IL's Stephen George asks: "Has The Courier-Journal lost its way?"

What is journalism now?

IL's Stephen George has written a very frightening glimpse into daily affairs at the once mighty C-J. This one's a must-read, folks.

With more staff cuts and a newsroom reorganization driven by market research, has The Courier-Journal lost its way? by Stephen George (Insider Louisville)

The executive editor and publisher of The Courier-Journal called the news staff of about 40 into a meeting on Tuesday afternoon, ostensibly to talk about the future.

That future, they soon learned, would start with all of them reapplying for their jobs. It’s a particularly dehumanizing part of an ongoing process driven by parent company Gannett and embraced by C-J executives to incorporate more market research and demographic trends into the paper’s reporting.

Journalism -- it's the perfect place for marketing professionals, rather like the best time to smoke cigarettes is while you're pumping gas.

The extraordinary contraction of the newspaper industry during the past decade has prompted round after round of layoffs and shrinking page counts. As ad revenue has declined, newspaper executives at the C-J and up the Gannett chain have scrambled to figure out what’s wrong, devoting increasingly more time and money to market research. Reporters and editors at the C-J have been subjected to various initiatives — driven by marketing professionals and often carrying goofy corporate rhetoric — designed to better connect them with their audience, a goal most media companies strive to achieve.

Uh oh ... it's the "profit motive" thingy again.

The memo is an explicit indicator of the change in approach C-J executives are pushing. Traditionally, reporters have been protected from the market pressures affecting their newspapers. It’s as old as newspapers themselves: Profit motive can corrupt the pursuit of news and investigations that aren’t exactly sexy but remain essential to the public discourse.

Now, reporters at all Gannett publications are being equipped with technology to monitor the performance of their online stories in real time. This might seem like useful information, but the implication has been clear: Write stories that people want to read. Never mind the traditional role of newspapers as keepers of the public trust.

“I don’t think they’re ignoring (the strong journalistic tradition at the C-J),” said one staffer. “I think they’re trying to obliterate it. It’s how can we get the most metric hits.”

It's a depressing and necessary read. I'm fond of reminding the uninformed that they're entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts, but as should be painfully obvious, we've already entered a protracted period of fact elimination. Then what?