We Interrupt This Rant

Everything that's been said here having being said:

This could be the month when the newspaper business as we know it dies.

Newhouse says that if it doesn't get concessions, it will sell The Star-Ledger and close the Trenton Times. Well, there's still The Trentonian. Whoops, it's owned by Journal Register, which may be in technical default. So the state capital of New Jersey could wind up without a daily newspaper and simply get whatever attention NJ.com gave Trenton local news without having a Trenton newspaper to support. (That's assuming NJ.com still exists, if Newhouse sells the Star-Ledger. Why would it?) There would still be some journalism being done, but would anyone who isn't already involved in government or civic activism really care? (UPDATE: While the New York Times story said the Trenton Times would be closed, the Star-Ledger story says the papers would be sold "as a unit." Whom to believe?)

Gatehouse, which owns 98 dailies and was a Wall Street darling not 18 months ago, is down to selling for peanuts and is seen as likely to default. Journal Register is selling for less than a peanut. Both of these companies not only own dailies, they own tons of weeklies that are usually the only sources of news for their communities. The only sources. There's no citizen journalism in Cinnaminson. There might be someone who would want to rant about trash collection or fourth grade teachers. My biggest problem with online journalism is those who see no difference between news and ax-grinding, indeed who feel there should be no difference. It's all information, it's all content, and none of us needs mediators. If you think it's just peachy to have someone who was fired by the city and failed to be elected to the council as the main source of local political news, that it's just another voice in the debate and that readers know enough to discount the bias, you have a faith in discernment and involvement that makes the concerns about the New Yorker's Obama cover look small.

Newspaper companies have churned over the years. Remember Ingersoll? Panax? Daily newspapers have disappeared from troubled markets. Remember the Metro-East Journal in East St. Louis?

This didn't use to be a problem because someone would have bought these papers. But who will buy them now? Who will step into the void, as the Belleville News-Democrat did in East St. Louis?

People have been talking about how some metro newspapers may not make it. Forget that for today. Lots of county-seat newspapers, which were immune until now, are owned by companies that may just blow away. This is not just going to two-day-a-week publication and updating the Web site and saying your main problem is going to be older people who won't see online obituaries. This is, gone. Look on Topix or Yahoo News for "Palmyra, N.J." or "Norristown, Pa." and see what you get, and from where.

This is not just the disappearance of classified advertising to the Web or the migration of readers, who in print still greatly outnumber those on Web sites. This is not small-town merchants who can't afford to advertise in metro papers. These are small-town or small-city papers. This is newsprint price rises and high-priced gasoline and collapsing retail sales and big-box stores that don't advertise. This is newspapers getting declining shares of local online advertising. These were decent bets for which loans were taken out in 2006 and that have gone bad. This is panic, and its result.

And there's nothing one can do about it, short of lots of people falling on their swords. But somehow, I don't think that this is what those predicting the glorious death of printed newspapers, replaced by a cornucopia of online information, exactly had in mind. One can imagine how one would replicate most of the functions of the Los Angeles Times online in some form or another and make actual businesses out of them, because of the scale of the market and the Times' emphasis on national and world news and stories affecting a vast region. One can imagine creating a Web site in Los Angeles serving an affluent neighborhood or one filled with goo-goo activists and making it into a business.

One struggles to say the same of Trenton, Ewing and Hamilton. At that point, it's someone's hobby. We have not yet come to terms with what happens when local journalism becomes a hobby.

Janus and Julian

My former colleague Mark Bowden is one of the notable journalists of our time. His "Black Hawk Down" was arguably the first major newspaper project to make full use of the Internet. He writes and reports with great facility. He tells interesting tales. And he understands what copy desks do. In his Atlantic piece on Rupert Murdoch's takeover of The Wall Street Journal, written weeks before they announced the end of the Global Copy Desk, he wrote:

"Thomson has made clear that he intends to 'clarify reporting lines,' which is taken to mean that he plans to thin the ranks of the mid-level editors who were the newspaper's line of defense against sloppiness and error. It is worth noting that the number of corrections in the first quarter of this year, under Murdoch's reign, has risen by more than 25 percent compared with the first quarter of 2007, an increase that the company says reflects an increase in the number of stories the new Journal is running." (They have 25 percent more stories? I doubt it, and clearly Bowden clearly does too.)

So who am I to criticize Mark Bowden? Well, I'm a guy with a blog, and this is the 21st century. But the problem is not Mark Bowden, it's an idea that ran wild, an ideal with two faces.

Bowden's article is an incredibly good read and I am only going to be pulling excerpts from it. in his review of the changes that came upon newspapers after TV and radio had rendered them virtual print monopolies:

"The concepts of objectivity and editorial independence grew into a kind of public religion. ... Newsrooms were increasingly peopled by a new generation of white-collar journalists, gentlemen (and ladies) of the Fourth Estate, arbiters of style, taste and decency, who took upon themselves the tasks of keeping government honest and educating the public. ... If only [skeptics] knew how mightily the newsroom looked down its nose at the business side of the operation...

