Dried-Up Ink

I’m hoping to hit the road in April and report to you from someplace other than this moldy office.

OK, it’s not moldy, and the asbestos was removed years ago. But winter, even Washington’s tame one, has that effect on you. Fortunately the fruit-and-vegetable vendor returned to his spot across the street this morning – an even more reliable sign of spring than a robin’s call or Carol’s reminder that the porch needs washing, the pansies need planting, and the sills need dusting.

. . . which are all good reasons to hit the road.

In the meantime, I keep shaking my head about what’s happening to a great American institution: the daily newspaper.

Dinosaurs Yesterday, Newspapers Today

Things have gone from bad to worse – or as cable-TV commentator Keith Olbermann would say, worse to worser – since I last lamented newspapers’ fate.

And worstest may not be far away.

This newspaper’s new online-only staff, which is one-eighth the size of the former newspaper staff, won’t need this big a building any longer

Already this month, the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer switched off its presses for good, replacing a 165-person news staff with 20 who will put out an online edition. And just 55 days shy of its 150th anniversary in the newspaper business, the Rocky Mountain News closed its doors entirely. Those two developments left Seattle, Washington, and Denver, Colorado, as America’s latest one-daily towns.

And there’s much more news in the world of print journalism – none of it good.

Things are dire – though maybe not yet this dire – for many newspaper employees across the country as their papers struggle to survive

Philadelphia Newspapers, L.L.C., which owns the venerable daily Inquirer broadsheet as well as the tabloid Daily News, and which is staggering under a $390-million debt load, filed for bankruptcy protection. And the Tribune Company, one of the nation’s most prestigious newspaper outfits as the owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, filed for bankruptcy as well, hoping to try to find a way out from under $13 billion of debt. Count the Minneapolis Star-Tribune among the bankruptcy filers, too. The publicly traded New York Times has suspended stockholder dividends. The Gannett Co. is requiring its employees at the national USA Today daily newspaper to take a week’s furlough without pay as a bitter alternative to losing their jobs entirely.

I’ve already told you, in an earlier blog, about the travails of Detroit’s struggling dailies. Their story is nearly replicated by the acclaimed national daily The Christian Science Monitor, which will soon go online only, save for weekend and some special-occasion print editions.

And the Washington Post has eliminated its separate, award-winning Business and Book World sections, folding some – just some – of their contents into other parts of the paper. These were, the paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander wrote, “wrenching decisions” by a “money-losing newspaper, mired in a bad economy.”

The Washington Post, once thought to be a “license to print money,” now a money-losing newspaper? Why, the U.S. stock market would have to lose half its value before such a thing happened.

Oh, sorry.

Printing Red

This is pretend strangling. The constriction of American newspapers is for real

All of this to try to stanch the terrible bleeding in daily newspaper revenues. It would take several blogs to cover the smaller weekly papers that are in desperation mode.

Buy-outs of the contracts of senior reporters and editors, elimination of costly national and international bureaus, and other cost-cutting measures can do only so much when readership and advertising levels are nosediving. Only mortgage bankers and car dealers have had a worse – worser? – month.

Sad times for the reporters and clerks and print shop grunts at newspapers. And for those who love their product. As Gregory E. Favre, a former top Chicago newspaper editor, wrote on the Poynter Institute’s Web site, “There is no easy way to say goodbye to the newspaper you love. . . . And worst of all is when the death comes quickly. When we don’t have time to prepare our thoughts, to really share last conversations and memories, to make sure the past is honored.”

Reading the paper is a morning tradition that ranks alongside brushing one’s teeth. Note the apt first word in this A.M. newspaper headline: “HELP” !

This matters to the fabric of American life, if only to a shrinking generation of mainly older diehards who treasure the ritual of retrieving the paper from the front lawn, unfolding it with a flourish over coffee and juice or more circumspectly on the subway or bus, and reading their favorite columnists and the stories that the papers’ news editors have selected for their attention.

But others have elbowed the oldsters aside:

One is a cadre of young people, in the main, who don’t read newspapers – or much of anything in print. They believe there’s just no time, what with all the appetizing choices available on their computers and hand-held texting devices. They see

Who has time to read the newspaper with so many other communication alternatives available?

newspapers as cumbersome, dense with useless information, hopelessly behind the latest developments, and unconnected to their lives. It is, after all, their lives that matter, not what’s happening to anyone else. They want to read what they want to read, not what some “gatekeeper” editor puts in front of them.

With more and more newspapers and online news available for free and thought to be eminently discardable, getting people to pay for the daily paper is an ever-harder sell

The second cadre is somewhere in the middle. Many of them still glance at the paper in the morning or read the free, advertising-laden handout papers before leaving them behind on the seat or floor of the train. They browse a bit longer through the fatter newspaper on Sundays, when time is more their own. But they rarely dig into long stories or explore sections of the paper that normally don’t interest them. And according to surveys and their own accounts, they pay little if any attention to the ads that support the enormous amount of money that’s required for a publisher to mount a credible newsgathering effort. These occasional, cursory, and casual readers, too, spend a whole lot more time checking various Web sites online.

Not Worth the Paper it’s Printed On?

It didn’t take long for advertisers to pick up on this, of course. They’re drastically downshifting their investment in the daily paper or moving their dollars entirely elsewhere. This can spell, and has spelled, doom to many a once-proud paper.

Take a good look at this young newspaper carrier. He’s part of what looks like a dying breed

Readership groups Two and Three – the halfhearted ones and those that never pick up a paper at all – say it’s no skin off their noses. If the paper disappears entirely, there are plenty of other places to find news and information. Besides, they’ll save a few bucks that had gone to the newspaper delivery boy or girl, the street vendor, or the corner newsbox.

The problem for society, though, is that while wild-eyed opinion pieces fly back and forth in ever-greater numbers on the Web, and broadcast and online media will still chase the big breaking stories, who will have the staff and the finances – or the inclination – to do hard reporting legwork, investigate government and corporate misdeeds, probe the causes of seismic economic shifts? Who will have the institutional memory to dig into old crime stories or put together historical comparisons? Who will fund thoughtful cultural criticism, travel reporting, and in-depth sports coverage? Can a staff of 20 at the new, online P-I – the Post-Intelligencer – do all that?

