Why the Richmond Times-Dispatch is Dying

Down to Coupons

2011-09-06T12:24:00.000-04:00

The last two times a marketing person called me about resubscribing to the Sunday Times-Dispatch, they pitched it the same way: Coupons. I am missing out on getting the coupons.

It is sad that the advantage of getting a newspaper isn’t getting the news anymore. But how can it be? The news is almost a day old. It used to be television news made it harder to compete, but the newspaper could always claim in-depth coverage. Now, with the Internet, it doesn’t even have that.

What it has is coupons and sales flyers on Sunday. Here’s the problem with the flyers. They create a need in us – okay, more my husband – for things we can’t afford and don’t really need. I would rather he not know too easily what is on sale at Best Buy. If I am actually looking for an item, I can look up the flyers online. Don't suggest items to me. Not in this economy.

And coupons – well, don’t tell me there’s $250 worth of coupons in the paper. That’s if I use every one of them. I don’t need every product every week. There’s lot of coupons for things I’ll never need, like dog food and baby items. The time I spent clipping and organizing them got annoying. And as expiration dates rolled around, I was throwing out three times as many as I was using.

And I really started getting annoyed with the newspaper itself. Didn’t need or want the sports section. Didn’t need or want the depressing classifieds with its lack of help wanted positions. Didn’t need or want real estate sections. Didn’t need or want the brides. That might work in a small town paper, but I don’t know any of these people anymore. Really don’t need or want the obituaries. This is just too sad. The bigger photos make it worse. What I needed was that $20 or $30 I was paying for 13 weeks of papers, so I am still canceled.

Newspapers need to stay small. Somehow there are too many employees involved with the business of newspapers, the advertising, the marketing, the bean counters. There’s too many vice presidents and not enough reporters. Newspapers always needed to stay small and focused. They never needed huge buildings, stockholders or board of directors.

Selling itself as a coupon distributor is not going to save the paper. While moving my niece out of the old Morton’s Tearoom building one Sunday, my assignment was to stay outside and keep an eye on the open truck. I also kept an eye on the newspaper boxes outside the YMCA. A person paid for a paper, opened the box, and took all the papers. I assume it was for the coupons. I hope the paper doesn’t think this counts toward circulation.

Latest KO to Newspapers

2011-07-05T09:39:00.000-04:00

The state recently asked its employees to come up with ideas on how to save money. The winning entry was to stop advertising state job openings in newspapers. In the past five years, the state spent $17 million on newspaper advertising, only to find out a mere 8 percent of new hires learned about the job from reading a newspaper.

The classifieds section continues to collapse.

18 Speakers in a Single Day - The i.e.* Launch

2011-06-24T13:00:00.001-04:00

June 23, 2011, I went to two events and heard 18 speakers. That’s a lot of information to take in on one day. Most of it was intended to be inspirational and motivating, and the last four were just a good way to end the day with some laughs about how the media and our culture have changed so much through the computer age.

The first event was the launch of the project i.e.*, which stands for Innovative Excellence. It is funded by the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce, whose chairman is currently the president and publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. That cleared up my initial objection as to why he was co-hosting when you don’t think of the daily paper when you think of innovation and excellence. The city’s innovators were invited at a ticket price of $125, including lunch and free parking at Mayo Island. My employer purchased a block of tickets and I was told the day before the event that I was going, so that’s how I came to be there. From talking to others, that’s how many people came to be there, and then some were local artists and activists who had purchased their own tickets. (I saw some online grumbling that the ticket price was prohibitive for others.)

The speakers, called “provocateurs” in the program, were primarily self-employed in business or artistic ventures. We heard from a mural artist, an ad agency kingpin, a writing coach, a portrait artist, a bio-diesel taxi company, a leadership preschool founder, a marketing agency founder, a musician who had branched out into commercials, an event artist, a child prodigy, a college think tank organizer, and a photo booth self-expression artist. In a session of break-out sessions, there were more entrepreneurs to choose from, including people who had started their own businesses or acquired grants to do innovative work.

I can’t find fault with anyone’s success story because their success speaks for itself. And yes, we all can be inspired by it. It would take much space to recount the stories I heard, so I will reference a couple. Both had to do with the nude female form. Being proud of your body, and thus yourself, even if you do not conform to what society considers beautiful, was the theme of the morning nudity. A painter and her subject both were generous enough to display huge, almost photo-realistic, paintings of themselves naked, with strategic parts not at all concealed. The point, I gather, was through this, you can become comfortable with yourself. Still, the crowd chatter during the breaks indicated some people were uncomfortable by the paintings. The models were very brave to do this outside an art gallery setting.

But when an artist in the afternoon session showed a slide of her nude self-portrait, I wondered what kind of double-standard we had here. The nude female form, fat or thin, Barbie doll or Rubenesque, has always been art, so we can get away with displaying ourselves as artistic. But if you’re a man, you have to resign your congressional seat.

During the event, the audience was urged to shout out the common British kudo “Brilliant!” whenever they heard anything that deserved an amen. Let me list what I thought was brilliant about this event.

Staging it at the furniture store, La Dif. There was adequate parking available two blocks away on Mayo Island. The furniture store had plenty of chairs and sofas. For one break-out session, we sat on beds in the bed area. The store’s loading dock, where they also stage patio furniture, was our lunch location. The chair I sat in had a $3,000 price tag on it, marked down to $1,299. I would not pay that much for that chair. It was not $1,299 worth of comfortable. Still, I saw a lot of furniture and decorative items that dazzled me. If I had money, I would shop here. Score for La Dif.

Each speaker was limited to 15 minutes, and each introduced the next one. That kept the program moving. You didn’t have the host returning repeatedly to introduce the next speaker. If you were uninterested in a speaker, you didn’t have long to wait for a change. The audio-visuals were top notch. I didn’t see one slide presentation that looked like a Powerpoint.

Lunch was brilliantly served family style. Instead of waiting in a slow-moving buffet line like so many cattle, you just picked a seat and served yourself from bowls of food on the table. Brilliant! And we had roaming entertainers during lunch including a belly dancer and a really annoying duo of masked men pushing baby carriages and playing loud baby crying noise. I assume this was performance art.

Our ice breaking activity, which also served as a leg-stretching break, was to find other people in the audience who had been issued the same color pencil at registration that we had. Then your little group took a walk around the building to chat and find interesting things to look at. During our walk, we were instructed to email a photo back to the mothership of an interesting find. This was an amusing break, even though at first it was chaotic.

Each group was embedded with someone from the organizing committee to ensure we stayed focused. Being on the peach colored pencil team gave me an investment in the program from the onset. In the afternoon activity, we did the opposite. We had to form a group with all different colored pencils, and then crowdsource the answers to three problems posed to us.

We were snacked like preschoolers throughout the day. There was the traditional bread products, coffees and sodas in the morning, but in the afternoon, we had more beverages, bowls of candy, and sherbet cups to fight off the after lunch drowsies. Thanks! Seconds before the closing, staff ran through the audience with cans of ice cold Switch beverages, another great promotional opportunity, and we all gave a closing toast to the day, which forced you to open the drink right then and sample it. No sneaking it home and giving it away or forgetting about it. Brilliant!

So if I didn’t come away with any new resolves to liberate myself through artistic nudity or start my own shoe store, I did get some great ideas for how to organize and pace a conference.

A couple of hours later, I was in a seat at the Barksdale Theater for the monthly Social Media Club of Richmond meeting, which I will also not go into detail about. It was an amusing, delightful, funny look at the wonderful, Internet-connected world we all live in now, the wealth of information at our fingertips, the memes, the crowd-sharing, the opportunities to make our mark in the world of public opinion, presented by young people who are doing jobs that 20 years ago did not exist. I could see real effort and thought went into their presentations, and it was a relaxing and comforting way to end the day.

Wanted: Business Model for a New Century

2011-06-08T12:38:00.000-04:00

I was thinking about the “business model” of news and advertising on news vehicles the other day. It hasn’t changed in more than 50 years, except the television network evening broadcast went from 15 minutes to 30.

Otherwise, it still comes on around dinner time, wrongly assuming that we have gone straight home from work. It wrongly assumes we are all the man of the house who can sit down and pay attention to the broadcast, unwinding at the end of the day while the wife prepares dinner.

It still assumes we will give the numerous commercial breaks equal attention because to not see them would involve getting out of the chair and walking to the TV to change the channel.

It still assumes we pick the news channel based on the looks of the reader, and that this person reading the news to us is an actual, trustworthy journalist who knows what they are talking about because they covered the story, instead of a “spokesmodel” type who is just standing in the camera lights reading a script prepared by a behind-the-scenes segment producer. He or she is good at reading without looking like they are reading, but probably have very little understanding of what the story is about.

Many of these so called reporters, especially on cable news shows, look like the type of young woman who in another time or place, would have been automobile showroom models, cocktail waitresses or stewardesses. How do they suddenly have the gravitas to deliver breaking news to me like Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow?

Local news is particularly maddening the way it religiously gives equal time to sports and weather, whether or not there is any, and the way the anchors start each story by saying their co-anchor’s name and looking at them as if they are the only person they are telling the story to and the rest of us are just spying on this chat. Seriously, anchors, you never have to look or speak to the other anchor sitting with you. We know they’re there. Just read me the news. I’m over here. Look in the camera at me.

Television as a whole still assumes we do not own DVRs or remotes. They think we will not get up to change the channel, so they program based on strong lead-ins, one show leading into a better show, which is teased throughout the first show as something you won’t want to miss, so don’t touch that dial. But I am watching this a week later on my TiVo, and I only recorded the one show I wanted to watch, not all the ones following it. Conan O’Brien was dethroned because the Jay Leno Show was too weak a lead-in to the 11 p.m. local news, and so that left even fewer people to stay tuned for Conan. So they put Leno back after the news where he’d be too weak a lead-in for Jimmy Fallon, but oh wait, everyone DVRs Fallon anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

The print newspaper business model is: we are interested in the news even though it is yesterday’s news and we already heard it somewhere, and anything that happens after 11 p.m. or so, didn’t happen as far as you know as you read your morning paper. I assume you are reading it at work because who has time in the morning to read it at the house? You will want to read it on great big sheets of paper, the size of aprons, that you will have to fold and refold into a more manageable 8x10 size each time you turn the page. Or you will have to clear off a big space on a table to spread it out, as if you are about to do a papier-mache project. Doesn’t this sound archaic?

The newspaper assumes you will look at the ads instead of skipping your eye over to headlines, looking for a story of interest. It assumes a third of your interest, no matter who you are, will be about sports. It assumes you do your grocery shopping on Thursdays, and gardening on weekends. It assumes you still cut out recipes and save them in little boxes.

Ten years ago I worked on a local paper that covered two zip codes. We had two high schools in those zip codes, so our single sportswriter only had to cover the games of two schools. A good portion of our readership identified with one or the other of those schools, so we had a 40/60 chance of a sports story being of interest (factoring out people with no kids or no connection at all to local schools). A daily paper covering a large metropolitan area might have 30 high schools, and the readership interest in any one football player from one of those schools can be what? And yet time and energy is still spent covering local sports.

News and journalism needs a new business model. I see the neighborhood blogs creating something promising, but the major media need to figure it out, too.

How to Write a Press Release: Don't Write One

2011-03-16T17:19:00.003-04:00

There are many articles claiming they can teach you how to write an irresistible press release. There are PR coaches who can webinar you into writing winning releases. Yet it turns out – at least according to a recent Business Wire breakfast panel – that the best press release is none at all. Editors hate press releases.

That was the consensus brought to a room of young -- and now thoroughly shocked -- PR professionals by three print editors – of a daily, a weekly, and a monthly – and one TV reporter.

The Monthly Editor can’t deal with emails at all. Too bad they were invented. She prefers phone calls. The Daily Editor says, “Email has hurt the PR industry.” He gets too many. We have become fat and lazy, pressing our Send button over and over. We need to tailor each email for each editor. Email subject lines should say, “Greg, Open This,” for his name is Greg. Not Gregory, even though that is the name on his placard at the panel table. If you call him Gregory, he will delete your reckless email, because anyone who knows him knows he answers to Greg.

Weekly Editor says if he sees “For Immediate Release,” he deletes it immediately. That is too cliché. So Lois Lane. We need to rise above that. It means everyone in the media is getting it at the same time, and to him, that is not a story of interest. The TV Reporter agrees. She hates “email bombs,” when the same press release hits all the mail accounts in the newsroom at the same time. They delete them without reading them! Delete! Delete! High five!

All the panelists had a specific time of day when they may possibly be available to take your phone call (because after all that, you are not sending emails, right?)

Do not call or email the TV Reporter or Daily Editor after 4 p.m. They are on deadline. They do not want to be bothered. The Weekly Editor is on deadline Friday and Monday. He won’t even answer his phone then! Don’t pretend to be his mother!

The TV Reporter says here’s a secret for you. We love Direct Messages on Twitter. (DMs, if you know your way around Twitter.) All the TV reporters chatter all day long on Twitter, which is true since I follow a lot of them. They tweet each other when they’re sitting next to each other in the newsroom. And they don’t get that many DMs. DMs pop up on their phones instantly! So your press release needs to be 140 characters or less now to send a DM.

Also – sorry to spoil the party, but -- if the reporter isn’t following you, you can’t DM them.

Press releases, if you persist in this foolishness, need to be “extremely well-written and attention-getting.” Your lead is not your boss’ name and title and the fact that he has announced something. Your lead is what he announced. (Your boss will not agree.) They do not need that boilerplate quote in the second paragraph from the boss. They only need to know what exact time he will be sitting by his phone available to answer questions.

Press releases “are gobbledegook; the lead is buried. I’d rather just have bullet points,” says Greg. (My friend, you know, because I call him Greg!)

They hate it when no one can talk to the media until the press release is released. That’s just old fashioned. If you want to connect, you need to reach out to an editor ahead of the press release.

In fact, you need to make friends with reporters and editors. Call them at the appropriate time just to congratulate them on stories that have nothing to do with you. Ask how you can help them. Offer yourself up as a comment source on other stories. Send bagel baskets. Find out where they drink after work.

They all hate attachments. First we have the audacity of thinking we are worthy of the editors opening our email in the first place, and then we task them with opening an attachment! Which could be in a program they can’t even open anyway! What is wrong with putting your news in the body of the email? (I happen to agree with this. A pox on attachments!)

Don’t toy with them with embargoes and exclusives. “We just laugh,” said Weekly Editor, although TV Reporter is so eager for preparation time before she has to go live, she’s actually partial to embargoes. “The worst thing for us is a podium in a room. It doesn’t relate to viewers,” she says.

Oh, how they hate the Podium in the Room. The dry announcement. The officials standing in a semi-circle behind the speaker, hands clasped in front of them. Then the floor is thrown open for questions. No TV reporter wants to ask their brilliantly crafted question and then all the other TV stations get to record the answer! So they don’t ask questions. They wait to rush up to the spokesman after he steps away from the Podium in the Room.

“Think about visuals,” says Daily Editor. “We all have websites that use visuals.”

Those websites and tablet and phone apps are the biggest challenge for the print editors. They have to hire tech guys now to make them. They have to figure this all out. Then they have to figure out how to make us pay for it. They have to learn how to feed the social media beast with fewer personnel.

I rarely see a print representative at these seminars say they are doomed. The Daily Editor boldly declares “print will still be around 30 years from now,” a safe statement since neither he nor I will be around to call him out on it.

Then they opened the floor to questions and the PR professionals tried to think of new ways to sneak their news into the media.

Expert columns?

Nope. They’re too often written above the average reader’s head (which for most print, is 7th to 9th grade). It takes too much time to edit them down.

Next question: But I called and called and called you, Ye Who Put Stock in Personal Phone Calls, and you don’t return my calls. How is calling better?

Then Daily Editor suddenly reverses himself on the email position. “I find emails better because I can answer them at 11 o’clock at night.”

Wait, what? What was that? So emails are good now? You actually don’t have time to answer our calls either? I swing around to see if the fresh faced PR pros sitting behind me are thoroughly confused, if hands are shooting up, but they are still stunned about all the deleting and ignoring they just heard. No one calls shenanigans!

Next question: What is the real relationship between account executives and editors? When we talk to editors, should we mention our account executive? Should we mention what a big advertiser we are?

No! No! No! They will hang up on you. They will laugh. They will ignore your email bombs and your attachments, and your ill-timed calls. There is no relationship whatsoever between advertising and news, even in these dire financial times.

I hear this from news people all the time, and every time I write about it, I mention my own personal experience as an editor and reporter when, yes, the publisher actually did care very much about advertisers. The publisher, with the Managing Editor on a short leash trotting right behind, would come storming down the hallway into my office to tell me to play nice or kill a story or cover a story. Yes, they did. When an advertiser made threats, all hell actually would break loose. (Maybe not on the Hanover Herald Progress under the late Jay Pace. I heard he was different. But they made a lot of their money printing other people’s papers.)

But every time I say this, everyone says I am wrong, delusional, crazy. That doesn’t happen where I work, they say, even when I worked for the same company as they do now. The trick is, PR people, you don’t ever say anything to a news editor about being an advertiser. If they treat you mean, then you tell your account executive, who tells the sales manager, who tells the vice president of sales, who tells the executive editor, who tells the managing editor, who releases the Kraken on that section editor’s ass, because the times, they are tough. Even so. Amen.

Okay, quick, how many times did I make an outdated Kraken reference? No peeking!

(Also, not included here is the devastating tale one editor told of thoroughly humiliating and demeaning a Florida restaurant owner who thought he might be interested in her new restaurant opening in "the area," only to find out it was opening in Reston, and he made sure she knew what an ignorant waste of his time she was in the most scathing, long drawn out way.

"Have you ever heard of the Internet?"

"Have you ever heard of Google maps?"

"Have you ever looked at a map?"

"Do you realize Reston is NOWHERE NEAR RICHMOND?"

There was time for that phone call. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. Maybe it would have played better at the Funny Bone.)

Alter Egos and Just Plain Egos

2010-09-17T16:28:00.000-04:00

The Social Media Club of Richmond's September meeting at the Empire Theatre was an exercise in One of These Things Is Not Like the Other. The theme was "Alter Egos, Identities and Covert Operations." There were three panelists who write under other names or who keep their identities shrouded, one who wrote a satirical news Onion-like website with an imaginary staff, and then there was Gene Cox.

Cox, the long-time news anchor for WWBT, has always just tweeted as himself. Maybe he was included on the panel because there was a short-lived parody Twitter account based on him, but it was an unsuccessful attempt because Cox doesn't take his own Twittering seriously, so how can you parody it?

That aside, did anything surprise me? A few things.

I had had some direct messaging exchanges with @thecheckoutgirl where she told me no one would ever confuse her for a boy, despite a blog entry about that very thing happening once at the grocery store where she works. From that I surmised she was buxom. Also, because she told me her bra size.

It was a surprise to find she was the mother of teenagers, after being surprised to learn she was a mother at all when she started a second blog marginally about motherhood at fuckyeahmotherhood.com. (The Check Out Girl blog is an empty shell and all posts are gone, for reasons I don't know. She eluded during the panel to being outed at work, and there is a strange recent post about a really tragic pet death that she introduces as the death of The Check Out Girl, and tries to make funny, but…no, it's tragic and horrible. I hope it's not true.)

But anyway, seeing her did not surprise me, but we'll revisit it later in Most Awkward Moments of the Evening.

I also knew that Jocelyn Testes-Harder was not a real person. (Really -- the name, think about it -- and redneck women don't usually go by hyphenated names because it is frankly too much writing.). "Her" writing style was too cosmopolitan and educated for the tooth-missing, mullet-haired woman who is the blog's avatar. I wasn't quite expecting the preppy looking man behind her, but I knew it was a man. I was expecting someone more arty looking, not a guy who looks like he works at the bank.

I was surprised Gene Cox feels he has to be careful about what he tweets because his boss and his boss' boss follow him. I would think he is at a point in his career where he is untouchable, but apparently not. He has been instructed, he told us, to just read the news straight and say no more, so tweeting is his outlet for his inner Jon Stewart.

And finally, I was surprised that moderator Jason Roop was such a very adequate singer, and was even more relaxed on stage than Gene Cox, who has spent his life on camera. I knew there was a rehearsal the night before and wondered how in the world you rehearse a moderated panel, but the night ended with a song parody of "Islands in the Stream" where the panelists at first seemed embarrassed as Jason sang about them, but then @thecheckoutgirl stood up and joined in the song just as nicely, so it was all an act. And a good one. I suspect there is a drama club in Roop's past. Or "Glee" is the story of his life.

Other Observations:

Much of the humor (and I am almost tempted to put the word humor in quotes here) of The Checkout Girl, Filthy Richmond and Cafe Darkness is based on being annoyed with their fellow man. They make fun of other people, sometimes very cruelly. And there's an element of self-loathing. Often the humor is vile, (although the value of vile humor is a matter of taste. My husband watches "South Park." It makes me cringe.)

(I am going to give Tobacco Avenue a pass here because its humor is a more benign parody of Richmond and its local celebrities, and is usually tasteful and genuinely funny. Also, Jeff Kelley does not appear to be a young man who loathes himself.)

During the evening, the panel insulted or offended a variety of their fellow men. Woe be to you if you are:

-- Meade Skelton, a true innocent who blogs his wistful musical ambitions in a painfully honest voice and has become a subject of ridicule and amusement to the bar crowd

-- Shoppers at The Check Out Girl's store

-- People who write comments on blogs and don't know how to use apostrophes

-- Mothers of babies proud enough to write about them and post photos

-- Babies in general

-- People on Facebook

-- "Older moms" on Facebook who are relieving the monotony of their lives by playing a little interactive Farmville

-- Co-workers in general everywhere

-- The Toothless

-- Panhandlers who smoke

-- People who tweet about drinking, enjoying, buying, or needing coffee

-- Anyone who has had the misfortune to ask Cafe Darkness on a date, only to be ridiculed as a moron as she live tweets the date. "I've got to let other people know how dumb you are," she said. I felt bad for that guy. It's never fun to be the butt of a joke, and such cruelty seems high-schoolish.

I have to congratulate Gene Cox who consistently returned the conversation back to more uplifting themes, and he was the only one I saw frequently quoted on my Twitter stream during the conference.

"There's a drive in all of us to say something…and we want someone to hear it," he said. He enjoys the brevity restrictions of Twitter. Blogs too often lend themselves to overwriting, and all the panelists agreed that they were blogging less since they went on Twitter. Blogging is like...work.

"The older I get, the list of things I worry about gets shorter," Cox said, maybe to offset the others who had spiraled through all the annoying things they suffer in their lives that needed to be insulted or denigrated by tweets.

Cox also told stories about how his tweets complaining about businesses and service have been noticed by those businesses, which respond with free coupons and apologies. I've had that experience, too, so it's not just because he's famous.

And now, what you've been waiting for:

The Most Awkward Moments

A guy came out during the middle of the discussion in an elaborate costume of some animal sort and handed out bananas to the panelists for what Roop said was a "potassium break." The audience did not laugh, maybe because they were waiting for the punchline, which didn't come. The distribution of the bananas was the joke but something was missing. Later during the panel, Cox unintentionally delivered the pay-off when he asked, apropos of nothing, "Why am I holding a banana?" That got a big laugh, and was widely tweeted, and of course, makes no sense whatsoever if you saw the tweet. You had to be there, I guess.

Jeff Kelley backed himself in a corner when asked to discuss the most surprising thing he had learned from the panel, and he said The Check Out Girl's early blog entries were written in such a "sultry" way, he was expecting someone entirely different. He was expecting a "hot blonde."

Which is another way of saying; you are not hot.

But I knew what he was trying to say because I had noticed it, too. Men who I knew were happily married would tweet back to @thecheckoutgirl in such a flirtatious way, I used to wonder what's going on here? They were too obsessed with finding out who she was and where she worked. Something about the way she wrote about her cranky, rude customers was indeed, as Kelley awkwardly tried to explain, tinged with a mysteriously alluring subtext. And then one by one, the flirtatious tweeting stopped. I surmised they had found her and been disappointed. Around that time, her style took a scatological and vagina-monological turn that was so raw, I had to back away, too. She peppered her panel talk that evening with a few shocking comments, like a reference to menstrual blood pouring into her shoes at work. While that stuff happens, the telling of it seldom turns men on, and I felt like rushing on stage and escorting the startled Gene Cox to a safe place.

