Quick hits, good reads

The BBC's Kevin Marsh has an excellent and lengthy post of his notes from the UK's news:rewired conference. Among other things, Marsh makes the sensible, if sometimes forgotten point, that the pan-skilled journalist is probably not going to be the future model, just because everyone can't be that good at everything.

An excerpt:

I think I detect a hint of ‘return to the cottage industry’ in a lot of what is written about new media’s potential for journalists.
Don’t make the mistake, for example, of thinking that journalism’s future will be populated mainly by ‘news entrepreneurs’ – it won’t, as even that particular idea’s uberzealots will tell you.
Don’t make the mistake, either, of thinking that in future journalism will be entirely or even mainly about the kind of skills we’re talking about today.
Like it or not, much journalism is about process and organisation – and seems likely to remain that way.
Demand for people who can organise an outside broadcast or coverage of a court case for live and continuous news remains and will remain high.
Demand for people who can elbow their way to the front of a scrum – ditto. Or for people who can field produce, problem solve or persuade players to appear on screen or on the web.
And so one of the challenges of learning multimedia and social media skills is to understand them not just for what they are and what they can do, but how they fit with the other essential - arguably more endurable - skills of journalism.

While you are at it, spend a few moments with David Sullivan's latest on the High Church of Journalism and professionalism, and how it eventually promoted a fatal disconnect from readers.

Worth reading over at "That's the Press, Baby"

David Sullivan, a longtime journalist and fine thinker on matters of the press who doesn't get enough recognition, has picked up the digital pen lately and is on a roll on his blog.

• His Nov. 3 A death in the desert about the announced closing of Arizona's East Valley Tribune is an insightful look into newspaper "mashups," which were all the rage in the 1990s and why they likely fall apart in an age when we can be so much more worldly because of the Internet but also can drill down to the hyper-local level.
• Two days later, in What if ... again, he introduced me to a blogger I have already bookmarked - Judy Sims, who used to be in charge of the digital space for the Toronto Star. I had not seen her Top 10 lies newspaper execs are telling themselves. But it's one of those pieces every editor and newsroom exec should have to read numerous times. Her thoughts about whether existing ad staffs can sell online touch on one of the underdiscussed but most imporant topics.
• And in How many axes can be made, his trenchant commentary to the comments on another blog's post asking whether the N.Y. Times should ditch its sports section highlight the difficulties of a mass market vehicle in this digital age. As Sullivan writes, "The question isn't that interesting, but the range of responses is, and really shows why our friend the newspaper is in such straits."

All are worth taking a spin. David writes sporadically these days, but I'd bookmark his feed because when he does write, it is very good stuff.

A little "techy conceit"?

David Sullivan, in one of his usual thoughtful posts, riffs off of Steve Yelvington's recent "Fatal Assumptions" post.

But also note that Yelvington does make a difference between "digital people" and "print people." It's not simply the difference between "old-fashioned people" and "modern people" who are all "journalist people." There are digital people in journalism just the same as there are radio people and TV people and magazine people and newspaper people, just the same as there are investigative reporters and graphic artists and photographers and copy editors and producers. And chances are, after the dust settles, there still will be, even if the newspapers are delivered to a printer in your house or are read on a Kindle with links, and you watch TV programs on your computer screen. Or even if newspapers are delivered by being thrown from cars and people watch TV on televisions.

The idea that all of us were simply meant to evolve from a retrograde print level to a higher digital level is -- a techy conceit, which kicked the confidence out of print people by the commingling of "Web page" with "Internet" when the Internet is really just an incredibly good delivery system and a Web page is just something it can deliver, and is probably an intermediate form. It is just my belief, but new technology usually creates more specialization, not less; and at some future point the idea that one reporter can do a print story and a video story and a blog and a tweet, all of which can be handled by the same editor, will probably be broken apart in some manner. The quality will be insufficient in all media. But that will require news providers to accept that each will occupy a smaller place in the cosmos, and newspapers still don't want to accept that, still want to be the Universal Source.

Read the rest. As usual, it's worth it to stimulate your thinking.

Wednesday roundup

So many good things to chew on today: Journalism's value and journalists' pay, the raison d'etre of copy editors and the never-ending debate over style, usage, language and just the general idea of getting it right.

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For starters, read Robert Picard's column in the Christian Science Monitor, "Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay."

Picard is simply one of the best, if not the flashiest, thinkers in the arena of journalism, media and the economics of it all. He says more elegantly what I have repeatedly argued here - journalism as we now commonly practice it has little to no economic value, or the value is so fleeting that to capture it is not feasible.

Of course, he says it better:

Journalists are not professionals with a unique base of knowledge such as professors or electricians. Consequently, the primary economic value of journalism derives not from its own knowledge, but in distributing the knowledge of others. In this process three fundamental functions and related skills have historically created economic value: Accessing sources, determining significance of information, and conveying it effectively. ...

To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped away by contemporary communication developments. Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.

Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay.

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So, then, what is the value of copy editing? Copy editors, of course, have suddenly discovered that they are not indispensable, as they once may have thought. In fact, again as argued here many times (use the "copy editing" tag to see many of the posts), to most managers they are a cost, not a benefit.

In "Copy Editing: Who are we anyway?" David Sullivan produces one of his usual perceptive posts that acknowledges all facets of the issue - not just the quality argument, but the reality that too many copy editors have done little to promote themselves or their craft:

It strikes me that one of the problems copy editors have is that at too many papers, their jobs consist of: Whatever no one else wants to do.

