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From Northeast Public Radio, this is the Media Project, a weekly discussion about issues
confronting the media.
Oh, newspapers and meets such interesting people.
They know the lowdown now it can be told.
I'll tell you, Craig, reliably off the record about some charming people I have known.
So the Media Project is underway and marked this day, folks.
This may be an important show, not that we're all pessimistic.
Don't break my back.
Dr. Shartak is going in for surgery tomorrow.
So Ira and I are wishing him the best.
And you guys want me gone.
You just want to do it yourself.
This may be the last show for the publisher of the professor.
Ira and Rosemary and Rex.
A nice billboard.
We can do it.
We can do fine.
Thank you very much.
It's been great, Alan.
It's been great.
Thank you very much for having us.
This is my watch.
So the Media Project is Ira Fussfeld of the Daily Freeman in Kingston, Alan Shartak
of North East Public Radio.
I'm Rex Smith from the Times Union.
At least for a little while.
And we're happy to be with you for the limited amount of time we have left.
You know, whatever.
It's a finite experience for all of us in this.
Sweet guy.
Whatever.
Hey, you know, you'll be happy to know Alan, by the way, that since you're always complaining
that we're going to sucker people into paying attention to our websites and then we're
going to start charging.
It's working.
Four news paper publishers got on a panel at a big conference down into Orleans and they
said, you know what?
These paywalls are working.
Starter, Buon Media up in Minneapolis, USA Today, the Omaha World Herald, which you know
is owned by Berkshire Hathaway.
And the Dallas Morning News.
They all say, hey, there are revenue opportunities and content.
Imagine that.
People will pay for good content.
You know, the other day, a very clever reporter called me from the Wall Street Journal.
And you know, Rex, sometimes people call me up and want to know what I have to do.
I can't imagine.
So this lady called me and she wanted to know what I thought about Andrew Cuomo asking
questions and then answering them.
Oh, I see.
Like, which is his style.
He's his style.
He says, so what should we do?
This is what we should do.
He does.
Okay.
That's his famous for that.
You notice that she was very clever and she made the rounds and you know, they call
her people and say, who's stupid enough to say anything that is even mildly critical
about Andrew Cuomo's call shark talk?
Who's suicidal enough?
So she calls me up and then Liz Benjamin, who used to work for you, but who now works
for what YNN has a blog.
People news.
And she put in her thing.
I check it in the mornings.
And it said the Wall Street Journal wants no way Andrew Cuomo answers his own questions.
I said, I better look at that.
So I look at it and they give you the first four sentences and there's no way around
it.
Uh-huh.
And your name wasn't in the first four sentences.
And she had to.
It was not in the first four sentences.
And I've been meaning to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal for quite a while.
So I did.
So the moral to the publishers of the nation is, let's do stories about Alan and then we
know we'll pick up a page of a subscriber because he will want to see when we set up
the page.
But you know, I, I know that you, you were mean spirited.
You were saying that.
But yeah, but the thing of it is, as I often say, the thing of it is that it is true that
I can't afford to subscribe to every newspaper.
So right now, the only two I subscribe to are the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Those are my two.
Now Rex's paper is for free, right?
Oh, digitally.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I currently, yes, you currently can't get it and it keeps it free minors for free, right?
Yeah.
So you guys haven't made me buy your product.
Well, the statistic that I cited a couple of weeks ago is 400 papers roughly out of the
1400 papers in this country, daily newspapers have paywalls.
The number is growing.
But I, in no doubt, they're picking up some money, those who are not generating money
before and it's great that it's flowing in.
But I don't know if that's the long term strategy and that's my story and I'm stuck with
it and I keep repeating it.
Well, you guys, you guys really just don't know what to do.
I mean, you're screwed because you don't know what to do.
On the one hand, you know, you want more people looking in on a digitally, on the other
hand, you lose the revenue.
It's that, it's really that simple.
Yeah, you know, I think that the lesson is that you can't create content and give it away
and expect that to be a long term business strategy.
You know, we have a great journalistic strategy.
The question is what's the business strategy and I think giving away content is valuable
content is ultimately not going to work for us.
Who win and how you actually charge people for it, it remains unclear to me.
Well, but you know, guys like you are always looking for ways to do this.
