Last week, the co-proprietor of a Web site called “24/7 Wall St.” posted a list titled, “The Ten Major Newspapers That Will Fold Or Go Digital Next.”
No. 10 was The Plain Dealer.
The author of the piece, Douglas A. McIntyre, based the list on his analysis of “the financial strength of the paper’s parent company, the amount of direct competition in their markets, and industry information on how much money they are losing.”
Here was his analysis of The Plain Dealer’s prospects:
“The Cleveland Plain Dealer is in one of the economically weakest markets in the country. Its parent, Advance Publications, has already threatened to close its paper in Newark. Employees gave up enough in terms of concessions to keep the paper open. Advance, owned by the Newhouse family, is carrying the burden of its paper plus Conde Nast, its magazine group which is losing advertising revenue. The Plain Dealer will be shut or go digital by the end of the year.”
That’s it. Not a single number.
Not a comment from anyone who might be in a position to know about the paper’s financial health. Not a phone call to anyone at The Plain Dealer. Not a shred of hard data that supported his contention. Just a comment about another newspaper’s problems, and the observation that The Plain Dealer is in Cleveland, where times are hard.
Some analysis. It was the financial equivalent of somebody asking me who I think will win the World Series this year.
Except . . .
Except that somebody at the Time magazine Web site picked up the piece and posted it on Time.com, under the heading of “The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America.”
The display made it appear that the story had been written by a Time reporter. And under the Time imprimatur, it suddenly took wing. Calls and e-mails started flooding Plain Dealer offices. “Time magazine says you’re going out of business . . .,” they would begin.
The “news” became so viral that The Plain Dealer was forced to publish a story about it in Tuesday’s Metro section, in which Publisher Terry Egger dismissed the prediction, saying that the newspaper made money last year and is budgeted to turn a profit again in 2009.
That didn’t even slow things down. Both CNN and ESPN reported the list. By Tuesday afternoon, AOL had posted a teaser on its news site that said, “Major Papers Likely to Fold . . . Bad Times Mean 10 Big Names Won’t Survive a Year.”
Readers who followed the AOL link found a story that, incredibly, attributed the report to “Time’s team of experts.”
Our Tuesday story has drawn more than 100 comments on cleveland.com – many from people concerned about the future of their newspaper, but a fair number from people who wrote, in effect, “good riddance.”
This whole episode ought to send a chill through anyone who values news and information that can be trusted.
Because if the “good riddance” people were to get their way, the above scenario is the kind of “news” they could look forward to: stories of undefined origin handed off from Web site to Web site, changing as they go.
McIntyre defended his story by saying that he gathered his information from newspaper brokers, inside sources, people who do business inside the newspaper industry. He declined to name any of them, but said he has a long background in newspapers (his father worked for the Akron Beacon Journal, among other newspapers).
Egger called it “baseless, and frankly not worthy of comment, if it hadn’t become a runaway Internet freight train.”
“Times are tough for a lot of industries in this economy and newspapers are no exception,” he said. “However, The Plain Dealer is the largest, loudest media voice in the state of Ohio. In Cleveland, we are committed to making the adjustments necessary to continue to serve our readers and advertisers every day in both print and online.”
Egger called the whole incident “Exhibit A confirming our relevance in serving the public.”
And that’s the point:
In McIntyre’s story, he failed to even allude to any sources who informed his “analysis,” much less name them. How is a reader supposed to evaluate the integrity of a list like this when there are no specific sources, no numbers, no perspective?
That’s what professional newsgatherers do – they let readers know what they know, and how they know it, so that the reader can evaluate the worth of the story and the information in it.
Newspapers have flaws. We get in a hurry, make mistakes, use bad judgment, miss important news, occasionally overemphasize small missteps.
But we have a process both for reporting and editing that is well established and that readers come to trust – a process that is carried over to the news you find on our Internet partner, cleveland.com. We’re here every day, and the words printed here are permanent. And when we make a mistake, we correct it.
Bloggers, or “citizen journalists” if you will, are not all bad. They have broken news and expanded the information landscape. But in the freewheeling world of the blogosphere, knowing whom or what to believe is a guessing game.
In the wake of the “Time” story, some people have said they get their news from the Internet anyway.
But they don’t. Just about any news of substance and credibility they see on a Web site got its start with a print reporter and a notebook. Check it out.
If you take away the newspaper, then that reporter, that notebook and all that hard-won credibility disappear.
And you will be left with people you don’t know and have no reason to trust making up lists.
