Recovering Journalist

Bill Wyman Speaks Truth to Power

Millions of words have been spilled over the past couple of years about what's wrong in the news business (many of them on this blog). But if you want to read a few thousand words that explain the state of play with superb clarity and brutal frankness, check out Bill Wyman's just-posted two-part series exploring why the news business is in the mess it's in today. It's thoughtful and probing and justly critical of the people who lead (and work in) news organizations.

Among many other things, Wyman explains well why many of the more simplistic proposed fixes (charging for content, anyone? Anyone?) just aren't as simple (or effective) as they appear. And it includes some smart recommendations for what newspapers need to be doing, pronto—though it's probably too late. (Hint: Go local.)

Along with Clay Shirky's sterling essay a couple months ago on the state of the news business, Wyman's opus is one of the most essential pieces of writing about the current maelstrom. Go check it out. 

PS: Maybe the notoriety surrounding the series' publication will end once and for all the hilarious confusion between Wyman—the longtime arts and music journalist—and the former Rolling Stone who bears the same name (though not from birth). (Sorry, Bill, I couldn't resist!)

Prime Cuts

I've written before about the crazy phenomenon in which newspapers send waves of staffers to cover sports events or political conventions. This happens regardless of whether those staffers truly add much to readers' understanding of events that are being widely covered elsewhere (not to mention available on live TV or webcast). It seems kind of obvious, in these newsroom cost-cutting days, that this redundant, multi-layered coverage is a waste of resources. But that message seems to move slowly through the brains of old-line newspaper editors.

The lightbulb seems to have finally gone off at Tribune Co., the paradigm of cost-slashing, which is finally reining in its various papers' tendency to duplicate sports coverage. Apparently it dawned on Tribune's beleaguered leaders that the chain had 14 reporters, columnists and photogs at this year's Super Bowl, even though neither Super Bowl team came from a city where Tribune actually has a newspaper. Not a great use of resources. You have to wonder why it took them so long to figure this out, but good for them. 

In a similar vein, the Dayton Daily News recently put out to pasture its longtime baseball writer, Hal McCoy, rather than spending $250,000 a year to have him cover the Cincinnati Reds, who hardly lack for coverage from other, cheaper sources, including the AP. McCoy may be a Hall of Famer, but it's hard to understand why the Dayton paper needs to cover a pro sports team located 50 miles away rather than, say, using that $250,000 to double down on coverage of truly local sports. (Not that that's what the money saved will probably be used for, alas.)

These are the kinds of obvious—yet obviously difficult—decisions that newspapers are long overdue to make to try to get their costs in line with the huge drop in revenue over the past couple of years. A lot of newspaper cutbacks are quite painful, but these seem to be pretty straightforward. Still, they've been a long time coming. Maybe now papers can start in on other unnecessary—but ego-satisfying—positions like, say, film and TV critics, food writers or travel or health sections. In fatter, happier times, such luxuries could sort of be forgiven. But in today's environment, editors at metro dailies have got to put their resources into (local) journalism that readers can't get anywhere else. It's amazing that that's still not obvious.

Get It Right the First Time

Washington Post sports columnist Michael Wilbon said something in an online chat a few months ago that has stuck with me:

Since I'm just about to start a new project that some will call a "blog" ... I want to work with an editor just the way I have for 28 years...It's a new world we're moving into, a world I'm clearly not entirely comfortable with but excited about. 

Wilbon's a terrific columnist and writer, and I'm as excited as he is about his purported blog (which still hasn't launched). But there's an implication in that statement that's troubling: That he's worried that without the protection of an editor, the quality of his work will suffer. Shouldn't he be confident enough to stand on his own and produce first-rate work without help?

That question reoccurred recurred to me when I read New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt's scarifying dissection of chronically error-prone TV critic Alessandra Stanley's trainwreck of an appraisal of Walter Cronkite. By failing to check some of the most basic facts, and having several layers of the Times' vaunted editing apparently fall asleep on the job, Stanley managed to bungle everything from well-known historical dates to the nature of Cronkite's participation in D-Day—and set some sort of record for a Times correction in the process.

That's stunningly sloppy work, but it points to a broader issue: Have (some) reporters, consistently bailed out by their editors, gotten terminally lazy about the quality of their work? In a time of thinning newsrooms, with people fighting for their jobs, you have to wonder how somebody like Stanley (who at one point was assigned a personal copy editor!) still is employed by the Times over somebody who, say, actually knew when man walked on the moon. (A note to people who don't know how newspapers work: Contrary to common misconception, newspapers don't employ fact-checkers, as some magazines do. Reporters are directly responsible for the facts in their stories.)

There's is a bit of a journalism dirty secret at work here: Everybody who's worked as an editor knows that there are certain reporters whose copy needs to be carefully checked and/or essentially translated into English on a regular basis. I edited a reporter who had little or no concept of how to use commas; another who would submit long stories with gaps labeled "insert transitions here;" and a third who infamously spelled a type of citrus fruit as "greatfruit." And these were experienced reporters at major papers, not rookies at the Podunk Press.

I suppose that sort of editorial backstopping was an acceptable luxury when newsrooms were fat and happy, but in today's budget-conscious world, it's unacceptable. (At least a spellchecker would catch "greatfruit." I hope.) Reporters turning in work that's got factual problems or is laden with spelling errors, in hopes that the desk will cover for them, are like an autoworker who puts a car door on crooked and hopes that the quality-control folks further down the assembly line will correct the mistake. It's just wrong, and unprofessional. And as a smart editor I worked with once wondered out loud, you always have to worry a bit more about the factual skills of a reporter who's careless about things like spelling.

Blogs, chats and other new forms that expose writers' raw copy only highlight the problem. I've cringed reading some blogs by respected reporters who apparently can't take the time to be sure that words are spelled correctly or that their syntax isn't tortured. We all make mistakes, but the writer's goal should be perfection, the first time. It's not that hard to, at minimum, backread a post or story for errors before pressing "Send" or "Save." Have some pride in your work, for God's sake.

Journalism may be the rough draft of history, but that doesn't mean that rough draft should be rife with factual errors and misspellings. As in other industries, the standard for errors should be zero tolerance. And a consistently sloppy worker like Stanley should lose her job in favor of somebody who can produce something much closer to error-free work.