Talk to newspaper folks these days, and you’ll get an earful. The anxiety isn’t just the usual newsroom gloom and doom.
These are uncertain times for the industry. Anyone not worried about the massive layoffs, or about declining circulation, stagnant advertising revenues, and how the print world will adapt to and make money from the Internet, isn’t paying attention.
Recently the Minneapolis Star Tribune sold for $500 million, less than what it cost to buy a few years earlier.
The New York Times Co. suffered a fourth-quarter loss and slashed the value of its Boston Globe and other papers by $814 million – well more than half the $1.1 billion purchase price for the Globe alone 13 years ago.
Time Inc. just cut 300 jobs after a year in which the company enjoyed an 18 percent profit.
The sky is falling.
On the other hand, the Los Angeles Times produces more than $1 billion a year in revenue and more than a 20 percent profit – over $200 million a year, twice the Fortune 500 average.
“How can an industry that produces so much cash be in so much trouble?” asks “Frontline” correspondent Lowell Bergman.
That’s just one of the questions, albeit the closest to home, explored in Bergman’s four-part series about the challenges facing the mainstream news media. In “News War,” premiering tonight on PBS (9 p.m. on KRMA- Channel 6), the news is not good.
“There has been a perfect storm brewing in the world of news,” according to Bergman. “Not since the Nixon administration has there been this level of hostility leveled at news organizations.” The difference is, 35 years ago the news business was operating from a position of strength.
When Watergate unfolded, the news industry was on the rise and the profession was considered downright heroic. Nowadays, shareholders are unhappy, owners are nervous, the number of people getting their news from conventional sources is shrinking, and many young Americans turn to Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” for their (fake) news.
Bergman, a former “60 Minutes” correspondent and New York Times reporter, lets his personal interest in the subject shine through.
The subtitle, “Secrets, Spin and the Future of the News,” lays out the format. Tonight’s hour (the only one previewed) concentrates on the issue of confidential sources, and how the concept has changed since Watergate. The debate is particularly timely for its focus on the Valerie Plame CIA leak case.
The opening hour itemizes the ways in which the press was spun by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war in January 2003, noting how certain reporters were “overly credulous.”
Once The New York Times weighed in supporting the administration, it had “an echo effect,” Bergman reports.
“The excuse can’t be, ‘I’m only as good as my sources,”‘ Bob Woodward of The Washington Post says on camera.
Next Tuesday’s hour looks at national security reporting.
The third film, 90 minutes on Feb. 27, surveys the future and the growing competition from the Internet. Interviews with network executives, newspaper editors and publishers, bloggers, Wall Street analysts and representatives of Google and Yahoo gauge the shifting media winds.
The final hour, airing March 27, is a production of “Frontline/World.” This segment covers the state of the media around the world, starting with a story on Al Jazeera.
The University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism co-produced the series with “Frontline,” and while it will have special resonance for those working in the media, it may be a bit dry for the wider audience. An opening discourse on the Supreme Court decision regarding the confidentiality of sources feels like a graduate seminar.
Still, the interviewees are impressive and the observations instructive.
Anyone who wonders why a group of newspapers, including The Denver Post, recently formed an alliance with Yahoo will find answers here. If you shook your head over ABC’s failed attempt to lure David Letterman from CBS to replace Ted Koppel, or if you’re amazed certain political blogs are counting 3 million to 5 million visitors a week, you will find this assessment timely.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
