Frustration

The keyboard is mocking me again. All the words I need are right here, nearby, but my fingers can't seem to find them. I mean, c'mon -- all the letters and punctuation -- they are all right here. I just sit and stare with the vain hope that maybe the keys will organize themselves into their own words. I am going to lie down on the couch again until it happens.

Turning over a new leaf

From now on, I am going to say only nice things about being a college professor with today's students. So here goes:

Free newspaper design critique

News Design School is offering a free video critique of 1 or 2 of your pages until Halloween.

Simply send me a PDF file, register at the NDS web site and/or follow me on Twitter to find out about more good deals, give me a few days, and I will send you the video critique. That's all there is to it.

How can you say no to free?

Oh, and Happy Halloween!

Newspaper design site finally updated

Finally have moved my site from static HTML to WordPress again after hacking incident caused me to re-think everything.

Visit News Design School for some helpful info on newspaper design.

Check out my new blog

If you are missing my cogent and pithy blog comments, they are still available at my newspaper design site. My newspaper design site's blog is just a click away.

Moved!

This entire blog has moved its headquarters a click away to my newspaper design site, News Design School. Thanks.

Moving

During the next few weeks, I'll be moving these posts to a new blog at News Design School. More info to come.

Going all the way

The Christian Science Monitor recently announced that it was ceasing its print edition and going to a web-only edition. Its circulation had fallen from several million to around 500,000. Despite its religious affiliation, it was -- er, is -- a good newspaper -- er, news web site. For me it was always a go-to paper for international news.

There's lots of hand-wringing and deer-in-headlights looks from journos about such a great newspaper doing the dirty and going all digital. What's the problem?

Did we freak out when we switched from hot type to cold type? From letterpress to offset? When Newsday went tab? It's the same stuff, just delivered differently. Yes, it's less portable, but with the hyperlinking ability of the web and virtually endless storage capacity, a lot is gained as well.

I am proud of the Monitor for having the cojones to make the leap. Who will be next? It's not going to be lemmings going over a cliff. It will be smart people following each other out of a dark room.

Bob Bohle
bob@newsdesignschool.com
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Check out my online newspaper design tutorials and redesign consulting services.

Good times will come again: who will be ready?

Thinking more about my last post, I think I was wrong. Good times will come again to the stock market and to newspapers and to the businesses that buy advertising. Sure, we may be in the basement, but the basement is the foundation of a solid business.

"Buy low, sell high" has always been good advice. Advertising during a down economy is also good advice, in part because many of your company's competitors will pull back. You will become more visible in the marketplace as the cacophony of advertising messages lessens.

It will cost money, and the short term might be tight, but over the course of several years, as the economy inevitably cycles back, your company will be in the top position because you stuck around in the consumer's mind.

For newspapers, it may mean a temporary lowering of ad rates. It will certainly call for aggressive and creative cross selling across print, web and mobile products, but it can be done. Not all companies will refuse to cut advertising, but the smart ones will.

And smart newspapers will put together appealing packages for them while they continuously improve their product. Information is a necessary commodity in any economic setting. I hope most newspapers are smarter than they have been acting so far in the downturn. Drastically cutting the producers is not the answer.

It will be interesting in a few years to see who survived and how they did it.
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Check out my newspaper design training and redesign consulting site.

It's just going to get worse

As I sat in on the deathwatch of my investments, watching as the Dow continued its downtick and my plans for retirement stretched into the evermore distant future, I realized that this could be the death knell for a number of newspapers. Sure enough, the next day The Wall Street Journal reported that the Star-Trib in Minneapolis was facing financial difficulties because credit was going to be hard to get and it was going to cost them more.

Even good newspapers, like the Strib, are in trouble. Businesses also will likely advertise less as consumers tighten their belts and spend less. So: less revenue in the face of increasing costs can mean only one thing: the b-word. We are likely to see more newspapers bite the dust.

What is sad about this is that I was beginning to believe that better newspaper web sites were finally figuring out a business model that would bring enough advertising revenue from the web site to make an honest go of it.