Carol, who falls into the occasional-reader category, replies that she can find anything she wants online, and so can anyone. Chess puzzles, recipes, long stories about disgraced Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, right and left opinions of our new president’s performance in office, and on and on.

I’d pay the modest newspaper subscription price just to read in-depth coverage of my favorite sports. Might even pay for such stories online if I had to

Yes, but I contend that the mind cannot grow when one fills it with only the things it wants. I certainly do want to read about the latest twists and turns on Wall Street, details of last night’s Washington Capitals’ hockey game, and more information about a big plane crash from the day before. But even more, I also love to check out whatever the paper’s editors have chosen to lay before me.

Why They Call them Newspapers

Here are just five headlines from a single day’s newspaper the other day:

“A Silenced Drug Study Creates an Uproar.”
“Ringling Bros. [Circus] Hits Town as [Animal-Rights] Case Heats Up”
“Trade Barriers Could Threaten Global Economy”
“Selection Committee Doesn’t Want Cinderella at the [National College Basketball Tournament] Ball.”
And . . . “With Punch Lines Instead of Headlines, ‘Ted’s’ a Great – Well, Good – Escape.”

How could I not be interested in that last one? Turns out, “Ted” is part of the name of a new television show.

It’s true that Carol could probably have found similar material among the 800-gazillion Websites online. But how would she have found them? Would she give them more than a glance on her computer screen? How could she easily mark them up, clip them, or set them aside for later viewing?

Town criers are long gone, except on ceremonial occasions. Their modern-day equivalent of news messengers – the daily paper – is barely hanging on

Kathleen Parker, a conservative columnist syndicated by the Washington Post Writers’ Group, posed it this way in a recent column: “How does the newspaper industry survive in a climate in which the public doesn’t know what it doesn’t know? Or what it needs?”

“As others have noted, the Internet can’t quickly enough fill the void created by lost newspapers,” she continued. “In time, some markets simply won’t have a town crier – and then who will go to all those town meetings where news is made? What will people not know [emphasis mine]? In such a vacuum, gossip rules the mob.”

News, news, read all about it... on your favorite video game?

And here’s the worster of it: Parker adds that, gulp, news may soon be delivered by via video games.

(I wish I were kidding.)

Then, as she puts it, “forget blogs, tweets, and tags.”

In such a cultural abyss, newspapers would have already been long forgotten.

New Medium, but a Foolish One?

It is possible to get a coherent idea, as well as chips, on the table at a poker game. This is not my group, I should point out. These guys are better looking

One idea advanced in many newsrooms – and at my monthly poker game, where most players are journalists and one is a long-term Los Angeles Times correspondent – centers on those newspaper Web sites, which, as I have noted, are attracting more and more readers who say they’re too busy to sit down and read the print editions. “It was arguably a mistake [maybe a slowly fatal one] for newspapers and magazines to hand out their goodies to anyone with a computer screen” by launching Web sites that competed with themselves, the Post’s media writer, Howard Kurtz, wrote recently.

“[B]ut the culture of the Net was – and is – that everything should be free. The question now is whether that mind-set can be changed.”

The irony, as Time magazine has pointed out, is that newspapers have more readers than ever, counting those who glance at their Web sites. “The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news.”

The misguided idea was to assign top writers, editors, and photographers to the papers’ Web sites in an effort to join the “Internet revolution,” perhaps make some money from online advertisements, and cross-promote the daily printed product.

The last of these efforts clearly has failed spectacularly.

So at my poker table and elsewhere where journalists gather and tremble, the talk has gone something like this:

Charge money for newspaper content on the “free” Internet? Many newspapers are scared to try

“Yes, for sure, we should have charged for our content, even if it was just a little bit. But a little bit times thousands and thousands of readers would have added up and paid a lot of bills. So the only answer we can come up with is to somehow begin charging now. Readers won’t like it, since people are used to getting good content for free on the Web, but what other choice is there?”

Former Time magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson is one media luminary who supports what he calls “micropayments” for online newspaper content. Under his system, newspapers would put their very best work, by their top writers, online. Readers, in turn would pay a modest sum for articles that interest them, much as people buy their favorite sodas out of vending machines.

Presented with the idea of charging for online content, though, those at my poker table – especially after losing a pot or three and in a sour mood – lamented that the genie is out of the bottle and can’t be stuffed back in. They say the only way to begin charging for Internet content would be for every paper – news magazines, too – to do so. If people wanted well-researched, carefully edited original reporting and nonpartisan commentary, they’d have no choice but to pay for it.

A Fatal Flaw in the Argument

Then, my pals would sigh, bitterly: “Of course, not everyone would agree to charge for their Web product. And so no one will.”

This was all especially interesting because the conversation, fixated on the future of news on the Web, seemed to concede that print journalism products were fated to financial strangulation and a slow death.

Don’t let Carol see this sign

Two days after my poker game, I was huddled near a space heater in my work shed, smoking a cigar and listening to a favorite local sports-talk show. Carol banishes me, or more correctly, the smoke, to the shed except on those monthly poker nights when it’s too cold to play on the porch. Then she tolerates the stench, rarely without comment and a not-so-furtive glance at the yellowing curtains.

To my surprise, the radio sports reporters – including Steve Czaban, who also hosts his own national morning sports-talk show, and Thom Loverro, who writes for the daily Washington Times here in town and knows firsthand the trouble that papers are in – got to talking about newspapers’ downward spiral. And Czaban came up with a rescue idea that was almost the exact opposite of conventional wisdom.

‘Help Yourself.’ So They Do

Steve Czaban, left, and Andy Pollin surprised me, and maybe others, with a provocative discussion about newspapers' future, of all things, on their WTEM sports show in Washington, D.C.

