Department Store Buildings of York, Pa. No. 1

York, Pa., a small city west of Harrisburg, was like Wilkes-Barre in that it was the home of a number of department stores, one of which had a significant impact on national retailing. That is the Bon-Ton, which still operates a large chain of stores. Here's a look at what was the main Bon-Ton store in downtown York; which became the corporate headquarters even after the store had closed.

The company name was S. Grumbacher & Son for many years, and it started in Trenton, N.J., as Grumbacher Bros., involving Samuel and Jacob Grumbacher. The brothers went their own ways and Samuel Grumbacher maintained his own store, which eventually became S. Grumbacher & Son when Max Grumbacher became a partner. Grumbacher's sons and sons-in-law spread across Pennsylvania to open their own Bon-Ton stores; Louis Samler in Lebanon was notably successful, but Max's move to York created the modern chain. The story of the Bon-Ton is too extensive to relate here; the Wikipedia article outlines how it sucked up Hess's, AM&A's, and eventually Carson Pirie Scott and Younkers after its own regional expansion that included buying Eyerly's in Hagerstown, Md., and opening branches in downtowns close to York in the 1950s. The Bon-Ton has had struggles in recent years as one of the last determinedly midrange department store chains. A new leader was named this year, the first from outside the Grumbacher family, which still owns the company. Here's hoping he can turn the Bon-Ton around. The picture shows the Bon-Ton store at 100 W. Market St. after its false front from the 1950s had been removed; it had a large Bon-Ton logo on it and the name S. Grumbacher & Son as well. Rooftop views such as this show the persistence of the skylights that let in light before there was today's level of electric lighting, and I'm assuming that all the area with the same color of roofing belonged to the store.

York also had (not pictured here) the farthest-east branch I have been able to find of the Interstate Department Stores brands, although it is rumored there was one near Troy, N.Y. In the mid-1920s, a Stillman's was opened in the building at 31 E. Market St. that had housed James McLean & Sons, then the oldest department store in York. Rudolph Blick, one of the Interstate "old hands" from the Midwest, was the first manager, and as near as I can tell another one of them, Franklyn Mason, was in charge when the store closed in the late 1960s, when lower-end department stores were being wiped out by discounters and the York market had been invaded by Baltimore-based Hochschild Kohn with a new mall store, which led the Bon Ton and another York store, P. Wiest's Sons, to make suburban moves of their own. Stillman's was to the east of the city's other department stores. In 1940 it moved into a new building right next door that was the first air-conditioned department store in York.

Die, Infurior Bieng!

Some department store buildings from York, Pa., are lined up and were to appear today, but some things are just too good to pass by.

In Canada's National Post on Feb. 13, a writer named Yoni Goldstein decided to hail what he sees as the imminent end of copy editing as a good thing for the world. That is, unless this was a piece of satire so deep that it already would have closed on Saturday night.

First, let's take it as a simple expression of his opinion. There's no point in getting into his ad hominem descriptions of we who are "cynical, gruff, and weird in social situations" or his feeling that copy editors only apply "arcane" style rules. The Washington Post once famously wrote an article in which it characterized what "all" Pentecostals are like. We all get a certain license to be idiots.

It is Goldstein's conclusion that would raise this to the level of extreme Internet utopianism. He writes:

"... Online news sites and blogs tend to be nearly completely unconcerned with the kinds of typos and grammatical errors that copy editors are paid to seek out and fix. ... Still, this is no reason to get sentimental about the lowly copy editor. If he is unacknowledged within the newsroom and a relic online, it is because we as readers have evolved. We no longer sweat the small stuff of proper hyphenation and correct usage of semi-colons - it's the ideas and opinions that we're after. If a few words here and there are misspelled, so what? We're smart enough to know it hardly matters to the quality of the story or argument."


As I said, this COULD be simply a piece of satire written with tongue so far in cheek as to not be visible.  Because it turns out that Yoni Goldstein, M.A. in English literature, 2003, at York University, former editorial board member of the National Post, former assistant editor of the Canadian magazine Maclean's, and former editor of something called the Book for Men, and current blogger for the Huffington Post Canada, also writes pieces such as this:

"Reaction to [Prime Minister] Stephen Harper's Davos announcement of coming changes to Old Age Security was predictable. "Poor old people" was the general tenor -- one day they're heading jauntily toward retirement at 65, but now, because of our emotionless jerk of a prime minister, they'll have to work an extra two years.

