Washington Post Advertisers Want Cheerier Stories
(cc photo by krossbow)
Time for another blogger ethics panel:
Weymouth, publisher of The Post, told the story’s author, freelance journalist Matt Mendelsohn, at a brunch earlier this year that advertisers “wanted happier stories, not ‘depressing’ ones,” Mendelsohn wrote in an online posting. His story was about a 26-year-old woman whose arms and legs had been amputated.
Post executive editor Marcus Baruchli, of course, wants to deny that the story was killed for business reasons:
“Whatever Katharine may have felt about the piece was immaterial to the editorial process,” Brauchli said. “We are not driven by what one of our business-side colleagues, or even our publisher, thinks about a piece. We follow a journalistic compass.”
But though Weymouth agrees that she didn’t specifically have Mendelsohn’s piece killed, she says that the paper’s editorial staff is, in fact, taking her direction about which kinds of stories to run:
Weymouth said Monday night that any impact she had was “completely inadvertent, because I would never interfere in an editorial decision and I had no intention of interfering.” She said that she had not even read Mendelsohn’s story, but that she had “used it as an example” with editors “of the kind of fare we should be moving away from.”
Honestly, I think the world might be better off if newspapers that are also subsidiaries of for profit companies just admit that that’s what they are and that, obviously, business considerations are relevant to the way the paper is run. Newspapers’ quasi-monopoly status during the classical 1960s-70s era of newspapering allowed the fiction that a newsroom has nothing to do with business to be fairly tenable. But in the pre-radio days when the newspaper market was highly competitive, everyone understood that the newsroom was part of a business. And this is a generally understood element of magazine journalism, and for-profit journalism in a broadcast and internet context. If you want coverage that’s untainted by commercial considerations, you should look for coverage done by non-commercial enterprises. The tradeoff is that non-commercial coverage may be shaped by fundraising considerations. But insofar as it costs money to produce content, the nature of the content that exists will be shaped by the quest for revenue. Note, for example, the insane proliferation of slideshows on commercial websites which is apparently driven by the fact that these are a good way to juice pageview stats.
At any rate, the alternative of having various Post editors and business officials contradicting themselves doesn’t seem to me likely to help anyone think through the dilemmas clearly. These issues exist whether people want to admit to it or not, but admitting to their existence seems like an important first step to coping with them.
33 Responses to “Washington Post Advertisers Want Cheerier Stories”
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September 15th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
OMG, Matt, could you please run a HuffPo style slideshow?
“Which of these low-level urban planning bureaucrats can actually carry off an earth-toned suit?”
September 15th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Newspapers suck. Media Matters can take just about any story written in a major daily and eviscerate it in a few paragraphs. Same goes for networks news. WTF ever happened to hiring fact checkers? Or an editor capable of detecting a badly wayward approach to the story? Honestly, when I see someone’s desk at work with an open newspaper on it I have to figure they’re stuck in a 1979 time warp.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Also, Matt, I think *your* readers might appreciate some cheerier stories. My suggestions:
“Relax: The EPA has Got This!”
“Getting Around the U.S. Senate: Unitary Executive Theory for Progressives”
Heart-warming pictures of Bo. Also.
September 15th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Newspapers don’t suck. Increasingly, WaPo does, though. Say your morning prayers for the NYT, kiddies.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Someone needs to get Auntie Tina to talk sense into the young thing.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
The profit-driven issues are real, but it’s worth pointing out that Katharine Weymouth isn’t in charge because she worked her way up the corporate ladder* — she’s there because she’s Katharine Graham’s granddaughter. There’s a reason she seems even stupider and sleazier than typical senior management.
The same goes for the Times, btw
*There’s generally a “but-she-did-work-her-way-up!” cover story for family management, and probably one set up for KW. Worked in every department, learned the business, etc. If you believe this (1) you’re stupid and (2) I don’t like you.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Smaller newspapers are the worst. Big employers in small towns really don’t want bad press. I went to Cornell, which is largest employer in tiny Ithaca, NY. During my time at Cornell, sixteen people committed suicide. How many made in the local paper? One. And only because they couldn’t find the body. The search effort was huge, and they just couldn’t hide it. And I grew up in Bethlehem, PA when the steel mill was still operating. People died working there all the time. Never made it in the papers. And there were two newspapers in town back then. Bethlehem Steel controlled both of them.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
The world would be better off if newspapers, and other media, were divested from corporate control, as such.
