As the Sagebrush Rolls

Tony Davis' essay in American Journalism Review on the death of the Albuquerque Tribune encapsulates why the problems facing American newspapers aren't just problems about journalism.

Many people knew of the Tribune as a little paper that could; my ACES colleague Jim Montalbano worked there happily. The p.m. paper had been saved in a JOA and for years Scripps was happy enough to let it continue with a fully funded newsroom and reap the profits from the larger partner, the Albuquerque Journal, even as Tribune circulation fell toward its end point of 10,000 in a metro area of more than a million.

As Davis notes, the Tribune in its heyday was run like this:

"It was a simple management philosophy that carried power far beyond its words: Hire the best people you can and let them do their jobs.

"The brainchild of our editor Tim Gallagher, this mantra sounds like a cliché, but it made the Tribune a laboratory for innovation. One former Trib reporter, John Hill, said he was impressed 'by how much they let the inmates run the asylum.' Another, Pulitzer-winner Eileen Welsome, likened the atmosphere to anarchy.

"Sounds a bit much, but think about it. You're a crusader, wishing to bust heads and take prisoners, or you're intrigued by a quirky tale that nobody has told. What's the first thing you need? Not a fat salary or big staff, but an editor who will tell you to take a couple of weeks or months and don't come back without the story. Even in the best of times in the newspaper business, such editors were rare. But we had them.

"Today, attitudes like Gallagher's are seen as an anachronism in what's left of our business. Editors can't afford not to micromanage. They operate from fear: of continued circulation declines and ad losses to the Web, of offending readers or giving them more than they can handle."

Aux barricades! Over the next hill! Mount your steed, put your notebook in a case marked "This Machine Kills Fascists," and it's off to save America. We all grew up believing this. And as a result, the paper "won prestigious honors: the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, two George Polk Awards, the IRE Award, the National Headliners Award (three times), the Roy W. Howard Award for public service reporting (four times), the Edward J. Meeman Award for conservation writing and the Sigma Delta Chi public service award."

But there was a darker side as well:

"The cost of this experimentation was that we missed, briefed or buried the meat and potatoes: meetings, budget hearings and government pronouncements. Gallagher dismissed such material as 'agenda journalism.' We got away with it because we were in a joint operating agreement–the country's first–with the more traditional Albuquerque Journal, which had a staff of well over 100 and a circulation more than three times ours. We sneered at them, citing anecdotes like the day [reporter Dennis] Domrzalski was finishing a lengthy probe of the county assessor and walked into a meeting room where his competitor was sitting through a budget hearing. "I felt like I was in heaven," Domrzalski says.

"The Trib cost itself with other lapses, like the time a consultant persuaded the paper ... to junk the sports section. That move lost us 6,000 subscribers, many of whom never returned ..."

Nothing worked. But could anything have worked? The Tribune was a p.m. paper in an a.m. world.

The Tribune offered Albuquerque some stories of superior journalism, there's no doubt. It apparently didn't offer dependable day to day coverage. It didn't offer delivery when people wanted it. For a while it didn't even offer them sports. (One suspects it didn't offer them pet pictures.) Albuquerque increasingly said thanks but no thanks. The Journal may not have reached the journalistic peaks, but it was dependable, covered the bases, and was there in the morning.

We are always told that journalism is full of stories where superior journalistic quality trumped inferior rivals. These stories tend to be: the New York Times vs. the New York Herald Tribune in World War II; the Boston Globe vs. the Boston Post in the 1950s; Newsday in the 1950s and 1960s; in the 1970s, the Philadelphia Inquirer vs. the Bulletin and the Washington Post vs. the Washington Star.

We tend not to remember as well the failure of the Chicago Daily News, or the Chattanooga Times losing to the Chattanooga News-Free Press, or the Arkansas Gazette losing to the Arkansas Democrat, and a number of other occasions on which the product regarded as the greater journalistically did not prevail. Now we have Albuquerque as well. There are always reasons -- JOA imbalances or strikes or whatever -- but "special circumstances" apply in many cases where the winner was the higher-quality paper as well, such as the 1960s strike that ruined the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. I'm reminded that Roy McDonald said the key to his success in Chattanooga was to run everyone's name in the paper once a year. Journalists hooted. His paper won.