"Well, boo hoo. Am I the only one unmoved by the 'Won't someone think about the old people' cries? Because it seems to me that working an extra two years is the least old people and soon-to-be-old baby boomers can do for the rest of us....

"Oldies have already been working for 40 years; they're used to the routine and it's my understanding that old people love sticking to routines -- that they turn into shriveled head cases when their daily schedules don't follow predictable patterns. So staying at work (combined with regular consumption of prunes) is actually the healthiest option for them....

"We know that we know more than you -- we've grown up in a world where all knowledge is available at the click of a mouse. The collective wisdom of the Internet trumps your meandering stories of personal hardships. We're the wise ones, not you.

"So, old people, it's time to get up off the couch and make yourselves useful. No more free rides here."

So at this point, I might be saying: Yoni, what you would truly need a copy editor to tell you is, I didn't know Jonathan Swift, but you're not Jonathan Swift. At some point, you've got to put a phrase in, a wink-wink, that says, "Hey, folks, I'm writing this as satire." Simply being over the top no longer counts, because people who really believe what you're poking fun at have been there before you and have said it already. Part of the collective wisdom of the Internet is that it is impossible to be over the top. Someone will try to surpass you just to show he or she can. And despite the old saw, words can harm.

When the Internet era was just catching fire, Mickey Kaus, one of the earliest big-name political bloggers, wrote enthusiastically about the layoff of copy editors (in what by today's terms would be small numbers) at the Los Angeles Times. I can't find it in a search of Kausfiles, it was years ago. Kaus' point was that some reporter he knew at the Times could write, as he saw it, flawless copy on a wristwatch keypad, and that all that copy editors did was mangle this 100 percent wordsmithing with their useless questions and "arcane" rules. It was clear that Kaus had had his subjunctive modes tied up in a knot about this for some time. He was not being satirical.

In this, he reminded me of a former editor at a newspaper far, far way and his tale to me of why he had abolished the local copy desk: "I'm a smart guy. I was a reporter for 20 years. Copy editors asked me a lot of dumb questions. Savvy?" Well, I savvied, and praised the stars I was leaving.

He may have been a smart guy, though I must humbly admit it was not apparent to me. He may have written flawless copy. He may have had copy editors who were obsessed with small points or arbitrary rules they couldn't back up. My experience in 35 years in newspapers is that most reporters do not write flawless copy, and about two-thirds of them know that. Those who do write nearly flawlessly for the most part appreciate the backstop. Those who do not and know it appreciate that someone is there to make their work better or at least stop it from being misinterpreted. Those who do not appreciate it tend to see writing as a form of masturbation -- I'm giving myself pleasure, and man, it feels good.

So either Yoni Goldstein thought he was aiding the cause of copy editing -- but did so too subtly that it was too easy to believe him, in a world where business-side cost cutters, egomaniacal writers, editors in chief obsessed with "feet on the street" are constantly looking for justification to get rid of all those picky, delaying, self-righteous copy editors who don't understand today's world -- because if you spell the prime minister's name Steven Harbor and follow it with "He're one superdooper dickhed," you'll get more web hits than a reasoned piece of political commentary will draw. ("Fuckin'-A! The prime minister's a dickhead! Pass me another Molson.") Canadian humor can be more savagely cutting than American. Or perhaps Yoni really does spend his days doing hand jobs. Perhaps he will enlighten us. A contribution to support the American Copy Editors Society -- which does have Canadian members -- would be a nice way to show it.

Department Store Building of the Wyoming Valley

Enough philosophizing about newspapers. Time to return to looking at buildings that once housed the department stores that were a city's pride.

Wilkes-Barre, Pa., "the heart of the valley that warms the nation" in the days of anthracite heating, was a great city for department stores -- there were five locally owned major stores in the mid-1950s on one block of South Main Street and around the "diamond," as Public Square is sometimes called. Of those, two buildings remain, one of which amazingly is still a downtown department store.

First, the fallen. Bergman's Department Store was founded during World War I by Justin Bergman. I have not been able to discover whether he was related to the Bergman who owned the Bon-Ton store in Altoona, one of myriad Bon Tons not related to the York, Pa.-based and still-existing Bon-Ton chain. While Bergman's remodeled in 1950 and held an open house, by 1958 it was gone from downtown, having moved to the area's first major shopping center, the Narrows in Edwardsville, which drew from all the towns in the area. Often this sort of thing followed a fire in those days, but I can't see any reference to one. The Bergman family, including "Mike" Bergman Jr. and relatives Seymour and John Dimond and Charles Pfifferling, ran the store until the Hurricane Agnes floods that so devastated the city.

