Brockett Blog

Reading the news about the news can drive one to many vices: drinking, bloviating, smoking. And sometimes you reach for the hard stuff to numb the pain, like old comic books. I recently stopped by the local library and picked up the Superman: Past and Future trade paperback for a quick pop culture fix.

Many of the stories are from the early days of the comics, when storylines could range from Jimmy Olsen going undercover with the Nazis to an especially desperate Lois Lane trying to seduce Jor-El (Superman’s father) on a pre-explosion Krypton. But amid the embarassments, there was a series of stories detailing the Superman of 2965, a direct decendent of Clark Kent who conveniently looks exactly like his forefather. “Klar Ken T5477″ retained the news gene as well, but in a very different news world. So, fear not, reporters: There will be reporting jobs 950 years from now. Editing jobs? Not so much.

Reason one, of course, is denying paycheck opportunities for yours truly. But what about something much more important – references in classic songs? If we aren’t careful, some of the beloved soundtracks of our lives could end up as low-hanging fruit for future snarktastic VH1 talking heads. Take The Monkees’ version of “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone,” a simple, emotional romp that takes aim at the types of women who evolved into what Kanye later identified as gold diggers. What could snatch this pop gem from the ranks of the timeless? Maybe this line:

When I first met you girl, you didn’t have no shoes/
Now you’re walking ’round like you’re front-page news.

If print falls, what then? Will she be walking ’round like she’s on Google News? Or grabbing pageviews? If you don’t think this can happen, just tell that to the Five Americans. Their song “Western Union” still hasn’t recovered from the blow e-mail inflicted:

My first reactions to the Time magazine cover story could be read with a nice, tall glass of Haterade. “We know these new ideas can be bad,” you’re thinking. “Who’s going about it the right way?” Now, in no way am I aware of the financial stability of these three examples. However, as a consumer, I thoroughly enjoy their editorial products in various ways. And as someone who hopes to be paid for his writing/journalism work the rest of his life, I am encouraged by the possibilities these three editorial outfits present:

Baseball Prospectus – the subscription/”taste” model
My subscription to Sports Illustrated will end soon after the arrival of Bar Refaeli in my mailbox (what a way to go!). I pondered extending the subscription at reduced rates and with various “free” items tempting my postcard return. After going back and forth, my mind and wallet converged on the idea of consuming some of the interesting personality profiles and features online rather than in print at the low $20 annual rate.

Contrast this with my Baseball Prospectus subscription, at a cost of $35 annually. I made sure to re-up a few days in advance just to make sure I didn’t miss any articles during the heat of the September pennant race.

What is the difference? BP succeeds in offering a diverse, unique product that can’t be found easily anywhere else. As a hopelessly devoted baseball fan, I know where I can find good writing, reporting and analysis online about baseball. The best sports blogs stand as some of the strongest examples of where the fan can do a more engaging and entertaining job than an uninspired beat reporter. But BP stands out in a couple of ways:

• hiring skilled analysts who do this type of thing for a living (and do it well),
• proprietary information (such as stats) that can’t be found anywhere else,
• and aggregrating information (transaction analysis, injuries) in ways that save me time as a reader.

BP supplements its online model with an annual book, a couple of articles each week that show potential readers what’s available, chats, a free podcast called Baseball Prospectus Radio and some partnerships with other media outlets, like Sports Illustrated during the 2008 season. All these efforts strengthen the brand while working toward the business goal, which is to get you to subscribe. Other media outlets can look toward this model, but only in instances where you’ve got the goods to make it happen. This requires talent and carving out a unique niche in the marketplace that can’t be easily duplicated.

Baseball America – concurrent online/print subscriptions
If Baseball Prospectus “owns” the statistical analysis field (amid some worthy competitors), then Baseball America certainly owns the minor league and college baseball arenas. The baseball draft, long thought of as an afterthought when compared to pro basketball or football, has turned into BA’s busiest time of year in satisfying the information cravings of amateur baseball fans following their boys to pro ball and prospect hounds hoping to see their team land the stars of the future.

BA provides order (top 10 prospect lists, etc.) to a massive amount of information that accumulates each night from Kane County to Sacramento. And readers can get to some of that information via a couple of free blogs at baseballamerica.com. But the real product comes via online and print subscriptions. I haven’t crossed the threshold to subscribe just yet, but I appreciate the options of receiving the information via the Web only (at $66 annually) or both in print and online ($91.95 annually). This allows the publication, should the need arise, to transition into a potential online-only business model much easier than its publication competitors. As is, the site uses the blogs and a podcast to tease out some of its “money” features and never forgets where that bread gets buttered. And, having picked up the magazine at the bookstore, I know what I’m getting for free now is just the tip of their news coverage.

