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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 right reliably off the record about some charming people
I have known. Or I meet politicians and grafters by the store. Killer's plane and fancy,
it's really quite a bar. Oh, meets Pegrim and meets such interesting people.
They wallow in corruption, crime and door, tingling, Ling City desk, full press, full press,
extra extra read all about it. It's a mess meets the test. Oh, meets Pegrim and meets such interesting people.
It's wonderful to represent the press. So, you know, we should start this program with
some assessment of what we would like to have this program accomplish. Rosenbaum, what would you
like to discuss in this program video? Rosenbaum, you're male from Albany. I would like to talk about
Twitter is not representative of public opinion, according to New Pole and the whole Bob Woodward
story. Okay. What's he threatened by the White House? Alan, do you have a particular topic?
I do. I do. I just talked about it. I'm so glad that you're asking me. I want to talk about the
new press that your, that's the time as union, which is really very challenging and a terrific
thing for the capital region of New York where we're broadcasting from because, you know,
everybody else is running away from this and I'm just a headlining pilot. You don't have to do a
whole dissertation. To the public. I'm set up. I'm actually the only one who's written a
dissertation in this room. Oh, yes. Indeed. That's Alan Sharpe. I can see
even Northeastern Public Radio. I'm Rex Smith, editor of the Times Union. And I also want to talk
about one of the ways that we might be able to survive in the internet age, which might be
more journalism. Imagine that. But we'll start first with Rosemary. You were, so you're upset
about Bob Woodward's side. I was offended by this. Bob would got into, I don't know what to call
it, it's not even an argument. He got into a disagreement with the source in the White House.
And we know the source is James Burling. Very close source. And Woodward was saying that sequester
is all Obama's fault despite press and public opinion that the Congress is mostly blame.
They got into an altercation. The next day, Spurling calls him and apologizes.
Bob Woodward, in talking to Politico and going on on some morning shows, some talk shows,
made it sound like this was the worst assault on the press since the Nixon era. The poster
repeated that. And I work with journalists who really have been attacked by their government.
And I just think this is so conceited and so self-absorbed. And it just does not help the
image of the press. The exact words were, you'll regret publishing that, which in Spurling's
explanation, I believe, and Jean Spurling used to be an economic advisor to Mario Cuomo here
when he was the governor of New York. So we knew him as a young man back in the day who didn't
have much of a jump shot. But the fact of the matter is what he said was, you're going to regret
that in the sense that you're going to look foolish. Yeah, yeah. And I do think that it is kind
of ridiculous, but it plays against the backdrop of politicians attempting to manipulate media
coverage, which we see a lot of. Oh, well, this governor, Andrew Cuomo is really famous for that.
And many of us have who don't deserve it, because we're not that important, have people
assigned to us who call us on a fairly regular basis and then talk to us about, you know,
something we wrote or never in a mean voice ever. Oh, Alan, I think you're very important.
But I'll be understanding with me, Rick. But here's one of the things that this governor has done.
And we've written an editorial about this. There is a software that they have set up,
actually an internal website called NewsTracker, that is a requirement of every public relations officer
in every state agency that any interaction with the press gets entered into this website. And
it's reviewed by the governor's press office. Is this to maintain uniformity of message?
Well, it does, but that's not the reason. Well, it's so close to the thing you used to break up the
Walnuts with. Well, he could indeed be that. It's just like. It's a lot,
or losing our high tone here. It really does suggest that there is an effort. And this comes
in the context of the what we discussed last week, I believe, the highway engineer upstate,
who, while when the State Department of Transportation didn't respond to the Adironduct Daily Enterprise
request for information about the response to Hurricane Sandy, or was it earlier? It was,
it was, yeah, yeah. He talked about what a wonderful job they had done. And how they had really
worked hard in this engineer after 25 years. And the job was pushed out of his job as a result of
having spoken to the press when he was not authorized to do so. So the issue was not that he had said
anything detrimental about the Cuomo administration, but that he had spoken to the press at all. Yeah.
