In case you're not already reading Matt Taibbi

If you are not already reading Matt Taibbi, it might be time you looked him up.
Taibbi is the offspring of Mike Taibbi, who was, in my youthful journalist years, a local TV news correspondent. I saw Taibbi pére having dinner once at Joyce Chen's at 11 at night back when I was enthusiastic enough about news to be starstruck by local TV news correspondents.
And that is probably why this offering from Taibbi fils particularly warms the cockles of my profoundly cynical heart in this time of unemployment, disillusion, and retrenchment:

"Let me just say that I’m always suspicious when I see articles about the motivations of journalists. I think they often reflect a misunderstanding of what journalism is all about. Journalists are supposed to be assholes. The system does not work, in fact, if society’s journalists are all nice, kind, friendly, rational people.

"You want a good percentage of them to be inconsolably crazy. You want them to be jealous of everything and everyone and to have heaps of personal hangups and flaws. That way they will always be motivated to punch holes in things."

There's more; equally insightful.

There are several problems with the takeover of news media by publicly-traded corporations. The first is that journalism, like almost every other process intended to result in a functional product, requires some specialized expertise, which the junior MBA wizards in mergers and acquisitions almost never possess, appreciate, or even recognize. I was once privileged to work for a magazine that had been bought out by such a conglomerate (well, actually, nearly all the magazines I've worked for have been bought out by such conglomerates.) In this case, the new owners installed a CEO who decreed that papers, files, books, folders, and materials of any kind could not be left on desktops, bookshelves, or any other horizontal surface overnight. This was before the World Wide Web required a graphical interface (remember Lynx?) and quite a lot of the research material upon which magazine articles were based appeared in the form of written notes, photocopies, books, pamphlets, letters, and faxes; and manuscripts spent much of their working lifespans on paper. Asking us to work without leaving paper on our desks was tantamount to requiring Detroit to make cars without stocking buckets of bolts.

Now, I have read the management books that say you should handle each paper that crosses your desk only once, deal with it or delegate it immediately, and leave your desk clean at the end of every day. That may work for an executive with very short-term goals and a very short attention span; it was never meant as advice for writers of nonfiction. But this publishing genius also arrived early each morning and (while checking horizontal surfaces for contraband, I suppose) patrolled the window offices, adjusting the venetian blinds so that each and every one fell exactly one inch above its sill. Apparently he was unaware that our paying customers -- advertisers -- never actually saw the building. There was no one to impress with our tidiness.

The corporate misunderstanding of journalism has its most destructive effect in the failure to grasp that there's a sound commercial reason for the firewall between content and advertising in the way news media are (or used to be) run: without it, there's no product. In the traditional news media business model, the customers are advertisers and the commodity being sold is readers. But to attract and retain readers, you have to provide a publication that they can trust and learn from. Readers know when they're being fed propaganda and advertorial, and they lose interest. All those brilliant schemes to build synergy for advertisers rest upon an essential misapprehension of the business, and, not coincidentally, undermine the credibility and value of the news content, driving readers away.

The second problem is related to the first, an extension of corporate owners' misunderstanding of the business they bought: most newspapers and magazines could, prior to the current rationalization forced by the digitization of media, deliver a fairly steady, consistent profit, the kind of thing that could support an extended family, like the Hearsts or the Sulzbergers, in sufficient luxury, while providing them with a gratifying sense of civic gravitas. What they couldn't do then and certainly can't do now, is provide an ever-increasing profit margin to satisfy investors who require growth -- which is what Wall Street demands. Papers used to make a solid 20% profit year in, year out. Which is sufficient, for a privately-held company that understands newspapers. But start demanding that the margin grow -- not just the amount of profit, but the percentage -- and the whole thing falls apart. Publicly-traded owners, in order to create the impression of meeting their fiduciary responsibility to their investors, slash resources, and further undermine the validity of the content, alienating readers further.

The third problem -- and the one that has, I think, driven a lot of the best reporting to the Web, where not only doesn't anyone know if you're a dog, they also don't know what look you have on your face while you're reading the latest memo from Headquarters -- is that it's impossible to staff a news organization with people who fit in the corporate interpersonal mode. As Taibbi points out, we are assholes. It is our job to ask impolite questions, to have trouble with authority figures, to keep irregular hours, and to fail to aspire to management. We are motivated by being given enough rope. What we want is to be left alone to track down the truth, and then to have a platform through which we can expose that truth to the light of day.

Taibbi again:

"Obviously it would be bad if all journalists were like this, and there is certainly a place for the more gentlemanly school, i.e. those writers and TV reporters who maintain good relationships with politicians and institutions, and work with them to deliver important information to the public.

"But the iconoclastic school of journalist should be a difficult person. You know how when you go on the subway, there’s always one asshole on the train who just has to whip a pen out and draw a mustache on the face of the cute blond stewardess in the Jet Blue ad? That’s the kind of person we’re talking about. A pain in the ass on the subway, and in most places (and personal relationships, for that matter), but very useful in this particular profession."

When you try to turn a news organization into just another corporate office, you end up with HR screeners who don't understand that you might want an employee that walked off a previous job; with corporate strategies that require reporters to stop caring about the only thing that really motivates us; and with a culture that demands a kind of hypocrisy, truthlessness, submission to hierarchy, and taste in footwear that are frankly incompatible with effective reporting. If you want your employees to aggressively question the mayor, you have to put up with employees who will also aggressively question you.

Which is why I find it silly to blame the Internet for the decline of news. If the Internet has made nothing else obvious, it has shown that, after they've satisfied their appetite for porn, people really want news -- news that is tailored to their interests and obsessions. But in abandoning the firewall -- the understanding that you secure readers by giving them news and information that is of interest and value to them and then deliver those readers to the advertisers -- and converting the content of news itself into direct political and commercial messages, corporate management has gutted its own product. It can't provide advertisers with captive readers, and the harder -- and/or more insidious -- the sell, the more readers desert.

It's as simple as this: people are smart enough to mute the commercials. When you make it all one big commercial, they take their attention elsewhere. And if you want to get their attention back, you're going to need some loose cannons who care more about the truth than about the org chart.