Trouble

Great song by Coldplay, of course. But to the point -- some brief notes before getting back to Strawbridge's:

Best Buy plans to cut back its newspaper spend. If that money was going to online, it'd be one thing. But Best Buy, the ultimate mass retailer, is going to use it on something it considers more effective and mass. Our old friend television. Yes, this is replaying the late 1980s. Either Best Buy is total idiots, or they're saying something about the utility of the Long Tail Internet for true mass marketers.

Their problem? Metro newspapers no longer deliver their mass audience. (The Macons and Rockfords of the world still do in their markets.) Best Buy has been among the newspaper business' best customers and also among those who have said to newspapers, look, get it together. "We're seeing a shift back to traditional media. And TV still has a gigantic reach," said the head of the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, who doubtless wants there to be a shift back to traditional media but says that the ROI on digital -- and remember how cheap digital ads are -- isn't showing up. That switch won't include newspapers as long as they appear to be a medium only read by people 75 and older, which will happen as long as newspapers say "We don't believe anyone under 75 will ever read our newspapers." If I were 25, I wouldn't want to read an old-folks medium even if I thought I might want to.

Only the newspaper business would find itself owning the Associated Press, as it does, and being told that the AP was losing money on serving newspapers and was going to remedy that eventually. Again, that's not on serving "print" newspapers. That's serving newspaper clients and their online sites. First-rate news, third-rate businesses.

And to get back to big-box stores, news from retailing on the front page of the New York Times: Not quite so big box stores, the Old Navy size, are downsizing and finding, perhaps to their surprise, that more people, not fewer, are coming into smaller stores. Now, this story has some weaknesses in the classic Times manner -- the lead promises more than is delivered, although by the end all the "we can't actually say this"es have all been said. The stores may be paying rent on the space they're not using, but that doesn't mean costs don't go down -- you're not having to have enough clerks to watch a larger room for theft and set up the displays, or straighten the merchandise, or put up signage. But it's in keeping with a problem department stores (and newspapers) have had for years: People have to be trained in how to use them efficiently.

A newspaper is a wonderful agglomeration of content even in the Internet age -- but you have to know how to use it (this is here, this is presented this way...) and be willing to spend the time using it exclusively. In department store terms, there's a wonderful selection of kitchen appliances when you want an iron, but you have to be willing to walk past perfumes and jewelry, take the escalator, turn around, and go past luggage. Then you have to find your way out, which is often harder.

In the Google era, your experience -- it's not the reality, there's a lot more starting and stopping and blind alleys than you realize, but you can always be doing something else at the same time -- seems to go from: I want appliances. Search for appliances. Find appliances. Having done so, walking into even an appliance store to look for an iron seems interminably long. I don't want no steenking gadgets. What I really want is: An iron store! I drive up to Iron World, walk in, and there are irons. No confusion. No need to ask the clerk, "Where are the irons," and have the clerk look at me with contempt as she says, "Behind you." I feel like I have not wasted my time, even if I spent 10 minutes more in Iron World than I would have in Appliance City.

As a person with Bloomingdale's notes, these are "stores that have been stripped of the distractions and temptations of unwanted merchandise." That sounds like the New Frugality, and it's certainly the New Inventory, but it also speaks of a change in shopper mentality -- if everything in the world is available online, why do I want to go to a store that has some of everything in the world when I am only there for a specific niche -- as with H&M and Zara, not even a specific product, but a specific gestalt? If I want everything in the world, I'll go online. But most of the time, I don't really want everything in the world. In that case, bricks and mortar works just fine. (Note to Long Tail enthusiasts: Yes, categories such as books suffer more than Iron World, because the number of irons is somewhat limited, whereas the number of books appears to be infinite. The number of blouses is infinite, but the number of blouses with H&M cred is not.)

As noted here before, it's not that the department store and newspaper failed to have enough content. They tried their darndest. It's that the amount of content available in the world rapidly exploded far beyond their ability to have a representative sample of Everything for Everyone. So you've got to figure out what your niche is -- who your customers are and can be, as opposed to who your customers used to be or who you wish they still were -- and then serve them to your profit, with your pipeline, and not worry so much about people who are never going to be your customers. And your pipeline can be Anything You Want It to Be.

And as Best Buy shows, your customers may not be living all their lives online at all. Newspapers, though, are still thinking that somehow they can create, online now, some product or combination of products that will still Grab Everyone in the Market. As Best Buy also shows, newspapers' problem is that that product was introduced after World War II and is ultimately responsible for their current fate far more than broadband access.

I'd just ask Best Buy, what can we do that works for you, and not worry so much if we can get the same product to work for Joe's Vinyl Record World that wants to reach 3,000 Long Tail vinyl fanatics. Let him be a customer of VinylLives.com and never have anything to do with a newspaper. But that's not how newspapers think traditionally -- there's local money on the table! We must try to grab it all, because in the past we could! We will find The One Answer! (Alas, he's in Istanbul now.) If One Answer had worked, newspapers would not have started to decline once they were down to one title per market. (Wonder what would have happened to TV from the 1960s to 1980s if it had been reduced to one station per city, as advertisers might have seen as a efficient buy back then? Bless those government licenses. It goes in line with the theory that American religiosity stems not from the Puritan tradition but from the history of competition among churches, which was nonexistent in most nations.)

None of this looks good for newspapers whether they have printing presses or not. What's a printie to do? Talk about copy editing's obscure points, as at my entry here on the American Copy Editors Society's board notes.

It's Been Summer...

Life was too nice to spend it posting. But things have been happening, so it's time to get back into gear.

First, though, a search for "That's the Press, Baby" on Google brings this link to a clip from the Bogart movie posted by a fan in Italy, with this as the famous last quote:

"È la stampa, bellezza. E tu non ci puoi fare un bel niente!"

Can't you just hear Bogey saying that!

---

Before going on to newspapers, a couple of comments on department stores. You may remember the snarky article the New York Times did on J.C. Penney Co. when it opened in Manhattan. Not only did the story seem to insult a goodly number of Americans, it may have missed the point on Penney's as well. Elizabeth Wellington, the fashion writer for my paper, notes that Penney's more fashion-oriented advertising is being backed up by actual trendy merchandise. (At least in women's wear. I've made a couple of passes through Penney's men's department and found it awash in polyester; also at both stores I have been in recently, the lighting and roof tiles seem unchanged since the malls opened. But you have to start somewhere, and just changing the color of "JCPenney" on the signs from white to red wasn't going to be enough.)

---

Finally there's a new-this-year site called the Department Store Museum. The blogger, whose name is given as "BAK," mentions that he was laid off recently. If so, he has used his time well, although I hope it becomes remunerative. The wonder of his site is that in addition to historic photos, he posts old logos, store directories, and branch locations. Thus, if you want to know what was on the fourth floor at E.W. Edwards & Son in Syracuse, you can find out it was housewares, wallpaper and paint, and fabrics. BAK started off with a bang and slowed down in July, and I hope he has gotten a job ... but what he's done is immensely helpful in tracking major department stores in the 1950s through 1970s, when they were branching out but also trying to maintain their large downtown presences.

Customer Service

The Washington Post has this problem.

No, not that problem. (Whatever you want to think. Fiscal Times, selling access to newsmakers, rampant liberalism, too much in Bush's camp on Iraq...)

The Washington Post has this problem with its readers' expectations, as ombudsman Andrew Alexander put it:

"A common lament from longtime print readers is: 'What's happened to my Post?' They want the newspaper to remain as it was. And many are put off by The Post's emphasis on the Web."

Alas, all Alexander can offer them is, basically, "your time is passing":

"... The print audience is generally older, and there is no evidence that large numbers of younger readers will acquire the habit of reading a newspaper. So The Post must do everything it can to retain its loyal print readers while preparing for the day when its Web site is dominant."

In other words, the Post must not completely alienate the people who are paying the bills, while at the same time putting most of its effort into trying to find a way to get a new group to pay the bills, and thus sort of partially alienating the first group. It's not Alexander's fault that he is left having to write a sentence such as "It's essential to maintain newspaper circulation, which inevitably will dwindle." He just works there, and he has no more idea how to solve the problem than anyone else.

Some copy editors would have challenged that sentence, even in an opinion column, as needing to be rewritten as "While newspaper circulation inevitably will dwindle, it's essential to maintain as much of it for as long as we can." But copy editing is in sad straits these days. Part of "what's happened to my Post?" is the lack of copy editing:

"Many in the newsroom, and more than a few readers, believe the quality of The Post's journalism has suffered. In some ways, I agree. For instance, excessive typos and grammatical errors are hurting credibility."

Alas, Alexander has no answer for that one either, and neither did Deborah Howell, the previous ombudsman, who left us all too soon as the result of a car crash, but while she was in that job often pointed out that the buying-out of large numbers of Post copy editors had hurt the Post in readers' eyes. Still, I understand that if your newsroom has shrunk from a staff of 900 to 550 and your paper is still losing money, bringing back copy editors is probably not going to be your first answer, although maybe it should be.

Department stores really didn't have an answer to this problem either. As their business started to decline, they reacted in basically the same way newspapers did: Cut here, prune here, whoops that's not enough, let's figure out our core mission ... which inevitably turns out to be "what do we want to do" and not "how do we execute it." I can see department stores saying, "Our survival depends on being leaders in fashions for men, women, children and the home, etc." and then saying, "So let's lay off the returns desk and let's cut back on the training our clerks receive, and then let's cut the number of clerks in half, because we've got to compete with discounters who don't employ any of those people. Oh, and make the gift boxes really flimsy and hard to get. But we'll still be leaders in fashions for men, women, children and the home, so people will come here."

