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A Daily Conflict of Interest

Update 6/14/06: Added point about hiring of editors, and clarified a few minor things.

I guess I didn’t mention it here earlier, but I’m a staff photographer for The Spartan Daily at SJSU this semester. I wanted to see explore my recent obsession with photography, but I think this semester has all but confirmed that my true calling likely lies in economics (see my LiveJournal for more on that). I’ve always doubted photojournalism was the way I was meant to change the world. After all, only a small slice of it is visible to cameras (try illustrating comparative advantage or opportunity cost with a photograph). Because of that, photos in newspapers are often used merely to fill space or as eye candy to draw readers (it’s telling that the best paper in the country by far, The Wall Street Journal, hardly runs any photos and indeed used to run none altogether). It’s a useful function, but it’s not the primary one of journalism, which is to inform and educate.

I still think my true calling will involve writing. Of course, I don’t intend to write for the Daily, because to tell the truth, it’s just not a quality publication. To be sure, it’s a bit unfair to compare it to the WSJ (required reading for my Public Policy course) or even The Daily Californian (which I probably didn’t judge as critically when I was there), but almost every time I attempt to read The Spartan Daily, I find it a poor use of my time. Erika agrees, saying that most of the stories read little more like press releases. Heck, at the Don Edwards Lecture featuring Terence Smith on Wednesday night, political science professor Terry Christensen couldn’t resist making a crack at how far the Daily has fallen.

Given that I haven’t worked on the writing side, my various theories as to what’s going wrong and how to address them are probably not worth much to anybody (which is why I blog). But there’s one thing that really sticks out as an obvious flaw. I may regret saying this, but I’ve generally been underwhelmed by most of the opinion columns (which tend to make up an unusually central role in this paper, for some reason). And I think there’s one really obvious reason behind this. You see, the paper is currently in the process of selecting the editors for next semester. Once that’s done, the editors then get to select the opinion columnists — inevitably themselves.

See anything wrong with this picture? Yeah, it should be pretty obvious:

1) This is about as fucked up as Bush asking Dick Cheney to head up a task force to decide who should be the VP candidate.

2) The skill sets of editors and opinion columnists have very little overlap.

3) Leaving a hiring decision up to a single person is worse than our system of selecting professors for tenure or choosing Supreme Court justices.

Now okay, Ryan Sholin (a Daily staff writer who’s not columnist but is a lot more insightful than most if not all of our current columnists) tells me that it doesn’t really work that way, saying that the editors don’t choose the columnists but simply get to do it themselves. If that’s the case, that’s even more fucked up. At least making good hiring decisions is a managerial skill valuable to a future editor. Having an editor automatically be a columnist makes about as much sense as designing a cell-phone with a built lawn mower or a fax machine with a built in egg beater.

I mean, how many top opinion columnists are former editors and vice versa? Okay, the question sounds like I meant it rhetorically, but I actually don’t know the answer to that question because I have to admit that I don’t read opinion columnists. In my mind, Paul Krugman is a poor man’s Brad DeLong and David Brooks is a partisan hack compared to Dan Drezner (and don’t get me started on the real partisan hacks out there). For that matter, I think some of the best columnists don’t even have a journalism background.

And to top it all, there’s a bit of a journalistic ethics issue here. Many newspapers have a policy of strict neutrality, requiring all their employees — except their Op-Ed columnists and editorial writers — to refrain from expressing any opinions publicly (and I’d argue that this is even more important for editors). For example, the New York Times doesn’t want their staff seen at protests or wearing campaign buttons. Indeed, this strict separation between the editorial department and the news department is one reason I think newspapers ought to get out of the opinion business altogether, leaving that to the bloggers. Of course, I guess it’s obvious where my loyalty lies in the blogging vs. journalism divide.

Now of course, columns shouldn’t be given out to just anybody. You need to pay your dues and prove your worth (as long as it’s not hazing, like depriving young doctors of sleep). But c’mon, you don’t call up a prize shortstop prospect and then stick him at catcher. Just contrast the skills and qualities that make a good editor with that of a good Op-Ed columnist. A good editor should work well with a variety of different people in order to be an effective manager (meaning that an abrasive personality is generally undesirable). A good columnist doesn’t need to work with others, and indeed ought to have a strong personality (so an abrasive personality can be a plus). A good editor needs to know how things work in the newsroom to know who to turn to get things done. A good columnist need never have ever set foot in a newsroom, and can indeed work completely remotely. A good editor doesn’t necessarily need to be a strong writer. It helps if they used to write, but they don’t need to be good at it as long as they can recognize bad writing and work with the writer to improve it. A good columnist, of course, needs to be a strong writer. A good editor is objective, but a good columnist is highly opinionated. A good editor needs a good eye for design and layout, whereas this is an utterly useless skill for a columnist.

