That's the Press, Baby

I'd Take 20 Percent

2009-11-11T16:45:00.004-05:00

A Los Angeles Times posting looks at figures on what news consumers would do if confronted with a paywall, and sees, of course, death.

The American Press Institute-Belden study, as Jon Healey's posting notes, "exposed a gap between the industry's sense of its content's value and the public's perception. Hmm, 'gap' isn't exactly the right word. Make that 'yawning chasm.'" And in that he's right. "The comparison revealed that news execs believed their stories were more valuable and harder to replace than readers did. For example, 52% of the readers surveyed said it would be somewhat easy or very easy to find a substitute for the online content that news industry websites were providing; 68% of the executives said the opposite."

But he inserts a table and says, "It shows just how slim the chances are that readers who can no longer find the content they want on a newspaper's website will migrate to the paper's print edition." Indeed it shows that for 67 percent of them, one place they would go would be to -- other Web sites. (The table must show all the places they said they would go, but ranking them in order.) But it also shows that for 30 percent, they would go to "their print newspaper," and 12 percent would go to "another newspaper," not another newspaper's Web site.

Gee, does that mean that 42 percent said that among the places they would go would be a print newspaper? I may be completely off base; I'm a journalist and can't do the math. And that indeed is far from what industry leaders think would happen. But a "slim chance" would be, 5 or 10 percent. Let's say that of that 42 percent, only 21 percent returned to a print newspaper or used it more -- that half of that number is already heavy print users. What could the newspaper business do with 21 percent more usage of its most economically lucrative product?

Yes, thinking as people in the newspaper business did -- that with pay walls, 75 percent of readers would go back to print -- is pretty unrealistic. If you're now getting sports agate from ESPN, as Warren Buffett apparently is, you're not going to go back to the Omaha World-Herald just to get the sports agate. But 20 percent is something. 10 percent would be something. 40 percent would be something. Saying "the predominant mode of communication is now Internet-based" is not the same as "there will be no further demand for print." Unless you're already in the camp of "I have no further demand for print," in which case you and all the other cool kids can laugh at the poor backward printies. Personally, given the disparity between print and online ad revenue, this is a deal I would take.

Copy Editing: Over at the ACES blog...

2009-11-09T16:56:00.002-05:00

I don't write all that much about copy editing on this blog, less than I thought I would, because there are so many fine copy editing blogs. But here's a link to a copy-editing piece I wrote for the American Copy Editors Society blog, on the overuse and misuse of the word "community."

How Many Axes Can Be Made?

2009-11-06T17:04:00.005-05:00

Newspaper folks used to think that, while everyone has his own ax to grind, most people were grinding one or another version of the same couple of axes. The length and brand name might be different, but, as we were taught, there were two sides to a story, we tried to get both, and people who were dissatisfied with us thought we hadn't sharpened their side of the ax enough.

A blogger named Tyler Cowen, who appears to be an economist, posted a sort of throwaway question on his blog, "Marginal Revolution": Should the New York Times drop its sports section to save money? This, of course, is the same question the New York Times has been fencing with since it added food and wine and other topics to the daily paper in the 1970s, in that pre-everything era: Should the New York Times devote itself only to serious political and cultural topics, for its serious political and cultural readers who feel that having less serious matters in the Times lessens the sense of their own seriousness they expect reading the Times to give them? The Internet has made that question harder, but it's essentially the same question as: If Oprah recommends reading your novel "The Corrections," does that mean you its writer are not an artist?

The question isn't that interesting, but the range of responses is, and really shows why our friend the newspaper is in such straits. Some examples, with comment:

"You have to wonder, does The Times really need 103 people working at the Metro desk? Does it even need 50? Does the paper need 14 book editors? My guess is, there are quite a few people that could be cut without drastically undermining the quality of the paper." Posted by Brian J. I wonder, if the Times came into Brian J.'s workplace and started asking how many fewer people it could run with, his reaction would be: What the heck do you know? But everyone thinks they know how a newspaper should run.

"The sports section is the best part of almost all newspapers because it is the section that is within the personal area of expertise of the largest part of their readership. If they screw that up, they'll lose more readers than they lose from screwing up any other section. The NYT can live without comics, but it can't live without sports." Eric, I suspect a lot of NYT readers would say that the sports section is the farthest from their personal area of expertise.

"America would be a better place if the NY Times failed -- the NY Times is a truly crappy journalistic product and it crowds out superior rivals." Thanks, Newsjunky, and if it's so truly crappy, why does it crowd out superior rivals? We've seen it's not the business acumen of its owners.

Nobody buys the NY Times for the sports section. They buy it for the A news section, for the Science on Tuesdays, for the Lifestyle sections on weekends and the Week in Review. Outsider, please get together with Eric above.

"The NY Times Sports section only concerns itself with 1 issue, RACE. Bill Rhoden is a joke. Every article re mgmt vs players......fans vs players.....mgr vs players always and everywhere goes back to....yep u guessed it...RACE....without player as slave metaphor u really don't have a NYT sports section." Well, at least this brings us newsroom types back to the most-familiar ax.

"maybe if the NYT would break more stories like this:
'The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country'
Instead we have to rely on the internet for real news." Well, perhaps. This is from a left-leaning Web site called Rawstory, which is based on a speech he gave, which was rebroadcast by the Real News Network, which is a Canadian-based operation that seems, from a cursory review, to be the 2009 equivalent of Pacifica radio or Ramparts or a really good underground newspaper. In other words, they may well be legitimate stories, but there are legitimate stories on Fox News as well. The question is: What is your motivation in putting them into play -- i.e. to what degree do you check for facts that are discordant with your theory of the world, or does the theory (the triumph of conservatism, the need for social justice, whatever) create its own facts? In a world where every story exists to further a worldview, newspapers -- which have their own biases to be sure, but whose base worldview is "what happened?" and not "why?" -- appear flaccid and irrelevant.

"I read an article in the Sunday Travel section, about a place that I visited a few months ago, that was a parody of what is wrong with the Times. The writer completely missed the main reasons one would want to visit the place and wrote mainly about motorbiking with his friends and trying to pick up girls. It managed to combine being annoying with giving no information to potential travellers about why you would want to visit the destination or what to do when you get there." And here's the other problem newspapers face -- their love of "the interesting well-told tale" over people who are looking for basic information. Let's say this is about Chiang Mai. The reader above went to Chiang Mai and saw the sights, enjoyed the cuisine, and looks to other articles to tell him of interesting places. The editor of the Times Travel section is bored by stories about sights, cuisine and interesting places. He or she may even be bored by stories about Chiang Mai. He or she wants to read something he or she hasn't read before. This will appeal to a number of readers, but not as many -- and presto, we're back to Gourmet magazine.

What If... Again

2009-11-05T16:04:00.003-05:00

Returning to the theme of the Sept. 3 post "What If," about Howard Owens' view that online should have been set up from the get-go as a separate unit:

Judy Sims, who alas was recently relieved of her job at the Toronto Star (which, even more alas, seems ready to relieve all of its copy editors of their jobs, too, sending them to Bengaluru or someplace), comes to the same conclusion. And while both are people who occupied the "online guru" jobs at their respective organizations, it's clear from her blog that Sims is more of a futurist, and more utopian, than Owens.

But she cites Owens as well, and expands:

"Economic pressures over the past few years have led many newspaper execs to convince themselves that the integrated organization is the best option.

"This will not work because the disrupted cannot manage their own disruption. Most newspaper employees are not qualified to do the strategic thinking required to manage disruption let alone create it in the form of new products that may challenge the core because they still see themselves as print newspaper employees. Just stating that you are a “news” company instead of a “newspaper” company doesn’t make it true.

"I couldn’t agree more with Howard Owens analysis. The only way newspapers can ensure the survival of their brands and the journalistic principles they hold so dearly is to separate the web organization completely from the newspaper.

"Clay Christensen talks about the “sucking sound of the core”. That’s exactly what is happening at news organizations around the world. The print product will always win because it still makes the most money, has the most people and cost associated with it and is where everyone feels comfortable.

"It would be very difficult to sit at a boardroom table and convince the room that the focus should be on the thing that makes little money, has unlimited competitors and a very unclear future or path to profitability. Michael Nielsen gives a nice explanation of this here. The sensible manager will focus on managing the core even if it is in decline and that’s why the two operations cannot co-exist."

She goes on to note why she believes print salespeople can't sell online, which is beyond my sphere, except to note that she also mentions why print people can't sell print either: "Because most print reps at most newspapers have not been sales people at all. They have been order takers. I remember several years ago hearing of the executive who quipped that his reps 'aggressively answer the phone'."

(At some newspapers in my area, my own included, this is changing. The question is whether it is too late for anyone to notice.)

What I appreciate about Sims' analysis is that she doesn't say that we "printies" (to take that term of opprobrium and claim it as a point of pride) win in boardrooms because executives are simply gutless wonders and news-paper folks are closed-minded nostalgists. As she says: "the sensible manager" will focus on the largest part of the business. Even if it's going downhill. The newspaper is still a business, and it is still unclear if online news and information will develop into a business or will always be a philosophical undertaking from which one may happen to eke out a living, somewhat like a religion. (If your margin is always going to be zero, are you a business?)

Early experiments like Nando Times were skunkworks. I once visited Tribune Interactive, which had 50 people who had nothing to do with the Chicago Tribune. But the change to make the newsroom the online driver wasn't just cost pressures. It was the belief also that 1) all we're doing is transitioning to publishing the newspaper online, as it is -- a belief that has been shown to be as absurd as building a five-story department store in a shopping mall and thinking it would function just like a downtown department store, ignoring the fact that the store's context was completely different --

and 2) the reason we are doing that is that what the newsroom is doing, right now, as it is doing it, is so beloved by readers that it is exactly what they want online. If it was that beloved by readers, they would be willing to pay for it. Hell, they'd be willing to get it in print. Time has shown us that the newspaper -- particularly one without classified ads -- is not as essential to most of its readers as journalists believe it should be. But heck, we knew that in 1980, and we ignored it then, too.

A Death in the Desert

2009-11-03T17:19:00.004-05:00

Announced this week: The closing of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz.

I have no inside knowledge of what happened to this paper serving the east side of Phoenix. In the 1990s, when Thomson owned it, it appeared quite the comer. Let me offer a few ideas, and if my good friend Rebecca Dyer, who alas will lose her job in December with the closing, can contradict me, all the better.

1) It's not editorial quality. The Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize last year. It received honors as Arizona's best newspaper this year. Add it to the charnel-house of good and great newspapers that have closed, along with mediocre newspapers that have closed, and remove it from the list of good and great newspapers that remain open, along with the mediocre ones that remain open as well. We've seen over and over again that editorial quality may move the needle, but not that much. But still, this is a paper that, in terms of news, will be missed.

2) The Tribune last year went to four-day (then three-day) free distribution from newsracks. This did not save it either. This makes one wonder about breaking reader habits so severely. Most readers can cope with the loss of a day. Losing vast numbers of days -- losing home delivery -- the verdict is still out in Southeastern Lower Michigan, a market no one particularly wants to be in anyway. Phoenix was a better market. As Ken Doctor has said, all this does is tell readers to "Go online, go online." Alas, the advertising dollars are not there to replace the print ones. In Detroit, "go online" may work to the advantage of the News and Free Press because there is nowhere else to go. In Phoenix, anyone wanting a daily paper simply took the Republic. The strategy was suicide.

3) Most important, mashups rarely work. Newsday is the mashup everyone looks to: Start with the southwestern Nassau County market (that had been deliniated by the Nassau Review-Star), expand into northern Nassau County (picking up the market of a separate paper there), and then blow into Suffolk and keep away the 1960s effort to create a Suffolk Sun. But Newsday had a great advantage. "Long Island" had finite geographic boundaries. People commuted on the LIRR or the LIE. The great suburban growth of the 1940s and 1950s created a sense of being a "Long Islander."

