Return to: Old Department Store Building of the (Week)

When times got overwhelming last year I stopped doing looks at old department stores -- stopping, I believe, in Lancaster, Pa., with Watt & Shand. In recent weeks I've encountered people who were fans of that feature, so I'm going to bring it back. I wanted to do so with Lebanon, Pa., home of what I believe is the first Bon-Ton store in Pennsylvania -- and one that had nothing to do with the long-lived chain still operating out of York, Pa. -- but alas, both it and the competing Haak Bros. appear to have been torn down.

So here's a look at Fifth Avenue in McKeesport, Pa. To the immediate left of what clearly was a big store, occuping about five buildings, is a much littler red-brick store. (Yes, the really little one.) This store, at 519 Fifth, was Helmstadter Bros., the last surviving locally owned downtown department store in this city best known for steel tubing. Helmstadter's was in a larger store two blocks west of this until the late Depression years.

McKeesport had a very strung-out downtown. It was four blocks west from here to what was its largest store, the Famous Store, and the main hotel was even farther west of that. The Famous Store was owned by a group of Pittsburgh merchants named Weil, Goldsmith, and Katz. When they retired, they sold it to a local discount chain called Misco, under whose operation it quickly closed. The much smaller Helmstadter's kept going into a second generation of family ownership.

McKeesport is a very odd place in terms of its physical layout. The downtown was adjacent to the tube works, and then a good bit away, up a hill, was the library and some large churches -- it almost felt like a different city. Neighborhoods changed from blue-collar to managerial almost in mid-block. Also, it has a long street named Jenny Lind Avenue. It's hard to get a sense of McKeesport as a whole.

Notice now the larger store in the photo above. This was the main store of the G.C. Murphy Co., one of the largest dime-store chains. Murphy's, like Grant's, aimed to be one step above Woolworth's and Kresge's, but was probably still one step below Newberry's.

For me, growing up, going to the dime store meant Murphy's, as they had stores in downtown Indianapolis, in Broad Ripple and at Glendale Center. My grandmother would buy chicken parts for frying there. I remember the Double K nut stands as well, with their revolving trays and heat lights, and the birds and hamsters on sale. Other than chicken, AMF and Revell car model sets, and things like needles, I can't remember if we actually bought anything at Murphy's, but even though there were a Grant's, a Kresge's, and two Woolworth's downtown, along with a local chain called Danner's all around town, we only traded with Murphy's in the dime-store category. (We didn't have Kress, or Green's, but how much of the decline of downtowns was related to the vast amount of space vacated by dime stores as they moved to strip centers and then fell before discounters?)

Not that this matters to anyone else, but it was exciting for me to walk by this building and see that, even though vacant, it still bore signs saying it was the headquarters of the G.C. Murphy Co. I suddenly wanted fried chicken and cashews.

Away We Go Again

I try not to write on this blog about my own newspaper, because 1) the blog has nothing to do with the newspaper and 2) one can always say the wrong thing inadvertently. But this week's developments would make it hard to say nothing.

The last time we were sold, it was 2006, the newspaper industry was just starting its historic collapse, and everything seemed bright.

The first time there were layoffs, as wrenching as it was, it seemed like an adjustment to a new world. But it wasn't, really. It was just a retrenchment.

The second time there were layoffs, it was in part a reaction to the economic collapse. But it was much more an adjustment to a new world. Whatever happens now, it will be further down that line.

At ACES, Nieman Lab's Josh Benton, as noted on Doug Fisher's "Common Sense Journalism," tried to put what John McIntyre calls the War on Editing into an economic package:

When print was the only model, it saved the publisher money to have editors, because 1) the more sharply the story was edited, the more room there was for more content, including ads; 2) the more accurately the story was edited the first time, less money was spent in replates; 3) (and this is my point and not his) if you were selling a "product," a physical artifact, people want to be sure that, like any physical product, it is well-made before they invest money or time in it.

