That's the Press, Baby

Segue: After yesterday's Gannassacre. it's another day on which we need some upbeat news. The Newspaper Association of America has posted its version of Presstime's "20 Under 40" -- brief bios of people who are making a positive difference in the newspaper business. One of them is written by my longtime pal Clay McCuistion.

Don't have time? Here are synopses:

News side
Bonita Burton, Orlando Sentinel -- the lead redesigner there and involved in many efforts by Tribune to refashion its papers. If you believe Sam Zell is the antichrist and that any effort to connect better with readers on their own terms is a cheapening of newspapers' mission, you can stop right here. Her design colleagues seem to like her, though; she's been elected to a top SND post.
Emma Downs, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette -- wrote a 16-part murder mystery for the paper set in the Three Rivers City. "She developed and often writes three columns, including the monthly 'A Week Without…' She has gone one week without swearing, one without using her car and another without styling her hair or applying makeup. Other columns include 'Rockin’ in the Region,' a weekly profile of a local band that includes song samples online, and the monthly 'Fashion Forward,' which showcases area residents who are artistic, creative or 'surprising' in their style choices, with an online audio slide show." In other words, everything she does is surprising. But perhaps a columnist's only role is to serve as a civic conscience. Or not.
Mike Fuhrman, editor, Statesville Record & Landmark -- Recently he helpted train 30 people from five Media General newsrooms on writing for the Web and alternative story forms. He also is working with the other papers to create an emergency response plan that would dispatch reporters, photographers and Web content producers to help a sister paper covering the event -- an obvious response to Roanoke's online fumble with Virginia Tech.
Chris Snider, Des Moines Register -- Brings his sensibility to digital news offerings, including "new excursions into mobile, live sports coverage, content-distribution widgets, video-sharing partnerships with Google and YouTube, and multiple versions of the site’s home page to accommodate different kinds of news events." In other words, as Doug Fisher says, not just doing print journalism online, but doing online journalism.

Digital media development
Brian Butts, Cincinnati Enquirer -- “By giving users a bird’s-eye view of local data," his product CinciNavigator.com "has increased Enquirer Media’s ability to embed hyperlocal information on many of the Web pages produced, allowing readers to find information ranging from neighborhood home sales to school report cards to where to see favorite local bands."
Dan Cox, Lawrence Journal-World -- Developed a publishing system based on open-source coding. He cites the author Douglas Adams: "Anything invented when you’re between the ages of 15 and 35 is exciting and anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.”
Jeffrey Graham, The New York Times -- Director of the paper's first product research department. "Graham’s department found a general correlation between increased Web traffic and single-copy newsstand sales. So when the Times broke a story on its Web site last March about then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s penchant for high-priced call girls and saw traffic climb to 35 million page views, the paper printed extra newsstand copies for the next day." Gosh, online drives print sales? Can't happen. Print is dead, right?

Advertising
Shannon Dunnigan, director of online revenue, Gatehouse Media -- "As her team works with sales reps and helps them become online specialists, revenues have climbed from $3.8 million that first year to a projected $25 million for 2008. In the second quarter of 2008, online revenue increased 41 percent year to date over the same quarter last year."
Chadi Irani, The Palm Beach Post -- His "six-pack program" boosted frequency for smaller advertisers who typically ran small ads one day a week, encouraging them to run ads at least six days in a 14-day period. The initiative generates between $200,000 and $300,000 in sales a month. Yes, that's right, print advertising.
Paul Kasbohm, Minneapolis Star Tribune -- "Helped the Star Tribune gain media market share in 2008 in the major retail, national and regional retail categories while showing year-over-year ad revenue growth in online and niche publication categories. In addition, Kasbohm has shown a willingness to invest in his people and take innovative chances with unique ad sizes and shapes, as well as sponsored content." Yes, that's right, growth in print advertising.
Tyler Mack, Spokane Spokesman-Review -- Created a print and online weather package that now generates about $190,000 in annual revenue, and an online directory that offers enhanced paid listings to area businesses.
Patricia Miller, Indianapolis Star -- Developed IndyMoms.com, the prototype for Gannett's Mom sites.

Circulation, marketing and business development
Brooke Christofferson, Arizona Republic -- Developer of a B-to-B Web site, a baby boomer readership campaign and increasing online community news. “We’ve been aggressive about understanding our audience and what’s important to them,” says Christofferson. I keep giving you opportunities to stop reading.
Giovanni Gutierrez, Tampa Tribune -- Product creation for Hispanics in the Tampa Bay area.
Amanda Mountain, Colorado Springs Gazette -- The paper’s good works help residents in need and also help readers connect with the paper, she says. Telling stories about area residents in need and giving readers guidance about ways to give back builds readership.
Wendy Reeves, Raleigh News & Observer -- Reeves contributed to daily circulation increases (2005 and 2006) and Sunday circulation increases (2005, 2006 and 2007), respectively. In one of her campaigns, subscribers received 13 Sunday papers for $13. Reeves adds that the campaigns’ number-based slogans seemed more effective than promoting specific editorial content in the Sunday edition. Yes, that's right, print circulation. Those of you who believe newspaper sales are about nothing other than journalism can stop...
David Sickle, Zerbey Newspapers -- Achieved “consistent home-delivery volume growth for the first time in many years.” Yes, that's right, print circulation.

Human resources and internal operations
Josie Martinez, Arizona Republic -- "In addition to nurturing staff with flex scheduling and improved career development opportunities, Martinez crafted a formal process that initiates new hire assessments at 45, 90 and 120 days to address employee concerns before they reach the point that the only communication left is the exit interview."
Sharon McGinnis, Ottaway Newspapers -- Seems like she just basically does a good job. Good for her.
Anna Singletary, Houston Chronicle -- A cost-saver par excellence: $250,000 by renegotiating a contract with a local courier service; $150,000 by reducing the number of printers in the building; $500,000 by shrinking the weekly TV book and streamlining its production and printing. Well, we need people like this today, particularly ones who can do it where you don't feel the knife.

OK, all together now -- Only one of these is about traditional capital-J journalism -- the editor at Statesville. Most of them are about -- how do we sell more ads, sell more papers, get more online viewers; what can we provide them that they will want to use, not how do we provide them what we do and get them to pay for it?

None of these is about winning prizes or landmark series that change the world, or at least a city. I don't know about the past of this particular recognition, but I can imagine that it might have included at least one Pulitzer-potential reporter or editor whose main accomplishment was a five-part series showing police harassment of the homeless.

That doesn't mean those are wrong. It means the current challenge is finding ways to raise the money to pay for them. Which means recognizing that readers don't need (except in a purely civic way), and are not willing to pay for, prize-winning landmark series. We should do them anyway, but the newspaper industry's crisis is not in creating journalism. It is creating ways to sell advertising to support journalism. Everyone, including newspaper journalists, has to be part of solving that. That will lead us back to Buzz Merritt.

But let's hope Gannett didn't lay off any of the five of the 20 who work for it.

The various facets of the "rebirth of journalism" idea that Newspaper Death Watch so exults didn't really hit me until the election. I had wondered what happened to Kevin Drum, who used to do "Political Animal" for Washington Monthly's Web site. He is now with Mother Jones, as I came across from a link from the new writers of "Political Animal." I haven't read Mother Jones for years, and in checking Drum's column I saw their tagline under the logo: Smart, fearless journalism. And I thought: I'd agree with it far more personally than I would with Fox, but this is in the same league as "Fair and Balanced." Yes, it's journalism. But it's not journalism the way newspapers have practiced it for the last 40 years. It's journalism in the service of a view of how the world should be. It's Zola writing "J'accuse," in L'Aurore, not a report from AFP saying "In an article in a Paris newspaper yesterday, the novelist Emile Zola accused the anti-Dreyfusards of..."

And for many journalists, that change is a relief and a blessing.

In the analog, print world, Mother Jones was a left-wing opinion magazine, Time was a weekly newsmagazine, and the Los Angeles Times was a daily newspaper. They all had different functions that were reflected in their form (size, frequency, etc.) Online, they are all Web sites. Thus the individual journalist, lance in hand, mounting his horse to point out the problems of the world as he sees them, on his personal Web site is the same as the massive infrastructure of the New York Times. He may not have the same credibility, or the number of hits, or whatever -- but he is in the end a Web site. So is the New York Times.

Thus, the rebirth of journalism is in part the rebirth of every journalist to be able to say on an equal basis with every other journalist, here is my view of what's important -- as the noteworthy Jon Talton in "Rogue Columnist" writes every day, down to his in-his-house style of always referring to McCain as "wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III." (Jon covered Phoenix.) I can say this, and no one can stop me. Every person an editor and publisher. Free at last.

As someone who grew up admiring I.F. Stone and Harry Golden, as mentioned before, I admire Talton as well. Isn't this the whole point of the Zenger case, that journalism is not just the ability to say "Four people were killed yesterday..."? Yet the point of Izzy and Harry was that things like I.F. Stone's Weekly tried to tell the real truth by telling their side of the truth, but they knew that they were not the same as the mainstream media avant le nom. The media mainly just tried to say what went on, except when a publisher or editor slanted some particular story. Their main message was: Things happen. Some of them involving John McCain, and some involving four people killed in a traffic accident. I.F. Stone's message was: Bad things happen, and we can stop them. Both were journalism, but they were not the same thing.

