Print Media

So I haven't done a post on the newspaper business in a while...

Two things in Tuesday's NY Times that got me to wanting to climb on the soapbox.

First, there's an actual bona fide full-color full-page ad for The Hurt Locker in the arts section. Years ago, right after the Golden Globes you could see the difference between the early edition and late edition NY Times, as all the film studios took out placeholder ads for all of their movies, and then would quickly swap in something more appropriate for the late edition to tout their winners. Same thing after Oscar nominations were announced, or after the Oscars themselves. Film ads in the Times have been steadily declining for years and years now, to the point where it's an actual surprising thing to see studios actually taking ads in size or quantity. And in fact, that rather "wow, what's that doing here" ad for The Hurt Locker today was the only film ad in the NY Times for any of the Oscar-winning movies. The total balance of the film ads was less than one third of a page.

And then there's the very sad news that Variety has given the heave-ho to its chief film critic Todd McCarthy and to its chief theater critic, David Rooney. It's all about the money, of course. The advertising in Variety is as sparse as it is in other print media, and the amount of award-related advertising was a tenth that I can remember seeing not all that many years ago. But this move by Variety is in my opinion a major bush league mistake. McCarthy was an excellent and learned film critic. He gave major reviews to the major releases of the last 31 years. He was rarely wildly off target in his reviews. He was himself a filmmaker whose documentary Visions of Light is an excellent film about cinematography. This where I'll cede the microphone a bit to Roger Ebert, who says far more and better in this blog post about Todd McCarthy than I really could.

Having been at Variety for 31 years, and with the title of Chief Film Critic, no doubt McCarthy did not come cheap on the salary front. And as noted above, Variety isn't rolling in the dough right now. But Roger Ebert ends his post by saying "if Variety no longer requires its chief film critic, it no longer requires me as a reader." And on that sentiment, I entirely agree. I've been reading Variety fairly regularly for a good 30 years right now. In my teenage years, after I first discovered the charms of Variety for myself, if I went to New York City for some reason, I put down my dollar. If my parents were going to NYC, they knew there was a standing order for them to please come back with that week's issue. When I started my own business and could then write off the cost of a subscription, going from buying the NY Times and Variety to subscribing were among the first checks on the JABberwocky accounts. And I read Variety in no small part for its serious reviews, for the belief when I read a Todd McCarthy review that I'm becoming part of a serious industry discussion. In dumping a Todd McCarthy, Variety is, to me, saying that it no longer cares to be a serious part of the industry discussion. And if Variety doesn't want to be a serious part of the industry discussion -- no, we don't need Variety.

And it ain't cheap to subscribe to Variety, for a thinning paper that takes less and less time to read and has migrated more and more of its content to the internet where it's vastly less pleasant to read.

One of McCarthy's last reviews is for this week's opener Remember Me. This is likely one of the longest and most serious reviews you'll find for a teen romantic comedy with Robert Pattinson. I don't know if McCarthy is "right" in his review or not, but I know that he gave this kind of serious critical attention to every film he reviewed.

I can't raise quite the same passion for David Rooney. Rooney had very big shoes to fill when his predecessor Charles Isherwood was lured away by the NY Times as part of a major upgrade in its arts coverage several years back. Isherwood is a great critic, and I was upset because he's the #2 theatre critic at the Times and thus reviewing fewer of the major Broadway shows than he did at Variety. Rooney is no Charles Isherwood. But it's the same basic thing. Covering theatre has been an important part of the Variety DNA since the paper was founded, and how exactly do you cover theatre when you don't have a dedicated solid critical voice you can count on.

How long does Variety have to live? This week's news is like watching someone with a termina disease who's been managing to cover it up, compensate, bring the belt in a little tighter or something, and all of a sudden it's progressed too far to keep it hidden, and you look at the wan face and thinning waist and wispier voice and suddenly realize the end is really coming.

credit where due

I've knocked on the Kindle a bit, but I should give Amazon some praise for having made some improvements in the Kindle operating system between my original Kindle that had something like 1.15y98y98u on it and the replacement in January with 1.2 (299870016) on it.  Still the first generation Kindle, but a slightly more developed version of the OS.

