There’s an old saying in the newspaper business, and if there isn’t there should be: keep your reporters close to your market and your ad staff closer.
Local, he says, is “where we see not just our papers but all metro newspapers. That represents a very difficult cultural shift for a lot of metro newspapers.”
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Journalists who don’t get their pictures in the paper alongside their stories tend to both envy and suspect the ones who do, believing those pictures fatten their paychecks, win them better tables in restaurants, and turn them into commodities. I like to believe celebrity journalists would benefit if freed from the obligation to do a turn every day or two; the guy I was kicking around ideas about the media group with likes to believe the Sun-Times would benefit if it got out from under their often bloated salaries. His idea is for the paper to “go the way of becoming almost like an urban daily magazine on newsprint and de-emphasize the personalities. That’s a mismatch. Give them the opportunity to become writers without their mugs in the paper, and if it doesn’t work sweep them out.” The Sun-Times, in his view, would do better “hiring a dozen to 18 outstanding writers and investigators who could write once a week or twice a month. That would add immeasurably more to the quality of the newspaper.
The job it chose became entirely too easy, as the press was “catered to by a public-relations apparatus that permeates every public and private institution, emitting an endless stream of incremental developments and story frames and pegs that keep deadline-driven reporters busy, busy, busy.” And, Cunningham continues, “This equation leaves far too little room for the press’s other, more important role: investigator, explainer, and, I would add, arbiter of our national conversation—the roles, in other words, that will not be filled in any comprehensive way by the swelling ranks of amateur or part-time journalists.”
How neatly this dovetails with the mess the Sun-Times finds itself in! It already pays less attention to breaking news—with its staff it has no choice. But what a boon it would be for writers like Michael Sneed and Richard Roeper if their new orders were to inquire and reflect instead of to fill a weekly quota of star turns. Cunningham’s advice to the press is to embrace the new social media but assert itself as the leader of this “cultural conversation.” He writes, “The marriage of all this connectivity with an activist mission of public-service journalism could cut through the layers of banality that clog not just the mainstream media but also the rest of our sprawling information environment.”
