Back again

The American Copy Editors Society once again had a successful and enlightening conference -- OK, in virtual terms it's tremendously old news -- it happened two weeks ago almost! -- but check out coverage at the ACES web site if you're interested. Every year, people at the conference say how they leave feeling renewed and encouraged about what they do. In these discouraging times, that's so wonderful to hear.

Part of that discouragement for some people seems to be what we used to call "information overload" before the overload went into hyperdrive. Andrew Ferguson, author of "Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College," puts it well, even though he does write for the Weekly Standard:

"Accustomed to turning to the Web to find any elusive piece of information... we now turn to it even for things that don't technically count as information -- advice, for example. ... As in other areas of life, such as pornography and day trading, the Internet hasn't caused the problem, it has just made it worse." Ferguson notes how nearly every hotel has reviews ranging from "good bargain" to "hellhole" and adds: "I of course had no way of knowing which advice to take. I'd search the comments for telltale clues that might indicate who was the bigger crank. ... The clues weren't there. And I'd be no better off than if I hadn't asked the question to begin with -- worse, maybe." And I love this graf:

"Internet utopians like to call message boards like College Confidential a 'community' ... What it is, is a Web site where people from all walks of life, from every income level and background, create a communal space without fear of reprisal and in a spirit of perfect openness, so they can spread misinformation, gossip, and lunatic conjecture to people who are as desperate as themselves. Cultural hierarchies are indeed upended, just as the utopians said they would be -- for example, the tyrannical, suffocating top-down arrangement that privileges people who know what they're talking about above people who don't." Maybe I have more in common with the Weekly Standard than I thought. (Whiggish! quoth the Internet utopian.)

And Scranton Times-Tribune columnist Chris Kelly: "The Internet has only amplified the din. Even the most specious arguments are granted legitimacy simply for having been made. Every opinion, however uninformed, is seen as inherently valuable. No argument is too preposterous or dishonest to share. If you are shameless enough to stand up and say it, someone is bound to agree and pass it along."

(To which I'm sure the Internet Utopian answers: Chaff from people already on the dustbin of history, pining for an era when there were gatekeepers. Judy Miller was a gatekeeper and here we still are in Iraq. Every argument is equally valuable because every argument may be equally wrong. But it does bring to mind from a somewhat enthusiastic story about the underground press of the 1960s this reference: “Editors rarely exercised the discretion that their title implied, for fear of being labeled ‘elitist’ or ‘professional,’” McMillian concludes. Naturally, this had ramifications on efficiency and consistency. At an Atlanta, Georgia paper called The Great Speckled Bird, the entire staff would sometimes convene for 'long and tedious meetings' whose sole purpose was to decide whether or not to cut a single paragraph from a piece.")

So, in the spirit of my argument being as good as anyone else's, let's let the always incisive Jim Chisholm make it:

"Whether our self-professed industry visionaries like it or not, 80 percent of our revenues will still be in print in five years' time. ... Newspapers are not so much losing readers as they are losing frequency and loyalty. In the United Kingdom, for example, over the last five years, the number of people who ever read a newspaper has fallen by 3.7 percent, but average issue readership has slid by 17.5 percent." But as he notes: "While around 60 percent of Web users visit a newspaper website, newspaper sites account for less than 1 percent of all pages viewed Internetwide." A chart shows that the average print reader spends 30 minutes with the paper, the average digital reader 4.4 minutes with the newspaper online; print newspapers reach 45 percent of the U.S. population, digital 10 percent.

Now, I do have my suspicion about this chart, because it says the average "Pages read" is 40, and a lot of papers have a hell of a time getting up to 40 pages. (And always have. When I grew up in Indiana, most daily newspapers outside the bigger cities struggled to get to 12.) And this is not controlled for age. But Chisholm's point remains true: "Our industry needs to refocus. That starts with recognizing that the 80 percent of the revenues that will continue to underpin our industry for the foreseeable future: Print circulation and advertising. Then, let's revisit the key drivers of success across all of our businesses, namely frequency, loyalty, and intensity."

Here in Philadelphia, my employer and nearly all the other area publishers of daily newspapers -- Calkins, Gannett, and Journal Register, everyone except Advance Publications and Metro -- have brought back the old idea of a Total Market Coverage vehicle, called Savings Spree!. Hate the name, but, the idea -- again, it's not a new one, but one newspapers dropped in the 1990s when all you needed to do to be rolling in dough was publish a Sunday help-wanted and real-estate section -- is to distribute "to more than 158,000 households not currently being reached by advertisers through Sunday newspaper subscriptions." The difference between then and now? Every newspaper back then -- and remember, we have more than 15 in the Philadelphia area -- put out its own product and gave it to people who weren't getting ITS newspaper. But many of them were getting someone ELSE'S newspaper, so advertisers were paying for duplicate circulation anyway. Under this plan, the product goes to homes that aren't taking ANYONE's newspaper. Also, combination buys used to be suburban papers vs. city papers. This brings both together.