The first Kindle crashed just often enough that I kept thinking how nice it would be to travel with a toothpick to hit the reset button, not daily or even weekly, but at least once every month or two.  And then usually one crash would be followed closely by a second crash before it would then be good for a stretch.  So far, 3 months and counting, the replacement Kindle with the slightly updated OS hasn't needed a reset.

The first Kindle, every so often you'd put on the wireless and wait and wait for the Kindle to talk to Amazon and for the newspaper to download, and sometimes I'd have to give up, turn off the wireless, and try again.  3 months and counting, so far the replacement Kindle has checked in and quickly downloaded whatever there is to download in 60 seconds or so just like advertised.

Lynxswift commented asking me about the news reports  of a new bigger screen Kindle and other e-readers that might be more suited to a newspaper.

I would love this.  I'm very glad to be able to subscribe to the Washington Post and the Wall St. Journal on my Kindle.  Along with the NY Times which I get home-delivered they are the only good newspapers left in the country.  But the Kindle is not great for reading newspapers.  The content is all there, but I miss the ads and feel kind of guilty that I might be giving the Washington Post some part of the $9.99 Kindle subscription fee but not eyeballing the few ads that are left.  It's a lot of page turns and back and forth to read the paper.  Even on the 1st generation Kindle there's a little more aggresiveness particularly with the Wall St. Journal to put in charts, but they are often shrunk and take up an entire page.  And any page with a photo takes longer to draw on the screen thus slower to refresh thus adding time.  If the Kindle or some other company could come up with something that would give me more of the newspaper experience I've grown up with along with my newspaper, I would probably buy it in an instant.

In fact -- and it shocks even Luddite me to admit this --  I would even consider foregoing a printed NY Times subscription in favor of the electronic version so long as I could still have free access or very small add-on access to the web site (currently a Kindle WSJ subscription gives no access to their web site, which is probably reasonable when they get but pennies from Amazon on the $9.99 I'm paying) in order to print out the Sunday magazine crossword puzzle or something like that.  Yes, today we all have free access to the NYT website, but when they had their Times Select section blocked off I did get access for my home delivery $$.  The paid web site is coming back, someway somehow, and I would not want to have to pay for a Kindle subscription and then pay again for that.  

Or to put it simply in less detail, the Kindle is still inferior enough for reading newspapers that I'm sometimes happy to pay $1.50 for a Times in print instead of $.75 for a Kindle version when I am traveling.  Make the experience just a little better, and maybe I'm totally there.

Of course today it was nice in a drizzle on the way to Pathmark to buy Diet 7-Up and Ben & Jerry's that were on sale to read a printed NYT that holds up to a drizzle.  It's been very rainy in NYC the past week so the Kindle utility hasn't been great.  Maybe they can come up with a waterproof cold-weather friendly version with a little Kindle umbrella...

Peeling the layers

Which sign of the apocalypse is it when the 2nd best newspaper in New York City might now be The Onion?

Many years ago I used to buy multiple newspapers every Friday to devour movie reviews and see what was going on in the weekend, and I'd cart around hundreds of pages of newsprint quite happily.  In the early years of JABberwocky I cut back a bit on how often I'd buy papers but would still decamp to the Sunnyside branch of the Queens library and read my Newsday, Post and Daily News.  Now I get my NY Times home delivered, and get the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post sent to my Kindle, and whatever's left in the NY tabloids I just don't much care about any more.  There's less and less news in any of them.  The San Francisco Chronicle wasn't much even several years ago when Worldcon was held in San Jose, and at this point it's probably so devoid of content that I don't know if it would be missed should Hearst kill it.  

The long and short of all of this is that I've been missing the smell of napalm, um, newsprint, in the morning, and not entirely happy that I've gone from having 4 or 5 reviews of a new movie to maybe 2 or 3, and since the Onion has this nice AV Club section I've decided to start picking it up 2 or 3 times a month.  And of course the news in the Onion isn't real, but it's darned funny.

I had to share this with my fellow comic book fans, because it's LOL funny.

The Shining is one of my favorite all-time movies, so you must click so we can discuss  And discuss forever, and ever, and ever.  The last line of the article is deadpan perfection.

My f0rmer assistant Steve, I think he hung out with this guy when he was grabbing his last smoke before our 2008 flight to London Book Fair.

All this, and I get some good film reviews to boot.

Only problem:  they have lots to say about the Kindle, but they don't seem to be aware of its problems with cold weather.

