Category: Blog Post

A couple of interesting meditations on the newspaper industry today. Generally, we just feel like we want to disagree on principal with such grandiose pronouncements as Michael Malone makes today over at ABC news, namely that “newspapers are dead.” All you need to do to refute such a silly claim is to look over the past fifty years of media history. Both television and radio were supposed to obsolete the printed word, but they didn’t—in fact, they helped build a readership which saw the inherent, qualitative differences in media. Now, according to Malone—a weird holdover from the heady days of the Web’s initial revolutionary zealots—the web will be the final coup de grace.

We hate to break it to Malone, but he simply doesn’t matter as much as he thinks he does: It is not the readers who will determine the fortunes of newspapers. It is the advertisers. We all know that readers are the third wheel in this relationship, have been for a long time… Recent circulation scandals are not scandals because they reflect badly on Americans reading less. They are a scandal because newspaper executives are lying to advertisers about their rate-bases. The basic paradigm—that advertising in print works—has not changed one iota, and there is a massive support industry designed to convince advertisers and publishers that their endless toil has the result they want to believe it does. (Interesting, innit, how there has been so much trouble transferring that same confidence to the web, where the science and technology of tracking actual readers through the content is so much more advanced.)

More to the point, as Jack Shafer makes clear in his excellent piece today about the strange maneuvers of Philip Anschutz, the only thing that is really outdated about newspapers today, in a concrete business sense, is the margins in which they continue to operate. Thirty percent is typical at a strong metropolitan daily! Those are numbers anyone in the media buisness, outside of television, would die for.

We’re not sure we agree with Shafer’s assertion that these healthy margins are due to “harvesting market strength” in the short term— but then we live in a city with one of those exceptional dailies that has actually managed to sustain growth in circulation. The other thing that is exceptional about the Twin Cities is that Kinght-Ridder—the bedraggled bridesmaid here—is everywhere else considered forward-thinking, whereas here the Pi-Press’s website is one of the most shamefully useless sites on the web, which comports well with the generally cadaverous scent of the whole operation down on Cedar Street.

No, newspapers will stick around just as long as TV, radio, and the web stick around, but they will continue to evolve—some for the better, some for the worse, many for free…. but all somewhat independently of whether the reading (listening, browsing) public thinks there is any value in them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Terri Schiavo, which, I think, puts me in some pretty good company–that of people who believe life is sacred and we shouldn’t allow it to end without good reason.

Like the abortion and death penalty debates, poor Terri has become a nexus of American confusion among our nation of laws, our nation under God, and our nation currently being run by the people who only believe in the law or God when it suits their political purpose.

As for what I think of whether Terri Schiavo should die, I couldn’t put it nearly so well as Harriet McBryde Johnson did on Slate yesterday. If Terri can live, like any profoundly injured or ill person–with care and feeding–she should. What’s being done to let her die is wrong, but it does have a rationale I can understand. It is not murder theologically unless Michael Schiavo believes it to be. He doesn’t. Unlike DeLay, Frist and Bush, he’s not a cynic. And whether Michael Schiavo is right or not, someday he will know when his own time comes.

What makes the political right’s attempt to keep Terri alive even more vile than her husband’s desire to let her die though is beautifully summed up by this piece by Dahlia Lithwick, also posted on Slate yesterday. She points out the irony of the right’s signature “defense of marriage” at the same time they are willing to put government firmly between a man and his wife. (Lithwick also notes that the money which has paid for Terri’s care came from a malpractice lawsuit of just the sort Congress wants to limit.)

When it comes down to it, I think I’d rather have someone like Michael Schiavo representing my interests than DeLay, Frist or Bush. I can only hope that that epiphany I spoke of above comes, too, to that unholy trinity. It would be great if it came early in November 2006, but I can wait for St. Peter if I have to.

We had a laugh a few months ago, when there was that little dust-up between the gay fellows over at Powerline and the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman. They’d all been in a running firefight—liberal this, neo-con that—and while we’ve come to appreciate the deceptively euphonious rhetoric of the full-time bloggers and Rather-slayers, they were far outmatched in wits by Coleman, who is, after all, a professional.

But that little flap went nookular when the bloggers’ boss at TCF Bank decided to step into this little flea-circus with a sledgehammer. Bill Cooper, an excitable, longtime GOP honcho, pledged that his bank would buy no more advertising with the Star Tribune so long as he was at the controls. (We commented at the time that TCF stockholders and directors were no doubt gratified with Cooper’s decision to make sure the last anyone heard about the company was that its CEO was making such an aggressive personal stance with ~their~ money.)

Now TCF has ingeniously gone one better—they’ve committed to buy the naming rights to the new stadium at the University of Minnesota for the kingly sum of $35 million. That kind of cabbage would have bought a lot of advertising in the Strib, of course, but we think it’s a brilliant move. Given that the daily—and all dailies like it—have rolled over on this insidious form of commericalizing public information, TCF will get its advertising and brand extension into the fish wrap anyway, without having to give the employers of Nick Coleman one red cent. Take that, you pantywaist, glue-sniffing liberals!

We note that the words “Target Center” have appeared in the pages of newspapers around the land more than one thousand times in the last month—ninety-seven times in the Strib. The cancelled NHL season didn’t prevent the words “Xcel Energy Center” from being recorded in the Newspaper of the Twin Cities nearly sixty times in the last three weeks.