If you want to work on some of this, check out News Design School.

Now I believe that we are in for more bad news from media companies. Even those papers that have embraced the web and created interactive, social-media web sites will have a hard time fighting through this economic rough patch. Still, the papers that are jumping on the web with both feet will be better positioned to survive. Are you one of those?

The Kate Moss-ing of newspapers

Within the last week or so, a number of major newspapers have spent the money and staff time on redesigning the paper. In a few cases, the Oklahoman for one, have gone to a 44-inch web, or the approximate width of a two-page spread. Gannett is planning to move all its papers to a 44-inch web. Some papers have moved recently from 50 to 46. It wasn't all that long ago that the 50-inch web was considered narrow!

Where will it end? Broadsheet papers have gone tabloid. Tabs have gone Berliner format (18.5 x 12 or so). There is a great little daily newspaper in North Carolina that has been ahead of the trend for years: it's 8.5x11 (The Tryon Daily Bulletin).

All this shrinkage is creating new challenges for newspaper designers. I wonder when we will arrive back at 1-column galleys as the final product.... What will designers do then?
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Need design training? Check out our services at NewsDesignSchool.

Help! I've lost my name.....

I have joined the long list of people bemoaning the treatment of professors in the classroom. I understand that times change, but I still miss the old days when students didn't feel entitled to good grades because they paid their good money for the class, and hey, they showed up nearly every day....

Lately, I have noticed a new trend. During class and in e-mails, I am addressed as Professor. Just that. No name. Just Professor. I don't expect rigid formality, but good grief! I am sure the students would be miffed if I simply said Hi, Student, when I passed them in the hall or called on them in class.

Just another example of how professors are seen by students not as experts in their field and the leader of the classroom, but just another dude standing between them and the piece of paper that says they are educated.

DISCLAIMER: I realize that not ALL students are this way nor do all my students not use my name in addressing me. I am just noticing an increase mainly in the numbers of Hey Professor openers in my e-mails. Just thought I would pass it along.

Check out my other blog

I am working on News Design School, my instructional web site with online newspaper design tutorials, as well as other services, for small-newspaper journalists and even college newspaper journalists.

I am writing, designing, researching, learning new programs, and having a blast! The newspaper design blog and my free newsletter take up a lot of time, so I am not posting as much here. Stop by and check them out. If you are into newspaper journalism, join -- or start -- a conversation at the News Design School Forum.

Thanks for reading.

Hillary: A cold thin morn

Forget pundits. Forget political polls and their error margins.

If you want to know who will be the next president of the United States, I have the answer.

I checked more important data: the moon, the stars, the planets, the Chinese zodiac, numerology, and of course, Las Vegas. If the candidates would let me, I’d toss in a phrenology session, too.

McCAIN: On the Republican side, we have John McCain, a Virgo, a Rat in the Chinese zodiac, and a 4. Vegas had him at 7-5 when I looked recently.

Horoscopes differ according to the expert, but I found the following at stariq.com: McCain has a need for balance and justice, he’s very pragmatic and not an ideologue, and a mix of conservatism and liberalism, but with a leaning toward the former. His signs don’t look all that good, but they are similar to George W. Bush’s, and we know what happened there.

As a Rat, McCain is among good company: George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Clark Gable, Louis Armstrong, T.S. Eliot and Cameron Diaz.

This year is not a good one for Rats, who are likely to feel gloomy and pessimistic. It was recommended that by December he would be so down in the dumps he should take a trip, but it must be West or North. I believe the White House is in the East.

As for the numbers, the main number of 4 means that McCain is into service, steady growth and struggling against limits (can you say fund raising?). A 4 is serious and sincere. On the other hand, 4s need to be careful about becoming dominant and bossy, a trait that has come out on occasion.

CLINTON: Now the Democrats. Hillary is a Scorpio, a Pig (or Boar), and a 6. The Vegas odds I saw were 4-1.

