On Chris Powell, blaming customers, and newspapers’ mission from God

Chris Powell has met the enemy, and she is them.

Chris Powell, managing editor (at least for now) of the Journal Inquirer in Connecticut, says illiterate, immoral, indigent single parents are killing newspapers.

He’s not 100% wrong.

Sure, as Slate’s Amanda Hess points out, his facts are wrong. And the contempt Powell packs into one sentence does tend to suggest sour grapes:

But newspapers cannot sell themselves to households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they’re living in, and couldn’t afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read.

That said, I don’t doubt that papers in general — and his in particular, I suspect — do not appeal the audience he describes. And I once had an experience that gave me a tiny bit of his frustration: We were focus grouping changes to The Plain Dealer’s personal finance section. We showed the group a current section and asked for reactions. One person, a poor, single mother, held up the section and said, “There’s nothing here that’s written for me.” The main story of that page, as I recall, was about budgeting for the poor.

My immediate reaction, on the other side of the glass, was anger and frustration. Kind of like Powell, but without the sweeping generalizations or the impulse to share my feelings with the world. However, I and the other editors weren’t there to place blame; we were there to figure out what the audience was for a personal finance section and what they wanted. Looking back, that budgeting story we did may well have suffered the same flaws as the McDonald’s-Visa debacle. We didn’t articulate that idea at the time, but we did end up producing some stories that were less paternalistic and more useful — for example, annotated versions of phone and gas bills, so consumers could figure out how the fees added up and what they might do about them.

What this gets to is a central flaw that seeped into newsroom culture: Blame the reader.

When I introduced our newsroom to a new tool that tracked page views for each reporter’s stories, I got the expected blowback. “We’ll never write important stories again,” went the basic complaint, “just stories that get a lot of views.” One of my counterarguments was that if you write an “important” story but very few people read it, it hasn’t made an impact. Reporters should want to know when that happens, so they can figure out how to get more readers to notice.

But, I was told, “sometimes it doesn’t matter if only a few people read your story, as long as it’s the right people.”

This is a clash of concepts. Since the late 1800s, the niche for newspapers has been as a mass-market medium. With the end of print competition in most markets, that became even more the case — no more slicing the market into Democrats and Republicans, upscale and downscale. Each city’s lone paper tried to serve everyone. But in the newsrooms, even as the workforce became more diversified in government terms — more women, more minorities — it became less connected to the bulk of its readership. We were college-educated. No matter what economic group we started out in, no matter even what economic group our starting salaries put us into, we aspired to membership in the U.M.C. Cops and suburban beats were exile; we wanted to hobnob with bigger politicians and business people. Our people.

Part of the professionalization of a role is credentialing — medical licenses, bar exams. I’ve been studying adult education, and we devoted several classes to examining the ways adult educators have tried to emulate the credentialing of elementary and high school teachers in the absence of state licensing. For journalists, increasingly rigid and restrictive ethics guidelines served the same purpose. Gawker’s John Cook got at a similar point recently. Not that ethics are always a bad thing, but some of the “rules” set up a tension between what readers are looking for and what we’re willing to give them. (Case in point: The notion that reporters should be held to even stricter strictures against going undercover than police.)

The antipathy toward being interesting extends beyond formal ethics. The blog Circa recently railed against headlines that end in question marks; Alex Shye was upset by those and seven other styles that committed the cardinal sin of getting people to click (i.e., read). Shortly before I left The Plain Dealer, my paper’s reader representative, Ted Diadiun, was shocked by my defense of not giving away the entire story in a headline. Can the types of headlines that upset Diadiun and Shye and Circa be misused? Sure. Does that make them verboten in all cases? Not on your nelly.

There are straight lines connecting Diadiun’s column to Chris Powell’s rant. We journalists, the underlying assumption goes, are like Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues: On a mission from God. We are priests of the News, and if people don’t read our stories it’s because they’re pagans beyond saving.

News is a product, not a deity. We’re selling soap. Complaining that people just don’t want to take baths anymore is not going to help. Insisting that we won’t change our packaging won’t help. Talking about how it’s not soap but a premium cleansing experience won’t help. Saying that it doesn’t matter how many people buy our soap as long as they’re the right bathers won’t help.

We need to come clean. What Powell should have said is that he can’t identify with a lot of his potential readers and can’t figure out how to produce or market news that appeals to them. The first step to a solution is being honest about the problem.