"This vision of a newspaper ... ensured that the paper was not just a propaganda mill, the house organ of some rich man or political party, but a community of street-smart shoe-leather scholars who worked as the eyes, ears, and conscience of their city. This was the world of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, of David Halberstam's and Neil Sheehan's courageous reporting from Vietnam, and of countless other examples...

"Even literary ambition began to creep into the pages of the great newspapers. At the best ones, when the material justified it, reporters were encouraged to write creatively and at length. A certain kind of reporter -- and I was one -- competed against each other not so much for scoops, but for recognition, prizes, and tenured positions at papers where the rarefied work of 'serious' journalism was underwritten. Mine was The Philadelphia Inquirer, where my byline read not 'staff reporter' or 'staff correspondent' but 'staff writer,' and which we writers called, in its heyday, 'the greatest care-and-feeding system for journalism ever invented.'

"In this elevated climate, The Wall Street Journal was held in unique regard. Its disdain for street sales was defining. In appearance, it was defiantly dull and predictable... The Journal broadcast its refusal to pander to readers. Every day the front page featured two 'leders' and the incomparable 'a-hed.' These were long, ambitious, exceedingly well-written stories. ... A probe of backdated stock options ... or Geeta Anand's moving narrative about the crisis at a biotech company that had been asked to provide an experimental drug for a dying child.

"The a-hed was a quirky profile or narrative, usually brilliantly reported, a master class in feature writing: Carrie Dolan on fainting goats, Barry Newman on a man who has a doctorate in bug gunk, or Tony Horwitz on going to work in a slaughterhouse. Breaking news, no matter how shocking, was relegated to a brisk summary in two regular columns. This was a serious newspaper for serious readers...

"When journalists worry about the decline of newspapers, this sort of seriousness is what they fear is being lost. ... The worst part of this is, the public doesn't seem to care....

"Murdoch is a panderer. Like most businessmen, he wants to figure out what his customers want and then deliver it."

Think about this for a while, thinking at the same time about terms such as "USA Today," "local-local," "focus groups," "declining circulation," "public service," "church and state," "readership," "major investigations," "prizes," "Los Angeles Times," "Bloomingdale's," "Wal-mart."

And we shall return to apostacism.

It's Time for the 50-50 Club

The Zellots at Tribune Co. have gotten rid of a big chunk of their news staffs -- although it's interesting that they also were criticized for imposing a 50-50 ad ratio. When I got into the business the ratio was generally 60 percent ads, 40 percent news. An alleged primer called "How to Run a Newspaper" on Wikibooks says: "Some publications use a ratio of 50 percent advertising to 50 percent content, while others use a 60/40 ad-to-content ratio, and still others use a 70/30 ad-to-content ratio. While each publication determines its own ratio, the closer to a 50/50 balance you maintain, the better your publication will be viewed by your readers. The reason: it will seem like they have actual content to read -- not just ads to pass by in a vain attempt to find your content." Gee, maybe Sam Zell did a Wikipedia search and said, "Aha, 50-50! Wow, this Wikibooks page explains the whole newspaper business to me."

An AJR article about the former Thomson Newspapers in 1998 said: "The ratio used to be 60-40 -- 60 percent ads, 40 percent news. Any local newspaper that can get 40 percent now considers itself riding high. But the 40 is ads." So if the newspaper business went from 60-40 ads to 40-60 ads, it wasn't strictly through its own desire, it was a lack of ads. And was Tribune really running all of its newspapers at a 40-60 ad ratio pre-Zell? This is, after all, the allegedly bean-counter-run Tribune Co., the organization whose only aim in life was to destroy the Los Angeles Times. (As opposed to today's Tribune Co., whose only aim in life apparently is to destroy the Los Angeles Times AND the Chicago Tribune.) Actually, it's hard to tell. Roy Greenslade in The Guardian indicates that Philip Stone in Follow the Media said they were, but the article is behind a pay wall so I can't tell what it really said.

Since Tribune clearly cut space, their news-to-ads ratio was higher than 50-50. But 20 years ago, when papers were chock-full of ads from Dayton's and Donaldson's and Powers', a 50-50 news-ad ratio would have been seen in most markets as manna from heaven. It still would at most Gannett papers, I expect. I assume they had space budgets based on 1990s ad volume and hadn't adjusted downward.

More to the point, I cannot find a story -- perhaps I am just not looking hard enough -- in which anyone asked Tribune what its previous news-ad ratio was across the chain, or called the Newspaper Association of America to ask whether it had any figures on what the typical news-ad ratio is in an American newspaper today. Indeed, many blogs referred to a 60-40 news-ad split as if it were a tradition of long standing, if not divine origin. It was far easier to simply decry the whole Zell business than to ask if what the Zellots are up to had any standing in our business today -- or even the traditions of our business. Zell says: I have to do this. There is no money. I have to save these businesses. Journalists say: We don't trust you. You didn't treat us with sufficient respect. You are a tradesman who does not understand what we do. We do not wish to lower ourselves to work for you in the first place. (But sometimes a check is just a check, of course.)

