A couple of interesting things across my screen today regarding the future of print media and its dependent child, journalism.
First, the New York Times has an interesting look at what’s happening in Europe. It’s not all bad though the Euro papers are what we call subscription or circulation titles, that is they make the majority of their money from readers while North American papers are advertising driven, that is they make most of they money from advertising while readers pay basically the cost of printing, the news print and the cost of trucking the paper to their store or box or home.
This is not a new concept and follows other funds for investigative journalism which have been created in the US and Europe.
The money comes from wealthy benefactors who obviously believe in journalism and particularly investigative journalism as essential to democracy and our society as we know and cherish it.
With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is no longer the message.
It’s not about whether local television can survive in small markets, it’s not about whether there’s enough Canadian content on the Web, it’s not about newspapers or magazines.
It’s about journalism folks. The one thing which illuminates democracy and makes it work.
The CRTC is fawning over the issue of broadcasters closing local stations in places like Windsor and Wingham. It already has a $60 million fund in place but broadcasters say that’s not enough to stop the red ink flowing as advertising tanks.
It’s the same story in print, of course, and we’re all feeling the effects. This week the CBC laid off 800 people and across all media there continue to be rumours of more layoffs to come.
For freelancers like me its just as brutal if not worse; budgets are frozen everywhere, doors are closed. My business is down 60 per cent since January.
But underlying this all, as echoed in the writings and observations of others whom I’ve quoted and linked to on this blog in recent days, is still the biggest issue of our age.
How do we come up with a business model to fund journalism?
I’ve suggested a tax deduction formula that allows proprietors to deduct a multiple of 1.5 or two or three times each dollar invested in local content creation.
That was each dollar paid a reporter and editor to gather news and write stories in local markets will general up to three times the amount in tax deductions which may help offset the cost.
In turn, proprietors have to accept lower profit margins. The days when owning a press or a TV licence was akin to a licence to print money are over.
Instead of 20 per cent margins they’ll have to accept five per cent or eight per cent perhaps.
Shareholder value is not just about stock price and dividends anymore. It’s about what you’ve done for the good of your community, society and civilization.
Those kind of corporate values would go a long way in offsetting the examples of greed we’ve seen over the last decade.
The latest NADBANK stats are about and it turns out newspapers have hit a plateau on their way to the grave.
You can read the full release here but readership is stable, the industry aggregator of statistics reports. The Globe and Mail suggests that while advertising is an issue, readership is not and notes the globeandmail.com’s audience is up 16 per cent while newspaper readership is steady.
So, what we really need is advertising to pick up and that won’t happen until there’s a whiff of consumer confidence in the air.
Meanwhile Russell Smith waxes nostalgically about the joy of reading a newspaper in his Globe column today and references an article by James V. DeLong in the American, an online magazine.
James V. DeLong is vice president and senior analyst of the Convergence Law Institute, LLC, and special counsel in the Washington, D.C. office of Kamlet Shepherd & Reichert, LLP and while the article is long, makes some excellent observations.
The first third is a retrospective look at what newspapers were and why they were so successful until revenues peaked in 2005.
The middle is a discussion of how the wheels are falling off and the last third is a look at what will be the results. It’s not encouraging but the key to this, as many of us are saying, is that unless we find a business model to monetize journalism, the craft risks being sucked into oblivion along with print.
His last paragraphs, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, gives us all pause for thought about a future without print media and the journalism it supports. I have bolded the salient points:
“If the newspaper business continues on its present path, then the structure goes into both individual and collective death spirals. Advertising and circulation declines will reinforce each other, and, crucially, papers will withdraw support for the AP (As is happening here in Canada with CP - Ian) and become exclusively local, where their control over a news collection apparatus will provide them with some market power. As is true of any cooperative enterprise, withdrawal of support by some will place more burden on those remaining, so the overall quality of news collection will decline, more papers will drop out, and so on.
It is this possibility of individual and collective death spirals that is causing news people to think about property rights and monetization. On the other side, the Internet community seems unaware of the extent of its own dependence on the newspapers for raw material; it acts as if the news is simply there, like the ocean, and damned if anyone is going to tell them “no fishing.”
So the Netizens will fight the news industry on this right up to the point of mutual destruction, and then all bets are off because it is impossible to begin to imagine the shape of an Internet deprived of the material produced by the newspapers and wire services. At that point, the options change to government bailouts of the news business, or endowments for wire services, or beneficent foundations.
It is hard to hazard how this one will come out. News collection will not disappear, but given the odds against creating a property rights model in the current zeitgeist, it seems ominously likely that we are headed for a government-sponsored news service. Maybe we will like it. China is already expanding Xinhua to go worldwide, so we can call ours Xinhua East. It shouldn’t take more than a few days to clear any given story through the White House information czar.”
