Lots of talk in Blogland of late about this Wall Street Journal column, much of it stupid (the talk, that is), almost all of it predictable. So predictable, in fact, that I wish journalists who throw pitches like this — it’s about the impending death of ink-on-paper news — would learn a few sinkers and sliders and stop sending big fat slow ones over the plate. The writer, Paul Mulshine, takes a few unnecessary cheap shots at bloggers, which elicits the usual response: Wah wah wah someone said something mean about Glenn Reynolds how arrogant how MSM I can’t wait until they’re all dead wah wah wah, followed a few hours later by welcome Instapundit readers…

These side squabbles, which all seem to boil down to “he didn’t write it the way I would have, so I’m going to get on my new-media blog and whine about it,” distract from Mulshine’s message, which comes low in the piece, and isn’t talked about enough, i.e., who is going to do the boring work newspapers do when they’re gone?

…The writer in question (who covers mundane government meetings) is performing a valuable task for the reader — one that no sane man would perform for free. He is assembling what in the business world is termed the “executive summary.” Anyone can duplicate a long and tedious report. And anyone can highlight one passage from that report and either praise or denounce it. But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader.

This highlights the real flaw in the thinking of those who herald the era of citizen journalism. They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren’t doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they’re under pressure is much more mundane. The Internet can carry ads more cheaply, particularly help-wanted and automotive ads.

So if you want a car or a job, go to the Internet. But don’t expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up. Soon, newspapers won’t be able to do it either.

We touched on this last week in the comments, when our BFF Deb put it in much more pungent language:

there is something truly terrifying about these people who seem to think journalism is such a simple-minded enterprise that any fool with a notebook can do it. and how do i know this blogger in bumfaulk isn’t sleeping with the school superintendent, a disgruntled former employee with a penchant for firearms, a garden-variety whack job, a parent with a beef against the principal, or… and what will these folks do when the board decides to convene an illegal closed session? do they have a lawyer they can call? go right ahead, round up all these reporter wannabes. but when they don’t make it to the next board meeting because the streets were icy, or left early because the whole damn thing was just TAKING too long, don’t come bitching to me.

The other day Lawrence Lessig was on “Fresh Air,” talking about digital copyright ideas and related topics, and Terry Gross asked him about the future of newspapers. He skipped right over the newspapers part — he gets all his news from Google News, he said — and said that what worries him far more is the future of investigative reporting. This is a common lamentation among the intelligentsia: screw Dear Abby, what about investigative reporting? It drives me right up the wall, because it tells me the intelligentsia knows little about reporting. Maybe HBO could put “All the President’s Men” back into the rotation, so we could all refresh our memories of Watergate and take a lesson about the most famous journalistic investigation in modern history:

It started as a routine story on the police beat.

We forget that Bob Woodward wasn’t Bob Woodward back then. He was just some guy in the metro desk bullpen who had to work Saturdays. He got a tip and caught a break. The rest was just following leads, shoe-leather reporting.

Many larger newspapers maintain so-called I-teams, but the fact is, the best investigative reporting is like that — bottom-up. (If you know your local reporting staff, you’ll frequently find the beat reporter’s byline, along with one of the I-teamers, on big projects. The former knows the territory, and the latter knows how to work databases and other specialized reporting tools.) So when Lessig says he worries about who will support investigative work, I have to say I don’t. Some Gates-type foundation will arise to fund worthy projects, ones that will make all concerned feel virtuous at the annual banquet. There will be investigations on crime rates and welfare-to-work programs and the fate of the Pacific salmon. There won’t be too many projects about public-servant thieves like Kwame Kilpatrick, because those come from beat reporters keeping their eyes and ears open as they do the scutwork of the job — going to meetings so boring they peel paint from the walls, checking police blotters and court dockets, schmoozing secretaries and clerks.

That’s what will be lost when newspapers go away. Get to work, citizen journalists.

Not much bloggage today. The news seems to be taking the week off, too. Well, there’s this, an NYT story about the difficulty of ending your marriage in a collapsed real estate market. I don’t know why the strawberry blonde in the second photo made me think of “Lyin’ Eyes,” the old Eagles song. Just something about her. I bet she opened lots of doors with just a smile, back in the day. And the fact she says money from their multiple homes would be her only income. Time to get a job, hon.

More coffee for me.

Oh, wait! We have a holiday photo. It’s Beb, all tired out from reading his Fun Calendar, colonized by cats:

Now more coffee for me.

Much talk, hereabouts, about this story from the Weekly Standard, by Matt Labash. The cover features a photo of the Michigan Central Depot, the most infamous abandoned building in Detroit. Guess what the story’s about? If you answered, “the decline and fall of what was once North America’s great industrial city,” pat yourself on the back. You’re on your way to earning a full scholarship to journalism school.

It’s long, and if you don’t want to read it, here are the Cliff’s Notes: Labash sets off to spend a week in our fair city. Packing for the trip, he meets unnamed people who give him him pithy quotes:

Before I’d left, I’d asked an acquaintance if he was from Detroit. “Indeed I am,” he said, “Give me all your f–ing money.”

