Back again

The American Copy Editors Society once again had a successful and enlightening conference -- OK, in virtual terms it's tremendously old news -- it happened two weeks ago almost! -- but check out coverage at the ACES web site if you're interested. Every year, people at the conference say how they leave feeling renewed and encouraged about what they do. In these discouraging times, that's so wonderful to hear.

Part of that discouragement for some people seems to be what we used to call "information overload" before the overload went into hyperdrive. Andrew Ferguson, author of "Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College," puts it well, even though he does write for the Weekly Standard:

"Accustomed to turning to the Web to find any elusive piece of information... we now turn to it even for things that don't technically count as information -- advice, for example. ... As in other areas of life, such as pornography and day trading, the Internet hasn't caused the problem, it has just made it worse." Ferguson notes how nearly every hotel has reviews ranging from "good bargain" to "hellhole" and adds: "I of course had no way of knowing which advice to take. I'd search the comments for telltale clues that might indicate who was the bigger crank. ... The clues weren't there. And I'd be no better off than if I hadn't asked the question to begin with -- worse, maybe." And I love this graf:

"Internet utopians like to call message boards like College Confidential a 'community' ... What it is, is a Web site where people from all walks of life, from every income level and background, create a communal space without fear of reprisal and in a spirit of perfect openness, so they can spread misinformation, gossip, and lunatic conjecture to people who are as desperate as themselves. Cultural hierarchies are indeed upended, just as the utopians said they would be -- for example, the tyrannical, suffocating top-down arrangement that privileges people who know what they're talking about above people who don't." Maybe I have more in common with the Weekly Standard than I thought. (Whiggish! quoth the Internet utopian.)

And Scranton Times-Tribune columnist Chris Kelly: "The Internet has only amplified the din. Even the most specious arguments are granted legitimacy simply for having been made. Every opinion, however uninformed, is seen as inherently valuable. No argument is too preposterous or dishonest to share. If you are shameless enough to stand up and say it, someone is bound to agree and pass it along."

(To which I'm sure the Internet Utopian answers: Chaff from people already on the dustbin of history, pining for an era when there were gatekeepers. Judy Miller was a gatekeeper and here we still are in Iraq. Every argument is equally valuable because every argument may be equally wrong. But it does bring to mind from a somewhat enthusiastic story about the underground press of the 1960s this reference: “Editors rarely exercised the discretion that their title implied, for fear of being labeled ‘elitist’ or ‘professional,’” McMillian concludes. Naturally, this had ramifications on efficiency and consistency. At an Atlanta, Georgia paper called The Great Speckled Bird, the entire staff would sometimes convene for 'long and tedious meetings' whose sole purpose was to decide whether or not to cut a single paragraph from a piece.")

So, in the spirit of my argument being as good as anyone else's, let's let the always incisive Jim Chisholm make it:

"Whether our self-professed industry visionaries like it or not, 80 percent of our revenues will still be in print in five years' time. ... Newspapers are not so much losing readers as they are losing frequency and loyalty. In the United Kingdom, for example, over the last five years, the number of people who ever read a newspaper has fallen by 3.7 percent, but average issue readership has slid by 17.5 percent." But as he notes: "While around 60 percent of Web users visit a newspaper website, newspaper sites account for less than 1 percent of all pages viewed Internetwide." A chart shows that the average print reader spends 30 minutes with the paper, the average digital reader 4.4 minutes with the newspaper online; print newspapers reach 45 percent of the U.S. population, digital 10 percent.

Now, I do have my suspicion about this chart, because it says the average "Pages read" is 40, and a lot of papers have a hell of a time getting up to 40 pages. (And always have. When I grew up in Indiana, most daily newspapers outside the bigger cities struggled to get to 12.) And this is not controlled for age. But Chisholm's point remains true: "Our industry needs to refocus. That starts with recognizing that the 80 percent of the revenues that will continue to underpin our industry for the foreseeable future: Print circulation and advertising. Then, let's revisit the key drivers of success across all of our businesses, namely frequency, loyalty, and intensity."

Here in Philadelphia, my employer and nearly all the other area publishers of daily newspapers -- Calkins, Gannett, and Journal Register, everyone except Advance Publications and Metro -- have brought back the old idea of a Total Market Coverage vehicle, called Savings Spree!. Hate the name, but, the idea -- again, it's not a new one, but one newspapers dropped in the 1990s when all you needed to do to be rolling in dough was publish a Sunday help-wanted and real-estate section -- is to distribute "to more than 158,000 households not currently being reached by advertisers through Sunday newspaper subscriptions." The difference between then and now? Every newspaper back then -- and remember, we have more than 15 in the Philadelphia area -- put out its own product and gave it to people who weren't getting ITS newspaper. But many of them were getting someone ELSE'S newspaper, so advertisers were paying for duplicate circulation anyway. Under this plan, the product goes to homes that aren't taking ANYONE's newspaper. Also, combination buys used to be suburban papers vs. city papers. This brings both together.

"Who says traditional media like newspapers can't innovate?" asked Michael Scobey of Calkins, which also published in March a "Best Places to Work" section that reads suspiciously like that old newspaper standby for the low-revenue winter months, a Progress Edition. Well, two groups of people -- Internet utopians (who say it doesn't matter even if they do) and traditional newspaper journalists (who see every change as pearls rewarding swine and diminishing their status as social arbiters). Unfortunately, those two groups are very loud. The same issue of News & Tech that contains Chisholm's column also notes that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram expects a half-million in added revenue this year from a premium television guide. Of course, we all know that newspapers should all drop their TV guides because no one uses them anyway, particularly Internet utopians and traditional newspaper journalists. Our readers, though, continue to be Not Us.

