Is the tide starting to turn?

There are a couple of items of good news floating around. First, we have the decision by the Orange County Register to invest more in local news coverage. Although Orange County is a populous county in the megalopolis known as Southern California, the Register is deciding to act as though it were a small-town newspaper, hiring reporters and photographers to cover all its high school football games. It is also hiring investigative journalists. I found this observation from editor Ken Brusic particularly apt:

“Think about a Starbucks model. If each day you went into Starbucks and plunked down $4 for a latte, and the cups got smaller and the content got weaker, chances are you’d stop going to Starbucks. That’s basically what newspapers have been doing as a way to deal with decreases in advertising revenue. The new guys are attempting to reverse that trend, and are attempting in a variety of different ways.”

I love the comparison. If advertisers are going to continue to abandon newspapers, and readers are going to have to pay for it, newspapers need to become a status symbol, like gourmet coffee, but a relatively affordable one, like a $4 latte.

The next bit of good news comes from the research firm Borrell and Associates, that forecasts revenue growth for newspapers in 2013.  Though Newspaper Death Watch gives us reasons to doubt the assessment, I think optimism is half the battle. If people see newspapers as a losing proposition, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and our companies become fodder for the modern day equivalents of Bain Capital. In the anecdotal evidence department, I am starting to see the frequency of help wanted ads for copy editors increase.

Why do newspapers need opinion pages?

As ad revenues fall, news holes are getting markedly smaller. At the newspaper at which I work, we are dealing with an effective news hole of 3 or 4 pages out of 18 or 20 on any given day. I understand the need to save on newsprint. But there is also the need to cut content that is unnecessary. So I ask, how many people buy the newspaper for the opinion page? There are 129 inches of news print that would be best reposition for what we do best, write copy on local news, and ditch what people can get elsewhere, read syndicated opinion pieces and editorial cartoons.
In most newspapers, the letter to the editor is a marked anachronism. Who bothers writing a letter, when they can comment on the story directly online? I'll tell you who. People without computers (old folks) and yahoos whose opinions make us cringe.
To ditch the opinion page would be a relief to most newspaper editors. And we'd have one more page to put news on (or for the publisher to reduce, when the ad count allows us to go to 16 pages)

That Webster's lady has a blog

http://korystamper.wordpress.com/
Allow me to note that Kory Stamper now has a blog. Stamper is one of the three people (the woman with various shades of red hair, not the woman with glasses or the bald guy) whose videos come up when you look up words on Webster's Dictionary website.

Monetizing content, 1916 style

I found this quote in 1916 trade magazine for silent movie theater owners:
"The stories of 1916 are no better than the stories of 1716 nor of AD 1 nor will those of 2016 be any better. A prize offer of a million dollars would not bring forth a story better than thousands for which the authors received a skimped handful of shillings or francs or dollars or told for the mere love of telling a tale."
(The Moving Picture World, Aug. 5, 1915, p. 930)

In other words, good writers will write the same copy for $1 million or for $1 or for nothing (or maybe even pay for the privilege). That's something the Internet hasn't changed.

Leaving college behind

While listening to Steven Levy talk about his new book, "In the Plex" about Google, it struck me how many of the Net's innovators -- Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg -- dropped out of some level of college. I'm sure this question has been explored elsewhere, but I wonder what the fact that the true innovators of our era leave college says about higher education. It seems that now college is merely a place where bright people meet each other and go off to their personal laboratories to create. This goes to a theme that is affecting newspapers as well as education, that the means and substance of what we do has changed so significantly, that we don't actually communicate much of value anymore. We are in the midst of such a paradigm shift that no institution has yet caught up to a point that it can reliably educate on the basis of the current state.

A voice from the past

I was only 12 or 13 when I was first introduced to A Prairie Home Companion and its host, Garrison Keillor. A family friend, one of the most insightful, cerebral and (do I even have to say?) troubled people I have ever known had recently separated from his wife, and we visited him for Saturday dinner in an old house much to spacious for its bachelor occupant. When 6 p.m. rolled around, he turned on the radio already tuned to the NPR affiliate in Columbus, Ga., and out poured the musings of the second most insightful and cerebral person I have ever heard.

