50 responses to
“My plea.”

1. 

   velvet goldmine said on April 8th, 2008 at 10:27 am

   Oh my God, now I’m wor­ried I’m one of the annoy­ing and irrel­e­vant posters get­ting shoved to the back of the line. I’m going to have to start check­ing!

   When I worked at my paper, which was one of a fam­ily of three, the sales and dis­tri­b­u­tion was a con­stant annoy­ance to the reporters — and vice versa, I’m sure. But it always seemed that it was on our shoul­ders to write the stu­pid “gift guides” and mer­chant spot­lights, rather than have the aging sales staff come up with any good ideas.

   Our own paper’s sales rep, when we saw her, was a sit­com in her­self. She was lit­er­ally a shopa­ho­plic who spent more time buy­ing crap dur­ing her sales calls than actu­ally sell­ing ad space. And, Nance, she actu­ally made away with the Nancy doll I was about to send you! I had to hunt her down and threaten her to keep her from garage-saling it.

   …Uh, yeah. I’m ram­bling. Back of the queue for me.

2. 

   nancy said on April 8th, 2008 at 10:41 am

   No one puts Vel­vet Gold­mine in a cor­ner! — Patrick Swayze

   Sto­ries of lazy, incom­pe­tent and oth­er­wise FUBAR ad sales­peo­ple are as com­mon as cof­fee stains in most news­rooms. But you’re mis­un­der­stand­ing the Slash­dot comment-rating sys­tem. When peo­ple file com­ments, oth­ers rate each one on its qual­ity. Those that make good points get higher rat­ings, the ones that say “DETRO1T SUXXXXX” get low ones. The com­ments load in order of qual­ity. So it quickly sends the shit to the back of the line. Not a bad idea, if you can’t spare the man­power to mod­er­ate in per­son.

3. 

   Danny said on April 8th, 2008 at 10:44 am

   …Every day, I read some­one online say­ing, “I can­celled my dead-tree paper because I don’t need it any­more. I read all my news online!” Well, good for you, then. Check back in a decade and tell me how that’s work­ing for you.

   Yes. This is so obvi­ous it sur­prises me that most poe­ple don’t get it.

   And regard­ing ads. Most peo­ple rou­tinely ignore online ads, but it is prob­a­bly not such a big deal, because the same can be said of print ads. So whether online or in print, the ads prob­a­bly catch about the same amount of eye­balls.

4. 

   Harl Delos said on April 8th, 2008 at 10:45 am

   It’s called geolo­ca­tion, Nancy. A num­ber of peo­ple sell data­bases, and there are a cou­ple of free ones, that map IP addresses to spe­cific loca­tions.

   There are prob­lems with geolo­ca­tion. If you use AOL, for instance, the IP the web­site sees is that of a proxy server in Vir­ginia, not the IP of your com­puter. And the broad­band com­pa­nies keep switch­ing IPs of their users, partly to keep you from run­ning a server in your home. If you want to do that, you need a fixed IP, and they’ll sell it to you at a fairly high price. It’s smarter to get a server sit­ting right on the inter­net back­bone.

   Nick Den­ton says that Pulitzers are bad for the news­pa­per indus­try. Back when news­pa­pers had a monop­oly, they could try to impress each other with the seri­ous­ness of their report­ing. The respect of peers is a lux­ury they can’t afford any more. Jeff Jarvis says if the Pulitzers had the future of jour­nal­ism at heart, they’d reward inno­va­tion.

   News­pa­pers have inno­vated – but not enough. When USA Today was founded 25 years ago, peo­ple laughed at McPa­per – but they used vel­lum instead of pulp, used full-color print­ing, and let adver­tis­ers blan­ket the US with a sin­gle inser­tion order. They also made the paper eas­ier to read – fewer jumps, for instance, and sto­ries that weren’t too chal­leng­ing, men­tally.

   There was a joke going around in the 1980s, that automak­ers were slowly adopt­ing Japan­ese man­u­fac­tur­ing ideas; so far, they’d started serv­ing sushi in the com­pany cafe­te­ria. Local news­pa­pers responded to USA Today in a sim­i­lar man­ner, by adding color, and remov­ing local con­tent.

   When news­pa­pers have had long strikes, 7 of the 10 items read­ers miss most were cat­e­gories of adver­tis­ing. But what do they use to fill up the sec­tion with the gro­cery ads? Recipes. That’s stu­pid.

   The most impor­tant sec­tion of the news­pa­per is obit­u­ar­ies, and most news­pa­pers have made obits smaller in the last 25 years. It’s as if they are try­ing to com­mit sui­cide.

   If I were try­ing to resus­ci­tate the News-Sentinel, or any other after­noon news­pa­per, I’d be cut­ting back on national and inter­na­tional news. A news­pa­per sim­ply can­not com­pete against CNN; the news changes com­pletely between the time the sto­ries are type­set and the news car­rier deliv­ers the paper to your door. And I’d elim­i­nate vir­tu­ally all the lifestyle sto­ries. If you can’t tell whether the story was writ­ten this week or last week, it doesn’t belong in the news­pa­per.

   What does? Local news. Schools, espe­cially. I’d dou­ble, or even triple, the space for high school sports, includ­ing the obscure sports. I’d dou­ble the space for obits, and increase the space for engage­ments and wed­dings by 50%. I’d actu­ally run some sto­ries about bowl­ing, instead of just print­ing scores.

   There used to be a fea­ture on WJR, back when they were in the “golden tower of the Fisher Build­ing”, called “peo­ple­worth” – sto­ries about peo­ple worth know­ing. They weren’t nec­es­sar­ily the lead­ers of finance, gov­ern­ment and indus­try. They weren’t nec­es­sar­ily peo­ple who were mak­ing a big dif­fer­ence. They were sim­ply sto­ries about the ordi­nary peo­ple who were extra­or­di­nary in some way – which describes about 90% of the pop­u­la­tion, once you start look­ing at peo­ple. Joe ties flies. Bill is learn­ing to fly, at the age of 73. Susan’s known for her egg noo­dles. Mil­dred coaches kids with Asperger’s Syn­drome in tech­niques that enable them to suc­ceed in school. Metta col­lects chick­ens in art and craft.

   I’ve seen about ten news­pa­pers over the years that claimed on their ban­ner or their mast­head, some­thing equiv­a­lent to “The only news­pa­per in the world that gives a hoot about Grosse Pointe,” but when you read the news­pa­per, you real­ize that even they barely give a hoot.

   I’m not sure that daily papers will sur­vive – but weekly ones can, if they stop play­ing “that’s the way every­one has always done it”. City mag­a­zines, I notice, seem to be thriv­ing….

5. 

   moe99 said on April 8th, 2008 at 10:50 am

   Nancy,
   As a Seat­tle res­i­dent for 27 years, I remem­ber how aghast I was at jour­nal­ism here when I first moved from D.C. We rented our house from a Seat­tle Times reporter so we sub­scribed to the Times (they also had the bet­ter comics then–always a deal maker) over the PI. Nei­ther paper has ever done report­ing well imo. The PI was a Hearst pub­li­ca­tion (nuff said) and the Times was owned by the Blethen fam­ily, which seemed to be totally parochial. I remem­ber one after­noon (the Times was the after­noon paper then) look­ing at the top head­line, and it was huge, which read: BILL MUNCEY DEAD!! Who the heck was he, we grum­bled. And it was not until we got to the sec­ond page of the arti­cle that we learned that he was a hydroplane dri­ver. Ah well.

