But think about the story we’re being sold: The National Enquirer pubs a story saying Tiger is stepping out on his wife. A couple nights later, at two or three in the morning, Tiger decides to leave the house for no apparent reason. While trying to back out of the driveway – stone sober, the reports insist – he manages to wrap the Escalade around a tree. With me so far? Good. Then his wife comes out and tries to “rescue” him by bashing out the windows with a club.

If none of this smells a tad overripe to you, call me. I’m working a sweet real estate deal – waterfront property in south-central Florida, as it turns out – and am looking for partners.

Anyhow, we’re not here to snark over the fact that Woods lives in a town with the most gullible CSI unit in America. We’re here to discuss what this case tells us about the brave new world of public relations and crisis communications in the land of the ubiquitous, 24/7/4ever tabloid news cycle.

The Ugly Choices

Say you’re a PR counselor. And you represent a client who encounters a personal crisis of the general shape and/or size of Tigergate. What do you do?

You say this:

Client, you have a choice, and I can’t make it for you. On the one hand, you have a right to privacy, despite what the howling jackals of the free press would like us to believe. You’re entitled to say nothing and to deal with your personal life behind closed doors. They may stalk you for the rest of your days, but you may, if you choose, ignore them. You don’t even have to acknowledge their existence, and if they get out of line you can get restraining orders and hire security to keep them out of your immediate personal space.

Or you can face the music.

Now, if you choose option B, you’ll need to be fully forthcoming. If they smell a lie, a dodge, a rhetorical two-step, any hint at all that the truth they’re getting is even slightly varnished, well, it’ll be worse than if you’d stonewalled them. And a calculated, cynical faux press conference event like the one staged by that Tiger look-alike robot a couple of weeks back? Yeah, I’d avoid that like I would pigeon tartare.

So option B = 100% transparency. Think about all the things that means. Like, what’s your self-respect worth? How you feel about being on your knees before the drooling, unwashed masses?

If you opt for route A, though, understand something – and this is critical. Your brand is going to take an epic nard-stomping. It may never recover. Even if it does, it may take a very long time. If your livelihood depends on your public reputation, the question becomes how much money do you need to live on? How much are you willing to sacrifice? And I mean this literally, Client. This is a math question – how many dollars do you have, how many do you need, and how many are you willing to forego?

Hell Hath No Fury

Sadly, options A and B are more or less mutually exclusive. That sucks, I know. It’s not fair that a person should have to make this kind of choice. But that’s the world we live in.

Once upon a time a newspaper arrived in the morning and the news came on TV in the evening. Like a dog that knows dinner time is 6pm, the public was acclimated to this information rationing routine. In that world a pro like me could control the flow of data. Gatekeep like a sumbitch, you betcha. Top-down, one-to-many them until the cows come home. Rover is going to eat at six, and he’s going to eat what I put in front of him, by god.

Those days are gone, though. With the ubiquitous tabloid infotainment cycle in which we now find ourselves morally adrift, you’re no longer facing the well-heeled family dog from your basic ’50s sitcom. These days Rover rolls with a posse and an attitude. Kibble at six? Fuck you, master. I’ll eat when I want, and if you don’t like it I’ll head over to the Johnson place. Dogs are a too-rare commodity these days, and unless you’d like me to become the neighbor’s faithful hound, there better be something tasty in that dish around the clock.

Forgive me if I’m torturing the metaphor, but hopefully the point is clear. In a world with 24-hour “news,” always-on Internet and now an exploding mobile landscape, where that ubiquity is never further away than your pocket, the rules have changed. And not in your favor.

Your Life May Belong to You, But Your Brand Belongs to the Public

See, today’s public has gotten entitled. They’ve gotten accustomed to the immediacy, the comprehensiveness of the on-demand infocycle. Key word: demand. Something happens, they find out within seconds. And if it’s even remotely interesting, there are dozens (hundreds, even thousands) of outlets and individuals on the trail, relentlessly scouring the story for every minute scrap of detail, no matter how banal or trivial.

It’s their right to know … well, whatever the hell they want to know. Information wants to be free. Information is power. They’ve paid for their phones and their cable and they endure the ads on their favorite Web sites because they want content. All of it. Now, bitches. Understand that, at least subconsciously, they feel like they have paid for the right to know whatever they want about you. Your private life is their property. You’re public domain now. That may seem perverse, but there it is.

If you get righteously indignant and insist on option A (that’s the “respect my privacy route”), Client, one of two things is going to happen. On the one hand, people may respect your courage and principles and give you the space you need to get your life back tog…[snzrrrk...hrrf...BWAHAHAHAHA....] Hoo. Thanks, thanks. I’ll be here all week. Remember to tip your waitress.

Aherm. So no, I was just kidding. That’s not one of the things that might happen. I just wanted to see that cute little glimmer of hope leap into your puppy dog eyes again. I know, I’m a hateful, soulless bastard. You knew that when you hired me, though.

Seriously, though. One thing that might happen is rampant outrage. How dare you clam up on us? Hell hath no fury like a consumer scorned. They’ll carry on like you betrayed them personally, even though they may never have been in the same time zone with you.

This will be very bad. But not as bad as the other thing that can happen, which is that they move onto some other shiny thing and forget about you completely. That yawning sound you’re hearing is the sound of your personal brand sloughing onto the heap of permanent irrelevance. It’s a very different sound than the clink of gold coins being dropped into your pockets, isn’t it?

This Is Your Life

I’m sorry, Client, I’d say. This is all I have. I can explain the landscape, detail your options, and execute like a hall of famer along the course you choose, but I can’t pick that path for you. This is the rest of your life we’re talking about. You have to decide which cup of poison to drink.

I mean, sure, if you were Tiger and I had a hot tub time machine I’d be happy to jacuzzi back a few years and try to explain to you the deleterious impact that unsanctioned cocktail waitresses can exert on your cash flow position, but let’s be honest. You’d listen to me about like Senator Fatback listens to a lobbyist who shows up empty-handed, wouldn’t you?

And in truth, we can carp about the system all we want, but if it weren’t for this over-the-top, completely ludicrous system your brand probably wouldn’t be a percent of what it is today, anyway, right? Live by the sword, die by the sword.

I know none of this is what you want to hear, Client, but you called me to manage the crisis. Which means I arrived shortly after we lost control of important parts of the game. So now we play the hand we’re dealt.

There is an edict that was always true about crisis management, but it’s about a million times more important today than it once was: the best way to deal with crisis is to avoid it. The lesson is a simple one. People will find out. So if you don’t want to see it on TMZ and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, don’t fucking do it.

As I say, simple.

In March, the Discovery Channel, teaming again with the BBC, plans to present “Life” — a “breathtaking ten-part blockbuster [that] brings you 130 incredible stories from the frontiers of the natural world … This is evolution in action.”

And again, viewers will be astonished by the remarkable videography done by the best pros in the world under arduous, even dangerous conditions. Viewers will park themselves in their Barcaloungers, appropriate beverage and salsa and chips in hand, and revel in the breadth and depth of the series. But are these series the most accurate portrayals of the state of the natural world? And do they desensitize us to reality?

Yet again, television will fail to remind viewers that the vast pollution and environmental degradation brought on by the needs and wants of those viewers and the industries that satisfy them are threatening to destroy much of what the viewers see.

In fact, viewers are hard-pressed to find videography of pollution anywhere on scheduled series on basic cable. Out of sight, out of mind. Check the lists of programming at National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. At least Nat Geo offers “Six Degrees,” but it’s a what-if, worst-case, disaster scenario special.

Pollution is ugly. It does not make for breathtaking television. Nor is televising the pollution of air, land, and water profitable. Corporate sponsors do not support programming of a topic whose root cause could often be laid at the sponsors’ doorstep.

In 1970, I was hired as an environmental writer, three weeks before the first Earth Day. Six weeks later, after the blush had faded from the environmental rose, the paper “promoted” me to full-time sports writer. But on every five-year anniversary of Earth Day, editors placed Denny back on the green beat for a few weeks. In those days, the green movement prompted newspapers to undertake science and environmental pages — and full pages at that. But such commitment to the cause faded, like my paper’s dedication to the environmental beat, because advertisers don’t like stories that paint consumerism as a root of all environmental evil.

As a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists for two decades, I’ve seen first-hand the decline of dedicated science and environment pages in the nation’s newspapers. Christine Russell, a former science reporter for The Washington Post and the president of the U.S. Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, lamented that those dedicated pages peaked at 95 in 1989 and dropped to 34 in 2005 — and they’re still declining. I’ve watched the number of members of SEJ working in print environmental journalism decline as members lost jobs or beats.

