Rupert Murdoch

I was hoping Rupert Murdoch’s speech on why “The future of journalism is more promising than ever” would read like a 1940 speech about the beauty of Poland, but it’s actually a battle anthem challenging editors to stop being such sissies.

He says to “innovate like never before”: Like he did when he saw a conservative market and started Fox News, editors need to create a new kind of journalism that reaches people. More importantly, they have to actually like it.

Now, I never intended to actually like the guy who created the Fox News Plague, but at least the guy’s got huevos. And I respect the fact that he actually cares enough about his product (The Wall Street Journal) to charge people to read it. Getting paid a decent amount for your work–Isn’t that a novel idea?

So if good journalism is like vegetables, instead of self-righteously playing “mom” and forcing them down consumers’ throats, we could figure out a way to coat them with butter. Tastes like candy, but still gives you vitamins. (Forget about the heart attack.)

If I were to graduate tomorrow…

I’d cry myself to sleep. But enough about my adolescent Eutopia they call college.

I’d pound on the pavement to prove to any employer that my amiable personality and superior writing skills make me qualified to do…well…anything. In an effort not to continue my 3-year waitressing career, I’d do the same thing Josie Geller did: search for a job as a copyeditor and plan to work my way up the ladder.

I won’t have trouble coming across as a “nerd to the core”, who got a grammar book for Christmas and loved it; who bought the AP Stylebook on her own free will; who can actually explain what the subjunctive tense is. (Thank gawd for Spanish!)

I’ve also found that people get intrigued in interviews when I tell them I play rugby. I had two jobs in Manhattan, and I swear that’s why.

I’d network with the alumni I know from SBU, call some friends from high school; I’d see who knows of any job openings, and I’d spend all my time proving that I’m the best person to fill them.

If I were to graduate tomorrow, I’d be unhappy, I’d be stressed, and I’d have my work cut out for me. But I’ll get by.

Journalism 24/7

This might afflict the comfortable.

There’s something inherently ironic about this course.

We talk about the changing face of journalism–how it’s not making any money. We talk about ways to improve it–get it to make money–, and we talk about how great it used to be–back when it used to make money.

In order to accomplish this discussion, Starbucks Talk, one student presents a “News Briefing” every class. The irony lies within the method: Each student brings in about seven highlighted articles from The New York Times. I’ve heard nobody reference another paper–like The Washington Post, or even The Wall Street Journal–which makes money. If The New York Times actually knew how to keep their profits up, we probably wouldn’t have this class. Is that good or bad?

It’s representative of the journalism industry today: journalists who get laid off–because the papers aren’t making any money–start a journalism school, and teach young people how to enter an endangered (certainly not extinct) industry. Mmm, healthy.

Which brings us to the irony to end all irony: It’s one of many courses that makes me not want to be a journalist.

To end up bitter at the people who fired me? I’d rather be the one who fired everyone else.

“You’re human. You could never be a dinosaur.”

Michael Rosenblum is a damn smart guy.

In the middle of listening to countless laid off journalists who have nothing better to do than complain that the big bad bossman cut their jobs, he’s using his Web site to dish out a reality check. And a harsh one it is:

…the singular reason that we as a smart and well educated professional class did not pay attention to key events like The Internet Revolution From Which We Should All Have Profited Mightily But Did Not.

Because we were ‘hands off”.

And, this nonsense continues to this day.

He’s saying same thing I was whispering in class today with my neighbor: Journalists don’t know crap about business. At least the ones whining don’t.

Why? We’re a bunch of liberal martyrs; self-obsessed, who think that we’re not really doing our jobs if we’re making a decent living off of it.  After all, who needs a paycheck or stock options when we’re already god’s gift to democracy?

(This coming from a woman who makes nothing at her student publication.)

A mediocre “professor” told 70 of us last semester that journalists have too much baggage to reinvent the journalism industry. What I didn’t realize was that our baggage was journalism school–the thing invented because retired reporters didn’t qualify to be high school American history teachers.

They’re teaching us–well-meaning or not–that we’re victims of others’ tyranny when, in fact, we’re victimizing ourselves with our own naivety. Instead, we should be learning that we can best question authority by (1) learning why they do what they do, and (2) replacing them as authority figures and using the power for good.

