Innovation

As we watch to see if Chrysler disappears into GM: Well, the U.S. auto industry is widely condemned for 30 years of management short-sightedness, and who's going to defend it?

Yet the U.S. auto industry consisted of three companies. The newspaper industry is condemned for not developing Monster, or eBay, or Craigslist, or, in some truly over-the-top moments, Google. (Asking why the newspaper business did not develop Google is like asking why GM did not develop the Atlas rocket. Why exactly would it have?) But think back to 10 years ago, when the Web is four or five years old, and newspapers were starting to put content online. What did the newspaper industry consist of in 1998?

Well, the publicly held companies that were reviled for putting profits first -- Knight Ridder, Tribune, Gannett, Journal Register. And then the two-tier stock companies such as NYT, Times Mirror, Dow Jones-Ottaway, Belo, Scripps, Post, and McClatchy, which at the time was a small company. Occasionally reviled, occasionally not.

And then the privately held giants like Hearst, Advance, Freedom and Media News. And then a host of smaller companies -- Seattle Times, Block, Central, Wehco, Morris, Media General, Cox, Copley, Guy Gannett, Pulitzer, Lee, Landmark, Donrey-Stevens, Pioneer, Swift.

And then even smaller companies with still significant holdings such as World-Herald, Forum, Ogden, Schurz, Nixon, Post & Courier, Harris. And then the independent companies in places like Cedar Rapids and Youngstown and Atlantic City and Hackensack and Arlington Heights.

They all stand in the dock accused of not developing Craigslist? Of not throwing out the old model and putting every bet on the new? Of putting short-sighted profits ahead of long-term gains? We're ranging from the occasionally bombastic and dynasty-obsessed Frank Blethen in Seattle to the quiet down-home Marcils in North Dakota, from the back-and-forth futurism of Knight Ridder and the Cue Cat fiasco at Belo to the print-is-first Walter Hussman in Little Rock. We're ranging from companies that looked for 35 percent margins to ones that were happy with 5.

If there was a way to get it right, someone, somewhere, would have done it. (And indeed, the newspaper business is full of many success stories, and despite the secular components of change, there is a cyclical nature to the newspaper economics of late 2008 as well. Most journalists, of course, ignore the successes because they happen in places like Anniston and Oklahoma City where they do not really want to end up.) This is not three giant companies, based a few miles apart, operating under nearly identical contracts. Newspapers may have been local monopolies, but nationally it was a very diverse group of businesses.

Journalists are good at pointing out how solutions could be easily obtained by doing the right thing, spending lots of other people's money and not worrying about the cost. And journalists are often pretty certain what the right thing is. But sometimes, when you eliminate the blogs of the "we saw the future in 1985" tech-editors-turned-consultants who are still angry about not having been able to do what they wanted, you are left with: We are going to lose our jobs, and it's your fault, you should have done something. We trusted you. What we do is important and so you should have taken better care of us.

Well, yes, in the early 1950s, the Big Three could have seen that given the potential of increased foreign competition, higher oil prices, the growth of environmentalism, exponential changes in health care and mortality rates, and the failure of the United States to comprehensively address medical insurance for decades while every other industrialized country did so -- so knowing, it should not have signed pattern labor contracts that essentially guaranteed health benefits for life to retirees and encouraged them to retire early, in return for relative labor peace to satisfy the post-World War II demand for cars, cars and more cars. Right.

Companies without the same legacy, operating under different conditions and political systems, with factories they had to rebuild because of wartime destruction, from markets where space was less prevalent, roads were worse and gasoline was four times as costly, would come up with different solutions not because they were freaking geniuses, but because they had a different frame of reference. What we're really reacting to is the same thing Michael Moore has said since "Roger & Me" -- why is it that the worker for a long-established successful company finds himself unemployed when it's not his fault, he's done his job well? It must be greed and incompetence. It can't just be, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.

The newspaper business has made myriad mistakes and few of its business leaders are terribly admirable. But it makes no sense to accuse it of not acting from 1993 on, or even today, as if it were a startup Internet business, or a hobby like Craigslist that just grew, or a program to organize all the world's information. Most innovation does not come from established players -- and should not be expected to.

