Pero, en septiembre de 2009, el mismo Barack Hussein Obama se sentó en el despacho oval con los directores de dos diarios regionales, el ‘Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’ y el ‘The Blade of Toledo’. En la conversación que mantuvo con ellos se definió como un «adicto a los periódicos en papel», hizo votos por la continuidad de la prensa y confesó públicamente su temor a que los tentáculos de la blogosfera acabaran asfixiando al verdadero periodismo: «Estoy preocupado -les dijo-. Si ésa es la dirección de las noticias, todo opiniones, sin contrastar los hechos seriamente, sin colocar las cosas en su contexto… Entonces terminaremos con las personas gritándose unas a otras sin hacer un ejercicio de mutua comprensión. La integridad del periodismo es algo fundamental para la salud de nuestra democracia».
Las palabras del presidente americano se clavaron como puñales en algunos blogueros entusiastas, que le acusaron de apostasía, le retiraron la coletilla ‘2.0′ y supusieron que semejante defensa de la prensa tradicional escondía el espanto de un político ante la libertad absoluta de internet. Sin embargo, los que saben algo de esta profesión subrayaron que el hombre más poderoso del mundo sólo recordaba la característica esencial del buen periodismo, sea cual sea su soporte: hechos contrastados, fuentes fidedignas y análisis riguroso.

La imagen de Cameron

En cualquier caso, a Obama le encanta repasar los periódicos en papel y no sólo por razones intelectuales. «Adoro sentir su tacto», dijo en una ocasión. Tampoco los políticos ingleses pueden vivir sin ellos: durante la última campaña electoral, Cameron, Clegg y Brown comparecían siempre con un surtido fajo de diarios bajo el brazo. «Esa imagen me parece muy significativa», asegura Alejandro Muñoz Alonso, catedrático de Opinión Pública y senador del PP. «Los periódicos en papel son todavía el centro del debate político; sólo muy poco a poco los digitales van ocupando su sitio. Internet y la televisión son medios imperialistas, que amenazan con colonizarlo todo, pero creo que el periódico en papel sigue siendo el rey». El vicedecano de la Facultad de Comunicación de la Universidad de Navarra, Ángel Arrese, tampoco tiene dudas: «Casi en cualquier ámbito de actividad, los periódicos y las revistas de calidad siguen teniendo un papel de primer orden en la configuración de la opinión pública y en su capacidad para influir en los que toman decisiones». «Esos medios -advierte- ejercen hoy su función en papel y en internet. Sólo de forma excepcional se pueden encontrar ‘nuevos medios’ que compitan con ellos en esa tarea y además lo suelen hacer de forma esporádica, en circunstancias especiales».

Acabamos de comprobar cómo un simple artículo en ‘The Wall Street Journal’ puede agravar la presión sobre el euro y todavía perviven en la retina las imágenes de la ministra Salgado tratando de convencer casi desesperadamente a los editores del ‘Financial Times’ de que España no era Grecia. «En las crisis se deforman y se revelan muchas cosas. La influencia de esas cabeceras siempre ha sido muy grande, pero en estos momentos de incertidumbre y de globalización económica se hace más evidente», subraya Arrese. «Esos medios tienen tanto peso porque no se limitan a ir a la rueda de prensa y a contar lo que quieren oír los políticos», tercia el analista José Sanclemente, autor del blog ‘Entre medios’: «Los periódicos se empeñan en seguir dando mucha información política. Y lo malo no es eso, sino cómo se da. Está demostrado que esos temas interesan poco a los ciudadanos, sobre todo a los más jóvenes. Ése es el problema. Está claro que el periódico tradicional sigue teniendo su influencia, sobre todo en los políticos, pero no sabe cómo atrapar a los lectores jóvenes».
En un escenario convulso, a las puertas de un cambio que se supone formidable, las cifras de difusión atormentan a los editores. Y no sólo en España. En Reino Unido, en un año, ‘The Times’, ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Independent’ y el ‘Daily Telegraph’ han perdido cerca del 10% de sus ventas. Sólo la prensa popular, con ‘The Sun’ a la cabeza, aguanta el tirón y se mantiene en los tres millones de ejemplares con su rentable cóctel de escándalos, sexo, deportes, lenguaje desenfadado y titulares enormes. «En las elecciones inglesas, el factor determinante no está en la prensa de calidad, sino en la popular», reconoce Gilles Tremlett, corresponsal en España del diario ‘The Guardian’. «El ‘Sun’ o el ‘Mail’ quizá no influyan tanto en las élites, pero sí en los votantes».

«Son insustituibles»

Aun así, todavía resuenan los ecos de la ira de Gordon Brown al comprobar que casi ningún medio le daba expresamente su apoyo. Esa costumbre anglosajona de que los diarios pidan el voto para un candidato resulta muy pintoresca en España. «Pero los periódicos están también para aconsejar a sus lectores. Lo contrario me parece hilar demasiado fino», se defiende Tremlett. «Su tradición es muy diferente de la nuestra -reconoce Sanclemente-. Pero sí creo importante que cada cabecera indique con claridad cuál es su postura. Y no sólo sobre el candidato electoral más idóneo, sino con respecto a cualquier cuestión ciudadana».

Como recalca el senador y catedrático Muñoz Alonso, «en la mesa de cualquier político importante hoy están ‘The Economist’, el ‘Wall Street Journal’… y eso seguirá siendo así aunque tengan que cambiar cosas». Nadie sabe muy bien qué deparará el futuro. De momento, y si hacemos caso de las cifras, estamos en plena borrasca. Algunos augures vaticinan la definitiva transformación de la Galaxia Guttemberg en un agujero negro. Otros se resisten a levantar el certificado de defunción de los diarios tradicionales: «Internet ha traído cosas positivas, al abrir el acceso a los medios. Pero en la red echo en falta profesionalidad y responsabilidad. Por eso creo que los periódicos en papel son insustituibles», asegura Muñoz Alonso, aunque reconoce que no sólo habla como experto en Opinión Pública, sino también como «enamorado» del papel. José Sanclemente prefiere apuntarse al condicional: «Dependerá de lo que quieran hacer los actores principales de este drama. E incluyo a los periodistas. Si la táctica es reducir el músculo de la redacción, cortar el periodismo de investigación e imposibilitar que haya equipos que trabajen sin estar urgidos por la hora de cierre… Entonces el futuro es malo. Si no, creo que el periodismo en papel tiene aún largo recorrido».

Desde su despacho de la Universidad de Navarra, Ángel Arrese apunta el valor sólido de las «grandes marcas periodísticas». «Creo que es indudable que el papel irá a menos, no a más», pero eso «no significa necesariamente su desaparición» si se obra con inteligencia: «El músculo más importante de una organización periodística, su corazón, son los buenos profesionales del periodismo. Cualquier recorte sustancial de esa fibra es fatal a no muy largo plazo».

Todo esto sucederá mañana. Porque hoy, mientras tomaban el primer café del día y se ajustaban la corbata, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy y David Cameron han sonreído, han arrugado el ceño o incluso han soltado un taco mientras echaban un ojo a los principales periódicos de sus respectivos países. En papel.

While print journalism and newspapers aren’t dead, subscriptions in the U.S. dropped almost 9 percent in 2009, and, as a recent Pew Research Center study shows, an increasing number of people turn to the Internet to get their news. Along with the recession’s adverse affects on advertising at major print corporations, these trends of increasing Internet usage and a diminishing of traditional advertising revenues give news startups a chance to challenge local news media to create a sustainable method of supporting the expense of conducting journalism in the public interest.

It’s a new frontier and one where there are no blueprints and lots of opinions. How can upstarts compete with comparatively well-financed mainstream publications? Newcomers must use a variety of web tools, create diversified revenue streams and attract an engaged community, experts say.

This thesis investigates three areas for startup media sites to concern themselves with – 1) revenue models, 2) social media and 3) web tools. Finally, the thesis puts this together the reporting on these three to suggest a sustainable – and profitable – business plan.

Here is a summary of each section (italicized links go to capstone articles):
Various models exist for online news, some can work, some will not, and nobody knows which will work, if any. Hot-button ideas include a strict pay wall and micropayment systems. But, few readers have paid the toll for entering existing local news pay walls, and are criticized for charging the same price for a less expensive product. Micropayments are another popular idea, but this system comes under scrutiny from experts for its inability to alter the psychology of Internet users to begin paying a small fee for the product. Grant funding and donations – $24 million has been promised or granted by the Knight Foundation alone between 2007 and 2011 – can get a fledgling journalism organization off the ground. However these can’t be counted on every year. Other revenue-producing models include services and basic display advertising. A site also save money over its print and television counterparts because production costs are much lower.

Will social media play a role in online journalism? That’s asked and answered by The Associated Press’ social manager Lauren McCullough – and it’s a resoundingly ‘yes.’ But how to use those tools and incorporate them into a news site ethically and effectively has yet to become standardized.

Some news outlets, like Syracuse.com, have created their own social networks, while others rely on Twitter and Facebook for their microblogging services and interactions.

A newer thrust from the world of social media and social news world is the concept of creating a community-based hyperlocal social network that charges businesses a fee to join as members, to then market at will and interact with the community.

A big challenge to startup news sites is name recognition and building trust within a community. A site should strive to bring the community into a conversation and to put its name out into the public sphere any way possible, including social media, journalism experts say.

Sites could employ Web tools such as live video services and live blogging tools to bring users into the conversation and feel closer to beat reporters, who participate in the conversations. The sites also should utilize social media as a means to promote, but that doesn’t only include microblogging sites like Facebook and Twitter, but expands to Picasa/Flickr and YouTube and countless others.

It’s not enough to only present a problem, but online journalism needs a solution. A model business plan will suggest how to take social-media techniques, interactive web tools and revenue models to create a viable – and sustainable – online news organization. It will have a full three-year financial projection, an explanation of its purpose and a complete plan for scaling. The goal of the plan is to meld the traditional ethics and standards of solid shoe leather reporting with the new opportunities – and challenges – the Internet provides.

Su especialidad son los modelos de negocio que han sustentado la prensa tradicional, asi como los que empiezan a financiar los nuevos proyectos informativos de internet. Edmonds escribe regularmente en su espacio The Biz Blog sobre las cifras y los hechos que se esconden tras las cuentas de las grandes y pequeñas empresas informativas.
En una entrevista telefónica, este periodista repasa algunas de las claves de la crisis que sufre la prensa desde hace un par de años, señala las dificultades en la búsqueda de nuevos ingresos y apunta algunas tendencias que podrán verse en el futuro cercano.
En 2008, usted avisaba de los malos tiempos que vendrían para los periódicos. Dos años después, ¿ha pasado lo peor, o todavía queda lo peor?
Sí, los últimos dos o tres años han sido muy difíciles para los periódicos de Estados Unidos y algunos más alrededor del mundo. La parte fundamental de esta crisis tiene que ver con una drástica reducción en la inversión publicitaria; otra parte, con la recesión; y otra, con la debilidad extrema de los anuncios clasificados, que eran una fuente muy importante de ingresos para los periódicos. Creo que ya hemos pasado lo peor y que la cosa mejorará un poco. De todos modos, los ingresos publicitarios todavía decrecen un 5% ó 10%, frente al 30% del peor trimestre del año pasado, y veo un periodo en que los periódicos deberán recortar sus gastos significativamente. Pero creo que lo peor ha pasado y que mejorará la situación actual, aunque aventurarse a apostar por lo que sucederá en cinco o diez años es mucho más arriesgado.
Con todos estos recortes y despidos, ¿cómo serán los grandes periódicos en el futuro?, ¿cómo serán el «Times» y el «Post», por ejemplo?
Creo que los grandes periódicos tienen fortalezas de las que carecen los diarios metropolitanos. Tanto el «Post» como el «Times» tienen sitios web muy fuertes y audiencia en todo el mundo. El «Post», que no se imprime fuera de Washington, ha conseguido audiencia nacional gracias a su web. Los grandes periódicos, entre los que incluyo «The Wall Street journal», «USA Today» y otros, parecen en buena forma. Los diarios metropolitanos tienen todavía muchos más retos que afrontar. Francamente, creo que han tenido tantos recortes que han debilitado el atractivo que despertaban en la audiencia.
¿Qué tipo de periodismo está sufriendo más la crisis?
Hay varias categorias diferentes. La cobertura de las capitales del Estado, que en el sistema estadounidense con 50 Gobiernos tienen un poder considerable, ha sufrido una perdida significativa. Ha pasado de ser hecha por 25 reporteros hace cinco años a 5 ó 10 ahora. Las secciones especiales, como ciencia, arte o educación, se cubren mucho menos de lo que se cubrían antes. Y el tercer periodismo que más ha sufrido, y que solían cubrir los diarios metropolitanos, es el de lospequeños ayuntamientos, urbanizaciones, Gobiernos locales y la gran comunidad que hay más alla de las ciudades.
¿Cree que las ayudas del Gobierno a los periódicos, como las que se han dado a la industria de automoción, pueden ser una solución?
Mantuvimos una discusión muy extensa sobre este asunto, hace un año, en una runión ante la Comisión Federal de Comercio. Es muy difícil identificar un modo de hacerlo teniendo en cuenta la tradicional separación entre prensa y Gobierno en Estados Unidos. Creo que es posible, pero es muy difícil encontrar un modo de hacerlo, y hasta cierto punto tanto el Gobierno como las organizaciones filantrópicas han estado más pendientes de financiar nuevas empresas informativas sin ánimo de lucro, o la red pública de radio y televisión, que de financiar las compañías privadas de periódicos.
¿Cómo será el equilibrio futuro en los balances económicos de los medios: más publicidad, más suscripciones…?
Ya se está produciendo un cambio. En Estados Unidos, se ha pasado del 80% u 85% de los ingresos en publicidad al 70% ó 75%. Los periódicos han subido el precio de sus suscripciones y de sus ejemplares muy agresivamente. Hay un cambio en favor de la suscripción y de los nuevos medios de distribuir la información, como los dispositivos móviles, el nuevo iPad de Apple y otras tabletas.
¿Son estos dispositivos, como el iPad, el iPhone, el Kindle… los que los medios tradicionales estaban esperando?
Creo que tienen potencial para serlo. Es muy pronto para decir cuánto sacarán y si los usuarios estarán cómodos pagando por las noticias en ese formato, cuando no han pagado en la web. La segunda dificultad, sobre todo con las tabletas pero creo que también con los teléfonos, es que la compañía intermediaria quiere una parte importante de los ingresos para ella, y obliga a los medios a compartir sus ingresos y sus clientes, algo que no habían hecho tradicionalmente.
¿Qué opina del sistema de muro de pago?, ¿cree que si todos los periódicos se pusieran de acuerdo en levantar un muro de pago, con el sistema de Journalism Online, por ejemplo, podría funcionar?
Primero, es muy difícil conseguir el consenso entre los periódicos. Y segundo, el sistema también sería muy duro. Creo que el entusiasmo por los muros de pago que se veía sobre todo hace un año se ha desvanecido, y sólo veremos experimentos muy limitados para poner una porción del contenido de pago, y dejar el resto abierto. Como pretende «The New York Times», al buscar un grupo reducido de usuarios avanzados de su sitio web a los que pueda cobrar. Pero creo que para la mayoría de periódicos es una apuesta perdedora: perderán más lectores y, por tanto, más ingresos por publicidad, que lo que puedan ganar con el muro de pago.
Hablando de experimentos, ¿qué nuevo modelo de empresa le ha sorprendido más gratamente en el último año?
Ha habido unas cuantas muy impresionantes apoyadas por la filantropía privada. Probablemente, la más conocida y grande de Estados Unidos es Propublica, fundada por una familia rica, que se ha centrado en el periodismo de investigación y que comparte muchas historias con empresas establecidas de prensa y televisión. Ganó un premio Pulitzer hace un par de semanas y cuenta con unos 25 ó 30 periodistas haciendo un gran trabajo periodístico. Hay otros proyectos parecidos en Texas, en el área de la bahía de San Francisco, en San Diego, en Minneapolis… ha habido una gran explosión de empresas de este tipo y algunas lo están haciendo muy bien.
¿Cree que la prensa tradicional confía en estos nuevos medios?, ¿cree que un editor habría creído hace sólo un par de años que ‘Propublica’ ganaría un Pulitzer?
No, creo que es sorprendente. Sorprendente lo rápido que han crecido y lo diferentes que son estos proyectos. Aunque creo que debería moderar mi optimismo y decir que muchos de ellos han tenido un buen comienzo, pero sus modelos económicos están en tela de juicio. No está claro que la fundaciones los apoyen indefinidamente y afrontan muchos problemas de la prensa tradicional, como conseguir suficiente dinero de la publicidad en línea para financiar lo que intenta hacer.
Hay expertos que creen que los periodistas tendrán que ser empresarios en el futuro. ¿Qué opina de esto?
El periodismo emprendedor es una de las tendencias que se están viendo y en el Instituto Poynter hemos empezado un curso para apoyar este periodismo, averiguar las habilidades necesarias y promover este área. Creo que es prometedor.
Pero ¿tendremos tiempo suficiente para ambas cosas: el periodismo y los negocios?
Conozco un par de compañías nuevas que considero exitosas desde el punto de vista periodístico y que generan ingresos suficientes para sufragar el trabajo de una o dos personas que tienen que trabajar mucho más duro, pues tienen dos trabajos a la vez. Es algo muy exigente.
¿Cree que el futuro ecosistema de información, con empresas informativas pequeñas, algunas sin ánimo de lucro, o incluso blogs y redes sociales, será una alternativa real a los periódicos de hoy en día? ¿tendremos mejor información en el futuro que la que tenemos ahora?
El sistema crecerá, algunas compañías fracasarán y otras empezarán. Ahora mismo, la mayor perdida de los últimos tres años es que, según mis cálculos, los periódicos han dejado de invertir de 1,5 a 2 mil millones de dólares en elaborar noticias que antes. La escala del ecosistema actual todavía no ha llegado a cubrir lo que se está perdiendo, pero espero que crezca y contribuya a crear un ecosistema más sano a largo plazo. Tal vez estemos atravesando un momento un poco inmerecido, por esta transición económica.
Si los editores hubieran creído antes en Internet, digamos a mediados de los 90, ¿estaríamos ahora atravesando esta situación?
Los editores han cometido algunos errores, como mostrarse complacientes ante los buenos resultados de la publicidad de hace unos años y no ver las amenazas de otros competidores, pero no estoy tan seguro de que si pudieran volver atrás levantaran un muro de pago y les fuera muy bien. Esto es un enorme cambio en las comunicaciones, y desafortunadamente para los periódicos los tiempos en que todo podía reunirse en un sólo sitio centralizado han sido reemplazados por un abanico tremendo de opciones y posibilidades, sobre todo en el campo de la publicidad. Creo que son víctimas de la historia, más que de sus propios fallos.

