Editorials

In this space on Friday we talked about how the major newspaper chains have been taken over by the Wall Street investment model, wherein profits must continually be maximized, and where papers and chains of papers have been dumped when profits dip to 19 percent. On Sunday night we attended a forum at the lately resuscitated Hillside Club, where the enterprising Sylvia Paull had convened a panel to discuss this proposition: 

“Bloggers and podcasters are suspicious of elitist big media and view the democratizing force of digital technology positively. In contrast, many traditional journalists regard most blogs, wikis and podcasts as amateurish and narcissistic. We wonder if expertise is, by definition, elitist. And we ask if expertise and elitism might indeed be necessary features of a high-quality media.” 

Panelists for what she calls a “Cybersalon” included New York Times technology reporter and author John Markoff, BlogHer cofounders and bloggers Jory des Jardins and Lisa Stone, blogger/podcaster/digital reporter Steve Gillmor, and Joshua Greenbaum, who writes for trade journals about technical subjects. The audience was heavily populated by geeks whose idea of news is the latest wrinkle in electronic technology, but included a number of members who also have some connection to the real world, including reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Contra Costa Times.  

The first pass through the panel produced the predictable encomiums for the democratization of information which the Internet has produced, tempered a bit by Markoff’s observation that the people have not yet seized the reins of power. He drew on his pre-journalism sociological studies of power structures with the likes of C. Wright Mills and Bill Domhoff to observe that if anything power is more concentrated than it was before. Last to speak was Josh Greenbaum, who aroused the ire of a good part of the audience with his mild and judicious comment that collecting information is costly, and someone has to pay for it—heresy to those who believe that everything is free in cyberspace. He mentioned the dread words copyright and patent, and there were dark mutterings on the floor.  

A lot of time was wasted in a discussion of what it might mean to be elitist, nothing any American would admit to being. The moderator, Andrew Keen, is a Brit, and as such had no problem with avowing elitism, but he was alone in this. The general consensus seemed to be that what is now called “Web 2.0,” the current state of Internet technology, offers a great way of disseminating information, but many were hazy on where the information is supposed to come from in the first place. They seemed not to be aware of newsgathering, the activity still conducted in most depth by newspapers. 

One commentator pointed with approval to the blogger Glen Greenwald, a lawyer who has evidently done a yeoman job of close textual analysis of legal documents about NSA spying on phone conversations. Markoff noted that he himself was raised on the work of I.F. Stone, who managed to find out much of what official Washington was trying to hide by studying documents, and was able to get the word out by mailing his printed newsletter, no Internet needed. He permitted himself a tiny gentlemanly smirk with a light reference to how the NSA documents got out in the first place: obtained by the New York Times. 

The question of who pays for collecting the news never really came up again. Markoff had earlier observed that Craigslist might be creating a drop in classified advertising revenues at the big papers, which might in turn lead to cuts in news staffing, but the topic didn’t interest anyone else in the room, save one questioner who asked about “corporatization” of major media and got little response. 

But this is a central question. Although there’s a lot of good stuff on the Web if you know where to look, much of Blogsville is inhabited by people who haven’t quit their day jobs, and have not much to offer except opinion within a narrow range of experience. Without a few people who are paid to find out what’s going on and to report it clearly, talk radio will continue to be the way most people form their opinions, with predictably bad results when it comes time to vote. Poor Craig Newmark, who’s only trying to do something useful, shouldn’t get all the blame for the decline in newspaper advertising, since advertising of all kinds in print media is shrinking.  

The loyalty that many local businesses used to feel to their local press has declined. Recent letters that the Daily Planet’s advertising sales staff have passed along to the editorial department clearly illustrate that mindset:  

Thanks for thinking of Berkeley Rep. I want to be candid with you and report that Berkeley Rep has no plans to advertise in the Daily Planet now or in the immediate future. We know that many of your readers are Berkeley Rep patrons, but we believe that we are reaching those audiences already through other means—none of which includes local print like the DP, Berkeley Voice, East Bay Monthly or East Bay Express. Sorry to disappoint. 

Our sales staffer asked the writer how he reaches his target audience, and he replied: 

We reach our patrons through direct mail, outbound e-mail and through ads in the major print dailies (primarily the Chron, also the CC Times and Oakland Trib for the moment). We use radio, especially KQED, and some television. Our non-subscriber patrons come usually once or twice a year. They come from all over the Bay Area including Marin, SF, the Peninsula. Less than half our audiences comes from Berkeley. They are, as you can imagine, educated and culturally literate. They are middle class and wealthy, and middle aged or older. Of course we also have a younger audience in their 20s and 30s, and we continually nurture them. Hope this helps.”  

The writer is marketing director for the Berkeley Repertory Theater, a well-regarded cultural institution which has received millions of dollars in subsidies from Berkeley taxpayers. It is regularly reviewed by the Daily Planet and listed in our calendar. Honesty compels us to admit that for a hot minute we were strongly tempted to drop the free calendar listings and reviews, but our editorial loyalty must continue to be to our readers, unaffected by the whims of advertisers.  

And we appreciate his own honesty. His letter helps us come to terms with what a challenge we’re facing in trying to continue to bring a newspaper to a community like Berkeley, where the sense of entitlement is strong, and where noblesse oblige died long ago. But if advertising doesn’t pay for newspapers, and subscriptions haven’t paid for newspapers for more than 20 years, who’s going to? We doubt that it will be, for example, Berkeley taxpayers. In 10 years, Web X.x may be the only source of information, and that won’t be good.