- The newspaper industry is in trouble, with papers closing and downsizing
- Even online news sources often rely on the work of newspapers
- Print ads are less popular with advertisers, leading to cutbacks in newsrooms
- Journalists are now required to meet digital demands, leading to mistakes
- The decline of statehouse reporters is concerning as it allows for political corruption
- News organizations need leaders who prioritize important news over what gets the most clicks
- The Tribune Company's former owner prioritized revenue over journalistic responsibility
- The future of journalism is uncertain and rebranding efforts have been criticized.

- The piece criticizes Tronc's rebranding and business model, calling it meaningless and absurd.
- It highlights the potential downsides of having a rich owner who may interfere with news coverage.
- The piece argues that the decline of the newspaper industry is partly due to people's unwillingness to pay for journalism.
- It concludes by emphasizing the importance of supporting journalism or else facing the consequences of unchecked malfeasance.

The newspaper industry is suffering. That’s bad news for journalists — both real and fictional.

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♪♪ Journalists, the heroes that we root for in movies like All the President's Men, The Great Muppet Caper, and most recently, Spotlight.

We gotta show people that nobody can get away with this, not a priest or a cardinal or a freaking pope!

Now remember, Spotlight actually won Best Picture at the Oscars this year, meaning newspapers finally received the recognition that we normally reserve for subjects of such importance as the incredible bravery of real-life Hollywood filmmakers, the incredible bravery of fictional Hollywood filmmakers, and the incredible bravery of wanting to fuck your daughter's friend.

But 1 of the things that made Spotlight so powerful is the knowledge that The newspaper industry today is in big trouble.

Papers have been closing and downsizing for years, and that affects all of us.

Even if you only get your news from Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Ariana Huffington's block quote junction and book excerpt clearinghouse, those Places are often just repackaging the work of newspapers, and it is not just websites.

Watch how often TV news ends up citing print sources.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle...

It's pretty obvious, without newspapers around to cite, TV news would just be Wolf Blitzer endlessly batting a ball of yarn around.

Stupid shows like ours lean heavily on local papers.

In fact, whenever this show is mistakenly called journalism, It is a slap in the face to the actual journalist whose work we rely on.

2 years ago, we ran a piece on state lotteries, and a not insignificant portion of it was built on the work of Harry Esteve, a reporter at The Oregonian.

Here is a clip we used of him talking about this series on camera.

Here I am quoting 1 of his Oregonian stories directly, and here I am doing it again.

You probably didn't notice it at the time, because you were too fixated on my bold choice of shiny gray tie with checkered dress shirt.

The tie says, Mafia Funeral, The shirt says, High School Debate Tournament.

And the face says, I am not confident enough to carry this lock off.

But the point is, we used a lot of Harry Esteves' work in that piece.

And we try to add new information to our stories.

But the media is a food chain which would fall apart without local newspapers.

And the problem is, print ads are less popular with advertisers than they used to be.

And online ads produce much less revenue.

Between 2004 and 2014, newspapers gained 2000000000 dollars in online ad revenue.

Unfortunately, in that same period, they lost 30 billion dollars in print revenue.

So that's like finding a lucky penny on the sidewalk on the same day your bank account is drained by a 16-year-old Belgian hacker.

And this has led to cutbacks in newsrooms.

In fact, in 1993, their editor talked about how proud he was of its record of success.

I've been at that paper more than 40 years, and every year I've been there, I've seen our staff increase, I've seen our salaries increase.

Not a year's gone by that an employee at the Oregonian, full-time employee, has not been a beneficiary of a raise.

Now, that level of confidence is almost tempting fate.

He's like a citizen of Pompeii saying, what I love about this city is how volcano-proof it is.

Not a year goes by without us not having to have our horrified reactions captured in ash forever.

Unfortunately, the Oregonian circulation has since dropped, and in 2013, just as Harry Esteve was working on his lottery series, their parent company, Advanced Publications, dropped a bombshell.

This picture, tweeted out from inside the Oregonian, shows staffers listening as editor Peter Badia broke the news some had feared.

Stop seven-day-a-week home delivery and lay off some employees.

This is a strategic move to really focus everybody on what that digital future is, and what our digital products and services can be.

And digital-first sounds like a high school euphemism for seductively sucking on a finger.

I put my finger in his mouth, we totally got to digital first.

It was like, ew, but it was also like, hot.

