Back in the glory days of TV news getting an exclusive usually meant an entire day’s advantage over the competition; what with just the one daily evening newscast. If teased appropriately a good scoop would add viewership to that evening’s newscast but mostly it was a prestige moment that helped build the network’s news brand. So, a good scoop (or more rightly consistently being able to get scoops and exclusives) had a positive business impact, but much less immediate and tangible than newspaper scoops.

But what is a scoop/exclusive worth in the Internet age? At best a media outlet will have the story to itself for a few hours before it is cited, cross-linked, and tweeted all over the world by other outlets. Granted, an exclusive will drive some traffic to the website and might, might, MIGHT drive some advertising click-throughs. But people who are looking for a quick read on breaking news are highly unlikely to take the time for a diversion into web advertising.

No, the only real business driver for working a scoop in 2010 has to be for the prestige of it. It is purely a brand-building exercise.

If that is the case then the aim should be to get the story right AND first, or to be in-depth AND first. And if being first is not possible (say for an afternoon newspaper with a 9 a.m. deadline) then it seems the business case would say that being right and/or in-depth would trump the now very ephemeral advantages of being first.

Being first with a bullshit story is probably worse than not covering it at all. It ruins the news brand. Unless your “brand” is focused on whipping up a particular market segment and reinforcing their existing belief structures. Then it’s fine. But it’s not really news, its commentary and opinion

It seems to me that the business aim for entities in the actual news business — especially for web-only outlets — should be quality and depth of reporting that will create stickyness and build the brand. Stickyness is web-speak for having viewers stay on your site for more than a few minutes and view more than just the one page that you might have entered by via an external link. Better yet, to be compelling enough to entice people to come back and be regular readers or god-forbid, actual subscribers to an actual newspaper.

I guess none of this is really earth shattering. Unless you run the Clinton Herald, our local newspaper. In which case your local beat is consistently scooped by the Gannett outlet, The Quad City Times forty miles downriver. The Times also does a better job of driving traffic to the website with a full twitter stream of breaking news (the Herald tweets maybe once a day) but more importantly the Times has all of its news archived on the web site unlike the Herald which still seems to think that if it’s not ink on paper delivered to the door then it doesn’t count.

The Herald consistently embargoes content on the website to drive people to the paper edition. If I miss a local story in the dead-tree edition and it doesn’t make the cut to the web page three or four days after publication? I have to physically go to the friggin Library. Which I’ve done. Once.

What I’m getting at is that it just doesn’t make a lot of sense that if you have a near-monopoly on the local newspaper business and are, in the claims of the publisher, “consistently one of the most profitable papers in the company,” to be consistently lagging your competition from down-river. Gannett, like all major publishers has a huge debt-load (unlike the privately-held CNHI, the Herald’s parent) and is always cutting budgets to the bone. Considering the minor marginal costs of placing additional, non-print content to the website and driving traffic and adding value with Twitter feeds, it would seem like a no-brainer.

In re: McCrystal. A couple of things that should pop right out as the nut graphs of this whole affair but that (typically) have been totally buried by the media in the whole scandaliciousness frenzy surrounding the Rolling Stone article by , Michael Hastings. One, Rolling Stone still does some awesome journalism. Two, mainstream media=total failure.

The sense of wonderment that pervaded on most of the TV puditocracy, e.g. “How is this guy ever going to get access again?”

Access isn’t the point because he’s now got the story of his life. Fuck access. See John Stewart.

And it was an outstanding bit of journalism. The “scandalous” stuff was really in the first 500 words. The rest of the article is a very illuminating piece on Gen. McCrystal — a soldier’s soldier if ever there was one — and our strategy in Afghanistan. For those of you who can’t be arsed to read 1,200 words of the most important journalism of 2010 here are the nut graphs of the Hasting’s piece:

The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they’ve been distorted as they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. “Fuck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fucking gun on,” says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. “I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they’re all fucked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don’t understand it themselves. But we’re fucking losing this thing.”

