Our Primary Focus

The only thing certain about the future of journalism is that there will be at least two conferences somewhere this week to discuss the future of journalism. Well, maybe not during the holiday season.

You also are likely to see some columns roundly condemning News Corp for threatening to block Google from searching its sites, because News Corp is obligated to give its work away for free. So says Jeff Jervis, who wrote “What Would Google Do?” available at Amazon.com for a mere $17.81. The newest wrinkle is that News Corp is negotiating with Microsoft and its search site, Bing, which could actually result in real revenue flowing back to newspapers.

I haven’t yet written the book “Who Should Paid Search Pay?” but know that I would include people who actually create content. Those of us not blinded by the miracles of technology will be heartened by the idea that some day we might again get paid for our work. But what should your union do about these questions right now, when there are no immediate answers?

We’ve spent a fair amount of time working the issues: attending those many conferences, testifying before Congress, working with reform groups and promoting alternative ownership ideas. And we’ll continue to pursue cooperatives, employee stock-ownership and agency-style employment ownership models, like the News Project in San Francisco that brings together public broadcasting, the Guild and the Berkeley J-school.

We’ll also continue seeking legal changes that would enable quality journalism to survive. I’ll state loudly that if banks can be bailed out, journalism can, too. Do we want direct infusions of government money into newspapers? No — meaning we don’t want a situation in which government controls the press. But if it’s possible to create a hands-off public endowment that helps sustain news organizations, digital and otherwise, why not?

But our primary focus in the coming months will be on answering the question, “What does a media union look like?” Between the collapse of the traditional business model and the overall economic meltdown, we need to look at our own resources. We need to examine who our community of interest is, and how we grow it.

Very real discussions are taking place about strengthening our ties to freelancers and stringers. It’s possible the future of media work will rely on more contingent labor — but that doesn’t mean such workers should be forced into the economic fringe. Quality journalism requires quality compensation, not to mention a sense of dignity and a voice in one’s working conditions. Our commitment must be to all media workers, and several Guild locals are already pushing in that direction.

We’re also formulating a strategic study of our resources and goals, with the understanding that the challenges posed by a rapidly shifting industry will require us to be willing to change ourselves. Many Guild locals already are looking into mergers with other locals and sharing resources. We are reappraising how we assign work at the national level and how that work gets done. This is about acknowledging the challenges before they become a crisis. We’ll work with local leaders to reorient our union, and hope to suggest material changes by next summer.

What we will not do is concede defeat and give up. Our locals have been making a huge difference in the lives of their members, and while they haven’t always liked the choices confronting them, they’ve been able to negotiate and improve outcomes. Indeed, the biggest reason for hope is the resolute nature of the activists I see throughout the union.

We all have to deal with change. But we don’t have to accept outcomes that don’t preserve quality jobs and decent working conditions. There will be a media industry and media workers 10 years from now. The only real question is whether the workers will have any say in what the industry looks like. I’m betting we will.

Unions as relevant as ever

The predictable onslaught of anti-union articles about the crisis at the Chicago Sun-Times has already started. My favorite is the one that contends the paper deserves to die because ungrateful Guild members rejected sweeping concessions demanded by a potential buyer. Why aren’t they happy just to have a job?

Many of those Guild members won’t have jobs even if they do accept the concessions, so the more relevant question for us has to be what kind of contract they’ll have. The Guild has negotiated concessions all over the country during this bleak period, with no two resulting agreements alike. Our goal has been to bargain what is needed, given the reality of the particular situation.

So why, then, would multiple bargaining units in two separate locals vote four-to-one  not to accept the concessions demanded by Jim Tyree, a Chicago billionaire and power broker who is making noises about buying the Sun-Times? Tyree’s deal was put forward on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, but the specifics weren’t disclosed for weeks–and then it turned out he was demanding much more from the Guild than from any of the other Sun-Times unions, raising questions about why someone claiming to be union-friendly insists on gutting the Guild.

