Department Store Building of the ... Whatever

It's getting harder to find old department store buildings in smaller cities. I went looking for one in Norristown. I knew the old Block's had been torn down years ago, but the last time I was there the building of Friedman's New York Store was still standing. No more; it's now a garage.

So rather than doing obscure stores in smaller towns I'll move on to my own city of Philadelphia, although the history of large-city department stores is extensively documented. Shown above is the Lit Bros. store on Market Street between Seventh and Eighth Streets. From the street it impressed people as one continuous frontage, but it was always a number of cast-iron front buildings linked together and painted white. 25 years ago, a sign that dated back decades atop the building said "A Great Store in a Great City," which was Lits' motto. (That was also on the warehouse, which stood where part of Community College of Philadelphia now is.)

Lits also had the motto "Hats Trimmed Free of Charge," going back to its genesis. It was run by Jacob and Samuel Lit for years. Just before the Depression they sold it to City Stores, which put its management under that of the Goerke family, which owned stores in Newark and Elizabeth, N.J. During the Depression City Stores liquidated the Goerke stores; the one in Elizabeth was reopened under the ownership of the Goerke family. City Stores operated Lits outside of its other interests until 1951, when it was integrated into the operation.

Like many downscale stores, Lits went into suburban branches early; the Lits, Wasson's, Crowley's of the world didn't crave the exclusivity of the carriage-trade store. There were stores in Camden and Trenton, and in Northeast Philadelphia and Willow Grove. Lits also benefited when another City operation, N. Snellenberg & Co., was closed as a reaction to a strike; Lits picked up its branches, including Atlantic City.

But City Stores, part of the Bankers Security empire, began to fade before other chains of department stores did. Divisions such as R.H. White in Boston were pruned and then disappeared. Lits lasted into the late 1970s, and had opened modern mall stores such as at Echelon in South Jersey. But that did not save it, as the "fourth store down" in Philadelphia, after discounters took away much of its trade.

The building was threatened, but was saved by the then Mellon Bank for a regional headquarters. It also has had street-level retail.

Copy Editing: A Hub-bub from Gannett

Gannett Co. announced this week that it would over the next two years consolidate all its page design at five locations. Thus the Palm Springs Desert Sun, the Indianapolis Star, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, would no longer be laid out at their home newsrooms, but in Phoenix or Louisville or Asbury Park.

Charles Apple -- the newspaper design guru who has brought his widely read blog to the American Copy Editors Society site, and bless him for it -- has some thoughts here. Here's a link to Gannett's statement. Since, of course, the principle of blogging is that there are never enough thoughts, here are some more.

1. LET'S TAKE THEM AT THEIR WORD

Legions of Gannett-haters, including many former and current Gannett employees, will laugh at this, but let's take their statement at face value first, as presented by VP/News Kate Marymount.

She says the goal of "the creation of News Design Centers that handle the design and production of newspapers" is "offering efficiencies but – just as importantly – sophisticated newspaper design." Certainly an impetus is to have one editorial system -- CCI -- in all of Gannett's newsrooms. Thus, a story written in Wausau can appear in Marion without having to be sent, picked up, recoded, published in print, published in mobile, whatever.

"Employees of the Design Centers will be trained in sophisticated newspaper design. And, most importantly, it allows our Information Centers to focus on – and protect -- the creation of unique local content."

Information Centers, of course, is what we used to call newsrooms. I think what this is saying is: If we take one Full-Time Equivalent out of Marshfield and make it a one-third FTE in Louisville, we have two-thirds of an FTE to do reporting in Marshfield. Also, if the job of the editor in Marshfield is simply to develop a local news budget rather than having to oversee and staff production, perhaps he or she will have more time to do that. (More on that later.)

"What work will remain locally? Creation of content and copy editing. To draw on the expertise and local knowledge at the local sites, copy editing will remain there. Copy that moves to the Design Centers is expected to be production-ready and include suggested headlines. ... We recognize that journalists everywhere handle multiple tasks every day, and that copy editors also paginate, create digital content, write SEO headlines, etc. We will work with each site to clarify what work is done locally and at Design Centers." Suddenly Gannett gets religion on copy editing? Hmm. But let's move on.

