Just back from a speech to the Optimist Club. It's reprinted below, in a reasonably close approximation of what I actually said. It's long, but bandwidth is cheap, right? Besides, it's the only blogging you will get from today. Besides speech writing, I'm deep into Autopost production, and this is my 25th wedding anniversary. Cheers

You’ve all heard the old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. I come before you today profoundly cursed, because these are very interesting times indeed.
One of the most interesting phone calls of my 25 years in the news business came last fall. It was from a saleswoman for the Thrifty Nickel, which is a weekly shopper here in town, and she wanted to know if we would be interested in starting a weekly automobile section. We certainly would, and after a series of meetings over the next few months, most of them at the Muzzle Loader, we eventually hired not only her but two other Thrifty Nickel sales representatives besides, plus an ad designer, a classified ad manager and two delivery drivers. It was such a big step for us that we expected right up until the last minute that it would never really happen. We thought it was some sort of elaborate Thrifty Nickel practical joke, and they would all come in some day and say, “Ha! Fooled you!”
But it was for real, and it has had a profound impact on our company. For our little newspaper, still not quite six years old, it meant a doubling of staff, meaning we had to find new and larger quarters. Ever since the Autopost was finally launched in March, it also has meant a doubling of revenues, and a doubling of expenses.
Perhaps more importantly, it has meant that for the first time in our young history, we had caught the undivided attention, big time, of the Thrifty Nickel’s parent company, Lee Enterprises, Montana’s largest, most powerful and most predatory newspaper chain.
That’s OK. We don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble. We never set out to raid the Thrifty Nickel. What happened was much simpler: The Nickel’s bosses at the Billings Gazette reconfigured the commission structure so that advertising reps there had to swallow pay cuts of up to 40 percent. Their pocketbooks and their feelings were hurt, and they thought they deserved better treatment. So did we.
But we are paying a price. In an effort to keep all of its advertising accounts, the Thrifty Nickel has been offering long-term contracts at discounted rates – as low as $200 for a full-page ad, with full color, or so we have heard. That’s roughly half the Nickel’s old rate, and it’s cheaper than we can afford to print an ad, even with our low overhead.
Naturally, we have been telling advertisers that the Nickel is offering those special discounted rates only to Autopost customers. If we didn’t exist, the Nickel’s rates would be rising, not getting slashed.
That’s the beauty of competition in the free enterprise system. Because our tiny little paper ventured to add a second section, advertisers all across the region are saving money. That means that more dollars stay in Billings, circulating in the local economy, instead of being shipped to corporate headquarters in Iowa. And it means that the advertisers’ cost savings can be passed along to customers, if they so choose. Everybody wins. Well, maybe not quite everybody, but some people deserve to lose.
I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture. We took a big chance starting the Autopost section, and it is by no means certain that it – or we – will survive. Running a newspaper used to be like owning a press that prints dollar bills instead of newspapers. It has gotten much tougher in recent years, and a lot of proud newspapers are no longer with us. I’m not talking just about shoestring ventures like the Outpost, but large metro dailies with proud histories, papers that survived two world wars and the Great Depression but nevertheless succumbed to the economic pressures of the ’90s: The Houston Post, the Dallas Times Herald, the Arkansas Gazette.
Yes, these are interesting times. We are undergoing, in certain respects, a media explosion: a huge proliferation of cable TV channels, Internet access to almost any publication in the world, talk radio, the amazing blog world, e-mail, instant messaging, digital, DVDs, downloads – I’m too technologically primitive to even name them all, much less understand and use them.
Yet for all the growth in the number of media sources and technologies, there’s a certain poverty in the media themselves. The number of media owners has been shrinking at a rapid rate for several decades; in radio, massive consolidation occurred almost overnight after Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. All of the most popular cable TV channels are owned by a mere handful of companies. Ben Bagdikian, a former newspaper man now at the University of California, has documented the consolidation in a book called “The Media Monopoly.” Every time he updates the book, and it’s been through five editions, the number of dominant companies gets smaller.
The number of working journalists in this country has not kept pace with the new media – it has, in fact, declined. Journalismjob.com has compiled a list of some 30,000 media layoffs over the last two and a half years. That list includes business-side layoffs, too, and it doesn’t necessarily represent a net loss in jobs, but it gives you some notion of the dimensions of the problem.
Despite the increase in the number of TV stations, the number of stations broadcasting local news has declined, too – although obviously not in Billings. In radio, with a few honorable exceptions, including a couple in Billings, news reporting has almost disappeared.
Investigative reporting, always honored more as an ideal than as a reality, has been in freefall decline. The Internet, for all its splendid promise, has, so far as I know, not yet produced a viable financial model for online journalism. Most of what you see on the net is either volunteer labor, or it’s losing money, or it has the backing of a powerful media company that made its capital in more traditional ways. Americans may be better entertained and less informed than at any time in their history.