Ha ha. He arrives and hooks up with Charlie LeDuff, a Detroit News reporter with a rather maniacally cultivated image as an eccentric renegade. (Of which I will speak no more, as conflicts of interest exist in the household.) The first part of the article is a full-on kneepads job on LeDuff, who muses that he was put in his current position by God. Then Charlie tells him to grab his coat, and they’re off to cover Charlie’s beat, which he describes as “the hole” — “forgotten people in forgotten places.” Labash recounts some of Charlie’s greatest reporting hits — the Dr. Kevorkian profile, the repo-man profile, the exhuming-the-dead piece — before sliding into the stock parachuted-in, out-of-town-journalist’s tour of the usual suspects and venues. Adolph Mongo, L. Brooks Patterson, Martha Reeves. They meet the latter at the Hitsville USA Motown museum; now there’s a place you don’t read about very often, eh? And they drop in on a firehouse that recently lost a beloved brother to a collapsing roof while fighting an arsonist’s fire in an abandoned house, surely the worst possible circumstances for such a death to occur. The Detroit fire department’s problems are a true shame upon the city, and Labash doesn’t fail to fully note it.

It’s a good piece, well-written and very readable, but it’s only a better version of dozens that came before it, and the fact it appeared in a conservative policy review, at this particular point in time, suggests a strategy underneath it all. Rod Dreher, faithful doggy that he is, catches the scent immediately:

I wondered over the holiday why it is that it’s correct to believe that New Orleans should be saved, even though it has many of the same endemic and seemingly unsolvable problems as Detroit, and faces one Detroit doesn’t: the likelihood (say some scientists) that it will all sink between now and 2100. Anyway, why is it correct to believe that it’s our moral duty as Americans to “save” New Orleans, whatever that means, but Detroit — well, it can keep going to hell, because what can anybody do with a city so far gone?

In the comments he answers his own question:

People who wish to save New Orleans generally argue that N.O. is so important culturally and otherwise to America that we can’t let it waste away. More pragmatic voices argue … that the city is in a nearly impossible position geographically, and that had Katrina not happened, it was still an economic sinkhole, with high rates of crime, illiteracy, welfare dependency, corruption and all the same demons that haunt Detroit. But there’s nothing romantic at all about Detroit.

In other words: Because I like New Orleans, and I don’t like Detroit. Do I need to mention where Dreher hails from? Yes, Louisiana. But of course that has nothing to do with why New Orleans should be helped, and Detroit written off. It’s all about culture and romance.

But you see what he’s done? He’s conflated Detroit, the city that’s been in a death spiral since the late ’60s, with Detroit, shorthand for the domestic automotive industry. When any fool could tell him they are two very different things. Unfortunately, any fool doesn’t write for the Weekly Standard, or any of the other publications who have sent less talented writers to essentially draw the same wrong conclusion. For those of you who may be newcomers here: The problems of Detroit-the-city are related to the auto industry, but not in the obvious way. The city is full of monuments to automotive wealth and largesse and history, but the truth is, outside of the GM corporate offices downtown, most of what we think of as Detroit-the-car-business is located outside of Detroit-the-city. Maybe all of it, at least in terms of major plants and production facilities. The GM Tech Center is in Warren. Chrysler’s in Auburn Hills, Ford in Dearborn. The plants are all over the place (and around the country). There are abandoned factories in the city, but they’ve been so for decades. If you want to cover what’s happening to southeast Michigan as a result of the auto industry’s problems, you need to go to the suburbs — Wayne, Wixom, Dearborn, Auburn Hills, Grosse Pointe, Livonia…all of them, really.

But here’s something else: No one in Detroit-the-city is asking for over-and-above salvation from the likes of Dreher. Like every other city in the country, it angles for handouts from Uncle Sam, but the idea that there’s a push on for the city to be “saved” is absurd. Its problems are many and complicated, not all self-inflicted but certainly self-propagating. However, it has been so for 40 years and will likely be so for another 40. After four years of living just outside its eastern border, I can tell you I don’t really understand the place and probably never will, but I have come to like it very much and even love it, as ugly and blighted as it is. It is a city with a heart that continues to beat in a terribly diseased body, and you have to respect any place that just flat refuses to die.

Dreher claims to have read and enjoyed all of Labash’s piece, but he doesn’t mention this part, which quotes Adolph Mongo, generally described as a “political consultant,” but as with many Detroiters, that’s not all of the story. He doesn’t pussyfoot around:

When white politicians want to get elected around here, explains Mongo, “They don’t say ‘n—-r’ anymore, they say ‘Detroit.'” And so, while the Big Three have been running away from Detroit for years, they “got a rude awakening when they went to D.C.” Mongo holds that when congressmen associate automakers with Detroit, what they’re intending to associate them with are all the inept black people who come from there. Or as he puts it, when they say “ ’Detroit,’ they really said, ‘they the new n—–s.’ Welcome to the club.”

Yup.