In all this talk about print media dying, perhaps there’s one point we haven’t made clearly enough and often enough.
Clay Shirky tackles the issue in his blog which you can read here. It’s a long, overly long, academic and somewhat dry treatise on the paradigm shift of media but it does make some good points at the end.
He compares our current malaise to that of the 1500s and the introduction of the Gutenberg Press. As we know, the press had a transformative effect on the world, driving literacy and spreading ideas and, as it turned out, launching the porn industry with the introduction of erotic books, just as the porn drive the VCR, the DVD and the Internet. (I didn’t know that last part but it makes sense!)
The question, he says, is not what happened after the press was introduced but what was it like before and during the revolution? He suggests it was probably similar to the flux we’re experiencing now as the old world was forced to adjust and confront the new world.
His key point, though, and one I fully agree with, is that it is perhaps not newspapers or print which needs saving, since other mediums are probably more effective and less costly to convey information to mass markets, but the role of journalism.
Indeed, it is journalism which must be saved at all costs, even to the point of subsidizing newspapers and magazines. As I and others are saying, without journalism we will be stuck in an age of corruption, misinformation and waste by both the private sector and our levels of government.
Investigative reporting is expensive. It takes time and skill and the willingness to take risk.
Bloggers won’t have the time or the skills; Who else then will rise to the cause and pursue stories with the zeal and dogged determination of the The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, both of whom have run investigative pieces on their front pages over the last week or so.
Who else will point the finger at corporate greed as exhibited by Enron executives and more recently those at AIG who scooped $165 million in bonus into their pockets even as the company was tanking and looking for government hand outs?
In time, says Shirky, this will be solved. But the question left hanging, is how long and can we afford to wait until natural forces and technology have combined to create a new business model for robust journalism? And how many journalists, good, experienced, dedicated journalists, will have abandoned the craft, forced on to other careers because they need to feed their families?
Wave after wave of layoffs continue to ripple through media this week but the most depressing hit came Thursday when venerable institution Reader’s Digest pink slipped Editor in Chief Peter Stockland and 14 others, most from the Montreal headquarters and two from Toronto.
The layoffs leave but one editor at RD based in Vancouver and will likely have two ripple effects: One, unique Canadian content will fall by the way side and two, we will see more reprinted material from other magazines and more
U.S. derived stories.
This is tragic. Not only was RD an icon on the Canadian magazine landscape with nine million readers every month and rated the most trusted brand in the nation, but its editors truly cared about content. They were obsessive, detailed and uncompromising about quality.
I wish the laid off staffers well and hope they land of their feet. I respect and admire them deeply and they were consummate professionals in all my dealings with them.
For freelancers like myself it’s a kick in the financial nuts.
I had several assignments a year from RD. They were a tough client to please but well worth the effort. They paid top dollar - $1 to $1.50 a word – and on publication of the story often asked you to promote it, paying $50 a pop for radio and $75 for TV interviews. I would often generate $500 from a story I had already been paid $2,000 or more.
But you worked hard for that money, first in pitching the story since you often had to fully research and pre-interview sources and refine and tune the pitch several times to get it to pass muster and then in writing the story, documenting every word and source to pass fact checking and in writing it to meet RD’s compressed style in which a “normal” 1,500 word story would run at 1,000 words and retain every fact and source and detail.
My relationship started with RD back in 2004. I knew Peter Stockland from his years at Sun Media and in 2004 was appointed EIC at RD. At the time he was EIC of the Montreal Gazette, having left the same position at the Calgary Sun a few years earlier. I had just started freelancing in September 2004 and in November, when I heard of his appointment, started calling him, even though we really didn’t know each other that well.
I left quite a few messages and I started to think I was getting ignored. Then, suddenly, one day, he picked up the phone. Yes, he said, he got my messages but he was swamped making the transition but was happy I’d called.
“I want to bring in more Canadian writers and I need guys like you who have good news experience,” he said. He was going to be in
Toronto meeting with his staff here in a couple of weeks and could we meet? We did and I got my first assignment, a piece of grow ops contrasting the attitude of Canadians around marijuana (66 per of us think it should be decriminalized) against the large scale commercial grow ops which exploited that thinking and were exporting millions in high grade pot to the
US.The fact that four Mounties were killed in February 2005 out west and there was a modest grow op involved only boosted the demand for the story which was processed in record time – hitting the stands two months after it was filed, remarkable since RD often takes months, if not a year to publish some pieces.
I was over the moon! That I count RD as one of my best client has opened all kinds of doors at other publications for me and is a source of pride for me personally, since I hold them in the highest respect.