Newspapers are local institutions. As such, they have to reflect a locality. The Fargo Forum can reflect Fargo-Moorhead because it's out in the middle of nowhere. When newspapers try to create a locality, they generally lose. Remember the Peninsula Times-Tribune, merged from the Palo Alto Times and the Redwood City Tribune? Remember the attempt by the New York Times Co. to make the Gwinnett Daily News into the "Newsday of Atlanta" by expanding it throughout the northern suburbs? Or, more recently, the failed merger of two papers in Bellevue and Renton, near Seattle, to create an "Eastside Journal" that belonged to no one?

Mashups can work when the identity is already there. The Ventura County Star is a merger of four daily newspapers. But there already was an identity of "Ventura County." (The two largest constituent papers, in Ventura and Oxnard, had been direct competitors for years.) Two other big mashups that I know have worked -- the Orange County Register and Florida Today. I don't know enough about either to comment as to why.

But Palo Alto and Redwood City hated each other -- one was Stanford, the other was (at that time) more blue-collar. People in Renton never went to Bellevue. They didn't want to read about it in "their" local newspaper. As they saw it -- and I know this from years of working in Neighbors -- stories from Bellevue were simply crowding out news from Renton. (The fact that those Renton stories didn't exist doesn't occur to them. They think we're holding them out of the paper.) People resent being told by a newspaper what their "local" area is.

The East Valley Tribune was a mashup of the Mesa Tribune, Tempe Daily News, Scottsdale Daily Progress, and weeklies or zone editions in Chandler and Gilbert. Mesa and Tempe adjoin, and I have no idea what sort of communities they are. Tempe is a university town; Mesa was founded as a Mormon settlement. Perhaps there was no animosity between them. I expect, though, that Tempe sees itself as higher on the social ladder than Mesa. Scottsdale was a different matter, an upscale resort and residential town based on golf spas and western wear. I suspect people in Scottsdale never went to Tempe or Mesa (except to go to the university) and probably bailed out of the merged Tribune as quickly as they could to avoid thinking they had anything in common with those towns. (It probably seemed like a good idea to advertising: Sell Scottsdale merchants on drawing in shoppers from Mesa and Tempe. But maybe they didn't want those shoppers.)

At the end of its career, the Tribune had reverted to being the Mesa Tribune, having dumped distribution in not only Scottsdale but Tempe. I suspect this tells of the interest people in Tempe had of news in Mesa. In the end, a paper generally reflects where its main office is. It's the frame of reference.

What would have happened if the Tribune folks had made some common sections but put out the paper under three different flags, making sure that each town had enough separate space? I don't know, because of point 4:

4) It helps to have your own county. If Mesa had not been in Maricopa County, the Tribune would still be with us. The East Valley is certainly big enough to be its own county. In the East, it would have been. In Arizona, with its giant counties drawn up when almost no one lived there, the Tribune was a paper in Maricopa County with 1/5 the circulation of the larger paper. This is simply an accident of geography. But national advertising is largely bought on county circulation data. The Tribune became a dispensable second buy regardless of how much penetration it had in its home market, because its home market didn't register with national buys.

Lesson for the few "second papers" left in America: Start an editorial campaign to create your own county. (The Daily News in Los Angeles' Valley tried this, doubtless for sound editorial reasons -- but it probably also hit them that being the No. 1 paper in Valley County was a lot better than being No. 2 in Los Angeles County, even if you were reaching exactly the same people.)

Find the Money First

2009-10-08T08:51:00.005-04:00

We will return to Valparaiso. But first: Gourmet.

The death of Gourmet is clearly part of the Newhouse family's hard, cold look at throwing good money after bad -- the same effort that led to the closing of the Ann Arbor News. The thinking has to be: When times are good again, there will be things that make money and things that either won't or won't make very much. Cut those, get out, and use what's left to rebuild. Thus, the Birmingham News, Mobile Register, Syracuse Post-Standard and Kalamazoo Gazette sail on, even though doubtless none of them is having a good year.

But stories about the closing were free of the "It's All About the Internet" reaction any story about a newspaper draws -- possibly because it is a magazine and thus newspaper people can be more objective about it. Yes, it's clearly about the Internet -- but the Internet as a way for people to swap recipes, the Internet as a companion to the world of Rachael Ray. But it's also even more clearly about the content.

The story of the death of Gourmet is in part the reaction to the Great Recession -- a combination of hard times combining with a desire for self-flagellation (if we whip ourselves first, will God let us keep our jobs?) and the desire to make whatever one does be right, creating a new world in which using French's yellow mustard will be seen as trendy by virtue of being anti-trendy. ("I feel so much better serving French's with the kids' hot dogs, Martha, you know we all have to get our priorities straight, and Debi still was putting out that spicy German stuff -- can you believe the nerve? Trying to lord it over us. I know we all used to do that, but it's so 2005. Now let me tell you about this great deal we got in Montego Bay...")

And all that is true, except that as the stories note, since the arrival of the legendary Ruth Reichl at Gourmet from the Times, the magazine -- once the only real base for foodies -- had "got away from the things that are going on in people’s homes, and seemed to be for an elite that got smaller and smaller,” as one editor put it.

To go on: "Dana Cowin, the editor in chief of Food and Wine, praised Ms. Reichl’s 'sociopolitical and cultural commentary,' as well as the magazine’s literary sensibility.... [Cooking] has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Ms. Ray and the Food Network stars. Ms. Reichl is a celebrity in the food world, but of an elite type. She 'is one of those icons in chief,' said George Janson, managing partner at GroupM Print, part of the advertising company WPP. But what harried cooks want now, it seems, is less a distant idol and more a pal."

I suspect "harried cooks" always wanted that. "Harried cooks" always have made the green bean casserole with onion rings and cream of mushroom soup. "Harried cooks" used the Good Housekeeping cookbook. As the Times said it, lacking self-conscious irony: "How had the magazine that seemed more likely to stay home, broil pork chops and take care of the kids won out over its sexy, well-read, globetrotting sister?" Gawd, we at the Times don't want to stay home and broil pork chops, and if you want to, go read something else, but we thought you wanted to be like us! Which may make sense for the Times but makes sense for no other newspaper, even though some newspaper food sections spent decades trying to ape Gourmet. Most newspaper readers take care of the kids and, unless they're kosher or halal, eat pork chops.

Gourmet -- like so many publications, like so many department stores in the past -- determined what it wanted to do, what customers it wanted to have, was very successful for a time, but then times changed and it apparently stopped trying to find new customers unless they were exactly like the old ones. What does it matter what advertisers or readers want, when we are producing such wonders? I didn't read Gourmet, but one gets the feeling that it was not only serving an elite, but trying to serve an ever-more-elite elite -- one interested in not only the subject but long-form journalism on social issues.

As the failure of GEO proved in the 1980s, the market for long-form journalism on social issues is small indeed. You can only do it as long as advertisers are willing to underwrite you -- i.e., they see no real alternatives. Many people want to be better cooks; despite going green and buying local, not that many of them aspire to read about "the source of food and the politics surrounding it," and issues such as "the exploitation of tomato pickers in Florida." As another story this week noted, putting nutrition and calorie information on menus makes, in essence, no difference in what people eat.

What does this have to do with the move of the Barnes Foundation, the small, eccentric art collection in Philadelphia, from its longtime suburban home to a central site near the Art Museum? Read the Times' review of the plans for the new building, which ends up being not as much a review of the plans as a dirge that once again, a little gem known mostly to those elite enough to have heard of it is falling before the desires of commerce:

"The old Barnes is by no means an obvious model for a great museum. Its unlikely suburban setting was partly intended as a tweak to the city’s wealthy downtown art establishment. Inside the lighting is far from perfect, and the collection itself, mixing masterpieces by Cézanne, Picasso and Soutine with second-rate paintings by lesser-known artists, has a distinctly oddball flavor.

"But these apparent flaws are also what has made the Barnes one of the country’s most enchanting exhibition spaces. The creaky floors and cluttered rooms are light years away from the bigger, more blockbuster-oriented museums of Philadelphia, Washington and New York — a difference that has only grown more extreme in recent years, as museums have poured money into increasingly slick expansion projects. There are no distracting, superfluous spaces in the old Barnes — no education centers or contemplation zones....

"Part of the beauty of the Barnes Foundation is that it is so far removed from the tourist economy that drives major cities today. To get to it, visitors have to make an appointment, then take a train or a car to Merion, a half-hour from Philadelphia. These steps put you in a certain frame of mind by the time you arrive: they build anticipation and demand a certain commitment. They also serve as a kind of screening system, discouraging the kind of visitors who are just looking for a way to kill time.

"The new Barnes is after a different kind of audience. Although museum officials say that the existing limits on crowd size will be kept (albeit with extended hours), it is clearly meant to draw bigger numbers and more tourist dollars. For most visitors the relationship to the art will feel less immediate. And this, alas, is a problem no architect could have solved."

Preserve art from people looking to kill time! Keep those Cezannes and Picassos where only those who are truly committed will see them! Oh, and did you read that wonderful article in Gourmet about the exploitation of tomato pickers? The Barnes Foundation a decade ago was basically broke. The creaky floors result in part from no money for upkeep (one need not take sides in the never-ending dispute between students of the Barnes method of analyzing art vs. leaders of the Philadelphia business community to simply state that money is an issue whichever side you favor).

And that brings us to Alan Mutter's obit for the Rocky Mountain Independent, the attempt by staff members at the old Rocky Mountain News to create a paid online news site. As Mutter notes:

"The Independent failed for exactly the same reason the Rocky did: A suicidally stubborn determination on the part of the organizers to be in the business they wanted to be in, instead of attending to the business they needed to attend to. ... Their plan was to emulate as much as possible the work they did so well at the Rocky, while continuing to receive the same sort of pay and benefits they had enjoyed at the newspaper. ... They essentially assumed, as had their former employer, that the quality of their work would attract the patronage they needed to continue doing what they loved. ... People felt the universe would reward them for doing what they wanted to do, instead of doing what they needed to do to earn the patronage of readers and advertisers."

They were operating online, but the same principle works for a print newspaper -- indeed, has to work for a print newspaper. "Quality," alas, only pays off after you first, as Marshall Field put it, give the lady what she wants. If your definition of quality is stories people should read even if they don't want to -- because they're important, significant, long-form, and everyone should know that the tomatoes they eat are from exploited workers -- then you will be out of business soon. Yes, you can do those stories, but you have to sell what is actually useful to people. If you sell those stories, the market for them is too small to support you. Newspapers used to know how to do this, before they became more about the conflict between journalism and commerce, the conflict between the sophisticated and the mass, than about selling newspapers.

We close today's sermon with this editorial from the Seattle Times, including these fateful words that are sure to bring the opprobrium of Mark Potts down on the writer's head:

"Most readers still want their newspaper in print, so they can scan it, carry it and clip it, and the printed paper works as it always did."

It's not the form, it's the content. Give readers something they want to read, and they will read it. Give them what you want to write, and you'd better have a sugar daddy. The vast profitability of newspapers in the 1980s, caused by the loss of big-city competitors and the elimination of composing rooms, let us forget this. I love gourmet mustard and it will always be available. A newspaper is French's.

More About Valpo

2009-09-28T10:03:00.005-04:00

I've been hither and yon, and will be for the next few weeks.

But back to local news as it was reported in 1930 in the Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger. Here's a story that one might find today:

"The Valparaiso Chamber of Commerce voted to carry its fight against the sale of the local branch of the Northwestern Telephone company to the Winona Telephone Company of Plymouth, to a finish.

"Warned that the Indiana Public Service commission which twice before had disapproved the scheme devised by Former Governor James P. Goodrich, to link the Valparaiso phone system to his Plymouth holdings, was going to change its position, the local civic body has determined to stay in the fight. The Chamber of Commerce has resisted the move through three hearings by the Public Service Commission, a court testing at Crown Point and finally a Supreme Court hearing which reversed the findings of Judge E. Miles Norton of Lake county, approving the deal, and sent it back for a rehearing."