In an electronic world, it doesn't matter how long the story is or how loosely written, because space is infinite; the cost of making a correction is zero, since there are no plates involved; and if what you are selling is quick-hit brain candy, updates to be perused when you're bored with work or wondering what's going on, the quality of the product is secondary to the appeal of the information. It can have typos, it can have run-on words, because you've invested no money in it and you can click away from it in a second and it's gone, as opposed to the newspaper, which is still in your hands even as you yell at it. Heck, the user may not really care where the end page of the information comes from. If you got it through Yahoo News, does it matter if you click through to the Chicago Tribune or the Sleepy Eye Herald-Dispatch?

Thus, the only thing you should invest in is content creation, because absent a mass audience, the only thing you can possibly provide is, simply, MORE. Not better, although better can help, but just MORE, to try to get a bit of any and every niche.

Now, against that, one could note that bots archive the first version of the story, which then can't be fixed without mammoth effort; and that part of the reason advertising costs pennies on the Internet is the infinite inventory, including publishers creating page after page after page in order to get high page views, but then having to sell ads for nearly zero because of the vast number of pages they produce.

But the end argument is still the quality of the brand -- that if anything will give newspapers a secure place in the electronic world, it is the years and years of brand recognition that carries over. The Huffington Post also is building a brand. But newspapers still have a brand that exists independent of the Web world and thus carries a competitive double whammy.

And, if money was still flowing in, they probably would recognize this and recognize what good editing -- and good copy editing -- brings to their brand. Alas, it isn't. And so I fear another front may open in the war, even if many good people really don't want it to.

ACES: What a Show

Last week was the American Copy Editors Society's annual conference, held in Philadelphia; as a board member and head of the host committee, I had an exciting week, although not as exhausting as many seemed to indicate. Copy editors pride themselves on quiet competence, and the ACES conference, with its multiple training sessions, lunch breakouts, opening and closing sessions, banquets, blogs, etc., is a complex work of machinery that has been well-oiled over the years.

Chris Wienandt, the outgoing ACES president, and Deirdre Edgar, the outgoing vice president for conferences, split the duties of programming the event and once again provided a full slate of interesting topics by authoritative and engaging presenters. Daniel Hunt provided access to more media than I really know exist. He and Gerri Berendzen led the way again in conference blogging. And they are just among the main builders of the framework on which more than 330 people came to listen, learn, talk and advance the cause, skills and roles of copy editors.

There was enough discussion of "building one's personal brand" -- a concept that I hate, copy editing is supposed to serve the reader and not the copy editor's ego -- that I have to link to the program on WHYY's "Radio Times" in which new ACES president Teresa Schmedding and copy editing uber-goddess Merrill Perlman expounded on what the cuts in editing mean to the reader/citizen. Oh, yeah, I was there too -- there's my branding for you!

What a past, what a cast, what a show, what a way to go. Join us in Phoenix in 2011.

The Reader Elite

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when Bloomingdale's became the hottest store around, some department stores in the Omahas and Indianapolises of the world tried to save themselves from the increasing competition of discounters on one hand and boutiques on the other -- remember when "boutique" was a new, cool word? -- by going similarly upscale, becoming stores full of designer sections and the like. Most of them failed, because you have to have a sufficient number of rich, style-conscious people in your market to support such a store. They made their middle-income consumers feel dowdy and unwelcome while not drawing in enough of their target audience, which probably was not sufficient in the first place to support an institution the size of a department store.

Partly this was geographic and partly they were ahead of their time. There is a Nordstrom/Neiman/Bloomingdale cadre in most metropolitan areas now, of people who either moved there or of people who grew up wanting that sensibility. But you couldn't just impose that sensibility on the people who were already there in the 1970s and 1980s. It was putting on airs, to them.

It's not exactly the same thing, but it reminds me again of my colleague, a great reporter and editor, who said back in the glory days that he wished we had only 50,000 subscribers -- the right 50,000 -- instead of 500,000, because then we could just write and edit the paper for people who were interested in capital-J journalism, and stop having to publish the third race at Liberty Bell Park and school lunch menus. Of course, he knew this would be ruinous to our pay. But he (and I) were from the generation of journalists who were not trained to "publish a newspaper" in the old sense of sending "In the Service" and blow-by-blow City Council accounts down to the composing room. We wanted to produce informed stories for informed people to make informed change, and the fact that most people had far less interest in such matters that we did was just something that history would take care of. Eventually we would get the audience we deserved.