Los pasquines, escritos en hebreo o yidish, a menudo anónimos y llenos de ironía, son un medio esencial para difundir información entre la cerrada comunidad ultraortodoxa, cuya rigurosa interpretación de la halajá (ley judía) le impide emplear otros medios de difusión.

La prohibición de ver fotos de mujeres, oír su voz cantando o la creencia general de que ‘todo lo nuevo está prohibido por la Torá’ hace que muchos haredim (literalmente, ‘temerosos’ de Dios) rechacen los medios de comunicación seculares y dependan de los carteles para saber lo que ocurre en su entorno.

‘Es como un blog para ellos; lo que dice un pasquín puede contestarse en otro y muchos se firman con seudónimos. No pueden usar internet, así que si quieren hacer algo público y estar seguros de que todo el mundo lo leerá, lo hacen con un pasquín’, explica a Efe Menajem Friedman, experto en la materia y profesor de sociología y antropología de la Universidad de Bar Ilán.

Nacido en el siglo XVI en Italia para oponerse a las autoridades católicas, su uso entre la población ultraortodoxa judía se popularizó en Mea Shearim, en el centro de Jerusalén, en el siglo XIX entre los residentes de la entonces Palestina que rechazaban el incipiente sionismo al considerar que el Estado de Israel no debería crearse antes de la llegada del Mesías.

Hoy, se utilizan para transmitir noticias, anunciar efemérides, convocar eventos o expresar opiniones sobre temas de actualidad.

También son usados por los tribunales haredim para difundir sentencias o denunciar a alguien y exponerlo ante la opinión pública como medida de presión para que la sociedad sepa que ha hecho algo mal y le castigue.

‘Tratan temas similares a la prensa, reflejan también la lucha entre los antisionistas y quienes apoyan el Estado de Israel, y a veces sirven para atacar a alguien o abordar cuestiones de modestia, con mensajes como: Las mujeres no son suficientemente pudorosas’, señala Ron Ofer, director de una serie documental sobre el mundo haredí.

Las paredes de Mea Shearim no tienen grafitis ni pintadas, pero están permanentemente empapeladas con estos carteles de grandes titulares sensacionalistas, que crean su particular paisaje al ajarse con la lluvia y el paso del tiempo.

Los pasquines emplean un lenguaje dramático y alarmante, tratando de llamar la atención del mayor número posible de transeúntes con enormes caracteres que gritan ‘Llanto Generalizado’, ‘Orden de salvamento’ o ‘Grave Peligro’.

Los ultraortodoxos tienen sus propios periódicos, pero éstos están expuestos al mundo exterior y cuestan dinero, mientras que los pasquines se leen gratis y sólo se cuelgan en sus barrios, por lo que se pueden emplear para criticar a sus propios líderes o para las guerras de un grupo contra otro, que no publicaría ningún rotativo.

Para Friedman, la presencia de estos folletos ‘es una muestra de que la sociedad haredí tiene liderazgos débiles y está muy dividida, llena de facciones enfrentadas’.

Los grupos minoritarios ‘utilizan muchos trucos para colgar mensajes extremos y radicales y que la gente no los pueda quitar’, explica a Efe Yoel Krois, del colectivo antisionista Eda Haredit.

Por ejemplo, pegan de noche los carteles más incendiarios y los cubren con otros anodinos que retiran justo antes de que comience la jornada sabática, en la que los religiosos no pueden realizar ningún trabajo ni esfuerzo, por lo que se aseguran de que sus mensajes quedarán expuestos a la vista de todo el mundo durante todo un día.

Krois, que posee una colección de alrededor de 20.000 pasquines, algunos de ellos con un siglo de antigüedad, asegura que los textos ’son muy irónicos y mordaces’, aunque echa de menos los que se hacían antes, más elaborados y artísticos.

‘Es culpa del ordenador’, señala el coleccionista, ‘porque hacer un pasquín es ahora muy fácil y barato, cualquiera puede imprimirlo, pero antes requería un gran esfuerzo, recolectar el dinero, organizar la producción. Publicarlos era algo importante porque era más difícil’.

Manuales o informatizados, artísticos o simples, un paseo por Mea Shearim demuestra que esta forma de comunicación se mantiene en su apogeo y que queda aún larga vida en sus calles para el pasquín.

La decisión revela la intención de echar un manto de sospechas sobre el origen de una de las firmas que proveen el principal insumo para los periódicos.
La tarea debería ser muy sencilla de llevar a cabo: bastará con remitirse a las publicaciones y documentos de esa época para recordar cómo nació esta papelera nacional que, desde un comienzo, abasteció a cientos de periódicos.
Los ataques de Moreno comenzaron en agosto pasado con la intención, confesada por el propio funcionario en una reunión de trabajo, de apropiarse de la empresa. Desde entonces, diversos organismos públicos fueron usados para presionar y, a partir de un supuesto error formal en una reunión de directorio, la Comisión Nacional de Valores intensificó sus objeciones y la Justicia nombró un coadministrador.
El supuesto error formal en el cual la CNV basó su acusación consintió en que la empresa no transcribió el acta de esa reunión de directorio en forma inmediata a su finalización. En rigor, la CNV no respeta el criterio que ella intenta imponer y, por otro lado, no hay norma legal que establezca el plazo en el cual debe cumplirse esa formalidad. Papel Prensa actuó conforme con las prácticas habituales aceptadas en el país y, recientemente, la Cámara de Apelaciones en lo Comercial revocó una resolución de la CNV que intentaba aplicarle aquel criterio a Transportadora Gas del Norte (TGN).
El miércoles pasado, Moreno dio otro paso: pidió a Papel Prensa información sobre las transferencias de acciones desde su origen y, según un cable de la agencia estatal Télam, impartió órdenes a los directores y funcionarios que representan al Estado nacional en la empresa, con el objeto de “procurar obtener la información y la documentación pertinente” sobre la adquisición, por los diarios Clarín , LA NACION y La Razón , de las acciones de Papel Prensa.
Los directores y funcionarios estatales deberán buscar documentos y requerir la colaboración de organismos públicos y privados para elaborar en un plazo de 90 días un informe sobre tales circunstancias.
Dando por supuesto que el origen de la empresa merece ser investigado y es tan oscuro como las violaciones de los derechos humanos, en la resolución se citan declaraciones de Osvaldo Papaleo al diario oficialista El Argentino (” Clarín compró Papel Prensa con la familia Graiver secuestrada”) y del embajador argentino en los Estados Unidos, Héctor Timerman, que en una nota publicada en Clarín la semana pasada había dicho que la Papel Prensa no nació de una transacción comercial.
Sin embargo, la fundación de lo que hoy se conoce como Papel Prensa no tuvo nada de oscuro.
* * *
En 1968, los editores de diarios y revistas habían comenzado a impulsar la creación de una papelera nacional. En 1970, la Argentina estaba entre los primeros importadores de ese insumo, por lo cual la prensa buscaba sustituir importaciones y asegurarse la provisión de papel, para evitar que la imposición de cupos o prohibiciones a las importaciones reeditara viejas prácticas de censura.
En 1971, el Estado organizó una licitación, pero fue declarada desierta y, en 1972, el proyecto fue encomendado en forma directa a la sociedad anónima Papel Prensa, que entonces estaba formada por Editorial Abril (César Civita), César Doretti y la constructora Tauro.
Sin embargo, durante la tercera presidencia peronista, el entonces ministro de Economía, José Ber Gelbard, logró que aquellos accionistas originarios vendieran su participación e ingresó, como socio mayoritario, el financista David Graiver.
En forma paralela, el gobierno proyectaba la creación de otras tres papeleras: Papel Prensa II, que no se concretó; Papel de Tucumán, que sí constituyeron diarios del interior pero que años más tarde, cuando fue comprada por otros accionistas, se concentró en fabricar papel obra, y Fapel, un proyecto constituido por Clarín , LA NACION y La Razón .
Hasta ese momento, Fapel (la compañía que era propiedad de los tres diarios) no tenía relación con Papel Prensa, que lideraba David Graiver. Pero en agosto de 1976, el financista falleció en un accidente con un avión que él habia alquilado en México. Entonces, Galería Da Vinci SA, sociedad del grupo Graiver, le vendió una parte mayoritaria del paquete accionario mayoritario a Fapel ( Clarín , LA NACION y La Razón ) por 8,3 millones de dólares, y retuvo la sucesión de Graiver una participación accionaria minoritaria.
La operación de compra realizada por Fapel se concretó el 2 de noviembre de 1976 y fue documentada en un contrato escrito.
Por entonces, Lidia Papaleo, heredera del grupo Graiver, estaba en libertad. Ella misma lo reconoció en una solicitada que firmó junto con Juan e Isidoro Graiver y que se publicó en LA NACION el 12 de octubre de 1989, es decir, en plena democracia: allí dijo que las detenciones se produjeron en 1977 (es decir, después de la venta del paquete accionario, en noviembre de 1976).
El 10 de noviembre de 1976, los diarios comunicaron la compra a la Asociación de Entidades Periodísticas (ADEPA), en una reunión en la que también estuvieron presentes autoridades de la Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa (SIP) y de Papel de Tucumán.
Se realizó también una conferencia de prensa y, al día siguiente, los medios dieron amplia cobertura a ese anuncio.
Por entonces, nadie sabía de la vinculación de Graiver con los montoneros -Lidia Papaleo, viuda de David Graiver, en la solicitada publicada en 1989, seguía desconociendo que hubiera existido esa vinculación- y ninguno de los integrantes de esa familia Graiver habían sido todavía cuestionados ni mucho menos detenidos por el gobierno de facto de Jorge Rafael Videla.
Dos meses más tarde, el 18 de enero de 1977, en una asamblea extraordinaria de accionistas realizada con un quórum del 88,73 por ciento de las acciones, el Estado -que conservaba el 25 por ciento de las acciones- y los representantes privados aprobaron la cesión del paquete accionario en favor de Fapel con el sufragio afirmativo del 79,62 por ciento de los votos, con lo que superaron el 75 por ciento necesario.
La sucesión Graiver, representada por el doctor Miguel de Anchorena, estuvo entre quienes aprobaron la transferencia.
Los diarios también hicieron pública esa información en sus respectivas ediciones.
¿Hubiera tenido sentido que los diarios dieran tanta publicidad a la creación de Papel Prensa si esta empresa fuera producto de un acuerdo turbio? La operación, a diferencia de algunos otros hechos de entonces y de ahora, fue completamente transparente.
Nuevamente, el 4 de marzo de ese año se realizó otra asamblea, en la que estuvo presente Lidia Papaleo, quien firmó el libro de actas antes de que pasara a cuarto intermedio.
* * *
Los arrestos de los familiares de David Graiver sólo comenzaron varios días después de esa reunión de directorio y seis meses después de formalizada la compra de Papel Prensa por parte de los tres diarios.
Ocurrieron a mediados de marzo de 1977. Según informaron los diarios Clarín y La Gaceta , de Tucumán, en sus ediciones del 15 de abril de 1977 (este último medio transcribió un cable de la agencia Télam), el día anterior el Comando en Jefe del Ejército suministró una lista de 15 detenidos, entre quienes figuraban Lidia Papaleo y numerosos integrantes de la familia Graiver.
La Asamblea Permanente de los Derechos Humanos-La Plata ( www.apdhlaplata.org.ar ) dice que las detenciones ocurrieron el 14 de marzo y dos investigaciones periodísticas publicadas por las periodistas María Seoane y Graciela Mochkofsky en Editorial Sudamericana señalan que fueron posteriores al 8 de marzo de aquel año.
Fapel compró las acciones del grupo Graiver por 8,3 millones de dólares. No tienen sustento alguno las sospechas que desliza el kirchnerismo en el sentido de que ese precio fue irrisorio y de que aquel gobierno de facto, como parte de una negociación, les cedió la planta a los diarios.
En efecto, Fapel depositó las cuotas por el saldo del precio en expedientes judiciales y, en 1978, luego de realizar una inversión de 200 millones de dólares -financiada con aportes de capital de accionistas y por préstamos de bancos públicos y privados-, la planta de San Pedro, cuya construcción se encontraba virtualmente paralizada en el momento de la compra de las acciones por los diarios, se puso definitivamente en marcha.
Es curioso, sin embargo, que el kirchnerismo soslaye otro dato de la realidad: que aquella compra que había hecho Fapel al grupo Graiver no contaba con el visto bueno del almirante Emilio Eduardo Massera, que quería tomar el control del suministro de papel en el país, tal como años antes lo habían pretendido hacer el peronismo y Gelbard y, ahora, el gobierno de Cristina y Néstor Kirchner.
Aquel sector de las Fuerzas Armadas pretendía anular el ingreso de Fapel en la compañía y apoderarse de las acciones del grupo Graiver. Pero eso, en agosto de 1977, Videla dictó el decreto ley 21.618 y designó a un hombre de confianza del marino, el capitan de Navío Alberto D´Agostino, para intervenir la empresa, pero cinco meses después, sin haberse detectado irregularidades, se levantó la intervención.
La cronología de los hechos es contundente, y prueba que las acusaciones que se efectúan desde el kirchnerismo son falsas y que sólo tienen como finalidad generar un clima favorable para que el Gobierno se apropie de la empresa, de manera de controlar un insumo vital para los diarios y presionarlos.
El mismo objetivo que tuvo el entonces almirante Massera y el mismo modus operandi.

