Critics play a game of survivor

One of the most memorable moments of the TV press tour, the twice-a-year junket that starts today in Pasadena, was provided by Gail Shister, the scrappy columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In early 2004, Shister took the microphone and in front of 200 or so colleagues asked network honcho Leslie Moonves whether he’d recuse himself from decision-making for “The Early Show,” given that he was then dating co-host Julie Chen. Moonves, who seems to enjoy sparring with reporters and is seldom caught speechless, reacted to Shister’s query as if he’d just seen the ghost of Edward R. Murrow rise up and do the Dance of the Seven Veils.

“Are you writing for Page Six now?” was the best riposte he could manage. (Chen later married Moonves.)

Shister, alas, won’t be putting any executives on the hot seat at this summer’s tour. In a sign of how the newspaper industry’s financial woes are catching up even with supposedly reader-friendly media and entertainment coverage, her bosses have ordered her to alternate attendance at the winter and summer meetings of the Television Critics Assn. with a colleague.

A tour veteran and the paper’s TV columnist for nearly 25 years, Shister is miffed to be staying home, cut off from making new contacts and trolling for scoops. But given the economic turmoil shaking the newspaper business -- especially at the Inquirer, recently sold to a group of private investors after former owner Knight-Ridder was put on the block -- a prudent journalist might want to avoid second-guessing too many spending decisions, lest the gaze of the powers-that-be alights on the spreadsheet line that includes the reporter’s salary.

“Basically, our budget was decimated, especially our travel budget, and TCA was a big-ticket item,” Shister told me Friday. (Her editor, Sandy Clark, did not return an e-mail seeking comment, but reporters interviewed for this column said papers typically spend up to $5,000 each tour to pay for plane tickets, hotel costs and incidentals.)

At the press tour, cable and broadcast networks bus in stars and producers to hype the new fall and midseason shows to reporters, spending $100,000 to $250,000 apiece for panels and parties, according to publicists. The reporters then massage, dress and send home that news to you, the end user. So the event is as good a place as any to weigh the changes affecting -- afflicting? -- what used to be known as feature (or, in other precincts of the newsroom, “soft”) journalism. At the very least, the changes hitting newspapers may influence how readers get their news about what’s on TV, not to mention the other arts.

Journalists and network officials alike rib the event held at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena for its endless inanities: the rubber-chicken lunch buffets, the occasionally idiotic panel exchanges, the petty internecine grudges among a group of beat reporters entrusted to divine, say, the nuance of Jenna Elfman’s career. As someone who’s been covering television awhile myself, indulge me to state a painful truth: The tour is a biannual reminder that our corner of the Fourth Estate is not always accorded the highest respect. “I normally cover Congress, but I’m covering programming this week,” a reporter informed a TCA panel in 2002. Producer Gavin Polone shot back: “What did you do wrong?”

Legitimate headlines do spill out of every tour, however; as Shister put it, “TCA is the Super Bowl of television coverage. Anybody who’s anybody is there and accessible.”

Shister’s is not the only familiar big-paper byline that may go missing; rumor has it that other TV writers are being pressured to pare or eliminate their Pasadena trips because of cost-cutting, a change in coverage priorities or both. “Papers have no money,” said Diane Werts, the longtime TV columnist for Newsday, which like the Los Angeles Times is owned by Tribune Co., another media conglomerate recently hammered by profit concerns on Wall Street. “People are having a harder time getting money to come to the tour.” (This newspaper will dedicate at least four writers to covering the event, including yours truly, but then we have to trek only 10 miles from downtown.)

Newspaper analyst John Morton says that in the current media recession, it’s natural that discretionary travel and entertainment items like TCA get tossed overboard. “It’s better to cut ‘T & E’ than to cut staff,” he said.

Meanwhile, even the reporters whose travel budgets remain untouched for now are being asked by editors to multitask, to get more bang for those scarce bucks: Why can’t you blog from the Ritz? the managers will say. Do a podcast. Grab some audio clips for the website.

While individual scribes may be facing financial pressures from the top, Chris Ender, the West Coast PR chief for CBS, told me there’s no evidence TCA attendance is dropping. In fact, his network is issuing press tour credentials this month to 253 journalists, up 3% from last year, which Ender attributes to an increase in outlets covering TV, especially on the Web.

However, Ender said he’s noticed lately that attendees, in addition to spreading their labors over more media “platforms,” are devoting more time to big-picture TV industry issues and somewhat less to profiles of hometown actors and other traditional TCA grist. That’s partly in a bid, he said, to prove to higher-ups that the tour isn’t all fluff, that it amounts to more than just two pampered weeks in the Pasadena sun.

Are you feeling sorry for my peers and me yet? Jeff Jarvis isn’t.

A former TV critic for TV Guide and People and founder of Entertainment Weekly who now works as a media consultant and operates the widely read blog buzzmachine.com, Jarvis, in this matter as in many others, tends to see the “old media” as a bunch of ossified whiners.

“I don’t think it’s a tragedy for journalism and Western society,” he said dryly, “if we have fewer [newspaper] critics going to TCA.” The print media has to focus on unique content, he said, “and frankly, that means not sending a whole lot of people to an event everyone else is going to.”

Instead, Jarvis said, editors and publishers should learn from the example of popular entertainment-oriented websites such as Rotten Tomatoes, where fans can sift through reams of data and participate in forums devoted to their favorite shows. In such a venue, trained journalists can be ringmasters rather than performers. “There’s a chance to be more of a moderator and recognize that it’s a community there,” Jarvis said.

That may well be the wave of the future, but don’t expect vets like Shister to surf it. She’s resisted bosses’ entreaties to write a blog because, she said, she’d prefer to focus on her print column, which runs four times a week. But the noise from the Internet is permeating even her hermetically sealed cubicle. “Technology has compressed the whole notion of journalistic time,” she lamented. “The day of a scoop being a scoop for 24 hours is long gone.”

My chat with Shister brought me down, admittedly more for selfish reasons than because I’m such an empathic guy. Her struggle today is mine tomorrow; “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls,” and all that. What’s more, the press tour -- which as you may have guessed can be dominated by superficiality and ephemera -- also happens to need her toughness and sense of history.

So maybe she summed up the nervous rumblings of a generation of journalists when she ventured a joking question of her own at the end of our interview: “You wanna buy my ticket?”