This give us a great deal of Adidas-brand pride in the Visa-Mastercard ingenuity of the entrepreneurial spirit, still so manifestly alive and well here in the United States of Halliburton.

Here is a true-life fairy tale for all embattled and embittered freelance writers everywhere—and we can say with some satisfaction that we know this fable by heart. But let’s run through the paces anyway, and we may arrive at a new and surprising moral to the story.

A solid mid-masthead writer at a New York magazine has been writing good if not sizzling feature stories for several years. He is already way ahead of most of his peers; it is a dream job to have a writing contract for a Manhattan glossy, a lot like reaching the Major Leagues. But after a change of management, he is suddenly out of favor, and he is fired. He spends the next year or so trying not so much to get another contract as to merely land an assignment. He finally gets one at another major publisher, and he produces the story. It is killed. He progresses slowly down the long list of potential markets, hitting what finally appears to be the bottom of his list—some city magazine in the outback, which likes the story and publishes it.

In the meantime, the writer manages to land another assignment back in Manhattan, but this story too is ultimately killed—for no apparent reason other than the caprice of the editors. This story too finds a home at that same humble city magazine. So now virtually every prestigious magazine publisher in New York—Conde Nast, Rodale, Wenner, probably Hearst too—has had its crack at Potter, and has taken a pass.

Early the following year, both stories are nominated for the industry’s highest honor—the National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzers (?) of the glossy world. So, then. A happy ending indeed, for Max Potter—and, one surely hopes, a shaming experience for Jim Nelson, Michael Caruso, Jann Wenner. And a sobering one for any other editors-in-chief with nose to grindstone in the slabs of Mid-Town. (Well, we don’t really expect such a widespread deflation of ego over there, but it’s fun to fantasize.)

As Potter mentions in today’s Observer, though, the really shameful thing is that his story is literally the exception that proves the rule. One can only imagine the hundreds of stories that never get published nor even written, because New York editors are too concerned about lunch at The Four Seasons and too worried about out-manuevering one another for whoever passes for the A-Rod of the moment in magazine writing. See, the thing is, the reading public cares less than anyone dares to imagine about bylines and mastheads, and while we editors are busy googling ourselves and calculating our own Q-ratings, the public yearns to be surprised, entertained, enlightened—and they do not need to see a writer’s resume first.

What we’re trying to say in our clumsy way is that there simply is not enough curiosity, good humor, and open-mindedness in an industry that takes itself far too seriously, and honors committments to ego before it ever gets around to processing and properly rewarding solid journalism that happens to be produced by a nobody.

Now, the surpising moral of this story: It is the same editors who rejected Mr. Potter’s stories the first time around who sit on the juries that this time not only accepted them, but considered them some of the best journalism produced in the nation last year. How did that happen? Whether this confirms or contradicts your own worst impressions of the magazine industry, we say bravo to 5280, and we think it bodes well for publications that don’t operate with the same levels of narcissism required of our New York friends.

We’ve been on vacation in Florida this week and for us news junkies it’s been a pleasure to partake of the St. Petersburg Times, and ignore the usual suspects. In consequence, we’ve been able to read the local, rather than national, coverage of the Terri Schiavo case, and get the perspective of the people who have been covering the story since way before DeLay and Frist decided to play God.

One story today noted the outrage of Florida Republicans at DeLay referring to Florida judge George Greer as a murderer and terrorist. It happens that Judge Greer is himself a Republican, and has a lot of Republican friends who have rallied to his defense. The irony of the Republican Congress violating its own oft repeated mantra of states’ rights to interfere in a Florida matter is not lost on the people down here. Say what you want about Florida (and we are certainly guilty of calling them names ourselves on many occasions,) but the folks here, even many right-to-lifers, don’t care much for DeLay’s cynical grandstanding.

Also today, an editorial pointed out that President Bush’s pronouncement that he should “err on the side of life” rings a bit hollow when one takes a look at the executions he approved while governor of Texas, including that of Gary Graham, the last American to be executed for a crime committed while a juvenile. As the Times points out, Graham was almost certainly innocent, and yet Bush rationalized his execution by asserting that he was guilty of other crimes. Actually the Times didn’t equivocate at all on the topic of Bush’s pronouncement: “That is a contemptible hypocrisy,” is the exact language they used.

Finally, columnist Howard Troxler asked today why DeLay and Frist waited during a legal procedure that has been going on for years before they acted “to say our [Florida’s] law does not count.” He recounts the story of Thomas More, albeit the fictionalized one of A Man for All Seasons. You may remember Thomas More as a genuinely religious man who gave his life for his principles when he refused to approve the divorce of Henry VIII. Troxler notes that the government of Henry was willing to trample its own laws for its political ends.

No matter what you think of whether Terri Schiavo should be kept alive or allowed to die, it is clear that the Florida judiciary did not take the matter lightly. The litigation has been going on for years. All sides have had their day in court, and the Florida legislature has had ample opportunity to make its wishes known.

In that context, the self righteous Thomas DeLay stands out in sharp contrast to the righteous Thomas More. One can only hope the Christian voters in Florida remember the difference the next time they get a chance to make their opinion known as to which sort of religion they prefer.