Texas Center For Community Journalism

We journalists have always recognized the tendency to kill the messenger – because people often take out their frustrations on those who tell them what they don’t want to hear.

The messenger is not the cause of the bad tidings, but it’s easier to blame that messenger than to change the event he or she is reporting.

John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, delivered a message last week that many Texas community newspapers might not want to hear – but it’s an important message we should all pay attention to.

Paton, in a speech to the Transformation of News Summit in Cambridge, Mass., put on by the International Newsmedia Marketing Association, said newspapers need to be “digital first” in everything they do.

Paton is no ivory-tower news philosopher. The Journal Register group has been living by that principle for the past year. The result: a company that was virtually bankrupt a year ago will have profit margins of about 15 percent this year.

The Journal Register has no papers in Texas – it publishes about 170 daily and weekly papers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. And its total online audience is bigger than its print audience. Paton’s approach has been to outsource everything he can to other companies who can do it cheaper or better and to put the digital editions at the heart of his business.

The staff of the Center urges Texas publishers and other journalists to read what Paton has to say. Admittedly, he is talking about a newspaper group with some unique circumstances half a nation away. We’re certainly not urging most Texas publishers to adopt the Journal Register business model. But based on all the evidence we see, that model is the future.

Not today’s future, or tomorrow’s, or maybe even the next few years – but the inevitable future for what we now know as newspapers.

Even the Journal Register company still publishes ink-on-paper editions, but the core of their enterprise is now digital.

So take a few minutes to read Paton’s explanation of what his company has done. This explanation goes into the background of their decision to go digital-first and how they pulled it off.

And while the core of the enterprise for most of us is still print and will be for the foreseeable future, we must pay attention to ventures like this and give some thought to the digital transformation we will all eventually undergo.

I have a great deal of admiration for the smaller weekly newspaper publishers in rural Oklahoma. A growing number of them have other jobs because their communities can no longer support a full-time newspaper office.
In spite of that, they still have the passion to get the news out.

Many small town newspaper publishers are in the office before 7 a.m. A typical day ends after covering a sporting event, city council or the school board meeting that now, because of school consolidations, may be more than 30 miles from the town they live in.

Then there is the long day each week of putting the paper together followed by a mad dash to the print shop to pick it up. Then they insert (if they’re lucky enough to have them), get the papers labeled and to the post office and finally fill the racks.

Now they can take a quick breath just before rushing, with camera in hand, to start the whole process over again.
Church is a place most people go to keep their life in balance. But for the small town publisher it is a place to answer questions about what you had and didn’t have in that week’s paper.

The small weekly’s definition of an evening off is not having anything to cover so you can go to the office and write stories and work up the backlog of pictures you now have in your possession. Vacation is finding a week that you can put out the paper a day early so you can take a three-day getaway – without pay.

Call it lack of jobs, lack of trees, lack of rain, better birth control or the lack of sex, but the fact is that many rural communities in Oklahoma are dwindling.

With that comes an even bigger struggle to pay the utilities, the printing bill and the post office. No, I didn’t forget payroll. The reality is that many rural papers are a one-person operation and the only way they get paid is if there is any money left at the end of the month.

Because of that, more and more small town publishers are doing other jobs to help subsidize the newspaper.
It is not uncommon to see the weekly newspaper being produced after the day care is closed, with a person selling an insurance policy and a classified ad at the same time or operating an antique mall in the same office as the newspaper.

We have seen a closed sign on a paper’s office so the publisher can make an ambulance call and at one point a publisher in southwest Oklahoma cooked breakfast at his restaurant every morning, operated his flower shop during the day and then found the time and energy to put out a newspaper.

When the 2010 census figures come out most western Oklahoma publishers will jump for joy if the population of their community remains close to what it was 10 years ago.

For centuries there has been the provoking question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. In our industry the question has been which died first, the town or the newspaper?

The answer is simple: the town, because I have never seen a town that could support a newspaper not have one. Like many others, some day the number of rural community newspapers will shrink, not because of the decline of the newspaper industry but rather the decline of many rural Oklahoma towns.

The small weekly publisher has been forced to become creative in finding ways to keep the news coming to his or her community.

I appreciate their commitment to do so and hope their readers understand how lucky they are to have someone who is committed to report the news and preserve the history of their town.

If there was ever any doubt about the utility and worth of a reporter’s privilege against third party requests for information, the proof is in.

In just over 14 months since the passage of the Texas Free Flow of Information Act, the number of subpoenas for trial testimony, document production or broadcast reproductions has dropped dramatically. Newsrooms across Texas are back doing the work they were made to do: securing the news and broadcasting or publishing it to the public for the common good.

For years, advocates of the broadcast and publishing industry lobbied the Texas Legislature for the passage of a shield law. Because our Legislature meets only every two years, the time required to pass this law was twice what it might have been. In the legislative sessions in 2005, 2007 and 2009, free speech advocates took their message to both the House and Senate. Finally, the current law was passed by both houses and became effective May 13, 2009.

Before the passage of the FFOIA, Texas newsrooms were being inundated by requests for information, trial subpoenas and document subpoenas by both civil and criminal litigants. It had become the quickest, easiest way for litigants to secure factual information that had been gathered and published by news organizations. While that was a cost-saving method for those litigants, the cost to the news organizations was both substantial and unavoidable.

Newsrooms had to set up standard protocols to manage and answer the innumerable requests. Most times, in order to ensure they were following the law correctly, this entailed the use of outside counsel, adding yet another cost to the transaction. While the actual costs of newsroom time, resources and attention spent on these requests were never quantified, the sheer number of requests highlights the depth of the problem.

According to statistics compiled by the Texas Association of Broadcasters, in the years leading up to the passage of the FFOIA, newsrooms were being subjected to an average of 30 requests per year, or one every two weeks. Some major market stations were served with subpoenas once every six days while another smaller market station was shut down for nearly two days in order to comply with the subpoena.

Since the passage of the FFOIA, the numbers have dropped so dramatically that averages are in the single digits. Most stations report that just quoting the FFOIA provisions to the requestor has stopped most subpoenas in their tracks. While the bill passage was watched closely by media outlets, it is not well known outside those circles.

This is great news for the news organizations and not the death knell for litigants the opponents of the bill foretold. There is no indication that fewer civil cases are being filed because the litigants can’t secure their proof from news organizations. Certainly, there is no indication that fewer criminals are being punished or set free because of this change.

Indeed, all the FFOIA actually did is return the litigants to the status they have always had under the law. They have just as many rights now as then, just as many legal theories with which to seek a civil remedy, and just as many sources of actual facts from those who were involved in them: not from a third party news source who arrived after the fact and reported what was told to them by the actual participants. Rather than having created a news room untouchable by the courthouse process, the FFOIA allows the news room to return to their assigned role in society — to gather and report the news.

Aaron Chimbel, a faculty member at the TCU Schieffer School of Journalism, led a workshop for community journalists in September 2010 on shooting and editing simple video stories using the Flip video camera. Below are his handouts from the workshop.