by Dave Barry
The newspaper business is a perfect fit for us, because it doesn’t require the firm grasp on factual reality demanded by businesses such as, for example, plumbing. When a plumber installs a bathroom, he has to understand and obey the laws of plumbing physics, and he has to have all of the plumbing parts he needs, or the bathroom is not going to work, and he is not going to get paid. Whereas we journalists, using our English-major skills, are able to routinely assemble authoritative-sounding stories even though we have only a few tiny shreds of second- or third-hand information and only the vaguest understanding of what actually happened. We produce stories that, if they were bathrooms, would have water spurting from the electrical outlets and bolts of electricity shooting out of the toilet.
I produced many such stories myself, starting out as a cub reporter in West Chester, Pa., for a daily local newspaper called, descriptively, the Daily Local News. I wrote stories about a wide range of topics I was unqualified to discuss with any degree of authority, including municipal government, crime, fires, traffic accidents, the courts, the public schools, politics, medicine, zoning, religion, sewage treatment, and local residents who had grown unusually large zucchini. I always tried to be accurate, but I suspect I made mistakes of varying sizes in every story I wrote, including about the zucchini, which I probably identified as some other vegetable, or possibly a raccoon.
“Wait a minute,” you’re saying. “Don’t newspapers have editors?”
Yes, but the editors are also English majors. What is worse, they are English majors who have ceased engaging directly in journalism. They spend virtually all of their time in conference-room story-planning meetings with other editors, and thus have completely lost touch with reality. Committees of newspaper editors are legendary for coming up with story ideas that would require reporters to perform feats of journalism that are clearly impossible, such as interview both Prince Charles and Jimmy Hoffa. Having dreamed up a story concept, the editors order some wretched reporter to execute it; when the reporter turns in the story, the editors are invariably disappointed that it doesn’t measure up to the shining polished brilliance of the original idea as conceived in the conference room.
Editor meetings are also the source of almost all newspaper “trend” stories, which over the years have consumed billions of acres of forestland without adding a single fact to the storehouse of human knowledge. These stories typically originate when an editor happens to notice something that strikes him or her as significant. For example, the editor might see a person wearing a Howdy Doody T-shirt, and then, a few hours later, see another person (or possibly even the same person; it doesn’t matter) wearing a Howdy Doody T-shirt. The next day, at one of the story-planning meetings, the editor might mention this, and another editor might report having also recently seen a person (also possibly the same person) in a Howdy Doody T-shirt.
The editors, having reached critical mass—Three Howdy Doody T-shirts!—decide that they have discovered a trend. They stride out into the newsroom, where reporters, seeing them coming, scatter like gazelles on an African plain when the lions show up. Some reporters will dive under their desks to avoid being assigned a trend story.
Inevitably the editors track down some unfortunate reporter and order him to produce a thirty-inch “fun” story about the Howdy Doody nostalgia trend that is sweeping the nation. And make no mistake: The reporter will produce that story. He has to. The editors have already scheduled a publication date and commissioned a fun graphic-design element; they would be very unhappy with the reporter if he threw a monkey wrench into the production line of journalism by reporting that there actually was no such trend. So using his journalism skills, he will scrape together a story containing the Minimum Acceptable Trend Story Factoid Content, consisting of:• A statistical sample of three regular people, representing the nation, who can be prodded into providing quotes affirming that, sure, they like Howdy Doody; and
• One authority willing to give an authoritative analysis of the Howdy Doody trend.
The three regular people can be anybody, including if necessary friends or relatives of the reporter. The authority is usually a college professor. There is no topic that you cannot find a college professor willing to produce an instant, authoritative quote about.
So the reporter grinds out thirty inches on the Howdy Doody craze and turns it in. The story gets a big display—bigger than most stories involving actual news—because (a) the editors thought of it; (b) it was on the schedule; (c) they had a graphic-design element for it; and (d) it’s fun! Editors for other newspapers or TV news may see the story and order their reporters to investigate, thereby setting off a chain reaction of Howdy-Doody-craze stories all over the country. It’s even possible that there might actually BE a nationwide Howdy Doody craze. Or, it could be that just one lone individual happened to be wearing a Howdy Doody T-shirt. Nobody in the newspaper business will ever know for sure, and nobody will care, because as soon as the story is printed it’s time to move on to the next story concept, which originated when an editor decided, based on two people he talked to at a party, that there is a trend toward converting to Buddhism.
I’m not saying that newspapers publish only stories about imaginary developments. They also publish box scores; horoscopes; Garfield; stock tables; movie listings; classified ads; deeply ponderous editorials in which an anonymous committee of editors in, say, Cleveland reveal what they think about, say, North Korea; Sudoku; letters from insane people; typographical errors; and the word jumble. Sometimes, when reporters are able to elude editorial supervision, they even publish actual news.