A local weekly, the Willamette Week, got their hands on a PowerPoint presentation for the Oregonian staff, outlining the fact reporters would be expected to meet a quota of 3 blog posts a day, and on any post of substance, they would have to post the first comment.

And what better way to win the trust of your readers than posting, -"First!" underneath your own article.

Those rules were widely criticized and have since been relaxed, but extra digital demands being placed on journalists is now common throughout the industry.

Just listen to Washington Post editor, Marty Barron, who you might remember as the guy Liev Schreiber played in Spotlight.

He describes his concerns about the average workload required of journalists.

They have to do their traditional reporting, They have to participate in social reporting, they have to participate in social media, they have to produce a wire service that's available 24 hours a day, they have to be responsible for video, you name it.

And if journalists are constantly required to write, edit, shoot videos, and tweet.

Perhaps that is how the Boston Globe wound up tweeting following a shooting in Tennessee that the FBI had investifarted about 70 leads.

Clearly, If they had more time, they would have written, hashtag Investifarted, because that's how you drive the conversation.

Now, at the Oregonian, at the Oregonian, those digital demands came just as almost a quarter of the newsroom was laid off.

And over time, even more staffers left the paper, including State House reporters, a two-time Pulitzer winner, and Harry Esteve.

So his work bolstered our lottery piece, and now the lack of his work has bolstered this journalism piece.

So, you can't say that we don't use every part of the Harry Esteve.

-♪ ♪ -♪ But here is where it gets frightening, because while the Oregonian rebuilt its statehouse team, other papers have been forced to simply go without.

A study of over 200 papers found that between 2003 and 2014, their number of full-time statehouse reporters declined by 35 percent.

Because while there are some great web outlets, some of which do cover local government, There aren't nearly enough to replace what has been lost.

Just listen to David Simon, who before creating the TV show The Wire, worked for years at the Baltimore Sun.

The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we've actually reached some sort of equilibrium.

You know, there's no glory in that kind of journalism, but that is the bedrock of what keeps, you know, the next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.

It is gonna be 1 of the great times to be a corrupt politician.

Because not having reporters at government meetings is like a teacher leaving her room of seventh graders to supervise themselves.

Best case scenario, Britney gets gum in her hair.

Worst case scenario, you no longer have a school.

-...and look, it is clearly smart for newspapers to expand online, but the danger in doing that is the temptation to gravitate toward whatever gets the most clicks.

Which is why news organizations badly need to have leaders who appreciate that what's popular isn't always what's most important.

Look at Sam Zell, a billionaire investor and living garden gnome.

9 years ago, he took over the Tribune Company, which owns newspapers like the LA Times, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Chicago Tribune.

After acquiring the company, he spoke to the Sentinel's nervous staff outlining his vision.

And listen to 1 particular exchange with a journalist.

His last 2 words are perhaps the most illuminating.

My attitude on journalism is very simple.

I wanna make enough money so I can afford you.

You need to, in effect, help me by being a journalist that focuses on what our readers want, and therefore generates more revenue.

I mean, we also need to inform the community.

You're giving me the classic, What I would call journalistic arrogance Deciding that puppies don't count hopefully we get to the point where our revenue is so significant that we can do puppies in Iraq.

-$$TRANSMISSIONS $$TRANSMISSIONS $$TRANSMISSIONS

Sam Zell just created an inspiring new motto for the Sentinel's masthead.

All the puppy news that's fit to print, and maybe some Iraq news too, if we can afford it.

Now, the good news is, Zelle no longer owns the Tribune company.

The bad news is, their latest attempt to balance business pressures with journalistic responsibility has not been confidence-inspiring.

Just this year, its publishing arm, Tribute Publishing, was rebranded into something much, much stupider.

If you care about media and technology, this is the place to be.

They have chosen to call themselves TRUNK, which sounds like the noise an ejaculating elephant makes.

Or, or more appropriately, the sound of a stack of print newspapers being thrown into a dumpster.

And if you are wondering how Tronc's business model will be different, get ready to have your minds tronced.

1 of the key ways we're going to harness the power of our journalism is to have a optimization group.

This tronk team will work with all of the local markets to harness the power of our local journalism, feed it into a funnel, and then optimize it so that we reach the biggest global audience possible.

-♪ ♪ -♪ What the f*** did she just say?

They're going to feed journalism into a funnel?

Oh, We're just gonna take content and simply cram it down your throat like you're an abused goose.

And the corresponding visuals make even less sense.

It looks like a bunch of digital sperm impregnating a trunk egg.

