newspapers – Hank Kalet

Who’ll watch the White House now?

This is bad news and typical of the way the journalism business works these days. I really have little to add and just want to wish Dan Froomkin well — he will end up on his feet somewhere.

I’ll just add this comment from Glenn Greenwald, which sums up my feeling:

All of this underscores a critical and oft-overlooked point: what one finds virtually nowhere in the establishment press are those who criticize Obama not in order to advance their tawdry right-wing agenda but because the principles that led them to criticize Bush compel similar criticism of Obama. Rachel Maddow is one of the few prominent media figures who will interview and criticize Democratic politicians “from the Left” (and it’s hardly a coincidence that it was MSNBC’s decision to give Maddow her own show — rather than the endless array of right-wing talk show hosts plaguing television for years — which prompted a tidal wave of “concern” over whether cable news was becoming “too partisan”). In general, however, those who opine from the Maddow/Froomkin perspective are a very endangered species, and it just became more endangered as the Post fires one if its most popular, talented, principled and substantive columnists.

Dispatches: The future of newspapers and news

This week’s Dispatches focuses on the uncertain future of newspapers.

The future’s so bright: the future of newspapers

Yesterday’s conference on the future of newspapers was interesting — if depressing — to sit through, though not very enlightening. The thing that struck me is that we, meaning people who work in or study the business, know that it is in crisis and have some sense of the changes and bad decisions that led us to where we are. The problem is that we have little sense of where to take it as we attempt to move forward.

It is not enough to say we need to embrace the new technology. We do, but that doesn’t offer us a sustainable model that maintains the ability of news organizations to do what we do best — i.e., investigative work.

And it’s not enough to bemoan the citizen journalist — that’s just foolish, by the way, alienating a public that has ceased to trust us by dismissing their efforts. (There are some good projects out there that would fall under the citizen journalism banner, like Red Bank Green and The Alternative Press).

What troubled me yesterday was the utter paucity of ideas — my colleague Fred Tuccillo, managing editor of The Princeton Packet and a longtime online editor/director, said much of what was put on the table yesterday had been tried with little success at various points over the last 10-15 years. The problem is that the news folks want to replicate what we’ve been doing, but on a different platform, when what we need to find is a new way to do what the public needs.

The reality is, as many who spoke yesterday pointed out, that professional print journalists still do the lion’s share of original reporting that serves as the basis for TV and cable news and commentary and much of what gets chewed over in the blogosphere. The handful of blog/online publications — Slate and Salon, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, among them — remain the exception. Others, like ProPublica, are good resources for information but seem to have little concept of general audience — it is a useful site for journalists but I’m not sure what the average reader gets from it.

Newspapers will survive in some form — in print (fewer and smaller), online, in SMS, etc. They are too important not to. But we will need to go through a period of extreme and wrenching change that will leave many of us by the wayside. In the meantime, those of us privileged — or is it cursed? — to be a part of the growing pains should embrace the uncertainty and engage with it.

To read my tweets from yesterday’s conference, go to www.twitter.com/newspoet41.

A moment to review

It’s been a strange week for me, subbing for John Saccenti as the editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press — the two papers I managed for the last 10 years. It was an interesting experience. Four months after handing the papers over and becoming online editor, I get to see what I’ve been missing.

And yes, there are things I miss — such as page design, especially of Page 1 — but there is a lot more that I don’t miss. So the extra work this week, which left me little time to blog, came at a good time.

I’m off tomorrow, though I’ll probably blog, and then back to the office on Monday, with a renewed sense that what I’m now doing is what I should be doing at this moment.

Team players, endorsements and the Post and Press

Joe Stasi, a Cranbury Republican, approached one of our reporters recently and complained that The Cranbury Press never endorses Republicans.

It was an odd criticism coming from Mr. Stasi, given that we endorsed his wife in her run for Township Committee in 2006 and have endorsed Alan Danser, Art Hasselbach, Michael Mayes and Wayne Wittman in the past. (This is not an exclusive list, by the way.)

I raise this not to poke Mr. Stasi, but to deconstruct a standard criticism of newspapers that offer endorsements — that the endorsements (a) influence news coverage, (b) are predetermined and (c) that we care more about the team (i.e., Democrats v. Republicans) than we do about policy.

