Between the News and the World, a Bad Dream
As long as newspapers remain shackled to advertising, the nightmare will worsen
Maybe this is an odd tack to take here, but Ta-Nehisi Coats’ book Between the World and Me has me thinking about the decline of newspapers and what our business now looks like, relegated to second-class status — “legacy” — in a powerfully privileged digital world.
In his book, Coates, a national correspondent for Atlantic Magazine whose work as also appeared in New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post, attempts to explain his take on the African-American experience to his teen-age son, taking on police violence, black-on-black crime, the institutional racism of white “majoritarians” and a Dream which keeps the divide wide, perhaps uncrossable.
Have you seen this Dream?
It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. (11)
Coates’ position is that this Dream — the American Dream of unlimited opportunity — is all that is purposely exclusive of the black world he grew up into, the one he now bequeaths to his son. “White America,” he writes, “is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.”
Between Coates and the world, there stands that Dream.
To attempt comment on what it means to be black in America in 2015 from the privileged position of an aging white male who has lived his life in the suburban megalopolis — where the Dream rules supreme, like kudzu or Wal-Mart — is surely a fool’s errand. In a July 17 New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks found no safe ground to tread. He asks, “Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions?”
At Politico, Rich Lowry (editor of the conservative National Review, and whose syndicated columns appear in King Features Weekly Service) was far less charitable: “He argues — although that might be too generous a word; it’s more like assertion shrouded in a haze of lyricism — that all other black people did to hurt or threaten him was ultimately the product of white racism.” To charge all white Americans with the crime of racism, Lowry writes, “Coates has to reduce people to categories and actors in a pantomime of racial plunder,” an offense Lowry calls intellectually “stunted.”
That said, it may be possible employ Coates’ argument just as forcefully in reverse, taking a look at that Dream from the metaphorical other side of the tracks, or jumped onto adjacent ones. (The train is, of course, America.)
Using the same rhetoric, it may be possible to understand the difficult crossroads faced by newspapers as that train now roars past.
* * *
Characterizing Coates’ writing as “a new race beat,” Chris Ip of Columbia Journalism Review says such journalism succeeds by finding a difficult vantage:
Reporting on race requires simultaneously understanding multiple, contradictory worlds, with contradictory narratives. Widespread black poverty exists; so do a black middle class and a black president. It requires both a hypersensitivity to peoples’ different lived experiences, and a frankness when telling hard truths. Reporters need to be able to see how far America has come, and how far the country has left to go.
How the “race beat” figures into your local coverage is something every community newspaper must answer. As the national lens continues to watch young black men fall to police gunfire, the “national conversation on race” isn’t going away. At any next moment you may find it unfolding in your local news. And with diversity in local newsrooms as low as they are — newspapers with a circulation of less than 50,000 typically employ no reporters of color — chances are that demands for committed race reporting will fast outstrip newsroom capacity, further damaging the community trust.
(The style of reporting described here isn’t exclusive about race writing, either, as it asks for journalism to be inclusive of what Wallace Stevens called a “complicate amassing harmony” — American experience in its widest, wildest, full-throated register. Difficult enough for any beat.)
But rather than argue that point here — each of you must engage that conversation in your own communities — I’d like to try to take up how this “race beat” was characterized to see what happens when its lens is focused on a Dream that is also bankrupting newspapers.
Could seeing through that Dream empower a starkly changed vision of what there is left for community newspapers to do?
What follows could serve both a letter to old hands still trying to hold onto their niche for a few more years, as well as to a young journalist eager to get started.
* * *
The Dream seemed to be the pinnacle, then — to grow rich and live in one of those disconnected houses out in the country, in one of those small communities, one of those cul-de-sacs with its gently curving ways, where they staged teen movies and children built treehouses, and in that last lost year before college, teenagers made love in cars parked by the lake. The Dream seemed to be the end of the world for me, the height of American ambition. What more could possibly exist beyond the dispatches, beyond the suburbs? (115
For our purposes, let’s imagine that the Dream as a gauzy, Madison-Avenue pastel of middle-class life, an indeterminately 1950's residence where everyone lives a comfy but not ostentatious life on a block of somewhat varied row houses, where everything is clean and perky and broadcasts in Technicolor. Trouble is never closer than two blocks away.
