Froomkin To HuffPo

Dan Froomkin has been hired by the Huffington Post. The post is Washington Bureau Chief, which means the duties are more editorial, but he'll write a column two times a week or so. Glenn writes:

Huffington says that it is Froomkin's views on the media that, for her, is his primary appeal. The key to vibrant, successful journalism, she said, is "getting away from the notion that truth is found by splitting the difference between the two sides, that there is always truth to both sides." Huffington argues that establishment journalism is failing due to "the idea that good journalism is about presenting both sides without a voice -- without any passion." The outlets that continue to adhere to that "obsolete" model "are paying a price." Froomkin -- who has written extensively about how passion-free, "both-sides-are-equally-valid" journalism is the primary affliction of the profession -- echoes that view: "The key challenge is to present an alternative to the 'splitting the difference' culture that has infested traditional media." [...]

For all the self-serving talk about how political journalism is dying, it is striking how new and online media outlets continue to thrive. Yesterday, Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo -- which began as a one-person blog -- announced a major investment from Netscape founder Marc Andreesen that is allowing it to double its reporting staff. And now today, a columnist fired by an old, struggling establishment outlet claiming "business reasons" as a motive is not only almost immediately hired by a new media entity, but was inundated with expressions of interest and even other offers from an electic mix of reporting outlets.
Clearly, journalism itself is not dying. What is dying -- and rightfully so -- is the staid, establishment-serving, passion-free, access-desperate, mindless stenographic model to which establishment journalism rigidly adheres. As The Post's Ombudsman reported from personal experience, Froomkin's firing left "an army of angry followers" and "an outcry from a loyal audience." People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices. The Huffington Post immediately capitalized on the Post's short-sighted and myopic decision to fire one of their most (and one of their very few) vibrant, passionate and innovative journalists. In this episode lies many insights about the real reasons establishment journalism is struggling severely.

While this shift to new media necessarily leaves behind those on the other side of the digital divide, and I hope that can get addressed, it's not like traditional media is doing all that much to keep themselves relevant and useful. Journalism won't die, but journalism as it is practiced in print and broadcast really wants to give itself a nice Viking funeral.

Solution For The Newspaper Industry: Charge People Until They Go Away And Get It For Free Elsewhere

The amusing part of this is the frame the writer puts on this, suggesting that the AP can't stand aggregators who drive traffic through links to the AP and their network of sites.

Taking aim at the way news is spread across the Internet, The Associated Press said on Monday that it will demand that Web sites obtain permission to use the work of The A.P. or its member newspapers, and share revenue with the news organizations, and that it will take legal action those that do not.

Associated Press executives said the policy was aimed at major search engines like Google, Yahoo and their competitors, and also at news aggregators like the Huffington Post, as well as companies that sell packaged news services. They said they do not want to stop the appearance of articles around the Web, but to exercise some control over it and to profit from it. The A.P. also said it is developing a system to track news articles online and determine whether they were used legally.

Good luck with that! You can have 50% of the nothing I make off this site, sound good?

There is no revenue to be had in the content itself. There never has been. Newspapers historically made their money not off the subscription price, but from the ad revenue tied to getting hundreds of thousands of people to view their product. And the aggregators GENERATE the traffic that drives the ad revenue online. The AP wants a cut on the action, after charging news organizations really exorbitant rates to provide the content in the first place.

Meanwhile, at the same time that the AP cries poor about all the riches being made off their content, their member organizations are meeting clandestinely to discuss how to charge users for their content, which means they want a dip from Google and the aggregators and a second dip from the end-users. And they're doing it in violation of antitrust laws.

Allen Mutter reports that a number of CEO currently in San Diego for the Newspaper Association of America convention are holding a clandestine meeting to discuss, among other topics, whether and how to start charging readers to view articles and other content online. The presence of a lawyer in meant to ensure the conversation doesn’t stray into antitrust territory, whatever David Carr might wish. Still, one might think these executives — whose companies are, after all, competitors — might wish to keep any brilliant ideas about monetizing journalism to themselves. Chances are this confab will be less a workshop than a support group.

Look, this is the same argument that the music industry has been having for years. They've tried to plug every hole to safeguard free music file sharing and it hasn't worked. The industry model, in short, has changed. Walling off content has failed every single time it's been tried, and it's sure to fail again in this case. And it's not even the core problem. Newspapers need to figure out how to scale up their online revenue relative to where it was in print. These other schemes are not sustainable.

Punch A Hippie Moment #2,938

So I was on NPR's Marketplace this morning, and when we taped the interview yesterday I was asked what kind of questions are likely to come from the online audience at the President's Open For Questions town hall. And immediately the question on the legalization of marijuana came to mind, and I thought "If I say this, the impression will be that everyone online is a pot-smoking dirty hippie," so I talked about bread-and-butter issues like health care and jobs, and then at the end I said "you'll see questions that are totally off limits to the traditional media, like the legalization of marijuana." It just slipped out.

