Tag: Eric Barnes

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

News Makers 3: Media Talk with Wendi Thomas of MLK50 and Storyboard’s Mark Fleischer

This post is supplemental to the Memphis Flyer cover package Going to Pieces about the state of print journalism in Memphis. This, and other posts featuring additional commentary by Wendi Thomas of MLK50, Jacinthia Jones of Chalkbeat.org, Eric Barnes of The Daily Memphian, and Mark Fleischer of StoryBoard Memphis were created to include voices and ideas that didn’t make it into the main story.

Wendi Thomas

Every day I wake up and discover I’m not on the wrong side of Wendi Thomas’  Twitter feed, is a good day.  I kid, but  when I typed that I’m pretty sure I heard a faint chorus of voices from Memphis’ political and business communities saying “Amen.” And that’s a good thing. Whether she’s dragging area media because newsroom diversity (and its lack), determines content and perspective, or calling out bosses who won’t pay a living wage, Thomas is one of Memphis’ most critical journalists — castigatory, elucidative, and vital.

In spite of her long history as a columnist and editor for The Commercial Appeal, I didn’t sit down with Thomas to talk about struggling dailies or the print journalism business. We didn’t get too deep into discussing the reporters she’s cultivated and work she’s published online as founder of the digital “Justice Through Journalism” forum, MLK50, either. I asked Thomas to help me develop a working definition of “information justice,” a topic I’ll come back to in future posts. But some of our conversation did overlap with the Memphis Flyer cover story, Going to Pieces, so I’m sharing some lightly edited excerpts that complement both Jacinthia Jones’s vision for mass partnership and Madeline Faber’s thoughts about transparency and engagement.

Like Jones and Faber, Thomas thinks outside the traditional newspaper bundle. She shared some common sense ideas for distributing less commodified, hyper-local news directly with those the news most likely affects.

Memphis Flyer: I want to talk about information justice but I’m not completely sure I know what I mean by that.

Wendi Thomas: I think information justice starts with “just us” — and who the “us” is. The media doesn’t provide everybody with the information they need to live better lives, or make better decisions about things that are critical — housing, shelter, you know… I read a story about FedEx expansion plans. There’s new tech for getting boxes on planes but not a word about how this might affect employment. When you’re writing with an eye toward justice, these are the kinds of questions you’d ask. So that story wasn’t written for people who work in the hub, or even worried that they might have to ever work in the hub.


I try to imagine a media environment where the information people —low income people in particular — need to make better choices is accessible without too much expense or hassle. And I wonder who profits from the current media environment, where you have to make an effort to get information.

WT: I’ve never found out much about it, but you’ve probably seen a quote I tweet: “If you want to solve any problem in America, don’t study who suffers from it, study who profits.” That’s a huge gap missing in journalism as a whole. There are exceptions, like reporting about expensive calls from the jail. That story was out one week. The next week we weren’t going to make juveniles pay to call their parents anymore. Period, full stop. Public policy can be changed quickly in ways that affect vulnerable people. But somebody has to systematically examine industries, and government organizations, to find where those places are.

I don’t know anything about that quote’s provenance, but I’ve seen you share that and thought it was absolutely right.

WT: I was at a people-powered publishing conference where they were talking about, instead of trying to put our middle class selves in the shoes of a person in poverty, they should be involved in every step of the process. In my 25 years in journalism, this is something I’ve only done sporadically. We tend to think, you know, you report the story
– you go out and talk to the people, you write the story, you do the follow-up. But what if we completely dismantled that process? What if people are involved at every step, and you report on your reporting, in maybe less formal ways. Maybe it’s not 8 paragraphs or 400 words. Maybe it’s using Facebook Live or posting in a group. We talk about growing audience. Part of growing our audience is involving people in the process, and not always deciding what’s best.

You see that kind of transparency sometimes. I’m thinking of the Washington Post’s investigation of the Trump Foundation, which involved posting notebooks, and keeping the process front and center. That changed things a little. But the level of engagement you’re describing is still rare, I think.

WT: It’s not built into our process. Your editor’s going to ask you, “Do you have art?” “Do you have diverse sources?” They’re not going to ask you, “How many times you engaged the people most affected by this?”

Let’s talk for a minute about how people get information, which obviously isn’t always the same as “news.” People weren’t always coming to the newspaper bundle for news. There are entertainment listings, housing and help wanted ads. Now people with public service information partner to multiply resources. Like if you’re doing a voter registration drive, you might piggyback with a health services opportunity, and engage people in barber shops and other third spaces. Can newsrooms learn from that?

WT: The library may be a more economically diverse third space. If we’re rethinking how we distribute information, there’s this system where you can send direct mail. Political candidates do it all the time, but I’ve never seen a journalist use it. So, say you’re writing something about 38126, which I think is the poorest zip code. So what if you used direct mail to distribute stories or solicit information in 38126? Or, you know, use the inserts you get in your MLGW bill? What if there was something in that? Or billboards? I have seen the Commercial Appeal do a little bit of that. Smaller outlets probably think they can’t afford billboards. But what if a non-profit found a way to underwrite [it] and every week maybe they worked with a different [news] outlet?

For justice-forward reports you can follow MLK50 — now part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network here.
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Mark Fleischer says he’s heartened by the changes he’s seen at The Commercial Appeal since they hired new staff. But when Fleischer’s monthly newspaper Storyboard Memphis was in the works, Memphis’ daily was, “getting worse by the day.”

