News-Record.com

"Working in the Glass House: Newspapers in the Age of Blogs, Grassroots Journalism and Transparency."

Good evening. Thank you, Jay, for that introduction. I'm delighted to be here, particularly because I have never been to Minnesota before. It seems that "Minnesota nice" appears to be more than just a marketing slogan. And my stepmother, who grew up here, says I got here at the perfect time of year: right between winter and mosquitoes.

Dave Pyle was kind enough to invite me here to speak to you because he labors under the delusion that because my name has been in the news, I have some sort of wisdom to impart regarding how we in the newspaper business can stay in business. I don't. Anyone who wants his money back can take that up with Dave, although I'll be touching on what we're doing at the News & Record and will be happy to answer questions about it later.

But before I start giving you my cheap prescription for keeping your newspaper in business, I'd like to tell you a little story, and it's cosmically correct that I be standing here tonight to tell this story because it involves Minnesota -- specifically, the Minnesota Twins.

Ten years ago this summer, a group of Greensboro-area business people made public the fact that they were looking for a way to bring major-league baseball to North Carolina. I was all in favor of the concept -- I've been a baseball fan since I could swing a bat. But when I looked over the survey data that this group gave one of our reporters, I started hearing some alarm bells.

Now, I'm not an expert on polls. What I do know, I learned by reviewing listener-survey data and methodology during my seven years in radio, plus what I'd picked up by covering political polling for the News & Record. But I saw some troubling things in this poll. For one thing, the market these guys were counting on to support their franchise looked like a barbell -- lots and lots of people in Charlotte and lots and lots of people in Raleigh, which are about 175 miles apart, but a relatively thin band of population connecting them. For another, all the schemes for paying for a stadium that got the greatest support from survey respondents called on people in the Triad -- the Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point metropolitan area -- rather than people statewide, to bear the financial burden. One of these facts was glossed over in our early coverage, the other not even mentioned.

Eventually, this enterprise, which had begun as an effort to get an expansion franchise, became an effort to convince Twins owner Carl Pohlad to sell the team to North Carolina investors who would move the team to the Triad. And as our coverage of the effort continued during the next 2 1/2 years, the pattern in our early coverage repeated itself. Information that made the effort seem viable got great play; information that could cast that effort into doubt was played down or overlooked.

How did I know this? Not from reading my own newspaper, of course. I knew it because at the time, I was running a campaign on my personal Web site to be made the next commissioner of Major League Baseball. No, really.

This page was mostly satire, but as a lover of baseball I had tried very hard to understand the finances and business of the game, so as to be able to figure out what would help preserve and enhance the game as an experience for players and spectators alike, and as a viable business. And what I had learned about baseball's finances -- how teams make and lose money, how the lack of a salary cap led to a few teams always being able to afford the best players (although I have to say that, being a Braves fan, I was not overly bothered by this phenomenon) and how payroll, in turn, correlated with on-the-field performance -- made it look to me very much as if even if these guys got a franchise, their business plan was going to doom the team to failure. Because taxpayers were going to be asked to approve a tax to pay for a stadium, I thought this was information our readers ought to have, and I shared it freely within our newsroom.

For a variety of reasons, the readers didn't get much of it. Fortunately, voters had the good sense to reject the tax by a wide margin anyway. I say "fortunately" because, as Jay Weiner of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune documented in his book on the episode that came out in 2000, Pohlad never would have sold the team to the North Carolina investors anyway. He was just playing them off against y'all to try to get public financing for a new stadium here. But if voters, based on our incomplete reporting, had approved the tax, and if Pohlad actually had been willing to sell, my neighbors and I now would be paying extra money for a stadium to house what almost certainly would have been a money-losing venture ... and a lousy team besides.

That wasn't a great time in the 115-year history of the News & Record,
but I'm confident such a scenario could not happen today. There are a lot of reasons why -- some of them, I'm happy to say, having to do with changes at my paper -- but the biggest reason is blogs.

