Santa Cruz Observer

A dIfferent sort of letter-writing campaign

By TOM HONIG

Picture this: Sitting around a table with a group of techies, and I bring up the obscure information that February has been declared "The Month of Letters Challenge," when writers are being asked to post a letter a day.

 "You mean, as in putting a stamp on an envelope?" asks one techie.

A couple of them nod their heads. So I press on.

"Actual letter-writing is an artform. One of my favorite genres of literature is "The Selected Letters of ...." Steinbeck wrote letters. Faulkner wrote letters. Emily Dickensen. Charles Dickens. Even Georgia O'Keefe and comedian Fred Allen.

"I don't think you'll be reading 'The selected e-mails of' anyone in the future."

"Well, we don't use Morse Code anymore, either," said another techie.

Then the conversation switched. But I got to thinking about my old "Britannica Guide to English Usage," which dictated style and etiquette in crafting a letter. Or an essay by Lewis Carroll about how it's best to address and stamp an envelope before writing a letter or the unsent missive will lie unsent on the writing table for days at a time.

So far, I haven't joined in the letter-writing campaign. But I might. E-mails and Facebook posts and tweets are not a substitute for an old-fashioned letter. Neither, really, is a telephone call.

A letter says: "I've sat down and thought about you and I'm taking the time to craft a few thoughts for your eyes only."

I haven't written a letter in years. I don't even have a mailing address for most of my friends. 

There's more than nostalgia here. An artform has been sent out on the trash pile of antiquity. It's a nice thought to have a "Write a Letter" campaign -- even if the only way to get the word out about it is on blogs.

News exec quits -- and has some things to say

By TOM HONIG

You just never know where cogent commentary on the future of newspapers will come from. This one is from the chief revenue officer of the Bay Area News Group -- owners of the San Jose Mercury News, the Sentinel and most of the other papers around the Bay Area.

His name is Jeff DeBalko, and as he quit his position, he posted some thoughts about daily newspapers' strategies -- or, more precisely, the lack of a strategy.

Writing on his personal blog, DeBalko talks of his brief career in the "local media" game after having spent most of his career in specialized, business-to-business media.

It's worth following the link and reading his entire post, but essentially, here's what he has to say:

1. Hope is not a strategy (Don't say: "Oh, things will get better. We just have to wait for a better economy."

2. Corporate culture is stronger than any strategy. ("Treat employees better.")

3. Get out into the community. (He argues that the web-only Patch.com is doing this better than most old-line newspapers).

4. Diversity matters. (Old white guys -- like me, admittedly -- are running the show.)

5. Selling online is not the same as building a sustainable business. (Too much focus on "the sale" and not enough on growing a productive business.)

6. Technology matters. (You're not a media company; you're a tech company. That's your competition.)

7. People matter. (Bosses might actually ask employees what works and what doesn't.)

I especially was convinced by his comment on tech. Think of every major change in media -- iTunes, Craigslist, Groupon, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix -- and not one came from an already-established media company. There are a lot of reasons for that -- mostly the need of established companies to affix a return-on-investment requirement to every new idea. Still, old media types love to talk about innovation -- even though I can't think of one real great original idea to come out of the standard, mainstream media.

The best reporters I've known over the years were the ones who spent more time out of the newsroom than in. I think that's instructive for newspaper executives. They should stop talking with each other, get their noses out of the budget sheets and actually connect with readers and advertisers to discover their needs.

 

Inane comments and half-baked opinions

By TOM HONIG

One of my goals in starting this website was to establish a higher level of civic discourse. I'm largely happy with the comments I've received here. Part of the success is that this website is out of the mainstream.

Consider, for example, the recent retirement of an editor named John Irby, who has retired from the Bismark (N.D.) Tribune largely because he got tired of putting up with nasty and inane comments on his paper's website. In a final column, Irby says: “I am retiring because I am tired of being the whipping boy, by one and all. My skin has thinned. Life is too short to put up with all the noise.” And: "I don't want to do this anymore."

His paper is hardly the only one plagued by nasty and even stupid comments on its website. Every newspaper has the problem -- including The New York Times and the Washington Post.