Fleischer, a California transplant now living in Midtown, describes himself as an urban studies enthusiast and “news junkie.”

“I started talking to people and realizing how many other stories need to be told,” he says. “And people have no means to tell them.” That’s when Fleischer, who’d already been blogging about Memphis, got an idea to start a digital magazine. That idea evolved into Storyboard Memphis, a monthly  broadsheet-style newspaper with original historical and urban-themed reporting, supplemented with news articles from many of Memphis’s digital-only news organizations like Chalkbeat and High Ground News.

Memphis Flyer: An online magazine sounds great, but how does it work? It’s tough putting even quality content behind a paywall if it’s not unique or if similar content is available somewhere else free.

Mark Fleischer: I didn’t see a digital magazine taking off. A couple of guys we all know in publishing said, “You should think about print.”… It took a year for me to convince myself that was doable… For-profit seemed the most straightforward way to go. I don’t want to be chasing non-profit money all the time.

You’ve solved at least part of the newsroom riddle by aggregating content from several of Memphis’s digital-only content providers, which is great for a lot of reasons. You get content, they get a sampler platter where they’re included in one nicely curated space with all these other information providers you’d have to track down individually online. Also, the digital divide — there are a lot more people who aren’t online than most people think.

Mark Fleischer: I remember thinking, if I can just convince High Ground to partner with me, and I can be their print medium. Then I’ve really got something.

The kind of deep dives into neighborhoods High Ground does seems like it really lends itself to the urbanist-focused work you’re doing.

Mark Fleischer: Yes. And I talked to Tom Jones at Smart City — same thing.

Another good fit.

Mark Fleischer: I realized, the more I talked about this, the more I realized there was an appetite for print. Maybe more like a hunger.

And there’s already all this content out there…

Mark Fleischer: It’s out there. But it’s out there in digital format. When I came up with Storyboard, I originally thought about telling a stories through all media: audio, podcast, video, photography, art. All that. Well, there’s no reason I can’t do that in print. Not audio and video, obviously, but we can certainly use the medium and get as close to that as possible… High Ground isn’t going to print any time soon. It’s just not in their model. Tom Jones can’t go to print, he doesn’t have enough content. But together we do have enough content. It’s like showing all the work being done by High Ground and Smart City and all these other niche publications.

Storyboard also features original reporting by Fleischer, fiction, poetry, puzzles, and children’s pages. Distribution is free but not forced. It’s available in coffee shops and other public places around Memphis.

This is the last supplemental post to the Memphis

Eric Barnes

 Flyer cover story Going to Pieces. For readers interested in a more in depth conversation with Daily Memphian executive editor, Eric Barnes, he and I spoke at length shortly after the digital daily’s 2018 launch.  Our more recent conversation, was brief and to the point, so there wasn’t really enough leftover content to make a stand-alone post.

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Going to Pieces

“We don’t have the backup we used to have, and the agencies know it,” Jacinthia Jones says, assessing the tough reality of independent journalism in the 21st century. During her 20 years working for The Commercial Appeal, Jones watched the paper’s education beat shrink from a team of a four full-time journalists to a single writer with additional editorial responsibilities — a change that’s definitely contrary to public interest in a community where education concerns run high.

Today, Jones is the Memphis bureau chief for Chalkbeat.org, a digital nonprofit newsroom focusing on education policy, with an eye toward correcting the coverage gap wrought by modern newspaper economies. Chalkbeat’s commitment to sharing free education-related content in partnership with relevant media organizations places Jones at the bleeding edge of conversations about Memphis’ print journalism future.

Jacinthia Jones

“When I worked for The Commercial Appeal, if you requested information and somebody told you ‘no,’ we’d call in the lawyers,” Jones says, reflecting on the daily paper’s financial resources and its historic role in forcing transparency and institutional oversight. “If you look at a lot of the court cases, The Commercial Appeal was filing the suit. Now these agencies are calling our bluff,” she says. “What are you going to do?”

Gather round the campfire, friends, and I’ll spin a tale of suspense, brimming with drama, comedy, and carnage. Information economies are anything but dull, and the ongoing demise of local and regional newspapers affects you personally and everybody you know, whether you’re a serial subscriber or only care about coupons and crossword puzzles. It’s a story about digital triumphalism and unintended consequences disrupting everything from how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks the spread of infectious diseases to consumer education and government oversight.

Local and community newspapers are a vanishing species. Among the survivors, many, like The Commercial Appeal, have become so diminished by layoffs, consolidation, and circulation loss (not to mention the steady shedding of tangible assets and influence), a spooky-sounding term has been coined to describe them: “ghost papers.”

Many articles have valorized print journalism and warned about the important things communities will lose if local papers go dark. This isn’t that kind of story. This is more like Game of Thrones, with Gannett, the CA‘s corporate parent, squaring off against MNG Enterprises (aka Alden Global Capital), a hedge-fund-backed media group formerly known as Digital First.

“If Alden gets Gannett, I think it will be a disaster for The Commercial Appeal,” says Eric Barnes. As the publisher of Memphis’ digital startup The Daily Memphian, Barnes wants to be clear: “That would not be a good thing for Memphis.

“Their track record is clear,” Barnes says of Alden’s infamous path to double-digit profitability. “People are so used to cuts, they may not be fully processing the level of cuts this could mean.”

