Another Round of AJC Layoffs?
Decatur Metro | March 12, 2009Creative Loafing reports a substantial blood-letting at the AJC may be imminent.
When and how does this ever stop?
Does an online news”paper” model require such a reduction in staff? With these layoffs, will we finally have a sustainable business model? Right now local news is written like its a recap for the rest of the metro area and not to keep potential affected citizens informed (see: Hey Atlanta, Decatur’s reconfiguring its school system and parents are concerned!“) At what point does the news get so watered down that people just stop reading?
Why not take a gamble and just make it a pay site? Or at least make local news pay-only. Keep all that AP, NY Times and WaPo stuff free. Lord knows “The Buzz” is a right and not a privilege. Who else out there can report local news on the same scale? In a choice between pay or nothing, which would you choose?
And what’s the worst that happens? More layoffs?
Nothing like a post full of questions to solve the world’s problems.
Disclaimer: Be aware that I know little to nothing about newspaper business models, except that online ad revenue is a joke (funny: scared, not funny: haha) and that Craigslist is Satan reborn as free, online classifieds.
you mean “imminent”
im·ma·nent Listen to the pronunciation of immanent
adjective
Etymology:
Late Latin immanent-, immanens, present participle of immanēre to remain in place, from Latin in- + manēre to remain — more at mansion
Date:
1535
1 : indwelling , inherent 2 : being within the limits of possible experience or knowledge — compare transcendent
— im·ma·nent·ly adverb
wle.
My editor is so fired.
The AJC online has long been a repository for an awful lot of total garbage. It seems like most of the front-page links are celebrity gossip news. So it’s watered down not by a lack of serious news stories so much as the inclusion of tons of fluff.
Like many people, I do not subscribe to the AJC. I read it online for free. But I do buy the Sunday paper from time to time, and judging by its sheer size, the AJC can stand to lay off an awful lot of people. It’s hard to navigate that monstrosity, even if you pull out all the ads.
They also need to focus far more on quality. The quality of the editorials and op-eds is especially abysmal.
Uh, wouldn’t ‘Lord knows “The Buzz” is a right and not a privilege’ be the other way around?
The NY Times online has an article today about cities at risk of possibly losing their remaining daily paper. I didn’t see any mention of Atlanta, although I’ve seen the AJC mentioned in similar articles about newspapers in trouble.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/business/media/12papers.html?hp
Traditional newspapers for sure face a host of challenges, now more than ever. Some of their problems were self-induced, like the AJC’s decision to go towards sensational, pop-culture infotainment, rather than hard-hitting investigation and news. But also keep in mind that newspapers’ traditional sources of ad revenue have been real estate, car dealerships, and retail; the three industries hit hardest by the economic collapse. So in that regard, their problems are reflective of what all businesses are now facing.
But even though the way that we now consume news has changed, we also need professional news-gathering organizations, now more than ever. I love blogs, but citizen journalists, as great as they are, simply cannot replace dedicated, full-time journalists. I don’t know what the answer is, but I shudder to think of a future where most cities do not have a daily newspaper, whether it’s technically on paper or not.
does anyone think the ajc is any *worse* recently?
i mean it’s been ‘advertiser-focused news’ for at least 10 years
infotainment, developers, celebrities, sports
also – maybe they keep the web site so bad, to try and make you buy the paper version
wle.
The AJC is selling stagecoaches at the time of Henry Ford. It’s now just a matter of time.
Thanks for the link Doug…I hadn’t ventured over to the Times for my daily dose yet. Ahh…feeling much more progressive now.
Is it just me or is there something really tragic about a newspapers covering their own demise? Especially when there’s been no real action to save themselves. I could write a whole, rambling post about that, chock full of MacBeth analogies.