Every editor I ever asked about the fate of his or her paper’s science or environmental page said the same thing: “No advertiser support.” What companies would want to put their ads for airline travel deals or SUVs on a page dedicated to depicting accurately the consequences of both purchases?

We know, of course, that corporatists can’t control all breaking environmental news — especially if good video can be had. Spill oil on a highly visible beach, dump toxins into a river and kill thousands of fish, let a dam holding 2.6 million cubic yards of toxic coal sludge break and inundate hundreds of acres, and by god you’ve got a public relations environmental disaster guaranteed to sit on the front page or lead the nightly news … for how long? Modern news media generally have the same attention span as their corporate owners — short.

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote “Unpopular Science” for The Nation. In that well-argued piece, they lamented the need for more, not less, critical writing about science and scientific issues, such as the environment:

We live in a time of pathbreaking advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology, of private spaceflight and personalized medicine, amid a climate and energy crisis, in a world made more dangerous by biological and nuclear terror threats and global pandemics. Meanwhile, advances in neuroscience are calling into question who we are, whether our identities and thought processes can be reduced to purely physical phenomena, whether we actually have free will. The media ought to be bursting with this stuff. Yet precisely the opposite is happening: even in places where you’d expect it to hold out the longest, science journalism is declining.

When Ted Turner was the financial muscle behind CNN and TBS, its environmental unit, led by Teya Ryan, Barbara Pyle, and Peter Dykstra, produced ground-breaking coverage. But that legendary green DNA has evaporated from CNN. Two years ago CNN whacked “its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, including Miles O’Brien, its chief technology and environment correspondent, as well as six executive producers.” Here’s the explanation from CNN’s flack:

We want to integrate environmental, science and technology reporting into the general editorial structure rather than have a stand alone unit. Now that the bulk of our environmental coverage is being offered through the Planet in Peril franchise, which is produced by the Anderson Cooper 360 program, there is no need for a separate unit.

Sure. More free-diving with great white sharks by the Silver Fox himself. O’Brien was a first-rate science reporter; Cooper isn’t. CNN has long since lost its moral compass regarding editorial decisions about content.

The New York Times still has its Tuesday “Science Times” page, but it’s an island in an uncovered ocean of environmental issues. So where does the public turn for science and environmental coverage if traditional media are bailing out? NPR’s Ira Flatow suggests that blogs and social media are filling the void. Perhaps, but where are they? Can viewers just point the remote and click and get environmental and science news they need? How is the credibility of online-only environmental and science writing unsupported by traditional media assessed? By whom?

Corporations that pollute without consequence the public goods of air, water, and land are no doubt pleased by the absence of serious, frequent, and thorough environmental and science news coverage. Between the newspaper industry’s self-implosion and the long-term lack of corporate advertising support for news and programming that depicts Nature as Soiled rather than Nature as Discoveryized, pollution will continue unabated.

Throw in deregulation. Throw in underfunding of federal and state staff needed to detect, correct, and regulate air, water, and land pollution. And throw in the Supreme Court of the United States:

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

In their Times story, part of a series called “Toxic Waters,” reporters Charles Duhigg and Janet Roberts trace the demise of the definition of “navigable waters” in the Clean Water Act. Supreme Court decisions may lead to exclusion of waters protected by Act from which 117 million Americans obtain drinking water. The pollution threat to water supplies is real — and ought to be far more compelling as a series topic for Nat Geo and the Discovery Channel. According to Duhigg and Roberts:

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years. [emphasis added]

Try to keep this in mind as you park your fanny on that Barcalounger to watch the first episode of “Life” next month.

Ponder, too, the sources of the water and crops used to make that appropriate beverage and
your salsa and chips. Still taste good?

“Snowboard Videos: Send Us Your Tricks”

“How dare The Times stoop to such pandering to an unseemly demographic,” I harrumphed. Snowboard tricks? In The Times? How could my principal source of serious news by serious people about serious issues and events sink to pandering to the fans of fakie? This is unthinkable.

Beginning Feb. 12, The Times will open a website to host these videos. But why on earth (or snow) would The Times want snowboard videos? I mean, gee whiz, this could amount to amateur night among the heathens. The Times does things right — you know, professionally done photography, video, graphics and other illustrations. What gives with wanting videos likely to be of goofy-footers eatin’ snow?

The Times needs money. That’s what gives.

Two and a half years ago, The Times had neared what some wags termed financial collapse. According to analyst Henry Blodget, in the short term The Times owed almost a half billion dollars more than it had in assets. A few months later, The Times decided to borrow $225 million against its interest in its brand-new headquarters. Those were tough “times.”

Today The Times reported that its fourth-quarter earnings more than tripled over a year ago. That does not mean, however, that New York Times Co., which owns its namesake paper, The Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune and 15 other daily newspapers, is making fat profits.

During that fourth quarter, The Times cut 8 percent of its newsroom staff. That, of course, saved money. Its advertising revenue saw its smallest decline — 14.7 percent — in a year, but that’s still a decline. According to the AP story: “Overall revenue fell 11.5 percent to $681 million, better than the $653 million expected by analysts.” But revenue — despite whacking personnel, a slightly improving economy and lower pension costs — continues to decline despite gains in online ad revenue. The Times continues to falter financially.

The Times over the past decade has removed so much talent from its newsroom, as have so many other American newspapers. It’s added responsibilities to those who remain — getting content on the website as well as managing content for mobile devices, for example.

These days, I read The Times mostly on my Blackberry. (And boy, does that surprise me.) But online and on mobile, each day I see evidence of erosion of the quality of The Times — editing errors, writing errors, failure to follow up on points made by sources, over-reliance on “official” sources, and so forth.

I love The Times. I have read it my entire life. Despite its increasing flaws, I still regard it as the best daily newspaper in America. But The Times no longer loves me. At 64 years old, I am no longer the demographic it desires to sell to advertisers. It you’ve seen The Times‘ television ads for its “weekender” subscription, it should be clear that the demographic The Times wants is far younger, with perhaps more disposable income, than me. (Fun link: See the parody ad.)

I keep waiting for the online edition of The Times to ask for videos of lawn bowling and shuffleboard, but I guess I’ll just have to keep dreaming.

Now, let’s go look at those shredder vids, eh, kids?

In the past year, had I sought a professorship to teach print news reporting, writing, and editing, I’d be hard-pressed to find a job despite my two decades of experience and a really expensive piece of PhD parchment. A reason: Several thousand highly experienced, talented print journalists have been shitcanned by their newspapers in the past two years. But print professorships are few, making it a buyer’s market, writes Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher.

But there’s another reason: Journalism schools, at least in terms of their job postings, may be shifting identities.

In its January 2010 edition of AEJMC News, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (colloquially known as AEJ) lists few jobs in which experience in print journalism is a must, or teaching print journalism is required.

Aside from traditional broadcast, advertising and public relations professorships, here are some jobs and or job descriptions listed:

• “new media including but not limited to Internet Technology, E-commerce, and Webpage Design”
• “Digital TV/Advertising/New Media”
• “Corporate Communications”
• “integrated marketing communications” (Disclosure: My school offers this as a graduate degree.)
• “digital communication” … “web design, social networks, search engines, new media theory, media law, media ethics, gaming, blogs, virtual worlds, databases, digital literacy, new media, online communities”
• “expertise in the use of digital media applications in the advertising and/or public relations professions (e.g., social media, Web 3.0, blogging”
• “Economic Literacy and Entrepreneurship”
• “the business of the news media, including entrepreneurship and/or management”
• “communications/ media economics/ regulation and/or innovation. Knowledge of entrepreneurship as it relates to telecommunications, information technology, digital media, and/or web-based enterprises”

It’s the same with many of AEJ’s online ads. Florida wants “two new visionary faculty members with expertise in the rapidly emerging fields of Interactive Media / Digital Arts & Science.” Boston University wants “[s]cholars utilizing diverse modes of inquiry and methodologies with an interest in any aspect of new media, including but not limited to online communication, media effects, media policy, social networking, media economics, media history, and computer-mediated communication.”

J-schools are changing. In some respects, have they become commercially oriented entities that focus on designing, formatting, presenting and selling content instead of the journalistic production of that content? Are journalism schools thinking more like schools of business about their missions and pools of potential students?

Difficult questions reside here for the press, the public, deans of journalism schools and faculty.

When (not if) media corporations find a successful business model and realize credible journalism can be a profit center, whom will they hire to produce it?

