Tales From The Newsroom:
I tell stories/anecdotes/examples from my time in newsrooms big (Chicago Tribune) and small (Waterloo Courier) and the larger meaning gleaned from them that illustrates the maddening way journalists think, building upon such classics as The Press, Who Will Tell The People, and Boys on the Bus.
Each chapter a newsroom? Or an issue: trends, crime, digital
Tracks how the mess they’re in is their own fault (drawing on that digital book, john morton, taking stock) – and how they still have failed to truly embrace the digital strategies that can save them.
examples: murder capital, mandatory minimums, olympics, obama editorial boards
op-eds to officials, no links in stories, jim kirk no comments, mayoral job announcements. rauner lying about payton, revolving door with PR; taught in schools!
So much of media critique is the same thing we’ve heard for years – nay, decades! – access journalism, cozying up to power, accepting official versions of events, the corporatization of newsrooms, including the reporters and their worldviews, the overemphasis of (what passes in the news media for) flash over substance, horse race political reporting instead of a focus on issues, way overemphasizing (wrong) polls, the lack of diversity … the litany is familiar, and guess what? It’s all true! Why has nothing changed? Why has it only gotten worse!
I’m going to tell you why. In a book. A book that might be called “My Journey Through America’s Dumbest Newsrooms.” Except my journey has not been through America’s dumbest newsrooms, but it’s typical newsrooms. And while a valuable part of my journey has been through the inside of our newsrooms, a great deal of it has been my view from outside those newsrooms as a media critic, as well as from the perspective of a consultant of sorts while I worked at the Newspaper Management Center at Northwestern University, my graduate education in media management, and my experience as both newspaper subject and reader.
1. OVERVIEW AND DESCRIPTION
This is nothing new.
Take the cover of A.J. Liebling’s The Press, a compilation of his pieces from the New Yorker dating back to 1946, published in book form in 1961.
“WHY HAVE AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS FAILED TO PROVIDE ADEQUATE AND RELIABLE COVERAGE OF THE NEWS?”
Sadly, and in typical cliched newspaper fashion, the question and answers are as relevant and viable today as back then, Internet be damned!
The stupidity – and greed – of publishers has proven impenetrable to advances in technology as well as the professionalization of newsrooms and sales staffs, in part because stupidity resides there as well.
Fake news, false trends, official narratives bearing little relation to reality, sensationalism, titillation, difficulty with basic facts, arrogance, poor training, slipshod editing . . . nothing has changed since Liebling’s day, and I’m going to prove it!
Using The Press as a model, I intend to write a book that puts today’s troubled news environment in historical context in order to provide a better understanding into the mindset of news organizations that causes them to fail so badly – just as they have for decades.
Consider the track record: Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, …. the bigger and most important the story, the worse the industry performs!
On the flip side, the old saw is true: Virtually everyone who has been the subject or a participant in some way in a news story, or who has close proximity to the truth of a story, has found glaring errors in even the simplest accounts. I, for one, have never been quoted accurately!
For that reason, but far more reasons, I am perfectly situated to write this book. Not only have I studied the industry for the entirety of my life, but I’ve spent more than a decade as the unique media critic who not only has a sophisticated understanding of the marketing and business side of news organizations, but who spends most of his time actually critiquing the actual work, instead of dwelling on insider gossip and the standard stories about who is winning the morning show wars.
By the time I finished high school, I not only knew the rosters of every major sports team, but I knew the editors (and owners) of nearly every paper in America, thanks to my close reading of the Editor & Publisher yearbook.
I studied journalism as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, worked at The Minnesota Daily, ultimately as managing editor the year we ousted the university president and a handful of others and won college newspaper of the year, worked in Lakeland, Florida at a New York Times owned paper, then in Waterloo, Iowa at a paper owned by far less illustrious group, studied newspaper management in an independently designed master’s program at Northwestern, combining coursework from the Kellogg School of Management, the Medill School of Journalism, and the Communication Studies department; also got a certificate, worked on campus … at the University of Minnesota, I learned all that was wrong with the media. At the Daily , I learned how easy it was to do it right. In Florida and Iowa, I learned how poorly run newsrooms were. At Northwestern, I sought to groom myself for editing by studying management and delving even deeper into the whole of the industry’s operations. I sat through numerous executive management training sessions, worked on consulting projects for the Tribune and Knight-Ridder, studied the emerging “telecommunications” industry … and when I got out and returned to newsrooms, most immediately, the Chicago Tribune, nobody cared.
No newsroom I have ever been in has been as dysfunctional as that of the Tribune. I have stories! I acquired a guru, Deming.
My editing career was not to be. You’re not supposed to discuss the industry’s issues inside the industry. People are too arrogant and insular. You’re just supposed to bitch and moan about office poltiics and gossip.
After five years as a freelancer,
I first pioneered this form of media critique as a staff writer at Chicago magazine, when I founded the weekly online Press Box. (Common themes: hating the internet, failed business strategies that ignore success stories usually built around verticals and niches, poor education and training, hiring practices, and redlining . . .
I left Chicago magazine 13 years ago to start my own website, whose most popular feature has always been the daily home page column I write not just aggregating the major news of the day, but red penciling the actual journalism produced – not for typos and misspellings, but for frames, missing context available from the news organization’s own archives, as well as elsewhere, translation of journospeak for civilian readers, and showing how the pols and PR folk are outsmarting the journos every step of the way.
