What is the Objective?

Objectivity, that favored newspaper theme, has been taking hit after hit. It was surprising to me when Rem Rieder of American Journalism Review sort of joined in, in his column in the Winter issue.

Rieder quotes Peter Goodman, now of the Huffington Post, saying, "It's sort of the age of the columnist... old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what's going on."

No offense to Goodman, but -- think about that for a moment. (And forget that for years, a large number of reporters have always felt, "I really should be a columnist.")

Rieder continues: "There has been something downright liberating about the emergence of so much lively, engaging, freewheeling writing. It makes the traditional straightforward story seem awfully vanilla... In the face of a Wild West world where so many outlandish charges, many of them based on absolutely nothing, are cavalierly tossed around, the old he-said, she-said approach seems bankrupt. If you are giving equal weight to truth and nonsense, you really are in the stenography business."

No offense to Rieder, but -- think about that for a moment as well.

We used to be in the "first rough draft of history" business. Now we're to be in the "we know the truth" business? Yet tons of our former readers say they've been tired of us lecturing to them what the truth is.

Rieder takes great pains to note that a news organization should not become partisan -- as Fox and MSNBC have become. But I read his use of "partisan" as meaning only identification with a political party rather than identification with a core set of beliefs, the "faction, cause, or person" of the Merriam-Webster definition, though I may well be wrong. In that sense, is there a nonpartisan truth these days? We used to think of science as nonpartisan, but global warming is partisan. Stem-cell research is partisan. Exactly how do journalists say, "This is truth and this is nonsense," when there is no societal agreement that there even is "truth" -- that some feel truth is relative and others feel truth is unchangeable? I may believe my opinion is right, but does that make it true?

OK, so this is just going back to journalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, and it makes life a lot harder for copy editors, which may be why they are in less demand. OK, it's more fun to write -- we all did it in high school, when we knew we knew the truth and the assistant principal was just a bluenose hypocrite. OK, there's no market for old-style objectivity these days. And Rieder closes by saying, "A news organization that wants a large, general audience has to steer clear of the partisanship trap. It has to ... be willing to call out those who are playing fast and loose with the facts. But it has to hold everyone and every position to the same standard." True enough, but again:

If climatologists generally agree that human-caused global warming is real and a large group of meteorologists believes that it's merely a historical fluctuation and a large group of conservatives believe that even if the climate is warming, it's just being used as a club by people who believe everyone should drive Smart cars and live in houses the size of nine tatami mats -- how do I, as the journalist, determine truth?

If I hold everyone to the same standard, no one is going to agree with me on what that standard means. So I'm left with what I believe, which if I'm a good journalist is based not just on my own prejudices but on research, interviews, and fair play -- but if I believe it's important for America to have vital urban centers and not just be a nation of suburbs, even if I accurately present the views of Joel Kotkin, I'll figure Richard Florida's interpretation is the truth. He'll get the summing-up graf at the end of my story, and Kotkin will fall into the "some disagree" section of the story. But are either of them really true? This is why journalists fall back on hypocrisy so often. We don't really know what's true, but we do know when X contradicts Y.

We all start with what we believe. We tell readers what's going on based on what we think is going on as balanced with what we are told is going on. It was easy to objectively report in the old days on break-ins and car crashes. Whether they constitute a trend or a crime spree is probably not objective and never was, but we all trusted authority a lot more back then when they said it was. (Now, we'd simply assume they were looking for clips to accompany a request for additional federal funds to combat the crime spree.) Journalists aren't omniscient. So how in the end does John Q. Journalist differ from Hannity or Olbermann? Unless they've become simply entertainers, those guys also want to tell people what they think is going on, truth instead of nonsense. You can't go down this road without being on the same road, unless you simply assume that everyone who thinks differently than you is simply a windbag propagandist peddling things they know aren't true. And then, you have taken fairness out of your quiver as well.

I'm not sure there ever was "objectivity" -- there's nothing new about that thought, of course. What there was was, at some point, a sense that trustworthy authority could settle it, a real meaning to "officials and experts agree." Journalism was once part of that authority. And isn't that what the tea partiers look for in the Constitution, and that the Christian right looks for in the Bible -- an answer that can be said to be ultimately true? So yes, Rem, objectivity is probably dead and journalists have to take another road. But we can't call it "truth" without walking into the traps our opponents lay. Maybe it's just "what we think is right."

When 10 is Really 13

December was stressful enough without blogging, tweeting, facebooking -- but again back to business.

One of my three local papers, in its Entertainment tab for the New Year's weekend, picked up a USA Today story on the 10 best movies of the year. As it ran in USA, critic Claudia Puig also included three honorable mentions, running them under the subhead "Noteworthy runners-up."

