Tom Mangan’s home page

Paul Oberjuerge, formerly a sports columnist for a California newspaper, offers 10 suggestions for people who still have their jobs, assuming they want to keep them:

1. Embrace the web.  
2. Get a meat-and-potatoes job.  
3. Suck up.
4. Stop whining.
5. Produce.
6. Stop spending money.
7. Make sure your editor hired or promoted you.
8. Keep your head down.
9. Lose weight, tone up, get a haircut, consider cosmetic surgery.
10. Achieve excellence.

Click the link to check out his comments on each one. Pretty much spot-on.

Last week a bunch more people left. A few went of their own volition, most were fired. Here’s a complete list. I still have a job, though there were many times when I longed for the nerve (and the financial resources) to walk away and leave the business of putting out a paper to more intrepid types.

While we were in the midst of stewing in our angst last week, a former Merc guy wrote the newspaper’s obituary on his blog. I still detect a pulse, but there’s no denying it’s getting fainter.

I recall thinking back in about 1996 that newspapers had about five years to get their act together before the Internet swallowed them whole. Well, our tail is sticking out of the whale’s mouth but most of our business is working its way through the leviathan’s digestive system. It doesn’t look good.

One forward-looking blogger has created a site called newspaperdeathwatch.com … mind you this guy doesn’t work in print anymore so he can marvel at watching the Titanic sink beneath the icy waves from his online lifeboat. One page at his site explains something that I knew 10 years ago: newspapers were charging higher and higher ad and subscription rates for smaller and smaller audiences, a business that was clearly unsustainable. What did they do about this? Invest billions in R&D to keep themselves relevant in the new age? If only.

What happened was newspapers kept expecting somebody to show them the way in the Internet era but failed to notice that Google and Yahoo were inventing Internet advertising. Now the technology belongs to somebody else.

All this has been hashed out in excruciating detail all over the Web, with new predictions of the newspaper industry’s demise showing up daily — tempered with forced optimism that something better is on the horizon. It’s like that “you’re going to a better place” business people feel compelled to tell the doomed on their deathbeds. The dying know it’s a lie, but it’s such bad form to correct somebody when they’re trying to cheer you up.

Here’s what I think will happen: everybody who bought newspapers in the last three or four years will go bankrupt because they bought the top of a market held aloft by the phony housing boom, and some clever operative like Warren Buffett will come in and buy them up at pennies on the dollar.

Most of us will be forced to get real jobs, like school teachers or dogcatchers.

I have this half-baked notion that I can ride this out from the inside and see how it all shakes out. People still want local news, I figure, and people still want to buy ads to promote their local businesses. Newspapers didn’t have to adapt all those years when they had markets to themselves. Now they have no choice. With our industry’s survival on the line, we’re apt to get more creative, or die trying.

There are plenty of jobs out there for writers and editors. I keep meaning to apply for them. It’s possible these days to create a blog that draws enough traffic to earn a living. I keep fixing to get ready to create one.

Back when I had my first paper route in 1974 — a job I despised, mind you — one of the first things I noticed was how the ink rubs off and blackens your hands when you deliver a hundred of the damned things in an afternoon. The ink on the outside washes off, but the ink that gets under your skin when you build a paper from scratch every day for two decades never goes away.

One thing in my favor: I’ve been a Web junkie from day one, and news and the Web go together. Maybe the newspaper I build in the future won’t be on paper at all. That can’t be a bad thing, really. Think of all the trees it would save.

American Journalism Review reports on what I’ve alluded to in past posts:

The layoff-by-phone drill represented yet another backpedal from the lofty rhetoric of just 11 months earlier, when William Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group bought the paper and its suburban cousin, the Contra Costa Times. MediaNews acquired both dailies in a complicated deal with McClatchy, which in turn had purchased them a few weeks earlier from Knight Ridder, the Merc’s deceased and dismembered former owner. “We have bought the crown jewels of Knight Ridder,” Singleton declared at the time. “They are excellent papers that we expect to make better.”

