Please take a few moments to read:
1. The esteemed John McIntyre's comments on how the problems confronting editors in the 21st century are in some ways those confronting theologians and leaders of the church in the 15th. And John raises an essential question that in some way explains the baby-boomer angst of these debates: Can those of us who in the 1960s and 1970s cut our teeth on the personal is political, off the pigs, trust no one over 25, suddenly turn about and say, wait a minute, that was our revolution but this Internet one isn't? As John notes: "I don’t have a badge and don’t want one. But I don’t see that self-policing is effective." (This follows a number of posts about Wikipedia, all of which are worth looking at.) I would like to think that when I marched around the Delaware County courthouse once in the early 1970s, that it was to protest unjust authority, not simply the idea of there being authority. Yet certainly the idea underlying Wikipedia is: We have met authority, and if it is not all of us, it is illegitimate. The idea of editing -- the idea of newspapers -- in the end rests upon, yes, dear reader, we do in fact know some things in more depth and detail than you do, and are better trained to judge them, just as you may be better trained to design a house or repair an electrical system. I believe this. Yet a voice in my head still says, yes, and Robert S. McNamara said he knew better than the American people did what needed to be done in Vietnam. Just as it can be hard for a parent who recreationally used drugs to draw a firm line for children, it can be hard to oppose proferred advances that aim to give all power to all the people. Yet standards cannot result from universal input on standards, because who then has the right to say, alas, it is your ox that shall be gored? But soon we would be into metaphysics instead of copy editing.
2. Robert Picard has been an infrequent poster on his blog "The Media Business," but January seems to have made him garrulous. Two posts worthy of mention. Here, he notes, as so many have, that the main problem facing newspapers is not that they are printed on paper, but that they produce a product that so often fails to distinguish itself. (Europeans call this the American newspaper business' failure to compete.) At the same time, he, like all heavy news junkies, has already read everything "newsy" on the Times and Post Web sites during the day, and wishes other papers (he uses the Globe as an example) to not simply use their print columns to regurgitate. Yet printed newspapers in the 21st century will never succeed if they consider news junkies their best customers, because 1) they will always have read it somewhere else first and 2) they probably don't read the ads anyway. At the same time, his essential point -- that there has to be a new model of what the product contains -- is true. And here, he makes an interesting forecast for the next year that is neither defeatist jeremiad nor utopian prophecy -- simply noting that for newspaper companies to survive, they are going to have to be run on the business side by people whose background was not in the leisurely, well-mannered, somewhat amateurish newspaper business, where, until two years ago, you could always put off the day of reckoning by publishing a progress edition. What this means for those in the newsroom is unclear.
3. One good link deserves another: Juan Giner, who posted a comment here about how the Spanish department store El Corte Ingles could save the newspaper business, elaborates. Juan notes that "El Corte Ingles" means "The English Cut," which is one of the strangest names ever for a department store, until you realize that it was started as a bespoke tailoring shop. Department stores in England, the U.S., Germany and the Nordic countries tend to use the family name or some relatively straightforward name like Stockholm's Nordiska Kompaniet (Northern Co.), although there are a raft of unique names such as City of Paris and Kaufhaus des Westens. Stores in cities using Romance or Slavic languages tend toward a title rather than the owner's name: La Rinascente (The Renaisance) in Rome, Bazar de l'Hotel de Ville in Paris, Bila Labut (White Swan) in Prague, El Fino de Siglo (The Turn of the Century, I believe) in Havana. But there are exceptions here too, such as Coin, the Italian department store named after the Coin family that started it in Venice, and stores in what were American colonies or pseudo-colonies, such as Rustan's in Manila and Madero's in Panama City.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Copy Editing: Questions of Identity
A couple of nights ago I was watching a program on the Kennedy assassination -- the point was to support the Warren report and the single-bullet theory, and this being TV today, I have no idea what the program name was or what channel it was on -- and I saw for the first time the video of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot. (Digression: Just like the NFL, a bowling tournament my father was in decided not to cancel on Nov. 24, 1963, and he would routinely take me along to the lanes, where I would amuse myself playing pinball, drinking Cokes and looking at the league standing sheets that used to line the halls of every bowling alley. Bored, I called my mother at home and she said, "I can't talk! Lee Harvey Oswald was just shot!" Relaying that information made the rest of that tournament irrelevant to most of the bowlers.)