So I remember in the beginning, you'll deny it.
But I remember in the beginning when this great controversy happened, you came up with
this half-hynied idea.
What's that?
Well, the idea was that you would not give all of the stuff to some of the, so you go
there and you know that there was something major that the TU had done and you know, that
wouldn't be there.
But you've stopped that now, right?
Well, yes.
No, we actually never fully implemented that.
We never actually did it.
We thought about it.
We talked about it.
We do withhold stuff like on Sunday, our biggest print circulation day.
We don't put our major stories on the web.
We make people buy the paper if they want to see it that day.
So that's the point.
That's right.
The part of the debate is that it's generally acknowledged that the business model for print
is broken.
Yeah.
That's what's creating the problems that we have for whatever number of reasons it has
become broken.
And if we take the digital editions and essentially make them digital business model versions
of the print, then we are replicating the print business model, which is broken.
So that's where when you talk about paywalls, you're essentially saying, okay, we are now
printing a newspaper that's digital.
And that affords us a lot of room to do a lot of things that we in print couldn't do
before.
And that's great.
But if we decide that the read the way that it's going to be paid for is the traditional
business model way of advertising revenue and circulation revenue, then we're just
moving the chips from one side of the table to the other side of the table.
So that's the counter argument to those who are saying this paywall is the savior.
Okay.
The difference though is that, you know, I would say there's one difference, but I understand
what you're saying.
I think there's a valid argument obviously to that because that's where a lot of publishers
including those of your company are.
But the difference is that in digital, you can target your audience so precisely that
you can create, in effect, create an audience, a niche audience that is therefore more likely
to buy valuable content in that niche.
Or it also affords you the ability to target your advertising to those people, which is
more attractive to advertisers when you can say we can sell you an advertisement that's
going to go to people who are age 45 with doctorates who live in a metropolitan area.
And by the way, the daily Freeman of Kingston, New York can tell an advertiser in my market
who may have a national product of national interest will be able to place your demographically
targeted ad in Los Angeles and Boston and wherever we can do that now from Kingston.
We're not just selling the daily Freeman.
We're saying.
So are you telling me, for example, that if the ad would be appropriate for Jewish readers,
you could pick out the Jewish readers and make sure they got the ad.
I think that I don't know how deeply that demographic profile has been established, but theoretically
yes.
But if there's a company in Kingston you're saying that it has a particular niche in the marketplace
that they think that they're buyers in Los Angeles.
Yeah, I mean, we have, I mean, if you...
Kosha Hadot.
Well, no, you can look at the tourism industry.
You can look at if an advertiser in medical or in education wants to reach out to somewhere
elsewhere in the country.
If there's a product that's manufactured in our market and there are several that are
unique, these are...
I was actually thinking of them and I didn't want to mention them, but then would stock
chines.
Would stock chines come in there?
I mean, this is a worldwide product.
So now they are trying to do the marketing themselves, but we can do that for them because
we can now target their digital advertiser.
Our company calls this project ad taxee.
That's, I don't know where that comes from.
Ad taxee?
Ad taxee.
And then everything you said a little while ago you were mentioning digital virgins.
And I was wondering...
Digital virgins.
It's wondering who they were.
It's people that have never gone on the...
I believe they have websites for that.
And you may have to pay for that.
Yeah, it's the media project from Northeast Belaface.
It is.
Sorry.
I was first filled.
Alan Shartalk and Rex Smith here in Paris.
Hey, by the way, any of you guys since you're well healed want to bid on the Boston
Globe in your time?
Well, what I was thinking about that, I've been reading about it.
The New York Post, which is nasty, nasty, nasty, has a headline this morning that says New
York Times selling Boston Globe again.
So what I was thinking about, well, they've tried before.
But isn't this a great place to have a community come together and buy a new bag?
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
And I think the same is true of Worcester, the Worcester Telegram, which is also a
Warchems company and is for sale.
I think you're exactly right.
This would be a great thing and it would prove the value of community ownership of newspapers.
It could be none for profit.
It's true, but there is a problem.
There's some pension obligations.
They're carrying some heavy liabilities there.
Problem is that one echo bankrupt like so many other places.
You could do that, I guess, and get out of from under it.
The Times Company, here's the interesting thing.