"The goal of this project is to elevate the quality of design at sites where the recession caused a loss of focus on design. And to sustain good design at sites that have been able to keep that a strong focus." OK, again, let's take them at their word, in part because the Gannett paper I read every day has suddenly undergone a design cleanup and its front page now looks like a thoughtful, well-designed entry point instead of a circus. (That's not a slam at my many friends there; it's what they were told to do, and now they're being told to do something better.) But let's also take them at their word because every editor cares about how his or her paper looks.

"Will all of our newspapers begin to look alike? No. Flatly, no. That is not the intent at all. The individuality of a newspaper is important. We will preserve that. ... Will our deadlines have to be earlier? No. The Design Centers will be staffed based on your current deadlines." Taking them at their word, this can't mean the aim is simply draconian cuts. The way to accomplish those is to make every newspaper look the same so that no story ever needs to be reformatted, as Tribune has largely done. And by assigning newspapers to hubs based on geography (and accompanying time zone) instead of, say, having Asbury Park lay out one West Coast paper for every East Coast paper, you're not going to have a designer do Morristown in the first half of his shift and Visalia in the second.

So taking them at their word, they want to:
1. Save some positions by not having to have a full-time layout person at every 14-page paper in the Midwest.
2. Have their papers look better by having designers who work together and under the direction of a design person, instead of somebody on his own in Iowa answering to an editor who doesn't know a thing about layout.
3. Have everyone on the same system.

2. LET'S BE CYNICAL

OK, they want to cut payroll. Name a newspaper company that doesn't. Nothing about that makes Gannett stand out from the New York Times Co.

OK, they want to cut payroll on non-content-creation positions. Again, name a newspaper company that doesn't. That doesn't make Gannett a saint or a good employer. It just doesn't make them the devil either.

So what are some cynical observations?

1. Gannett has giant buildings in Louisville and Asbury Park (I've been in both) and Phoenix. I don't know about Nashville or Des Moines. I assume, since those buildings came from the Binghams and Lasses and Pulliams and Cowleses, that they own them and that there's probably not much they can do with them. So might as well fill them up. If continued downsizing means one can move out of an old-style newsroom building somewhere else and pay less for office space, as has happened with Singleton's Bay-area papers...

2. I don't know much about CCI, but I've been told that their layout system is not accessible from non-layout workstations (unlike the system my paper uses). I assume this means fewer licenses, and you don't need someone in Mountain Home who knows how to troubleshoot it.

3. If you've got a designer in Hattiesburg, you've got to have a backup. If your designers are all in Nashville, you just shift someone around. (As newsrooms shrink, though, this actually makes sense.)

4. The statement about "making the papers look alike" probably refers back to the attempt to make Florida Today exactly resemble USA Today, to see if people would buy it. They didn't. But designers working in a hub are going to copy from one another, and look for shortcuts to make their jobs easier, so the papers will come to resemble each other more over time. Plus, Gannett has never been shy about corporate design edicts -- remember the days when all the non-metros had to have a 7-column front page?

5. If you're trying to get your newsrooms to think more platform-agnostic, the existence in your newsroom of the group that's Getting the Paper Out ties the newsroom to Getting the Paper Out. It's your paper. If getting the paper out is someone else's job, you may spend more time putting things online or on mobile. The page-design function is no longer a newsroom hub. The editor doesn't wander over and say, "Whatcha doin?" The editor's job is the coverage, not obsessing over A1. It's divorcing the newsroom from the print paper, because otherwise tradition will dictate that that print paper will still be the Real Thing.

6. Assume the number of pages produced will inevitably shrink. It will still be a long time, if ever, before it shrinks to nothing. But perhaps you go down to five days or three. Or you keep going at seven days but you've only got two sections instead of four. If you've got 70 page-design desks, you've got to keep them staffed regardless. With hubs, you can spread the work around and shrink the staff gradually while still keeping people occupied.

So to me, the unspoken thing in this memo is: This is a plan to prepare for shrinking print production while not actually admitting it, and to get local newsrooms to focus less on "the next day's paper" and more on simply preparing things regardless of how they are presented.

3. LET'S BE COPY EDITORS

The major surprise in this memo is the separating of the copy editing and design functions, at least for local copy. Recent bang-together moves such as Tribune, Scripps and Media General have all moved both functions to hubs. Gannett makes it very clear in this memo: Copy editing will remain in each newsroom.

