More About Valpo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What If...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't know.

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

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

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

When Everyone Read Newspapers -- Valparaiso I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Lewis' saying this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wonderful Meaning of Me, Vol. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Love New Media People So

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incoherence

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

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

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

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

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

Some examples of newspaper incoherence:

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

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

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

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

It's the Summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Then Came A Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More to come.

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 31

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

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

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