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.

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?

Find the Money First

We will return to Valparaiso. But first: Gourmet.

The death of Gourmet is clearly part of the Newhouse family's hard, cold look at throwing good money after bad -- the same effort that led to the closing of the Ann Arbor News. The thinking has to be: When times are good again, there will be things that make money and things that either won't or won't make very much. Cut those, get out, and use what's left to rebuild. Thus, the Birmingham News, Mobile Register, Syracuse Post-Standard and Kalamazoo Gazette sail on, even though doubtless none of them is having a good year.

But stories about the closing were free of the "It's All About the Internet" reaction any story about a newspaper draws -- possibly because it is a magazine and thus newspaper people can be more objective about it. Yes, it's clearly about the Internet -- but the Internet as a way for people to swap recipes, the Internet as a companion to the world of Rachael Ray. But it's also even more clearly about the content.

The story of the death of Gourmet is in part the reaction to the Great Recession -- a combination of hard times combining with a desire for self-flagellation (if we whip ourselves first, will God let us keep our jobs?) and the desire to make whatever one does be right, creating a new world in which using French's yellow mustard will be seen as trendy by virtue of being anti-trendy. ("I feel so much better serving French's with the kids' hot dogs, Martha, you know we all have to get our priorities straight, and Debi still was putting out that spicy German stuff -- can you believe the nerve? Trying to lord it over us. I know we all used to do that, but it's so 2005. Now let me tell you about this great deal we got in Montego Bay...")

And all that is true, except that as the stories note, since the arrival of the legendary Ruth Reichl at Gourmet from the Times, the magazine -- once the only real base for foodies -- had "got away from the things that are going on in people’s homes, and seemed to be for an elite that got smaller and smaller,” as one editor put it.

To go on: "Dana Cowin, the editor in chief of Food and Wine, praised Ms. Reichl’s 'sociopolitical and cultural commentary,' as well as the magazine’s literary sensibility.... [Cooking] has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Ms. Ray and the Food Network stars. Ms. Reichl is a celebrity in the food world, but of an elite type. She 'is one of those icons in chief,' said George Janson, managing partner at GroupM Print, part of the advertising company WPP. But what harried cooks want now, it seems, is less a distant idol and more a pal."

I suspect "harried cooks" always wanted that. "Harried cooks" always have made the green bean casserole with onion rings and cream of mushroom soup. "Harried cooks" used the Good Housekeeping cookbook. As the Times said it, lacking self-conscious irony: "How had the magazine that seemed more likely to stay home, broil pork chops and take care of the kids won out over its sexy, well-read, globetrotting sister?" Gawd, we at the Times don't want to stay home and broil pork chops, and if you want to, go read something else, but we thought you wanted to be like us! Which may make sense for the Times but makes sense for no other newspaper, even though some newspaper food sections spent decades trying to ape Gourmet. Most newspaper readers take care of the kids and, unless they're kosher or halal, eat pork chops.

Gourmet -- like so many publications, like so many department stores in the past -- determined what it wanted to do, what customers it wanted to have, was very successful for a time, but then times changed and it apparently stopped trying to find new customers unless they were exactly like the old ones. What does it matter what advertisers or readers want, when we are producing such wonders? I didn't read Gourmet, but one gets the feeling that it was not only serving an elite, but trying to serve an ever-more-elite elite -- one interested in not only the subject but long-form journalism on social issues.

As the failure of GEO proved in the 1980s, the market for long-form journalism on social issues is small indeed. You can only do it as long as advertisers are willing to underwrite you -- i.e., they see no real alternatives. Many people want to be better cooks; despite going green and buying local, not that many of them aspire to read about "the source of food and the politics surrounding it," and issues such as "the exploitation of tomato pickers in Florida." As another story this week noted, putting nutrition and calorie information on menus makes, in essence, no difference in what people eat.

What does this have to do with the move of the Barnes Foundation, the small, eccentric art collection in Philadelphia, from its longtime suburban home to a central site near the Art Museum? Read the Times' review of the plans for the new building, which ends up being not as much a review of the plans as a dirge that once again, a little gem known mostly to those elite enough to have heard of it is falling before the desires of commerce:

"The old Barnes is by no means an obvious model for a great museum. Its unlikely suburban setting was partly intended as a tweak to the city’s wealthy downtown art establishment. Inside the lighting is far from perfect, and the collection itself, mixing masterpieces by Cézanne, Picasso and Soutine with second-rate paintings by lesser-known artists, has a distinctly oddball flavor.

"But these apparent flaws are also what has made the Barnes one of the country’s most enchanting exhibition spaces. The creaky floors and cluttered rooms are light years away from the bigger, more blockbuster-oriented museums of Philadelphia, Washington and New York — a difference that has only grown more extreme in recent years, as museums have poured money into increasingly slick expansion projects. There are no distracting, superfluous spaces in the old Barnes — no education centers or contemplation zones....

"Part of the beauty of the Barnes Foundation is that it is so far removed from the tourist economy that drives major cities today. To get to it, visitors have to make an appointment, then take a train or a car to Merion, a half-hour from Philadelphia. These steps put you in a certain frame of mind by the time you arrive: they build anticipation and demand a certain commitment. They also serve as a kind of screening system, discouraging the kind of visitors who are just looking for a way to kill time.

