The Huffington Post-AOL Deal

makes perfect sense, and in the abstract follows exactly the same strategy as the Murdoch-Apple deal behind The Daily. (And note how the HuffPost news quickly overwhelmed what little attention The Daily had generated.) Both are alliances of a news operation with a holder of a digital bottleneck. Of the two, I think the HuffPost-AOL deal is more likely to work, but that is a hunch based purely on the amount of fun involved in reading the two products. Granted, NewsCorp has a nice brand in newspapers and opinion, but it's still antique--it smells like the viewership of Fox News. Huffington may be a charlatan, but she knows how to keep it fresh.

The Newsosaur, who is always worth reading, thinks the deal is another example of the valuation of aggregated content at the expense of content creation. He compares FaceBook's market cap with McClatchy's to underscore this point. His argument underscores the fact that the new media bottlenecks don't really have an economic incentive to be content creators. And this is obviously true for FaceBook. It is less obviously true for the social networking sites in 2nd thru 10th place, or for the search engines that want to challenge Google.

Network television news is one of the great legacy media now under considerable strain. But television networks (and radio before them) were not drawn to enterprise reporting out of economic motivations. They were drawn to news as a public service in the full knowledge that the public stood ready to have the state regulate their content and scrutinize their license to monopolize a frequency. Broadcast news was a loss leader, at least on the national level. It is a bit utopian to think that the Googles and the Microsofts of the world can invest in news operations without some inducement external to the market. Perhaps a quick visit to the tax code might give some incentive? Internet businesses are still wildly undertaxed.... In the meantime, there's only the value of news in drawing traffic. AOL is making a gamble, but not a bad one.

HuffPost is more than an aggregator. In fact, it is one of the first sites on the web to actually project the kind of voice that newspapers project while offering a good range of original material. I'm not a daily reader, but could imagine being one. And I do know a couple of people who occasionally write for it. They don't feel exploited. (Of course, it's not their day job.)

HuffPost is not the destination for news on the web. It is located at the kind of place where news on the web will eventually wind up.

The Daily Debuts

but it will be a long time before I actually see it. That doesn't mean I won't comment, though.
The newspaper industry seems to be rooting for this one. Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp is charging something like a buck a week for a subscription to this IPad only product, becoming the first to seize the do-over that the tablet computer moment seems to be granting to news organizations. All of em blew the first chance to get the digital age right.
Murdoch et al. have gotten one element right this time. They have colluded with the company that controls a key bottleneck. According to an anonymous source quoted in today's NYTimes,

The News Corporation agreed last year to make Fox programs available on Apple TV for 99 cents, making it the only network other than ABC to do so. Apple in turn agreed to throw its considerable muscle behind The Daily, this person said. Mr. Jobs said he would appear at the debut event alongside Mr. Murdoch, but Mr. Jobs was absent, having recently taken a medical leave from Apple.

Sounds like a handshake deal among robber barons, or titans of industry, or some other nineteenth-century set of personages. Leave the personages aside, though, and the industrial logic is clear. In the age of the newspaper, economies of scale in print technology and urban advertising let dailies become monopolies and then control the flow of every sort of intelligence: financial information, classified advertising, political reporting, sports news. In the digital media environment, economies of scale have created similar concentrations of power at other points: the browser, the operating system, the I-whatever. If a news organization is going to make money in digital land, it will have to partner with Google or Microsoft or Apple. That's simple math.

But Apple and Rupert? That's non-Euclidian geometry. You just can't picture it. The more I try, the more I root against it.

On The Anniversary Of My Last Post

I am finally prompted to write again. For xmas this year, my big gift was a Nook. It came as a surprise, because I thought I was about a year away from such a thing, and wasn't sure whether it would be an e-reader or a tablet. The choice has been made for me, and I am about to begin acquiring e-books to read.

The last leap forward I made in the communication revolution was about five years ago, when I acquired a light laptop, started this blog, and opened a Facebook page. Those moves added clutter: new channels, more of the same, less overall command of the flow of information and communication. Is acquiring an e-reader another move in the same direction?

I made a decision to stop accumulating books last year. No place to put em. No time to read em. But I continued to pick up books nonetheless--physical books that I buy or that get sent to me for one reason or another, and electronic or pdf versions that I download from, say, gigapedia. If I could snap my fingers and convert them all into an electronic format stored on a portable device, I think I would, even though I love physical books. Just to simplify.