As the Wave Heightens

Long thoughts and third thoughts:

1) As Rick Edmonds noted on Poynter, that was depressing news in McClatchy's earnings report. The rate of newspaper ad dollar fall-off for McClatchy -- which admittedly has a lot of operations in still property-depressed areas such as Florida and California -- was back to 10 percent in January after reaching  reasonable levels in the third and fourth quarters of 2010 ("reasonable" in the sense of "not falling off a cliff"). On the one hand, didn't major national advertisers -- whom McClatchy chief Gary Pruitt blames for the loss of advertising -- basically tell us this last year, that they were going to redirect dollars from newspapers toward online? Are we surprised that after 15 years of newspapers telling everyone how they're going out of business, advertisers have now gotten to the point where they completely believe it? (After all, if it's in the newspaper, it's so.) At what point do online revenues, which are increasing as a share of most companies' revenue not because of incredible success online but simply that print revenue keeps disappearing, achieve the 35-40 percent level at which your other revenue simply goes for paper, ink, and trucks, and so you don't care if you lose it if you stop the presses? But since you get a dime online for every dollar in print, your online revenues have to grow, what, 100 percent a year to cover that 10 percent print loss? And can you be sure that without that print avatar in the market, you will be able to sustain your online ad rates? And you've still got to deliver inserts. And will everyone whom advertisers want to reach follow you online, or will they just say, oh, the heck with it, I'm using Google News?

McClatchy and Gannett have responded to this distressing news by laying off people. A Los Angeles Times story on what happens to Southland journalism after Freedom is sold at auction, and with it the Orange County Register, says the hedge funds that now control about 10 percent of American newspapers (much more in terms of circulation) have decided that there isn't that much more cutting that can be done on the news side or you don't have a newspaper. Apparently our newspaper companies themselves don't agree. On the other hand, I'm sure the principal job Gary Pruitt is concerned about is Gary Pruitt's. That's not a cheap shot or a statement that he is a heartless person. Anyone who's had to decide to lay people off, or tell them, knows it's hard for everyone no matter how they try to spin it. But the job I care most about is my own, and I'm sure Gary and his counterparts at Gannett feel the same way, telling themselves, "If we can just get past this, we can hire again..." Which always reminds me of the pilot in "The Right Stuff" auguring in toward the ground, saying, "I've tried 'A'! I've tried 'B'!"

2) Hearing AOL chairman Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington talk about the merger of AOL and the Huffington Post on PBS news Tuesday night, what struck me about the gamble AOL is making is that if they're right, it means Internet 2.0 is over for the news business. What they were basically describing is a newspaper without the presses -- floated by ad support, covering a wide range of issues, covering them perhaps with more spin than print has done but not being a liberal political organ. Huffington herself took pains to show how many writers from the right the Post has brought on board since the 2008 election. I don't know if HuffPo still draws most of its traffic from celebrity photo galleries. I can't imagine how Arianna Huffington is going to relate to the local-local Patch. (For the life of me, I can't imagine how, after her career, she is suddenly going to be able to succeed in a large organization she did not create. Any bets on which one of these two will be around a year from now?) Maybe she believes that with apps the era of browser-based Internet usage is indeed gone and she'll never get a higher price than this and she really doesn't care. But that doesn't seem like Huffington. But can HuffPo transition to be a sort-of-New-York-Times with local news from Summit and Flanders?

Either way, this and Murdoch's The Daily mean that we're leaving the era in which the future of journalism on the Internet was going to be defined by at least Talking Points Memo, if not Daily Kos and its equivalents. AOL/HuffPo may not work. But news on the Internet is going to become a business and not a free agora of ideas done from love and passion and obsession. Newspapers, alas, got there too early, and have spent the last 15 years Trying A and Trying B to preserve their way of doing business while every time running up against the Innovator's Dilemma. On the other hand, we now can look forward to decades of reminiscences about Internet journalism's "Golden Age," just like television producers and scriptwriters did sitting at the bar talking about how much better life was before networks discovered they could draw bigger audiences with "Petticoat Junction" than they could with "Playhouse 90." Not that it wasn't better, at least for them, but as "Mad Men" and "Boardwalk Empire" and many other programs show, golden ages come and go and come again; it's just that most of us only get one, if that, and it only lasts for a while.

3. The rumor about Andy Reid losing his job as head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles drew a number of columns in response locally -- that of John Smallwood of the Philadelphia Daily News is here. I use it as an example not out of any desire to single out Smallwood, a fine columnist. But he, as other columnists who wrote on this, first makes his obligatory bows to the house god of online -- the "yes, folks, you know I'm not a Luddite" line -- and then deplores the loss of print standards in the virtual world that allowed a silly, unsourced rumor posted on one site to become a viral exclamation point. What I liked about Smallwood's column was how he mentioned the effort he had to spend chasing down this ridiculous rumor. Before the Internet, this would have been a water-cooler conversation that got spread among people by phone or at bars, if that. Someone might have called the sports department and had the phone slammed down on them by a clerk after he yelled out, "Anyone hear anything about Reid?" But because someone posted it on his website and someone else picked it up, it becomes News, it becomes What Everyone's Talking About, and frantic calls must ensue.

Smallwood rightly notes that mainstream journalism has to come up with some sort of rules or conventions to deal with this. Perhaps it will be easier when the Internet is a business, and journalists who work for Internet businesses will be journalists and bloggers will be anonymous tipsters. But nothing made every sports medium that covers the NFL or Philadelphia football chase this. They could have said, gosh, there's nothing to this, we would have known, we would have gotten a tip, we Cover the Freaking Eagles! But then they would not have driven traffic to their website from obsessed Eagles fans willing to check 40 websites in 40 minutes to see if Permanent Loser Andy was indeed gone. They would have looked noncompetitive by not reacting to idiocy. Yes, we need to consider the source, not the frequency. But to do that, we need to stop thinking that we are competing with everyone in the world. We are competing with people who do what we do to gain the readership of people who want to follow what we do. Those are our customers. Other customers will go to other types of information. With every person having a printing press, it has to be that way. There are too many options to cover every bet. We have to figure out what customers we can get and what they want, and not be worried about the customers we won't get.

Mainstream news media also need to note the blogger's initial response when he posted that the whole thing was not just an unsourced rumor, but an unsourced rumor he heard from someone else, not even someone in the Eagles -- "What Fun." This is like the response of the guy who posted the New York harbor tornado photos from 35 years earlier that sucked in NBC -- that he was just doing it for a hoot to get a rise out of his friends. Katie Couric was doubtless wrong for Tweeting that Hosni Mubarak had resigned, when he had not. (On the other hand, UPI used to do this sort of stuff all the time.) Couric wasn't doing it just to get attention. She thought it was a legitimate story. She would not have posted a photo of a years-ago tornado in New York harbor and said it was new just to get a rise out of her friends. The people who do this may have websites and may occasionally post something of interest and possibly of newsworthiness, but they are not journalists. Be watching this case in New Jersey to see if nonjournalists suddenly are defined as if they were. Again, newspapers shot themselves in the foot on this, on the one hand for First Amendment motives and on the other for Web Economy reasons (if we link to you, it will drive traffic), but in doing so again forgot exactly what they are selling. Smallwood is right. We need as a profession to come up with ways to handle this, and that means seeing ourselves as a profession and not just as the equivalent of anyone with a site.