Editors like Tim Gallagher were rare then, and are rare now, because in the end it didn't matter to the owners if the Albuquerque Tribune made money or grew readership. Doing so would have been nice, but as long as the Journal was rolling in the bucks, everyone's wallet was filled. Having the Tribune around let the JOA charge a premium for morning-evening advertising over just what would have been charged for the Journal, until things got to the point that literally almost no one read the Tribune. That being the case, let the boys and girls at the Tribune have their fun. Had quality journalism been the sole answer, readers would have flocked to the Tribune. Instead, the Journal got its community to reward it through circulation dominance, and Tribune reporters sneered at its reporters for being drones. There really is a lesson here, no matter how much journalists don't want to hear it. A business model needs to support good journalism, but good journalism is not a business model.

A Penney for Your Teens

So USA Today reports that J.C. Penney Co. is first among mall stores among 13- to 16-year-old girls. Who knew? This is the same Penney's that was being written off as dead not many years ago.

Admittedly, the article goes on, Penney's loses them when they get to age 16 and then gets them back when they have their own children.

(Why newspapers are, or at least used to be, like department stores...)

But this line particularly struck me: "Department stores can feel too physically unwieldy for teenagers." When I was a kid, I never had that feeling -- but I can well understand having it. Teens are always onstage in their own minds, always self-conscious, and here you've got to walk in through the perfume counter and the gauntlet of women in their 20s and 30s and find your way to the juniors department, wherever they put it -- whereas at Hollister, you walk in and you're THERE.

Newspapers feel the same way for teens. They're in that weird size nothing else is, and the stuff that you want to read -- sports or comics or whatever -- is somewhere back in the back, but to get there you've got to wade through all that other stuff that you don't have a clue what it is.

Those of us who remember downtown department store shopping will know that if you went into a large store in another city, you had to look for the sign over the door saying "Washington Street" or whatever to know where you came in. It was disorienting. You "learned" the store through shopping there regularly. Similarly, people "learned" the newspaper by reading it, which may have been simpler when there were only two sections.

But on the Internet, you're THERE. Wherever you are. If you don't want to be there, you can leave easily. You don't need to look for Washington Street.

Sometimes I think one of our problems is that even journalists as parents don't teach their kids how to read the newspaper. They just think they'll pick it up through imitation. But it's not worth their effort unless they know there's something there that they want. If we offer almost nothing to younger readers, why should we be surprised that they don't read us? (Well, because we confuse the readers with us. All teens should be debate captains who are interested in state policies on wind power.)

Penney's knows its job. "With the teens, we have to capture them with a brand and a look," the chief marketing officer says. The story goes on: "Penney executives are stressing its brands' names -- not its company name." If, say, high school sports was marketed both print and online as not just a department of the newspaper but as something entirely different -- published as a tab with a completely changed layout and way of writing -- with links to "more photos and chat online,," but with some of the components available in print only -- could there be opportunity there?

Finally, one mother in the story says her children "'don't like to shop at the top department stores like Macy's and Dillard's, but they will shop at J.C. Penney,' because its styles seem trendy." If dowdy old Penney's can make itself more trendy than Macy's, newspapers can easily save themselves.

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 Post and Copy Editing: A Followup

Scott Butterworth and Bill Walsh of the Washington Post held a session at the ACES conference yesterday to speak about their new copy editing system. Scott passed out a handout which included this very blog as an "other views" item. I've never been a footnote before, and it's kind of cool. Thanks, Scott!


It's clear that a major aim of this is to get stories moved earlier in the day so that they can make the Web during the time when people actually read the Web, and also to avoid the late production bottleneck. Those are worthy aims. Another major aim is to save money, but these days there's nothing we can do about that.

Scott was asked directly if he thought the model was replicable at other newspapers. He said he thought it was, possibly, maybe probably, but that it would have to depend upon the circumstances of that newspaper. He took severe issue with Jack Shafer's overall characterization of the program, saying the "two-touch" idea was probably only going to happen with lesser stories and that A1 and major stories would still have five or six editors working on them. Shafer, he felt, had led much of the comment on this story (including, presumably, mine) down the wrong path.