170 diarios son los que abastece Papel Prensa en todo el país, lo que la convierte en líder del sector.

175.000 toneladas es lo que produce aproximadamente por año, para cubrir el 95 por ciento del mercado.

27,5% de las acciones es lo que corresponde al Estado. El resto se reparte entre Clarín (49%) y LA NACION (22,5). Cotiza en bolsa el 1%.

750 empleados tiene la planta, lo que la convierte en una de las grandes empleadoras de la zona de San Pedro.

Cute line, appropriate for retweets. But as my hangover settles in, I realize that there’s something much more basic and profound that worries me about the iPad — and not just the iPad but the architecture upon which it is built. I see danger in moving from the web to apps.

The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn’t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them. The most absurd, extreme illustration is Time Magazine’s app, which is essentially a PDF of the magazine (with the odd video snippet). It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.

That’s what we keep hearing about the iPad as the justification for all its purposeful limitations: it’s meant for consumption, we’re told, not creation. We also hear, as in David Pogue’s review, that this is our grandma’s computer. That cant is inherently snobbish and insulting. It assumes grandma has nothing to say. But after 15 years of the web, we know she does. I’ve long said that the remote control, cable box, and VCR gave us control of the consumption of media; the internet gave us control of its creation. Pew says that a third of us create web content. But all of us comment on content, whether through email or across a Denny’s table. At one level or another, we all spread, react, remix, or create. Just not on the iPad.

The iPad’s architecture supports these limitations in a few ways:

First, in its hardware design, it does not include a camera — the easiest and in some ways most democratic means of creation (you don’t have to write well) — even though its smaller cousin, the iPhone, has one. Equally important, it does not include a simple (fucking) USB port, which means that I can’t bring in and take out content easily. If I want to edit a document in Apple’s Pages, I have to go through many hoops of moving and snycing and emailing or using Apple’s own services. Cloud? I see no cloud, just Apple’s blue skies. Why no USB? Well, I can only imagine that Apple doesn’t want us to think what Walt Mossberg did in his review — the polar opposite of Pogue’s — that this pad could replace its more expensive laptops. The iPad is purposely handicapped, but it doesn’t need to be. See the German WePad, which comes with USB port(s!), a camera, multitasking, and the more open Android operating system and marketplace.

Second, the iPad is built on apps. So are phones, Apple’s and others’. Apps can be wonderful things because they are built to a purpose. I’m not anti-app, let’s be clear. But I also want to stop and examine the impact of shifting from a page- and site-based internet to one built on apps. I’ve been arguing that we are, indeed, moving past a page-, site-, and search-based web to one also built on streams and flows, to a distributed web where you can’t expect people to come to you but you must go to them; you must get yourself into their streams. This shift to apps is a move in precisely the opposite direction. Apps are more closed, contained, controlling. That, again, is why media companies like them. But they don’t interoperate — they don’t play well — with other apps and with the web itself; they are hostile to links and search. What we do in apps is less open to the world. I just want to consider the consequences.

So I see the iPad as a Bizarro Trojan Horse. Instead of importing soldiers into the kingdom to break down its walls, in this horse, we, the people, are stuffed inside and wheeled into the old walls; the gate is shut and we’re welcomed back into the kingdom of controlling media that we left almost a generation ago.

There are alternatives. I now see the battle between Apple and Google Android in clearer focus. At Davos, Eric Schmidt said that phones (and he saw the iPad as just a big phone… which it is, just without the phone and a few other things) will be defined by their apps. The mobile (that is to say, constantly connected) war will be won on apps. Google is competing with openness, Apple with control; Google will have countless manufacturers and brands spreading its OS, Apple will have media and fanboys (including me) do the work for it.

But Google has a long way to go if it hopes to win this war. I’m using my Nexus One phone (which I also had morning-after doubts about) and generally liking it but I still find it awkward. Google has lost its way, its devotion to profound simplicity. Google Wave and Buzz are confusing and generally unusable messes; Android needed to be thought through more (I shouldn’t have to think about what a button does in this use case before using it); Google Docs could be more elegant; YouTube’s redesign is halfway to clean. Still, Google and Apple’s competition presents us with choices.

I find it interesting that though many commercial brands — from Amazon to Bank of America to Fandango — have written for both Apple and Android, many media brands — most notable The New York Times and my Guardian — have written only for Apple and they now are devoting much resource to recreating apps for the iPad. The audience on Android is bigger than the audience on iPad but the sexiness and control Apple offers is alluring. This, I think, is why Salon CEO Richard Gingras calls the iPad a fatal distraction for publishers. They are deluding themselves into thinking that the future lies in their past.

On This Week in Google last night, I went too far slathering over the iPad and some of its very neat apps (ABC’s is great; I watched the Modern Family about the iPad on the iPad and smugly loved being so meta). I am a toy boy at heart and didn’t stop to cast a critical eye, as TWiG’s iPadless Gina Trapani did. This morning on Twitter, I went too far the other way kvetching about the inconveniences of the iPad’s limitations (just a fucking USB, please!) in compensation. That’s the problem with Twitter, at least for my readers: it’s thinking out loud.

I’ll sleep with the iPad a few more nights. I might well rebox and return it; I don’t have $500 to throw away. But considering what I do for a living, I perhaps should hold onto it so I can understand its implications. And that’s the real point of this post: there are implications.

: MORE: Of course, I must link to Cory Doctorow’s eloquent examination of the infantilization of technology. I’m not quite as principled, I guess, as Cory is on the topic; I’m not telling people they should not buy the iPad; I don’t much like that verb in any context. But on the merits and demerits, we agree.

And Dave Winer: “Today it’s something to play with, not something to use. That’s the kind way to say it. The direct way: It’s a toy.”

: By the way, back in the day, about a decade ago, I worked with Intel (through my employer, Advance) on a web pad that was meant to be used to consume in the home (we knew then that the on-screen keyboard sucked; it was meant to be a couch satellite to the desk’s PC). Intel lost nerve and didn’t launch it. Besides, the technology was early (they built the wireless on Intel Anypoint, not wi-fi or even bluetooth). Here’s the pad in the flesh. I have it in my basement museum of dead technlogy, next to my CueCat.

El jueves pasado, cuando cerraron la compra de otro respetado pero tambaleante periódico británico, The Independent , la pregunta, contra todas las previsiones, era otra: si los Lebedev no serían la mejor esperanza de preservar el periodismo serio en el país.
“Creo que fue casi demasiado halagador para mí”, dijo irónicamente Alexander Lebedev, de 50 años, sobre la reciente cobertura periodística. Hablaba desde Moscú, adonde viajó para reunirse con su socio, Mikhail Gorbachov, el ex líder soviético. “Espero no convertirme en un malcriado”.

En Inglaterra, los artículos periodísticos sobre la venta de The Independent mencionaban una vez más su pasado en la KGB, su enorme fortuna (2000 millones de dólares, según Forbes ) y sus aspiraciones políticas. Pero esta vez, gran parte de la cobertura periodística elogiaba a Lebedev por haber mantenido vivos dos diarios que perdían dinero y probablemente hubieran desaparecido sin los nuevos dueños, y por no haber interferido con la cobertura de noticias de The Evening Standard .

“Hubo gran escepticismo, pero hasta el momento no hay evidencias de que Lebedev pretenda otra cosa que financiar una prensa gratuita y seria”, dijo Tim Luckhurst, director del centro de periodismo de la Universidad de Kent. “Habla con pasión de la prensa gratuita, y por lo que parece, lo dice en serio.”
En octubre pasado, los Lebedev convirtieron a The Evening Standard , que se distribuye en la región de Londres, en un diario gratuito sin reducir sus contenidos… y eso, en una nación en la que los diarios gratuitos han tendido a ser poco más que un breve resumen. Además, el diario casi triplicó su circulación, hasta alcanzar los 600.000 ejemplares. Ayudado por la desaparición, el año pasado, de dos diarios gratuitos londinenses, The Standard afirma que ha ganado en ingresos publicitarios más dinero del que ha perdido por no cobrarle nada a sus lectores. “Hemos pasado de un periódico que perdía unas 500.000 libras semanales”, o alrededor de 745.000 dólares, “a un periódico que ahora pierde la mitad de esa suma, o menos”, dijo Eugeny Lebedev, de 29 años. Como presidente de The Standard -cargo que también ocupará en The Independent - está mucho más involucrado que su padre en el funcionamiento del periódico.

¿Los Lebedev habrán descubierto un nuevo modelo empresarial para una industria en dificultades… un nuevo modelo que puede ser una amenaza para sus competidores?

Temores y desafíos

Durante los meses de negociaciones para la compra de The Independent , uno de los diarios nacionales británicos, los medios especularon con la posibilidad de que también fuera convertido en un diario gratuito, o al menos se recortara su precio, que es de 1 libra. Eso podría afectar seriamente a otros periódicos nacionales, particularmente a The Guardian , cuya postura de izquierda es la más similar a la orientación de The Independent .

“Lo que sí sabemos es que no podemos seguir adelante con el diario en su forma actual”, dijo Eugeny Lebedev sobre The Independent , que perdió 12, 4 millones de libras (alrededor de 18,5 millones de dólares) el año pasado. “Tenemos que implementar algún cambio del modelo empresarial”.
Los Lebedev dicen que aún no han decidido una nueva estrategia. Y, más notable aún, dicen que les preocupa la manera en que su estrategia pueda afectar a otros periódicos -una afirmación que está muy lejos del usual enfoque encarnizado de los magnates mediáticos-. “Si uno intenta salvar un buen periódico, no quiere perjudicar a los otros”, dijo Alexander Lebedev.

Los expertos dudan que un periódico pueda convertirse en gratuito con una circulación en todo el Reino Unido sin perder enormes sumas de dinero, porque el costo de la distribución es muy grande. “Tiene la red de distribución en Londres, de manera que podría convertir a The Independent en un periódico gratuito solamente en Londres, y seguir cobrándolo en el resto de los lugares”, opinó Roy Greenslade, ex editor de varios periódicos británicos importantes, que escribe comentarios sobre los medios en The Guardian y The Standard . Los otros diarios “están muy preocupados por la decisión que puedan tomar los Lebedev”.

Haga lo que haga, Alexander Lebedev seguirá siendo una figura poco usual. Empezó a leer los periódicos británicos en la década de 1980, como parte de su trabajo en la KGB, que le encomendaba la tarea de reunir información de inteligencia sobre la economía británica. Durante varios años, esa agencia lo destinó a Londres.

Se convirtió en empresario después de la desintegración de la Unión Soviética a principios de la década de 1990, y edificó un imperio que incluye instituciones bancarias, líneas aéreas, hoteles y manufacturas. Dijo que su experiencia empresarial, que lo obligó a enfrentar la corrupción en Rusia y en otros países, estimuló su interés por promover un periodismo de investigación amplio y abierto. “Francamente, no veo otra manera de hacer eso si no es a través de los medios de comunicación”, dijo. “E incluso así, el gobierno puede reaccionar o no”.

Mientras otros magnates se dedicaban a comprar equipos deportivos, Lebedev invirtió, junto con Gorbachov, en Novaya Gazeta , un periódico caracterizado por su trabajo de investigación y su postura crítica con respecto al gobierno y a poderosos intereses comerciales. (También es conocido por sus cuatro periodistas asesinados en el curso de la última década, incluida Anna Politkovskaya.) Alexander Lebedev aún mantiene su domicilio principal en Moscú, mientras que el de su hijo está en Londres.
A principios de este año, algunos medios británicos cuestionaron la independencia de Lebedev respecto del Kremlin, después de que la línea aérea Aeroflot, mayoritariamente propiedad del gobierno, accedió a comprarle su parte accionaria de la empresa.

Alexander Lebedev se ha postulado varias veces para ocupar cargos públicos y ha ocupado durante cuatro años una banca en el parlamento ruso, la Duma, un antecedente que en EE.UU. sería considerado un caso de conflicto de intereses. Ha cambiado de partido político varias veces, y él y Gorbachov han hablado de fundar un partido reformista.

Tras comprar el 74,1% de The Standard , contrató a un nuevo editor, Geordie Greig, con la misión de revivir el diario. Se lanzó una campaña publicitaria con el eslogan “Lamentamos perder contacto”, atacando directamente la percepción de que el diario era demasiado seco y demasiado negativo hacia Londres.

Greig le ha dado a la tapa un aspecto menos pesado y más atractivo, dijo Lorna Tilbian, una experta en medios del banco de inversión Numis, “pero no sacrificó las notas serias”.

En Rusia y en Inglaterra, los Lebedev han defendido una prensa que no está alineada ni controlada por ninguna facción política o empresarial y, bajo su égida, The Standard se ha alejado de su postura conservadora.

Además, en el caso de The Independent , la postura deberá “ser de principios elevados”, dijo Eugeny Lebedev, “y evitar la cultura popular de las celebridades. Ese nicho está más que cubierto”.
© The New York Times

It’s easy to forget that CNN was once revolutionary. Founded in 1980, back when the idea of watching a channel other than ABC, NBC, or CBS seemed exotic (Fox would not start for another six years; Fox News not till 1996), it was, in terms of cultural impact, the Google of its day. Its gonzo “fluid news” style, low-cost methods, and disdain for the woolly orthodoxies of traditional TV news- gathering terrified the big three, and attracted their most forward-thinking journos. And the internal contradictions in Turner’s vision (public service versus profit growth) were for years obfuscated by the extraordinary cash-spewing awesomeness of the cable business. By 2000, CNN was making $300 million, causing Jerry Levin, the CEO of Time Warner, to rank CNN alongside Time magazine as the “crown jewels” of his empire.

It’s hard to see the fervor of early CNN in today’s product, with chummy King cozying up to out-of-date celebrities and the resolutely humorless Wolf Blitzer stumbling through banter with Jack Cafferty. As with USA Today, CNN’s best work and workers (Sanjay Gupta, Christiane Amanpour, Fareed Zakaria) strain to break through a stultifying smog of midmarket general-interestness, neither high-toned enough to feed into upmarket affectations nor downmarket enough to be … fun.

The news of CNN’s decline prompted a flurry of free advice, from bringing back Crossfire to NYU media prof Jay Rosen’s idea of having a show produced by liberals about conservatives, and vice versa. But it’s always easy to pontificate when you’re not weighed down by decades of process, staff, relationships, and cash flow. Would you want to tell Larry King it’s time to retire?

