Those who have been longtime followers of this blog know that for whatever reason it early on became fixated on Jeff Jarvis. But there was always the question of, OK, but he is Jeff Jarvis and you are TTPB. So you know naught and he knows much. Ergo, know thy place. (Just snipe.)
The New Republic has published a review of Jarvis' new book, "Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live," written by Evgeny Morozov, who admittedly is the author of "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom." Clearly the battle lines are drawn.
To me, Morozov does a wonderful takedown of Jarvis' view that the link economy, the conversation, the very netness of the net, constitute a door into a new realm of human understanding and probable happiness. But the point is not that Morozov's views are close to mine in terms of Internet utopianism and the dark cloud it has left over businesses such as newspapers, which lost their mojo in the face of its orthodoxy of "the future," one, inevitable, inescapable, and undeniable.
The point is that this is a debate between clear points of view, without the one feeling it must cringe and apologize for its backwardness or obtuseness or whatever before daring to present its thus fatally weakened case. This review takes the position that Jarvis, Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, Chris Anderson, etc. represent a point of view that has some validity, has many weaknesses, does not respond well to having its positions challenged, and wrongly sees itself as the avatar of The People when in fact it is largely interested in promoting some people (those who espouse it).
And yes, it may simply be coincidence that the rise of the belief in Internet utopianism followed in short order the final collapse (in most places except Nepal) of belief in communism as the expression of the will of the masses, as the rejection of the opiates of the people, as the embodiment of historically determined progress. Or it may not. But that impulse is part of human nature and has to go somewhere. As Morozov notes in asking why books like Jarvis' are so sought after by the bewildered public: "What better way to make sense of it all than to claim that the source of their perplexity is in fact a part of some inexorable historical process that has been unfolding for centuries?" Mr. Zuckerberg, there is a gentleman here, name of Marx, who wishes to talk to you.
Morozov quotes the novelist Chuck Klosterman as saying: "The degree to which anyone values the Internet is proportional to how valuable the Internet makes that person." This is true whether it is simply the Webmaster for a small organization or the prophet of what is proclaimed as an unavoidable revolution. The first is a person with a good job that cannot easily be filled; the second is, well, a prophet seeking followers. Morozov writes, "Internet intellectuals like to tell companies and governments what they like to hear -- including the kind of bad news that is really good news in disguise (you are in terrible shape, but if you only embrace the Internet, all your problems will be gone forever!)"
In the newspaper business, unmanned by instant electronic communication -- Tony Ridder's nightmare of 1996, free online classified, having come to pass -- the prospect of a universal solution was too good to pass by. A decade later, newspapers still can't figure out what to do, as their problems continue. To which Jarvis would have an answer, and he would be partly right: You did not fully embrace the Internet. But even if they had, they would simply have had a different set of problems that they had even less experience in trying to solve. There is a difference between using a technology and surrendering in its seductive embrace.
Like anyone else, TTPB is happy to find someone with respectable credentials who upholds its position. And it regrets once telling a colleague that the Internet was "the future," as it is still fashionable in newspaper circles to say. The Internet is part of the future. There were people who hoped it would just go away, and they were pretty silly in the end. But the future is the future. The Internet does not necessarily determine or program the future, although those who see in it the New Jerusalem can tell us how they feel it inevitably must be done. We can follow that advice if we want; or we can evaluate it against other advice. Perhaps we are getting to a point where we will again see the Internet as one useful technology among many and not the long-awaited moment that makes straight of the way of the Lord, whatever Lord that is.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
At the Core
Have been on the road a lot -- last week in New Orleans for a board meeting. As in most large cities, the buildings that housed their department stores are still there, though with alternate uses. (Other than basket cases like Detroit, department store buildings tend to be reused in large cities -- it's the medium-size ones in which they are torn down because no one can think of any economic use for a big downtown building. The Zara chain not only has taken over part of Woodward & Lothrop in Washington, it now occupies the former Rinascente store on the Corso in Rome.)
The buildings of both Maison Blanche Co. and D.H. Holmes Co. in New Orleans are now hotels. It's a shame that no one will be able to experience again the quirky Holmes store, which went through interconnected buildings fronting on four streets, but good that it isn't just a large hole in the ground.
One then sees the many Target and Wal-Mart stores as well as the Macy's and Dillard's and again asks, why did these stores that dominated their markets for generations die? The answers, of course, are clear and found many places, sometimes here. But one is that they built capacity to handle a period when they were the dominant games in town, and then had trouble backing out of it when a new type of competitor -- the one-stop, single-floor suburban discounter -- became the "default" option. Newspapers have had the same problem, now spending money to shutter printing and inserting plants that in some cases they built only a decade earlier.