Still, some of the program is smoke and mirrors -- for example, when the "assistant editors," who are largely former rim editors, are done with their normal work, they are to jump in to help copy edit. Some of it is directly related to the circumstances of the Post -- one aim is to give talented copy editors a new career path as assigning editors. At many newspapers, such as my own, making that leap does not appear to be as difficult as it is at the Post.

Part of this is just different cultures. Scott, for example, noted that copy editors who really wanted to delve into heavy lifting on stories would be able to move into the assistant editor role, whereas those who, as I think he put it, wanted to concentrate on grammar and headlines would still be able to move into the slot. Our paper has never had quite this dichotomy and I suspect many others do not. I don't know that much about how the Post does business, but what I picked up was that their expectation of copy editors was less about content and more about fact-checking and grammar than ours is. Our paper, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News tend toward one model of what copy editors should do; the Post and the Boston Globe tend toward another. Let a hundred flowers blossom.

So is the model replicable? Perhaps, if a paper looks at the job in the same way as the Post. But there are still, to me, four strong reservations:

1. There is not a rim editor looking at the story who is independent of the assigning process and thus whose primary role is to look at it as a reader, and not as another internal editor.
2. The system is based on exceptional people doing exceptional work. That is certainly true of Scott Butterworth, Bill Walsh, and many of their colleagues. Not everyone is exceptional, even at the Post. Part of the role of a copy desk is to smooth out the different gaps that everyone brings to the process.
3. Bill noted that in his view, if I have it right, proofing was going to function more as what had been the slot's role in smoothing out wording and headlines. This is fine as long as you have a first edition that you can treat (along with its readers) as a throwaway.
4. This all seems to me totally story-driven, with less thought given to captions, pulled quotes and even headlines, although they are covered. It's a system set up to reflect a view based on reading a story budget and not the way readers come to the paper, which is display-type first. Editing the story is just one of the functions we do. A lot of the job of those rim editors is to make the headlines, readins, readouts, etc., work well and sing. And there never were multiple eyes on that.

ACES Post Time

Blogging at the ACES conference can be found here from my colleagues Jim Thomsen, Gerri Berendzen, Neil Holdway, Daniel Hunt and others.

A followup to Doug Fisher from yesterday's meeting: You said that the economic value of what we do is miminal, as in no one would pay much for "news" because it is so transitory. That what we sold was the package. My question is, does that apply just to "breaking news"? If one is talking about, oh, Sue Shellenbarger's columns on balancing work and family in the WSJ, things one might clip, would that be of a higher economic value? What sort of editorial content is worth more money than just stuff you might find on A1 or B1? Hope you can reply.

Doug Ward, Sara Hendricks and Kathy Schenck moderated a session this morning based on comments in the opening session, about what can raise the profile of copy editors and what can raise the value of ACES. One thing that keeps coming up is that ACES, which was founded to raise the profile of newspaper copy editors as a result of the early 1990s American Society of Newspaper Editors study, is still seen by many who come for the first time as being too much of a newspaper organization. Yet at the same time, the number of potential newspaper employees who have never heard of ACES is still huge.

ACES would seem to have a bright future as a broad-based organization for copy editors whether they are in newspapers, books, magazines, PR departments, organizational Web sites, online journalism, or whatever. On the other hand, given the efficiency with which the scythe reaps its harvest in newsrooms and what it cuts down first, does ACES still have its major work to do as a news-organization advocacy group based around newspapers and news magazines? Because time, resources and energy are limited.

Mile High

Writing from the ACES national conference in Denver, which once again is proving to be the best training program in the journalism universe. In our stylebook, that would be an "undocumented superlative" and our copy editors would challenge it. What makes you say it's the best? What is your source? Have you examined all other training programs? Should we say that it is "among the best," or can we say that it has been "rated by journalism educators as among the best"?

And that's why a copy-edited newspaper is superlative in the quality and reliability of its information, except in this case the blogger just wants to say: But it's the best training program in the journalism universe, and that's because I say so.