But she also said, in a revealing moment, that it's all a parody of other Tweeters and bloggers, and testing jokes for a possible stand-up comedy act. (A local Lisa Lampanelli?) Her "real pain" she doesn't write about. And now it all fits, because real deep pain often travels with this kind of no-boundaries humor. I can relate. I know whenever I am relatively content or feel safe, or possibly even happy, my ability to write funny eludes me.

And the last Most Awkward Moment was when Cafe Darkness accused Gene Cox of unfollowing her. He looked apologetically puzzled. Then she offered a possible explanation. She had just fired off a tweet full of "fuck yous" and "fuck thats," and poof, he unfollowed her. She appeared offended that Mr. Cox might choose to exercise his right to not want her invectives clogging up his Twitter stream. How dare he?

One thing the younger generation doesn't understand is they've grown up in a society where the "ef" word is as common as "phooey" and they've been inundated with it in movies to the point where it has no shock value anymore. But to older people like Mr. Cox, and myself, it still resonates like a slap in the face. We still imagine we live in a Polite Society where such language is reserved for extreme moments, the verbal equivalent of an atomic bomb over Nagasaki. I actually feel beat up when someone peppers their conversation with obscenities. It's not a good feeling, so if I can walk away from it with a simple unfollow click, I do, too. Again, I wanted to rush on stage and escort Mr. Cox to a safe place where he still had the right to unfollow a cursing girl and not be chastised publicly for it.

So, the Twitter hashtag #smcrva was aglow afterward that it was the best SMCRVA meeting ever, and it actually was. We don't need guest speakers to come in and tell us how to do it. We just want to talk about ourselves. Isn't that what social media is?

Good bye Brick, Not Even a Nice Try

2010-07-11T21:21:00.003-04:00

During most of Brick Weekly and Brick Reloaded's life, until this spring, I had to hold my tongue because my son was pulling down a weekly check from the publication for shooting one or two events each weekend. The photos were usually used on the cover and in a two-page photo spread. You can see many of those photos still on Brick's long-neglected website.

Getting his photo assignment was always a last-minute thing. After the editor was sent packing and never replaced with anyone who knew the difference between a newspaper and a shopper, the photo assignments tended to come from whoever was last in the office on Friday afternoon, and not much thought went into it. Several times I found myself scanning event calendars on Saturday afternoon trying to find something worth a two-page spread for him to shoot, since whoever was running Brick had just said, whatever you want to shoot is fine with us. I would think, this is a Media General product and they don't seem to care if it's good or not. Why are they doing this?

Brick folds next week. I'm surprised it lasted this long. I could count the ads each issue on one hand. It started out as Punchline brought back as a zombie. The format of snarky, hostile replies to letter writers, inside jokes in the small type, and a mix of boring, dense, articles from third rate syndicates -- it was all too reflective of the editor's personal tastes and interests. And it had already failed once. You would think someone would say, okay, let's try something that might actually have a broader appeal.

But, no. Eventually they let the editor go, but didn't change the format except to gradually phase out every single local writer except Chris Bopst, whose columns are just not enough to support a wide reader base. And it's not like Bopst was even exclusive to Brick. He also wrote for the RVANews website.

People don't pick up newspapers to read syndicated material. You will not last long doing that. And people don't go to flimsy, finger-staining newspapers to read reviews of movies, books or music. The national stuff is all available everywhere on the Internet. You really need big local coverage from local writers who can infuriate and delight readers, sometimes at the same time.

The embarrassments were legion: using dirty language in a misguided effort to appeal to hipsters, the made-up letters to the editor, which destroy a paper's credibility; restaurants writing their own reviews, cheesy strip club ads on the back page. Who exactly was the market here?

The only amazing thing about the paper were the classifieds, which appeared to have more genuine help wanted ads than even the Sunday Times-Dispatch. And I knew one person who enjoyed doing one of the puzzles every week.

Why did Media General never put a genuine editor in charge of the paper and actually package some reporting and opinion writing that would appeal to a target audience? It is not that hard. I could go to the RVAblogs website, pick a few bloggers that are particularly talented and knowledgeable in a variety of topics, offer them a modest payment for a weekly contribution, and have plenty of material to edit into a lively, creative and interesting paper that these writers would then cross promote on their blogs and Twitter feeds.

Most street papers have to struggle to fill the ad sales positions, but here you had a built-in room full of newspaper ad salesmen. All you had to do was give them a great product to sell the hell out of. And the one thing that every real journalist knows is you never, ever let the ad salesmen be in charge of the paper's content.

Nothing about putting together a paper that reflected this moment in time in the history of Richmond's up and coming youth culture should have been a problem...except working with Media General, I guess. How could they have failed so miserably at their own profession?

Playing Nice in the Social Media Sandbox

2010-05-21T17:25:00.003-04:00

Is there anything new to learn about social media? Or is there just too much to learn, and as soon as you think you know something, things change? Yesterday I had a breakfast meeting on social media I paid $10 to attend, and an after-work meeting that also cost me $10. So what's my money's worth of information?

I've been putting out social media for work and personal use for nearly 18 months now. How am I doing?

I heard about Facebook landing pages in the morning. I didn't know they existed, and it was a brief mention in passing. The rest of the presentation was fairly basic and obvious information. I had to go back to the office and watch a YouTube video on how to create a landing page to realize what it was and what it was used for.

Then I also realized that companies are making money creating these landing pages, which are essentially, one web page.

I heard about QR codes, which I think won't be in common use for awhile yet, so I have time to figure that out.

I learned we should be thrilled about Ustream broadcasting, even though the quality is usually crappy. I decided not to be concerned with that either right now. I'm still thrilled about how easy the Flip Video camera is and it's not crappy.

The evening session was on evaluating social content. There were more PowerPoint slides. Whoever figures out something more dynamic than a PowerPoint slideshow will be the next software billionaire. And I have yet to attend any presentation where the projector and computer worked from the beginning. Or that the first people to arrive didn't sit in the aisle seats and make everyone else crawl over them.

There were mentions of various Internet tools to measure performance, most of which cost something to use. The presenter used the expression "play nice in the sandbox" three times, if not four. Once it was used to explain why he thought you should follow everyone on Twitter who follows you, even if obviously you are never going to have the time or interest to read all their posts.

Why? I asked. Why not just have the stream you want or is most useful to you? Because it's playing nice in the sandbox. For results people, it's all about numbers, and this is a number. Finally, the nice lady who twitters for Strange's Florist explained she follows everyone and apparently reads all their posts to learn about what kind of gardening everyone is doing.

Well, in that case, I can see it, but I felt like if you follow everyone, you are going to get pitched by other marketeers or at least asked to look at someone's naughty photos of themselves more than you want to be.

There is a guy on Twitter who was always bragging about his followers number. If he reached 1,000, he wanted 5,000. If he was at 5,695, he kept begging for more followers until he had an even 6,000. Why? He didn't read them. He probably only looked at the stream that mentioned him. What did the number mean? It certainly didn't mean all those followers were reading him because they were probably just collecting him like he was collecting them.

At a staff meeting, a person tweeting for another department bragged about having 700 followers. Wondering if I could entice any of them to follow our department, I went through her list and found marketeers from around the world, pornbots, and empty shell twitter accounts. If I counted only the real people who were likely to actually use her department's services, she really didn't have any more followers than I did. But saying "700" in a meeting sounds better than "346."

Lurking in all this is the thought that if you have a certain number, you will be paid to send out paid tweets. That's where all these measurement guys come in with their charts and graphs, looking at all the demographics of your pool. And this was the core of the evening lecture, to study and analyze and chart and graph your audience so you would know exactly what piece of bait to put on your hook.

Advertising and marketing is so eager to get into social media as a delivery tool, it kind of spoils social media as just something we were playing with before. It's like when cable tv starting having commercials just like broadcast television. Why am I watching commercials and paying for cable? What happened to my sandbox? I started using it for work, that's what, and now it's work.

What Happened to the Press Women?

2010-04-26T09:38:00.002-04:00

I didn't go to the Virginia Press Women conference in Roanoke last Friday because even though I had received a postcard informing me I had won something, Roanoke is just too far to go. I am not a fan of that long ride down Interstate 81, and I made that trip last year to go to a conference in Blacksburg. Once a decade is enough.

I figured I'd find out what I won in the Saturday newspaper. But the Times-Dispatch didn't have a Saturday story, or a Sunday one that I could find online. I googled my name and came up with nothing new. Only the Fredericksburg paper had posted a story on Saturday, and that was about the people from the Fredericksburg area who won awards. If anyone else in the state did, that was not news in Fredericksburg.

So I went to my real source of information, Twitter, and posted a plea for information. Sunday night, the editor of the Richmond Good Life website, a news aggregator, tweeted back that the Virginia Press Women website had finally posted a press release. I had won first place for full color newsletters!

Yeh! But wait, as I went over the list, I found no second place, or third. I was in a class by myself. Apparently a full color newsletter is so expensive and useless, no one does them anymore. My nearest competitor was the George Washington Foundation, which had entered a spot color newsletter and also come in first without any competition.

The more competitive fields seemed to be in web writing. Wait, how are press women involved in web writing? There is no press in web. Then I noticed the reason why the Times-Dispatch had taken no interest in publishing this story. There were no winners from the Times-Dispatch. Back in the days when I yearned to be considered a Virginia Press Woman, the Times-Dispatch and Norfolk newspapers dominated these awards. No one from the Virginia Pilot won anything either.

That's when I looked over the list again and found that out of 54 men (yes, there was one) and women winning awards from the Virginia Press Women, only six of them actually worked full time at newspapers, and those newspapers were the Farmville Herald, the Fredericksburg Freelance Star, and the Henrico Citizen. Media General, which owns a big block of newspapers in this state, had apparently not budgeted for contest entries or their female employees are in such fear of losing their jobs, they don't want to call attention to themselves.

Or maybe there are no women left working full-time for major newspapers. Twenty-four of the winners listed themselves as freelance writers. Seven did communications and public relations for colleges and universities. Twelve worked in communications for businesses, non-profits or government. One listed herself only as a web content librarian, which may be another word for freelance. Three were from magazines. One entry was even in radio. There is no press in radio, either.

Of the web category awards, only one winner worked for a newspaper. Two were magazine web pages, four were college web pages, nine were associated with businesses, nonprofits or government, and five were freelance, so there's no telling where their web writing or editing appeared. Does this mean I can start entering my blogs?

The Press in Virginia Press Women is dying as surely as newspapers. This organization needs to rename and rebrand itself if it wants to embrace a wider membership of young women entering the communications field, because surely there is still a communications field. The hottest job title these days is "social media manager." VPW, except for its web categories, hasn't opened up categories yet for news twittering or Constant Contact or Mail Chimp-generated electronic newsletters.

Until they do, I guess I can continue winning easily in the uncrowded field of full color newsletters.

Weaning Ourselves Off the News Print

2010-04-26T09:21:00.004-04:00

My husband survived another Sunday without the advertising inserts from the Sunday paper. That is his only interest in the Sunday paper, and it was so intense, after I finally let our Sunday-only subscription expire, he went to the 7-11 for three weeks to purchase the paper. I made him buy me a lottery ticket every time he went, so maybe his intense dislike of the lottery finally helped to wean him off the paper.

His argument, and that of others who have posted comments, was we recouped our investment in the Sunday paper by using the food coupons. That's possible, but cutting out and sorting the coupons was becoming as much of a chore as flipping through the Sunday sections looking for articles I was interested in reading -- which was always not many. I was down to reading just one comic, just the fake letters in the Parade section, and maybe an article in the Money section. The want ads were down to three or four pages at best.

News print is dirty, smeared and difficult to read. The size of the newspaper is difficult to handle. Who has a kitchen table these days where they spread out this huge paper, and flip through the pages? Who even has a leisurely Sunday to do that? With the end of blue laws, Sunday is a major shopping day. You can even go to Ukrop's (uh...Martin's) now. I would come back as a subscriber in a second if the Times-Dispatch went to a daily tabloid format, but as many times as I tell them they need to imitate the New York Daily News and the New York Post, they ignore me. Even though we don't have subways except for sandwiches, we are a commuter society and if print survives, it's going to have to be as a more portable format.

But back to those suggestions that the Sunday paper pays for itself through coupons. No, it doesn't. If you are married to a shopaholic, the Sunday paper ad inserts, especially from Best Buy and hhGregg, were temptations to buy things you didn't previously know you wanted. That last Sunday paper he bought actually cost me $375 because a Craftsman rolling on wheels toolbox he wanted was on sale at Sears. It has been two weeks now and there are still no tools in that toolbox, and probably never will be. Maybe a few will go in eventually, but then they'll drift back to the last place they were used, and eventually they will disappear or rust up from being left out in the rain. The toolbox is a promise to get organized that will be broken. I have been through this many times before.

At least the Sunday paper will no longer be a guilty party in this.

The Legal of Social at SMCRVA

2010-02-19T12:13:00.002-05:00

This month's Social Media Club of Richmond VA meeting on "The Legal of Social" was the most informative one of the series, and yet I have few notes.

Maybe it's because the presenter, fast-talking lawyer Chris Gates, opened with the closer: there is no social media law.

Okay then! Back to the cash bar!

If you paid attention in your libel law class in j-school, you know the basics already. Libel is hard to prove and a hard case to win, and if you are in any way a public figure, even within your own community, too bad. People can say whatever they want about you. On the other hand, try not to be the type of person who says whatever they want about other people. It's just not nice.

Blog and website hosters with open comments sections should post a policy in advance about what kind of posts will be taken down. You can have standards, as long as everyone knows them going in. What's said in the comments section is not your problem. Comment liability belongs to the commenter.

What kinds of things shouldn't you tweet or post? Well, how dangerously do you want to live? You probably shouldn't tweet trade secrets, or insider trading info that could impact stock prices of your company. You definitely shouldn't tweet nasty things about your boss or co-workers, that you're cheating on your spouse, or you buried the mailman under the house.

If you like to tweet or post ideas for movies or inventions, and then someone else makes that movie or invention, you may have a hard time proving you hold the rights to it on a tweet alone. And if you are the first to hashtag the rallying cry that wins the war and rights the economy, don't expect to get any credit for it. Settle for being a legend in your own mind. Who invented #SNOMG anyway?

If you're an adult outside the privacy of your home and you are photographed doing something stupid, illegal or naked, and that photograph appears on the Internet, kind of too bad for you. I imagine if you invite all your friends over to your private house and they all have camera phones, and you do something stupid, you may be equally screwed. Moral: don't be stupid. Or naked.

And avoid misunderstandings by giving your tweets and posts those stupid emoticons because the Internet doesn't have a tone of voice or facial expression to clue people into the context. ;P

There were several questions about the sticky area of adults and children interacting on the Internet. Photo releases at registration for events are recommended. Teachers letting their students be their Facebook friends? Hmmm, no. That's just asking for trouble. (Why not set up a classroom fan page, but keep your personal profile private?) Chatting with underaged kids online even if you work with them during the day? Not good.

Rhythm Hall at the Carpenter Center was standing room only at this event.

What Probably Went Down at the Beheading

2010-02-18T11:49:00.004-05:00

It's a PR flak's job not to stop trying, so you can't fault that person for persistently bugging a reporter to the brink of insanity. As a result, one previously unknown motivational speaker who would have had a limited turn-out for his speech just scored a bonanza of free publicity and cast a massive PC guilt trip over all the liberals in town. If you don't come to his speech now, the verbal terrorists have won. From a PR point of view, that flak is a genius.

But who are we kidding? Many people say disparaging things about others among themselves, especially under stress, under extreme aggravation, or even for public stand-up comedy under the defense of "it's comedy." Who gets more publicly insulted than overweight people? What comedian hasn't let slip a sly joke about the governor of New York's disability? Who hasn't "The Family Guy" insulted? Yes, it's part of the culture. Tasteful and polite we're usually not. So why did a local reporter get axed today?

On a less national (or showbiz) scale and especially when you're in a sensitive official position, you have to know better than to put an unPC insult in writing. Then there's the nightmare of hitting the REPLY button on the email instead of FORWARD. Whoops. This isn't the first time email technology has resulted in dire consequences.

I professionally know, and at times have competed against, the reporter in question, Chris Dovi, for more than a decade. This behavior wasn't out of character. He's had similar dust-ups at previous jobs. Those of us who travel in the same circles have heard about them. He's rough around the edges and doesn't play by the rules. It is part of what makes him good at what he does, actually. But journalism in Richmond has historically been a bow tie profession for gentlemen. There's no other explanation for why the premiere investigative reporter in the area, Mark Holmberg, was aggravated out of the city's only daily newspaper, and no one with the same skill set has ever taken his place there.

I have no doubt Style Weekly has privately flogged him before for brash behavior, loose talk, chronically missing deadlines, or being less than tactful with sources in order to squeeze info out of them. Years ago I read Dovi's unedited stories in the Hanover Herald Progress. They ran his copy as written. Somewhere along the line, someone had given him the bad advice that every first paragraph of every story -- whether it was hard news or a soft feature -- had to be clever, funny, or a pun. His lead-ins were almost always excruciating attempts to be attention-grabbing, and his stories were rambling and sensationally written. When he advanced to the next level, the Times-Dispatch with its grim, humorless copy desk, I knew there was no way his rambunctious style would survive intact. Predictably, his bylined stories there were indistinguishable from any other reporter's. The copy desk was earning its salary distilling him into bland, acceptable news-ese.

From there he went to a county public information office -- who thought that would be a good fit? Apparently it wasn't. It wasn't long before he turned up at his most recent employment where he was a contributor before he was put on staff. I suspect they were hoping someone else would show up to fill the position full-time, but it's not easy finding a writer who can produce hard-hitting investigative journalism and still be such a nonabrasive person, you never cause your publisher one moment of embarrassment. Plus, if your rough copy needs editing for style and structure, turning it in late all the time must make your immediate editor hate the day he was born (or you were born) on a regular basis. I've heard Holmberg was similarly unconcerned with copy deadlines.

So, when a good excuse to part company appears out of the blue, the employer grabs it, even though with such a small writing staff, it's going to hurt. A lot. Management could have offered a rote apology to the offended party and then circled the wagons around their star employee, but when the wagons don't circle, you know there's more to it. I've been through this myself with different results each time, and on the surface, it never makes sense to outsiders. You have to know all the unrelated deep background. Sometimes a boss throws a protective shield over you, and sometimes they let you twist in the wind, regardless of the transgression, which is seldom the only deciding factor. This was just the final straw on a totally different haystack.

There will be a lot of public dialogue in the coming days about whether the punishment fit the crime, our culture and our social boundaries -- and that's what the PR flack wants you to think this was about, as well as buy a ticket to hear his client -- but the fact is, that's not even what this was about.

Flooring It at Another Crazy News Panel

2010-01-28T21:44:00.002-05:00

Aaron Kremer, founder and editor of the website and email newsletter Richmond BizSense -- and famously against Twitter as a useful tool -- is apparently also against chairs. He originally booked his "Future of News" panel at a bar, Black Finn, then due to a surge of early registrations, moved it to another bar, Infuzion.

Except for bar seating along the walls, there were no chairs. No one thought to rent any. At least two-thirds of the attendees stood on the dance floor, drinks in hand. This is not my idea of a panel discussion venue. I sat on a cold concrete floor. Drink tickets don't do much for me; nor do salty chicken fingers and the ever-present veggie tray with a cup of ranch dressing in the middle -- so for $15, I would really like a chair. Even an uncomfortable folding chair would be nice.

And I would like some hard questions and some controversy, not a moderator throwing out soft, vague questions that can only elicit equally vague answers. Moderators need to actually listen to the answers and corner the speaker with their banalities or inconsistencies. Nail somebody with something! Make somebody squirm! Challenge the panel. Demand some creativity of thought. Instead we get bland nothingness from adults in the communications business who don't know yet to hold the mic up to their mouth.

(I will refrain from commenting about having only one person checking people's names off and collecting the money at the door, creating a three-row line reminiscent of getting into Space Mountain, and name tags typed in a micro font, so as far as being readable from a distance: useless networking tool.)

So there sat Tom Silvestri, publisher of the Times-Dispatch, and an assortment of other media people helping to put him out of business.

Moderator Jim Bacon, after being schooled by the audience on speaking into the microphone instead of waving it like a magic wand, asked the first softball question, does content want to be free?

(Ooooh, let me predict the print people will say you must pay for quality and the digital people will say with their much lower overhead, they can survive with a few web ads and not require digital subscriptions.)

Susan Winiecki of Richmond Magazine said high end journalism requires funding. Bacon doesn't ask her the follow-up question I'm thinking. Isn't advertising paying your freight? Why would you need to charge the readers, too? (Silvestri actually cops to this at the very end of the night. Subscriptions are not where the income is or should be.)

Ross Catrow of RVANews is fine with low-end, citizen journalism and gives a shout-out to John Murden and the Church Hill People's News. Anywhere else, there would be cheers for John, but I don't think this crowd has ever heard of the CHPN.

Silvestri says if there's no advertising support anymore, you need a different business model. (Okay, obvious.) Yet (!) Bacon doesn't ask the follow-up question, what would that different business model look like? Do you have any idea? Do you have a contingency plan in the works?

Lori Waran of Style says the online edition of her paper is making money.

I don't even know what the next question was or if there was one, but the conversation goes pro-digital. Catrow's RVANews is doing well with internet ads, too. Kremer bragged about getting his email newsletter out by 7:30 a.m. and by 9 a.m., he has solid analytics on what stories were hits and which were misses. Restaurant news is big in Richmond. So are stories about salaries. He phases out topics that get few hits, so he's evolving into the perfect business model. Survival of the hittest.

Waran can also track popular Style stories online, the winner being Jenna Bush's engagement. (Really? Really? Shame on you, Richmond!)

Winiecki has to blame or credit her cover stories for selling her magazines, which is why we see so many "Richmond's Top Restaurants" and "Who Makes the Most Money" covers (I am not joking.)

Silvestri agrees restaurant stories and obits sell. (Where is the niche entrepreneur who is working on an Eat Richmond weekly paper and a Who's Dead Today website? They're going to make a fortune!)

At one point, I actually think I heard Bacon ask Ross Catrow if his business model was a threat to his business model. (The question was about web news aggregators. Part of Catrow's empire, RVABlogs, is one. And the bottom half of RVANews carries feeds from the community blogs.) And how do people like that Murden guy you gave a shout-out to feel about you STEALING HIS WORK?

Catrow says he really feels like they're all working in tandem. (Bacon must be unaware that Catrow's sites and the community blogs are all financially linked together in an ad-sharing network.) Catrow gives a shout-out to Nate's Taco Truck, a one-man business that does all its advertising on Twitter. I am Nate's Taco Truck. I am here today. Eat my tacos. They are good.

It doesn't get any simpler than that, and it costs him nothing in advertising. The hard follow-up question: how do you as an outlet dependent on advertising counteract that? Nope, not asked. Bacon, an early blogger, does admit he does not understand Twitter or Facebook. He calls it more spam.

Waran tells a touching story about reaching out for her iPhone first thing in the morning (you know that song, "Touch Me in the Morning"?) to read the overnight headlines on her Twitter feed. (Me, too.) It's faster and more convenient than sloshing outside to get the paper in your pjs. But, she adds -- trying to be nice to Silvestri -- some people probably still prefer the ritual of walking outside and looking for the paper on their lawn.

Bacon does not ask the hard follow-up question: isn't the news on the lawn actually yesterday's news? If Haiti was hit by a 15.7 earthquake at 2 a.m. and sunk into the sea, it's not going to be in the paper that morning. It is going to be on your Twitter feed.

Catrow admits to loving his Twitter, "a useful tool." (That's what she said.)

Kremer felt overwhelmed by his brief flirtation following 50 people on Twitter. I am baffled, and begin to wonder if he has speed reading issues and can't scan through a narrow column of short sentences, which is all Twitter is. I follow 185 people and can keep up in two or three 20-minute scanning spurts a day. You cannot tell me that people who go outside to smoke three or four times a day and talk about what they had for dinner with the other smokers are getting as much out of their breaks.

