The Press of Business As Seen From Abroad

Earl Wilkinson of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association has long been one of my personal antidotes to Newspaper Gloom and Doom. Part of this is that Earl takes a worldwide approach -- he sees what's happening in Colombia and China as well as America and England. More important is that Earl doesn't see the newspaper as being identical to the newsroom. The newspaper is a business that sells ads and distributes a product and serves customers and reports the news. The first two exist to support the last two, but the newspaper is not just an institution that reports the news and the heck with everything else.

The ever-esteemed Doug Fisher must have caught Earl's blog posting around the same time as I did, but he beat me to the post. So I'll link to Doug's ever-informative "Common Sense Journalism" and his excerpt, in which Earl says after a visit to Australia:

"The two trains of thought among publishers worldwide are that:
"*The United States is an early warning system of consumer and advertiser behavior.
"*Or, that the U.S. publishers have so under-invested in their print products that they have no root system when disruption hits. Thus, the U.S. story is avoidable in other parts of the world. ...
"What the Americans get wrong in print, I was told, is projecting a templated, soulless environment for the consumer who wants to slowly browse. In the past decade, this is an increasingly gaunt-looking print environment reflecting poorly on local media brands that haven't gotten a workout in decades. While quality print newspapers should be platforms for deep engagement, U.S. publishers have created tools to get readers in and out of their print pages in shorter and shorter time increments.
"Advertisers won't invest in such a platform, my friend said. They don't want to be associated with platforms devoid of sizzle."

I'll quote further:
"American publishers, [his friend] mused, have given up too quickly on print as a platform of lucrative engagement.
"Don't confuse migration of eyeballs to digital platforms with the death of the print platform. Don't abandon all efforts to transform print from our only platform of engagement to 'one of several platforms.' Just because print might have a smaller impact in the next five years doesn't mean it's a dead platform."

Further:
"Others at the conference had plenty more to say from what they've viewed from afar — volunteering to the American speaker their views of why their national newspaper industry is different from my country's experiences. For example, the U.S. newspaper brands don't stand for anything other than guardians of a professional journalism standard that — to consumers — feels distant, detached, and unemotional. In design, story selection, and locally written news as a percentage of pages printed, the American publishers have fumbled the print environment.
"Sobering. Probably goes too far. Yet interesting perspectives.
"By contrast, the conference featured three case studies of newspapers that are getting the print environment emotionally correct: “i” in Portugal, Toronto Star in Canada, and A Crítica in Brazil. The Portuguese newspaper redefines what a brand can be in print with a “daily magazine” design so stunning and different as to defy characterisation. The Toronto Star lives by a set of principles by its most famous owner with a clear “social conscience” viewpoint. And the Amazonian daily A Crítica personifies soulfulness and a reader-first campaign mentality."

Earl elaborates on this in the September Editor & Publisher, which is behind a paywall so I will further quote him:

"Advertisers aren't investing in newspapers because a print product doesn't work. In fact, the research suggests that print works beautifully because of the nature of the audience and medium. Instead, advertisers aren't investing because newspapers are losing the perceptual war in building, sustaining, and nurturing their audiences....

"A brand isn't like wine in a bottle that grows in value as it ages. We confuse age with value... A brand is the sum of all contacts over time.... The perception of a news brand gets shaped by product condition, billing, editorial position, rack location, the way a phone is answered. ... I sometimes wonder how a multibillion-dollar industry can function without knowing much about its customers."

(From the traditional newsroom perspective, of course, anything you knew about your customers would lead you to pander to their biases, so best not to know anything. We would produce what was best for them, and they would appreciate it. From the business-side perspective, we didn't have to know about our customers' problems. They had to know about ours, because not only was our business infinitely more complicated than theirs, where else were they going to go? Take it or leave it, pal. Hmm, we didn't expect they'd choose the latter...)

Earl's point in all this is that everything affects whether people care about your product -- what you cover, how it's delivered, whether the Sunday paper at the 7-Eleven has a torn front page and inserts falling onto the floor, whether the person you call in the newsroom does the usual newsroom thing and hangs up on you after belittling you for bothering him -- and the point he and his overseas friends make is:

Customers have to care about your product. If they don't, they'll just walk away.

And while Earl's feeling is that sometime before the year 2100, the economics of gasoline, ink, paper will spell the end of printed newspapers -- "The issue won't be whether people abandon print, it will be whether it's economically feasible to serve markets via print versus other alternatives" -- in the short run, print works.

He even notes "a counter-revolution against digital -- too much information, too much connectedness ... short-term, there's a backlash that we should take advantage of." Elsewhere in the issue, E&P quotes the "Digital Future Study" findings that for the second year in a row, the number of Internet users who said they would miss the print edition of their newspaper increased, and this year the number of people stopping subscriptions to get information online decreased.

As News & Tech columnist Doug Page wrote in the June issue (I couldn't locate a link in its archive):

"For the newspaper industry to remain viable, it needs to go back to basics, focusing on sales, service, and content of the printed edition and changing its attitude toward its old-fashioned paper product."

