REMEMBERING JOHN RICH, NEWSMAN

A regular guy with a glamorous life

John H. Rich, Jr. passed away last week. Who's he? 

You likely didn't see the obit, unless you happened to be reading the Portland (Maine) Press Herald. If you're of a certain age, the name might seem familiar if you watched NBC during the great days of TV news. He was a foreign correspondent for the network through the 50's to the 70's. He covered the war in Korea and Vietnam end-to-end, was part of the first delegation to China with Nixon and, late in his career, reported on the Gulf War in the early 90's. 

Rich was a remarkable figure in that everyday way that many of the "Greatest Generation" were. He lived an extraordinary life and made it seem like no big deal. There was a quality of amazement he had telling his own stories as I interviewed him nearly ten years ago to capture his personal history for his family and for posterity. In all, it took some twenty hours for him to take me from his upbringing in Maine to island-hopping with General MacArthur as a Marine translator to his career in broadcast news. For all that, I was only able to skim the surface. 

He had seen war both as a participant as an observer. I'll never forget what

Hammering out copy in Korea, circa 1951

he said was a common denominator between the soldiers he'd seen down through the years. "They're always so young," he said, something that became painfully obvious as he matured.

I also remember him talking of the camaraderie between fellow journalists/ veterans. For many years after WWII, those at the press club in Tokyo would inevitably share stories about their part in it. They had a custom for when the old soldiers drifted into these tales. They were only permitted to do so while donning the standard issue steel helmet they had on hand for this purpose.

Rich started as a newspaper reporter, then moved to radio. His greatest work was in pioneering the new media of his day, TV. With it, he was able to realize what NBC News chief Reuven Frank said was its unique quality to shape our world.

The highest power of television journalism is not in the transmission of information but in the transmission of experience.  

With his "Seoul Mate," D. Lee

John Rich's life's work was seeking out extraordinary experiences, then bringing them home to us. Of necessity, he brought his home with him whether as bureau chief for NBC in Tokyo or Paris. D. Lee, his wife for some 60 years, was along for most of it. She passed just weeks before he did. And with them, I feel a sadness at the passing of an era. They had taken up - and been taken up - by the call of journalism in a time of changing media. Suddenly, television offered the hope for transforming the world, perhaps creating a Global Village. Maybe we'd get to know each other a bit
better, hopefully for the better.

John Rich is gone, but this work continues. Perhaps our digital news will carry forward TV's power of transmitting experience by actualizing the New Media's ability to foster mutual understanding.

Here's a few select moments from a life well lived:

• In 2004, the New York Times wrote about his lifetime friendship with a former foe. 

• Here, his recollections of reporting on the Korean War. 

• Rich was also in the first group of reporters allowed into China as Nixon famously opened a new era with "ping-pong diplomacy."

• In 2008, he gained national visibility following his discovery of priceless color snapshots from his Korean days.                          
• NBC News' Mike Taibbi, too, reported on this with a brief retrospective of his work. 

Oh, and last - here's a radio interview I did with him back in 1995 gathering his views on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

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Tips? Suggestions? Ideas? Drop a line to carl (at) inanityofsanity (dot) com

THE PRICE OF NOT PAYING FOR OUR NEWS - PART II

Texas Trib's Publisher/COO Tim Griggs

As the newspaper business continues to struggle, we fear that "serious" journalism may be a goner. But our fears may be misplaced. What we might be witnessing is a positive transformation. 

The Fourth Estate enjoys a special place in society, and so to try to have it conform to the norms of a market-based business is mistaken. It has an intrinsic value that lies outside of market valuation. That we come to understand the real value of news could bring a great renaissance for public interest reporting and the open society it fosters.

The realities for those in the business is slightly less resplendent. Like they say, when one door closes, another opens - but it is hell in the hallway. The downturn in the newspaper business and the reason for the Digital News Revenue Summit earlier this month is because journalism won't pay for itself. Appropriately, the news of the day during the Summit was how the Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest paper, just gave the axe to a quarter of the newsroom - 40 more reporters out on the street! 

Sweet Tweet - hundreds of new news jobs!

No doubt there have been a lot of jobs created in the hundreds of digital news organizations that seem to be popping up all over. Some are "quality" jobs like those at the Texas Tribune - real salaries, benefits and even a vague sense of job security. I would guess these are the exception. Far, far more are traditional news folk put out on the street by the "digital disruption" scrambling to put something together. I'd call those gigs more of an "opportunity" than a real-deal job. 

Now, let me come back to the less-than-appetizing point I came to earlier - that news has to be carried financially, compromised or some combination of the two. With that, we have a start of a framework to understand various digital news business models - and the myriad ethics issues that go along with them.

