Savior of the industry

It's a rare glimmer of honesty that appeared in the Lansing State Journal this morning.

"I do believe there is a role for local ownership," (Billionaire Eli) Broad, a Michigan State University alumni, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"Can a newspaper do a good job being owned by someone at a distance? You know what the record is as well as I do."

This should be self-evident, but people tend to be confused by the same wrong-headed arguments that government should be run like a business. The idea that for-profit structures inherently are more efficient than are government ones is a sad one that passes for conventional wisdom these days. I've been in both government work and the private sector, and it's always been in the private sector -- under distant corporate owners -- where I've seen the most dizzyingly stupid and inefficient decisions made.

Today's corporate newspaper managers tend to think that you can still conduct quality reporting while cutting positions, forgetting that a key ingredient to reporting is spending time in the field, cultivating sources, and investigating. You can't do that with the work of two or three other people piled on top of you. You also can't do that, as a newspaper, after cutting positions that in a sense means cutting the number of beats properly covered. The slow death of environmental reporting is evidence of that.

The L.A. Times is kind of a new phenomenon. The old publisher refused to cut the newsroom staff, and was forced out. Now, watching the slow erosion of the hometown news product, local folks are no longer confident that far-flung corporate owners can deliver an essential service.

How is the State Journal reacting to this gorilla in its midst? By hiring someone to help market the paper to readers. Launching new products in new mediums but without significantly increasing the reporting staff isn't improving the product, it's just shifting the chairs on the Titanic, so to speak.