"The new Barnes is after a different kind of audience. Although museum officials say that the existing limits on crowd size will be kept (albeit with extended hours), it is clearly meant to draw bigger numbers and more tourist dollars. For most visitors the relationship to the art will feel less immediate. And this, alas, is a problem no architect could have solved."

Preserve art from people looking to kill time! Keep those Cezannes and Picassos where only those who are truly committed will see them! Oh, and did you read that wonderful article in Gourmet about the exploitation of tomato pickers? The Barnes Foundation a decade ago was basically broke. The creaky floors result in part from no money for upkeep (one need not take sides in the never-ending dispute between students of the Barnes method of analyzing art vs. leaders of the Philadelphia business community to simply state that money is an issue whichever side you favor).

And that brings us to Alan Mutter's obit for the Rocky Mountain Independent, the attempt by staff members at the old Rocky Mountain News to create a paid online news site. As Mutter notes:

"The Independent failed for exactly the same reason the Rocky did: A suicidally stubborn determination on the part of the organizers to be in the business they wanted to be in, instead of attending to the business they needed to attend to. ... Their plan was to emulate as much as possible the work they did so well at the Rocky, while continuing to receive the same sort of pay and benefits they had enjoyed at the newspaper. ... They essentially assumed, as had their former employer, that the quality of their work would attract the patronage they needed to continue doing what they loved. ... People felt the universe would reward them for doing what they wanted to do, instead of doing what they needed to do to earn the patronage of readers and advertisers."

They were operating online, but the same principle works for a print newspaper -- indeed, has to work for a print newspaper. "Quality," alas, only pays off after you first, as Marshall Field put it, give the lady what she wants. If your definition of quality is stories people should read even if they don't want to -- because they're important, significant, long-form, and everyone should know that the tomatoes they eat are from exploited workers -- then you will be out of business soon. Yes, you can do those stories, but you have to sell what is actually useful to people. If you sell those stories, the market for them is too small to support you. Newspapers used to know how to do this, before they became more about the conflict between journalism and commerce, the conflict between the sophisticated and the mass, than about selling newspapers.

We close today's sermon with this editorial from the Seattle Times, including these fateful words that are sure to bring the opprobrium of Mark Potts down on the writer's head:

"Most readers still want their newspaper in print, so they can scan it, carry it and clip it, and the printed paper works as it always did."

It's not the form, it's the content. Give readers something they want to read, and they will read it. Give them what you want to write, and you'd better have a sugar daddy. The vast profitability of newspapers in the 1980s, caused by the loss of big-city competitors and the elimination of composing rooms, let us forget this. I love gourmet mustard and it will always be available. A newspaper is French's.

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.

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.

Retailing and Media

If you're reading this today, take a few moments and put some money in Gannett's pocket. Buy a copy of USA Today and go to the Money section. (If it's not April 13, here's the link. But this story is easier to comprehend on Pages 1 and 3 of Money than it will be online, I wager.)

The story is about how rumors of retailers' impending demise affects whether that demise occurs. Is there a smoking gun? No. What this story makes clear is the complex way in which information plays with reality. Substitute "newspapers" for "retailers," of course, and it's the same story; but that's a point of this blog.

The story and its sidebar makes the same point that Jon Stewart took Jim Cramer to the woodshed about -- is what you're saying about Firm X based simply on an analysis of its business, debt, competition and management, or is it affected by how you yourself will make money by cratering or hyping certain companies? In other words, is anyone who trades in stocks for any substantial part of their income able to be an independent analyst, or is he or she always positing the comments with an eye on following up himself with "Buy" and "Sell"?

As the article notes, one analyst has been predicting the closure of Sears and Kmart basically every year since 2002. But as the article notes: "Moody's downgraded Sears to Ba2 on March 23, but even that lower rating implies just a 2.5% chance it would default on its loans in a year. And even in the challenging fiscal year ended in January, the company generated free cash flow, which factors in the costs to upgrade facilities, of nearly $500 million." I guess, though, every year he says it, he has an increasing chance of getting it right sometimes.

But are all these pundits just stock manipulators? I suspect that they're just as much quote hounds, addicted to seeing their own genius in public. If I were working for the Dacron Republican-Democrat, I might call the professor of retailing at Dacron State College and ask him what he thinks about Sears. But he might be on sabbatical. Or he might say, I really haven't studied that. Or he might give some totally nonunderstandable quote. Or he might say something that sounds really good, except that he is just making it up and has never studied Sears at all. And I just wasted a half-hour. Better, for my story, to call someone who has a reputation and who I know will give me three pithy sentences or 20 terse seconds with a strong, clearly expressed opinion. As the story says, "Journalists seeking to balance often-glowing comments from companies or the consultants who work for them often turn to some of the more dependable retail contrarians, who can now point to data like the soaring unemployment rate or store liquidations they predicted as evidence of expertise."

