Musings from an erstwhile Town Hall moderator

from Ken Davis

It’s been two weeks since the Town Hall as I write this. Lots of people have expressed lots of opinions about the future of journalism in Chicago.  I thought I’d offer a few observations of my own, in the hope that it might help keep the discussion going.  A word of warning, though. It’s almost as long as a Reader cover story circa 1981. 

Here goes…

Musings of an erstwhile Town Hall Moderator 

 

Maybe you saw the CBS-TV report last week. Mayor Richard M. and Mrs. Daley reportedly traveled,  free of charge, fifty-eight times on a private jet owned by a charity called EduCap. According to the story, they went to Sweden, Turkey, Asia and other places. It’s a sordid story of a questionable “charity” that overcharges students and uses the profits to enrich the CEO’s family and curry favor with politicians. 

 

The mayor has denied it. Maybe the story’s wrong. But for our purposes, it’s a great illustration. That story wasn’t broken by the Trib, the Sun-Times or any of the other big-time media shops in Chicago. It wasn’t broken by a lone blogger doggedly seeking the truth or a devoted citizen journalist. It was broken, more or less incidentally, as a part of  CBS’s unrelated national investigation. 

 

There’s probably not an investigative reporter or editor in town who hasn’t wondered about Mayor Daley’s incessant travel. He almost seems to be abroad more than he’s around City Hall. Who really pays for it? What are the hidden costs of a globe-trotting Mayor? 

 

What would it have taken to have followed Daley to the airport, noted the aircraft’s tail number, traced its owner, and asked at a mayoral presser exactly why he’s flying to Turkey on a plane owned by a not-for-profit that charges 18% for student loans? 

 

I don’t ask this question in a sarcastic tone, because I know the answer. It would have taken a lot. Daley’s press operation goes out of its way to keep such things secret, and they’re very good at it. I know this because I worked for a while in Jackie Heard’s press office, and I saw its ruthless efficiency first-hand. No independent journalist, whether working for an on-line shop or her own blog, would have been able to get anywhere near the concourse. The Trib and S-T city hall reporters wouldn’t have gone, because they would have known that press wasn’t allowed. Investigative reporters might have tried, but as soon as the MPO knew someone was snooping around, they would have taken evasive measures.

Here’s where  the Washington Post piece by The Wire’s David Simon comes so sharply into focus.  Just as Baltimore’s Police Department benefits from lack of press scrutiny, Daley gets a free pass every day by Chicago’s big papers. It’s not because the Hall’s beat writers are incompetent.  It’s because their bosses don’t have, or don’t want to spend, the resources to throw six reporters at him armed with FOIs and databases – and the lawyers and time to back them up. 

 

Before that statement incites Steve Rhodes to start writing Part Three, allow me to say that’s not a defense of Big Paper. The critics are right. The conglomerates and robber barons bled Chicago’s papers dry, and it’s too late to cry real tears over their current plight. Looking back serves no purpose except one. It helps us think about what’s missing, and how we might move forward. 

 

 

As the conversation at the Journalism Town Hall began to balkanize along age and distribution-platform battle lines, both “sides” heaped abuse upon one another for the failings of their respective media, with the implicit understanding that their own held out the best hope for journalism. From my perspective as the guy with the moderator’s mic, and as someone who has read so much of the post-mortem on-line debate, I think we’ve all come up short. 

 

The divide that seemed to cleave itself open before our eyes at the Town Hall is an apparition.  When John Callaway declared that theft is an on-line business model, and when Sachin Agarwal stood, his voice and body shaking in anger demanding that the papers stop producing crap, the tone was set for a lot of the divided loyalty that followed. It was as though those younger than 28 had no use for aggressive, accurate, balanced reporting, and no one older knew the definition of a hyperlink. 

 

It’s not true. Young reporters are hitting the streets every day at Chi-Town Daily News, and their ethics are as solid as at that other Daily News.  Given some money and time, they might become Chicago’s next big newsroom. And crusty oldsters up on the panel were among the first humans ever to use Internet tools, doing so with verve and curiosity before some in the room had set foot on this planet.  It’s not about “old” vs. “new”. 