At the core of the disagreement are severance and job security, which under Tyree’s ultimatum would be negligible. The gun-to-the-head proposal comes amazingly close to employment-at-will, with all employees vulnerable to being tapped on the shoulder and asked to leave at any moment. But Tyree, in numerous interviews, has explained he needs complete “flexibility”–that without such carte blanche he might have to meet with union representatives to do what he wants. Which, when you think about it, is a strange point of view for someone who claims to respect unions and who also invests a lot of union money in his core business, at Mesrow Financial.

In truth, the Guild has had many conversations with Tyree and his representatives, working diligently toward that elusive balance between management flexibility on one hand and workplace protection and  dignity on the other. But because we won’t agree to “complete flexibility” on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, we’re accused of arrogance while Tyree publicly laments that after working for six months and spending half-a-million dollars in putting together his bid he should be able to get everything he wants.

Compare this one-sided approach to recent events in Portland, Maine, where the Portland Press-Herald and three other media properties were sold in a package that includes an employee stock ownership plan. More than a year of negotiations resulted in employees exchanging significant workplace and wage concessions for an equity stake in the company, while their  unions won seats on the board of directors. Among the happy results: a recent round of buyouts may make layoffs unnecessary. Joint labor-management committees meet regularly to improve the product and to revitalize the business model.

Critics of newspapers and other traditional news organizations claim that newspaper people have only themselves to blame for the current mess. There is some truth in this. Many newspaper organizations have been rigidly hierarchical, their lack of flexibility entrenched by years of fat profits. But when all that ended, with ad revenue migrating to the internet and the economy plunging into recession, the reflexive response too often was to shed front-line workers. Few of the critics, meanwhile, have questioned the vitality of a business in which all wisdom comes from on high while creative front-line workers are regarded as commodities. Those businesses are doomed to failure. Portland, on the other hand, is an attempt to try something different.

Sadly, things don’t feel all that different at the Sun-Times.

All mass media are rapidly restructuring, for better and for worse, and no one really knows what success will look like. But I’ll venture that whatever it is, it’ll come from the “creatives” who actually gather, edit and disseminate information–the ones getting kicked out the door by people with too much money and not enough sense.

So contrary to what our critics say, the Guild is not trying to hang on to the past–precisely because it’s mired in that self-defeating, top-down mentality. We’re more interested in building the future. We’re prepared to be flexible and to help management succeed. We believe there is still value in news organizations that have a critical mass, enough to provide quality news. We also know that smaller products and independent journalists have a vital role to play. Our goal is to follow the work and to advocate for those workers who provide quality content.

So when you see those stories that castigate the Guild for being hidebound and unwilling to change, don’t believe them. Instead, take a hard look at the facts and decide whether something new is being created, or whether it’s just one more attempt to perpetuate the old, unsustainable model.

And let’s hope that reasonableness prevails at the Sun-Times. We’re all in this together.

Labor Day 2009

Labor Day, 2009. A day for shopping I guess. Started the day by listening to a National Public Radio piece that was in essence promoting decertification of a union shop in the South so that they could steal business from a union shop in a “right to work with honor” state. Even NPR plays to conservatives that would do nothing to help the real plight of workers.

We see that almost 10 percent of our fellow Americans are out of work, which really means the number is much higher, because the statistic has been cynically shaded so as to not reveal true unemployment.

And I see attacks on Labor, as always from the left, even on my own organization’s website. You have to love the left. No group has ever been harder on its leaders, or ever so busy always tearing them down – of course always in the name of renewal. But extremists never win the day, left or right, or rarely ever.

They did have a patron saint in the last president. This was a man that never let a reasonable decision get in the way of partisan ideology. So we’re left with a decimated culture, unemployment, foreclosure and serious pain, but we lead the news day with an ad for workers to get rid of their union.

I watched an incredible documentary on the rebuilding of the Parthenon in Greece. But what I remembered most was the description of democracy. The Greeks had brought it to the world, and they had done it by joining two words that translate into “people power.”

The real battle that’s taking place in America is between people power and the status quo.

