American newspapers aren’t used to groveling.
Before the internet gave advertisers more options, many newspapers had a monopoly on advertising – especially with the classifieds. Newspapers were cash cows. Smug cash cows. So smug they didn’t see what was coming their way.
As a commenter on Twitter put it this week: “The downfall of newspapers started with Craigslist. In 1995 I spent about $1,000.00 per week on employment ads between the Akron Beacon Journal and the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer. By 1997 I spent $0.00 on employment ads as we switched exclusively to Craigslist and employment agencies.”
He was reflecting on the closing this week of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. It was an extravagant edifice dedicated to America’s First Amendment professionals. But like so many newspapers, the Newseum couldn’t afford to stay open.
Here in Portland, Ore., our local newspaper was ending the year with a different kind of announcement.
“(W)e have what I believe is a major improvement to announce,” wrote editor Therese Bottomly. “We’re eliminating the comments sections on OregonLive. The ability to post new comments will be turned off Jan. 2, and existing comments will disappear.”
Her New Year’s resolution is to improve the conversations on The Oregonian’s website by doing away with comments. Brilliant. What kind of conversations will be left? Safe conversations. Controlled conversations.
As much as Bottomly and her staff might hate to admit it, the comments became part of The Oregonian’s journalism. With so many staff layoffs over the years, news coverage suffered. As the news stories became more thinly sourced, comments filled information gaps. Some commenters clearly had backgrounds and expertise in public education, environmental science, state government, law enforcement, mental health, real estate and the legal profession.
I only commented occasionally, but I always checked the comments to see where a conversation was going – particularly if there were gaping holes in a story. Chances are someone would provide added background or information.
Some contributors were crackpots. Readers can decide for themselves whether to read those comments.
What was most disturbing about Bottomly’s announcement was her lack of honesty.
She claims that most readers will be cheering her decision. If she’s hearing cheers, it’s from members of her staff who don’t like public criticism of their work. Some journalists are surprisingly thin-skinned. Other cheers she is likely hearing are from people who can’t believe that progressive Portland has residents who don’t share the progressive agenda.
Undoubtedly, Bottomly didn’t like getting complaints about the comments. There were a lot of them – especially because The Oregonian’s moderators aggressively censored comments, sometimes inexplicably so. I once sent her an email asking why a comment I had posted had been deleted (it concerned something I had observed during a floor session at the legislature). She replied she was tired of getting complaints about the comments.
Well, OK.
There are better ways of dealing with it. Those comments represent a lot of energy from some of the most passionate readers of The Oregonian. Bottomly is slamming the door on them. She is either taking them for granted – or dismissing them as deplorables.
I worked at a newspaper in the mid-1990’s that decided to experiment with shortening news stories like USA Today. The stories on section fronts could not jump inside. The reason for this? To attract more readers who don’t like to read.
But what about the readers who did like to read? It was assumed that they would stick around, even if the quality of the newspaper changed. That didn’t happen.
Now there are many other options for people who want to read. Not many focus on local news. Those that still do, like The Oregonian, are floundering. (Even in its flush days, The O played it safe. It sat on the story of Portland Mayor and Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt having sex with his underage baby sitter.)
Last year I started visiting Quillette.com. I had never heard of this website until a Portland photojournalist named Andy Ngo was roughed up by antifa protesters. Ngo has worked on Quillette and is frequently dismissed by local media as “right-wing.” (In Portland, if you’re not progressive you’re either irrelevant or a punching bag.)
Quillette is described as “a platform for free thought. We respect ideas, even dangerous ones. We also believe that free expression and the free exchange of ideas help human societies flourish and progress.” Its editors are based in Sydney, Stockholm, London and Toronto.
Just as Quillette has seen journalistic opportunities in America, so has Britain’s 191-year-old magazine “The Spectator,” which began an American edition last year. I subscribe to both “The Spectator” and Quillette Circle, the conversation site. Mostly I read the comments. They cover the political spectrum and confront head-on subjects that the American media tip-toe around.
For example, one of the more popular essays from 2019 was on a school discipline technique called “room clears.” When a student throws a tantrum that could endanger classmates, the teacher evacuates the other students until the angry one is calmed.
According to Max Eden, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, “56 percent of surveyed teachers and parents in Oregon now report having experienced a room clear in their or their child’s classroom over the last year. … The emergence of room clears is a product of several fashionable education-policy trends designed to protect the rights of troubled students, often with little regard for the rights of their classmates.”
Eden notes that this approach has received praise from the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as the Trump Administration’s Department of Education.
The comments did what political conversation is supposed to do: provoke thinking in the search for answers. Some of Quillette’s commenters would never find a home at an American newspaper:
“What we’ve got here is the classic deviance defined down. It is the degradation of civil society,” writes Quillette Circle commenter Jonfrum. “So what happens when the same student starts shouting ‘Nigger!’ or ‘Faggot!’ while disrupting the class? I think I know.”