Later on:

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal’s side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn’t hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France’s nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. “Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan,” he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. “It’s all very cynical, politically,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. “Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there’s nothing for us there.”

Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. “Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem,” says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. “A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we’re picking winners and losers” – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word “victory” when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.

Of course, Stanley McChrystal is not in charge any more is he? And what we are not getting right now is any kind of rational debate on exactly what the fuck we are planning on with regards to an exit strategy for a war that has drug on for one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-NINE years and shows no sign of being over inside of a decade.

It seems to me that in our hate and fear of Al Quaida is holding hands with with a whole series of national neuroses that we can bundle up under the label, Vietnam Syndrome, e.g. support the troops at all costs, keep the faith, the illusion that winning only requires enough will power and the right strategy, etc. ( Read the article for why all of this is relevant in regard to Gen. McCrystal in particular but for the current generation of military upper brass in general.)

Looking at Vietn… sorry, Afghanistan through those lenses we have totally overlooked the really important thing about war in general; it is supposed to further the national interest.

A U.S. Marine, from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has a close call after Taliban fighters opened fire near Garmser in Helmand Province of Afghanistan May 18, 2008. The Marine was not injured. (REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic)

Outside of finding and killing some murderous douchebags hiding out (mostly in Pakistan) in caves and mud huts — a job that can be done by a few handfuls of drones, spies and special operators — where is the national interest in spending hundreds (if not thousands) of billions of dollars and thousands of lives here?

Hundreds of billions of dollars. Do you have any idea what we could have done with that (borrowed) money? For the war in Afghanistan we could have built a coast-to-coast high speed railway. We could have sent every graduating senior in America to four years of college for the past nine years. We could have had free freakin’ healthcare for everyone.

In today’s episode, the Newspaper Industry. To recap: newspapers are going broke. The large multi-paper conglomerates overspent in the 80′s and 90′s and loaded themselves down with debt. So, even though their flagship newspapers are still doing okay, they cannot meet their debt obligations. See: The Tribune Company. Other papers are seeing one of their main revenue sources, classified advertising, eaten away by Craigslist, et. al.

For smaller papers, lower revenues mean a smaller “news hole” and fewer reporting resources. This leads to a downward spiral where there is less original, local reporting, the relevance of the newspaper decreases, readership – already hemorrhaging to the web – decline further through disatisfaction and so on.

The news business is changing radically. There will be a new business model for printed news. The problem is no one knows what it is and there are darn few volunteers to find out among the big players. One thing is certain, in the future, ink on paper will only be a small part of a “newspaper’s” distribution model.

So, today’s post is from noted new-media observer and critic, Dan Gillmor, and Eleven Things I’d Do If I Ran a News Organizaton.
Example:

2. We would invite our audience to participate in the journalism process, in a variety of ways that included crowdsourcing, audience blogging, wikis and many other techniques. We’d make it clear that we’re not looking for free labor — and will work to create a system that rewards contributors beyond a pat on the back — but want above all to promote a multi-directional flow of news and information in which the audience plays a vital role.

But my personal favorite:

6. We would refuse to do stenography and call it journalism. If one faction or party to a dispute is lying, we would say so, with the accompanying evidence. If we learned that a significant number of people in our community believed a lie about an important person or issue, we would make it part of an ongoing mission to help them understand the truth.

Which seems to me not a New Rule at all, but a fundamental definition of what it means to be a journalist, period. The fact that we have to “reinvent” this is a sign of just how far mainstream news organizations have fallen from their core business in the quest for higher profits in the 1990s and to fight for survival in the 2000′s. And yes, I am looking across 6th Avenue South when I write this.

Per Gawker’s post:

But while cable news is niche, politics is mass. The chart above shows GOP party approval in as reported by New York Times/CBS in national polls going back to 2006 and Fox News’ total primetime audience, in millions, over the same time period. Fox News can and does thrive with a primetime audience of 2.5 million, many of which are the aforementioned zealots. The Republican Party needs more than that to function electorally. And the aforementioned angry zealotry that’s in vogue on Fox News is distasteful to the independent voters that the GOP needs to court.