Corridor Business Journal Article

Editor’s note: The Fifth Estate column takes a critical look at local media issues. It returns after a hiatus with new writers. It will appear the second week of each month.

In the land of media dinosaurs, newspapers are the lumbering beasts most vulnerable; nipping at their heels are readership declines, advertising losses, rising expenses and changing habits.

The threats are imminent. Some media empires, built on a model that relied on monopolies and ruled until the web evened the playing field, have begun to fall; the Chicago Tribune’s parent company and the Minneapolis Star Tribune have filed for bankruptcy and Davenport-based Lee Enterprises has watched its stock price drop to junk level. The Des Moines Register and the Iowa City Press-Citizen, both owned by Gannett Corp., cut jobs to improve the bottom line of the parent company.

The Gazette, it seems, is now prepared to chew off its own leg in an attempt to escape the downward tug.

In a recent column and blog post, the Cedar Rapids newspaper’s editor, Steve Buttry, outlined the changes and the reasons. “Demand for the packaged newspaper product is falling at the same time that newsprint prices are rising and the economy that supports our advertisers is in turmoil. But demand for information content — news photos, videos, answers to questions — is stronger than ever.”

So if the content is still in high demand but the final product isn’t, what’s the fix? The Gazette’s basic plan for a new business model boils down to a seemingly simple, but uncertain, idea: separate content from the product and track metrics like mad.

To that end, reporters will become, primarily, bloggers with yet-to-be-defined entrepreneurial incentives to build audiences around their blogs.

The role of these “super-bloggers” is to break and develop stories on beats, making their blogs go-to places for information. Live chats, reader responses and more will be used to crowdsource and plug into other online communities. These bloggers would mostly work independently, subject to no real supervision by a traditional editor. Reporters will have the responsibility of marketing their work directly to audiences, with those building the biggest audiences seeing the biggest paychecks.

That’s a good thing because it will encourage, and reporters will be held accountable for producing, news stories audiences actually read, at least in theory. But no one can tell if, say, reporting on state corruption and misgovernment (of the kind that won the newspaper its 1936 Pulitzer Prize) will beat out feel-good stories about babies and pictures of pets.

The what-ifs are numerous. What if a product manager determines the metrics indicate readers want more celebrity news and less government coverage? Does the government blogger lose his job? Is coverage hired out to a less experienced — or cheaper — freelancer? Is government coverage dropped?

Since reporters will see bonuses based on page views and other metrics, and are encouraged to market their work on various social networks, this new business model also seems to encourage sensationalism and “link baiting,” the practice of promising exciting content to users who click through only to find run-of-the-mill work.

In a follow-up column, Mr. Buttry notes that reporters won’t be expected to reapply for their old jobs; they'll be applying for new jobs. Besides Mr. Buttry, who was hired in June and is slotted to oversee the new newsroom, few are guaranteed new jobs.

While Mr. Buttry will continue to oversee the content part of the newsroom, another business-editorial hybrid part, will contract with reporters and photographers for content that will then be directed into different packages, such as the company’s newspaper, its web site, its new weekly tabloid Hoopla and other niche products.

It’s not clear how much this new unit, with “product planners” instead of editors, muddies the traditional business-editorial dichotomy, which news organizations have employed to prevent pay-for-play, or at least the impression that ad revenue sways editorial coverage.

Reorganization details are still a work in progress — Mr. Buttry wrote that the plan was still developing — but one staffer, who asked to not be named, said the plan “feels very nebulous and extremely rushed.”

While constantly tracking what is drawing eyeballs (read: ad dollars) is important, journalism (a word that didn’t appear once in Mr. Buttry’s 1,100-and-some-word column) isn’t only about giving people what they want; it’s also about being the eyes, ears and conscience on behalf of the public. Is it still journalism when a newspaper becomes a “niche product” offering “packaged content?”

The Gazette may have one foot on a slippery slope, says Stephen Berry, journalism professor at the University of Iowa. “When I hear corporate executives use those kinds of words plus phrases like ‘entrepreneurial incentives,’ I do not know whether they are talking about journalism or a box of cereal. I hope, for the sake of journalism’s higher cause, they keep the difference in mind,” said Mr. Berry, a 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Watchdog Journalism: The Art of Investigative Reporting (Oxford University Press, 2008).

“Whatever plan emerges, I would hate to see it turn serious, public-affairs journalists into incentivized, entrepreneurial bloggers who must focus more on crowd-pleasing content than on keeping tabs on the institutions that purport to serve society and holding them accountable when they don’t,” Mr. Berry added.

Sometimes journalism is about giving people what they don’t want, but still need. Whether this new model can provide that has yet to be proven.

John Goodlove is a graduate student and teaching assistant in journalism at the UI, and a former Gazette staffer. Nick Bergus teaches multimedia news at the University of Iowa.

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