SHOESTRING REPORTER — what’s that?

by Joel Thurtell on September 10, 2008

I call it my Journalism anti-textbook.

Sometimes.

Other times, I call it my faux Journalism textbook.

Whatever it might be, this book is heading towards the market. I’m fine-tuning the manuscript now so a copy editor can go through and critique its basic arguments, not to mention catch my spelling and grammatical boo-boos.

What is SHOESTRING REPORTER? I wrote a proposal with the idea of enlisting my literary agent’s help in peddling the book to a major book publisher.  Wouldn’t a $100,000 advance be nice? Well, I’m not holding my breath. But here’s a peek at what I’ll soon be offering for sale on this site, without the help of a major publisher or a big advance.

First, the title page:

SHOESTRING REPORTER

HOW I GOT TO BE A BIG CITY REPORTER

 (WITHOUT GOING TO J SCHOOL)

 AND HOW YOU CAN DO IT TOO!

OR

A MANIFESTO FOR SAVING JOURNALISM

By Joel Thurtell

And now for the summary:

Would you like to make a fortune without stirring from your home? Without having to work?

If your answer is “yes,” then my book, SHOESTRING REPORTER, I’m happy to say, is not for you.

But if you’re the kind of person who likes independence, works to the cadence of your own drum and are not afraid of hard work and harder truths, know how to be enterprising and most of all can think for yourself, then maybe I can help you make part or even all of a decent living from your home, after all.

That’s the opening of my new book, SHOESTRING REPORTER, a combination how-to, Journalism school anti-textbook and personal memoir in which I explain how I got to be a big city newspaper reporter without going to Journalism school, and how anyone with a questioning mind, a way with words and a yen to tell stories can become a newspaper writer.

Better yet, make a living at it.

Better still, they can take part in a movement for questioning many of the values J schools instill in their grads — elitism, intellectual me-too-ism and a general lack of courage.

Along the way, I dispel many myths about Journalism that have been instilled in formally, academically-trained Journalists in large part by non-Journalist J school professors and the newspaper industry itself.

But the guiding theme of SHOESTRING REPORTER is how you can become a part-time correspondent for one newspaper or even many newspapers without shelling out time or money for a college degree.

The job description: Stringer.

But wait a minute — newspapers are dying, aren’t they? Why would someone want to enter an industry that is disappearing?

Good question. The answer to that is, Don’t believe everything you read in the papers. Yes, newspapers are dying. So the papers say. But many of them – particularly the smaller ones that have not given their product away on the Internet — still earn profits.

Most of them are downsizing, which means they’re getting rid of full-time writers.

And hiring more stringers.

I got into the newspaper reporting business 30 years ago. I had no formal Journalism training. It didn’t matter. I knew how to write. I knew how to listen. I knew how to ask questions. I was hired as a stringer at the South Bend Tribune.

Eventually, unlike most stringers, I was hired as a staff writer first by the Tribune and later by the Detroit Free Press. Inside the newsroom, I learned much more about Journalism, but the main lesson I see now, after three decades, is that I was more independent and less hassled when I was a stringer.

Whether its part-time stringing or fulltime staff work, Journalism is a fascinating way to see the world. What are you interested in? I’ve flown upside down in a Navy Blue Angels fighter jet, I’ve learned that climbing into the gondola of a blimp feels a lot like stepping into a rowboat; at age 62 I played dodge-ball with a bunch of twenty-somethings and survived to write about it. I carved a dolphin with a chainsaw from a 300-pound block of ice, I rowed in an 8-persopn shell on the Detroit River, I dressed up like a beekeeper and handled honey bees, then told the story.

Like to live dangerously? I shared my car with a trio of pit vipers; I was chased by an angry Diamondback rattlesnake and almost wandered into a barroom pistol shooting spree.

Always for a story.

In my book, SHOESTRING REPORTER, I explain how a smart, literate person can become a Journalist without spending time or money on a college Journalism degree.

In roughly 50,000 words, I explain how I got my first stringing job and how you can do it too. How to talk to editors, how to keep editors from screwing you, how to find out about jobs, how to write like you’re a real J-school reporter, how to write BETTER than a J-school grad, how to double dip or syndicate your articles, and how not to be discouraged by rejection.

I explain why I don’t think newspapers are dead, and point out that there are budding alternatives in this digital age. But I also tell why we should be careful when working for Internet sweatshops, aka blogs, that pay a pittance and drain you of material, time and energy.

I explain the importance of photos. I give some secrets into the news-hunter’s mentality. What is a story and how do you tell?

How do you divine smoke from fire?

I write about legal issues, provide a “true ethics policy,” and end with a “Stringer’s Oath.”

A central thesis of my book is that newspapers are being killed by formally-trained Journalists who tend to think alike. The pack mentality that often ensures that stories are reported alike by different writers also has led the news industry into its present money-losing predicament.

I believe newspapers can be saved, but not by conventional-thinking Journalists.

Who will save Journalism?

Not the people who are practicing it, clearly: They don’t have a clue how to handle the challenge of the Internet.

Journalism will be saved, I believe, only if many people are inspired to practice the craft of reporting and writing about events, people and social processes that they find important. Many of these people are now excluded from the ranks of Journalists.

If Journalism can be saved, then maybe newspapers too can be revived. The saviors of Journalism will come from outside the industry. They will work their way into the craft (NOT a profession!) and, eventually, take over and transform Journalism. They will become paid part-time reporters – “stringers”  – on the temporary payroll of newspapers.

How will they do this?

By reading SHOESTRING REPORTER, a manual outlining how people equipped only with eyes, ears and intelligence can, with forethought and discipline, become paid members of newspaper staffs.

