Depressing News

Copyright 2009 Ben S. Pollock

The news business is collapsing. Lots of other industries are imploding — banking, autos — but who can do without loans and cars, while who needs news in this time of peace (yes, it is)?

I. News Always Has Been Free, Almost

The explanation given is that the Internet is free. If people believe that, it’s no surprise that individuals are going broke nearly as fast as corporations. They’re all idiots. The “free” Internet is paid for with a monthly phone or cable bill. If you bring your laptop to a wired coffee shop, you pay for it with overpriced caffeine. If you check e-mail at the library, then taxes are paying for it. Sure that’s not much money, but there it is. At the cheapest, the home connection is about $1 a day. The amount hasn’t changed much — though response gotten pleasantly faster — in years.

I got a bill from my newspaper the other day (by mistake) and got out a calculator. Subscribing for seven days a week costs 30 cents to 34 cents per, depending on the choice of a quarterly or annual agreement. That’s Blow Your Nose Money, especially when compared to the other bits you blow bucks for in the course of a work week. Buying a newspaper off a stand moves the daily price closer to that of the Internet. That dollar a day for the Web is nothin’, either, unless you’re really, really hurting. As the Good Depression moves in, that day may be coming for the rest of us.

I long have held a conclusion about what will save the news business but have kept quiet. Explaining it would be roundabout. Then the area’s huge ice storm gave me an “aha” moment, making the route less circuitous though long.

II. The Burger Crowd

We, My Beloved and I, met with a restaurateur when we first settled in the Eureka Springs area in early 1998, to manage for a year a bed-and-breakfast with gift shop owned by four Arkansas businessmen. The guy was a stranger but from Fort Smith and we had people in common. I was looking for advice.

From him we learned some background on Eureka then, out of the blue, about turning tables. It was on his mind. If we were starting out a decade later we’d know the restaurant term, because the details of small business have been popular articles, to say nothing of “reality” shows. This man priced his meals higher than needed to prevent local old-timers and Passion Play tourists (as opposed to the artsy-spa tourists) from ordering the cheapest items on the menu — burgers — plus coffee or iced tea and camping a couple of hours. Three sets of diners could have been seated there in that span.

Yet who wants to be rushed when paying resort prices? Elsewhere in the country, Starbucks was expanding quickly and raking in great profit with the nearly the opposite concept, where people hang out for hours on an espresso drink, no free refills, conversing, reading or using computers.

MB and I came back to buy dinner from him a few weeks later, with another couple. To be nice. Maybe we should not have been surprised at the routine menu choices and their ordinary quality. If he wanted the sophisticated crowd, why the hunting-and-fishing motif and Holiday Inn fare? And his turned out to be a place, rare in Eureka, that had neither vegetarian entrees nor an accommodating chef so we did our country diner ordering dance: side-dish improv.

His place was out of the way for us, and we didn’t return, nor have MB and I ever seen or heard of him since. He was cynical to the point we wondered why he agreed to see us, but he was the one who kept the conversation going. So we remember the Burger Crowd lesson 11 years later, as we see some restaurants follow it to good success, while old-fashioned diners ignore it to stable income year in and out. We see Starbucks and its locally owned take-offs do well, even as we read that the chain has suffered great setbacks in the last year.

I think he was angry because his theory wasn’t working all that well. In truth though the Burger Crowd theory is applied everywhere still. It’s what sets Panera at a remove from Burger King and Martha Stewart above other Kmart products. Yes the quality is a couple of clicks better but is it worth the price difference? The Starbucks model does well in other circumstances. Many working theories besides these abound; it’s a matter of the proprietor making the appropriate assessment of all factors.

III. Blow Your Nose Money

Our year at the Beaver Town Inn & Trading Post gave us a lifetime of anecdotes, although MB and I aren’t the sort to share them often. “Burger Crowd” is the second, and this is the favorite. The Trading Post sold few gifts but a good share of cigarettes, snacks and beer. In Arkansas, the managers of any store that sells alcohol are compelled to go to a one-day “Beer School” in Little Rock for the permit. (People running on-premises consumption joints have their own hoops to run). The state Alcoholic Beverage Control ran the workshop. Its purpose was to teach the 20 of us that Saturday in 1998 what’s permitted and not, and the penalties of selling to minors and so forth.

