA Times on Kindle, but it was clear they just didn't get it when it came to reformatting for the new medium (and made no effort to fix it), so I canceled.

As for "bias" in the MSM: so what? I still have a few functioning brain cells, and I can tell when someone has a slant (either left or right), so it's not hard to take that into account when reading something. Besides, for every alleged incidence of liberal bias in the LA Times, I can probably find three or four instances of right-wing bias from the first several decades of its existence. It's often forgotten that until Otis Chandler took over as publisher in the 1960s, the LA Times was a Red-baiting, xenophobic example of reactionary journalism at its finest. In comparison, today's Times is a model of "fair and balanced" reporting, its occasional forays into silliness notwithstanding.

btw, has anyone looked at the carbon footprint of newspaper publishing and other effects on the environment?

man this is sobering, rod

i went thru an experience much like this in book publishing in the '90s

some perspective:

http://mashable.com/2008/10/24/new-york-times-deadpool/