I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed.

— Buzz Bissinger, author of “Friday Night Lights” and other bestsellers, castigating blogs on HBO’s “Costas Now”; May 1.

It’s one of the bigger Cadillacs. I’ve got a desk in it. It’s like an airplane. … I want them to feel that they are somebody and their congressman is somebody. And when they say, ‘This is nice,’ it feels good.

— Rep. Charles Rangell, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, describing the 17-foot-long, 300-horsepower, 2004 Cadillac DeVille he leases for for $777.54 a month; House rules permit members to lease any vehicle at taxpayer expense; May 1.
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It’s the new conventional wisdom: The news biz is dying. Declining circulation. Abandonment by advertisers. Falling revenues. Cuts in staffing to reduce costs. The news biz needs a new business model, the critical harpies proclaim.

But what should a new business model for an industry whose principal product is journalism look like?

It would have to recognize several new — and old — realities.

• Any new business model must generate profit.

There’s no way around this. Journalism is best sustained within a for-profit frame. A company that engages in newspaper journalism as a product is not supported by government (unlike public television) nor should it be. The same holds for commercial broadcast journalism as well. To provide news, the company must make a profit to attract investors and secure the resources to collect, report and transmit that news. A non-profit model cannot immediately match the breadth and depth of news reporting that a healthy democracy of more than 300 million citizens requires.
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Timothy Crouse’s book gave us the overused phrase “boys on the bus.” Now, it seems, the boys (and girls) are being yanked off the bus in droves. Fewer and fewer reporters for the nation’s major dailies are riding the campaign bus and flying on the press plane to regularly cover the remnants of the pre-convention presidential race.

That bodes poorly for both the survival of the print press and the level of political knowledge of the electorate the print press decreasingly serves.

Jacques Steinberg of The New York Times reports that 650 journalists parachuted into Cleveland, Ohio, in February to cover the debate between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “But,” Mr. Steinberg writes, “early the next morning, as the two candidates set off for engagements across Ohio and Texas, representatives of only two dozen or so news organizations tagged along.” [emphasis added].

Newspaper managers say they have reasons for pulling the boys off the bus.
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You probably haven’t heard of Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard. But because of them, you may be thinking twice about the water you drink — especially if you live in Philadelphia.

Mr. Donn, Ms. Mendoza, and Mr. Pritchard wrote and reported the story that reveals “[a] vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans.” (Elsewhere at S&R, my colleague Martin discusses what this all means.)

The three reporters did extensive work on this story:

Members of the AP National Investigative Team reviewed hundreds of scientific reports, analyzed federal drinking water databases, visited environmental study sites and treatment plants and interviewed more than 230 officials, academics and scientists. They also surveyed the nation’s 50 largest cities and a dozen other major water providers, as well as smaller community water providers in all 50 states.

Journalists broke this story. Not a government agency. Not a corporation. Not a whistleblower. Not a blogger. Well-trained, experienced journalists did — with the backing of a news organization willing to dedicate resources to do for the public what governments and corporations can’t, won’t or don’t.
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Everyday life, supersaturated with images and jingles, makes intellectual life look hopelessly sluggish, burdensome, difficult. In a video-game world, the play of intellect — the search for validity, the willingness to entertain many hypotheses, the respect for difficulty, the resistance to hasty conclusions — has the look of retardation. - Todd Gitlin

Maybe it’s our name.

After all, this blog called Scholars and Rogues contains in its moniker two terms against which certain types of Americans react: Rogues are, after all, known law questioners, rascals, generally naughty types; Scholars are, in all probability, intellectuals, know-it-alls, all around smart asses. Both of these are groups that some here in the land of Deciders deem, if not outright outlaws, at the least needing (preferably warrentless) surveillance.

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Edward Wasserman, writing in the Feb. 18 Miami Herald, makes an obvious but still unsettling point about the news business:

The nearly two-century-old marriage between consumer advertising and journalism is on the rocks.