The program had extensive interviews with Oswald's brother Robert, and it struck me, as he was talking about how Lee Harvey Oswald wanted to go down in history as a big shot, that Lee Harvey Oswald probably never expected to go down in history as Lee Harvey Oswald. He was just Lee Oswald to his friends and family. But Oswald became Lee Harvey, because no one knew who he was and reporters got the formal police identification when he was arrested for killing Officer Tibbett; yet his killer never became Jack Leon Ruby, because nearly everyone who saw him shoot Oswald already knew who he was -- the cries of "Jack!" start on the tape just a second after the shot -- and thus reporters simply identified him as Jack Ruby, not needing to wait for the formal police ID. (Also, "Lee Harvey" rolls off the tongue easier than "Jack Leon.")
Jimmy Carter certainly stopped the newspaper tradition of referring to political leaders by their full names with middle initial, although at first he was just an annoying exception to the rule. At my first job, which was a very old-school paper, I was taught to always use full legal names with middle initial because 1) it helped the morgue file the clips and 2) consistency equaled credibility. With arrests, you used the middle name because the person might be J. Wesley Wright to the public and thus John W. Wright would be meaningless -- and this also would make sure the clips got in the right file. Of course, this was also in the days when you had to identify women as "Miss" or "Mrs." because "readers would want to know if they are married."
But as a result of Carter's self-identification -- famously taking the oath as "Jimmy" instead of "James Earl Carter Jr." -- using legal names seemed as passe as wearing hats. Instead it became a matter of self-presentation. Pennsylvania Gov. Richard L. Thornburgh had been Richard L. Thornburgh in news stories throughout his long political career, but in running for the Senate in 1991 he asked to be known in news reports as "Dick Thornburgh." This puts the reporters covering the campaign in a bind -- do you risk being sent to Siberia by the candidate over his first name? No, you lobby the copy desk to change the rule. Similarly, the Philadelphia Flyers' Bobby Clarke wanted to be seen as more managerial when he went into team management and asked that he henceforth be known as Bob Clarke. We compromised, referring to him as Bob in the present tense and Bobby when remembering the Broad Street Bullies. The night Wilson Goode was elected mayor of Philadelphia in 1983, our sidebar referred to him by his legal name -- Willie Wilson Goode -- in the first edition but was changed to W. Wilson Goode by a very high ranking editor who felt that we might look like we were being disrespectful to the city's first black mayor by pointing out that his first name, which he did not publicly use, did not carry the same historical resonance as, say, Richardson or Thacher.
One local politician who recently moved from the district attorney's office to the county board of commissioners suddenly started losing his middle initial and "Jr." in news stories. We had no idea why but wondered if he wanted to lose the image of power he had and be seen now as a man of the people. Turns out he had simply moved into the domain of a different beat reporter, one who thinks people should be called in the paper the way they present themselves. We insisted that the county's Web page be used as a reference, assuming that would reflect how the person wished to be known, and got into a discussion about whether county Web pages are put together by low-paid functionaries who give such matters no thought. But I had never liked giving in on Dick Thornburgh very much. You don't get to change the rules in mid-stream just because you want to.
And, of course, all of this would have been simply an academic copy editor question had it not been for the controversy over the middle name of the current president, who took the oath of office with almost his full name -- the "2nd" was not intoned, perhaps because the chief justice would have said "Barack Hussein Obama faithfully 2nd" -- but who clearly identifies himself as Barack Obama, not Barack H. Obama, in his signature, his literary works, and among his friends -- yet whose mother and grandparents always called him "Barry." What's a poor copy editor to do? What if someone runs for office named "Richard Adolf Smith" and you go along with calling him "Dick Smith" and the opponent says it is a conspiracy to delude Jewish voters? Well, you cross that bridge when you come to it.
But at the same time, Google has become the universal newspaper morgue, and while "Jimmy Carter" or "James Earl Carter Jr." will bring you to many of the same places, "John W. Wright" vs. "J. Wesley Wright" now matters a great deal. And while Barack Obama may have put the "that doesn't sound American" name question to bed, "Bobby Jindal" still sounds different than "Piyush 'Bobby' Jindal" and you know some bloggers, and, yes, the occasional less-than-informed reporter, will somehow make the possible presidential candidate Robert Jindal at some point despite his having taken the nickname out of a childhood love for the "Brady Bunch" character.
So what is a copy editor to do? Use the official reference? Which official reference? Which Web page of the official reference? Insist on the legal name? Say it's a free-for-all? On the one hand, it's an academic question because Barack Hussein Obama II was elected instead of John Sidney McCain III; on the other hand, it wasn't an academic question to Ann Coulter during the campaign. Names still have power. What, in this time of less copy editing, should the beleaguered corps of copy editors insist upon?