This has been the basic newspaper recipe for many decades, and until fairly recently it was hugely successful. Newspapers were raking in money, and they spent it freely. It was a golden age for us English majors. I was on the staff of the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, Tropic, and among the items I put on expense reports, and got reimbursed for, were:• a four-day rental of a monkey costume;
• a three-day rental of a massive recreational vehicle that I used for the sole purpose of camping out overnight in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart located 27.8 miles from my house;
• a night at a strip club;
• a man-sized fiberglass goose; and
• many hundreds of alcoholic beverages, including one $50 drink at Nick G. Castrogiovanni’s Original Big Train Bar in New Orleans called “A Wild Night at the Capri Motel,” which was served in a large foam container shaped like a commode.
We journalists were fearless spenders of our newspapers’ travel budgets in those days. In 1987, The New York Times Magazine discovered, about ten years late, that Miami had a drug and crime problem, and ran a big honking spectacularly clueless cover story called Can Miami Save Itself? In response, Tropic sent an investigative team consisting of me and photographer Chuck Fadely to New York City to conduct an intensive two-day probe to see if we could uncover any problems up there.29 As part of our investigation we decided to have a look at the Islip, Long Island, garbage barge, which was this disgusting barge with a huge reeking pile of garbage on it that had become a big story because New York couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. At the time it was probably one of the two or three most famous barges in the world; it had become, in its own way, a celebrity, comparable to Lindsay Lohan.
By running up a ridiculous taxi bill, Chuck and I were able to locate the garbage barge somewhere off the coast of Brooklyn; however, Chuck couldn’t get a really good picture of it. So we decided to rent a helicopter. Yes. We took a taxi to New Jersey and rented a chopper so we could fly over the harbor and take a picture of garbage. I don’t remember exactly what it cost, but it was thousands of dollars, and the Miami Herald paid for it without batting an eye.
Another example: One time the editors of Tropic, Gene Weingarten and Tom Shroder, decided to do a cover story in which they offered a $200 prize for the reader who came up with the best idea for a new fad. The winner was a guy whose fad idea was eating money; he said that if h
e won, he would eat the prize, in cash. Which he did. In other words, the Sunday magazine of a major newspaper aided and abetted a person who ate legal U.S. currency. (Gene recalls: “I think we also donated two hundred dollars to charity. As if that made it any better.”)
And it wasn’t just the Miami Herald that was tossing money around. Many big newspapers had large travel budgets and far-flung bureaus staffed by reporters on generous expense accounts. The papers could afford it; they were making big profits. We journalists assumed that this was a result of the unquenchable public thirst for the vital journalism we were cranking out.
And then, pffft, it all went away. Today newspapers everywhere, if they’re not shutting down completely, are laying people off and cutting expenses to the bone. Newspapers that used to send reporters all over the world now won’t authorize any trip that would involve leaving the parking lot.
What the heck happened?
Again I hear the wiseacres: “What happened was, you rented a monkey suit and a helicopter.”
True, but that’s not the whole story. Another big factor was the Internet, which is an important trend that the newspaper industry discovered in approximately 1998. The Internet posed an unprecedented challenge to our business. We had long thought of ourselves as the ultimate collectors and distributors of timely information; suddenly we were being confronted with competition in the form of the most revolutionary, powerful, complex, fluid, cost-effective, and far-reaching information-technology development in human history. Fortunately, to meet this challenge, the newspaper industry had . . .
English majors!
They swung boldly into action, forming teams, holding many, many brainstorming meetings in conference rooms, and coming up with a variety of strategies for dealing with the Internet challenge. In the early going, the main two newspaper strategies were:• Pretending there was no Internet.
• Redesigning newspapers so they looked like the Internet, but a special kind of Internet where the information was outdated and static, and you couldn’t click on anything.
Unfortunately, neither of these strategies succeeded in defeating the Internet challenge. So newspapers switched, reluctantly, to a strategy of actually putting their stories on the Internet. At first the plan was to charge money for this content, but the public was not willing to pay for it. It turns out that the public is nowhere near as convinced of the value of journalism as journalists are.
So newspapers came up with a bold new plan: not charging money for their Internet content. This is the strategy we employ today, and it has been highly successful from a purely marketing standpoint. The public is very receptive to the idea of being able to read newspaper stories without paying for them. In fact, many people have canceled their subscriptions and read newspaper content exclusively online. This makes sense, from a consumer standpoint: If you went to a gas station, and they offered you two pricing plans—Plan A, in which you paid for your gas, or Plan B, in which you got exactly the same gas for free—you would have to have the economic IQ of a rutabaga30 to choose Plan A.
So the good news is that, thanks to our current strategy, lots of people are reading newspaper stories. We know this because we can measure “hits,” which indicate how many people have looked at a story online. Newspaper people these days get very excited about “hits.” Unfortunately, all these “hits” produce very little “money.” So newspapers have been laying off people, including many of the reporters who produce the actual stories. At the same time, newspaper editors are ordering the dwindling number of reporters to spend more and more of their time engaging in non-journalism, non-revenue-producing Internet activities such as Facebooking, making videos, podcasting, blogging, tweeting, fwirping,31 etc. The strategic thinking here is: “Hey, other people are doing these things on the Internet, so we should, too! We might get ‘hits’!”