Eric Barnes

Although its initial purchase offer was rejected and characterized by Gannett as “not credible,” Alden Global Capital/MNG/Digital First, is a minority shareholder and can stack Gannett’s board with Alden-friendly directors. That means the company might change its business philosophy, even if it never changes hands. So, if the takeover stalls or fails, it’s not impossible that the surviving CA could still be reduced to a West Tennessee edition of The Tennessean. It could also just as easily vanish like an apparition and never be heard from again.

And if it disappears, what then? Is the not-for-profit Daily Memphian positioned to replace the city’s historic paper of record? What’s the role played by community newsletters? Or social media? What about all the other news/lifestyle publications like the Memphis Flyer, StoryBoard, the Memphis Business Journal, Memphis Parent, La Prensa, or The Best Times? What about smaller, digital-only newsrooms like the neighborhood-focused High Ground News and the justice-oriented MLK50? Are Memphians equipped to sift through the clutter, internet noise, and propaganda to access the range of information and basic utility daily newspapers still bundle in print and online? Can other local news sources fill the void? That’s the big question.

About the Carnage …

The media-consuming public craves blood, so here it is: During the period between 2008 and 2017, newspapers shed nearly half their editorial workforce, according to data from Pew Research. During roughly the same period, one in five newspapers shut down nationwide.

The Expanding News Desert comprehensive report put out by the University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Journalism in 2018, pegged the number of U.S. newspapers closed since 2004 at just under 1,800. The negative trend continues uninterrupted due to media consolidation, and the one-two-punch of changing technology and reader habits. But hedge funds also fundamentally changed the nature of newspaper ownership when they bought in during the Great Recession, circa 2008. During that period, advertising revenues and the price of newspaper companies bottomed out, transforming the market from a predictable “buy/hold” environment into a five-year flipper’s game.

The UNC report shows more than half the country’s newspapers changed hands in the last 15 years: “Many have been sold two or more times.” The Commercial Appeal, for example, a Scripps-Howard product since 1936, was merged with Journal Communications in 2015, then, just a few months later in early 2016, Journal Communications was obtained by Gannett. In January, 2019, Gannett received an unsolicited acquisition proposal from MNG/Digital First Media, the newspaper company owned by Alden Global Capital.

Self-inflicted Wounds

You’ve probably read stories about the newspaper industry’s decades-long struggle to staunch its slow readership bleed-out. Most of these stories focus on technological change or popular ideological narratives, and every one of them is misleading. Without a doubt, the most drastic newspaper consumer loss of the past 20 years was self-inflicted.

In 2008, for the purpose of reducing costs related to wages, ink, gasoline, and newsprint, The Commercial Appeal curtailed its delivery in Arkansas, Mississippi, and outlying parts of West Tennessee. This change fit a national pattern, as major city dailies ended rural home delivery. This deliberate shedding of the newspaper’s most expensive customers heralded a new emphasis on digital distribution while killing readership that was never resurrected online. The change hedged calculated consumer loss against variable cost savings and the promise of virtually free digital distribution. The change aimed to save money but also made it harder to cover costs associated with newsrooms and the creation of original news content.

Ending rural and regional home delivery also contributed to the nationwide rise of what are now being called “news deserts,” a dynamic that worsened with corporate acquisition and subsequent shuttering of hometown and family newspapers in places where 40 to 60 percent of the population may not have broadband or wi-fi access. News deserts are most common in Southern states, according to the UNC report, and less likely to affect younger, whiter, and more affluent communities.  

Profit-minded investment companies with no historic ties to publishing or local media markets have been more inclined to sell or shutter underperforming acquisitions than previous ownership groups. Which brings our story back to Alden/MNG/Digital First’s bid to acquire Gannett’s papers. Ironically, The Commercial Appeal — in spite of being turned out of its landmark Union Avenue offices, and frequently embarrassed by insensitive, out-of-town editing — is producing some of its most relevant, energized work in years.

Nostalgia for a mythic golden age of journalism makes it fun to believe that relevant work pays the bills. It doesn’t. And it’s not hard to understand why critical evaluations of the newspaper business and its confusing impact on content, quality, and meaning can be experienced as an attack on weary editors and reporters doing the best they can with fewer resources and less material support.

Simply put: News reporting that changes policy at Juvenile Court or shows us how TVA may have endangered Memphis’ water supply or that equips readers to make better choices as citizens and consumers doesn’t create subscription or advertising revenue. Investigative reports and in-depth explanatory journalism may be the result of hours of interviewing, weeks of research, and months or years of institutional knowledge and beat coverage. The first draft of history is always expensive to make. But none of this is especially interesting to advertisers or general-interest readers.

“We’re used to writing an article and thinking all these people are reading because we had all this circulation,” Jones says, recalling her time at the CA. “Now, with digital metrics, we know that’s not always true,” she says, illustrating an important point: The most important newspaper reporting isn’t always the best-read or most desirable for web traffic or circulation. It’s always been subsidized by softer content in a diverse bundle of professionally edited and curated information. This unpleasant fact makes the prospect of starting a fully digital, general-interest daily especially daunting — in an environment where only one in four digital news startups make it.

A New Hope

The Daily Memphian doesn’t yet share its number of paid subscribers, but the publication says monthly page-views clock around 1,400,000, and every morning the paper sends a news digest to 23,000 email accounts. Stories about University of Memphis basketball coach Penny Hardaway do very well. Stories about government and public affairs sometimes do, and sometimes don’t.

