In response to the popularity of televisions and the Internet, Ted Nesi, of WPRI, posed this idea on Twitter: “TV and Internet arguably have more in common as media (info via screens!) than papers & Internet.”

It caused me to pause and reflect about the barrier to use for each of these four sources of news. I think the commonality all three of the rising news sources (television, the Internet, radio) is that you can get them regardless of whether you want to get them for news, and it never has to be a conscious decision.

Virtually every audio system you can buy comes with a radio, they appear in your car, and prior to the rise of MP3 players, radios were installed on every portable audio device. You can listen to music on a radio or fill your ears with news.

Television isn’t as readily available as the other two, but it’s still virtually everywhere, from bars and restaurants to your home. And it’s easy to switch from reality television, to (more) scripted entertainment, to music, to news. Even within a single channel there can be a diverse range of programming.

The Internet is sort of like television and radio in that it tends to have specialized sources for specific genres, but those genres include everything you could ever want. You want to see a dog riding a skateboard? Check. Read up on what that guy you met in college like one time is doing in Malaysia now? Check. No other medium comes close to the diversity and range of the Internet, your all-in-one stop for everything there is under the sun (and everything that avoids direct sunlight as well). Furthermore, the Internet is now virtually everywhere, thanks to smartphones and wi-fi.

And now this brings us to the poor plight of the newspaper. Here’s the thing, newspapers have to be a major network, and in print, and at least a day behind everything else. Furthermore, unlike television, radio, and the Internet where you can just stumble across news, newspapers don’t have that advantage. Few people just “stumble” across a newspaper (well, maybe the Phoenix). You tend to have to make a conscious decision to go get a newspaper, whether its from your front step or the box. And though they often contain sections related to entertainment, culture, lifestyle, etc.; their name says it all. They’re a “newspaper” and its primary purpose is to deliver news to you.

The point here is not to disparage newspapers. It’s to point out that by their very design, newspapers are disadvantaged in simply getting to their consumer in a way other mediums aren’t. Until the Internet became widely available and used, newspapers were doing just fine. Now, their place in the media landscape is shifting so rapidly that their very future no longer seems assured. That said, despite these disadvantages, they have managed to continue beating radio, which of all media has the lowest cost barrier for consumers.

You know me; I wrote a snarky comment about how newspapers have nobody but themselves to blame for their predicament. That comment raised the ire of one Linda Borg, a Projo journo. (That link is to Ms. Borg’s LinkedIn page. If you click her name on the Projo website, it opens an email to her instead of a profile page that would have a short bio and a listing of her work. That is nine different kinds of stupid. More on this later.)

Some of her not-particularly nice comments about yours truly inspired this post. And my point here is not to excoriate Ms. Borg, but to win her over to what I would call “a more modern way of thinking about these things”.

My Newspaper Website Bona Fides

As longtime readers might remember, I spent about a decade as an early employee and later as a consultant building up a newspaper services company that is well known at the Projo and its parent, Belo Corporation. Our goal was to help papers get more ads, but as the resident “netizen”, I spent a lot of time trying to explain to the papers what this wacky Internet thing was all about.

My short answer circa 2000: It’s your future.

The papers didn’t care for that answer or any of the follow-on advice I offered. They didn’t care for it one little bit. More than once conversations devolved quite badly.

Eventually, I gave up. Most of the webby types that try to engage newspapers end up in the same place. Clearly, the Internet – and particularly “Web 2.0” – is a space that challenges virtually every core tenet of what it means to be “the paper of record”.

Newspapers and the Internet: A Brief, Skewed History

Granted, I’m not at all objective about this issue. I wanted to be the guy that taught newspapers how to be successful in the emerging, user-centric space that was known back then as Web 2.0. I was not, but neither was anybody else.

Here’s why: newspapers know everything. Including how to be successful businesses on the Internet. No matter how much data I brought to bear, no matter how many examples of proven, successful approaches I presented, the papers knew better.

They resisted mightily the concept of allowing “reader comments”. (Um, they’re called “users”.) And they positively ruled out the possibility of direct editor/journalist-to-user interaction. At best, they would implement the easily-gamed user voting form of moderation. Oh, and a lame ass and never enforced “be nice” note at the top of the comments.

