Want to cover local? Then you'd better BE local!

May 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Allow me to suggest one more mistake that the newspaper industry made that we shouldn’t allow the slip down the memory hole. It was a practice that I am sure struck many newsroom managers as a smart one… at the time. But it ultimately helped sever ties between publications and their communities, leading to less informed, less engaging coverage that left readers – and advertisers – with fewer reasons to support their local paper.

What was this practice? It was conducting national job searches to fill local reporting positions.

When I began my journalism career, J-school advisers told us to expect to start out at a smaller paper in a national chain, then try to work our way up to larger newsrooms, bigger cities, and more desirable places to live. You had to “pay your dues” in some small town before you could move up to a major metro.

The model was that of an assembly line, where you started by proving yourself on low-risk tasks that weren’t particularly critical to the overall operation, before moving up to higher-speed, higher-pressure jobs with national visibility. (By broadening the candidate pool for every local reporting job, this helped chains keep labor costs down, too.)

But while the smallest papers in a chain might be next to invisible to the suits in corporate HR, they were real, and important, to the people living in the communities they served. Most of those readers weren’t trying to “move up” to some bigger city. They were home, and happy there.

The old newsroom hiring model saw the nation’s communities as interchangeable rungs on a corporate ladder. But, despite the billion-dollar efforts of companies such as Walmart, Target, McDonald’s, and Applebee’s, people in those cities and towns continue to resist their commoditization. Sure, they shop at Walmart and eat at Applebee’s, but only because they’re cheaper than alternatives. (Which often were run out of business by big-chain outlets operating at a loss until they killed off that competition.) Cookie-cutter newspapers could hold onto their local customers only so long as they offered the cheapest way to get information, too.

When online competitors such as Craigslist and Yahoo! News gave readers a cheaper alternative for classified ads and national news headlines, they bailed. And understandably so. It’s hard to appeal to readers’ sense of loyalty to local voices when those voices are recent college grads who’ve only lived in the community for a couple years and who flee the state whenever they get three or more consecutive days off. Those new hires didn’t grow up in the community. They barely know anyone outside the newsroom and the official sources they encounter on their beats. And frankly, they don’t care, either. They’re looking to “move up,” and get out of town.

If you’re a local, you might as well get your local news from a discussion board. At least the people posting there actually know the town, send their kids to school there, and are planning to stick around a while.

My first full-time job in the news industry was in Omaha, Nebraska – a community I’d never stepped foot in before my job interview at the paper. To my surprise, the paper offered me a gig, and with my first student loan payment looming, I took it. I had no business writing for anyone in Omaha, or the states of Nebraska or Iowa. Hey, I tried my best, but I didn’t know the names, the places, the people or the unique issues that mattered to anyone who’d grown up in that state. So I took the hint when the paper tried to run me out of town and eventually rented a truck to move to a city my wife and I knew and loved – her hometown, Denver.

(I worked there for nearly four years until I got recruited to a job in my hometown, Los Angeles, where I continue to live today.)

So as we look for new companies to emerge and redefine the journalism industry online, let’s hope those new leaders won’t make this same mistake, too. Readers deserve writers who are as invested in the community as they are.

And if that expression of idealism does nothing for you as a cold-hearted capitalist, allow me to frame the issue another way: You can’t collect a premium price for a bargain-basement product.

If you’re producing product in the cheapest way possible, you’ll only hold your market share so long as you offer the lowest price available. (Walmart’s learning this the hard way as its bargain-hunting customer base begins to abandon it for dollar stores.) Trust me, even if you think that the cheapest way to run a newsroom is with fresh college grads desperate for a job, they’re still more expensive than outsourcing to writers in Bangalore watching Web cams. Or script kiddies in Eastern Europe writing scraper algorithms. If you want to publish using actual live, local journalists writing your publication, you’ll never be able to operate at lower costs than your online competition. To survive as a business, you’ll need the higher income that only a premium product can command.

So your local writers better really be local writers, people are from – and of – that community. This goes for niche topic sites, too, and not just for geographically focused publications. Writers for niche sites must be insiders of the community they cover, as well – individuals with passion for and personal experience in the topic they cover.

What does this mean? If you’re a manager at a national news chain, it’s time to zero out the relocation budget, if you haven’t already. Make local publications hire exclusively from candidates in their local markets. It’s time to reconnect with those communities. Promote from within at your titles, too. If “outsiders” really want to work at one of your publications, insist that they move to that community on their own, first.

For journalists, it’s time to make an investment in your future by relocating to the community where you want to live and work, if you’re not there already. Then start blogging as soon as you arrive. Build the audience that you will leverage into either your own publishing business or a job at an established local publication.