 

I’ve spent days poring over the comments from Moser, Zorn, Rhodes, Miner, Duros, Iverson and the dozens of others who’ve weighed in.  All have made brilliant points.  Dismiss me as a Pollyanna if you like, but I think there’s a surprising amount of agreement and common ground.  There’s also a deep divide. It’s just not where we all think it is. 

 

There was a moment, late in the Town Hall, when a chilling thought washed over me. The on-line entrepreneurs, so engorged with their enthusiasm for turning eyeballs into big cash, keeping salaries as low as possible or inducing people to work for free, and using “information” as the commodity they’re selling – they’re perfectly positioned to replace the robber-barons and clueless slugs who mismanaged and stole big newspapers into bankruptcy in the first place. Meet the new boss…. 

 

You see, it’s not a generational divide at all. It’s not even a “platform” divide. It’s the same old tension between people who want to be journalists and people who are willing to let them be journalists as long as there’s profit to be made selling the journalists’ work. 

 

Like Brad Flora, I’m not nostalgic for Big Paper or Big Television. But here’s what worries me. Over the decades, within the belly of this bloated system, some devoted, talented people did some stunningly important work. It was as tumultuous as helping demolish McCarthyism and as mundane as keeping Baltimore desk sergeants in line with the law.  

 

We all grew up with the assumption that journalists were sentinels – keeping watch in the dark corners, letting us know when things went wrong.  That’s romantic and exaggerated, of course, but “reporters” have always had a special place in the American story. It’s why, even today, J-schools are filled with idealists who want somehow to follow that dream. 

 

Some, to be sure, are just burning up mom n’ dad’s money in hope of being a superstar TV anchor. But for every one of those kids wasting a seat, there’s another who believes in the value of reporting and storytelling.  I believe there were dozens of them in that room. Some of them talked to me afterward. But they surrendered the floor to the cock-sure business-class types and I wish I could have plucked a few of them from the crowd and asked them to speak. It’s the thousands of passionate future journalists we need to hear from most, because they’re going to need the most nurturing and support. The young adherents to the church of web commerce will do well for themselves whether journalism survives or not. 

 

The owners of on-line corporations can, and will, make staggering amounts of money in the years to come. But there’s no reason to believe that the people getting rich from “news” on line will have any more regard for journalism than Clear Channel has today. Journalists have always had to fight for their craft, and it’s not going to get any easier on-line. In fact, the instantaneous-feedback world into which we’ve migrated makes us all click-whores, and if we don’t learn ways to control the “give them precisely what they want and only that” impulse that on-line mechanics nourish, we’ve got way bigger problems than How To Monetize Our Web Sites. 

 

Whet Moser has written insightfully about Search Engine Optimization, and it’s a must-read. He explains why it’s so important to get your work shoved up the Google-ladder, and describes the nefarious methods being used to assure good elevation. But his thought-provoking piece served, in my mind, only to deepen my conviction that journalism is more vulnerable than ever. I made reference earlier to the past Belly of the Beast Model. Some good work can get done when the owning class doesn’t really have much appreciation for, or understanding of, that journalism thing that’s going on somewhere on a different floor by scruffy-looking people. Just so long as the company’s awash in money. It’s when the profits start to deflate that everybody’d better watch out. 

 

The new beast doesn’t have a belly. 

 

Journalists, by disposition, don’t feel a need to give the public “what it wants”. That’s not as elitist as it sounds. It’s simply recognizing that the public doesn’t know “what it wants”, other than compelling, interesting stuff.  If all you’re offering is fright pieces on urban mayhem, celebrity fluff and warmed-over press releases, they’ll “vote it up”. But I contend there’s a market for really tough, nuanced original reporting, too, and that it will be enthusiastically embraced by the public, just as it always has. It’ll work if there’s an implicit intelligence to it. If it exhibits the soul of a smart person, or group of persons, making judgments. 

 

The system, whether “new” or “old”, must find a way to nurture and support these professionals. In the old system it was a combination of accident and a few beneficent, dedicated family-owners. In the new, we have to find a way to inject that sensibility right into its DNA. Before it’s too late. 

