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

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

From a story on this round of cuts at Newsday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bargain Basement

(For those keeping up, I've added some links to the last post. Particularly good was the link on Sattler's, so I'm repeating it here.)

So, where do we find department stores heading in the late 1980s?


Many of them were trying to find the customer base they wanted to have, because it would be most profitable for them, but it also would be people whose tastes they understood or shared. In doing so they were driving away some traditional customers. This would have been fine if they had been developing lots of new customers. But many of the customers they wanted didn't seem to want them, at the same time that they no longer wanted many of the customers they had.


They promised service, as opposed to the discounters; but many stores rarely had enough people, some of the people they did have were poorly trained, and service desks were hard to find. The discounters didn't promise personal service, so they couldn't be faulted for failing to deliver on it.


Because the stores relied on sales to move merchandise, you never knew what price you were going to have to pay, or if it was the best price, and indeed you often had no idea if they would have in stock what you were looking for. Discounters had less selection, but the price was low every day, and the same things tended to be in the same places.


By cutting back on what they offered, they gave people less reason to come in. It's hard to make money as a boutique with the fixed costs of a giant.


The little extras they had offered to solidify their relationships -- free boxes and wrapping, generous return policies, restaurants for ladies who lunched -- fell under the need to maintain profits with sagging business. The stores said they were reacting to the desires of today's shopper. But they offered little to replace them, other than simply having a wide selection of goods -- admittedly a very wide selection in many lines, and much of it well-made, fashionable, quality merchandise, but some of it indifferent or inferior.


And they had forgotten that when they first appeared, they had promised reasonable prices, merchandise attractive to a typical shopper, attentive service and a focus on the customer. As Marshall Field said: "Give the lady what she wants!" Now it was becoming, Give the lady what's in our interest to give her.


Now, anyone associated with a department store in the 1980s could quickly rebut this and offer an equally valid case. Time-pressed shoppers weren't willing to wander the store in search of tulip bulbs. Suburban shoppers weren't willing to go downtown. The discounters had shown that no one cared about boxes anymore. Ladies didn't lunch. Good help was hard to find. Investor demands were merciless, even if the investors were family members. And all of those things would be correct. Department stores weren't being run by idiots. Most of them were being run by sincere, hardworking people who were just trying to stay ahead of the ball that was rolling toward them. They were trying to deal with the crises they had.


Nearly all of them failed, of course. A secular crisis (the economic problems of the late 1980s) was followed by the Robert Campeau crisis, and the giants of the field began to crumble. Allied, Associated, City Stores...


So as we walk through the revolving doors of our downtown department store, heading out onto Main Street to visit the newspaper office, three questions:


1. Does an industry come to mind that often tells its customers what it believes they should want and whose employees often view them with contempt, sometimes publicly, if they do not; cuts back on lines its core customers want; offers poor or indifferent customer service; fails to put money into its core business; offers an inconsistent variety of goods from day to day and makes them hard to find, and cuts back on side efforts that have connected it with its community?


2. Thinking back to our department store of the 1960s -- the one with everything from soup to nuts -- what business today offers a large variety of general merchandise, from clothing to groceries to tulip bulbs, promises customer service and low prices, emphasizes a fashionable and current image, and does so through relying largely on the traditional bricks-and-mortar concept of a store rather than saying that because many people use the Internet for purchases, the only way to compete in the future will be to sell exclusively on the Internet?


3. Forget the Herbst, Falk's I.D. Store, or Paris of Montana that you grew up with and still mourn in your heart. Name four regional (non-national) U.S. department store chains -- i.e., not Macy's, Sears or Penney's -- that exist today.

Mezzanine

A department store need not start downtown to be successful. Anyone from Erie, Pa., knows that the Boston Store was the heart of downtown and is still a landmark building today; yet the Boston Store started blocks from downtown on Peach Street. Bartel's Hoosier Store moved to downtown Richmond, Ind., from its original location opposite the railroad station.

And many successful stores, generally aimed at a blue-collar market, never did go downtown. Skydel's in Bridgeport, Szold's in Peoria, Sattler's in Buffalo operated successfully for decades as major department stores at some remove from downtown. Madigan's in Chicago was the equal of any medium-size city's department store, but was located five miles from the Loop.

