February, 2009

Gus Haynes, city editor of the fictionalized Baltimore Sun on HBO's "The Wire."

In the final season of HBO’s “The Wire” Gus Haynes, the city editor at the fictionalized Baltimore Sun is outside on a smoke break after an announcement of buyouts, talking about papers and why he went into the business. In essence he said he did so because his father, when Gus was young, was never to be disturbed until he’d read the paper and finished his coffee. Anything that could command such attention became a powerful force in Gus’s life and he knew that he wanted to be a part that world.

Written by newspaper-men, the final season of “The Wire” was a paean to the old school newspaper, as much as it was a gritty cop drama focused on the drug trade of Baltimore. Sadly the dramatization of the Sun is being played out ever more frequently in the real world.

Wither newspapers? I hope not. Though deeply steeped in digital media I still have some very strong attachments to certain analog artifacts of our world: Corked wine bottles, ink-printed and bound books, and newspapers

I still get two papers, each day,The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal. While I don’t love the Globe, I enjoy its sports page and it does provide solid local news coverage. I love the Journal. I would be devastated to lose either, never mind both. I can only imagine how the 330,000 or so subscribers to the San Francisco Chronicle feel today with yesterday’s announcement by Hearst Publishing that they are either going to sell or shutter the paper.

Papers are the world delivered to the door, every day. The effort and skill that go into creating them and the ability to produce that world-recap each night and have it at the end of my driveway,or beneath my car (different story), every morning is amazing. The loss of each paper, some with long and illustrious histories, marks the death of a cultural artifact. From that perspective, news of the woes at the Chronicle, The Austin Statesman, the Rocky Mountain News, The LA Times and Chicago Tribune should upset anybody concerned with the material culture of our country.

This is not to say that some of the issues surrounding the pending demise of the newspaper industry are not to blame on the papers themselves. They were slow to adopt and adapt to the online space. They are embroiled in issues of fairness and impartiality. They were unable to match the ROI metrics of the web — the medium is the message. They were gobbled up by giant, publicly traded holding companies with much more emphasis on the bottom line than had been the norm in often, family-run, avocational-enterprises.

Now here we are.

I would say the potential death of the American newspaper is not good for the Internet, or the country. The papers provide a counterpoint to the information generated on the web and vice versa. Biased or not you know the political leanings and axes-to-be-ground of the paper’s staff and can process accordingly. This is not so evident when reading Larry-in-Wichita’s (and I’m not picking on Larry nor Wichita) coverage of the State of the Union. I’ll come back to, and close with another aspect of the materiality of the paper — there really is no replacement for the morning cup of coffee on top of the folded paper. As much as I love our laptops, it isn’t the same.

The above image comes from an exchange that I saw on Twitter on last night (2/17/09). Francois Gossieaux, @fgossieaux, is a very smart guy that I started following a couple of weeks ago, and I have to admit that I was more than a little surprised to see what he re-Tweeted from @pbrannigan, who took umbrage at a perceived slight directed towards her ill pet, and fired off the above. Her account is now locked so we, who are not among her followers, can no longer see her Tweets, and her Blogspot blog for her company is no longer in her profile. Obviously she’s gone to ground in the wake of her outburst which shows bad form and a certain, unattractive, xenophobic, intemperance.

As a self-professed social media expert @pbrannigan should have known that the first rule of social media (as I intuit them from participating in it) is to be social — interact, share, comment. The second rule, maybe even rule 1a), is to be polite. As in other parts of our lives, both social and professional (and Twitter blurs that line) sometimes it’s best to just walk away, or bite ones tongue. Don’t write something that you will regret later because the quote never really goes away, it lives on, cached forever, or propagated for all time in perfect digital fidelity (see above). One final thought about this little incident is that by and large most of the exchanges I see on Twitter are really positive, upbeat and helpful. It’s great to participate in such an atmosphere, and that’s the power of the social space. People work and play in it in order to help and learn and communicate. There is a tremendous civility in communities like Twitter — even if, occasionally, some fire-ants invade the picnic — and that’s refreshing, because civility seems to be increasingly uncommon in our culture.

Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix

The other day, kicking around in my pantry I came across a box of “Jiffy”corn muffin mix. As far as iconic branding of consumer packaged goods go, I’d put Jiffy’s near the top. On this day though it was not the Jiffy Blue, nor the interesting mix of typography on the box-front, nor the close-up of the finished product that caught my eye — the front of the box was actually facing away from me. What caught my eye was the line, at the top of the back of the box, above the “Jiffy” logo, and the prep directions: “Great products since 1930.”

The parent company of “Jiffy” is Chelsea Milling, located in Chelsea, MI. It has been around for nearly 200 years but introduced the first ready-made baking mix in 1930. This was the first year of the Great Depression, and, one would imagine, not exactly a great year for new product launches. Yet, 79 years later, “Jiffy,” now in 21 varieties, can still be found in pantries and cupboards around the country.

Though seemingly ubiquitous now, ready made mix was a technological leap forward, and no doubt a costly investment for Chelsea Milling. They took a gamble going to market in 1930 and it paid off. As I start my own company in a downturn I find reason for hope in the “Jiffy” story. It reaffirms for me my belief that in flux there is opportunity if you are courageous enough to pursue it. In an environment as challenging as the one we face now (though not as challenging as 1930) I’m seeking inspiration and finding that examples of smart risk taking and savvy management abound — even in a box of corn muffin mix.