The program had extensive interviews with Oswald's brother Robert, and it struck me, as he was talking about how Lee Harvey Oswald wanted to go down in history as a big shot, that Lee Harvey Oswald probably never expected to go down in history as Lee Harvey Oswald. He was just Lee Oswald to his friends and family. But Oswald became Lee Harvey, because no one knew who he was and reporters got the formal police identification when he was arrested for killing Officer Tibbett; yet his killer never became Jack Leon Ruby, because nearly everyone who saw him shoot Oswald already knew who he was -- the cries of "Jack!" start on the tape just a second after the shot -- and thus reporters simply identified him as Jack Ruby, not needing to wait for the formal police ID. (Also, "Lee Harvey" rolls off the tongue easier than "Jack Leon.")
Jimmy Carter certainly stopped the newspaper tradition of referring to political leaders by their full names with middle initial, although at first he was just an annoying exception to the rule. At my first job, which was a very old-school paper, I was taught to always use full legal names with middle initial because 1) it helped the morgue file the clips and 2) consistency equaled credibility. With arrests, you used the middle name because the person might be J. Wesley Wright to the public and thus John W. Wright would be meaningless -- and this also would make sure the clips got in the right file. Of course, this was also in the days when you had to identify women as "Miss" or "Mrs." because "readers would want to know if they are married."
But as a result of Carter's self-identification -- famously taking the oath as "Jimmy" instead of "James Earl Carter Jr." -- using legal names seemed as passe as wearing hats. Instead it became a matter of self-presentation. Pennsylvania Gov. Richard L. Thornburgh had been Richard L. Thornburgh in news stories throughout his long political career, but in running for the Senate in 1991 he asked to be known in news reports as "Dick Thornburgh." This puts the reporters covering the campaign in a bind -- do you risk being sent to Siberia by the candidate over his first name? No, you lobby the copy desk to change the rule. Similarly, the Philadelphia Flyers' Bobby Clarke wanted to be seen as more managerial when he went into team management and asked that he henceforth be known as Bob Clarke. We compromised, referring to him as Bob in the present tense and Bobby when remembering the Broad Street Bullies. The night Wilson Goode was elected mayor of Philadelphia in 1983, our sidebar referred to him by his legal name -- Willie Wilson Goode -- in the first edition but was changed to W. Wilson Goode by a very high ranking editor who felt that we might look like we were being disrespectful to the city's first black mayor by pointing out that his first name, which he did not publicly use, did not carry the same historical resonance as, say, Richardson or Thacher.
One local politician who recently moved from the district attorney's office to the county board of commissioners suddenly started losing his middle initial and "Jr." in news stories. We had no idea why but wondered if he wanted to lose the image of power he had and be seen now as a man of the people. Turns out he had simply moved into the domain of a different beat reporter, one who thinks people should be called in the paper the way they present themselves. We insisted that the county's Web page be used as a reference, assuming that would reflect how the person wished to be known, and got into a discussion about whether county Web pages are put together by low-paid functionaries who give such matters no thought. But I had never liked giving in on Dick Thornburgh very much. You don't get to change the rules in mid-stream just because you want to.
And, of course, all of this would have been simply an academic copy editor question had it not been for the controversy over the middle name of the current president, who took the oath of office with almost his full name -- the "2nd" was not intoned, perhaps because the chief justice would have said "Barack Hussein Obama faithfully 2nd" -- but who clearly identifies himself as Barack Obama, not Barack H. Obama, in his signature, his literary works, and among his friends -- yet whose mother and grandparents always called him "Barry." What's a poor copy editor to do? What if someone runs for office named "Richard Adolf Smith" and you go along with calling him "Dick Smith" and the opponent says it is a conspiracy to delude Jewish voters? Well, you cross that bridge when you come to it.
But at the same time, Google has become the universal newspaper morgue, and while "Jimmy Carter" or "James Earl Carter Jr." will bring you to many of the same places, "John W. Wright" vs. "J. Wesley Wright" now matters a great deal. And while Barack Obama may have put the "that doesn't sound American" name question to bed, "Bobby Jindal" still sounds different than "Piyush 'Bobby' Jindal" and you know some bloggers, and, yes, the occasional less-than-informed reporter, will somehow make the possible presidential candidate Robert Jindal at some point despite his having taken the nickname out of a childhood love for the "Brady Bunch" character.
