media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

Pray for the ‘Reporter!’

(Dec. 6, 2007)  In my favorite movie, Three Days of the Condor, the assassin Joubert advises Robert Redford’s character, Joe Turner, to leave the United States. Turner says “I’d miss it if I were gone.”

Turner knows that people within the U.S. government hired Joubert to kill him, but he still doesn’t want to leave. He’d miss it. That’s how I feel about the Eureka Reporter.

For those who like to bash the Reporter, consider Humboldt County without it. When a newspaper goes from publishing seven days a week to five, that’s a sign of hard financial times. There are others. Its reporters are disappearing and more articles in the paper now carry no byline than stories that do carry a byline. (Generally that means that what you think is an article is just a printed press release.)

To many people, that’s reason to celebrate. A local boycott of the Reporter is a running joke — you can’t boycott something that’s free. Advertisers can, however, although I tend to think that the failure of the local business community to support the free paper has more to do with the problems of measuring the readership of a free paper than it has to do with dislike of its political slant.

I’d rather have a conservative paper than no paper. I’d rather have a paper owned by a conservative zillionaire than no paper. Consider that Dean Singleton owns the other paper. He lives in Colorado even as he owns just about every local paper in California.

There’s a rich history in the media business of newspapers founded on the egos of crazy rich men. In my short journalism history I worked for four crazy zillionaires — Charlie Munger, Bruce Wasserstein, Jim Cramer and Sy Newhouse. All four operated good publications. I avoided working for Singleton, not because of politics but because of his disregard for quality, his focus on newspapers as product and his tendency to pay reporters little, work them hard and bust their unions.

These days, with newspaper circulation falling across the board, you’d have to be crazy to get into the newspaper business. Consider the Bancrofts and the Wall Street Journal — a whole family of crazy rich people getting out of the newspaper business.

The Eureka Reporter recently attempted to survey its readers. Unfortunately, it was a case study in how not to do a media survey. First, it distributed the survey only in the Sunday newspaper, so it eliminated people who didn’t pick it up that day. You had to return the survey by hand delivery or mail.

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