But I can only think of one U.S. department store that started outside the main shopping area, watched the city move toward it, and became a dominant upscale retailer. That would be Bloomingdale's.

When the Bloomingdale brothers decided to open for business, "downtown" New York was around Union Square on 14th Street. Stores were moving into the "Ladies' Mile" on Sixth Avenue, which eventually would reach to Herald Square. The Bloomingdales considered a downtown location, Maxine Brady wrote in "Bloomingdale's," but decided against it. They opened where the story is now, at 59th Street and Third Avenue; the store was known as the Upper East Side Bazaar.

For its first 70 years, Bloomie's went after a mid- to downscale trade, like most off-Main Street department stores. The people who lived on Fifth Avenue didn't buy there; their maids did. But after World War II, astute leaders of the store noted that the traditional client base was not going to expand, and the most fashion-conscious high income market in the country was basically within walking distance. If you could sell more expensive merchandise in the same place, profits would go up.

So through promotions, shows, and dropping items like toasters, by moving its ads from the Daily News and the Mirror to the Times and the Herald Tribune, Bloomingdale's went in 15 years from being a downmarket retailer to an upmarket one. In essence, Bloomingdale's decided who it wanted its customers to be, rather than who its customers were.

The 1970s was the era of Bloomingdale's -- the Big Brown Bag, the visits by European royalty. The department store as theater, as a collection of boutiques. The emphasis on fashion for which people would pay a premium. Across the country, department stores large and small tried to follow suit. Bloomingdale's had shown the way! Out with the commodity items, in with exclusives. Out with the Tea Room, in with Le Train Bleu. And Bloomingdale's itself moved into other markets -- Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles.

But in other cities as the local Marks and Sparks tried to parrot the Bloomie's formula, customers voted with their feet, going out the door. Established customers didn't like the new, upscale feel to what had been their store. And there weren't enough new customers to make up the difference. The Bloomie's formula was based partly on the unique circumstances of New York City and exported, one store at a time, to other major cities with urban neighborhoods of intense wealth. Once you got past Houston and Atlanta, you were in trouble. There weren't enough Bloomie's people in Kansas City for a Bloomie's, let alone for a Jones Store as a Bloomie's wanna-be. But many of the people who worked at the Jones Store would have felt at home at Bloomie's. And heck, the customer is just like us, isn't she?

It's sort of a like a newspaper trying to pick its customers and not appeal to those it doesn't want. Back when we had a much larger circulation, an editor I greatly respect once said: If we just could put out a paper for the 50,000 subscribers who understand and appreciate what we're doing and forget about the 500,000 who don't and who buy the paper for the comics and the weather and the sports agate, think what we could do.

Well, we're on our way.

It can work for the New York Times because in New York there's enough upscale to support anything. It can work for the New York Times nationally because it can take a small niche off any market. The Minneapolis Star Tribune can't afford to start slicing and dicing its customer base similarly. It has to appeal to the market it has, not the market it wants to have. But it's very easy to think that the market you have looks a lot like you.

Knight Ridder used to do market research for us, and would send its research director around every couple of years. I looked forward to the point in her presentation when she would present the circulations of competing papers in our market. She would note that the New York Times (and this is pre-Internet) had 3 or 4 percent penetration in our market. Hands would raise! That cannot be! Yes, she said, this is the circulation of the Times. Next to you guys, they're nothing here. They're not even as big as the largest suburban paper.

And one brave soul would always venture: But that must be wrong! Your figures are bogus. Everyone I know reads the Times.

To which she would say: Yes, everyone you know reads the Times. As does 3 to 4 percent of the market.

Fourth Floor, Carpets, Rugs, Sports

Never promise to post "tomorrow" if you fear you will have to shovel the walk for the first time all winter.

Anyhow, department stores were in a tizzy. How to compete in a vastly different landscape? They tried everything they knew. In the late 1960s, "boutiques" such as The Gap were the rage; L.S. Ayres, for one, opened a chain of boutiques called Sycamore Shops. The book department at Dayton's in Minneapolis morphed into what became B. Dalton, Bookseller. As fewer people shopped downtown, downtown stores closed off floors and cut back lines. In some cities with vast suburban growth, such as Phoenix and Raleigh, stores simply closed downtown as early as the late 1950s; in the 1970s, it became a flood.