But CNN’s biggest problem may actually be its founding principles. In an era when news flows like water—available everywhere, all the time, instantly—a network devoted to providing headlines topped with a touch of analysis no longer seems quite so useful. If anything, sitting down for 22 minutes to watch a middlebrow mix of politics and weather that’s too proud to dabble more than passingly in the latest Hollywood crack-whoredom seems … inefficient. What was very urgent in 1980 or on 9/11 no longer seems crucial when we’re drowning in news. CNN’s decline may be, in Wall Street analyst-speak, secular as opposed to cyclical.

As bulwarks of old media are discovering, it’s hard-to-nigh-on-impossible to refresh an entrenched brand at the speed required by our rapidly metastasizing digital culture (and wait till we’re all watching video on our iPads!). CNN took two generations to go from vanguard to rearguard. It should consider itself lucky. AOL and Yahoo, both now in the throes of their own frantic rethinks, only got one.

Well, now it appears The Journal’s New York section is ready to throw itself into the dirty underbelly of the city’s nightlife!

The Journal has hired Marshall Heyman, a freelancer from Los Angeles who worked at W magazine, to shepherd the new coverage, sources said.

The section is expected to cover parties, nightlife, high society and events, sources said.

As far as the war with The Times is concerned, The Journal is clear to go! The Times did away with its gossip coverage four years ago.

But how will the broadsheet fare as it swims in the same waters as Page Six and Guest of a Guest? We watched The Times play around with this awkwardly, when it launched Boldface Names in 2001. The section was light on dish. It was relatively sober. There were lots of process stories about the difficulty of landing interviews! It lasted for five years, and Bill Keller and Joe Sexton pulled the plug in 2006.

Off the Record called Joyce Wadler, one of the Boldface Name veterans at The Times, to see if she had any advice. “Millions of years ago, when I did a lot of celebrity reporting, you could go out and hang out with Robin Williams for a few days,” she said. “There were no publicists! It was a happy time.”

By the time she wrote for Boldface Names, the press aides were out in force, and Ms. Wadler said going out was a tough, tough grind.

Any advice for The Journal or Mr. Heyman as the paper tackles the new beat? “I wish them well! Good luck,” said Ms. Wadler.

jkoblin@observer.com

In the interests of moving discussions about the endangered outlook for professional journalism back into the realm of realistic thinking, we’re going to do the simple math today to prove conclusively why this never will happen.

The math, as detailed below, shows that it would take $88 billion – or nearly a third of all the $307.7 billion donated to charity in 2008 – to fund the reporting still being done at America’s seriously straitened newspapers.

If you want to cover magazines and commercial broadcasting – not to mention the myriad journalism start-ups responding to the meltdown of the mainstream media – it would take billions more in philanthropic support. But the number is so big and unapproachable that I gave up counting when I saw how comparatively little – $141 million – was raised in the last four years to fund non-profit news ventures.

To be sure, a few boutique non-profits like Pro Publica, the Texas Tribune and the Center for Independent Media (recently renamed the American Independent News Network) have been funded generously to date to provide specialized reporting on select topics. But they make no pretense of providing the ongoing and intense beat coverage that historically were the meat-and-potatoes of quality local journalism.

The sharp contraction in recent years in the sales and profitability of for-profit media companies has led to dramatic and traumatic staff reductions in almost every newsroom in the land. As the economy tanked in 2008, even philanthropically supported public broadcasters had to cut staff when contributions declined from not only foundations but also viewers and listeners like you.

Rick Edmonds, the estimable media economics expert at the Poynter Institute, calculated that American newspapers are spending $4.4 billion today on news-gathering, or about 29% less than the $6.2 billion that funded newsrooms as recently as 2006. That’s a drop of $1.8 billion.

If you wanted to sustain the current level of newspaper coverage by replacing for-profit funding with non-profit dollars, the typical approach would be to raise an endowment that would be invested conservatively to produce an annual return of 5%. The investment income would be distributed each year to provide the operating budgets for non-profit news organizations.

The endowment necessary to provide $4.4 billion in annual newsroom funding would be $88 billion. This happens to be 29% of the entire $307.7 billion contributed to charity in 2008, according to data published by the Giving USA Foundation, the non-profit arm of an organization of professional fund-raisers.

Given the downturn in the economy since 2008, it is a safe bet that charitable donations dropped in 2009 and probably will be less than $307 billion in this year, too.

The decline in donations is not the biggest challenge for those counting on charity to rescue the press. The infinitesimal amount of support to date for non-profit news projects suggests that philanthropists have other long-standing priorities.

As reported recently in the annual State of News Media study by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, Jan Schaffer of the J-Lab at American University estimated that only $141 million (not including public broadcasting) of philanthropic support has gone into non-profit journalism efforts in the last four years. The sum is less than 0.05% of the $307 billion given to charity in 2008 alone.

In light of the above objective facts, it is clear that there are only two ways to establish a substantial philanthropic base to preserve journalism:

Either (1) vast new sources of charitable funding would have to be identified or (2) existing philanthropists would have to be persuaded to abandon their traditional commitments (see chart below) to religious, educational, social service, cultural, environmental and other organizations.

While there is a pressing need to save the press, a major shift in the philanthropic paradigm seems unlikely, especially in an era in which most folks – with the notable exception of a fortunate few – seem to be tightening their belts.

So, let’s stop dreaming about a visit from the Non-Profit News Bunny and get serious about discovering some realistic possibilities.

The 47 volumes of documents and reports known as the Pentagon Papers were prepared on the orders of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, whose own gloomy judgments on Vietnam in that era were not publicly revealed until decades later in his memoirs. It has been so long since Vietnam entered American consciousness that the arrival off-Broadway of Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers by Geoffrey Cowan and the late Leroy Aarons definitely feels like a historical artifact. Cowan, dean emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, and Aarons, who was a reporter at The Washington Post at the time of the case, wrote a version of the play in the early 1990s that was presented on National Public Radio. As revised by Cowan, a lawyer, writer, former director of the Voice of America, and cultural entrepreneur, a staged version of the drama has now toured the country and been featured at universities as well as theaters in Los Angeles and Washington.

For performances at the New York Theater Workshop (it runs until March 28), Cowan arranged for twelve benefit evenings on behalf of organizations such as Human Rights Watch, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Columbia Journalism Review, where panelists discussed the impact of the case and, significantly, its relevance to the issues of today. At the CJR evening (which was taped by C-SPAN for airing sometime in the near future), the panel had an all-star cast.

Daniel Ellsberg was a former Pentagon official who, having turned against the war, gave the papers to the The New York Times and The Washington Post in the belief that the revelations they contained would undermine the conflict. Ellsberg was the subject last year of an Oscar-nominated documentary called The Most Dangerous Man in America, which is what National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger once said of him on a Nixon White House tape. He clearly has never lost his outraged edge, calling the war against the Taliban “Vietnamistan” and insisting that officials critical of American policies in the region should publicly renounce them.

Leslie Gelb was project director for the Pentagon Papers and later gained eminence as a journalist at the Times and as president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He revealed that in 1969, when he brought the finished papers to McNamara, then president of the World Bank, the former defense secretary sent them back. Gelb never asked McNamara why he rejected his own report and, to Gelb’s personal relief, he was never asked to defend the papers.

James Goodale was, as general counsel of The New York Times, instrumental in the decision to publish the contents of the papers, despite warnings from outside counsel to the newspaper of dire consequences. Goodale, who is a commentator on media issues, focused on the resources and time the newspaper had devoted to the publication, clearly raising the question of whether any publication today would match that commitment.

Nicholas Lemann was a young reporter at The Washington Post in the years when the Post was still riding the crest of its role in the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. He is dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Nowadays, he observed, classified documents would be posted on the Internet by an Ellsberg-like whistleblower, sidestepping the epic free press issues or at least raising different ones. But the great challenge now, Lemann said, is to maintain news-gathering enterprises with a zeal for old-school investigative reporting.

Ultimately, the contents of the Pentagon Papers mattered less to events than the great confrontation over whether the press could override government’s objections to their release. So if you get a chance to see Top Secret or watch the panel on C-SPAN, here’s what to remember: important decisions being made today by proprietors and journalists will be judged by history. Let’s hope they meet the test.

In a speech last night entitled ‘Is news over?’, the former Times international editor questioned the role of journalists and the very nature of journalism in the digital world. He told the audience of students and media professionals gathered at City University that the rapid development of technology had prised the concept of news out of the hands of traditional media.

“The ability for anyone to produce something called news, circulate it, discuss it and edit it brings an oligopoly to a brutal end,” he said.

“Until recently journalists could rest secure in the knowledge that it wasn’t easy for anyone to claim to be a journalist unless they were in a position to use the capital-intensive equipment to publish or broadcast. That barrier to entry has of course gone.”

Brock told how news, once the binding factor in so many communities in the form of a local paper, was now created by online communities which “form, congeal, dissolve and disperse” at a speed unimaginable to previous generations.

On the inevitable question of how to fund journalism, Brock was candid. “There is no law of economics which guarantees that when one business model fails, a replacement one is immediately available,” he said.

Yet he went on to suggest that we should be grateful for “ever cheaper, ever lighter” multimedia devices, which allow stories to be told in the broadest possible form, with both audio and visual dimensions. With the decline of newspapers, however, he stressed the importance of maintaining the role of the written word.

“We have to find a way to make sure that words survive in the equation. Each technology tends to affect the way news is reported on that particular platform and some of the most successful ways of telling stories seem to weave words, video and sound together. I only plead that words, so beautiful and so useful, don’t get squeezed out.”

Throughout his address, Brock insisted that journalists, if they are to survive, must begin reassessing how they regard themselves and their place in the new structures of the digital world.

“If journalism is to be valued, and perhaps even paid for, that worth has to be clear to people who are not journalists. Journalists have to start by accepting that they don’t automatically hold the powerful place in the new information system that they held in the old,” he said.

He concluded by telling the audience that journalism is indeed valuable, but reminded those present that challenging times lie ahead.

“We’re entering a new communications age and making the argument for journalism all over again needs a little more critical self-appraisal than we have been used to doing. The worth of journalism is real, and its case will need to be made often in the next few years.”

Es como para estar orgullosos de que estudiantes de 21-22 años sepan ya aventar el buen periodismo de la paja mental que exhiben algunos apoltronados responsables de medios, siempre empeñados en echar la culpa de todos sus males a todos y a todo, menos a ellos. La autocrítica profesional sigue brillando por su ausencia.

Así que de los buenos y muy buenos contenidos que hemos escuchado en el Congreso durante jueves y viernes no voy a escribir porque ya lo han ido haciendo requetebién Rosa para El País y @juanlarzabal para 233grados y mucho más para su periodismo al pil pil. Y, además, ya se han publicado las conclusiones aunque yo, personalmente, preferiría llamarlas resúmenes de lo dicho porque conclusiones, lo que se dice conclusiones… si lo fueran, algunas serían terribles. Bueno, la verdad es que también pueden considerarse como tales algunas de mis reflexiones después de lo visto, oído y vivido y que son éstas:

Reflexión visual: los editores gráficos con calcetines cian provocan que más de uno se ponga magenta.
Triunfa el ponente que expone con humildad su camino, no el ingeniero con planos.
El periodista que lleva 15 años hablando de nuevos medios es que ni los ha visto.
Si un periodista va a un Congreso sin saber qué va a decir es que nunca sabe qué va a decir.
El periodista que se hipnotiza con el retrovisor se la pega, seguro, porque nunca ve lo que le viene.
La cuestión no es el periodismo digital: es si los periodistas entienden el periodismo.
El periodista charlatán es un cansalmas.
El periodista profeta es un estafador.
Si el periodista no entiende “lo” de internet… cómo carajo va a entender a su público.
Al periodista, hoy y siempre, se le reconoce porque tiene algo que decir, no por dónde lo va a decir.
Los periodistas que lloran porque han perdido sus fuentes es porque nunca las tuvieron.
Los periodistas que no avanzan por culpa de sus empresas, que cobren y callen, pero no lloren.
El periodismo no es digital. Es vital.
El 13 es inevitable: el periodista venido a empresario y/o el empresario venido a periodista es la mecha.
Delibes escribió al camino, Machado lo versó, Serrat lo cantó. Y yo camino por el periodismo.
El mejor periodismo sigue emanando de suelas desgastadas: world press noquea a wordpress.
Por favor, no me lo diga antes. Dígamelo mejor.
El periodista de papel sorprendido porque el lector ahora le puede contestar fue un virrey indigno.
Los periodistas intermedios (en edad y rango) andan perdidos y pierden a los que vienen andando.
Para enseñar alguna vez periodismo tienes que estar toda la vida aprendiendo.
El periodista que llega a decir “yo llegué hasta aquí porque…” es porque nunca llegó ni llegará.
Si un periodista de 37,4 años le dice “es que antes las cosas eran distintas”… huya y llame al 112.
El ponente que dice tacos en su intervención está faltando al respeto al público que le escucha.
El ponente que se espatarra en su butacón sobre el escenario está faltando al respeto al público que le escucha.
El periodista que se expresa con palabras inexistentes ante un auditorio de profesionales y futuros profesionales deprime.
…?
Gracias por su atención y gracias especiales a Toni, periodista de raza que como tal ha publicado este balance en primicia mundial porque en principio yo no iba a hacerlo y le pedí que lo hiciera él. Además de colegas, amigos.

[Actualización a petición de Javier F. Barrera (@juanlarzabal): “Te rogaría incluyeras http://cort.as/HNE http://cort.as/HNC http://cort.as/HA3 http://cort.as/HND para que no se mosqueen mis jefes”. Eso, como si tus jefes me fueran a leer… O_O].
Etiquetas: periodismo, periodistas, universidad

• Publicado por Paco Sancho a las 12:29

His prepared speech, in full:

“Each time I visit this part of the world, I experience your fabled hospitality. Making guests feel at home is a long and honored tradition in your culture – and you have happily shown that the best traditions are fully compatible with a modern skyline. Nowhere is this wisdom more clear than in your plans for Abu Dhabi 2030 – a capital city for the 21st century.

I have looked at your plan, and it is visionary. Your new capital district will be built on four guiding principles – cultural heritage, economic development, social cohesion, and the natural environment. You will have state-of-the-art transportation. Architecture that draws from the past while pointing to the future. Great new universities, medical research facilities, museums and the like. And a sense of community that will make this city not just a showcase for visitors – but a home for your people.

You have set a high bar for your ambitions. Today I hope to use this conference on the media to share my thoughts about the contributions that a thriving creative sector might make – to your society, to your economy, and to your future.

In this I am mindful of the Arab proverb: “if a wind blows, ride it.” As I speak, there is a powerful wind blowing through this region. This wind is the creative energies of your people, who are aching to make their own mark on the world around them. Without this creative spirit, the museums, universities, and other fabulous buildings you have planned will be empty shells. But ride this wind and you will raise from these desert sands something extraordinary: a capital of creativity that is modern … that is global … and that is fully Arab.
These days our homes and offices are cluttered with the latest electronic devices. It is easy to be dazzled by this new technology. But the bright and shiny wonders that technology gives us can be like the desert sun – they can blind us to what is real and valuable. Amid the digital dazzle, we risk missing the magic: the creative content that brings these devices to life.

That is the point I wish to discuss with you today. What is a Kindle or an e-reader worth without books or newspapers or magazines to read on them? What is a cell phone without the access to e-mail, the photos of your children or your favorite websites? What is the most advanced high-definition TV without the dramas and comedies and news and sport to watch on it?

The answer is this: Without creative content, these electronic devices are merely expensive playthings.

Your citizens know this, because they are among the earth’s most sophisticated consumers. They watch films from all parts of the world. And they own all the best and latest gadgets.

That is a good thing. Your citizens should be free to take full advantage of human creativity wherever they find it. But they also deserve the opportunity to add their own creative contributions to our vast and growing media world.

