When the publisher of the Daily Herald announced last week that his paper would be throwing up a pay wall around its online news content, public comment on the publication’s website was overwhelmingly negative. “I’ll be dammed if I would ‘pay money’ to read the poor info the DH provides,” wrote one of the first posters, setting the tone. “This paper will go down.”
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No, said Ray. “I’ve not seen an editorial staff so invigorated in a long time,” he told me. “They like it that we’re first to market. They like it that it’s a bold move. They like it that we’re going to the marketplace and saying, ‘What we do has value.’”
Would I hear that from the staff? I called a couple of veteran reporters. “No, it’s not rolling the dice,” said film critic Dann Gire. “This is an educated and calculated risk where the benefits are going to hugely outweigh the detriments. I’ve been around long enough to know the difference between a company that wants to make money and a company that wants to make money and provide really good service to the community. And that’s us. So I’m thrilled. The other option, waiting for someone to do something, is a slow train to oblivion.”
True enough—though relaxation gets harder when the multitudes wandering off include the advertisers. But I think journalists feel less hopeless because they see less to feel hopeless about. In 2009 the mainstream media crowd was confounded by a marketplace that didn’t seem to give a damn about newspapers and their profits—the news was nothing you’d pay for. Now some MSM journalists think they see a way forward. One of them is Hagit Limor, an investigative reporter for the ABC affiliate TV station in Cincinnati and national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
This doesn’t mean an evolutionary change in the Lisagors suddenly went into reverse. More and more journalists in recent years have paid their own entry fees and then paid for their own dinners—either because they’re freelancers or because their employers want to save money. The CHC membership (401 in June) is the highest it’s been in years, but this doesn’t mean laid-off reporters are flooding back to work. On the contrary. When a young copy editor looking for a job in Chicago had breakfast with me last month I told her to join the Headline Club and network because that’s what her competition’s doing.