“Paid subscribers broke through the first year’s projections in a couple of months,” Barnes says. But he worries The Daily Memphian‘s big rollout may have set expectations too high. “We didn’t cover something on the first weekend, and got a ton of criticism,” he says. “People really thought we were going to cover everything right away, top-to-bottom, 24/7.”

Looking for an experience like the traditional print newspaper bundle, readers have asked for obituaries, comics, puzzles, and national and regional news that may be available elsewhere, but hasn’t been a regular part of the DM‘s mix.

Barnes responded to his first round of criticism by adding five reporters to pick up night and weekend work. He plans to eventually include AP news and additional soft content.

The riddle of the digital news Sphinx goes something like this: “How can an online startup produce enough original content across a broad enough range of consumer interests to build a big enough subscriber base to support a newsroom able to produce original content across a broad range of consumer interests?” Repeat that enough, and you’ll start to see the economic dilemma in an information environment where it’s tough to put content behind a paywall if comparable goods are available free, elsewhere.

Newspaper stories and digital posts are what economists call “experience goods.” You can’t know if a story will be interesting or useful unless you read it, so news organizations rely on columnists and star-reporters to give consumers and potential consumers some idea of what to expect before they buy. As a startup, The Daily Memphian had no brand recognition, so it hired marquee names from The Commercial Appeal: sportswriters Geoff Calkins and Chris Herrington, and food guru Jennifer Biggs. Barnes thinks bringing these known commodities onto a team rounded out with younger but experienced reporters is one of his fledgling newsroom’s big success stories.

“They already knew Memphis,” he says of his team. “There was no learning curve.” Additionally, The Daily Memphian distributes content acquired via partnerships with education policy newsroom Chalkbeat.org and the University of Memphis’ Institute for Public Service Reporting.

By now, at least some of you are probably asking, “Who cares about newspapers?” It’s taken as an article of faith the traditional models are dying, right? But remember Jacinthia Jones’ opening comments about how the agencies know when you’ve got “no backup.” Now figure in a related piece of collateral damage: Between 2005 and 2010, while so many newspapers were biting the dust, the number of Freedom of Information Act requests being filed by government watchdogs dropped by half. This data was reported by James T. Hamilton, the Hearst Professor of Communication at Stanford, in his latest book, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism.
Hamilton answered questions for this story, and the data reviewed in Democracy’s Detectives and his earlier economic critique, All the News That’s Fit to Sell, inform much of this article. Hamilton’s work shows how trends like the ones outlined in this story, “point to a lower chance” of accountability stories being told by professional news organizations about local institutions.

“If the costs of discovering and telling stories drops radically, then it may be the case that subscriptions at the local level would support a smaller newsroom that would survive online,” Hamilton wrote in an email exchange, offering a ray of hope about the viability of local newsrooms. “If a nonprofit or local online service generates other goods, such as events that are ticketed or sponsored, that could also generate income,” he said, allowing that use of artificial intelligence may eventually make story discovery and assembly cheap enough that, “local subscription or nonprofit [models] might support a local bundle.”

Savages at the Gate

In late February, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a sternly worded letter to Alden Global Capital, expressing concern about what could happen if the hedge fund acquired Gannett newspapers. He’d already weighed in on the Senate floor, noting that Gannett was a troubled example of newspaper consolidation, plagued by layoffs and delocalization.

Schumer’s worries were at least a little ironic, considering what Memphis stands to lose if there’s a takeover. Hedge fund-backed owners like MNG/Digital First depend on deep layoffs and cost-cutting, including the outsourcing of back office, sales, and certain editorial duties to central hubs, far removed from the places where news is gathered and where the paper is circulated and primarily read. They sell a newspaper’s real estate holdings and other tangible assets, squeezing all the assets for cash. As the UNC report shows, there’s always been a willingness to sell poorly performing properties or to close them entirely, “not so much to inform the public or hold officialdom to account, but to supply cash to use elsewhere.”

In other words, so much of the worst that might happen has happened already. And yet, to borrow from Bloomberg.com columnist Joe Nocera, when MNG/Digital First moves in, the layoffs aren’t just painful, “They’re savage.”

Epilogue

All newspaper news appears to be bad news. The trends are terrible. The outlook is grim. And yet, most of the people engaged in the act of gathering, organizing, delivering, and paying for the news seem determined, if not optimistic about finding a way forward. Barnes is hopeful he’s found the right business model to go paperless. Jones is excited about using text-based news delivery to close the digital divide. MLK50, a justice-oriented not-for-profit led by former Commercial Appeal columnist Wendi Thomas, expanded its capacity by joining the local reporting network for ProPublica, a national, not-for-profit digital newsroom.

Karanja Ajanaku says he has “some awareness” of what’s happening in the newspaper industry, but the executive editor of the Tri-State Defender takes a unique perspective. “We’re in growth mode,” he says, describing a plan to move the historically black newspaper’s online content behind a paywall. Diverse representation in Memphis newsrooms has sometimes been called out as problematic, and in a majority-black community he thinks the Defender has been underperforming its potential to serve everybody. “But we have to be able to do a deeper dive into the community, and to do that we’ve got to have reporters,” he says, returning to a more familiar theme. “We’ve got to have journalists. We’ve got to have editors — local people telling local stories. So we’re asking the community to help us help them, and we think they will respond to that.”

