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AUDIO: JRC's John Paton at MediaNews Denver

Listen to Journal Register Corp. CEO John Paton address and answer questions from employees of the Denver Post and MediaNews Group on Sept. 7, 2011 in Denver in this 36-minute MP3 podcast. Click on the carat to the left of the bar at the bottom the launch the audio stream, or download the MP3 podcast for offline listening.

The original audio was posted as a WMA-formatted file HERE. And it is linked from THIS PAGE.

The MP3 format can be played on Apple devices more readily than WMA. The only editing of this MP3 version was to eliminate a minute of whitenoise at the beginning of the session and pauses of more than a couple of seconds. The audio level of some questioners was also boosted.

Paton is introduced for a few minutes by Dean Singleton, executive chairman of Media News Group and a co-founder of the company. The person first heard introducing Singleton is not identified in the recording. For a partial transcript of this audio and Paton's remarks and answers, go to http://billdensmore.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/paton/

Posner thinks great polarization is a byproduct of new media technology, but is it?

The ease with which Internet and other new technology allows anyone to become a "publisher" is causing media to become more polarized, according to a federal appeals court judge who is himself a recreational "blogger" on topics which don't come before his court. Judge Richard A. Posner of the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago writes in the July 31, 2005 edition of The New York Times Book Review. His conclusion: media without entry barriers results in purer delivery of what the public wants -- and that generally isn't civic-minded journalism. Yet for the "sliver of the public" interested in policy issues, it is easier than ever to become informed, he concludes. To illustrate his point, Posner cites the example of a two-newspaper town in which the two newspapers historically were slightly left and slightly right in their political orientation. They took these views to capture each roughly half the market, it not being economically feasible for a third competitor to emerge. But with the Internet and blogs, says Posner, each paper must worry about a MORE liberal, or MORE conservative competitor. And thus they must move more to the edges to survive. He writes: "Now the liberal newspaper has to worry that any temporizing of its message in an effort to attract moderates may cause it
to lose its most liberal readers to a new, more liberal newspaper; for with small-scale entry into the market now economical, the incumbents no longer have a secure base."

OBSERVATION: Is it possible that Posner is missing another option: That each competitor will move MORE toward the center, trying to secure the mass market, and intensifying their competition, with one the ultimate loser and the other the winner -- or both reaching an equilibrium? Is it possible that is what we are seeing with the mainstream broadcast networks, which seem largely indistinguishable in their format and political orientation?

So while there may be, as a result of the Internet and no-barrier-to-entry blogging, a far richer spectrum and variety of political and social commentary accessible to all (who have access to the Internet), will all that diversity be chosen and seen by a significant number of people? Rather, is it possible that the masses will be treated -- as with ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN and PBS -- increasingly to more homogenized news and information, even while Posner's "sliver" of policy-minded consumers have a  (largely unnoticed and ineffectual) field day?

The link, which requires registration, is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31POSNER.html?

Already, Posner's views are being considered in the blogging community. Here's a link to a post by Robert Cauthorn, former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle's web site: http://www.corante.com/rebuildingmedia/archives/2005/07/31/posner_on_media_polarization.php

Richard A. Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and, along with the economist Gary Becker, the
author of The Becker-Posner Blog. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

As newspapers' approach the news differently, is it time to consider a fresh approach to their ownership, as well?

By Bill Densmore
The Media Giraffe Project

The way newspapers approach the news has changed. It is worth thinking about how the ownership structure of newspapers is related to that change, and what options for different ownership forms might exist.

Buckminster Fuller once wrote: "You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change things, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

That is happening so quickly now to news that the traditional news and entertainment organizations -- newspaper, radio, music and probably film -- seem to have little hope of switching gears quickly enough to survive. I was not convinced of that after the dot-com boom ended; I thought they had a new lease on life. But the fact they have not capitalized on this lull, and the fact that I have just seen and heard about new applications and technologies that totally disrupt, leaves me inclined to think the malaise may be fatal.

-- While reading a Ghandi piece on Peoples Committees and trusteesheep, I thought of a recent civic outcome in Williamstown. The Selectmen and a segment of the business leadership had proposed a new waterline. You can gain an appreciation of the issues by looking at http://www.newshare.com/williamstown/ , a simple site we created.  A group of us, representative of a consensus of the town's unofficial leadership, built a broader consensus that it was not in the town's best interest to build the waterline. I joined the process because our daily newspapers were not playing the traditional role of truth-seeking and telling; they were just regurgitating what "officials" said.  Through our website and our group process, we illuminated the truth, and the community voted at a town meeting to defeat the water-line proposal.

