A News Day?

Just back from my niece's wedding near Grand Rapids, in honor of which here is the former building of the Herpolsheimer Co., one of America's most unpronounceable department stores (Hochschild Kohn in Baltimore still being the winner as far as I am concerned).

If you saw the movie of "The Polar Express" there is a wonderful scene where the train appears to pass along Monroe Street in front of Herp's and you can see the store name in gold script to the right. Of course if you had no association with Grand Rapids you would just wonder what it meant. Author Chris Van Allsburg is from Grand Rapids.
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And that brings us to the sale of Newsday (no, it doesn't, but I have no good transition here). One has to hope for the best, but these days it's often just hope. The always interesting though increasingly downbeat Alan Mutter writes: "Cablevision’s vision evidently is to develop a holistic advertising sales program that will enable merchants to buy everything from print to cable to Internet from a single representative offering a comprehensive bundle of integrated and interactive services." (I like that phrase "Cablevision's vision.")
Mutter goes on to wonder if that can happen, given the free fall of newspaper revenues, and comes up with ways in which he thinks Murdoch's offer would have made more sense economically -- which are interesting because they relate primarily to print-newspaper marketing and not to a holistic vision. He saw more upside in a Post-Newsday Sunday combination buy, for example, coupled with a joint printing agreement, but as he notes the same thing could have worked for the Daily News. As it is, Cablevision now owns a stand-alone newspaper with a fractional share of the New York metropolitan newspaper market. So all it can do is hope for synergy.

Now for the synergy with this story by Jim Chisholm of Newspapers & Technology. He notes about advertising:

The downward trend in newspaper advertising "has been accelerated by the absurdity of upselling and encouraging converged advertising sales. .... By forcing salespeople to sell print and online together we are encouraging them to focus on the few advertisers who need or wish to buy both together, at the expense of the others.

"Our experience demonstrates that by simply encouraging salespeople to end the month with more advertisers than when the month began, and by compensating them appropriately, the rot can be stopped.

"This habit of replacing loss by selling more space at a higher price to fewer advertisers can no longer be supported. Increasing ad rates has forced smaller companies to look elsewhere. Selling bigger and more frequent insertions has not resulted in advertisers getting a proportionately better ROI.

"Today, as the Web becomes an increasingly significant part of the revenue mix — and more importantly, an important contributor to potential profit and value — it is vital that we revisit these smaller lapsed advertisers.

"We can certainly woo these companies to buy space online, but we also should encourage them back into print, either in the main product or perhaps a niche product."

Will Cablevision assume that its only customers are those who want to buy cable, print and online together? Or will its salespeople simply fall into that default mode? Here, only time will tell. The Harbinger assault on Media General asked for the sale of the Tampa operation that was one of the first and most heralded sites of convergence (a term less used these days). That may be more related to Florida real estate than anything else, but it was interesting.

Is any of this stuff going to be the much-awaited big score, or is it simply that in a more competitive world nothing will ever replace the $1,000-an-inch Sunday help wanted ad, and we should stop looking for the big score and get used to slogging it out in the trenches?

Classified Secrets

Getting back to the Indy Star's local-local sections:

One of the things that has struck me in the ongoing Death to Print debates is: A lot of the Death to Print people don't read the ads. I read them a lot less than I used to. As journalists, we look at the journalism. As a copy editor, I look at the headlines and layout. But we are not the readers. And as the NAA and others repeatedly point out, print advertising, when compared to radio, TV, and banner or floating Web ads, is the only type that is not an interruption. (Although click-through ads probably aren't either.) Journalist savants probably miss the role newspaper advertising plays for the general reader, even as they decry its loss.

So what does the Star offer in the North Indy Star? The display ads are an interesting mix, from J.C. Sipe Jewelers, which has been in Indianapolis forever, to a really gross ad for a shingles vaccine. There are a couple of pages of restaurant ads accompanied by an advertorial on one restaurant; but the Star has had this since I was in high school. These are zoned, but even so there are restaurants Downtown on the one hand and 20 miles away in Noblesville on the other.

No, what's remarkable is that even though, as we know, Classified is Dead, the Star is still trying to make it work with Community Classifieds. Dogs for Sale is a particularly hot one. And while generic real estate classifieds have largely disappeared, the weekend's Open Houses still work well in print -- you peruse Realtor.com to see what's available, but the newspaper, because of timeliness, still has a role in saying what you can walk though on Sunday.

What really strikes me, though, is "Jobs Close to Home." In the Friday issue there were eight tab pages. We've all been told that professional recruitment ads don't work in print anymore, and why: If you're an accountant looking for an accounting position, easier (and more professional) to look online. But blue-collar jobs still work effectively in print, because the person may not be looking for a specific position -- he or she is looking for a job.

