CNN’s ratings in the prime 25-54 demographic fell 77 percent in the last 12 months. Finger-pointers and blame-gamers abound. The Times‘ Bill Carter calls the last-place performance of CNN’s “signature host” Anderson Cooper “alarming” at the 10 p.m. slot. Charles Warner of mediacurmudgeon.com writes at HuffPo that Fox and MSNBC may have outbid CNN for favorable channel positions. Others, like Bill Gorman of tvbythenumbers.com, thinks CNN lost its substantial advantage gained from its political coverage from 2006 to 2008.

But seasoned TV pundits are missing a significant point lost in the blizzard of analyses of the cable news rating wars.

The Times‘ Carter offers a forest of numbers to paint a distressing picture for CNN (which, of course, paints an equally depressing financial picture). His Oct. 26 story provided ratings and leaders for each prime-time hour. (By the way, his story provided no source for the numbers. Mr. Warner at HuffPo says Mr. Carter received the numbers from MSNBC executives perhaps eager to stick it to the Chicken Noodle Network.) But here’s the nutshell for the evening hours:

For the month, CNN averaged 202,000 viewers, ages 25 to 54. That was far behind the dominant leader, Fox, which averaged 689,000. But it also trailed MSNBC which had 250,000 viewers in that group and HLN, which had 221,000 viewers.

For those without a calculator handy, that’s about 1.3 million viewers between 25 and 54 years old for all prime-time cable news programs. According to Neilsen, the rating service, America has about 115 million TV households. Those households have an average of 2.83 television sets.

So what the hell is everyone else watching? Or doing? Let’s subtract about 30 million people over 70 who just don’t watch TV at late hours. And another 20 million under 5 years old for the same reason. If only 1.3 million are watching the “journalism” that supposedly maintains an adversarial relationship with government (hah!), then what are about 62 million people doing between 7 and 11 p.m.?

Let’s cut another 25 million who would be watching prime-time network or cable entertainment programming. (Even “Law & Order” reruns — which draw up to 10 million viewers — dwarf CNN’s viewership.) That’s still 37 million people not watching the prime-time cable “news” programming.

No, I don’t know why. But I’ll hazard a guess or two.

The 1.3 million who do watch cable news prime-time programs have firmly held (and not always rationally adopted) political points of view. They need their daily ideological dose of Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly. But the 62 million who don’t watch the cable prime-time offerings may have simply concluded that it’s just not news, and that the opinionated content simply has too little value.

Frankly, the cable news networks’ collective decision to bloviate instead of inform between 7 and 11 p.m. has hurt all of them. Fox may outdraw CNN by a factor of three, but given that tens of millions of Americans do not watch Fox and its opinion programming should be little comfort to Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.

After all, many millions of those tens of millions of people who do not watch Fox or CNN or MSNBC or HLN are between 25 and 54 years old. And they have money to spend.

Cable news networks should re-examine what they do between 7 and 11 p.m. if they wish to be more profitable — and survive.

Art as the Servant of Commerce

“… every Beatles song ever recorded is going to be advertising women’s underwear and sausages… It’s one thing you’re dead, but we’re still around! They don’t have any respect for the fact that we wrote and recorded those songs, and it was our lives.” – George Harrison, 1987.

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.” – Walt Whitman

The Levi’s jeans company is currently running a new advertising campaign featuring Walt Whitman’s poems “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “America.” What sets the ads apart is the use of Thomas Edison’s 1890 recordings of Whitman himself reading the poems as images of 21st century heroin chic models clad in Levis cavort in scenes designed, one supposes, to suggest the new American realities – including as some in the blogosphere have noted, a scene in which a woman offers what can be interpreted as a Nazi style salute – but might simply be a dumbass mimicking a statue….

But I digress…

Over 20 years ago Apple Corps., representing McCartney, Harrison, Starr and Yoko Ono Lennon, won a legal decision preventing advertisers from using actual recordings by The Beatles as background music for commercials (this was precipitated by the infamous Nike “Revolution” ad). Beatle songs may be used in commercials, but only if they are performed by other artists. That explains Blackberry using “All You Need is Love” or Target using “Hello Goodbye” with other artists performing those Beatles classics.

Both Whitman and Harrison are dead. So if George was right, maybe having Whitman read his poetry to help a company that has offshored its plants and put thousands of Americans out of work to increase profits for stockholders and bonuses for its top executives while helping drive down wages for American workers is okay. And maybe using George’s song “Something” to sell Chrysler LeBarons for a company that was bailed out of bankruptcy by American taxpayer dollars (twice!) was okay because George wasn’t singing it.

But I digress again….

Art as Commerce?

Art has had a long history of depending on the kindness of strangers. Whether from royalty, religious institutions, or the wealthy, artists relied on patronage and commissions to support them and allow them to create their works. This made them vulnerable to patrons meddling – and perhaps to the enticement to compromise their art to guarantee they received support. The great “liberation” of artists that some claim occurred during the Romantic Period (two great examples being Beethoven and Byron who could command large fees from orchestras and publishers respectively because their work filled concert halls and sold books) is really a shift in support – from dependence on the support of wealthy elites, artists could look to the marketplace for livelihood. To achieve this end, however, required that artists consider how their works functioned as product in the marketplace. So again rises that issue of compromise (popularly seen as damaging to artistic integrity – and, indeed, to creativity).

Not all artists have accepted this view of work as product that must meet marketplace expectations, of course, and Whitman is an example – he worked variously as a journalist, teacher, clerk, and nurse to support himself because – well, initially his poetry didn’t sell. His poetry, far out of step with the verse of his time (which was highly formal in rhyme and meter) only gained acceptance slowly – and his reputation (and sales) have enlarged much more since his death than they did during his life. Even as art and commerce were merging (and audiences were turning from poetry to prose), Whitman made his poetry his life’s work – apparently without serious thought of recompense. And his reputation as America’s greatest poet grows with every passing year as audiences have come to appreciate his seriousness of purpose and artistic vision. (Think what

Harrison, on the surface, would seem the exemplar of the artist fully accepting his art as product. The staggering success of The Beatles music, based on its promotion and distribution as if it were “women’s underwear [or] sausages,” seems the triumph of commercial concerns over artistic ones. Yet the evolution of Harrison’s/The Beatles’ music from the simplicity that musicologist Wilfrid Mellers terms “Edenic” to the later problematic complexity that challenged, educated, and enriched audiences exploded the (once) popular conception of rock music as disposable and indeed raised rock musicians’ and audiences’ expectations of that music as an art form. As Harrison and The Beatles treated their music ever more seriously, their audience mirrored the artists’ seriousness by becoming serious listeners. As the art became greater, the audience became greater also.

So, it would seem from the examples of Whitman and Harrison/The Beatles, artists will find ways of expressing their art with integrity and creativity despite whatever temptations or rewards the material world may/may not offer. And audiences will recognize and appreciate this.

Artvertising

Art enriches human experience. It lifts us, changes us, takes us out of ourselves. It inspires us to think more, to feel more, to live life more fully.

The above claims are true, I suspect most of us would contend, but they can also be (and often are) attacked as truisms, as platitudes, as wishful thinking.

Making money, on the other hand, is, at least in one proven way, rewarding. Money will get us things – things like cars, video games, jeans.

And things – as we are constantly told by advertising – things will make us happy.

The above claim is untrue, I suspect most of us would contend, though advertising tries relentlessly to convince us otherwise.

And this is why advertising repeatedly attaches its claim to the claims of art. By associating buying jeans with great poetry or buying cars with a great song, advertising hopes that its audience will associate (or confuse, perhaps) the rewards of art with “getting and spending,”as Wordsworth put it.

But the public outrage that greeted the use of The Beatles’ work to sell sneakers two decades ago and that greets the use of Walt Whitman’s poetry to sell jeans today must give us hope that we are about more than things.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Been there. Feeling your pain. May all your clients not be like these…

Part of my job as a journalism professor is to recruit students. Because I was a journalist, I’m interested in finding bright, hard-working young men and women who’d like to follow the calling of the public service mission of journalism. (I remain optimistic, perhaps foolishly.)

Parents of prospective students, of course, routinely ask: “What’s your record on job placement?” That I can tell them, based on surveys of our grads six months after matriculation. (And it’s an excellent record, too.)

But here’s the question I dread:

My daughter says she wants to be a journalist. Even if her financial aid package is half your $35,000 per year cost — and rising at 5 percent a year — and despite what parents can pay, she may end up with more than $30,000 or $40,000 in student loans. How long will it take for her on an entry-level journalist’s salary to recover her investment?

Surveys of journalism school grads from recent years say salaries in the mid-20s are customary. Entry-level print journalists earn a little less (in some cases, a lot less, as my graduates tell me); PR, advertising and some broadcast jobs earn more. That parent envisions an ROI on the family’s investment in the daughter’s education at three to five years or more. That’s at a private school; presumably, a public school grad would fare better.

If that young woman is bright, she’ll do her homework. She’ll ask me before sending in her enrollent deposit for the names of recent grads who landed daily print jobs after graduation. After getting their permission, I’ll give them to her. They’ll tell her this:

They love being journalists. They love telling a good story. But they detest working 60 or 70 hours, nights and weekends, for 40 hours’ pay. They detest the unpaid furloughs imposed by corporate managers looking to cut costs. Their raises, if profferred, lag significantly behind inflation. Because of numerous rounds of buyouts and layoffs, fewer older, experienced reporters and editors are available (and willing) to serve as mentors. Young journos are tired of seeing assignments that serve more as fluff than substance. They thought, as journalists, that they could make a difference. They are discovering that the current structure of the industry prevents that, frustrating them. Their health-care plans suck. And they’re tired of providing their own reporter’s notebooks.

