Friday, May 22, 2009
News / News Bites The IFC TV media town hall
Posted by Michael Miner on 05.22.09 at 02:37 PM
Gerould Kern didn’t say anything thoughtless or unreasonable at Thursday’s media forum at the Newberry Library, so why pick at nits? I suppose it’s because of the blood on his hands. Someone in the audience asked him for reason to believe that after five rounds of layoffs the Tribune is still a "really good paper." Kern said the Tribune -- which he edits -- made "hard choices," and the staff shrank, but it actually has more people on its metro staff than it did a year ago, and it's decided "watchdog investigative reporting . . . was going to be part of our brand statement."
When did "brand statement” insinuate itself into the argot of journalism? When did "watchdog reporting" acquire an invisible trademark? It was, until recently, simply something newspapers did. Now the Tribune has given it an icon -- an eye open wide in a black box -- and a standing heading, "Tribune Watchdog." To my mind, the Tribune is telling us it is less important to be a watchdog than to be seen to be a watchdog -- but is that fair to Kern?
The front-page Watchdog reports the past couple of days on apparent quackery in the treating of autism are worthy journalism. But as Kern spoke I recalled a front-page story I’d just read in Thursday’s New York Times. It was headlined, “Death Row Foes See New Hurdle to DNA Testing” [retitled online] and it began:
“Opponents of the death penalty looking to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners say their efforts have been hobbled by the dwindling size of America’s newsrooms, and particularly the disappearance of investigative reporting at many regional papers.
“In the past, lawyers opposed to the death penalty often provided the broad outlines of cases to reporters, who then pursued witnesses and unearthed evidence.
“Now, the lawyers complain, they have to do more of the work themselves, and that means it often doesn’t get done. They say many fewer cases are being pursued by journalists, after a spate of exonerations several years ago based on the work of reporters.”
One of those reporters was the Tribune’s Steve Mills, who’s now writing about autism. Another was Maurice Possley, who’s quoted in the Times article. Possley’s no longer at the Tribune. The Tribune has a proud history of digging into the yeasty subjects of prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions. But far fewer Tribune readers know someone on death row than know someone with an autistic child.
I can’t call Kern wrong for deciding it was time for more reader-friendly exposes. The problem with the “brand statement” news model is that it becomes about how a newspaper dresses itself up. And when clothes make the man, a smudge of ketchup can ruin the man. Wednesday’s Tribune carried this admission in its "Corrections & Clarifications" space: "A headline on the front page of some editions of Wednesday’s Chicagoland Extra section misspelled the word 'opportunity.' The Tribune regrets the error." A few pages back in the same newspaper was this headline: "Solider from Downstate killed in Iraq explosion."
The Tribune is far from being the only publication to lay off copy editors and proofreaders, scaling back the quality-control process and paying a price. But it was Kern front and center on the Newberry panel, and as he spoke about emerging business models I thought about the sociological theory that holds that a single broken window that goes unrepaired can lead to the decline of an entire street. Leaf through a Tribune (or any other newspaper) these days and you spot more and more broken windows.
The panel was the first of a series of "town hall meetings" sponsored by IFC TV as part of its campaign to "Make Media Matter." Here's an audio recording of the discussion.
Some other impressions:
Panelist Carol Marin personally symbolizes the consolidation of media in our straitened age, representing Channel Five, where she’s political editor, Channel 11, where she contributes to Chicago Tonight, and the Sun-Times, where she writes a column. Her finest moment came when she announced she hates the word content though she occasionally uses it. "Content to me is not news," she declared. "Lots of stuff will qualify as diet -- a good diet, a great plan for the weekend. But news is 'Oh, my god, I had no idea that this was going wrong in my government."
In other words, reporting news can lead to expensive aggravations such as subpoenas, something Marin had talked about a little earlier in the program as "one of the costs of doing business." It's a big cost measured in time and money, but it's invisible to the public, and if you're contemptuous of mainstream media it probably doesn't occur to you that it's a cost only the MSM has had the money to cover. News is content, but content isn't necessarily news. It can be whatever you feel like shoveling into a news hole when you don’t want to spend time and money -- or can no longer afford to.