"Jobs Close to Home" is a wonderful idea for a zoned edition whose focus, as noted before, seems to be largely on families with the parents in their late 20s and 30s. You don't want to work 30 miles away, because how will you pick up the kids? So there are a lot of medical, nursing and billing jobs on the North Side here, as well as retail. And there is a territory manager for a cigar company, welders, truck mechanics. utility locators.

A big company in my area, like Merck, probably won't find newspapers a good bet anymore for the sort of high-level jobs it used to advertise in papers like the Inquirer and the Star-Ledger, because it is trying to recruit highly trained people from throughout the Northeast. Why buy all those papers when you can just post online? If the Public Service company is looking for a lineman, though, the newspaper starts looking better. Finally, these classifieds have color ads scattered all through them, and it's a tab. Newspaper classifieds are usually so depressing because they are lines of small black and white type. These ads look like something you might actually want to answer.

Local-local success doesn't mean you have to open a bureau of 40 people. You just have to figure out what "local" really means.

The Thing About California

As we all know by now, the epicenter for the newspaper disaster is the San Francisco Bay area. The unprofitable Chron. The near-collapse of the Mercury News. (Some recent postings on that here and here.) The cutbacks in publication frequency in nearby Tracy and Gilroy.

And, because the Bay area is also the epicenter of what has happened in computing in the last 30 years, at least, the two are tied together. Craigslist. Mercury Center. Hot Coco. Cole Papers. People in San Francisco and San Jose were seeing the potential change brought about by the computer industry years before everyone else, because it was the center of the computer industry -- people at newspapers were writing about it, and newspaper people who were interested in computers were attracted to the area.

And that is all true. But it's too facile to simply say, one, therefore the other, simple explanation, cause, effect. There are other things to take into account.

California, particularly its major metro areas, is a costly place to do business. In 2005, California had the fourth highest cost of doing business in the country, and we can assume it hasn't gotten better. That's the whole state, and California has a huge variation between inland markets such as Bakersfield, Fresno and Redding -- even Sacramento -- and the coast. (New York state obviously has the same situation.) California has the highest gasoline costs in the country, and San Francisco has the highest gasoline costs of the nation's big cities.

And we all know about housing prices in the Bay area, particularly in San Jose-Palo Alto, which have been among the nation's most costly for years. This means as an employer that you have to pay people in a national job market enough to be competitive, and as a business that people have less money left over to spend on your products after spending a huge chunk on housing.

To be able to afford housing, many people have to live way far away from their jobs. I remember reading about the start of commuter rail service from Stockton to the Bay area. That takes two hours each way. Just planning to driving in from Tracy, a hour and a half by rail? Estimate it to take two hours. Now, people have long commutes in New York and L.A. also. People generally do not do this sort of thing in Detroit or St. Louis or Kansas City. The more time spent in commuting, the less time there is to read a paper, unless you're commuting by rail. (And that paper had better be there early.)

So these create a challenging market for a newspaper -- a lot more so than in Memphis or Tulsa. Now let's look at the physical nature of the market, and to do so let's go back before Dean Singleton ended up owning everything other than the Chron.

First off, there's always been a unity to the Bay market. In 1965, Macy's in San Francisco -- Macy's has been there long before the recent Macyization -- had branches in Santa Rosa, San Rafael, Santa Clara (San Jose). These were not stores in outlying towns in the way that Thalheimers in Richmond owned stores in Durham and Greensboro, N.C.; they were just suburban branches of the San Francisco store. The Bay area was an area, the same as Chicagoland or greater Philadelphia or metropolitan Atlanta. It was metropolitan San Francisco.

So let's ride around the Bay and count daily newspapers in, oh, the early 1980s. Start in San Francisco and drive south. You pass the posh suburbs of Burlingame and Hillsborough and it's 20 miles until you hit the first paper, the San Mateo Times. Then it's five miles to another daily, in Redwood City -- which at this point in the 1980s has just recently been merged with the Palo Alto daily seven miles away, in what proved to be a disastrous move by Tribune Co. From downtown Palo Alto it's 13 miles to San Jose.

Now let's go up the other side. San Jose to the Fremont Argus, 10 miles. Fremont to the Hayward Review, 10 more. (These are admittedly sister papers.) Hayward to downtown Oakland and the Tribune, 16 miles. Oh, and 12 miles to the east is Pleasanton, with a daily paper engaged in a newspaper war with a paper in Livermore, six or seven miles away.

From Oakland to Walnut Creek, home of the Contra Costa Times with more than 100,000 circulation, is 15 miles. Dailies are hanging on by the skin of their teeth in Alameda, Berkeley and Richmond, all within five to 10 miles from Oakland. (Soon all will be gone or be zone editions.) It's about 13 miles from Richmond to Vallejo, which has its own paper, and four miles from Vallejo to Benicia, which has another. And 10 miles from Richmond in a different direction we're in San Rafael and the Independent Journal.

