How to save newspapers: Time Magazine

Here's one writer's ideas for saving newspapers. Hat tip to a loyal reader for bringing it to my attention. It also echoes a lot of what I have said previously about the original insanity to give the online product away for free.

How to save newspapers

(And yet, here we are taking another publication's article for free. Maybe Time Magazine should take its own advice.)

Stimulus, schmulus

Here we go again. The change people voted for is looking suspiciously like what we had before.

Unrestrained spending, pork barrel projects and an additional $1 trillion in debt. Who knew change could be so much like what we already had?

And now word that our Congressional leaders, of both parties, have spent $500,000 for a weekend away at four-star resorts so they can talk. What is wrong with these guys, and gals?

Are they so tone deaf to the current economic conditions and mood in the country that they can't see past their own hypocrisy in criticizing bank executives for lavish spending on the taxpayer dollars that they don't think someone will notice when they do?

I hope that President Obama goes behind close doors and spanks all of them and gets them back to what he was talking about in the first place, creating jobs. I see where one of the $500 million proposals in the new bill creates 338 new jobs. Do the math you idiots, that's more than $1.3 million per job. And by the way, do any of these guys pay their taxes like the rest of us?

And as I said before the first bail out, what we are doing to our children and grandchildren by borrowing all this money and putting it on the next generation to pay off seems criminal, but it is at least immoral. When did anyone ever give someone the advice that the best way out of a financial hole was to borrow your way out? Hopefully, never.

We need a good House, and Senate, cleaning. Now I'm going back to the real house cleaning for my late brother's party. The vacuum is sitting right here next to me calling my name.

The fog rolled in

It is probably appropriate that today the marine layer has moved in over the coast of northern California. After a week of above average temperatures for this area for this time of year, average has returned.

Today is also the day that my trip moves to a new phase. The fun and excitement of visiting with my two sons and, of course, my brilliant, beautiful granddaughter always comes to an end far quicker than when I am in the dentist's chair or in line for an oil change, for example.

Not that there isn't good times ahead. Today I'm headed to Auburn and my sister-in-law Barbara's house to help her get the house ready for my brother's party on Saturday. Lots of family and friends getting together to celebrate my brother Mike's too short life.

Next week, I'm spending some down time with my cousin Cynthia and sister Pam near Santa Rosa.

So far I've been able to keep blogging while here and will try to keep up, but there may be a gap in blogging and posting comments during the next week or so.

For a look at where my son Tim and I are right now go here:

WorldMark Marina Dunes

News about the News

A loyal reader sent along a link to a long story on the current conditions at the Ann Arbor News.

Forty-nine down and one to go

Sometime in the past week someone from Wyoming checked into Free From Editors, which only leaves North Dakota as the one state that has not visited here.

I'm not going to beat up on North Dakota again, but I will let you know if someone there finally checks in down the road.

Better than ever

Monterey was in all its glory yesterday. As anyone who has ever lived here can tell you as beautiful as the area is, it is subject to fog and cool weather. Not yesterday, it was gorgeous. Temperatures in the high 70s, no fog, etc.

Tim, my youngest, and I went on a three-hour tour (no deserted islands) watching for whales. We ended up seeing five grey (or is it gray?) whales, tons of sea lions and seals and a plethora of birds. One disturbing thing was the way the passengers kept pointing at me and yelling "Thar she blows." Guess I better stay on my diet.

Mostly we just had a great time being together. Last night we went and saw "Taken." Plenty of violence, but almost cartoonish in nature.

Today we're off to the aquarium.

The photos above are from a couple days ago in Aptos and Capitola. I don't have my download cord so the whale photos will have to wait.

Monterey beckons

As a native Californian it is hard for me to be close to certain places here and not feel the draw to at least stop by and take a nostalgic look.

Monterey is one of those places. My sons William and Timothy live just 40 minutes from Monterey and every time I come here I find a strong pull to just head there and hang out, even for just an hour or two.

It is a beautiful city anchored to its past as a fishing port. But nearby there is the 17-mile Drive into Carmel, the beautiful Pebble Beach Golf Club and some of the most natural beauty anywhere to be found.

So today and Tuesday, my youngest son, Timothy, and I will be heading there for two days of fun in the sun. A stop on Cannery Row and no doubt, a long visit to the world famous Monterey Aquarium.

Tim, 37, a lifelong surfer will take his board and brave the waves and Great White Sharks that prowl the area. I'll take some pictures and put them up when I return home.

I have written a couple posts to be put up while I am out of touch. Talk to y'all in a couple days. (See I do know how to hyperlink).

An afternoon Super Bowl!

The Super Bowl starts about 3 p.m. today here. Who knew there was an afternoon Super Bowl?

For the last 31 years I have watched the Super Bowl in the Eastern time zone. I had forgotten that football Sundays, even during the regular season, start early here. 60 Minutes always starts on time on the west coast.

But this year, because of my trip out here for my brother's memorial, I will be watching the game on Pacific time, in a warmer climate. What does that mean?

I'll be in bed at my regular 10 p.m. time. On the east coast that's about the time half time is over.
The sun will be out during the entire game here.

I can move to the patio if the house gets too crowded and not suffer from hypothermia.

It also means for the first time ever I will be watching the game with my granddaughter Brittany. (That's the best part).

If the game is bad, which it usually is, it won't make me mad that I lost sleep over it.

It'll be time for dinner, instead of bed, when the game ends. Not that we won't already be full of chips and chicken wings.

By the time my son William and I get home from his mother's house (thanks for inviting me to the party, Chris) we will still have time to do a load of laundry and watch a movie. (William made me watch "Meet the Spartans" on Saturday) No comment.

Most of all when I wake up on Monday morning there won't be any snow on the ground.