And we can't have that. We have to send a signal. So Bob Woodward maybe was not threatened, but
certainly what happened to him, you're saying highlights a bigger problem for the press. Which is
the journalistic arrogance. Well, he's journalist, a arrogance or a rex the same. No, no, no, no, no,
no, Bob Woodward. Look, this one, this is probably the most famous guy in America when it comes to
journalism. Yes, investigative reporting. And I happen to be, I have to admit something that I
don't really want to admit. But I was on the great bike one morning and I happened to come upon
morning Joe who had to test. And there was a gene spurling on the same panel with Woodward.
And they were duking it out nicely. And spurling was saying, you know, did I ever say, did I
and morning Joe was saying, no, you never said that. And so what we have now is a situation in which,
you know, it's out there. It's already been spoiled. The most famous journalist in America has
taken it upon himself to say, this is like the Nixon administration. And it was nothing of the kind.
And he admits it. But so that's disgusting. But now let me just say, and I know that you don't
really much like to have criticism of Barack Obama. But let me say that this administration has
not been good about dealing with aggressive reporters, that print reporters basically have been
shut out of the White House in favor of letting the president speak to local television news anchor.
Strategy agree with, by the way. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
Well, it does it does shut out the medium that's most likely to go in depth to question to not
just go for a sound bite. Well, that's a good way of putting it, Rosemary or Mayo. But there's
another way of putting it, which is that people expect a fair break. And I have for years cited
this service club that I gave a talk to and everybody's grousing about the press. And what were
they saying? They were saying, I said, how many of you have had something to do? They always
their hand. How many of you think they got it right? And every hand goes down. I mean, a cheap shot.
Well, if I'm critical, it's a cheap shot. If you're critical, then it's okay. Okay. Everybody
who loves WAMC put their hands up and everybody is out there saying it's okay. Everybody who
likes everything on WAMC puts your hands up. And so everybody's hand goes down. No, no, no,
that's not what I asked. I asked. Have you had one major story written about you and were you
satisfied with it? And they weren't. And did you ask about one major story broadcast about them
because the attitude is the same. None of us get it. And I would rather expect exactly. I think
I mean, there is a wagon. But I would also rather have aggressive questioning of the president
than to have pushovers. And what they're doing in the White House is they're taking advantage of
the fact that electronic media is easier to push over and print because you have to go with the
sound bites you're given rather than having an editor back in the newsroom saying, but wait a minute,
what about this question? No, let's put this in. Let's give some context to it. And there is very
little context in the news. Okay, Rex, I've heard you and as a period, I think at the end of your
second phone, I get to go. And I tell you right now, there is a sense that if it's bad, it's
going to be there. It bleeds. It leads. This is the game that is played. Now with that said, let me
just compliment you and your staff of state reporters here in Albany who have done such a phenomenal
job of exposing stuff that needs exposing. I mean, that. Well, thank you. I mean, I'll pass that
along in case they're not listening. They're listening. But okay, well, including a story about
a state senator who has two star exemptions on two different properties. You better explain what that is.
No matter how many houses you own, you get a tax break on your primary residence after a certain
age. But if you do it on two, that's not according to law. But she did it on a condo as well as
on a house at China husband owned. She blamed her husband for it. It's a matter of less than a
thousand dollars if I read the story correctly. And the husband and comment, she said, it's a mistake.
As soon as I found out about it, you know, I'm paying it right back. And then we quote a whole
bunch of other people saying, well, you know, there's a lot of these mistakes. And usually it's greed.
And that's, I mean, that's an expose, but it's a little bit hot. No, it was a good story.
It was a good story. But this is an example. This is an example of what Rosemary is citing is
putting the people alongside it saying, yeah, there are a lot of these mistakes made. That is
putting something into context, which is again, my point that in print, you do that. You find that
you don't just let the person have the sound bite. And in her case, state senator Kathy Young
from out in Western New York, her sound bite would have been, it's my husband's fault. He makes all
the decisions about money, which is a rather amazing thing for us. It was. It was for a woman in politics.
And you know, I did very big decision making. Well, you know, they make a few decisions about budget.
Well, well, in my house, my wife, Rosel, pays all the bills and makes all of the major financial
decisions. And I'm not unwilling to give her that credit because we have a neutral relationship.
