Media
Media
Bring Back Colin McEnroe
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/04/2009 - 13:05Recently, WTIC cancelled Colin McEnroe’s radio show. There has been lots of discussion about this online. Stan Simpson writes what he thinks is The Real Story Behind The Purging At WTIC AM Radio : “The ousting of Colin McEnroe and Diane Smith was NOT about improving programming. It was about dumping salaries.”
John Dankosky of Connecticut Public Radio talks about some goodbyes, and notes that “responses, taken from Courant blogs, suggest more listeners might tune our way”. Christine Stuart posts about WTIC Layoffs Have One Sponsor Questioning His Support, and the Facebook group, Bring Back Colin McEnroe now has over 300 members.
Perhaps it is all about the money, the salaries, advertisers and listeners. So, what does Mr. McEnroe have to say about it? In his blog at the Courant, he writes, “I can also tell you that your energies would probably be better used contacting public radio and telling them you'd support a show like mine through memberships and donations”
So, if you want to fill out a petition to bring back Colin McEnroe, please use this form. Please enter a numeric value in the field “Contribution Amount” representing how strongly you feel about it, along with an explanation that it is showing your support for Colin McEnroe’s show in the comment section.
If you want to bring back Colin McEnroe, do it right!
Update Jan 8
Andy Thibault over at Cool Justice Report has a report about WNPR, aka Connecticut Public Radio, reaching out to Colin.
It includes this quote from Kim Grehn, VP/Station Manager - WNPR
...WNPR is exploring the possibility of bringing Colin McEnroe to WNPR and creating a program around his talents. It would be premature to suppose that he will be on WNPR. We have yet to discuss anything with Mr. McEnroe, but we have contacted him and expressed our initial interest.
Colin McEnroe is scheduled to be on Where We Live February 2nd at 9a to talk about the state of Talk Radio in Connecticut.
Reading the Community Newspaper
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/02/2009 - 13:00CTNewsJunkie reports about five possible buyers stepping up to the plate to save the newspapers around New Britain and Bristol. Over at the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell is not impressed. He suggests that what the newspapers need is not tax breaks, but a community to be involved with. I posted about this on a mailing list about journalism that I’m a member of and generated quite a discussion which I want to chronicle a little bit of here.
First, I should note that I don’t always agree with Mr. Powell’s opinions. We have had some very interesting email discussions in the past and I look forward to similar discussions in the future. Some people got stuck on the first part of his opinion piece. I will skip over that part. What is important to me is the relationship between news organizations and community.
Another caveat that I would add is that I don’t want to get into the role of State government in fostering community at this point. That is a large and complicated issue that perhaps we can explore a bit later. The interesting questions to me right now are if there is a relationship between the decline in civic involvement and newspaper reading, if there is, which is the cause and which is the effect, and finally, if there is a relationship, what can or should be done about it.
One person wrote, “Newspapers are in decline everywhere and it has nothing to do with ‘community disintegration’. It has to do with an outdated and failing business model that has been overtaken by technology.”
This is an argument I just don’t buy. According to the Newspaper Association of America, total paid circulation of newspapers has been in a fairly steady decline since the mid 80s, long before Craig Newmark started siphoning away some of the classified advertising revenues.
The response is that "Papers aren't folding because of a lack of readers, but from lack of revenue". Yet that argument doesn’t stack up all that well either. Yes, advertising revenue was off 9% in 2007 to only $42 billion dollars. Advertising revenue also took a big hit back in 2001, but even with both of those big hits, 2007 revenue is still greater than it was a decade ago.
On the list, I commented, “I would suggest that the problem isn't even completely lack of revenue. The problem in many cases is that the revenue doesn't meet the desired ROI by investors. This is compounded by newspapers not being able to meet their debt obligations as a result of LBOs. Indeed there are problems with the business model, but a large part of that may be in terms of capital structure and expected return rather than in terms of revenue.”
Another response was “the reality is that paying people to write interesting stories in order to attract eyeballs for advertisers is no longer cost effective". I don’t buy this hypothesis either.