When they bought the Globe in 1992, I got to say something before I have to interrupt
and say, oh, I'm all for the sanctity of the world.
I don't want anybody to think what I just said means that they should do it.
I just meant it sort of just casually.
Not even casually.
I just meant it how despicable when people do that kind of thing.
I see.
Well, OK, noted for the record.
So the Times Company paid a billion dollars.
I should 1.1 billion for the Globe in 1993.
But that's a good deal.
That's a good deal.
Circulation is about half of what it was at that time.
So what do we think it's worth now?
Half of that?
Well, I don't know.
They turned down a bid for a $35 million a couple of years ago.
That's insulting.
That's insulting.
So we'll solve the Times.
I mean, if you were Arthur Sultzberger, you would not like that.
Well, but you know, the Times, like a lot of other newspaper companies, including mine,
when newspapers were really booming in the late 80s, started spending in an ordinance amount
of money to buy additional properties.
And the timing couldn't have been worse because not only the economy started going downhill,
but the industry started going downhill.
So for the Times to have spent 1.1 billion and to try to unload the Boston Globe now, they
should be happy.
And I don't want to advise Mr. Sultzberger.
He won't listen to me anyway.
But he ought to take a reasonable offer.
Well, what would you pay the billion for?
What would be?
No, wait, no, wait a second.
Just wait a second, Mr. Rex Smith.
Just wait a second.
I'm going to ask, I'm going to ask, I heard this question because he was the publisher.
He knows business backwards and forwards.
He knows the industry.
Give us a finger.
I read and I'm going to emphasize that I have no specific knowledge of this.
I'm only reporting what I've read from company press releases.
That hour, that hour company, which is currently going through bankruptcy, has a bid on it
of $122.0 million.
Now that's for the entirety of the journal register company.
In the Daily Freeman's former news owners, the Goodson newspaper group, which was about
six or eight daily newspapers on a bunch of weeklies.
One of the first in a Goodson Todd.
Yeah.
When we were sold to the journal register company, I believe the selling price was $280 million.
Well, that sounds correct.
So let's stop to think about that.
That's $280 million for the entire company.
And now they're selling it to for $122 million.
So that's an indication.
Well, that mean would mean you think the globe is worth about $500 million.
No, you can't.
No, but because the globe is about the deaths.
We know what the dead is.
And it's a brand name.
I mean, there are people who feel that, contrary to what many people might think, that newspapers
like the New York Times and the Boston Globe, one would think are impregnable.
Impregnable?
That's the way it has it.
They can't have a time.
But they may be more at risk long term than community newspapers.
Because community newspapers have a unique content that the New York Times is of the world
and the Boston Globes of the world, which primarily are international and national coverage.
That can be replicated elsewhere more easily than the kind of content that community
newspapers.
I think anybody who believes that these big properties are impregnable ought to take
a look at Philadelphia, which narrowly escaped.
But both the daily news and the inquirer almost shut down a few weeks ago.
And their, well, the benefit owners basically, well, the unions accepted huge value.
Well, they said to the unions, we're going to have to reopen your contracts or we're
going to liquidate them.
And so they basically said, no, they have no job or you'll have a job with, you know,
but maybe not under the conditions that you like.
Huge cuts, exactly.
And so the brand, no less a journalistic brand in terms of quality content is the Philadelphia
inquirer than the Boston Globe.
So this was a, this is a big thing to almost lose your big daily newspaper in the city
like Philadelphia.
So now you guys have been counting all along on being able to sell ads online to replace
the revenue you lost, you know, in the print edition, right?
And what I'd like to know, and I think what all America would like to know from you experts
or so-called experts is how that's coming is online advertising beginning.
And I don't mean that, you know, 10th of a percent.
I mean, really beginning to kick in.
Yeah, the growth of it is phenomenal.
Actually, a huge trajectory.
If you look at the slope, the difficulty is, and I reckon speak to this probably better
than I can, that it's dimes to dollars.
That the, what you get the CPMs, they call it the cost per thousand eyeballs.
Actually, it's two eyeballs per person, so it's the cost per 2000 eyeballs.
But that's interesting.
Yes, thank you.
The cost per thousand is one tenth.
An hour company has famously said, well, you're only generating dimes.
Well, let's start stacking the dimes.