SHOESTRING REPORTER explains how I became first a stringer, then a part-time newspaper editor, then a fulltime staff reporter on a medium-sized paper. And finally, I was hired, with no formal academic Journalism training, as a fulltime staff reporter at the Detroit Free Press, then (1984) the ninth-largest newspaper by circulation in the nation.

SHOESTRING REPORTER explains how people who don’t have a college degree can be paid for reporting news. Why, I knew a stringer at the South Bend Tribune who had two licenses – as a hairdresser!

I believe people who are not tainted by the orthodox thinking of news-gathering institutions could – if enough of them became involved – save Journalism.

We need many people to write for newspapers from their own personal, private points of view. We need these people to bring independent, fresh approaches to reporting. We also need to make sure that along the way they don’t become corrupted by standard Journalistic thinking.

SHOESTRING REPORTER offers a “how-to” approach to becoming a reporter without spending a fortune on college coursework that may not prepare a person for a working life as a Journalist, anyway.

And the price of the book is much less than tuition to a conventional J school. You won’t learn “How To Think” in J school. Nor will you learn how to think up unorthodox stories. SHOESTRING REPORTER promotes a non-standard approach to reporting. It explains how you can gain access to information without spending huge amounts of money on lawyers and photocopies.

On a shoestring.

 

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A real Journalists’ ethics policy

by Joel Thurtell on August 18, 2008

By Joel Thurtell

“Ride hard, shoot straight and speak the shining truth.”

Why would I post a one-line, nine-word bromide that is open to a wide range of interpretation and claim it as my blog’s ethics policy?

Because it contains three elements missing in the long-winded, self-serving, so-called ethics policies put out by many major and minor American newspapers to impose “ethical” standards on their editorial employees.

First, my policy is short.

Second, it is actually possible to parse sense from it.

And third, it contains a word missing from its supposedly more sophisticated brethren. More about that word later.

But now, time for a warning: I have a pony in this race. Six months before I took a buyout from the Detroit Free Press, I was disciplined for behavior that managers, long after the fact, decided was “unethical”. In fact, they agreed that what I did was not unethical at the time I did it, but after they found out about the horrible act I had committed three years previous, they tinkered with the language of their “ethics” policy to make it, ex post facto, a breach of their new re-jiggered and ever plastic guidelines.

In other words, don’t do it again. If that seems convoluted, don’t blame me. Having amended the meaning of “ethics,” managers then asked me if I would ever do what I had done three years before — again. What they failed to tell me was that they had already decided that if I answered “Yes,” they planned to punish me, possibly even fire me. Ain’t they sweet?

In the next days, weeks and months, I’ll be exploring “ethics” issues on joelontheroad.com, and I’ll be discussing the ramifications of newspaper “ethics” and what this little adventure in pseudo-philosophy has meant to me. Example: Anyone who thinks this episode towards the end of my 30-career in journalism didn’t play a significant part in my decision to retire from the Free Press should read a book about the business practices of Gannett, the corporation that owns the Free Press. It’s called “The Chain Gang,” by Richard McCord.

My supposed sin? As a citizen of the United States of America, I participated in the political process in fall 2004 by contributing $500 to the Michigan Democratic party.

Horrible, horrible me. But as I say, at the time I did it, donations didn’t violate either the Knight-Ridder or Gannett ethics policies. And, while I continued at the Free Press, I didn’t donate money to political parties. Not so our bosses. At least one of our managers, AFTER he’d re-tooled the ethics policy and his minions had played their little head games with me, actually donated money to a political organization — $175 to the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce Political Action Committee.

Yesiree, right there on the Michigan Secretary of State website for anyone with a computer to take a gander at. The Eliot Spitzer Moment for Shameless Hypocrisy.

But back to my ethics policy which, following industry standards, is subject to change at my whim. I really think my ethics policy du jour has it all over those fatuous policies put out by the big name newspapers.

Take a look at the creme de la creme, which is to say the ethics policy of our nation’s elite newspaper, The New York Times. The Times was so proud of its 54-page tome on newsroom social control that it saw fit to attach an index.

An index! This thing must be really important. Hmmm. Gosh, I don’t see any index entries for “Newspaper Guild,” or “union,” or “collective bargaining agreement” or “contract.” Guess this hyped-up, obese document isn’t part of the New York Times contract with the New York local of The Newspaper Guild. Wonder how meaningful it really is.

I haven’t seen another American newspaper ethics policy that reached quite the Times’ height of fatuous self-importance and pomposity, but they all have these elements in common: Florid, grandiose but murky verbiage in describing goals or standards impossible to meet. At least Eliot Spitzer was a one-trick — or should I say, SAME trick — horse. The Times sows hypocrisy far and wide.

Okay, I’ll stop kicking the Times around. For a minute or two. Here’s one of my favorite examples of a double standard, found in the Dec. 13, 1984 edition of the Detroit Free Press’ “Ethics Guidelines.” It says: “No staff member should write about, report on, photograph or make a news judgment about any individual related to him or her by blood or marriage or with whom the staff member has a close personal relationship.”

That ban existed for years in the Free Press’ Ethical Guidelines, then disappeared without explanation. Here’s what I bet happened: Someone in management with the power to re-assemble these elastic ethics policies belatedly figured out that the prohibition on writing about family members was being violated with impunity every day of the week by then columnists Jim Fitzgerald, Susan Watson, Bob Talbert and others. Of course, lowly reporters like me had to abide by the Law or face recrimination, humiliation and even termination from editors. But the columnists were and are the paper’s stars, paid far better than other writers to ruminate on anything that bestirred them, which often was a spouse, a kid or a grandchild. In direct violation of the paper’s behavioral edicts.