In reply, I wrote, “If I thought that local papers were actually paying people to write interesting stories in order to attract eyeballs for advertisers, and if I thought that local papers had advertising sales people that understood the value proposition of the newspapers, I might agree with you. However, Tracey's post reflects an opinion that I hear all too often, that local newspapers are not writing interesting stories that attract eyeballs and that is a big part of the problem. On top of that, most of the advertising that I've seen seems to have moved from advertising that understands the local community and is sold cookie cutter like any other bulk advertising. The problem with this is that as there are more sources for advertising, the value of bulk advertising is plummeting. However, at the same time, the value of niche advertising is doing well.”
Many other people hopped in with stories about how the local newspapers in their areas are not producing interesting journalism, and it is the online hyperlocal sites that are reporting the news that people are seeking. Still others have noted the role of technology in helping promote community that goes beyond the idea of community being primarily geographically based.
So we come to the chicken and egg problem. Are we seeing a decrease in newspaper readership because of a decrease in community involvement? Or, are we seeing a decrease in community involvement because newspapers are not covering community news as well as they used to? I don’t have a good answer to this and would be interested in seeing more research in this area.
While Mr. Powell might be calling for the State Legislature to be doing a better job in addressing issues of community, it seems like others are calling on newspapers to also do a better job of addressing issues of community. Mr. Powell talks about the issue of illiteracy in many of our cities. Perhaps, we need better coverage of school board meetings and how our schools are addressing education. Perhaps we need journalists to step into the schools and help students understand the importance of telling their stories and reading the stories of others. I do believe that whichever came first, journalism can help address some of the issues that seem to be leading to the demise of so many local papers.
I guess this leaves me with the fundamental question: How important are news organizations in your community? Unfortunately, it sounds like they are not nearly as important as they should be in many communities and we all need to find ways to work together to rectify this.
Happy New Year!?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/01/2009 - 13:35Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, Happy New Year, and all that stuff. The snow is bright white beneath the cold deep blue sky. In the background, I hear the Rose Bowl parade on television. My mind is a bit foggy due to an annoying head cold I’m trying to shake off.
There are many things I want to write about, thoughts about the year that has just ended, hopes for the year to come, and reflections on what it all means. Yet I can’t concentrate, so this may end up being a bit stream of consciousness.
2008 was not a great year. It was difficult for us financially, as it was for many of my friends. Yesterday, I listened to Colin McEnroe do his farewell show on WTIC. I twittered parts of it, and friends listened in to WTIC’s live stream of the show. Another friend has sent me an invitation to the Facebook group, Bring Back Colin McEnroe. Colin is one of the few media personalities in Connecticut that seems to get what is going on. He appears to understand the role of the media ecology and the relationship between print, radio and online.
It is becoming popular to talk about the convergence of different types of media in the newsroom, but there is another part of convergence that should be considered. Colin, like a few other media personalities that seem to get it, also teach at various higher educational institutions in Connecticut. This makes a lot of sense to me. I wonder how many people started in journalism in hopes of educating people about what is going on. It seems like a convergence that should be promoted and nurtured.
Later, last night, I received an IM from a friend that lost his job a while ago, and has not had any luck finding a new job. We chatted and neither of us had a lot of hope for the New Year.
I read some of @BlinkyStJames tweets and her blog Anywhere But Here: Chronicling near(?) homelessness. I highly recommend her writing.
Around midnight, I was twittering with friends. One person from the left coast, still waiting for New Year’s in his town, asked those of us on the right coast if 2009 was any different from 2008. I responded that while it is good to have 2008 done with, it feels like New Year’s won’t really be here until January 20th. I’ve seen many people echoing that thought.
As I tried to find words to describe 2008, I remembered an old Calvinist joke.
What did the Calvinist say when he fell down the stairs?
Thank God, that’s over.
I guess that captures a little bit of my feeling about 2008. So, what’s on tap for 2009? I’m really not sure. I’ve kicked around resolutions to make. One is to stop rolling my eyes or shaking my head in disbelief every time the President of the United States speaks. It is going to take a little work, but I suspect I should be able to achieve that in about three weeks. With Kim’s Lyme disease currently seeming to be under control, we are hoping to get back into a little better shape. Personally, I would like it if our family could go for more walks on some of the wonderful trails around Connecticut. I would like to work on some sort of Social Media Relationship Management system, and do a better job of nurturing my relationships in social media.