The Press of Business As Seen From Abroad

Earl Wilkinson of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association has long been one of my personal antidotes to Newspaper Gloom and Doom. Part of this is that Earl takes a worldwide approach -- he sees what's happening in Colombia and China as well as America and England. More important is that Earl doesn't see the newspaper as being identical to the newsroom. The newspaper is a business that sells ads and distributes a product and serves customers and reports the news. The first two exist to support the last two, but the newspaper is not just an institution that reports the news and the heck with everything else.

The ever-esteemed Doug Fisher must have caught Earl's blog posting around the same time as I did, but he beat me to the post. So I'll link to Doug's ever-informative "Common Sense Journalism" and his excerpt, in which Earl says after a visit to Australia:

"The two trains of thought among publishers worldwide are that:
"*The United States is an early warning system of consumer and advertiser behavior.
"*Or, that the U.S. publishers have so under-invested in their print products that they have no root system when disruption hits. Thus, the U.S. story is avoidable in other parts of the world. ...
"What the Americans get wrong in print, I was told, is projecting a templated, soulless environment for the consumer who wants to slowly browse. In the past decade, this is an increasingly gaunt-looking print environment reflecting poorly on local media brands that haven't gotten a workout in decades. While quality print newspapers should be platforms for deep engagement, U.S. publishers have created tools to get readers in and out of their print pages in shorter and shorter time increments.
"Advertisers won't invest in such a platform, my friend said. They don't want to be associated with platforms devoid of sizzle."

I'll quote further:
"American publishers, [his friend] mused, have given up too quickly on print as a platform of lucrative engagement.
"Don't confuse migration of eyeballs to digital platforms with the death of the print platform. Don't abandon all efforts to transform print from our only platform of engagement to 'one of several platforms.' Just because print might have a smaller impact in the next five years doesn't mean it's a dead platform."

Further:
"Others at the conference had plenty more to say from what they've viewed from afar — volunteering to the American speaker their views of why their national newspaper industry is different from my country's experiences. For example, the U.S. newspaper brands don't stand for anything other than guardians of a professional journalism standard that — to consumers — feels distant, detached, and unemotional. In design, story selection, and locally written news as a percentage of pages printed, the American publishers have fumbled the print environment.
"Sobering. Probably goes too far. Yet interesting perspectives.
"By contrast, the conference featured three case studies of newspapers that are getting the print environment emotionally correct: “i” in Portugal, Toronto Star in Canada, and A Crítica in Brazil. The Portuguese newspaper redefines what a brand can be in print with a “daily magazine” design so stunning and different as to defy characterisation. The Toronto Star lives by a set of principles by its most famous owner with a clear “social conscience” viewpoint. And the Amazonian daily A Crítica personifies soulfulness and a reader-first campaign mentality."

Earl elaborates on this in the September Editor & Publisher, which is behind a paywall so I will further quote him:

"Advertisers aren't investing in newspapers because a print product doesn't work. In fact, the research suggests that print works beautifully because of the nature of the audience and medium. Instead, advertisers aren't investing because newspapers are losing the perceptual war in building, sustaining, and nurturing their audiences....

"A brand isn't like wine in a bottle that grows in value as it ages. We confuse age with value... A brand is the sum of all contacts over time.... The perception of a news brand gets shaped by product condition, billing, editorial position, rack location, the way a phone is answered. ... I sometimes wonder how a multibillion-dollar industry can function without knowing much about its customers."

(From the traditional newsroom perspective, of course, anything you knew about your customers would lead you to pander to their biases, so best not to know anything. We would produce what was best for them, and they would appreciate it. From the business-side perspective, we didn't have to know about our customers' problems. They had to know about ours, because not only was our business infinitely more complicated than theirs, where else were they going to go? Take it or leave it, pal. Hmm, we didn't expect they'd choose the latter...)

Earl's point in all this is that everything affects whether people care about your product -- what you cover, how it's delivered, whether the Sunday paper at the 7-Eleven has a torn front page and inserts falling onto the floor, whether the person you call in the newsroom does the usual newsroom thing and hangs up on you after belittling you for bothering him -- and the point he and his overseas friends make is:

Customers have to care about your product. If they don't, they'll just walk away.

And while Earl's feeling is that sometime before the year 2100, the economics of gasoline, ink, paper will spell the end of printed newspapers -- "The issue won't be whether people abandon print, it will be whether it's economically feasible to serve markets via print versus other alternatives" -- in the short run, print works.

He even notes "a counter-revolution against digital -- too much information, too much connectedness ... short-term, there's a backlash that we should take advantage of." Elsewhere in the issue, E&P quotes the "Digital Future Study" findings that for the second year in a row, the number of Internet users who said they would miss the print edition of their newspaper increased, and this year the number of people stopping subscriptions to get information online decreased.

As News & Tech columnist Doug Page wrote in the June issue (I couldn't locate a link in its archive):

"For the newspaper industry to remain viable, it needs to go back to basics, focusing on sales, service, and content of the printed edition and changing its attitude toward its old-fashioned paper product."

And for what to do next, we will turn to, out of character for TTPB, Jay Rosen.

After You, My Dear Alphonse

Ehren Meditz, one of the devoted band who will not let copy editing die, sends me this report on "Employment Projections, 2008-18," from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

According to it, the largest decline in employment over this period -- which, of course, we are two years into -- will come in: No, not that. In department store employment, which is estimated to fall by 159,000 jobs to a total of 1,398,000, or a loss of 10.2 percent.

The third highest percentage hit, however, is to come from newspaper publishing, which is estimated to lose 24.8 percent of its jobs over the period, falling to 245,000 jobs from 326,000. (What's worse? "Cut and sew apparel manufacturing" and "semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing.")