The teacher was a staff lawyer in a suit and tie. After grading our exams at the end of the afternoon, he signed our certificates with a fat Montblanc fountain pen. His biggest lesson — in terms of time he spent on it — was that the penalties for violating nearly any provision were slight and affordable. Opening too early or staying open too late, selling booze on Sundays, could be met with a fine of $100 per each day that the violation occurred. Compared to what convenience stores can take in for beer sales (allowed only in certain areas of the state), $100 for an “oversight” here and there meant mere Blow Your Nose Money, he said.

The lawyer asked if we students thought $100 was a lot of money. All of us did. MB and I wore business casual — we’d be seeing friends later — still not the lawyer’s pinstripes, but all the other students looked downright grungy, not much wealth there. The lawyer focused on them.

“You and your honey go to the lake a lot of weekends, right? (Many nods in response.) Stay Friday night, maybe Saturday night, too? (Nods.) What’s a motel cost? How much you pay for lunch, for chips, for dinner, for your beers? You have a trailer, well OK, what are your payments? And the boat payments, buying ice? See, $100 is Blow Your Nose Money.”

The lawyer gave example after example like this of routine life for working-class families, interrupting himself often to check for reactions and shows of hands for How many do this or How many pay for that. He thus kept them involved, that he meant them.

I believe the teacher emphasized this as a way of throwing in a free lesson on business, to rethink money, and that he couldn’t fill six hours on just state regulations. In the 11 years since, both MB and I think $100 is a lot of money even when indexed for inflation, but we understand it’s Blow Your Nose Money too. Consumer Reports persuaded me to pay 94 cents at Wal-Mart for good toothpaste. When I am spending minutes squeezing the last of the goo on my brush, I remember, $1 is a hundredth of Blow Your Nose Money, so I grab a fresh tube from the cabinet and toss the spent one.

Blow Your Nose Money is a contradiction of the Great Depression generation mushing slivers of soap together to get a few more washes. As our Good Depression deepens (the Great Depression was suffered by the Greatest Generation, and at best we’re just a Good Generation), how penny-pinching will we become? Will it help?

The dollar-a-day Internet is a better value than the 30-cent delivered newspaper: You can check e-mail, view TV shows you missed, interact via Facebook, read Roger Ebert’s movie reviews, some people get to work remotely (away from the office) with it. Even if you invest in one of the few fee-based Web sites (I pay for The Wall Street Journal and Cooks Illustrated online), those are just pennies a day over that.

MB’s and my parents were children in the 1940s and ’30s. Well into their later years, they maintained nervous money-saving habits that could not have helped much then. But the principal is: Every bit helps.

Does it really?

IV. The Ice Age

MB and I will be sorting for a long time the lessons gained from the ice storm that began Monday, Jan. 26, 2009. The aha for me starts like this: My newspaper managed to show up on my doorstop every morning that week. On the first dawns, the carrier must’ve walked it up as we live on a steep lane, thickly coated with ice and littered by fallen oak and pine limbs.

My street had neither electricity nor land-line phone service. The various newspapers gave us storm tips and emergency phone numbers, as well as facts on the weather and the responses to it. Due to federal deregulation news-talk radio stations had sports call-ins and in the afternoon Rush Limbaugh. The storm cut the public radio station from the air. Until we decided to evacuate to a Bentonville motel and board our pets, we didn’t have TV, whose capsules when we got to see them proved always never quite enough.

In fall 2005 the New Orleans Times Picayune famously kept production during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, both online and print, the latter done miles away then returned by truck and boat. Until our ice storm that impressed me. Now, to what end? No power no Internet. A print edition can’t answer every question a storm victim will have about what’s going on and what to do about it, not when it’s also got to fit in all the other news, not to mention sports, comics and classifieds. Plus, it’s the latest — from yesterday afternoon.