Garrison Keillor's show is of and for his home in rural Minnesota, but it resonates with everyone who has somewhere they call home. Keillor has done the improbable, resurrecting the genre of radio variety show with folksy monologues of Lake Wobegon's Norwegian bachelor farmers, folk singers, fiddlers and a sound effects guy doing bird calls with his mouth. It is an anachronism, as unlikely as a revival of Vaudeville or the Lawrence Welk Show, complete with tap dancers and champagne bubbles.

What makes Keillor's show so effective is its authenticity. Though the sponsors (Powder Milk Biscuits, “heaven's, they're tasty and expeditious!” and the Ketchup Advisory Board) are fake, the nostalgia is real. Garrison has a true affinity for the personalities of a world that only can exist in our memories, for songs that are only appealing in their simplicity and humor that tends to make us smile instead of laugh.

Like any personality-driven institution, from Mr. Rogers to Paul Harvey to Charles Schulz, you know that “A Prairie Home Companion” is destined to end when Keillor succumbs to our common adversaries, age and mortality. He has already announced a date for retirement, spring 2013, when he says he hopes to fade into the woodwork and hand off the microphone to an as-yet-unnamed replacement. But everyone knows that Lake Wobegon will fade like Brigadoon without him.

On Tuesday, Sept. 6, Keillor will bring a version of his show, currently on summer hiatus, to the Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth in what is called the Summer of Love tour. A few tickets remain. I will be there. And I will be reminded of my isolated, insightful, cerebral, troubled friend, alone is a house that is too big for him. Keillor's show is just like that, an isolated, insightful calming voice in a world that is too big and too busy for a place like Lake Wobegon to exist anymore.

Score one for the fontmeisters

This is a story to warm the hearts of copy editors everywhere. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has changed their default font from arial to century gothic and said this will save money on ink when kids print out their emails. Who new a serifed font would save ink over sans-serif?

Ubiquity

When I was in college, I had to take a macroeconomics class. I can't remember if it was the prerequisite to a journalism degree or simply a degree, but I remember it was by turns excruiciatingly boring and intensely interesting. The dapper asst. professor told our class that economics was the science of satisfying unlimited wants with limited resources. For this effort, the free market was touted as the best system to fairly satisfy the most "wanters" reasonably. He drew a chart on the chalkboard (remember those?) where one line represented increasing price and another line represented decreasing demand. Invariably this chart formed and "X" and this nexus was where supply met demand. This was the solution to the problem of limited supply. But what he never explained is what happens when there is unlimited supply, or at least relatively unlimited supply.
This is the conundrum facing journalists today. The Internet represents a potential limitless source of news, and when that happens, people are willing to pay what some people are always willing to sell that info for: nothing.
And it seems that the Internet isn't the only place where relative ubiquity defeats the free market model. Remember all those "can you believe this?" stories about Farm Bills that paid farmers NOT to plant corn or bought milk from dairy farmers to pour it down the drain?
The fact is that in certain segments of agriculture, technology reached the point that, in many years, supply exceeds demand. Just ask any farmer and they can tell you a bumper crop is bad news.
That's what we have, a bumper crop of information. And just like agricultural goods, it varies in quality, but most people are just as satified with information of questionable value as they are with food of questionable nutritional content.
As technology progresses, this will expand to other commodities: If green technology succeeds this will happen with energy. It seems to have already happened in housing.
The odd outcome of ubiquity is that sometimes it leads to enforced shortage to prop up the free market paradigm. There are too many houses. Prices are falling. We must kick people out of their houses.
There is too much food. Prices are falling. We must dispose of perfectly good food and let some go hungry.
There is too much access to news. Profit is falling. We must wall off and charge for content.
Please don't call me a Communist, but when supply overwhelms demand, the free market doesn't work.
Just ask my Economics professor.

Who needs page designers?

Have you seen the newly redesigned, or perhaps I should say undesigned, Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Take a look and try to hold on to your lunch.
It looks like the editor's high school graduate nephew is laying it out. No depth. No clear story hierarchy. Nothing to catch the eye. It is a pointless collage of words, heads and a couple of generic pictures. Looks like the AJC is throwing in the towel on the print product. First it was copy editors who became expendable (who needs spelling, grammar and fact checking?) and now it's page designers (who needs news as an art form?) Would somebody cover this abortion with a white sheet?