But I would have waited another year, mostly because of newspapers. 2011 may be the year when a viable electronic option for newspapers finally appears. Web-based versions simply lack voice and form, and hold my attention for only a fraction of the time I'll devote to a print edition of even a crappy newspaper, like my local daily. The tablet version of newspapers is better, but still mostly an article-by-article thing. The page is as important to my experience of a newspaper as the album side is to my experience of recorded music. After around 30 years of digital music, there is still no analog for the album side, so it might be that the newspaper page will never be successfully replicated in the digital universe. And newspaper folk are much less interested in innovation than music folk. Probably all the tablet will do to enhance digital news is to give news organizations a second chance to construct a paywall.

Will I pay for digital news? No. Not today, at least. And it wasn't included in the gift.

In Twilight of the American Newspaper,

Richard Rodriguez writes about the decline of especially the San Francisco Chronicle and comments intelligently on the ways that the newspapers we know are 19th-century creatures and tied to cities as they existed then. For him, the troubles of the newspaper are both a symptom and a result of the disappearance of the city as a place, as a geographical source of identity and a public space for ordinary people. Newspapers did a lot to create the culture of the city, and they did it on the back of a belief in the republic, more or less: of the importance of public life, and of the foundational role newspapers played in public life.

You can see that I think he's on to something.

On the other hand....

I renewed my subscription to the local newspaper here. When I did, my wife told me I was doing it out of pity. I realized immediately that she was right. I hadn't learned anything useful about my community from the newspaper for years, and have spent a lot of time bitching about the paper's editorials and news coverage and letters to the editor and sports coverage and classified advertising and just about everything I bother to look at. I like the Sudoku. I used to like the fact that it was an evening paper, and I could count on getting the late scores and boxes from the night before. But it shifted to morning publication. It's the kind of newspaper that, in theory, one should love and support, because it is independent and, since the death of its owner a few years ago, owned by a foundation. A friend jokes that chain ownership would improve it. I doubt that, but find that I yell less at other papers I read that are owned by Gannett or the Tribune Co.

I had a few weeks to ponder renewing my subscription, and during that time the world gave my local newspaper a few useful chances to prove its worth. One was an admissions scandal at my university. Another was more local--an African-American teenager was shot and killed by police under dicey circumstances and the community was embroiled. And a third was national--the health care debate. What we need journalism for, as the whiners (I'm a whiner too) keep reminding us, is to engage in the kind of enterprise reporting that will root out corruption, unveil the hidden workings of power, make it more difficult for interested parties to dissemble, and make intelligent public discussion more likely. How did my local newspaper do on those three tests? It failed, and it sucked while it failed. It used its reporters to repeat the official story on all three. On health care, it featured articles in which the local (Republican) Congressman explained his position without seeking out balancing opinions--something even the laziest reporter could do. On the admissions scandal, it did day-later reporting on what the Chicago Tribune published, and again repeated the official story. On the local police shooting of the teenager, it coupled reporting that simply repeated the official story with reactionary letters to the editor that blamed the victim. In every case, it made it easier to be stupid.

It didn't have to. On health care, for instance, a good local newspaper could have done excellent enterprise reporting explaining what the implications were for local employers, clinics, workers, medical professionals. Of course, considering the way this newspaper is ideologically driven, I probably would have bitched about that reporting too, but at least it would have shown some commitment.

So go ahead and blame it on the disappearance of a sense of place. But also on the fact that newspapers have for years been doing a shitty job at their core mission.

