From Maureen Dowd's NYT column: "Old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology."
San Francisco Chronicle editor-at-large Phil Bronstein seems to suggest that traditional journalistic notions of ethics, particularly when it comes to advertising, are outmoded.
Many L.A. Times journalists were outraged over a recent front-page NBC ad for the cop show “Southland” that was tarted up to look like a real news feature story (a tactic the paper repeated with an ad supplement for “The Soloist”).
“It’s one thing being marched to the gallows by an uncaring and unappreciative public, sentenced by shifting technological and cultural habits and a few bonehead moves of your own,” Phil Bronstein, San Francisco Chronicle editor at large, said in a blog, summing up the attitude of the 100-plus journalists at The L.A. Times who signed a petition protesting the “Southland” ad. “But it’s quite another having to go to your death stripped naked as a jaybird.”
When I met up with Bronstein in San Francisco — where The Chronicle was bleeding nearly a million a week last year — he said he thought the L.A. Times reporters had overreacted, and that newspapers should not be so prudish.
“The principle is a sound one — you don’t want to deceive your readers,” he said. “But I’m not all that convinced your readers are so deceivable. A lot of readers think we’re biased, and because we think we’re unbiased, we think they must be stupid. But they’re not. They’re just opinionated.”
Dowd asked Bronstein to take her on a justify-your-existence tour:
We drove around the city for hours, looking at places where journalism had had an impact. At police headquarters, he told of The Chronicle’s coverage of police brutality that forced the department to create a database tracking misbehaving officers. He talked about the paper’s AIDS coverage as we drove through the Castro and past San Francisco General Hospital, where the AIDS wards once overflowed. Parked outside the Giants’ ballpark, he praised the paper’s reporting on Barry Bonds and the steroids scandal, noting that “there are far fewer fly balls going out in the bay.”
His tour ended with cold comfort, as he observed that longer life expectancies may keep us on life support. “For people who still love print, who like to hold it, feel it, rustle it, tear stuff out, do their I. F. Stone thing, it’s important to remember that people are living longer,” he said. “That’s the most hopeful thing you can say about print journalism, that old people are living longer.”