Baseball Musings – stop, aggregate and listen
But what about those lone wolf bloggers who want to make their own way? David Pinto shows one way how to do such a thing. He was one of the first baseball bloggers to successfully aggregate* content both from newspaper sites and blogs, and do it as a full-time profession. You can see his influence in sites like MLB Trade Rumors, that does the heavy lifting (compiling) in similar fashion.

And how does the site make money? One, you notice quite a few ads on Musings, especially compared to BP and BA. These click-throughs can add a few pennies to the coffers every time (like an ad-based form of the micropayment proposal). Still, as any Google AdSense participant knows, that won’t always pay the domain name bills. Pinto makes like public broadcasting and holds a pledge drive, which generated $3,600 in 2008. I read of a similar outreach effort at the Gannett Blog as it details the crumbling of that once-mighty newspaper empire. This concept most closely resembles the micropayment possibilities, but still relies on donations rather than mandatory payments.

*While time-strapped readers appreciate the efforts of these aggregators, the micropayment idea most likely would hurt their efforts. Not only would it be hard to figure out good stories to link to, but people could come to the site and not have to click on anything. While this probably appeals to some in the newspaper profession who don’t like the link culture, one wonders how it would affect traffic numbers.

Now, these are simplistic samples of business models. But all three derive much of their revenue from consumers rather than ad sales, and that seems to be the concept pushed as a solution to surviving economic downturns. But all three devote large amount of resources per employee to their editorial product, and all to reach a readership that will leave for other options if a better opportunity presents itself. My feeling is that many news organizations will splinter into niches they can own and aggregation for the consumer on the go (iPhone apps, headlines, etc.) This allows the product to be more nimble and authoritative in coverage, while making things easier for advertisers targeting markets that are increasingly elusive.

Time magazine* featured a column by Walter Isaacson in its Feb. 16 edition, delving into the problems of print journalism and picking out micropayments as a solution. That is, paying 10 cents to read a story online with a click of a button (conveniently compared to the iTunes model as something that works). My experience in newspapers, though limited in circulation numbers, found plenty of problems with the story and its central concept.

• “In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse,” Isaacson writes. “It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue.”As the editor of a free weekly paper, I can tell you that such a broad generalization misses the success stories at the smaller, community level (where many Americans get their news outside the major cities and suburbs). Besides figuring out what page an advertisement should go on, our reliance on advertisers never got in the way of our newsgathering process. Sure, our reporters were charged with limited enterprise and investigative reporting that could uncover some unsavory business practices. But in cases where the newspaper might be a business’ major advertising outlet, all involved found it best to work out any problems and continue the existing relationship.
• I think a lot about small dailies and weeklies when people talk about moving to a Web-centric news operation. In DeKalb/Sycamore, many of my readers still didn’t know anything about the Web, and weren’t exactly taking library classes to get in on that action. But how much of the population does that encompass? Is that number shrinking? Or will this group, having already built up a dependable newspaper habit in their lives, be shoved to the margins as media companies go after the fickle tastes of a Twittering 20 year old?
• More than the readers, local businesses depend on good community newspapers to advertise their wares. With the competition including costly direct mail and low-impact cable or radio ads, newspapers still find themselves as the best option in town for a small business. In my experience, many of these businesses also worry about the storefront first, and then the online presence. Thus, the online banner ad doesn’t always work (even if you can give that business a report detailing impressions/click-throughs/etc. that a print ad can’t match). The best ads I can remember usually involved a 2×2 coupon ad placed in the first few pages of the paper.
• Isaacson imagines something like an E-ZPass that deducts from a pre-paid account. First, the iTunes model works in part because it is limited to one software product (granted, across multiple platforms like the iPhone). But if you want something like this, you not only need to have the major daily newspapers sign on to a standard. You also need to sign up independent papers throughout the country if you’re looking for it to really work. And would the Associated Press just set up its own Web site to take advantage of these pennies from Pennsylvania? Already, some newspaper chains drop the ball on their Web presence, promoting ease of uploading and chain consistency more than ease of navigation. I am bearish on some of these chains, pending survival, adapting fully to anything approaching easy, secure navigation.
• If such a payment plan was implemented, would newspapers sue if blogs like Gawker aggregated the best content, like the site does for the weekly gossip rags?