Donald Hayner, editor of the Sun-Times, thinks the conversation among journalists is so skewed toward "change all the time" that the fundamentals get lost. "There's so much thinking outside the box," he said. "I think we’ve got to have somebody in the box. . . . The fundamental gathering of news still sells, and the bigger that news the bigger it sells." He'd like to see Chicago’s news organizations join forces and create a common firewall behind which their gathered news will be protected from online scavengers who read but don’t pay. The problem, he said, is that everyone’s too independent to agree to such a thing -- and antitrust laws might also be a problem. So Hayner talks about his idea, but he hasn’t pursued it.
Carl Bernstein spoke with great joy about the newspaper game, but he said the number of papers has been shrinking all his life and when papers go under these days it’s evolution, not a tragedy. He called the Web a "great delivery system" for news that’s simply still in search of a business model that will pay for news gathering that’s up to American journalism’s traditional standards. I was impressed by Bernstein. Decades beyond his Watergate glory days, he looks a lot less like Dustin Hoffman than Shoe’s tubby Perfesser Cosmo Fishhawk, his suit jacket precariously held taut by a single button that looked like it could pop at any second, his shirt pink, his socks several colors. In any proper newsroom he’d be the shrewd, avuncular old-timer sure of the lore in his head and bearing not an ounce of envy for the rambunctious kids all around him. Someone in the audience wondered why journalism, TV especially, doesn’t dump the "huge" $250,000 and $300,000 salaries and "hire 8 or 9 people for $50,000 a year who can go out and produce good broadcast-quality content." Bernstein was fine with that. "Reporting has really always been a young person's business. Yes, we we have older people in journalism to steady the tiller, and yes, we have older editors. But really what has always made this business crack has been young people getting stories."
Comments (10)
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"Brand statement" is just exactly the kind of utterance one would expect from Gerry Kern. No newsroom is democratic, but in most the editor is at least someone with the kind of journalistic chops whom you could imagine being elected by the staff, or ascending to the job by popular acclamation. That certainly isn't the case at the Tribune. No one of sound mind could have desired, dreamt, envisioned or hallucinated Kern in the big corner office.
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I listened to it, and the biggest problem - aside from the fact that 70% was different phrasings of "we have to do something different" - was that everyone neglected to mention that the Trib and the S-T would be solvent, or at least have more resources to devote to being so, if it weren't for the incompetent or criminal financial mismanagement well above the editorial level. It's not just that I would be happy to see Kern poke Sam Zell in the eye. Talking about how your business model is "broken" when TribCo is doing reasonably well in a terrible economy doesn't make a lot of sense. Obviously the business model is changing, but I still think Kern's statement is inaccurate, and the quality of your business model is something to take some care to be accurate about.
pretty much everything kern says is ignorant, to some degree, of the basic tenets of journalism. the fact that he is more concerned about appearing to be a watchdog than actually fulfilling the role is telling. and this stuff about a bigger metro staff? bullshit. I can't believe no one questioned him on that. the only thing they have added, net, are some internet types of indeterminate function and a crapload of managers whose roles overlap. kern is the worst thing to happen to the tribune since sam zell.
The AP should take on a new role. Every newsgathering operation with a Web site, from the smallest radio station to the biggest TV network, joins AP Online. A reader pays $10 a month subscription with portability across all sites. AP Online allocates subscription revenue based on page-views, and litigates against thieves. Become the music industry.
Kern is just a drone for Sam Zell and his cronies. As soon as they tire of him, and that will once he has totally ruined the Chicago Tribune, they will discard him. He will have a terrible time finding a job after that day comes! He has no skills, no body of work to point to that measures his success.
I think that Gerould Kern is such an unpopular person right now with the people in the Tribune newsroom and those who hang aroung this blog that anything he says is going to be critisized. When he states that watchdog reporting is important to the Tribune's brand he is critisized for making a "brand statement" instead of just letting the work speak for itself. Of course, I would wager quite a lot of money that if he took the opposite stance he would be critisized for that by the same people. Let's say he didn't create a section labelled "Tribune watchdog" and all of those stories were exactly the same but unlabelled. And let's say, for the sake of argument, that somebody at the panel complained about what they felt was a lack of commitement by the paper to play up its investigative reporting and asked Kern why the paper didn't do much to spotlight it. And let's assume that Kern stated that doing so would give the impression that the Tribune's investigative reporting was for the purpose of being seen as a watchdog instead of actually being one. My guess would be that Michaal Miner would have written a blog post that stated this was bull and that Kern actually just didn't believe in that these types of articles were good for the bottom line. And At.tribune would have been the first person to respond saying that he/she agreed and that Kern's lack of inclination to tout the paper's investigative reporting indicated he didn't believe in the stuff and would likely soon lay-off all the investigative reporters. But I could be wrong. In my opinion, making a strong marketing statement about a particular kind of reporting indicates you are proud of it. Why wouldn't you want to make a brand statement about something that is important?