A part of the editing process at newspapers is not about the subjunctive mode or capitalization. It is about trying to bring a sense of humility and perspective to the process, a sense that the newspaper is bigger than we are -- both the reader and the newspaper staff. The newspaper had a magisterialness that made it larger than Izzy Stone. In the online world, the newspaper is just as small as everything else. This diminishes it. No wonder people pay less attention to it.

On election night, other than actually doing my job, I spent the night alternating among Daily Kos, Eschaton, Talking Points Memo, and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. I did so even though I knew that working in a newsroom, I would know almost all of what they knew before they could post it. But I didn't really want on this election night to just read the objective reporting of facts. I didn't want to be glued to the Politics folder of the AP feed. I wanted to be told this time that we were going to win. I wanted to know how great this was (or be told we were right if we lost). I wanted to hear it from friends, even if I had no idea who they were. Virtual communities are like sports bars; you have no idea who is at the next table, but they're cheering for your team so they must be your friends.

The Thursday Camden Courier-Post had six pages of post election coverage. Not all of it was favorable to Barack Obama. Much pointed out the intractable economic problems he faces and the prospect he will fail. I was happy to read it because I wasn't anxious anymore that we would win. I did not need Drum or Atrios to put it into a friendly perspective. I was ready for an objective, nonpartisan, newspaper-style look at the challenges ahead. I will be spending a lot less time with Kos in the weeks ahead.

The Committee of Concerned Journalists always notes that journalism is information subject to a process of verification. That is not the same as telling the truth. It is just saying that there are a lot of people saying a lot of truths and we should report them all. There are times when people want to read lots of truths, and times when they want to read their own truth. Newspapers really can't do much about the latter. The Internet is a superior medium for that, and for journalists who want to report the truth as they know it.

Newspapers are about much more than journalism, which means that journalism is not all that newspapers are about -- which means that some journalists may have less use for newspapers than readers do. Some journalists have claimed that newspapers have no purpose without journalism. That should be asked of the reader, not the journalist, who does not need the newspaper to do journalism but has long appreciated its steady paycheck. The publisher should ask: What are the readers interested in reading, and what can I make money doing? That is different from what the journalist asks himself or herself.

As Justin Williams of the Daily Telegraph noted, the effective cost of publishing anything is now zero; nearly anyone in the world can publish anything online at realistically no cost. It is ruinous for newspapers to believe they have a sustainable economic future from competing head to head in that world on its terms. If the New York Times is in the same business as Jon Talton, the New York Times cannot possibly compete on price. No matter how hard they try, newspapers cannot reduce their costs to near-zero without ceasing to be newspapers. To survive, the newspaper business has to be in a different business than simply the Internet journalism business.

Newspapers are not Internet companies or single operators. Barnes & Noble cannot win by competing head to head on price with Amazon. Barnes & Noble simply has higher costs and always will unless it tries to become a purely Internet company, and during the inevitably shaky transition to that, Amazon probably would destroy it because Amazon would be a better Internet company. The only way for Barnes & Noble to exist is to be what Amazon is not. The only way for newspapers to exist is to be what journalism on the Internet is not, as well as being journalism on the Internet when it suits their purposes.

Newspapers should not expect most journalists to solve this problem for them, because many journalists are overjoyed with the new order. But the owners of newspapers need to realize that you do not predict as inevitable a future you do not want, and that therefore all predictions of the future are suspect. If newspapers do not want the future seemingly laid out for them, they need to hear other voices than those calling for their demise. (For example, newspapers need to run ads showing people lined up to buy copies after Obama's win and the Phillies' championship -- and aim the ads at other advertisers, not readers.)

Newspapers need to acknowledge that some voices, no matter how well intentioned or loud, are not friends of the newspaper business even though they see themselves as friends of journalism. They see the newspaper as an impediment -- and very well might see a totally online newspaper, without physical presses but trying to maintain the same standards it has always had, as as much of an impediment to the rebirth of journalism as a printed one. It's unlikely that an Arizona Republic that had shut down its presses and operated totally online would enthusiastically let Talton say:

"The prohibition on enacting real-estate transfer taxes ("Save Our Homes") will further hamstring government's ability to pay for the public investments desperately needed by this broiling dystopia. It won't save anybody's house, but it will keep the Real Estate Industrial Complex from paying even a modest amount into the commons from which it reaps so much profit."

But there have always been many journalists who have seen the institutions of journalism as the foe of the true journalist.

Last week's post was occasioned by Marc Andreessen's claim in Portfolio that newspapers should just shut down the presses because Wall Street had decided that they were doomed and had so indicated by killing their stock prices. (Wall Street, of course, has also killed the stock prices of other businesses and industries over the years, some of which survive.) Alan Mutter notes here why a newspaper without a print component is at least at present an even weaker business that one with, and as Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg noted, the problem with Andreesen's argument is simply that newspaper companies are not Internet companies. They don't think like Internet companies and they don't act like them. (He did not make this argument approvingly.)

This weakness often given as part of the reason they are doing so badly, but to me part of the reason they are doing so badly is that they think they should be Internet companies when they aren't. That doesn't mean they shouldn't do a lot of stuff on the Internet; but Google is an Internet company and the New York Times is not. Amazon is an Internet company and Barnes & Noble isn't. Trying to be what you are not usually indicates a lack of confidence in what you are, which has been endemic to newspapers since Walter Cronkite moved to a half-hour Monday through Friday. Newspapers in their romantic little hearts want to be competing with other newspapers to scream "Extra!"

But since I encountered the site Newspaper Death Watch with its motto of "Chronicling the Decline of Newspapers and the Rebirth of Journalism," I have realized that much of what newspapers face is an attack from many current or former journalists who really don't like newspapers anymore. They may have loved them growing up, they may have been pulled into the field because of them, they may keep a certain historical reverence for them. But they don't like them now, and it's not that they don't like just the corporate mismanagement.

They think journalism can be done better without newspapers -- the printed ones, to be sure, and in many cases without anything resembling newspapers as we know them. That's not the same as forecasting their decline. They actively want them to go away. They want to work for Internet companies, or they want newspapers to be transformed into Internet companies, or they want to make themselves into Internet companies. Not just because it's the wave of the future and all that, but because the Internet seems to free journalism from some of the restraints print reporters have always scuffed against. And because they do have their residual affection and respect for print newspapers and because they don't see a financially interesting business model rapidly appearing to replace them, they berate newspapers for not being what they are not, which is, simply journalism.

Journalism without print isn't dependent on press deadlines, so you can file a story when it's happening or when you want. You don't need to provide A matter or write four grafs of background that could be cut for space. Instead of spending five minutes trying to summarize someone's argument in one graf, you can say "As so and so said here..." and do a link. It doesn't seem to be as dependent on mass audiences. Because of that, it doesn't have to have the same "But others say" reflexivity, the same need to "balance" the story. It isn't dependent upon finding a centerpiece to anchor the page, meaning that you will have to cover something you don't want to just because it has art. It doesn't have that lag between when something happens and when the paper arrives, meaning that you never have to worry about your story having been upstaged by events. Your story never has to be held for space. You can write a story that seems incredibly significant but that you know will only interest 1,000 people. You can get applause (or boos) right away. And instead of having to think about something new to write about, you can write in response to what someone else said.

This is not to say that these things are bad or that all online journalism proponents support them all. But they are not necessarily good in and of themselves either, unless you want them.

Online journalism offers the dream that "I can finally tell the truth" without the mediation process involved in putting together a group effort aimed at a large audience. It is the dream of every high school journalist who wanted to take over the school paper and say what he and 10 of his friends knew was really going on, instead of the administration saying what they could publish. It's falling back on the view that censorship is not the heavy hand of official oppression but "any time anyone stops me from saying what I want to." I wrote it, so your refusal to publish it is censorship. What do you mean it sucks? Well, not any more.

Election night brought this home to me. More tomorrow. (There may be no length limitations online, but still, the reader's attention must be lagging here.)

Howard Owens has been writing about his experiences trying to create a paperless local newspaper for Batavia, N.Y., a site selected by Gatehouse apparently because they determined that the local newspaper was totally clueless about online. He falls into the camp of those who believe that newspapers' problems come initially from their abandonment of local community news in pursuit of the highminded, abstract solutions presented to a community by people who did not live the same lives as most residents.

Jon Talton, of course, would say that he is just as interested in coverage of the local community as Howard is. But I expect that they would have an interesting in-person discussion, with Howard eventually seeing Jon as one of those highminded abstracters not in touch with typical community concerns, and Jon seeing Howard as a slave to focus groups that preach the gospel of local-local at the expense of inconvenient truths. Or I could be wrong and they could spend the night happily buying each other round after round.