Dead Trees and Live Wires

There's nothing quite like reading a good newspaper the day after an election, and I was excited just anticipating the special election section that I hoped would still be part of my NY Times on Wednesday.  And there it was, or was it?  15 pages full of news.  A long article on the Obama campaign, analysis and results and pictures.  Reading galore that occupied me the entire way on an evening walk into Manhattan.  And then I could attack the Washington Post on my Kindle.  But where was the four page regional wrap-up of every single state's results?  Will those show up in tomorrow's paper when all of the results are actually in, or are they gone forever as being too yesterday's news that we've all long since found on the internet if we really really wanted to see it?

But then again, there was nothing quite like having a broadband connection on election eve to follow the results in ways I never could have imagined 10 or 20 years ago.  Go to nytimes.com and there's this nifty little map that just keeps updating itself, refresh it, refresh refresh refresh.  Once upon a time you had 3 networks, and if Walter Cronkite said "but we haven't gotten a lot of the vote from eastern Freedonia where Groucho's support is the biggest so Harpo's lead may or may not be safe..." we had to take his word.  Now every three minutes I can look for myself and see not just that it's 40% in Indiana but that means it's 2% in the northeast corner and 58% in central, and then I can look again.  And look again.  And look again.  And waste time looking again, and refreshing, and then I can switch over to looking at the senate map, or the house map, or the governor map, and then it's five more minutes which means the president map has surely refreshed again.  Pull down, refresh, pull down, refresh, spend an evening.

So who needs the dead trees when you have all those live wires?

But  yet, but yet...  It's a really really big world out there, and do any of us know all of the hot congressional races, or the interesting ballot measures?  The news is there for us to find, but maybe we still need the newspaper to have those four pages of fine type from each state in each region to tell us what we didn't even realize we needed to know.  Did you watch your Campaign 2008 coverage on Fox News or MSNBC?  It wasn't the same campaign on both of them.  It's so easy on the internet to cocoon with the like-minded and see what you want to see instead of what maybe you need to.  There's no commonality in the society and the culture, that fracturing of the audience into its little slices where we have 189 channels to choose from.

Several elections back, I purchased 2 copies of the NY Times.  This was back in the day when they still printed the paper in Manhattan and the first and very early edition would be available by 10PM from a vending machine in the lobby of the Times building on W 43rd St. in the heart of the theatre district, walked over and almost still wet from the presses.  And there would be so much election news the next day, so why not buy one paper at 10PM and read everything else, and then get another with a later deadline the next morning where I could just linger over the election coverage.  This year I could sit at my computer and read all the coverage of anything that I could possibly want from the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the LA Times, and anywhere, really.  It's better, but it's worse.

This is a grim time for the print media.  The LA Times is taking the hatchet again with a newsroom half the size of what it was.  The Star Ledger in Newark is cutting its staff by 40%.  Gannett had a round of layoffs.  Oops there goes 20% of the review hole from my weekly Variety so it's internet or bust to keep up on movies and plays the way I used to in those halcyon days of May 2008.  Many papers had double-digit circulation drops though in some instances purposeful as they cut back their distribution area or tried to get rid of lower rent subscribers.  I worry about this, about not having that common source of news that hits 30% or 50% of the homes in a metropolitan area, of not having a newspaper to dig up Charlie Rangel's 4 rent-controlled apartments or the 95% of retired Long Island Rail Road employees getting disability.  

But dang that map is nifty.  Maybe if I go back now I can see if Coleman or Franken has harvested 2 more absentee votes.  But I so want those 4 pages of fine print tomorrow...

Newspapers, Again...

At least based on the comment counts, my blog readers don't really care so much if the newspaper industry withers away to a Sunday coupon delivery vehicle and a few articles on the Dillon Panthers during the football season. But I'll keep hacking away at the topic because it's one I care about.

A brief recap: newspaper advertising is under attack, as the internet gobbles up more and more of it. Newspaper circulation is under attack since more people go online for their news, and younger people especially see newspapers as less important. Even online migration to newspaper web sites helps only so much since the ads there generate less revenue than the print ads. The economy doesn't help. Recessions are bad for ads. You need fuel to drive trucks to deliver newspapers. I don't have any good solutions to this, but the newspaper industry has most often tried to cut its way to success. Fewer reporters, fewer bureaus, fewer pages of smaller size, etc.

