It’s official: I’m not laid off.

The Journal Star is a rare newsroom governed by seniority when cuts are made, as stipulated in our Newspaper Guild contract. I’ve been there almost 6 years – an eternity in print time – but have been left at the bottom of the heap by the departures of younger coworkers.

I was saved on Good Friday in 2010. Today, I was saved on Friday the 13th. Each time, numerous senior colleagues stepped forward to voluntarily face the guillotine. These rolling heads have saved my own.

We’re all acutely aware of reality, that the blood runs freely at every newspaper. Mine is not unique. Each time the ax swings through our newsroom, I duck; I’m a tall man, after all. That swift execution can come on any day of any week of any year. I no longer know the meaning of future plans.

And yet I stay! I persist, much like this infamous cat. I’m not masochistic, but could I convince you otherwise? I will admit that there’s less celebration this second time around. I don’t want to become “good” at this. While my love for newspapers is eternal, we need to hug this out before someone gets hurt.

– No 30 –

I made the desolate trek across Iowa to spend Turkey Day with friends in Nebraska. We know nothing about birds.

So much has been written already, but I still feel the urge to add to the pile.

Sunday night, fresh from emergency grocery shopping with my neighbor/friend/coworker, I noticed several tweets by prominent WH network correspondents in my timeline. Each emphasizing the unusualness of Obama calling a presser at 11pm eastern on a Sunday.

I checked NYTimes.com and found zilch. And yet here was Twitter, sputtering to life with accounts of large media organizations calling their hotshots to the White House – “just come in” and “get to work” were common refrains.

I’m a dude without cable TV, so I texted my neighbor to ask if I could hop downstairs to watch the presser. A flurry of texts flew from my phone to alert friends and family, and the great Internet machine ramped into high gear. Read midway through this AP story for some fascinating traffic statistics.

Despite knowing that the announcement would be related to national security, I distinctly remember being anxious. And that I was munching on a bowl of cereal – my dinner for the night. I looked at my neighbor, and she seemed unnerved, too. Here we are, newspaper people, worried about the unknown.

I’m not even sure what we were worried about. But “national security” is a big umbrella, one that can hold “aliens have landed” as easily as it can fit “we’ve started another war.”

So we watched her television, smartphones in hand, and nervously laughed at CNN’s desperate attempt to hold our attention for lengthy periods of pure speculation. Twitter was desperate with attempts at snarky humor, while Facebook was a bit more measured. Both were unrelenting. I decided drinks were in order, so I ran back upstairs to my apartment and looked for something to toast with – anything, really – and settled on an almost empty bottle of Captain Morgan and two tiny espresso cups.

By this point, crowds began celebrating outside the White House in a way normally reserved for Super Bowl victories. An important realization was reached: neither of us own American flags.

Obama finally spoke, confirmed the news and we quietly clinked cups.

____

Fast-forward to Monday morning at 6 a.m.: I did not get enough sleep. I needed espresso and newspapers. The first is successful, but the second fails unnecessarily. Starbucks had the New York Times, alright, but it was an early national edition sans any bin Laden mention.

I was able to find both a Tribune and Sun-Times later in the day. The Trib chose to hold presses for 2 hours after 1st edition, with editors saying “skip the deadline.”

At work, I immediately set about pushing updated wire reports onto our homepage and packaging it in a way that looked clean and pretty. It’s a difficult task with our Zope CMS system, seemingly developed to tie our hands behind our backs at every turn. I resorted to CSS trickery with negative values and other non-kosher remedies.

Our print edition was striking, one of the few Journal Star fronts that made me want to smash the glass in the single-copy box out of news hunger. Cutting the typical skybox promos let the nameplate float to the very top, leaving plenty of room for a nice, fat 1.75″ screaming head across 6 columns. Kudos to Shannon Countryman, who had to blow up A1 that night like hundreds of other copy editors around the country. Our 11:50 p.m. off-the-floor deadline was delayed until after 12:30 a.m.

Tuesday’s budget had 7 local stories by 6 reporters slated, not including countless wire reports. One of our copy editors said she was in “folo hell.”

“Hey man, we cut another hole in the glass before the game.”

One of the rough-looking Civic Center employees is talking to me. That never happens. And he’s pointing to an impossibly small area about 50 feet away.

“You might have to get to it from underneath the bleachers.”

Uh, okay. I’m at a Peoria Rivermen hockey game, their last regular season home game of the season. 9,000 fans are packed into the arena, the air is chilly and the ice is slick. I leave my usual, behind-the-net spot where a hole is cut into the protective dasher board glass and try to find my new home.

This is disgusting. And dark. I’m tiptoeing around spilled nacho cheese and beer bottles still oozing sticky amber booze. There’s a real danger that I’ll crack my skull open. Remember those jungle gyms from childhood’s past? Brains all over the ground with one missed step.

