Goodbye

My dad was buried this morning at Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, NY; with full military honors.

Regular blog will resume January 1.

Update

My father, Robert Rosenblum, died this morning at 12:30 am, after a very long and protracted illness.  Many thanks to all of you for your good wishes.  It meant a lot to me and the whole family.

Many Thanks

MANY THANKS TO EVERYONE FOR YOUR KIND COMMENTS AND EMAILS.

THE WHOLE FAMILY WISHES TO EXPRESS ITS GRATITUDE FOR YOUR CONCERN AND SUPPORT AT THIS DIFFICULT TIME.

The End of the Road

The phone rang at 6am yesterday morning and it was my mother in Miami.

I knew it was bad news.

“Your father is choking”, she said, “I think he is dying”.

I knew this call would be coming for along time.  For more than a year in fact. Yet when it finally does come, I don’t think anyone is ever really prepared for it.

We had been planning on leaving for London on Friday. Instead, we scrambled to get on a flight to Miami, which is where I am now.

We drove directly from the airport to the hospital where my mother was waiting. My sister and one of her kids joined us.

They have moved him to the hospice. He is DNR, and I suppose it is only now a matter of time. Hours.. days… one does not know.

Do you know the way to San Jose?

My father had been in decline almost five years. He suffered a series of strokes, each one taking away another function, until he was bedridden, and finally unable even to swallow.  It was long, slow, tortuous and ultimately stripping away the last vestiges of dignity.

A few years ago, when the strokes started to come, we went down to Florida to visit my mother and father.

On that trip, my father had just lost the ability to walk.  We went out and bought him a wheelchair, and Lisa and I took him for a walk in the small nature preserve that is adjacent to their condo in Key Biscayne.

We pushed him in the chair and we sang “Do You Know The Way To San Jose”. It was his favorite song.

“Take a picture of your dad” she said to me.  “There will come a time when you will want to remember this moment.”

Watching him struggle for breath, I took out the picture.

The time has arrived.

The First Internet

nonlinear… portable…

It’s no secret

The newspaper business is in trouble.

But it’s not becasue newspapers don’t have value.

But I am not so sure that the ‘value’ is in the news. Maybe it’s something else.

I grew up on Long Island, NY.

And the only newspaper we had on Long Island was Newsday. It was a pretty popular paper, and like everyone else, I read it every day.  Looking back on what the paper meant, I realize that the paper was about much more than news. In fact, the news part of it was almost secondary.  Newsday was critical to life on the Island because it provided day to day information essential to living.

And that information generally wasn’t that Ray Margiotta had been indicted again.

Interesting, but who cares.

No.

The information that the paper provided us with was what sales the stores were having. Or what was playing at the movies. These were the ads, not the articles.  Years later, when I lived in Manhattan, and my wife and I wanted to go to the movies, we would open The Times and scan the ads to see what was playing.

On Long Island when I wanted to sell my car, I took an ad in Newsday. When I wanted to sell my boat, I took an ad in Newsday. When I wanted to go to a concert, I checked the paper.  When I needed my first job, I got it through The New York Times.

The paper was much much more than news. Through its ads and its classifieds, it was a community bulletin board.  A place where you went to buy a house, rent an apartment, get a job, see what was for sale at Macy’s, check out the movies, the concerts, the clubs. Do you remember the pages and pages of personal ads in the Village Voice?

In retrospect, I can now see that the local newspaper did what the web would ultimately come to do: publish all the necessary and relevant information that one needed to have a full life – or at least do all the stuff you had to do.  It was the ads as much as the ‘news’ that made the paper not only so attractive, but so essential to day to day life.

Now, as we watch the newspaper industry collapse around us, we are fixated on the journalism. But in retrospect, I think, those news stories were nothing but filler for the ads, and it was the ads that were the really essential part of the paper.

Maybe, if we want to rescue the newspapaper business, and ironically, it is the ads that we should be paying attention to. They not only paid the bills, they broadcast vast reams of local information that, it turns out, was critical.

Where Are Your Priorities?

1959 Caddy. But does democracy hinge on this?

Washington, it seems, is not prepared to let the auto industry and Detroit go down the tubes.

The bail out is going to happen, even if the White House has to fund it itself from the $700 billion rescue fund.

While cars are nice, and everyone understands the impact of Ford, GM and Chrysler going Chapter 11, one must wonder about the impact of losing The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and The LA Times… not to mention a few others.

While Senators and Congressmen fall all over themselves to bail out the failed American car industry, not one person raises a single voice to bail out the failing American newspaper business.

Strange culture we have.