In 1996, newspaper industry employment was 442,000 -- meaning that the estimate is for the loss of nearly half the jobs over a 22-year period. In 2005, however, we were down to 370,000 jobs. How many people have lost their jobs in 2009? Depending on where you were during the year, somewhere between 8,000 and 15,000.

Let's say it's the worse figure. That means a loss of, what, 66,000 jobs over the next eight years. Or, about 8,000 per year. In other words, every year for the next eight years would be basically like this year.

This sort of stuff is beyond me, but -- every year for the next eight years like this one?

Thank heavens, E&P is still with us, at least through December. It reacts by quoting analyst John Morton:

"I suspect what has happened in recent years has a big influence on how they predict the future. I don't know how they base those predictions. It is an unknown. A lot of it is going to depend on how the newspaper industry comes out of the recession and how successful they are in translating their business onto the Internet. One thing that would be supportive of newspaper employment is that 70% of daily newspapers have circulation under 50,000. Those kinds of newspapers have suffered far less than big city papers have. Going forward, they will suffer less."

And Poynter's Rick Edmonds:

"That is consistent with what has been happening the past three years. But I don't think the next three years will be as bad."

So what's the truth. Is it the labor statistic? Is it, well, maybe this:

"What are publishers' expectations for 2010? Not as bad as one would think according to an outlook report from Kubas Consultants that polled 500 newspapers executives in November to get their thoughts on future advertising and strategic initiatives.

"Ed Strapagiel, executive vice president of Kubas and author of the report, ventures that 2010 might be the year of the bottom. Don't expect newspapers to be turning in major positive ad growth results, though. From quarter to quarter things are anticipated to improve or 'decline less quickly.'

"'Newspaper executives and managers are significantly less pessimistic than a year ago,' Strapagiel wrote.

One of the more surprising finds to come out of the survey is that many respondents said they don't expect to outsource ad sales or printing next year. Nor do they anticipate upgrading the presses or cutting frequency.

Remarkably, one in four respondents said they plan to start a specialty, niche or lifestyle product. That said publishers intend on tightening operating budgets next year.

'Things won't get much better, but they won't get much worse either,' Strapagiel wrote. 'If the same trend continues, we could see positive growth in 2011.'"

This would indicate that publishers see a year of somewhat consolidating where they are now, and looking for areas to make additional money while maintaining their current operations. In other words, fighting back.

It will be hard to do that if one has to cut 8,000 jobs from the industry. Moving semiconductor manufacturing overseas is probably much more predictable than the volatile information business.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects from current trends. As this blog has said from day one, current trends never continue indefinitely.

It's the Summer

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.

Where It's Not At

This month I was on a panel at Temple University on finding journalism jobs. The moderator started things by asking where the students got their news -- well, actually he said something like, "You get your news online, don't you?" No student is going to contest that, given that introduction. But where did they get their news? CNN. MSNBC. BBC. New York Times.

Not sources that provide a lot of news about Temple University or Philadelphia. But then, "news" means the front pages of the New York Times until proven otherwise. Somali pirates, presidential dogs, economic crises. Robert Picard, in his perceptive looks at the actual economic situation of the news business, would be willing to pay for this sort of news, but decries what is actually offered. I can just imagine what those Temple students, let alone Picard, will do with this story on today's front page of my county daily. "Potato Yields Image of Cross" may not make it to the BBC. Most longtime journalists would tell you that this story of God's apparently placing a sign inside a potato to restore a beleaguered woman's faith will be the best-read thing in today's paper. Will it? If the paper had a most-read or most-e-mailed ... but even then, do we know if it was the most-read thing in the paper, which has a different readership than the paper online? What I do know is that most journalists would find this story probably one step away from the NBC ad on the front of the Los Angeles Times. Both assault their dignity.

I don't think I can gracefully segue from that to Martin Langeveld's analysis of online newspaper readership, so I won't. Langeveld is a sober-minded proponent of online journalism; he sees a future and pronounces it good, but not heavenly. I'm not sure I follow every bit of his analysis or agree with it down to the last jot and tittle, but the headline -- "Print is still king: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online" -- tucks in nicely with the recent U.S. and Canadian statistics, quoted here earlier, showing that the online-only audience for newspapers was about 4 percent in each nation (2 percent in Australia), with an additional percentage of, oh, 10 to 20 percent, depending on the market, who read the print paper and also used the online version of it -- for updates, for e-mailing stories, for reading at work stories they didn't have time to read at home, whatever.

Langeveld's analysis does not turn him back to print as the answer, of course; he's been calling for an online-led news operation with a print product 2 or 3 days a week, and one analysis is not going to change his mind. And he makes a case for why he should not -- given the changes in advertising, as he sadly notes, "Not only is online revenue alone insufficient to sustain news operations, but the print operations of our larger newspapers, having lost most monopoly pricing power, are not sustainable either, recession or no recession."

(By the way -- another graceless segue here -- Langeveld, in a response to postings, says: "I’ll continue to disagree with those who say in effect, 'I don’t see any newspapers being read by two or more people, therefore it doesn’t happen.'" His conclusion is based on Scarborough data and points out a vital difference between print and online readership, one that any editor who has re-sectionalized the paper in recent months knows well and one that shows the "the world is me" myopia that afflicts many people online. Online readership is one person at the computer. Much of print readership is the husband and wife, or other domestic partners, sharing the paper. So, yes, in many cases two people read each copy of the paper. They live together. Two people rarely read a Web page together. Go back to your oar, solitary man.)

But now we do segue back to Picard, who, in discussing Twitter, notes: "Journalists and technology writers are enamored with communications technology and tend to portray successful technologies as representing large-scale trends. We are regularly presented with news stories and promotional materials about the rise of new technologies and about how their uses create social trends that are significantly altering society. ... The impression given by coverage is that anyone who doesn’t have an iPhone or Blackberry and anyone who doesn’t Twitter is out of touch with the mainstream and being left out of modern society. ... iPhones represents about 1 percent of mobile phone users. The number of Twitter users is currently around 1 million, representing only about 3 tenths of 1 percent of the US population." (That number may now be higher as Twitter has its CB Radio moment.)