“Czabe,” as his devoted listeners call him, drew this analogy to what newspapers are doing right now: It’s as if a premier steakhouse had its chefs prepare bite-sized samples of its finest filets, sirloins, chops, and side dishes. Then waiters would put them on trays, carry them out to the street, and pass them out, for free. Passersby would, in fact, be encouraged to help themselves, on the theory that they’d love the food so much that they’d come right into the restaurant or make reservations for a full, paid meal.

Hey, here’s an idea for newspapers: Give away samples, like free slices of steak, in hopes of building readership. Oh, they’re already doing that on the Web

That’s an absurd business plan, of course, Czaban continued, with clear logic. Most people would just help themselves to the samples, say thank you very much, and move right along. The place would get few new, paying customers and, in fact, would soon go broke distributing the free samples.

Sound familiar, news executives?

Steve Czaban’s idea: Instead of scrounging for ways to get people to pay for newspaper content online, get out of the Internet business entirely

Instead of charging Web readers for newspaper content, which they would likely resist and certainly resent, and instead of just giving the content away as they do now, Czaban suggested that papers shut down their Web sites entirely!

That would force anyone who wanted the content that only a local daily newspaper can consistently supply to return to the printed product!

Loverro, co-host Andy Pollin, and listeners mostly responded that this was a brilliant idea in theory but would not work for one of two reasons, or both: • Someone else would jump into the void and produce an information-rich local news-and-feature Web product or • in cities like Washington that have more than one daily, the paper that held onto its Web version would “wipe up” and gain the loyalty of thousands of readers who were mad at the paper that pulled its online edition. That, of course, would mean that the competing paper’s strategy of eliminating its Web product had backfired terribly.

Czaban replied to the first point – correctly I think – that there might be meager attempts at producing new local, online information products. But nobody besides a big publisher has the staff or other resources to come up with original stories, reported from the scene, or to pay top columnists and commentators. Web sites, including blogs like Ted Landphair’s America, rely heavily on – read: steal ideas from – the hard work of newspaper reporters. They’re not going to do this hard work themselves. So, Czaban said, newspapers might as well at least get sales from their printed editions before everybody else packages the information electronically, not give it away online themselves.

Online ads are nothing new to newspaper publishers, but they haven’t proven to match the income potential of the printed variety. Full-page ads would take the reader away from content, for instance

The second objection – that papers that kept their Web sites as their competitors shut theirs would “wipe up” – is trickier. Even buying the idea that eliminating the Web site would be suicide against local competition, the paper that gained all the new Web readers would not necessarily be celebrating. Its online visitor numbers might skyrocket, but that wouldn’t bring a dime into the printed paper’s coffers. Or perhaps help the online site much either, since ads on newspaper Web sites have certainly not been cash cows. And so, if survival of the printed newspaper was the goal, both papers – the one that abandoned its Web site and the one that kept its – might be slitting their own throats once again.

But Can They Hold a Kindle to Newspapers?

Well, look what’s on the screen of this new, handheld Kindle electronic reader: a newspaper page!

There is one other vision of newspapers’ future, advanced by none other than the sprawling Hearst media conglomerate, which just closed Seattle’s printed Post-Intelligencer. It has developed an electronic reader that’s much larger than Amazon.com’s popular new Kindle, which is designed primarily for books . I haven’t seen Hearst’s new reader, but I picture a sort of floppy X-ray-sized sheet of film where one can see an entire newspaper page and electronically zip through the entire “paper.” Of course I’d be terrified to set my hot coffee cup on it or let the cats anywhere near it. And how would I tear out an article to bring to work?!

Let’s see if I can summarize all that’s been happening and what it means for the future of daily newspapers. I’ll simply repeat a few phrases from this very posting. They won’t be pretty:

Discarded. Will this soon be the word not just for this one paper but for newspapers in general?

“Shut down its presses.” “Closed its doors.” “Indebtedness.” “Bankruptcy protection.” “News – none of it good.” “Furlough without pay.” “Money-losing newspaper.” “Folding of entire sections.” “Terrible bleeding.” “Readership and advertising nosediving.” “Shrinking generation of readers.” “Hopelessly behind.” “Unconnected to their times.” “She can find what she wants online.” “News organizations are merrily giving away the news.” “Financial strangulation and a slow death.”

And if I may be forgiven one more gasp of horror about the last one:

“News may soon be delivered by video game.”

It all makes you wonder what they’re telling college print-journalism majors. If there are any, any more.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Circumspectly. Cautiously, watchfully, often a little furtively, not wanting to call attention to oneself.

Cumbersome. Awkward, unwieldy, hard to manipulate physically.

Genie. In popular fable, a genie is a powerful, often turban-wearing figure imprisoned in a bottle. Some lucky soul stumbles upon the bottle, rubs it, frees the delighted genie, and is granted one or more fabulous wishes. The origin of the word is less cheerful, however. In early African and Middle East cultures, genies were sinister spirits that took animal or human form.

Morose. Gloomy, sullen, dejected.

Ponzi scheme. An age-old grifter’s con in which investors are convinced to send the schemer considerable sums of money on the promise of lavish returns. Handsome interest is indeed paid, using some of the money contributed by fresh, eager new investors. But the crook is keeping most of it. Ponzi schemes almost always collapse when not enough new investors can be found, or old ones are tipped off to trouble and try to pull out their money en masse. They quickly find that there’s no money at all.

Town Crier. In a tradition brought from Europe, criers, employed by the community, would walk the streets of early America, often at dusk, carrying lanterns or handbells, calling out public announcements. These would often begin, “Hear ye, hear ye,” or the more formal “oyez,” which is still used to bring many U.S. courtrooms to order.

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Inside Baseball

When people write about their own professions or subjects of particular interest to themselves, we call it “inside baseball.” There’s a danger that only others who share those interests will appreciate and enjoy the discussion. Others may find it esoteric or, gasp!, boring.

This is not exactly what we mean by "inside baseball." Ours is more theoretical

So I’m taking a chance with a bit of inside baseball about the journalism profession. But I think some recent developments have implications for us all.

