The value of journalism, sir, is not ‘zero’
John Paton, the chief executive piloting the radical remake of the Journal Register Co., declared last week that the value of journalism is “about zero.” But he is dead wrong.
First and foremost, Paton is wrong to dismiss the intrinsic value to society of vigorous, ethical and independent journalism that is committed to comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. There is no other institution to perform this function, making journalism – and journalists – not only valuable but also well worth saving.
In addition to being way off base, Paton’s conclusion is oddly illogical, inasmuch as he is counting heavily on journalism to turn around the recently bankrupt company that he is trying to restore to financial health.
Here’s what Paton said in remarks prepared for a keynote speech last week to the WAN-IFRA International Newsroom Summit in Zurich: “As career journalists and managers, we have entered a new era where what we know and what we traditionally do has finally found its value in the marketplace and that value is about zero.”
Explaining that the digital media have empowered everyone, everywhere to report or comment on the news, Paton pronounced “traditional journalism” to be dead, according to a text of the speech he published at the blog he maintains to motivate the employees of his company. “The Crowd collectively knows more about any subject, city or event we choose to cover than we do.”
In steering Journal Register out of the bankruptcy occasioned by the financial over-reaching of his predecessors, Paton has decided to outsource almost every aspect of his business – from ad make-up to information technology – so he can concentrate on its two unique competencies: content production and advertising sales.
To be successful, Paton necessarily must rely on the skillful production, aggregation and curation of reporting, writing, photography and other content to create high-quality, authoritative and compelling products that people want to read – and where advertisers want to appear. While some of the content can, and should, come from the crowd instead of paid staffers, someone is going to have to make sense of all the yadda-yadda on the web.
In other words, the value of Paton’s publications in the eyes of readers and advertisers will require them to be professionally put together.
That will require journalists performing journalism. So, how can he say that journalists – and journalism – have no commercial value?
Even if, arguendo, there were no “commercial value” to journalism, the pursuit of disciplined and open-minded inquiry into public affairs and social issues has an incalculable value to society. Whether they are working for a media company or blogging for free, ethical and professional journalists contribute just as much as artists, scientists, academic researchers and people who dedicate themselves to fighting to assure honest government, enhance social justice and alleviate human suffering.
Given the flood of free content available on the web, publishers may not have to pay journalists what they are worth. But that doesn’t make journalism, or journalists, worthless.
First and foremost, Paton is wrong to dismiss the intrinsic value to society of vigorous, ethical and independent journalism that is committed to comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. There is no other institution to perform this function, making journalism – and journalists – not only valuable but also well worth saving.
In addition to being way off base, Paton’s conclusion is oddly illogical, inasmuch as he is counting heavily on journalism to turn around the recently bankrupt company that he is trying to restore to financial health.
Here’s what Paton said in remarks prepared for a keynote speech last week to the WAN-IFRA International Newsroom Summit in Zurich: “As career journalists and managers, we have entered a new era where what we know and what we traditionally do has finally found its value in the marketplace and that value is about zero.”
Explaining that the digital media have empowered everyone, everywhere to report or comment on the news, Paton pronounced “traditional journalism” to be dead, according to a text of the speech he published at the blog he maintains to motivate the employees of his company. “The Crowd collectively knows more about any subject, city or event we choose to cover than we do.”
In steering Journal Register out of the bankruptcy occasioned by the financial over-reaching of his predecessors, Paton has decided to outsource almost every aspect of his business – from ad make-up to information technology – so he can concentrate on its two unique competencies: content production and advertising sales.
To be successful, Paton necessarily must rely on the skillful production, aggregation and curation of reporting, writing, photography and other content to create high-quality, authoritative and compelling products that people want to read – and where advertisers want to appear. While some of the content can, and should, come from the crowd instead of paid staffers, someone is going to have to make sense of all the yadda-yadda on the web.
In other words, the value of Paton’s publications in the eyes of readers and advertisers will require them to be professionally put together.
That will require journalists performing journalism. So, how can he say that journalists – and journalism – have no commercial value?
Even if, arguendo, there were no “commercial value” to journalism, the pursuit of disciplined and open-minded inquiry into public affairs and social issues has an incalculable value to society. Whether they are working for a media company or blogging for free, ethical and professional journalists contribute just as much as artists, scientists, academic researchers and people who dedicate themselves to fighting to assure honest government, enhance social justice and alleviate human suffering.
Given the flood of free content available on the web, publishers may not have to pay journalists what they are worth. But that doesn’t make journalism, or journalists, worthless.
posted by Newsosaur at 5:00 AM
9 Comments:
Exactly so.
Alan:
Years ago I was in a meeting at the Philadelphia Enquirer where a bright young computer scientist from MIT was explaining to Max King that advances in technology would one day make it possible for everyone to report on the news – enabling the newspaper to just “aggregate” all the stories on a computer and get rid of the expensive journalists. This was long before the term ‘Crowdsourcing’ or anything like it had entered the lexicon. In the middle of his presentation the computer guy cast about for a word to describe this eventual content cornucopia – and in the pause Max said: “That is fascinating - and we already have a word for it in the newspaper business”. The computer guy rose for the bait like a big fat trout: “What is it Mr. King?” Max said: “We call it crap”, and the meeting, mercifully, ended.