This is 2009. Comparing online to TV is probably a fool's game, but I'm a fool. TV first started really emerging in 1946. (Think of this as newspapers trying to use channels on America Online.) My home town, one of America's 25 largest cities at the time, got television in 1949. (Nando Times and Hot Cocoa.) Uncle Miltie premiered in 1948; to quote Wikipedia, "the number of TV sets sold during Berle's run on the show was said to have grown from 500,000 his first year on the tube to over 30 million when the show ended in 1956." (Oh, the middle of this is, what, Real Cities?) In terms of comparing the growth of online and TV, this is the 1959-60 season; the peacock is blooming, "Bonanza" has just come on, and kinescopes are no longer being used, though you still see them sometimes to fill time at 3 in the afternoon. Television is far, far, far from what it will become, there are three networks, no PBS, no HBO, but it is no longer a baby either. People have fully incorporated it in their lives, except in rural areas where you can't get a signal (and even then, cable is coming, having been created in 1948 in Mahanoy City, Pa.).

So here in 2009, in the online equivalent of the 1959-60 TV season (other debuts are "77 Sunset Strip," "The Donna Reed Show" and "Naked City," so we're moving out of the Paddy Chayefsky Golden Age and into the era of the three-network mass-programming model that prevailed for decades), online is arguably 3 percent of newspapers' total readership, about 4 percent of people in a week use a newspaper site online only, and in a month, the typical online user in the U.S. views 2,405 Web pages, and 166 million people, or, what, half the population of the U.S., is listed as in the "active digital medla universe."

The point is not that some plateau has been reached; comparing 3-network TV in 1960 with 400-channel TV in 2009 shows what can happen. But digital is not a startup medium with crystal sets. People have incorporated it into their lives. And the future in which U.S. newspapers were going to simply move their pre-digital reach, influence, readership and advertising online hasn't happened and isn't going to happen, now or ever. That ship has sailed, and we are in steerage, if not simply packed in the hold. Newspapers (at least the 1,300 of them that are not the New York Times or USA Today) will be a small and not particularly dynamic niche in the online universe, and when students are asked where they go to get "news," they will probably say CNN or MSNBC.

So to close, read this story by Nicholas Carlson in "Silicon Valley Insider," called "Maybe Newspapers Don't Belong Online." Carlson makes a point made here earlier -- that whatever journalists' core competency may be, "manufacturing newspapers is the newspaper companies' core competency; solving the online advertising problem is not."

And he goes back to that famous Ur-text-f0r-all-innovators, "Marketing Myopia":

"The conventional wisdom is that all media companies need to figure out how to take their business model and transform it to the web – Almost all of them have heeded the late Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt’s famous lesson of what killed the railroads: 'They thought they were in the railroad business, not the transportation business.' But after ten years of following Levitt’s advice, it’s not at all clear that the traditional media model works on the web.
There is also the possibility that the web will not be a place where content will create sources to be viable on the web. value. In fact, there’s just one unfortunate thing about Levitt’s compelling mantra about railroads and the transportation business.

"It’s wrong.

"Transportation may have been a wonderful business on rails and sea, but it has proven a dreadful business in the air. Even today, the market cap of Burlington Northern is $22 Billion; the market cap of Carnival Cruise is $14 Billion while the market cap of American Airlines is less than $1.5 Billion. The railroads may have done many things wrong, but avoiding the airline business was not one of them."

How and where can we make money?
Where is the best use of our resources?
Where are readers and advertisers willing to pay us for being there?
How do we sustain ventures that actually make money?
How do we determine where we are throwing good money after bad?
How do we focus on reality instead of overoptimising the future, while still not closing our eyes to opportunities?

These are not just the questions for newspapers. These are the questions for journalists, whether their aim is to revive their print newspapers or create successful online news sites or seek foundation support.

But we need to say that asking the question "how can we support and revitalize printed newspapers" does not simply brand you as a retrograde caveman but is in 2009 perhaps the most important question. It is not the only question. The 4 percent has its future and its own opportunities as well, but in 1959-60, "Stereo Action Unlimited" with totally separated left and right tracks was the next great thing. Some will always want the next thing and some will want to read about crosses in potatoes. Let's do something that works.

(Addendum: The always-on-point Alan Mutter notes here that newspapers' Web revenue is continuing to crater just like print. He might say that the most important question is, how can publishers come up with creative online sites that will draw ad revenue, given the secular trends against print ads? The challenge, he notes, "is for them to develop web and mobile venues that are less like newspapers and more like the interactive, viral and fun environments operated by their competitors." My own feeling is that newspaper companies, by their nature, have trouble with "viral" and are genetically predisposed against "fun," and that this might be a harder task than figuring out how to reposition print. But we would both agree, I think, that the idea of "publishing our newspapers on the Web" as the gate to the promised land is over and that the revival of the newspaper business depends on everyone recognizing this.)

Tomorrow. Not Today.

Presstime convened a panel of 10 leaders in examining the prospects of the newspaper business and asked them: How would you reinvent the print newspaper? This is truly a blue-ribbon panel: Mario Garcia, Ken Doctor, Charlotte Hall, Juan Antonio Giner, Alan Jacobson, Tim McGuire, Alan Mutter, Ken Paulson, Howard Weaver, Ted Leonsis.

It does leave out the "there's really no print future" types -- Mindy McAdams, Jeff Jarvis, etc. -- and yes, there's only one woman there; McAdams aside, that pretty much reflects the state of blogging about the future of the newspaper business, though it certainly does not reflect the present of the newspaper business. Sandy Rowe, anyone? Geneva Overholser? Is argumentative blogging simply the online version of guys sitting around the cracker barrel saying, "Now what I think is" -- or of "Pardon the Interruption" -- while the women are less interested in beating their chests? He asked, being a he.

Although the returns are not in from the Detroit Experiment, the advance reviews were not particularly good. Mutter: "Publishers should make every effort to sustain the continuity of their publication cycles, because disruptions will anger and disorient loyal readers and send a not-so-subliminal message to advertisers that it really isn’t important to be in the newspaper on a regular basis." McGuire: "Printing some days may be a viable answer, but it’s happening for all the wrong reasons. More newspapers ought to be asking where are the holes in my media market, and how can I fill them? And they should be asking if we make certain moves in this market like publishing three times a week, what are the counter moves I can expect? I am going to be stunned if a competitor does not put a Sunday-Monday sports product into Detroit." Doctor: "Dropping days altogether saves significant costs in the short run but accelerates the transition to digital—and we know there’s far less money in digital publishing at this point.... Cutting back the core product doesn’t strengthen it. It may be a necessary evil, but pitching a less-is-more approach to readers won’t fool them."