A brave, unflinching observation. Had Bottomly allowed a comment like that to appear on The Oregonian’s website, she – or one of her underlings – would have been forced to apologize.
Perhaps another Craig Newmark – the guy who invented Craigslist – will come along, take a look at all the energy being expended on comments at news websites and figure out a way to harness them – and make money.
Meanwhile, Bottomly wants readers to “Like us or follow us on Facebook.” Why? Isn’t Facebook that outfit run by the Russians who elected Trump? Amazing how the media can flip-flop when it suits their purposes.
Ironic that The O’s ending of comments coincided with the closure of the Newseum. The news museum included a stainless steel reliquary containing trace remains of Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Kent Potter and Keisaburo Shimamoto — four journalists who lost their lives covering the Vietnam War.
Think of the courage those journalists had. Poor Therese Bottomly can’t handle the people’s comments.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
Newspapers: Nobody Knows Anything
The Reincarnation of Al Neuharth
My background’s in law enforcement. I think the last time I tried to post a comment on OLive was the night Hardesty got elected under a different handle that I use here. I said something about Dani Outlaw polishing up her resume to get out of Dodge. She’d be gone in a year. I wasn’t far off turns out. My comment didn’t pass muster.
You failed to mention Bottomly has a sister who’s a judge. Is that why she’s so worried what Judge Hernández thinks? A little guy wants to talk back to a judge in the comments Is a fair trade. Judges can make bad decisions.
Thank god I’m retired.
I did know that Bottomly’s sister is a Multnomah County judge. Maybe Bottomly feels more comfortable in that rarefied world. In her column about ending comments, she said it made her “wince” when federal judge Marco Hernandez said the biggest threat to judicial independence “are blog posts written about the decisions judges make.”
What kind of newspaper editor would be sympathetic to a statement like that from someone as powerful as a federal judge?
Consider some of the decisions Hernandez has made. In 2018, he ruled that “transgender” students have the right to use whatever restroom they feel like.
Hernández said if parents didn’t like it, they were welcome to pull their children out of school. Isn’t it terrible that some folks might have an opinion about that?
Although Bottomly was cowed by the judge, The Hill website allowed more than 300 comments on this decision by Hernandez. The Hill also offered readers the option to hide comments. That option probably wouldn’t have soothed Hernandez or important sources that Bottomly wants to protect from criticism. They want to shut down opinions they can’t control.
Mims Rowe prepared the ground for this, this implausible imitation journalism.
Jack Ohman descended into pure hackery while plumply confident in the wit and insight of his cartoons.
It was from Ohman that I learned of the newspaperman’s thin skin. I wrote comments that parodied the viewpoint in his cartoons and he pretty quickly banned me.
An anecdote worth repeating was an event I attended with Dulcy Mahar as the featured speaker. It was in this century. She praised the present and future of journalism.
I brought up the statement made by Evan Thomas after Newsweek condemned Duke lacrosse players for a racist rape they did not commit: “The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.”
She doddered a bit in reply but stuck by her observation and was applauded for her answer.
The only museum journalists like this merit is one that freely employs a taxidermist.
Dulcy Mahar should have stuck to gardening advice. The applause was probably from her long-time gardening fans who doted on her. She knew her way around plants but wasn’t too insightful about the future of journalism.
OregonLive is less lively without the comments. Ms. Bottomly might be surprised who some of her commenters were. I’ve met her socially. A former state representative I know monitored the comments on political issues to get a feel for what a cross-section of the public really thought, minus the filter of media and consultants.
I’ve been reading The Oregonian a long time and the only thing it seems to be capable of holding on to is the attitude.
The O’s attitude, not surprisingly, matches the attitude of Portland: We’re special. It’s all those “Portland values,” I guess.
I would love to know what recently departed Police Chief Danielle Outlaw really thought of Portland. The local media immediately turned her into a mini-celebrity. I bet no cop-watcher in Philly follows her around with a video camera while she’s grocery shopping.
The ultimate end of the O is now in sight. So thin-skinned they can’t take often valid criticism from anonymous readers. Does Bottomly forget that for DECADES only 5% of the better read and opinionated subscribers actually read. much less commented on the Op/Ed pages. Bob Landauer and Bob Caldwell, and even even Rick Attig and Erik Lukens (still on this mortal coil) are likely mortified. The simpering “op=ed” by AG Rosenblum is typical of the meek, apologetic, gutless tone of what will now pass for “op ed.” Of particular amusement is the O comparing themselves with two unheard of small papers who ditched comments, NOT the NYT, WaPo, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, etc.
etc. So ends journalism, not with a bang, but a whimper
I had a friend who was born and grew up in Portland but moved away in the early 80’s. She comments on the changes to The Oregonian and told a story about her father and brother having a discussion about Marijuana legalization back in the early 80’s. The father said that even if you could get a measure on the ballot it would fail because The Oregonian would “never allow it”. Unless you have lived here awhile you really can’t absorb the monopoly The big O had way back then and how far it’s fallen. We still keep our subscription after over 30 years (and it’s not cheap). Old habits and attitudes die hard.