   But your point about the boots on the ground nature of print jour­nal­ism vs. blog­ging is well taken. I think that Talk​ing​pointsmemo​.com is one site that is going beyond sim­ply com­men­tary and I would sus­pect we may see more as they fig­ure out how to cre­ate and main­tain a sta­ble rev­enue stream. For now, we are in the midst of that old Chi­nese curse: “May you live in inter­est­ing times.”

6. 

   Danny said on April 8th, 2008 at 10:51 am

   The com­ments load in order of qual­ity. So it quickly sends the shit to the back of the line. Not a bad idea, if you can’t spare the man­power to mod­er­ate in per­son.

   Hmm. Up until recently you could choose how you wanted com­ments fil­tered on slash­dot (e.g. high­est scores first, for­ward or reverse chron order, etc). I guess that choice is still there, i am just not see­ing it.

7. 

   Dave B. said on April 8th, 2008 at 11:30 am

   Nancy,
   I’m very con­cerned about all the peo­ple who can­cel their dead-tree papers. Cir­cu­la­tions seem to drop around 7% a year, and the papers seem to get thin­ner and smaller in size. My busi­ness shreds and fiber­izes about 250,000 tons annu­ally to make cel­lu­lose insu­la­tion. The demise of the dead-tree paper will also be the demise of my busi­ness. The big ques­tion is WHEN.

8. 

   Jeff Hall said on April 8th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

   I have, and will con­tinue to have as long as there are trees will­ing to give their life to be tattoo’d and deliv­ered to my door, a sub­scrip­tion to my local daily (in this case the Raleigh News and Observer – big shout out to the N&O, yo!), but the rela­tion­ship between the online world and tra­di­tional media needs to be rethought. There has to be a way to syn­chro­nize and cre­ate sym­bio­sis between the two. As long as we all try and make it a zero-sum game, then it will back­fire – we all lose.

   That said, the fact that news rooms across the US con­tinue to slash the num­ber of real reporters doing real jour­nal­ism in the name of some per­ceived eco­nomic ben­e­fit we will suf­fer as a repub­lic. A truly free press is the only real check on gov­ern­ment power we have. Sorry Judy Miller.

   And the com­ments most peo­ple leave on most web­sites, up to and includ­ing this one, are com­pletely and totally, what’s the word? Oh yeah. Dum­b­ass.

9. 

   whitebeard said on April 8th, 2008 at 12:11 pm

   As a dead-tree jour­nal­ist for the past half-century, first as a stringer and now as a free-lance colum­nist (with a hel­luva lot of chal­lenges in between) I see some news­pa­pers mor­ph­ing from just reprint­ing their paper sto­ries on the web. They offer slide shows and videos of top news sto­ries, oth­ers will put break­ing news on their web­sites or run updates on the web while their presses are idle. On obit­u­ar­ies, The Prov­i­dence Jour­nal in tiny Rhode Island, http://​www​.projo​.com has guest books online where friends and fam­ily can com­ment. One obituary’s guest book has 19 pages that will be on the web­site for slightly more than a year and seems to be able to accept audio and pho­tos. The New York Times broke the Gov­er­nor Eliot Spitzer sex scan­dal story on its web­site as it hap­pened and then did the fol­lowup in printed form. The news rooms of mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers have a flock of tal­ent that can pro­duce both web and print con­tent as long as the blood­let­ting does not get too severe. One writer told me his mag­a­zine has hired a half-dozen video­g­ra­phers (is that a word) to keep pace with the tech­nol­ogy and sup­ply video con­tent on its web­site. News is news, ladies and gen­tle­men, and should not be aban­doned to the new­com­ers who sit at a key­board and mon­i­tor and copy what­ever they find and present it as their own. OK, I will step down to the ground and put the soap­box back in the laun­dry room.

10. 

    velvet goldmine said on April 8th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    Nancy, thanks and a self-duh, rolled into one.

    White­beard, So many of the inno­va­tions you men­tion make sense. Make news­pa­pers the place for professionally-written hard news, sports, and fea­tures (and, while I’m dream­ing, the old-fashioned kind of “human inter­est” fea­tures, not the “news you can use” stuff).

    If my expe­ri­ence par­tic­i­pat­ing in brain­storm­ing ses­sions about what our newspaper’s web site should look like is typ­i­cal, I would assume that most papers focus over­much on the tal­ent of the web design­ers rather than in get­ting per­son­able, lively edi­tors to set the tone for the thing.

    Let the web sites be a read­ers’ hang­out for lively forums, the obits guest­books that you men­tioned, and for addi­tional stuff you can’t stuff into the paper. (I know as a wordy reporter and enthu­si­as­tic pho­tog­ra­pher, it always broke my heart to have to pick one just one photo and slice out the inter­est­ing mar­ginal text.)

    Wouldn’t it be great if news­pa­pers threw some more money at some of their more tal­ented colum­nists and had them kind of hang around the web sites andintroduce/moderate forum top­ics, spice up the com­ments — that kind of thing? It seems like a lit­tle thing, but it makes such a dif­fer­ence if there’s a kind of den mother at a forum to set the tone and make every­one feel like part of a com­mu­nity.

11. 

    John said on April 8th, 2008 at 12:31 pm

    The Prov­i­dence Jour­nal and many other news­pa­pers join with Legacy​.com in pub­lish­ing on-line obit­u­ar­ies. Legacy is one of my stops of my morn­ing rou­tine. Obit­u­ar­ies, in addi­tion to hon­or­ing the life of deceased, almost always have the fam­ily con­nec­tions that are tough to find else­where.

12. 

    whitebeard said on April 8th, 2008 at 1:20 pm

    vel­vet gold­mine. my expe­ri­ence with news­pa­per brain­storm­ing ses­sions is almost every­one, with note­wor­thy excep­tions, seems to leave their brain back at their desk. My wife was at one brain­storm­ing ses­sion where the bet­ter (or worst) part of an hour was spent dis­cussing the size of the sub­heads on the op-ed page and one math­e­mat­i­cal genius used a very pre­cise ruler to announce that the sub­head was 13 points, but the elec­tronic pho­to­type­set­ter only had 12 and 14 points. When my wife showed it to me, I replied that it was 12 points …. but it was out of focus … because the com­pos­ing room was hav­ing mechan­i­cal adjust­ment prob­lems. When there was a brain­storm­ing ses­sion at my news­pa­per and we went from down­style to upstyle, e.g. cap­i­tal­iz­ing the first let­ter of the first word in a head­line to cap­i­tal­iz­ing the first let­ter of every noun and verb in the head­line, there was a long heated dis­cus­sion of whether to cap­i­tal­ize pro­nouns, con­junc­tions and other words as in “To Be or Not to Be” My out­ra­geous sug­ges­tion (I have a loud voice even when I am not shout­ing) was totally upstyle in that every word in the head­line should start with a cap­i­tal let­ter just as in book and movie titles, so we could stop all this use­less bick­er­ing each day about “to” or “To” every time a head­line was writ­ten. My idea was accepted and is still In Force (mostly) more than a decade later, even on the web­site.

13. 

    nancy said on April 8th, 2008 at 1:28 pm

    Maybe part of the prob­lem is, no one reads *a* news­pa­per any­more — they read dozens. I do, any­way. So while I mourn what’s hap­pened to my old paper, I’ll still look at it online, and if I find a sin­gle inter­est­ing story, that’s a good day. But it doesn’t bug me as much as it would if the thing were sit­ting on my doorstep every evening, because I can read many more sto­ries, even sto­ries about FW, in the dozens of news sites and blogs I visit daily.

