FINALLY got chapter 16 of The Complete Writer online at Plain & Simple Press: a detailed squib on how to do journalistic research.
This is one of my favorite chapters in the book. It’s based on a chapter in my textbook, The Essential Feature, which appeared in another century (possibly on another world…) through Columbia University Press — much revised and updated for our time and our world. Tracking down facts, following the money trail, getting the dirt: I love this stuff!
😀
Back in the day when I was a working journalist, the thing I used to love the most about the job was that it gave you an excuse to ask people nosy questions. The work is as ill-paid as teaching, but because of the nosy-question factor it’s one hell of a lot more fun.
Dear Reader: Would you please post a link to the P&S Press post on research for nonfiction writers at Facebook, Twitter, and waypoints? Here, explicitly: is the URL: http://www.plainandsimplepress.com/the-complete-writer-journalistic-research/
The Times didn’t arrive at the usual hour this morning (nor, I notice, did the Arizona Repulsive, delivered to the neighbors). It finally did show up, around 9:00 a.m.: it was reclining in a puddle of rainwater when I went to drive out of the garage.
A paper that gets to me after breakfast is a paper that arrives too late. I won’t even open the thing. I won’t have time to look at it, because I’ll be fully engaged in the hectic round of time-consuming, repetitive, can’t-be-neglected activities that is my daily life. And my life isn’t even especially busy, compared to most people’s.
As newspaper subscribers realize they’re paying to have half-a-forest of pulped wood delivered to their front doorstep that they have no time to read, they cancel their subscriptions. Revenues fall and management cuts back on the delivery of news. We get less content, less serious reporting, less of value. More readers cancel. In due time, the paper falters and then fails.
That’s about where I am with the Times just now. The only reason I haven’t canceled is that I got a smokin’ deal while I was on the ASU faculty. If I cancel the paper and then decide I want it back, that incredible bargain won’t be available again. I certainly can’t afford to subscribe to the New York Times at its full price. In addition, the Times is instituting a scheme to limit readers’ access to its online edition unless they’re already subscribers to the paper version (huh?) or are willing to pony up some cash for the privilege of cruising the web version. So…it’s either keep the paper subscription, continuing to abet the destruction of forests, the contamination of the environment in the production of ink, and the transport of wads paper smeared with ink that go directly into the recycling bin, or (since on principle I do not pay for Web content) forgo reading the Times altogether.
It sets up quite the internal conflict. I’d like to support journalism. It’s one of the pillars of democracy. Without good reporting—real reporting, not Play-Nooz—citizens cannot know what their elected leaders are doing (or not doing) and can’t know when it’s time to throw the rascals out. The long, slow demise of journalism has traced the long, slow demise of education in this country, and in fact when solid journalism no longer exists, the American republic will soon cease to exist.
But still… Sometimes I feel like a fool, continuing to pay for something that’s fading away like the Cheshire cat.
Image: John Tenniel, The Cheshire Cat. Illustration for Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. Public Domain
This is totally off-topic, but have you seen the photo that appears on the front page of the Home section in today’s New York Times? Look at it closely, and then consider that it runs over a story asking the slightly titillating question of whether letting kids run around nude is OK. It made me wonder where the heck their editor was, and what on earth he was smoking!
Personally, I don’t think letting your kids trot around the house or the fully fenced backyard in the altogether is some sort of moral issue. Nudity isn’t especially objectionable in my book, and nudity among small children is benign enough. But… I think we have to consider the context of the society in which we live.
First, many Americans do consider a state of undress to be some sort of moral issue, and they are abhorred at the very thought of nude three-year-olds running rampant across the landscape. We may consider that to be their problem. But really: civil people don’t go around offending other people’s sensibilities on purpose. It’s common courtesy to teach your children to dress modestly in public and before guests.
Second, and more to the point: we live in a culture that is inundated with sexual imagery, much of it quite violent. We know that a surprising number of adults—women as well as men—develop unhealthy cravings for small children, and that quite a few will act on these cravings. Teaching the kiddies some modesty is, alas, the better part of valor.
To my eye, the Times‘s photo is pretty sexualized. Am I crazy? Note the position of the little boy’s hand vis-Ã -vis the thigh of the man standing near him, and the handsomely exposed legs of the woman in the foreground. Maybe I’m nuts…but IMHO the Times‘s Home editor should have exercised a little discretion.