Times are different. It's difficult in today's world to comprehend exactly why it would matter who owned the local phone company, but remember that there were no area codes or direct dial. Long distance meant connecting with another phone company. And chambers of commerce no longer command the sort of institutional authority they did 80 years ago. Still, this sounds like an outlier of an investigative story alleging corruption.

But the 1930s Vidette-Messenger practiced a sort of personal journalism that we don't see and that probably would be condemned today. As noted in my last post, the Vidette was Pro-Valparaiso. Its view was that whatever was for the development of Valparaiso as the business center of Porter County -- particularly at the expense of Chesterton -- was good for Valparaiso, Porter County, and the Vidette-Messenger and its readers and advertisers. (This, of course, was the viewpoint of most newspapers during the 1950s and 1960s, the last era when everyone read newspapers. Newspapers were For The Community back when "community" had a broader meaning than today.)

Lynn Whipple, the co-owner and editor, daily expressed (in a column that often ran more than two columns long, back in the era of wider columns and smaller type) what he thought was best for Valparaiso, and I'm sure he expected many leading citizens of Valparaiso to fall in line (if, indeed, he was not simply falling in line with them). An excerpt from his column explaining why this was an issue shows the sort of involvement a small-town editor was then expected to have with his community. This is a long excerpt, but this is less than half the column. It opens with some high-minded

"The re-electicn of Glfford Pinchot as governor of Pennsylvania and that of George W. Norris of Nebraska as U.S. Senator, are outstanding examples. These men, for years have been as voices in the wilderness, warning the people against too great centralization of public utilities, such as light, power and heat, in the hands of a relatively few men. They have made powerful business, banking, industrial and political enemies. Yet, the people believe in them and continue them in office. ...

"It would seem that those holding public office charged with the responsibility of
representing the public interest as it is concerned with regulation of utilities and utility service would now awaken to the fact that the people of the United States, who have been very liberal and unquestioning in these matters, are beginning to become aroused to the fact that advantage is being taken of them. The above serves to give a background to a question of utility management ... the question of who shall own and operate the telephone company which, until three years ago, was a local utility, owned and operated by men of this community.

"In summer of 1927, however, the local owners decided to sell ... the local telephone company -- which had closely linked the entire county into one telephone system. They knew that there was a buyer for their properties...a buyer which represented the largest telephone system in the world and which controlled telephone operations in the great industrial and metropolitan areas with which Valparaiso and Porter County are closely linked... The Illinois Bell subsidiary of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. [was] for several years, looking forward to eventual purchase of the Northwestern Indiana Telephone Company's "Ideal" system, with stations at Valparaiso, Kouts, Wheeler, Hobart, Porter and Chesterton. The Illinois Bell Company, which controls the telephone service in Chicago, Gary, Hammond and other Calumet district cities, including Crown Point, h£d had a direct hand in the development of the Northwestern Company.

"It was natural, then, for the owners of the local company to turn to the Illinois Bell Company, as the purchaser, when they determined to dispose of their holdings. The Valparaiso and Porter county public looked with favor upon the pending negotiations as they promised to tie local telephone service directly into that of the fast developing district to the west. The Illinois Bell company financed the transfer of stock holdings.

"Under Indiana law (as under the law of most, if not all other states) the consent of the Public Service Commission has to be secured before the sale of a utility can be consummated. Before giving approval to any such transaction, the commission is required to hold hearings to determine whether or not the proposed action is against public policy and interest. It demands all the facts. Then it was that it was disclosed for the first time, that the local telephone company was not to be sold, as a unit to the Illinois Bell Telephone Company, but instead, to be divided arbitrarily between two operating companies.

"The Crown Point Telephone Company, owned by the Illinois Bell Company, was to gain possession of the Chesterton, Porter and Hobart holdings of the Northwestern
Company...and the Winona Telephone Company, with headquarters in Plymouth, was to come into possession of the exchanges at Valparaiso, Kouts and Wheeler.

"Immediately every civic interest [pointed out that the] county telephone system had been developed as a unit and ought to be so held. It pointed out that Valparaiso had no interest in the Plymouth telephone system, which is functioning some fifty miles east.... {The commission] denied the petition, and demonstrated that it was serving the purpose for which it was created... protection of the public. This left the Illinois Bell corporation the potential owner. Back of the Winona Company, however, was a man once powerful in Indiana politics, former Governor James P. Goodrich. He then took the case to court...under a law that [gives] judges the right to overrule the commission.

"The case was taken to the Lake County circuit court over which presided Judge E. Miles Norton. Why the former governor's company selected this particular court for the hearing has never been disclosed. It did develop that Judge Norton was first named to the bench by Mr. Goodrich, when governor. Judge Norton overruled the commission's order and directed it to approve the deal.

"Then the Valparaiso civic group, :through Attorney Bruce B. Loring, carried the issue direct to the Indiana supreme court... contesting the legality of the law which gave courts the right to make decisions for the Public Service Commission. It got the commission to refuse to comply with Judge Norton's order until and unless the supreme court upheld his position and the law under which he acted. Again the commission demonstrated its desire to serve the public interest.
"Finally, after months and months o£ delay, months, by the way which brought many changes to the financial set-up of the original deal when, because of a severe storm and needed development, the Illinois Bell Company had to extend credit involving many thousands of dollars...the supreme court announced its ruling. It held that part of the law which directed courts to write orders for the commission unconstitutional and sent the case back for a new start.

"Largely because of the contests made by the Valparaiso community representatives the 1929 legislature repealed so much of the 1927 act under which courts were directed to rule for the commission and directed the attorney general of the state to appoint a special deputy whose duly it would be to appear for the commission in all court contests of its rulings.

"It happens that the man now holding this important office... Deputy Attorney General George Huffsmith...is a Plymouth man and acquainted with the group which is seeking to obtain the commission's approval of the transaction opposed by the Valparaiso civic interests. That is where the issue now stands. Judge Norton has again placed the issue squarely up to the Public Service Commission under the theory that its original order, disapproving the entire transaction, was "unreasonable" and implying that it ought to approve. The commission, for some reason or another, and for the first time, seems to hesitate as to what to do. In view of this, the Valparaiso civic group has appealed to the commission to dismiss the original petition asking for approval of the transaction ...

"Even so, local spokesmen are certain that if the commission will reopen the case, and stands firmly by the policy of protecting the public good, they will be able to again conclusively demonstrate that the proposed deal should not be permitted to go through. With the founding of a new steel city in north Porter county, and the further development of the dunes industrial and recreational district there is added reason why Valparaiso, the county seat, should be directly connected by telephone service and operation, with the entire county on a radius of some ten
to fifteen miles, as it has in the past.

"If the "Goodrich deal" goes, through, Valparaiso's telephone system will be divorced from that of Chesterton, Porter, the Dunes Region and Hobart and tied back into an unnatural and unpromising hook-up with Plymouth, fifty miles east.

"Any other position, on the part of the commission will only serve to feed the fire of discontent relative to utility operation and regulation and hasten the day when control of such will again be lodged with the local communities and strong utility development seriously crippled."

Whew. Here was clearly a man who bought ink by the barrel full. I guess it was his paper and no one could cut his copy. But in other words -- maybe the Plymouth investors are using undue influence; maybe the fix is in with the Crown Point judge; maybe none of that is true and it is simply that Illinois Bell had no desire to serve Valparaiso. But let us pay that little mind. What matters here is that the deal would remove Valparaiso's phone service from that of Chicago and Gary (while leaving Chesterton's with it, by the way). The Valparaiso "civic interests" merely want the commission to see the public good by making it easier for Valparaiso to be part of the Calumet region's growth. The interests of the little guy and the "interests" seem to be one.

As it turns out, until the deregulation of the phone system in the 1970s Valparaiso was a GTE city, as was Plymouth. So clearly the commission failed to act as the Vidette wished.

Yes, we're still in the William Allen White era of journalism here, not the modern era. This is an opinion piece -- but the front-page story on the chamber of commerce, which is simply a news release, is in line with the paper's program. This is how minds were influenced then. This is the sort of journalism that would soon fall into disrepute. More to come.

What If...

2009-09-03T10:00:00.001-04:00

Stop what you're doing and read this post by Howard Owens if you've ever wondered why newspapers, so much more than any other medium disrupted by the Web, have presented matters as Their Imminent Demise, while TV and radio and magazines have also lost readers and business to the Web but tend not to talk about it so much.

I was thinking earlier today: Is it just newspapers' tendency to see the worst, or is it newspaper journalists thinking that in order to be fair, we must publicly flagellate ourselves? Owens has a better answer: Newspapers saw online as just another way to publish newspapers. (Radio, TV, etc., which moved into online more slowly, did so because they saw it as a threat. Newspapers saw it as higher-profit nirvana.) But newspapers' objective was to use online to support the "mother ship" -- the newspaper business as it had been known and grown up, with all the divisions and add-ons that came from print's profit margins. And that, of course, has proven to be a fatal error.

Owens presents this largely as an advertising revenue problem -- which it is -- but notes:

"Throughout the history of newspapers online, there has simply been a lot of thinking that there isn't much different between the Web and print.

"It's understandable. The Web, especially in the early days, is a text-dominated medium. The natural response is to think editors could simply move print stories into pixels and be done with it. ... If publishers thought the Web was no different for content, how could they possibly be expected to see online sales were different, too?"

His answer -- which stands the last five years on its head, but I agree with him -- is that online should have been set up from the start as a separate business unit.

"So ... if newspapers had created more totally separate business units, would newspapers be 'saved' today?

"I don't know.

"The strategy could have hastened their demise, but I think you can also make the case that by letting newspapers be newspapers, and keeping online far away, you would have had fewer readers dropping subscriptions in favor of free online content. Maybe. Maybe the online competitor would have been seen by readers as just another media outlet, not a replacement for the newspaper."

Boldface mine. Of course, publishers, whose essential aim is to not have competition, probably would never have gone for it. They would have seen it as competing with themselves. But since what we have now is, as Dominic Toretta said after hitting the truck at the end of "The Fast and the Furious," not exactly what we had in mind, think about it from Owens' view. If the Daily Reflector-Cotillion had not viewed online as a way to publish the Daily Reflector-Cotillion with no printing expenses -- thus seeming to guarantee itself 50 percent profit margins forever -- but had viewed it the way newspaper companies viewed radio and TV when they first came out, as a medium with its own rules and challenges and for which content should be developed differently -- would the Daily Reflector-Cotillion be so shunned in print? Or would it have a profitable DRC and a profitable, much smaller, Mytown Online?

As Owens says, you can't tell. But at least you would never have had people saying, "Why should I pay you when you give the same stuff away?" -- which, though they come at it from different angles, Owens and Alan Mutter essentially agree is the Original Sin. Perhaps the answer is not pay walls after all, but -- let newspapers be newspapers.

When Everyone Read Newspapers -- Valparaiso I

2009-09-02T09:21:00.006-04:00

I've lately been reading old newspapers through the site Newspaper Archive -- a hefty monthly fee, but you get an amazing group of papers at amazing times. Its only shortcoming is the absence of truly major metros -- although the Post is in there for a few years early in the 20th century. But from Iowa weeklies to papers on the scale of the Oakland Tribune and the Syracuse Herald-Journal, you can get a sense of what the typical American was seeing back when everyone read newspapers.

To me, the era when really everyone read newspapers was the 1950s and 1960s. That may seem curious and I invite contradiction. But small-town newspapers had pretty small circulations until the 1930s. Rural free delivery was a 1910s startup, and motor routes were just a dream for many small papers. The town and city population could easily get a paper or papers when published; if you lived elsewhere, you might get the paper in the mail a day late, or in some cases got a weekly edition with the local news that had been published during the previous week; or you might have to pick up the paper when you went into town. Also, World War II drove increased interest in the news, to follow the boys from your town -- from your family -- as they fought and died in Europe and the Pacific. And in the 1930s, a lot of people simply didn't have the money for a newspaper.

