CSotD: Adventures among the ink-stained wretches
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"You must be looking through my windows!" is a common remark made to cartoonists, but mostly about domestic comedy strips.
However, today's Carpe Diem makes me suspect that Niklas Erikson was following me around at one newspaper I worked where, at the department head meetings, I made myself unpopular by, when someone mentioned an uptick or downtick, asking if it were month-to-month or year-to-year.
I thought it mattered.
For instance, if you say that, in November, circulation fell by X-percent, it could be pretty stunning. If you mean from the previous November.
If you mean from the previous month, October, it's not all that surprising, at least, not in the Northeast, because a lot of snowbirds shut down their houses around Halloween and head for Florida. The question then becomes whether to hold on to them perhaps by offering a special postal subscription rate, and whether keeping the circulation numbers is worth the cost of mailing papers.
Another possible solution is converting them to a digital replica ("e-edition") subscription, an increasingly attractive option given the fact that snowbirds are often pretty computer literate, at least within the demographic of retired folks.
On the other hand, if it's down from the previous November, then it's time for everyone to run around the room screaming and tearing out their hair.
But running around the room screaming requires less math, so we did that in either case.
Knowing how things work, however, does not necessarily lead to sound decisions.
As long as we're talking about newspapers and numbers, Pat Bagley offers this reflection on Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that, as he suggests, is dedicated to sucking the lifeblood out of the newspapers it owns.
He's not making this up. The Denver Post (for whom I freelance) ran a courageous, heartbreaking editorial a few weeks ago begging for someone, anyone to buy the paper before Alden killed it completely with layoffs and cutbacks.
The editorial was accompanied by several op-ed pieces explaining how the company takes money from the newspaper and pisses it away on foolish, speculative investments elsewhere, while downsizing both the staff and the newspaper itself, which has, over the past few years, gone from giant paperweight to wispy brochure.
At the time, it seemed the owners were allowing the paper to be unusually frank, but apparently they were just a bit blindsided. Corporate's top brass recently spiked a follow-up piece and a number of Post management figures have just walked out.
It's not as simple as someone buying the paper, or, at least, buying the paper isn't simple.
Though at least the Post still has a press.
At small papers, the vultures' first move is to sell the press and contract out their printing. So you wouldn't have the control of quality or of budget you'd likely want without a second major capital output.
Meanwhile, as Bagley's cartoon indicates, the Post is only one of the papers under Alden's umbrella.
A.J. Liebling is credited with saying "Freedom of the Press Is Guaranteed Only to Those Who Own One," and the background on that quote is worth reading.
It is possible to put out a newspaper entirely on-line, as with South Africa's Daily Maverick, which launched as an on-line only paper in 2009, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which converted to on-line only that same year after nearly 150 years in print.
But the more common local aggregators are not the same thing and will never have the same reach or impact as a "real" newspaper. You can succeed in re-purposing police and fire handouts and collecting community news, along with birth and marriage announcements and so forth.
However, to take the place of a for-real newspaper, you have to have a full-sized, professional newsroom to do the original collecting and writing of the news — not just what the highway department is doing on the main drag, which is contained in the press release, but why they're doing it and who called the shot — which requires trained, disciplined reporters and a long-term intimacy with city hall.
Which is to say that you can have freedom of the press in a conceptual way without having any of the actual benefits of a free, active press on a practical level.
I think it might be better to not have it at all than to have the illusion without the reality.
Open to discussion
Chan Lowe suggests, if Donald Trump were to win a Nobel Prize for his efforts in North Korea, it would not be the worst awarding in the history of the prize. (And I wish I thought his use of flies were a reminder that Arafat is dead rather than some kind of ethno-political commentary.)
But here's who is missing from the cartoon: Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, because the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to all three for the Oslo Agreements, and, if Trump should get a medal, he'd have to share it with North Korea's Kim Jong-un and South Korea's Moon Jae-
Probably the same year the physics prize goes to someone for developing perpetual motion.
Note that the Oslo Agreements did not usher in an Age of Peace and Plenty in the Middle East.
Though it was not as transparently futile as in 1973, when the prize was awarded jointly to Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho for the treaty that ended that war. Theoretically.
It being so clearly farcical that Le Duc Tho declined to accept his half.
Might be kind of fun to award the prize to Trump, Kim and Moon just to see who has the cojones to touch the thing.
On a much lighter note
Friend-of-the-Blog Terri Libenson has a new graphic novel out (here's a review).
I bought her first one, Invisible Emmy, for my granddaughter only to find she already had it, which was pretty encouraging for Terri.
But this time, I'll ask.
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