Whap! Whap!

Stanley Bing of Fortune writes a scathing entry about people who question the future of newspapers.

He makes several points. Among them:

• People see other industries as dying, but never seem to see anything wrong with their own.
• He and his children enjoy newspapers, so all is well.
• The internet is a medium used to spread rumor, gossip, falsehoods, etc.
• 89 percent of citizen journalists are full of it.

I actually agree with most of his points, but overall he misses the point entirely.

For example, I agree that people tend to over-emphasize the troubles facing other industries while downplaying those facing their own. Unfortunately, newspaper and magazine folks are more guilty of that than most, and Mr. Bing’s column is a prime example. I don’t believe I’ll live to see a day with no newspapers. I think that’s possible, but not likely.

I am, however, certain that I will live to see the day when newspapers in general will be shadows of their former self in terms of size, content and influence. That day is today.

I’m also certain that soon we’ll see far fewer daily papers than exist today. I don’t know what percentage decrease we’ll see. Maybe the 89 percent he throws out in a later point …

He says he and his children still enjoy newspapers. I don’t doubt that, but there are two problems with this point. First, I don’t know anyone who suggests that no one (even no one under the age of 35) likes newspapers. There are lots of people in all age groups who do. But there are many fewer of them than 10 years ago, and the number continues to fall. Second, the challenge isn’t so much getting people to want newspapers; it’s finding a model that makes filling that desire possible. I would love a compact, safe helicopter that runs on water and doesn’t make any noise. Anyone have a business model for meeting my desire?

The internet is a medium used to spread rumors and falsehoods. So is television. So are newspapers. So is talk radio.

Finally, 89 percent of citizen journalists are full of it. Probably true. I think 89 percent of newspaper columnists are full of it, too. I read newspapers for the 11 percent who write informative, compelling stories. I read the internet every day for the 11 percent of citizen journalists who do the same.

So I would add that 89 percent of the people who say that newspapers are dead are 89 percent full of it. Mr. Bing, as evidenced by this column, is 89 percent full of it. I’m 89 percent full of it.

But somewhere in all those remaining 11 percents there’s truth about the bleak future for many papers, and there’s truth about what can be done to make the future brighter for those that survive.

Your editors at The Record of Hackensack are on a witch hunt against liberal bias. They’re watching your every word, which might make you nervous, because “liberal bias“ is such a nebulous phrase.

I’m here to help. In several decades as a newspaper editor, I took hundreds of complaints about liberal bias, and in my current job I hunt them down on forums and in letters to the editor. I think I have some tips for you to avoid some common mistakes:

• Mention Barack Obama’s name only in reference to attacks against him. If you must print rebuttals, identify those making the rebuttals with adjectives such as “Muslim,” “left-wing,” “controversial,” or just plain “liberal.”
• Label any story about science, especially those about evolution, fossils, dinosaurs or global warming, as “theory.” Ideally, also use one or more of the adjectives above to describe the theory. This does not include any reference to science made from the pulpit of a conservative church, which should be reported as fact.
• Make no mention of terms such as “recession,” “lagging consumer confidence,” or “layoffs,” unless you explain that they are caused by consumer fears of an Obama presidency.
• Do not run any story identifying someone as gay unless it involves an indictment, incest, child pornography or overdue library books.
• Insert the phrase “where the John McCain-backed surge is working” after every reference to Iraq.
• Limit pictures of blacks to police mug shots.
• Do the same for pictures of Hispanics, but also list their immigration status.

You’ll make the occasional slip-up, like the one I made a few years ago when I ran an AccuWeather forecast for rain on the Fourth of July. I fielded an angry phone call from a woman who had heard a forecast of no rain on a local television station. This was clearly another example of the paper’s liberal bias because we wanted to discourage people from attending patriotic rallies.

Still, if you follow this advice I am confident you can reduce charges of liberal bias by up to 7 percent. There’s nothing you can do about other obvious signs of liberal bias, such as late papers, circulation rate increases, typos, ink that comes off on readers’ fingers, natural disasters …

And please, don’t let any of this crimp your writing style. Bias against gays, blacks, liberals, Muslims, the United Church of Christ and others is still OK.

In the New York Observer, Iraq war correspondents lament the lack of a narrative for their coverage (http://www.observer.com/baghdad).