So I'm going to concentrate on the 1950s and 1960s. But I did want to look back and see what readers of a small-town newspaper would have gotten in the 1930s. I took the Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger for a couple of reasons; I know Indiana, and the paper was merged into a zone edition of the Hammond Times in the 1980s, I think, so there's no one there to yell at me.

Background: Valparaiso is the county seat of Porter County, which is the first county east of Lake County (Hammond, Gary, East Chicago). Porter and LaPorte Counties are the popcorn center of America (home of Orville Redenbacher) and were mostly agricultural or small industries until the steel industry took over Lake County and created Gary. Valpo, as it's known, is over to the west side of the county and thus started to become an exurb. So the Valparaiso paper would have been fighting off the Gary Post-Tribune as well as all the Chicago papers for the reader's interest. So the news consumer had more choices than, say, in Butte or Waco.

The Vidette-Messenger in the first week of December 1930 -- I figured it would be at its fattest that month, even though the Depression had taken hold -- was about 8 to 10 pages an issue. (I looked for 1929 and it was 10 to 12.) It was owned by its editor and publisher, Lynn Whipple, in partnership with another man, Humphrey Gray of Benton Harbor, Mich. Circulation was just under 5,000. Porter County had about 22,000 population at that point, with 8,000 in the city of Valparaiso. I don't know what ratio per household to use for 1930, but using three per household, that would put the Vidette in, what, 60 percent of county households?

The Vidette was a booster of Valparaiso. Its flag contained the following mottos: "Published in the Ideal Residential City in the Great Calumet District"; "Valparaiso, the Home of Valparaiso University"; "Valparaiso, the Gateway to Indiana Dunes State Park." (Valparaiso University had some national fame as the "Poor Man's Harvard.") That may have been too Valpo-centric, so stuck between the rules was "A Daily Newspaper for All Porter County." (Valparaiso had an eternal war for dominance in the county with Chesterton, a smaller city but closer to the long-planned lake harbor that finally was developed in the 1960s.)

The Vidette ran a streamer on Page One every day. No one could accuse it of subtlety on Dec. 11:
"Bandits Rob Leroy Postoffice; Negroes With Guns Get $145, Make Escape"

But even then, Porter County was seen as a middle-class white escape from ethnically diverse Lake County. The Vidette knew it was in a competitive market and had to get attention. Its front page was designed to "sell newspapers." In the 1930s, of course, photos were few -- engravings cost a lot of money and time -- but the Vidette found A1 room for this:

"Girl, 11, Wanted Live Doll -- So She Kidnapped a Baby!" The caption read:

"I wanted a live baby instead of dolls," ll-year-old Mary Fieder sobbed to detectives after she was found with Evelyn Gaffney, 2, whose mysterious kidnapping had terrorized neighboring families in Newark, N. J. The girl kidnaper is shown, at the left, after her arrest, with police and the stolen baby. She was held for Children's Court. She is alleged to have confessed to authorities that she entered through a window of the Gaffney home, lifted the infant from her crib, and escaped unnoticed."

And Albert Einstein was making his first trip to New York, which was noted on the front page: "Master Mind of Cool Thought Warms to Welcome by American Metropolis." But human interest had the best chance of landing a national or world story on A1. Most of the content on A1 was local or in proportion to the Vidette's mission -- cover Porter County; cover top news from Chicago; get in as much news from Indiana as you can, to compete with the Illinois papers; and then look elsewhere. In the 1930s, the Vidette was largely following the model newspapers are encouraged to use today -- keep it local.

Thus readers were told: "Stormy Time Expected at Sewer Hearing; Property Owners Hardest Hit by Assessment Spread to Appear Before City Council Friday." Gee, assessment appeals. Nothing really ever changes. And "Liberty Township Girl, Noted as Dancer, Succumbs After Three-Year Fight Against Odds." (She was 30.)

We sort of know this newspaper; a newspaper from the 1900-10 period looked at today seems impossibly distant in its style, content and distribution, but we can see here a good bit of what we all recognize as the American Newspaper, along with anachronisms that distance us. What's the point of this exercise? To look at what newspapers were doing back when everyone read them, to see if there's anything that relates to today. There's more fascinating stuff in the 1930s Vidette, but we'll make that another post.

Once More -- It's More Than Paper and Ink

2009-08-24T20:42:00.003-04:00

A blogger named Lewis Grossberger -- who probably would object to my referring to him as "a blogger named Lewis Grossberger," in that he seems to post identically on more than one blog, has written books, was a columnist for MediaWeek, teaches Humor and Comedy Writing at NYU, and graduated from Syracuse, of which my son will in nine months be an alumnus, and therefore I Simply Should Know Who He Is -- takes Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt to the cleaners over a skanky column in the Times about J.C. Penney Co. (see, a department store link at last!) opening a store in Manhattan. No, not to the cleaners. He puts him through the chemical process of dry cleaning. He pulls every thread from his garment.

The skanky column isn't the media divide. (I read the lede of it aloud to my boss. She laughed and thought it was really funny. I was queasy about it myself.) Newspapers have always done weird things. The divide is between Clark's saying this:

Writer Cintra "Wilson told me she usually writes about 'obscure stores that don’t exist outside of Manhattan,' and she thinks of her audience as '1,300 women in Connecticut and urban gay guys in Manhattan.' She said it was 'kind of provincial of me' not to realize how big The Times was and how her audience would expand when she reviewed a store like Penney’s." ... Wilson's "sort of arch tone is pushing it even when reviewing the highbrow likes of Christian Louboutin, Gucci or Christian Lacroix. It really doesn’t work when taking on a mainstream retailer like J. C. Penney."

And Lewis' saying this:

"Hoyt, Keller, the rest of you fatuous, Sanforized twits, let me explain something to you that for some reason they don’t teach in journalism school. I’ll make it simple: Funny not bad. Funny good! People like funny. Funny make people larf. People larf, people feel good! They maybe buy paper again. True, funny usually offend some jackball or other. Too bad! Why you always scared silly of a few whining dunces? Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke."

In other words, Wilson got to write what she thought of as, well, sort of a blog, which was published in the New York Times, and probably was treated basically as a blog by its readers -- we know you, Cintra, we're hip to you and you're hip to us -- and decided to blog (in print) about how just, eew, middle-American polyester Penney's is. (Does this mean that -- gasp -- Manhattan is suddenly Like the Rest of America?) Readers saw the headline about Penney's -- readers who weren't hip to Cintra -- and read it because, well, lots of people buy clothes at Penney's and are interested in Penney's. Cintra basically said they were all fat and tasteless. (Penney's said the average weight of a woman in the U.S. is 150. They also said, basically, that they quickly realized that was not the case in Manhattan.)

Readers wrote in to say they were offended. The Times was putting down the Average American. The Times was making fun of everyone who couldn't have been in "Sex and the City." Not some writer named Cintra Wilson. The New York Times was making fun of them. So, Clark Hoyt, Bill Keller, everyone at the Times basically lines up and says, yeah, this was a Bad Thing for us to do. And Lewis Grossberger responds: They don't get it! It's fucking funny! Otherwise the Times is JUST LIKE SHOPPERS AT PENNEY'S! It's just a big, lumbering, middle-class, middle-income, middlebrow organization. It's Brian Williams vs. Jon Stewart. (Forget that recent poll that showed Stewart to be Walter Cronkite's successor as the Most Trusted Man. As the writer in Entertainment Tonight noted, it was results of online readers of his column who bothered to respond, not an actual poll. They might get Cintra, too.)

In other words, a lot of this never-ending argument isn't old media vs. new media. It's square vs. hip. It's we get it vs. you don't. It's the quasi-public-utility approach newspapers adopted when competing newspapers largely went by the wayside in the 1970s and 1980s (our job is to serve everyone and thus we should never purposelessly offend anyone) vs. those who feel that the job is to just do it and if you don't like it, it's because you're stupid, not me. It's once again saying, our real problem is that we should have better customers. Unfortunately, newspapers -- even the New York Times -- are more like Penney's than Bendel's, and so this is what we have.

(Full disclosure: Worked with Clark Hoyt on a couple of projects when we were both part of Knight Ridder. Found him to be a straightforward person. His view of a responsible press would not include taking cheap shots at Penney's customers even if he were still working for the Free Press.)

(Second full disclosure: Boy, how embarrassing, that I got Cintra Wilson's first name wrong -- even after I went back to Clark Hoyt's post to double-check that I had it right, because something seemed wrong about it. And then I had it wrong anyway. Who double-checks the copy editors? When they blog, no one, which is why everyone needs an editor. At any rate, I've corrected it throughout the copy, and thanks for catching it!)

The Wonderful Meaning of Me, Vol. 2

2009-08-24T16:40:00.004-04:00

Just saw this in a Balt-Sun story we are running about Tweeter and movies:

“Just two years ago, if I saw a movie I loved or I hated, I’d be able to tell a dozen friends, tops,” says John Singh, who works for the movie and social networking Web site Flixster. "Now I can be walking out of a theater as the credits are rolling and immediately tell 500 people what I thought. … "It’s never been this easy to be this influential."

OK, he works for a Web site. But isn't he speaking for everyone who uses Twitter (or perhaps any social site)? Let's assume of his 500 followers, 100 tell some of their friends. He's thus been read by, oh, 1,000 people -- not bad. At our height of circulation, using current readership figures, more than 1 million people would have been able to read our critics' reviews. (Counting online readership, who knows how widely they are read today?) Assume in the old days that 10 percent read our reviews. 100,000 people. Get in line, John. We'll leave aside the question of whether anyone should have had Clive Barnes-like power or whether it could ever be attained again. And I don't know what John Singh's aspirations are -- whether he ultimately wants to be the Charles Champlin of Twitter. But social networking is all about the "I" -- I want to tell you this, I want you to pay attention to me. Whether "I" have anything you should bother to pay attention to -- for that matter, whether any of John Singh's followers actually pay attention to him -- isn't even a large part of the equation. The gatekeeper was a gatekeeper for a reason, which is that most "content" is drivel and that gatekeepers were paid to recognize drivel so that John Q. Citizen would not have to waste time on it. (No offense to John Singh, who for all I know may be the next Carrie Rickey.)

Witness this story from the Columbus Dispatch on life in Ann Arbor after the end of the News, in which the Powers That Be -- government, agencies, the university and its vast sports operation -- are finding that they have no reliable way of getting their information out -- and that wrong information, stupid information, whatever information suddenly has just as much credence as their information -- and that they don't really think that anyone should trust even their OWN web sites as much as they trusted the Ann Arbor News. In other words, in a way even the Powers That Be are saying, why should you trust what we say any more than anyone else? You need a reliable third party. And -- admittedly just a month into the News-less world -- TPTB in Ann Arbor are not finding it online. (Of course, that's because they didn't early-adopt it or they didn't grow up with it or they are held back by nostalgia for print.... There's always a reason why any shortcoming of the Internet is simply the problem of true communism waiting to emerge from war communism or socialist-communist or Great Leap Forward communism. Hold on, folks. Eventually true communism will be here, and all problems will be addressed. In the meantime, trust the pundits of the Internet and they will guide you amid the dictatorship of the Twittertariat.)

On another point: My esteemed friend Doug Fisher has written about how some of newspapers' problems come from their desire to make one tool -- the story -- serve all purposes. (And of the over-worship of The Story as the sole praiseworthy goal of journalism, as with one, I would guess professor, whom he quotes: "Twitter strikes me as ridiculous. It begs the question: What is news? Is it a stark factual sentence, or a well-crafted story steeped in sensory details, heavily dependent on the reporter's presence at the scene?" To which Doug responds: Well, that's a non-question. And of course, it doesn't beg the question, it prompts it.)