Fine and dandy, except by the time it was moved into the local paper's entertainment section, the "Runners-up" line had disappeared. So the headline said "10 best movies," the lead said "10 best movies," and there were 13 best movies with no clear explanation.

Honestly, we expect people to pay for this? As Frank Drebin might say, trust us, we know what we're doing?

The thing is, you can't blame this on the collapse of copy editing in the last few years. For most of the time I have lived in South Jersey, the other local paper had a policy of knocking datelines off the "people in the news" items -- but then either no one thought to, or thought they had time to, write the location back into the text, so items would always say "here" and you had no idea where "here" was.

I find it amusing when newspapers write about how they're going to make all these cutbacks but "the really big stories, the projects and major investigations, will still get multiple layers of editing." That's great, but that's not what readers read every day. It reflects the newspaper's sense of what it considers important, but doesn't speak to the reader's experience of the newspaper. A reader may not know firsthand anything that contradicts your six-months-in-the-making, four-part series. The reader knows that 10 best movies should have 10 items. And this has nothing to do with print -- stupidity on any platform is stupidity.

Mistakes will happen, and this is just a mistake. But newspapers are not going to succeed any better on iPads if they continue to take the approach that their job is to present professionally to the reader the one or two things they really cared about that day, and then a bunch of stuff to fill up the space. There needs to be a culture of "we care about what we do," not a culture of "we care about what we care about."

Department Store Building of the ... Book

One of the greatest (and most self-conscious) department stores ever, and still operating as a Macy's -- John Wanamaker Philadelphia, at 13th and Market Streets, in the center of this photo. I could tell you about it, but I'd rather you buy Michael J. Lisicky's second department-store book, "Wanamaker's -- Meet Me at the Eagle."

I had the pleasure of listening to Michael on Saturday at one of his Philadelphia appearances and he is as knowledgeable a person on department stores as you will find. His day job? He's a symphony musician. Part of the tale of his first book, on Hutzler Brothers Company in Baltimore, is how he got from point A to point B. Plus he is the designated "answer man" on Jan Whitaker's department store blog, which is linked to over at the left.

If you're interested in department store history, buy his books.

-- Just as an aside: It may be that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is completely happy with WikiLeaks and its release of State Department memos. It may be that he's not. Just in terms of the name, though, it shows again what happens when you create a shiny new car and don't think of what happens when Mayhem jumps up and down above it yelling "Shaky, shaky." The fact that Ward Cunningham used a Hawaiian word for "fast" to create a software program allowing for easy universal updating of text is probably not going to mean much to John Q. Public, who could be perhaps not forgiven but possibly understood if he assumed that Wikipedia somehow was involved in a cabal to bring down world diplomacy and attack America's presumed interests. That doesn't make it more correct or more right than any other stereotyping. (Wonder what people would think today of the old Hollywood hotspot the Garden of Allah?) It is, though, why utopianism never succeeds, although it does have successes along the way while also causing damage. John Q. is not a utopian. John Q. is suspicious, not terribly well informed, and interested in self-preservation above all else.

I haven't forgiven Editor and Publisher for firing Mark Fitzgerald and his staff, but I will support its editorial in the December issue while acknowledging it shows the divide. When the Duncan McIntosh Co. bought E&P after its brief closure, it said it wanted a magazine devoted to the business side of newspapers as opposed to being another editorial review. Its editorial is consistent with that, attacking "self-absorbed 'experts' who most likely have never sold advertising in a depressed economy, negotiated contracts with labor unions, kept pace with evolving technology, or planned for fluctuating newsprint prices -- all the while meeting payroll..." But that is the journalistic dream of the Internet -- where journalism would exist without people worrying about selling advertising, negotiating contracts, etc. Where journalism would be a profession without the barnacles of the newspaper and magazine businesses. Where the individual journalism would never have to compromise because of press deadlines or length restrictions or presumed audience interest. Where we could have a world where nothing would ever be behind the curtain. Where the individual journalist would be as free as WikiLeaks to determine what was in the public good, and present it for the edification of the public.

Fine. But when that curtain comes down, watch out for John Q's reaction.

More About Strawbridge

As noted two posts ago, Philadelphia's Strawbridge & Clothier was one of America's most successful, innovative, and responsive department stores, and remained so under family ownership for more than 130 years. But eventually the cost of staying competitive in the field -- and in the discount field as well with its Clover division -- got too big, and the family sold out. (Beyond my expertise is how the cost of keeping up with vast national chains like Federated and May requires more capital than smaller companies could access based on their lesser cash flow.)

