By Michael Bugeja, Director, Greenlee School, Iowa State University
The Iowa State Daily has a strong online, new media presence, with video, audio and text in an innovative design that also is easy to navigate.
Things should be looking up, but revenue is down.
The Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication has a historic relationship with the independent student newspaper, housed in the same building. Many on staff are our students. Alumni who won Pulitzer Prizes worked there. Our top benefactors have been editors.
But mostly we want the Daily to succeed because it holds the university (and at times, us) accountable.
In addition to directing the School, I am a former college media adviser at Oklahoma State University. For a decade now, my research in media ethics and my reporting for The Chronicle of Higher Education (and other outlets) have analyzed how Internet has changed the nature of journalism and education.
I have argued that journalism, especially print, would lose readers to the point of economic collapse because of the conventions of Internet, a medium that gives away information for free (especially timely information) and vends information about information that sells more than once.
All those presentations at AEJMC conventions about Information Centers replacing newsrooms failed to factor the nature of the platform developed by military, enhanced by entrepreneurs and promoted by the same consultants who catered to Wall Street rather than Main Street and are architects of our woes.
I take no pleasure in being proved correct when prophesying our present state of affairs in print media, mostly in my 2005 book, Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press).
A follow-up Oxford book, Living Ethics across Media Platforms, tries to counter the Internet effect and maintain principles that have guided journalists for decades.
In coping with the current situation, I usually remind myself of the motto: Ethics are easy when nothing is at stake.
Something is at stake for all of us in print and digital journalism, something ethical, something our association will have to deal with in as much many members promoted convergence on counsel of the over-optimistic, ill-informed CEOs of media companies whose stocks sell now for less than $10 a share.
Because I know the nature of Internet, I also know how to use it to generate revenue. It requires us to think more like Sergey Brin than like Phil Currie.
And because our newspaper is losing money—as are counterparts on other campuses—I find myself wandering into the Daily newsroom to speak to the advertising staff rather than the editorial staff, sharing my Brin-like visions rather than investigative tips.
Case in point: Each morning I begin my day by reading the online edition of the Daily and then follow up with the print edition when I reach the office. Last week I read an advance about our women’s basketball team, currently in the top 20, concerning a difficult game with its next opponent; but online, the article lacked a nut graph noting when and where the event would take place.
I wanted to buy tickets. I decided to speak to the sports staff about the importance of basic information. However, later I saw why it was missing online: the print edition had a display design noting time, place and opponent.
My first impulse was Currie-like in innocence: Tell writers to revise print copy for online consumption. The second impulse was deviously Brinesque: There are no mistakes online, only missed opportunities to make money.
What if the sales staff at the Daily offered free online clickable display ads with each advance story containing that missing nut graph, something like, “Iowa State women’s basketball team takes on Texas, Sunday, Feb. 15, at 2:30 p.m. at the Hilton Coliseum. Click here for tickets, $5-12”?
The Daily would get 10% of each ticket sold through that button.
“Of course,” I told the ad staff, “we could encourage our readers to buy tickets through the Daily and increase our take. But we don’t have to stop there. We do a lot of advance stories—for athletics, sure—but also for the performing arts and any number of events that require admission.”
I shared my idea with the general manager, Annette Forbes, in addition to another about classified ads. “We can offer free online classifieds uploaded by sellers with a shareware PayPal button asking them to donate 10% of any sale for the upkeep of the site.”
The Ames Tribune, our local competitor, once sued the Daily to limit our distribution in Ames. “We can get around that, too,” I told Forbes. “What about a digital distribution box? We can design one with a laptop where newspapers used to be and place them in bars and convenience stores. People are addicted to Internet. Want to Facebook? Put your debit card in the slot where quarters used to plop. Get 10 minutes for 10 bucks to graffiti a friend’s wall.”
“Let’s do lunch,” Forbes said.
Later in the newsroom I saw Mark Witherspoon, the Daily adviser. Conscience pinged my inner IP.
Ethics are easy when nothing is at stake. …
I could justify some of my ideas. After all, student newspapers still purchase ink by the barrel, but that ink has been red for so long now that even the flagship of such newspapers, The Columbia Missourian, faced record losses of $1 million.
Unlike the Daily at Iowa State, the Missourian is a community newspaper staffed by students but directed by such professionals as Tom Warhover, executive editor and chair of the print and digital news faculty at the Missouri School of Journalism.
The publication is a century old. With that tradition, staff and brainpower, the Missourian was losing revenue at such a rate that Warhover at one point wrote a column about a possible partnership with its local competitor, Columbia Daily Tribune. (The Missourian has since decided to go from a seven- to a five-issue per week publication schedule.)
I telephoned Warhover. He’d been to that same ethical precipice as I, but stepped back and took stock.
“I have a problem with your basketball ad,” he said. “Why not make sure your reporters remember to include the nut graph and then add a link to that paragraph—‘for ticket information, click here.’”
We discussed other problematic issues such as conflict of interest when covering athletics, for instance. And if we vend information that sells more than once, methods as well as the reasons for newsgathering might be lost on future generations. We’ll sell DWI arrests to attorneys, sports stats to college recruiters, and human interest stories to online paper mills.
We’re journalists with a new platform lacking theory to guide us morally and monetarily.
But we have each other. That’s something. And we’re in this together. That’s something, too.
We need to pick up the phone as I did with Warhover and air our consciences about the state of journalism and what, if anything, can be done to address it without losing our principles in the process.
That, I think, is what AEJMC had in mind when inviting colleagues to be commentators on Hot Topics. It’s why we go to conventions and submit papers, testing ideas among peers, this time using the platform that may have changed journalism as we knew it into something we may not yet recognize … or want to.
Michael Bugeja’s research has been cited in The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, and The Economist, among others. His articles have appeared in Journalism Quarterly, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, New Media and Society, and Journal of Mass Media Ethics, among others. Bugeja also writes professionally for The Quill, Editor & Publisher and The Chronicle of Higher Education.