The future, present and importance of journalism

Steve Klein sent this over for your consideration. Pay close attention to the last two paragraphs. This is why serious journalism is important.

Dan

Read All About It

by Steve Coll August 13, 2007

When there’s big news, the main story on the Wall Street Journal’s front page usually starts with a short, ringing sentence, such as the one that appeared last Wednesday: “A century of Bancroft-family ownership at Dow Jones & Co. is over.” On the left side of the page that day was another signature motif: an in-depth reconstruction of how Rupert Murdoch had triumphed in his four-month campaign to buy the company and the newspaper it owned—the Journal, one of the best papers in the world. The story was gang-tackled by six reporters and came furnished with the Journal’s mandatory scenes of business titans with murky motives negotiating in restaurants. The writers referred to their own company’s chief executive as Murdoch’s “dance partner,” and noted, on the front page, the possibility of a “big payday” for the boss following the sale.

In all, the Journal’s coverage of the sale was a kind of prideful and impressive demonstration to Murdoch of the values, the talents, and the daring of the editors and reporters he will now have on his payroll. The subliminal question that the coverage seemed to ask was, Will Murdoch destroy the Journal? Will he undermine the paper’s values and call that “investment”?

Many journalists, including some in the Journal’s newsroom, assume that Murdoch’s victory will lead eventually to the paper’s diminishment. In a sense, Murdoch has said as much. He favors what he calls “popular journalism.” He has mentioned that he finds long stories about complicated subjects to be rather trying. At his numerous other properties (which include the Post, the London Times, and the Fox network), he has no record of funding the relentless, risk-taking investigative reporting in which the Journal has specialized.

There can be little doubt that a Murdoch-owned Journal will be different, and that some of the changes will amount to loss. Murdoch has voiced skepticism, for example, about the Journal’s peculiar front-page feature stories known as “A-heds.” In this hyperlinked era of multimedia, the A-hed is an almost atavistic institution that relies upon wit and originality but offers no pressing connection to the news of the day. This was the headline stack on one classic: Listening to Prozac: ‘Bow Wow! I Really Love the Mailman!’ Some Are Pushing the Drug To Treat Pet Ailments; Scientologists Are Yelping

It would not be entirely fair to blame Murdoch for the prospective vanishing of such compositions, though—and perhaps, since they sometimes concern drug-addled animals, he will change his view.

Nor can it be considered a surprise that Murdoch succeeded in his quest to buy the Journal. At seventy-six, he is apparently still juiced by the adrenaline that flows from empire creation. He prepared his bid skillfully; he offered a high price in cash for a troubled company; and he had no competitors. The newspapers that Murdoch publishes and the television networks that he operates may be coarse, lacking in public-minded ambition, and craven about their owner’s political and business interests. None of this, however, disqualifies him from throwing money around as he pleases in a democratic marketplace.

The more regrettable aspect of the deal involves the sellers, the Bancroft family. The same civic marketplace that granted permission to Murdoch demanded responsibility from them. Over time, the Bancrofts failed their newspaper—not so much because they sold out as because they did not prevent the conditions that made Murdoch’s offer irrefutable. Their values may have been the right ones, but as a collective they lost focus, lacked vigor, and, in the end, could not resist the blandishments of a cunning suitor.

A decade ago, four American families regarded themselves, correctly, as guardians of public trusts, because they controlled independent newspapers, situated in America’s most influential cities, that were vital to the national discourse. They were the Sulzbergers, who control the Times; the Grahams, who control the Washington Post; the Chandlers, who controlled the Los Angeles Times; and the Bancrofts. Within their separate ranks, the families faced a common challenge: as generations passed and ownership became dispersed among siblings and cousins, it grew harder to act decisively. The Sulzbergers and the Grahams handled the problem by empowering a single leader; the Chandlers did the same for a time, but then fell apart; the Bancrofts never addressed it.

Defiant statements about civic duty issued by members of the Bancroft family during the struggle with Murdoch have made it plain that some of them had a rich awareness of their public role, and were prepared to make financial sacrifices to preserve the company’s independence. But the Bancrofts failed because they proved incompetent in the sphere that belonged to them as owners. This involved the adaptation of their inherited newspaper business model to support deep and independent reporting in the digital age.

The urgency of this mission has been clear since at least the mid-nineteen-nineties. As newspaper circulation fell, computing and telecommunications merged, and the Internet arrived with all the subtlety of a supernova. The business readers and the financial-market participants crucial to Dow Jones lived and worked at the forefront of these changes. Yet for years the Bancrofts coddled a chief executive at Dow Jones, Peter R. Kann, who, although he was a likable man and a talented journalist, could not find a winning strategic path.

As the Bancrofts dozed and Kann floundered, Michael Bloomberg erected a skyscraper of a company on Dow Jones’s front lawn. He did this by pioneering the use of new technologies to profitably speed up and deliver business information. Dow Jones might have recovered from any number of mistakes, but it could not overcome its failure to dominate the profitable sale of electronic financial data. This ultimately laid the company bare for Murdoch, a master of technological change. Crawford Hill, a member of the Bancroft family who works as a biology teacher, summed up this background acutely in an e-mail to others in the family, reported last week by the Journal: “We are actually now paying the price for our passivity over the past twenty-five years.”

No railroad family could forestall the automobile, and no newspaper family can prevent the eventual end of newspapers in their old, accustomed form. Reporting without fear or favor arose from newspapers but is not inherently tied to them or even to the search for a well-turned sentence. Most of what matters about the coming media age is already being decided outside of traditional newsrooms, on YouTube and countless other Web sites, or in the advertising agencies that calibrate Google search results with the mouse-clicking habits of young consumers. Perhaps Google or its ilk will find it profitable or desirable to fund independent, expert foreign correspondence; or to support investigations of corporate and government power; or to train the sort of journalists who feel free to call out their employers’ pay packages on the proverbial front page, although there are no signs of this yet. Or perhaps the Sulzbergers and the Grahams can adapt their public trusts successfully to the new technologies. And even if their efforts fail to become profitable these families might still preserve their newsrooms’ independence by converting them into nonprofit foundations, similar to what the Poynter family did with the St. Petersburg Times, in Florida.

The tenets and the traditions of unfettered journalism are marrow in our constitutional system. The Journal matters most of all because it has been a rare American incubator of the values and the skills necessary to carry out independent reporting, and because the newspaper has continually demonstrated through its stories how the First Amendment is supposed to work. Rupert Murdoch’s vanquishing of the Bancrofts reminds us that even small outposts of besieged values are worth fighting for if the alternative may be their extinction.