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| New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, second from right, responds to a
question from the audience during the Editing the Future plenary session on the opening
day of the ACES conference. Other panelists include Frank Fee (University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill journalism professor), left; Rick Rodriquez (Sacramento Bee
executive editor and new president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors),
second from left; and John Carroll (Los Angeles Times editor), right. |
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A panel of journalism
leaders explores how newspapers
can play to their strengths
and reassert themselves
to reverse shrinking circulation numbers.
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By Matthew Crowley
A recurring cry has come from journalism’s
highest ranks in recent years: Circulation is falling, credibility is eroding. What,
they ask themselves, can we do?
At a plenary session Thursday afternoon for “Editing the Future: Upholding Editing,”
a conference coinciding with the opening on the American Copy Editors Society’s ninth
annual conference in Hollywood, a panel of academics and editors laid out the problems
and offered tactics to solve them.
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| Philip Meyer, journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, discusses the research findings in his book "The Vanishing Newspaper:
Saving Journalism in the Information Age." |
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Some of the top-level editors on the panel suggested
that papers could help themselves by better promoting their content and their attention
to quality and ethics. They noted that print’s message may get lost in the information
din created by other news-dispensing channels, including Web sites, Web logs and
television.
“Editing the Future,” organized by Ohio University
Professor Deborah Gump, consisted of three sessions: a Wednesday night preliminary
meeting involving members of ACES’ executive board, a Thursday morning roundtable
with newspaper executives and academics, and Thursday afternoon’s plenary. ACES sponsored
“Editing the Future” along with the Knight Ohio Program for Editing and Editing Education
with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The panel included New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller; Los Angeles Times
Editor John Carroll; Sacramento Bee Executive Editor Rick Rodriguez; Bill Kovach
of the Committee for Concerned Journalists, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill assistant professor Frank Fee and Phil Meyer, a University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill professor and the author of "The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving
Journalism in the Information Age.”
Meyer gave statistics grim enough scare most publishers. He cited a survey by the
National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago showing that confidence
in the press has been falling for the latter part of the 20th century. Readership,
too, has eroded sharply, the research found. In 1967, 73 percent of people surveyed
said they read a newspaper every day. Research shows this number has been declining
by about a percentage point a year ever since, he said.
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| ACES President John McIntyre, left, offers his views on the importance of copy
editors. He and five other editing representatives spoke to newspaper executives
and leading academics Wednesday evening as part of the Editing the Future event held
in conjunction with the ACES conference. |
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Looking at the shrinking circulation, some newspapers
may shrug it off using a mass-versus-class argument, Meyer said, They may say “There
are fewer readers, but the ones that remain are the ones the advertisers really want
to reach.”
“If that’s true, then a newspaper that concentrates on elite readers should get more
per 1,000 readers through it’s advertising, right? It doesn’t. I read the numbers
on it and found exactly the opposite is true.”
The more a newspaper stretches its readability to reach for a broad audience the
more it gets per 1,000 readers from its advertising, he said.
For journalism to survive, Meyer said, newspapers must stop clinging to profitability
models left over from when newspapers monopolized news.
“Publishers act as though it were God’s gift to them that they should seek those
(profit) margins, and they are engaging in a strategy the business school people
call ‘harvesting mentality’: Raise prices, cut quality, get out the money while you
can and with any luck the business won’t collapse in your lifetime.”
The Los Angeles Times’ Carroll suggested that newspapers could serve themselves by
perhaps shifting some of their energy toward better promoting themselves. Newspapers
now, he said, may be in the most competitive environment they’ve ever been; there
are myriad new ways for people to get news and myriad new ways for people to advertise.
“All of these outfits that are taking a piece out of us are promoting themselves
in various ways. … Meanwhile, we are folding our tent and not promoting and instead
are maintaining ultrahigh profit margins. … We ought to be doubling and tripling
our promotion budgets.”
Furthermore, added The New York Times' Keller: “Marketing and promotion is the first
easy thing to cut when the business side has to cut.”
Newspapers' reputations are under attack, Keller said, and newspapers don’t do enough
to silence attacking critics through self-promotion. The New York Times, for example,
this year won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories on deaths at railway crossings.
“(That’s) something that people who accuse the Times of being urban liberal leftist
newspaper probably don’t associate with us,” Keller said. “And yet we don’t do nearly
enough to promote that kind of thing.”
Nor, Keller said, do newspapers do enough to promote public understanding of the
standards that they follow and other media may not, such as conflict-of-interest
rules. At his paper, for example, travel writers are forbidden to take junkets paid
for by the people who will be featured in the travel articles.
“I’m not sure that readers know that or are aware that we hold those sorts of standards,”
he said.
Matthew Crowley is a business copy editor for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
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| Editing the Future panelists who appeared before the ACES membership on Thursday
were, from left, Philip Meyer (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Frank
Fee (UNC-Chapel Hill), Rick Rodriquez (Sacramento Bee and new president of the American
Society of Newspaper Editors), Bill Keller (New York Times), John Carroll (Los Angeles
Times) and Bill Kovach (Committee of Concerned Journalists). |
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| Audience member Alex Cruden (Detroit Free Press) takes part in the Q&A with
the newspaper leaders. |
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| Editing the Future participants listen to a panel ACES members discuss editing
at a gathering on the eve of the ACES conference. The Knight Ohio Program for Editing
and Editing Education, with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation,
presented Editing the Future. Deborah Gump, the Knight professor of editing at Ohio
University, organized the event. |
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| ACES panelists met with journalism leaders on Wednesday evening to express their
opinions about the future of editing. The ACES members, from left: John McIntyre
(Baltimore Sun and ACES president), Sara Hendricks (Victoria, Texas, Advocate), Merrill
Perlman (New York Times), William G. Connolly (New York Times, retired), Ron Smith
(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) and Zoe Cabaniss Friloux (Rocky Mountain News, in Denver). |
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