03.01
It’s no secret these days that newspapers are hurting (well, to be more accurate most newspaper companies are hurting, the newspapers they hold are generally still profitable enterprises) and a lot of people have been wondering what it will be like when the newspapers are all gone.
Well hopefully not like this.
Recently when the Sacramento Bee Newspaper Guild entered into concession negotiations with Bee Management, the local TV stations and “alternative media” jumped all over it and gave us all a glimpse into some ugly dystopian universe where the media eschews accuracy for what, speed? pretty pictures? I’m not sure.
First up was local TV station KXTV News10 with their atrocious handling of the whole story. From their end-of-the-world headline, Sacramento Bee Fights for Survival to their cartoonish editing online:
Advertising assistance Cindi Taylor has worked for the paper for ten years. “It’s pretty grim. It’s hard to watch people lose accounts,” Bee advertising assistance Cindi Taylor, who has worked at the Bee for 10 years.
They got so much wrong in their stories that it was laughable especially when a simple look at the Newspaper Guild blog provided far more information and contradicted a lot of what was being reported on TV.
But the negotiation teams weren’t laughing. The garbage stories (one media outlet at one point suggested the Bee was going to lay off over 500 people in the mistaken belief that the California WARN act was triggered at 500 people and not 50) were causing serious problems with advertisers who suddenly believed the Bee was right on the heels of the Rocky Mountain News which published its last edition last week when clearly it is not.
If TV outlets and other news sources can’t even get a media story right, how can they be expected to get anything else right? Yes the Bee gets things wrong on occasion and of course people think the Bee is as incompetent as the next media outlet, but I know these guys — the reporters and editors — and they really take this stuff seriously. They at least try.
If they don’t, who will?
When corporate announced furloughs earlier this year, our only “competitor” the local TV station here did a “story” (i.e. read the story we posted on our site and condensed it to a soundbite). But when she read it, the anchor said the wrong first name of the publisher, making them look pretty dumb. We cracked up at that in the newsroom. It was a highlight amid the otherwise grim news.