Finally, because Dreher identifies himself as a Christian and writes for a religious blog, I’d ask him this: Since when did romance and culture become the criteria for determining who should be helped? Both Detroit and New Orleans are full of people, or as Dreher’s religion would describe them, souls. Are Louisiana souls more worthy of help than Michigan’s? I guess so. And finally finally, if he’s going to put NOLA culture up against Detroit’s, I hope he brought his lunch, because Detroit is going to eat it. I suspect he’s one of those guys who puts on his Meters CDs a few times a year and says all that bon temps roulez shit to his kids, while up here in Gritty City we’re incubating the next Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Eminem, White Stripes, Don Was or the-list-goes-on. Here’s a video taste of one show last summer. (Admittedly, an extraordinary one. Don Was is like a magnet of cool. I still can’t believe I missed it.)

So. Rant over. But it put me in such a mood! So let’s close out with a brief bit of bloggage, once again from Roger Ebert — a collection of his best zingers through the years, nearly all of them from pans:

I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny. — Response to Vincent Gallo’s hex to give me colon cancer

This film obtained a PG-13 rating, depressing evidence of how comfortable with vulgarity American teenagers are presumed to be. Apparently you can drink shit just as long as you don’t say it. — “Austin Powers II”

At first I thought it was presumptuous to select your own best lines — isn’t that the reader’s job? — but I soon found myself laughing so hard I couldn’t read them aloud to Alan. So I guess I trust his judgment.

Oops, one more: The best single story about Caroline Kennedy’s ambitions, and oh my, it’s satire:

Caroline Kennedy would like to be considered Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2009 and has let the magazine’s editor know of her interest in the honor, aides to Ms. Kennedy confirmed today.

Off to shop for my holiday dinner. Among about a million other chores. Huzzah.

Well, you could have this weekend and return it to the manufacturer, eh? The giant snowstorm was followed by a big freeze — this is not news to a large number of you, I know — and everywhere was suffering. The dog is irritable, torn between his instinctual need to visit the outdoors regularly and its utter suckitude. My poor car looks like it has leprosy, but it’s too cold to wash it and besides, it’s only going to snow again tomorrow and probably the next day, too. I deprived a local mall of my business and went to one farther away, because the former is one of those Potemkin Village lifestyle-center malls, and if there’s one thing I don’t want to do on a day with single-digit temperatures and a howling wind, it’s walk outdoors between stores.

I went to Somerset instead. Every luxury store under the sun, plus a few you haven’t heard of. None had anything I wanted. Everything seemed cheap and stupid. The upside: Cheap and stupid is now 30 percent off. Even Barney’s was having a sale. You could buy a pair of ugly shoes for $325, marked down from $545. I really can’t wait for Christmas to be over. Nothing like double-digit unemployment (barely; Michigan’s now at 9.4 percent, but expected to go much higher, and I suspect that makes us No. 1) and the promise of an even worse future to extract all the fun out of spending your money.

But enough about me.

Some good bloggage today: Every so often I go Googling for Tim Goeglein (who really should work for Google, don’t you think? He could answer his phone, “Google, Goeglein.”), to see if he’s left a breadcrumb trail. The new Washington will be a hostile place for conservatives other than Rick Warren, but you should never underestimate the ability of people to land on their feet, change and/or find a seat somewhere on the Wingnut Welfare gravy train. So far, nothing’s turned up, until this, a WashPost story from earlier this month, about a lunchtime gathering at a D.C. Buca di Beppo. Deal Hudson, founder and former publisher of Crisis magazine, was host of a big table in the Pope Room, and the idea was to read Christmas poetry aloud to the group. That’s it. Sort of charming when you think about it.

Tim’s not in the story, only in the photo (and only the top of his head, at that). But just to show you what a big tent the right wing is and remains, note that lineup in the picture: born-again virgin Dawn Eden; nice Lutheran Tim (hands folded prayerfully?); and Hudson, the host. (The other two guys are Googleable, but ciphers — to me, anyway.) Eden is known for having rejected what she calls a “‘Sex and the City’ lifestyle” for orthodox Catholicism, celibacy, anti-abortion activism and a book contract (“The Thrill of the Chaste”). Hudson became ex-publisher of Crisis after a story surfaced about a drunken sexual encounter with a teenage college student that led to harassment charges against him, i.e., unchaste behavior. And among the magazines Goeglein plundered in his strange career as a writer was Crisis.

We are all sinners, and the balm of literature is soothing to all. Remember that.

Thinking of the Wingnut propaganda chorus reminds me that Alicublog is still on the job keeping tabs on them all, and has a fine roundup post on Christmas Week at the National Review. Sample:

“Why does an obsessive Nazi-hunter like Simon Wiesenthal get positive press,” (Mark Goldblatt) asks, “while an obssessive Communist-hunter like Joe McCarthy is vilified?” Maybe because Wiesenthal hunted actual Nazis, while McCarthy was happy to tar citizens ranging from Owen Lattimore to Adlai Stevenson.

