Still Day Late, Dollar Short

The New York Times had an article over the weekend looking at the Greensboro, NC, newspaper experiment and the broader changes sweeping newspapers. Trouble is, the story's written as though it's current, when in fact this story has been rolling along since last year. Jay Rosen of PressThink has been covering it extensively, as he thinks it's pointing the way for the future of newspapers. The Memphis Commercial Appeal even gets a mention.

Read that article first then come back here.

OK. What The News & Record is doing is ceding a lot of control of their paper to non-paper people. They are blending the newspaper's traditional mission -- to gather and print the events of a community, as well as pertinent opinions -- with the blog revolution, where anyone is a reporter and editorialist. Papers benefit from having more reporters and more diverse voices, the community benefits by gettign a broader and deeper picture of itself. But it requires the paper to explicitly align itself with the people of the community, and not the business and civic interests they typically support.

That's why the Commercial Appeal is having problems. They make moves in the direction of the blog revolution and going online, but are still deeply wedded to tradition and the old way of operating a newspaper, the "voice of God" model, as the NYT article puts it.

Remember failed initiatives like "Readers Respond?" That was a brief experiment where reader questions about particular articles written by CA staff were printed in the paper, along with the writer's response. It failed because it was just a version of the typical "Letters to the Editor" model, but particularised. Actually having writers defend and explain what they wrote was also a bit difficult for people used to operating protected behind the institutional wall of a daily newspaper.

For heaven's sake, look at the whole "Letters to the Editor" model. As someone who's written his share of letters (before the blogosphere liberated me), it's still baffling. Readers send in their thoughts. Does the paper just print them? No. Not only are spelling and punctuation cleaned up, but letters are modified in all sorts of ways. Cut for space; re-ordered for "clarity"; the tense of verbs is altered to suit the newspaper's voice, even if it's the readers voice speaking; if the letter refers to a previous LttE the name is changed to "a previous letter writer" and sometimes names are just changed to "protect" something.

It's instructive: The paper can't let people speak with their own voice, but must filter that voice through the bureacracy -- through the control -- of the newspaper. That's not an institution that sounds willing to cede some control.

The Commercial Appeal has starting bringing in more guest editorialists, which is good, but far too often these voices support the position of the paper, rather than represent the many voices of the community on any given issue debated.

Well, I don't have time right now to run down everything wrong. Let's just say that when each story comes with, not a link to a forum on another part of the website, but comments directly below the story posted, when the writers address the concerns of readers directly and do have to defend what they write, when a paper that wants to "tell the story of Greater Memphis" actually gives those stories their own voice rather than editing it to fit the paper's style, then we'll be making progress.

As it is, they are just aping what they see, missing the deeper points by a mile. Circulation is falling still; credibility is falling still; importance and relevance are plummetting. What used to be a flinty rock is now a mushy bowl of tapioca.