State of the Media

The Dallas Morning News, still the bellwether mainstream journalism entity in Texas, has decided to align its editorial muscle with the online-oriented, Dallas-based advertising firm Slingshot.

The newspaper and the ad firm are creating and co-managing what has been described as a “social media agency.” Known as Speakeasy, it will create digital ad campaigns for local and national businesses, in part by using newspaper stories that it distributes via Facebook and Twitter, or features on websites managed by the ad firm for clients.

Jim Moroney, publisher of the newspaper, will serve as chairman of Speakeasy. The founder of Slingshot will be the CEO. And though the partnership has been described as a joint operation, it’s clear that The Dallas Morning News will be the principal owner—and the one continually scrambling to find new ways to monetize its content. I used to work there, and I now teach inside The Belo Center for New Media at The University of Texas at Austin, supported by the newspaper’s parent company, A.H. Belo Corporation.

The arrangement is basically a sign of the national times come to Texas: publishers, from the heavyweights on down, are racing to connect with social media experts. Sometimes, as in Dallas, they are simply siphoning money from print budgets to form their own social media companies that unabashedly view content as a mash-up of news and advertising.

And they’re not just trying to figure out how to disseminate the news in faster-moving bursts on Twitter. The partnership in Dallas is predicated on exploring better ways to allow journalism, presumably in any multimedia form, to be used as an integral part of digital ad campaigns.

The newspaper’s mid-September story on the strategy says its social media agency “will also have access to the complete archives of The News, allowing clients to post stories related to their products and services on their own sites.” In other words, the ad agency will offer the journalistic content of the newspaper to its clients. The clients, in turn, can use the newspaper’s stories on their own websites and in their own social media channels.

It’s one of the buzzy new mass-communications mantras sweeping the 2.0 media landscape, whereby the old journalism boundaries between editorial and advertising are increasingly blurred, and some publishers talk unapologetically about “content marketing.” Defenders of the new strategy say the approach puts a smoother, more believable face on the ubiquitous “advertorials” that sometimes consume whole chunks of magazines like Texas Monthly. Now, instead of clients paying publications for an advertorial that’s clearly marked as an advertorial, companies can re-publish works of bylined journalism on their sites. One Speakeasy executive described it as a “softer” sell than an advertorial.

Some people in North Texas are raising red flags. Tim Rogers, editor of D Magazine (over the last several years he has done the best, most consistent coverage of the media in Dallas), wonders whether newspaper editors will be tempted to start assigning stories that advertisers would consider appropriate for marketing purposes.

Morning News executives insist there’s no potential conflict, that the newspaper’s creation of a social media ad agency is, in effect, just a continuation of what the paper has always done. For example, the newspaper may allow stories from its business section to be used in corporate newsletters. The social media agency, the execs say, simply provides a digitally groomed way to do the same thing. And, without question, it’s a way to make up for the dwindling revenues from print advertising.

In its own story announcing the move, Moroney said the Morning News is a “tremendous repository of great content,” and that the social media/advertising/journalism initiative will increase the newspaper’s reputation as “an innovator in the newspaper industry.”

The Morning News promises to retain editorial independence, and that its stories will not be selectively edited by businesses.

But does having works of journalism on a company’s website—and coursing through its social media streams—imply a tacit endorsement from the newspaper? Is the result a “softer sell” because it seems to come with the independent vetting that news outlets should always provide? Time will tell.

It’s the kind of thing that almost no one would notice. That, in and of itself, is part of a welling media problem. In New Orleans, the clerk of the Civil District Court, Dale Atkins, quietly released a mid-summer memo with this news tucked inside it:

“The Clerk of the Civil District Court’s Office has selected Gambit as its official journal for all advertisements required to be made in relation to judicial proceedings. Beginning August 1, 2012, all advertisements required to be made in relation to judicial proceedings for the Clerk’s Office shall be placed in Gambit.”

Atkins was telling the public that those small ads written in confusing legalese—and that are often found in the very back of newspapers—will be running in the alternative Gambit newspaper instead of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Atkins announced that he was motivated, in part, by what might prove to be the real canary-in-the-coal-mine moment for mainstream newspapers in America. He said his decision, a financial knife in the back of the already staggering Times-Picayune, was guided by the fact that there is going to be a “reduction in the number of times the paper would be printed.”

Come October 1, the historic Times-Picayune—the paper that won Pulitzer Prizes for its courageous coverage during and after Hurricane Katrina—is scheduled to cease being a daily newspaper. Newspaper executives announced plans earlier this year to cut back publication to just three days a week. If that happens it will be a watershed moment in American journalism, and could become the tipping point for the nation’s large dailies. (Never mind that staffers at the Times-Picayune first learned about this when they read an article in The New York Times.)

Publishers everywhere, including Texas, are watching closely. The Austin American-Statesman—which rarely receives reassurances from its owner, Cox Media Group—must be studying the impact of slicing its seven-day-a-week publication schedule, cutting the print-centric staff and coalescing around its online operations in tech-friendly and tech-savvy Austin. If there were one place in Texas where the financial planners might want to go all-in on an online-only operation, it would be Austin.