As noted here before, Kohl's has become a major national chain by offering many parts of the department store experience (good lighting, classic merchandise displays) with shopping carts and a checkout. Traditional department stores cut back on the number of people working, added to their duties (such as making them handle returns), and had people working the register who had no idea how to operate it, let alone help you actually select something. But they still had you wander the floor looking for an open register. I can see how the traditional L.S. Ayres or Famous-Barr shopper would have reacted with horror if greeted by carts and a checkout aisle. But how many people also simply said, after waiting in line 25 minutes at Wanamakers, the heck with this?

People react to how they're treated, and a newspaper that says, as the Post and most newspapers basically have, that "more typos are just going to happen while we try to figure out how to survive on the Internet" runs the risk of its readers saying, "Gosh, they think I'm a moron," and thus not maintaining that essential-for-now circulation. People may not know the intricacies and lengths and efforts you went through to get an investigative story or even an interview with the stars of "Glee." They may not even care if you didn't get it and ran a story about Jay Leno instead. That's what you care about. They do know if you say "The stars of 'Glee' is planning for next year."

Unrelated but interesting note: Alexander's column notes that "Only 19 percent of those who read the newspaper go to The Post's Web site. And 86 percent of The Post's online audience is from outside The Post's newspaper circulation area." He notes, "That helps explain why The Post last year launched a 'Local Home Page' for those online visitors who live in the area," assuming that this will drive more of its print readers online. But isn't that less-than-20-percent figure the case for most newspapers? And don't most newspapers have an online audience profile that contains a lot of one-hit wonders, people who used to live there, and national sports fans? As has been noted to death, newspapers' problem is not that their readers all hate print. Most of them would have enough print readers to run for years. The problem is that advertisers find print overpriced and unresponsive to their needs -- as many of them found it for 20 years before the Internet offered an easy alternative. But hey, it's all about us journalists, right?

After You, My Dear Alphonse

Ehren Meditz, one of the devoted band who will not let copy editing die, sends me this report on "Employment Projections, 2008-18," from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

According to it, the largest decline in employment over this period -- which, of course, we are two years into -- will come in: No, not that. In department store employment, which is estimated to fall by 159,000 jobs to a total of 1,398,000, or a loss of 10.2 percent.

The third highest percentage hit, however, is to come from newspaper publishing, which is estimated to lose 24.8 percent of its jobs over the period, falling to 245,000 jobs from 326,000. (What's worse? "Cut and sew apparel manufacturing" and "semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing.")

In 1996, newspaper industry employment was 442,000 -- meaning that the estimate is for the loss of nearly half the jobs over a 22-year period. In 2005, however, we were down to 370,000 jobs. How many people have lost their jobs in 2009? Depending on where you were during the year, somewhere between 8,000 and 15,000.

Let's say it's the worse figure. That means a loss of, what, 66,000 jobs over the next eight years. Or, about 8,000 per year. In other words, every year for the next eight years would be basically like this year.

This sort of stuff is beyond me, but -- every year for the next eight years like this one?

Thank heavens, E&P is still with us, at least through December. It reacts by quoting analyst John Morton:

"I suspect what has happened in recent years has a big influence on how they predict the future. I don't know how they base those predictions. It is an unknown. A lot of it is going to depend on how the newspaper industry comes out of the recession and how successful they are in translating their business onto the Internet. One thing that would be supportive of newspaper employment is that 70% of daily newspapers have circulation under 50,000. Those kinds of newspapers have suffered far less than big city papers have. Going forward, they will suffer less."

And Poynter's Rick Edmonds:

"That is consistent with what has been happening the past three years. But I don't think the next three years will be as bad."

So what's the truth. Is it the labor statistic? Is it, well, maybe this:

"What are publishers' expectations for 2010? Not as bad as one would think according to an outlook report from Kubas Consultants that polled 500 newspapers executives in November to get their thoughts on future advertising and strategic initiatives.

"Ed Strapagiel, executive vice president of Kubas and author of the report, ventures that 2010 might be the year of the bottom. Don't expect newspapers to be turning in major positive ad growth results, though. From quarter to quarter things are anticipated to improve or 'decline less quickly.'

"'Newspaper executives and managers are significantly less pessimistic than a year ago,' Strapagiel wrote.

One of the more surprising finds to come out of the survey is that many respondents said they don't expect to outsource ad sales or printing next year. Nor do they anticipate upgrading the presses or cutting frequency.

Remarkably, one in four respondents said they plan to start a specialty, niche or lifestyle product. That said publishers intend on tightening operating budgets next year.

'Things won't get much better, but they won't get much worse either,' Strapagiel wrote. 'If the same trend continues, we could see positive growth in 2011.'"

This would indicate that publishers see a year of somewhat consolidating where they are now, and looking for areas to make additional money while maintaining their current operations. In other words, fighting back.

It will be hard to do that if one has to cut 8,000 jobs from the industry. Moving semiconductor manufacturing overseas is probably much more predictable than the volatile information business.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects from current trends. As this blog has said from day one, current trends never continue indefinitely.

Bec and Call

There's something here I can't quite put my finger on, in this story by Michael Callahan in Philadelphia magazine about the perceived decline of Le Bec-Fin, for so many years Philadelphia's signature restaurant, and the confusion that its longtime eminence, Georges Perrier, finds himself in as a result.

I arrived in Philadelphia after the "Restaurant Renaissance," the sudden outburst of restaurants -- from haute cuisine to hip cafeterias like the Commissary -- in the 1970s that in some way said that despite Mayor Frank Rizzo, despite the collapse of the workshop economy, despite the Third World aspects of the place (the built-in inefficiency, the bureaucracies, the corruption), the city was not the dour place of organization men, sheltered housewives, high society and Joe Sixpacks that it had seen itself as. One could be hip in Philadelphia, which one could never be before.

The growth of The Inquirer and the eventual downfall of the Bulletin was part of that. The Bulletin was Old Philadelphia -- stable, predictable, Brooks Brothers for the rulers, Sears for the ruled. The Inquirer roared onto the scene in the same manner as Le Bec-Fin or Frog or the Garden -- saying, in essence, Yes We Can. It was in part saying that we were as sophisticated as New York, as important, even while looking over our shoulder and wincing every time New York said, no you're not. But it was also saying that we were ready to stand up to the disapproval of our "betters." Le Bec-Fin was the "we can compete with any city" restaurant; Steve Poses' restaurants were saying that it wasn't inferior to just do what we liked. One dressed to the nines for Bec-Fin, as other restaurants became increasingly informal.

I went to Bec-Fin once, with my wife. I didn't enjoy it very much. It wasn't just wearing a suit for dinner, though I don't like to bother. And the staff was, as advertised, friendly and cooperative, not full of itself. The food, the presentation, were, of course, excellent; and although Perrier is notoriously cranky, he has always wanted people to enjoy being at his restaurant. There was nothing wrong with Le Bec-Fin. It's just that I didn't want to belong to that group, and thanks to the multiplicity of restaurants with food and experiences not on Bec-Fin's level but Good Enough, I didn't have to. I didn't have to prove I could fit in at a place like Bec-Fin to prove that I was knowledgable or sophisticated. I didn't need to feel I had merited Georges Perrier's seal of approval, because it wasn't that the only other option was Howard Johnson's. I knew in my heart that I wasn't sophisticated in that old-school way, but I also said: And it doesn't matter. It's not either Brooks Brothers or Sears.

In looking at department store ads before Christmas from the 1950s, I'm struck by how many said something like "They'll appreciate your gift more when they open that Ayres (or Shillito's or Emporium or Frederick & Nelson) box." Part of the gift was showing that you 1) cared enough and 2) were couth enough to understand that buying a gift at Foley's meant something beyond the gift itself. Why? Well, there really wasn't that much variety. Men wore white shirts to work every day. Women wore gloves and hats. There was a uniform for every occasion.

The department-store box showed that you had bought quality -- possibly even paid a bit more -- for a sweater vest that didn't look that much different than the sweater vest you could have bought at Nat's Cut-Rate Men's Wear. You understood the rules. Newspapers were part of the way in which society said, every day, here's what's important, decide to what degree you are going to fit in. You can decide not to go to Le Bec-Fin, but if you do you will belong to the class of people who don't go to Le Bec-Fin, and there are really only two classes of people.

Georges Perrier's temple of gastronomy is suffering not because he has refused to change -- given the sort of chef he is, he's jumped through hoop after hoop this last decade. It's because no one needs to go to Le Bec-Fin to feel sophisticated anymore. In food, "good enough" is now as good or better than "excellent" used to be, and thus, if I think I am sophisticated, wherever my friends and I go shows our sophistication. We don't have to be "discerning," because "discerning" no longer means "figure out what people better than you say is good, and learn to like it." And thus, the death of "Gourmet."

A department store box no longer communicates that the gift-giver cares, because there's huge variety and nearly everything is of the same quality -- not as good as "excellent" used to be, but good enough that "excellent" no longer matters. And one no longer has to read a newspaper to feel informed -- even if the newspaper is no worse than it was 10 years ago, even if it is an excellent newspaper, "good enough" is sufficient because knowing what's in the newspaper is no longer a civic expectation. You no longer need to show you understand the rules; you find the group whose rules understand you. Or you create one.