The mall stores seemed to be the answer, but the malls carried their own problems that were just becoming apparent. For one thing, once under one roof, the mall itself was kind of a department store. What was the point of a fur salon in the department store if there was a fur salon out in the mall with a bigger selection, and you didn't have to put on your coat or cross the street to get to it? So the department store was just another department in the mall. For another, universal credit cards had taken command.

At one time systems such as Charga-Plate had made it possible for department stores to carry credit accounts much more easily than the small retailer. A Charga-Plate was a metal tag with your name and address on it. It had notches cut out of the side that fit each store's Charga-Plate machine, which was basically an ink roller. If you didn't have an account at Wasson's, the Charga-Plate wouldn't go in their machine, although the same plate would work at Ayres if you had one there. Department stores were large enough to be able to pay people to hand-process and ledger all these accounts. Smaller stores weren't. In the 1960s, with business computers, stores came out with their own plastic credit cards, as did local banks (Older Indianapolesians can remember the introduction of the "AFNB Charge Card").

But the computer makes local business almost the same as international, and so those city-by-city bank cards became tied up by the 1970s into Master Charge and BankAmericard. and all of a sudden you could charge anything anywhere on one card (except the department stores, which found them too hoi polloi and didn't want to undercut their own charge accounts).

The 1970s also saw the first emergence of what we now would call "big box" retailers. Levitz Furniture came out of Pottstown, Pa., to become a nationwide chain. Appliance stores in particular hit the department store business hard. Refrigerators, stoves, air conditioners, TVs now came in bewildering variety. In Flint, Mich., a store called, if memory serves, Greenlee's had begun as your typical neighborhood appliance store, in a small space in an urban neighborhood on South Saginaw Street. Suddenly it opened suburban branches with lots of space. Department stores couldn't devote the same amount of space to compete, because the sales per square foot were lower than for clothing, jewelry, perfume -- and so they had to charge a higher price to meet their overhead, as they were paying more for their pricey location. Smaller selection at higher price ... not a ticket to success. So they began to leave the appliance business and the furniture business. But that, of course, gave people one or two more reasons not to go into the department store -- somewhat like stocks and TV listings drew people into newspapers even though they occupied space with somewhat noncompetitive features.

(Stores still advertised like gangbusters in newspapers, though.)

And then along came ... Bloomingdale's. But alas, the snow (all three inches of it!) means the return to newspapers must wait.

Third Floor, Shoes, Hats, Sports

Further background on department stores -- we'll get back to newspapers tomorrow.

It's hard to remember that as late as 1965, the shopping mall was a rare thing -- as rare as a city that didn't have two or three newspapers. Cherry Hill, the mall that set the tone for the future, was only three years old. In 1965 or '66, in my hometown, there was one non-enclosed mall, Glendale, with Ayres and Block's; one, Eastgate, with Wasson's and (I believe) Sears; and a new mall, Greenwood, with Ayres and Sears and/or Penney's. The other department store branches were in strip malls, and Block's had closed a freestanding store in the Broad Ripple neighborhood. In most cities it was similar -- a combination of downtown stores, strip mall stores, and freestanding stores made up the local department store locations. (Some were beautiful, such as in Los Angeles not only the famous Bullock's Wilshire but the Bullock's branch in Westwood and J.W. Robinson Co.'s in Palm Springs.)

Then came the great mall era, as developers put roofs over the entire center. In Indianapolis we got, in quick succession, Lafayette, Washington and Castleton Squares, all with Ayres, Block's, Penney's and Sears. Developers such as DeBartolo and Simon couldn't built them fast enough, as the big department stores -- many of them now part of chains such as Allied and Associated -- along with Sears and Penney's tried to clone themselves everywhere. Malls would have five anchor stores, as even out-of-town department stores got into the act. (The F. & R. Lazarus Co., from Columbus, Ohio, invaded Indianapolis.)

Sears, indeed, had a subsidiary, Homart, that just developed malls. And the change in attitude by Sears and Penney's was crucial. Until now Sears and Penney's had operated a hodgepodge of stores. Penney's-on-the-Circle in Indianapolis was a typical urban department store, but a Penney's in a Muncie or Anderson would be much smaller, and some Penney's were downright minute.