Paula, I gotta disagree with ya this time. The sensational stuff sells papers. Always has, always will. Therefore I don’t believe that a lack of hard-hitting news has hurt the papers, instead I think the problem is that the papers are caught in a vicious cycle of cutbacks and in that process have slowly lost the one thing that made them vital. Local news. Be it smut, hard-hitting, in-depth, fluff…all of it should be big-time local. Hell, dump the AP and its ridiculous membership costs. People can get that stuff free online. Produce a paper Atlantans want to read because it talks about their town. Yes you need more people out on the street to produce that sort of paper, but then maybe perhaps people would buy it!
Local has become undervalued because the audience isn’t as big as nationals. People got greedy and wanted to appeal to everyone, everywhere. But give me a break if you don’t think that a staff of a couple dozen couldn’t put together a good daily and have the subscription/ad costs to support them.
So maybe my friend Rusty is right. Maybe we just need to wait for the papers to fall away so a new model can emerge. Though it would be less effort for an existing paper to revamp under a new model, it sounds like – from the NY Times article – that many of them are going under because of all the debt they’ve incurred in the past few years buying each other up.
BTW…the map in that article shows circulation declines across the country. The AJC is in the highest category at -20% or more. Regardless of whether that’s because they shrunk the distribution area…that’s bad news.
This is an industry that is dying, if not already dead.
A full year, 7 days a week subscription to the AJC comes out to $135.20. Would you pay $50 per year for an online subscription?
How many here have a subscription to the AJC? I would assume, not many.
As long as there are huge internet news gatherers, it doesn’t look good for local newspapers, period. Google, Yahoo!, Breitbart, BLoomberg, CNBC….the list is endless.
I understand that we need local news coverage, but what can you not find out from numerous different blogs that you can’t find by searching online?
Also, in this writers opinion, I feel that the rise of the Internet has made it perfectly clear that the rise of citizen journalists has shown that dedicated, full-time journalists are not needed as much.
And to my last point, let’s face it, a majority of journalists are liberal. For years the liberal establishment had a choke hold on the dissemination, production and delivery of most news UNTIL the Internet rolled round the bend. All of the sudden there were options. The major news outlets have responded by morphing into advocacy journalism. As an impartial witness (in my humble opinion, as a fiscal conservative and a social liberal) the coverage of last years Presidential Election was a disgrace.
Take a look at yesterday’s USA Today front page. Side bar, small byline, something along the lines of “Obama signs $410MM Omnibus Spending Plan” go to 4A. 4A? This was MAJOR news. A newly minted Democratic President, after campaigning for two years on the promise of hope and change, caved on what was one of his biggest campaign promises, to oppose pork barrel spending and earmarks. Amazing.
My point is this….I have a lot of Republican friends. They notice these things. All the time. So if you of the right leaning class, what would you do? Buy more papers? No, you would go to other sources.
I have never understood this phenomenon. During all the years that circulation has been declining, missed fiscal expectations, layoffs….how come no one has stood up in the boardroom of one of these papers and said, “Hey, perhaps we should be more balanced in our reporting and editorials so we could bring back 50% of our projected audience?”
And like clockwork yesterday, this gem from the AJC:
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2009/03/08/pubnote0308.html
Too little too late.
NIT
I must disagree with you on a number of counts. “I feel that the rise of the Internet has made it perfectly clear that the rise of citizen journalists has shown that dedicated, full-time journalists are not needed as much.” Investigative journalism has revealed hundreds of very significant stories. I’m not going to try and defend the AJC as a model paper, but they have produced many high quality and effective investigative reports. One of the most recent dealt with conditions at state mental hospitals. Maybe someday we will see a Pulitzer prize for some “citizen journalist”, but until then I’m not feeling too good about democarcy without an aggressive, resourceful and active free press.
And please, the so-called liberal bias of the media is a bunch of hogwash. Conservatives have been “working the refs” for so many years that the media bends over backwards to tell both sides, even when one side is totally lacking in substance. I have a friend at CNN that speaks of this constantly. Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter did not exactly have an easy time with the media.