Of course, that's what NPR used.

And the question was indeed asked at Obama's online town hall, and while I didn't see it, the President apparently snickered, along with his snickering staff, made a crack like "This is a very popular question to you online folks," and then categorically said no, that it wouldn't grow the economy, and moved on. Thus insulting the audience about their very popular question and giving it little respect. Here's how the liveblog at TechPresident discussed it, and I basically agree:

12:10
[Comment From Karen]
Not sure making fun of the "online audience" for asking is the best way to have handled that.

12:11
[Comment From Josh]
Probably not, he turned the question into a joke

12:11
[Comment From Andy]
Only good way to deal with it if you don't want to deal with it.

12:11
[Comment From Gene]
Is that going to feed the trolls or placate them

12:11
Matthew Burton: Too bad that he laughed off the most popular topic

12:11
[Comment From Josh]
feeds the trolls

12:11
Matthew Burton: Josh is right. There will be blowback from this.

12:12
[Comment From Karen]
Now how many million people feel that they weren't taken seriously? Frustrating. At least the room approved.

12:13
[Comment From Gene]
Blowback from a relevant segment of the audience?

12:13
Matthew Burton: He made it even more likely that the most popular questions in future town halls will be about marijuana

12:13
[Comment From Josh]
The fact that he made light of one of the most popular questions being asked does not say a whole lot for mr. obama

12:13
Joan McCarter: It was a simplistic response on the pot question, particularly in light of the border violence that Napolitano talked about yesterday. There's a connection he could have drawn to give a serious answer.

There are two issues here. First, legalization actually does deserve a serious response. You don't have to agree with it - I'm not certain that I do - but you ought to engage with it. The war on drugs has utterly failed, so it's not like the status quo is any less silly. But the second issue is even more damaging. Obama's Administration wants to bypass the media filter and open the tools of communication to a much larger community. And then a non-Village approved question gets asked and he snickers about it? For a real community interaction to work there has to be a certain level of respect, and that was apparently sorely lacking.

Then again, the only caucus Obama has not met with on Capitol Hill is the Progressive Caucus, so this is not surprising. In Washington, every day is Punch a Hippie Day.

Out-Chuck Todd Chuck Todd

We have a pretty terrible media. The press conference featured question after question of irrelevant, puerile, ill-formed half-thoughts that was about as depressing as reading a Twitter feed. President Obama was game, but I think he might want to ditch the news conference part and just go Perot, whipping out charts and graphs and delving deep into explanations of what the country faces and what we need to move forward. The media filter just stifles thought.

That said, perhaps opening the Q&A process up to adults - namely the general public - can yield better results.

Today, the President invited everyone to use a new feature on WhiteHouse.gov called "Open for Questions" to ask a question about the economy and rate other questions up or down. Then, on Thursday morning, the President will conduct a special online town hall on the economy and answer some of the most popular questions and the event will be streamed on WhiteHouse.gov.

"Open for Questions" is a new experiment for WhiteHouse.gov, the President’s latest effort to open up the White House and give Americans from around the country a direct line to the Administration.

This first round will deal with a chief concern for all of us: the economy. We’ve created a few categories to better organize the questions, and encourage you to search for a specific question before you submit your own in case it already exists.

To get started, head over to http://WhiteHouse.gov/OpenForQuestions and set up your account. Then follow the simple instructions to start voting on questions or submit your own (we encourage you to include a link to a published video of the question being asked, although this is not required).

If this means I never have to listen to Ed Henry or Chip Reid or Major Garrett again, then thank you, White House. I'm sure you can think of a few good questions for the President, so have at it.

The Long Death March Of The Newspaper Industry

Today is the final printing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which starting tomorrow will be a Web-only product. Sitting about 950 miles from Seattle, this means nothing to me, as any news in the Post-Intelligencer would be as available to me tomorrow as it was today. But that assumes all things being equal, and the same commitment on the part of the online product - and the same budget - for state and local journalism.

But The P-I, as it is called, will resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper, with a news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting.

Other newspapers have closed and many more are threatened. But the transition to an all-digital product for The P-I will be especially closely watched in an industry that is fast losing revenue and is casting around for a new economic model [...]

Hearst said it would offer severance packages to about 145 employees. Because the newspaper has had no business staff of its own, the new operation plans to hire more than 20 people in areas like ad sales.

Among the new columnists, Hearst said, will be Norm Rice, a former Seattle mayor; Maria L. Goodloe-Johnson, who heads the city’s public schools; John McKay, a former United States attorney; and two former governors.