Most department stores faced another problem -- they wanted their customers to be, to some degree, everyone and anyone, and to that end they sold not only nearly every class of merchandise (basement stores! women's floors! the Tribout Room!) but nearly everything that was for sale except cars. Recently I was in Prince George's County, Md., which has a couple of Macy's that before the Great Macyization were branches of the Hecht Co. It was a time warp to go into these stores, which Macy's has not spent very much on -- the Marlow Heights store was like walking back into Block's Glendale in Indianapolis in the early 1960s. (Lovers of Googie architecture take note, it has an outdoor stairway with a canopy straight out of the Space Age.) At the Prince George's Plaza store, a derelict auto center reminds that not just Sears, but local department stores did tuneups and sold tires -- sometimes at freestanding locations not in a shopping plaza parking lot. And you could still see where the garden center was, back when upscale suburban department stores also sold plants, fertilizer and mowers.
Omnia omnibus ubique -- all things for all people everywhere, as Harrods' has it. That idea created the great stores so many of us remember -- and here's a plug for Michael Lisicky's new book on Gimbel Bros., just out. When enough of all people turned away from buying all things, the weight of the department stores began to collapse them. The existence of Macy's, Sears, Penney's, Dillard's, Kohl's shows that the department store is not dead, but the department store that contained everything for everyone is long gone, and the department store that stood as a Pillar of the Community is gone as well. If Harrods truly followed its motto just in terms of the London market, it would be as dead as Simpson's of Piccadilly or Whiteley's of Bayswater. Harrods is all things for a few people -- the rich and the tourists.
Wal-Mart found out the danger of trying to appeal to everyone when, near the end of the most recent era of prosperity, it tried to draw in a more upscale shopper and found it had alienated its core users. Newspapers' institution of online paywalls to me means that at last they are realizing that they cannot be all things to all people anymore in the online world, where anyone can be everyone. They have to decide who their customers (and potential customers) are, which means realizing that 1) a lot of people will never be your customers and you shouldn't care and 2) you actually don't want as customers a lot of the people who visit your website, except to gather some low-hanging-fruit revenue until you can figure out if you can do away with it. Digital dimes will never replace print dollars, but with a defined, committed, enthusiastic customer base you can at least sell ads for digital dimes, as opposed to the digital pennies available to anyone with an open website.
Early in this blog I argued that the essential advantage of print was that it created a pipeline to the reader -- a separate distribution system apart from general dissemination -- and that we needed to exploit that. Still think so, but the apparent years of economic malaise ahead keep pressing in. Paywalls create another pipeline, and the tide seems to be turning in their favor. I remember a conversation with my managing editor back in 2002 or 2003, at which time the Times and the Post were playing chicken over a paywall. When one of them does it, she said, we will do it too. Neither did it, and the newspaper business went into years of decline while talking pointlessly about the conversation. Then the Times did it, and even though the Post did not, the newspaper business rule is that if the Times does it, it must be right. Your traffic doesn't fall off that much, and what you end up giving up is ad inventory you couldn't sell anyway. You get to know your customers and satisfy their needs instead of trying to walk down the street with a sandwich board surrounded by thousands of other people walking down the street with sandwich board. And you even see some resurgence in the print business, particularly on Sunday, from people who didn't really object to a print newspaper or paying you, but didn't want to feel like suckers for paying for something others got free.
The hardest part of this is realizing that you will never again be what you were, no matter how successful you may be. That's hard for people who have been successful to give up, particularly when they hear from longtime customers who really don't want you to change. I was talking with a colleague who came to the paper in boon times and remembered arriving at this giant operation and saying, "Wow, I have really made it." It was a wonderful time, a wonderful feeling, and no one else is likely to have it ever again. We sure don't have that sugar high anymore. But it doesn't mean you can't be successful both as a business and journalistically.
And one has to be willing to realize that long-established customers are going to hate what's happening and let you know, even though they can do nothing to make your situation better. Having heard from them in my job for years now, I realize that they'd be happy if Hecht's came back with its garden and tire centers even though they might never go there. They liked 1970 and would like to have it back. I'd like it too, but that won't get me a ride on the subway. You may have to continue to alienate some of these customers, which is really hard. There is little more pathetic than a reader in her late 80s who tells you that by dropping "Ziggy" you have taken the last bit of joy out of her life. (I do not exaggerate.) But if you continue to spend money on "Prince Valiant," which seems to now be jumping the shark by apparently having Flash Gordon appearing in a crater, just because a few people have read it for 60 years and no one else reads it, then you're the Hecht's garden store manager looking across the street at Home Depot and saying, "But they'll come back. I know they will." They're not coming back to a department store garden center after Home Depot. But they will do business with you for what you can do better. And never forget -- what we can do better than anyone else includes print.
The buildings of both Maison Blanche Co. and D.H. Holmes Co. in New Orleans are now hotels. It's a shame that no one will be able to experience again the quirky Holmes store, which went through interconnected buildings fronting on four streets, but good that it isn't just a large hole in the ground.
One then sees the many Target and Wal-Mart stores as well as the Macy's and Dillard's and again asks, why did these stores that dominated their markets for generations die? The answers, of course, are clear and found many places, sometimes here. But one is that they built capacity to handle a period when they were the dominant games in town, and then had trouble backing out of it when a new type of competitor -- the one-stop, single-floor suburban discounter -- became the "default" option. Newspapers have had the same problem, now spending money to shutter printing and inserting plants that in some cases they built only a decade earlier.
