The Printer’s Devil

Much has happened since my last post, including the demise of the venerable Rocky Mountain Post and the print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

It appears that the Rocky was one of those exceptions to my dictum that newspapers aren‘t hurting despite the economy and despite CorpsNews caterwauling about hard times. It looks like the Rocky was closed because it truly lost money. But I suspect it was not so much because its time was up or because of the economy as much as it was done in by another stupid-but-busy publishing theory that sounds great but has proven catastrophic — a joint-operating agreement (that‘s a post for the future).

The Post-Intelligencer, which from my view had cut back on the size of its reporting staff to the point of anemia, thought it couldn’t keep its print editions going so management cut the size of its shrunken staff in half and voila, is going to dominate on-line Seattle. If I’m not mistaken, the Seattle papers also shared a JOA.

Over the past few years, newspapers — and with a friendly assist from radio, television and Internet media — have assured themselves and everyone else that newspapers are dying and that they need to “transform” and get on the Internet to survive.

For those who follow this Web site, you know that transformation and convergence is pure unadulterated baloney. I’ve told you the real reasons newspapers are dying (committing suicide to be more accurate). I’ve told you that the idea that newspapers are losing money are bush-wa and that the idea that there’s no future for newspapers is fantasy — although stupid and busy publishers and publishing companies are doing their best to make it a self-fulfilling fantasy.

However, there are signs that newspaper executives are starting to panic because they’ve done so good of job of peddling gloom and doom that they’ve gotten their readers — and especially their advertisers — to believe them.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen newspapers carrying full- or half-page promotional ads featuring a letter from some national newspaper CorpsNews type saying that actually things are better than what they’ve heard and that obituaries for newspapers are premature. So much better, that the writer notes that newspapers are generating 10 to 20 percent profit — plus a bit of understatement that 10 to 20 percent profits (no matter how horrifically smaller) are better than other industries in this country.

Personally, I think it’s better that fantasy becomes prophecy and CorpsNews goes belly up. The faster the CorpsNews jack-leg journalists become new corpses the better off we‘ll be. One of the sad commentaries of American newspapering is that the amateurs who have taken control of papers in recent years are better newspaper people than the “pros.” The amateurs still believe that newspapers should actually print the news and try to do something positive for their communities. The pros run newspapers as products to generate obscene profits while cutting expenses to the bone and produce crap — but hey, it’s hyper-local crap — that no one wants to read. Their “commitment to communities” is a cynical gesture to hide the fact that they’re only there to suck as much money as quickly as possible out of their communities.

Random thought of the day
Speaking of jackleg journalism, I notice the Internet madness spread to a place I thought would have known better — the University of Missouri’s journalism school, which I had previously regarded as one of the nation’s best J-schools. Now I see the school has been advertising for professors to breathlessly carry on “convergence,” to go where no newspaper has gone before, telling compelling stories visually and digitally-designed and reaching new readers in “this new age” of Future News etc., etc. (I am, of course, being facetious. That’s not what readers want; and newspapers who have jumped whole-hog into the Brave News World of Digital Journalism have been dying to prove it.)

But in these Brave News World times, college journalism schools — those that still exist — haven’t done that good of a job of serving the news industry.

I have always said there’s little future in the Internet for newspapers except in limited circumstances and J-schools aren’t doing their journalism students (not that there are many of those any more) any favors by encouraging them otherwise.

But I could be wrong. Maybe the Missouri J-school faculty does know better.

Evidently, there must be some career opportunities in doing funny videos on My Face and You Boob.

Remember the famous French poem of World War II D Day fame? “The violins of autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor.”

The violins of autumn are a bit late, but of late, during this winter of discontent, they’ve playing pretty energetically.

No doubt you’ve heard them. On the radio, on the TV, and especially in the newspapers; all you hear and see is about the miserable plight of America’s newspapers, their impending demise, and what the consequences will be on their communities when all the newspapers disappear.

Everyone agrees. Readers are distracted by the Internet, television, personal and family time pressures and the sour economy.

Newspapers are being forced to lay off reporters and editors and to cut back the number of times they publish.

Horse manure.

I’ve said it in previous posts. I’ll say it again. The problem with the American newspaper industry is the same problem that has afflicted the American auto industry, the American steel industry and Wall Street.

Rampant stupidity and greed.

Newspapers aren’t dying because readers are turning to the Internet, TV or communing with nature. Newspapers are dying because they’re committing suicide. They’re driving their readers to the Internet, TV or Mother Nature because they aren’t given them any better alternatives.

Sure, in hard times, people will drop their subscriptions as they go into economic survival mode. That’s happening now.

Sure, it’s easy — and fashionable — to blame TV, the Internet or the press of time on families.

But that allows CorpsNews to dodge the real problem: they’re unwilling to spend the money or effort to offer their readers anything worth reading.

I’ll ask it again. Why do readers buy newspapers?

Because they want to read what’s in them. And who does what readers want to read? Reporters.

I’ve written frequently about the sum total of CorpsNews management for the last 20 years: cost-cutting. Cost-cutting is surely one of the stupidest, laziest and least effect ways to manage a business, which is why it’s so popular in the newspaper industry.