Left alone, these creative talents remain constrained by arbitrary boundaries. To make this talent bloom, you need businesses willing to invest in creativity, to nurture talent, and to build audiences that will buy and enjoy the fruits of this enterprise. That takes the right incentives. By unlocking the creativity of your people, you can diversify your economy … provide millions of jobs for a rising generation … and give the Arab people a global voice and influence commensurate with your importance.
A few months ago, I spoke in Beijing about the critical importance of having good copyright laws that protect the value people create. Today I wish to speak more broadly about values, competition, and incentives.
In particular, I wish to emphasize the incentives that will help money flow to those who invest in creativity … the need for global competition to help make local media companies strong … and the reminder that a creative sector flourishes best in societies where governments intervene with a light hand. With these incentives in place, you will build a creative sector worthy of the great capital you have planned.
Let me start with content. Right now the world does not think of the Middle East when it thinks of creative content. Even your own citizens often look elsewhere for a film or television show or news site. As a result, many of your own citizens prefer Hollywood movies or American television shows to local production.

You can change this. Recently I had dinner with the trade minister from another Muslim country, Indonesia. We started talking about the economic value of a creative sector. She told me that the creative sector now accounts for more than 5.4 million jobs and 6% of the Indonesian economy – and is the country’s fifth largest source of exports. She also told me her government set a target that would nearly double the contribution to GDP by 2025. Think of the millions of stimulating new jobs that would mean for the Indonesian people.

Now think what a growing creative sector would mean here. A recent Arab Human Development Report suggests that this region must create 50 million new jobs in the next ten years. A thriving creative industry would contribute many of these jobs – most of them environmentally friendly, well paying, and contributing to a better quality of life for all.

The good news is that the geographic borders that once limited your potential are today largely irrelevant. Let me give you an example that you might know about. It’s a film called My Name Is Khan … it is the story of a Muslim boy in San Francisco after the September 11 attacks … and it made its international debut in this city last month.

In all its aspects, this film speaks to the cross-border soul of the creative industry. The film is a joint venture between an Indian company and an American company. It is a story told from the point of view of a Muslim. It was financed in part from Abu Dhabi. It features Indian stars who are popular in this region. It is attracting huge audiences here in the Middle East … in India … in the U.K. … in the United States. The popularity of My Name Is Khan reminds us that no nation has a monopoly on creative content. If you tell a good story, people will respond.

Let me give you an example from the business end. One of our company’s biggest films right now is Avatar. It’s playing all over the world. It’s already grossed two and a half billion dollars and is on its way to three billion. Those of you who have seen it – if you have not, ask your children – know that Avatar has revolutionized 3-D and film animation. What many of you may not know is that a good part of this remarkable film was produced in New Zealand.

That’s right. Each night, when the lights went out at the production studios in Los Angeles, their collaborators in Wellington were starting up a new day – using their computers to generate the film’s jungle environment. If a visual-effects company in a faraway island like New Zealand can find its niche in the most technologically advanced film of our time, you can be sure that the Arab people are fully capable of making their own contributions to this fast-growing global industry.
So what do you need to encourage your creative sector? Obviously you need money. High-quality content is expensive. The simple fact is that if you want quality content, you need to encourage a marketplace where money flows to those who invest in and create that content.
Take television. Right now television is still a young market in this part of the world. The potential, however, is huge. If you want higher-quality television, you need a transparent market that helps ensure that people receive a fair price for the value they create.

A more transparent advertising market means having effective tools to measure who and what people are watching. Advertisers and creators need metrics that tell them who they are reaching and how effective their message is – or else they are simply throwing money in the dark.
A more transparent advertising market will also encourage media buyers and sellers to compete for business. By contrast, opaque markets tend to be unfairly dominated by one or two players. This can be a cozy arrangement for those players. But a nation pays a very high price for this cozy arrangement – because it takes away the financial engine needed to drive investment in local content.

Advertising is only one part of this financial engine. In many parts of the world, we are finding that the best way to finance quality content is by having a balance of advertising and subscription revenue. So a thriving creative sector also needs to be open to new business models that allow companies to know their customers better. The stronger the relationship between media companies and their customers, the more they will cater to local tastes – and invest in the technology that makes for a better experience. That’s exactly what we are doing with our Sky pay-television businesses in the U.K., Italy, and now Germany and India.

Some people will say that you cannot build a creative sector here. I do not believe that for a moment. The beauty of creativity is that the raw materials are all in the human mind. With the right economic incentives, you will find creative Arab enterprises rising higher and faster than your most modern buildings.

Another critical ingredient for a vibrant creative sector is global competition. Our company operates in almost every media market in the world. Everywhere I have been, one thing is clear: the local companies that are in the best position to challenge us are those whose home markets are open to foreign competition.

Sometimes nations seek to promote their own creative industries by limiting foreign participation and protecting local producers. And sometimes these restrictions and protections do keep us from entering such a market – or limit us to a tiny share.

Unfortunately, when that happens you are also making your market smaller and less competitive. Japan is a good example of a modern nation with a protected – and limited – creative sector. As a result, Japanese citizens pay higher prices for more limited fare. The Japanese economy has fewer jobs for its workers. And Japanese culture is denied the global voice that a nation which boasts the world’s second largest economy ought to have.

In short, creative protectionism is as destructive as other types of protectionism. It is expensive … it is unfair … and it guarantees that local companies coddled by protection will never be strong enough to compete outside their own borders.

By contrast, if you open your creative market up to competition, your companies can challenge the biggest players. I have seen it done. Most of you probably think of News Corporation as an American company, because we are now based in New York. But we did not start out this way.
We started in a provincial Australian city called Adelaide. When I brought our company to America, we were still a small Australian firm. We had a few media properties in Britain – and a single newspaper in San Antonio, Texas.

We succeeded because the open American economy let us compete on our talents. So we grew. And as we grew, we expanded our reach and influence to other parts of the world – and created thousands of jobs. Today News Corporation has 64,000 people working for us across the globe – and many thousands more working for us indirectly.
I have every confidence that Arab companies can do the same – and more. I also believe that Abu Dhabi can lead the way. In two decades, your plans will transform this desert city into a gleaming capital of the future. By welcoming foreign competition, you will call your people to their best – and cultivate a world-class industry on par with the finance and oil giants that now dominate this region.
Finally, I’d like to say a word about freedom and regulation. This city is the capital of one of the Middle East’s most cosmopolitan societies. Your people have one of the highest GDP’s per capita in the world. And every day you continue to grow – in size, in sophistication, in wealth, and in the attention of the global press.
With this increased global attention comes the occasional inconvenient or unwelcome story. Again, I speak from some personal experience. Throughout my life, I have endured my share of blistering newspaper attacks … unflattering television coverage … and books that grossly distort my views or my businesses or both.

I have learned that this kind of coverage is a fact of life in a modern media society. I have learned too that it is the price one pays for success.

For a nation, the stakes are even higher. In face of an inconvenient story, it can be tempting to resort to censorship or civil or criminal laws to try to bury it. This is not only a problem here: In France a criminal defamation law remains in place. In the long run, this is counterproductive. Markets that distort their media end up promoting the very panic and distrust that they had hoped to control.
Certainly each nation and culture has the right to insist that the people they allow into their countries to do business respect their national values and traditions. This is best administered, however, with a gentle touch. Human creativity flourishes in freedom. By making the decision for greater openness, you will signal the importance you have assigned to creativity in your plans for the future – and declare your confidence in your people.

Now, I’m sure there is no shortage of experts who fly in here and give you nice words. It’s very easy to chatter on about talent and creativity. For our company, this is more than talk. We’ve been here for some time. And we are expanding our presence at a moment when others are paring back.

Our presence here cuts across many different forms of media. We’ve had reporters for the Times of London and the Australian and the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires for decades. We opened up a branch of HarperCollins. We’ve also been broadcasting some of our Fox International Channels.

More recently, we took another step by investing in a local media company that also is the world’s largest producer of Arab music. The company is called Rotana. To be frank, Rotana does not really need our financing. We are partnering with Rotana for something more ambitious: To tap into Arab talent and ultimately produce original Arab content for markets both here and abroad.

Yesterday we further extended our presence by announcing a strategic partnership between Fox International Channels and Abu Dhabi’s twofour54. First, we will move some of our satellite channels from Hong Kong to here. Second, we will establish a production office here for one of our documentary filmmaking companies. And third, we will headquarter the Middle Eastern operations for our global online advertising network business in Abu Dhabi as well.

I mention these partnerships only to emphasize that my words are backed up by my investments. With these new partnerships, we are sending a message. When we look to the future, News Corporation is betting on the creative potential of the more than 335 million people who make up the Arab world.

Ladies and gentlemen, you know your history better than I do. You know of your contributions to global knowledge and wealth. The West rediscovered Aristotle through Arab translations and Arab commentaries. We owe much of our mathematics, science, and medicine to discoveries by your scholars. Europe traded with Asia via routes pioneered and developed by Muslim merchants. And the leading economies of our world would grind to a halt without your oil.

While oil is undeniably vital to our world, the untapped creativity in this region represents a resource infinitely more precious. In this bright new century, the most advanced societies will be those that are most creative. Creativity is a resource that excites the imagination … expands jobs and opportunity … and improves our quality of life. It is clean, and it is high-value. Most of all, because it is rooted in the human mind, creativity is the one economic resource that is truly inexhaustible.

Your people are eager, talented, and young. They have aspirations in common with their peers in other parts of the world – yet they hold fast to the traditions that make them unique. Give them a society that rewards creativity. When you do, you will breathe life into your blueprints – and build a future worthy of your grand boulevards and glistening skyscrapers.

Thank you for listening.

El ranking es: 1) Televisión local, 2) televisión nacional, 3) internet, 4) radio, en casa o en el auto, 5) diario local, 6) diario de alcance nacional.

El avance de internet es disruptivo. Más importante que desplazar a los diarios es que está modificando toda la ecología mediática: se acaba la lealtad exclusiva a una plataforma. Fíjense qué fuerte es la tendencia:

Casi todos los norteamericanos usan varias de aquellas plataformas todos los días y casi la mitad consulta entre cuatro y seis de esas plataformas.
Sólo 7% usa una sola plataforma.
Y miren qué pasa con los recalcitrantes:

Los que sólo quieren fuentes offline apenas superan un tercio.
Los que sólo quieren internet para noticias suman un magro 2%
Que unos se vayan extinguiendo y otros sean insignificantes parece coherente con que el nuevo consumidor de noticias es voraz y activo y no excluye ninguna plataforma.

Ahora, cuando el consumidor de noticias ingresa a internet tiende a acotar sus elecciones quizá porque está en un territorio inabarcable: el 57% consulta dos a cinco sitios de los miles y miles disponibles; el 21% consulta solamente uno, y el 11%, más de cinco. La gran mayoría (65%) no tiene un favorito. También se acaba la fidelidad exclusiva a una publicación, una marca.

El mundo del periodismo cambia y se fragmenta. Algunos datos de la encuesta indican que esto se profundizará: “En este nuevo ambiente multiplafaforma, la relación con las noticias deviene portátil, personalizada y participativa“.

Portátil: el 33% de los usuarios de celulares acceden a noticias con sus teléfonos (más de setenta millones de personas). Esta es una tendencia que sólo puede crecer, a medida que los celulares se hacen más poderosos. Un smartphone de hoy es tan poderoso como una desktop de hace ocho años.

Pero en el fenómeno se incluyen también todos aquellos que acceden a internet con una conección inalámbrica: laptop, netbook, tablet: son nada menos que el 53% de los adultos de Estados Unidos, son usuarios intensivos: están conectados a cada momento y la amplia mayoría “obtiene algún tipo de información online“:

72% clima

68% noticias

49% descarga aplicaciones que le permite acceder a noticias

44% deportes

35% tránsito

32% finanzas

etc.

(La suma de los porcentajes no da cien porque la gente podía elegir muchos temas.)

Personalizada: el 28% de los usuarios de internet (más de sesenta millones) ha configurado en su página inicial un menú con los temas informativos y las fuentes preferidas. También se valen de filtros y agregadores de noticias

Participativa: Ocho de cada diez de los usuarios que se informan online dicen que obtienen su información a través de emails o de posteos en medios sociales del tipo de Facebook o Twitter. El número es impresionante. La información periodística siempre ha sido una experiencia colectiva, un vínculo social. La gente se informa para conocer su sociedad, para poder participar, para tener qué charlar. Pero internet ha profundizado este rasgo al hacer mucho más fácil la comunicación y la multiplicación de las fuentes de información. Fíjense que para aquellos “ocho de cada diez“ que se informan online las marcas periodísticas son menos importantes que las recomendaciones de sus fuentes confiables: por ejemplo, sus amigos.

Algo más en el renglón de lo participativo: el 37% de los usuarios de internet (84 millones) dice haber contribuido de alguna manera en la creación de noticias. Comentar, 25%; postear en medios sociales, 17%; etiquetar, 11%; crear material original, 9%; twittear, 3%. Esta claro que el crear está por detrás de las otras actividades, pero un 9% de creadores originales puede ser algo extraordinario, según la calidad del aporte. Nada dice sobre esto el estudio de Pew. Pero sí revela una tendencia fuerte: el 44% de los consumidores de noticias online prefiere los sitios que facilitan el compartir los contenidos.

¿Cuáles son los contenidos noticiosos que prefiere la gente en internet? El tiempo, en primer lugar; noticias nacionales, salud y medicina, negocios y la economía, noticias internacionales, y ciencia y tecnología. Brilla la ausencia de noticias locales. Entiendo que esa carencia es un reflejo de la poca oferta de noticias locales e hiperlocales que hay ahora en internet (algo que posiblemente esté en vías de cambiar: ver mi columna anterior).

Precisamente, el tema aparece (si bien no como una prioridad) cuando se le pregunta la gente sobre qué temas le gustaría tener más información. El ranking de lo deseado:

44%, ciencia y decubrimientos

41%, religión y espiritualidad

39%, salud y medicina

39%, gobierno estatal

38% vecindario, temas comunitarios locales

Les recomiendo leer el informe de Pew. Es un excelente estímulo para que los periodistas nos hagamos preguntas.

¿Cómo involucro al usuario? ¿Cuán abierto estoy a su participación y cuánto la facilito en la práctica? Conozco algunos periodistas de texto que no permiten comentarios a sus artículos; conozco otros que los padecen mucho. Sólo unos pocos los disfrutan.

¿Cómo hacer hoy un periodismo para los celulares y no rebajarlo en el intento: podemos hacer algo más que títulos?

¿Cómo cubrir las necesidades de un lector que quiere tener libertad para elegir y facilidad para encontrar y compartir? ¿Cómo hacerlo con rigor, interés y profundidad?

¿Cómo hacer que todo esto sea económicamente sustentable?

¿En qué medida mi trabajo aprovecha estas realidades?

¿Cómo me preparo para esto?
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Esta es una versión ampliada del artículo aparecido en Perfil.

Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

Andreessen once famously put the New York Times on deathwatch for its stubborn insistence on trying to save and prolong its legacy print business. With all the recent excitement in media quarters recently over Apple’s upcoming iPad and other tablet computers, and their potential to create a market for paid digital versions and subscriptions of newspapers and magazines, I wondered if Andreessen still felt the same way. Does he think the iPad will change anything?

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

But people pay for apps. Wouldn’t he pay for a beautiful touchscreen version of a magazine? Maybe, if it were something genuinely new that blew him away. It would have to be more than an article with video and graphics though. (I agree, otherwise it’s no better than a CD-ROM).