I do agree with the idea that many newspapers do a poor job with what they put up online. The idea that the Web needs the full, best version of stories puzzles me. Under the current business model, I would consider the Web site a window into the community and a tease to search out the paper. That means focus should be placed on news briefs, multimedia, full archives and – most importantly – online-only content. The medium requires a different set of storytelling skills and just uploading a story and placing a few html tags on it just won’t work. I bookmark a number of newspaper blogs, and for every success like Pop Candy at USA Today, there are text-only, seldom-updated monstrosities that serve as little more than an outlet for meandering musings (hey, a new tagline for my site!).

I am encouraged about some of the video pieces I have seen, and see the podcast as an under-utilized tool that can further the current goals of furthering the brand cheaply without immediate financial gains. Actually, a few non-newspaper entities have best grasped these ideas, and I will describe how some of the giants in baseball media have done so in my next post later today.

* As an aside, I haven’t picked up a Time magazine in a while. Like most longtime magazine readers, I was struck at its pagecount, as well as its lack of ads. But as a designer, I was amazed at the amount of whitespace used throughout (reflected accurately in the stark cover pictured above). If you use that much whitespace, you’re giving the impression that there’s no better (or longer) content available. Also, and this is just a pet peeve of mine, but I really dislike columnist mug shots cropped at odd angles. Either show a full shot or not; the halfway art project doesn’t serve any function.

She likes to say that she saw this coming.

In 2006, recently elected U.S. senator Barack Obama visited the University of St. Francis for a town hall-style meeting. There, she now says, Obama showed that mish-mash of personality and presence that makes a mother think “He’s going to be president one day.” And my mom did everything she could to make that statement prophetic.

The news networks probably don’t have a category for her, one that’s easily accessible with a few touches of CNN’s touchscreens and a John King-style breakdown. She grew up with the romantic ideals of the John F. Kennedy administration, married twice and had four kids while teaching and eventually serving as a school district administrator. My first politically conscious election (1992), she supported Ross Perot. She wasn’t swept up in the prosperity of the Clinton years, at least not enough to allow Al Gore to ride in on that tide in 2000. So she voted for George W. Bush then, and again for re-election (or against Kerry, really) in 2004.

But something changed in the leadup to the 2008 election. I missed the first stirrings while away from the hometown and working in DeKalb. But little details made their way upstate, when my brothers would talk about the increased presence of cable news at the dinner table. Almost five years after I started watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann (a different incarnation than the one that eventually garnered significant ratings), she took an interest in his writerly take-downs of the Bush administration … and even humored my anecdotes about his awesome baseball card collection.

Soon, the days started with Morning Joe and ended with The Situation Room, Hardball and Countdown. The mail brought a new subscription to Newsweek, where it joined random issues of U.S. News and World Report. The Internet became more than just a portal for her Juno e-mail forwards, as she started asking me questions about Salon and Slate. It was a total media binge, and a transformation from previous nights spent sipping wine and enjoying an episode of The Sopranos or Deadwood. It all culminated with the debut of Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, who she talked about so glowingly that it seemed like she was trying to set me up with her … except for, you know.

And once my mom settled on Obama, she set her maternal instincts on swatting away predators. Hillary never stood a chance, heckled from afar for her “manipulative” moves like a soap opera antagonist. She supplemented her financial support with signs, shirts and a last-weekend canvassing of Valparaiso, Ind. before my brother Jim’s surprise birthday party. Even those family parties turned the dinner table into a dance floor strewn with land mines, as she wasn’t afraid to defend her candidate … especially to her sister (my aunt). Meanwhile, her red-faced sons tried to steer the conversation toward something else – baseball, weather, Daylight Savings Time, anything to avoid the confrontation so prevalent on her TV shows.

So last night, she settled into the couch a bundle of nerves. “Oh, I can barely stand it!” she said as the polls closed along the east coast. We flipped around the dial, mostly settling between MSNBC and CNN (and making fun of the latter for its delay in calling states … oh how soon we forget). As Anderson Cooper navigated his way between two flanks of analysis, the tension ratcheted up with each precinct reporting in Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia. My mom was convinced the news networks were stringing things along to get great ratings for the 10 p.m. news. Then, as Pennsylvania and Ohio turned blue on the Rockefeller ice rink and NBC switched from local election results to the national broadcast at 10 p.m., her efforts were realized in the form of fancy graphics and the types of pronouncements that normally seem so pompous except for these grand circumstances. Barack Obama will be the 44th United States president.