"Trade-Off," a new book by Kevin Maney, a longtime USA Today journalist, gets at this from a related angle. He redefines the "you have to be Wal-Mart or Target, but Kmart is nobody" argument as: It's the balance between "fidelity" and "convenience." "Convenience" is the mass-market stuff you don't really care about but need to have. "Fidelity" is what you love. You'll pay a premium for fidelity and suffer as little inconvenience as possible for the rest. Thus, the cost of a newspaper, the getting it from the street in the cold, the ink on your hands, most important having to concentrate on it instead of multitasking are massive inconveniences -- unless you love the newspaper. The problem for newspapers is, not enough people love the newspaper.

What Maney's book doesn't bring out is that it used to be common to have mass-market fidelity. People used to love department stores because one got one's sense of self from doing what seemingly knowledgable people did, which was to buy at department stores. I think it's this sense of wanting mass-market fidelity back that animates many social conservatives -- "I want broadcast TV to reflect my values because I want to fit in with broadcast TV, I don't want to have to care about what's on HBO or AMC, I want there to be a mainstream and I want to be part of it" -- but that's just a silly personal opinion.

And Then Came A Time

... when I realized that I wasn't posting, and that I really didn't miss it.

But that left a loose end, and I couldn't figure out how to tie it up, until the last week. So to return:

The professionalization of journalism in the 1970s meant that, over time, being editor of a newspaper became a little less like being responsible for all the non-advertising content, and more like being an uber-city editor. I recall back when I was young and ideological, objecting to why we published "sewing patterns" syndicated features. We could be running news there! I was told that even though they brought in, oh, $40 a month, that that was revenue credited to the news department and kept it from being a total cost center.

The editor who made that determination knew every comic in his newspaper, every syndicated column, every part of the package. I would guess that many top editors today don't even know what comics and columns their papers publish (except as "how can we get this off the budget"), nor do they read them. As professional journalists, their role is to push investigations and local coverage. Anything else -- such as "does anyone actually read the replacement for Ann Landers" -- is not what they got into journalism to do. In the old days, part of training for becoming the top editor was learning how to select what your staff didn't produce. Being editor of the newspaper was not just about journalism. It was about producing a newspaper.

But a newspaper, as any longtime readers of this blog will remember, is a department store. People came into the newspaper store for lots of reasons -- to read news, to read comics, to read ads, to look for jobs or houses. The same with the department store, but as more competitors rose up it had to figure out what areas it simply couldn't compete in profitably (white goods) and make choices. Some department stores made bad choices, basing their businesses on having more upscale customers than the market actually had; others simply did business as always until there wasn't enough business left. But at one time it was unimaginable that a city would not have at least one locally-based department store.

Many of them did badly, but their aim was still to serve the customer. Journalists' aim was to serve society, and it wasn't their business to make society buy their content. In fact, it became kind of against the point. Those of us who worked in the business in the early 1980s will remember that it was a time when newspaper editors were stuck on the point, "Why don't they love us?" We had brought down Nixon! We had exposed the hard truth about their communities! They did not appreciate us. We would keep doing what we did, until they learned to.

Even at that point, when the business model seemed unassailable, journalists had fallen into their position of, "If the public doesn't like what you're doing, get a different public." The wall between church and state had liberated newsrooms from having to write puff pieces about major advertisers and keep their children's DUIs out of the paper. The professionalization of journalism meant that space devoted to things such as police blotters, marriages and divorces, club notes and small-town newsletters would be instead used for actual journalism written by trained journalists. It didn't matter that those items were what some people bought the paper for. (Some readers actually read progress editions.) We would educate those readers to appreciate what they should want. It was like the impressionists vs. the academy.

So there was no need to ask if this was what readers wanted. It was what we were going to do to make a better society. (We brought down Nixon!) Did a doctor ask his patients what they wanted? He tried to cure them. The prospect that a reader would plunk down the price of a newspaper to do the crossword, but wouldn't pay one red cent for journalism, either didn't enter people's minds, or if it did -- well, those people were the wrong public. We're all the New York Times on this bus.

European newspaper people, looking at the problems in America, often say: It's because you don't know how to compete. But American journalists are very competitive. They knew very well how to compete -- with other newspaper journalists. They knew how to get the scoop first. As nearly every city found itself with one newspaper, they learned to compete increasingly through entering contests. But competing for the reader's time by putting out a product the average reader wanted to buy -- this was harder. (Many, many readers, of course, wanted -- still want -- the newspaper product.) Then came the online revolution, and newspapers were told that it was all about "content" -- which they interpreted as being "do what you're doing and someone will pay for it" -- and here we are. OK, but so what?

The problem is that where we are is incoherent regardless of whether it's print or online or cellular or whatever. Department stores became incoherent in the late 1980s when no one could figure out what they really were about (selection? price? service?). Trying to adapt to a new world, newspapers cannot figure out what they are. Steve Yelvington -- who may not know what copy editors do in the 2000s, but is a strong and clear-eyed analyst of newspapers' problems and opportunities -- made the point that hit home with me:

"Journalism has never had a business model of its own. It's always been a tool in the execution of some other agenda. This was true in the era of the partisan press, and it's true in the era of the commercial press. Newspapers are in the business of helping other businesses sell goods/services. Journalism is useful in that business, but it's not essential."

More to come.

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 31

In addition to Penn Traffic, noted in Vol. 30, Johnstown's other major department store was Glosser Bros. As noted in "Johnstown, Pennsylvania: A History, Part One, 1890-1936" by Randy G. Whittle, Wolf Glotzer immigrated to the U.S. in 1903 from Russia and was soon joined in Johnstown by his son Nathan. The name became Anglicized to Glosser and Nathan opened a men's store and cleaners that made enough money to quickly bring the entire family over. This was a late start for an Eastern department store family. Glosser's occupied the brick building on the corner as well as the five-story building to its left.

By the post-World War I era, the store had expanded into a full department store, including a full grocery business -- which Glosser's maintained into the 1960s at least, far after most department stores had left the food business. (El Corte Ingles in Spain still runs full-line groceries in many of its department stores.) David Glosser was a well-known philanthropist in Johnstown. Glosser's soldiered on into the late 1980s, by which time its major emphasis had become its Gee Bee discount stores, which eventually were sold to the Value City chain.

The building on Locust St. at upper left is the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. There was a third Johnstown department store, Kline's, that made it into the 1960s, but I am not sure exactly which building it was on Main Street.

Why Newspapers Need to Charge, Part II

Yesterday's post also was written before I read the American Journalism Review article "A Costly Mistake?" about the Associated Press' decision to sell its content to Web sites, even though the AP is owned by newspapers. It shows how for reasons that seemed right at the time, and some of which probably seem right still, the AP "has been strengthened by customers from outside the newspaper circle. But those new customers have helped foster a competitive climate that has weakened the health of newspapers, which threaten the newsgathering ecosystem that the AP brought into being 163 years ago."

Tom Curley, the AP president, now says: "It was a dumb idea to think that you could pay the rent on the Internet with advertising alone. Free is not a business model. The Internet means unlimited [ad] inventory, competition and a chaotic branding experience. It's a disaster for most companies."

Curley also notes: "If I had tried to suggest this a couple years ago, I'd be hollered out of the room."

Such was the sway of Internet triumphalism, and there are doubtless those who would read this article and say, Good! Death to the AP! Why do we need the AP when the world is full of tweets? Why do we need reporters when everyone can contribute something to the conversation? Corporate journalism should die anyway. The only real journalism is the voice of the people.

Why do we need electricians when anyone with the equivalent of "Electrical Wiring for Dummies" and the ability to tweet, "Hey, I'm about to connect this wire (see picture I just took) to the circuit breaker box, am I doing the right thing?" can find advice, counsel and probably someone who will say, "You moron, you're about to blow up your house." But still, I think we need electricians.

That said, newspapers, I hope, also have learned this lesson that AJR points out, which department stores, in their own hubris, also did not heed:

"Why buy a copy of the New York Times, or bother going to its Web site, when the AP's versions of the same national and international events are available just about everywhere? Who needs the Washington Post's take on politics when the AP's generally comprehensive and thorough reporting suffices?"

Which means, in essence, who needs the Washington Post's take on politics even if there was no Internet?

One of the mistakes department stores made when they lost their own hold on exclusivity and thus on pricing -- as clothing became so cheap to manufacture overseas that any store could offer a competitive selection at a low price, and as the agreements that had kept major brands out of discount stores were ruled illegal -- was to say, well, we are the department store. People have done business with us for years, and they will appreciate our neat, ordered and upscale atmosphere, not having to throw stuff into a shopping cart, being able to talk to a salesperson, the wide selection we offer, bonuses such as gift wrapping and boxes (with our name on them!), and our generous return policies.

And some people did. Others appreciated throwing stuff into a shopping cart, not having to wait for a salesperson, and were glad to do their own wrapping (with cheap boxes), etc. And the "we've been here since 1827" argument impressed few (that's nice, but I'm here today). Whereupon the department stores' business continued to suffer, so they offered fewer salespeople, cheap boxes, poor gift wrapping, etc., etc., as well as cutting back on what they sold, while continuing to go into each new mall because if they didn't, the other department store would be there by itself.

