Media Curmudgeon: December 2009 Archives

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December 17, 2009

How to Save Journalism: Part I

Everyone seems to agree that we need save journalism as we watch newspapers slowly sink into insolvency.

Why? Mike Royko, the acerbic, blue-collar, Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Daily News put it best, I think, when he wrote that “a reporter is to a politician as a barking dog is to a chicken thief.” The country needs these watchdogs not only for politicians but also for businesses, Wall Street, and the climate.

Many newspapers, magazines, blogs, commissions, and even the government have taken up the question of saving journalism. One report, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” by former Washington Post Editor Leonard Downie, Jr. and respected newspaper historian Michael Schudson and sponsored by the prestigious Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is the most extensive research I've seen that has been conducted on the subject to date.

Downie and Schudson are basically optimistic, especially for local journalism, but they are less optimistic for hard-hitting, responsible investigative reporting on national issues and put forth some ideas and suggestions for preserving this important type of journalism. See this video interview with Schudson to get a summary of the report.

Here are my specific suggestions:

Because The New York Times is the best and most important newspaper in the country, its survival must be addressed first.
First, The Times must be wrested away from the Sulzberger family. How?

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have to start things off by agreeing to put a $5 billion matching grant from the Gates Foundation into a new Journalism Preservation Foundation and then pressure other billionaires (Bloomberg, Murdoch, Redstone, Ted Turner, Page and Brin of Google included) to contribute to get the fund up to $10 billion.
Buy Carlos Slim’s $250 million loan to The Times by giving him 15 or 16 percent interest on his money. He’ll take the deal because he doesn’t care about the viability of The Times or journalism because if he did he would have given it a lower interest rate; he cares about the money – that’s how he got so rich.
Then, call in The Times’s loan as soon as legally possible, which will force The Times into bankruptcy.
When the paper is in bankruptcy, offer to buy out the Sulzberger family’s voting stock at a big discount and buy non-voting stock at pennies on the dollar. Investors who were dumb enough to buy non-voting stock in a company run by Pinch Sulzberger deserve to lose most of their money.
While the paper is in bankruptcy, get rid of current business-side management (Sulzberger, Robinson, etc.) and the many layers of bureaucratic management and hire bright, young professional managers who want to save journalism and are not interested in getting rich – make sure they live in Queens or Brooklyn where they can hobnob with the folks and not need to pay high rents.
Negotiate ruthlessly with the paper’s unions to get major concessions.
Renegotiate the contracts with all the editors, reporters, and columnists. It’s an honor to write for The Times and the top compensation should be $200,000 and contracts should be 360 contracts like the record companies are making with musicians in which the paper would get a percentage (40 percent?) of the speaking and consulting fees. Reporters, editors, and columnists wouldn’t get gigs without Times exposure, so the paper should get some of the action. If they don’t like the deal, they can try to get a job that pays more somewhere else – they could interview at Google, for example.
Charge $299 a year for online subscriptions to a complete version of the Web site and put a Times Lite version on the Web free and charge non-subscribers a per article fee for the heavy versions of articles.
Give students with an .edu e-mail address a 33 percent discount on subscriptions.
Charge readers who want to get the newspaper printed on paper and delivered the actual cost of each paper – if it’s $10 a paper, so be it. If they want their fingers smudgy, let them pay for it.
When The Times exits from bankruptcy, it will be a non-profit organization run for purpose of putting out great journalism, not for making a profit.

The New York Times

Posted by Charles Warner at 4:44 PM | Comments (4) | Print | Mail this entry

Media Curmudgeon at December 17, 2009 10:43 PM writes:

Jim Lewis - I actually did do a free sales seminar for The Huffington Post last year. I don't know the salary levels at the NY Times, but I suspect that some of the marquee columnists and top editors are making more than $200,000 a year.

Media Curmudgeon at December 17, 2009 10:39 PM writes:

Jim Hopkins - Sorry for the error -- you're correct, it is $250 million and I have changed it. Thanks,

Jim Lewis at December 17, 2009 10:04 PM writes:

Exactly what percentage of you sales and management seminars and consulting projects that you shamelessly advertise on your bio do you contribute to huffington post?

And what percentage of journalists at The Times do you think makes more than $200,000?

You get what you pay for, Chuck.

Jim Hopkins at December 17, 2009 6:31 PM writes:

I believe the Carlos Sims loan was for $250 million -- not $2.5 billion.

December 16, 2009

Bruce Braun Agrees With Weiskopf on Aghanistan Decision

Guest blogger Bruce Braun agrees with Michael Weiskopf on Obama's decision to increase troops in Afghanistan and adds some points on why he thinks it was a bad decision.