 

From all of the above I draw one, fairly simple conclusion.  A proposition: 

 

Significant, professionally researched, edited and written news stories are democracy’s oxygen. I believe that this endeavor, which I’ll choose to call “journalism”, is so essential to the body politic that it can’t be left to chance. It must be nurtured, refreshed and encouraged. And as such, it must be a profession. As a profession, its practitioners must be well trained, dedicated to their craft, experienced, and compensated to a level that’s commensurate with the importance of their endeavor. 

 

If you don’t believe that, you probably won’t agree with much that follows. 

 

Journalism, if you define it as I have above, produces news. News is its product. It is manufactured by human hands, hearts and brains. It’s no less a product than a shirt or a 747. When done properly it requires experience and judgment. Experience and judgment are also products –  the personally-forged matrix of time, mistakes, triumphs, intelligence and sometimes even mind-numbing boredom. 

 

Products do not “yearn to be free”.  Despite the sloganeering, news is not free. Nor should it be. But it plays a profound role in preserving our freedom. 

 

So let’s try to survey the current landscape, and see if there are any lessons to be learned.

 

 

Newspapers are obsolete. Just like AM radio.

Can there be anything more old-fashioned than amplitude-modulated radio?  Talk about analog. In technical terms, its lo-fi signal sounds today exactly the way it sounded in 1939. When FM stormed on the scene in the seventies most informed people thought the AM band would be turned over to the police for cop calls. And, truthfully, much of the band did become a moribund wasteland. 

 

But today, forty years later, WLS, WBBM and WGN still command close to a quarter of all Chicago radio listening. They’ve repositioned themselves as the legacy voices of this city, and criticize them as you might, they’re still major players. That’s certainly more than you can say for any one of the commercial FM’s, since they’ve devolved into insipid, soul-less corporate slop. 

 

Newspapers are obsolete. Cutting down and mashing up trees is such a ridiculous way of transmitting information today that it’s laughable. Except for that legacy part. If the Trib and the Sun Times can somehow, miraculously, get through this financial tsunami, and if they can somehow find a way to make some money with their on-line operations, they’re perfectly set up for another twenty or forty years as the principle news-leaders in this town. It might not happen. Many “informed people” of today state flatly that it won’t happen.  But both papers still have, even in their battered states, a functioning core of intellectual property, both human and historic. They also have close to a million daily readers in print, and untold more on-line who trust those banners. They’re easily underestimated. 

 

More about funding models below. But I think we should all consider what conventional wisdom dismisses as folly – that one or both newspapers could still be vital in ten years. They probably won’t still be printing – just as WLS isn’t still playing the hits – but they could still be unearthing crooked inspectors and stupefying trucking deals in the Daley administration, then in its thirtieth year. 

 

That’s just the two major dailies. The Defender, already making promising steps into on-line existence, could find its own voice enhanced, and its influence greater than it’s been in decades. Community newspapers, many of them freed from lackluster purgatory in the Sun-Times News Group, just might have one last shot at life if local people get hold of them again and find the right mix of print and on-line that hyper-serves a local community. 

 

And, in yet another AM radio lesson, once given-up-for-dead stations like WIND and WAIT have taken on new importance as partisan political voices (the equivalent of political blogs) and myriad ethnic and brokered stations are merrily clicking along by satisfying small, but doggedly loyal audiences. 

 

 

On-line-only news shops will grow and become more influential.

It’s hard to find anyone (myself included) who disagrees with this. 

 

They are, generally speaking, well-positioned to take advantage of every technical innovation washing over us. If Kindle 3 or some iteration of the i-Phone arrives perfectly gestated as a gotta-have portable reading device, these folks will have the content – waiting to be flashed, streamed and downloaded. Faster smart phones, city-wide Wi-Max, live 30-frame-per-second video from anywhere to everywhere – it’s all either here or just around the digital corner. Will the on-line community be ready for it and eagerly embrace it all, or will the new technologies pass many of them by, too, just as web sites eluded newspapers?  As the bleeding-edge folk are already saying, the Tweet culture kinda makes web sites look awfully static and, well, yesterday. To quote the sign-off from a million live TV standups, only time will tell. 