The newspaper business is the only industry enshrined in the US Consitution. The First Amendment guaranteed the right to a free press.  Perhaps, had the US Contitution been written in the 1950s, it might have guaranteed every citizen the right to cheap and dependable transportation – but it does not.

A free press, as the Founding Fathers made clear, was the cornerstone of a democratic society.

As Thomas Jefferson said, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost”

Jefferson did not, as far as we know, say anything about our liberty being dependent upon a reasonably priced automobile that is manufactured in the United States.

Automobiles are still going to be made.

They are going to come from Japan and Germany.

No one will go wthout a car who wants one. In fact, you will be able to get a good car for less money from Japan, just as you do now. Who can tell? Lexus? Why not?

But let the newspapers die and you will be hard pressed to replace The New York Times with the Asahi Shinbum.

It says a great deal about our society, and none of it good by the way, that we are willing to countenance and watch as detached observers, the death of the American newspaper industry, yet we are seemingly unable to do the same with cars.

I say, the time has come for a bailout for the American newspaper industry.

A few billion dollars to cushion the blow as they make the difficult transition from print to online only.

Help keep the journalists, with their many years of experience, in place.  Believe me, a great reporter is a whole lot harder to replace than a line worker in Detroit.  Once you lose them, they are gone forever.

Let the publishers of The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The LA Times go down to DC for Senate Hearings. They won’t take private jets – they don’t have any.  Let them explain to the Senate and to the American people just how important quality journalism is to a functioning democracy.

Let’s set up a loan fund for the papers, just like we’re going to do for Detroit.

You are on a sinking ship and you can only rescue one: A Chevy Aveo or The New York Times, which do you pick?

Hello?

Mr. Watson, come here… I need you…

Sometimes when new technologies come along, they overturn the world of conventional thinking – particularly when it comes to valuation.

Take a look at the telephone.

Before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, value was directly married to rarity.  The more rare an object, the more it was worth.  Gold had great value because there was not a lot of it. Make gold as common as lead, and its value would plummet.  So people horded gold and nations went to war over gold. Only kings and very rich people had gold. That was how they liked it.  Open the treasury in the middle of the night and luxuriate in your wealth.

Comes the telephone.

What is the value of a telephone if only one person has it?

Nothing.

Who are you going to call?

If only a few kings and a few rich people have phones, the value increases, but only marginally. Now you can call a few friends,but that’s about it.

However, if everyone has a phone, right down to the local plumber, suddenly a phone is so valuable that you can not afford not to have one.

Now that’s value, but an inverse value from that which had been true through almost all of human experience. It is no longer rarity that gives value, but rather commonality.

What does this have to do with the current crisis in newspapers?

A lot, I think.

Because the crisis we are facing in newspapers and journalism in general is also a moment in which conventional thinking about valuation is being turned on its head, although we are slow to see that , as usual.

Up until now, we have thought that the primary asset of a paper or a TV station was, in fact, the station or the newspaper itself.  It was The New York Times that had the value, or CBS News. The rest, the people who worked there, were in a sense fungible.

In other words, the institution lived on and on, and readers or viewers were attracted to the institution, while the people who created the content for the institution were fundamentally replaceable or interchangeable.

This we sometimes referred to as ‘branding’.

This remained true so long as the technology of the day meant that there were a limited number of pipelines or platforms for delivery of information or content (and the advertising that went along with them).  In the words of AJ Liebling “freedom of the press is limited to those who own one”.

Because it was ridiculously expensive to even entertain the idea of having your own press.  The very cost of a press and the attendant mechanisms of distribution were a barrier to entry for competitors.  Thus, the perceived value of an institution like The New York Times was vested in that barrier to entry.  The reporters might go from paper to paper, from The Times to The Herald to The Daily News, but the paper, the institution would survive.

The reporters were marginal.

The same was true for television.

When it surfaced in the 1950s, the signal was pushed through the air.  There was limited space on the electromagnetic spectrum, so the FCC licensed the limited space to three networks, ABC, NBC and CBS and they held a virtual monopoly over access to people’s homes.

Shows might come and go, but the platform, the pipeline was in the frequency (and in all the expensive investment in infrastructure to push pictures and sound into the air).  The value was in the network, not in the content, per se.  The content was simply the filler, which was changeable depending upon taste.

When cable arrived, it as the same model, simply fractionalized over more players.

The web, however, like the invention of the telephone, changed everything.

At first, newspapers and later television stations saw the web as yet another platform for distribution – a kind of super cable, that would carry The New York Times or CBS shows into everyone’s home.

But that was not the case.