    The catch is, the fewer peo­ple take the paper at home, the more they cut staff, which reduces the chances I might find even one story on the web­site worth read­ing, and…

    That’s why I think maybe it’s time for the clean break from paper, or at least some sort of rad­i­cal shift. Require reg­is­tra­tion to get past the home­page of the news­pa­per, tar­get adver­tis­ing by zip code (or geo-location; thanks for the explainer, Harl), and aggres­sively sell the thing to online adver­tis­ers. Have rollover-and-expand ads, Flash, what­ever. But cut the costs on the production-and-delivery side, because that really is yes­ter­day. You can argue that there will always be a mar­ket for news, but you won’t cul­ti­vate it by drop­ping jour­nal­ists’ bod­ies.

    EDIT: Oh, and White­beard, your rec­ol­lec­tion sounds like most of the news­room meet­ings I suf­fered through. Once we spent an hour dis­cussing our mis­sion state­ment. Yes, we had one.

14. 

    Jen said on April 8th, 2008 at 1:30 pm

    What do peo­ple think about news­pa­per web­sites where you have to have a sub­scrip­tion or pay to read it online? The news­pa­per I work for has that.

    Our web­site has video and slideshows, so I think we’re start­ing to under­stand at least some of the poten­tial there. How­ever, I’m the one who is always check­ing my sto­ries and see­ing if they need to be linked to some­thing else.

    I think that news­pa­pers need to get more and more local if they’re going to sur­vive. I cringe when most of the front page of our paper is wire sto­ries. Today, all but one story on page 1 was local, but Mon­day, four of five sto­ries were wire. I’d ven­ture to say that there were few peo­ple who didn’t already know that Charl­ton Hes­ton died by Mon­day after­noon when the paper actu­ally got to their doorsteps. That’s one of the main things peo­ple com­plain about when I say I work for the news­pa­per: There’s too many AP sto­ries! Peo­ple I talk to usu­ally read the police news (arrests and wrecks), obits, engagements/weddings and divorce list­ings. They read the paper essen­tially for the local gos­sip, not for the national news.

    Also, it sounds like a silly thing to worry about, but some news­pa­pers (the one I work for included) could prob­a­bly stand for its comics page to be updated just a lit­tle bit. I was look­ing at back issues, and I don’t think our comics selec­tion has changed at all since the 1980s, and all of the comics from the 1970s still run in our paper. If they’re try­ing to get younger peo­ple to read the paper, they need to have more hip comics like Get Fuzzy or Zits and less stodgy ones like The Born Loser and Blondie.

    I could go on and on (don’t get me started on film and music crit­ics).

15. 

    moe99 said on April 8th, 2008 at 2:01 pm

    Nancy, this is OT but worth a read from Harpers.

    http://​harpers​.org/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​4​/​h​b​c​-​9​0​002819

    It’s the tale why attor­ney John Yoo gets a plum posi­tion after writ­ing the memo legal­iz­ing tor­ture and the attor­ney who fought against it is in dan­ger of being dis­barred. As an attor­ney, I am out­raged. And I wish more Bez­erkely grads would live up to their back­grounds and do some­thing about Yoo.

16. 

    velvet goldmine said on April 8th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    Yup, I guess most news­pa­per meet­ings are indeed the same. Maybe because there’s a cor­re­la­tion between alpha per­son­al­i­ties and those who worry about font and caps? Maybe because the con­tent peo­ple are hung over when the meet­ings hap­pen and in no shape to con­tribute?

    One meet­ing I went to hap­pened to be right after our sis­ter paper ran a front page with pho­tos from a fire, and so a rant started about how anal fire and police types are about let­ting the press on to acci­dent scenes and fire sites. They scoffed at the claim that one lit­tle per­son with a cam­era could get in the way. Think­ing about what a klutz I know myself to be, I timidly asked if the fire/cops might have a point.

    You would have thought I’d sug­gested that the media start run­ning all sto­ries by George W. Bush prior to run­ning them. I felt like a right idjit by the time I stum­bled out of that meet­ing.

17. 

    beb said on April 8th, 2008 at 2:16 pm

    So some­one who has all but stopped read­ing the Detroit Free Press I would argue that it isn’t so much that I’ve left the Freep as the Freep has left me. Since Gan­net sold the news and bought the Freep it has become thin­ner and more content-free.

    And the con­tent they do include often seems ill-considerd.
    Here’s Susan Tom­bor about a month back tout­ing adjustable-rate mortages as if ARMs weren’t at the heart of the cur­rent credit indus­try melt down. Last Sun­day she was tout­ing Reverse Mortages, which involves sell­ing your house to a mort­gage firm and liv­ing there until you’ve spent all your equity ad then its out on the street, grandma. What kind of a finace adviser con­stantly touts the lat­est scheme of flim-flam artists?

    The other busi­ness guy talks about how hard it is for busi­ness to oper­ate in Michi­gan but never talks about how hard it is to be a worker in Michi­gan. If they want to sell news­pa­pers they should be writ­ing to their largest audi­ence – work­ers – and not the Fords and De Vos who only see labor as an expense to beat down as fre­quently as pos­si­ble.

    One of the things I really miss about the Freep is its for­mer list­ings of impor­tant deaths from around the world. These days the world is divided into celebs whose deaths are front page news and your uncle whose announce­ment you have to pay to have inserted. When artist Dave Stevens, cre­ator of The Rock­e­teer (made into a movie) and insti­ga­tor of the sec­ond com­ing of Bet­tie page, died recently it would have been nice of the paper had men­tioned it.

    I’ve read the occa­sional arti­cle over the years which have pointed out how pornog­ra­phers have con­stantly been at the fore­front of tech­nol­ogy. It is said that with­out pornog­ra­phers the VCR would not have taken off, or the inter­net and that the recent bat­tle of blu-ray over HD-DVD awaited the deci­sion of the pornos which media to sup­port. So I’m not sur­prised that Porno sites have found new ways to tar­get web surfers. I just think it’s really creepy that they can do this kind of stuff. The inter­net was sup­posed to be all about anony­mous brows­ing and com­ment­ing but every time you turn around there’s some­one try­ing to rob you of your anonymity.

    Can this kind of tar­get­ted brows­ing help news­pa­pers? I sus­pect if there was more porno in news­pa­pers there would be more read­ers. Maybe the brits have some­thing with their “page 3″ girls… News­pa­pers used to run comic strips as cir­cu­la­tion builders and to do that (back in the 20s and 30s) they let daily strips run the width of the page, 5-6 pan­els long and 3-4 inches talk. You could tell a real story with that kind of space or put in some real art. Today’s strips are so small that only the crud­est of car­toon exag­ger­a­tion can come through, strips are gag-a-day though a few still try to throw in a week’s worth of con­ti­nu­ity once in a while. How do you build cir­cu­la­tion with that kind of junk?

    Where are the must-read colum­nists like the late, great Molly Ivens? I sus­pect that some­one a few bub­bles off bal­ance like Jack Lessen­berry would bring in more read­ers than he would drive off. News­pa­per are just dying because peo­ple get their news else­where they’re not offer­e­ing any­one any­thing. They need to be a des­ti­na­tion, but they’re not.

    “I can­celled my dead-tree paper because I don’t need it any­more. I read all my news online!” Well, good for you, then. Check back in a decade and tell me how that’s work­ing for you. Peo­ple who say stuff like that prob­a­bly never read a news­pa­per to begin with. Peo­ple who have read news­pa­per aren’t going to be a cav­a­lier about stop­ping.

