Category: Media & Journalism

News Item Tells Part of the Story

Ford sales off 48% say the news stories today. But that’s not the whole story.

Last month Ford sold 99,400 vehicles.

In February 2008 Ford sold 192,799 vehicles.

In February 2007 Ford sold 211,150 vehicles.

In February 2006 Ford sold 244,021 vehicles.

So a more accurate headline might be, “Ford sales down 60% in three years.” While the biggest drop has been over the past year (made worse by the fact that there was one more day last February), the decline is part of a continuing trend, and that seems to me to be a significant factor. See if you can find mention of it in any of today’s news stories.

Exactly

An excerpt from Bronstein at Large:

I get two newspapers delivered at home: The [San Francisco] Chronicle and the New York Times. The Times hits the step somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m. The Chronicle gets there before 6. Both papers are in existential trouble despite good work and 300 years of accumulated history between them.

So even in the face of the threats to our survival, there are still at least two different people and two entirely different delivery systems in place to get two newspapers to the same address in the same couple of hours. Really? In what rational world does that make sense? Why is that a good idea for businesses on the brink?

I’ve had the same thought when The New York Times and The Albuquerque Journal were delivered on my street at different times by different people. Why?

But, on the other hand, the banks f***ed up, the automakers f***ed up, Mervyn’s and Circuit City and Bennigan’s aren’t around anymore. Why should we think that newspapers are run by intelligent people? Why should they be different?

Disconnect

CNBC had Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb on yesterday. Watch the discussion (10 minutes) as the CNBC crew displays a complete disconnect with what Roubini and Taleb are saying.

As Josh Marshall put it: “These two guys are talking about a deep structural crisis in the world economy. And these CNBC yahoos can’t stop asking for stock tips. Really surreal.”

Pathetic, too.

Update: See also this video.

Will the Times Live?

It’s possible, of course, that my skepticism about forecasts of the impending death of the Times is simply the product of wishful thinking, since I am one of those dinosaurs who finds the idea of a morning without the print edition of the Times pretty much unimaginable. Just yesterday morning, in fact, I was quite powerfully struck by the tremendous variety and detail of information that a single day’s edition of the Times offers, and by the—clichéd, but nonetheless true—fact that reading, or at least skimming, the print edition cover to cover guarantees you’ll come across stories that you may not have thought you were interested in but in fact are fascinated by, like the reclassification of Tule elk as a target species for bowhunters (just imagine how that news was received in the Tule elk community) or the constitutionality of animal-cruelty videos. And yes, the Internet offers these things as well, but, I have to say, nothing quite offers the unusual combination of comprehensiveness and serendipity of the Times’ daily edition. It’ll be bad news when it’s gone.

James Surowiecki — The New Yorker

What Might Have Been

Matthew Yglesias and Atrios write about the newspaper industry — and what might have been.

They are getting closer to the truth I think. Newspapers publish news, comics, and ads in order to create what they sell. And what they sell is you. They sell you to advertisers (just as television does).

The product of newspapers is readers. The content on newspapers is the means to attract readers. Except for a sense of community involvement — real in some instances, perceived in most — a newspaper’s relationship with “journalism” is a marriage of convenience.

Ramblings

FedEx is reducing the pay of its salaried employees 5% effective January 1. Do I hear the D-word (deflation)?

Dean Baker wonders why news articles about the auto industry mention employee pay, but similar articles about the newspaper industry don’t.

Calculated Risk has an update graph of the Four Bad Bears. (Be sure to click on the chart to get the readable version.) Doesn’t look to me like the game is over yet. Am I waiting too long to get back in equities?

News You Can Lose

Who among NewMexiKen’s readers subscribes (or otherwise gets) the daily local newspaper? Why? Why not?

Some background:

James Surowiecki sums up the sad state of the newspaper industry in this week’s New Yorker.

Felix Salmon responds to one part of Surowiecki’s report.

In a comment, Becci suggests The Old Media by Susan Estrich.

The science reporter for The Albuquerque Journal, John Fleck, has been blogging some of late on this topic. Elephant Diaries: The Economics of Local News and The Elephant in the Room are particularly useful.

[This post restructured and updated from original versions.]

The best piece on the Heisman

“The lunacy of the Heisman Trophy” by Allen Barra, first published in 2003 and still right on. Key excerpt:

The Mackey, the Lombardi, the Outland, the Biletnikoff—there are more than a dozen college football awards, and all of them taken together don’t generate one-tenth of the ink given to the Heisman Trophy. Why, exactly? What is particularly puzzling is that the Walter Camp Award, presented to the “nation’s top player” by the Walter Camp Foundation, has never caught on, considering that it is named for the father of football, the man without whom none of the other awards would exist. But then, the Walter Camp Foundation is in New Haven, Conn., and the Heisman Trophy is presented by the Downtown Athletic Club in New York. Which, come to think of it, probably answers the question right there….

And, by the way, why not present the Heisman sometime in mid-January, after the bowl games have been played? Why continue the pretense that the bowls aren’t part of the “season”? Since the bowl games determine the national championship and final rankings, why do the various groups and foundations that give out trophies pretend that the biggest games these kids will play don’t matter?

Every year, sportswriters wail and wail for a Heisman overhaul, and still nothing changes. So here’s a more feasible remedy. College football would gain some credibility by simply acknowledging that modern football is a division of labor among specialists. Gather up all the various year-end awards, including the Heisman, rent a ballroom, and present them all on the same night. If we can’t get the best players checked off on the Heisman ballot, maybe we can at least get them all in the same room.

