"What's wrong with the newspaper?"

I'm viewing this on an iPad = irony x 2. 

For the past couple of years, I've kicked off my ad and PR classes by showing the above photo, from The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, a report by Columbia Journalism School (click here for the full PDF).

The photo features the Miami Herald building with a giant iPad ad on the side.

"Why is this photo ironic?" I ask.

Student: "The newspaper business is advertising the thing that helped destroy it."

Perhaps it's even more ironic that I'm showing it to them on an iPad plugged into a digital projector in a program that teaches journalism.

The report rubs salt in the wound:

"At the end of March 2001, the stock market valued the Herald's parent company, Knight-Ridder, at almost the same amount as Apple: $3.8 billion. Ten years later, Apple's valuation is more than $300 billion. And Knight-Ridder no longer exists as an independent company."

It's an old discussion, but it's a subject worth considering for students who want to work in journalism, many of whom are too young to know what "traditional media" means.

Layoffs lead to hate, hate leads to suffering

Last week, that discussion hit Winnipeg the way any discussion usually does: 10 years after it hits everywhere else. The catalyst was the Winnipeg Free Press laying off seven employees, who were widely perceived as "the young ones" primarily concerned with social media and the Winnipeg Free Press News Cafe, the paper's noble experiment selling scones and news under one roof.

Among the layoffs were some grads from the program in which I teach. One of them was among the first students I ever saw in a classroom. She was and is "an awesome kid," and was doing awesome things for her newspaper. That they got rid of her was an enormous surprise. That they laid people off was not.

The Winnipeg Free Press then ran an opinion piece by one of my current students called, "What's wrong with the newspaper?"

I have no idea if the headline writer meant, "The writer is going to tell you what's wrong with the newspaper," "What's so bad about a newspaper?," or both. I asked my student how she perceives it, and she doesn't know either. Whatever the case, she's a convenient bogeyman for the newspaper industry to parade before its imagined audience of octogenarians: "Nooooo - not the young people on the Twitter!!"

The writing on the wall has been there for some time, so I was surprised when folks blamed "the kids," Twitter, and those greedy readers who refuse to pay for content. More irony: the debate was happening online.

(Read Free Press reporter Dan Lett's column: What did you think was going to happen).

The Elvis genie has left the barn

I hate to break it to ya, folks, but the horse has left the barn, the genie has left the bottle, and Elvis has left the building: we live in a digital world, and the old, traditional media model doesn't cut it anymore. You don't have to like it, but it's a fact: we're going digital and we're going there yesterday.

Like the Titanic slowly approaching the iceberg, we've seen no shortage of evidence that this is where our local newspapers are going (and other traditional-media journalism and media is right there with them).

There's also Newspaper Death Watch, which exists to mark the death of print and "the rebirth of journalism," and Wikipedia's "Future of Newspapers" entry. Adbusters wrote a story in 2007 with the optimistic headline, "The Death of Canadian Journalism."

I recall pulling out the latter article out on the first day of school in 2007 and joking, "You enroll in a course to be a journalist, and the entire profession dies - ain't life grand?" (It was, of course, only a joke).

I also wrote a blog post in 2009 in which I expressed frustration with the Free Press for choosing a Sunday tabloid format (On7!) over digital. I ended up getting an email from a Free Press reporter who was upset at my lack of belief in newspapers, but ultimately ended up agreeing with me that On7 was off in terms of the demographic it was trying to reach.

When the Free Press finally launched it's iPad app, it was also a dud. I wrote about it two years ago.  

What's up? Here's how the Columbia Journalism School report calls it in its conclusion: "Journalists just don't understand their business," says Randall Rothenberg, then-journalist and now-president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The foot is on the other shoe

I do understand the frustration of the remaining staff at the Free Press. No one who has power and then loses it likes it. Just ask Saddam Hussein. Oh, yeah...

Rupert Murdoch weighs in on the issue in Mike Walsh's excellent book, Futuretainment:

"Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry - the editors, the chief executives, and let's face it, the proprietors. A generation of media consumers has arisen, demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it."

Right on, Rupe.

For the longest time, the gatekeeper-controlled media had it good. They controlled the info, and we paid for it, because we had no other choice. It could put out anything and do reasonably well. Traditional media gave us Knight Rider, and we had no choice but to watch it. Years later, traditional media tried to give us Knight Rider again and we refused to watch it, because we had some choices.

For traditional media, it's been a struggle to find a profit model. You can't charge as much for ads online. Some newspapers have put up a paywall only to realize that "popularity" is as much a currency these days as currency. You want your audience to link to your content, rate it, debate it, embed it, pass it along, mash it up, and talk about it. A paywall stops this from happening.

The proletariat has seized the means of production (just as Karl Marx once predicted in the Facebook Manifesto!). The former gatekeeper is now dependent on a loud audience network. Futuretainment: "Your only hope of ensuring distribution is ensuring that consumers are motivated enough to do it for you."

The solutions

I've offered my own starting point to a solution, which no journalist likes to hear: Journalism could use a little PR right about now. Hint: if you blame your readers for embracing online media, we might as well shut down the paper now.