Zell's ideas may not work. At least he and his associates are putting ideas on the table instead of saying, "God, we bought a pig in a poke, let's just do nothing and let it collapse and sell the real estate." When they put ideas on the table, many journalists respond, "Those ideas have already been tried and failed." Some have, not all, and some have only been tried halfheartedly. (Not that Zell won't try some only halfheartedly himself.) We say, "We know the answer. Good journalism. It's not our fault it isn't working financially. It's your fault. But don't tell us what we should do. Who do you think you are, a brain surgeon?"

What is it about our business that when people show up and say, "We want to save your frickin' business," we tell them to go frick themselves? As it turns out, one of America's best journalists has just told us something about this in an article in the Atlantic, to which we will turn next.

Department Store Segue: Boscov's

The New York Post says Boscov's is in trouble. I went to our local Boscov's yesterday; it's a chain that prides itself on being stuffed with merchandise, and there were obvious holes. So it looks like it's in trouble.

This could be disastrous for newspapers in Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware, where Boscov's is a major advertiser. And, of course, even more disastrous for the people who work for Boscov's. In normal times, if Boscov's was in trouble you would wait for The Bon-Ton to buy it, but that chain is hurting as well. But in normal times Boscov's would not be in trouble. Boscov's has never forgotten who its customers are and what they want; it never made a frantic rush upmarket to find no one waiting for it there and its usual customers walking away.

(Never heard of Boscov's? Most of the country hasn't. Until the mid-1960s it was a neighborhood department store in Reading. Most of these little stores simply shut down when the founder retired, but Al Boscov, the son, took Boscov's into the Reading suburbs, then into the small markets in Pennsylvania. Through heavy promotions and sales it became a large regional chain. In the mid-1980s it moved into Philadelphia's suburbs.

(A couple of years ago Al Boscov and his brother-in-law Ed Lakin sold the company to the next generation and Boscov's picked up some stores set adrift in the Great Macyization; thus, like anyone who took on debt in 2006 based on expected cash flow, they're now dying. As usual, newspapers and department stores are joined at the hip.)

News coverage mentions the usual suspects -- the continuing decline of the department store model, the difficulty in being a mid-market store (you aren't the cheapest and you aren't the most stylish). Boscov's has these issues, yet with its aggressive prices, discounts, sales and promotions, Boscov's has been known as a place for bargains. I'm sure it's hurting as people trade down to Wal-marts and even dollar stores, but this seems more a case of expansion at the wrong time.

Mark Potts did a recent post called "The End of Mass," reiterating a point many have made, that there is no longer any mass market. In many ways that is true, but it can be overstated. If it were the End of Mass, Wal-mart would be in huge trouble, as would Home Depot, and not just Boscov's. In fact, in terms of product line, department stores offered far more choice than many big-box retailers do.

In television, as the New York Times noted, the total cable audience has been overtaking the total broadcast audience even while the four major networks remain the largest operations in the field. As it noted, "despite the gains, only a handful of cable series and specials — 'High School Musical,' 'WWE Raw' — draw audiences comparable to those of broadcast." And that's with broadcast drawing far fewer people than 20 years ago. So we can assume from this that mass media are dead at the same time as we can assume that mass media still have a large, though smaller, audience.

But another line in that article makes me think of newspapers and department stores more than trying to define "mass" or talking about long tails:

"It is not a totally fair fight. More than broadcasters, cable networks rely extensively on repeats and a handful of signature shows that define their brand. If viewers miss a new episode of 'Zoey 101' on Nickelodeon, they know the episode will be replayed many times. ... 'Cable’s dependable. Broadcast isn’t,' said [Ted] Harbert, a former programming executive at ABC. 'If you like the kind of stuff that E! does, you can turn it on any night and it’s there.'"

That's what Wal-mart's been selling for years, down to its trucks just bearing the word "Always." That's paint at Home Depot; we only sell Behr and Glidden, but we'll always have what you want. You can't get more mass than that, and mass retail has been driving out less mass-oriented competitors for years. And since Wal-mart is really a department store that we call a discount store, it made me think about a major difference between department stores and other mass retailers.

Department stores originally had all their goods behind the counter, on shelves or in counters. As stores moved into ready-to-wear this became less workable -- although I have a vague memory of my mother being discomfited when I was about 6 by one of our three big stores' having boys' wear kept in locked bins. (This would have been about 1958.) I do remember that Block's toy department had most of its merchandise behind the counter. You had to ask a salesperson to show you anything you wanted. I liked Ayres' a lot better.

Because there was no computer to track sales and because each department was run like a fiefdom, you had to pay at that department. If you had men's clothing to buy, but the line was long and there was no one at women's wear, that didn't matter; the salespeople there would not take your money. (I guess this is because it needed to be written up in the men's department so that a proper accounting could be made and commissions could be paid, even though the money was sent by pneumatic tube to the central cash office until the 1960s.)

Clearly that did not trouble the original discount store owners, though they did not have computers to track sales. The checkout people took the money, and that was that. Though anyone at a department store can now handle any merchandise, I was well trained and, like many department store shoppers, won't walk across the store with underwear to check it out at the furniture department, because I'll look like I'm trying to walk out with the underwear and the guy in furniture will look offended that he has to ring it up. The checkout person at Target doesn't care what you have.