Extremist ideologies have formed the decisions for the last several years, but now, when we’ve voted for and demanded change we’re told it’s not possible. We see the current administration, that so many of us badly want to support, backing off on everything we hold dear. The status quo, the money power, refuses to go easily, and they still have kindred friends in conservatives and those on the right that would take down Obama for any reason really.

So what to do? Join one of the purist camps, and complain about how nothing is good enough and no leader can be trusted. Don’t watch the President at school cause he might talk about what he believes in (like Reagan did in his anti-government, anti-tax screed broadcast to students in the 80’s).

Understand that Labor Day was about celebrating advances made by workers, not a day to shop at Best Buy. Maybe there isn’t much to celebrate this year. That means it is time to get to work, to build credibility and people power. When you’re told that you can’t create real change, don’t accept it. When you’re told you can’t trust any leaders, don’t believe it.

If we insist on talking about reasonable solutions based on fairness, justice and democracy we can still build a strong America. It’s really up to us, together, to decide what kind of world we want to live in. Do we want to be able to celebrate how well workers are treated in our civilized country, or hide out at Best Buy? You decide.

Prepared Comments to St. Louis SPJ, April 25

Clyde Bentley, U of MO. Professor, Neal Ralston, U of West KY Professor (moderator), Bernie Lunzer, Guild President and Arnie Robbins, Editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch spoke to the St. Louis SPJ about the future of print journalism.

I love the smell of newsprint in the morning. How long will we smell that smell? And why does it matter to journalism?

A couple of years ago I would have thought that our major metro dailies would have time for the transition to digital. And I believed, as I still do, that there’s a place for print. A substantial portion of America doesn’t have broadband – can’t afford it – won’t see your stories on the web. Papers in Europe and Japan continue to draw profits from print as they transition – good product still sells. TV didn’t kill radio – print will survive in some form.

But for some news organizations that have relied on their print product for the bulk of their profits, the current situation is a nightmare. Some won’t make it. If we’re to believe the “creative destructionists” it doesn’t matter. These are the conservative romantics that believe this is just a tectonic shift – a force of nature. While we’re not being attacked from the right as the liberal media, or the left as the mainstream media, we’re being attacked by the tragically hip technologists who say, preserve nothing, great journalism will rise from the ashes.

I’m not so certain. We might have to live through an information and news “dark ages” before we get to the other side. The problem is that very few digital products exist that can sustain the level of investigative or local journalism that we’ve come to expect. Some say the big newspaper newsrooms are dinosaurs – perhaps, but they have set the gold standard for quality journalism in America.

It still astounds me to hear average Americans express surprise when you explain that most original news found on the web, and echoed in broadcast, originates in newspapers. You have to explain that the blogosphere can only do what it does because of the hard news injected into the news cycle by newspapers. We are starting to see some new examples that are the seeds of real news to come on the web – like MinnPost in my hometown – but even those online publications currently feed off the existence of newspapers like the Pioneer Press and the bankrupt Star Tribune.

What can we do – what are we doing? We’re looking for solutions and help wherever we can. The Guild has been particularly active promoting new types of ownership – employee stock ownership, which will likely be a reality in Portland, Maine this week; co-op ownership, like the Puerto Rico Daily Sun in San Juan, where we replaced the closed English-daily. We’re working on non-profits, and hybrids, like the new corporate L3C model, that allows a for profit organization to accept foundation money.  We don’t believe there’s one answer. We’ll facilitate whatever works in individual markets.

I testified before a congressional sub-committee on Tuesday against relaxing anti-trust law. Publishers like Hearst and MediaNews are pursuing this solution, but we’ve opposed it out of concern that it will just result in fewer journalists and less innovation. It won’t create anything new – it will forestall the inevitable, while encouraging bad practices. Generally monopolies don’t work. Joint-operating agreements already exist, with the requirement that separate newsrooms be maintained, and in the end even that didn’t save the Rocky or the P-I. Still, speaking for the Guild, we’ll sit and talk to anyone with an idea on new business models.

