Every time you read a news story that mentions the president’s “jobs bill,” pause and consider that the journalist who wrote those words is living under the likely threat of losing his or her job.
What’s it like to write about the decline in solid, middle-class jobs knowing your own might be next?
It’s not a question that Peter Bhatia, editor of The Oregonian, contemplated in a tepid column he wrote recently updating the latest layoffs and changes at his newspaper. A follow-up column wasn’t much better.
Bhatia invites questions from readers, then doesn’t answer most of them. Of course, he may not have much choice. Bhatia doesn’t own the paper. He’s just another working stiff – though highly paid.
The media (especially NPR) binged on the recent 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, emphasizing the racial angle but only occasionally mentioning that it was actually a march for jobs.
Fifty years later it isn’t just blacks looking for work. College graduates – even those with light beige skin – are in need of jobs. What – if anything – is going to replace all the lost family-wage jobs? When President Barack Obama talks about his “jobs’ bill,” what specific jobs is he referring to?
He speaks vaguely about high-tech jobs. Can anybody be trained to work in high tech? We all have different talents and aptitudes. Just because we use electronic devices does not mean that we can – or even want – to work in technology. (How many people who drive want to design cars or be auto mechanics?)
A couple of years ago, out of curiosity, I took a course at Portland Community College in writing HTML code. While I enjoyed seeing what goes on behind the scenes of a Web site, it seemed to me that writing code was a task well-suited for someone with autism.
Indeed, a little research turns up stories like, “Tech giant sees competitive advantage for autistic.” Even Temple Grandin recommends computer programming as a career for the autistic.
What if the high-tech jobs we are chasing for the future are not satisfying work for many people? What if digital is not the answer to all our prayers?
These are not questions that are asked and answered on the president’s short and long Q-and-A’s about his job’s bill. And they are not questions that newspapers seem eager to explore.
Raising such doubts runs the risk of being perceived as old and out of touch. Fortunately, nobody would dare call Jeffrey Bezos a Luddite.
Maybe it takes someone who’s been on the cutting edge of technology to point out to newspapers what they have that’s special. Newspaper executives have been so busy trying to appear digitally relevant – and laying off staff – to look creatively at what they have.
Bezos is buying the Washington Post, and he spent two days meeting with employees. According to The New York Times, while the news staff speculated on how many electronic devices Bezos had in his pockets, he suggested that the paper might bring back in print some of the sections it had eliminated for digital only.
Bezos prefers reading a newspaper on paper vs. digital.
“People will buy a package. They will not pay for a story,” he said in the Post.
Websites like Gigacom reacted predictably: “But is he (Bezos) misunderstanding how the news business has changed? … The scarcity value of news has disappeared.”
The scarcity value has disappeared only because newspapers still exist to produce copy with real journalists, who still report stories that non-newspaper sites feast on. Sites like Gigacom desperately need the newspaper business to continue as is, providing news for free so they will have something to respond and link to.
Digital devices don’t dig up the news, report it and write it. Digital devices do not cultivate credible sources or take complicated information and translate it for ordinary readers. Journalists do.
Sadly, The Oregonian is following the digital pack.
“Our digital audience has grown exponentially these past few years through the website, mobile capabilities and apps,” Bhatia said.
What he didn’t say is that his print product has been shrinking exponentially as solid news content, produced by flesh-and-blood journalists, has been reduced.
By firing experienced reporters and editors, The Oregonian saves on salaries but loses employees who know that news doesn’t just break. Often the most important news, the most meaningful news is found through myriad sources – government records, people bearing witness, following a hunch or simply hanging out. This doesn’t just happen with an easy click of a keyboard.
“New staff members are being hired, and their digital skills will create more news and a better online and mobile experience as we go forward,” Bhatia said.
I don’t buy Bhatia’s – or any other newspaper executive’s – excuse that only young reporters can have digital skills. What young reporters have are lower salaries, in some cases, very low salaries. And their youth is a prized American demographic, which news executives think will magically attract young readers and advertisers.
The young do not stay young, and people’s habits and preferences – no matter what their age – change. One of the stupidest beliefs embraced by American newspaper executives was that newspaper reading was a habit that must be acquired in youth, or it won’t be a habit in adulthood.