It's tempting to think that a publisher could just stand up and say, "I'm shutting down the presses, laying off all the drivers and pressmen and carriers and circulation people and the classified ad-takers and a lot of the business side people, and I'm doing this so that we can save the news content and the reporters' jobs." Nice, but egocentric. The publisher has to operate the business he has, not the business he might start today if he were 21 and willing to starve for a while. It's true that the end product of the revolution in information may be the end of the newspaper companies we have known. That would be a shame, and readers of this blog know I do not believe it is inevitable or that the future does not involve print. But to expect that leaders of newspaper companies in the U.S. would have solved this problem by somehow developing Monster or Craigslist themselves is looking for a scapegoat. It comes from the same source as saying that if the publisher was just willing to live on $30,000 a year, eliminate all bonuses, dividends and payments to the owners, and give all that money to the newsroom, the newspaper would be a success, because think of all the great stories we could do. (CareerBuilder did take on Monster with some success. But when they have to compete with free, with niche job boards, etc., even if the newspaper business had created Monster first, it could not have kept all that classified dough rolling in. I am told that the job market in the rest of the world tends to be more localized than in North America, which has led to more success for newspapers overseas in holding onto help-wanted classifieds, which until the real estate collapse was the main source of newspapers' recent economic woes.)

The problem now is that newspaper companies are so confused that they cannot even figure out how to be successful newspaper companies, and they are surrounded by people telling them that they should not even try. It is hard in a cascading-to-the-bottom economy, but they really need to get a grip. More to come next week (as if this wasn't enough!)

City of Champions

When they show Charlie Manuel on TV holding up a laptop showing the Philly.com home page with "Phillies Win," instead of the front page of The Inquirer, then we can say print is dead. For now, we can just all be happy.

But What Does Reading a Newspaper Online Mean?

In his/her comment on my last post, Hypnosis wrote:

"I must admit that I read most newspapers online myself. Sign of the times."

Which raises in my head once again the question: What does "reading newspapers online" mean? So I ask Hypnosis and any others who mainly read newspapers online to say: What exactly do you mean by that? What do you read? Not in terms of "how long do you read it," although that is of major concern to advertisers.

By way of exemplifying what I mean, here is the print content of today's Camden Courier-Post, before Gannett cuts back by another 10 percent on staffing. I just "read the newspaper," which means I at least glanced at all the headlines, except for sports which I don't care that much about, and read some of the stories, including ones about the Phils in the World Series, which I do care about.

Front page and national-foreign:

• 2 stories on World Series postponement with photos
• Cherokee HS teacher sorry for racial remarks
• Camden budget would cut 31 jobs from city's payroll
• Rebels gain ground in Congo
• Kim Jong-Il back in hospital
• The weather
• Lotteries
• White House prods banks to make loans
• Syrian border targeted by US to deter al-Qaeda
• Central Fla. plays key role in election
• Study says cold germs can linger in home
• NF briefs: Kristallnacht items found in dump, Kwame Kirkpatrick sentenced, Iraq to reopen talks with US, Pakistan and Afghanistan want talks with Taliban. trial at Guantanamo, Israel elections scheduled, Britain to publish list of banned extremists, 4 charged in killings at Ark. college
• Director of "Deep Throat" dies
  
  Editorials on replacing Camden police cars, cameras at high-accident intersections, Ted Stevens; letters to the editor; columns by Michelle Malkin and Susan Estrich
  
  Local and state:
• Mantua mother gives birth after traffic accident
• Informant tells trial of plan to attack Ft. Dix, with trial highlights sidebar
• Washington Twp. studies options for old library
• Sale of bonds approved to finance Paulsboro port
• Briefs: Mt. Holly man accused of luring, groundbreaking for Camden housing, police seek trucker in fatal, S. Jersey man dies in Alaska prison, absentee ballot reminder
• Bad weather knocks out power, brings snow
• Dems admit they wrote slush fund memo
• Corzine set to testify for second stimulus
• Corzine backs education investments
• Senate candidates differ in debate
• Big office building planned for Newark
  
  Features section:
• Kids learn to cook Halloween meal, with photos
• How to throw a cheap Halloween party
• Nine recipes
• Martha Stewart has new book
• "Rocky Horror Show" to haunt Collingswood
• Dear Abby
• Tv listings
• Comics and puzzles and horoscope
• People items: Novelists' suit, Paul Newman charity aided, LL Cool J quits tour, Russell Brand prank calls
  
  Sports:
• Flyers win
• Sixers open season
• Briefs: Arizona coach had stroke, A-10 top 2 picked
• Six field hockey stars
• Eagles column
• Phils column
• League roundups and news
• Kevin Curtis of Eagles
• College football advancer
• Penn State advancer
  