The other shoe is falling

on the Tribune Co. The Tribune is reporting that Sam Zell has hired a lawyer in the ongoing investigation of Rod Blagojevich, and the Associated Press is reporting that Zell and Blagojevich met personally, as well has having contacts through intermediaries.
When Blago was arrested a few months ago, one of the items in his "crime spree" was an attempt to get the Trib to fire staff and moderate their editorial policies in return for the State of Illinois's assistance in selling Wrigley Field. At the time, the reporting left the Trib and its staff looking heroic for resisting, or ignoring, or being totally unaware of this pressure. Today's news doesn't indict the editorial staff. We may continue to think of them as responsible, professional, and, if you want to get gushy, heroic. Or clueless, perhaps.
But the Trib Co. itself, that's a different story. We always knew that Sam Zell is not a news pro, and should not be surprised if it turns out that he bargained with the Guvner. I've been betting he did. I could be wrong, of course.
The more interesting question is, Which matters more? The staff behaved ethically. Would ownership's turpitude trump that?
Yes.
Ethics in the journalism world, as now constituted, is for news workers. But all the newsworkers in the world behaving ethically can still end up producing a news media system that behaves in an unjust manner. Ethics is the moral compensation that newsworkers get instead of actual control over the system they populate.
If Fitzgerald hadn't blown up Blago and Zell, and they had conspired to trade favors, the editorial staff would still have been innocent and ethical and probably largely in the dark, but the public would have been betrayed nonetheless.

When the Tribune Co. Filed for Chapter 11 Yesterday

it felt like something really big was happening in the news industry. Today it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't look like the Trib Co. filing is going to close any newspapers; instead, it will give the Co. leverage to bargain with its unions and creditors. It's more movement in the same direction, and not the tipping point--we're still waiting for that.

But here's the big story: Today the feds arrested Governor Rod Blagojevich, and reportedly the charges involve the Tribune Co. Also the appointment of Obama's successor, incidentally: he'd allegedly tried to "profit" from that appointment. But it's the Trib Co. angle that's really interesting. The allegation is that he withheld state support because of editorial policy.

Patrick Fitzgerald's press release cites recorded phone conversations in which the Governor instructs his top aide to tell the Trib that he would withhold support from the state (worth around $100 million to the Trib) for its sale of the Cubs unless two specific members of the editorial board were fired. He identified them as driving the Trib's support for his impeachment.

Now the news media have always been in a panic about the dangers of government support. That's why they mention a "bailout" for the news industry only to repudiate it. But here's what's becoming clear today. The big media are already deeply compromised by their business involvements. Blago got caught. How many people--smarter than Blago, for sure--don't get caught? What journalism needs is some secure form of support from The People, perhaps acting through Their Government, perhaps not, that will make it secure from the pressure of the powerful.

The Blagojevich arrest may be the financial equivalent of the Scooter Libby trial. Libby's trial pulled the veil off of the cozy relationships between DC reporters and powerful sources within the Bush administration. If we can focus on the money, the Blagojevich trial might provide an equally revealing cut into the ways that money entangles a media company. Remember, this is now a privately held company, albeit one with nearly $13 billion in debt.

Journalism Should Have an Important Role

to play in the debate we're about to have about the national health care system. If today's front-page article in the New York Times is any indication, it will serve to seriously distort that debate.

We know from the last time around that the health care providers and the health insurers will flood the media with their point of view. They'll do this by press release, by advertisement, and most of all by making their expertise available. Good journalists will pay attention to them skeptically and balance that agenda-driven subsidized information with stuff driven by other agendas or by academic (and therefore supposedly neutral) expertise (though who knows how many academic health economists, say, are really neutral).

The BEST journalists, though--the ones with the most initiative and the most resources--will try to set their own agenda. They'll do this by doing "enterprise" journalism. Last time around, that meant going to Canada and finding a story. That story will always be about a breakdown: long lines at hospital emergency rooms, denial of service to needy people, long waits for non-urgent procedures, people driving to Buffalo to get heart surgery, and so forth. Heaven knows there are enough stories to go around.

To an expert, all of that journalism will be "anecdotal evidence." So the BEST journalists, who want to pay serious attention to the experts, will contextualize their stories, maybe not in the first five paragraphs, but somewhere in the article. They'll do this by talking to experts. But the best journalists will carefully balance their experts, in order to represent BOTH legitimate points of view. I say "both" because two is the easiest number to balance, and because two fits the general mindset of professional journalism, which is oriented around the electoral process (the 2-party system) and the legislative process (you're either for it or agin' it). Because the initial story will be about a dysfunction, the two points of view will be "it matters" and "it doesn't matter." In the world of journalism, "it matters" always wins.

So the BEST journalists are going to produce a file of articles that cumulatively scare the public--or, more precisely, make the legislators believe the public has been scared--off from serious reform. That's what happened last time.

If you want serious reform, you'll have to hope that a movement for it appears, and that it drives the agenda. You can't expect journalism--especially the BEST journalism--to stand in for it.