If we published our initial story today, bloggers would be demanding, both on their own blogs and in e-mails to our staff -- that we post the actual survey questions and responses. And today I'm pretty sure we'd do that without even being asked. When we did, the patterns in the responses would be teased out and highlighted. As our coverage progressed, I'm certain that bloggers would be asking whatever questions we didn't ask ... and hounding us until we got answers, or digging those answers up and posting them themselves. If our reporting continued to be incomplete, they'd let us hear about it ... and raise cain about it with journalism trade magazines and other news outlets as well.

You know, newspapers historically have been very reluctant to talk about themselves, often for the best of reasons. We feel like we need to avoid becoming part of the story so that we can retain our independence and, by extension, our role as an honest broker of news. But the fact is, we live in a glass house today, folks, and sometimes we become part of the story whether we want to be or not.

And we've got three ways we can respond. We can get all defensive and arrogant. We can take the kind of absolutely silent approach that comes across as defensive and arrogant. Or we can acknowledge in fact what we always say whenever we're pushing for more liberal open-records laws: We're a public trust. We work for the people. And if we're smart, we're going to work with the people as well, and talk to the people about how we can best do that.

Why? Because people don't trust us. Consumer-attitude surveys are saying that newspapers now are less trusted than local TV news. I mean, c'mon, how much lower can we go?

And you know why people don't trust us? There are lots of reasons, but I'm convinced that one big reason is because we don't trust them. We don't trust them to give us good story ideas. We don't trust them to tell us what they're really interested in, and we don't believe them when they do. We don't trust them when they say we write stories that are too long, too dry, too divorced from the reality of their everyday lives. We don't trust them to understand the guiding principles we live and work by, but then when we write a story they don't like, we wonder why they're so ready and willing to suspect our motives. We don't even trust them with the mundane details of how we do our jobs, because we're afraid that somehow if we do it's going to come back and bite us in the butt. Folks, you know when the last year was that we gained circulation? 1988. We lost almost 2 percent of our circulation in 2004, and that's more than we expected. Our butt's already being bitten. If you're not feeling the pain, you're not paying attention.

So how do we get readers to trust us? The basics. Don't publish errors of fact. Don't spin. Don't lie. Don't publish stories that suck. But to that reliable list, we need to add a new item: We need to trust our readers. Sure, a few people out there want us to fail. But many more desperately want us to succeed -- they have even higher expectations of us than we have of ourselves. All they're trying to give us is the means to meet those expectations. Let's not make that hard for them.

That's where transparency comes in. We need to tell our readers what we're doing and how we're doing it ... and we need to seek their feedback every step of the way.

What does that look like? Well, let's say I am Joe Reporter, a guy who has not been trying to get himself named commissioner of major-league baseball, and that I have been assigned to cover, or have uncovered on my own, the news that some local business people are trying to get a major-league baseball franchise located in my market.

First, forget the scoop. On news like this, the scoop mentality is a lot more likely to get you in trouble than it is to help you cover the story fairly and accurately. We need to play to our strengths: depth, context, analysis. So what I would do is post on my blog that this was going on and ask readers for their suggestions: What are the issues that this news raises? What kinds of questions does the newspaper need to be asking? What kinds of decisions might this news lead the community to have to make?

You'll notice something about these questions: They're the same sorts of things we kick around in every budget meeting and story conference in every newsroom in the country. The difference is that we're involving our readers in answering these questions. Why? Well, take two groups: the people in your newsroom ... and everyone else who reads your paper and/or your Web site. Which group do you think is going to know more, as a group, about the structure and finances of major-league baseball, particularly in a market that has never had it? I know which one I'd bet on.

We need to be transparent about our methods at the level of the individual story and at the big-picture level, as well. We need to be willing to talk about ways in which we will, or will not, go about getting a particular story. We need to talk about what our coverage priorities are, how they're arrived at and the kinds of juggling of resources that we all have to do. We need to talk about ethical issues -- ideally, when they don't come up in the context of any reporting we're doing, and particularly not on deadline -- and how we would, or could, or might handle them. The paper in Spokane, Washington, recently made news for retaining a computer forensics expert to engage in online conversations with that city's mayor on a gay chat site. Would your paper ever do that? Under what circumstances? If your answer is "I don't know," you'd better find out, and you'd better involve your readers in that process. And it probably is instructive to note that although that paper has gotten a lot of criticism from other papers for hiring the expert to do what he did, its readers have overwhelmingly supported it.