What the web did was to rewrite the fundamentals of valuation.

And like medieval kings, it was and is hard for those who once had the most precious things in the world to grasp that the very definition of value has now changed forever.

What the web did was to take away the barriers to entry. To make the ‘gold’  of the NY Times or NBC’s FCC license as common as lead.

Now, anyone, any time, and for no cost, could get into 2 billion homes. For free.

So where does value suddenly reside?

In the content.

People online are seeking content.

Quality content.

And they do not care where it resides.

iTunes is a classic indicator of what is coming.

In webworld, music is often a harbinger of where the future lies.

When I go to iTunes to download a song, I don’t care if the recording artist is signed with Arista or RCA or Decca or whomever. It does not matter a bit to me.  It is the music I am after.  The ’studio’ goes away. It is the content that is king.

Each day I go to NYTimes.com to read the paper, but in truth, if Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman and a handfull of others were to suddenly break away from the paper and set up their own website (and like Drudge, they might aggregate headlines), I would go there instead.

Now, the NY Times might be in financial trouble, and perhaps their website does not generate enough revenue to support their building, the presses, their trucks, their vast management and HR teams and so on. But my guess is that online revenues from The New New York Times  (aka Rich, Dowd, Friedman and Co.) would more than satisfy the writers.

That’s all that counts.

The content.

So it strikes me as more than a bit odd that when budget cuts come, which is inevitable, the first places to be cut are those who actually create the content.

It does not make sense.

It is like eating the seed corn.

Sell the building.

Fire the management.

Close down HR.

Do anything, but save and nurture the talent.

Or maybe the talent will simply leave and set up their own online ‘paper’. I mean, why do they really need management anyway?

WUSA Goes VJ

This just in, courtesy of our friend Adrian Monck

WUSA Moves to One-Person News Crews

By Paul Farhi

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 12, 2008; Page C01

The march of technology and the shrinking economy are beginning to take a toll on the traditional means of television news-gathering: the TV news crew.

Under a new agreement reached this week with its labor unions, WUSA, Channel 9, will become the first station in Washington to replace its crews with one-person “multimedia journalists” who will shoot and edit news stories single-handedly.

The change will blur the distinctions between the station’s reporters and its camera and production people. Reporters will soon be shooting and editing their own stories, and camera people will be doing the work of reporters, occasionally appearing on the air or on in video clips on Channel 9’s Web site.

For decades, TV journalists have worked in teams, with the lines of responsibility regulated by union rules or simple tradition. Stories were covered by a crew consisting of a camera operator and a correspondent (and further back, by a sound or lighting technician); their work was overseen by a producer and their footage assembled into a finished story by an editor.

But technology — handheld or tripod-mounted cameras, laptop editing programs and the Internet — have made it possible for one person to handle all those assignments, station managers say.

The change is driven by increasing financial pressure on TV stations, as advertisers disappear from nightly newscasts and audiences scatter to the growing number of channels and Web sites.

In fact, separate from its new union agreement, WUSA — owned by McLean-based media giant Gannett — plans an across-the-board cut in reporters’ salaries as it increases their responsibilities. Multimedia journalists will earn 30 to 50 percent less than what traditional reporters have been earning, with salaries topping out at around $90,000 annually, according to people at the station.

Channel 9 — which is running last in the local news ratings — will switch to the new system early next year, becoming the first station in a major market to revamp its entire newsroom. Its agreement is with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which represents on-air reporters, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents production employees. Union members said they expect the agreement to be ratified.

Competitors are paying close attention. Another Washington station, WRC, Channel 4, is expected to begin phasing multimedia journalists into its newsroom later next year as part of a sweeping cost-cutting effort by its parent, NBC Universal. WJLA, Channel 7, has already used some of the work of multimedia reporters employed by NewsChannel 8, the cable station that is owned by the parent of WJLA, Allbritton Communications. A fourth local news station, WTTG, Channel 5, said it has no immediate plans to do something similar.

“We believe strongly that [this change] will raise both the quality and quantity of the product we’re putting out” on TV and on the internet, said Allan Horlick, the president and general manager of WUSA, in an interview yesterday. “The concept of a multimedia journalist, having his own beat, with an area of expertise, and a limitless virtual news desk is something we can get very excited about.”

However, the concept gets mixed reviews in other quarters. Veteran TV journalists say their concern isn’t the quantity of news that can be produced but the quality, because not all TV journalists are skilled enough to do a job formerly handled by specialists.

“There are some people who will be very good at this, and some not as much,” said Bill Lord, WJLA’s news director. “If you’re forcing everyone to do things against their skill levels and desire, your product suffers.”