Do you get the picture yet? Egg-beating fax machines. And when you’re talking about a photo or copy editor, the disparity in skill sets is even wider.

I don’t expect this to change. It’s been this way since at least back when Erika was at SJSU (she graduated in 2004). No, she wasn’t at the Daily, but she was on the “to call” list of almost every writer there when they needed a source, so she knew how some things worked. And besides, I don’t expect anybody to listen to lil’ ol’ me as a once-a-week photographer who isn’t a journalism major. But that won’t stop me from calling things the way I see it. Indeed, I think it frees me up a bit to call things the way they are.

Now I have to admit that there’s probably some sour grapes going on here. I do think it’d be cool to write a column for the Daily and be read by other students (hopefully impressing some cute ones, since I know I’d be pretty good at it). However, the opportunity costs for all the time required by editorial duties would be prohibitive for somebody not eying a career in the field. So I am admittedly a little disappointed by this arrangement, especially since it makes no sense whatsoever.

But I also know that my writing style would be sorely crimped by the 800 word limit (if this post wasn’t evidence enough, peruse these pieces, particularly The Case Against Bush which I wrote before the 2004 election). So career-wise, I’m much more suited to writing in-depth policy analysis pieces aimed at the movers and shakers instead of the Average Joe (something like Tim Lee’s absolute must-read piece on the DMCA). So it doesn’t really bother me too much, especially since I can always submit a guest column (which I’ll hopefully do next semester when I don’t take such a high workload). So I think I have a semblance of detached objectivity in pointing out what should already be obvious.

Of course, it’s easy to criticize, but harder to suggest how to fix things. So how do I think the decision ought to be made? Well first of all, don’t have individuals make the decisions. Create a hiring panel for that. This prevents editors from choosing themselves and makes it harder for people to get the position merely because they happen to be buddies with one.

Secondly — and this is key — make sure that panel is made up by people with a strong incentive to select the best candidates. In other words, eliminate or weaken any other conflicting incentives. So obviously you’d want journalism faculty on it, as they are much less likely to have any conflicts of interest than students. Although students will have relationships with faculty, they are already trying to build good relationships with faculty in order to get good grades and letters of recommendation and gain access to their network for post-college careers, so this doesn’t change anything. Indeed, you might want to include some professors from other fields of expertise, like political science, economics, sociology, etc. And you probably also want to include alumni who used to serve on the Daily, as they are less likely to have close friendships with any of the current candidates but will have an interest in the Daily actually being well-regarded as a publication.

Certainly, you can’t get around having at least some current students on the panel. Although these will create possible conflicts of interest, the other members will help mitigate this effect, and you can also have a policy where panel members must recuse themselves when a conflict occurs. Now the executive, managing, and opinion editors obviously ought to be on it, but besides them, I think the only other students you want on the panel are a random sample of readers (where each vote counts as a fraction of that of the other panel members).

Then you have the columnist candidates submit sample columns on a variety of pre-selected topics and have the panel judge the samples blindly (not that they have to close their eyes while reading, you smartass, but where they don’t know who wrote what). Given that everybody and their grandma wants a column, you should get a broad array of talent to choose from. And if you want to go further, have the final candidates come in and be given a limited time to write a column on a topic chosen by the panel. And of course, the final decision can also weigh things like what journalism classes they’ve taken and whether they’ve served at the Daily.

There’s probably many other ideas to consider, but I think you get that it’s a system that can be greatly improved. The logistics aren’t even that complicated when you consider that this panel never has to meet in person, but can make all decisions via e-mail. And that’s just the opinion columns. A similar process ought to be used for selecting the editors as well, instead of just leaving it up to the executive editor as Laura describes, which, as she points out, lends itself to the “good ol’ boys club” problem. In the private sector, a hiring decision of any importance in an organization this large is hardly ever completely left to one person (sure, one person may have the final decision, but always after input from multiple interviewers).

Plus, the news coverage itself would take a whole other monster of a blog post to talk about (it very obviously doesn’t even attempt to be fair and balanced with its coverage of A.S.). But I think I’ve said plenty for now. I mean, I’d like to continue shooting for them next semester, although I wouldn’t be too broken up if they kicked me out. I think it’d be their loss anyway. Not that I’m a great photographer, but econ geeks are generally pretty good at spotting procedural inefficiencies like this.