Certainly, the dozen of so corporations that dominate the media landscape have been doing their best to see that media ownership remains in a tiny number of hands. We see that on a small scale in Montana, where Lee Enterprises, for one, continues its efforts to lock up all available niches in the market. This new quarterly publication, for example, appears to be aimed at the same upscale market that a locally owned publication, Yellowstone Valley Woman, has been tapping for the last couple of years. A few years ago, the Gazette launched a free entertainment weekly that appeared to be aimed directly at us; Lee Enterprises has done the same thing in Missoula, where the Missoula Independent has carved out a growing share of the market. In Billings, the corporate-owned weekly lasted just a few issues; weekly newspapering is not for the faint of heart, or for those who demand high profit margins. The Gazette here also has done joint reporting projects with local TV stations, and it now prints Channel 2’s weather forecast. In return, Channel 2 airs a nightly preview of the Gazette’s featured headlines the next day.
Truly, these are interesting times.
At the national level, the Federal Communications Commission, as you may have heard, recently voted along partisan lines to relax caps on broadcast media ownership and to allow cross-ownership of TV stations and newspapers in the same market. This decision provoked an unprecedented response from an unlikely coalition of activist groups as well as from about 2 million ordinary citizens, nearly all of whom expressed the same idea: Consolidation has gone far enough.
This happened despite the fact that most of the major national news media gave the story almost no coverage. Indeed, I believe that it is no exaggeration to say that prior to the FCC vote, the issue received more coverage in the Billings Outpost than on all three major TV networks combined. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that all three networks have an intense financial interest in seeing that the new rules passed.
Even after the House of Representatives voted July 23 to block the new rules, the network gave it scant coverage: a concise overview by ABC, 42 words on CBS, no mention at all on NBC. Word got out to the public without major media involvement, and therein lies what may be the real story.
These are, indeed, interesting times.
What seemed to fuel public response to the FCC debate was the growth of an independent, online presence on the World Wide Web. Several websites were devoted exclusively to exploring every nuance of this complex issue. These invited public comment, and made it easy to get those comments to the FCC. In short, opponents were angry, and they were organized. Big media could ignore the story, but they couldn’t make it go away.
That, despite my longstanding pessimism about the state of American media, is what makes me, for today at least, a fellow Optimist. While some of the changes that are going on in the media world are disturbing, and scary, there also are signs that something better might be coming along.
On one hand, I believe, we are rapidly seeing an end to the longstanding American ideal of objective journalism. Instead, we seem to be moving toward overtly partisan journalism of the sort that the Founding Fathers knew when they wrote the First Amendment two hundred years ago. Instead of a few dominant media voices, the web may lead us to hundreds, even thousands, of small but loud voices, each giving its own take on the day’s affairs.
I don’t think that’s all bad, by any means. After all, objectivity always has been more of a mirage than a technique. Bias is inherent in everything humans do, and reporting could not possibly be an exception. As Brent Cunningham writes in the Columbia Journalism Review, “Reporters are biased toward conflict because it is more interesting than stories without conflict; we are biased toward sticking with the pack because it is safe; we are biased toward event-driven coverage because it is easier; we are biased toward existing narratives because they are safe and easy.”
Alternative weeklies like The Outpost have grown tremendously in recent decades to the point that every major city, and quite a few smaller ones, has at least one major newspaper alternative. Where competing daily newspapers have almost disappeared, weeklies have arisen to take their place.
We also may be entering an unprecedented era of media criticism. I used to think that the media didn’t do enough self-examination, but now there’s so much going on that even I get tired of it.
Much of it has come through a new Internet phenomenon, the web log, or blog, for short. These are individual websites that function as personal diaries, or as repositories of political or media analysis. They are quirky, independent, self-referential and increasingly influential. While most people never read them, they are read by people who shape the news, and they have an influence that is disproportionate to their readership. They are widely credited, for example, with costing Trent Lott his job as Senate majority leader.
Within a couple of years, I predict, blogs will become essential tools for most reporters. I started my own blog a couple of months ago. Ed Kemmick at the Gazette started his a couple of weeks ago. It was a step that showed both how old media are changing, and how they still don’t quite get it.
There are only three blogs in Billings that I know of that delve into state and local political affairs. We all are linked to each other – with one exception. While my blog links to the Gazette blog, there is no link back. Old media habits die hard: Companies like Lee Enterprises are not quite ready to concede that on the Internet, we all stand on the same playing field. The big companies think that by ignoring the competition, they can make it go away.
But they’re wrong. And they will learn better, or they themselves will have to go away. These are interesting times, and what is happening now will shape American media, and perhaps American democracy, for generations to come.