House targets NPR funds in divide-and-conquer move

House Republicans wanted to end funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which stakes public radio and television stations around the country, in addition to giving funds directly to NPR and PBS (two-thirds of CPB money goes to public television).

The slow grind of the budget process and resistance from the Democratically controlled Senate have thus far made a complete gutting of CPB impossible. So, the GOP has a new strategy, with Republicans in the House planning an "emergency" vote to cut only the funds that go to NPR and its affiliate stations (this includes KCRW, of which I am an employee). The bill must first go through Rep. David Dreier's Rules Committee. That vote is scheduled for today.

The James O'Keefe heavily edited sting video of Ron Schiller is the impetus for the new strategy. By stripping PBS out of the fight, Republicans hope to peel off the more powerful public broadcasting lobby in Washington. It will be interesting to see whether public television folks will continue to stand with NPR given the embarrassing foot shooting NPR execs have done in recent months.

All of which puts an even uglier spin on David Carr's recent story noting the successes of NPR in a world of shrinking news:

According to the State of the Media report, NPR’s overall audience grew 3 percent in 2010, to 27.2 million weekly listeners, up 58 percent overall since 2000. In the last year, total staff grew 8 percent, and its Web site, npr.org, drew an average of 15.7 million unique monthly visitors, up more than five million visitors. Its foreign bureaus and global footprint continue to grow while other broadcasters slink home. 

And while NPR receives a small portion of its operating budget through government money, millions of people also think that its journalism is worthy enough to pay for through contributions, a trick that the rest of news media have had trouble figuring out, to say the least. 

Trouble is, NPR has often been better at breaking news than running a news outlet. The current problems started five months ago when Juan Williams, a longtime NPR commentator, was hastily fired for remarks he made about Muslims making him fearful in airports. Then in January, Ellen Weiss, senior vice president for news, resigned after a report to the board found her management of the affair wanting.

The view from New York

New York Times media writers Brian Stelter and David Carr discuss the AOL-Huffington deal. It's short and to the point, with a cliffhanger of an ending. The link is here.

Newspaper, the movie

Andrew Rossi spent a year inside the New York Times, documenting the paper's inner workings and the work of media critic David Carr, as he did his own documenting of the collapse of the newspaper industry. "Page One" is premiering this week at Sundance. Here's a summary:

The film deftly makes a beeline for the eye of the storm or, depending on how you look at it, the inner sanctum of the media, gaining unprecedented access to the New York Times newsroom for a year. At the media desk, a dialectical play-within-a-play transpires as writers like salty David Carr track print journalism’s metamorphosis even as their own paper struggles to stay vital and solvent. Meanwhile, rigorous journalism—including vibrant cross-cubicle debate and collaboration, tenacious jockeying for on-record quotes, and skillful page-one pitching—is alive and well.

Being good makes you a bad choice at Tribune

Another passage from David Carr's story about the Tribune Co. offers a glimpse into the company's future. It doesn't include experience, which taints the creative mind in the eyes of Tribune managers (and requires more compensation in the eyes of the Tribune accountants):

And management still is confident that the new thinking has Tribune on the right track. The company recently announced the creation of a new local news format in which there would be no on-air anchors and few live reports. The newscasts will rely on narration over a stream of clips, a Web-centric approach that has the added benefit of requiring fewer bodies to produce.

“The TV revolution is upon us — and the new Tribune Company is leading the resistance,” the announcement read. And judging from the job posting for “anti-establishment producer/editors,” the company has some very strong ideas about who those revolutionaries should be: “Don’t sell us on your solid newsroom experience. We don’t care. Or your exclusive, breaking news coverage. We’ll pass.”

Randy Michaels denies Tribune-turned-frat house story

David Carr at the New York Times writes about a "rugged ride" at the bankrupted Tribune Co. under the management of owner Sam Zell and chief executive Randy Michaels. The story describes a frat-house executive suite that reined over a crumbling empire.

From the NYT story:

Mr. Zell and Mr. Michaels, who was promoted to chief executive of the Tribune Company in December 2009, arrived with much fanfare, suggesting they were going to breathe innovation and reinvention into the conservative company. 

By all accounts, the reinvention did not go well. At a time when the media industry has struggled, the debt-ridden Tribune Company has done even worse. Less than a year after Mr. Zell bought the company, it tipped into bankruptcy, listing $7.6 billion in assets against a debt of $13 billion, making it the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry. More than 4,200 people have lost jobs since the purchase, while resources for the Tribune newspapers and television stations have been slashed. 

The new management did transform the work culture, however. Based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of Tribune, Mr. Michaels’s and his executives’ use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company. Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the staid company, came to resemble a frat house, complete with poker parties, juke boxes and pervasive sex talk.

Michaels has pushed back against the story. In a memo posted by LA Observe, he says Carr dug up old, discredited allegations and describes the company culture as "creative" and "fun." From the Michaels memo:

Mr. Carr has made clear that he is digging up these old allegations because he believes that decisions about the company’s management are about to be made, and he wants to influence those decisions. Mr. Carr knows that an outside firm investigated the most substantial of these allegations, and that they were found to be without substance. Mr. Carr intends to use them anyway.

(Found via LA Observed)

An old-fashioned war in San Francisco

David Carr of the New York Times headed out to San Francisco to visit Bruce Brugmann, editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian, and talk with him about the old-fashioned newspaper war that threatens to bring down either his paper or the SF Weekly, part of the Village Voice Media chain.

