Today's Word—HoHoHo . . . Ommmmmm!

The Holiday Edition

“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”—Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), writer, 2003

As part of my own personal “war on Christmas” (which a Utah state senator has offered legislation to outlaw), the WORD celebrates the season by going on hiatus until January,
and offers this collection of some favorites—our holiday gift to you.
May all our days be merry and bright, and here’s to
a safe, healthy and saner New Year.

Empty Minds
“Of all the people expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing deadlines to trample him flat. Broadcasting the contents of empty minds is what most of us do most of the time, and nobody more relentlessly than I.”

—Russell Baker, Pulitzer-winning columnist

English Majors
“On behalf of the newspaper industry (new, cost-cutting motto: ‘All the News That’) I wish to announce some changes we're making to serve you better. When I say ‘serve you better,’ I mean ‘increase our profits.’ We newspapers are very big on profits these days. We’re a business, just like any other business, except that we employ English majors.”

—Dave Barry, columnist, 2001

And English Journalists
“... the British media [are] as untroubled by logical inconsistency as they are by a shortage of facts, lack of knowledge, or deficiencies in spelling, punctuation, and grammar.”

—Larry King, TV talk-show host, 2007

Writing Books
“Well, I’ve worried some about, you know, why write books ... why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it’s been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with ... humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it’s presumably to encourage them to make a better world.”

—Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), writer, 1973

Illumination
“A 19th century Irish immigrant named O’Reilly called the newspaper ‘a biography of something greater than a man. It is the biography of a DAY. It is a photograph, of twenty four hours’ length, of the mysterious river of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year’s newspapers—which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue, than the greatest book ever written—and we use them to light the fire.’”

—Adair Lara, columnist, San Francisco Chronicle, 1999

Today's Word—Dinosaurs

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NEWS NOTE: Tribune Co. fears bankruptcy; NYTimes in discussion with lenders on debt payments....

At Least Dead Dinosaurs Made Oil. . . .

Q: “Would you want you kid to go into the newspaper business?”
A: “No. It’s a dying business. Being a newspaper reporter is like being a cowboy on a dinosaur ranch.”

—Anonymous California reporter responding to a 1990 newsroom survey
(“‘Still the Invisible People’: Job Satisfaction of Minority Journalists at U.S. Daily Newspapers,” 1991.)

Today in History
2000: U.S. Supreme Court halts Florida election recount; 1989: Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean, goes to jail; 1980: tycoon Armand Hammer buys Da Vinci notebook for $5.1 million; 1925: the first motel opens in San Luis Obispo; 1917: Father Flanagan founds Boys Town; 1915: Frank Sinatra’s birth day; 1901: Marconi sends first trans-Atlantic wireless message; 1787: Pennsylvania becomes 2nd state to ratify Constitution.

Today's Word—I’ll Drink to That

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NOTE: The WORD today celebrates Repeal Day, the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition in 1933. The Demon Rum is occasionally linked to writers and journalists, and this 1887 New York Graphic item also reveals drink as the mother of technological necessity in the newsroom of “Petroleum V. Nasby,” editor and owner of The Toledo Blade.

Necessity Is Mother of Innovation

“The first editor in the United States to throw aside his quill or pencil for the typewriter was D. R. Locke, “Petroleum V. Nasby,” the editor and proprietor of the Toledo Blade. A dozen years ago, when The Cincinnati Gazette and Commercial, Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Globe Democrat were the only Republican journals of any note west of New York, Locke was a power in the newspaper world. The circulation of the weekly edition of the publication founded by Horace Greeley and his ‘Confederate Cross Roads’ letters were widely read and copied. Locke had always been a heavy drinker, but his success seemed only to spar him on to renewed efforts in the anti-prohibition line. He made it a point to get ‘half shot’ before breakfast of a morning, be ‘three sheets in the wind’ by dinner and wind up the evening too full for utterance. Although possessed of an iron constitution, whiskey gradually undermined his nerves, and after a time he was no longer able to hold a pen and turn out legible manuscript. He tried dictation, but his ideas did not seem to fully concentrate in the presence of a second person, and for a time he seriously contemplated reformation. While in such a plight he chance to see a typewriter of the crude style of the day. The thought came to him like a flash that he had found a way out of his dilemma he bought the instrument, and in the course of a few weeks could knock off ‘copy’ as rapidly and far more decipherably than he could with a pen in his most gifted days.”

—The New York Graphic, 1887

Thanks to alert WORDster Dennis Dunleavy, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, who writes: “The article, found in the Ashland, Ore., Daily Tidings of 1887, was reprinted from The New York Graphic. The article tells the story of how humorist and journalism pioneer David Ross Locke, commonly known by his pseudonym ‘Petroleum V. Nasby,’ became the first editor to use a typewriter in the newsroom. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but in Locke’s case it may have been something else all together.”

NOTE: The WORD will be traveling to visit ailing family, so no new wisdom until next Friday (12/12). Be strong.

Today in History
1996: Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan questions stock market overvalue; 1978: USSR and Afghanistan sign "friendship treaty"; 1955: AFL merges with CIO to form largest labor union; 1952: Abbott & Costello Show debuts; 1945: 5 U.S. Navy bombers vanish in Bermuda Triangle; 1933: Prohibition ends; 1876: Hundreds killed in Brooklyn theater fire; 1839: Gen. George Custer's birthday.

