Playing in the big leagues

My name is Matt Beagle III, and I come from Akron, Ohio. I’m an expert on the media by virtue of academic and professional training but also because I’ve devoured media content since I was old enough to read. Although I’ve never worked for The New York Times or The Washington Post, I’ve read them since I was a junior in high school and preparing to apply to colleges. Plus I have some friends who work for both of those papers and others at other major newspapers, magazines and television stations.

It’s no secret that the mainstream media are in crisis. Many of my friends in the media are out of jobs. Sometimes I feel a twinge of guilt when I realize I’m making a living off of writing about a dying industry, but somebody has to do it, and in the end I may help it resurrect itself.

It’s hard not to pine for the good old days. When I was in grade school, our media leaders were healthy, journalists had steady jobs and the public was happy. We had two newspapers in my home city, one that came out in the morning and the other in the afternoon. They took different editorial slants - one was Democratic, the other Republican - but they co-existed peacefully, and many families including ours took both papers. There was something reassuring about the slap of the paper as the delivery boy would hurl it onto our front porch.

We didn’t buy The New York Times back then except on Sundays. But the best columnists, the ones who set the policy agenda, were syndicated and carried by one or the other of our local newspapers. I was too young to read Walter Lippmann, but James Reston carried the banner after him and both were cut from the same cloth. In those days a citizen could trust the best columnists to tell them the truth and how to vote.

Something very fundamental changed when our town and many others lost one of their two newspapers. I consider it a watershed moment in our media history. I know many attribute it to the loss of industries that employed workers who were the traditional buyers of afternoon papers. To that extent, they were victims of structural changes in our economy. (Brought on by the Japanese and the Koreans, but that’s another story.) I wonder if the end of two-newspaper towns did not presage the de-intellectualization of our populace, or something like that.

TV was important but could co-exist with newspapers. There were three channels and for all intents and purposes each had but one national and one local news broadcast a day (no one watched at midday). All of them were good, although there was something more venerable about CBS and Walter Cronkite. NBC’s logo - a peacock - always bugged me, and ABC was an upstart. But as I said, they co-existed, and I don’t think they greatly harmed newspapers. 

Of course all of that changed with cable television. Ever since cable, I have the feeling that we have lost control of our media. The breakup of AT&T meant the same for telecommunications. It was easier and things seemed a lot more stable when you had a heavy black phone with a rotary dial, a TV set with three channels (and maybe a Canadian station for hockey games) and newspapers with want ad sections, good sports sections and owners who cared about editorial quality and the bottom line.

So I actually saw our media industry heading downhill before the Internet, which has only hastened its demise. I call it the fragmentation of the media industry. Basically there are not enough people to support all of these media entities, and only the strong will survive. But of course people no longer demand the same quality, so there is no guarantee that the best journalism will win out.

On the other hand, I’m well aware that Facebook and Twitter cannot be ignored. They are very much on the playing field now. Politicians and corporations have understood that to reach the voter and consumer, you’ve got to use social media. I’m not a big user myself, but I recognize they can’t be ignored.

One of the ironies of the Rep. Weiner saga is that he fell on his own sword, so to speak. He had made good use of social media in his campaigning, and it was social media that brought him down. Life is full of ironies.

Now the other day I was reading The Wall Street Journal and I came across an interesting article. (I don’t read all of the Journal, but I know it’s something you have to pay attention to. I like the “What’s News” column, for example.) It talked about how the media company Thomson Reuters was making a major effort to crack the U.S. media market. Everyone knows that Reuters has been around for a long time but it’s not quite a household name in the U.S. In fact, finding someone who can pronounce Reuters properly (“Roy-ters”) is not easy, even on the East Coast, where I live.

I started looking into Thomson Reuters. I came across a couple of amazing facts which took me quite by surprise. First, it has 2,900 journalists. By my calculation, that’s more journalists than any other news organization in the world. I have no idea how there could be so many Reuters journalists and I’ve never met one of them.

Actually, that’s not true. I know quite a few of the new editorial managers in Reuters (you can drop “Thomson” when talking about the news side of the group) because many of them have worked in the past for such venerable media groups as The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. Reuters wants to succeed in the U.S. market, and so like the owners of a professional sports team, they are buying up existing talent who know how to play the game on U.S. soil.

The other amazing thing I discovered is that Thomson Reuters makes a great deal of money and that most of it comes from the financial sector. Media clients account for less than 5% of its revenues. So this is a news juggernaut that does not depend on fickle consumers and is not at the mercy of abrupt changes in the media market. It’s basically like Bloomberg, only older and it’s owner is not a mayor.

Still, it’s got to irk Thomson Reuters managers to be so big and yet so unknown in the most powerful country in the world. It’s understandable that they want to be part of the media elite in the United States and to be mentioned in the same breath as The New York Times and CNN. There’s nothing worse than having second-rate guests at the White House dinner.

But Reuters is going to have to get in the trenches with the rest of the media, and that’s not going to be easy. Where were they on the Anthony Weiner story - what I’ve dubbed the Battle of the Bulge? Were they first with the pictures? First with news that he would not step down? And first with news that he would? How many people re-Tweeted the Reuters Tweet?

Reuters might be big and strong, but if it’s not cited by Fox and CNN at the same time on the big breaking story of the day, it will never be a household name and its journalists will always labor in the shadows. There was only one Michael Jackson, for sure, but stories like his death are the meat and potatoes of the media market. Reuters better get ready for the next one. While it’s at it, it might want to look into talk that he never did die. ■