Well, as a copy editor who has written about the need for copy editors to be seen as part of the local news-gathering and reporting force, I can't help but be happy. I know Gannett has changed its copy editor jobs in many places to include things such as video, so I don't know exactly what they feel the job is. But they clearly believe that a copy editor in Cherry Hill has to see the copy about Cherry Hill, that a copy desk in Louisville is not going to do the job right. As Apple says: "So at least the critical copy-editing functions will remain in the hands of folks who become familiar with local names and landmarks and customs. This is a smart move on Gannett’s part."

So bully for them, although without the design job I suspect that the one copy editor left in each newsroom may have his or her hands over-filled. The fact that copy editors are supposed to send "suggested heds" instead of actually filling in the head orders is a problem, because designers will be able to make ill-advised changes. (Apple notes this as well.) But a proofreading system could do away with that.

But this again shows to me that the endgame is the withering of print. Gannett has apparently decided that copy editing has a future in the digital world -- you still need that set of local eyes. So keep it in house. But newspaper design? Buggy whips. Move it out the door.

As someone who loves a good newspaper page, that makes me sad. On the other hand, as a copy editor, it's the same choice I'd make -- if I had to make the choice. Design is more exportable than text editing. (Graphics, such as maps and charts, are another thing entirely.) But I still don't know, for example, how stand-alone photo packages will be handled, or if the obscure wire story of interest only in a certain region will be picked up.

--
Note: I wrote this before seeing Steve Yelvington's and Brian White's comments on Apple's blog. Yelvington sees this as an overdue move to let print go further into its long fade to black and applauds it, while for me it's a sad thing that the newspaper business has come to this. That said, both of us drew the same conclusion. My friend Brian notes that local copy editing has stayed in Asheville and Greenville anyway while wire editing went to Louisville. Will wire editing all be in these hubs? Gannett's note is silent on that point. My own guess, a total guess? USA Today eventually will take over all wire content for the local papers.

It's Not the Paper. It's What's On It

A Nieman Lab post by Dan Froomkin said a reason newspapers are failing on the Web -- a debatable proposition, so let's phrase it as "the reason newspapers are not as dominant players in the post-online news ecosystem as they were in the system that preceded it" -- is that the product they're providing doesn't work online. Some quotes:

"We’re hiding much of our newsrooms' value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations. While the dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story still has some marginal utility, it's mostly a throwback at this point — a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community. (For instance, it’s the daily delivery cycle of our print product that led us to focus on yesterday’s news. And it's the focus on maximizing newspaper circulation that drove us to create the notion of 'objectivity' — thereby removing opinion and voice from news stories — for fear of alienating any segment of potential subscribers.)

"The Internet doesn't work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice. There's a reason why opinion writing tends to dominate the most-read lists on our 'news' sites. Indeed, what we’ve seen is that Internet communities tend to form around voices — informed, passionate, authoritative voices in particular. (No one wants to read a bored blogger, I always say.)...

"One option might be to imitate cable TV, and engage in a furious volume of he-said/she-said reporting, voyeurism, contrarianism, gossip, triviality and gotcha journalism. But that would come at the cost of our souls. The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.

"Obviously, we do some of that already. But I would argue that even then, we do so in a much too understated way. We stifle some of our best stories with a wet blanket of pseudo-neutrality. We edit out tone. We banish anything smacking of activism. We don’t telegraph our own enthusiasm for what it is we're doing. We vaguely assume the readers will understand how valuable a service we’re providing for them — but evidently, many of them don’t."

For years, people have been saying that this hasn't worked in print either. The Internet merely opened the door for new competitors who could enter the market without learning to do things the way a newspaper demanded. But as noted here and elsewhere ad infinitum, people have been moving away from newspapers for years, in part because they often are filled with often-boring, often-incremental, often-insider-oriented stories.

They became filled with those stories not just because of a commercial imperative to reach the most people. In fact, newspapers were often more interesting when they were competing with others to reach the most people to fulfill a commercial imperative. When almost every newspaper realized it was the Only Game in Town and likely to remain so forever (as it seemed in the 1970s and 1980s) was when they most felt the pressure to be "objective" (a word I think Froomkin misuses here in terms of the way it was meant by the people who defined it in the mid-20th century, but nevermind). By that time they had already largely maximized circulation. At that point, yes, they certainly wanted to maintain their large circulations. But they also wanted to be seen as fair and impartial truth-tellers, not as activist, enthusiastic, passionate voices. (Eugene Pulliam and William Loeb were activist, enthusiastic, and passionate.)