In short, you need to catalog -- and ruthlessly exterminate -- anything that keeps your readers, your customers, your community from understanding what you do and how you do it, and anything that keeps you from understanding your readers. And you need to hunt down just as ruthlessly anything that keeps them from helping. That means you need a vibrant online presence, and that means you need to create mechanisms for them to contribute directly to it in a variety of formats -- text, audio, visual, Flash animation, anything you might use yourself, and everything else you can think of. You know why? You want to tell their stories. They want to tell their stories. You're on the same side. So act like it.

If you do only that, I think, you'll have taken a big step toward making sure that your news organization remains in business as a news organization for a long time to come. It's not a guarantee. There are no guarantees. But if people feel invested in what you're doing, they're going to try to help you keep doing it, or at least not throw up obstacles. So we need transparency of method.

But I would argue that if independent local-news organizations are going to survive, in whatever medium, we need another kind of transparency as well: not just transparency of method, but also transparency of motive. Fox News has done very well for itself by lying about its motives. How much better could we do if we told the truth about ours?

That does not mean we have to pick a side in the red/blue culture wars, let alone align with a political party. But it does mean that we need to make sure our readers understand our guiding principles and make sure they have an opportunity to weigh in on our coverage priorities. If you're going to concentrate on local news, however you define that, then do it and tell readers why.

There are other examples. Is there anyone in this room who is NOT in favor of more open records and open meetings? OK, if you're pro-public access, make sure your readers know that, and know why that is, and make sure your coverage reflects that sensibility. If you're pro-consumer -- and you should be, because this is one area where local TV news has been eating our lunch -- make sure your readers know it and make sure your coverage and your editorials reflect it. If you see your job as holding the powerful accountable, them make sure people know that and go out and do it, whether the powerful in question is an individual, a corporation, a government agency or a nonprofit. Encourage your readers to help, and give them public credit when they do.

The reason I'm standing here tonight talking to you is not that I've done all that. All I've done is agreed, with no staff and no budget, to try. I have no idea whether it will save us; I believe it might. But I also believe we should try because doing so will give us better journalism and because it's what our community wants. What does it say about our industry when the fact that we're doing something that will give us better journalism and is what our community wants becomes a story in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal? It tells you that we are a horribly change-resistant industry, even when we know that business as usual will kill us. And it will. Phil Meyer, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina and the author of the book The Vanishing Newspaper, gives us one more generation, two tops.

We're going to have to invest more in online to make these partnerships with the community real. Just as an example, as part of my job I'm having to learn how to report and edit and produce audio, video, Flash animations and other media for our Web site. Now, I worked for seven years in radio, but that was so long ago that we were editing audio with 3M tape and a razor blade. (Y'all ever heard of 3M?) And once I've learned these new techniques, I'm going to be expected to train, first, other people in my newsroom and then, at least potentially, people in our community. I was an investigative writer and editor before I took this gig, and I hope to return to investigations once we've got a lot of what we want to do up and running. My dream assignment at this point is leading a group of citizen journalists, or Contributing Readers, as the News & Record calls them, in an investigative assignment.

Such a revolution in the way we do business will require a lot of resources -- new resources, not cannibalized from existing resources. As Rob Curley of the Lawrence Journal-World and Lawrence.com says, it's not about doing more with less, it's about doing more with more. Read my lips: The days of the 25%, 30%, 40% pretax profit margin in this bidness are over. If you don't believe me, ask Phil Meyer; he's done the math. And if you disagree, you need to just go ahead and leave now because you're part of the problem. Seriously. Go on. Get up, go to your office and leave your resignation on your boss's desk because your attitude is a big part of what's killing us.

Those of us who are left will become partners with people in our communities who know things about the news we want to cover and the news we ought to be covering. I think that down that path lies the best chance of preserving independent journalism, in whatever medium, in this country. And no pressure or anything, but if we don't do that, we can kiss our grand constitutional experiment and our way of life goodbye.

I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to do that just yet. Journalism has been around at least as long as this country has, but our best days are ahead if we go do what I've been talking about. So let's go do it. Thank you.