Most department stores faced another problem -- they wanted their customers to be, to some degree, everyone and anyone, and to that end they sold not only nearly every class of merchandise (basement stores! women's floors! the Tribout Room!) but nearly everything that was for sale except cars. Recently I was in Prince George's County, Md., which has a couple of Macy's that before the Great Macyization were branches of the Hecht Co. It was a time warp to go into these stores, which Macy's has not spent very much on -- the Marlow Heights store was like walking back into Block's Glendale in Indianapolis in the early 1960s. (Lovers of Googie architecture take note, it has an outdoor stairway with a canopy straight out of the Space Age.) At the Prince George's Plaza store, a derelict auto center reminds that not just Sears, but local department stores did tuneups and sold tires -- sometimes at freestanding locations not in a shopping plaza parking lot. And you could still see where the garden center was, back when upscale suburban department stores also sold plants, fertilizer and mowers.
Omnia omnibus ubique -- all things for all people everywhere, as Harrods' has it. That idea created the great stores so many of us remember -- and here's a plug for Michael Lisicky's new book on Gimbel Bros., just out. When enough of all people turned away from buying all things, the weight of the department stores began to collapse them. The existence of Macy's, Sears, Penney's, Dillard's, Kohl's shows that the department store is not dead, but the department store that contained everything for everyone is long gone, and the department store that stood as a Pillar of the Community is gone as well. If Harrods truly followed its motto just in terms of the London market, it would be as dead as Simpson's of Piccadilly or Whiteley's of Bayswater. Harrods is all things for a few people -- the rich and the tourists.
Wal-Mart found out the danger of trying to appeal to everyone when, near the end of the most recent era of prosperity, it tried to draw in a more upscale shopper and found it had alienated its core users. Newspapers' institution of online paywalls to me means that at last they are realizing that they cannot be all things to all people anymore in the online world, where anyone can be everyone. They have to decide who their customers (and potential customers) are, which means realizing that 1) a lot of people will never be your customers and you shouldn't care and 2) you actually don't want as customers a lot of the people who visit your website, except to gather some low-hanging-fruit revenue until you can figure out if you can do away with it. Digital dimes will never replace print dollars, but with a defined, committed, enthusiastic customer base you can at least sell ads for digital dimes, as opposed to the digital pennies available to anyone with an open website.
Early in this blog I argued that the essential advantage of print was that it created a pipeline to the reader -- a separate distribution system apart from general dissemination -- and that we needed to exploit that. Still think so, but the apparent years of economic malaise ahead keep pressing in. Paywalls create another pipeline, and the tide seems to be turning in their favor. I remember a conversation with my managing editor back in 2002 or 2003, at which time the Times and the Post were playing chicken over a paywall. When one of them does it, she said, we will do it too. Neither did it, and the newspaper business went into years of decline while talking pointlessly about the conversation. Then the Times did it, and even though the Post did not, the newspaper business rule is that if the Times does it, it must be right. Your traffic doesn't fall off that much, and what you end up giving up is ad inventory you couldn't sell anyway. You get to know your customers and satisfy their needs instead of trying to walk down the street with a sandwich board surrounded by thousands of other people walking down the street with sandwich board. And you even see some resurgence in the print business, particularly on Sunday, from people who didn't really object to a print newspaper or paying you, but didn't want to feel like suckers for paying for something others got free.
The hardest part of this is realizing that you will never again be what you were, no matter how successful you may be. That's hard for people who have been successful to give up, particularly when they hear from longtime customers who really don't want you to change. I was talking with a colleague who came to the paper in boon times and remembered arriving at this giant operation and saying, "Wow, I have really made it." It was a wonderful time, a wonderful feeling, and no one else is likely to have it ever again. We sure don't have that sugar high anymore. But it doesn't mean you can't be successful both as a business and journalistically.
And one has to be willing to realize that long-established customers are going to hate what's happening and let you know, even though they can do nothing to make your situation better. Having heard from them in my job for years now, I realize that they'd be happy if Hecht's came back with its garden and tire centers even though they might never go there. They liked 1970 and would like to have it back. I'd like it too, but that won't get me a ride on the subway. You may have to continue to alienate some of these customers, which is really hard. There is little more pathetic than a reader in her late 80s who tells you that by dropping "Ziggy" you have taken the last bit of joy out of her life. (I do not exaggerate.) But if you continue to spend money on "Prince Valiant," which seems to now be jumping the shark by apparently having Flash Gordon appearing in a crater, just because a few people have read it for 60 years and no one else reads it, then you're the Hecht's garden store manager looking across the street at Home Depot and saying, "But they'll come back. I know they will." They're not coming back to a department store garden center after Home Depot. But they will do business with you for what you can do better. And never forget -- what we can do better than anyone else includes print.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Still Joined at the Hip
As has been pointed out, the original purpose of this blog was to draw parallels between the department store and newspaper businesses – a purpose that has been largely forgotten. Permit me then to quote at length from a wonderful book, “The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960,” by Richard Longstreth:
“The financial challenges identified by department store executives during the 1920s persisted over the next thirty years. … The percentage of revenues consumed by operating expenses…. continued to plague profit margins. … Even more ominous was the fact that department store sales formed an increasingly smaller percentage of retail sales overall. … Even in the best of times it was all the industry could do to hold its own.