The still not-famous-in-this-crowd Murden ventured forth to ask the first question about the "quality of the conversation," which got Silvestri a little worked up. His stock in trade is selling depth and quality of information since newspapers haven't been able to deliver immediacy since the dawn of television. Comments get out of control, especially in the morning. The morning brings out the crazies. No quality of conversation then! Never read any comments posted before noon. Thoughtfulness doesn't check in until lunch time. The internet is going to need moderators.

Waran speaks up that at Style, they like the passion of the debate. Bring on the crazies!

Second question is from a small business owner who says he thinks the future is web advertising and branding your business online. Winiecki counters with: you need a mix of advertising. You need to talk to your reps for direction, what's best for you. (!!!!! Like my newspaper rep is really going to tell me that newspaper advertising is not for me? Like Richmond magazine's ad rep is going to say, we're too expensive for you and people turn the page too quickly. We're not right for you. Take your money to my competitor.)

A business woman -- did she say she was from La Dif?-- said she had no idea how to get into social media marketing and needed help. (She probably thought she was going to learn how at this panel discussion…and maybe even sit in a chair!) Someone handed her their business card. That person will make more money tonight as a result of this seminar than anyone on the panel.

Someone brings up the iPad and Silvestri says with almost genuine emotion that he wants OUT of the news delivery business and into the content business. He doesn't want to think about printing presses, paper, ink, and newspaper carriers. The electronic newspaper is his Valhalla.

I forget to indicate who said "my hunch is most people are still getting their news from the Richmond Times-Dispatch" in my notes. It wasn't Silvestri. And I don't think it's even true. I think the television and radio reporters are still getting their news from the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Catrow, several times during the evening, sends big hugs to the Tweeting, blogging Richmond Fire Department, which truly is going gangbusters with the breaking fire news and the blog recaps of flame fighting frenzies, complete with photos.

Then the night ends with the stupidest question directed at Silvestri. "Do you feel like you're sitting next to pirates?"

What? WHAT?

Not only did we then have to hear pirate jokes from Silvestri, including an aaarrrgh, no one from local television or radio was even on the panel! If anyone is pirating the morning paper, it's them. Richmond magazine and Style Weekly cover different news in a different way. RVANews is covering a completely different side of Richmond -- the side where we all actually live everyday -- and aggregating nonsensical bloggers and the community blogs. The closest thing to a pirate in the room was Kremer, who builds most of his daily content with feeds from other news sources.

This panel was sponsored by a law firm and the Home Building Association of Richmond, who got in free. I can't imagine what they got out of it. I go to about three of these "future of news" type affairs a year, and it's never any different. There's never any real insights. You hear about the now, but seldom is the future actually discussed. But I guess we'll keep talking about the future of news until news finally gets there.

To Sunday or Not to Sunday

2010-01-06T16:13:00.002-05:00

A subscription renewal envelope fell out of last Sunday's paper, so it's that time again. Time to decide if I even want to keep getting the Sunday paper.

Last time the decision was made for two ridiculous reasons. My husband enjoys the sale inserts and convinced me clipping the grocery coupons more than paid for the subscription.

But now that I've reached the point where I barely read any of the paper at all, the fact that the subscription cancels out whatever savings I get from grocery coupons makes that seem less of a deal.

The more my life gets automated by electronic conveniences, the more annoying manual transactions are -- clipping and sorting coupons, pulling them out in the store and going through them by hand in every aisle. Who has the time! Besides, I scan my grocery card at a machine on the way in and it prints out a sheet of coupons for things I often buy anyway. Or I scan my card on the way out and it gives me all the sales. (Who shops without a card these days?)

I could live without the coupons. Sometimes they work against me like sales inserts, creating a desire to buy items I actually don't need, like ever-changing types of household air freshener dispensers. And my husband can definitely live without the sales inserts because it only creates a desire for things we can't afford. We replaced two perfectly good TVs last fall because of store sales. Yes, we wanted them, but we didn't actually need them.

As for the rest of the paper, I only read Dilbert in the comics. I only read the fake questions and answers about celebrities in Parade. Definitely won't miss that. I don't open Sports or Celebrations. So now I'm down to what used to be called the A and B sections, Flair and Moneywise, or whatever the business section is called. I used to read the help wanted ads just to see if I could be doing better somewhere else, but now I have a problem finding wherever they are. And there's not that many of them.

Even this small pile of sections seems like a chore to get through on Sunday mornings. There's no convenient space on my table to spread out the paper and once your eyes get bifocally or trifocally like mine have, reading on the sofa is impossible without a lot of folding and unfolding the paper into smaller sections. I'm not in the mood for origami on Sunday morning.

Sundays are not like they used to be. Church, a big lunch that looks more like dinner, sports, a smaller meal, "60 Minutes," bed. Mom can relax with the paper because she's been home all week cleaning the house and doing the shopping. Well, not on this planet. I've been at work all week. The house is a disaster area. I've probably spent all Saturday cleaning and doing 10 loads of laundry, and Sunday I have to shop for groceries and other things. Who has time for a big newspaper? I don't. No time.

The paper, now that I think about it, was always something I read in the evening during commercial breaks or boring program interludes, or while I was not watching a program, but waiting for a program I did watch, on one of the four television channels I used to get. Now I get 300 television channels, and there's no boring interludes because I've recorded only the shows I want to watch, and I watch them straight through, fastforwarding through the commercials as well as the car chases. No time for any reading, and if I do find a moment, I look at my Twitter feed on my iPod Touch. The news is there in a series of headlines. The iPod fits in my hand and I can hold it right up to my eyes easily.

The first Sunday the paper is not on the lawn anymore when my husband goes out to smoke his morning cigarette and hack and cough, he's going to whine. What about Best Buy? I don't know what's going on at Best Buy. Well, you don't need to know what's going on at Best Buy. Besides, that flyer is actually on their website every week. You can virtually turn the pages with your mouse just like it was a real paper. I'll buy you a wireless keyboard to go on your Playstation 3 and you can access it on your big TV hanging on the wall. You just can't take it into the bathroom anymore.

I don't want that to be the winning argument for spending $30 for 13 weeks of Sunday papers: so he can look at the Best Buy flyer in the bathroom. That would be sad.

Are Reporters Necessary?

2009-12-21T09:15:00.002-05:00

Interesting blog post here about the need for public relations professionals to video their clients when they're being interviewed by the press. That way if they're misquoted, or a spin is put on the story or the broadcast footage, you can counter with the actual, unedited footage, or the entire interview video or transcript on your client's social media outlet.

Which begs the question, then why is the reporter even necessary in the first place for getting a message out?

You've Been Served

2009-12-17T17:11:00.003-05:00

In my last post, Head in Sand, there was this exchange with a rep from the Times-Dispatch:

As evidence that bloggers are liars, one Richmond rep mentioned bloggers and Tweeters had gotten the Ukrop's sale story all wrong. That we fanned a rumor furiously that turned out to be false. Did it?

I think they dug it out, speculated on it, and when the sale fell through, they moved on, and all that before the T-D went to press for the next cycle. And essentially the core of the story is true. The supermarket chain is faltering and might very well take a good offer.

And besides, if Jim Ukrops picked up the phone -- big T-D advertiser that he is -- and said to the editors at the newspaper that there was no story here, don't go with it, would they go with it?

Well, look what happened today. Ukrop's sold itself to Royal Ahold. They can't compete in today's market (I'm assuming they mean open six days a week and without wine or beer). So, the Twitter did have it right and first from the beginning and broke this story while the newspaper was still tiptoeing around. WWBT-12 was on it from the beginning, too.

Head in Sand

2009-11-13T16:34:00.002-05:00

I've been to literally half a dozen seminars in the past few months about social media. Everybody is excited about it. Government and business communicators are excited about it because it's an inexpensive, often free, way to get information to their clients and citizens.

Since the elections there's been a seminar every week on how the candidates used social media.

People who are entrenched in social media are very excited about it because it's creating new ways to do their jobs, and in some cases, actually creating jobs. Bloggers, Facebook users, Tweeters are all feeling a part of a social information revolution.

Only the established press is not excited. I recently attended several lectures at the Virginia Press Association headquarters in Glen Allen. I got in through the backdoor. I maintain a membership in the Virginia Press Women and that group was invited to this VPA event to fill chairs. In the two social media tracks I attended, the presenters were excited about how newspapers can embrace this technology and make it their own.

Like: find your cities' most influential, popular bloggers and link to them on your newspaper's website.

Amazingly, some of the editors and reporters from small towns across the state said they had no idea how to find such bloggers, or even if they existed. The rest were downright hostile. Bloggers traffic in rumors and untruths, according to the press. We are the Billy Carters to their Jimmys. Why do they want to link to bloggers?

One presenter showed how reporters who also blog are doing amazing jobs covering sports. Sports is a weekend game. No one wants to wait until the Monday morning paper to read about the game or comment back. The sports reporters who are online are instantly reporting. This often means staying up late after the game is over to converse with readers, or writing and posting on Sunday.

On Sunday.

You can feel the room ice up with Virginia-resistance.

Some of these sports bloggers have become their own self-employed news hubs, divorcing their papers and setting up advertiser-supported websites to report on their beats.

As evidence that bloggers are liars, one Richmond rep mentioned bloggers and Tweeters had gotten the Ukrop's sale story all wrong. That we fanned a rumor furiously that turned out to be false. Did it?

I think they dug it out, speculated on it, and when the sale fell through, they moved on, and all that before the T-D went to press for the next cycle. And essentially the core of the story is true. The supermarket chain is faltering and might very well take a good offer.

And besides, if Jim Ukrops picked up the phone -- big T-D advertiser that he is -- and said to the editors at the newspaper that there was no story here, don't go with it, would they go with it?

The moderator brought up several types of stories -- like how to buy and finance your own home without a realtor -- and asked how many papers were doing those kind of stories? In these perilous financial times when no newspaper wants to lose more advertising, do advertisers have some control about the type of stories written?

There was no shouting of nay, nay or blasphemy! blasphemy! Everybody there had probably had an idea for a feature spiked because it would upset an advertiser.

Another lecture was about how to make money from social media. It's hard to get ad salesmen excited about selling little button ads at $100 or less. Some innovators have found ways to automate it. But here was the future of ad selling: Twitter!

The Austin Statesman will run certain types of ads -- those that offer discounts or coupons or say the magic word time incentives -- on its Twitter feed for two Tweets a day for $150.

But what's going to keep a person with a healthy following from undercutting you? Tweeting your ad twice a day for $50? Or just doing it for free. You'll be craiglisted in weeks. In fact, I pointed out, in Richmond we already have @rvabargains doing that and @styleoffers is trying to get off the ground.

Ice.

Amusingly, a fleet of VCU students were sent to the conference to live-Tweet the whole thing and tapped away at their laptops throughout. You can read the stream at #onavpa.

Superman's Alter Ego

2009-10-08T10:29:00.003-04:00

From, of course, The New Yorker, the greatest magazine ever, and which hasn't changed its layout design, font or look since never. Because when you're perfect to begin with, you don't need to change.

Writing Less is More

2009-10-07T16:48:00.003-04:00

I used to write essays/editorials. For a long spell, I sold dozens of these to three or four regular newspaper clients. I had a 1,000-word limit. This was good training. My average first draft was around 1,500 words, and telling the same story in two-thirds of the words is a great discipline. People don't want to read all your digressions. They want you to stay on topic.

As my clients went out of business, or new editors came in with different tastes, I started self-publishing myself on my various blogs. This is bad because there's no money at all in it, and fewer readers. But it's also good because there's no rejection. Everything you write gets published. But there's also no discipline. You don't have that 1,000-word limit. Out of habit I still tend to edit down, but I am seeing many, many bloggers who have never experienced writing for print publication -- or even writing under a copy editor -- who have no discipline or polish at all. A few of them even have avid followings. I just wish they were better self-editors. I had to give up reading most of the posts on rvablogs.com because it's like a Wild, Wild West of undisciplined, unedited verbal diarrhea for the most part.

So there I was, rattling along on my various blogs, writing in a silent vacuum for mostly myself when I discovered Twitter. Twitter doesn't just limit your words. It limits your characters to 140. Big words can drastically reduce how much you can say. This was a challenge, to write that small, that concisely, that to the point.

It's also a lot less work when you get the hang of it, meaning I neglect most of my blogs now for the quick, dirty, in-and-out of Twitter. I neglect reading blogs because a Twitter stream is so much more efficient. I can tell immediately, in seconds, whether you have anything worthwhile to say or not. Writing less is the future.

It's hard to pick up a newspaper after you've been in the Twitter stream, or even watch the evening news, because both news reporting disciplines still depend on time-honored but archaic ways of padding out a story. For instance, getting a man-on-the-street comment or observation, which is just ridiculous. Who is this random person? Why do I care what they think? They're actually just a stand-in for the reporter who, because of that objectivity thing, cannot react emotionally to whatever he/she is reporting.

Or the horrible, terrible how-do-you-feel question. Something terrible has happened to you or to someone you know, or someone you've heard about. How do you feel?

I feel bad. I feel sad.

No one ever says, I feel nothing. Or I don't care. Or I am precariously enjoying the suffering of this other person. No one!

We need to get past this style of reporting because people want the news fast, short, and unadorned with the unnecessary or obvious observation. Get to the point. Write like you were tweeting.

My Lunch Tabloid

2009-10-02T11:23:00.002-04:00

Polish newspaper designer Jacek Utko says the future of newspapers is

FREE

TABLOID

LOCAL

NICHE

OPINION

and people want to read it over breakfast. Well, maybe in Europe. I think we are too busy getting out the door to sit down with a paper in the morning unless we grab one on the way to the office and read it there. So I am going to change his BREAKFAST to

LUNCH

Yes, T-D, I would subscribe if I got a daily tabloid from you that was mostly local news with a smattering of the sexiest, grisliest if-it-bleeds-it-leads national and entertainment stories, the latest tech news, and a lot of columnists opining about more than just op-ed politics, and some comics and puzzles. (Did I just describe the New York Daily News?)

Pie Charts Not Dead, At Least

2009-09-24T16:25:00.001-04:00

http://is.gd/3DzCV

Designers Can Save Newspapers

2009-09-22T10:16:00.000-04:00

I found the future of newspapers and it is in Poland.

Brick, the Orphan Child

2009-09-17T10:26:00.004-04:00

If George Bush doesn't care about black people, and Kanye West doesn't care about little girl country singers, then Media General doesn't care about its bastard child tab, Brick. Which I notice is no longer Reloaded. It's just Brick, as in sinking like a...

The inside front cover is a house ad. The back cover is a house ad. The inside back cover is a puzzle page. Underneath the staff box and (one) letter is a house ad. All prime advertising spots are going vacant. The staff box lists an executive manager, but no one claiming to be anything even remotely close to an editor. The editing shows it. Chris Bopst's column is fraught with awkward phrasing and repeated words in the same sentence. (It's called a thesaurus.)

In a comical mis-edit of the Wear It page this week, each of the four people pictured are asked how they are similar to their dog. Their dogs all have different names, but since the first text box asked "How is Henry (the dog) similar to you?," every text box after that asks all the other people not how they are similar to their own dog, but "How is Henry similar to you?"

Most telling, this week the Times-Dispatch changed the size of their paper for a sleeker, narrower look. But this means the tabloids are also printing on these narrower sheets, giving them an almost perfectly square (11x11.5) look. (Style, in comparison, is 11x12). No one thought how that would impact the classifieds, which are either bunched at the bottom of the page or cut off at the top, or that the cover template would need to be redesigned.

Media General needs to take care of all the products it prints and not put something out on the streets that is embarassingly designed, poorly written and edited, appears to have not an iota of preplanning involved, and broadcasts the lack of advertising so blatantly. (You can't even find some non-profits to give free ads to rather than bulk up with house ads in all the key spots?)

Not to mention, the Brick website has been all but abandoned.

Don't you care about your image, MG? Even a little bit?

A Step in a Direction

2009-09-15T22:40:00.002-04:00

I like the new, thinner Times-Dispatch. The content still needs work (Local? Local.) Eventually we will get to my master plan that it should be a twice weekly all-local tabloid, with weekly tabs covering lifestyle, sports, business, as separate publications.

The bigger obituary photos are kind of disconcerting, but I really really like it when someone very old is represented by a photo of themselves when they were very young. I enjoy seeing those 1920's hairstyles and big red lips on the ladies.

I was looking at the Benny-fit coverage on Facebook. For those who don't follow music, it was a reunion show of popular local bands from the '70s and '80s. I thought for a moment, well, if I was still doing my local music newspaper, I would have written this show up and photographed it....but...but...it's 2009. Facebook has almost 450 photos posted on the fan page set up for the show. How could any publication top that kind of coverage? There's comments under many of the photos from people who were there or not here. I'm sure somewhere on the Internet there are blogs or Facebook entries about what happened.

Who needs a newspaper anymore? We're all publishing our own news.

The Business Pitch

2009-09-02T15:58:00.002-04:00

"Reporting Local, Reaching Global" was a free panel discussion on business news hosted at Plant Zero by Aaron Kremer, founder of Richmond BizSense and notorious anti-Twitterite. (Can you be a Luddite if you operate a website?)

Panelists were freelancers Phaedra Hise and Maya Smart and former Media Generalists Robert Powell (now editing Virginia Business), Sean Ryan (now a PR flak with Hodges Partnership), and Pam Feibish, current activity unknown but former T-D business editor.

Here's what I learned.

Kremer wisely had several prepared questions to start the program. By the time they were answered, the audience was ready with their own, and if they had stiffed him and asked nothing, he still would have provided a substantial panel discussion, so that was good thinking.

Press releases, faxed or mailed, remain uselessly dead. Press releases sent as attachments to emails are on life support. Time of death will be called momentarily. Your best shot at a pitch now is in the SUBJECT LINE of an email, because most editors get so many emails, they can't open and read them anymore. Feibish said she used to get 300 a day.

Pitching your story in the subject line is shorter than an elevator pitch. It's shorter than a Tweet. It's a semi-tweet. All the more reason you should be on Twitter, learning how to say what you have to say in 140 characters or less, because less is not going to be more in this new media age. It's going to be ALL.

If you're pitching yourself or your client as a story, hang it up. Better to pitch yourself or your client as a source a la Larry Sabato who can be available to comment on any story the reporter is working on. When you call freelancers, ask only, "what are you working on?" and "what do you need now?"

As for being the story, you must have a narrative, a struggle, a trial by fire, from which you rise like the phoenix, triumphant and whole. You must be willing to divulge all your secrets and finances. You must contact reporters when you don't want anything from them and just be their friend. You must not call them on the phone because they are too busy. But you must call them when you have breaking news, especially if they are a frequent publisher.

You must never say "no comment" because it only makes them desire the words you do not want to say all the more. If you are in a scandalous mess, better to call the media yourself before they hear about it elsewhere, call all the media, and try to contain your bad news in one 24-hour news cycle. (In my opinion, confessing on Friday night is always good. The second-stringers are manning the media over the weekend and really don't want to work that hard.)

Panel discussions are always lighter learning experiences than one guy/woman with a PowerPoint and a laser light, pounding in the truths of our time, but this one wasn't bad and I went home with a new resolve to keep lobbying my workplace to give up the press release attachment. Also, the price was right and I had a Pepsi and some chips.

Are Guest Columns Really Ads?

2009-08-31T12:20:00.002-04:00

When the "guest columns" started on Mondays, I wondered how freewheeling this was going to be, or how they were going to decide who gets to be a guest columnist. So far, of the ones I've looked at, there's always been a contact email, website, or company name at the end, identifying the guest columnists as someone who has a business or works for a non-profit -- in otherwords, has something to sell.

That makes me wonder if this is actually space for hire disguised as news.

Writer for Hire

2009-08-25T23:12:00.003-04:00

Here's the thing: If someone pays you to write something for them, you write it the way they want it. They are the client. You are the hired help.

It's not about journalism, or integrity, or your personal artistic vision. You accepted a job. It doesn't matter what the "understanding" was at the outset. Whoever is writing the numbers on your check has the final say.

Sometimes in the glorious battle of "writing" -- which gets even more heroic when you fancy you are practicing journalism with a capital J -- we forget that. Sometimes even when you're working on what you think is an actual newspaper, you're still the pen for hire and someone else is calling the shots. I can't get too high and mighty about this because I once confused a weekly community newspaper with journalism when it was really about selling ads, making money for the owners, and not getting the readers so worked up, they called or, even worse, called the publisher.

Since then, I've been traveling in the totally different world of public relations writing where the client's version of any story is the truth, even if it's not. It is! And it is your mission to spread that truth, even if you don't believe it. You do! And that is your job. It's always an option not to accept the job, but if you do, then suck it up.

Social Media as the New Frontier

2009-08-14T09:19:00.002-04:00

I don't know if he was being real or sarcastic, but here's Garrison Keillor this morning:

"Bloggers are writers who've been liberated from editors, and some of them take you back to the thrilling days of frontier journalism, before the colleges squashed the profession."

When I was just out of j-school, I had two interviews with the editors of the daily sister papers. The afternoon editor told me he didn't hire j-school grads because they were too trained and he wanted out-of-the-box thinkers with diverse backgrounds. The morning editor told me I was too out of the box, my background too diverse. The model for the female journalist at the time was a spinster with ferociously correct grammatical skills and safety pins on her blouse where buttons should be.

That hasn't got much to do with what Keillor wrote, but I'm practicing frontier journalism this morning. Back to Keillor:

"This is the beauty of new media: It isn't so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people e-mail it to friends and slowly it floods the country. "

Oh, To Be Ann Arbor

2009-08-11T15:25:00.002-04:00

Time magazine reports that the publishers of the Ann Arbor News -- Advance Publications -- shut down the town's only daily, which was losing money, and replaced it with a website, AnnArbor.com, and a companion print edition that comes out on Thursdays and Sundays.

This is a fabulous idea, and as soon as the Times-Dispatch turns its next money-losing corner, it should do it, (and make those two print editions tabloids.)

Advance Publications, owned by the Newhouse family, is saving on newsprint, printing and delivery. A staff of 316 has been reduced to 60. They link to 80 bloggers, who are paid little or nothing and don't require health insurance or retirement benefits. The covered news is decidedly local and refreshingly interactive.

And here's some brilliant thinking outside the box: web readers rate the web ads and the ad voted the best deal of the week gets a coveted space on the cover of the Sunday print edition. (Way to get people to look at the ads!)

Ann Arbor is also blessed with a couple who provide extensive, exhaustive coverage of local government and civic association meetings on their own website, a site that gets so much traffic, they're able to make it their full-time and only jobs. An alternative monthly is thriving, and so is a new start-up weekly, all picking up the advertising that once went in the daily.

This sounds like an exciting media town even if it's a major municipality without a daily newspaper.

Some Thoughts on Free

2009-07-16T19:31:00.005-04:00

These are quotes from Malcolm Gladwell's article on Chris Anderson's book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" from The New Yorker.

[Anderson] Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business.

Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists...There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won't be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free -- paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards -- may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.

Anderson's second point is that when prices hit zero, extraordinary things happen.

[Behavioral economist Dan Ariely] A group of subjects are offered a choice between two kinds of chocolate, Hershey's Kisse for 1 cent, and Lindt truffles for 15 cents. Three-quarters choose the truffles. For the next test group, the price is reduced by 1 cent. The Kisses are now free. The order of preference is reversed. Sixty-nine percent choose the Kisses. The magic word free has the power to create a consumer stampede. Amazon does the same thing with free shipping for orders more than $25. People will buy a second book to get free shipping.

[Anderson] From the consumer's perspective, there is a huge difference between free and cheap. Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it, and you're in an entirely different business. The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.

The philosophy of embracing the Free involves moving from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. Giving something away means that a lot of it will be wasted. But because it costs almost nothing to make things digitally, we can afford to be wasteful. Mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are artifacts of an era of scarcity. We had to worry how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint, shelf space and broadcast time.

