Labor Day 2018 to the Seattle Times News Editor

Thank you for your recent column about the role of the local newspaper and for making yourself accessible. I’m going to take advantage of that access by raising a few issues:

1. SIGNIFICANT WOMEN DIED THIS WEEK, TOO!

Almost 3 decades ago I wrote to the Seattle Times complaining than the national obituaries were almost exclusively of men’s deaths. I got what I considered was an almost frivolous reply (I think it was from Michael Fancher; wish I had kept it, but this was before scanners). He said 1) there just weren’t any women of significance in the generation that was dying – women of this vintage just weren’t achievers; 2) the Times used a national news service so it wasn’t their fault who got mentioned.

Well, once in a while you actually have an obituary report that contains equal numbers of men and women. But it’s still, 30 years after Fancher’s fatuous foolishness, mostly men meeting their maker, many editions of the paper still have ONLY men dying. Since women are 52% of the population and likely make the newspaper purchasing decisions in more than 52% of households, I think it’s time to fix this! I found quite a few online sites that report celebrity deaths; the main challenge is they don’t seem to be kept up weekly. I’m sure you could find workarounds if the will was there. But here we are, 30 years later and I am still complaining, because the Times doesn’t seem to be doing anything different!

2. NOBODY AT FACEBOOK RISKED THEIR LIFE AS A JOURNALIST TO GET A STORY POSTED

I didn’t understand, until Mark Zuckerberg began being grilled by Congress in 2018, how the “news” that Facebook posts CANNOT be gathered first-hand because it would change the company’s legal (and tax?) status. For a long time, I wondered why Facebook didn’t just hire its own journalists, to go out and gather firsthand information like everybody else must, in order to counter the “fake news” criticism. I even thought, since Jeff Bezos has a bunch of journalists on his payroll, perhaps some sort of collaboration of the giants might be possible. Then I began to understand that this would totally upset the Facebook business model. I imagine this all makes true journalists absolutely furious. How many journalists have lost their lives or were imprisoned in the world’s trouble spots recently? (More grist for the Times’ obituary mill?)

What a solid paper such as the Times could do, is a series of reports on the difference between e-news and real reporting. What it takes to get through journalism school, what the average reporter’s life, pay and lifestyle are……what are the rewards and satisfactions.

On this subject, I was appalled to learn that some friends in a relatively well-educated household no longer subscribe to basic TV, just to Netflix et al. The husband gets all his news all day long on his phone. The wife doesn’t really get the news at all. This looks like a scary trend.

Let me say, I myself don’t watch local network TV. I am sick of fires, car wrecks and national dramas. I watch BBC World News America (1/2 hour most nights); I less and less watch what used to be my mainstay, PBS Nightly News. They need to replace Gwen Ifill, who died the week Trump first got elected, and not just have Judy Woodruff running the show. I feel she has no charm. I usually watch 60 Minutes. I subscribe to The Week and to the Seattle Times, which I can now read adequately in 10 minutes most days. I subscribe to Yes! Magazine which focuses on positive futures, unlike The Economist which I had to dump as being too embroiled in the “dismal science”. I have a few listservs sending things but don’t always read them.

3. A NEW BUSINESS MODEL FOR LOCAL NEWSPAPERS?

I expect you saw this: www.theweek.com/articles/793309/death-local-news?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=afternoon&utm_medium=09_03_18-article_1-793309 In your shoes, and perhaps this has been done and I just didn’t hear about it, I would organize a few focus groups of people under 40 and kick around ideas for the new proper role of journalism. It’s the “bits” not the “atoms” that are in question, to quote an old book I have just started (Negroponte, Nicholas: Being Digital, 1995). It’s how to make money from primary data collection. Personally, I am amazed that you have any print advertising left on the books at all. perhaps the under 40s would go for a tailored phone news report each morning? Perhaps they’d go for not having to scroll past dozens of ads like they do when online for other purposes? Could some of them be enticed to become online Times subscribers through an initial free trial that rolls automatically into a paid service after 3 months? Etc. etc.

4. TEACHING THE PUBLIC TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION

Didn’t the University of Washington initiate a wildly popular course on this? Has the Times covered the outcomes? (I think this is it: https://www.polisci.washington.edu/news/2018/08/08/seeking-truth-age-cynicism-and-political-polarization-professor-mark-alan-smith) Who else is doing what else in this genre?

In conclusion, I think you’ve failed to reach and teach the audiences you need if real journalism is to survive. Even calling it the free “press” is a complete anachronism, as the last hot lead printing presses went out of use decades ago.