The majority of copy editors I have known combine a high level of skill, a perfectionistic streak, an incredible work ethic, and a combination of shyness and a sense that "if I can just keep my head down, maybe they won't give me even more to do." But as surveys have shown, such as the one that led to the founding of ACES more than a decade ago, copy editors are often the most alienated people in the newsroom -- not the most negative, not the most critical, but the ones most detached from what is going on elsewhere. In part that is their job -- to look at things with a fresh eye. In part that is the hours at a morning paper, which separate them from most of the reporters and top editors.

Sullivan has a good prescription:

Go to the top editor in your newsroom and say: I'd like to talk to you about what you see copy editors' role as. Don't start off talking about staffing levels and page throughputs and all the "production" stuff we do. Most top editors are bored stiff by "production." So talk to them about what they see the job of a copy editor as a journalist.

I'd quibble with him on only one thing: As said here before, yes, you need to try to get editors and other managers to understand what you do, but if you want to quantify your worth (and in the current business climate, you MUST quantify your worth), the real people you want to get to are the libel insurers. If they think their risk increases because there are fewer copy editors or because they are not being used properly, they'll quantify that by raising the rates.

Maybe the leadership of the American Copy Editors Society is moving on that front. If so, it's very quiet. So far, I'm not sure they've gotten that message.

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Sullivan's ruminations can be contrasted with those of Penelope Trunk in "Good grammar might derail your career" and the earlier "Writing without typos is totally outdated."

Trunk's posts are fine exhibits of the postmodern debate between grammar as snobbery and grammar as communications skill.

Most grammar rules don’t matter, though. That is, if you get them wrong, the reader still can find the meaning. For example, few people know when to use effect and when to use affect. But it doesn’t matter because the first is a noun and the second is a verb so the likelihood you'll mistake the meaning of a sentence because of a grammar error in this case is extremely low.

Here’s another example: Find me a sentence with the wrong version of it’s that you can’t understand due to the error. Wait. No. Forget it. Because you can’t. So a lot of grammar does not clarify meaning, it just serves to show you are good at grammar.

There are a couple of logic holes here. First, she confounds, as do many people, grammar with style, usage, spelling and punctuation -- they are not the same thing. Grammar is the way words go together to create meaning (actually, you can say symbols, not just words, because there is such a thing as visual grammar). The other stuff is there to help the process along or shape it in whatever way the predominant dialect that you are using supports.

Second, she is using only one real frame for her argument - that of more informal communication. As many of those commenting point out, writing occurs across may spheres - some more formal than others. Trunk complains, for instance, that as an English major she had been published in literary journals, but had to learn the AP Stylebook to manage a Fortune 500 company's Web site.

Yep, shur 'nuf. When communicating in business, where that communication may be seen by many different audiences and stakeholders, consistency in meaning and application are not just important, but critical. Just ask Rogers Communications, for which a misplaced comma cost the company $1 million (CAN). That's why business (and journalism) use the predominant -- and I will concede, hegemonic -- conventions of "standard written English." Layered on top of that is whatever style the organization wants to adopt.

Good writers (and editors) know when and how to break the "rules" and for what audiences. By and large, those commenting on Trunk's post seem to understand that. Hers would be lots more useful if she put her energies into delving into that.

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And while you are at it, tool over to Alan Mutter's Newsosaur blog and read the guest post by David Boraks, proprietor of the DavidsonNews.net site. A good look into a startup doing hyperlocal journalism.

A plaintive cry from the blogosphere

If you have read David Sullivan's post from last week, Sic Semper, and you blog (or write or think, for that matter) about the future of this business, you can't help feel a little twinge in what reads like a "finis."

It isn't of course and as David, one of the true gems in the newspaper and copy-editing world, says, he will continue writing about copy-editing and department stores and such. But there is a plaintive cry here, a resignation of sorts:

But I have become a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. It is time to be quieter, to write about department store history -- which I actually have original research on. To write about copy editing, probably. But to raise a voice to say that the print newspaper is not simply paper on which to publish stories, but is a product that carries its own meaning, that creates and binds a community, that gives it a history and a direction, that says that the real world is bigger than the worlds we build for ourselves? Given time and money, we could find a future for it. But time is not on its side when there is no revenue.

I have been looking at a copy of the 1976 Editor & Publisher Market Guide. It is the newspaper world that I entered nearly 35 years ago. "An Offset Newspaper With Over 25,000 Circulation!" That was in Olean, N.Y. "The Money Tree: Looking for choice pickings? Look no further than Bristol. ... Make your sale in Bristol with The Bristol Press." That in Connecticut, at a paper that will probably close next month. "Hawaii Has Many Faces... And One Advertising Buy Reaches Them All." The former Honolulu JOA. It was a great world that I was fortunate to be part of, and it is ending too soon for me. But I expect people said the same thing about vaudeville.

Far from it, of course.

Sullivan, despite being the apparent object of Jay Rosen's snark at some point (I didn't see it, and I wish David had linked to it), remains one of the must-read voices in all this. Rarely is there a posting that does not make you think. Agree or disagree, that is the definition of good writing.

Fortunately, after writing those discouraging words, David provides us with some fine thoughts on Lauren Rich Fine's latest report suggesting it may take a billion or more page views a month for a site like the New York Times to become profitable without the print component.

Carry on, Davide, carry on.