"Who says traditional media like newspapers can't innovate?" asked Michael Scobey of Calkins, which also published in March a "Best Places to Work" section that reads suspiciously like that old newspaper standby for the low-revenue winter months, a Progress Edition. Well, two groups of people -- Internet utopians (who say it doesn't matter even if they do) and traditional newspaper journalists (who see every change as pearls rewarding swine and diminishing their status as social arbiters). Unfortunately, those two groups are very loud. The same issue of News & Tech that contains Chisholm's column also notes that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram expects a half-million in added revenue this year from a premium television guide. Of course, we all know that newspapers should all drop their TV guides because no one uses them anyway, particularly Internet utopians and traditional newspaper journalists. Our readers, though, continue to be Not Us.

Two Things Before An Exile

On the one hand, Montreal's La Presse -- the former spokesman for French North America, which used to have readers in New Hampshire and Maine -- says, give us three to five years, it'll all be tablets -- we'll just have some rump press run of 75,000. The story doesn't say, but I'm assuming that that's La Presse's circulation in metropolitan Montreal that would be saved and the rest is all over French North America where it no longer pays to run trucks to every village and town in Quebec. Just guessing. La Presse threatened closure during union negotiations a while back, so I'm guessing this is another hope that a Hail-Mary pass -- a Je vous salue, Marie pass, perhaps -- will save a threatened property.

On the other hand, AnnArbor.com -- how Newhouse was going to lead Ann Arbor into a newsprint-less future, killing the daily News and replacing it with a website and a twice-weekly publication -- lays off a bunch of people, accompanied by the usual platitudes about how this will lead to better local news. What is the success rate in football for Hail Mary passes, anyway?

With the exception of the Christian Science Monitor -- not a business in the usual sense -- which has benefited from dropping daily publication, who actually is doing well at this? I tried looking for current statistics, financial or readership, on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but couldn't find any; I doubt I'd be able to read them for Jornal do Brasil. Great for the Monitor, hoping it's great for the PI, but this is starting to seem like the Peter Palazzo redesign of the Chicago Daily News -- great product, but you were already dead.

On yet another hand, Journal Register -- the former bottomest feeder of the bottom feeders -- gives out bonuses. It cites its digital efforts, but one notices it is still publishing print newspapers.

On yet another hand, the Project for Excellence in Journalism says online has surpassed newspapers as a source of news. (As always, we have to assume people mean "online" vs. "print," but we're never sure, since newspapers are online.) But it notes that the money is still not there. On yet another hand, Damon Kiesow notes that much of the use of mobile is people looking for weather and traffic reports. I've already read criticism of the project's report along this line -- that people aren't looking for journalism, but for the weather. But some people bought print newspapers just for the weather report.

What does it all mean? It seems like the answer is the same as five years ago: No one really knows.

Well, so much for pondering the imponderable. It's time for the American Copy Editors Society's annual conference. Hope to see you in Phoenix.

The Little Tent

Doug Fisher at Common Sense Journalism draws attention to an essay by James Fallows in the Atlantic on why we should come to Love the New Media. As the headline deck puts it: "There isn't any point in defending the old ways. Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media -- and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future."

(As a copy editor, always gotta love that phrasing "may also be." When I used to do headline seminars for Knight Ridder, one of my targets was any headline with "may" in it. It might be the best you could do, but that headline by definition could also be written as: "Or it may not." "Dow may hit 34,000, or it may not." If it stands for "largely unsupported speculation -- by respected and knowledgeable sources, however -- on a subject everyone's interested in," what can you do? It's the story you were given. If it simply indicates "story has no point," then you've got a bigger problem.)

OK, this is the same James Fallows who famously preached that Japan was going to overtake America, although with enough ahems, caveats, and shuffles that he could also fairly say, no, I merely presented this as a possible outcome. It is his style to do lots of reporting in seemingly foreign parts, then find a conclusion that's way out in front of everyone else, because -- well, most of us in journalism know who James Fallows is, right? You don't get attention by totally reasoned responses, as Barack Obama continues to refuse to learn. Fallows notes that 15 years ago, a book he wrote said "scandal, spectacle, and the 'game' of politics was driving citizens away from public affairs, making it harder for even the least cynical politicians to do an effective job, and at the same time steadily eroding our public ability to assess what is happening and decide how to respond." He now says that's still true, but what's the point of fighting it? The new media have won.

This is basically an overheated article about Gawker, and in justifying its approach, he says this, which of course is true: "Giving people what they want as opposed to what they should want is a conflict as old as journalism, certainly as it has been practiced in this country. My capsule history of journalism is that for more than a century after the Civil War, American readers and viewers were in various ways buffered from getting exactly what they wanted from newspapers and, later, radio and TV news shows. News, like education, aspired to be as interesting as possible but to have an uplifting civic intent." (Like all of culture. Read the book "The Judgment of Paris" to see the battle between the Academie des Beaux-Arts and the impressionists on this very point.) And then he shows how we in journalism have tried to have an uneasy balance of both: Drawing an audience with bells and whistles, but not so many bells and whistles that they would damage our self-proclaimed status as rational men and women above trying to attract people with bells and whistles. And all of this is true as well.