So what is a copy editor to do? Use the official reference? Which official reference? Which Web page of the official reference? Insist on the legal name? Say it's a free-for-all? On the one hand, it's an academic question because Barack Hussein Obama II was elected instead of John Sidney McCain III; on the other hand, it wasn't an academic question to Ann Coulter during the campaign. Names still have power. What, in this time of less copy editing, should the beleaguered corps of copy editors insist upon?
Monday, January 19, 2009
Digital Youth, and Other Dramas
A previous post noted that college students are not all uniformly digital masters, noting that the use of, say, Twitter was a minority interest at the University of Kansas. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at Virginia, reports the same thing in an article summarized in the Winter Wilson Quarterly (behind a wall). He writes:
"I am in the constant company of 18-to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technologies vary greatly within every class." The writer of the summary adds: "Overall, Vaidhyanathan finds, students' level of computer savvy hasn't budged in a decade." The professor adds: "Mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won't read books are just not true... They all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or webpage."
To be honest, this sounds just as anecdotal as my report from Kansas. But it lines up with the anecdotes my son tells me -- that there are the super-technological savvy, then there are the ones like him who are heavy users of technology but not wishing at heart to download themselves into it, and then there is the other four-fifths of the university. At the same time, clearly they all use Facebook. The point, as the summary notes: "College students are more complicated than any 'imaginary generations' can portray." A snapshot of the heaviest technology users among them is not a predictor of the whole, even though newspapers seem to have become convinced that it is.
---
As noted before, when I get really depressed about the future I look forward to Newspapers & Technology. The January issue has three articles well worth one's time. Douglas Page, identified as a "media executive" -- wish we knew a little more -- writes about how "David is winning because Goliath either doesn't understand how to use all the tools available to him or is too lazy to do so." He quotes ad agency executive David Walker as saying of newspapers' audience, "You can't get to 120 million in virtually any audience, other than television, on a specific day and date like you can with newspapers. You certainly can't get there digitally." But the article also notes how newspapers are "still fighting the fight from 20 years ago -- frequency and reach." (We can't do anything special for you, Mr. Advertiser, but we have 600,000 circulation!)
Mark Johnson of the direct-mail firm Valassis says successful advertising sales come down to telling the advertiser how a consumer uses the print product. "Does it have a shelf life and is it used as a reference piece? Do they pass it on to others? Do they clip coupons, do the puzzles...?" The article ends by noting, "Executives see advertisers taking their business elsewhere and feel they have no choice than to be like everyone else on the Web. The problem with that solution is that newspapers risk being commoditized. No other Web site offers a print product.... newspaper executives should consider that a strength." Alas, it seems that Page's first point -- that newspapers are simply lazy -- is going to win out.
A story on newspapers' road to financial recovery shows that "Publishers are obsessed with the notion of monetizing their Web audience. To that end, they've launched dozens of sites, spanning the spectrum of interests. Those sites have attracted traffic, but they've also fueled an exponential increase in the amount of ad space to be sold. The result? Plummeting ad rates." (But we have 3.5 million unique visitors, which is the equivalent of -- 6oo,ooo circulation!) Newspapers need, as has been said here before, to concentrate on making money, not just on having big numbers. But the newspaper business has been based its entire life on circulation numbers, and it appears to be unable to wean itself.
Finally, the redoubtable Jim Chisholm of iMedia adds:
"Promote newspapers' selling card: Quality. During crises newspaper readership increases."
"Increase sales staff, don't sink it."
"Offer advertisers new solutions."
"All our staff losses are in part an inability of management to identify and pursue new product opportunities, and in part an internal aversion to change."
And he closes by saying: "We are now at the bottom of the cycle."
---
As with department stores, newspapers have to deal with the customers they have, not the customers they want. My hometown paper, the Indianapolis Star, decided to drop the daily prayer, which had been a staple of the paper for nearly 50 years. This was not done for space reasons or to save the $20 they were paying a retired minister per week to write it; it was done for the usual high-minded newsroom reasons, expressed by editor Dennis Ryerson as, essentially, why should a secular institution be offering prayers to a specific God? Well, they heard from the customers they have, and now the prayer is back.
Star religion writer Robert King puts the matter into perspective on his blog item. The editors of the Star, good people all, looked at it from a journalistic perspective. They did not look at it from the standpoint of, how do our customers use the product and what do they want from it? But now they have alienated those readers who thought the prayer was stupid but never would have bothered themselves about it. Those readers now will see the Star as having caved in to conservative Christians. This was not worth it for seven lines of type per day and $20 a week, but I'm sure the editors of the Star thought they were doing what was in the best interest of the People of Indiana, without asking the actual people of Indiana what they wanted from the Star.
