Bob Mercer, “State of the News Media,” C-SPAN, 2017.09.04. Screen cap from C-SPAN.
What I’ve seen here in the last 30 years is a complete reversal in terms of what newspapers and TV stations cover here in the Capitol. We went from having ten year-round reporters here in the 1980s—two for the AP, two for the UPI, three daily papers, two TV stations, public radio—and it gradually has diminished, and it’s gotten to where right now there are two of us left. There is an AP reporter whose job is the entire state, and then we have me.
I think that is counterproductive, because then what you get is superficial reporting. You don’t get depth.
For example, in our Legislature, there are 105 members, and every one of those people comes into the Capitol with something they want to accomplish, or many things they want to accomplish, whatever the case may be. I don’t think that on any given day a third of the committees get covered during Session. And then in the afternoons they run dozens of bills, pieces of legislation, through, and I don’t think that beyond one or two or three that those get covered. And yet they’re all laws that people want passed, or want to kill, whatever the case might be.
And so you’ll have tremendous debates on things that just never see a word in print or get a word on broadcast [transcript by CAH; interview with Bob Mercer, “State of the News Media,” C-SPAN, 2017.09.04].
Mercer also tells C-SPAN that while the Aberdeen American News is adapting reasonably well to the Internet age, that Sioux Falls paper is committing suicide:
In terms of where the newspaper industry is at in South Dakota, they’re transitioning to an online presence as well, but they’re doing it in different ways. The company I work for, which is a privately owned company, they prize local content. They want good newspapers. They provide grants to pursue projects, things like that, whereas the Argus Leader, which is owned by Gannett, they’re trying to just basically put themselves out of business. They want to go strictly online and not print a product at all. So we’re going opposite ways.
And then you have papers that are just slowly dying on the vine. They’ll continue to publish, but I don’t know for how long. I don’t know where they’ll be twenty years from now [Mercer on C-SPAN, 2017.09.04].
Mercer says that newspaper circulation has dropped in Sioux Falls and Rapid City while population has grown. He says newspaper circulation has remained steady in Aberdeen and Watertown.
Mercer mentions that when he wrote a column asserting that Trump changed the national conversation in his first hundred days, one of his papers declined to run it. (I can find that column in the Aberdeen, Watertown, Yankton, Pierre, and Spearfish papers.) Mercer says the paper “didn’t agree with what I was saying about him changing the conversation or attempting to change the conversation. They just thought he’s wrong.” Mercer says that’s the first time that a paper chose to “censor” him.*
*Mercer doesn’t go into further detail, but I can dream up one justification for that one paper’s rejection of his column. Mercer wrote, “Trump was, and is, right, in the allegations, the accusations, that some news organizations were, and are, dishonest in their treatment of him,” but Mercer offered no examples. A newspaper concerned about a frequently lying White House waging a concerted campaign to delegitimize the objective, independent press might rightly require that a columnist provide specific examples to support a claim that furthers that delegitimization. But even if such a position crossed the mind of the censoring paper, it didn’t stop five others from running Mercer’s column.
Basically, what Mercer is saying is that everyone besides himself is doing a piss poor job.
I prefer to get my news in hard copy, but I also liked to drive Corvairs in their day. The world changes. Even back when there were ten reporters helping clog up the Capitol hallways, not every issue or bill could be covered to the depth they deserved.
Today, you, the reader, can go to the LRC website to the source to get the guts of the bill. There is even a recording of most of the testimony on these bills. The problem today is not that things don’t get covered. It’s that you have to do the work yourself, and not rely on a story written by a journalist to pull out nut quotes. It’s a lot of work to listen to all that testimony.
If you want opinion and discussion, it can happen here on DFP, or any other blog. I remember having to wait a week to get a letter to the editor published. DFP publishes things instantaneously. That has a downside.
It does make some sense for news organizations to try different things.
Good assessment, Donald. I’m not convinced a newspaper commits suicide simply by moving away from print and toward electrons; however, I will acknowledge that the Sioux Falls paper may not have figured out how to generate enough revenue online to keep itself afloat and provide anything like the state government coverage we got back in the 1980s.