Some of this they either got away with or it didn't matter (no one wanted to buy outdoor TV antennas at department stores) but when you talked to people in the 1980s and 1990s about why they no longer went to department stores, there was one large issue -- undertrained salespeople and not enough of them -- so you had to wander through the store looking for a register that was open (in the 1960s, every department always had an open register) and be willing to be told (before computerization), "I can't take that merchandise, you have to go to him over there..." and then stand in line 10 minutes while a hapless clerk who had started yesterday was asked to exchange three shirts and a belt for two pair of pants and a swimsuit, because the department store had already eliminated its separate exchange desk as well. The department store could have gotten away with a lot, but not by making the customer experience the weak point as it tried to manage its real estate portfolio and credit lines and elevator repairs.

Newspapers also misjudged the number of people who thought that some of the bells and whistles of newspapers offered a major competitive advantage. The chore of reading news on the Web -- the fonts, the wide width, the scrolling -- yes, you can adjust some of this on your computer, but Drudge, for example, has the graphic design of a mid-1990s high school project. Few except the most avid Web users will deny that newspapers are easier to read than Web pages, and newspapers spend huge amounts of money on design, font selection, dot screens and the like, and yet it appears that many people will read anything they are interested in no matter how badly it is presented, as long as it's free.

If you talk to most good reporters, their objective is "to not do the AP story" -- to not simply tell what happened, but to add the poignancy, creative writing, and other coloratura that will distinguish the story and make it theirs. They do so largely to please themselves, but they also believe this will make the experience better for the readers. On such efforts was the old advertising motto of the Los Angeles Times -- "a special kind of journalism" -- founded. Again, the Internet era has not shown that such things don't matter at all. It has shown us that such things matter less, and to a smaller group of readers, than we perhaps thought, because the reader is not us.

The AP has brightened up its writing, but clearly a story saying "Flooding devastated North Dakota yesterday, forcing hundreds from their homes and..." is just fine with a large number of readers. The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times and Dallas Morning News national bureau stories of the 1990s, gathered at great expense and exclusive to them and their wire clients, and beginning with something like "Jethro Bodine looked sadly at the field behind his house. It should be brimming with wheat, he said, just days away from harvest, as it has been for him and his father and grandfather on these 2,000 acres a few miles from Jamestown, decade after decade. Instead, he said, 'It's all flooded. Ruined. Probably ruined me, too'" were very well done, and some readers loved them; but many others would have been just as happy with "Flooding devastated..."

But large newspapers convinced themselves that this was their competitive advantage. It was, in luring top reporters, winning awards, getting recognition within the journalism community; it just wasn't quite as important as we thought to the general readership, which kept telling us, "I don't have time to read the paper," which we ignored. The readers didn't have 10 minutes to wait in line at Wanamakers, either.

The Mysterious Deaths, Part II

This month, Gannett announced it would make major changes to what anyone who worked in southeast lower Michigan journalism knows as the O&E. What were once the heart of the chain, the Birmingham Eccentric and its West Bloomfield edition, are being closed -- in fact, anything with the moniker "Eccentric" will disappear. The footprint of the Observer papers, which I think began as a chain in Livonia -- it might have been Farmington -- and were merged with the Eccentrics when Phil Power owned the group, will continue to be supported. This was western Wayne and the South Oakland suburbs -- Southfield, Pleasant Ridge, Berkeley. But the Eccentric heartland -- oh-so-upscale Birmingham and Bloomfield, along with less-hoity but still well off Rochester and Troy -- will be abandoned, according to this story by the Detroit News, which should know, as it also is owned by Gannett. No papers, no Web site, nada.

This twice-a-week operation was once a gold mine. Coming on the heels of the end of the Ann Arbor News, the end of 7-day home delivery in Detroit, the end of 7-day publication up I-75, it says once again that recovery for Detroit is years away, if ever. One can spin the Ann Arbor News closure as a proper response to a young, hypereducated, hyperhyperlinked town. One can't spin that for Flint, Saginaw or Bay City, and the spin on Detroit is creaky. All one can do is pull out empty pockets in the manner of the Monopoly card. And unless Birmingham and Bloomfield have changed into Seattle overnight, one couldn't say it about them either -- which is probably why there was no "we're going to be making the Eccentric into BirmEcctoday.com" or something. Just goodbye, unless I'm totally missing something in this story as well as Editor & Publisher's.

I went to Topix and looked for local news about Birmingham, Mich., assuming that since I lived there, some other competitor had come into the market and cleaned the Eccentric clock. But the stories there were from something called Hometown, which turned out to be the soon-to-be-abandoned Web site of the Birmingham Eccentric. I googled "local news Birmingham MI" and didn't find anything relevant at the top of the list either. So much for a local online news site devastating these papers. Or maybe everyone in Birmingham tweets each other all the local news.

Now, I've heard anecdotally that Birmingham is no longer the destination it once was in Detroit terms -- the young and trendy go to Royal Oak, and the closure of Jacobson's had to hurt badly. (One of the things that made Michigan a special place to live in the 1970s was Jacobson's, a department store chain that was once equal parts Penney's, Lord & Taylor, and Lily Pulitzer. Its answer to the Michigan Malaise of the 1980s was to throw out the Penney's element and try to become a national upscale chain. That didn't work.) And the O&E is a union shop, although something nags at the back of my brain that says there was some sort of distinction between Observer people and Eccentric people. But that may be completely off base.

One main reason the Birmingham Eccentric in the 1970s and 1980s was such a gold mine -- and had journalistic talent and standards comparable to any midsize daily newspaper, including a real copy desk -- was real estate advertising. Page after page of real estate ads, not the crabbed little print of the typical daily but large photo displays for each trophy property. Birmingham and Bloomfield are, with Grosse Pointe, the home of Detroit's elite -- Bloomfield having some reputation as where you lived if you were a GM executive. The market for executive homes in Detroit is probably not going to be good for many years to come (although perhaps some Fiat executives will be looking), so union pay levels are probably unsupportable. (Goodbye Turin, hello Detroit -- I wonder how many euros as a bonus that move would have to entail.)

But still. People read print newspapers in Pittsburgh, in Milwaukee, in Rochester -- like Detroit, not cutting-edge markets for the young, hip and wired. (People of every age read them everywhere, but let's just not get into that one today.) So Detroit is becoming Ground Zero for newspaper reinvention not because the market is demanding it, but apparently because there simply is no advertising market. For those of us who can remember B. Siegel, Himelhoch's, Winkelman's, Tuttle & Clark, Grinnell Bros., the Good Housekeeping Shops, Hughes Hatcher Suffrin, Louis the Hatter, Adler-Schnee and Annis Furs, let alone Hudson's, Crowley's and Federal's, it's too sad. Any rate, if anyone has more concrete information about the Eccentric's end, please add to this.

First Floor, Not Everything

My pal Ehren Meditz alerted me to this article in the Dallas Morning News about the plight and apparent death spiral of ne-- no, not newspapers, but department stores. The disgruntled department store shopper sounds like the disgruntled newspaper non-user -- now that the universe of what I can buy is, basically, the universe, the department store simply can't have enough, or at the right price, or in the front of the store, or what I saw on the Oscars in stock five days later, or, or -- check out in particular the "department store paradoxes" at the bottom of the story.

When I was a child, and my mother would take me shopping at Ayres, Block's and Wasson's -- I wonder why we were grammatically incorrect and never called it Ayreses' -- occasionally they would not have something in my size. No problem; we just looked for the same thing, or nearly the same thing, at one of the other stores. The same thing for my mother and grandmother. Ayres might not have the right size purple housedress, but Block's would have it (it might be the same line, if not it would be close enough).

The stores had a wide enough selection that you didn't feel that you were missing anything. Indianapolis was not a city of specialty stores. For women's clothing downtown, there were a couple of mass-appeal shops -- Morrison's and Three Sisters -- that my mother avoided, plus Peck & Peck and a store my mother did like called Schamberg's. There were some neighborhood stores -- Peacock's was ours, run by a relative of the Ayres family -- and the occasional children's wear store like Tot 'n' Teen, but for women's and children's wear, furniture, appliances, carpets, china, etc., if you shopped the three big stores, you had pretty much seen what was on offer. (Men had a couple more choices -- Strauss, which was almost a department store, and Harry Levinson, which had been a hat store.) Just like back then, the newspaper -- newspapers at that time -- gave you 90 percent of what you could have found out about that day's happenings anywhere else.

When Glendale, our first big shopping center on the Northside, opened, there were some new shops -- Kay Bradfield for women and Roderick St. John's for men -- but the same pattern held -- there was Ayres, there was Block's, there was Morrison's, there was Strauss, and Harry Levinson. It wasn't until the mall put a roof overhead -- making the whole mall into a department store of stores -- and stores such as the Gap and the Limited opened that it became more apparent that some mall stores, and later big box stores, were selling lines and styles you couldn't even find in a department store. If you search for shopping malls in Europe, you find that malls can even be called department stores there -- because they don't have the traditional anchor store.

And once this all happened, the fact that they didn't have that shirt in medium suddenly loomed larger -- why bother with the department store at all? It might be overpriced or not have your size or not have the style you wanted. Chances are that it would only be lacking in one of those areas. Chances are the boutiques would be equally lacking. But the boutiques you could just run in and out of and drift back into the mall, which was never out of view. The disappointment was not as great, because the commitment of time and energy was less. (Think of the people who stand in the middle of a department store and have no idea where to go to get back into the mall.) Sort of like the average amount of time a reader spends with news online as opposed to the printed newspaper.

Department stores such as Bloomingdale's did try to answer this question with: So what sort of merchandise are people willing to spend time looking through? And thus came the era of in-store boutiques, which worked for Bloomingdale's but didn't work for mid-range stores like Hudson's and Halle's because half of their customers essentially said -- we're not willing to spend any time at all. We either want to flit about, or we just want the lowest price possible at Walmart.

