Yes, newspapers need to cut costs to keep going – or, more properly, to keep profits at levels that make investors and owners happy. Yes, they need to preserve reporters, because they need to fill the newspaper, which still brings in most of the revenue.

The economics are basic: it costs money to have those copy editors’ bums in local newsroom chairs. A centralized desk, serving a number of newspapers, has benefits: fewer people are needed and the centralized staff probably isn’t subject to the same union contracts that cover the home office.

(According to one report, the Toronto Star will replace copy editors that it was paying as much as $85k a year with centralized deskers who top out at $45k. Sorry, but I’ve lost the link; if I track it down, I’ll add it to the post.)

You can see the sense: if I have to cut the newsroom, better to outsource copy editing and page production than to start hacking away at feet-on-the-street reporters.

But the people doing the page production are the newspaper’s last line of defense against the type of sloppiness – grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, tangled syntax and the like – that eat away at credibility. I don’t have anything empirical, but I do have anecdote: Since our local Postmedia daily outsourced its page production, typos and grammatical errors have increased. You won’t find an error on every page, or even in every section, but the number is growing. It’s off-putting in a high-level, professional publication and, I’m sure, annoying to those still in the newsroom.

(Online is worse: I recently read a website report from the same daily that had four grafs and four grammatical errors.)

I think there’s long-term pain – beyond the loss of jobs – for newspapers if they can’t find a way to maintain the quality we’ve come to expect. It’s no secret that good, strong writing comes from writers (who also report), editors, copy editors, fact-checkers and proofreaders. Newspapers have traditionally collapsed a lot of that editing power into the individuals on the desk, making those people vital to quality. So far, here in Vancouver, cutting that editing power and outsourcing it to strangers has created problems. They’re minor, but they are problems.

Maybe I’m making too much of this. Maybe most newspaper readers react to the occasional glitch, typo or howler with shrug. Or maybe I’ve reached the age of crankiness and am only a step away from being the guy who mails editors envelopes stuffed with clippings with the missteps circled in red.

On the other hand, maybe those slips that make their way into print, and the slips that less-than-attentive (and possibly overworked) central deskers introduce, a little at a time, nibbling at the credibility and authority that newspapers desperately need.

Update: Just after finishing this, I came across Lopping off Limbs by John Gordon Miller, which makes much stronger case for copy editors.

A number of newspapers seem to prevent comments on contentious articles, and at least one has killed it Facebook page because of vitriol.

The value of comments is the conversation and, at some sites (which I suspect are heavily moderated), great discussions unfold that really do deepen the reporting and storytelling.

I have an idea for saving that but it’ll take a little work and some hard-headed decision-making.

Create two comments sections for each story. Call one something like “The Conversation.” That’s where the good stuff goes: thoughtful analyses, reasoned arguments, mannerly disagreements, dearly-held and well-expressed thoughts and ideas and the like.

Call the other one something like “The Slop Bucket.” (“The Septic Tank” would work, too.) Everything else – the rants, the baseless attacks, the racism, the conspiracy theories – whatever – goes there.

The benefit for the reader is obvious: a nicely curated section for when we want to be engaged and a seething mess of madness when we need to be reminded how ugly the internet can become.

And maybe, just maybe, some of the fire-first, think-later commenters may try to work their way out of The Slop Bucket (or Septic Tank) and return to the land of reasonable, passionate conversation. You know, the land where the grown-ups live.

The 800-word story is dead; go short; go long; or even better, go visual (with photos and charts) – @zseward #cjfjtalk

— Craig Saila (@saila) February 1, 2013

…and…

How to stand out: high-quality long-form journalism, or short-hit social-style stories. Middle stuff (800-words) is dissolving #cjfjtalk

— dana lacey (@danalacey) February 1, 2013

(Both came from a Toronto event, a Canadian Journalism Federation J-talk on media innovation. The Canadian Journalism Project has a recap.)

The way I read those – and a couple of tweets that followed – is that what’s important for media orgs is journalism that adds value, either through storytelling, deep immersion and investigation – long-form – or through bits and bites and engagement – the quick-hit-on-to-social-media stuff. I may have that a little wrong; if so, that’s what the comments are for.