That’s the problem with so-called “ethical guidelines” or “ethical policies” — their lofty, pompous proscriptions too often collide with workplace reality. Everyone in the newsroom knew that those columnists were highly prized for their ability to spin homey yarns about pals or hubbies into down to earth essays that persuaded people to trade their spare change for the newspaper. Why, people would even swap good money to buy books that collected these family-oriented columns. Meanwhile, a rule that insiders know is being broken, if they think about it, is unknown to readers. How often do you see a newspaper’s ethics policy in print where its readers can easily find it and compare what they’re reading to the paper’s ethical cant du jour? The hypocrisy goes unrecognized by the public and therefore it has no importance to newsroom managers who write the regs.

Here’s another “ethic” I find entertaining, because it has survived and lives on in current iterations of many newsroom ethics policies. I quote from the 1984 Free Press document: “A staff member may not enter into a business relationship with a news source.”

There was a time at the Detroit Free Press when a certain columnist had a book deal as co-author with a certain famous but now-dead football coach whom he continued to use as a news source. It was okay by management, despite the seemingly emphatic prohibition, that Mitch had this deal with Bo.

Really, the language is pretty vague. What does it mean to say “business relationship”? If I buy a book from a bookstore, then write a story about the store manager, was the purchase a “business relationship” that violated the policy? If I pay for lunch at a restaurant, then write a review of that eatery, am I in trouble?

Don’t ask me. I don’t write the rules.

We know who writes them. Newspaper owners, or their managers.

I’m told (by a lawyer from Gannett, wouldn’t you know) that the New York Times’ ethics book is the “gold standard” of ethics policies. Wow. That is really impressive. It stands to reason. They are the classiest newspaper in the country. They must have the smartest writers, deepest thinkers, so it’s natural to turn to them as the wisest of the wise.

On page 19 of their hefty book, I find the Times’ rules for staffers regarding “Voting, Campaigns and Public Issues.”

I’ll be writing in depth about this section later, but right now I’m interested in the opening line: “Journalists have no place on the playing fields of politics.”

What a mouthful that is.

At risk of being branded a smart-ass, I’d like to know — can somebody explain to me? — what the phrase “playing fields of politics” means?

I picture an immense soccer field with goal posts all along the sides. Lots of soccer fields. No, wait a minute. They’re football fields. No, baseball fields. See what I mean? What the hell DOES it mean?

It is my understanding — correct me if I’m wrong — that Times reporters travel with political candidates and government officials either on campaigns or as part of the officials’ governmental duties. It is my understanding that reporters attend press conferences called by officials and candidates for political office. Am I wrong to believe that reporters sometimes hold private conversations with politicians and government officials, say over lunch, and that they sometimes shoot the bull about politics in off-the-record contacts and may even discuss the ins and outs of political maneuvering with people who have a political leaning of one kind or another? And that these unpublicized conversations between journalists and politicos from time to time affect the course of political history?

Hmmm: Could these scenes be construed as “the playing fields of politics”?

I’m sitting in the dining room of my home writing this, having perused the front page of today’s (Jan. 20, 2008) New York Times. Oh my, here’s a headline, “VOTE OF WOMEN PROPELS CLINTON IN NEVADA CAUCUS, followed by a deck, “OBAMA IS STRONG 2ND” and a sub-deck, “G.O.P.’s Primary Goes Down to the Wire in South Carolina.” The article was co-written, we are told through a by-line, by JEFF ZELENY and JENNIFER STEINHAUER.Where did Mr. Zeleny and Ms. Steinhauer learn about these elections if it was not on the “playing fields of politics”?

Gosh. I wonder if these two reporters will be cited for ethical lapses if it turns out that they in fact conducted some or all of their reporting on “the playing fields of politics”?

Don’t ask me. I don’t make the rules.

Isn’t it just possible that these very articles might have some impact on the behavior of the very politicians they cover? Might not politicians choose to do one thing and not another based on conversations with reporters or based on their reading of the reporters’ articles? How about the Times’ articles about National Security Agency wiretapping? Didn’t those articles affect government behavior? It seems like the very publication of articles takes place on one or more of those “playing fields,” doesn’t it?

I’m not even going to get into the question of why the Times’ ethics gurus chose that term, “playing fields of politics.” Were they perhaps sports writers or sports editors? It’s a pretty lame metaphor, made more so by its choice of athletic lingo. It’s a cinch they aren’t philosophers.I’d like to know this: Why do newspapers write these hyperbolic policies if they can be construed and re-construed to the point they’re meaningless?In my opinion, the people who run newspapers see these rules as clubs they can use to beat on reporters when no other weapon is handy and whenever it suits them. Control. Keep those lackies in hand. That’s not what the managers say, of course. I recently heard a top newspaper editor explain what these policies are meant to do: Preserve the paper’s credibility. You see, in this manager’s view, readers lose confidence in the paper as a believable source of news if they find out their favorite writers have conflicts of interest.

Problem: All those exceptions. The sports writer with the book deal, columnists writing about family members. Another problem: Those “conflicts” were obvious to readers, who never knew they were “ethics” conflicts because they were never told about the policy. If they had known, would they have cared? Who knows? Who cares? Columnists provide entertainment. The whole paper can’t be murder and mayhem or politics and courtroom folderol. Managers know it. They give those writers great latitude, freedom to break the rules because it sells papers.

Did readers give a rip, really?

According to the editor, though, if the public realizes there’s a conflict, they will stop buying the paper. That would hurt the paper’s bottom line.

Did it hurt the paper’s bottom line to let writers wax on about their families or write about sources they had deals with? Not if readers didn’t know. They wouldn’t have cared, anyway. They continued to buy papers, maybe bought even more papers, thanks to the wit and homeyness of the columns.