Lord says stations in Nashville and San Francisco have used multimedia journalists on an experimental basis in recent years but have backed away because of “falling quality” and declining ratings.

Another concern: safety. With complicated, fast-moving news stories such as traffic accidents or civil unrest, people on a news crew watch out for one another, said Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association. “You need to be careful,” she said. “I think this could work fine for feature stories, but with breaking news, you may need a different approach.”

The newspaper industry has experimented with something similar — using “mobile journalists” or “mo-jos” to report and write articles and take video and photographs, which they upload to their newspapers’ Web sites.

The upcoming changes at WUSA have soured veteran reporter Gary Reels, who began working at the station in 1980. Reels has decided to take a buyout offer from the station and will leave Dec. 23. He doesn’t know yet what he’ll be doing next.

“It takes a lot of time to shoot and edit and write and prepare a story, and if you have one person doing all that, something has to give,” he said yesterday. “For those people who want to take the challenge of adding all that to their workload, my hat’s off to them. But it’s not something at my ripe old age that I care to venture into.”

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The Privileged Few

The J School is the building on the left….

I graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1983.

That was a long time ago.

We were a class filled with ambition, fired by Woodward and Bernstein (or Woodruff).

We were journalists, with a capital J, and headed for a world in which journalism ran a spectrum from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal to Time Magazine to NBC News and far far beyond.

It seemed immutable.

The class was relatively small. About 150, I think, but many of them went on to stellar careers in the profession.  We have 5, I think at last count, Pulitzer Prize winners.. and many others of fame and note.

Our class, perhaps uniquely, perhaps not, continues to stay in touch through a list-server that the University graciously set up many years ago.  Remarkably, we still talk to one another and as a group.

The collapse of the Tribune Company set off another round of discussion.

I commented on the list-serve that we were all privileged to witness this event.

This resulted in some acidic responses.

One member of the class, a well known and award winning science correspondent wrote that  “it is is both offensive and thoughtless to suggest that watching their demise is “a privelege”.

(He was referring to the many people who were losing their jobs.)

Others followed.

It was about the word privilege.

Well, we are journalists, or at least we were trained to be journalists, so words are important.

Here is what I wrote back: (names have been deleted, as I think the list-serve is not public)

Dear xxx and anyone else offended
First, let me say that I am sorry if I offended anyone by the use of that word.
Needless, to say, that was no my intention.
Of course I feel terrible for those who have lost their jobs, for those whose jobs are threatened
and for those who are going to lose their jobs, (and there will be many yet to go).
I am deeply sympathetic.
However, as we are all journalists (certified, no less!), I don’t mind engaging in a syntactical discussion.
Words are our surgical instruments, so to speak.
Privileged, I don’t think is wrong.
Privileged in that we are getting to watch a massive and powerful historical event unfold.
That event may have, does have, overwhelming consequences, not only for those struck by the storm
but for all of us; for democracy and society, if I may be so bold.
The collapse of newspapers and magazines (and I am here to tell you that TV networks are about a decade
away from the same situation, if not less), is an event of vast historical proportions for journalists.
These things don’t happen often, and when they do they are world changing.
This event is not driven by some business happenstance or bad investment or momentary downturn in the market. It is driven by technology.
And it is global – in all meanings of the word. And permanent.  There is no ‘quick fix’.
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, the birth of our own trade, caused no less havoc amongst the scribes and
Monks whose purview was writing 500 years ago.  That piece of technology, in an instant, rendered their entire world
obsolete.  What followed was surely better, but you can be sure that for the Monks, it was a terribly wrenching experience.
As xxxx points out, I have indeed made my living over the past 20 years calculating and riding the impact of this
technological shift, and trying to prepare (often without much traction), many media companies for the tsunami that
has now begun (and I emphasize begun) to arrive.  More is to come.
It is, believe me, no momentary dislocation.  You are witnessing a once-in-a-500 year event.
The Chinese have a curse. “May you live in interesting times”. It is a curse for a reason.
What we are seeing is awful, but with the emphasis on the etiology of the word,
Awe.
We are filled with awe, even as we watch the world around us dissolve.
So no, I don’t think privileged is wrong.
We are observing a unique and massive historical event, even if it is a very terrible one.
And not everyone gets to do that – awful though it may be.
It doesn’t mean I don’t care.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

A few years ago, Robin Sloan, who is now CTO at Current produced this incredibly prescient video.

It still holds true.

As the narrator says, and not to be too trite, ‘it is the best of times, it is the worst of times’.