Finally, although it isn’t technically Holiday Photos Week yet, I’m kicking things off with a couple of contributions from our webmaster, J.C. Burns, who is way ahead of me on the digitizing-old-photos chore. He sent two along, pegged to my comment about Tri-X film, but since one includes me and another features a famous mystery guest, let’s get it started. First, here are three of J.C.’s women friends, c. 1979-80ish, in the courtyard of his salad-days garden apartment in Atlanta. The woman on the left is Verneda I-forget-her-last-name, the one on the right is Deb Warlaumont-now-Mulvey, my BFF then and now (posts here as deb, always lower-case), and in the middle is a woman who really should have rethought that scarf. And her hair. And the shoes (Dr. Scholl’s!). And certainly the glasses, although that was the fashion at the time.

It looks like I was consulting my checkbook while about to descend concrete stairs in wooden sandals. Which explains why I frequently sported bruises in those days.

The other is today’s Comment Thread Mystery, and if I had something to give as a prize I would, but alas. Below is another picture of Deb, along with a college classmate of ours. Same general era. He is, today, a journalist of national reputation (his official bio calls him “renowned,” but I think that’s pushing it), who makes frequent appearances on TV. This puzzle may favor the men in our audience, but that’s the only clue I’m giving you. Once his identity is correctly identified, I’ll post a contemporary photo in an update, so we can all laugh over the difference. Who is our mystery man? (And please: Those who knew him then, or know because they read all the comments here, sit this one out, please? This means you, MarkH. The underlying joke of this photo is the physical change.)

Everyone have a great start to a short week. And try to stay warm.

UPDATE: Jeff TMMO wins, but I think he had help. I just don’t see how you could recognize “renowned NFL reporter Peter King” based on the jaw alone. Not when the hair is such a distraction, anyway. (It looks like a wig, doesn’t it?) I guess it’s all that practice at looking at the soul within, because this is what he extrapolated from:

Whew. Congratulations.

Sorry so late updating today. As others have noted, we’ve had a complication hereabouts. The school cancellation came by robo-call at 5:45 a.m., which rather ticked off the house’s phone-answerer, because we’ve known this storm was coming for days, you could see its vast pink-and-white mass bearing down on us from the west, and most schools cancelled last night. At least there wasn’t the 6 a.m. answering chorus of snowblowers, mainly because it was still coming down so hard we were in what’s-the-point territory. I was able to go back to sleep and make it clear until 8:30 a.m. — pure luxury.

Anyway, I’m going out in a bit with the video camera. So maybe we’ll have something to add for the weekend.

In the spirit of the already wack-a-doo schedule, then, let’s make this a leftover stew today. First, an announcement:

Last year’s NN.C commenters’ holiday photo submissions were so nice, let’s us all do it again, shall we? For the week between Christmas and New Year’s, let’s see if we can assign a face to some of the names in our community. I know a lot of you have blogs and already put up pictures there; if so, give us a link. It’s just that this is such a close-knit little group already, it’d be nice to put a face with a name. You know where to send things — my first name at nancynall.com. If you’re shy, send a picture of Christmas out your way. Because God knows, there’s not a lot to talk about that week. Historically, anyway. Knock wood.

A little bloggage:

Maybe we are reaching the blogging/fair use/who’s-zooming-who tipping point sooner rather than later. The Chicago Reader has problems with the Huffington Post’s sticky-fingered blogging style. Good posts on it here and here. The latter post sums it up nicely:

I’m sure that someone is thinking, “hey, you get lots of inbound links from a popular site, and they link to you directly from their local homepage, which helps your SEO.” Whatever–they’re still taking other people’s content, in my non-expert but reasonably well-informed opinion well outside the bounds of fair use–so that they can get more pageviews and SEO advantages for themselves by taking the entirety of other people’s work. They’re taking all of it. Real people–my colleagues–wrote those. You can give us the inbound links, which helps you, us, and everyone, without taking entire pieces of work.

Preach, my bruthuh.

Maybe I’m showing my age here, but I came of age in newspapers when the prime visual element in them wasn’t the USA Today dumbass graphic, the “charticle” or any of the other graphics so common today, but a big-ass, black-and-white photo. Tri-X Kodak film, ASA 400 pushed to 1600, baseball-size grain heavily burned and dodged in the darkroom. Pictures like this. And this. I like video fine, but there’s nothing like a still to say “news” — at least to me. All this by way of setting up a link to this 2008 Year in Photos collection, with many jaw-dropping images. (All in color, however. RIP, Tri-X.) Warning to dial-up users: These are big, high-res images that will take a while to load even on fast connections. Be patient.

Finally, an idea so silly it could only come out of Detroit, but at the same time crazy enough that it just might work. I’d drive one, anyway: A Cadillac Volt. Shut UP. Too expensive for me, but I’d love to drive one to, say, a Whole Foods parking lot in Santa Monica. I’d be Chili Palmer, only greener.

The problem with cold-weather outdoor art is, some people always have to overachieve. Note the fish.

With that, I think the battery is charged and I’m ready to go out again. Bon voyage, Danny, you bastard, heading off to Hawaii. The rest of us will be down here, reeking of two-stroke engine enhaust (from the snowblowers). Spare a kind thought.