The estimable Doug Fisher (his blog is in the link list) and the equally estimable Chuck Moozakis of Newspapers & Technology did an enlightening session today on the various tools that the Internet offers copy editors and all journalists for more easily checking information or getting ideas for stories. The universe of gadgets, devices, widgets, assimilators, etc. really is bewildering, particularly for those of us who grew up in an era when there was one phone company and your choices were desk, wall or Princess ("it's little, it's lovely, it lights").

There was a good bit of hesitation about using shared links as tips for a story, that struck me toward the end as a fear that newspaper people have about relying on "citizen" sources in general -- your usual sources may be biased, predictable and full of boring information, but you generally know their biases and you both know how the game is played. Crowdsourcing involves amateurs, and amateurs can make newspaper people nervous. But as Doug noted, "crowdsourcing" properly should be the starting point. If a bunch of shared links say "there's something going on in Poughkeepsie," that doesn't make a story of itself, but it probably does mean it's time to make a phone call rather than waiting for an official person or the AP to say, "There's something going on in Poughkeepsie."

One of my colleagues, who works in Features, asked if things such as RSS or Deli.ciou.us. could help her in her editing -- if she knew she was getting a story for that day on the Nobel Prize winner, she could set up a feed to get information from other sources during the day. A copy chief from the Chron said they already were doing that for their specialist copy editors. Great question and great advice. And Doug made the point that all this enables us to do in seconds the sort of checking that used to take a researcher minutes, if not an hour. This is good, except that the researchers lost their jobs. People are rightly concerned about this all taking time away from editing or shoe-leather reporting, but one doesn't need to spend every minute monitoring one's RSS feeds. A glance or two a day would be satisfactory in most cases. Information updates constantly, but significant information updates infrequently.

But Chuck and Doug, even though they are more plugged into current technology than most people in daily journalism, made the point again -- print isn't going away. Print is the base and the heart of a newspaper. What we need to do is to use the tools offered today to enhance journalism, whether it be print or online or whatever. And copy editing isn't going away -- except in places that wish to advertise their capacity to make poor decisions. It will be different, but it's different now than it was when we were hanging grafs on AP hard copy, or sizing wirephotos sent on explodable paper.

The week opened with an elegy from San Francisco. This writer from the bay is more sanguine about the whole Whither We Goest thing. Read it if you need a bracer. Read it if you don't, for that matter.

(Postscript: Chuck brought in two copies of one of our host papers, the Rocky Mountain News. On the back page of today's is a full-page Macy's ad. On the back of one from 1964 was a full-page ad for the Denver Dry Goods Co. The world has in some ways changed more than we could have imagined, and in other ways it has changed far less than we think, and it's important to keep both in mind.)

Hello, Goodbye

This story from sfgate by professor Peggy Drexler -- well, what to do? It is tinged with the sort of elegiac sadness over a vanished land that we seem to love these days. Yet her underlying point is -- don't let others define the playing field for us, let us play to our strengths. Some excerpts:

"Sure, the Internet is a wonderful place to be. But the digital newspaper shares space with those who post because they have a position to promote, a score to settle, a diet to sell or that voice in the microwave told them to.

"Newspapers are better than that. They are apart from that. No, they don't always get it right. But they are the only daily medium of depth that has the resources and the responsibility to try.
They are the alternative to wrapping our lives in the perspectives of those who believe exactly as we do - cheering as the Bill O'Reillys and Keith Obermanns lob rhetorical loogies at each from behind the battlements.

"Newspaper companies will try to keep eyeballs and advertisers by investing in the Web. But a medium that was born free and has been ingenious in staying that way may or may not ever make enough money to sustain the kind of journalism it would replace.

"As Sulzberger talked about this downward spiral in essentialness of the American newspaper, I realized there is nobody to blame because it is nobody's fault. You don't blame cell phones when you can't find a phone booth. It's simply the onslaught of technology and the inevitability of consumer choice."

I want to agree with her, but part of what she's saying is: Gee, wasn't it better before we had to think about all this stuff? Yeah, it was. But "Alas, what an artist is about to perish" is not the right answer, although we love to soak it up.