I read everything with a critical eye, whether it is in the WSJ, NYT, AJC or CL. I don’t accept everything as truth. I make a point of hearing opposing sides. I read conservative columnists to better understand an issue. I hate to say it, but I’ve listened to Limbaugh and watched O’Reiley. Not for very long mind you, but long enough to get the gist of their ratings based diatribe. Hearing from the other side challenges me and strengthens my arguement. All of us have to synthsize the facts that we have and reach the best understanding possible.
Are their biasis, shortcomings and inaccuracies in the media, absolutely. Nobody nails the truth. Have reporters conspired to push the country to the left, don’t be ridiculous. The vast majority of reporters are like every other professional, they are trying to do the best job they can. It is up to you to filter out the bias.
I’m sure there are many reasons why newspapers have been losing readers, network news shows have been losing viewers and weekly magazines have lost subscribers. It isn’t as simple as liberal bias. Just because you and I read a paper everyday, it doesn’t make me or you an expert on the newspaper business.
Finally, Obama never promised as FOX News claims to ban all earmarks. He said he would ban earmarks in the stimulus bill, which he did. During the campaign he promised to reform the earmark process and to reduce earmarks to lower than the 1994 levels and to ensure more disclosure of earmarks. He promised to go line by line through the federal budget to eliminate programs that didn’t work. Go here for a thorough recap of his promises: http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/mar/02/john-boehner/spending-bill-wasnt-candidate-obamas-type-boehner-/
OK, as someone who currently (at least for now) works in the AJC newsroom, I feel I have to offer my two cents.
First thing everyone needs to realize is that newspapers aren’t in trouble because they are losing readers. Hell, newspapers have been steadily losing readers since the mid-1980s. Newspapers are in trouble because they are rapidly losing ADVERTISERS. I’ve been a journalist since the early 1990s, and everyone knew that our circulation numbers were falling like rocks, but no one cared because the advertisers stuck with us.
Even when the Internet came along in the mid-90s, newspapers were OK because advertisers didn’t initially take all of their money to the Internet. But by 2001 or so, advertisers began to finally see how advertising on the web was so much better in certain cases then advertising in print, so that’s when the advertising dollars began to go away. Newspapers still weren’t too worried about this because they had classified advertising, which used to be a little more than half of all newspaper revenues. But then Craigslist came along and took all of that way.
So it wasn’t until Craigslist took away half of their revenue that newspapers got concerned. But by then it was too late. Lots of other advertisers (car dealers, real estate, etc) started to permanently take away their dollars, and newspapers found themselves in the shocking position of losing perhaps 75 percent of their revenue in less than a decade.
But aren’t newspaper making money from all of those ads on their Web sites? Not really. Because there are so many ads on the Internet, web advertising doesn’t generate as much revenue as print advertising. An advertising rep at the AJC explained it to me this way. He said suppose a print ad in the newspaper brings in $100 worth of revenue. That same ad on the AJC web site is only going to bring in about $7 bucks. That’s it.
So while yes, a newspaper Web site can turn a profit, it will only be a small one. And such a small profit won’t be enough to support the large newsrooms that most newspapers have had in the past.
So why don’t newspapers just charge for the content instead of giving it away for free? Because it’s been repeatedly proven that the pay model doesn’t work. I mean, what exactly are newspapers going to charge you for that you can’t get for free somewhere else on the web?
Charge for national and international news? Readers can get that for free from CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc.
Charge for local news? Readers will just go to the TV station web sites to get that for free.
Sports? ESPN and the various sports blogs that people love will handle that.
Weather? The Weather Channel web site. Next?
Charging people means the flow of traffic to a newspaper web site shrinks to a trickle, and that means you won’t be able to attract any advertising at all.
So what’s going to happen to newspapers? I believe most will close and/or become online publications only. Everyone knew this would happen, but we thought we were 20 years away from this. Now I think it will happen within the next few years.