The ideas there tie in with something Alan Mutter wrote earlier in the week – Most newspaper stories are still too long – and some of the reaction that produced, including Steve Buttry’s detailed take, Newspaper stories are too long, except when they’re too short.

The very-short version of Alan’s post is somewhat wrapped up in this:

With all due respect to my colleagues and friends in the business, newspapers are written by journalists for journalists, who not only love their words but also tend to equate the length of a story with the importance of the subject, if not the writers themselves.

Steve, in a post worth reading, added this:

I support Mutter, Gannon, McGuff and lots of editors past and present in their quest to introduce more discipline in journalists’ writing. I freely acknowledge that many of my blog posts run too long, without the limited space of print and without editors to help me trim an extraneous word here and a redundant paragraph there. But frankly, the problem and the challenge (whether in my blog or in a newspaper or on a news website) is not how long the story is, but whether it’s worth the length.

(Editing note: I combined two grafs into one in that quote.)

All of these tweets and quotes from blog posts are of a piece, and they’re pointing us past newspaper journalism as it is, for the most part, presently committed.

It makes sense. We have an arsenal of storytelling weapons and war-room filled with storytelling strategies that allow us to break out of the old ways, reshape what journalism means and connect more deeply with an audience crying out for understanding (and entertainment).

(An aside: Does anyone remember the pre-crisis days, before the economy went south, the newspaper companies went bankrupt and all those talented, talented journalists lost their jobs? The largest concern then was the trend lines that showed newspaper readership and connection to community and ability to attract advertisers were all, long-term and steepening, heading downward. Did, sometime during the awfulness of the past four or five years, all that disappear? Did the fact that amid all that tumult newspapers got themselves online, dove deep into social media and got interactive – while more or less doing what they had always done in terms of journalism – suddenly make them more relevant and deeply connected to community? I don’t think so.)

Back on topic: the message I got from the tweets and blog posts makes sense. When I pile it on the other, less-recent messages about what media needs to be – hyperlocal, reader-driven, mobile-first and on and on, they they all make sense, too. Which leads to two conclusions: I am (1) glad I am no longer a newspaper editor who is charged with figuring this all out and (2) convinced that this whole enterprise of figuring out where media is going/needs to go is still incredibly messy.

We see some interesting stuff happening. For instance, I’ve just noticed that The Toronto Star has, since November of last year, published at least a dozen e-books as part of “a weekly series of quality journalism in ebook form” available at the Apple iBooks store either free or for $2.99. (An example is here.) And, for instance, Chad Skelton, here in Vancouver, is doing some increasingly interesting storytelling with data. His blog hasn’t been updated for a bit, but there are some links to some of his work there.

There’s a lot, like the ideas that kicked off this post, to be excited about.

But what I’m not aware of is any deep or widespread discussion of what, in the second decade of the 21st Century, a newspaper is. For all the tweets, Facebook posts, online conversations, videos, data-driven stories and the rest, the newspapers I see most often are still trying to be all things to all people. They are still filled largely with 20-inch pieces of commodity news that are need far less space. They hit the doorstep every morning as if the news they carry has not already been covered – sometimes to death – and they add little that is truly new and important.

I get that part of the challenge – a big, big part of it – is maintaining an older, generally supportive readership (which maintains the advertising base they are still able to cling to), while moving into the areas that they know they need to, but which have so far proven very much less conducive to making money.

Still. We have lot of hows out there, long-form and short- and the disappearing middle being the latest to catch me eye. What I would like to see is much more discussion about what, as in “What could a newspaper be?” I suspect there are some interesting answers in there.

If I had to put a formula to it, it would be something like x = ? + ? + ?, where x is the amount of media money I’m willing to spend and the questions marks are fees per media. It’s fair to say that the number of question marks is limited and x will be reached fairly quickly.

That’s made me cautious about sharing my credit-card number with any of the news media that want a glimpse of it.

I’m not sure newspapers, in building their paywalls, realized that one of the effects would be that at least some readers now need to be convinced that there is actual, personal (as opposed to societal) value in what they are producing.