Will they hire journalism school graduates whose coursework and internship experiences left them adequately trained to use various media to present content but who were not necessarily encouraged or sufficiently trained to do the hard work of reporting to produce it? Or, more simply, will they hire iPhone journalists or future Jimmy Breslins? (Breslin on media economics: “Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.”)

In the coming decade, who will provide information — the product of rigorous reporting — in the public interest?

Readers and viewers should expect a lost decade in which they are told much more about that of little import and much less about that of great import.

Name the journalistic illness, and the decade will provide it: more one-source stories; fewer competent analyses of political, economic, and social issues; and more focus on the mundane and meaningless (i.e., celebs and pseudo-celebs) than on the meaningful (such as the true human cost on readers of the performance failures of the nation’s political and corporate elite).

Why? Simple: The newspaper business, which once had about 56,000 journalists and was understaffed at that level, lost nearly 16,000 jobs (not all newsroom) in 2008 and almost 15,000 in 2009.

Any manager faced with the need to cut people begins with the most expensive ones first — in the newspaper business, they are often the most experienced, those with decades of experience in finding out stuff others tried to hide and telling us what they learned. But newspaper executives have been lying: With each round of staff cuts, they’ve continued to say: “We’ll be a leaner, more efficient newspaper, better able to serve our readers. Our award-winning journalism will be the same as ever. And everyone can find us online.” Do they think readers really believe that?

As the new decade unfolds, who will tell the stories 315 million Americans need to hear as citizens and consumers facing overwhelming taxes, higher health-care costs, unemployment over 10 percent, and two wars (about to become three, perhaps)? They won’t be told by the experienced former journalists who lost their jobs and who are now working in public relations but not necessarily richer or happier.

In 2005 I wrote in a commentary for E&P:

Without journalists, others without a sense of the journalistic mission — such as unscrupulous advertisers and political charlatans — will be telling the stories.

Duh. Expect more stories from more sources who hide their motivations and intent. Fewer journalists are on the job. Journalism schools are training, it appears, fewer journalists. Strupp notes that newspaper majors at the University of Missouri have declined. Lee Becker’s 2008 survey of J-school enrollment notes an increase overall but a slight decline in any form of journalism as a major. Thus fewer journalists-to-be may be in the pipeline. Meanwhile, those remaining in newsrooms, if they survived because they’re inexpensive, are likely to be less experienced and will need this decade to mature.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So, predicts Rachel Sklar at The Daily Beast, bylines as brands, niches, “undernews” and Web TV will fill it. But how credible will be the content produced by the 200 million Twitterers and the 350 million Facebook users?

Do those hundreds of million of Americans trying to live out their lives with some vestige of happiness and faith that the American Dream still exists even give a damn about the economic, social, cultural, and political consequences of the media turmoil that surrounds them?

A traditional task of journalism is education. That’s why, when the Republic was founded, newspapers were given special mailing rates. School systems had not taken firm root. Teaching the public (not brainwashing or misleading it) ought to still be a part of the public-service mission of journalism.

Perhaps that’s why there’s room in journalism schools for ossified, old newsroom hacks like me. We need to teach that mission. We need to teach these iPhone-honed students that there is still a need to observe well, record faithfully, analyze intelligently, organize thoughtfully, and present compellingly. That’s the nature of communication, be it print journalism or “entrepreneurship as it relates to telecommunications, information technology, digital media, and/or web-based enterprises.”

And Sklar, who is as “new media” as you can get, walks the fine line between the old and the emerging:

Grownups, you’ve been in this business for decades, but the ground is shifting under your feet and if you don’t grab on to some smart 22-year-old, you’re screwed. Why? Because that 22-year-old grew up on the Internet while you were spending all your time working in some other quaint old-timey medium. So stop pulling rank and just say, “help me.” They will. And to you young punks who think you run this world—there actually are rules in this Wild West. Quaint old-fashioned conventions like transparency, attribution, confirmation, and accountability will matter just as much in 2010, maybe more now that the Internet is multiplying around us like Mickey’s broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And if you don’t get that reference, ask a grownup. There’s much we can teach you.

Thank you, Rachel. Well said. You’d make a terrific colleague.

That’s because paid circulation of daily newspapers nationally fell more than 10 percent from a year ago. Some papers suffered truly horrendous daily circulation losses: the San Francisco Chronicle (down 25.8 percent), The Boston Globe (down 18.5 percent) and The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger (down 22.2 percent), reports Rick Edmonds on his Poynter Biz Blog. USA Today, hit by a slump in travel, fell nearly 18 percent. The circulation of 400 daily newspapers has fallen to only 30 million readers.

This hemorrhaging of circulation — the worst ever — will have serious consequences. Expect newspaper staffs, already slashed below the minimum necessary to adequately cover their turf, to be cut further. Expect more shallow, one-source stories. Expect more stories laden with anonymous sources because the poorly paid, younger, inexperienced reporters left on staff won’t have the skill to persuade sources to speak on the record. Expect more wire-service content because local stories won’t get done. Expect corporate newspaper management to continue to stall on finding a business model that enhances the public-service mission of journalism. Expect more style than substance.

Just expect less of what good newspapers used to be. The nation’s newspapers, the constitutionally anointed watchdogs and adversaries of government, can no longer be considered as successful in those roles as they used to be.

Mr. Edmonds lists several reasons for this continuing, massive loss of paid circulation. From his Biz Blog:

• Readers continue to migrate from print to the Internet — sometimes to newspapers’ own sites, sometimes to aggregators.
• Papers, metros especially, are voluntarily trimming circulation to remote areas because they are more expensive to serve and less valuable to advertisers.
• So-called “start pressure,” the selling of new subscriptions to replace lost ones, has taken a hit from cost-cutting.
• Decisions at many papers to aggressively increase subscription and single copy prices has resulted in fewer copies being sold, though circulation revenue has increased.
• This period is the first to include the full impact of the recession, in which some consumers are dropping subscriptions and others buying the paper less frequently.
• Smaller news staffs and news space make the product weaker and less appealing.

In 2008, newspapers shed more than 9,000 jobs. This year, so far, newspapers have cut more than 14,100 jobs. How can such cuts in reporting and other capabilities not have serious social, cultural, and political consequences? Yes, various foundation-funded, non-profit, experimental approaches to independent newsgathering have emerged. Consider the well-intended efforts of ProPublica and MinnPost. (Read Alan Mutter’s excellent two-part take on non-profit news startups.)

Too little, perhaps too late. American journalism sprouted from local printers who became family owners of newspapers — local newspapers. The Founders intended the First Amendment to protect those who owned presses and printed newspapers from interference by the government. But the utility of the First Amendment has been eroded by overt corporate mismanagement and malpractice far more than covert government malfeasance.

At the local level, newspaper staffs have been reduced far below necessary levels for competent, comprehensive coverage of local government. Government didn’t cause this — but it now benefits from the ability to operate with far less inspection by journalists.

No non-profit efforts on the horizon would make up for the quantitative loss of experienced reporters nationally. Fewer reporters means fewer watchdogs.

How is that not costly to a democracy?

On the same day that The New York Times said (buried in its Media Decoder blog) that it would cut 100 newsroom jobs (again), Columbia University said it would not accept applications next year for its dual-degree graduate program in environmental journalism. The former is no surprise; the latter is a sad sign of the impact of newsroom job cuts on what news gets reported — or not.

In a letter to faculty, the directors of the program wrote:

As you know, media organizations across the county are in dire financial straits and thousands of journalists’ jobs have been eliminated. Science and environment beats have been particularly vulnerable. Although our graduates have done well in their careers, even those still employed are finding few opportunities to do the kind of substantive reporting for which the dual degree program has trained them, as they scramble to do their own work plus that of laid-off colleagues. [emphasis added]

Obviously, it’s a very discouraging time to be working in journalism with so many layoffs, buyouts, and closings. There are fewer staff jobs for specialized environmental reporters and fewer resources available to those who do have jobs. Tragically, this is happening at a time when environmental issues are finally getting more attention from the political and business realms. … the fate of newspapers will be the fate of science and environmental journalism at newspapers. They’re hemorrhaging jobs like mad, as so many of this journal’s readers are painfully aware, and I certainly have no idea what will staunch the bleeding. However, I can say that it’s been phenomenally impressive to watch how well print reporters have transitioned to the Web over the last few years. I really have no idea how practical it is — because there’s still no reliable business model for any kind of (web) journalism … [emphasis added]

One of those training grounds has been at Columbia. The directors of its suspended program, however, can read the tea leaves: Their graduates cannot reliably find reporting jobs at the nation’s daily newspapers. Yes, various online environmental journalism operations have sprouted. But their readership still can’t match the nearly 50 million newspapers printed daily. Though declining, that amount of paid circulation still has some muscle. But the decline in numbers of environmental journalists hurts, says the Observatory’s Brainard:

But who is watching all the municipal waste departments out there, looking over the environmental impact statements of local energy projects, or paying attention to water quality? Who will be keeping track of all environment- and energy-related stimulus money as it filters down to the lowest levels of government and out to businesses and contractors? Regional news outlets are the only ones who can reliably monitor such things. That’s exactly where we’ve lost so many of our very best journalists.