You print lovers need to brace yourself. I think there’s a real possibility that the print version of the AJC may be gone by the end of next year. Yes, I’m serious.
Whew, I didn’t mean to write so much. Before I go, one word on the whole liberal media/conservative thing. That has absolutely no bearing on the success or failure of newspapers. Newspaper executive don’t care if a bunch of conservative readers drop their subscriptions or not. They only care about the advertising – that pays the bills. And until the Internet came along, the advertisers remained, so the newspaper executives were happy.
“During the campaign he promised to reform the earmark process and to reduce earmarks to lower than the 1994 levels and to ensure more disclosure of earmarks. He promised to go line by line through the federal budget to eliminate programs that didn’t work.”
How exactly is it that signing a budget resolution that had about 9,000 earmarks “reducing earmarks to 1994 levels?” And ensure more disclosure of earmarks? What a canard. There is no disclosure problem. Everyone knows they’re in a bill before the bill is signed. That Congress is wasting our money is no secret; we don’t need to be reminded of it, we need it to be stopped. Obama simply punted on this bill, arguing that it was “last year’s business.” I guess going through line by line will have to start sometime later, but even then, he’ll be careful not to get those earmarks below “1994 levels.”
This is a very timely subject, since China has now finally started complaining about all our spending and the threat that we are simply going to inflate our way out of the trillion dollars we owe them. The crowd that champions sustainability in all things but federal spending is going to learn a hard lesson in this.
[...] Metro has a great conversation about my colleague Scott Henry’s news that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom is [...]
This is off subject from the fate of newspapers, but anyway. Yes, it is probably fair to say he punted on the earmarks in the continuing resolution that appropriates funds for the remainder of the fiscal year. The earmarks accounted for less than 2% of the costs of the budget resoltion. So let’s not get overly concerned about the impact of this spending derived by the legislature. Some of the earmarks make great fodder for supporting the theory that everything the government does is wasteful. Spending $200,000 for researching tatoo removal sounds wasteful to me, but I don’t have any tatoos.
Personally, I don’t think earmarks are necessarily a bad thing. Certaintly there shouldn’t be any secrecy and they shouldn’t be slipped into a bill without full disclosure. This has been a problem in the past. I have been told, but can’t confirm, that the Human Gene Map is the result of an earmark, so good things can come from earmarks. I think if a local congresman could secure a few million for MARTA to expand service, we might all be a little better off.
Obama’s position is that he needs to keep the support and backing of Congress in order to pass his agenda on health care, education and energy reform. This spending bill originated in the previous congressional session and should have been passed much earlier. He has said that he will play a more active role in discouraging earmarks in the future, and we will have to wait and see.
I thought Obama’s agenda on those items was shared by the party generally, which controls both houses of Congress. The members have to be bribed by earmarks to vote for programs they support?
It’s always possible for good things to come from spending a lot of money. That mere prospect doesn’t mean its a good idea to start writing tons of checks. The more fundamental problem is that we just don’t have the money. With trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, now would be a very good time to start cutting everything we possibly can.
My experiences in advertising sum up the challenge facing the AJC, and all other regional dailies:
I own a rental house. Last year, I placed a for-rent ad in the AJC. As I recall, it cost more than $100. The clerk who took the ad was new, and it took us more than 15 minutes to get the thing right. That was merely for four lines of copy, no images.
That night, my wife posted the ad on Craigslist, with photos. It took her five minutes, tops. No money exchanged hands, either.
We got about six calls and emails. I asked each would-be renter where he/she heard about the house. One cited the AJC.
This is chaos theory at its best/worst. One little website created by some guy in his underwear on his couch causes the collapse of major newspapers everywhere. Ouch. All information based businesses better watch out. Stock brokers, real estate agents, funeral directors, etc. have all been selling information for years and the internet has taken away their informational advantage.
AJC journalist…thanks for your input. Really valuable stuff. Thanks for verifying my description of Craigslist as the online version of “Satan” where newspapers are concerned.