Also a victim of Agnes was the Lazarus Department Store, 57 S. Main St., which had nothing to do with the larger Lazarus chain in Ohio. The store was founded as Lazarus Bros. by Asher and Henry Lazarus in the early 1890s after Asher Lazarus ended his partnership with Solomon Langfeld, who with his own brother Feist operated a department store in Wilkes-Barre for a number of years. In the World War I era the store was sold and reorganized as the Wilkes-Barre Dry Goods Co., which became part of the giant Claflin bankruptcy that spawned two chains. It ended up in the hands of the Milliken family's Mercantile Stores. While Mercantile, which had a strong commitment to its downtown stores, kept its chain going until 1998, the flood damage was too severe for Lazarus to reopen. Lazarus had also had a branch in Pittston.

Then there was the Isaac Long Store at 17 Public Square, one of two major stores founded by Longs in Wilkes-Barre. Isaac Long's descendants Harry and Julius Stern ran the store until 1955, when it was sold to the Cleland-Simpson Co. of Scranton, operator of the Globe Store and for a time owned by John Wanamaker. It also was a victim of the flood.

The large building in the photo in the upper corner of the diamond is the other Long store, which was begun by Jonas Long and then continued as Jonas Long's Sons. The store's original address was on Market Street, which until the 1890s was as prominent a shopping street as Main Street. Jonas Long's sons Charles, Louis, Bernhard, Arthur and Edward took over the store and expanded into Scranton. That may have been too much, because the Scranton store was sold to Isaac Oppenheim and became the Scranton Dry. William MacWilliam, an executive of Fowler, Dick & Walker, then took over the Wilkes-Barre store and for a brief time it was MacWilliam's, which also had a branch in Nanticoke. In the late 1920s Allied Stores purchased it and made it a Pomeroy's unit, thus this is one of the three surviving former downtown Pomeroy's stores, with the others in Pottsville and Easton. Harry Adamy, a spokesman for Pennsylvania merchants in fighting the sales tax in the 1930s, was later pulled away from Lazarus to manage Pomeroy's -- a cross-chain switch that was very rare, people generally moved from store to store within one company..

Pomeroy's opened a suburban branch on Route 6 in the 1960s, but the Great Macyization happened at the Wyoming Valley Mall, where what is now a Macy's was previously a Kaufmann's (Pittsburgh) and a Hess's (Allentown) and had been opened as a Zollinger's (also Allentown). Whew.

Finally -- and still operating -- at the bottom left of the photo, with the greenish front, is the aforementioned Fowler, Dick and Walker, the Boston Store, now a Boscov's branch. George Fowler, Alexander Dick, and Gilbert Walker created the partnership in Wilkes-Barre in 1879 after having worked together in Meriden, Conn.. In 1881 Fowler and Walker moved to Binghamton, N.Y., to open a second store. Walker later opened a third in Evansville, Ind., and the men remained partners even though they were spread across the country. FD&W had other branches across Pennsylvania, New York, and Indiana at various times. In Wilkes-Barre, descendants of Alexander Dick took prominent roles, among them Malcolm Burnside and Millard DeMun; in the 1960s the chairman of the store was named Alexander Dick. (FD&W was clearly a Scots store, although not part of the great Scottish-American department store chain Syndicate Trading.) My colleague Jim Remsen, who grew up near Scranton, remembers radio ads mentioning "Fowler, Dick & Walker." In Binghamton, however, the store was called "Fowler's," perhaps because that was where the Fowler heirs mostly lived. FD&W was sold to Al Boscov in 1980.

A couple of the links here are to a fine local history photo site called "Wyoming Valley Photos" posted by someone I can only see identified as James.

Onward, Part Three

In the early days of “TTPB” it tried to make the point that print offered a pipeline into readers’ homes, and that the newspaper business could forget the concept of a pipeline at its peril. It is cheered by the endorsement of print by Halifax Media, the new owners of the former NYT Regional papers. It hopes the new owners in San Diego find their way. At the same time there are decisions such as that of Booth Newspapers to cut back home delivery to such an extent as to try to force people to get the news online (or at their own inconvenience), which, as Doug Page notes in a controversy-drawing article in News & Tech, simply changes them from one among 1,400 daily newspapers to one of about 100 million websites.