But we then hear it’s not even reality that matters. It is perception. If people PERCEIVE a conflict, they may stop buying. That would be bad. But all those years when columnists wrote about family members and didn’t get caught, that was okay. There was no PERCEPTION of a conflict. So people kept buying papers and there was no economic harm to the publishers.

So what ethics really are about is not credibility at all. What “ethics” are about is selling newspapers. Ethics equals money.

Why is this important to me? I love newspapers. I see them dying. No, I see them killing themselves. I see them doing dumb things they got away with when they were the only show in town. But now, with competition from the Internet, they are like deer in a forest of klieg lights. Either they’re paralyzed with fear or simply lack the basic intelligence they need to survive. This is about the future of newspapers.

It’s worth looking again at those highly-paid columnists who write to a different standard from other staffers. Managers assume that readers buy more papers because they want to read those columnists. If the issue is economics, as the editor said, then if what they write sells papers, then everything should be okay — even though they may violate ethical standards. No credibility problem as long as the cash flows in. And as long as nobody blows the whistle.

I keep reading these ethics policies, and there’s one word that I don’t find in any of them. “Credibility” is all over the place. But that word which readers REALLY prize more than credibility, well, I can’t find that word in the index to the Times’ “Ethical Journalism: A Handbook of Values and Practices for the News and Editorial Departments September 2004.” I don’t find it in the Free Press policies, of which there have been so many it’s difficult to catalog them.

Okay, I made fun of the Times’ pompous index, but maybe it can help.

Oops.

No sign of that other word that comes between “trustees” and “University of Missouri.”

My little policy is not 54 pages long. It has no index, only nine words.

But yes, my policy has that most important of words:

Ride hard, shoot straight and speak the shining TRUTH.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

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“New Journalism” checklist

by Joel Thurtell on August 16, 2008

Let’s say you’re a pinko, left-wing think tank.

Or, hey, maybe you’re a bunch of fascists on the right.

For the sake of this lecture in the Shoestring J School, it doesn’t matter how you’re aligned on the political spectrum.

There are certain Immutable Laws of Journalism which, like Laws of Physics, apply to everyone regardless of creed, gender or politics.

But there are also people who think they can set aside those Laws. They are the Managers of the nonprofit think tanks I mentioned. They will not really dodge the Eternal Verities, of course. They will only try to make the rest of us believe they’ve dodged them.

So you’re a left- or right-wing think tank. Why not the center? Because Moderates are easy-going and don’t think the system needs changing. Whereas, people on the left or right think things are screwed up and need radical improvement.

Okay, again, you’re a Liberal or Conservative think tank and you’re appalled at the way media cover just about everything from art to real estate to government. Why, in some states, you realize, almost all newspapers are controlled by one or two companies. If you’re looking at things from the right, you realize that the monopolistic media pump out a left-liberal stream of biases. If you’re looking from the left, the media run with the thoughts and prejudices of the capitalists who dominate all business and control government.

Something must be Done. Citizens must be armed with Better, Higher Truths. Aha! The solution is to have your own newspaper. This way, the masses can be informed of Eternal Truths as a counterweight to the mainstream media.

But here we run against one of those Immutable Laws of Journalism: It costs money to own a newspaper. Real money. Why, you need printing presses to reproduce your counter-capitalistic or counter-leftist ideas. You need trucks to deliver your papers to vending machines, newstands, coffee shops and residential driveways. And most expensive of all, you need human beings to help you work the presses, drive the trucks, and find and write the left- or right-wing blather you want to reveal to the People.

Immutable Law Number Two for the upstart newspaper publisher: You do not want to spend lots of money. Not necessarily because you don’t have lots of money. But upstart publishers operate according to the same rules that govern conventional publishers.

All publishers follow Immutable Law of Journalism Number Three: They are cheap.

But today it doesn’t matter. We live in an Enlightened Age with lots of New Technology. It is possible to publish a newspaper today without printing presses or trucks. We don’t need to buy all the equipment. We don’t need to hire all those people to run the equipment. All we need is a server and access to the Internet.

Oh yes, come to think of it, we do need some human beings. They will be the reporters and writers and editors who create the material we publish on our virtual newspaper. And, of course, there will be some Bosses.

Question: Do we have to pay the writers and editors?

Go back to Immutable Law of Journalism Number Three, silly. Of course, you don’t have to pay your writers.

But wait a minute — we’re LIBERALS here.

Or no, we’re CONSERVATIVES.

Either way, it’s one thing to be cheap. But we wouldn’t want people to THINK we’re cheap, would we? Liberals are, well, Liberal. Conservatives are Compassionate.

So we care. We will deviate from Law Number Three and pay our employees.

But we don’t care that much, so we will not pay them much. We will not pay them enough to live on, because the fact is that although we are LIBERALS or CONSERVATIVES, we still are human beings and despite what we may tell you, we think like grubby old-style newspaper owners.

Now, how do we get Journalists to write for nothing or at best starvation wages?

That’s where the New Journalism Checklist comes in handy.

We will have to train our New Journalists to think they can work for little or no pay. It is called Subjugation of the Newsroom, and it is made oh so much easier given that our reporters will not see each other and thus will not bond socially or psychologically with one another.

First, we convince our employees — oops, our writers and editors — that they are taking part in a radical experiment that could change forever the way Journalism is practiced. They are part of a New Elite. We will call the experiment New Journalism. If anybody asks how the New Journalism differs from the old, we will tell them it’s because the Old Journalism is controlled by greedy newspaper publishers, whereas we are Independent from the lucre-based business culture. Why, we don’t even sell advertising. We are financed by our Donors, rich people and institutions whose Hearts are in the Right Place and who are dedicated to creating a New Journalism.

If someone notices that this is a tautology, that we have defined New Journalism as New Journalism, we can just laugh them off. We know that in truth there is no New Journalism other than meaningless words we have put on pixels. Besides, say what they want, we don’t need to publish anyone’s errant criticisms. Screw ‘em We’re Independent.