And for what to do next, we will turn to, out of character for TTPB, Jay Rosen.

Back to Work: Wide Open

That's the problem that no one in the news business has been able to crack. Economic models exist because you can control your business. If you can't control your business, you don't have one.

Way back in the early days of this blog, it strongly held that print was necessary as a pipeline into the reader's home. You controlled what went into and out of that pipeline. The glory of the Internet was, of course, to be that no one controlled what went in, and you controlled what you saw. Good for theory, bad for business.

But the Internet wasn't designed to be a business or a home for one. As Dan Kruger, CEO of iPhase 3 Corp., a software developer, was quoted as saying in News & Tech when asked why stories seem to be impossible to monetize:

"The design of the Web was for the unconstrained distribution of information. Every piece of Web software you use has that protocol on it. An ad is another piece of content -- stories and ads need distribution control and you cannot do that on the Web. ... The inherent design of the Web thwarts control of distribution, security, privacy or payment.

"If it was possible to get that control on the Web from all the time and attention the newspaper industry has spent trying to do so, the industry would have already achieved it."

We move on to Michael Hirschorn, founder of the TV production company Ish Entertainment, in the Atlantic, who says that the Internet as we know it is "the product of a very specific ideology. Despite its Department of Defense origins, the matrixized, hyper-linked Internet was both cause and effect of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The open-source mentality ... proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. ...

"Ironically, only the 'old' entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era's freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet. As a result, they undermined in little more than a decade a value proposition they had spent more than a century building up."

Hirschorn's point is that "the era of browser dominance is coming to a close." Replacing it will be the app-based model, whether for phones or tablets: You want something, you pay for it. "For all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it." In other words: Utopia always fails. It's a business, son.

The utopianism that powered so much theorizing about the Internet -- Hirschorn quotes John Perry Barlow, an early proponent of digital freedom, as saying, "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone" -- powered Surrealism and Dadaism, powered Communism, powered forms of religious ecstasy since time immemorial. But why did so many news industry leaders, not just editors but publishers, CFOs, etc., sober men and women, either fall for it or feel they had to genuflect toward it to the extent of putting their businesses and mission in mortal jeopardy?

Just some thoughts:
*The newspaper industry lost its mojo with TV news, spent decades trying to come up with a substitute for "we told you first," and thought it could find its way back.
*Newspaper people are always suckers for futurists, idealists, and anyone who makes one feel behind the times.
*Maybe these guys will be right. What do we know?
*It killed the record industry first. It must be inevitable.
*Our own kids not only don't read newspapers, but don't think we're very special for working for newspapers. We must be outmoded. Get with it.
*Maybe there really is a business model out there and we just haven't found it yet.
*Being part of "the conversation" is more important than how we make money being part of it.
*Hell, this business ain't that different from print, we're just selling adjacencies.
*Free classifieds will fail because an ad in the newspaper is worth more than an ad in a shopper. Context is everything.
*I don't understand what they're talking about, therefore they must be right.

All well and true. But I have to recall dimly what Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times was quoted as saying a decade ago, which was something like: If I could get rid of the cost of printing, ink, trucks, drivers, bundlers, inserters, mailers, delivery fulfillment staff, etc., I'd get rid of 70 percent of my costs. (And if I could keep the same level of income...)

Certainly the Times was planning to use a lot of that to increase news coverage. But stopping the presses would have done the trick that eliminating linotypes and competing newspapers had also done: Create a period of increased quarterly earnings without much effort, and get the analysts and investors off the newspapers' back. It would have meant a few years of not managing every dime every week just to keep the stock price up.

And it would have worked, had someone noticed that the Internet was not designed to restrict the flow of information. But newspapers came early to the Internet game, and thought the model was going to be AOL -- which did restrict the flow. I can still remember our publisher saying in 2003, who knew the model was going to be search?

So the future: Newspapers will try to turn their efforts away from the Web and toward tablet and mobile apps, while at the same time denying that they are abandoning the Wild West of Browser City (because someone might yell at them for restraining information or being only concerned with money) and probably only doing so half-heartedly (because they still are wedded to getting millions of clicks, from the DNA of selling millions of papers), while still printing newspapers but doing them for senior citizens instead of trying to reinvent them, because everyone says you can't do anything but watch them die.

Everyone but newspaper executives nearly everyplace else in the world, it turns out. More to come next week.

It's Been Summer...

Life was too nice to spend it posting. But things have been happening, so it's time to get back into gear.

First, though, a search for "That's the Press, Baby" on Google brings this link to a clip from the Bogart movie posted by a fan in Italy, with this as the famous last quote:

"È la stampa, bellezza. E tu non ci puoi fare un bel niente!"

Can't you just hear Bogey saying that!