Given that Obama, like Bush, Clinton, et.al are all career politicians, his actions should not be a surprise to anyone. Especially, if one has spent more than ten minutes examining the lists of broken presidential campaign promises.

No matter how seemingly sincere a candidate for the presidency may portray themselves on the campaign trail, once in office, campaign promise amnesia sets in about 30 seconds after being sworn in.

I disagree that Obama was elected by appealing to our "best instincts". He was elected because of the intense hatred and backlash towards Bush and a joke Republican ticket. It helped that Obama was an attractive candidate, preaching a message of harmony and peace while evidencing how racial attitudes have changed along with a sophisticated campaign management team.

How much difference a year makes! For those of us who voted for Obama on the basis of his campaign rhetoric, we overlooked that first and foremost, he is a politician, like any other politician. Obama is the product of a political system and political class elites. And we forgot that like all politicians, they will say and do just about anything to get elected and to stay in power. We are then stuck with them for two, four or six years with free reign to do just about anything they want, with a blank check, courtesy of us, the US taxpayers. We allow them to gerrymander their districts in ways that essentially guarantees lifetime job security short of being convicted of felonies.

Do we really expect 100 senators and 435 members of the congress to ever come together in a bi-partisan way about anything? The only show of a modicum of unity we ever see, is when something like 9-11 takes place. And even then, all 535 of those elected representatives begin exhibiting amnesia within six months after an attack, about the blood they were demanding in revenge.

Our founding fathers crafted a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that was just six pages long and has been the foundation of our republic for almost 300 years. Now look what we have: Healthcare Reform, Obamacare, whatever you choose to call it, is over 2000 pages long and Title 26 or the US Tax Code runs 5.6M words!

We will never know what took place in the Afghanistan War discussions over the past 11 months, despite the campaign promises for greater transparency in government. Michael makes excellent points in his essay, especially in regards to who should have been invited to weigh in on the ramifications of potential decisions by Mr. Obama. However, original ideas such as Michael's are not part of the psyche of our political class.

We have created a global geo-political welfare state over the past 60 years for almost every third-world conflict. Got a problem with your country or the country next to you? Call the US. They will send you billions and spill their young people's blood for you, without question or accountability on your part. Are you ripping off and subjugating your citizens? Murdering them too? Not a problem. Exporting narcotics? No sweat. It is the American Way!

We need to face the reality that we do not have a two party system that works in and for the best interests of the citizens of this country. We have one party, the political class, that exists for the propagation of their interests. This is why Mr. Obama and the Congress makes the decisions they do and pisses away our hard-earned monies and sacrifices the blood of dedicated military.

Posted by Charles Warner at 4:43 PM | Comments (0) | Print | Mail this entry

How To Save Journalism: Part I

Everyone seems to agree that we need save journalism as we watch newspapers slowly sink into insolvency.

Why? Mike Royko, the acerbic, blue-collar, Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Daily News put it best, I think, when he wrote that “a reporter is to a politician as a barking dog is to a chicken thief.” The country needs these watchdogs not only for politicians but also for businesses, Wall Street, and the climate.

Here are my specific suggestions:

Because The New York Times is the best and most important newspaper in the country, its survival must be addressed first.
First, The Times must be wrested away from the Sulzberger family. How?

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have to start things off by agreeing to put a $5 billion matching grant from the Gates Foundation into a new Journalism Preservation Foundation and then pressure other billionaires (Bloomberg, Murdoch, Redstone, Ted Turner, Page and Brin of Google included) to contribute to get the fund up to $10 billion.
Buy Carlos Slim’s $2.5 billion loan to The Times by giving him 15 or 16 percent interest on his money. He’ll take the deal because he doesn’t care about the viability of The Times or journalism because if he did he would have given it a lower interest rate; he cares about the money – that’s how he got so rich.
Then, call in The Times’s loan as soon as legally possible, which will force The Times into bankruptcy.
When the paper is in bankruptcy, offer to buy out the Sulzberger family’s voting stock at a big discount and buy non-voting stock at pennies on the dollar. Investors who were dumb enough to buy non-voting stock in a company run by Pinch Sulzberger deserve to lose most of their money.
While the paper is in bankruptcy, get rid of current business-side management (Sulzberger, Robinson, etc.) and the many layers of bureaucratic management and hire bright, young professional managers who want to save journalism and are not interested in getting rich – make sure they live in Queens or Brooklyn where they can hobnob with the folks and not need to pay high rents.
Negotiate ruthlessly with the paper’s unions to get major concessions.
Renegotiate the contracts with all the editors, reporters, and columnists. It’s an honor to write for The Times and the top compensation should be $200,000 and contracts should be 360 contracts like the record companies are making with musicians in which the paper would get a percentage (40 percent?) of the speaking and consulting fees. Reporters, editors, and columnists wouldn’t get gigs without Times exposure, so the paper should get some of the action. If they don’t like the deal, they can try to get a job that pays more somewhere else – they could interview at Google, for example.
Charge $299 a year for online subscriptions to a complete version of the Web site and put a Times Lite version on the Web free and charge non-subscribers a per article fee for the heavy versions of articles.
Give students with an .edu e-mail address a 33 percent discount on subscriptions.
Charge readers who want to get the newspaper printed on paper and delivered the actual cost of each paper – if it’s $10 a paper, so be it. If they want their fingers smudgy, let them pay for it.
When The Times exits from bankruptcy, it will be a non-profit organization run for purpose of putting out great journalism, not for making a profit.