Doug Fisher and I had many interesting go-rounds until it sort of hit both of us that he was talking about journalism and then talking about how printed newspapers would fit into its future with myriad and seemingly limitless technological opportunities, and I was talking about printed newspapers and how journalism would fit into their future amid myriad technological opportunities. And then, of course, there are the Kens and Marks who say that print fits into no future at all. And then Tribune Co. is trying to make the reading of a print newspaper more enjoyable, at least as it sees it.

And sometimes the discussions about whither journalism in an era of print decline act as if journalism barely exists outside daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines, which has always struck me as odd -- journalism has always existed in books, broadcasting, movies (Frederick Wiseman to Michael Moore) and other forms; journalism always takes advantage of whatever communications media exist, adapting its presentation to the medium, and newspapers are both a medium for journalism and a consumer product. So in a purist sense it does not matter in the long run to journalism if they do not exist; but it does not matter if they do exist, either.

Journalism is full of theories -- there used to be the four theories of the press (totalitarian, social-responsibility, etc.), there used to be op-width, balanced vs. circus layout. So I'm going to propose my own for talking about journalism, newspapers, whatever in the future, because I'm a blogger and therefore I can.

And that is that we're talking about Jonie. (I tried to keep it to Joni so we could hear from both sides now, but it was leaving something out.)

Jonie is, in newspaper terms:
J -- Journalism. Capital-J journalism. Investigations, major takeouts, Barlett and Steele, pulling back the curtain to show what's there, locally or nationally -- usually, the bigger the game, the more important it is seen as.
O -- Opinion. Editorials, most blogs, letters, anything whose thrust is "here's what I think about that."
N -- News. Galveston nearly destroyed. McCain says X, Obama says Y. Man helps community baseball league. Mostly just saying here's what happened; you can look behind the curtain, but you don't pull it back completely. It accepts the world as it is and reports on it.
I -- Information. Listings, community events, theater times, business promotions, garden columns.
E -- Entertainment. Not just news about entertainment, but things that entertain the reader -- Hey Mabel stories, comics, Ask Amy, those Monday features on well-meaning local people not doing anything in particular that exist to fill the bottom of the B page.

This just pertains to news. You could drop the J and the rest holds up for advertising, too: Opinion (Exxon should be able to drill for oil, Exxon advertises), News (on sale today!), Information (Dr. Marcos has moved his office), Entertainment (any Volkswagen ad).

Newspapers in the 20th century took Jonie as their guide. Now, many pieces of content did two or more things -- a news story can entertain, the line between information and news is small -- in fact, everything was able to be covered under the rubric of "news," except "opinion" got its own pages except when the publisher wanted to write a front-page editorial or the editor wanted to put a piece of commentary on A1. (News was broken up into news, sports, women's... but it was generally still news.) But the point is not to propose textual analysis, "This story seems like N with a dollop of E." It's just that when people talk about the future of newspapers, they are not talking about the same thing.

So much discussion now is about what emphasis to give to the different parts. Owens writes:

"If local communities are less coherent today than 60 years ago, well certainly mobility and network television play a role, but so do newspapers that fired their community correspondents, stopped covering Eagle scout promotions and tea socials, concerned themselves more with the process of local government than the community impact of its decisions, and tried to be the only indispensable source for all the news of all the world, instead of the one indispensable source of Little League news."

OK, textual analysis, I lied. The community impact part is putting J over N when it comes to local government. But Owens is also saying, in other areas the daily newspaper should have given I more emphasis than J, or at least given I more emphasis than it did. Many bloggers berate newspapers for not immediately combining N and J in the same story, if not O as well. I suspect Talton's view is: Lots of J, less of mundane I. And E? Well, over here we have Lee Abrams, and over there we have -- oh, lots of people who think that J cannot exist with E because E means pandering and cheapening, we are not here to please, we are here to enlighten, and enlightenment is thirsty work.

Much of the despair about newspapers' shaky financial future comes down to: "Without gobs of money, newspapers can no longer do J. They can only do some N and probably more I. Since I see the prime role of newspapers as J, and got into newspapers to do J, they are useless to me. MacArthur Foundation, where are you?" For others it's: "Online can more easily present I and a lot of N. With a strong Web site doing this, the newspaper is for people who are interested in J." Juan Senor of Innovation in Newspapers largely made this point in Australia recently. Does J work better online or in print? Does N have any role in print? If N has no role in print, what is the point of a newspaper? And on and on.

It would be far easier to save newspapers -- in whatever format -- if we could figure out what we were trying to save, or at least group ourselves into parties based on what we think is important and then try to save that. As it is, one person points to a zebra, one points to a hippopotamus, one points to a crocodile, and all say: There's our problem, the newspaper. Let me post a response to your hippo in which I talk about a rhinoceros.

So which newspaper problems are you are mainly trying to solve? The rapid dissemination of news? The provision of information? The full employment of the opportunities offered by digital communication? The establishment of a central community reference? The continued existence of printed journalism? The invocation of a community to act on public issues? The death of obsolete tchnologies and their drain on the corporate purse? The satisfaction of the reader in buying a physical product? The enlightenment of the public on social issues? The preservation of your business? The free expression of opinion? The role of a people's champion? (Think how allowing unlimited posting on every story, as opposed to presenting a selection of edited letters, both supports and undermines the interrelation of those two.) And we haven't even gotten into the advertising problems yet.

You can pick more than one, because some are philosophies and some are tactics. But while they can all fit under the rubric of "reinventing the newspaper," all will not lead to the same solution. And in the long run, it is probably beyond the capabilities of most journalistic organizations to solve all of these problems, even though most are being told that their only future is to try to cover every base in every medium.

As for me, I think newspapers should try to solve the invocation of a community, the establishment of a central community reference, and the satisfaction of a reader in buying a physical product. Through their geographic reach they create, bind and define communities; through their journalistic work they create the most comprehensive databases that could exist; and, as Barney Kilgore said, the first duty of a newspaper is to stay in business. To do that you need to sell something to someone; print products maintain a brand, and newspapers know how to disseminate and distrbute information through print, and charge people for doing so, better than anyone else does. Then whatever else you do has to support this. That's my zebra.

When I started this blog it was in part because I thought it might be interesting to show the parallel fortunes of newspapers and department stores, and because, like any other blogger, I had the solipsistic attitude that what I said might actually make a difference. But my final motivation was that I just don't like meanness and name-calling. And I was tired of reading blog after blog whose underlying message was: "You people who aren't totally getting it are so stupid! There's nothing you can do to save your precious outmoded obsolete print newspapers that absolutely no one reads anymore except for the 75 million losers who still do! Just die and get out of our way!" It just seemed that if we were all united by our belief in journalism, that saying there might be a purpose in trying to save, by rethinking, print newspapers' role might play a part in that. But the people who felt that way were being drowned out by people screaming, "Idiots! Revanchist morons! There is only one future!"

Whenever I hear that there is only one possible future, entsichere ich meinen Browning. So I launched myself into the fray.

Mark Potts at Recovering Journalist felt the need to launch a Jeremiad. (I've done my own.) In his condemnation of a class he calls Printies, he wrote:

"Call these dangerous dinosaurs Printosaurus Rex. Or, for short: Printies. Printies exist throughout the newspaper business, but they're most pernicious in the executive suite, where they continue to hold back intelligent, aggressive digital development. You know the type: They rhapsodize about how nice it is to be able to hold news in their hands as they read it. They tend to wear expensive suits and drive nice cars, paid for in better times. They declaim about never reading blogs. They may have a Facebook profile–but no friends. (But they don't hesitate to hold forth on their "expertise" about Facebook.) They spend money on inane print promotions but don't bother to market their Web sites.

"They print out their e-mail.

"Rather than firmly embracing and investing in the digital future, Printies are doing everything they can to preserve the dead-tree product they're so comfortable with, even at comical expense. They do crazy things like investing in printing plants. They fear the immediacy of the Web, leading to unfortunate memos that mandate paper-first publication (fortunately, cooler heads often prevail on these). They demand prominent "Subscribe to the print edition" links on the top of their Web sites. Truthfully, do these idiotic links really sell papers? Enough to justify that prime placement? I think not."

It was the part about printing out e-mail that got me, in part because I remembered a blog post from some conference -- I tried to find it, couldn't, trust me, it existed -- where a tech-savvy member of an audience was listening to a print reader whose issue with online newspapers was how she was going to save the recipes. After hearing her ask twice what she was going to do without being able to cut the recipes out of the paper, the blogger exploded (either internally or externally) into a huffy "Just print them out, for God's sake!"

Potts is not referring to recipes, but apparently the solution offered to this woman would qualify as a printie remedy as well. She should simply move them into her "recipes" folder and then call them up on her laptop next to the range.

I get more than 100 e-mails per day, and I might print out one or two -- to put on a pile marked "deal with this in coming days." I know I could put them into a folder called "Deal with this in coming days" in Outlook and then access it from my mobile device. I also know I can scan through a bunch of printouts on my desk easier than I can scan the contents of a computer folder. But I am sure Potts is thinking of some executive somewhere who prints out all of his e-mail to read it (or perhaps even still has a secretary to print it out). So I was not personally offended. I just asked myself:

Why does it make so much difference how we use technology? Any technology exists to be used. It does not exist to mandate any use. If I print out my e-mails and read them, what possible difference can it make to you? It is not the same as saying, "I will only respond to letters sent through the U.S. Mail." If I like to read them on paper, and if I respond to them, why is that subject to your condemnation? In the 1980s, if I never set the time on my VCR clock and only used it to watch prerecorded tapes, you might sneer and think that I was not getting as much out of something I paid money for that I could, but if I was satisifed, who cares?