My esteemed compatriot and mentor Doug Fisher, at Common Sense Journalism, notes a couple of articles, one about journalism education and one about the Christian Science Monitor, that speak to this point.

As Doug notes, the Monitor always went for an elite audience. But most newspapers told the same news to the masses. That role may not be economically possible now, much less whether anyone actually wants it. But is news for elites the way journalism really wants to go? Often it seems like that is the dream or goal -- that freed from the responsibility to produce newspapers for the masses, a great flowering of journalism will occur, to be lapped up by a small but influential and educated audience. Out with the Robesonian and Pajeronian, in with the Davosian.

My former colleague later admitted chagrin when reminded of his statement. The point of almost every newspaper was to speak to the community, not just to the opinion leaders. The New York Times is Bloomingdale's. What happens if the Denver Post or Oklahoman -- in whatever medium -- decides its role is simply to be the New York Times of Colorado or Oklahoma, to give "important news" to people who appreciate it and will understand how to act on it? Will the Volkischer Beobachters of our day then have an even wider field to till? If so, will journalists have failed society even while speaking to an audience that "gets it" -- that visits journalism's new boutiques in which the Wal-Mart masses never intrude?

There is something to be said for the middlebrow, because that is where the middle class can exist without feeling outclassed or underclass.

Curioser and Curioser

Martin Langeveld at Nieman Lab revisits his study of a year ago, of time spent with print newspapers as opposed to online, and finds that other than a decline in the number of people using print newspapers, things are basically as they were -- the people who use print newspapers still spend as much time with them, people do not use newspapers online to any great degree, and people get news online from non-newspaper sites increasingly. This matches with circulation declines and research showing slipping use of newspapers online, so Langeveld's point seems correct even if someone wants to go after his statistical method, which apparently, from his comments, many have done.

What I found most interesting was that Langeveld felt he had to include this:

"I began with the readership counts derived as above, and assumed average time spent with printed newspapers to be 25 minutes on weekdays and 35 minutes on Sundays. Now, this assumption got considerable comment flak last year, and no doubt will have its doubters this year. For those who say 'I don’t know anybody who reads a newspaper at all, so how can the average be 25 minutes?' let me say that more than 40 million newspapers are still sold every day and someone is reading them, whether you know them or not."

Which could lead to more meditations on how the webbed world is leading us all further into the sort of siloing of ourselves, as shown by the divide in Wilmington, N.C., over a planned cement plant as reported in the Journal. By golly, people who moved to Wilmington because it has cute neighborhoods and an arts community and you can surf at the beach a few miles away don't want those cement-plant jobs near them. They envision themselves being in Austin-by-the-Atlantic. But Wilmington, which spent decades as a declining seaport -- it once was the largest city in North Carolina -- still has a large group of people who look at factory jobs as a good thing. I guess the feeling is that all those people should move to Hickory or Lumberton or somewhere that software entrepreneurs don't want to live, where they can also read newspapers among their own kind, and leave Wilmington to those who "get" the new Wilmington.

But I digress. Langeveld closes with this:

"Meanwhile at newspapers, much effort and much dialogue continues to focus on getting readers to pay for content and battling aggregators — energy that might better be spent figuring out how not to lose the sizable remaining audience for newspaper content, not by 'protecting print' but by keeping the current print readers in the fold as they, too, gradually migrate to reading news online."

Had Martin said "keeping the current readers in the fold until they are supplanted by those reading news online" -- i.e., until people like me die -- I might disagree, and say there will always be some audience for newspapers, but the trend lines are clearly there. But in the end, Langeveld assumes that nearly everyone living now will eventually come to his or her senses and get news online, because, well, that's just what people will do, it's just that some are slower than others.

The fact that there might be an audience that says, you know, this printed newspaper thing, I really like it -- and I want to stay with it -- as Martin points out, in his town in Vermont he lives among people who read newspapers faithfully, but he probably doesn't invite over to the house people who would admit that they will keep doing so. Just like the people who are my close friends, who tend to be people who read print newspapers, even though they use the Internet all the time. My silo is not your silo.

