Laid-off journalists have a home

For the unemployed journalist thrown out on his or her keester, Jim Gold, a former senior editor for the Arizona Republic, and his wife Sue have created Jilted Journalists.

It’s nothing much to look at design-wise, and the content is rather thin so far. But it has a cheeky tone, and at least endeavors to offer some helpful advice for those recently reacquainted with the ranks of the unemployed. A couple of highlights:

When journalists are laid off

Severed heads. A bloodbath. A wake. Sacrifice. Put them all together and you get one blogger’s rather dramatic story of journalists who lost their jobs at the Baltimore Sun.

Why newspapers don’t need government handouts

Jeff Jarvis has an excellent post at BuzzMachine explaining, point by point, why newspapers and their lawyers are wrong to lobby the government for tax breaks, changes in copyright law and antitrust exemption. Here’s a taste of his must-read piece, on the issue of tax subsidies:

We out here don’t actually need such a subsidy because we’ve been smart enough to take advantage of the new, free press and we are not saddled with the costs of an old press. Why should we then have to subsidize the market failure and anti-strategic stubbornness of the owners of those old presses? “Congress,” they write, “could provide incentives for placing ads with content creators (not with Craigslist).” That’s just plain payola.

Here’s where newspapers need to invest their resources

Of the seven strategies Mark Potts lays out for the news industry to adopt, two in particular stood out for me as of particular importance. His criticism of news sites that spread themselves thin by trying to appeal to all readers is one that bears repeating. See if you agree.

I’m excerpting them here, but I recommend you read the entire post.

Vertical products: One of the most broken things about the newspaper business is the “all things to all people” model. By trying to do a little of everything, newspapers don’t really do anything well—for readers or for advertisers. New products that focus on specific, vertical audiences should be the wave of the future, but so far they’re barely even a trickle (let’s see—there’s Gannett’s MomsLikeMe franchise, and then…not much else).

New forms of advertising: Banner ads are so…1997. Interstitials, pop-ups and intrusive ads are so…obnoxious. Classifieds are so…dead. Meanwhile, Google is making money off of local search, other non-newspaper companies are pioneering things like click-per-call and pay-per-click, and various startups are perfecting cheap ways to create and sell local ads. Could it be that newspapers are having trouble making online advertising revenue grow because they’re selling the wrong kinds of online ads? Hmmm.

Talkin’ newspapers and journalism

A couple of articles worth your while regarding the financial troubles  of newspaper industry and what has brought them (in part) to this point:

The Fed shouldn’t save newspapers because they “are not too big to be allowed to fail.” (Newsosaur)

American journalism is in trouble because of “editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances.” (Walter Pincus, Columbia Journalism Review)

The physical attraction of newspapers

Alan Mutter explains why newspapers have it all over Amazon’s recently  released Kindle DX, a larger version of the electronic tablet.

Nothing beats the convenience and portability of a well-organized newspaper.

A newspaper requires no batteries or AC current, can be read anyplace in all-but-blackout conditions, can be folded (unlike a jumbo Kindle) for convenient transport, can be clipped for coupons, can catch canary poop and can be responsibly recycled into cute flower pots (see below) in a way that electronic detritus cannot.

Plus, you can’t smash a bug with Kindle.

There’s laid off, and then there’s axed

While going through a divorce, and  recovering from painful surgery, Laura Meade Kirk was let go by the Providence Journal, where she’d worked for 23 years. Let’s just say the timing wasn’t all that great:

I then hobbled to HR to listen to the company spiel about the layoffs. Blah, blah, blah. “Do you have any questions?” I was asked.
“No,” I replied. But holding out my arms, with the IV lines hanging, I did say: “Your timing sucks.”

I then signed the requisite forms and crutched off to the elevator, fighting back tears. I wasn’t going to let them see me cry. I punched at the buttons, but the elevator never came.
Of course not. Just my luck.
So I crawled down the stairs, on my hands and knees, careful to make sure my crutches didn’t catch the IV lines and rip them from my heart.

Kirk’s story ends up having a happy ending, perhaps validating the old adage, “It’s darkest just before the dawn.” But what a way to get there.

Rethinking the newsroom and journalism

I’m sharing a few quotes I’ve excerpted from Gina Chen’s excellent post, “Journalists must change thinking to change industry.” Chen was inspired by Jeff Jarvis’s recent blog entry about the need for journalists to add value in their newsrooms. And while Chen frequently cites Jarvis’ What Would Google Do?, her own observations are equally compelling:

• In my experience, the hurried newsroom culture doesn’t encourage deep thinking.

Indeed it doesn’t. To give but one example: Journalists on a beat are forced to quickly write stories both large and small, with no time to step back and consider, “Is my daily routine serving my readers in the way they would — and should — expect?”

• We forget that we’re a service industry: We’re in the business of helping readers make sense of their world, not of selling them news.

And yet how many times have we read articles that are little more than notebook-dumps of information? Journalists, in the rush to make deadline, have little time but to toss half-baked, confusing stories upon their readers — readers who need knowledge, and don’t care whether we’ve included a minimum of three sources, or have written an award-worthy nut graf.

Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks

Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer lambastes newspapers for living in an “echo chamber,” failing to “adapt their business models,” and makes note of that “perfect storm” that has so many journalists bemoaning the fate of their industry. Criticisms that should sound more than a little echo chamber-ish to anyone who’s been following the pontifications about the newspaper industry.

Megan Garber (who’s awesome, btw), respectfully summarizes Lerer’s talk at Columbia University, where he prescribed the same vague calls to innovation that Clay Shirky wrote about a month ago (nothing will work, everything will work). But after initially bristling at Lerer’s generalized recommendations, upon reflection I realize he’s probably right. Now is the time for experimentation:

Lerer (after noting the usual caveats: that there’s no silver bullet to rectify journalism’s woes, and that “no one knows what the future will look like”) pointed to innovation—and hasty innovation, at that—as a necessity for newspapers and other news outlets. We need to “embrace disruptive innovation,” he said. …

Chicago Tribune writer covers recession, joins it

Lou Carlozo was covering the recession for the Chicago Tribune. Then he got laid off.

Writing for True/Slant, Carlozo expresses his discontent at being forced by Trib management to write for a blog — “The Recession Diaries” — that, in his words, “involved me telling very tough stories about my own family finances–stories that led me and my wife to squabble many times over which details to withhold, which to print, and which ones looked inappropriate in print after the fact.”

Then, to add insult to the injury of being laid off, the Trib censored Carlozo’s attempt to let his readers know he was joining the ranks of the unemployed:

I wanted to post a final blog Wednesday to readers explaining that I had lost my job, a victim of the very recession I covered. I posted this without management’s approval. I then informed management. Management took it down.

Oh, by the way: On the same day that Carlozo and over 50 newsroom staffers who were laid off by the Tribune, the company petitioned bankruptcy court to dole out $13.3 million in bonuses to over 700 workers.