If I think there is a future in printed newspapers and want to spend my company's money building printing plants, whether I am Hearst or Murdoch, you might say I am making a questionable business decision, you might not want to put your money on my marker. Do I deserve the scorn of "comical expense," of such phrases as "harebrained schemes to propagate the print product through laughable 'e-editions'"? Am I not presumably doing this because I, like you, believe in journalism and want to ensure its future?

After throwing invectives around the room, Potts answers that question:

"In clinging to their legacy print products at all costs, they invariably starve development of the innovative digital products that have the best chance to save the industry."

In other words: Money is tight, and if you take the money for your project, we don't have it for ours, and I think your project is stupid and mine isn't. And your project is stupid because you print out your e-mail and so you're stupid. Only those who embrace every new technology to its fullest know what's really going on. I hold the trump card. Give me the money and go away.

Well, Potts got some interesting comments. On e-editions:

"The main reason the newspaper industry is pumping out PDFs is that libraries and the Library of Congress now wants them instead of the mailed paper product. It saves shovel-loads of money, which as taxpayers we all should applaud, and newspapers are required to file their copies with the LC to keep their copyrights. ... As an historian who uses these records from time to time, I truly love PDF versions of newspapers and books. I have spent too many hours reading microfilm and microfiche in a backlit reader not to be really jealous of a generation that has easy and efficient searches of mounds of documents."

A reader identified as "A" spoke up in support of print, admittedly not terribly convincingly, to which Pat Thornton, who as noted here before can be an angry man, responded:

"You're an idiot."

A writer known as Working Journalist, who tends to write at great length as I do, probably to our mutual detriment, noted:

"Ease up on the condescension, Mark. It adds nothing to the debate and alienates people who should be learning from your views. ... I agree with you that the reluctance by many managers to let go of print has hampered digital innovation. There are also 'digital idealists' at papers, people who seize on every new e-gadget and insist that the newspaper must embrace it, even if it offers no obvious new journalistic or financial benefit. They, too, are a problem. Newspapers are poorly served both by blind traditionalism and by blind idealism....

"A pragmatist looking at the print product would not simply abandon it, nor scoff at its fans. At most newspapers, the print product delivers more than 90 percent -- 90 percent! -- of total revenue, and effectively delivers news and ads to tens or hundreds of thousands of readers. By no measure is this technology obsolete or irrelevant.

"On the other hand, we have electronic media of many types, many still evolving. The potential of these media is obvious and exciting, with the possibility of delivering news and advertising to thousands, millions -- billions! -- and permitting a radical new form of interactive journalism that we're only beginning to imagine. But, so far, the new model doesn't make money -- or not much....

"A pragmatic view -- what I called the 'accountant's' view at Mutter's site -- would be to base newspaper business decisions not on tradition nor on promises of a new era dawning, but on hard data: income and loss. The next steps forward should lead clearly toward solvency; otherwise they're not worth taking. It does us no good to create an exciting new kind of journalism if it comes with an eviction notice. Let's look at how we can make more money and commit better journalism using all the tools in the box. ...

"We are poorly served by divisive posts mocking those who cling to traditional journalism, or dismissing those seeking a new path. We need to work together to find business models that can demonstrate, with hard numbers, an ability to succeed in a capitalist economy."

And Howard Owens, who gave me needed guidance in the early days of this blog, added in terms of the "subscribe here" link:

"When I ran the Ventura County Star Web site, we did a little redesign and removed the 'subscribe' link. The circulation director came to me immediately and said, 'What are you doing to me?' He had in his hand a printout showing the Web site was generating about 20 new subscribers per month. Now that was a few years ago, but why should we make it hard for people to find a way to subscribe to our most profitable product on our Web sites?

"Us Onlinies always argue that we shouldn't force people into getting news how we think they should get news -- so why shouldn't we make it easy for them to get the print edition if that's what they want? Some of our readers, even ones who visit our Web sites, really still do prefer print. And the same can be said for the PDF version.

"I'm also one who doesn't believe online is going to kill print. The decline of print started long before there was a Web, driven by forces that have little to do with technology. Those forces have much to do with more choices (which yes, does include the Internet now), changing lifestyles, a more mobile (less rooted) culture, and problems with journalism itself (core, deep problems). The more troubling trends are driven by declining readership along generational lines, which goes back 80 years and has nothing to do with the Web.

"To say that all of our efforts should be concentrated on the Web is just as hidebound as the attitudes of the worst of the Printies."

I was waiting to someone to answer: "You're an idiot." I guess Howard's reputation prevented that. Or the fact that he used his real name.

The Daily Telegraph in England has started printing on the presses of the Times. The reason is that Rupert Murdoch invested in presses that will allow printing of color on every page. The London newspapers see color on every page as essential to print's future. That might be called enhancing and exploiting technology. Or it might be called being a dinosaur. ("The right idea for -- 1975!") If we have a tool at our disposal that we know a lot about, the printed newspaper, why not use and exploit it along with using the other tools we now have? Oh, because if we didn't you'd have more money to work with what you want to work with.

I started this blog because I was tired of feeling as if I really were an idiot for believing that print had a place in journalism's future whatever else the future holds. Now I'm even more glad for those -- Duncan, Giner, Owens, Garcia, Fisher, Jacobson, Picard, and many more whose blogs I simply don't read or don't know of, or who don't blog because they have more humility than I do -- who despite their many differences keep the focus on the world as we find it and not on who's the bitchin'est futurist in the room.

... is that when it arrives, there's still the Future ahead.

Doug Fisher, in commenting on presumed plans in Tampa for a one-section paper at least three days of the week, notes:

"Right now, much of our digital strategy -- and this includes companies far beyond media -- is of necessity tied to a multi-pound chunk of silicon and plastic. It's still basically a 9-5, desktop world online (even if the "desktop" is a laptop). As small, powerful information appliances and readers emerge, that single-hump graph of usage will smooth out or maybe become multi-humped. ... The bottom line is that five years, and definitely a decade, from now we don't know what we'll be using to get our news and information.

"... Is the idea of putting longer stuff online counterintuitive if mobile devices become a primary way to access the Internet? Eventually, I suspect these things will not only upend newspapers but all this stuff we've come to 'know' about our Web sites, which might not really be sites at all but various digital streams."

I can just see the postings two or three years from now:

"God, is ANYONE still using a computer to access a Web site? That is so 20th century. Get with it, people!"

"Newspaper Web sites are even deader than print because they don't have as many legacy users. People who still use Big Key media are just going to have to adapt. Those people who still use computers instead of mobile devices -- well, most of them are in their 70s and 80s anyway. As Jeff Jarvis says..."

"Journalism as we know it will come to an end without Web sites. Without the rich mix for the eyes given by the 15- to 19-inch screen, without the ability to easily read 20 to 30 headlines at one glance, no one will ever read most news stories again. It'll be all Jamie Lynn all the time."

"They'll go back to Web sites once their eyesight gets worse."

"The home page model offered a wonderful medium for long-form, literary journalism. This new medium only favors information and opinion. A golden age has disappeared."

"As I predicted in 1996, 2000, 2004, whatever, the business model of Web sites will collapse by 2012 and the last server will be turned off by 2014."

"We have a plan to ensure our company's profitability through distributing paid classified advertising on mobile devices."

"Microsoft believes that using proprietary software installed on PCs to update and develop Web news sites is a viable longterm business. Microsoft stock closed yesterday at 3 cents a share, while AP Mobile Newsnext, spun off last year by Sergey Brin in partnership with the Associated Press, closed at $12,416.25. In other news, Steve Ballmer's mansion in Washington state was put up for sale yesterday..."

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.

As promised! I love analogies, though my former colleague Frank Wilson often told me they were the weakest form of argument. Jesus, of course, also loved analogies. I can just see Frank now. "Forgive me, Master, but your comparison of heaven to a mustard seed? It doesn't hold up." But are there stories of other transformations out there that might offer clear guidance to the poor, beleaguered newspaper business?

Within the field, the presumed transformation of the Christian Science Monitor to an online news service with a weekly newspaper -- no one knows whether this will happen, but knowledge is less interesting than speculation, as most conversations about sports show -- seems to offer an in-the-trade analogy. Why not just do what they presumably will do? But the Monitor is very different from your traditional newspaper company. First, of course, it is not a newspaper company. It is an outreach of a church, and while the church has said it no longer wants the newspaper to be a financial loser, it is not looking for a profit center either. (The Wikipedia entry on the Monitor, with all the usual Wiki caveats, is here and does seem to address most of the major issues.) Were the Monitor simply a business, it would have closed long ago. It still exists because Mary Baker Eddy said it was to exist. Journalists can praise Mrs. Eddy's decision, but it isn't a business model.