Now, the owner of the Tribune Co., Samuel Zell, is taking this to new levels, as explained in this NY Times article and in many others. He has decreed that his newspapers should have a one-to-one ratio of advertising to news content. Many newspapers and magazines have a ratio of some sort. But 1-1 is pretty bad. The New Yorker would certainly be a lot thinner that way. As the article describes, the LA Times would lose 82 pages a week, that's almost 12 a day. That's an entire section gone, or two pages out of sports, two out of business, 2 here, 2 there. The Calendar section is rich with film advertising, so will that hold stable and every other section lose out? Some sections can shrink only so far because even Sam Zell will need to cover both the Dodgers and Angels, and the Kings, and the Bruins, and etc. He's also done page counts and has determined that journalists at the Hartford Courant produce 300 pages a year while those at the LA Times do only 50, and this just cannot be allowed to stand, either. And the market research says people want more charts, more graphs.

Washington Post columnist Harold Myerson sums up my thoughts on June 11. People at the Hartford Courant can produce lots of pages because they don't have a choice (they have maybe 200 people in the newsroom) and cover things only locally, and the paper's gone from being decent on the weekdays and a coupon vehicle on Sundays to having very little in it at all. You want to run around and cover the local school board and the police blotter you can fill up lots of pages. But some serious journalism requires lots and lots of time and effort over long periods of time. Like the discussion-changing Washington Post coverage of Walter Reed, which Myerson refers to.

I used to look forward to going to LA and buying the LA Times, but when I'm in LA in September for the premiere of True Blood I'm not sure I'll buy at all unless I really like the funnies assortment. Because why read a paper with nothing in it?

I don't know what the solution is, but it can't be this. I used to eagerly and happily buy at least one newspaper a day, something with funnies and gossip and such to go along with my daily dose of the NY Times. Now, I look at the funnies online or just don't bother because it isn't worth fifty cents or more a day just for that. The Baltimore Sun now costs 80 cents with tax and doesn't even have such a good funnies section. That's a Samuel Zell/Tribune/once-Times Mirror paper like the LA Times, and when I left Balticon on Memorial Day Monday, I said "well, let's not buy the shitty Baltimore Sun, because when I get to Penn Station in NY, I can find the Newark Star Ledger for fifty cents and it has a bigger better funnies section and it's not as if the rest of the paper will be any worse" Now, I go around the country, and I think I'll maybe buy the NY Times in print or in my Kindle, and I've got my monthly Washington Post and WSJ subscriptions for my Kindle, and do I really need to buy yet another local paper that has hardly any news hole left, that relies entirely on AP or the Post or the Times for its miserly column inches on the world outside the city I'm in, and has as its biggest virtue that there's a Doonesbury on page C7.

No industry can save itself by alienating its biggest customers. I don't care what the market research says. The people who say they want this chart and that graph still won't pick up the paper. Maybe I'm wrong on that. There is that great debate in sf/fantasy over whether to be Solaris and try and sell sf/fantasy to people who like sf/fantasy or like Orbit and try and reach out to the occasional reader, and maybe I should just consider the newspaper industry debate to be similar. But Orbit and Solaris are at least both trying to sell books to people who like books, while the Samuel Zells of the world have given up on selling a newspaper to people who like newspapers.

Me & My Kindle

I'd give the Kindle 3 slithy toads.

This seems a good day to write about the Kindle. I boarded a crowded Amtrak train to head down for a Charlaine Harris signing in Newark, DE, and while I was reading my Kindle I noticed a man across the aisle reading a Sony Reader. Whatever is the world coming to?