Will it happen? No. That’s why so many of us simply wish these serial liars a happy bankruptcy.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
The Boston Globe is good about showing you a beautiful gallery of photos all on a single webpage. See many examples here
September 15th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Balderdash. If that were so, the Press would look quite different.
Example: Something like a million people went to Washington, DC last Saturday to “petition for redress of grievances”. Every one of them went home, picked up the paper or turned on the TV news, and learned that they were one of a few thousand rowdy extremists whose only goal was to make sure sick brown people stayed that way or, preferably, died. And all but a tiny minority looked at that and realized that The News was useless as a source of information, not worth paying for, even when “paying” just means the time wasted sitting through the ads.
And, clearly, the Press doesn’t care. They’ll sit around in the bar lamenting their loss of “eyeballs” and subsequent diminution of revenue, and their solution is “Hey, Harry, go find us some more wingnuts to sneer at. That’ll grab em.”
Regards,
Ric
September 15th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
And, clearly, the Press doesn’t care. They’ll sit around in the bar lamenting their loss of “eyeballs” and subsequent diminution of revenue, and their solution is “Hey, Harry, go find us some more wingnuts to sneer at.
Nobody fucking cares, Red.
September 15th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Something like a million people went to Washington, DC last Saturday to “petition for redress of grievances”.
In the same way that a blue marble is something like the planet Earth.
September 15th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
September 15th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Yeah, Ric, the DC Fire Department has a hidden agenda. The biased media got the numbers from them. It is much better to rely on the organizers of the event.
September 15th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Something like a million people
What, in that they were both numbers?
Do you have an aerial photo? (From this event, not the Promise Keepers rally of 1997.)
Do you have an estimate from anybody who wasn’t actively promoting the event?
One million people is a lot for a city like DC to handle. The city would notice a crowd like that. If they didn’t, it’s not because of how much more polite, tidy, and civilized you are than the masses of people who came to town for the inauguration. It’s because there weren’t nearly as many of you.
September 15th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
[...] suggests that I might want to start taking my cues from Katherine Weymouth and offer some cheerier stories: [...]
September 15th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I love it when people try to refute my thesis by citing examples of it.
Regards,
Ric
September 15th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
I am definitely going to use that line next time I get totally smacked down in an argument and don’t have anything else to say.
September 15th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Ric Locke Says:
I love it when people try to refute my thesis by citing examples of it.
When you start your whine/”thesis” with an absurd – and more than a little pathetic – lie, why should anyone bother listening to you? The only news outlets that confirm your inflated view of yourself and your fellow teabaggers are FOX News, right-wing talk radio, and blogs; is it your contention that all media are “narrative-confirming propaganda” outlets except those?
September 15th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
@JustMe
While to most people it appears you just burned Ric Locke really, really well and very humorously, in fact you just confirmed his thesis, so the joke’s on you!
September 15th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Yeah, Brendan. Keep it up.
No, I don’t have an aerial photograph. Airspace rules around DC make low-altitude aerial photography nearly impossible, and satellite coverage wasn’t available because it was overcast.
You know that, and chuckle about it. Then Jon posts a reference to a webcam shot from a bright sunny day at a different time of year, put up by a poster with no reference data, and claims that’s the one really used!
So: I may be confused, but we know you’re a liar. How’s that for “whine”?
Keep it up, guys. Hey, buy NYT stock — Pinch could use the subsidy.
Regards,
Ric
September 15th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
I didn’t think America’s wingnuts could get even wingnuttier, but Ric Locke has disproved that thesis. It really demonstrates something scary about human psychology.
September 15th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Amusing. I know when to leave — when the “refutals” turn into sniggering sexual innuendo (”teabaggers”) and gratuitous putdowns (”wingnuttier”) I know the other guys have got nothin’.
