Tony Botello, my fellow blogger and friend (not close, by any means, but certainly we’re friendly), is fond of referring to The Star and other newspapers as “the dead tree media.”
Gotta hand it to him, it is catchy, and easy for people to nod in agreement.
But, as even those who might nod in agreement might suspect, it’s far too dismissive of traditional, shoe-leather-thinning journalism.
Even after a decade or so of transition to digital venues and outlets, the vast majority of the best-researched, best-reported, most important and most relevant news stories are still generated by newspapers…Without a doubt. Case closed. Shut the door.
For example, who but The Star could throw a half dozen or so reporters — most with deep newspaper experience and the ability to stay cool amid chaos — at the Verruckt tragedy? No one. All other reporting outlets — TV, bloggers, whatever — are just nibbling around the edges. By contacting engineers, physicists and other experts, The Star was able to create in the readers’ minds an understanding of how things likely unfolded in that raft that hurtled down the water channel, left the channel at some point and brutally killed 10-year-old Caleb Schwab before the raft reached the calm waters of the receiving pool.
That’s a local example. Here’s a farther-reaching one. The New York Times leads the way on so many national and international stories — both straight news and investigative — that it leaves all other news organizations in the dust. That’s how good it is. Frequently, stories you hear featured on NPR (the only national news worth listening to on radio) were initiated by reporters and editors who read about them first in The Times.
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Kathleen Parker
The importance of the role that newspapers play — not necessarily with their the print editions but through the content they produce — was wonderfully expressed in today’s Star by Op-Ed columnist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post Writers Group.
Listen to this, from the column:
The problem: People want news but they don’t want to pay for it. Consequently, newspapers are failing while consumers get their information from comedy shows, talk shows and websites that essentially lift material for their own purposes.
But somewhere, somebody is actually sitting through a boring meeting, poring over data or interviewing someone who isn’t nearly as important as he thinks he is to produce a story that will become news…(N)ews is a food chain, yet with rare exceptions, the most important members of the chain are at the bottom, turning off the lights in newsrooms where gladiators, scholars and characters once roamed.
As a reporter who earned his spurs in the 1970s and 1980s, I had to smile when I read the line about the newsroom being a place where “gladiators, scholars and characters once roamed.”
…I can’t help but digress here and give you an example of one “character” I encountered early on. Shortly after I started at The Star in 1969, reporters would routinely be sent out with photographers to go “cruising” for news. It was a ridiculous custom and never yielded anything, but it was what the editors did to keep us busy. Otherwise, between stories, we mostly sat around the newsroom, feet on our desks, reading the paper or magazines…Anyway, there was one particular photographer (still alive today, somehow) who was both an alcoholic and moral degenerate. While driving around with young reporters like me, he would routinely stop at the home of one of his girlfriends for a quickie. “Wait here,” he’d say, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Twenty or 30 minutes later he’d come back, refreshed — it would seem — and ready to resume “cruising.”)
But back to Kathleen Parker’s homage to newspapers. Here’s another dead-on paragraph:
“My point…is that only newspapers are the brick-and-mortar of the Fourth Estate’s edifice…What happens to the ‘news’ when there are no newspapers left? We seem doomed to find out, as people increasingly give up their newspaper subscriptions and seek information from free-content sources. And though newspapers have an online presence, it’s hard to get readers to pay for content. As (HBO’s John) Oliver says, now is a very good time to be a corrupt politician. Between buyouts, layoffs and news-hole reductions, there’s hardly anyone paying attention.”
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I say, then, that Tony Botello and others digital dabblers who, for the most part, feed off other people’s research and reporting should reflect more deeply before they consign “the dead tree media” to history and irrelevance. Newspapers are the lifeblood of the news-generating machinery in our country and much of the rest of the educated world, and they will continue to fill that role for a long time to come.
We all need and greatly benefit from the content that newspapers provide, in whatever form, and I urge you readers to consider that good, valuable content does not come free: Those people turning out the lights in the newsrooms deserve to get paid well.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
See the following link. David Brooks referred to this essay on Charlie Rose this week. I think you would appreciate at this juncture â¦.http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf
Who, WHAT, When, Where, How, Why.
The revered formula for news stories.
Shame on the STAR for ingnoring and refusing to report the WHAT, in the Caleb Schwab decapitation story.
They didn’t want to lose an advertiser: Schlitterbahn.
So they are skipping to other reporting tasks.
Kudos to Tony for having the courage to report the facts.
He does a better job, aggregating from all over the world, than the STAR has, on this story to date.
As for Parker’s comments, she offers no solution. If making folks feel guilty WORKED, we would all be thin. And pay for the Star’s pathetic online content.
Fitz, when I first knew you at the Times, covering Charlie Wheeler and Jerry Jette, you were neither a gladiator nor a scholar. So I guess that makes you, fittingly, a character!