So first, why do I have a Kindle, and not a Sony Reader? Well, I am a Mac person. The Sony Reader requires you buy stuff at the Sony Store, and they haven't made it easy to sync purchases on a Mac. I tried once to see if I could go to Sony's web site and at least check out the offerings and didn't even find that very easy to do. The Kindle, you don't even need a computer since you can shop wirelessly from within the Kindle. It also offered a feature that I found very tempting, that you could email your .doc files to your Kindle and have them show up there wirelessly for a ten cent fee. Some people think it's silly to pay to send your own files to yourself, but I can compose an e-mail with attachment much more quickly than I can grab a USB cable, connect some other gadget with my computer, and drag and drop a file. If you really want to save the ten cents, you can e-mail the file back to your computer and do the USB connection. The Kindle also offers newspaper subscriptions. A good newspaper is hard to find, so the idea of being able to get at some of the few good newspapers that are left was tempting. So those two things were to me the killer apps. If the Kindle had been in stock I would probably have ordered one well before I did, but I had to overcome my reluctance to buy with no idea when I would receive. As it turned out, I ordered just in time to have my backorder arrive several weeks later when they finally had enough to keep it in stock, so I ended up having mine around zero days sooner than if I'd waited. Oh well.

I find the reading experience on the Kindle to be excellent, and at the end of the day that's probably one of the most important things. The electric paper technology is crisp and readable, and walking around in very bright DC sunlight a few weeks ago I had no problem at all. There is one problem the Kindle shares with a physical book. Since there is no backlight, it cannot be read in darkness. And in dim light, it is more like reading a gray newspaper than a coated white paper like an issue of Variety. You don't have as much contrast. But unlike the newspaper, I can adjust the size upward to compensate, so I got far more Kindle reading of the Washington Post on Kindle done walking over the Queensboro Bridge at night relying on street lights than if I had been reading the physical paper. There is one area where the newspaper has an advantage over either a book or a Kindle. I can read a newspaper in a light rain or drizzle since it doesn't matter if it gets a little wet; I'll be throwing it out soon enough anyway. But the Kindle is an electronic gadget, and rain and electronic gadgets are not a good match. Today, I had to balance whether it was better to read more newspaper (printed NY Times) on the train ride down which I could then deposit in the newspaper recycling bins, or to read more Kindle (Washington Post & Wall St. Journal) on the train and save all my newspaper for the rainy outdoor parts.

On balance, the Kindle might be too good a reading experience. The screen kind of draws you in a little hypnotically, and I find when I am walking that I give more of my attention to it than a physical newspaper where I almost have to look up when I turn the page. Agent run over by car when crossing street against light, Kindle in hand.

Mr. Sony Reader on the Amtrak train and I spoke only briefly as we were pulling in to my stop. It did seem the Sony Reader has a better interface to change the type size. You press something on the bottom of the screen, and it's done. The Kindle requires you to press a "size" button on the keyboard, then move a cursor to the desired size, then press an enter button.

But the Kindle isn't Mac friendly on the audio front. You can play audio on the Kindle, but you can't set the Kindle up to get Audible content without first having access to a PC. Once you have set it up on the PC you're good to go without a PC, but it's annoying that I'd have to rely on the courtesy of strangers (or a friend) to let me have at their PC and download the audio manager first.0

The wireless and the newspaper subscriptions are every bit as wonderful as I had hoped. Late last night I e-mailed a Jim Hines manuscript to my Kindle, it showed up there while I was on the train, along with the Wall St. Journal and the Washington Post. No paper, mom! When I was in DC, I was able to buy a Kindle NY Times for seventy-five cents instead of a print version for $1.25. Less paper to carry around, save a few pennies. The Washington Post costs at least $3.50 for the Sunday edition in Manhattan, for $10 I get it for the whole month. There are some sacrifices. The Post on the Kindle comes with no pictures at all, the NY Times with maybe half a dozen, and the Wall Street Journal with a sampling of their line drawing portraits. There aren't charts or tables or box scores. The NY Times includes its baseball roundup with brief lines or two on the out of town games, the Washington Post does not. You don't get to look at the ads, and sometimes I like looking at the ads. You don't get the funnies. The Kindle can show illustrations (you can e-mail your JPGs to it), but it's used sparingly in the newspaper subscriptions. But you pretty much get the entire article text of the paper, front page to back. Parts of the paper read a little quicker, parts a little slower, and on balance I don't know if I'm better or worse off time-wise. I know I'm worse off to the extent that I'll spend a lot more time with the Washington Post each day than with the NY Post or Newsday or Daily News which I just can't abide paying for any more. If you're at the beginning or end of an article you can go back with two presses to a list of sections, a list of articles, or to the article list for a particular section, but this option isn't present in the middle of an article. I wish it was, when I'm 400 words into a 1000 word article and ready to move on. Some words with an accent, you get something like an HTML tag for the accent instead of the accented letter.