So I agree with Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal that newspapers were dumb to not ask themselves "What content will people pay for" as opposed to "How can we get people to pay for the content we want to produce." As he notes, Stewart Brand said both that information wants to be free and information wants to be expensive; one wonders what the last 10 years would have been like had he changed the order in which he said that.

Newspapers' biggest mistake with online was not, in the end, the longest free introductory offer in history; it was thinking that online simply equaled existing newspaper minus printing press, just as department stores thought mall equaled downtown minus streets and poor people.

But I am not sure how the Journal example solves the problem for the Oregonian or the World-Herald or the Commercial Appeal. The level of scale they have to operate at to be the Oregonian or the World-Herald -- can they ever come up with enough content to place with a price tag to support themselves?

Which brings us back to Christine Urban, who reminds us (at the end of this piece): "I think we have so convinced ourselves it's OK that print goes away. ... There are hundreds of thousands of people in markets that do not get their news from the Internet and, thank you very much, don't want to get it from the Internet." Why do we treat those people like idiots? Because to an Internet enthusiast, how could anyone be so stupid as to not want to get news from the Internet? And that leads us to memories of the hot box, to come.

---

Two addenda. First, thanks to Alan Mutter for this post on, you know, Jeff Jarvis. I don't remember communist theory, but there were all these intermediate steps on the road to Pure Communism, and somehow, we never got there, and the length of time it would take to get there just kept getting more open-ended because, just as with Millerites' date for the end of the world, the truth is not out there. The Internet revolution has allowed endless refrains of "Imagine all the people, sharing all the world ..." Yes, I'd like that too, but as Jeff says: "Dog's gotta eat."

Finally, while I do try not to comment on events at my own employer -- yes, bankruptcy court is a heavy weight hanging over us. But so was the end of Knight Ridder and so is the possible death sentence for the Chron and so is the situation at GM and Chrysler and God knows what else. So that weight is hanging over everyone these days as the country deals with the fact that 30 percent of the money that existed three years ago is simply gone. So I won't be drawing attention to it, unless I suddenly find myself with an immense amount of time to write blog entries.

Will the Great Macyization Come to Newspapers?

The Zeltdown leads Jon Fine to speculate on a newspaper industry with concentrated ownership. Quoting an unnamed executive: "You're going to see a big wave of consolidation that will be forced on the industry." Said another: "We're going to end up with one big, giant merger, facilitated in bank negotiations."

In other words, Associated+Allied+Federated+May+Carter Hawley Hale+Dayton Hudson+Marshall Field=Macy's Everywhere, but in newspaper terms? "Fill-in-the-blank Today" as your local newspaper, with lots of centralized back-office operations and some local reporters as the equivalent of your local manager and sales staff?

The department store industry started as the newspaper industry did: Mostly locally owned stores, but with the occasional national chain (a la Hearst and Scripps-Howard) or local tandem. As families got tired of running stores that required ever-increasing amounts of capital to compete, once you got out of the late 1930s-to-late-1960s world of enforced stability followed by incredible prosperity, they either closed down or sold -- to the owner of a nearby store they knew, or to a major corporation. Again, like the newspaper business.

These companies then found themselves running a plethora of regional brands and devoting a huge amount of effort to re-creating the wheel -- separate price tags, separate management structures, separate billing offices -- so they started to consolidate brands -- a concept that has come late to the newspaper business, where re-creating everything city by city has been almost sacrosanct until now. An L.S. Ayres would take over Wolf & Dessauer in Fort Wayne and Kaufman-Straus in Louisville; then you only needed one division manager instead of three, one set of shopping bags, one warehousing department. Shoppers in Fort Wayne and Louisville missed their local store; you lost market share, but you were losing it anyway. The question was whether you had cut your costs enough to compensate for lost market share.

Eventually, you had to do it again and again. The local department-store business -- a Famous-Barr competing with a Stix Baer competing with a Vandervoort's (St. Louis, for those who don't recognize the names) -- became a business of Macy's competing with Penney's competing with Wal-mart competing with Kohl's. There was still a place for the traditional department store as a store; but it was a smaller place for a national brand or a regional chain, a Boscov's or Bon-Ton, maintaining a precarious toehold. In the old days, the department store was the only place that sold everything. Now you could get TVs at the grocery and groceries at Target. Also, the department store business did not attract the entrepreneurial personality as it once had, the larger-than-life figure who had made the local store into part of the city's DNA.

The Internet is a national (or international) distribution model, but taking print as the bricks-and-mortar Barnes & Noble, the Web as Amazon, and assuming that there is room for both to stay in business -- well, there probably is, but not for the traditional local merchant such as Robin's Books in Philadelphia. The cost to compete is too high. And Barnes & Noble will never be as mindlessly profitable as it could have been before the Web enabled Amazon.

Which is to say that part of the reason for the Great Macyization is that the third-generation ownership that characterized many department stores in their later years were quite content to mind the store when things were good, but when things were bad, they cashed in. (Contrast this with Al Boscov, who in his late 70s put his life and fortune on the line to save his family's stores. But then again, it was he who created the modern Boscov's business. He is in many ways the first-generation owner in the manner of Marshall Field, or the inspired enterpreneur such as Fred Lazarus.)

Which leads to a post by Salon cofounder Scott Rosenberg noting that the great newspaper families weren't always everything they were cracked up to be. Newspaper people mythologize the Binghams, Otis Chandler, Jack Knight; yet they were always the exception, just as a Max Hess Jr., who made Hess's in Allentown into a nationally respected store, stood out among the Clelands and Bowmans and Stearnses who operated locally dominant department stores, yet were simply content, once they had the leading store in town, to operate the leading store in town until that became too hard and their own children lost interest in the idea. They did a good job, but they were minders, not creators. The Bancrofts' El Foldo to Rupert Murdoch -- was their ever a family ownership more benign than the Bancrofts at the Journal? Just keep the money coming in, and we'll let you publish whatever you want. Whoops, here's a guy with more money who is going to completely destroy the newspaper you have known (even if he replaces it with something respectable). See ya.

In the Indiana in which I grew up, the Crittenbergers, Rileys, Bradfutes, Bosses, Foellingers, Snyders, Marshalls, Harrises -- all were families that owned local newspapers. People may have fond memories of working for them, but they are not mentioned in the same breadth as William Allen White or Joseph Pulitzer. Other papers were owned by consortiums of local businessmen, as in New Albany, or by chains smallish (the Weils' Federated Publications) or largish (Scripps-Howard, Central Newspapers). Dick Neal in Noblesville published a great smalltown newspaper. Families such as the Nixons, Schurzes and Browns still do honorable work after generations.

But every family gets to the point of saying -- do we run a local institution, or is this a business and we will sell it for what we can get? If we hold on too long, do we just watch it run itself into the ground, and our fortunes with it? The Latzes in Fort Wayne sold W&Ds to City Stores; the Ayres and Block families in Indianapolis found ready buyers in national chains. The other myriad small department store-owning families -- the Levines and Ziesels and Weilers and Carstenses -- held on until the cost of competing with the mall became too high, and there was little point anyway because the grandchildren had no interest in running a department store. At that point they closed down and tried to cash in on the real estate. OK for them, or not; bad for their employees, who believed that the White House or the Boston Store had been there forever and thus would be there forever.

But until the 1930s, the history of department stores and newspapers is of businesses opening and closing with great regularity. From the 1930s to the mid-1960s, greater stability prevailed. Since the 1960s, relative decline in both industries -- because of other media or stores opening and closing with great regularity. Is our thinking still held prisoner by the 1940s and 1950s, decades which look increasingly as if they were the exception, and not the rule we still think of them as? Did department stores and newspapers become institutions, rather than simply well-liked businesses, simply because there were two decades (the 1930s and 1940s) when it was nearly impossible for new competitors to challenge them, because of depression and war? It will be interesting to see if the Great Macyization, which has contributed to newspapers' financial hell, will cause a Great Somethingization in newspapers as well. What emerges may well be a viable business; it will probably have little romance, however.

Trust

I've written here about how newspapers used to sell trust, and the always insightful Bruce Cubbison of Syracuse noted how that trust has in many cases been transferred -- you trust, say, Jon Stewart more than you trust the New York Times, because you know -- or at least think you know -- that Jon Stewart shares your underlying attitudes. The problem with journalism's stock in trade, semi-omniscent objectivity, is that almost no one views the world with semi-omniscent objectivity. To see the world and see it whole, as a London Times editor once said of his calling (doing so before the Internet and thus having a not easily findable quote), is just not what the typical reader does, for the obvious reason that the typical reader is self-interested.

My former colleague Andy Cassel once wrote a column (I can't find it, but here's a brief comment showing it existed) on how Independence Blue Cross paid for the fireworks at a Phillies game. If IBX had the money to pay for fireworks, wrote Andy (now writing for the "Dismal Scientist" at Moody Economy.com and working with another incredibly talented journalist, the reporter and editor Colleen Gallagher), that was money that in a purely competitive economic system would have not been there because insurance prices would have been lowered. IBX's operation in a semi-protected sphere meant it could put aside money for what it saw as "good corporate citizen" activities. I don't remember, but I think Andy's point was that if the Phillies wanted to have fireworks, they could provide them themselves and build the cost into a ticket price. Thus you, Homo economicus, moving in a transparent market of goods and services, would be able to allocate your resources appropriately.