The netizens predicted that newspapers that allowed unmoderated or lightly moderated commenting would rapidly devolve to a lowest-common-denominator form of discussion. Our experience from building, you know, the Internet told us that it takes tremendous effort to create a space where more-or-less intelligent, more-or-less civil conversation could occur.

NEWS FLASH: We were right.

The Cesspool

I’m virtually positive that my reference to newspaper website commentary as “The Cesspool” is what set off Ms. Borg’s relatively mild indignation. I did not coin the phrase but picked it up from a 2009 post by David Brauer, a Minneapolis alt-weekly reporter and blogger on the media scene out there. (For comparison, click Mr. Brauer’s name in the link. Three guesses what it opens…)

The cold, hard truth is that the term is apt. Newspaper commentary – unmoderated or lightly moderated – is a wretched, wretched space; no self-respecting netizen will wallow in it.

So it should come as no surprise that newspaper websites cannot aggregate any level of “stickiness”, that is time spent, pages per visit, etc. I have parsed a giant number of Audit Bureau of Circulation circulation reports, Newspaper Association of America reports, and pretty much any data source for newspaper performance. While they were able to grow unique visitors and numbers of visits, their engagement metric barely moved. (The image below is a chart from what looks like a late 2009 analysis I did. Overall NAA newspaper website performance for 2009 in a word: flat.)

And now, perhaps, the base metric – unique visitors – might be deteriorating as well.

I’m shocked. /sarcasm

Let’s Talk, Shall We?

Readers know that I’m not a big fan of the views of some of the commenters on RI Future, but I’ll give them all this: they’re here to debate. It ain’t always the most eloquent discussion, but at least it’s more-or-less smart people talking more-or-less on topic. And commentary here stands in marked contrast to that on the Projo site.

In all fairness, Projo’s commentary is better than, say, MarketWatch or the NY Post. But it’s not anything like what we have here or what we used to have on Urban Planet when that discussion forum was HAWT. (UP was the best discussion space I’ve seen in the PVD area. Woneffe, where have all the good times gone?)

The point is, there’s a well-known, easy-to-implement and documented, like, infinity times technique to creating a good conversation space. I can sum it up in one word: ENGAGE.

Odds are pretty much 100% that I will personally respond to comments on this post, and I certainly hope Ms. Borg is amongst the commenters. Other authors and our EiC Mr. Plain might be so good as to weigh in as well. It’s all to the good.

But the “professional” sites simply don’t allow editors, journos or other authors to participate in discussion. And because neither are they present to set the tone nor do they empower others to do so in their stead, they get what they get.

I don’t say this to be mean and I don’t say this in ignorance: the decisions that newspapers make about engaging on the Internet are directly responsible for their inability to thrive in a space where they should.

As Mr. Hocking says, “It’s heart-breaking.” If I seem cavalier and bitter, it’s because my heart was broken more than a decade ago.

I tried telling myself I was just being paranoid. There were any number of reasons I could’ve been called down to my publisher’s office at Southern R.I. Newspapers’ Wakefield headquarters at 9:30 a.m. on a March Friday morning.

It could’ve involved some major changes at the East Greenwich Pendulum, the weekly newspaper for which I had served as the main news reporter since June 2010. Maybe it was a promotion, or a reassignment within SRIN’s family of papers. Perhaps the Pendulum won a Rhode Island Newspaper Association award, and our publisher, Nanci Batson, wanted to let me know in person.

But having been laid off twice before during a 28-year career in the newspaper business, it wasn’t paranoia. It was experience and wisdom smacking me mercilessly upside the head. When I walked into Nanci’s office and saw a document on the table, I didn’t have to read the fine print. The big right uppercut to the liver felt familiar, though.

She said all the polite and apologetic things. I’m not into bridge burning (I still freelance for the Pendulum). But she could’ve at least offered me a blindfold and a cigarette.

During my sleepless night while waiting for that fateful Friday morning meeting, I recalled the recent carnage at our sister daily papers, the Woonsocket Call and Pawtucket Times. Just a week earlier, during my pre-show schmoozing at the Providence Newspaper Guild Follies, I learned from several of my former Call colleagues about another round of buyouts and layoffs (the second since I left in 2004) at the two papers, which are being smooshed together in all but name, to the point where longtime reporters of each paper were being shipped to the other at least once a week. Kind of like the Boston Red Sox putting Daniel Bard on the bus down I-95 when the PawSox need a second starting pitcher for a doubleheader.

