Bad editing at the Arizona Republic. (Latest in an ongoing series.)

The decline of the American newspaper is being caused by many things, the collapse of the industry’s business model first among them.

But it’s also true that the editorial employees of the papers have brought some of this on themselves. How? Well, basically by not doing their jobs well.

There’s always a lot of talk about how newspapers are biased, a lot of which is overstated. What makes readers uncomfortable, though, is being left with questions after they read a story.

Given the resources at the paper’s command, and how much the reporters and editors are being paid, it’s not too much to ask to have them anticipate what those questions are, and answer them before the story goes to print.

That’s what editors do, and if they don’t readers start to feel that the paper doesn’t care about them.

Now, this didn’t matter when the papers held an effective monopoly on news dissemination. Today that’s not the case, and it’s all the more important.

I found a slew of examples just in a couple of days last week.

Consider the case of the professor associated with ASU, Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel memorial prize for economics last Monday. Every other paper in the country said that Ostrom lived in Bloomington, Indiana, and was a professor at the state university there.

The local papers, of course, played up an ASU connection—Ostrom oversees some sort of study center there—but didn’t bother to try to find out how substantive (or tenuous) the connection was. (Most national news outlets also noted that the economics prize is technically a memorial Nobel, which the Republic didn’t, but whatever.)

You can read this whole Republic story—in which we learn in turn that she’s a “part-time professor” and a “research professor” and a “faculty member”—and never get a sense of what Ostrom actually does at ASU. It leaves a subtle feeling that the Republic wasn’t giving us the whole story—probably because Ostrom’s role is pretty tangential.

Indeed, it wasn’t until Wednesday that we found out the extent of her involvement:

Ostrom communicates with ASU on conference calls several times a month and has come for three or four weeks in January for the past four years.

As for what she does, I read this …

Ostrom is the founding director of an ASU center incorporating a variety of disciplines that aims to guide policies toward more sustainability. It is the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, and it is in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in the College of Liberal Arts.

…and still don’t know. A good editor would have asked that both bits of information be in the first story—and that the second should have been followed by any sort of tidbit that could give a layperson a sense of what it was her center actually did.

Here’s another example. You know about James Ray, the self-help guru who oversaw a sweat-lodge-ceremony-gone-wrong a few weeks back. On Sunday, the paper ran a story with this hedline:

Sweat-lodge leader mum about ritual Sheriff: Adviser refuses to describe day of deaths

The story began:

A spiritual adviser and self-help author whose saunalike sweat lodge ceremony left two people dead Thursday has left the state and is refusing to tell detectives what happened during the spiritual-cleansing ritual, Yavapai County Sheriff Steve Waugh said.

Sure sounds like Ray isn’t cooperating! Four days later, we get a followup, based on an AP dispatch, that contained this passage:

When an audience member asked Ray to describe what happened, he declined to elaborate, saying only that he has hired his own investigative team and is cooperating with authorities.

“We’re looking for answers,” he said. “I’m as frustrated and confused as other people are.”

That story leaves the impression that Ray is cooperating. Why didn’t the editor notice the discrepancy? Again, a reader gets a sense that people inside the paper just aren’t thinking—and not even reading their own paper.

Another example—a story in the Valley & State section about a lunkhead with some large dogs that were barking and bothering the neighbors. Things had escalated until there was talk of restraining orders and lawsuits; the story was all about how mediation solved the problem.

The story went on for an eternity but never answered the questions in any reader’s (and presumably any editor’s) mind: What’s the law about barking dogs? For those of us who know letting your dogs bother your neighbors is a misdemeanor, the questions continue: Why didn’t the police just enforce the law? Were other neighbors bothered? Why didn’t the reporter ask the dope with the dogs why he just didn’t stop them from barking?

According to the story, a mediation session solved everything by … making the idiot get anti-barking collars for his dogs. The mediation didn’t fix anything, it was just part of what read like a crazily incompetent and drawn-out process that should have been solved early on, by a simple enforcement of city law.

Finally, while editorial pages operate under different rules, the standards of rhetoric dictate that a persuasive argument is one that anticipates objections in the reader’s minds, and answers them.

It’s obvious that some Republic editorial writers aren’t familiar with that concept. Case in point: A recent editorial criticizing President Obama for going on the attack against Fox News. It was the editorial writer’s contention that that would only serve to draw attention to Fox:

Just why the president has opted to declare open war with Fox News is beyond explanation. By raising the network’s profile, Obama has all but guaranteed higher ratings for his nemesis.

Now, this sounds like a Republican talking point, but the issue isn’t whether you agree with Obama or Fox. Here again, a lot of questions are raised.

For one, I think anyone who thinks about this for more than a few seconds can see it’s precisely wrong to say the move is “beyond explanation”; obviously, there’s a strategy involved here. I’m not a big political expert like an Arizona Republic editorial writer, but it’s certainly possibly that this is part of the Obama administration’s moves to characterize the right as a bunch of prejudiced crackpots. It’s a plan the right has been accommodating nicely, and it’s not surprising the administration is taking Fox on.

More importantly, the editorial carefully doesn’t take a position on the issue on the merits; recently, for example, the Fox News gave the country wall-to-wall coverage of the tea-bagger rallies at the Capitol, but barely paid attention to an equally large gay march last weekend.

Whoever wrote that editorial had an editor; and that editor should have told the writer to address the issue of Fox News’ undeniable right-wing slant, and then discussed head on how a political problem like that should be handled by a Democratic administration—because that would have made the writer’s point more persuasive.

The unshakable sense you get from the Republic most days—most days, not all—is that some pretty basic journalistic norms are not followed. And that’s the fault of the editors. When the Republic starts facing the same end some of its fellows have, let’s remember that some of the employees there didn’t help themselves when they had a chance.

ASU gets a Nobel, sort of

What’s called the economics Nobel is actually a memorial award, created in 1969 by the Swedish Central Bank, somewhat distinct from the others. It went today to an economist and a political scientist who study the ways economic coherence sometimes evolves even if free market policies are not strictly followed.

One of the recipients, Elinor Ostrom, is a director at ASU’s Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, though she apparently actually teaches at Indiana. From the NYT:

In its announcement, the committee said Ms. Ostrom “has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories.”
[…]
Ms. Ostrom, 76, was born in Los Angeles, and received her Ph.D. in political science in 1965 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the Arthur F. Bentley professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is also co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.

Cruelly, the paper doesn’t mention ASU. ASU itself claims her as a “research professor.” The other winner was Oliver Williamson, from Berkeley.

From the EVT:

Arizona State spokesman Virgil Renzulli says Ostrom is working at Indiana University this semester but also holds a research professorship at ASU.

She founded Arizona State’s Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity in 2008.

The paper has this Associated Press detail about her work:

Ostrom devoted her career to studying the interaction of people and natural resources. One notable publication she wrote in 1990 examined both successful and unsuccessful ways of governing natural resources — forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands and irrigation systems — that are used by individuals.

Ostrom’s work challenged conventional wisdom, showing that common resources can be successfully managed without privatization or government regulation.

To explain her ideas, the academy cited an example about dams in Nepal that Ostrom used in her 1990 book “Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.”

Local people had for many years successfully managed irrigation systems to allocate water between users, but then the government decided to build modern dams made of concrete and steel with the help of foreign donors.

“Despite flawless engineering, many of these projects have ended in failure,” the academy said.

That was because the new, modern dams cut out communications and ties between the users. The new dams required little maintenance whereas the earthen local dams forced users to work together to keep them functional.