Manuscript reading is good, and there's a full keyboard so if I want to take a note while I'm reading so I can share my thoughts with the author I can start typing a note in two presses. But one big but. All those notes go into a single "My Clippings" file. If I switch back and forth from one manuscript to another, the notes will be mingled in this file. To separate out the notes for a particular manuscript or author, you've no choice but to grab out the USB cable, move that My Clippings file on to your computer, and cut and paste and separate them out. I would be much happier if the notes or annotations I might make to one thing could be separated on the Kindle. Second big kind-of but. Because you can change the type size the concept of page #s is alien to the Kindle. If I e-mail a manuscript the page #s disappear, and in some instances the chapter #s may. Or may not, I guess it depends on whether the chapter #s are typed in or updated via some kind of insert page # marker? Instead, the Kindle gives you a "location, " with each location representing around 15-18 words I think. So in "My Clippings" I will have a note that some character does some foolish thing at "Location 2383-2395." Do I make my note longer to give full context so the author can find the place I am talking about, or do I have the Kindle and original Word file that i e-mailed to the Kindle side-by-side so I can dig up a page # to give the author to help with finding where a revision is needed? Will someone set up a unifying standard so that Word, Pages, neoOffice, the Kindle, the Sony Reader will all agree on some replacement for the page #?

The back of the Kindle has a clip of some sort that fits into an indentation on the cover, and which does somehow hold the KIndle in place as you tilt it different ways in the course of reading it. But, you have to tilt the Kindle up a bit to access the on-off switch and the wireless on-off (battery life goes down a lot if you leave the wireless on when you don't need it), and that act can sometimes dislodge the clip mechanism. Can those switches be put someplace where you don't need to tilt the Kindle? The Kindle also comes with a cover, but it's easy to open the Kindle from the wrong side and again risk dislodging the clip mechanism. The cover should come with some writing of some sort so you can tell the front cover from the back and top from the bottom without having to remember that the space with the power cord, USB outlet and earphone jack should be on the bottom left when reading. Maybe they're worried this would make the Kindle a theft magnet? Hence the anonymous cover tha looks almost little like a diary or an organizer, so they're not putting "Kindle, valuable, steal me" in big letters? If so, they can take the Mad Magazine approach and put a fake book cover on it?

I'm not sure the battery life even with the wireless off is as long as they say. This is not an uncommon thing with gadgets. But is this just my imagination? I haven't drained the battery since the instructions say it will last longer being charged often than being drained and recharged. Is it because I read or skim a newspaper very thoroughly and turn many more pages than the usual person? On the other hand, I read in the smallest size and thus turn fewer pages than somebody reading in large type.

There is rudimentary web access that I've tried only once. Worked OK, nothing to write home about, may get better w/subsequent iterations.

So it's not perfect, but it does a lot of things right and fewer wrong, I think.

And I am not known as an early adapter. If I am finding the Kindle to often be better than a newspaper or magazine on dead trees, are we finally at the cusp of the e-book revolution? I do know more of my clients have gotten e-mails regarding e-book unavailability since the Kindle came out than before.

Going, going gone...

Once upon a time Newsday was a great newspaper, the NY Times in tabloid garb for people on Long Island, and for several years with aspirations of becoming a 4th paper in New York.

Well, not any more. Roiled by a scandal over inflated circulation and dragged down by one staff cut after another after another, the paper's become a shell of its former self, a newspaper without any news. And now another 120 people are disappearing, including 25 more editorial staff.

I used to buy this paper every day. When I started JABberwocky in 1994 I switched to reading at the library to save a few bucks, but if I had to buy it on any given day, no problem. Now, it's not worth the fifty cents. Never.

Sadly, this is a situation that's coming up more and more, as newspapers confront plummeting print ad revenue and the ability of the web to provide information. One reason I can afford not to buy Newsday is that I can use the Daily Comics widget on my Mac Dashboard to get my comics, and that's about 25% of the newspaper reading time I don't need the newspaper for.

But should reading the funnies ever be 25% of my newspaper time? I am a confirmed newspaper addict, and I don't want to buy a newspaper. I don't imagine the solutions to the industry's problems are easy ones, but if the best they can come up with is to stop giving even their most addicted customers a reason to use each day...