You’re right about my instantaneous publishing having problems—factual and typographical errors slip through more often when only one set of eyes reviews the material. But I also get corrections pretty quickly from the ad hoc editorial board of the commentariat. :-)
The LRC website plus SDPB’s livestreaming of committees is a great improvement over the 1980s, when journalists really were the sole sources of daily information about Session. Every South Dakotan with Internet can directly obtain unfiltered instant and day-of information about bills that only legislators, lobbyists, and others in the Capitol could get.
Of course, the problem with our having to do the work ourselves is that very few of us can do the work—i.e., pay constant attention every day throughout Session, talk to multiple sponsors and bill proponents and opponents, and accumulate the legal and institutional knowledge necessary to make sense of the torrent of action during Session. Reliable political journalists (including us bloggers) can help filter that information to give readers with limited time the highlights they need to know to guide their votes come election time… assuming anyone is going to the polls thinking beyond party labels to actual legislator performance.
Roger Cornelius
Would it be fair to speculate that the Rapid City Journal is the periodical that censored Bob?
There are two take aways for me about Mercers interview, the first being that South Dakota media is just too damn cheap to have reporters in Pierre and that far to many South Dakota voters are willing to sit back and accept what the SDGOP feeds them. You know, the less you know the better.
grudznick
Journalism is dying. In fact, it is nearly dead. Newspapers from my day are all long gone. The Argus has become a rag that only lies. All papers need to pull the plug on themselves.
Roger, that’s a fair assumption. Interesting: we usually hear that the RCJ is a conservative rag. That narrative would lead us to believe they’d have no problem printing Mercer’s quasi-pro-Trump column.
Grudz, if journalism is dying, the subscribers left paperless all need to pool their leftover cash and send it to Dakota Free Press. I’ll give Bob a run for his money. :-D
Roger Cornelius
Cory,
Here’s the thing about the Rapid City Journal, the alt-right thinks they are too liberal
Donald Pay
I think there is a tendency to look back on the good old days and think things were better then. Let me suggest that when we gaze back on a “golden age of journalism” in South Dakota, we are talking about an age that lasted only about 25 years (1972-1997). One could argue about the beginning and ending dates, but lets just say it started, I think, with some of the groundbreaking early journalism on the Oahe Irrigation Project fight and ended with the rise of digital media
Before 1972, journalism consisted of turning out pap. When a few brave reporters started digging up stuff on Oahe, they were repeatedly censored and at least one was fired. Truth, you see, was not part of journalism in South Dakota. When the powers that be at the papers and electronic media figured out telling the truth sold papers and air time, they could hire more reporters. Many young and most not afraid to dig out and write stories that wouldn’t have been done before.
Really, the death of journalism is due to the lack of guts to go after stories and tell the truth, more than the lack of reporters.
grudznick
Mr. Pay has interesting points, and I agree with many. However, grudznick believes the death of journalism is due to the money grubbing liberal tendencies of most of the newspapers in South Dakota. The Argus cut its own throat in public and we all still have to watch it thrash around in its death throes. The RJC stands alone as a bastion of mostly accurate reporting. What we need is a state run news paper. Maybe a state run Tee Vee station would be good, too. And I don’t mean the liberal public broadcasting arm of state government. A new arm. A fat thick arm.
Roger Cornelius
Donald,
It has often been said that every reporter needs to be an investigative reporter to which I agree.
Maybe that is part of the problem with South Dakota journalism, we don’t have enough investigative reporters and as result we don’t see real news being reported.
Cory, even as a blogger, seems to be part of a dying breed of journalist that give a damn.
grudznick
Newspapers, and blogging too, is dying. When good journalists can’t feed their children you know that the collapse, if not government takeover, of all media is soon to follow.
Donald Pay
Roger,
You are right about investigative reporters. South Dakota journalists did some really good work, but I doubt they were given the time and resources to do top notch investigative work. That’s why the Technical Information Project stared the newsletter we had from 1984-1992 or so. We got tired of the superficial coverage and wanted more depth. Still, a lot of stuff we dug up or got leaked from various sources went to reporters. Because we published once a month, if we wanted it out fast or to a broad audience we would send it to the RCJ, or the Argus-Leader. On many environmental issues we served as a sort of investigative arm that dug out info for the news media.
Jeff Martin
A newspaper choosing not to run one of Mercer’s columns is not censorship, according to my understanding of the term. Censorship is done by the government.
