Editor Packenham Speaks at Inns Meeting
Grim state of journalism in US is cause for concern
Retired editor Michael Pakenham spoke to the Charles F. Greevy, Jr. Inns of Court on Wednesday, April 28, 2010. He was invited to speak by retired Judge Thomas Raup, whom he has known since they met at the National Judicial College, in Reno, on July 26, 1983.
Pakenham spoke about the state of journalism in the United States today. His assessment was not encouraging. The entire text of his speech is reproduced below.
Michael Pakenham retired in 2005 from a career in journalism. He spent the previous ten years as Books Editor and literary columnist for the Baltimore Sun. Before that, he was an Executive Editor, Editorial Page Editor, Associate Editor, Assistant Managing Editor, Foreign Editor, reporter, and columnist at the Chicago Tribune, the New York Herald-Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Daily News, the Sunday Correspondent (a British national weekly newspaper), and SPIN magazine. As reporter and as an editorialist, he interviewed and profiled or endorsed seven U.S. Presidents and hundreds of other prominent national and international leaders. He began his career as a criminal and civil courts reporter in Chicago, a political reporter, and Washington correspondent, including covering the Kennedy and Johnson White House. He was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University.
Good evening. Tom Raup, my good friend and fly-fishing companion for almost 30 years, suggested that you distinguished legal authorities would be interested in a review of the present state and future implications of journalism in the United States. I wish I could satisfy that curiosity. The grim truth is that American journalism – especially its most historically constructive role -- is today in such a state of disintegrating economic flux that it is impossible to make a confident estimate of its future. What is more deeply troubling is that that disintegration makes it impossible to be sure of the implications to the democratic process in this nation.
Through modern history, journalism has served as a check upon government that no constitution has otherwise been able to provide.
I won’t inflict on you the dozens of historic citations of the importance of journalistic provocation. As a proud Pennsylvanian, I must concede that I know of no other state that has endured more of that provocation, for two centuries and more.
I'm delighted to report there is still aggressive enterprise work going on throughout the country, and particularly gratifyingly in Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia Inquirer -- where I worked for almost 20 years -- has maintained its deep commitment. As a result, only this month, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court imposed a series of tough new rules on criminal courts systems, especially in Philadelphia. The Inquirer's exhaustive investigative reporting over a period of months had demonstrated that the system there was broken and continued to deteriorate.
Then -- consider the ongoing investigations and prosecutions that have come to be called "Bonusgate," pursued by the Commonwealth's attorney general. They were precipitated by aggressive reporting by the Harrisburg Patriot-News.
A third example: As everyone in this room is well aware, two former Luzerne County judges are now under criminal charges for pocketing at least $2.6 million in kickbacks for unspeakably abusing the rights of juveniles in their courts for years.
We would have to order breakfast if I were to go into the details of corruption in Luzerne and Lackawanna counties. I cannot say that newspapers have cured corruption there -- it has been deeply endemic for something like eternity. But the Wilkes-Barre paper played a major role in exposing some of the most horrendous abuses.
In Erie, Allentown, York, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere, daily newspapers are aggressively pursuing the very promising new Pennsylvania Open Records Law with some excellent effects. Just last week, I attended a lunch titled “Celebration of Open Government,” put on by the Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition, a five-year-old entity that is aggressively pressing forward the widest possible implementation of the new Open Records Law. In that effort, news people are joined by librarians, lawyers, educators, and community groups. An already, there are many gratifying demonstrations of the cleansing effect.
Throughout the nation, there are examples of newspapers and other news organizations protecting the public trust -- some of them requiring very substantial investments and considerable courage. But almost all of those newspapers face debilitating problems. The most expensive, intellectually demanding work of journalism is investigative, enterprise reporting. Tragically for the democratic process, that is the first casualty of the catastrophic economic erosion of newspapers in the United States.
What is going on?
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism on March 15 released its seventh annual "State of the News Media" report. It is voluminous, with more than a dozen chapters and several hundred pages of research, compilations, assessments, and conclusions.
Anyone who would like to learn more than I will cover tonight can get access to the entire document on line, at “journalism.org” -- clicking on “The State of the News Media, 2010.”
Unrelated to the Pew Center is The Poynter Institute, a foundation-based major national organization that teaches the craft and follows the news industry. Bill Mitchell has been editor of Poynter Online, a valuable resource, since March 1999, and before that held top editing and reporting positions in several newspapers. His summation of the Pew report: And I quote:
“The study paints a picture of mainstream media beset by crumbling business models, journalism start-ups still stumbling in their efforts to generate significant original content, and audiences left to bumble along as best they can, trying to make sense of a confusing media landscape.” [End of quote.]
Chilling. But on the same day, an equally well-credentialed authority, Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, offered a very different view.
In an interview, Rainie said: “There is every reason to think that high quality, ethically sound journalism will be alive and well after our grandchildren are dead … citizens understand the importance of it.”
Rainie went on [ I quote] “News organizations are trying to adapt to the new realities that will allow them to provide it, and there will always be a portion of the population who deeply cares about public life and civic life and the way that public institutions perform. And there will be ways for them to tell their stories and learn about what’s going on in their communities.”
