Newspaperproject.org: Shiny, happy journalists
A group of newspaper executives have banded together to get the word out: We are important! People like us! That’s the story according to this E&P article: Newspaper Execs Launch Group to ‘Fight Back.’
Reading the “About” paragraph at the newspaperproject.org web site, we discover that:
NewspaperProject.org was launched in 2009 by a small group of newspaper executives to support a constructive exchange of information and ideas about the future of newspapers. While we acknowledge the challenges facing the newspaper industry in today’s rapidly changing media world, we reject the notion that newspapers—and the valuable content that newspaper journalists provide—have no future.
That’s fine. I read thousands of people thinking about the future of news, and I rarely read that newspapers have no future. But whatever.
The next paragraph, however, goes straight over the cliff into “fair and balanced” territory:
Unlike websites that feature negative, gloom-and-doom stories about newspapers, this website will be devoted to insightful articles, commentary and research that provide a more balanced perspective on what newspaper companies can do to survive and thrive in the years ahead.
Notice the construction of that paragraph. Web sites that “feature” negative, gloom-and-doom stories are “bad” because they don’t provide a balanced perspective. Newspaperproject.org will be devoted to “insightful” stuff that “provide a more balanced perspective…” And that is “good.”
If you go to the site, you will see links to what amounts to a whole lot of cheerleading, like this:
- The Catalog Factor: Why investors should buy newspaper stock
- Time for Newspaper Folks to Fight Back! Here’s How
- Let’s Invent an iTunes for News
- Brian Tierney: Papers matter more than ever
- Sorry, Brian, we’re not dying – what about TV news?
- Newspapers: History will always needs its first draft
- What’s with the self-flagellation?
- The ‘Secret Weapon’ of Newspapers in the Digital Age? Paper!
- St. Petersburg’s Neil Brown believes newspapers’ future lies in smart, credible journalism
Obviously, the folks who organized newspaperproject.org are passionate about saving newspapers. Heck, most everyone I interact with on a daily basis is passionate about saving newspapers (okay, I said “most everyone”).
But putting up a web site linking to articles meant to extol the halcyon days of newspapers past and placing promotional ads in newspapers isn’t going to suddenly change perception, much less reality.
More disconcerting than the slant (no articles at all about doom-and-gloom) is there is no information about who’s running the newspaperproject.org on the actual web site. What information we do have comes from the Editor & Publisher article. I’m also a little leery of the term “grassroots” as used by E&P here:
With that irony in mind, a group of concerned newspaper executives has decided to fight back against the misrepresentation of newspapers and their continuing importance to the public, to the marketplace and to democracy. The name for the grassroots crusade is the “Newspaper Project.”
“Grassroots” efforts are not usually defined by their association with the word “executives” in the same sentence. The word more closely associated with “executives” would be “astroturf.”
To get an idea of a real grassroots effort, visit letsbuyanewspaper.com, started by UNC-Chapel Hill journalism student Andrew Dunn. Or CoPress.org, begun by a group of college media web folk who wanted to share information.
There’s also this:
Monday, the group will launch a series of print and online ads telling, among other facts, the story of how American newspapers and their Web sites daily reach 100 million people, more than watched Sunday’s Super Bowl.
The ads will appear in major newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, and also in scores of community dailies, including the 89 owned by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc.
I don’t know many “grassroots” groups that could go from zero to an ad in the New York Times AND Washington Post (not to mention an entire newspaper group) in that amount of time, especially with an ad that contains this type of funny:
In fact, where did football fans find the real story behind Sunday’s big game? In our nation’s newspapers.
Or on ESPN.com or SportsIllustated.com or CNN.com, not to mention the AP reports, which appear on Yahoo! News and other online outlets in addition to the print products, or any of a hundred other football junkie information sites. Real football fans also soaked up “the real story” from SportsCenter right after the game, watching the post-game press conferences just like all those newspaper reporters. They watched highlights at NFL.com, or ESPN as well.
Martin Langeveld has more, and a response from the grassroots themselves. Langeveld sums up my thoughts in this sense: “fuzzy.”
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