These moves say that the newspaper business is no longer just a one-size-fits-all model in which the New York Times and the Kingman Daily Miner essentially do the same thing. Different companies try different strategies. Time will tell which succeed. And the end product is that cities that now have daily newspapers may not have them, while other cities will – a daily newspaper may be like an Olive Garden, there’s one here and one there, but not one way over there. Not every town big enough to have a daily newspaper has a Macy’s, and nowadays not every town big enough to have a Macy’s has a daily newspaper.

This seems inevitable, though regrettable. But then, the files of the Library of Congress are filled with old titles that when they closed left their cities without a daily newspaper. Here in New Jersey, Union City, Hoboken, Dover, Passaic, Long Branch, Toms River, Elizabeth, Red Bank, all had local daily newspapers that foundered for one reason or another. Typically a larger nearby competitor would pick up part of the slack, but no one covered the heck out of the town in the same way. And local people said, “Sure was nice when we had that Elizabeth Journal,” and either read another paper or watched “Good Morning America.” Somehow for most the gap was filled. (The people in City Hall, of course, varied between exultation – we no longer have someone watching our every move – and agony – we no longer have someone doing a story every day about our every move!)

News is not a necessity. The closing of their local Food Fair or Wrigley Market did not stop people from going to the grocery. Newspapers’ Achilles’ heel has always been their sense of indispensability, because for the most part the people who work for them, business side or news side, find them indispensable and therefore feel, wrongly, that they need do little to promote their use. (Remember the downbeat Renault ads in the 1970s at the end of which George C. Scott intoned, “It sells itself”? Sure are a lot of Renaults on the roads here.) Most of us believe in what we do, and many of us are terrified that we are doing the wrong thing. We need to listen to owners who say, yes, there’s a future for print as well as a future for newspapers in digital. We also need to look for owners who are willing to support that with marketing, with promotion, yes, with progress editions if they want, with intelligent efforts focused on the desires of readers and not the importance of the First Amendment. (The First Amendment is vital, but it’s not going to make me buy a newspaper.)

Newspapers are too un-hip to do a Cadillac-style reinvention to the voice of Robert Plant, but they need to avoid how Oldsmobile spiraled into the grave by having a choir out of a 1950s soap ad sing, “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” Because we cannot simply change ourselves into the Huffington Post. And we need to not listen to the people who say, there is no future for you unless you do exactly what I say, which, amazingly enough, is exactly what I want to do.

We need to remind ourselves that a website got it wrong about Paterno, CBS got it wrong about Paterno, and yes, some newspapers got it wrong about Paterno, but the AP didn’t, the New York Times didn’t, my own newspaper didn’t, most newspapers didn’t, not in print or online, and the reason is that we don’t see ourselves as organizations throwing out the baby to have the coolest 21st-century bathwater you’ve ever seen. At the same time, we need to remember that Hearst’s people made things up, Pulitzer’s people made things up, there have always been and always will be journalists who make things up or publish half-baked rumors because they’re good stories.

Part of the reason newspapers cracked down on this was that their advertisers wanted a reliable, truthful, respected medium in which to advertise so that their own ads would be seen as believable. Left to ourselves, we could have kept on writing the legend. Storytelling is easier when you can fill in the gaps with speculation or obtain the information by, say, tapping into someone’s voicemail illegally; when you can say, “Hey, someone told us this, what are we going to do, not publish it?” Yes. Someone will publish it anyway these days. It just shouldn't be you.

We need to acknowledge that in many ways we will always be unhip and that even if we end up publishing only a tablet-based product with an associated website, what we do is compile, create, and distribute a product to customers, and the ideals of journalism and the needs of the writer are part of that but are not the core or only competency of the industry. We want to meet people’s needs for a journalistic product, but we are not foundations to underwrite journalism. It just seemed that way when newspapers were licenses to print money. A foundation may be a successful journalistic model, on a small scale with a tight focus. But it has not been terribly successful in the newspaper business and it would be folly to try to make ourselves into it. As Page wrote, “Your job as a newspaper executive is to figure out how to successfully operate in these tricky times while still holding your business true to what it is: a newspaper.” It is easier to ignore this if you believe that your business is simply journalism.

