Reporting Well Is The Best Revenge

 

Leaders of supposedly competitive businesses who get together and discuss things tempt both fate and the federal anti-trust laws, especially if the discussion is about prices. And if they lead big enough companies with high public profiles, they can probably count on having five business reporters for every meeting invitee.

 

Unless, of course, they’re the titans who employ most of the reporters. Then they can simply not say anything and feel safe from the glare of the media spotlights they own and control.

 

That must have been the reasoning as a couple of dozen certified media hotshots fluttered into the O’Hare Hilton Thursday for a discreet Newspaper Association of America-prompted discussion sanitarily titled “Models To Lawfully Monetize Content.” The discussion among most major U.S. newspaper publishers was so lawful, in fact, the NAA would later say it took place “with anti-trust counsel present.”

 

That’s reminiscent of a couple of young Alaskans who said they used protection, but anyway, the hush-hush meeting’s agenda was said to have an 8:10 a.m. kickoff.

 

James Warren had it on The Atlantic’s web site at 8:31.

 

In detail. With names of individuals and the companies they represented, the topics to be discussed and Warren’s take on the day, including the full disclosure that as a former managing editor and Washington bureau chief of The Chicago Tribune:

 

 “At the behest of new corporate superiors (yes, some from radio), I helped oversee the painful layoffs of about 100 in the Chicago Tribune newsroom last year, before being dispatched by someone the Marlon Brando character in ‘Apocalypse Now’ might characterize as ‘an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill.’”

 

A less-sanitized title of the NAA’s meeting might have been “We’re All Bleeding Ad Dollars, So How Do We Start Making A Buck From The Content We’ve Been Giving way For Free?” And a person without a trusting soul might speculate that on the advice of counsel, all the participants were thinking individually, by coincidence and without collusion that “if we all stick together, here we might pull this off.”

 

But that’s speculation.

 

What isn’t speculation is that Warren’s reporting found its way into the online worlds of Editor & Publisher, Poynter Online’s Romenesko, Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab, Politico, Slate, The Huffington Post, Gawker, MediaWeek, mediabistro.com and elsewhere. The story even made the AP’s news report, which dutifully mentioned that AP CEO Tom Curley had been at the meeting.

 

You remember reporting. It used to be done in newspapers, and some of it still is.

 

But as James Warren just demonstrated, including to a couple of dozen media moguls who shouldn’t have needed the lesson, reporting doesn’t depend on newspapers. Newspapers, especially ones seeking to replacer ad dollars with content dollars, might hope to depend on reporting.

 

You know, reporting from the folks who’ve been let go by the thousands, or had their salaries and benefits slashed to keep up debt payments or stock prices for the bonus babies at the helm.

 

So here’s hoping reporters will continue to report, but not in newspapers – reporting well is the best revenge.

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See Warren’s Atlantic piece at: http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/james_warren/2009/05/shhhh_newspaper_publishers_are_quietly_holding_a_very_very_important_conclave_today_will_you_soon_be.php

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