Yet for big resolutions, I’m still at a loss. It feels like I should make a Sisyphusian resolution, to enjoy the view of the boulder as it rolls back down the hill. Yes, I would like to make a difference, to somehow help people find their voices and get more involved in the public sphere, yet that boulder seems not to be budging very much.
So, there you have it, out with the old boulder and in with the new. What about you?
(Categories: )
Continuing the Discussion about the Future of Newspapers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/27/2008 - 12:10Since my last post on the future of the news in Connecticut, I’ve received lots of interesting comments and there has been plenty of other interesting news about news organizations.
In personal news, my wife got me a shirt that says, ”I Get My News from Twitter”. (Note: The preceding is a flagrant attempt to monetize my writing. My wife gets a commission on each shirt like that that gets sold.)
In the big picture, GateHouse Media has sued the NYTimes Company over aggregation. Most of my online friends are smacking their heads, and saying “WTF?” As a general rule online, you don’t discourage people that link to you online. Instead, you seek them out and encourage them. As an example, if you go to the Connecticut section of my blog, you will find links to stories from the Journal Inquirer. The JI is trying to establish a stronger presence online. I’m linking to them, and they are listing my political posts on their opinion page. At least one of their reporters is on Twitter, and I would love it if they would set up a Twitter stream that posts their hottest stories as they occur.
Yet the GateHouse v. NYTimes case is a bit different. Both sites are competing to be the hyperlocal media gateway in the greater Boston area. I can see how the old mentality at GateHouse works its way out. Sue people who try to compete with you, instead of trying to find win-win situations that help both companies. As you might guess, I’m not particularly sympathetic to GateHouse’s move. It seems a little bit too much like a rehashing of the RIAA’s approach to the digital distribution of recorded music. Sue anyone that tries to come up with a better approach.
My previous post did receive a great comment from Rick Hancock. Rick hosts a weekly segment on WTIC about the Internet and is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut. It is a well thought out “Pat On The Back” comment and I greatly appreciate it. He talks about various types of comments, including his comment on my blog in a great post, A Comment About Blogging. If you are a blogger, especially relatively new to blogging, you really must read his blog post. He makes important points about more and more elderly people getting their news online, and talks about how University of Connecticut should consider providing instruction to citizen journalists. I think this would be great.
Beyond that, his comment, in and of itself, illustrates an important trend in blogging, and I would suggest any good journalism. We are moving from a broadcast mentality where a news anchor could be “the most trusted man in America” and a newspaper could claim to print “all the news that’s fit to print”. People want conversations. They want to think about the issues and discuss them with others. Ideally, we will foster friendly discussions that encourage an exchange of views, instead of the anonymous efforts to present one view and not listen to another view that we see on so many sites like Topix.
I touched on this a little bit in a previous post, Graffiti and the Public Sphere. Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix responded with a well though out comment. He says, “If we get 20% of the American population engaging with each other in Topix, then we have indeed expanded the public sphere”. I disagree with him on this and need to write a longer response when I have more time, but I do not consider people anonymously posting inaccurate information as characters attacks on others as an expansion of the public sphere.
I also received an email about one of my blog post saying
I think it would be more productive to be broader, to address filling
Connecticut's local news gap in general, not necessarily by
volunteers.Some steps might be:
* Inventorying what already exists, what's been lost, what's needed
* Exploring possible conference venues and dates
* Contacting potentially interested parties
My initial reaction to this was somewhat negative. Here in Connecticut, we’ve had substantial cuts in news staff. We just lost about a dozen weekly papers, and there are around another dozen papers slated to be shut down in about two weeks. More significantly, the local papers that are still around seem to have been losing any significant role in the public sphere. There are not enough articles being written about local government, or for that matter, with a few notable exceptions, about state government. There seem to be fewer and fewer political debates being organized and sponsored by local news organizations.
One line of research I want to pursue is how the Citizens Election Program has affected advertising in local news outlets. Much of the data will become available for analysis early next year.
Yes, it would be good to find a venue and a date for some sort of conference, but I’m weary of conferences. It seems like more and more people spend time wringing their hands and conferences and little seems to get done. Conferences, in and of themselves, seem to hearken back to the old broadcast mentality instead of the conversational approach that new media seems to be moving towards. Perhaps what we really need is an un-conference.