But now comes Poynter advisory board member Matt Thompson with a must-read article pointing out that that story -- well-crafted, steeped, presence-filled, as yeasty and tasty as a Richard Thompson song, presumably -- comes to the reader with a large number of gaping holes.

While he elaborates on them to great effect -- you really should read him as soon as you're tired of me talking about it -- all of them come down to this: The reporter is swimming in a sea of data, history, connections, facts, inferences, rumors, personal actions and expertise and inexpertise, journalistic conventions, out of which she must produce a "story" -- that, according to journalistic convention, should assume that you, the reader, want "the news of the day" followed by a summation of the basic outlines of the controversy (for those who came in late). But that largely serves just to recount the posturings of the major players -- access to whom, of course, give the reporter standing to play her part in the swirl -- and by convention leaves out most of the data, history, connections, facts, inferences, rumors, personal actions and expertise and inexpertise by which the reader could actually get a sense of what's going on. Is it any wonder that people look away from newspapers and news sites to a more "personal" journalism? Increasingly I think that the albatross around our necks is not the hardware of the press, but the convention of "the news story" in matters of controversy. (The story works quite well in talking about John Singh and Twitter, though.)

Why I Love New Media People So

2009-08-17T19:29:00.003-04:00

So James Warren, of the Chicago Tribune, goes to England for a wedding and, like many an American visitor before him, picks up British newspapers and marvels at their intelligence, depth, breadth of world news, and spirited cheekiness.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had some of that in American newspapers? he asks. Our newspapers are so darn boring, it's no wonder no one reads many of them.

All of which has been said before, but, of course, no challenge must go unanswered, and Roy Greenslade immediately leaps to the fore:

"Indeed, I wonder whether editorial content would make any difference at all to newsprint sales.

"After all, despite Warren's praise for "British high-energy imagination and flair" in our papers, sales here are in decline, as the latest set of the ABC figures show (here and here and here).

"That is not to say that the quality and range of journalism is irrelevant to readers and potential readers. Far from it. But print, as veteran editors seemingly find it impossible to admit, is a failing medium."

But while Warren is certainly writing from a print background, nothing he says could not be equally true of U.S. newspapers' online operations. Consider:

"That (middle-class) strategy twinned with a firm belief in most newsrooms that being too colourful, impressionistic or intentionally provocative undermined one's air of authority and legitimacy. By and large, balance meant rarely offending. The premeditatedly provocative tended to be relegated to the occasional serious investigation or editorial, or to the approved ranting of a well-compensated "populist" sports columnist, inveighing on ultimately inconsequential topics."

Since much of the content of American newspapers online is produced by, and is often identical with, the content in print, it seems like Warren's point could be made regardless of medium. And what if more people might read a better print paper? But let us not ponder such issues. Greenslade must make the point again: You print people are dead, dead, dead. Stop trying to do better, stop trying anything. Nothing you do can do anything. Just roll over and die.

How this can possibly be useful is beyond me. All it really says is: Those of us who got it early got it, and those of you who didn't are chum.

Incoherence

2009-08-12T10:20:00.004-04:00

In an earlier post I said that newspapers, like department stores, had become incoherent.

Looking at ads from department stores from the 1930s through the 1960s, their message was pretty clear: Here's what we sell, here's when we're open. Most department stores competed on price; a few competed on class, but not as many as you'd think; almost all competed on breadth. Discounters' steady growth put department stores' message in flux. They couldn't compete head to head on price because they had higher fixed costs; increasingly, they couldn't compete on breadth.

I found one ad from a small-town store in the 1930s that sold tires right out of the men's wear department. But the stores had to move upscale to fight the discounters; the middle-income store went after a more upper-middle market. The bargain basement stuff increasingly got in the way. Kmart didn't have that image problem.

Department stores traditionally had little sales (this just in, read the paper for the price!) and big sales (End of Month, January White Sale, etc.) to move out merchandise too long in the tooth. Now they had to have coupons, weekly markdowns, etc., to try to compete with the discounters and big box stores. So no one knew what their price was. Unless you walked in during a big sale with a coupon, you felt like you were paying too much. Call in William Shatner! You might actually pay more at Walmart, but you didn't feel like you were an idiot, because Walmart's price stayed the same. The department store was playing you.

So the department store's message became: Come here and buy stuff, some of which is better quality but some is not, and pay more, unless you get here on the right time or do lots of homework, and you still have to go to another store to get stuff we don't carry anymore. Gee. Macy's and Penney's sell "shopping environment" -- nicer store than a discounter, more fashionable clothes -- but even some lines I thought would never fall from department stores, such as bridal registries, increasingly are going to places like Bed, Bath & Beyond. The bride doesn't shop at Macy's, her friends don't shop at Macy's, they bought all their dorm stuff at Bed, Bath & Beyond, and you no longer have to impress the bride's mother by having the stuff in a box that says The Killian Co. or Meier & Frank.

Some examples of newspaper incoherence:

One of my three dailies at home has in the last year made great strides in packaging and presentation -- color nearly everywhere, lots of brief wire stories instead of just running evergreens at length to close a page. The paper has a fraction of its old staff, yet in some ways is more readable. But it shares content with two papers that serve a neighboring county in another state (one that's not that easy to get to from here, being across a major river and having an ancient highway system). For an inside-the-paper news story, that's not a big problem. But the food section week after week is about people and events in that county and not in ours. Why? Only one food writer, and a common food cover for all three papers. Since recipes are available everywhere now, all a local paper can sell in food is local cooks and food events --which should be quite salable. I know it's the best they can do under the circumstances, but it makes the local mission of the paper incoherent (we're about your county HERE, but their county THERE, and you figure out why).

The New York Times runs its famous obit of Walter Cronkite with, depending on what you count as an error, seven to nine factual errors. Anyone in the newspaper business knows that sometimes stuff like this happens. The Times, which wants to be seen as the gold standard of journalism in the world, ends up trying to explain the thing with and on top of a garbled mess of statements about how the reporter is a really terrific reporter but on the other hand she's not always good at facts and so we had to assign a copy editor to fact-check her but then because the copy editor was fact-checking her she didn't have as many errors so we took off the copy editor who fact-checked her because there wasn't a problem anymore and now we'll probably have to put one back and this was an internal problem of passing off the story among editors but we are still the gold standard of journalism in the world and you should trust us because we have now told you all the ways our system broke down and are transparent. This may be the best they can do, but it is incoherent to the reader who can't understand how the gold standard of journalism would put the assassination of Dr. King on the wrong day. (Why didn't they just say, when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, and forget the date? The more minute the historical facts you have, the more they can be wrong.)

The Detroit home-delivery plan is incoherent (we'll publish the paper, but somedays we'll get it to you and some we won't, and it's our choice). In my former home of Flint, they simply made the paper a three-day-a-week operation. That at least sounds coherent, and so when I got a copy of the revamped paper I expected it to have been rethought. But the paper still has (or at least had as of a month and a half ago) a nation-world section and the previous night's baseball standings, just as if it came out every day. It was the same old Flint Journal as before, only three days a week. If it's not a daily paper, it's not a daily paper. This is incoherence.

The consumer does not have the time or money to waste on incoherent businesses. Newspapers still think the reader should understand that we have problems and thus accept our product on our terms. What is amazing is how many readers still do.

It's the Summer

2009-08-05T16:20:00.004-04:00

As noted previously -- I haven't missed doing this. Perhaps I have said everything I had to say on the point. Or perhaps everyone has said everything they had to say, and now, in the manner of sports coverage, we're down to memes and themes, repeated annually.

Steve Yelvington -- who, as noted here previously, makes a lot of sense except when talking about copy editors (or perhaps I'm just too parochial) -- said a number of things this year that have really made me think. One was that journalism, while nice for newspapers, is not essential -- they are in the business of selling solutions to other businesses through advertising. So much of the high-minded discussion of journalism in an era of weaker newspapers has been from journalists, who look at newspapers as if they should be -- well, foundations that exist to publish journalism, which is why doing journalism for a nonprofit foundation looks pretty good to them. (And then they don't understand people who talk about, We're not making any money!) In a lot of ways, a foundation is what we had in metro newspapers in the 1980s and early 1990s. Journalists these days are not newspaper(wo)men as of yore, who wrote a puff piece on the new addition to H. Gordon & Sons in Gary if they were assigned to, and then did a completely factual report on city hall corrpution. For a brief time, newspapers just happened to provide a well-paying home for the sort of journalism that high-church journalists want to do now.

This was less the case 40 years ago, and I've been spending a lot of time looking at newspapers from that era -- the only era when everyone read newspapers, if you look at circulation figures -- to see what it is that newspaper(wo)men did then. I'll be posting some looks at that in days ahead.

But Yelvington also said something that made it clear where things such as Mark Potts' famous sneer at "printies" come from:

"Digital people generally lose power struggles with print people."

How many of the death-to-print bloggers took up their cudgels after one too many bureaucratic losses, in which they, who had seen the glorious future, who had shown the company how to be part of the New Jerusalem, found themselves losing out to some pissant production director who wanted the investment for iron, or an editor who wanted to save the exclusive for print, or an advertising director who thought he could stick his finger in the dike and stop the classifieds from escaping? So there's bitterness there, and a sense (which Yelvington does not have) of, screw all you stupid, backward, print-oriented folks. Stop your freaking presses. I saw the future, I showed you the future, and you did not fund it. Now you will pay. (Even though print still pays 90 percent of the bills.)

Overpainting, but: Journalists, as noted before, are shy egomaniacs. Tech people are incomprehensible egomaniacs. Techy journalists are...

But also note that Yelvington does make a difference between "digital people" and "print people." It's not simply the difference between "old-fashioned people" and "modern people" who are all "journalist people." There are digital people in journalism just the same as there are radio people and TV people and magazine people and newspaper people, just the same as there are investigative reporters and graphic artists and photographers and copy editors and producers. And chances are, after the dust settles, there still will be, even if the newspapers are delivered to a printer in your house or are read on a Kindle with links, and you watch TV programs on your computer screen. Or even if newspapers are delivered by being thrown from cars and people watch TV on televisions.

The idea that all of us were simply meant to evolve from a retrograde print level to a higher digital level is -- a techy conceit, which kicked the confidence out of print people by the commingling of "Web page" with "Internet" when the Internet is really just an incredibly good delivery system and a Web page is just something it can deliver, and is probably an intermediate form. It is just my belief, but new technology usually creates more specialization, not less; and at some future point the idea that one reporter can do a print story and a video story and a blog and a tweet, all of which can be handled by the same editor, will probably be broken apart in some manner. The quality will be insufficient in all media. But that will require news providers to accept that each will occupy a smaller place in the cosmos, and newspapers still don't want to accept that, still want to be the Universal Source.

I did want to close with a shout-out to Yelvington for this post on real estate advertising, which has been all but written off by many analysts, Alan Mutter included. The gist:

"There are two things you can do with advertising. You can create demand. And you can channel demand to a preferred resolution. Some advertising may do both, but they're really different functions.

"Printed newspaper classifieds perform both of those functions. You're flipping through the paper, you idly glance through the classifieds, and the next thing you know, you're daydreaming about a "Beautiful home situated on Lake Thurmond w/ dock!" or a 1997 Harley Davidson Softail Classic, less than 14kmi, $10,000." You had no idea that you wanted one, but here you are.

"But for years the place where newspaper classifieds really performed beyond all competitors was in the second function: channeling demand to a resolution. You're already looking for a house: Here's what I have to offer this week. You're already looking for a car: Here's what's on my lot.

"And this is where print classifieds are really getting clobbered. Forget all the whining about Craigslist; it's a convenient target, but not very important. What hurts print is that it's lost its primacy in channeling existing demand by providing data to the seeker.