---

Before going on to newspapers, a couple of comments on department stores. You may remember the snarky article the New York Times did on J.C. Penney Co. when it opened in Manhattan. Not only did the story seem to insult a goodly number of Americans, it may have missed the point on Penney's as well. Elizabeth Wellington, the fashion writer for my paper, notes that Penney's more fashion-oriented advertising is being backed up by actual trendy merchandise. (At least in women's wear. I've made a couple of passes through Penney's men's department and found it awash in polyester; also at both stores I have been in recently, the lighting and roof tiles seem unchanged since the malls opened. But you have to start somewhere, and just changing the color of "JCPenney" on the signs from white to red wasn't going to be enough.)

---

Finally there's a new-this-year site called the Department Store Museum. The blogger, whose name is given as "BAK," mentions that he was laid off recently. If so, he has used his time well, although I hope it becomes remunerative. The wonder of his site is that in addition to historic photos, he posts old logos, store directories, and branch locations. Thus, if you want to know what was on the fourth floor at E.W. Edwards & Son in Syracuse, you can find out it was housewares, wallpaper and paint, and fabrics. BAK started off with a bang and slowed down in July, and I hope he has gotten a job ... but what he's done is immensely helpful in tracking major department stores in the 1950s through 1970s, when they were branching out but also trying to maintain their large downtown presences.

Sometimes It's Clear

Part of my job is overseeing our corrections column. Normally I hear from the aggrieved, but today I got a call from a guy with a radio talk show who asked about a story we ran Saturday. Actually, he was asking about the story because we had run a really minor correction to it.

The story concerned a new trial ordered in a 1996 murder case in a prominent suburb. Our mistake concerned a current use of the historic building where the crime occurred -- we said there were many things there, including a restaurant, but there actually is no restaurant. One had been planned, but it never opened.

That mistake didn't draw people's attention. What did get them talking, the host said, was the order of a new trial. They hadn't seen the story Saturday, even though it was very prominently played. They knew a new trial had been ordered because it was mentioned in the clear, through the "A story Saturday about the ordering of a new trial..." throat-clearing manner of Clearing the Records. Then they were calling up the host saying, "Why was there a new trial?" (I don't think he had seen the story either, so he wondered if I could tell him what it was about.)

Well, beat me with a switch, but when a Clearing the Record item gets people's attention more than the actual A1 story, I'm left scratching my head. The headline was prominent and accurate, and mentioned the name of the previously-found-guilty party, as did the Clear. While the lead was in the third paragraph, it wasn't a story that one had to read past the jump to find out what was going on -- it was all laid out pretty quickly.

It was a summer Saturday, so maybe no one read the paper or checked the Web site. Of the three local papers I get at home, one doesn't even publish on Saturdays. So maybe the people who are saying "The world will get along just fine without newspapers" have a point. But clearly it was read in the corrections column during the week. So that's not it.

One answer I can come up with is that the Clears, like News in Brief items, are -- brief. Yes, people read them to see how we've screwed up again. But they're also bite-size -- we try to write tight corrections. Still, I don't think that's the main point.

Most days we publish Clears. We publish them every day in the same place -- on the fourth page of the A section. Thus, they're something predictable, like the weather, the comics, the sports agate.

I'm sure it looked differently at the time to an adult, but when I was a kid, newspapers had a wonderful predictability to them. Not just in the comics and the TV listings, but in the narratives. Every day there would be a story about whatever they were doing perfidiously in Moscow. Every day there would be a story about what the president did. (Alas, every day there would be a story out of Saigon as well.) On the world stage, there was a set cast of characters -- Charles de Gaulle, Willy Brandt, Kwame Nkrumah, spade-bearded Walter Ulbricht -- who appeared regularly. There would be reports of accidents and fires, much like the previous day's report of accidents and fires. There would be, in TV terms, the mini-series, like Bobby Baker. And then there would be the specials -- the Coliseum explosion, the Evansville Aces plane crash, let alone the Kennedy assassination -- that would rivet one's attention.

The newspaper, in that sense, was comforting at the same time it was provoking. There might be a report about Mongolia, but it would be presented as news of a far-away land of which we know nothing. The newspaper "habit" that was a fixture in American houses was in part seeing what was "new," but seeing it in the context of what wasn't -- which was most of what you read. You checked your team, your stock, your crossword, your funny pages, your police blotter, your Berlin Wall. For other amusement, you might check the society column or, for those who enjoyed it, the Personals ads. ("Tom. Come home. All is forgiven. Jane." Followed by: "I am not responsible for any debts incurred by persons other than myself. Tom Smith.")

Yes, people do that online, and yes, in many of the same ways. But before everyone had broadband, newspapers had already chucked many of the habit-forming aspects. Not in the comics, which are still with us, and not in the business and TV agate, which fell to the Web. But it can be hard to make an attachment to ongoing themes in the news. It's the downside of today's enterprise-and-insight-driven newspapers: We cover a story, try to do it thoroughly, offer enlightenment, and then, having done our job, move on to the next story.