Second, the Monitor doesn't own presses or delivery trucks. It doesn't deliver Best Buy inserts. It arrives in the mail. Well, so does the West Plains Quill in Missouri, but the Monitor also doesn't have a local circulation area. Neither, of course, do the Wall Street Journal or USA Today. But the Monitor also doesn't have much advertising and it has a national circulation around, what, 60,000. The Monitor is unlike anything else in the daily newspaper field, which is why it is hard to use it as a model for anything else in the daily newspaper field.

Dropping the daily print paper may be the only move left for the Monitor, and in 2008 might be the only move left even if they had not thrown millions away on Monitor Radio and had stayed with Kay Fanning's efforts in the 1980s to again make the newspaper a national institution. But the Monitor's owners have made more bad business decisions than any other newspaper short of the Brooklyn Eagle ("Long Island outside the city will never amount to much"), so no one can be sure. And while I do not want to wade into the morass of hopes, fantasies and conflicts that constitute the membership statistics of nearly any church, it is hard to find anyone outside the Church of Christ, Scientist who believes that the Church of Christ, Scientist is a growing denomination in the United States. Some put its membership as low as 100,000, which makes a circulation of 60,000 for the print newspaper pretty impressive. But this also makes the Monitor unique. We move on.

General Electric no longer makes toaster ovens or televisions and apparently is planning to get out of its last consumer-goods operation, major appliances. Does this moving out of old businesses provide a model? GE is getting out of low-profit, highly competitive businesses and concentrating on, as its Web site puts it, "jet engines to power generation, financial services to water processing, and medical images to media content." (NBC.) They're not saying the key to success is to concentrate on a business with no effective bar to competition and where you make five cents for every dollar you made in the previous business. But that's a business decision and not a journalistic one.

At any rate, GE did not turn the light-bulb business into the jet engine business. It started some divisions and bought others and sold off others, such as when it sold small appliances to Black & Decker. (Let's not even get into the tortured history of television-set branding.) GE was at one time one of the largest computer companies. GE, a giant in the locomotive business. GE was and is a massive conglomerate that in the 1960s looked to viewers of "College Bowl" like a light-bulb and toaster-oven company. Had GE been involved in the newspaper business, it would have sold off its newspapers by now; but the newspapers would have been sold off, not made into something else. GE transforms itself, but its units do what they did under new owners. So GE's move out of refrigerators does not look like an analogy.

Mass transit once was vital to newspapers and department stores. (For European free sheets, mass transit still is.) Trolleys brought the customers to a centralized shopping area whose merchants needed the newspaper to draw them in. The newspapers used the trolleys and interurbans to get their papers to outlying distributors. Streetcars had their main day from the late 1880s to the early 1920s. But many a streetcar line ran in the red. Transit operators made their real money off real estate development and amusement parks along their lines, and in smaller towns they barely made any money at all.

So mass transit was already in trouble by the 1920s, but it was given new life by the Depression and was saved by war rationing, so companies bought PCC cars or converted to buses. But it was back in trouble by the 1950s and was basically done as a business by the late 1960s, when it became a governmental responsibility. Now it is having a new vogue. We could have a nice libertarian vs. social responsibility debate about whether light rail is smart development or government coercion on property development, but that's not the point here (so let's not).

The mass transit analogy has some uses for people who want a PBS-like structure for journalism. It's a social good and therefore it shouldn't be simply a profitmaking business. The histories are very different, though. The justification for saving mass transit as a social good was to provide transportation to those who had no alternative -- the poor, the disabled, the young, the old. (The bickering over L.A. mass transit -- is it subways for the middle-class or buses for the poor -- shows this question remains active.) But news, in some form, is offered free everywhere you go. The cost for the poor or otherwise disadvantaged is for broadband access, not news. So we move on.

So that leaves us with that old standby, the buggy-whip business, to come.

GE, etc., will have to wait.

I started doing this blog because, like everyone who does a blog, I thought I had something to say that at least I would be interested in saying, and maybe one other person -- the usual readership of blogs -- would be, too. And apart from the department stores, what I was trying to say about newspapers was: There's what we should and can do online, and there's Internet craziness. There are things you can do with print media, but there are a lot of people online who believe the only thing you can do with print is bury it. There's 90 percent of your income coming from your print newspaper and half the city reading it, and there are people who will say: "Who cares? Shut it down tomorrow! Everything now lives online, because -- well, I live online and your teenager does, too."

Just like the hammer and the nail, to the man with a cursor, there's no problem that can't be best solved by a Web application. And it seemed like people were being cowed, because journalists have a tendency to be cowed by people who say: I know the future with certitude.

In other words, I've been doing this for months to try to say, half as well, even half of what Tim McGuire said last month to the American Association of Independent News Dealers. It got posted late Monday on Romenesko and thus might be overlooked. But -- drumroll for sweeping universalist statement -- everyone who works in newspapers and everyone who cares about newspapers and journalism should read this speech, and read it again when the next teardrop falls. McGuire indicates he's said much of this before. But has it been said in one place quite this clearly?

He says there are seven realities. To encapsulate: "We are not the alpha dog anymore—the consumer is. ... News online is here to stay and no, that does not mean print is dead. Smart newspaper executives need to create a future which makes both online and print essential building blocks of a completely integrated information strategy. ... It’s the advertising business model, stupid. ... This has everything to do with distribution. ... The key to any new business model for American newspapers is content and we’d better stop killing our golden goose. ... Great leadership is required... An industry in crises takes a huge psychic human toll on long-time practitioners and you need to either leave or take personal responsibility for your own success."

He addresses Dean Singleton and others:

"I think he’s missing the whole point when he attacks reporters, editors and unions as whiners. I just don’t see very many people wishing for yesterday. I do see people frustrated with corporate leadership that has amassed incredible debt and CEOs who want to correct their own failures on the backs of the working folks. ... I think what newspaper people want is aggressive corporate leadership that is driven by an interest in saving the journalistic franchise rather than being focused on greed and self-interested management preservation. ... I know the clock is not going to be wound back. ... Journalism and the newspaper business have changed dramatically, and it is far wiser to look forward rather than back. Newspaper people should understand that things are going to get worse before they get better, if we measure better and worse by the 1990s."

He says, let's see what's happening but keep it in perspective:

"Content is indeed moving to the web. That is undeniable, but it can also be overstated. Not all content is best suited for the web, and a lot of consumers are not ready to consume all their new information on the Internet. ... Undeniably, a certain part of our audience is growing more dependent on the choice offered by the web... The question is how fast does that move occur? I don’t think the move of all content to the web is going to come as fast as some people think. A lot of consumers still want mediated news... A lot of readers covet the prioritization offered by a newspaper. There are still large audiences for things like comics, crosswords, sports, entertainment calendars and local news that are best consumed in a newspaper. ... Mass distribution of messages and products will have its place for a long time."

He says, Internet gurus are simply gurus and, more important, online news at this point is still a technology in search of a business:

"Ballmer is pretty darn sure of himself for somebody who can’t make Vista work. The technical gurus often vastly overestimate the computer savvy and comfort levels of consumers. Just because we have great technical capability does not mean consumers enjoy wrestling with technology. ,,, The second reason I think it is premature to write off newspaper delivery is there’s no business model for online delivery of news. The business model for newspapers is battered and tattered, but there is still a model. The business models that are working online do not currently support news. ... Finally, newspapers still have strength. Stop laughing! ,,, I think newspaper readership, while declining, is staying ahead of advertising declines. As I have said many times this is a business model problem more than it is a readership problem."

He says that just because print isn't dead doesn't mean that it doesn't need a different approach:

"When we talk about the newspaper we should not start with what we have now. We have to reinvent print just as much as we have to reinvent electronic delivery of news. Innovation is essential. ... Everything we do with our print and electronic products has to ADD value for citizen readers. ... It is essential that the newspaper of the future be a convener of people online and in print. Newspapers must convene all sorts of audiences in all sorts of imaginative ways. In a fractured media world it is incumbent on the democratic responsibilities of newspapers that newspapers lead, guide and direct everything from democracy to knitting clubs."

Because he's talking to delivery folks, he talks about how one of our great strengths -- our production and delivery network, the pipeline that we control as opposed to the Internet -- can be put to better use in the 21st century:

"Daily distribution of a one size fits all newspaper is not necessary and it is not the smart business decision. Publishers need to be willing to print sheets of varying sizes and shapes on different days of the week. ... Those choices should be made according to news demand AND advertiser demands. Customized special products delivered to different subscribers also have to be a part of this imaginative print approach. ... I think the smart companies are going to ask you to deliver a main sheet of varying sizes, and lots of auxiliary products aimed at specialized audiences. The business models of each product and each day might be dramatically different, from mass, to target, to circulation-based, to advertising-based, to sponsorships."

And, yes, he says that despite all the talk about business models, this is about more than business:

"One of the greatest threats to democracy is that our long-tailed world might destroy all sense of community. ... The journalism that shores up democracy is currently driven by newspapers. Nobody else, not citizen journalists, not bloggers, not television and not Google, Yahoo or Microsoft seems capable of protecting our society from governmental excess like newspapers do."