What's the difference? The shopping cart. The traditional department store model was: You saw something, paid for it, put it in your bag, went to another department, saw something else, paid for it, put it in your bag. ... But the discount store, or Best Buy, or Kohl's, etc., gives you a cart. You wander the store at will, you only stand in line once, and because your merchandise is in the cart you don't look like you're holding it close to your body trying to steal it. You don't have to look for a cash register with an open salesperson until you're ready to leave, so there's less anxiety. And you have somewhere to put the baby. At Boscov's, you're walking around holding some purchases in your hands (along with the baby) that you have to pay for so you can go to another department and start over, because if you have any more stuff you're going to drop the clothes or the baby. Wal-Mart and Kohl's are more convenient and more dependable, even though they offer less selection -- and are therefore more "mass" -- than Boscov's.

So to bring this back to newspapers: In newspapers you often have no idea what the content is going to be or where it is going to be placed. Maybe the sports agate is on the fourth sports page, maybe on the sixth. Comics are here, or they're there. Maybe there'll be a story about what I care about today, or maybe there won't. And we keep wanting the readers to start reading a story, turn forward to Page 12 to read the rest of the story, then go back to Page One, then go to Page Seven, then back to Page One, and then start reading the rest of the inside pages. Or else they follow the jump to 12 and then go on from there, missing all the content and ads on 2 through 11.

It may be a great product editorially, but it's not very good as a consumer product. Mass still works, but mass without convenience doesn't work in the 21st century. Wal-mart doesn't expect all of its shoppers to go to the toy department, but it does let them know where the toy department is and doesn't move it from day to day, or put part of it here and part of it there. Some of what newspapers face is inevitable with different ad volumes and color positions, but some of it is just a lack of self-discipline. Combine that with our hostility to criticism and you've got a business bound for trouble even without an economic downturn. All you need is a consumer-focused competitor and you're toast. And that will bring us to Zell's 50-50 club.

Wiki Weekend No. 2

From the page for Casa Grande, Ariz.:

"Little Rock, Arkansas was supposedly the only city in the United States of America that was an adjective but this is proven false as Casa Grande means 'big house' in Spanish."

Oh, Little Rock being an adjective is too-low-hanging fruit. Let's assume this meant to say "Little Rock, Arkansas, was supposedly the only city whose name was an adjective-and-noun phrase." South Bend? Terre Haute? Baton Rouge? OK, still too easy. How about "an adjective and noun phrase dealing with size"? Big Spring, Texas, easily comes to mind -- it's big enough to have a daily newspaper -- and you might be able to stretch it to include Great Falls, Mont. (Grand Rapids doesn't work because it's on the Grand River, and let's leave out Little Falls, N.Y., because it only shared a daily newspaper with nearby Herkimer. We must have SOME standards.) Beyond that it does get hard, except that doubtless there are cities with American Indian-based names meaning "big" or "little." Perhaps we can say "Little Rock and Casa Grande are the only U.S. cities whose names are adjective-and-noun phrases in European languages involving size but not involving water." Whoops, forgot about Alamogordo, N.M. -- meaning "fat cottonwood." So we have to make it "two-word adjective-and-noun"...

But I guess it's still OK to say that "Little Rock and Casa Grande are the only U.S. cities that are adjectives." Put that in your next travel piece and say, "But I checked it against an encyclopedia."

The Chisholm Trail

Looking Sam Zell in the eye, the redoubtable Jim Chisholm in Newspapers & Technology decided not to go with the received wisdom:

"So, Sam Zell plans to trim 500 pages of content each week across his group of Tribune newspapers. Zell... and Randy Michaels ... have concluded that less is better, and not just because it is cheaper. ... Well, they're right on both counts."

I now lower my head for 20 seconds to miss the rotten vegetables being thrown.... OK, back to Jim:

"Newspapers produce far more content than readers have time to read. Why do we insist on delivering two to four hours of reading material to an audience with a window of 20 minutes... Which would you rather have? Sixteen pages of great content you read from end to end? Or 60 pages that you begin to feel you don't have time for."

Readers have told us for years, "I don't have time to read it and it just sits in the corner unread until I recycle it." Well, we respond, it's important stuff and you should make time for it. Find what you want to read and throw away the rest. That probably has a good deal to do with our current advertising problem -- "that's right, most of our readers will throw away your ad" -- but we press on with Chisholm:

"Journalism ... may be vital to social freedom, democracy and so on, but in its current manifestation it is failing. And this failure, I believe, is internally cultural as much as it is externally demand driven. In any other industry, if sales start to fall it's generally regarded as evidence that something is wrong with the business. In our industry, it's the customers' fault."

Well, they don't appreciate what we're giving them. If they were just more like us, they'd want it. And if they would just read it, they would become more like us, and thus they would want more of it. So the brickbats are coming pretty fast at Chisholm. But as he notes:

"By focusing on quality rather than quantity, it ups the perception and value of a newspaper."

The brickbat throwers sit for a moment. Can't disagree with that. Might even bring in some ads, if the product were perceived as of higher quality and value. But then Chisholm touches the third rail.

