The Friday Spicy: Three Questions About This Week in Journalism that ONLY an Academic Will Ask
It’s week six of this ongoing but brief media critique of the questions that didn’t get asked by the people best empowered to ask them: those with regular gigs at news orgs with the huge platforms from which to scale their arguments.
This week: 1) How does The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s end of daily print disadvantage the poor? 2) Why won’t the LA Times look at home rather than outside for talent? 3) Why is gender bias in journalism sourcing just so bad?
1. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is ending daily newspaper distribution. Can everyone who wants it actually turn to digital news?
The answer is no, not everyone who wants the digital version can pay for it. In this country, the growing gap between rural and urban, rich and poor, and other vectors of inequality are growing in kind and cultural orientation. When access to news and information gets harder, the tradeoffs are huge. It’s not just that newspapers killing print have made a difficult decision that they can live on digital alone, but that the information ecosystem they have just let for their communities has cut may people out — the poor, the unwired, and the busy. This is particularly problematic in a place like Pittsburgh, where these divisions come to the center (as we saw in the last election).
Pittsburgh, home to two newspapers, is now home to two newspaper-like news organizations, one without Pittsburgh edition of its print newspaper (the Tribune-Review) as of 2016, and now, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is ending its daily circulation to move to two days a week. About 80,000 residents get that newspaper each day. What we don’t know is how many of those residents 1) don’t have broadband or regular wireless access and 2) wouldn’t otherwise see the PG unless they saw it in print. I’ve written in the past how the end of the Detroit Free Press’ daily circulation in 2008 reduced roughly 33% of its subscribers to not having access to its product because they didn’t have broadband. They could not just “go online” even though they were paying for a print product. They didn’t have broadband or wifi. The problem is worse in rural areas, too.
I’ve heard some grousing inside newsrooms by some business/tech staff that if people can’t pay for digital news or updated mobile phones, they’re not worth having in the mix anyway because they’re not attractive ad demographics. Seriously? Let’s not kid ourselves that local TV counts as a substitute, either. Local TV is entertaining and really violent, great for weather, traffic, and breaking news, generally, if you’re watching local TV, you getting some news, but not the nuanced stuff you read when you’ve need a detailed explanation of how local tax issues will impact you (Pew’s 2011 look at this is revealing in what it says and doesn’t say — people use TV for political news in roughly the same percentage as they do for TV, but how much of that political coverage shows up on local TV is not discussed).
Here’s the other side of the rub: Incidental exposure to local news is a lot easier in legacy formats. Incidental exposure to local news also builds local knowledge. Without daily newspapers lying around in gas stations, coffee shops, libraries, on bus benches, etc. people who wouldn’t see local news another way probably won’t. Local news is impossible to read on your phone (pop-ups), local news, especially local newspaper news, doesn’t surface unless your friends are posting about it on Facebook, and according to some figures my colleague Matt Hindman likes to cite, ComScore data suggests the “local newspaper gets about five minutes per capita per month in Web user attention.” The physical product of a print news means you can’t ignore it; you pick it up, you read it, you see it. When that’s gone, you just simply do not have the same chance encounter to learn about your community from people who spend their days trying to understand it and make it discernible for you. (side note: One of the things that has hit me the most since moving to Central Illinois is how little of that ephemera is around — you can walk into a coffee shop and see no printed material to linger over, though every gas station has some form of a print newspaper to buy right by the register. What happens when this news goes, too?)
2. The LA Times has a million jobs (ok about 33) —but will local California journalists have a shot at them?
I remember so well when I scored my internship at The LA Times in 2004. I had finally landed at a newspaper that did not require a second read in order to learn about the world; it was all there — Middle Eastern news, DC news, and it was such a great moment to finally not feel the need to look at The New York Times to make sure I got my news (*look, wifi wasn’t even a thing then, alright?). From 2004–2011, I watched that newspaper get thinner and thinner, fantastic as always, but thin — requiring as second read. We cheerleaders like to believe that under new ownership, The LA Times no longer wants to be a second-read but that only-read. What’s an aspiring fancy newspaper to do? Well, like all good competitors, raid the bounty of the newspaper it wants to be not the newspapers it sees itself already better than.
A high profile hire, Sewell Chan (a top notch human I have known for more than a decade) is leaving The New York Times for The LA Times to be deputy managing editor. I’d hire Sewell to rebuild my newspaper in a hot second, so I get it. It is certainly a nice bold move for LA to raid the NYT and snag a born and bred New Yorker for this spot (I still haven’t asked/heard what special magic went into those negotiations to pull Sewell away…a corporate beach apartment is not unheard of when USC recruits top faculty)…. But the question remains, is this going to be the trend? The people who know California best are reporting and living in California right now, already working for The LA Times company. Maybe they’re the people who you might want to hire for your LAPD beat.
And what about paying for the parking for Times Community News employees who work their butts off? Can some of this hot hire money be spent on… not making your employees have bake sales to pay for their parking spots? What about hiring some of this talent into the big fancy newspaper?
3. Why is gender bias in sourcing so so bad?
This week, Helle Sjøvaag, an academic in Norway (and a friend of mine) and co-author Truls André Pedersen finally saw their study that was three-years in the making get published by an academic journal. It is an indictment of so much wrong with how journalists source the news today. And it’s particularly noteworthy because these problems were found in Norway, where there is actual legislation to require gender equity in democratically elected bodies and corporate boards (40% must be either gender). What the *f people? Women who are legislated into equality are STILL not covered with the same regularity unless they’re baking cookies or talking about movies, essentially.
This past week, I’ve been taking the time to call out male journalists who I think have overlooked women in their reporting. Thank you to those who have been super receptive about this (special h/t Andrew Beaujon, Brian Barrett)— I didn’t use to see the gender inequity in sourcing but I see it constantly. And I feel like a gender-warrior when I do this, but I’m not, I’m just sick of reading story after story knowing that a good woman who is doing the same job (if not better) could have also gotten a call. In those Pittsburgh PG stories, all the experts cited were men. Hey! You’re looking at a female expert source on the future of the news industry here. We really are not that hard to find, just ask/look. It’s just depressing and sad, and I guess my only recompense and suggestion is to call it out when you see it to men (and to women) who are receptive to hearing it.
First week of school. Excuse this being less tightly edited.