And I certainly agree with most your points regarding where people can go to get their news for free. But I’m not convinced that’s true with local news. I don’t know how others feel on this subject, but I personally would be really pissed if the only way I could get news was on 11alive.com. Those stories aren’t nearly indepth enough for my taste. I don’t think a dedicated AJC reader would balk at a subscription fee for the AJC, if their only alternative was a local news channel’s website. If you have some data that disproves my point, I’d love to see it. I’m learning as I go here.
Also, here’s another criticism. I think part of the reason that Craigslist has cannibalized newspaper classifieds is because newspapers’ size has gotten too big to be considered target advertising. I’m still thinking this through, but ultimately my point is that papers have spread themselves too thin and so readers don’t value them as they used to. For instance, time after time on this site, I’ve featured local businesses and received incredible feedback, hearing things about all the people that showed up because of my little blurb. THAT’S the power of local. I sent 4x as many people to candyvote.com than the AJC story.
Craigslist can compete because newspaper advertising has gotten generic enough that a blank message board can take the place of classified space in a paper and nobody blinks an eye.
AJC Journalist,
Thanks for the cold, hard truth. It hurts that the powers that be don’t give a lick about what we think, unless we’re the big buck advertisers. I was kinda hoping that they cared about covering their communities … what kind of dream world was I living in?
Craigslist isn’ Satan.
It’s Napster.
Isn’t it telling that the most informative, insightful and well-written post came from AJC Journalist? If professional newsrooms disappear, they will leave a void that won’t be easily filled by citizen journalists. I mean no offense to anyone posting here, much less Decatur Metro — which is a wonderful source of local news.
“Won’t be easily filled” does not mean won’t.
Unfortunately citizen journalist will probably step into the void without actually filling it.
I also want to point out that since I put that AJC post on our Fresh Loaf blog two days ago, it’s gotten exactly one very brief comment. On the other hand, when same the post gets mentioned here on Decatur Metro, it (so far) gets 30 comments, some quite long and well-thought-out.
Certainly, as AJC journalist points out, the primary cause of the newspaper crisis is the decline in ad revenue. But I would also submit that newspapers have historically provided a forum for viewpoints within their communities – and enjoyed the attention and readership that came with that role. But now they must compete for – “share” might be the better word – this attention with local blogs.
This very discussion is an example of this phenomenon: a professional journalist (me) gathers the information and reports it, but a local blogger (Decatur Metro) gets the comments and page views because he’s successfully created an online community of loyal readers.
I’m not belly-aching (consciously, anyway), but merely trying to point out how the traditional newspaper business model doesn’t work any more. I don’t know how to fix it; nobody does.
But I can say with certainly that news aggregation sites like HuffPo and, yes, even community-based bloggers, cannot possibly replace the information gap that’s being created by a dying newspaper industry.
Aggregation only works if there’s new content being produced somewhere to be aggregated. And even if most bloggers were trained journalists, they wouldn’t have the institutional – or financial – support to take on big industry or government in the often brutal and expensive fight for information.
In other words, the smaller the AJC and other media outlets become, the less all of us will know about our world.
Scott, I want to point out that when you wrote on February 23rd about your criticisms of the AJC’s recovery plan I replied with my own criticisms of your points and CL. Again, a story of yours got only one pitiful reply, boo-hoo. But what difference does that make if you and other writers don’t engage your audience, defend your facts or opinions, and remain silent in your own demise? I’m sure you don’t have the time and energy to be in a 24/7 dialogue with your audience, but you’re the one complaining about lack of comments to your stories. I also know most professional writers are very interested to know what others think about their writing.
I left the AJC last year, on (presumably) good terms. It was the best job I’ve ever had, and may be the best I’ll ever have. We’ll see.