Now, one can quibble with his specifics. He says printed newspapers have a life of about 20 to 25 years and that there's no point in trying to market them to younger people or come up with products for them. Well, the people involved with Red Eye and the Philadelphia Daily News would argue with that, with some justification, and let's see how Baltimore does with its new B. Maybe Giner's 3030 format could be a hit. You can't try to reinvent print and not hope that it draws a wider audience. What we certainly know is that the current broadsheet formula isn't making it with younger people. So maybe he's right, but let's not put the kibosh on print innovation -- to freeze it in 2001 just to appeal to the geezers.

And while he takes Dean Singleton to task for calling "whiners" people who are merely pointing out Singleton's mistakes in management and finance, he does seem to underestimate how one or two old heads can thwart change. In addition to futurologists, journalists can be cowed by people who state with certitude that they hold the moral high ground. "If you ask me to change what I do, you are trashing the ideals of" -- oh, Joseph Pulitzer, Adolph Ochs, Otis Chandler, Gene Roberts, you name it. And some journalists will then run for cover. Journalists are always susceptible to idealists, because they fear they aren't idealistic enough themselves.

But those are quibbles. If in the next five years someone makes a breakthrough with print and younger readers, McGuire will jump on board. If they don't, well, they don't. His points are: Be realistic, pay attention to what the reader wants, the first problem is advertising, don't turn away from our strengths while we build new ones, don't look for a single magic bullet, be part of what happens, and what happens to newspapers matters to us as our business but it matters more to the country.

Yeah, THAT's the press, baby.

Doug Fisher's "Common Sense Journalism" is, gosh, next to "That's the Press, Baby," the most vital blog about journalism. ... Seriously, it is something everyone interested in the future of the business -- and particularly in the future of copy editing, which Doug is also greatly interested in -- should be reading regularly. Doug and I differ on whether newspapers are basically print publishers who can also do other things or information providers who look for the best medium, as the exchange after my last post shows. But we agree on a lot of the rest -- such as that there is no one magic bullet -- and his viewpoint is always enlightened and enlightening. And he zeroes in on tidbits that don't get noticed widely elsewhere. He pays attention to more input in a day than I can follow in a week. These ex-radio guys, how do they do it?

In a post about his post in response to my post before this post -- God, this is what I love about blogging, it's like the old Velveeta Box Infinity Paradox -- Doug's quote of John C. Abell at Wired News (yep, a link from a link) really struck home with me:

"If nobody pays for news –- or rather, if the people that gather the news aren’t paid -– then there is no business model for journalism. ... But free often only means that it isn’t me who has to turn my pockets inside-out, that someone else is paying what amounts to a subsidy. In all media – online and offline -- that subsidy is generally advertising.

"But there is a rub: pre-internet, that subsidy always went one way – straight to the content creators. Now, it can go in infinite directions. It can even go to a site that makes use of what the market determines are the most valuable bits of a news package and not to the writers and producers. Is that wrong? This is more a matter of nature than the law; you can’t make hurricanes illegal."

It comes to mind because of this quote from Sun-Times editorial page editor Tom McNamee as quoted in Chicago Reader:

“'Even bands like Wilco, nobody's buying the records, they get them free online. So what's going to happen, music is not going to die, people still love music, there will still be bands out there making fantastic music, but they won’t make megafortunes. There's nothing wrong with that. That’s a wonderful thing -- the only people it’s bad for is Wilco. Same thing here.'"

So we're not going to get paid as well, maybe not very well at all. But hey, that's OK because there'll still be fantastic journalism, and whaddya gonna do? This is truly an aesthetic appreciation of one's own plight. It reminds me of one of my college professors, who one day told us we would be lucky as the first generation of journalists who made enough money throughout our careers that we could raise families and not have to go into P.R. A couple of days later, he said: I'd write for free for a byline, and so should you. So as for Wilco's diminshed paychecks -- well, who cares? I downloaded their music free. Let 'em live in a garage. Just keep turning out those tunes, Jeff. I love your stuff. Not gonna pay ya for it, though. Find someone else to subsidize it.

Somehow Tom Lehrer's famous lyric comes to mind: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun." And that's why Doug's thoughts are so worth reading. We may disagree on tactics, but he knows that journalistic idealism and a hope that something will somehow take care of things is not going to get us out of our problems.

OK, the head of USA Today said it, now Gary Pruitt of McClatchy said it:

"McClatchy will likely end up with online revenue around a couple hundred million dollars this year. But it will not equal print revenue in the foreseeable future."

As an anonymous poster on Gannett Blog noted today:

"News gathering is too expensive to be sustained in the low-rent world of the Internet. We can't produce a page of news as cheaply as a competing site fills its screen with user-generated content -- or stolen digests of what the newspaper world produced at great expense."

Fine. Can we stop having to believe now that the online fairy is going to make everything OK again at some unknown point down the road? Can we start really talking about how to save ourselves and what we do and believe in, for those of us who believe in it, and stop saying it's all about the conversation and trying to match the economic model of bloggers? More niche products, fewer but smarter pages (whether just for now or forever), higher cost to consumers, pay walls like Little Rock's, whether beneath the bombast of Lee Abrams' notes are ideas that could save the sort of journalism we need to do while producing the sort of products readers may want more than we do? Every idea gores someone's ox. Can we do this without running for cover every time someone says, "You're just trying to save your stupid 19th-century buggy whip business"?

We've believed for a decade that at some point in the future, we'd strike online gold and clean up there like we cleaned up in print. It's not going to happen. That doesn't mean, forget online. It means we need a strategy based on what we are, and not based on a complete metamorphosis into something else that in any event hasn't happened in the last decade anyway. In the end, our core competency is that we publish newspapers. Let the people who want to be something else be something else.

More on advertising: I haven't found the link yet, but May's Presstime also reported that among young people newspaper inserts were the second-most-favored method of researching purchases. Link TK. Alan Mutter reports today that the cost of printing may increase ROP advertising -- and thus newsprint space. And a study by Google seems to indicate that for at least some readers, internet shopping works better with newspaper advertising. As the article notes, "Yet, it may suggest that newspaper and Web work best when working together."

As noted, today's topic is W. Dean Singleton, and even to in some places praise him, which can be a hard thing to do. Dean is like the old Thomson chain -- even when they were doing the right thing, you wondered what they were hiding and you feared it couldn't last. The headline on Dean's speech at the WAN conference in Stockholm was that 19 of the top 50 U.S. newspapers were losing money. (For years journalists have railed about obscene profit margins and money-grubbing management. Now, papers are being kept alive by their owners despite no profits, and journalists are railing about money-grubbing management.)

But back to Dean, who noted (here is his speech) that the only industries as challenged as newspapers are airlines and -- yes -- department stores. (It's good to know we're still joined at the hip and are going to hell together.) He adds:

"Despite the growth of radio beginning in the 1930’s and TV in the 1950’s, we continued to enjoy growth in revenue even if our market share declined. Life was good. But in the 1990’s something began to change for us.

"Was it the proliferation of cable news channels, the inexorable trend toward two-wage earners per household working outside the home, time pressed lifestyles, the emergence of the Internet, or the explosion and fragmentation of all forms of media? Was it the consequence of consolidation in our industry, combined with public ownership and subsequent pressure from institutional and large shareholders? It was all of these factors."

It may seem obvious for Dean to note this, but Dean is right to note once again that our problems didn't begin with broadband or this generation of young people. Market share has been declining since the 1960s and circulation has been declining since the 1980s and we didn't care because we kept charging more money for advertising. Of course, Dean was among those who did that. But he was far from alone.

He goes on: "The merger of Macy’s and May Co. resulted in substantial consolidation of department store print spending. The merger of Sears and K-Mart had the same effect. Newspaper advertising from all general merchandisers has declined by 20% across the industry over the past 5 years, and within that category, department store spending has declined even more steeply." (And Wal-mart barely even advertises in newspapers.)

"In the national advertising category, revenue is down almost 30% from last year. In better times, we enjoyed brand advertising from General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. We also benefited from the wave of growth in telecommunications products, such as cell phones, long distance services and Internet access. But as you know, the telecom industry has succumbed to a surge of consolidation, hitting hard our ad revenue form this important category."

It's not just that newspaper advertising is down. All kinds of advertising are down. Read Advertising Age long enough and you will read "Death of Advertising" stories. But Dean wants to keep the presses rolling.

"At MediaNews, we believe in print. Our newspapers and partnerships have, in the past two years, invested almost half a billion dollars in new, modern and efficient printing and mailroom plants. Why? Because these investments help make our core more efficient as revenue is challenged. Efficiency in our core product is a key building block in our new strategy, because our core newspapers fund our growth of new business. ..."

I believe in anyone who believes in print. But Dean then wanders into the newsroom:

"We have also been more creative about how content is produced, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and localness while sharing resources among newspapers and on making these changes transparent to the reader. ... In San Francisco, we have consolidated reporting and editing functions to eliminate costly duplication, just as we’ve merged production, administration, accounting and circulation of our newspapers. And in Los Angeles, we’re merging functions of our nine dailies in areas of news, production, accounting, advertising, circulation and administration. And in most of our newsrooms, we’re eliminating costly infrastructures as we protect our core news gathering functions and expand online staffing."

