Diary from newspaper retreat

I participated in a Minnesota Newspaper Foundation Leadership Retreat for publishers and editors, funded by the Blandin Foundation, this past week joining smaller papers from such diverse areas as Sleepy Eye, Ortonville, Cottonwood County, Park Rapids and Fergus Falls.

Here are some random thoughts that bubbled up during this time.

• Equation for successful newspapers: ? => # => ! => $ 
• Defined: ? (find out what people want to know about our communities) => # (interview or be authority that gives most useful answers) => ! (aha moment keeps readers coming back) => $ (subscribers/advertisers will follow authority). This is different from what we provide today because we tend to cover meetings, not issues.
• Just like hospitals, newspapers are obligated to improve the health of their communities. When all other leadership fails, newspapers are the institution of last resort before anarchy.
• Regardless of where we are with leaders in our community, we should be developing a "training" or "step up" program for our future leaders and not leave it to serendipity.
• What is impossible to do today at the Free Press but if done can make us a success? Shouldn't we focus on how to make it less impossible?
• Those who say it can't be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it.
• What is being yelled at us from around the curve? "Pig!" Talk to me and I'll explain it.
•  The courage and dedication of editors, writers, desk people -- hell, all newspapers people who live in the Red River area to continue to cover the story while their own families and homes are threatened. I'm hard pressed to believe a citizen blogger would do the job just as well. Why aren't we telling this story more?
  
• Think you are prepared for all emergencies? How about a pandemic! (Thanks, Deb.)
• You know your own social capital but what about the links from the rest of your staff? You may have more valuable connections waiting to be utilized.
• What's wrong with using fear to get the community to activate, participate, attend? Because the Blandin process of involvement must carry ethical issues of how to involve the community or shoulder some of the criticism of instigation rather than activation.
• Newspapers can help a community define itself. If you focus on crime, conflicts and rock & roll to sell newspapers, it may be great for newsstand sales but it presents a distorted picture for all to assume. And it can shape the personality of its members -- we aren't a mirror as much as we are a shiner of the light, an educator. Our goal is not audience; our goal is community development so our businesses stay healthy.
• Why would any newspaper editor want to be a mere chronicler of a community's slow, spiralling death?

'Keep on publishing'

Amid all the talk of moving to a "new platform" for news delivery and journalism evolving to web only, we need to keep in mind a constituency that will not follow that migration.
Here's a letter received today from a reader in Cleveland MN.
"Please! Don't stop publishing your newspaper as others have. I have been retired for several years and when I get up in the morning, I grab a cup of coffee and my newspaper; settle down and enjoy! We don't all own computers, nor do we want to. Most of us have lost friends and spouses. Please! We don't want to lose you too. Keep on publishing!"
I know the immediate reaction from some would be "Your most loyal customers will be gone soon and those not in the newspaper habit will not be there to replace them."
I think the jury is still out on that premise, mostly because we all age and we all need portability. And, no, not "everyone" is migrating to just the web. My bet is on maintaining both online and print as the viable business model but with product differentiations -- not one copying the other and not one replacing the other.
Frankly, I am both encouraged and saddened by this letter. Encouraged because not many businesses have such a personal connection with their customers. Saddened because the actions of others are scaring people needlessly. Smaller newspapers are not going away and probably will come out this faring better because they will fill the voids left by scaled back metros in some areas.
Meanwhile, we need to keep readers like the one from Cleveland MN in mind as we "evolve."
We have a greater purpose than just putting out a product.