That prospective student may still attend my journalism program — but if she’s keenly aware of her ROI, she may apply her time, treasure and talent to mastering the skills of a journalist only to apply them to other avenues of communication that pay more. She’ll learn to observe, record, analyze, organize and present. But she’ll do that concocting advertising and PR campaigns instead of digging up the dirt at city hall that unpaid “volunteer” amateurs and bloggers don’t do well or at all. That’s because those stories — the mundane but necessary stuff of holding government accountable — don’t drive traffic to blogs.

Yes, I paint a bleak picture. Yes, it’s overdrawn. But scratch journalists in their mid-20s, either at print jobs or small-market broadcast stations, and you’ll hear all these threads. And yes, there are a number of emerging avenues for distribution of journalists’ work operated by laid-off journos, foundations, non-profits and for-profit, online-only startups. There are places she can work as a journalist. But then there’s that ROI calculation: Making a difference vs. paying the bills and student loans.

I wonder where the journalists will come from who will be around 10 to 20 years from now to cover the financial funeral of Social Security, the continuing debate over health-care reform, the attempt by President Hillary Clinton to amend the constitution to allow her a third term and the still unfolding drama of Brett Favre’s 15th “retirement” from the Toronto Argonauts.

Thousands of journalists at daily papers have lost their jobs in just the past few years. Generally, they’ve been the older, more experienced journalists. Bean counters figure they can hire two, maybe three cub reporters for the dough they pay an experienced journo making Guild scale and excellent benefits after 25 years. And that’s if they hire at all.

Studies show that the nation’s journalism schools are cranking out about 12,000 graduates every year. But is the trend line of those who wish a journalism career with a public-service aura ascending or descending?

Where will the next generation of skilled, committed journalists come from if the perceived ROI of a journalism education is so dismal?

Managers of content-provision corporations — there’s no point any more in calling them “newspaper companies” — are desperate for revenue after enduring print ad losses. So, after 15 years of giving away the milk for free online, they’ve finally mustered up the cojones to at least talk about charging for content on their websites. They speak of this in a language the reporters they’ve fired would never use — the content provision managers talk of monetizing their sites, of incorporating paid-content strategies, of generating additional digital revenue.

And if you believe pay-content impresario Steven Brill of Journalism Online, about 1,000 publishers — er, content-provision specialists — expect to make $900 million at $8.33 a month from the 10 percent of online website visitors Mr. Brill thinks would be willing to cough of up the cash. But an American Press Institute study says only 51 percent of publishers (who voluntarily completed a survey) think they can charge successfully for online content.

But what does “successfully” mean? And who gets to define it? Easy: Cui bono?

Those at the top of many content-provision corporations believe they would benefit. Mr. Brill says he has 1,000 publications signed to non-binding agreements. Others aren’t so optimistic. Consultants for the American Press Institute, in an early study with admitted weaknesses, suggest only readers would only pay $4.64 — nearly halving Mr. Brill’s nearly $1 billion estimate.

Content-provision corporations are eager, nay, slaked with thirst for advertising revenue to replace the dollars that have fled print newspapers. Although a few large content-provision corporations have managed to hold share prices lately despite tumbling profits, managers need that pay-wall revenue to reinvigorate investors who lost a bundle on newspaper stocks over that past five years. (And let’s not forget some argue consortium-set, pay-wall prices are tantamount to collusion in pricing.)

Because sound data to predict pay-wall success, erecting that wall risks revenue flight as much as revenue restored. Respected analyst Alan Mutter (”Reflections of Newsosaur“) has written extensively in the past few months about pay walls. Mr. Mutter says:

But what, publishers rightfully wonder, will become of the other 90% of website visitors – and the $3.1 billion in advertising revenues the U.S. newspaper industry generated on the web in 2008?. … Here’s why publishers are sweating: While Brill argues that newspapers can preserve some 90% of their page views and online advertising after erecting a pay wall, publishers consistently have told me that they fear they could lose 75% or more of their traffic and banner revenue if they started to charge for content.

Readers — at least those who pay the toll to cross the pay-wall moat — get to define success. (Here’s a look at what some smaller, rural newspapers in non-competitive situations have done in terms of content behind the pay wall.) Remember that “Members Only” clothing line of the ’80s? That’s what a pay wall promises: Uniqueness. Frankly, that’s always been a good local newspaper’s strength — unique content. Local news about local people and local issues.

Erect a pay wall. Promise quality, unique, premium content. That’s the formula the content-provision corporations promise. Will they deliver in terms of what the readers accept as a fair exchange for fee paid? It’d be easy to snark here. For example, in May more than half of the 45 million visits to the online Palm Beach Post linked to the police mug shots the Post runs online. (It’s not the only online paper that does this, too. And a host of ethical issues are involved.)

Is this the quality, unique, premium content that lies behind the pay wall? No, not really. Most of that unique content will be locally generated news, features and “service” information — school lunches, entertainment listings. But will that local behind-the-wall content have quality in quantity?

If the pay walls had been erected 15 years ago — even five years ago — then the answer would be more yes than no.

In this still-dawning century, thousands of the skilled, experienced professional practitioners who produced the quality, unique, premium content no longer work for the content-provision corporations. That’s because the corporations fired the producers. To maintain profit levels to satisfy the investors to whom content-provision management sold its collective soul, it cut expenses — firing the professionals it desparately needs now to make good on the pay-wall promise.

A successful business model? Or crap shoot?

Even if content-provision companies have that $900 million fall into their laps as Mr. Brill suggests, which is more likely to happen? Stock buybacks and dividend increases? Or investment of at least tens of millions of dollars into hiring professional newsmen and newswomen to make good on the promise of quality, unique, premium content?

Yeah, right. It won’t be the latter.

Recommended reading:

Alan Mutter’s excellent series on arguments for and against pay walls:

Why aren’t we paying for news?
What stops publishers from charging for news?
How publishers can make Web content pay

Paul Farhi of the American Journalism Review, arguing for reinvigoration of the print newspaper:

Build that pay wall high

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 182 nations of the world had a combined GDP of nearly $60.9 trillion (or $60,900 billion) in 2008. But comparing the GDP data to the Fortune 500 data produces the table at right (click for the top 182 nations and corporations each, in order). If Exxon Mobil were a country, it would rank 25^th in the world, right between Norway and Austria. Wal-Mart would rank 27^th, sandwiched between Austria and Taiwan. Chevron would rank 28^th, ConocoPhillips 42^nd, GE 49^th, GM 59^th, Ford 60^th, and AT&T, H-P, and Valero would be ranked 64-66 respectively.

In fact, all of the Fortune 500 would rank above the 40 smallest national economies in the world. And the smallest company on Fortune’s list of the 1000 largest U.S. companies would be larger than the national economies of 28 entire countries. Exxon Mobil’s revenue is greater than the combined GDP of the 78 smallest countries (out of a total of 182) in the world.

And yet the Supreme Court took the unusual step of ordering a hearing during the court’s recess in order to hear legal arguments over whether corporate money could be spent to influence elections and whether the current bans on most such money in politics were constitutional. And indications are that the conservative majority will likely rule to overturn nearly 20 years of precedent and rule that it is constitutional for corporate money to be spent directly to influence local, state, and federal elections.

According to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the four liberal justices were the ones quoting from the U.S. Constitution to support their questions and arguments:

Justice Ginsburg reminded Olson that it is living persons, not corporations, who are “endowed by [their] Creator with unalienable rights.” Justice Sotomayor, too, picked up on this theme, emphasizing how the Supreme Court had rewritten the Constitution to create the fiction that corporations are persons entitled to the same basic rights as human beings. If we are looking to constitutional first principles to topple precedents, she asked, why shouldn’t we also look at the cases that invented corporate constitutional personhood and “imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics”?

Several of the court’s conservatives are supposed to be Originalists, judges who believe that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at it’s writing (except for amendments, of course) and has not changed since then. Granting state creations the rights guaranteed to flesh and blood people when the Constitution doesn’t mention state creations is hypocrisy of the first order. It’s also an example of the very judicial activism than the Senate Republicans who voted against confirming Justice Sotomayor feared she would bring to the court. Perhaps the most activist judge on the Supreme Court today, defined by being the most willing to overrule Congress, is Antonin Scalia.

At present, corporate profits may not be spent to directly influence elections. This has historically been the case because corporations can live effectively forever and amass financial resources that no individual person could equal, and because legislators and courts have been concerned about corporate influence corrupting the political process. In essence, these are many of the same arguments that federal law uses to ban foreign nationals and governments from donating money to political campaigns. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, there are no foreign governments suing for free speech rights to influence elections.

The problem twofold – corporations are presently considered people, and money is considered speech. Corporations were defined legally as people for the purposes of limiting personal liability in the event of a business failure. But one of the results is that corporations have claimed the rights guaranteed to real people in the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment right to free speech. And because the Supreme Court declared, in Buckley v. Valeo, that spending money equals exercising the right to free speech, corporations are now claiming that their money should be given identical rights to the money of individual citizens.

