Solomon Scandals hyperlocal series so far: A list for latecomers
Late to the hyperlocal series in the Solomon Scandals blog? In reverse order, here’s a list of key parts.
–How hyperlocal journalism can help big media grow closer to local communities, just posted today.
–TBD D.C.-area news site not a steady riser in early Alexa stats. But let’s wait for the full story.
––Washington Post vs. Patch.com and Examiner.com
–How Washington Post and New York Times could outgun hyperlocal sites like TBD and Baristanet.
–Georgetown Dish joins TBD blog network: Deju vu angles—in Washington Post’s backyard.
–How TBD could use hyperlocal journalism to kick the Washington Post’s butt.
–TBD, meet NYC’s Westside Independent: Role model for SOME neighborhood blog affiliates?
–Washington Post vs. Allbritton’s TBD Web startup plans: BOTH sides could do better.
–‘What Would Google Do’ with my old steeltown newspaper in Lorain, Ohio? Here’s what I’D do.
Please I’ve avoided a formal approach, so you won’t see “Part One” and so on.
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- TheGeorgetownDish starts up: Hyperlocal newspaper war ahead? Or a friendly buyout?
- Washington Post vs. Allbritton’s TBD Web startup plans: BOTH sides could do better
Google IS killing newspapers—but not in the way you might think
I mourn the decline of traditional newspapers, like The Telegram in The Solomon Scandals, despite their many flaws.
How many paper dailies—not just individual copies of them—will end up as trash?
And, yes, as many in the industry believe, Google is responsible to a great extent, but not in the way you might think.
Google’s news site actually draws traffic to newspapers. It isn’t Google’s fault that they’re not smart enough in many cases to monetize it. As a long-term retirement investment, I own a tiny speck of Google but would say precisely the same if I didn’t.
Here’s the real newspaper-killer. As noted yesterday by Hal Varian, Google chief economist, online news readers are spending an average of 70 seconds a day on this activity, compared to 25 minutes for a daily physical newspaper. I believe him. Online newspapers still are not interactive enough.
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- A few words on tech, ‘screening’ and e-text—and Danny Bloom (1949–2032?)
- Free paper copy of ‘The Solomon Scandals’ if you come up with the best replacement for ‘L Street’ and ‘WaPo’
‘What Would Google Do’ with my old steeltown newspaper in Lorain, Ohio? Here’s what I’D do.
Related: Media critic James Fallows and Google News’ Josh Cohen will discuss digital-era journalism tomorrow, Wednesday, at 6:30 p.m., in D.C.
What if reporters didn’t take over from newspaper publishers, the tease I posted earlier? Suppose someone else did, Google. One old newspaper alum, Jeff Jarvis, has even written a book called What Would Google Do?
Guess which newspaper conglomerate has just bought copies of WWGD for “all publishers, editors and sales directors.” None other than the Journal Register Company, once singled out by a disgruntled ex-peon as “the most evil newspaper company on the planet.” It owns The Morning Journal, in Lorain, Ohio, fictionalized as “Marseilles” in The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel. Eons ago, when the Journal thudded against doorsteps in the afternoons and lacked the M word in its name, I worked the poverty and public housing beats and wrote front-page features quaintly known as “blockbusters.” It was a time of black ink in the ledger, not just in the Lorain Journal’s news columns.
Well, good-bye to all that. In the early ‘70s when I was in Lorain and the Journal Register takeover was years off, daily circulation might have been around 35,000 and Sunday readership was heading toward 45,000. A quick, er, Googling showed the daily figure at 25,334 and the Sunday one at 27,248 for a six-month period ending in March 31, 2008. Thirty miles west of Cleveland and the hometown of Toni Morrison, Lorain is a classic Rust Belt city whose population has shrunk to around 70,000 from a peak of maybe 100,000. U.S. Steel’s pipe mill remains, but Ford has retreated to an existing plant in near-by Avon Lake. During the 2000 census, when the U.S. economy was healthier than today, 17 percent of Lorain’s people lived below the poverty line, compared to 12 percent for individuals in America at large. Just earlier this year, Barack Obama visited nearby Elyria and spoke on jobs and the Great Recession.
How to run a newspaper in a plucky but rundown town like Lorain and use Google-style strategies to stay solvent? In fact, the Journal Register Company, currently the owner of 19 dailies and more than 150 other publications, did enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company is out of of bankruptcy now, and in his blog, John Paton, the CEO since February 1, not only talks up the Jarvis book but also says the company has bought Flip video cameras for all reporters. The first Flips are already in use, with some spectacular results. Paton also promises an advisory board “to bring the outside to the Journal Register Company,” a stellar idea.
As part of the “outside,” then—and as a very small Google shareholder who has stuck with the company through the stock’s ups and downs—let me share my own thoughts.
