It was 40 years ago today

December 16th, 2009
stub

My first pay stub came with a motto: "Support those who support the Star-Beacon." Still true today.

There used to be lots of jobs, good jobs, in the newspaper business.

I had one. It paid me $1.60 an hour, which meant if I stayed really busy on the weekends and in the evenings, I might make $60 before taxes. Pretty good for a high school kid.

How good? In 2009 dollars, the government’s CPI calculator tells me, that would be about $353.  More than gas money.  More than a paper route.

newsboyIt was the Ashtabula Star-Beacon, a 6-day-a-week P.M. paper.  And, in fact, earlier in the fall, I had indeed been delivering it. I even wound up on the cover of its annual “salute to carriers” special section (right). I actually hadn’t been a paperboy all that long, as it took me far too long to learn to ride a bicycle.  But my route, fairly close to my house and the high school, was a decent way to get me out of the library and into the out-of-doors, and like I said, the Star-Beacon was a P.M., so even at the age of 16, I was still doing it. (The kids who delivered the Cleveland Plain Dealer had to get up waaaay too early in the morning.)

In November, though, the sports editor of the Star-Beacon called Tony Chiacchiero, football coach and head guidance counselor at Ashtabula High School, looking for someone to work part-time covering games and taking photos.  I had spent the previous two football seasons as statistician for the Panther football team, traipsing up and down the sidelines with a clipboard – a job that Coach Chiacchiero had given me because, in his completely accurate guidance-counselor estimation, I could use a little socialization.

“I have just the kid,” the coach said.  Or words to that effect.

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Not dead yet, but for how much longer?

November 30th, 2009

As I have mentioned here a couple of times, the students of the fall Interactive Innovation Project at Medill have been studying the past, assessing the present, and projecting the future of obituaries as a form of journalism and as a source of audience and revenue for publishers. Today on its Web site, obitresearch.com, the class released a white paper, “The State of the American Obituary,” that contains their findings.

They report that the central position that newspapers have held in communicating the news of Americans’ deaths is substantially threatened by changes in technology and audience behavior. Unlike other categories of aggregated listings, this is an area where newspapers today still retain a dominant market share.  In fact, Legacy.com Inc. – the Evanston-based aggregator of newspaper death notices that sponsored the research project, and where (disclosure) I am an independent board member – hosts death notices for 7 of every 10 Americans who die each year.

The class found that new user- and family-driven forms of remembering the dead, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace as well as standalone memorial sites and services, are attracting audience members who want not only to read about their friends and loved ones, but also to participate in their memorialization. While this began happening as soon as the first Web browsers appeared, the growth of social media, particularly among the Baby Boom generation, is causing an acceleration.

In preparing their report, the eight students who worked on this project conducted quantitative and qualitative surveys, reviewed scholarly and industry research, and conducted interviews with employees at newspapers nationwide. Based on their findings, they conclude with recommendations to media stakeholders on how to adapt to the many changes in the landscape of grieving, remembering and memorializing the dead.

You can download the report here. It was principally written and edited by Ashley Bates, Ian Monroe, and Ming Zhuang.  Contributing researchers were Jake Bressler, Alina Dain, Chris Deaton, Tiffany Glick, and Kate Goshorn.

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Co-operative-etition, Chicago style

November 24th, 2009

The festival of links you can create these days when writing about new business models for the news industry is a wonder to behold. As we have noted here before, it seems sometimes there are almost as many conferences on the topic as there are stories about paid content, most of them involving Rupert Murdoch and/or Google.

Chicago News Cooperative logoOne prominent example, of course, is beginning to play out right here in Chicago: The Chicago News Cooperative launched last week, publishing two-page reports in the Friday and Sunday editions of the New York Times. I of course am watching with much interest, given that, by my count, I worked at the Tribune with around three-quarters of the 20 people named on the staff page today.

I suspect the Tribune and Sun-Times are watching with interest, too, given that the Tribune chose Sunday to publish another [not "the second" as originally reported--ORY] in a series of spadeas about its priorities (Capturing the Chicago Experience – click to download PDF, 3.44 mB). Its letter to readers from editor Gerry Kern ends, “We are Chicago’s newspaper. We tell your stories.”

(By my lights, the most remarkable thing about the Chicago News Cooperative example is that the NYT’s own journalists actually wrote about the launch. I guess that’s another example of how the world is changing; in the Olden Days, writing about anything your employer had done to try to improve its business prospects had a good chance to get you hooted out of any newsroom in America.)

But let’s not spend any more time here on background.  If you want more, read Alan Mutter’s piece at “Reflections of a Newsosaur” from earlier this month. Instead, let’s see what Chicago readers found in their driveways and newsstands Friday and Sunday morning, and not just in the NYT (using the acronym consistently today, to avoid confusion).

After all, CNC editor Jim O’Shea and his colleagues say they’re not out to supplant the existing newspapers; they are out to protect and sustain a kind of reporting they perceive as threatened, the public-service journalism “that we feel is crucial for a democracy . . . and provide accountability for the institutions and public officials in the city, county and state.” (Quote is from a WTTW interview with O’Shea, video after the jump.)