My son is the economist, but I know enough to know that 1) I don't know enough about economics to say anything rebutting Andy Cassel and 2) the Homo economicus model has been under a lot of attack because of its underlying assumption that while individuals may act irrationally, the marketplace as a whole will not act irrationally. It is like the Catholic teaching that while priests and bishops and even popes may err, the church itself cannot err -- a teaching that says that the only errors are those that the church chooses itself to call errors and correct. This asks ordinary mortals to trust the church, which is what institutions do. And we have seen the cost of institutional errors in the Catholic Church. In a pure free market there are no institutions, merely traders in the bazaar, which looks attractive when a surfeit of information makes it appear that we all know as much as everyone else.

The giant department store Rich's Inc. in Atlanta was known for having one of the most liberal returns policies anywhere. As Leon Harris wrote in "Merchant Princes":

"In each generation there were dozens of tales -- the true stories often more remarkable than the apocryphal ones -- of how Rich's resolutely, unremittingly, satisified its customers no matter how unreasonable, outrageous, or provocative. The store refunded the full price of an unused pair of high-buttoned shoes thirty yearsold, of an unworn man's shirt ten years old, of a dead canary. It accepted for credit or exchange merchandise that customers had bought not at Rich's but from its competitors, because when a customer alleged that she had bought it at Rich's, the Riches did not propose to call her a liar."

The Rich family took the omniscent view -- what appears to not be in our self-interest is actually in the interest of the store as an institution, and indeed in the interest of Atlanta. Harris notes that clerks tended to act in self-interest, though:

"Such a liberal program was very difficult to enforce because employees usually felt that they were giving away their money, their profits, that they were being taken advantage of. ... The store's liberal return policy was only one aspect of the family's insistence that the store must be run to suit the needs of its customers."

In other words, hey, Mr. Rich, if you didn't take that shirt back, you'd have more money to pay me. But Rich's was incredibly successful for generations, becoming the largest downtown department store in the South and helping build the reputation of Atlanta as a place to be. Clearly Rich's built the cost of its return policy into its prices.

What probably made the policy less important was that as many goods got cheaper, it seemed less of a hassle to throw things away than return them. In a country with what many analysts (yeah, I know, that's a journalistic thing that means "some analysts whom I happen to agree with but don't want to take the time to cite") say there are too many stores, Homo economicus could buy the same toaster oven at Rich's or Wal-mart or CVS. Rich's could no longer build in its convenience premium. But Rich's then lost the ability to offer the consumer the same level of trust in the Rich's brand. Rich's then lost the ability to be a good corporate citizen as it had been with such programs as the Christmas Tree Bridge and its activities in the Depression:

"In 1930, when the virtually bankrupted city had no money to meet the schoolteachers' payroll, the store's president, Walter Rich .... called the mayor to suggest that the city issue scrip to pay the teachers, which the story would not only accept in payment but also cash at full value with no obligation that a penny be spent at the store. Rich's paid out $645,000 for this scrip and held it until the city could redeem it." (Harris.)

The individual gets the toaster oven for 30 cents, but society suffers unless your model of the world says there is no such thing as society, only self-interested individuals pursing maximum satisfaction. The weaknesses in that model are why institutions and regulations wax and wane. Institutions -- department stores, newspapers, banks, what have you -- tend to build "trust" in as part of their economic model. (IBX says, we'll put on fireworks to show we're good guys and you will trust us for your health coverage. Of course, good customer service is also necessary.) But "trust" is just another expense to throw over the side when the only market value is the highest return for the least effort -- the lowest cost. Homo economicus, being fundamentally irrational, throws trust out the window in pursuit of short-term gain, then rails back, wounded, when institutions are no longer trustworthy, having pursued nothing but short-term programs themselves.

All of which is a long way of wondering whether newspapers would have adopted the "everything is free" model of Internet service in an era less driven by a laissez-faire model -- or indeed whether they would have been able to (imagine the Internet appearing between 1905 and 1945, the era in which license plates, broadcasting licenses and modern banking regulations were established). Newspapers used to charge in part for "trust." The conundrum, of course, is that if people are told that anything except pure self-interest is "being taken advantage of," no one wants to pay for it. And then they find trust in people who they feel think as they do -- who, in journalism's case, mainly take what newspapers, newsmagazines and network broadcasters do, comment on it, and present it for their circle of fans. (Jon Stewart does his own form of original reporting, of course, which is why he has been honored, seemingly against his will, as a journalist.)

If newspapers were to suddenly say, "Hey, bloggers, you know, if you now want to comment on this information, you will have to pay for it," what would happen? Yes, I know the nature of digital information means that after the first person paid for it, it would be free. But for people to be able to trust anything other than "my friend whom I agree with," a price for trust -- for example, to employ editors whose job is to verify that the information is correct -- has to be paid.

All of which comes to mind in the current apparent failure of a system founded on laissez-faire unregulated self-interest. Will trust will be more important to the younger people now in high school, college and early jobs? And can institutions, such as newspapers, use this to emphasize trust as a value, even though it cannot come free?

Excitement

In the early 1980s I was occasionally doing the front page for The Flint Journal, which had a big street sale with first-shift workers coming out of the city's then-gigantic auto plants. I was trying, in keeping with the best thinking about newspapers then -- you weren't selling breaking news in the afternoon, you were selling in-depth journalism, you didn't want to overplay stories -- to do a front page placing the most meaningful, thoughtful stories at the top, with evocative headlines that could convey their subtlety -- i.e. small. And I got word that I was killing the paper's street sales.

When people came out of the factory, they wanted to see a big headline on the Journal's front page, one that said -- there's something interesting here. Buy this. All I was giving them was a small blur of black. And until then we had run stories above the flag, we had chopped the flag down by two columns. I knew instead that one was always supposed to run the flag full-width at the top of the page, and laid out the page in that manner. The flag was the visual starting cue that let the reader know where to begin.

When I was a child reading The Honolulu Advertiser -- if I've never explained how, as a child in Indiana, I read The Honolulu Advertiser every day, don't ask, but I did -- the paper would have gigantic headlines in red, and sometimes the name of the paper would be placed as an afterthought in columns three through five. The Los Angeles Times "Preview" edition had huge headlines.

The thinking in the 1950s and 1960s, though, was that that treatment was just for street sales. The home subscriber wanted something more restrained, more middle-class.

Department stores used to have display windows facing Main Street, some of them over-the-top. I remember talking to executives of Ziesel Bros. Co. in Elkhart, Ind., in the early 1970s. They had taken out the display windows because research had shown that people liked to see into stores to see the actual merchandise. Unfortunately, what you saw inside the windows of Ziesel Bros. was the store and not that much merchandise. I'm sure that there was a turn away from artificially designed display windows, but if you replaced it with a boring view of a store that next week looked pretty much like last week, why would anyone get excited?

In the 1980s, newspaper designers said that the flag was sacrosanct. Did Time run the word "Time" at the bottom of the page? And so the flag became an immutable element. Now papers such as The State in Columbia, the Yakima Herald Republic and the Klamath Falls Herald and News are running mini-flags, overlay flags, embedded flags. Also, papers such as the Waco Tribune-Herald are making sure that every day's paper comes with one extremely large headline. Alan Jacobson's design for the Boomerang in Laramie comes with almost incredibly large headlines above the flag, which may be halfway down the page.

What this has needed is a blessing, and now designer Mario Garcia has given it. I'm sure many designers will be aghast, that this deviates from all the work done to create clear navigation and a sense of priority and reader comfort. And those things are important. But they only work when someone actually uses the paper. And clearly many papers are asking themselves if they have become too staid, too predictable, too caught in the New York Times vision of saying that whatever may happen in the world, it is (with rare exceptions) not a surprise to The New York Times or its readers and thus it will be treated appropriately and measuredly. That is how readers of The New York Times want to see themselves, but it probably doesn't move many papers in Tulsa.

Yes, the reader wants to be able to get through the paper easily, and yes, geegaws and gimcracks ought not to get in the reader's way out of our boredom. But America is full of front pages that nearly scream, "Gee, nothing in particular happened today." If we're just going through the motions, why should you care? The sanctity of the flag always seemed to me to be more about the sanctity of the designer's design than selling the paper. Even if it will inevitably swing too far, it's time to swing. Excitement and fun are not opposed to good journalism.

Sixth Floor, Another Blog

Pat Thornton of Stars and Stripes has a blog -- you can't be a newsroom technology master without a blog -- called The Journalism Iconoclast, which consists of the same collection of looks at the future and rants about the backwardness of most newspaper staffs found on many blogs of newspaper technology masters. That's not a snark; it's just a fact, the same as how many comments by newspaper journalists who don't have their own blogs simply rant about these young pups and how they don't know anything and don't respect their elders. What we have here is a failure to communicate, as this posting by Pat shows, speaking to the Bowden Literary Journalistic Model; there's a value-system conflict, and its lack of resolution is killing the self-confidence of newsrooms just as much as declining ad revenue.

(It's finally starting to sink into my brain that, just as journalism-as-excellence-in-storytelling was seen in the 1960s and 1970s as the newspaper's proper answer to the problems of disruptive technology -- television confronting the boring, stodgy newspaper -- journalism-as-information is seen in the 2000s as the newspaper's proper answer to the problems of disruptive technology -- the Web confronting the boring, stodgy newspaper. The difference seems to be that some of today's critics don't expect the journalist getting onto his steed, free lance in hand, coming back to present the truth, to save the world. They expect the free exchange of information among everyone, enabled by journalists, to save the world. They have more trust in "everyone" than we did.)