APPROACH

Newspapers used to report and build this sort of consensus -- leading and informing public opinion. Too many now merely provide a bulletin-board reflection of "official" opinion or punditry, characterizing all issues in terms of two, competing points of view, rather than seeking to independently assess the truth. They fail to promote a conversation that leads to consensus.

Terry Mollner, founder of the Trusteeship Institute, has studied group organizational forms, and especially those advocated by Ghandi.  Mollner writes that Ghandi's committees were  "facilitating the discussions and keep[ing] the community informed . . . their only power would be the power of persuasion."

You could almost think of newspapers -- those whose owners once focused first on community and second on profit maximization -- as having served the function of Ghandi's Peoples Committee. Newspapers, in a sense, have come to behave as the adult in the Ghandi/Mollner model of maturity.  They apply generalizations to situations, and still think of the debate as a debate -- not a process of coming to consensus -- as this-that, either-or -- and frame issues in terms of winners and losers. 

But winners and losers is the unfortunate paradigm of 21st-century "objective" journalism in the United States. It has abandoned any sense of responsibility to promote consensus and community from conflict. Rather, it simply presents "both sides" without analysis, and without a sense of the consequences of division without a drive for unity.

Mollner, in dialog with this author, doesn't believe newspapers are up to the task of adopting the function of the Ghandi people's committees.  He writes, in an email reply:

"I agree with your thoughts except for this. I do not think the news mediacan play the fourth estate role anymore. We need to move to a more mature system. That is why what Gandhi figured out as the solution to this problem is so important. It has to be institutionalized, not hoped for."

OWNERSHIP

There are some models in the U.S. newspaper business which begin to approach the notion of non-profit holding-company ownership which Mollner's writing suggests. They include the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the St. Petersburg Times, the Milwaukee Journal and, recently, the Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader. There is now an association of family-newspaper owners. And I think there is a general consensus that the citizens in the areas served by these newspapers enjoy a now-atypical level of news quality and quantity.

The most curious model of all is The Associated Press, which is a chartered cooperative under a special New York state law, which is owned cooperatively by the daily newspapers who take its service. It has no stock and can retain no profits (only a surplus which must be budgeted out in subsequent years).  I was intrigued by some recent comments by Sandy Close, editor/founder of Pacific News Service, who was at a conference I attended, about the need for a new collaboration, an "unassociated press" among independent news organizations.

Newspapers will inevitably migrate away from paper. Because of their ownership structures, these organizations with non-mainstream ownership structures may be able to make the leap to the new information economy because they are either non-public or can ignore quarterly profit demands of Wall Street to some degree. The jury's out. The AP definitely will, unless the owner/membership decides to disband it.  These organizations continue to behave with some sense of "trusteeship" about their role to foster participatory democracy. This commitment is growing increasingly fragile and needs support.

THE FUTURE

Much of the new Internet information technology is being applied to expand and empower relationships among topic-specfic and geographic-specific communities. That is the direction that search and recommendation engines are moving in, that "blogs" are beginning to fill and that content syndication is facilitating.  All of these technologies are nailing the coffin shut on top-down communication. Increasingly the lines are becoming blurred among those who make news, those who interpret it, and those who consume it. Roles switch and switch again from issue to time to place.

Information velocity is now so fast that soon no centralized printing press or physical delivery system will be able to move fast enough to be relevant for anything other than archival or deeply analytical, timeless services.

Emerging are a series of relationship "cooperatives" -- Yahoo, Google, Friendster, Technorati, Del.icio.us. But some of these cooperatives are still caught in an investor-ownership structure which pushes them to short-term, "exit strategy" behavior. The founders of Google are struggling with this, but will they win or be chewed up by the tyranny of quarterly earnings and ROI?

Mollner observes in dialog with this author:  "Google will be OK because the two founders control the company with 10 votes per share B shares. They did this so they would not be slaves to quarterly
findings and not be able to be taken over. It is quite clear to me that they learned something from what happened to Ben & Jerrys. So they are public but privately controlled. Others are copying their model and they should. The managers should be in charge of companies, held accountable, and the
investors should only be investors, not owners as such. As you know, seldom do the mass of "owners" ever act as owners. Google, thank God, is taking us in this direction."