Excerpts from conversations with Jacinthia Jones of Chalkbeat, Eric Barnes of The Daily Memphian, Karanja Ajanaku of the Tri-State Defender, Wendi Thomas of MLK 50, and Mark Fleischer of StoryBoard: Memphis will be made available online at Memphisflyer.com. Commercial Appeal Executive Editor Mark Russell did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Q&A with Eric Barnes, President and Executive Editor of The Daily Memphian

CREDIT: Chris Davis

Chris Davis

Eric Barnes

The Daily Memphian, a new, ambitiously scaled and digital-only print news source, launched online this week. When the venture was announced earlier this year, the company’s president and executive editor Eric Barnes said such a venture became necessary when Memphis’ traditional “newspaper of record,” the Gannett-owned Commercial Appeal, lost considerable editorial autonomy. Many of the new startup’s first hires were marquee reporters and columnists siphoned away from the CA — refugees from the increasingly non-local local newspaper.

Barnes recently spoke with The Flyer in a brief but far-ranging conversation about sustainability, availability, representative news rooms, and the potential risks and rewards of going big and all digital.

Memphis Flyer: Obviously, you’re not starting from nothing. You’re building off The Daily News‘ legacy with so much banner talent direct from The Commercial Appeal. But with this launch, The Daily Memphian goes from zero to light speed in some ways. There’s lots of digital news out there, but a startup daily of this scale is barely charted territory. Do you feel the eyes of the industry on you or are you too busy to worry about all that?

Eric Barnes: I’m not worried about industry pressure, and there are people watching us. It’s been interesting. When we started talking to people nationally about other startup digital dailies, we talked to everybody from this really cool little website in Philadelphia to the Graham family that used to own The Washington Post and still owns a bunch of TV stations. It became clear that what we were after was quite a bit bigger and more ambitious than what other people were doing — and they were still incredibly encouraging about doing it.

Most people that have started something like this — for profit or nonprofit — have started very small and grown. We made the calculated decision that we would go big and launch with a really big staff, making a lot of noise by hiring talented, popular writers. And we would come out with a big editorial mission rather than a small mission we’d then expand upon. I think by and large nobody’s done that. At least none I’ve found. Though I’m sure someone from Des Moines or somewhere will call me tomorrow and I don’t mean any disrespect.

Subscription is hard. The tech is hard. The customer service is crazy hard. And on top of the mechanics, you also need unique content people are willing to pay for in addition to what they already pay just for digital access. And all of that’s in the context of a redundant media environment where the same information may be available in other spaces, often for free. How are you navigating all of this?

A few things. We wanted to come out with a good subscription signup process. So we went with a company called Piano. They handle everybody from Condé Nast’s online magazines on down. We wanted it to be simple, so there’s only one offer. We’ll have other offers down the road. But we wanted to be $7 a month, first month free. Don’t have to think about it or choose. I think a lot of online publications fail because they make it so hard to sign up. There are lots of options. You’ve got to tie it to your print subscription. You’ve got to enter a special code. It’s all intentional and understandable, but we wanted to keep it simple.

I’m probably going to overuse the word sustainability, so I’ll apologize for that in advance. You guys had, I think, $7 million at startup, which is pretty great. But this is a business where community-spirited billionaires with nothing but the best of intentions have struggled with the cost of building and keeping modern newsrooms. Is there enough revenue and readership in Memphis to support two full capacity dailies?

Obviously, we think so, but it’s not proven yet. We think our projections are modest and doable. We’re talking about, by year 5, having over 20,000 paid subscribers at a relatively low price point. We may go up from $7, but we’re not going to go up dramatically.
I’m not going to give you the paid subscription numbers that we have now, but I will say we’ve exceeded our expectations at launch quite dramatically. So, early signs are good but there’s no doubt it’s unproven. This is uncharted territory. I think we do know, to be a daily news source of high quality, and have the number of journalists you need to do that, I don’t think it can be free. There’s a place for free papers, I’m not saying it’s an impossible model. But to have a newsroom of over 20-people, covering the city on a daily basis, there’s not enough ad dollars out there. So many advertising dollars go to Google and Facebook, and there’s not enough left for the rest of us. We are going to have advertising, and we do have advertising. And we’ve exceeded our numbers on that too. But there’s definitely risk involved.

Do you hope to eventually be fully reader supported? You throw out the number 20,000 paid subscribers in 5 years. With $7 a month subscriptions, is that the number or is there a target number of subscribers for reader-supported sustainability?

Our goal is definitely to be sustainable so we don’t have to live grant to grant and constantly be raising money. For us to fulfill a mission of high quality journalism, people are going to have to participate in that. You see it at the national level. At the big metro papers like Boston.com, Philly.com, Seattle — papers that are below the New York Times but bigger than Memphis. They’re all going harder and harder on their pay wall. And they’re seeing success. It all comes back to, whether you’re for profit or not, you want to run your publication like a business. You want to pay your own way and don’t want to be forever dependent on fundraising.

Non-profit has been a big buzz in media for a while and I get a lot of it. But what I often find myself telling people is it’s not some kind of magic status that makes all the sustainability problems go away. All the same essential challenges exist. You’ve got to attract and retain an audience while also covering payroll. And you’ve got to provide content people want badly enough to pay for it. So maybe we can address myths and realities of non-profit, and how maybe it changes what you do as a publisher.

