A couple of years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, I asked Adam Michnik, one of Poland's leading dissidents who had founded a major new newspaper, how he thought the country was doing. "Terribly," he said, describing factional squabbles among the emerging political parties and his growing disdain for Lech Wałęsa, who had become Poland's president. He called him "Piłsudski without a horse," invoking the country's strongman of the 1920s and 1930s, a brief era of Polish inter-war independence ending with the Nazi invasion."But what about the defeat of the Communists?" I asked. "Oh that," he said, dismissing decades of subjugation to the Kremlin as so much historical detritus, of which Poland has accumulated a great deal.
Our exchange came to mind the other day when I read an interview in the Wall Street Journal with Michnik, still a leading intellectual voice in Poland. Asked to describe the country's situation today, he replied, "fantastyczne," the exact opposite in Polish of his assessment to me all those years ago.
(Photo: antaldaniel/Flickr)
In 1985, Ken Auletta published Greed and Glory on Wall Street, a national bestseller. This was a colorful account of the battle for control of Lehman Brothers and was the first book that turned the machinations of previously discrete bankers into a topic for public fascination. In 1991, Auletta wrote Three Blind Mice, as the three great broadcast networks "lost their way," in the words of the book's subtitle. Then in 2001 came World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies, which was about the anti-trust cases that nearly brought the software giant down. Auletta's new book is Googled: The End of World as We Know It. Once again, he has identified an enterprise that is at the core of the way society now operates and, in this instance, how information is disseminated. Based on the history of Auletta's work, the appearance of the book is at once a measure of the company's dominance and a signal that pressures on its overwhelming power are growing.Google may well go on to ever-greater triumphs. But if it does, it will defy the odds of Auletta's previous subjects and comparable communication companies, such as AT&T and IBM, who discovered that from the pinnacle the only place to go is down. For some time, I've been trying to figure out why Google is different from all those other great businesses that, one way or another, got their comeuppance. In the popular mind, Google has the most positive image of any media company (in the broad way that term has come to be defined) since the golden era of Walt Disney's animated features and theme parks. So what makes Google different from the other behemoths of the Internet age?
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For the past twenty-five years, Harry Evans (formally, but rarely, known as Sir Harold Evans) has been based in New York in a succession of high-profile media roles, including publisher of the Random House Trade Division, founding editor of Condé Nast Traveler, best-selling author, and husband of Tina Brown. But before all that, Harry already had made his name as hands-down the best newspaper editor in Britain of his era, mainly at the Sunday Times. Now 81, Evans has written his memoir, covering the full arc of his very full life. His youth and early career take nearly half the book and have an elegance and generosity of style. Harry does everything with verve, and this autobiography is, to use a time-honored encomium, rollicking.
But at the core of the book is also an element of melancholy, not about the time he has spent so productively, but because he believes the courageous spirit of journalism's best features are endangered. He titled his book My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, reflecting his sense that myriad pressures are debilitating newspapers without providing the clear path to how they will be adequately replaced. Evans's career always has been characterized by creative optimism. In recent years, he was involved with the Week, the American offshoot of a British weekly that is a well-edited aggregator in print format and that has defied the odds and succeeded in this very troubled period. And, on his next-to-last page, he cites the Daily Beast, Tina Brown's lively Web site, which he mentions in the midst of declaring his hopes for the best of newspaper traditions to be combined with the potential of Web technology.
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Chicago was the quintessential twentieth-century newspaper town. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play Front Page, which premiered in 1928, captured the city's zest for breaking news. Tribune Tower, a monument to Colonel Robert McCormick's vision of his daily as the "World's Greatest Newspaper," was also a buttressed symbol of power. In its pre-World War II heyday, the Chicago Daily News had the premiere cadre of foreign correspondents in the country. In later years, New York was the financial and media capital of the nation. Los Angeles had the movie business. Washington had politics and government. Chicago had The Mayor (Richard J. Daley) and the ne plus ultra of big-city columnists, the great Mike Royko.
With both of its surviving metro newspapers in bankruptcy and local network affiliates' running cut-rate news outfits, this decade has been a harsh comedown for newsgathering on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.