Then, in the "Japan will overtake us" manner of reaching a fixed outcome from a current trend, he writes: "Of course, there will for a long time be a range of publications, all of them subject to the new market pressures but each having its own conception of its culture and the 'brand,' the reputation and audience it can deliver to advertisers. But existing American media operations must become slightly if steadily more like the Gawkers of the business — we’re doing it right here, at the magazine Ralph Waldo Emerson and company founded before the Civil War — and new operations will grow up knowing no other environment."

For journalists and their self-conceits, however, the next part of the essay is very useful -- reminding us that Henry Luce and Brit Haddon were once seen as Gawker, and that our culture is still in thrall to something that ought to have a name -- the Richie Cunningham fallacy, perhaps? -- the idea that 1950s America should be normative rather than an outlier. He finally draws some conclusions, which are well worth reading. But I think one cannot go unchallenged, and not just because it quotes, inevitably, Jeff Jarvis:

"American life is becoming more polarized, and this is a phenomenon bigger than whatever is happening in the media. But the separate spheres of political discussion — Hannity for some people, Maddow for others — may be less of an emergency than is often assumed. 'Government is not life,' Jeff Jarvis, a Time Inc. veteran and the founder of Entertainment Weekly, who now teaches journalism at the City University of New York, told me. 'The fact that people want to ignore it is okay.' In this view, the political class, fascinated by the process of campaigning and strategizing, dominates the media, imposes its obsession on the public at large, and worries when citizens don’t share its passion.

“'The people who are mainly interested in politics are crazy in a way,” Denton (of Gawker) told me. 'Maybe I’d rather reach people whose first passion is video games, or fashion, or are retirees or young professional women. Their interest in politics is the normal interest in politics, not as the main source of rage and resentment in their lives or to the exclusion of everything else.' The targeting of such communities, ever easier with social media, is not an answer to America’s polarization. But it does suggest the possibility of new, complex connections that offset a stark right/left divide."

It does if you are determined to make lemonade. It may portend the death of the two-party system, which may or may not be a bad thing, genuflections toward the late David Broder, that towering believer in compromise and the middle who died this week, aside. But politics is not simply the same as a mall, where if the department stores are gone, an ever-larger group of big boxes and boutiques can supply the customers' needs, possibly more efficiently than when the Big Store was trying to satisfy all.

I'm not a religious person, but I occasionally play around with, what if I were to go back? Sure would be nice sometimes to be able to say, "I'm letting Him take charge of that one." But churches today don't seem to be the religious department stores they were in the Richie Cunningham fallacy era -- come in, take a pew, listen to music and words, put some money in the till, go and serve the Lord, see you next Sunday. It is an increasing expectation that you are joining a like-minded community -- not the imposing Gothic building near your house -- and will participate in Stephen ministries and feeding the hungry and marriage retreats, if not Wednesday night basketball games. If you're not interested in that -- well, there's no cultural requirement in America any longer that one be a member of a church. (One still has to believe in God to be fully accepted, but one can simply cite "faith" as one's method of worship.) So the churches become more about, and oriented to, those who really believe.

Everything's optional in life now -- except politics. Politics is still a single-class tournament like Indiana high school basketball used to be -- everyone's got a chance, and everyone's in the end watching. If politics becomes simply a video game or NFL for its obsessives, it will fall into the hands of those who look to it for "rage and resentment." For, as we're all learning, what the new media are about is emotional connection. Perhaps, as Fallows hopes, the answer to Fox News is The Daily Show -- and the answer to The Daily Show is Fox News -- and from this a better commonwealth will arise, one in which alternating stories based on some level of truthiness create opposed-yet-cooperating communities as the media used to feel existed in Congress.

Fallows thinks we have to believe this, because it's coming regardless and we should hope for the best. But when politics becomes simply another genre interest, such as fashion or football, we can forget that we can wear denim shirts and ignore all sports, but we can't not be citizens of our country. If we decide we aren't, those on the extremes will gladly make the decisions for us. One has to hope that American common sense will prevail as always -- but American common sense was always supported by prominent figures coughing, saying "harrumph," and, yes, writing articles sometimes vacuously saying "while facts are hard to come by, it appears more and more people may be...," all possibly full of holes but all existing to nudge people who Don't Care All That Much toward the middle road. Take those away, and it is a new-media world indeed.