When the bad news piles up, it’s tempting to brood, but today let’s give ourselves a break, shall we? All is not lost. There are even pleasures to be had in bad times, as last night, on the phone with my sister, when she let loose with a short list of punishments she’d like to see visited on Bernard Madoff:

…and I’d like to see them go into his closet. I’d like to see his shoes auctioned off. I’d like to see him in jail. Not a good jail, but a really, really bad one…

Me: The Wayne County Jail!

Yeah, that’s a good one. And I’d like to see his kids go there, too. And his wife, and…

Actually, I think the Scourging of the Wall Streeters would not only be a totally excellent reality show, I think that if Barack Obama made it a centerpiece of his inaugural ball, we could go ahead and start carving him on Mt. Rushmore now.

So let’s pause and just throw a little credit and praise around the room, shall we? Let’s start with this week’s Metro Times, where the horribly bylined “Detroitblogger John” has another gem, about one of the many Detroit storefronts that have become private hangouts. It’s one of the unique features of this city, with so many empty buildings and cheap real estate, that it costs practically nothing to claim a little commercial space as your own. I first noticed this when I wrote a (very bad, but that wasn’t entirely my fault) story on one of the city’s bid whist clubs, where members gather twice a week to play cards. The MT story is on the Chip-in Sportsmen’s Club on Seven Mile, home to a group of retired autoworkers who’d rather hang with their friends than hang at home, and are willing to pay a modest fee to do so:

Dues are $35 a month, plus $6 for Mega Millions lottery tickets bought by the club. Members are entitled to a key and free access anytime, including two private parties a year. They throw a Christmas Eve bash and a fish fry now and then, and grow a garden out back, giving the vegetables to folks in the neighborhood in the fall. On warm summer afternoons they’ll line chairs out front and watch as traffic passes by and the day winds along.

Detroitblog publishes in the Metro Times, and later in the day posts the same story on his own website, with additional photos. So, in keeping with what we’ve been talking about of late, read the story on the MT link above, and then, if you like, check out the extra pix here.

Everyone must be in a mellow mood today. Check out the Bush twins in People, via New York magazine:

People: Barbara, Jenna, any advice for Sasha and Malia Obama?
Jenna: Well, they’re a lot younger than we are, cuter than we are. We’re old news.
Barbara: Even the puppy is going to be cuter.

A puppy cuter than you, Barbara? It doesn’t exist!

No, wait: It does.

Finally, let’s forget our economic troubles and turn our focus to something that really matters — redecorating the White House — especially when it gives us an excuse to link to this picture:

Kids, the ’60s were real, and they happened for a reason. See above.

Off to relieve stress. Back later.

I had a nice little post going for a while there. It was about newspapers and the new arrangement here in Detroit. It paused to aim a kick at some of the Free Press and Gannett spin artists fanning out to sell this crap sandwich, then settled in to what I consider the topic of the day: Online advertising, and the need for it to be properly priced and not such a ridiculous bargain.

Like I said, I was rattling away on it before I went to work last night, and had no browser crashes or anything else that might have scuttled it. But today, only the first sentence of it was to be found. Sigh. Autosave, I curse you. On the other hand, maybe that was a sign that we need to rethink our point. OK:

Why doesn’t online advertising cost more? That is all.

OK, here’s a bit more: The modern newspaper’s problem is not readership, it’s revenue. Let me see the hands of everyone who is reading more than their hometown papers these days. Leave your hand up if you feel you are, in general, better-informed about the world than you were, sayyy, 10 years ago. One of the Freep apologists yesterday trotted out the figure 500 million — that’s 2008 page views for the Detroit Media Partnership. Stipulated: Page views are the easy figure — a page loads and it counts as a view. In the olden days when nervous circulation managers held these meetings, they never talked about circulation (which was inevitably down), but readership, which always seemed to be just fine. The bonus joke for newsrooms was that this was sometimes paired with penetration, defined as circulation divided by households. Gannett used to have a graphic illustration that said satisfaction would increase with penetration, and don’t think a few million laughs weren’t had over that.

Anyhoo, in online measurements, “unique users” is the coin of the realm; it’s the beating-heart figure. But page views are significant, too, and at this point in the game I’m less concerned about whether the MotorCityMoms site will continue (groan: It will), as much as what, exactly, is being done to fairly price the ads that reach them. Every day I open my ink-on-paper, home-delivered, top-dollar-expensive New York Times and see the Tiffany’s ad at the top of page 3. They pay a premium for that spot; they’ve held it for years. I notice it. Its message sinks in. Its brand is underlined. I carry around these impressions on my personal hard drive. But online, it’s not going to pay the NYT much unless I click on it. I wonder how that’s justified. Advertising of all sorts is our cultural wallpaper, and just being able to identify certain business on the basis of their ads is considered a huge coup. If the Detroit papers are delivering the eyeballs, shouldn’t that count for something?

Heath Meriwether, a former Free Press editor and publisher, points out an important distinction in Editor & Publisher:

“The home delivery audience was the big prize. They were the committed audience, they had the money to spend and they were more involved in the community.”