[Disclosure: I am a member of the SEJournal editorial board and its former chair.]

We certainly hear examples of businesses getting it right with new media, but in truth these cases represent a painfully small minority. With the advent of each new electronic tool we see a familiar pattern playing out.

• First phase: nobody gets it. Despite the fact that X represents obvious potential for a wide range of businesses, uptake is slow, primarily because these technologies tend to be driven initially by either the young or technophiles (or both).
• Second, a few agencies begin integrating X into their offerings, although all too often what they’re selling is the fad. Still, they’ll hook a client or two and “do” a pilot project. Since X is new and unproven, this “doing” is frequently conducted in a vacuum – that is, the “campaign” is implemented outside the scope of the company’s larger strategic planning. Everyone wants to see if it works before committing to it. The problem is that some of these approaches only work if they’re fully integrated. Take mobile/SMS marketing, for instance. There’s simply no way for it to work as a standalone because the nature of the technology and the carrier practices governing it make push tactics impossible. It can work beautifully if integrated with Web, print and point-of-sale, however. The result, in cases like this, is that the pilot underperforms the hype, thereby “proving” that it doesn’t work. Lesson learned – sadly, it’s the wrong lesson.
• Eventually we reach a period where everyone, even the company’s senior execs, have heard of it, and this marks a tipping point – X is no longer mysterious and obscure by virtue of its sheer newness. At this point, more businesses may begin implementing X. However, having heard of something isn’t the same as understanding it, and this is the phase where we sometimes see companies implementing programs that aren’t really suited to them. SMS marketing campaigns, for instance, are great for some contexts and an utter waste of resources in others. Blogging can be an incredibly powerful tool, but it requires a significant level of internal commitment and an audience that’s accustomed to searching for (and acting on) product, service and business insight on the Web. Twitter can be very effective once it’s understood that it isn’t the thing itself, but is instead a tool for pushing people to the thing (often Web content).

And so on. In a nutshell, business use of new media technologies and practices has been slow to mature. It’s probably safe to say that a vast majority of companies that could be productively using various strategies either aren’t doing so at all or are doing so in a way that fails to maximize the business potential of the tool.

Corporate Ambivalence and the Tipping Point

Which raises an obvious question: why? There’s plenty of expertise in the marketplace (and many companies probably have more expertise inside their own walls than they know how to tap). Not only that, but the tools themselves are getting far more sophisticated. Witness the recent New York Times story on Sentiment Analysis, a technology that seeks to mine the Web and social networks for valuable indications about the consumer’s emotional state. Then there’s Predictive Markets, which function like stock markets and are designed to help users do a better job of predicting the behavior in various systems.

A recent report from Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law sheds some light on the issues surrounding social media adoption, and in doing so perhaps provides even broader insight on electronic media diffusion generally. According to the report:

…confidence exists in social networking as viable communication outreach, but so do worries about the potential liabilities. Concerns regarding social media use were acknowledged by some eight in 10 businesses participating in a recent national study undertaken by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law. Fifty-one percent of senior management, marketing and human resources executives fear social media could be detrimental to employee productivity, while almost half (49%) assert that using social media could damage company reputation.

Other concerns include “confidentiality or security issues (40%)” and “simply not knowing enough about it (51%).” Despite these reservations,

• 81% believe social media can enhance relationships with customers/clients
• 81% agree it can build brand reputation
• 69% feel such networking can be valuable in recruitment
• 64% see it as a customer service tool
• 46% think it can be used to enhance employee morale

To my point earlier about new media not being integrated into the business’s strategic planning, the study notes that:

• “…only one in 10 executives say they have staff who spend more than 50 percent of their time on such efforts – perhaps somewhat surprising given that half of the organizations surveyed employ over 1,000 people.”
• “…only 13 percent have included social media in their organizations’ crisis communications plans.”
• “Only one in three businesses surveyed has a policy in place to govern social media use, and only 10 percent said they have conducted relevant employee training.”

Want more ambivalence? “40 percent of companies technically block their employees from accessing social media while at work. At the same time, 26% of companies use social media to further corporate objectives and 70% said they plan to increase the use of these new opportunities.”

At this point it seems clear that while businesses are generally intrigued by the potential, fear and uncertainty are still winning the war.

My comments on the tipping point above refer mainly to the transition from one type of dysfunction to another. However, with each passing day we inch a little closer to a moment where organizations are finally capable of a mature evaluation of new research, marketing and communication tools. In this innovation-savvy near future, emerging technologies and practices will be quickly assessed and implemented in accordance with the company’s strategic goals. How will we know when this moment is approaching? The clue lies in this critically important observation:

Much of senior management’s direct experience with social media appears to be reactive versus proactive, an interesting fact given the confidence they express in these new mediums. The majority (72%) of executives say that they, personally, visit social media sites at least weekly to read what customers may be saying about their company (52%), and to routinely monitor a competitors’ use of social networking (47%). One in three search social media sites to see what their employees are sharing (36%); or check the background of a prospective employee (25%). (Emphasis added.)

There it is: reactive vs. proactive. Social media remains something to keep an eye on, but these executives have not yet reached a point where they’re comfortable integrating it into their overall plan for addressing the marketplace.

Once upon a time there was probably a period where business leaders kept a wary eye on that newfangled printing press, for the time being choosing to rely on their tried-and-true army of scribes for important publishing tasks. Perhaps in the late 19th Century there were companies that eschewed the telephone, instead building their communications practices and policies around the established telegraph. And perhaps I’m being unduly snarky. But the point is that we’re clearly in the general vicinity of a tipping point, and to some of us the cautious behavior of many corporate leaders seems a little like having a grandmother who’s afraid to try programming a digital alarm clock.

Strategy to Execution: Bridging the Gulf

A big part of the lag we’re experiencing between innovation and implementation (and strategic integration) derives from the insane pace of technological advance over the past few years. If we consider that state of marketing and communication in, say, 1970, things were much as they had been in 1960 and 1950 and so on. Sure, there had been incremental advances in things like publishing technology, but a senior exec, 30 years removed from his first job in the trenches (and senior execs were pretty much all “hims” at that point), could sit in the C suite and consider strategy and tactical approaches from a position of knowledge. The IBM Selectric was a big step up from the old manual typewriter that he used right out of college, but it was still a typewriter, and if you set it on the desk in front of him he could quickly figure it out.

Then, the world didn’t change appreciably over the span of 20 years. Now, though… Imagine if you’d put that same exec in suspended animation in 1989 and you thawed him out today. Unless he were just naturally comfortable with technology that he’d never seen, you might as well have propelled him a hundred years into the future. The basic tech of today’s workplace would be massively confusing, and this is before you ever asked him about developing a social media policy.

There is significant social media know-how in the company, however. Probably every employee under the age of 50 has a Facebook page, a Twitter account and/or a LinkedIn profile. Many of them read blogs and a good number of them (especially the ones with children over the age of 10) text. Most have visited YouTube. Most have consulted various online forums when considering purchases. The younger employees live and breathe social media, and in that particular segment of the population lies a huge amount of knowledge about how new media work.

However, since they’re younger, they lack the kind of broad experience needed to run organizations. Precocious or not, very few 20-somethings are ready for the C suite.

The problem, then, is that the company has seasoned senior-level strategic expertise and it has vast knowledge about social media. And never the twain shall meet. These two things, which need to be fused if a business is to develop a truly effective new media footing, lie at opposite ends of the corporate spectrum.

The solution: these organizations must develop bridge mechanisms. The most logical source lies in between, with the middle-level directors and managers who routinely touch both senior leadership and the front lines. They likely have a good measure of first-hand new media experience, and many of them are strategically capable. (Some are tracking toward C-level positions, in fact.) And given the generational character of the average company (if we might over-generalize for a moment), we’re probably talking about a cohort that brings a healthy entrepreneurial bent to their work. They’re comfortable trying new things, they’re comfortable with innovation, and most importantly, they’re accustomed to dealing with leaders who don’t quite get what they’re up to half the time.

