Beginning of end for Miami Herald

[slappy4428]

What I mean by Herald arrogance is that the powers that be thought the Herald was crown jewel of the K-R empire. And in some respects, it was. But as the other papers around it got stronger, the Herald never adapted.

Look, I am not one of the people here who bash you for sport, but you're talking out your ass. Adapt how? Tribune and Cox decided to publish great newspapers, and The Miami Herald was to supposed to do what? Send David Lawrence to break their legs? The Herald was already putting out a great newspaper. They spent a lot of money on the Broward edition and had some incredible editors up there, including, for a time, Paul Anger as editor and then publisher.

The fact is that a shirtload of people in Palm Beach and Broward counties do not see themselves as suburbs of Miami, they perceive Miami as a foreign country. The paper is defined by its home base. There is no way around that.

As for crown jewel, the people in KR and in the Herald newsroom were not unaware of all the money being spent and all the Pulitzers being won by Gene Roberts' Philly Inquirer newsroom. Or all the money being lost to put out a great product in Detroit. Or all the profit being made and all the tremendous journalism coming out of San Jose. Or, for that matter, high-quality journalism coming out of Charlotte and St. Paul and Akron. And Long Beach and Boulder and Macon and Gary and Grand Forks. People in Miami's newsroom rooted heavily for the company as a whole, partly because many of them bought stock in the company and followed the price like roto nerds charting players. I can remember answering the phone one day, Edwin Pope calling from Wimbledon. "How'd KR do today?" he asked. In no sense did I see people in Miami believing they were above the rest of the chain. There was a tremendous amount of respect and gratitude for what the other KR papers were doing. A unique atmosphere and a gung-ho mind-set.

Great post, Frank. You put this in perspective in many ways.

 

[I Digress]

I've always thought the three South Florida papers do an amazing job on sports. Palm Beach does an amazing job with fewer resources and it's not a coincidence that it's one of the most raided staffs in the country.

The Dolphins beat has always been one of the most competitive sport beats in the country. How many other places have a top beat where news breaks consistently in all three papers?

Seen the Post in the last six months? Ain't the same publication, but that's no surprise to anyone here.

 

[Joe Williams]

The whole thing is short and worth the read, but I've included a snippet below.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/01/more_on_papers.php

The current owners (particularly the Sam Zell's and private equity firms of the world) don't give a hoot for the public trust aspect of the major metros that they own - unlike the families that started and ran these papers for generations.

There is truth in this. But let's never forget that it was someone -- often the snot-nosed heirs of the founder/publishers -- who never gave a rat's ass about the public trust aspect of their daddy's or granddaddy's business and were interested only in the 20 percent margins. They're the ones who took these companies public and opened the gates to even more people who never gave a rat's ass about the public trust aspect. None of them ever wanted to stick half of the profits into R&D or even a rainy-day fund (rainy-century?). They began to treat newspapers solely as a profit machine, a business, when their reasons to exist began as community watchdog first, business second.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

The whole thing is short and worth the read, but I've included a snippet below.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/01/more_on_papers.php

The current owners (particularly the Sam Zell's and private equity firms of the world) don't give a hoot for the public trust aspect of the major metros that they own - unlike the families that started and ran these papers for generations.

There is truth in this. But let's never forget that it was someone -- often the snot-nosed heirs of the founder/publishers -- who never gave a rat's ass about the public trust aspect of their daddy's or granddaddy's business and were interested only in the 20 percent margins. They're the ones who took these companies public and opened the gates to even more people who never gave a rat's ass about the public trust aspect. None of them ever wanted to stick half of the profits into R&D or even a rainy-day fund (rainy-century?). They began to treat newspapers solely as a profit machine, a business, when their reasons to exist began as community watchdog first, business second.

In terms of this particular thread, not really true. Coincidentally, Knight and Ridder each went public in 1969 before merging in 1974. Jack Knight died in 1981, his brother Jim in 1991. His biography -- an excellent one by Charles Whited -- indicates Knight had some hesitations about going public but ultimately signed off on the deal because the company needed to grow.

While I'm not a huge fan of Tony Ridder, he did explain years ago that high profit margins were necessary to keep the stock price high enough to make the company safe from hostile takeovers. While that isn't exactly what happened, he was in the ballpark about that. His fears were not unfounded.