We know this means, in general, that instead of reporters from Pasadena, the Valley, Long Beach and Torrance covering the Los Angeles County government, one reporter is covering Los Angeles county government. And "costly infrastructures" mean "copy editors, layout editors, graphic artists..." So, yeah, as a journalist, this is the point at which I stop praising Dean for his clear-eyed realism, his investments in print, his willingness to see a future for newspapers, and say: Hey, Dean, stop goring my ox. I love my ox. Go lay off some more pressmen.

Dean does know how to end a speech, though, with a rousing call to arms:

"... We must not lose sight of why we’re in business in the first place and why ensuring a dynamic future for newspapers is so important. Sure, economic performance is important. After all, without solid earnings you can’t fund future growth. But there is also a greater calling to us all.
Newspapers are the cornerstone of democracies everywhere. We owe it to our countries to succeed in navigating a new newspaper model.

"So this 400-year-old industry has been a leader since the first newspapers were formed in this country … we were there before government … we are the model for emerging democracies even today … and we can be on the cutting edge of the new social revolution that’s before us now … … if we stay true to the role we are meant to play.

"If we print what our readers … not what we … want. If we discard our arrogance and old ideas. If we let our readers participate. There is more at stake here than our economic fortunes. The old newspaper model, without major changes, is destined to fail. Paired with a revolutionary new model, we can succeed. If we fail, democracy fails. Failure is not an option."

You can parse that one backward and forward, but let's take Dean at his word. He's based in Denver, so he could have made his money in Chipotle franchises. Something has kept him coming back to newspapers. Why not the same thing that all journalists believe, that we're doing this for the good of mankind? And Dean, bless his well-brought-up Texas soul, knows enough not to say "fuck" to meetings of journalists. So whatever he said here, he can relax knowing that it's Sam Zell they're after this year, not him.

No, our problem with Dean isn't with his motivations. It's not with whether he centralizes call centers or lays off pressmen. Our problem with Dean, with Sam, with Tony Ridder, with Gannett, comes down in the end to one sentence the always praiseworthy Rem Rieder says in his response to Zell's byline count plan:

"The contribution of staffers is measured by the quality of their work."

Rem is a wonderful writer and editor and is a realistic man. But he is saying: What we do can't be measured quantitatively. And who can measure quality? People who understand quality. Thus, I would hear Rem saying, we are the best judges of what we do.

If the measure of my work is quality, and the people who can measure quality are myself and my peers, and I know that the sort of work I and my peers do and want to do is quality work ... Dean, just sit down and write some checks. Your ideas are not welcome.

And if we are the definers of quality, and if the public says something like, we want shorter stories on routine matters, thus fewer (not no) jumps, and someone says (as someone with a swath of major prizes always will) that if we give that to them, we are diminishing quality... then one who disagrees risks automatic definition as a Philistine. That's at the far edge. We know most people in a newsroom do not live there. We know some do. We know how that can block any sort of change in a newsroom, whether it's for print, for online, for anything.

Yes, when we talk about the "Death of Newspapers," we're not all talking about the same thing. We're talking about newspapers and journalism and how and whether they're linked. We're talking about some people who love print and some people who don't give a damn about it and pr0bably hated it before there was an alternative. We're talking about whether democracy can in the end be served by a company that has to make money or whether journalism should be a publicly funded good like NPR. We're talking about whether reporting on high school soccer games is information or news or journalism and whether journalists should have to be involved in it. About whether resources spent on sizing engagement photos mean fewer resources spent asking Scott McClellan, "Why did you lie?" Whether quality is our only criterion. And whether Wal-mart will ever run ads with us. Questions that didn't matter much when it looked as if newspapers would keep having more and more money endlessly.

That's a hell of a lot for an economically challenged industry to deal with. So those of us who believe in newspapers may have to position ourselves away from those who believe that newspapers are irrelevant or revanchist or have too many distractions from journalism. We may just have to say, we're trying to save newspapers, with an online component and a mobile component sure, but we're saving newspapers as a product that has this and that and the other, that creates and binds a community, and that means not just saving but enhancing our core product instead of abandoning it as a carcass to feed senile wolves. We believe in the end that this will be good and that if we fail, some part of democracy is lessened. We have common ground with Dean Singleton and we think that a newspaper put on a better financial basis might be able to afford more reporters to cover Los Angeles county government, but if one reporter speaking to thousands of newspaper readers is what we can do today, it's not wrong because it's not optimal. If that's not where you are, fine, seek your happiness, but we're not going to listen to "newspapers are dead" anymore. And we aren't Philistines because of it.

It seems like we're at the watershed.

It isn't just gas prices and lack of advertising that brought us here. It's Sam Zell. Or, rather, it's Sam Zell and the Los Angeles Times.

But what a week it's been.

The Wall Street Journal looks at the Washington Post's local-local effort in Loudoun County, Va., and pronounces it a failure. The hitherto golden-child Rob Curley flees to Las Vegas, saying it's all his fault and that he tried to do local-local without actually being part of the community he was doing it for. Jon Talton weighs in, writing in part:

The Journal story says local-local "'embraces the idea that a high-school prom is as newsworthy as a debate over where to build a hospital, and that Little League deserves major-league attention. ....' This kind of sophistry was rammed down the throats of newsrooms around the country, backed by questionable research. ... I sat in countless focus groups where regular readers reacted with disdain to these schemes, while non-readers said "gee, kewl," but would still refuse to buy the paper. Yet the corporate bosses plunged ahead. ...

"Highly skilled journalists were demoralized and pushed out the door. These are the very people who could indeed compete 'with the Internet or cable TV.' To take one example, Knight-Ridder's superb Washington bureau was the only mainstream news organization to provide skeptical coverage of the run-up to the Iraq folly. And newsrooms were discouraged from compelling, high-impact coverage of local news. ... Scripps shut down the Cincinnati Post rather than try something like an Internet newspaper, with a staff of 10 top-notch journalists and propellerheads on a mission to cover real news in a fascinating but secretive city. Get this: The failure has been the business model, not real journalism."

Meanwhile, over at the current definition of journalistic evil, Tribune Co., the innovation officer Lee Abrams, famed for his rock-radio memos, has been to Baltimore and sees them saving the newspaper:

"Creating something that is both economically viable and completely engaging and credible that will delight existing fans and significantly raise the interest of occasional readers and re ignite interest among non and former readers. ... Looking overseas. That's where reinvention is happening...and circulations are often rocketing upwards. Ideas influenced by papers like Excelsior in Mexico City. Looking outside of the obvious circle for inspiration. Foreign papers are far from perfect...but they ARE trying things we aren't. And keeping our eyes outside of the traditional circle will feed ideas. ... Defining it as a Lifestyle paper. Hard news? Of course! But also tools for better living. A lot to like. The hard stuff is there...it's all about a really modern presentation that mobilized the skills, talents and visions of a passionate group.... The paper will be smaller and more compact, BUT far more focused and engaging which at the end of the day will be more satisfying. Despite the words of the pundits, the idea is not to equate economic reality with quality loss. There's NO reason that quality can't soar in a new reality environment. Though it's understandable that an initial reaction would be that quality will decline...but only if we let it."

Fie on that, says Ken Doctor in looking at the Zellibune's cuts (not Abrams' memo specifically) in his blog Content Bridges, because it's too late, too late, nothing will help:

Tribune's Randy Michaels' "saying the papers will become more USA Today-like, with:
"a new look and feel in each market, emphasizing what people are telling us they want in the research: charts, graphs, maps, lists. ... Wow. Great solution for 1992 perhaps, 10 years after USA Today turned the newspaper world, Pleasantvillelike, from black and white to color. The problem with that is that USA Today is essentially flat last several years in circulation, and it's got a national base and multiplicity of hotel/travel programs to keep the numbers up. The biggest innovation of the last couple of years isn't the color weather map on USA Today's back page; it's Google's ability to map everything and anything, instantly -- at the customer's fingertips and choice, 24/7...."

The end of newspapers "is, at this point, inevitable anyhow. I give Michaels credit in publicly announcing some thinking about how to justify cuts, but he could have put it more simply. People and paper are our two biggest costs, and we don't have enough money to maintain current levels of spending. That's less fancy, but more to the point. ... Anyhow, the whole notion of a daily newspaper is now obsolescent. It has taken way too long to get to 24/7 newsrooms and news output, but that's what the national players -- from CNN to the New York Times to the BBC -- have adjusted to. ... The old daily paper is being -- as we watched Hillary Clinton's concession on Saturday and its instant analysis on TV and web -- replaced by the web."

Fie on that, says Fortune's Stanley Bing in his blog:

"Newspapers are dead. Dead dead dead. Yes, Rupert Murdoch doesn’t seem to believe so, but he is incorrect in this, or doesn’t see the truth right now, or whatever. Because you know newspapers? They’re dead. This is not helped at all by the appearance of Sam Zell, who bought Tribune ... and whose chief operating officer recently announced they would begin to judge the value of journalists by the column inches they produced in a year. This is sort of like saying that Chichi’s is the best restaurant in America because it serves the greatest weight in nachos. That aside, however, everybody does agree: they’re dead. One day there will be no newspapers, because No Young People Read Newspapers.