With the democratization of information creation and consumption and the end of physical limits on content shelf space, it's a great time to be "think tanking" the creation of a new structure for reporting the news.

Forty authors, scholars, execs convene at Annenberg-Philadelphia to inventory solutions to journalism crisis

(UPDATED: Read what blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote about this conference)
(UPDATE, 07-08-05: View a page of photos of the participants)

By Bill Densmore
The Media Giraffe Project

PHILADELPHIA, Pa., June 14, 2005 -- Nearly 40 journalism author/scholars, former news-industry executives, consultants and observers wrapped up a meeting today in Philadelphia and plan to inventory ideas for stemming what many participants called a crisis over how the press fosters democracy.

The three-day "Commission on the Role of the Press in a Democracy," was assembled by the Institutions of Democracy project of the $250-million-endowment Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, a legacy left by Walter Annenberg, the former owner of TV Guide and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

THE IDEAS WHICH EMERGED

Particpants were brought together by invitation of two organizers, Geneva Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Overholser, a former editor at The Washington Post, New York Times and Des Moines Register, is now a professor at the University of Missouri's journalism school. Jamieson is director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. They are co-authors of a volume in a five-book series on the key institutions of democracy, including the press, public schools and the three branches of American government.

Jamieson called the assembly, and subsequent scholarship, an effort "to try and get the dialog out of the old treadways" in a process inspired by, but different from the  1947 Hutchins Commission report on "A Free and Responsible Press." 

The group assembed at the Annenberg Center on Sunday evening and spent Monday listening to proposals from presenters among the group. They had been prepped with an advanced reading list advanced reading list totaling hundreds of pages of articles and book excerpts. Among initial suggestions recommenders made upon arrival on Sunday:

-- Create demand for the use of news in schools.
-- Provide "media literacy" training for adults.
-- Study worldwide media systems for ideas.
-- Accept that the current economic model for newspapers has failed.
-- Figure out how to provide non-boring substance.
-- Get corporate media executives involved
-- Better connect scholars with journalism business.
-- Abandon newspaper "core product" in favor of new forms.
-- Compare journalism to other challenged businesses
-- Learn more about readers and audiences
-- Celebrate journalism which works.
-- Regain more public use of telecommunications spectrum.
-- Create an "Associated Press" for ethnic and youth media
-- Become news gatherers, not just creators
-- Consider the "subscriber model" online

The fragmentation of mass-media audiences is ending defacto monopolies of TV networks and major daily newspapers and this is undermining their ability to finance journalism in the way it has been practiced in the last generation, attendees were told repeatedly by Monday's presenters. "There isn't any audience anymore, there are audiences," said John Soloski, dean of the University of Georgia journalism school. "And that's driving newspapers and advertisers crazy."

As audiences fragment, attendees learned, new classes of news presenters are emerging, including citizen journalists, bloggers, podcasters and others who might have formerly been considered amateurs but are now helping evolve new forms of two-way, participatory journalism. In this new environment, said Soloski, the key asset traditional news organizers still have is their brand, which they are in danger of undercutting.

Attendees considered ways in which the government might foster public-service journalism, listening to experts describe they way spectrum regulation since the 1930s, and postal subsidies since the 18th century, have done so. But most were deeply ambivalent about inviting government to be more active in creating tax or other benefits to journalists, saying content control might result.

Also debated without conclusion were ways in which journalism reformers might be able to speak as one voice through a new institution or collaboration which lobbies for open government and other free-press issues. "We must market," said James M. Naughton, retired president of the Poynter Institue, a St. Petersburg, Fla., journalism think tank. "We [must] speak more broadly for journalists . . . I think we have to act and we have to act now." He said media executives aren't speaking out and many, "don't seem to have a lot of confidence in their own companies."

If today's major-media companies are to be salvaged, a first step may be changing the compensation incentives which drive senior managers to make decisions based upon short-term profits goals, said Lawrence E. Mitchell, a George Washington University Law School professor who has written books on corporate governance. He proposed that media directors explicitly notify shareholders that their managements are being told to take a longer view, and modify compensation plans to de-emphasis short-term increases in stock price.

