Who do you want in a digital knife fight?

The long knives go slit-slit faster and deeper at benighted newspapers. Publishers reserve the longest, sharpest blades for slicing off their own noses to spite their faces.

It's the darndest thing. Newsroom budgets have a one-for-one ratio of product quality. So where does the front office slash? Why, the very place that would bring in more customers for themselves and their advertisers.

Ad reps advise clients to buy more space in a downturn when merchants need more traffic. They don't do it. They advertise less. But that's the argument.

When publishers need a better product to boost the bottom line, they invariably cut back too. If that's not hypocritical, it's sure short-sighted and makes for a brutal nose job.

They imagine they are in the business of printing words on paper. So they reduce pages and the wordsmiths to fill them.

The truth is, they really are in the information business. They need constantly to create demand and to generate ad attraction with more and better information. But they do the old biz school thing that reduces costs in a version of supply side economics instead of spending wisely to create product demand.

The newspaper industry is a metaphor for failed imagination.

If Silicon Valley had thought that way, I'd be writing this on an upright typewriter instead of a computer.

That's why I like the advice of columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., although he admits he was slow coming to his own view. The Internet should be at the core of journalism, not off to one side, he now writes http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/story/574088.html

"And then maybe we should hire away the bright people who figured out how to make Yahoo and Google profitable and ask them to make our sites profitable, too."

Go, Leonard.

Publishers recognize the virtual world when their IT Departments show them. But they're not thriving in it like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, now competing with downloadable texts via Kindle, http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA or like Craig Newmark, the Internet entrepreneur taking the classifieds away from conventional print http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/user_accounts.

Bezos and Newmark and all the Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other dagger gaggles may look like a publisher's worst nightmare.

But if I'm in a knife fight, I want a guy who's good with a stiletto at my side.

Media generations: MTV and the AARP crowds can set government right again

MTV may save the republic
Ladies Home Journal and the Crown Forum book How to Raise an American and even The AARP Magazine will help.
’Bout time someone did something. Really. It’s all about time or at least age. The issue is how to motivate the youth vote, and those media are onto something.
The big news is Viacom’s countercultural music broadcaster announcing it will now take political ads.
It’s for the money of course. When Sen. Barrack Obama passed up public funding of his Democratic presidential campaign, he put a monster ad budget in play with a youth orientation.
But an ad is information, too, not just a commercial. If campaign advertising weren't suddenly cool, MTV wouldn’t break its 27-year ban against marketing candidates.
This is watershed stuff. Potentially, anyway.
Just a few years ago David T. Z. Mindich wrote Tuned Out, explaining why Americans under 40 don’t follow the news. He said political process alienated the young who found it immoral, unresponsive to the people and irrelevant along with the news media that covered politics.
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam broke that ground with his landmark study of civic disengagement.
And journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr., decried the exchange between politicians and the governed as “unintelligent” in his book, Why Americans Hate Politics.
For the smart set, the young set, the MTV set to tune back in as both the Iowa caucuses and the Obama millennials indicate is big for the future of self-government.
A letter to Reader's Digest calls this "The Facebook Election." But ultimately, the writer said, two things will have to happen:

• These young activists will have to run for office;
• And leadership in both major parties will have to step aside to "let younger, more open minds take over."

Too soon to say if the information industry and especially newspapers will reverse their own downward spiral related to civic malaise.
Mindich anticipated some rise from the ashes, because “despite their disengagement with news, young people are as thoughtful and passionate and self-reflective as they have ever been, ready to interact with news if we just provide the right conditions for them to do so.”
One condition could be for parents and grandparents to be civic-minded and to model participatory government for the generations to come of voting age.
Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, started Take Your Kids 2 Vote, promoting the idea of adults taking their children into polling places with them. She remembered it when she was a kid.
She and cofounder Chriss Winston researched Election Day involvement and wrote How to Raise an American.
Naturally http://www.takeyourkids2vote.org/ is their Web site. Emphasis is on recollection and narrative.
“Sharing your memories of voting makes kids realize their family is part of the American experience,” Blyth said to writer Nick Kolakowski of AARP http://www.aarpmagazine.org/.
And that’s cool too. For the self-described “World’s Largest Circulation Magazine” to publicize civic lessons across the generations really does link MTV’s ad policy news with shoring up the Republic’s future.
Rap that tune.

Stars Fell on Barack Obama

I will go to Korea, Ike said. He campaigned during an unpopular Asian war.
And America elected Dwight David Eisenhower as president.
I will go to Iraq, Barack Obama said, campaigning during the latest unpopular war.
Now the star system in American journalism is burning, burning bright to light up the Democrat’s presidential campaign.
If the candidate doesn’t make a major foreign policy goof, the media celestials will brightly backlight his election profile. They’re going too.
You get the impression of a royal progress by an oriental potentate. Newspaper poobahs and magazine satraps and TV sultanas will climb aboard decorated dromedaries to form the entourage. The U.S. military will assist the Secret Service in Janissary duty.
Headliners from national newspapers and magazines are going.
So are all three network news anchors – Charles Gibson of ABC, Katie Couric of CBS and Brian Williams of NBC. They’ll be doing primetime interviews with the candidate.
Clang the cymbals. Blow the trumpets. Beat the tabla. The cavalcade comes.
Obama couldn’t buy this kind of publicity.
Neither could Republican opponent John McCain. Coverage of his international trips fit into the routine category.
The old hat McCain is getting the “also running” treatment stingingly felt by Hillary Rodham Clinton in her party nomination campaign against Obama.
“He’s the new guy, though,” rationalize media executives to Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. The reporter documents the ongoing imbalance of TV coverage in favor of Obama. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/politics/17anchors.html?ex=1374033600&en=00fc706cfaedd8e9&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
My own political reporting for The Courier-Journal years ago had to measure up – literally – to the standards of the Louisville managing editor, a stickler for fairness and ethics. He used a yardstick to make sure every candidate got exactly the same number of column inches.
The M.E. also said you have to rise above your ethics sometimes. So he would excuse a lack of balanced coverage for news reasons.
Barack Obama traveling to get his foreign policy ticket punched does not excuse blatant unfairness.
Neither does the “new guy” argument after a long “rock star” campaign by the now familiar candidate.
Nor does the Ike analogy. This isn’t history. It’s politics. And the star system.
Media celebrities recognize a fellow luminary when they see one in politics. So they give chase like Magi going to Bethlehem.
Stardom is an addiction constantly to be fed. Journalism egos are not too big but too little, too insecure, too threatened not to conform with the pack. They can’t stand the idea of being left behind when the court travels abroad.
And network newscasts look enviously at ratings by cable outlets for political coverage. So on caravan they will go.
They’ll need a little music.
Here’s my parody on a Mitchell Parish, Frank Perkins lyric familiar to Alabama:

We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.
I can’t forget the glamour, your eyes held a tender light.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

I never planned in my imagination, a situation so heavenly
A fairy land that no one else could enter
And in the center, just you and me, dear
My heart beat like a hammer, my arms wound around you tight
And stars fell upon Obama last night.