Like any mature business, Strawbridge faced challenges to its continuance every year. A couple are similar to the challenges newspapers have faced and are facing. Strawbridge's responses worked for a while, and while the company disappeared, many of its locations still are successful department stores under the Macy's name, so it's not that the business model of the store was bad, just the business model of the company.

As Alfred Lief notes in "Family Business," after World War II price competition increased, "resulting from improved production in many lines. Theoretically, lower levels were good for business because they were good for the public, ushering in better values; and from a financial standpoint it could mean lower capital requirements." This isn't quite the disruptive change of the Internet, but it touches on the same issue. Cheaper costs should be good for business because they allow you to lower your price and spend less on capital, so for a newspaper the need to not buy presses or paper should be good for it and its customers. "But too much of a good thing was always unhealthy." Get to a point where there's too much competition with too little capital investment needed, and established business founders. It can do nothing else. It can't make the past go away.

More important was that sales volume at the giant downtown store -- which had been expanded in the 1930s to handle its tremendous and growing business -- was now falling off. (Read: The massive pressrooms built during the height of classified and insert growth in the 1990s.) Disruptive change -- the postwar suburban push -- had made people less inclined to take a longer drive or train trip to go shopping. Yes, Strawbridge and Wanamakers might have better merchandise than was found at E.J. Korvette or Shoppers Fair -- but was it that much better to make the trip worthwhile, except for special occasions such as Christmas shopping or buying a party dress? Sort of like only buying a newspaper when your team wins the World Series. But while you can run a bridal shop on special occasions, you can't run a department store.

So Strawbridge went to the suburbs, opening stores throughout the Philadelphia area. This is somewhat the same as metro newspapers' response to suburbanization -- creating Neighbors sections. It was different in that Neighbors was more of a boutique than a branch. But the point was usually the same -- to try to follow one's customers' out to the suburbs and keep them from going to suburban rivals there.

Because department stores were department stores, those rivals were seen as -- other department stores. While department stores recognized that their customers increasingly were going to Kmart, they apparently thought it was only because a major department store wasn't close enough. Thus, when Strawbridge's was the motive force behind opening Cherry Hill Mall in 1962 as the prototype (Correction: Off by one -- see comments) for all of today's enclosed malls, the aim was to not re-create downtown Philadelphia with its (now down to) four department stores. As Lied writes, Strawbridge "proposed Bambergers of Newark as an acceptable neighbor... This development prompted Wanamakers and Gimbels to make a defensive move. They paired off the next year in a shopping center at Moorestown, New Jersey, about five miles east."

In the short run, this was fine, and Cherry Hill -- which eventually grew to include a Penney's as well -- was one of the marvels of the age and remains one of the East Coast's most important shopping destinations, with a Crate & Barrel, a Nordstrom, and a Container Store joining Macy's and Penney's. While it and similar stores in Springfield, King of Prussia, and elsewhere kept Strawbridge's going, they didn't address the discounter problem. This Strawbridge did, of course, with the Clover division, just as the Dayton Co. of Minneapolis did with Target. Eventually, of course, Dayton Hudson sold off its department stores and just kept Target. Would Strawbridge's have eventually just become Clover? Probably not, because it didn't have the resources to compete with national companies in either venue.

Strawbridge's recognized what was happening, as noted by these sentences bringing to mind the multiplatform moves (internal and external) of newspapers: "The future business of Strawbridge & Clothier would be carried on and directed in mutiple locations. In order to be able to run a multi-store operation, the organization would have to be restructured." In the short run, Strawbridge's did well. In the long run, though, its days were numbered.

What did Strawbridge's in was that it was competing with national chains (May Co., Federated, and Macy's at the end in department stores, Walmart and Target in discounters) that could outdo it when size and breadth were the issue, and competing with an incredible multiplicity of small stores that could outdo it in the personal service it once offered but could no longer afford because it was having to cut costs to compete with the national chains.

But could it have transformed itself into a surviving boutique organization? Doubtful. The "Strawbridge" name stood for a classy department store, just as the same of, say, the Omaha World-Herald stands for a newspaper. To make it stand for a small jewelry boutique -- doubtful. Loyalists would be miffed, and jewelry buyers would not care. They might still totally go to Jared.

So the problem for newspapers may be that in the end, there's not much you can do if your world falls apart. That's less hopeful than I usually try to be, but it wasn't bad management or resisting the customers that put an end to Strawbridge & Clothier. Strawbridge just didn't fit into the world anymore. That doesn't mean that there still aren't department stores, just as changes in communication don't mean that there won't be newspapers. But perhaps they will be print editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for those who are willing to pay for them -- produced in ways that spread the overhead around nationally -- and a bunch of weeklies or local replacements as news boutiques, with the Internet as Walmart. The thing is that in the end, that doesn't matter that much for the consumer, who may even be happier with the arrangement. Whom it matters for, other than the people who lose their jobs, is those who remember how great it was to shop at a store like Strawbridge & Clothier, and feel a loss in their lives.