The report I link to, above, does as nice a job as any at chronicling what's up and what's to be done about it. Spoiler: the jury is out. However, as a famous former CreComm instructor once told me (1,000 times in a row): "The Chinese symbol for crisis is opportunity." At press time, China has not returned this reporter's calls. 

Regardless of where you stand on the issue, we can agree: the journalist of the future won't be a gatekeeper, but an inventor. The revolution starts now.

Do U.S. teacher unions support or subvert school reform?

What a difference a week makes. 

Last week, asked to choose a stance on teacher unions in the U.S., I wrote piece on the topic for my master's in education. Shortly thereafter, Chicago teachers went on strike. Yes, it must be the power of my writing that made them do it. Cough, cough. 

Here is the paper, edited for brevity, which I wrote in response to a chapter in the book Critical Issues in Education, which asks the question posed in the headline, and outlines the arguments for and against U.S. teacher unions as they relate to school reforms.  

As a member of the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union and a resident of the home of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, I’m predisposed to agree with my pal, Billy Bragg.

Be that as it may, I would be very reluctant to strike knowing that my students’ education and profession's reputation are hanging in the balance. There’s something very disheartening about a teacher walking the picket line while his or her students sit on the sidelines (as happy to have an extended vacation as they may be). Says the PR instructor: it’s bad PR.

The appearance of U.S. teacher unions goes back to the early days of the profession, when teaching was considered less a career than, in sociologist’s Willard Waller’s words, “a failure belt…the refuge of unmarriageable women and unsaleable men.” Like me!

Bad working conditions, detached administrators, and a negative perception of the profession sewed the seeds for early U.S. teacher unions. The National Education Association (NEA) formed in 1857 to advance “the profession of education” but was dominated by men and not as “concerned with the personal welfare of classroom teachers.”

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) formed in 1916 and “focused on improving economic aspect of teachers’ lives” and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 “changed the status of unions by recognizing that workers in private industry had the right to bargain collectively.” At the same time, some courts still considered unions to be “criminal conspiracies.”

“Collective bargaining changed the relationship between classroom teachers and administrators. It promised teachers more pay, better job security, and an audible voice in education.” Today, the NLRA covers private sector workers, the NEA and AFT are rivals for the same teacher base (together, their membership is comprised of 80 per cent of U.S. teachers), and teachers enjoy the promise (if not practice) of better “pay, job security, and an audible voice in education.”

The two positions:

Position 1: “Teacher unions are champions of teachers and school reform.”

The pro position is that unions “have had a positive effect on teachers’ working conditions” in terms of salaries, collective bargaining, status, job security, and to “prevent a teacher from getting fired solely for disagreeing with administrators.” It also maintains, “unions also have been good for students,” and cites Finland, the shining example of educational reform, as having “the highest student test scores” and “some of the strongest teacher unions in the world.”

 Position 2: “Teacher Unions Stand in the Way of School Reform.”

The against position raises the specter of “bad teachers” and “rubber rooms” and wonders, “why the nation has done almost nothing to get bad teachers out of the classroom?”

It also says that unions “have outlived their usefulness,” are for teachers and not students, are apologists for poor teaching and an obstacle for school reform” and agrees, while unions do lead to higher teacher pay, it’s at the expense of everything else (except maybe union dues). Instead of union representation, this side suggests the solution to school reform is “merit pay and quantifiable data.”

The anti-union position in the book makes much of the idea that unions protect bad teachers and don’t support great teachers. However, the reality is that teacher unions don’t just represent bad teachers, but also good ones.

Presumption of innocence wasn’t invented by a teacher union, nor was due process or right to a speedy trial. As much as we might like to rally behind a simplistic slogan, like “bad teachers should be fired and good teachers rewarded,” it’s sobering to remember that few people agree on what makes a teacher good or bad.

The article, Building a Better Teacher, from the NY Times Magazine, illustrates the struggle inherent in the pursuit:

"But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching.”

If the answer is, as the article suggests, “voodoo,” it’s unlikely we’ll be any closer to objectively defining good and bad teachers anytime soon. For the same reason, I also don’t believe that merit pay is a more reasonable way to solve the problem of school reform.

A key problem with merit pay is “teacher quality cannot be measured solely by changes in student test scores.” Student performance can be a function of many things, including family environment. Would parents agree to be judged on their parenting skills based solely on their kids' test scores?

The other side of merit pay is the recent epidemic of teachers being caught raising their students' test scores. Further, it’s proven to be unsuccessful in other countries. "England ended its experiment with performance pay in the 1890s following public outcry over academic dishonesty and the negative effects of exams on students and teachers."

I believe that U.S. teacher unions and school reform aren’t mutually exclusive ideas and agree with the quote attributed to Albert Shanker: “It is as much the duty of the union to preserve public education as it is to negotiate a good contract.”

- All quotes from Nelson, Jack, Stuart Palonsky, and Mary Rose McCarthy, Critical Issues in Education, Eighth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013.