That the Digital News Revenue Summit focused on not-for-profit conepts acknowledges this. The cost of news needs to be carried, and that puts it alongside other socially beneficial, charitable ventures. What caught my attention is how this emerging not-for-profit business model is being developed mostly by people from for-profit backgrounds. That could make for something of a culture clash. Is wedding news to a not-for-profit model simply a marriage of convenience for these would-be media magnates?  That isn't my sense of it. News people and not-for-profit types share a mission-driven nature. Maybe the real culture clash for them was before, being in for-profit news. If so, the emerging not-for-profit model could prove to be true love.

        NEWS DEEPLY's Lara Setrakian & Kristin Nolan

That's good. What's better is going beyond the bottom-line vs. mission-driven contrast. The claim I heard time-and-again is that tomorrow's journalist must be entrepreneurial. Well, that's nothing new to freelancers used to selling stories. What's really needed is something more,  leadership that takes this enterprising attitude to another level. These are the social entrepreneurs. They have the sizzle of entrepreneurial innovation but are driven by something that transcends the profit motive. Their ambitious nature seeks fulfillment in a success measured by different metrics than their for-profit peers. These folks most certainly don't live by bread alone.

Some of the presenters at the Summit fit this category. In particular, the people behind News Deeply are taking this attitude towards fostering narrowly-focused specialty news sites. It will be interesting to see where they can take this. 

Rethinking how not-for-profit news can operate by bringing for-profit business sensibilities to bear is very promising. I've seen how this has worked well elsewhere. Public broadcasters have had their operations take off with innovation brought by those from commercial broadcast. But there are possible compromises. What happens when "underwriting" announcements on PBS or NPR come close to being a plain old commercials? Hybrid concepts can cut both ways. 

Still, my caveats aside, I came away feeling excited for the possibilities that digital news presents. Now that I'm back from my recent travels, I'm finally going to dig deeper into this to finish my inquiry into the flap over the Texas Tribune's practices. I will report back on that soon!

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Tips? Suggestions? Ideas? Drop a line to carl (at) inanityofsanity (dot) com

THE PRICE OF NOT PAYING FOR OUR NEWS - PART I

Revenue Riddle Redux

Thursday, as part of my ongoing look into the Texas Tribune and its place in the political scene, I was fortunate enough to find my way into the Digital News Revenue Summit organized by Jake Batsell. 

It was an impressive, international gathering of leaders looking for practical ways to address a crucial infrastructure issue that will determine the fate of open societies - and its enemies. 

The subject of the day-long symposium? "Solving the Revenue Riddle." It's an age-old issue in the news business - how to put it on a paying basis (see here and also here for reportage on what went down).

Before getting to my take on the presentations and workshop, let's put "Digital News Revenue Riddle" in context. That will help answer this nagging question I had all through the day: 

Has news EVER truly been on a paying basis? 

The Great Sage of Electronic Media, Paddy Chayefsky, laid out the harsh realities nearly 40 years ago in Network. From this perspective, his cautionary tale is about the trade-offs needed to make the news business pay for itself. What's the anchor of the evening news to do when the ratings and the ad revenues slip?

Want profits? Get a prophet

Howard Beale: I'm gonna blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the 7 O'clock news.

Max Schumacher: You'll get a hell of a rating, I'll guarantee you that. 50 share easy....We could make a series of it. "Suicide of the Week." Aw, hell, why limit ourselves? "Execution of the Week."

Howard Beale: "Terrorist of the Week." 

Max Schumacher: I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: "The Death Hour." A great Sunday night show for the whole family.... 

The bottom line?  You have to either carry news financially or find some way to spice it up into a profit-center. 

Chayefsky spoofed the compromises to achieve the later by drawing from changes in the news business.  Four years before the film was released, Roone Arledge discovered that a terrorist attack got more eyeballs than athletics while broadcasting the Munich Olympics***. After, when he took over ABC News in 1977, he leveraged that sensibility to realize the lighter side of Network's dark vision - celebrity newscasters and infotainment.

No plans for a Katie Couric plaza at UT

The effort to make "serious" news a popular entertainment is a race to the bottom with no finish line. It began when Arledge gave Barbara Walters the industry's first million-dollar contract. Since, there have been notable markers along the course. Katie Couric's failed stint occupying Walter Cronkite's seat on the CBS Evening News is a notable milestone. Unfortunately, the celebrity news concept has proven to be problematic as a business model since those celebrities don't come cheap. Worse, it is corrosive to the news "product" since fat multi-million dollar paydays inherent to this cult of personality starve other parts of the news budget (for a more detailed - and upbeat - assessment, check Marc Gunther's "The Transformation of Network News" from 1999. Also, Paul Waldman's recent "Glorious, Ghastly News" gives an update from a broader perspective).