 

For purposes of this document, though, the question remaining very much unanswered is whether maturing on-line-only shops will be sources for exemplary “journalism”. 

 

Yes, Chi-Town, Gapers Block and others are generating original reporting, and they’re growing. That looks promising. But it’s a huge leap from where they are now to where we need them to be.  In order to be effective in big-city journalism, a news shop must have heft and muscle. It has to have the ability to make an alderman reach for his heart meds when that first reporter’s call comes in. It needs to be undeterred by Daley’s army of public information officers deployed at every level of city government whose real job is to make sure that reporters don’t get anything he doesn’t want got. Will one or more of these shops ever achieve this critical mass? 

 

More important, how many of them want to? 

 

If a site can make money for its owners selling video games, gossip about celebrities, or generated-for-gratis opinion pieces from armchair experts, where’s the incentive to waste money doing journalism? Journalism’s hard, controversial, and, as Carol Marin so aptly pointed out, fraught with lawyers and lawsuits, at least when it’s done properly. Where’s the evidence that any of Chicago’s up-and-coming on-line news shops will have the guts and the stamina to become newsrooms? (Please note that I didn’t include funding in that question. This is about way more than a site’s ability to raise cash. It’s about commitment.) 

 

My fear is that the brave new world is strikingly similar to the tired old world. Journalism – true, in-your-face journalism, is something you have to really want to do. Marshall Field wanted to do it. In his own way, so did the Colonel. And Robert Sengstacke Abbott. Let’s hope some of that spirit is suffusing itself into the optic fibers spidering out from a thousand news-site servers. 

 

Don’t discount the other big news sites

All the TV stations and several news radio stations have developed credible, highly-trafficked Web sites. Because they were never print-oriented, they were born with digital-media spoons in their mouths. They have big-number capabilities for serving streaming video and audio, and in many ways they’re advanced way beyond the newspaper sites or the insipient on-line news shops. It might be a lot easier for Channel 7 to add more written content to its already dynamic site than to teach the older dogs multimedia tricks.  These sites could take on a dramatically enhanced role if the funding piece gets settled. 

 

We haven’t really taken into consideration that the “ten o”clock news” is probably a bigger dinosaur than the dead-tree newspaper. Like the papers, these shops are experiencing upheaval, too. Why watch a newscast when you can get the Burris report on-demand? While I’m there, I think I’ll watch the network’s report on Hilary Clinton, too. On my i-Phone, on the Metra.

 

 

The non-profit newsroom

So if the greedy capitalists and money-grubbers are what’s in the way of journalistic nirvana, why not cut out the middle man and go non-profit? Well, there are quite a few reasons, actually, and no less than Carol Marin and John Callaway, both of whom have spent years in both worlds, wisely offered caution. Non-profit managers are not inherently smarter, or more predisposed to risk-taking than their commercial brethren. Public television has made invaluable contributions to our culture, but despite fifty years and billions and billions of government dollars, it certainly isn’t seen today as a must-see source of television news. In fact, some of its very best journalism, and there’s been a lot of it, has been the source of its deepest troubles, since small-minded lawmakers quickly reach for the CPB card when they get offended.

Public radio is probably most often cited these days as a not-for profit success story, and I’m too conflicted to have a credible opinion. I was program director of WBEZ during the 80’s and 90’s, when public radio was just emerging as a journalistic force. I’ve always believed that National Public Radio is the biggest American journalism success story of the past generation, coming from nothing to 400 journalists and 30-some bureaus around the world in about 30 years. Today it has legions of critics and admirers, but as every other true news source is on the ropes, NPR is incredibly potent. It has retrenched a little because its endowment is shrinking, but it’s still a healthy, $75 million a year operation. 

 

The local public radio story is more complex. Over the past couple of years, WBEZ has generously allowed me to work as an occasional freelancer, and I count so many there as my professional and personal friends that anything I say is suspect. But I feel strongly that, as other news sources have receded, WBEZ has not become the journalistic powerhouse it could and should have become over these past years. News has always been an important part of their mission, and they have the awards to show their accomplishments. But it has never, in my opinion, been the highest priority. Vocalo, their recent bold experiment in youth-oriented citizen journalism, while admirable, has sapped what should have been their core mission, and a phenomenal opportunity is passing them by.  There’s really no reason why, today, that station shouldn’t be in the top three or four primary news sources in Chicago. 