I believe it. I grew up for a time in a family that subscribed to the morning Oregonian and the afternoon Medford Mail-Tribune (a Pulitzer winner, too!) Back then The O was truly a statewide newspaper. I left Oregon for about 25 years, but I know you’re right about the monopoly The O had. Ultimately, it made them unprepared for competition.
Bottomly’s reference to Judge Marco Hernandez wincing at the comments speaks to how much the paper’s influence has shrunk. The guy’s a federal judge, appointed for life. She’s concerned about upsetting him? Like Jason says, The O is ending with a whimper, not a bang.
It’s nice of you to continue supporting them. Almost an act of charity.
Well, let’s not forget the Journal.
How could I forget the Oregon Journal! In my senior year at the University of Oregon, I was a Eugene correspondent for the Journal. Only two stories stick with me. One was a private plane crash that killed several members of a Eugene family, and I had to get quotes and photos from relatives. The other story was about a blind newspaper boy who delivered papers in Eugene. I should track that story down and see how his life turned out.
Ala Ring Lardner Jr.
Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.
Shut up he explained.
And of course, there is this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXiQlPGqT7I
Paradoxically, it is because of the dominant “Shut up” culture that has emerged in the media, schools, and politics that I am optimistic.
People will simply not shut up for very long, especially when their lives and families are being damaged thru silence.
In a somewhat related digression recently I was on the receiving end of a shut up variant:
I was called to eject the male half of a black couple from the bar.
Earlier in the evening I had worked diligently for the wife to put right a gaming machine error that had cost her 20. At that time he was speaking in a very loud injured voice that made it difficult to walk thru the steps a woman from the state was providing via the phone.
Later, after the server called me I went into the bar. He was pretty well along in a racist rant. I got him to walk outside to get a taxi. I mostly did this by either being quiet and listening or offering conversational alternatives as we moved. She was silent, the taxi came and they left. The next day I called her at home to ensure that her 20 had been returned.
At work the night after the incident night a new black security employee asked me if I’d heard what happened after I had left and got the man into the taxi? I had, a Ukrainian immigrant went on about “niggers” in the bar until he turned around and saw my co-worker at which point he became craven in his apologizes.
I told our new man that if this was about the Eastern European idiot carrying on about “niggers” I had.
My saying the word pulled the trigger on repercussions that have yet to still. I mean H-E- double hockey sticks! Are we children?
Three hours earlier the night of the incident I reprimanded a black fellow for driving his truck into an area I had barricaded to prevent such action. The guy got chin to chin with me and apropos of I know not what shouted the word in my face. He then told me if he caught me off of the property…
My response had been, yeah, yeah…move your truck and don’t drive through my barricades again you block-headed son of a bitch.
Lenny Bruce had an effective routine about this word. And, you have to admire the Gays ability to seize the denigrating language used to injure them and own it (however, I’d really like gay back).
The fetishistic appropriation of the term has been an unmixed evil.
“My saying the word pulled the trigger on repercussions that have yet to still.”
So you successfully handled and defused a situation that could have turned violent after one man lost his temper, and you worked to help his wife get her $20 back. Would the new guy have been able to handle that call with the same success?
I have to wonder if your new black coworker was setting you up, hoping you’d use “nigger” after he used “nigger.” Anything to get some reparations.
I’m sick of people genuflecting before the sacred N-word. Do they have a clue what a true injustice is? Your work is especially dangerous in a place like Portland. Progressives here are more than happy to sacrifice other people’s well-being to serve their own politics.
It will take a monumental disaster — say a nuclear bomb dropped on Disneyland — before America’s social justice warriors realize they have been preparing for the wrong battle.
“Portland’s City Council passed new policies on Wednesday that will immediately ban all police bureau members from working with federal law enforcement.” I grew up near and loved “The Rose City” (now, The Skunk Cabbage City) and bemoan Portland’s feckless and perfidious Mayor and City Council presenting Portland as an international dysfunctional entity. Throwing Portland citizens and businesses, who provide the taxes and support for said city, under the bus, will likely be their undoing as reasonable citizens contemplate supporting anything emanating from the mayor and council. As I understand this new ordinance, reliable intel from federal sources that the mayor and city council members’ homes would soon be attacked would be forbidden. In that case, this would seem to be a helpful ordinance.
You appear to have given that ordinance more thought than the City Council did. I like your scenario. It would be sweet justice.