There are three threads to this story, and perhaps coincidentally, all three involve the Gannett Co. That’s the U.S. multimedia giant that publishes 85 daily newspapers and owns 23 television stations. Gannett’s properties are renowned for their aggressiveness, profitability, tight control of a dollar, and emphasis on local over national and international coverage. Some doubtlessly disenchanted former Gannett editors and writers have peppered the Web with stories of alleged “sweatshop” demands on the staff at many of the properties.

Gannett is also legendary for its technical innovation and its willingness to try new approaches in a profession that is hidebound by romantic traditions. Founded in 1982, Gannett’s nationally distributed USA Today was the first, or one of the first, papers to emphasize compact stories, color graphics, and lots of photographs to grab readers’ attention at a time when they were increasingly turning to television, especially, when they wanted news.

Gannett also runs Web sites that, according to the Nielsen/NetRatings service, reach about 16 percent of the total Internet audience.

In all, Gannett is a media powerhouse to which people pay attention. So . . . pay attention! Perhaps you’ll discern a connection of the dots among these developments. Perhaps not.

Bad News for Paperboys

• If you read my last post about the psychological distress of autoworkers and others in economically battered Michigan, you caught the comments of two editors at the Detroit Free Press, a Gannett daily. I did not know at the time – and perhaps neither did they – that the paper itself would soon be making headlines. The Free Press announced that come spring, it and the News – another Detroit daily separately owned with which the Free Press partners in news-gathering and production – would deliver printed newspapers to people’s homes only three days a week. Limited print runs for in-store sales and public news boxes will continue seven days a week.

People aren't buying newspapers as much as they used to. If they read them at all, many people scan them online

The Free Press reported that Dave Hunke, its publisher, said the move would, among other things, enable the two Detroit papers to spend some of the money saved on paper, ink, and fuel on their Web sites, to “develop new ways to deliver information digitally, [and] enhance multimedia offerings.”

“There is a day of reckoning coming for newspapers, which in my mind don’t change and change rapidly,” Hunke added. He noted without apparent rancor that customers were rapidly moving away from the printed product – “most people don’t read us that way” – as “lifestyles and technology have changed.”

And as customers turn to their computers and various hand-held devices to keep up with the world, Hunke said, “We can’t be afraid about moving at light speed toward that.”

• The second development does not directly relate to the Web, but it says something about the quick-quick, hurry-up-and-tell-me-something nature of the “new media.”

You're looking at newsprint rolls that could some day, perhaps sooner than later, become historical artifacts

Bowing to what The Washington Post called “the march of technology,” WUSA, Gannett’s television property in Washington, D.C., announced that it will replace its traditional news crews with “multimedia journalists” who will single-handedly report, shoot, and edit their stories.

News crews in large markets typically include a reporter, camera operator, and often a field producer, plus an editor or editors back at the station.

Now a single “one-man band” – not necessarily a classically trained journalist but often a production person – carrying a camera and microphone as well as a notepad – will cover breaking stories in particular. “They’re passing out cameras to the janitors,” one unhappy WUSA staffer told me. Surely the person was exaggerating!

“The concept of a multimedia journalist, having his own beat, with an area of expertise, and a limitless virtual news desk is something we can get very excited about,” the station’s general manager told The Washington Post. To say nothing of the cost savings. The paper reported that WUSA “plans an across-the-board cut in reporters’ salaries as it increases their responsibilities.”

And Make Coffee, Too?

A lot of traditional newsrooms have empty cubicles - though maybe not THIS empty - as media companies downsize and consolidate job responsibilities in the hands of "mobile journalists"

“Mo-jos,” or mobile journalists, will be expected to report, shoot, and capture audio for stories and quickly upload reports and raw material to the station’s Web site, as well as appearing on air as needed.

As I noted, many WUSA staffers are less than thrilled. Veteran reporter Gary Reals – disclosure: he’s a friend and poker buddy of mine – accepted a buyout offer and is leaving. “It takes a lot of time to shoot and edit and write and prepare a story, and if you have one person doing all that, something has to give,” he told The Washington Post.

Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-TV News Directors Association, indicated that this one-man-band approach “could work fine for feature stories” but could be dangerous for the “mo-jos” in breaking-news situations, especially involving developing crime scenes and civil unrest.

Zuli Palacio is one of the VOA journalists who's a "one-person band," reporting and shooting stories, such as one for a feature assignment here, near Taos, New Mexico

(Some years ago here at the Voice of America, a New York consultant taught dozens of people from several divisions how to become “video journalists,” or “V-Js,” shooting as well as reporting and writing their own stories. Only a handful of V-Js remain, as later groups of senior managers concluded that, indeed, something does “have to give” when a journalist tries to combine research, reporting, shooting video, setting up lighting, capturing quality audio, then writing the story and editing its production elements for television.)

Winds of Change

• The third development relates to both Gannett and VOA. A couple of weeks ago, several VOA managers attended an American Press Institute seminar led by Mackenzie Warren, the director of digital content for Gannett Digital, which supports the publisher’s various online products and develops new ones. Just 31 years old and very much in tune with the Web culture, Warren came to his job at Gannett headquarters in northern Virginia from a position as managing editor in charge of editing, packaging, and distributing the chain’s Fort Myers, Florida, News-Press in print and online.

VOA managers came back thunderstruck from his presentation. (If “thunderstruck” is too strong a word, “amazed” fits for sure.) They were shocked by the warp speed at which online journalism appears to be moving, and wondering what it portends.

Mackenzie Warren makes no bones about it: He's a "new media" crusader

In particular, they were struck by Warren’s belief in the “one-man-band” approach. So struck by it that I wanted to hear details from Mackenzie Warren himself. Here is some of what he told me in a telephone conversation:

“Everyone is a publisher now,” he began. Not just newspapers or news organizations that host Web sites, but also bloggers and other “citizen journalists,” including those who quickly put up raw video of news events. No longer can traditional publishers smugly rest on their laurels as “trusted news brands” that news consumers are sure to count on for information, nor can they dismiss assorted providers of content as unqualified, untrustworthy, irrelevant rogues. Like it or not, more and more news consumers are turning to the Web – including these unaffiliated information providers – especially in crisis situations.