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Winter: A season for a few good books

November 19th, 2009

Great Horned Owl

Great Horned Owl

Well, it was pretty exciting in Deerfield tonight, what with a Great Horned Owl calling from two blocks down the street at 8:45. Of course, the only reason I was outside to hear him was that I was straggling home from Northwestern at that hour, extracting my daily quota of catalogs from the mailbox.

And the reason I was straggling home was that I stayed in Evanston until I had more or less finalized a reading list for my winter class for graduate students. The winter term is almost as close as actual winter: It starts Jan. 4 at 9 a.m.

It’s the reading list work that has kept me away from blogging the last couple weeks:

  • The good news for me is that I worked my way through thousands of pages chock full of good ideas and trenchant observations, many of them published over just the past few weeks and months.
  • The good news for my students is that part of the exercise was identifying the absolutely most pertinent few pages in each of these books to assign to them.
  • And the even better news for me, my students, and the copyright holders is that my colleague Dr. Rachel Davis Mersey pointed me to a company, University Readers, that handles copyright clearances for book excerpts and then assembles them into a “course pack” that students can buy for a tiny fraction of the cost of that stack o’ books.

My nearly final draft of the syllabus begins this way:

The objectives of this course are

  • first, to reset the starting point from which students view both the craft and the business of journalism;
  • second, to familiarize students with the media industry and its rapidly changing practices in areas including business, operations, technology and content; and
  • third, to position students to capitalize on changes they encounter during their careers.

So, in order to accomplish that, what have I been reading?  After the jump, you will find a partial bibliography of my reading list.

41B7NrA03OL._SS500_Of course, some books are too interesting or important or trenchant or closely argued to be excerpted.  Such a book is the new Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It. So alone among my recent readings, that’ll be one we peruse from beginning to end.

Owen's Wired collectionOne more observation:  Wired magazine remains tremendous.  Several recent pieces also made the cut, making me glad that I not only have maintained my subscription, but that I keep them handy on my office shelves.

At any rate, now it’s time to move on to the lectures and presentations.  But I sure have a lot of ideas in my head to play with.  Oh, and if you take the trouble to go to the jump and look at my recent reading, do me a favor:  If you see some recent book that I should be diving into, by all means let me know.

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Not dead yet (cont.)

November 3rd, 2009

Medill_logoAs I noted a month ago, this fall’s Interactive Innovation Project at Medill is an exploration of the state of the American obituary, and the eight graduate students with whom Rich Gordon and I are working are posting regularly on a blog at obitresearch.com.  There, I have recently learned

quite a bit more, including obituary practices at newspapers of different sizes.  And the class also has linked, each Friday, to a handful of interesting examples of obituaries and online memorials that run the gamut and then keep running.

The class’s final presentation isn’t till Dec. 10, so there is still lots more to learn.  Till then, I commend the site to your ongoing interest.

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Looking for business models? Mind the gaps

October 30th, 2009

I suppose that every day is a good day to talk about how and whether the journalistic enterprise will remain commercially viable as the world turns in these days of our lives, or indeed whether all my children can recover from their financial ailments, be released from the General Hospital, and find a guiding light to lead them to the promised land of free cash flow. Progress on “new business models,” however, seems to move along at about the same pace as a soap opera plot – even though hardly a day passes without an announcement that someone is going to try something new, or someone else is going to essay something old in a new way.

Indeed it was thus on Thursday, a day when I opened the New York Times to read about the plans by the folks behind Politico to compete online with the Washington Post on local news. And I was actually in a good spot to keep thinking about their admission that they didn’t know how the Web economics might work; since the dean of Medill, John Lavine, had another commitment, I was at Harvard, sitting in at an “executive session” on, ahem, news business models.

Entitled “How to Make Money in News: New Business Models for the 21st Century,” the event gathered an intentionally small group at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge: about 20 panelists for the day’s three discussions, and about 30 additional participants on hand both to listen and to take part. Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, and author most recently of Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy, was the convener.

As it turned out, the three panels were so packed with speakers with something to say  that many of us other participants – who sat in chairs ringing a central square of tables where the panelists faced one other – got in our licks à la mode du 21ème siècle: 140 characters at a time.

Now, granted, this may not have been optimal.  In her prepared remarks, MIT’s legendary Sherry Turkle – generously not calling attention to anyone seated behind her or on the flanks – pointed to the substantial body of research that shows “your ability for any single task goes down when you multitask. No matter how much we want to jump on the bandwagon, multitasking degrades performance.”

I therefore must cop to the fact that none of my listening, note-taking, or tweeting were as good as they might have been. On the other hand, I must also say that those of us who were intermittently posting and reading got a window in what an additional 10 people were thinking, were piecing together, or were valuing as interesting (or, in some cases, not thinking, not piecing, not valuing). If you’re interested, you can recreate the moment by searching Twitter for the hashtags #Shorenstein and #newsmoney, with far more at the former; I certainly won’t get to all the sound bites here. My own tweetstream is at twitter.com/YoungOwen.