Trouble

Great song by Coldplay, of course. But to the point -- some brief notes before getting back to Strawbridge's:

Best Buy plans to cut back its newspaper spend. If that money was going to online, it'd be one thing. But Best Buy, the ultimate mass retailer, is going to use it on something it considers more effective and mass. Our old friend television. Yes, this is replaying the late 1980s. Either Best Buy is total idiots, or they're saying something about the utility of the Long Tail Internet for true mass marketers.

Their problem? Metro newspapers no longer deliver their mass audience. (The Macons and Rockfords of the world still do in their markets.) Best Buy has been among the newspaper business' best customers and also among those who have said to newspapers, look, get it together. "We're seeing a shift back to traditional media. And TV still has a gigantic reach," said the head of the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, who doubtless wants there to be a shift back to traditional media but says that the ROI on digital -- and remember how cheap digital ads are -- isn't showing up. That switch won't include newspapers as long as they appear to be a medium only read by people 75 and older, which will happen as long as newspapers say "We don't believe anyone under 75 will ever read our newspapers." If I were 25, I wouldn't want to read an old-folks medium even if I thought I might want to.

Only the newspaper business would find itself owning the Associated Press, as it does, and being told that the AP was losing money on serving newspapers and was going to remedy that eventually. Again, that's not on serving "print" newspapers. That's serving newspaper clients and their online sites. First-rate news, third-rate businesses.

And to get back to big-box stores, news from retailing on the front page of the New York Times: Not quite so big box stores, the Old Navy size, are downsizing and finding, perhaps to their surprise, that more people, not fewer, are coming into smaller stores. Now, this story has some weaknesses in the classic Times manner -- the lead promises more than is delivered, although by the end all the "we can't actually say this"es have all been said. The stores may be paying rent on the space they're not using, but that doesn't mean costs don't go down -- you're not having to have enough clerks to watch a larger room for theft and set up the displays, or straighten the merchandise, or put up signage. But it's in keeping with a problem department stores (and newspapers) have had for years: People have to be trained in how to use them efficiently.

A newspaper is a wonderful agglomeration of content even in the Internet age -- but you have to know how to use it (this is here, this is presented this way...) and be willing to spend the time using it exclusively. In department store terms, there's a wonderful selection of kitchen appliances when you want an iron, but you have to be willing to walk past perfumes and jewelry, take the escalator, turn around, and go past luggage. Then you have to find your way out, which is often harder.

In the Google era, your experience -- it's not the reality, there's a lot more starting and stopping and blind alleys than you realize, but you can always be doing something else at the same time -- seems to go from: I want appliances. Search for appliances. Find appliances. Having done so, walking into even an appliance store to look for an iron seems interminably long. I don't want no steenking gadgets. What I really want is: An iron store! I drive up to Iron World, walk in, and there are irons. No confusion. No need to ask the clerk, "Where are the irons," and have the clerk look at me with contempt as she says, "Behind you." I feel like I have not wasted my time, even if I spent 10 minutes more in Iron World than I would have in Appliance City.

As a person with Bloomingdale's notes, these are "stores that have been stripped of the distractions and temptations of unwanted merchandise." That sounds like the New Frugality, and it's certainly the New Inventory, but it also speaks of a change in shopper mentality -- if everything in the world is available online, why do I want to go to a store that has some of everything in the world when I am only there for a specific niche -- as with H&M and Zara, not even a specific product, but a specific gestalt? If I want everything in the world, I'll go online. But most of the time, I don't really want everything in the world. In that case, bricks and mortar works just fine. (Note to Long Tail enthusiasts: Yes, categories such as books suffer more than Iron World, because the number of irons is somewhat limited, whereas the number of books appears to be infinite. The number of blouses is infinite, but the number of blouses with H&M cred is not.)

As noted here before, it's not that the department store and newspaper failed to have enough content. They tried their darndest. It's that the amount of content available in the world rapidly exploded far beyond their ability to have a representative sample of Everything for Everyone. So you've got to figure out what your niche is -- who your customers are and can be, as opposed to who your customers used to be or who you wish they still were -- and then serve them to your profit, with your pipeline, and not worry so much about people who are never going to be your customers. And your pipeline can be Anything You Want It to Be.

