Take the paper out of news

Tag : Making Paper Flowers


A sign affixed to the bird -- a statue of a rooster in full crow --said: "Brought in by a Santeria priest ... to help save our jobs.Make an offering."

The bird, placed last week on a bank of file cabinets in thenewsroom of the Miami Herald, drew flowers, wine, pennies,peppermint, dolls, candles and other oblations. A few days later,the McClatchy Co., which owns the Herald and 30 other newspapersaround the country, announced it was cutting 10% of its workforce.At the Herald, that means 190 jobs throughout the newspaper'svarious departments.

So if Santeria -- it's a combination of Catholicism and the WestAfrican Yoruba religion -- has any miracles to work, it had betterget busy.

Not that the Herald is alone. Virtually every newspaper is goingthrough the same thing: shrinking profit margins, decliningcirculation, staff cutbacks, and morale at subterranean levels asjournalists struggle to figure out how we can save the Americannewspaper.

But I have come -- reluctantly -- to believe we can't. We must blowit up instead.

Doing otherwise is like trying to save record albums in an era whenmusic is downloaded to iPods, trying to save film in an era whenevery camera is digital. People did not stop listening to music ortaking pictures, but new methods of doing so evolved, and those whowere in the business of selling music or pictures had to adapt ordie.

We in the business of selling news have yet to adapt. Yes, everynewspaper has a Web site now. Some, like the Herald, have TV andradio facilities as well. I'm talking about something more: aradical change of focus.

We still tend to regard our Web sites as ancillary to our primarymission of producing newspapers. But I submit that our primarymission is to report and comment on the news, and that it is thenewspaper itself that has become ancillary.

So maybe we should regard the Internet not as an extra thing we do,but as the core thing we do. Maybe we should maximize the fact thatwe know our cities as no one else does. Maybe we should make ourWeb sites not simply online re-creations of our papers, butentities in their own right, destination portals for those who wantnews and views from and about a given city, but also for those whowant to find a good doctor in that city, or apply for a job in thatcity or reach the leaders of that city or research the history ofthat city.

Maybe the goal should be to make ourselves the one indispensableguide to that city. Then maybe we should hire away the brightpeople who figured out how to make Yahoo and Google profitable andask them to make our sites profitable, too. Maybe -- heretical ideaahead -- it's as simple as requiring online readers to pay for theproduct, just as our other readers do.

If you are a connoisseur of irony, you may find it amusing thatthis argument comes from a guy who recently wrote that the Internetis eroding our ability to focus. Well, let me say this: I have fondmemories of growing up in L.A. with the feisty (and long defunct)Herald-Examiner, and much of what I know about writing a columncomes from Al Martinez of the Times, so none of this comes easilyto me. Like most print journalists, I am sentimental aboutnewspapers. But I am also sentimental about eating.

A few weeks back, Carl Sessions Stepp, senior editor of theAmerican Journalism Review, published a call to arms, an essayexhorting journalists to stop weeping over the state of theirindustry and launch an all-hands-on-deck, man-on-the-moon campaignto reinvent and save it. Consider this my way of seconding hismotion.

I don't know how it is in Santeria, but in the Judeo-Christiantradition, we have a saying: God helps those who help themselves.

I'll bet the chicken would agree.