Department Store Building of ...PottsVILLE (not town)

Busy times at work and in life... but here's another old department store building, the flat-faced brick one in the center. This one, in Pottsville, Pa., has been reused as a hotel -- as a number have across the nation (for example, the old Maison Blanche Co. store in New Orleans). A Ramada (previously a Treadway, a Travelodge, and a Quality) occupies this property at 100 S. Centre St., the site of a longtime branch of Dives, Pomeroy & Stewart.

Pomeroy's located here around 1900 after the closure of the firm of H. Royer and Son at the same address. The building that's here appears more modern. From the conventions of city directories -- where a change in address from "100-04" to "100-06" means some sort of expansion or rebuilding -- I'd assume this took place in the early 1920s. But I have nothing that actually says that, and the brickfacing on the building seems even more modern than that. Anyone know?

With both the main stores of Pomeroy's, in Harrisburg and Reading, now destroyed, there remain this store, the one on Public Square in Wilkes-Barre, and the former Laubach's store in Easton from the era when Pomeroy's, as the eastern Pennsylvania outpost of Allied Stores, was a name known from the Delaware River to the Susquehanna.

Beer aficionados make pilgrimages to Pottsville to visit Yuengling's. Some fans of nearly forgotten authors may still trek there to remember John O'Hara. Both sites are along Mahantongo Street, which in addition to being nearly unpronounceable offers a short history of Pennsylvania architecture in two miles. Beginning with an old hotel and passing a former coal company office building, a walk up Mahantongo passes typical Pennsylvania two- or three-bay attached houses with single dormers, Philadelphia-style rowhouses with flat roofs, at least one freestanding manor of the late 18th or early 19th centuries, Victorian turrets, bay-window duplexes that wouldn't be out of place in Boston, mansions of the Robber Baron era, 1920s Colonial Revivals, 1950s ranchers, 1960s two-story tract houses, even a 1950s garden apartment complex. before finally coming to an end a half-block beyond that staple of mid-20th-century development, a rounded-end cul-de-sac. Someone who knows far more about architecture than myself could do worse that doing a book on Mahantongo Street, which O'Hara renamed for his fiction as Lantenengo Street, and how it shows in one short walk the progress of residential architecture in the United States, from house styles that would have been familiar to the Founding Fathers to those baby boomers grew up with.

Department Store Building of the ... Pottstown, Part II

Thanks to the two people in western Montgomery County who liked seeing Pottstown's old New York Store mentioned. Although Pottstown had a branch of Pomeroy's, the big Reading-based store, into the 1920s, the other store most people would associate with the city is Ellis Mills of Pottstown Inc., 223 High St., shown here as the white-brick five-bay building at center.

Ellis Mills first appears in Pottstown directories as a dry goods and department store around 1900, although the Montgomery County Historical Society indicates that it was in business far before that. Boston's Jordan Marsh Co. was named for the last names of two men, but Ellis Mills was named for a man named Ellis Mills, a British immigrant.  He had two sons, Charles and William, who took over the business, which also had a location in Reading at 647 Penn St., just east of Pomeroy's main store. (He also had two daughters.) William ran things in Pottstown, and Charles was in charge in Reading. Although Pottstown is officially in suburban Philadelphia, it is closer to Reading and has long been in its orbit. (The tyranny of county boundaries.) The Reading store, separately organized as Ellis Mills of Reading Inc., petered out in the Depression.

Pottstown's Ellis Mills continued on as the upscale department store in town, and became financially associated with Harry F. Armstrong, a now-obscure department store investor based in Schenectady, N.Y. In the 1920s and 1930s there were capitalists -- Earl Knox in Detroit is another -- who backed fledgling department store owners through an interest in their stores, without actually moving to a new city to take charge of them. Armstrong also reorganized a store in Oil City, Pa., into Armstrong-Collier Inc., and was involved at one point in the large network of western Pennsylvania stores in which Sankey Metzler of Uniontown, Pa., had an interest. (It appears his descendants still live in the Capital District. Perhaps one will read this and tell more about this man.) But it remained in the hands of the Mills family -- Roberta Mills was its president for many years -- and closed in 1980.

What's the Score?

I'm not qualified to talk about sports journalism, and therefore I merely read this column by my colleague John Gonzalez with interest. I've heard of Deadspin, of course, but had no idea it was now in the hands of a Philadelphia native. But then comes its latest coup, of presenting a lawsuit that appears to be a teenager's half-thought-out, back-and-forth revenge against/boast about New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez for a brief tryst, and this cri de coeur of Dan LeBatard of the Miami Herald. For all I know, Gonzo, or LeBatard, or Sanchez, or the girl have Tweeted, Facebooked, and Deadspun this thing to death by this time this morning. I don't know, and I don't care enough to know.

