Park Row

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 30 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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The difference between a journalist and a blogger is a paycheck.

What I was taught at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, back in 1977, was that “a journalist is someone who works for someone who buys ink by the barrel.” That was later updated to “a journalist is someone who works for someone who buys bandwidth by the gigabit.” Although the last should be amended, since most web sites are not journalistic enterprises.

The key phrase above is “works for someone.” A journalist is someone who works for someone. They're an employee. They get a pay check, maybe benefits and a retirement plan. They are subject to ethics imposed by their employer. The employer can pull their press card at any time. The journalist, in other words, is under the publisher's control. And the publisher is subject to business ethics, not journalistic ones.

Contrast this with what a blogger does. A blogger could be many things. They could be a freelancer, like me, an independent contractor, a typewriter for hire. They could be an amateur, someone who is practicing journalism in their community as a sideline, solely to benefit their community. Or they could be a publisher, someone who is starting a business around a beat using the blog metaphor. Examples of this include Gigaom and Talking Points Memo, both of which have become substantial businesses.

The point is that the blogger works for himself. He is a free agent. He is beyond an employer's control. He or she may in fact become an employer.

This makes them hard for government to control.

When the Department of Justice recently decided to clarify and limit its proposed prosecution of journalists, this shield only covered employees, not freelancers, and certainly not amateurs. Thus it wasn't really a shield. It was instead a cozy relationship offered to certain favored employers.

But in a way, that's OK. Because, ever since the Web was spun, journalism has been re-inventing itself, as a business and not a profession.

I am constantly coming up against stories like this one which bemoan the future of freelancing. (I've been a successful freelancer for 30 years.) Or this one, from former reporter Dan Lyons, saying he can't make money as a writer any more and he's going into PR. (People have been doing this for a century. There's no shame in it.)

Really, Dan? I've been making money in online journalism since 1985. This may be my best year ever. The difference is that I don't expect to make big money, while you do. So don't go calling your greed principle, sir. It's just principal, and interest, that interests you.

What's actually happening is that journalism is returning to its 19^th century, pre-Pulitzer roots, when papers were small, staffs were smaller, and the incentive to get a “scoop” was for the immediate pop of sales. Back then there was a direct connection between the daily work product and the bottom line. That was lost in the 20^th century. It's ba-a-ck.

Online journalism is thriving as never before. Sites that began as blogs are becoming full-fledged news operations with paid staffs, like Gigaom and TalkingPointsMemo. They're doing it the old-fashioned way, by being in very close touch with both their business partners (sometimes called advertisers ) and readers.

Om Malik started Gigaom in 2001 to cover what was called “web 2.0,” the wreckage of the dot-bomb that eventually became the social media and mobile booms we see today. He has built it into a top property by hiring experts who were passionate in related areas of technology.

A good example is Katie Fehrenbacher, who mainly focuses on green technology but has also worked on other areas, like mobile. In addition to writing, she hosts conference sessions for Malik. Like generations of reporters before her, she has made herself into a minor celebrity, focused on her credibility as a clear-eyed analyst of the stories she's done. (I am a fan.)

Josh Marshall launched TPM in 2000, after falling out with his editors at The American Prospect, a liberal magazine, and has since turned the blog into one of the best political reporting sites around. He won a Polk Award for his coverage of the U.S. Attorneys scandal in 2007 and by 2009 was considered one of the most powerful people in Washington by GQ Magazine, even though he's based in New York.

Marshall now regularly hires other journalists, having launched a D.C. Office in 2010 under David Kurtz.  As the article quoted here suggests, other D.C. News organizations don't really know what to make of it, some calling it just an “opinion journal, ” but the key to the story is what Marshall himself says. “There are still very few organizations that do what we do, and there's almost no track record for it. We have to evaluate people for a job they haven't done before.”

Actually, I've been doing this job since 1985, when I joined Newsbytes. The key to success is being able to get lots of stuff out fast. That's what the job was in the 1870s, when New York's media was centered a few blocks from City Hall, in a set of buildings on“Park Row.” This was a collection of offices where the newspapers of that time fought tooth-and-nail for scoops and scraps, eventually building the 20^th century newspaper model.

But in the early days it was anything but staid. As the 1952 film “Park Row” dramatizes, a bunch of guys fired from one paper could quickly launch another. Freelancers were paid a pittance, many working just for the chance to show what they could do, and salaries were low enough that most reporters lived among the people they covered.

As the industry grew fat this changed, and that has been its downfall. The idea that a reporter is a wealthy celebrity who is as important as any other player in a business or industry is ludicrous, but that's what people have come to expect, mainly because newspaper reporters who knew where the money was became TV people, starting in the 1970s, when I was in journalism school.

A talking head is not a reporter. They are an entertainer.

While there is now full-throated competition on a national stage, in the online media, with technology, finance and politics all sporting several competing titles, this is not yet true on a local level, and that is where the greatest opportunities lie. Academics are studying these markets like petri dishes, expecting newspaper chains to emerge, or merge into the new medium.

That isn't going to happen. Not for a long time. It took decades for the 19^th century press to become corporatized, and national. It will take decades again.

Any successful publication starts, not with readers, not with stories, but with markets. Real journalism is, and always has been, an exercise in market-making. The best targets for ads remain extrinsic targets – targets based on the content of the page – rather than intrinsic targets – targets based on assumptions about readers. That's true because readers focus on markets only when they're looking at content that reflects a market. They care about local when reading local content, politics when reading political content, finance when reading financial content.

If you can prove that you reach a market, any market, you can sell access to your readers for a premium. This is how TheStreet.Com works, and they pay me handsomely for my work. This is how Motley Fool works, and they pay handsomely for my work. It's how ZDNet worked when I worked there, and I did very well for several years there as well. It's not magic. Demonstrate to someone who is selling that you have his buyers, and they will do business with you.

Studying journalism from the point of view of journalists is like studying a pig based on what comes out of his rear end. You want to look at the whole mechanism, and when it comes to journalism that mechanism is a business, not a profession.

Online journalism has been a great life for me, and it can be a great one for you if you're still in school. Just remember to study business as well as writing, to consider yourself a brand and not just a commodity, and to protect your credibility account, building it every day through truth-telling and working with the very best people you can.

Do that and you'll go far.