  Business:
• Halloween sales could fall
• Commission to vote on Tropicana sale
• Wall St. surges
• Fed considers reduction in interest rate
• Briefs: Crude oil prices decline, IMF may need infusion of funds, sharp decline in home prices, Boeing union to vote on labor deal, Gannett to cut 10 pct. of staff
• Take hardship withdrawal from 401 (k) as last resort
• Short items: Investors can find bargains, attorney to discuss document issues, AmeriHealth vp named, Hydropower a 10th of energy, 46 million in US lack insurance, How to terminate MySpace account, Action to take for new manager, Web site has data on credit carrs, Exxon to set records, How to save on child care,
  Stock agate

Special Phils in World Series section with 9 stories

And this does not count, of course, any of the advertising. Or about 30 paid death notices.

My point is not that this is better or more convenient or anything when compared with online. It is what it is. This, however, is what you would, or could, read if you read a standard American medium-size city newspaper on a Wednesday. You're not in southern New Jersey, so the local news listed here is probably meaningless to you, but you have your own. And many people do not read sports or food or whatever. And the weather and stock agate and lotteries and the sudoku game are available online from non-news sites. But this is what "reading the newspaper" -- not a huge one in this case, 48 pages -- can mean. What does reading the newspaper online mean? Is it your RSS feeds of -- what? Is it checking links from Drudge? Is it nytimes.com? Is it the equivalent of the Courier-Post Online? Looking at the top screen and a half of your local newspaper's home page, or going through it section by section? Looking at the home page of the newspaper where you grew up? Is Time a newspaper site if it posts articles daily? Is Andrew Sullivan?

I have a sense that no one really knows the answers to this, which is part of why newspapers are having the troubles they are having. We aren't going to provide the answer or answers here, but it may be interesting nevertheless.

An International Non-Daily Newspaper

As noted here on July 8 -- noted many other places far earlier -- the Christian Science Monitor will become a weekly in print in April 2009. As noted here on July 8, and noted many other places today, the decision of the Monitor has very little to do with the rest of the newspaper business. The paper was nationally distributed by mail, which meant that it closed at some unheard-of time in the afternoon. (Maybe even the morning.) It had almost no advertising. It existed, and will continue to exist, because it was the will of Mary Baker Eddy that it exist. And it carried proudly the name of a church that has a relatively small (and generally believed to be declining) number of adherents, always leading to confusion about exactly what it was.

Had the Monitor been a for-profit business, or even a break-even business, it would have been closed years ago after the debacles of Monitor Radio and the dismissal of Kay Fanning as editor. The paper's management had no clear idea how (or apparently any desire) to effectively compete in the print newspaper business in the 1980s; it is no wonder they have no wish to do so in 2009. Functioning as essentially an online news service will be a better deal for the Monitor, its readers, and Christian Science.

One must, of course, make a sad bow of nostalgia for what the Monitor was in the 1950s and 1960s -- one of the foremost proponents of true journalism at a time when newspapers were just starting to cease to be organs of bias or tawdry sensation. Of course, it was not the example of the Monitor that drove them to this; it was the collapse of competing newspapers in the mass economy of the 1950s, the end of evening newspapers in the wake of TV, and the fact that TV could always be more sensational than newspapers. But the Monitor showed editors across the country how professional, intelligent journalism could be done.

For someone growing up in Indiana in the 1960s, when the Pulliam papers basically anointed our governor, Roger Branigin, as a "favorite son" for their own purposes, and largely refused to cover Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign, the simple existence of quality newspapers like the Monitor and the Louisville Courier-Journal meant that the world as defined by the Star and the News was not the entire world.

It is not hard in the media environment of 2008 to imagine biased journalism; it is far more prevalent today than it was in 1968, if you take everything purporting to be breaking or commenting upon news as journalism. It is hard to imagine how there simply were so few outlets for political discourse. Robert Kennedy won the Indiana Democratic primary despite the Star and the News ignoring him, so it is not that they had a stranglehold upon the voters. They did try, when they wanted to, to have a stranglehold upon the political movers and shakers, which was far more important locally. Your political career could be derailed by an unfavorable comment from Ed Ziegner or Michael Padev; the City Council could be told to back off in a column by Mickey McCarty. The papers and their owner could have some control over whom the political movers and shakers were and thus control what was put forward for debate. Now you have many, many people attempting to do the same thing, all presenting what they call journalism. At least back then, you could read between the lines and find out what you were supposed to know and supposed to not know. It may have been Pravda, but you could learn how to read Pravda. Now you have no idea how much you have to read. And because the Star and News had to cover everything, they couldn't make everything in the paper biased. The Huffington Post can ignore whatever inconvenient facts it wants.