People develop habits because the same thing satisfies their needs time and again. Newspapers, often run by ADD-afflicted personalities wanting to cover the world and looking for what they don't know, want to not do the same thing over and over. Thus, amid the onslaught of a world of unrelated chaos, people find out about a story through the corrections column, because it's there for them every day.

The Ultimate Lightness of Revolution

This has nothing to do with copy editing or department stores. But...

I've always been sanguine about the fact that in the late 1960s and early 1970s I was among those who protested the war and thought that maybe there was more to Che than to, say, Everett Dirksen. I'm far from ready to forsake that and grab onto a neocon flag of repentance. But Richard Wolin's review of Pascal Bruckner's "The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism" in the Aug. 12 New Republic has made me wonder.

It can get tough going, and like too much of the New Republic it can read as if it had to have a ritual insertion of something pertaining to Israel in order to be published. Still, it makes one think about the different worldviews between the international-referencing class and the national-referencing class -- views that I think are as much behind the culture wars as the specifics of abortion, taxes, or bowing to the emperor.

Some excerpts:

"The process of decolonialization and the concomitant rise of multiculturalism have resulted in a surfeit of competing cultural claims. By degrees, the ideal of cultural excellence, which at one point seemed more or less self-evident, has ceded to an overextended and anthropological definition of culture: the idea of culture as the 'expression' of a way of life of a group, a tribe, a people."

Which even gets at the famous statement about rural Pennsylvanians clinging to their religion and guns amid the stress.

"The unintended consequence of this development has been a paralyzing incapacity to make significant cultural judgments and distinctions."

Which seems to cover so much of the culture war -- one out of many, virtuous and (at least in our own minds) superior, or one among many, with all having some good points or bad points, and it's bad form to say one is superior except by being superior enough to see that none are... ?

"France's historical badge of distinction had been the Great Revolution of 1789. This is the heritage that accounts for French 'exceptionalism': the obsession with insurrection as a vaunted and permanent feature of the national political imagination."

But is not the tea party...?

Quoting Bruckner: "We searched for a more intense and, therefore, more innocent version of ourselves in Angolan soldiers, Bengali Naxalites, and Bolivian guerrillas."

I'd never made a connection between intensity of feeling and authenticity before in that manner -- but if you think about it, it also partly explains the press' preoccupation with gaffes and gotchas (as revealing the 'real person' instead of just another facet) and the ongoing desire for a utopia that informs so much online theorizing. If we can simply throw off the Don Draper we have worn, we can again be who we think we really are, or at least who we dreamed we would be. Except that Don is also part of us...

Quoting Bruckner: "Wearing such outfits [looking like Cuban guerrillas, etc.] was an attempt to make mere loitering look like the Long March. (If I pretend to be the Other, his victories become my victories.)"

And not just for Che or Ho, of course. This has made me think of athletic-team jerseys in a different way. It's not just showing support; it's imagining oneself as a part of the team. (I don't wear jerseys, and when I was a student radical I wore dress shirts and polyester pants. Obviously a failure of my imagination.

Again quoting: "From existentialism to deconstructionism, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasizing the latter's hypocrisy, violence, and abomination. The whole world hates us, and we deserve it. That is what most Europeans think."

I have no idea what most Europeans actually think, but clearly much of the criticism from the right of the "you liberals hate America" variety seems to revolve around the idea in this sentence. We held ourselves to a higher standard; we failed to meet it; therefore we should be condemned; or, we held ourselves to a higher standard; we tried to meet it; therefore we should be praised and should praise ourselves. And neither side understands the basis of the other. This plays out every day in attacks on newspapers and other media.

"In reasonable quantities, of course, self-criticism and repentance are praiseworthy: necessary stages in working through a politically or morally compromised past. Yet when indulged to excess ... they turn into an unhealthy preoccupation with the past that shuts down the capacity to live fully and honestly and constructively in the present."

Yet demonization of others can yield the same outcome, and again we face the tea party.

Quoting: "Romantic fascination with exceptional beings -- with the insane, the criminal, the genius, the artist, the pervert -- stems from our fear of being lost in the flock, in the stereotype of the petit bourgeois man. 'I am different from the rest.' That is the motto of the man of the herd."

Well, somehow I doubt I will ever see "Mad Men" in the same light -- or the "Newsmakers" column.

Department Store Building of the ... Whatever

It's getting harder to find old department store buildings in smaller cities. I went looking for one in Norristown. I knew the old Block's had been torn down years ago, but the last time I was there the building of Friedman's New York Store was still standing. No more; it's now a garage.

So rather than doing obscure stores in smaller towns I'll move on to my own city of Philadelphia, although the history of large-city department stores is extensively documented. Shown above is the Lit Bros. store on Market Street between Seventh and Eighth Streets. From the street it impressed people as one continuous frontage, but it was always a number of cast-iron front buildings linked together and painted white. 25 years ago, a sign that dated back decades atop the building said "A Great Store in a Great City," which was Lits' motto. (That was also on the warehouse, which stood where part of Community College of Philadelphia now is.)