Who knows, the region may benefit from a strong online presence like this. But the reach will be smaller, by design. Until broadband is universal, Web-only services necessarily leave many behind. The future is very uncertain.

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen [...]

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

I don't think that clinging to the past will be a worthwhile solution here. There is a market for journalism, but not a market that is profitable, at least for all but a few outlets. There has arguably never been a profitable market for local journalism; its appearance alongside the news people wanted to read, like sports and the movie listings and national coverage, served the function of keeping local government honest and exposing corruption and malfeasance. Like Dana Goldstein I hope that marketers will switch over to fund Web journalism at some point and sustain the institution. However:

But even if that's true, we are entering a long, dry spell in which reporting resources will shrink at most publications once dependent on print revenues. Now matter how much of an Internet triumphalist you are, this is cause for serious concern -- especially at the local level, where small newspapers serve as watchdogs over police, school boards, town councils, and the like [...]

I have every confidence that in a democracy and market as vibrant as ours, web publications will spring up to fill the void. But that will take time. And we will also lose newspapers' role as the trainers of young journalists. I know I benefited greatly from the daily paper internship racket. I worked at The Journal News in New York's northern suburbs, and was taught there how to copy-edit, write a lead, and churn out five stories a week. All skills crucial to blogging.

What is most troubling is not that the financiers of journalism have yet to make the online side profitable (even the Politico loses money, except for its print edition in DC), but that in that arduous process, the well-balanced civic diet will get thrown away in favor of the junk food of three-year election cycles and daily tracking polls. A functioning society needs the full spectrum of journalism - just look at California as an example of what happens without it.

Twits

The Politico, seeking to prove its commitment to substantive journalism, had an article today about the 10 most influential DC Twitterers. Enough said on their claims to substance. But they do hit on a mini-phenomenon; unlike blogs, which the Beltway media was slow to accept and embrace, Twitter has become something of a hit. Which makes perfect sense. After all, if you knew nothing about a topic except the barest outlines of the "who's winning/who's losing" dynamic, you'd want to limit yourself to 140 characters, too.

I'm not saying that Twitter is useless: it's a good publishing tool for quick news bytes and reporting from spaces where a computer is impractical. The best information from the California budget standoff came from the few reporters and advocates left in Sacramento updating their Twitter feeds (of course, that says more about California's political media than it does about the medium). However, reading the blurb for Ana Marie Cox' designation on the list, it appears that to them, Twitter has just become Village IM:

The former Wonkette makes the cut for two reasons: productivity and popularity. At 54,000 followers and climbing, Cox’s tweets (sometimes as many as 100 a day) are among the most followed in Washington. With attitude and humor, Cox documents just about everything: White House briefings, her cats, her former employers, her ongoing debate about whether to wear pants around the house — and political sound bites on TV that could pass for bad pickup lines at a bar (“My filibuster lasts all night long”).

Usually DC gets these things 4-6 years after the fact, like my grandparents' rural small-town radio station ("Coming up, music from a hot new band called The Who!"), but Twitter allows the chattering class the double pleasure of maxing out on their Blackberry usage, along with being forcibly constrained by time and space to definitively not talk about anything of import whatsoever. "John Edwards' haircut ZOMG LOLZ" fits the format; an analysis of proposed USDA country-of-origin labeling policy doesn't. And the structure of having "followers" surely appeals to Village types. All in all, it's better than passing notes in junior high! Actually, kind of the same thing!

This is the by-product of a media utterly consumed with self-regard and groupthink, who cannot conceive of talking about politics without sports analogies and scorecards. And the head Twit of them all, Tweety, has been unwittingly exposed by Chuck Todd:

NBC White House Correspondent Chuck Todd has a theory on why MSNBC's Hardball host Chris Matthews begged off from running for the Pennsylvania Senate seat held by Republican Arlen Specter. "Because [Chris] had a really good friend of his say to him, 'What are you going to do when you get there?' and he couldn't answer the question and he realized that, and that's why he didn't run," says Todd. "It was a childhood dream to be a senator, but he didn't know what he was going to do if he got there."

Eric Boehlert is quite rightly astounded.

Matthews, who has been inside the Beltway for going on, what, four decades, who once worked on the Hill and has been commenting, non-stop, about politics for countless years, had no idea what he'd do if he were a senator.

We've said it before and we'll say it again here: The Beltway press doesn't do public policy. It doesn't get it, and it has even less interest in it. So no, we're not surprised Matthews couldn't figure out why he'd do, y'know for other people, if he ever got elected.

Twitter's like a weighty public policy document to this crew.

Protecting Their Turf

Vice President Biden's chief economist Jared Bernstein held a blogger conference call today (my invite must have gotten lost in the mail, sniff), where he talked pretty frankly about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's final version that should see passage this week. Bernstein called the bill a "down payment" and that the health care and energy sections need to be "deepened" in the future. “My view is no windows are closed when it comes to these good ideas,” he said. They're hoping that the bill reduces unemployment by two percentage points in the next two years, but they still expect the jobless number to be hovering around 8%, or higher than it is even today, by the end of 2010.