Besides the star turn, the effort to transform network news divisions into a highly profitable reality TV production units has only yielded lukewarm results. So what carries the news business? Fortunately, the television broadcast industry in the United States is increasingly the beneficiary of a corrupt campaign finance system. You don't need to look up political expenditures on the Texas Ethics Commission's website to know where most of the money in politics goes. Does that corruption contaminate the reporting paid for in this political ad-based business model? 

How money defines politics here (and how this fuels economic injustice) may be second only to climate change as the story of our era. Yet it is only on the margins of public awareness.  Perhaps what is little more than legitimized bribery simply doesn't translate well to the TV medium? Regardless of the cause, don't expect much attention for the fact that Citizens United (and, now, "Oligarchs United") has proven to be a bonanza for broadcasters. No, you won't see the Wesleyan Media Project's findings get much on air exposure on commercial TV news. Don't expect to find reporting about the National Association of Broadcasters lobbying efforts to keep their good thing going outside of Democracy Now!

But I digress. 

The Trib's Tim Griggs greets summit attendees

What does all this have to do with the Digital News Revenue Summit?  

Let's apply the lessons of financing broadcast news to reading-based news media. How is the news there either carried, compromised, or some combination of the two?

The news part of the newspaper, too, was once carried. The current crisis there comes from the classified ads cash cow getting slaughtered. The search is on for what, if anything, can replace it. So far, no good. That's part of the impetus behind the search for a fundamentally different not-for-profit paradigm for digital news. 

The question is - despite differences, is not-for-profit digital news fundamentally different from print journalism or commercial broadcast? If not, then we should look to how this, likewise, must be either carried, compromised, or some combination of the two.

And yes. I'll be getting to what I saw at the Digital News Revenue Summit in Part II.

   

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Tips? Suggestions? Ideas? Drop a line to carl (at) inanityofsanity (dot) com

THE "OLIGARCHS UNITED" SCOTUS RULING

The Roberts Court will be known as the Robbers Court

Today's Supreme Court decision, once again, favors money over ideas in what drives public debate. The Roberts Court seems determined to undo all the reforms put in place in the wake of the corruption exposed in the Watergate scandal. What we have here is another long step towards oligarchy. Some have noted that this, combined with the Citizens United ruling, is a one-two punch in the gut of our democracy. So, in honor of that, let's call this the Oligarchs United ruling.

Shaun McCutcheon, the Alabama businessman who brought the case along with the Republican National Committee says his aim was to realize his conservative values. “To me, being a conservative means smaller government and more freedom,” he said. But is that what happens when government fails to do the things needed to ensure our freedoms? Who steps in when one person's freedom interferes with another's? Specifically, what happens when one person's freedom of speech silences another's? What is the price paid when good, public-spirited ideas are shouted out by mean-spirited, selfish spin?

One reason we will tolerate today's ruling is because most people have no idea how peculiar our campaign finance system is compared to other functioning democracies. Pride and patriotism feeds this, since many insist that our system is beyond compare. The reality is that our privately-funded elections aren't the only way to go. But to suggest that we look at others and learn from their best practices gets howls from some quarters. By the same token, other democracies can hardly believe what we are willing to accept.

Back in 1996, I interviewed Ken Silverstein who had just published a book with Alexander Coburn called Washington Babylon. Silverstein detailed the various improprieties apparently inherent to our privatized political system. The detail that sticks in my mind all these years later is the reaction from the publisher when they submitted the manuscript. The first person to read it at Verso, a U.K. publishing house, refused to believe it. That our politicians are dependent on deep-pocketed donors to get elected seemed unreal. Silverstein and Coburn had to take the publisher by the hand and guide them deep into the rabbit hole to understand our peculiar way of doing things.

For Chief Justice Roberts, the only legit reason for the government to get involved in the electioneering enterprise is to stop outright payola or the appearance of such corruption. But to those not numbed by our pay-for-play system of legitimized bribery, the whole thing looks corrupt. Exactly why do very wealthy, self-interested players give a lot of money to political causes and campaigns? Are they selfless and public-spirited, or do they seek a return from these investments? Our oligarchs are too sophisticated to engage in the “quid pro quo corruption” that Roberts says is a legitimate interest for government intervention. So they're forced to accomplish the same ends by more circuitous means. What his court accomplished here is to simplify the process.

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Today's ruling was about individuals, not corporations. Previously, the notorious Citizens United ruling granted corporations the same First Amendment protections as people. That was - and is - laughable. So, here's a laugh - a parody of a political ad I wrote and produced awhile back. It's for a fictitious political group, "We the People for Corporate Influence"

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Tips? Suggestions? Ideas? Drop a line to carl (at) inanityofsanity (dot) com