Can you see it as well as I? What strange optical illusion makes it possible to view it with eyes closed. The image seems to occupy that same spot in our noggins where we have a vague self-image ourselves somewhere in our mid-30s. Do you surprise yourself like I do when looking in the mirror, asking, who IS that old fart?
Can you see anything else? That’s the disturbing part. If the lion’s share of our imagination is still doing time in Mayberry, where the heck is 2015?
Similarly, when most of us try to imagine this country, the image that conjures up is of a pristine, mid-50's neighborhood. You can’t see the super-mansions and you won’t see the ghettos, even though they crowded out the real picture twenty years ago. It’s mid-size, upper middle class America, neither too big nor too small. TV shows from the The Partridge Family to Modern Family reside there.
The mood on that block is All-American: Idealistic, individualistic, hard-working and rooting for American exceptionalism from backyard scenes found Norman Rockwell paintings and Chevrolet commercials.
I’ll even bet that when you think of the audience who reads your newspaper, you see that same interior Anytown, composed of the same six or seven Readers, salarymen and housewives and retirees on porches that you were thinking of when you wrote your first city council story.
First impressions rule; the TV must have been on when we got the news, for when these images come to mind, we are reading the Dream. Or, perhaps, it is reading us.
* * *
The Dream has always paid for the news. By its measure news hole — how much copy is fit to print — was determined. Spoiler alert: the Dream for newspapers is its advertising: for every ad sold, a story placed.
But it isn’t an even exchange, not the way advertising became the primary source of revenue the fattening agent of profit margins. Corporate ownership meant an incessant nudging up of earnings, to the degree that quality journalism was another cost to contain.
Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write in The Elements of Journalism,
Rather than invest in R&D to figure out new ways to deliver quality research and reach audiences in new ways, the newspaper industry focused heavily on managing costs on the one hand and raising the price of its advertising on the other, making the argument that in a fragmented news environment, advertising had become a singular way to reach elite audiences. The industry did not change its business model, in other words, as it changed its argument about why it was a good business. (86)
Mindful of the hand that fed it, newspaper made news the servant of what church and state proponents call the business side. Careful to not sully the mercantile possibilities of the Dream, news orgs became its Mayberry, a family newspaper, charted by a sensibility and respect for a buying public. Customers replaced citizens as the core audience of newspapers, and newspapers ditched providing what the public trust needed to become retail shops fretted by minions making sure customers got what they wanted.
* * *
Translated to the newspaper industry, the Dream is market dominance: fat Sunday editions plush with full-color ad sells and double-digit profit margins.
However, no matter what we do to improve ourselves, that old dominance is gone. We can learn to code and perform data analysis, but we’re piling up on the other side of the curve. Everything is moving away from us now, faster every quarter.
Our place in the Dream is gone; the big buildings downtown have been sold and the remaining employees are being relocated to smaller, less expensive quarters on the edge of town, out where everything is faded and cracked and soon abandoned.
The business is much smaller now. Platforms rule. The important tools aren’t journalism but coding and app development and data collection. Relentlessly marginalized by digital disruption, legacy business like newspapers eventually become a thing of the past.
And that’s where — out there in the fields of irrelevant, old-school making — that, for some reason, our Dream turns toxic, gold turns to lead, presses to dust. Is this why newspapers are so notoriously reluctant to archive their reporting for the community trust?
The new age of newspapering is just as devoted to the Dream, only the market is fragmented toward infinity and the returns so nightmarish as to make one wonder why anyone’s still trying. Only those haunted by the ghost of a dream would still attempt it.
Not that what we’re missing is such a hot deal for anyone, with or without algorithms. As former Gawker editor Choire Sicha recently wrote, big media has become “a swirling death trap of dubious gossip, outraged tweet-to-tweet combat and a million identical pieces of over-processed, hormone-injected “news content” written for fourth graders.” Venture capitalists love the digital pure-play startups, investing $6 billion in “media and entertainment” in 2014; that gets a lot of shiny new offices opened where fevered content marketers/journalists pumped anything rousing enough to “wrestle viewers away from Candy Crush at viewing time.” All this, for Internet advertising “tabulated in slivers of a penny.”