So we've covered about 110 miles in a circle, and had a couple outsprouts of 10 miles, and in there we've gotten two San Francisco dailies, the Oakland Tribune and 13 other daily papers. (And there were still more suburban daily papers in metropolitan San Francisco. We just haven't come upon them yet.) OK, you say, from Philadelphia to Harrisburg on the turnpike I would go from Philadelphia to Norristown to near Phoenixville to north of West Chester to Lancaster to south of Lebanon to Harrisburg. There are some papers there. What's your point?

Well, first of all I would be in Harrisburg instead of back in San Francisco. But look at a map. The Bay area papers are all pinched between the bay and the mountains, or caught between mountain ranges. They had almost nowhere to go. They ended up fighting each other over the same territory, whereas the Harrisburg and Lancaster papers just snipe at each other at the edges of their markets. The only way they could compete in the Bay area was to try to out-local each other, which is very costly. So the Contra Costa Times did a separate nameplate in the growing, rich suburbs of Danville and San Ramon -- the latter about 10 miles from its main office. But it had to do so to compete with the Pleasanton paper, which is five miles from San Ramon.

Second, a lot of them are in the same county. When a buyer for Sears or Penney's looks at the market Kansas City market she sees the Kansas City Star offering, oh, 70 percent penetration of Johnson County. Here she sees this paper with 25 percent and this paper with 10 percent and this paper with 8 percent. If she's not locally rooted, she doesn't say, well, this paper has 100 percent of the market between X Road and Y Road. She buys the major metro and the one with 25 percent and the rest go begging.

In the 1980s everyone's competing for pieces of this oddball market. The Chron and the Examiner want to dominate it; the other papers want their little pieces. And San Jose, down at the far end, sees itself growing into a major city and its newspaper wants to be a big city's newspaper.

But San Jose can only grow so far before it runs into the bay, or the mountains, or people who think they're living in San Francisco, or the East Bay, or Santa Cruz, or Watsonville, or whatever. Why would they read a San Jose paper? And people commuting from Stockton are driving through the circulation areas of five other daily newspapers before they even get to San Jose.

Something had to give, which is how we got Alameda Newspaper Group, which then expanded into the Oakland Tribune, and now has wound up owning every newspaper in the area. (OK, Dan, nearly every.) If this had been Long Island, you would have had Newsday. Dean Singleton has taken the approach of trying to preserve local nameplates on increasingly identical products. Given how Tribune Co. threw away the Palo Alto market in the 1980s by thinking that one paper would appeal to Palo Alto and Redwood City, Dean's approach has a lot to recommend it. But to journalists who note five or six nameplates without five or six reporters at county commissioners' meetings, this is awful. To the reader in San Leandro or Milpitas who was only getting one paper anyway, it may not look as dire. (The absence of people covering San Leandro or Milpitas, of course, does.)

The San Jose Mercury News had a core area of Santa Clara County and a good bit of San Mateo County. It couldn't grow into rapidly expanding but largely vacant suburban areas like those around Omaha and Indianapolis; it kept running into other newspapers, or water, or mountains. Its suburban growth was largely in areas that were some other paper's market already or just its own county getting more and more built up.

Now, it wasn't all bad; the home county kept growing, too. But as Gary Pruitt noted when McClatchy bought Knight Ridder, it wasn't growing that fast. And it's really, really expensive to live there, which is partly why it wasn't growing that fast.

So the San Jose Mercury News was in a high-cost market with lesser possibilities for growth, hemmed in by geography and a full range of suburban competitors, with lengthy commutes and with the market effectively a sub-market of a larger city. Oh, and a big part of the market was reading a group of free newspapers based in Palo Alto.

Certainly Craigslist didn't help this situation. Knight Ridder's late-in-life disarray didn't help. Dean Singleton's debt burden is crushing. The Internet pulls away readers. The Mercury News may become simply a small suburban paper that had a brief moment of glory, the Brooklyn Eagle of our times. This would be a shame. I've known many wonderful people from the Merc. But perhaps San Jose really is just a bigger Fremont or Hayward, in the end just another town down the Bay. I have no idea.

But the San Francisco area is not identical to the situation faced by most American newspapers. And the reason is not just that people use the computer a lot in San Francisco. That's the standard view, as seen here. And it's not that that view is all wrong. But there's more to the story.

Newsday and the Daily News (No, not that one)

So much of what happens in the newspaper business is terribly sad, and one does not wish to offend by appearing to be disregarding someone's trauma. We've been down this road in our own shop.

From a story on this round of cuts at Newsday:

"The whole history of this being a great national paper, this is definitely the death knell," said one shell-shocked insider.