In an environment like this, a senior leadership that’s willing to embrace new media marketing and communication tools can vest this junior leadership/middle management layer with the resources and stroke necessary to fully integrate emerging tech and best practices into how the company does business.

There will come a time – maybe soon – when emerging marketing and communications tools will be treated the same way that conventional advertising and PR are treated today. First, though, leadership must embrace the potential and empower those in their organizations who are positioned to drive success. Once businesses accept that this is about when, not if, social media strategy becomes an imperative, not an option.

Further, during that decade, the newspaper industry has purposely deteriorated its product in a vain attempt to chase the last dram of declining advertising revenue. To do this, it has cut costs in the two principal areas it can — paper and people. Physically, newspapers have shrunk in height, width and number of pages, reducing the amount of newsprint required. In 1990 America’s daily newspapers had 56,900 staffers; 5,900 journalists lost their jobs in 2008; and thousands more have been whacked this year. And it’s the expensive high end of the experience spectrum that the industry has callously discarded. So profit levels remained tolerable to shareholders, but only because of decreased costs — not increased revenue.

And the titans of the industry now say they’re going to charge for a product produced by fewer people with less experience that’s led to far more editing errors and one-source stories that reveal much in their shallowness about the quality of the product being sold? Good luck with leading the paid content charge, Rupert.

Now, the claim that the news product has been disfigured by fiscal folly is admittedly a swipe with a broad brush. But there was a time when readers of many, if not most, newspapers in the United States could point to more than one story in their local paper that exhibited the characteristics of first-rate reporting and writing. These would be stories that provided context, background and meaning beyond the mere reporting of “what happened.” These would be stories fleshed out with color, tone and detail. These would be stories grounded in substance wrought by vigorous reporting, rather than inexpertly daubed with cloying style. These would be stories that a reader would remember — stories by an experienced, competent journalist whose byline a reader would remember and look for in the future.

That’s not true any more. And readers know it. They know when they’re being poorly served. They know when the product loses value yet the newsstand and subscription prices rise. And the prime demographic the industry wishes to reach (because they’ve got discretionary income to spend) has come to know another truth promulgated foolishly by the industry: News is free. Newspapers may place their product behind a pay wall — but that’s no guarantee that readers who have come of advertiser-sought age during the Era of All Media Are Free will actually buy the product.

I don’t know how this seller-vs.-buyer drama is going to play out, but the first act will come soon. I expect larger metro papers, now free online, to institute partial pay walls within a year. Perhaps a consortium of papers, as envisioned by Steven Brill’s Journalism Online, will institute some sort of online subscription or pay-per-story scheme (which might qualify as price-fixing?). I’d bet newspapers have already done readership surveys asking would you pay and how much would you pay. (Wouldn’t you love to see those survey results?) Heck, is this even a well-thought-out business model? Or is it a new biz model, same as the old biz model?

The industry will spend huge sums on Web platforms and promotion. It will spend oodles of dough on technologically particularizing its pay walls. It will spend rafts of money on promoting the advantages of its new superb online news subscription systems.

But how much will it spend on improving its product?

The last decade suggests an answer: Nada.

Good luck with this Brave New Pay Wall World, Rupert.

The Post knows better, Mr. Alexander writes:

The Post has strict rules on the use of anonymous sources. They’re spelled out in detail — more than 3,000 words — in its internal stylebook. But some of those lofty standards are routinely ignored. Others are unevenly applied.

Anonymous sources have their place in news gathering. Whistleblowers who make charges of malfeasance against governments or corporations need protection against reprisal. Victims of sexual assault similarly have been granted anonymity to protect against reprisal or demonizing. Sources in crucial national security stories may need protection. Sometimes, the grant of anonymity is the only way to obtain information that will serve the public interest.

“Anonymous sources are critical to newsgathering — and to informing readers,” writes Mr. Anderson. “Without a guarantee of confidentiality, many sources wouldn’t share sensitive information on corruption or misconduct.”

But far too many journalists and their editors use anonymous sources routinely without more critical assessment of the consequences. So should such journalists be surprised at the erosion of their credibility?

You know anonymice when you see them:

• said one of the FBI agents involved with the case who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.
• said a senior Pentagon official, who requested anonymity when discussing internal decision-making.
• said one Democratic strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Obama campaign has banned any comments on the selection process.
• The advisers—who, along with the diplomatic official, spoke on condition of anonymity—
• a former Countrywide executive said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized to discuss the program.
• said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
• The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue
• said a member of local union bargaining team, who insisted on anonymity because union officials said they would not negotiate in the news media.
• according to two sources close to the negotiations.

These anonymice were published last year in The New York Times, the Post, the Los Angeles Times or the Wall Street Journal. Slate’s Jack Shafer and intern Kara Hadge collected them and placed them in a database — complete with a five-point ranking system of the merit of the mice. (Oh, it’s fun. Go read more of these.)

Some anonymice have merit. Here’s one of Mr. Shafer’s examples from the Post:

Several EPA officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that throughout the process, White House officials instructed the agency to change their calculations with the aim of reducing the “social cost of carbon,” a regulatory term that reflects the economic burdens stemming from greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Shafer rates this as creditable: “Don’t you love it when bureaucracies battle one another? This anonymouse is worth the bother.” His sarcasm aside, EPA officials needed protection from a White House that undercut and misrepresented the work of EPA scientists, adversely affecting public policy.

Mr. Shafer says, “Often a journalist has no alternative to attributing his information to an anonymouse when reporting, say, a criminal investigation or from a war zone. Likewise, many national-security stories cannot be reported without citing unnamed sources. The NSA story, the CIA prison story, and the torture story could not have been undertaken without anonymous sources.”

As an example of appropriate use of anonymice, he cites the Dana Priest rules. (Ms. Priest is a national-security reporter for the Post.) The best reporters, Mr. Shafer argues, dig for detail from anonymice:

They’re disciplined about their use of anonymous sources, and give more credence to whistleblowers than blowhards. They present multiple sources, increasing the likelihood that the information is accurate. They serve their readers, not their sources’ agendas. And the information they publish is remarkably specific—proving dates, locations, events, circumstances, participants, quantities, and the like … [emphasis added]

Clark Hoyt, the Times‘ public editor, writes that the newspaper’s policy says anonymice should be “a last resort when the story is of compelling public interest and the information is not available any other way.” [emphasis added]

True, many stories of public interest relating to crime and national security may need anonymice. Anonymous sources led to reporting by Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada on the BALCO steroids scandal for the San Francisco Chronicle. (Then again, some of the sources proved a tad shady, raising some old questions about anonymice.)

The Post and most large news organizations have policies regarding use of anonymous sources. But are they properly adhered to?

The Times‘ Mr. Hoyt writes that the newspaper’s policy forbids some uses— but that doesn’t prevent them from appearing in the newspaper:

The policy says the newspaper will not allow personal or partisan attacks from behind a mask of anonymity. Yet an anonymous Yankees official could trash Alex Rodriguez (“His legacy, now, is gone”), and an anonymous Jets official could say that the team did not want to sign Terrell Owens because he would have poisoned it and torn up the locker room. A competitor of an Internet start-up was allowed to slam its business model without his name being attached to his belittling quotes. [emphasis added]

Anonymous sources, used properly and improperly, are here to stay. And it’s not just traditional media anymore. Blogs have become notorious for abuse of anonymity. So have other social media.

So what do readers (and viewers; TV does it, too) do when confronted by an anonymous source in a news story — or blog post? Just ask one question.

Cui bono? Who benefits from the anonymity?

Slate’s Mr. Shafer includes that information in his database. If the perceived benefit is not for the reader, then the anonymouse is, well, probably bogus. Over the past few years, I think the benefit of anonymice has shifted even further to the source. Anonymice float trial balloons on policy. They goad opponents behind anonymity. They belittle, undercut and lie about someone or something, all to the anonymouse’s advantage. The advantage increasingly goes to the source because reporters and editors allow it.

So why do reporters continue to use such cunning, deceitful anonymice? Two reasons.

First, overwork. There are simply fewer reporters these days. The revenue crisis in the newspaper industry has seen thousands of reporters laid off or bought out, especially those with years, even decades, of experience. The talent pool is shallower. Fewer reporters with lesser experience feel the pressure to do more stories — stretching their professionalism, perhaps, too far.

Second, preservation of access. Reporters working beats may have to use an anonymouse against their better judgment — to make sure the anonymouse doesn’t shut them out of future stories.

Sometimes, the public interest is well served by use of anonymous sources. But, as two reader representatives of major newspapers write, anonymice have become more a vice than a virtue. Readers are the losers in this framing game.