Sears had long built stores on the edges of downtown or even farther out, such as in Fort Wayne, to provide room for its farm stores but also to provide parking. (A lonely former Sears store stands on South Salina Street in Syracuse, blocks from where Dey Bros., C.E. Chappell & Sons, and E.W. Edwards once held forth.) Small-town Sears stores, though, were right on the main street. And when it got to the largest cities, Sears and Penney's weren't even downtown. Now both companies saw a way to create a new model based on nearly identical shopping mall stores, where they would have no disadvantage next to Younker Bros. or J.L. Brandeis & Sons or whoever the local merchant was.

The big-city stores, trying to get bigger to compete with Sears and Penney's and the discounters, and quickly running out of malls in their area, knew that they already drew customers from surrounding towns and could promote themselves to more on TV. They had started going into surrounding cities in the 1950s and early 1960s -- Burdine's from Miami to Fort Lauderdale, C.J. Gayfer & Co. from Mobile to Pensacola -- but the malls made it easier. Because the malls to some degree advertised themselves just by existing, and pulled shoppers in just to see the marvel of 72-degrees-in-any-weather, a store merely had to show up; success wasn't guaranteed, but it beat trying to establish yourself at the edge of Main Street.

Hochschild Kohn of Baltimore went into York, Pa.; the Philadelphia stores colonized malls in Reading and Harrisburg. In many cases the local department store didn't have the interest or the firepower to follow. A mall opened in Logansport, Ind., with, I believe, Penney's, Sears and Kmart; the Schmitt-Kloepfer Co. Golden Rule Store remained downtown with no mall presence (and no nearby Penney's or Sears, to draw shoppers, either).

I remember going to Fashion Square in Saginaw and wondering why the local store, William C. Wiechmann Co., had such a small outlet as opposed to Hudson's, Penney's and Sears. Only later did I realize that was all they could afford to commit to when the mall opened, based on their business, which draw only from Saginaw whereas Hudson's by that point drew from most of Michigan.

The urban unrest of the 1960s, meanwhile, scared middle-class white shoppers away from downtowns, as they sank into a nadir from which some have only now begun to emerge (and many still have not). And rulings in restraint-of-trade cases kept department stores from signing exclusivity agreements with brand-name manufacturers. This is a bit above my expertise, but as I understand it, previously, department stores could sew up the rights to sell, say, Sunbeam appliances and the manufacturer could set a floor price; if discounters could even get the goods, they could not undersell and could only do so with "off-brand" merchandise, the sort of stuff that used to catch fire in Consumer Reports tests. Now Kmart and Woolco could sell the same irons and toasters as the department stores, but for less. This is probably a gross oversimplification, but the result of whatever happened was that the department store no longer had a lock on selling, say, GE Toaster Ovens for $14.99.

More competition with lowered barriers, legacy infrastructure, transportation disruption, changing social attitudes, even "free" (as in the acres of free parking) -- sounds like the problems facing another business we know well.

Tomorrow, on to the fourth floor -- what department stores did to compete.

Second Floor, Lingerie, Weather

Now, as promised: To relate the department store to the newspapers. But this requires a lot of exposition, or at least I think it does. Bear with me...

So let's go back to that department store of the 1960s that sold clothing and shoes and furniture and tulip bulbs and outdoor TV antennas. It was following the motto of Harrods Ltd. in London: "Omnia omnibus ubique." Everything for everyone, always. (ADDED: Whoops, lousy translation. See reader comment below.)


The department store sought everyone's business, time and attention. It wanted to meet all shopping needs -- some had groceries, many had pharmacies. There was no need for you to go anywhere else. Make a day of it! Have lunch in the Tea Room.


But there had been ominous signs. Downtown department stores in many big cities had begun to see their sales figures fall with the end of World War II, as people not only moved out to the far suburbs but used their autos more, now that there was no rationing. Fewer people were taking the bus downtown, so department stores, which specialized in delivery to your home of a finished product (an adjusted suit, a spiffed-up hat), were competing with "carry-it-home" business increasingly. And discounters were threatening the low- or popular-priced stores -- the "third store down," in industryspeak.


Business was going to stores that were closer to the new housing developments and had "acres of free parking." A lot of them were discount stores, but many were small retailers -- appliance stores, children's clothing stores, and the like awash in 1950s American prosperity.


