Print still dying, retirees keep rocking, college is a rip-off, and the onion of news

I raced through the "Media Firms at Crossroads" story on the Sunday Business section today because it was about newspapers dying and I'm about newspapers dying. It was one of the few stories that made me pause through my 10-minute perusal of the Sunday paper.

Fun facts from the story:

Advertising is down 60 percent.

Of the only three Pulitzer Prizes won by Media General (two going to the late Jeff MacNelly for cartooning), one was won by Virginius Dabney for calling for an end to lynching. Lynching! Were enough people actually pro-lynching that someone had to call for an end to it?! And win a prize for being so obvious? (Lynching=bad.) (And this was in 1948. Shame on you, South, shame, shame.)

Young people, according to Expert-On-All-Things Larry Saboto, "want to get everything for free. That is at the heart of the problem [of the printed newspaper]."

Well, I'm not young people, and I want to get things for free, too, especially things that are already bombarding me with a boatload of advertising. Why do I have to pay for that? The advertisers should pay for the privilege of accessing me.

I thought cable TV was supposed to be ad-free because I was paying for it, but except for the premium channels -- which I would have to pay even more for, I pay for a lot of advertising on the channels. Some channels are nothing but advertising. And satellite radio, another thing I pay upfront for, is starting to inflict more ads on me. So why not try to get as much information and fun as you can for free?

When I worked for the Mechanicsville newspaper, the ad department could offer advertisers saturation coverage. Every single address in two zip codes received the paper by mail. Whether or not they read it, I don't know, but they got it. It was free to all. Seems like that would work. The Mechanicsville paper was always chock-a-block with ads. It just changed ownership so many times, bad ideas set in, like switching from mail delivery to throwing it in people's driveways where it became unwanted, weather-damaged litter.

A free Times-Dispatch doesn't seem like a bridge anyone in MG wants to cross yet. (I'm still supporting the tabloid-size model.)

My eye continues to race through the pages. Getting done with the Sunday paper is like a chore, homework I am eager to finish so I can move on. In the commentary section I stop because of a break-out subhead in the middle of George Will's column on the recession.

"The idea that protracted golden years of idleness is a universal right is a delusion of recent vintage."

That hit home. Where I work now, a pile of people have been there since they were just out of high school, filling clerical and maintenance positions and working their way into slightly higher titles. Secretaries these days are called project managers, administrative analysts, administrative project analysts, executive assistants. They're in their 50s now and have 30 or more years on the job and can retire! My father, a federal government employee, retired at 60 and lived another 24 years doing nothing. I've never stayed anywhere longer than six years, so I suspect I'll be working until I'm 70, and by then they will probably raise the retirement age to 75.

Anyway. This break-out subhead turned out to be misleading. The issue of early retirement was only a lead-in for George Wills' main theme that the economy is actually not as bad as we think and all this subprime lending crisis involves only a small fraction of people who greedily bought big homes they couldn't afford anyway. And why? Because we have this entitlement culture.

He concludes by predicting that older adults who are still paying on student loans might be next to cry out for government relief. (And I'm going to support that, too, not because I have a student loan. My dear dad paid cash for me. But my son has incurred a huge debt, and not because he learned anything valuable in college that he needed to know in order to work. All he got out of the investment was a few contacts and the right to say he has a degree. What he does, he already knew how to do and he's continued to learn on his own by doing it. College was nothing but a bunch of meaningless credits administered by joke teachers who were trying to make some money the easiest way possible because they sure didn't teach much. Okay, let's not get me started on that, but it was my college experience, too. I learned more after graduation on the job. College was a waste of time and money, except to be able to say you went there.

And then you get saddled with these huge Sallie Mae debts for the rest of your life.

Almost done, except to look at the "Home Page" in the Commentary section in which the T-D editors share a glimpse inside their working environment which is more often than not TMI.

What photo editors read into the photos they select reminds me of people trying to interpret art in galleries. The interviews with employees in sales or production always sound as chillingly artificial and fake as job interviews. "What was your most challenging assignment? What gives you the greatest satisfaction?" No one ever hates their boss in this column.

Sundra Hominik's saga of how the story of the Richmond school superintendent's "leaving" set a new record for the number of times an onion metaphor is used in a single story. Nine times!

Our approach to coverage is like peeling an onion...peeled back several thick layers of the onion...still more layers to peel...what layers he could peel away...a tougher onion to peel than first thought...another day of peeling...more layers were peeled back...it peeled away of a lot of layers for readers...this story was a well-peeled onion...still more layers to go.

Okay, I get it. Reporting is like onion peeling. But what do you get when you peel an onion? More onion. What is at the center of a well-peeled onion? Nothing.

And I don't think there's anything in the center of this story, either. The "leaving" is not until summer 2009. That's not so much leaving as job security. Who among us can guarantee we can stay in our current jobs until then? And we've been down this road before. The lady may protest now that if asked, she will not stay, but there's nothing stopping the School Board from coming up with another boatload of money at the 11th hour to persuade her to stay. That might even be the point of this whole drama because actually finding someone new is too much work. She did it before, teasing that she might leave for another job, even though....was another job ever seriously offered to her? A big raise was promptly delivered. It won't surprise me if nothing changes in the summer of 2009 except her salary.

Still, the T-D deployed 14 people to produce several days of reporting on this story which, if you finally get to that little green dot at the center of an onion, is no real news at all. If she actually does leave, then call me. Send me one of those breaking news bulletins then.