Perhaps he meant “smaller.” The first layoff at the Merc newsroom (15 people) came just four months after Singleton, known in some quarters as “Lean Dean,” assumed control. A series of resignations starting in June trimmed 15 more jobs. Combined with the Passover cuts, the newspaper’s staff had shrunk by 22 percent in the first year of the Singleton era.

The Mercury used to have more than a dozen reporters in its San Francisco peninsula bureau located about 15 miles from San Jose. Now there’s just one. The Merc gets most of its peninsula news from the short-handed San Mateo Times and the Palo Alto Daily News, a free tabloid MediaNews acquired in the Knight Ridder deal last year. Some parts of the paper’s newsroom have simply just disappeared, among them a five-member projects team that included 40-year Merc veteran Pete Carey, who was part of a group that won a Pulitzer for foreign reporting in 1986. Carey is now a business reporter.

I can also add this: We used to have 40 copy editors. Now we have 15.

Singleton says it’ll be a rough three or four years till things turn around. Well, not so rough for him, I suspect.

Always On Network praises legendary biz reporter Carol Loomis.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who says there’s never been a famine in a country with a free press, describes the connections between a free press and a just society.

The first - and perhaps the most elementary - connection concerns the direct contribution of free speech in general and of press freedom in particular to the quality of our lives. We have reason enough to want to communicate with each other and to understand better the world in which we live. Press freedom is critically important for our capability to do this. The absence of a free press and the suppression of people

William Greider on our inability to remember.

The war in Iraq is different from Vietnam in one fundamental respect: A substantial portion of Americans (and others around the world) were in the streets protesting this venture before the shooting started. The media generally dismissed them and often caricatured the protesters as aging hippies on a sixties nostalgia trip. It’s a pity reporters didn’t listen more respectfully. Virtually every element of what has gone wrong in Iraq was cited by those demonstrators as among the reasons they opposed the march to war.

How could such forgetfulness prevail, especially among a smart, engaged group like news people? It is perhaps not as sinister as it sounds. Most of the men and women now in charge of the news processes were boys and girls during Vietnam. The youngest reporters were not yet born. Their generation, I imagine, experienced the war more distantly as a disturbed era that ended in national humiliation. An air of shame hung over their growing-up years, a residue of bitterness and guilt all around. Did Americans wimp out? Did the news media poison their patriotism? My hunch is that many of today’s reporters and editors came to think so and were determined to be less squeamish, more “manly” about warmaking. Editors over 50 can’t hide behind this excuse.

Link via Romenesko.

How many of us are guilty of covering only the tips?

Here’s a fun exercise for a Friday: Favorite movie scenes featuring journalists.

The scene where the reporters all run into phonebooths and knock the phonebooths over has got to be up there (is that from “Airplane” or one of the Naked Gun movies?).

Just about all of “His Girl Friday” qualifies, but my favorite line has got to be, “Put Hitler on the funny pages!” And the look on Rosalind Russell’s face when she’s phoning in her big scoop about how Earl Williams escaped. “Shot him right in the classified ads.”

Ever notice that no matter how outrageous the press behaves in the movies, it’s never an exaggeration?

Herr Lasica profiles a filmmaker who got stamped under Disney’s heel. The closing quote:

“This all comes down to whether you believe culture should be bottom up or a top-down approach imposed by the corporations,” Horowitz says. “As it is now, copyright law has become the killing fields of culture.”

He’s the L.A. Times car critic who must’ve caused furrowing of brows among the Capital-J Journalism crowd. Who wants to encourage people to think cars might, you know, occupy a place in our culture or anything?

I got around to reading some of his reviews this morning … gotta say the guy can write like the blazes. He takes the usual “this is what the car does” and bumps it up a notch to put the car in the context of the lives of those who drive. He’s also hip and sassy, sort of a Wonkette for the passing lane (I realize he was writing before Wonkette existed but hey, logic can be set aside on a Saturday.) An extended passage from his review of the 60-mpg Toyota Prius pretty much defines why Dan deserved the P:

Have faith, America, and take another toke off your asthma inhaler. On some as-yet-unspecified date, on the golden horizon of the hydrogen economy, Detroit will deliver the ideal car, clean and powerful, trailing only clouds of noblesse oblige.

