This Week:

Quote of the Week

Off the Front Page: Uninsured Kids

State of the News Media 2006: "The Idealists Have Lost"

Greetings,

This week, a glimpse into the heart of the journalism establishment, with a look at "The State of the News Media 2006."  It's not a pretty picture, but there's a note of hope at the end.

That's all for now.  Out of room!  Thanks a million to all of you who not only sent in pledges, but such wonderful words of support for the Notes!  Wow.  I really appreciate the feedback!

Until next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

This is a lengthy quotation, taken from a March 20th article in one of the major publications of the public relations industry called "PR Week."  The article was about the release of "The State of The News Media 2006," which is the subject of this week's longest article in the Notes.  The article (entitled "PR Pros Can Aid Overworked Journalists") notes that the "workload crunch that individual reporters say they're feeling is part of the widely noted economic pressures facing journalism as a whole."  Taking off from there, here are four of the most telling paragraphs from the PR Week story:

"Not surprisingly, into the maw of overworked journalists and reticent corporate owners comes the PR industry.  The simple fact is that the less staff a newsroom has, the less time a reporter has to devote to gathering news, and the more receptive a reporter is likely to be to a PR pitch.  In this sense, the 'state of the media' is 'overworked,' and ready to hear about your client's 'exciting new program.'

"Jonathan Capehart, a former head of the editorial page at the New York Daily News who is now a [senior vice president] for [PR firm] Hill & Knowlton, says the report heralds an opportunity for 'crafty' PR pros to deliver complete, top-to-bottom story ideas.

"'Because reporters are so stressed for time and for ideas, the PR person who can give the reporter a complete package, if you will, is the PR person who stands a greater chance of piquing that reporter's interest,' he says...

"Reporters themselves would undoubtedly chafe at the idea that friendly PR pros are happy to step up and do their jobs for them.  But deadlines are deadlines, word counts are word counts, and Happy Hour at the bar next door to the newspaper's office ends at 8pm sharp.  The Project for Excellence in Journalism may have unwittingly signaled the beginning of a new 'Project for Excellence in Media Relations,' which will offer tired journalists an increasingly tempting crutch."

Off the Front Page: Uninsured Kids

A CBS News/New York Times Poll taken in January found that an amazing 90 percent of United Statesians agreed that "fundamental changes are needed" in "the health care system in the United States" or that "Our health care system has so much wrong with it that we need to completely rebuild it."  90 percent.

It's hard to tell if Minnesotans feel the same way, since Minnesota polls haven't asked such questions in recent years (Talk about Off the Front Page!), but I think it's safe to say that access to health care is a concern for many Minnesotans.

That's why it was so discouraging to find that the release of a major study on children's health care in the state was relegated to the inside pages.  The study--called "The Road Not Traveled: Universal Children's Health Care Coverage in Minnesota"--was released on April 19th by the Children's Defense Fund of Minnesota (CDF).  The St. Paul Pioneer Press didn't even bother to assign a reporter to the story, and their report the next day, running a mere 175 words, was simply pulled from the Associated Press wires and stuck on page B7.  The Star Tribune was hardly better.  They did have a staff-written piece, and it was somewhat longer at 332 words, but it, too, was relegated to the inside pages--B5, in this case--and left out a lot.

The CDF study, running 22 pages, documents a "complicated, 'patchwork' health care system" that is "failing children" in Minnesota.  It deserves far more coverage than I can give it here, but the following five "Reality Checks" included in the report give a decent summary of the key points:

Reality Check #1: The Uninsured Can Face Overwhelming Medical Debt

Reality Check #2: Cuts to Public Programs Leave Some Families Without Options

Reality Check #3: Rising Premium Costs Make Employer-based Coverage Unaffordable for Many

Reality Check #4: Safety Net Care Is Not Stable Health Care

Reality Check #5: Public Programs Barriers Prevent Access

The Star Trib report, in an apparent attempt to soften the bad news about uninsured kids, included in its lead the comment that Minnesota "still probably ranks in the top five states for the percent of children covered," and went on to cite a comment from state Human Services Commissioner Kevin Goodno that "the situation may have improved in the two years since 2004."  Sure, it "may have" improved.  Or, it "may have" gotten worse.  Why this meaningless comment was included is hard to imagine.

Instead of this apparent attempt at "balancing" a report that seems pretty unambiguous, I would have preferred the inclusion of the urgent call from Jim Koppel, Director of CDF Minnesota: "We have to admit we have a problem, and then find the political will to fix it."

Also not included in the news reports, although featured prominently in the report, was the following very telling quotation from Jan Malcolm, former Minnesota Department of Health Commissioner:

"The legislation that created MinnesotaCare in 1992 would have provided universal care through public programs and private insurance by 1997, and it included cost-cutting strategies.  Both elements were repealed when it seemed to some people that the market was working, and we didn't need that much government intervention."

"The market was working"!!

I suppose it goes without saying that neither of the local news reports mentioned that a universal, single-payer health care system--such as the ones currently before both the Minnesota House and the Minnesota Senate--would provide all Minnesota residents (including children) with insurance coverage.

The report is filled with all sorts of facts, analysis, charts, graphs, and other things that really belong on the front pages of the local press.  To read the full report for yourself, visit the website of the Children's Defense Fund Minnesota at http://www.cdf-mn.org/

State of the News Media 2006: "The Idealists Have Lost"

On March 13th the Project for Excellence in Journalism released its third annual report on "The State of The News Media."  This report (henceforward referred to as The Report) comes from the heart of the mainstream journalism establishment--the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism--and is worth a quick look.

