Shots Across The Bow

A Blogger Visits the MSM. Part 1: The Fourth Estate Goes Commercial

If there's one thing that the left and right halves of the blogosphere agree on, it's that the mainstream media is biased.

Of course, we don't agree on the direction of the bias, but that's just a minor quibble, right?

Folks on the left say that the media is biased to the right because wealthy corporate types own the media, and we all know that all wealthy corporate types are conservatives, right? Folks on the right say the media is biased to the left because the vast overwhelming majority of editors, publishers, reporters and columnists vote Democrat.

So which side is right? Both? Neither? After spending a day at the Knoxville News Sentinel, I still don't know, although I suspect that the answer is "a little of both." What I did discover was that there are other factors that play a far larger role in determining A) which stories are followed, and B) how they are presented.

Before I get started, I have to thank Michael Silence for getting me in the doors, and Editor Jack McElroy for allowing me complete access to his newsroom. “Go where you want and write whatever you want,” is what he said to me. We’ll see how serious he was about that when I get back from Vegas and send him an expense report.

To begin, we have to understand that a newspaper is a business, and like any other, it must pay the bills and make a profit. Fail in that regard, and it doesn't matter how many Pulitzers you win; nobody can read a paper that goes out of business.

There are many who look at the idea of operating a paper for profit as, well, a conflict of interest, and they have a point. After all, facing the truth is an often unpleasant experience, and how many people will continue to buy a paper that they find unpleasant? The publisher will want to print stories that will appeal to his readers in some fashion or another. A good example of this is the recent story in the KNS about the Farragut Birthday Bacchanalia. Since when is a girl's birthday party news?

Since it becomes one of the most popular pieces the paper has published in recent times. The front desk at the Sentinel has sold more copies of that paper than any other this year. The links on the website to the multimedia portions of the story continue to draw significant traffic. Email to the editor is still flowing in. As online producer Erin Chapin told me, the Jerry Springer Days stories bring the most traffic. Or as Editor Jack McElroy posted on his blog:

News is what people talk about, and people definitely were talking about "My Super Sweet 15." Our Web traffic showed it was the best-read and the most discussed story of the year.

This brings up a very important point; not only do people usually get the government they deserve, they absolutely get the press they deserve. One of the things that online news makes possible is the ability for the consumer to custom tailor the news he reads on a daily basis. He can use any one of a dozen different aggregators to pick and choose which news stories he reads. This sounds great in theory, but there's a drawback. If people only read the news stories that appeal to them, there's a good chance they'll lose track of the big picture, and never know they're missing it. An online newspaper has the ability to marry the depth of coverage from newspapers with the immediacy and multimedia of television, leveraging the strengths of both mediums, but if all Joe Public wants to read is the Sports pages and Peanuts reruns, it all goes to waste.

And there's very little that can be done about it. As Jigsha Desai, online editor said, the consumer gets to make the final choice. I also talked with Deputy Managing Editor Tom Chester, (Think Lou Grant with a pony tail and a toothache) who had a more optimistic view. He pointed out that it wasn't just the salacious stories that got big traffic. There were a couple of stories with national impact that pulled very strong online numbers, including the Roane County prison break that killed Cotton Morgan. According to Chester, the KNS updated frequently and rapidly, and became the best source for those following the story nationally.

It becomes a balancing act of sorts; you have to maintain your readership so they’ll be there when the news breaks.

Making it even tougher is the fact that 75% of the paper's revenue comes from advertisers. The biggest single impact of this fact is space. That amount of advertising takes up a ton of space that would otherwise go to news. On the day I was there, Say Uncle criticized the KNS for not covering a story he was pushing concerning Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam. Say Uncle said:

I handed the local newspaper the story on a silver platter. I posted the story on their blog. I know that some local TeeVee folks read that blog and my blog. But, not a peep any where in the local press. Your average Knoxvillian (who’d likely not be happy about this) doesn’t know it happened.

But the local newspaper has some hard-hitting stories on beefcake, planting trees, and chainsaw sculpting.

On the day in question, both the A and B sections of the paper were running long, and stories were getting bumped and trimmed to fit. I sat in on the final budget meeting of the day, and while Uncle's story never came up, it was clear that there simply wasn't room for another story. Add that to the balancing issues I discussed earlier, and you can understand more about how the story about Knoxville's top bachelor made the cut.

It's not a perfect business; there's always going to be compromise.

But here's the thing that Uncle is forgetting; the KNS did publish a story about it. They published Uncle's story via Michael's blog. And assuming that the blogs are archived just like the rest of the online content, any searches on Haslam and Bloomberg will pull up Uncle's post. Think about that for a second. A private citizen, writing anonymously, can publish a hard news story on a MSM website.

I think that's fairly impressive myself.

So here's the bottom line of this first look at the KNS. Like so much else in the real world, newspapering is all about compromise. You have competing demands for space, plus you have to report the hard news while keeping your increasingly distracted readerships full attention.

And you have to make a few bucks at the same time.

I know there are a lot of folks who hate the idea of a for profit media, and as we've examined, there are drawbacks to the corporate model. But it seems to me that we as consumers are the most glaring drawback. We say we want hard news but we follow stories about Britney Spears and her baby much more avidly. Steve Irwin's death by stingray drew significantly more attention than North Korea's detonation of a nuclear weapon. We get the media we pay for folks, and right now, we're putting all our money into gossip and hype.

And what is the alternative to a corporate media? One that's government sponsored, like the BBC in England? Talk about a conflict of interest!

This may be the dynamic that is driving the blogosphere. Tired of the filler and fluff, frustrated by the lack of space for in-depth coverage, we go out and do the job for ourselves. We aren't limited by column inches, only by bandwidth and server space, and that gives us a freedom most reporters can only envy. But as more content goes online, and more newspapers break the old school mindset, I think we'll see newspapers come to resemble blogs more.

I talked for quite a while with Jack Lail, Managing Editor/Multimedia about how online newspapers would compete with free news aggregators already out there. His response was that people came to the internet looking for original content, and somebody had to be able to provide it. And as Tom Chester mentioned, one of the things that drew international attention to some of their stories was the frequent updates that kept the story fresh and current.

Original content, frequently updated?

That's blogging, folks.

Part 2 will cover the online growth of the KNS in more detail.
Part 3 will cover how a story is framed and presented, using two different stories.
Part 4 will cover election night at a major newspaper.
Part 5 will cover the Sports operations, which are almost completely separate from the rest of the paper, from the standpoint of covering the Vol's bowl game. (In my dreams!)
Part 6 (If they let me back into the building) will cover the physical aspects of the paper's production.
Part 7 will cover any questions you, my loyal readers will want to ask that I've forgotten to ask.

Posted by Rich at October 19, 2006 7:06 PM | TrackBack