I am sure the Monitor of its day had myriad faults -- it was delivered by mail then, with later deadlines, meaning, I am sure, that it came to most readers a day late -- but partisanship was not among them. My hope is that the Monitor can be successful online as the sort of force it was founded to be, and for decades was nationally respected as in print -- a clear-eyed antidote to misleading partisanship in reporting news. But while it claims a large online readership -- hell, what paper doesn't claim a large online readership? If I click on one headline in Romenesko and stop reading after the second graf I become one of the Washington Post's online readers. The Monitor was founded in the context of print newspapers. I suspect its true online equivalent will come from that world and not from the past.

Cold Winds

The Suburban Newspapers of America group recently took an "innovation mission" to Scandinavia. Pages of ads in Editor & Publisher trumpeted its findings along with winners of its yearly contest.

My eyebrows went up when I read in their report "Newspapers in Norway and Sweden were early adopters of a Web platform -- some taking to the Internet in the early 1990s. Because of this, pure play competitors like Monster.com and eBay.com never really penetrated their markets."

Because of this? What about Hot Coco? Nando Times? I know there is a point there, but I think that the differences in the national marketplace between Norway and the United States -- the size of the national market, for one thing, both in numbers and in geography -- played a role here as well. Craigslist, after all, happened in the home base not only of the Contra Costa Times' Hot Coco, one of the earliest newspaper Web sites I can remember, but of Sfgate as well. I don't know enough about Norway and Sweden to say this isn't true, but I suspect the Norwegians and Swedes don't know enough about the United States to authoritatively make this claim either.

But worrisome was the tale of publisher Margaretha Engstrom and her community newspaper Ystads Allehanda. She "shut down the evening shift of copy editors and put them out on the street as reporters." This is a "nearly a decade ago," according to the report. Let's give some license and say 2001. "I started wondering why we were sitting at 10 o'clock in the evening still editing stories when the reporter goes home at 5 o'clock," Engstrom says. The story says "dozens and dozens of templates -- for nearly every situation, even breaking news and long-term projects -- have shrunk the editorial day at Ystads Allehanda to half of what's experienced on a daily basis back in the states. 'Now, when reporters go home at 5 in the afternoon, the page is done. Everything is done,' she says, adding that news editors follow suit, often leaving by 6 p.m. at the latest."

"The entire paper -- with the exception of breaking news and night meetings -- is put to bed by 7 p.m."

Well, the Swedes must be more efficient. I work at a morning newspaper like Ystads Allehanda -- which had 24,000 circulation in 1997, according to an old E&P directory -- and not many of our reporters go home at 5 o'clock. OK, 6:30 to 7. But except for sports and the late wire news, most of our local stories are fully edited, except for display type, by 8. Those that aren't usually are either events that happened after 4 p.m., or stories involving the roundup of a lot of sources; and then there are the stories that the reporter just couldn't get done, for one reason or another, which I'm sure afflicts reporters in Sweden as well. The Ystads Allehanda system sounds like a good system for where you have made all your major decisions by 1 p.m. and can go home pretty confident that little will change. Perhaps very little happens in Ystad after 3 p.m. Perhaps very little happens in Sweden after 3 p.m.

But even so -- who's editing that copy at 4 or 5 in the afternoon? Are those copy editors still out on the street? Is this another misguided publisher who believed that the only reason copy editors exist is because they work at night and trim stories? What puts the lie to her statement of "I started wondering..." is that the story says that she had eliminated copy editing "within the first week of her stint." In other words, she did not analyze the workflow and practices of her new newspaper; she knew what she was going to do when she walked through the door. Usually this is someone who did not like copy editors from Day One. One hopes her previous jobs had given her the right experience, but usually when you arrive at a new place you at least pretend to study how it works before imposing what you were going to do anyway. And indeed the Canadian Newspaper Association's report on this same visit notes:

"Conference participants heard from Margaretha Engstrom, publisher of the Swedish daily Ystads Allehanda and proponent of 'layout-driven editorial,' where rather than submit their stories to a copy desk, reporters put text and photos directly onto a template version of the newspaper they can access online. The method effectively eliminates most of the work carried out by copy editors."