Both Gonzo and LeBatard, however, present this as some sort of unique fallout of the new media, as if without the Internet, these sort of offenses against society/telling of truths would not happen. But is this not the reaction to the New York Daily News' photo of the execution of Ruth Snyder? Is this not the reaction to Pulitzer and Hearst at the time of "Remember the Maine"? Or the penny press taking on the commercial and political newspapers of the 1830s? Or, for that matter, the underground newspapers of my younger years? The issue always seems to be: We wouldn't say that; therefore no one should say that; because it's irresponsible. And yet the irresponsible always seems to bubble up, and gets tons of readers. (Heck, you could say the attacks on USA Today for its first-issue lead of the death of Princess Grace over the death of a now-forgotten Lebanese president come from the same place.)

But the contrast between Deadspin's motto -- "without access, favor, or discretion" -- and LeBatard's column, in which he salutes himself for keeping a gay player's sexuality confidential until his career was over -- is apparent. LeBatard admits without rebuttal, "I can be accused of protecting him" -- and says he did so as a human being not wanting to expose him to the canards that would be hurled by Joe Q. Fan, possibly leading to a premature end to his playing days. Fair enough. Sports journalists also know, just as those in mainstream coverage of entertainment or politics do, that you can criticize or truth-tell only so far. Any good reporter knows so much more than can be written, and not just because it can't be backed up by two sources. The boundaries pertaining to athletes and sex are shifting the way politicians and sex shifted in the last generation, and for the same reasons: Not just, as LeBatard has it, that people will read it because it's salacious and not be embarrassed or skeptical about it anymore, although that's a big part of it; but on the other side, the respectful establishment side, at least part of society has decided it doesn't want females treated as bedwarmers by the powerful because of the message it sends to women about their own empowerment. So you get the push and the pull, and the line markers move.

At the same time, many are the fans who still want to think of sports as a moment of purity, as fine young men (and women) giving their all merely for the success and fame most of us dreamed of when we were 12 but realized we would never achieve. And there also those who want to think that athletes should still be our children's role models, whether they can be or not. Yet many are the other fans who want every day to get their own revenge for the athletes' getting that adulation, and millions of dollars in many cases, while they are stuck in pedestrian lives, to show the red card and say: See, you are Joe Cool, but I made you.

When journalism -- which used to be a record of what happened in public view -- tries to lift the curtain, it keeps finding multiple curtains. We can say what occurred and be accurate, but we cannot say the truth because the truth only lives in each person's heart and brain. Absent feeling, absent motive and dreams and delusions and lusts, all we describe are events, not truths. Yet events have their own consequences -- it does not matter to the dead of World War I if the last thought the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had was, "Damn, I shouldn't be doing this" -- and we can never know every motive and lust when the heart sometimes deceive even those it resides within. So the recording of public events should be honorable and sufficient. But it's often boring, and a salacious link is fun.

I'm not qualified to talk about sports journalism. I can talk about Indy-car racing a little. Do I really want to know the whole, real story of why Tony Kanaan came to a split with Michael Andretti's team? Sure. There's brain candy behind that curtain. Do I really really want to know, if I knew (which I don't) that it could affect people's livelihood, other drivers' contracts and sponsorships? I don't, but a lot of fans would. So should sports journalism should be in the hands of those, like Deadspin, who don't want to be able to ask a player how his team did and get in return, "Well, our team came to win. If John makes that play, we go home on top. But he didn't, so we didn't. But you've got to give Lower Upper Slobovia credit. They came to play" -- while "everyone knows" that had John not had a crushing hangover because his idol is Charlie Sheen, that play would have been made?

In journalism for about 25 years -- from the time of the Pentagon Papers until the rise of Google -- we made everyone (again, except for alternative weeklies) play by pretty much the same rules. The fact that newspaper circulations were dropping during that entire time perhaps should have told us something. But even today I'm not entirely sure what we could have done about it, although we certainly could have gotten the papers delivered on time and made them easier to read and not headlined day-old airplane crashes as if they had just happened.

What people want to read is a story that they think tells them that really happened, that lifts the curtains. But only in rare cases can journalism lift a curtain the reader doesn't want to see or believes isn't there. And readers often want to see exposed only what they believe is behind the curtain, even if it isn't there or if it's only a small part of the real story. "Children aren't learning? Blame the teachers. I hated my teachers, and teachers make more than I do."

For their part, journalists want to lift the curtains they believe hide the important truths, but let other curtains keep hiding other truths that they see as less important, distracting, or not socially beneficial. Every now and then they get a bit of financial power and can be both journalists and respectable; then technological or social changes make them Grub Street crawlers again.  Journalism usually is respectable only when respectable journalists have a near-monopoly on its supply. This is sad for those of us who have spent most of our careers being respectable journalists with normal middle-class lives, playing by the rules we thought made us pretty much the same sort of professionals as accountants or lawyers, but there's nothing Dan LeBatard can do about it except to say, as the headline on Gonzalez's column states: He's playing a different game, and as a sports journalist knows, games have winners and losers.