 

Nevertheless, they’re doing so many things right. Their $20 million annual budget is probably five times greater than when I left in 1992, and fully half of it comes in voluntary subscriptions from their listeners. Ten million dollars a year from people who could get their product for free. Does that sound intriguing? 

 

So- just because you don’t make a profit doesn’t necessarily mean you’re better. But it’s not a bad alternative, either, and it demands further exploration.

 

Commercial, non-profit, whatever. Somebody’s got to pay something.

The big dogs may survive and thrive as on-line news operations with huge audiences and propitious influence. Seems hard to believe right now, but I hope that it happens. 

 

The on-line sources will grow, and find audience, and I look forward to that, too. 

 

But despite Kyoshi Martinez’s enthusiasm for on-line advertising, It almost certainly won’t support journalism in a significant way. In fact, on-line advertising’s most attractive quality is also its biggest limitation. Yes, it’s capable of hyper-hyper-hyper targeting. But while the Trib may happily accept revenue for an ad flashed directly to me about White Flower Farm introducing a new line of tetraploid daylilies, how many such messages make up for a full-page Abt ad? 

 

So there’s got to be something else. There has to be a way to raise revenues from the consumers of news.  I’ve heard, and I largely agree with, the criticism that this shouldn’t be necessary. But pacemakers shouldn’t be necessary either, until they are. 

 

There are dozens of schemes. Eric Zorn likes the bundled cable-TV model. Mike Miner and others prefer Kachingle. Some favor just hiding all the good stuff behind a fortified firewall to force user payment (although, in fairness, I think that extreme position has been discredited.) It seems pretty obvious that any web payment scheme is going to be a layering of many methodologies, but I remain convinced that something must, and will, emerge. 

 

Those who’ve suggested an i-Tunes for news have been pretty much laughed out of the room. I agree that a penny-a-listen approach isn’t the way to go, but an important point has been lost in dismissing i-Tunes. If you give people an easy, seamless way to pay for intellectual property, many of them will. That, to me, parallels the public radio model, and is its most instructive lesson. 

 

I was recently in Columbia, Mo, where I met with Bill Densmore of the Reynolds Journalism Institute. They’re bringing fellows in from around the country to ponder just this question. And they’re promoting a new idea called Information Valet. It involves signing up and submitting a fairly detailed self-profile.  You’re then given a broad array of options. You can subscribe directly to hundreds of available sites, from large to small. You can enter into a Kachingle-like agreement in which you budget a certain amount per month and it’s allocated to the sites you visited most often or that you rated most highly. Or you can go the free-enterprise route, in which you get everything free, but your profile is flashed before advertisers every time you enter a site so that hyper-targeted ads can be displayed. Clicking an ad gives you credits that can accrue to the site if you wish. That’s a grossly understated  representation, but you can get lots more details here.

 

Often lost in this discussion is the fact that most payment schemes will treat Chicagoist, the Sun-Times, the Washington Post and Jen’s Healthy Baby Tips equally. Imagine being an independent blogger competing directly with Richard Roeper, and making a living at it?  Imagine Gapers Block becoming so successful, and so clicked-at, that it raises the money it needs for its expansion at least in part from its readers? 

 

Eventually even the “information wants to be free” crowd, a little greyer and sobered by mortgages and tuition bills, will come around to, and benefit from, a sane payment methodology.  Some gentle advice for the smaller guys. Stand aside for a while and let the NYT, Washington Post and Tribune Company fight this battle. Eventually, son, this will all be yours. 

 

 

We may need an interim solution. A kind of wildlife sanctuary.

I’ve come to believe that we need to start immediately building some kind of limited-proftit, public-interest Metro Chicago News Bureau, to house reporters, researchers and editors, and to create a 24/7 stream of original reporting content.  For various reasons, I think it should exist for only a short time – perhaps two or three years.  It cannot be, or be perceived as, a competitor for any other on-line news operations. Ideally, as smaller on-liners get stronger or the fate of the large commercial operations becomes clearer, the temporary bureau would dissolve into one of those shops. 

