Dana Blankenhorn

If the newspaper business is gonna drown put a hose in their mouth

Newspapers have reached the desperate stage of their death spiral, the point where they're looking for government bail-outs.

In the case of the financial industry there was a case to be made that letting AIG and Citigroup fail would cost more than propping them up. In the case of the auto industry there's a case to be made that we'll at least get the money back.

There is no such case to be made for newspapers.

What they're looking for is a "tweak" to the copyright laws that would bar linking to copyrighted material without consent.  What they're seeking is the destruction of the Internet.

The same argument holds for the idea that content should be exclusive to its source for 24 hours. If you can't link to it, content does not exist. I'm amazed people like Connie Schultz manage to breathe they're so stupid.  

The Internet is based on links. Content you can't Google does not exist. We have learned this before with the news industry when it tried to hide its content behind paid firewalls and registration systems. 

It didn't work.

The industry now knows it needs links. It just wants to extract monopoly rents  for them. Hey, I want a pony. 

Any Senator or Congressman who stands up for this nonsense needs to be slapped down, hard. Can you imagine the cost of this to schools, to libraries, to universities? Can you imagine the bureaucratic cost of tracking this free money? And I guarantee it will go only to a few politically-connected news barons, people like Rupert Murdoch and Carlos Slim. 

General Grant's Tree

I had last been at Ueno over 20 years ago.

Time had made the memories hazy, but they came flooding back as my son and I approached.

What had been a shabby neighborhood of tiny lanes and small shops had become office towers. Another nearby section had remained to become a red light district.

The temple inside the park I had thought ancient turned out to have been rebuilt in 1958, after the American firebombing of Tokyo.

But I watched closely and finally understood the Buddhist way here. Wash your hands before entering, buy and light sticks of incense, stand in prayer before the altar as the smell surrounds you, and when your prayer is over stick the incense into the sand of a communal urn, with that of every other follower of the way.

In addition to the temple, Ueno Park has a lake, a zoo, and several important museums, along with many wide walks and small plots of land devoted to trees, flowers or grass, arranged with care. Acrobats from China and musicians from Peru vied for attention as workers and neighbors strolled through the morning calm.

There are many signposts with maps, some in Japanese, some in English, easily distinguished because they align the park differently. And my son, examining one English map, found something he thought exciting.

General Grant's memorial.

General Grant? U.S. Grant, the 18th President? Or some other Grant? I was curious, so I let him lead us through the unknown sidewalks, seeking out the Grant memorial.

We found a large statue of a general, astride a horse, but this was a Japanese, and behind it were tarps and people, so we moved on. We found other memorials to other men, and were turned around several times. We were quite exhausted when I read the map again.

The Grant memorial is right behind the statue of the general, between the general and the entrance to the zoo. My son went in one direction and I in another. (The inscription below the General reads "let us have peace.")

As you can see we finally found it. Along with one of the saddest stories I have ever found in Tokyo.

Mad Men

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 22 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Many Americans are familiar with “Mad Men,” about Madison Avenue and life in the early 1960s.

Today's China reminds me a lot of that show.

My son and I just completed a week in Chengdu. It is a nice city, situated in a bowl on a plain that was also the home of one of the first Chinese Kingdoms .

But in most ways it is brand new.

Like the rest of China much of its modern history dates from 1979, when the country began opening up economically. The differences between then and now are stark. The old city is nearly destroyed – there are just litle bits here and there – and a city much like New York has taken its place along wide avenues placed by Chairman Mao. (A huge statue of him directs traffic in the center of town.)

“Mad Men” is a show in which everyone lies to themselves about their inner reality. Everything about the 1960s is just below the surface, waiting to explode. Chengdu is much the same. All the various revolutions of the 1960s are waiting to appear, they are just below the surface, yet the citizens are completely wrapped up in their external prosperity.

The Chengdu Boom

I have become a student of booms.

I grew up in the boom of New York's Long Island during the 1960s. I moved to the Houston boom of the 1970s, joined the PC boom of the 1980s, covered the Internet boom of the 1990s, and watched the housing bubble of this decade.

I know what booms look like.

Chengdu is a boom town. (To the right, an image of Brazilian soccer star Kaka hawking Chinese-made throat lozenges in Chengdu's Airport.)

Big, Rich and Ignorant

Frank Rich of The New York Times has offered a thoughtful, provocative piece about The American Press on Suicide Watch. 

There's only one thing wrong with it. 

Mr. Rich still  doesn't know how his employer's business works.

I, on the other hand, actually took a publishing course at Medill, so let me state this as clearly as I can. No one pays for their newspaper. They pay for its delivery, for the infrastructure of trucks and men who get that paper from the printing press to your door. 

Newsgathering costs have always come from advertising. Always. That's how it was in Joe Medill's day, and that's how it is a century later. 

Where newspapers screwed up was in forgetting the purpose of advertising and their business role. The purpose of advertising is to sell stuff. A publisher's job is to help the businesses he is advocating for and organizing to sell stuff. 