There are at least two direct solutions to this problem. The first would be to overturn Buckley v. Valeo. This would make money no longer equal to speech and could be an even more significant change in legal precedent than overturning 100 years of campaign limits on corporate donations to candidates. It would also require the conservatives on the court to go against their known personal ideologies.

The second is to redefine corporations so that they are not considered individual people for all situations. This would certainly require federal legislation and would probably require state legislation as well. It would also require that the economic and political powers at the state and federal levels voluntarily relinquish the power that corporate money (via PACs today, possibly via direct contributions in a few months) brings them.

Neither is particularly likely given the composition of the Supreme Court and the major influence of money in politics today.

Eventually, though, if the laws are overturned, enough companies will corrupt enough politicians with direct donations that they’ll overreach, and the public reaction will be swift and unstoppable. And when that happens, Exxon Mobil’s money and Wal-Mart’s money and Chevron’s money will be as untouchable as money from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Both of which have smaller economies than either Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart.

You’re honey child to a swarm of bees
Gonna blow right through you like a breeze
Give me one last dance
Well slide down the surface of things

You’re the real thing
Yeah the real thing
You’re the real thing
Even better than the real thing

- U2

Fantasy stories, myths, legends, tall tales, fairy tales, horror, all these have been with us for a very long time. Science fiction, as well, has been with us since Mary Shelley found herself in a bet with Lord Byron about the possibility of writing a new kind of horror, one not grounded in the gothic.* So the presence in our popular culture of stories based in unreality of one form or another is certainly nothing new.

It seems to me that there’s been a lot more of it lately, though. I don’t have the means to conduct the kind of thorough study we’d need to prove the point, but a cursory examination of what’s on television demonstrates that a good bit of our attention is being occupied by various hyper-realities.

• In this TV.com list of most popular shows, at least 20 deal with the supernatural in some form.
• A quick look at the networks’ fall line-up reveals 11 non-reality-based shows. Add to this Chuck, which will be back mid-season sometime.
• That list doesn’t include cable, of course. In addition to SyFy (or whatever the heck it’s being called these days), HBO is currently burning it up with True Blood, an exceptional vampire/mystery series.

When you factor out reality and game shows, soap operas and children’s programming, the ratio of supernatural-to-natural (such as it is) is quite high. And we’re not even including ludicrously fanciful programming that’s ostensibly based in the plausible (think Desperate Housewives here).

Now let’s have a look at the top-grossing films of 2008:

• The Dark Knight
• Iron Man
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Hancock
• WALL·E
• Kung Fu Panda
• Twilight (2008/I)
• Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
• Quantum of Solace
• Horton Hears a Who!

And 2009:

• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Up
• The Hangover
• Star Trek
• Monsters vs Aliens
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine
• Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
• The Proposal

Beginning to notice a pattern?

I can’t help wondering why. Cultures behave the way they do for reasons, and studied examinations of those behaviors (and most especially, of the culture’s popular artifacts) tell us a great deal about the society. What does it love, what does it hate? What does it dream of, what does it fear? What are its dysfunctions…

In this particular case, what are we running from?

We Are the Hollow Men

I have a theory. Well, actually, it’s not well developed enough to be a theory. Or even a hypothesis, for that matter. So let’s just call it a question. I recently read Affluenza, a book that sets out to examine our culture’s pathological need for stuff. The editor’s review at Amazon sums it up this way:

The definition of affluenza, according to de Graaf, Wann, and Naylor, is something akin to “a painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” It’s a powerful virus running rampant in our society, infecting our souls, affecting our wallets and financial well-being, and threatening to destroy not only the environment but also our families and communities. Having begun life as two PBS programs coproduced by de Graaf, this book takes a hard look at the symptoms of affluenza, the history of its development into an epidemic, and the options for treatment. In examining this pervasive disease in an age when “the urge to splurge continues to surge,” the first section is the book’s most provocative. According to figures the authors quote and expound upon, Americans each spend more than $21,000 per year on consumer goods, our average rate of saving has fallen from about 10 percent of our income in 1980 to zero in 2000, our credit card indebtedness tripled in the 1990s, more people are filing for bankruptcy each year than graduate from college, and we spend more for trash bags than 90 of the world’s 210 countries spend for everything. “To live, we buy,” explain the authors–everything from food and good sex to religion and recreation–all the while squelching our intrinsic curiosity, self-motivation, and creativity. They offer historical, political, and socioeconomic reasons that affluenza has taken such strong root in our society, and in the final section, offer practical ideas for change. These use the intriguing stories of those who have already opted for simpler living and who are creatively combating the disease, from making simple habit alterations to taking more in-depth environmental considerations, and from living lightly to managing wealth responsibly.

Grist notes that in the wake of 9/11, affluenza seems to have evolved from social disease into official policy:

In each of the past four years, more people declared bankruptcy than graduated from college. On average, the nation’s CEOs now earn 400 times the wages of the typical worker, “a tenfold increase since 1980.” Although the United States makes up less than five percent of the world’s population, we produce 25 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions; since 1950, we “have used up more resources than everyone who ever lived on earth before then.”

Many of us also know that bigger houses, bigger cars, more gadgets, and more expensive clothes do not make us more content, despite the glossy promises of advertisers. Yet consumer spending has long been used as an indicator of both the national economy and the national mood. The more we spend, the better off we are — or so we’ve been told. This mantra has been particularly insistent in the past year, as the great blooming bubble of stock market riches began to deflate and the Bush administration chose instant gratification as an economic strategy. Since Sept. 11, national leaders have been telling us with ever-increasing urgency that consumer confidence must and will rebound. While confidence — as an indicator of our faith in the future — should return, it’s equally clear that the past few decades’ rate of consumption is neither sustainable nor desirable. Moreover, we must assume — and hope — that tragedy has made us wiser, and tempered the impulse of so many Americans to affirm their existence with a pleasing new purchase.

To be honest, reading Affluenza is one of the hardest things I’ve done in some time. I not only saw the moral emptiness of my society laid bare, there were entirely too many pages that described my own life. Even in instances where I feel like I’ve won the battle against consumerist addiction, I still had to acknowledge that once upon a time I was eaten up by a craving for material things that not only couldn’t have made me whole, it would have made the hollow space even larger. I had to slog through passages that seemed specifically written about people I know, people close to me. Worst of all, the book flogged me relentlessly with details about how our obsessions with status and toys are annihilating the physical world that sustains us … for the moment.

Affluenza ripped at my guts in ways that brought me literally to the brink of illness. Or maybe past the brink – I haven’t written about it before, but I’m currently battling at least a couple of medical conditions that may ultimately be the result of affluenza. One of them – a blood sugar issue that I’m now taking medication for daily – is certainly a product of the American food complex. If you drink, on average, two liters of soda a day for the better part of 25 years, how many milligrams of high-fructose corn syrup have you strained through your body? I’m not blaming anybody for my stupidity, which was considerable, but let’s not pretend that our consumption patterns exist in a vacuum, either.

The physical impact pales next to the psychological, though. I grew up desperately seeking the sort of validation that comes with success in America, and if you aren’t careful you can fixate on all the wrong goals. Is success a certain income level? Is it a house in a certain neighborhood? Is it the security that comes from knowing that your children have newer, cooler and more expensive basketball shoes than their friends? Is it a Lexus or Beemer or Mercedes? Is it having a certain number of people reporting to you?

Is it the satisfaction that comes from working so many hours your wife doesn’t recognize you when you come home? Is it the number of ulcers you have? Is it having a physical stress level so consistently high that your body is more or less always sick in some way?

Affluenza made me think about the lies we tell ourselves about success. About the “American Dream.” We grow up enculterated into a consumerist assumption (unless our parents raise us in the woods, miles from the nearest television – and then we have a whole ‘nother set of problems). At some point we realize that we’re not happy (although “realize” may be the wrong word – one thing affluenza seems to do is systematically kill off our self-awareness – in any case, we aren’t happy). Everywhere we look, though, we see happy people (these are called advertisements), and the happiness we see emanates from a thing. A car, a haircut, a shirt, a house, an iPhone, a particular brand of computer…whatever it is, it’s something that can be purchased. So we purchase it. And after a few minutes, we’re not happy again.

I once watched a young boy on his first real Christmas morning. The monetary value of the presents he had under the tree was probably triple the value of all the presents I’d ever had under all the trees during my entire life. He ripped into the first present – it was spectacular. He looked at it, then put it aside and ripped into the second one. And the third. And the fourth, and fifth, and so on. He never paused to play with any of them. It was only about more, more, more. And when there were no more, he still didn’t play with them. The look on his face at that moment was one of profound and unmistakable disappointment. There were no more.

I had never seen anything like it, and I was as horrified as he was unfulfilled. That young boy has had several more Christmas mornings since then, and as best I can tell each one has been little more than a re-enactment of that first one, only with escalating price tags. He’s a smart kid and a very good kid in many ways, but I shudder at the hollowness that now threatens to consume his entire life.

Can I complain about the parenting decisions that have been made in this boy’s life? Well, I could, but in truth the significance of the story isn’t what happened to him, it’s that what happened to him happens millions of times a day all across our consumerist nation. The more we have, the emptier we are. We’re a nation of addicts, and all the stuff that we’re Jonesing for is a million times more addictive and destructive than crystal meth.