Lits also had the motto "Hats Trimmed Free of Charge," going back to its genesis. It was run by Jacob and Samuel Lit for years. Just before the Depression they sold it to City Stores, which put its management under that of the Goerke family, which owned stores in Newark and Elizabeth, N.J. During the Depression City Stores liquidated the Goerke stores; the one in Elizabeth was reopened under the ownership of the Goerke family. City Stores operated Lits outside of its other interests until 1951, when it was integrated into the operation.

Like many downscale stores, Lits went into suburban branches early; the Lits, Wasson's, Crowley's of the world didn't crave the exclusivity of the carriage-trade store. There were stores in Camden and Trenton, and in Northeast Philadelphia and Willow Grove. Lits also benefited when another City operation, N. Snellenberg & Co., was closed as a reaction to a strike; Lits picked up its branches, including Atlantic City.

But City Stores, part of the Bankers Security empire, began to fade before other chains of department stores did. Divisions such as R.H. White in Boston were pruned and then disappeared. Lits lasted into the late 1970s, and had opened modern mall stores such as at Echelon in South Jersey. But that did not save it, as the "fourth store down" in Philadelphia, after discounters took away much of its trade.

The building was threatened, but was saved by the then Mellon Bank for a regional headquarters. It also has had street-level retail.

Copy Editing: A Hub-bub from Gannett

Gannett Co. announced this week that it would over the next two years consolidate all its page design at five locations. Thus the Palm Springs Desert Sun, the Indianapolis Star, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, would no longer be laid out at their home newsrooms, but in Phoenix or Louisville or Asbury Park.

Charles Apple -- the newspaper design guru who has brought his widely read blog to the American Copy Editors Society site, and bless him for it -- has some thoughts here. Here's a link to Gannett's statement. Since, of course, the principle of blogging is that there are never enough thoughts, here are some more.

1. LET'S TAKE THEM AT THEIR WORD

Legions of Gannett-haters, including many former and current Gannett employees, will laugh at this, but let's take their statement at face value first, as presented by VP/News Kate Marymount.

She says the goal of "the creation of News Design Centers that handle the design and production of newspapers" is "offering efficiencies but – just as importantly – sophisticated newspaper design." Certainly an impetus is to have one editorial system -- CCI -- in all of Gannett's newsrooms. Thus, a story written in Wausau can appear in Marion without having to be sent, picked up, recoded, published in print, published in mobile, whatever.

"Employees of the Design Centers will be trained in sophisticated newspaper design. And, most importantly, it allows our Information Centers to focus on – and protect -- the creation of unique local content."

Information Centers, of course, is what we used to call newsrooms. I think what this is saying is: If we take one Full-Time Equivalent out of Marshfield and make it a one-third FTE in Louisville, we have two-thirds of an FTE to do reporting in Marshfield. Also, if the job of the editor in Marshfield is simply to develop a local news budget rather than having to oversee and staff production, perhaps he or she will have more time to do that. (More on that later.)

"What work will remain locally? Creation of content and copy editing. To draw on the expertise and local knowledge at the local sites, copy editing will remain there. Copy that moves to the Design Centers is expected to be production-ready and include suggested headlines. ... We recognize that journalists everywhere handle multiple tasks every day, and that copy editors also paginate, create digital content, write SEO headlines, etc. We will work with each site to clarify what work is done locally and at Design Centers." Suddenly Gannett gets religion on copy editing? Hmm. But let's move on.

"The goal of this project is to elevate the quality of design at sites where the recession caused a loss of focus on design. And to sustain good design at sites that have been able to keep that a strong focus." OK, again, let's take them at their word, in part because the Gannett paper I read every day has suddenly undergone a design cleanup and its front page now looks like a thoughtful, well-designed entry point instead of a circus. (That's not a slam at my many friends there; it's what they were told to do, and now they're being told to do something better.) But let's also take them at their word because every editor cares about how his or her paper looks.

"Will all of our newspapers begin to look alike? No. Flatly, no. That is not the intent at all. The individuality of a newspaper is important. We will preserve that. ... Will our deadlines have to be earlier? No. The Design Centers will be staffed based on your current deadlines." Taking them at their word, this can't mean the aim is simply draconian cuts. The way to accomplish those is to make every newspaper look the same so that no story ever needs to be reformatted, as Tribune has largely done. And by assigning newspapers to hubs based on geography (and accompanying time zone) instead of, say, having Asbury Park lay out one West Coast paper for every East Coast paper, you're not going to have a designer do Morristown in the first half of his shift and Visalia in the second.

So taking them at their word, they want to:
1. Save some positions by not having to have a full-time layout person at every 14-page paper in the Midwest.
2. Have their papers look better by having designers who work together and under the direction of a design person, instead of somebody on his own in Iowa answering to an editor who doesn't know a thing about layout.
3. Have everyone on the same system.

2. LET'S BE CYNICAL

OK, they want to cut payroll. Name a newspaper company that doesn't. Nothing about that makes Gannett stand out from the New York Times Co.

