Do Newspapers Need Opinions? (Do Opinions Need Newspapers?)

From Mike Kinsley
To John Carroll, John Puerner
Cc Dean Baquet, Andres Martinez

I

NO ONE CARES if a dry cleaner is a Democrat. But newspapers are different. Newspaper companies and television networks are the only businesses in the US economy that need a reputation for political neutrality or objectivity in order to perform their core function. And yet newspapers are also the only businesses that produce a constant stream of opinions on controversial subjects, and even stamp some as their own.

This anomaly becomes even stranger when you look at a page of newspaper opinion. The basic forms haven’t changed since the spread of op-ed pages 40 years ago. Our paper has all three standard components: editorials, an op-ed page and a Sunday section.[1] These parts of the paper have fairly low readership and carry no ads. Annual revenue from these pages is approximately zero ($0.00).

Two developments make it unlikely that this situation can last. First, rationalizing and cost-cutting throughout the industry and at our company in particular. And second, the internet.

Naturally, I believe that well-reasoned opinion is a useful service to readers, a valuable contribution to civic life at all levels, and an ornament to the institution that publishes it. And I have total confidence that the Los Angeles Times management believes all this too. But we are not entirely in control of our own destiny. Even the Tribune Company is not entirely in control of our destiny. We need to be ready for whatever comes, whether from Chicago or from Cyberspace. And we need to consider this challenging new environment as we work to make dramatic improvements in the opinion pages.

[II and III omitted]


IIII. The Challenge From Cyberspace

AT A STARBUCKS in Claremont recently, I watched the ceremony performed every day throughout the world, but in its most extreme version on Sundays in Southern California. People lined up to exchange cash for a pile of newsprint so thick and heavy it has to be tied with a string. They then lugged it to a flat surface, sorted it out, and threw about 80% of it away. I asked one person if I could have her Opinion section. She was willing to give it up (depressing) but couldn’t find it in the pile (even more depressing).

Trees chopped down, logs trucked to paper factories, huge rolls of newsprint trucked from paper plants to printing plants, where more trucks await to distribute the printed product throughout a huge metropolitan area, so that people can throw away most of it without a glance. In the age of the Internet, with information (meaning data bits, but also meaning news) zapping into people’s houses at many times the speed and an infinitesimal fraction of the cost, the process that gets a fat newspaper to my front door every day seems insane—and doomed.

In the early years of the Internet, the threat it posed to newspapers was exaggerated. Today, I think, the threat is underestimated.[2] Anyone who thinks the steady long-term decline in newspaper circulation will reverse itself is in dreamland. The advantages of the web are well rehearsed: no paper, no printing, no delivery. Instantaneous publication. The allegiance of younger people. Universally available. The revolution didn’t happen immediately because people are creatures of habit. And newspapers are among the most powerfully branded products for sale. But the generation that is totally comfortable reading everything on a computer screen is inching up into its 30s, and those screens are getting easier and more comfortable to read. The advantage that pre-established brands should have had on the Internet either never materialized or was squandered, and it has been easier than predicted for new brands to establish themselves on the Web (Amazon, Ebay, Google, Yahoo and so on)..

The last safety net of print journalism—people’s apparent reluctance to pay for on-line content—is finally starting to crumble. And newspapers can’t take much comfort in the knowledge that people won’t pay for journalism on-line, since what they pay for journalism on paper doesn’t even cover the cost of the paper. Meanwhile, from the perspective of cyberspace, it was astonishing to read that the Times just spent $45 million on new printing facilities in order to get eight color pages into each issue. Color pages cost nothing on the Internet.

Coming back from the web to traditional journalism, I have been struck by all the small ways a newspaper seems antiquated (leaving aside the big ways noted above). All the time and energy that go into cutting a few lines here and adding them there, because a paper page is inflexible. Choosing a sample from the vast pile of letters to the editor, instead of just running them all or turning the letters into a bulletin board, so that anyone who wants a say can have one. (It’s also 1 ½ jobs or more just to go through the letters and pick the ones for publication.) Writing something and waiting days, instead of minutes, for it to appear.