I remember admiring Newsday when I was younger. It was the great newspaper success story of the postwar era. I remember reading of the legendary Community Affairs Department and how it could answer any question or problem relating to Long Island. I remember being told that one of the things that made Newsday great was that every reporter had some local jurisdiction to cover; you might be the national military reporter, but you were still responsible for some local piece of real estate as well. You had to stay connected to local news and government on Long Island, and that this lasted until the paper started opening national and foreign bureaus. Those things might be apocryphal or overstated.

But in the 1970s, what seemed to me to make Newsday great was that it was the best local newspaper in the country. Nothing moved in Long Island to which Newsday did not pay attention. And that attention was paid by some of the best reporting and editing vision in the country.

Thus I looked forward to reading Robert F. Keeler's history, "Newsday: A Candid History of the Respectable Tabloid." And it is a thorough history, warts and all, even though it is copyright by Newsday itself and was published in 1990. But it presents the world view as Newsday saw it then.

And that world view was: Newsday had grown beyond being a Long Island newspaper. Newsday was too good of a newspaper to be confined to covering Long Island. Newsday could compete with the Times and the Post on selected international and national news and could be a New York City newspaper as well. Newsday was a playah.

As one mention of zoning put it: "The need to fill these daily and weekly regionals has created a demand for the kind of local stories that most of these new reporters thought they had outgrown before they came to Newsday. ... 'I didn't come to Newsday to write stories for 40,000 people,' one Long Island reporter said."

And of course, in terms of the ability of its editors and writers, it could compete with any newspaper. It was one of the country's 10 best. But had the readers outgrown those stories? Or was it just that journalists had?

That's not to closed-mindedly defend 1980s-style Neighbors. As noted, what Newsday made its reputation on in the 1950s and 1960s was "trying to broaden out stories: If something happened in Islip, the editors pushed reporters to find out if the same thing was happening in other towns and write a story that was interesting to people beyond that community."

By the 1980s, Newsday's increasing focus, as the book makes clear, was on being seen as a viable newspaper in New York City and as a rival of the L.A. Times, the Globe, the Inquirer as a journalistic heavyweight in that just-below-the-Times-Post-Journal category. That doesn't mean it neglected hard-hitting coverage of Long Island. That meant that it saw its focus broadening beyond Long Island. We all thought this was good. Heck, back then, if we could have figured a way that the Opelika Daily News could have done national reporting, we would have thought that was good. A newspaper owed it to its readers to put its own staff to work on the biggest stories of the day, whatever and wherever they were. After all, weren't readers buying the paper for the work of the newspaper's staff?

But along the way, readers had to start asking themselves: Just what is Newsday, anyway? It's not the Times and it's not the Southampton Press.

Newsday's increasing focus on covering the city, the nation and the world and its confusion about how to cover the suburbs would have been more understandable if it was a typical city newspaper trying to cope with the 1980s. But it was a suburban newspaper.

Yes, the suburbs were changing, becoming more like the city. But still, much of the staff didn't go there to cover the suburbs. And the customers are like us, right?

I know far less about the Los Angeles Daily News, whose recent travails are summarized here. It seems to me that the Daily News has kept its original identity far more -- down to supporting an effort to have the San Fernando Valley secede from Los Angeles. (Way deep in this story, if you want to look.) It has had to bear the burden of covering a gigantic home base that has no independent municipal identity.

I remember seeing it when it was the Valley News & Green Sheet, with the section fronts on green paper and little but local press releases. (A Wikipedia entry notes: "The Green Sheet name is used today as an insult by veterans of the Los Angeles Times to refer to the days when classified ads outnumbered the pages of news, and when the newspaper was given away for free.")

Tribune Co. bought the paper, made it more professional, sold it to Jack Kent Cooke, and now it is in the hands of Dean Singleton. No defense of Singleton's management techniques will be found here. And editor Ron Kaye clearly has the admiration of much of his staff.

Still. At some point the newspaper stopped thinking of itself as the "Valley News" and started thinking of itself as the "Los Angeles Daily News." Perhaps that was just to help the advertising department. Kaye noted that the paper would try to "plug along as an alternative to the Times" even with a newsroom down to 100 people.

One has to ask in utter ignorance: Did the readers of the Daily News want a "Los Angeles" Daily News? Or was it the people who worked there? Clearly putdowns from the L.A. Times rankled. Did their customers want a journalistic alternative to the Times -- or did they want a paper about the Valley? Maybe they got both. As I said, I know very little about the Daily News. And with these cutbacks as well as more in Boston, it is another sad week in the newspaper business.

But this morning I got a letter from a reader who was upset because in a story we had referred to a lettered street (like X Street) as a lettered avenue (like Avenue X), and questioned our overall reporting chops and probably our parentage as a result. I know no reporter, editor or newspaper wants to get anything wrong. I also know that journalists in general would see that as a small fact that does not impinge on the meaning of the larger story. The reader doesn't know much about our story, but he knows it's not Avenue X. He wants to know we care about his world. So I know we don't think like readers.