But everyone's got a dog in this fight, except, probably for the professor at Dacron State College. (And even he may be looking for a grant, or may be using his press clips to support his bid for tenure; and the P.R. department at the college certainly has its dog.)

The problem, again, comes from the nature of "the story" -- someone says yes, we have to find someone saying no so that we can show we're not pushovers or are going to have egg on our face when Brown Trask & Thompson closes tomorrow after all. But here's the problem with "the story." Let's say Circuit City was still in business, and came out with a rosy press release. Who best would be able to say, ah, they're full of it? Probably Best Buy, which doubtless knew everything Circuit City was doing. ("Despite Circuit City's statements, our share of the business has risen at twice the rate of theirs and customer surveys...") As USA Today notes, a company like Best Buy will say no such thing, for a host of legal and competitive reasons. A credit-rating agency can speak to the financial situation, but not to the zeitgeist. Realtors are not going to tell you who has or has not paid the rent. Interviews with customers are anecdotal. Who then do we turn to to put Circuit City's shout-out into perspective? Someone who says, my job is to study the retail industry and to tell you what these companies are trying to hide. Ah, get that reportorial blood flowing! The real truth!

But why is he going to tell you that? What's his game? Whoops, don't really care, got my quote and now I can turn in my story. If Brown Trask recovers, I got it right by quoting them. If Brown Trask closes next week, I'm covered as well. But is my source covering what happens to Brown Trask's business -- or is his only real interest what happens to Brown Trask's stock, which is a very different matter?

Nearly anyone who covers Pennsylvania politics has to turn to G. Terry Madonna. He is the source -- because of the polls he runs, the conversations he has, his immersion in the topic. I've never dealt with Terry personally, but I've been editing stories quoting him for more than a decade. Is he a quote hound? Absolutely. Does he call back any reporter, anytime, with comments that can be easily inserted into a story? Absolutely. Does he make his living off politics? Certainly. But there seems to be nearly universal acknowledgment that his analyses are not biased toward one party or the other, or that he benefits from either side's winning. His dog in the fight is simply that there will be a dogfight anyway and he wants to tell you about the dogs so that he can get more money to study them, because he really loves the dogfight. (I typed in "Terry Madonna biased" in Google; the first story says he is a Democratic minion, the second accuses him of being anti-Obama.)

Such grease makes the wheels of journalism run. USA Today is pointing out that we sometimes are not sufficiently skeptical about who our sources are and what their long-term aims are -- which is a lesson for newspapers reporting on the malaise of newspapers as well. That person saying "print is dead" may in fact be a totally unbiased source who has studied the matter and has conclusive proof. Or it may be someone selling his services to help publishers maximize Web profits. Or it may just be someone who has fallen in love with seeing his own name in print when he shouts. Maybe it would be better to just say "Circuit City said its sales..." and let it go at that and not try to find "the other side." Because for every side we find, there's always another we don't.

The Mysterious Death in Ann Arbor

Came back from Spain to find out that Newhouse decided not only to take down the Bay City, Saginaw and Flint papers to three days a week -- no street sale or e-edition as in Detroit, simply three-day-a-week papers -- and kill the Ann Arbor News altogether, having it "reborn" in the manner of the Madison Capital Times, as a two-days-a-week print publication (Sunday and a weekend tab) while being online as a news source, but under a different name.

Very sad personally. I worked for the Flint Journal for five years; met my wife there; my in-laws live in Flint. When I worked for the Ypsilanti Press, I lived literally across the street from an Ann Arbor mailing address. Twice was offered a job at the AA News; twice turned it down.

So what's going on here? How can one not make a go of it in one of America's most educated markets? To hear editor Tony Dearing of the News tell it, that's exactly why. He links his paper's problems with those of the San Francisco Chronicle (by extension, probably, to Boston, Seattle and San Jose). Newspapers, he says, do well in -- well, he doesn't use this word, but in "less progressive" areas. That, he says, is why Jackson, Mich., the next county over, gets to keep its Newhouse seven-day daily.

Well, maybe. I remember from working at the late Ypsi Press the horrendous problems we had (in the 1970s!) getting home delivery accomplished because of the large number of people who lived in apartment buildings with locked doors; papers were still doing doorstep delivery back then, and all you could do was leave the paper outside the front door to the building, where either a nonsubscriber would take it or the apartment dweller would have to walk all the way down to get it. This was a problem in every city, of course, but in a city of the young and transient such as metro Ann Arbor, it was disproportionate.

But I also remember the Ann Arbor News of those days (and why I didn't go to work for it). The News of the 1970s was a paper that would have felt at home in Jackson or Saginaw. It did not seem to be edited for the professors, researchers, and executives who made Ann Arbor such an upscale place, or the students, intellectuals, and artists who made it so unique. We would joke that the News was edited for the people who lived in Ann Arbor but hated it -- the factory workers at the Chrysler parts plant on the edge of downtown, the secretaries and landscapers at the University of Michigan, the farmers in Saline and Pittsfield. The people on campus, and the people at the labs, read the Detroit Free Press or the New York Times or the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper.

