The Public Method of Journalism, and Other Monday Reads

The most interesting read on a pretty interesting day in Newspaperland? It’s this analysis from Cody Brown of the “trustee method” of media, exemplified by the New York Times, and how many supposed reinventions of journalism are really just working at the edges of that model, leaving its basic workings untouched. Brown imagines a more fundamental shift to what he calls the “direct method,” and his central insight is this: “Instead of telling a public what is news, the role of a direct news organization is to create a space where the people in that public can tell each other.”

Brown is always intriguing to read, with a curiosity about journalism and its history that keeps him from getting hung up on supposedly eternal journalistic truths that turn out to be a lot more ephemeral than we might think. (I definitely include myself on the list of those sometimes ensnared.) I need to think a bit more about his latest effort to give it the reaction it deserves, but I think I can bring one old-school journalistic convention to bear: He sure did bury the lead!

Some other interesting things to read today:

• It’s not news that the newspaper industry is in trouble, but look at these circulation figures gathered by E&P. If you could have shown these to newspaper execs 10 years ago, they would have started hoarding canned goods, convinced that the numbers meant 2009 was the year the United States collapsed into civil war or was ravaged by some kind of superflu. Not really surprising — and with all the interesting things bubbling under the surface of traditional journalism, it shouldn’t be the stuff of terror — but still stark and sobering to review.

• This Stephanie Clifford article in the New York Times looks at how Mercedes Benz used Web advertising on newspaper sites to tout an update of its E-class cars last summer, but is expected to sidestep newspapers when it rolls out Web ads for its more basic models early in 2010, turning instead to Web ad networks and exchanges. Clifford writes that “newspaper sites are the patent-leather stilettos of the online world: they get used for special occasions, but other shoes get much more daily wear.” Interesting evidence of the eclipse of newspapers as general-purpose vehicles for consumer communications, and the slow process of finding new niches.

• Sticking with talk of niches, Knight Digital Media Center’s Michele McLellan covers a talk by Slate editor David Plotz in which he discusses his site’s future as depending not on its seven million unique visitors, but on a subset of that — some 500,000  loyal users who want the kind of journalism in which Slate specializes. That took me back to my recent discussion with Greg Harmon about traffic numbers and how newspaper audiences may be a lot smaller than publishers think, but much more valuable.

• This is fairly amazing. Yes, Virginia, the Chicago Sun-Times still has six workers with lifetime guaranteed jobs who make around $45,000 a year to set some last-minute pages in hot type. And those six workers’ union had the ability to scuttle a deal to keep the paper from extinction. Beats me why this industry is in trouble.

Because I can’t end on that sour note, I came across a headline in the New York Times over the weekend that made me click because it just seemed so improbable: “Ignacio Ponseti, Hero to Many With Clubfoot, Dies at 95.” That sounded like an outtake from The Onion, but it turned out to be a beautifully written record of the remarkable life of an extraordinary man. I don’t know what the emerging ecosystem for news will look like, but I do know it needs a place for quietly amazing stories like this one.