Multitasking, Harvard Square style: in-mirror televison

Multitasking, Harvard Square style: in-mirror televison

(Oh, while we’re on the subject of multitasking, staying at the Charles Hotel provided me with a new model.  I guess they’ve been around since 2006 or so, but the Charles’ bathrooms feature “in-mirror TV’s” from a company called Séura, whose web site explains, “Enhanced color correcting technology allows the LCD picture to appear when on, while flawlessly concealing the screen behind a bright reflection when off.” Turkle, I am sure, would rightly caution us that there is a risk of degrading the quality of one’s ablutions in the process.)

Turkle’s actual multitasking point, by the way, was centered on how journalists should choose their methods and channels of communicating. “Newspaper reading creates a ‘reading space’ that journalism occupies,” she said. “The teenagers I study leave us with a profound question: Will we be able to have journalism when we don’t have newspapers to appear in? Reading on the Web, if it is all you do, does not favor complex lines of thought. So the implication for news is to stay with narratives that need to be read with all one’s attention.”

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Dead trees and dying cities

October 22nd, 2009

The New York Times’ decision to add pages of metropolitan-area news to copies of the papers circulated in San Francisco (last week) and Chicago (Nov. 20) is, if nothing else, an interesting juxtaposition with its nearly contemporaneous announcement of 100 layoffs in the newsroom. By contracting with newly formed local news entities, it doubtless will acquire high-quality content at less cost, and with less long-term liability, than had it staffed up to do the same thing (or had transferred folks to the hinterlands).

Official word came today that in Chicago, several of my former Tribune colleagues are launching the Chicago News Cooperative – not only to supply stories to the Times, but also to repopulate some of the beats and coverage areas that have been affected as the Chicago papers have laid off staffers, reduced newshole, and changed their focus and approach. (When current Tribune editor Gerry Kern delivered the Crain Lecture here at Medill recently, the editorial changes at the Tower were among the topics he addressed; the text of the lecture is here, and here is an interactive video that includes both his remarks and the slides he used to illustrate them. The video requires Microsoft Silverlight. The fact that I delivered the introduction to the lecture may be reason enough not to download Silverlight and view it.)

Of course, the number of Starbucks available to sell the Friday and Sunday NYT in Baghdad-by-the-Bay and Beirut-on-the-Lake might also be a reason for the Times to start its metro news initiative in those two cities.  But I think an answer even deeper than journalistic idealism or straight competitive instincts is lurking in the cover story of the November issue of Harper’s, by Richard Rodriguez: “Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper.” (It’s not available online except to subscribers.)

Wrinkle in Time (detail), by Steve Mills: Cover art from the November issue of Harper's.

Wrinkle in Time (detail), by Steve Mills: Cover art from the November issue of Harper's.

Rodriguez got my attention back in June when he gave an interview to New American Media on “The Death of the SF Chronicle” that included the following: “I don’t think the Chronicle is dying so much as I think that San Francisco is dying. When a metropolitan newspaper of that magnitude  stops publication it indicates that there has been a death of the metropolitan ideal.”

This piece in Harper’s expands on his theme of “the death of place,” but also is far more expansive on the Chronicle in particular, newspapers in general, and most especially of San Francisco.

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There were giants. . .no, there are giants.

October 16th, 2009

David Axelrod was grateful.  His Secret Service guy, I’m not so sure about.

It was Saturday night in Greektown, and about a hundred more-or-less-literally-ink-stained wretches were shaking their heads and shaking each other’s hands at the Parthenon restaurant.  It was a reunion of Chicago Tribune newsroom employees from the mid-sixties to mid-seventies.  You could read that as either their current ages or their decades of employment and, for the most part, be pretty close to right.

In my online invite from Sel Yackley (corrected 10/17; sorry, Sel), the event had been billed as having a 1975 cutoff for participation, but who would begrudge a presidential adviser a few lousy months?  Though Axelrod couldn’t stay for dinner . . . his Secret Service guy  was waiting offstage to whisk him away for another commitment . . . David summoned up his first days at the Tower and first stories in the paper.  It was June 14, 1976, and he was wearing his best suit.  It wouldn’t stay clean for long.

He was on his way to Lemont with the casually attired Jeff Lyon to write sidebars on the previous night’s killer tornado. The town was a mess, but not the prose on page 2 of the next day’s paper, a shared Lyon/Axelrod byline (with another Axelrod piece nearby):

“Possessions–bowling shoes, toilets, lasagna packets, princess phones, dishwashers, cheese graters, Christmas tree lights, and wagon wheels–lay set out as at some grotesque garage sale. But the garages, along with the most of the homes and trees along McCarthy Road from McCarthy Street to Walker Road, were gone.”

tornadotrim1

After the storm: Click for PDF of photos and text

Then he moved on to the next day and his even riskier next assignment: Finding a Teamster or two willing to talk on the record about their president’s 25% raise to $156,250 a year, which was coupled with a doubling of their dues. Well, he found one, and the story ran on Page One.  (That salary would be $593,060 in today’s dollars, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if you’re scoring at home.)

A pretty good first couple of days at the office, if you ask me.  But Axelrod was not taking the credit.  No, he pointed to Jon Van, sitting out in the Parthenon banquet hall.  ”And so I started to learn the value of rewrite men.”

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