CRESCENT People: John Boyanoski — Print Media is Changing.

Well, when you get rich enough, how about buying some daily newspapers and and turning them back into actual local newspapers?

Ooooooh.

Do you want to get into that? 

We’re not going to talk about that.  Local media…

Newsrooms have been completely gutted.  You jumped ship from print journalism and there are a number of others who have done the same thing. Where is traditional print media going?

Unfortunately, traditional print media…

Newspapers. Dailies. Weeklies. Magazines.

There is always going to be spot for something. What it’s going to look like and where they’re going to put their efforts, I don’t know.  I remember thinking ten years ago, as the first round of cuts started coming to newspapers and we were all worried about the future, I remember thinking, “OK. Put your focus on the web.”  You can have a fifty person news department that has web-generated revenue and still survive, but unfortunately, the dailies have not realized that. They’ve been relying on the printed model, and they’ve been losing staff, so the model gets worse.  Their on-line presence gets worse so, right now, these shell corporations, they don’t want to say…

Well, Page 2A has become a reheated version of their national counterparts.

Yeah, yeah.  The Greenville News is being put together partly in Louisville, KY, and when you get curse words in The Greenville News sometimes.

Oh, really (asked with sarcasm)? How does that happen?

Actually, I know.  What happened was it was being put together in Louisville.  This is what I’ve been told. This isn’t from Gannett.

You mean ALLEGEDLY, this is what happened.

What I understand was, somebody on the Louisville desk (who was laying out the next morning’s Greenville News) was IM-ing (instant messaging) somebody, wrote a swear word  going back and forth with a friend saying, “Hey, we’re going to be working late.” Something happened. Something makes him say “_-_-_-_” (Obscenity Deleted), and it went in the newspaper’s layout instead of the IM.  He (the layout person) thought he IM’d it, but it went to a page because he was working a page and going back and forth between newspaper layout and IM. And that’s how it got into The Greenville News.

There was a conspiracy theory that it was somebody that was disgruntled, that it was a retaliation for the announcement of more layoffs and furloughs. 

No, from my understanding, it literally was an IM accident over, “We’re running late on something.”  As you talk to your buddies, you might throw a curse word in there, and from what I understand, that’s what happened.

It was amazing to watch that spread because when I first saw it, I went ahead and got the electronic copy of the paper so I had a nice, clean crisp version. It seemed like within a half an hour, HuffPo printed it.

The first place I saw that morning…I get the paper at home. I’m still a traditionalist.

I’m not gonna read a Georgia/LSU game recap, so I didn’t see it, but a friend of mine who works for a local television station posted to his Facebook page saying, “Oh well, if I said this on air, I would not be filing stories right now.”  And he just did it as a joke, not even thinking about it.  It was about 5:00 that morning that he posted that.  I don’t know if he was the first person in America who posted it, I can’t say for sure, but that’s the first place I saw it, and all of a sudden it was like tweeting back and forth. It just spread and spread and spread.  To HuffPo, Deadspin, it was everywhere.

Somebody wrote, “Don’t fire the guy who wrote that. Give him a raise because this is the most the newspaper has been talked about in years.” 

That’s a great point, because that’s what hurts traditional print media. If you go on a blog or you get that edgy “They can curse. They can make allegations,” mentality, everyone gets freaked out because they see it on page 3 of the Sports section in a major print.  Because it’s a family newspaper, they’re darned if they do and darned if they don’t.  They get…it was a mistake, but if someone else makes a mistake, no one cares about it.  We still expect…we have these high standards for traditional media, and we want them to be fantastic, but we don’t want to support and make them fantastic.  Does that make sense?  I mean, they’re not getting ad revenue in, people don’t trust them, but when they screw up ask why we can’t trust them.  It’s a double-edged sword.

But is it “chicken-and-the-egg” or “irresistible force/immovable object” thinking? It’s tough to put that local content there when you’re continuing to cut your staff because you can’t afford to have the staff if you don’t have the ad revenue.

Exactly.  It’s a never-ending cycle.

It’s like the postal service.  “We’re going to cut Saturday service, and we’re not going to guarantee next day delivery on first class mail in town because we can’t make the money.”

Right.

OK, so you’re complaining that you can’t compete with the other things so you’re going to give us worse service than we got before?

Yeah, and that’s what newspaper companies are doing.  “We can’t make money, so we’ll make the product worse.”  And the product keeps getting worse and worse and worse.  Then they wonder, “So why are we losing money?”  Well, the product’s worse.  What’s their answer?  “Let’s make the product even worse.”  It doesn’t make sense.  And it’s hard because there are some good people that work in print media.  I have some great friends who are fantastic journalists, hardworking people, and I give them all the credit in the world because they’re doing it with…they’re working major hours, they’re hustling, they’re doing a lot of stuff. The other thing, too, is, a lot of the best stuff still comes from newspapers.

We don’t like to admit it.  We like to pretend that, “Oh, it’s coming from some guy embedded with the military unit or who covered politics with a slant.”  Some of the best stuff is still coming from newspapers.  We sometimes overlook that.  We’re so caught up in the hype of new media.  New media is so spread out.   I’ll give you an example.

I went to a forum earlier this year talking media politics, and a web guy was there, a blogger, and he was trying to make his point that print’s dead.  “Print is so dead. No one reads print.” So he thought he’d be smart because it was a roomful of college kids and some mixed adults.  “Who gets their news from the internet?”  Everyone raised their hands.  “Who gets their news from the paper?”  Half the room.  “So there you go,” he said to me.  So I asked “Who gets their news from your web site?”  No one raised their hand.

And sometimes newspaper companies fall into that trap.  They see the declining numbers but everyone’s still reading a paper or people are still getting their source of information from newspaper web site or something like that.

Stay tuned for Part 4. For Part 1, Click HERE. For Part 2, Click HERE.