It doesn’t change a lot. There aren’t a lot of limitations that come with that status. We can’t do endorsements, but I don’t know that we would have done endorsements anyway. More and more local papers are moving away from endorsements. There are at least 200 non-profit news sources online around the country. Some have chosen a niche or advocacy, but there’s a full range of stuff. I tell people all the time, one of the most successful businesses in Memphis has to be Methodist hospitals, and they’re a non-profit. But a very sustainable non-profit. Revenue producing. High-quality employer and a big contributor to the community. I’m with you 100%, non-profit doesn’t solve the problem. And non-profit doesn’t make it easier.

You say you can’t endorse. But does this change in any way how you cover government or politics otherwise? Also, you’re a non-profit, but you sell ads? How does that work?

It does not affect the way we’re covering government or politics. There is a difference between advertising and sponsorship and if we bring stuff in that’s deemed to be advertising in the eyes of the IRS, it probably means we end up paying taxes on it. And that’s fine.

Watching our non-profit cultural institutions grow over the years I’ve noted how they are shaped by and service their audience and donor community — which they should, and even have to to survive. But it’s not the same as reflecting and serving the community at large. That’s a tough line to walk and I wonder how will TDM be publicly and proactively transparent?

One thing is, we’re trying to be as accessible as possible to civic groups, clubs, churches, or anybody who wants to get one of us to come speak. And I don’t mean that in a token way. It’s very interesting to meet people and hear what they like and what they are interested in and want. The board is transparent. All the board members are listed on the website. Beyond that, there are some things we won’t be transparent about. Somebody said everything we do editorially should be transparent and public. But I’m not going to do that. There are a lot of stories we’re working on and we want to be first to publish. So there’s a certain amount of privacy. In the end, what matters is what we do on the site and that we’re judged by the work we do on the site.

Can the public view your financials? See big donors. Is any of that required on your 990 tax form?

Everything required to be on 990s will be on 990s. The money’s been donated anonymously and that’s kosher. The money went through the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis and so that’s not required to be disclosed.

A lot of pre-launch criticism has focused on representation in the newsroom. I don’t want to be too redundant, but I tend to agree that when you take a birds eye view — or almost any view — there does appear to be a crisis of representation in Memphis print media. Do you think it’s a crisis? And, given an opportunity to build a newsroom from the ground up in a majority African-American city did you have any kind of strategy for building a more representative newsroom?

We were very intentional in trying to build as diverse a newsroom as we could. Both male and female and with people of color. We got close with female participation. We’re somewhere in the 45-percent range. We fell short on what we would have liked for people of color. We’re going to be 20-25-percent African American. That’s pretty standard. I’m not making excuses, but that’s just kind of the world we live in. The number of people of color in journalism is very, very small. The CA was in that range. Otis Sanford has talked at length about it. This has been a problem as long as he’s been in journalism. Even when newspapers were making huge profits, they were not able or did not find ways to crack that code and find ways to make newsroom more representative.

When we were hiring we had criteria. We wanted people with a print journalism background. We wanted people who had daily or near daily experience because the grind of that is not to be taken lightly. And we wanted people who are in Memphis and had covered Memphis for a long time. That meant we weren’t going to go out of market. And we weren’t going to hire kids out of college. So our pool of people was very small. That also meant, when a handful of African Americans turned us down for various reasons, our pool got really, really small. I’m proud of the people we’ve hired.

I get it. We see the world through our own eyes. I try see the world as broadly as I can but I’m still a 50-year-old white guy from Tacoma, Washington. That’s why it’s important for all companies, maybe newsrooms in particular, to be diverse. Because we see things through our own lens. The other part of this, I’ve said, and will keep saying, is that we should be judged by the work we do. If day after day after day the front page is a bunch of 60-year-old white guys who work and live on the Poplar corridor, then I’ve failed miserably. If the stories we write about don’t look like Memphis in all its complexity and diversity then we’ve failed.

We’ll come back to this more in depth later. I also want to talk about the digital divide a little. And also briefly, because I want to revisit this in depth at a later date in regard to another project I’m working on. But the post-pulp environment creates information monopolies. There’s this idea that “everybody has a phone,” but in reality there are so many obstacles to digital access. Is there a strategy for serving the whole community or are we approaching a kind of trickle-down theory of information?

We are going to be as aggressive and smart and creative as we can be in getting access to The Daily Memphian regardless of whether or not they can afford it. We don’t want to leave people out. Simple things. I believe we’re already free in the Shelby Co. libraries. We’ll get to the suburban libraries soon. We’re free to all teachers. We’ll possibly be free in schools and other public spaces where we can take down the paywall and make access available. Then we’re going to talk to more and more people. And I’m open to ideas about how we balance financial sustainability with access.

And can I say one more thing on the diversity front?

Sure.

We will be starting an internship program that’s for everybody — black, white, male, female. But we will have a particular emphasis for people of color getting into journalism. That’s another small but important way we can start getting more African-Americans, and more people of color into journalism.

The Daily Memphian is available now at  dailymemphian.com

Categories
News News Blog

‘Daily Memphian’ to Launch in Fall

CREDIT: Toby Sells

Toby Sells

Eric Barnes, president/executive editor of The Daily Memphian, unveils details of the new online newspaper on Monday.

Official details emerged Monday about the city’s newest media outlet, an online-only newspaper called The Daily Memphian, including the facts that the paper will have a paywall, will cost $7 per month, will be funded initially by a nonprofit, and will launch in the fall.

