Publishers' Auxiliary fellates the Roswell (Daily) Record

Not the one in Georgia. 

The one in New Mexico, beloved by conspiracy theorists.

Lead story in Pub Aux's July issue? 

Touts local news production with "Roswell UFO controversy was a local story."

Well, today, there is no controversy.

There IS a lot of grifting by the Beck family ownership.

Re both of those issues? 

Per the "about" on its website, the Record is like Jill Stein trying to pretend to not be an antivaxxer while actually being one. In this case, it's trying to pretend not to push 1947 UFO conspiracy theory while actually doing so.

In July 1947, something streaked out of the sky, hitting the ground outside of Roswell, New Mexico, beginning years of ongoing speculation as to what the object was. According to initial information provided to the Roswell Daily Record by the Roswell Army Air Field, the startling headlines claimed that the military had recovered a flying saucer from a nearby ranch.

Overnight, the story changed from a flying saucer to a weather balloon, and over the ensuing years, that explanation morphed into a military high-altitude surveillance program. Over decades of conspiracy theories that the U.S. government has covered up the possibility that an alien spacecraft and its otherworldly crew were responsible for the 1947 crash. Through it all, and continuing to this day, the Roswell Daily Record was there to report the news and to spark the public interest and fascination with this story.

Wrong. 

And, Beck daughter has a reason to peddle this, as did daddy, assuming he did, too.

The paper owns its own UFO store.

Of course, here's the reality.

And, I knew that reality long ago. I also know that, 25 years ago, Roswell boosters were talking about when the city would hit 50,000. Never happened. Population's been basically flat since 1990 and Farmington has just about caught it, while the Farmington metro area is much bigger.

Not that Teri Saylor at PubAux will tell you that. About halfway through:

In 2022, on the 75th anniversary of the crash event, CBS News reported the debate is far from settled, and “for decades, journalists, authors, documentary film crews and others fascinated by the incident have unearthed and publicized countless bits of information and artifacts o that time.”

Ugh. No skeptical organizations or individuals are quoted anywhere. 

But wait, it gets worse:

On the newspaper’s website, Beck wrote that “over decades of conspiracy theories, the U.S. government has covered up the possibility that an alien spacecraft and its otherworldly crew were responsible for the 1947 crash. Through it all, and continuing to this day, the Roswell Daily Record was there to report the news and to spark the public’s interest and fascination with this story.”

Saylor doesn't question that, nor does she mention the grifting involved. Well, she did mention that above two paragraphs:

Both the Roswell Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch are trademarked, and their UFO crash stories and images cannot be reproduced without permission or by paying royalties to Record Publishing, the parent company.

To be more accurate, she doesn't mention the ethics of a newspaper promoting an untrue conspiracy theory off of which it's grifting.

She and PubAux should be ashamed of themselves. 

But they won't be. (I tagged both on Shitter the day this came out.)

Gack.

And, people in the media biz wonder why people in the media biz don't believe all claims about the media biz? 

Newspapers 'versus' public relations

We've seen the infographics all over Twitter and elsewhere, how there used to be one journalist to one pubic relations person and there's now, what, six PR flacks to one journo or something like that.

But, that assumes that journalists — or their bosses and corporate masters at least — aren't into public relations themselves. That's true at both the national and the local level.

Major dailies are indeed into PR in foreign relations, with their customer being the United States government and the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. The Venezuela coup and the pile-on against Rep. Ilham Omar on AIPAC are clear examples.

On the domestic side? Major dailies still paddle lightly on single-payer, don't localize the realities of what climate change will cause — and how ending fossil fuel tax credits would fund a Green New Deal — and other things.

Regional major dailies, and national ones, are also loathe to attack local big biz. Did the New York Times look at the real cost of Amazon's second HQ? The Houston Chronicle explain the reality of how fracked wells have rapid depletion rates and are generally money losers? No and no. The Chicago Trib look closely years ago at Rahm Emanuel's privatization? No. It may eventually have looked at the craptacular police department, but anything financial? No.

But, it's not just nationally.

Local newspapers, despite claims otherwise, pull punches in news stories, columns and house editorials. Don't think otherwise.

The online only Gnu Media? Don't think they're that much better. Many of them are one-person ownership, and the staff ain't biting the hand that fees them.

Accepting that, and accepting that some newspapers are worse about it than others, may help you as you decide whether to get into, or stay in, journalism or not.

Community newspapers, wake up and plan for worst case 2025 now!

Community newspapers, a somewhat vague term but one that starts with small-circulation six-day dailies and goes downward in size from there, face somewhat different concerns in today's world of financial perils than do their larger siblings. This is even more true for the non-daily segment of the community newspaper world.

Non-daily newspapers don't have to worry about people going online to find AP news, because that's never been in their papers. They don't have to worry too much about slashed national advertising money. (They do have to worry about that to a degree, though; retailers and fast-food chains have cut their pass-through money for advertising and marketing to local franchises, and Valassis, the nation's No. 1 publisher of insert advertising, has increased its downward pressure on community newspapers after cutting a sweetheart deal with the United States Postal Service.)

That said, that parenthetical comment shows that community newspapers aren't worry-free. And, given that they can look at their bigger seven-day dailies, they have no excuse to be complacent.

For example, the L.A. and Tampa Bay daily newspaper worlds have hit new levels of crisis, as I blogged earlier this week.

That said, back to the community newspaper world, both the daily and non-daily sides.

First, "programmatic advertising," in which major national ad brokers use computer algorithms to find the cheapest slotting they can for their clients, is likely going to partially trickle down to those five- and six-day community daily newspapers.

And, digital ad revenue will fail to make up for print ad declines. Print ads will decline less at community newspapers, to be true, but digital advertising won't pick up much. With no wire stories, local websites just don't get that much traffic. See here for more on ad issues in general.

And, Valassis, and other major inserters, like Red Plum, will continue to apply downward pressure.

Second, circulation revenue will likely continue to slip. There's a couple of reasons for that. At the daily wing of community newspapers, days that are thinnest on community news will continue to fall in single-copy sales. More six-day dailies will thus look at moving to five-day editions. If they don't provide a slight break on subscriptions with that, they'll lose yet more folks. A fair amount of five-day dailies will look at going tri-weekly (with a mini-wire service feed) or even semi-weekly. That will save money, yes, but subscriptions will have to be adjusted at the same time. (Personal experience: CNHI tried going from five-day daily to semiweekly at the first newspaper where I worked, without crediting current subscribers or extending their subscriptions. By the time the mass of subscriptions cancellations told them what a mistake they had made, they wound up deciding to close the paper.)