 

[Drip]

The whole thing is short and worth the read, but I've included a snippet below.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/01/more_on_papers.php

The current owners (particularly the Sam Zell's and private equity firms of the world) don't give a hoot for the public trust aspect of the major metros that they own - unlike the families that started and ran these papers for generations.

There is truth in this. But let's never forget that it was someone -- often the snot-nosed heirs of the founder/publishers -- who never gave a rat's ass about the public trust aspect of their daddy's or granddaddy's business and were interested only in the 20 percent margins. They're the ones who took these companies public and opened the gates to even more people who never gave a rat's ass about the public trust aspect. None of them ever wanted to stick half of the profits into R&D or even a rainy-day fund (rainy-century?). They began to treat newspapers solely as a profit machine, a business, when their reasons to exist began as community watchdog first, business second.

In terms of this particular thread, not really true. Coincidentally, Knight and Ridder each went public in 1969 before merging in 1974. Jack Knight died in 1981, his brother Jim in 1991. His biography -- an excellent one by Charles Whited -- indicates Knight had some hesitations about going public but ultimately signed off on the deal because the company needed to grow.

While I'm not a huge fan of Tony Ridder, he did explain years ago that high profit margins were necessary to keep the stock price high enough to make the company safe from hostile takeovers. While that isn't exactly what happened, he was in the ballpark about that. His fears were not unfounded.

Frank, in your opinion, what stagnated that growth? I'm sure you'll remember that KR was on the cutting edge of the internet with Viewtron but bailed out because it didn't produce immediate dividends. I'm firmly convinced that had KR stayed with it, they would've found a way to make internet use profitable for newspapers. The Viewtron experiment ended in 1986.

 

[shotglass]

Nothing should be posted on a paper's website without being edited first.

Nothing.

I'm not saying a blog needs to be edited the same way a story would be before it goes in the paper, but it needs to be read at least once.

I'm guessing the hockey writer who went off on ESPN in his blog would agree. I know of countless other writers who have gotten in trouble because of their blog content, including a NFL writer who made a Mons Venus reference about covering the Super Bowl in the last couple days. It lasted on the website for three hours before someone complained and it was taken down.

Very, very true, and something which news executives should have drilled into their heads.

Instead, it's the first corner to be cut at many places.

They'll learn when they wind up in court over something that gets up there unedited. Or maybe they won't, and it'll happen again.

 

[SF_Express]

Nothing should be posted on a paper's website without being edited first.

Nothing.

I'm not saying a blog needs to be edited the same way a story would be before it goes in the paper, but it needs to be read at least once.

I'm guessing the hockey writer who went off on ESPN in his blog would agree. I know of countless other writers who have gotten in trouble because of their blog content, including a NFL writer who made a Mons Venus reference about covering the Super Bowl in the last couple days. It lasted on the website for three hours before someone complained and it was taken down.

Very, very true, and something which news executives should have drilled into their heads.

Instead, it's the first corner to be cut at many places.

They'll learn when they wind up in court over something that gets up there unedited. Or maybe they won't, and it'll happen again.

OK. I wrote a medium-sized post about this the other day and then lost it. Simon and I have had a spirited debate about this. I'll try again, since it seems to have been deemed appropriate for this particular thread.

The thinking on this, if you wanted to take it to extremes, would be that writers are immature boneheads who can't be trusted with copy. Maybe there are some of those. We don't have any.

We've got veteran, experienced, educated writers who have all been doing this a while. They believe in accuracy and maintaining standards just like editors do, and they understand libel. And we've told them that when they're blogging, they have a certain leeway in terms of opinion, but they ultimately are responsible for maintaining all the standards of accuracy and fairness and taste that they apply to their news stories and columns.

Some blog once in a while. Some blog several times a day. All of them send us an e-mail alerting us when there's a new blog post. And we can then have the capability of reading them, and we can either contact the writer to make a fix if necessary or, for some senior editors, do it ourselves.

Here's the decision we've made: We trust these people, and we believe blogs are a different kind of content. They're personal journals, observations about the world, mostly their beats, but basically anything they want. And we're comfortable with the notion that the nature of blogs isn't the same as other editorial copy. We don't want these posts getting hung up in the copy editing process, we don't want to inhibit the spontaneity we believe blogs are supposed to have. Sometimes they send posts about something that just happened seconds ago at an event; sometimes, they even break little pieces of news in their blogs.