I am again reminded of the incredulity in our newsroom in the 1990s that only 3 pct. of the Philadelphia area read the New York Times in print. Why, everyone we all knew read the New York Times! And indeed, everyone we knew tended to be in that 3 pct. of people who read the New York Times and not in the other 97 percent, let alone anyone who wanted to work in a cement factory in Wilmington, N.C.

I should end here, but always go for the low-hanging fruit. In a blog post picked up and reprinted by Online Journalism Review, David LaFontaine -- whom I would say more about, except that the link to his "Technorati Profile" doesn't work -- decides to draw a link between GM and newspapers. As someone who draws links between department stores and newspapers, and who knows that GM has been a large newspaper advertiser -- and who used to live in Flint, GM's Depression City Central -- this was of major interest.

LaFontaine starts out promisingly with this bullet point:

"1. STARTING IN THE 80S AND GOING THROUGH THE 90S, SALES DECLINED, AS CUSTOMERS WERE TURNED OFF BY THE SHODDY QUALITY OF THE PRODUCT"

And admittedly, GM's cars of the '80s and '90s left much to be desired. His comparison in the newspaper business is zone feature stories. I worked in Neighbors for years, and admittedly many stories left much to be desired from a capital-J journalism sense. But then we work our way to:

"2. THE WORKERS FELT IGNORED AND BELITTLED, SO THEY BEGAN TO ACT OUT, AND BAD ATTITUDES TOOK OVER"

"Reporters that dared to try to make suggestions about long-term changes (like less coverage of O.J. Simpson, and more of things like the erosion of middle-class opportunities) were ignored. Newsrooms have always been 'simmering cesspools of cynicism,' but this morphed into outright nihilism and rage."

Really? But we press on:

"3. A TEMPORARY BUBBLE ALLOWED THE INDUSTRY TO RACK UP EASY PROFITS AND POSTPONE CHANGE"

"In the newspaper industry: the subprime mortgage/real-estate boom created a huge advertising windfall for newspapers. The Homes section of the LA Times was often larger than the rest of the newspaper combined. Thousands of pages of expensive classified ads, paid for by realtors who were so awash in free money that they didn't care what the cost was. Of course, the rest of the classified business was absolutely cratering at this time. When the real-estate market imploded, and advertisers abandoned newspapers, looking for more efficient ways to sell their products, newspapers were also left without a viable product to sell."

Really again? So the solution would have been to cover the erosion of middle-class opportunities, but without real-estate advertising there was no viable product ... OK, I'm not sure that's what he means, because I'm really not sure what he means. But what I do get from this is that he is outraged that the L.A. Times decided to take the revenue Realtors were shoveling over the transom instead of doing what was needed for change, which seems to be a mix of both missing Internet opportunities and covering O.J. Simpson, real estate, and Neighbors features instead of covering "news."

In other words, the Los Angeles Times acted like a business instead of like a high church of journalism. Hey, here are advertisers, they have money, they want this, readers want to buy it! We should tell them all, "No! Read our exhaustive coverage of middle-class workers' lives in Pacoima online instead!" We are back once again to the point of so much criticism from Recovering Journalists all over the Internet, which is: If newspapers would just stop making short-term business decisions and realize that their real job was to subsidize ace reporting -- particularly the sort of ace reporting I did until some hackneyed city editor, dollars-mad publisher, or whatever took me off my important beat and told me to write about a woman who collects sponges shaped like George W. Bush -- all their problems would have been solved! Because the readers are, and always will be, people like me. But business is a business.

And news, it seems, is not much of a business by itself. Robert Picard wrote last month:

"News has never been a commercially viable product."

He notes:

"The Mass Media Finance Model appeared in the late 19th and 20th century, made possible by the industrial revolution, urbanization, wage earning, and sale of finished goods. In this model news was provided for the masses at a small fee, but subsidized by advertising sales. Because most of the public was uninterested in day-to-day events and 'hard' news, the bulk of newspaper content was devoted to sports, entertainment, lifestyle, and features that increased the willingness of the public to spend pennies for the product.

"This mass media financing model remains the predominant model for financing news gathering and distribution, but its effectiveness is diminishing because the 'mass' audience is becoming a 'niche' audience in Western nations as those less interested in hard news continue abandoning newspapers for television, magazines, and the Internet. This is creating a great deal of uncertainty how society will subsidize and pay for journalism in the twenty-first century."