Digital infrastructure is effectively Free.
Consumers love Free.
Free means never having to make a judgment of value.

Counter argument: [Gladwell] The Wall Street Journal has found more than a million subscribers willing to pay for reading online. Broadcast television is struggling. Premium cable is doing fine. Apple makes more money selling iPhone aps (ideas) than the iPhone (stuff). The company could give away the iPhone to boost downloads.

[Me] Fascinating stuff!

The Dinosaur on the Lawn

2009-06-21T12:18:00.003-04:00

I am so over the format of newspapers. I still get the Sunday paper for the grocery store coupons and my husband has an addiction to the Best Buy flyer. Truly, that is the only thing he reads. He takes that, the K-Mart, Target, and OfficeMax flyers, and goes downstairs and dreams his little dreams of having all the toys.

This morning he was away on a camping trip, so I was the one at the window looking at the paper rolled up in a plastic bag on the lawn. In this day and age, this is how this product is delivered to me. Rolled up. On the lawn. In a plastic bag. I went out and got it. The paper was rubberbanded in two tight rolls. One part was the ad flyers and sections like Commentary, Flair, the ads, that were obviously printed around Friday, and the other roll was the usual paper, A section, B section, sports, business, which is now called Money?

I took off the plastic bag. A waste of plastic. I took off the rubberbands. A waste of rubberbands. Part of a page ripped off while I was pulling off rubberbands. Then I had to smooth it out on the table. It felt dirty to my hands. It wouldn't lay flat. It kept wanting to curl. I moved the big pile of papers, the ad inserts in one size, the news in another, various other inserts falling out, to the sofa, but it was too big a pile of paper to comfortably read, not that there was anything I wanted to read anyway. I don't care about a dozen profiles of area fathers. I really don't.

What do I care about this morning?

Well, how's Iran doing?
Has North Korea fired a nuclear missile toward us?
Did Steve Jobs really get a liver transplant and is he going to survive and continue to run the greatest tech company ever?

I scan my iPod's news service aps, read those stories, and I'm done with the news this morning. I have lots of things to do. I can't spend even an hour turning these huge, dirty, newspaper pages, scanning for stories. Later on this evening, I'll scan the headlines on the iPod again and see what's happening. Meanwhile, after 15 minutes, the entire paper has already been put in the recycling. Later today, I'll clip my coupons.

Nothing Changes in Richmond

2009-06-17T16:00:00.003-04:00

I started reading Roger Mudd's The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News this morning, and his story starts in Richmond, at the News Leader where he got his first job, replacing a reporter who was out on maternity leave. The year was 1953 and what was amazing to me (besides there being a female reporter who was going to come back after having a baby) is he talks about the same people I encountered when I arrived there 20 years later -- Charles Hamilton, John Leard, Charlie McDowell, and Guy Fridell.

All of them still had jobs of sorts at Media General decades later. McDowell and Fridell were columnists. Hamilton had been booted upstairs to the executive floor where he was put in charge of the employee newsletter, and he wasn't happy about that one bit. Because I wouldn't flirt with him or otherwise play nice, he sidelined my professional career. It took me several years to discover that he was the reference that was tripping me up. I swore I was going to show up at his funeral to glare at him, but he lived a very, very long time, and by the time the obituary appeared, I had lost my steam. There was so much sexual harassment going on back then anyway.

But my point is, back then the newspaper was so reluctant to change, even when the person was old, retired, and completely out of it, Media General found a job they could do so they could keep writing or keep coming to the office to sit behind a desk, even if they didn't have anything to do. One old guy had his wife drive him in from Barboursville twice a week so he could sit in his little glass cubicle and turn in his column, with the date line Barboursville. He actually died in that little cubicle one Labor Day weekend.

Mudd writes that black preachers could not be called The Reverand. Only white preachers could have the The. The blacks were just Rev. He also reported living in Baltimore Row in the "historic district." Where is Baltimore Row?

After his spring and summer at the News Leader, he was hired by WRNL, the sister radio station, and had several successful years there chasing the Byrd political machine with his gigantic tape recorder. He went on to jobs in Washington radio and television and eventually CBS News, coming back to Richmond to be married at the Cathedral.

AP Memories

2009-06-16T16:07:00.004-04:00

Bill Baskervill retired in 2004 after a 36-year career as a reporter and editor with The Associated Press in Virginia. The award, given annually for outstanding contributions to Virginia journalism, will be presented to Baskervill on June 16 at SPJ’s Virginia Pro Chapter banquet in Richmond.

-- Times-Dispatch

I haven't seen Baskerville since the early '80s when I left the AP. Desperate to leave the production pit of the Richmond News Leader where nothing good was happening for me, I had taken a job as the secretary at The Associated Press, which was in the basement of the Media General building, so I didn't go far. In fact, I literally sunk lower into the ground. I was making $170 a week at the RNL. The AP offered me $175. RNL counteroffered with $180, but despite all the big money negotiations, it was time to go.

Bill was there before me, the whole time I was there, and apparently from this news story, for a very long time afterward. Most of the time the guys and occasionally a woman in this small basement office rewrote stories from the Times-Dispatch and News Leader and put them on the wire for other newspapers in the state and for radio.

It didn't seem like a very hard job to me, and it paid very well. I think it was $600 a week to start! A fortune! It was a union shop. The challenge was periodically they had to actually leave the office and develop an "enterprise story," a long feature. I couldn't apply for any openings because you had to have two years experience writing for a radio station or newspaper, so I left after three years to edit a short-lived cable television magazine. My boss at the AP, Bureau Chief Bob Gallimore, was probably the nicest boss I ever had, a very kind man, and I can still see him in the glass cubicle next to me, combing his comb-over. When the reporters and editors made fun of him behind his back, they imitated him combing his hair. (He was management, so even though he was such a nice guy, he was the bad guy.)

We had a nice system going with the in and out trays. Mr. Gallimore typed his letters on scratch paper and I retyped them on stationery. There weren't copy machines then. I made copies with carbon paper.

Each year the AP had two conferences to hand out awards, one for newspapers and one for broadcast outlets, so I got to travel around the state and stay in some nice hotels. At one conference in Newport News, I let the waiter keep refilling my wine glass. I was fine all the way back to my room. But then I could not take off my shoes or dress, or even move. If I did, my head would shatter into a million shards. All night I was on top of the bed spread, still in my shoes and evening dress, not moving. That pretty much ended my association with alcohol.

A row of teletype machines chugged along all day, spitting out streams of news on brownish paper. The men were always in there, replacing the paper rolls and cursing. Big news happened while I was there, news that made bells ring on the teletypes. President Ronald Reagan was shot. Richard Obsenshain, running for the Senate, died in a small plane crash at the Chesterfield County Airport. John Warner, who was married to Elizabeth Taylor at the time, was selected to run in his place.

Photographs were coming in on this big printer contraption, photographs that would never appear anywhere because they were distasteful, but still they were transmitted on the wire. I am still haunted by one of a child in a pickup truck in the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens in 1980. Fifty-seven people were killed, including this child in the back of the truck who looked untouched. Apparently during a volcanic eruption, the oxygen must get sucked out of the air, suffocating everyone in the area. The child's eyes were open, looking blankly upward in the aerial photo.

The other haunting photo was taken by a local photographer of a woman killed in a shoot-out or a domestic dispute or something down in Petersburg. Ambulance crews had tried to save her, which meant cutting off her clothes, but she died, and they left her there on the ground for a moment, enough time for the photographer to take his photo. Men are men, not above enjoying a photo of a topless woman, even a dead one. I was disgusted that day. And that photo is burned into my head, too. Her eyes were also open.

But this is supposed to be about Bill, so here's my Bill story. The way he taught his wife to drive a stick shift, he said, was they went down to an empty department store lot one Sunday in two cars. He drove the stick and she drove the other one, but then he took the other one home and left her in the parking lot with the stick. Good luck. Find your way home.

That's it. I have another story about pens, and how union workers wouldn't bring their own pens to work. They wanted to be issued a company pen, and they often misplaced it, so I would have to reissue pens often which started to get on my nerves, and I never understood this (it's a pen! and you make very good money! can't you use your own pen?), but being provided that damn company pen was important and I ended up crying in the bathroom because I was management and keeper of the pens, and don't you get smart with us, missy, but who wants to hear that story.

Time Magazine on Twitter

2009-06-12T21:44:00.003-04:00

Managing Editor Richard Stengel had this to say about Twitter in the June 15 issue of Time magazine:

"There is an admirable brevity to tweets that is increasingly rare in our culture. Twitter is a uniquely democratic form of communication -- that is, it's open to everyone, there is no central authority, and people vote on whom and what they like by signing up to be followers. It's about the wisdom -- or folly -- of crowds. It's also a prototype of a new kind of shared national experience: people talking to one another in real time about real events...

"Its characteristics -- real-time conversation, instant links, groups of followers -- will affect the platforms that come after."

In the article itself by Steven B. Johnson, Twitter is identified as the newspaper of the very near -- or maybe here now -- future. "Increasingly, the stories that come across our radar will arrive via the passed links of the people we follow...a customized newspaper compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network."

Oral Sex, Organic Blueberries and Social Media

2009-06-09T22:18:00.002-04:00

At the Social Media Club monthly confab at the Science Museum, @laptopmnky stole my attention away from the waiter with a tray of thick cucumber slices topped with a dab of caviar (not at all as nasty as I thought it would be). After @laptopmnky moved on, I desperately sought the man with the tray, but he was nowhere to be found. The huge crowd, whose excited chatter was producing a roaring feedback in the domed entryway of the museum, was moving toward the iMax auditorium. So much for dinner.

Members of the Social Media Club are an amazingly handsome group of people (and pretty much white). If we had had an age contest, I could have easily won Oldest Woman. I yearned to be young, slim, attractive and here to mate. The selection was luscious, but the competition was fierce. Who said nerdy girls weren’t good looking?

I had a moment of celebrity enthrallment when I spotted @knownhuman and suspected his companion might be @bigevil, who I do not follow because he is a lethargic tweeter.

And the other thing I noticed was everyone used their skinny photo for their Twitter ID. If the camera adds 10 pounds, you guys were once super thin, and you’re not now. No, you are not.

Well trained by formative years at Disney World, everyone filled in the rows without leaving empty seats (keep moving, I don’t want to have to crawl over you), and precisely at 6:45 the program began and a sea of iPhones lit up across the room, Twitter screens at the ready.

Here’s what I learned:

Style Weekly, despite the downward trend for newspapers, is growing.

Richmond social mediorites turn out in bigger numbers than our D.C. counterparts.

Rachel DePompa’s Facebook page is private.

Social media, even if it’s the only communications avenue used, can draw people to an event like flies to….uh, watermelon. (This may be the true revenue stream it generates…the ability to direct attention to a product, event, person or idea.) @RVAMAG’s Ian Graham boasted of getting a massive crowd for the first Carytown New Year’s Eve at next to no expense, using social media.

Aaron Kremer filled the Andy Rooney role, despite his youthful appearance and past history writing for Brick. The Richmond Biz Sense curmudgeon does not Twitter, despite working for a completely online publication. The advantage of online-only is you can stay viable during the start-up phase without printing expenses or deadlines.

(Time for a reverie. I’ve been vigorously trying to unleash my employee newsletter from its print schedule because it is a feast or famine situation. Some weeks you have nothing and the newsletter is garbage with stories like wash your hands more and don’t drive distracted, and some weeks you have so much employee news, you can’t fit it all in and then there’s a complaint riot. Blogging the employee newsletter would solve all this, but management is still clinging to having something they can hold in their hand. End of reverie. Back to what I learned at the #smcrva.)

Everyone claimed they got story ideas from their Twitter and Facebook friends and followers, but then everyone conceded the same thing happened during the old email days, or even the old telephone days. Or for DePompa, the standing on the corner waiting for her live shot days.

DePompa crowed about being able to break exclusives even faster on Twitter, before the T-D got it online (muffled laughter at that), or even before her newscast aired. But then she remembered she really shouldn’t do that because Channel 6 then steals her story. (We are not worried about Channel 8. They’re too busy doubling their money in Ponzi schemes to steal news stories.)

Jason Roop of Style Weekly said reporters and columnists for the Times-Dispatch should be tweeting to give the newspaper some personality. (Is that columnists with an “s,” Jason? Are you sure? I think there’s no “s” anymore.)

WWBT’s Ryan Nobles contributed the most quotable quote, that the Internet was making the world smaller, not bigger, because we were all falling into these little niche communities. (I looked around warmly at my niche community, such a handsome group of niches.)

By a slip of a pronoun, DePompa revealed that her secret City Hall source was a male. My list of suspects immediately narrowed.

How to monetize Twitter? Nobody knew. (Hand up, hand up, I know! Invite your followers to a gathering and charge $15 a head! My house next week! Panel discussion topic: clean up my yard.)

Roop astutely noted that Richmond’s blogging community seems obsessed with food -- that any blog headlining food or a restaurant immediately rockets to the top of Most Clicked Open on RVA blogs. I might add, sexual references work, too. (Hmm, what should I call this post?)

Is journalism still ethical? (Uh, was it ever really?) With the 24-hour cable news cycle and the rise of conservative talk radio, we’ve gotten a rash (and rash is a good word) of commentary programs that put a clear political spin on everything. Ian Graham sought to warn us about the evils of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, but was almost shouted down by audience members (alcohol blood levels rising) who said “we’re not stupid!” (Maybe not us, because we’re all so good lookin’, but Rush’s callers certainly do sound like they don’t get that he’s an entertainer playing a role.)

Nobles waxed wise again with his endorsement of Twitter as a medium that provides the most results with the least investment. How long does it take to twitter a few times a day? No time! “Those not on it don’t understand it.” So true. I get weary of hearing people who have never used Twitter dismiss it, although I feel the same way about scallops. (Heads up, #rvafoodies!)

Nobles is wise again. Appointment journalism is out the window. Despite his need for employment, we soon won’t be gathering religiously around the TV at 4, 5, 6 and 11 because we will get news on our own time schedule.

Then Andy Rooney Kremer becomes bafflingly unwise. He opines that the only future is micropayments. We will go to a system where we pay to read the news online, sure as shootin’. I just don’t see that happening, except maybe for highly technical or political websites, or for people willing to pay a subscription to watch a video feed of Rush Limbaugh sitting at his microphone like a Buddha during his broadcast. Graham calls him out on that rather forcefully, the only flair up of even slight incivility all evening. Maybe he was still smarting from his O’Reilly/Limbaugh audience smackdown. Anyway, go Ian!

DePompa becomes momentarily unwise, thinking newspapers will always be there because in times of Huge News, like 9/11 or the Virginia Tech massacres, we will still turn to newspapers for information and to buy them as souvenirs of a disaster. (How macabre is that?) I disagree. Newspapers by their very production schedule, end up being too far behind disasters and Huge News. We go to television for that, and for the souvenirs, a nice magazine special edition holds up so much better in the attic. (I still have my John F. Kennedy Jr. memorial Newsweek edition, waiting for the prices to improve on eBay.)

Prizes are awarded to those who stayed. (At home I review the tweets of the evening and discover most of the people I follow were talking about needing to pee during #smcrva.) Starving, I head out and find another wonderful man with a tray of shrimp! And something else, which I discover to my regret is a piece of lemon with a shred of lettuce on it. Not enough, but shrimp man has disappeared. I wanted to network with shrimp man. Oh well. The Golden Arches next door beckon. I burger up and drive home in the worst downpour I’ve ever been in since I tried to get to Innsbrook during Tropical Storm Gaston.

T-D is Stupid about Twitter

2009-06-01T10:57:00.002-04:00

The T-D editorial page is being stupid about Twitter again, acting like all it is is a celebrity conduit, an instant message version of a supermarket tabloid, and not only that, but the celebrity tweeters are fakes.

This is probably coming from Todd Culbertson, who was writing editorials (yes, editorials) about opera and ballet when I was in scooter skirts, and he's still there, so he can partially be forgiven for being out of touch or just feeling superior to mainstream culture. (On my Twitter feed last night, I noticed the people I follow, prominent people in the local alternative media, were live-tweeting the MTV Music Awards. Todd may not have heard of MTV yet. Or cable.)

But this is a terrible way to describe Twitter for the oldsters still reading T-D editorials. The celebrity feeds are a very small element of the Twitter experience, not to mention an optional element. Twitter is anything you want it to be. It all depends on who you follow.

I think Todd would actually envy my Twitter feed. I have major national media, both conservative and liberal, and all the local TV stations and some of the Twittering TV reporters. I have all the mainstream alternative print publications (including Times-Dispatch tweets). I have both the Richmond and Henrico police, the Virginia National Guard, and VDEM. If anything is happening, locally or nationally, it crosses my Twitter feed often before it's broadcast to the public. It's like sitting next to an AP teletype or a police scanner. I like to hear things first. Don't you?

I have all the local major bloggers, who are continually spinning their takes on what's going on in the news, as well as the neighborhoods, the farmers' markets, the shops and restaurants, and the civic organizations. I have all the major advertising and public relations agencies, so I know about upcoming conferences, classes, trends. These folks provide helpful daily links to websites and columnists providing the latest information about the rapidly changing fields of journalism, public relations, tech, communications, and social media. And it's all free information.

I keep in touch with a few personal friends, former co-workers, and local celebrities I wish I knew, as well. I connect to some businesses and brand name products I support. When I wanted to know where to find the new wheat beer sampler, Michelob tweeted me back with local dealers who had it in stock. When I was royally pissed off about my Bank of America credit card, I fired off an angry Tweet and a Bank of America guy in charge of monitoring Twitter got in touch with me and we exchanged emails about my issue. You need service better than that?

When I'm watching TV alone and wish I had someone to share a program with, I can tap into Twitter trends, find other people watching that same program and see what they're saying. You can do this for any popular topic that is "trending" on Twitter.

It's all in one Twitter feed which rolls on continually day and night, accessible at my convenience. And yes, I have a few celebrities I check in on from time to time. Usually I drop them after awhile because they either tweet too much or not at all, but I recently followed Jane Fonda on her trip to the Galapagos Islands. She included photo links in her tweets of what she was seeing and doing, so I almost felt like I went on the trip with her.

It's been a wonderful experience being part of this huge community, carefully selected by me, and it's very sad that the T-D's ignorant dismissal of it might prevent other people from taking part.

Chesterfield County Morality Police

2009-05-24T09:46:00.002-04:00

A post on my Richmond Music Journal blog remembers my decade-old run-in with the Chesterfield County morality police.

Kill Another Hostage

2009-05-19T21:48:00.003-04:00

The terrorist and the hostages scenario -- does this ever work? I'm not sure what's going on with the newspaper union since I'm not there, but it seems like the deal was, pass on your 2% raises or we fire more people. And they did. They let go more reporters.

I'm not sure how this works if the stated goal is still to become a local news paper -- how do you do this without reporters? Already all the feature material is syndicated. Do they really expect to sell a newspaper that is 95 percent AP wire copy?

Eventually, who and what will the executives on the upper floors manage?

Addendum to the post:

At the last conference where I heard Procter speak, he said don't send them press releases. They don't read them. No time. Too many. Call a reporter instead and make an appointment to come in and pitch your story. (My theory at the time was there would also be an ad rep at the table telling you the best way to get your story out would be to buy advertising.)

Now I wonder who do you call when there are no more reporters? It may be the era of not only news freshly ripped off the AP wire and served to you a day cold -- long after you've already read it online -- but also press releases barely edited by the one old coot left on the copy desk rim. The old richmond.com used to do that. (Not to be confused with the new richmond.com which just links you to AP stories now.)

A new daily needs to rise from the ashes, one without stockholders, marketing departments, or floors full of executives, directors, and multiple layers of editors, a daily with the goal of providing a readable product of local news and information and keeping the lights turned on as proof of success, even if it means everyone working from home on a laptop network.

Would Independent Papers Survive?

2009-05-10T19:42:00.002-04:00

This writer proposed an interesting theory that the collapse of newspapers is due to newspaper chains, and that locally owned, independent papers would have a closer tie to its community and require less of a profit margin to be succeed.

I have to give that theory a small round of applause. The Times-Dispatch began losing its grasp when it became top heavy with editors who had not worked their way up from copy boy. Who made the decision to hire the current trio in charge from not only out of town, but out of state?

I credit keeping my kitchen table niche newspaper alive for 11 years -- until I got tired of it, not until it financially broke me because it never did -- to low overhead. I did not require it to make a profit, just to break even. Success was paying its own way. How many papers would be a success now if that was the only goal? To not have to pay stockholders, or bloated executive salaries, but just meet the payroll, pay the rent, and print the paper?

Newspapers became corporations, big chains, big business, and that's never what they were meant to be.

The Urban Pigeon

2009-05-01T22:34:00.004-04:00

Every day at the bus stop downtown, I watch the pigeons. They are fearless. They don't care that cars and buses are whizzing by inches away from them. They don't care that people are sharing the sidewalk with them. They're busy looking for garbage to eat.

Then they fly to a monument and crap on it.

It's sort of like my life.

Actually, I really do like pigeons. They remind me of my father. As a boy growing up in the 1930s in the tenements of Long Island City, he raised pigeons. A lot of city kids did. They kept the roosts on the roofs of their apartment buildings. You didn't need pet food as the pigeons could find things to eat while they were out flying, and they always came back.

When I was in the 7th grade, we moved to a house in Greenville, North Carolina. It was the first house we ever had to ourselves. In New York, we had lived with relatives, or at least had my grandmother living upstairs. Then we lived in an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, and then we moved to this house in North Carolina. There was a kid in the neighborhood who had a pigeon coop and we were so enthralled with it -- I had heard my father's pigeon stories -- we decided to buy a couple of his pigeons and build our own coop.

So for a year, I had this project I shared with my dad, the pigeons. I have never had a very close relationship with my father, and this was the last chance. Before long, I'd move to permanent alienation via puberty and then distance, and then evil stepmothers.

Our two pigeons had babies (squabs are very ugly babies; I don't think there is an uglier baby in the animal kingdom), and the babies had babies, and I kept journals of which pigeons were married (they mate for life) and who their children were, and who their children married. We let them out. They flew around the house, sat on the roof, and came back to the coop. We cleaned out the coop. That was an awful job, and what eventually distanced me from the pigeon project. That and puberty.

Towards the end, it was just my dad. I'd see him out in the yard, hands in his pockets, wearing his Eisenhower jacket, watching the pigeons circle the sky around the house. And eventually it was no fun for him either and he sold our pigeons back to the boy who had gotten us started. The roost was still in the yard when we sold the house.

And that was pretty much it for me and my dad. He died a few years ago. His third wife kept us all at a distance, so I hadn't seen him in 20 years. But he wrote me one letter every month of just casual chit chat and put a $50 bill in it. I would write him back not to send cash through the mail, but then it occurred to me it was the only way he could do it without his wife knowing. And sending me money was the only way he could make up for not ever coming to see me, or being there for me.

So I watch the pigeons at the bus stop, and because of my dad, I know they're not well bred pigeons because they don't have thick crusts on top of their beaks, but they're not trashy birds either because they do have rainbow coloring on their necks. I wonder who they're married to and where they live. And I think about my dad, standing out in the yard by himself, hands in his pockets, wearing his Eisenhower jacket, and watching the pigeons we named and raised together, flying around the sky.

So, that's why I'm moving to a new blog, Urban Pigeon, where I can write stuff that isn't about the newspaper dying. I'll still come here for that, but otherwise, I'll be over there. I value your bookmark, and thanks for listening.

Just Saying

2009-04-27T10:57:00.003-04:00

Shouldn't richmond.com be local? Isn't that the one unique thing they can do that few other web portals in the world can do? So why, in the Monday Arts & Entertainment set of links, two of the three are not local? One is about Beyonce, the other about the Miss California that annoyed Perez Hilton, as if P. Hilton is someone anyone should be concerned about annoying.

Are there not three local Arts & Entertainmnet stories in the entire metropolitan area today? The third one is a shallow mini-essay introducing an online Mother's Day brunch listing in which the restaurants actually have to enter the data themselves. There's only four places listed today, one twice because I assume no editor will ever go into this page to clean up mistakes.