    “Were the Times to fold, and all the other big pubs to be drawn down into its mael­strom ….. A lot of other news­pa­pers are doomed to extinc­tion but the NYT, the Wash­ing­ton Post, WSJ, these are our national news­pa­pers. They will sur­vive because these are the ones peo­ple turn to to find out what’s hap­pen­ing. But blog­ging won’t dis­ap­pear with­out news­pa­per to react to. A sub­stan­tial por­tion of Media­Mat­ters cov­er­age is of radio and tele­vi­sion. Crook­sand­liers is all about the TV. And other sites, like Fire­DogLake, have vir­tu­ally cre­ated the con­cept of live­blog­ging. Jour­nal­ism straight to your com­puter.

    DaveB wor­ries My busi­ness shreds and fiber­izes about 250,000 tons annu­ally to make cel­lu­lose insu­la­tion. The demise of the dead-tree paper will also be the demise of my busi­ness.

    I sup­pose Dave could always con­sider buy­ing raw lum­ber and shred­ing it into cel­lu­lose fiber, cut out the paper-making mid­dle­man. But con­sid­er­ing how many adver­tis­ing fly­ers still come with the news­pa­per I don’t think he has any­thing to worry about. He just won’t be recy­cling waste, he’ll be recy­cling a pre-owned resource.

18. 

    Dexter said on April 8th, 2008 at 2:24 pm

    I was a huge paper-junkie. The Fort Wayne papers were on the break table.
    I bought the Plain Dealer, The Detroit News, The Free Press, the Chicago Tri­bune, and the two locals from Auburn and Bryan, every day. How could I take a chance on miss­ing Mike Ryoko or Neal Shine? (Neal has been gone a year now).
    It’s just rou­tine, you have your favorites and you know where to find them in the paper.
    When peo­ple started using com­put­ers at home and work, and news­pa­per sites were read­ily avail­able, much space was alloted to peo­ple who bragged they “never brought paper into the house”. It was all there online. I deeply resented that con­cept.
    Then, years ago, The Plain Dealer dri­vers stopped at San­dusky. Sun­day papers made it Toledo, no fur­ther.
    I stopped buy­ing the ChiTrib when it went to 75 cents in the vend box.
    Now I am retired and I read only online edi­tions. It is not bet­ter.
    News­pa­pers indeed have to find ways to increase rev­enue from online adver­tis­ing.
    After a year or so of Times­S­e­lect at NYT, where we had to pay …what was it? $49 a year?—to read Fried­man, Krug­man, Dowd, Rich, etc., the Times ceased that and decided they could make much more than the 10 mil­lion dol­lars or so a year by pro­vid­ing the super-columnists as free online con­tent and reap­ing the cash flow from the accom­pa­ny­ing ads.

19. 

    Jolene said on April 8th, 2008 at 3:11 pm

    I’m one of those awful peo­ple who no longer sub­scribes to a daily paper and, yes, I really do feel guilty about it because I love my daily paper, the just-honored WaPo. Why? Because it’s so damn much paper! I live in an apart­ment, and recy­cling is by no means con­ve­nient. There are parts of the paper I never read, but I still have to haul them out of my place. I’d be delighted to pay for an online sub­scrip­tion, and I’ve said so in sev­eral online chats. But the Post has no pro­vi­sions for this. Now, more than a decade into Internet-ism, it’s not clear how many peo­ple could b per­suaded to pay for sub­scrip­tions, but I wish there were some way to make this hap­pen.

20. 

    irishbill said on April 8th, 2008 at 3:45 pm

    Uhhh, Nancy?……..Teamsters have mort­gages, too…….I’m a deliv­ery fore­man for the NYTimes who is wait­ing for the shoe to drop………….incidentally, the trucks use diesel fuel, which is way over 4 bucks a gal­lon in the NY area. The com­muter RR new­stands? Blind guy runs one in Port Chester; thirty years in the biz….use to sell 400 copies NYT a day………down to FIFTY now. He’s got a mort­gage too………As we used to say in the USMC “Shit rolls down­hill, and I’m at the bot­tom”……..

21. 

    nancy said on April 8th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

    Well, as one who has been hit by load after load of shit in the last few years, Irish­bill, you’re not telling me some­thing I don’t already know.

    And I know Team­sters have mort­gages, too. My only response would be you can drive a truck with some­thing else in it, whereas I’m unqual­i­fied to do much other than write words and tell sto­ries.

    Those sales fig­ures are ter­ri­fy­ing.

22. 

    velvet goldmine said on April 8th, 2008 at 4:05 pm

    Jolene: If only you lived near me, I’d take those papers off your hands. I roll ‘em and soak ‘em to make logs for the wood stove, and this time of year go through tons when mak­ing new “lasagna” gar­dens. (You know: the bot­tom layer is news­pa­per to kill weeds, fol­lowed by this and that, depend­ing on your favorite recipe. It’s a lit­tle twee, but one book advises dust­ing the top with wood ash “like the Parme­san cheese.”)

    Obvi­ously my creakly lit­tle news­pa­per job didn’t exactly have great ben­e­fits, but I con­sider it my pen­sion that I can drop buy the for­mer office when­ever I want and pick up vast amounts of those never-got-sold papers for the gar­den.

    God, I’m on tan­gents today. It’s because I’m avoid­ing a dead­line. I’ll talk about any­thing. Meet­ings, weed killer, you name it. House­hold income? How many times a week? All you have to do is ask.

23. 

    Harl Delos said on April 8th, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    one math­e­mat­i­cal genius used a very pre­cise ruler to announce that the sub­head was 13 points, but the elec­tronic pho­to­type­set­ter only had 12 and 14 points. When my wife showed it to me, I replied that it was 12 points …. but it was out of focus

    That math­e­mat­i­cal genius doesn’t under­stand typog­ra­phy, because you can’t deter­mine the size of cold type from a sin­gle line. If you mea­sure from base­line to base­line, you can tell the type size assum­ing that there’s no led­ding. The impor­tant thing to know is that type size is NOT the size of the type, but the size of the metal it’s cast upon.

    In any case, elec­tronic pho­to­type­set­ters are all screwed up. They start off with the assump­tion that there are 72 points to the inch, which is NOT true. Take a look at any line gage. The 10 inch mark doesn’t amount to 720 points, it’s between 724 and 725.

24. 

    Jeff Hall said on April 8th, 2008 at 4:51 pm

    Some great dis­cus­sion here.

    As a con­sumer of jour­nal­ism, and not a prac­ti­tioner of it, I only have one thing to say.

    Don’t you think that the fact that you ALL get so wrapped around the axle about this shit is part of the prob­lem?

    We (the pub­lic) all want to be informed. And we want you to take shots at the peo­ple in power.

    But we (most of us any­way) really don’t care whether you do it online, in the paper, or on the TV.

    We just want you to do it.

    Con­tent trumps deliv­ery mode EVERY time…

25. 

    Harl Delos said on April 8th, 2008 at 4:59 pm

    What do peo­ple think about news­pa­per web­sites where you have to have a sub­scrip­tion or pay to read it online? The news­pa­per I work for has that.

    The Wall Street Jour­nal used to make money using that model, and Janes did, too. Janes pub­lishes “All the World’s Armies”, “All the World’s Navies”, etc. I don’t think there are ANY other news­pa­pers that have suc­ceeded using that model.

    Except that I have ques­tions about the WSJ. About a year ago, they started let­ting peo­ple see the page they clicked on, if they clicked on a link at Digg or Google. Then some wiseacre cre­ated a plug-in for Fire­fox that lets you visit ALL pages at WSJ freely.