If you want to be a pure journalist, with no strings holding you back in your service to society; if you want to analyze the communications patterns of a wired world and write articles on paradigm shifts; that world offers you more opportunity than ever before. Good luck to you. And then there is the newspaper business, which, despite what its many critics say, does not exist only as a sort of catalyst to allow the creation of journalism. Unlike the motto of “Newspaper Death Watch,” the death of newspapers would not necessarily bring about the rebirth of journalism. It would just be the death of newspapers. Journalism might be better. It might be worse. Newspapers are not what holds journalism back from the salvation of the world. The inherent limits of journalism and human nature do that. Newspapers exist to bring a community together and they exist to sell dry goods. They exist to shine a light on society and they exist to not gratuitously offend longtime readers. They exist to take principled stands against the misuse of power and they exist to be part of the town’s power structure. They exist to quote professors decrying the hold sports has over their campuses and they exist to run 16 columns of college sports results on Sunday. Newspapering is a business, and journalism is an idea.

Newspapers employ journalists, but do not exist simply to enable them. If that becomes the case, the focus becomes them and not the customers. Which of the business practices being trotted out now will be successful, we will see. But newspapers need to remember what they are about, even though scores of journalists will deride them for that and work to make them feel uncomfortable about themselves.

Onward, Part Two

Perhaps because we are enjoined to spew out of our mouths that which is lukewarm, it’s always been hard to say, when confronted with the imperfections of newspapers as opposed to the ideals of journalism – well, this newspaper may not be perfect, it may not be as good as it can be, but perhaps it’s better than any of the alternatives that could reasonably be expected to occur. But part of it was, it was just the way things were. One didn’t speak back in those days of how international coverage was being passively underwritten by automobile dealers and Realtors. The concept didn’t even enter one’s head. There was advertising revenue, there was spending on news coverage, things went into a big pot and then someone doled out the honey.

At least that was the case in newsrooms, most of which were into the 1970s before the concept of “a budget” took hold – not a news budget, but a spending budget. Until then, you spent money, and if you were spending too much money, the publisher told you to spend a little less for a while. The publisher was never going to give the newsroom enough money to break the bank, and the editor had a pretty good idea of what he could spend – but it was still a business where, as happened in Alabama in the 1990s, the editor of Newhouse’s Mobile paper could be talking to a company official about wanting to obtain a sister paper’s coverage of University of Alabama football and be told, well, why don’t you just hire your own beat writer? It was informal, ad hoc and, as long as the owners got enough money to live their lives the way they wanted to, not terribly complicated.

We, of course, as journalists, were too high-minded and high-status to think about things like how the money was divided up, which brings us to progress editions. At my first two papers we did progress editions. Whether you were a reporter or an editor, you were assigned stories for the progress edition. (For those unfamiliar with the idea, it is a once-a-year section extolling the community’s economic growth and prospects, and including company-by-company profiles, which, depending upon the local view of things, were variously 1) done totally on a journalistic basis, or 2) assigned based on who bought ads but still were written objectively, or 3) were written as puff pieces that were guaranteed when you bought an ad. But they were done by the newsroom and not the advertising department.)

I, like everyone else in the newsroom, resented doing progress editions. It wasn’t my regular job. It was shilling for someone who bought an ad. It had no news peg. It wasn’t what I went to college to do. It did not benefit society. That was what advertising people did – promised an advertiser anything to get money. I was above that. I was a journalist. These were elements from a less ethical past, when reporters took free liquor at Christmas from the mayor. Still, I had to do it, so I tried to write the best article on the National Automatic Tool Co. that I could. But I knew nothing about its business, had no interest in what it did, and, to be honest, looked down on the people who worked there, managers and workers alike, as people who spent their lives assembling National Automatic Tools, whatever they were, while I was living in the world of ideas, of abstractions, of political and generational change, hanging out with hip young people who didn’t drive pickups, didn’t go hunting, didn't follow conventional morality, and didn’t wear flannel shirts except to be cool.

In the second year of my doing progress edition work – I believe this year I had to edit the stories – I asked the managing editor, why do we, professional journalists, have to do this crap? It is beneath us. To which he answered: You may not have noticed, but no one advertises in January and February. It’s winter. Most people don’t buy new cars.  Most people don’t buy new houses. Knollenberg’s and Elder-Beerman don’t run big sales.  People just buy what they have to, so other than the supermarkets, businesses don’t advertise.  This is how we make money in January and February, by appealing to the vanity and civic pride of the Wayne Works and the Second National Bank and the National Automatic Tool Co. They want to advertise in the section because everyone advertises in the section and if they don’t, someone at the Rotary will say, “I see you didn’t advertise in the progress edition. Aren’t you for our city’s progress? Are you having, er, financial problems?” If we didn’t do this, we would have less money and would have to do less the rest of the year.  So go edit the damned stories.