A quick trip through the comments on mainstream websites is depressing. The attacks are vociferous. The claims are often wrong. Opinion has replaced fact. Just once I'd like to see this reaction: "Hmm. I had never thought about this aspect of the issue and I'm changing my mind." Wouldn't that be a treat to see?

And as long as I'm complaining, wouldn't it be wonderful if people of every political stripe would learn to use an apostrophe correctly? An apostrophe is for the possessive and for contractions. It's not for making words plural.

Some schools require a swimming test before allowing students in the pool. Maybe newspapers should make commenters pass a grammar test before writing out their thoughts.

Newspapers and a digital future

By TOM HONIG

Sentinel Editor Don Miller has posted a fascinating look into modern journalism on his blog. He describes the appointment of the new chief executive of MediaNews -- the company that owns 56 daily papers, including my alma mater, the Sentinel.

The CEO, John Paton, also runs another organization, the Journal Register Co. In a nutshell, these companies will be operated cooperatively under the umbrella of "Digital First" and will feature, yes, a "digital first" strategy. The Nieman Journalism Lab -- a think tank at Harvard -- calls it a "merger without merging."

What's interesting about all that is that newspaper executives have long known that the future of news is online. But it's still the physical paper product that brings in most of the revenue.

Miller links his blog to some fascinating articles, including this one on the website Gigaom: Is John Paton the Savior Newspapers Have Been Waiting For? And another, this coming from Paton's own blog.

By the way, three cheers for Miller, who puts all this maneuvering into context without sugar-coating any of it. I had complained here last week that other newspapers had reported on their own layoffs by burying that information inside some sort of corporate-speak.

Everyone knows that newspapers are going through massive change. Survival is uncertain. But the articles that Miller links to describe well the latest developments in the ongoing disruption of an entire industry.

The dominating source of news about the media decides to call it quits -- sort of

By TOM HONIG

The single-most dominating force in media news and gossip is someone that most people outside the media business have never heard of. It's a man by the name of Jim Romenesko. His daily aggregation of media news is required reading by anyone in the news business. He puts the site together mostly from his home in Evanston, Ill. (or from nearby coffee shops) and it's sponsored by the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

Actually, it's more than that. Some of us who occasionally pontificate on the ins and outs of the news business rely on news coming from Romenesko about what's happening at newspapers and other media outlets around the country. One of his services has long been to reprint internal memos from media companies -- a practice that at one time was criticized and later became welcome. (My own departure from the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 2007 was documented in his column -- which I took as an honor.)

Romenesko has announced his semi-retirement. To get an idea of his impact on the industry, check out this story by Michael Calderone in the Huffington Post.

What's fascinating about Calderone's profile is that it demonstrates 1) how influential Romenesko has been and 2) how he had no interest in doing what most entrepreneurs would do -- make a ton of money off such an influential site.

Semi-retirement for Romenesko means getting away from the aggregation and back to -- gasp! -- some original reporting. His new site, JimRomenesko.com, will be well worth reading.

How should offensive language be presented?

An interesting development on the language police front: a number of activists are arguing in favor of going ahead and using the words that are considered objectionable. That would mean reporting accurately on Kobe Bryant's homophobic expletive from the Los Angeles Lakers' bench. And, according to other reports, there's a pushback from the cognescenti  and civil rights groups regarding the use of the "N-word" in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In fact, Thursday at noon PST language expert Roy Peter Clark is hosting on online discussion at Poynter.org entitled: When writing, how should you handle slurs like the one Kobe Bryant used? (If you miss it, the discussion will remain on the site and will be available for viewing.

Writing on the Poynter website, Clark argues that "Publishing taboo words that arise in the news does not require red headlines, bold face or 30-point type. A word can be revealed in the body of the text, or inside the paper, or via a link on the website. Any further inhibitions smack of a misguided political correctness, however well intended."

It's an interesting change. I've assumed that the trend around college campuses and in other intellectual corners has involved a move toward more censorship. Now I'm finding evidence otherwise.

Notice that I haven't reproduced the offending phrases here. My training took place at a proverbial "family newspaper" and even though I have sympathy with Clark's point of view, I'm not comfortable letting the words fly here.