"Assuming they are like the rest of us, and that managers want to do the right thing, they will be freer to chose to do so," said Mitchell. He also suggested industry-specific tax-law changes to increase short-term capital gains on stock sales and to allow capitalization rather than expensing of journalism expenses, including training.

Two attendees with recent experience in web-based journalism -- ex-MSNBC.COM editor Merrill Brown and former Advance.NET President Jeff Jarvis expressed separate concerns that mainstream journalists and observers don't yet seem to understand that their business is slowling dying. "The discussion feels a little to me like moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic," said Brown. "Like what failing industries undertake."  Brown is author of a recent study for the Carnegie Corp. on that subject.

Here's an alphabetical list, in addition to Overholser and Jamieson, of the recommenders. Academic scholars are journalism or communications professors unless otherwise noted:

Claude-Jean Bertrand, professor emeritus, Institut Francais de Press of the University of Paris; Tom Bettag, senior executive producer, ABC News Nightline; Leo Bogart, columnist, Presstime and former head of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau; Merrill Brown, founder and principal, MMB Media LLC and former senior vice president, MSNBC.com; James Cary, Columbia University journalism professor; John Carey, Fordham Business School professor; Nicole A. Childers, Emmy Award-winning producer at National Public Radio; Sandy Close, founder, Pacific News Service and New California Media; and Timothy E. Cook, University of Louisiana political-communication professor.

Also, Everette Dennis, Fordham Business School professor and former vice president of the Gannett and Freedom Forum Foundation; William Densmore, director/editor of the Media Giraffe Project at UMass-Amherst; Karen Brown Dunlap, Poynter Institute president; Robert Entman, North Carolina State University; Robert Giles, Nieman Foundation curator and former Detroit News publisher.

Also, Doris Graber, University of Illinois-Chicago political scientist; James Hamilton, Duke University; Jeff Jarvis, consultant, author of BuzzMachine.com and former Advance.net president; Alex Jones, Shorenstein Center director at Harvard University; Jane Kirtley, media ethics/law professor, Univ. of Minnesota and former director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; Stephen Lacy, Michigan State University; Gloria J. Ladson-Billings, education professor, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison; Craig LeMay, Northwestern University Medill School; and Charles Lewis, president, Fund for Independence in Journalism.

Also, Philip Meyer, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Dean Mills, dean, Univ. of Missouri journalism school; David T.Z. Mindich, St. Michael's College; Lawrence E. Mitchell, law-school professor, George Washington University; James M. Naughton, retired president, The Poynter Institute and former executive editor, The Philadelphia Inquirer; Thomas Patterson, press/government professor, Shorenstein Center at Harvard's JFK School; and O. Ricardo Pimentel, Milwaukee Journal editor-page editor.

Also, Abby Scher, sociologist and former director, Independent Press Assn.-New York; William Siemering, co-founder National Public Radio and former station manager WHYY, Philadelphia; John Soloski, dean, University of Georgia; William M. Sullivan, senior scholar, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; Susan E. Tifft, Duke University; Judy Woodruff ex-anchor and consultant, CNN; and Barbie Zelizer, University of Pennsylvania.

Web editors agree: Newspapers have lost control of the news agenda to blogs

By Bill Densmore
Media Giraffe Project

NEW ORLEANS, La., June 8 -- The newspaper industry has lost control of the news, two online editors agreed in conference talks, although they don't agree whether executives realize it or not.

Newspapers are no longer in charge of the news agenda, said Ken Sands, publisher of the Spokane, Wash., newspaper's website. "But they just don't know it yet." Added Sands: "The blogosphere is full of half lies and half information. But hopefully in the end the truth will emerge . . . [Newspapers] are trying to get to the truth too. Our methods of getting there are very different [from bloggers]. It will beinteresting whether we hold on to our broadcast sensibilities or whether we try to engage in a meaningful way."

CNET News.com Editor Jeff Pelline, himself a veteran newspaper reporter turned web editor, said the newspaper business has been run like a utility, with a sense of no competition. But with newspaper-company stocks at a 52-week low, the industry has reached a "tipping point" where it is embracing interactive media from a defensive point of view. "I think that major media companies have lost control . . . now they know it and I think they are on the verge of coming up with some solutions which I think are going to be interesting to watch."

Both Sands and Pelline were among panelists discussing blogs on Wednesday [June 8] in New Orleans at the Editor & Publisher/MediaWeek Interactive Media Conference & Trade show. 