And by the way, just to clarify-
What does that mean?
Well, it means, okay, you're not getting as much as you're not getting as much as you
were getting for print, but we're getting stuff.
So let's start building up on it.
Let's not scoff at the fact that their dimes, let's grab this way.
So out there and sell.
Yeah, and by the way, just to clarify, because I wanted to re-emphasize something, when you
said that that Goodson Journal Register comparison was half, that 280 million dollars was just
for the small piece of the Journal Register Company that was Goodson News.
Oh, I see.
So in other words, the entire Journal Register Company.
I get it.
Is it other newspapers?
40- some papers.
Yeah.
So I think it's 18 dals a whole bunch of weekly's, but so it's significantly more of a
gap.
That's very good of you.
Wait, wait, wait.
It's very good of you to tell me that because, you know, of the two of you, you and Rex,
you're my friend.
Yes.
Rex, before we went on to this program, I said to Rex, Rex, we leave the clock so I know
how many minutes are going.
So I reach my head around to look at it and he moves the clock behind the phone where
I can't see it.
How much was he telling me?
He would sit in the middle of things here and sit down there at the end and the controlling
seat.
You wanted to make my complaint.
Fine.
This makes no sense of the people listening.
Yes they do.
But when we sign a cast on TV, you'll be able to see the one of these days.
We use them.
Hey, now, here's, we have to turn our attention to celebrity after all.
We have to talk about journalistic values here.
Since we've spent this whole program so far talking about dollars and cents of journalism
support.
And what about all this attention to that WCBS anchor in New York arrested for beating
up his wife and other WCBS anchor?
Yes.
And I know that.
Are we, well, you know it because it's been like crazy everywhere everywhere.
What is with this?
Why is this an overplay?
Is this simply bad journalism that we're so fixated on this one story?
I think it's an interesting story.
I think it's another indication of how broadcast journalists are more celebrities.
I don't think that if this was a reporter for the New York Post that this would be quite
as big a story.
But it's an interesting.
I'm more interested in why we are covering the story as heavily as we are.
Because it's a beautiful woman.
They put her, the tabs put her picture all over the place.
Sometimes on two or three pages during this.
And it's a great shame.
But you know, guys, isn't it also that when we see something like this, it talks about
universal frailties.
In other words, we know that abuse is a huge story.
And when you point it out with a celebrity, you're also pointing out a societal problem.
It puts a face on it.
That's a nice thought.
But I don't think that is what drives the huge play.
What do you think?
I mean, you would think if I said that, you would say, oh, you're just so high-falutin
and you would say, come down on me because the fact is what is driving this play, I think,
in the tabloid press.
It's a big story, both of these.
Pistorias, I think, significantly more so.
Both women are beautiful.
Yes.
Pistorias is an international figure.
And so the tragedy is more compounded.
That's a bigger deal.
The local TV anchor is simply a celebrity.
And it's catnip for the tabloid press, which generates so much of its revenue from single
copy sales.
It's that the impulse buy at the newsstand is a much bigger deal for the tabloids.
And so they have to grab you with what they call the wood, the big headline on the front
page.
So I think it's a little bit...
I'd like to think that it's in order to inform people about this universal problem.
Well, no, that's not the motivation.
I agree with you.
By the way, I agree with you.
That's not...
Well, don't get so up in your face.
But I agree with you.
But on the other hand, it does have this other secondary thing, which is that people say,
yeah, the lady around the corner just had somebody joking her.
And this is a terrible thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Hey, let me ask, in your experience, have you ever had people fake something in your paper?
Have you ever had like...
Have you ever published an obituary of somebody who wasn't dead or something like that?
I don't recall obituary.
I do recall an engagement announcement.
At least one, it may have happened more than once.
I know you're referring to a similar issue.
Right.
It's all around the country.
There is this engagement announcement in different papers, one out in Iowa, the Lamar's
Daily Sentinel, and a couple other places where these two young women, allegedly, have
announced their engagement in approaching marriage.
These articles are appearing in newspapers and states that do not have gay marriage by
law.
And apparently, these are fraudulent announcements that are being placed in these papers
and nobody's quite sure where they're coming from.
But is there a political motive for this?