We live together and we divide up the work. I'm not talking about credit. If she committed a felony,
would you hang her out to dry and said, oh, it's all her fault? No. And how many property tax
exemptions do you claim? Oh, you wait, you know, New York State resident for that right? And then
go back. In fact, in fact, I'll be honest with you. Well, no, I won't. I thought better,
anyway, if you're just joining us, it's the media project from North East Public Radio,
Alan Shartak, Rosemary Armeo and Rex Smith here, happy to help you. What did you say you wanted
to talk about Alan? I want to talk about your press. Oh, thank you very much. Now this is dead
serious stuff. Okay. Now you guys at the Albany Times Union, the Hurst Albany Times Union,
like a salmon swimming upstream, have decided that you're going to take a big risk.
You're going to build a beautiful new press, which is going to do everything possible that, you
know, a press can do all kinds of color or the place. What else does it going to do? Well, it's going
to enable us to print quickly more efficiently. It's a sharper reproduction, less expensive because
the plates that you use don't use all the metals and chemicals. So it's much less expensive to buy
the raw material and so on. It's going to just be a, and you can run it a lot faster, 80,000 copies
an hour. Actually, if you printed in a mode called collect, you can print 160,000 copies an hour,
which is about four times faster than we can go now. And we'll probably take on some commercial
clients, meaning we'll print other stuff for other people. So that's, uh, how about other newspapers?
Probably so. Last week when Ira Fussfeld was on, he was talking about his press that's in the
basement of the Kingston paper, which hasn't been used for years, even though it's a fairly good press.
Yeah. So what can you offer other newspapers that will make them come to you and not use their own
presses? Well, a lot of newspapers are doing this. They're a, most recently, the Cincinnati
and Quarer started printing at the Columbus dispatch, even though those two papers in Ohio are not
that close together. But in Cincinnati, they decided they didn't want to have the, uh, high expense
of running and maintaining your own press and the labor costs associated with all those positions.
But you have to amortize, right? Can you tell us how much the press cost? I cannot. You cannot. Okay.
How will this improve journalism? Well, deadlines go back. Will more news fit into the paper?
Well, there are two ways to answer that. Yes, there will be three ways, probably,
answered actually. There will be later deadlines for the, uh, late news stories. This is a good thing.
Second, we have made some improvements to the product that are going to be unveiled when this new
press starts running and will be on WAMC here talking about it, whatever the first day is.
We're not going to be doing anything in this show doesn't show up until Sunday. So why don't you just
get some, well, we're still 10 days out. We don't, we have a target date, but we don't know for sure
that we're going to make that target date. Well, you don't blame, you don't blame, you don't blame,
as a journalist for trying to get the story. I think it's a wonderful thing and quite unusual
in the electronic media. So, uh, it's a, uh, you're paying for wonderful, wonderful thing.
And the third way in which this is good for journalism is that if you reduce costs for production
supposedly, the notion would be you have money for journalism. You have money to maintain your
newsroom. So the financial success of a newspaper helps the preserve. Well, how do we know
that we won't go to the smirk of cynicism on my face at the smirk? Yeah, how do we know it's
aldemovent smirk? I'll actually put it at the words. How do we know it won't go to the profit
side of the corporation? Well, you know, as they say, no margin, no mission. You have to make money
in order to sustain the enterprise. Same thing here. You know, otherwise you wouldn't do fun drives
in terminally. Oh, please stop the cheap. But it's a, but I want to, but I want to know whether or
not, you know, this has implications for organized labor, for example. In other words, if you're
printing the paper in a much quicker time, will that mean that people are paid less?
Paid less? Wouldn't it be paid? Well, they're paid by the hour. Oh, you see my point. Uh, you may
be going into areas that I'm not that familiar with. Okay. So I'm just a editor, but that's an
interesting question. I don't think so. I'm just a nothing, but an electronic journalist trying to
that's a very, and you're doing very well at my day. Thank you a lot in this job. So basically,
the notion is that one of the reasons that newspapers are shutting down, our course is very different
from what's going on, for example, in Syracuse, where they're now only delivering the newspaper three
days a week. It's a paper roughly the same size as ours. A lot of the same notions of family-owned
company. But the problem is if you don't reduce some of these production costs, you're not going to
be able to sustain the journalism. What kind of press did they have in Syracuse? They got a
beautiful press. They invested a lot of money some years, about 10 years ago in a great press.