I see a tiny bit of light from under the seats. I crouch down and… yes, there’s a hole. And about a foot of clearance. Holy cripes.

I’m not a claustrophobic man by nature, but I do possess a healthy respect for tight spaces. There’s a reason why I don’t climb into places where I could get stuck. I might get stuck.

I imagine getting wedged in tight enough that I’m not able to cry for help. The cheers and jeers of hockey hooligans would serenade the end for this guy. I’d die hearing profanities and body checking. If brave, I might try a “127 Hours” effort. But I subscribe to “never leave a man(‘s body part) behind.”

I slap my head on a girder and realize I have no camera gear. So back through the debris I go, pushing several cameras and a 200-400mm monster zoom under the opening into what might be a fissure in the Earth itself.

My turn. I slither on my belly, cleaning the floor with each inch traversed. I’m doing them a favor, these lazy bastards! One final push and I’m alive… in a cage.

This new hole in the glass was cut at a perfect spot from a photographic standpoint: six feet back from the goal line, with a great view of someone slapping that puck straight into the net.

But the arena configuration means that the seats don’t meet flush with the dasher boards in all places, leaving awkward gaps for stupid photographers to be forgotten.

I need a chair. So I get a chair. Back through the gap I go. A woman screams as she realizes where I am.

And then it’s off to the races. I work and worry about peanuts and pucks and tennis shoes, all hitting the back of my head simultaneously.

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The party included two cakes, Jones said. One was decorated with the words, “Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler.” The other bore the phrase, “The South Was Right. White Men Fight,” Jones said.

“Smoke bomb ends Hitler birthday party” – Chicago Tribune, April 19, 2011

April 3, 2011

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – Every other store in that blasted town takes the holy name of Lincoln in vain. The man beneath the stovepipe hat smiles from signs, creeps from windows. After a late night with friends and a cathartic breakfast, Amanda graciously took me around to see the sights. “I want to show you just one more thing” turned into a full, sunny afternoon that may go down in the annals of history as my best Springfield trip.

Take that, Abe.

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I was on the desk the other night at the paper, pulling stories from the federal budget showdown, and I saw this AP photo of House Speaker John Boehner cross the wire. It looked familiar; little did I know how familiar it actually was.

I was a pallbearer Friday, but I also was not. My grandpa died last week, and instead of being at the funeral in Wichita, Kan., I was in Champaign, Ill. on a freelance assignment.

This is a very personal subject to shove into the great emptiness of the Internet, but I’m driven to do it anyway. My first draft was heartfelt and very good. It evaporated from my hands after I forgot to save. This final text is stilted and clunky, but I’m not writing to garner sympathy or to impress. I write to pay my respects.

He was 87 years old. It wasn’t a dramatic exit; he’s been constantly in and out of hospitals and care facilities for the past 6 months. My immediate and extended families have carried the burden by keeping vigil with him in shifts. The role of parental caretaker, even if split between siblings, is brutal. I wrote about it in January.

So when it was time for him to go, I imagine a great exhale released into the air. We will miss him much – very much – but he ended his time on Earth the way most of us dream of it: surrounded by family, loved until the end. It surprised no one, but that doesn’t matter. It’s always too soon.

He leaves behind 3 siblings, 6 children and his wife (my grandma.) And me, one of twelve grandchildren.

I remember him as a farmer, even though he made a career as a flight line mechanic at Boeing. He had a fondness for old country music and short-sleeve dress shirts. A stroke many years ago took away some of his speed, but his sense of humor remained intact.

My brother sent me a vague text to call him on the night he died. I was on a date, in the middle of a Scrabble game suddenly placed on hold. I spent the rest of the night digging through shoeboxes, looking for old photos I’d taken of him. The image at the top is my grandpa at his birthday party in 1999. It’s a rockin’ photo.

I called my mom the next day to check on her, and we talked about the business of dying. There were funeral plans to make, burial plots to purchase and affairs to get in order. I felt really guilty for not being able to attend the funeral because of my poor planning. But as any good mother would do, she struck the perfect mixture of “lesson to be learned” and “it’s alright.” My dad urged me to enjoy life.

Toward the end of the conversation, she mentioned a family viewing at the funeral home the next day. She was ready for it, she said, curious to see what her dad looks like. It was a shocking statement, but she continued: he’d been in a state of decline for so long that she was looking forward to seeing and remembering him at peace. I could feel tears form as I quickly hung up the phone.

He was buried on a sunny, crisp Friday in Kansas. Back in Illinois, I lit two votive candles at a downtown church while on my lunch break. I’ll miss him.

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The bomb dropped last night: my newspaper of employment, the Journal Star, will implement an online paywall starting April 4.