Liebling’s section headers: Toward a one-paper town
the dserving rich
press mess
innocene at home
no-news
not too lopsided
starting with the end of free lunch/
I will take the reader on a rollicking and outrageous tour of the nation’s mediasphere, using my own experiences at small newspapers in Florida and Iowa, as well as working for the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek Chicago magaizne and innumerable organiations as a freelance writer to salt personal stories with grave import and bring it all up to date ot the internet age.
“News is an essential ingredient in the decisions of democratic peoples. The absence of reliable reporting, the ignorance of important events, are signs of incipient failure.
“Why are there fewer papers every year? How does the natural stupidity of publishers affect the way in which certain stories are reported? How can the reader sharpen his own sense of the amount of truth in a story?
In 19xx, Liebling published:
“Caustic, informed – often hilarious – this survey of the omissions, distortions and downright fiction in our newspapers may well be the best book ever written about the American press.”
“Every American newspaper claims to be fully informed, absolutely impartial, and 100% accurate. In this devastating and often hilarious book, A.J. Liebling cites stories and names papers to show how far such claims are from the truth.”
“A long-time student of the metropolitan dailies, A.J. Liebling has watched papers come and go. He reports that now they are mostly either going or gone. What it means to live in a one-paper town, the effects of the growing concentration of power in the hands of a few reactionary publishers, the future of newspapers themselves in an age ever more addicted to television – these are some of the subjects Liebling discusses with incisive wit in this unique and informative survey of the American press.”
Sadly, as relevant today as then. An avalanche of media books has come and gone – boys on teh bus, fear and loathing, on bended knee, greider, downing, rosenstiel, even movies like Chicago – and yet, nobody seems to have learned any lessons. The industry is just as false as ever, though still with as much self-regard. This book intends to catalog the issues Liebling and others highlighted and show through anecdote, data and reporting that they still exist in spades, and then to ask: Why? Training/journalism education? Faulty hiring process? The Internet to blame ha ha? Loss of identity, purpose, ethical bearing … and what is the way out? (same: shallow, lack of policy seriousness, easily and complicit in manipulating via access journalism, for example, desire to rub elbows with power rather than put it in the dock, lack of diversity – not just racially ethnically but culturally and economically, polls, celebrity, greedy owners, interference with integrity of the news (michaels), lack of courage of journos standing up and telling the stories, lack of engqgement no comments …
INTRO
HOOK: A media critique from somebody who’s seen it from the inside!
DESCRIPTION
A description of your major markets. This could run from one to two or more paragraphs.
An enumeration of your minor markets. This could fit into one or more paragraphs, depending on how many minor markets you can identify.
PROMOTION: My site, Twitter feed, media connections, well-known in Chicago, willing to do whatever it takes, except that I’m poor. TV and radio experience, public speaking on panels.
important in aga of trump because trump is easy; will need to sustain gains; fake news era now on liberal side as well, but it’s facts we need to demand; objectivity confusion; credible can win, must win.
metro editor of trib asks why it’s a problem that kirk wnt’ comment to his own reporter
2 – 3 page introduction. thesis, concept. how you came to idea, why it’s important.
big picture, book in context
start with one-paragraph lead
then: the book will be in x parts. part one will …
“The book will be 55,000 words and contain a bibliography, photographs, and an index. The manuscript will be completed six months after receipt of the advance.”
OUTLINE:
talbe of contents, detailed chpater by chapter a paragraph for each. do i have an anecdote for each?
THE PACKAGE
X pages, take a year to write.
AUDIENCE
The audience for this book is fairly obvious: Media people! But also, media academics, and the relatively small cadre of people who are quite interested in the media. Call them media junkies. They are out there. The book isn’t likely to reach beyond that audience, but perhaps a book like this written in a jargon-free, candorous tone with some funny stories can break it more broadly.
I suspect this book could be used in classrooms, though journalism education will also be a target.
COMPETITION
I’m not sure who this book will really compete against, except the books already in existence, as opposed to books coming forth. Among the works I have read and will cite:
Also let’s face it, a local brand name, but not a national one. Could widen the work beyond Chicago through interviews, analysis, case studies, for one thing. Other media people will love the insider stuff I’m capable of delivering, though a careful, thorough review of media scandals etc. over the years should provide plenty of fodder, backed with fresh reporting of such. One way to market, though, might be that this is an unvarnished, truthful account by someone who has worked in these newsrooms, but is also familiar with academia and outsider critiques; I have a unique blend but an accessible voice. A media critique for the rest of us! Not ideological, for I despite ideology, I will explain why everyone is wrong!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WRITING SAMPLE sample chapters: my media stories? sun-times vs. trib sports; press box; best examples from BR.
So few media reporters: Biggest institution not being covered.
Go back to Public Opinion, and Bernays, of course, but also check in with Boys on the Bus, Fear and Loathing, Chicago the movie, natural born killers, media critique is everywhere, the front page, the paper, through greider, downie, hertsgaard, the al gore article, somerby, FAIR, right wing people (an examination of media critique itself!), rosensteil, then the digital guys, (all guys!) rosenstiel, jay whathisname, that other guy who gets parodied, margaret sullivan, people like dylan baers …
Posted on November 8, 2017