What Happens When We Run Out of Fantasies?

We are the age of insubstantiation,
a generation of digital bells,
loose change on the sidewalk.

Our days are loops,
our nights tight spirals,

and if the virtual is
          even better than the real thing

it’s only because the real thing is so goddamned empty.

So here’s my theory/hypothesis/question. We’re a hollow nation, a society that provides nearly all of us with rampant access to more material goods than we know what to do with. But we cannot find happiness in the material because there is not happiness in it. On the contrary – it’s a system that’s rigged to feed us a shiny, pretty lie that hollows us out some more, all the while whispering that only more of the lie will make us happy.

This is our reality. So should we be surprised that our favorite television shows and movies aren’t about “reality”? That instead, we turn toward the magical, the mystical, the alien, the supernatural and hyper-real realms that can promise us even more? Even when these narratives are dystopian, they can’t help but be more interesting than stories about this world. After all, we have everything that this world can offer and we’re still bored to tears.

These are heady days for fantasy merchants. But where will we go next, when even better than the real thing grows dull?

_________________

* Alkon, P. Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

Further, during that decade, the newspaper industry has purposely deteriorated its product in a vain attempt to chase the last dram of declining advertising revenue. To do this, it has cut costs in the two principal areas it can — paper and people. Physically, newspapers have shrunk in height, width and number of pages, reducing the amount of newsprint required. In 1990 America’s daily newspapers had 56,900 staffers; 5,900 journalists lost their jobs in 2008; and thousands more have been whacked this year. And it’s the expensive high end of the experience spectrum that the industry has callously discarded. So profit levels remained tolerable to shareholders, but only because of decreased costs — not increased revenue.

And the titans of the industry now say they’re going to charge for a product produced by fewer people with less experience that’s led to far more editing errors and one-source stories that reveal much in their shallowness about the quality of the product being sold? Good luck with leading the paid content charge, Rupert.

Now, the claim that the news product has been disfigured by fiscal folly is admittedly a swipe with a broad brush. But there was a time when readers of many, if not most, newspapers in the United States could point to more than one story in their local paper that exhibited the characteristics of first-rate reporting and writing. These would be stories that provided context, background and meaning beyond the mere reporting of “what happened.” These would be stories fleshed out with color, tone and detail. These would be stories grounded in substance wrought by vigorous reporting, rather than inexpertly daubed with cloying style. These would be stories that a reader would remember — stories by an experienced, competent journalist whose byline a reader would remember and look for in the future.

That’s not true any more. And readers know it. They know when they’re being poorly served. They know when the product loses value yet the newsstand and subscription prices rise. And the prime demographic the industry wishes to reach (because they’ve got discretionary income to spend) has come to know another truth promulgated foolishly by the industry: News is free. Newspapers may place their product behind a pay wall — but that’s no guarantee that readers who have come of advertiser-sought age during the Era of All Media Are Free will actually buy the product.

I don’t know how this seller-vs.-buyer drama is going to play out, but the first act will come soon. I expect larger metro papers, now free online, to institute partial pay walls within a year. Perhaps a consortium of papers, as envisioned by Steven Brill’s Journalism Online, will institute some sort of online subscription or pay-per-story scheme (which might qualify as price-fixing?). I’d bet newspapers have already done readership surveys asking would you pay and how much would you pay. (Wouldn’t you love to see those survey results?) Heck, is this even a well-thought-out business model? Or is it a new biz model, same as the old biz model?

The industry will spend huge sums on Web platforms and promotion. It will spend oodles of dough on technologically particularizing its pay walls. It will spend rafts of money on promoting the advantages of its new superb online news subscription systems.

But how much will it spend on improving its product?

The last decade suggests an answer: Nada.

Good luck with this Brave New Pay Wall World, Rupert.

Thx to JS O’Brien for pointing this one out.

Just because….

You will want to know what happened. You may not immediately want to know what someone else thinks or feels about what happened. That may come later. You first want someone to tell you clearly and with minimal subjectivity what happened with no opinion or impression attached.

You live in a second-hand world. You need someone to observe the world first-hand when you cannot. Who will you trust to faithfully do that for you?

Sociologist C. Wright Mills described this half a century ago in the book The Politics of Truth:

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced, and their own experience is always indirect.

The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others. Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid facts. …

[I]n their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and never shall meet.

Yet for every man these images — provided by strangers and dead men — are the very basis of his life as a human being.

Your information needs may be summed up by three questions: How does the world work? Why does it work that way? What will be the impact on me?

The answers reflect the raw data of empirical observation and a neutral explanation of phenomena eventually followed by analyses laced with points of view. Those “crowds of witnesses” offer that information in many forms — books, movies, art, advertising, television, music, and the various means by which journalism and pseudo-journalism are distributed.

You first need to know what happened. But doesn’t it increasingly seem that your principal sources are also those who didn’t witness the event first-hand either? Doesn’t it seem as if your first notice of what happened comes from a second-hand source who is not a witness at all? Is that source someone using the pretense of a witness, someone who imbues that initial report with analysis laced with a point of view, pre-coloring and presaging your first impression? Which do you need first — a subjective point of view or one as objective as possible?

Reflect on your information needs. (Not your wants — that’s a different post.) What do you need to know? Why do you need to know it? Who will credibly tell you?

Mills’ analysis of understanding the human condition anticipates the digital world you live in. Your second-hand world consists of, in Mills’ words, “stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations.” From what source do you not receive pre-digested reports?

If you want information without a point of view shaping it, perhaps you need Anne. She is a Fair Witness in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Her employer, Jubal Harshaw, is asked to demonstrate her capabilities. Harshaw points to a building and asks Anne its color. Her reply: “White on this side.” In Heinlein’s fictional world, a Fair Witness has total recall, is fully impartial, and makes no intuitive or analytical leaps beyond what she can witness (such as assuming the color on the side of the building she cannot see).

A Fair Witness is the antithesis of a Spin Doctor. Anne, the Fair Witness, is a source of unfiltered fact. You are left to divine the meaning of that fact in a context uniquely yours.

In the midst of this high-noise, low-signal digital information age one S&R writer called “Shoutworld,” no Fair Witness appears to exist. Traditionally “objective” sources of information increasingly have colorized what happened through an ideological, self-centered, or selfish lens. The numbers of those sources who minimize the predigestion of what happened declines daily.

You eventually may find that subjective witness reports are necessary to help you ascertain context, importance, and meaning. On what basis, however, do you trust their authors?

If all your information sources tell you what it means before telling you what happened, how certain are you of what, indeed, did happen?

These are skilled people with diverse interests and even more diverse points of view. Three are college professors. Also writing for S&R have been or are an Hispanic activist from Texas; a foreign affairs writer who specializes in nuclear deproliferation issues and civilian casualties resulting from armed conflict; a gay staff cartoonist; a management consultant specializing in organizational behavior whose clients include 20 percent of the Fortune 500; an ex-pat South African economist; three experts in popular culture; a former director of the Berkeley Stage Company and statistical demographer for the U.S. Census Bureau; a professional stage actor; two stay-at-moms; a photographer; and occasional guest columnists.

However, we all share one trait: We are volunteers. We don’t get paid. We have other lives, other responsibilities, other people dependent on us to make a living. As business models go, ours sucks. Modest ad income and passing the hat means S&R remains a labor of love. But can love be a sustaining force for the online medium in the absence of profit?

In the Beginning of Blogging, it was all so exciting. Thrilling, even. Putting up a post, watching the stats, seeing who read your work, where they were — and how many read your stuff. Generate those hits. Yeah. That was heady stuff.

Is it still?

Most individual and group blogs are dependent on volunteers. It’s rare that a Huffington Post can raise $37 million to sustain the enterprise. (Of course, HuffPo has “volunteers” too, doesn’t it?)

The print newspaper industry continues to collapse in terms of revenue, profitability, and numbers of paid, professional journalists. So the dominant use of volunteers to inaugurate and maintain sites featuring commentary and/or advocacy journalism becomes an increasingly important public-interest issue.

Most S&R writers are ideologically progressive but rarely hew to party lines. As the S&R mission statement says:

Scholars & Rogues is a diverse band of thinkers, social analysts, activists, grousers, jesters, and troublemakers. We’re different in many ways, but we share a general belief in progress, a conviction that smarter is better, and a passionate distaste for convention.

That statement mirrors the intent of many capable bloggers. Many (but perhaps not most) bloggers seek to simply make things better. We have particular issues or problems that occupy our blogging attention. We are exceedingly dependent, though, on the research of others (those paid professional journalists whose stories we link to) to support points made in our posts.

But those posts, which leaven “objective” journalism with (usually lucid) commentary, add substance to debates of public interest. Yet the majority of bloggers are not paid for their work. What will become of community blogs such as S&R as the corps of volunteers 1) lose interest, 2) lose access to reliable, verifiable information produced by journalists, 3) lose equal access to the Web as politicians favor corporate control of the Internet or 4) just need to spend more time at the day job in a bad economy to make ends meet?

Note that newspapers, in the early days of online news Web sites, had links where volunteers could post community news. Now, that didn’t work out so well, did it? Let’s hope community blogs fare better.