"This doesn't mean newspaper companies are locked out of the action. Far from it; they're very well positioned to channel online demand through behavioral targeting of advertising that helps connect seekers to the treasure they seek. And both print and Internet advertising can work in that other dimension of advertising, creating demand. I did not know that property up at the lake is selling today for less than half what it was going for before the economy tanked. Probably a good long-term investment, certainly smarter than a Harley. Priced at $70K, a lakefront lot is out of my reach, but not out of reach of others. Demand gets created, maybe a lot gets sold, and somebody gets a 7% commission.

"This dimension of creating demand is one that deserves more attention that it gets. Google can't do it. Yellow Pages can't do it. There's plenty of competition. But it's not something you can lose to a smarter algorithm."

Yep, here's a "digital person" saying, "here's where print comes in" -- stop trying to lure back the liner ads for houses (3 BR 2 BA gd schls, riv vu, $138,500, contact...) because they are gone because the Internet can do that better -- but sell in print how to make the reader think he really wants a new house, with something like a river view, in a better neighborhood, because the Internet can't do that very well at all.

So listen to people such as him, instead of those whose answer is always, "Print is dead." The fact that print will not be what it was does not mean it is dead. The fact that you want print to be dead does not make you a prophet of the future.

And Then Came A Time

2009-07-15T09:45:00.003-04:00

... when I realized that I wasn't posting, and that I really didn't miss it.

But that left a loose end, and I couldn't figure out how to tie it up, until the last week. So to return:

The professionalization of journalism in the 1970s meant that, over time, being editor of a newspaper became a little less like being responsible for all the non-advertising content, and more like being an uber-city editor. I recall back when I was young and ideological, objecting to why we published "sewing patterns" syndicated features. We could be running news there! I was told that even though they brought in, oh, $40 a month, that that was revenue credited to the news department and kept it from being a total cost center.

The editor who made that determination knew every comic in his newspaper, every syndicated column, every part of the package. I would guess that many top editors today don't even know what comics and columns their papers publish (except as "how can we get this off the budget"), nor do they read them. As professional journalists, their role is to push investigations and local coverage. Anything else -- such as "does anyone actually read the replacement for Ann Landers" -- is not what they got into journalism to do. In the old days, part of training for becoming the top editor was learning how to select what your staff didn't produce. Being editor of the newspaper was not just about journalism. It was about producing a newspaper.

But a newspaper, as any longtime readers of this blog will remember, is a department store. People came into the newspaper store for lots of reasons -- to read news, to read comics, to read ads, to look for jobs or houses. The same with the department store, but as more competitors rose up it had to figure out what areas it simply couldn't compete in profitably (white goods) and make choices. Some department stores made bad choices, basing their businesses on having more upscale customers than the market actually had; others simply did business as always until there wasn't enough business left. But at one time it was unimaginable that a city would not have at least one locally-based department store.

Many of them did badly, but their aim was still to serve the customer. Journalists' aim was to serve society, and it wasn't their business to make society buy their content. In fact, it became kind of against the point. Those of us who worked in the business in the early 1980s will remember that it was a time when newspaper editors were stuck on the point, "Why don't they love us?" We had brought down Nixon! We had exposed the hard truth about their communities! They did not appreciate us. We would keep doing what we did, until they learned to.

Even at that point, when the business model seemed unassailable, journalists had fallen into their position of, "If the public doesn't like what you're doing, get a different public." The wall between church and state had liberated newsrooms from having to write puff pieces about major advertisers and keep their children's DUIs out of the paper. The professionalization of journalism meant that space devoted to things such as police blotters, marriages and divorces, club notes and small-town newsletters would be instead used for actual journalism written by trained journalists. It didn't matter that those items were what some people bought the paper for. (Some readers actually read progress editions.) We would educate those readers to appreciate what they should want. It was like the impressionists vs. the academy.

So there was no need to ask if this was what readers wanted. It was what we were going to do to make a better society. (We brought down Nixon!) Did a doctor ask his patients what they wanted? He tried to cure them. The prospect that a reader would plunk down the price of a newspaper to do the crossword, but wouldn't pay one red cent for journalism, either didn't enter people's minds, or if it did -- well, those people were the wrong public. We're all the New York Times on this bus.

European newspaper people, looking at the problems in America, often say: It's because you don't know how to compete. But American journalists are very competitive. They knew very well how to compete -- with other newspaper journalists. They knew how to get the scoop first. As nearly every city found itself with one newspaper, they learned to compete increasingly through entering contests. But competing for the reader's time by putting out a product the average reader wanted to buy -- this was harder. (Many, many readers, of course, wanted -- still want -- the newspaper product.) Then came the online revolution, and newspapers were told that it was all about "content" -- which they interpreted as being "do what you're doing and someone will pay for it" -- and here we are. OK, but so what?

The problem is that where we are is incoherent regardless of whether it's print or online or cellular or whatever. Department stores became incoherent in the late 1980s when no one could figure out what they really were about (selection? price? service?). Trying to adapt to a new world, newspapers cannot figure out what they are. Steve Yelvington -- who may not know what copy editors do in the 2000s, but is a strong and clear-eyed analyst of newspapers' problems and opportunities -- made the point that hit home with me:

"Journalism has never had a business model of its own. It's always been a tool in the execution of some other agenda. This was true in the era of the partisan press, and it's true in the era of the commercial press. Newspapers are in the business of helping other businesses sell goods/services. Journalism is useful in that business, but it's not essential."

More to come.

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 31

2009-06-21T16:27:00.005-04:00

In addition to Penn Traffic, noted in Vol. 30, Johnstown's other major department store was Glosser Bros. As noted in "Johnstown, Pennsylvania: A History, Part One, 1890-1936" by Randy G. Whittle, Wolf Glotzer immigrated to the U.S. in 1903 from Russia and was soon joined in Johnstown by his son Nathan. The name became Anglicized to Glosser and Nathan opened a men's store and cleaners that made enough money to quickly bring the entire family over. This was a late start for an Eastern department store family. Glosser's occupied the brick building on the corner as well as the five-story building to its left.

By the post-World War I era, the store had expanded into a full department store, including a full grocery business -- which Glosser's maintained into the 1960s at least, far after most department stores had left the food business. (El Corte Ingles in Spain still runs full-line groceries in many of its department stores.) David Glosser was a well-known philanthropist in Johnstown. Glosser's soldiered on into the late 1980s, by which time its major emphasis had become its Gee Bee discount stores, which eventually were sold to the Value City chain.

The building on Locust St. at upper left is the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. There was a third Johnstown department store, Kline's, that made it into the 1960s, but I am not sure exactly which building it was on Main Street.

The Missionary's Dilemma

2009-06-19T10:00:00.000-04:00

An increasingly professionalized, educated, socially aware group of journalists began to change the traditions of America's newsrooms in the 1960s, and generally triumphed in the 1970s. They didn't want newspapers to just report what happened; they wanted to seek out what wasn't being announced. Like journalists always, they were drawn to the new, the different, the interesting, the sometimes bizarre. But they had lived through the era of the civil-rights movement and Vietnam. They had realized that if you just quoted Martin Luther King and "Bull" Conner, you weren't getting the real story.

They saw important work for newspapers to do in making the country confront its own shortcomings, little white lies, institutional prejudices. They saw voices asking "Why not?" and that those voices could be ignored or suppressed -- and saw what happened when they were. They had a heroic vision of journalism, particularly of newspapers and their role -- not just as the tribune of the people, but as helping guide people, and the nation, to a better place. The truth shall set us all free, and we are trained to see the truth.

But there was a problem. Newspapermen were still seen in the popular mind as layabouts, oddballs, idlers, drunks, malcontents who couldn't quite fit into society. Sure, they performed a service, but you wouldn't want your daughter to get near one. They were ink-stained wretches, hacks who worked odd hours and got bottles of Scotch from the mayor at Christmas in return for stories not covered. They worked, as they knew, for commercial businesses that ran puff pieces for major advertisers, kept politicians' DUIs out of the paper, and could be owned by saints like the Binghams or by schemers like William Loeb or bombasts like Gene Pulliam. Exactly how were they to stand as Caesar's wife?

The professionalization of journalism -- and of newspapers -- offered the way. Through ethics codes, training, awards, journalism would make clearer than ever before what it stood for. Newspapers would undergo some structural changes as well. No longer would it be acceptable for a major daily to run liquor ads on the front page, as the Evening Edition of the Boston Globe still did in the mid-1960s. In fact, no longer would ads on the front page or even most section fronts be acceptable -- and increasingly, the newsroom would work to control where ads could appear, though success ebbed and flowed. At many papers, headlines crept down in size, so as not to indicate that we were trying to use the news to sell newspapers. The point was to say: We are not the slaves of commercial interests. The news is more important than an ad for D.H. Holmes Co. Ltd. Thus, when we say, "This is wrong," or, "You must pay attention to this," you will pay attention. We are not laboring in our own self-interest; we are acting from noble motives.

In addition, newspapers would no longer be identified by party. Look at an Ayer's Directory of newspapers from the 1960s and a large number of papers still identified themselves as Republican or Democratic, or at least "Independent-Democratic" or the like. As most towns were reduced to one newspaper, part of this was just good business. But editorial pages and publishers no longer wanted to be seen as carrying water for one party. A professional news-gathering operation would present all views, but make its own judgments. The days of the Los Angeles Times being part of the California Republican Party were done.

From this, American newspapers approached a level of professionalism, of excellence in writing, editing and photography, they had never before seen. Compared to the backbiting British dailies, the opaque ideology of the French and Italian, the uniformity of the Japanese, and the professional but stolid journalism of the German and Swiss -- let alone the party-controlled organs of the communist nations and the often amateurish, though well meant, efforts in the Third World -- America's newspapers stood for what journalism could be.

Newspapers would shine their light, as always, on political corruption. But they now would stand for a renewed sense of social justice. They would show the problems of the dispossessed and disenfranchised. They would make America confront its glass ceilings, its fear of minorities, its social conformity. These were not Republican or Democratic issues as journalists saw them. They were issues of human rights, and both parties should come together on the right side and argue about means but not ends. Newspapers also would write about sports, and advances in health care, and the orchestra, as they always had. But they would no longer concern themselves with the leadership of the garden club, or whether a street was going to be repaved, or whether it sure seemed like a long hot spell.

Those things did not make the country better. They were ephemeral and parochial. Journalists would take the long view, because, how could one not be on the side of social progress? And newspapers would become their testaments, their reports to society on its own health, increasingly less bound to commercial considerations, and more guided by a sense that journalists knew what they were about and the people who employed them did not. And thus, journalism would be something that a college-educated intellectual could devote one's life to, instead of going into social service or law or religion, and know that one was doing one's part to make life better instead of merely chasing ambulances and hanging out with the boys down at the press club.

Which totally makes sense as a position to argue, as long as you accept it as a prism and a position to argue, and not as a reality to which everyone will eventually subscribe when their eyes have been opened.

More to come.

The Missionary Position

2009-06-16T10:17:00.007-04:00

Following up on the previous post, "Mario Looks at the World."

U.S. newspapers are different than their overseas counterparts for many reasons -- the First Amendment, the vast size of the country, its booster-led-and-legislated localism (until the last couple of decades) in retailing, banking, and other advertising areas, and the absence until recently of national newspapers, particularly of the Red Top, Boulevardier, etc. genres found in much of Europe.

This meant that your typical newspaper, in speaking up for the Common Man -- somewhat of a Jeffersonian construct and thus possibly more important in America than elsewhere -- tended to speak up for someone named either John Q. Public or John Q. Taxpayer, usually portrayed with a fedora, a round nose and a bristle mustache, saying, "You can't fight City Hall!" -- except that the newspaper was there to help him look for corruption, mismanagement and the like so that he could get his taxes held down, his property rezoned, or his garbage picked up on time. Oh, and potholes filled.