To better understand the problem facing the AJC, here’s a few points from the paper’s advertising rate card:
Mon – Wed advertising costs a base of $566 per column inch, Thurs – Sat costs $585, and Sunday costs $755. A quarter-page ad is about 31 column inches, assuming I’m reading the rate card correctly. The prices slide down with volume advertising. Retail advertisers pay about half that cost.
Count the number of ads in the paper, next time you pick one up. Last time I looked, there were only about 12 in the whole paper, but that may have been an anomaly. As I understand it, print advertising wasn’t offsetting the price of paper and ink, delivery and production — that the paper wasn’t covering its variable costs of production, even without accounting for newsroom staffing costs. I could be wrong. Commodity prices have fallen. I’d love to be corrected.
Now, for online advertising, I believe the AJC charges something like $12 per 1000 impressions. The AJC’s digital rate card seems to be hidden right now, so I can’t be sure. Larger ads cost more. The front page of AJC.com runs three to five ads, and a typical news story carries two ads. An average AJC.com user sees 3.15 pages per visit, according to Alexa.com, and the site has an average of 1.8 million visitors a month, according to Quantcast.com.
That’s about 60,000 page views a day, of about eight ads, at an average of, say, $15 per 1000 ad impressions. 60 x 8 x $15 = $7,200 a day, or $2.63 million a year. The AP probably charges the paper something like $200,000 a year for content. If a staffer costs the paper an average of, say, $60,000 in salary, benefits and whatever, then the online advertising can support about 40 journalists, editors, layout folks, ad people and random administrative types. I imagine the price of server space and digital distribution costs to be nominal, although you need an IT person or four in there.
Good luck keeping a news staff of 350, if the print paper is losing money. An all-digital paper with the AJC’s hit count could support a news staff of 35, maybe, and turn a profit. I hope that’s enough.
Paula,
I do not believe it will be seamless either. Nor do I think we are even on the verge of a “citizen journalists” spinning out that kind of investigative piece. However, neither do I think we are going to fall into a void.
We have to stop looking at this as a false dilemma. It is not an either or situation.
What we know as newspapers are doomed. The time has long passed when their model could be repaired. But when the last printing press stops, the news will still be there and as surely as the sun rises, the news will be communicated somehow. It may be a non-profit supported vehicle or it may be a virtual newsroom or it may be citizen journalists or it may be a chimera of all three or it may be something we have not thought of yet. But it is high team we start discussing this future and figuring out what the hell is about to birthed.
I have sympathy for anyone who loses their job, but my days of fretting over an industry intent on self-immolation are over.
Meant “high time” not “high team” of course.
You know, as long as I’m at it …
Here’s an odd thought. There’s no way — none — that you can cull a third of the AJC’s staff and not chuck a whole lot of real talent, no matter what you think about the paper.
Suppose a group of, say, 10 of the most talented to leave got together and formed their own Atlanta news site. No brand equity, certainly, but no legacy costs, either. Find a good ad person-marketing type to get the public’s attention, assuming they don’t manage it themselves with the right reporting. I wonder how long they would take to pick up a hit count greater than, say, 40 percent of the AJC’s? I figure they wouldn’t be able to command the same ad rates of the AJC, but $5-$8 per thousand impressions isn’t unrealistic. At that point, if they stay lean, they might actually become more profitable than the AJC.
The question, my friends, is whether a small group of writers can be compelling enough to attract wide attention in Atlanta. If most people are reading the paper for a narrow enough set of interests — to get mad at a columnist, to get Braves and Falcons news, and occasionally read about something funny or lurid — then it’s possible.
Former AJC Reporter,
Let me give you the analogy I use.
Hanson
Don’t laugh. Humor the wild-eyed blogger for a minute.
Hanson released MMMbop and sold about a billion records. After realizing their record label wanted them to keep churning out MMMbops, they left, started their own independent label. Now they sell in the neighborhood of 200-300k records with each release.
Guess which way has resulted in the brothers Hanson having more money in their pocket.