Richmond's arts coverage by the major media has always been lacking. It may be because arts coverage by its very nature has to be confrontational. You can't like everything to have any credibility, and disliking anything requires superlative writing skills and nerves of steel because inevitably the population turns on you.

But generating anger is an important part of the arts discourse, the feedback, the opposition, the sound and the fury. It builds readership for the next expected insult to their sensibilities and it engages them in the criticism and enjoyment of local art and entertainment. Everyone likes to rise to the defense, more than they like to agree. Editors often forget about this necessity and see it as undesirable controversy that might damage advertising revenue. Big mistake. It might damage advertising initially, but if the readership increases, the advertisers will come back.

That's why coverage of local arts and entertainment is essential, and it's not Beyonce or Miss California, unless they appear at The Camel.

Silence of the Neighborhoods

2009-04-11T20:54:00.003-04:00

Now that richmond.com has been newly tainted by the Times-Dispatch, I must find fault. It was clean and simple before. Now it's obtuse and complicated. Like the big map that takes up prime real estate on the page. Find stories in your neighborhood, it says. I picked my neighborhood and the neighboring neighborhood. There are no stories.

I picked my last neighborhood, Mechanicsville, which had two feeds from the Mechanicsville Local, and then, oddly a feed from the food blog "whine me dine me" and another from the blog Buttermilk & Molasses, which is not neighborhood-centric.

There was a TV show in the late '50s called "Naked City" that signed off with "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."

Well, apparently there are no stories in most of the naked neighborhoods according to richmond.com. Why put this map in the middle of the page?

I Tweet, Therefore, I Am

2009-04-07T21:29:00.003-04:00

The social media website Twitter is like being at a cocktail party where you don’t actually know anyone, but you’ve heard of them. You stand against the wall with your drink, or you walk slowly around and listen to fragments of their conversations. You’re always coming in at the middle of a story, and you can’t stay for the end because they may look at you rudely for eavesdropping, so you keep moving. Very few people speak directly to you, but when one does, you feel very happy, as if you connected, even for a moment.

Some of the people at this party do know each other, and their conversations are lively and fun. You enjoy just listening in.

And in the end, you feel like you had a good time. You were with people who ordinarily wouldn’t include you in their reindeer games. You heard interesting things. You picked up some tips about how to live a fabulous life, how to be more like them, what you have to do to have a career like they do. Maybe next time you’re at the party, more people will speak directly to you. It's like being with the King of Comedy without having to physically kidnap him.

After awhile, as you spend more time at this party where people drop in and out, you begin to notice there are people hovering near you. They think you are interesting, but they don’t know you to speak directly to you, so they’re just hanging out nearby, listening to you talk to yourself, listening to you pretend you are the center of attention and everyone is hanging on your words. You are flattered.

It’s not that peculiar a social networking model. It’s the traditional after work mixer, only ported to a virtual world and the mixer goes on night and day. The ways to get popular in the Twitterworld are the same ones as in the real world. You can be funny. Someone who is fast and culturally current with the quips gets followed by many. You can be the wagon train leader, out in front of the Internet exploration, sending back appropriate links to interesting pages and articles.

You can be a news service, either an actual news service like a blogging TV reporter or CNN, or a limited area reporter (which is probably the future of journalism). I follow people who write about the weather, several who tweet about what’s happening in their neighborhoods (crimes, accidents, fires, traffic jams, lost pets), and others who seem to be home unemployed all day breaking the news of what’s on TV.

Then there’s the people I call the cool crowd, the same group you yearned to be part of in high school. They all know each other, so you follow everyone in the crowd and you know what they’re up to, where they’re going for dinner, what’s the latest popular bar, who’s doing what this weekend.

Then there’s the salesmen and scam artists, trying to figure out how to play the room to their advantage. There’s a Twitter philosophy that says you should follow everyone who follows you, but this clutters your feed with their sales pitches. I see no point in following people I don’t know from other towns either. Where they’re going to dinner in Palm Beach or Irvine doesn’t add anything to my daily experience like a rave about a local restaurant could.

Yes, there’s fake celebrities on Twitter, but there’s also several genuine ones – actors, comedians, musicians, tech columnists – who have eliminated the Catholic Church model of communication. You don’t have to go through a priest to communicate with God. These celebrities have eliminated the entertainment reporter and the magazine editors who filter their stories back to the fans. They talk directly to their fans, but in a nice, safe way, which preserves their privacy and guarantees they’re never misquoted or misrepresented by someone with an agenda.

Newspapers should be afraid, be very afraid. I would hazard a guess many bloggers are frustrated reporters who couldn’t get hired by the almighty paper or had other careers to pursue but still wanted to write. Even if no one is reading them, they are self-fulfilling their desire to communicate. Several have amassed faithful readerships any newspaper columnist would envy. Twitter flings open the communications portal even more – to those who don’t even have the verbal wherewithal to blog, who haven’t got the skill and talent to put together an informative, tight, well-thought out 1,000-word Style Back Page. They don’t have much to say, but they have this to say, and dammit, they’re going to say it, and what do you know, a couple of hundred or more people will read it.

It’s the Mini-Me Newspaper, all about just me and what I think is interesting. Subscribers come onboard, whether you’re a celebrity, the life-of-the-party, the wagon train leader, the scummy salesman, the lonely girl, the frustrated reporter…doesn’t matter. You are the center of your universe and a galaxy of Tweeters will revolve around you in an exchange of news, ideas, jokes, secrets, sighs and lies. It’s your party within a party in an ever-expanding chain of parties where the conversation never stops except for the occasional sighting of a whale being carried by birds through an azure sky.

Marley & Journalism

2009-04-05T17:18:00.002-04:00

"Marley & Me" wasn't so much a story about a dog to me as it was a fantasy journalism story. The movie did not take too many liberties with the facts of the Grogan's careers. By 1991, both Mr. and Mrs. were employed journalists on neighboring South Florida newspapers. Mrs. voluntarily gives up writing to be a mom. Mr., at least in the movie, is almost forced by his gruff but lovable editor to switch from being a reporter to being a twice-weekly columnist. Then he again is almost forced by Gruff But Lovable to write a daily column at twice the money (!!!)...about things that take little or no research: the life of his community and his personal life in that community.

He easily changes from Florida columnist to Pennsylvania reporter and moves into a big stone house on lots of acreage. At the turn of the new century, apparently you could still live high on the hog on a single income as a newspaper or magazine writer. In the book, he actually left Florida to be the editor of Organic Gardening magazine, a Rodale Press product, and tiring of that, walked right into another columnist job with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

It was reading stuff like this as a child that made me think this was the desired life and within the realm of possibility, making a grand living writing about myself for a daily paper. Grogan, though, is a rare case of an extraordinarily lucky guy since his writing skills are average. The prose is workmanlike but doesn't sing or soar in "Marley & Me." The amazing second act of his fantasy life is not only did all that dream journalist stuff happen to him, when his dog died, he wrote a book about the dog's life and it became a best seller of such monster proportions, he never has to work again. Money has just poured down upon this guy's head. (And who among us has not had a pet that did stuff and then died of old age? We've all been sitting on book fortunes all this time and never knew it.)

His payday for the movie "Marley & Me" is icing on the icing. The movie is actually faithful to the book (which is not a plus here) and a stupider movie you couldn't ask for. Owen Wilson, he of the bizarrely indented nose, and Jennifer Aniston never age during the 12-16 years this movie covers. Not only do they not age, they never change their hairstyles. Aniston, showing why she will always be a celebrity and never an actress, doesn't employ a single wig to show the passing of time. She is Jennifer Aniston and her trademark hairstyle stays in the movie. Throughout I wondered what this movie might have been in the hands of two actors who were more committed to the roles instead of two celebrities who usually pick the worst scripts and don't act other than to be the same character they play in every movie.

Kathleen Turner, who has not aged well at all (I think she has actually become a man), appears as a dog trainer who gets humped by Marley in one scene. How terrible is Turner's finances that she had to accept this role? No hairstylist or costumer lifted a finger to try to make her look like something...anything.

And worst of all, after enduring the movie, I was really looking forward to the extra features on the DVD, especially a look at the many dogs used to play the life of Marley, but my Netflix copy did not include them. What...was this a two-disc DVD set in the stores?

Less is Less

2009-04-03T17:04:00.003-04:00

The Times-Dispatch is doing things. Maybe not the right things, but it's doing things.

It's pretty obvious why certain reporters were laid off (names were named on various blogs and tweets, if not in any of the "official" media stories). You can see the perimeters of coverage being pulled in as the farflung reporters were dismissed. Just a few weeks ago, the Washington bureau was closed and those people (was it more than just Marsha Mercer at the end?) sent home.

I had heard that Douglas Durden opted to finally retire from her enviable job as a TV critic when she was switched to a particular irksome beat like Chesterfield County schools or something similar. An insider at a seminar I attended said when the beat assignments came out that year, it was like the suits were daring the reporters to quit by jet-propelling them out of their comfort zones.

Durden had been at the paper since I was in college a thousand years ago and never had to function as a beat reporter. But TV stuff could be pulled off a syndicate cheaper. Daniel Neiman should have seen the handwriting on the wall at that point, and probably did. After richmond.com was acquired, there were two movie critics, but I don't see that Mike guy listed on the staff of richmond.com now. (Is he gone, too? When will all these people surface on rvanews.com to tell us what the trip to the guillotine was like?) Movie reviews can be pulled off a syndicate wire. There's thousands of them online anyway.

Rumors are flying that the food and real estate sections will be cut next. I can see the reason for food, but even in a bad housing market, you would think real estate would attract some advertising support.

What we aren't seeing yet is what the T-D plans to offer us instead. There's got to be an instead. You can't just provide less and raise the price, too, which they did last week.

And how many of the layoffs were executives who do nothing related to producing a daily paper, but go to meetings and think thoughts...thoughts that aren't translating into increased advertising revenue or circulation. What do they do?

Meat and Vampires

2009-03-31T09:04:00.006-04:00

I experienced two things this past weekend that are ordinarily well-liked: Texas de Brazil and “Twilight.” As usual for me, I couldn’t get on the excitement bus.

I have to thank RVAblogs for my trip to Texas de Brazil. Someone else blogged about going to the restaurant's website and entering personal data and getting discount coupons. So I did that, and sure enough, for my birthday the restaurant sent me a free entrée ticket, as long as I arrived with someone who was paying full price. Otherwise, I would never pay this much for a meal. Not without winning the lottery.

Yes, the salad bar is delightful with an unusual assortment of vegetables, breads and cheeses that are not your usual salad bar fare. We both forgot to even try a soup. As for the meat, it almost makes you turn vegetarian. There is something unseemly about guys walking around with long skewers of meat. It was hard not to think about the Amazing Race All-Stars edition where the teams had to eat a bucket of gnarly looking meats in Brazil while whooshing away flies. The clever Rob of Rob and Amber fame figured out a way to pass on it and take the penalty, as long as he could convince a team behind him to do the same. It was almost like I now had to figure out how to get out of this meat-eating competition at Texas de Brazil to save myself.

Instead of a bucket of meat with a side of flies, they slide off one small piece for you as each skewer goes by. This way you don’t get stuck with too much if you don’t like it. There are no doggie bags at Texas de Brazil. You either eat it then or it gets trashed. Our server told us, yes, they waste a lot of food, but the alternative is to be taken advantage of by the evil conniving people among us, and if you don’t believe they exist, read the Check Out Girl’s blog.

The garlic sirloin was very salty, not surprising since everything is cooked in rock salt. The Parmesan chicken was thigh meat, which I find gross. This almost ended the meat-eating competition for me. The flank didn’t have much flavor, and neither did the regular sirloin. None of the other 10 or more meat choices ever came by our table. Garlic sirloin came back three times. After I declined a second piece three times, our server came over to ask, well, what do you want? Like Oliver Twist begging for more gruel, we timidly asked for filet mignon wrapped in bacon? But the next meat man to come by said it’d be five minutes before any was ready, and by that time we were full anyway and just wanted to leave.

But, now that I’ve survived it and know a little better what you have to do (plan to be there a long time waiting to meet the meat of your choice), by the time my anniversary and another coupon rolls around, I might be up for it again.

As for “Twilight,” this silly teenage romance is a metaphor for every teenage romance. At 16 or 17, what does any girl know about choosing a lifelong companion? Nothing. We haven’t even figured out a hairstyle yet. But we are mightily convinced a boy we hardly know is “the one” we want to spend the rest of our lives with, when they’re really not even worth spending the rest of our teens with. We just can’t see beyond the moment. It’s sad and tragic. I know the vampire I met when I was 15 should have been stabbed through the heart right away. Instead I clung to him until I was 20, and he left me with a baby to pursue his Peter Pan existence. What about my Peter Pan existence? Why do I have to be Wendy and the responsible one? You know how hard it is to finish college and launch a career in a demanding field when you’re a single mother? In the 1970s?! It’s hard. It is a game-changer that impacts every job and relationship you have in the future, and usually not for the best. Damn high school vampires.

So I’m watching moody Bella insist that yes, she wants to spend the rest of her life with cold-skinned, deer-sucking vampire boy and his unusually friendly vampire family playing superspeed baseball. Bite me! Bite me at the prom because it’s a prom moment. Vampire boy, on the other hand, is totally entranced with Bella only because he can’t read her mind. The fact that he can’t figure her out makes her special. So he will protect her forever, except if he wasn’t hanging out with her, making the out-of-town vampires jealous for her blood, she wouldn’t need protecting.

Maybe the book is better. I am tempted to put it in my Amazon cart, except I am afraid it will change me somehow. Everyone I have talked to who has read “Twilight” is insanely crazy about it and has read the whole series about this goofy girl and her pasty lover and they talk and talk about it like it's an addiction. I don't want to be one of those women.

Old People Are On The Internet!

2009-03-25T14:55:00.003-04:00

I went to a focus group recently to see what kind of advertising people were seeing, and was amazed to find the over 50 group wasn't reading the newspaper. Even the retired people no longer subscribed to the newspaper and were getting their news online and on the radio. What the newspaper perceives as its last solid market is eroding.

In fact, the only person in this focus group, a thirtyish young bachelor in a baseball hat, said he only subscribed to the Sunday paper for the coupons. Me, too, and only because my husband is still addicted to the Best Buy Sunday ad insert which is like his letter to Santa. (And Santa keeps writing him back, "show me the money.")

The old guys in the group said they were "immune" to all advertising, and when they wanted to buy something, they researched it on the Internet. They checked their stocks on the Internet. They checked sports scores on the Internet.

Breasts Like Pizza Dough

2009-03-19T18:01:00.002-04:00

Who likes mammograms? Nobody. It is a flawed system, in which something round and attached vertically to your body is supposed to become flat and extend horizontally between two pieces of glass. The technician is pulling and tugging on you like she expects your breasts to be pizza dough, which she can twist like bread sticks.

The lady at the registration desk has a collection of photos of her family at her station. And they all face me instead of her. Why does she have them when she can't even see them? Why does she want me to look at her family? Why does she even have to have this many framed family photos at her work station? Is she going to forget she has family if she doesn't have the BACKS OF THE FRAMES looking at her all day? I don't understand this.

This is a change. They put an identity wrist band on me, and I'm only having a mammogram. Is there a chance I won't survive the mammogram and they won't be able to identify my body without this tag? I'll get lost in the jumble of women who were twisted to death that day in the mammogram lab? Or do they think I have a stunt double in the wings who was going to sneak in and take my mammogram instead of me? They want to be sure that it is me attached to my breasts, not some imposter.

The xray technician puts little band-aids on my nipples. They are purple with pink and green flowers on them, and each one has a tiny little pink fake nipple on it. Why do I need this? The technician tells me some women don't have noticeable nipples and it confuses the people reading the xrays. For the past 15 years I've been having mammograms done without artificial nipples. Have the doctors been confused all that time? (Or are they stupider now?) But I have fairly obvious parts. Nursing a baby will do that to you. It is obvious I am obvious, but I get the band-aids anyway. The fake ones are not even as obvious as the real ones. This makes no sense whatsoever.

"What do you do if someone comes in with a pierced nipple?" She doesn't have an answer for it. I speculate that maybe the pierced nipple crowd has not reached the age of mammograms yet.

The wrist band is on my right wrist. I am right-handed and do not handle scissors well with my left hand. I spend the afternoon trying to wrestle this band off my wrist. I don't have the nerve to try to pull the band-aids off.

I Save the Paper

2009-03-16T16:11:00.002-04:00

Here’s what I would do with the paper.

Pink slip the marketing department. Whatever they do hasn’t been working anyway. The product should sell itself.

Keep people who actually produce work that ends up in the newspaper. That’s ad salesmen (are they all on a low base salary plus commission? They should be), ad and page graphic designers, reporters, probably half the photographers (really, these guys could probably cover more if they had to), and a precious few editors. There’s no doubt way more middle management “editors,” advertising supervisors and production supervisors on staff than necessary. Everybody should have to write or do actual work. I bet the staff that produces the editorial and op-ed page is twice as big as it needs to be.

Now that the payroll is down and we’re operating at maximum peak efficiency, bag the public squares. That is the function of a politician who can actually do something about the feedback. It’s really not the role of a newspaper, unless the feedback is in writing on the editorial and op-ed pages. And if you’re going to solicit citizen opinion, then print it. You’re a newspaper. Also, save money on all those syndicated columnists. We can read them online somewhere else.

Change the paper into a daily tabloid with an all-local focus. The front page should be an eye-catching big photo, the beginning of the one or two most compelling local stories of the day, and a tease for some of the sexier inside pages. Only one page, maybe page 2, should be devoted to national and world news, presented very briefly. If we need to know more, it’s on television or the Internet. The bottom line is, by the time you print national and world news in the paper, it’s old news already.

Then local news, two pages of editorials, letters, and local opinion; the obituaries, local business, a couple of pages of lifestyle news about tech, health and entertainment only. (We’ll discuss recipes, cooking, decorating, bridge, and gardening later.) A couple of pages of local sports, then four pages of comics, crosswords and puzzles. As much as I hate it, yeah, the horoscope. Whatever classifieds you have. Break up the classifieds with some comics, like Brick does. Then a nice, clever photo of the day for the last page, like Life magazine used to do. Could be local, or not.

What is now the Flair section should become a weekly niche paper of its own. There’s no room for features in a daily tab, so here’s where you park those feature stories, along with the food columns, gardening, decorating, parenting, and other get-in-touch-with-your-feminine-side stories. The goal is to keep the syndicated material you have to buy here to maintain as much local purity in the daily as possible. This separation of the fluff gives those of us who don’t want it or need it the opportunity not to buy it.

I’m almost tempted to say do a daily sports tab, which would include national sports, and keep the sports out of the regular tab, but that would be very bold and ambitious. I would do it. You guys – who will never do this much and die not trying – wouldn’t.

This handy daily tab would be perfect for reading on the bus, carrying in a briefcase, taking along with you at lunchtime. Easy to read on the sofa without completely blocking your view of the TV. You don’t have to be New York City to embrace a daily tab. Just remember: L O C A L.

Newspaper Needs Some News

2009-03-15T20:10:00.002-04:00

News as in new. This morning's big front page story was how much money area government officials make. Richmond magazine does this story every year, so I already know. Do the Times-Dispatch editors ever expose themselves at all to the other media in town? Do they know what's already been done? Did someone actually pitch this story idea at an editorial meeting and everyone else got excited, yes! That would be a really ground breaking way to demonstrate the power of a Freedom of Information act request!? Really? Is everyone in a bubble there? Or just a bubble of apathy? Let's do what's the easiest.

Style Weekly will routinely break a story online on Tuesday, with the print version hitting the streets on Wednesday, and then the T-D runs the story on Thursday with the little Breaking News box. This is news to who? You? The rest of us have already chewed it over, posted comments, tweeted about it, and moved on.

I would have been more interested in a story on how much money all the top editors and marketing people make at the Times-Dispatch, but I don't think you can get that information through a FOIA request. It would have been interesting to see the difference between the editors and executives who strategize (where are the visionaries?) in the background and those working on the front line.

Then I turned the page and scanned the little short national stories on page 2 and 3 and realized I had read them all yesterday. Where? On my Wii! While waiting for lunch to be ready, those of us playing Wii took a break and scanned the headlines on the Wii newsfeed. The stories that intrigued us, we clicked on and read the details. We have the same good taste in news as the T-D editors because they picked the exact same ones to run, except in less detail.

Next I saw a house ad (translation: an ad promoting the paper itself) for an upcoming series on the death of Tyler Binstead, the poor VCU student who was senselessly murdered in Byrd Park by hooligans. Uh, T-D, Richmond magazine already did that story, too. I read it while standing online at Ukrop's. All the same bases will be covered, the twin brother's pain, the girlfriend's horror, the doomed personal lives of the three losers who committed the crime, the sad families. How it went down, the arrests, the trial. Know it already.

Maybe it's news to radio and television, who use the morning paper as an assignment editor, repackaging the stories for their use until something happens during the day they can run out and cover. Until then, why get the newspaper when the morning radio and TV news readers will read it to me, and even my Wii will tell me the other headlines.

What's the solution? I think the daily paper's survival will require a tremendous amount of cutting back on manpower, as in everyone who doesn't directly contribute to creating the core product, and doing a smaller paper much better than they're doing a big paper now.

T-D Only Cares about Old People

2009-03-08T10:41:00.003-04:00

Or so it seems since they've scheduled their coffee meeting with the general public for 9 a.m. on a Monday morning at McLean's on Leadbetter Road. Who can go to these things except retired people? And that's already their core audience, so this must be a retention meeting rather than one seeking new readers or departed readers.

Well, I can tell you what the people who have nothing else to do on Monday morning are going to tell you about the paper:

Bigger font.

Don't worry about the lack of tech and tech business coverage because we can barely operate push button phones, much less use a computer. We don't care about the future. We aren't going there.

That paper delivery guy is throwing my paper into the bushes. What are you going to do about that?

What happened to all those nice reporters we used to read, like Betty Booker and Jan Malone? What happened to them? (Uh...Boomer Life.)

Dagnabit, stop moving the bridge column, and I don't understand these new fangled comics. What happened to Gasoline Alley and Henry? I liked Henry. Little bald white boy. Didn't say nothing.

Bigger font. Especially in the obituaries. I like them obituaries. I read them first, and if I don't see my name, I have a second cup of coffee. Ha, ha.

Today in History, why that ought to be on the front page. I remember some of that stuff. That's interesting stuff. And the horoscope. Well, you know I know they're probably just made-up stuff, but I like to call my friend Eleanor -- she's in assisted living at Westbrook -- and read hers to her. Sort of gives her something to look forward to every day, knowing how the day might turn out.

Can the paper be delivered earlier? Because we're up at 4. We like to get to the Waffle House before the crowd, and bring our own paper. We've got things to do after that. Like, I've got to be at Ukrop's as soon as the doors open, because if you're just a few minutes late, those old biddies take all the good marked down meat and bread from yesterday! Especially Mildred Hawkins. I swear Miz Hawkins must get to the parking lot at 3 a.m. and just sits there, waiting, she's so determined to be first.

You say more people are reading the paper online? You mean on line at Ukrop's? Well, sometimes I do look at the People or Us Weekly. Woman's Day. Now there's a good magazine. Recipes. I don't know why they have to talk about sex, though. Everything is sex. Getting your man to do stuff. Pshaw. I'd be happy to get him to take out the trash. Ha. If you want to see the Enquirer and those trashy papers, you have to go to...what, Food Lion? K-Mart. I heard Sears took over the K-Mart, but it still looks like a K-Mart. Those clerks at the K-Mart, they don't care nothing about helping you. Have you see the size of their fingernails? They have these big ol' claws, painted all kind of colors. I don't see how they wipe their butts with those things on their hands. You see them? Some of them have jewels on 'em. I declare, I don't know what the world is coming to.

Bigger font.

What's the Point, Stylebook?

2009-03-04T16:58:00.002-05:00

One casualty of the death of newspapers is the death of the AP Stylebook. I suspect most bloggers and young newsies don’t even know what it is. They learned to write by text message and have a whole different style.

So it’s ironic that by the time I finally acquired a basic grasp of the Stylebook, which had been a thorn in my side trying to break into journalism, it doesn’t matter anymore.

