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Sherman Frederick
News needs competition
Half a century ago, many cities supported two competing daily newspapers. Today, cities are lucky to have one.
My first journalism gig came in the 1970s. Las Vegas tolerated three daily newspapers locked in a winner-take-all war: the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Las Vegas Sun and the North Las Vegas Valley Times.
If you rode for the brand of the Review-Journal, as I did coming from the U.S. Navy via Northern Arizona University, you were taught one thing: Beat the other guy. Get the story first. If you couldn't get the story exclusively, then make your story better with a more poignant picture, a juicier quote or more colorful detail.
And when I say "colorful," I mean the grittier the better.
Rather than writing "police killed the suspect on Main Street," you'd write, "The man's half-severed hand lay in the street, as if pointing to the casino where the getaway started."
It's that kind of grit that would get you in front of the night editor, Roy Vanett, and if you were lucky, on the front page. Maybe even the top story with a big, blue, all-caps headline.
"Talkin' to the dead now, kid? How do you know he was pointing to the casino where the 'getaway started'? Saying 'getaway' convicts the poor bastard, and worse, it sounds like a 'Dragnet' script."
"I said 'as if,' Mr. Vanett."
"Jee-zus Christ. I don't know where to begin editing you kids!"
But cheesy pulp detail like this often made it to press because intense competition breeds an ethic in which taking the high road to boredom didn't win the day. Readership wins advertising. Advertising wins wars. And you weren't going to get readership by getting your ass kicked day-in and day-out.
It's a gentler time now. The Valley Times died an ignoble death with the stroke of a pen of a Bankruptcy Court judge in 1984. The Sun arguably died when founder Hank Greenspun passed in 1989.
Reporters now leisurely work on "think" pieces. Half-severed hands appear only in sentences like: "There's been a 15 percent reduction in murder this year, but an increase in the number of severed hands with tattoos. A three-part series examining the cultural relevance of tattoos begins Sunday."
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. And I will stipulate that too much competition in journalism produces sensationalism. But too little competition produces an orthodox uniformity that's dangerous for a democratic nation.
And, did I mention, it's boring?
There's little awareness in journalism today that survival of the brand is always on the line. Most reporters exiting college take print extinction as an article of faith.
They're taught the Internet is the new frontier. Video is the hot medium. But even the Internet and its new "platforms" (how I hate that term) has yet to jump-start competitive journalism.
Maybe it's because newspapers still have an ironclad deadline. When the press starts, the race is over. The day's winner is declared. But with the Internet, the clock never stops. Stories continually update with giant search engines that periodically scrape and homogenize the news, rendering news gathering for individual websites less important.
There's no glory in a system that diminishes the newspaper brand. And there's no honor for reporters who use social media to communicate with competitors while gathering stories, then circle back on Twitter to mutually fondle each other's egos and denigrate the newsmakers about whom they just wrote.
Those types of journalists compete only in the sense of who can promote themselves into a better job or a bigger "platform."
It's not war anymore. It's networking.
And it's a damn shame.
Sherman Frederick, former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, writes a column for Stephens Media. Read his blog at www.lvrj.com/blogs/sherm.
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your newspaper is owned by a bank....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjOBP91kMCw
Newspapers and Journalism have cut their own throats when it comes to credibility. To over sensationalize is a self defeating process as the people get sensitized to the new style and you musts make even more extreme outrageous statements. TV news is VERY guilty of this which is why I no longer watch any of them. TV news has sex week every November for Sweeps. Journalists try to personalize everything and engender fear or suspicion in the people. And they do just that in many.
I rarely read the newspaper as the only credible things are the ads and the cartoons. Maybe you should work on that.
This sounds to me like a riff on the classic question of "substance versus style." And Sherm is, of course, quite right: substance without style IS boring. But on the other hand, style without substance has no meaning, even if it does sell newspapers. We see that clearly from the kind of "WWE Smackdown-style" ad hominem attack journalism that Sherm and this newspaper are so good at, which does little more than excite the readers by saying shocking, "edgy" things about it's vicious, bilious hatred for Barack Obama.
Amen. Reporting is gone. Every "journalist" here writes opinion pieces disguised as news stories with the usual left wing spin. The columnists now cover the whole spectrum, you know, left and far left. Only the Sunday paper has any kind of balance. They will do away with that soon enough. If you want to know why the newspaper business is failing it is content. Left wing group think doesn't sell anymore.
Jeeze, mrs ed, can't you even spell correctly?
In this new world, you guys should only report the basic facts. We'll do the rest.
I think the papers that are left would do well to remember what made papers great.....great news storeys ....and opinions left to the editorial pages and opinion pages......not a totally slanted front page that delivers it agenda to readers and not the news....and yes you are going to have to use the internet in a more timely manner and deliver up to date news and not have the same articles on for a week
It is a bit ironic that you predicted the demise of Senator Reid and then both you and Thomas Mitchell lose your jobs. You also wrote the Review Journal would be around for years to come. Considering the rise of Internet news and resources, printed newspapers are going the way of the horsewhip. In hindsight, those statements would have been left unsaid.
Just curious, Sherm, are you promoting a Sharron Angle candidacy for the 2012 Senate race?
"Arguably?" From the same blogger who "argues" that Sharron Angle was the best choice for Nevada? "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" or, as a republican presidential nominee once said "My mind is a terrible waste"; all-time classic conservative Fraudian slip.
"The Sun arguably died when founder Hank Greenspun passed in 1989."
_________
Ouch, that's got to sting, uh Brian?