Category: Media

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Media Uncategorized

Guest post

My brilliant sportswriter friend Joe Posnanski (author of the best blog in the history of the Internet) asked me to write something for his other blog, on the future of newspapers. I have pretty much made a vow never to go to another conference or workshop about the future of newspapers, because it all ends up sounding like a meeting of Depressions Anonymous. When somebody figures out the future of newspapers, drop me a line. If I ever figure it out, I promise y’all will be the first to know.

Anyway, I may have blown the assignment, because it’s not so much about the future of newspapers as the future of stories. Take a look and see what you think.

Categories
Media Uncategorized

Guest post

My brilliant sportswriter friend Joe Posnanski (author of the best blog in the history of the Internet) asked me to write something for his other blog, on the future of newspapers. I have pretty much made a vow never to go to another conference or workshop about the future of newspapers, because it all ends up sounding like a meeting of Depressions Anonymous. When somebody figures out the future of newspapers, drop me a line. If I ever figure it out, I promise y’all will be the first to know.

Anyway, I may have blown the assignment, because it’s not so much about the future of newspapers as the future of stories. Take a look and see what you think.

Categories
Charlotte Media

Charlotte blues

It’s spring break at Harvard so Alix and I decided to come back home to Charlotte for the week. It turned out to be remarkable timing. We arrived in town the same day our newspaper laid off another large chunk of the staff — including many of our friends. One of our photogs took a pretty amazing photo of the announcement. I know every single person in that photo. I’ve seen that body language before. That’s a funeral.

Alix and I are safe for now. Whatever “safe” means these days.

We had lunch today with a group of co-workers, all of whom (for now) have survived. We just happened to end up next to a table of Observer people from outside the newsroom. Two of them lost their jobs yesterday. One told me she’s more worried about the people she’s leaving behind.

None of this is unique to us, of course — the same thing is going on all the way up and down the line, to white-collar workers and blue-collar workers and no-collar workers. We are catching it hard for many reasons, one of them being that the people who used to advertise in our paper can’t afford to anymore.

I think what we do is important — if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have done it for these last 25 years — but we don’t deserve a job any more than a teacher or a textile worker. Everybody who puts in an honest day’s work contributes to the world. And the market works its will on us the same as it does everybody else.

Newspaper people get by on gallows humor — it’s how we cope with having to cover murders and missing children and the mamas of sons who don’t come back from the war. So at lunch we mourned the people who lost their jobs and we worried about our own futures but mostly we laughed at it all the best we could. Is the glass half full or half empty? All I know is, somebody peed in the glass.

We’ll be back for good in June. I don’t know what it’s going to be like, and nobody else does either. We just have to enjoy the moments we get, make the most of the rest, and prepare ourselves for whatever happens next. Somebody peed in the glass.

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Media Music

Online = CD, print = LP

Harvard Square has a lot of record stores, and I mean that literally — most of them carry CDs and cassettes and posters and such, but it’s mainly bins and bins of vinyl. Some of it’s new, some of it’s collectible, a lot of it is Tom Petty albums from the ’80s for three bucks.

Turntables are even making a comeback of sorts, even though most people don’t own one anymore. The point is, at least in a big metro area, you can still make a living selling LPs.

Why is that? I’d say there are three main reasons:

Dynamics — to lots of people, a well-kept LP on a good turntable just sounds better. My ear isn’t sharp enough to tell the difference, but the idea is that an LP brings in more highs and more lows and a generally warmer sound.

Artwork — the extra space on an album cover provides lots of room for art, and makes the LP a visual experience (I cannot begin to tell you how long I stared at the cover of the first Boston album when it came out. Surprisingly, I did not have many dates back then.)

Keepsakeability — OK, I just made that word up, but you get the idea. A CD is just a tool — take it out of the case and plug it in. An LP is more of a relationship — you spend time taking care of the record, you spend time reading the liner notes, maybe you even put the cover in a frame and hang it on the wall.

It seems to me there might be a lesson here for the newspaper business.

Maybe you treat your online operation as a CD collection — digital, clean, unlimited selection. And maybe you treat your newspaper like an LP — dynamic, beautifully packaged, maybe in a limited edition.

If you follow the newspaper business you know that Tuesday brings the first big move in what might be the endgame for the daily paper — the Detroit papers, it seems, are planning to stop regular daily home delivery. And newspapers across the country are thinking about dropping the print version of the Monday paper — Monday is the thinnest paper with the least news and the fewest ads.

So what if you turned the Monday paper into a magazine?

I’m not talking about going from broadsheet to tabloid — I’m talking about a real magazine, with glossy pages and acres of space for photos and art.

The most underused material at any paper is photography. Photogs shoot hundreds of frames at every assignment, and sometimes the print edition uses one, inside Local, squeezed to credit-card size. Online, some of that work makes it into slideshows. But what if you took all the photos from the previous week and ran 30 or 40 every Monday? What if you had 10 pages of photos from high-school graduations or New Year’s Eve or (in our town) the NASCAR race?

If you live in an NFL town and the Monday edition gave you a killer photo package on Sunday’s game, wouldn’t you want to get ahold of that?

That’s the art. Now the dynamics.

What if you took that Monday edition and ran the best stuff from your blogs? Run the great posts and run the best comments next to them. You could even run a “best of the Web” page from other blogs everywhere. And you could have a standing box listing every one of your blogs, how to find them and how to comment.

