Whap! Whap!

It’s a fact. A Pulitizer Prize winner says so. Not only that, but they’re too small and need to be owned by corporate behemoths to ever be good. I wish I were making this up, but it’s all here, in the Washington Post.

Business writer Steven Pearlstein and I agree on some points. Newspapers have to surrender huge profit margins to survive … OK, so we agree on one point.

From there, his recommendations are astonishingly contemptuous of customers. Some highlights:

“Today there are 1,437 daily newspapers in the United States, of which all but 400 have circulations of under 25,000. At that size, it is unlikely they can ever be very efficient or, for that matter, very good.”

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Ah, the mainstream media is having a field day over Obama’s “bitter” remarks. He is so elitist!

On the other hand, Republicans apparently are not elitist at all, from what I’ve found in newspapers. Rich men sending disadvantaged youth to die in Iraq aren’t elitist. Rich men preserving top-notch healthcare for themselves aren’t elitist. Denying family-planning help to poor people isn’t elitist.

I know, because if it were, “liberal” newspapers would tell me.

A new report says that the internet soon will overtake newspapers in the race for ad dollars in Britain. How soon? Next year.

This is both a technology and political story on several fronts. Broadband penetration is far higher over there than over here. In fact, the U.S. is falling behind a number of countries in broadband. Seems many American phone companies have followed the same disastrous path that newspapers find themselves on: heaps of debt from acquisitions and paltry R and D budgets.

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I wrote this for the employee newsletter at The Columbian six or seven years ago. At the time, few people found it appropriate or helpful. Not much has changed in the ensuing six or seven years:

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My wife, Kris, comes from a family that owns a cabin on the shores of Lake Chelan.

I thought about the cabin yesterday when I read the e-mail about stress and change, but not because it conjured an image of its serene beauty. I thought about it because earlier this summer a wildfire ravaged the area, causing the entire family to worry about the beloved house.

The fire came at a time when I was staying awake nights worrying about stagnant websites and how to re-invent New Media to cope with a 50 percent cut in resources. (more…)

I run a company that carries people and freight to Hawaii.
Way back when, people used boats to haul all this cargo. But then came a new-fangled invention called railroads. Back then, hauling people and cargo to Hawaii was so lucrative that my grandfather and some of the other cargo companies bought railroad trains and even built bridges to Hawaii to haul stuff over there.
Now railroads are expensive to run, and very capital-intensive, so soon most of our competitors failed, leaving us with all the business.
Our customer base became very diverse. There were the people. They wanted to be entertained and kept informed of events back home on their way to Hawaii, so we hired people to report the news. We also hired entertainers. Mostly comics.
We carried freight of various classifications. So many classifications in fact that eventually we came to call the freight “Classifieds”
We also carried chickens, because Hawaiians wanted eggs and livestock. We built tables for the livestock to perch on so we could collect the eggs without bending over. We eventually came to refer to these as livestock tables, and then simply as “stock tables.” (more…)

The liberal media. We see blatant examples every day, like this one from the far-left … Virginian-Pilot????

How do we know the Pilot is so far-left? Because it refused to honor two high school artists because they painted or sculpted nudes, and posters in the paper’s forums pointed out this obvious liberal bias. Now, you ask, in what conceivable way is this an indication of liberal bias? I don’t know, and apparently the people who said it don’t either, or at least didn’t bother to explain. (more…)

The liberal New York Times has another hit piece against … a liberal.

This time it’s Deval Patrick, but the real target is Barack Obama (read it here). What liberal media, indeed?

This morning on the Today show, Chris Matthews said that John McCain had run a “brilliant” campaign as the anti-Bush candidate. This is on NBC, the network most often criticized for its liberal bias, yet no one questioned his absurdly anti-liberal bias. John McCain has adopted the Bush doctrine in its entirety. Yet the mainstream media still portray him as a “maverick.” The message: Those silly liberals are wrong; you can vote for McCain in good conscience even if you dislike George W. Bush.

I guess that’s true, but you definitely cannot vote for John McCain in good conscience if you dislike George W. Bush’s policies.

Yet McCain is being framed as an agent of change.

I spent 30 years working in newspapers. I had lofty ideals, big dreams, helped usher in incredible technological innovation … and ultimately left the industry in much worse shape than when I found it.OK. I can’t take all the credit for the industry’s problems. I had plenty of help from my fellow Baby Boomers.

In fact, in some ways my career might be a microcosm of the broader failure of leadership in our generation. When I entered the field in the 1970s, the future looked bright for print journalists. It’s true that the industry already was showing signs of a serious illness. A number of big city papers were failing, but it was to attribute that to the stagflation that had hold of the economy and the crime wave that had hold of the big cities. People were moving to the suburbs, and as they did suburban dailies cropped up to replace the shuttered metros.

So we knew we were a little sick, but we were confident that it was nothing more than the cyclical kind of sickness newspapers always had faced. I knew that my generation, with our passions inflamed by Woodward and Bernstein, would ignite a resurgence the likes of which the country had never seen.

I didn’t notice the clues that the symptoms of more serious illness. I didn’t notice that many of fellow Boomers didn’t love papers the way I did. Circulation numbers were up, so who cared if household penetration numbers were headed south. As my cohort settled into family life, the numbers would go back up. I just knew it, and so did my colleagues. Unfortunately, the problem never cured itself. Eventually we realized that, and set off in a million different directions to find solutions. Shorter stories, color graphics, humanized leads. None of it worked. We were dying a slow death, along with the other institutions of our parents: fraternal organizations, bowling leagues, lifelong careers at the same company …We just never found a way to make the institution our own. There were radical ideas along the way, but when it came down to implement them, we were too terrified to try. Too terrified that we might fail and lose our precious jobs in disgrace.

Eventually there came a time when some of my colleagues acknowledged the pending end of papers, but we were comforted in their belief that it wouldn’t happen in our career lifetime. We will be safe. But boy, that next generation is going to have one hell of a mess on its hands. (more…)