VCU didn’t teach the Stylebook. My professors were mostly moonlighting newspaper reporters and they didn’t want to work too hard for their side money, so I came out of school knowing how to imitate newspaper writing only because I read newspapers, and that’s about all. The Times-Dispatch and News Leader took glee in making me take Stylebook tests and I didn’t score that well and didn’t get hired, but it was just a screening tactic. When they had someone they wanted to hire, like the offspring of an existing editor or someone at random who would increase the number of minorities in the newsroom, the Stylebook test didn’t matter.

I wrote book reviews for years for the News Leader’s late Ann Lloyd Merriman and noticed what she edited. Then I did another stint writing essays for Style’s Rozanne Epps and paid attention to her changes. This was my actual college education.

It was hard to get into the good habits of the Stylebook (you learn best by repetition) until I started grinding out routine news copy regularly, and this finally happened when I became an editor/reporter at the Mechanicsville newspaper. I wrote with my Stylebook open on my lap. It made my managing editors happy, but in the long run, did it matter? Not a bit.

My next boss was a press secretary with a master’s degree in journalism, or so said his office wall, and he didn’t seem to know anything about the AP Stylebook. He routinely changed my carefully Stylebooked writing into his own anti-Stylebook and when I pointed it out, “That’s not AP Stylebook,” he’d just smile. He was making twice the salary of those beady little reporters at the T-D, so what did he care? He could hang up on them all day long and twice on Sunday.

Rolling Stone has its own set of rules, which makes it difficult for me to read their articles without mental red lights when my eyes brush across something that strikes me as wrong, and just now, while reading Time, “17%” jumped out at me, which should be a Stylebook “17 percent.” So who still cares about the AP Stylebook? Maybe the AP.

I still try to write Stylebook style, just to show my whole life of struggle with it wasn’t a waste, but what does it matter? I get submissions from people all the time for the publications and newsletters I work on, and nobody is writing Stylebook-style. And don’t get me started on two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence (it's been one space since the birth of computers!!!). Why are so many people still writing typewriter-style?

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off to Work We Go...Sort of

2009-03-02T14:43:00.004-05:00

A forced snow day is a good time to reflect on office work.

I’m not an early person. I tend to be late, not because I can't get it together but because usually it doesn't seem critical. I never seem to get out of the office at the designated time either, so I figure what labor is being lost at the front end is being recouped at the rear end, although some supervisors don’t appreciate the logic of this.

And no one appreciates it if I call attention to the fact that those who come early are not actually working. They’re doing the same things that we who are late are still doing at home on our own time: reading the paper, going to the bathroom, eating breakfast, and -- a major time-killer -- talking about everything they did since the last time they were at work.

For several years I worked at a non-profit office of 30 women divided up into rooms of three or four. After the bathroom, newspapers and breakfasts were taken care of, and the news of the night before shared with their office mates, they would then go to the other rooms to converse with the people there. This took up the entire morning, and then lunch was convened in a lounge where a television played the noontime soap operas.

The hour after lunch would be consumed by discussion groups about the activities of the soap opera people. By this time, school was out and everyone was calling home, checking in with their kids and making plans for after-work and dinner. By now there was about an hour to go to actually do some office work and everyone is complaining how much work they've got and they can't possibly catch up. We're swamped, swamped!

I keep seeing a variation of this same pattern at subsequent jobs, and often it actually results in more people getting hired to catch up with all this work, and yet the same amount of work gets done because the new people fall into the same pattern. It also explains why I watch my email, waiting for replies and information I need to move forward on my projects, and nothing happens -- I get nothing at all -- until 5:05 p.m. Every day. Without fail. For years and years now. The pattern is still in force.

The more people you have in an office, the less work you get done because it increases the number of birthdays, weddings, new babies, house warmings, promotions and transfers. Every one of those events requires, if not a covered dish luncheon, then at least the ubiquitous yellow cake with white icing and pastel roses. During the two years I worked at Signet Bank's operations center, I think I set a new lifetime record for the amount of yellow cake with white icing I consumed. It got to the point where it seemed truly unusual if there wasn’t a cake each day. I couldn’t work. I’d have yellow cake withdrawal pains on no cake days. What, there’s no cake? No where in this building? There’s gotta be cake somewhere.

There's the coffee pot and microwave wars. A cottage industry in any office is the maintenance and supplying of the coffee. This can tie up one or two workers most of the day. Coffee has to be made, then remade, filters dumped -- preferably in the water coolers so there will be the traditional office water cooler clog -- and then pots washed. There’s always someone who will do all this, in lieu of their actual work, and complain the whole time about it, as if they actually wanted to be doing their actual work.

Then there's the who got the microwave all dirty crisis, which can consume hours of time trying to, by power of gossip, guilt the offender into cleaning the microwave.

Another time-killer is the sales force. I don’t mean the salesmen who are selling the product manufactured by the office. I’m talking about the auxiliary sale force. I have never worked anywhere where there wasn’t an Avon lady or women leaving catalogs of stuff on your desk, proceeds to benefit their child's school. I make a forgiving exception for band candy, although I haven't seen one of those long, almond-studded chocolate band bars in a long time.

Finally, there's the Odor Patrol: People have decided they have a civil right not to smell anything, or at least, not anything they don’t want to smell. Cigarettes were the first to go and after that heady victory, with some basis in health considerations, they went berserk with power and started going after everything. Now we have Fragrance Free Zones. You’ve seen the memos.

“There are some employees who are allergic to fragrances, and request other employees to refrain from the use of colognes and hairsprays.” This, of course, is no fun for the Avon Lady. (See The Sales Force above.)

I worked with one woman in a telemarketing sales maze of cubicles who kept requesting a new seat assignment because she couldn’t stand the odor of cough drops or throat lozenges co-workers were using. When I'm trapped in a cubicle waiting for a phone to ring or a 5:01 p.m. email to arrive, I have a bad habit of removing and reapplying nail polish. I’m surprised I haven’t been clubbed to death by the Odor Patrol yet. I like the stench of nail polish remover. Others don’t. What I don’t like, and have often contemplated joining the Odor Patrol to protest are:

Microwave popcorn and Chinese Take-Out. Years ago, a T-D columnist (probably Ray McAllister) wrote about the all-encompassing, breathtaking stink of burnt microwave popcorn that can overtake an office and linger all day. He received so many heartfelt responses, it was apparent this is a common office hazard. (In fact, 90 percent of the fire evacuations in my current job are popcorn-related).

I find successfully nuked popcorn just as disruptive. The seductive odor of hot butter belongs in a movie theater, so it’s distracting to be overwhelmed by it twice a day during mid-morning and mid-afternoon munchy periods. You can’t think of anything else but popcorn, popcorn, popcorn.

But at least it's preferable to the horrible stench of Chinese take-out! Ever wonder why all Chinese restaurants have take-out? Because even the people who work in Chinese restaurants want you to take it out! This food smells worse than it looks, and it looks like regurgitated animals from Dr. Seuss books. There’s always somebody in an office who has Chinese food delivered to their desk several times a week, and you can smell it the rest of the day.

Staying Alive in Richmond

2009-02-28T23:26:00.003-05:00

Don't eat dinner at New York Chicken at Broad and Belvidere

Don't go for strolls in Byrd Park at night (Binstead)

Don't go to Chimborazo Park for a romantic view of the city skyline after dark

Don't leave your front door open and unlocked even if you are expecting guests (Harvey)

If you are a female alone, lock all the windows, even the upstairs windows (Southside Strangler)

Avoid driving on the Boulevard (see 10 S. Boulevard website)

Pass on iBook giveaways at RIR

It's getting so you may also have to pass on attending basketball games at the Siegel Center

Don't tell anyone you meet at a bar, or piss off at a bar, where you work. And if their car pulls up in your parking lot at the same time you do the next morning, jump back in your car and take off.

The Woes of Sports Marketing in Richmond

2009-02-26T16:33:00.003-05:00

Richmond Renegades President/GM Allan B. Harvie Jr. made the rounds of the room, talking to everyone personally. That morning the Times-Dispatch had announced that Harvie was requesting permission to suspend hockey operations next season. No money. But by the time of the PRSA luncheon, just a few hours later, he was saying he had calls from possible benefactors. Plus, if we all could convince everyone we knew to sell out the last three Renegade games, with everyone sitting in the lower level $10 seats, that alone would save the team for another season.

(Just a few days later, Harvie announced the possible benefactors had backed out.)

The we’re-outta-here press conference and the pitch for sell-outs were both good evangelical telethon marketing techniques. That in itself was a lesson to be learned by the public relations practitioners in the room: how to put on the desperation appeal.

The lunch panel also included Matthew Becherer, RIR Guy, and Scott Schricker, Sportsbacker Guy. RIR Guy said they were marketing northward since the Southern market for NASCAR was oversaturated with events to attend. RIR has only a year-to-year agreement with NASCAR. They can be cut out of the loop anytime! There’s a desperation appeal for you. The economic impact of NASCAR on Richmond is “huge, and yet the community doesn’t always cooperate.” They jack up $80 rooms to $350 and limit length of stays. Track survival means getting a variety of races in there that appeal to locals and families.

Sportsbacker Guy said they started as a lunch club in ’92, selling tickets for guest speakers to raise money for scholarships. Then they started bidding on bringing sporting events to Richmond before realizing it’s better to operate your own event because then you always win the bid! They picked up the Richmond Marathon when the Times-Dispatch dropped it, invented the Monument Avenue 10K, and it was onward from there. Yet the lack of good sports facilities in Richmond is hampering them. The Coliseum (1971) is old and there’s still the perception that Downtown is not safe. (Especially if you’re not good at dodging spit. Downtown people are the spitting-est bunch I’ve ever seen, and they don’t even turn their heads.) Why, there’s only been one fatal shooting after a Coliseum event! And it was a domestic quarrel!

(I beg to differ on crime. My son’s camera bag was stolen right off the sidewalk while he was unloading his car at the Coliseum, and this was the circus crowd! You’d think they’d behave with their children right there watching them steal. Although the last time I went to the Coliseum it was for a KISS concert and nothing bad happened except it took a very long time getting out of the parking deck. The smart rednecks just partied on top of their cars until the deck cleared out.)

The Coliseum also notoriously banned the Grateful Dead because their fans liked to camp out around the building for days and left a lot of garbage. Now John Paul Jones Arena is eating the Coliseum's lunch.

Advertising vs. News Smackdown

2009-02-19T16:21:00.003-05:00

The biggest commotion at the AMA Richmond panel discussion today was when Jason Roop, editor of Style, asked Scott Christino, retail and national manager of the Times-Dispatch, about where Brick drew the line between subjectivity and ads disguised as news. The audience, previously subdued, went into a low, humming buzz, mostly whispering “What’s Brick?” We’ll get to that later.

The panel was Christino, (T-D Guy), Aaron Kremer, youthful owner of richmondbizsense.com (Web Guy), Don Richards, vp and gm of Channel 12 (TV Guy), Roop (Style Guy), and Bob Willoughby, general manager of Cox Radio (Radio Guy).

Round 1. Style Guy is thrilled to be in publishing and journalism right now. Good journalism is, like the Colbert Report, truthiness combined with fun. TV Guy yada yada. Web Guy says richmondbizsense has 3,000 daily readers. Radio Guy is all about making marketing work. T-D Guy, who wears a pencil behind his ear the whole time, reminds everyone the T-D is also three websites that offer “electronic solutions.” Advertising is like diet and exercise. Done regularly, your business will have a long and healthy life.

Round 2. Radio Guy says consumers are time-starved and radio is the only portable electronic media. (Huh? Everyone at Panera is carrying laptops and iPhones, not radios.) It has low production costs, offers websites, and client endorsements. (I assume he means all the announcers telling you how much they love their mattresses, or poor Glenn Beck shilling investing in gold. Even the mighty Limbaugh does endorsement ads.) Radio can become part of your story! Even stations with low ratings have loyal, responsive listeners. Style Guy (reading my mind) pipes in with the iPhone KO. Twitter, Facebook…all portable electronic media. Score 1, Style Guy.

TV Guy says they’re always fighting the impression that TV advertising is expensive, when they’re actually “pretty flexible.” (i.e, we’ll take what you got now). “We were wireless before wireless was cool.” Even with all the media available, TV still reaches 80 percent of homes weekly, same as always.

Web Guy says he has a niche audience, and his niche is “salivating” over his website. He gets the who’s who in Richmond business. Plus, he has low overhead. No legacy expenses or pensions. Since they only do web ads, they are the master of web ad technology.

Round 3. T-D Guy says the Richmond Chic column in the Sunday Flair section is barely disguised advertising that produces big sales after an item appears in the column. Radio Guy fesses up that the air talent have deals to promote products. (No kidding?!) They all agree it’s important to keep the news clean of advertising to maintain reader trust. Style Guy crows they have more readers than ever between the paper and online and Style strives for news purity, even though it is sad when adside co-workers lose commissions because of it. So sad. TV Guy assures us that the viewers know it when they see ad placement where it shouldn’t be.

Did we all know it when 30 Rock made the goodness of McDonald’s McFlurries a critical plot point?

Radio Guy backtracked that “people are really not coming to us for news.” T-D Guy moved forward that news is never impacted by advertising. “There’s a wall, but there’s a door on that wall…” conceding that without advertising, nobody gets paid. Style Guy steps in for the take-down. “Brick?” (Which is not above letting restaurant owners write their own reviews at times.)

The AMA audience apparently has never heard of Brick. There is a what-is-this-thing-called-Brick buzz. Is there a magazine that will give them all the editorial support they crave and they didn’t know about it? Where is this Brick? The cornered T-D Guy flounders and turns to his reinforcements, for lo and behold, T-D Director of Product Innovation and Strategic Marketing Frazier Millner is in the audience. She is always in the audience when anyone from the T-D appears anywhere, and they always default to her. She pops up like a jack-in-the-box. “Non-core product,” she declares. (I’m going to use that excuse whenever I do anything unethical from now on. Non-core product!!) I couldn’t hear what else she said because my table was still aroused and rumbling about what-is-this-Brick? Brick should have been at the door, passing out cards. A fortune in advertising and product and story tie-ins was there for the taking!

Score 2 for Style.

Round 4. Audience member wants to know where marketeers can park their good news. Style Guy has two products, Giving and Belle, the latter soon to be a monthly, as avenues for success stories. T-D Guy says there’s not so much good news, except for the Public Squares they host. “I never saw an organization so open and engaged with the community,” he gushes.

Style Guy comes back with Style is a free publication so they know their readership wants it if they pick it up. Advertise with them and you’re “fishing in a well-stocked lake.” TV Guy says TV ads deliver with emotion. The average household has as many TVs as it has people. Everyone is watching what they want. Is TV also a well-stocked lake?

Young Web Guy said he thought his readers were going to be young, you know, with-it Web 2.0 types, but instead they’re older business people. Surprise! We oldies gotz web skillz and haz cheesburgerz! Web is the only media outlet actually growing. Radio Guy says 93 percent of everybody listens to the radio every week, and 70-something percent listen every day. (I miss the exact figure because a cell phone went off, which meant time-out for a round of cell phone jokes.) Radio advertising can be more creative. (It’s all happening in your mind!)

Cranky audience member says the mainstream media is relying too much on blogs and RSS feeds from dubious web sources for their online content and it’s confusing his clients because the blogosphere is not known for its truthiness. Style Guy says we’re not doing that. We all look at T-D Guy. (Hey, inrich.com, we're talking about you). TV Guy changes the subject. They get swamped with press releases which are useless to them. PR people need to develop a relationship with the assignment editor. Find out what they need. Give them only what they need. Not what you want. (This is the second time I've heard this. Nobody wants press releases.)

Round 5. What does the future hold? Style Guy can’t imagine newspapers will ever be completely dead. Good journalists will always be needed. TV Guy reminds us that 30 percent of people online are watching television at the same time. Web Guy channels Bette Davis. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. People will go to “where [the news] is well-written, well reported and they can trust it.”

Most of them agree that local content is the savior, and putting that local content behind a paid wall will save them. Like a peep show. Put in a quarter and turn the crank. See the local lady take off her clothes. Whoops. Show over. If you want to see more, pay another quarter. Radio Guy says local news is “more impactful to local communities.” I love being impactful. The conclusion: the media that gets that and invests in the community will survive.

And I apologize to everyone I spoke to after the meeting because apparently I had pesto in my teeth and didn’t notice it until I stopped at my son’s apartment afterward and he told me, and not in a nice way. Mom continues to be an ongoing embarrassment. I would score this meeting Style: Win. TV: Place. Web: Show.

A Penny for Your News

2009-02-11T14:40:00.002-05:00

There’s been a flotilla of articles lately on how to save newspapers, and they all seem to agree – giving away news free online was a big mistake. The newspapers should have made their web portals subscription-based from the get-go, and now it’s too late.

So the new plan that will save them is micropayments. It worked for iTunes, they say. It’s currently working like gangbusters for the iPhone apps. You would open an account, tie it to your credit card, and then access a menu of daily headlines. Every time you clicked open a story, you’d be charged. Whether it’s a penny, a dime or 99 cents hasn’t been determined yet, but all this change flowing in will save newspapers. They say.

Well, here’s why it’s not going to work. As long as somebody is giving it away free, you’ll go there instead. The whole internet would have to agree to put a protective pay-for-view on news. As great a site as iTunes is in looks and convenience of use, I still know people who go to Limewire or other sharing sites first, and those sites are messy and unreliable. But free.

And second, when I open a story link, what if I decide it wasn’t worth 10 cents? After a few wasted dimes, wouldn’t I quit? The headlines would have to be very clear about what the story is about, and currently they are not. I click on murder stories and find out it happened in Dinwiddie, and I don’t care. The inrich blogs, especially Barticles, carry headlines which don’t give you the slightest clue what the story is about. I won’t even click on them now when they’re free because I’ve been burned too many times by mysterious Barticles headlines.

In the current issue of Boomer Life, editor Ray McAllister, of the banished tribe of T-D writers, says without newspapers, who will do the investigative reporting, “who will do the spade work to find waste, corruption, fraud, unfairness and mere ineptitude in government. In business. In society.”

Who? Probably the same people doing it now, Style Weekly, the Save Richmond blog, even the Free Press dug up some scandals. (The star reporters in this town right now are all off the T-D grid: Chris Dovi, John Sarvay, Don Harrison, Scott Burger, Silver Persinger, and the commenters at Church Hill Peoples News.) The T-D seemed focused on the big picture, Pulitzer Prize-entry stories like the City jail or long, involved lack-of-medical-care stories, and let all the other stuff just fly by them.

(Boomer Life is a free print publication which puts its entire content online as well. It posts the same .pdf file it sends to the printer. And when you turn the pages online, they even make a swishing paper noise. Their writing staff is everyone you remember from local TV, radio and the newspaper except maybe Sailor Bob. It’s a well-executed marketing plan, and yet there’s no fees involved. Maybe this is what’s going to save newspapers. A better product?)

One Flew Over Patient First

2009-02-04T21:20:00.003-05:00

I'm sitting in the waiting room of Patient First while my husband is seeing a doctor about a persistent nosebleed. There's a mentally disabled young man in the waiting room who, between phlegm-filled coughing spells, shouts out nonsensical phrases so he sounds like a giant parrot. Either he learned to be loud from his mother, or over the years, his mother has become loud to be heard over him. She's on the cell phone, shouting a conversation between bellowing at her son to "Shut up your mouth!" and "Cover your mouth when you cough!"

She even places an elaborate take-out order during which we all learn the family enjoys extra extra bleu cheese on their salads.

The woman sitting across from me is also on the phone, except it's in her ear so to me she looks like a crazy woman talking to herself. She is also not using her indoor voice. Why do people think they have to project their voice on the phone, as if it requires volume to get into the airwaves? Her daughter text messages the whole time.

I hope the father and son behind me are actually talking to each other, but when I turn around to look, he, too, is on the phone. Everyone in this waiting room is talking on the phone! Loud enough for me to hear! The disabled boy starts bellowing, "MA. MA. MA," trying to get his mother's attention, but she's not hanging up until the nurse comes out and calls them. A man in a baseball cap approaches the father-son behind me because they are also wearing baseball hats indoors. "You inda automo bzzzzn?" he asks.

Second Hat says, "What?"

First Hat repeats it twice before he's understood. "You inda automo bzzzzn?" Indeed, he is, so they begin talking about automobile repairs. First Hat is a car salesmen in Colonial Heights, except "ain't nobody got no money ta buy no car."

Blessed Mary, finally everyone except First Hat is called back and the waiting room is quiet. Waiting rooms used to always be quiet. There weren't even TVs in them like there is now. People were sick, quiet, and read magazines. The nurse calls in First Hat and he responds by showing her a finger gun and making a loud clicking noise when he pulls his thumb trigger. Would you buy a used car from this man?

Now I'm alone, convinced my husband is dead or forgotten somewhere in the back because it's been 90 minutes. Oh no, Larry King is coming on the TV and I can't even change the channel. In the end, we learn that nosebleeds can be stopped with an ice pack, something we forgot because no one in our house has had one in years, and I didn't Google it. That lesson costs a $50 co-pay. Make a note of that: nosebleeds, ice pack, always Google it first because ain't nobody got no money for co-pays.

Chipotle News Takes a Circular Route

2009-02-02T10:14:00.002-05:00

The story "Chipotle confirms new store at VCU' on the inrich.com website, the strange twin of the timesdispatch.com website, is linked to a blog called urbanrichmond. But when you go there, urbanrichmond sends you back to timesdispatch.com for the story. That's a crazy trip.

But I took it because Chipotle anywhere is important news in my household, and I have discovered that any mention of food or a restaurant in your blog headline earns visits and sometimes even top 10 ranking for the day on rvablogs. They love their food blogs over there. Why is this an obsession? I am waiting for a local politician to run on a restaurant platform now.

Capriccio's Has Good Pizza

2009-01-31T20:32:00.005-05:00

The ad in the Clipper coupon booklet said it was "the best New York-style pizza in Richmond." Most pizza in Richmond is so not-good, you wouldn't have to do much to be the best, but claiming "New York-style" is ballsy, so we clipped our coupons and headed to the Capriccio's on W. Broad. We had never heard of the place.

It was in the TJ Maxx shopping center, which was packed with cars around David's Bridal Shop. Why are there so many people in the bridal shop in January? Anyway, at first we couldn't find the place because their roof sign was in red letters, which doesn't show up well. There wasn't a luscious smell when we entered, but the pizza arrived with little specks on it, which is always a good sign. Someone remembered a sprinkle of basil or oregano makes a pizza. Without it, I don't know what you've got. The only other place in the South I've ever seen specks was at Busch Gardens Ocktoberfesthaus, and that was only when they first opened. Jo Jo's downtown used to have good pizza, or maybe it was just better than what you normally get around here, but then they went downhill.

The first slice was delicious. The second was very very good. The third was okay, which is the problem with pizza. It's best oven hot. I shouldn't have had the third slice anyway.

I only lived in New York for 10 years, but that was enough time to be permanently branded with what food is supposed to taste like, and there are some things no other city seems to be able to do as well as the New York of my memories: Pizza, big salted pretzels sold from poles on a cart, Italian bread in paper tubes, Hoffman's or White Rock cream soda, bagels, soft ice cream.

The Holy Grail for soft ice cream is Carvel's. Carvel has made a few attempts to come to Richmond before and never stayed in business long. But in 2005, the same time I moved to the Dumbarton area, a Carvel's opened in the Crossridge shopping center way down on Staples Mill. It is still there. My birthdays are resplendent with Fudgy the Whale cakes once again, after decades of being Fudgy-deprived.

Lunch with T-D Guy

2009-01-28T19:32:00.002-05:00

I went to the PRSA luncheon today to hear T-D Executive Editor Glenn Procter, who is not a quotable guy. There wasn't a "money quote" (words worth capturing for a story) until the very end when he answered a question about whether the citizenry was taking over journalism since they are everywhere with their blogs and camera phones. "For big news events, I want trained reporters on scene. Good content still sells. Watchdog journalism still sells."

