Private Equity and Media Consolidation
The business practices of private equity firms have been forced into the spotlight as attacks on Mitt Romney’s past leadership of Bain Capital become a central theme in the Republican primary race. I hope that as journalists focus more attention on private equity firms, they also turn around and look at their own industry. Over the last ten years private equity firms have become major players in the media, introducing new questions and considerations in the debate over media ownership.
It just so happens, that this new focus on private equity also comes as the Federal Communications Commission launches its next review of media ownership rules. In January of 2008 I wrote about the role of private equity firms in the debate around media consolidation. At the time, the FCC had just voted through troubling changes in its media ownership rules (which were later overturned in the courts) and they had just approved the sale of Clear Channel to two private equity firms. One of those firms was Romney’s Bain Capital, which has a stake in a number of media properties.
At the time, the Broadcast Law Blog wrote “Private equity should be aware that, in a future FCC, an investigation of the economics of their operations should be expected.” That has yet to happen.
A year later, Matt Crain conducted an in-depth study of the regulatory challenges raised by a media system so intertwined with private equity. He wrote:
“Private equity’s entrance into media ownership compounds the already convoluted networks of attribution that characterize the U.S. media landscape. Clear Channel’s takeover by Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners illustrates this dynamic. Both private equity firms own stakes in Cumulus Media, one of Clear Channel’s main radio competitors, and both firms are heavily invested in Warner Music, a major music supplier to the radio industry. Thomas H. Lee Partners holds stakes in Univision, also an active radio broadcaster.”
In his final assessment, he writes, “The evidence presented in this analysis strongly indicates that private equity, in its perpetual search for profit maximization, is, at a foundational level, antithetical to the public interest obligations of the media sector.”
Below is the post I wrote in 2008, much of which is more relevant now than ever. Read the rest of this entry »
The Missed Opportunity of HuffPost’s “Good News”
Today the Huffington Post introduced a new section of its website called “Good News.” In her introduction to the new feature Arianna Huffington wrote:
“I’ve long said that those of us in the media have provided too many autopsies of what went wrong and not enough biopsies. It’s a belief that goes hand-in-hand with HuffPost Good News’ editorial mission to turn our attention to what is working.”
Trying to emphasize positive news rooted in “what is working” is good, but Huffington missed an opportunity to do something deeper and more impactful with “Good News.” In her short introductory post Huffington uses the word inspiring (or some variation of it) nine times, and provides examples like a man who rescued puppies in Afghanistan. Granted there are also examples of activists and leaders writing on social change, but it all seems retrospective, not forward looking. At first glance, “Good News” looks less like a biopsy, and more like a Hallmark card you send after someone gets terminally ill. Read the rest of this entry »
Misunderstanding Innovation and Fearing Failure
In what has now become a widely circulated blog post by Patrick Pexton, the ombudsman of The Washington Post, Pexton asks, “Is The Post innovating too fast?” Here is a smattering of points from the conclusion of his article:
”I know from talking to folks in the newsroom that all the change may be exhausting the staff, too. Many of these innovations require considerable staff time, as well as more time from editors and reporters to monitor them… Staffers say that sometimes they feel as if the innovations are just tossed against a wall to see what sticks, without careful thought as to which of them will enhance and shore up The Post’s reputation and brand… I want The Post to continue to innovate. It’s important for the publication’s survival. Many of these changes are working… But there’s a time to press on the accelerator, and a time to ease off. Substance, clarity and direction will be more important in the long run than buzz. Take a breather lap, Post.”
I don’t know Pexton and I don’t know the inner-workings of the WaPo newsroom, but most of the people in my Twitter stream viewed Pexton’s post as at best bizarre and at worst a troubling sign for the Post’s long term relevance. However, it’s worth noting, Pexton does root his analysis in the concerns he is hearing from readers, and a news organization – whether it is innovating or stagnating – should listen to its readers.
But in this case, I don’t think the diagnosis, nor how it was delivered, fit the symptoms. Read the rest of this entry »
Poem: Table Legs
Every year for my friend Andrew’s birthday he asks his friends to write a poem and mail it (hard copy) to him. The poem need not be about him, or about any specific topic. Here is the poem I wrote last year (inscribed on the bottom of a plastic shoe mold), and this year’s poem is below.
Be sure to check out Andrew’s tumblr blog for a wonderfully curated collection of poems, his and others.
Table Legs
Running your hand over the grain, you said you regretted the wood. So tonight we ate dinner off of you.
As you knelt on all fours, I spread our best linens over your back, smoothing them over your shoulder blades, those remnants of wings.
You were too short for chairs so we sat around you on telephone books and dictionaries. You preferred it that way, sitting on top of stacks of words.
Our plates sloped towards us, leaning away from your spine. We built walls of potatoes to stop the peas from rolling away.
And your heart beat sent ripples across the surface of our wine. I pulled myself in close, bumping my knees against your ribs, and felt the heat of your body on my thighs.
We ate in silence, looking only occasionally at the old oak table, its underside, unvarnished and still rough.
When the others weren’t looking I fed you my radishes and you kissed my fingers.
T’was AT&T’s Night Before Christmas
This is my little holiday ode to one of our big victories of the year at Free Press. If you like this adaptation, or if you like public media, quality journalism and using the internet (all issues we work on), please consider giving $25 to Free Press (you can choose my name from the menu). Your donation is tax deductible and will be matched dollar for dollar, doubling your gift.
