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.
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.
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:
Once out of the building, he got on the laptop he had thrown out to tell people through Facebook what happened. He also emailed his teacher to tell her he “narrowly escaped a fire by dangling out of a window” and would not be in class.
– 11 hurt in extra-alarm fire near Loyola (Chicago Tribune, March 14, 2010)
Because I haven’t learned my lesson the last time I crashed a hard drive, I have yet another sob story for you. Sit down.
I recently bought a new SSD drive, which should be cause for celebration: fast, quiet, all that jazz. But it’s only 120gb, since those buggers are still pretty pricey.
I begin moving data from my boot drive to an extra drive I found in a drawer. The Post-it note said “blank” and I assumed all was well. Over 300gb of “really important stuff” was uprooted and moved.
And then it stopped working.
This means that most of my life from the past year is now dead. And, again, my entire collection of music. This last happened in 2007 and I had the same reaction – nothing! I’m numb.
There are recovery programs out there. I run one, which recovers 100,000 files. Each file is rendered anonymous, dumped in new folders without proper filenames. All of my JPEG pictures now read like binary code.
The music seems to be slightly better off; some of the filenames survived, along with most of the ID3 tags. So, in interest of getting things usable again, I turned to iTunes’ organizational tools. I normally hate letting iTunes move my files around, but I’ll let it go to town on this. 1,000 files now moved and sorted (quite a few incorrectly.) It’s as if I cut the DNA bonds between artists; there is Bach growing out of The Crystal Method.
I (may) have learned my lesson. Backup. Please hold me to it.
In other news, my credit card number was stolen this past month. Stop doing that.
Read, damn it, read! And so I am. I have a few library books I’m chugging away on finishing before owing 3 figures in fines, yet I want to forget them and start All in the Timing, fourteen plays by David Ives. Posthaste.
It begins with a preface to rule all prefaces:
Thank you for your very kind letter about my plays. Here are the answers to your questions:
1. Longhand, with Bic blue medium-point pens.
4. Yes
5. No
6. “Pinocchio”
12. By moistening the tip and saying, “Wankel Rotary Engine,” of course.
You get the idea. 41 answers. And a cover of a man with an axe embedded in his head. I assume that there are actual plays in the book, too. I can’t wait.
“Most gentlemen callers don’t even make it to the bedroom. One bolted when Ms. Ruttenberg, who has a total of 160 animals on her sprawling mountainside property, let a baby goat into the living room after Trixie, the pig, had already joined the visit.”
Cold Nights, Warm Noses (New York Times: Feb. 16, 2011)