And whatever happens to newspaper journalism because of the Internet will happen first in the area of opinion. The web is a special threat to newspaper opinion pages specifically because opinion is something the web does especially well. Blogging is a web invention that really works. It is opinion journalism that can’t be duplicated on newsprint. In terms of reader participation, the primitive web bulletin board is centuries ahead of the newspaper letters page. E-mail dialogues are another example. And these differences undermine the basic logic of editorial and opinion sections attached to newspapers. A lone blogger sitting at his computer in his boxer shorts has access to the same information (input) and can reach the same audience (output) as the largest metropolitan daily. He can’t gather and report the news. He has no correspondent in Baghdad or bureau in Sacramento. But he can do virtually everything editorial writers can do, and a lot that they can’t.

A special challenge to opinion in the LA Times is the web’s instantaneous national and global distribution. Especially with the demise of the national edition, it is hard to break out of the vicious circle: we don’t get read because we have no impact, and we have no impact because we don’t get read. For the only plausibly national newspaper published outside the east coast, and one of only two (along with the Washington Post) without national distribution, the web obviously is a tremendous opportunity as well as a threat—if we seize it. Shoveling our print content inelegantly onto the web isn’t going to do it.

Right now, to be brutally frank, the most influential voice on national politics coming out of Los Angeles (leaving aside talk radio) is not the Los Angeles Times. It’s Kausfiles, with a staff of one person operating out of his small apartment in Venice.

[V. The Challenge From Chicago (Omitted)

VI. Outside the Box
…
Six months into this job, I am pretty sure that we have to think more imaginatively and act more dramatically than we have been doing so far.

Maybe, for example, the Los Angeles Times should simply stop publishing opinion. It gets low readership, brings in no revenue, and complicates the basic mission of reporting the news. (Think of it as an extension of our “no endorsements” policy.) Andres could resume his dream of becoming a foreign correspondent, I could slink back to Seattle, and the paper would save a ton of money.

Or maybe we should just stop publishing editorials. I think it’s pretty clear that, apart from endorsements, a signed opinion piece carries more weight with readers than an unsigned editorial. (And in our paper, given the likely authors, it ought to.) With the money now spent on the editorial board, we could hire top-notch columnists, develop semi-regular relations with almost any professional writer we wanted, and pay decently for everything we publish.

Or maybe we should be the first big paper to take what I suspect is an inevitable step: moving opinion entirely on-line, or close to it. The internet does opinion better. Among our readers who actually care about the opinion pages, virtually all must be on-line by now. For less than the $XXXf million we now spend (plus the vast savings in paper, etc.), we could create the nation’s best on-line opinion section—and have it actually read across the nation and around the world.

We could also perhaps continue to publish in the newspaper a “best of” or summary version of the web opinion section. It would take no more than an editor or two, and a page or two. And I think it would almost surely seem more lively and original and very likely be as informative and useful as our current print product.

A relatively small change would be to move letters, at least, to the web. Over 90 percent come via email already anyway. It is very strange to pay two people to sort through them and discard almost all, when it would be easier and cheaper to let everyone have a say on the web. We would try to move people from letters to bulletin boards. It’s a bit of a metaphysical distinction. But basically we would make our web site a great place to discuss matters reported in the Times, to vent complaints about the Times, and so on. And we could, as with other opinion, publish excerpts or a summary in the paper itself. (We should have in any event some sort of letters-editor column, which gives a more general sense of what people are writing about, and which quotes some of the good lines from particular letters that aren’t worth publishing at any length.)

VI Editorials: A Radical But Serious Proposal

WE CAN think about all the above possibilities. But if it were completely up to me, I would stop thinking and start immediately reinventing the editorial page, the editorial board, and the editorial process, as follows.