Here’s the sad truth though – the most important asset within news organizations, the front-line journalist, has been under full-scale attack for several years. Corporations that should know better have balanced the books on the backs of the people that do the work that matters. This is what the current “perfect storm” and market ideology has done. It is not sustainable. Subscribers are not fools – they know when the product is weak. Quality will sell, where it is pursued. Empty papers will blow away.

What to do? We should seek help where we can get it. That means pursuing legislative changes like tax deductions for subscriptions to news products (not just print), tax credits for employing journalists and new laws that enable new business structures. We don’t want direct subsidies from government – no one would find that acceptable. And for those that say government has no role – study your history. The early American government, in the 1790’s, gave postal subsidies specifically to help print publications. Many of the founders were either journalists, or contributing writers. We can and should pursue policy that creates an environment that supports journalism. It’s not a new idea. (These ideas were put forward strongly by my fellow panelists at the House hearing, Ben Scott of FreePress, John Nichols and C. Edwin Baker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School).

But surviving news organizations need to tap their talent. Front-line journalists, and advertising salespeople, should be engaged in dialogues with the publishers and editors about making the products work. The top-down hierarchy of the old newsrooms need to be discarded – they are a big reason why many newspapers have not been successful in defining the new era.

I don’t mean to dismiss the other serious issues – Google needs to be taken to task for draining all the revenue online. The paid search companies and aggregators of our work need to help. We’ll need to find a way to recapture some of the online revenue. Those that profit from our work need to provide a “fair share for fair use,” a concept I’ve worked on with Ken Doctor, one of the smarter analysts in the industry right now. This won’t be easy. But at the end of the day if you value something, you’ll have to pay for it.

Bankruptcies that are used to restructure news organizations in a top-down way won’t save those publications. We’re involved in 5 current bankruptcies, on each creditors committee, and we’re seeing first hand the mistakes that have been made in running some of these businesses. Taking away pay, vacation and seniority won’t cure struggling businesses. We’re committed to partnering with organizations that train and trust front-line workers – that tap the knowledge and skill of journalists.

But journalists also must recognize that the future of the news and information industry in America is in their hands. The old days of just keeping your head down and doing your job won’t cut it. Engage. Get involved. Hope is built on good ideas and hard work. If you’re looking for the adults who are in charge, look in the mirror. It’s up to you.

On futher consideration

I’ve had some folks ask me – weren’t you kind of hard on Shirky – he may have said that we don’t need newspapers, but he actually wants to preserve the same things you say you value.

Correct – I could have changed my initial blog – but it’s better to acknowledge it this way. I’m mostly angry with people that rush to the assumption that we should be comfortable with this revolution – that’s clearly not what Shirky intended. I’d like to believe that the digital products can quickly fill the void. Not likely.

Brilliant Drivel

Brilliant Drivel – a response to Clay Shirky’s proclamation that we don’t need newspapers

I saw Craig Newmark’s pronouncement that there was a very important article about journalism just posted by Clay Shirky. Although the piece was well-written, it made me angry and still searching for solutions.

Part of my response had to do with attending the San Francisco Chronicle unit meeting of the California Media Workers on Saturday. It was an emotional meeting, where a very tough decision was voted up. The workers at the Chron gave up a lot, out of love for the paper. It was made all the more difficult because Hearst took advantage, pursuing ideological desire rather than real economic need. I saw pain, and a lot of very good people who had their bags packed.

So reading Shirky’s piece about how we don’t need newspapers just pissed me off. Yes, we get it. The business model is broke. Craig Newmark must still feel some guilt about the disastrous effect Craigslist has had on speeding the demise. Newmark was not a brilliant revolutionary, just a timely opportunist. He did what the newspapers should have done. Good for Craig. But I don’t want his guilt, I want his help. Don’t just suggest that there’s a need for good journalism, help us fund the new models.

We’re supposed to just feel good that we’re living through a revolution. I guess we could have written a blog for Europe during the bubonic plague saying, “Get over it. It’s happening, it will trim the herd, and there’ll be more stuff for those who are left. So what if you lose a few family members.” That would have made it okay.