The debate we have been having is not a debate over whether newspapers will be printed. That's a debate, but the debate is over what I'll call for now "freewheeling journalism" vs. "institutionalized journalism." (Those are sucky labels.) When the Arizona Republic devoted its front page to an editorial on the controversial "ask their status" law, it had to be aware as well that someone could now say, "Your reporters cannot possibly be seen as neutral on this because you as an institution have already taken a stand." But it was certainly an opinion. We could argue church/state about the editorial page's role, except that this was the front page.

When the Republic was owned by Eugene Pulliam, who was known for front-page editorials, it would have been clear that it was the view of Eugene Pulliam. Newspapers spoke for the powerful people who owned them. Was the Republic's view the view of Gannett Co.? Was it the view of the local publisher? The editorial board? In the end it was the view of an institution called the Arizona Republic. But the reporters work for that institution.

Print and trucks and distribution cycles create their own problems, but journalists are engaged in a debate over what constitutes "journalism." Is it saying what happened, or saying what should happen? Is it being a neutral observer who stands back, or an engaged participant who calls it like he sees it? Is it speaking to a general audience, or speaking from a specific standpoint to those who get the point? It's not that Froomkin is wrong. It's that Froomkin's journalism does not fit into a mass-market journalistic organization -- regardless of how whether it's printed or broadcast or posted. And the debate continues to be -- is this better?

Old Department Store Building of the (Week), New Series Vol. 2

New Castle, Pa., is one of those places that clearly was once a Big Deal and has become less of one as industry has moved elsewhere. The main floor of the New Castle News building, for example, reflects not only the onetime grandeur of the newspaper business but the economic prowess of New Castle. If you're ever there, walk in and check it out.

Before the depression, New Castle had many department stores -- Brown & Hamilton, Clendenin's, Stritmater Bros., and the entertainingly named J.N. Euwer's Sons' Sons. None of these made it out of the Depression. John Stillman, creator of the Interstate Department Stores chain of lower-end department stores from central Pennsylvania into Indiana and Michigan, had his first department store in New Castle before relocating to Fort Wayne. After the Depression, the Strouss-Hirshberg Co. of Youngstown, Ohio, moved into an old furniture store for a department-store branch, and New Castle also was home to the Fisher Bros. Dry Goods chain, a low-end operation that had many stores in western Pennsylvania from the 1940s through the 1970s.

But the longest-lived department store in downtown New Castle was the New Castle Dry Goods Co., at 253 E. Washington St., which was operated by the Boston Store in Erie. What made the survival of what was known as the New Castle Store even more interesting was that it was by itself across a river from the main part of downtown. The store grew out of R.S. McCulloch & Co. and took its place in the mid-1910s. When the Boston Store became part of the Allied Stores operations, the New Castle store eventually was made part of Allied's Troutman division based in Greensburg.

Why Robert Knilands Is Partly Right

Robert Knilands -- variously known as Rknil, Wenalway, and as a bete-noire and pain in the ass to the point where he has been banned from a number of discussion boards -- is too quick with ad hominem condemnations.

He hijacks various topics and keeps beating them against the wall with what clearly are posted rants.

He gets unduly personal and bitter. He not only holds people's work in contempt, which is churlish but fair, he holds them personally in contempt because of their work when he does not know them at all.

He continually presents the American Copy Editors Society for attack because it is not what he thinks it should be -- a phalanx to somehow force news organizations to change their ways -- instead of what it is -- a training and support organization that was not created to hold a cudgel to bosses' heads.

He comes across as an angry man whose idea of debate is, "Let me tell you how stupid you are, except you're too stupid to even realize it."

And yet.

Knilands' main point -- that when copy editors also became page designers, the craft of copy editing was pushed to the side -- is partly hyperbole, because at most papers copy editors were always page designers of a sort. Most small papers had people who edited copy and drew page dummies for the composing room. Occasionally you laid out a photo package or the like. It was part of the job. Only at the larger papers -- which from my knowledge Knilands never worked at -- were there ranks of copy editors who just edited copy. And only as graphics capabilities improved in the 1980s did some of these desk jockeys become designers instead of simply news editors or copy editors.

And yet.