Scorpios with all the various moons and alignments that she has are strongly pushed to succeed (duh), but should feel fortunate to have a job at all (another duh). She has a great talent as an actor, which she uses to get what she wants. The position of Saturn says she has a nuts-and-bolts approach (whereas Obama’s Neptune positioning says he has the ability to sell dreams of a better world – pretty cool!). Last, Hillary’s moon is apparently in Leo, wherever that is, and 10 former presidents have shared that fact.

Other pigs are – ahem – me, and: Woody Allen, Bryan Adams, the Dalai Lama, Billy Crystal, Glenn Close and Humphrey Bogart.

Pigs will travel a lot this year, but the year doesn’t really look good until May, and then it will run only to end of 2009. Most important, pigs will lose some personal items this year, such as a wallet or keys. Could it be the keys to the White House?

As a 6, she is responsible and balanced. She has a sympathetic, kind and generous personality with openness and honesty in all relationships (unlike Bill….). On the downside, a 6 sometimes has difficulty distinguishing helping from interfering. She dreams of being a leader, seeking unconquered heights. Some people may see her as aggressive and self-assured. Really?

OBAMA: Barack is a Leo, an Ox, and a 1. Vegas had him at 2-3.

Obama’s Leo settings tie him to radical change and the positioning of Pluto (is there less influence now that it is no longer a full-fledged planet?) leads to the support of influential and powerful people. The online reading from February was generally quite favorable, but then it also predicted the Ohio and Texas primaries would go well.

Other well-known Oxes: Richard Gere, Jim Carrey, Warren Beatty, Johann Sebastian Bach, Napoleon, Charlie Chaplin and George Clooney.

Oxes will enjoy a good career year if they co-operate with partners. Obama will get opportunities to increase the odds (Vegas says he doesn’t need it) of getting a desired promotion. He is more likely to get help from men than from women. There are some negative potential problems with current plans, but changing the plans instead of sticking with the old is the answer.

Ones are pioneers, independent leaders and individualistic, keen administrators. Ones have little need for supervision, preferring to act on their own. They are self-confident and self-reliant. On the down side, ones tend to be egotistic and self-centered – it’s an aggressive number. Ones often want to dominate to be the boss (i.e., no veep).

Because I couldn’t think of a good headline for this post, I tried an anagram maker. Based on my own tea leaves and her moon in Libra, by the way, it’ll be Hillary. Obama’s ego will lead him to implode aggressively somewhere along the way.

• John is mendicancy
  
• Johns in candy mice
  
• Hillary: A cold thin morn
  
• Rot Hill cannily
  
• Lo, tyrannic Hill
  
• Barack heinous abeam
  
• A Bushier casaba monk
  
• A cabana bro hikes
  

Two words

I like words. How they sound, how they feel rolling off your tongue and lips. I like avuncular and laconic and phlegmatic. I like it when words I didn't even know I knew come tumbling out during a conversation. I usually surprise myself when I dip into my subconscious lexicon, as small as it is. (I am certainly no William Buckley.)

The other day as I was driving to my university to drag the uninterested through the issues surrounding the unread textbook chapters when I passed a group of inmates picking up the trash along the roadside. The warning sign said, "Prisoners Working."

Suddenly my over-burdened mind hit upon a question that bugged me the rest of the day. Prisons and jails are both places where criminals are incarcerated, right. So why are "prisoners" the inmates, but "jailers" run the jails? Ah, the English language.

Death by a thousand (job) cuts

In today's (3-23-08) L.A. Times, writer Dennis McDougal laments the merging of the Long Beach (Calif.) Press-Telegram and the South Bay (nee Torrance) Daily Breeze as a cost-cutting effort by the parent company of both. Sad.

Decades ago I spent nearly four years at the P-T (Well, actually, the P-T was the afternoon paper at the time. I worked for the morning Independent.) I learned an awful lot about journalism, about writing, reporting, human nature, how to down drinks for dinner and still copyedit, and much more.