OK, they want to cut payroll on non-content-creation positions. Again, name a newspaper company that doesn't. That doesn't make Gannett a saint or a good employer. It just doesn't make them the devil either.

So what are some cynical observations?

1. Gannett has giant buildings in Louisville and Asbury Park (I've been in both) and Phoenix. I don't know about Nashville or Des Moines. I assume, since those buildings came from the Binghams and Lasses and Pulliams and Cowleses, that they own them and that there's probably not much they can do with them. So might as well fill them up. If continued downsizing means one can move out of an old-style newsroom building somewhere else and pay less for office space, as has happened with Singleton's Bay-area papers...

2. I don't know much about CCI, but I've been told that their layout system is not accessible from non-layout workstations (unlike the system my paper uses). I assume this means fewer licenses, and you don't need someone in Mountain Home who knows how to troubleshoot it.

3. If you've got a designer in Hattiesburg, you've got to have a backup. If your designers are all in Nashville, you just shift someone around. (As newsrooms shrink, though, this actually makes sense.)

4. The statement about "making the papers look alike" probably refers back to the attempt to make Florida Today exactly resemble USA Today, to see if people would buy it. They didn't. But designers working in a hub are going to copy from one another, and look for shortcuts to make their jobs easier, so the papers will come to resemble each other more over time. Plus, Gannett has never been shy about corporate design edicts -- remember the days when all the non-metros had to have a 7-column front page?

5. If you're trying to get your newsrooms to think more platform-agnostic, the existence in your newsroom of the group that's Getting the Paper Out ties the newsroom to Getting the Paper Out. It's your paper. If getting the paper out is someone else's job, you may spend more time putting things online or on mobile. The page-design function is no longer a newsroom hub. The editor doesn't wander over and say, "Whatcha doin?" The editor's job is the coverage, not obsessing over A1. It's divorcing the newsroom from the print paper, because otherwise tradition will dictate that that print paper will still be the Real Thing.

6. Assume the number of pages produced will inevitably shrink. It will still be a long time, if ever, before it shrinks to nothing. But perhaps you go down to five days or three. Or you keep going at seven days but you've only got two sections instead of four. If you've got 70 page-design desks, you've got to keep them staffed regardless. With hubs, you can spread the work around and shrink the staff gradually while still keeping people occupied.

So to me, the unspoken thing in this memo is: This is a plan to prepare for shrinking print production while not actually admitting it, and to get local newsrooms to focus less on "the next day's paper" and more on simply preparing things regardless of how they are presented.

3. LET'S BE COPY EDITORS

The major surprise in this memo is the separating of the copy editing and design functions, at least for local copy. Recent bang-together moves such as Tribune, Scripps and Media General have all moved both functions to hubs. Gannett makes it very clear in this memo: Copy editing will remain in each newsroom.

Well, as a copy editor who has written about the need for copy editors to be seen as part of the local news-gathering and reporting force, I can't help but be happy. I know Gannett has changed its copy editor jobs in many places to include things such as video, so I don't know exactly what they feel the job is. But they clearly believe that a copy editor in Cherry Hill has to see the copy about Cherry Hill, that a copy desk in Louisville is not going to do the job right. As Apple says: "So at least the critical copy-editing functions will remain in the hands of folks who become familiar with local names and landmarks and customs. This is a smart move on Gannett’s part."

So bully for them, although without the design job I suspect that the one copy editor left in each newsroom may have his or her hands over-filled. The fact that copy editors are supposed to send "suggested heds" instead of actually filling in the head orders is a problem, because designers will be able to make ill-advised changes. (Apple notes this as well.) But a proofreading system could do away with that.

But this again shows to me that the endgame is the withering of print. Gannett has apparently decided that copy editing has a future in the digital world -- you still need that set of local eyes. So keep it in house. But newspaper design? Buggy whips. Move it out the door.

As someone who loves a good newspaper page, that makes me sad. On the other hand, as a copy editor, it's the same choice I'd make -- if I had to make the choice. Design is more exportable than text editing. (Graphics, such as maps and charts, are another thing entirely.) But I still don't know, for example, how stand-alone photo packages will be handled, or if the obscure wire story of interest only in a certain region will be picked up.

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Note: I wrote this before seeing Steve Yelvington's and Brian White's comments on Apple's blog. Yelvington sees this as an overdue move to let print go further into its long fade to black and applauds it, while for me it's a sad thing that the newspaper business has come to this. That said, both of us drew the same conclusion. My friend Brian notes that local copy editing has stayed in Asheville and Greenville anyway while wire editing went to Louisville. Will wire editing all be in these hubs? Gannett's note is silent on that point. My own guess, a total guess? USA Today eventually will take over all wire content for the local papers.