We used to have blog posts going through the copy desk. We didn't like it, for the writers, for us or for the content that appeared on the website. So when we changed to a content interface that allowed writers to do that on their own, we let them.

I know it offends the sensibilities of some, and I know Simon thinks this is just one step on the process of getting rid of copy editors altogether someday. I don't agree, because I know personally at our place that copy editing is a very important part of our editorial process -- just not blogs. We read thousands of words a day; we choose not to read these (beforehand) because we trust the people involved.

And I would say this: If I was at a newspaper with varying levels of experience, there might be two standards: some people who were allowed to blog on their own, and perhaps others who weren't because they just couldn't handle it yet.

So that's my feeling on the whole thing, and I sleep very well not worrying about what our writers are going to do in their unedited blogs.

 

[shotglass]

Hey, we can disagree on occasion.

 

[SF_Express]

Hey, we can disagree on occasion.

Absolutely.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

SF, if trust is the key issue, why edit the non-blog material? Same people with the same good judgment, right?

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

Nothing should be posted on a paper's website without being edited first.

Nothing.

I'm not saying a blog needs to be edited the same way a story would be before it goes in the paper, but it needs to be read at least once.

I'm guessing the hockey writer who went off on ESPN in his blog would agree. I know of countless other writers who have gotten in trouble because of their blog content, including a NFL writer who made a Mons Venus reference about covering the Super Bowl in the last couple days. It lasted on the website for three hours before someone complained and it was taken down.

Very, very true, and something which news executives should have drilled into their heads.

Instead, it's the first corner to be cut at many places.

They'll learn when they wind up in court over something that gets up there unedited. Or maybe they won't, and it'll happen again.

OK. I wrote a medium-sized post about this the other day and then lost it. Simon and I have had a spirited debate about this. I'll try again, since it seems to have been deemed appropriate for this particular thread.

The thinking on this, if you wanted to take it to extremes, would be that writers are immature boneheads who can't be trusted with copy. Maybe there are some of those. We don't have any.

We've got veteran, experienced, educated writers who have all been doing this a while. They believe in accuracy and maintaining standards just like editors do, and they understand libel. And we've told them that when they're blogging, they have a certain leeway in terms of opinion, but they ultimately are responsible for maintaining all the standards of accuracy and fairness and taste that they apply to their news stories and columns.

Some blog once in a while. Some blog several times a day. All of them send us an e-mail alerting us when there's a new blog post. And we can then have the capability of reading them, and we can either contact the writer to make a fix if necessary or, for some senior editors, do it ourselves.

Here's the decision we've made: We trust these people, and we believe blogs are a different kind of content. They're personal journals, observations about the world, mostly their beats, but basically anything they want. And we're comfortable with the notion that the nature of blogs isn't the same as other editorial copy. We don't want these posts getting hung up in the copy editing process, we don't want to inhibit the spontaneity we believe blogs are supposed to have. Sometimes they send posts about something that just happened seconds ago at an event; sometimes, they even break little pieces of news in their blogs.

We used to have blog posts going through the copy desk. We didn't like it, for the writers, for us or for the content that appeared on the website. So when we changed to a content interface that allowed writers to do that on their own, we let them.

I know it offends the sensibilities of some, and I know Simon thinks this is just one step on the process of getting rid of copy editors altogether someday. I don't agree, because I know personally at our place that copy editing is a very important part of our editorial process -- just not blogs. We read thousands of words a day; we choose not to read these (beforehand) because we trust the people involved.

And I would say this: If I was at a newspaper with varying levels of experience, there might be two standards: some people who were allowed to blog on their own, and perhaps others who weren't because they just couldn't handle it yet.

So that's my feeling on the whole thing, and I sleep very well not worrying about what our writers are going to do in their unedited blogs.

Are you not saying that you trust these people to not need an editor?

I can't read that any other way.

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

SF, if trust is the key issue, why edit the non-blog material? Same people with the same good judgment, right?

Precisely.

I would love to hear the answer to this that makes sense to me.