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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Tell Derf it was only business. We always liked him.

Published: July 30, 2013 1 minute 7 comments

Newtoon
And now it's Derf Backderf's turn: "Coach wants to see you. Bring your sketchbook."

This is the last "The City" strip, at least, the last one in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which joins other Advance Publications newspapers next week in going to a four-day-a-week home delivery schedule, and not only eliminates the section his weekly strip was in, but also (for the purposes of subscribers) the day it was on. 

(Derf's brilliant book "My Friend Dahmer" is something you should own. This would be an excellent time to buy it.)

Some people — mostly on the outside — are going to say, well, there you go. Print is dead; long-live the Internet.

The whole print/online medium thing is spectacularly not the point. 

In fact, the whole "journalism" thing is spectacularly not the point, as the new president of the reformed company blithely, if indirectly, says in that above-linked article:

“When we launch the Northeast Ohio Media Group on August 5th, the
foundation of the team will be sales and marketing executives from
Cleveland.com, The Plain Dealer and Sun News … That
integration of expertise, along with some very talented new hires, is
paramount to our mission.”

New hires? Show me. They're going to be laying off people in the newsroom, and not just Derf. But, hey, gotta break some eggs to make an omelet, right?

This is not a case of sitting by the bedside of an aging grandparent, holding his hand as he gradually slips away.

It's like being married to a junkie or a compulsive gambler or a real-life-and-therefore-not-funny Ralph Kramden, watching him blow one opportunity after another, watching him fail at every possible chance to climb out of the hole, waiting for that late-night phone call that won't be him stuck without money miles from home or maybe in jail for something stupid but fixable.

No, it will be someone official, telling you he screwed up one last time and in a way that can't be fixed.

And, while you lose sleep waiting for that call, you get to hear him explain every stupid, ill-conceived, ridiculous plan along with an excited, optimistic storyline of how it's going to make everything better, and you start out listening and believing, but, after awhile, you just listen and no longer believe, while a little voice within you says, "Here we go again," and yet there you sit.

So Advance Publications explains how cutting back on content and delivery is going to save the industry, and that little voice asks, "Why am I falling for this?" but you want to believe, so you don't say it aloud.

Besides, rich people in expensive suits say it will work, and they should know.

In the Honeymooners scenario, those guys in expensive suits hand out fancy brochures that explain how rich Ralph is going to be once he becomes a distributor for Magic Elixir and gets all his friends to become distributors and gets them to host get-togethers to show all their friends how great Magic Elixir is.

It's gotta be legit — look at how fancy the brochure is. Look at how expensive their suits are. Look at how lucky Ralph was to be invited in on the ground floor of this fabulous opportunity for such a low, low investment.

And what an honor it is for him to be trusted to stand there and hold the bag.

Same deal. And stop blaming the Internet. It's not about the Internet. 

Look around. Do you see any naked people? No. People still buy clothes, and it's not some inevitable consequence of progress that they're wearing clothes made by underpaid, exploited workers in Bangladesh instead of by well-paid workers in the United States. 

The guys in the expensive suits made a conscious decision to shut down their American factories and go overseas, and, after all, what's good for the syndicate is good for all of us.

Similarly, people still want to know what's going on. The Internet is the sweatshop that tells them.

And you can talk about how the "industry" is going down, but the geniuses at corporate aren't the ones losing money any more than the owners of the clothing industry are losing money.

They're stockholders, not publishers, and they're not there to make newspapers. They're there to make profits, and they're in about as much danger of losing out as that guy handing out the fancy brochures about Magic Elixir distributorships.

It's not about the freaking elixer: It's about the distributorships. And it's not about the freaking newspapers.

Newspapers are viable. You can set up a good local newspaper and make enough money to pay your staff, cover your costs and still have a nice house on the hill and a new car.

Just as, assuming Magic Elixir actually worked, you could make a nice living selling it through drug stores and markets, maybe on the Internet and by mail order, to people who wanted to cure whatever it cured.

Newspapers still work, but it stopped being about the freaking newspapers back in the 1980s when the guys in the fancy suits started buying up family-owned papers and turning them into massive publicly-traded franchises.

Then they cut back their costs, cannibalizing what they could and eliminating what they couldn't consume or spin off, to maximize P/L and spike stock prices, and the fact that they screwed up the central product was irrelevant, because the "central product" was now the stock, not the newspapers.

Cutting back the size of the paper and the number of days you deliver it is not a plan to do anything more than slow the train down enough that the guys in suits can safely jump off before it plows into the wall. 

In other words, when Alice makes Ralph go back and get a refund for his investment in the Magic Elixir Company, he's going to find an empty office, because the guys with the fancy brochures have skipped out. They never paid their rent, they didn't pay the printer and there never was any Magic in the freaking Elixir.

Of course, it's only a metaphor. The Magic Elixir guys had to head for Costa Rica to stay one step ahead of the law.

The stocktraders can stay right here and do it again to another industry and to another set of workers.

They don't have to stay one step ahead of the law. As John Oliver noted about Detroit's bankruptcy, the government will step in to prop up General Motors, but when it comes to pension and retirement promises?

Tell Grandpa it was only business. We always liked him.

 

 

UPDATE: Here's the ever-so-classy memo from the suits.