Circulation revenue will slip for two other reasons. One, for community papers that have put up paywalls, there's not only no more low-hanging fruit, there's no more fruit, period. Unlike a New York Times, you can't price out mini-subscriptions for just op-eds, or just the books review, or whatever. See here for more on digital subscription issues in general; same link as above.

Also, while old white folks are the most regular newspaper readers, they're also the ones nearest death! Most of the obits in community newspapers are lost subscribers.

Meanwhile, the Postal Service is only going to get worse. Even at the NAA, I don't see anybody picking up the Washington lobbying cudgels for my ideal solution of going back to the pre-1971 United States Post Office, either. By 2025, half of the remaining regional service centers may well be closed. And, the kids of the old white subscribers, especially if the parents are dead, the kids that have moved away, will drop their subscriptions. They'll only do a digital one if it's digital-only, and discounted.

That leads to a related issue. Even if you have a paywall, saying the digital comes free with print, as a sneaky way of saying you don't offer digital-only subscriptions, won't fly forever, either.

And, Facebook in particular and social media in general will not be your salvation! If anything, it will be even less the salvation of community newspapers than it has been for major ones. Community gossip, rumor, and occasional fact are easy to get spread digitally with somebody's "community" Facebook page.

Hence, my header.

Community newspaper owners need to brainstorm what they think could be their worst scenario in 2025 — then start planning for that to happen in 2020. And then, of course, figure out how they can prevent, or at least mitigate that.

The worst case? Per that link above, newsprint prices have held pretty low. Picture them taking a major jump. Picture electricity prices for presses taking a hike as the shale gas "boom" turns out to be pretty much of a bubble by 2025. And, the Postal Service is 3x teh suck of today.

Dear community newspapers: Are you really preparing now to be really digital-first newspapers? I kind of doubt it. Even more, are you preparing for the outside possibility that your best realistic financial move 10-12 years from now might be digital-only? I totally doubt that.

Age discrimination and other hiring issues in the 'liberal media'

Update, Jan. 13, 2015: Six months after passing me by,  possibly for age-related reasons, the Bastrop Advertiser's managing editor has spit the bit, and it's hiring again. I may apply again, but if I do, I'm going to insist on some information up front, related to the original version of this post.

Meanwhile, the Austin American-Statesman, running second to the Dallas Morning News in digital world idiocy among major Texas papers, has almost totally folded the Advertiser's website into its own. 

I don't like it for two reasons.

First, it undercuts what's left of the "community newspaper" idea.

Second, I do NOT like the "Microsoft Surface/Windows 8" type website layout in general.

Now, back to the original post.

===

For people who have gotten of a certain age, as they hunt for new jobs, a common phrase is "X is the new X," in terms of a certain age.

Well, I've come to believe that's very true at times.

Especially in terms of age discrimination. 

I had originally dialed back some critique of a recent hiring process, described here, to in exchange, at that link, focus more on the idiocy of the Austin American-Statesman and/or Cox Communications with its suburban and exurban papers in Austin.

Well, I've decided to do a part two, and dial the heat back up.

Speaking of, it looks like I'm still in my current location in the media world, vis-a-vis an interview I had to go to another location, which would be a community newspaper under the umbrella of the Austin-American Statesman. I was their official No. 2.

That said, is saying that the winner had more social media skills an unofficial version of age discrimination? (I was told this was the deciding factor.) I've been  officially age-discriminated against once. I was told so off the record, that's how I know.

And I've seen claims of bigger age discrimination, in the previous decade, in cases where the employer claimed that people were let go because it was thought they couldn't learn new computer skills. And, that was at another newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, about six years ago. I guess it was just "happenstance" that many of the people let go were older, and columnist or critic types, who happen to make bigger bucks in the newspaper world.

Interesting that those were all newspapers, eh?

It's the real world, and the so-called librul media is actually, in general, one of the more conservative members of the real world on this and other fiscal-related bottom lines. I'll note, as part of that, that "community" newspapers, especially, are bad about using "blind box" help wanteds. And, since the Great Recession, and Internet 2.0, and the combined detritus nuking newspapers, many have gotten worse about all of this.

First, because I'm kind of tired of this, I'm naming names, to a degree.

It was one of the community newspapers owned by the Austin American-Statesman. I'm not naming the person who interviewed me, as I don't know if that person did or did not have the final call on the hiring. And, that person may have not had the final call on age X being the new age X.

And, I can't legally prove any of this. Age discrimination, as the ex-employees who sued the Snooze soon learned, is a lot harder to prove than racial or sexual discrimination.

That said?

As for the claims of not noting my social media background? Per the top 1/4 of the first page of my resume:

COMPUTER SKILLS

• Quark  • Photoshop  • InDesign  • Office • Video • Web content  • Social media • QuickBooks

Last I checked, "social media" was spelled as, uh, "social media"! So, that's undercut right there. Plus, "Web content"? That means that, using either a house-based system or a third-party web host, I have experience (and it's extensive) in website "publishing" for various newspapers. I've done that for years.

If you, the interviewer, wanted to know more about my skills, and amount of usage, of Facebook, or Twitter, or Google+ or Instagram or Pinterest, all you had to do was ask. But, since the Bastrop Advertiser only lists the first three under "social media" on its home page, although it has a Pinterest icon on the "more social media" link below the first three.

Now, I don't list "blogging" for two reasons. One, it's not always considered "social media." Two, I got Googled once, and I keep personal blogging detached from my journalism resume for that reason. 

Second, the interviewer with whom I had such rapport didn't ask ANY questions, to the best of my memory, specific to my social media skills. My memory is never perfect, hence the caveat. But, it's usually pretty damned good, so put that caveat in agate type with an asterisk. And, I know, I know, this person didn't ask any advanced questions about social media, such as target audiences, what each of the different types of social media is best for, etc.

Third, the Bastrop Advertiser doesn't even have its own social media feeds. The "trio" listed above? The links it its website are all for the Austin American-Statesman social media sites. The same is true of every other one of the Statesman's community newspapers.

So, the desire for social media skills? It's all bullshit. 

If you really actually cared about social media, each of your community papers would link its own social media accounts on its pages. If I'm interested in the community newspaper in Bastrop, or Pflugerville, or Round Rock, and I'm interested in its online presence, I don't want to be directed to Statesman Tweets.