"A few years ago, I wrote a report for the World Association of Newspapers called 'Editorial Management.' It was a fairly straightforward analysis of how newspapers can measure the quantity, quality, efficiency and effectiveness of what they produce.... Friends told me I was insane. WAN's director received letters that said that what I was doing was wrong and dangerous. I was -- how do I put it -- verbally abused on three occasions by people who said journalists could not be measured. ... The level of aggression against what I was saying was extraordinary. It summed up everything to do with why our industry is in the mess it is."

Sort of like the reaction Tribune's Randy Michaels got when he proposed evaluating the productivity of the news staff. He admittedly proposed this in an unsophisticated manner -- appearing to just wish to divide column inches per reporter without any sort of quality or time-spent rating -- that harked back to the 1970s. But -- zzzzzppp! -- he touched the third rail, and whatever good will the Zellots had left at that point went up in smoke, as Rem Rieder's column notes:

"It assumes that newspapers are like factories in which everyone is doing the same thing. It ignores the fact that important journalism – investigative reporting, enterprise pieces, projects, in-depth profiles – takes time. A lot more time than quick-hit stories from press conferences and press releases. ... There's nothing wrong with quick-hit pieces. But failing to distinguish between them and more time-consuming, yet essential, reporting is silly."

Rieder, an excellent editor and press critic, did say it this way: "Evaluating the productivity of reporters this way is astonishingly dumb." Rieder is too smart to say that evaluating the productivity of reporters at all is wrong. Chisholm seems to have heard from others who believe that it is. The new Chicago Tribune editor, Gerould Kern, has said that Michaels was not simply counting bylines and was taking into account what types of stories they were. But the message to Tribune was clear: You cannot quantify what we do. You cannot evaluate what we do. "Not to say that they are dummies, but this is a complex business and I don't think they understand that," one reporter said. "Look, I wouldn't walk into Northwestern [Memorial Hospital] and tell the brain surgeon how to do his job." And even if you can develop a sophisticated tool to do it, you should not do it, because quantification will inevitably lead to a conflict with quality. Don't open that door, McGee!

The room was turning against Zell anyway, with Lee Abrams' rock-and-roll memos saying he didn't know there were actually newspaper reporters overseas, but Michaels' comment clinched it. (Whatever can be said for these guys' ideas, they are singularly inept at presenting them. But they can learn. Abrams, for example, is learning to write without capitalizing every third word.) And then there's Zell's 50-50 club. A good Cincinnati reference if you know it. On to the next post.

Things to Do in Print When You're Dead

Newspapers are dead. We know this. Mindy McAdams tells us so. "Newspapers were a nice business. ... However, this is clearly over. It’s done. It worked for a long time, but now, like trans-Atlantic leisure travel in big passenger ships, it will never work again.... Future generations will not read newspapers. Ever. "

This nevertheless presents a problem for McAdams, because "journalism is vital to a democratic system of government, because without independent busybodies (yes, journalists) sticking their nose into everything, governments and large corporations can cheat, oppress, and starve people. ... {But} the business model to sustain journalism in the 21st century has not been seen yet."

But newspapers are dead. Out with the old, and in with -- well, we're waiting...

This presents a problem for Douglas Page, CEO of spot-on.com, "a Web-based news and opinion syndication service." He writes:

"A newspaper is both a consumer product and an advertisising vehicle. The latter's success hinges on the former. So if publishers want better results, they had better find a solution to the one part of their business that no other media wishes to replicate -- the daily printed newspaper. This requires a print strategy ... If Tribune and its fellow companies fail to formulate a plan to own the one thing that no other media outlet.... is interested in promoting or duplicating -- a daily printed newspaper -- publishers face a grim future indeed."

Shut up, Doug. There is no grim future because there is no future. Though as McAdams says:

"I don’t usually address this subject because I don’t know much at all about business, running a company, generating profits, and so on. ... The absence of any viable model is something we need to accept and (quickly) move past — so we can invent one that will work."

McAdams often provides very pragmatic information on her blog, "Teaching Online Journalism." So praise her candor about what she does not know. But one feels that that approach -- taken from two quotes about the same point -- is like the Shakers' saying, "We practice celibacy, and therefore do not have children to increase our numbers. We need to accept the absence of the children model to perpetuate ourselves, so we can invent a model that will work. Of course, we haven't a clue what that is, and neither does anyone else. Let us pray."

As McAdams notes, "In my current lifestyle, I concluded, the printed newspaper just does not fit. I spend a lot of time in front of a computer, in various environments. ... In that, I’m not so different from most people in North America." Leave aside that the use of "most" for the people of North America probably kicks Mexico out of the continent. Even if it were true for the U.S. and Canada, do those people have the same freedom to use it to graze that McAdams does? Is there any environment more conducive to spending nearly all of your time in front of a computer, with absolute freedom to look at whatever you want, than a university? I don't know.

There may be. Perhaps it is a newsroom. Perhaps government economics research. Perhaps it is Wall Street or perhaps it is the people doing logistics for UPS. What McAdams really knows is that the people with whom she interacts are kind of like her. And newspapers don't fit their lifestyle. And the customers are just like us. Ergo, it's dead.