That is crucial. We are Independent because we are the publishers. Our writers are not Independent, but it is our job to entice them to believe they are.

But if we lure writers to work for zilch, they must be convinced we are Different from mainstream media. They must believe they are part of a Movement towards Purity in Journalism. If they believe they are New Journalists, they will take the next step and think they are superior to Old Journalists. That is important, because if we are going to pay nothing or next to nothing, our writers must be dedicated to us. Otherwise, they might be tempted to work for a mainstream newspaper where they pay actual salaries.

Having established a broad sense of superiority over other media and media personnel, we must find ways of gluing our poorly-paid workers to our masthead. Employee loyalty is what we are talking about, but we must not call our writers and editors “employees.” Old Journalism institutions have employees. We will have something else. Oh yes, let’s call them Fellows!

Fellows will not receive pay. They are mailed instead monthly stipends. “Fellows” implies that they are learning. From us. They are our apprentices. We speak and they listen. We will call ourselves Mentors. They will learn from us. It follows that they obey. Our New Journalism organization has something to offer them: We will teach them the ways of the wily Internet even though we don’t understand them ourselves. The Fellows won’t know that. Besides, we will provide the Fellows with Resources — Copy Editors who are not Fellows but who are paid the same wages, oops, stipend.

Something else is needed to inspire our writers. To keep them loyal and true to us, we need for them to have a sense of comradeship. The best way to achieve this is to spark rivalry and competition among our stable of Fellows. Rivalry will also help with another problem based on Immutable Law of Journalism Number Four: Thou must fill the paper unceasingly. We need many, many, many stories.

Here the checklist provides us with the Star System: We will treat writers unequally. We will bestow praise on writers who achieve certain goals, while withholding praise from those who don’t do as we say.

The goals will be numbers. How many “hits” does a story incite? Do not worry if the story is well-researched or well-written. Concern for Quality is very Old Journalism. The New Journalism is computer-driver and computers are all about counting.

Always, of course, we must stress our Independence from Old Journalistic ways of thought.

With the Star System, we will elevate the wages of one person so that he or she is paid slightly (not a lot because remember, we are cheap) more than her or his peers.

Now, we must not seem to purposefully let other Fellows know they are getting the short end of the stick, but nonetheless, it helps to promote rivalry and factionalism if we somehow leak the information that we have created a one-person elite, a Super-Fellow. Believe it or not, rivalry and factionalism actually promote company, er, institutional loyalty among employees — I mean Fellows.

If necessary, we may enhance the stratification — also known as Pecking Order — by creating two or more tiers of writers. There will be the Fellows, who will be promised a relatively long period of work-for-pay, er, Stipend (say, three months at most). And there will be some lower order who will be promised a short try-out period (maybe 30 days?) and receive none of the Training and Resources we offer our Fellows. We will call this lower order String Contractor, and we will pointedly not invite String Contractors to any of our professional-social gatherings.

Thus, though the Fellows who are not Stars may feel inferior to the one or two Super-Fellows, everyone can at least laugh up their sleeves at the lowly String Contractor. Because the word “Contractor” has a venal connotation, the person who bears that title will take on a sordid identity compared to others in the Virtual Newsroom who will never meet this person anyway or otherwise give a rip about him or her.

While we are hiring inexperienced and poorly-trained Journalists as Fellows, we recommend reserving the String Contractor spot for someone who is actually a veteran news person with real savvy. Thus pilloried, the Oldster will never be able to put on airs of superiority, even if he or she is manifestly more qualified than our Fellows. The Oldster is a potential threat, because he or she will have real Knowledge that could damage the system if it were imparted to Fellows. But if Fellows believe the String Contractor is a superannuated no-account, he or she will get no traction.

Once again, loyalty and rivalry are strengthened through enlightened Liberal or Conservative policy.

Awards are another gambit on the checklist. Our New Journalism virtual publication will not actually hand out its own Awards, because that could be a drain on resources of the financial kind. But we will assure our Fellows that we will help them garner Awards doled out by other Journalistic and quasi-Journalistic groups. We are aware ourselves that Awards are really empty vessels that rarely recognize real Quality in Journalism, but Journalists New and Old rarely discover this fact because they become obsessed with winning more Awards than their fellow Fellows.

Again, the handing out of Awards promotes a sense of inequality, which keeps writers striving to best each other. Divide and Conquer is important in New Journalism, because we certainly, despite the fact that we are LIBERAL or CONSERVATIVE, would not want our Fellows to get any ideas of starting a UNION.

All of these measures — Stars, Awards, Rivalry, Pecking Order — work towards accomplishment of a primary goal linked to Law Number Four which has to do with filling our publication interminably with written material of never mind the Quality.

Here were are talking about Story Quotas. The actual number of stories we will require of our Fellows is not crucial. Perhaps 4-7 per week will work, though the number may be elevated if the need becomes greater. It is important, though, to give the impression that because the salary, er, Stipend, is based on part-time work, the stories can be very, very short and still count. Once a Fellow is acclimated to the pay structure, he or she may be requested to work longer hours than the Stipend’s puny amount would suggest is fair, and Fellows may be obliged to travel without remuneration for expenses. While this may not sit well with some of the more surly of Fellows, and likely will offend the String Contractor, the Star System and Award Promise will help offset any disloyal impulses.

It may be mentioned by some cynical writer that a Story Quota places Quantity over Quality of writing. To which the proper response would be, So what? Since when did Journalism New or Old stress Excellence over meeting the demands of Immutable Law Number Four which demands that the paper be filled, filled, filled?