I was amazed, given that the American economy no longer is based upon local industries such as the National Automatic Tool Co., to see not only that progress editions are still being published, but that the reaction to them – in this case from a journalism professor – is exactly the same. Justin Martin, Ph.D., Honors preceptor at the University of Maine – yes, I had to look “preceptor” up, it basically means “head of the honors program” – reacted unfavorably to a progress edition in the Bangor Daily News, the local paper for the main campus in Orono. Unlike in my day, the stories were advertorial. Unlike in my day, the section was labeled as advertorial. But as Martin notes:

“According to the author of the articles, these stories focused only on companies that had previously purchased advertising from the paper. Editors, though, weren’t transparent about this with readers. Atop each of the seven full-page articles extolling the virtues of the businesses, there was no note to readers indicating the stories were linked to money coming into the newspaper. The content was delivered on broadsheet newsprint, not the smaller inserts of, say, Best Buy offerings or Parade magazine, which set the content apart from a paper’s own news. And the newspaper’s name listed beneath each of Fitzpatrick’s bylines seemed likely to confuse readers into believing these were standard news stories on Maine businesses.  The minuscule disclaimer is not enough. This insert feeds readers copy that looks like vetted news. In the version of the insert published online, the notice that the coverage is linked to advertising is invisible unless one zooms in considerably on the front page.”

Martin – who, and I know this is a cheap shot worthy of Michele Bachmann, not only mentions his doctorate in the tagline, but once in the article where it is not really necessary -- is severely offended by all this. His feeling: “Readers have virtually no way of knowing that the upbeat coverage of the businesses is connected to paid advertising. Even if readers saw the extremely small identification of an ‘advertising supplement’ on the front page of insert, is that enough? Readers don’t know the content inside is a thank-you to companies that have written checks to the paper. The section’s front page boasts in very visible type that ‘Maine has a rich business history, and within these pages you’ll find great examples. And we’ll honor seven of those businesses that have stood the test of time with in-depth histories.’ This language leads readers to believe The Bangor Daily News is independently appraising these companies. When flattering news coverage is in any way linked to paid advertising, news providers have an overriding obligation to fully disclose that quid pro quo to the public. Of course, it would be better if news outlets simply resolved not to flirt with deceiving their audiences in the first place.”

Well, all well and good, except, of course, we have not proved that anything in these stories is false, overwritten or deceptive beyond the fact of their existence. The editor of the Daily News, after some hemming and hawing, promised in the future to try to have each article labeled as “advertising.” And I’m not writing to defend the section – it may be a piece of junk.

But here it is 2012, after years upon years of collapse in the newspaper business, and Preceptor Martin, Ph.D., remains as high-minded as Young Journalist Sullivan was in the 1970s. The answer of “this is how the Bangor Daily News pays its bills in the winter” would doubtless not satisfy him. The answer of “we do this so that we can provide more and better journalism in the news sections” would not satisfy him either, any more than it would have me back then, although it would now. The only answer that would satisfy him is, “Journalism must be above commerce.” Because, of course, journalists should not have to deal with the sort of messy matters that confront the publisher of the Daily News – or that confronted the owners of the National Automatic Tool Co., which did not last much longer than my story about it. Journalists place in society is to do journalism, and the car dealers can subsidize the cost.

At this point in my life, my prescription would be somewhat different that Martin’s, although we might agree on some points. Make it a news section. Do two or three good stories about business in Maineand Bangor. Then have reporters do stories on firms that buy ads – not just a 1x2, you have to buy a quarter-page. Tell them the reason they are doing these stories is that today’s equivalents of NATCO – the hospitals, the trucking companies, the firms that fill the office parks -- are where most of the readers work.  Their stories, their companies’ stories, are usually untold in the newspaper, which will never notice them unless they go bankrupt or have a layoff. (We will spend our time focusing on government and agencies for the disempowered.) And no, we don’t want a piece trashing these companies. But it doesn’t have to be slimeball stuff either. It’s just a piece saying, here’s what the CEO or whoever says the next year looks like for his company, and exactly what it is his company does, and what his company's local payroll is, and is that up or down from last year, and so forth. And now you, our local journalist employee, actually know something about the people who write the checks that pay your readers who spend money on the newspaper and its advertisers. And now you, our local journalist employee, understand that your own paycheck comes from much the same place. And yes, we're going to call it a progress edition, and no, we're not going to use it to critique capitalism or call for Realtors to get 2 percent commissions or ask how the CEO can live in a $1 million house while people are homeless.

