Letters

From the March 2003 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Woe is Media

Thanks to Matt Welch for strumming the pretenses of journalism's elite ("Woe is Media," December). The sweetest music to my ears was this: "It is hard to distract men so despondent with the news of such salutary post-1955 developments as female editors, 24-hour cable news, alternative weeklies, business journals, and fingertip access to 10,000 faraway newspapers."

How true. In my 13 years at the weekly Orange County Business Journal, I've seen our vaunted dailies, the Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register, endure several rounds of staff cuts. As I write this, the Times is putting the finishing touches on a regional approach to news coverage that has sharply reduced the paper's Orange County presence, while the Register is undergoing layoffs and other cost cuts as a possible prelude to a sale.

The OCBJ has recently felt the effects of a soft advertising market too. But we're still running in the black, and unlike the big boys we've managed to keep intact our record for never having had a layoff. Our success amid adversity is the kind of small-business story you'd think the dailies might get around to covering, but not yet. Perhaps our financial and editorial success hits a little too close to home. The dailies have been similarly dismissive of the OCBJ's ideological opposite but functional soul mate, the alternative OC Weekly, another relative newcomer that has found avid readers and healthy profits in the shadows of the faltering giants.

This Orange County dynamic is being repeated in communities across the country, where business journals and alternative papers have taken root and grown with only grudging acknowledgment, at best, from the journalism establishment.

Oh, well. Business readers know that the typical understaffed business section of a daily newspaper is increasingly reliant on wire stories, consumer features, and personal finance items. It's the business journals that are filled with enterprising reporting on economic trends, corporate winners and losers, entrepreneurs, real estate deals, and the like.

This adds up to good news for journalism, when taken in sum with all of the other specialty publications, cable channels, and online services. There's also increased energy in community papers -- one group, at least, that seems to be benefiting from big-media consolidation. Those papers' lower-paid reporters have in many cases picked up the slack from the retreating parent dailies. Bottom line, decrying the state of journalism because daily newspapers are in decline is like decrying transportation in the early 20th century because railroads were then in decline: It was only depressing if you failed to notice all of the new automobiles and airplanes.

Rick Reiff
Executive Editor
Orange County Business Journal
Irvine, CA

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