That’s a start. I’ll have some more ideas in Part II, but in the meantime, I’d like to hear your ideas on how to save journalism and The New York Times

Posted by Charles Warner at 1:10 AM | Comments (0) | Print | Mail this entry

December 15, 2009

Michael Weiskopf Goes After the NY Times

Guest blogger Michael Weiskopf goes after the NY Times for endorsing the Afghanistan buildup -- a position I do not agree with, but one which a number of my friends and readers do, so I'm posting Michael's comments:

Concerning The New York Times editorial endorsing the Afghanistan buildup and Peter Baker's NY Timesarticle "How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan," I respectfully I disagree.

Mr. Baker’s story evoked the famous Yogi Berra line “It’s Déjà’ vu all over again.” By virtue of the culture lens of the NY Times,, once again the paper is playing the role of cheerleader for an administration's generals as they beat the drums of war. While reading I checked the byline several times to see if Judith Miller was the writer.

Public support for any military action is essential in a democracy. The "Intelligentsia" also must be brought along, at least in the initial stages. And once again, the NY Times seems to understand and dutifully fulfill its role.

Baker's article profiling the “lonely and difficult decision that the new president must face,” is a portrait of the corridor of power and of the agonizing decision and supports the notion that there is no alternative but to go forward with an escalation of violence. The article makes a persuasive case for war. If a free and critical press were truly at work, one might expect a bit more critical thinking and reporting of a decision that was apparently reached without the presence or appearance in the room of a single Afghan official, a citizen of a village likely to experience the violence, any opposition leader nor the head of state of any neighboring country in the Middle East.

During his speech on Monday, President Obama stated that the enemies are extremists that have hijacked a kind and gentle religion and are now its militant enemies.

If that is the case, then where are the Saudis, Egyptians, Kuwaiti’s, U.A.E., (the latter two could offer some financing if not much of a military contribution) and other peace-loving Sunnis, and Shiites, who are far more at risk than the western world? Why are they not participating in the struggle against militant Islam? The question is never even put on the table. Why are the economics of the financing of the Taliban and Al Qaeda not analyzed and reported on?

The poppy trade and the thugs that run it are part of a network of corruption that can easily be interrupted with military action against crops instead of people. It would seem likely that this strategy would do far more to destabilize and break up the militant groups than chasing them back and forth across the Pakistan border. Some of us would like to know if this option was ever considered as a strategy or tactic.

Finally, Pakistan has an army, it is already trained and, as we all know, Pakistan has more to lose with a Taliban controlled Afghanistan than any country, including the United States. If an escalation of war is the answer, why isn’t the Pakistan army the first line of offense in this surge, with U.S. soldiers securing their nuclear facilities?

Perhaps there are good answers to these questions, perhaps our government is acting in our best interests, but the arguments and reasoning put forth reflects the idea that fear, politics, and the military are running the day. The Military is not at fault, its job is to provide military solutions and to paint a worse-case scenario. It is the responsibility of a civilian controlled democracy to run the Military.

The opposite seems operative since 911. It is ironic that a president, who was elected by appealing to our best instincts, has bowed to fear and the illusion that we can somehow be protected against the threat of violence through increased force. There is virtually no difference in the rhetoric coming from this administration than that of his hapless and deceiving predecessor.

It is positively Orwellian that this president, after choosing to address this complex issue by caving in to his military advisors, would soon trot off to accept his Nobel Peace Prize.

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:05 PM | Comments (1) | Print | Mail this entry

Bruce Braun at December 16, 2009 3:47 PM writes:

Given that Obama, like Bush, Clinton, et.al are all career politicians, his actions should not be a surprise to anyone. Especially, if one has spent more than ten minutes examining the lists of broken presidential campaign promises.