The 2006 Report noted six new trends "that add to the underlying trends transforming journalism we have noted in earlier reports."

The Six New Trends in 2006

TREND #1:"As the number of places delivering news proliferates, the audience for each tends to shrink and the number of journalists in each organization is reduced."  The result is that "we tend to see more accounts of the same handful of stories each day...often covered in a similar fashion by general-assignment reporters working with a limited list of sources and a tight time-frame.  The result: less diversity of views, and more susceptibility to propaganda.

TREND #2: The big-city metro newspapers suffered the biggest circulation drops and imposed the largest cutbacks in staff in 2005.  "The big metros are the news organizations most likely to have the resources and aspirations to act as watchdogs over state, regional and urban institutions, to identify trends, and to define the larger community public square.  It is unlikely that small suburban dailies or weeklies will take up that challenge."

TREND #3: "At many old-media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over.  The idealists have lost."  The Report adds that "at many new-media companies, it is not clear if advocates for the public interest are present at all."

TREND #s 4 and 5: The big media companies are getting the hang of the technological changes, finally.  That's good, since the Internet news sites are mostly just cutting and pasting the reporting that the big media companies do.

TREND #6: "The central economic question in journalism continues to be how long it will take online journalism to become a major economic engine, and if it will ever be as big as print or television."

Now we're getting down to it: Identifying the "central economic question," that is.  I don't think they have got it right, though, as I will now explain.

"The Market Is Amoral"

A look at the full text of The Report makes it fairly clear that the "central economic question" is this: Will Wall Street's demand for exorbitant profits ultimately destroy journalism as we know it?  And the answer, I think, is pretty clear: Yes.

For example, The Report includes a section on "Ownership," which begins like this:

"At the end of the 20th century people began to worry about the trend toward public ownership. Not only were such companies not tied to community, they were now beholden to the demands of Wall Street, where the value of the product a company made was purely a matter of money.  Making bolts would be measured the same way as creating information that helped forge communities.  The market was amoral."

What they mean by "amoral" is that, to the owners of corporate news organizations, it doesn't matter whether their journalism is "good" or "bad," as long as it draws in the audience that advertisers desire.

A Rough Year? Or "Ridiculously Profitable?"

In the section on "Economics," the authors of The Report tell us that "On balance, 2005 has to be considered a rough year for journalism financially."  At the same time, in the Executive Summary that accompanies The Report, we read that "The industry still posted profit margins of 20%."  That's the newspaper industry.  For local TV news, the "rough year" was really rough: "Pre-tax profit margins of 40% and even 50% are not uncommon."  Perspective on this is provided by reporter Lee Drutman, writing in the Daily Breeze of  Torrance, California, who points out that the average profit margin for corporate America has been 8.3 percent over the last 25 years.  "By contrast," he pointedly adds, "last year ExxonMobil--whose record profits have drawn angry calls for a windfall-profits tax on the oil industry--turned only a 10 percent profit margin."

Drutman concludes with the comment, "By any standard, newspapers are still ridiculously profitable."

Paul Janensch, writing in the March 18, 2004 Hartford Courant, says that the explanation for such profitability in the face of declining audience is: "Simple.  The top managers of most media companies are cutting news expenses to pump up the bottom line and, for publicly-traded companies, to look good on Wall Street."

The point is underlined, in more colloquial language, by Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik, who led off an article with this anecdote:

"Many years ago, a veteran editor at what was then the Chandler-owned Los Angeles Times made the following observation about that family and its dividends from their newspaper: 'They're either rolling in it, or they're really rolling in it.  And when they're only rolling in it, they start to panic.'

Cutting Out "Newsroom Professionals"

Such "panic," The Report tells us, results in a continuing reduction in "the resources devoted to original newsgathering: reporters, producers, editors, correspondents, boots on the ground."  Here are some numbers: "By the time the tallies are in later this year, the industry is expected to lose between 1,250 and 1,500 newsroom professionals--editors and reporters."  That would mean that the newspaper industry would have lost 3,500 to 3,800 newsroom professionals since 2000, or roughly 7%.  That's a lot of people, and the decline of quality in corporate news reporting is already being seen.  In their section on "Ownership" the authors of The Report say that "heading into 2006, there was more worry that the publicly traded corporation may not be positioned to address the problems of journalism to the satisfaction of society."

And that, I suggest, is the "central economic question" that "The State of The News Media 2006" raises: Can the economic model upon which we have built our current media industry really carry us into the future?  Um, no.  Doesn't look like it.

One hopeful sign is provided in The Report's section on "Audience."  There we learn that the apparent decline in the audience for profit-oriented media is being accompanied by an interesting development: "The alternative weekly press," The Report notes, "continued to thrive.  Circulation reached 7.64 million in 2005, the highest since 2001."  What is "alternative" about "alternative" journalism is, among other things, that it is oriented to journalism first, and money second.  Think "Nygaard Notes."

The one fact about the media industry that is indisputable is that things are changing rapidly. Although "The State of The News Media 2006" is a bit of a wonkfest*, I still think it is a useful tool to use in assessing the nature of some of the changes in the media that we will all have to deal with in one way or another.  The full report can be read at the site of Journalism.org, at http://www.journalism.org/   Particularly interesting is the "Journalist Survey," which I didn't even have room to quote.

* "Wonkfest" = "A document of particular interest to fanatics or maniacs of some kind, the type of people for whom there are never enough details."