But then, asked to look at the nearly immediate future, the response seems to be contradictory. Garcia: "In some communities, the core printed product will not be around in two, five or 10 years." Jacobson: "In less than a year, there will be very few seven-day-a-week newspapers. ... In less than 10 years, no newspapers will be printed."

OK, Garcia and Jacobson are not Mutter, McGuire and Doctor. (Doctor, for his part, does envision a daily print product of the future. And it should be noted that Garcia Media and Jacobson's Brass Tacks Design are now heavily promoting their Web consulting work. They, of course, are not the only two on this panel who make a good part of their living from consulting, but they probably are aware that this is not the year to sell consultant-led print redesigns.) But if Garcia and Jacobson are right, why would it matter what happened in Detroit? It would be what is going to happen everywhere. It just happened there first. It'll happen in your town tomorrow.

The future looks wonderful when it's the future. When the future actually arrives, suddenly it looks a lot more uncertain. Maybe it's premature. Maybe we're not ready for it. Hold up, all the other balls haven't fallen into place yet. The future will be great if it all goes according to plan. I can't of course say why the reporter chose to lead the closings with Garcia's comments instead of with someone saying that there will be print newspapers, but different; except that, as with any story, no one wants to be writing the story that isn't edgy enough or anticipating what might happen or looks like you favor the status quo. She did give the last word to Hall: "It would be foolish to try to predict even two years out in our business." (Sit down for now, Mr. Jacobson. No, wait, let's go Round the Horn! 'Cause what I think is... Pass the crackers.)

Newspapers have trouble defending themselves in their news columns because reporters and editors still think it's not objective to speak positively about themselves -- that you become a homer by doing so. By talking a lot about how bad things are -- admittedly, they are bad -- you show that you are not a shill for the publisher and that you can be trusted to write honestly about anything because you have no illusions about yourself. But there are many occasions when a newspaper cannot write objectively about itself without undermining its readers' trust in it and its ongoing business. We need to get past the idea that this is some sort of act of selfless heroism, the ultimate test of objectivity -- writing a story that would radically hurt your employer and saying your employer should print it. Why in heaven's name would it? You only do this if you have an untouchable revenue stream. Oh, wait, we did. In the 1980s.

Doing a story that says "the paper was racist in the 1960s," of course, can be both objective and good for the paper. But let other media do the "newspapers are dying" stories for a while. They will. Maybe we can do "television is dying" stories to fill the void. We don't have to do "Sam Zell today announced a breathtakingly adventurous plan..." either. We can soberly report the facts, but not pile on.

At any rate, give this Presstime article a look. It's not a really upbeat story -- at the start of 2009, who would believe it if it was -- but it is part of the continuing effort of "Let's make print work in a way that is good for readers and good for the newspaper" as opposed to just saying "Print is stupid" and betting the whole farm on Web faith.

The Real Problem Isn't Paper

Over at "Reflections of a Newsosaur," Alan Mutter has been at the center of a large discussion because of his ongoing series showing that 1) newspapers can't afford to go digital-only, 2) newspapers nevertheless have failed to react to market changes over the last decades, and 3) he believes that the only solution is to start charging per article online.

In saying this, of course, he is being shot at with the usual ammunition. But the comments show that the real discussion is not in the end about whether there is a printed product called a newspaper -- or even a nonprinted product called a newspaper. What we are discussing is whether journalism as we have known it for 100 years -- the presentation of news by professional journalists, working for or with organizations whose avowed purpose (though they fall short) is to accurately, fairly and disinterestedly report on significant human activities, and done in a redacted manner that tries to at some point separate the wheat from the chaff and present the reader with the significance of it all -- is even what heavy Web users are looking for, and whether our journalistic organizations are simply holding a losing hand in trying to play their game there.

Consider these comments:

"The only way newspapers can successfully charge for content is by creating unique and valuable information."And here is the the stumbling block. Journalism doesn't give anyone the capacity to create unique information. You either stumble onto it or arrive at it in the course of your endeavors.

"Hence the situation that a biochemist with a degree in business communications is going to write a better article on a new pain reliever, and describe it in his blog which will be picked up by aggregators long before a journalist can bring himself up to speed as far as understanding the subject well enough to write about it.

"You aren't gatekeepers anymore. people don't even want a gate."

Well, leave aside for now the question of how many biochemists have degrees in business communications... You stumble onto it or arrive at it. A reporter or editor does not find it for you and point it out. This somewhat negates the entire purpose of a newsroom.

--

"Giving away their VALUABLE content for free ? Until last year, I subscribed to the WSJ, the best newspaper I ever read or hope to read. But many days I never opened it because I was saturated from reading the web before the Journal arrived at 11:30 in the mail. As good as I still think the journal is, I'd spent all the reading time I had in the early morning before I started working. The valuable content was the same but it wasn't as valuable as my time. Might as well offer me another meal right after lunch. ...

"..I choose the articles I read based on the headline or titles I see at news compendiums such as Lucianne, or Real Clear politics. When the article is behind a firewall, even requiring something as simple as a login, I hit 'back' and go elsewhere. The web is a giant smorgy and I don't have the patience or the time to read everything I even want to read, much less something that irks me to get to. I won't jump through any hoops and I know I'm not alone in this. The web is a glut of good articles and I'll try another I haven't read yet. This mitigates against the value of what you are trying to sell. There are more good articles than I'll ever find the time to read and I know that. Your 'valuable' articles arn't worth the hassle of signing up for, or paying for, not even a mill or a mite."

One realizes, of course, that this person is saying: There is so much to read, that I don't really care if it is by a team of five reporters at the Journal backed up by a string of editors, or if it is one person's opinion made up of whole cloth. I just want to read something interesting. The difference between a good article and a not-good article is whether I want to read it, not the qualifications and effort that produced it.

---
And finally:

"The fundamental idea behind the paid content model is flawed, in part because the last great hurdle that newspaper folks can't get beyond is that the 'article' model is a relic of the old business model. That's not to suggest it doesn't have value, but ... when you think about it ... the article is not a very good way to organize information on the web. An article's shelf-life is tiny, they're usually long and difficult to scan and, nine times out of ten, you have no idea if the information contained is researched and reliable on a longer scale.