“Equally daunting was the challenge from competitors. … What was seen as a potential problem in the 1920s became a very real one in the 1930s as the low-cost items that chains purveyed appealed increasingly to a consumer public with shrinking disposable income. Even more threatening was the fact that chains were expanding the scope of goods they sold, treading ever closer to the department store’s traditional base. …
“The persistence of economic challenges to the big stores led to mounting debate over the future of the industry. Considerable discussion was percolating by the eve of the war over whether the basic way that business was conducted should change. At the core of the debate lay the department store’s identity. Criticism of the status quo abounded….”
A writer for Women’s Wear Daily blamed the situation on “antiquated ... methods… The process had to be ‘streamlined’ so that the ‘merchandise is instantly accessible.’ … Increasingly, the great emporia were being admonished for employing ... methods that would surely bring about their demise…
“Service was upheld as the hallmark of the department store’s reputation. By abandoning this mode the great emporia would, in the words of one prominent retailer, surely lose much of their ‘character and prestige,’ becoming just another ‘low-cost distributor.’ …
Harvard professor Malcolm McNair in the 1950s “admonished the trade for failing to grasp changes in consumer habits brought about by supermarkets and other chain stores. The distinction between the kinds of merchandise these outlets sold, he intimated, was irrelevant. The lessons transcended such particulars…
"A flurry of critiques ensued, all now strident in delineating the department store’s intransigence. The great emporium was equated with the brontosaurus. …
In 1952, WWD noted that “‘many adults grew up with the idea that their department store was the center of life of their community. Contrast that … with those who have grown up in the last 15 years or so. … The department store is not highlighting the excitement of visiting their establishment.’ ….
"Furthermore, Albert M. Greenfield, chairman of the City Stores, emphasized that many of those who shopped were comparatively young. Wartime routines and the self-service structure of the supermarket had conditioned them to independence. Merchants underestimated the intelligence of their public, he charged.”
Substitute “newspaper” for “department store” and “Internet” for “supermarket” or “chains” and indeed, there is nothing new under the sun. Longstreth devotes the next 200 pages of his book to discussing what department stores did, and anyone who grew up in or near a city before the big stores began to shut down will find not only enlightenment here, but nostalgia. A different era for newspapers, of course, but what to do? Hint: It begins with determining who your customers are and what they want – which necessitates saying that everyone is not going to be your customer no matter how many offerings you have, a problem that all once-titanic businesses (railroads, department stores, newspapers, Microsoft) face and have trouble facing. Yes, more to come.
As an aside, I was amazed to learn that H.P. Wasson & Co., one of the three department stores in Indianapolis in my youth, was the first “windowless” department store in America. Part of my love for Moderne design came from seeing the unique Wasson’s building in the midst of the blocks of traditional buildings downtown; another source was the lettering used when the entrances to the William H. Block Co. were redesigned in the same era. From early parking garages to suburban branches and downtown redevelopment, it’s all here.
“The financial challenges identified by department store executives during the 1920s persisted over the next thirty years. … The percentage of revenues consumed by operating expenses…. continued to plague profit margins. … Even more ominous was the fact that department store sales formed an increasingly smaller percentage of retail sales overall. … Even in the best of times it was all the industry could do to hold its own.
“Equally daunting was the challenge from competitors. … What was seen as a potential problem in the 1920s became a very real one in the 1930s as the low-cost items that chains purveyed appealed increasingly to a consumer public with shrinking disposable income. Even more threatening was the fact that chains were expanding the scope of goods they sold, treading ever closer to the department store’s traditional base. …
“The persistence of economic challenges to the big stores led to mounting debate over the future of the industry. Considerable discussion was percolating by the eve of the war over whether the basic way that business was conducted should change. At the core of the debate lay the department store’s identity. Criticism of the status quo abounded….”
A writer for Women’s Wear Daily blamed the situation on “antiquated ... methods… The process had to be ‘streamlined’ so that the ‘merchandise is instantly accessible.’ … Increasingly, the great emporia were being admonished for employing ... methods that would surely bring about their demise…
“Service was upheld as the hallmark of the department store’s reputation. By abandoning this mode the great emporia would, in the words of one prominent retailer, surely lose much of their ‘character and prestige,’ becoming just another ‘low-cost distributor.’ …
Harvard professor Malcolm McNair in the 1950s “admonished the trade for failing to grasp changes in consumer habits brought about by supermarkets and other chain stores. The distinction between the kinds of merchandise these outlets sold, he intimated, was irrelevant. The lessons transcended such particulars…
"A flurry of critiques ensued, all now strident in delineating the department store’s intransigence. The great emporium was equated with the brontosaurus. …
In 1952, WWD noted that “‘many adults grew up with the idea that their department store was the center of life of their community. Contrast that … with those who have grown up in the last 15 years or so. … The department store is not highlighting the excitement of visiting their establishment.’ ….