---
Finally, Gottschalk's, the Fresno-based chain that has been one of the last independent department stores, filed for bankruptcy. It's hard to tell from the stories exactly what is going on, but this story from the Bakersfield Californian indicates that the store might end up in the hands of El Corte Ingles S.A., which is already a minority owner. El Corte Ingles is the incredibly successful Spanish department store that owned the Harris Co., a San Bernardino department store that Gottschalk's bought. In downtown department store days Harris' was the largest store between Los Angeles and Phoenix. This will be interesting to watch. Usually, what El Corte touches turns to gold.
"I am in the constant company of 18-to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technologies vary greatly within every class." The writer of the summary adds: "Overall, Vaidhyanathan finds, students' level of computer savvy hasn't budged in a decade." The professor adds: "Mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won't read books are just not true... They all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or webpage."
To be honest, this sounds just as anecdotal as my report from Kansas. But it lines up with the anecdotes my son tells me -- that there are the super-technological savvy, then there are the ones like him who are heavy users of technology but not wishing at heart to download themselves into it, and then there is the other four-fifths of the university. At the same time, clearly they all use Facebook. The point, as the summary notes: "College students are more complicated than any 'imaginary generations' can portray." A snapshot of the heaviest technology users among them is not a predictor of the whole, even though newspapers seem to have become convinced that it is.
---
As noted before, when I get really depressed about the future I look forward to Newspapers & Technology. The January issue has three articles well worth one's time. Douglas Page, identified as a "media executive" -- wish we knew a little more -- writes about how "David is winning because Goliath either doesn't understand how to use all the tools available to him or is too lazy to do so." He quotes ad agency executive David Walker as saying of newspapers' audience, "You can't get to 120 million in virtually any audience, other than television, on a specific day and date like you can with newspapers. You certainly can't get there digitally." But the article also notes how newspapers are "still fighting the fight from 20 years ago -- frequency and reach." (We can't do anything special for you, Mr. Advertiser, but we have 600,000 circulation!)
Mark Johnson of the direct-mail firm Valassis says successful advertising sales come down to telling the advertiser how a consumer uses the print product. "Does it have a shelf life and is it used as a reference piece? Do they pass it on to others? Do they clip coupons, do the puzzles...?" The article ends by noting, "Executives see advertisers taking their business elsewhere and feel they have no choice than to be like everyone else on the Web. The problem with that solution is that newspapers risk being commoditized. No other Web site offers a print product.... newspaper executives should consider that a strength." Alas, it seems that Page's first point -- that newspapers are simply lazy -- is going to win out.
A story on newspapers' road to financial recovery shows that "Publishers are obsessed with the notion of monetizing their Web audience. To that end, they've launched dozens of sites, spanning the spectrum of interests. Those sites have attracted traffic, but they've also fueled an exponential increase in the amount of ad space to be sold. The result? Plummeting ad rates." (But we have 3.5 million unique visitors, which is the equivalent of -- 6oo,ooo circulation!) Newspapers need, as has been said here before, to concentrate on making money, not just on having big numbers. But the newspaper business has been based its entire life on circulation numbers, and it appears to be unable to wean itself.
Finally, the redoubtable Jim Chisholm of iMedia adds:
"Promote newspapers' selling card: Quality. During crises newspaper readership increases."
"Increase sales staff, don't sink it."
"Offer advertisers new solutions."
"All our staff losses are in part an inability of management to identify and pursue new product opportunities, and in part an internal aversion to change."
And he closes by saying: "We are now at the bottom of the cycle."
---
As with department stores, newspapers have to deal with the customers they have, not the customers they want. My hometown paper, the Indianapolis Star, decided to drop the daily prayer, which had been a staple of the paper for nearly 50 years. This was not done for space reasons or to save the $20 they were paying a retired minister per week to write it; it was done for the usual high-minded newsroom reasons, expressed by editor Dennis Ryerson as, essentially, why should a secular institution be offering prayers to a specific God? Well, they heard from the customers they have, and now the prayer is back.
Star religion writer Robert King puts the matter into perspective on his blog item. The editors of the Star, good people all, looked at it from a journalistic perspective. They did not look at it from the standpoint of, how do our customers use the product and what do they want from it? But now they have alienated those readers who thought the prayer was stupid but never would have bothered themselves about it. Those readers now will see the Star as having caved in to conservative Christians. This was not worth it for seven lines of type per day and $20 a week, but I'm sure the editors of the Star thought they were doing what was in the best interest of the People of Indiana, without asking the actual people of Indiana what they wanted from the Star.