It's Not the Paper. It's What's On It

A Nieman Lab post by Dan Froomkin said a reason newspapers are failing on the Web -- a debatable proposition, so let's phrase it as "the reason newspapers are not as dominant players in the post-online news ecosystem as they were in the system that preceded it" -- is that the product they're providing doesn't work online. Some quotes:

"We’re hiding much of our newsrooms' value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations. While the dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story still has some marginal utility, it's mostly a throwback at this point — a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community. (For instance, it’s the daily delivery cycle of our print product that led us to focus on yesterday’s news. And it's the focus on maximizing newspaper circulation that drove us to create the notion of 'objectivity' — thereby removing opinion and voice from news stories — for fear of alienating any segment of potential subscribers.)

"The Internet doesn't work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice. There's a reason why opinion writing tends to dominate the most-read lists on our 'news' sites. Indeed, what we’ve seen is that Internet communities tend to form around voices — informed, passionate, authoritative voices in particular. (No one wants to read a bored blogger, I always say.)...

"One option might be to imitate cable TV, and engage in a furious volume of he-said/she-said reporting, voyeurism, contrarianism, gossip, triviality and gotcha journalism. But that would come at the cost of our souls. The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.

"Obviously, we do some of that already. But I would argue that even then, we do so in a much too understated way. We stifle some of our best stories with a wet blanket of pseudo-neutrality. We edit out tone. We banish anything smacking of activism. We don’t telegraph our own enthusiasm for what it is we're doing. We vaguely assume the readers will understand how valuable a service we’re providing for them — but evidently, many of them don’t."

For years, people have been saying that this hasn't worked in print either. The Internet merely opened the door for new competitors who could enter the market without learning to do things the way a newspaper demanded. But as noted here and elsewhere ad infinitum, people have been moving away from newspapers for years, in part because they often are filled with often-boring, often-incremental, often-insider-oriented stories.

They became filled with those stories not just because of a commercial imperative to reach the most people. In fact, newspapers were often more interesting when they were competing with others to reach the most people to fulfill a commercial imperative. When almost every newspaper realized it was the Only Game in Town and likely to remain so forever (as it seemed in the 1970s and 1980s) was when they most felt the pressure to be "objective" (a word I think Froomkin misuses here in terms of the way it was meant by the people who defined it in the mid-20th century, but nevermind). By that time they had already largely maximized circulation. At that point, yes, they certainly wanted to maintain their large circulations. But they also wanted to be seen as fair and impartial truth-tellers, not as activist, enthusiastic, passionate voices. (Eugene Pulliam and William Loeb were activist, enthusiastic, and passionate.)

The debate we have been having is not a debate over whether newspapers will be printed. That's a debate, but the debate is over what I'll call for now "freewheeling journalism" vs. "institutionalized journalism." (Those are sucky labels.) When the Arizona Republic devoted its front page to an editorial on the controversial "ask their status" law, it had to be aware as well that someone could now say, "Your reporters cannot possibly be seen as neutral on this because you as an institution have already taken a stand." But it was certainly an opinion. We could argue church/state about the editorial page's role, except that this was the front page.

When the Republic was owned by Eugene Pulliam, who was known for front-page editorials, it would have been clear that it was the view of Eugene Pulliam. Newspapers spoke for the powerful people who owned them. Was the Republic's view the view of Gannett Co.? Was it the view of the local publisher? The editorial board? In the end it was the view of an institution called the Arizona Republic. But the reporters work for that institution.

Print and trucks and distribution cycles create their own problems, but journalists are engaged in a debate over what constitutes "journalism." Is it saying what happened, or saying what should happen? Is it being a neutral observer who stands back, or an engaged participant who calls it like he sees it? Is it speaking to a general audience, or speaking from a specific standpoint to those who get the point? It's not that Froomkin is wrong. It's that Froomkin's journalism does not fit into a mass-market journalistic organization -- regardless of how whether it's printed or broadcast or posted. And the debate continues to be -- is this better?

Old Department Store Building of the (Week), New Series Vol. 2

New Castle, Pa., is one of those places that clearly was once a Big Deal and has become less of one as industry has moved elsewhere. The main floor of the New Castle News building, for example, reflects not only the onetime grandeur of the newspaper business but the economic prowess of New Castle. If you're ever there, walk in and check it out.

Before the depression, New Castle had many department stores -- Brown & Hamilton, Clendenin's, Stritmater Bros., and the entertainingly named J.N. Euwer's Sons' Sons. None of these made it out of the Depression. John Stillman, creator of the Interstate Department Stores chain of lower-end department stores from central Pennsylvania into Indiana and Michigan, had his first department store in New Castle before relocating to Fort Wayne. After the Depression, the Strouss-Hirshberg Co. of Youngstown, Ohio, moved into an old furniture store for a department-store branch, and New Castle also was home to the Fisher Bros. Dry Goods chain, a low-end operation that had many stores in western Pennsylvania from the 1940s through the 1970s.