Now they are assuming that the young will only get their news digitally and that 50 years from now, as a new crop of old farts, they will be hooked up to the latest tech devices and have the news transmitted directly into their brains. (Reading will be dismissed as worthless as paper.)
We won’t return to print-only newspapers, but the future isn’t going to be digital-only. People like variety. They also respect classics (and not just in the literary sense). If you spend your workday in front of a computer – as more people of all ages do – going offline is a treat.
Even the late Aaron Swartz, a brilliant (and young!) computer programmer who helped develop the RSS software we all use, in the years before his suicide decided that “computers were awful in many ways.” He spent a month in 2009 with no Internet access and said it was the happiest time of his life, according to a New Yorker profile.
The last 15 years that I spent in newspapers, news executives were constantly seeking redesigns, new marketing studies, smaller pages, new marketing studies, youth-oriented features, more marketing studies – and laying off staff.
The public could smell the fear.
“Everything all right at that place you work?” a San Bernardino, Calif., police sergeant asked me after my paper had undergone another redesign and even briefly changed its name from “The Sun” to the “San Bernardino County Sun.”
Even great newspapers can’t hide their desperation.
Last year, The New York Times basked in an interactive digital project called “Snow Fall” that drew millions to its Web site.
“Snow Fall” was hailed as the future for newspapers. How many Web visitors will pay to read and watch projects like “Snow Fall,” especially once the novelty wears off? How many former print advertisers will rush to return via a newspaper’s Web site?
Unless it can replace the advertising revenue that newspapers lost to the Web, special projects like “Snow Fall” will continue to be just that – special projects.
In his Hollywood masterpiece, “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” writer William Goldman describes the panic that hit the movie business in 1981-82 when the major studios suffered a string of failures.
Like newspapers, movies had always been reliable moneymakers – until they weren’t. Goldman explored the movie business, its stars and executives, looking for the secret between success and failure in a movie. He discovered this single most important fact: “Nobody knows anything.”
That’s how it is for newspapers now. That’s how it is for President Obama, his economists and their job’s bill. That’s how it is for the future of digital.
To paraphrase Goldman, not one person in the news business, in the tech industry or in the White House knows for a certainty what is going to work. (See Goldman’s chapter, “Studio Executives” or Page 39 in the 1984 paperback edition. How’s that for a link? Reminds me of that bumper sticker: “Read a fucking book.”)
As an entrepreneur, Bezos understands and accepts the risk of not knowing for sure. But the way some employees at the Post seemed eager to embrace him as a Sugar Daddy suggests that they don’t.
Despite the financial woes of city newspapers, there is still a snootiness about who is worthy of owning them. When Bezos’ purchase was first announced, there were snide comments that at least the new owner wasn’t Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.
It isn’t Newmark’s fault that he saw an opportunity in newspapers’ classified ads that they didn’t see.
While newspapers were spending money on more marketing studies, shrinking pages, reducing staff and chasing after young readers, Newmark started Craigslist – and snatched the classified ad market that used to be reliable source of revenue for newspapers.
Even more amazing, Newmark has carried on successfully, year after year, with the same boring design.
Meanwhile, The Oregonian will try another digital incarnation.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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“What – if anything – is going to replace all the lost family-wage jobs?”
SNAP cards, tens of millions of them. That’s our future.
Tomorrow I’m off to Asia again, because that’s where the work is. We will never and can never compete with those nations that so devalue human life that their workers are virtual slaves, and their environmental policy can be summed up in one word: oblivion. There’s no way we would peacefully accept those standards here at home in the name of competition.
What reason is there to report directly from the streets of America anyway? It’s either body counts or the lines in front of the Apple Store, but nothing productive seems to happen here any more. Tell me who you know who produces anything locally, except perhaps food and drink.
The great irony is that the papers weren’t “in trouble” so much as they were losing some of their cushy and predictable 15% profit margin, and the owners wanted it back pronto. The solution is always the same in top-down management styles: cut the bottom line. Well heck, if you cut it to zero we can all go home.
Or instead you might have asked what it is people want to buy and give them more value instead of trying to trick the customers into buying a cheaper product at the same price.
I like the daily paper, and I need the daily paper. How else am I going to start my fireplace?
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