And, if this were "only" an IT error off of using a Statesman template for new community paper websites, if I'm the only person in a full year who caught it and complained, that's sad.

Fourth, beyond my own previous personal experience from before this? I was in the Metroplex when, as part of the "bleed," in 2008 or 2009, the Dallas Morning News canned a bunch of older staffers, almost all of them columnists and critics, as noted more briefly above. It got sued — I haven't Googled recently to find the results. In the filing of the suit, the plaintiffs mentioned that computer skills, or alleged lack thereof, and ability to learn and/or improve them, or lack thereof, were among the reasons for the dismissals.

Ahh, the "don't have skills" with the presumption one's too old to learn them. In our tech world, that's one of the "easiest" excuses/pseudo-justifications in the deck for age discrimination. 

And older folks at newspapers, like elsewhere, make more money. Usually, the hope is that a younger person will work for less. You can always, in a vacancy, go back to the older person if you tried to lowball the younger person too much and he or she said now. That's if a role isn't contracted out to a freelancer, as more and more big dailies are doing with more and more columnist and critic spots, with "created" vacancies.

And, I've seen other tricks of the trade, too. I don't know if they're more common in newspapers than other media, or media in general versus other jobs, but I've seen other tricks of the trade, too.

Advertise a job, get resumes, interview the top candidates, then hire nobody. Re-advertise the job a month later, having "skimmed" whoever first applied so that you can now raise the bar on minimum qualifications without raising the pay. 

Or a related trick. Advertise the job, interview top candidates. Decide whether some internal candidate is close enough to the top that he or she will be fobbed off by a fancy title and 15-20 percent less pay than the old managing editor, if they even know what the salary is.

Beyond that, if either the American-Statesman, or its Cox Communications parent, is so idiotic as to say it will, and I quote, "never" have paywalls for the web versions of its community newspapers? I was a bit hesitant about that issue already. If you want to be dumb enough to piss money away, I'm going to be smart enough to think twice about going there.

There is of course no chance in hell a person in my position would win a legal action, if one were undertaken, even if justified.

I'll admit part of this is just upset over something not panning out. But, something that smells like age discrimination stinks. Even if it wasn't deliberate, it was presumptuous as hell.

Warren Buffet's gamble on community papers a loser — and other stupidities (updated)

Warren Buffett doubled down on community newspapers a couple years back, and it's a loser, so far. Hell, I could have told Bloomberg that. First, despite Buffett allegedly supporting paywalls, here in Central Texas, his two small 7-day dailies only paywall the PDF e-edition, which means bupkis, especially as nobody reads PDFs on mobile devices. And, the HTML news stories on site are all free. Given that most non-daily community papers still think this is what a paywall means, it's no wonder that community newspapers are basically, with some differences in detail, about at the same spot in the financial stupidity curve as larger newspapers were a decade ago.

Linked to this is that smaller metropolitan areas, at least here in Tejas, aren't fully sharing in the economic recovery of the big cities.

Take Waco, where the Tribune-Herald is one of the two papers I'm talking about. On Saturdays, which should be a big day, the paper struggles to hit the 30 percent mark on ads, and that's counting the inches of paid obits as straight ad space. I don't know about Bryan-College Station, but I venture to guess the Eagle's in somewhat similar boat, though maybe not as bad.

Beyond that, whether his investments in the biz are small or not, Buffett knows nothing special about newspapers, other than fairly typical slash-and-burn. At the Buffalo News, early on, he was strong on union-busting as part of reducing costs.

Back to the main point, though. PDFing an e-edition while posting in HTML all your main news stories for free is NOT a paywall.

What it is, is stupidity and a waste of time even as newspapers try to do more with less on staff time as well as money.

And this isn't likely to get better in the near future.

Meanwhile, per Editor & Publisher, "winning stratetegies" of small and middle sized dailies include:
1. Publishers using the C-word. Any time a publisher mentions "content," I reach for my revolver.
2. Newspapers "rediscovering" special sections. Problem? If you're hosting the event for which the special section is about, and "hosting" as in paying costs to put it on, having staff on the ground, etc., aren't you losing at least part of your profit? If so, how much? Are you trying to minimize this by having only salaried and not hourly people do this? If so, how much, if any , comp time are you giving them?
3. Newspapers "partnering" with folks like chambers of commerce for tourism guides, etc. Sounds good — until your chamber of commerce does ill-advised spending of hotel-motel tax money, or the equivalent in your state, and, you have to write a story about it. What if the chamber, the economic development board, etc., then "un-partner" with you?
4. A newspaper saying that its expanded database of email addresses for discount blasts have helped ward off Groupon. If you're that worried about Groupon, a company more and more despised by merchants, and you're that worried in part because you've not read NEWS STORIES and not CONTENT that has reported exactly this about Groupon, then [sigh].

What can you expect from such stupidity, though? Per Poynter, back with the big boys, the Boston Globe is now going to a metered paywall, with 10 freebies per month, vs none before. But, it refuses to call it a paywall, just using the term "meter." It's unclear if the totally free Boston.com is staying around. If it is, then the Globe is as stupid as the Chron in San Francisco and the Snooze in Dallas.

That said, the stupidity isn't limited to the U.S.

The Guardian is getting a pretty penny for selling its majority stake in Auto Trader, but, without a paywall, Alan Rusbridger and gang will continue to burn through Scott Trust money, and this "infusion," like money's going out of style.

The company, which has divested of non-core newspaper assets such as GMG Radio – the third largest radio group in the UK which owned brands including Real and Smooth – for £70m has revealed that the sale of its majority stake in AutoTrader has secured the financial future of the newspaper portfolio for a minimum of 30 years.

Yeah, we'll see if this last for 30 years. Meanwhile, how much profit were these other assets making? Maybe you should have kept them and done more to fix the Guardian's bottom line at the same time.

I mean, you can chase the allegedly "lucrative U.S. market" all you want, but since that market, for newspapers, is expected to have another 8 percent ad revenue decline this year, it gets less lucrative all the time. And, new numbers on digital circulation aren't doing a lot more than offsetting print subscription declines, in many cases.

There is essentially now an infinity of digital inventory, very different than scarcity in print, so you can buy digital advertising anywhere and everywhere,” (Ken Doctor) said.

This is something I've been hammering myself, as the flip side of the Gnu Media gurus talking about how the digital world offers an infinity of room for news stories, length of news stories, etc. Throw in programmatic advertising, which is further driving down rates, primarily in print, but surely in digital, too.

