Naaah, I take that back. Worse than terrible… horrific, hyper-horrific, terribly worse than that, whatever word that is.

Wait… the word “negligence” is coming to mind.

Steve FitzGerald
Immediate Past President
Society of Professional Journalists Cleveland Pro Chapter
steve@lakewoodbuzz.com

This is the comment I left over at Blogger Interrupted this morning:

Shalom Tim,

Any PD employee not desperately scrambling to find another job, another career, is delusional. The fat lady is on the high note.

Egger’s either lying or out of the loop.

He dare not speak the truth lest his remaining staff evaporate over night before he, and the rest of management, have time to loot the PD carcass before leaving town.

For a good examples of what this looks like, just review the Jon Stewart fisking of CNBC.

B’shalom,

Jeff

p.s. @paul, i was part of byron scott’s first ohio university videotext class with compuserve in ’81. ah the good ole days of pounding out copy at 300 baud.

THE INQUIRY
Gerry McCann is the latest witness to appear before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee during their investigation into “press standards, privacy and libel”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7935156.stm

Sometimes that has been very beneficial as when Ex Mayor Foltin (Lorain) wrote a blog piece for the PD where he made an erroneous statement with regard to the sale of Ford Plant in Lorain…. I called him on it and looked like a fool as the original blog was “changed” and the statement had disappeared .. luckily I had copied the original and thereby had proof……….

It is very difficult to cut the wheat from the chaff in the best of times and relying on integrity can be a dangerous thing….. I try to rely on “lack of agenda”

Another a thought crossed my mind a few days ago when ITV ( UK) is downsizing and cutting programs….they said their main competition for ad revenue was Google….. I asked some of my “circle of 7 or 10 readers” (depending how you count your stats) do they ever pay attention to the ads…. not one said yes ( as I never do ) ….hmmmmmm are advertisers being led down a rose tinted garden path ?

It seems to me that the real challenge for the newspaper industry isn’t the format conversation from paper to digital, but rather how they are going to convince the public that their content is valuable.

You, I and millions of others post a flurry of content which attract a mixture of steady readers and occasional passers-by. Over time, we can try to develop a ‘brand’ that is known to be trustworthy. We cite sources appropriately, and try to make sure it is clear what is fact and what is opinion.

The newspapers should have this brand game down in spades. I read stories from the online version of the NYT because I have a high degree of trust in their journalistic integrity. That’s not a function of the medium – it’s a matter of, well, integrity.

So the problem is, I think, that some newspapers, as their revenue falls, have made the choice to further compromise the journalistic standards, by reducing their staffs of editors, fact checkers, etc. They don’t get that their revenue is falling not so much because of the media shift, but rather because their brand was never really that strong in the first place. Crap is crap, whether on paper or pixels. They want to blame the digital world for blowing up their revenue model, as though the digital world can’t accommodate an advertising-based revenue model (Google would disagree). Such publishers are not going to recover by further reducing their quality.

What the internet has really changed is the competitive environment. If you are a paper that merely publishes the AP feed, and local junk, I don’t have to subscribe to your paper any longer to read the AP stuff – I have other sources than the paper on my front porch. I’ll go the NYT and get not only the AP feed, but also some pretty good ‘branded’ news and analysis.

We said at CompuServe 20 years ago that “it’s the content, stupid.” It’s still true.