So Engstrom is hawking this as her signature achievement, perhaps her possible road to the top of the international Bonnier chain for which she works. SNA is bringing her to a conference in Tampa on Feb. 5 specifically to address how you can, as the come-on notes, "Find out how Engstrom improved the quality of her paper, eliminated most of the copy editor positions and put more reporters on the street." Without irony, this follows the topic on Jan. 13: "Making Your Core Product Better/More Attractive for the Reader. There's a reason why most papers in Norway/Sweden still enjoy 80% readership levels — they constantly improve their print product. From the coolest design trends to tabloid formats, Scandinavian newspapers rock!" I am only wondering if Ystads Allehanda still enjoys 80 percent readership levels. But as the Canadian story notes of newspaper success in Scandinavia: “'Part of that is sheer luck,'” said John Hinds, conference participant and CEO of the Canadian Newspaper Association and the Canadian Community Newspapers Association. “'They’re linguistically small communities, and they’re geographically isolated. They’ve traditionally had very poor television… so there’s a culture of reading newspapers.'" Eight million Swedes can't be wrong, but they probably couldn't have been a market large enough to create eBay.

Under crisis, people are always looking for The Answer. Beware the person who says, I have it. But copy editors need to figure out a way to respond to the concerns of the Suburban Newspapers of America's membership, who will simply see dollar signs.

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 18

Poor Hudson County, N.J. -- squeezed between New York and Newark, a hard place for locally owned, independent department stores to develop. Most of them in Jersey City had given up by the 1920s, those in Bayonne and Hoboken never got any traction to last long. But there was one exception, in Union City, one of those towns no one has ever heard of that had more than 50,000 people -- the store of A. Holthausen Inc. on Bergenline Avenue. I know very little about Holthausen's; records of Union City are fragmentary. I do know that it was founded by Arend Holthausen and, after his death, was run by Valesko Hugo. Great names.

Holthausen's made it into the 1970s, when Union City went almost overnight to being Cuban and Dominican. Union City's daily newspaper, the Hudson Dispatch -- universally known as the Hudson Disgrace -- made it a little longer. Hudson County once had four daily newspapers; now it has only the down-to-its-last-20,000 subscribers Jersey Journal. But in addition to the Dispatch, the Bayonne Times and the Jersey Observer in Hoboken are but memories. Observer Highway in Hoboken does keep its memory alive, and the Jersey Journal is still located on Journal Square.

Hudson County had a problem -- its suburbs were New York's suburbs were Newark's suburbs. When people moved to the suburbs, they didn't take the Journal or Dispatch with them; in fact those papers didn't circulate in their new areas. So they picked up on the Bergen Record or the Star-Ledger or the Times. The newer residents of Hudson County were more heavily black and Hispanic. Were the Hudson County dailies too oriented toward their white readerships to adapt? Did the chain stores pull out of them because they didn't want Hudson County customers? It wasn't a lack of local news in the traditional sense, though; the Hudson County papers barely recognized the world outside the county existed. Hudson County has not been depopulated in the manner of Detroit; and in the last two decades lots of affluent people have moved into Jersey City and Hoboken and Weehawken. But it has been a daily newspaper graveyard. I'm sure it's all explainable, it's just more evidence that the problems of the newspaper business largely predate the Internet and some of its problems have nothing to do with it.

What Copy Editors Do

Dean Singleton said the O word about copy editing at a meeting yesterday. ACES' leader, Chris Wienandt, points out far more succinctly than I could why outsourcing copy editing is a bad idea. At this point Dean probably would like anything that would let him pay the bills, and he has always seen copy editing as the sort of back-shop check-processing operation that you only keep until you can figure out a way to get rid of it.

But I do fear that part of what allows people like Dean to bring up these ideas is copy editors' tendency to martyr themselves as underappreciated cogs who will throw themselves into the machine to die rather than let a deadline be missed and then say, If the bosses valued what I was doing they would reward me, but they are not rewarding me so I will do it again just to spite them.

My former colleague Steve Lovelady once described all journalists as shy egomaniacs, and many copy editors I have known fit the bill precisely. Just as often, copy editors say of top editors, "They have no idea what we do." Clearly Dean Singleton has no idea. But yes, we have all known non-copy editors who would look at a story with five major and 20 minor flaws and say, "Seems all right to me. What's your problem?" We often dismiss them as idiots, but over time I have come to see that many of them just don't see what we see, any more than I would see the problematic weld that could bring a bridge down. That, of course, is why you are supposed to trust experts -- but it's hard for many editors to not see themselves as experts in everything journalistic.

