Hanging with the contrarians

Two posts you need to read: Leonard Witt’s Newsrooms must decide: dumb down or smarten up, and Very dizzy busy work by Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Both of them deal with “significant” changes in some American newspapers and both raise some go-slow signs as media reinvents itself.

Len, reacting to a much-discussed Washington Post article (A Newspaper Chain Sees Its Future, And It’s Online and Hyper-Local), writes:

Fighting to fill web space because of some preconceived notion that people are clamoring to read about chamber events is dumbing down. Drilling down into neighborhoods to find their real essence is smartening up.

He doesn’t think what’s happening at the Fort Myers News-Press — journalists doing the hyperlocal thing, working basically from the front seats of their cars — is a bad thing, but he finds the potential for some bad things in it. (One very big Bad Thing is the mating of reporter and sales reps for sales calls.)

Alan has his sights on another bit of reinvention and he’s agin it:

The 24-hour online news desk is the worst idea for newspapers since publishers foolishly decided 10 years ago to put all their valuable content on the web for free.

On one hand, the 24-hour new desk proves publishers can come up with a fresh idea every decade, whether they need to or not. On the other, the concept is a disheartening strategic blunder with the potential to simultaneously degrade the print and online coverage at most newspapers for no discernable gain.

The nub of the argument is here:

Quickie web coverage seriously imperils the print product, because these down-and-dirty stories deprive reporters and editors of the time they need to consider – and report on – the major issues affecting their communities. If news staffs thinned by continuing economic cutbacks are stretched even thinner with busy work, who will write the compelling stories that merit the continued patronage of the print product by readers and advertisers?

A lot of what’s happening reminds me of the history of “convergence,” which went from an exciting possibility for extending and strengthening journalism, to an exercise in bean-counting; from throwing more and different resources at the news, to cutting the number of people covering the news.

Newspapers are being smacked around by falling readership, the flight to the ‘net, loss of relevance, investor demands, rising operating costs…you know, the whole, sad list, at the same time that they are being dragged onto the ‘net, where the readers are and the advertisers are going.

The warning flags that both Len and Alan are setting out deal with the space where those two trends meet. I think that both of them (and a lot of the rest of us) are hoping that the decisions — whether it’s about the 24-hour news desk, the hyperlocal coverage, or such things as citizen journalism — are being driven by the needs of the journalism, not the fact that you can (only) appear to do more with less, or by buying into good ideas but implementing them half-assedly.

(NOTES: There’s a good roundup of reactions to the Ft. Myer experiment at Innovation in College Media. And while you’re at Alan Mutter’s site, which I recommend bookmarking, take the time to read Bulls, bears and ostriches for a take on the blindness of media execs.)