Anyhow, Pat can be an angry man, as naming a blog "The Journalism Iconoclast" would indicate. But Pat knows the department store-newspaper link, and wrote a post called "Newspapers are the new general stores" touching on the department store theme. He notes that the problem with big stores -- he uses Woolworth's as a model, then compares it to Wal-Mart -- to say:

"Google, in a sense, is a general store for information. The thing is that Google has a lot of information, just as those gigantic Wal-Marts have a lot of items for sale. A Woolworth is about the size of one department in Wal-Mart." (Some downtown and mall Woolworths were much bigger, but a lot of neighborhood ones were not.)

"Wal-Mart combined the general store idea with a niche — really low prices on non-dollar store goods. ... Google has a niche too; it’s the easiest way to make sense of information and find information on the Web. There is just so much information on the Web that someone had to come along to help us sort through it.

"The thing is, most newspapers don’t have a niche. They're just like Woolworth. They do a lot of things OK, sometimes even relatively well, but excel at nothing. And without a niche, they’ll be overtaken by competitors who cover those individual areas better. ... I used to buy pet fish supplies at Woolworth when I was a kid, but now I can get a much better selection and better prices at Petsmart.

"Sure most dailies have local news, regional news, national news, international news, sports, business, technology, etc., but few excel in any of those areas. Think about how many newspapers still have film critics and even auto critics.

"These movie/entertainment and auto sections are nowhere near the caliber of niche outlets like Movies.com or Edmunds.com (or Car and Driver magazine). With the Web, why would I want to consume inferior, cursory content? I don’t. Many newspapers still operate like there aren’t strong niche competitors."

There's to me a small bit of incoherence to this -- how does Wal-Mart exist, then? Not everyone wants a niche store and many people want everything in one place, even with less selection -- but truth as well. Up until the 1960s department stores could say they offered everything because they offered a high enough percentage of everything to justify the claim. If the basic differences in refrigerators were brand name and size, it was easy to cover the market.

Here was the department store's conundrum: Once you had myriad options (side by side! icemakers! water through the door! silver doors!) from each manufacturer, the space you had to devote to a representative sample of what was available became more larger, to the point where you were making, comparatively, nothing on refrigerators. You could make more money per square foot by selling something else, with a higher markup, in that place. In addition, you could never fully compete with the big-box appliance store's selection.

So you got out of the refrigerator business and used the space for china or clothing or something that you made more money on. But now the customer who was shopping for a refrigerator had no reason to come into your store. Not so bad with a line like refrigerators, perhaps, that aren't bought every day; but the smaller your breadth of goods became, the fewer the number of customers who came into your store. And you had a massive infrastructure to support.

Newspapers have been facing exactly the same problem with stock listings, TV books and the like; space is valuable because it is limited, and while you could once round up the entire TV schedule in three columns, now you would have to devote three pages to it. So you cut back from that field, but the customer who mainly turned to the newspaper for complete TV schedules then no longer buys the newspaper, and is exposed to nothing else in it.

The department store's problem was not that it lost the people who came into the store to buy TV antennas; it lost the people who came into the store to buy TV antennas and then bought a shirt, buttons, shoes and a toaster oven while they were there. Newspapers similarly are losing the people who read the whole paper, but whose main reason for buying it was to check how AT&T was doing that day. (Journalists have the additional problem of not understanding that readers might buy the paper simply to do the Cryptoquote, and of disdaining them as a result.)

But while newspapers do have mediocre content -- and most newspapers do have the local-news niche; we somehow always end up making the top 40 metro dailies stand for all 1,300 daily newspapers -- I am not sure that the real issue is "inferior, cursory content." Much of what newspapers offer is good. The problem for Pat is not quality, but quantity. A newspaper can review a movie, but it only offers one review. Before the Web it could have tried to assemble a "movie page" in which it put together everything it knew about the movie business that day, but if you really, really care about movies you can do this yourself and see more than the newspaper could ever have presented -- because information now is theoretically limitless. Much of that content is going to be inferior and cursory, of course, usually more so than what the newspaper ran; but if you're really into it, do you care? Or do you just want: More. Indeed, feeling that you individually are so informed as to knowingly separate wheat from chaff is part of the emotional payback of the Web.

One of the roles of department stores from the 1930s to 1960s was trying to elevate middle-class taste. Pat is right that most newspapers don't need film critics these days; what we used to call middle-class taste barely exists now. (You either have inculcated what Pauline Kael was saying and gone on from there, or you don't give a damn. In the 1960s there really was a mass of people who wanted to be more sophisticated but had no idea how to go about it. Newspapers and department stores played a huge role in that process. Now, you get it from an early age or you don't.)

What newspapers do need is a film writer who tells the general reader what's new, culls from descriptions of it, and also writes about the local film community -- who's making independent movies, who's trying to establish a film series -- letting the newspaper be a leader in convening the community and enlarging it. And yes, this can operate as well in both the print and online environments. But for large papers, would the theaters stop advertising if you weren't reviewing their products?

In any event, it again shows that the problem facing newspapers is that there is no Problem Facing Newspapers. There are myriad problems in which people argue over which piece of the newspaper bundle they in particular care about.

Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 12, Plus a Train

Fixation on jeremiads led me to neglect this feature. Here is a look at a part of downtown Passaic, N.J., showing two small buildings that were the local centers of retail trade; Passaic never grew much beyond the neighborhood-business level, stuck as it was between Newark and Paterson. The tallest store at left center was the Fair Store -- there were so many department stores across America called the Fair Store. The largest Fair was in Chicago, but there was a Fair in New Albany, Ind., and one in Flint, Mich., that was unrelated to it, and one in Anderson, Ind., that was started by the Stillman interests, just like the Flint one, but was spun off and ultimately became part of the charmingly named Weiler's Banner-Fair Inc. Passaic's Fair was owned by the Shier family and was still open in the early 1990s when I was in downtown Passaic. You can still see "Fair" written on the side of the building.

Next door to it to the right, at 636 Main Ave., was Passaic's longest-lived department store, J. Abbott & Son. Abbott's also was never a large store, but what makes it distinctive is that the "J." stood for Josephine. When I was a child, one of the things that interested me about department stores was the initials -- what did the "L.S." in "L.S. Ayres & Co." stand for? (I remember "Lyman," don't remember the middle name.) The J.L. Hudson Co. in Detroit was for Joseph Lowthian Hudson. Department stores run by women were rare enough -- I. Magnin & Co. in San Francisco and G. Fox & Co. in Hartford being among the most famous examples, as well as Ronzone's in Las Vegas -- but a store actually named after a woman is incredibly rare. The Abbott family held onto it until the 1950s, when it was sold to a Newark man named Vicarisi and then disappeared.

Not pictured here is Passaic's third department store, Wechsler's, which was at 200 Jefferson St., but I am not sure enough of what building it actually was in to post a photo.

Many cities at one time had railroad tracks in the middle of some downtown streets -- here's a wonderful picture of a giant Monon locomotive making its way down Fifth Street in Lafayette, Ind., having just gotten a green light at the previous traffic signal -- but Passaic at one time had a line of the Erie Lackawanna dividing the heart of downtown, right down the main street and not a simple single track laid down in the street like a trolley line, either, but two tracks with gravel on the sides. Here's a photo that sort-of shows what this was like. In steam days, this certainly would have made Passaic an interesting downtown. Now there's just a parking lot in the middle of the street that makes you wonder why it is there.

Here's another great photo from Lafayette.

The News in 1967 -- Prelude

The Burlington County Times, one of our local newspapers, has an interesting story. Unlike most dailies, it did not grow out of a weekly or have its base in an established community. It owes its existence to William Levitt.

Having built Levittowns on Long Island and in Bucks County, Pa., Levitt looked to Burlington County for his third community (and final one on the U.S. mainland). He selected Willingboro Township, a rural area halfway between Philadelphia and Trenton and right across a bridge from Levittown, Pa. Levitt had learned from his mistake in Pennsylvania, where his community went across township lines and thus he needed approval from many levels of government. In Willingboro he would deal with one community.

His ambition had grown as well. Long Island was basically a huge subdivision, but starting with Pennsylvania he aimed to build not just subdivisions, but complete communities -- not just with schools and parks, but with shopping, movies, newspapers -- ready-made towns. In Levittown, Pa., he had convinced Pomeroy's, the Reading-based Allied Stores operator of department stores in eastern Pennsylvania, to be an anchor of the Shop-A-Rama. (Pomeroy's even developed a separate store logo for its new division.) Pomeroy's would also have a store in Willingboro.

In 1954, Stanley Calkins, publisher of newspapers in western Pennsylvania, had bought the Bristol Courier from Bucks County's political boss, Joseph Grundy. Calkins then purchased a weekly serving Levittown and created the Bucks County Courier Times. It was a natural for Calkins to be involved in creating a newspaper for the third Levittown as well. But while Levittown, Pa., was near Bristol and its established daily, the new Levittown, N.J., was in a county served only by weeklies. And the nearest towns, Burlington and Riverside, were hardly retail hubs.

The challenge was clear. The Willingboro Levittown -- it only briefly legally adopted the name of Levittown and was back to Willingboro by 1963 -- was to become the hub of Burlington County; the Fox Theater relocated there from Burlington (in a Levitt building) and the Plaza, with Pomeroy's and Sears as anchors, was to be the largest shopping area between the new South Jersey malls (Cherry Hill and Moorestown) and Trenton. That meant that once the early excitement of thousands of families establishing new homes in Willingboro was over, the mall had to draw from Mount Holly and Edgewater Park and Fort Dix. That meant the newspaper had to pull people from around the county to Willingboro as well as taking whatever ads came from stores in the established towns. In essence, the developer and the newspaper were creating a regional market where none had existed before.