Rainie concluded that – I quote -- “The skill set of journalists has never been more in demand. In an information-abundant environment the skills that allow you to gather up that information and make sense of it, then tell stories around it, have never been more precious, and so the thing that we call journalism will be surviving and well. Whether it exist in institutions we call news organizations is probably the bigger question, but it will exist in all sorts of forms in the future.” [end of quote]
Which of these two expert summaries is closer to realistic? I find the more pessimistic view irresistible. I have stayed in touch with many of my former colleagues, senior editors and publishers in the newspaper industry. All of us are asked frequently the questions that concern us this evening.
Among my colleagues, Bill Mitchell’s pessimism tends to far outweigh Lee Rainie's optimism. Without boring you with statistics, let me give a few underlying economic facts, many of which can be found, with greater elaboration and attribution, in the Pew report and other responsible surveys.
A relatively small number of newspapers have gone bankrupt and out of business. But many – indeed most -- have so critically contracted in the last several years that they are becoming thin ghosts of what they once were in terms of original news content. Investigative and thorough analytic efforts are the most expensive demands of newspapers’ commitments.
Daily newspaper circulation in the U.S. has declined 25.6% since the year 2000. In 2009 alone, advertising revenue for newspapers fell by a total of 26%. That brought the loss over the last three years to 43%. That includes revenue from papers’ online sites, which are increasingly seeking ad income. One Poynter Institute study estimates that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in reporting and editing capacity since the year 2000 -- roughly 30%.
What about other media? In 2009, local television advertising revenue decreased by 22%. Advertising on radio decreased by 22%. Magazine ad revenue fell 17% nationwide. Network television altogether dropped 8%. Online revenue -- which many people look to for the future of supporting news -- fell by 5%.
The only commercial news sector that it did not lose revenue last year was cable news, and that was principally Fox News.
Advertising is, of course, affected by the state of the economy, but more is going on than the recession. One established investment firm recently projected that by the year 2013, the economy will have recovered but that newspapers, radio, and magazines will still take in 41% less advertising revenue than they did in 2006.
Even if those declines were restricted to print sources, there would be a dismal implication in terms of news reporting and enterprise. Even before those declines, television and radio organizations that broadcast news do very little original, investigative, or probing reportorial work of their own. Most local television stations employ presenters who are largely doing scene sets for visual impact and getting the factual news itself from local newspapers.
This is also true nationwide. It is estimated that network television news spending has decreased by more than half since the peak in the 1980s. Staff expenses at the magazines Time and Newsweek have diminished 47% since 1983.
Most authorities estimate that 90% of the journalistic reporting in the United States comes from daily and Sunday newspapers. Almost every one of them is in serious financial difficulty today.
Most experts believe that although recession has a role, the declines are fundamentally rooted in the technological revolution, driven by the Internet and by developments that go beyond what most of us think of as the Internet.
Virtually every news organization today is devoting a great deal of energy to finding revenue streams that can keep up with these profound technological changes. There is very little evidence, however, that levels of funds even remotely approximating the old print forms will be found.
Some major publications – with the Wall Street Journal leading the way -- charge for online access. But there is little indication that those funds will even remotely approach traditional circulation revenues from four centuries and more of print. In any event, circulation income historically has been substantially less than half of all revenues in the United States industry -- with advertising providing the larger resources. Most agree that there is very little – if any -- chance of online advertising ever reaching the effectiveness or prosperity of print advertising. There are just too many sites to leap around to. And it takes an active decision to look at most online advertising.
One study often cited these days reports that 79 percent of Internet news consumers surveyed say they "rarely if ever have clicked on an online ad." A recent Pew Institute study found that among users who go to online news sites, only 19 percent say they would continue to visit a site if they had to pay for it.
If that were not distressing enough, The Poynter Institute’s “Mobile Media” site reported that on March 17 four unrelated announcements sent a deeply troubling message, which Poynter’s mobile media expert, Damon Kiesow, reported. Begging your patience with cyberspeak, Kiesow said, and I quote:
“Real estate listing and search provider Zillow.com added an Android app to its mobile lineup, joining an already popular iPhone app; Aol Autos released a new-car buying guide for the iPhone; local business listing site Yelp.com announced it had added 1 million user-submitted business reviews in the last quarter; and Yahoo.com purchased the social-media and mobile-platform friendly Citizen Sports. And, a fifth as a bonus, location-based social network Foursquare announced it had added 100,000 users in less than two weeks.”
And he went on:
“Aside from the obvious (none are traditional media companies and their mobile apps are free) each one also carves out a niche that had at one time been the province of daily newspapers. In short, the disadvantage local media organizations face on the desktop Web is quickly being migrated to the mobile Web as well.” [End of quote.]
If you understand all those dot-coms and yelps and apps, I congratulate you. You are far ahead of most learned Americans over the age of 19.