Still, what could you do? The News at that time had a circulation of about 40,000. (It got up into the mid-50s by the 1990s.) I don't know what the staff size was -- when I arrived at Flint, we had about 90 people with a circulation of 105,000, but let's be generous and say the News had 40 people. That would have given the News about 22 reporters for news, sports and features. It would have had an AP feed and access to the Booth Lansing bureau. It would have been, in other words, about the equivalent of the Jackson Citizen Patriot. But Jackson was not Ann Arbor. This was a city that, folk wisdom had it, had the largest readership of the New York Times outside the East Coast, back in those pre-internet days. The News could cover Washtenaw County and the school board and the courts and the city council. Vast numbers of people in Ann Arbor had no interest in those topics. They were too young, or too etherial, or too cosmopolitan, or too much part of metro Detroit. They wanted to read analyses of national policy and scientific breakthroughs. The News was a paper for the "locals." The main thing it had going for it was that the sports editor was joined at the hip to Wolverines coach Glenn "Bo" Schembechler.

Things changed over the years, and the News became much better. (A true tragedy in this is how much work Newhouse did over two decades improving its newspapers.) But I wonder if it ever shook its reputation, or was always seen by the chattering classes in Ann Arbor as that small-town daily they didn't bother with. Even so, is that enough to kill the Ann Arbor News, particularly with the Free Press cutting back on home delivery to three days a week?

Well, pretty clearly the cutbacks on the I-75 (WHOOPS: I had said I-95; thanks, Vince Tuss) corridor owe a lot to that Detroit move. Advertisers, particularly those with inserts, understand the game; they will place their ads in the Thursday, Friday and Sunday papers. The Detroit papers make those three days profitable by concentrating everything there. Flint certainly, and Saginaw and Bay City probably, are viewed as sub-markets of metro Detroit; ads will be placed by major accounts following what Detroit is offering, and days that were unprofitable in Flint or Saginaw will become increasingly so. (Otherwise you would keep publishing and try to pick up disaffected former Free Press readers.) The three Newhouse papers on the western side of the state (Grand Rapids, Muskegon and Kalamazoo) are not tied to the Detroit market or even particularly to the auto industry; I am assuming Jackson is more a subset of Lansing, which also will have a seven-day Gannett paper (a big GM town, a big college town, but also a state government town, and MSU is not UM).

All of these moves are being made with the assumption that whenever the economic recovery comes, the distress of the auto industry and the fact that the companies and the UAW will have to make continuing major cuts means that it will come last to metro Detroit, which in many ways has never recovered from the early 1980s. If you're in Palm Beach or Orlando, things really suck now, but you hang on and hope that when the recession moderates you can stand on your feet with a smaller organization. In Detroit, Flint, Saginaw and Bay City -- the latter three being largely old GM colonies left adrift by its problems, cities that existed for decades simply as GM factory towns with plants such as Saginaw Steering Gear -- the recession is not going to moderate any time soon. Therefore, so what if you bet wrong and the market rejects a three-day-a-week Bay City Times? You weren't going to make any money with a seven-day-a-week Bay City Times either. As with Boca Raton and Knight Ridder, you don't do a grand experiment in the newspaper business unless it no longer matters to you whether the experiment fails because you had no hope of winning the old way. You do little experiments, but you don't kill the cash cow until it no longer can give any milk at all.

But could you pawn a three-day-a-week Ann Arbor News off on the Ann Arbor market? They would laugh. If they want a newspaper only three days a week, for the ads or the Sunday comics or whatever, they will take the Free Press. If they want a newspaper seven days a week, they will take the New York Times. If they are the "locals," advertisers probably don't want them much anyway. You can pick them up with the TMC product. You have two choices -- keep publishing seven days a week, hope that the prosperity of Ann Arbor eventually overcomes the recession, and try to pick up unhappy Free Press readers; or give up on print altogether. Since you are officially a suburban Detroit newspaper and ad campaigns are going to be based on the Detroit publication days, you are stuck. Since Detroit is going to be the last to recover, you are stuck. Since your market is younger and more transient, and since you have never had the household penetration rate of a Grand Rapids or even a Jackson, you are stuck. All you can do is make a hail-Mary pass.

All well enough and good. But other companies face similar problems. So keep in mind the Newhouse Pledge. Newhouse was famed as the company that never had layoffs; as long as you could not be dismissed for cause, you were guaranteed a job for life. With the troubles at the Newark Star-Ledger, publisher George Arwady -- who came out of Newhouse's Michigan operations -- clarified the pledge last year:

"Since its inception, the concept of the Pledge has always been to protect our full-time non-represented daily newspaper employees from layoffs so long as the newspaper continues to publish daily in its current newsprint form. The Pledge never was intended to apply to weekly publications or to distribution of content over the internet."

In other words, unlike Gannett or Hearst or the New York Times Co., the only way for the Newhouse operations to engage in massive layoffs is to cease to publish a printed daily newspaper. And the layoffs will be massive. In fact, all 242 employees of the AA News will be laid off, and may reapply for their jobs. Layoffs at the other papers will approach 35 percent. And remember that Newhouse has been a generous company with benefits, and that the income level (and thus probably typical pay) in Ann Arbor is high (although I have no idea about the News specifically).