Volunteerism is the principle means of support for community blogs such as S&R. Many such blogs, blogs populated by smart, capable people (see our blogroll), no doubt face the same pressure the volunteers at S&R do: Keep pumpin’ out the posts. Keep the conversation going. Keep the debate fresh and focused. But it’s difficult, as a volunteer, to pump out as many posts as I’d like. (I do like to get eight hours’ sleep each night.)

At some point, as B.B. King would sing, “The thrill is gone.” I hope most of us aren’t there yet, but it’s increasingly a problem faced by those bloggers who believe in candid, civil, and common-sense conversations in the public sphere — yet have family and job responsibilities elsewhere.

If you click on the “America’s Power” advertisement (screen shots shown at right), you’re taken to this page, where the ACCCE claims “it’s easy to see why 72 percent of American opinion leaders support the use of coal.” On this page, however, there are four links on the page that all go to the same press release that describes the ACCCE study that produced this 72% number.

The Election Day press release makes a number of claims about an earlier survey that are inconsistent based exclusively on the information presented in the press release. The claims all rest on the study’s definition, provided at the bottom of the press release, of “opinion leaders,” aka “opinion elites.” They are defined as follows:

The poll interviewed 600 opinion elites nationwide. Elites are defined as adults with $80,000 or more in household income and a four-year college degree or more and a professional or managerial job title or a business owner and a high degree of involvement in politics and policy matters.

According to the Census Bureau economic data, there were 116.8 million households in the U.S. in 2007 (the latest year for which there’s complete data), of which only 34.1 million meet the income requirement described for an “opinion elite” above. That’s just 29% of all households.

According to the Census Bureau educational attainment data, there are approximately 60.5 million people in the U.S. with four-year college degrees more more. That’s just under 28% of the estimated population of the U.S. in 2007 that was at least 18 years old.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if we take all occupations in management, legal, computers and mathematics, architecture and engineering, healthcare providers and technicians, and business and finance as individuals who might qualify as “opinion elites” by profession, that’s a total of approximately 26.1 million people out of a total of approximately 253 million people employed in 2007. That’s only about 10% of the workforce.

Finally, we’ll have to make an educated guess about how someone was defined as having “a high degree of involvement in politics and policy matters.” It’s probably fair to say that the nation’s 65,000 legislators and 15,000 lobbyists in 2007 qualified, but they are certainly not alone (and they’re already counted in the workforce numbers just described). If we assume that there are about 20x more people in the U.S. who meet the survey’s political participation threshold than there is legislators and registered lobbyists, then that’s approximately 1.6 million people who meet this criteria as well. That’s only about 0.4% of the population.

As you can see, there’s a significant problem with this definition – it applies to such a small number of individuals in the U.S. that it’s difficult to generalize the results. At best there’s between 1 and 2 million people who meet all the requirements. In reality, however, the number of “opinion elites” will be much smaller given the number of people who meet most but not all of the criteria of the definition. Unfortunately, without more information, we can’t know how much smaller, except that there are at least 600 “opinion elites” in the U.S. – that’s how many were surveyed, after all.

So much for the available survey methodology notes – on to the survey’s results.

The first claim based on the definition of “opinion elite” is that the survey “found that 72 percent of opinion leaders nationwide support the use of coal for generating electricity.” Right away this claim raises an important question: what is the margin of error in this number? The press release doesn’t say.

The second claim is that the 72% represented “a significant increase over the past year and the highest level of support since the group began polling almost 10 years ago.” How is this possible when the ACCCE didn’t exist 10 years ago – it was founded in 2008. Is the press release talking about the polling organizations, AmericanPublic.us and RT Strategies, or one of the ACCCE’s precursor organizations?

The third claim is that “the poll shows that Americans are very optimistic about the future for coal. When asked the question ‘do you believe coal is a fuel for America’s future?’ — 69% of Americans agreed (compared to only 26% who disagreed).” This claim is an outright lie. According to the survey’s own methodology, they polled only 600 people who qualified as “opinion elites.” It is not possible to generalize the results of a survey from a tiny selected minority out to the entire population at large. It would be like polling just my immediate family about our car buying habits and then trying to apply that to my entire community.

The last two claims related only to “those surveyed,” and you can always draw conclusions about the survey’s respondents from their answers. But without a statistical method to correlate your data with the wider population, you cannot draw any conclusions for the wider population. And there’s no suggestion in these last two claims that there is any correlation to all American or even just to all “opinion elites.”

In summary, the survey as its described in the ACCCE press release suffers from a number of critical problems: an amazingly tight definition of the survey’s population, no defined margins of error for any of the questions individually or for the survey in its entirety, an unexplained discrepancy regarding how many years the poll has been taken, and an outright lie. I requested a copy of the survey’s methodology last week and did not receive any response.

So what can we surmise about the survey and the related web advertisement from these survey claims? Since we don’t have the actual survey as a reference, we have to make educated guesses from what information we do have.

First, we can probably say that the participants of this survey were either a) selected by the polling organizations or b) self-selected their own participation in the survey. We can make this educated guess because of the lack of any margins of error and because of the phrase “those surveyed” for the last two claims. Selected polls are only valid for the individuals selected and so statistics cannot be used to extrapolate the poll data to the rest of the target population.

Second, we can probably say that this press release is an attempt to manipulate people, and for more reasons than “that’s what press releases exist for.” There’s one blatant lie, possibly a second (the “10 years” claim), and a huge number of unanswered questions. In addition, the page that the advertisement links to has four different links on it – that all go to the exact same survey press release. This suggests that the ACCCE online communications expert wanted to make that first page look like there was more research supporting for the ACCCE advertisement than there really was.

And third, given the first two educated guesses, it’s almost certainly accurate to say that the ACCCE advertisement is unsupported bunk.

In truth, the problem runs deeper than just “our side’s” billionaires, or so it appears. It started the other day when some prominent Left Blogistanis decided they weren’t going to keep their mouths shut anymore. The first shot was fired in a Greg Sargent piece at Who Runs Gov:

Some of the leading liberal bloggers are privately furious with the major progressive groups — and in some cases, the Democratic Party committees — for failing to spend money advertising on their sites, even as these groups constantly ask the bloggers for free assistance in driving their message.

It’s a development that’s creating tensions on the left and raises questions about the future role of the blogosphere at a time when a Dem is in the White House and liberalism could be headed for a period of sustained ascendancy….

“They come to us, expecting us to give them free publicity, and we do, but it’s not a two way street,” Jane Hamsher, the founder of FiredogLake, said in an interview. “They won’t do anything in return. They’re not advertising with us. They’re not offering fellowships. They’re not doing anything to help financially, and people are growing increasingly resentful.”

Hamsher singled out Americans United for Change, which raises and spends big money on TV ad campaigns driving Obama’s agenda, as well as the constellation of groups associated with it, and the American Association of Retired Persons, also a big TV advertiser.

“Most want the easy way — having a big blogger promote their agenda,” adds Markos Moulitsas, the founder of DailyKos. “Then they turn around and spend $50K for a one-page ad in the New York Times or whatever.” Moulitsas adds that officials at such groups often do nothing to engage the sites’s audiences by, say, writing posts, instead wanting the bloggers to do everything for them.

John Aravosis was quick to chime in:

At some point, Democrats – progressives – need to start investing in the future. And by “the future,” I don’t mean large organizations that have been around for years but haven’t accomplished anything in the past two decades. I mean investing in progressives who can kick ass, and have a proven ability to do so.

There is the perception on the right that all of the top liberal blogs are funded by George Soros. I wish. We, for example, are funded by advertising and by your individual donations. Both are dropping in a terrible economy. No one subsidizes my blog. I wish they did. But they don’t.

For our blog to survive – for the liberal blogosphere to survive – we need support. Unlike many of the top bloggers on the right, many of the top liberal bloggers blog for a living (many of the folks on the right have “real” jobs, a lot of them work as lawyers, and blog on the side). This is our job. It’s our career. It’s our passion, to be sure. But it’s also how we pay the mortgage, invest in our retirement, and put food on the table. It makes no sense that Democrats have not found a way to invest in the blogosphere, and help us not just survive, but grow and become even more powerful. It’s almost as if we don’t want to win.

These comments touched off some lively conversations – much of it behind the scenes – and I don’t think I’d be out of line to suggest that while there are nuances aplenty, the consensus is that yes, it sure would be nice if our brightest and best didn’t have to fight the war for America’s future in their spare time, what little of it there is.

The problem here isn’t quite the same as with my hypothetical legion of prog billionaires, though. To put it simply, I’m not sure the large organizations being railed at by Hamsher, Moulitsas, Aravosis and others see much practical value in advertising to the choir. If these groups were to take those bloggers and their readers for granted – where, after all, are they going to go? – it might be hard to argue with them. Maybe. Sure, those bloggers might not campaign for the individual causes in question, but their work on behalf of others who shared the same general mission would lift all the boats together, right? Whether this is accurate or not, it’s certainly a plausible hypothesis.

Would they go so far as to say that the enduring victories we’re after require us to win the hearts and minds of those not already firmly on our side? This is ShoutWorld, after all. If we were persuaded that supporting the faithful would pay off through their redoubled energy – a very solid proposition – that would change the equation. Still, we might find ourselves wondering about diminishing returns or the incremental value of spending on new markets instead of further saturating established ones.

