Blog-friend Callimachus of Done With Mirrors is a journalist working on a newspaper in eastern Pennsylvania. Don’t miss his post on Winds of Change in which he gives a moment-to-moment account of the story from the point-of-view of someone trying to put out a daily newspaper. He concludes:
What did you learn about newspapers? Nothing that wasn’t always true. We try to bring you the latest news, but even when we do our best there’s always going to be a time gap, and things can fall in it. Big-city newspapers like the Chicago Tribune have the luxury of replating during a press run. Some copies get out wrong, some get out right.
Honestly, I wonder why newspapers pretend to be definitive news sources in the age of the Internet and round-the-clock TV news coverage. We do better at analysis and long-view stories and continuing coverage. We can still give you a few things no one else can deliver as well: Local news, obituaries. But does anyone but the Amish pick up a daily newspaper to discover the current state of the world? What you get when you open it is a fossil of an assessment of what was believed to be known about what were believed to be important stories at some point between 3 and 12 hours before.
That’s exactly right.
Our hearts go out to the miners’ families and loved ones. I can’t imagine how they feel. Being a miner is a back-breakingly hard, dirty, dangerous job and miners only do it because that’s what they know and they want to provide for themselves and their families. I think we make a mistake if we look for villains in this—neither the mine operators, or the reporters on the scene, or the national journalists, or the West Virginia authorities. Or the President (as some would have it).
Am I white-washing the mine operators? Far from it—just presuming innocence. There’ll be an investigation and I’m willing to wait for the results before making any judgments.
Don’t try to make villains of the media, either. They’re just trying to do the job they’ve defined for themselves and, frankly, it’s an impossible job. You can’t be authoritative, thoroughly sourced, and timely.
In our great-grandparents time (as I’ve pointed out before) “news” was frequently months old. Nowadays we expect news instantaneously—essentially as events unfold. Retail news outlets like newspapers and television stations essentially operate on a distribution model not unlike that for books, toothpaste, or computers. Reporters (manufacturers) sell to wire services (distributors) who sell to individual outlets (retail stores). That’s not a model that lends itself to instantaneous response. And, as Jeff Jarvis has been pointing out for as long as I’ve been reading blogs, both the business and operational models for print journalism are failing under the pressures of modern communications technology.
Don’t expect the newspapers to change. They can’t. There’s nothing harder than altering a business model—changing what you do, how you do it, and how you’re compensated for it. I recall ten years ago when we were being assured that the Internet would change everything. Manufacturers would improve their margins by selling directly to end users. Customers would get exactly what they want when they wanted it. That hasn’t happened. Amazon.com is just another retail outlet.
The reason for this is reluctance to change the business model and cost of entry. Automobile manufacturers (for example) don’t define themselves as companies who sell to end users. They define themselves (mostly) as companies who sell to automobile dealerships. There are relationships, contracts, formal business processes, preferences, and engrained habits that push towards leaving things just this way. And when the cost of entry is high—as it is in established industries based on manufacturing—you don’t just walk across the street and start your own automobile manufacturer.
So go over and read Callimachus’s account. This is the way things are done in the newspaper business and it’s being replaced even as I type but noone knows what is replacing it.