For journalism students, do the same. Start your career right by going to the best J-school you can get into in the city (or state) where you want to live and work. If your goal is to work in niche-topic publications, rather than covering a geographic community, go ahead and look at big national J-schools. But select the one that also has the best available program in the field you want to cover, too. Either way, immerse yourself in the community you’ll be covering. Only by being in and of the community you want to cover can you make yourself an attractive candidate to the smart publishers who recognize the need to remain connected to their communities.

The market is speaking to us. It wants the era of clueless, disconnected, outsider coverage in journalism to be over. And thank goodness for that. Let’s make it happen.

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The fastest-dying industry in America

March 13, 2012 By 6 Comments

Is any university in America still admitting students as print journalism majors?

That question popped into my mind last week when I read a LinkedIn research post that claimed that newspapers have shed a larger percentage of jobs that any other industry in America over the past five years, losing more than 28 percent of its jobs during that time.

I mean, wow, everyone in the business knew that newspapers were shrinking, but dead last? And dead last in a down economy?

When you consider that many newspaper companies have been trying to add or at least redeploy positions to their online operations, the jobs picture becomes even more grim for the print side of journalism. As far as jobs go, this is – literally – the worst part of the worst industry in the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Given that job market, why would any students want to major in print journalism? More importantly – why would any ethical college or university allow those students to do so?

College today costs an obscene amount of money, an outrageous expense that’s often justified by the extra earning potential that college graduates enjoy over those who do not earn a college degree. But median wages for college graduates (adjusted for inflation) are shrinking, not growing. And given the collapsing job prospects in print journalism, it seems to me mad to invest tens of thousands of dollars in training to work for newspapers.

And, yes, I wrote “training.” Journalism schools long have considered themselves professional schools, with a focus on training over scholarship, and if you doubt that, consider the relative dearth of PhDs on university journalism faculties, compared with the large number of adjunct faculty and instructors. But it’s going to be increasingly difficult for journalism schools to retain support within their universities if employment prospects in the profession for which they are training their students continue to collapse at the rate that newspapers’ are.

Students are wise to all this, of course. I’m hearing plenty of anecdotal accounts that students are abandoning print journalism, choosing instead to apply or transfer to programs in online journalism, public relations and communications. Add that newspaper companies are no longer enjoying the massive double-digit annual profit margins that led them to fund million- and billion-dollar foundations to support journalism education, and journalism schools are facing a one-two punch to their revenue with many feeling declining enrollment and donation support.

Fortunately, there’s some very good news in the LinkedIn analysis. Take a look at the top three growing industries over the past five years. There’s the Internet at number two and Online Publishing at number three. That’s the future of journalism education right there – fulfilling the growing need for instruction and guidance in profitable and community-building communication in the growing online publishing media.

Unfortunately, too many journalism faculties aren’t well staffed for this shift. While the core principles of sound reporting, clear writing and honest imagery remain for online journalism, today’s journalism students also need instruction in entrepreneurship, as well as building and leading communities in a dynamic, real-time, interactive publishing environment – skills where print veterans too often lack needed years of real-world experience. Worse, too many print-focused instructors advocate journalists maintaining distance from the communities they cover in the name of objectivity – advice that I believe harms 21st century journalism students.

The situation reminds me of the dilemma that newspapers have faced over the past generation, as they tried to diversify the ethnicity of their newsrooms, while at first holding their size steady, then laying off workers. It’s next to impossible to make the numbers work for adding new people from different backgrounds into a work environment that you’re trying to shrink. It’s far easier to diversify a growing industry, where employment opportunities abound.

So, too, will it be difficult for journalism schools to find the empty positions to recruit and hire community-minded entrepreneurial online journalists – who often have plenty of competing career opportunities – while those schools feel funding pressure due to the newspaper industry’s collapse. Journalism schools shouldn’t abandon instruction in print journalism, for jobs and opportunities remain the field. And the history of print journalism needs to remain a part of any journalism or communication school’s curriculum, for the lessons learned (and ignored) by that industry remain instructive to publishers and journalists in any medium.

But with the newspaper industry collapsing faster than any other segment of the American economy, it’s time to quit actively directing students into print. FWIW, I could make the same argument about many professional schools in which colleges and universities recruit and admit far more students that their fields need, including law schools and some departments of business schools. Over-recruitment of students for shrinking fields is an emerging national scandal in higher education. Or, at least, it ought to be.

Students considering professional programs deserve hard facts about job market in those fields, not to discourage them from learning, but to help them be fully informed about their prospects in the future. The primary responsibility for journalists is to tell the truth. So journalism educators should lead the way.