Whenever people start talking about online experiences and progress and new paradigms, tell them to follow the money. But things change. I could buy into the optimism of fellow Ypsi Press alum Tim McGuire except for this statistic from E&P's Fitz and Jen blog:

"On a weekly basis, 4% of adults visited a newspaper Web site-only in Canada. ... I want to draw your attention to online-only readership here in the United States. Because it's no better.
For the most part, online readership is measured on a monthly basis. So I reached out to Scarborough Research to see if they could provide me with a weekly national online-only readership stat. Here's what Scarborough came back with for the 81 top U.S. markets it measures (a really close approximation to a national number): 4% of adults visited a newspaper Web site only in the span of a week."

That's "a newspaper Web site only," not "my local newspaper's Web site only." In both countries, as the comments note, about 15 percent of adults combine print and online newspaper use. Now there will no longer be a print newspaper of any real frequency -- three, four, seven days a week -- covering one of America's most educated counties. There will be an entertainment section and a weekly.

The News promises a way out of this by saying that the new Web site will not be a newspaper Web site -- it will be a community Web site chockablock with new ideas. This from a company that has made pretty much of a hash of its Web sites over the years.

For Washtenaw County and its residents, my prayer: Ave Maria, gratia plena!

--
(The title of this post refers to the book "The Mysterious Deaths at Ann Arbor," a book about deaths at a VA hospital in Ann Arbor. The story was broken by the Ypsilanti Press. That was how things were in Washtenaw County journalistically in the 1970s. Even though I didn't really fit in at the Press, and I'm sure some of the people who worked with me there don't have fond memories of me, I was always happy that I worked for the better paper in the county.)

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.

And What THEY Said

Alan Jacobson certainly does not hide his candle under a shade, and one might argue with some of his specific approaches. But he's right, and right, and just generally right. And yes, Sam Zell -- though it's clear from his use of the word "copywriter" that he still doesn't really understand how newsrooms work -- is largely right as well.

1. The era of what Alan Mutter called the longest-running free trial offer in American history -- the newspaper Web site as we know it -- has to end. As Bob Garfield was quoted earlier as saying, it's never going to pay off with an effective business model. Never, never, never. Newspaper valuations, still robust in mid-2006 even after years of competition from free classifieds, went to the floor when investors figured that out. It isn't really anyone's fault that newspaper leaders didn't immediately see it. In 2000 it seemed like it would work. In 2000 newspapers seemed invulnerable and the Internet was in many ways experimental. Whatever we did would work, because we were newspapers. Radio in 1922 was an experiment and in 1932 was a huge business in which a lot of the early attempts had not worked. Things change. As MediaWeek reported this week (I just spent five minutes trying to find the link and failed), banner ads online are about to expire from lack of interest in a bad economy -- essentially, everyone's figuring out that no one clicks on them. People use social networking sites like crazy, but advertising doesn't work on them. It's time to give up on the particular hope that any Internet ad model that we are now using will support journalism.

2. When we did not have to work hard for revenue, we could put the interest of the Paper and the People above commercial interests and the desires of individuals. It was a great time. I loved it. It is gone. Journalists have to accept that the point of our thinking about "how do we raise revenue" is not just to put money in Sam Zell's pocket. If it works, money will go in Zell's pocket, but the goal is to allow us to do our jobs. As I read somewhere yesterday -- I can't find it to make the link, this is not my day -- we are no longer working for the Church of Truth, but a business. There is nothing wrong with working for a journalistic business, it beats lots of other ways to make a living, but it is not the same as working for the Church of Truth, which was not a business. It is our misfortune, but there it is.

3. Zell's much criticized point that Pulitzers don't sell newspapers -- it needs to be noted that he is saying "today." In the past winning the Pulitzer Prize did sell newspapers -- not for an individual story, but for the idea that your newspaper was better when compared with another newspaper. Pulitzer Prizes helped the Inquirer beat the Philadelphia Bulletin. They helped if you were the Pottstown Mercury and wanted to make your paper seem better than it really was. They don't work when your competition is not other newspapers. They don't work when quality is not the deciding point between two otherwise nearly identical products.

I think the hardest change one can make isn't saying that you were wrong -- it's saying that what was right once is wrong now. Anyone can own up to a mistake. But doing what was right and then having it become wrong means there are no fixed lodestars. In a business that is totally built upon individual reputations in the pursuit of truth, it means you have to say that "what I said was right two years ago is no longer right" -- and if so, what is truth and why did I work so hard -- and so let's just not go there, because someone will accuse me of apostasy, which undercuts my reputation, which means the end product of everything I did is devalued. And the Internet allows anyone to undercut anyone's reputation in an instant. But go there we must. And yes, people who believe that journalism should not be a business activity will have to seek different answers from people who see little other option. Success to them; success to us.

Ding, Ding, Ding Went the Bell

Yeah, another weird interest other than department stores. Mass transit, especially light rail.