No matter how seemingly sincere a candidate for the presidency may portray themselves on the campaign trail, once in office, campaign promise amnesia sets in about 30 seconds after being sworn in.

I disagree that Obama was elected by appealing to our "best instincts". He was elected because of the intense hatred and backlash towards Bush and a joke Republican ticket. It helped that Obama was an attractive candidate, preaching a message of harmony and peace while evidencing how racial attitudes have changed along with a sophisticated campaign management team.

How much difference a year makes! For those of us who voted for Obama on the basis of his campaign rhetoric, we overlooked that first and foremost, he is a politician, like any other politician. Obama is the product of a political system and political class elites. And we forgot that like all politicians, they will say and do just about anything to get elected and to stay in power. We are then stuck with them for two, four or six years with free reign to do just about anything they want, with a blank check, courtesy of us, the US taxpayers. We allow them to gerrymander their districts in ways that essentially guarantees lifetime job security short of being convicted of felonies.

Do we really expect 100 senators and 435 members of the congress to ever come together in a bi-partisan way about anything? The only show of a modicum of unity we ever see, is when something like 9-11 takes place. And even then, all 535 of those elected representatives begin exhibiting amnesia within six months after an attack, about the blood they were demanding in revenge.

Our founding fathers crafted a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that was just six pages long and has been the foundation of our republic for almost 300 years. Now look what we have: Healthcare Reform, Obamacare, whatever you choose to call it, is over 2000 pages long and Title 26 or the US Tax Code runs 5.6M words!

We will never know what took place in the Afghanistan War discussions over the past 11 months, despite the campaign promises for greater transparency in government. Michael makes excellent points in his essay, especially in regards to who should have been invited to weigh in on the ramifications of potential decisions by Mr. Obama. However, original ideas such as Michael's are not part of the psyche of our political class.

We have created a global geo-political welfare state over the past 60 years for almost every third-world conflict. Got a problem with your country or the country next to you? Call the US. They will send you billions and spill their young people's blood for you, without question or accountability on your part. Are you ripping off and subjugating your citizens? Murdering them too? Not a problem. Exporting narcotics? No sweat. It is the American Way!

We need to face the reality that we do not have a two party system that works in and for the best interests of the citizens of this country. We have one party, the political class, that exists for the propagation of their interests. This is why Mr. Obama and the Congress makes the decisions they do and pisses away our hard-earned monies and sacrifices the blood of dedicated military.

December 9, 2009

The Dallas Morning News Is On the Right Track

Many traditional journalists were up in arms last week when the Dallas Morning News announced that senior editors in the sports and entertainment departments would report to executives from the business side of the newspaper. Purists accused the A.H. Belo paper of breaking down the traditional wall between the editorial and business/sales sides of the business.

Really? The newspaper Titanic is sinking fast and the journalism dinosaurs are arguing about the proper color of life preservers.

Dallas Morning News Executive Sports Editor Bob Yates said in a phone interview with Richard Prince of the Poynter Institute, "To me, this is nothing new for the newspaper. Editors of the paper report to the publisher. It's the same pattern."

And it’s been the same pattern in television and magazines for decades, but the arrogant journalism elitists who benefitted from newspaper monopolies that were sustained by massive barriers to entry looked down their noses on considering the interests of consumers and customers as crass. Journalists had no concept of or interest in the business of news and thought that people in management and, especially, in sales were the bad guys, which I know from first-hand experience because I taught at the oldest journalism school in the country for ten years.

As early as the 1970s television executives, including those in TV news at ABC and at local stations, realized they were not in the news business but in the advertising delivery business and that the goal was to attract eyeballs – get ratings – not necessarily to produce what newspeople thought was good journalism.

Time, Inc. launched People magazine in 1974 not because Time, Inc. thought it was great journalism, but because it realized that the People section of Time magazine was the most popular section in the magazine and celebrity and human interest stories were what consumers (readers) and customers (advertisers) wanted, and People soon became the most profitable magazine in the world.

The internet brought down the barriers to entry into the news business and eliminated the basis for many local newspaper monopolies. So what was the response of journalists at these papers? Often they decry massive layoffs. But the The Dallas Morning News is doing something radical; it isn’t crying, it’s on the right track and trying to deal with the problem.

Maybe the business people will suggest to the editorial people in the sports and entertainment sections, which are the only ones affected at this time, to think about what readers are interested in. Maybe they will encourage the reporters to start conversations with their readers, because that’s one of the things the internet does best, facilitate communication and conversations.