Add in that digital dimes are likely to be replaced by mobile nickels, especially per my note above about PDFs and mobile devices, and, Rusbridger can chase diminishing returns all he wants.

Unfortunately, the only real hope Doctor sees is from points 2 and 3 under the "best practices" above:

Growth may come, he suggested, as companies expand into “third, fourth, and fifth” businesses, in addition to the first two, advertising and circulation. Newer revenue sources include digital marketing services, sponsoring events and conferences, and in-house publishing activities to help other papers looking for publishing services.

Uhh, given that Doctor was one of the first media analysts to talk about Digital First Media shutting down Thunderdome for its own papers under "in-house publishing activities," as I noted in my blog about DFM's pending implosion, that's a big negatory, Ken, on that being likely to do anything.

Doctor should also read this piece by Jack Shafer. Shafer gives a good smackdown to the NYT's "Premier" premium website in specific, and to the concept of "premium" newspaper websites in general. Folks in Dallas, Boston, and likely San Fran, who think they can "sell" a premium website while keeping a totally free, totally unpaywalled basic one, should take note. But almost surely won't.

Doctor doesn't specifically mention "swag" under his ideas, but it's kind of hinted at.

So, let's look once again at this.

Digital marketing services? In small towns, papers may have a partial edge on this. But, big cities? Nahhh. That's what public relations companies do, Ken. Thousands of them, both newer and older, flood Monster, Indeed, and other job sites with "SEO specialist wanted" ads all the time, even as that job market loses steam.

So, scratch No. 3.

No. 4? I've already poo-poohed this on conflict of interest grounds. Or worse, on sponsored conferences? We've already seen this backfire with the NYT and WaPost. And Politico. That said, as we see with the likes of Advance Media paying writers bonuses for, essentially, promoting clickbait, journalistic ethics, on the management side, continues to sink by the day. John Paton at DFM should be kicking himself that he didn't think about hosting digital-only cyberconferences, like ginormous Google Hangouts.

No. 5? Given that more media companies are already consolidating printing services, and the long-term future points digital only, how can you even offer this one? And, as I just updated, with that link a few grafs above, that ain't going anywhere, either. Joint copy desk hubs in major newspapers will likely become bigger clusterfucks the more newspapers they're asked to build in the future. (And it's probably time for a separate blog post just on that.)

Shows that outside stereotypical Jarvis, Rosen, Shirky, and other Gnu Media gurus, other analysts aren't so brilliant all the time, either.

I have the feeling that many newspaper companies, their top management, their family owners, or whatever, suffer from the Dunning-Krueger effect.

Folks, analytics say that ads are going to fall 8 percent on average this year. Odds are there's nothing special about your newspaper to beat those odds.

The big issue is that, as Michael Wolff notes, we still haven't figured out how (with select exceptions) to make the online model pay. I've blogged before that the Net is exactly the opposite of print in this way. Because space for stories was limited, it made the "information" of ads pricey, to quote the second paragraph of Stewart Brand's famous saying — one that Gnu Media gurus routinely ignore. Wolff adds elsewhere that advertisers have figured out that Net traffic numbers aren't real, either, which is why click-per-impression rates continue to drop. (Yet more from Wolff here.)

(Brand himself claims he's blamed for a lot of tech-neoliberalism stuff that is not his fault. The rest of that interview indicates he's lying to himself if he really believes that and lying to the rest of us anyway.)

On the Net? Because story/photo/video/space is limited only by server size, and every daily paper with a website, plus top blogs and news aggregators, post wire service stories, ad "information" is almost free, even if it doesn't "want" to be so.

In Buffett's case, other than staff-slashing at Buffalo, then Omaha, he knows no more about new media revenue models than any other old media owner. And, since Omaha's a relatively recent buy, and both it and Buffalo, pre-Media General, were tiny drops in his empire, he's never bothered to give much thought to it, unlike buying BNSF stock a few years back because he expected both intermodal and energy shipping to pick up as the Great Recession lessened.

Dear generic freelance columnists: Please go away

A lot of freelance in today's brave new post-Internet media world are complaining about other people asking them to write for free, promising them the magic coin of "exposure" at some website, publication arm, or whatever, allegedly more high-profile than what they do now. This even happened, infamously, when a Scientific American blogger (already a pretty high profile there) was asked to write for free by a staffer at a mid-level (I think, certainly no higher than that) science journal, then called her an "urban whore" when she said no, along with SciAm totally bungling its response to that, in part because of pulling down a previous blog post about sexual harassment claims, then, a week after this, its blogging editor resigning over harassment-related concerns.

There's plenty of other cases, and I agree with telling freelancers, "Don't sell your soul for 'exposure,' no matter how honey-dripping sweet the sales pitch is."

And, I know the Internet has exacerbated writer's pay problems.

But, there's a flip side to being asked to write for free.

It's asking to be paid for writing that ... just ain't worth it!

For example, per my header?

I got three emails in a week from a would-be freelance columnist, writing generic "lifestyle" columns, asking for $15 a week.

Let's say, out of the 350-plus small community daily plus community non-daily papers in Texas, this person gets 25 to sign up. Let's say in the neighboring states plus Kansas and Missouri, she gets 15 more.

Forty papers at $15 a week? That's $600 a week, or $30,000 a year, for spending 3 hours a week, if that (not counting time you spent on the initial bombardment of unsolicited emails), on a generic lifestyles column that you won't tailor to old, white readership at old, rural, small town papers, nor to suburbanites at suburban newspapers, nor to minorities at some minority-heavy small towns and suburbs.

So, go away, please go away, and stop emailing newspapers asking to run content that's not relevant and not needed.

If you want your name in print, or the online equivalent, it's called a "blog." Blogger and Wordpress will set you up for free. If you want to try to make money, sign yourself up for Google Ads at Blogger, or whatever equivalent Wordpress has. If you're in it for money, and you're that egotistical about what you think you're worth, set up a PayPal tip jar.

And have fun counting your pennies.

None of this is meant to be sarcastic or rude, though if it's blunt, I'm fine with that.

First, in case you haven't read the news, the modern newspaper is not some money-making machine. As more of us inside the business get laid off, face stagnant salaries or whatever, we're not in the mood to slit our own throats by handing out some of our money to a non-local person writing a generic column. Period. End of story.

Second, to the degree we have space in the paper, if we haven't had to tighten up page counts, and the degree we have time, we the editors and publishers sometimes like writing those lifestyles or feel-good columns ourselves, addressing our local readers as their local newspaper leaders.

