http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/davidhorsey/archives/132826.asp?from=blog_last3
Liberty, journalism and Sam Zell
Who is Sam Zell and why should you care? The answer to the second part of that question is easy: the health of our nation depends on an informed electorate and an informed electorate depends on an unfettered news media willing to tell people more than what they want to hear.
The answer to the first part of that question is that Sam Zell is the most vulgar embodiment of a pervasive bean counter mentality that is threatening the best of American journalism.
At the end of 2007, Zell concluded a sweet deal to take over the Chicago-based Tribune Company — sweet, because he did it with a small amount of his own money. He leveraged the deal by borrowing billions of dollars from the Tribune employees retirement funds (how this is legal, I cannot fathom). Now he is master of a media conglomerate that reaches 80 percent of Americans through 23 televisions stations and 11 daily newspapers.
What does Zell know about journalism? No more than any other billionaire real estate mogul. But that hasn’t stopped him from telling off journalists at some of the country’s best newspapers — the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Hartford Courant, the Baltimore Sun and, finest of all, the Los Angeles Times. Zell has told these new employees of his that they are practitioners of an arrogant kind of journalism that doesn’t give readers what they want and fails to make increasing company profits a key objective of news gathering.
As I detailed in my cartoon, Zell has delivered his message on a grand tour of his properties, dropping F-bombs all along the way. Worse than his crude language, though, is his vision of the future of journalism. Apparently, foreign coverage and reporting from Washington, D.C., will be discounted. Stories that seek to protect the public interest by tackling tough, important subjects will be frowned upon, unless they can somehow be shown to enhance the bottom line.
Yes, Zell wants to give people what they want. That’s not such a radical idea. From comics to horoscopes to gossip columns, newspapers have always done that. But Zell’s diatribes imply that should be the only way to define news. He seems to believe it is arrogant to say people don’t always know what they want or need to know. I’d argue that is not arrogant, it is a simple fact of communication. None of us — journalists included — know everything we need to know. We depend on people who are better informed to tell us many important things. It has always been the job of reporters to inform themselves and then to pass on that information to readers in an intelligent, fair way. It has also been the vital role of newspapers to act as watchdogs, to let corrupt politicians or corporate crooks know they are being observed by people who buy ink by the barrrel. I’m sure Zell would deny he is undercutting that role of the media outlets he now owns, but the fact is, the job cannot be done by newsrooms without the manpower to do it and without the assurance that traditional journalism will be honored rather than derided by the man at the top.
No one would dispute that newspapers are in dire trouble. Profits and readership are falling fast. But publishing pap will not bring them back. People still value serious and substantive information. Newspaper web sites are booming. What is missing is a new economic model for the news business. That’s what a smart businessman like Zell should be working on. Sure, journalists need to adapt to new ways of delivering information to an audience that can access a world of information with a few clicks of a mouse. But dumbing down the news product is the dumbest idea of all. It won’t bring in the profits wheeler-dealers like Zell crave. It will, however, imperil our free society.
There is a reason Thomas Jefferson said, if given the choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he’d opt for the latter. Jefferson knew there was nothing less at stake in that equation than our very liberty.
Waiting For Sam: Zell Hovering As Newsday Shakes
by John Koblin | February 26, 2008
This article was published in the February 27, 2008, edition of The New York Observer.
Sam Zell.
William Couch’s Flickr
Off the Record
*
Tell the Truth, But Slant, While Web Trolls Rant
It’s been a jittery two weeks in Melville.
Over the next week, Newsday reporters and editors are expecting an announcement about job cuts. Even veterans of the Vlad the Impaler year of 1995, in which Times Mirror ordered the elimination of 800 jobs from a payroll of 3,200, contemplate the coming week with dread.
“To be honest with you, it’s really grim here,” said James Bernstein, a business reporter and 30-year-veteran.
“It’s very bleak, and everyone is totally absorbed in it,” said another reporter.
“It really wears you down,” said William Murphy, a reporter on the Long Island desk.
On Feb. 13 Sam Zell—who bought Newsday’s parent company for $8.2 billion in December—wrote in an e-mail that there would be job cuts at every Tribune paper. The L.A. Times made its announcement the next day—100 to 150 jobs would be lost—and the Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant put their estimates at about 45 jobs. Newsday has yet to make its decisions on job cuts.
“First you’ll hear the rumor that it’s seven positions, then 40, then 10, then you hear the newsroom will be spared, then it won’t, and there’s just all these e-mails back and forth and no one knows what’s happening,” said Mr. Murphy.
“It’s difficult to work ’cause one second you’re on the phone and then somebody comes in and screams, ‘I heard the latest!’ And then you tell the guy on the phone, ‘Wait, I’ll be right back with you,’” said Mr. Bernstein.
And the latest is still little more than: The decision is coming.
“We’ve gotten the sense that it will be this week,” said Zachary Dowdy, a reporter and editorial vice president of the Local 406 that represents Newsday employees.
It’s an exacting time at papers nationally—The New York Times announced earlier this month that it was cutting about 100 newsroom jobs this year.
But at Newsday, there is no jobectomy left that won’t take out some bone.
Since the 1995 purge that eliminated the paper’s New York edition, the paper has steadily cut positions, generally in increments of 50.
Thirteen positions in the newsroom have been vacated in the last year, and have not been refilled; it’s not clear whether those will even count toward whatever cuts Newsday will have to make. (L.A. Times publisher David Hiller announced in his job-cuts e-mail that all open positions would be eliminated.)
In one demoralizing memo back in December, editor John Mancini announced that four star reporters were leaving: Matthew McAllester to Details; Katie Thomas to The Times; Tom McGinty to The Wall Street Journal; and James Rupert to Bloomberg News.
Mr. Murphy, the Long Island reporter, felt that Newsday got beat badly on a story in its own backyard—the story of the three children found dead in their Garden City apartment on Feb. 24—because the paper hasn’t replaced its social services reporter after Lauren Terrazzano died last year.
But what gets really depressing are the small-ticket items that are being slashed: Can the scale of Newsday’s current expenses really make the cancellation of staff subscriptions to the New York Post, the Daily News and USA Today seem worth the candle? Who’s going to bust ass on a story after they’ve initialed the pass-around chit on the single copy of The Times and two copies of The Wall Street Journal that wend their way among the desks of 26 reporters and editors?
“You get accustomed to opening newspapers at Newsday, it’s been like that for 30 years,” said Mr. Bernstein. “Now it’s like working blind!”
The environment like this one leads to all sorts of speculation: One reporter grumbled about the cafeteria shortening its hours after the paper replaced contractors late last year; another said that reporters are being discouraged to taking sources out to lunch.
The paper’s summer internship program, one of the most popular nationally with college seniors and J-school grad students since it offered up to 25 internships, a cushy $523 weekly salary and a job offer for two interns, will be cut this year. Two reporters said that word around the newsroom is that it will save the paper a little more than $100,000.
The paper’s spokeswoman, Deidra Parrish Williams, described the cut this way: “What I can tell you is that the summer internship is on a hiatus, but we will still have academic interns. With regards to your question about whether those interns will be offered jobs, that is still taking shape.”
http://www.observer.com/2008/waiting-sam-zell-hovering-newsday-shakes
They haven't done this in a long time.
After listening to the question on the video, by a male, ‘ the women are offended!’
I have to ask are they in a sheltered workshop?
Our high and mighty journalist sorely needs intervention to break free from his MSM koolaid drip.
Pure arrogance,....we are the gatekeepers of truth.....barf!
And I do think the people ought to know that....Global Warming may rapidly turn to Global Cooling!
What arrogance!