The newsroom then was not the clean, sanitized, cubicle-ized blah it is today. I worked the sports desk, and several of the guys (I can remember only one or two women in the entire newsroom and they were, of course, in the Lifestyle corner, protected from the vulgar, hard-drinking and harder-smoking newsroom) kept a flask in the bottom desk drawer and even smoked cigars across the desk from me. Unthinkable today.

Part of my initial job interview as copyboy (yes, boy) was to make coffee in one of those huge silver pots. The newsroom went through multiple pots nightly and it fell to me to keep it full, and it had better be good. I guess I made good coffee.

Despite all these and more idiosyncrasies -- oh, the stories I could, and maybe should, tell my students -- the experience was no doubt better than a degree in journalism (mine is in Creative Writing). I owe a lot to John Dixon, my sports editor, who taught me much about tight editing and ethical reporting.

So, first the Independent died in the early 80s, leaving only the P-T. Now the P-T is losing its editor and publisher and merging with a former competitor! All told 19 staffers from both papers will lose their jobs and probably end up falling into public relations (shudder). It's like I am watching a beloved old friend lose body parts and slowly die.

I started in newspapers in 1967, back in the days of "hot type." Then technology began to speed up and we went through "cold type" and then into computers. All these improvements were supposed to make things better, but technology can't replace good reporters or compelling stories. The money saved should have been used to improve the product, but instead it went to shareholders.

The downward spiral of newspapers began and the Press-Telegram is just the latest to start slipping down the drain. Newspaper companies made more cuts. Circulation dropped. More cuts. The product has become so weak from overworked journalists that no one wants to read the papers when they can be wowed by the Web.

Newspapers are still making a reasonable profit, just not what they were hauling in during the glory years. Shareholders whine. Publishers downsize. The product suffers.

I am going to lift a glass tonight and toast not just my poor old friend, the P-T, but all newspapers. It's all but over.

Today's college students

Among those of us toiling in the groves of academe, there are a lot of wailings and lamentations about the lack of basic knowledge among our students.

To a certain extent this is true. I give my journalism students current events and general knowledge quizzes, and you would be surprised (well, maybe you wouldn't be) at some of the answers. Many thought our Civil War was in the 1700s, about a third had never heard of Watergate, and most couldn't name the state directly south of Wisconsin. They all knew the host of American Idol, however.

I have concluded that there is a larger problem, and it is articulated well in a famous quote by Will Rogers: "It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so. "

In my journalism labs, I always ask about their knowledge of computers and a few software packages. They all claim well more than adequate knowledge, but when faced with lab tasks, they are often clueless not only about how to do the task, but how to use the Help function to get the answer. Turns out that they can check their e-mail, MySpace and Facebook pages, but beyond that. . . .

Whether it's computers or content from textbook readings, they seem to think that a cursory reading and a loose grasp of the material is all they need. When I ask them questions that require some in-depth, critical thinking, they can't do it. They don't know how. The problem is that they think they know something if they have memorized facts, so they don't stretch their minds to make connections between Fact1 and Fact2. Why should they? They know at the highest level already.

I really think this is why I get the blank stares I get when I ask a tough question. It's not that students are dumber today, it's that they came to premature closure in their thinking because they came to class sure they knew it all.

The push for assessment, migrating up from the K-12 ranks, plays right into this. Assessment needs simplicity in measurement, so instruction becomes what's measureable, not what's right. If I were a wee bit more pessimistic, I would say that higher ed is near the start of a long decline, close on the heels of the decline we have seen in K-12. Sad.

Journalists and bloggers

People -- and even some courts -- have been trying to decide whether bloggers are journalists for years. An answer, as far as I can tell, has not been definitively decided.

As with most good questions, the answer is: it depends.

For my money, if one is just spouting forth one's own opinions, without reference to the source of factual information, that's blogging. One could argue that the word journalist derives from the idea of keeping a daily journal, which sounds an awful lot like what bloggers do. But let's not get lost in semantics.

Most blogs are just someone holding forth on some subject or another. Most of my posts on this blog are that. They are posted with little use of sources, little or no editing, and no bowing to some professional Code of Ethics. Caveat lector.