His solution is to replace the tons of cash from Realtors with tons of cash from selling tickets or books.

I suspect Dave LaFontaine would shake his head. But unlike GM, a lot of newspapers were giving their readers what they wanted at that time. That was why they had massive household penetration rates and tons of money. I suspect they were not giving LaFontaine what he wanted -- a news product aimed at news junkies and wonks -- even back when they had tons of money, let alone now. But then we're back to the 3 percent of Philadelphians who took the New York Times.

Whatever newspapers' future is -- in whatever medium it is -- appealing to news junkies will provide simply a small niche. Whether that niche can be monetized is still up for grabs. Meanwhile, keep watching the print publication schedule of Politico.

There's Always an Angle

iMedia Connection writer Chris Tolles, in discussing "5 Marketing Battles That Make No Sense," one of which is placing print vs. online in a Manichean struggle:

"Pundits and prognosticators have to make a living too -- and they do so by positing great changes and paradigm shifts. Indeed, there has been an online revolution, and things are different. But too often, in the interest of making a point, people deliberately create a series of harmful false choices. At least in the above cases, optimizing these choices means embracing the 'and' instead of being content with the 'or.'"

I once mentioned before the "hot box" that was introduced at a newspaper I worked at in the 1970s -- it was an idea just thought up as a whim and probable throwaway by the designer, who was amazed that the editors bought it. The editors, for their part, could not imagine that that was what happened. Had it been a politician, they would have been skeptical. But as journalists, they saw themselves as philistines in the company of artists, and therefore 1) unequipped to make any challenge and 2) not understanding that everything was not to be taken with equal seriousness.

Thankfully we're often more realistic about redesigns, but with Internet pundits you see the same thing. Yes, things are different. Yes, the person stating "everything must change now!" may be trying to get your attention to sell you ultimately on 20 pct. of his views. Or just to get anyone's attention. Or he may actually believe it all and that it must be fought to the death, which is why he is a consultant and not a career-track employee. Don't oppose changes, but common sense is not the same as opposition to change, even though you may be told it is. If 90 pct. of your ad revenue comes from print, that must mean it is a pretty important part of your business, not a useless appendage from the 19th century.

Copy Editing: Dash It All

From today's Wall Street Journal story about a man's desire to establish an eight-track museum:

"He managed the ukelele playing vibrato singer Tiny Tim and produced his final album."

I bet that ukelele was hard to manage when it was playing Tim. As Miss Vicky found out, Tim was hard to play with.

I'm not very good at hyphens and compound modifiers myself. Want to learn about language? Need a tuneup on copy editing? It's not too late to sign up for the 2010 American Copy Editors Society conference from April 15 to 17 in Philadelphia. Go to this site to sign up.

Book It

Here's one of those "stop what you're doing and read this" articles. Jason Epstein, the author, has been around book publishing since the early 1950s; between the article and the author blurb, he takes or is given credit for things ranging from the invention of trade paperbacks to the much-loved Reader's Catalogue of the 1980s.

But you can read "newspapers" into this nearly everywhere it says "books." Honestly, in some places you can read "department stores."

Epstein, in two printed pages in the New York Review, manages to both support the view of unstoppable revolutionary change caused by digitization -- which we in newspapers usually call "the Internet," but his is a better word -- and be skeptical of the more high-falutin' claims for it.

On the one hand, "it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers... New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are ... as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.... The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future [arises] from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them, one in which most of their traditional infrastructure and perhaps they too will be redundant."

And, "digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into the air and only the ultimate filter -- the human inability to read what is unreadable -- will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats's nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary's haikus."

But from this, Epstein adds, "readers will be guided by the imprints of reputable publishers, distinguishable within a worldwide, multilingual directory ... [titles] will be evaluated by competent critics and downloaded directly from author or publisher to end user while software distributes the purchase price appropriately. ... With inventory expense, shipping and returns eliminated, readers will pay less, authors will earn more, and book publishers, rid of their otiose infrastructure, will survive and may prosper."