A couple of decades ago, I paid to have three newspapers, two local and one national, delivered to my door. The decision was pretty easy: those newspapers were not only the most relevant at the time, they were also the most readily available. At lot has changed in two decades, not the least of which is what’s relevant to me. And, today “readily available” describes just about every media outlet anywhere in the world.

Now, if a media company wants my money, it has to convince me that it’s valuable to me.

The idea that media has to prove itself to me is interesting. Before, I guess, I paid for whatever value I deduced with my attention. Now they want money for it and I’m very much more aware that I want to get my money’s worth. (I’ve never believed I should support the local media “just because,” nor do I buy the argument that the life or death of any particular outlet equals the life or death of journalism.)

So far, I’m proceeding cautiously. A chunk of the available paywall budget went to the New Yorker a week or so ago, because there was an article I really want to read. I could have bought that issue, but the value of having that magazine on the iPad every week won out.

Some of what I’m willing to pay is also getting soaked up by sites such as The Ativist, and others selling stories at by-the-piece rates.

Most likely – based on the number of times I’ve had to switch browsers after hitting a page-meter limit – the next decision I will have to make is whether the Globe & Mail gets some cash. In recent weeks, there have been a number of pieces that are pointing me to an online subscription. The excellent The China Dairies Diaries series by Mark McKinnon and John Lehmann comes to mind as journalism of value that is worth paying for.

(I should note that, through the university, I can have access to the full Globe & Mail package. There is something in me, though, that says that if I truly find it of value, I should pay for it.)

Beyond that, I’m not sure. There’s a world of journalism out there, much of which will remain free because while I may enjoy an occasional piece from Edmonton or Seattle or Tampa Bay or wherever, there’s no continuing value in access beyond the eight or 10 pages per month that slip outside the paywall.

(Of course, media can still get some cash from me by re-publishing large-scale journalism projects as e-books. I buy an inordinate number of books and many of them are impulse buys.)

The problem for my local newspapers is that, so far, they’re not in the mix. Twitter is as effective as anything has been in tipping me to the breaking – and not-so-breaking – news of the city and province, and if I want more I can dive deeper. And, in truth, the older I get, the more the news junkie in me fades. I’m still a journalism junkie – but I only want the really good stuff –, while the need to be constantly in the know about everything is less and less important.

I’m not sure if this process of carefully adjudicating where the paywall money will be spent is something others are going through, too. I read a while ago (sorry, I’ve forgotten where) one man reporting that the fact he was allowed only 10 articles a month was causing him to pause and carefully weigh the value of each article he was tempted to click on, resulting in far fewer clicks than he was used to making.

(Update: Chad Skelton has helpfully provided me with a link to the post mentioned above: The Beneficial Impact of Newspaper Paywalls on Users. Thanks, Chad.)

This whole process of determining the value of individual media titles is deeply interesting. I let you know how it works out.

Stuff happens. Twitter, for one. Real life, for another.

Despite the social media whirl, blogging isn’t dead yet and it feels like it’s time to devote some attention to doing some writing, teasing out some deeper thoughts, performing some self-promotion…

Speaking of which…

Cover of eBook created in iBooks Author.

I have mixed thoughts about self-publishing. It’s great for the ego and I’ve had some nice responses. But I’ve added to the clutter of self-published works that are filling up the virtual bookshelves of the various online vendors. It makes the task of finding books by browsing more difficult and time-consuming. Everyone has a book in them, we’ve always been told. Modern times mean all those books are coming out, some that I’ve seen without ever having had the benefit of a good editor or even just a proofreader.

Presumably, as happened with blogging, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and all the rest, the wheat-from-chaff sorting will take place, the cream will rise … choose your favourite cliché … and from the burst of what we used to call vanity publishing, new, strong voices will emerge and be recognized as whatever the e-book world’s equivalent of Google juice or trusted Twitter “editors” kicks in.

However you or I feel about this whole thing, self-publishing books is a logical extension of the DIY ethos that drives blogging and YouTube docs, Instagram streams and all the rest in this ragged, wonderful world.

I’m going to keep poking around in self-publishing, and I’ll pass what I learn along to my students.

Maybe I can convince them, along the way, that their best friend will always be a good editor.