T’was AT&T’s Night Before Christmas
T’was the night before Christmas, and all through DC
Not a lobbyist was stirring, for old AT&T.
They thought that their merger would be wrapped up with a bow
But that just goes to show how little they know.
It all started so smooth, with Jim Cicconi in the lead,
Supporters lined up with remarkable speed,
Filing letters, making statements, it was going so well,
Until people remembered the long history of Ma Bell. Read the rest of this entry »
Your Actions Should Be Your Credentials
Today’s celebration of the 220th birthday of the Bill of Rights comes after three months of journalist arrests and press suppression in cities across America — the most recent of which happened just this week. When the NYPD arrested a group of photographers, live video-streamers and other citizen journalists at an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City earlier this week, it rekindled a long smoldering debate over who is a journalist.
The people arrested were all aligned with the Occupy movement, with some serving on the Occupy Wall Street media team, but based on videos and first-hand accounts they were primarily there to bear witness and cover the events. In fact, over the course of the Occupy movement, in many cases when police kept other journalists at arm’s length, the only video and reports coming out of Occupy raids were coming from these kinds of citizen journalists.
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
The question “who is a journalist” has been raised often over the past two months as reports of press suppression and journalist arrests have spread from city to city. See, for example, the debates here, here and here. I’ve already described my views on this in relation to my own work monitoring journalist arrests at Occupy events: “I decided early on that I wasn’t going to quibble about who is a journalist, and who isn’t. My goal was to account for anyone who was clearly committing acts of journalism when they were arrested.”
But, tangled up in the debates over who is a journalist are very real legal debates about who is given press credentials and what protections those press credentials provide. In general, the press credentialing system is broken — a poor fit for the media landscape we find ourselves in. The courts have already ruled that, as more people gain access to the tools of reporting, “news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.” If the question is not who is a journalist, but rather, what are the acts of journalism that should be protected, then we need to rethink what a “press credential” actually is. Read the rest of this entry »
NYPD: Elmo Safe, Journalists Not So Much
There is breaking news out of New York City today. The New York Police Department has announced that it is halting its crackdown on Elmo. Journalists, on the other hand, are out of luck.
Just a day after a series of violent arrests of citizen journalists covering Occupy Wall Street, and reports of NYPD blocking and harassing a New York Times photographer, the Big Apple’s police force released a statement saying it would no longer ticket the costumed cartoon characters that frequent Times Square. Read the rest of this entry »
Journalism as a Service, Not a Product
I came to journalism through community organizing, so for me, news and information has always been important in the context of our communities. That’s perhaps why I was so struck by the way Melanie Sill, executive in residence at USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, puts community at the center of her new report “The Case for Open Journalism Now.”
Like many journalism reports released in the last five years, her report begins by asserting that journalism is a “public good.” However, where other authors have used that frame to explore business models or argue for new funding streams (including my own 2009 report), Sill is more interested in how the journalism itself needs to change.
“We need a new orienting idea for journalism,” she writes. If journalism is a public good, she asks, how must it change and adapt to the new digital public sphere and the demands of newly connected (and disconnected) communities. “To bring real change,” Sill argues, “we must reorder the fundamental processes of journalism toward the goal of serving communities.”
Sill sums up this shift under the idea of “open journalism,” a term that doesn’t immediately explain itself. Here is Sill’s definition:
“Open journalism’s core principles are transparency, responsiveness, participation, collaboration and connection. … It’s an idea for making quality journalism a collective endeavor and transforming it from a product driven by factory processes to a service driven by audience needs.”
In this way, open journalism brings together the democratic needs of communities with the increasingly networked technological shifts in media and information. Part argument, part case study, and part handbook for newsrooms, her paper offers a wide range of concrete examples drawn from a diverse set of journalism organizations across the country. As such the paper reads as a study of an emerging movement, one which is gaining steam but still facing very real challenges.
On The Loss of a River
When I was growing up I spent a lot of time in the Adirondack Park. I went to college just north of the “blue line” (as the border of the park is commonly known) and spent a year after college serving with AmeriCorps and the Student Conservation Association (SCA) in the Adirondacks. During that year I worked on a number of week-long conservation projects in the high peaks area of the park outside Lake Placid, NY.
I started many of those trips in Keene Valley, hiking in on a trail that runs parallel to Johns Brook. One week we hiked in and demolished an old lean-to at “Slant Rock” that had grown unsafe. We blazed a new trail and built a new shelter from scratch. I spent another week repairing the Johns Brook interior ranger station, a backcountry base station for park rangers.
Johns Brook wound its way through my summer that year, and has since wound its way through my memory. I listened to it as I slept, swam in it, drank from it, scrambled down its banks. A year after working on that project at the ranger’s cabin, one of my friends who I had worked alongside, died suddenly. The weekend of his funeral I hiked back up there and sat on a rock in the middle of Johns Brook feeling the mighty stream roll over me. This past summer marked ten years since that summer, and I returned to Keene Valley with my wife and son, and we spent long afternoons swimming in Johns Brook and the neighboring Ausable River.
And so, when I received the note below from a longtime family friend who lives in Keene Valley, I was struck by how quickly the landscape of our memories can change, and how profoundly I could feel the loss of a river. Read on to see what I mean.