"Is this true? My kids are of sentient age. They read newspapers. In fact, they’re both knee deep in Obamamania right now, and read everything they can get their hands on. I see people reading newspapers on the street, in parks, on subways and buses… when you get a bad story in the newspaper it still ruins your day… But no. They’re dead. Know why? Because Advertising is Down in newspapers. Now of course, advertising is sort of down across the board, and actually MUCH more disappointing on all those social networks everybody loves so much… and newspapers still attract a HUGE proportion of total advertising…

"But no. Newspapers are dead. And advertisers read that and, timid little lambkins that they are, cut their budgets even more, because after all who wants to advertise in a dead medium?
Finally, newspapers are, you know, dead because they Haven’t Changed With The Times and News Is A Commodity That You Can Get Just As Well Online. Except guess what. It’s not. ...
So let’s take a breath and just agree: newspapers aren’t any deader right now than any other coughing, wheezing business in this lousy environment. Lehman is losing nearly $3 billion dollars this quarter. Nobody talks about investment banking being dead. Broadcast television just racked up more than $9.2 billion in its upfront sales season, in spite of analysts’ predictions that this year would be its last. And not one social network is really making a go of it yet."

Dead? Living? At least nearly everyone agrees: Fie on Sam Zell! Juan Giner, who advocates for smaller but better print newspapers, says: Fie on Sam Zell! A story in the New York Times said: Fie on Sam Zell! And Harold Meyerson writes on the op-ed page of the Post, which started all this by not succeeding with local-local in Loudon County:

"During his first year in journalism, Zell has visited the city rooms and Washington bureaus of a number of Trib publications to deliver obscenity-laced warnings and threats to employees that whatever it was they were doing, it wasn't working. There was too much coverage of world and national affairs, he told Times writers and editors; readers don't want that stuff. Last week, the company decreed that its 12 papers would have to cut by 500 the number of pages they devoted every week to news, features and editorials, until the ratio of pages devoted to copy and pages devoted to advertising was a nice, even 1 to 1. At the Times, that would mean eliminating 82 pages a week.

"As the company prepares to shed more reporters, it has measured writers' performances by the number of column inches of stories they ground out. It found, said one Zell executive, that the level of pages per reporter at one of Zell's smaller papers, the Hartford Courant (about 300), greatly exceeded that at the Times (about 50). As one of the handful of major national papers, however, the Times employs the kind of investigative and expert beat reporters not found at most smaller papers. I could name a number of Times writers who labored for months on stories that went on to win Pulitzers and other prizes, and whose column-inch production, accordingly, was relatively light. Doing so, I fear, would only put their necks on Zell's chopping block. So let me instead note that if The Post's Dana Priest and Anne Hull, who spent months uncovering the scandalous conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and whose reporting not only won a Pulitzer but caused a shake-up in the Army's treatment of wounded veterans, had been subjected to the Zellometer productivity index, they'd be prime candidates for termination."

I don't want to put words in Meyerson's mouth. I'm sure he feels bad for the overworked wretches at the Courant or the Newport News Daily Press or the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. But they are not his main concern. They might even be doing local-local news. The Times, the Post, the L.A. Times, the Journal, are playing the world-and-national-affairs game, and Zell comes along and says: That's not my game. Readers don't want that game. Fie!

On a side note, over at Presstime, the NAA magazine, vice president of advertising Jim Conaghan writes about reader behavior:

"The washing machine in my home was leaking badly and needed to be replaced. So I found myself in the elite category of less than 1 percent of adults who were in the market to buy a major appliance during a typical week (see chart). But all I needed to do when I returned home from the trip was pick up the Sunday newspaper in my driveway and look through the inserts. Which I did, just like 87 percent of newspaper readers."

Wow. 87 percent of newspaper readers look at the Sunday inserts. I am wondering if Jon Talton, Rob Curley, Lee Abrams, Ken Doctor, Harold Meyerson or even Stanley Bing look at the Sunday inserts. (I don't look at the Sunday inserts.)

Now to Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, the creators of EPIC2014, writing from the National Conference for Media Reform at their blog Smarkmarket:

"When we finally got to the question-and-answer part of the session, I asked, 'What do we mean when we talk about "saving The Newspaper"?' A newspaper is actually a collection of rather disparate things, I pointed out. And I inferred from the panelists’ remarks that some of The Newspaper’s contents seem more urgent candidates for salvation than others. ... Coverage of high school football games, political punditry, and breezy trend stories, for example — all typical and significant components of many newspapers — might not be in any danger of imminent death. Nor, some would argue, might Democracy suffer much if they were. Yet [outgoing Newspaper Guild chairman] Linda Foley speaks of 2,500 journalists leaving the industry last year as though each of them was out on the streets exposing slumlords and investigating groundwater quality.

"Serious, detailed, local, investigative journalism is a relatively small component of what composes the modern newspaper. As is nuanced, context-rich news analysis. Or even probing coverage of school district developments, city council meetings, business mergers, etc. All of these things used to sit rather innocuously alongside the flood of rehashed national and international briefs, crime reports, traffic accidents, weather updates, game recaps, home decor tips, pizza coupons, casserole recipes, movie reviews, and gossip columns that make up your typical newspaper. But I suspect the union of all these types of content in a single package has always been something of a shotgun wedding.

"And in the age of the long tail, there are fewer and fewer reasons why a cobbled-together Frankenstein monster like The Newspaper should exist. If what we want to ask is 'How can we save serious, detailed, local investigative journalism?' then I suspect we can have a more focused and productive conversation if we actually asked that question. Ditto if the question is 'How can we make sure the local school board meeting is covered?' When folks rightly say that there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer to the problems plaguing journalism, it’s because we lack even a one-size-fits-all question. 'How do we save The Newspaper?' certainly isn’t it."

I suspect they don't like Sam Zell either. If they were commenting on him, they would say: Fie! And they may not read the inserts. Sloan and Thompson do need to admit the possibility of asking the question: How do we save the newspaper? Because that question can be asked just as legitimately as: How do we save serious journalism? But they are right in saying: These are not just different ways of asking the same question. These are different questions, and if we try to find one answer that will satisfy everyone, we will fail. The watershed is deciding what questions each of us wants to answer.

In an earlier post Sloan and Thompson, like Ken Doctor, said: Why are we still having the same conversations we were having 12 years ago? Because we're not really having a conversation about the same thing. We're talking about:
1) The package -- the newspaper -- as a product, whether in print or online, vs. news coverage. If news can be conveyed instantly, is there any purpose for something that does not convey news instantly?
2) What the typical newspaper customer wants from the product vs. what the heavy news reader wants from some source or product. Does the product have any purpose apart from journalism? If 87 percent read the inserts, are the inserts nevertheless irrelevant?
3) What constitutes journalism, what constitutes news, what constitutes information.
4) Is journalism too important to be entrusted to newspaper owners?

We THINK we're talking about the same thing -- the future of newspapers -- but we're not. We're talking about whether a newspaper exists to produces a consumer product that contains journalism, and/or whether it exists to enable journalism and all the other stuff is there to be thrown over the side if necessary. We're talking about economically supporting a product of varied news and advertising and/or economically supporting a watchdog group on the powerful and on civic matters. We're talking about space and time to investigate Walter Reed and/or putting space and time into local-local news. We're talking about whether the Web is just so superior in letting people access movie reviews that everything else just needs to give up, and/or whether a staff position can be given to a movie critic if that means that someone is not looking into the financing of the housing authority. We're talking about whether readers want a union of world briefs, marriage licenses, garden columns and Macy's ads from a newspaper and/or whether they want the I-Team.

And what makes the conversation harder is that some people are seeing those questions as "or" and some are seeing them as "and." Lee Abrams says there's lots that can be done to save newspapers. Ken Doctor says nothing can be done to save newspapers. Some say newspapers are not worth saving unless they concentrate their fullest resources on their highest calling. Others say newspapers are a viable product regardless. We get business arguments conflated with moral arguments conflated with professional self-definition arguments conflated with past/future arguments. No wonder we can't figure out what to do. We can't figure out what we want to do. Maybe we need to accept that we used to all live in the same house, and now we can't anymore.

I've gone on too long, and I am about to write something praising some remarks of Dean Singleton's, which will totally discredit me for some, so ... more to come.

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Wednesday, December 3, 2008

20 Stars in the Sky

Friday, November 7, 2008

They May Really Just Not Like Us, Part II

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

They May Really Just Not Like Us

Friday, September 19, 2008

Listening to Jonie

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Why We Fight

Thursday, September 4, 2008

The Problem With the Future...

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Things to Do in Print When You're Dead

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

The Monitor, GE, and other analogies

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

The Real McGuire

Thursday, June 19, 2008

A Hug for Doug and a Coupla Quotes

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The Revenue's Just Not There

Friday, June 13, 2008

The Singular Moment, Part II

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

The Singular Moment

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