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.