CULTURE CLUB: The Ballad of Ink-Stained Wretches

Newspapers forge cluelessly into a shaky future

Chuck Twardy

The folding of the Sun into the Review-Journal is a cue to ponder the future of newspapers. The prospects, certainly, are not bright, especially for afternoon papers, but the numbers are hardly rosy, regardless the edition. Readership is down and it skews older. The New York Times Co. recently announced staff layoffs totaling 500 at the flagship and its satellites in New England. The Knight-Ridder papers in Philadelphia are offering buyouts in advance of likely layoffs.


Part of the problem is that ballyhooed distrust of journalists, and another part is the increasing complexity of daily life, which allows less time for leisurely reading and a funhouse of more attractive distractions. Including, of course, that darned Internet.


I hate to say it, but as a former employee of four newspapers I have to admit that to some extent newspapers have themselves to blame. I was fortunate to work directly under some very talented editors, so I do not want to make sweeping indictments. But over time, through experience and through tales told by colleagues at other newspapers, I became aware of a general culture of mismanagement that seemed to be driving a proud trade into the ground.


Of course, employees of all types of enterprises gripe about the Peter Principle—people rising beyond their levels of incompetence—and reporters are notorious whiners in any event. But the evidence seems too blatant. A good friend recently resigned his reporter's job, with no plans, after watching the management of his storied newspaper squander away three-quarters of its readership through incompetence laced with arrogance. It started with a publisher brought in from the outside, who hired cronies with little or no relevant experience as editors, who promoted into their ranks the least-talented reporters. Along the way, the new crew lost all sense of the readers' interests and, to salt the wound, started editing mistakes into his copy.


Or consider the New York Times. I love the Times, subscribe on Sundays, read it daily. It's still a great paper. But recently its public editor chided management over its reluctance to acknowledge that the TV critic had written something manifestly wrong. Bloggers, of course, have had a field day. Former Chicago Tribune TV critic John Cook, on his Reference Tone website (http://www.referencetone.com/2005/09/wrongest-critic.html) discovered by Nexus search that the Times critic had a "not-quite-appalling-but-still-kinda-large 11 percent" correction rate back to 2001. Well, that IS appalling, and at some point editors are to blame, both for missing mistakes, and for shielding the critic. Recall that the Times has a public editor because previous management had too-long sheltered a reporter who filed fiction in place of news.


So clearly the culture of newspapers must change. The old officer-editor, troop-reporter model that shoveled sentences into Linotype just might not work in the Ether Age. Something more collaborative, in which everyone is both editor and reporter, might better-suit a 24-hour, online news environment. And I suspect the approach has to be more collaborative with the reader, as well. The current newspaper model, especially in large chains, fosters management whose cocky self-confidence rises in proportion to its clueless isolation.


"The reality of it is that the economic model of the Industrial Age of journalism ... will not last," says Chris Waddle, a longtime newspaper veteran, most recently as an executive with The Anniston Star in Alabama. Papers like the family-owned Star have fallen into chain-ownership in recent decades, as children and grandchildren choose to cash in rather than carry on. To forestall that, says Waddle, the Ayers family started a foundation to acquire ownership gradually. It also launched the Ayers Family Institute for Community Journalism, of which he is president, to advance a new model.


The institute is launching a masters-degree program at the University of Alabama "to salt the industry" with journalists attuned to the more collaborative information-distributing model of the Internet. This model still involves print, and for that matter cable and broadcast, often in integration. "There is a journalism for people who see themselves as a community ... [which] has a sense of writing on a base of solidarity with the readership, or listenership, or viewership," says Waddle.


The Internet is turning what used to be a one-way relationship into a dialogue, he observes, with papers increasingly offering forums and blogs and mediating the conversation. Reporting and expertise are still crucial, and wanted by readers, but without condescension. And community can mean urban as well as small-town. Waddle cites the Orange County Register, which "views itself as the world's biggest community newspaper."


Waddle sees no reason why a "community" newspaper should abandon the watchdog role, either. "I just reject the premise you can't do good journalism in a community context." Readers want lively debate, he says, "and most of all they don't want to be bored."



Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.

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