"Furthermore, Albert M. Greenfield, chairman of the City Stores, emphasized that many of those who shopped were comparatively young. Wartime routines and the self-service structure of the supermarket had conditioned them to independence. Merchants underestimated the intelligence of their public, he charged.”
Substitute “newspaper” for “department store” and “Internet” for “supermarket” or “chains” and indeed, there is nothing new under the sun. Longstreth devotes the next 200 pages of his book to discussing what department stores did, and anyone who grew up in or near a city before the big stores began to shut down will find not only enlightenment here, but nostalgia. A different era for newspapers, of course, but what to do? Hint: It begins with determining who your customers are and what they want – which necessitates saying that everyone is not going to be your customer no matter how many offerings you have, a problem that all once-titanic businesses (railroads, department stores, newspapers, Microsoft) face and have trouble facing. Yes, more to come.
As an aside, I was amazed to learn that H.P. Wasson & Co., one of the three department stores in Indianapolis in my youth, was the first “windowless” department store in America. Part of my love for Moderne design came from seeing the unique Wasson’s building in the midst of the blocks of traditional buildings downtown; another source was the lettering used when the entrances to the William H. Block Co. were redesigned in the same era. From early parking garages to suburban branches and downtown redevelopment, it’s all here.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Out With the Old...
Wow, what a depressing week in the newspaper business again. Layoffs here, layoffs there, as Charles Apple notes. One of my former colleagues was laid off in Dallas for the second time there. Yeah, we laid him off, too.
At times like this I have to turn to my favorite upbeat source of news about traditional newspaper operations, News & Tech. As Chuck Moozakis writes:
"I understand that the Web and mobile audiences are important. But in order for newspapers to serve those audiences ... print is the engine that must be carefully nurtured and maintained."
He quotes a consultant, Sam Wagner, as saying, "We seem to want to leave the broadsheet here to die; in the States nobody wants to take the chance to really shake up their product and really try to redo it, whether it's content, size, or shape. Circulation is declining, page counts are declining, but people are afraid to change. To do nothing seems to be on a path to death to me ... What do they have to lose?"
And as Jim Chisholm -- boy, I want to meet this guy someday, I may have to go to France to do it -- says,"Don't believe everything you see in our own medium. ... Only about 8 percent of the industry's revenues are from digital. In the United States, that percentage is a bit higher, around 12 percent, but still nowhere near enough to sustain the business."
Of course, to this, digital fans would say -- not enough to sustain the business you have, but abandon that business and it is. In the old days, if I remember this figure right, you budgeted newsroom expenses as around 11 percent of your costs (since most of your money goes to paper, ink, plates, trucks, and carriers). As John Paton, whose newly ascendant Journal Register Co. just apparently engineered a back-door coup of Dean Singleton's Media News Group, said this week, online revenue by the end of the year will cover the cost of newsrooms. Chisholm's figure indicates that is correct. The issue then is, at what point do you say you also covered the cost of ad salespeople, business-side employees, and (if you're doing a paywall or replica edition) whatever you call your circulation department and your increasingly important promotions and community events departments, at which point you say, shut off the presses and let all those pressmen, drivers, and contracts with ink companies go. While Paton is careful to say that print will be around "indefinitely," any copy editor can tell you that word has two meanings.
U.S. newspaper companies say they are committed to whatever platform the customers (ad and reader) prefer, but it's clear many of them want to help consumers give up print, whereas in the rest of the world that pressure is not so strong. If you see it as inevitable, that's a good thing. But one of the mottos of this blog has been to challenge the idea, "If current trends continue..." What do you want the current trend to be? Who do you want your customers to be? If your definition of "local news" is "we have a few reporters to do the big stuff but most local news is Mrs. Smith putting her announcement of the book club on our site free," then heck yes you want to tell your print readers they're stupid and get out. The future then is, have volunteers do most of the work for you, and reap the profits.
Admittedly, News and Tech's advertising base is people selling print products. And its columnist Marc Wilson, reporting on a Borrell Associates survey, noted that a "panel of industry experts" -- this column was about Yellow Pages, so I don't know what industry this is -- 21 percent said "fewer than 100 daily newspapers in North America will exist in print form" within three to five years, and 63 percent in total said that would happen in 20 years or longer. It's hard to know what to do with that -- does that mean "exist in print form every day" or "exist in any print form at all," and also hard to know if that the people answering knew that means 1,300 out of the 1,400 or so daily newspapers in the United States and Canada, taking the typical American position that Mexico is not part of North America -- but even admit N&T's upbeat attitude, the views of the Minneapolis publisher editor that in more than five years, the Star Tribune might be a Sunday print product with daily digital news -- well, it makes you wonder if Moozakis is, probably like me, just a person who still loves printed newspapers even as the country says, go fish.
A final word on layoffs. We journalists and our amen corner -- academics, goo-goo advocates, and dyed-in-the-wool readers -- tend to believe that cuts in editorial staffing will inevitably lead to less readership and thus less advertising. But advertisers have always used tons of media that don't involve editorial staffing, and readers complain about reading wire stories they've already seen on TV or the Web -- i.e., big stories -- not about wire stories that didn't make the top of Google News; they complain about a paucity of local news, but don't really care if the local news was written by the local antiques dealer. There's probably a relationship there between news and advertising, but if it were as strong as we think, news departments wouldn't have to deal with continual staffing cuts. People generally just want to read something they haven't read before.