And as Best Buy shows, your customers may not be living all their lives online at all. Newspapers, though, are still thinking that somehow they can create, online now, some product or combination of products that will still Grab Everyone in the Market. As Best Buy also shows, newspapers' problem is that that product was introduced after World War II and is ultimately responsible for their current fate far more than broadband access.

I'd just ask Best Buy, what can we do that works for you, and not worry so much if we can get the same product to work for Joe's Vinyl Record World that wants to reach 3,000 Long Tail vinyl fanatics. Let him be a customer of VinylLives.com and never have anything to do with a newspaper. But that's not how newspapers think traditionally -- there's local money on the table! We must try to grab it all, because in the past we could! We will find The One Answer! (Alas, he's in Istanbul now.) If One Answer had worked, newspapers would not have started to decline once they were down to one title per market. (Wonder what would have happened to TV from the 1960s to 1980s if it had been reduced to one station per city, as advertisers might have seen as a efficient buy back then? Bless those government licenses. It goes in line with the theory that American religiosity stems not from the Puritan tradition but from the history of competition among churches, which was nonexistent in most nations.)

None of this looks good for newspapers whether they have printing presses or not. What's a printie to do? Talk about copy editing's obscure points, as at my entry here on the American Copy Editors Society's board notes.

Department Store Building of the ...

History gives us enough lessons of how you can do most things right and still disappear. Here in Philadelphia, we had such a department store, and it's not the one people who just know stores by reputation might think of.

Strawbridge & Clothier did not have the national panache of John Wanamaker for a number of reasons: 1) Wanamaker helped create the modern department store in terms of size and advertising, while also serving as postmaster; 2) the S&C main store didn't have the Eagle and the pipe organ and wasn't dedicated by a sitting president of the United States; 3) the Strawbridge main store was located at Eighth and Market Streets, where two of the city's mass-market department stores, Gimbels and Lits, also were; 4) Strawbridge throughout its life was a Quaker-run company, not prone to the Grand Gesture.

But as the history of Strawbridge (as recounted in "Family Business" by Alfred Lief, one of the essential histories of department stores) from the 1920s onward is one of constantly seeing the horizon and trying to reach it. Early moves such as the Clover Days sales and establishing a book department by buying the retail store of publisher J.B. Lippincott were just part of it.

Before the Depression, department stores may have operated in more than one downtown (such as Pomeroy's in Pennsylvania), but branch stores, outside of operations in resort hotels, were basically confined to some of the New York stores, Marshall Field's in Chicago, and Bullock's in Los Angeles. Strawbridge decided to join this group in 1929 by opening a store at Suburban Square, one of the first suburban shopping developments, on the Main Line. It followed up immediately with a store just north of Jenkintown, which -- like Bullock's Wilshire -- recognized that future customers would largely be arriving by car and provided, for the time, adequate parking.

After World War II, Strawbridge saw the downtown store's sales volume declining as 15 years of depression and war shifted into the suburban boom of modern houses for new families. It reacted aggressively, locating branches wherever it saw a combination of an established middle-class hub and new development nearby. After opening freestanding branches, it moved into South Jersey with the first truly "enclosed mall" shopping center, the prototype for a genre that has taken over the world. It saw the growth of discounters and established the Clover division. Recognizing the drain its massive downtown store was becoming, it worked with city officials to try to revitalize Market Street and made sure the store was attached to the new downtown mall. It continually tried to find the line between being a fashion store and a store for everyone.

And yet, after the company fought off a hostile takeover bid in 1986 and incurred a loss in 1995 after a failed bid to buy Wanamakers, the Strawbridge and Clothier families -- which still ran the business after 145 years -- decided it was in the best interest of the shareholders to get out, selling to May Company. The business was no longer profitable, and it was time to fold before the value of the goodwill started to evaporate. May Company kept the name Strawbridge's until the Great Macyization.

A second post will look at, as before, the parallels between the department store and newspaper businesses. Let one quote suffice for now. In 1941 business had been bad for years and the family was split about what to do. J. Clayton Strawbridge opposed the recapitalization plan presented by president Herbert Tily. In response, Frederick Strawbridge, son of cofounder Justus Strawbridge, said to Clayton, as Lief quotes:

"It is a very healthy thing to bring this out in the open, but rather presumptive for thee to tell older men about the goodwill of the business."

Thus sayeth the aged Quaker, his hand still on the tiller in a business that was ahead of nearly all of its rivals locally and nationally in recognizing changes in consumer behavior, but saying, await thy turn, what knowest thou? More to come soon.