But if you can pay for more and better journalism through stratagems such as a progress edition – which John Q. Reader is not going to give a fig about its provenance one way or the other – in this financially challenged era, and can benefit your newspaper, then, to channel noted journalism critic Sarah Palin, “Sell, baby, sell.” It may not be perfect, but these days it's as good as can reasonably be expected to occur. Part Three to come.

Onward, Part One

A story for Bloomberg News by Nathan Myhrvol reminds “TTPB” that two things happened to the newspaper business as we knew it and only one of them has to do with new approaches to journalism.

One is that the growth of the Internet provided an alternative to classified advertising that was easier to use, less costly, and more versatile. People started fleeing in large numbers from classified before newspaper circulations started to follow suit. The falloff in newspaper revenue since the high-water year of 2005 has been tremendous, but how much larger it would have been had volume after the dot-com crash followed its usual upward slope with the recovery. Instead, newspaper advertising volume remained pretty flat in the first years of the 21^st century, and revenue was boosted through raising rates. It’s true that people were pounding on the door looking for ads. It’s also clear that a lot of people were no longer pounding on the door.

The other is that not that many of the attacks on benighted newspapers from journalists – need we mention the name Jarvis here? --  are not only about the loss of revenue and the industry’s generally poor, disorganized, and fitful response. Some critics have concentrated on the interplay of the decline of the business model and the journalism produced – the always thoughtful Howard Owens, the redesign artist Alan Jacobson, and Alan Mutter with his continuing chronicle of the industry’s descent into the flame. But others would have been attacking daily newspapers if classified revenue was still storming along, if a way had been found to finance newspapers in print as well as adapt to the Internet age.

Their criticism, to me, is that “newspapers” does not mean the same thing as “journalism,” and either 1) should or 2) since it doesn’t, newspapers should just die.

The momentary crisis over “Is Joe Paterno dead” shines light on the point. Until its premature obituary Saturday night, Onward State was being hailed as an avatar of the new way, of throwing out all the barnacles that have held back newspaper journalism. It was being hailed in the same way that “underground” newspapers had been hailed. It was being hailed somewhat in the same way that the “new journalism” had been hailed. Now, these guys at State College just made a mistake in the same way that UPI used to make mistakes. They thought they had something and they didn’t. Careers should not be ended. But is their process, their approach – described in the article as “smashing some sacred journalism traditions, quaint rituals like editing, striving for objectivity, and verifying rumors before publication” -- truly a model for us to emulate, or is it simply the desire to let the id run free?

There’s always something to appeal to journalists, professors, and other critics who want to decry newspapers for being, as they forever have been, not hip, not disinterested, and not solely devoted to the care and feeding of journalists. They call out newspapers as institutional. Subject to the whim of editors who may not be as knowledgeable as they should be. Closely allied with the traditional power structure. Wary of “offending” their longtime readers. Subject to competitive marketplace pressures. Occasionally willing to kill stories to satisfy car dealers, real estate agents, and the like. Aimed at a mass market that doesn’t know Ugandafrom Uzbekistan. Reporting on the deeds of institutions and not the needs of people. Mainly printed to sell dry goods. Alternating between a principled stand against intimidation and fear that their readers are so easily swayed that they will lose them unless they “balance” the editorial page 80-20. In big cities, largely staffed (until recent years) by college-educated cosmopolitans whose interests were not the same as Joe Sixpack’s.

And some of the critics are people who strode into newspapers full of purpose and ideals and self-regard, as we all did, and then were told, after writing a poetic 250-word lede or wanting to spend six months researching the problems of adoptions from Tanzania (if there indeed are such problems), that, well, we don’t do that. Give me 10 inches on this car crash. Some of us said, OK, that’s what the job is, and others said that this was not what they intended to do with their lives and talents, and therefore what they had been told to do was wrong, irrelevant, out of date.

