Yesterday I was told my syndicated version of The Write Referee blog would be sacked by The Oakland Press in favor of citizen journalism.
Citizen journalism is the ingenious creation of editors lacking for legitimate journalistic resources and the financial inducements to compensate said legitimate journalists. As advertising revenue plummets, so does pay for real writers. What newspapers and an endless list of Internet blog sites offer is byline stardom in return for copy. The byline is the payment for the copy. All the newspapers pay for is the editor responsible for making sure it's true -- that's code for a once-over to make sure all the key facts of the story seem to be in place -- and the online platform they publish within.
I was fired in an e-mail, only to be e-mailed back and told I should look at the decision not as a firing but rather, an obvious inability to pay for content. In the next sentence, I was offered the same opportunity to be a citizen journalist and blog for free in the same manner I was previously paid for. No thanks. I already blog here for free.
No hard feelings.
Thankfully, I have a handful of key accounts to sustain me. I have a successful book writing endeavor that invigorates me. And, as you can see from the picture, I have a couple other hobbies to make that blue feeling feel a little more green.
I'm not mad. The Oakland Press was very good to me and payment wasn't substantial to begin with. Newspapers are in disarray nationally and locally, the consequences are beyond dire. Royal Oak's Daily Tribune closed their Royal Oak office a few months ago. The 'Press' is in bankruptcy. The Ann Arbor News is closing forever and the Detroit dailies are fighting for their very existence.
The Ann Arbor News isn't that big of a loss. Ask syndicated sports columnist Jason Whitlock or author John Bacon what they thought of The News in the 1990s and you'll probably get a sarcastic laugh at the thought of journalism and The News in the same sentence. It's one of the reasons the paper's extensive look at the University of Michigan's football program two years ago -- one that exposed a culture of fraudulent academia in return for athletic excellence -- garnered little more than a slight yawn when it was published with a heavy dose of self-promotion. This is a paper that halted the presses containing their staff's critical review of the city's annual art fair in the mid-1990s in favor of mindless wire copy. The Ann Arbor News stopped being viable years ago.
What does sadden me is the continued resistance to understand and embrace the Internet age from the newspaper management at-large. Oh sure, the papers all have online sites, but newspaper platforms lag, almost languish, behind the cutting edge of the Internet age. The papers haven't figured out how to seamlessly interweave advertising with copy. They don't have any proprietary knowledge of what to charge for Internet advertising beyond using the sacred 'Hit' totals and most savvy with the 'Net know those totals can be very misleading. I think we all know a 'hit' doesn't always equate to a 'read'.
To survive, newspapers need to embrace their long history of credible journalism to re-make themselves into a trusted source to be an all-points information source. However, the panic that ensues from the thought of you clicking on a link and not returning to their site makes nearly every managing editor squirm, so most paper sites don't list many competing links and in return, most readers start elsewhere. The 'hit' totals suffer and not surprisingly, ad revenue falls short.
Further, with every print edition, resources are bled from the online edition and vice-versa. Already suffering from heavy operating losses makes available cash infusions for an online conversion difficult to tender. All of this contributes to the thinning of the herd in the daily publication business.
The new age of media arrived long ago -- will the papers figure it out before they're out of business for good?
(Picture courtesy Oakland University, May 2005)
Dear Mr. Cameron and Mr. Gantert,
While you both raise good points on issues I’ve commented on, I’d like to take this opportunity to speak for myself.
Regarding my independence, it is true I teach at Michigan and appear on WTKA. I enjoy both endeavors very much – teaching has been particularly rewarding – but neither comes close to paying my bills, nor do they entail long-term commitments from any of the parties involved. They certainly have not stopped me from being highly critical of Fielding Yost’s racism, the Fab Five’s reprehensible behavior on and off the court, the department’s remarkably weak leadership throughout the 1990s, the stumbling search for a new football coach in 2007, and the flat-footed responses to Jim Harbaugh’s comments and the Ann Arbor News series. Jim Carty also successfully persuaded me on the air one Sunday that Tommy Amaker needed to go when it still appeared Michigan would retain him.