ADDED NOTE: Thanks to Vince Tuss for correcting the title of the Minneapolis executive quoted.
At times like this I have to turn to my favorite upbeat source of news about traditional newspaper operations, News & Tech. As Chuck Moozakis writes:
"I understand that the Web and mobile audiences are important. But in order for newspapers to serve those audiences ... print is the engine that must be carefully nurtured and maintained."
He quotes a consultant, Sam Wagner, as saying, "We seem to want to leave the broadsheet here to die; in the States nobody wants to take the chance to really shake up their product and really try to redo it, whether it's content, size, or shape. Circulation is declining, page counts are declining, but people are afraid to change. To do nothing seems to be on a path to death to me ... What do they have to lose?"
And as Jim Chisholm -- boy, I want to meet this guy someday, I may have to go to France to do it -- says,"Don't believe everything you see in our own medium. ... Only about 8 percent of the industry's revenues are from digital. In the United States, that percentage is a bit higher, around 12 percent, but still nowhere near enough to sustain the business."
Of course, to this, digital fans would say -- not enough to sustain the business you have, but abandon that business and it is. In the old days, if I remember this figure right, you budgeted newsroom expenses as around 11 percent of your costs (since most of your money goes to paper, ink, plates, trucks, and carriers). As John Paton, whose newly ascendant Journal Register Co. just apparently engineered a back-door coup of Dean Singleton's Media News Group, said this week, online revenue by the end of the year will cover the cost of newsrooms. Chisholm's figure indicates that is correct. The issue then is, at what point do you say you also covered the cost of ad salespeople, business-side employees, and (if you're doing a paywall or replica edition) whatever you call your circulation department and your increasingly important promotions and community events departments, at which point you say, shut off the presses and let all those pressmen, drivers, and contracts with ink companies go. While Paton is careful to say that print will be around "indefinitely," any copy editor can tell you that word has two meanings.
U.S. newspaper companies say they are committed to whatever platform the customers (ad and reader) prefer, but it's clear many of them want to help consumers give up print, whereas in the rest of the world that pressure is not so strong. If you see it as inevitable, that's a good thing. But one of the mottos of this blog has been to challenge the idea, "If current trends continue..." What do you want the current trend to be? Who do you want your customers to be? If your definition of "local news" is "we have a few reporters to do the big stuff but most local news is Mrs. Smith putting her announcement of the book club on our site free," then heck yes you want to tell your print readers they're stupid and get out. The future then is, have volunteers do most of the work for you, and reap the profits.
Admittedly, News and Tech's advertising base is people selling print products. And its columnist Marc Wilson, reporting on a Borrell Associates survey, noted that a "panel of industry experts" -- this column was about Yellow Pages, so I don't know what industry this is -- 21 percent said "fewer than 100 daily newspapers in North America will exist in print form" within three to five years, and 63 percent in total said that would happen in 20 years or longer. It's hard to know what to do with that -- does that mean "exist in print form every day" or "exist in any print form at all," and also hard to know if that the people answering knew that means 1,300 out of the 1,400 or so daily newspapers in the United States and Canada, taking the typical American position that Mexico is not part of North America -- but even admit N&T's upbeat attitude, the views of the Minneapolis
A final word on layoffs. We journalists and our amen corner -- academics, goo-goo advocates, and dyed-in-the-wool readers -- tend to believe that cuts in editorial staffing will inevitably lead to less readership and thus less advertising. But advertisers have always used tons of media that don't involve editorial staffing, and readers complain about reading wire stories they've already seen on TV or the Web -- i.e., big stories -- not about wire stories that didn't make the top of Google News; they complain about a paucity of local news, but don't really care if the local news was written by the local antiques dealer. There's probably a relationship there between news and advertising, but if it were as strong as we think, news departments wouldn't have to deal with continual staffing cuts. People generally just want to read something they haven't read before.
ADDED NOTE: Thanks to Vince Tuss for correcting the title of the Minneapolis executive quoted.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Department Store Building of ... Uniontown
My relative Larry Stratton has been getting acclimated to his new home in southwestern Pennsylvania, and has even been taking the local paper from Washington, Pa. We'll get to Washington in a bit, but first here's a surviving store building in Uniontown, which for a coal-mining capital had two very sophisticated stores.
Most people probably remember this store at 22 E. Main St. just as Metzler's, but it was linked to a large regional operation. The genesis of the chain was the Wright-Metzler Co., which started in Connellsville with two Wright brothers and Sankey Metzler. Metzler was a West Virginian who took over the Uniontown operation. After his death in 1939, his son William took over, and then it went into the hands of daughter Martha and her husband, Daniel MacDonald.