In the picture above, the main Strawbridge store is both the large building and the smaller one to its left. Strawbridge downtown, which was completely rebuilt in the 1930s, may have been the last downtown department store built in the old style (with windows); or that might have been Loveman's in Birmingham or some store I've never seen, but those that followed or were contemporaneous, such as Cain-Sloan in Nashville or Herpolsheimer's in Grand Rapids, were clearly from the modern playbook. The little building to the left was part of the old Strawbridge store and was briefly the entire main store while the old building at Eighth and Market was torn down and replaced with what's seen above.

Gee, It's Been a Long Time

Last post was in late September. Gosh.

Been learning how to use Twitter. Not really succeeding.

Off researching department stores in Baltimore. Going to the ACES board meeting. Being ACES secretary, which takes more work than being just an ACES board member.

Then there was the little matter of the ownership handover at my paper. I survived. Not everyone did, alas, but the bloodletting was minimal, for which I am thankful. I was going to quote from an issue of Editor and Publisher, but then they fired Mark Fitzgerald and his staff so that seemed irrelevant. No link for you guys.

And, probably most important, my addiction to Google Street View. I'm so angry at them for the data collection snafu, because -- to be really preachy here -- seeing how and where people in other countries actually live, as opposed to the tourist-oriented districts everyone knows, has made me feel more that it is one world than anything in recent years.

But a month and a half? I've probably lost all my readers, and preachiness like the above will lose the rest. Well, we'll just keep on plugging.

Let's get grounded again with News & Tech's Chuck Moozakis:

"When it comes to contradictions in terms, the words 'logic' and 'online' rank right up there with the best of them. Too often, objective, critical reasoning is dulled by the lure of the online siren.... Online has its place, heaven knows.... But the Web is a dangerous place when it comes to sustainable business." He's talking about the Toronto Globe and Mail's decision, noted in this New York Times story, to put money into better paper and reproduction:

"For Globe (Sorry, I wrote "Glove" earlier -- ds) and Mail Publisher Philip Crawley... investing in online, while important, pales in comparison to pouring resources into the paper's most vital component: the print edition."

Part of the problem is not in our Stars, or Timeses, but in ourselves. Chuck quotes from another Times story, about the mess at Tribune Co.:

"But even in 2010, when a print product is viewed as a quaint artifact of a bygone age..."

By whom, exactly? Not saying that it isn't by many. But one of the largest groups saying that is -- people who get their living from the sale of advertising in print newspapers. Yes, it's us journalists.

Not by the 2 out of 3 who, according to this poll, prefer print over digital. The report on the study is flawed and it looks to indicate that "paper" media has a lot in this survey to do with "printing out things at the office." But still. And then there was another Harris poll, which while highlighting that most Americans think "traditional media as we know it will not exist in 10 years" -- which is vague enough to cover any possibility -- also noted that 76 percent of 18-34s said "There will always be a need for newspapers in print." Admittedly, maybe they won't buy them. When I was 20 I thought there would always be Al Martino records, even though I wouldn't touch them myself.

I have no idea what people write in any country except America about newspapers and their problems -- except for Roy Greenslade in England. It's accurate to point out the vast fall in circulation and profitability. But I do know that like Barack Obama, those of us who see a future in print often have problem getting the point across, perhaps for the same reason: We see a nuanced future involving many platforms, whereas saying "Print Is Dead" is definitive, easy to understand, and makes you feel good about seeing the truth and contemptuous of those who don't.

But I can't think out if the sort of throat-clearing lines such as David Carr's quoted above come from this or that.

This: One becomes a journalist in part to show that one's hip, knowledgeable, not some stick in the Sandusky or Sidney or St. Cloud mud; so if those who "see the future" say, "Print's a dinosaur just like an Oldsmobile," I gotta let people know that I'm hangin' with them and not with those old guys. (As a baby boomer who went through many years in the 1970s of being an arrogant young ass who thought anyone over 35 who didn't agree with me knew absolutely nothing, I'm amused by the postings of so many young techies who are clearly just another generation of arrogant young asses who think anyone over 35 who doesn't agree with them knows absolutely nothing. Example: The comments on this report on our new CEO's plans.)

That: One is genuflecting in the direction of the future but also saying, "But of course, in my heart, I wish it were another way." So, print is like a scenic Victorian ruin, and wistfully accepting its departure allows one to think oneself superior even while bowing before the more denigrated future.

Only Connect

New York University professor and news-future pundit Jay Rosen, as noted before, once said of something I had posted, in essence: WTF? You got it all wrong. And I had indeed gotten a good bit of it wrong. I always associated Jay with the early days of civic journalism, which seemed like sort of a Goo-Goo exercise, to bring people together in a theoretical agora and have them high-mindedly discuss civic problems and work toward agendas – the sort of poli-sci charette that the high minded, be they Barack Obama, Michael Dukakis, Adrian Fenty, think John Q. Citizen really wants.