What bothers me about the mainstream media coverage of Iraq is not the lack of narrative in the war zone. It’s the lack of coverage of the war in Washington. For example, what is John McCain’s strategy?

This morning on the Today show, McCain put on his best dismissive smirk and praised the glorious progress we’re making. When Matt Lauer lobbed him a softball question about when troops can start coming home, McCain’s smirk got bigger and he said it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

All that matters, he said, is that casualties remain low.

What sort of strategy is that? The war can go on forever, as long as casualties remain at a level he’s comfortable with.

Barack Obama’s strategy really isn’t much clearer, but no one presses either of them on this issue.

The narrative is there. The problem is the press, and the politicians, are afraid to tell it.

So Dean Singleton says 40 percent of the top metros in the country are losing money, and that the future of the industry is online.

So Mr. Singleton can’t tell Barack Obama from Osama bin Laden, but he does see the future clearly, right? Not so much. Toward the end of his speech, he says this:

This year, we’ll generate 89% of total revenue from our core, 7% from online and 4% from new products.

On operating cash flow, we currently generate 73% from core, 22% from online and 5% from niche products.

In five years or 2012, we expect 68% of revenue to come from core, 20% from online and 12% from niche.

On operating cash flow, our goal in 2012 is 40% from core, 50% from online and 10% from niche.

What’s wrong with this picture? First, his choice of wording. As long as print is the “core,” it will be treated as the core. Second, print does not generate anywhere near 89 percent of current revenue; that’s due to legacy accounting that attributes classified revenue to print.

Finally, he brags about his heavy investment in the dying core while laying off the people needed for the growing segments of the company.

Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Brit Hume, Chris Wallace, Charles Gibson, Tim Russert … all smirky conservative newscasters. They’re OK. There’s really only one terrible threat to journalism on TV today, and he just happens to be the one liberal broadcaster: Keith Olbermann. Read the buffoonery from the oh-so-liberal Los Angeles Times here.

The Record of Hackensack is going ahead with its probe of nefarious LIBERAL BIAS.

Research uncovered for editors the startling fact that some people who believe the Record is liberal. Imagine that. Vague, unsupported shouts of “liberal bias!” The Record surely is the first newspaper to face this charge.

Where have these editors been? There is a very small, but very vocal, minority of readers at every paper who attribute anything they dislike about the paper to “liberal bias.” It’s and empty, meaningless phrase. Never mind that most papers blindly printed pro-war propaganda in their news columns, print attacks against Barack Obama in their news columns while giving Republicans a pass and now are picking up John McCain’s diversionary “congressional earmarks” cry in the name of investigative journalism.

Never mind that papers overwhelmingly endorsed George Bush on their editorial pages and print conservative op-ed columns far more often than liberal thought. Never mind all that. A few chants of “liberal bias,” and clueless editors respond by becoming even more conservative, alienating the majority of their potential marketplace.

Newspapers are not dying because of the internet. They’re dying because they have lost their audience, particularly their younger, better-educated readers. You know the type: Liberals.

Forget politics. This obsession with becoming more conservative is bad business.

So drink the Liberal Bias Kool-Aid, Record editors. The rest of us will watch one more newspaper continue in its death spiral.

This is not, strictly speaking, about newspapers. Then again, with the announcement of AP and 25 papers defining congressional earmarks as their critical campaign issue, maybe it is.

Apologists for the American health-care system long argued that we have the best quality of care in the world. That notion has largely been debunked, so the apologists cite the bureaucratic nightmare national health care would create. Hmmm. Let me tell you about bureaucratic nightmares …

Last week, we received a refund for an overpayment we made to a hospital. An overpayment we made in 2006.

This week, we received a letter from a collection agency for services rendered in January 2008. A bill for services the hospital has acknowledged, on several occasions, that we don’t even owe. After hours of frustrating calls, both the hospital and the collection agency have agreed to send us letters acknowledging their error. Anyone want to bet we don’t get one or both of those letters? Anyone want to bet we’ve heard the last from these folks?

In summary. When a hospital owes a patient a debt it doesn’t dispute, it takes two years to pay it (without interest). When a patient is wrongly billed, that bill makes it to a collection agency in four months (plus 15 percent interest).