---
Finally, Gottschalk's, the Fresno-based chain that has been one of the last independent department stores, filed for bankruptcy. It's hard to tell from the stories exactly what is going on, but this story from the Bakersfield Californian indicates that the store might end up in the hands of El Corte Ingles S.A., which is already a minority owner. El Corte Ingles is the incredibly successful Spanish department store that owned the Harris Co., a San Bernardino department store that Gottschalk's bought. In downtown department store days Harris' was the largest store between Los Angeles and Phoenix. This will be interesting to watch. Usually, what El Corte touches turns to gold.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 23
William Laubach & Sons was the large department store in Easton, Pa., and for a long-lived department store it had a very placid life. Founded in 1860, it remained in the 300 block of Northampton Street for nearly its entire life, and remained in the hands of the Laubach family until 1947, when it was sold to Allied Stores. Allied operated it as a separate division up until the early 1960s, when it was merged into the Pomeroy's chain Allied operated throughout Eastern Pennsylvania.
A fuller biography of the Laubach store is here. Laubach's was the sort of successful community institution no one ever thought would just go away -- five or six generations shopped there.
Similarly, its building is representative of 19th-century commercial structures. The one oddity to note is the four-story tower at the back of the building -- was it warehousing, or does it date from the time when department stores made their own ready-to-wear clothing in house?
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Why This Could Be Good for Newspapers
In the 1980s newspapers started increasingly hearing from advertisers that they wanted to know who newspapers' readers were. This flummoxed them. Newspapers' readers were everybody. Merthe's and Vaughn-Ragsdale and Gold's had never asked them who their readers were. (A gold star to anyone who posts all three cities of those department stores.)
Breaking down circulation by county, newspapers had been doing for years. By zip code was harder. For smaller newspapers, zip codes had never mattered. In big cities it mattered to advertisers a great deal, but delivery routes were not by zip code. No one thought in those terms. Some newspapers had no idea who their customers were. One of the reasons for the Detroit newspaper strike of 1995 was that the drivers and distributors controlled the circulation lists and the newspapers couldn't say who was getting the paper. None of this had mattered when the newspaper said "We have 600,000 circulation!" and Hudson's said, "Great! We'll buy 15 pages on Sunday!"
But in the 1970s, advances in printing technology made it possible to produce a specialty publication for any interest, just as changes in the number of storefronts available, a more spread-out population, and a greater inventory of goods on offer made it impossible for a department store to offer a representative sample of everything. So you had Cat Litter Box Scoop World, and advertisers of litter box scoops and anti-furball medicines knew who was reading it and targeted their advertising.
Newspapers said: Everyone reads us! Advertisers said: We don't want everyone! Tell us why they read you. Newspapers said: Because they want to read the news! Advertisers said: Why is someone "reading the news" interested in my product? Newspapers said: Because we have 600,000 circulation! And things just drifted along, with newspapers raising rates and depending more on classified revenue to make up for their losses to advertisers, who felt that huge portions of their ad budget were being wasted on readers who had no interest in their product and would have none, ever.
Last week I noted three studies -- by Gallup, Pew, and Lee -- that seemed to indicate that at least at the moment, there is a floor of print-only readership somewhere in the area of 30 percent at bottom and 40 percent at top, even among 18-to-29-year-olds; add in print-and-online and it gets better.
The disadvantage to newspapers is that they can no longer shout: We have 600,000 circulation!
The advantage is: In an era of unlimited choice, these are people who have chosen to take your publication. Why? What are they looking for? How can that audience be marketed? They're no longer buying the paper to play the numbers based on Cha Ching or check whether AT&T went up .02. Among those readers, your newspaper has a niche of some sort. What is it? Who are they?
The median age of TV viewers is now 50. For newspapers, it is above 50. The median age of the U.S. population is 38. However, that includes people below 18. Readership studies always are of people 18 and above. What is the median age of people 18 and above? (Tell me if you can find this figure, I can't; but there are indications it's about 48.) But 75 percent of the U.S. population is above 18. To what degree does the age level of readership of newspapers match the average age of people 18 and up? (In other words, if you drop people under 18, if the average age is then 48, if the average age of newspaper readership is, say, 51, it would stack up nicely.) And are newspapers really trying to sell themselves to people under 18? Have they ever been? As the story on the age of TV viewers notes, the average age of Nickelodeon viewers is 10. It's useful in the TV world to know those figures; does including under-18s make any sense for newspapers?