But no Jeff Jarvis is he, dismissing the "utopian fantasy that in the digital future content will be free of charge and authors will not have to eat.... Newborn revolutions often encourage utopian fantasies until the exigencies of human nature reassert themselves." (Gosh, is he a secret reader of TTPB?) He has no belief in "the assumption of e-book maximalists that authors who spend months and years at their desks will not demand physical copies as evidence of their labors and hope for posterity."

His article also discusses file-sharing, the fragility of digital content, and the abuses possible from it -- "Digitization will amplify our better nature but also its diabolic opposite." He ventures into business models and sees somewhat what is happening in newspapers in terms of the specialization of functions vs. a vertically integrated newspaper company: "The cost of entry for future publishers will be minimal, requiring only the upkeep of the editorial group and its immediate support services... Small publishers already rely as needed upon such external services as business management, legal, accounting, design, copyediting, publicity, and so on." A large part of the Crisis of Copyediting is that newspaper copy editors see themselves as key parts of the editorial group, whereas others (in newsrooms and out) see theirs as simply a production job (therefore outsourceable) as opposed to a direction-setting creative role. Well, that fight's been going on since I first showed up in a newsroom in 1975, and doubtless before.

I'm sure all this is derivative, but rarely have I seen it said so well, so concretely, so succinctly, and without taking sides for "the way it was" or "the way it ideally should be." But even with this, a note creeps into the essay, the same note one hears from so many journalists who were with newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s, and now long for a digitalized future in part out of their disgust at how the counting house subverted their ideas of nobility:

"From the beginning of my career I have been obsessed with the preservation and distribution of backlist -- the previously published books, still in print, that are the indispensible component of a publisher's stability and in the aggregate the repository of civilizations... By the mid-Eighties I had become aware of the serious erosion of publishers' backlists as shoals of slow-moving but still viable titles were dropped every month.... This demographic shift turned the book business upside down as retailers, unable to stock deep backlist, now demanded high turnover, often of ephemeral titles."

This he blames on tax law changes and the era of Walden and B. Dalton, with their vest-pocket stores, replacing the lower-rent independent downtown bookstore that stored loads of back titles up on the second floor. The digital world, he foresees, will turn this around by eliminating the need to physically stock backlisted books -- you can either read them electronically, or have them printed and bound on request at a store. (For backlist as an economic mainstay, read "classified" in newspapers. For tax law changes, read rulings against department stores and manufacturers being able to jointly set exclusivity on advertised pricing.)

But ultimately, the mall bookstores stocked those books because that's what people wanted to buy -- and the independent bookstores didn't close just because they were downtown, but because people weren't certain they could find what they wanted there, whereas they figured B. Dalton would have it precisely because it was ephemeral. (Kathleen Woodiwiss, anyone?) It misses that in most locations big enough to have a mall, the Waldenbooks succeeded because it was better than the local bookstore -- assuming there even was one, or more than one. It doesn't mention how Book-of-the-Month Club and Literary Guild were simply the Amazons of their day and provided a stable income to publishers.

It harks back to a golden age when one could work in the business of ideas without having to be too troubled by the need to sell, sell, sell every day. That era didn't just end because of rules on inventory. As the cost of printing came down with the end of hot type and its need for huge machines and engravings, more and more could be published. As people had more choices for entertainment -- which is what reading usually is -- many of them chose to spend their time reading Dog Fancy World instead of Time. Nothing wrong with Time, but only so many hours in a day; when there was no Dog Fancy World, Time would fill the ... time. The cultural subsidy of the middlebrow caused by people's only being able to pick from Column A or Column B was ending.

Now, with the cost of printing effectively zero -- and thus more and more choices available -- Epstein's belief that readers will be guided by the imprints of reliable publishers seems a pious hope. Many readers believe Matt Drudge is a more reliable publisher or editor of news than the New York Times. Others believe the same of Arianna Huffington.

Near the end, he writes: "E-books will be a significant factor in this uncertain future, but actual books printed and bound will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom." One could hope for a similar role for newspapers, even with the different economics; but then one would be written off as standing against the hurricane, particularly by those who feel that newspapers irretrievably lost their souls when Gannett sold Wall Street on quarter after quarter of higher earnings instead of quarter after quarter of more journalism.