Oh, and he points out, that the iPad will have a “fantastic browser.” No matter how many iPads the Apple sells, the Web will always be the bigger market. “There are 2 billion people on the Web,” he says. “The iPad will be a huge success if it sells 5 million units.”

Despite trying time and again, Andreessen’s observation is that media companies have no aptitude for technology, nor do they really understand what technology companies do. The one thing technology companies do really well is deal with constant disruption. “Microsoft is going through this right now,” he points out, “Ballmer is not complaining about it.” He’s tackling it head on. So did Intel when Andy Grove gutted it to shift from memory chips to microprocessors. So does every technology company CEO. It is ingrained in the industry Andreessen comes from, so it is just obvious to him: “You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.” Media companies need to learn that lesson fast. To the extent that their products are now delivered and consumed as digital bits, they too are becoming technology companies.

Beyond the iPad, he believes that all the talk once again from big media companies about erecting paywalls or somehow charging for news, articles and video online is shortsighted at best. He comes back to the simple fact that the open Web is where the users are. Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.

El New York Times y la New York University, vecina del East Village, juntan conocimiento, recursos y energía para lanzar un sitio periodístico digital -The local: East Village- que cubrirá esas 110 manzanas; no más. Harán “periodismo hiperlocal“. No es algo nuevo; recuerden los diarios barriales. Lo nuevo es:

- se aplicará en ese pequeño espacio, la atención, la intensidad y la calidad que los grandes medios aplican a grandes territorios y a temas macro,

- se incorporará a vecinos como productores de contenidos,

- esos contenidos serán multimedia y

- es el trabajo conjunto de periodistas, académicos, ciudadanos, un gran diario, y una universidad prestigiosa.

Me pregunto si acá hay condiciones para hacer algo similar. Veamos el proyecto:

El diseño del sitio está a cargo de estudiantes dirigidos por Jay Rosen, uno de los teóricos más importantes del nuevo periodismo. La tarea de este cuatrimestre abarca:

- el diseño formal del sitio, su estética,

- la estrategia de relación con la comunidad,

- el diseño de los flujos de trabajo,

- la definición de las páginas (opinión, política, economía) y las áreas a cubrir (consejos barriales, comisarías, tribunales),

- los mecanismos del tipo usado por los “medios sociales“ como Facebook.

La cobertura periodística estará a cargo de:

-alumnos y ex alumnos asistidos por profesores, y por periodistas del NYT,

-“blogueros, periodistas amateurs, líderes de la comunidad, escritores y artistas de video“, todos vecinos del barrio.

El proyecto materializará la idea de que el periodismo no será más territorio exclusivo de los grandes medios y los periodistas profesionales. Y que su fortaleza vendrá de una relación mucho más rica con la comunidad.

El Times brinda supervisión editorial, alojará el nuevo sitio en su propio sitio de internet y aportará “inspiración, prestigio y un standard de excelencia reconocido en todo el mundo“, dice Rosen

Otro rasgo del proyecto: alumnos de negocios y de tecnología de la información de la misma universidad trabajan en una estrategia de sustentabilidad económica y en un programa editorial no propietario para la gestión periodística. Ambas cosas son cruciales para el tipo de periodismo que Rosen vislumbra. La primera se explica sola. La segunda: si el proyecto es exitoso, el software será accesible a todos. Por ejemplo, a los periodistas de un pequeño medio de un pequeño pueblo. O de un gran medio, etc.

Si vemos experiencias similares del NYT, podemos aproximarnos a lo que puede ser el nuevo site:

- entrevistas que una vecina y su esposo hacen al azar en la calle; esta pone la piel de gallina,

- instrucciones para cosechar ajo silvestre en un parque,

- pedidos de voluntarios para cubrir una reunión con autoridades vecinales y de preguntas para formular (vean qué buenas propuestas reciben)

Les recomiendo seguir de cerca esta experiencia (el site estará listo en la primavera austral: http://eastvillage.thelocal.nytimes.com). En lo estrictamente periodístico, es un “dream team“: no sólo están el diario y la universidad, y Rosen; también está la voluntad de unir el mejor periodismo tradicional con el que puedan aportar los usuarios, en línea con mucho de lo que hemos expuesto en esta columna. Un barrio parece un ámbito ideal para este experimento que es, en esencia, una herramienta de distribuición de poder.

Es posible que el proyecto abra nuevos territorios; el padrinazgo del NYT es un impulso muy importante. Para mí, es un paso más valioso aún porque es dado en el momento más crítico de la historia del periodismo, cuando deja de ser un gigantesco negocio pero conserva un papel central en la sociedad. Esta paradoja y las nuevas tecnologías ya están produciendo replanteos. Un ejemplo: pago vs gratis. Otro: construir un periodismo con más participación de la gente, más eficiente, más confiable y autosustentable. Habrá muchos modelos más.

El proyecto es un ejemplo también en lo institucional. No es nuevo entre nosotros que un diario (aquí y aquí) trabaje en conjunto con una universidad. Sí lo es la dimensión y la ambición del proyecto. El NYT está en peligro, sumergido en deudas; cada cuatrimestre parece al borde de la quiebra. Pero no abandona la innovación y el riesgo. Los principales medios locales parecen -en distintas medidas- absortos en la pelea con los Kirchner y en sus propios problemas económicos, sin duda mucho más leves que los del NYT. En cuanto a las universidades públicas y privadas, hasta ahora no han mostrado iniciativa en este tipo de proyectos.

Pienso que para medios y universidades un proyecto así es una oportunidad para participar en los cambios que se vienen; pero también, que esos cambios son inexorables, con o sin su participación.

Me preguntaba al comienzo si acá hay condiciones para un proyecto así. Hacen falta talento, recursos y ganas. Talento, hay; recursos, también. Necesitamos muy poco más. El problema es que las ganas están mal repartidas. Hay que trabajar sobre eso.

¿Qué es una carrera en periodismo hoy?

Yo hice una carrera en Clarín. Entré el Día del Periodista de 1976 y me fui el último día de marzo de 2003 como jefe de la Redacción. Se le llamaba carrera a un recorrido generalmente hacia arriba en una escalera de aprendizaje, reconocimiento profesional y monetario, y poder (el ranking es mío, claro).

En los años 70, hacer una carrera era trabajar en una institución que brindara seguridad. Empezar joven y salir jubilado, el recorrido de mis abuelos.

Pero los periodistas éramos un caso aparte. Una buena carrera era cambiar mucho de empleo: así, el crecimiento y el aprendizaje estaba más apoyado en uno mismo que en una estructura empresaria. Cambiar era crecer. Apenas dos años en el oficio, en La Razón, empecé a trabajar también en El Cronista, y luego estuve en el diario Noticias. Y mientras tanto, intenté hacer televisión: “audicioné” y gané un puesto como reportero en Canal 7 (Felipe Solá fue otro de los postulantes; sí, fue periodista) pero no lo tomé porque me obligaban a afeitarme.

El golpe militar cambió todo. No sólo estaba el peligro: se reducían mucho las fuentes de trabajo. Los periodistas también necesitábamos un lugar que nos diera cierta ilusión de seguridad.

Cuando se fueron los militares, ya estaba en marcha un cambio superior: ahora no era una catástrofe política sino la cultura de la época la que modificaba las condiciones para el periodismo. La informática desplazaba a la industria pesada, el conocimiento se transformaba en el valor supremo en la economía.

Las empresas con organizaciones verticales y procesos lineales (propias de las industrias tradicionales y los ejércitos… y de los diarios tradicionales) entran en crisis. Siempre funcionaron con un costo altísimo en energía derrochada: exigían creatividad y la castigaban porque el verdadero valor supremo no era la innovación, era la complacencia con las jerarquías, algo propio de los procesos industriales. Qué ironía, los diarios eran empresas del pasado que producían los bienes del futuro: la información y el conocimiento.

De pronto aparecen empresas como Google, capaces de trabajar con equipos, descentralizadas, deslocalizadas, en red, sin jerarquías congeladoras. Empresas capaces de estimular y aprovechar toda la creatividad: no se puedan dar el lujo de desperdiciarla porque su supervivencia depende de ella. “Hay una relación profunda entre el tipo de organización de los procesos sociales y los valores que los constituyen”, dice Felix Stalder en su libro sobre las ideas de Manuel Castells. “En el industrialismo, la forma social dominante es la jerarquía; en el informacionalismo, es la red”.

Las viejas empresas dicen “mi verdadero capital es la gente“ y en su acción concreta privilegian los procesos y las máquinas. A las nuevas empresas no se les ocurre decir eso. Sería como decir “yo respiro aire”. En ellas el poder se basa en el conocimiento y la capacidad de innovar y coordinar.

En esa cultura, no hay carrera en el viejo sentido. La época tiene un ratio de cambio inédito: Internet explotó en el ’95 con la aparición de los navegadores; en 1998, empezaron los blogs; en 2000, Google ya vendía avisos; en 2004, las redes sociales ya eran una fuerza imparable. Cada hito es un cambio profundo. Qué sentido tiene esperar un lugar cómodo para siempre. Suena a morirse, ¿no? Es la muerte.

El problema que tienen los periodistas jóvenes es que estamos en una transición y estamos en la Argentina, unos años atrás de un futuro que ya está ocurriendo en los países centrales. Todavía los diarios de papel tienen un gran prestigio entre los periodistas jóvenes. Y las nuevas tecnologías son asignaturas marginales en las carreras de periodismo; aún escucho decir que no hay que darles mayor espacio porque lo esencial del periodismo es inmutable.

Linda frase para quedarse quieto. Son las nuevas tecnologías de la información las que hacen posible la globalización. Son herramientas, sí, pero están embebidas en nuestra cultura: sin ellas, no podríamos comprender nuestro momento histórico ¡ni escribir sobre él!

Entonces: el riesgo de estar en la Argentina es prepararse para el pasado. No es solamente un problema de los medios ni de las escuelas de periodismo. Es un problema general: se ha gravado la importación de productos de informática para beneficiar a los ensambladores de Tierra del Fuego. Otra: los Kirchner privaron a las telefónicas  de la posibilidad de hacer triple-play para conseguir votos de la izquierda a la Ley de Medios. Es insensato: la tecnología impone la convergencia.

El otro problema para pensar hoy en una carrera es que estamos en la transición. Está en marcha la construcción de un periodismo nuevo pero el viejo aún tiene más prestigio y más gravitación social y política.

Los que hoy empiezan una carrera en periodismo tendrían que apostar a una promesa y navegar, si es necesario, en ambos mundos. Para mí, les conviene tener la cabeza y el corazón puestos en los medios digitales: vivir en aprendizaje y cambio. Las carreras profesionales siempre han sido, sobre todo, un recorrido interno. La gran novedad es que hoy un periodista puede tener su propio medio. No es el único camino. Es una posibilidad. Así que no necesita tanto como antes de soportes externos. Esto le voy a decir al colega que me consultó sobre su carrera.

Periodista. www.robertoguareschi.com

The utopia I picture is only “quasi” because I do not have any faith in utopia or utopians. There is always a devil in the details, for one thing and often the details matter more than the grand visions. At any rate, what is emerging does not come out of any single grand vision – that is its beauty. Utopian visions tend to be totalizing and the virtues of a liberal society that I cherish are anything but. The informational future that is approaching is right for liberalism. The liberal society hopes for unity but only within a world that honors and makes safe diversity; the liberal society hopes for common values and collective action but only when personal liberty and individual privacy are respected and guarded under law. And the liberal society recognizes its own incompleteness, its own revisability, and its own contradictions. This is a recipe, I think, for a good society, which is to say, a messy one.

My vision is less than utopian also because one of the sorts of social heterogeneity that I believe useful for a society is a heterogeneity of competence based on specialization and expertise. In my world of universities, I like it that the social science faculty has the greatest role in appointing social scientists, the law faculty in appointing law professors. I would not want the sociologists to have a large role in appointments to the medical school or the medical school to have much say in appointing sociologists. If you feel otherwise, come to see me when you’re having chest pains – I have a Ph.D. in sociology.

I will get to the reasons why I think the emerging information ecology can and very likely will produce a better journalistic environment than we have seen before. But a necessary preface to this argument requires that we assess how good journalism has been to this point. As it turns out, we have few serious studies of journalistic quality over time. So what I have to say about this is speculative and opinionated but I will do my best to justify the conclusion that one reason that the emerging journalism has a chance to be better than the journalism of the near past is that past journalism, to put it kindly, did not set the bar very high. I say this with the greatest admiration for the best achievements of contemporary American journalism. You cannot read the Pulitzer Prize winning news stories without taking off your cap in recognition of remarkable writing, frequently remarkable courage, imagination, and fortitude, and often the kind of dogged research that deserves not just a Pulitzer Prize but a Ph.D.

Even so, most of the 40,000 or so journalists writing for daily newspapers most of the time are producing work that is routine and, more often than one would like, trivial. On the whole, so far as I can judge, journalism before the late 1960s was generally superficial, often servile, usually unambitious, narrowly focused on government, almost devoid of critical inquiry about business, inattentive to the professions, the universities, the environment, women, minorities, schools, the family. If there was a golden age of American journalism, it began around 1965-70 and lasted for a generation. There were plenty of problems with that journalism, too, but it was our best. In some publications, it has not stopped. It continues right into the economic crisis of 2008-09 and in complicated ways endures to this day. I would be very surprised to find studies of the content of the New York Times that would discover enterprise, investigative depth, or a cosmopolitan attitude to be more impressive on any date before, say, 1968 than it is in 2010. (Were more books reviewed in the Sunday book section? Yes. But I do not think this stands in for the increased quality of front-page news or, for that matter, an increased sophistication in reporting on culture and the arts.) And in 2008 and 2009 and 2010 there have been stories of extraordinary worth – difficult to have researched, shrewd in analysis, stunningly detailed, enterprising in going beyond the reigning public agenda politicians discuss, digging beneath and behind the conventional public declarations of the day.

I wish I could assert this story of journalistic progress over the past several decades with unimpeachable authority. I cannot. It is not so easy to assess change, not without major content analysis studies, few of which have ever been undertaken. But here are the bits of evidence that influence my own thinking:

1. All scholars and most journalists who have written about this see the

1960s as a major point of transition in which the American news media became significantly more critical of established authority. Meg Greenfield, who began her career in Washington journalism in 1961, before the transformations of the sixties, recalls in her 2001 memoir (published just after her death in 1999) that “We, especially some of us in the journalism business, were much too gullible and complaisant in the old days. Just as a matter of republican principle, the hushed, reverential behavior (Quiet! Policy is being made here!) had gotten out of hand. It encouraged public servants to believe they could get away with anything – and they did.” (88-89) In her view, what she calls “the great change” (83) began in the late 1960s. It broke down a “mystique” that said that “the people in charge in Washington knew best. They could make things happen if they wanted to. Almost all of them were acting in good faith. And they were entitled to both privacy and discretion to do what they judged necessary for the nation’s well-being.”

Greenfield adds that no one believes that anymore and “practically no one admits to ever having believed it – which is a bald-faced lie for hundreds or thousands of people in Washington. So I’ll confess: I believed it. My approach to the public people I covered was that they were basically honest, competent, and usually effective.”

Other journalists recall similar things. And it is very easy to provide examples from the 1950s of journalists showing extraordinary deference to politicians or even colluding with politicians they were presumably reporting about. For my purposes here, I will simply let Greenfield’s recollections stand in for all the others. And I will tell you on another occasion how, in 1945 when James Reston for the New York Times and Walter Lippmann in his syndicated column covered a path-breaking speech of Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg that, as it happens, Reston and Lippmann had written for him.