A defining moment for both Detroit and newspapers

The publisher of the Detroit Free Press, the country’s 20th largest paper by weekday circulation, is expected to announce next week that it will cease home delivery of the print edition of the newspaper on most days of the week, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.

The publisher hasn’t made a final decision, said this person, but the leading scenario set to be unveiled Tuesday would call for the Free Press and its partner paper, the Detroit News, to end home delivery on all but the most lucrative days—Thursday, Friday and Sunday.

WSJ.com

Overload!

There are more than 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites today—a number that is expanding at a rate of approximately ten thousand an hour. Two hundred and ten billion e-mails are sent each day. Say goodbye to the gigabyte and hello to the exabyte, five of which are worth 37,000 Libraries of Congress. In 2006 alone, the world produced 161 exabytes of digital data, the equivalent of three million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By 2010, it is estimated that this number will increase to 988. Pick your metaphor: we’re drowning, buried, snowed under.

From a lengthy piece at Columbia Journalism Review, Overload! Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information.

It’s the Housing Bubble, Not the ***** Credit Crunch!

The bursting of the housing bubble damaged both consumer confidence and the card house of the credit markets. These in turn led to the bursting of the stock bubble, which has led to even more loss of consumer confidence.

This excerpted from a posting by Dean Baker — Beat the Press:

The news media almost completely missed the housing bubble. They relied almost entirely on sources who either had an interest in not calling or attention to an $8 trillion housing bubble or somehow were unable to see it. As a result they did not warn the public that their house prices were likely to plunge in future years.

Having dismally failed in their jobs to inform the public, reporters are still relying almost exclusively on sources that completely missed the housing bubble. As a result, they are still badly misinforming the public, first and foremost by attributing the economic downturn to a credit crunch.

This is truly incredible. Homeowners have lost more than $5 trillion in housing wealth. There is a very well established wealth effect whereby $1 of housing wealth is estimated as leading to 5 to 6 cents of annual consumption. This implies that the loss of wealth to date would cause consumption to fall by $250 billion to $300 billion annually (1.7 percent to 2.0 percent of GDP). If you add in the loss of around $6 trillion in stock wealth, with an estimated wealth effect of 3-4 cents on the dollar, then you get an additional decline of $180 billion to $240 billion in annual consumption (1.2 percent to 1.6 percent of GDP).

These are huge falls in consumption that would lead to a very serious recession, like the one we are seeing. This would be predicted even if all our banks were fully solvent and in top flight financial shape.

Morons

Via Daily Kos

Campbell Brown: For those people who have been worried about the possibility of one party controlling Congress and the White House, the last president to do that, of course, was….?

John King: Ah, that was Bill Clinton, and…

Brown: Jimmy Carter! Jimmy Carter had… Bill Clinton had Democrats in the House and in the Senate?

King: Very briefly.

Brown: Very briefly. [Crinkles her nose] Didn’t go so well.

King: No it didn’t.

OK, class: Who was the last president to have one-party control of both houses of Congress?

Sleeping in at the morning paper

This translates for Albuquerque too (indeed, even more so).

There are now countless Southern Californians who understand L.A. — whether by osmosis or by marriage — through the prism of its Latino texture. Everyone here interfaces daily with Latinos, speaks some form of Spanish, and knows Mexican culture and cuisine. In effect, everyone in L.A. is Latino. Does your morning paper feel like it’s at all cognizant of this?

From Shades of Brown, an excellent article about the Los Angeles Times mentioned here Saturday.

Shades of Brown

“It’s not their kind of newspaper. It’s too big, it’s too stuffy. If you will, it’s too complicated.”

That’s then Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler referring to the need to attract Latino and African-American readers. He made the remark in 1978. And Chandler was considered the modernizer of the Times.

From an excellent look at the Times’ coverage of the Latino communities, Shades of Brown by Daniel Hernandez at LA Weekly.

“‘If I’m not in it, it means that the other readers don’t know about me.’ This is a far more profound conclusion. It means the L.A. Times is a separating force,” Parks says. “What Frank got me to see was that the Times had been approaching the Latino communities as ‘Them,’ as the ‘Other.’ We had to approach the coverage as, it’s about ‘Us.'”

(Sometimes it seems to NewMexiKen it’s like no one has ever heard of the motto of the United States: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. Hello!)

Thanks to Annette’s Notebook for the link. A fascinating article.

They never mean it

“If the [Ashley Todd] incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.”

John Moody, Executive Vice President of FOX News Thursday evening.

Yeah, and Senator John McCain said he’d commit suicide if the Democrats took control of the senate two years ago, too. These people are full of unintended hyperbole.

(McCain made the remark on October 16, 2006. Original link from NewMexiKen to the source at The Washington Post no longer works, but this one to ABC News does.)

Strong words from historically Republican voices

It may have seemed audacious for Obama to start his campaign in Springfield, invoking Lincoln. We think, given the opportunity to hold this nation’s most powerful office, he will prove it wasn’t so audacious after all. We are proud to add Barack Obama’s name to Lincoln’s in the list of people the Tribune has endorsed for president of the United States.

Chicago Tribune

We may one day look back on this presidential campaign in wonder. We may marvel that Obama’s critics called him an elitist, as if an Ivy League education were a source of embarrassment, and belittled his eloquence, as if a gift with words were suddenly a defect. In fact, Obama is educated and eloquent, sober and exciting, steady and mature. He represents the nation as it is, and as it aspires to be.

Los Angeles Times