Regardless, the behavior of those with money suggests that not all of them are worried about their intellectuals or their footsoldiers. And those being taken for granted are in a tough spot. You can make your point by withholding your time and effort next time around, but think about the price. Eight more years of whatever neo-Bushevik wins the 2012 GOP nomination isn’t just cutting off your nose to spite your face.

No, folks, that’s more like taking an assault rifle to your nards.

In a June 1st, 2003 article by Catherine O’Mahony, published by The Sunday Business Post Online, Joey Mason, founder and managing director of Eumom is quoted as saying,

“This is really going to make us a player. For advertisers, we want to get higher quality interaction with the women they are targeting. We want them to be able to choose when and how they speak to their target customers.” He further says, “We know we are a new kid on the block and that we need to prove ourselves.” (emphasis added)

Where will Mr. Mason’s firm be a player? In 2003 Eumom was awarded a three year contract worth at least €2.4 million to provide promotional materials to Dublin’s three maternity hospitals. Eumom replaced the 25 year veteran Bounty Euro RSCG.

Speed ahead to February 2, 2009 when Michael Brennan of The Independent reports that the largest maternity hospital in Dublin now allows marketing representative from Eumom access to the maternity ward. Coombe Women’s Hospital has entered into a financial agreement that accepts a per-child fee for every mother and child signed up by Eumom’s marketing representatives. The actual figure is in dispute, but the total fees collected by Coombe Women’s Hospital could be €245,000 during 2003-2008 based on the average 7,500 births per year at the hospital.

Is this clever marketing, creative financing or a horrible violation of trust?

Let’s look at Eumom’s own words and practices. The Independent also provided a story outlining the guidelines for conversations with new mothers. Never mind the overall layer of sleaze associated with the disingenuous comments like “oh look at all this pink – it must be a girl…” look at the last dot:

V important to reassure mom that: a) Eumom is custodian of her details; b) Eumom uses it in collaboration with partner companies; c) Eumom’s collection and usage of data complies with data protection office guidelines.

Should the Mom still say NO – one final question: Do you have private health insurance? If so, VHI/Quinn/Hibernian? If asked why we need to know — we are conducting a survey. (emphasis added)

Survey, I bet. Whose next at those hospital room visits…

So with hospital maternity stays in most of the west as short as 12 to 24 hours, why would any woman want to spend any of that time answering your marketing questions? As a curious exercise I asked some women I know to respond to this policy. Comments included the words: abhorrent, invasion of privacy, pissed off, crosses the line and gross. One woman speculated on the effect to hospital security by having non-family members present in the maternity ward. I’m guessing these aren’t the answers Eumom or Coombe Women’s Hospital would hope for in a focus group.

Having a child myself I can attest to the value of information from reliable suppliers. There is a time and a place. Give me that bag of information after the Lamaze class and I’ll welcome it.

Talk to me after labor and childbirth and I’ll remember you for all the reasons you don’t want… and I have a very long memory.

But their (new?) ad at the Washington Post was a stroke of genius, because they put the ads up on every “Page does not exist” page that the WaPo puts up when you mistype a link or find one that’s out of date. Here’s a screenshot of it.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

But north and south of I-80 lie many small towns, populated by only a few hundred or few thousand Iowans. Towns like Belle Plaine, Brooklyn, Benton, Marengo, Montezuma, North English, Williamsburg, Parnell, Homestead, Oxford and Holbrook. These are towns whose median household income is less than the $47,000 statewide average.

The people who live in those towns need information to effectively make political and consumer decisions. They need it just as much as people in big cities do. But come Monday, local news may not flow quite so freely in Benton and Poweshiek counties.

For Christmas, the good folks of Victor, Iowa, received a lump of coal: The East Iowa Herald newspaper announced that it would suspend print operations Dec. 31. Mitch Traphagen, the paper’s owner, wrote that a lack of subscriptions and circulation were not the problem: “As local businesses cut back due to concerns over an economic recession, that left only limited advertising dollars available to competing newspapers. As a new business, we haven’t been able to build up the resources necessary to overcome the financial hurdles during this period of economic slowdown.”

That’s not the only publishing insult to strike that I-80 corridor. Marengo Publishing Corporation, which publishes three weekly advertisers, seven weekly newspapers and a monthly magazine, plans to repackage the seven newspapers into four weekly newspapers on Jan. 5. Of the seven newspapers — The Belle Plaine Union, The South Benton Star-Press, the Brooklyn Chronicle, The Marengo Pioneer-Republican, The Montezuma Republican, The North English Record and The Williamsburg Journal-Tribune — the Chronicle and Republican will become The Poweshiek County Chronicle-Republican; the Star-Press will add the readership area covered by the Union; the Journal Tribune will add a page of North English news. Subscription prices will rise.

Said a statement from MPC Publisher Dan DeBettignies and editors Nick Narigon, Dann Hayes, and Jim Magdefrau:

The names and the faces of the newspapers will change, but the content will not. We remain dedicated to serving as the premier news source of Iowa County, eastern Poweshiek County and southern Benton County. [Emphasis added]

Premier news source? The content won’t change? How? Reducing seven weeklies to four means reducing the number of pages on which to place the news nearly in half. There will be fewer staffers to produce the stories to place on those fewer pages.

From that same MPC statement:

Gannett Inc., the parent company of Marengo Publishing Corporation (MPC) and Poweshiek Publishing, announced a staff reduction of 10 percent in late October. Plans and decisions were made during the month of November and now the repercussions are hitting home.

MPC and Poweshiek Publishing have been running with a relatively bare bones staff for quite some time. We have gone through several cuts to our expense budget and have been learning to do the same amount of work with fewer people for several years. [Emphasis added]

Gannett says it owns 85 daily newspapers including USA Today, and nearly 1,000 non-daily publications and USA Weekend, and 23 television stations, reaching more than 20 million households, in about three dozen states. After years of proclaiming ever-higher stock dividends, Gannett has been fiscally contracting for many months by rigorously cutting expenses. In August, Gannett cut 1,000 jobs, so its stock price got a bump. But that didn’t last: Its stock price hit an 18-year low in October. Gannett’s in a death spiral.

But this isn’t about slamming Gannett. How will the information needs and wants of residents of Benton and Poweshiek counties be served now? By whom?

The nation has far more weekly newspapers than it does dailies. Historically, weeklies generally have been Mom-and-Pop enterprises run on shoestrings by people who believed in finding out stuff and telling their readers what they found out.

But some media companies figured out that they could buy a bunch of individually owned weeklies in a narrow geographic region, run them all out of one common newsroom and ad sales site, and make oodles of money. For example: Community Newspapers Inc., headquartered in Athens, Ga., includes 29 newspapers in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina. Check their locations; they’re tightly bunched geographically.

Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. owns about 90 daily and more than 200 non-daily newspapers, television stations, Web sites and niche publications in more than 150 communities throughout the United States in nearly two dozen states. Many of its newspapers are geographically grouped.

Brown Publishing has a cluster of 8 daily newspapers, 27 paid weekly newspapers, 15 Total Market Coverage (”TMC”) newspapers, and 11 TMC shoppers that it says reaches more than 1.8 million people and 750,000 households in 31 counties in south, central and west Ohio.

Freedom Communications Inc. says its has more than 33 dailies and 77 weeklies, including shoppers, magazines and other specialty publications coast to coast.

Now, these and other companies that have substantial numbers of weeklies serving readerships more rural than suburban may in fact be financially healthy. But Gannett used to be one of the soundest operations in terms of balance sheet. Look at what’s happened to its subsidiary of weeklies serving east-central Iowa. Seven papers, already thin in resources, will become four.

The United States has more than 6,500 weeklies. The economic factors affecting dailies — declining advertising revenues, declining readership, rigid adherence to a failing business model — affect weeklies as well.

“Go to the Web,” readers are urged. But in rural areas, served by weeklies, is that really a credible option? Until broadband access in offices and homes becomes as universal as telephone and electricity, going to the Web may not be a rural choice. Readers whose newspapers fold may lose access to the local journalism they need to make informed consumer and political decisions.

And, as in the case of the readers of the East Iowa Herald, they might end up with nothing: The paper’s owners have not yet decided if they have the resources to produce a viable online newspaper.

I learned to parse cop code by making daily phone calls to the cops to get the police log — and often walked to the cop shop and read it myself when the damned desk sergeant wouldn’t read it to me. I learned by paying attention to details. I listened to what sources said — always more than one, y’know — and wrote it down. I had a newsroom godfather who taught me well: “Get it right. Period.” I only used anonymous sources three times in 20 years.

One day Editor Bob said he’d heard somebody was going to build a nuclear plant up river. “Find out,” he said. I did. I had to learn how nukes operated in less than two hours before going to the presser for the announcement. I was the only newsman who asked: “Will this be a boiling water or pressurized water reactor?” Hell, the PR types didn’t know. I did. I knew the in’s and out’s of each. Score one for me. I learned the beat quickly. I reported what the utility and the government didn’t want my readers to know. I wore a button given to me by my news editor: “Question Authority.” I found facts — so my readers found out something they needed to know.