Reporters understand one-way communication -- called "push technology," according to Sands, "Whereas bloggers, just because of who they are and how they operate, they understand a social network."  The term "social network" is used to describe a variety of Internet services in which writers and participants communicate back and forth, sharing interests and recommendations, rather than in one direction. "It is probably easier to teach a good blogger how to be a journalist than it is to teach a journalist to be a good blogger," Sands told an audience of about 200 at the conference.

Sands offered this advice to newspapers considering the launch of weblogs:

-- Wait. Talk to others who have done so to learn from their mistakes. Have of current newspaper-site blogs being launched are mistakes, Sands said.

-- Supplement and lead the newspaper's big story by including email exchanges, transcripts of interviews and source documents for the reporting.

-- Considering doing what the Spokane paper is doing -- offer readers a daily update on the reasons behind the paper's coverage decisions.

BLOG SPREADS DISCOUNT KNOWLEDGE

Pelline described a blog post he had written less than 12 hours before, from his hotel room, about a DSL price war between phone giant SBC and cable giant Comcast in the Bay Area. As a Comcast user at home for $40 a month, Pelline said he had called as a consumer and gotten Comcast to lower his price to $14.95 a month for three months to match a $14.95 introductory offer from SBC.  Before the conference audience, Pelline showed how within hours, one reader of his blog post had himself called Comcast and reported, "thanks . . . I got a discount, too." Pelline called this a perfect example of how blogs speed up the news cycle and make it two way.

On the upside, news websites are starting to make money from advertising, according to panelist Josh Moss, managing editor, FoxNews.com. "The advertising model is finally starting to work," he said. "And so a lot of websites, including ours, are starting to hire people."

Nick Denton, a former Financial Times reporter who quit in the 1990s to become an Internet entrepreneur, now owns Gawker Media, a network of 13 "weblog" sites. He said he thinks newspapers are pompous and are overreacting with thin skins about the criticisms and threats of blogs to their business. He said blogs are to newspapers what Canada is to the United States. "It's a relationship that works."

For example, he said most blogs are completely dependent upon linking to newspaper stories in order to have something to comment on. Newspapers should take the cue, he added, but they generally don't. "As long as newspapers have a 'not invented here' philosophy in terms of content, matching instead piece for piece, scoop for scoop, they are not going to be that good at linking out or engaging in this wider web conversation and they probably shouldn't bother [to do blogs]," said Denton. Denton said his sites sometimes put out "half the story" and ask readers to supply the rest. "It works pretty well," he said.

Like Sands, Denton said journalists don't necessarily make good bloggers. Gawker bloggers are required to write at least 12 short posts per day, and most reporters are used to writing on so many different subjects so quickly, he said.

"Accuracy over time" is the goal Denton strives for. His sites don't claim to be 100 percent accurate on all facts. He expects them to be "more honest and accurate" about the overall story line. "But if something is wrong, we'll correct."

Newspapers need help from outside the business for how to escape from "static" approach, futurist says

By Bill Densmore
Media Giraffe Project

NEW ORLEANS, La., June 8, 2005 -- Newspapers need to ask for help from outside the industry if they want to stop losing the battle to be relevant to young consumers, futurist Jim Taylor told about 200 people gathered at the Interative Media Conference and Trade Show.

"I don't know what I'd do," said Taylor, a former advertising and PR executive whose company, the Harrison Group, who does market research for the interactive gaming industry. "But I sure know one thing. I would get some help. Because you guys are losing the kids . . . you need help in solving this problem."

Newspapers need to figure out how to become an element in an "inbound technology" where consumers can provide feedback and see evidence that the product -- a newspaper or website -- is changing in response to their requests and contributions, said Taylor. He said it's a mistake for a newspaper to have a website which just references content in the parent newspaper.

(Another speaker, John Skipper, advertising chief for the ESPN sports site, echoed this opinion in a talk after Taylor, saying the "least successful thing" ESPN had ever done was to put plain HTML versions of its print magazine stories on the ESPN website. "People do not want to read a newspaper on line. I see very little point in reproducing the paper in HTML," he said.)