Third, I suspect that many of you know exactly how much you stand to make if you can get just a relatively few sucker newspapers to buy. This isn't like the purely local columnist who might want a free subscription to the paper for a year in exchange for writing for us or something.

So, again, please go away. And, please learn a bit more about the modern community newspaper business.

Newspapers are like automakers - SUVs and hardcopy editions (updated)

NOTE: I am expanding this into a running post about problems with newspapers, both old and new.

And now, back to the headers.

Mathew Ingram has used this analogy before.

Although I think it's a good one overall, I don't think it's 100 percent right. Even more, to the degree that I do think it's right, it's frustrating that Ingram doesn't extend the analogy.

And I shall now do so.

Where the idea is right is that print newspapers are like full-sized SUVs.

Let's unpack that more.

American automakers got stagnant in the 1960s, other than running away from the big fins of the late 50s. Japanese cars were laughed at. So was the VW Bug. "Snooty" upscale European imports were accepted as a fact of life.

US automakers then had the two Arab/Iranian oil embargos of the 1970s to face. American automakers didn't lear from the first and still had little in the way of small cars, let alone quality ones, ready to compete with Japan, or with expanded offings from VW.

But, along came the 1980s. Then the 1990s. Oil prices not only stabilized, but after a short spike for the Gulf War, went downward, way downward. Down to around $10/bbl.

So, U.S. automakers, also buoyed by the EPA's CAFE standards stagnating, and knowing that the corporate fines for average fleet CAFE falling short of standards, and ignoring ideas of peak oil and the rise of car-driving classes in the developing world, said "What, me worry?" The Chevy Suburban had been around for decades, yes. But, none of the other SUVs had, by and large. So, with a variety of marketing angles, they pitched Americans on a bunch of low-mileage, high profit margin vehicles. (Japan followed suit, yes, but hedged its bets by not making anything as big as the Suburban and by keeping most of its SUVs on car chassis so as to help mileage by 1 or 2 mpg. But  I digress.)

Meanwhile, there's newspapers, with the timetable a decade or two later, but with parallels.

In the 1970s and 80s, TV has achieved near-total saturation of the US. Cable TV has helped make that happen, as well as allow for the rise of the early superstations like WGN and TBS. But, the industry has "held its own," at least in terms of keeping readership constant, although it hasn't quite kept readership percentage.

Then, along comes the Internet. Newspapers start to worry. They invest a lot of money in early websites, early digital baseplates for SLR cameras, and other things, in the early 1990s. However, the Net doesn't take off as fast as expected, so by the late 1990s, they figure why worry? Major media trade groups don't see the storm clouds ahead, like readily available broadband, etc.

Instead, they see the housing bubble inflate their real estate pages (even as Craigslist cuts into classifieds, though that hurts alt-weeklies more), and also their auto pages, as low post-9/11 interest rates combined with home refinancing lead to a spate of new auto purchases. (We even have a tie-in.)

So, the hardcopy newspaper with all the new ads became like the SUV. High-margin, as high of margin as newspapers had been for some time, as more and more big cities lost their second daily newspapers.

But, both sides ignored storm clouds.

For the automakers, it was Peak Oil. (And, for any deniers, King Hubbert wrote about Peak Oil *after* the first fracking for oil had been done. That's part of what figured in to his calculations of difficult-to-get oil. You can sit down again.) They also failed to address climate change concerns, and that that issue, along with newly skyrocketing oil prices, might lead a more liberal presidential administration to to address CAFE standards anew.

For newspapers, it was ignoring that Net 2.0 was on its way, leading to an explosion in company direct marketing, plus many more outlets for web ads. Both would drive online ad rates down even as more people went to the Internet. Ad-blocking technology and other issues would add further headaches.

Some of the two industries' problems overlapped. Despite warning signs, neither newspapers in general (though I'm focusing on US ones, and larger dailies, to be precise) nor automakers braced themselves for the possibility of a housing bubble bursting.

As a result, the Great Recession hit both hard, "demanding" that both turn on a dime, though the bulky SUV can't, and the US automakers' mindset behind it wouldn't easily. Ditto for newspapers. The only answer was to cut, cut, cut jobs in both places. The automakers at least had more reason; people were buying few cars in general, and fewer American cars and SUVs in particular. And, they didn't have fat profit margins tapering down; they had slim profit margins going negative.

In the newspaper world, people were still reading. They were just doing more of it online because it was free there in most cases. In a disaster as big as Detroit ignoring Japan in the 1960s, National Newspaper Association leaders, along with most board members of the Associated Press, etc., assumed a "TV model" would work for online newspapers, and made no backup plans to quickly move away from that if they were proven wrong. As part of this, the AP underpriced its product to news aggregators like Yahoo, followed by Google.

The future?

Both industries are likely to make future mistakes, as I see it.

Even though a 20-cent/gallon fluctuation is no more than 2 cents a gallon just before the first oil embargo, Americans, between expecting cheap gasoline as a God-given American exceptionalism birthright and seeing gas price signage every day (or being alerted by places such as Gas Buddy), are extremely sensitive to gas prices in the short term. And, since President Obama allowed loopholes for E-85 vehicles and other things (even though nobody will run them on E-85 and we can't afford to make that much ethanol anyway), and didn't seriously raise the penalties for failure to meet corporate CAFE, Detroit will follow suit on such sensitivities, while Japan and Europe will carefully hedge their bets. (Speaking of those two areas, why, why, why, won't somebody combine the best of both and bring a diesel-hybrid to market? Ford actually built a nice concept version, but won't sell it.)

For newspapers, it will be the belief that the bottoming out of online ad rates, like Herbert Hoover's expected economic recovery, is just around the corner. That will combine with a belief that ad dollars from mobile devices are part of the salvation, even though, as I have blogged before, digital dimes are likely to face an undercut replacement in mobile nickles. Smartphones aren't big enough to do a lot for either ad display or news story reading. And, the idea of creating two different versions of mobile-land, one for smartphones and one for tablets, surely makes newspapers, ad designers, web designers and others all cringe.

So, are we headed to Bezos' point of hardcopy newspapers being dead in 20 years? With rare exceptions of truly national papers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and maybe USA Today, I say yes. (USA Today, despite whatever hopes Gannett has for it, is a different kettle of fish. It's not a newspaper of news or financial record and most of its content is wire copy. That said, for older readers who see their  local daily go online-only in another decade or two, and want to hold a hardcopy paper in their hands, it will still have an audience of sorts.)