My mom fielded the congratulatory text messages and calls well past her usual bedtime. In a way, she represented the way anyone could dive into the current media landscape – technology learning curve be damned – and join in a cause. It made me hope that there were others like my mom out there who could support the news media when it aligned with her curiosity and interests. She may have seen Obama as president coming, but I never envisioned My Mom: The Politico.

But, of course, powers such as these inevitably create a monster. As we waited for John McCain’s concession speech and Obama’s first words as president-elect, she couldn’t help herself.

“I really hope he gets Montana!”

For those who read the news about the news, the latest dispatches could come with a photo illustration of an axe. (For examples, see here. Or here. Or here. Or …)

Frankly, many in the news industry could use some good news. And if they can’t get it during normal business hours, maybe it can arrive through the wonders of DVD rentals and summer television programming.

The first season of TBS’ My Boys (out on DVD now) showcased the interesting intersection of sports, a profession, friends and one’s late-20s single life. PJ (Jordana Spiro) searches for love on the streets of Chicago, all the while finding support from her group of male friends and one dangerously-close-to-stereotypical token sassy black friend. The show used voice-over narration from the PJ character to frame her relationship quandaries using the sports metaphors developed as a newspaper sports reporter. True, the show focused more on the ethical quandary of dating the new Cubs pitcher than on narrative ledes or nut graphs, but still – journalist depictions shouldn’t be relegated just to Lou Grant or Chloe storylines on Smallville.

My Boys‘ first season drama and comedy both develop from the odd collection of men who orbit PJ’s life, collecting in various incarnations for a weekly poker game at her apartment. The foibles of each friend and potential suitor (and sometimes, the two shall meet) bubble up naturally, even with the unique pacing of a summer cable season. The writers and Spiro gave PJ a healthy mix of one-of-the-guys attitude and handled the “how girly can she be” question by having the character ask that of herself.

Each half-hour show wasn’t afraid to offer up non sequitors, running gags and other extraneous details to add both some true-to-life singledom details and comedic fodder to the search for romance. And as an Illinois native, one also can appreciate the unique ways Chicago becomes a character in the story, be it the nightlife, denigrating the suburbs or making a Sybaris joke.

All this came to a head in the season one finale, setting up a “what guy did she pick” mystery with legitimate drama that could have degenerated into some bland knockoff of a Sex and the City plotline if not handled so craftily. Building on this momentum, this summer’s season premiere answered the question. The fallout from that decision (no spoilers here) have propeled the rest of the season. And while the camraderie and humor remain, some notable things are missing in both PJ’s life and the show: her job and her sports.

Gone are the life-is-like-the-bottom-of-the-ninth narrations (much to the delight of a few sports-averse critics at Entertainment Weekly), and they wouldn’t make sense anyway given how the show has dropped the instigator of so much of season one’s drama. The show has replaced Wrigley Field clubhouse scenes with more wacky friend hijinks – particularly PJ’s brother Andy (Jim Gaffigan) dealing with a close female friend and some marital problems. Gaffigan’s supporting role excelled in small, strong doses in season one, and the writers haven’t been able to sustain that quality with more at stake.

Or maybe the writers don’t want to remind viewers that their likable protagonist shares a similar professional background to the likes of Jay Mariotti and Skip Bayless. Which is a shame, because one of the show’s highlights from season one found PJ trying her hand at TV punditry, to embarassing effect. There’s a lot to like concerning what the show says both about women in sports journalism and women on the single’s market. To borrow a conceit from season one, though, the show has whiffed on the first while focusing squarely on the latter.

In early 2008, Shaw Newspapers looked to streamline printing of its core publications in the northern Illinois market. This meant relocating the offices of the Kane County Chronicle and printing that newspaper in DeKalb with some print upgrades. As part of these upgrades, all publications were changed to a broadsheet-size. This affected my paper, the MidWeek, as it was a tabloid size (significantly smaller, but with more pages).

The change wasn’t a smooth one, as this meant changing the size of features, advertisements and figuring out where everything needed to be. With color availability at a premium (only certain pages could be printed in color), the paper changed significantly, and the reason was cost more than anything it could “do” for readers.

About a dozen people e-mailed in complaints, and as editor I tried to answer each one as best I could. But the anonymous phone calls were the best. Here are two of them that I recorded off the voice mail, for your enjoyment.

The MidWeek “stinks.”

Yeah, the MidWeek stinks.