But what seems at first like a banal corporate rebranding speech quickly goes off the rails with their next big idea.

Artificial intelligence is going to allow journalists to do their jobs more efficiently.

Finding the right photos, the videos, the databases, the things that you would package your stories with.

With artificial intelligence, you can create a system that automatically is doing that for you.

Putting aside the news robots, I would like to take a moment to break down what may be the most meaningless graphic ever created.

If you take a look, on the left, there is the phrase, reading habits.

But once those reading habits undergo X, they become increased consumption.

It almost feels like a test, and the first employee to raise their hand and say, that doesn't mean anything, becomes king of the news.

And look, it is easy to make fun of Tronc.

I could happily do it for another 20 minutes.

But the truth is, publishers are desperate.

No 1 seems to have a perfect plan to keep newspapers afloat.

1 option seems to be to pray you get bought by a billionaire benefactor who could afford to swallow losses.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, and since then, they've done some spectacular journalism, and the reporters seem pretty happy, despite some of his stupider ideas, like, and this is true, a game that would allow a reader who didn't enjoy an article to pay to remove its vowels.

Taking out all the vowels makes every word sound like the name of an app.

Turk is a dating service that helps you fuck long-haul truckers.

But there are potential downsides to having a rich owner, especially if there is a concern that they could meddle with the paper's coverage.

Just look at what happened to the Las Vegas Review-Journal last year.

It was acquired by Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate and Republican mega-donor.

He's a big deal in Vegas, and his businesses are at the center of a lot of stories the Review Journal covers.

But while Adelson and the paper's editors have strongly denied that he interferes with news coverage in any way.

The editors have admitted that they put any articles about him or his business through a special review process to make sure that they are fair.

Although, listen to an ex-deputy editor describe his experience of that process.

In this review process, things are changed, things are added, things are removed.

There's no explanation for why and there's no appeal.

More than once, reporters have asked if they could have their name taken off the story and have been told, no, that's not allowed anymore.

There are things that are done because it's known that this is the way Sheldon Adelson wants it to read.

And it can be something very minor, or it can be something very, very big.

Now, if that's true, that is very compromising.

There could not be a worse owner of a paper in Vegas than Sheldon Adelson, with the possible exception of Cirque du Soleil.

Because they wouldn't even give you a newspaper, you just have a fistful of glitter thrown in your face by a 90-pound man in a thong.

And look, look, none of this is to say that there aren't people producing great work in local newsrooms right now.

Many are, at the Oregonian, at the Review Journal, even at fucking Tronc.

But, they are doing it despite their current conditions.

And the truth is, a big part of the blame for this industry's dire straits is on us, and our unwillingness to pay for the work journalists produce.

We've just grown accustomed to getting our news for free.

And the longer that we get something for free, the less willing we are to pay for it.

And I'm talking to you, the person watching this segment on YouTube, using the Wi-Fi from the coffee shop underneath your apartment.

But sooner or later, sooner or later, we are either going to have to pay for journalism, or we are all going to pay for it.

Because if we don't, not only will malfeasance run amok, but the journalism movies of the future are going to look a lot more like this.

I'm hearing there's corruption in City Hall.

Only a newsroom willing to stop at nothing can uncover the truth.

Yeah, I'm just not sure what kind of clicks we're going to get on that.

I've got a thing about a cat that looks like a raccoon.

Or it could be a raccoon that looks like a cat.

We'll come back to that if we have time, but...

It's the movie critics are hailing as genuinely deflating and depressingly accurate.

I'm the director of social media strategies, but I consider myself an important part of the editorial.

I'm being replaced by whatever the f*** this is.

1 reporter and some kind of burnt orange ex chase the story of a lifetime.

Buddy, I got to talk to you about your Twitter.

He wasn't just up against the most powerful voices at City Hall.

And you're the only 1 who can give them to me.

He was up against the most powerful voices at his newspaper's parent company.

We gotta show people that no 1 can get away with this.

Hopefully we can get to the point where we can do Raccoon Cats and City Hall.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution raves, actually, we had to get rid of our full-time movie reviewer 9 years ago, so we haven't seen it yet.

And the Las Vegas Review-Journal says, for fun and excitement, look no further than Sheldon Adelson's casinos and resorts.

I hear you, but technically, you don't work for a newspaper anymore.

You work at a multi-platform content generation distribution network now.

Get some likes, get some clicks, get some retweets, get some forwards.

I'm talking about corruption in City Hall.

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