Breaking down circulation by county, newspapers had been doing for years. By zip code was harder. For smaller newspapers, zip codes had never mattered. In big cities it mattered to advertisers a great deal, but delivery routes were not by zip code. No one thought in those terms. Some newspapers had no idea who their customers were. One of the reasons for the Detroit newspaper strike of 1995 was that the drivers and distributors controlled the circulation lists and the newspapers couldn't say who was getting the paper. None of this had mattered when the newspaper said "We have 600,000 circulation!" and Hudson's said, "Great! We'll buy 15 pages on Sunday!"
But in the 1970s, advances in printing technology made it possible to produce a specialty publication for any interest, just as changes in the number of storefronts available, a more spread-out population, and a greater inventory of goods on offer made it impossible for a department store to offer a representative sample of everything. So you had Cat Litter Box Scoop World, and advertisers of litter box scoops and anti-furball medicines knew who was reading it and targeted their advertising.
Newspapers said: Everyone reads us! Advertisers said: We don't want everyone! Tell us why they read you. Newspapers said: Because they want to read the news! Advertisers said: Why is someone "reading the news" interested in my product? Newspapers said: Because we have 600,000 circulation! And things just drifted along, with newspapers raising rates and depending more on classified revenue to make up for their losses to advertisers, who felt that huge portions of their ad budget were being wasted on readers who had no interest in their product and would have none, ever.
Last week I noted three studies -- by Gallup, Pew, and Lee -- that seemed to indicate that at least at the moment, there is a floor of print-only readership somewhere in the area of 30 percent at bottom and 40 percent at top, even among 18-to-29-year-olds; add in print-and-online and it gets better.
The disadvantage to newspapers is that they can no longer shout: We have 600,000 circulation!
The advantage is: In an era of unlimited choice, these are people who have chosen to take your publication. Why? What are they looking for? How can that audience be marketed? They're no longer buying the paper to play the numbers based on Cha Ching or check whether AT&T went up .02. Among those readers, your newspaper has a niche of some sort. What is it? Who are they?
The median age of TV viewers is now 50. For newspapers, it is above 50. The median age of the U.S. population is 38. However, that includes people below 18. Readership studies always are of people 18 and above. What is the median age of people 18 and above? (Tell me if you can find this figure, I can't; but there are indications it's about 48.) But 75 percent of the U.S. population is above 18. To what degree does the age level of readership of newspapers match the average age of people 18 and up? (In other words, if you drop people under 18, if the average age is then 48, if the average age of newspaper readership is, say, 51, it would stack up nicely.) And are newspapers really trying to sell themselves to people under 18? Have they ever been? As the story on the age of TV viewers notes, the average age of Nickelodeon viewers is 10. It's useful in the TV world to know those figures; does including under-18s make any sense for newspapers?
People under 18 are not newspapers' target readership, in print or online. People over 65 skew the readership data because of their heavy reliance on print -- caused probably as much by not needing to waste time at work as their dislike of computers. Newspapers need to sell their reach, whatever it is, among people 18 to 65 and figure out a way to avoid having their penetration in this market be skewed out of recognition by both the absence of young people and the dominance of senior citizens, whose massive use of newspapers makes it too easy for people to dismiss the medium as simply Lawrence Welk on paper.
Newspapers' online strategy has been flawed by trying to reproduce on the Internet what they are in print, while not recognizing that while in print it makes sense to have a little bit of everything, the online world in itself is a little bit of everything. (Department stores had the same problem once malls became enclosed; an enclosed mall is in essence a department store, so what is the point of a department store in a department store?) But even so, newspapers can use declining readership as an opportunity to either define the readers they have, or increasingly try to market themselves to specific readers they have and forget others. This is happening with the geographic pullbacks but it doubtless needs to go further. And yes, it means trying to figure out who your target market is, instead of simply saying: It's everybody. Nobody wants everybody.
Monday, January 12, 2009
A Copy Editor Should Never Assume
In a previous post I noted incredulity that the L.A. Times could be covering Web and print editorial costs from online revenue only. I said, surely this is a copy editing error, surely they meant online only costs.
Well, apparently not. As noted here, -- yes, by Jeff Jarvis -- the L.A. Times apparently can cover the payroll costs of 660 newsroom workers totally off online revenue.
Let's just assume that each worker comes attached to $100,000 in pay and benefits. That means that the L.A. Times pulled in $66 million last year in online revenue. By contrast, all the newspapers in the McClatchy group reported in October that they had $16.4 million in online revenue. That was a down month, but probably better than some of the summer; let's just assume that they have $16.4 million a month in online revenue. That would be $198 million in online revenue. That would mean that in the McClatchy company, the jobs of 1,980 newsroom workers would be covered by online revenue, assuming each was tied to $100,000 in compensation -- but I suspect the number for McClatchy is much lower. Using the old 1-per-thousand rule, McClatchy would have about 2,500 editorial employees. So there you go. If McClatchy fell down to, oh, 2,100 editorial jobs, they would all be covered out of online revenue.