And one month before, South County Newspapers, publisher of our main print competition, the North-East Independent, announced layoffs, with the casualties including its East Greenwich reporter. Competitively, good news for my team, right? In any other business, perhaps.

It nagged me that my company had a chance to solidify its hold on a market through our competition’s pullback. Instead, it became just another convenient opportunity to hack at bone (four other heads in SRIN rolled along with mine) thanks to South County’s decision. I am not an MBA (just the son of one), but is that sound business practice?

The irony really hit home at a recent Greenwich Odeum restoration planning meeting, while talking a little shop with Odeum board chairman Frank Prosnitz, a former Providence Journal copy editor and Providence Business News editor who has since entered the public relations field.

“When you came to town,” he said, “I figured the changes in the business meant we were at least getting some experienced reporters coming to community newspapers.”

If only such things mattered, Frank.

So much for the job I hoped would launch me back close to where I had been, as a copy editor at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, before I was laid off in February 2009. All I will say about my salary at the Pendulum was that, as a veteran journalist, my weekly paycheck was smaller than the weekly unemployment check I received from the state of Massachusetts (which, at 50 percent, is a lower portion of salary than R.I. unemployment compensation).

My first layoff, though, was in 1995. I returned to work from vacation only to be called into the office of then-managing editor Karen Bordeleau (now the Journal’s deputy executive editor) and informed that Bob Jelenic, the legendary CEO of The Call, had decreed a smaller newsroom. More precisely, a smaller copy desk, on which I was low man in seniority after seven years at the paper and four full-time on the desk.

Three months later, in November, I interviewed for an irregular extra job on the Journal copy desk (variable amount of work each week, no benefits), made the cut, surrendered some hair for the drug test and was slated to start in January. But in early December, The Call called me back (ironically, for an opening created after Karen was fired, a decision perhaps even more outrageous and ill-advised than my layoff. If you ever want to set a former JRC employee’s head afire and hear some of George Carlin’s favorite words, just say “Jelenic”).

I went back. As an unmarried guy at the time, I needed the health care.

Eventually, I found a copy desk opening at the Telegram & Gazette, where I spent 4½ years of feeling I had finally made it into a well-paying job in this business. Then its owner, The New York Times Co. (yes, the same organization you hear denounced on talk radio and by politicians as this flaming liberal monolith), decided it was time to do some hacking, through layoffs and buyouts. Falling just short of making the seniority cut, I had to take the buyout, and was able to at least walk away with some cash and free health care for a year. A few more colleagues laid off six months later didn’t have the buyout option. That $15 million golden handshake Times CEO Janet Robinson received at her retirement? She owes us more than one drink.

To the people who dismiss mainstream media as controlled by liberals (like those who complain that Charlie Bakst and Bob Kerr have dictated the Journal’s agenda): take a look at the people who are making the really important decisions. Who gets hired and who gets fired, what people get paid, how financial resources are committed. How many liberals are making those decisions?

And to those who whine about the Internet ruining the newspaper business: Please. While all types of other businesses, from Microsoft to McDonald’s, focus on improving the product if profits or market share slip, mine cuts people and resources, weakening the product further. Customers vote with their feet, turning away from it. And how does mine respond? More layoffs. And the self-fulfilling prophecy continues.

The most painful part of being an unemployed journalist is listening to people close to me question my choice of profession. My answer: for all the alleged security in accounting, my father had two significant stints of unemployment during my college days, when companies were bought and merged out from under him. That’s what he did, and this is what I do. The occasional pity party breaks out, and I look for the door.

Yes, my profession and its travails have cost me plenty in recent years, both financially and personally. Maybe I could’ve jumped the train safely earlier in life.

But it’s given me friends, memories, the satisfaction of knowing I’m skilled, versatile and respected in the field I’ve chosen, and some opportunities I look forward to pursuing – makes me a pretty lucky guy.

Being a journalist in 2012 means you get knocked down (or are likely to). But you also get up again. And so have, and will, I.