You may have noticed Facebook’s new feature that allows everything from big companies to lowly blogs like us to reserve facebook.com/YOURNAMEHERE, and thanks to Jennifer Angliss, who manages our Facebook account for us, you can now visit us and become a fan at facebook.com/scholarsandrogues. Thanks, Jen.

In addition, you may have noticed that little Tweet widget at the top of the right column, which means that you can also follow us on Twitter, if you like. We’re @scholars_rogues.

CNN’s John Roberts, co-host of the cable news network’s American Morning program, continues to decide what the appropriate spin is for a story in his intros to interviews. He did it earlier this week with correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who stuck to facts instead.

This morning, Mr. Roberts did it again while introducing Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. Said Mr. Roberts:

Joining us now is New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. His article, “Tear Down This Cyber Wall” focuses on Iran and the technology war of information.

So many people are saying that this could be the very first Internet revolution. How much of a part do you think the Internet is playing in what’s going on inside Iran versus what we’re learning about what’s going on? [emphasis added]

Mr. Roberts has a penchant for advancing a premise based on the apparent testimony of a teeming slew of unidentified sources. He told Mr. Kristof: “So many people are saying that this …” Earlier this week, he used similar language while introducing Ms. Amanpour: “some people might say …” Well, says who? Who are these people to whom Mr. Roberts refers?

Mr. Kristof politely rejected Mr. Roberts’ conjecture with a tad more insight:

I wouldn’t call it an Internet revolution. I mean, fundamentally, people are protesting because they’re upset about the government, and that’s been happening for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Mr. Kristof explained, from his point of view, the role of the Internet during Iranian unrest without labeling that role as a “revolution.”

Television news, as we know, places a premium on brevity. (How ironic for a 24-hour cable news operation, eh?) Anchors and reporters need to summarize (in what print journalists might call a “nut” or background graf) salient information prior to a video report or interview.

Mr. Roberts could have done that in the same amount of time. Rather than offering an opinion masked as a leading question for his witness, he could have not said “So many people are saying that this” and just asked:

Mr. Kristof, would you tell our viewers your perceptions of the use of the Internet during the unrest in Iran?

Instead, he used a meme — Internet revolution — that places more emphasis and focus on the Internet itself rather than the actual unrest and violence it has transmitted.

Broadcast anchors used to know the difference between a fair summation of necessary background and a hurriedly contrived spin from the anchor’s point of view. (Or, perhaps, the producer’s. I do not know if Mr. Roberts’ intros are scripted by someone else.)

Then again, the ratings have not been kind to CNN in the first quarter of 2009. Perhaps that explains the increased use of conjecture by one of CNN’s principal on-air anchors.

Despite pie-in-the-sky economic theory, competitively priced, quality products do not always trump those of lesser quality in the marketplace. A variation of Sony’s Beta format video was used for decades by professionals because of its superiority to the VHS format, but this didn’t stop VHS from becoming the dominant consumer format. McDonald’s does not make food that is cheaper, more nutritious, or even better tasting than a good sandwich from a local deli, but this hasn’t stopped the burgermeister from selling untold billions of its artery-clogging offerings. The US health care system gets arguably fewer positive results per dollar spent than any other health care system in the world, but there are US consumers who will defend it as being “the best” right up to their untimely deaths.

The truth is that marketing techniques often trump product value when determining marketplace winners and losers. The growth of advertising in the late 19^th century taught marketers that they could make profitable products that had no value whatsoever. These included electrical trusses, waistbands, and other devices to improve health, universal medicines that were mostly alcohol mixed with God-knows-what, and “arctic” boots guaranteed to produce frostbitten toes for the clueless Yukon prospector. Breakthroughs in psychology in the 20^th century gave marketers powerful new tools for their arsenals. For instance, they learned that products could be sold while ignoring their real attributes by attaching them to an image. Cigarettes, a product that tastes pretty much like you would expect burning leaves to taste, could make you so sexy and alluring that people would ignore your tobacco reek. Rocks could be packaged and sold as pets. A coonskin cap could make you Davy Crockett, and becoming a fake blonde would make you irresistible to men, while having little or no effect on your intelligence (or that’s the claim, anyway).

In one sense, nothing has changed much. A brightly colored, but underpowered, computer can be sold because it’s been carefully linked to “cool,” or a lousy video game can fly off shelves because it’s based on a popular movie. There are signs, though, that the days of sizzle counting for more than steak are coming to an end, and the best current example of this may be the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 camera, a product that most traditional marketing departments would consider very difficult to sell, but that is selling so well, in fact, that it is going for up to 50% over suggested retail price at those few outlets that can manage to keep it in stock. The reason the LX3 is selling so well is that it is a superior camera for its class. The marketing issue is that it does not appear to be superior, and therein we have both the mystery and the hope for the quality of future products.

Most of us have walked through consumer electronics stores and seen the compact camera displays. Generally, there is at least one long row of small cameras, each having a little card next to it with the brand name, model name and number, price, and a few sales points. Most common among these sales points is the number of megapixels a camera’s sensor possesses. There was a time, indeed, when the number of megapixels on a sensor was a pretty fair indication of a camera’s resolution, which is one of the key factors of image quality. Early compact electronic cameras had barely enough resolution to make a decent 3×5 print, so there was a race to pack ever more pixels onto small chips to improve images.

It was true then (and now) that a three megapixel camera will almost always outperform a one megapixel one, and a six megapixel camera will make a much sharper image than a camera with only three. But once one gets above six megapixels, the issue becomes much more complex. Understanding why is a bit technical, and it’s the very complexity of the issue that has kept camera marketers trumpeting ever more megapixels — while tolerating ever-decreasing image quality at most settings — to sell their products. Simply put, consumers have come to equate megapixels with higher image quality even though it is not true, so marketers have forced camera manufacturers into degrading image quality to sell to badly informed camera buyers. Consumers also seem to like large range zooms of almost telescopic power, not realizing that these relatively slow lenses also work to degrade image quality. The LX3 bucks this trend and, contrary to expectations, consumers have rewarded it for doing so.

Some Technical Notes

Note: I’m going to go into a bit of a technical explanation here, and will try to make it as painless as possible. Those who would prefer to skip the technical part are welcome to read down below this marked section for my conclusions.

The race for ever-more megapixels has an enormous quality drawback. By their nature, electronic components produce fields that interfere with other electronic components. Pack too many pixel-sized sensors on a tiny chip, and this interference manifests itself as noise in the final image. The noise is caused when a number of pixels produce colors (often white) that are at odds with the colors they should produce. The result is a sort of static that is roughly like the grain one can see on high-speed films.

At their lowest sensitivities, when there is the least current or “gain” in the electronic sensor, small chips with very high megapixel counts can perform quite well. When the sensitivity is turned up to account for low light, however, or to allow greater depth of field by closing the aperture or faster shutter speeds to freeze motion or avoid camera shake, the noise increases. Camera-makers have fought this problem with software that identifies the noisy pixels and guesses at the correct color replacement. This software inevitably blurs the image until, in some cases, it appears to be almost a watercolor. As a result, camera manufacturers have tried to set their software to allow some noise in order to maintain sharpness. The end result is that small-sensor, compact cameras tend to produce poor image quality and/or unacceptable noise at anything above the film equivalent of ISO 400. For some cameras, even ISO 400 produces too much noise for acceptable images.

Compounding this problem is the race toward ever-more-powerful zoom lenses for these little cameras. Zoom lenses tend to be long lenses, and long lenses are a bit like looking down a cardboard tube – they are “slow” because they simply admit less light than larger, less zoomy lenses. So, a camera with a sensor and software that tend to produce poor images in low light is often equipped with a lens that lets in a half to a quarter of the light allowed by cameras with less-aggressive zooms, meaning that it will produce many, many more inferior, noisy images than the “faster” lens-equipped camera.

The obvious technical solution is to build compact cameras with larger sensors and/or fewer megapixels than is currently possible, and equip them with large, fast, wide-angle lenses of limited zoom range. All other things being equal, cameras built this way would produce superior images in more lighting conditions than cameras equipped with small, megapixel-packed sensors and slow, long-zoom lenses. They would also allow higher shutter speeds and greater control over depth of field in lower-light conditions, giving both more creative control and less possibility of hand-held camera shake.

The obvious marketing solution is to build cameras with ever more megapixels packed onto a small chip, more aggressive software to gloss over the noise, and longer and slower lenses to wow consumers with telescopic range most of them will seldom use, because these things are supposed to be what consumers want and will buy.

Can Internet Product Reviews Overcome Marketing Hype?