Isn’t that interesting? All that traffic that bloggers claim they’re driving to news media websites? It’s crap, for the most part. A local tire store doesn’t care that people in San Diego are reading a story about the Pistons; they’re selling tires to people in southeast Michigan. Every night I read the Times of London, but it’s safe to say 90 percent of their advertising is wasted on me — I don’t even live on the same continent. On the other hand, I just checked their home page, and was served three ads for National City, an American bank. That’s IP sniffing for you. I can’t think of the last time I checked a Detroit News or Free Press website and was served an ad for a bakery down the street, offering two-for-one specials on Christmas fruitcake; are the ad staffs being trained to make such sales? Are they honestly and truly trying everything? Or is this just a desperation Hail Mary pass no one expects to succeed, to be followed in a few months by a sad news conference about an unforgiving business climate, etc.?

God, this is depressing. I wish I felt better about all of this. Among the facts weighing me down today: the Detroit newspaper partnership built a $170 million printing plant THREE YEARS AGO. Alan Mutter quotes an analyst with a sobering observation:

Radical as the restructuring may appear to be, the newspapers remain saddled with certain large and inescapable costs, said Alan Flaherty, a nationally recognized newspaper production expert.

“Nothing they do at this point can mitigate the cost of owning the $170 million (or maybe more) plant that they occupied in about 2005,” said Alan in an email. “At 7.5% interest and a 15-year life, the $170 million investment represents a weekly capital lease expense of $370,000.” That’s a bit less than $20 million per year.

(Fort Wayne Newspapers built a new press even more recently. The publisher at the time had a stock answer when asked about it: “This shows how committed we are to our future in Fort Wayne,” accompanied by a smile that showed frost at its edges. Then she left town. And yet the FWN package — one pathetic p.m., 75 percent of a somewhat more robust a.m. and the agency that produces both — sold for something like $90 million in 2006. Staggering.)

Clearly I know nothing about how this business works. If someone else does, enlighten me. For further reading, this Romenesko post has the most useful links.

You can tell I’m grumpy this morning. We had a snowstorm overnight and the blowers commenced around 5 a.m. Last night’s bedtime for yours truly: 1:30 a.m. The luck of the neighborhood blowers that I am not a violent person with a sniper rifle in my possession? Priceless.

Let’s try to leave on an high note. My Russian teacher forwarded me a set of pictures going around, called “only in Russia.” This one’s my favorite. The sign reads, “This is our favorite store.” At the moment, it’s mine, too.

I’ll say this for durable goods: There’s nothing like a brand-new major appliance to take your mind off your troubles, especially when it’s linked to the one activity that can always make me feel competent and in control — banishing dirt and clutter. Sears delivered our new washer today, a Bosch high-efficiency model. It uses about a tablespoon of water per load, and no more electricity than can be generated by a single stroke of a butterfly’s wings. The clothes are spun so thoroughly they come out practically dry. If I could, I’d move it into the living room and watch the clothes go ’round, which is more entertaining than the HGTV show I watched on the elliptical at the gym yesterday morning.

It reminded me of when we bought our first house, and got a brand-new washer and dryer. It was the first time I’d ever lived in a place where I didn’t have to shlep my laundry somewhere else, and along with the dishwasher, nothing before or since made me feel so rich, virtually overnight. All those nights spent in the Solar Sudser on Broadway in Fort Wayne left a mark — the dirty kids who would walk up to you and cough in your face, or the attendant with trichotillomania who would talk on the phone for hours, narrating events in her life, which lurched from crisis to crisis as she yanked her bald spot bigger and bigger. I’d sit there with my book and try to let the white noise of the swish swish swish do its job, but it could never compete with the cigarette smoke and the yelling and everything else. To do one’s own laundry, in one’s own basement, while you got something else done, too? Sheer luxury.

The delivery man was Croatian. Someday I’ll be able to hear an intriguing accent and refrain from doing an impromptu interview with its owner, but that day hasn’t arrived. Besides, when someone says they’re from “the good part” of Croatia, don’t you want to know which part that is? (It’s the part where the war wasn’t.) So what brings you to Detroit? The fact your homeland is entirely run by thugs? And how is that different from Detroit? Ha ha ha ha ha. Enjoy your new washer, you parody of a bored housewife, you.

Well, that may all change sooner than we think. Today’s the day we find out if the household can continue to afford detergent, and if so, for how long. I intend to be in my weightlifting class at the time. Good wishes appreciated, but our fate is already sealed. We just don’t know what it is yet.

Bloggage to take your mind off it all:

Those Brits really know how to write a headline, or at least a subhed: The worst christmas party injuries I see in my surgery / The comedy stuff, such as plucking shards of photocopier glass from revellers backsides, happens when the surgery is closed. Now that’s something to read.

Gay penguin soap operas. A good story, actually.

The Iraqi who graciously offered his shoes to our president? Is a folk hero.

My admiration for Roger Ebert’s blog grows with every entry. Today, one for you parents out there, likely to be the only ones who’ve seen a Tru3D movie (unless you really are a Hannah Montana fan, in which case I will back away slowly).

Off to wash away my worries. I’m doing darks.