First off, I can say unequivocally that news and opinion are separate matters at the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. Yes, I have strong opinions about a lot of matters. And, yes, I am not afraid to share them. But I also refuse to allow my opinions to dictate the stories we choose to do or the way they are presented.

Second, endorsements are based on any number of factors, including resume, vision, a candidate’s connection to a larger whole (will election of a candidate lead to a shift in party control, for instance, and will that change be positive) and are never made until we meet with all candidates willing to sit down with us.

As for the third issue that seems to come up, I think the way partisanship has come to be defined as near the end of the first decade of the 21st Century has poisoned our ability to independently review candidates and policy through any other prism but political party.

Part of this is the GOP’s fault, a by-product of the Newt Gingrich revolution in the party that shifted Congressional control and enshrined in office a class of Republicans more intersted in maintaining power than effecting policy and following a core philosophy.

Before anyone jumps all over me for being a lousy liberal or radical communist, consider that long time conservatives have made the same argument. On Bill Moyers Journal on Friday, for instance, Mickey Edwards — author of “Reclaiming Conservativism,” a founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation who served 16 years in Congress and was national chairman of the American Conservative Union — and Ross Douthat — author of “Grand New Party” — said that the conservative movement changed after Gingrich and his colleagues came to power.

MICKEY EDWARDS: Right. Some of the things were good. But there was a change in the dynamic of Republicans in Congress to where hold winning power and holding power became the most important goal they had. It wasn’t about what they had come there to stand for.

BILL MOYERS: Party loyalty over principle?

MICKEY EDWARDS: Party loyalty or loyalty to a person. In, you know, because what happens is instead of the President becoming, you know, the head of a separate branch of government, you know, he’s not the head of government. He’s the head of a separate branch of government. Well, all of a sudden, you don’t look at him that way. You look at him as your team captain. So instead of keeping a check on him, what you do is you find a way to rally around him and help him.

BILL MOYERS: And you said Newt Gingrich…

MICKEY EDWARDS: You know…

BILL MOYERS: …actually made the Republicans in Congress the handmaiden of the executive.

MICKEY EDWARDS: Pretty much.

ROSS DOUTHAT: What’s interesting about Gingrich is, in the short run, he was trying to change that. He was really the only figure on Capitol Hill in the last few decades who’s tried to really shift the center of political gravity in Washington back to Congress.

The problem is, though that the means he ended up using to do it, the only way he could do it, was by trying to rally the GOP around him and make it a much more partisan, more like a parliamentary party, really, than a traditional you know, House of Representatives / Senate party in the United States. And as a result, once the control of the White House flipped, once the GOP held all three branches, you did have this mentality that Mickey’s describing where it was, you know, Republicans in Congress were just on the same team as George W. Bush. And they were going go along with what whatever he was going do.

That, in a nutshell, is how we have come to view everything — whether at the national, state or local level. I’ve written consistently as a columnist that there is a need for two-party respresentation on the local governing bodies — Wayne Wittman is the only Republican among 23 elected officials in Cranbury, Jamesburg, Monroe and South Brunswick — but I also believe that it is the responsibility of the political parties and the residents of the communities to find good candidates and to offer coherent visions for the future. The problem has been that, aside from Cranbury and the occasional Republican in Jamesburg, the GOP has failed miserably at this task locally.

On the national level, I have been intensely critical of President Bush, but not because Bush is a Republican. It is because the Bush presidency has been a disaster. Forget for a minute that the 9/11 terrorist attacks occured on his watch — somehow he managed to use them to bolster his own limited credibility. What we have witnessed during the last eight years — an unnecessary war that is costing us lives, money and prestige around the globe, a negligent response to a national disaster (Katrina), the erosion of civil liberties and the separation of constitutional powers, a ballooning deficit, the appointment of political hacks to positions of authority, the politicization of the Justice Department and much of the bureaucracy, an attack on scientific standards and the replacement of scientific judgment with political opinion — is mindboggling.

I’ve been critical of Jon Corzine (a Democrat) and the state legislative leadership (Democrats), endorsed Bill Baroni for Senate (a Republican) and have written positively about reform efforts made by both parties.

The connecting thread in all of this is a belief that something more than the team for which these candidates play should drive the papers’ and my own political commitments. I don’t care if a candidate is a Democrat or a Republican, only that the candidate share my values and have a coherent and practical vision for his or her community, the state or the country.