Department stores fought back by opening suburban branches as well as expanding downtown. The J.L. Hudson Co. in Detroit created Northland and Eastland. Los Angeles had the Miracle Mile. In Philadelphia, free-standing stores opened throughout the Pennsylvania suburbs -- John Wanamaker in Wynnewood, Lit Bros. in the Northeast and S. Philadelphia, and Strawbridge & Clothier adding to its existing Ardmore and Jenkintown branches. Cain-Sloan Co. in Nashville and Foley Bros. in Houston built giant new downtown stores. In cities big and small, stores such as H. Gordon & Son in Gary or Frederick & Nelson in Seattle built downtown additions. All seemed well. By the 1960s, most of these stores were 60 to 70 years old. Some had reached the century mark.

And newspapers were chock-full of department store ads. Then came the mall boom of the 1960s, and malls with two or more anchor stores appeared in every large suburban area. All the branches were originally considered as twigs, though; some lines would only be carried downtown, and all of them would be carried there in greater depth.


Sales increased for the branch stores at the continuing cost of downtown. But the overall organization could still support its large advertising budget and existing warehouses and odd little curiosity departments that had been there forever. All things for all people.


Of course, departments, especially in the main store, were still in odd places, and sometimes the stores, because of their longevity, were not placed either downtown or in the suburbs to reflect changes in consumer traffic. But the 1960s were heady years for department stores, which opened tire centers and furniture stores and wine departments. And to cover their bets, they moved into discounting as well -- L.S. Ayres & Co. in Indianapolis opened Ayr-Way, The Dayton Co. in Minneapolis had Target. Omnibus omnes.

But massive, disruptional change lay ahead. More to come...

Second Thing, Let's...

I don't know if this supports or rebuts Alan Mutter's posting of yesterday, but one has to pass it along:

One of the local papers in the area I live in recently laid off its editorial page editor. I don't know who's now doing the editorial page.

Today's editorial is headlined: "Kosovo goes out on its own: With assistance from NATO, struggling African nation declares independence."

(You know, all struggling nations are African. Mr. Mbeki, have you seen your next-door neighbor, Mr. Milosevic?)

I think this is what happens when you treat a print newspaper like a Web site and just post stuff without having it edited; on the other hand, someone with a title or job description that included the word "editor" did this. So I think we're back to the question of number of reads. Unless Jayson Blair wrote it, in which case no level of editing could have caught it.

Oh, Yeah, Those Pages With Lines On Them

In reading the biography of Charles M. Schulz, "Schulz and Peanuts," by David Michaelis, I was struck by the level of interest there was in "Peanuts" when it came out in the 1950s. Newspapers feuded over which would get "Peanuts." Newspapers promoted themselves as the place where you could read "Peanuts."

I wonder how many two-newspaper towns were sustained by: One had Ann and the other had Abby.

How the situation has changed. In this column George Rodrigue of the Dallas Morning News speaks to a reader's concern about the funny pages and Abby and their adult content and his 7-year-old (search in the post for the word "Sarda"). One could have an enlivening discussion about the merits of a Funnies section for kids and a Funnies section for adults, but first we'd have to have a discussion about even having them. Because, as Mr. Rodrigue notes to the reader:

"...Like most American newspapers, we have a long history of running comics and advice columns together. To tell you the truth, we don't think about it much."

Twenty years ago my newspaper had two top editors who obsessed over the comics and syndicated features. They knew readers bought the paper for specific things and a large number of them weren't news content. As stated earlier, we had our secret weapon, and it was the Cryptoquote. How many newspapers do we sell on the basis of the crossword puzzle, a feature placed in many papers with absolute disdain for those who work it?

Now, newspapers in general not only try continually to squeeze the space given to comics and other features -- which, of course, are not part of the core mission -- but many of them, out of a combination of a lack of interest and a skittishness that comes from having once tried to kill a cat or dog strip, pay as little attention as possible to one of the major draws newspapers traditionally have had. ("I didn't go to journalism school to talk to 5,000 readers upset that we dropped 'Fred Basset'! The damn dog probably died! Get over it!")