Department Store Building of the... Let's go to Pottstown

It's rare to find a store that closed a couple of decades ago but still has most of its sign on the building.  One example is the New York Store at 244 High St. in Pottstown, Pa. The store was founded in the early 1920s by Samuel Hoffman and in many of its early years was formally known as the New York Cut Price Department Store. When discounters started to eat department stores' lunch and they tried to react by moving more upscale, it went back to being the New York Store and adjusted its advertising accordingly.

Like a number of Pennsylvania stores -- Leh's in Allentown being the largest -- the store was run as a partnership of the descendants of the founder rather than being organized into a stock corporation. Nathan, Jack, Morris, Pincus, Edward, Harry and Estelle all were involved at one time or another, as was the widow, Rose. The store closed in 1986 and was redeveloped into the New York Plaza, which accounts for the sign's remaining in place with the word "Plaza" replacing "Store." As of this writing, the building appears to be for sale. Only $1.3 million and a former downtown department store can be yours!

You can tell from this photo -- including the false-front aspect of the "modern" storefront at right -- the number of buildings and additions this not-very-large store meandered through. I'm sure modern store executives found the sort of odd layouts most old department stores had -- alleys running through the first floor, steps and ramps to even off the floors in different buildings, strange corridors and passageways leading to obscure departments -- as something to get rid of with pleasure in their new mall stores. I always found them part of the fascination, such as at Pogue's in Cincinnati, with its two buildings connected by a bridge going through the vaulted lobby of an art deco office tower. But then, most shoppers looked at department stores simply as stores and not for aesthetics.

As the Wave Heightens

Long thoughts and third thoughts:

1) As Rick Edmonds noted on Poynter, that was depressing news in McClatchy's earnings report. The rate of newspaper ad dollar fall-off for McClatchy -- which admittedly has a lot of operations in still property-depressed areas such as Florida and California -- was back to 10 percent in January after reaching  reasonable levels in the third and fourth quarters of 2010 ("reasonable" in the sense of "not falling off a cliff"). On the one hand, didn't major national advertisers -- whom McClatchy chief Gary Pruitt blames for the loss of advertising -- basically tell us this last year, that they were going to redirect dollars from newspapers toward online? Are we surprised that after 15 years of newspapers telling everyone how they're going out of business, advertisers have now gotten to the point where they completely believe it? (After all, if it's in the newspaper, it's so.) At what point do online revenues, which are increasing as a share of most companies' revenue not because of incredible success online but simply that print revenue keeps disappearing, achieve the 35-40 percent level at which your other revenue simply goes for paper, ink, and trucks, and so you don't care if you lose it if you stop the presses? But since you get a dime online for every dollar in print, your online revenues have to grow, what, 100 percent a year to cover that 10 percent print loss? And can you be sure that without that print avatar in the market, you will be able to sustain your online ad rates? And you've still got to deliver inserts. And will everyone whom advertisers want to reach follow you online, or will they just say, oh, the heck with it, I'm using Google News?

McClatchy and Gannett have responded to this distressing news by laying off people. A Los Angeles Times story on what happens to Southland journalism after Freedom is sold at auction, and with it the Orange County Register, says the hedge funds that now control about 10 percent of American newspapers (much more in terms of circulation) have decided that there isn't that much more cutting that can be done on the news side or you don't have a newspaper. Apparently our newspaper companies themselves don't agree. On the other hand, I'm sure the principal job Gary Pruitt is concerned about is Gary Pruitt's. That's not a cheap shot or a statement that he is a heartless person. Anyone who's had to decide to lay people off, or tell them, knows it's hard for everyone no matter how they try to spin it. But the job I care most about is my own, and I'm sure Gary and his counterparts at Gannett feel the same way, telling themselves, "If we can just get past this, we can hire again..." Which always reminds me of the pilot in "The Right Stuff" auguring in toward the ground, saying, "I've tried 'A'! I've tried 'B'!"

2) Hearing AOL chairman Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington talk about the merger of AOL and the Huffington Post on PBS news Tuesday night, what struck me about the gamble AOL is making is that if they're right, it means Internet 2.0 is over for the news business. What they were basically describing is a newspaper without the presses -- floated by ad support, covering a wide range of issues, covering them perhaps with more spin than print has done but not being a liberal political organ. Huffington herself took pains to show how many writers from the right the Post has brought on board since the 2008 election. I don't know if HuffPo still draws most of its traffic from celebrity photo galleries. I can't imagine how Arianna Huffington is going to relate to the local-local Patch. (For the life of me, I can't imagine how, after her career, she is suddenly going to be able to succeed in a large organization she did not create. Any bets on which one of these two will be around a year from now?) Maybe she believes that with apps the era of browser-based Internet usage is indeed gone and she'll never get a higher price than this and she really doesn't care. But that doesn't seem like Huffington. But can HuffPo transition to be a sort-of-New-York-Times with local news from Summit and Flanders?

