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.