So to sum up the situation: Newspapers are not making money on the Internet, and have decided that the solution is to do more things on the Internet that do not make money. Everybody hopes that somehow—nobody can say how—this will enable newspapers to survive. It’s like the classic 1998 episode of South Park in which the boys discover that gnomes are sneaking into people’s homes and stealing their underpants. The boys visit the gnomes’ secret underground lair and find a huge mound of underpants. The boys ask why, and the gnomes explain that they have a three-phase business plan, which is:Phase 1—Collect underpants
Phase 2—?
Phase 3—Profit
This is basically the current newspaper plan, except with the Internet instead of underpants. We have NO idea what’s supposed to happen in Phase 2. But if things keep going the way they are, in a few years the newspaper industry will be down to one reporter, who will sit in the middle of the newsroom watching cable-TV news and frantically cranking out 140-character news tweets under the supervision of two or three dozen editors.
That’s the bleak future of newspaper journalism unless somebody can come up with a plan to save it. Fortunately, I have such a plan. Unfortunately, it involves using time travel to go back to 1971.
So we’re doomed. Within the next decade or so, newspaper journalism, as we know it, is essentially going to disappear. Then the public will be sorry! Unless there’s something else to read on the Internet or watch on TV, in which case the public won’t care.
Either way, it’s over.
This makes me sad. For one thing, it was a lot of fun. For another thing, the newspaper business, despite its many flaws, managed to do a lot of good. And it employed, in its newsrooms, the smartest, hardest-working, funniest, quirkiest, most cynical and at the same time idealistic group of borderline insane people I’ve ever known. As newspapers fade away, I raise my glass in a farewell toast to all those wonderful colleagues, and in memory of the glory years.
Speaking of which, my glass is actually a foam commode.
Judaism for Christians
My wife is Jewish, and I am not. Most of the time this is not a problem, because neither of us is what I would call strongly religious. Especially not me. If I had a religion, it would be called jokeatarianism. We jokeatarians believe it’s possible that an all-powerful, all-knowing God created the Earth and all its creatures, but if He did, He was obviously kidding.
I was, however, raised in a Christian household, and sometimes I feel the influence of my upbringing. This happens mainly at Christmas, when I engage in traditional rituals such as making a series of frantic, nearly random retail purchases; overeating; buying a Christmas tree; complaining about how much the Christmas tree costs; getting sap in my hair while wrestling with the tree in a futile effort to make it stand up straight even though it has some kind of tree scoliosis; and spending the better part of an evening untangling the five-thousand-bulb string of lights that has, using its natural defense mechanism, wadded itself into a dense snarl the size of a croquet ball.
Also at Christmas I like to engage in “wassailing.” This sounds like a kind of violent assault (“Fred wassailed Herb upside his head”) but is actually an old English word meaning to drink a festive beverage and sing traditional Christmas carols such as “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” verse two of which goes:Oh bring us a figgy pudding
Oh bring us a figgy pudding
Oh bring us a figgy pudding
And bring it right here!
This carol dates back to seventeenth-century England, when groups of carolers would go from house to house demanding figgy puddings. If they didn’t get one, they would break down the front door (using a fruitcake), then barge inside and wassail on the occupants. This was the origin of both Halloween and soccer.
But aside from that, I am not devout; I almost never attend church unless somebody I know is getting married or has expired. My wife, on the other hand, does go to services at the synagogue. But here’s one big difference between Christians and Jews: Whereas Christians break their worship time down into manageable chunks by attending services every Sunday throughout the year, many Jews, my wife among
them, do not go to synagogue for most of the year, then compensate for this by worshipping for as many as fourteen thousand straight hours in a single day.
You may think this is impossible, but that’s because you are not, as far as I know, married to my wife. I am, and here’s what happens. Every few months she’ll say to me, out of the blue, “You remember that tomorrow is Harish Kadoma, right? ”
(She doesn’t actually say “Harish Kadoma.” I’m just using that as an example of what it sounds like she’s saying.)
And I’ll say, “Is it important? Because I have plans tomorrow.” (These plans typically involve watching old episodes of Reno 911 on TiVo, but I do not say this.)
And she’ll get this exasperated look and say, “I told you to put it on your calendar. It’s the second most holy day in the Jewish year.”
(Sometimes she says it’s the third. As far as I can tell, every Jewish holy day ranks, holiness-wise, either second or third.)
When this happens, my heart sinks, because I know this means she’s going to go to services at the synagogue, which means I’m going to services at the synagogue. My wife always says: “If you really don’t want to go, you don’t have to.” But as you veteran married men know, this is Wife Code for: “If you really don’t want to go, you still have to.”
So the next day I put on my least comfortable suit and we drive to the synagogue. Actually we can’t drive all the way, because on Jewish holy days everybody goes to the synagogue, so we have to park in an adjacent state and walk from there. Usually when we arrive the service has been going on for several hours, which means it’s just getting started.