If copy editors are only seen as the people who lay out pretty pages and put wire stories in the paper and make sure that we use "who" instead of "whom," then yes, a case could be made for commoditizing that work and selling it overseas for the cheapest rate possible -- not a case I would support, but a case. And I'm sure there are papers that have copy editors who only do that, because I have twice worked for editors who essentially wanted that. There will always be journalists who feel that errors do not undermine larger truths, who see copy editing as quibbling, who just want to go home, who think "alacrity" means "reverently" because it must be what "alack" comes from.

But a good newspaper's copy editor needs to know to look up on a map the street that runs from my town to the Ben Franklin Bridge because it is variously known as Main Street, Camden Avenue, Maple Avenue and Federal Street. and to double-check in which town each name takes effect. That in Philadelphia neighborhood boundaries matter a great deal and in Indianapolis they matter barely at all. That Councilman Bill Green is not the same person as former Mayor Bill Green and that former Mayor Wilson Goode's first name is Willie but it would be a rare occasion when you published it. That Dunkin' Donuts has an apostrophe and that saying "it happened when customers were present" does not mean it happened in the daytime even though police said that. That one state in your coverage area calls the crime DWI and another DUI. That in one state General Assembly describes the entire legislature and in another it is the name for the House. That "the Fightin's" is what people call the Phillies and should not be changed to "the Fightings." That the district attorney's name is Risa Vetri Ferman and not any of the 25 ways you could get that wrong just by hitting the wrong key.

And a newspaper copy editor partly needs to know this from memory so that minutes do not have to be lost checking references -- but mostly a newspaper copy editor needs to know what can go wrong, what questions to ask, what experience has taught him or her. If you don't know Resa Veti Furman seems odd, why would you question it? If you don't think the weld would be problematic, why would you point it out? Oops, there goes the bridge.

The problem for copy editors is that their job consists of catching other people's slipups -- because to err is human -- and thus it seems unseemly to go around pointing out what we do. It makes others look bad, and it's a lot more fun to talk about investigations we want to do. But then owners and business managers look at pages and headlines and say, oh, that's all that copy editors do. The Times of India has pages and headlines too. Hey, let's save money!

It misses the fact that the reader expects the newspaper to be His Newspaper. And he lives somewhere that he expects the newspaper to know as well as he does. And the more we weaken that connection, the more the newspaper becomes dispensible, whatever form it is delivered in.

I expect readers in India feel the same way. There are entrepreneurs there, though, who will be happy to take our money to watch us further destroy ourselves. As long as the check clears.

Randomness

1. Following my recent posts on the late Red Bank Register, I certainly never expected suburban daily newspapers to go before city ones. Thirty years ago, metro newspapers were on the ropes, and were starting their zoning efforts to try to capture the suburbs. Now papers that are based in the suburbs -- whether large, such as the Orange County Register, or small, such as the now-deceased Noblesville Times, are collapsing. The East Valley Tribune near Phoenix seems to be on its last legs, and the Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., is contemplating Chapter 11. Is this just the coincidence of bad business decisions? Is it national inserters buying newspapers by total metro penetration and punishing ones with huge penetrations in small areas? Or are suburban dailies less essential than urban ones, because you don't have the big government/big sports agenda? Whatever, it continues to amaze me, because I got into the business when everyone was putting their money on suburban dailies.

2. Personal paranoia: As a copy editor, I am starting to feel as if all the half-grudging respect given us in years past was simply pro forma. If all that copy editors did was lay out pages and do the mechanics of producing a print newspaper -- which, OK, at many papers is all they do -- then one can see the weakness in the field. But is not the elimination of error, the honing of language, the institutional memory of fact, important regardless of medium? You can say that "readers will catch it and we can correct it online," but isn't the point to keep the mistakes away from readers? You can say that the resources of the Internet make the sort of trivia arcana that copy editors keep in their heads less necessary, but that still requires a reporter or assigning editor to bring to their own story the critical mindset a copy editor has.

But copy editing positions are being massacred at newspapers, enough that I am now thinking that many of the enconiums about the "last line of defense" were simply the equivalent of crocodile tears -- not so much from reporters, who are generally thankful for the 999 mistakes you do catch even while maintaining a lifetime grudge about the one thing you make wrong, but from managers who think that as long as you get a story on the dart board, it's the same as making a bullseye. (This is decidedly not true of the folks I report to, by the way.) Assigning editors admittedly often occupy the same sort of occupational hell generally reserved for middle-school principals, but they don't get promoted because the percentages in the story add up right or the name of the company was hyphenated correctly, or the stories have (or don't have) all the first names right; they get promoted when their reporters 1) do stories that please the top brass and 2) aren't running in to the editor complaining about their supervisor. This makes the value of copy editors nice, but dispensible. Well, I'm off this weekend to the midterm board meeting of the American Copy Editors Society; perhaps we will find the answer.

