Master Index of Archived Threads


State of the Journalism Industry

Edgy DC Dec 29 2008 09:29 AM

We've had a couple of laments of late from journalist posters worrying about the dying of newspapers in the encroaching era of new media. My question how is this necessarily a hit for the old-skool journalist. 1) The old gray ladies all have online entitles. 2) They need writers to provide content. 3) They're finally figuring out how to make money from online advertising, so in the last 18 months have one-by-one been dropping their paid-subscription requirements for online access. 4) Online newspapers can contain more content than print newspapers, so the amount of work available for journalists is limited only by the journalist's ability to write compelling work. It seems the real problem --- and call me Buzz Bissinger --- is the old-skoolers losing readers to fanboi bloggers posiing as journalists, but operating under none of their rules. And folks get their morning crap from the Daily Koz instead of the Detroit Free Press. I don't doubt that tirmes are definitely troubling for legit journalists, but I'm trying to flesh out the process by which.

John Cougar Lunchbucket Dec 29 2008 09:46 AM

3) They're finally figuring out how to make money from online advertising, so in the last 18 months have one-by-one been dropping their paid-subscription requirements for online access. At least where I work Internet ad revenue IS growing, but is still only a tiny fraction of what print advertising could/did once provide and probably won't ever be as big. The advertisiers themselves have pretty much decided that print isn't worth supporting anymore, especially given its cost, and I am convinced there will be no getting that back. The whole model is just being compacted: Smaller base $$, smaller staffs, etc etc. down the line. I think opening the paid-subscription gates is a loss leader.

Edgy DC Dec 29 2008 09:52 AM

How much can the losses from reduced ad revenues made up for by shutting down print shops and mail houses? They're becoming more pointless every day.

Benjamin Grimm Dec 29 2008 09:52 AM

What kind of advertising is being lost? My guess is that classifieds has taken the biggest hit. My Sunday paper still seems full of supermarket coupons and circulars for places like Best Buy and Sears and other big chain stores. And there's still enough to justify a separate section for Real Estate and Automotive ads. Maybe there are fewer pages devoted to department stores in the black-and-white interior of the paper? I remember pages and pages of models in bras. We don't see as much of that anymore.

metirish Dec 29 2008 09:57 AM

If I had a laptop to take on the train I am quite sure I would never buy a newspaper , I have no idea if they are dying but from what I read they are losing money at a rapid rate. As an outsider I think the image of the hard hitting street journalist is dead, at least for me anyway.

John Cougar Lunchbucket Dec 29 2008 10:14 AM

[quote="Benjamin Grimm":38mzuhsz]What kind of advertising is being lost? My guess is that classifieds has taken the biggest hit. My Sunday paper still seems full of supermarket coupons and circulars for places like Best Buy and Sears and other big chain stores. And there's still enough to justify a separate section for Real Estate and Automotive ads. Maybe there are fewer pages devoted to department stores in the black-and-white interior of the paper? I remember pages and pages of models in bras. We don't see as much of that anymore.[/quote:38mzuhsz] If you took a stack of Sunday papers and weighed them on a scale vs. against an equal number from 5 or 10 years back, you would notice a difference. And the weekday papers probably moreso. Classified got destroyed by craigslist and Monster.com, etc. It was a biz just begging to be reinvented for the Internets. All of the stores that include a circular in your paper also publish the same thing on their websites at a fraction of the cost, and those that have things like loyalty cards are increasingly doing away with a mass-market approach and creating "ads" specifically for geographies and even individual shoppers based on more precise data than a newspaper could ever provide. This will only continue to accelerate as more and more people get broadband.

Frayed Knot Dec 29 2008 10:29 AM

Buying fewer Newsdays now that they've gone to 75 cents from 50. Meanwhile their Sunday went from $1.50 to a $1.59 (wtf? - barely more revenue, lots more inconvenience) Then I got a look at the Portland (Me) Press-Herald - a paper looking for a buyer (read: savior) charging 75 cents for a paper sometimes as small as 20 pages (broadsheet-style). One place where you really see the disappearance of in-issue advertising is magazines. Even stalwarts like Time or SI are becoming virtually devoid of ads. And SI, for one, has been relying on car company ads in recent years so even those may dry up soon.

metsguyinmichigan Dec 29 2008 11:13 AM

Papers are shifting to a 50-50 ratio of ads to copy. That means you'll see two section papers on the smallest ad days, like Monday and Tuesday. A number of papers tried doing one-section papers, but sports people freaked out, so you get the same number of pages but in two sections. On line ad revenue is growing, but doesn't begin to approach the level generated by print. And evey time you see something like Circuit City or Kay Bee or Linens and Things going under, that's one less ad section. I know it's an industry in transition, and I hope they'll still need content, so I think I'm in a better spot that people on the production side of the business. But it's still really scary right now. We're offering buy-outs and a number of really good people are leaving. I think this presents opportunity to those of us who hope to stay, but it's not a fun thing to watch.

Kong76 Dec 29 2008 12:52 PM

FK: One place where you really see the disappearance of in-issue advertising is magazines <<< PC Magazine used to be about four times the size and it was chocked with advertising. I've been getting PC Mag since the A: & B: floppy was all there was on my PC and the advertising was one reason why I flipped through it from front to back. After the January issue, it's going all web-site and I find that to kinda suck. I spend so much time on the computer that I don't like to read certain things online, I'm just not used to it. I get the WSJ delivered at work and the NYT in the driveway and I'd be lost if I had to navigate those sites to get what I get out of all three publications and probably wouldn't try.

metsmarathon Dec 29 2008 01:40 PM

there's something about print on paper that's infinitely more readable than backlit phosphors of varying luminosity... that's my big problem with internet news.

Benjamin Grimm Dec 29 2008 01:50 PM

I like paging through the newspaper. I end up reading articles that I might never have encountered if I had to click and drill around a web site.

John Cougar Lunchbucket Dec 29 2008 01:57 PM

I couldn't ride the subway or take a dump at work without a paper so I hope they live forever.

Kong76 Dec 29 2008 02:12 PM

We should start a business, the pop down laptop shelf. "Having trouble sitting on the throne and reading the paper on your laptop? Get the pop down laptop holder and read your news in comfort while you take the daily dump. Installs in minutes and folds neatly back up against the wall out of the way until tomorrow morning. Optional TP dispenser model available too!"

metirish Dec 29 2008 02:18 PM

Right now I am taking Nelson DeMille to the loo , I do like Kong's idea though.

A Boy Named Seo Dec 29 2008 02:27 PM

Sometimes I get grossed out when I think about the poo hands that have likely touched the library books I thumb through. We go from the failing newspaper industry to poop in 14 posts. And no Fman either.

Frayed Knot Dec 29 2008 02:42 PM

[quote="Benjamin Grimm":3uwtunfb]I like paging through the newspaper. I end up reading articles that I might never have encountered if I had to click and drill around a web site.[/quote:3uwtunfb] Same with me. I only read internet articles if they smack me in the face or if directed there. With a paper I'll read all sorts of things I wouldn't ever see on their site.

sharpie Dec 29 2008 02:58 PM

Not only do I only read internet articles if they are thrust in front of me but I never look at internet ads. Unlike a newspaper ad which I might pause at or perhaps even read and process the information and on occasion actually act upon something I see there.

dgwphotography Dec 30 2008 04:25 PM

I'm purely an internet paper reader. The keyboard doesn't leave ink on my fingers...

SteveJRogers Dec 30 2008 06:15 PM

[quote="Kong76"]We should start a business, the pop down laptop shelf. "Having trouble sitting on the throne and reading the paper on your laptop? Get the pop down laptop holder and read your news in comfort while you take the daily dump. Installs in minutes and folds neatly back up against the wall out of the way until tomorrow morning. Optional TP dispenser model available too!"

Alongside the George Constanza model desk bed, complete with shelf space!

DocTee Jan 07 2009 05:45 PM

From today's SF Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gre ... type=green Is The Library A Museum? Are end times near for books and magazines? I still enjoy words on paper, but then I'm over the magical, all-digital age of 30. To wit, note these recent developments in online reading: In addition to the many newspapers you can read online for free, Zinio is currently offering free one-year digital magazine subscriptions on some 200 magazines. (Who doesn't love free? Check it out.) You may already have heard of Amazon's new digital reading device, Kindle. The interface still isn't as nice as real paper, to my eye, but it offers a convenient way to get texts quick. The "books" themselves are cheap, but the device costs $359. Of course, paper isn't all good, either. I'm pleased to see my weekly issue of the New Yorker in the brick-and-mortar mailbox, but I'm not happy to see catalogues addressed to former housemates' siblings and mystery persons with whom I clearly have nothing in common. I'm resolving this New Year to do what I can to cut down on junk mail. Here are two options: Go to the belly of the beast, the Direct Marketing Association, and change your preferences. Sending an email with your name and address to the other major paper-spammer will also help. Finally, you can also go to this greenie site to opt out of various catalogues. With still more newspapers shrinking or folding, let's rekindle the reading debate: Will the internet eventually displace paper texts altogether? Is there anything about paper that's worth saving? And is the evidence that reading online is better for the environment really conclusive? For what it's worth, I'm also not wholly convinced that the internet is the sole villain of the newspaper story. Think another popular bad guy: Wall Street.

