Paper boy: Ken Auletta's Gotham-centric musings on the media - Backstory: Inside the Business of News - Book Review

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2004 by James Warren

At the same time, the elitism decried by Ailes is in evidence when it comes to the skepticism, verging on outright condescension, which Auletta displays toward any tampering with a church-state divide of news and business or sharing content among different realms of media companies. Thus, the executives who run my giant company "blather endlessly about synergy" and their editors threaten to lose their "keep-your-distance watchdog" role by cooperating with the business side of their operations (this appears in an unflattering piece, dotted with puzzling factual errors, on Tribune Co., in which, nevertheless Auletta treats my days as a Washington bureau chief with great and much appreciated generosity. A pre-scient 1997 piece on the ham-handed boss of the Los Angeles Times, a bottom line obsessive brought in from General Mills and later forced out amid a newsroom scandal, cites a magazine publishers' conference at which "partnerships" with advertisers were encouraged--"Whatever that means," Auletta hurrumphs at the mention of that ominous word.

He is also openly disdainful of market research, here betraying unadulterated naivete. The newspaper industry's many problems most certainly include a traditionally reflexive aversion to marketing and basic research. It operates with woefully small outlays for understanding its customers and hawking the product, spending less than one-half of one percent of its revenues on research--a stunningly low total when compared to the average big time consumer products company or TV station--and only slightly more on marketing. Precious few industries know, and care to know, as little about what customers think of their daily handiwork.

For sure, broadcast executives may lamentably be enslaved to research, given to changing the wardrobe of anchors or playlists of jocks overnight if viewers and listeners decline. But newspapers' heavy reliance on anecdote is no less troubling, and is surely one reason for the unceasing decline in readership, and lack of interest among youth. To devote substantial sums to market research, or fully to understand advertiser concerns are not the unseemly exercises Auletta believes them to be, especially if one genuinely learns from both, rather than becomes their lapdogs (as we all readily concede that television, radio, mad many magazines do). A year ago, I created a new Sunday features section for The Chicago Tribune and have spent time pitching that section to advertisers. And why not? I know more about the section than any Tribune ad sales executive, Have I offered any editorial deals or hinted that I might alter content to make my interlocutions feel cozier? Not for a second. But my mere presence in a room with a Target executive would seem, in Auletta's eyes, to relegate me to the rabble of amoral hucksters and carnival barkers because I've crossed the Rubicon between journalism and commerce. Hogwash. I'll match my department's ethical strictures with that of any media organization in the land (excepting, I suppose, the saints at C-Span or Consumer Reports.)