When I read about mass transit's pretty good Election Day -- give it up in Kansas City, but things looked OK in Seattle, Honolulu and elsewhere -- I started looking for Jon Talton's take on it and Yglesias', because I believe that light rail specifically and upgraded transit in general are necessary for the health of America's cities and our global competitiveness, as do they. And thus, as noted in previous posts about the election, another area where, when I want my team to win, I don't want to read about it straight, no chaser.

And I certainly do not really want to read about it as reported by a foe of light rail such as Wendell Cox. Heck, I don't even really want to read a balanced story in which Wendell Cox is quoted as an "On the other hand" to the American Public Transportation Association.

It just makes me mad. At the same time, it was Cox who first showed me his posts from driving around European cities as they really are, and not just the central areas that Americans generally see, that suburban sprawl is not just an American disease. (Anyone been to the new giant malls on the bypass around Rome lately? Driven 15 miles northwest of Madrid and still been in suburban Madrid and stopped at a McDonald's drive-through for a Coke, and said, gee, I thought Europe was different?)

If you really want transit as a viable option, you have to acknowledge much of what Cox points out -- that the more money people have, the more apt large numbers of them are to buy single-family detached or double houses and use cars to get around to malls and highway stores. This is not just some weirdness of the United States; we just went there first because we had wide-open spaces, low cost of land, a domestic gasoline industry, a larger middle class, a government determined to make people homeowners out of fear of Bolshevism, and no need to rebuild our cities after the destruction of two wars. We decided to destroy them on our own.

But for all the abuse heaped on Los Angeles' visionaries in the 1930s and 1940s for rejecting mass transit in favor of auto-oriented development, was this not prefigured in the works of Frank Lloyd Wright? Le Corbusier and CIAM? Soria's linear city for Madrid? It seemed like a logical idea at the time, and was not simply General Motors killing the Red Cars, whether it did or not. (The genesis for this post is having seen Clint Eastwood's "Changeling," in which a very petite streetcar masquerades as a Pacific Electric interurban to Pasadena.) Los Angeles thought that being totally car-dependent would make it the city of the future; just as heavy investment in public transit now seems like a good bet in the L.A. region to its voters, having seen what unbridled growth with a car-dependent system means in 2008.

But Cox wants light rail to fail because he believes that low-density housing and auto usage for everyone is the answer. Well, fine, but I don't agree; if we all get everything, in the end none of us will be able to get anything; or, as I see Cox's view, if you win you get what you want, and if you lose, well, you lost, not my problem. And the views of mass-transit advocates -- most of them, I hope -- have progressed since the 1960s, when there was a "the world should be Manhattan or Paris" view coupled with that of people living in places such as Manhattan who didn't use cars and didn't like them and therefore thought the world would be better if no one used them. Well, fine, but America is not Manhattan any more than France is Paris. All the well-to-do Parisians may very well live in the city, but lots of rich Lyonnais appear to live in very California-like suburban houses with swimming pools and garages. That ship has sailed. Mass transit is a supplement for the car, for what mass transit can do better. Sort of like newspapers in the Internet world.

But whatever form of publication they take, one of the major problems for newspapers in the 21st century is that by nature they are neither too warm nor too cold, so, as the Bible says, people spew them out of their mouths. Newspapers try very hard to be fair, and generally succeed; yet they look at things through prisms. When the River Line light rail was proposed to run between Camden and Trenton, The Inquirer gave it fair coverage, but you could tell its prism was that light rail and mass transit are good things; it reflects the view of transit-dependent Philadelphia as well as the puritan-liberalism that too many cars are just bad for us -- self-indulgent wastes of energy and gas.

The Burlington County Times also gave it fair coverage, but its prism was that since the line was connecting two cities outside the county, how was it going to help the county; and thus it paid more attention to people in Palmyra and Riverton who didn't like the horns and feared that criminals were going to commute by rail from Camden. (The image I've always loved -- home robbers standing at the light rail station with four TV sets; the officer walks up and says, what are these? Oh, we bought them at Best Buy and carried them here. )

The Inquirer took the regional view, as a regional newspaper; the BCT the local. The Inquirer stories struck me as more positive to light rail. Yet neither paper's work was unbalanced. If you really wanted or really hated light rail, though, you probably were not happy with the coverage. Used to be you were stuck with that. Now, pro- and anti-rail groups can start their own sites and link to pro- and anti-rail stories around the world, and if light rail is your issue instead of reading the local newspaper you can spend part of your day reading My Personal Light Rail Digest Today. Newspapers see their advantage in the 21st century as providing "perspective"; but I am wondering if this is a losing game. I can get all the perspective that agrees with me I want on any issue that I choose; and if I don't care that much, do I want perspective? Maybe what I want is just to find out what's going on.

And that will bring us to Voice of San Diego -- but not for a while. A lot of traveling ahead in the next couple of weeks.