But the longest-lived department store in downtown New Castle was the New Castle Dry Goods Co., at 253 E. Washington St., which was operated by the Boston Store in Erie. What made the survival of what was known as the New Castle Store even more interesting was that it was by itself across a river from the main part of downtown. The store grew out of R.S. McCulloch & Co. and took its place in the mid-1910s. When the Boston Store became part of the Allied Stores operations, the New Castle store eventually was made part of Allied's Troutman division based in Greensburg.

Why Robert Knilands Is Partly Right

Robert Knilands -- variously known as Rknil, Wenalway, and as a bete-noire and pain in the ass to the point where he has been banned from a number of discussion boards -- is too quick with ad hominem condemnations.

He hijacks various topics and keeps beating them against the wall with what clearly are posted rants.

He gets unduly personal and bitter. He not only holds people's work in contempt, which is churlish but fair, he holds them personally in contempt because of their work when he does not know them at all.

He continually presents the American Copy Editors Society for attack because it is not what he thinks it should be -- a phalanx to somehow force news organizations to change their ways -- instead of what it is -- a training and support organization that was not created to hold a cudgel to bosses' heads.

He comes across as an angry man whose idea of debate is, "Let me tell you how stupid you are, except you're too stupid to even realize it."

And yet.

Knilands' main point -- that when copy editors also became page designers, the craft of copy editing was pushed to the side -- is partly hyperbole, because at most papers copy editors were always page designers of a sort. Most small papers had people who edited copy and drew page dummies for the composing room. Occasionally you laid out a photo package or the like. It was part of the job. Only at the larger papers -- which from my knowledge Knilands never worked at -- were there ranks of copy editors who just edited copy. And only as graphics capabilities improved in the 1980s did some of these desk jockeys become designers instead of simply news editors or copy editors.

And yet.

My esteemed former colleague Charles Knittle, now in charge of copy editing for national and foreign copy at the New York Times, addressed the salient point at the ACES conference in Philadelphia, as noted on Doug Fisher's "Common Sense Journalism":

"•Knittle: Copy editors were unnecessarily smug when pagination rolled into newsrooms in the 1990s. Hundreds of printers and backshop makeup people were laid off. A few copy editors were hired. But what the editors actually were learning was a "machine skill," the same kind of skill those printers and makeup people had, the same kind of skill that is easily displaced."

And copy editors now indeed are being laid off (or, in foreign countries, their jobs are being outsourced) as publishers -- and yes, editors -- increasingly decide that they are "production" workers, the same as linotypists, stereotypers and the like used to be. They are no longer seen as actual editors, but as people who move something into the realm of publication the way the person running the Ludlow set the End of the World giant headlines. They are viewed -- wrongly, of course -- as mechanics who do not produce anything. Knilands might say, and such is justice, and he would have a point.

Yes, we did believe that by taking design and production into our own hands, we were becoming essential. And yes, we have found that when the monetary chips are down -- as they have now been for years -- some publishers and editors will say that a poorly edited story with a mediocre headline and an incomprehensible caption and a graphic that does not match the story is clearly sub-par but at least is something, whereas copy editors do not create and designers draw pretty pages that are irrelevant on the Internet.

So the main point of Knilands' criticism -- that copy editors ceased to be editors and became illustrators, doing work that can be outsourced or junked, while not concentrating on their real task, which is editing -- is one deserving fair consideration.

Yet -- how would he have had us act otherwise? Say "No, we're not going to do that?" The unemployment door awaited. It wasn't a vast conspiracy. Although the essential desire was to save money, most of the people proposing this also believed it would mean that the newsroom would now be in final control of all pages and that this was a Good Thing. Most of us wanted to be part of that. God knows I believe in copy editing, yet I also saw this as a Good Thing.

What's amazing is not that Robert Knilands has a valid point (although Charles Apple, Howard Owens, and others might think so). It's that whether the work is being outsourced to Corpus Christi or Lynchburg or wherever, editors who once proudly said "the newsroom will be in final control" now seem to just roll over and nod when that work passes from the control of their newsroom. (Yes, I know they can see the pages instantly on their computers. Yes, I know they can text or call. It's not the same as walking over to someone's desk in the newsroom.)

Is this simply a reflection of financial times? Or does it reflect that the editors of (now) 20 years ago, who welcomed pagination and design into their newsrooms, had come of age in the era of composing-room control, whereas fewer of today's editors experienced that and thus say, so what's the big deal? Or is it simply that the standards of the Web -- immediacy and convenience (combined with easy disposability) trump all, and the reader's expectation of quality is thus far lower -- are either inevitable, or are actually the same standards held by a number of publishers and editors?

Personally, I wish that Robert Knilands didn't act like such a jerk. Perhaps his points would have been taken more seriously. On the other hand, he might note, he got attention, and perhaps would not have had he been more civil. So, again perhaps, Knilands simply stands as a representative of the Internet media age, one that cannot fully meld its longings for the standards of old with its desire to be included in the new, and thus, as did Obi-wan, wishes this were a more civilized age as it tries to deal with the empire instead of the republic, and often ends up light-sabering its own foot as a result.