As noted here before, the Metzler stores were interconnected with stores Warren and Latrobe, as well as, briefly, Washington, Pa., all of which eventually went in other directions. What I haven't been able to track down is if there was any connection between the Metzlers and the Kaufmans, who owned Uniontown's other big store, N. Kaufman's Inc. Nathan Kaufman, a merchant from Brownsville, Pa., bought what had been Rosenbaum Bros. in Uniontown in the wake of the Depression. Day-to-day operations went into the hands of Bailey Greenwald in the late 1950s, although Kaufman's son William was still the owner. The interesting question is: When I was in Uniontown a few years ago, a house on the same street that Bailey Greenwald had lived in was owned by one Sankey Greenwald. The chance of "Sankey" being coincidental would seem minuscule. So did the Greenwald and Metzler families intermarry? Nothing exists online to show such a connection; indeed, many of the references to Sankey Metzler in Uniontown are to this blog. But if anyone reading this in Uniontown knows whether its two department store families finally became one, let me know.
NOTE: IT'S ONLY WEEKS AWAY: The release of Michael Lisicky's newest department store history, this one profiling Gimbel Bros. Start storing away your money now to buy it!
Most people probably remember this store at 22 E. Main St. just as Metzler's, but it was linked to a large regional operation. The genesis of the chain was the Wright-Metzler Co., which started in Connellsville with two Wright brothers and Sankey Metzler. Metzler was a West Virginian who took over the Uniontown operation. After his death in 1939, his son William took over, and then it went into the hands of daughter Martha and her husband, Daniel MacDonald. NOTE: IT'S ONLY WEEKS AWAY: The release of Michael Lisicky's newest department store history, this one profiling Gimbel Bros. Start storing away your money now to buy it!
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Department Store Building of ... Happy Valley
It's been far too long since I posted a department store building photo. This is one I know well -- the former Danks & Co. store in State College, Pa., address 148 S. Allen St.
Although Penn State made State College a reasonably sized city, college towns were rarely draws for regional business. To serve the students and the professors, they often had to have a different mix of merchandise than was wanted by the residents of surrounding towns and farms. Thus, the Danks store in State College was not large.
Danks & Co. was based in Lewistown, about a half-hour south of State College. Lewistown was the shopping center for a large range of industrial small towns. Its iconic store was E.E. McMeen & Co., which became a branch of the Bon Ton chain from York, Pa., during its second expansion in the 1950s. Danks was founded by George Danks of Burnham, Pa., one of those towns, in 1924. It operated various branches, one of which opened in State College in 1942 in a moderne-designed building rare for a department store, let alone one in a small town.
Although Penn State made State College a reasonably sized city, college towns were rarely draws for regional business. To serve the students and the professors, they often had to have a different mix of merchandise than was wanted by the residents of surrounding towns and farms. Thus, the Danks store in State College was not large. The Danks chain closed in 1995, including the Lewistown store -- which, along with the Bon Ton, had been rebuilt in suburban strip-mall style, though still downtown, in an urban renewal effort. To me, Danks in State College remains the building where I first had lunch at a Panera Bread location with Brad Thompson, who then taught at Penn State and now is at Linfield College in Oregon. The building's main use is to house the Penn State Theater Center. Now, that's adaptive reuse -- bread and circuses, so to speak.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Once in Love With Amy
The redoubtable Mario Garcia -- the collapse of American newspapers has led him to do most of his work overseas, more's the pity for us -- had, well, a THANG, as my former colleague Wendy Dowkings used to say, for Amy Winehouse. He makes no bones about it. Her death caused him to collect some front pages from Europe and South America reporting her death.
Looking at the pages -- and as a copy editor, reading the headlines to the extent I could -- may indicate why American newspapers have such a youth problem.
From Il Secolo XIX in Bologna: "Enormous talent and fragile soul: Winehouse may be the Lady Diana of Rock. Fans besieged the star's house crying." The emotion of the opera. But they're Italian. We move on.
From Bild in Germany: "We must grieve today about Amy Winehouse. The police found her dead in her London apartment. She was only 27." Perhaps German newspapers all speak in the first person plural. We move on.
From Las Ultimas Noticias in Santiago: "The sudden end to the solitary diva. Amy Winehouse died at her home at 27. Her mother: 'It was a matter of time.' She had been depressed for a month after breaking up with her last boyfriend." But this is a paper that plays soap-opera entertainment on the front every day. We move on...
From Clarin in Buenos Aires: "Amy Winehouse: An early goodbye. The renowned English singer was found dead in her London home. She was 27 and had a history of addictions." Seems pretty straightforward. But even here, a hint of sympathy.
From Correio in Santiago do Bahia, Brazil: "Amy at the end. Singer, 27, found dead in London." The same (and I'm not completely sure of that translation.)
From Correio Braziliense: "Curse of 27 silences the voice of the 21st century." Referring to the deaths of Cobain, Joplin, Hendrix, etc. -- and assuming its readers know what it means.
From El Tiempo in Bogota: "Amy Winehouse dies. She was found in her London home. The artist was famous for her excesses." Hmm, we must be getting closer to the United States.
Now, for three from the U.S. that Mario collected:
The New York Times: Amy Winehouse (1983-2011): British Retro Soul Singer With Troubled History.
