Sunday, May 24, 2009
A reminder of all that's good about print journalism
From the newsroom
Carole Tarrant, editor
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From the Newsroom blog
"State of Play" is certainly not the most authentic movie ever made about journalism. Russell Crowe's murky ethics and action-hero antics make most journalists squirm in their seats, yearning for a dignified remake of "All the President's Men."
Yet Crowe's portrayal of reporter Cal McAffrey performs a valuable service. It reminds us -- members of the reporting profession and hopefully you, our readers -- that journalism takes work: pounding the pavement, burning up phone lines, arriving early, working late, thinking fast and Googling through every last link in 32 pages of search results.
Much of this work is not visible on our pages. Every journalist alive has tales to tell of chasing leads that went nowhere.
They traveled two hours to knock on the door of an elusive source in a fraud investigation. Nobody home.
They spent four days cold-calling names in old phone books trying to land a murder witness. Witness found, but she's drug-addled and remembers nothing useful.
They tromped two counties over to look through property records, hoping to decipher a mysterious land deal by a prominent developer. Records found, but no story -- yet.
Journalism takes work and, by consequence, money -- a profitable underpinning that subsidizes that search for the truth and pays reporter salaries.
"State of Play" reminds us of this, and at a most opportune time. Headlines this spring reported the closings or financial troubles of daily papers in major metro markets: Seattle, Denver, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles.
But in that list you do not see Roanokes, Buffalos or Little Rocks, other midsize and smaller markets where it's not time to declare, "Newspapers are dead." Headlines and CNN crawls have not yielded this context, or the actual reality outside big-city America.
As a result, readers of this paper ask us, "Are you going to close?" Our neighbors pull us quietly aside and ask, "Are you all right?" Some see this as a chance to make a political jab: "I knew your liberal bias would do you in."
Yet from many others we hear encouraging support: "I don't know what I'd do without a daily newspaper."
To all this, I say, let's pause and address some half-truths and ironies.
Uniquely different
First, the half-truth: Newspapers are dying.
In some major metro markets, newspapers have closed, and more are likely to. But the reasons are unique to each market.
In some, the owners of publicly traded companies took on enormous debt and paid inflated prices when they bought once-hot media properties over the past 10 years.
In other markets, the collapse of the housing and auto markets piled on newspaper companies already weakened by Craigslist and other online competitors.
But take some time to read newspaper industry publications and you'll see another story: Smaller papers face problems, true, but they are better positioned to survive the recession and remain a vital community presence.
In Roanoke, we go into mid-2009 carrying no onerous debt. We remain profitable. Our owner, Norfolk-based Landmark Media Enterprises LLC, is a privately held partnership. As such, it is not required to make quarterly reports to public stockholders. That allows us to think and plan longer-term.
We're gratified, and even humored by, an industry blogger's recent declaration that we're one of "10 Newspapers that Will Survive the Apocalypse."
Remember this as you read of the Boston Globe's late-hour negotiations with unions, or the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's struggle with bankruptcy. Their story is not ours.
Yet like most companies in our community, we have experienced discomfort and uncertainty in the past six months. We have responded to the recession as any practical and responsible company facing an economic downturn.
We raised our newsstand price for the first time in 15 years. We merged the main and Virginia sections Monday through Saturday, yielding a substantial newsprint savings with little impact to our news content. We also furloughed employees for five days.
Behind the scenes, we made many internal changes in an effort to sustain us financially for the long haul and to invest in growth areas such as roanoke.com and our targeted community publications and Web sites.
From the newsroom perspective, it's important to note that we have made these changes while maintaining our reputation for producing award-winning journalism rooted in the Roanoke and New River valleys. Just this spring, we won Virginia's top award for public service journalism and received international recognition for our multimedia series examining the health care challenges of our aging population.
Granted, we are a slightly smaller newsroom than a few years ago. This was a reality of the times, but something that occurred gradually through attrition and voluntary buyouts -- not the widespread layoffs seen at other papers.
Our staff of more than 100 journalists continues to dwarf any in Southwest Virginia, and we remain committed to strengthening the paper and Web site in years ahead. We will continue to emphasize community news and enterprise reporting. And we will be your watchdog in the public arena, bringing you in-depth stories before anyone else.
Moving online
Next up, the irony: The Internet giveth and it taketh away. It's given us more readers than ever, a fact that energizes the journalist who wants his or her reporting to have the greatest impact.
Not factoring in roanoke.com, our printed product already reaches a higher percentage of adults in our market than in almost any other U.S. city. When you include the online users with the print readers, that's an audience of 245,000 adults in our local area on a daily basis.
Yet while the Internet has extended our reach, it's also presented us new online competitors for advertising dollars. Readers' habits have changed, as well, with some preferring the efficiency of scanning online headlines to the more leisurely serendipity of turning printed pages.
A few major metro papers are responding to this new climate by experimenting with online fees -- charging readers a per-article rate, or a flat fee for access to their entire site.
We're not convinced either of those approaches is right at this time. (Keep in mind that your subscription pays for only about 20 percent of our costs. Advertising revenue makes up the difference.)
Later this year, you will see us experiment in a different way. We will offer an "e-paper," a digital replica of the printed Roanoke Times viewable online for a subscription fee.
Printing the truth
"State of Play" casts the workaday reporting life in a dramatic light. Crowe, the rumpled reporting ace, is trying to solve three murders with possible ties to corruption at the highest levels of U.S. government.
The story makes for entertaining moviegoing and, in the end, provides some satisfaction for the fact-checking journalist. Amid the final plot contortions and guns a-drawn, Crowe's Cal McAffrey issues a profane rallying cry about the resilience of journalism:
"Nobody reads the paper anymore, is that it? It's just another story. A couple days s--- storm and it's wrapping paper. You know, in the middle of all this gossip and speculation that permeates people's lives, I still think they know the difference between real news and bulls---, and they're glad that someone cares enough to get things on the record and print the truth."
As the viewer leaves the theater, the closing credits roll over images of what remains an everyday American scene, one that plays out every night here on Campbell Avenue.
The camera shows a newspaper press, fired up and printing daily newspapers.