John Cougar Lunchbucket Jan 13 2009 01:28 PM

If I didn't buy the Daily News everyday I wouldn't know anything about the "Kidney Wife" divorce proceedings, and that would make me sadder.

metirish Jan 13 2009 01:51 PM

He gave her his kidney and all he gets is to smell her nickers , terrible state of affairs. Imagine being a patient of his.

Edgy DC Mar 16 2009 04:31 PM

Down goes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Staying alive online, but laying off the majority of the staff.

Edgy DC Mar 20 2009 08:17 AM

Nicholas Kristof laments that the decline and death of the civic daily is contirbuting to our growing intolerance of, and inablitly to live among, people with thoughts opposed to our own.

seawolf17 Mar 20 2009 08:22 AM

The Chicago Tribune's masthead, as they join the internet revolution.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Mar 20 2009 08:44 AM

[quote="Edgy DC"]Nicholas Kristof laments that the decline and death of the civic daily is contirbuting to our growing intolerance of, and inablitly to live among, people with thoughts opposed to our own.

"Americans increasingly are segregating themselves into communities, clubs and churches where they are surrounded by people who think the way they do"? People are happiest when they hear things which confirm their opinions and beliefs?

Well, no shit-- it's called being human. Weren't we lamenting the death of community and the figurative "village" it takes to raise and nourish ourselves just 10 years ago?

Informal associations predicated on shared values (like pride in one's ethnic heritage, love of the Mets, or liking the word "Kiwanis") are the glue of American society-- they're what observers like de Tocqueville have pointed to since the nation's inception when asked what makes this nation work.

I'll miss newspapers for a number of reasons. This isn't the strongest-- nor the least self-serving-- argument for mourning their fade.

Edgy DC Mar 20 2009 09:01 AM

Well, don't count me among a "we" that represents Hillary's thesis. I think a tolerance for and exposure to dissent and difference is something a healthy village brings also. And if our broader choice for intellectual stimulation is leading us toward only unchallenging views, we should always reassess. One cool thing on the web, though, is places like this. People cluster for likeminded appreciation of a baseball team, but they have to tolerate (like it or not) that we may disagree about art, politics, and Ring Dings.

Benjamin Grimm Mar 20 2009 09:03 AM

Ring Dings???? There better not be anybody here who doesn't like Ring Dings!

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Mar 20 2009 09:12 AM

[quote="Edgy DC"]Well, don't count me among a "we" that represents Hillary's thesis. I think a tolerance for and exposure to dissent and difference is something a healthy village brings also. And if our broader choice for intellectual stimulation is leading us toward only unchallenging views, we should always reassess. One cool thing on the web, though, is places like this. People cluster for likeminded appreciation of a baseball team, but they have to tolerate (like it or not) that we may disagree about art, politics, and Ring Dings.

Agreed completely on the need for mental exercise and how much stuff like this rocks (We are awesome). I just don't know that death-of-newspapers equates to or necessarily leads to increase-of-intolerance, automatically.

And Ring Dings are the devil's food, indeed.

Edgy DC Mar 20 2009 09:18 AM

I certainly have an appreciation for cultural niches. We remain a strong diverse nation because of the safety in which subcultures flourish. But when that safety becomes a cocoon of willfull ignorance --- then we have to review and challenge ourselves. I just find too many people constitutionally incapable of accepting that somebody in the room may disagree with them. My brother-in-law is down to pretty much one friend and he's self-employed and never gets out. Anywhere. His wife is a flight attendant, but I don't see any photos in their house of the exotic places she's been, and I get the idea she lands, goes straight to the hotel, and locks herself in.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Mar 20 2009 09:29 AM

[quote="Edgy DC"] I just find too many people constitutionally incapable of accepting that somebody in the room may disagree with them. My brother-in-law is down to pretty much one friend and he's self-employed and never gets out. Anywhere. His wife is a flight attendant, but I don't see any photos in their house of the exotic places she's been, and I get the idea she lands, goes straight to the hotel, and locks herself in.

That's exceedingly sad. But that's a pretty extreme brand of isolation-- bordering on antisocial. (My fiancee is an ex-FA herself, and there were a few in her previous work life who lived life on a plane-to-room shuttle... but they were overwhelmingly in the minority.)

That said... I don't think it's anywhere near an exclusively modern phenomenon. The internet makes it easier for those folk to make something like social connections... but I think those who self-assess do so, and those who don't tend toward it shy away from self-examination (except at crisis points). Do you really see us doing MORE cocooning than we would otherwise? And do you think that the splintering of our informational media are a primary cause or facilitiator of this?

Edgy DC Mar 20 2009 10:04 AM

I honestly don't know if I see that. Kristof does. And he asserts that Nicholas Negroponte and Farhad Manjoo do, or at least have publish observations that hint at the elements of that. I do know that when I have an opionion these days that differs from the zeitgeist, I tend to keep it the heck to myself. One can say that's because the zeitgeist is more entrenched and intolerant than it used to be, or that I'm a bigger wimp. Probably both.

John Cougar Lunchbucket Mar 20 2009 10:09 AM

I don't really get Twitter. Am I a complete fuckstick?

metirish Mar 20 2009 10:13 AM

[quote="John Cougar Lunchbucket":3bpzzkuq]I don't really get Twitter. Am I a complete fuckstick?[/quote:3bpzzkuq] Me neither , apparently it's the new craze . Did you know for instance that John Mayer left this cryptic update on his twitter " this heart doesn't come with instructions"....

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Mar 20 2009 10:23 AM

[quote="metirish":915ezkci][quote="John Cougar Lunchbucket":915ezkci]I don't really get Twitter. Am I a complete fuckstick?[/quote:915ezkci] Me neither , apparently it's the new craze . Did you know for instance that John Mayer left this cryptic update on his twitter " this heart doesn't come with instructions"....[/quote:915ezkci] I had been holding back... but now I'm lost to this troubadour. Aniston-- watch your ass.

themetfairy Mar 20 2009 10:25 AM

[quote="John Cougar Lunchbucket":si99klz7]I don't really get Twitter. Am I a complete fuckstick?[/quote:si99klz7] I did Twitter for a while. Then I decided that anyone I wanted to keep up with was also on Facebook, so I don't Tweet anymore.

seawolf17 Mar 20 2009 10:36 AM

I use Twitter professionally. It doesn't do anything that Facebook doesn't already do.

G-Fafif Mar 20 2009 10:51 AM

[quote="John Cougar Lunchbucket":q4mekhsc]I don't really get Twitter. Am I a complete fuckstick?[/quote:q4mekhsc] Isn't that a question better Tweeted? No, I don't get it either. But I didn't get just about everything that's a part of my norm today when first exposed to it. Still, it seems like Twitter, and not you (or I), is (are) the fuckstick in all this.

John Cougar Lunchbucket Mar 20 2009 11:15 AM

I dunno. Seawolf gets paid to use Twitter.

John Cougar Lunchbucket Mar 20 2009 01:14 PM

I understand now. Twitter is a fun humor laughter thing:

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Mar 20 2009 01:24 PM

Think "mass, multiplatform texting." (And all the pain/"pleasure" that brings.) Those of you who are Tweet-happy... if you're not following The_Real_Shaq or FakeRickReilly, you're missing out on the Big Funny.

MFS62 Mar 20 2009 03:03 PM

[quote="Benjamin Grimm":2nn9q4d9]Ring Dings???? There better not be anybody here who doesn't like Ring Dings![/quote:2nn9q4d9] As you might have guessed, I plead guilty to that. I have never been a fan of chocolate cake, no matter how much yummy vanilla cream it may contain. Later

metsguyinmichigan Mar 23 2009 09:39 AM

My paper announced wage and benefit cuts for us this morning. But we're better off than others in our chain, which is either closing or merging and publishing only three days a week. We're fortunate to be away from the Detroit area. It wasn't good news, but it could have been a lot worse.