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Comments 7

  1. The paper I wrote for 30 years ago went from small-town family ownership to distant corporate control, with the usual empty assurances and broken promises. It taught me valuable life lessons about the difference between “business” and “friends,” and that when someone says “we’re like family” it doesn’t mean they’ll let you sleep on their sofa after they lay you off. At least those new owners were a “media group” newspaper chain that ostensibly wanted to stay in the business, and last I checked that paper was still publishing, albeit with a newsroom staff one-third the size it had when I was there (which is to say about four instead of 12; it was a SMALL paper…).
    I’m watching my current local paper with great interest. Circulation about 80k, long-ago family-owned, then owned by the New York Times (which brought some meddling but also some cachet), then sold to one of the strip-mining carrion munchers you mention. That was a few years ago and their intentions were clear: strip the paper of anything valuable and skip town. By all accounts they nearly did it, until a group of local investors/community leaders stepped up and bought it back. There are some potential conflicts of interest–some of the paper’s new owners are the sorts that a paper would normally watch like a hawk–but editorial independence was promised and so far appears to be lived up to. If this works, it could be a model other communities and papers could follow.
    Newspapers can still work, especially at a local level, and there’s nothing that can take their very important place (not even “citizen journalists!”). In my mind the danger isn’t that newspapers actually become irrelevant, but that everyone (especially young readers) THINKS they’re irrelevant, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  3. I remember, just about that time, being tremendously impressed that the editor of one of the local papers could log on at home and check out the news feed — even edit text if he wanted to.
    The rest of the conversation didn’t really start up until the graphic interface began and home computers became more common, if not ubiquitous.
    That’s the point at which the fragmented culture of newspapers became toxic — I’ve worked in the newsroom, in marketing and in circulation, and given rare privileges if not an official seat in production. But when you sit in a dept head meeting, you realize that they have no idea how anything works around their own little sphere, and, while publishers used to have a more cross-departmental awareness, they’re coming right out of sales or accounting now, and have since papers went corporate.
    The decisions being made — on this and other topics — have been a combination of protecting your own turf and having no clue as to what else goes on the the building, and the result is as we see.
    It’s fun to remember the Wild West days when not just newspapers but businesses across the board were bringing in random geeks to try to get them into the computer age, but hearing those guys blithely say they wouldn’t make money, they just want to see if they can do it? That was useful as an experiment, but they never should have let the kids do more than drive the car back and forth in the driveway.
    Rupert Murdoch still has his email printed out for him. How I wish his level of technical awareness wasn’t such a worthy symbol of it all. We had Rupert and his printed-out emails at one end of the building, and a group of “Magic the Gathering” freaks making decisions at the other end, and everyone else caught in the middle.
    It wasn’t the technology — it was the lack of oversight, the lack of insight, the lack of competent decision-making.

  4. And, Brian, I am so with you on the self-fulfilling prophecy aspect. There is a piling-on that isn’t simply unoriginal and unseemly but harmful, and, when it is fueled from within, it’s a real head-scratcher.
    Last weekend, when I was orienting our new reporters, I told them one of the obligations was to read the publication each week, and I asked them, if they were running a restaurant, would they hire a cook who said, “Oh, no, I’d never EAT here!”
    I told them that, if they want to work in my kitchen, they need to eat in my restaurant.
    But newsrooms now are full of reporters who don’t read the paper, and they aren’t all 23 years old. And they are hired and supervised by editors who don’t dare ask them to please do something so unhip as “read the damn paper” for fear of looking old and square.
    Neither Perry White nor Lou Grant ever suffered from that fear.

  5. (In these discussions I hate to keep drawing on my paltry experience as a newspaper reporter ages ago, but it’s all I’ve got…)
    Back in those dark ages, I always took a few minutes at my desk to read our paper pretty much front to back (small paper, didn’t take long). The news editor and I were out to lunch once and he mentioned he’d noticed that. I started hemming and hawing, thinking I’d been busted for wasting company time. “No no,” he said, “you’re the only one who does it. Keep it up.”

  6. Well, now you’re giving me flashbacks … I was the main business writer, so I’d start each day going through the WSJ looking for trends that could be localized as well as stories and briefs about local companies. I got busted for it by the city editor — reading papers instead of working. (Never mind that I was inputting three or four briefs a day, beyond the features thus generated.)
    I explained that it was my job to be familiar with what was going on in business, particularly as it related to the local economy, and was told maybe I could do that at home so other reporters wouldn’t see me doing it. So, I asked, are you going to have a separate subscription to the Journal sent to my house? And, oh by the way, I’ll consider myself on the clock while I read it at home.
    This, mind you, was back in the days when the idea of beat reporters who know what it going on in their area was still alive in newsrooms. Today, they’re spread too thin. Find an expert. Ask him questions. Publish whatever the hell he tells you. Go on to the next story.
    And thus a darkly humorous horror story becomes the default. *sigh*

  7. The “Sun” newspapers are mostly canned stuff and ads, with a few page of local stories (the Medina edition includes Strongsville news, which is a bit like having Pittsburgh and Philly covered by one paper) They “serve” the small communities whose local papers (such as The Wadsworth News-Banner and The Lodi Advertiser have long been run out of business. )They used to throw the Sun in your driveway every Thursday, but so many piled up in the ditches (along with The West Side Leader and The Trading Post) that they sent out cards where you had to enclose $1 to acknowledge you wanted it “delivered” in perpetuity. I didn’t, so I no longer get The Sun. Just so you know, the PD is not being partnered with The Times, here.

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