"Yet we publish article after article after article ... why? Because that's the business model we know.

"Ever try to gather information about a city council by trawling a newspaper site? I have and God have mercy on your soul if you ever try. The information is thin, scattered about, and ... at most sites ... any article older than a couple weeks (car accident or mayoral profile) has been spirited away behind another fence somewhere. ...

"Newspapers piss away more information in a 24-hour news cycle than most web sites post in a calendar year. Why? Because they won't invest in codifying it into a useful, searchable form. Instead, they repurpose 'stories' that will be worthless within a day and gone -- whether relevant or not -- within two weeks, anyway. It's an absolute waste of an overwhelmingly dominant position in most markets....

"What would I do? What most (non newspaper) sites do. Offer a base free product and monetize the crap out of just about everything else. The Wall Street Journal enjoyed some success at paid subscriptions because it offers deep, online profiles of companies ... profiles that are (or at least, were) worthwhile to investors.

"Where's the depth newspapers have developed that people might pay for? ... Do you think there might be a market for a t-shirt featuring the sports page from dad's state championship. Maybe a mug with grandma and grandpa's wedding announcement?

"Why isn't the business staff at major papers cranking out e-books detailing the market status of different sectors, ready to be downloaded at $5 a pop? Why haven't the entertainment staffs doing e-book biographies of local musicians ... or actors ... or whatever? Podcasts of interviews with local heroes and stars available for "upgraded" members?

"Not easy ... it'll take a huge investment (cash, not just stretching out already beleaguered staffers' time a little bit more) and patience, but a model could be built that ... along with targeted advertising and niche sites (general interest is dead, folks) should be able to sustain a nice operation, indefinitely.Will it be the same? No .... but is that such a bad thing, really?"

---

Television news wandered around for two decades before it realized that people weren't looking to have a newspaper-structured story read to them, with visuals in the way that photos illustrate a newspaper story. They were looking for visual information with narration.

Newspapers have not yet come to terms with their fundamental problem on the Internet: Publishing on the Internet is not the same as replacing film with digital storage in a camera. Take the film away and you have allowed the user to take 320 pictures at the wedding instead of 24 -- but they are still pictures. The picture is the product.

Newspapers thought that the Internet was going to be simply an endless roll of newsprint without ink and trucking costs, but they would still have their product. It's not. It's a completely different product for the end user than a newspaper; one might say it is a completely different environment than the one of the physical reality in which newspapers exist. As such, what newsrooms are set up to do -- have a staff to write, edit and present news stories -- is not what the heavy user of the Web is looking for.

If they don't value what newspapers do, why would they pay for it, in print or on the Web? They didn't abandon newspapers because they were printed. They abandoned newspapers because they are no longer interested in what we have known as news -- a mediated news product, a snapshot in time.

I don't think that newspapers could ever create a working business model off trying to satisfy such customers, but if they tried to, they would have to in essense shut down their current operations, probably fire most of their remaining people (not for economic reasons but because what they do and are trained to do is to cover the news and create stories), bring on people with a completely different orientation, market themselves as an entirely different organization -- which, let's be honest, they are not going to do, any more than General Motors or Macy's or Pfizer is going to do.

Thus the future of newspapers depends upon identifying and serving those people who want the service that a newspaper and its newsroom and advertising can provide, and forgetting about trying to satisfy the people who are quite glad to take the odd scrap that falls off the table free but who do not have enough interest in the newspaper, its newsroom, its advertising and its purpose -- to convene a physical community, to present a public agenda, to serve as a spotlight and a conscience -- to ever pay one bloody cent for what it does. Those people will try to convince you that they, and only they, are the future; but why should that be so any more than that traditional newspaper readers would be the future? They just have the megaphone of the Web, and apparently a lot of time.

If you mainly exist in the endless, nontemporal world of the Internet, you simply will not have any use for a newspaper, glued as it is to location and time. You might be interested in an occasional news story, but not to where you would actually pay anyone to write it (or read advertising that paid the bills), because you might be just as interested in an Australian ophthalmologist's four paragraphs on the single tax. Trying to save daily journalism by appealing to them is like trying to save the sugar business by appealing to diabetics.

Sic Semper

The problem with blogging is that it becomes permanent. You think, will I be disappointing my one consistent reader? Will I cease to exist? If I do not have a voice in the electronic conversation, do I even matter anymore?

It ends up not being a matter of whether anyone pays attention or whether you have anything to say. You end up scared that without it you will simply be -- well, nobody.

Isn't this the genius of social networking? You exist for others to see you. Because I did not know if anyone was paying attention, I figured people were paying attention. Occasionally a reader engaged in conversation, but mostly it was: Here's what I think. I did not need an excuse. I could simply tell anyone what I thought, because I wanted to. There was no need for a nut graf.
---

I thought I knew a good bit about the history of newspapers, and the history of the department-store business, and it might be entertaining to write about how they were joined at the hip. And I thought that a lot being said about the Web was like tracts for the Harmony Society in the 1800s; through this, we will free humanity from shackles and change its nature. And I thought that people who believed in the Web were more apt to write on the Web than print people were. And I felt that Americans, who pay little attention to the rest of the world, would be unaware of what print newspapers were doing to succeed in other countries. And I just found Jeff Jarvis annoying.

And I thought that maybe I could give someone else's voice a little more strength, and at least the argument could be more balanced, and possibly more courteous. I read the blogs of many online journalism prophets and wondered how they kept from exploding from their own disdain for the larger fraction of humanity that didn't get it. And so I wrote, as a person who loves print newspapers, who wanted them to have a future. No matter what you think, on the Web there's someone like you. You need never feel alone. And feeling alone is feeling disempowered. There were others. So I hoped, and I wrote.
---

And then, like many a blogger before me, I am sure, I fell in love with my own thoughts. I came pretty near exploding myself. I stopped thinking about clever comparisons with department stores and started thinking about how everyone else had made mistakes. But I was on a roll. I had lunch with Juan Antonio Giner. Jay Rosen trashed me. Jay Rosen took the freaking time to trash ME? Life was good.