Rumblings, rumors, and speculation about the new publication began in May, with a post on the Smart City Memphis Blog. After that post came the departures of some of The Commercial Appeal’s most-known names — sports columnist Geoff Calkins, food and dining writer Jennifer Biggs, and editor and columnist Chris Herrington.

Similar departures of other key CA newsroom staff have followed, including reporters Clay Bailey, Tom Bailey, Marc Perrusquia, Wayne Risher, and photographer Jim Weber. Reporters have departed other newspapers, too, including Elle Perry and Michelle Corbet from the Memphis Business Journal. The current editorial staff from The Daily News will join The Daily Memphian as well.

Organizers of the new paper called themselves “a concerned group of Memphians, including key journalists and media professionals, recognizing the need for a strong, locally produced media sources.”

Eric Barnes, president and executive editor of The Daily Memphian, said the need for a new local publication came as The Commercial Appeal has been reduced in size and staffing and has lost local control. Gannett Co., the newspaper’s corporate owner, is based in Virginia. Much of the copy-editing, design, and other functions of The Commercial Appeal are out-sourced elsewhere.

“This effort will be of Memphis, not only in Memphis,” said Barnes. “The team will cover a wide range of Memphis-focused news, including politics and government, community and neighborhood issues, education, business and economic development, sports, arts and culture, and much more.”

James Overstreet, current editor of The Memphis Daily News, will be editor in chief. Terry Hollahan, also of The Daily News, will be managing editor.

The Memphian will also enter a joint venture with The University of Memphis Institute for Public Service Reporting. That unit will be led by Perrusquia and advised by former CA editor, Louis Graham. Investigative news stories created in the Institute will be published in The Memphian.

Here’s a full list of The Daily Memphian’s staff, as announced Monday:
Eric Barnes, president/executive editor
James Overstreet, editor-in-chief
Terry Hollahan, managing editor
Kate Simone, associate editor
Jim Weber, photo editor
Jennifer Biggs, food and dining editor
Geoff Calkins, columnist
Chris Herrington, columnist
Michael Nelson, columnist
Otis Sanford, columnist/editor at large
Clay Bailey, reporter
Tom Bailey, reporter
Michelle Corbet, reporter
Bill Dries, reporter
Yolanda Jones, reporter
Jonah Jordan, reporter
Elle Perry, reporter
Wayne Risher, reporter
John Varlas, reporter
Don Wade, reporter
Omer Yusuf, reporter
Kyra Cross, designer/copy editor
Yvette Touchet, designer/copy editor
Holly Weber, designer/copy editor
Houston Cofield, photographer
Patrick Lantrip, photographer/videographer
Natalie Chandler, video/podcast production
Madeline Faber, editor, High Ground News, in partnership
Jacinthia Jones, Chalkbeat TN, in partnership

Barnes said the staff will likely grow as the paper gets closer to its fall debut.

Toby Sells

Andy Cates, general partner and CEO of RVC Outdoor Destinations, serves as the chairman of Memphis Fourth Estate Inc., the nonprofit organization responsible for raising capital for The Daily Memphian.

The nonprofit behind The Daily Memphian is called Memphis Fourth Estate Inc. That organization is led by Andy Cates, general partner and CEO of RVC Outdoor Destinations.

Look for an updated story in this week’s print edition of the Memphis Flyer.

Categories
News News Blog

New Media Venture May Be Home for Calkins, Biggs, Herrington

CREDIT: G. Crescoli, Unsplash

G. Crescoli, Unsplash

Some new news-media venture is in the works in Memphis, sources close to the move said Thursday morning, and it may be the new home for some of The Commercial Appeal’s most-recognized bylines.

Though details are scanty, a read of the tea leaves in a Smart City Memphis blog post said that new venture might be the new home for sports columnists Geoff Calkins, food and dining writer Jennifer Biggs, and editor and columnist Chris Herrington.

Smart City Memphis said Biggs and Herrington have both resigned from The CA. Sports radio station ESPN 92.9 tweeted that Calkins, too, was leaving. Calkins has a show on the station.

New Media Venture May Be Home for Calkins, Biggs, Herrington

Smart City Memphis claimed that while the details weren’t readily available, the new venture seemed to stem from ”an aggressively expanding (The) Memphis Daily News.” However, sources said Thursday morning the new venture is not an outgrowth of that newspaper.

Eric Barnes, publisher of The Daily News, said he could not comment on the situation.

The Smart City Memphis piece harshly criticizes Gannett Co.’s stewardship of The Commercial Appeal, noting “that (Gannett) has in only three years, eviscerated even those fond memories of a time when (the newspaper) mattered so much to the Memphis region.”

A source said the new venture involves many people disappointed in what The CA has become.

Neither Biggs nor Calkins had formally announced their moves Thursday morning. However, the Smart City Memphis post accurately pointed to the resignation of Chris Herrington, an editor at The CA and author of the daily online “The 9:01” column, and of a new place for him to ply his trade. Herrington announced on his personal blog, “Sing All Kinds,” that Wednesday was his final day at The CA.

“In the absence of another compelling opportunity within this city, I may well have been there as long as they would have had me, though, like most Memphians I lament the paper’s shift toward being a corporate cog in a Nashville-centric Tennessee network,” Herrington wrote.

He said, while he can’t divulge much about his new employment situation at the moment, that “I’ll re-emerge later this summer, writing about many of the same topics in many of the same ways, but in different formats and at different frequencies.”

The Flyer will continue to follow this development and will update this story when new information comes to light.