From the for what it's worth (not much) department

A piece of information that a couple of years ago would have been heralded as proof of newspapers' relevance, a Nielsen report showing better than 73 million visitors to newspaper Web sites in the first three months of the year, will no doubt now draw a collection of yawns.
Round after round of cost-cutting, layoffs, increased workloads and dire news has taken the umph out of most newsrooms. The kind of ideas that once were bandied about at weekend confabs and daily editorial meetings has been replaced with the yawning ennui, a result of resignation to a seemingly inevitable future.

Pursuing mid-size circulation

I'll have to admit, this one really hurt. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution used to "cover Dixie like the dew," or at least the Journal did, until it became politically incorrect to say the word Dixie out loud. It was affectionately called the urinal-constipation by resident conservatives, of which there were many in Georgia. My journalism school was named for Henry Grady who popularized the term "New South." He was editor of the Constitution. Across my campus students made a little extra money by selling subscriptions to the AJC. At the time there was a newspaper war going on. The New York Times had purchased the Gwinnett Daily News and tried to take on the AJC. They built a multimillion-dollar three story building. The president of the Times told the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce they were going to march through Atlanta like Sherman. Two years later they folded. I worked for the newspaper that took the Daily News' Gwinnett County niche, the Gwinnett Daily Post.
When I went to the University of Georgia, the local newspaper, Athens Banner-Herald and Daily News (still a morning and afternoon paper in the 90s, can you believe it?) barely bothered to sell on campus. It was the paper of locals. Students were mostly Atlanta kids who wanted Atlanta news. Now the AJC is abandoning the Athens market completely.
I have no idea what their circulation was in Athens at the end, but it is a community of over 100,000, and I'd be willing to bet it was at least 15,000, maybe more.
With such increased retrenchment, it is clear many big-city dailies that once covered their entire state (Dallas, Atlanta, Minneapolis) are now focused in on the immediate metro. They are seeking to emulate to profitability of many midsized dailies that still dominate their market. Small circ, locally focused.

What is ten percent of nothing?

It always warms my heart when I can beat the Death Watch to a tidbit of news. Morris Communications, owner of the paper in the town of my alma mater, is forcing everyone to take five to ten percent pay cuts. This is the same Morris Communications which built a multimillion dollar news building in a town with a 30,000 circulation newspaper. The building has a helicopter pad. Rumor has it that the Morris family had to sell their helicopter to pay debts. At the very least, I never saw a helicopter land there. And this was in the go-go 90s.

Tossed salad and scrambled eggs

As all of you have heard by now, Tuesday's is the last edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And the webheads rejoice in the death of another newspaper (don't deny it, note the snarky attitude toward Kathleen Parker, or anyone who feels nostalgic for the printed paper, or anyone who feels they are important to civilized society, or anyone who thinks good grammar and fact checking is a good idea). Seeing as how the P-I is operating without copy editors, I wonder in what multiple of 10 the daily errors would be.

Journalism apostates

Just when Paul Gillin tries to convince that he is not an enemy of the press, he takes down those who speak lovingly of their craft. He calls it" journalistic self-indulgence today as newsroom veterans tell their readers about what a great job they’re doing in the apparent self-deception that readers give a hoot:"
Have you noticed how the journalism apostate's talk about our audience as if it were a monolithic entity that en masse is rejecting our craft. If we heed their call, the solution to this disease is to abolish journalism that markets to an entire community and focus on discreet groups with blogs.

Whither the archives?

• The obituaries of the Rocky said that Scripps is selling the name, Web site and archive. Which raises a larger question. With a handful of newspapers already closed and more threatening to close, what is the future of their archives -- which we used to call, interestingly enough, their morgue, and which, for many records before, say, 1990, still exists in those file cabinets that made up the morgue? I can say from experience these archives are some of the most complete records of a city's existence. Most cities have newspaper archives on microfilm, but in most cases they are not indexed. The only index exists in the morgue, because clipping were taken and put in alphabetical order by subject. These morgues also contain the original photos, not just the printed halftones. I would hope that Congress, when it's not passing laws about chimpanzees, would outlaw throwing away this important history at any newspaper, though I fear it may have already happened in some places.
• By the way, since we're all doomed, I think the newspaper industry needs an elegaic theme. At the risk of sounding maudlin, how about Iris Demint's "Our Town"?
  