The ad space on any page, whether real or virtual, is just the last piece in this puzzle. The ad space is a billboard which the advertiser fills. 

Why does he fill your empty billboard? This is the question newspapers used to be very good at answering. He fills it because the medium can prove that an ad placed with it will reach his target market, and that some of the people in that market will act on the ad. 

Print newspapers, and magazines, long answered this question with surveys. Not just surveys of their readers or their advertisers, but surveys of the target market. These surveys would show, for instance, that "46% of the people who will buy a new car next year in New York read The Times," or that "you can reach 50,000 millionaires for less with The Times than with any other medium."

Ad agencies used these kinds of surveys in planning campaigns. They would say, "we have to reach X number of people who have Y characteristics Z number of times," and if their creative was right it would result in $ worth of sales. 

Newspapers, in the print era, were never just at the billboard end of the sales funnel. They actually went deeper down the funnel than that. 

The Media Civil War

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Out of sight of readers there is a true Civil War going on within the world of  journalism.

Part of it is the old shrinking water hole problem. Some people actually fear that advertising is disappearing, that it will soon cease to exist. That's how scarce advertisers are on the ground these days.

The evidence is all around them. Newspapers have disappeared from many cities and will disappear from many more. Magazines have gone under without telling anyone. Even giant TV companies are fading fast. 

One place to watch the fun is at CNBC. Right-wing talent has become increasingly strident. At the same time management has brought in Obama supporters like Dr. Howard Dean to add balance. This is supposed to be a business channel but it has become more like a non-stop Crossfire show from the 1990s. 

What this is providing is opportunity. Advertisers who step up to the plate now can get enormous concessions from any media property they talk with. Entrepreneurs who launch now can get traffic, attention, and positioning for the next recovery -- which will happen.

Question is, what do you invest in?

You invest in people like Emptywheel, aka Marcy Wheeler (above). 

Nixon Nova

Stars are born and stars die.

It's true for us, and it's true for political philosophies as well. They have sell-by dates. They expire. Often explosively.  

That's the real lesson of today's Republican Party. As Markos Moulitsas notes it's strange for Netroots Democrats to be watching the edifice of the once-almighty conservative movement collapse like Sauron's eye at the end of Lord of the Rings.

But I am old enough to have seen this before. Welcome to the 1969 Game. 

The 1968 election had been wicked close, so Democrats at that time had no sense they had lost the mandate of heaven, that their New Deal politics was as dead as Herbert Hoover, on whose political grave they had danced for a generation.

Their inclination was much like that of today's Republicans. In response to their electoral defeat most Democrats decided the answer was to become more like themselves. George McGovern. 

The views of that era's Democrats were far, far to the left of anything which might be considered politically acceptable today. They rejected the Cold War in mid-stream, not just the Vietnam War but the entire premise. They supported truly progressive tax rates across-the-board, not just on the federal level but on the state and local level. They wanted to resume the War on Poverty and wars against every form of injustice known to man or woman, just as most Americans had grown exhausted by the effort.

A new writer's life

There is good news today.

My daughter Robin (right) will have her Associates Degree in a few months and has been accepted to both her first-choice schools for the B.A., one in Texas and one in Washington State.

She's leaving home, bye-bye.

It's a bittersweet moment and a long time coming. She's 21. She has looked down the barrel of both ADD and dyslexia, and faced down both. She loves reading, even if her decoding is slow. 

I have seen her writing and it can be better than mine, because her process is internal. She writes after she has everything in her. My process is external. I write as though I'm talking, and nearly as quickly. 

There are advantages to both methods. Internal writing is often deeper, more heartfelt, and the first draft may be more complete. External writing is what journalists do, and it's what I've been since I was old enough to want to be anything. 

The writers we remember are internal writers. Those we read most days are external. That's the way it is. 

But back to her. Some advice follows:

The market hits paradise

Having watched a number of recessions during my journalism career one constant remained. Those journalists who most  sucked up to the hierarchy, who served their owners, were insulated and isolated from the marketplace.

They became the journalism "profession" equivalent of tenured professors. They were pundits, with high salaries for the Washington cocktail circuit, and with no responsibility other than tell the rest of us what to think.

In 2009 those days are over. Suck on this, Maureen Dowd. You too, Tom Friedman (and your wife).

The Atlanta Blackout of 2009

The lights went out here around 10 AM and just came back on about an hour ago.

So a blackout you never heard of actually lasted longer than the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. (This home about a mile from my own was destroyed yesterday, writes DecaturMetro.)

I learned an important lesson. I'm completely unprepared.

I never replaced the laptop that blew up a year ago and so didn't have an alternate machine. I misplaced the stick memory to which I'd copied my passwords. Even if we had a burglar alarm system it would have stopped running without wall power, so I was forced to stay home.

Mostly I read, I slept, and I used my cell phone. I got cold because the heater requires electric power to turn on the gas. I couldn't eat because opening the refrigerator door would spoil all the food inside it. Had this gone on overnight no one in the house could have gotten to work tomorrow because all our clocks use wall power.