Apart from reporting in the interests of John Q., the typical newspaper was a grab-bag of press releases, wire stories, human-interest pieces, humorous photos, check-passings, and the like that largely chronicled the official business and middle-class lifestyle of the community. The reporters were often lower-middle-class types who grew up there and found their writing or reporting skill saved them from 30 years on the line at Saginaw Steering Gear. Sometimes they thought John Q. was kind of a boob, but they generally disliked potholes, too, and enjoyed a day at the track just like he did.

Comes then the professionalization of journalism, starting in the early 20th century and building to its crescendo in the post-World War II years, when America was contemplating the professionalization of nearly everything. Then mix this with journalists having been on the right side in the three biggest news stories of the time:

* Watergate, in which, in the end, he was a crook.
* The Vietnam War, which, whether you think it was wrong in the first place or was conducted wrongly because we didn't aim to win, ended up being a fiasco.
* And most important, civil rights, in which the news media, as detailed by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in "The Race Beat," (whoops, got that wrong in the first posting) played a major step in the country's finally living up to its creed.

But ol' John Q. was of two minds on these issues. Nixon resigned and the Democrats briefly won, but people seemed more upset that the president cursed in the Oval Office than that he tried to subvert the law. Vietnam led to Kent State and "My country right or wrong" bumper stickers. And primarily, the press showed the rightness of Dr. King's cause, and people voted for Lester Maddox as governor anyway. The press showed how the police were used as an occupying force, and John Q. elected Frank Rizzo as mayor.

And let's not even mention La Raza or the ERA. From the view in many newsrooms, John Q. just wasn't getting it. He seemed willing to protect his suburban dream at the cost of all of America's cities. When people talked of the need for sex education, he heard "my daughter could get pregnant at 14." (After all, if he had known how to do it at 14, he might have tried to.) It turned out that he didn't really care very much about American petit apartheid, separate motels and drinking fountains and the like; they were legislated away, and nothing much happened. But John Q. did want an orderly universe. He wanted one in which there were some rules, and people who followed them, barring acts of God, generally came out ahead.

He wanted his newspaper to keep fighting for the little guy, as it always had. But increasingly, the newspaper said that the little guy was the black person denied equal housing, the woman wanting to be a police officer, the prisoner jammed into a cell and beaten, the teen demanding an abortion without telling her parents. John Q. didn't see much point in going over and over these points. Equal housing, yeah, but you know what they did to property when they got it; cops needed to tackle 250-pound miscreants, not just read them their rights; prisoners were prisoners, for God's sake; children were children and if their parents were legally responsible for them, how could they not be told? It didn't make sense.

Meanwhile, the streets were unpaved, crime was up, taxes were up, and cars were rusting out in two years; and anyway, where are the divorce listings? I heard the couple down the street split up, but it's hush-hush. But the newspaper doesn't run divorces anymore! Oh, and the woman I work with, her son was dean's list at old State U and her daughter just got married to a guy from New York. Her taffetta gown was just beautiful -- they must have spent a fortune, wonder where they got that type of money? That stuff used to be in the newspaper. What happened?

And further meanwhile, in newsrooms, a growing, professionalized, committed journalistic force -- backed by more money than newsrooms had ever before had, educated in colleges, and often drawn to newspapers far from where they had grown up -- found its own view of the world growing further and further apart from John Q.'s. The answer, clearly, was to educate. "Give light and the people will find their own way!" "Let the people know the facts and the country will be saved!" Such were the mottos that had graced editorial pages. Trained journalists would make sure that the real reality -- not the reality of the era of "Father Knows Best" -- would be presented, and eventually John Q. and his whole family would get it and catch up.

More to come.

Mario Looks at the World

2009-06-16T09:52:00.002-04:00

Mario Garcia -- certainly the dean of newspaper redesign experts at this point by longevity if nothing else -- had some comments recently on why U.S. newspapers are starting to lag behind the rest of the world in some areas. Whether or not you will agree with Mario, he certainly has the international contacts and context to comment, having redesigned newspapers all over the world.

While noting that U.S. newspapers excel in professionalism, he adds: "American newspaper editors, unlike their European or Asian counterparts, may have a heightened sense of mission. They see their role as that of producing the type of journalism that not only reports, but also exposes and investigates. It is the idea of the journalist as a missionary. ... As a result, editors are extremely protective of what they consider to be 'serious journalism,' and with this comes a negative reaction to anything that, like innovative advertising, could create a notion of compromising editorial values."

Well, you're either with Mario by now, or you're not.

"...Some American newspaper editors have a greater sense of the printed newspaper as king, with online and digital editions being less important.... This belief is more prevalent in U.S. newsrooms than anywhere else in the world." He then quotes a U.S. metro newspaper editor as saying: "American journalists are too often absolutists or even fundamentalists. They regularly defend a form of top-down, tablets-from-the-mountaintop journalism. Any changes either to that approach or even to the surrounding content or the relationship with readers is seen as unacceptable compromise...."

He then goes on to note that papers overseas are more liberal in where they will let advertising be placed, and says focus groups are overused. But you can see the flip side of this coin in the belief that "journalism as we know it must survive" even if no one wants to pay for it or underwrite it. It is our holy mission. The problem is that many readers -- and I do talk to some of them -- think we have been preaching at them for decades, and they really don't like it. They find us haughty, one-sided and arrogant -- and not just because they do or don't watch Fox News. The sort of collapse the newspaper business has had does not come from just the existence of an alternative. People have to actively want to not use your product, because otherwise inertia rules. Many, many people have been alienated from newspapers for some time, in my view.

What I found most interesting was that I have always thought of newspapers in other countries -- not Britain so much as the Continent and South America -- as even more opinionated, polemical, etc. as we are. But I will trust Mario that this is not so. It is in many ways coincidence, but the sense of newspapers not as crusaders -- which goes back to the beginning -- but as missionaries in the sense we know now begins at about the time their circulation started to fall off in relative terms, in the 1960s. And yes, I am an unreconstructed liberal. But more to come.

Where the Disconnects Are

2009-06-08T10:00:00.001-04:00

Last week I posted a comment on the wonderful blog "Fitz & Jen" -- E&P's newspaper-business writers Mark Fitzgerald and Jennifer Saba doing brief daily updates on what passes for the newspaper business these days -- and we had a nice back and forth, but a later posting really gave me pause:

"I can read a summary a reporter writes about some (but not all) of my town's local board meetings. Some of the stories are good, some introduce inaccuracies either by the reporting, typos, or editing. That used to be the only choice you had unless you went to the Town Hall to read a copy of the minutes. Today all minutes are posted on the web within 7 days, and reading them I get more accurate and in-depth information.

"If I want to know what truly happened at a meeting, I don't go looking for a news article, I go to the town website and open up the meeting's minutes. That is a choice I didn't have 5 years ago."

Think about that. If I want to know what happened at a meeting, I don't trust an independent news reporter to tell me. I trust the minutes of the meeting. In other words, I trust the elected officials to tell me what they are doing more than I trust a reporter.

Thirty years ago at my second newspaper, we had a huge fight over doing "phoners" of suburban meetings. The reporters did not want to do them, because they would have to ask the board secretary what happened, and the secretary might lie to them. Or, it might be that 100 people turned out to protest something, and the secretary might say: "There was some comment against the proposal." Unless they were actually there, they did not write a story saying that something happened. Now, it was the immediate post-Watergate era when reporters felt that every town board was hiding an 18-minute gap somewhere. And yes, the minutes are taken by someone who is actually there. But is that the point?

The town where I live doesn't appear to post minutes, so I can't say for sure how useful they would be to me as a resident. But doesn't this strike at the entire concept of news-gathering? Even back in more stenographic days, the reporter was supposed to go and say what of importance happened. The minutes will simply report votes and motions in order.

"If I want to know what truly happened" -- I trust the town government to tell me in its minutes. I don't trust a reporter or a newspaper. And it's not, apparently, because of "liberal bias," though it may be. It may be that the reporter got a person's name wrong, or a fact wrong -- or it may be that the reporter thought this was important and the reader didn't think it was as important -- or it may be that the reporter thought something was unimportant and the reader thought it was --

But this bespeaks a problem greater than whether newspapers are printed, doesn't it? If the reader feels there is no need for the reporter to be there -- I can trust the government to tell me what it did, and presumably if I and my neighbors find from reading the minutes that it did something I don't like, we will go and demand redress -- means that the "press as a check on government" is no longer valued, at least by this reader on this level. And I think we know he speaks for many.

Now, admittedly a local town board is not Congress. Most of its actions are pretty mundane. And I have read some stories on my township board that were incomprehensible, and during our local-local days edited my share of stories in which a planning commission somehow managed to change a property's zoning, or a vote that was reported as 5-2 against turned into a clear the next day because it was 5-2 for. But the level of government was never the point, nor was the competence of the reporter. It was the eye on the public's business. If you don't value that eye, you won't want a newspaper no matter how it is presented.

For the Record

2009-06-03T10:00:00.000-04:00

The challenge laid down in the post Copy Editing: Who Are We, Anyway:

I did take the questions to my editor.

He answered them.

You can do it too.

This Baby's Only Got One Gear

2009-06-02T10:00:00.000-04:00

Charles Apple notes the redesign of the Eugene Register-Guard as part of a swath of redesigns brought on by chopping paper-web size. Well enough; we know that smaller page sizes -- narrower or not as deep -- are not a turnoff to readers as long as we continue to have sectionalization, so that Pop can read sports while Mom reads the comics. (Not a sexist aside; taken from recent comments on page-size reductions at Sarasota.)

But among the goals of the Register-Guard -- and this is not to dump on that paper, which has had a fine reputation over the years -- is:

“All the comics, all the puzzles — they’re going to be in one place. Readers won’t have to wake up and ask ‘Where’s the TV page today?’"

I mean, you know where the TV page is on your digital cable or DirectTV.

And no, that's not a "how can people be so dumb as to use a newspaper TV page" riff. But if in 2009 we're still dealing with putting the comics and the TV pages in the same place every day -- as we always are -- even though since the 1970s we have known that readers want the things they use every day to be in the same place every day, so that they don't have to waste their time trying to find them --

Yes, I know we solve this problem, and then something happens (in good times, we decide to do a tabloid features section two days a week because the new features editor wants to make a mark; in bad times, we no longer have a classified section and so the place where we anchored TV disappears).

But readers really don't understand why we can't solve these sorts of problems, although we can always manage to write about what we want to write about at whatever length we want to write about it.

Also among the goals:

"Tighter editing of wire stories."

Also possibly a goal of every editor of every newspaper since, oh, 1975. Well, good luck, Register-Guard.

Charles also talks about the redesign of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, which has among its goals:

"As we move forward and adapt to the narrower measure, we anticipate a larger focus on short-form storytelling..."

Obviously the Nieman Foundation's decision to suspend its narrative journalism workshop is simply coincidental to this, but the conferences, Nieman notes, "were part of our strategy to establish the Nieman Foundation as a leader in supporting the value of long-form storytelling." The values of newspapers and of high-church 1980s-style Journalism seem to keep moving further apart. Well, good luck as well, Spokesman-Review, unless they've hired a reporting staff that is eager to do short-form storytelling (and yes, some will say that a story really cannot be told in short form).

Our county newspaper, which is now edited from the office of its sister, across-the-river newspaper, has taken the philosophy of "tighter editing of wire stories" to heart. Each issue now has 20 or more national or foreign stories cut down to briefs size, instead of the previous approach, which was based on the "I've got a 20-inch hole around the ads. Where do I have a 20-inch story so I can close this page and move on?" technique.

And you know what? I like it. It gives more room for local stories and for really significant wire stories, while making sure that I don't miss anything. Maybe it is simply Google News in print. Maybe that's why it works. Maybe the Register-Guard will need to staff its desk so that people have time to, and are rewarded for, cutting wire stories down instead of seeing how quickly they can get the wire pages moved through.