“Journalism is evolving not on our time frame but on the world’s,” Warren told me. People who turn to the Web want to know what’s happening this instant. To borrow Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase from 1964, “The medium is the message,” meaning that the delivery system – in this case, the Web – greatly influences how information is presented and received. When it comes to breaking news in its presto-change-o culture, there is no time for the time-honored journalism drill: carefully gather the story, meticulously write it, confirm the details with multiple sources, and submit it for vetting by one or more editors before it is worthy of putting in print or on the air.

“If you can’t give it to them right now, they’ll go elsewhere” and quite possibly never return, Warren told me. So journalists feeding the Web have to be swifter about “putting things up” as they encounter them, often without the luxury of review by other “sets of eyes” belonging to line and copy editors. There just isn’t time.

“I’m not suggesting that we should ever be reckless, leave out crucial aspects of a story, or not worry about inaccuracies,” he told me. But in the online world, “there’s a higher degree of forgiveness” about errors of grammar, syntax, chronology, and even facts, especially early on in a story. News consumers on the Web “don’t expect perfection,” Warren says. “They expect us to give them the story as best we know it” and fix mistakes later as they are discovered.

The Three “T’s” of Today’s Online World

Web users want information “on their terms, on their turf, and on their timetable,” Warren believes. And providers had better give it to them that way or step aside for those who will. News managers who are consumed with getting it right rather than getting it first soon won’t have enough readers to notice.

It’s a “risk-reward deal,” Warren says. You risk some mistakes for the reward of getting things up so quickly that you become Web users’ “go-to source” for information.

That’s a chilling thought for owners of traditional “news brands” and the old axiom that “it’s more important to get it right than to get it first.”

The delivery of news took a long time to evolve until recently. Now it seems as if there's a new approach every day

Mackenzie Warren, who is not at all uncomfortable being labeled a “new media evangelist and agitator,” insists that the “get it on fast” approach does not do violence to journalistic tradition.

“We’ve long had eyewitness reporting that goes straight from the reporter’s notebook to the consumers,” he says. “That’s what live television is. I think that readers value the immediate nature of this style of reporting and, while they’d not permit it in a printed newspaper – which is permanent and had the benefit of many hours of editing and production – I think they are demanding it in the Web version of newspapers.”

He adds that, in his view, getting it right and getting it first are not mutually exclusive. “I trust our professional reporters to get most of what they report right,” he says. “For 99 percent of the things we report first, we also report them right.”

Today’s news customers get involved in the product “much earlier upstream,” Warren points out. “We’re letting readers see what we’re gathering as we’re gathering it,” not packaging the information and putting a pretty bow on it before readers get to see it. “They see the whole lifespan of a story.”

Warren says that reporters must still be well-trained, vigilant, and ethical, and that their commitment to credibility, balance, and objectivity remains paramount. “I carry a copy of the [U.S.] Constitution with me,” he says. “That’s how much I value the safeguards of a free press.”

This is one of the delivery systems of today's "newspaper." What would Johan Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press back around 1439, think about such a thing? It's amazing enough to those who live today

That copy of the Constitution, naturally, is not a pamphlet or book or parchment. It’s an interactive application on Warren’s iPhone.

What about editors? Are they obsolete? “Not at all,” replies Mackenzie Warren. “There’s a small minority of stories – those with special sensitivities or controversy – that demand continual oversight from an editor.” Otherwise, “editors can be a bottleneck [lavishing precious time on getting the nuances right]. We have to trust the good judgment of trained reporters on the scene.” Besides, editors so often find themselves trying to juggle two, three, or 10 stories, that none of them gets out quickly.

Quickly!

Mackenzie Warren believes that news executives can no longer sit smugly above the fray, deciding which stories to tell and when and how to tell them. The typical news pro “has never had to worry as much about ‘customer service,’ as those in other businesses have,” Warren says.

“They’d better start.”

And reporters had better get used to being “mo-jos” – mobile journalists, generalists – thinking on their feet, handling different kinds of equipment, telling stories verbally, visually, and in writing.

A Far Cry from J-School

One would think that more “old hands” besides WUSA’s Gary Reals would berate these developments or walk away from them. “My experience is just the opposite,” Mackenzie Warren told me. “They were afraid we were making their work obsolete, and they’d be left out. Once they get the right training and get into a cadence, they’re thrilled to be in the forefront of all that we do. They’re not cast aside. They’re on the cutting edge.”

And, he adds, not every old hand will be asked to grab the nearest hand-held camera and race off to fires and traffic accidents. “We’ll still need specialists” writing commentary and analysis, Warren says.

Could it be that all this talk of immediacy is really camouflage, an excuse for deeper cost-cutting by a company famous for being profit-wise and controlling the bottom line? “Never, ever, ever has cost come into it,” Mackenzie Warren assured me. “It’s all about better coverage. If it takes many mobile journalists to cover a story, that’s what the story will get. We want journalism to thrive.”

Warren acknowledges, however, that media outlets that meet users’ demand for quick, comprehensive information will build an audience large and strong enough to attract advertisers to pay the company’s bills and stockholder dividends.

As for newspapers like his company’s Detroit Free Press, Mackenzie Warren says they were always “a mile wide [covering a million things] and an inch deep. They’ll evolve into niche products, appealing not to anyone and everyone but to specialized audiences.” For all practical purposes, he believes, they’re already out of the breaking-news business.

So, what’s to be made of all this? Journalism is obviously mutating, and fast, into a sort of “ready response strike force,” not so much assembling information and making sense of it, but grabbing the latest information here, there, and everywhere and sharing it immediately, sometimes without much of a filter.

Journalism’s ‘New World Order’

For this “old hand,” and perhaps anyone else who’s over 30, this represents an unsettling concession to the demands of a busy, “instant gratification” world for fast, bite-sized information unencumbered by pesky nuances. I keep thinking, and worrying, about Mackenzie Warren’s three “T’s”: providing information to Web users “on their terms, on their turf, and on their timetable.”

***

Thanks Back Atcha

Got a couple of very nice mentions from other bloggers recently, which gave me the chance to enjoy what they are doing.

