The Dallas Morning News is a broadsheet daily — the lone major newspaper of the metro Dallas, Texas, area. I’m sure it has a long tradition of editorial independence and high ethical standards in newsgathering. According to its Wikipedia page, it has won eight Pulitzers.
Now though, in kind of an upset, and in a reversal of years of North American news heritage, the foxes are being given the keys to the henhouse. As reported by the Dallas Observer (a local weekly) news blog:
As of yesterday, some section editors at all of the company’s papers, including The News, will now report directly to [a] team of sales managers, now referred to as general managers. In short, those who sell ads for A.H. Belo’s products will now dictate content within A.H. Belo’s products, which is a radical departure from the way newspapers have been run since, oh, forever.
The publisher of the Dallas News, of course, defends the change:
I come from the advertising side of the media business. I started off in ad sales. The editor of this paper reports to me, and the business side reports to me. Just becaue a business person has an editorial person reporting to him or her doesn’t mean our content is now for sale or that the salespeople, the business people, the publisher will dictate to the newsroom what content they choose to publish or not. I have never gone to Bob Mong and said, “You have to do the following for business reasons.” Never done it, never would do it. The integrity of the process is absolutely fundamental to your business and our business. The moment they think our information is for sale, we’re out of business.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t find the fact that he comes from the advertising side of the media business to reassuring. But he’s got it dead to rights when he says that readers won’t trust a product they think can be bought and sold.
Grant Hamilton
3 Responses to “Newspaper Watch: The Who’ll Shoot J.R. Edition”
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The publisher’s very first sentence says it all.
Print is dying because people like him are strangling it.
Best thing I’ve read on this subject: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/dec/02/mike-kelly-seo-journalism-world-newspaper-congress-keynote#
Trent – thanks for the link, that was a great read! It’s an interesting thought — that search engine traffic led to a collapse in advertising value.
i’m not 100% sure the argument holds up. Historically, subscription revenue has always been just enough to cover circulation costs. So, as delivery costs approach zero in an online world, the price that people are willing to pay gets driven down, too. It sucks that people don’t appear to be willing to pay much for news, but it turns out that advertising has always subsidized the newsgathering operations.
I’m encouraged by his successes with the Mirror’s new websites, though. It seems obvious that creating a community among users is better than just attracting bazillions of discrete users. But so few people invest in that.
Thanks again.