And if the New York Times’ recent assessment of employment in the highest of high-tech sectors (“Inside Amazon”) is correct, servitude to the engines of digital disruption is a human-mangling process, even more so than the corporate sweat-box newsrooms of the 1990s and 2000's. The hyper-busy hive has become a lesson in how to create newspapers in vastly empty rooms.
Certainly, the tools which the digital age has empowered media news sites are wondrous — consider that a start-up with 20 employees can rapidly best the online traffic of a rival newspaper that employs hundreds. Such efficiencies work best at the tech giants who create no content but simply engineer transmission. In 2013, Google had 50,000 employees and generated $55 billion in sales — about $1 million per employee. Vice Media is on track to make $1 billion in revenue this year with 800 employees worldwide.
Yet what disruption effects is a downsized workforce wearing too many hats competing for vanishing ad dollars.
Unless newspapers ditch the Dream, it will drag them off the cliff.
* * *
In some way, remaining stuck in the Dream is similar (and may be identical) to the world’s slo-mo descent into the coming horrors of global warming. Fossil-fuel fantasias of cheap gas keep the frackers busy and the smokestacks billowing. That Dream is our descending nightmare.
Coates classes neoliberalism as a way of putting a vanilla face on institutional racism (it’s just not that bad any more). That nuance or shading can be also applied to environmental groups that have formed strategic alliances with oil companies in the name of any progress.
Applied to newspapering, colluding with the Dream means refusing to see all the way through it. It means playing by the old rules and expecting the old results. It means not transforming enough; it means staying wed to advertising.
In all three situations, progress is the lie, the myth of golden promises built on a violence — slavery, Earth-pillage, destruction of the public trust.
* * *
Is it it that the sweetness of the Dream is just too precious to let go of as the world keeps souring toward a bitterness no one cares to taste?
Is the truth just so damn difficult to admit?
Can anything survive without it?
* * *
So what to do? In Coates’ book, Dreamers emerge from the Dream only by struggling to remember the narratives that got lost in it. (What Charles Ip called “the new race beat.” )
When I was working at Orlando’s local daily newspaper back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Tribune corporate culture had taken over. Sixteen hundred employees — a third of which worked in Editorial — went under the lash every day to produce the Daily Miracle. New technology was putting powerful tools in the hands of individuals, huge systems were evolving at the speed of light, and Tribune Company was demanding its due. When the recession hit in 1992, the newspaper laid off 100 employees, the first time in its history. No longer could employees count on a job for life. Programs, extras, benefits were reduced.
Still, Sunday ROP full page color advertising rates were the highest in the country.
The next year, while I was working in Human Resources, I edited and published a values statement where the president and department directors each championed one: Teamwork, Integrity, Customer Satisfaction, Employees, Diversity, Financial Strength, Innovation, Public Service and Excellence. The entire daily corporate entity that we were was stated clear enough in those values.
The online news page for the newspaper also launched that year.
Working elsewhere in the industry now, it strikes me today, two decades later, as that newspaper struggles to survive with less than 500 employees occupying only the second floor of the main building, that never once in all the years I worked there did I hear that there was anything more important than the profits that we sent up the corporate udder.
There was only the Dream, and now there is next to nothing.
* * *
This week, Alabama Media Group — the Advance-owned regional media company — cut “five to nine” full-time editorial positions. They’re going after more core audience, focusing on breaking news, high school and college sports, Alabama culture. NOLA Media Group, who run an online version of (New Orleans) Times-Picayune and is also owned by Advance, is looking to make cuts soon, it was reported. The two groups are being merged into the larger Southeast Regional Media Group.
It’s the second time AMG has laid off employees this year. Back in January when 10 employees were cut for the same decisive reasons, Michelle Holmes, vice president of content, announced: “In our quest to constantly focus on a sustainable future, we have had to make some very tough decisions about which positions and who best fits into that future.”
All that matters is the leap into that upward spike of digital disruption, until there’s no one left to leap.