Censorship by the government is certainly egregious (and mostly unconstitutional), but, as the ACLU notes, private entities can engage in censorship as well. TV networks employ censors. Twitter and Facebook censor content.
Jeff Martin
Regardless of the numbers of reporters around, you’ve got to use video to tell the stories coming out of Pierre. The world has changed, and newspaper articles with no pictures or video are not what they used to be. Far fewer readers will engage.
Jeff Martin
I don’t think the ACLU has the sole authority to define censorship, but perhaps I am incorrect — I have just always been taught that censorship is an act done by governments and not businesses.
Jeff Martin
The other thing is, Bob Mercer should thank the Lord that South Dakota is so cold. I remember in the fairly recent past (7 or 8 years ago) walking into a coffee shop in Mitchell in February and a bunch of farmers were reading physical copies of The Daily Republic. Now, could I walk into ANY restaurant in Atlanta and find ONE SINGLE PERSON reading physical copies of an actual newspaper – No. Try walking into a restaurant in any big city and find just or two people reading a newspaper made of paper — It would be a challenge.
Jeff—video?! Ugh—do you know what a pain in the keester it is to produce video versus text? Does no one read anymore?
Jeff Martin
Ha! Sometimes I think few people read anymore – the younger people I know don’t read much of anything. They get their info from tweets, memes, gifs and video clips. In South Dakota, where it’s cold and there’s an older population, especially in rural areas ( and I don’t mean that in a negative way because older people are some of best people ) people still read newspapers. In the big cities, where the population is younger and often busier, they just don’t read. 90-95 percent of their information comes from Tweets, memes, gifs and video clips. They don’t even watch TV on TVs – they get their Saturday Night Live songs and news from Internet clips.
Basically, what Mercer is saying is that everyone besides himself is doing a piss poor job.
I prefer to get my news in hard copy, but I also liked to drive Corvairs in their day. The world changes. Even back when there were ten reporters helping clog up the Capitol hallways, not every issue or bill could be covered to the depth they deserved.
Today, you, the reader, can go to the LRC website to the source to get the guts of the bill. There is even a recording of most of the testimony on these bills. The problem today is not that things don’t get covered. It’s that you have to do the work yourself, and not rely on a story written by a journalist to pull out nut quotes. It’s a lot of work to listen to all that testimony.
If you want opinion and discussion, it can happen here on DFP, or any other blog. I remember having to wait a week to get a letter to the editor published. DFP publishes things instantaneously. That has a downside.
It does make some sense for news organizations to try different things.
Good assessment, Donald. I’m not convinced a newspaper commits suicide simply by moving away from print and toward electrons; however, I will acknowledge that the Sioux Falls paper may not have figured out how to generate enough revenue online to keep itself afloat and provide anything like the state government coverage we got back in the 1980s.
You’re right about my instantaneous publishing having problems—factual and typographical errors slip through more often when only one set of eyes reviews the material. But I also get corrections pretty quickly from the ad hoc editorial board of the commentariat. :-)
The LRC website plus SDPB’s livestreaming of committees is a great improvement over the 1980s, when journalists really were the sole sources of daily information about Session. Every South Dakotan with Internet can directly obtain unfiltered instant and day-of information about bills that only legislators, lobbyists, and others in the Capitol could get.
Of course, the problem with our having to do the work ourselves is that very few of us can do the work—i.e., pay constant attention every day throughout Session, talk to multiple sponsors and bill proponents and opponents, and accumulate the legal and institutional knowledge necessary to make sense of the torrent of action during Session. Reliable political journalists (including us bloggers) can help filter that information to give readers with limited time the highlights they need to know to guide their votes come election time… assuming anyone is going to the polls thinking beyond party labels to actual legislator performance.
Would it be fair to speculate that the Rapid City Journal is the periodical that censored Bob?
There are two take aways for me about Mercers interview, the first being that South Dakota media is just too damn cheap to have reporters in Pierre and that far to many South Dakota voters are willing to sit back and accept what the SDGOP feeds them. You know, the less you know the better.
Journalism is dying. In fact, it is nearly dead. Newspapers from my day are all long gone. The Argus has become a rag that only lies. All papers need to pull the plug on themselves.
Roger, that’s a fair assumption. Interesting: we usually hear that the RCJ is a conservative rag. That narrative would lead us to believe they’d have no problem printing Mercer’s quasi-pro-Trump column.