Someone Must Pay

Earl Wilkinson of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association, his blog published in the New Jersey Press Association's newsletter, InPrint:

"What would happen if our local newspaper went out of business? ... My pat answer is that hypothetically, bloggers and nonprofit Web sites would rise up and take over the role of the local newspaper. Eventually, amateurs would become professionals, a Web site would emerge as the leader, a business model would revolve around their audience, and the ecosystem would return to equilibrium....

"How did E&P really die?" Of course, it's been resurrected, but still. "Like newspapers, its classifieds shifted to free online sources. Like newspapers, there was an overreliance on a certain advertising category.... Like newspapers, it gave away far too much for free on its Website. Like newspapers, its coverage became too broad for its resources.

"The E&P story should serve as a sober warning for newspapers on several levels:

"First, influence is great, but it rarely pays the bills.

"Second, to create value for content there must be the perception of scarcity. Don't give it away.

"Third, don't try to build audience by being all things to all people...."

Doug Page writes in February's News & Tech:

"The Internet forces yet another dismal economic model on newspaper Web sites: perfect competition.

"In this scenario, many players produce the same product -- as consumers see it -- which, because of this abundance, lowers the price and, more importantly, gives Internet users an incredible advantage: the substitution effect.

"And keep this in mind: The substitute need not be perfect.

"'The comparative advantage that newspapers have is professional reporting,' said Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a New York University game theory specialist. 'They have the ability to take information, digest it and inform better than an amateur can.

'But that doesn't mean anyone will pay for it.'...

"The smartest Internet strategy may come from a publisher whose embrace of the Internet is more like a weak squeeze.

"Former USA Today Publisher Cathie Black, now leading Hearst Magazines, maintains only skeletal Web sites for her titles.

"As the New York Times quoted her last year, Ms. Black wants this: 'I want 1.6 million women to go to the newsstand and every month to buy Cosmo....'

"If you listen to what Black is saying, you'll know what's really important: The print edition is the only thing that cannot be substituted; the only thing that makes any newspaper unique; and the only thing that assures an advertiser that their message is displayed."

Of course, any new-media theorist will simply dismiss all this as: "They're so stupid!" But it's really up to the owners of newspapers. Most journalists don't think in terms of workable business models; indeed, a workable business model often seems to be the enemy of journalism, in the same way that doctors don't really want to run businesses, which is why their offices are so often an operational mess. So publishers and chairmen have to take the lead.

They can act boldly for print, as Walter Hussman in Little Rock has done; or they can act boldly for online, as in Ann Arbor; or they can say: "Well, I don't know, if I do something, there might be a downside." Since most newspaper publishers and prospective publishers who came out of the 1990s and early 2000s got their jobs for keeping profits churning while avoiding any substantive risk, I suspect Earl's projection of the future -- current big media swept away, replaced by new big media -- will happen, much more than a future in which the independent citizen-entrepreneur-journalist model prevails. Permanent revolution didn't work for Mao, so why should it work in the news business?

Busted

I overheard a woman at our township library recently as she was checking out a video: "This is so much better than when there were video stores, and when you had to bring them back by noon the next day or something."

Blockbuster is already in the grave if late-middle-aged women in an older suburb think it's gone out of business. The Blockbuster in a strip mall close to us closed late last year, and the small Main Street video store maybe three years ago. There are still a number of Blockbusters in our area. But as far as this woman was concerned, only a bad memory -- "when there were video stores."

But while our library has a decent selection of DVDs, it's not as many as Blockbuster -- and there's only one copy of each. That didn't matter to this woman, however. The main thing to her was that she didn't have to bring it back by noon the next day or two or three days, or whatever the video store had once done, or face an unknown penalty, maybe, or maybe not. The last couple of times I've gone to Blockbuster, they've given me a week to bring it back. But memories die hard, and nearly everyone remembers Blockbuster and other video stores for their attitude of a decade ago -- have it back by noon or pay a substantial fine, collected by a clerk who sneers at you as you fumble through your pockets and your kid says he has to go potty. You can't even run to the ATM to get the money, because the pastor droned on and you arrived at the store at 11:58 just to beat the deadline, and if you leave to get some money, you'll miss it.