Good news, bad news

Good news: New York Newsday is wising up about the free Internet stuff.
Bad news: The Rocky is closing, but, like Tucson and Seattle, we're still talking about a city losing a second newspaper. Hearst is threatening to close The San Francisco Chronicle, but who wants to bet that if it happens, the Mercury News will drop the "San Jose" appellation? Also, keep in mind that 881 U.S. auto dealerships shuttered in 2008. Let's keep some perspective. There are thousands of newspapers. Newspaper Death Watch only added its 11 th dead newspaper, and two of those were related.

Lies, damn lies and internet "journalism"

In what I assume is a column (have you ever noticed it's hard to tell on the internet what is supposed to pass as hard news and what is opinion?) referring to the oft-discussed switch to non-profit newspapering in the Internet "magazine" Slate we find these as the first seven words:

Now that newspapers have stopped generating profits

Hmm. Let's see. In a fourth-quarter that should see a net loss for the S&P 500 companies, Gannett reported operating earnings of $158 million. New York Times Company reported $27.6 million in earnings. These are just the big boys. Most community newspapers don't report earnings because they are often privately held, but I doubt many posted operating losses. It's just that they don't get the routine 20 percent margin they are used to. Yes the big boys are swimming in debt they accumulated from buying up papers (and making the former newspaper-owning families rich), but so what? If GM were posting operating profits and merely needing time to refinance debt Detroit would be ecstatic. Where is the earnings statement of the internet only news operations? The truth is, most internet companies from Twitter to Facebook are losing money. But everyone wants to give them millions because "they're the future." Newspapers MAKE MONEY, but its cool to diss them, so let's celebrate their destruction, or mock those who are trying to figure out how to survive the onslaught.
I guess real journalism involves making up "facts" on the fly and editorializing out of your sphincter.

Hubris alert

The Jeff Jarvis ego train rolls along. Here's the latest prediction.

Newspapers will die this year and there’ll be silence before successors emerge.

Note, he did not say some newspapers will die. He didn't say American newspapers will die. He said newspapers will die. So if just one of the tens of thousands of papers worldwide survives 2009, we win. Does he really think even a majority of American newspapers will fold?

The Triple -J?

I'm starting to consider renaming my blog Jeff Jarvis is a Jerk (the triple J?)
What is offensive about Jarvis and his ivory tower assertions (it figures that one of the media's chief journalism biz pundits hails from academia) is not that he heralds the end of print. If that's your opinion (and it's a common one) that's fair. What's insulting to journalists everywhere is his criticism of the profession. Note this statement in a recent posting criticizing those who say Google should pay newspaper for posting, in total, the work journalists produce in small newspapers that gets picked up by the Associated Press

* Make Google pay. This one assumes that newspapers have a God-given right to the income they used to get from advertising and that Google (and craigslist and eBay and papers’ own customers with their own, free web sites, for that matter) stole it from the papers and thus are starving journalism. Show me where that commandment is written. Others competed with lazy, monopolistic newspapers, giving the marketplace a better service. Google and the rest owe them nothing. Indeed, newspapers should be paying Google for its distribution and promotion, as Google is the new newsstand and content gains value with links.

Shame on us for assuming that well-researched news stories that are vital to an informed public have intrinsic value. And newspapers are "lazy," while others competed, giving the marketplace a better service. How? When a bunch of computer geeks build an better Internet mouse trap to repackage the work of real journalists while doing absolutely NO original reporting, that's industrious competition??? And shame on us for thinking they should pay.
Jarvis' rejoinder, no doubt, is that his criticism is aimed at the business institutions behind newspapers and not the individual journalists. But journalists know we can't ply our trade covering one beat on one blog. Some sort of organization is needed. In the past, newspapers have provided that organization. In a newspaperless future, some Internet organization will provide that organization. The consumer loves the elegant simplicity that clearinghouses provide. If Google is that clearinghouse, fine. But I doubt Google has much interest in paying me to cover my city council. How lazy and monopolistic is that?