Ann:
Every good leader seeks out constructive, informed criticism. As I’m certain you intend to lead your organization through its current rough patch, please consider my honest if blunt suggestions for success.
Taking off from your declarations published today:
“We will still be unrelenting in our pursuit of public service journalism.” This is a mistake. It is mistake because you manifestly define “public service journalism” in terms of winning journalism contests, the plaudits of your similarly cocooned peers.
This leads you to grievously misallocate resources toward multi-part “investigative” pieces on dubious, flavor-of-the-week topics whose sole focus is to provoke some official government response, thereby validating the enterprise. The archetype was the ridiculous poultry plant expose that took days and hundreds of inches of news hole to convey the not-at-all news that low wage jobs in North Carolina processing plants were hard, dangerous, and manned by illegal immigrant labor. Readers laughed at this package, Ann, particularly the all-time classic graphic on how to cut up your own fryer.
If you truly aim to serve the public, ratchet down the pedantic crusading and instead focus on interesting stories, particularly ones that fly in the face of convention — any convention.
“With charlotte.com and Observer readership combined, we reach more readers than we ever have.” This is irrelevant. Yours is still a display-ad mindset. You believe your content is associated with your ads. Right now any semi-engaged computer user disables all your ad-loading scripts and pop-ups and never sees a single ad. Of any kind. This is the future. Mass circulation outlets must adopt some sort of opt-in advertising model or perish. I cannot stress this enough. You need to press this point on a McClatchy executive team that clearly has no idea what is going on, that thinks nationally syndicated ads will somehow reach end-user eyeballs.
“We will work harder than ever to keep your trust.” You have already lost the trust of many in the community. I know this hard for you to accept, but it is true. Your paper is not viewed as an honest broker of information. Let me give you some recent concrete examples.
Coverage of the latest city of Charlotte budget has uncritically passed along the council and city manager’s claim that it is a no new taxes budget. It is not. Water and sewer rates were increased 14 percent, other user fees hiked, and — most importantly — the property tax rates for the municipal service districts Uptown that fund Center City Partners were greatly increased.
Your coverage of illegal immigrants and college admissions has been misleading at best. The “ban” on undocumented students extends only to the small subset of community college students in degree-track programs. This means that as much as 70 percent of all students enrolled in the system are not affected by what you have portrayed as a draconian “ban.” Further, the full range of continuing education classes — including highly respected vocational and technical training classes — remain completely open to a class of students many of whom do not pay any state property tax to help support the system.
Then there was the dogged editorial support for Jim Black up until the bitter end, the curious decision to send three reporters to Durham to cover the Duke lacrosse matter as it broke, heedless of the sketchy nature of the claims, and just today — was sending Ron Green Jr. to San Diego really a good use of scarce dollars and news hole?
Trust only comes after good judgment has been repeatedly demonstrated. One gesture of renewed commitment to the community as whole that is totally within your power to secure is to resign from the Board of Directors of Center City Partners effective immediately. Please consider it.
Best of luck.
Jeff A. Taylor