Only the blogs are often better watchdogs. He did concede that a large part of the news website of the future was going to be contributed citizen journalism. (Don't have to pay them salaries or health benefits either.)

I wanted to ask what happened to the seasoned and senior reporters who all left in a mass exodus, but never quite got my hand up since I was feeling asthmatic-y and not in the mood to pick a fight. And I was also full of cake.

But in his defense, he was telling how reporters go out the door now with a "tool kit," which consists of a video camera, still camera, pad and pen, and an audio recorder, so they are prepared to report a story for multi-media. That's probably why the old-timers bailed. That's too much stuff to deal with. I know when I go out on a story, I can't really do justice to taking photos and taking notes at the same time. I end up doing a semi-assed job when I have to multi-task with equipment. Imagine if I also had to do video and audio.

Other tidbits:

He wears ear rings.

Seventy percent of Richmond area businesses do not advertise in the paper.

Timesdispatch.com is getting another makeover soon.

"We're a media company. We're not the newspaper anymore."

Buying up all the suburban weeklies was to "get as much of the population into one of our products."

T-D is hosting employee forums this week to hear them out.

The priorities "going forward" (I hate that phrase) are 1) breaking news, 2) state government, 3) municipal governments, 4) health, 5) environmental issues, 6) education. Maybe not in that order since he came back a minute later and said state politics was No. 1.

The most hated things about the T-D: the website and the half pages.

Since this was an audience of all public relations specialists, naturally they asked what is the best way to get their news into the paper, and Procter pretty much said they didn't look at our press releases or emails. "Face to face is the way to play. Come and talk to us." He repeated it later on, too.

Now, this makes no sense because why do you need to come begging in person to have your press releases considered for story material unless....unless...

You make the appointment with the appropriate editor for the face-to-face, and when you get there, you find an ad salesman and a newspaper marketing person at the table, ready to pitch web and print ads...giving the illusion that if you buy in, your press releases will be read and considered. (Like, you don't have to buy magazines to be entered into the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, but people still think it gives them an edge.)

When I was an editor, I didn't want to meet everyone sending in press releases. Who has time? I just looked at them and asked myself, is this a calendar item? Is this a feature story? Do my readers want to know about this? Where in the paper do I put this? Or does it go in the wastebasket? I could call them if I needed more info. I didn't need them to come for lunch.

The Richmond Voice is a case in point. I send them a press release about a community meeting, something my job is doing that is going to impact the community in their pocket books, something they need to know in case they want to protest or ask questions. The Voice calls me within minutes and asks if I want to buy an ad for the announcement.

No, I say, it's a public meeting. Just run it in your community calendar.

No, you need to buy an ad, they say again.

This is news. This is the sort of thing you're supposed to write about as news. (And I say that sincerely as a fellow journalist, not as a PR hack. We're not selling anything!)

No, you need to buy an ad. She even puts me on hold to talk to the editor, and still comes back and says I need to buy an ad.

So I don't send The Voice things anymore because after going through this twice, I get the message. You're not a newspaper anymore. You're a shopper. I got the same creepy vibe when Proctor told the room full of PR people they needed to come in and sit down at the table with his editors.

Which begs the question, how much can you trust the newspaper if story selection and placement might be influenced by face-to-faces?

Death of Newspapers - Colonial Edition

2009-01-26T13:24:00.003-05:00

The first newspaper in the Colonies was Publick Occurrences, printing in Boston in 1690.

Early American newspapers were inevitably weeklies because it took 16 hours to set in type four pages.

The first “death of newspapers” in America was 1765 as a result of the Stamp Act, which levied a tax on every printed page.

The second death of newspapers was the Sedition Act of 1798, a low point of the John Adams presidency, making it a federal crime to defame his administration. (whoa!)

Thomas Jefferson once proposed newspapers should have four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies. (Wouldn't it be great if someone did a paper like that now?)

Objectivity in journalism is a creature of the 19th century. Prior to that (and apparently now) the whole point was to espouse a point of view.

Thanks again to my favorite magazine, The New Yorker for source material.

Changes at the T-D

2009-01-26T10:05:00.002-05:00

My T-D ad rep called me recently and didn't even mention the usual special sections coming up. He pitched all web ads. Ah, the future, I thought. This morning's stories on reorganization at the T-D confirmed it. "Web-first selling a top priority," it says.

I've forgotten all about that regional news team the T-D sent up several months ago, but apparently there's been another shakeup in their ranks, with a new local news editor, deputy editor for breaking news, deputy editor for Richmond and north of the James, deputy editor for South of the James, and a single editor czar for merged community news and features, lifestyles and entertainment. Is that too much compartmentalization? Maybe not. I expect to see a big jump in local news coverage.

Of Fat and Financial Failings

2009-01-21T12:45:00.004-05:00

I am fascinated by documentaries about the morbidly obese, those who literally cannot get through the door anymore and need rescue squads to get them out of the house. So I was mesmerized by Discovery Health's "Half Ton Teen," the story of 800-pounds plus Billy Robbins last night. Finally, a show that puts the blame somewhere: 19-year-old Billy's equally obese Mom who buys the groceries and brings him his food since he hasn't been able to leave his room in three years. For a teenager who is almost a man, he is totally childlike. Somehow this mother has completely controlled and emasculated her son. I am amazed since mine starting rebelling against me by age 15 and I haven't had a lick of influence since. Billy was fat going into high school, teased by everyone, and dropped out as a result, so the mother found a successful way to prevent losing her influence over him to his peer group.

Billy is so childlike, he doesn't appear to have any teenager traits at all, or any shame. The camera catches him nude, being washed like an elephant by orderlies. You actually don't see anything because the stomach fat is like a curtain down to his knees. (Note to self: exercise more!)

The documentary left me hanging about his fate, but I read on a UK website that after being forced to diet at the hospital, literally having fat cut off his body, and finally being a safe enough weight for a stomach bypass, he was then moved to an out patient facility to keep him away from his mother. Good move. That was one toxic mom.

Meanwhile, I read Media General can no longer match retirement contributions of its employees until its financial picture improves (read: Never). I looked at my husband's VCU retirement plan status, which came in the mail yesterday, which literally can buy him a computer right now and nothing else. It has lost $345 since the last report a month or so ago. So he could be flushing $20 bills down the toilet every payday and getting the same return on his investment.

Circuit City's demise will impact one distant in-law, and the tottering West Point paper mill (Smurfit-Stone? I think), will impact several more in-laws, so the rotting economy creeps in closer. My father's family escaped The Great Depression by joining the Mafia, but I don't see that as an option right now. My few remaining living family members are in the entertainment, education, and religion businesses which seem to be doing okay for the time being. Even in hard times, people try to pay off God (or at least his reps on Earth) hoping for a break.

Suits, Salaries and Bird Strikes

2009-01-16T07:22:00.003-05:00

The T-D reported this morning that five white guys in suits are heading a new Media General division to "manage production and distribution" of the print products. What the story neglects to say is what is the combined salaries of these five suits and how they will produce added value to the print products, increase subscriptions and ad sale revenues. That's the story I'd rather read.

And how long will it be before the expression "bird strike" goes into widespread use for a minor occurrence that causes a reaction with catastrophic results?

RVA Blogs, Twitter, Facebook Addiction

2009-01-10T22:04:00.002-05:00

Up until just now, I was never a social networker. I didn't like MySpace. It seemed like a lot of loud kids in messy rooms playing loud music. Literally, the pages were cluttered; the wallpaper was ugly, and music blared when you visited a page. I had to sign up to look at someone's page, and consequently had a ghost account. People tried to be my MySpace friend, but I replied to no one because I didn't even know how to get onto my vacant page. It looked like that creep Tom, who is everyone's first friend, was my only friend.

Then, after attending a dozen public relations and marketing seminars about social networking, I decided to try Facebook. Oh my gosh, it's like back in 1993-97 when I went to bars seven nights a week and kept running into the same people. Now they're on Facebook! Going onto my page is like going to the bar and hearing snippets of conversation and updates and gossip from the same crowd. All that's missing is the smell of beer, the smoke-filled air, and the band.

RVA Blogs is another addiction. It's like all these people have left their diaries open on my table. It's amazing how many people write about food, and how popular those entries are in the rankings. Is Richmond's social, intellectual and arts culture food-based?

And now I'm trying Twitter. Like Facebook, I can get it on my iPod Touch when I'm sitting with my soup at Panera Bread. I'm not sure how you find people to follow on Twitter. So far I have mostly Tobacco Avenue, and that guy twitters something every few minutes. I have a crush on Alex Albrecht from Diggnation, even though at first I thought he was gay, and I found him on Twitter, but he doesn't twit much.

It's amazing how I live like a hermit, but still know about all kinds of stuff going on now. And it's amazing that the Times-Dispatch doesn't have a daily technology section yet that covers this stuff, plus the latest computers, electronics, web pages, video games, software, iPod apps, all the 21st century things that are engaging people now, even older people. The paper wants to appeal to a younger demographic, and yet this huge chunk of news and articles is only being superficially touched on once in awhile on the business page. This is a grave error in news judgment! If nothing else, Brick Reloaded should be doing much more of this coverage.

My Richmond Police Story

2009-01-06T21:54:00.002-05:00

My husband was driving down McCloy and stopped to turn right onto Cary Street at 2 a.m. It was right after he played a gig and he stopped at the bank there to get money to pay the drummer, who was in the van. They see the cop in the Cary Court shopping center. Now my husband is a by-the-book driver and he doesn't drink at all when he's playing music. (Yes, call Ripley's Believe It or Not, it's true!) He's always yelling at me about my driving. And no one wants any trouble in the middle of the night when you have a drummer in the car. He's eyeball to eyeball with a cop car, so you know he's not going to blow past the stoplight. That would be crazy ass stupid.

He comes to a full stop before turning. The cop pulls him over ANYWAY and gives him a ticket for not stopping because it's 2 in the morning and two guys in a van have to be up to no good, right?

Well, he goes to court to contest the ticket. He tells the judge he made a full stop, honest to goodness. My husband is a short haired, sincere fellow who looks like an old Harry Potter. The judge asks the cop, is it possible he did stop and you just didn't see it? The cop says, yeah, it's possible. He might have stopped.

The judge finds my husband guilty, ANYWAY! The drummer was supposed to go with him as a witness, but court starts at 9 a.m., and he's a drummer, so...not gonna happen. And if the drummer had testified, my husband might have gotten jail time for being in possession of a drummer at 2 a.m., so maybe it was for the best.

Go West, Young La Siesta

2009-01-03T19:33:00.002-05:00

It turns out La Siesta is not so much closing as relocating farther down the road to somewhere near where 288 intersects with Midlothian, or so said our waiter today when we went to the restaurant to pay what we thought were our final respects. He said the place was so slammed Friday night, they ran out of food. Saturday at lunch was crowded, but we got what we wanted and the sangria was particularly tasty. There was an email sign-up sheet at the register so all the loyal customers would get word when La Siesta reopened again far to the west. For some reason this part of the story was not told to the Times-Dispatch.

Is urban blight creeping so far up Midlothian that businesses are now abandoning the Powhite interchange area and moving west of Midlothian village? It appears so. We just don't want to say that out loud, in case Chesterfield County becomes alarmed that the part of it that snuggles up to blighted Richmond has caught the blight. And without even a GRTC bus to blame!

Around 1983, I built a "solar house" off Providence Road on the Southside. There were three solar neighborhoods: the solar slum off Court House, where the houses were priced in the 40,000s, the middle solar off Providence where I built (50,000s) and the fancy solars off Arch Road (60,000s.) We got a big tax credit for this house the first year. Everything solar-related was deductible. In our case, most of the walls facing south were actually big plastic tanks of water, and other than all our big windows being on the south side of the house, that was the only solar thing about it.

Anyway, we were in the Southside, and La Siesta opened there and it was my favorite Mexican restaurant. I always ordered the Enchilada Suizas. I seldom tried anything else on the menu. When I got a divorce and moved to Carytown, and then on with my life, it was still the only restaurant on the Southside I liked. Of any kind. My husband can eat at any Mexican restaurant and be happy, but I only found satisfaction at La Siesta, although after I found out this particularly creepy Goth boy I knew was cooking there, I didn't go as often. And then there was the green onion scare, and when it was over, the green onions never returned to the Enchilada Suizas. What made that dish, beside the mild white sauce, was the sprinkling of tomato bits and chopped green onions.

Lean Cuisine makes an Enchilada Suiza which is kind of good, but not as good as La Siesta's back in the day when green onions didn't poison you. I am on my own now, forced to replicate the Enchilada Suiza at home, which I can in all ways except the suiza sauce, although I suspect it may be the same white stuff they give you with your chips in addition to the salsa. If so, that will make life easier since I read in the T-D that La Siesta sells their chip dips at Ukrop's. I've never seen them, but now I will look. This will either work or be a culinary disaster.

I AM 10 S. BOULEVARD!

2009-01-02T10:47:00.003-05:00

I have been in envy of the residents of 10 S. Boulevard and all the mayhem, vehicular disaster, missing cat drama, fires and assorted disasters available for them to photograph from their balcony. This morning the fire trucks came to my block, although I don't know why. They didn't turn on their sirens. They went into the house. The family was outside the house. The family, including a pie, went back inside the house. The firemen came out of the house, and the dad photographed the firemen leaving.

And yes, one of my neighbors has his front porch roof propped up on poles.

More Death to Newspapers!

2008-12-26T11:10:00.003-05:00

Now I can get AP Mobile News on my iPod touch, even the Virginia AP feed as a separate channel.

The one nice thing Bush did for me was send me an incentive check for $1,200. Okay, half of it was for my husband, but I saw the deposit hit the checking account first. I hustled down to the Apple store in Short Pump and incentived myself, upgrading my white beach ball of an eMac machine into a new flat panel iMac. But wait! It was back-to-college shopping season and they offered me a free (as in FREE) iPod touch and an all-in-one printer for buying the iMac. I will take them free things.

My husband forgot all about being cheated out of his share of the incentive check when I gave him the iPod Touch and then watched for the next year as he...just like in the commercials...had awesome fun with it. He was the hit of all parties with his flash light application, beer pouring application, and Magic 8-Ball. Would you like to play my little piano? If he had been single, he would have picked up chicks with this thing. Hmm, must get back iPod Touch. But how?

Well, buy him one for Christmas. Then the old one becomes mine! Mine! (And I bought the new one at Target, which offered me FREE a $25 gift certificate. (Hmmm, laundry sorting basket on wheels or Legos Batman? What to do, what to do?)

P.S. I suck at Super Monkey Ball. And although Urban Spoon app recommends Franco's Ristarante as the best upscale Italian restaurant in the West End, only 64 percent of voters thought it was any good. Urban Spoon app, you are giving me mixed messages.

Mad Santa

2008-12-22T22:31:00.003-05:00

I am not a fan of Christmas.

Shopping in cold weather is not fun.
Having to do regular errands, like buying mailing envelopes, dishwashing liquid, and return a malfunctioning storage drive means no place to park and long lines no matter where I go to do it this week.
No one in my family has small children, so Christmas is adult-oriented. Adult presents cost more than children's presents, and you're shopping for people who already have everything they want. When money is tight, the person who ends up not getting a gift is my husband. That doesn't seem right.
Did I mention neither of us got a raise this year? Well, neither of us was laid off, either, so I guess I shouldn't complain.
I have a double set of in-laws, since my husband's parents are divorced and remarried. That means double in-law presents. Double road trips over the river and through the woods...
I have never been able to establish any family Christmas traditions of my own because I've never been able to have a Christmas at home with just my immediate family. I have been on the road for 29 years, a visitor to other people's traditions, except for a six year break between husbands when my Christmas tradition was happily home alone with my own turkey and dressing, and three movies, Coal Miner's Daughter, Manhattan, and When Harry Met Sally. I was never sad to be alone.
Sometimes I just want to cry. And then the bills come in January and I really want to cry. (When I worked at the Times-Dispatch, back in the newspaper prosperity days, they used to give you a Christmas bonus of a week's salary. That was very helpful. I'm pretty sure they don't do that anymore.)
I don't put the tree up because then I would have to take it down. Or I could be like some of the people in the Fan District who leave their Christmas lights up all year.
Aren't I pathetic. Grinch has nothing on me.
My favorite holiday is Martin Luther King Day. I get a three-day weekend and I'm not expected to do anything, not even have a dream.

Why is Ukrop's Being So Benevolent?

2008-12-21T12:27:00.002-05:00

What is it with this milk of human kindness coming from my local seller of milk, Ukrop's? Yesterday I filled up my gas tank when it was light-on empty and it cost me $8 and change. When I bought this car new in '02, it cost $15 to fill the tank. At the height of the gas prices, I was paying between $45-50 to fill up.

True, gas is $1.50 a gallon at my local Exxon right now, but I had 80 cents a gallon off in Ukrop's fuel perks. Ever since they started that program, at the height of the crazy costing gas, it has resulted in helpful savings to me.

What are they gaining from it? Are they seducing people away from Kroger's and Food Lion? But I seldom shop there. Except when I lived in Highland Springs and had to go to the A&P on Williamsburg Road (A&P! Imagine!), Ukrop's has always been the geographically closest store. Sundays, of course, you experiment with the competition. Ukrop's and Chick-fil-a still believe in Sundays.

Even if I am paying more, I tend to gravitate to Ukrop's. The aisles are clean. The baked goods look real, not peculiarly plastic-coated like at the other stores. The deli seems cleaner. The no-tip robotic baggers go with you back to the car (always appreciated in the dark of night). And now, for however long it lasts, Fuel Perks!

Google-Blocked from Mr. Christmas

2008-12-21T11:30:00.006-05:00

You can't get to Mr. Christmas with Google maps.

My caller had the most unimaginative, been-there, done-that photo assignment this week for a local publication, to get photos of people enjoying over-the-top Christmas displays. I consulted the T-D's list and emailed him a few addresses in his neighborhood, then told him to come get me and I'd drive him to a few places in my area of town. I knew the streets, I thought, and it'd go quick with me behind the wheel. He refused. (I guess it has something to do with not wanting to be seen with your mother, or something.)

Instead, I had to provide directions over the phone. The first place went okay, then I provided directions to the famous house of Mr. Christmas on 2300 Wistar Court. Since he was coming from the highly decorated houses of Pine Grove Drive, I instructed him via Broad Street. Right turn off Broad onto Wistar Street, four blocks down, left on Wistar Court. I am looking right at Google maps.

He calls back and says the street dead ends on Biscayne. That's not what the map says, I tell him. I'm right here, he says. Well, I can't tell what your situation is because I'm not there and the map says....and then he shouts at me that I purposely misdirected him because I wanted to go. But the map says....

Next night, as I'm getting ready to go to the boring office Christmas party, I see the Crazy Lights show on TLC and there's Mr. Christmas. I know it's an old show because they interview Cynthia McMullen in her messy little Times-Dispatch cubicle, and she's gone, but surely Mr. Christmas is still there. His street wouldn't have disappeared like Brigadoon. All I can think of at the boring Christmas office party is leaving early and finding out what happened on Biscayne Road.

We get there, and sure enough, Wistar Street dead ends at someone's driveway, which has a street sign on it that says Wistar Street. (Who ever saw a street sign at the end of a driveway?) We turn the brights on and can see Wistar Street continues right on the other side of this driveway, but there's a metal barricade keeping you from driving on the driveway, over a little stretch of this house's lawn, and back onto Wistar Street. We go up and down Biscayne but cannot find another street that will hook us back up to Wistar.

Back at home, I Google-map it again, ask for directions, and Google Maps innocently draws me a route right through this person's yard. On the map, Wistar Street goes right through to the end from Broad. In reality, you can't get to the end of it with the Wistar Court and Wistar Place cul-de-sacs unless you enter from Skipwith. And here in this conundrum is where Mr. Christmas abides, ever elusive to those of us Wise Men coming from the North. That just ain't right.

The Information Business

2008-12-20T10:32:00.002-05:00

The New Yorker's "Financial Page" this week was on "News You Can Lose" and the demise of newspapers. Some highlights:

Many traditional advertisers, like big department stores, are struggling, and the bursting of the housing bubble has devastated real-estate advertising.

(One of my first jobs out of college was in the advertising department of Thalhimers where I manually constructed, with type and glue, the many full page ads we ran in the two daily newspapers. There were several of us who did that, as well as a row of cubicles full of copywriters and artists. Imagine the payroll for that staff, not to mention we then paid the Times-Dispatch and News Leader to run all these ads. The A section was full of them every day. If there were no cell phone industry, I think the paper would have hit the skids even sooner. Cell phone ads still fill the pages.)

Papers' attempts to deal with the new environment by cutting costs haven't helped: trimming staff and reducing coverage make newspapers less appealing to readers and advertisers.

Newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago--but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout. Papers now seen to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the 20th century--a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology....Had the bosses realized they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate...if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.

Local papers could have been more aggressive in leveraging their brand names to dominate the market for online classifieds, instead of letting Craigslist usurp that market.

None of the important aggregation sites, to say nothing of Google News, are run by a paper. Even now, papers often display a "not invented here" mentality, treating their sites as walled gardens, devoid of links to other news outlets.

The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn't the Internet; it's us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That's a consumer's dream, but eventually it's going to collide with reality: if newspapers' profits vanish, so will their product.

There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby, the deep-pocketed patron.

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime--intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on--and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can't last. Soon enough, we're going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

(Case in point, very few blogs offer unbiased reporting. More common is the editorializing model, and even more common is the navel-gazing model, the blogs as life trivia diaries, of interest to only the writer. You have to spend time pouring through all the headlines and opening paragraphs, trying to separate the three models. It would be great if the local aggregation websites would do that sorting for you.)

Rethinking Richmond Magazine

2008-12-19T18:34:00.002-05:00

I am actually thinking of subscribing to the magazine I once scorned, and it seems an appropriate gift for a step mother-in-law who has everything. They've got this two-fer deal card tucked in the current issue. I always thought of Richmond Magazine as being advertiser-driven as far as most of its content with its suspect best doctors, dentists, real estate agents, etc. type features. Then they started making fun of the City government, which was more entertaining.

And now they have two writers who I enjoy, Bill Farrar and Anne Thomas Soffee, contributing regularly.

I don't like this Richmond Inside Out blog. It looks like a bunch of advertising blurbs posted by unusually happy people, prompted by the site's leading questions that can only be answered with unbridled enthusiasm. Being a grinch, I'd rather read grousing and warnings. It always seems more genuine.

Every section of the Times-Dispatch's website seems like it was designed by someone else in an entirely different style.

Out with the Old on Channel 12

2008-12-19T14:01:00.001-05:00

I was shopping in Target when my cell phone went off and it was my son in a state of alarm because Ben Hamlin had been cut from channel 12. “He’s been on TV since I was little.” I did the math in my head, and my son was 9 when Ben Hamlin went on the air here. I guess so.

Later on, the office speculation was Hamlin had probably taken an early retirement buyout because 28 years is 28 years. Wow, that’s a long time in local television. Most of the time, it seems to be a revolving door with youngsters passing through to bigger markets, kids that have no idea what the history of Richmond is when they frame their stories. Without the old journalists, we are without “context.” It’s a risk the print media is taking, too.

Channel 12, in my memory, is even creakier, as the team I recall was Charles Fishburne, Sailor Bob, and Jim Granger. Sailor Bob was a holdover from a local children’s show, back when the local stations actually did their own programs (cooking, public affairs, kid shows). Channel 6 had their own Bozo show, and I have this memory that just won’t fade of driving down Thompson Street and here comes a VW bug with Bozo at the wheel, in full makeup and costume, going to work at channel 6.

Sailor Bob was replaced by Spencer Christian, who went on to national exposure on “Good Morning, America.” Charles Fishburne hung in for a long time, his hair going higher and higher in an atomic mushroom shape, held in place with industrial strength hairspray. He should still be doing the news at 12. He was as smooth and Richmondy as Tim Timberlake was on WRVA, the calm morning voice of radio, (trained by Alden Aaroe as heir apparent).