This presents a problem for Mary Nesbitt of the Readership Institute. She notes that "readership among 18-24 year olds in the general population continues to slowly decline." I suppose this is another way of saying "Future generations will not read newspapers. Ever" but being more polite about it. She's Canadian, you know. North American.

But Nesbitt also notes that readership is fairly stable among all other groups, and those people spend 27 minutes a day with newspapers, as they did in 2002. She also notes that "the penetration of newspaper Web sites is still quite low in most communities." All this leaves Nesbitt scratching her head about the numbers: "Why aren't they much worse, when the imminent demise of newspapers seems to be all we ever hear about? The short answer is that reading customers aren't deserting newspapers at anything approaching the rate that advertising customers are... Lots of people still want it and lots of people are paying attention to the local newspaper." Darn, how can that be? Mindy told me they're dead.

When reading letters to the editor, you can tell that an overly sure-of-himself citizen thinks he has stumbled upon some major breakthrough in exposing cant when he starts his letter, "Now, let me get this straight."

So, let me get this straight.

Newspaper readership largely holds steady except among the youngest. "Readers are more engaged with print than the Web site." Lots of people are still paying attention. And the CEO of an online site says the only way for newspapers to save themselves is to come up with a workable print model. But none of it matters. We're dead.

Nesbitt does note: "The very youngest adults have media and news habits very different from their parents." So she asks the question: "Is it asking the impossible to expect newspapers to maintain a relevant, engaging print product for that large swathe of the population that clearly still reads and enjoys print; and to create something differently compelling online; and to build a new business model?"

Well, the answer is probably yes if "new business model" means "completely unlike the old one." Page notes: "About two years ago, Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company, announced that there are 100 million Web sites. ... If you're a newspaper publisher, take note: If you're struggling to sell ads in a monopoly market, how are you going to effectively compete against 99.9 million other Web sites?" He then quotes a Harvard Business School professor -- always dangerous -- named Michael E. Porter as saying, "A firm that engages in each generic strategy.... but fails to achieve any of them is stuck in the middle. It achieves no competitive advantage."

Page adds: "The daily newspaper industry can differentiate and stand out from all other media by creating a printed product that people want to read and advertisers find attractive." Part of his solution: The tabloid. Which seems to be a popular option on campuses where those 18-24-year-olds are. As my son said, "If they published The New York Times as a tabloid, I'd read it in print every day." OK, Arthur Sulzburger, over to you....

Alan Jacobson, of course, would shoot that down in a second. And maybe tabloids won't work. Or maybe they'll work for some readers and not for others. Maybe they work better for younger readers, and don't work as well for couples who want to read separate sections of the same paper at the same time.

In the long run, Mindy McAdams might be right. Or online newspapers might turn out to be a niche product unable to support themselves -- which, according to the Pew report released this week, seems to be what newspapers are becoming. Print might enjoy a brief nostalgia boom, like B&Bs in the 1970s. Or, maybe, someone would come up with a workable answer. No one knows the future. The current trend works for Mindy. She loves journalism and sees myriad ways to do it excellently online. She doesn't have much use anymore for printed newspapers. Therefore, why should she care about saving them? Any money used to save them inhibits the glorious future, which someone will figure out how to pay for sometime. Begone.

So those of us who see a future with print -- indeed, see a future with print as linked to the success of the sort of journalism we all love -- need to find a way to not be pulled down by those who say, "Print's doom is inevitable -- why look, everyone online says it is." Print without online is a losing bet today, but online without print remains a technology in search of a business plan that, like the 13th Imam, is still in occlusion.

The best way to help print is to Put Ideas on the Table. Lots of them. Counterattack can be the best defense.

Milton Friedman is quoted in the current New Republic -- actually he is quoted by Naomi Klein in "The Shock Doctrine," which then is quoted by reviewer Jonathan Chait, but let's assume that someone, perhaps a copy editor, verified that Friedman actually said this -- "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around."

Chait dismisses this as obvious, and I'm fine with putdowns of Milton Friedman, but the second sentence is the more interesting. You're in a crisis, so what do you do? You ask, "Anybody know what to do about this?" But the U.S. newspaper business may be unrivaled in its ability to internally shoot down any effort at innovation. Too many senses of professional identity are tied to doing things a certain way. We often confuse practices with outcomes. So there were very few print ideas on the table and a lot of frustrated online people with lots of ideas. Publishers were riding the money train and journalists fall prey to the idea that any change is "making the paper like USA Today." There are, in fact, many ideas for "a solution to the daily printed newspaper," some good and some bad. And that, of course, will bring us back to Sam Zell.

Department Store Segue: Those Guys From Harrison

An earlier response to a post asked about Two Guys. I normally follow mainline department stores and not discount stores, but when Chase closed in the former Kresge-Newark store in 1967, Two Guys moved in and operated there for about a decade. I hadn't known that. So they merit a mention for having run a downtown department store.