I covered the construction of that plant — how it helped and hurt the local economy, whether the utility’s general contractor was using local union labor or bringing in its own non-union crews, what the impact of the finished plant would be on property-tax rates in a very small town. I covered the environmental protests over the plant, learning what happens to fish when warm water is discharged into a cool river. I covered the squabbles over the environmental impact statement and licensing hearings. Then there was the radiation thing …

I covered boards of selectmen and planning boards and school boards and conservation commissions. I did zoning appeals meetings, where commercial interests tried quietly to get land use restrictions altered. Not on my watch: I found out, because my newsroom godfather taught me the law — and showed me the corner of the town-hall bulletin board where the zoning board posted required legal notices in type so small you’d need a magnifying glass to read ‘em. I found out facts — so my readers found out something they needed to know.

I explained why school budgets ballooned. I wrote why property taxes were heading up — again and again. I knew the paper’s readership area, I knew the readers’ interests, and I knew all the back channels of local government. I wrote stories when a town official gave the town’s winter salt contract to an in-law.

Yep, I was a newsman. Began with a typewriter, an old LC Smith, Army surplus. Ended on Hendrix computer terminals with disk drives the size of dinner plates. Even ran a linotype once.

After 20 years, I had accumulated institutional memory of the news and names of 400 square miles of readership area. I had an encyclopedic Rolodex of politicians’ names and numbers, including the bars they drank at (and in some cases, their lovers’ home phone numbers).

After 20 years, I was barely 40, and I knew my craft. I knew the public-service mission: Protect the readers. Find the facts, and tell readers what they need to know.

But in today’s Sam Zell universe, I’d be toast. I’d have been bought out years ago or laid off. I would have become an extraordinary expense in the chase for maximizing shareholder profit. Me and my costly health-care benefits and Guild salary would have been dropped like a fiscally toxic hot potato.

And out the door I’d have gone — with that institutional memory, that massive Rolodex, that 20 years of experience of writing more than 10,000 stories and editing three times that and penning 2,000 editorials and columns. Maybe into PR, like so many have. Or maybe into attempts to try different venues for news, as a few are doing.

Imagine today’s me — the experienced journalist in his or her late 40s, or 50s, or 60s. At the end of the last century, newsrooms were well-stocked with versions of me. No more. Newspaper corporations in their unbelievable arrogance ignored the emergence of the Internet as a competitive force. Newspaper advertisers began switching media allegiances. The trend of declining ad revenue at newspapers has accelerated, complicated by the current dismal economy. Look at these third-quarter numbers:

• Print ad revenue down 19.26 percent to $8.2 billion. (Down 16.07 percent in Q2, down 14.38 percent in Q1)
• Online ad revenue down 3 percent to $749.8 million. (Down 2.4 percent in Q2, up 7.2 percent in Q1)
• Combined is down 18.11 percent to $8.94 billion. (Down 15.11 percent in Q2, Down 12.85 percent in Q1)

The modern me — experienced, knowledgeable, presumably unflappable — is a pricey commodity in a business that’s losing its shirt so badly corporate practitioners are trying to sell off big metro dailies such as E.W. Scripps’ Rocky Mountain News and McClatchy’s Miami Herald. The New York Times Co. wants to mortgage its grand edifice for $225 mill to maintain cash flow — and Sam Zell’s Tribune Co. has filed for Chapter 11. He ran its newspapers and their veteran journalistic abilities into the cold, cold ground of indebtedness.

The modern me is unaffordable. So there are fewer version of the modern me in the nation’s biggest dailies. Staffs at the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and other newspapers nationwide have been slashed.

Yeah, yeah, you say. Heard all this before. So what?

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, that’s what. The weird case of the bamboozling guv illuminates the weak underbelly of American Corporate Journalism. Writes syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker:

Latest score: The bums are winning. And the corrupt politicians are, too.

Thanks to mismanagement and debt, Tribune’s eviscerated newspapers are riddled with more holes than Al Capone’s enemies, while Illinois holds the nation’s highest gubernatorial incarceration rate. Three of the past eight governors have spent time in jail or prison. Blagojevich would bring the number to four.

If ever The Chicago Tribune’s renowned staff of swashbuckling reporters, cartoonists, editors and columnists (Mike Royko and Jeff MacNelly, RIP) were needed — or more sorely missed — it is now. Not that those still standing don’t do a heroic job, but they know what I mean. Staff cuts and shrinking news holes make it hard to keep pace when the enemy is communing with one’s own generals, as seems to be the case here. [emphasis added]

That’s why more, not fewer, modern versions of me are needed— to keep the Bums from winning. Blago’s a Big Bum, but every newsman and newswoman at a small local weekly or daily know bums like Blago exist everywhere. That’s why I’m still a journalism educator, trying to provide young men and women the education and common sense needed to practice a craft vitally necessary to the conduct of a fully functional and fairly operated democracy.

You know that $700 billion bailout of financial institutions overseen by Hammerin’ Hank Paulson? Outside of a simple pie chart I saw on CNN showing a breakdown of who got what, I don’t know if that dough is really being used effectively, honestly and fairly. I read there’s dozens of federal investigations into the financial markets. How seriously are those look-sees being undertaken by the feds? American Corporate Journalism won’t and can’t cover these things adequately.

And if you think the majority of blogs you read are well-stocked with veteran, experienced professional journalists who can keep tabs on corporate cheaters and government incompetents at local, regional and national levels, send me some of what you’re smokin’.

Some blogs provide useful commentary and analysis. But it takes well-trained, experienced journalists fully supported by adequate organizational resources to find out stuff readers need to know. Good journalism is expensive.

Veteran, experienced journalists find out facts — so their readers find out something they need to know.

Sooner or later, the free stuff online will be precisely worth that price – absolutely nothing.

The Tribune Co., publisher of what used to be some of America’s best newspapers and operators of 23 television stations, has filed for bankruptcy, citing nearly $13 billion in debt compared with $7.6 billion in assets.

Let’s make book: Who’s next?

Could it be McClatchy, the nation’s third-largest newspaper chain, which is looking for a buyer for its flagship, the Miami Herald? Or the New York Times Co., struggling with debt and trying to cop a $225 million mortgage on its year-old grand edifice of a headquarters in Manhattan to get more cash on hand?

Hey, how about Lee Enterprises, which owns 54 daily papers in 23 states? In the second quarter of 2008, Lee’s net income was down 87 percent to $2.8 million in part due to charges based on the falling value of its assets. What about Gannett? In October, Gannett said that “advertising revenue at its publishing business fell nearly 18 percent during the July-September quarter compared with the same period last year.”

Will it be E.W. Scripps, owner of the 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News, which Scripps offered to sell after reporting an $11 million loss through the first nine months of this year?

The newspaper business climate is the worst ever:

U.S. newspaper advertising revenue collapsed by nearly $2 billion, or 18 percent, in the third quarter, according to the Newspaper Association of America, an industry group. Even online ad revenue made a small U-turn for the second quarter in a row.

The year-on-year quarterly percentage decline is the worst since since the NAA has been keeping such records and represents an increasingly rapid deceleration that began in the third quarter of 2006, when total ad spending dropped 1.5 percent.

Tribune is filing under Chapter 11, which permits reorganization, rather than Chapter 7, which oversees liquidation of assets. Bankruptcy presumably provides equitable and fair treatment of all parties, but especially secured creditors.

But a reorganized Tribune — or any newspaper corporation or entity — following a bankruptcy proceeding is unlikely to produce fair and equitable treatment of 1) the public dependent on good, sound journalism or 2) the experienced journalists who produced that product who have been laid off or bought out over the past five years.

Won’t the emergent Tribune Co. — publisher of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, both journalistic shells of their former selves — merely be a reorganization of its current and failing business model? Will the idiot, er, “media titan,” who played a significant role in the Trib’s financial demise, still be in charge?

How about this crock ‘o’ candor from Sam Zell, who bought Tribune with other people’s money:

Over the last year, we have made significant progress internally on transitioning Tribune into an entrepreneurial company that pursues innovation and stronger ways of serving our customers. Unfortunately, at the same time, factors beyond our control have created a perfect storm — a precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt. [emphasis added]

Newspaper companies, especially the larger ones, own regional newspapers. These are the newspaper that in the past have had the necessary resources and journalistic clout to effectively hold government (and let’s include corporations) accountable.

No more. These big metros — The Times, The Washington Post, the LA Times, the Miami Herald, Hartford Courant, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, the Denver Post, and so many other great American newspapers — no longer produce what they once did. Oh, they win Pulitzers. But careful checks of the size of their geographical coverage, their shrinking news holes, the increasingly shallowness of beat coverage, the reduction of bureaus, the increase in one-source stories, and the diminishing readership area redefined by circulation cutbacks all lead to a public less well served.

Thus, the inability of regional newspapers to practice good journalism benefits those governments and corporations whose motivations may not always be in the public’s interest. The public’s the loser here.

Instead of improving those papers, corporations have turned them into cost-cutting enterprises, shedding staff and circulation. Now those corporations are actively seeking to unload big regional metros — The Boston Globe, the Miami Herald, the Rocky Mountain News — all to shed costs. If your daily paper is a big metropolitan daily, it’s for sale — you just haven’t been told that yet.

Anyone in the market for an entity that’s losing gobs of money, has fired or bought out its best artisans, and has produced no credible response to its problems other than cutting more costs? Think you can turn that entity around?

So what should we watch as this impending wave of bankruptcies washes ashore?

• Did top management get canned? Who replaced the outgoing miscreants?
• Did independent, local entities buy controlling interests in local and regional newspapers?
• Did different business models emerge?
• What role, if any, did courts play?
• What become of the experienced journalists no longer employed by newspaper corporations? (More on that in a future post. They’re doing some interesting things.)
• Would you buy a newspaper from the reorganized corporation?