Chicken Little with a bigger megaphone

Sat down Monday morning with a friend who also is president of the local credit union. Not exactly a financial institution that is hurting today but the effects are felt everywhere just the same.
As we talked, he paused a little, set down his mug of coffee and said "Have you ever experienced anything like this before? This is a little different."
In fact, we both had been here before but in circumstances one could say was much worse than today. We both lived through the 1982-83 recession when the prime rate was 17% and that was coming down from its high of over 20%. I had just locked in my mortgage at 13.3% a few years earlier and felt lucky!
Unemployment hit a high of 10.8% that year and my employer froze every one's pay. He then took to wearing dress shirts with frayed collars and driving a run down pickup truck after we just had some layoffs. I was lucky because I was new and lower paid. I was also young and being poor was nothing unusual for people my age.
We didn't remember those times as being particularly paralyzing as they seem today. Today is a little different.
Back then we had very specific and limited sources of information. We had only the three network news programs at 6 p.m., a common point of reference for us all. Rush Limbaugh and his ilk had not yet made it to the national talk radio scene. Johnny Carson was a reassuring Midwestern voice for late night viewers and his satire was less biting than today.
Of course, we had newspapers and we had our backyard fences over which neighbors would discuss the trials of the day and find some solace in shared pain.
Why are we so much more frightened today than we were 25 years ago?
We lived through the S&L crisis and survived. We lived through the "malaise" of the '70s with the long gas lines and heating oil crisis and moved on to those dastardly '80s.
And before that we lived through the upheaval of the '60s when people thought our very democracy was crumbling.
And here we are having just lived through one decade of "excessive exuberance" -- that we were sufficiently warned was unsustainable but who was listening -- so that when it did start to erode, we now feel somehow that the end is near.
Today, we seem more edgy, more pessimistic, less sure about coming out whole.
But why is it so different?
It could be because today we are barraged constantly, unrelentingly with updates -- we have 24-hour cable news of all persuasions needing to find ways to fill up the other 23 hours; news alerts on stock market conditions beamed to our Blackberries; Twitter texts sent with up-to-the-minute reinforcement from other Tweeters to let us all know that it is still bad out there, don't get too comfortable; Internet at home and at work accessing all sorts of unfiltered news, blogs and chat rooms.
There is barely enough time to reflect and ponder before the next news blast.
And the backyard fence conversations have been replaced with societal clones -- people who like to converse with, listen to and read from like-minded people thereby shutting off the chance contact with someone who may have a different perspective on things.
In an effort to surround ourselves with assurance, our comfort zone must be secured and isolated from challenge. Consequently, other voices -- maybe unpopular voices, definitely different voices -- are not heard, evaluated, challenged and measured against what we see, hear, believe.
And so we remain paralyzed -- first by the constant drumbeat of bad news and secondly by our cloistered existence -- lacking confidence that it will all come out all right even though times were tougher ... maybe not for those who have lost their jobs in this latest round but historically so.
This is especially tough for those under 40 years of age who don't have a frame of reference to or (as some research suggests) even a desire for history.
So what's to be said of all that?
Well, maybe we should all pause at bit, step back from the dance floor and climb up on the balcony. Disentangle ourselves from the chaos of the every day and find those related experiences to learn what was done back then as well as seek out those who lived through it and find out how. Learn from history. I know that's a bit out of vogue but something I genuinely hope the leaders of today are spending some time doing.

Peeling back the covers

Here are two columns that address the proliferation of "doom and gloom" scenarios and the motives behind them.

The first one is by Mark Morford of SFGate.com Die, newspaper, die? "Look, I'm all for media upheaval and revolution. I'm all for seeing what will emerge from the ashes of print, should it die out completely. But there's a reason the traditional newsroom model has lasted 150 years, that professional journalism is still considered so vital to a healthy democracy, that it's still a profession requiring years of training and education, and not just a casual hobby you engage in when you're a little drunk and you've read a few McLuhan books and you don't get enough sex so hey, might as well mosey over to that Planning Commission meeting and scribble some notes.'

The second one is by Randy Siegel, publisher of Parade Magazine. Behind The Newspaper Naysayers "As newspaper companies fight for survival and attempt to rectify many of the mistakes they have made in the last decade, they don’t deserve a break from anyone—their readers, their advertisers, or their competitors. What they do deserve, however, is a little more objective coverage of their problems and more detailed disclosure about the possible motives of those 'critics' and 'analysts' who are hardly unbiased observers."

From out of the din

The cacophony of wildly diverse opinions on the state of newspapers today can be distressing for some, gleeful to some and bewildering to others. What it is NOT is enlightening because the discussion is fueled on a false premise that newspapers are dying.
Now, before you start swinging again, take a breath and follow my logic.
As I was a young lad in Chicago, our household had three daily newspapers to read -- The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago American and the Chicago Sun-Times. The American (or rather its evolved version, The Chicago Today) died as many PM newspapers died.
We thought then that newspapers were dying and TV was killing them.
Let's get a little perspective.
According the Illinois Newspaper Project, run by the University of Illinois and the Chicago History Museum, "Today there are more than 450 current newspaper titles published in Illinois."
That's 450 newspapers in one state -- daily and weekly.
Now take what is widely being circulated as proof that newspapers are dying -- figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The latest figures show that circulation for all AUDITED newspapers dropped 5% last year. The problem with citing this figure is it represents roughly 500 newspapers. By last count I believe there are 1,500 daily newspapers and 8,000 weekly newspapers in the U.S. That's hardly representative of all newspapers in America.
However, let's use the ABC figures for remainder of this argument. Newspapers that lost 10% or more of circulation include The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Star-Ledger of Newark, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Orange County Register and The Detroit News.
See anything common about those cities? They are ones served by more than one newspaper.
There is a widely circulated "death watch" list of newspapers purported to be the next to fail. With one exception, all of them are newspapers in cities that are served by more than one newspaper.
Allow me then to posit this theory -- this is not a matter of newspapers failing en masse. In some cases, newspapers are dropping readership that is too hard and costly to serve. So losses are self-inflicted. And in the big cities where a lot of the losses are happening, I would suggest that time-pressed readers are not able to read as many newspapers so they are culling their choice to one.
The injuries that newspapers are feeling now are not related to readership losses. Rather it is coming from loss of advertising revenue -- especially classifieds from large declines in auto (very little metal is moving anywhere), real estate (again, home sales are down) and employment (no jobs to advertise).
This is to suggest that our financial woes are cyclical and tied to the present economy and not an overall abandonment of newspapers.