As we noted yesterday, journalism—even its most prominent avatars—is fading away like the Cheshire cat. Money Beagle left a winsome comment to that post, in which he remarks,Â
I guess great blogs like yours and mine will eventually have to save the day. 🙂
Can’t let that one lay! It’s a broad concept that raises all sorts of questions and issues. I was about to respond in the comments field but found myself going on at post length. So:
@ Money Beagle: Eventually, something vaguely like that is about what will happen. It’s not a good development, because…
First, there’s no organized way to get whatever news or newsoid we produce to a coherent audience. Audience is ultimately what matters.
Second, we have no editors! Reporters need editors for a variety of reasons, all of which apply to bloggers. In the absence of editorial guidance, discipline, and help, we’re not really doing journalism.
Third, we have no real, widely accepted code of journalistic or bloggerish ethics. While reporters often stray from the SPJ code, we have no code at all. At least journalists try.
Fourth, bloggers do not have funds for investigative journalism, the single most important function of the Fourth Estate.
Money, of course, is at the root of print journalism’s troubles. What I’d like to see is a combination of public and nonprofit funding similar to what supports PBS and NPR, only modified for the needs of print magazines and newspapers. Publications would continue to run as many ads as they could get, but advertising revenue would be supplemented by foundations.Â
Donations to journalistic foundations would be tax-deductible, whether or not the groups were government or, strictly speaking, charitable entities. This policy would be put in place because of the crucial importance of the Fourth Estate to the continuing education of voters, to the health and safety of the public, and to the survival of a free society. As a more or less democratic republic, we can’t afford to lose high-quality journalistic enterprises. Just as donations to schools are deductible, so support of journalism would be deductible, for much the same reasons.
For bloggers to morph into true journalists—not Play-Nooz yappers but real journalists of the sort you find at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Yorker—we would have to organize into networks that incorporate the best organizational features of large print publications and adapt those features to a diffuse online operating model. We would need training to understand the principles of investigative journalism, political and science writing, community journalism, and basic ethics. We would need a centralized set of editors who could establish an overall mission and keep the enterprise moving coherently according to that mission, assign bloggers to “beats,” assign specific stories and projects, and oversee accuracy, quality, and integrity. We would need a master site with a layout that would effectively direct readers to content. And we would need a lot of money, which means we would need ad agents and a system of advertising that generates serious revenue. Each blogger’s site or contribution to the larger site would have to earn enough for her or him to make a living.
Few of us earn enough from blogging to live, even modestly. Those individuals who do are, by and large, not journalists. Whatever it is you can say they’re doing, it isn’t journalism.
Most of the heavy-hitting journalists in this country today are products of heavy-hitting schools—many have degrees from the Ivy Leagues. Although some highly educated and sophisticated writers reside in the blogosphere, they’re not organized and few earn enough from blogging to justify the cost of that sort of training. In a word, they have paying day jobs. If blogging is to replace print journalism, it will have to generate enough money to support more than just a few writers—full-time, not as hobbyists.
Image:
Henry Louis Stephens, “Black Man Reading Newspaper by Candlelight”
The painting is said to represent a man reading the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation in the paper
Public domain, U.S. Library of CongressÂ
From Wikipedia CommonsÂ
This may not be visible to those of you who view the New York Times Magazine online, but today the Times downsized the magazine’s print version in a big and ominous way. They’ve cut the trim size (the issue’s physical height and width) and, to accommodate the smaller pages, have switched to an eye-straining smaller font with display type that at one heading level looks weirdly smaller than the body type. The effect is…well, depressing. It’s another symptom of the demise of print journalism, a development that does not bode well for a healthy democracy.
They’ve also upgraded to a “brighter and more contemporary color palette.” {gasp!} I woke up this morning with the remnants of a migraine that started two days ago and is only just clearing. Today’s brighter and more contemporary cover consists of a stomach-flipping, brilliant, sulfuric ochre that bleeds off all four margins, with black type against a window of Day-Glo magenta: eyeball-grating! At first glance, it actually caused physical pain. No exaggeration: I still can’t look at it without making my head hurt more. In fact, as we scribble, I’m ripping off the cover, folding it so I can’t see it, and hiding it in the trash.
When a magazine starts out with a large trim size, shrinking it to the dimensions of an ordinary newsstand publication doesn’t sound, on the face of it, like a big deal. But lemme tell you: a publication like the Times Magazine builds much of its appeal through its visual presence and its tactile effect on readers. The magazine was physically pleasing to read and to handle, and that is why one is willing to pay to have such a thing delivered to one’s home. This fact is not understood by management, particularly when management has no comprehension of journalism or graphic design and is interested primarily—one might say solely—in the bottom line. These bozos fail to grasp the idea that when you diminish the magazine, you may save money on production costs, but you lose readers. When you’re already hemorrhaging readers, you can’t afford strategies that drive away those who have stuck with you through good times and bad.