The news biz as we’ve known it is about to go belly-up. What will replace it, and will the public benefit?

That’s because The Times has fallen on hard times (forgive me). The faltering business model that has strapped financial straitjackets onto other newspapers (witness the Christian Science Monitor ending its print edition) may have finally knee-capped the nation’s best newspaper. It has significant debt coming due, and insignificant cash on hand.

Reports Henry Blodget of the Silicon Valley Insider:

[T[he company must deliver $400 million to lenders in May of 2009, six months from now. The company has only $46 million of cash on hand, and its operations will likely begin consuming this meager balance this quarter or next. The company has been shut out of the commercial paper market, but has a $366 million short-term credit line remaining that it entered into several years ago, when the industry was strong. It has not yet drawn this cash down, and given the current environment and the trends at the company, we would not take for granted that it will be able to do so. [emphasis added]

Consider numbers we can all understand: In 2002, The Times’ stock price hit nearly $53. On Monday, the last line of a Forbes.com story relayed this telling stat: “Shares in the Times company fell 59 cents, or 6.3 percent, to $8.73 in mid-afternoon trading …” [emphasis added]

The Times‘ suddenly accelerated descent into fiscal disarray has probably irritated Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú. Just two months ago, Mr. Slim bought a 6.4 percent stake of the New York Times Co. at about $14 a share, an investment then worth about $127 million. If he’s still in, he’s lost nearly half his investment.

Recall, please, Mr. Sulzberger’s comment just 21 months ago at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, when asked about the future of the print edition of The Times:

I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing The Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.

Bet he cares now. At the time, he said The Times was focused on becoming an Internet news leader, saying it had doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition. But the problem is simple: It may have consistently high readership online, but that’s not translating into sufficient online advertising revenue to meet the expectations of institutional investors concerned primarily with short-term gain.

Here’s the short-term financial picture for the Times company as constructed by Mr. Blodget based on recent NYTCo. filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission:

What NYTCo. has:
• $46 million of cash
• $366 million owed to it by advertisers
Total: $412 million

What NYTCo. owes:
• $398 million of short-term debt (due in May)
• $161 million of accounts payable (newsprint, travel, etc.)
• $100 million of payroll (salaries)
• $159 million of other expenses
• $50 million owed on long-term debt and rent
Total: $865 million

Bottom line, short term: NYTCo. owes $453 million more than it has.

Other harpies have been snipping at The Times‘ heels. Recall, please, that in January a pair of hedge funds demanded changes at the company:

The trouble, according to Firebrand Partners and Harbinger Capital, is that the New York Times company has moved far too slowly to replace the revenue that is being lost as readership figures come under pressure and advertisers shift their spending from newspapers to the internet. [emphasis added]

Firebrand’s founder, Scott Galloway, wants the Times company to diversify. In a January letter to Mr. Sulzberger, Mr. Galloway wrote: “We believe a renewed focus on the core assets and the redeployment of capital to expedite the acquisition of digital assets affords the greatest shareholder appreciation and creates the appropriate platform to compete in today’s media landscape.” [emphasis added]

Well, good luck with appreciating shareholder value with that acquisition of digital assets. (About.com is highly profitable, so why’s the Times company shopping it around?) Too little, too late. The Times, like virtually every major newspaper company in America, refused to accept the Internet as an effective colleague and instead regarded it only as an ineffective, sure-to-fail upstart. Such arrogance is proving costly.

The news worsens. Nielsen reports that advertising spending for the first half of 2008 declined by 1.4 percent compared with the same period in 2007. Its news on Internet advertising is mixed:

Although overall Internet ad spending, when including paid search and online video advertising, was up by 11% during the first half of this year, image-based Internet advertising declined by 6% during the first half of 2008, compared to the same period in 2007. …

The decrease in image-based Internet advertising was driven by a 27% drop in online ad spending by financial services companies, which decreased their spending from $1.5 billion in the first half of 2007 to $1.1 billion during the first two quarters of this year. [emphasis added]

AFP reports that:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers said Internet advertising revenues rose 15.2 percent in the first six months of 2008 over the first half of 2007. Online advertising revenue was up 12.8 percent in the second quarter over the same period of 2007 but declined 0.3 percent from the first quarter of the year, from 5.8 billion dollars to 5.7 billion dollars, the IAB-PwC survey said. [emphasis added]

And that’s the problem for the Times company and every other newspaper company that has placed its business-model bet on sure-to-be-profitable Internet advertising. Despite double-digit growth in online advertising revenue in recent years, that growth isn’t paying off fast enough.

“Total advertising revenue for the newspaper industry is expected to decline 11.5% to $40.1 billion this year,” reports Jennifer Saba of industry trade journal Editor & Publisher. Print ad revenues, though declining, still provide the bulk of the industry’s income. Internet ad revenues, though increasing, will not produce sufficient revenue soon enough to stave off drastic, perhaps catastrophic, changes in the newspaper industry.

In February, reported The Times‘ Richard Pérez-Peña, “The Times has 1,332 newsroom employees, the largest number in its history; no other American newspaper has more than about 900.” When The Times said in February it would cut 100 jobs, its stock immediately rose 86 cents to $18.84. Now it’s under 10 bucks.

The Times, in fiscally happier times (forgive me again), bet big on expansion in New England to maximize revenue. In 1993, shortly after Tim Berners-Lee released the World Wide Web for full public use, the Times company bought The Boston Globe for $1.1 billion. In 1999, it bought the Worcester, Mass., Telegram & Gazette for $295 million. Both deals were roundly criticized as too pricey for value received. Both deals have proven to be financial drains on the Times company. (The Times did not significantly embrace the Internet for several years and made poor decisions. Remember the ill-fated, pay-for-premium-content TimesSelect?)

Early this week, Forbes reported that the company “increased its estimates for how much The Boston Globe and other New England newspapers it owns have declined in value because of reductions in advertising revenue.” That drop in value — $166 million — occurred in just the third quarter. The Times company said the fourth quarter will bring further devaluation of the properties.

Prediction I: The Times will initially follow the industry’s formula: Cut expenses drastically (read: jobs). Seek to at least maintain current share price. Prediction II: The strategy will fail. Prediction III: The Times will sell assets. Prediction IV: That, too, will fail, because the company has insufficient assets relative to its debt and declining ad revenue. In September, E&P reported that the Times company ad revenue had declined 14.1 percent compared to the same period a year ago. Total revenue dropped 8.8 percent for the month.

Could the Times company raise enough cash to take itself private? Hmmm. Perhaps that’s why About.com may be on sale.

All this in a tanking economy. The Times and other newspaper companies shouldn’t bet on traditional big-bucks advertisers — Detroit, real estate, and want-ad classifieds — to come to the rescue. They’ve got problems of their own.

According to Mr. Blodget, the long-term view for the Times company is equally bleak:

What NYT has:
• $1.355 billion of buildings, real-estate, printing presses, trucks, technology
• $146 million of investments in joint ventures (Red Sox, etc.)
Total: $1.501 billion

What NYT owes:
• $673 million of long-term debt
• $7 million of long-term rent
• $284 million of pension benefits
• $214 million of retiree healthcare and other benefits
• $290 million of other liabilities
Total: $1.468 billion

Bottom line, long term: Balance sheet carrying values can provide a very misleading picture of long-term asset values, especially for things like land and buildings, which may have appreciated (or depreciated) significantly. As a result, there may be significant embedded value in these assets. But assuming the NYT’s land, buildings, and joint-ventures are carried at something approaching market value, NYTCo has only about $33 million more than it owes. [emphasis added]

The Gray Lady badly needs a Green Mistress, but in an American economy this distressed, that’s unlikely to occur. (Oh, Rupert? You interested in a really good deal?)

So what will the Times company do? Sell assets? In this economy, who will buy? Cut jobs? Assuredly, but at what credibility cost to the journalistic product it sells? End its print editions, and not just that of The Times, but of other papers it owns as well? Newsprint and subscriber delivery are costly. Aside from staff cuts, that seems the most likely — and quickest — route to cut costs substantially.

Any change in the Times company’s business model will influence the readership habits and information needs and wants of millions of people. The Times has been the opinion leader of the fabled Eastern Liberal Elite™ for a century and its front page has influenced daily the contents of hundreds of newspapers nationwide.

Perhaps the changes won’t immediately be so drastic, preserving the print edition. Says Mr. Blodget: The Times company’s realistic options have been reduced to:

• Major cost cuts (including dividend)
• Large asset sales
• Sale of equity at fire sale price.

Like most newspaper companies, the Times company has proven to be short-sighted in its adaptation to the Internet, its recognition of changing demographics and readership needs and desires, and its dog-on-a-short-leash relationship with institutional investors.

We should hope The Times survives with the quality of its journalism intact (wrong-on-WMDs Judith Miller, plagiarist Jayson Blair et al. incidents notwithstanding). With nearly 100 Pulitzer Prizes to show to the tourists, it’s still the best journalism gig in town.

As the new year approaches, The Times will surely and frequently editorially instruct president-elect Barack Obama on the appropriate means to reinvigorate the American economy.

In the midst of its own partially self-induced financial decline, The Times‘ advice ought to be taken cum grano salis.