Forgive me if I’m skeptical. The most optimistic estimates put the mass marketing of fuel cells more than a decade away. It makes zero sense to give Detroit a pass on improving emissions and fuel economy now for some promised land of milk and money in the future.

Freedom CAR replaced the Clinton administration’s fig leaf of hypocrisy, the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, which doled out $1.5 billion to a consortium of automakers, universities and suppliers for nearly a decade and likewise was used to stall efforts to increase mileage standards. The Bush administration pulled the plug on the partnership last year, citing its failure to reach its goal: developing an affordable family sedan that gets 80 mpg.

Well, the Prius (pronounced PREE-us) gets 60 mpg — the highest fuel mileage of any mass-production car sold in the United States — and Toyota did it without subsidies from the federal government and much less posturing than the Big Three’s promising to save the world when they get around to it.

This is what my exec. editor would call “sophisticated” writing: it touches many bases — politics, industry, society — and sounds authoritative even when it’s breezy or preachy. Only the best of the best critics can pull this off.

Reading Neil’s pieces reminded me most of reading Car and Driver back in the late ’70s, when P.J. O’Rourke was in its stable of writers. They were all smart-alecky car nuts who wrote with the same verve and authority Neil exudes.

It sorta bugs be that cars have been around for a hundred years and good car writing has been around all of my adult life, and the Pulitzer people are just now getting around to recognizing a car writer. But the issue isn’t so much that the Pulitzers are late to the game. It’s mostly about the newspaper industry being in the pockets of local car dealers who take a dim view of car criticism because it gets so doggone critical. If writers of Neil’s caliber were welcome on the auto beat at most newspapers, Pulitzers would not be so scarce.

Doomed.

Not doomed

(I’m biased, of course, but I consider “not doomed” more persuasive.)

Read ‘em both and decide for yourself.

“If bankers gave themselves prizes (’the most reckless Third-World loan of the year’) with the same abandon as journalists, you may be sure that the public ridicule would soon force them to conduct the proceedings in secret.”

– Alexander Cockburn

From a Testy Copy Editors thread about the real reasons why awards are given out (to avoid giving pay raises, naturally).

Turns out that quote was plucked from this Jack Shafer column heaping scorn on the Pulitzers. He concludes with a zing:

One way to make the Pulitzers Page One-worthy would be to transform them into an honest annual inventory of journalism. Cockburn suggests a “record of journalistic failure” to accompany the year’s best stories. I second his idea. I’d give awards to the Worst Editorial Page, the Most Compromised Local Paper, the Most Predictable Critic, and the Most Tractable White House Reporter. Rent out Lincoln Center, trot the finalists down the red carpet, and televise the event. “Now accepting the award for Most Pliant Reporter on the Weapons of Mass Destruction Beat, Judith Miller.

Media Bistro has an interview.

(Posted for Nicole Stockdale, the foremost Wonkette-ophile.)

CJR’s Campaign Desk has glommed onto the fact that AP’s reporting goes out into the world with the assumption that other editors at member publications will finish the editing. “Lots of papers run AP unedited” is a running joke at Testy Copy Editors, except we’re not really kidding about it.

It’s not just because you can read one while sitting on the throne.

In retrospect, I question whether I ever truly mastered the change from print to pixel. Sure, I can navigate a Web page with the best of them, and come away with the salient facts. But I’m now convinced that the same information, read in print, tends to stick differently in the brain, as if the words have better adhesion.

Link via iwantmedia.

Scalzi on 10 things all aspiring writers need to know. (link via Mme. Paquin.)

Michael McDonough

I’m still trying to figure out what to think of the raft of fabrication scandals we keep having.

I wonder how many reporters have made up quotes or invented sources. The temptation must be powerful. Think of it, you’re 20 minutes from deadline and a quote that you know somebody would say is unavailable, but it makes your story complete. How many have given in?