And government health care would be a bureaucratic nightmare?

Yet the press mostly lets politicians skate when it comes to health care. John McCain mumbles something about health care here being the best in the world and the only fixes it needs is to stop malpractice suits, allow people to buy drugs from Canada and to slow the skyrocketing costs. Debate moderators and pundits yawn and nod their heads and get back to attacking Hillary Clinton’s depiction of her Bosnia visit and Barack Obama’s pastor scandal du jour.

Oh yes, and then papers ignore the issues of the day to instead eagerly jump on John McCain’s earmark bandwagon.

Maybe this really is about newspapers after all.

The Associated Press and 25 newspapers are launching an in-depth analysis of Congressional earmarks.

The press has been asleep for seven year of scandals, but now comes alive to carry John McCain’s torch.

We don’t know the results of this study yet, except that it’s sure to provide ammunition for the GOP, even if only one piece of pork is uncovered.

This project is not inherently bad until compared with newspapers’ sorry performance holding the Bush Administration accountable. Where was this effort during the run-up to war? For No Child Left Behind? For unfunded mandates? Health care? Media concentration? Federal appointments? Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Where was this project when the GOP ran Congress?

If nothing else, the press is letting McCain frame the debate. Compared to the war in Iraq, health care, Medicare, etc., earmarks are at the bottom of the priority list.

Unless you’re John McCain, who wants to divert the nation’s attention from these issues …

Regardless of the rhetoric, newspapers view themselves first and foremost as factories producing a product, not as information companies.

My first post on the subject suggested that gutting classifieds is a good start to changing the self-image of papers. In that post I mentioned Steve Outing’s new reinventingclassifieds.com, which offers up some innovative thinking. It’s a good site and I don’t want to pick on it or its users. But even among these innovative thinkers you find people tied to some pretty outdated ways of thinking about technology. Here’s an example:

“We need a better online ad placement system and/or verticals offering video/animation, all the bells and whistles at the point of sale. AND ALL THIS FROM ONE VENDOR!”

Software vendors are necessary at papers primarily because of obsolete production methods. Being reliant on these vendors, even the very best ones, limits what a newspaper can do. Until newspapers adapt to open-source, platform-independent software, they’ll be weighed down by their vendors. And these vendors are getting weaker all the time, because trying to run a software company with only a few hundred potential customers is not a very good business model.

In the case of classifieds, the need for specialized vendors virtually disappears with a few relatively minor changes to the business model:

• Make private-party ads free, or at least charge per ad, not by line, and billing becomes easy.
• Stop nickel-and-diming customers with silly upsells, and the software suddenly becomes pretty vanilla.
• Automate the process for web placement and you can survive with almost no staff, so you don’t need vendor workstations.
• Print classifieds in easy-to-read formats and you can use off-the-shelf publishing software.

Some of the software you need if you make the right changes is free. Some of it is a couple hundred dollars a workstation, instead of thousands. Hiring IT help is easier because employees don’t need to know or learn arcane proprietary systems.

Get out of the assembly-line factory thinking, and everything becomes cheaper and easier. “Change” no longer means endless vendor interviews and scary, problematic conversions; it becomes organic and fluid.

“The Surge is working!”, the debate moderators, reporters and pundits keep telling us. Apparently it has worked so well the press doesn’t even have to cover Iraq any longer.

The Surge has worked so well that the press doesn’t even have to ask John McCain what his strategy for the war is. It’s enough to just print his speeches attacking Barack Obama.

The Surge has worked so well that most papers have ignored inconvenient facts such as the ones The Washington Post uncovered here.

The Surge has worked so well that the McCain campaign, through its shadow arm “Vets for Freedom,” can have the press uncritically report on its preposterous ad, claiming that “the Surge worked,” and that the civil war, which conservatives have heretofore insisted never existed, is now “Over!” (The ad, if you haven’t already seen it a dozen times on the news shows, is here.)

So let’s have a surge of news coverage about the surge. Let’s examine all this wonderful progress, all the political reconciliation, economic rebirth, etc. etc.

Mostly, let’s ask George Bush and John McCain and Joe Lieberman one simple question: “What’s next?”

Let’s keep asking it until we get an answer.