Our fates are linked, TV kids.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant article I read today from Variety magazine

I used to get so frustrated at school when our campus TV station – Newswatch – grabbed the stories and reporting done by The Daily Mississippian staffers to fill their 30-minute show, not once ever mentioning that The DM had reported the news first. I got in arguments with their station manager over the pilfering of our content; some of them were bloody. I asked my journalism professors, “Do TV stations even have reporters of their own, who go out and drum up stories and gather facts like newspaper people do?” I was assured that at bigger stations, many reporters did run out to cover things. But the local newspaper was still one of their first, go-to sources for story ideas and content.

Gag.

Even some print-based writers who visited UM for journalism week hinted that they were frustrated by the “read and tell” strategy of TV networks; one big name from a big mag in New York even said CNN would stop running if the New York Times failed to come out one day. I nodded along with him from my seat in the audience and cursed TV journalism one more time.

So it’s nice to see that:
• People are aware that broadcast sources borrow heavily from newspapers and other print media
• As such, TV and radio will see declines like the newspaper industry

Karma, karma, karma.

Somebody stop the bleeding!

Before I graduated from Ole Miss in May, I had to write and defend a 75-page honors college thesis on the future of newspapers.  I paid special attention to all published State of the Media reports from the Project for Excellence in Journalism as I was doing my analysis.  If you havent checked the PEJ’s report, you should.  It’s amazing.

My findings weren’t much of a surprise to me or any of my journalism professors – the writing has been on the wall for a while now.  Circulation is down (though readership is up in some places), advertising revenues are down.  Web site views are up and increasing, but few papers have found a way to make enough money off their sites to support their print product.  The public opinion of newspapers continues to drop, thanks to publicized scandals, conflicts of interests and decreased quality.  And all of this is compounded by increasing cuts in staff and resources necessary to put out a consistently good product everyday.

Which is why it saddens me to see things like this, but no longer shocks me:

• So long, Wall Street journal editors
• We’ll miss you AJC team
• Aloha in Honolulu

I concluded at the end of my thesis defense that I believed newspapers that invested in their reporters, photographers and editors and provided them with the resources and support they needed to do their best work would see revenue gains.  Quality is directly linked to revenue, I said.  Mass layoffs and buyouts fly in the face of quality and make readers even less confident in the product that hits their front porch and newsstands everyday.

Are newspapers really the last of a dying breed?  I want to make my career with these things.  I’m hopeful they can turn it around for my sake, and the sake of the millions of readers who count on them – despite insisting they don’t.