Commentary: Why media revolution only just beginning
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The daytime city editor at The Boston Herald came running over the minute I sat down at my desk that Monday morning.
"Dave, I'm glad someone from (the business desk) is here. The Dow is down more than 300 points in the first hour. This seems big. What do you think?"
Well, even for a young reporter four weeks into his first full-time job, I could figure this one out. While any 300-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU:
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$INDU13,428.05, +136.40, +1.0%) is news, the one that morning of Oct. 19, 1987 represented almost a 14% drop in the famous stock market index, equivalent to a loss of more than 1,800 points on the Dow at today's levels. Not bad for the first hour of trading.
By the end of the day, the Dow had fallen 508 points, or almost 23%, triggering declines in markets around the world, fears of a global recession after five years of boom times on Wall Street, and the coining of the term Black Monday.
By sheer luck, I happened to be in the right place at the right time in the Herald newsroom that morning, and got to write the story. The news business is like that. It remains one of the biggest news events I ever covered -- so big that I didn't even get a front page byline. The tabloid newspaper blew out the whole front page with a frantic image of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor and the headline "Meltdown on Wall Street."
Twenty years later, as I prepare to mark a different September anniversary this week - two decades in business journalism -- the sense of fear and foreboding among readers and investors remains fresh in my mind. Crowds of people massed outside the Fidelity Investments walk-in center on Congress Street that day to watch the Dow plunge on the window ticker. The Boston Stock Exchange was locked down to reporters. The words recession and stock market crash rang from Boston to Wall Street and every other regional stock market in the country, most of them now closed.
Those same words ring through the markets today. The same concern and fear are out there, just hiding behind terms such as subprime, hedge funds and credit crisis, instead of junk bonds, program trading and portfolio insurance. The market looks vulnerable. Even Alan Greenspan, a rookie Fed chief in 1987 who faced a trial by fire, says the current markets look a lot like they did that autumn.
But the difference between now and then is that we know what happened then. The markets rebounded at the end of 1987 to finish the year higher. The crisis ended. And though we've endured several more crises in the intervening decades -- the Salomon Brothers trading scandal, the Mexican currency crisis, the collapse of Barings Plc, the Long-Term Capital Management crisis, the bursting of the Internet bubble -- the markets over the long term have managed to continue rising. The Dow today is more than six times what it was 20 years ago, despite the daily fear and loathing chronicled by the business press. Investors who hung in there and did not give way to panic did great.
Which brings me to my own industry.
Back in 1987, it was widely assumed that newspapers were dying. The post-Watergate rush to become a reporter was over. Circulations were down. And new technologies were threatening. At one point, the hot new thing was to deliver news by fax machine, and papers were going to die because readers would be able to get news quicker by fax. They would even be able to tailor the type of news they wanted to receive. Imagine that?
In my section of the paper, which we affectionately called FIN for "financial," we kept abreast of the market's movement with an old Dow Jones news ticker, which clacked out spools of dark blue, inky copy all day long, and market updates once an hour. You had to get up from your desk, where primitive word processors had been installed only a year before, and walk over to the ticker, which was close to a blood stain on the aging carpet that newsroom legend held had been there ever since a printer coughed up a lung two decades before that. It was right out of The Front Page.
I'm told the rug has been cleaned. But 20 years later The Herald is still there, breaking news and still providing a daily slap upside the head to its larger, more comfortable rival, The Boston Globe. In the meantime, the industry has morphed completely.
Business journalism took off in the late 1980s, then continued to grow in the 1990s as companies like Bloomberg News came on the scene. The Wall Street Journal launched a subscription Web site in the mid-'90s and soon after companies like MarketWatch, TheStreet.com, The Motley Fool, and a host of new Web sites from legacy business began competing for the online financial news reader.
But while the names changed and new companies came on the scene to compete with old, the stories remained the same -- thrilling, devastating, frightening, heart-wrenching -- all in need of real journalists to report them and tell the world.
There's been a lot said about the latest craze in news dissemination recently, in which some Web sites electronically post news based on how many readers have hit the stories, instead of letting editors decide. This is a fascinating development in online community and user-generated editorial.
But go to any one of these sites and ask yourself the simple question, what's going on in the news today. At one of the sites Wednesday afternoon, the lead story was a video from YouTube headlined "Leave Britney Alone." Another site led with "How to hide beer in the office." Clearly an under-emphasized talent, but hardly newsworthy on a day oil prices hit $80 a barrel and Vladimir Putin dissolved the Russian government.
I know I'll come under fire for stepping into this, and maybe after 20 years I'm in danger of becoming the curmudgeon I always thought some of my older journalistic brethren were. But as long as there are Enrons and Worldcoms out there; hedge funds and pyramid schemes; crimes and wars and corrupt leaders, there will be journalists who will find platforms to report on them -- whatever the technology.
Indeed, this is not the beginning of the end for journalism. It wasn't 20 years ago either. It's a bull market for those who can write a sentence and tell a story and know how to do it across the mediums of print, Web, audio, video and mobile. The stories are there for the taking.
Oh, and one more thing about my first job at The Herald. It was owned at the time by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., in-coming owner of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes MarketWatch.
So 20 years of excitement later, here we go again. End of Story
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