Right now, it works about like this. Something noteworthy happens: a tsunami, or a Supreme Court decision, or a corporate scandal. The subject comes up at the next day’s editorial meeting. (Or it doesn’t, as often happens.) We have a shapeless discussion among about a dozen people around a strangely-shaped table in the editorial conference room. . Someone volunteers or is asked to write 500 words or so reflecting whatever conclusion we have reached, if any. He or she calls various experts on the subject, maybe even reads through a book or a research paper, and produces a draft. Andres or Judy or I then completely rewrite it, if it’s a subject one of us cares about. Meanwhile, the op-ed page editors are operating a similar machine a few yards down the hall: putting news in at one end and getting opinion out the other.[3]

One way to think about a different approach is: cut out the middleman. Instead of editors getting writers to get scholars and experts to express opinions, which the writers then parrot, why not go straight to the horse’s mouth? What if the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board was reconceived as an honorary society of the few dozen smartest and most interesting minds in California—at universities, think tanks, law firms, corporations, whatever. They would be ideologically compatible with the paper in some general way and together they would have expertise in almost anything we might need to comment on. And what if the editorial staff consisted of just half a dozen or so really top-flight editors, good with issues as well as with language. (all of them capable of thinking about the substance of issues, as well as turning thoughts—their own and others’-- into prose). This smaller group would examine the menu of available brilliant minds, discuss who might have something worth saying, and make the calls asking for an editorial or an op-ed essay or sometimes just for help. Much of what these non-journalists produced might have to be totally rewritten. But that’s true, unfortunately, of much of what we get today.

Producing a coherent and consistent editorial line would be easier with only four or five editors around the table. But the larger and more distinguished group would give editorials a degree of authority—in fact, a raison d’etre—that they don’t now have. If this worked, the page would gain national attention, but do so as a showcase for California intellect and scholarship, thus feeding our state chauvinism and national ambition simultaneously. Certainly there is enough intellect in California to produce the smartest editorial page in the nation.

Why would these 50-60 people agree to do this? It would be flattering to their egos. It would be an outlet for their ideas. It would be public spirited. It would be fun. Even the money would be appealing to many of them. (Given what we now spend on editorials, we could pay $1000—for what would often be a couple hours of work—and still come out ahead.) Ultimately, and maybe quite soon, being on this board could become quite prestigious. Once a year we could gather them all at some kind of brainstorming session or Aspen-type conference.

We would try to find money in this new arrangement for at least one full-time person acting as webmaster of opinion. Right now, latimes.com posts our material, but no one in the opinion department has anything at all to do with it. That pretty much forecloses the possibility of …well, more or less everything. I have bought the URL “opinionla.com” (along with “.net,” and so on), and registered it for the Los Angeles Times. The idea would be for the opinion pages to run a semi-separate site (but with heavy crosslinks), like the Wall Street Journal’s opinionjournal.com. Even a single creative and energetic web jockey, joining this core group of great opinion editors, could produce a great web complement to the new editorial/op-ed approach, including vastly more interaction with and among readers.

This Unknown Webmaster might also be able to do some rudimentary promotional exercises, such as building an email listserve and sending the people on it a weekly “what’s up.” In my dreams, he or she also takes charge of the headlines, which are probably the most important promotional exercise, and one we do badly at the moment.

While sorting out the pros and cons of this proposition, don’t forget the biggest pro: good or bad, it would be different. When you’re dealing with an ossified tradition like newspaper editorials, different is good in itself.


Postscript: None of My Business, But…

A final word about the Los Angeles Times' relationship with the Tribune company. This is basically none of my business, and I hope that neither John is offended by my bringing it up. But what happens on this front will affect the opinion pages one way or another. At worst, we will face more staff and budget cuts, along with the rest of the paper. And at best? This is the part that puzzles me.

Why do people at the Los Angeles Times see the Tribune relationship so completely as a peril and not at all as an opportunity? Everyone seems obsessed with autonomy. Trepidation is only natural. But some serious integration of the Tribune’s newspaper businesses seems not only inevitable, but irresistable. Why in the world should one company maintain half a dozen Washington bureaus, all performing essentially the same function? Yes, journalistic competition is a healthy thing. But even if all the Tribune papers merged into one national product, there would still be more Washington bureaus, more car columnists, more newspaper test kitchens, and so on, than there are auto companies or washing machine makers (two industries that are regarded as fairly competitive). And there is fearsome competition between individual reporters even within large bureaus.