They May Really Just Not Like Us, Part II

The various facets of the "rebirth of journalism" idea that Newspaper Death Watch so exults didn't really hit me until the election. I had wondered what happened to Kevin Drum, who used to do "Political Animal" for Washington Monthly's Web site. He is now with Mother Jones, as I came across from a link from the new writers of "Political Animal." I haven't read Mother Jones for years, and in checking Drum's column I saw their tagline under the logo: Smart, fearless journalism. And I thought: I'd agree with it far more personally than I would with Fox, but this is in the same league as "Fair and Balanced." Yes, it's journalism. But it's not journalism the way newspapers have practiced it for the last 40 years. It's journalism in the service of a view of how the world should be. It's Zola writing "J'accuse," in L'Aurore, not a report from AFP saying "In an article in a Paris newspaper yesterday, the novelist Emile Zola accused the anti-Dreyfusards of..."

And for many journalists, that change is a relief and a blessing.

In the analog, print world, Mother Jones was a left-wing opinion magazine, Time was a weekly newsmagazine, and the Los Angeles Times was a daily newspaper. They all had different functions that were reflected in their form (size, frequency, etc.) Online, they are all Web sites. Thus the individual journalist, lance in hand, mounting his horse to point out the problems of the world as he sees them, on his personal Web site is the same as the massive infrastructure of the New York Times. He may not have the same credibility, or the number of hits, or whatever -- but he is in the end a Web site. So is the New York Times.

Thus, the rebirth of journalism is in part the rebirth of every journalist to be able to say on an equal basis with every other journalist, here is my view of what's important -- as the noteworthy Jon Talton in "Rogue Columnist" writes every day, down to his in-his-house style of always referring to McCain as "wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III." (Jon covered Phoenix.) I can say this, and no one can stop me. Every person an editor and publisher. Free at last.

As someone who grew up admiring I.F. Stone and Harry Golden, as mentioned before, I admire Talton as well. Isn't this the whole point of the Zenger case, that journalism is not just the ability to say "Four people were killed yesterday..."? Yet the point of Izzy and Harry was that things like I.F. Stone's Weekly tried to tell the real truth by telling their side of the truth, but they knew that they were not the same as the mainstream media avant le nom. The media mainly just tried to say what went on, except when a publisher or editor slanted some particular story. Their main message was: Things happen. Some of them involving John McCain, and some involving four people killed in a traffic accident. I.F. Stone's message was: Bad things happen, and we can stop them. Both were journalism, but they were not the same thing.

A part of the editing process at newspapers is not about the subjunctive mode or capitalization. It is about trying to bring a sense of humility and perspective to the process, a sense that the newspaper is bigger than we are -- both the reader and the newspaper staff. The newspaper had a magisterialness that made it larger than Izzy Stone. In the online world, the newspaper is just as small as everything else. This diminishes it. No wonder people pay less attention to it.

On election night, other than actually doing my job, I spent the night alternating among Daily Kos, Eschaton, Talking Points Memo, and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. I did so even though I knew that working in a newsroom, I would know almost all of what they knew before they could post it. But I didn't really want on this election night to just read the objective reporting of facts. I didn't want to be glued to the Politics folder of the AP feed. I wanted to be told this time that we were going to win. I wanted to know how great this was (or be told we were right if we lost). I wanted to hear it from friends, even if I had no idea who they were. Virtual communities are like sports bars; you have no idea who is at the next table, but they're cheering for your team so they must be your friends.

The Thursday Camden Courier-Post had six pages of post election coverage. Not all of it was favorable to Barack Obama. Much pointed out the intractable economic problems he faces and the prospect he will fail. I was happy to read it because I wasn't anxious anymore that we would win. I did not need Drum or Atrios to put it into a friendly perspective. I was ready for an objective, nonpartisan, newspaper-style look at the challenges ahead. I will be spending a lot less time with Kos in the weeks ahead.

The Committee of Concerned Journalists always notes that journalism is information subject to a process of verification. That is not the same as telling the truth. It is just saying that there are a lot of people saying a lot of truths and we should report them all. There are times when people want to read lots of truths, and times when they want to read their own truth. Newspapers really can't do much about the latter. The Internet is a superior medium for that, and for journalists who want to report the truth as they know it.

Newspapers are about much more than journalism, which means that journalism is not all that newspapers are about -- which means that some journalists may have less use for newspapers than readers do. Some journalists have claimed that newspapers have no purpose without journalism. That should be asked of the reader, not the journalist, who does not need the newspaper to do journalism but has long appreciated its steady paycheck. The publisher should ask: What are the readers interested in reading, and what can I make money doing? That is different from what the journalist asks himself or herself.

As Justin Williams of the Daily Telegraph noted, the effective cost of publishing anything is now zero; nearly anyone in the world can publish anything online at realistically no cost. It is ruinous for newspapers to believe they have a sustainable economic future from competing head to head in that world on its terms. If the New York Times is in the same business as Jon Talton, the New York Times cannot possibly compete on price. No matter how hard they try, newspapers cannot reduce their costs to near-zero without ceasing to be newspapers. To survive, the newspaper business has to be in a different business than simply the Internet journalism business.

Newspapers are not Internet companies or single operators. Barnes & Noble cannot win by competing head to head on price with Amazon. Barnes & Noble simply has higher costs and always will unless it tries to become a purely Internet company, and during the inevitably shaky transition to that, Amazon probably would destroy it because Amazon would be a better Internet company. The only way for Barnes & Noble to exist is to be what Amazon is not. The only way for newspapers to exist is to be what journalism on the Internet is not, as well as being journalism on the Internet when it suits their purposes.