Two Guys started as a snack bar in the RCA plant in Harrison, N.J., which is an industrial suburb just across the river from Newark. The brothers who owned the snack bar started selling damaged RCA TVs. Word spread. As Bill Newman wrote:

"In the trade the Hubschman brothers became known as 'those two bastards from Harrison.' Shortly later they were ready to run their first newspaper ad and to name the business. They decided to taunt their competitors and call their business 'The Two Bastards From Harrison.' This move failed, as no newspaper would accept their ad. The name was changed to 'Two Guys From Harrison' and the ads ran."

Maybe an urban legend, but a hell of a good one. Newman also notes: "Herb and Sid became leaders in the fight to break the Fair Trade laws, which they did and to eliminate 'Blue Laws' in many places and to set the discount business in motion." The Fair Trade laws kept discounters from selling major brands for less than the department stores could. Once you could buy a GE toaster at Two Guys for less than at Hahne's, department stores started losing business. So one can see why they were known as those two bastards.

The original Two Guys store was at the RCA plant in Harrison. The eventual main store was in Kearny, the next town north. Apparently that store is now a Marshalls location, but I have no idea if it is the same building so I did not provide a photo.

Weekend Wiki

I don't know if I will be able to pull this off, but it's always nice to end the work week with a laugh, and Wikipedia, for all its strengths, offers so many. So I may try to find a Wiki of the Week.

My wife and I are great fans of "The Tudors," the occasional series on Showtime. We both know enough about the life and times of Henry VIII to know it's not entirely accurate. We enjoy it anyway, although Sam Neill's Wolsey is badly missed -- but at least "The Tudors" doesn't play with history so much as to make Wolsey a continuing character down through Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves. ("Off with his head! Wait, sign him up for 16 more.")

At any rate, yesterday I decided to check out the page for "The Tudors," and found that this sentence was in the lede:

"The Tudors is a historical fiction television series created and entirely written by British screenwriter Michael Hirst. The series is loosely based upon the early reign of English monarch Henry VIII. It is marred by its misleading inaccuracies (see treatment below of "Princess Margaret"), and this deprives it of any authoritative status."

Later in the day the second sentence read:

"It is marred by its misleading inaccuracies (see treatment below of "Princess Margaret"), and the "departures from history" (dealt with below) which deprive it of any authoritative status, and make it at most, an entertaining well-acted fiction based largely upon real events."

But if you'd called up the page, oh, seven minutes later:

"It is marred by its misleading inaccuracies (see treatment below of "Princess Margaret"), and the "departures from history" (dealt with below) which deprive it of any authoritative status, and make it at most, an entertaining well-acted fiction based largely upon real events. It is devoid of real historical interest and is midleading as it is impossible for the general viewer to distinguish fact from fiction."

One minute later, an editor swoops in and changes it back to what it was the day before:

"The Tudors is a historical fiction television series created and entirely written by British screenwriter Michael Hirst. The series is closely based upon the early reign of English monarch Henry VIII." (end of paragraph).

But the anti-"Tudors" watch is lurking and within 10 minutes it has been changed to:

"The Tudors is a historical fiction television series created and entirely written by British screenwriter Michael Hirst. The series is loosely based upon the early reign of English monarch Henry VIII. It is marred by its inaccuracies (see treatment below of "Princess Margaret"), and the "departures from history" (dealt with below) which deprive it of any authoritative status, and make it at most, an entertaining albeit arguably well-acted fiction based largely upon real events. It is devoid of any real historical interest and is downright midleading as it does not give the general viewer assistance to distinguish fact from fiction. In this sense, it is an extraordinarily arrogant work from the point of view of the general viewer, as it alters facts and produces fiction, prserving accurate historical knowledge as the province of an elite and disseminating inaccuracy."

And three hours later, that's all gone again and it's back to the way it was two days ago. I visited the page with its second iteration of "Hollywood schlock!" and said, "Wow, that's the lede of the entry on 'The Tudors'?" I had no idea that a guerrilla battle was going on. Meanwhile, the article itself consists in about 2/3 part of a list of historical errors of "The Tudors," probably put there by the writer of "extraordinarily arrogant" and "province of an elite." That's still there. Perhaps it's useful, and perhaps it's totally made up.

"The Tudors" is not "Hill Street Blues." It's not epochal television. It's a fun costume drama. So I didn't expect the depth that would be devoted to a true cultural change, like, say, Pokemon. I mainly wanted to see if there was a reason Henry Czerny was not brought back. (How can you have Henry VIII without Norfolk?) I did not find that, but I did find all this. Maybe Henry Czerny was dropped from the cast and devotes his days to rewriting "The Tudors" site on Wikipedia as revenge.

So why, if, for example, if I want to check a fact on Desmond Llewellyn, the famous "Q" of James Bond films, and Wikipedia tells me that his name was Desmond W. Llewellyn and he was born Sept. 12, 1914, should I believe it? Maybe it says that today. Maybe tomorrow it will say "Desmond Llewellyn was the stage name of Rhys W. Llewellyn, born in Wales on May 1, 1912 (although many records give his birth date as Sept. 12, 1914). Llewellyn felt that international audiences would not know how to pronounce "Rhys," so he changed his first name to honor Nick Desmond, a local troubador." And maybe one of the Wikipedia editors will catch that and send someone a note for violating Wikipedia's quality standards. Or maybe they won't, for days or weeks. (How many times a day does someone look up Desmond Llewellyn? I'm sure there's a way to see. Does it really matter?) And someone somewhere will post a Web page repeating that, and Rhys Llewellyn will become a possible truth.