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What are students really buying in an education?

March 6, 2012 By 2 Comments

Will journalism education make some of the same mistakes as the journalism industry? It’s a reasonable question to ask because Internet publishing threatens to roil the education industry every bit as much as it disrupted the news publishing business.

Fortunately, I’ve heard from several journalism educators who are eager to get into distance learning, and to find ways to use the rise of the Internet to their schools’ advantage, rather than wait for the Internet to change the marketplace so radically that their schools are forced to react. But moving lectures from a classroom to the Internet is simply a medium change. Like newspapers starting websites, that won’t be nearly enough for institutions of higher learning to prosper in the Internet age.

The key to surviving a business disruption is to understand clearly what it is that you’re actually selling. If you want to look at this from the flip side, it’s understanding the customer need that those customers are paying you to resolve.

Newspapers screwed up by thinking that they were selling daily news reports to home subscribers. What too many newspaper managers forgot was that home subscription fees were token payments that barely covered the cost of distribution. Their real customers were the advertisers.

Similarly, educators might believe that their “product,” if you will, is information – the deep knowledge of a subject delivered by an instructor during a class. If so, those educators would be just as wrong as their colleagues in the newspaper business were.

Sure, lectures and instruction are part of the package that students get when they pay tuition to a college or university. But the Internet has made
university-level knowledge free and ubiquitous online, just as it made classified ads free and ubiquitous a more than a decade ago. If your institution’s distance learning plans are focused on charging tuition-level amounts of money for access to online lectures, you’re future’s as bleak as a 1990s newspaper trying to peddle overpriced online classified verticals. That’s not your strength. So don’t try to make a play on it.

I’ve written before about how the Internet is fueling a revolution in self-directed learning, especially among the tech-savvy young. If you are a broadcast journalism faculty member and looking to find a market for video editing instruction online, you’re going to have a hard time getting people to pay university-level tuition to access that instruction when they can instead click over to Video Copilot get pro-quality tutorials for free. (That’s the site my 11-year-old son told me he used to teach himself Adobe After Effects.)

This isn’t to say that people won’t pay for instruction online. Much of the time, the Internet’s about as easy to navigate as my kids’ rooms. (They are not neat freaks.) Students, whether pre-career or mid-career, will continue to value and pay for instruction that’s well-organized and presented with a clear and engaging voice. But that’s the eBook market, earning eBook prices from individual students. If you want to earn tuition-level prices from individual students, you’ve got to offer more. Much more.

So if journalism schools aren’t selling knowledge, through in-person lectures or online tutorials, what are they selling? What’s the need that they alone can fulfill that allows them to earn income that free instruction sites online can’t?

Here are a few such needs:

Evaluation, not just instruction.

Community, in lieu of isolation.

Coaching, instead of lectures.

The market for higher education lies not in the flow of information from the academy to the public, it lies in the exchange of information between the public and expert instructors at the college or university. And it lies in the development of a community (that word again*) of learning where students help teach and learn from each other as they learn for themselves.

(*I swear, there could be an OJR drinking game – every time I write the word “community,” readers have to drink. If anyone tries this, I urge you to leave your reading of OJR for the final 10 minutes of your work day. And to arrange for a cab ride home.)

You can’t beat the rest of the Internet on pricing instructional tutorials. You can’t go cheaper than free. But if you’re trying to learn how to make documentaries or video news stories, would you rather hear the feedback of anonymous YouTube commenters, or award-winning filmmakers and journalists? There’s going to come a point in your budding career when you need professional guidance and advice. That’s the moment for education online.

Many self-instructional sites include forums and community (drink!) elements. But I know from personal and professional experience that people cherish the opportunity to become members of a community with informed and experienced leadership. Aspirational readers don’t like to settle for online communities led by flame war winners. That’s a business opportunity, and not just for educational institutions.

The most valuable element of my college education wasn’t anything that I learned in a specific class while I attended school. It’s been the opportunity to be part of my alma mater’s community – the connections I’ve built over the years with other alumni and with faculty members at the school, and the “brand name” value of my degree. So a smart distance learning play for a college or university should not only be built around fostering one-on-one instructional relationships between students and teachers (and between students and other students), it should do so in a way that will enable those connections to develop into lifelong coaching relationships.

It’s tempting to take the cheap and easy way out by throwing together some Flashy lectures and slapping a huge price-tag on them. But that’s not a viable model for distance learning. If higher education is going to seize its future online, educators are going to have to do the more difficult work of finding ways to build relationships with and between students using online media. That is what the students are paying for. Only the foolish in college and universities will forget that.

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