Here's a screenshot of Nik Peachey's very nice plug of our blog

Nik Peachey, a teacher, writer, and technology consultant in Morocco, writes two blogs. One, called “Daily English Activities” and aimed at those for whom English is a second or foreign language. It has a lot of exercises for teachers and those interested in stretching their minds, and not just in English. One had a memorization test involving photos. Another, linked above, talked about stretching one’s vocabulary using “spidergrams” and “vocabulary webs.” These were challenging (but fun) in any language at any level. They reinforce the seriousness with which people around the world study English, not just to expand their minds but also in hopes of creating more opportunities for themselves.

This reminds me, briefly, of a memorable visit that I made to Indonesia, where I was pleasantly surprised to find college students not only watching undubbed American movies and listening to American songs in English, but also broadcasting in English on a campus radio station. It reinforced the reality that English – American English – is becoming, if not already is, the language of science, the Web, international travel, and youth. That does not make the language or our people superior in any way. But it does say something about the spread of American culture, not all of which is uplifting.

Nik’s other blog, called “QuickShout,” talks about developments in language and technology. I don’t know how he does it!: create two blogs and still have a life. Nor do I know how Nik manages to write such short and compact editions. Writing short is so much harder than writing long. I’ve been at it for more than 45 years and still don’t have the hang of it.

Thanks, too, to recent commentators, including Patrick and Cui Litang, who passed along generous thoughts about my writing. My own time as an editor has helped me spot a lot of gaffes in time to correct them. And I have grown more and more comfortable with a cadence developed by reading my words aloud, not just on the radio, but also as I write this blog. I find that hearing the words often helps me pick the right word and tone. As my reader “Anonymous” called them, my “fantastic picture of words” derives from hearing as well as writing them.

I still struggle - as my editor and several of you readers have noted - to write succinctly. In the face of the discussion about immediacy and brevity above, I worry if there’ll be a place for long-form writing down the road. Perhaps one day readers will grow unsatisfied with Writing McNuggets and will demand something more filling.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Hidebound. Inflexible, stubbornly narrow-minded. The term may have morphed from the animal world, where the abnormally dry skin of a hidebound animal clings rigidly to the underlying flesh.

Rancor. Not just dislike or irritation but deep-seated ill-will and hostility. The term is related, in its derivation from Middle English, to the word “rancid,” so rancor is not a pleasant thing.

Rest on One’s Laurels. To be so satisfied with your abilities and accomplishments that you stop trying to improve. In Roman times, victors in battle wore a head-ring of leaves (laurels). Those who rested upon those victories often lost the next battle.

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About You and About Me

I have a few things on my mind for this post, but I want to begin with a survey of sorts.

Ted Landphair’s America has been up for a couple of months now, long enough for you who’ve checked it out to form an impression. As you see in the blurb next to my autumnal photo above, I’m hungry for your feedback.

So far there hasn’t been much. That could be a good sign of satisfied “customers.” Or it could reflect indifference. Nature abhors a vacuum, and I fret about indifference.

So please take a minute if you can, click on “Comments,” and answer a few questions. I’ll keep it to just five of them:

Do Carol’s, and others’, photos enhance the reading experience of Ted Landphair’s America?

1. Do you find the American life topics and the writing compelling enough to read the posts all the way through? (Many other blogs are shorter and chattier. I find that I get “on a roll,” and before long, I’m several pages deep into a topic.) Do you stick it out or bail?

2. Do you like my “Wild Words”? Are they useful, or do they just take up space?

3. Have you recommended Ted Landphair’s America to others, or would you?

4. What suggestions would you make to me, Carol, and my Web guru Anne Malinee to improve what you see?

5. How might I better involve you and other readers to make the blog more interactive? While I have a lot to say about America, this is not a monologue. You and your comments and stories and experiences matter to the success of Ted Landphair’s America.

***

Rescue Plan for Newspapers?

I have a couple of observations about my field, journalism, as it’s practiced in America. They are prompted by worrisome developments.

In 1910, when this photo was snapped in Buffalo, New York, even kids could make a modest living selling newspapers. Buffalo was a three-daily town then. It’s down to the Buffalo News today

If you’ve read or listened to my Only in America essays on the Voice of America, you know that I’ve written frequently about our nation’s troubled newspapers: troubled because fewer and fewer people are reading them.

Or I should say subscribing to them. Lots of people still read them at the office or check out their online editions. But true circulation numbers are dropping at even the nation’s most prestigious papers.

Publishers can see it plainly and painfully in their diminishing revenues. While money from subscribers and those who drop coins in news boxes is a small part of newspapers’ income stream, circulation numbers matter. That’s because the advertising rates that a newspaper can charge are based on the number of people who are buying the paper and are exposed to the ads. Newspapers with declining readership not only cannot raise rates, they also must sometimes cut them to keep advertisers from going away.

The local daily newspaper or papers – and many cities had two or three, published morning and afternoon – as well as a few big TV and radio stations once dominated the media spectrum. They hogged the city’s advertising dollars. But advertisers and readers now have a zillion and one options, including many online and on cable TV, that have pecked away at papers like the proverbial “death by a thousand cuts.” Even newspapers’ old, reliable money-makers like classified ads are shriveling in the face of online competitors such as eBay and Craigslist.

Growing desperate, publishers have tried all sorts of triage measures to hold onto readers and promotions to attract new ones, including:

• starting Web sites and blogs of their own to cross-promote their brand and their star journalists;
• making wholesale staff cuts, especially by offering contract buyouts to older workers to get them and their high salaries to go away;
• reducing national and especially international news to a few briefs buried inside the first section, and instead writing like mad about the local scene. The theory is that this is one coverage area in which the networks and cable newshounds can’t or won’t compete;
• closing bureaus or teaming with other papers, even longtime rivals, to keep the shell of a presence in Washington, New York, and fewer and fewer world capitals;
• adding pizzazz to their graphics, shortening stories and sentence length, showcasing glib writers in coverage of hip music and club scenes, as well as sponsoring endless reader contests and polls;
• merging with other newspapers and with big TV and radio operations. This helps corner the market on advertising dollars and presages still more slashes in staff. Invariably, it’s the employees of the purchasee, not the purchaser, who are soon looking for work.