2. Some longitudinal studies demonstrate in quantitative terms what

Greenfield recalls anecdotally: journalism grew more critical over time. Steve Clayman and John Heritage at UCLA examined a sample of presidential press conferences from 1952 through 2000 and did a close analysis of the questions reporters posed at those conferences. Over this half a century, questioning grew more critical, more persistent, and more aggressive. Surely this is in part a matter of style rather than substance, but style matters and a style/substance divide is not a hard and fast one. Yes, journalists had to demonstrate to their colleagues that they were tough – but why did they not have to do so in 1952? The questions at the very least show the growth of a norm among journalists in Washington that their job was to be critical, that they were to be watchdogs of government and not a part of a governing operation. If “watchdog” journalism or “accountability” journalism is the center of journalistic merit, there was more of it or at the very least more of a performance of it in 2000 than in 1952.

This research is supported by independent studies by Thomas Patterson that also find journalists growing more critical, more skeptical, tougher, and less cooperative over time in covering Washington. For example, he found that presidential candidates have been treated more and more negatively from l960 through l992 in Newsweek and Time coverage. Newspaper and television coverage of candidates gravitated from reports of candidate speeches to analysis of the political strategy behind the speeches – implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, communicating the message that politicians take the stands they do only in order to get elected. This may be a pat and prissy oversimplification itself, but it is one clearly encouraged by the growing legitimacy of critical and aggressive reporting since the late 1960s.

Spurred by the experience of Vietnam and Watergate, and encouraged

by obliging younger government officials who were also deeply affected by Vietnam and willing to provide reporters inside information, journalists in the l970s sought multiple sources for stories than earlier would have been covered by just citing a high government official. A new skepticism flourished and received blessings from the news establishment. Newspapers developed special teams for investigative reporting; even the Associated Press in l967 created a “special assignment team” to report on “the submerged dimension” in government. Investigative Reporters and Editors (I.R.E.) was organized in l975 and still exists as a professional association to advance the cause of investigative journalism

3. A study by Carl Sessions Stepp in the American Journalism

Review shows that between 1964 and 1999, in a sample of ten leading metropolitan daily newspapers, the news hole doubled. The percentage of total news represented by international, national, and local hard news declined (while sports coverage and business coverage grew significantly), but the absolute quantity of this hard political news increased by 25%. Stepp also found that there were fewer very short stories – stories of six inches or less; and there was a growth in the number of stories that ran 20 inches or more. Granted, there were fewer newspapers in 1999 than in 1964 in the ten cities examined, but it is not clear how much of a loss that was; overlap between two papers would have been quite high, particularly on national and international news.

Stepp’s own judgment is that the 1999 newspapers were “by almost any measure, far superior to their 1960s counterparts: better written, better looking, better organized, more responsible, less sensational, less sexist and racist, and more informative and public-spirited than they are often given credit for.” The bad news, in Stepp’s judgment, along with this good news, is that the 1999 papers are “less flavorful, less surprising, and – distressingly – less imbued with a distinctive sense of place.”[i] To me, this sounds like: “The cake is much better than it was, and there’s more of it, but the frosting is missing here and there.”

4. Coverage expanded from politics to other phases of public life. Hobart

“Bart” Rowen, business editor of the Washington Post for many years, said in a 1992 interview that he came into his field in 1966 when “the paper’s advertising salesmen routinely delivered to the newsroom press releases from major advertisers, ‘a not-too-subtle way of making sure the handouts got into the paper.’” As he said, “the financial section of most large newspapers, The Washington Post included, was a dumping ground. The business editor…was there to rewrite the handouts, and in other ways to keep local advertisers happy, not to make waves. Payola at Christmas time was acceptable practice. In short, business news reporting was a true backwater of the news business.” The growth of business reporting from the 1960s to the 1990s was not only a quantitative increase in reporting but the production of at least some good and critical journalism in the 1990s when essentially none had existed in 1965.

Of course, Rowen’s experience was at the Washington Post and it

was not in 1965 anything like the distinguished national paper it would become in the 1970s. Still, Rowen’s remarks are significant, I think. They indicate in one newspaper what I strongly suspect characterized the vast majority of newspapers – a complaisance, an acceptance of a “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” set of routines. I picture a field of colorful characters, some clever writers, the occasional bright young man on the way up, but people mostly local rather than cosmopolitan in their orientation, not particularly well educated, not particularly knowledgeable or curious about whether there might be a better way or an alternative way to run their news operation or for the local politicians to run their city.

Business news, of course, was not alone in its growth. Nor was growth

in coverage generated so much internally as it was by a changing understanding in the broad culture of what counted and who counted in news coverage. Internally, there was for the first time in the history of U.S. journalism a recognition that the narrow demography of the newsroom contributed to a narrow focus in news coverage – there were few minority employees at all, and the relatively few women were largely confined to writing about fashion and high society. When Meg Greenfield came to Washington as the national correspondent for The Reporter magazine in 1961, replacing Douglass Cater, Cater took her to the National Press Club to show her where she could consult the Associated Press wire ticker. They were informed that women not only could not be members of the Club but could not enter its premises except on special social occasions that included them as guests. She would have to keep up with the wire service in some other way.

I am eager for more evidence on changes over time in the quality of

American reporting and solicit you for your best evidence. If some of the evidence runs contrary to what I am suggesting here, so be it. But at this point, everything I know suggests that American journalism before the late 1960s was less diverse, less critical, less investigative, and less thoughtful than it would become thereafter. All of this was produced by a mutually reinforcing mix of profit, professionalization, and publicness or what is fashionably called transparency.

Any of these developments could be revised or even reversed, but

none of them can be undone easily. This much said, I can now move from past to present. I have established, or at least have provoked you to consider, that the virtues we prize in American journalism of investigation and skepticism are of relatively recent vintage. If there is a decline in the quality and democratic value of American journalism over the past five or ten years, it is a decline from a higher state of performance than we have since at any time in U.S. history before the late 1960s. It should also be clear that the high quality of journalism I am describing for the period of the 1970s and after is an unevenly distributed quality. The legacy media survived and did honor to democracy by virtue of a happy accident, as Clay Shirky has put it: that advertisers were willing for their own purposes to subsidize quality journalism, that Wal-Mart was willing to pay for the Baghdad bureau. Shirky is right about this but he offers here a very partial view. It is also important to remember how little serious accountability journalism most American newspapers ever did. Or, to put it another way, there are today more than 1400 daily newspapers in this country. How many ever had a Baghdad bureau? Or any foreign bureau? Or a full-time statehouse reporter? There has been a lot of mourning for the declining statehouse bureaus with the number of full-time staff in state capitals receding from over 500 to the 300’s. But this means that at a time when American newspapers were remarkably prosperous and when newsroom employment was at historic highs, more than two-thirds of daily newspapers did not cover the state capital with their own staff.

Okay, back to quasi-utopia. Let’s begin with the looming and distressing fact that in 2000 there were something like 60,000 journalists employed in the newsrooms of daily newspapers and today the number is somewhere in the vicinity of 40,000. Craigslist and other competitors for classified ads have been devastating to newspapers that counted on the classifieds for 20 to 40 percent of their ad revenue, and ad revenue made up something like 75 percent of total revenue. Add to this that newspapers competed against themselves by providing their news free of charge online, inviting many people among their traditional readers to cancel their subscriptions, thereby cutting into that other 25 percent of their total revenue, and forcing further cuts in advertising income since you can’t charge an advertiser as much if your circulation shrinks. And then add a deep and prolonged recession that forced businesses across the board to reduce discretionary expenses – and that includes advertising.

The result is surely a decline in the quality of American journalism. There are fewer reporters and fewer editors, fewer pages and fewer stories, more incentive to run stories that grab readers and less inclination to invest in stories that win more prizes than readers. So on what conceivable grounds do I believe that the emergent journalism is the best we have ever had, apart from the fact that the journalism of the past wasn’t all that great?

I’m placing my bets on low-profit and non-profit journalism, on collaborative journalism, most of it but not all of it online. Let me take as my model the online startups that already exist, from TalkingPointsMemo to ProPublica to MinnPost, VoiceofSanDiego, St. Louis Beacon, New Haven Independent, Rustwire, and many more. They are springing up, and growing, and providing effective journalism, including original reporting, and so providing effective models for the future. They are able to do so, with few employees and modest resources, for six reasons.

First, they do not have to invest in a printing press, in paper, or in delivery trucks. Newspapers spend about 70 percent of their budget on these items, another 16 percent on their own efforts at advertising and marketing, and about 14 percent on actual journalistic content. The Internet levels the playing field and nearly eliminates the established newspaper’s competitive advantage. If you need a printing press to make your business work, you need substantial capital – and once you get in, you have a substantial barrier to others entering after you. If you need only to put up a Website and can do that yourself or hire a consultant for a few thousand dollars, you can be up and running with the savings from your summer job.

Second, the productivity of an individual journalist is enormously increased by the Internet and the personal computer. Three months ago I heard the media business columnist of the New York Times, David Carr, at a conference. He went to the podium, lifted up his laptop up over his head, and announced, “There are more resources in this machine for me as a reporter than there have been in the entire newsroom in any newspaper I have ever worked at.” No one denies thisw. But few have really ‘fessed up to it or acknowledged that, even without the recession, the overleveraged newspapers, and the loss of advertising and circulation, newspapers would still be letting go hundreds of reporters because they do not need them to provide the same level of reporting quality they offered a decade ago. Online searching is more efficient than the newsroom hunt and peck; more information and databases are available online; more and more and more information proves to be just a few clicks away. If there had been no recession and if there had been no Craigslist, newspapers would still have cut hundred and likely thousands of jobs because they could have put only the same quality product with fewer people in the newsroom.

Third, most of the online operations have taken on an ethic of sharing rather than an ethic of exclusivity. Sure, they want credit for their stories. But they need and use other media to get the stories out. Voiceofsandiego editors appear regularly on commercial television and public radio in San Diego to disseminate their work. It’s advertising and public service all at once. Newspapers that once would have done everything in their power to avoid crediting a competitor or even mentioning a competitor, now trade news gathering tasks with former rivals, now mention the bloggers they read, accept stories from ProPublica, collaborate with Kaiser Health Fellows, take stories from education reporters at the Hechinger Institute at Columbia Teachers College or work on investigative projects with the California Healthcare Foundation project Michael Parks directs at USC.

Fourth, there is a growing availability of relevant data that make first-class journalism more accessible than ever before. You do not need to be the New York Times with 1000 people in the newsroom to go online and find out which foreign lobbyist contacted which Congressman regarding which bill; there is now an easily available database that provides you that information with a few clicks. Why does www.foreignlobbying.org exist? Because an open-government non-profit called the Sunlight Foundation and Pro Publica, an investigative journalism nonprofit, built it from 2007-08 foreign agent filings. Collaboration is not only in publishing news, then, but even in constructing the data sources that become the raw material that journalists from any news organization can work with.

As you know, there have long been complaints about congressional “earmarking”, but how does a reporter pursue the topic? It would be very difficult — except that a conservative non-profit, Taxpayers for Common Sense, founded in 1995, compiles “earmarking” data and their database is the starting point for any Washington reporters on the “earmark” beat.

This is not to mention that essentially all the public information about campaign contributions in federal elections that we have has existed only since the campaign reform acts of 1971 and 1974. This is basically the year zero for all news coverage of campaign financing – there simply was no data before then. Are you trying to cover your local Congressional delegation’s voting record? Until quite recently, this was a time-consuming task. U.S. government online records did not make it possible to download a legislator’s roll-call votes by the name of the legislator. You could go online for every bill that came for a vote and scroll down and find Rep. Jones and keep a tally on your own, but you could not search for “Rep. Jones” and get the good Congressman’s voting record for each bill before the House. But now you can at OpenCongress.org or GovTrack.us or WashingtonPost.org.

The San Diego Union and Copley News Service won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting that sent Rep. Randy Cunningham to prison for eight years for the largest bribery scandal in the history of Congress. Reporting the story took a lot of work and a lot of digging. But the reporting, as Marcus Stern explained in Nieman Reports, relied heavily on three sources, at least two of which would not have been available to reporters in the 1950s or 1960s. This included disclosure forms of lobbyists (including former San Diego representative Bill Lowery) and campaign finance records that a non-profit, the Center for Public Integrity, had compiled that enabled the reporters to follow up Lowery’s contributions to different candidates’ campaigns.

Great claims have been made for this new transparency – claims that are perhaps overdone. But the new databases and the organizations that demand greater accessibility of government databases – and have been prepared to provide that accessibility themselves if the government will not take its own steps – is all part of the presumption of publicness that began in the 1960s. And Internet activists and government reformers have taken this presumption and run with it.

Fifth, the new online operations remind us how important is the resource of obsessive, endless, gritty enthusiasm. Yes, somehow there has to be a way for these individuals to pay their bills – ultimately. They don’t have to dine on expense accounts. What they have to do is pursue work that gets their adrenalin going and makes them feel that they are doing something that matters. If they can make money doing this, that’s good for them and that’s good for society and that’s good for democracy. But many worthwhile pursuits endure without a so-called business model. Artists, musicians, dramatists have been doing it for centuries. And so have some journalists, those who set up their alternative weeklies in the sixties, those who worked for political magazines or started vegetarian newsletters or pieced together a living as free-lance foreign correspondents. They lived on a combination of passion and lowered expectations for comfort. With just about everyone I have talked to at the new start-ups, whether twenty-somethings at one of their first jobs or 50-somethings who had been let go or had taken buy-outs. One top editor from a major daily newspaper, now working at Pro Publica, told me she felt she had died and gone to heaven, that she was doing more of the work that had led her to journalism in the first place than at any other time in her career.

This brings us to a sixth point and a key point: there are non-market ways to assure the survival of worthwhile practices that the marketplace itself can no longer protect. Whether we are talking about the delivery of social services to the ill or the indigent, the elderly or children, or are discussing the survival of live theater, opera, symphonic music, chamber music, poetry, serious fiction, museums, higher education, most K-12 education, and much more, there is no business model. There is no business model for a string quartet, no balance sheet for poetry that doesn’t bleed red, no income streams that can support LACMA without philanthropic donations. There is no market solution. There are tax-supported solutions and there are philanthropic solutions and there are various blends of government support, philanthropy, and bake sales.

I would add that – as with culture and the arts – the universities have and should have a growing role in supporting journalism. Walter Robinson, a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter at the Boston Globe for several decades, returned to his alma mater, Northeastern University, two years ago and began teaching an investigative reporting seminar to both graduate and undergraduate students. In two years, those students have produced twelve front-page stories in the Boston Globe. Robinson proudly told me “In all the stories so far we’ve not had a single correction or substantive complaint.” More journalism schools are going into the business of actually producing journalism. Here at USC, integrating the California Healthcare Foundation’s impressive health reporting initiative into a university has not, Michael Parks told me, been a piece of cake and maybe he will one day produce a handy guide for others moving in the same direction. At any rate, his effort is part of a movement that is changing journalism.

Why should anyone support these professional, skillful, but small operations? Here let me just throw out the challenge that comes from the powerful assertion of Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen: “No substantial famine has ever occurred in a country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press.” China has had substantial famines killed millions since World War II; India, a country as poor or poorer, has not, despite crop failures. Famine, Sen shows, is a product of distributional failures more than production failures; electoral democracy with the support of publicity cuts short the corruption and neglect that produces famine.