On the flip side, there is some truth to how going online only, and totally, not a hybrid like Advance Publications is doing with its major papers, frees up a lot of overhead. (And I'm talking about online-only as Net-HTML style only; no "e-editions" of PDFs of hardcopy newspaper pages.)

Obviously, pagination copy editors are gone. A small portion of them will be kept around for line-type copy editing, though I don't think it will be many; even larger newspapers will be cheap here. (And, with Adobe going to the cloud, on a subscription basis, including forced buys for updates, you escape having to have so many copies of InDesign, unless, of course, you dodge that by going back to Quark.)

As for a website? Teach the managing editor, sports editor and other guys who now paginate how to use Wordpress (the website version, not the blogging one). That way, you also dump TownNews or whoever else is providing your web services and likely overcharging you.

Printing press? If you're a daily of any size, you own your own. Well, now you don't have to pay pressmen, or press maintenance, or buy upgrades.

Those savings are known by all pundits. But, don't forget others.

You no longer need your contract carriers and paying all of them. Related to that, your circulation department gets whacked; assuming you have a paywall, you train a small bit of your old circ folks in the IT basics to manage online subscriptions. And, if you're a non-daily, and you go by mail? Going online avoids the overhead of the Postal Service, along with its increasing deterioration in and cutbacks of service. (That said, the old, largely white small town folks are the ones still most wedded to hardcopy newspapers, and with lesser rates of Internet access, let alone use, then the nation as a whole, so it may well be more than 20 years before the community non-daily paper in hardcopy is dead. But, given the rapidity of change, it may not be.)

And, per an end-of-October mass email by the National Newspaper Association, here's another reason for non-daily as well as daily newspapers to be thinking about an online-only future at some date:

On Capitol Hill, NNA opposes proposals by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, to hand over authority to USPS—to set rates and to change service levels without—pre-review by the Postal Regulatory Commission. Coburn’s proposals are included in a the Postal Reform Act of 2013, jointly proposed by Coburn and Sen. Thomas Carper, D-DE, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. NNA believes handing unfettered authority over the government monopoly’s services and rates to the USPS Board of Governors would result in higher rates for Periodicals and more attempts at promoting selected direct mail products over newspaper advertising.

Oh, I'm sure this is a possible outcome.

So, get ready to go online only. And, if this drives the cost of other second-class mail higher yet, and threatens the solvency of the Postal Service? Well, this is just like the situation with the AP. Newspapers as a business don't exist to keep the Postal Service in business.

And, per this post, re Adobe's future plans for cloud-based software, going digital-only lets one cut other overhead, too.

As for places like New Orleans, who saw the loss of a daily print newspaper as a blow to status? Well, if Advance didn't have such crappy websites, this could be spun into entering a brave new world and offering the best in all-digital daily coverage.

That then gets me back to Jeff Bezos.

The Newhouse kiddos at Advance, I think, simply want their "cut" from their family's legacy with the chain. (Having worked at a paper in the Freedom chain when it went into bankruptcy and then came out, I've seen the dynamic at play.)

Bezos has no such attachments, nor does he have such a chain of newspapers to work with. It's just the Washington Post and some Beltway outliers.

Now that a basic paywall is in place, I don't think he plans any major changes for, say, 3-5 years. Rather, he's going to do a LOT of brain work, and when he's ready, he'll make changes so wholesale, all at once, that Advance will look like pikers in contrast.

How well other papers will then emulate him remains to be seen.

To wrap up, here's why I say that the analogy isn't perfect.

Newspapers, at least theoretically, have more of this issue under their control on their side of the street. Detroit can't do anything about Peak Oil. It can appreciate the car market in developing countries, but it has to accept that a thin sliver of that, except in a country both totalitarian and inegalitarian like China, is for SUVs. Barring massive lobbying, it can't undo Obama's CAFE standards tightening, or block higher gas taxes in Europe, etc.

Newspapers? They can accept that Bezos' 20-year deadline is real, especially if they see him treat it as real at the Post. They can ignore people like Ingram and other Gnu Media gurus when they oppose paywalls. If the print paper doesn't quite totally die within 20 years, they can price it like an SUV.

And, Advance, while doing it the wrong way, is still better in some ways than other stopgap measures. From what I've read, pagination hubs in general are a nightmare. (The only way they might work is if more newspaper chains had developed better local or close-area regional hubs in general.) CNHI, now near the end of its fifth full year of a mandatory week of furlough every quarter, continues to blacken its own name and foul its own sheets.

===

Meanwhile, I'm looking at "house" ads for National Newspaper Week from the Newspaper Association of America.

Two of them specifically talk about the sports section, which is arguably one of the more problematic spots in hardcopy in daily papers, especially larger ones. There's that massive amount of space demanded for agate for box scores. Then, most papers continue to have a page 2 box that lists sports on TV and radio, something that's not done for science programs, either classical or modern music programs or anything else. And, the biggest dailies, like the Dallas Morning News, have dumped almost all of their high school stuff on paywalled websites now, for that reason, on issue No. 1.

It's also funny in another way, and sad in yet another.

Funny? All the ads that show a newspaper still show the old hardcopy; not a one has a person at a computer, tablet, etc.

Sad? All the ones that have people in them? All white folks.

But, wait. Besides this misplaced nostalgia in ink, there are multiple op-ed columns. Some of them talk about online newspapers, even while ignoring most of the financial issues involved, or else engaging in major spinning. That's OK. National Newspaper Week is about what newspapers do right — local news, sports, features, holding governments to account ....

And, speaking of ...

The columns and op-eds?

Lamar Alexander? Puhleese. ANY U.S. elected official who has not robustly opposed the Patriot Act, NSA spying, etc., has no fucking business writing a column for this.

I am officially disgusted, and appalled that the National Newspaper Association gave him this platform. And, I counted at least halfway to 10, then emailed relevant officials. (And have yet to hear back.)

===

Editor and Publisher now has a piece about newspapers and newspaper related companies with new effort to add value to their products.

It's kind of laughable.

One of the five listed companies is AdBlock, which is adding value by floating the idea of an individual user creating a whitelist of certain companies' ads to allow, as long as they'll agree to certain standards. AdBlock's whitelist could ding online advertising even more than the use of it already does. (Speaking of, if you're a user of AdBlock Plus, it now has an extension specifically for Facebook blocking needs.)

