Two Cathedrals Discussion: Where is the UT taking us, why are we in this handbasket?

In a new weekly series at www.twocathedrals.com to run every Thursday, Erik Bruvold and Lucas O’Connor will knock around issues of the day in a point-counterpoint format. The following first of those discussions appears below in its entirety, with the permission of Two Cathedrals. See the original post here.

Erik Bruvold:
Lucas, as our first cut in experiment in conversational commentary it seemed apropos to take on the local catnip of choice, the U.T. sale. As owners, Lynch and Manchester have every right to run the UT as they see fit. If they want to put ads for the “Grand Manchester West Penasquitos” or the Mighty 1090 on the front page, their choice. Maybe they can get Hacksaw Hamilton to write commentary on the City’s pension problems (“Looking at YOU, Chiron!”) or get Jeff and Jerr to do running commentary at planning commission hearings. How about THAT for cross platform synergy? Maybe they can do a contest where the winner is the first one to call after Marti gives Carl a nasty look?

But I do wonder, if the U.T. doesn’t at least keep the veneer of objectivity, can it survive? Will people pay for dead trees that is mostly commentary? And, if not, then what as democracy seems to need the media? Worrying about such things tends to keep me up at night. I know, odd.

Lucas O’Connor:
Sure, they can do whatever they want, but this isn’t just a question of whether they can produce something – anything – that people are willing to buy. As you allude to, this is a deeper opportunity for civic self-examination: Does San Diego even care about having approximately unbiased news? If we’ve reached a point where news must be a commodity, certainly we can’t also be passive. Heck, the U-T doesn’t even necessarily have to turn a profit in order to improve the profits of ownership. Obviously there’s a market for misinforming the public, so are we just stuck trying to create a market for a better-informed populace?

It’s hardly revolutionary to observe that puppies make more popular public interest stories than water board meetings, but are we resigning ourselves to that media world? Or are we going to take responsibility for heading us off the gentle slope to oligarchic Hell? Market forces can’t be a cop out.

EB:
Oh ye of little faith. If San Diegans want to have objective news intrude on the perpetual beach party and the UT chooses to drop the ball, what finally gets me BACK to sleep is my belief that someone will fill that demand – be it blogs, on-line web sites, non-profits, or even other for-profit MSM outlets.

That is going to require a major change in the media culture in San Diego. Alternatives to the UT will have to invest more in investigative reporting and be willing to find stories and pursue them even if the dominant daily is taking a pass. The electronic media that spent hundreds if not thousands of hours of coverage on the Arevalos trial, will need to spend a few minutes asking “why.”

Of course the troubling issue is that San Diego’s might not demand this, that really mostly what they DO want is Ron Burgundy to entertain them at night before dawn on another sunny day with highs in the 70s and a nice 4 foot curl on southward facing beaches. And while that might be “oligarchic hell”, at least there always will be OTL until someone figures out Fiesta Island would make for a great hotel site.

LO:
There’ll be OTL until booze banners meet the new special event permits. Then we’ll all be in a fine mess.

Look, it isn’t like San Diegans are unique in preferring candy to vegetables. The question is whether anyone is going to be able to explain that replacing vegetables with candy will kill you. Cause otherwise, good intentions don’t really matter anymore. Markets don’t just appear out of thin air anymore, demand is manufactured. Banking on San Diego to just suddenly spawn a discerning class of engaged citizens won’t end well.

Besides, the scary possibility in all this isn’t that objective journalism stops being profitable or even sustainable. What’s scary is if the price of buying up and neutering journalism is more attractive than the price of actually earning support out of good journalism. If that hits the tipping point, no matter how many alternatives pop up, we’re talking about the steady erosion to a new normal.

EB:
What is interesting is that this could not be a new normal- but a return. Advocacy journalism was the norm, not the exception for much of our history. What characterized that past was a multitude of news sources and a readership that sampled from many different sources. The world after Manchester’s purchase could be that world, but only if other sources pursue stories that the UT doesn’t.

LO:
I know there are circles where a return to the Gilded Age is an incredibly popular notion, but ‘a multitude of muckrakers’ doesn’t really sound like a system that produces a better informed San Diego. People just don’t have the bandwidth to go all Rashomon on every story. Much of our politics may be rooted in the collision of opinions, but any step away from expecting the underlying facts to be included in journalism is worrisome. It isn’t like San Diego has media infrastructure to burn, so if there end up being changes at the UT that make it any harder for people to know what’s really going on, I’m not nearly as confident that it’s so simple a matter as someone else just doing it instead.

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Lucas O’Connor bio here

W. Erik Bruvold, the founding President of the National University System Institute for Policy Research has guided the institute through its first four years of operations, conducting several widely cited public policy and economic research reports on the San Diego region. Prior to joining NUSIPR, he was Vice President of Public Policy for the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation (EDC) where he oversaw the organization’s public policy efforts on a range of issues impacting San Diego’s business climate. Among Erik’s achievements at the EDC was his leadership of the successful effort to extend the TransNet sales tax for transportation investment and his leadership of the successful regional response to the 2005 round of military base closures and realignments (BRAC 2005). Prior to joining EDC, Erik was Executive Director for the San Diego chapter of the American Electronics Association. He has served on several boards, including the Lincoln Club of San Diego, the North County Economic Development Corporation, the East County Economic Development Corporation and the San Diego Association of Government’s Transnet Citizens Advisory Committee. He holds a Bachelors of Arts with Highest Honors from the University of Denver and a Masters of Arts in Political Science with High Honors from the University of California, San Diego.