Istory and Yoo

2009-05-28T09:37:00.003-04:00

My paper on Wednesday ran as its main headline "A Historic Nomination" about Justice-designate Sotomayor. I expected calls alleging the usual supposed left-wing bias and carrying water for minorities. Instead, we got nailed by people upset that we did not say "An Historic Nomination."

To those who left e-mail addresses or phone numbers, I and others responded that our stylebook, and the AP stylebook, said that "historic" and "historical" are to be preceded by "a." I noted that we would precede "honorary" with "an" and that it depended on whether the "h" was aspirated when you pronounced the word by itself, and quoted Bill Walsh's book "Lapsing Into a Comma" as noting that this apparently comes from a British pronunciation.

Most people were mollified, and, as often is the case, simply grateful that someone from The Newspaper had actually called them back. One woman was unimpressed and said, essentially, so I have to adapt myself to your being wrong. All of those I talked to had, like me, gone to Catholic school in the 1950s. So, once again, newspaper readership seems to be toppling into the grave; on the other hand, perhaps it was just that the high-water mark of teaching "an historic" as the only proper phrase was in Catholic schools in the 1950s, in an era when schools taught rules, Catholic schools taught rules that had divine oversight, and the language was seen as under attack from phrases such as "like a cigarette should" -- in other words, the era when the gatekeepers of cultures were being totally undermined by a revolutionary change agent, television.

(Discussion question: If the Web were totally regulated by a government agency as television was before cable, would the head of the Internet Communications Commission be describing online content today as a "vast wasteland" and would such a quote be eagerly picked up by traditional media? Further, is the Web a vast wasteland today in the same proportions as television may have been in the early 1960s? 25 points. Keep your answer under 400 words.)

OK, cranky old folks. Yet the reaction to my paper's employment of John Yoo as a columnist seems not to be confined to retired English teachers.

John Yoo could certainly publish his views on his own Web site. He could be linked to any number of conservative news-and-politics sites. The issue is not that the views of Yoo could be suppressed.

The link between "A historic" and John Yoo is that even in its damaged state, people still have certain expectations of a newspaper -- expectations that they do not have for other media. The newspaper is supposed to reflect and stand for what is right, whether it be linguistically correct or morally correct. The newspaper is supposed to seek the truth and not be complicit in coverups, lies, and the general human search for entropy. The newspaper is supposed to be one of the institutions that hold the community to a higher standard.

So far, we have not discovered a media replacement for that role, which is largely based upon print's combination of near-universal access to a product with a high cost of entry for producing similar products, which makes it both ubiquitous and singular.

My son has been challenging me recently about my mention of community institutions. When you look at the changes in society, the 1950s vs. now; the more roles, options, choices people have; the continuing rise of social justice; the limits that were placed on people in an era when everyone had to read the World-Herald and shop at Brandeis or Kilpatrick's to see an informed and representative choice of what was available, in news or merchandise -- exactly how did these slow-moving, bureaucratic, closed-minded, often racist and sexist institutions (including mainstream churches, and schools in the era of rote learning) make things better than they are now? It's a good question, and part of the answer has to be -- they didn't.

But community institutions such as newspapers -- which are in some ways the last community institutions -- still stand for the community's desire to be better than it is. When the Penn Center development was proposed for Philadelphia, where was it unveiled to the community? Gimbel Bros. In that era, a department store was part of what was telling a community, you can reach higher than you are reaching today. And it was not just an store saying this; it was something that was Bigger Than You Are. The answer to "what's bad about the loss of institutions" is that it loses the balance in which some things are bigger than the individual. (At the same time, 50 years ago the balance was out of whack as well, in institutions' favor.) A newspaper still fills that role. If it did not, we would publish John Yoo's column and no one would care.

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 30

2009-05-24T10:00:00.000-04:00

Wood, Morrell & Co. was the "company store" for the steelworks in Johnstown, Pa. The building basically survived the great flood, which Daniel Morrell had had intimations of happening. If you've never read David McCullough's "The Johnstown Flood," it's entertaining and blessedly short, and also goes into great detail about a department store owner named Quinn.

After the flood, the store was gradually separated from its company-store relationship and established as a publicly held company in 1903. But earlier, its name had been changed to Penn Traffic Co. for reasons that, as near as I can tell, have never been explained. I once spent time in the Johnstown library going through newspapers for the weeks before and after the name change, hoping that an ad or a news story would explain the name "Penn Traffic." None did. One day it was Wood, Morrell & Co.; the next, it was Penn Traffic, and that was that. It may have been the oddest name of any traditional U.S. department store, although Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution in Salt Lake City and the City of Paris Dry Goods Co. in San Francisco would give it a run for its money.

Penn Traffic never moved from its company-store location, though, on Washington Street a few blocks from Johnstown's Main Street. In this it also was singular; Kline's, Thomas' and Nathan's were on Main, Glosser's a short distance away. The isolation of the store is clear from the photo above. Not many cities had outlier department stores, ones that clearly were downtown but just as clearly were not and had never been on a main shopping street; Alms & Doepke in Cincinnati comes most prominently to mind, and Jordan Marsh's main Miami store. (Another category was big department stores that were based in neighborhoods, such as Schuster's in Milwaukee and Sattler's in Buffalo.)

Johnstown recovered from the flood but never really went anywhere after that; Penn Traffic had the same sort of career until it went into the grocery business, where it had great success. It eventually sold its department stores to Hess's, but kept its headquarters in the old downtown store until moving to Syracuse. A 1994 biography of the company is here.

Penn Traffic early went into branches outside the city, its earliest ones being in DuBois and Indiana, Pa. If memory serves, the Bon-Ton store in State College was opened as a Penn Traffic.

Copy Editing: Who Are We, Anyway

2009-05-20T10:00:00.001-04:00

With John McIntyre's blog moving to a new location, I did some cleanup of the copy editing links part of the blogroll. (I had outdated links to Andy Bechtel and Kathy Schenck as well.) And I added a link to another great copy editor's blog, that of Craig Lancaster at the Billings Gazette. I didn't link them in this post, because they're over in the blogroll.

Craig, in a post, raised the question: What exactly should we be doing?

Part of the problem copy editors face is that their jobs vary from paper to paper. Do they lay out some/all pages? Are they the "wire editors"? Are they expected to smooth out stories, or simply punctuate them correctly, or are they the first editor of record? Are they fact-checkers, or is that the job of the reporter or assigning editor? Do they proof pages? Do they manage the Web site?

It strikes me that one of the problems copy editors have is that at too many papers, their jobs consist of: Whatever no one else wants to do.

The majority of copy editors I have known combine a high level of skill, a perfectionistic streak, an incredible work ethic, and a combination of shyness and a sense that "if I can just keep my head down, maybe they won't give me even more to do." But as surveys have shown, such as the one that led to the founding of ACES more than a decade ago, copy editors are often the most alienated people in the newsroom -- not the most negative, not the most critical, but the ones most detached from what is going on elsewhere. In part that is their job -- to look at things with a fresh eye. In part that is the hours at a morning paper, which separate them from most of the reporters and top editors.

But in part it's because of the resentment many copy editors feel that things simply get dumped on them while others' roles (as they see it, and in many cases inaccurately) barely change -- that for all the nice-sounding words editors throw out about "last line of defense," many top editors see copy editors as somehow less than full journalists. (Real journalists, dad-gum it, they come up with story ideas and interview someone!) This it seems to me is why photographers can also get the short end of the stick, even though photos work wonderfully on the Web. Editors want to talk about cool stories that could be done, not about operational problems, and photographers, with their masses of assignments and cameras and interfaces, always have operational problems.
And some copy editors also feel that the less other editors know about what they do, the better -- a view held by some reporters as well, but which comes for the copy desk out of a latent fear that if asked, the top editor really would say, "No, I don't want you to change a word of any reporter's copy unless it's simply wrong, because I think what they write is perfect (or I just don't want them yelling at me)." Copy editors sometimes feel that they are saving the paper from itself in spite of itself, and take a certain pride in it.

So here is my challenge to copy editors, which I am going to take up myself (after the Indy 500, of course -- we all have our priorities). Go to the top editor in your newsroom and say: I'd like to talk to you about what you see copy editors' role as. Don't start off talking about staffing levels and page throughputs and all the "production" stuff we do. Most top editors are bored stiff by "production." So talk to them about what they see the job of a copy editor as a journalist. And ask them to put their thoughts down on paper.

Is the job of a copy editor to:

1. Edit grammar and spelling?
2. Fact-check stories? And check which facts? All? Some?
3. Trim stories to fit? (Or design the page to fit the stories?)
4. Make the writing of stories smoother (this is poorly phrased, you can do better)?
5. Work for changes to the story from the view of a typical reader?
6. Write headlines? (This is being increasingly put on the assigning editors or reporters.)
7. Write captions, or merely copy and edit caption information from wire and local photographers?
8. Lay out pages, using one's own news judgment? Or, lay out pages, using the news judgment of another person?
9. Proof some/all pages?
10. Update stories from watching for new information, or update stories as instructed, or edit updated stories, or whatever...
11. Pull and edit sports agate? Post lottery winners?
12. Post stories online?
13. Edit blogs?
14. Develop links?
15. Edit audio and video?

And on and on. Whatever you can think of, and also, "For everything in the paper/Web site/whatever," or just part of it. Don't assume that what you are doing now is what the editor wants or will say the job should be. It's just what you're doing now. Get the editor to say, yes, this is the job of a copy editor.

Because chances are, more than half of America's newspaper editors have never actually said, What is the job of a copy editor? They just have copy editors who do some job that they can say "last line of defense" about. They can tell you exactly what the job of a city hall reporter is, though. (The other less-than-half came up through the copy desk. But they sometimes forget, and sometimes feel they must prove to reporters that they are not copy editors at heart.)

And then, at the end, ask something like this:

Given what you have just defined as the role of a copy editor, how many slugs/stories/pages/columns/online tasks -- whatever makes sense in your location -- do you the editor think a copy editor should be able to handle in a day's/night's shift? Don't argue the point. Don't provide your own recommendations. Don't parse the thing into 15 subsets. Make it simple. You can make some nod that "Given that stories range from major investigations to police briefs, from wire copy to freelance book reviews," whatever. But make it one number, two if you have to because it can be hard to make audio and video equivalent to other work.

Half of the editors at this point will probably say, "Um, I don't want to say that." Because they will know what you are up to. They will want to say, "As many as there are." Make it clear you are not going to beat up on them. You just want to know what their expectation is. If they want to say "80 slugs," they say 80, and you don't start screaming, "Dammit, Jim, I'm an editor, not a bricklayer." If you're doing 80, then you're doing what the editor wants. If the editor says, "I don't want my reporters' prose ever touched," then you know to stop doing it. You may need to make a note to yourself to find another job once there again are other jobs to find.

But whatever, quietly and nonconfrontationally, then, a week later or so, give the editor the actual number of slugs/stories/whatever a copy editor is now handling. EVEN IF IT'S LOWER THAN WHAT THE EDITOR THINKS SHOULD BE DONE. We have to be honest. And let the editor say, hmm, I guess my figure was off, or, hmm, you guys can do more than I thought, or whatever. This is not an argument. (If the editor says, I don't think you should be doing sports agate, and you are doing sports agate, of course, point this out. The editor may have no idea how sports agate is being done.)

This will not save copy editors from being laid off or reassigned. It doesn't discuss "quality," which we copy editors love to discuss but which unfortunately is not quantifiable. It may put copy editors in the same category as reporters. Any top newsroom editor knows what beats the newspaper is covering vs. what beats it wants to cover, and bases its staffing assignments on that compromise. This may gives you the ability to say, well, then, what do you, the editor, want us to give up, the same way you give up covering X county courts? (And then, if the editor says, "I don't want you to proof pages," then you have to stop proofing pages.) But it may make the editor also take full responsibility for what happens on or to the copy desk, instead of saying, "Well, what can I do? I have to have feet on the street." It's a lot easier for the editor to say that if he or she really has no idea what the copy desk does or how it is done.