Prof. Wasserman, the Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, recounts that two hundred years from the penny press to the difficulties that “new media” have with a business model that presumes people will pay for news — and therefore advertisers will pay to park themselves in front of those eyeballs. But, says Prof. Wasserman:

That era is now ending, not because the public no longer needs news or because people mistrust news any more than they always have — but because new technologies are churning out better ways to reach customers who are shopping for cars, jobs or homes.

For two centuries, advertising has supported journalism. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press — but does not guarantee profitability. That news organizations must achieve without government support.
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Just as a quick hit, I’ve noticed a number of interesting pieces floating about the blogosphere that delve into the hidden dynamics and power struggles of the Clinton campaign and why it, originally as inevitable as the sunrise and paying taxes, is now foundering so badly.

The inestimable Pam Spaulding has a roundup of Michele Cottle (from The New Republican) and Josh Greene (from The Atlantic) looking into the resignation of Patti Solis Doyle, the role she played as power broker and manager, and how Clinton, like Bush, seems to prize loyalty and discipline over competence and effectiveness.

Last week, Obsidian Wings’ Hilzoy looked at coverage of the campaign and Clinton’s failures (including the Doyle resignation), and asked why the heck could Clinton have not foreseen this. Full Story »

It’s official–the three-month writer’s strike has come to an end, with 92.5% of the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) voting to get back to work after an agreement was struck between the WGA and the major studios that would (in theory) guarantee writers a larger percentage of revenue from shows broadcast or sold over the Internet–the chief sticking point that led to the strike in the first place. Full Story »

When a newspaper dies, “a voice is stilled.” That was the headline in the Cincinnati Post Dec. 30, the day before the newspaper’s presses were silenced. Corporate owner E.W. Scripps closed both the Cincinnati Post and its cousin, the Kentucky Post.

In their day, they were great, ornery, cantankerous papers fearing and favoring none:

Vance Trimble, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Kentucky Post in the 1960s and ’70s, explain[ed] his newspaper’s editorial philosophy this way: “Everybody could get in the paper, and nobody could stay out.” [emphasis added]

That applied to Mr. Trimble, too. When he was arrested on a drunk-driving beef, the paper ran a photo of the editor behind bars the next day. Now, that was a newspaper I can admire.

But should this be RIP, Cincy Post — or good riddance?
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The left blogogentsia is all blowed up this afternoon over the story Martin wrote about earlier today. Since that post, more info has come to light that makes Sandeep Kaushik, the campaign spokesman in question, look considerably less guilty and that makes the cub reporter in training look like somebody who walked into the room knowing what story he was going to write, regardless of what was actually said. I think Martin is going to have more on this later, so I’ll hold off on further comment about the story itself.

However, I do want to offer a thoughts on how to avoid the fate that Mr. Kaushik stumbled into. Full Story »

Someday I’d like to be a Democratic consultant, and be paid thousands of dollars to help my candidates lose elections and insult the people who support them. Because nothing says “victory” like a staffer on a progressive blogosphere-supported campaign shitting on the very folks that put his boss on the map. Full Story »

Last week I joined a legion of business bloggers in poleaxing the shizizzle out of a self-satisfied new project called The Blog Council. Josh Catone of Read/WriteWeb stomped them. Dave Taylor, who’s probably forgotten more about blogging than the entire council put together knows, took them to school. Robert Scoble - another guy who knows a thing or two about blogging - explains why he’s skeptical. Jordan McCollum goes door-to-door on some of the group’s players. Mike Moran prays that it’s all just a big mistake. And so on.

Then Jake McKee comes along and explains that all us “experts” don’t get it. In fact, our failure to get it proves that the Blog Council is right in doing things behind closed doors. Full Story »

Scholars & Rogues has enjoyed some collective recognition in its brief history, and now one of our writers has been singled out for individual acclaim. Major props to Edmundo Rocha, whose Silver Star nod from the Texas Progressive Alliance is extremely well-deserved. Full Story »

When a new innovation comes along, corporations typically follow a predictable arc. First there’s the “Ignore It” phase. Then, once it becomes clear that it’s actually important, they dive into the “Getting It All Wrong” phase. The first step in Getting It All Wrong is “pretend that the new thing works like all the old things.”