The LX3 uses a larger-than-normal sensor for a compact camera, limiting it to only 10.1 megapixels. It also uses a fast, 2.0 to 2.8 zoom with a rather limited 35mm camera equivalent range of 24mm to 60mm. It is also built around a high-quality, Leica lens with minimal barrel distortion for a lens this wide and this small. It also has a retro, rangefinder look and a manually removed lens cap that is dictated by its fast lens and larger-than-average sensor. None of these attributes is supposed to make buyers of the average consumer. So, why is the LX3 flying off shelves for nearly $700 in some places, when its suggested retail price is around $500?

I wish I knew for sure, but I suspect, and hope, that we are witnessing the power of the Internet. Key “Panasonic LX3 review” into google.com, and you’ll get a list of glowing reviews. Or just go here for a thorough review or here for an abbreviated review comparing the LX3 to its competition.

If one tracks the pricing history of the LX3, it’s clear that the initial pricing curve was what one would expect; discounting to around 80% ($400) of its suggested retail price within a few weeks of its introduction. Within a few months, however, large outlets such as Dell, B&H Camera, and other on-line camera stores were sold out, and prices soared. When I phoned around my metropolitan area for a camera store with the LX3 in stock, I couldn’t find a single one. They all wished they had them because they could sell as many as they could stock, but they’re sold out and had no idea when they’ll receive a new shipment.

What could explain the LX3’s phenomenal sales performance other than the power of Internet reviews? Based on its design, it appears that they were trying to produce a camera compact enough and with a high-enough quality image to appeal to professionals and serious amateurs who don’t want to haul around 30 pounds of camera equipment and a tripod everywhere they go. In other words, the camera is meant to appeal to experts or semi-experrts – not the average consumer. Panasonic must have expected the product to have limited appeal in a high-end compact market being threatened by a price drop in digital single-lens-reflex (DSLR) cameras. Instead, they can’t make enough LX3s to meet the demand.

Have we entered the beginning of an age when information, in the form of product reviews, will be so available to the masses that consumers will start to make better quality buying decisions? Will this trend force manufacturers to actually make better products instead of gimmicky devices that sell by fooling consumers? Will the promotion-oriented marketers lose power and influence to product development departments?

We can only hope.

Here are some images taken with the LX3 the day after delivery:

Editor’s Note: Space limitations prevent us from displaying these images at full size and resolution.

You will want to know what happened. You may not immediately want to know what someone else thinks or feels about what happened. That may come later. You first want someone to tell you clearly and with minimal subjectivity what happened with no opinion or impression attached.

You live in a second-hand world. You need someone to observe the world first-hand when you cannot. Who will you trust to faithfully do that for you?

Sociologist C. Wright Mills described this half a century ago in the book The Politics of Truth:

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced, and their own experience is always indirect.

The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others. Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid facts. …

[I]n their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and never shall meet.

Yet for every man these images — provided by strangers and dead men — are the very basis of his life as a human being.

Your information needs may be summed up by three questions: How does the world work? Why does it work that way? What will be the impact on me?

The answers reflect the raw data of empirical observation and a neutral explanation of phenomena eventually followed by analyses laced with points of view. Those “crowds of witnesses” offer that information in many forms — books, movies, art, advertising, television, music, and the various means by which journalism and pseudo-journalism are distributed.

You first need to know what happened. But doesn’t it increasingly seem that your principal sources are also those who didn’t witness the event first-hand either? Doesn’t it seem as if your first notice of what happened comes from a second-hand source who is not a witness at all? Is that source someone using the pretense of a witness, someone who imbues that initial report with analysis laced with a point of view, pre-coloring and presaging your first impression? Which do you need first — a subjective point of view or one as objective as possible?

Reflect on your information needs. (Not your wants — that’s a different post.) What do you need to know? Why do you need to know it? Who will credibly tell you?

Mills’ analysis of understanding the human condition anticipates the digital world you live in. Your second-hand world consists of, in Mills’ words, “stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations.” From what source do you not receive pre-digested reports?

If you want information without a point of view shaping it, perhaps you need Anne. She is a Fair Witness in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Her employer, Jubal Harshaw, is asked to demonstrate her capabilities. Harshaw points to a building and asks Anne its color. Her reply: “White on this side.” In Heinlein’s fictional world, a Fair Witness has total recall, is fully impartial, and makes no intuitive or analytical leaps beyond what she can witness (such as assuming the color on the side of the building she cannot see).

A Fair Witness is the antithesis of a Spin Doctor. Anne, the Fair Witness, is a source of unfiltered fact. You are left to divine the meaning of that fact in a context uniquely yours.

In the midst of this high-noise, low-signal digital information age one S&R writer called “Shoutworld,” no Fair Witness appears to exist. Traditionally “objective” sources of information increasingly have colorized what happened through an ideological, self-centered, or selfish lens. The numbers of those sources who minimize the predigestion of what happened declines daily.

You eventually may find that subjective witness reports are necessary to help you ascertain context, importance, and meaning. On what basis, however, do you trust their authors?

If all your information sources tell you what it means before telling you what happened, how certain are you of what, indeed, did happen?

“Tiananmen” means “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Ironic, then, that most Americans know it, if at all, as a scene of violence and bloodshed.

photo by Jeff Widener, A.P.

June 4 marks the 20th anniversary of the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on protestors who’d gathered in Tiananmen Square. The incident made headlines across the world, and the image of a lone protestor blocking a line of tanks proved especially powerful.

The protesters had camped out in the square since the April death of a pro-reform Communist Party official, Hu Yaobang. By June 4, after a great deal of international attention that embarrassed the Chinese government, tanks and troops rolled in and started cracking skulls.

Western news outlets reported yesterday and today (June 3 and 4) that no media would be allowed near Tiananmen Square on June 4th. Soldiers and uniformed and plainclothes police stood at attention everywhere in the square this morning, and visitors were being searched.

But visitors to Tiananmen Square are always searched. I was searched when my group first visited the square on Tuesday, May 26. I was searched again when I went there on my own last Sunday. The searches were similar to the same thing I went through at the airport: carry-on bags and metal items got sent through an X-ray machine, and I had to pass through a metal detector. We were allowed to keep our cameras with us.

Standing in Tiananmen Square for the first time really drove home how significant the crackdown was which the Chinese government refers to as “The June Fourth Incident”).

First of all, it’s impossible to appreciate how wide and vast Tiananmen Square is. It’s the largest public square in the world, even beating out the public courtyard at the Vatican. It can hold a million people—just as it was doing by June 3, 1989.

China’s Great Hall of the People, opposite Tiananmen Square

The square sits opposite the Great Hall of the People, roughly China’s equivalent of our Capitol Building. In essence, that made the protests a direct slap in the face of the Communist Party and central Chinese government even though the demonstrations were peaceful.

In the resulting military action, thousands were injured. The number of killed various from 241 (the Chinese government’s official number) and 2,600 (an unofficial number once given by the Red Cross).

While I certainly don’t condone the government’s decision to clear the square, I can understand it a little better than I once did. China is not, nor has it ever really been, ruled on principles anywhere close to ours. Authoritarian rule has always been the way there—for five thousand years. We forget how old and ingrained that is.

On Sunday, as I strolled the square, I saw a few extra plainclothes police near Mao’s Tomb. Nearby and just out of direct sight, soldiers were drilling in a closed-off portion of the square. I have no idea if that’s normal or not; it’s just what I saw and heard on Sunday.

I’ve also heard that the government was blocking internet access and it was blacking out CNN. It was trying very hard to be sure that no one remembered the events of June 4, 1989.

I didn’t register as a journalist before I went to China, so my dispatches have been under the radar screen I suppose. But from my own perspective, I’ve not had any trouble blogging since I got to Beijing (although I think some of my e-mail was reviewed or filtered or something). I couldn’t access YouTube, which I only tried to access because I’d heard from my students that it was off-limits. They were right. On Tuesday, students suddenly couldn’t access hotmail, either.

I actually had more trouble in Shanghai than in Beijing. In Shanghai, I couldn’t log on to LiveJournal, although I never had a problem logging into or posting at Scholars & Rogues (I suppose we at S&R need to start being even more subversive!).

In Tiananmen Square, looking south toward Mao’s Tomb

But I’ll be honest: I didn’t feel comfortable talking about Tiananmen Square in my dispatches other than to provide a description. In my post about Mao’s Tomb, I didn’t feel I could talk about just how oppressive Mao’s regime was. Maybe it was just my good manners because I didn’t want to run the risk of causing headaches for my host from the Beijing Institute of Technology—which is, of course, a government-run school.