I am not sure readers feel the same way, but at least that would be consistent with the theme of this blog that newspapers are in the pickle they are in because they do not think like readers do.

3. The remaining words "Nevius Voorhees" above the store entrance in Trenton reminded me that one of the things I loved about downtown department stores were the brass plaques so many had on their buildings announcing the name of the store. These were admittedly retail hubris; the typical store, as old photos showed, was often covered with gaudy signs, and department stores wanted to show their superiority through understatement. Yet the giant sign on State Street in Chicago reading

MARSHALL FIELD
and
COMPANY

in, what, five-inch tall embossed brass letters said: This is no ordinary store. I can remember these plaques on Ayres' and Wasson's in my hometown, Hudson's in Detroit, Jordan Marsh in Boston, Pogue's in Cincinnati, and many other stores. (An alternative was the serifed letters above the door, looking like a Roman inscription, as in "THE F. & R. LAZARUS & COMPANY" over the back door of the store in Columbus. Never understood why that second "and" was there.) I wonder if anyone took photos of them before they disappeared. I wonder where they in fact went. Did heirs to the store retrieve them before the building was demolished or repurposed?

Newspapers are little better about keeping their physical history. Recently I was in the lobby of the Wilmington News Journal, where there is a large artwork that notes that it was in the lobby of the newspaper's old downtown headquarters but was left there and made its way to the new building on Basin Road circuituously and after some years. There's a similar piece in the Hackensack lobby of the Bergen Record, in a building the newspaper plans to abandon in a matter of months. Will it follow to West Paterson? Or will it simply remain there, a curiosity of newspaper days gone by?

OK, there's not much to this post. Busy week.

Department Store Building of the Week, No. 17

Actually, two buildings, but if you lived in Trenton from the 1940s through the 1970s they were one store. The one at the left, 131-33 E. State St., was originally H.M. Voorhees & Bro., a store that appeared around 1900 and was run by, of course, H.M. Voorhees and his brother. The one on the right, 127-29 E., was Nevius Bros., to which reference has been made with P.J. Young's in New Brunswick.

Nevius Bros. started as a small-town department store in Flemington. Two offspring, Albert and George Nevius, operated branches. Albert went to Trenton, which included Flemington in its orbit; George went to run the operation in Somerville, which was closed after the firm bought P.J. Young's.

I'm not sure of the exact date, it was between 1938 and 1946, but Nevius Bros. purchased the adjacent Voorhees store, which then became known as Nevius-Voorhees even though the Voorheeses were completely out of it. It then became the headquarters of the Nevius empire, which at its height also included a store on Nassau Street in Princeton. In geographic reach, at least, it was the dominant department store operation in central New Jersey, with stores in Middlesex, Hunterdon and Mercer Counties, but central New Jersey was squeezed between New York and Philadelphia and the Nevius family could not compete with the onrush of Wanamakers, Bamberger's, Lord & Taylor, Stern's, what have you.

Nevius-Voorhees advertised as the upscale department store in Trenton, as opposed to the larger S.P. Dunham & Co., which was the all-things-to-all people store. Trenton also had Yard's, a part of the Hydeman store family that also operated Kennard's in Wilmington, Del., and Wiest's in York, Pa., as well as a branch of Lit Bros., the Philadelphia store, and Hurley's, the large Camden-based outfit that largely sold downscale furniture on credit, but had other department-store lines as well at some of its locations. Hurley's would be better known to many people as Hurley-Liebman's, after it was bought by the Joseph Liebman Co., a similar operation in Philadelphia. I think the Hurley's building may still be there, but all the rest are gone. Dunham's lasted into the late 1980s or early 1990s.