    The rea­son I think news­pa­pers can’t make money that way is that radio sta­tions and tele­vi­sion sta­tions are openly wel­com­ing users to their sites for free. What’s more, I find the news is bet­ter from WGAL​.com, the Lan­caster NBC sta­tion, than at Lan​cas​t​erOn​line​.com, the Lan­caster news­pa­pers site. There’s a lot more video, for one thing, and they update the site all the time, instead of once a day.

    In 1960, 25% of a newspaper’s rev­enue came from read­ers. By 1975, it was down to 15%. I got an ad yes­ter­day from Lan­caster News­pa­pers, offer­ing me the Sun­day News and the Sat­ur­day Intelligencer-Journal for $13 per quar­ter – $1 per week. At that rate, they can’t even cover the cost of the ink and pulp, the truck­ing, and the money that goes to the car­rier.

    I also got a coupon on the back of my reg­is­ter tape at the gro­cery yes­ter­day, offer­ing me 8 weeks of the Wall Street Jour­nal for free. But why would I bother? It’s a morn­ing news­pa­per – but Monday’s news­pa­per arrives in the Tues­day after­noon mail. Who wants to read the “olds”?

26. 

    Jolene said on April 8th, 2008 at 5:09 pm

    Con­tent trumps deliv­ery mode EVERY time

    I agree and, for the life of me, I can’t fig­ure out why the cable news sit­u­a­tion don’t use some of their resources to do some actual report­ing. Report­ing is expen­sive, I know, but I can’t believe there aren’t capa­ble peo­ple who’d be will­ing to do it for salaries well below what the news­babes on Fox and MSNBC get.

27. 

    Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on April 8th, 2008 at 5:38 pm

    His­tory note: News­pa­pers in this coun­try, at least, began as sub­scrip­tion month­lies, then week­lies. Broad­sheets, gazettes, then rec­og­niz­able (tho’ very dif­fer­ent) news­pa­pers.

    Free became a com­mon model along­side of sub­scrip­tion in the 19th cen­tury, in large urban areas for gen­eral read­ers, with tar­geted audi­ences sub­scrib­ing (sheep rais­ers, abo­li­tion­ists, polit­i­cal par­ties).

    Sub­scrip­tion became the norm as the daily came to the fore post Civil War, with Sun­day papers an entirely dif­fer­ent crea­ture and often busi­ness (see Sun­day Times of Lon­don in this era). 1920s were the begin­ning of a six/seven day a week news­pa­per with a price plus ads, and as has been hashed over in these columns, usu­ally with mul­ti­ple play­ers per mar­ket, seg­mented between morn­ing papers and evening papers.

    This can be dis­puted, but jour­nal­ism didn’t become a pro­fes­sion (a craft with a set of inter­nally enforced ethics for prac­tice) until the yel­low jour­nal­ism era of Hearst, Pull-it-sir, et alia forced a reac­tion from oth­ers like the Peabodys and Bing­hams, around 1900. The pro­fes­sion of jour­nal­ism is built on a busi­ness model with less than a cen­tury of prac­tices behind it, which com­pared to med­i­cine and law is fairly slen­der. Med­i­cine and espe­cially phar­macy are pro­fes­sional fields which are going through major upheavals with new modal­i­ties of get­ting paid/making a profit.

    So writ­ing will con­tinue to be a craft, and jour­nal­ism will be prac­ticed, but the way we find jobs and/or get paid is going to shift. There’s almost cer­tainly going to be some print papers around through our life­times and a num­ber of peo­ple work­ing there, but i’d rather be a skilled, con­sis­tent writer than a tal­ented ad sales rep in whatever’s com­ing next — to be a hack under either cat­e­gory is going to be fatal regard­less. Some tal­ented writ­ers will lose jobs, but there’s gonna be oppor­tu­nites of some sort — ad goobers will be utterly with­out oxy­gen.

28. 

    Jeff (the impolite one) said on April 8th, 2008 at 5:43 pm

    Jeff the nice and I agree. I will spare you the his­tory les­son, but the pint is the same – good writ­ing and report­ing will always find a voice.

    So calm down.

29. 

    sue said on April 8th, 2008 at 6:02 pm

    I loved that video.
    I read three blogs every day: Nancy, Punt­ab­u­lous and Austen­blog. Punt­ab­u­lous recently put in a donate but­ton. I “sub­scribed” right away. If Austen­blog and Nancy did the same thing, I’d sign on also. It’s time to under­stand that there are thrown-together per­sonal blogs and there are cream-rises-to-the-top per­sonal blogs, well-written and obvi­ously time-and-thought-consuming to put together. Not that I’m look­ing for PBS-style mem­ber­ship dri­ves, but really, qual­ity should be appre­ci­ated and rewarded. Time to stop think­ing of blogs as poor rela­tions to “real” jour­nal­is­tic endeav­ors. You should know that bet­ter than any­one, Miss Plagiarism-finder. How about every­one is wel­come to read but only sub­scribers can com­ment? Take it pro, Nancy.
    And speak­ing of top-notch blogs, will Bossy be vis­it­ing you? I can’t make either the Chicago or the Madi­son get-together, but I’m fol­low­ing the trip.

30. 

    nancy said on April 8th, 2008 at 6:18 pm

    Good writ­ing will always find an out­let, but like I said before: Health insur­ance. It might not always come with that.

    Sue, Bossy is com­ing to Detroit — at least in part to meet with her cor­po­rate spon­sor — and I’ll be join­ing the gath­er­ing, but she won’t be stay­ing here at Chez NN.C. Some­body out in Ply­mouth is host­ing her. But I’ll be there.

31. 

    Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on April 8th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

    Health insur­ance — we gotta go sin­gle payer for basic care, which is already true for 60% of the coun­try (Medicare, Med­ic­aid, VA, walk-in unin­sured to ERs). We’re just fight­ing over what the other 40% of us are gonna get, and from whom.

    I think we’ve reached a point where the com­pet­i­tive­ness and entre­pre­neur­ial val­ues of the nation are best served by end­ing employer-based health care insur­ance. Maybe if R’s like me can keep say­ing that, the national com­pro­mise can be that Dems quit pos­tur­ing with­out sin­cer­ity about free trade and glob­al­iza­tion, and in return Rs will shut up about the free frickin’ mar­ket in remov­ing your appen­dix or can­cer­ous tumors.

    Then we’ll fig­ure out how to carve out pro­tec­tions for Mex­i­can farm­ers and con­vert the energy grid to solar/wind/geotherm inputs, and save ANWR for a really rainy day rather than try­ing to raid the piggy bank for another mark­down at Best Buy.

    (The GOPo­lice are at the door already for my mem­ber­ship card. Darn it, they really do read every­thing. Thought i was safe being hon­est here . . .)

32. 

    Jeff Hall said on April 8th, 2008 at 7:37 pm

    What are we look­ing for? Jour­nal­is­tic integrity or health insur­ance? If it is the lat­ter, you will be co-opted by those who con­trol the purse strings.

    If what you are really look­ing for is health insur­ance, then get a job with Burson-Marsteller. Seri­ously.

    The point that the major­ity of the Amer­i­can pub­lic stopped car­ing about jour­nal­ism is the exact moment when they started to care more about what was on their W-2 than what was in the paper.

    Pas­sion­ate, car­ing peo­ple will always find an audi­ence. That is why blogs are suc­cess­ful while tra­di­tional papers strug­gle.

    Blogs con­nect. Reporters care about health insur­ance.

    C’mon. What hap­pened to giv­ing the fin­ger to author­ity? And vet­ting every source? And telling the truth to power?

    Glass. Blair. Miller.

