The morning jitters just get worse

Too many newsroom executives are so deeply imbedded in that mechanical culture, they are slow to adapt to electronic alternatives. Some can’t or won’t adopt at all. They prefer to ride out this info-technology endgame until personal retirement or until their embrace of the dead tree industry ends in a forest denuded of everything but computer screens.

My newspaper didn’t come this morning. Am I grumpy? You bet. And so’s my labradoodle, Jack.
He and I walk out to the front porch every morning at 5. He does what he needs to do. I look for what I need – my ink and newsprint fix. A sensitive animal, Jack picks up on my moody empty-feeling when the paper is not there.
Dogs and newspaper readers have a lot in common. No, I don’t mean the puppy puddle training stage on yellowing newsprint. I mean regular, repetitive reward for behavior is what conditions us.
It’s the open secret of newspaper circulation departments.
They interrupt our training pattern at their peril.
I can if I must skip the printed edition yet still get the news and features.
My laptop is primed and ready to dispense a lot more information than the broadsheet and from far more sources.
At 5 a.m. the regional news and weather are coming on TV. CNN is already telling me what the world markets are doing and what the overnight events are. Why, wonder of wonders, that includes even those occurrences since the local editors put to bed the newspaper, the one that didn’t rise and shine anyway.
Non-delivery simply underscores the anachronism of the printed word.
But the paper remains a comfort to hold in the hand, to turn the pages, to have an outward and physical sign of the inward sense of place where it’s published.
How comforting it is to get mad at its opinions or to mentally upbraid the columnists or to disagree with the selection of news. The faux anger gets my day started.
I love a paper I can hate and still keep coming back to. As long as it keeps coming back to me!
Oh, I could call the newspaper office where someone would dispatch a replacement carried by a fawning, apologetic route manager tugging his forelock and promising to do better if I just won’t drop my subscription.
I’m hooked. I won’t drop. But it will happen again that the paper won’t show up. And again. And again in a random string of unpredictable breaks in the delivery ritual. Even now I’m surprised when the paper does arrive on time and unsurprised but still petulant when it does not.
The newspaper factory is a relic of industrial technology with an infinite number of things that can go wrong on the transmission belt that ends at Jack’s and my doorstep.
Forget all the modernization and good intentions, which are considerable.
The mechanism of newspaper production wheezes and creaks and ultimately depends on some scarcely paid, non-professional driver to open bundles in the nighttime and to wrap a rubber band around a paper (double wrapping it with plastic in bad weather) and to get it to me before I get cranky for having to wait.
Too many newsroom executives are so deeply imbedded in that mechanical culture, they are slow to adapt to electronic alternatives. Some can’t or won’t adopt at all. They prefer to ride out this info-technology endgame until personal retirement or until their embrace of the dead tree industry ends in a forest denuded of everything but computer screens.
Established readers like me encourage the old ways with memory feelings of romance. And of habit.

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.