Salespeople know how to develop relationships with their customers, maybe the newspeople will learn to do the same thing with their readers like Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times is doing.

Posted by Charles Warner at 6:56 PM | Comments (0) | Print | Mail this entry

December 7, 2009

Pearl Harbor Day

As I walked in Central Park today, Monday, I was reminded by a flag at half staff that it was December 7, Pearl Harbor Day.

When I got up this morning, I wasn’t aware of the date, and I didn’t see a reference to Peal Harbor Day when I did my morning online skimming of The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and the blogs I subscribe to via Google Reader. Does this mean that everyone the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation has forgotten about Pearl Harbor?

As I walked back home, I thought that I should blog about my memories of December 7, so at least those who read or skim my blog will remember Peal Harbor and some of the lessons from 68 years ago.

I was nine years old on Sunday, December 7, 1941. It was before lunch on a bright, chilly winter day in Battle Creek, MI. Bobby Baker and I met on our bikes near Fremont School. I remember riding my Schwinn Classic Deluxe and that Bobby told me that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Neither Bobby nor I knew where that was or what the implications were, but I knew about the Japanese because my mother and father had scrap books of their trip to Japan in 1928 when my father worked for the W. H. Gary Company in Kansas City.

In our house we had Japanese glass flowers and a metal crane standing on a turtle’s back and pictures of Japanese women in kimonos. My dad also had a trunk in the basement full of maps wrapped in wax paper.

The next Monday, the 8th, my father sent a telegram to the War Department in Washington that read something like: “I have a trunk in my basement that has complete, detailed maps of the entire telephone communication system in the Japanese Islands.”

On Tuesday he got a telegram back that read, essentially: “You want your trunk get on a train to Washington, D.C. today.” And he did.
My mother and I joined him in June and we spent WWII living in Alexandria, VA. My father worked in the Japanese section of G2 (Military Intelligence) in the Pentagon.

Looking back 68 years and thinking about the lonely flag flying at half staff in Central Park, I came home and Googled “flags at half staff” and discovered there are only four days during the year that it is customary to fly flags at half staff: Peace Officers Memorial Day, May 15th; Memorial Day, the last Monday in May; Patriot Day, September 11th; and Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, December 7th.

Two of them commemorate all who died in the line of duty and two commemorate single-day events: December 7, when 2,402 died, and September 11, when 2,953 died.

In 1941 the United States declared war on the Japanese government to demonstrate that there were consequences for its terrorist, murderous behavior. We then occupied the country, disarmed it, and spent billions to help it become a world-class economic power, in part because it wasn’t allowed to spend on a military presence or on defense. We did the same thing with Germany with the same result.

It occurred to me that the 30,000 troops that Obama is sending to Afghanistan should probably be taught history so they could indoctrinate the Afghans, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda on the lessons of Pearl Harbor and World War II: Attack the U.S., let us declare war and then win, occupy their country, demilitarize it, pay to rebuild it, and get rich.

U.S. troops should be armed with guns to protect themselves, hammers and saws to build schools, and a DVD player to show the 1959 Peter Sellers comedy “The Mouse That Roared” that demonstrates step-by-step how to make war on America and prosper.

Unfortunately, from what I can see, the Taliban or Al Qaeda doesn’t have a sense of humor or the sense to learn from history, so they’ll have to learn the lessons of Pearl Harbor the hard way.

I remember the easy way – by seeing the flag at half staff.

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:31 PM | Comments (2) | Print | Mail this entry

Bruce Braun at December 8, 2009 9:21 PM writes:

Great commentary, Charlie.

Your thoughts reminded me of the observation that for most people, history begins on the day they were born.

The indifference of the press to even making mention of December 7th is perhaps a reflection of the current generation of journalists and editors. For them, Tiger Woods is more newsworthy and deserving of column space and air time.

Re: Afganistan et.al, I do not believe that the Afghans or any of the other related "stans" are ever going to be a manageable situation for the US, let alone an ultimate victory. Our press lines up on the side of standard left-wing beliefs but for the wrong reasons.

What we seem to keep glossing over in the political and public debates and within press coverage is fundamentally these countries, if you want to call them that, are as similar to Japan and Germany as East is from West. Japan and Germany did not have a 6000 year history of small tribal territories run by strong-man chiefs and rooted in radical stone-age religious beliefs.

With that sort of societal and religious fervor, anchored in such a long a history, we are fools to think we will ever change the hearts and minds of what are in truth, backward cultures. History as we understand it, bears no significance to the average Taliban, Al Qaeda or Afghan tribesman.

arcdoc at December 7, 2009 10:59 PM writes:

Nice column, Charlie. You're a good man.
Best, g