This is “Newspaper Rock” in Utah, where early Indian cultures left symbols in this petroglyph, or rock carving. Were those civilizations still around, would anybody be reading Newspaper Rock any more?

Panicky newspapers have sought other “efficiencies” in their efforts to survive as well, down to publishing on cheaper newsprint. But nothing has seemed to stanch the decline.

No More Ink-Stained Wretches?

The near-to-last step – short of giving up and closing their doors – is to abandon paper papers – that is, tactile printed editions. No less eminent a paper than the century-old, daily Christian Science Monitor recently announced that in 2009 it will become an online product exclusively, though still offering a weekly print edition and – in a classic sign of our times – “daily e-mail editions,” whatever that means.

“The paperless newspaper now a reality,” screamed a Chicago Tribune headline, in reaction.

That paper knows something about the dire straits of the newspaper business. The Tribune Co. has taken over, downsized, and slashed bureau staffs of the venerable Los Angeles Times, the Sun newspapers of Baltimore, and other, smaller papers. “Journalism at its best,” the Tribune Co. Web site describes itself. Its staff, one of whom regularly lightens my wallet at poker, would choose less salutary words to describe what’s happening.

Good Old Days

“The original opening of the TV show ‘Lou Grant’ began with a bird in a tree,” wrote esteemed Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal. Then “the tree was chopped down, the wood turned to paper, paper was delivered to a publishing plant. Newspapers came off the presses, were delivered, read, and then used to line a bird’s cage.”

That was 31 years ago: quainter times, as Rosenthal observed. Noting that the Christian Science Monitor had finally concluded that printing daily newspapers is simply too costly and that only online news seems to appeal to younger readers, Rosenthal stated the obvious – though eloquently:

“[The Monitor’s decision] is a test case to be watched intently by anyone who enjoys flipping pages, or at least need something for the bottom of their pet’s cage. . . . There’s an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it vibe in the news business lately.”

Morning Paper and a Cup–a-Joe

This Tupelo, Mississippi, fellow enjoyed reading his newspaper. But a lot of Americans don’t hold the paper in their hands any longer, unless they’re picking up their computer monitors

I’m one of those page-flippers. A devoted, doting reader, I treasure and prolong, when possible, moments over breakfast spent reading the details, background, and analysis that dogged reporters and insightful newspaper writers and editors have carefully constructed. It doesn’t matter if I’ve watched every “breaking news” development on television the night before. I want to know more, in depth, and with a writer’s flair and photographer’s eye. I love choosing which stories to read, which to come back to, which to circle or clip or save, and which to slip unread under the parakeet.

(We actually have three cats and thus no parakeet. But you get the idea.)

My children “live” on their cellphones and hand-held text devices. They watch some news on TV, and they check out news sites on the Internet when something is amiss in town or the nation or the world. A couple of them still get the newspaper, mostly for the sports or the political columns or the advertising inserts.

One of my daughters, though, doesn’t read the newspaper at all.

Read All About It! – But Quickly

Carol falls somewhere in between. When she’s not shooting photographs, she’s on the computer, perfecting them. While there, she checks online news sites habitually, and the TV picture flicks in the background. The sound goes on when something’s breaking.

But Carol, too, enjoys the morning paper. The difference between us is that when the juice and coffee are gone, so is she, while I move to the couch to meander through the front, Metro, Style, and even Business sections that she has only skimmed. She doesn’t crack the sports section. I devour it, metaphorically.

I don’t know if Phil Rosenthal is right that we’re seeing the end of the media world as we know it. But I’m sad about newspapers’ decline because I edited high school and college papers and worked for great local and national newspapers.

This woman is “reading the newspaper,” 21st-century-style

And I worry that the decline in readership that has led to the slow financial starvation of America’s newspapers is eroding our literacy, citizenship, imagination, curiosity, and preparedness. We’re in real trouble if today’s definition of “being informed” is “checking my messages.”

***

We’ll Miss Your Toothy Smiles

The second, shorter, media observation is prompted by a New York Times report that “across the country, longtime local TV anchors are a dying breed.” Times reporter Brian Stelter cited several examples of veteran news hosts who’ve been booted out in cost-cutting measures. Local TV stations, it seems, have been wounded in the Internet onslaught as well.

This . . .

“When the anchors depart, they take decades of experience and insight with them,” Stelter wrote. They are replaced by oh-so-attractive, obsessively groomed, endlessly cheerful young people who are taking their next step from nowhere to somewhere to anywhere, up the media ladder. They are “talking heads” who get and give their worldview from a teleprompter.

This does not mean that the old, expensive, less-pretty faces were lions of journalism. Many were just more comfortable

. . . not this, is the smile that cost-cutting TV executives are looking for

news readers. But comforting figures as well: old shoes that we liked and trusted, who got out in the community and usually cared for it, knew how to pronounce our towns and street, and knew who the mayor was two terms ago.

Like the old-timers kicked to the curb over at the paper, they have had their day. Youth has been served and will now do the serving.

But what will it serve, and with what depth and understanding?

***

Know Your Globe

Mumbai’s magnificent Taj Mahal hotel in better days. Who will soon forget the tragic sight of flames shooting from its rooftop, and gun-toting terrorists silhouetted in its grand windows?

After all that high-horsing, it’s humbling – given my professed love and passable knowledge of geography – to admit my own ignorance about a famous place: one of the world’s largest cities. As the terrible events in Mumbai unfolded last week, reports mentioned – as if everyone surely knew – that Mumbai was India’s financial capital and a bustling port.

Well, I did not know this. In fact, I sheepishly admitted to myself, I had never heard of the place!

Never heard of a metropolitan area of 19 million people. Never knew that India’s thriving “Bollywood” film industry was centered there.

And somehow missed the word that Mumbai is the former Bombay.

Oh.