Journalism's Great Depression has meant the loss of many thousands of jobs: 16,000 in 2008 alone, according to estimates cited by the Columbia Journalism Review. These departures are characterized and paid for on a scale that goes from lucrative buy-outs to firings with virtually no severance. Overwhelmingly, the cuts represent a break from expected career patterns with resulting personal and family upheaval. Not surprisingly, a fin de siècle gloom tends to hang over newsrooms these days, especially in the once-proud metropolitan dailies and in many magazines.
But there is another emerging strand to this narrative. It certainly does not off-set the magnitude of contraction, yet is well worth noting. Newsroom refugees are reinventing themselves in a variety of ways as entrepreneurs, authors, free-lancers, teachers, public relations and communications specialists, and presumably, craftsmen and women of various kinds.
Last week, the Columbia Journalism Review (where I am vice-chairman) announced the first CJR Encore Fellows, four eminent journalists who will write for the magazine and cjr.org over the next nine months. They are Lisa Anderson, who was the New York bureau chief and a national correspondent for the Chicago Tribune; Jill Drew, who was an associate editor at the Washington Post; Terry McDermott, most recently at the Los Angeles Times; and Don Terry, who was on a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times and now contributes a column to the Chicago Sun-Times. The group will also spend time at The Poynter Institute and at Columbia University at what are intended to be sessions about how to take advantage of their transition from high-profile jobs to the next phase of their careers.
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Two announcements lately highlight the growing and increasingly glamorous role of the digital delivery and distribution of books. HarperCollins, publisher of Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, said it was rushing the book to sale on November 17, months earlier than originally planned. But the publisher is withholding the e-book version to be offered on the Kindle, Sony Reader, and their emerging competitors until the day after Christmas because the hardcover price, listed at $28.99, will be so much higher than the digital book, which certainly will go for much less ($9.99 on the Kindle, for example). Meanwhile, Tina Brown and my colleagues at the Perseus Books Group launched a new imprint, Beast Books, which will feature works by writers from Brown's Web site, The Daily Beast, first as e-books, and a month or two later as paperbacks.
Read MoreBut this is not merely an ode to old fellowship. It is a toast to what it means to be a journalist--mainly a foreign correspondent--a category of reporting that is under particular pressure in these hard times for the news business. In every way definable, Whitney upheld the standards and ethics of his trade. That is appropriate as an accolade because his last job at the Times has been as editor responsible for both standards and ethics, a position created after the Jayson Blair debacle, now securely in the hindsight of history, but still a symbol of what a rogue can do to trust in the gathering of news. Read More
At its core, the meaning of the agreement is that Google, the preeminent repository of digitized data and the foremost organizer of access to it, has acknowledged the obligation to compensate providers of content for use of their material in digital forms. The pell-mell scanning of millions of books from libraries and other sources represented an overwhelming threat to the printed word; comparable to what happened when music lost its moorings as unauthorized file sharing replaced royalties and sales. As the news universe discovered to its profound chagrin, once the concept of free use of content is established, it is damnably hard to reverse course. The Google settlement provides payment now and procedures for the future that assure the rights of those who create material to benefit from the use of it. Bravo to that.
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A. J. Liebling was the principal writer of the New Yorker's "Wayward
Press" column from 1945 until his death in 1963. These columns were widely
regarded as the ne plus ultra of journalism about journalism because of their
combination of reporting, insight, and wit. Liebling's appraisals could be
scathing, but always derived from his respect for what could be, but rarely
were, the standards of the trade he practiced. Delving lately into a collection
of Liebling's work called The Press (purchased in the used books section
of Amazon), it is striking how much of his bleak assessment of the performance
of newspapers--which are mostly what he wrote about--has echoes and even
relevance for today's accumulation of problems in the news business.
The crisis in Liebling's time was consolidation. Writing in the early 1960s, he cites Editor and Publisher as saying that, of 1,461 American cities with daily newspapers, all but sixty-one were one-ownership towns, creating monopolies where competition once flourished. Liebling contended that the remaining newspapers tended to cut back on news and staff, no longer feeling the need to make much effort to attract readers. His favored targets were skinflint conservative Republican owners whose only goal was to squeeze profit from their rags. "The function of the press in society is to inform," Liebling wrote, "but its role is to make money. The monopoly publisher's reaction on being told that he ought to spend money on reporting distant events is therefore exactly that of the proprietor of a large, fat cow, who is told that he ought to enter her in a horse race."
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