Two others are Gatehouse Media and Digital First Media. They both seem to be touting their own versions of something like product-placement-based advertorial content that I can find for free elsewhere. Given that Gatehouse just filed Chapter 11 and portions of Digital First have done so in the past, why does this not surprise me? Also given that a lot of DFM's products are cheap, and that CEO John Paton is a paywall-hater, his advertorial content is likely to be cheap, anyway.

===

And, see this new post of mine for how expecting video, "2.0" ideas, or going down the Buzzfeed route, let alone the Daily Mail route, isn't likely to bring serious new money in the traditional newspaper coffers.

Federal journalism shield law might not be so good

The moon is blue once in a while, and I agree with Matt Ingram! He's right in that any federal "shield law" which, as part of said law, defines who a journalist is, is problematic at best. On the government side, what it gives, it can then take away. On the traditional media side, the reason they're liking it is arguably as much turf/cartel protection as anything.

Specifically, on the first issue, the current bill, though it does offer some coverage to journalists, it specifically excludes the likes of Wikileaks. Not just implicitly, but explicitly. And, some senators, like Sen. Betty Crocker (Dianne Feinstein) want it to go further and explicitly exclude all blogger-type journalists. That's you,  Glenn Greenwald. And, that part of this bill is only likely to get MORE politicized. So, the Newspaper Association of America and the National Newspaper Association should drop their support for the bill as it now stands.

Period. End of story. The government picking and choosing who a journalist is undercuts the First Amendment and is censorship by the back door. As Ingram says at the top link:

(W)e could just try to defend the First Amendment, which is specifically worded so that it doesn’t just apply to professional journalists, but to anyone involved in a “free press.” At the time the Constitution was written, that included everyone from Ben Franklin to the guy down the street printing pamphlets on his home-built printing press — the 18th-century equivalent of a blog. Instead of broadening the definition, the Senate is in fact severely narrowing it.

Bingo. Given how much journalism is in transition right now, the current shield law ideas that are floating around could cause more of a problem than they fix.

And, along Ingram's line of thought, freedom of the press was one of four freedoms all put in the same amendment, along with religion, speech and assembly. The big idea, to put it into today's terms, was "freedom of communication." That includes the freedom to spread my ideas as well as the freedom not to have to have others' ideas forcibly spread upon me, or the government aiding such people in so doing. (And that's where the rock is for we atheists on freedom FROM religion.)

And, beyond all this, with Members of Congress like Sen. Betty Crocker who continue to write blank checks to the CIA and NSA, their definition of "free speech" is questionable in general.

That's why I say the praise for the "Free Flow of Information" act by the likes of the NNA, is just wrong. (As well as the name of the bill being wrong.)

But, don't hold your breath over media trade groups changing their minds. Once they've got theirs, if they do, "nontraditional journalists" can probably just cut bait, in their minds.

That's just part of the turf angle, though, I beleive. I suspect both groups, and especially the NAA, which represents the big seven-day dailies, would want to keep the likes of Wikileaks in a subservient position. Assange, Manning, Snowden and whoever is next only gets to see the broadly read light of day if they play ball with Big Media.

But, that's wrong thinking too; the major journalism trade groups (and that's what they are, folks) shouldn't get greedy, narrow-minded, or short-sighted. The current, and the previous, presidential administrations have shown no compunction about abusing material witness statutes. Even if a Bradley Manning had not allegedly done anything "wrong," Team Obama or BushCo might have no problem letting him cool his heels for a few weeks, while under investigation as a material witness.

Now part of their praise for the act may be out of legitimate issues. In that case, the trade groups are still thinking wrong, per the First Amendment. And, that's not an "originalist" interpretation. I personally despise originalism in the version touted by the likes of Antonin Scalia and find it questionable even in lesser forms. And Ingram's not even a U.S. citizen; he's Canadian.

Which leads to the observation that it takes observant foreign nationals in many cases to point out what our Constitution actually means. That's sad, but it's nothing new.

That said, the more cyncial side of me has now arisen to use the old journalism phrase, "Follow the money." What if NAA and NNA don't want to protect even top-grade bloggers unless they become dues-paying members?

Apologies for originally misspelling "shield" in the header.

#Adobe, cloudy reasoning, your local paper and #effyou

If you've heard the recent news about how Adobe is going to move all future releases of its Creative Suite software program bundle to the cloud, and you're also a newspaper fan, especially of smaller community newspapers, you should be concerned.

This will be an additional price burden for said community newspapers, and it's not yet clear how much.

Meanwhile, Adobe's InDesign desktop publishing program took off as quickly as it did, even though its predecessor, Pagemaker, was A: Pretty crappy; B: Designed to work best on PCs, not Macs, because the competition, Quark XPress, rightfully got a bad reputation, mainly in the customer service field. It didn't respond well, or quickly, to queries or complaints, first. Second, its updates didn't generally offer all new services customers wanted, even after InDesign started gaining ground. And today, Quark appears content to rest on its legacy background along with "trapped overhead costs" of many newspapers, hoping they don't want to spend the money to switch, if they haven't.

First, if you're a smaller newspaper, and you haven't switched, you shouldn't.

Second, if you're still running pre-Intel Macs, and you're realizing you're eventually going to have to face the upgrade wall, you have options.

That includes buying Windows 7 PCs while they're still around, but dirt-cheap. Quark 7 or 8 on Windoze works well. Depending on the size of your paper, you may be able to buy a couple of copies of older versions of Photoshop as a stand-alone and work with them.

Or, look at Photoshop Elements. Or a non-Adobe photo-editing program. Anything up to the size of a 7-day daily of less than 25K circ doesn't have to go hog-wild on the latest and greatest version of Photoshop. (Or the same for either Quark or InDesign.)

The latest edition of Publishers' Auxiliary, the monthly newspaper for the community newspaper industry from the National Newspaper Association, goes into this issue with a lot of detail. Here's their lede piece.

Anyway, if you have a small newspaper or small mag, explore your options.

And, this could lead more to consider other options.

Like finally making the transition to digital only. Of course, that will be digital in an HTML sense. Not an e-edition, as without either InDesign or Quark, you're not creating PDFs, unless you want to try to creatively downgrade to Microsoft Publisher. .

Seriously, this is another option for newspapers and magazines. Depending on what version of Creative Suite you have, how likely it is to get continued Abode debug support and for how long, and how long it's going to be able to handle files (like until Abode gets dickish and creates extensions like "tifx" or "inddx" to force your hand) you have a few years to plan details of a move to digital only.