The traffic Newsday has drawn online with Walt Handelsman's animated cartoons shows that cartoons appropriate to the medium will succeed. Print is still a wonderful medium for cartoons. One can't conjure up a "Peanuts" or "Calvin and Hobbes," of course; the talent has to be there. But it sure looks like it would be there if we would again pay attention to how to promote it.

One of my dreams has always been that the New York Times, out of some fit in considering itself a metropolitan newspaper, would say, OK, well, let's run a few comics -- politically pointed, upscale ones, of course. ("Woody's World," by Allen Konigsberg.) The resulting interest in newspapers in running comics and puzzles, once it had been sanctified as an Appropriate Thing for Journalists to Consider, might knock down syndicate doors.

Log Me Up, Scotty

You forget the simplest things when learning to do this. One is the courtesy of adding to your blog list those people whose work you have mentioned or who have mentioned you. We work to remedy our errors... Alas, we not only grind slowly, but not exceedingly fine, either.

First Thing, Let's...

Well, one truly doesn't want to wake up on a Monday to this. But one did, so let's look at it.

Because Alan Mutter's argument -- are layers of editors in the editing process now a luxury? -- is not only just the next step beyond outsourcing -- if we can't move these jobs to India, do we even need them at all -- it gets back at a point made in lo this very space:

"If you don't post news on the Web, someone else will. If you do, someone else will anyhow. TV stations, local entrepreneurs, L.A. Observed. All you're doing is doing it with a higher cost structure. Unless you get your cost structure down to their level, you can't compete on the Web in the long run. If you get it down to their cost structure..."

I left that unanswered. Mutter raises the question and offers a Tevyean response ("On the one hand, Mottel is a good man..."), yet in the classic journalistic sense of "I will write this story fairly, but I will show which side I think may be right by giving them the kicker paragraph," he writes:

"All things being equal, everyone would vote for giving newspapers sufficient resources for both gathering news and checking their work closely. But things aren’t equal. Newspapers are operating at an increasingly unequal disadvantage against their online competitors.While there is no doubt about the value of the industry’s traditional values, the question is whether the industry can continue to afford them."

Thus, Gresham's law wins for Alan Nutter. He also raises the point that multiple layers did not stop the Jayson Blair episode. Nor did it stop Janet Cooke, although the redoubtable Bill Connolly has devoted years to a training program showing copy editors where the red flags were in her story. But there is very little in the editing process that will catch a talented liar who is a staff member, because the process is built upon trusting the reporter.

Now, many good objections to Alan's post have been raised already, the best of them being that the chart he refers to shows a process for editing copy that does not exist even at my own large and well-respected metro. A typical story moves through assigning editor to copy editor to slot and is proofread. Others may have input into it or may not, depending on the prominence of the story. Mostly, they don't. The statement that a half-dozen people "are likely to lay hands on an ordinary story bound for the pages of the typical metropolitan daily" wasn't true here even when we had twice the number of people we have now.

And we are, indeed, a big newspaper still. Nearly all of the one thousand howevermany hundred daily newspapers in the U.S. would look at this and simply scratch their heads. Many are the newspapers -- even large ones -- where most copy goes in read by one person, two at the most. If competing with online news means competing with anyone who can post something online, then the only way to compete is to have no editors. To me, that becomes a competitive disadvantage.

Look, we are who we are. The only way we can realistically continue to operate as newspaper journalists is to show how what we offer is better than what someone else offers. That means operating behind a brand. That brand has to stand for something. Quality is a good thing to stand for.

John Robinson of the Greensboro News and Record -- a paper that has been a leader in online journalism and blogging -- responds to Mutter by saying, we need this. He calls for two reads and I would call for three, but that's quibbling. Even with his paper's extensive commitment to online, he also makes the point: Online is not print. That means print has a role. And thus John and I and Alan are back to the question of determining how that role can pay off in the 21st century.

But please go to Newsosaur and take Alan's poll. (Here's the link again.) And since I do know how to write the end of a newspaper story:

"Sullivan recommended that anyone taking the poll should use his or her own conscience. 'Matters are in flux and everyone benefits from all opinions being counted,' he said. 'At a time like this, people should speak their minds.'

"Then he added with a smile: 'Of course, I can always hope that most of those who speak their minds freely are those whose minds are in the right place.'"