@IAC Fair points all. I've often had some of the same sorts of questions when I've seen someone who's widely disliked getting trashed yet again in a public forum. In some cases, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't, and it's just not fair. In Kern's case, though, he's damned for good reason. In the newsroom in particular, he just has no respect. He hasn't over the course of his 18 years at the Tribune distinguished himself in any way, either as a reporter or as an editor. It's a profound mystery to anyone remotely acquainted with him as to how he has managed to advance himself. He's famous for not reading stories, there is no substantial evidence at any point that he has campaigned for better journalism or ever stood up to the perpetual cost-cutters on the corporate side. He originated the idea of "byline counting" at the Tribune, an embarrassment that even he now acknowledges and tries to minimize. But it was a big deal at the time, perhaps the genius move that has attached rockets to his career, such as it is. And then, of course, we've lately had this market-testing of stories in preparation that happened under his watch and, we suspect, with his strong backing. So it's a lot of little things and some definitely scary things combined with the big mystery of not just how he has managed to advance himself but why he's even still employed. Add them together, and what you have is easily the most distrusted figure in the newsroom, someone that reporters and editors strongly suspect will never have their backs, will never step up for them, unless it somehow involves "branding" or some other corporate garbage. He may not be as awful as some of us, including myself, make out in the heat of the moment. But he certainly falls way, way, way short of the inspiring figure one would like to see at the helm in trying times.
Just finished a New York Times article on business guru Jim Collins who, according to the article, maps out the following stages of decline for a previously thriving business in his latest book. They seem apt for the newspaper industry and Tribune Co. in particular. Here they are, with my additions in parentheses: "hubris born of success" (routine 30 percent profit margins industrywide, and not that long ago) "undisciplined pursuit of more" (Tribune Co.s acquisition of Times Mirror) "denial of risk and peril" (fairly common in all the industry's daffy corporate happy talk until a few years ago) "grasping for salvation with a quick, big solution" (Zell, the Tribune redesign, Kern/Hirt, heavy emphasis on the lame digital product, reader-testing yet-to-be-published stories, transparent self-promotion in what are supposed to be legitimate news stories, etc. etc.) "capitulation to irrelevance or death" (virtually everything newspapers are writing about themselves these days, even though they remain profitable, by and large, in a deep recession) Collins' remedy for decline is paying careful attention to the smaller things that one can control and simply doing a good job. Don't see much of that in the newspaper industry, though, where they seem to be in one hell of a rush to throw overboard standards, principles and people in a panicky search for some wacky big solution. It's like watching Barney Fife commit suicide.
Gerry Kern doesn't even have the stature to be a Willy Loman. His fall from the tiny power level he clawed to ascend to will just be a minor joke in the end. Great people surround themselves with other great people. Mediocre people can do that too, and achieve greatness in an organization. Kern has instead surrounded himself with minor ninnies, who apparently care about a sad little patch of their own power. Honestly: Hirt, Adee, Adee's ex wife (barbie?), the RedEye crew? And the mid-level lackies leftover from the Lipinski days? But none seem to care about good writing or even decent news It shows.
Cassandra has it right. The flock of ninnies around Kern attests to the likely tortured future of an increasingly marginalized but once great newspaper. The building fuss over the new TribCo Website, ChicagoNOW, is an example of category confusion. This thing appears to be Bill Adee's brainchild, and maybe it'll work and maybe it won't. But in the meantime, the paper product (what used to be known as a newspaper and is or ought to be a different kind of medium) is in severe decline and there's no one in the key seats in the tower willing--or, more tellingly, qualified or able--to put up a fight. And the way to do that is to aggressively assemble a product that is EXCLUSIVELY in print, with EXCLUSIVE journalism that is substantive, authoritative and accountable. Instead, we have a paper that increasingly looks like a fugitive from the online universe, chatty, fragmented, cute and dumbed-down. If you like that sort of thing, you'll find it online for nothing. Why pay for a paper subscription to get something that lamely recapitulates the digital product?