This week I'll be looking for the right answer at America's greatest journalism training program, the American Copy Editors Society conference. Hope to see you in Denver.

Department Store Building of the Week, No. 3

The three-story building with cornice at the center of this photo is emblematic of how small-town department stores looked, at least in the Northeast, around the turn of the century. Robert G. Dunn's store at 323 High St., Burlington, N.J. was the town's leading store until the Depression, which hit Burlington hard -- not only did it lose most of its established retailers, it lost its daily newspaper, and it was two decades until another one appeared. This lack of "progress" means that most of the buildings in downtown Burlington have been there for more than 100 years. Most of the stores on High Street were built to have the store downstairs and the owner's apartment upstairs; Dunn was one of the few in Burlington who prospered enough to live elsewhere. His name once filled the round device at the center of the cornice; the building's current owner now has his or her name there. Dunn's is certainly gone from memory and never was anything other than a basic small-town store for fabric, ready-to-wear and notions, but many department stores can be traced back to something that looked like this.

Might As Well Jump?

So my former colleague Ehren writes from Fort Worth to say, in essence: OK, smarty pants. Readers don't want jumps and you say you're on their side. But how does one really do that? Is all you can put on the front, then, short, substanceless stories, what with photos, graphics, indexes, and a shrinking page width?

Ehren's right; saying "no jumps" is disingenuous on my part. As long as you have a broadsheet you will have jumps. The question to me is: Do you use known reader dislike for jumps to say, "Let's hold them to a minimum or at least make them more user-friendly"? Or do you use the impossibility of having a totally jumpless paper to say, "Well, we can't do anything about that, sorry?"

We're not just talking about A1 here. I get four papers home delivered, and this morning they have:
Paper 1: Five A1 jumps, six B1 jumps, three D1 jumps, four E1 jumps, three F1 jumps. One story (C1) does not jump. Jumps are on three A section pages, five in the B, two in the D, two in the E, two in the F.
Paper 2: Three A1 jumps, three B1 jumps, four C1 jumps. Two stories (A1, B1) do not jump. Jumps are on three A section pages, two in the B, three in the C.
Paper 3: Four A1 jumps, three B1 jumps, five C1 jumps. Two stories (B1) do not jump. Jumps are on one A section page, one B section page, three C section pages.
Paper 4: Four A1 jumps, four B1 jumps, four C1 jumps, three W1 jumps. Three stories (B1 and C1) do not jump. Jumps are on three A section pages, two in the B, two in the C, three in the W.

So that's 59 jumpers and seven that don't (I hope, I'm a journalist, I can't do math). Of the seven, two were columns. And this was held down by its being a Friday, when two of the normal broadsheet features sections are replaced by Weekend tabloids. This is how we respond to readers' asking for fewer jumps.

How does one respond? Something's got to give. We could respond to younger readers' preference for tabloid- or Berliner-size newspapers, but that involve spending money we don't have, not to mention plunging into the unknown (upset older readers, advertisers who want a full broadsheet page, no comparability to the New York Times). Why, you can't completely change your product line and image! It won't work. Look at Cadillac. Oops, it worked for them, but you know...

But we don't have the money for new iron anyway. So what can we do?

1. Assume, like USA Today, that the reader has time for one substantive story per page, and try your best to always jump it to the second page of the section. This is a good method on inside tabloid or Berliner pages as well.
2. Do like Waco and hold down the story count. As noted earlier, readers seem to like this, although you have to devise a new internal reward system for good staff-written stories that aren't on A1, lest the reporters stop writing in despair. Or, you could just do like Singleton in California and lay off all the reporters.
3. Do like Rockford or Fort Worth and make the front page a poster for inside.
4. Do like the Guardian and have one or two substantive stories on A1, which may jump or which may refer to more inside, and have three to four synopses of stories.
5. I can't tell if the Globe and Mail does that or just jumps every story on a break, which is at least more reader friendly than jumping the story and having the first line on the jump page consist of:

Continued from A1

said.