As for my response to Jim Harbaugh’s comments and the series in the Ann Arbor News on academics and athletics, my two commentaries on Michigan Public Radio on these subjects (which you can find on the johnubacon.com blog) cover just about everything I have to say on the subject. But, in a nutshell, I believe Harbaugh’s criticisms were not supported by the facts about the BGS degree and the experiences of the late Dr. Tom Slade and Rich Hewlett -- two former starting quarterbacks who went on to become a dentist and an attorney, respectively. The academic series revealed independent studies were being abused by some athletes and professors, but the weight of the series struck me as much ado about not much. This is open to debate, I realize – I consider Jim Carty a good friend, yet we certainly disagree on this -- but that is my view.
If memory serves, the issues raised in my 1994 Ann Arbor Observer piece on the Ann Arbor News focused more on management decisions (some certainly questionable) and morale (undeniably low at the time) than journalistic quality. While it’s easy to take shots at any daily paper, and the News has made mistakes, I have always believed the Ann Arbor News is better than most papers of its size – and the annual awards it received would seem to support this. In fact, I have quoted the paper almost weekly on the radio, as a reliable and vital news source.
Anyone who’s listened to our last two Monday afternoon shows on WTKA, devoted principally to the fate of the Ann Arbor News, knows how deeply I regret the demise of our local paper. While I might have had, as Frost would say, a “lover’s quarrel” with the paper on occasion, I feel strongly its disappearance is bad for journalism, bad for the city, and downright sad for those of us who cut our teeth in that newsroom, and made lifetime friends there.
I, for one, will miss it greatly. And I’m certain I’m not alone.
Beyond this, I’ll leave the debate here to you two and others who no doubt know much more about the Ann Arbor News than I ever will.
Respectfully submitted,
-John Bacon
Posted by: John U. Bacon | April 03, 2009 at 00:32
Mr. Gantert:
John Bacon wrote an article about the 'culture of fear' at 'The News' in the 1994 titled "The News Loses A Star". I worked there at the time and it was a truthful, detailed look at the political and sometimes oppressive newsroom in Ann Arbor.
It would seem you've launched into your response without knowing the entirety of Bacon's work. And I'm guessing here but if I were a betting man, I'd lay flat bills that you know nothing except what the paper told you of Jason Whitlock's departure or Jeff Chadia.
The paper has literally dozens of other examples of killing the real news in favor of a more tasteful look at Ann Arbor while mashing neighboring communities like Ypsilanti into the ground.
Finally, your letter to me is one of the more mean-spirited responses I've read in some time. A good writer doesn't inject their person feelings about the subject but rather, responds to the message with merited reason. Who's the person who likes to rant on their lunch break here? You may not like my message but I'm no hack and you're awfully emotional to be calling out people for ranting.
I'm just saying...
Posted by: Mr. Referee | April 02, 2009 at 07:34
Mr. Referee,
I'm a reporter at the Ann Arbor News. Your take on my newspaper is problematic in many ways.
Who made John Bacon the barometer of journalistic excellence? He teaches at the University of Michigan. And he also comments on U-M on WTKA, a station that has been reputed to fire announcers U-M has issues with. And why not? WTKA's meal ticket is U-M sports. But that's a conflict of interest. You think Bacon is going to support an investigative report that shines a negative light on U-M?
Not if he wants to keep his radio shows.
So you got laid off? Welcome to the world of bloggers. Who doesn't have a blog? Supply and demand. There are literally hundreds of "citizen" bloggers that newspapers can now choose from. Some are bad. Some are good.
That same medium that allowed you to have the public voice has created competition.
But the simple fact is that online ad revenue is just not enough to support paid professional journalists, let alone the high school baseball umpire that wants to rant on his free time about high school sports.
Newspapers across the country are laying off journalists who won Pulitzer Prizes, so excuse me if I don't shed tear for the wanna-be prep editor bemoaning he can't make a quick buck with his lunch break rants.
Posted by: Tom Gantert | April 01, 2009 at 21:38