TENTATIVE NEW WORLD
The University of Arkansas-Fayetteville journalism department sponsored a forum at the beginning of the month that warrants your attention. What follows is the piece written by Christopher Spencer, a former reporter for The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas who started up the online magazine Ozarks Unbound after the newspaper laid him off earlier this year.
Text of the story follows. The link is here:
By Christopher Spencer
Ozarks Unbound
For decades, newspapers created information monopolies throughout most of the country.
New challenges and challengers on the Internet are tearing into newspaper’s financial bottom lines and competing as news sources, destroying those old monopolies, said Gordon Witkin, managing editor at the Center for Public Integrity.
Witkin served on a panel Thursday titled “The Fog of New Media” exploring the current state of news media and what the future means with the growing prominence of online forms of journalism. The panel was hosted by the University of Arkansas’ journalism department.
The long-standing divide between business realities and newsroom concerns created naivete among journalists in the business of news. That naivete leaves news gatherers in a position where they now struggle with how to support themselves with their skills, said panelist Matt Waite
Waite is a news technologist at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida and co-founder of a media consulting company called Hot Type. He started his journalism career more than a decade ago at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Newspapers struggle with dropping circulation numbers and dwindling advertising revenue, Witkin said. It’s time for journalists to better understand the market realities of making journalism pay.
“The underlying problem here is that those of us who are ‘Capital J’ journalists, we can’t really ignore the business aspects of any of this anymore. We were really, for decades, lulled into a false sense of security because newspapers were virtual monopolies and that meant that good journalism … good journalism made a lot of money, unbelievable amounts of money,” said Witkin.
“Truckloads of it,” interjected Waite.
Witkin continued.
“So we fooled ourselves into thinking that the corporations that owned these outlets were really interested in good journalism. In many cases, they weren’t. In many cases today, they are not. They’re businessmen. They believe that what they have is akin to a widget company. And if they are making a lot money, great. If they are not, then lay off 50 reporters.
“So we can’t ignore that anymore, we have to find ways to make this pay if the way we want to come at this business is going to survive.”
Newspapers and online news sources are still struggling with how to make the Internet pay enough to support quality journalism, Waite said.
These groups must learn to correctly value and define their audience and deliver that audience to advertisers.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette chose to pull its content behind a pay wall and requires readers to pay a subscription fee mainly as a defensive gesture to protect their print newspapers, said panelist Conan Gallaty, online director for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The Northwest Arkansas edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas, along with other WEHCO Media and Stephens Media properties merged into Northwest Arkansas Newspapers on Sunday.
The Stephens Media news properties are expected to require a paid subscription online by Dec. 1.
Gallaty said the second part of the company’s online policy is to provide original and different products online. Unique sites such as 501pets.com, a Web site geared toward pet owners in central Arkansas, is an example of this.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s central Arkansas Web site is arkansasonline.com and Northwest Arkansas Newspapers are found at nwanews.com. Gallaty praised the efforts at both of his company’s sites.
“There’s a ton of free original content on that site and on arkansasonline, breaking news, photos. There’s a lot of reasons to go there beyond paid content from the paper,” he said.
One student asked the panel whether it’s still worthwhile to pursue a journalism degree.
“It’s a wonderful and a terrible time to be pursuing a journalism education,” Waite answered.
“It’s wonderful time because this proliferation of choice might also indicate a proliferation of employment opportunities. You don’t have to look at the newspaper industry and think ‘Oh boy, the newspaper industry is in deep trouble.’”
“They are just one of many now doing journalism on the web, in print, in magazines. The road is far far far more wide open for you than it was for me I graduated in 1997. My choices were pretty much the papers or find something else to do.”
The 40-hour-a-week job is quickly disappearing. The new journalism jobs reward flexibility, aggressiveness and an entrepreneurial bent, Waite said.
“If you are fighter, this is a great time. You will have a job.”
Witkin added that the number of skills that needed by a young reporter are now more broad than they were. It used to be mainly a language field with writing and editing courses dominating.
Now, web design, graphics, video production and computer science are much-needed skills, he said
Journalism professor Katherine Shurlds told the panelists that herself and others in the Baby Boomer generation came up in newspapers at a time when journalists reported the news and didn’t care anything about advertisers.
“I think that the implosion of the news print business model has shown us that maybe the complete separation of advertising and, not so much reporting, but journalism, was maybe naive and ultimately harmful. It is naive to think that you can completely isolate the people who pay the bills from the product and still survive. And that we were able to pull it off for as long as we did may be a historical accident of monopoly pricing and power,” Waite said.
That doesn’t mean writing ad copy for advertisers, he added. But editorial staff should be aware when news content draws a specific audience and learn to market that, he said.
The wall between editorial choice and advertisers shouldn’t be breached, but being more sophisticated in marketing content is necessary, he said.