Various jump-friendly strategems have been tried, such as the Johnson City Press' jumping all stories to the back page of the section and printing it upside down, or the more popular trying to herd all the jumps onto one page. None of these have worked in the long run, for probable good reasons -- usually involving advertising's wanting to sell the back page because it has color, or not all of the jumps fitting. The "there will be no jumps" edict has also been tried, and it always fails as well. So as long as we use the broadsheet front page as our model, yes, there will be jumps. If Al Neuharth could have gotten rid of them all at USA Today, I suspect he would have. Even he could not crack that nut. And there is no absolute solution that will work every time. The point is that the way we do it now is for our convenience rather than the reader's, starting with the Times' jumping A1 stories into the C or D sections because "it's coming out of their space."

Ehren also notes that Fort Worth's no-jump poster front page draws criticism from people who don't like reading a paragraph of a story. Well, anything you do will draw criticism. I wonder if it's from the same people who don't like jumps? If so, maybe there is nothing we can do short of being a tab (which they wouldn't like either). There still are people who read the paper from front to back, and they may not like being told "Oh, why don't you look at B7 now" whether by jump or refer, because they will and then they go back to A1 and they get confused. But if we confine our audience to the people who find newspapers the way they are today user-friendly, we are really in trouble.

The other question is whether they're the "give me red meat" readers who are mad at the Times for starting the inside of the A section with three pages of refers. (They may be the same as the front-to-back readers for all I know.) We think of these as our core readers, but part of our problem in the Internet era is that our most involved readers -- the real "news junkies," particularly the political ones -- are going to get most of their news online whatever we do in print. Why read one story about Obama when you can read 15? Trying to put out a print newspaper simply to satisfy those readers is a dead end. More on this to come.

Newsrooms and the Corrections

Online Journalism Review recently ran this piece on advice for "what smart journalists need to do to survive, and do great work, in the Internet era." It was directed at individuals. The first two items work just as well for newspapers, and indeed, if newspapers had been doing them for the last 30 years, Online Journalism Review would not be addressing an article to thousands of out-of-work journalists.

"Step One: You must create content that readers will value highly.

"Step Two: You must promote your content to individuals most likely to value it highly."

(The third step was: Make yourself the brand. Not applicable to an institution as much.)

A store my wife shops at sends her an e-mail coupon every week. An interview in the WSJ with the new head of Burger King said that they are turning the company around by asking their core customers what they want. Newspapers often don't even think they have core customers, and when those customers do ask for things, like "no jumps," they ignore them. Like the managers of wanna-be upscale department stores, they assume their core customers are people just like themselves.

Sam Zell's famous F-bomb came when an Orlando staffer challenged him on giving readers what they want. The interplay (I found it here):

"Fajardo told Zell that 'what readers want are puppy dogs,' presumably referring to soft feature stories. She added, 'We also need to inform the community.'

"Zell shot back: 'I’m sorry but you’re giving me the classic, what I would call, journalistic arrogance by deciding that puppies don’t count. . . . What I’m interested in is how can we generate additional interest in our products and additional revenue so we can make our product better and better and hopefully we get to the point where our revenue is so significant that we can do puppies and Iraq.'"

It's unfortunate that Zell didn't hear the "also" and reacted just to the disdain for puppies. Because actually they were not far apart, whereas in some newsrooms inserting the caveat of "also" would be nearly heretical. We need to inform the community, Sam, and you think puppies have any role in that, well, F- you too. You are not worthy to employ us.

Remember when Jonathan Franzen single-handedly put an end to Oprah's original book club? She picked "The Corrections" as her book of the month and Franzen was seemingly horrified that his piece of art would be read to hoi polloi and be put on the same bookstore tables as Dean Koontz and Janet Evanovich. Now, Farrar Straus may not have been horrified, but once Franzen was in high gear there was little they could do about it.

From the blog linked above: "One imagines he fears ... that if too many housewives and middle managers pick up his book, then Wallace and Antrim and Pynchon and DeLillo might shun him as too bourgeois." (Links in the original.) One also images that if one's journalism runs in a publication that spends a lot of space running photos of pets, one's sense of oneself as a high-media-culture professional could be sullied. If I work for you, and you do X, then I must be X by association. But I am Y.

The heck with whether anyone buys it.