And stop saying that we’re trying to preserve newspapers. We’re not. It’s always been about the journalism. And don’t insult us with the “You’ll miss us when we’re gone” line. Anyone who has seen the direct effect on communities of uncovering corruption, scandal and exploitation knows that there is little real replacement for good journalism. We get that it can be delivered in different ways. That’s not the problem. You need a critical mass, a large enough news organization, a way to pay writers and editors, if you’re going to provide good journalism to cities and communities.

We have been all talking about new experiments, and trying new things. The industry did not plan well for the internet. The collapse of unfettered, free-market capitalism, simultaneous to the onslaught of the “everything should be free” web, is a full-blown disaster. We can all look around and see that many of the answers are not coming in time. I know, too, that many people are hurting in this economy.

But let’s please get to the solutions. I would have been more impressed with an article that had new ideas – about new corporations, like L3C’s, about co-op efforts like the new Puerto Rico Daily Sun, or ESOP efforts like that being attempted in Portland, Maine. We understand that print is giving way to digital, but there’s much more to the story.

Let’s be clear about revenue. The current internet model is not fair to content creators. Under the current model, almost all the revenue on the web goes to Google and other aggregators. They feed off content, but don’t share back. That’s unacceptable. A solution may take time and not come soon enough, but one has to be found.

Those of us who have worked in and around news organizations all our lives, know that something truly valuable is being lost. At the Chron meeting, one member said, “Our work has value.” You wouldn’t know it from the behavior of so many, including owners like Hearst.

We need real innovation and real investment. We have known for some time that there is not a simple solution. Merely repeating that and stating that it will be good for us in the long run is pretty damned empty. We’ll be looking for financial investment back into working products, even some that will include print products. Europe and Japan show us that we shouldn’t just be tragically hip and write off real cash flows. But we should reinvest that money back into digital. The platform shift is real. We get it.

Because our work has value, we’ll need revenue from endowments, foundations, non-profits, L3C’s, LLC’s, trusts, consumers. We have to find a way to pay for this work or it will go away. And if you think that’s just the way it is, and we’ll get through it, and things will all work out, and people will blog for free, etc. – grow up. We’ll be wandering in the wilderness for some time.

Our culture and economy is in crisis. Greed became a sacrament in the early ’80s, and high finance replaced an economy that built things. Hard work was not only no longer rewarded, it was scorned. We’ve been made to pay billions into the failed enterprises of the high priests of this religion of unfettered capitalism. I have yet to see a room full of bankers come together and make the courageous choice I saw made yesterday. And now you’re telling me that we can afford to go a decade or longer without access to reputable, sourced, edited, credible information on how our businesses and government work?

What we do right now is vital. We need real talk of real solutions for the information industry, not brilliant drivel about how change will be good for us. We need good journalism. Yes, Shirky says that. But he insults us when he says we don’t need newspapers – suggesting that our mission has been only to pulp trees into newsprint. For a very long time newspapers have been the core of good journalism. That is endangered, and the absence of good journalism will be a full-blown crisis.

I’m angry for all the good journalists, some that haven’t even started their careers, who won’t be able to work. I’m troubled by a culture that will lose access to vital information. But let’s not be angry – let’s get to work.

Following up on yesterday’s post on the RNC debacle

This is a must read story on MinnPost.com by Coleen Rowley, who retired in 2004 from a 24-year FBI career and is a frequent speaker on issues relating to ethical decision-making and the need to balance national security and civil liberties. In 2002 she brought to light several pre-9/11 intelligence lapses. She says, “For the majority of residents for whom the Republican National Convention (RNC) in St. Paul is but a distant bad memory and who don’t have the time or inclination to wade through the recently released 97-page RNC Commission Report & Executive Summary, there’s little reason to read beyond the first footnote. There, former criminal prosecutors Thomas Heffelfinger and Andrew Luger lay out their response to community members, like me, who asked whether such aggressive “police state” action during the RNC was actually necessary. Their simplistic answer is that it was, but they furnish little by way of proof for that conclusion.”

She states further, “Perhaps the worst mistake made in the RNC Commission Report is falling for the notion of trade-offs between security and liberty instead of seeing them as intertwined.  President Obama phrased it well in his inaugural speech statement, when he said “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals”.