G’night, all.
Regards,
Ric
September 15th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
There were not a million people there. And Ivan Ivanovitch did not invent the light bulb, either. Are you getting your information from old issues of Pravda?
September 15th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
satellite coverage wasn’t available because it was overcast.
Oh, my. You can’t stop the True Believers, can you?
Look, pal. I was in DC this weekend, and I’ve been in DC for big events and protests. 75,000 on Saturday, tops. And I’m being generous, because it’s not like I was counting noses.
September 15th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
It was a long day for many at the 9/12 event in DC. Certainly many people were tired, hungry, sweaty and in no mood for returning home that day, preferring a night in a clean bed after a good meal and a shower. Glenn Beck says 1.7 million people showed up. Why no stories about the owners of hotels, restaurants and multitudes of other service oriented businesss being overwhelmed with guests demanding meals and accomodations? We’re led to believe a great many people came great distances to attend. Why no stories of unbearable traffic congestion and snarls as the day ended? And what of overbooked flights, jammed airport lounges and bus stations and gasoline stations? Events attended by 1.7 million people create all manner of disruption and commerce. Does the Right believe stories about all these scenarios were quashed by scheming editors to downplay the rally? WTF? If only 10% of the people wanted to spend the night that’s 170,000 needing hotel rooms in the DC area. Does the Chamber of Commerce have knowledge of that many rooms getting booked? Again, WTF?
September 15th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
The crowd size question could be pretty easily solved by posting cameras at ten or twenty prescribed locations and taking photos at prescribed times. You could use timestamp cameras, though of course wingers would claim that they’d been hacked. Perhaps film cameras would be regarded as more reliable.
In all seriousness, this would pretty much work. You could have rules of thumb, e.g. that if Alpha Street is empty throughout a demonstration, the crowd can’t have been larger than x thousand.
Probably people have more fun fudging and quibbling than they would knowing th answer, so this won’t happen.
September 15th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
I went to Cornell, which is largest employer in tiny Ithaca, NY.
I spent a few years at Cornell. The winters were harsh, but Ithaca is a beautiful little town. Harsh winters, but the minus 14 degree walk to school was very quiet and still.
September 15th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Joe Locke is a paid operative.
September 15th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
there are over a million people who know from their own experience that it ain’t so.
Uh huh. And in five years time, there’ll be five million, just like the 50,000 Red Sox fans who probably claim they were part of the 3,000 in Busch Stadium for the last game of the 2004 series.
I’m going to be generous about this: people aren’t good at estimating big crowds. The capacity checks out at around 100,000 — Big House / Beaver Stadium crowds, stadium gig and festival crowds, the kind of gatherings that are managed on a regular basis. Stick a zero on the end, and you have a different order of logistical magnitude.
Really, claim to yourselves that you brought out the same crowd as the inauguration. Go hog wild, because it matches the birferism and Fear Of A Black Commie President mythmaking. But remember that we’ll be laughing at you all the way.
September 16th, 2009 at 6:37 am
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September 17th, 2009 at 11:14 am
[...] Matthew Yglesias: Honestly, I think the world might be better off if newspapers that are also subsidiaries of for profit companies just admit that that’s what they are and that, obviously, business considerations are relevant to the way the paper is run. Newspapers’ quasi-monopoly status during the classical 1960s-70s era of newspapering allowed the fiction that a newsroom has nothing to do with business to be fairly tenable. But in the pre-radio days when the newspaper market was highly competitive, everyone understood that the newsroom was part of a business. And this is a generally understood element of magazine journalism, and for-profit journalism in a broadcast and internet context. If you want coverage that’s untainted by commercial considerations, you should look for coverage done by non-commercial enterprises. The tradeoff is that non-commercial coverage may be shaped by fundraising considerations. But insofar as it costs money to produce content, the nature of the content that exists will be shaped by the quest for revenue. Note, for example, the insane proliferation of slideshows on commercial websites which is apparently driven by the fact that these are a good way to juice pageview stats. [...]