V-Fog, it's called it's a German company like ours. So why do you think it'll be different in
Albany than in Syracuse? We think that we've made a smarter strategic investment. We're not
putting as much capital into it. Uh, upfront, it's not the huge capital cost. We have this
really down in so much a week. Yeah. Basically. And this brilliant guy who came into our paper from
the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel figured out how to squeeze this press into an existing building where
we used to have these huge rolls of newsprint. So we didn't have to build a new structure, which is
part of the huge cost usually associated with this kind of thing. Now how about newsprint itself?
This is one of the big expenses news papers have. Yeah. Is there any way this is going to reduce that?
Uh, yes, because the size of the page is going to be somewhat smaller. I forgot about that. That's
another one of the efficiencies. We're going to cut an inch off each side and an inch and three-quarters
off the bottom, which actually gives you a bit of a better dimension. And I think people are going
to like it a little better. We'll add a couple less words. Yes, we're going to be writing a little
bit shorter stories, but that's not necessarily bad thing. No, no, no, no, no. This is my friend,
and this is my hometown newspaper, but it is when editors start talking about how it's good to cut
staff or word, and that makes for better journalists and big-ware consumers. The stories that are
sometimes flabby, let's say, are the ones that we're going to go after. We will probably reduce,
we're reducing the image size by 22.5%, and I'm saying let's make most stories about 15% shorter.
And I think that people will like it. In fact, your average reader spends 22 minutes with the paper,
meaning some people only spend a few seconds. What are you doing? The research has shown this.
Some of us would spend more if there were more interesting meaty stories, and if you're cutting
15% meaty stories, it grows better. You are so good. Well, these are questions that Rex is going to get.
He is, and he has answered these questions for many other people. He's actually
a professional. Some stories. What is that for you? I thought of the microphone.
Well, this is different. This is public radio, but some stories have to be long,
which is a good thing. And some stories should be shorter, and one of the reasons you do some
stories shorter is to make room for the stories that need to be longer. And our goal, we believe,
as you know, as I often say here, that the stories that make a difference, the ones that are going
to preserve us, are the watchdog and investigative reporting. I mean, we're not going to be sustained
by doing, I mean, I hate to say this because there are a lot of good lifestyle journalists out
there, but that's not what's going to sustain a newspaper, because people can get lifestyle stories
from a million other places. What they can't get is the aggressive local reporting, the kind of
watching that I complimented you on before. This is very kind of you. And you do. There's no
two ways about it. Inevitably, you break the story, and then everybody else follows. One plug
for long-form journalism, the best piece that I have seen in the news in maybe two years, cover
story of Time Magazine by Stephen Brill call Bitterpill is a 36-page report. We've been talking
about this, and he has really set everybody on their ears with this piece. John Stort got a
right. He said, this is a silent spring piece of journalism. It's going to change thinking.
That's a wonderful notion. And that was done in a very long form. You cannot, it's hard to read it.
Well, you better explain to people what the basic, the rest of this thing was about health care.
I will. That's great. Brill did a great investigative reporting trick and changed the question.
About health care for years, he says, we have been debating in this country who should pay the bill.
He instead asked, why is the bill so high? And he went back and looked at people's actual hospital
bills and traced it back to the facilities. And what he found was this outrageous charges based
on completely arbitrary, I say measures, but there is no real measurement. It's just made up
really horrible methods of collecting money. And people are being bankrupted by the size of the
bill. It's not doctors or nurses who are who are profiting. It's companies who make medical
equipment and hospitals, not for profit hospitals make a lot of money. That's not the way it's
supposed to work. It's an amazing piece of work. Sure it is. Now Rosemary, since we don't always have
you here because you're always off doing investigative reporting, I did want to ask you a question.
You said in the beginning you wanted to talk about Twitter. Remember that? Yeah. But your issue.
There's an interesting story. The pew people who do all these, they kind of like investigate
everything and pew, yeah, investigate modern journalism and public opinion about it. They've
looked at Twitter and opinions on it. They figured out a way to code and measure them. And they found
that it doesn't really represent what people think. You know, in the media, as he uses it that way,
like, oh, this is what they were saying on the Twitter traffic. Instead, they found that you get
extremes. It's either much more like real or much more negative than public opinion. That's
so fascinating. It does that because so do you gather people who think like you, right,
your friends. And so naturally it leads to that kind of straight-jacketed thinking. And so you get
more liberal, more conservative, right? Well, no. I think you get nuts. I mean, I think that
it's not that they're all nuts, but a lot of them are. And you get people who for years have been
repressed, you know, they're strange sometimes and they go on the social media and they just vomit.