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- Can ageism save the old media? Under 25 is the age limit for new Jawa Pos reporters
- Lorain, Ohio: The real Marseilles, sort of—and Toni Morrison’s old town, on top of that
The Skyline collapse—and property rights vs. human life
Scandals at one level is a beach read, a mix of a thriller and novel of manners. But at another, it’s about bureaucratic laxness, which can kill workers—not just drain investors’ bank accounts.The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico makes Scandals all the more timely. Penny-pinching proved to be lethal. – D.R.
Fourteen workers died and 34 were injured in the real building collapse that inspired the one in The Solomon Scandals.
The Skyline Plaza disaster at Bailey’s Crossroads in Northern Virginia happened on March 2, 1973—the result, many said, of premature removal of concrete shoring.
Fines amounted to just $300 for the shoring-related lapse and $13,000 for violations of worker safety codes. Not so coincidentally, an even worse disaster followed in West Virginia just five years later, killing 51 workers in America’s most deadly construction accident.
The Skyline death toll of 14 was minor compared to the calamity at the fictitious Vulture’s Point, the IRS/CIA building that I located in the general area of Dyke Marsh, south of Alexandria. I added a hill and other topographical features missing from the actual site on the Potomac River. The nature-lover in the right photo is “stalking the birds hiding in the cattails.”
Aided by Gordon Batson of Clarkson University and M. Kevin Parfitt of Pennsylvania State University, I came up with my own causes for the Vulture’s Point disaster, which, unlike Skyline, didn’t happen during construction.
You might also enjoy:Lorain, Ohio: The real Marseilles, sort of—and Toni Morrison’s old town, on top of that
The Washington, D.C., area gets the most ink in The Solomon Scandals.
But Scandals also contains flashbacks to the steel town of Marseilles, Ohio, a fictionalized version of Lorain, where I wrote features and worked the poverty and public housing beats for the Journal, the local daily.
The phrase “factory town” applies. In Scandals even D.C. comes off the same way, as a hierarchical place with the bosses in firm control most of the time. Most. There is the occasion when Juan Garcia, “a malcontent of a steelworker in Marseilles…tampered with some machinery at U.S. Steel, so that a sadistic foreman became part of a twenty-ton ingot shipped to a Chevrolet foundry.”
“Everybody in the area looked down on Marseilles,” recalls Jonathan Stone, the narrator in Scandals with a crush on a medieval studies major from Oberlin. “The Cleveland papers said Marseillans wed in bowling shirts. Oberlin students condescended toward the Marseilles the way some missionaries from the school must have sneered during the nineteenth century toward the Chinese.” Marseilles is “as large a city as can exist without anyone having heard of it.”
Sense of humor despite bleak times
Luckily some natives of the real Lorain share Stone’s sense of humor, and in that vein, I recently ran across a delightful group on Facebook, called You Know Your From Lorain When… Here are some sample entries, thrown together in one paragraph to save space. “Your idea of a luxury car is a Ford Escort GT. Every time you hear Spanish music, it brings back fond memories of South Lorain. You find yourself hanging out at Super K in the wee hours of the morning. Before you went to Super K you were at Rebman’s Bowling Alley. Your high school football team doesn’t win more than 3 games a season. You cried when the last Ford Thunderbird was driven down Broadway.”
The latter line is especially significant since Lorain has been in a recession for years, and D.C.‘s élite-driven trade policies just may have contributed to the shutdown of the huge Ford factory. Current population is 68,652, as reported in Wikipedia. I suspect it was much greater when I lived in Lorain during the ‘70s.
Toni Morrison ties—plus a giant concrete Easter basket
Lorain is also the hometown of Bill Schroeder, the ROTC cadet and ex-Eagle Scout killed at Kent State. But Lorain is much more than a city of victims. Toni Morrison, for example, the Nobel Prize laureate, once lived there, and Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, is a Lorain native. Lorain is even the inspiration for a hypertext poet. And on top of that, as shown by another Facebook group, it is the setting for one of the world’s largest concrete Easter baskets. What’s more, I have wonderful recollections of the Lorain Public Library system, which, by the way, has created a memory project online (source of the basket photo). Perhaps there’s more than a little connection between the quality of the library system and the Morrison Nobel and Dirda Pulitzer.
About the other images: The bridge photo is Creative Commons-licensed from ronnie44052, on Flickr. Lorain is in northeast Ohio, where the Black River flows into Lake Erie. Caption reads, “The Yosemite from Monrovia, Liberia, on the west coast of Africa, enters the port of Lorain…with the assistance of the tugs Illinois and Iowa.” The steel plant image is is CC-licensed from ronnie44052, the number being Lorain’s ZIP code. Wikipedia is the source of the GT photo. Toni Morrison’s picture is also from Wikipedia and includes modifications by Entheta.
Related: ‘What Would Google Do’ with my old steeltown newspaper? Here’s what I’d do.
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