USA TODAY International Edition
‘Merchants’ casts grim eye on news business
One of the facts bemoaned by traditional journalists in the current state of the news business is that, with a growing banquet of news to offer on any given day, in any given hour, consumers are opting for boiled down listicles and scannable reads.
It’s the antithesis in style to what The New York Times used to embody, particularly by its former senior editorial leader, Jill Abramson, the first woman to serve as the paper’s Washington bureau chief, managing editor and executive editor – the top job in American print journalism.
But as everyone knows , Abramson didn’t last long at the top; just three years. In May 2014, she was fired for allegedly poor management and being too “difficult” for even hard-boiled Times journalists to handle.
Her account of what happened as laid out in her new book, “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts,” is absorbing and fair – and it’s likely the first section many journalists will turn to.
“There was no simple reason I was fired. I was a less than stellar manager, but I also had been judged by an unfair double standard applied to many women leaders. Most of all, I became the first woman editor at a very bad time in journalism,” she writes.
Now comes “Merchants,” published Tuesday (Simon & Schuster, ★★★☆).
Reviews have been generally positive, mixed with sharp criticism. There already has been a contretemps over whether she accused the Times of being biased against President Donald Trump in its coverage. She batted that away as an exaggeration of something taken out of context. A fair reading backs her up.
Now she and her publisher are dealing with more serious charges of factual errors and plagiarism lodged late Wednesday in a series of tweets on Twitter by a reporter for one of the four news organizations she examines in the book, Vice – which under her gaze does not come off as a journalistic paragon.
Simon & Schuster issued a statement Thursday promising revisions if warranted in the 534-page book. Abramson also issued a statement to USA TODAY that the passages in question involve facts that were imperfectly cited in her 70 pages of footnotes. “I wouldn’t want even a misplaced comma so I will promptly fix these footnotes and quotations as I have corrected other material that Vice contested,” she said.
Meanwhile, the book as published documents the crisis: Journalism may have not yet been annihilated but the barbarians are at the gate and banging hard. More news than ever is out there and more people than ever are in need of reliable information in order for democracy to function, Abramson observes.
At the same time, she reports, the journalism business model is stuttering and a steadier replacement is not yet obvious. Every news company struggles to produce a product for the digital age amid sharp staff cuts, while more consumers, marinated in “the internet is free!” assumptions, are unwilling to pay for it, Abramson says.
The author explores this grim state through the experiences of two legacy media titans, her former employer, the Times, and the Washington Post, fighting to retain their “values” in a maelstrom, and two digital titans, BuzzFeed and Vice, “improbable players” in an arena where social media drives large numbers of consumers to news.
“I was determined to capture this moment of wrenching transition – and to do it as a reporter, my first calling,” Abramson writes.
She has her pet peeves: The sometimes dishonest nature of clickbait headlines, designed to capture attention but promising more than they deliver. Tedious business meetings watching PowerPoint presentations of eyeglazing data charts. The “ridiculously” few women in senior editing jobs at the Times, a deficit she is most proud of improving during her tenure.
She is alarmed about the chipping away of the traditional wall between the news side and the business side. When the new CEO of the Times told her he expected new “revenue-producing products” to come from the newsroom, she snapped, “If that’s what you expect, you have the wrong executive editor ... The truth had flown out of my mouth before I could edit either its substance or tone.”
Abramson doesn’t see an entirely trouble-free future for any of her examined news organizations, despite their various successes. “All four are endangered,” she warns. That even goes for the Post, which was rescued in 2013 by its “white knight,” Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, who bought the familyowned paper for $250 million with the idea that “restoring its glory would be a contribution to democracy.”
For legacy media survivors, following the trials and tribulations of two newspapers may involve equal measures of envy, dread and schadenfreude. BuzzFeed and Vice may seem like alien entities.
Abramson traces how BuzzFeed began with a steady diet viral cat videos, but founder and “virality” genius Jonah Peretti and his team figured out how to connect with a mostly disaffected young audience through their emotions – at the “beating heart of the internet.” They pioneered a new business model – native advertising – and by the end of 2011, BuzzFeed had “pivoted” to original news reporting, beefing up its reporting staff with a goal of being taken seriously.
Vice started out as a print lads mag constantly pushing the bounds of bad taste in the quest to be “edgy,” which led to such outrages as “The Racist Issue.” In 2017, Vice’s 18 hours of footage of the deadly Charlottesville, Va., Unite the Right rally garnered a total of 50 million views and became the “defining image” of the violence, Abramson says.
Non-journalists may find “Merchants” dense and complicated, with something surprising or infuriating on every page. Journalists working today already know in their guts most of what Abramson is reporting, if not in the depressing detail she presents.
Abramson earns three stars for her thoroughness and insights, but this is not a beach read, and certainly not a happy read. Unless, of course, you believe journalists are the enemy of the people.