Our library charges a fine as well, but less, and later, and it's set. No one expected Blockbuster to not charge a fine; but they expected it to be minimal and straightforward and not based on having to rush there in the morning.

NetFlix by itself can't kill video stores; not everyone is willing to wait two to three days to get a video in the mail. RedBox can't kill them by itself, because it doesn't have the selection and you have to pay an extra dollar for every day you don't bring it back (although again, the fee is 24 hours after you rented the movie, not necessarily noon). On Demand can't kill them because not everyone has cable or premium channels. All these together can kill Blockbuster, but a lot of people never forgave Blockbuster for policies such as its hidden sale for late returns and only went there because there was no better alternative.

One of my -- I was going to say oldest friends, but I'm getting too old for that, so let's say one of my longest-time friends -- who has been a journalist all her life, and who works for a Big Media company -- recently wrote me that she was dropping the Washington Post. She lives in Northern Virginia and is a news junkie -- and reads some Post stories online. But, she said, when she gets stuck in a two-hour traffic jam at Tysons, there's never anything about it in the Post. What it gives her are self-indugent articles by its writers about their lives. Why should she waste her time paying for it and having to go out in the snow and get it? They don't pay attention to what I want, she says. The Post is a great paper, but it's an inconvenience to flip through page after page to find nothing that relates to me.

A relative of my wife's takes the Harrisburg Patriot-News and says it's a fine paper and he really likes it. But he's probably going to drop it anyway, he says. The reason is that in an attempt to appeal to time-pressed readers, the paper is now wrapping a sort-of-spadea -- if you don't know journalism lingo, it's that page-and-a-half thing that wraps partway around the front of a section; in Harrisburg, it's an actual half-page on both sides -- with a "five-minute read" on it. Advertisers love spadeas because they get a front-page ad without having to argue with the newsroom over buying half the front page. Readers tend to hate spadeas because when you're holding the section up, the spadea just falls away. There's no upper right corner to grab when you're holding the paper. When I tell people, "Just take the thing off and throw it away" -- spadeas usually contain no irreplaceable news content -- they get that mortally offended look in their eye or timbre in their voice, that combination of "But it's part of the newspaper and I might miss something" coupled with "Why should I have to inconvenience myself for your damn half-page ad?"

Alan Mutter wrote recently that newspapers theoretically could go on in print into the 2040s (by which time they might have figured out what to do) but on the other hand could all start to fall within a year if the hemorrhaging of readers continued. They will just become too expensive to distribute to a smaller reader base. This is not the issue of "no one under 35 reads newspapers." This is the loss of people in their 50s and 60s, people who have loved newspapers. Partly they're irate about one specific thing. But also they recognize that there's no longer any social opprobrium attached to not taking a newspaper. You can consider yourself well informed from online. You can even feel progressive (green, modern, whatever) by not taking a newspaper. You will no longer be seen as somehow a little less than fully cognizant. You can join that group that says, "This is why newspapers are going out of business." So why put up with the inconvenience?

Soon, that woman at my library may be saying, "This is so much better than when there were newspapers." She may like the experience of curling up with a newspaper and a cup of coffee, or being distracted by it over a solitary lunch, or whatever. But eventually a vacation stop that isn't followed through on, or too many wet papers, or a spadea too many, will make her say, oh, heck, it's not worth it, even if all she does to replace it is watch a little more CNN.

Some inconvenience just is built into newspapers, just as it is at Blockbuster. But Blockbuster's interaction with customers became centered on "you have to go out of your way to bring it back." (With RedBox, maybe you're going to the grocery anyway.) Newspapers have a lot of fault lines, but in my experience the ones that kill us are poor delivery service and content that readers aren't interested in -- not the "saving democracy even if you don't care" stories, but ones that are either irrelevant or at variance with their own view of the world. And of the two, I'd put poor delivery service at the top. It just mystifies people when they don't get the paper reliably. They get the mail every day. And what really honks them off is when they call to complain and they don't speak to a real person even though they keep pressing 1 or 0 or whatever. They know what we're telling them -- that their problem is not really important to us.