Life before technology

When I started in newspapers the typewriter was on life support. At Canada College in California and at MSU the student newspapers were still using the legendary typewriter, copy paper and glue pot systems.

That system involved typing your copy on paper with floating wood chips on it, gluing the pages together until a decent story looked like the Dead Sea Scrolls and then ending it with a the mark -30- to indicate it was done.

Once glued together, you went back over your copy and made changes and corrections with a series of "copy-editing" marks. There were marks to switch the order of words, add words, add punctuation and sometimes you just added lines of copies with a little "v" mark to indicate where it started. A period was an "x" with a circle around it, I think. There must be an example of this in the Newseum.

A copy editor would then read that mess, make their changes and send it to the composing room. Linotype was gone at most places when I started in 1977, but there were a few holdouts.

After copy was set in a strip of film, the "back shop" would then fit it into a hole in the layout marked by an editor. The copy was waxed and stuck down on a layout sheet. Plates were burned and sent to the press room and put on the presses.

Almost no one had a cellphone or a pager in 1977 in the news business. My off campus job (other than being a bouncer at the old Coral Gables) was for rewriting high school sports at the Lansing State Journal. I worked for Dave Matthews and Edward "Ed" Senyczko, the sports editor. It was trying work made more trying by the IBM Selectric type setting system at the paper.

Going from the glue pot to the IBM system was extremely frustrating. Under the IBM system there were a series of codes you had to type at the end of a sentence or paragraph so that the type would be set correctly.

One time ol' Ed came streaming out of the composing room with one of my typeset stories yelling at me because the coding I put on the paper told the film making machine to set the type one letter per line. He was holding a sheet of film about 20-feet long with one letter on each line.

"That's about $10 in film," he yelled at me. At the time I was making $5 an hour doing the sports rewrite and I was hoping he wasn't going to charge me for the film. He didn't.

By the time I arrived at The Oakland Press they had an ATEX system which was a primitive computer word processing program. It was the first time I had worked on a system that didn't include paper and it caused me some problems at first.

The annoying habit of the system to suddenly blink off and take all your copy with it into cyberspace was just one problem. "Remember to keep saving your copy," the editors would remind us.

It was a challenge getting information back to the office from a breaking news scene in the days before cellphones. Yes, there were sometimes pay phones nearby, but my preferred system involved begging residents to let me use their home phones.

"I'm from the Oakland Press, can I borrow your phone to call the paper?." Most of the time people would do that. At that time the OP was an afternoon paper and we could get breaking news into the paper well into the morning.

I was teamed with a woman reporter there who I later worked with at the Flint Journal. Because of the nature of the stuff she and I covered (cops and courts) we got the nickname "Gloom and Doom." I couldn't tell you today who was "Gloom" and who was "Doom." She and I still talk and she is a reader of this blog.

We alternated between being the reporter and the rewrite person and it really worked well. Calling in a story on deadline, writing it in your head before you ever touched a keyboard, was a real challenge. It could also be frustrating to the rewrite person as you were constantly revising or remembering details that you had forgotten to begin with.

It was a skill that helped me later in my career. As night police reporter I was only on deadline on Friday nights (Saturday was a morning paper, as was Sunday, but the rest of the week was afternoons at the Flint Journal). So working solo on Mondays to Thursdays, I would often start writing the story in my head on the way back from a breaking news event so that by the time I sat at my desk the story would flow out on the computer screen.

The biggest new technology I had at the Journal, compared to the Oakland Press, was a huge bag phone that I was given when I started in 1989. This was an early cell phone that came with its own suitcase and plug in power source. No more begging a homeowner for a phone.

I also had a pager, something I had not been given at the Oakland Press. At the OP when you were out on an assignment you were supposed to check in frequently in case there were new instructions or a new assignment.

Over the years, I came to view the pager and phone as not just a necessity, but as a curse. "My electronic leashes" I would tell people. Now there was no excuse to be out of touch. An editor could always find you and that's not always a good thing especially when you are off duty.

One thing I always carried was a police scanner. The Michigan State Police issued permits to carry them to reporters because under state law here they are illegal to carry in an automobile. In obtaining the permits, you had to sign an affidavit that even though you were carrying it in your car that you would not respond to the scene of an event or use anything you heard on it in a public account. Everyone kind of winked at that. No one ever asked me to show them my permit either.

It was sad to me when the composing room went away a number of years ago. It used to be fun on a late Friday night or early Saturday morning to wander back after deadline and watch George, Jerry and the others put together the newspaper one waxed column at a time.

There was a life to it. Even on the second floor of the FJ, when those big old presses started up you could feel a slight vibration in your feet and the building. To me it was a sad day when they shut down forever and moved to the big building across the parking lot.

When I would walk outside about 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning, my shift complete, the parking lot would be choked with rusty vans, the route drivers, waiting for the Saturday papers to come off the presses. Just a few hours later, one would be delivered to my home in Lapeer.

"The Daily Miracle," some of us used to call the newspaper. Miracle, because so many things had to come together each day to make it happen.

No doubt technology has improved the speed of production, although it completely decimated the ability to include late breaking news in the printed product. Each time we upgraded in technology the final morning deadlines were rolled back until at one point 8-8:30 a.m. (where once it had been 11 a.m. or later) was the point of no return.

Technology broke the traditional newspaper rhythm. Newspaper employees came and went as the rhythm of production dictated. Even the newsroom rhythm changed. In an old typewriter room the crescendo of typing leading up to the deadline was exciting. When the deadline arrived the typing would dramatically taper off and then stop. Silent keyboards are just not the same.

If I think hard I can even remember the sound of paper being pulled quickly from a typewriter roller.

Technology, in my opinion, is neither good or bad, it just is. But for those of us who started out on paper it did take a lot of the fun and excitement out of the business.