psmith, journalist

I’m a fan of Blunt, the pseudonymous author of the Playing the Game: Real Adventures in Journalism blog on life inside a regional newspaper. He (She?) consistently tells it like it is and gives a valuable glimpse into how the endless staff and resource cuts have affected papers’ quality. On the raping and pillaging of editorial budgets in pursuit of profit, he makes some valid points.

But his attitude to change in news publishing is alarming and will have digital executives cringing. In this Bullshit Translator, he reduces 15 years of development in online journalism as a discipline to this:

Web Manager – An expert in cut and paste. Probably a journalist but not necessary.

I understand this is somewhat satirical, but I wonder to what extent. Check out Blunt’s dismissal of web-first publishing:

Web first – We really have no idea how to make money from the web but by banging up every story as soon as it is written eventually someone will write us a large cheque. Won’t they?

This ties into the conspiracy theory – favoured by many journalists I’ve spoken to over the years – that newspapers would be profitable if the owners would only “invest in quality”. This theory holds that since newspapers once were hugely profitable (not necessarily true…) they could be again if the pagination, staffing and multiple editions came back the way they were.

Instead of wishing, let’s look at the facts of publishing: advertising spend across all media, including print, fell by 7.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 (paidContent:UK has more) – but online grew 10.4 percent.

By the middle of this decade, if you believe Zenithoptimedia, online will overtake print as the world’s second-biggest ad medium.

This is not about the quality of journalism – this is about economics: The web is simply more effective for advertisers – Google ads are more effective and have less wastage than an ad in the Oxdown Gazette, no matter how good the editorial quality of the paper is.

There really is no way around it: the solution for keeping these papers running is a digital one, whether through paywalls, e-commerce partnerships, ads, sponsorship or public money – or a complex web involving all of those. There’s no excusing the treatment of staff at the hands of greedy news plcs, but hoping for a return to the days of typewriters and print’s media monopoly won’t help at all.

For some sensible ideas, I recommend Ian Wylie’s roundup of the NUJ pay conference over the weekend.