President's Corner

SPJ is like any other media operation that needs to keep an eye on its bottom line. As the new year approaches, the national organization is looking at ways to bring in new revenues.

President’s Corner

By Jennifer Croshaw, San Diego Pro Chapter

Entertainment editor, SignOnSanDiego.com

When the Boston Globe and The New York Times started selling ads on their section fronts last summer, something in us knew it was only a matter of time before our city's major daily followed suit. After all, as advertisers and readers gravitate toward their computers and other devices to present and obtain information, newspapers here are suffering the same revenue and circulation woes.

In early September, a two-inch-high, horizontal ad graced the cover of The San Diego Union-Tribune's Night&Day section, and ads on the Arts and Sports section fronts followed. I'm not holding my breath for the dreaded front-page ad, but you can see as clearly as I can: The times are definitely changing.

Where only a few years ago, editors would have defended their writers' turf, today they've little choice but to let the business side sell it to the highest bidder. News holes are shrinking. Ad space is growing. And the newspaper biz seems ready to try anything to stay afloat in a landscape where Google sits poised to trample us all. (How a recent partnership between 176 daily newspapers and Yahoo! will play out remains to be seen.)

Even media Web sites, thought by the print side to contain over-the-top ad units, are going even more over the top, with half-page ads and "roadblock" advertising, in which one advertiser buys every ad unit on a webpage.

As we in-the-trenches journalists on the online side discovered much less recently than our print counterparts (whether we wanted to or not), the field we're in is a business. We balance the presentation of editorial content with advertisers' content, try our best to label the ads and all too often cross our fingers that it's clear enough to the user which is which.

The nearly 100-year-old Society of Professional Journalists also is a business. During a November visit with the San Diego Pro Chapter's board of directors, SPJ national president Christine Tatum laid out the society's plans. And you can bet they involved making money.

"We need to begin to innovate," Tatum said, "to develop goods and services to make ourselves more marketable (and) bring new revenue in the door."

 Among SPJ's money-making plans are training programs in which journalists educate attendees about the Society's Code of Ethics and journalism's core values. Who's interested? Public relations people and corporations looking to develop their own codes of ethics, among others. Journalism: It's not just for journalists anymore.

Will we soon be seeing the "Society of Professional Journalists, brought to you by Google"? I hope not. But journalists who never thought they'd need to be bothered by the business side are becoming more and more aware of a changing media landscape.