From the Department of Whaddaya Mean We, White Man?, Detroit’s very own Mitch Albom has found a new vein of cheap sentiment to mine, and it is rich indeed, i.e., the so-called “open letter” trope:

Do you want to watch us drown? Is that it? Do want to see the last gurgle of economic air spit from our lips? If so, senators, know this: We’re taking a piece of you with us. America isn’t America without an auto industry. You can argue whether $14 billion would have saved it, but your actions surely could have killed it.

We have grease on our hands.

You have blood.

Huh? You do? Grease? Where did that come from, passing a tip to the masseuse? This piece is headlined, Hey, you senators: Thanks for nothing. I suppose we should be grateful the editor didn’t try to channel the driving spirit behind the piece, and call it “t’anks for nuttin’!” But it’s bad enough as it is, a millionaire claiming solidarity with The People — worse, claiming to be a voice of the people. (One would hope that The People, if allowed to speak for themselves, could come up with a better turn of phrase than “the last gurgle of economic air,” etc. I do, anyway.)

The prose gets worse, too. You all know Mitch’s favorite rhetorical device: The single-sentence paragraph set off by lots of dramatic white space. Note the next passage; this may be a record:

And now you want those foreign companies, which you lured, and which get help from their governments, to dictate to American workers how much they should be paid? Tell you what. You’re so fond of the foreign model, why don’t you do what Japanese ministers do when they screw up the country’s finances?

They cut their salaries.

Or they resign in shame.

When was the last time a U.S. senator resigned over a failed policy?

Yet you want to fire Rick Wagoner?

Who are you people?

I like that last one — Who are you people? It’s the latest way to say How dare you?, a phrase that always packs a punch. Why I never is another goodie, the verbal equivalent of a clutched strand of pearls. Albom is a short little guy, a fact that doesn’t come across on ESPN, which perhaps explain his effortless belligerence in print. If he actually walked onto a shop floor, they’d pull the old no-really-we-need-you-to-be-the-crash-test-dummy joke. And he’d believe it.

Last check: The story had been recommended 825 times by readers. Probably a record. Most popular? Yup. Most e-mailed? Yup. I smell…book contract!

Well, he’s going to need one. I assume you all heard the news that leaked over the weekend, which hasn’t been formally announced yet. As it stands, you all know as much as I do, including how it might affect our household. I’m hoping for the best and expecting the worst, and if I can get something in between, I’ll be happy.

Of course, there are other ways to make money in this crazy world.

I’m posting this Sunday and spending Monday a) waiting for Sears to deliver our new washing machine, because of course no economic crisis can be complete without a major appliance throwing in the towel; b) studying Russian sentence structure; and c) writing and writing and writing and writing, in the hopes that someone might throw me a few coins for it, someday. I suppose Dwight has a lecture he’s about to deliver in 5,4,3…

You all have a good week.

UPDATE: For a lesson in how to say all the same things Mitch Albom said, only in less eye-rolling fashion, see the great Gretchen Morgenson in the NYT.

I didn’t trust my first reaction to Alex Kuczynski’s cover story in Sunday’s NYT magazine. The story is about how she, a very rich woman with a “successful investor” multimillionaire husband, had a child with the help of a surrogate, obviously far less fortunate, although not the white-trash rent-a-womb you might be expecting. We know this because Kuczynski, in explaining her reasons for choosing Cathy Hilling to be her designated vessel, makes an issue of it:

When we came across Cathy’s application, we saw that she was by far the most coherent and intelligent of the group. She wrote that she was happily married with three children. Her answers were not handwritten in the tiny allotted spaces; she had downloaded the original questionnaire and typed her responses at thoughtful length. Her attention to detail was heartening. And her computer-generated essay indicated, among other things, a certain level of competence. This gleaned morsel of information made me glad: she must live in a house with a computer and know how to use it.

See? She lives in a house with a computer and knows how to use it. So much for any class guilt.

But what am I talking about? Alex Kuczynski suffers from no such thing. If she did, she might have hesitated at posing for the remarkable photos that accompany the piece. For starters, there’s the cover…

…which sort of suggests someone thought stretch marks and fat ankles would totally not go with that black sheath dress. The copy contradicts that — Kuczynski did indeed try to get pregnant herself for years before hiring Hilling. But then there’s the real money shot, inside:

That was taken “at home in Southampton, N.Y.,” just one of the couple’s fabulous homes. Note the “baby nurse” standing at attention, waiting for Mistress to hand off little Max, about two months old, should he need something only a nurse is qualified to provide, like maybe a diaper change.

I’m aware that my reaction to these photos seems pretty by-the-book. I can scarcely believe Kuczynski is so clueless that she didn’t know what the pictures would suggest. (There’s another porch shot, of Hilling on her own. You should not be surprised to learn it isn’t nearly so grand. Go ahead and click to see it, because I’m done hot-linking.) So I have to believe she planned it this way, for the “buzz.” As long as I’ve been doing this job, I’ve always held my most toxic contempt for people who say or do things they don’t believe, just to get the phones ringing.