    Jour­nal­ism is hoisted on its own patard. Come down off the moun­tain and con­nect with your audi­ence. Tell the frickin’ truth. Then maybe, just maybe, we will give a damn. Don’t assume we are stu­pid, or fig­ure we don’t give a shit. We care. And we are smarter than you think.

    You decry cor­po­rate own­ers who slash news­rooms to save money and at the same time ask for health insur­ance.

    And you won­der why we all don’t give a damn.

    Really?

    Is it that hard to fig­ure out?

33. 

    nancy said on April 8th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

    When you have a kid and a 50-year-old body, yes, health insur­ance mat­ters. I ain’t apol­o­giz­ing.

34. 

    Jeff Hall said on April 8th, 2008 at 7:59 pm

    I have 4 kids, includ­ing one with spe­cial needs, and I tossed a 12 year mil­i­tary career for the sake of them.

    I love you and your work Nancy.

    But a com­pro­mise is a com­pro­mise.

    No mat­ter how small.

    Ask Hor­ton.

35. 

    sue said on April 8th, 2008 at 8:31 pm

    It’s impor­tant to remem­ber that health insur­ance was in many cases orig­i­nally given to employ­ees because it was a cheap ben­e­fit. It’s not any­more, and there are no easy solu­tions, espe­cially with all us “50 year old bod­ies” head­ing full-steam into old age. The ques­tion isn’t going to be “who gets it?” but “how is it going to be rationed?” It’s not going to be pretty in any case. And I hate­hate­hate the “how dare you ask for health insur­ance, your job isn’t impor­tant enough to war­rant it, don’t you know these are hard times?” atti­tude that I see way too often. I guess if we can accept that the US gov­ern­ment employs peo­ple to find ways of turn­ing down health claims for sol­diers who fought in Iraq, then not hav­ing any patience with some­one who con­sid­ers health insur­ance an impor­tant part of basic liv­ing in the US shouldn’t be that big of a sur­prise.
    Nancy, you’ll come through this. Cream rises. I’m still sur­prised that you weren’t approached by any­one after your recent scoop.

36. 

    Harl Delos said on April 8th, 2008 at 10:07 pm

    When you have a kid and a 50-year-old body, yes, health insur­ance mat­ters. I ain’t apol­o­giz­ing.

    Even if you don’t, it mat­ters.

    When peo­ple talk about being gay as a “cho­sen lifestyle”, I think of Mark Twain’s com­ment on being tarred and feath­ered and rid­den out of town on a rail. If not fer the honor of the thing, he said, he’s have druther walked.

    Sim­i­larly, when I hear a kid say “I’m think­ing about becom­ing a writer”, I tell him not to. Nobody sen­si­ble chooses to be a writer; being a writer chooses them. That’s not ink on the paper; it’s the writer’s blood, squeezed out under great pres­sure. Many writ­ers are bipo­lar, and the rest must be feeble-minded; the aver­age pay of a free­lance writer is less than $10,000 a year, and while a lot of peo­ple call them­selves free­lance writ­ers because they think it sounds classier than being unem­ployed, free­lance writ­ers gen­er­ally would be well-advised to prac­tice say­ing “Yew wunt fries wit dat?” because the pay is both higher and more steady. And it’s not a sta­tis­ti­cal fluke that a lot of writ­ers die the way Papa Hem­ming­way did.

    But then, that’s a pre-existing con­di­tion, isn’t it? The other day, Eliz­a­beth Edwards was on TV, point­ing out that nei­ther her can­cer nor John McCain’s can­cer would be cov­ered by the health plan McCain is propos­ing, for exactly that rea­son. Each of them were able to get treat­ment because they mar­ried peo­ple who were mul­ti­mil­lion­aires.

    Every­body seems to think he has a great amer­i­can novel in him, includ­ing peo­ple who have trou­ble com­pos­ing a shop­ping list. Peo­ple get paid well if they do things that other peo­ple can­not do, either for rea­son of tal­ent (such a Tiger Woods) or spe­cial train­ing (a car­di­ol­o­gist), or things they don’t want to do (work in a hot, noisy steel foundry, erect the frame­work of sky­scrap­ers, under­wa­ter demo­li­tion team mem­bers.) Writ­ing looks like some­thing every­one can do, while seated in a com­fort­able chair in an air con­di­tioned office. It’s never going to be well-paid work, except for super­stars like Stephen King, John Grisham, and Deepak Chopra.

    Which is why we need uni­ver­sal health care. As a start, they could fig­ure out how much it costs, per per­son, for Medicare A, B, and D, and allow every­one to buy in at cost. Then a few years down the road, they can take the next step, and require every­one who isn’t cov­ered by a bet­ter plan to buy in.

    That plan has the advan­tage of sim­plic­ity. Every­body under­stands it. Obvi­ously, it’d have no chance of pass­ing; the lob­by­ists like com­pli­cated lan­guages that let the peo­ple who find loop­holes get rich.

37. 

    Jeff Hall said on April 8th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

    Do you hear that? Here comes the “waa”mbulance. You don’t like being a writer Harl? Go to law school. Like, umm, Eliz­a­beth Edwards.

    Uni­ver­sal health care is a noble, and vir­tu­ous thing. But any­one who has nav­i­gated a large HMO or gov­ern­ment health sys­tem (like Tri­care for the mil­i­tary) will tell you that it doesn’t always work out like you think.

    There are delays, inef­fi­ciency, missed appoint­ments, not enough doc­tors, etc., etc., etc. I spent over a decade in the Army. I would wait 6-9 months for a pedi­atric psy­chi­a­try appoint­ment for my autis­tic son.

    Sim­plic­ity?

    Have you been to a doc­tor? Like, ever?

38. 

    Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on April 8th, 2008 at 10:23 pm

    Hey, i broke the aver­age last year! (Who’s doing their taxes tonight . . .) Just crept past $10K. Glad i mar­ried an aca­d­e­mic, fer sure. TIAA/CREF rawks.

    Ash­ley, your muf­faletta trib­ute also mixes nicely into a pasta salad that my nine year old will eat — thank you, blithe spirit!

    (If you do free­lance writ­ing that makes the aver­age and get away with it by being mar­ried to an aca­d­e­mic, you’d bet­ter do the cook­ing, shop­ping, too.)

    Jeff H., we’re mostly there on the uni­ver­sal health insur­ance. It’s just about nego­ti­at­ing the details, ‘cuz it’s work­ing for seniors and the dis­abled and the astuter poor pretty well. Mean­while, our HMO is as inef­fi­cient as it needs to be to dis­cour­age me from unnec­es­sar­ily stay­ing healthy. When i was a kid in the unfet­tered ’60′s, as old­est of four, i remem­ber many, many hours wait­ing in a doctor’s office mem­o­riz­ing back issues of “High­lights.” We never sub­scribed, because, as i men­tioned, there were three other lit­tler ones. No need — my Goo­fus and Gal­lant fix was reg­u­larly ser­viced.