Most important, integration of the Tribune papers could create new competition—for the first time in, what? A century?--for the unofficial title of most important newspaper in America. Or to put it more crudely, this is a chance--probably the only conceivable chance-- for the Los Angeles Times to take on the New York Times. Take it on for prestige, for quality, for influence, for national advertising. National paper distribution, I assume, is out of the question. But the web can solve that problem.

No matter how good the LA Times is, or how bad the New York Times might get, the paper product we put out every day will never be the nation's number-one newspaper[4]You can be number-one even if nobody reads you in Los Angeles. But you can't be number-one if nobody reads you in New York or Washington.[5]There may have been a moment during the "Pacific Rim" period of the late 20th century when people thought this might not always be true. Nobody thinks that now.

Number-one newspaper is what economists call a stable equilibrium--ie, the position reinforces itself. Being number-one gets you more of the things that make you number-one. A bigshot with an important op-ed essay, or a whistleblower with a big scoop, is more likely to go to the New York Times because it is the New York Times, which makes it easier to keep being the New York Times. A disgraced pharmaceutical company planning to piss away millions for an ad campaign in a futile attempt to restore its reputation is going to put many of those millions in the New York Times, even if the Los Angeles Times is a better paper. The LA Times does a great job under this disadvantage. But imagine how great we could be without it. The fortuitous combination of two developments--the Tribune merger and the Internet--make this possible for the first, and probably last, time.

Imagine (as I'm sure you have) the Tribune chain of papers integrated to the point where they are perceived as a national newspaper with a lot of localized content. This paper is a serious player in New York, it dominates the nation's second and third cities, Los Angeles and Chicago. It is already widely available in Washington DC (as the Baltimore Sun) and could easily become even more so. Hartford and Orlando aren’t too shabby, either. By comparison, the other Times has Boston. (And Chatanooga?)

Such a paper would instantly be as important as the New York Times, in theory.
And it would be well positioned to make this true in practice as well. No other newspaper company, certainly not the New York Times, is as likely as Tribune to be able to give customers top-quality national and international coverage, and top-quality local coverage at the same time. If newspapers have a future at all, this is it.

What would the Times’s role be in this enterprise? In a word, dominant. Unless the Tribune people are nuts, which they aren’t. That reality of dominance would have to be fudged for a while. But this shouldn’t require more than 50 to 100 years of extreme tact. And what is the alternative? It’s hard to see much future in being a “sort-of” national newspaper, spending vast sums on top quality DC and foreign coverage that doesn’t get read by anybody outside of southern California. (And the folks in Chicago may see even les of a future in doing this half a dozen times simultaneously, all for local audiences.) The New York Times is betting on a national strategy. For everybody else in the country, the obvious strategy is: go local. Everybody except us. Only Tribune is in a realistic position to do both, and do them best.

The editorial and opinion pages are probably the least promising candidates for integration, which makes it a bit easy for me to be mouthing off like this. Having lots of opinion and commentary on local issues is key to being seen as a member of the community. And the Tribune company editorial pages have gaping ideological differences. These differences are entitled to respect for their own sake, and also do real service in warding off the Justice Department. Nevertheless, you could imagine a centralized Tribune Company opinion machine that would produce high-quality opinion from across the political spectrum. Local editorial page editors could use whatever they wanted and label it however they preferred.

The same opinion shop could be in charge of a Tribune-wide website, drawing on the resources of all the papers and turning their differences into a peppery stew of ideas and controversies.

Anyway, this is all (as I said) none of my business. Except that I can’t help thinking that newspapers really are at a crossroads. And, to put it very crudely, the choice they face is: (a) use the Internet to go national; (b) give up any serious attempt to cover the world beyond your local market; or (c) die. And even if the role of the opinion pages in this decision is small, our future rides on the outcome as much as any other department.

Thanks for reading this. I look forward to your reaction.

mek
12/04