My esteemed former colleague Charles Knittle, now in charge of copy editing for national and foreign copy at the New York Times, addressed the salient point at the ACES conference in Philadelphia, as noted on Doug Fisher's "Common Sense Journalism":

"•Knittle: Copy editors were unnecessarily smug when pagination rolled into newsrooms in the 1990s. Hundreds of printers and backshop makeup people were laid off. A few copy editors were hired. But what the editors actually were learning was a "machine skill," the same kind of skill those printers and makeup people had, the same kind of skill that is easily displaced."

And copy editors now indeed are being laid off (or, in foreign countries, their jobs are being outsourced) as publishers -- and yes, editors -- increasingly decide that they are "production" workers, the same as linotypists, stereotypers and the like used to be. They are no longer seen as actual editors, but as people who move something into the realm of publication the way the person running the Ludlow set the End of the World giant headlines. They are viewed -- wrongly, of course -- as mechanics who do not produce anything. Knilands might say, and such is justice, and he would have a point.

Yes, we did believe that by taking design and production into our own hands, we were becoming essential. And yes, we have found that when the monetary chips are down -- as they have now been for years -- some publishers and editors will say that a poorly edited story with a mediocre headline and an incomprehensible caption and a graphic that does not match the story is clearly sub-par but at least is something, whereas copy editors do not create and designers draw pretty pages that are irrelevant on the Internet.

So the main point of Knilands' criticism -- that copy editors ceased to be editors and became illustrators, doing work that can be outsourced or junked, while not concentrating on their real task, which is editing -- is one deserving fair consideration.

Yet -- how would he have had us act otherwise? Say "No, we're not going to do that?" The unemployment door awaited. It wasn't a vast conspiracy. Although the essential desire was to save money, most of the people proposing this also believed it would mean that the newsroom would now be in final control of all pages and that this was a Good Thing. Most of us wanted to be part of that. God knows I believe in copy editing, yet I also saw this as a Good Thing.

What's amazing is not that Robert Knilands has a valid point (although Charles Apple, Howard Owens, and others might think so). It's that whether the work is being outsourced to Corpus Christi or Lynchburg or wherever, editors who once proudly said "the newsroom will be in final control" now seem to just roll over and nod when that work passes from the control of their newsroom. (Yes, I know they can see the pages instantly on their computers. Yes, I know they can text or call. It's not the same as walking over to someone's desk in the newsroom.)

Is this simply a reflection of financial times? Or does it reflect that the editors of (now) 20 years ago, who welcomed pagination and design into their newsrooms, had come of age in the era of composing-room control, whereas fewer of today's editors experienced that and thus say, so what's the big deal? Or is it simply that the standards of the Web -- immediacy and convenience (combined with easy disposability) trump all, and the reader's expectation of quality is thus far lower -- are either inevitable, or are actually the same standards held by a number of publishers and editors?

Personally, I wish that Robert Knilands didn't act like such a jerk. Perhaps his points would have been taken more seriously. On the other hand, he might note, he got attention, and perhaps would not have had he been more civil. So, again perhaps, Knilands simply stands as a representative of the Internet media age, one that cannot fully meld its longings for the standards of old with its desire to be included in the new, and thus, as did Obi-wan, wishes this were a more civilized age as it tries to deal with the empire instead of the republic, and often ends up light-sabering its own foot as a result.

Return to: Old Department Store Building of the (Week)

When times got overwhelming last year I stopped doing looks at old department stores -- stopping, I believe, in Lancaster, Pa., with Watt & Shand. In recent weeks I've encountered people who were fans of that feature, so I'm going to bring it back. I wanted to do so with Lebanon, Pa., home of what I believe is the first Bon-Ton store in Pennsylvania -- and one that had nothing to do with the long-lived chain still operating out of York, Pa. -- but alas, both it and the competing Haak Bros. appear to have been torn down.

So here's a look at Fifth Avenue in McKeesport, Pa. To the immediate left of what clearly was a big store, occuping about five buildings, is a much littler red-brick store. (Yes, the really little one.) This store, at 519 Fifth, was Helmstadter Bros., the last surviving locally owned downtown department store in this city best known for steel tubing. Helmstadter's was in a larger store two blocks west of this until the late Depression years.

McKeesport had a very strung-out downtown. It was four blocks west from here to what was its largest store, the Famous Store, and the main hotel was even farther west of that. The Famous Store was owned by a group of Pittsburgh merchants named Weil, Goldsmith, and Katz. When they retired, they sold it to a local discount chain called Misco, under whose operation it quickly closed. The much smaller Helmstadter's kept going into a second generation of family ownership.