So let us ask: What may develop as successor to or substitute for traditional news gathering and investigative efforts? The speculations are almost totally intertwined with technological development. One major element of that world is what is called "social media" – Facebook, Twitter, and others. For anyone who spends time tickling an iPhone or sitting at a computer can dance all over the world finding commentary.
The problem is that that ostensible information is in no way professionally fact-checked, vetted, or edited.
It can be argued that traditional journalism was not monitored -- that under the First Amendment it should not be. But there traditionally have been strong checks and balances.
Beyond such vulnerabilities as defamation tort litigation, there have been professional reputations to be kept and often fierce professional pride. Even minor instances of plagiarism and serious misquotation have tended to collapse the careers of reporters and editors alike.
The new volunteer efforts on the Internet and beyond have no similar restraints. The speed of transmission is so close to instantaneous that it's hard to imagine controls that could approximate those historic traditional restraints.
I was particularly enchanted by a recent illustrative event. A law school professor -- in the grand tradition -- set up for his class a fictional hypothetical situation from which to work the lesson of the day. This brief scenario that he invented for the sake of argument included the hypothesis that the Chief Justice of the United States was going to retire or resign soon.
Among the students -- as is now common -- a number were Twittering. That is, during the class their handheld digital devices were electronically on line. One of these students immediately Twittered or Tweeted a statement that Chief Justice Roberts was about to resign.
That went out to his social medium pals. Within a matter of minutes that statement was given nationwide and even international circulation on the Internet. Within a brief time, it was being reported as real news on some radio and television news stations.
Of course, it was not true and it was quickly rebutted, but not before it had widespread circulation. I was somewhat relieved that the story quickly became not the spuriously reported resignation, but a tale of the vulnerability of instant communications.
It is hard to imagine that lesson will prevail for long or among many.
That is but one illustration of the dangers or failure inherent in what has been held up as "citizens' journalism."
A brighter side of the instantaneous communication phenomenon is that a great deal of coverage -- in video as well as written and audio form -- is flooding in from handheld devices all over the world. The apparently burgeoning popular revolution in Iran is not covered there by established media, which are rigidly censored, but there is vast communication by cell phone photos and messages. The early reporting from the Haitian earthquake and the Icelandic volcanic eruption were predominantly by cell phone -- until news organizations could begin to get staff into the initially unreachable disaster zone.
This phenomenon has led to the development, still in infancy stage, of specialized news entities. Many of them are supported by nonprofit or foundation money. One recent estimate is that in the last four years nationally $141 million of nonprofit money flowed into these new media efforts. That, however, is substantially less than one-tenth of the losses in newspaper resources in the same period.
Emphasizing the limitations of these new efforts, an exhaustive recent study by the Pew organization estimated that after analysis of more than 1 million blogs and social media sites that 80% of their information was derived from what is called "U.S. legacy media." By that they mean -- basically and definingly -- traditional newspapers.
ProPublica [spelled …] is the most prominent of all these specialized, not-for-profit organizations. It was founded less than three years ago by Herbert and Marion Sandler, the former chief executives of Golden West Financial Corporation. It now has a staff of 35 professional journalists, based in New York. The Sandlers have committed an annual $10 million to it. It yields investigative journalism, in some cases independently, and in others in tandem with major newspapers, magazines, and television companies. Already, it has made waves.
The annual Pulitzer Prizes, announced this month, granted ProPublica the award in investigative journalism. It shared the citation with the New York Times Sunday Magazine, for reporting on decisions made by physicians in New Orleans who were cut off by Hurricane Katarina.
Another such project is the Fund for Investigative Journalism, supported by foundations and individual contributions. It accepts no money from corporations, labor unions, special interest groups, or governmental agencies. It awards grants to individual journalists and groups, ranging from $500 to $10,000, for investigative projects.
There are several other new entities, mostly marginally financed, doing enterprise journalism. There is one in San Diego, another in Texas, and one in San Francisco that specializes in California investigations. The list goes on, but to quote my good friend John Carroll, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and before that of the Baltimore Sun: “None of these outfits, I'm pretty sure, has a business plan that will get them off the dole. In short, there's no way we can sustain the vast number of professional reporters we're accustomed to.”
Enough background!
What are the implications of everything I have been moaning about?
The pessimist in me sees the decay and foresees the near destruction of the sort of journalism that has traditionally been a vital monitor of the execution of power in the United States.
Is there a substitute, a successor, in sight to fulfill that role? Not clearly, despite the efforts I have outlined. Some valuable relief can come from increased vigilance by other institutions. These include nongovernment organizations that seek to ensure probity, whether in the law, medicine, the academy, politics, or business. The effectiveness of that sort of institutional self-discipline is historically highly specific and thus sharply limited.
In 1787, Thomas Jefferson famously declared that “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Although that choice today is not a yes-or-no matter, there can be no doubt that under present circumstances the tide is overwhelmingly running against Jefferson’s preference. Even in the most optimistic light, newspapers are rapidly and radically diminishing as a check against official malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance. With national opinion polls today indicating that up to 80 percent of adult Americans distrust government as a whole, the prospect is . . . simply terrifying.
I would be delighted to try to answer questions.