And, if you have to have creative tools, there's alternatives. If not Photoshop Elements, there's GIMP,  the German photo editing program Photoscape and more. Anything halfway like Photoshop that has good work with layers and a decent filter set is an option. Illustrator? Corel Draw's the easy alternative. And, on InDesign? You can go back to Quark, or suck it up enough to figure out a way to do something with Publisher if you have to.

And, then, at some point, go web-only.

Plus, there's Abode's lie, I believe, of saying they're doing this for a more steady revenue stream. No, it's an anti-piracy measure, which will probably just up the piracy wars. Given what we already know about cloud-computing and security issues, I don't see why this would be much harder of a hack than before.

Meanwhile, if it's smart, Corel bundles PaintShop, Draw, and Word Perfect, and looks at creating its own desktop publishing program to bundle with that. It could aim at the lower end of the market, say something about as bells-and-whistles as Quark version 3. A lot of non-daily papers would find that whole suite fine if they've not upgraded to Office 2007 or later on the Windoze side. Add in that Corel has basic-level video editing software and more, per its Wiki page and its home page,  and there's potential indeed. Or it could buy Quark; after all, Corel itself is a "built-up" company; all of its main products were acquired by acquiring companies.

In short, Corel could become a new "player" in multiple software games, and also give a lot of people a new way to say "Eff you" to Adobe (and a bit of sideswipe "eff you" to Microsoft in the process, and to Apple in a way, as well).

Update, July 16: I now have found further reason to very dislike Adobe. The advertising salesperson's newspaper at our office has an older version of InDesign than I do. I was going to "downsave" a page of spec ad templates for him to open on his computer.

No soap. Adobe apparently doesn't allow downsaves to older versions. Quark does. Even Microslob does. This increases the possibility that, at least in proprietary Adobe formats, it may increase this with the equivalent of a "docx" setup at some future date.

You can do a quasi-template downsave, but even that only works with going down one edition. I don't think this is a "limitation" problem, since Quark allows more flexibility and Word (though a lesser program, modern XML Word is more than fried Spam) offers much more. Rather, I think this is an Adobe snootiness issue. Thank doorknob common photography formats are pre-Photoshop.

Local advertisers next to flee newspapers?

Classified advertisers started leaving years ago, in some cases to Craigslist, in others, to the likes of Monster and CareerBuilder.

Next were the national retailers. Some, years ago, notably Walmart, opted for direct mail only rather than inserts. For page-based, or ROP advertising, company websites became first a supplement to, then more and more a replacement for, the newspaper. Social media accelerated that trend.

And now, even with an economic recovery of some sort, national advertisers are in no hurry to come back. And why should they? Between house websites, social media and Google searches, they have a presence, and will focus more on beating competitors on visibility, branding, etc., there.

That's not just retailers, but individual brands, etc. Especially for service companies, it's a no-brainer.

But, through all of this, allowing for the economic downturn, local advertising had seemed steady.

However, it appears that Pat’s Diner, the local Ford dealer (not just Ford the company), and others are also looking to move on elsewhere.


Not a surprise, overall, from personal knowledge though the amount of decline is, as it looks like local businesses are going to slash newspaper advertising in years ahead.

And, this will affect smaller papers than your major metros, or even mid-sized ones. In fact, it will affect the “community” five-day and six-day dailies, and even non-dailies, perhaps, even more than seven-day dailies.

In this case, it’s a mix of things.

In some cases, small business owners have developed basic website design skills themselves. That’s helped by WordPress remaking itself to be more than just a blogging site.

In other cases, it’s social media, as with bigger companies. In a number of cases, companies aren’t even doing a website, just a Facebook page, or “presence.”

If a small-town, or small-county, Chamber of Commerce has a website, and one with links to member businesses, that’s about all that’s needed to get visibility on the Internet.

Add to that another part of WordPress. It, and Blogger, are letting people start online “newspapers” in small communities to compete with the traditional ones. Sell ad space, or even sell linking, and the newspaper, even as a hobby, is making a few bucks.

So, expect this trend to continue. Even accelerate. 


Next? As recovery stays slow, look for more state governments to change laws about public notice legal advertising in newspapers.

I work at the fifth-worst career, part 2 - the #advertorial world

Last week, I blogged about the fact that a certain careers website said that journalism was the first worst job/career field right now, noting that, from the inside, that was no surprise.

Well, I'm probably going to do a few follow-up posts, looking at more specific issues.

Today, I tackle where the editorial and advertising rubber overlap on the same road, the good old "advertorial" content, as well as a couple of other business issues.

Per a recent post on Bloomberg about BuzzFeed, new media may be headed in an even more advertorial direction. This should be of no surprise. A recent story at Editor and Publisher said that many newspapers don't "get" either the traditional web or various new media as being different enough in format from hardcopy to call out for different presentation styles.

Now, a big paper like the New York Times has staff to create graphics slideshows and more. A community daily, a six-day or five-day, doesn't, really. A nondaily certainly doesn't. But, if readers who are reading the nearest metro seven-day of any size see those, won't they start expecting them from smaller papers, too?

So, per BuzzFeed, if smaller dailies want that type of stuff, it probably will be an easy opening for online advertorial content. For nondailies, it will probably be an issue of web news getting no more than an Onion-esque first-graf look. Or else.

And, it's not just smaller dailies. I've already seen online advertorial content at the Austin American-Statesman. In fact, it may be easier to disguise the advertorial nature of online content until after someone has clicked the link.

For nondailies, more advertorial content is probably going to come via the newspaper oriented web content companies that host, and provide support for, most nondailies that aren't part of big corporate chains. Expect more advertorial video first. Slideshows second. Text "news" third.

Meanwhile, advertorial's always existed in hardcopy newspapers, and usually more so at community ones, and above all in smaller communities that still had the fortune, or the misfortune (due to it straining both papers even thinner) of competing newspapers.

Even when not part of explicit "buy a story, get an ad" special sections, I've seen it. At my current newspaper, we got a fax last week from the area's top renter and property manager. An official from said company asked if we were aware that current highway construction projects plus the pending work on a new power plant were likely to make renting a better option than ever for homeowners who can't sell their homes right now? Said official then said his company would like to advertise in the same issue of our semiweekly that we ran a story about this.

It's fucking disgusting, to be honest. The story line actually isn't a bad one, though the highway projects don't have that many new people in town, and we'll see on the power plant. But, that we the newspaper will be that blatant (and not the first time) ...

So, journalists? Let's be honest and stop calling PR "the dark side." You're going to get expected to do more and more of it.

Part 3 ... advertising and circulation revenues ... is ahead.