Eventually they get past these early “ballistic podiatry*” activities and begin to figure things out, although there’s often a step, which falls late in Getting It All Wrong, called “Hire a Consultant Who Was Successful at Other Things But Barely Knows More Than You Do About The New One.” Sometimes these outside hitters have read a book, but mainly they rely on the tendency of executives to overgeneralize about prior successes.

Which brings us to The Blog Council, Full Story »

Thanks for all the votes, folks, and if you haven’t voted yet, or would like to vote for S&R again, today’s the last day to do so. Registration’s not required, it’s just cheap ‘n easy clickage. Currently, we’re in fourth place behind ‘Slow Cooker Recipes.’ Please, let us keep our dignity… vote now for S&R at this link. Your support is appreciated!

The 2007 Weblog Awards nominees have been named and voting is open. S&R has been nominated in the category “Best of the Top 6751 - 8750 Blogs” against the likes of Winter Patriot, Gus Van Horn, et al. You don’t need to register, you can vote daily (once every 24 hrs.), and voting will end soon… so if you like what we do here, please feel free to express it at their voting page. Thanks for your support!

Begin writing the long-term obituary of the American newspaper — at least for the newspaper envisioned by the Founders as a public service and a significant component of the checks and balances that once allowed American democracy to function properly and purposefully.

You think know the now-familiar story: Advertising revenues are down. Circulation’s declining. Corporate ownership listens to Wall Street instead of Main Street. Newspapers are shedding their older, experienced (read: more expensive to maintain) reporters and other staffers, all in service to the ROI (return on investment) demanded by stockholders of those corporate owners. All to maintain a profit level unmatched by any other American industry.

But that’s not the whole story. Some of that heralded doomsday circulation decline is intentional. The financial rationale behind that self-inflicted injury will have consequences beyond the short-term profitability of print news organizations. It will continue to erode the quality of those corporations’ principal product — journalism. It will taint online news operations — especially those promoted by bloggers as alternatives to mainstream news.
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Part four in a series.

I hope that by this stage of the discussion a few fundamental points are evident:

1. Traditional journalism - the institutional form that most of us grew up with and the codes that governed it - is in decline. For a variety of factors it has lost (or is rapidly losing) its place as the dominant means by which information is transmitted in our culture, and in the process its capacity to help shape public opinion in a productive manner has been gravely undermined.
2. Blogging and other forms of alternative journalism have assumed a dramatically important role in the news and information transmission processes formerly served by legacy media. This trends seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Full Story »

Part three in a series.

In the aftermath of the 2004 election I wrote a fairly jaded op-ed for Editor & Publisher lamenting just how badly our brave new world of electronic media had failed us. I said, in part:

In the “marketplace of ideas” model that gave rise to the First Amendment, rationally self-interested citizens would enter the market with an informed, more or less open mind, where they would wander from stall to stall sampling the wide array of ideas on display. Some of these wares would be premium quality, some would be second-rate, and some would probably be rotten to the core, but an educated and contemplative electorate would inherently arrive at the best decision; in the estimation of John Milton, the “truth would out.

“This isn’t how the electronic marketplace we saw in this election worked. Full Story »

Part two in a series.

Let’s begin with a brief look at how Americans view the press.

• A 2004 Gallup Poll says “Americans rate the trustworthiness of journalists at about the level of politicians and as only slightly more credible than used-car salesmen.”
• Only about one in five Americans “believe journalists have high ethical standards, ranking them below auto mechanics but tied with members of Congress.”
• Only “one in four people believe what they read in the newspapers.”
• Chicago Tribune Editor Charles M. Madigan says: “If you are a journalist, you should probably just assume that you come across as a liar.”
• A 1999 American Society of Newspaper Editors survey said that “53 percent of the public view the press as out of touch with mainstream America, while 78 percent think journalists pay more attention to the interests of their editors than their readers.”
• About 22 percent of respondents to a 2003 Pew survey said they thought “the unethical practices of [Jayson] Blair, which included fabricating sources and events, occur frequently among journalists, while 36 percent said they thought wrongdoing happened occasionally. Another 58 percent believed journalists didn’t care about inaccuracies.”

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