Save the Philadelphia Daily News
Will Bunch, who banned me from his comments after I brutally went after one of his trolls, writes an important entry today about the impending doom of the Daily News:
The irony that drives me crazy is that the Daily News has survived — when many No. 2 papers in metro markets, especially tabloids, have failed — because years ago we became the kind of news organization that many newsrooms wish they were today. When other newspapers squandered millions on overseas bureaus and first-class air travel, we made a decision to focus most of our fire on the streets of Philadelphia, with front pages and an upfront section that was 80 percent (my own guesstimate) local. And we crusaded for local causes that no one else would touch, from putting lights on a major bridge to raising awareness about one of the nation’s most deadly roads, Roosevelt Boulevard, to fighting for lower wage taxes. We became the kind of paper that working people –firefighters and teachers and overtaxed moms — could read, and wanted to read. We became, and still are, the metro newpaper with the highest percentage of African-American readers in the nation, serving urban readers of the kind who’ve been ignored in other cities by news execs chasing after suburban ad dollars….
But the “close the Daily News” chicken littles — be they pundits or bankers — are showing the same lack of imagination that’s killing the business in the first place. Why take a sledgehammer to a problem that requires a scalpel? And why break the unusual bond that the Daily News has with its readers when so many newsrooms elsewhere are desperately trying now to create exactly what we already have?
Go read the rest.
The fact is that, on any given day, most people I know would rather read the Daily News than the Stinqy. As Bunch articulates so compellingly, the DN serves the people who live here in the city, reporting local news. Is it perfect? No. Like most tabloids, there can be a tendency to the frivolous. Some of the columnists, like Christine “Kill them all” Flowers, are as irresponsible as they are reprehensible.
But unlike the Inquirer, which tries to be all things to all readers and fails spectacularly, the Daily News is actually successful in filling its mission. I may have strong disagreements with writers like Michael Smerconish and the aforementioned Christine Flowers, but at least there are other writers like Elmer Smith and Ronnie Polaneczy to balance them out. not so at the Stinquirer, which boats a stable of tired, predictable, boring, and obsolete writers like Rick Santorum, Jonathan Last, and certifiable idiot Kevin Ferris (who once irritably told an unemployed Brendan not to bother trying to enter the journalism business).
Daniel U-A at YPP amply echoes Bunch’s column, sounding what can only be described as a clarion call:
There is no way that we will ever, ever, ever be able to survive without good local reporting. And, while the Inquirer has a solid City Hall Bureau, without the Daily News, we instantly lose a huge chunk of focus on our City. There is no way that something like YPP will replace it. None…
But, if we lose the Daily News, and we no longer have Bob Warner, Dave Davies, Catherine Lucey, Chris Brennan, and company writing about the City, things we should know about will simply go unreported. Instead, life will be spent trying to decipher a bunch of press releases. And it will matter a whole lot less that City Council may be violating the Sunshine Act, because there is a good chance no one will be around in the first place to report on it.
If the Daily News dies, so do we.
Daniel is right. I don’t know who you should contact (the parent company might be a good place to start), but the message has to get through: the Philadelphia Daily News has value. It’s a vital resource for Philadelphians. It reports news that matters to the people who live here, not the people who live in the surrounding burbs.
I think one thing that the industry needs to accept, and which must be integrated and institutionalized in newspaper publishers’ and owners’ bottom line is that profit margins for newspapers cannot, and should not, be expected to be similar to those of retailers, banks, and entertainment sources. This is not news: Neil Hickey, contributing editor at Columbia Journalism review, said as much more than a decade ago.
The “tabloidization” of TV newsmagazines is strictly geared to ratings and profits. “A major tragedy of the moment,” Cronkite maintains, is the use TV newsmagazines are making of the valuable prime time they occupy. “Instead of offering tough documentaries and background on the issues that so deeply affect all of us, they’re turning those programs into television copies of Photoplay magazine.” News executives know better, Cronkite says, and are “uncomfortable” with what they’re doing. “But they are helpless when top management demands an increase in ratings to protect profits.”
News chiefs themselves perceive that the press is perilously compromising quality in pursuit of gain. Nearly half the nation’s editorial and business-side executives surveyed in a January Editor & Publisher poll think press coverage in general is shallow and inadequate, and fully two-thirds say newspapers concentrate more on personalities than important issues. J. Stewart Bryan III, c.e.o. of Media General, Inc., and publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, told E&P that serious news is being sacrificed to profits as papers reduce news holes and produce softer stories. Said he: “I don’t think we can put the bottom line ahead of our commitment to quality.”
As the race for profits heated up, the quality of the news went down, losing readers who don’t want to part with their hard-earned money to read about Tila Tequila’s tits. Some time, somehow, the notion that every endeavor must profit the maximum extent possible, must be put to rest. Newspapers are expensive to run, with costs ranging from paper and heavy machinery to providing salaries that attract and retain good reporters. By setting profit margins to an impossible height, owners actually end up hurting their papers by making it impossible to afford the kind of staff necessary to publish a good papers, instead relying on cheaper wire services and syndicated cookie-cutter columnists.
i hate to make a blanket statement, but it seems to me if publishers and owners would be a little less greedy and a little more willing to live a little lower on the hog, setting realistic margins that allow them to live comfortably if not extravagantly, then maybe the papers they own wouldn’t be in SUCH dire straits.
But I guess it’s just easier to blame Craigslist. let’s take the harder road: kill the Inquirer is you must, but save the Philadelphia Daily News.
February 27th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
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