And then came the economic collapse of 2008, and it suddenly no longer mattered what the future might have been or what had happened in the past. The present was here like the water at Johnstown, and it was sweeping away anything that it encountered that was not built like the Methodist Church, which withstood the great flood. And all you could do was figure out how you would survive in the world it left behind.
---

Ward Bushee of the San Francisco Chronicle gave a long and educational interview with KQED in which he said, the ad money is not there on the Internet and it is no longer there in print and some of the answer has to be to charge the readers more of what it actually costs, not to deliver the newspaper, but to produce the news -- both in print and online. He is hopeful for print newspapers, saying the demographic in San Francisco is suited for what they offer. Peter Osnos at the Century Foundation is among those who don't see that future, but his view of providing news lines up with Bushee's in many ways: "Reestablish the principle that news has to be paid for by someone: the consumer, the advertiser, or the distributor." And so the era of everything-free online is probably going to come to a close.

But the news from Detroit and the Gannassacre indicate to me: The towel is being thrown in on print, that malnourished cow now on its way to the stockyard. Life magazine had millions of readers when it closed in 1976 (CORRECTION: 1972, thanks). Many department stores had thousands of loyal shoppers when they closed. The cost of producing and maintaining the product exceeds what people are willing to pay for it. That is clearly the point of the Detroit cuts. So you butcher it.

At the same time, despite the opprobrium heaped on them, most leaders in the newspaper business have been loyal until now to their print products. Even Gannett. They may have been incompetent, they may have ignored what their customers wanted, or been huge disappointments to their staffs, but few were actually malign, out to purposefully destroy what they had been given. (Let us not speak ill of the dead, the recently departed Journal Register chairman.) Some have indeed damaged their businesses for the long term to maintain that wonderful product we call the newspaper. They tried poorly, but they did try. And given a few more years of graceful decline they might have figured out how to give it a real future. The financial collapse has taken that away. Now is panic. Now is the realization that the customers who love your product don't love it enough to pay the actual cost of producing it, and no one seems interested in underwriting it anymore. Well, screw them, then.
---

One thing blogging teaches you, alas, is how little you know. Newspapers and department stores, up until the 1960s, did well because many of their customers believed that institutions knew more than individuals did. Department stores didn't stop being "the first with the best" overnight; but the categories of things to be first in kept multiplying beyond every boundary, until no one could claim that title; and once the department store was no better than Old Navy, why put up with its hassles?

Newspapers and department stores have conventions they can't overcome; the newspaper, by its nature, has to make everything a story, but a "news story" worked when there was a start and an end to the news, and it has to have certain phrases ("although statistics are hard to come by, it seems clear that more and more...") to justify itself and its placement, as opposed to simply: I wanted to write about this. The Daily Beast has no such requirement. It does not speak for what it sees as the interest of its community; it creates its own community. And both it and the department store bundle together lots of items; a useful strategy when things are hard to get, a financial drag when things are overabundant.

It was when the sportswriters, after Buzz Bissinger attacked bloggers, responded by saying that unlike bloggers they had access to the coaches and athletes and could ask them questions, and many sports fans responded: "Who cares? I don't care what the coaches and athletes think. I care what other fans think of them" -- that it really struck me that the journalistic problem (as opposed to the ad problem) is that a newspaper is an institution in an individual age. A newspaper spoke to and quoted and explained the voices of authority, it was a voice of authority itself, trying to set rules under which authority could legitimately operate; and we live in a world where authority is always understood to be simply covering its own ass, the same as all the rest of us. Yes, there is still authority, but I will pick my own.

Authority is the programming directors of the networks; perhaps the 21st century role will be whoever decides what is promoted on Hulu. Between them lies the chaos of YouTube. Newspapers have no idea how to write about what appears on YouTube because there is no one person to talk to, no Fred Silverman or Grant Tinker. There is no strategy such as Appointment Television. It all just is. So newspapers write one more time about the network news shows, which they understand. They have spokesmen. Newspapers don't know how to write about Achmed the Dead Terrorist, because he isn't introduced on a press junket. Is he significant? Is he puerile? He just is. But there is no thesis and antithesis to report, so there is no story, and the world newspapers cover becomes increasingly detached from the worlds people live in. Fifty years ago, the world newspapers covered was the world most people lived in. There were fewer worlds. Gene Roberts famously said newspapers should cover stories that ooze out instead of being announced; but that was before everyone could ooze.
---

This blog has kept me up nights; it has made me obsessive; it has led me to neglect other responsibilities. I truly love few things in life: My wife, our son, my mother, my in-laws and their family; modern architecture of the 1890s through 1930s; the lore of department stores; the memories of time with people who were my friends and lovers when I was young; and print newspapers. After my wife, son and mother, newspapers take pride of place.


I consider myself a good journalist, but I love working in the newspaper business. What I wanted to do in life was to put together newspapers. I care about the placement of folio lines and lift markers. I love the nuance of a headline that conveys in four words the subtlety of a 20-inch story. I have always drooled over newspapers that did the typography of the masthead with panache and held in contempt those that clearly had just kicked something out. Let others tell stories; I would start the presses. When I held that product in my hands, whether it was the New York Times or the wonderfully named Cadillac Evening News when it was a morning newspaper, I felt: Here is what I know. Here is what I understand. Here is what I can make better. This is a weird, wonderful world, and it is what I do. Boy, am I lucky.

But I have become a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. It is time to be quieter, to write about department store history -- which I actually have original research on. To write about copy editing, probably. But to raise a voice to say that the print newspaper is not simply paper on which to publish stories, but is a product that carries its own meaning, that creates and binds a community, that gives it a history and a direction, that says that the real world is bigger than the worlds we build for ourselves? Given time and money, we could find a future for it. But time is not on its side when there is no revenue.

I have been looking at a copy of the 1976 Editor & Publisher Market Guide. It is the newspaper world that I entered nearly 35 years ago. "An Offset Newspaper With Over 25,000 Circulation!" That was in Olean, N.Y. "The Money Tree: Looking for choice pickings? Look no further than Bristol. ... Make your sale in Bristol with The Bristol Press." That in Connecticut, at a paper that will probably close next month. "Hawaii Has Many Faces... And One Advertising Buy Reaches Them All." The former Honolulu JOA. It was a great world that I was fortunate to be part of, and it is ending too soon for me. But I expect people said the same thing about vaudeville.