While I was working for Arizona Highways, the publisher decided to save dollars by cutting the trim size and, worse, by going to a cheaper, thinner paper stock. Save money? Yup. Stupid move? Oh, yeah!
Highways was the pre-eminent regional magazine in the country. It also was one of the premier photography publications in the world. For a certain type of landscape photographer—the sort who hauls a hundred pounds of large-format gear 15 or 20 miles into the bush, eschews Photoshop, and rarely if ever does a set-up shot—it was a go-to market that could make a career. For readers around the world, it was a window to the American Southwest and a nice little dream factory. For the state of Arizona, it was the mother lode of tourism.
Cutting the trim size meant they had to cut the size of the photo reproduction. A spectacular scenic looks a whole lot less scenic when you shrink it a quarter-inch or so all the way around—surprisingly so. Cheesying down the paper quality meant ink on one side of a sheet would show through to the other side. This annoyed the photographers, so much so that the real heavy hitters, who did not need Arizona Highways to make or break their businesses, quit submitting their work.
Overall the magazine’s quality dropped markedly: markedly enough to be noticeable to readers. Circulation, which at one time reached every country on the earth but one, went into free-fall. It had been dropping; now it plummeted.
Two editors in a row walked or were fired. The second, who pretty clearly was hired to ride the publication into the ground, fled before it could crash. Highways is still being printed, but no one understands why. Its days may be numbered in the single digits. They were numbered in the first place, but the numbers were surely reduced when management decided to cut production quality.
Hey, guys. Give us NEWS! Give us QUALITY! Real readers don’t want infotainment. We don’t want Play-Nooz. And we’re not gunna pay for junked-up products. If journalism were still journalism, maybe it would survive a little longer.
…that is the question. Whether ’tis better to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous costs, or to read my favorite magazine online for free.Â
Actually, the cost isn’t outrageous: Atlantic Monthly is trying to get me to re-up my subscription, telling me the regular price of $25 I’ve always paid is some sort of special “alumni” discount. As though they really could get new subscribers to pony up $60 for twelve issues. Twenty-five bucks is only two dollars apiece to have the magazine packaged up and delivered to my door by the U.S. Postal Service. That can’t possibly cover the cost of mailroom staff, mail list management, packaging, and shipping. It’s a bargain, really.
I do enjoy TheAtlantic. But the problem is, oftentimes I don’t read it. Sometimes a new issue will arrive and I’ll realize the old issue is still sitting on the bureau in the bedroom or on the desk in my office, scarcely ever opened. My life is so fractured and so gestalt that I rarely find enough time to focus on anything longer than a few minutes. Unless…yes, unless I’m in front of the computer. These days, the only time I focus on anything for any length of time is when I’m sitting in front of a monitor or trapped on the light rail reading page proofs.
And oddly, The Atlantic is online! Apparently the whole thing is posted, free of charge, cover to cover. Not only that, but it’s got videos, it’s got slideshows, it’s got blogs…all sorts of extra content. And all free.Â
So…why would anyone even think of sending a $25 check to get a paper version—a lesser version, really—of all this splendid stuff? It’s hard to come up with an excuse.
One reason, I guess, is the impulse to try to help keep journalism alive. It’s like a charitable contribution. Too bad it’s not tax-deductible.
Would I pay $25 to read it online?Â
Nope. As a medium, the computer screen doesn’t give me what I’m looking for in leisure reading: the tactile sensation of pages turning, the portability…with a high-speed cable connection, you can’t carry a computer to the backyard, to the breakfast table, to the bathtub. And what could be more uncomfortable than craning your neck to read a laptop monitor? That’s not my idea of leisure reading.
On the other hand, as a practical matter I’m not reading the magazine in those places.
I do occasionally pick up on ideas from Atlantic writers for this blog. If I read every issue online, I probably would engage more of those ideas in my own writing, more often, because FaM’s dashboard would be right at hand. Instead of putting down an article with the thought that I must blog about it—and then forgetting it—I might go directly from the author to Posts > Add New. Â
Hmmm… Maybe I should void this check?
What say you?
Do you cling to your hard-copy, snail-mail subscriptions, or have you abandoned them in favor of the Internet? Why? If we all stop reading print magazines, what will that do to the world as we know it? And what will happen come the Revolution, when all us proles are knocked offline, or, as in China, our online choices are censored?
Dear Reader: Would you please post a link to the P&S Press post on research for nonfiction writers at Facebook, Twitter, and waypoints? Here, explicitly: is the URL: http://www.plainandsimplepress.com/the-complete-writer-journalistic-research/