Newspapers should not expect most journalists to solve this problem for them, because many journalists are overjoyed with the new order. But the owners of newspapers need to realize that you do not predict as inevitable a future you do not want, and that therefore all predictions of the future are suspect. If newspapers do not want the future seemingly laid out for them, they need to hear other voices than those calling for their demise. (For example, newspapers need to run ads showing people lined up to buy copies after Obama's win and the Phillies' championship -- and aim the ads at other advertisers, not readers.)

Newspapers need to acknowledge that some voices, no matter how well intentioned or loud, are not friends of the newspaper business even though they see themselves as friends of journalism. They see the newspaper as an impediment -- and very well might see a totally online newspaper, without physical presses but trying to maintain the same standards it has always had, as as much of an impediment to the rebirth of journalism as a printed one. It's unlikely that an Arizona Republic that had shut down its presses and operated totally online would enthusiastically let Talton say:

"The prohibition on enacting real-estate transfer taxes ("Save Our Homes") will further hamstring government's ability to pay for the public investments desperately needed by this broiling dystopia. It won't save anybody's house, but it will keep the Real Estate Industrial Complex from paying even a modest amount into the commons from which it reaps so much profit."

But there have always been many journalists who have seen the institutions of journalism as the foe of the true journalist.

They May Really Just Not Like Us

Last week's post was occasioned by Marc Andreessen's claim in Portfolio that newspapers should just shut down the presses because Wall Street had decided that they were doomed and had so indicated by killing their stock prices. (Wall Street, of course, has also killed the stock prices of other businesses and industries over the years, some of which survive.) Alan Mutter notes here why a newspaper without a print component is at least at present an even weaker business that one with, and as Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg noted, the problem with Andreesen's argument is simply that newspaper companies are not Internet companies. They don't think like Internet companies and they don't act like them. (He did not make this argument approvingly.)

This weakness often given as part of the reason they are doing so badly, but to me part of the reason they are doing so badly is that they think they should be Internet companies when they aren't. That doesn't mean they shouldn't do a lot of stuff on the Internet; but Google is an Internet company and the New York Times is not. Amazon is an Internet company and Barnes & Noble isn't. Trying to be what you are not usually indicates a lack of confidence in what you are, which has been endemic to newspapers since Walter Cronkite moved to a half-hour Monday through Friday. Newspapers in their romantic little hearts want to be competing with other newspapers to scream "Extra!"

But since I encountered the site Newspaper Death Watch with its motto of "Chronicling the Decline of Newspapers and the Rebirth of Journalism," I have realized that much of what newspapers face is an attack from many current or former journalists who really don't like newspapers anymore. They may have loved them growing up, they may have been pulled into the field because of them, they may keep a certain historical reverence for them. But they don't like them now, and it's not that they don't like just the corporate mismanagement.

They think journalism can be done better without newspapers -- the printed ones, to be sure, and in many cases without anything resembling newspapers as we know them. That's not the same as forecasting their decline. They actively want them to go away. They want to work for Internet companies, or they want newspapers to be transformed into Internet companies, or they want to make themselves into Internet companies. Not just because it's the wave of the future and all that, but because the Internet seems to free journalism from some of the restraints print reporters have always scuffed against. And because they do have their residual affection and respect for print newspapers and because they don't see a financially interesting business model rapidly appearing to replace them, they berate newspapers for not being what they are not, which is, simply journalism.

Journalism without print isn't dependent on press deadlines, so you can file a story when it's happening or when you want. You don't need to provide A matter or write four grafs of background that could be cut for space. Instead of spending five minutes trying to summarize someone's argument in one graf, you can say "As so and so said here..." and do a link. It doesn't seem to be as dependent on mass audiences. Because of that, it doesn't have to have the same "But others say" reflexivity, the same need to "balance" the story. It isn't dependent upon finding a centerpiece to anchor the page, meaning that you will have to cover something you don't want to just because it has art. It doesn't have that lag between when something happens and when the paper arrives, meaning that you never have to worry about your story having been upstaged by events. Your story never has to be held for space. You can write a story that seems incredibly significant but that you know will only interest 1,000 people. You can get applause (or boos) right away. And instead of having to think about something new to write about, you can write in response to what someone else said.

This is not to say that these things are bad or that all online journalism proponents support them all. But they are not necessarily good in and of themselves either, unless you want them.

Online journalism offers the dream that "I can finally tell the truth" without the mediation process involved in putting together a group effort aimed at a large audience. It is the dream of every high school journalist who wanted to take over the school paper and say what he and 10 of his friends knew was really going on, instead of the administration saying what they could publish. It's falling back on the view that censorship is not the heavy hand of official oppression but "any time anyone stops me from saying what I want to." I wrote it, so your refusal to publish it is censorship. What do you mean it sucks? Well, not any more.

Election night brought this home to me. More tomorrow. (There may be no length limitations online, but still, the reader's attention must be lagging here.)