Taylor said in his talk: "What I think you ought to be doing is making news about your customers and publishing it on the web . . . use it as a vehicle for offering insight into how other people are finding meaning in the interactive world." He added: "I would be looking at how to turn my audience into my stories. I think this is what is wrong with the media is you see yourselves as broadcasters, and the world wants to see you as relational others . . . people want to interact with your reporters." 

Taylor's firm researches the habits of young Americans, affluent and wealthy Americans and adoption rates of new and convention media.  His background is in the advertising and PR business, with  Ernst & Young, E.F. Hutton, Hill & Knowlton and others. He lives in Santa Fe, N.M. Taylor describes his work as the "search for meaning" in advertising and media. He said he was focusing on how young people search for facts. The title of his talk: "What's the hell going on out there? A few remarks on the interactive world."

"For most people today technology is not innovative, it is a fact of life," Taylor said. For example, he said 27 percent of Americans now talk to other people over the Internet at least once a day and the average AOL Internet Messenger list has 40 people on it. He said 92 percent of young people are on the Internet daily or almost daily.

"This is not going to be a particularly good news discussion for the newspaper business," said Taylor. "It is going to be a difficult discussion." Taylor said newspapers are at a disadvantage because they are a "push technology with no pull through" -- people can't talk back in real time (other than through letters to the editor). With the proliferation of information resources, he said, "people don't need you anymore."

And so the static structure of the newspaper has to change, said Taylor, in response to the requirements of the audience newspapers want to reach. In general, he says, the human brain looks for large volumes of information that support a point of view.

"In this world, boldness wins," says Taylor. "I admire USA Today, because when they first came up with this idea nobody believed it was going to work . . . they relied on travelers . . . they were gutsy and they produced something of real lasting value. It gets better and better and better."   "In this world, boldness wins."

BLOGS AS 'PRIVATE SPACES'

Taylor views Internet blogs as a "shared private space" in the sense that -- unlike a billboard for example -- no one is required to view a particular blog. For that reason, Taylor suggests the laws of libel may not apply as rigorously as in "public spaces." People participate in networks as a way of establishing their identity. In addition, they are a way for individuals to present an opinion and become a category leader without having to be validated other than by the other people in the community.

The rules for success in media and marketing are changing, says Taylor. "In your business, anybody can be best in class instantly for an investment as small as a quarter million dollars," said Taylor. "If you produce an information product, and you produce it  effectively on the web . . . you can be a major player in the information business for almost nothing . . . and overnight."

How did Apple create the success of the iPod? Taylor says Apple found 50 thought leaders in the illicit-downloading world and gave them the iPod. Early communication was entirely word of mouth. "By the time they went public, the produce was fully innoculated against negative persuasion becuase the thought leaders bought it," said Taylor.

EXTINCTION OF MIDDLE CLASS

Taylor talked about the disappearance of the American middle class and the near-extinction of what he termed "the great American passive consumer. "Marketers can't get a random sample anymore because anyone under 20 doesn't have a land-line phone anymore."

What the data show, said Taylor, is that "We are shifting to an economic of the poor and nearly poor, and the affluent and nearly-affluent, and the wealthy." Taylor said research shows that one-half of one percent of the American population holds 67% of the nation's private assets. "That's an astonishing rollup of assets we haven't seen since the likes of the French Revolution," Taylor said. "And to say they are nervous about their money is an understatement."

Will shame have any effect?

Take a look at the March 18, 2005 edition of "The Water Cooler" at the Columbia Journalism Review Daily website -- http://www.cjrdaily.org/archives/001386.asp -- an interview with retired CBS foreign correspondence Tom Fenton, who has a book out.  He's asked about the prospect that pressure from the FCC might improve television journalism. Not likely, he says.  Instead, he uses the word "shame" as in this excerpt:

<i>TF: Well, I think that's pie in the sky. It would be wonderful if they
would. Somehow, the mainstream media have to be shamed into going back to
performing their prime function. In the book, I use the analogy -- it's
not a perfect analogy -- of how far Detroit fell in the '60s and '70s when
they were turning out inferior cars. We're turning out inferior news. And
somebody needs to stand up and say, "That's enough. Stop dumbing down the
news."</i>

Will it really be shame, however, that works? Will Wal-Mart be "shamed" into paying workers higher wages or selling higher-quality products? Depends who is applying the shame. If customers apply shame by not shopping, that might do the trick.  But shame has to be accompanied by consumer action to not purchase the product -- and not watch network TV news.