In calmer circumstances, my VOA Hindi Service colleagues would have explained, effusively, that Mumbai, the world’s largest city proper – let me say that again: the largest population within any city limits anywhere – had reverted to its Marathi-language derivation and away from its British colonial name – twelve years ago.

Twelve years ago! People still drink Bombay Gin. Bombay jackets remain in fashion. But, absorbed in my own country and life, I had completely missed the fact there hasn’t been a Bombay in India for more than a decade.

An American Prism

There are embarrassing lessons here: One is that American myopia and conceit are uninformed, foolish, and potentially dangerous. Another, especially for one who writes about America, is that we should not leap to assumptions about others’ degree of knowledge about our country – even among the educated. If I, that satisfied newspaper reader described earlier, did not know that Bombay had been ordered stricken from maps twelve years ago, can I assume that you know there are two American cities named Kansas City, or that New England is in the upper-east corner of our nation, or that Delaware and Idaho even exist?

Kansas City, Missouri’s, restored, 1914 landmark Union Station has now features shops and a vintage-train exhibit. And it is once again one of Amtrak’s busiest stops

My editor, Rob Sivak, a soothing friend who rarely grouses, is forever grumbling about the need for “context” in all that we write. Snappy writing earns style points and deserves approbation, he concedes. But of what value is style if our readers and broadcast listeners aren’t sure what, or where, we are talking about? Americans know Kansas City because of its sports teams, its barbecue, and the old song, “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City.” But do even most of us, let alone others, realize that “K.C.” is two cities of the same name – the larger in Missouri, the smaller across the Missouri River in Kansas?

Have people in Paraguay or India heard of any Kansas City at all?

The next time that I sputter to Rob that of course everyone has heard of Kansas City or Phoenix or Buffalo, a single word will put me in my place:

“Mumbai.”

***

I Could-A Been Skiing!

For more than a week now, I’ve been working at home, not on job-related business but on a comprehensive database for a Web site that will showcase thousands of Carol’s photographs.

Here’s an early image of the dastardly spreadsheet, before the ordeal of entering SKUs and ASINs and such began. I had a bounce to my step then: energy, hope. Now I’m a shell of my former self

It has been a revealing – and exasperating – experience that leaves me with profound respect for computer programmers and the drudgery they endure. Their mind-numbing work, I learned all too intimately, is a recipe for a nervous breakdown for a free thinker like me. We all enjoy the fruits of their efforts in resplendent Web sites full of catchy words, beautiful photographs, and tempting advertisements. But “putting them up” takes a steel-trap mind and the concentration of safecracker.

On a computer spreadsheet, I crafted more than 10,000 lines of scintillating descriptions for Carol’s photos, which the Web considers to be products like garden tools or men’s socks. I carefully copied and pasted sinister little product SKU and ASIN codes, whatever they are, into columns among the 100,000 active cells on that sheet.

Don’t nod off. This gets worse.

Behind the scenes lurked still more code called HTML. My long-suffering Web wizard, Anne Malinee, explains that HTML, short for HyperText Markup Language, is a programming lexicon of symbols, formulas, and jargon that, it appears to the uninitiated, takes secret grips, passwords, and exceptional legerdemain, to interpret and untangle.

On my spreadsheet, which directs what finally shows up on the Web, every jot and tittle must be flawless. Ted Landphair, travelin’ man, had become Captain Computer, data-entry drone.

In one, just one, of my 100,000 cells, lurked a hidden imperfection: an extra space at the end of a number. Spaces, I’ll remind you, are invisible. Can you blame me for missing it late one early morning, if such a timeframe makes sense? Captain Computer has seen a lot of late early mornings.

Thanks to that single evil space, at heart-pounding moment of launch, all that appeared was a yawning white screen.

Perseverance Pays, But Ages You

I was ready to fly to Seattle, burst into Bill Gates’s office, and demand an explanation. But calmer heads prevailed and the errant space was detected – not by me, that’s for sure.

I think I’ll create a repository and call it the Errant Space Museum.

It was “publish time,” take two. Newspaper folks note: the Web people have even appropriated your term. They’re doing a lot more publishing than you are these days.

Victory was ours, champagne flowed, and Carol’s site, if not Captain Computer, is now live.

Ah, the beach in sunny Waikiki, Hawaii. When the spreadsheet ordeal has ended . . . maybe. Dream on: Carol has thousands more photos to put up

So that’s how I’ve spent my winter “vacation.” They say it’s therapeutic to take a break and do something mindless: cut the grass, walk the dog, get your hair cut. I do not, though, under any circumstances, recommend assembling a Web site database as that diversion.

While I get back to nouns and verbs and adjectives, I joyfully, with profound admiration and gratitude, turn the foreign languages of HTML and SKUs back to Anne.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Approbation. Warm congratulations and approval, especially from an official source such as your boss. Praise is nice. Approbation could mean a raise!

High Horse. One gets on his high horse to opine grandly on a topic, as if from a position of certitude. The word dates to the Middle Ages, when the tallest horses were used in battle. Apparently your lance would strike higher into your opponent’s mail. That’s not his stamped letters. Mail, or maille, was his armor.

Joe. No one’s certain, but calling your morning coffee, especially, a “cup of Joe” may go back to 1914, when a mean-spirited U.S. Navy admiral, Josephus Daniels, banned wine in officers’ quarters and stipulated that coffee would be the strongest libation allowed. Or maybe those wine-swilling officers had slurred the term “Cup of Java,” dating to the days when much coffee came from the Indonesian island.

Jot and tittle. Every minor detail. A jot is the little cross-mark on the lower-case “T,” and a tittle is the dot on a lower-case “I” or “J.” These are two words that never seem to be apart. Just as one never sees a nook without a cranny, one always attends to every jot and tittle. And jots always first for some reason. I wonder what would happen if we fixed our tittles and jots instead for a change?

Legerdemain. Skill and adroitness. The word is taken from the French léger de main and from the world of magic and illusion, where it refers to sleight, or lightness, of hand.

Pizzazz. An energetic personality. Flair. Pizzazz is an asset to television stars and infomercial hosts, but all that bubbliness can be annoying.

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