And crap it is, unless it is aggregated, curated, filtered, considered, organized and put in context and presented in a thoughtful form appealing to the target audience – you remember Alan, like you used to do at the Sun-Times!
Now any idiot can see that the sausage-packing editorial heyday of yesteryear is over. Mr. Paton’s job is not to point that out (maybe he should have consulted, god forbid, and editor).
His role is to figure out how to shepherd the brands he is responsible for into a new economic environment – a digital environment where production is not a core value, nor are trucks, or ink, or inserters, or presses, or any of the other once valuable sausage-making apparatus. Those brands of his have value and heft in their communities – Still. That value is the result of consistent efforts over a considerable period of time by journalists and editors to make things understandable by an audience.
People still want that. People still value good story selection and style and graphics and pictures and all that jazz. People want things explained to them, because they are busy and tired and confused and afraid. And if sufficiently challenged and intrigued they want more.
So Mr. Paton (and the rest of the brain trust out there) – start figuring out what it takes to operate a media brand without printing anything. I will bet either he, or his successor finds that content is the key ingredient in the recipe.
I once heard a publisher talking about the divide between advertising (revenue producing) and editorial (revenue consuming) and he said, "I have yet to see anyone sell a box of M&Ms with nothing inside the box."
Hey! Love to see some commentators speaking up for good journalism here... and it looks like the NYT Paywall... IS WORKING!!!
http://www.businessinsider.com/time-for-a-lot-of-people-to-eat-crow-the-new-york-times-paywall-is-working-2011-6
For the record, Paton did not lead JRC out of bankruptcy. The company emerged from Chapter 11well before Paton took charge.
In addition, although JRC posted a profit of $41 million in Paton's first year, someone should ask how that compared to the prior year's performance.
This guy said it very elegantly:
. . . the new world has all the shiny bells and whistles that make it the most glamorous tool in the shed, but don’t throw out all the older tools just yet; they are the ones paying the bills for the new tools of tomorrow.
regardless of the life cycle in your market, you are sure to reap the harvest you invest in. If you play the game as if you have five years left, gutting the circulation departments and leaving them to fight on the modern battlefield with pitchforks, the odds are very good that you will have close to five years left in the game. On the other hand, if you play the game as if you have 20 years left, the odds are much higher that you will have closer to 20 years left rather that five.
Read more: http://www.inma.org/blogs/value-content/post.cfm/newspapers-we-will-reap-the-harvest-we-cultivate#ixzz1PQNbErJg
This guy said it very elegantly:
the new world has all the shiny bells and whistles that make it the most glamorous tool in the shed, but don’t throw out all the older tools just yet; they are the ones paying the bills for the new tools of tomorrow.
regardless of the life cycle in your market, you are sure to reap the harvest you invest in. If you play the game as if you have five years left, gutting the circulation departments and leaving them to fight on the modern battlefield with pitchforks, the odds are very good that you will have close to five years left in the game. On the other hand, if you play the game as if you have 20 years left, the odds are much higher that you will have closer to 20 years left rather that five.
Read more: http://www.inma.org/blogs/value-content/post.cfm/newspapers-we-will-reap-the-harvest-we-cultivate#ixzz1PQOEJgq5
Content is King in Publishing, like Location is in Real Estate, like Liquidity is in Finance, like Character is in Reputation Management...
A million spider monkeys or chimps pounding away at Underwoods, Linotronic or Bloomberg workstations, cannot hope to produce saleable copy, or a succinct paraphrase of Pres. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Neither can machine translation by Google or Yahoo! approximate the style and tone of Wordsworth or H.L. Mencken. These propellerheads often can code, but can't produce a Powerpoint presentation without spelling errors. Just because you have some Post Hole Digger's Degree doesn't give you license to pontificate about the artistic matters of literary value, although you might figure out some of the technical elements of style by reading Strunk or White. Owning a printing press doesn't mean you will produce 1:1 watermarked color reproductions of U.S. currency [for long, anyway ;-p ] or that you will make meaningful contributions to journalism.
Yes, 'crowdsourcing' should be judiciously, and sparingly, used, in our craft. It's nice to obtain people's opinions, but please, edit for clarity, conciseness and factual accuracy. Maybe even inject some consistent style and elements of poetry and alliteration into that wood pulp, clay, ink and varnish mixture!
Markets set prices.
Price is not the same as value. They are different economic prices.
Conflating the two is both erroneous and leads to mismanagement.
Thank you for pointing out how illogical the statement was, I agree!
I will add, however, that as long as distribution is through digital means and the marginal cost of distribution of content trends toward zero, the competitive equilibrium price a firm can charge for content like news fact that can not be copyrighted - will trend towards zero.
That said, the American media business never relied on high consumer prices to make a profit, rather the model was about selling the attention of the audience.
As the audience becomes an active community on digital platforms, there are ever more ways to engage and capture audience attention and market to the community.
In the short run, online marketing seems to just get cheaper and cheaper. However, this is simply the miscalculation of audience attention. The bottom line is that there is a finite amount of audience attention. It is a scarce good. The market will stabilize when metrics improve and as firms become more competitive and strategic about their marketing efforts online.
How do I know this stuff? I publish a local online newspaper with strong growth. Understanding the economic principles involved with online media is the most important brick one must lay when building a business around news and community.
Mistakes like "price = value" reveal a lack of understanding of the economic basics. It is not trivial and leads to the undermining of the value of the firm in the medium and long term.
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