The Burlington County Times is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, having been established in 1958 when the first families began moving into their Levitt houses in Willingboro.
On the one hand, the BCT had a blank slate -- it had no longtime readers to alienate with changes, as it had no readers at all. On the other hand, it was being made up and printed at the Bucks County plant until it was firmly enough established to have its own, so it had to conform to the basic makeup of that newspaper. And it had to conform to reader expectations of a newspaper so that people would not reject it in favor of the Philadelphia or Trenton papers, while recognizing that many people would take the larger papers anyway. Quite a challenge, and one that easily could have not been met. Yet the BCT sunk its roots and established itself as a paper for a county without a traditional center. It had to offer its readers what they wanted from the start. So what did it offer them?

By the fall of 1967, the nine-year-old BCT, which published Monday through Saturday afternoons, was running one or two pages of "women's news," two clear pages of editorials and news features -- the op-ed page was not filled with pundits but with in-depth wire stories as well as Dear Abby -- three or four pages (with ads) of sports, a couple of pages of comics and puzzles, and general news pages to fit the ads. A Monday might have eight to 10 news pages, a Wednesday or Thursday around 25. Page 3 was always open, but everything from there to the comics pages was clearly determined by how many ads there were. What was the news-to-ad ratio? No idea, but 60 percent news looked like a stretch. It was probably 50-50.

This was an afternoon paper, so the only way it got out the door in those days of Linotypes and stereotypers was for many of the pages to be made up the day before. Just a few pages would be reserved for breaking news, and the back pages had to consist of wire or local stories that would not change overnight. The front page would be made up late, so it would have to have a couple of "not really front page stories" available to fill it out when local copy ran short or didn't happen. But generally, as a local afternoon paper, only the most essential or interesting wire stories would get in. On one Thursday in mid-October, this meant there were nine stories on A1. Only two jumped.

This Thursday's paper -- in a typical week, no election ads, no pre-Christmas runup, just an ordinary paper -- had about 56 columns of general news (it was an eight-column page). Women's news added 10 columns and, perhaps most shocking by today's standards, Sports had 11 -- the equivalent of two pages today. This didn't take into account the comics and puzzles. There were four pages of classified, but again, the pages were wider.

Readers looking for advertising on this Thursday -- a Best Food Day, as we used to call it -- got ads for the major groceries. Sears took six pages, and Pomeroy's probably accounted for three although its ads were scattered. Other display advertisers included a carpet store, a paint store, an optometrist, a fabric store, discount stores, a beauty salon, a bank, a children's clothing shop and two tire stores -- the same odd collection of advertisers local newspapers have today. (If your memory goes back this far, the major movies playing were "Dr. Zhivago," "Up the Down Staircase," "The Sound of Music" and "A Man for All Seasons.")

But what news did the paper provide its readers as it continued to sink its roots into its county? Next post.

Department Store Segue: Boscov's

The New York Post says Boscov's is in trouble. I went to our local Boscov's yesterday; it's a chain that prides itself on being stuffed with merchandise, and there were obvious holes. So it looks like it's in trouble.

This could be disastrous for newspapers in Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware, where Boscov's is a major advertiser. And, of course, even more disastrous for the people who work for Boscov's. In normal times, if Boscov's was in trouble you would wait for The Bon-Ton to buy it, but that chain is hurting as well. But in normal times Boscov's would not be in trouble. Boscov's has never forgotten who its customers are and what they want; it never made a frantic rush upmarket to find no one waiting for it there and its usual customers walking away.

(Never heard of Boscov's? Most of the country hasn't. Until the mid-1960s it was a neighborhood department store in Reading. Most of these little stores simply shut down when the founder retired, but Al Boscov, the son, took Boscov's into the Reading suburbs, then into the small markets in Pennsylvania. Through heavy promotions and sales it became a large regional chain. In the mid-1980s it moved into Philadelphia's suburbs.

(A couple of years ago Al Boscov and his brother-in-law Ed Lakin sold the company to the next generation and Boscov's picked up some stores set adrift in the Great Macyization; thus, like anyone who took on debt in 2006 based on expected cash flow, they're now dying. As usual, newspapers and department stores are joined at the hip.)

News coverage mentions the usual suspects -- the continuing decline of the department store model, the difficulty in being a mid-market store (you aren't the cheapest and you aren't the most stylish). Boscov's has these issues, yet with its aggressive prices, discounts, sales and promotions, Boscov's has been known as a place for bargains. I'm sure it's hurting as people trade down to Wal-marts and even dollar stores, but this seems more a case of expansion at the wrong time.

Mark Potts did a recent post called "The End of Mass," reiterating a point many have made, that there is no longer any mass market. In many ways that is true, but it can be overstated. If it were the End of Mass, Wal-mart would be in huge trouble, as would Home Depot, and not just Boscov's. In fact, in terms of product line, department stores offered far more choice than many big-box retailers do.

In television, as the New York Times noted, the total cable audience has been overtaking the total broadcast audience even while the four major networks remain the largest operations in the field. As it noted, "despite the gains, only a handful of cable series and specials — 'High School Musical,' 'WWE Raw' — draw audiences comparable to those of broadcast." And that's with broadcast drawing far fewer people than 20 years ago. So we can assume from this that mass media are dead at the same time as we can assume that mass media still have a large, though smaller, audience.

But another line in that article makes me think of newspapers and department stores more than trying to define "mass" or talking about long tails:

"It is not a totally fair fight. More than broadcasters, cable networks rely extensively on repeats and a handful of signature shows that define their brand. If viewers miss a new episode of 'Zoey 101' on Nickelodeon, they know the episode will be replayed many times. ... 'Cable’s dependable. Broadcast isn’t,' said [Ted] Harbert, a former programming executive at ABC. 'If you like the kind of stuff that E! does, you can turn it on any night and it’s there.'"

That's what Wal-mart's been selling for years, down to its trucks just bearing the word "Always." That's paint at Home Depot; we only sell Behr and Glidden, but we'll always have what you want. You can't get more mass than that, and mass retail has been driving out less mass-oriented competitors for years. And since Wal-mart is really a department store that we call a discount store, it made me think about a major difference between department stores and other mass retailers.

Department stores originally had all their goods behind the counter, on shelves or in counters. As stores moved into ready-to-wear this became less workable -- although I have a vague memory of my mother being discomfited when I was about 6 by one of our three big stores' having boys' wear kept in locked bins. (This would have been about 1958.) I do remember that Block's toy department had most of its merchandise behind the counter. You had to ask a salesperson to show you anything you wanted. I liked Ayres' a lot better.

Because there was no computer to track sales and because each department was run like a fiefdom, you had to pay at that department. If you had men's clothing to buy, but the line was long and there was no one at women's wear, that didn't matter; the salespeople there would not take your money. (I guess this is because it needed to be written up in the men's department so that a proper accounting could be made and commissions could be paid, even though the money was sent by pneumatic tube to the central cash office until the 1960s.)

Clearly that did not trouble the original discount store owners, though they did not have computers to track sales. The checkout people took the money, and that was that. Though anyone at a department store can now handle any merchandise, I was well trained and, like many department store shoppers, won't walk across the store with underwear to check it out at the furniture department, because I'll look like I'm trying to walk out with the underwear and the guy in furniture will look offended that he has to ring it up. The checkout person at Target doesn't care what you have.

What's the difference? The shopping cart. The traditional department store model was: You saw something, paid for it, put it in your bag, went to another department, saw something else, paid for it, put it in your bag. ... But the discount store, or Best Buy, or Kohl's, etc., gives you a cart. You wander the store at will, you only stand in line once, and because your merchandise is in the cart you don't look like you're holding it close to your body trying to steal it. You don't have to look for a cash register with an open salesperson until you're ready to leave, so there's less anxiety. And you have somewhere to put the baby. At Boscov's, you're walking around holding some purchases in your hands (along with the baby) that you have to pay for so you can go to another department and start over, because if you have any more stuff you're going to drop the clothes or the baby. Wal-Mart and Kohl's are more convenient and more dependable, even though they offer less selection -- and are therefore more "mass" -- than Boscov's.

So to bring this back to newspapers: In newspapers you often have no idea what the content is going to be or where it is going to be placed. Maybe the sports agate is on the fourth sports page, maybe on the sixth. Comics are here, or they're there. Maybe there'll be a story about what I care about today, or maybe there won't. And we keep wanting the readers to start reading a story, turn forward to Page 12 to read the rest of the story, then go back to Page One, then go to Page Seven, then back to Page One, and then start reading the rest of the inside pages. Or else they follow the jump to 12 and then go on from there, missing all the content and ads on 2 through 11.

It may be a great product editorially, but it's not very good as a consumer product. Mass still works, but mass without convenience doesn't work in the 21st century. Wal-mart doesn't expect all of its shoppers to go to the toy department, but it does let them know where the toy department is and doesn't move it from day to day, or put part of it here and part of it there. Some of what newspapers face is inevitable with different ad volumes and color positions, but some of it is just a lack of self-discipline. Combine that with our hostility to criticism and you've got a business bound for trouble even without an economic downturn. All you need is a consumer-focused competitor and you're toast. And that will bring us to Zell's 50-50 club.