Today's Word—Front Lines

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Journalists: Freedom’s Frontline Troops

NOTE: Today is the 17th anniversary of the release of kidnapped AP newsman Terry Anderson in 1991, after being held, often chained to a radiator, by Hezbollah for 2,454 days. We take the opportunity to acknowledge the courage of journalists who place themselves in danger to tell the world stories.

“The only thing that protects you out there ... [are] the principles of journalism. A lot of times people are tempted to look for other protection, like, ‘I’m going to wear a bullet-proof vest. I’m going to go out in an American convoy.’ ... There’s only one thing that is going to protect you, and that’s being perceived as somebody who is really just there for the truth and is as objective as possible.”

—Micah Garen, U.S. documentary filmmaker
and co-author of American Hostage (2005), who was kidnapped in Iraq in 2004
and thought he was going to die: “It was like they had set up a studio for a beheading.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports 51 journalists kidnapped in Iraq since 2004, and 135 journalists and 51 media workers killed in Iraq since 2003.

Today in History:
1992: President Bush Sr. ordered U.S. troops to Somalia; 1978: Dianne Feinstein becomes San Francisco mayor after assassination of George Mascone and Harvey Milk; 1969: police kill two Black Panther Party members; 1952: smog kills thousands in England; 1945: Senate approves U.S. participation in United Nations; 1917: psychiatrists report “shell shock” among WWI troops; 1816: James Monroe elected fifth U.S. president

Today's Word—Nixon’s Enemies

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Enemies: Press & Profs

“Never forget, the press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”

—President Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994) in taped conversation after his 1972 landslide reelection. A new 2,000 hours of Nixon audiotapes were released yesterday.

(Click here for clips and more.)

Nov. 25, 1972/AP photo

Today in History 1979: 11 people killed at Cincinnati Who concert; 1964: 800 student protesters arrested after Berkeley sit-in; 1947: “STELLA!” Brando opens in “Streetcar” on broadway; 1857: Joseph Conrad’s birthday; 1818: Illinois becomes the 21st state

Today's Word—CNN

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Dog-Eat-Dog
NEWS NOTE: CNN to offer cheaper alternative to the Associated Press?

“But in his conference with employees, [AP President Tom] Curley suggested that the CNN wire service needed major improvement before it could play at The A.P.’s level.

‘You really don’t want to put quotes up there that could end up on locker room walls,’ Mr. Curley said, before doing just that.

‘The current CNN wire, if you look at it, truly is still, and remarkably, abysmally written,’ he said. ‘However, they’re interviewing A.P. people, we know, and that can be transformed. And if you have enough money and you have enough ego and enough desire, you can fix that in a hurry.’”

—The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2008

Today in History
2001: Enron files for bankruptcy; 1954: U.S. Senate condemns Joseph McCathy; 1942: Fermi’s creates first nuclear reaction; 1939: LaGuardia Airport opens; 1938: 70th anniversary of the first Bloody Mary hangover; 1859: Abolitionist John Brown hanged

Today's Word—Bailout!

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Bail Me Out, Mr. Paulson!

“Hello? Bailout people? Mr. Secretary of the Treasury Paulson? Aren't you forgetting somebody? Like me? I'm a print journalist. Talk about financial meltdown! . . . The print journalism industry is taking a beating, circling the drain, running on fumes. . . . Not that print journalism actually emits much in the way of greenhouse gases. We have an itty-bitty carbon footprint. We're earth-friendly. The current press run of an average big city daily newspaper can be made from one tree. Compare that to the global warming hot air produced by talk radio, cable TV, and Andrew Sullivan."

—P.J. O’Rourke, columnist, The Weekly Standard, December 2008
(Thanks to alert WORDster Dan Kubiske)

Reality check:
Alert WORDster Steve Ross, a Boston-based media analyst, argues in a new post for The Institute for Analytic Journalism that newspaper income may not be as bad as the doomsayers pretend:

Craig’s List had NOTHING to do with a decline in classified ad revenue.

by Steve Ross analyticjournalism on Thu 13 Nov 2008 05:16 PM MST

IAJ co-founder Steve Ross has long argued that Craig's List HAS NOT contributed in a major way to the decline of North American newspaper advertising revenues. Here's his latest analysis:

This isn't rocket science. Craig's List had NOTHING to do with a supposed decline in classified ad revenue.

Here's the raw PRINT classified revenue data, right off the NAA website. (If anyone doesn't use excel 2007 I can send the data file in another format, but everyone should be able to read the chart as a jpg). Click here for bar chart

Note that the big change that pushed classified ad volume up in the 90s was employment advertising. Damn right. The country added 30 million new jobs in that period, and the number of new people entering the workforce declined because births had declined in the mid-1970s. More competition for bodies = more advertising needed.

Knock out the employment data and everything else stayed steady or INCREASED for newspaper classified. The past 7 years were not as good for employment ads, but still better than in pre-web days. . . .

All those corrections make this look even better for newspapers.

This is SO OBVIOUS that I just do not understand the "Craigs List has killed us" argument or even the "web killed us" argument.

It is (to me, anyway) a transparent lie. Either the newspaper barons are so inanely stupid that they don't understand their own business, or they are incompetent managers, looking for an excuse. Maybe both. (Click here for full column.)

Today in History: 1990: Chunnel drilling breaks through; 1955: Rosa Parks stays in her seat; 1939: Lee Trevino's birthday; 1913: Ford debuts assembly line; 1824: Congress decides presidency for John Quincy Adams