I’ve been involved in meetings about it for the past month, and we’ve been closely following the New York Times as they begin their own paywall tomorrow. Now it’s official. The chickens are restless, as expected, with most readers voicing some version of the following:

Readership will drop off like the Mariana Trench.

RIP Journal Star

I’ll take that $69.95 for a year over to the Casino and put it on three months before you either return to a free site or have to raise your rates even more to make up for the lack of ad revenue and visitors.

Perhaps if your advertising rates weren’t so ridiculous, you could afford to keep content free.

This is clearly and sadly the signal of the end of newspapers.

As a JS reader for 20+ years now, I can safely say this is the end of our relationship.

If the paper wasn’tt mired in such a far left bias I might consider it.

If this gets rid of the trolls on here who will now no longer be able to afford******ing on here because they have no job and just****** here all day,,,,,,then Ill pay double what youre asking.

Good luck PJS…I promise I will NOT pay.

Boy, talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. Fine job PJS, fine job indeed.

Not worth my milk money.

I think you get the picture. Managing editor John Plevka has already replied to some of the criticism in a blog post.

So do I personally believe in paying for news on the Internet? I’m going to cautiously say “yes.” Reporting is time-consuming, costly work; why pretend that it isn’t? Critics of this move will cite lost pageviews and further decline of online ad rates. But these numbers don’t fully tell the truth about your audience. This mass of anonymous readership isn’t local, and they will never again return to your website. These ad views by “randoms” are lost advertising dollars. But a reader that returns 6 times a day should command higher ad rates, even if overall pageviews are down. This is a captive, interested reader. And he’s likely looking for the local news he or she can’t get elsewhere in such depth. There was a recent article on the decline of SEO (search engine optimization) that basically agrees with this premise. And besides, those casual users coming from Google are still in the clear – we won’t start metering them until they’ve read their 15th story in a month.

There has admittedly been much newsroom grumbling about the amount of effort we put into our free website. Some editors have complained about putting valuable bodies to work on a product that, quite frankly, hurts our bottom line. And they’re honestly right. Starting in April, pjstar.com is no longer a freeloading enemy of our print product, but instead a complementary business model. It’s been proven again and again that people have a different psychological response toward a free product. You expect very little from it and, in turn, you value it less. This applies internally, too.

Some are already plotting their ways around the paywall at the NYT. And of course it’s porous, a javascript method easily disabled by those who care to give it a try. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger said in Australia’s The Age that he isn’t worried: “It’ll be mostly high school kids and people out of work,” he said, before adding “I can’t believe I said that.” Oops.

I’d add readers aged 20-35 to that list of people unaccustomed to paying for information. That worries me, too, since these are the readers we so desperately need to attract. This dispatch from SXSW confirms my fear.

I fully admit that this is a risky gambit. It’s rocking a boat that was launched 16 years ago, one that readers have made a part of their daily lives. But if there was ever a time to experiment, this is it. As Henry Ford put it, “Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.”

And so the debate continues. Former New York Times online dudes worry. And so do the media pundits. But I haven’t been this excited about the newspaper business in a long time.

$6.95 a month or $69.95 a year. Would you subscribe?

Tonight, a printing press will die. The ink will coagulate in the wells, the paper will rend to shreds, and the gears will scrape to a noisy halt. And if not tonight, soon enough.

As part of a newspaper chain, I’ve seen the life cycle of a printing press in real-time. GateHouse Media has chosen to consolidate printing operations in the central Illinois region to our press right here in Peoria. My mouth is shut on whether this is good or bad, but it has meant change. The Galesburg Register-Mail shuttered their press in 2010, and now the State Journal-Register spit out their last edition in 2011. And in the chaos of reorganization, Galesburg began printing again the same day that Springfield went silent. It’s a tongue-twister.

Amid all this, the Journal Star reduced page size from 50 inches to 44 inches. I did a quick photo project on the web-width reduction. Go look. It gave me a good excuse to climb around on the machinery, to scale the 4-story towers and listen the thrum of the beast scale rapidly to 70,000 copies an hour. The German-built MAN Roland Geoman 70 offset press is state-of-the-art, completed in 2004 at a cost of millions of dollars. It’s a beauty, from the giant rollers spinning paper at her ankles to the folder and former under her skirt.

There are foreign, ragged pieces of machinery sitting around the Journal Star complex. These are dismembered body parts, pieces and chunks of the Springfield press and mailroom machinery. They’re in various stages of being installed in Peoria; “we can rebuild him!” Frankly, it’s creepy.

I hate seeing journalism tied to the printing press; in fact, the day that we no longer need to spend large amounts of money on heavy machinery is the day that journalism can start healing. But that primitive machine, rife with danger, smelling of sticky ink… wowee zowee!

Photos of dead presses:

The Palm Beach Post

The State Journal-Register