Either way, this and Murdoch's The Daily mean that we're leaving the era in which the future of journalism on the Internet was going to be defined by at least Talking Points Memo, if not Daily Kos and its equivalents. AOL/HuffPo may not work. But news on the Internet is going to become a business and not a free agora of ideas done from love and passion and obsession. Newspapers, alas, got there too early, and have spent the last 15 years Trying A and Trying B to preserve their way of doing business while every time running up against the Innovator's Dilemma. On the other hand, we now can look forward to decades of reminiscences about Internet journalism's "Golden Age," just like television producers and scriptwriters did sitting at the bar talking about how much better life was before networks discovered they could draw bigger audiences with "Petticoat Junction" than they could with "Playhouse 90." Not that it wasn't better, at least for them, but as "Mad Men" and "Boardwalk Empire" and many other programs show, golden ages come and go and come again; it's just that most of us only get one, if that, and it only lasts for a while.

3. The rumor about Andy Reid losing his job as head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles drew a number of columns in response locally -- that of John Smallwood of the Philadelphia Daily News is here. I use it as an example not out of any desire to single out Smallwood, a fine columnist. But he, as other columnists who wrote on this, first makes his obligatory bows to the house god of online -- the "yes, folks, you know I'm not a Luddite" line -- and then deplores the loss of print standards in the virtual world that allowed a silly, unsourced rumor posted on one site to become a viral exclamation point. What I liked about Smallwood's column was how he mentioned the effort he had to spend chasing down this ridiculous rumor. Before the Internet, this would have been a water-cooler conversation that got spread among people by phone or at bars, if that. Someone might have called the sports department and had the phone slammed down on them by a clerk after he yelled out, "Anyone hear anything about Reid?" But because someone posted it on his website and someone else picked it up, it becomes News, it becomes What Everyone's Talking About, and frantic calls must ensue.

Smallwood rightly notes that mainstream journalism has to come up with some sort of rules or conventions to deal with this. Perhaps it will be easier when the Internet is a business, and journalists who work for Internet businesses will be journalists and bloggers will be anonymous tipsters. But nothing made every sports medium that covers the NFL or Philadelphia football chase this. They could have said, gosh, there's nothing to this, we would have known, we would have gotten a tip, we Cover the Freaking Eagles! But then they would not have driven traffic to their website from obsessed Eagles fans willing to check 40 websites in 40 minutes to see if Permanent Loser Andy was indeed gone. They would have looked noncompetitive by not reacting to idiocy. Yes, we need to consider the source, not the frequency. But to do that, we need to stop thinking that we are competing with everyone in the world. We are competing with people who do what we do to gain the readership of people who want to follow what we do. Those are our customers. Other customers will go to other types of information. With every person having a printing press, it has to be that way. There are too many options to cover every bet. We have to figure out what customers we can get and what they want, and not be worried about the customers we won't get.

Mainstream news media also need to note the blogger's initial response when he posted that the whole thing was not just an unsourced rumor, but an unsourced rumor he heard from someone else, not even someone in the Eagles -- "What Fun." This is like the response of the guy who posted the New York harbor tornado photos from 35 years earlier that sucked in NBC -- that he was just doing it for a hoot to get a rise out of his friends. Katie Couric was doubtless wrong for Tweeting that Hosni Mubarak had resigned, when he had not. (On the other hand, UPI used to do this sort of stuff all the time.) Couric wasn't doing it just to get attention. She thought it was a legitimate story. She would not have posted a photo of a years-ago tornado in New York harbor and said it was new just to get a rise out of her friends. The people who do this may have websites and may occasionally post something of interest and possibly of newsworthiness, but they are not journalists. Be watching this case in New Jersey to see if nonjournalists suddenly are defined as if they were. Again, newspapers shot themselves in the foot on this, on the one hand for First Amendment motives and on the other for Web Economy reasons (if we link to you, it will drive traffic), but in doing so again forgot exactly what they are selling. Smallwood is right. We need as a profession to come up with ways to handle this, and that means seeing ourselves as a profession and not just as the equivalent of anyone with a site.

Department Store Building of the ... Golden Triangle (2)

I couldn't get a good screen shot of the former Gimbel Brothers store in downtown Pittsburgh, and this shot of the Joseph Horne Co. store is not all that satisfactory. Horne's in the 1960s had among the most stylish ads in the country, and part of that was that the store name was placed almost as an afterthought: instead of dominating the ad -- the dress or coat or table and the copy would be used surrounded by white space, and down in a corner would appear in sans-serif type, not very large, as if "it would be in poor taste to draw attention to ourselves," a simple

JOSEPH HORNE CO.

Downtown Pittsburgh is oddly sited, and it was always hard for me to understand how it developed with Horne's at 501 Penn Avenue blocks away from Gimbels and Kaufmann's on Smithfield Street. The answer is in Pittsburgh's peculiar geography and where the stores drew their trade from. Unless you're from Pittsburgh or have a map this will probably make no sense, but: downtown Pittsburgh was originally centered on Market Square, at Diamond Street (now Forbes Avenue) and Market Street. Stores spread up and down Market, and then onto Fifth Avenue a half-block north as well as Diamond. Kaufmann's was originally a South Side store, serving the working class, and the Smithfield Street bridge was a main entrance to downtown from the South Side, so when Kaufmann's came downtown it built on Smithfield where it encountered downtown traffic reaching out along Diamond (Forbes) and Fifth.