McKeesport is a very odd place in terms of its physical layout. The downtown was adjacent to the tube works, and then a good bit away, up a hill, was the library and some large churches -- it almost felt like a different city. Neighborhoods changed from blue-collar to managerial almost in mid-block. Also, it has a long street named Jenny Lind Avenue. It's hard to get a sense of McKeesport as a whole.

Notice now the larger store in the photo above. This was the main store of the G.C. Murphy Co., one of the largest dime-store chains. Murphy's, like Grant's, aimed to be one step above Woolworth's and Kresge's, but was probably still one step below Newberry's.

For me, growing up, going to the dime store meant Murphy's, as they had stores in downtown Indianapolis, in Broad Ripple and at Glendale Center. My grandmother would buy chicken parts for frying there. I remember the Double K nut stands as well, with their revolving trays and heat lights, and the birds and hamsters on sale. Other than chicken, AMF and Revell car model sets, and things like needles, I can't remember if we actually bought anything at Murphy's, but even though there were a Grant's, a Kresge's, and two Woolworth's downtown, along with a local chain called Danner's all around town, we only traded with Murphy's in the dime-store category. (We didn't have Kress, or Green's, but how much of the decline of downtowns was related to the vast amount of space vacated by dime stores as they moved to strip centers and then fell before discounters?)

Not that this matters to anyone else, but it was exciting for me to walk by this building and see that, even though vacant, it still bore signs saying it was the headquarters of the G.C. Murphy Co. I suddenly wanted fried chicken and cashews.

Away We Go Again

I try not to write on this blog about my own newspaper, because 1) the blog has nothing to do with the newspaper and 2) one can always say the wrong thing inadvertently. But this week's developments would make it hard to say nothing.

The last time we were sold, it was 2006, the newspaper industry was just starting its historic collapse, and everything seemed bright.

The first time there were layoffs, as wrenching as it was, it seemed like an adjustment to a new world. But it wasn't, really. It was just a retrenchment.

The second time there were layoffs, it was in part a reaction to the economic collapse. But it was much more an adjustment to a new world. Whatever happens now, it will be further down that line.

At ACES, Nieman Lab's Josh Benton, as noted on Doug Fisher's "Common Sense Journalism," tried to put what John McIntyre calls the War on Editing into an economic package:

When print was the only model, it saved the publisher money to have editors, because 1) the more sharply the story was edited, the more room there was for more content, including ads; 2) the more accurately the story was edited the first time, less money was spent in replates; 3) (and this is my point and not his) if you were selling a "product," a physical artifact, people want to be sure that, like any physical product, it is well-made before they invest money or time in it.

In an electronic world, it doesn't matter how long the story is or how loosely written, because space is infinite; the cost of making a correction is zero, since there are no plates involved; and if what you are selling is quick-hit brain candy, updates to be perused when you're bored with work or wondering what's going on, the quality of the product is secondary to the appeal of the information. It can have typos, it can have run-on words, because you've invested no money in it and you can click away from it in a second and it's gone, as opposed to the newspaper, which is still in your hands even as you yell at it. Heck, the user may not really care where the end page of the information comes from. If you got it through Yahoo News, does it matter if you click through to the Chicago Tribune or the Sleepy Eye Herald-Dispatch?

Thus, the only thing you should invest in is content creation, because absent a mass audience, the only thing you can possibly provide is, simply, MORE. Not better, although better can help, but just MORE, to try to get a bit of any and every niche.

Now, against that, one could note that bots archive the first version of the story, which then can't be fixed without mammoth effort; and that part of the reason advertising costs pennies on the Internet is the infinite inventory, including publishers creating page after page after page in order to get high page views, but then having to sell ads for nearly zero because of the vast number of pages they produce.

But the end argument is still the quality of the brand -- that if anything will give newspapers a secure place in the electronic world, it is the years and years of brand recognition that carries over. The Huffington Post also is building a brand. But newspapers still have a brand that exists independent of the Web world and thus carries a competitive double whammy.

And, if money was still flowing in, they probably would recognize this and recognize what good editing -- and good copy editing -- brings to their brand. Alas, it isn't. And so I fear another front may open in the war, even if many good people really don't want it to.