Well, they just want an impact, which may be the same thing. They write something out right.
Whatever, but the middle gets left out. And that's why I think this is such an important point
that you're making and why I insisted that you bring it up. Thank you so much. You're wonderful
thing. By the way, Steven Brill, who you were talking about earlier, is not only a smart journalist.
This article that he wrote that you're describing is one of the first times I've seen recently,
him actually exercising his muscles as a as a reporter. But Brill also is a businessman. And he
co-founded something called press plus, which is a method of creating platforms to help people pay
for website content, which is a controversial issue. Their research suggests, get this, that you
get more subscription revenue. This may seem just so self evident that it's not so.
Right. So you get more subscription revenue on a website if you offer more journalism.
Ta-da. Who shocked by this? But the fact is the more stories and they did research involving
different sites, websites, whose paper websites. And they concluded, if you want to sell journalism,
you have to do journalism that you can't get revenue for a website that is just all about
entertainment and blood. Well, it's taken us a long time to get there. I mean, I remember some
editors who said in the beginning, we're going to hold some of it back. We're not going to let
it all go. And it turns out that that's not the way to go. Turns out that even though you can get
a lot of page views by putting glitz on there, you know, you get the Miss Universe page and
swimsuit competition. You'll get a lot of web traffic. But that isn't what people are really
willing to pay for. What they're going to pay for is serious journalism. As I announced last
week, I have actually done something that I consider to be totally reprehensible. I'm giving
Murdoch money because I bought a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which has been absolute
in their paywall policy. Can't get it otherwise. And they do some very good work. And the idea of
ruper eating another piece of, you know, whatever shrimp is not. As subscription in what form, by the
way, did you get digital or print? Digital. Good. Because you know one of the advantages is if you
get the digital form here, you can get the greater New York section, the print version of the
Wall Street Journal that comes up state does not have great in New York. Well, the single kind of
best article that's ever been written about me and it came out of that New York section,
on the Metro section. So I've always wanted to. For that reason, I've always wanted to thank you.
Just if you want to see it, you just got a Ralph Gardner Jr. and you put in Shartock next to it
in your finest wonderful piece. There was. While you're googling, look up bitter pill too. Good reading.
Good or pill. This is a great thing. That's the name of the, uh,
brill piece, right? Yes.
Great thing. Oh, okay. Right. Who cares about that? Or silence spring for that.
Or absolutely. Finally today in our last minute of the program, we'll just point this out. The
annual count of women's bylines in journalism. Mm. Not a good factor, folks. It shows that, uh,
the, in terms of the overall agenda of book reviewers, authors, and so on. It is shrinking,
actually. Why Maros married, do you know? No. In fact, a group journalism and women's
symposium has begun. I campaigned to get more women's opinion on opinion pages. And part of
the problem is women don't try for it. And we don't know exactly why not. They self-edit.
They don't want to go to the trouble. We can't quite figure it out. There was a piece just the
other day on the, uh, beef on the BBC in the middle of the night. And they were talking about,
you know, how come so many women don't get, don't get. It's like women. They don't put themselves.
They don't put themselves out. It's like women running for the Senate or for the House.
And it is. Why aren't there more? It's some of it is prejudice, absolutely, but some of it is
the women themselves. And the premise was, what if women ran the world? You know, I believe they do.
And that's the end of the program for today. So there we go. We're out of time.
And actually the world goes on and we'll see you next week on the media project.
The girl who could not bake a cake.
Now this Superman are such interesting people. They used to work like hell just for romance.
But finally the movie is not withstanding. They all got tired of patches on their pants.
They organized the union to get a living wage. They joined with other actors upon a living stage.
Now news Superman are such interesting people.
When they know they've got a people's fighting wage.
Tingling, lings, paper, guild. Got a free new world of bills.
Meet the people that's a thrill. All together it fits the bill.
On this Superman are such interesting people.
It's a wonderful deal. Rappers and Christy more.
Now publishers are such interesting people.
Their policies are an acrobatic thing.