From the time of the penny press, through the muckracking era, into the attempt to create PM, through the readership of I.F. Stone’s Weekly to the era of alt-weeklies, and now to today’s world of the Huffington Post, there have always been efforts to break the perceived stranglehold of the establishment press, the mainstream media. And there have always been people who portray themselves as the honest seekers of the truth as opposed to the dull scribes, who feel that if we could just break down the walls of tradition and process and manufacturing there would be a journalism that would finally shine its light on the darkest corner, finally do its fullest part to end whatever evils one perceives. Oh, and a journalism that would never, ever make me change my lede or trim to length.

And all of us bow before this criticism and feel duly chastened, because we know we are not as high-minded as we once were, and with the loss of revenue we can lose faith in what we do, which, as Steve Yelvington noted, traditionally has been to work in a business whose core competence was manufacturing and delivering a product to people’s homes. 

Newspaper companies would like to tell you that their core competence has always been storytelling or creating content. They would like to say this because in part they believe it, in part because they want to believe it, and in part because they see the business of delivering a product to people’s homes falling apart. But this is not what they have been. Regardless of whether you spent gadzillions on journalism, like the New York Times, or tried to eke out an inferior report on starvation-level expenditures, as the Jelenic-era management of Journal Register did, the product was essentially the same. You brought together whatever you had, news and ads, you put it on pages, you printed them, and you delivered them. That was the business.

What you made into the content and how much you paid to get it was secondary, and was to some extent a loss leader to give people a reason to buy the product. Your customers were your advertisers and people who paid to have something in their hands every day as they sipped their coffee. Your customer was not the needs of society. Your product was not simply journalism. You were glad that your business allowed you to commit journalism, within certain strictures – such as not “offending” longtime readers, not being critical of 6 percent real estate commissions, and being gingerly in covering the affairs of the powerful who decided whether they would buy ads. It was not ideal. It looked to ideals for inspiration and fell short. Still, the good far outweighed the bad. But to some, the fact that there was bad simply invalidated the good.

Part Two to follow.

All the World's Knowledge, and It's Theirs

On this morning when the always unimpeachable Wikipedia decided to show us that it is not simply a group of public-spirited citizens trying to bring the benefits of the link economy to everyone, but, in the end, just another business engaged in protecting its own interests at the expense of its customers -- even though, like any business, it would say that its long-term interests are of course in its customers' benefit, what's good for General Motors is... -- it brings to mind a recent Harper's article on Amazon's control of the book business.

 The story isn't available free online, but it basically concentrates on the Amazon-Macmillan feud over pricing. (Here's a look at publishers' options in the wake of that.) The piece is a jeremiad and not utterly convincing in broadening from its example to a universal argument that the gospel of "efficiency" is a corrupting influence on America. But its main argument is that companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple -- and, yes, Wikipedia, even though it is organized very differently -- are just as much monopolists as Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller presented what he was doing as ultimately in the public good by rationalizing the oil business to prevent price wars that drove producers out of business and to share the cost of capital investment so that the benefits of oil could be made available to the world. Doubtless it did that. It also did many other things not quite as beneficial to all.

Does that mean that Larry Page is a latter-day Henry Clay Frick? No, and it doesn't have to, although Jeff Bezos seems much more the Rockefeller of our day. We're not seeing goons going after Wobblies; those battles have been outsourced, if they are to happen at all. And instead of the railroads setting ludicrously high prices for Midwestern farmers, we see Amazon selling online books at a loss. So perhaps it is different and the innovative giants of our age are merely enabling a flowering of human culture unlike what has ever been seen. Perhaps legislation such as that Wikipedia and others are fighting are continuing attempts by the Old Economy to strangle innovation and restore monopolistic controls.

On the other hand, Wikipedia told all of its users and contributors today: You may think this is yours. We've told you this is yours. But we own it. And we can do with it what we want. That's the way of monopolies and oligopolies. In the end, they get arrogant. Can't be helped, probably. That's not the point. The point is that millions of people around the world still believe, "This time, it'll be different." That coolness and connectivity are worth any price that those who offer them exact. That the people who offer them are the good side of Steve Jobs without the bad. Maybe they are. Or maybe Google is today's Standard Oil.

The public needs to debate and decide, but somehow the flow of information seems to have made it harder to hear anything except talk about issues where the lines were drawn in the pre-Internet era -- so many of which still seem to be men talking about whether women were created by God as vessels for babymaking and little else.