Los Angeles Times: Amy Winehouse (1983-2011): Iconoclastic pop singer found dead. The five-time Grammy winner inspired a new generation of vocalists.
New York Post: They tried to make her go to rehab, she said No No No! Amy Winehouse dead at 27.
So in Europe we hear of her fragile soul, for which we must grieve. In South America we hear of the depressed solitary diva whom we bid an early goodbye, the voice of the 21st century famous for her excesses. Callas! Duncan! Nijinsky!
OK, these are just the papers Mario selected, as are those in the U.S. But the U.S. reader is calmly told of the death of an iconoclastic retro soul singer -- whatever that may mean -- who inspired a new generation -- whoever they are -- but whose troubled history including refusing rehab.
It's a random sample, but it seems to me that papers overseas -- and OK, Mario didn't include any from England -- assume their readers know who Amy was, embraced her or her music, and mourned her passing. Here in the U.S. (and, OK, somewhat in Colombia), we first must assume that our readers have no idea who she was -- which we try to remedy with somewhat vacuous terms -- and in some cases, make sure we understand she was not an avatar of traditional American values. (But hey, she won five Grammys! So she must have been somebody.)
There's an ocean of difference between "Fragile Soul" and "Troubled History," and it's not just one of Italian vs. English, and it doesn't mean we have to go there. (And until this weekend, I had never heard a note that Amy Winehouse sang.) But it does convey the attitude of detached Olympian judgment that people accuse American newspapers of having -- and that does not work in the 21st century, when emotional connection is all.
More to come on emotion.
UPDATE: Today (Tuesday) my paper had a sympathetic tribute, as did the Burlington paper. So perhaps it just had to get out of the hands of the newsside and over to the features desk. Does this mean arts writers elsewhere work on weekends?
Looking at the pages -- and as a copy editor, reading the headlines to the extent I could -- may indicate why American newspapers have such a youth problem.
From Il Secolo XIX in Bologna: "Enormous talent and fragile soul: Winehouse may be the Lady Diana of Rock. Fans besieged the star's house crying." The emotion of the opera. But they're Italian. We move on.
From Bild in Germany: "We must grieve today about Amy Winehouse. The police found her dead in her London apartment. She was only 27." Perhaps German newspapers all speak in the first person plural. We move on.
From Las Ultimas Noticias in Santiago: "The sudden end to the solitary diva. Amy Winehouse died at her home at 27. Her mother: 'It was a matter of time.' She had been depressed for a month after breaking up with her last boyfriend." But this is a paper that plays soap-opera entertainment on the front every day. We move on...
From Clarin in Buenos Aires: "Amy Winehouse: An early goodbye. The renowned English singer was found dead in her London home. She was 27 and had a history of addictions." Seems pretty straightforward. But even here, a hint of sympathy.
From Correio in Santiago do Bahia, Brazil: "Amy at the end. Singer, 27, found dead in London." The same (and I'm not completely sure of that translation.)
From Correio Braziliense: "Curse of 27 silences the voice of the 21st century." Referring to the deaths of Cobain, Joplin, Hendrix, etc. -- and assuming its readers know what it means.
From El Tiempo in Bogota: "Amy Winehouse dies. She was found in her London home. The artist was famous for her excesses." Hmm, we must be getting closer to the United States.
Now, for three from the U.S. that Mario collected:
The New York Times: Amy Winehouse (1983-2011): British Retro Soul Singer With Troubled History.
Los Angeles Times: Amy Winehouse (1983-2011): Iconoclastic pop singer found dead. The five-time Grammy winner inspired a new generation of vocalists.
New York Post: They tried to make her go to rehab, she said No No No! Amy Winehouse dead at 27.
So in Europe we hear of her fragile soul, for which we must grieve. In South America we hear of the depressed solitary diva whom we bid an early goodbye, the voice of the 21st century famous for her excesses. Callas! Duncan! Nijinsky!
OK, these are just the papers Mario selected, as are those in the U.S. But the U.S. reader is calmly told of the death of an iconoclastic retro soul singer -- whatever that may mean -- who inspired a new generation -- whoever they are -- but whose troubled history including refusing rehab.
It's a random sample, but it seems to me that papers overseas -- and OK, Mario didn't include any from England -- assume their readers know who Amy was, embraced her or her music, and mourned her passing. Here in the U.S. (and, OK, somewhat in Colombia), we first must assume that our readers have no idea who she was -- which we try to remedy with somewhat vacuous terms -- and in some cases, make sure we understand she was not an avatar of traditional American values. (But hey, she won five Grammys! So she must have been somebody.)
There's an ocean of difference between "Fragile Soul" and "Troubled History," and it's not just one of Italian vs. English, and it doesn't mean we have to go there. (And until this weekend, I had never heard a note that Amy Winehouse sang.) But it does convey the attitude of detached Olympian judgment that people accuse American newspapers of having -- and that does not work in the 21st century, when emotional connection is all.
More to come on emotion.
UPDATE: Today (Tuesday) my paper had a sympathetic tribute, as did the Burlington paper. So perhaps it just had to get out of the hands of the newsside and over to the features desk. Does this mean arts writers elsewhere work on weekends?
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