Fman99 Mar 23 2009 09:41 AM

[quote="metsguyinmichigan":1hckamr9]My paper announced wage and benefit cuts for us this morning. But we're better off than others in our chain, which is either closing or merging and publishing only three days a week. We're fortunate to be away from the Detroit area. It wasn't good news, but it could have been a lot worse.[/quote:1hckamr9] Wow. Best wishes MGIM.

themetfairy Mar 23 2009 09:45 AM

Glad to hear that the paper is hanging in there.

metirish Mar 23 2009 09:51 AM

[quote="metsguyinmichigan":qhxl4rty]My paper announced wage and benefit cuts for us this morning. But we're better off than others in our chain, which is either closing or merging and publishing only three days a week. We're fortunate to be away from the Detroit area. It wasn't good news, but it could have been a lot worse.[/quote:qhxl4rty] Yeah it could be worse but wage cutting and the cutting of hours and benefits is like the new thing now. All the best metsguy

metsguyinmichigan Mar 23 2009 11:30 AM

Thanks, guys!

metirish Apr 02 2009 02:15 PM

Daniel Gross blames greedy executives Paper Money Newspapers aren't assets to be flipped, leveraged, and stripped. Each time a newspaper company closes or files for bankruptcy—as Sun-Times Media, the owner of the Chicago Sun-Times and 58 other newspapers, did this week—analysts are quick to hammer another nail in the coffin of the printed word. Roughly coinciding as they do with the advent of the Kindle 2, the failures give ammunition to voices who say newspapers are obsolete. Now that both of the Second City's major newspapers are operating under the umbrella of Chapter 11, and with papers in Denver and Seattle shutting down, it's tough to argue with those who say the industry has useless management, a fundamentally unviable business model, and not much of a future. While newspapers have serious problems, the recent failures of several newspaper companies (here's a list of list of four others that have gone BK in recent months) shouldn't necessarily lead to visions of the apocalypse. Virtually every newspaper in the country has experienced a sharp drop in advertising and is suffering losses. But not every newspaper company in the country has gone bankrupt as a result. And the failures may say more about a style of capitalism than an industry. Each company was undone in large measure by really stupid (and in one case criminal) activities by managers. Let's review. Sun-Times Media is the name given to the company formerly run by convicted felon Conrad Black. Black and his colleague, Publisher David Radler, who confessed to his crimes, improperly took tens of millions of dollars in fees from the company and caused it endless legal heartache. Jeremy L. Halbreich, the interim CEO of the company, blamed the bankruptcy filing on "this deteriorating economic climate, coupled with a significant, pending IRS tax liability dating back to previous management." The actions of the top executives in other bankrupt newspaper companies were criminal only if you consider gross financial stupidity and recklessness to be jailing offenses. Who loads up newspapers—cyclical companies whose revenues are in secular decline thanks to the disappearance of classified advertisements and the rise of the Internet—with tons of debt at precisely the wrong time? Financial geniuses, that's who. In 2007, legendary real estate investor Sam Zell decided that a talent for good timing in flipping office buildings made him an expert on the ailing newspaper industry. In December 2007, he closed on the $8.2 billion purchase of the Tribune Co., which owned the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Cubs. Zell put down just 4 percent of the purchase price—$315 million—and borrowed much of the rest, leaving the company with a $13 billion debt burden. This deal was the purest expression of the "dumb money" mentality. The only hope Zell had of making a dent in the debt load and keeping current on the $800-million-plus annual interest tab was to sell off trophy properties like the Cubs, office buildings, and big-city newspapers—assets that themselves don't throw off lots of income but whose purchase requires tons of cheap credit. Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy Dec. 8, 2008. Two of the other large newspaper companies that went bust in recent months have similar back stories. A bunch of private-equity types bought the company that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News in June 2006, borrowing about $450 million of the $562 million purchase price. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in late February but not before paying top executives $650,000 in bonuses in December. Among those getting a bonus: Brian Tierney, the former public relations executive who was one of the architects of the deal. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, which filed for Chapter 11 in January, was another private-equity train wreck. About two years ago, Avista Capital Partners bought the paper for $530 million, loading well over $400 million of debt onto the company. In other words, the newspaper companies that have failed wholesale were essentially set up to fail by inexperienced managers who believed piling huge amounts of debt on businesses whose revenues were shrinking even when the economy was growing was a shrewd means of value creation. A similar dynamic is playing out in other industries. Several mattress companies have filed for bankruptcy or are near it. It's not simply because sales are down due to the economy or because mattresses, which rely on an inferior technology, are being displaced by futuristic futons. Rather, as the Wall Street Journal reported (subscription required), the companies are going bust because private-equity types loaded them up with absurd levels of debt at the wrong time. It's true that plenty of smaller newspapers without huge debt loads are in trouble. But lots of newspapers are muddling through, in part because, like our sister publication the Washington Post, they're owned by a parent company that has other lines of profitable businesses; or, like the New York Times, their parent companies have the financial flexibility to take dramatic action to raise capital; or, like Gannett papers, the parent company manages expenses aggressively. All newspapers—all print media—have been hit hard in this recession. All face an existential crisis and may ultimately face the prospect of bankruptcy. Those whose owners saw papers as assets to be flipped, leveraged, and stripped are already bankrupt.

metirish Apr 03 2009 01:23 PM

I read so many articles like this , makes me laugh and makes me mad at the same time. The Orphans of Ireland Dingle County Kerry DINGLE, Ireland — Under a sky that looks like a late-winter coat of sheep fleece, the island of saints and scholars falls away in a sheer drop to the Atlantic. The next parish over, they say from this far western edge of Ireland, is Boston. It is reassuring to an Irish-American on a first-time visit to find the wellspring of poets and balladeers as advertised: those emerald fields, those ruddy-cheeked fishermen warming pub seats, a land of stone and cold wind that produced a lyrical people and a music embraced more than ever by the young. But it is also jarring to see this ancient landscape littered with empty monuments to the kind of excess that helped bring down the global economy. For a time, the Irish thought they would never fall off those cliffs into the sea; a nation of barely 4 million people could defy gravity. If Barack Obama, the president with roots in County Offaly, were to skip across the Irish Sea this week he would find a big part of what afflicted much of the western world during a mad era. Houses prices quadrupled in less than a decade. Every village that had seen nary a rock wall or a cottage window unchanged suddenly had a cul de sac of insta-homes and a half-dozen O’Mansions. Anyone with a mortgage could get rich in little more time than it took for a head of Guinness to settle. The crash was sickening, and much like Ernest Hemingway’s description of going broke: slowly, then all at once. Throughout Ireland, more than one in eight homes now sits empty. The skyline is crowded with idle cranes towering over roofless apartments. Property prices have plummeted across Ireland. And as the government plans drastic service cuts, people worry that Ireland will follow Iceland into insolvency. Just outside of this wonderfully brooding town, where David Lean filmed “Ryan’s Daughter,” the sod was peeled back for the worst kind of Southern California housing developments. These were houses intended as holiday getaways for the new Princes of Dublin and Galway. Now they’re orphans — abandoned, and not even a nationalized bank wants them back. “The Celtic tiger that transformed a beer-soaked backwater into the envy of every small nation with a thirst for a makeover is dead,” The Sunday Times noted last week, in a story with the kind of sneer that only a paper, owned by Rupert Murdoch, from still-hated England could produce. They quoted an Irishman, John O’Keeffe, who moved back home in the midst of the boom: “I left a godly land of broke but merry alcoholics and came back to a place where people who used to dig potatoes were buying luxury apartments sight unseen and driving Porsches.” If the rush to riches was very un-Irish, this country is now back to something more familiar — a state of misery. It was that greatest of Irish poets, William Butler Yeats, who described the indigenous character trait as an abiding sense of tragedy that sustained people through temporary periods of joy. Hope is a thing of sporting miracles — the national rugby team last week winning a European title that had eluded Ireland for 61 years — and that new American president whose maternal ancestors came from a village with an oddly-prescient name for our times, Moneygall. The Irish are looking to Obama, wrote Kate Holmquist, a columnist for the Irish Times, “as if he’s not just America’s but also our president.” Ireland is not on the itinerary for Obama’s travels this week. When he does come here, I would recommend a visit to the west: for inspiration, and for a cautionary tale woven into the land. Clinging to the bony shoulders of Dingle Peninsula are beehive huts, the stone igloos once inhabited by Celts 1,500 years ago. You huddle inside the small space of those homes and marvel at a people burning peat to stay warm against blustery Atlantic winds. You walk along Dingle Harbor past a forlorn rock tower, Hussey’s Folly they call it. It was a 19th century stimulus project, a jobs generator for starving people at the time of the Great Famine. And then, in the green folds of a peninsula holding the greatest concentration of archaeological sites in Ireland, you see the latest and largest of artifacts — the empty houses built at the peak of the Celtic tiger period. If they stand as long as the beehive huts or Hussey’s tower, the orphans of Ireland will prove to be instructive. The huts are a testament to perseverance. The tower is a monument of hope against despair. And the empty new homes tell a story of greed. A traveler, 100 years down the road, may wonder what a traveler of today ponders in the presence of the older sites: what were they thinking? This is on the Opinion page on the website. Writers bio next to it About Timothy Egan Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series How Race Is Lived in America. Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including "The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest," and "Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West." He lives in Seattle. http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/0 ... reland/?em

Edgy DC Apr 03 2009 01:48 PM

They quoted an Irishman, John O’Keeffe, who moved back home in the midst of the boom: “I left a godly land of broke but merry alcoholics and came back to a place where people who used to dig potatoes were buying luxury apartments sight unseen and driving Porsches.” Apparently, the hyperbole hasn't deflated along with housing prices.