So I would not have guessed that, when asked in an Economist interview to name news sources he believes are doing it right, he would have listed:

“'Advertising Age. Gawker. Wired. Voice of San Diego. The New Yorker. The Economist. (Disclosure: You're The Economist!) Rachel Maddow. Frontline. The New York Times. West Seattle Blog. Texas Tribune (Disclosure: I'm an advisor there). 'To the Point' with Warren Olney. The Atlantic. 'This American Life.' The Guardian. Jon Stewart.'”

Yeah, it's the liberal media. But the way in which Jon Stewart, Ira Glass, Rachel Maddow, etc. present news is not the classic, dispassionate, objective-view-of-the-world manner that in my mind, a typical Good Government type would crave.

Jay goes on:

“I think it does take a certain detachment from your own preferences and assumptions to be a good reporter. The difficulty is that neutrality has its limits. Taken too far, it undermines the very project in which a serious journalist is engaged. … The American press does not know what to do when neutrality, objectivity, balance and ‘report both sides’ reach their natural limits. And so journalists tend to deny that there are such limits. But with this denial they've violated the code of the truth-teller because these limits are real. See the problem?. ... When journalists get attacked from the left and the right, they take it as confirmation that they're doing something right, when they could be doing everything wrong.”

Which gets back to what has become a thesis of “TTPT” – that newspapers did not fall from favor because they are printed, but because they became boring to their readers – which, then added to the fact that print is relatively boring compared with online, became a death sentence. A point of civic journalism was that journalists had become detached from the communities they covered; it was an effort to reconnect journalists with the public, and less with Reliable Sources. But the point of a Reliable Source was not just that he was a source; it was that he understood the rules you were playing by and played by them as well. The public was less in love with those rules than we were.

OK, this seems really obvious, but it also concerns why newspapers have been unable to save themselves. It’s not just because someone has to press the red button on a Goss Metroliner every night. It's because their entire worldview has been based on preserving and enhancing a professional technique that vast number of their readers found offputting, like putting out a car without upholstered seats.

Other voices:
INMA’s Earl Wilkinson: Newspaper publishers overseas think "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."

Russell Baker in the New York Review of Books reviewing “Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post" (nonsubscribers blocked): “The Internet was not ruining the paper, [newsroom executive Walter] Pincus argued…. Newspapers had lost audience through self-indulgence: they wrote stories for themselves instead of readers and produced blockbuster stories designed to win journalism prizes but destined to be unread by masses of people… Pincus was describing a divorce between reader and newspaper, and he thought American journalism’s passion for ‘objectivity’ deserved a lot of blame. It was ridiculous, ‘a lie,’ to believe that a journalist could not have an opinion. The illusion of ‘objectivity’ created reader detachment from a newspaper, and detachment leads to indifference and loss of another reader.”

Jon Stewart himself, in New York magazine: “’The thing that shocked me the most when I first met reporters was the people who would step aside and say, ‘Boy, I wish I could say what you’re saying.’ You have a show! You are a network anchor! Whaddya mean you can’t say it!.... It’s one reason I admire Fox. They’re great broadcasters. Everything is pointed, purposeful. You follow story lines, you fall in love with characters… The mistake [mainstream news outlets] make is that somehow facts are more important than feelings.”

UNC senior Christopher Sopher, quoted on Poynter’s website for his study of how to attract young people to news outlets: “’There's this sense that you're not getting the whole truth, or you're getting a varnished, polished, cold representation of what's going on, because it feels so impersonal.’ More than previous generations, Sopher found, young people seek a personal connection to their news providers. But that doesn't mean that consumers want biased reporting. Rather, he found, they're seeking a more conversational, explanatory tone. Reporters should leverage their extensive knowledge of their subjects to not only report the facts of ‘what just happened,’ Sopher said, but the context of ‘why it matters.’"

A wide swath of opinion, and one that needs to balanced with commercial considerations, as Marc Wilson in News & Tech quoted Advertising Age: “Advertisers trust newspapers to provide safe, sober environments for their brands and … marketers want newspapers’ authority to rub off on their ads.” Yet Ad Age and Stewart would doubtless agree that Fox News’ viewers see it as authoritative. And yet they care, passionately. Fox News tells them -- in my view incorrectly, but it tells them -- why the most obscure news story matters to them. And Fox News speaks to them as people who are just fine because they devoutly worship God and believe in the right to bear arms, as opposed to people who one can see objectively simply cling to shibboleths such as guns or religion while under stress, instead of coolly analyzing them.

