The Hard Work of Getting the News

            We went to see the movie “Spotlight” last week, and like nearly everyone else thought it was terrific. Viewing it from the perspective of a former newspaperman, I couldn’t help but think about it in the context of today’s news business.

            The film tells the story of a team of four reporters from the Boston Globe who, in 2001-02, uncovered the widespread pattern of pedophilia by priests in the Boston diocese and the systematic degree to which the Catholic Church covered it up. It took a year of attacking the story from multiple angles before the paper finally had it nailed down and ready to print.

            A little more than a decade later, things have changed. Four reporters no longer constitute a special investigative team. In too many cases, four reporters is the whole newsroom, and that obviously has a limiting effect on any news operation’s ability to investigate a large, complex story.

When It Takes More Than a Tweet

            This has been a while coming, but I could see it on the horizon when I left the business more than 20 years ago. I vividly remember a conversation I had toward the end with a corporate executive whose office was far, far away from the town our newspaper served. Arguing against budget cuts, I made the point that when a reporter is cut from the news staff, that amounts to two to three hundred stories a year that don’t get covered.

            “That’s the old way of thinking,” the executive replied, strongly implying that there was something wrong with me for not being able to figure out how to generate professionally written news stories without any people to research and write them.

            What “Spotlight” depicts so well is the phenomenal amount of hard work and ingenuity that goes into running a story to earth. It takes an understanding of the wide range of ways of getting information (from interviews to poring over documents until your eyes glaze over) that non-professionals simply don’t have. Sure, anybody can tweet a photo or a putative factoid, but a complex story that someone doesn’t want told? That’s another matter.

Making Sense out of Chaos

            Seeing the movie shortly after the terror attacks in Paris brought home another point. It takes both professionalism and time to make sense out of a huge breaking story like the Paris attacks. But we have become a society that wants to wait for nothing, hence a much more partially (and dangerously) informed society.

            Writing in the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo, a technology columnist, noted that the internet, and Twitter in particular, in the wake of a big, messy story like the terror attacks, is a maelstrom of knee-jerk opinion and misinformation (slightly paraphrased).

            The great CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow once said, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.” Instant communication has made that situation even worse, and I have to wonder how many people will remember things about Paris years from now that simply aren’t true, but that came out in the immediate aftermath without proper vetting.

            I agree with Manjoo. If you really want to be informed about a story like Paris, turn off the TV, don’t look at the internet, and wait a day until the facts have been sorted out and the worst misinformation has receded into the background.

            As if anyone will do that.

The Last Good Owners

            A wise old newspaper editor — it may have been Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, but I’m not sure — was once asked by a journalism student if the editor was the key to a good newspaper. He shook his head.

            Nope, he told the kid, the most important person in a good newspaper isn’t the editor, or even the publisher. It’s the owner. Without an owner who’s willing to spend money on news coverage and stand up to threats, no editor, however good, can accomplish much.

            If it was indeed Bradlee who said that, he spoke from experience. His owner was Kay Graham, and she was a great owner. Nothing lasts forever, and the Post is now under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. So far, from what I’ve read, he seems willing to spend money and try different things, but the jury is still out on whether he’ll attain great-owner status.

All in the Family

            Great newspapers have typically been a labor of love for families that had been in the business a long time and regarded the paper as an extension of their identity. I’m thinking here of families like the Grahams of the Post; the Ochs and Sulzbergers of the New York Times; the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times, and the Binghams of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

            And, to be fair, there were always plenty of terrible family-owned newspapers, where the crusading spirit of the founder had long since faded away, and the descendants were content to make no waves and cash the quarterly dividend checks.

            From the 1960s to the 1980s a great many family papers were bought by large chains, which saw their monopoly on a local advertising market as something worth a premium. In a few instances, the chains made the paper better (if for no other reason than it could hardly have gotten worse) by bringing a scintilla of professionalism to it.

            In most cases, though, the chains were content to cut the staff, cut other expenses, and raise advertising and circulation rates to a level that a local owner would have blushed at. The customers might not have liked it, but for years those papers were cash cows generating profit margins of 30-40 percent, sometimes more.

Gone Are The Days

            The Internet killed all that, beginning in the mid 1990s. The newspaper business will never again be a place where you could almost put a chimpanzee in charge of the operation, and still sit back and collect hefty rents from the advertisers and subscribers. The gutting of the old business model, though, has rained on the just and the unjust alike.

            There are a few weekly papers and small-town dailies that are still doing all right, and that have owners who care about the paper and what it means to the community. But of the four owners I mentioned earlier, only the Sulzbergers are still running the paper as a family operation. The Times is the best there is now, but it’s limping along financially.

            A lot of smart people don’t think newspapers will be around much longer, and if something comparable were rising to take their place, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Some day the Times may no longer exist, or will exist without the Sulzbergers, whom I think of as the last good owners, in some greatly diminished form. All I can hope is that it doesn’t happen for a long time, and that I’m not around when it does.

A Latte, My Mystery, or Both?

            A few hours after posting the previous blog, in which I forecast a future for dead-tree books for some time to come, I had to attend a meeting in Santa Cruz. Before it started, I was talking with several people I know, and one of them asked how my book was doing.

            Another asked what kind of book it was, and when I replied it was a mystery novel, he said he was a big mystery fan and asked for the name of it. I told him The McHenry Inheritance, and in about 30 seconds he showed me the cover, from Amazon, on his iPhone. When I told him that was the one, he bought it on the spot and showed everyone the title page on his phone. Then another friend, also a mystery fan, joined the conversation, and the guy who had just bought the book sent him a link as we stood there.

            I wish selling books could always be that easy.

Instant Digital Gratification

            At $2.99 for the e-book, my mystery, like a latte, is essentially an impulse purchase. The internet makes it way too easy to buy something on the spur of the moment, but since that’s working in my favor at the moment, I’m not complaining.

            Shortly after Christmas I was reading The New York Times Sunday book section on my iPad when I came across a review of Death Comes to Pemberley, a mystery novel by British author P.D. James, drawing on characters from Pride and Prejudice. My wife, Linda, is a big Jane Austen fan, so I e-mailed the review to her, along with a query: Want to buy? From the next room, she e-mailed back yes, so I went to Amazon, bought the book with one click, and a few minutes later had it on my iPad ready to go. She stayed up late that night to get started reading it.

            For all the ease of doing it that way, I am not yet a total convert. Probably three out of four books that I read are actual printed books. I subscribe to the Times on my iPad and enjoy it very much, but find it maddeningly slow at times — three to four minutes to bring up a page in the worst case. I’ve been a New Yorker subscriber since 1968 and get the iPad version as well as the print. I read about a third of it on the pad and the rest in the mail-delivered print version.

Buyer’s Remorse

            The ability to buy something on the spur of the moment has its downside. A few months ago I was in a large department store trying to cash out a couple of bucks on a gift card. The only person ahead of me was a woman with two Santa Claus-sized bags in tow, from which she was taking item after item, which then had to be scanned for a return. As the line began to build behind her, she turned, flashed a wry smile, and said:

            “Sorry. I do a lot of online shopping.”

            When I recently offered my book free on Amazon, more than 300 people bought it. If 15 of them actually read it and post a review, I’ll be doing pretty well. Most of the rest probably grabbed it because it looked halfway interesting and the price was right. It was an easy score, but probably with not much reward. It calls to mind Carrie Fisher’s famous line, “The problem with instant gratification is that it isn’t fast enough.”