39. 

    whitebeard said on April 8th, 2008 at 11:26 pm

    Harl, despite your asser­tion that ‘That math­e­mat­i­cal genius doesn’t under­stand typog­ra­phy, because you can’t deter­mine the size of cold type from a sin­gle line.” the whole point of the anec­dote was that the math­e­mat­i­cal genius did not under­stand that the type was out of focus, which is pretty hard to do with hot metal but was easy to do with pho­to­type­set­ting in its ear­li­est stages.
    Another related anec­dote was that my wife was the only per­son in the news­pa­per work­ing with cold type at first as a test sub­ject and another genius (well, not quite, obvi­ously) decided that she had to know when the pho­to­typset­ting machine was off line so he installed an elec­tric horn in her room that blared enough to wake the dead. even the brain­dead.
    Funny thing, if one opened the horn’s innards and inserted a bro­ken pop­si­cle stick, less pop­si­cle of course, as i did, from then on it only made a very meek buzz.
    As a retiree, I was offered a free online news­pa­per sub­scrip­tion this year so they would not have to pay a dri­ver to drop off my free daily dead-tree news­pa­per on a rural route.
    So, I totally agree with you, Harl, on being against charg­ing for an online news­pa­per or a news­pa­per web­site.
    Funny thing, I keep on get­ting mail now ask­ing me to recon­sider sub­scrib­ing to the printed news­pa­per, which I got free for a quar­ter cen­tury. (Left hand not knoweth what right hand doeth, I gues­seth)

40. 

    whitebeard said on April 9th, 2008 at 12:09 am

    Now, one more rant, I am a Cana­dian and was on the city desk in Mon­treal when the doc­tors were on strike against uni­ver­sal health care, but then went back to work because the Cana­dian insur­ance lob­by­ists could hold their annual meet­ing in a tele­phone and were not very effec­tive. Yes, income taxes are higher in Canada, partly to pay for uni­ver­sal health care. But with my first major oper­a­tion, to reat­tach my left retina, maybe $20,000 or $30,000 a quar­ter cen­tury ago, which did not include two weeks in hos­pi­tal flat on my back with heavy sacks to keep my head straight and hand-fed by my wife and news­pa­per friends, I was forced to pay $5.69 for a bot­tle of eye­drops to keep my pupil dilated. No doc­tor bills, no hos­pi­tal bills, no eff­ing insur­ance com­pa­nies say­ing they would pay only 80 per­cent, no being kicked out of the hos­pi­tal after four days by an eff­ing pen­cil pusher, no slimy col­lec­tion types ask­ing when I can pay the money I owed the hos­pi­tal. No, it did not cover pre­scrip­tions e.g. the eye­drops; no, it did not cover nose jobs or other cos­metic surgery. My mother in Canada fell and broke her hip in her 80s and the local hip sur­geon was on vaca­tion. She was flown (her very first plane trip) to a city a few hun­dred miles away where the hip sur­geon was not on vaca­tion and she had the hip oper­a­tion. Her cost: Nil, Zero, Nada. As long as the U.S. has killer phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies who ped­dle drugs they know are not effec­tive, greedy insur­ance com­pa­nies who make big bucks say­ing no to needed med­ical treat­ment and hos­pi­tals who turn away those in need who do not have a fat-enough wal­let, the aver­age Amer­i­can worker is screwed until he or she retires and is old enough for Medicare (and can afford expen­sive sup­ple­men­tal health insur­ance). OK, I will put the soap­box away again.

41. 

    nancy said on April 9th, 2008 at 12:16 am

    The debate over single-payer health care is too com­pli­cated to have in a blog com­ments sec­tion, but when­ever I hear a story like that, I won­der why you never hear Euro­peans and Cana­di­ans say­ing, “You know, our sys­tem has a lot of prob­lems. You know what could fix it? If we adopted the Amer­i­cans’ way!” It just doesn’t hap­pen.

42. 

    EJ said on April 9th, 2008 at 1:12 am

    At most papers, sub­scrip­tion rev­enue barely cov­ers the cost of print­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion – so can­celled sub­scrip­tions (assum­ing those for­mer sub­scribers are now read­ing the paper online), are at best a very small part of the prob­lem.

    It’s really only in the last few years that big adver­tis­ers have begun to “get” the inter­net, and as a result online ad rates, at least on pre­mium prop­er­ties, are begin­ning to creep up. But online is still an absurd bar­gain for adver­tis­ers, and it puts a real squeeze on news­pa­pers as they have to set­tle for reduced online ad rev­enue as their print rev­enue declines along with cir­cu­la­tion.

    A big­ger prob­lem is that the papers missed the boat on online clas­si­fied ads. All the pri­vate party adver­tis­ing went to ebay, and employ­ment, which used to be a gigan­tic cash cow, went to Mon­ster, Dice, etc. I used to work in adver­tiser mar­ket­ing in a big city daily, and I remem­ber our sense of dis­be­lief as we watched the brass dither around while this busi­ness that they could have com­pletely owned crept away.

    I don’t know what’s to be done about this. That rev­enue is gone, and it’s not com­ing back, even if online dis­play rates reach par­ity with print.

43. 

    Dexter said on April 9th, 2008 at 1:26 am

    So it’s estab­lished we all love news­pa­pers. Here’s one I glance at to keep up with news from a place I lived for a year. Any­body read one reg­u­larly that is far­ther away?

    http://​www​.nhan​dan​.com​.vn/​e​n​glish/

44. 

    Harl Delos said on April 9th, 2008 at 2:24 am

    You don’t like being a writer Harl? Go to law school. Like, umm, Eliz­a­beth Edwards.

    I didn’t choose to be a writer; it chose me.

    Among the nice things about being a writer is that “equal pro­tec­tion of the laws” clause in the Bill of Rights. If some­one steals a 25c loaf of bread from Scott’s Dis­count Foods, they could go to jail for months. When Scott’s Dis­count Foods stole a $300 piece of writ­ing from me, told me they decided against using it, and then six months later, I dis­cov­ered that they’d printed it any­way, I found that the fed­eral pros­e­cu­tor couldn’t be both­ered to enforce crim­i­nal vio­la­tion of the copy­right code. She said I had other reme­dies avail­able to me, such as pay­ing an IP lawyer $10,000 to take it to fed­eral court – no small claims court actions allowed! – and then wait up to ten years to wend my way through the courts. Here’s a quick math prob­lem for you: what’s $10,000 at 6% inter­est for 10 years? Yes, it would cost $6,000 in fore­gone inter­est to col­lect that $300. Unless my lawyer was to screw up, in which case, it would cost me $10,000 plus $6,000 in fore­gone inter­est to NOT col­lect that $300.

    Uni­ver­sal health care is a noble, and vir­tu­ous thing. But any­one who has nav­i­gated a large HMO or gov­ern­ment health sys­tem (like Tri­care for the mil­i­tary) will tell you that it doesn’t always work out like you think.

    There are delays, inef­fi­ciency, missed appoint­ments, not enough doc­tors, etc., etc., etc. I spent over a decade in the Army. I would wait 6-9 months for a pedi­atric psy­chi­a­try appoint­ment for my autis­tic son.

    You don’t seem to under­stand triage.

    Napoleon’s medics real­ized that some sol­diers were going to die, no mat­ter how much effort they put into sav­ing them. Some sol­diers were going to recover any­way, and doc­tors couldn’t speed that up, or make the recov­ery more com­plete, no mat­ter how much effort they invested in the sol­dier.

    But there were some sol­diers, where prompt med­ical atten­tion would mean the dif­fer­ence between life and death. They get pri­or­ity treat­ment.

    You know what causes autism? If so, you’re the only per­son in the world who does. There are a lot of the­o­ries float­ing around, none of them proven. You know how to cure autism? If so, you’re the only per­son in the world who does. My wife is a TSS, cur­rently work­ing with kids in the autism spec­trum dis­or­der. You can give them tools for cop­ing with their prob­lem, but that’s the work of a ther­a­pist. Psy­chi­a­trists don’t do that; they write pre­scrip­tions, and there’s no med­ica­tion that’s worth a darn for autism.

    So when it comes to sched­ul­ing appoint­ments, your case would be pretty low pri­or­ity.