Categories
Book Features Books

Eric Barnes’ The City Where We Once Lived.

In The City Where We Once Lived, we never learn of which city Eric Barnes writes. In its post-apocalyptic state, it could be San Francisco after the big one. With its rampant flooding, it could be post-Katrina New Orleans. With its clear line of delineation between the haves and have-nots, it could be Memphis.

The North Side of the city, divided from the South Side by a highway with a single overpass as egress between the two, is long neglected and blighted. Something has eroded the North, leaving it seemingly uninhabitable, and we’re only given hints as to what that something might be. Those who remain do so by choice, living wherever they choose. Our protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout, lives alone in a high-rise hotel. We see the North Side through his eyes from his lofty perch and as he wanders around the barren and desolate streets. Over time, we come to know his tragic story, but the information is parceled out by Barnes who is in no hurry to tell his tale.

Where his previous novel, Something Pretty, Something Beautiful (he’s also the author of the novel Shimmer) is all movement and adrenaline, The City is subdued, quiet and unsuspecting. The quiet, though, is punctuated by head-spinning action. A character asks, “What is your capacity for violence?” Barnes has a voice for violence and a heart of compassion, and the human element of his story is in neighbor helping neighbor. There is a dizzying moment of chaos followed by a beautiful moment when the citizens of the North End come together to help those from the South.

It doesn’t matter the city because its inhabitants’ behavior is universal. The North End is a land of sameness, of routine, and this may be the truest element of any post-apocalyptic story. How many of us, faced with the end of civilization as we know it, would take to the road to search out like-minded societies or create such a society ourselves? Who would fight zombies to the death while foraging for a cure? Not many, I suspect. Instead, we might be more apt to surrender and lie down on a sofa under the cover of blankets. And that’s just what the hero wants to do here. His memories weigh him down, yet he goes to work every day to put out a newspaper for the North Side. Maybe it’s the momentum of routine that will keep us alive come the end of days. In his wanderings around the city, researching the history of long-empty buildings and grim neighborhoods, he comes across people in the same situation — a woman working at the water pumping station, a security guard at the abandoned airport. The people of the North End keep doing what they’ve always done because, dystopia or not, everyone needs a purpose.

Though the city and characters remain nameless — the woman and the boy, the preacher, the gardener, the pressman — there is a lot going on here: climate change, industrialized pollution, man-made flooding. There is also the possibility that this isn’t an isolated case, but that it’s happening in communities worldwide. But maybe Barnes is making a simpler statement. He writes, “The South End is the suburbs to the North End. The sprawling, senseless suburbs that will also someday be abandoned. You can’t build places of substance and duration only as an antidote to what you have for so long neglected.”

We learn that, as the problems with the North End became apparent, the citizens and politicians gave up on it and escaped to the south. As a result, the South End is overcrowded, congested with traffic, and a place where “surfaces of everything are like plastic, the neighborhoods finished along sharp lines and dull curves that are repeated, again and again, on every house, every block, every subdivision for many miles.”

Barnes doesn’t name his city because this is every major metropolitan city in America dealing with sprawl and neglect and blight and a citizenry far too accommodating of the easy way out. Our man in the North End doesn’t take the easy way out, and, in the end, it’s a life worth fighting for.

Eric Barnes signs The City Where We Once Lived at Crosstown Arts, Saturday, April 14th, 6 p.m. Benefiting Overton Park Conservancy.

Categories
News The Fly-By

New News

In a time when newspapers are struggling, the company behind The Daily News has decided to launch a free weekly newspaper.

“We are definitely taking a contrarian position,” Daily News publisher Eric Barnes says of the upcoming Weekly News venture.

Barnes, who describes himself as an “addict” to the trade site Editorandpublisher.com, calls the news and commentary about declining advertising revenue and layoffs at newspapers a “litany of despair.”

But Barnes isn’t worried. While most newspapers are suffering, The Daily News, which has a circulation of 3,000, has managed to remain stable and, according to Barnes, even grow a bit.

“Five years ago, if I told someone I was editor for The Daily News, they didn’t know what I was talking about,” Barnes says. “Now people tell me they either pick up the paper, or they read it online.”

So if The Daily News is growing in spite of industry trends, why launch another newspaper?

“We were asking ourselves how to capitalize on our growth,” Barnes says. “There are some limitations for the daily. For starters, it’s daily. It’s here and then it’s gone, and people want a little more shelf life for their ads.”

“We also wanted a purely editorial product,” Barnes says, noting that The Daily News is only a third editorial, with the rest of the paper divided between public records and public notices.

“People read those public records, and I can talk till I’m blue in the face about why advertising against that content is smart. But advertisers are always right, and they like to advertise against editorial,” he says.

The Daily News is priced at a dollar a day at a time when people are coming to expect free content.

The Weekly News is slated to hit the streets on June 18th.

“We’re shooting for about 10,000 [issues],” Barnes says, adding that 20 percent of the initial circulation will be forced circulation, or delivered directly to non-subscribers. Eighty percent will be available for free pickup at 150 distribution points around Memphis.

“Seventy-five percent of the weekly paper’s editorial content will be lifted from the daily editions,” Barnes says. Original content will fill the remaining 25 percent.

“We’ll have a cover story, a restaurant review, and a cultural review of some kind. It’s a real opportunity for us to do a lot more in-depth reporting,” Barnes says, adding that most of The Weekly News‘ cover stories will be written by former Commercial Appeal reporter Bill Dries.