Objectivity means in the end distancing yourself from everyone, because anything, even one's own feelings, can be analyzed. But most people don't do this about themselves and what they believe. There’s no doubt to me that Obama was factually correct in his famous statement about clinging to guns, religion and bias. But that's for a sociology paper, not a campaign - or a newspaper.

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.

Back to Work: Wide Open

That's the problem that no one in the news business has been able to crack. Economic models exist because you can control your business. If you can't control your business, you don't have one.

Way back in the early days of this blog, it strongly held that print was necessary as a pipeline into the reader's home. You controlled what went into and out of that pipeline. The glory of the Internet was, of course, to be that no one controlled what went in, and you controlled what you saw. Good for theory, bad for business.

But the Internet wasn't designed to be a business or a home for one. As Dan Kruger, CEO of iPhase 3 Corp., a software developer, was quoted as saying in News & Tech when asked why stories seem to be impossible to monetize:

"The design of the Web was for the unconstrained distribution of information. Every piece of Web software you use has that protocol on it. An ad is another piece of content -- stories and ads need distribution control and you cannot do that on the Web. ... The inherent design of the Web thwarts control of distribution, security, privacy or payment.

"If it was possible to get that control on the Web from all the time and attention the newspaper industry has spent trying to do so, the industry would have already achieved it."

We move on to Michael Hirschorn, founder of the TV production company Ish Entertainment, in the Atlantic, who says that the Internet as we know it is "the product of a very specific ideology. Despite its Department of Defense origins, the matrixized, hyper-linked Internet was both cause and effect of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The open-source mentality ... proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. ...

"Ironically, only the 'old' entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era's freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet. As a result, they undermined in little more than a decade a value proposition they had spent more than a century building up."

Hirschorn's point is that "the era of browser dominance is coming to a close." Replacing it will be the app-based model, whether for phones or tablets: You want something, you pay for it. "For all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it." In other words: Utopia always fails. It's a business, son.

The utopianism that powered so much theorizing about the Internet -- Hirschorn quotes John Perry Barlow, an early proponent of digital freedom, as saying, "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone" -- powered Surrealism and Dadaism, powered Communism, powered forms of religious ecstasy since time immemorial. But why did so many news industry leaders, not just editors but publishers, CFOs, etc., sober men and women, either fall for it or feel they had to genuflect toward it to the extent of putting their businesses and mission in mortal jeopardy?

Just some thoughts:
*The newspaper industry lost its mojo with TV news, spent decades trying to come up with a substitute for "we told you first," and thought it could find its way back.
*Newspaper people are always suckers for futurists, idealists, and anyone who makes one feel behind the times.
*Maybe these guys will be right. What do we know?
*It killed the record industry first. It must be inevitable.
*Our own kids not only don't read newspapers, but don't think we're very special for working for newspapers. We must be outmoded. Get with it.
*Maybe there really is a business model out there and we just haven't found it yet.
*Being part of "the conversation" is more important than how we make money being part of it.
*Hell, this business ain't that different from print, we're just selling adjacencies.
*Free classifieds will fail because an ad in the newspaper is worth more than an ad in a shopper. Context is everything.
*I don't understand what they're talking about, therefore they must be right.

All well and true. But I have to recall dimly what Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times was quoted as saying a decade ago, which was something like: If I could get rid of the cost of printing, ink, trucks, drivers, bundlers, inserters, mailers, delivery fulfillment staff, etc., I'd get rid of 70 percent of my costs. (And if I could keep the same level of income...)

Certainly the Times was planning to use a lot of that to increase news coverage. But stopping the presses would have done the trick that eliminating linotypes and competing newspapers had also done: Create a period of increased quarterly earnings without much effort, and get the analysts and investors off the newspapers' back. It would have meant a few years of not managing every dime every week just to keep the stock price up.

And it would have worked, had someone noticed that the Internet was not designed to restrict the flow of information. But newspapers came early to the Internet game, and thought the model was going to be AOL -- which did restrict the flow. I can still remember our publisher saying in 2003, who knew the model was going to be search?

So the future: Newspapers will try to turn their efforts away from the Web and toward tablet and mobile apps, while at the same time denying that they are abandoning the Wild West of Browser City (because someone might yell at them for restraining information or being only concerned with money) and probably only doing so half-heartedly (because they still are wedded to getting millions of clicks, from the DNA of selling millions of papers), while still printing newspapers but doing them for senior citizens instead of trying to reinvent them, because everyone says you can't do anything but watch them die.

Everyone but newspaper executives nearly everyplace else in the world, it turns out. More to come next week.