If some smart-ass comes back at us with the observation that Star Systems, Rivalry, Story Quotas and Awards are all tried and true motivational techniques used by mainstream Old Journalism, the proper response would be simply a loud, raucous laugh followed by a “You don’t say!” If that doesn’t quell dissent, simply state that as New Journalists, we are Independent and thus not controlled by the kind of sordid managers who make rules for the Old Way.

We are New and Different, utterly Independent, even if we borrow the managerial tricks of our avowed enemies in Old Journalism.

So here you have a Checklist for New Journalism that should instill Discipline and Pride among our Fellows:

Stars

Awards

Quotas

Rivalry

Pecking Order

Most importantly: If our Fellows busy themselves with one-upping and down-putting their colleagues, they’ll never have the unity and solidarity Old Journalists would have inspired to organize and demand we raise their piss-poor pay.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

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Shoestring ethics policy

by Joel Thurtell on July 23, 2008

Ride hard, shoot straight and speak the shining truth.

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Future of newspapers, 1.1

by Joel Thurtell on July 23, 2008

By Joel Thurtell

When I started this blog, I fully intended to turn it into a carbon copy of the Detroit Free Press community newspaper whose pages ran my stories for the past several years. That was before I understood what I was getting into with the blog. Maybe I should say that was before I realized how entrapped my brain was in the newspaper’s peculiar and, from my new perspective, rigid manner of thinking.

Yes, I planned to write “cover stories” similar to the ones I banged out for the good old Free Press. But that was then. Which is to say less than a month into this brave new world, I’m starting to realize that I’ve stepped into a dimension where I am free to re-invent my writing and myself. I don’t HAVE to write cover stories. Wow, what a thought. I like to think I pushed the envelope by writing first-person accounts of my experiences trying out things — blowing glass, carving an ice sculpture, playing a church organ, rowing a shell in the Detroit River and so on. But no matter how I tried to free myself from the constraints of mundane journalism, I was ensnared in the paper journalist’s rule book.

If there is to be a future for newspapers, their owners had better toss that rule book out. Problem is, they don’t understand there is a rule book. Worse, it’s really hard to figure out the rules in this new game called the Internet.

Here’s what I mean about freeing myself from those old, arbitrary and, yes, irrational, rules. Imagine that you are assigned to crank out five stories a week about a geographic area that for some reason is called “Downriver” and another one called, seemingly more reasonably, “Plymouth-Canton-Northville.” You get an idea for a story in a Downriver community, say, River Rouge. Great. But you can’t write it. Why not? Well Downriver is not Downriver, as far as your newspaper is concerned. Example: To all the world, River Rouge, a town situated just south of Detroit at the confluence of the Rouge and Detroit Rivers, seems to me is as Downriver as a town can get. But your newspaper has chosen not to deliver your Community Free Press weekly section to River Rouge. ny story you write about the town will not be read there. Thus, according to the perverse logic of your newspaper, River Rouge is NOT Downriver. And because it’s not Downriver, even though it IS Downriver, you can’t write about it.

See what I mean? It’s whacky, but we had to train ourselves to think that way. It was the same under Knight-Ridder, before Gannett bought the Free Press and Knight Ridder vanished into thin air.

It was Newspaper Think, and it’s why the papers are in trouble. How can you reach out to people, cajole them into buying your paper and paying for your ads, when you pretend they’re not there?

It wasn’t new to the Free Press. When I came back from the strike in 1997, a fellow reporter and friend at the Free Press warned me that certain suburban communities weren’t being covered, he believed because so many of their inhabitants had stopped subscribing to the paper because they sympathized with the strike. Some of these communities were Downriver, some were in western Wayne. I sat through a meeting with editors who put little stickers on the county maps. Favored communities got “platinum” stickers. Upon my return in ‘97, I was assigned to the Oakland Bureau in Royal Oak. I was to cover the various Bloomfields and Pontiac, but the city editor told me not to bother with Pontiac because what he wanted was coverage of the “moneybags” in the Bloomfields.

Who wins in a situation like that? Not the people of River Rouge. Not the people in Pontiac. Not even the people in the Bloomfields we were supposed to suck up to. Maybe they would LIKE to read about Pontiac.

Not the people in other Downriver towns who might like to know what’s up with their neighbors. Not the newspaper, for that matter, because it’s not faithfully representing communities even though it claims to be covering them. And when a reporter has to explain to someone with a legitimate story idea that it can’t be done not because it’s a bad idea, but because it’s happening on the wrong side of the tracks, both sides know the situation is ridiculous. Isn’t there a word for it in banking and insurance? “Redlining,” I believe it’s called.

But that is the newspaper mind set, and a reporter has to self-censor his or her articles to conform to the delivery map of the paper’s production department.

Compare this to the web. As a blogger, I can write that River Rouge story. When I visit my son in Los Angeles, I’ll write about what I find there. As a blogger, you see, I don’t have to be concerned about printing and delivering physical papers. It was that huge assignment — every day running presses and trucking paper products all around the state and beyond — that so limits the imagination of newspaper managers that they can’t possibly do the creative thinking they need to do to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve made for their businesses. And since I’m not selling ads, I have no incentive to discriminate by geography.

Little by little, I’m understanding how chained my imagination was, how snarled up in absurd territorial-think I was. And so gradually, I find that I’m thinking of stories not only beyond my old geographic limits, but also topics into which I never before dared stray.

For instance, have a look at my piece on Joe Haydn and how I geek myself, energize myself, in the morning. You wouldn’t have seen that in the Free Press. Watch for more of these faux-music critiques. Why not? So what if I lack the credentials of a musical Authority? What difference does it make that I think the circle of fifths is a container of booze? I’ll write about the music I like when I like. That’s one difference between blogging and newspapering.

There are other differences. I just haven’t figured them out.