Bernstein also explained that the stimulus and a recovery in the banking system have to work in tandem to move money through the economy. That's the only way you can get multipliers out of the stimulus spending.

You want the money to circulate smoothly and efficiently from those who have it to those who need it. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to spend the money instantly. But it means that when people want to park their money, those funds should come available to other people who have good business opportunities that could be exploited with the assistance of a little credit. That’s where a healthy financial system comes in.

You may have heard tales from Japan’s “lost decade” in which stimulus measures failed to actually get the economy moving. Part of the problem was somewhat ill-conceived and ill-executed stimulus. But perhaps a bigger issue is that the didn’t actually clean up their banking system. Instead, they put it on life support. And then they used fiscal stimulus to put employment on life support. But we don’t want life support, we want stimulus that actually brings us back to life.

This is all good stuff, and it's great to have an economist from the Administration who was in the room on some of these deals engaging directly with progressive bloggers. This is the kind of access that the traditional media gets quite often, and yet they seem to squander it on tangential issues and optics and horse-race nonsense. I think it's very telling that, at this time of economic crisis (including in the journalism industry) a main concern of some members of the White House press corps is that a blogger from the Huffington Post got to ask the President a question at his first press conference. They are literally steamed about this.

Mara Liasson, National political correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) and long-time contributor to Fox News, appears to be fuming after President Obama called on Huffington Post blogger Sam Stein during yesterday’s news conference. (It’s said to be the first time a president has acknowledged a blogger during a White House press conference, so the moment generated a bit of press chatter.)

Just over an hour ago, Ana Marie Cox (formerly Wonkette, now frequenting MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow) reported in on Twitter:

Mara Liasson next to me; on the phone; just said "He called on Huffington Post! I was surprised he didn’t call on Air America!" Oh honey.

As Chris Bowers notes, there is a reason why this has drawn so much attention, and that's simple jealousy, and a feeling of being threatened by new media. But it's not like White House access by HuffPo or blogs has detracted from access by the traditional media. They still have far more resources and access, and yet they use it to the most insipid ends possible. Bowers continues that there's another element to this.

Since you can't stop the rise of the new medium, the only available tactics left are to discredit the emerging new outlets within the new medium that operates independently of your control (portray independent new media operators as rabid, inexperienced, uninformed, arrogant, newcomers) while simultaneously working to co-opt their tactics within that new medium (hire a bunch of rabid, inexperienced, uninformed, arrogant, newcomers to produce content for your outlet). So, for example, you attack the credibility of the largest independent new media political website, the Huffington Post, write diatribes about other large blogs such as Daily Kos, and pass Congressional resolutions chastising the largest online political organization, MoveOn.org, while simultanesouly hiring bloggers to produce content for your show, inviting them as guests on your programs, and trying to start email based activist organizations of your own.

All of this is done not because new media itself is despised, but because new media has allowed alternative power centers on the left-wing of the Democratic / progressive coalition to rise as challenges to established, and largely corporate, dominance. No one in the political and media establishment would attack the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, or Moveon.org if they were operating as supportive adjuncts to, say, the Blue Dog coalition. The reason they are viewed as dangerous and worthy of attack is because of the political views they espouse, not just because they are new media.

It's an interesting thesis. Certainly there is a marginalization that goes on that makes individuals in traditional media happy, but also serves their corporate conglomerates' ends. Where they don't have the expertise, knowledge or even access, all they have left is perceived authority. And when that goes away, what are they left with? Shrinking audience share.

(Of course, they do have resources, and we need a vibrant and robust media in this country because I can't visit Afghanistan in my spare time. But the chattering class is really threatened. Which is why they are the most vicious.)

Because We Need Less Political Media In California

Looks like PolitickerCA is going down.

Twelve Politicker political news sites around the country, including PolitickerCO.com in Colorado, were shut down and their reporters unexpectedly laid off Friday morning. The sites, billed as “Inside politics for political insiders,” covered news in 17 states around the country and are owned by the Observer Media Group, based in New York.

Politicker.com sites in New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania will remain operating, according to a source with the company. Sites in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Vermont and Washington state will disappear.

The sites were put up in a very aggressive way and appear to be coming down even more aggressively. PolitickerCA will definitely be missed. Their morning link-fest was perfect to keep up to date, and they had decent political reporting. But online media, always shaky in terms of their financial model, is likely to cut back very severely in the current environment.

The lack of transparency and accountability in the decisions made by government leaders in the state and the lack of news outlets reporting from Sacramento and throughout the state on local issues is in direct proportion.