Well, watch "The Tudors" page, which for a few hours was even more interesting than "The Tudors." And now we have a new Wikipedia axiom. Check a fact against it, then come back four hours later and see if the fact's still there. If it is, it might be a fact.

Copy Editing: The WSJ Cuts Back

News yesterday that the Wall Street Journal is shutting down its Global Copy Desk near Princeton. While plans apparently call for at least some of those jobs to be effectively moved to New York and even overseas, a large number will simply fade away. As has happened at newspapers far and wide. In this case, it affects three of my friends. Had it not been for a quirk of timing, I might have been among them.

Last weekend a friend who used to report for our paper and now does so at a large newspaper near the Ohio River came up to me and said: It's scary working for a newspaper that really doesn't have any copy editing. There's no one behind you. No one checking your math. No one making sure your work makes any sense. No safety net. And sometimes, no matter how good you are, you're just going to fall.

This, of course, is simply higher productivity. When the rockets go up...

I know about how copy desks are cost centers and how there are legendary stories "touched" by nine editors. I know about urban legends, too. And I also know that a cost center is how you define it on your balance sheet. This section (say, Sports) has almost no advertising but that's OK, while that section (say, Culture) has almost no advertising and that's not OK, while that other section (say, Travel) has enough advertising to be profitable, but that may not be OK either. I'm not talking about pulling in readership, but Sports has become the largest section in terms of space in U.S. newspapers and has almost no ads and isn't viewed as a cost center.

Back-office sorting operations are a classic cost center; check processing, post office routing, telephone switching, etc. You figure out a way to handle most of the work (bar codes, whatever) mechanically and then you only need enough people to deal with rogue stuff (envelopes with handwriting so poor that a machine can't read them). I'm sure the people who did these back-office jobs felt that their individual skills were irreplaceable. So I may just be another self-interested civil servant in whining about cuts in copy editing. But it does seem that the sort of judgment calls one makes as an editor of any sort are less replaceable by technology or simply squeezing staff.

There are wonderful editing-check systems on the market that do so much more than spellcheck; if set up right, they can indicate that the phrase "on trial for murder" is libelous and that if you use the address "Springfield Township" you need to specify which of the five it is. These are things that copy editors keep in their hip pockets but many reporters and assigning editors barely think about. If used simply on the copy desk, they can make the copy editor's job easier and indeed more productive; if used from the start of the process, from the reporter on, they can probably make the process more efficient -- i.e., involving fewer people -- and they certainly can make stories more accurate.

But everything still involves a judgment call. A mail sorting system can route mail to 08057 and problems can be dealt with; an intelligent checking program can't say, "Whoops, the D.A. used the phrase 'on trial for murder' in a direct quote so it shouldn't be changed." Someone not only has to make that determination; someone has to be make sure that the determination actually is being made. What we call "copy" is a bunch of piecework components, each by definition put together uniquely. Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows that you can't even tell what level of procedure was applied to any given story. ("It's deadline and I gotta move it and I'm sick of the damn story anyway!") It truly is herding cats, and if for some reason you needed to herd cats, it would become clear that it was not a back-office function.

But just as important is the loss -- and here I do sound like beating my own drum, but I will beat it anyway -- of the leaders of copy desks in newspapers as their departments are subsumed into others. As the columnist Susan Estrich said this week on an entirely different subject, "I understand there are more important things in life than having a show or a column or a fancy title. But it matters whose voice gets heard and whose doesn't. It matters who has a megaphone and who has the power to hire and fire and make the rules we all live by."

At the beginning of this decade many newspapers had given that megaphone to people whose job was to oversee, improve, and advocate for the copy editing of the news. People like Alex Cruden of the Detroit Free Press and Leslie Guevarra of the San Francisco Chronicle and Kay Jarvis of The Denver Post and Don Podesta of The Washington Post. And people like Christine Glancey of The Wall Street Journal. Part of the job is to draw up schedules and rule on the use of semicolons, but the job also exists to say: Hey, this is just as important as anything else we do. Not more important; if the place is being downsized, down we go as well. But as important.

Christine moved on to Hong Kong before this happened, but the rest either got the parachute or the sword, and while someone still draws up schedules, that seat at the front table was removed. It's still there for some people. Other papers never put it there. They had, of course, city editors and features editors and sports editors, and then there were those check-processors over in the corner.

Is the failure partly ours -- too many conversations about who and whom and not enough about how to cover fraud in the legislature; too many "your lead sounded fine, but I changed it to say 'He felt it strongly' instead of 'He felt it strong' anyway" and not enough "I really liked how you told this story"? Not from the copy desk leaders I know, but maybe that's what some others hear. Or maybe it is just economics. Whatever, forgive me for thinking that once again, this is just the story of a newspaper stabbing itself in the chest while saying, "I'm protecting the heart of the mission." Stabbing an artery can be just as effective as stabbing the heart itself.