Send me a line at joelthurtell(a)gmail.com

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Future of Newspapers, 1

by Joel Thurtell on July 23, 2008

By Joel Thurtell

Seems like the demise of newspapers is on people’s minds. I stopped at the Plymouth, Mich. shop of glass blower Don Schneider, who gave me his take on the Detroit dailies’ apparently unstoppable descent toward doom.

The Free Press and the News have blown it, he told me. Blown it multiple times in their ill-begotten Joint Operating Agreement, forcing a strike from which they never recovered and now downsizing themselves nearly out of existence.

After my talk with Don, I opened an email from a former Free Press colleague who’s still at the paper. She told me how a manager explained that the recent departure of 16 Free Press staffers through buyouts won’t add to the workload of those who remain because Gannett has a plan: The gurus in Virginia who own Michigan’s oldest daily will simply reduce the paper’s size so there’s less copy to write and edit and less space for photos.

Presto — less work! What geniuses! That’s on top of what I estimate as a 35 percent reduction in news space since mid-2005. You can’t help wonder if readers notice.

Of course they do!

People are, generally speaking, pretty doggone smart.

Today, 12-11-07, I opened an email asking if if I’d talk to a group of suburban women who badly want someone in the news industry to explain to them what’s going on with their newspapers. Well, I’m retired from the news biz, but I’m always glad to talk.

It happens that early this year I was asked to speak to a group of community college students about, guess what? “The Future of Newspapers.” I gave the talk at Schoolcraft College. Here, with a few changes, is the speech on “The Future of Newspapers.”

Man, that’s a killer. Who came up with that topic, anyway? I’d like to meet that person. No, I’d like to…Never mind. I agreed to talk about The Future of Newspapers, so here I am. But wait a minute. What do we mean by newspapers? Are we talking about newspapers that are printed on actual, real, feel-it-and-the-ink-slides-off-on-your-hand paper? Or are we talking about this new-fangled gizmo, the electronic, or digital, whatever – computerized Internet news that has no connection to paper at all?

I’m going to assume we’re talking about both – the whole kit and kaboodle.

Great. Now, who am I to talk about such a weighty topic? What is my expertise? I’m just a beat reporter. Some days, with all these electronic advances, like how do I do this audio and video recording or coping with clogged email, I feel real, real beat.

If we’re talking about the future of newspapers nationwide, or worldwide even, I probably know less than some or maybe even all of you. I’m not taking a class on the topic. To be candid, I’ve never taken any kind of journalism class. So who am I to talk about the future of newspapers?

Well, not having formally studied the topic, it’s possible that I might see things somewhat differently. I do believe that what we are talking about is a very simple thing: How to persuade people to buy newspapers and how to persuade those people and maybe others as well to purchase advertising in our papers. Paper or electronic, it doesn’t matter. Unless we’re being subsidized by some rich foundation, we need to sell papers as the vehicle for the ads that we also sell, and together, that is what ensures that our paychecks don’t bounce.

I know a little something about this. A long time ago, I was editor of a very, very small circulation weekly newspaper. It was called the Journal Era and it circulated with a very weak pulse to begin with in Berrien Springs and Eau Claire, two towns in southwestern Michigan. In 1979, I became editor of the Journal Era. That meant that I reported and wrote all the news, wrote editorials, an occasional column, features; I took the photos and developed the film, printed the negatives, laid out the pages, answered the phone, sold an occasional ad and watched the publishers cull deadwood. What I mean by deadwood is that they were slowly figuring out which subscribers had not paid and were on the mailing list simply to puff up the circulation figures for the former owner so he could defraud the new owners when he sold the paper to them. Gradually, the new publishers discovered that the paper did not have the 2,000 paid subscribers the old owner had touted. It’s a good thing we didn’t know at the outset that only 700 people thought enough of our paper to pay for it.

In little over a year, we had pumped the numbers up to a real 2000 paid subscribers. We had some things going for us. First, we lacked credibility because the former owner had squandered it. This was good. It gave us contrast against the past. As we struggled to regain what the previous owner had frittered away, people slowly realized we were different. We created our own identity. The contrast was dramatic. People came to trust us. Credibility. Very important. Another thing we had going. We were curious. If it seemed interesting to us, we would find out about it and write about it. No matter how goofball the topic. None of us were journalists, so we didn’t know what was the norm for news. We had courage. We investigated and broke stories that made life uncomfortable for some people, including us. We alienated neighbors and big wigs who benefited from secrecy. We had flexibility. We could try something one week, see if it sold papers. If it didn’t, we could stop it pronto, no recriminations, no layoffs.

From 700 to 2000 – that’s a 285 percent increase. Pretty heady. I felt like a real dragon slayer. Now around that time in Detroit, in 1981, the paid daily circulation of the Detroit Free Press was said to be 622,129. I joined the Free Press as a reporter in 1984. I had great ideas about how I could make a difference. Detroit – wow! This was the Great Newspaper War. I sent a memo to the executive editor, Dave Lawrence, outlining my plan for printing the Free Press on the presses of out-state dailies and really eclipsing our arch rival, the Detroit News. I quoted Ulysses Grant on the art of war. Find the enemy, hit him fast and hard and move on. There was bitter rivalry between the News and Free Press in those days. I worked hard to break hot stories. It was not as easy as it was at the weekly, though. It was weird. It was supposed to be war, but it seemed like we pulled our punches. There were committees of editors who could blunt a story or stop it entirely.