DocTee Apr 17 2009 07:11 PM

Rolling Stone leaves SF Rolling Stone Magazine has severed its last tenuous link to San Francisco, the city where Jan Wenner co-founded the irreverent biweekly 42 years ago to cover the psychedelic rock scene and counterculture movement flourishing in the region. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New York publisher Wenner Media will shutter its three-person office at 1700 Montgomery St., spokesman Mark Neschis said. It housed one Rolling Stone sales representative, who will relocate to Los Angeles. The other two employees, a Men's Journal representative and an assistant, are being laid off. "There wasn't enough business to justify having a full time office in San Francisco," Neschis said. "It's a challenging economic environment." Indeed, the magazine's ad pages dropped nearly 17 percent in April compared to the same issue last year and are down nearly 22 percent year to date, according to the Mediaweek trade publication. Men's Journal is faring even worse, with ad pages down 39 percent over last year. In recent months, Wenner Media has conducted several rounds of layoffs across its titles, which also include Us Weekly, according to media reports. "They're being caught in the same maelstrom, although somewhat less so, as newspapers," said John Morton, a media analyst with Morton Research Inc. in Silver Spring, Md. "They're looking for ways to save money." In truth, Rolling Stone fled its native city years ago. The company moved its headquarters to New York in 1977 and closed the last San Francisco editorial bureau in the early 1980s. On his way out of town, Wenner told The Chronicle that San Francisco was "a provincial backwater." In the early years, however, there was a symbiotic relationship between Rolling Stone and the city, said Ben Fong-Torres, who joined the magazine as an editor in 1969. "It was one of the energy centers of the cultural, rock and roll scene of the mid to late 60s," he said. "For Rolling Stone to be in San Francisco gave it a particular strength, a singularity. Of course, we also naturally nurtured our own scene here, we gave a lot of attention to local bands." An early issue featured a spread of a drug bust at the Grateful Dead's studio on Ashbury Street, he said. It regularly reported on San Francisco acts like Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin's band Big Brother and the Holding Co. and the original Charlatans. "It was just natural because they were in our backyard and we saw them all the time, at the Fillmore, the Avalon Ballroom and also, clubs like The Matrix," Fong-Torres said. Because of the magazine's permissive style and generous length allowances, it attracted established members and fostered emerging talents within the so called New Journalism and Gonzo Journalism movements, in which writers used fiction devices to tell nonfiction stories or inserted themselves as central characters in pieces. Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Tim Cahill, P.J. O'Rourke and Greil Marcus all contributed to the magazine. Film maker Cameron Crowe wrote for Rolling Stone as a teenager, an experience upon which he loosely based the movie "Almost Famous." "It was the only place to go for a long time, particularly on the West Coast, if you were in the business," said Lowell Bergman, a professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and producer for Frontline on PBS, who worked at the magazine until it moved to New York. "Especially if you wanted to write something that was long and may be seen by a lot of people." Rolling Stone was as well known for covering politics and culture, as it was for music. Thompson wrote free wheeling, and pharmacologically enhanced, dispatches for the magazine on the presidential campaign of 1972, focusing on George McGovern's doomed bid and the character flaws of Richard Nixon. The articles were compiled in the book, "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." Timothy Crouse's reports for the magazine on the same campaign turned into the seminal work on the phenomenon of pack journalism, assigned in journalism schools, "The Boys on the Bus." In subsequent years, Rolling Stone has been criticized for losing its edge and identity, as it targeted a younger audience with shorter stories and more coverage of mainstream bands and celebrities. "In the years to come, Jann Wenner got himself a jet and a home in the Hamptons. The world changed," Bergman said. "It still continued to do (serious journalism), but its focus moved more in what we call a pop culture direction."

Edgy DC Apr 17 2009 10:37 PM

Yeah, Rolling Stone will continue to do serious journalism. And The Sporting News will continue to be the go to source of information for the serious baseball fan.

Edgy DC May 10 2009 07:57 PM

Frank Rich mentions this clip in his column today. (Yes, I read it online. Of course I did.) It otherwise speaks for itself.

Frayed Knot May 10 2009 08:05 PM

It's like the scene from 'Almost Famous' (speaking of Rolling Stone) where RS's Ben-Fong Torres tells William that the NY Daily News will let them use their new machine which can transmit text pages through the phone line in just 18 minutes per page.

MFS62 Jun 18 2009 09:27 PM

Sad but true. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqRcCHk_Pc Later

metirish Jul 27 2009 01:01 PM

Newsday seems intent on stopping traffic to newsday.com, their revamped website is horrible.

metirish Oct 02 2009 11:56 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

London Evening Standard to go free , this will be interesting to see how it unfolds. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oc ... ndard-free