So let’s open up our minds and settle on paid subscriptions or micropayments so we can go back to being our dinosaurs.

Journalists suck at covering economics. Seriously.

The Washington Post reported today that the United States’ economy “grew” 3.5 percent in the third quarter. In other words, in the past three months, the people have bought a lot of sh–. Mostly because the government has been dishing out money to consumers to buy new cars, and anything else our little hearts desire.

The U.S. government will give you a few thousand bucks for this.

Now, I went to The Post as a protest to The Red Sox Paper, but I stayed because it was the article that provided better context for the complicated subject of the economy. It used and defined real GDP (as opposed to nominal GDP, which means almost nothing) and provided analysis free from “ZOMG we’re out of the recession forever! Where’s the vodka?” like most other news media do. (Tequila is better.) However, it still didn’t define a recession.

 

Two things must happen in order to be a recession: First, have two consecutive quarters of negative growth in the economy (six months in a row of a negative real GDP); then, wait for the Fed to declare it. But chances are, you never heard that on the news. Because you don’t have to take economics to get a journalism degree.

 

Instead, journalists have spent most of the last year quoting any economist who would return their calls, and acting like those people’s words were defining for the entire state of the economy. Which is stupid. Economics is based on cycles. And on psychology, confidence, and all that touchy-feely crap that makes people decide whether they want to spend money and on what they want to spend it.

 

An economics journalist made this pretty picture.

It’s also, as my mother says, one of the only fields in which you can consistently screw up and still have a job. (The other is meteorology. And apparently working for A.I.G..)

 

So these stories about the economy? They’re about as useful as the ones about Brangelina’s 37 children. The claim that everything’s going to be fine just because we had a three-month shopping spree? Kind of like claiming that Mountain Dew lowers your sperm count. Nobody knows if the recession is over. Stop fooling yourself.

“You guys are like a walking Colonial Williamsburg.”

According to an article in last Tuesday’s New York Times, The New York Times plans to “trim” 100 (or 8 percent of) newsroom jobs before the end of the year. (That sentence felt awesome to write.) This news comes after another consecutive quarter of huge drops in online advertising revenue, 18.5 percent this quarter (as compared to last year’s third quarter).

"What's black and white and red all over? Your balance sheets."

According to my journalism class, making decisions based on quarterly earnings reports is an example of tyranny because companies just want to keep their stock prices up. According to a businessperson I know, cutting a job because you can’t afford to pay the person is fiscally responsible because the money trees just aren’t growing like they used to.

The article says that The Times is still wrestling with the idea of charging a subscription. If they don’t do it now, they’ll never be able to charge for their online content.

Look at the Business section. Or, should I say, their Business-Sports section? One guy wrote what’s left of it. Then there’s the International-National-New York section. When they cut another 100 jobs, what’s it going to look like? The (Inter)National-New York-BusinesSports Pamphlet for Kids Who Can’t Read Good?

I won’t pay for that. Fewer businesses are going to want to advertise in it, and fewer people are going to want to read–let alone pay for–it. This will be especially true if they want to lay off the highest-paid journalists–because they’re usually paid well for writing and reporting well. At a different paper, they laid off a Pulitzer Prize-winner. (Thanks again to Mr. Pena–he wrote that article, too.)

The Times will essentially be selling off everything it has, which brings us to the underlying reason that they’re going bankrupt: They own stock in The Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park. And they can’t get rid of it.

Clearly they’re making their business decisions while they’re high.

Still Unimpressed by Newsday

According to an article in Friday’s New York Times, Newsday is going to start charging for its online content.

Sounds good, except they’re charging $5 per week, which is roughly TWICE what The Wall Street Journal charges for its “online + print” subscription.

What’s worse? Cablevision customers–or 75 percent of Long Islanders–will get to read it for free.

Dear Newsday,

Charging 25 percent of Long Islanders an outrageous price to read your sub-par news site (full of misspelled article tags and grammatically incorrect content) won’t save you. It’ll get you a few dollars from the journalism students at Stony Brook who are dealing with your washed up layoffs, and your Cablevision customer base might increase; but you’re really only screwing the pooch. Your attempt at fiscal responsibility is making you look stupider than you already are.

Happy Holidays!