The small hope is that newspapers will, out of desperation, re-engage with their communities in defiance of the Dream. That they will focus on citizens first and customers second. That support of the community replaces slavish dependence upon advertising.
Kovach and Rosensteil suggest that five essential commitments would be necessary for this to happen:
1. The owner must be committed to citizens first. “Rather than the newsroom being cloistered from the rest of the organization, journalism works best when both sides are committed to the values of honest independent news, not one side to business or ideology or some other cause and the other to public service. History suggests that this only works when the owner of the operation believes deeply in these core journalistic practices.”
2. Hire business managers who also put citizens first. “While the owner is the ultimate determiner of an institution’s values, successful businesspeople also talk about hiring manager who share the mission, even if selling ads or building circulation is a different path from producing stories.”
3. Journalists have final say over news. “The leader of the newsroom, in the modern news operation, is the protector of the brand.”
4. Set and communicate clear standards internally. “Even if owners share the journalistic mission, and hire managers who agree, those standards must be clearly articulated down the ranks, to create an open atmosphere in which the businesspeople and newspeople, at least at certain levels, can talk to make sure they understand and appreciate one another’s role.”
5. Communicate clear standards to the public as well. “…Be clear with audiences — clearer than in the past — about how news organizations operate.”
“To reconnect people with the news, and through the news to the larger world, journalism must reestablish the allegiance to citizens that the new industry has mistakenly helped to subvert,” they write. To find the citizen, the customer — funded, fantasized, enfolded and sold by the Dream — will have to step aside.
* * *
Newspapers may soon enough be cut free of their corporate masters, and the private equity owners who have taken over will probably not be around for long either, if what’s happening at Digital First (which is currently squeezing every operational penny out of the organization to create the illusion of profit margins that might attract a buyer. Hopefully they won’t close the papers before they go, which is also what Digital First is now doing.
Meanwhile, it’s been a year since Ferguson, ten years since Katrina, fifty years since Watts, a hundred since Jim Crow. There have been 200 homicides already in Baltimore, almost all of them by guns. An unarmed black man was recently shot and killed by a police officer in a Dallas car lot.
In a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, white and Asian families headed by someone with a college education were much better able to withstand the shocks of the recession and build long-term wealth than white and Asian families without a college-educated head. But for Hispanics and blacks, college-educated families actually fare worse than families in those demographics without a college degree. The conclusion: higher education protects wealth, but only among white and Asian families.
In a 2014 report on the economic well-being of U.S. households released by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Forty-seven percent of respondents say they either could not cover an emergency expense costing $400, or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money, and thirty-one percent of respondents reported going without some form of medical care in the 12 months before the survey because they could not afford it.
Stock markets around the world are falling for the second day today as the Chinese economy continues its slowdown. Oil prices are under $40 a barrel and American interests are laying off workers and ceasing all new drilling.
Print advertising revenues continue to decline while mobile advertising grows at a fast but exponentially smaller scale. Nothing seems to be able to stop the precipitous decline of print advertising, and online advertising faces the specter of ad-blocking. Global online ad revenue continues to rise — $180 billion last year — but people are turning to ad-blocking software in droves (198 million people this last year, up 41 percent from 2014, blocking some $21.8 billion in global revenue). If anyone is hoping that mobile ads will save the day for newspapers, it might be said they are Dreaming. The sooner newspapers take a hard look at their future, the sooner they can start seeing what 2015 is all about, and where our communities struggling to survive may yet be found.
OK, so where is the power to change? Producing a newspaper (or news website) without advertising is like, well, battling poverty without the privilege.
But there’s power — and hope — at the source of this writing, which Ta-Nehisi Coates offers to his son at the conclusion of his long letter. According to Coates, there is power in making something vital even when there is no chance to break free:
This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello — which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. Even the Dreamers — lost in their great reverie — feel it, for it is Billie they reach for in sadness, and Mobb Deep is what they holler in boldness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha is the last sound they hear before dying. We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rules of the Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. (149)
Newspapers may lose the business, but they may still find the people.
It is resonant of how Booker T. Washington defined success: “The true measure of success is not what a man has accomplished, but rather, the obstacles he has overcome in trying to succeed.”
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