I hope, of course, to work with RD again but I also learned last month, before the layoffs, that they had frozen their freelance budget until at least July. There’s no word yet on how this latest development will affect commissioning of stories but I don’t think the news will be good.
RD in the US of course, were looking at Chapter 11 Bankruptcy last month but have since backed off, saying they will not go that route. Layoffs and perhaps making
Canada a branch office may seem to be their response in terms of cost cutting.Canadians stand to lose a vehicle which celebrated our stories. Under Peter the magazine went after Canadian stories told and shared by Canadians.
So here’s my take: With all this talk at the CRTC about imposing a levy on Internet Service Providers (which will doubtlessly be passed onto we consumers) to create a fund to ensure
Canadian content on the Internet, it again brings to mind the vision of someone reorganizing the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Print media is tanking. It is in danger of going the way of the horse and buggy. Quebecor is said to be planning to cut all editors at its newspapers and relocate a team in
Barrie, Ontario where they will lay out all the papers’ pages. It is of course union busting on the part of the megalomaniac Pierre Karl Peladeau who has installed himself as CEO of Sun Media so he can drive his vision ofthe McSun – a paper which is the same in every market with no regard for local news, culture or tastes.
And that’s a theme picked up by television with the axing of local stations across the country.
Everyone blames the Internet, of course, but it’s only part of the syndrome Setting up a fund to pay creators for Web content misses so many points it’s not even funny.
What content? Who decides? Who gets the money? How do we arbitrate, with a panel? How do you apply? Its smacks of a boondoggle in the making. How long before we find out $40,000 has gone to pay for a video of a giant yellow banana floating over
Texas, as we recently discovered with the Canada Arts Council. Or will some metal-mouthed, spotty-faced kid pick up cash for burping the alphabet in both official languages on You Tube?
The real issue here is that the real creators of content, the writers and journalists who have been writing for newspapers and magazines in this country have been forced to give up their web rights at economic gunpoint. CanWest, Quebecor and others say sign the contract, give us your digital rights and all right for all media now known and not know in this universe and any other for all eternity or we will not assign you work.
Given the concentration of media ownership in this country, many writers have had no choice but to sign.
Now, those publications themselves are on the brink. CanWest is teetering; The Globe is cutting staff and pages and budgets, The Star is hurting. Transcontinental has laid off staff. So many good people, such a waste.
So, here’s the thing. If writers like myself drift out of the business, who is going to generate the stories about Canadian by Canadians which populate the web now? Let’s not forget 95 per cent of them come from print media. Will we write for free? I think not.
So who will tell those stories. Who will report local news? How many blogs will you have to read to get a fair, accurate and responsible account of an event in your community?
Will newspapers and magazines of the future, the McPapers, be populated with press releases run verbatim? Who will challenge authority? Who will investigate the wrongs? Who will expose wrong doing, corporate greed and government waste and dishonesty?
We risk sacrificing the glue which helps bind us as a nation and in our own communities. It’s no use just pointing to the Internet. Not everyone has net access or even a computer. Television and radio by their nature distort news much more than newspapers or magazines where there is more room and time to explore all facets of a story.
This government needs to look at what can be done to bail out print media in this country and we’re not talking just a loan or one time grant. We’re talking about a fundamental shift in how we see media in this country.
The CBC is but one media entity; Print reaches far more people and tells far more Canadian stories as written by Canadians than the CBC in all its forms.
We need a tax structure which treats the cost of content creation differently than other over head expenses. Instead of a dollar for dollar deduction, perhaps a multiple of 1.5 or two three times. In other words for every dollar you pay a freelancer you get to deduct two dollars as an expense. Trust me, freelance budgets aren’t that big that it would bankrupt the nation.
And as much as I hate to give the corporate media bosses a tax break, it’s the only way to ensure writers and editors have jobs.
It’s certainly a damn sight better than an Internet levy which will be paid by you and I and is fraught with the potential for fraud and waste.
The state of print media in this country is bad and getting worse.
And so what? I can already hear the cries of disinterest. Print is irrelevant. Print is wasteful. Print is so yesterday.
Maybe. But start to think, as I suggested in my last post, about how your world would look without print.
Let’s start with Chill magazine. It’s a piece of crap put out by the Beer Store with ambitions of being the Food and Drink equivalent for the Two-Four crowd.
Now we can hit on Food and Drink as an indulgent waste of taxpayer’s money but that’s a rant for different time since they actually spend big bucks on the product.
But Chill is a magazine of a different scam. The current April issue has 114 pages, about 28 or so appear to be paying ads, about 26 per cent and way below what a magazine should generate in paid ads to survive. Granted they have a free ride in distribution since the mag is available at Beer Stores and they don’t have to get people to”buy” it and can claim all kinds of inflated readership numbers.