Her piece is a must read.

Verdict is in: St. Paul guilty, 85% of protestors are not

RNC Protest

It brings me no great joy to castigate my hometown of St. Paul. But the recent story by Pat Pheifer in the Star Tribune makes it clear that what happened at the Republican National Convention last summer was just wrong.

A broad dragnet was used, to apparently arrest everyone in reach. I think it limited the right of many peaceful protestors to speak their minds, and I think the city didn’t care.

It also substantially kept many journalists from telling the story, as they too found themselves wrongly (as it is now clear) in custody. Check out this one specific detail from Pat Pheifer’s story – 39 cases against journalists were dropped. That’s a lot of journalist arrests in a small space of time. We also know that some of the working journalists were pepper-sprayed, and held for lengthy periods.

Yes, there was an investigation of the authorities by the authorities, which ended with them slapping themselves on the back for a job well-done.

I know that there were some bad actors on the stage in Minnesota, and they were there to cause trouble. But I also believe that law enforcement’s show of force was overkill. I don’t know who orchestrated it – don’t know how much new equipment and police overtime was involved – but there should be a lot of questions left to be answered.

As a society we have to ask ourselves if the “peace at any cost” approach taken by St. Paul is acceptable. What about the right of protest? Does it still exist within this mindset? There were detailed, lengthy reports of the game playing law enforcement did with fencing, and crowd containment. And, how do you cover the story from a jail cell?

In the end no real protest was possible, and the political pageant went off like a picnic (with a little tear gas wafting in on the breeze).

What have you done for me lately?

This is a common refrain in member-based organizations, but it was refreshing to get this question from the NiemanJournalismLab blog the other day.
I posted a long response (see the article and responses at http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/02/unions-its-time-to-step-up-with-actual-ideas/).

I’ll admit that I resented the initial implication – those do nothing, trogs that are stuck in the past. Tim Windsor may have started out in the wrong place, but he did us a great service, and in the thread he acknowledges that at least the Guild is doing somethings right.

What it left me with was a strong sense of how badly unions, and the Guild, get their message out. Yeah, I’m biased. I’m the “union boss” that one of the ideologues in the conversation pointed to. We really have to tell our story. There are so many important things that are happening at all levels within our union, and I am so proud to be a part of a group that is so forward-thinking, whilst we get pillaged and plundered by the owners.

We make no bones about it – we need innovation. And we’re not going to be on the wrong side of history when it comes to that.

But we need to tell our story better. Sara Steffens accurately points out in the thread that there is a great misunderstanding as to what unions do. I think the cultural misunderstanding is there because we don’t tell our story well, and because business has a fundamental need to marginalize us. It’s important to point out that we’re about the only organized group left in the U.S. challenging the basic principle that unfettered capitalism is a religion – sort of the divine right of kings (owners). We’re not bomb throwers, because then we’d just be trying to overthrow the system. We’re trying to civilize it, and create democratic workplaces. We believe it creates better businesses.

So this blog, and our latest redo’s of the Guild Reporter and our newsguild.org site, are meant to begin to tell the story. Let’s all of us get the word out. Our industry is worth saving, and I’ve said it before – if you’re looking for the grown-ups in the room, look in the mirror. It’s up to us.

I can’t let that “union boss” thing go though. I suppose there are such beasts somewhere in the labor movement, still. To suggest such a concept in the Guild is laughable. We always say, if you get two members together, you’ll have three opinions. Telling someone what to do in the Guild – priceless, and impossible. And that’s the beauty of the Guild. We debate, haggle, argue and try to be witty. In the end, we come together to try to be a positive force for our workers and our industry. That’s who we are.

The writing is on the paywall

This recent blog by Nicholas Carr comes closest yet to realistic thinking about what the future of journalism might be. It still frustrates me in some of its conclusions (because I don’t like the possible outcomes) but it debunks many of the current prognosticators who think you don’t have to somehow pay for good journalism. It’s a must read.

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/02/misreading_news.php