If I remember, newsroom costs are 10 to 11 percent of total newspaper expenditures, or were before 2006. If you get online revenue to 10 percent, clearly you cover it. As Doug Fisher notes, none of this covers the cost of your ad and business staffs, real estate, promotion, etc., and some of it still has to be pass-through revenue. But the Times seems to have found an online lease on editorial life. And how has it done it? Blogs. Perhaps the Times is making the breakthrough in showing how the problem with newspapers on the Web is that the newspaper's style of writing and reporting does not work as well in an atmosphere of immediacy.
In any event, well, my previous post was wrong, and stupid, and I eat crow.
Well, apparently not. As noted here, -- yes, by Jeff Jarvis -- the L.A. Times apparently can cover the payroll costs of 660 newsroom workers totally off online revenue.
Let's just assume that each worker comes attached to $100,000 in pay and benefits. That means that the L.A. Times pulled in $66 million last year in online revenue. By contrast, all the newspapers in the McClatchy group reported in October that they had $16.4 million in online revenue. That was a down month, but probably better than some of the summer; let's just assume that they have $16.4 million a month in online revenue. That would be $198 million in online revenue. That would mean that in the McClatchy company, the jobs of 1,980 newsroom workers would be covered by online revenue, assuming each was tied to $100,000 in compensation -- but I suspect the number for McClatchy is much lower. Using the old 1-per-thousand rule, McClatchy would have about 2,500 editorial employees. So there you go. If McClatchy fell down to, oh, 2,100 editorial jobs, they would all be covered out of online revenue.
If I remember, newsroom costs are 10 to 11 percent of total newspaper expenditures, or were before 2006. If you get online revenue to 10 percent, clearly you cover it. As Doug Fisher notes, none of this covers the cost of your ad and business staffs, real estate, promotion, etc., and some of it still has to be pass-through revenue. But the Times seems to have found an online lease on editorial life. And how has it done it? Blogs. Perhaps the Times is making the breakthrough in showing how the problem with newspapers on the Web is that the newspaper's style of writing and reporting does not work as well in an atmosphere of immediacy.
In any event, well, my previous post was wrong, and stupid, and I eat crow.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Department Store Building of the Week, Vol. 23
People in their 30s on up who grew up in the small cities of western Pennsylvania will probably remember The Troutman Co. Troutman's had stores in Butler, Connellsville, Greensburg, Indiana, Latrobe, New Castle and Washington, and there may have been later mall stores elsewhere. It was part of the Allied Stores chain and was historically linked in Connellsville to the group of stores in Uniontown and Warren run by the Wright brothers and Sankey Metzler.
The building at the right is the Butler store at 202 S. Main St., which as far as I can tell was the original Troutman operation, founded in the 1800s by Adam Troutman. At this point, records thin out and I am not sure what happened next, but the Troutman family in Butler kept control of that store, known as the A.E. Troutman Co., and Greensburg became home to the main Troutman business that people around Pittsburgh will remember, The Troutman Co., run by another Adam Troutman and the entertainingly named J. Lacosse Cote. In the 1940s, the Butler Troutman's was reunited with the Greensburg Troutman's and was operated as a branch thereafter. If anyone is reading this who knows from the history of Butler and Westmoreland Counties exactly what went down, please enlighten.
Pennsylvania lent itself to these early regional chain department stores -- ones before the mall era. It had a large number of medium-size cities within close proximity to each other, making it easy to supervise stores in the era of trains and interurbans as well as autos. But the same was true in southern Michigan and most of Indiana, and there each city had its own independent stores. It may just have been a matter of the aspirations of the owners. The Globe Warehouses from Scranton, Pomeroy's and Bowman's in the eastern part of the state, the waxing and waning Bon-Ton operation from York, even the Danks Co. in and around State College were all regional chains in Pennsylvania; the Bon-Ton survives even today.
The building at the left was a Montgomery Ward store, and its French-chateau facade may be familiar to people elsewhere. I have seen the same storefront in Meadville, I believe, and I know also somewhere else, where it had a brief other life as a Carroll House in the Interstate chain, but I can't put my finger on that one. And I suspect I have seen it elsewhere before I started to put together that this was a generic Ward's design. It's an odd design for a department store.
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