So I’ll refrain from taking the bait, and hope little Max Dudley Stevenson is soon kidnapped by loving fairies who will spirit him away and raise him far from his horrible parents, perhaps on a farm in Iowa, like Clark Kent. (Kuczynski is her husband’s fourth wife, and Max either his sixth or seventh kid.)

I asked a bona fide member of the eastern media elite what he thought of this, and while he hadn’t read the story yet, he offered an interesting observation I hadn’t thought of:

Before the great weeding out of newsrooms, didn’t every shop have (or should have had) a pampered richie-bitchy? Whom all the male editors could not wilfully ignore? In features? (Or metro g/a? If nothing else, I’ve seen it in ingenue photogs, who just arrived from the Eddie Adams Photo Workshop and had long blond hair and only weeks or months into their extended internship do you learn she’s, like, a Rockefeller or something.)

I think he’s right. One of my first colleagues in Columbus used to speak of a former secretary, who cashed her paycheck every Friday and promptly took the loot next door to an upscale boutique, where she spent every penny on a new outfit. There was a columnist at the other paper who gave the accountants fits; they had to remind her to please cash her paycheck, because she always had half a dozen stacked up in her drawer, and they needed to get them off the books. And now that I think of it, I recall a copy editor in Fort Wayne who had married well and was passionately devoted to the cause of animal rights. She refused to wear leather, although she made an exception for the upholstery in her Mercedes.

And Caroline Kennedy interned at the New York Daily News. So I guess it could be worse.

My Monday-morning moping went away almost as soon as I expressed it yesterday. On my way to the gym, I returned a missed call to my cell phone. A man with a heavy Indian accent answered, and when I asked who had called me, said he represented something like Tech-Ar Corporation, and if I’d share a little personal information, he’d be happy to tell me about their exciting financial services.

“Please put me on your no-call list,” I said.

“We are not selling products or telemarketing,” he protested.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“I am …Don …Junior,” he said. I started to laugh. In the background, I could hear another Indian accent saying, “Ma’am? Ma’am? I am not harassing you!”

I finally told Don Junior that if he made another call to a phone I have to buy minutes for, I’d be reporting him to the attorney general. Total b.s., but I figure they have their hands full in Mumbai these days, and really don’t need to be calling me.

One of the things I’ve learned from this blog after nearly eight years of keeping it daily, or nearly so:

Sometimes you’re just not that into it.

I suppose it’s inevitable. The election nearly killed many of us, and even though the news has not stopped or even slowed down — economic meltdown, brink-of-disaster-Detroit, Mumbai bloodbaths, hello newspaper what horrors have you brought me today? — it lacks a certain frisson of late, and that frisson is: Opposition. You could get into the election because no matter who you were rooting for, there was a guy on the other side, and you were working toward the crushing defeat of that guy, and when it happened or didn’t happen, we had, what’s the word? Closure. I hate that word, because it’s bullshit, and because it implies that stories end. Stories never end, which we’re discovering now. To be sure, a curtain rang down on November 4, but on November 5 Sarah Palin was still with us and campaigning was giving way to governing and the narrative wasn’t nearly so clear.

It isn’t just me. Even Rachel Maddow is getting on my nerves of late. Keith Olbermann has gone back to being supremely annoying. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert keep their standards high, but if it weren’t for that Christmas special, who knows how I’d feel?

Anyway, it just seems like a little air has gone out of the balloon, and many days I sit down to the blinking cursor with one thought uppermost in mind: Meh. It’ll pass; it always has in the past. And this isn’t navel-gazing. I’m telling you so if one day you check in and see a sign reading, “Gone to Texas,” you’ll know it wasn’t you, it was me.

Texas. I should be so lucky.

So today the New York Times has a story on Page One, about the way cost-cutting is hitting local TV news, and that is: Farewell to the highly paid local-TV anchor. I am hearing the sound of the world’s tiniest violin, and it is playing a sad, sad song. While a part of me can empathize with any journalist who’s feeling a moving rug underfoot, anyone who’s worked in newspapers isn’t going to be moved much by hearing the local show pony down at Channel 6 is losing their six- or seven-figure salary. Especially those of us who’ve worked outside the big cities, and may have known a few of these lucky bastards personally, may have trouble empathizing. It’s hard to accept, sometimes, that simply by virtue of showing up every night at 6 and 11, they have the power to command advertisers, and hence earn their dough. You think: Even viewers in this town aren’t that stupid. And yet they are.

It’s the passing of an era, to be sure. How many entertaining stories have we heard through the years? The adulterous male-female anchor team, caught making the two-backed beast in a deserted state park somewhere. The blow-dried talking head, annual salary somewhere north of $450,000 a year, enraging the local stripper community with his attempts to tip with quarters. (They called the station to complain.) The female anchor, arrested for DUI after her car pinballed off the Jersey barrier one too many times. Another so thoroughly useless around the newsroom for any job other than smiling and reading, told by the news director that she needn’t bother trying to actually write any copy. Dinosaurs stumbling into their own version of the tar pits. All that will be left are the veneers and the toupees.

Off to start the day with a little exercise. Envy me, world: I have the metabolism of a 50-year-old 51-year-old woman.