A great example of quality, local online journalism can be found here: http://www.stlbeacon.org/ This online “paper” was founded by ex-St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalists (after a round of layoffs and buyouts at the Dispatch) and is operated as a not-for-profit. The editor is a good friend and, thus, I check it from time to time. I’ve always been impressed with what they produce.
I am a former journalist (recently laid off–although not from the AJC). What I find so disheartening about the newspaper cuts, beyond the human toll, is there will be fewer staff to do the in-depth reporting that we as a community need. I don’t know if blogs and newzines have the resources to investigate issues as deeply as the established papers. They may in time, and the cream of online reporting will surely rise to the top, but in the meantime I think we run a terrible risk of not being able to hold officials and other leaders accountable.
[...] March 15, 2009 Blogs , journalism Screw newspapers — as long as we have bloggers, the public will be properly informed. I understand that we need local news coverage, but what can you not find out from numerous [...]
Just saw this article and thought it was quite relevant for this conversation.
I posted this in response to ATLmalcontent over on his site…
Wow. There’s some bad blood out there regarding this issue.
ATLmalcontent, I’m a little perplexed as to why you picked a single comment out of what I thought was a very thoughtful and thorough discussion of newspapers vs. bloggers. And in my experience I haven’t found that particular view to be all that pervasive. Many will miss newspapers dearly…myself included.
As I stated in the post you linked to, and on many other occasions, there are many things that bloggers can’t do…due to lack of time and resources. Therefore, the loss of newspapers is a really serious issue for society. And we all know the unanswered question is how do you create a business model that can support investigative journalism if the papers don’t survive. (I know grift wants me to say “when the papers don’t survive” )
But don’t underestimate bloggers and their motives. I have no journalism background and my motive is simple. To support my community. Yes, I inject my opinion into my site, but I also work VERY hard to support an open commenting environment and I’m not afraid to admit when I’m wrong. And that model works. And where does my credibility comes from? Simply my own online words and actions and little else. If you were to ask many of my readers who they have more faith in…a faceless local blogger or the AJC, you might be surprised by the result.
Has this motive of supporting my community paid off? I think so. I now have more monthly visitors than any GA/Atlanta blog I can find, including Peach Pundit. So now I have a double motive. Support my community, which I do with news and commentary, but also with event announcements and free advertising for local businesses, AND to keep my site relevent and popular. Can a site like DM support itself? That’s the $64,000 question.
And while I agree that investigative journalism is important, I would say that the newspapers long ago lost the ability to do a valuable service for smaller local communities. While the AJC might do a decent job taking the governor to task on occasion, they are WEAK when it comes to local stories. Reporters today are stretched too thin and often misstate stories in my experience. In fact, the AJC has been pilfering stories from me for a good long time without so much as a thank you or hattip.
As for evidence of bloggers breaking stories…though I can only take credit for some of them…my readers have helped me break many stories over the years including the Trackside Fire, which we reported a full 12 hours before the AJC, resulting in over 8,000 hits in a single day. Also, the Fellini’s robbery comes to mind, which the AJC never reported.
Additionally, I do my own leg work, going to commission mtgs, talking to city officials about issues such as our wi-fi system and development in town and I may soon even venture into the realm of doing book reviews.
What can a blog put up against the journalistic integrity of a newspaper? How about a forum for open discussion and an entire community of support? It can’t spend a day at the Capitol, but it can cover a local community much better than a stretched newspaper.
[...] better understand the problem facing the AJC, here’s a few points from the paper’s advertising rate [...]
As newspapers in general and the AJC in particular have moved to advocacy journalism, the nature of their appeal to advertisers has changed. No longer is the AJC the agreed upon voice of credibility in the community with which an advertiser wants to associate its brand. As the consensus about the fundamental fairness of the paper broke down, the brand value of its advertising collapsed.
As an advocate, there are different ( and fewer) brands who find the connection with the AJC helpful and valuable.