This picture shows, on the building at the right, the words "Nevius - Voorhees" on the building, above the door. Don't know if they're still there.

redbankgreen

Following up on downtown Red Bank and the former Register, there's a site called redbankgreen that deserves a look as an unheralded attempt (at least to me, but it's certainly not like the widely noticed New Haven etc. sites) to provide community news online. It is run by a couple -- he's a journalist, she's a graphic designer. Here's what they covered on Oct. 1 when I looked at it --

1. Some sort of railroad propane problem in Little Silver that tied up traffic. The initial report: "A leaking propane tank in the vicinity of the Little Silver train station is causing road and rail backups in Red Bank, according police radio transmissions. A train that's been reported to have been sitting in the Red Bank station for more than 20 minutes is causing a tie-up at Monmouth Street, according to the report." The site was doing posts every 20 minutes or so -- "5:45p: Branch Avenue in Little Silver remains closed as far north as Markham Place. 6:13p: We're still unable to get any information about the propane leak from the Little Silver Police Department, which is on the scene."
2. Man on the street interviews about the financial crisis, followed by comments of the usual sort. Pictures of all people interviewed.
3. A standalone photo of the pretty sort we all used to run on the front page back when it took three days to do color separations. Nice photo, though.

And a series of continuing references to a newer site called Red Bank oRBit, which describes itself as "a companion website to redbankgreen, delivering news, information and feature stories about all manner of amusements and culture in the verdant slice of northern Monmouth County, New Jersey that we call The Green. It is updated on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Red Bank oRBit exists because there’s just too much fun and mind-expanding stuff going on in these parts to fit into redbankgreen. It’s branded differently from its sibling website because, well, it insisted on it." What that means, exactly, I don't know. The couple works for this site as well, but it also has its own editor. Its emphasis is clearly the arts community, which has become quite large in Red Bank due to the Count Basie theater and, well, a lot of disposable income nearby.

The sites on the day I visited looked to have about 20 advertisers (I did a couple of refreshes to see if they changed) with the equivalent of newspaper contract ads. Clicking on them takes you to a Web site for the advertiser, which I suspect is hosted by redbankgreen. (To me this redbankgreen and Red Bank oRBit with a capitalized RB stuff is too cute by half, but that's just me.)

So I'm sitting here thinking:
1. Boy, you had to be a complete idiot to blow a daily newspaper franchise in this sort of market in the late 1980s. This is where Bell Labs was, for heaven's sake. Yet the Register did.
2. But how did they? Probably that they were close enough to New York and Newark that people who were looking for big news took those papers. The merchants around the malls would have put most of their inserts into the Asbury Park Press, which covered the entire county. Newspapers with sub-county-level circulation always have trouble because circulation is reported by county instead of by local trade area, so you can have 80 percent penetration in your area and 15 percent in the county as a whole and look like a weak sister. All you were left with was the merchants just in Red Bank, who by the late 1980s were probably still reeling from the mall down the road at Eatontown. (Red Bank had not yet been fully reborn as an arts center yet.)
3. In this case, regardless of county lines, the fact was that the Register was physically located less than 10 miles from the Press. Hard not to see them as direct competitors.
4. The problem of all suburban dailies. Red Bank, Fair Haven, Little Silver and Rumson are historically one unit, and what interests one interests all, but go eight more miles to Atlantic Highlands and they could give a darn about Red Bank. The propane problem in Little Silver was important if you lived near there or were driving around Red Bank; five miles away it was irrelevant unless it exploded and took part of Little Silver with it. In the Red Bank Register's case it didn't even have county government to itself as a common theme. You were just trying to shove enough local-local into the paper to appeal to someone in every town.

Speaking personally I would never care enough about local news to bother with something like redbankgreen, with its journalist wandering about and posting updates from the police scanner and asking Joe Smith what he thinks of the bailout. But then I don't use the computer flipping back and forth among five or six sites running at the same time (my problem with Facebook, Twitter, etc., which makes me so 20th-century). I can see my having more use for an arts-oriented site in terms of checking in once a week to see what to do for the weekend. On the other hand, for people whose lives revolve around the town in which they live -- whether in real terms or just in their own heads ("everyone looks at this to follow my comments on government waste!") -- this sort of thing works well.

This may be the future of local journalism, and if it is, fine, but rather than knocking it on its own terms, all I can say is that it would never have drawn me into journalism as a career in the way newspapers did. But then, I'm not growing up today. On the other hand, it is the local-local that readers want, and at my first paper as a reporter I did man on the street stuff and many a story on what ultimately was a nonevent and people liked those stories just fine. It just seems to lack a certain gravitas. If redbankgreen wants to rise up against the depredations of the Red Bank government, to be the civic conscience and scold, can it? Or is it just to be dismissed as "Joe Blow and his redbankgreen site, snicker, snicker."