Well, you might think, is it to support the notion of gay marriage or is it to tweak
those states where they don't have it?
Shame on any newspaper, including ours, when it happened to us once, that allows the...
There are certain stories, well, all stories you hopefully are going to verify, but certainly
obituary's wedding announcements, engagement announcements, there is a procedure so that
this kind of fraudulent material can't be printed.
There should be prevented.
So I'm not sure.
I mean, it sounds to me like these things came in the mail and they said, okay, let's
run a story.
Yeah, whatever.
That's just not the way it's done.
Well, it's interesting because Janet Axelrod is on our board.
She was married.
She's with David Axelrod, the commissioner of the...
Oh, yes.
And she's an Axelrod.
A wonderful man, wonderful woman.
And when their son got engaged, I got a telephone call from the New York Times wedding lady
who was checking everything, including the fact that she was on the executive committee,
which I was also on.
The executive committee of WAMC and asking if that was important.
I said, oh, yes.
They have sovereignty.
They have sovereignty.
They run the corporation.
That's right.
And the New York Times wedding lady is related to Dana Carvey's church lady.
It's a big...
And your time is wedding lady.
I wonder if that's in the guild contract.
That's great fact checking.
You know, the people who sit right outside my office are part of the core of people who
make phone calls to check on letters to the editor.
And I hear them all day long calling up people saying, hello, it's the times you know,
we're checking.
Did you write this letter?
Have you sent it anywhere else?
And that's it.
And in letters, that's a guy I'd forgotten about them because we have gotten snookered
on those before.
But even that, the procedure is not fail proof because you could call up the address or call
up the person and say, we have this as that accurate.
Oh, yeah, it's accurate.
I mean, how are you going to prove that it's not accurate when they've verified that
it's accurate?
Right.
It could be that they're...
People who send a letter to more than one person.
We have two things.
Yes.
First, we don't publish stuff that is published elsewhere in terms of letters, the editor.
I wonder why my recent letter about our fund drive didn't get into your work.
Is that why?
What do you know?
Second, we don't publish self-serving tripe.
Third, we don't...
Did I say iron?
Third, we don't...
We try to avoid what they refer to as astroturf.
And that is stuff that looks like a grass roots male that is actually fake.
It's actually a national campaign or a regional campaign.
That's usually easy to spot.
Yeah.
People say dear parentheses editors here.
When we get led to the editor, just a daily and Sunday frame, and we know that somebody
has pulled that out of a book somewhere.
Yeah.
By the way, one more thing here before we leave, and that is the poor White House press
corps.
You know, it often feels sorry for the celebrities of the White House press corps, but
they apparently are having a terrible time with the Obama administration because the
president doesn't talk to them.
That's right.
He's found that it's much easier to go around them to speak to regional TV reporters in
the life, because even just to speak to TV reporters rather than print, you get more of
your message out there.
That'll teach the gotcha guys in the press corps to watch their peas and queues.
The gotcha guys.
I mean, the people who ask tough questions.
Yeah, well, that's one way of putting it in a world.
Sure.
But, you know, I think what president, so with this president who is a wonderful president,
his thinking is you're not going to be honest and give both sides of the story.
Oh, you know, it's not about both sides of the story.
It's about one side of the story, and he's trying to sell it, and he can sell it better
to a TV reporter than to print.
You know, you can get your message across because you use the president's own words instead
of having pesky editors back at the newsroom saying it.
That's right.
But wasn't what was the last straw to the White House people because they wouldn't let
them watch him play golf with all of you.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that picked a stronger argument.
And we wouldn't let us out watching the government.
And I just said snookered.
I happen to have been in Ireland and go away and watch the snooker championship of the.
I just thought I'd mention that because you threw the words snookers.
Well, that's always a sports writer at heart.
You know, we are going to miss you, Alan, those kinds of insights.
Don't hold your breath.
I'll be back.
When will you be back?
I'm just going to score back.
This is a wonderful new procedure.
It's a day procedure.
They used to take six months to recuperate from and knock on wood.
Oh, that's more like it.
Show them the clock times up.
Okay, we'll be back soon.
Finally show me the clock.
Pull the press extra extra read all about it.
It's a mess meets the test.
Only Superman meets up to the resting people.
It's wonderful.
Who reparsed and depressed.