But other blogs -- and even a few of my posts here -- do good reporting or opinion-sharing, replete with sources. The fact that a copyeditor or fact-checker didn't touch it doesn't bother me. Based on the number of corrections and uncorrected errors in my local fishwrap, I'd have to say that most mainstream stories receive only a cursory glance from overworked and underpaid newsworkers on the copydesk anyway.

So I guess that for me the bottom line is intent. If the intent of the blogger is to simply natter on about something, then that is not journalism. But if the blogger uses reportorial techniques, such as using multiple sources and fact-checking, with the intent of presenting an accurate description, then that is journalism. Whether bloggers should be protected by shield laws and such is a tough one for me. I haven't decided yet.

What I think is funny is that for years newsworkers have been lamenting the loss of multiple journalistic voices in cities and towns around the country. Now that technology has allowed those multiple voices, many have cried, "But that's not journalism!"

I believe it is and I also believe that the sooner the MSM bring blogging into the fold the better.

Taking a break

But don't despair. I'll be back.

Let my Scooters go....

I am so appalled that Bush commuted Lewis Libby's 30-month prison sentence that I can't write any more. I had a post about bloggers as journalists, but then this hit.

Break a law, go to jail....no wait, break a law and be set free. I can be pretty agnostic when it comes to politics, but I have to believe the pundits on both sides will think it was a bad move. Can't wait to take it all in tomorrow! Then back to bloggers and journalists.

I love newspapers

Despite my previous post, I love newspapers and I love the organizations that love newspapers.

Recently, I was watching NBC Network News and two of their top stories were basically quoting The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Man, those TV journalists work hard at getting a story! At least it is not (yet) as bad as radio news, which is basically someone reading stories from the local paper. The publisher of a paper I was redesigning in Wyoming a few years back had a good line: "It's like [our newspaper] for the blind every morning."

Then there is the "local" news on television. They don't want to pay for actual reporters, so we get loads of canned video on usually odd or outrageous happenings from around the country, after the usual bleeding lead stories about shootings, stabbings, accidents and general mayhem.

Thank God for newspapers, sick as they are.

I have some posts backed up, but until this intense summer teaching session is over, I don't have much time....

Am I dim or just grumpy?

Maybe I am just being grumpy, but I am still stunned by the poorly written press release from the Newspaper Association of America (menioned in earlier post). I am probably more stunned by the fluffing of the numbers and the stiff direct quotes (obviously written by the PR folks -- nobody speaks like that!) from leadership, however, than I am by the ungrammatical and flackified writing.

From the press release:

"In addition, on average newspaper Web sites have contributed to a 13.7 percent increase in total newspaper audience for the coveted 25- to 34-year-old demographic and a 9.2 percent increase for 18- to 24-year-olds (Scarborough)."

Compare those numbers to ones listed in an Editor&Publisher story:

"Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani noted slowing online growth in a brief to investors regarding Q1 results. She pointed to Yahoo’s difficulties over the past twelve months, The New York Times Co.’s About.com -- where revenue advanced 26% in Q1 compared with 98% in Q1 2006 -- and the revenue shortfall at E.W. Scripps' Shopzilla as evidence of the slackening pace.

In Q1 2006, online advertising for the companies that Bear Stearns covers, rose 35% versus 22% for Q1 of this year. 'A double digit revenue growth profile is still impressive,' she wrote, 'However, at 7% of revenues on average, the rate of deceleration is a bit of a concern as this online segment may not ever become a sizable enough contributor to offset losses in the print world.' "

Granted, they are looking at different numbers, but there is not a hint of negativity in the NAA release. I visited the NAA site and poked around a bit and found the same thing. Reading through the site leads one to conclude that the newspaper industry, thanks in no small part to the NAA, is healthy and on the upswing. It is?

Just for chuckles, I visited GuideStar.org, which provides information about non-profits. (I visit the SEC site to get background on public companies.) I don't know what the dues are for NAA, but the most recent IRS Form 990 showed some mighty high salaries -- including nearly $1 million in total compensation for the president -- for an organization whose hype is bigger than its help.