To illustrate this, I want to mention two emails I received on a different post I had written about promoting civic involvement. One person responded, “My attempts to bring this sort of engagement politics to my town were not well received. The status quo like thrives best on opacity and limited citizen participation.” Another responded, “In my town things are a little different. The Mayor and School Supt. just LOVE committees and task forces - which they then either ignore, or mismanage, or both. It's a great way to marginalize citizens.”
So, where does this leave us? I’m going to run out the door in a few minutes to attend a Tweetup wearing my “I get my news from Twitter” shirt. When I get a chance, I’ll follow up with Rick and a few others and see what we can do, to get more people involved in our media and in our communities. If I get a chance, I might even follow up on a conference, if it can be run in a way that does not marginalize citizens.
What Now for News in Connecticut
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/21/2008 - 13:20As the first snow of the year started coming down here in Connecticut, word slowly leaked out that the Journal Register Co. has shut sixteen of its weeklies in Connecticut and laid off twenty-one reporters and editors. These are different papers than the eleven weeklies and two dailies that the Journal Register had announced plans to close in January. All in all, over the course of a month, Connecticut could lose nearly thirty newspapers.
The reactions were fairly predictable. Some lamented the loss of local government coverage and the decrease in public accountability it would produce. Others suggested that the newspapers had long ago stopped providing adequate coverage of local government, that this was part of the reason for their demise, and there would be little change. Still others fretted about the loss of cheap material for wrapping fish or training puppies.
Some blamed the youth for not being more interested in the news. Others blamed the news organizations for not making their news more readily accessible where youth look for the news online. Many blamed the management of the Journal Record Co.
Some people did find bright spots, highlighting the work of CTNewsJunkie and the New Haven Independent as examples of where quality reporting still happens.
Perhaps, some have suggested, online citizen journalism can help take up the slack. I’ve often suggested this myself. However, we need to think very carefully about how this could happen.
Steve Collins has raised the concern about what happens to people that are not online, especially the elderly who are major subscribers to many of these papers. I’ve suggested that one solution is to get people to use community access television to read some of the news. Already, we have good government access broadcasts of various meetings in Woodbridge. Yet getting new community channels up and running is a lot of work, and this would be a large project.
Doug Hardy has commented about the loss of institutional memory. There are reporters who have covered events in Connecticut for many years and they bring a very important perspective of how the current events relate to a bigger picture. This is a big issue in my mind. Sure there may be some Web 2.0 type ways of gathering, storing and searching a little bit of this, but that is a big project in and of itself. Perhaps we need a Connecticut News Wiki. Yet even the best Wiki fails in searchability when compared with asking the person in the newsroom who knows where all the bodies are buried.
Yet there is a greater issue; how do you get citizen journalists to cover events that matter in a fair and informative manner? People write about what interests them. You may find some good coverage of Little League by parents of star pitchers, but what about getting someone to cover local selectmen meetings or the town committee meetings of various political parties?
Here, there is a chicken and egg problem. Unless someone is covering what is going on, others may not realize that there is something important going on in their backyards. If people don’t know what is going on they may not be inclined to produce try and cover events themselves. Even if they to get motivated, it may take a while before they get proficient in writing good articles.
It seems as if this is a place where two interesting groups can and should get involved. The New England News Forum has suggested getting journalism schools in New England to help jumpstart online citizen journalism. Central Connecticut State University and Southern Connecticut State University could play key roles. It would be great to see some conferences around the state on this.
Help Fill the Local News Gap: How to be an Effective Citizen Journalist
Other organizations like the Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists would be great additions to such an effort. The IRE provides great training for investigative reporters and some of their material would be a great addition such conferences and every journalist, whether they be a professional journalist or a citizen journalist should read and adhere to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.
The other interesting group would be local good government groups. Organizations like Common Cause and The League of Women Voters as well as people energized by the 2008 Presidential campaigns could bring energy and an important focus on watching local and state government.
Would such efforts help the situation here in Connecticut? It’s better than nothing and I would love to work with anyone who wants to help bring together people to provide better citizen journalism. If people have better ideas, I’d love to hear them to and see if there are ways I could help in that area.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to have happy holidays, and keep up my own writing about events in Woodbridge, in Connecticut, and in the media ecosphere.