That means skimping on reporters. That means paying them less than what most businesses pay their janitors. Reporting is an art form. It takes at least a million words and a whole lot of life and experience to properly report. But that never happens in CorpsNews Land because newspapers are unwilling to pay to attract the best candidates and to keep them for any length of time. Even the mediocre ones are pushed out of newsrooms by the rotten pay.

That means “news that matters to you” or “hyper local news coverage.”. The translation for both is the same: “News” that is not newspapering but newspimping — “news” that’s cheap and easy to print and which can passably done by the most inept and incompetent reporter and by manipulating readers’ emotions, it’s easier to hide that what the newspaper is not doing, which is real substance.

The tragic part of this is that most newspapers aren’t in financial trouble — although CorpsNews publishers think so and will tell you so. Don’t be fooled. CorpsNews generates colossal profits. Twenty- to 30-percent profits year-in-year-out are standards — as I mentioned in one post, a manager who turns in a 10 percent profit at a grocery store would be hailed as a genius; while a publisher who turns in a 10-percent profit at a newspaper would be disgraced. Even now it’s not that they’re not making enough money; they’re not making enough money.

The other day, I talked to someone I know who served as a publisher in CorpsNews Land. In surveying the long list of recent newspaper layoffs in the area, he sourly observed that CorpsNews isn’t anxious to offer reporters any of the goodies when their work generates tons of profits but CorpsNews is eager to make employees share the burden when things are bad.

So where does that leave newspapers?

As everyone tells you, newspapers’ future is on the Internet.

Horse manure.

I find CorpsNews publishers’ eagerness to embrace the Internet hilarious.

They’ve been able to get away with “something for nothing” and shafting reporters and readers for so long because they don’t have any competition in the cities they do business. They’re jumping into a medium where relatively few people have figured out how to generate the colossal profits that CorpsNews is used to, a medium that is highly competitive and a medium in which the CorpsNews doofuses will be slow, fat and dumb guppies in a pool full of sharks.

Or newspapers close. In years past, I would have agreed about the terrible consequences that occur to communities that lose their newspapers. More local government corruption. Loss of an important source of community information. A common identity — and many times, the only common identity in a community.

I’m not sure I would agree now.

I urge you to go to your local library and look at microfilmed copies of your local newspaper as it was published 100 years ago, 50 years ago, even 30 years ago and compare that with your local “newspaper” today. It will make you cry.

If it’s a CorpsNews newspaper, and most American newspapers are owned by CorpsNews, it doesn’t really serve the community no matter how loudly its ads proclaim it. Newspapers are just dog ticks, sucking as many profits as they can from their communities, while doing and paying as little as they can get away with. that matters to you.

If a CorpsNews newspaper folds because it isn’t sucking out enough profits, it’s no great loss to the community.

What will happen is what’s starting to happen. Amateurs are starting their own newspapers. In most cases, the newspapers are better both in reporting and in their values for the community. As newspaper critic A. J. Liebling once wrote, the greatest good a millionaire philanthropist can do for his or her community is start a newspaper and compete with the established paper.

Sweet violin music in any book.

It’s that time of that unique American weirdness: Super Bowl Week.

That time of hopeless overhype for what will likely be mediocre pro football and dazzlingly creative television commercials — something for everybody.

In honor of Super Bowl Week, I’ll pass on a bit of handy wisdom from a computer tekkie. Normally, I ignore newspaper computer tekkies — I’ve found they needlessly complicate an editor’s existence — but once in a while, they‘ll complete a Hail Mary pass.

If you’re like me, your newsroom will have to deal with aging computer equipment, desktop-publishing software that’s unsuitable for your paper and difficult Internet service providers.

During one rough patch a few years ago, I was at odds with our Internet service provider over our less than stellar Web access. The ISP’s invariable response was that it was our computers and software that were the problems and to deal with that before calling and bothering them again.

The tekkie told me to go to the National Football League’s home Web site: www.nfl.com.

She explained that the NFL spends tons of money and time ensuring that when you go to its Web site, it pops up faster than, as the legendary Hunter S. Thompson said, a bullfrog out of a dynamited pond. Being the suspicious news editor type, I checked. She was and still is right. Even on the most decrepit computers and software, www.nfl.com is fleeter than a $20 million running back — and although it has lots of features and photos, the NFL Web site loads faster than most other Internet pages.

She explained that if you were having Internet issues, type in the NFL address and see what happens. She said that usually the computer isn’t to blame — given the right connection even the oldest computers can handle the Internet. Instead, it’s the data pipeline — the phone or satellite company or the ISP itself — that’s the bottleneck, she said.

If the NFL loaded fairly quickly, odds are that your problem was indeed your computer system . However, if www.nfl.com didn’t come up, that meant your connection to your computer system had failed, which almost always meant either the carrier, the phone or satellite company; or your ISP, she told me.

In rare instances, the problem was with our phone or satellite companies. Almost always, it was the ISP.

Although I’m mostly computer illiterate, I’ve won most of my arguments with various sneering fast-talking ISP representatives thanks to the NFL. The NFL trick let me know instantly when the ISP was trying to scam me.

Admittedly, the tekkie told me the trick a few years ago and computer knowledge hangs around as long as a third-and- real-long position. But she has been proved right since then, so I’m sticking to the story.

And if you’re a NFL or Fantasy Football fanatic, it’s a great excuse for goofing off on company time.