Grudz, if journalism is dying, the subscribers left paperless all need to pool their leftover cash and send it to Dakota Free Press. I’ll give Bob a run for his money. :-D
Cory,
Here’s the thing about the Rapid City Journal, the alt-right thinks they are too liberal
I think there is a tendency to look back on the good old days and think things were better then. Let me suggest that when we gaze back on a “golden age of journalism” in South Dakota, we are talking about an age that lasted only about 25 years (1972-1997). One could argue about the beginning and ending dates, but lets just say it started, I think, with some of the groundbreaking early journalism on the Oahe Irrigation Project fight and ended with the rise of digital media
Before 1972, journalism consisted of turning out pap. When a few brave reporters started digging up stuff on Oahe, they were repeatedly censored and at least one was fired. Truth, you see, was not part of journalism in South Dakota. When the powers that be at the papers and electronic media figured out telling the truth sold papers and air time, they could hire more reporters. Many young and most not afraid to dig out and write stories that wouldn’t have been done before.
Really, the death of journalism is due to the lack of guts to go after stories and tell the truth, more than the lack of reporters.
Mr. Pay has interesting points, and I agree with many. However, grudznick believes the death of journalism is due to the money grubbing liberal tendencies of most of the newspapers in South Dakota. The Argus cut its own throat in public and we all still have to watch it thrash around in its death throes. The RJC stands alone as a bastion of mostly accurate reporting. What we need is a state run news paper. Maybe a state run Tee Vee station would be good, too. And I don’t mean the liberal public broadcasting arm of state government. A new arm. A fat thick arm.
Donald,
It has often been said that every reporter needs to be an investigative reporter to which I agree.
Maybe that is part of the problem with South Dakota journalism, we don’t have enough investigative reporters and as result we don’t see real news being reported.
Cory, even as a blogger, seems to be part of a dying breed of journalist that give a damn.
Newspapers, and blogging too, is dying. When good journalists can’t feed their children you know that the collapse, if not government takeover, of all media is soon to follow.
Roger,
You are right about investigative reporters. South Dakota journalists did some really good work, but I doubt they were given the time and resources to do top notch investigative work. That’s why the Technical Information Project stared the newsletter we had from 1984-1992 or so. We got tired of the superficial coverage and wanted more depth. Still, a lot of stuff we dug up or got leaked from various sources went to reporters. Because we published once a month, if we wanted it out fast or to a broad audience we would send it to the RCJ, or the Argus-Leader. On many environmental issues we served as a sort of investigative arm that dug out info for the news media.
A newspaper choosing not to run one of Mercer’s columns is not censorship, according to my understanding of the term. Censorship is done by the government.
Censorship by the government is certainly egregious (and mostly unconstitutional), but, as the ACLU notes, private entities can engage in censorship as well. TV networks employ censors. Twitter and Facebook censor content.
Regardless of the numbers of reporters around, you’ve got to use video to tell the stories coming out of Pierre. The world has changed, and newspaper articles with no pictures or video are not what they used to be. Far fewer readers will engage.
I don’t think the ACLU has the sole authority to define censorship, but perhaps I am incorrect — I have just always been taught that censorship is an act done by governments and not businesses.
The other thing is, Bob Mercer should thank the Lord that South Dakota is so cold. I remember in the fairly recent past (7 or 8 years ago) walking into a coffee shop in Mitchell in February and a bunch of farmers were reading physical copies of The Daily Republic. Now, could I walk into ANY restaurant in Atlanta and find ONE SINGLE PERSON reading physical copies of an actual newspaper – No. Try walking into a restaurant in any big city and find just or two people reading a newspaper made of paper — It would be a challenge.
Jeff—video?! Ugh—do you know what a pain in the keester it is to produce video versus text? Does no one read anymore?
Ha! Sometimes I think few people read anymore – the younger people I know don’t read much of anything. They get their info from tweets, memes, gifs and video clips. In South Dakota, where it’s cold and there’s an older population, especially in rural areas ( and I don’t mean that in a negative way because older people are some of best people ) people still read newspapers. In the big cities, where the population is younger and often busier, they just don’t read. 90-95 percent of their information comes from Tweets, memes, gifs and video clips. They don’t even watch TV on TVs – they get their Saturday Night Live songs and news from Internet clips.