I would not underestimate the effect of this associative effect on the decisions of the advertisers to find other outlets for their dollars. It is no accident that the online edition cannot find the ad revenue needed to make it economically successful.
For a long time, i have argued that the destiny of the AJC is an on-line version of the Great Speckled Bird, a niche advocate of a narrow social and political perspective. The inability of the AJC to step away from its advocacy in a down market only accelerated the process.
Publishing, that is an industry characterized by high fixed costs that serve as a barrier to entry and a restraint of competition, is dead. Now there is a news content and distribution business characterized by low fixed costs, people intensive and wildly competitive. Until a brand emerges that broad segments of the public trusts, we will live in the wild west. What happens next is the fragmentation of news along social, political and age lines
Bullshit.
The AJC, for all its faults, doesn’t engage in advocacy journalism. It probably should.
I agree that consensus about the AJC’s credibility has broken down. Largely, that’s because conservatives have campaigned loud and long to smear any media that doesn’t identify itself as conservative.
I’ve had quite enough of that. Define your terms for advocacy journalism, please. I may agree with you. Show me examples, my friend. Don’t just put that one over the plate as a given and expect the good reader to accept the bias you perceive as fact.
[...] old-fashioned print journalism vs. blogging. (And if you haven’t, you can some catch up here, here and most especially, [...]
lol! go easy on him – he’s a good guy.
I don’t know cb! He’s been askin’ for it for months!
DM – Actually, I don’t think we are in that much disagreement overall. Basically, my point was that the AJC chooses to provide information that is readily available for free elsewhere (the fluff, and by that I mean the stuff that Yahoo news posts every few minutes on its homepage), and dumped the stuff that could be value-added (in my opinion, that’s investigative pieces, but I do agree that uber-local coverage of other stuff could be value-added as well). And I absolutely agree with you that it’s been a sad, vicious cycle of cutbacks, for sure. (The last season of The Wire made this point in its usual stomach-wrenching, eloquent way.)
But my big point is really that while the medium may change, it in no way diminishes the need for the content. I would go so far as to make the grandiose claim that our democracy depends on a robust press (and by that I include news outlets that don’t literally have presses!). All that said, I really have no idea how this will play out.
We have a daily subscription to the AJC. Call me old fashioned, but I HATE reading my news online. I might go looking for a specific story, but as far as reading the AJC online the way I read the print copy, I’d never do it.
As far as liberal vs conservative media, remember that the Atlanta Journal was a conservative paper and it no longer exists as a separate entity. And who remembers the Atlanta Times, launched as a conservative mainstream paper in the 60s and lasting only few years?
dec mom, I agree. I’m not going to sit in front of a screen for my daily news.
What does the job pay? I’ve always thought I’d be good at editing!
Grift – With all due respect to you and your fellow citizen journalists (who certainly fill a valuable place at the table), there are some stories that simply won’t get told without institutional support. An example: my brother-in-law is literally a Pulitizer-Prize winning investigative journalist. The story for which he won the prize took eight months of 60-80 hour weeks to investigate, not to mention the years of building relationships with sources. Aside from the fact that very few citizen journalists have the resources to devote 8 months of full-time investigation to a story, some stories also require the “clout” that comes with being a member of an organization. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s impossible, or that there aren’t non-mainstream media types out there breaking important stories, but I fear that the transition to the New Media won’t be as seamless as some predict.
Scott, you bring up an interesting point. The one of comments/discussion. But I would argue that again, it all comes back to ad revenue. Because you need to appeal to a large number of eyeballs, you stretch your coverage well beyond the “community” level. So you loose the “common interest” aspect of your site and with it the possibility of intense discourse. Now of course, the discourse doesn’t come without a great deal of effort and nurturing, but then at least there exists the possibility.
And though I take no offense, I will just point out that this site has a decent amount of original content. Both from readers and through my own efforts. The newspapers have already deserted the local communities long ago and they aren’t coming back, so we must make do.