 

Creation of the Bureau

Maybe a Chicago news bureau is already happening. The Medill News Service is obviously already in place. I hear that other organizations in town are in the planning stages for some kind of non-profit news entity. Maybe all that’s needed is to support these efforts. But something with a large, credible footprint needs to be created outside of the current commercial news environment, and, in my opinion, created quickly. 

 

Dissemination

The bureau would maintain its own Web site, or partner with another entity that has Web capacity. It would also offer its products to any news service that wants it, probably for a small charge, or even free if the funding can support it.  The bureau can act as a special contractor, doing reporting on a contractual basis for a specific news shop, much like traffic services on radio stations. It would provide, to the best of its ability, video, audio, and written products compatible with smart phones, Web distribution, etc. 

 

Funding

This is where Sally Duros’  L3C idea comes into play.  The bureau would be a limited profit company. Initially, and possibly on an ongoing basis, it would draw funding from the philanthropic community, and it would aggressively seek both corporate underwriting and advertising. Since its life would be short, it might attract a little more generosity from funders, who know there’s a sunset ahead. It would actively seek public donations and subscriptions, in public broadcasting mode. 

Sally tells me she sees Chicago’s journalism, blogging and online communities unleashing the power of self-organization to create the Newsroom of the Future. Contact her if you like that idea.

Budget

Obviously a controversial topic. I part with the “two million dollar newsroom” adherents at this point, because I don’t believe you can achieve the effectiveness of scale until you have enough journalists to crank out consistently high quality, professional stuff.  You probably don’t have to pay huge salaries, but you need to pay enough to achieve loyalty and commitment, at least for a couple of years. You’d need a lot of people. And at least a few of them would have to be truly experienced, adventurous souls. 

 

I don’t have the expertise to come up with an intelligent number. But it’s probably closer to ten million, and I think that’s do-able, even in these crazy times. It can be done for less, but as the budget goes down, the value of the service, and the reason for doing it, diminish quickly. 

 

 

Sound goofy? Maybe it is.  But isn’t it reasonable to try to find a way to buy some time as this stuff sorts itself out? I detect that Chicago’s foundations are truly ready to step up, but they need a concrete proposal to get behind. If not this one, then let’s devise another. 

 

So much of this is already in place. It doesn’t have to be created out of thin air. We’re awash in resources, academic power, smart people and low-hanging news just waiting to be plucked. 

 

Developing some kind of publicly-operated interim news bureau gives the entrepreneurs a couple of years to find the funding, build their organizations and supplant the bureau if they succeed. It also allows the big dogs a chance to find their footing, gain strength and, newly revitalized, buy out the bureau. Or, if all else fails, it’s positioned to become the new big dog.  The foundations and sponsoring corporations will have bought a kind of journalistic insurance policy. 

 

 

Another Town Hall?

I’ve been asked fairly often if there will be another Town Hall. I don’t sense the need, or value, for another one in the immediate future. If there’s any interest at all in trying to create something like what’s described above (or anything else), working groups should begin gathering right now. 

 

If there were to be another large-scale forum, it should probably have a completely different panel, although I’d hope the original panelists would all attend. (Someone suggested it might be better without a panel at all)  I completely agree with the idea that a follow-up Town Hall must include participants from the advertising, business, technical and management sectors. Maybe it should be held on-line, although I’ll always prefer face-to-face communication. 

 

Barb Iverson, I believe, has talked about a follow-up meeting in the fall, possibly at Columbia College. Brad Flora has mentioned a possible up-coming bar-camp, and he’s assembling journalism start-up info here. Maybe you have your own idea for what should come next. 

 

No matter what happens, it was an honor and a thrill to host the first one, and I thank you sincerely for your interest. And for reading all this way.  Please, please comment below, and let’s keep this conversation going. 

 

When planning the Town Hall, Mike Miner was one of my first calls. He told me he believed we are facing a matter of civic urgency. He was, and is, right.  We must not allow the sense of urgency to abate. 

 

Ken Davis