A bunch of beautiful photos. Commentary from all around your site (driving people to the site, by the way). A couple of pages devoted to Sunday’s breaking news. And the comics in color.

Seems to me that would be something advertisers would love and readers would jump all over.

You’d struggle a bit on the days when big news breaks on Sunday — maybe two or three times a year. Those days you’d wish you had the flexibility and later deadlines of a broadsheet. But even on those days you could carry a summary in your Monday mag and point readers online. And by the way, if big news broke on Sunday, most of them will have read it online anyway.

These days most newspapers of any size are in the magazine-publishing business — back home in Charlotte, according to this, the Observer puts out at least 10. We know how to put out magazines. I’m not sure if we print them in-house or contract it out, but they get printed somewhere.

No doubt I’m way off base on some crucial element here — it’s too expensive, the deadlines will never work, we have to serve the readers who demand a full news report in print seven days a week. I’m sure somebody can point out all the ways this idea is loony.

But before the newspaper business completely circles the drain, maybe it’s time to try loony.

Here’s the thing about the record-store shoppers in Harvard Square: They’re young. Not all of them, but most. If they’re like the vinyl collectors I know, they’ve got CDs at home, too. They’re not anti-digital. But they know that the record on the turntable and the album cover in your hand is a different experience.

Obviously it’s not as big an audience as the CD audience. But there’s an audience that likes that experience. And apparently they’re willing to pay for it.

Categories
Media Writing

Gardens, guns and flytraps

Garden & Gun is not a magazine for people with split personalities. It’s named after a legendary bar in Charleston, S.C., and published down there (in Charleston, not in the bar). It’s got beautiful photography, an interesting take on the South, and in this issue, a story by yours truly.

Go take a look and see what you think. Of course it’s even better if you buy a copy (or several dozen). And, as always, patronize their advertisers.

Categories
Media Obama

A ticker in every pot

(Just in case you haven’t seen the ticker… watch the bottom of the screen.)

After tonight’s presidential debate it is more clear to me than ever what Americans really need, and what we need is for every American to have one of those tickers they run underneath the debate on CNN.

They put these remote-control thingies in the hands of undecided voters and tell them to dial up or down depending on what they think of what the candidates are saying. So you can follow along on TV and watch Obama’s ticker rise when he talks about Iraq, or McCain’s ticker dip when he talks about needing a hair transplant or whatever. It’s like a running EKG of their political success.

(How can there be any undecided voters at this point? Obama and McCain have been running for TWO YEARS, they’ve been on the news every single day, they’ve visited every town in America with a red light, they debated other candidates in the primaries, they’ve debated each other twice now… unless you just this week emerged from a coal mine, how can you not have picked one or the other? These are the same people who get to the front of the line at McDonald’s and stand there scratching their chins because it’s just too hard to decide between the Quarter Pounder and the chicken strips.)

((Memo to CNN: At one point in the debate coverage, the camera backed up for a long shot and I counted THIRTEEN talking heads on the set, including poor Wolf Blitzer, who stood in the back like the last kid to get picked for kickball. This is not Monopoly. You don’t win by accumulating pundits like houses on Boardwalk. Put three people out there and maybe let them speak for more than eight seconds at a time.))

(((This also, it goes without saying, applies to every NFL pregame show.)))

((((Because we are fair and balanced, we even switched to Fox News after the debate. Sean Hannity was yapping about why Obama once served on a board with former bomber/current college professor William Ayers — because, as you know, if you serve on a board with somebody you believe in exactly the same things they believe in. “He blurbed his book! He blurbed his book!” Hannity kept shouting at some poor guest — honest to God, I don’t know if he was an Obama guy or a McCain guy or the guy who showed up to fix the Coke machine. It was clear he was NEVER going to get a chance to speak. That was it for us and Fox News.))))

Anyway: the ticker. How great would this be on a job interview? “Well, sir, I’d bring lots of experience to the job” (ticker goes up)… “which means I’d of course want a decent salary” (ticker goes down)… “and I played baseball in college so I could hit cleanup for the company softball team” (ticker goes way up).

And of course you would immediately see where you stand on a date: “Maybe you’d like to come over to my place” (ticker goes up)… “to see my comic book collection” (ticker goes down)… “but of course you can’t actually read them, I’ve got them individually sealed in acid-free sleeves” (ticker plummets off screen, date gets up and leaves).

The debates would be so much better if the candidates could see the ticker in real time like the audience does. “Wait! When I said that Americans would have to pay higher taxes, what I MEANT to say, of course, was: I like puppies.”

I’ve spent 570 words so far not actually talking about the debate itself, because the outcome is pretty clear at this point: If nothing truly weird happens in the next four weeks, Barack Obama is going to be the next president.

And if you didn’t know anything about the candidates, and you didn’t know anything about race in America, if all you did was watch the debate and ask yourself: “Which one of these guys is going to be the next president?”, you’d say the same thing.

But of course truly weird things happen in politics all the time. And Barack Obama is a black man and that still matters. And trashing your opponent is sometimes the winning play.

I’ll just add this: When you watched the ticker, and the two candidates talked about their actual ideas — to fix the economy, to cut back on foreign oil, to deal with Iraq — the tickers always went up.

When either candidate started to rip the other, the tickers always went down.

I’m just sayin’.