Horne's, however, was the carriage-trade store, and in the late 19th century much of the carriage trade -- not the super-rich, who lived out past East Liberty, but the upper middle class -- lived on the North Side, in what then was the separate suburb of Allegheny. Allegheny had its own department stores -- one, Boggs & Buhl Co., lasted into the 1950s -- along its main street, Federal Street, which when it crossed the Allegheny River entered Pittsburgh as Sixth Street and eventually turned into Market.  Horne's started out near Sixth Street on Penn, and then moved a block west. Eventually, Market Square, which had been the center of downtown Pittsburgh, lost its prominence. The railroad that ran down Liberty Street and other commuting trails also enter into this, but the strange disconnectedness of Pittsburgh's major department stores in the 1960s came from their placement to dominate the streetcar lines coming across the bridges from very different parts of town.

A Bit Less Sun in Naperville

The Sun-Times Media Group -- probably America's most buffeted newspaper chain -- announced last week that its papers in Aurora and Joliet, Ill., would go from seven to six days, and that the Naperville Sun would return to three after a few years as a daily. Those who see the end of newspapers can of course see this as another nail in the coffin. But don't overread it.

Naperville -- a booming and affluent Chicago suburb -- had its paper taken daily right before the Newspaper Holocaust and the economic crash. In good times, publishers have always seen money going to their metropolitan competitors, and tried to lure it away with a new daily. Sometimes they succeed. Often they do not. In the 1920s boom, dailies were started on Philadelphia's Main Line and in the Oranges outside Newark. The 1930s sent them back to weekly status.

A paper in Mount Kisco, N.Y., was cranked up to daily status in the 1970s and cranked back in about a year. The same happened recently in Plainfield, Ind. In the 1960s there were briefly dailies in Garden Grove and Huntington Beach, Calif. There were two attempts in Castle Rock, outside Denver. A publisher finds out pretty quickly whether there's a market for daily readership and whether she can lure ads away from competitors. So the change in Naperville doesn't mean much except to quote from the Chicago Tribune's article:

"These moves are driven by reasons related to economics and efficiencies, (chief executive Jeremy) Halbreich said. But he also said that, in Naperville, the company had received comments from local officials, readers and advertisers favoring a return to a three-day schedule for the Sun."

And that's also often the case. You might think that local officials would love having their name in the paper every day. But readers (and officials) who aren't total news junkies may find it easier to just catch up with what's happening a couple of times a week, instead of having to pay attention every day. Plus, readers of small-town papers often like the "villagey" feeling of a less-than-daily. People live in places like Naperville because they don't want to live in Chicago. They may not want it to feel more urban -- with a daily newspaper and all. It's not news that's going to be on the local television.

With two or three times a week, they can "catch up" on all the local news without having to look for it every day. It's a lot easier to get the big national and foreign stories online than it is most local news -- there are so many sources. Take that away need away from dailies and increasing numbers of print readers may say, sure, I want a print paper -- just a couple times a week.

The other advantage is that a daily schedule makes people think they "have" to read it that day or it's obsolete. My wife will let our three dailies pile up on the counter, and then read three days' worth on the weekends. But I'd say most people's feeling is, "God, here's another one and I didn't even get to yesterday's! Now I've got to throw that old one out unread!" You don't, but with a couple of days between publication, you have more time to get to it. In the 1980s people told us that they felt oppressed by unread newspapers. We told them they should rearrange their lives to have more time to read us. They didn't. This may be the compromise.

As for the Saturday cuts in the other two papers, while those are clearly economic, it's important to remember that many newspapers were not seven days until the classified-and-insert boom started in the 1970s, and the majority of papers never were (despite our beliefs, readers of most newspapers have always been willing to go a day or two without a paper). In 1966, Illinois had (I might be off by one in any category) 14 seven-day papers, 60 six-day papers, and 7 five-day papers. In 1997, it had 25 seven-day papers, 30 six-day papers, and 13 five-day papers. (Yes, this is Before the Internet, a drop from 81 to 68 daily papers. It's always been about television.) In 1966, 74 percent of dailies came out on six days and 17 percent seven; in 1996, 44 percent were six days and another 44 percent were seven. Now Aurora and Joliet were in the seven-day category until now, and in 1966 some of the six-day papers were part of morning/evening combos with one Sunday paper, and some people bought their local daily and then the Chicago Tribune on Sunday. But it's so much easier to staff a six-day operation and then put more strength into the Sunday paper instead of frittering it away on a largely unread Saturday, as long as you post Friday-night high school sports online.