    Now, con­sider some­thing that’s fix­able. Your back has gone out, and you can hardly stand upright. Call up ten doc­tors, tell five of them that you have pretty good insur­ance, being a postal car­rier, and tell the other five that you’re self-employed and have no insur­ance at all. You think hav­ing no insur­ance at all will get you an appoint­ment sooner?

    Sim­plic­ity? Have you been to a doc­tor? Like, ever?

    I’ve been hos­pi­tal­ized 14 times in my life, and my first wife spent 16 years dying of SLE. Yeah, I’m famil­iar with the drill.

45. 

    alex said on April 9th, 2008 at 7:40 am

    I’m not look­ing back wish­ing to relive my days as a free­lance writer. You can actu­ally make a very good liv­ing at it, pro­vided you find a reg­u­lar gig churn­ing out absolute crap like retail ad copy. I used to pull down forty bucks an hour for that and it’s been a few years ago. Cat­a­logs of ging­ham hens, or lawn fur­ni­ture, or power tools. Ad cir­cu­lars with Swif­fers and Rub­ber­maid garbage cans and the like, or the occa­sional high-end piece full of pumps, purses and per­fume. It helped sup­port my writ­ing habit — the one that earned me cents per word in newsprint.

    Alas, it even­tu­ally wasn’t enough to pay for decent health insur­ance. Now I’m in an HSA through my employer. $3K deductible per year for all treat­ment and pre­scrip­tions before the insur­ance kicks in, but then it pays 100 per­cent of every­thing, which ain’t a bad deal if you’re antic­i­pat­ing the even­tual $100K heart attack. Kind of like tra­di­tional insur­ance plans were, it was explained to me, before peo­ple began run­ning to the ER for every pim­ple and tummy ache and demand­ing to try every pre­scrip­tion drug adver­tised on tele­vi­sion.

    In my cur­rent occu­pa­tion (which involves writ­ing of the dryest sort), I work on behalf of the insur­ance indus­try in “loss pre­ven­tion,” which is to say lit­i­ga­tion. When you see the sheer mag­ni­tude of fraud and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion in insur­ance claims, you begin to under­stand why it costs so damn much and why car­ri­ers treat each and every claim with sus­pi­cion. They’re still money-grubbing fuck­mooks, though, and so’s big pharma and the hos­pi­tals.

    I may be bit­ing the big teat in the sky that feeds me, but I’m not afraid to say the sys­tem needs a major over­haul. So does con­sumer credit. I hope Con­gress will find the polit­i­cal will to work on these, the two biggest prob­lems fac­ing the Amer­i­can mid­dle class. You know, besides homo­sex­u­al­ity and flag burn­ing.

46. 

    nancy said on April 9th, 2008 at 8:19 am

    EJ, excel­lent point. We tend to for­get about clas­si­fied, when it’s the biggest cash cow in the build­ing.

    And this just kills me, because with Craigslist and Mon­ster, I’m inter­act­ing with classies more than ever. I search “grosse pointe” and what­ever else strikes my fancy on Craigslist every day. I have RSS feeds set up to find inter­est­ing job open­ings with my key­words. When I think I could be doing this through a for­mer news­pa­per, I want to cry.

    And you know what? Many of them STILL DON’T GET IT. By now, “Craigslist” should be part of every journalist’s base­line vocab­u­lary, and I still run into peo­ple I have to explain it to. Or they go to the site and, see­ing the plain-vanilla inter­face, think it’s some kind of ama­teur oper­a­tion. It’s like they’re not pay­ing atten­tion. (The week­end of the Goe­glein affair, I rewarded myself with a $300 Tiffany neck­lace that I picked up for $75 on CL. And yes, it’s authen­tic.)

    Alex, the woman who tracks health-care spend­ing at GM — one of them, any­way — said she can tell which drug is being heav­ily adver­tised sim­ply by watch­ing their cash flow. When I was a J-fellow, the peo­ple from over­seas were sim­ply flab­ber­gasted by direct-to-consumer adver­tis­ing; one of the Turks cracked us up in a sem­i­nar, bad­ger­ing some guy from Pfizer. “And then there is a man on the beach run­ning with his golden retriever, and the announcer is say­ing, ‘Ask your doc­tor if this is right for you.’” All in his Turk­ish accent. It was hilar­i­ous.

47. 

    John said on April 9th, 2008 at 8:53 am

    Our Attor­ney Gen­eral is about to go after Craigslist for the adult ser­vice adver­tis­ing. The ser­vice providers are not very sub­tle in their offer­ings.

    I love my local news­pa­per, The (New Lon­don) Day, and have sub­scribed to it since we moved here 20 years ago. I don’t read the national AP sto­ries in it any­more since I have already read them on line, but the local and state news is still fresh. My favorite sec­tion is the Opin­ion Page which never fails to enter­tain with its out­ra­geous let­ters.

    Off sub­ject, but is any­one else totally icked out by the “Big Love” raid in Texas?

48. 

    Sue said on April 9th, 2008 at 9:04 am

    From Bioethics Inter­na­tional: “Canada’s ban on direct-to-consumer drug adver­tis­ing prob­a­bly saved Cana­di­ans with high cho­les­terol and their drug plans $150 mil­lion in 2006 alone, sug­gests a new study com­par­ing sales pat­terns of a con­tro­ver­sial cho­les­terol low­er­ing drug in the United States and Canada.Canadian sales of the drug Ezetrol – the generic name is eze­tim­ibe – were four times lower than those rung up south of the bor­der, where the drugs’ man­u­fac­tur­ers spent US$200 mil­lion adver­tis­ing the drug to con­sumers in 2007.”
    Also re clas­si­fied ads: Our weekly paper, which is affil­i­ated with a daily in a nearby town, is barely hang­ing on and clas­si­fieds keep it going. How­ever, there is no flex­i­bil­ity for its major user, the munic­i­pal­ity. They have their dead­lines, which they keep short­en­ing because their stuff has to go over to the moth­er­ship in the other town. Prob­lem is, if you email some­thing in plenty of time (I always email at least three days before) but the per­son in charge takes a few days off, no one checks her email and you’ve missed the dead­line! So work­ing within their sys­tem gets you screwed either way. If the City decided to make some other paper its “offi­cial news­pa­per”, our local would go out of busi­ness and we would look really bad. So we put up with it and try to explain to var­i­ous enti­ties why their projects, bids, appeals etc. have to wait until another meet­ing cycle.

49. 

    Jen said on April 9th, 2008 at 9:18 am

    I’m always shocked when I talk about some new inter­net phe­nom in the news­room and peo­ple don’t know about it! My edi­tor is pretty good at keep­ing up on what’s new and hip – he has three sons in their 20s-early 30s who I think help him keep up on what’s going on – but the rest of the reporters often have no clue what we’re talk­ing about and have no idea how to uti­lize the inter­net. I am shocked at how many times some of them walk around and ask for a phone num­ber, address or some other fact that it takes me about 4 sec­onds to find by typ­ing it in to Google. I’m no Inter­net ace, but some news­pa­per reporters I know don’t even have a work­ing knowl­edge of the Inter­net, much less enough to be able to uti­lize it to its poten­tial. They’re the ones who are going to be SOL as the inter­net takes over, or at least becomes a more impor­tant force in the news biz.

50. 

    Elaine said on April 10th, 2008 at 10:58 pm

    You are so right, Nancy. I’m one of those old news­pa­per dinosaurs who got tired of the old ways and decided to rein­vent myself. I just wish I had Bossy’s skills (or yours for that mat­ter). It would make my effort to secure adver­tis­ing a lit­tle eas­ier, no doubt.
    This post should be required read­ing in every paper in the land, and every J school, too.