Look closer and you’ll see the real story. Ads appear next to stories about the product or service. This is called advertorial and there’s a reason there’s no bylines on some of the stories.
Not just because the writing is crap, because it is, but because it’s a pay off for buying an ad. You buy an ad and we’ll run some crap in editorial about how great it is.
They don’t even try to hide it.
And this, my friends, is the future and why we need a national plan and government tax support to save print media in this country.
Qualifying print media - newspapers and magazines - should get a special discounted tax rate because they provide a public service by upholding the rules and ethics of good journalism.
Sure, politicians hate the media when they’re caught with their pants down but they love it when they get their name and picture on Page One.
Consider how much it would cost our governments - and by extension the private sector, to reach the same readership as the top newspapers and magazines in this country without having the benefit of those pages.
We’re talking billions. Sure, they could just send out press releases and statements, but I’ve spent a career deciphering them and I don’t think the average Joe and Josephine want to be bothered with that turgid crap.
What we want is an authoritative, trusted source which they know will dive into the baffle-gab and filter out the crap, delivering what they need to know.
If they don’t like the liberal bent of the Toronto Star or National Post they can read the Globe and Mail or Toronto Sun, and vice versa.
But the survival of print media in this nation is a matter of national security, culture and economics wrapped up in one.
1) We need access to solid, sourced news and that only comes from reliable, trained journalists. It’s not the best solution, but like democracy, it’s the only one we accept.
2) Print media consistently delivers information which binds us culturally and as a nation.
3) The impact on the economy of losing the vehicle of print as an advertising medium, as a consumer of newsprint, in providing jobs and growing knowledge and creating content about this nation and ourselves is unfathomable. I would argue that we could cut the entire CBC and have less effect than letting print die.
So why is it we have regulation and tax subsidy for the CBC when in fact print media does more for this country than the exploding pineapple?
As much as it pains me to suggest the concentrated media owners of this country get a tax break for the cuts they have made to print, it seems the only way out.
In fact, I think print media should be a non-taxable entity, if certain conditions are met around staffing, news coverage and new hole ( the white space available for editorial content).
Note I didn’t say the government could dictate what coverage, or the content of that coverage, but that minumum levels had to be met.
Okay, so as depressing as it is to think about, what would a world without responsible journalism and newspapers look like?
Here’s my challenge to you J-school students out there. Mock up a newspaper and a TV show based on the assumption that journalism and newspapers have gone the way of the buggy whip and the telegram. Take a newspaper, say today’s Globe, and remake it as the newspaper of tomorrow. Ditto for a TV show.
My guess? The newspaper would look pretty much like Metro or 24 Hours, I’d guess. Small, free and crammed with ads.
And in between the ads, in the white space where we ply our trade? Have a look at some of the trade pubs or those givaway “mags” for apartment rentals or condo sales. They’re full of generic, bland, monolithic copy that just fills space.
Look online at the blogs and You Tube for how TV might be affected. The airtime would be full of inane chatter, poor video, rumours, bad grammar, non existent spelling (OMG, LOL, IMHO). Is this what we really want?
There would be no hammering coverage by Gary Mason of the RCMPs execution by Taser of a Polish man in Vancouver. No questions raised about the death of a teen in Grand Valley Institution for Women; No investigative journalism at all. No one questioning authority.
Just press releases run verbatim, celebrity pictures and gossip, a best of bloggers page perhaps with all the gravitas of a six grade show and tell: Cute but hardly inspiring.
Governments, corporations and insitutions would be free from any kind of scrutiny. We’d never know a recession was upon us until the press releases about bankruptcy protection or plant closures were issued after market close at 4 p.m.
Put the mock up beside the real thing and the awful truth emerges. As a society, a civilizaiton, we have so much to lose if newspapers bite the dust. Now more than ever, local news matters, yet CTV and CanWest are poised to close stations and cut Canadian Content.
Quebecor, for example, wants to make all its newspapers a cookie cutter operation, like USA Today. So instead of local news and general news filtered for a specific local audience, we’ll get McSuns. Digestible but hardly meaty or sustaining.
It’s so erie that you start to believe there could be a consipiracy here between government and corporate conglomerates. At the end of the day both want to control the news, highlighting only the “good” while burying the “bad.”
And when that happens, we’re all screwed.
Me? I’m looking for a second career (probably my third or fourth by now in truth). There’s little future in this business.
Which brings my to you J-School kids: After you’ve done the above assignment, take a good look at what your future might look like. Then go to the bar, get drunk and in the morning go down the Registrar’s office and change your major to law, health care, construction technolopgy, bar tending. Anything.
Just get the hell out of Journalism before you’re trapped like me and the other old timers, sitting on a chunk of ice which is slowly melting as the dark waves of progress close in around us.