The Guardian recently won a court case against the Weekly, having alleged that the chain paper tried to run the Guardian out of business by selling ads below cost. The Weekly was ordered to pay $22 million to the Guardian, but Village Voice Media isn't ready to pay. So the fight goes on, at considerable expense to both properties, at a time when alternative weeklies, perhaps more so than traditional newspaper, are simply struggling to survive.

The war is a throw-back to a bygone era in San Francisco, when media giants like the Examiner and Chronicle tore at each others' proverbial throats. Today, the Guardian and Weekly throw punches even as most of the crowd heads for the exit.

Or, as Andrew O'Hehir, former SF Weekly editor, describes the battle, it's “like some kind of Greek myth where the two protagonists are still fighting over a city that died 85 years ago or something."

The Sarah Palin show

David Carr at the New York Times takes his turn trying to figure out why Sarah Palin's popularity continues to grow as she morphs into the mainstream media's anti-mainstream media darling. NYT

Two for the Times

Do the top executives at Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, deserve $66 million in retention bonuses? New York Times media critic David Carr questions the rationale for paying millions to keep the people who made the deals that thrust the company into bankruptcy:

Under questioning, Chandler Bigelow III, the chief financial officer, said the bonuses would help “incentivize our key managers to battle all of the intense challenges that unfortunately our local media businesses are facing,” according to The Associated Press. ...

But regardless of whether the bonuses have been earned or not, James Warren, a former managing editor of The Chicago Tribune, wonders how necessary they are.

“Without denying that many of these folks are toiling hard and diligently, the basic arguments underlying this request are laughable and beg at least one simple question,” he said. “How many of those that are being enriched by the bonuses have been contacted by headhunting firms seeking their talents? After what has happened there and what is going on in the broader economy, where are they going to go?”

Back here on the West Coast, Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd reviewed the PBS documentary "Inventing LA: The Chandlers & Their Times," about the family that founded the Times and helped shape the city of L.A.:

If there's a hero in the film -- albeit a flawed and ultimately failed hero -- it's Otis Chandler. Surfer, bodybuilder, bushy-haired blond Adonis, Otis, who was made publisher in 1960 at age 32, took The Times from a provincial house organ to a nationally respected newspaper. But he alienated conservative family members (and Nixon, who put him on his enemies list) along the way. And when he stepped down as publisher, he went outside the family to hire Johnson. "Otis didn't feel his children were as outstanding as he was," observes his first wife, Marilyn Brant. "Otis didn't like competition from his children."

Lloyd calls the documentary overlong and says that the filmmakers lose interest in the newspaper side of things once the Chandler's sell the company to Tribune.

Goodbye, hello

What David Carr's story about a reporter who left the Star-Ledger in New Jersey to become a flak and then returned to the paper to become a political columnist tells us, beyond the fact that Thomas Moran, at 52, found out he still wanted at a newspaper job, I don't know. But its interesting to note that the Star-Ledger laid off 40 percent of its staff a year ago and then, in July, had to respond to a massive corruption scandal. Maybe the paper suddenly realized the value of institutional memory. Maybe the layoffs gave the paper the margin to hire a few more bodies, meaning the bleeding has stopped. Or maybe Moran just didn't want to be a flak anymore and got lucky with an opening.

One last question... any job openings?

This post from David Carr comes a year or two year too late, but the point he makes, riffing on the apparently false accusation that a New York Daily News sports reporter used his position to try to get a job with the NY Mets baseball team, is worth considering:

As newspaper people search for an exit from an industry that is rapidly shrinking, their beats would seem to be a fertile place to look for a job. Asked about the episode, Stephen J. A. Ward, the director at the Center for Journalism Ethics at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Wisconsin, wrote in an email that he expects it will be a growing problem.

“It is very likely that more conflicts of interest (and concerns about journalistic independence) will arise in the months and years ahead because of the changing nature of journalism and its economic base,” he wrote. ...

And it’s even more scary once you run the scenario beyond the cozy confines of baseball. Reporters are covering government officials all over the country. What if, instead of reporting out corruption and mis-and-malfeasance on their beat, a reporter in imminent danger of layoff suggested to the targets that she or he could help fix the problem from the inside rather than writing a big old expose about it?

Also worth considering: Taking a job with the industry one covers is not a new phenomenon nor is it unethical on its face. The worry here is that desperation could lead to some bad decisions.

Four today

1. Once you're out, they won't pull you back in: the reverse-roach-motel effect ... black cars and helicopters ... the neverending campaign ... will the NYT survive? - the David Carr interview (note the comment from former SGVN editor Eddie Barrera at the bottom) Ad Age

2. Alison Hewitt, formerly of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, looks at UC professors who put their lectures online for free. UCLA Today

3. With hefty chunks of classified advertising now gone, newspapers depend more than ever on legal ads (dbas, calls for bids, public notices, etc.) to boost their bottom lines. In fact, the Washington Post and Richmond Times-Dispatch have both filed lawsuits to block the New York-based Wall Street Journal from publishing legal ads in and around Virginia. VPA

4. The Twitter filter that lets you follow your favorite journalists. Muck Rack

Carr reads my blog

Well, no he doesn't, but he sums up more eloquently than I do the media angst of the week.