It’s like breaking the speed limit: no harm done if there are no cops around and you don’t crash into anything.

Then you get away with it. Then you do it again and get away with it again. It could happen over the course of years, even decades.

This strikes me as one of those dirty secrets none would ever admit unless cornered. Has everybody done it? I haven’t a clue, but I can’t help thinking the answer is yes.

This opens a huge can o’ worms for editors, because we can’t cast a jaundiced eye on every quote and insist it be verified. We’d never get any work done.

You’d think by now that the Internet would’ve sufficiently scared the liars into reverting to safe environs of the truth, but the thing about criminals is they always assume they’ll never get caught. Getting away with their crimes encourages them to keep doing it.

But we need to be careful about assuming a source doesn’t exist just because he/she can’t be found.

Back when i was in college, I attended a huge civil rights march in Georgia. I saw a reporter walking from one person to the next, scribbling down quotes and hurrying on his way. Could any of those people be found again, if his editors got nosy? I wonder.

We’re stuck with this thing called trust which is always tenuous. But it serves us well, except when it doesn’t.

Clay mentions the S.F. Chronicle’s decision to bar two women who’ve wedded from covering the same-sex marriage issue.

Seems the Chron is sensitive to the charge that married gay couples have a conflict of interest if they cover the issue. But aren’t we always asking blacks to cover the “race relations” beat? Would we hesitate to send the daughter of a migrant worker to cover a farmworkers’ strike?

Seems to me the Chron talked itself into some pre-emptive fanny covering here. Shielding yourself from potential criticism is not exactly the bravest stand available, particularly when it deprives you of using people on your staff who have direct knowledge of the issues at hand.

I’d be like my boss saying, “sorry, Tom, you can’t write a story about blogging … you’re too close to the issue.” I would argue my closeness is precisely the reason why I should write such an article. (Note: this has never happened because none of my bosses reads my blog, as far as I can tell. For safety’s sake, though, I pretend they do.)

It’s not exactly an endorsement of the paper’s editorial acumen for the executive editor to essentially throw up his hands and say, “Sorry, we have no editors on staff capable of correcting biased reportage.”

From USA Today:

And as investment in journalism declines, many journalists face real pressure trying to maintain quality. Newsroom cutbacks (2,200 newspaper jobs lost since 1990), changes in content and a focus on profits rather than innovation raise serious questions about the long-term health of the industry.


“How long can news organizations keep increasing what they charge advertisers to reach a smaller audience?” the report asks. “If they maintain profits by cutting costs, social science research on the media suggests they will accelerate their audience loss.”

I was in the first grade and a bunch of us boys — you know, 6-year-olds — were noisily goofing off in the boys’ bathroom. Then this big ol’ nun comes barging through the door and slaps me right across the face. It’s about the only thing I remember from first grade (except the time I wet my pants because another nun wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom).

These, of course, were important preparations for a life peppered with indignity, injustice and downright meanness. I was lucky: I got out after the first grade. My darling wife, bless her heart, endured eight years of it.

So I have some context on Pat Oliphant’s hilarious cartoon depicting a ruler-wielding nun who sets the grammar-school Mel Gibson on a path that ends in “The Passion of the Christ.” Seems it was so funny that it moved a few Catholics to tears. And so funny that the editorial page editor felt moved to express regret over the ruffled feelings of people with warm, misty memories of their favorite nuns.

All this caught the attention of William Powers of the National Journal, moving him to expose the nefarious forces on the loose in newspaperland.

We are living in The Age of the Ombudsman, a deeply earnest and practical time when it all comes down to a simple cost-benefit analysis. “The point” of any piece of work is weighed against “the cost,” i.e., the number of people it offends. The implications of this approach are enormous, but nobody seems to care.

Powers implies that if papers were more wicked, they’d be more popular. A dicey proposition in a time when people are tuning out all news in droves. Still, Powers makes one point we ought to put in the first paragraph of our Newsroom Mission Statements: There is never a need to apologize to people who can’t take a joke.