Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Abandoning the News, page 4

It is widely believed that this election year data represents, in some ways, a sea change in both consumption patterns and in how news is consumed. Those Jon Stewart viewers or consumers of popular blogs like Talking Points Memo (talkingpointsmemo.com) on the left side of the political spectrum and Power Line (www.powerlineblog.com) on the right have, it would seem, changed the way they approach and view the news. Active consumers are unlikely any longer to rely on single sources for coverage of issues that matter to them. And they'll never be consuming news without clear chunks of opinion as part of the mix.

Few news executives are active, widely read bloggers. But for the one who can make that claim, journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis, the election-year attention on Jon Stewart, the blogging phenomena and the surging growth of Internet use for both business and personal activities points out that attitude and voice matter more to today's young news consumers than earlier notions of journalistic objectivity and fact gathering. And Jarvis observes that today's young people want to understand—on an entirely different level from previous generations—the politics and attitudes of those who write and deliver the news.

That kind of transparency is what pundits like Jarvis are often most passionate about and indicates why, as perceived from the right and the left, Fox News Channel, Jon Stewart and bloggers have a lot in common. All three both dish and dig and combine opinion and fact gathering in ways that have caught on with significant numbers of consumers. Opinionated reporting, seen most clearly from bloggers, raised questions about the documents in the Dan Rather-George Bush scandal about use of unverified documents in CBS News reporting about President Bush's military record, and had stunning impact. Jon Stewart, meanwhile, hosts politicians of all persuasions while at the same time calling his program “phony news.” Jarvis says that rather than be alarmed about Stewart's popularity and credibility as a “news source,” news professionals ought to view Stewart's ascent as “as an endorsement of a new honesty in the news, of the importance of bringing news down off its pedestal and presenting it at eye-level.” He adds: “I think we [are seeing] a phenomenon in news that cuts across age groups but includes young people: we are coming to prefer our news with opinion, or at least an admission of opinion.”

What's more, Jarvis and others talk a great deal about giving audiences and especially young people a level of control about when they access news or choose to participate in public affairs. For the Internet world of the Howard Dean campaign with its reliance on online “meetings,” web-based communications and fundraising and the blog world, in which anybody with a keyboard is a publisher in a new community referred to as the “blogosphere,” everybody who wants to be involved not only can be, but can also make choices about when and at what level to become or stay involved. It's as easy, now, as turning on a computer.

New Products For
A Different Consumer
In a growing number of urban areas, if you've gotten off a train or bus lately, it's likely you've been offered a free newspaper—or at least, a new version of a newspaper. Around 50 newspapers (and Luxembourg-based Metro International with editions in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia) have launched pared-down versions of their product, generally for free distribution at commuter locations. The goal: introduce busy young professionals and others to publications that highlight headlines, weather, sports scores and news you can use on the run. It's an Internet-inspired phenomenon, in part, because it serves a similar purpose: providing quick snapshots of what's happening in the world of culture, news and entertainment, and placing it directly in the hands of consumers.

Says Chris Ma, publisher of The Washington Post's giveaway paper, Express, “We're reaching commuters who are infrequent or non-newspaper readers and building an advertising business at the same time.” About 175,000 copies of Express are given away daily. In Miami, Knight Ridder's Miami Herald now publishes Street Weekly, or Street for short, which it cheerfully refers to as an “alternative arts and entertainment free publication.” Street has a free circulation of 70,000 throughout the Miami-Dade region and promotes itself as “Edgy, colorful and irreverent.”

The development of these free papers represents the largest single media industry response yet to the readership collapse. What's less clear, though, is what the production of these “newspaper-lite” products means for journalism. Will these papers merely summarize the work of the parent publication or create their own voice and journalistic traditions? Will they make original reporting obsolete by a concentration on summaries, wire stories, graphics, stock data, sports scores and weather?

At the parent companies of these papers and at the large news organizations, talented producers and editors are wrestling with these same issues but often approaching them from a different direction, working on methods of bringing in younger audiences without disturbing powerful news products which, in most cases, continue to enrich their owners with consequential profit margins. Media executives like Sandra Rowe, editor of The Oregonian and a former chair of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, have their hands full trying to evolve their publications with the profitability paradigm as the vexing, short-term conundrum.

Rowe thinks there are many things her paper can do and is doing in terms of story selection, story telling, packaging and creative use of the Internet to engage young people, but wishes the resources were available to do more, especially to develop new products. “I look at this age group as really smart young adults,” she says. “They don't have any patience for us wasting time and approaching things in predictable ways. So part of what newspapers can do is tell them something they don't know about something interesting.” Just covering City Hall isn't enough, she says. “What they're looking for is a closer lens…[In order to be that for them] we have to be plugged in at City Hall so we can tell them how money is used and how they are affected. With this crowd, newspapers and magazines have to be visually strong and focused on what the story is—a story with a beginning, middle and end. If papers could do that, we could satisfy that age group.” She also believes that editors who look at newspaper beats as independent sources of newsroom information are missing the boat, particularly when it comes to assessing the interests of younger readers. “Arts, business, commerce and education…these areas are no longer discrete and what's most interesting are the places where they intersect.”

Though frustrated at the industry's slow pace, Rowe sees a day ahead when newspaper editors will have more products and ways to leverage their expertise. In this model, she says, her paper would be reaching different sensibilities with, for example, an alternative weekly, community papers, the leading regional portal and a network of sites. By managing multiple products and building a stronger economic base, Rowe thinks that such an organization would have the resources to put “the interest back in public interest reporting. If you can be the primary information source in the community,” she adds, “and do so because it's your responsibility, the commercial argument would work and would be designed to support that.”

The view that the traditional news organization, whether it's a daily newspaper or television network news operation, is effectively a “mother ship” feeding material to multiple products on multiple platforms isn't necessarily a brand-new one. But the scale of what Rowe is proposing is a start at rethinking fading traditions.

Next page: That's why it's already an overwhelmingly challenging time in the worlds of cable television and broadcast news, as well as in print media.

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