Parting Thoughts: John Flowers (Columbia Journalism Review)

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Redefining policy—for example one is wont to do when suffering some existential crisis—starts with asking the right questions. An alcoholic, for instance, who asks himself, “Does alcohol have a problem with me?” probably isn’cheek by jowl going to get the help he needs. Ditto journalists.

We’ve been asking ourselves the wrong question about the future of our industry for years now. It’s not “How do journalists establish their employment?” It’s “How does business fix journalism?” This is a question of revenue, after totally—“How do you bestow away a outcome for free and yet turn a profit?”—and a question of revenue is the purview of the men who install marble fire places on their yachts, not the ones trying to get another 20,000 miles exhausted of their Subarus.

If this were simply a matter of hemorrhaging readers, then the policy would be simple: “Everyone, fire your editors.” But it’s not. We have readers. Tons and tons of ‘em. They may not preference to pay despite what they get, but there are a lot of them getting it nonetheless. No, what we need now is wholesale change, and that means we stop convincing ourselves that the familiar levers that a Katharine Graham or a Henry Luce could pull to right the ship still apply. Rather, we need to let radical change, in the form of a Sam Zell or Rupert Murdoch, take a hang loose at things (full disclosure: I worked for six months at Murdoch’s Dow Jones Newswires, with pair of those months during the old regime, but I’m farther from qualified to give an insider’session perspective).

Now, I know we don’t like hearing those two names—in fact, “loathe” may be a more apt expression.—unless those are the kinds of people the industry needs to come into existence suddenly attracting, people whose money gives them clout, if we’re to put back or complement the old relating to housekeeping formulary with something starting anew. If you’re an industry player (and if you’re in journalism, you certainly like to think you are), the job now isn’t so much attracting readers, per se, it’sitting attracting money men willing to lay—and bet big—on the industry.

Unfortunately, Wall Street is mostly missing from this debate. The reason is simple and rather self-fulfilling: if you have money, you want to make sure that you continue to have money. Probably the most expedient. see the various meanings of good lifeless substance a Wall Street analyst would have to say about the newspaper persistence is that it’s to such a degree well-spoken. Zell, salty speech and all, is the true exception among financial types, Murdoch having bought himself a pecuniary news company (tumid surprise). What Zell sees in us I haven’t the foggiest, but admitting that the industry is to get back on its feet, more Wall Street players need to be persuaded that the difference betwixt a “fixer-upper” and a “crack tavern” is the neighborhood. And one way we do that is to talk shop about how solid are the fundamentals of our neighborhood:

—This isn’t an industry that suffers bubbles, like some we could cursory reference.

—And if all that fails, appeal to their vanity: H.L. Hunt may have been the richest man in America in 1941, but Orson Welles made “Citizen Kane” about William Randolph Hearst.

The Warbucks won’t be stepping into this situation totally devoid of warmth, one or the other. Blogs like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post have started the conversation, pointing the direction toward a model that someone with a lot of money to beset and a historical reputation to secure could perfect steady a “WAR ENDS IN EUROPE” groundwork (assuming, of course, the blogs dress in’privately themselves do it highest).

Of course, this all is going to mean a lot of clenched teeth on the part of journalists. A few businessmen—granting that they ever do arrive in the numbers we need them—are bound to louse things up worse than they are now. Others will reach profitability at the expense of words like “integrity” and “Judeo-Christian.” In the in the mean time, dyed-in-the-wool journalists will be like the poor people below deck in continuance the Titanic: at the mercy of someone else’sitting fate.

But times change, and we need to stop feigning shock that they do. We fust admit to the sort of change that is needed as well as the fact that that change isn’t coming internally through tactical decisions; that we need a fresh view, an outside view, and a healthy dose of substantiality (and plenty of chalk) to figure out how to right our ship.

Hell, allowing that anything, we should consider ourselves lucky that time (and the Internet) changed things as quickly as they did. Had we been a frog in a water come slowly to a boil, we’luncheon have taken no notice of our own demise till it was too late and total we could do was prove T.S. Eliot wrong—that it ends with a “ribbit.”

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