Meanwhile, the executive overseeing the changes in New Orleans for Advance Publications, which owns the Times-Picayune, told the excellent media reporters at Poynter Online that he wasn’t concerned with “how many days we publish but how well we cover the community.” That sounds noble but it probably rings extremely hollow to the hundreds of staffers who have been forced out, or will be forced out, of the Times-Picayune because of publication cutbacks.

One Times-Picayune staffer has described the retrenching into the online operation as doubling down on an unproved bet—a gamble with livelihoods … and a public’s need for daily news. Not to mention that we are talking about New Orleans, a city that can shift on a dime, and that is often home to more human and natural disasters than many places in America. New Orleans (hell, the entire state of Louisiana) practically exists as a poster child for the need to have daily, constant, vigorous, intensive investigative and explanatory journalism.

A few folks in The Big Easy are howling in the face of the storm. The colorful owner of the local football and basketball teams offered to buy the paper but was basically told it was not for sale. Various citizen kings, community leaders, academics and artists have formed groups to lodge protests with Advance. You know people are pissed when both Mary Matalin and James Carville have joined the protest.

There have even been vague rumblings about big players ironically canceling even more advertisements in the paper unless Advance agrees to cancel plans to leave New Orleans without a daily newspaper. So far, it doesn’t look like any of the moves has gained momentum.

Finally, some enlightened souls have suggested that Advance could have split the difference—keep some semblance of the daily print operation alive, but stripped down to the necessary essentials: hard news and investigative packages. That’s the type of reporting that really changes lives, that people need to see in paper, in their hands.

Instead, Advance appears to be staying the course. And it might not be too long before publications in Texas make the same mistake.

Erwin Seba, a reporter with the Reuters bureau in Houston, has exposed one of the most alarming ongoing stories in Texas. His 2,000-word saga, published in late June, began with this: “In the end, all it took was a small chemical spill—perhaps less than a barrelful—to bring down the newest, mightiest oil refinery in the United States.”

Seba traced how things have gone dangerously awry at the newly expanded $10 billion Motiva Enterprises Port Arthur refinery—the largest refinery in North America—resulting in the shutdown of some of its units. The plant is spread across thousands of low-lying acres in humid Port Arthur, on the site where the first oil refinery in Texas was built 111 years ago, and close to where oil was first unearthed in the state.

The refinery is a joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco, owned by the Saudi Arabian government. A few weeks before Seba’s story appeared, steel-gray storm clouds gathered in Port Arthur as the Shell and Aramco executives arrived for the triumphant ceremonial opening of the new units. Assembled inside a huge tent, the oil executives gleefully turned an imitation valve, symbolically launching an operation that promised to produce 6 million gallons of gasoline daily.

Spokesmen for Motiva, headquartered in Houston, crowed to reporters that 14,000 people had found work building the new units and that the plant would add $17 billion to the Texas economy. “Our commitment to meet the needs of the United States’ oil market … will contribute to enhancing the United States’ long-term energy security—today, tomorrow, and for decades to come,” added Aramco CEO Khalid Al-Falih.

But within days of the opening ceremony, there were scary problems at the refinery, which have gone unexamined by the state media, with a handful of notable exceptions:

Two fires broke out in a new crude distillation unit, and then whole sections of the plant were shut down on June 9. More than a few oil experts feared another Texas City-style disaster was simmering. In 1947, the worst industrial disaster in American history occurred in Texas City when refineries blew up, killing more than 500 people and injuring 5,000. In 2005, 15 people were killed and 180 injured in an explosion at the British Petroleum plant in Texas City.

Given fears of another wide-scale tragedy, the historic scope of the project, and the regional and national implications of a plant shutdown, it’s staggering that so few media outlets have disclosed what is happening in Port Arthur.

The earliest reporting appeared in a few outlets: Bloomberg, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The Beaumont Enterprise produced solid breaking news stories on the shutdown. Then Seba’s drilled-down piece, abetted by unnamed sources, emerged three weeks after the ceremonial opening. Seba reported that a chemical had leaked into a new 30-story crude distillation unit; as it heated up to nearly 700 degrees Fahrenheit inside the chamber, the chemical vaporized and began to corrode thousands of feet of stainless steel pipe.

Seba’s dispassionate report included a panoramic view of the history of oil in Texas and was informed by independent industry experts, who suggested that such problems at the plant should never have happened. “We have the worst-case scenario,” one of Seba’s anonymous sources told him.

Motiva, Aramco and Shell officials have been almost silent on the topic. Motiva’s home page still features the glowing PR account of the May 31 opening, and no mention of the subsequent problems.

Since Seba’s piece, James Shannon, who writes for the Beaumont Business Journal and Beaumont-based The Examiner, has pushed the story forward. One of Shannon’s anonymous sources said it was not “plausible” that corrosion caused the plant’s shutdown. “The combination of secrecy and speculation makes this a difficult story to cover, but reporting efforts will continue,” Shannon wrote.

That reporting will continue is good news. That so few media outlets have reported the problems at the Motiva plant is as ominous for Texas journalism as the storm clouds on the day of the refinery’s ceremonial opening.