Tiananmen is one of the “Three T’s and an F”: Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan, and the Falon Gong (a cult-like religious group that stirs up a great deal of political controversy). Those are the taboo subjects. The government actively discourages and represses coverage of those topics, although I was able to discuss the “Three T’s and the F” openly with tour guides and people I met.

The same day we visited Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall, for instance, the president of Taiwan was in town for talks on more open relations. The few Chinese citizens I spoke to about Taiwan expressed delight that relations between the mainland and the island had thawed considerably over the past year or so.

My students, colleagues, and I had a chance
encounter with a Tibetan monk (pictured center).

That same day, our group also had a chance encounter with a Tibetan monk near the gates of the Forbidden City, just a stone’s throw away from Tiananmen. The students thought he looked cool and all wanted their photo taken with him, but I’m not sure if they realized what a rare encounter or a big deal it was. “Imagine what he must feel like,” one colleague said. “People around here must be looking at him like he’s some kind of trouble-maker.”

It’s too bad the government frowns on discussion of those controversial topics because the rest of the world doesn’t get the full story. Any P.R. person knows it to be true: Tell as much of the truth as you can because otherwise people will think you have something to hide, and their assumptions will usually be far worse than the actual situation.

I’m no expert on Tibet, for instance, but talking to ordinary Chinese folks—who are, far and away, an apolitical bunch—they see the Tibet issue much differently than Westerners do. A Chinese princess married the Tibetan emperor in 640 A.D. to unite the kingdoms, and in Chinese minds, they’ve been one kingdom since and that’s that. Their sense of history comes not from the Communist Party but from a long oral tradition, so they aren’t just spouting party propaganda.

The Chinese people aren’t exposed to the Dali Lama’s P.R. efforts—and we are. I emphasize that because we forget, in the end, that the Dali Lama is conducting a P.R. campaign. (I don’t mean to oversimplify, although I am, because I know there’s a lot more to the Tibet situation than I’ve even broached here—but that’s part of my point: there’s a lot more to the Tibet situation than we even realize.)

The silver lining is that the Chinese people find ways to talk about these things anyway. As CNN correspondent Jaime FlorCruz told us, technology provides ways around the government controls. As restrictive as the Chinese government can be with its censorship, it can only just keep up with the internet—it can’t control it. FlorCruz’s kids, for instance, can bring up YouTube on a whim by easily circumventing government blocks.

That trend will only continue as the number of online users grows (the online population in China already exceeds the entire population of the U.S.). The Chinese themselves call for more information.

“The internet is one of the most revolutionizing phenomena in China,” FlorCruz said. “The Chinese government can join it, ride it, sort of control it, but they cannot stop it or shut it down.”

My colleague told The News that his class had scheduled a media critic from Scholars and Rogues as a guest. He invited The News to send a representative to join in as a co-guest. It would have been a wonderful opportunity for The News — and me — to talk about western New York’s largest newspaper in the context of the larger turmoil surrounding the industry. But The News yanked the microphone, er, the keyboard, out of my hands.

The News was offered a guest and a topic in its own online platform that it could use to talk about its own efforts to meet the challenges of the current industry climate. It could respond directly to readers online — which is precisely what the newspaper industry has to do to survive. The appearance of a well-spoken representative (and me) in its own venue would have been its public relations folks’ wet dream.

But The News declined the offer. And nixed the topic —and me. I don’t know why; I didn’t ask my colleague. The program belongs to The News; it can do what it damn well pleases.

But it missed an opportunity to speak directly to the online audience and answer this question: “How is the newspaper going to ensure that it can continue to meet the needs of its readers?”

That The News not only refused to talk about this but also waved the students away from the entire topic depicts the newspaper as fearing circumstances in which it might face criticism. Why wouldn’t it want to let its readers know how it was coping with the industry crisis? Why would it want to pretend like nothing’s amiss? Why doesn’t it want the lens of public scrutiny turned on itself?

It seems the paper is behaving in exactly the way that, if it was a public official, the paper itself would crucify him or her for. If a newspaper’s representative was shut out of a public forum by someone else, it would scream “foul” in a too-long editorial about freedom of the press, etc.

Perhaps The News was concerned about what I might say to its online audience.

Too bad. I would have said this:

I’m proud of how The News has reacted to declining circulation and revenue. Its Internet operation is done well. It has resisted pulling reporter Jerry Zremski from his Washington, D.C., post, allowing News readers unique insights into politics with a western New York context. I like how The News continues to support exceptional, veteran reporters like Bob McCarthy, Dan Herbeck and Lou Michel. I like how it has freed Steve Watson to report more on communications and the Internet.

The News has been a better newspaper in the past. But it remains, still, a good one. I’m willing to pay 75 cents for a newsstand copy before heading off for a diner breakfast.

And today, The News’ online audience will not read that in an online chat. They’ll have to come here, to Scholars and Rogues, to read it.

But this week, it gave its product to me for free. I would have gladly paid up to 5 cents to read just one of its stories. But the JS didn’t charge me. What kind of business model allows me to consume a product for free?

I learned of the story through an e-mailed version of Romenesko, the legendary (or infamous, depending on your POV), media news page at Poynter. org, the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

The Poynter e-mail contained this tease: “Wisconsin university football coach bans student reporters (http://www.jsonline.com/business/43539347.html).” I clicked on the link and —ta da — there it was, a story written by JS reporter Don Walker. Free. Didn’t have to pay a penny. And I would have. Gladly.

I know this isn’t a rare phenomenon. I suspect you’ve read news for free online, too. Bet you kinda expect it to be free, even demand that it be free. Perhaps you think it’s some kind of birthright. But in the long run, if you do not pay for the product of professional journalists, you will lose one of your best defenses against secrecy, corruption, and tyranny.

Those who wish to keep information from you, those who demand or offer kickbacks and bribes to get what they want, those who wish to secretly manipulate the levers of power unfairly for selfish financial advantage, those who wish to attain and maintain power over you … they’re winning. They’re winning because fewer and fewer journalists are keeping an eye on them, holding them accountable for their words and actions. Remember, that’s the deal the Founders gave the press: Hold government accountable, and we’ll protect you from government intervention.

If you don’t pay for the product produced by professional journalists who cover the “eat-your-spinach” stories bloggers don’t, won’t, or can’t, then don’t complain if the powerful and influential take advantage of the lack of scrutiny formerly provided by the 5,900 journalists who lost their jobs last year.

In 1990 America’s daily newspapers had 56,900 staffers, very close to the historical high, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Newspapers were cash cows for investors, with profits north of 20 percent. In 2000, the population of journalists at dailies was still high — 56,400. Then the Internet came, folks say, and stole all the advertising revenue. Profit margins have been halved — as revenue has dropped precipitously. (Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Apparently, bad management and arrogance had much to do with the decline of circulation, and hence the declining advertising revenue, of daily newspapers. In effect, corporate newspaper management shot itself in the foot as it bad-mouthed the Internet as an irrelevant upstart.)

To attempt to maintain the profitability of that now-highly suspect business model, newspaper managements whacked jobs — the very jobs that produce the product those executives presumably want to sell. This has to be among the dumbest responses to economic stress in corporate history.

At the end of 2008, only 46,700 journalists were left at the America’s daily newspapers. 2009 is off to a rough beginning: The Web site Paper Cuts reports that about 8,500 newspaper staffers (including journalists) have been laid off or bought out as of mid-April. (Paper Cuts is a Web site by Erica Smith, who has been tracking newspaper layoffs since 2007.) It is possible that by 2010, the number of daily print journalists will have been halved in only a decade.

Surely that’s not a positive development for the democratic health of the Republic.

Interestingly, the nation’s premier journalism graduate programs are seeing marked increases in applications: Columbia, up 38 percent; Stanford, 20 percent; and NYU, 6 percent. But these new students are not necessarily seeking to become journalists. Says Jim O’Brien, director of Northwestern University’s Medill Career Services office:

Corporate communications is a growth area in terms of opportunities for jobs for our MSJ grads. Both corporations and nonprofits who are interested in communications, where they had typically looked at an English major before, are now thinking that a journalism grad might have leg up on those candidates because of their training.

This is a two-pronged blow to “eat-your-spinach” news. First, newspapers are shedding the very people trained —and paid — to do that. Second, former journalists and others are seeking graduate journalism degrees to become corporate communicators.

That means fewer professionally trained and experienced journalists are digging for information corporations and governments wish to hide, and more smart people are being trained — and, eventually, paid handsomely — to do the hiding.

They’re winning. Democracy is losing. Please consider that next time you read a news story online — for free. It may be, in the long run, a very costly read.