I dropped my subscription three years ago. I am richer and happier and better informed about Johnson County. The STAR dropped covering my neck of the woods when OJ Nelson left. It’s been downhill ever since.
Tracy, you know very well that OJ Nelson’s departure had nothing whatsoever to do with the shrinking coverage of Johnson County. It had everything to do with loss of print advertising and revenue and the resulting need for The Star to “pull in its horns.” Eventually, all the suburban bureaus were shuttered. The JoCo bureau just happened to be the biggest and most prominent.
I also believe, to this day, that The Star’s coverage of JoCo, at The Star’s peak, was disproportionate to the real news coming out of Johnson County. We were constantly trying to come up with “trend” stories we could roll out on the front page, mostly to satisfy a series of publishers who made their homes in Johnson County and were convinced the most important news was taking place where they lived. What self-deluding fools they were!
Tracy I think the guy is mentally ill myself, kudos or no.
Jim, it’s very simple for me. It’s just not civilized not to read at least one print newspaper each day. Yes, the Star has driven me crazy with their never-ending delivery failures, but I wouldn’t think of cutting them off (who would deliver my WSJ?). My wife and I both have online access to the Star, the NYT and the WSJ along with the daily print editions of the Star and WSJ…I think that keeps us “fair and balanced”…and hopefully, civilized.
Quick question: While my admiration for the NYT is not as deep as yours (and I will admit I get the occasional kick out of the NY Post’s front pages) I have recently wondered: why does the NYT lose so much money while the opposite seems to be the case for the WSJ? They both produce fine products on a consistent basis. Does the business orientation of WSJ give it a leg up with advertisers, or is there something else at play here — their editorial views?
Great question, Rick…While I don’t know a lot about the specific financial situations of The Times and the Wall Street Journal, I do know that The Times is not losing money. It is not making nearly as much as it used to, but it’s still a very strong and valuable company. I base that assessment on the wide “moat” separating it from virtually every other paper, besides the WSJ.
This from a February 2016 Fortune magazine story:
A big chunk of the NYT’s $63.2 million profit for the year (almost twice what it made in 2014) came because of lower costs, primarily depreciation and severance. In 2015, the paper spent only $7 million on severance, down from $35 million in 2014. If not for that, its profit would have been virtually identical to the one it made the previous year, for a return of about 2% on revenue of $1.6 billion. (Here’s the link to that story.)
…Also (this from me), an important aspect of the WSJ’s ongoing financial success is that, unlike almost all other newspapers, including the NYT and The Washington Post, the WSJ never, ever, gave its content away. From the outset of the digital transformation, it established and held fast to a pay wall. Other publications, fearing they would lose out to no-pay sites, capitulated and gave away their valuable content for years, and they’re still trying to reel that nasty fish back into the net.
Let’s not forget, when a business pays the WSJ for online content, it is always TAX DEDUCTIBLE. But when a homeowner pays a local paper for online content, or door to door delivery, it is NOT. (unless one runs a business.) So the two business models were never parallel.
I never thought about that. Good point, Tracy.
Also, As I was thinking about this a while ago, the WSJ is a business-oriented publication, naturally, and you would expect its managers to always be thinking along the lines of “how’re we going to make as much money as possible on our enterprise.” The NYT, on the other hand, was much more journalistically oriented, with less emphasis on the business side, for much of its history. That’s been changing the last decade or so. Out of necessity.
Good post, Fitz. We get a lot of breaking news and important information from bloggers, but we still need newspapers.
I’ve been getting the electronic version of the Star for free for a few months, since my wife flamed them for the well-publicized delivery debacle of recent months. But somebody working on behalf of the Star called me yesterday and offered me a what I (and more importantly my wife) consider a good deal: three months of the electronic edition, plus the Sunday and Wednesday print editions, for $26 and change. We have an agreement!
And just for the record, my duties at the Kansas City Star never included photography. Nuff said.
That is a good deal, Julius!
Thank you for finding columns that agree with the drum I’ve been beating about The Star’s business model of wasting money on boring, predictable editorial writers like Yael and Lewis (and Babs, thankfully gone) instead of solid reporters who can produce original copy. Bloggers simply cannot compete with them.
Good reporters provide the value in a newspaper, not useless editorial writers. There are dozens of bloggers in our community that have far more credibility than anyone on editorial at The Star and yet, unbelievably they’re foolishly trying to replace the two losers they were lucky enough to get rid of.
Tony is not a “reliable blogger.” He is a misogynistic pig, who promotes hate speech against women in Kansas City, especially women in politics. You do not want to associate yourself with him.
Now there’s a strong voice from a strong lady from the famous Romanelli West neighborhood.
Now wait a minute, have you seen the selfie Fitz posted of himself in nylons, Cheryl. Pretty racy stuff.