DocTee Nov 04 2009 07:32 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

An excellent, but lengthy piece in the November Harper's: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/11/0082712 Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper By Richard Rodriguez Richard Rodriguez is an editor at New America Media in San Francisco. His most recent essay for Harper's Magazine, "The God of the Desert," appeared in the January 2008 issue. A scholar I know, a woman who is ninety-six years old, grew up in a tin shack on the American prairie, near the Canadian border. She learned to read from the pages of the Chicago Tribune in a one-room schoolhouse. Her teacher, who had no more than an eighth-grade education, had once been to Chicago-had been to the opera! Women in Chicago went to the opera with bare shoulders and long gloves, the teacher imparted to her pupils. Because the teacher had once been to Chicago, she subscribed to the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, which came on the train by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. Several generations of children learned to read from that text. The schoolroom had a wind-up phonograph, its bell shaped like a morning glory, and one record, from which a distant female voice sang "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life." Is it better to have or to want? My friend says her teacher knew one great thing: There was something out there. She told her class she did not expect to see even a fraction of what the world had to offer. But she hoped they might. I became a reader of the San Francisco Chronicle when I was in high school and lived ninety miles inland, in Sacramento. On my way home from school, twenty-five cents bought me a connection with a gray maritime city at odds with the postwar California suburbs. Herb Caen, whose column I read immediately-second section, corner left-invited me into the provincial cosmopolitanism that characterized the city's outward regard: "Isn't it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?" Newspapers have become deadweight commodities linked to other media commodities in chains that are coupled or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and executive vice presidents and boards of directors in offices thousands of miles from where the man bit the dog and drew ink. The San Francisco Chronicle is owned by the Hearst Corporation, once the Chronicle's archrival. The Hearst Corporation has its headquarters in New York City. According to Hearst, the Chronicle has been losing a million dollars a week. In San Francisco there have been buyouts and firings of truck drivers, printers, reporters, artists, editors, critics. With a certain élan, the San Francisco Chronicle has taken to publishing letters from readers who remark the diminishing pleasure or usefulness of the San Francisco Chronicle. When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death-and why else would the editors celebrate its 144th anniversary? and why else would the editors devote a week to feature articles on fog?-it is because San Francisco's sense of itself as a city is perishing. Most newspapers that are dying today were born in the nineteenth century. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer died 2009, born 1863. The Rocky Mountain News died 2009, born 1859. The Ann Arbor News died 2009, born 1835. It was the pride and the function of the American newspaper in the nineteenth century to declare the forming congregation of buildings and services a city-a place busy enough or populated enough to have news. Frontier American journalism preserved a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could read and write itself into existence. We were the Gutenberg Nation. Nineteenth-century newspapers draped bunting about their mastheads and brandished an inflated diction and a Gothic type to name themselves the Herald, the Eagle, the Tribune, the Mercury, the Globe, the Sun. With the passage of time, the name of the city was commonly attached to the name of the newspaper, not only to distinguish the Alexandria Gazette from the New York Gazette but because the paper described the city and the city described the paper. The Daily Dramatic Chronicle, precursor to the San Francisco Chronicle, was founded in 1865 by two teenage brothers on a borrowed twenty-dollar gold piece. Charles and Michael de Young (a third brother, Gustavus, was initially a partner in the publishing venture) had come west with their widowed mother from St. Louis. In California, the brothers invented themselves as descendants of French aristocracy. They were adolescents of extraordinary gumption at a time when San Francisco was a city of gumption and of stranded young men. Karl Marx wrote that Gold Rush California was "thickly populated by men of all races, from the Yankee to the Chinese, from the Negro to the Indian and Malay, from the Creole and Mestizo to the European." Oscar Wilde seconded Karl Marx: "It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be in San Francisco." What must Gold Rush San Francisco have been like? Melville's Nantucket? Burning Man? An arms bazaar in Yemen? There were Russians, Chileans, Frenchmen, Welshmen, and Mexicans. There were Australian toughs, the worst of the lot by most accounts-"Sydney Ducks"-prowling the waterfront. There were Chinese opium dens beneath the streets and Chinese opera houses above them. Historians relish the old young city's foggy wharves and alleyways, its frigates, fleas, mud, and hazard. Two words attached to the lawless city the de Young brothers moved about in. One was "vigilante," from the Spanish. The other was "hoodlum"-a word coined in San Francisco to name the young men loitering about corners, threatening especially to the Chinese. The de Young brothers named their newspaper the Daily Dramatic Chronicle because stranded young men seek entertainment. The city very early developed a taste for limelight that was as urgent as its taste for red light. In 1865, there were competing opera houses in the city; there were six or seven or twelve theaters. The Daily Dramatic Chronicle was a theatrical sheet delivered free of charge to the city's saloons and cafés and reading rooms. San Francisco desperately appreciated minstrel shows and circuses and melodeons and Shakespeare. Stages were set up in gambling halls and saloons where Shakespearean actors, their velvets much the worse for wear, pointed to a ghost rising at the back of the house: Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again. An Italian who came to San Francisco to study medicine in 2003 swears he saw the ghost of a forty-niner, in early light, when he slept and then woke in an old house out by the ocean. The forty-niner was very young, my friend said, with a power of sadness about him. He did not speak. He had red hair and wore a dark shirt. We can imagine marooned opera singers, not of the second, perhaps not even of the third rank, enunciating elaborate prayers and curses from the Italian repertoire as they stumbled among the pebbles and stones of cold running creeks on their way to perform in Gold Rush towns along the American River. It was as though the grandiose nineteenth-century musical form sought its natural echo in the canyons of the Sierra Nevada. The miners loved opera. (Puccini reversed the circuit and took David Belasco's melodrama of the Gold Rush back to Europe as La Fanciulla del West.) In 1860, San Francisco had a population of 57,000. By 1870, the population had almost tripled, to 149,000. Within three years of its founding, by 1868, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle would evolve with its hormonal city to become the Daily Morning Chronicle. The de Young brothers were in their early twenties. Along with theatrical and operatic listings, the Chronicle then published news of ships sailing into and out of the bay and the dollar equivalents of treasure in their holds, and bank robberies, and saloon shootings, and gold strikes and drownings, an extraordinary number of suicides, likewise fires, for San Francisco was a wooden city, as it still is in many of its districts. It is still possible, very occasionally, to visit the Gold Rush city when one attends a crowded theater. Audiences here, more than in any city I know, possess a wit in common and can react as one-in pleasure, but also in derision. I often think our impulse toward hoot and holler might be related to our founding sense of isolation, to our being "an oasis of civilization in the California desert," in the phrase of Addison DeWitt (in All About Eve), who, though a Hollywood figment, is about as good a rendition as I can summon of the sensibility ("New York critics") we have courted here for one hundred and fifty years. And deplored. The nineteenth-century city felt itself surrounded by vacancy-to the west, the gray court of the Pacific; to the east, the Livermore Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, the Sierra Nevada range. Shipping and mining were crucial to the wealth of the city, but they were never the consolations the city sought. The city looked, rather, to Addison DeWitt-to the eastern United States, to Europe, for approbation. If there was a pathetic sense of insecurity in living at the edge of the continent-San Francisco proclaiming itself "the Paris of the Pacific"!-the city also raised men of visionary self-interest who squinted into the distance and conceived of opening trade to Asia or cutting down redwood forests or laying track across a sea of yellow grass. Readers in other parts of the country were fascinated by any scrap of detail about the Gold Rush city. Here is a fragment (July 9, 1866) from Bret Harte's dispatch to readers of the Springfield Republican (from a collection of such dispatches edited by Gary Scharnhorst). The description remains accurate: Midsummer! . . . To dwellers in Atlantic cities, what visions of heated pavements, of staring bricks, of grateful shade trees, of straw hats and white muslin, are conjured up in this word. . . . In San Francisco it means equal proportions of fog and wind. On the evening of the Fourth of July it was a pleasant and instructive sight to observe the population, in great-coats and thick shawls, warming themselves by bonfires, watching the sky-rockets lose themselves in the thick fog, and returning soberly home to their firesides and warm blankets. >From its inception, the San Francisco Chronicle borrowed a tone of merriment and swagger from the city it daily invented-on one occasion with fatal consequences: in 1879, the Chronicle ran an exposé of the Reverend Isaac Smith Kalloch, a recent arrival to the city ("driven forth from Boston like an Unclean Leper") who had put himself up as a candidate for mayor. The Chronicle recounted Kalloch's trial for adultery in Massachusetts ("his escapade with one of the Tremont Temple choristers"). Kalloch responded by denouncing the "bawdy house breeding" of the de Young boys, implying that Charles and Michael's mother kept a whorehouse in St. Louis. Charles rose immediately to his mother's defense; he shot Kalloch, who recovered and won City Hall. De Young never served jail time. A year later, in 1880, Kalloch's son shot and killed Charles de Young in the offices of the Chronicle. "Hatred of de Young is the first and best test of a gentleman," Ambrose Bierce later remarked of Michael, the surviving brother. However just or unjust Bierce's estimation, the de Young brothers lived and died according to their notion of a newspaper's purpose-that it should entertain and incite the population. In 1884, Michael was shot by Adolph Spreckels, the brother of a rival newspaper publisher and the son of the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, after the Chronicle accused the Spreckels Sugar Company of labor practices in Hawaii amounting to slavery. De Young was not mortally wounded and Spreckels was acquitted on a claim of reasonable cause. When he died in 1925, Michael de Young bequeathed the ownership of the Chronicle to his four daughters with the stipulation that it could not be sold out of the family until the death of the last surviving daughter. San Francisco gentility has roots as shallow and as belligerent as those of the Australian blue gum trees that were planted heedlessly throughout the city and now configure and scent our Sunday walks. In 1961, Holiday magazine came to town to devote an entire issue to San Francisco. The three living daughters of Michael de Young were photographed seated on an antique high-backed causeuse in the gallery of the old M. H. de Young Memorial Museum their father had donated to the city to house his collection of paintings and curiosities (including a scabrous old mummy beloved of generations of schoolchildren-now considered too gauche to be displayed). For the same issue, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, widow of Adolph, was photographed taking tea in her Pacific Heights mansion in what looks to be a fur-trimmed, floor-length velvet gown. The Spreckels family donated to the city a replica of the Palais de la Legion d'Honneur in Paris to house a collection of European paintings and rooms and furniture. One Spreckels and three de Youngs make four Margaret Dumonts-a San Francisco royal flush. In 1972, the museum donated by Michael de Young merged with the museum created by the family of the man who tried to murder Michael de Young to become the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Men, usually men, who assumed the sole proprietorships of newspapers in the nineteenth century were the sort of men to be attracted by the way a newspaper could magnify an already fatted ego. Newspaper publishers were accustomed to lord over cities. William Randolph Hearst was given the San Francisco Examiner by his father, a mining millionaire and U.S. senator, who may or may not have won it in a poker game in 1880. As it happened, young Hearst was born to run a newspaper. He turned the Examiner into the largest-circulation paper in San Francisco before he moved on to New York, where, in 1895, he acquired the New York Journal. Hearst quickly engaged in a yellow-journalism rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Both Hearst and Pulitzer assumed political careers. Hearst served in the Congress of the United States-served is not quite the word-as did Pulitzer, briefly. We remember Joseph Pulitzer not as a sensationalist journalist but as the philanthropist who endowed an award for excellence in journalism and the arts. We remember William Randolph Hearst because his castle overlooking the Pacific-fifty miles of ocean frontage-is as forthright a temple to grandiosity as this nation can boast. And we remember Hearst as the original for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Welles portrayed Charles Foster Kane with the mix of populism and egomania audiences of the time easily recognized as Hearst. Kane the champion of the common man becomes Kane the autocrat. Kane builds an opera house for his paramour. Kane invents a war. The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner were both losing money when, in 1965, Charles Thieriot, grandson of Michael de Young, met with William Randolph Hearst Jr. to collaborate on what they called the San Francisco Newspaper Agency. The Agency was a third entity designed to share production and administrative costs. The papers were to maintain editorial discretion and separate staffs. In addition, an incoherent Sunday edition shuffled together sections from both the Chronicle and the Examiner. The terms of the publishers' agreement eventually favored the afternoon Hearst newspaper, for it was soon to fall behind, to become the lesser newspaper in a two-paper town. The Examiner nevertheless continued to collect half the profits of both. In January 1988, Phyllis Tucker, the last surviving daughter of Michael de Young, died in San Francisco. Tucker's daughter, Nan Tucker McEvoy, managed to forestall the sale of the paper for several years. But in 1999, the founding publisher's posthumous grip was pried loose by a majority vote of family members to sell. At that time, the Hearst Corporation was desirous of reclaiming the San Francisco market. Hearst paid $660 million to the de Young heirs for the San Francisco Chronicle. To satisfy antitrust concerns of the Justice Department, the Hearst Corporation sold the still-extant San Francisco Examiner to the politically connected Fang family, owners of Asianweek, the oldest and largest English-language Asian-American newspaper. The Hearst Corporation paid the Fangs a subsidy of $66 million to run the Examiner. Florence Fang placed her son, Ted Fang, in the editor's chair. Within a