I can’t convey the anguish of how badly I wanted information that icy week and how unavailable it was. Maybe it was just nervous compulsion, from years of conveniently checking e-mail, of glancing at The Weather Channel, of news.google and news.yahoo. I can’t say precisely what I wanted from the storm-edition newspapers except, more. In the drafty cold house, we had no TV, and why waste the radio’s batteries on not-much? Cell phones connected us to other people who knew no more than us. Ours is an older neighborhood with wide diversity of neighbors — we moved branches for one another and exchanged phone numbers like we should have done years ago — and they felt the isolation from information, too. We checked who had gas water heaters and wood stoves and generators, which are great while you have gallons of fuel around. We had lists of who left for motels and who toughed it out (“Hey, come home, your power’s back! No, ours is still out.”) It was a short-lived panic, as on the first afternoons I would walk and slide 3/4 of a mile to my car, parked at a supermarket, and drive to the newsroom. This was no Katrina.

The ice storm thus persuaded me — I already thought this — that an all-Internet newspaper won’t work as a news source in the full and likely variety of circumstances. But the journalism profession is heading that way because the print model is going broke.

V. World War Three Strikes and We’re Out?

With a track record of foolish predictions, allow me to state with certainty yet no authority or proof what’s going to happen to the news business. It’s kind-of going to repeat history, or repeat myth, that of the Spanish-American War. The news business — and local and network or cable television news have similar economic problems — will be free-falling for a few years, even spinning out, until something bad happens. Real bad, worse than 9/11.

The New York newspapers were invaluable in the weeks after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but various Web sites were a great source of information and comfort to everyone, too, as was TV and NPR and bloggers for that matter. But that faded fairly quickly into the economic meltdown that was just beginning then.

News will come back when people really need it. The Good Depression won’t be enough. No one’s ever said the Great Depression caused a jump in revenue. Today there is no increase in circulation or ratings attributable to people wanting to understand the Obama Stimulus Plan. There won’t be. The worsening economy won’t be enough to bring either newspapers or online news vehicles into prominence. People now are getting all the information they want about job retraining and avoiding scams, never mind what more they need to know. It’s not enough to worry about shelter and food; we’re going to have to be worried about our lives before we demand to know the whole story, the real story as far as professional journalists can dig in and figure it out, day in and day out, to bring the news media back.

With large, tangible threats to ourselves and our country, people will demand knowledge, including gory photos and revelations of deceit from leaders we had admired. Actually, threats won’t be enough.

We don’t need a third world war. A full-fledged one-on-one war will save the news media. Iraq and Afghanistan are not out-and-out wars, sorry. We are not being threatened, personally, politically or geographically, the troops are not drafted, and we can leave Baghdad or Kabul at any time. Yes, we need to withdraw carefully, but that’s up to us. In an out-and-out war, the enemy will have a say on when it stops.

Don’t want war? OK. A terrorist attack with a handheld nuclear weapon, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans immediately and with radiation spreading for months. (Fewer than 3,000 people died on 9/11.) That’ll do. That’s when the Web won’t be enough, and print editions won’t be enough, either. Americans will demand reliable information, summarized intelligently, in any conveyance they can access — including paper, Internet and cell phones — because one or more may be knocked out at times.

Folks either will be willing to pay for information or — more likely — corporations will see value in advertising to consumers of news. The news media might become a defense-related industry. More likely is that advertisers will be trading in war. Munitions and the like pulled the country out of the Great Depression via World War II: You think Rosie the Riveter was knocking out hot tubs? Advertisers will see a market and subsidize the news for us. Investigative reporting, declining in the cutbacks due to its cost, will return to value. Readers and viewers will insist on the truth.

In recent months, news executives and academics have proposed ways the news business can return to profitability. Slate summarized them well, from non-profit status to pulling back from publicly owned incorporation, and hybrid forms. Between these and various online consumer payment setups, we have multiple ways of securing the barn doors after the critters left: Yale lock, Master or Kryptonite? They’re untested in today’s circumstances. Sure, the Burger Crowd or Starbucks models could be studied. I don’t know. We never tried the restaurant business.

When people really want news, and badly enough, what they will afford will become Blow Your Nose Money. Until blood flows, our media free fall will continue.

Would you like extra foam on your latte?

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