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Philip Meyer

The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age Paperback – December 21, 2006

by Philip Meyer (Author)

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Five years ago in The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer offered the newspaper industry a business model for preserving and stabilizing the social responsibility functions of the press in a way that could outlast technology-driven changes in media forms.

Print length

264 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of Missouri
Publication date

December 21, 2006
Dimensions

6 x 1 x 8.75 inches
ISBN-10

0826215688
ISBN-13

978-0826215680
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Resplendent with vivid examples and analogies that illustrate its concepts and conclusions, this book poses practical suggestions for reviving U.S. journalism.”—Choice

About the Author

Philip Meyer is Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Assessing Public Journalismand Letters from the Editor: Lessons on Journalism and Lifeby William F. Woo.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Missouri (December 21, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 264 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0826215688
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0826215680
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 0.01 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 8.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,819,542 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,039 in General Library & Information Sciences
- #2,371 in Environmental Engineering (Books)
- #5,897 in Environmental Economics (Books)

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Philip Meyer

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Philip Meyer (1930- ) began his newspaper career as a carrier for the Clay Center (Kansas) Dispatch in 1943. He still porches his neighbors' newspapers when he finds them thrown carelessly at the curb. He majored in journalism at Kansas State and was editor of the daily Collegian his final semester in 1952. After serving two years in the Navy, he joined the Topeka Daily Capital as assistant state editor and met his wife there. She had a part-time job writing wedding stories, and she wrote their wedding story in 1956.

Their wedding trip took them to Chapel Hill, N.C., where they remained while Meyer worked on his M.A. in political science. In 1958, the Miami Herald hired him to be its education writer, and he covered Florida's first court-ordered school desegregation. In 1962, he was posted to the Knight Newspapers Washington Bureau as correspondent for the Herald's sister paper, the Akron Beacon Journal. He won a Nieman fellowship to Harvard with the help of his bureau chief, Edwin A. Lahey, who had been a member of the first class of Nieman fellows in 1938. At Harvard, he studied the quantitative methods in social science that he had avoided in graduate school. He applied those methods while on loan to the Detroit Free Press to help cover the 1967 riot in that city. The use of survey research to discover the underlying causes of the riot was one factor in the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for local general reporting to the staff of the Free Press.

The civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s offered more opportunities for demonstrating the journalistic application of social science methods, and the Russell Sage Foundation supported the writing of his first book, Precision Journalism, published in 1973. In 1978, Meyer turned his attention to newspaper marketing problems and joined the corporate headquarters of what by then was Knight Ridder Newspapers. Chapel Hill lured him back with a Kenan professorship in 1981, and he became the school's first Knight Chair in Journalism professor a few years later.

Professor Meyer retired in 2008 and started writing a memoir that was published in 2012 as Paper Route: Finding My Way to Precision Journalism.

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Dane S. Claussen

Right book at the right time

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 11, 2005

Verified Purchase

This book is a unique and excellent work attempting to statistically discover relationships between newspaper characteristics, newspaper circulations (and changes thereto), and communities. The newspaper industry was behind other U.S. companies that directly serve consumers for decades in conducting rigorous research. Now, with scholars like Phil Meyer and organizations such as the Newspaper Management Center at Northwestern U., the newspaper industry might finally find out what it needs to know to survive--as long as it is not already too late.

As for the other reviewer's charge that Phil wants papers to become more liberal, the reviewer has had to stretch to find what he found and then takes it out of context. The entire claim that newspapers are liberally biased is nonsense; in 23 out of 25 presidential elections in the 20th century, the majority of U.S. newspapers endorsed the Republican candidate for president. That is a fact. Check it yourself. Daily news coverage is heavily biased toward the status quo, whatever it might be, as reporters interview governors, senators, CEOs, etc.; they rarely interview union presidents and almost never interview true leftists, while constantly interviewing extreme right-wingers. The "liberal bias" charge is manufactured by the right-wing to try to make much of U.S. news media--which overwhelmingly is conventional, traditional, slowly changing--as reactionary and regressive as those making the charge.

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Walter Neary

A vital supply of context

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 27, 2005

You should give this book to anyone considering a career in newspaper journalism. If the person still decides to go into journalism, you know he or she is dedicated and belongs in the business!

With both anecdotes and detailed numbers and charts, Meyer describes the 'harvesting' of media properties in the 80's, 90's and beyond. Just as a landowner can harvest trees that have grown over many years, a publisher can pull out greater profits by reducing the expenses that produced quality and reputation over many years (like reducing the number and quality of reporters and editors).

