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Downsizing the News And Pretending to Increase Quality
By Walter Brasch
featured writer
www.walterbrasch.com
Executive management at the Allentown Morning Call recently laid off more than two dozen persons from its newsroom, most of them veteran reporters drawing higher salaries. Management plans to cut 35–40 positions, according to a letter sent by publisher Timothy Johnson. The cuts are about one-fourth of the news staff. The remaining reporters are being told to write more stories under the same deadline constraints. Coverage of local meetings has been put into secondary importance; bureaus have been combined. The Morning Call is not alone.
About 85 percent of all dailies with more than 100,000 circulation, and about half of all dailies with circulations under 100,000, have cut the number of reporters and editors, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. During the first half of this year, newspapers laid off or froze more than 6,500 news positions. This was the biggest loss in three decades, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
With the layoffs, news quality has suffered. A newsroom filled with younger reporters–they aren’t paid as much as the senior reporters who were terminated or laid off–leaves a newspaper vulnerable to a newsroom with less knowledge of the community and how to gather, report, and write news. Almost no newspapers have proofreaders. About 40 percent of all newspapers report they have fewer copyeditors today than just two years ago. No proofreaders means more typos. Fewer copyeditors means sloppier copy, more factual error, and a lot more stories that are incomplete.
During the past few years, newspaper owners demanded and were getting at 20–40 percent profit, among the highest for any industry–and that includes Big Oil. With newsrooms and the news product already lean, the owners kept taking and taking.
And now there’s an economic recession. Subscribers are questioning their annual $150–250 investments. Businesses are folding, and the ones remaining are reducing newspaper advertising budgets.
Go to any journalism conference, and you’ll see a lot of hand-wringing. Reporters and editors are whining about how bad it is. They rightly blame owners and publishers. But, they also blame readers for accepting abbreviated news drops from TV and myriad cable networks. They whine about the Blogosphere and Internet domination. They complain about the short attention span of their readers. It’s this and it’s that. And so, with the help of $500 an hour consultants who eruditely harrumph their grandeur of divine guesses, they make cosmetic changes. They follow the 24/7 cable networks and increase entertainment and gossip. They give us more syrupy “feel good” news. They say they want to be “relevant.” Editors at the Morning Call, like many newspapers, are placing light features and how-to columns higher than hard news. Some changes improve the product, most are band-aids. A decade ago, the American Society of Newspaper Editors published a study that revealed Americans wanted less, not more sensationalism, gossip, and celebrity news. Apparently, no one was listening to the people.
The system is broken, and it’s the owners’ fault. They have already “maximized profits” by low salaries and minimal benefits, giving veteran reporters “involuntary terminations,” significantly reducing employee education programs, cutting the number of pages, reducing the page size, and increasing the use of material provided by syndicates rather than local news staff. These latest cuts are deep into the muscle. Owners of the Morning Call, like owners at hundreds of other newspapers, apparently believe that reducing quality improves profits. The owners of the newspaper industry need a course in Basic Journalism 101.
A quality news product will increase circulation.
Increased circulation will bring more advertising.
More advertising brings better profits and allows even more news quality.
Cutting reporters, benefits, employee training, and news coverage is not the way to save newspapers.
– Dr. Walter M. Brasch is an award-winning social issues columnist, former newspaper and magazine reporter and editor, and professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. He is president of the Pennsylvania Press Club, and former president of the Keystone state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalist. He is also the author of 17 books, including America’ s Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Giovernment’s Violation of Constitutional and Civil Rights (January 2005) and Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush (November 2007), available through amazon.com and other bookstores. He frequently writes about the media, social and political issues. You may contact Brasch at brasch@bloomu.edu or through his website at: www.walterbrasch.com.
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One Response to “Downsizing the News And Pretending to Increase Quality”
Posted on 21 Aug 2008 at 12:09 pm by Robert M. Cerello
Straightforward talk , quite a good bit of that, is found in this article perhaps. About everything except the three scientific definitions which I assert ,as the leading scientist of this area, must form the foundation of ideas of non-fiction.
And the last time I looked, headlines, concepts and journalism were still supposed to be practiced under the aegis of “non-fictional information”. These three missing ideas are:
1. Any sufficient definition of non-fiction.
2. The lack of a normative definition of the 5–6 prioritized essentials of how non-fiction needs to be presented by and to human adult minds.
3. The underlying definition of language and the specification of its exact relationship to perfectly-good-enough or higher levels of statement about the real world–not fantasizings which one can brainwash a “public” of deluded minds into believing as if pretense were as good as real knowledge.
In these non-fictional pursuits, Postmodernism (in other words) cannot replace Realism.
The author cites specifics about what is or isn’t being done by news-corporation ‘leaders’. Thank you, author. But what’s wrong is simpler:
1. What’s being presented isn’t real.
2. It isn’t news.
3. It isn’t being presented sufficiently nor by following how-tos of presentation necessary to its being verifiable and understandable by human minds who apperceive it.
The three basic areas od concern here in nonfiction, other than generic rather than argumentative or slanted headlines, should be obvious.
I. Attested facts must be separated from myths and until attestation has been provided, nothing can be labeled as anything but unfounded myth.
II. Standards based evaluations must be separated from unaccountable attitudes; and only providers of the former can be permitted to use value terms–good, bad, excellent, terrible, of value, not of value, good enough, not good enough, etc. The providers of other attitudes must in plain terms be restricted to using relative term such as better, worse, like, dislike, feel, opine and guess, preferred and not preferred–never terms of thought of “values”.
III. Scientific full proof must be required before anyone can call something ’science’, rather than mere beliefs–and presented in a fully-regulated and determined order, beginning with and following the laws of the definition of categorizing science I adduced above.
It is ctegories that have been destroyed or elminytaed from US thinking, education and non-fiction; and that destruction have ruined our culture’s minds and all the areas of knowldge founded upon its reality-knowing and reality-statement=making basis.
As a final note: let me add that “objectivity” consists in defining which universe your statements refer to, then following the rules of how to define, and then choosing the level–proof or belief–at which you wish to function, so as to claim or forfeit your right to be called a non-fictional legal provider.
There’ i more to the problem than that–the use and misuse of television/filmic media’s information-releasing, contexting and sequencing is different than that applying to print/theatrical/radio media.
But the basis of objectivity I assert lies in the three rules of “level of statement” I just provided. Regulate how statements are made and value labeled and proofs and facts adduced, and you mcanonce more provide vitally needed reality news. Fail to do so, and you end up with discontexted myths, slanders and false claims/ mere beliefs usurping the place of reality-based information speaking.
And that way lies national and newspaper suicide. But you knew that–you’ve been watching it happen since 1902 to the US’s so-called thinkers.
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