Basically, Cablevision is trying to take over Long Island’s market, and it’s using Newsday to get the job done. Otherwise, Newsday would do the smart thing and charge everyone for content.

It should be interesting what their adjuncts here at SBU have to say about things.

Wal-mart vs. Amazon: The Showdown of the Century

According to an article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Walmart.com lowered its prices on 10 best-selling books to $10 each. In response, Amazon.com lowered its prices to $10. So Walmart.com made theirs $9. DUN. DUN. DUN.

The Journal says this means that Wal-mart wants to take over Internet sales, force prices down, and that could ultimately make publishers have to reinvent their business models altogether. The little guys are saying that they’ll be able to compete. The little guys are wrong.

Last year, when Wal-mart told the music industry to drop their prices, they were taken seriously. Because it’s not exactly good business to tell your biggest customer to go f— itself.

So what’s going to happen this time? A battle of epic proportions, of course.

Unless Amazon.com can stiff arm Walmart.com and keep them from taking over their Internet market, Wal-mart will spread its wings, stomp its feet, and get its way whether we like it or not.

And if that’s not bad enough, Walmart.com is cutting its e-book prices, too, which will cause the same thing that happened to journalism: print readers turn to the Internet to save money; print suffers a long and painful death; nobody visits it in the hospital.

Amazon, we’re bettin’ on you.

Internship Shminternship

While it’s obvious that student internships are crucial to future success in any industry, journalism internships have taken a U-turn.

Most of our inspiration.

It used to be that students would intern for free: They’d get some “work experience” by bringing executives their coffee, and they’d use it on their resumes.

Now, since so many news media outlets are dealing with frozen budgets, it seems that they’re taking work that used to be done by paid, trained professionals and laying it on unpaid, professional trainees.

The users have become the usees.

NYULOCAL compiled three students’ testimonies about the difficult journalism job market, even with vast internship experience. One said to gain multimedia skills, and another says to “know somebody.” (The Stony Brook Press  published a similar story.) Aside from the grammatical mistakes, or the fact that the students say essentially the same thing, they do represent the jist of New Journalism.

The third, most insightful student, Joe Coscarelli, an NYU graduate, said that after three years of school, networking and  unpaid internships, he was just paying to write. He wrote: “They’d pay me if they could.”

The Apple Tablet & Why I don’t Care.

As if the iPhone trend weren’t annoying enough, Apple is coming out with the Tablet.

The best part about this next trend? We don’t even know what it’s going to do.

But you probably want one anyway.

Computer World, which I assume is another nerd forum, has quotes from experts saying it’ll be more than an e-reader. (An e-reader is like the Kindle, where you read print from a screen.) Apparently it’s going to revolutionize print. Whatever that means.

An article in the Wall Street Journal, which addresses how the mice had to get back in line once the cat came back from his liver transplant, confirms that Microsoft has already come out with a similar device; it works kind of like a laptop.

This sounds like unnecessary technology to me. I mean, what’s wrong with reading a book when you want to read, and using a laptop when you want portable Internet?

Here’s how I imagine the process of Apple’s product development:

1. Is it shiny?
   Good, let’s have PR tell everyone how shiny it is.
2.  Has someone already made it?
   Crap. Time to make it shinier. Tell everyone it’s new anyway. They’ll never know.
3. Still not impressed?
   Time to talk about the touch screen. It baffles consumers.
4. Make sure it has a cool name that we can put “i” in front of.
5. Will it have an Imaginary Girlfriend application?
    Of course it will! It’s a Mac!
6. Mission Accomplished. Time to sit back and rake in the profits, so long as Steve doesn’t get sick again.

My friends (as the guy I take pride in voting against last year would say), we’re falling into Apple’s marketing traps; we’re judging the book by its cover, and we’re praying that each and every piece of technology they release will solve every one of our problems–you can even get laid if you show off their products at parties. (Don’t forget to check your own reflection in it!)

Apple, you don’t impress me as a consumer. You impress me because you somehow manage to convince people worldwide that your portable hard drives are better than other portable hard drives; that phones aren’t phones if all they do is call people; and that books aren’t cool.

You’re a good businessman, Mr. Jobs, but as for your new iTablet, iReallyDon’tCare.