Friday, May 18, 2007

Journalism-is-doomed roundup

  • Timothy J. McNulty on why local journalism can't be outsourced.

    Unlike most of my colleagues, I think PasedenaNow's experiment is actually pretty interesting, if only for forcing journalists to ponder the value they bring to readers and what makes journalism different from, say, PR.

    But I agree that PasedenaNow's effort will fail badly. And it suggests that the editor there doesn't understand his own profession.

  • The San Francisco Chronicle is cutting 100 newsroom jobs, or 25% of its news staff. Ouch.

  • Susan Goldberg, Andrea's now-departed boss, addresses both of the above-mentioned points, at least obliquely, in an interview for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

    Notable quotables:
    "As painful as any kind of cutting can be, the upside is that it does force you to focus on your priorities. ... You really need to think long and hard about what makes you special in your marketplace. In San Jose, one of the things that made us special was our technology coverage. So, if that's at the top of the heap, than maybe something else falls off the bottom so you can keep doing technology coverage incredibly well. So in Cleveland, perhaps that would be coverage of the growth industry here -- the medical industry."

    "Whiny people who live in the past, they drive me crazy. Because, there's nothing we can do about the massive changes in our industry. ... Just whining and moaning about the way it used to be will not solve anything. ... I find as time goes on and our problems become more and more apparent, and our need to change becomes more and more apparent, my patience for 'whiny people who live in the past' becomes shorter."

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