Nothing Sharper

Update: I did indeed revamp this piece for the Sacramento Press. The newer version is here.

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I penned the following opinion piece in response to an editorial printed by the Sacramento Bee’s publisher. It apparently didn’t meet their standards, but there’s no reason not to include it here. I’ll likely be revising it and submitting it to the Sacramento Press, but for now, this draft should do.

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Cheryl Dell’s recent column, It’s not a lack of readers, it’s a lack of advertising, was a worryingly misguided review of the newspaper business. Instead of focusing on the Sacramento Bee’s advertising draw, she should look at what that advertising supports. Put another way, it’s not the Bee that’s the problem, but the McClatchy Company.

I have no axe to grind against McClatchy specifically. The problem is that as a business, McClatchy has institutionally different goals and different definitions of success than do its subordinate parts, including the Bee. While McClatchy is (and should be) a profit-seeking corporate entity, the Bee is a member of our cherished free press, an institution enshrined in the Constitution and fundamental to our civil society. The Bee should be a civil servant in the best sense of the term, but investigative reporting naturally creates numerous conflicts with the profit motivation, and not just influence over which stories to run or editors to pressure.

For starters, consider that many papers nationwide, McClatchy-owned or not, are profitable in and of themselves but were required to make drastic cuts because their corporate owners incurred too much debt too quickly to maintain their business expansions. We Sacramentans do not deserve cuts in the quality of our primary news simply because McClatchy can no longer afford its 2006 acquisition of Knight-Ridder.

Consider also that though it is a sound business decision to develop corporation-wide platforms and standards, it undermines the charm of a local newspaper devoted to its city’s character. Instead of a newspaper tailored to the unique interests and values of Sacramento, we readers are treated to the same diluted content as other McClatchy readers. This is especially evident on the web. Given an amazing and infinitely malleable digital distribution medium, sacbee.com is a bland pixel-for-pixel rehashing of McClatchy’s Charlotte Observer. Blank out locations and names, and you cannot tell California from North Carolina.

Another sound business decision is to drop original reporting and editorializing in favor of already-ubiquitous feeds. These days, there are more ways to receive an AP news feed than there are AP stories, and the same is true of nationally syndicated columns. Unfortunately, the Bee does neither itself nor its readership any favors by reprinting what is already widely available and eliminating what it alone can provide: local news, local opinions, a broad and diverse forum for community discourse, and public scrutiny of local powers.

A strong newspaper would measure itself in its relevance to Sacramento, not its contribution to McClatchy’s share price. This means cutting back on wire and syndication reprints in favor of a renewed focus on local stories and local issues. This means celebrating life in Sacramento. This means redesigning the paper to reflect Sacramento’s unique character. This means prioritizing investigative pieces. Where advertising is concerned, this means pushing advertising quality over quantity, providing more column inches than ads.

It is true that the Bee needs to review its business model, but “business” shouldn’t be the model.