year, Florence Fang fired her son; Ted Fang threatened to sue his mother. In 2004, the Fang family sold the Examiner to Philip Anschutz, a scattershot entrepreneur from Colorado who deflated William Randolph Hearst's "Monarch of the Dailies" to a freebie tabloid that gets delivered to houses up and down the street twice a week, willy-nilly, and litters the floors of San Francisco municipal buses. The day after I was born in San Francisco, my tiny existential fact was noted in several of the papers that were barked through the downtown streets. In truth, the noun "newspaper" is something of a misnomer. More than purveyors only of news, American newspapers were entrusted to be keepers of public record-papers were daily or weekly cumulative almanacs of tabular information. A newspaper's morgue was scrutable evidence of the existence of a city. Newspapers published obituaries and they published birth announcements. They published wedding announcements and bankruptcy notices. They published weather forecasts (even in San Francisco, where on most days the weather is optimistic and unremarkable-fog clearing by noon). They published the fire department's log and high school basketball scores. In a port city like San Francisco, there were listings of the arrivals and departures of ships. None of this constituted news exactly; it was a record of a city's mundane progress. News was old as soon as it was dry-"fishwrap," as Herb Caen often called it. Unwilling to forfeit any fraction of my quarter, I even studied the classifieds--unrelieved columns laid out like city blocks: Room for rent. Marina. No pets. File clerk position. Heavy phones. Ticket agent for busy downtown box office. Must be bonded. Norman, we're still here. Only once did I find the titillation I was looking for, a listing worthy of a barbershop magazine, an Argosy, or a Mickey Spillane: "Ex-Green Beret will do anything legal for cash." Newspapers were sustained by classifieds, as well as by department-store ads and automobile ads. I admired the urbanity of the drawings of newspaper ads in those years, and I took from them a conception of the posture of downtown San Francisco. Despite glimpses into the classified life of the city, despite the hauteur of ad-art mannerism, the Chronicle offered some assurance (to an adolescent such as I was) it would have been difficult for me to describe. I will call it now an implied continuity. There was continuity in the comics and on the sports page, but nowhere more than in the columns. During Scott Newhall's tenure as executive editor, from 1952 to 1971, the Chronicle achieved something of a golden age. Newhall was flamboyant in ways that were congenial to the city. At a time when the Los Angeles Times was attracting admiration from the East Coast for its fleet of foreign bureaus, Newhall reverted to an eighteenth-century model of a newspaper as first-person observer. For nearly two decades the city that prized its singularity was entertained by idiosyncratic voices. At the shallow end of the Chronicle's roster (under the cipher of a coronet) appeared Count Marco, a Liberace of the typewriter who concerned himself with fashion and beauty and l'amour. At the deep end-a snug corner at Gino and Carlo's bar in North Beach-sat "Charles McCabe, Esq.," an erudite connoisseur of books, spirits, and failed marriages. Terrence O'Flaherty watched television. Stanton Delaplane, to my mind the best writer among them, wrote "Postcard"-a travel series with charm and humor. Art Hoppe concocted political satire. Harold Gilliam expounded on wind and tide and fog. Alfred Frankenstein was an art critic of international reputation. There was a book column by William Hogan and a society column by Frances Moffat. Allan Temko wrote architectural criticism against the grain of the city's sensibility, a sensibility he sometimes characterized as a liberal spirit at odds with a timorous aesthetic. All the Chronicle columnists and critics had constituents, but the name above the banner was Herb Caen. Herb Caen began writing a column for the Chronicle before the Second World War. At that time, Caen was in his twenties and probably resembled the fresh, fast-talking smarty-pants he pitched his voice to portray in print. Item. . .item. . .who's gotta item? In 1950, he was lured over to the Examiner at a considerable hike in salary, and circulation followed at his heels. He knew all the places; he knew the maître d's, the bartenders, the bouncers, the flower-sellers, the cops, the madams, the shopkeepers-knew them in the sense that they all knew him and knew he could be dangerous. In 1958, Caen returned to the Chronicle, and, again, circulation tilted. Each day except Saturday, for forty years, Caen set the conversation for San Francisco. Who was in town. Who was in the hospital and would appreciate a card. Who was seen drinking champagne out of a rent boy's tennis shoe. His last column began: "And how was your Christmas?" He persuaded hundreds of thousands of readers (crowded on buses, on the way to work) that his was the city we lived in. Monday through Friday, Caen was an omniscient table-hopping bitch. On Sunday, he dropped all that; he reverted to an ingenue-a sailor on leave, a sentimental flaneur infatuated with his dream "Baghdad-by-the-Bay." The point of the Sunday perambulation was simple relish-fog clearing by noon; evidence that the mystical, witty, sourdough city had survived one more week. After a time, Caen stopped writing Sunday panegyrics; he said it was not the same city anymore, and it wasn't. He wasn't. Los Angeles, even San Jose-two cities created by suburbanization-had become more influential in the world than the "cool grey city of love," a George Sterling line Caen favored. The Chinese city did not figure in Caen's novel, except atmospherically-lanterns and dragons, chorus girls at the Forbidden City, Danny Kaye taking over the kitchen at Kan's, that sort of thing. The growing Filipino, Latin-American city did not figure at all. In Caen's heyday, the San Francisco Chronicle reflected the self-infatuated city. But it was not the city entire that drew the world's attention. In the 1950s, the version of San Francisco that interested the world was Jack Kerouac's parish-a few North Beach coffeehouses habituated by beatniks (a word Caen coined) and City Lights Bookstore. By the time I was a teenager, the path to City Lights was electrified by the marquees of topless clubs and bad wolves with flashlights beckoning passersby toward red velvet curtains. Anyway, the scene had moved by that time to the fog-shrouded Grateful Dead concerts in Golden Gate Park and to the Haight Ashbury. A decade later, the most famous neighborhood in the city was the homosexual Castro District. San Francisco never seemed to grow old the way other cities grow old. In 1967, the Chronicle's rock and jazz critic, Ralph J. Gleason, teamed up with a renegade cherub named Jann Wenner to publish Rolling Stone magazine. What this disparate twosome intuited was that by chronicling the rising influence of rock music, they were effectively covering a revolution. In New York, writers were cultivating, in the manner of Thackeray, a self-referential point of view and calling it the "New Journalism." In San Francisco, Rolling Stone was publishing a gospel "I" that found itself in a world without precedent: Greil Marcus, Cameron Crowe, Patti Smith, Timothy Ferris, Hunter S. Thompson. I remember sitting in an Indian tea shop in South London in 1970 (in the manner of the New Journalism) and being gripped by envy potent enough to be called homesickness as I read John Burks's account of the Stones concert at Altamont. It was like reading a dispatch from the Gold Rush city. One morning in the 1970s, the Chronicle began to publish Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City-adding sex and drugs and local branding to the nineteenth-century gimmick of serial fiction. At a time when American families were trending to the suburbs, Maupin's novel insisted that San Francisco was still magnetic for single lives. In those same years, Cyra McFadden was writing satirically about the sexual eccentricities of suburban Marin County in a series ("The Serial") for an alternative newspaper called the Pacific Sun. In those same years, Joan Didion wrote, in The White Album, that for many people in Los Angeles "the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the (Manson family) murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community." To borrow for a moment the oracular deadpan: In San Francisco, the Sixties came to an end for many people in 1977, when Jann Wenner packed up and moved Rolling Stone to New York. As he departed, the moss-covered wunderkind griped to a young reporter standing by that San Francisco was a "provincial backwater." What no one could have imagined in 1977, not even Jann Wenner, was that a suburban industrial region thirty miles to the south of the city contained an epic lode. Silicon Valley would, within twenty years, become the capital of Nowhere. What no one could have imagined in 1977 was that San Francisco would become a bedroom community for a suburban industrial region that lay thirty miles to the south. Don't kid a kidder. Herb Caen died in 1997. With the loss of that daily hectoring voice, the Chronicle seemed to lose its narrative thread, as did the city. The Chronicle began to reprint Caen columns, to the bewilderment of anyone younger than thirty. If you die in San Francisco, unless you are judged notable by our know-nothing newspaper (it is unlikely you will be judged notable unless your obituary has already appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times), your death will be noted in a paid obituary submitted to the Chronicle by your mourners. More likely, there will be no public notice taken at all. As much as any vacancy in the Chronicle I can point to, the dearth of obituaries measures its decline. In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance had placed proximate to them. So, I suppose, it is incomplete to notice that the San Francisco Chronicle has become remiss in its obituary department. Of four friends of mine who died recently in San Francisco, not one wanted a published obituary or any other public notice taken of his absence. This seems to me a serious abrogation of the responsibility of living in a city and as good an explanation as any of why newspapers are dying. All four of my friends requested cremation; three wanted their ashes consigned to the obscurity of Nature. Perhaps the cemetery is as doomed in America as the newspaper, and for the same reason: we do not imagine death as a city. We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with "I." Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin's wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city. A few months ago there was an item in the paper about a young woman so plugged into her personal sounds and her texting apparatus that she stepped off the curb and was mowed down by a honking bus. In this morning's paper there is a quote from an interview San Francisco's mayor, Gavin Newsom, gave to The Economist concerning the likelihood that San Francisco will soon be a city without a newspaper: "People under thirty won't even notice." The other day I came upon a coffeehouse that resembled, as I judged from its nineteenth-century exterior, the sort of café where the de Young brothers might have distributed their paper. The café was only a couple of blocks from the lively gay ambience of upper Market Street yet far removed from the clamorous San Francisco of the nineteenth century. Several men and women sat alone at separate tables. No one spoke. The café advertised free wi-fi; all but one of the customers had laptops open before them. (The exception was playing solitaire with a real deck of cards.) The only sounds were the hissing of an espresso machine and the clattering of a few saucers. A man in his forties, sitting by the door, stared at a screen upon which a cartoon animal, perhaps a dog, loped silently. I should mention that the café, like every coffeehouse in the city, had stacks of the Bay Guardian, S.F. Weekly, the Bay Area Reporter-free and roughly equivalent to the Daily Dramatic Chronicle of yore. I should mention that San Francisco has always been a city of stranded youth, and the city apparently continues to provide entertainments for youth: Gosta Berling, Kid Mud, Skeletal System El Rio. 8pm, $5. Davis Jones, Eric Andersen and Tyler Stafford, Melissa McClelland Hotel Utah. 8pm, $7. Ben Kweller, Jones Street Station, Princeton Slim's. 8:30pm, $19. Harvey Mandel and the Snake Crew Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $16. Queers, Mansfields, Hot Toddies, Atom Age Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $12. The colleague I am meeting for coffee tells me (occasioned by my puzzlement at the wi-fi séance) that more and more often he is finding sex on Craigslist. As you know better than I do, one goes to Craigslist to sell or to buy an old couch or a concert ticket or to look for a job. But also to arrange for sexual Lego with a body as free of narrative as possible. (Im bored 26-Oakland-east.) Another friend, a journalist born in India, who has heard me connect newspapers with place once too often, does not dispute my argument, but neither is he troubled by it: "If I think of what many of my friends and I read these days, it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and forwarded in bits and pieces on email-a story from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffington Post, something from the Times of India, from YouTube. It is like a giant newspaper being assembled at all hours, from every corner of the world, still with news but no roots in a place. Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore." So what is lost? Only bricks and mortar. (The contemptuous reply.) Cities are bricks and mortar. Cities are bricks and mortar and bodies. In Chicago, women go to the opera with bare shoulders. Something funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the "New Establishment" issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London, they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortar and do not disturb signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (add to shopping cart), they will do it. We will end up with one and a half cities in America-Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between "conservatives" and "liberals." We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is "not a really good piece of fiction"-Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.-two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry. National newspapers may try to impersonate regional newspapers that are dying or dead. (There have been reports that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will soon publish San Francisco Bay Area editions.) We already live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your doorknob at a Nebraska Holiday Inn or a Maine Marriott. We check the airport weather. We fly from one CNN Headline News monitor to another. We end up where we started. An obituary does not propose a solution. Techno-puritanism that wars with the body must also resist the weight of paper. I remember that weight. It was the weight of the world, carried by boys. Late in grammar school and into high school, I delivered the Sacramento Bee, a newspaper that was, in those years, published in the afternoon, Monday through Saturday, and in the morning on Sundays. My route comprised one hundred and forty subscribers-nearly every house in three square blocks. The papers were barely dry when I got them, warm to the touch and clean-if you were caught short, you could deliver a baby on newspaper. The smell of newspapers was a slick petroleum smell of ink. I would fold each paper in triptych, then snap on a rubber band. On Thursdays, the Bee plumped with a cooking section and with supermarket ads. On Sundays, there was added the weight of comics, of real estate and automobile sections, and supplements like Parade and the television guide. I stuffed half my load of newspapers into the canvas bag I tied onto my bicycle's handlebars; the rest went into saddlebags on the back. I never learned to throw a baseball with confidence, but I knew how to aim a newspaper well enough. I could make my mark from the sidewalk-one hand on the handlebar-with dead-eye nonchalance. The paper flew over my shoulder; it twirled over hedges and open sprinklers to land with a fine plop only inches from the door. In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers-the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember.