Thus, this book is the equivalent of a VH1 'behind the scenes' docudrama explaining in painful detail the travesties we all saw in 80's and 90's newspaper management. Just as the rock band members look like heck by the end of an episode, newspapers are showing the effects of abusing their bodies. A carefully explained survey and analysis show that as many as three out of five newspaper stories are inaccurate in one form or another (Meyer's descriptions of this whole subject are considerably nuanced and a joy for anyone who has tried to quantify newspaper accuracy).

Much of the talk about journalism, quality and respect has been very fuzzy. We used to say stories were 'good' or 'bad' based on whatever was the criteria of the biggest editor in the room. We had no idea where individual stories or overall patterns of story quality fit into the newspaper's future. Meyer has detailed chapters quantifying whatever can be established about the role of profit and accuracy, profit and and credibility, and profit and the role of the various kinds of editors. To give just one example of the helpful level of detail in the book, Meyer writes that trouble may ensue once copy editors manage more than 14 stories a shift. That and other statistics will be useful for anyone who wants to manage for quality and growth.

The good news is that there is at least some connection between quality and profit. As just one example, an analysis in the book shows that for every percentage point of gain of credibility in the community, newspapers seem to command 2.5 percent more in their asking price for advertising.

That sort of thing matters because newspapers compete with targeted advertising vehicles like Google and blogs and standalone classified advertising sites. For most people, the newspaper is more portable; but that's a temporary advantage. Long term, what will distinguish papers from other advertising vehicles is the public's belief that newspapers are a more useful place to spend attention. Meyer's thesis is that newspapers must embrace this thirst for credible information. Newspapers must manage for both credibility AND for profit.

But keeping newspapers afloat with any sort of quality will be difficult. When everyone seems to focus on quarterly earnings reports, it's not easy to manage with long-term quality AND profitability in mind. So that's why I suggest giving this book to someone contemplating a future in journalism. Perhaps this book will prove to be as true about the future as it is true about the past. If so, the young journalist can go into work with eyes open and brain brightly illuminated.

13 people found this helpful

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K. GROENHAGEN

Good book, albeit with a disastrous prescription

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 2, 2005

Mr. Meyer's bok includes much valuable information and statistics concerning the newspaper industry. However, having spent most of his life in the industry and in academia teaching about the industry, he may be too immersed in the culture to realize what is the industry's major problem, i.e., liberal bias.

On page 71 Meyer lets the cat out of the bag. According to the editor of the Grand Folks Herald, his newspaper's credibility amongst its readers dropped after the paper had endorsed a proposal to drop "Fighting Sioux" as the nickname of the University of North Dakota. Meyer concludes, "It was a classic example of a newspaper's being a bit ahead of its community."

Meyer also writes, "In Wichita, the Eagle had been a step ahead of its highly conservative community in the 1990s with its aggressive reporting of controversial issues inclusing the death penalty and abortion. That cost it some credibility, but it was only a temporary cost."

Note that Meyer equates a newspaper's liberalism with being ahead of its community. Mr. Meyer may have missed this, but conservatives won control of Congress in 1994 and we elected a conservative president in 2000 and 2004. A Democrat won the presidency in 1992 and 1996 after convincing enough voters that he actually was a "New Democrat" (i.e., not a liberal one).

In my opinion, newspapers' household penetration rates are dramatically falling because thet are behind the times--they simply haven't accepted the fact that reporting with a liberal bias turns off many of their readers. The same phenomenom has occurred with cable television, where the overhwhelming liberal CNN and MSNBC have ratings far below Fox News, which offers a much more balanced presentation of the news.

In Lawrence, Kan., we have a daily newspaper that has won national praise. However, its editorial page is dominated by liberal columnists and cartoonists. Lawrence is the county seat of Douglas County, which voted for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, and the Journal-World may be trying to cater to that population. However, it seems to ignore the fact that the number of voters in Douglas County who voted for Bush in 2004 surpasses the Journal-World's total circulation by about 2,000. The Journal-World's look has improved considerably since 1980. However, its household penetration rate in the market has dropped from 63 percent to 33 percent during the past 25 years. I have to think that many conservatives have simply decided to get their news elsewhere.

Mr. Meyer has done an excellent job of identifying the problems with daily newspapers. However, I think its going to take someone like a Robert Ailes (who referenced "The Vanishing Newspaper" in a recent speech) to offer a prescription that will get people back to the newspaper-reading habit.

5 people found this helpful

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The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age Paperback – December 21, 2006

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