‘Rescuing the reporters’
Internet thinker Clay Shirky does a quick-and-dirty content analysis of his hometown newspaper to find it lacking in what some have called the “iron core” of news.
He examined the Columbia, Mo. Columbia Daily Tribune on Aug. 27 and found the six city reporters produced a total of nine original stories. Here’s what he found:
- Created vs. Acquired: The content created by Tribune staff made up less than a third of the total; over two-thirds was acquired from other sources, including especially the AP.
- News vs. Other: The paper was about one-third news and about two-thirds “Other” (and this is after ignoring the all-sports insert, tipping the balance in favor of news.)
- Created News vs. everything else: News reported by the paper’s staff was less than a sixth of the total content of the paper (again, ignoring the insert, which tips the balance in favor of news.)
In other words, most of the substantive part of that day’s Trib wasn’t locally created, and most of it wasn’t news.
Shirky admitted to some methodological weakness, but then raised this point:
However, I would be astonished if those ratios were to reverse — for a medium-sized metro daily to publish twice as much News as Other, or to create twice as much as it acquired — because the economics are tilted so strongly towards material other than news, and towards buying content vs. making it. (The AP provided most of that days news, and the cost of running a wire story is tiny compared to employing a beat reporter.)
That would be the problem: News is expensive. There’s a reason Google makes so much money off content despite producing practically none of it.
And there’s a reason why the old Thomson papers, as one example, set daily minimums of how much copy reporters had to file (two 10-column-inch stories would usually do the trick). People also had to show they wrote on both sides of a notepad and to surrender their old pencil stub before getting a new one (I’m being serious).
Shirky seems amazed the paper had only six city reporters out of 59 editorial staff. He notes 11 people cover sports and there are soft lifestyle columnists galore. He does seem to put in a good word for strong local reporting:
No one surveying the changes the internet is bringing to the newspaper business is saying “My God, who will tell me about Big 12 football! Where will I find a recipe for spicy chicken wings!” What matters in the Tribune, and what’s at risk, is Terry Ganey’s work on a state coverup of elevated levels of E. Coli in Ozark lakes, Jonathan Braden on anti-gay protesters from Kansas picketing in Columbia, Jodie Jackson’s reporting of on a child molestation case against a local politician.
He then turns to an idea floated by the New Yorker’s Steve Coll, among other people, that reporters should work for non-profit entities.
For people who see newspapers as whole institutions that need to be saved, their size (and not the just the dozens and dozens of people on the masthead, but everyone in business and operations as well) makes ideas like Coll’s seems like non-starters — we’re talking about a total workforce in the hundreds, so non-profit conversion seems crazy.
All that changes, though, if you start not from total head count but from a list of the people necessary for the production of Jones’ “iron core of news,” a list that, in the Columbia Daily Tribune’s case, would be something like a dozen. (To put this in perspective, KBIA, Columbia’s NPR affiliate, lists a staff of 20.)
Seen in that light, what’s needed for a non-profit news plan to work isn’t an institutional conversion, it’s a rescue operation. There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model. With that framing of the problem, the question is how to get them out safely, and if that’s the question, Coll’s idea starts to look awfully good.
Is it a burning business model in Columbia? I don’t know the community at all, so I can’t offer any informed comment on how well the newspaper is doing there in terms of either profitability or acceptance in the marketplace.
I don’t know how the paper’s news staff ratio compares to similar-sized papers in similar-sized markets. I don’t know how its created content to acquired content ratio compares (Shirky certainly doesn’t offer any figures).
But frankly, if you went with the CPR (Community Public Reporting) approach, what would change except the manner of funding?
If the whole economic enterprise is collapsing, then some type of triage might have to be considered. But Shirky didn’t even try to make that case.
He also doesn’t seemingly consider the question of what the audience wants. Maybe they like a big dollop of sports with their city news, along with a heaping helping of folksy observations and some chicken-wing recipes.
Part of Shirky’s mantra is that newspaper-style bundling no longer makes any sense. At a talk in Toronto on Friday night, he said if a person selects a crossword puzzle online, the very next thing they want to see is likely some other type of puzzle — not news from Tegucigalpa or whatever.
Is he so sure the customers of the Daily Tribune feel the same way?