Edgy DC Nov 04 2009 07:39 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death-and why else would the editors celebrate its 144th anniversary? and why else would the editors devote a week to feature articles on fog?-it is because San Francisco's sense of itself as a city is perishing. Ouch.

Benjamin Grimm Nov 04 2009 08:11 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

I love-love-love newspapers, but I can't agree with that statement. I think it's more likely that San Francisco is getting its sense of place from somewhere other than the Chronicle.

Edgy DC Nov 04 2009 08:28 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Well, I don't think it's completely true either. I just think there's enough truth in it to be haunting. I think a place is full of subcultures that are utterly ignorant of each other, but still they have a sense (and it can be a healthy sense) of each other as part of a unified whole, and there are certainly concrete cultural touchstones that they link that sense to. Newspapers are part of that. Bridges and architecture. Major industries, particularly locally owned ones. Sports teams, certainly. There's an argument floating aroundthat the exodus of the Dodgers set back not just Brooklyn, but the concept of the American city, by decades. If and when the Chron crashes and burns, it won't take the Bay Bridge with it. So that's good. But if and when the Bay Bridge crashes and burns (and it might), San Francisco will be that much poorer as a city if they don't have the Chronicle and Examiner to turn to collectively. That's not to say I don't see the huge downside to what papers have become. We as a nation that has been tricked into thinking we only have a very narrow palate from which to select our political and cultural views, and newspapers have played their part in creating that false reality.

metirish Nov 04 2009 08:46 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Good article to read, I think newspapers today have lost their importance to the city they are in , or at least the kind of importance that would have been attached to say the Chronicle as described in the article. My Grandfather would only ever read The Irish press becasue he was a de Valera man and that was that....never do I remember The Irish Times in our house and to this day it's not....my grandfather passed a few years before The Irish Press did and I wonder what he might have read if that were reversed. I don't think newspapers are nearly as impotant as they themselves might think they are these days , important in the sense that they help shape a city and such.

Edgy DC Dec 31 2009 07:02 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

The Washington Times making huge cuts in their 170-person staff, including eliminating the Sports and Metro sections. Rather than look people in the eye, they held a meeting and then told them to pick out envelopes on the way out telling them their fates. Class. The Washington Post seems to be announcing that it's now a regional paper and no longer a national one --- which I assume means shutting down satellite bureaus.

Ashie62 Jan 01 2010 10:45 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Time Inc. is taking most of their better magazine brands and developing a "digital newstand"..If succesful, and it will be 2-3 years to find out, the print editions will no longer be produced.

Edgy DC Jan 19 2010 08:07 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Looks like a 50/50 chance I don't survive the day and a 75% chance I don't survive Friday. But I've got 10 years here and hopefully that means almost half a year of severence, plus maybe a buyout on my sabbatical and unused sick leave. I'm kind of begging for it at this point.

TransMonk Jan 19 2010 08:13 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Jeez...and I was kinda pissed I didn't get a raise this year. Hope this all works out for the best.

John Cougar Lunchbucket Jan 19 2010 08:24 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Yeow. Go where S has gone.

themetfairy Jan 19 2010 08:45 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Best of luck Edgy!

Benjamin Grimm Jan 19 2010 08:48 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

[quote="TransMonk":3hvi9cyz]Hope this all works out for the best.[/quote:3hvi9cyz] Me too!

metirish Jan 19 2010 08:49 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

WOW....all the best

Edgy DC Jan 19 2010 08:54 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

We'll be fine. One way or another. We have no kids and no tutions to worry about and we're not in Haiti. I have my part-time job in the evening and my wife has crazy amounts of talent. It's just the not knowing that sucks.

John Cougar Lunchbucket Jan 19 2010 09:04 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

There's the old misgiving about 'survivors being the lucky ones.' I've been working for 18 months or more under the impression that today could be my last. The layoffs came and went, but it's constant minor humiliations (revoked 401K contributions, benefit/travel/freelance slashes, furloughs, earned-and-not-rewarded wage hikes) that makes it every bit as rotten.

Fman99 Jan 19 2010 10:06 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

[quote="Edgy DC":3c38yh9l]Looks like a 50/50 chance I don't survive the day and a 75% chance I don't survive Friday. But I've got 10 years here and hopefully that means almost half a year of severence, plus maybe a buyout on my sabbatical and unused sick leave. I'm kind of begging for it at this point.[/quote:3c38yh9l] Sorry to hear that, hope things work out for you Edgy.

Edgy DC Jan 19 2010 10:11 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

it's appreciated, but your vomitey kids need your sorrow more than I do (unless somebody fucks around with my exit package). I'm not sympathy grubbin', only reporting on where my life is going. I'd certainly welcome any writing/editing leads, however.

Fman99 Jan 19 2010 10:15 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

You're getting puked on by your profession and I am getting puked on by a couple of Fman youths. Same difference.

Edgy DC Jan 19 2010 10:17 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Me and Bobby, baby. To some observers, Setoyama and his men were employing a kind of "mura hachibu," (village ostracism), a tactic designed to isolate Valentine, make his final season as miserable as possible, and perhaps force him to quit early and thereby save the front office part of his salary — or, if that was not possible, at least affect Valentine's ability to run the team successfully.

Chad Ochoseis Jan 19 2010 10:38 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

I'd certainly welcome any writing/editing leads, however. A good friend of mine from college is a managing editor (or some similar position) with a scientific book publisher in the DC exurbs. I'll send him an e-mail and see if he knows anything. Last time we talked about work, the conversation went something like this: Ocho's friend: My job sucks. Ocho: I vaguely know someone from the Crane Pool Forum who lives in DC and works in educational publishing. Seems like a good guy. If you want me to put you in touch, let me know and I'll contact him. So I wouldn't be too optimistic. But I'll e-mail him tonight.

Edgy DC Jan 19 2010 10:48 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Thanky.

Edgy DC Jan 19 2010 02:59 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Sword of Damocles lays off for one day. How about that shit?

themetfairy Jan 19 2010 03:36 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Yea Edgy (for now).

TransMonk Jan 19 2010 03:47 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

And he lives to write another day.

Kong76 Jan 19 2010 04:04 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Wow, I never open this thread and for some reason did. Best of luck, Edge ... maybe it's time for a change anyways?

Chad Ochoseis Jan 19 2010 04:11 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Glad to hear it - sent an e-mail to my friend in the DC area just in case. His job doesn't really suck.

