Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Barry / Media Let's Have a Wee Look at the City Paper
Posted by Bruce Barry on Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 9:38 AM
The flashy wine thing with photo is nothing more than a link to a brief in Nashville Post's regular civil litigation roundup, which contains less than one sentence of information about the dude's wine collection.
In the "top stories" section, the first item on the state budget is certainly important news this morning, although Ken Whitehouse's well-written squib is more of a brief than a detailed story.
The next "top story," about the attorney general, is a link to a firewalled Nashville Post story that you can't read unless you are a paying NP subscriber.
The planning department item is an important piece of Nashville news this morning, but the link here is to an extremely brief (180 word) writeup that provides no detail or context for this latest development in the May Town Center saga.
The CMA Festival item is also (potentially) news, but the link here is to a skimpy 127-word bit of press-release journalism in a music industry publication.
The Titans-related item is an astonishingly thin morsel of non-news that maybe rates a mention as a sports brief for the NFL obsessed, but a "top story"?
And the last of the top stories, the Ramsey/Williams feud, is a link to a one sentence Kleinheider blog post that quotes and links to a 178-word knoxnews.com blog post from yesterday afternoon.
To be fair, we do find some reasonable (if sketchy) coverage of Monday's local budget and schools developments in articles linked under the "City News" heading. On the other hand, the five items this morning under the "City Business" heading (not shown in the screen grab) consist of four links (actually three because one is duplicated) to one- or two-sentence items from the Nashville Post business aggregator blog, and one actual business "story" -- a rewritten press release about O'Charley's outsourcing.
The CP has also stumbled badly in its blogging, which one would expect a news organization pursuing an online/offline mixed publishing model to take seriously. The Political Animals blog, still positioned atop the blogs window on the CP online front, hasn't seen a new post in 13 days, and has had just five new entries since the first of April. The Giant Steps pop culture blog is only a bit more active, with just three new posts this month.
Nashville is unquestionably better off with the CP than without it, so it's sad and disappointing to see so little actual journalism happening at what is supposed to be the city's other daily news operation.
Comments (5)
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Have you picked up a Nashville Scene lately? It's not much better. The Scene's news content has almost entirely vanished, as its now catered toward a 19-year-old indie rock audience. Former Editor Bruce Dobie's 2002 story on Watauga, recently cited in Pith in the Wind by Caleb Hannan, would have never found a place in today's Scene. If The City Paper doesn't cut it as Nashville's online source can the Nashville Scene really say it passes muster as the city's alt-weekly?
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Bruce,
I totally agree with your analysis. What has not been documented - and could stand to be - is the atrocious attrition and cuts at the City Paper since the new owners took over. I am sure they were done in the name of "right-sizing" but it reached a point of diminishing returns some time ago.
The paper no longer has a courts reporter or a capitol hill bureau, instead sharing copy from the Nashville Post on these beats - and rather sketchy, brief copy as you correctly point out. These two beats use to be a mainstay for the City Paper, but they have abdicated this part of their mission. Their coverage of the courts system used to be the most in-depth in the city, rivaling the days of Kirk Loggins at the Tennessean. Now it is all cops press releases and civil briefs from the Post.
The political and governemnt coverage has badly slipped as well. Quite simply, the paper does not appear to have enough reporters or editors. You can count the lack of bylines, It's easy math. By the way, the paper has stopped writing editorial altogether. There is no longer an editorial voice at the paper, just columnists. Sad.
I saw Albie's presentation to the business community not long ago about the new vision for the City Paper, moving into Web 2.0, but there is no evidence of it in the product. Albie was impressive as always, but the company does not seem to be giving its newspaper the resources it needs to do the job. The City Paper web site is devoid of copy, and the print edition has a glossy new cover which is just lipstick on a pig.
Thanks for writing this. It has been what everyone in town has been thinking and saying. It needed to be said publicly. Maybe the new masters over there will get the picture. Right now, it looks like Southcomm and the City Paper are prepared to go the way of the Nashville Banner. They would be lucky financially to meet that fate. Staying as the product is now, that mine as well have already happened.
I want to highlight Playmaker's observation about the CP abandoning house editorials. When it sent Clint Brewer packing and put two different individuals in charge of the two paper editions each week, I wondered how the paper's editorial voice would adapt. Southcomm's Chris Ferrell told me at the time that it would evolve, but apparently evolution turned into extinction.
The Tennessean largely neutered its own voice when it went to the full-page-topic format on the editorial page a couple of years ago. Although that approach yields a worthwhile and even provocative multi-faceted take on an issue a few times a month, the rest of the time it varies from trivial to silly, manufacturing pro-con arguments on topics where disagreement is elusive, or else just offering up three vapid opinion pieces taking the same uncontroversial position. (Today's page on the state house charter schools kerfuffle is one of the potentially good ones, although the arguments presented on both sides are painfully superficial.)
Hence the CP's abandonment of editorials means Nashville doesn't really have a meaningful newspaper editorial voice. These are tough times for newspapers, but this really leaves a big hole in the city's political culture. (And yes, the Scene isn't filling it either.)