But the voiceofsandiego and its counterparts in New Haven, St. Louis, Minneapolis are not going to save the world, are they? If you add up the employees at all of the 50 or 100 startups – I have no good estimate of how many there are or how many of the people at them actually earn a modest living at them – but I would be surprised if there are more than 500 people at these organizations drawing some sort of salary. (There are about 3000 people employed in online journalism but overwhelmingly these are individuals who are working at websites operated by and for the leading broadcast and newspaper organizations, not by the independent start-ups.) If you look at the big picture, newspapers still employ some 40,000 journalists; the online startups are a drop in the bucket. So why emphasize developments that on Feb 11 2010 provide so small a percentage of the total news output?

For all the reasons I have already mentioned. The journalism of the future is going to be partly commercial, partly non-profit, partly publicly-supported, partly university-fueled. The journalism of the future is going to blur across economic sources, across styles of work, across the divide between professional and amateur. Each of these organizations needs to learn to work with the others.

Last fall, Leonardie Downie and I produced a report for Columbia Journalism School called “The Reconstruction of American Journalism.” Our report recommended changes in tax laws to make it easier for news organizations to convert to non-profit status or to become low-profit limited liability corporations with an “L3C” status of their own; it recommended significant new investment in local news reporting by NPR-affiliated radio stations; it urged philanthropists to support news organizations committed to local accountability reporting; it recommended that universities become ongoing sources of accountability news reporting; it recommended the development of more accessible and comprehensive public information databanks; and it recommended, finally, that the federal government institute a fund for the direct support of innovations in local news.

Our report was well received in many quarters but, as we should have been able to predict, our critics ignored most of the report and ignored five of our six proposals, concentrating their fire on the proposal for federal funding of local news. Our critics came from two places – conservatives who oppose essentially all new federal programs (but learn to defend the old ones like social security or Medicare); and journalists. Journalists left, right, and center. Journalists young and old. Why?

Well, I should acknowledge first that it is not a stupid response. Government funding does open the door to government control. But I found it amusing when a senior reporter for Newsweek, asked me, “Don’t you know that government funding means government control?” What is amusing is that he asked it of me on-camera as we were taping a show for public television. My come-back was obvious: “Are we or are we not on a program for public broadcasting? And are you or are you not able to say here what you think?”

To offer the knee-jerk and often smug assertion that any government funding for the media is the beginning of the end of press freedom requires that you ignore a great deal of the established facts of the world. You have to ignore National Public Radio and PBS. You had better ignore all of American medical and scientific research and no small part of social science research too. President Obama hosted a reception for his fellow 2009 American Nobel Prize winners, and noted the federal grant money that had supported their research – millions of dollars in some cases, hundreds of thousands for nearly all, including Elinor Ostrom who won the prize for economics.

It is reasonable to be concerned about federal control of the news media, but it is not reasonable to dismiss it out of hand. It ignores that PBS and NPR have operated for 40 years without turning America into a slave state. You have to ignore the federal postal subsidies to newspapers that have been instrumental from 1792 on in promoting the industry. This includes the provision, centrally important to newsgathering in the early 19th century, that newspapers could mail copies of their newspapers to other news organizations free of charge. You have to ignore the role the federal government played in financing the very first telegraph line in the country and making the Associated Press possible.

And of course you hve to ignore the rest of the world. That’s fine, according to a recent statement by Harold Furchtgott-Roth, a former FCC commissioner and one-time chief economist for the House Committee on Commerce. “Direct government support of journalism is a foreign concept,” he wrote. “The Soviet Union had Pravda and Izvestia, news outlets that supposedly competed with one another to add insult to the injury of the absence of a free press. Every repressive regime in the world today controls some part of its national media and censors the rest.” But the question is not what repressive regimes do but what democracies do or can do. Mr. Furchtgott-Roth reached immediately to Pravda, now defunct. He did not think to mention the $6 billion government subsidy that fuels the BBC and makes it far and away the largest, most ambitious, best funded news operation in the United Kingdom. He ignores the CBC. His argument ignores the direct subsidies to newspapers in liberal democracies in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France and it ignores the studies (from France and Sweden) that the subsidized newspapers are as or more critical of government than those that receive less or no subsidies. Government funding does NOT mean government control in strong liberal democracies in Europe or in North America.

But we never proposed government funding as a solution to the crisis in American journalism. We proposed a package. We offered a model of mixed funding – commercial, non-profit, tax-supported, and university-embedded. Could American journalism be supported more in the way we support the sciences? Could it be supported more in the way we support the arts and the sciences? I think so. I think it should be.

Remember, once more, as we mourn the decline of a vital, vibrant commercial journalism, that it has long had severe limitations. That Walter Lippmann in 1920 thought it could not be reformed and would succeed, to the extent that it succeeded at all, only if other institutions of information-gathering should arise to substantially help it out; that H. L. Mencken talked about the journalism of Baltimore when he was starting out in the 1890s – “there were five papers, and four of them were cheap, trashy, stupid and corrupt. They all played politics for what there was in it, and leaped obscenely every time an advertiser blew his nose. Every other American city of that era was full of such papers – dreadful little rags, venal, vulnerable, and vile.” He found great improvement in the papers of his own day largely because a few newspaper barons had bought up the worst of the lot and consolidated them.

In the midst of the present crisis in news are the birth pangs of the kind of public information that Walter Lippmann sought for journalism and democracy nearly a century ago.

In the midst of a crisis in which talented and skillful journalists are being let go every hour, ten or a hundred amateurs replace them in minutes. I am not persuaded that this is a good trade; we lose something important when we lose the old pros. But do not make the mistake of thinking that we are gaining little by the new ways for incorporating the amateurs. There is something to be said for the wisdom of crowds, something to be said for the power of wikis, and something profound in the computer software executive’s claim that no matter how many smart people he assembles in a room for making decisions, he can be sure that the person who knows most about the topic at hand is not there. And that that person just might announce himself or herself if decision-making were done more publicly or more in a wiki format.

We did not need the Internet for the rapid proliferation of wild rumors in our political life. There was a widespread belief in the 1930s and 1940s that black domestics in the South were conspiring in Eleanor Clubs to stop working for white women, inspired by the civil rights advocacy of Mrs. Roosevelt. The 1950s saw a widespread belief that the fluordination of municipal drinking water was a communist plot. The rumors of razor blades in the apples and candy given to children trick-or-treating on Halloween were widely believed without a single verifiable instance ever turning up. And in the 1980s milk cartons featured the faces of children believed kidnapped aand there were widespread fears about an epidemic of child kidnappings. It took some effort for a journalist to determine that the vast majority of the alleged kidnappings were cases of non-custodial parents after divorce keeping a child with them in violation of the divorce decree. Kidnapping? In a sense, yes. But not the random kidnapping that millions of people believed to be a plague on the nation.

Does the Internet spread rumors faster? Absolutely. It corrects misinformation faster, too. What difference does all of this make? I take that to be a perfectly good question and someone should study it.

We are not going to get utopia out of this, no. But a quasi-utopia? I think so. If I’m right, we’ll learn again that information is not enough to build a good society. Sound storytelling is not enough. Actions still speak louder than words. The problems we have in building a good society are in some measure problems of communication but they are not only communication problems but problems of limited resources and competing values and interests, and incompatible world views. But if communication can help, as I believe it can, we cannot turn away from the remarkable openings that the new communication technologies, in the context of the professionalism and presumption of public-ness that brought American journalism to its highest achievements in the 1970s and since, can extend and revise. This is a tremendously difficult time for journalism when the great engines of its finest achievements, particularly the metropolitan daily newspapers, are in crisis. Some of those great redwoods will fall, some of them will survive. But pay attention to the saplings far below them that are replenishing the soil in ways that will transform the informational forest in ways that may make it more nourishing for us all.

President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law and made a few surprisingly interesting remarks upon doing so. Not only did he harken back to the $30,000 the government provided for the first telegraph line in the country in 1844. He called for not just a broadcast system but urged the country “to build a great network for knowledge…one that employs every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use.” He imagined a system in which a country doctor could get help from a distant laboratory or hospital and a scholar in Atlanta could draw instantly on a library in New York. He imagined creating an “electronic knowledge bank” and it would be not just national – it could involve other nations to “in a partnership to share knowledge and to thus enrich all mankind.” He even remembered how skeptical Henry David Thoreau had been about the telegraph and his remark that it is all very well to be constructing a telegraph to connect Maine to Texas but it could well be that Maine and Texas have nothing to communicate to each other. . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic . . . ; but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Don’t be skeptical, President Johnson counsels. “I do believe that we have important things to say to one another – and we have the wisdom to match our technical genius.”

I hope he was right about that wisdom. And I hope we have the confidence to find out.

[i] Carl Sessions Stepp, “The State of the American Newspaper: Then and Now,” American Journalism Review, September, 1999, pp. 60-75, all quotes from p. 62.

Son versos, son de Borges, encabezan el primer gran libro de Tomás Eloy Martínez. En la página inicial de Lugar común la muerte resuena la pregunta: ¿Quién nos dirá de quién, en esta casa, sin saberlo nos hemos despedido? ¿Quién será el que se ha muerto ahora que, muerto, les ha quedado a los vivos? ¿Quién será aquel que fue, ya ajeno de sí mismo?

Morir es entregarse. Los muertos se hacen nuestros: los hacemos. Nosotros, los provisoriamente vivos, hilamos una vida sin saber que la hilamos, como quien se distrae –“yo vivo, yo me dejo vivir, para que él trame su literatura…”–, y esa vida se va haciendo relato sin querer: un relato donde a veces influimos más que otras, tallando marcas, sembrando materiales. Hasta que, al fin, el día más pensado, nos volvemos tan poco, cajita de cenizas: construcción de los otros. Morirse es, también, convertirse en un cuento que otros van tejiendo. ¿Quién nos dirá de quién, y quién será el que era? Mi maestro Tomás se murió hace unos días.

Lo hemos llorado, lo hemos saludado, le hemos dicho que lo vamos a extrañar –y es tristemente cierto. Tomás era cariñoso, pícaro, generoso, malévolo. Tomás era absolutamente querible, interesante, culto, atento a sus amigos: uno de esos raros grandes conversadores que no se olvidan de hacer preguntas y escuchar respuestas. Tenía un arte del relato oral que envidiaría cualquier tía solterona, y le gustaba tanto charlar de libros como de chismes, de política y películas como de bueyes muy perdidos; contaba chistes malos. Y, sobre todo, le interesaban con pasión los hombres y mujeres, las historias. Ahora se ha vuelto, finalmente, una.

Me gusta pensar que le interesaría ese pasaje: que podría, como solía, reírse, sorprenderse, enfurecerse incluso escuchando lo que empieza a ser. Él, que lo hizo con otros muertos, con grandes muertos de la patria: él, que inventó algunas de las formas más precisas de Juan Domingo Perón, de Eva Perón –y tantos otros. Nada le gustaba más que recordar cómo ciertos episodios que imaginó para Perón en su Novela, para Evita en su Santa eran citados aquí y allá como historia verdadera. A mí me gusta recordarlo así: como un gran inventor de historias verdaderas. Cualquiera inventa historias; es muy difícil inventar historias verdaderas.

(Este martes, al lado de la lluvia, su cuerpo muerto tronaba en medio de la sala y en un rincón, en una mesa, descansaban sus libros. A las dos de la tarde unos señores se llevaron el cuerpo; los libros se quedaron. Sólo la realidad puede hacer metáforas tan malas; Tomás la habría tachado o mejorado. Pero es cierto que, de ahora en más, él va a ser, sobre todo, esas historias verdaderas que inventó.)

Tomás empezó a escribir en serio en la Argentina de los años sesentas. Era un gran periodista, jefe de redacción de una de las mejores revistas argentinas, donde cada nota era obsesivamente reescrita para que mantuviera el estilo de un autor colectivo que se llamaba Primera Plana –y donde nadie creía que los lectores fueran a asustarse frente a páginas rebosantes de letras porque en esos días todos –periodistas y lectores– se creían gente inteligente. En medio de esos alardes –de esas facilidades, diría alguna vez–, Tomás Eloy Martínez se buscaba.

Empezó a encontrarse en esa mezcla de historia y ficción en que tanto la ficción como la historia se mejoran. Si el nuevo periodismo –entonces nuevo– consistía en retomar ciertos procedimientos de la narrativa de ficción para contar la no ficción, él se apropió lo más granado del momento. Sus crónicas fueron un raro encuentro entre Borges y García Márquez: sus frases tomaron préstamos del ciego, sus climas del realismo mágico. Y, muy pronto, consiguió lo más difícil de alcanzar: un estilo –una música, ritmos, una textura de la prosa.

Tomás –como muchos de los mejores– se pasó muchos años escribiendo, de alguna forma, el mismo texto. Ya en Lugar Común anunciaba su intento: “Debo acaso explicarme: las circunstancias a que aluden estos fragmentos son veraces; recurrí a fuentes tan dispares como el testimonio personal, las cartas, las estadísticas, los libros de memorias, las noticias de los periódicos y las investigaciones de los historiadores. Pero los sentimientos y atenciones que les deparé componen una realidad que no es la de los hechos sino que corresponde, más bien, a los diversos humores de la escritura. ¿Cómo afirmar sin escrúpulos de conciencia que esa otra realidad no los altera?”.

Con ese programa, contra la práctica notarial del periodismo chato, escribió sus crónicas de entonces y, obstinado, entusiasta, ligeramente escéptico, creyente, sus dos libros más celebrados, los Perón. Donde terminó de romper los límites entre ficción y realidad, porque entendió que la realidad puede comunicarse mejor con la dosis necesaria de ficción, y la ficción se enriquece con su parte de realidad –y que esa mezcla desafía al lector, lo obliga a no creer, lo convierte en un cómplice activo. Fue su consagración o, dicho de otra manera, su hallazgo de sí mismo. Desde entonces se pasó dos décadas fecundas componiendo una Argentina que –vaga, complaciente– aceptó ser la que él contaba. Tomás, mientras tanto, se dejaba vivir, gozaba de la vida, sufría de la vida –y escribía escribía escribía más.

He conocido a pocos tan ferozmente escritores. Hace unos años, cuando leí su despedida de su mujer, Susana Rotker, me impresionó que, en medio de tal dolor, pudiera escribir esas palabras. Hace unos días, la última vez que nos vimos, me dijo que, contra la enfermedad, seguía escribiendo, y entendí cómo una metáfora gastada puede volverse realidad: escribía porque era la única forma en que sabía vivir, porque escribir era seguir viviendo.

Ahora, ya desembarazado de la obligación de ser real –esa torpe necesidad de comer, querer, ganarse el sueldo, elegir la camisa–, será puro relato. Por eso ya no importa quién era aquel Martínez. Importará, de ahora en más, cómo lo hacemos: ¿quién nos dirá de quién, en esta casa, sin saberlo nos hemos despedido?

“Todo texto es fatalmente autobiográfico, pero las columnas de prensa no tienen por qué convertirse en un confesionario. Si traiciono esa ley de hierro es porque no me perdonaría jamás seguir adelante sin decir todo lo que le debo”, escribió Tomás alguna vez. Hace muchos años le dediqué mi primer libro de crónicas. Ayer encontré, doblado dentro de mi ejemplar de Lugar común la muerte, Caracas, 1978, el papelito donde había ensayado esa dedicatoria: “Porque/ si no hubiera sido por aquel Lugar Común,/ jamás me habría atrevido/ a suponer este libro./ Gracias”. Otros harán otros Tomás; yo seguiré escribiendo, en cada texto, acechado por mis limitaciones, éste: el que nos permitió escribir lo que escribimos, el que nos inventó. Por eso me gusta pensar que leería estas líneas con su sonrisa pícara, con el brillo guasón de sus ojitos claros, y me diría que no he inventado suficiente. Tiene razón, maestro. Denos tiempo. Total, por fin, ya no lo apura ningún cierre.