Edgy DC Jan 19 2010 08:23 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

[quote="Kong76":33ysd1wx]... maybe it's time for a change anyways?[/quote:33ysd1wx] Absoflutely. Thanks, Ochoseis.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Jan 19 2010 10:39 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Rarely look here, either. Here's to unmuddiness, EH.

metsguyinmichigan Jan 19 2010 11:20 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Hang in there, Edgy. My paper announced layoffs two weeks ago, the first-ever for the company. With both of our salaries tied to the paper, it was a scary day. We survived, but some very good people were let go. We had all kinds of buyouts, salary rollbacks, pension freezes and insurance contribution increases in the past year. Publisher said he thinks the worst might be behind us now, and we're better off than the other side of the state. I wish you all the best, and we'll keep you and your family in our prayers. if there's anything I can do, don't be shy.

metirish Jan 22 2010 09:11 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Any news Edgy?

Edgy DC Jan 22 2010 09:17 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

I'm kinda being dicked, thanks.

Benjamin Grimm Jan 22 2010 09:30 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

[quote="Edgy DC":1vhucf7x]I'm kinda being dicked, thanks.[/quote:1vhucf7x] With or without foreskin?

Edgy DC Jan 22 2010 09:40 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

By a woman. Basically the expiration date on a probabationary period has come and gone. I'm busting my ass trying to get ready for a conference I might not be at and I'm still not getting an answer. She also has a history of crying when confronted. If I make her cry, I fear, I come off as a bully and give them grounds to withhold the exit package I have coming to me by using that as an excuse to fire me with cause.

Ashie62 Jan 23 2010 09:16 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

[quote="Edgy DC"]By a woman. Basically the expiration date on a probabationary period has come and gone. I'm busting my ass trying to get ready for a conference I might not be at and I'm still not getting an answer. She also has a history of crying when confronted. If I make her cry, I fear, I come off as a bully and give them grounds to withhold the exit package I have coming to me by using that as an excuse to fire me with cause.

"There's no crying in journalism"

You're sharp and will land softly wherever it may be..bets wishes**

Rockin' Doc Jan 23 2010 05:36 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

I don't look at this thread very often and I'm saddened to hear of all the cut backs, frozen salaries, and reduced benefits that so many of the forum members are facing in their jobs. Best of luck going forward, Edgy. Hopefully, the economy and the job market will improve for all in 2010.

metirish Jan 26 2010 08:01 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

A insightful interview here with Pulitzer prize winning photojournalist David Hume Kennerly.It's a good read but if you scroll down to the picture of Nixon on the chopper he is asked about journalism. http://www.bermangraphics.com/press/dav ... nnerly.htm

Ashie62 Jan 29 2010 06:01 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

The National Enquirer is "demanding" a Pulitzer Prize nomination for being first, and correct with Tiger Woods. Best part is the NE is owned by Playboy Inc. Hef could accept the award

Edgy DC Feb 02 2010 07:38 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Well, Homeboy survives after all.

metirish Feb 02 2010 07:42 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Good news, maybe you'll stop being so damn argumentive now, oh wait that's just you:)

Edgy DC Feb 02 2010 07:49 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Seriously, intervention time. Am I that big an asshole? In a room full of New Yorkers, I'm the big pain in the ass? I think I'm a big fucking cupcake.

metirish Feb 02 2010 07:52 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

No , I'm taking the piss.......

Rockin' Doc Feb 02 2010 07:56 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Edgy, I'm glad to hear that you shall remain employed. It's a shame that so many people continue to become casualties of the poor economy.

Edgy DC Feb 02 2010 08:03 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Because this is how I ruin everything: Boss: "You don't seem, I don't know..." Me: "Yeah, I'm sorry, it's just been a stressful time." Boss: "Well, I'm sorry, how do you think it's been for me?!" Me: "Well, this probation period was up two weeks ago and I hadn't heard anything." Boss: "Well, just because the period ended doesn't mean that we can make a decision right away!" Me: "Well, I appreciate hearing, it's just been hard, working around the clock for a conference when I don't even know whether to buy plane tickets." Boss: "Uh...! Uh...!" (Storms out of my office and back to hers where she shuts the door and, I guess, cries.) I sit there wondering if I'm the biggest asshole in the Kingdom of Assholia, before writing her an apologetic email. She accepted, but I managed the physically improbable trick of climbing out of the doghouse and into the doghouse. Jane Jarvis, be near me in my time of distress.

Fman99 Feb 02 2010 08:55 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

What a cunt.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Feb 02 2010 09:16 PM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

God, you're a piece of crap. Crap-piece.

themetfairy Feb 03 2010 05:13 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Glad to hear you lived to write another day Edgy!

John Cougar Lunchbucket Feb 09 2010 07:45 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Been waiting for the day for 2 years, finally it's here -- My employer filed Chapter 11 this morning. It's supposedly not a big deal unless you were dumb enough to have loaned money to the company, everyone's expected to keep their jobs, plan already approved, in-and-out quick, etc. etc.

MFS62 Feb 28 2010 08:52 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

Yesterday, A co-worker and I were talking about school systems. He said to me that in order to be a good editor, you have to have taken Latin. Do you agree? Disagree? Why? Later

metsmarathon Feb 28 2010 10:55 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

well, otherwise, you'd let shit like "forums" slip onto the pages of your publications. and thats just plain unacceptable.

DocTee May 27 2010 09:41 AM Re: State of the Journalism Industry

An interesting trend in local media: L3C The brash owner of the Point Reyes Light - who put his normally meditative readers into a state of high anxiety - has sold the newspaper to what essentially is a no-profit company, raising hope among the ink-stained of a new era in financing for print media. The sale of the Pulitzer Prize-winning paper to a group of journalists, educators and community leaders should end the hostility that has taken hold of this bucolic West Marin community since former Monterey County prosecutor Robert Plotkin bought the paper five years ago. Plotkin, who immediately generated enmity when he vowed to turn the sleepy little newspaper into the New Yorker magazine of the West, sold the paper for considerably less than the $500,000 he paid for it, according to several sources involved in the negotiations. The terms of the sale, completed May 21 and announced today, were not disclosed, but the paper will be run henceforth as a limited liability company for the benefit of the community, the ownership group said. "I think it is part of the future," said Mark Dowie, chairman of the editorial advisory committee for the ownership group, Marin Media Institute. "It's a way to save small-town community newspapers." The sale was financed by $350,000 in donations from 75 people, including San Francisco media financier Warren Hellman and descendents of the family that once owned The Chronicle. "The money should last two years, so we'll have two years to get some grants," said Corey Goodman, a local biologist who is chairman of the board of the media institute. "We hope to have a real profitable community newspaper." The Light will officially be a low-profit limited liability company, known as an L3C. That essentially means that it will be operated like a business, with much of the revenue coming from advertising, but the profits will be invested in what Dowie called "village journalism." The L3C category provides a structure that facilitates investments in socially beneficial, for-profit ventures. Grants can be used to make program-related investments. Spoiled daughter Plotkin likened his role in the sale to that of a father approving the marriage of his spoiled daughter to an aristocratic suitor. "I am glad she is marrying into West Marin's hippy oligarchy, who can more easily support her spendthrift habits," Plotkin wrote in a prepared statement. "The non-profit that purchased the Light has the financial backing of hectomillionaires and will be able to increase spending on reporters and staff without worrying about profit." Although there has been a lot of talk lately about saving newspapers by turning them into nonprofit corporations, the Light is the first community paper in the Bay Area and one of a very few newspapers nationwide to be owned by an L3C. The new owners immediately restored the old newspaper logo, a lighthouse, which was eliminated in a Plotkin redesign. A new staff writer was hired and contributors were lining up to submit their writing, said Tess Elliott, the editor. "It will continue to grow in order to better represent the communities in West Marin, including the very underrepresented Latino community," said Elliott, a poet who was hired by Plotkin four years ago. "The primary goal is to keep alive the printed paper and a lively newsroom, which I think is really critical to a good newspaper." The collision between Plotkin and West Marin highlighted the importance of the paper to the 15,000 people who live in 14 rural villages, including Bolinas, Woodacre and Point Reyes Station. After Plotkin bought the Light in 2005, he declared he would become "the Che Guevara of literary revolutionary journalism." He vowed, with characteristic chutzpah, to put the region on the map while his neighbors were busy removing directional signs on the highway. Plotkin recruited interns from East Coast journalism schools with vows that he would turn them into the next George Orwell or Joan Didion. But the want-to-be Orwells and Didions found themselves working slavishly in an unfamiliar and unwelcoming outpost inhabited by aging hippies who didn't like the idea of replacing the tie-dye shirts with the button-down variety. 'A pantywaist' Plotkin's well-publicized dispute with the Light's former publisher, David Mitchell, further alienated the locals. Plotkin accused Mitchell, who was awarded a public-service Pulitzer Prize in 1979, of a variety of transgressions. Mitchell, in turn, called Plotkin "a pantywaist." It was a philosophical gulf so gaping that locals demonstrated in front of the newspaper offices in Point Reyes Station with signs urging community members to "Take Back the Light." A rival publisher started up a competing newspaper called the West Marin Citizen. "Robert Plotkin was a fish out of water here," said Dowie, the former publisher and editor of Mother Jones magazine. Plotkin did not appear chastened after completing the sale and instead offered a critique of the community's literary tastes. "Sadly, West Marin did not want editorial excellence. They did not want to see behind the curtain," he said. "They wanted a newspaper that would record their births, celebrate their accomplishments and habitually congratulate them on living here. But most of all, the neo-romantics of West Marin took themselves too seriously." Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... z0p92R0tTQ