By 2007, Free Press circulation was 318,000. That’s a decline of 49 percent from 1981. Man, I feel like a failure. I’m kidding, of course. Back in 1984, I got my audience with the big boss. Dave Lawrence listened politely and explained why each of my ideas was harebrained. Notice, however, that out-state dailies are now printing the Chicago Tribune and New York Times. What if the Free Press had done that back in the eighties? Little did I know that I was tilting against culture. At the Free Press, the state edition was considered a throwaway, of no interest to advertisers. But think of the circulation they could have built. My plan also called for bureaus in towns like Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids. Oh well. There’s not much one person can do as we hear that those kinds of declines are being reflected across the country.

I’m trained as a historian, not as a journalist. So I am loath to predict the future. But I believe that if we look at the past, we can learn some important lessons that may help us understand where we are headed. If we ask the right questions.There is too much generalizing about the future of newspapers. Their general demise is prematurely predicted. The general does not explain the particular, nor does the particular necessarily explain the general. If newspapers are all losing readers, how is it that the Philadelphia Inquirer just reported a circulation increase?

Certainly, the experience in Detroit is unique. In that span of time between 1981 and 2007, we have seen major disruptions. Nothing to do with the Internet. First, there was the Joint Operating Agreement in 1989. Gannett at the News and Knight-Ridder at the Free Press actually had an amazing thing – 40 percent of readers took both papers. And the companies wanted to get rid of the duplicate readers. Circulation declined after the JOA and directly because of the monopoly. Deliberate self-sabotage and incompetent implemention drove readers away. Did I say self-inflicted injury? Just wait. In 1995, the companies provoked a strike. Circulation went down by roughly a third and stayed that way. Self-inflicted. I still find people who refuse after nearly 12 years to re-start the Free Press. Recently, circulation at the Free Press and News has plummeted. The Free Press went from 342,000 readers in January 2006 to 318,000 in January 2007, an eight percent decline. The Detroit News went from 217,000 to 193,000 in the same period, an 11 percent drop. One year!

The JOA and the strike carved huge numbers of readers away. So it would seem. But we have to question everything. Remember that deadwood I mentioned at the Journal Era? When I came to the Free Press in 1984, I was shocked to see the Detroit News telling advertisers it was selling 1,000 copies a day in Berrien County. I knew that was a lie. I used to string for the News, and I couldn’t buy the paper in Berrien Springs. I had to drive to Benton Harbor, where it was sold at one newsstand only. We heard tales of whole semi-loads of the News being dumped daily, of huge quantities of the News being found in ditches. I was sure they were lying about their numbers. I was outraged. In my Ulysses Grant memo to Dave Lawrence, I urged the executive editor to investigate the fraud at the News. A pal at the Free Press laughed at me. He predicted nothing would be done because, he claimed, the Free Press was fudging its numbers, too. This was the Great Newspaper War, remember. Think about this: In 1981, both Detroit papers were claiming a combined circulation on Sunday of more than 1.5 million copies. Today, the lone Sunday paper, the Free Press, claims 631,000 subscribers. A 58 percent loss. Wow. But is it possible that the 1981 figure is bogus? And if those earlier numbers were inflated, that means the decline in circulation now being lamented was not nearly as dramatic as it’s being portrayed. I don’t know. But I think some Ph.D. candidate in history would find a very interesting dissertation topic questioning the very foundation of our fears. What if the baseline for our grief over newspapers’ demise turned out to be a mirage? It’s hard to talk about the future if we’re glimpsing the past through a thicket of misconceptions, misinformation and lies.

Nowadays, it seems that the big downward driving factor for circulation is the Internet. Right? Nobody talks about JOAs or strikes or mendacious circulation claims.

I wonder. Over the past 20 years at the Free Press, I’ve listened to editors lecture us in meeting after meeting on how important it is for us to somehow attract young readers. I know young readers. I have two sons, ages 24 and 27. We don’t have to go after them. They read newspapers. But they don’t subscribe to them. They read them online. Free.

Are we wasting time trying to attract readers we don’t have, never will have or already have on the free Internet while shortchanging readers who are actually paying for the paper? I hear from middle-aged and older people now that they are freeloading online, too. Nobody is forcing newspapers to ramp up the money-losing Internet while undercutting the for-pay product. Let’s not blame the Internet.

It appears to me that newspapers are putting more and more effort and time into online reports. But not only are they getting no reimbursement for the news, they’re having a hard time selling ads online. Nationwide, online advertising accounts for only 5 percent of newspaper ad revenues.

The print papers still produce 95 percent of the revenue, yet readers of the print paper are being shortchanged by increasingly smaller news holes and stories that are hastily reported. I think readers know this. Could a decline in quality explain why people are canceling subscriptions? If so, the fault can’t be the Internet. Once again, self-inflicted harm.

I actually have hope for the future of newspapers. Journalists mostly lack originality. They follow the leader. If the decline is more apparent than real, they are not likely to see it unless somebody at a bigger paper begins to say it. Still, there is a breaking from the ranks. Keep your eyes on the papers that are privately owned. Wall Street has a hand in many of the decisions that are ruining the quality of our news. Some newspaper owners seem to realize this and are taking their papers private. Examples are the Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. We see new people owning papers. They apparently see that newspapers are able to return 15 to 20 percent on their investment where supermarket chains are lucky to yield 5 percent. To them, the papers look like a good investment.

The future of newspapers, whether paper or digital, may well lie with those owners who are able to fine-tune their operations without bullying from Wall Street and institutional investors. The future of newspapers may be with those editors and publishers who can think independently, separate their decision-making from the pack mentality and find flexibility to experiment and change quickly.One thing is sure. If newspapers are to survive, whether paper or digital, they need to find more good old-fashioned credibility, curiosity and courage. Forget pandering to age groups or other special interests. Good stories appeal to everyone. If they don’t, people will see no reason to pay for them.

Newspapers will survive. I’m not so sure about the owners of newspapers. But in my next post, I’ll explain why I think newspapers — in the broadest sense — will always be with us.

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

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