When Clear Channel took over WRVA, that was another unceremonious and unnecessary housecleaning of all the familiar voices, and for years we had to endure a cacophony of loud, abrasive Northerners, although they finally have an afternoon drive guy who is not a loudmouth idiot, and I’ve gotten used to the morning guy. Lou Dean is now the voice of Henrico County’s telephone system.

I’ve finally been in Richmond long enough now to adapt to the culture of not appreciating change for change’s sake. How many Richmonders does it take to change a lightbulb?

The Santa Lie

2008-12-18T19:49:00.003-05:00

It all starts with the first great lie, Santa Claus.

We have lost faith. We do not know whom to believe. We do not know whom to trust. Our parents, our ministers, our teachers, our politicians, our lovers, our car dealers, our anchorman--who among us is worthy of our trust?

And it's all because of Santa Claus.

Who can't remember when they first realized there was no Santa Claus?

For me, it was when I discovered a secret cache of gifts in a closet. I carefully unwrapped the end flaps on one, read the lettering on the side of the box and re-taped the package. On Christmas morning the card on this same box said it was from Santa Claus. How could Santa have brought this from the North Pole just hours earlier? And if there was no Santa, who was devising this elaborate hoax, who was drinking the milk and eating the carrots I left out for the reindeer? Who was leaving me thank you notes written in a feathery Santa hand?

My parents? My own parents were doing this to me? The same people who had selected my religion, mandated my moral values and set our standard of ethics?

Herein lies the crux. In our formative years, two similar controlling factors are presented to us, God and Claus. They both see you when you're sleeping, know when you're awake, know if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake. They both reward you for faith and sterling behavior, and punish you for lack of both, one with fire, brimstone and eternal damnation and the other with a mini-version of the same thing, a lump of coal. When Claus is revealed as a fraud, can God be far behind?

Some of us desperately need to believe in something. I dealt with the loss of Claus. But I clung to the big Santa in the sky. When I became a parent, I decided not to tempt my own child with a similar crisis of faith. I would make life easy for him. I would tell him upfront there was no Santa Claus. I explained very carefully, or maybe very vaguely, it was just a Christmas game. I met direct questions about Santa head-on. Is there a Santa Claus? There are lots of Santa Clauses, Santa Clauses in every mall.

Unfortunately, in the end, it didn’t work. Whereas I continued to cling to the Santa in the sky with diamonds, he rejected everything I believed in. Did it all stem from the original loss of Claus, even as careful as I was to prepare him for it?

The Santa Claus conspiracy is the first conundrum we encounter on a lifetime journey of losing faith, and that's the only thing in life you can trust, the true and certain knowledge that you can’t believe in anything.

(I originally wrote a longer version of this about 15 years ago, and ever since, I keep seeing it floating around on the Internet, usually attributed to The City Paper, which never bought it from me, so I hereby lay formal claim to my own essay.)

Mystery of the Missing Portrait

2008-12-11T23:24:00.003-05:00

In 1969, a VCU freshman named Janet Johnson, who lived on the 8th floor of Johnson Hall, painted this picture, which amazed us all because she wasn't even an art major, so we took a picture of it.

She dropped out mid-semester because she never went to class. She got her days and nights mixed up and was up all night and slept all day. I think she was originally from Northern Virginia. She was very tall and liked to wear short, fluffy wigs. She also liked to party at Andy's, which was on Grace Street near the Mister Swiss, a few doors down from Lum's.

A few years later, someone told me they saw this painting for sale at Arts in the Park. That was almost 40 years ago. I wonder what happened to it.

Do or do not. There is no try.

2008-12-05T09:36:00.002-05:00

Is there any local news left on the T-D website generated by their staff? Most of the breaking news links this morning were from WRIC or the AP. Clicking on the inrich tab took me to an Adolf Jewelers ad and nowhere else. Maybe I misclicked, because the second time it did take me to inrich which is now called inrich.tv and is all videos and ads. Under News Videos, two wheezy editors stumble through what's going to be in the paper tomorrow. Tomorrow? Everything on this page loads very slow. Under Slide Shows, the first choice was a slide show on cranberries (yes, fascinating), and yet it took me to an article on making fresh cranberry sauce from scratch. Where's the slide show? Well, not that I needed to see it anyway.

Mad Dog, wherever on the West Coast he went, would be touched to know his Tacky Lights tour is about the only story holding the T-D together for an entire month each year. That's some legacy.

Looks like I won't be going to the Bass Pro Shop again this weekend to goggle at the fish. The restaurant there got another great review, so it'll be packed again. I gotta see this place.

Perez T-D

2008-12-04T19:43:00.002-05:00

I went down to the little Entertainment square of vague headlines on the T-D website and clicked on one and it took me to the Perez Hilton website! T-D sending me to the Perez Hilton website for news!

Oh, this is sad.

The Killer Child Story

2008-12-01T00:21:00.003-05:00

This is the dilemma. More often than not, the T-D editors don't agree with me about what I want to read. They make their choices. I make mine. I prefer mine. The story I wanted to read today was about that 8-year-old boy in Arizona who shotgunned his dad and the lodger to death and who calmly told the police a variety of amazing scenarios to explain it away. And when outed, was sad -- not because his dad was dead -- but because he was "going to juvie." How did he even know to call it juvie? How did he know about juvie? This is one amoral prodigy!

(This is why I don't believe in gun ownership. Most of the time, someone in your family is going to use it on you.)

The T-D gave this story three short paragraphs. Okay, it's an Arizona story, not local. But I have to go to the Internet and find an Arizona paper online, to get the details. (Or I can google "boy shoots father" and up comes the worldwide coverage.) The 24-hour news channels have a better grasp of the....wait! I can hear "Inside Edition" doing a story on the boy killer right now!

Wait! Now Inside Edition is doing a story on a business woman who trashed her $3 million dollar home by taking in nearly 200 dogs and cats. (Animal hoarding is another favorite topic of mine since I am an amateur animal hoarder.) Crazy lady lies to the reporter that she acquired all these animals from the side of the road or they wandered onto her property. (Cats are difficult to catch unless they were previously owned. I'm not buying this.) The reporter doesn't question it. The reporter doesn't ask why crazy lady didn't get the animals fixed so they wouldn't keep breeding, either.

So today, Inside Edition was my news source of choice, unfortunately the reporters are models, not journalists.

Craigslist or the Economy? Where are the Jobs

2008-11-30T23:49:00.002-05:00

The jobs section of the classifieds this Sunday was four pages. If you take out the house ads, it was more like three and a half. Wow. What happened to all the jobs?

Ninety percent of the jobs I've had, I found in the T-D classifieds. I religiously looked through the Sunday job listings every week, even when I had a job, in case there was a better job. Sometimes there was. Occasionally I got it. Then you hit this dangerous plateau where you're making a hard-to-exceed salary, but you don't particularly love what you're doing. You'd like to do something else, but you can't afford to. You're stuck. (I guess that's called success?) So I torture myself by finding way more interesting jobs and then being appalled by the salary range. It used to be quite a process, scanning every column of tiny text on every page, searching for that gem of a job, which could be under any category really. You had to look at every single one.

That doesn't take very long these days. The claim is that all the jobs went to craigslist, but did they really? Most of them look like email address-collecting scams. So where did all the real jobs go?

The company websites.

So you pretty much have to pick the places you want to work and keep checking their websites. I want to work for Henrico County, so I have to go there every week, which is hard to remember to do, and scroll through the listings, which only marginally change, and then guess. For instance, they have a "community liaison" position which based on the title alone sounds like something I wouldn't be good at, but turns out is exactly what I do now, only the title is completely different. I wouldn't have known about it if a friend didn't tip me off, (and then I didn't get it anyway).

The newspapers had a classifieds model which worked great if you knew what you could do, and didn't care where you did it. Sad to see it crash and burn.

(The other thing that killed the classifieds: They cost too much to place, especially when it's free online.)

Bad in So Many Ways

2008-11-30T23:30:00.003-05:00

They managed to make the website worse.

Everytime there is a "makeover," it never seems to be for the better. Both TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly made over their magazines so it is difficult to tell the difference between an ad and an article. Even the articles have big headlines, small blocks of big text, and big photos. I'm letting TV Guide run out. Bless The New Yorker for never changing. Still three columns of black text on white, same font, broken up with line art sketches and cartoons after all these years. Why mess with a winning formula.

The T-D doesn't seem to have a formula to even mess with. The website timesdispatch, which is indeed different than inrich.com (and why?) has a big block of wasted space in the middle called the Continuous News Desk which is hard to navigate. It scrolls horizontal, when most Internet users are accustomed to vertical scrolling. Inrich is even more ablaze with flashing, popping, moving ads, even some that peel down over what you're trying to read. The inrich site is cleaner, but the "breaking news" seems to be "any news," just a list of stuff. I clicked on one thing that looked like an obituary, but might have been the bio for an Obama-appointee. There was no explanation. When I went back, the page had changed all around and I had no idea where I was anymore, even though I was back on the homepage.

This is marketing desperation to make money, with presentation of the news only a marginal vehicle. I'm sure if the marketing department comes back with the proposition that only stories about catz haz cheezeburgers should be on the page, that will happen. Reporting the news rides way in the back of this bus.

Did newspapers always have marketing departments? Did they need them?

Mayhem on the Boulevard

2008-11-25T19:36:00.002-05:00

I found this link in the morning's press packet, of all places, and now it's my favorite local website. www.10sboulevard chronicles the news happening in a small area around the epicenter of 10 S. Boulevard, and it's all told with the urgency and blaring headlines of a tabloid supermarket rag, headlines emblazoned over gory photos of car wrecks and crime.

From their balcony, the webmasters seem to have front row seats to dozens of car wrecks, break-ins, vandalisms, drunks parking crazy, alley cats lost and found, and they manage to get photographs of it all. They even mounted a webcam on the balcony and actually recorded a fender bender on the Boulevard as it happened. These guys are clever with graphics, which adds an element of realism, like their crime maps. Is it really that bad on South Boulevard? There's even spectacular rainbows over the Museum District which they photograph and headline like it's an alien invasion.

This is the future of journalism. Every little geographic plot will have its own web coverage, recording every little thing that happens as if it's the front page of the NY Times. Too bad I can't do that for my block, but there's less anonymity in the suburbs, and way fewer car wrecks.

Thumbs Down

2008-11-19T21:19:00.002-05:00

Media General (which unveils its new website tonight!) has forced Daniel Neman and richmond.com's Mike Ward to do video movie reviews together under the awful title, "Showtime Showdown." Ward (who I mentally imagined was some little punk kid, and he's nothing like that) looks like he'd rather be just about anywhere else. Sparks do not fly. They stiffly seem to be reciting something from cue cards. The movie they're reviewing is "Quantum of Solace." Neman says it was better when it was called "The Bourne Identity." I think Ward liked it. Maybe they should try looking at each other and actually having a conversation, but it wouldn't fit into the rigid time requirement of this video. I can't imagine I'll be checking into this Showdown again, unless Ward takes his tie off and chokes Neman with it.

As for movies, my dilemma is whether to keep or delete "Synecdoche, New York" from my Netflix queue. Half the reviews really really like it, and half really really hate it.

Ward wrote a farewell to the old richmond.com world in Style this week. I have warm feelings for the place even though I visited only once on a job interview (Richard Foster got the job instead) and I never met anyone who worked there. That's because that same Richard Foster asked me to write a weekly band calendar for the princely sum of $100 a week. That extra $400 a month (and sometimes it was $500) was extremely welcomed, and it was an easy column to write since I knew something about most of the bands on the scene at the time and even had a huge personal photo collection to draw from. I did that from fall of 1999 to spring of 2001, so that's about $12,500 worth of band describing, and never once did I miss a deadline. Or meet Richard Foster. We did it all by email.

In the spring of 2001, they decided to make the column a staff position and give it to a young female writer who did actual band interviews, and that went on for awhile and then died, because here's the problem with band interviews (and I know this after doing a local music monthly newspaper for 11 years): it's the same story over and over and over. It never changes. A bunch of people get together to play music. They think they're different and unique, whether they are or not. They want a record deal. They record an album. They fight. Some of them quit. They get new players. They split and form other bands like reproducing cells. They travel to other small towns to play in other small bars. The van breaks down. They don't get paid. Even Fighting Gravity's story is the same times a decade or two, an endless loop of constantly changing players as they keep looping through the same Eastern seaboard frat circuit.

You can only read this story so many times. (And yet Rolling Stone -- the magazine -- not the band, but also the band -- survives. And Rolling Stone even told the Fighting Gravity version of the story.) Boy o Boy.

If you got that joke, you are old.

My Secret Mentor

2008-11-18T20:22:00.004-05:00

I went online to peek at Style Weekly a day early and saw that Rozanne Epps had died on Sunday. Rozanne was Style's "Rosie Right," the copy editor, and for a very long time, editor of the Back Page. She was The Decider during the 1990s who decided who got to be on the Back Page, and very, very often, especially in the early 1990s, she chose me.

I was very grateful because I couldn't get anywhere at the Times-Dispatch as a writer. Every time I applied, it seemed the editors found a new way to humiliate me, variously insulting me for having a child, being a woman, having gone to VCU, having majored in journalism...all things I couldn't do anything about. And they were not kind about it. I wasn't asking for a lot, but even collecting recipes and recording wedding submissions were jobs I could not get.

When Style began, its first editor, Laura Cameron, was encouraging. She bought my articles and said nice things. Then she left and the next editor, an elitist male, didn't like me at all, so I was out for many years. Then Rozanne came in and seemed to love everything I submitted, even things I now realize were half-baked. When I didn't have any ideas, she would prod me with an email to come up with something, and always requested "first rights," as if dozens of publishers were clamoring for my essays. Actually, for awhile I had a little racket going as Style's sister publications under the Landmark umbrella would buy the essays, too, as well as a weekly in Charlottesville. A quadruple score, Richmond, Norfolk, Charlottesville and Jacksonville, Fla., would net me a decent check. (Style alone paid $60.)

Musicians and writers tend to be at their most creative when they're miserable, broke, poor and desperate. As the 1990s progressed, my life improved and I submitted less. Than Rozanne was no longer the Back Page editor and nothing I wrote after that made it to the Back Page. So I have to say, thanks Rozanne, for the ride. It was fun. I still run into people who remember some of my pieces, and that $60 was sometimes all the money I made that week. It was Miller Time!

Strangely enough, we never met or even talked on the phone. Our whole relationship was by email. One time I was in the office for some reason and she walked by me, and of course, didn't know it was me. And I didn't identify myself because...well, I have problems being even that marginally outgoing. But I knew it was her, the closest thing I ever had to a mentor. And I was grateful. Thank you for believing in me. It is the most precious gift of all.

Oh T-D How Do I Hate Thee

2008-11-15T10:25:00.003-05:00

Really, Times-Dispatch, you could not spare a reporter, not even an intern, to cover Mayor-Elect Dwight Jones' speech at the Eye on Richmond luncheon Friday, which was held walking distance from the newspaper's offices?

I looked in vain to see what he had planned for running the City of Richmond, then had to make calls to find someone who had gone. I had reserved a seat for myself, but then an offsite work assignment made it impossible to go. I was very disappointed to miss it, and even more disappointed that the T-D didn't bother, either. Did any media outlet go?

Oh, the new revamped Channels section. How ugly. It reflects how few ads were available for it, and if more ads should come, the only place they can go is to replace what's left of show descriptions. The movie listings only cover well-rated movies, but if you are not subscribing to a movie package that includes all those ENC4 and HBO2 channels, you can't actually get most of these movies anyway. I would not buy Saturday's paper to get this.

My Tivo provides me with a rundown of what's on TV, and I supplement that with adding things Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide recommends, but I'm letting the TV Guide subscription expire. They focus on shows like Gossip Girl and The Hills, which I've never watched and don't care about the people who appear in them. The TV Guide website does a good (and free to me) job of covering television, and has more content than that magazine anyway.

Germs! Fish!

2008-11-12T19:13:00.002-05:00

During the Today Show this morning they did a segment on all the germs on the handles of shopping carts. Tests detected fecal matter! Gross! I am definitely using those sani-wipes at Ukrop's now.

Then the Style restaurant review didn't excite me, but the Bass Pro Shop has a two-story aquarium? I gotta go! Last year my holiday outing was Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens. This year it's going to be the Bass Pro Shop!

Bob Holsworth at St. Paul's

2008-11-07T22:59:00.004-05:00

A couple of years ago, I heard Bob Holsworth speak at a Virginia Government Communicators conference and enjoyed it, so I rolled out for his Eyes on Richmond gig at St. Paul's Episcopal today. I knew I wasn't late when I found myself walking up the sidewalk right behind him. He was alone, which oddly surprised me, like political analysts should travel with entourages or be flanked with security and sycophants like the mayor?

Some of what he said was obvious -- like Obama brought out voters who don't usually go to the polls, the young, black, and Hispanic -- which turned Bush Red states in the Southwest blue, as well as Virginia. And then he'd pull some data out of the hat, which made me go whoa, he's doing this without notes.

So here's my notes.

Although nearly the entire full house raised their hand when asked if they'd rather see a four-week campaign for President, Holsworth said the way we do it now is just right. Limited campaign periods favor established people. It takes a long campaign to allow a new face to emerge and fight enough battles to earn the title.

Bush's approval rating now is lower than Nixon's was at the height of Watergate, and is matched only by Truman, who was later redeemed by history. Bush is hoping for such a redemption.

Bush pretty much elected Obama. It was too much of an uphill battle for McCain. Suspending his campaign to support the Wall Street bail-out was a huge political blunder. The 18-29 age group went 2-1 for Obama. "A party that's losing the next generation by 2-1 has to be very concerned," he said of the Republicans.

We tend to watch the TV network that supports our own views. Then he made a joke about Alan Colmes who is "paid to lose every night" opposite Sean Hannity on Fox News. (Actually, Colmes has a radio show I listen to every evening on XM Radio where he wins every night.)

Amazing fact: When Holsworth asked us to raise our hand if we read the newspaper every single day, the entire room, except me, raised their hand. But this was a decidedly old crowd. (When I pass by a mirror, I am always startled by the old woman who looks back. Who is she?) Young people, Holsworth said, are getting their news from The Daily Show, SNL and Letterman. (Letterman is old, I hate to tell you.) The Republican party needs to "develop conservative comedians."

What happened in Virginia was Northern Virginia. It has gone heavily Democrat with minorities, Hispanics, and post graduates working in high tech fields. Hanover County may be the last bastion of Republicanism in the state. (And where I first met Mark Warner in person, at a small gathering of the few Democrats in the county in someone's backyard. He gave a great speech, and I've voted for him ever since.)

Albemarle County, another Republican stronghold surrounding Democratic Charlottesville, is in the throes of high unemployment, which is how Virgil Goode's seat fell into jeopardy.

In the mayoral race, Grey dropped the ball with his enthusiasm-free campaign despite having a boatload of money, whereas Jones had all the traditional Democrat endorsements, and the good luck to be on a ticket where Obama was attracting new voters to pull the lever for the Democrats.

Obama proved it's possible to run a winning campaign on donations from small contributors, free of fat-cat money, which opens the door for anyone with an attractive platform and a good website. He was a "cool hand, smart guy" who never took the bait during debates and remained above the fray. While McCain was taking Virginia for granted until too late, Obama opened 50 campaign offices and inundated the airwaves with ads, even in the expensive D.C. market where he ran 1,342 ads versus McCain's 80.

One question from the audience was why couldn't the Republicans "swiftboat" Obama like they had Kerry? Because Kerry opened himself to attack, according to Holsworth, making a fatal mistake at his convention by "reporting for duty" and emphasizing his Vietnam service, without balancing it with his anti-war activities. "He only told half his story when he had a problematic second half." (I'm not sure talking about his anti-war activities would have silenced the swiftboaters, but you gotta love the new word.)

Bush Free TV

2008-11-05T19:24:00.002-05:00

I actually watched the evening news tonight, something I haven't done in many years, and then I remembered why. Ever since Bush Jr. was first elected, I didn't want to see his smirking face, so I stopped watching televised news. Soon he will be gone.

How did he ever get elected, not once but twice? I guess because no one really cared except the evangelical Christian right and they turned out. They couldn't get excited about McCain this time, even with Palin on the ticket. To get elected, you have to energize some group to tremendous heights, or create some sense of false urgency. Kennedy's assassination got Johnson elected. (Oh, how I don't like him! I dislike him as much as my mother disliked Douglas MacArthur.) 9/11 got Bush reelected. Poor lovesick Monica Lewinsky got him elected the first time. Ford giving Nixon clemency gave Carter mileage.

Hope is a powerful word. Change is another one. Homeland security...not so powerful a mantra anymore, especially after you see the administration that couldn't take care of New Orleans after Katrina was supposedly going to protect us all.

The guys with charisma who created magic (in my lifetime) have been Kennedy, Carter, Clinton, and now Obama. (Okay, maybe Reagan for the Republicans.) Magic doesn't always equal a successful Presidency, though. Sometimes the charmer turns out to be bad husband material.

I don't know how many homeless, toothless guys the T-D put on the streets to sell papers like in ancient times, but there was one on my block, hawking the T-D at the downtown bus stop from an old-timey looking newsboy's bag. Or maybe he was just in business for himself.

Extra, extra, read all about it. Obama elected President.

Imagine back. There was a time that you first heard breaking news from shouting boys hawking newspapers on street corners.

It Was Harder to Get Lunch Than to Vote

2008-11-04T22:07:00.004-05:00

By happenstance, my annual physical of lady parts was today, so I took the whole day off. That enabled me to go to the polls at a slow time. My husband stood on line for an hour at 6 a.m. I walked right in and voted at 11:30 a.m. The place where the line was too long for me to hang in was at Panera Bread at noon!

I got right in Grease Monkey. Then I hit another too long line at the Ukrop's take-out counter. I could only eat a couple of bites before I had to rush off to Henrico Doctor's to make my appointment. And I was an hour later anyway! I couldn't find the doctor's office. I went from one end of that place to the other, wandering through wards of old men in gowns sitting in hallways, looking like they were ready to die. Everyone I asked for directions sent me in a different direction.

I finally found the doctor's office right next to the parking deck where I had parked. The doctor had no time to see me so late, but the nurse practitioner -- who was actually nicer to me than the doctor ever was -- fixed me up, stuck fingers up all orifices, squeezed my chest like she was kneading bread, gave me a ticket to get a dastardly mammogram, and sent me on my merry way.

Tim Russert's son, who apparently has inherited an NBC job, desperately needs a hairstyle.

I went to the City's website, did the math, and knew by 8 p.m., Pantele would have to come from behind to take the 3rd and 5th districts in order to win, whereas Jones only had to hang on to one of them. This will change my life in ways I don't know yet. But according to The Secret, a DVD I watched this evening, I have to think positive thoughts.

Tears for Opus

2008-11-02T21:53:00.005-05:00

I've been snuffling all day about the death of Opus. Some of you may say, no, he's not dead, he just went to spend eternity asleep on the last page of "Good Night, Moon," which is how he's drawn in his final panel (which can only be viewed via a Humane Society web page.)

But he looks dead to me, with the added clues of the text, "Goodnight Opus and goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere."

When you say goodnight to air, that's pretty dead.

It was hard enough on me that he knew weeks ago his end was coming and he had to get to the place where he wanted to spend eternity, but didn't know where, and then through a series of misfortunes, ended up in a cell at an animal shelter with a dog that had never known a home. (What an allegory for life! Isn't our whole journey about getting to the place where we want to spend eternity, but we don't know where or how and end up in the wrong place?)

And then it was hard enough that when a trio of Tahitian beauties came calling, looking for a pet to adopt and take home to their island paradise, he stepped aside and let the dog go. (Another allegory. Redemption through sacrifice.)

I was more a fan of Bloom County and Outland than this latest revival of the strip, but hats off to Berkeley Breathed for wringing me out emotionally over a cartoon penguin. Something about the last panel is so unbearably sad, I haven't been able to snap out of it all day.

Eaten by a Shark!

2008-10-31T17:14:00.003-04:00

Media General bought richmond.com.

Another alternative media outlet absorbed by the Borg. All our cultural and intellectual discourse must come through the collective?

Marks and Obama

2008-10-22T12:32:00.003-04:00

An unusual mid-day. The office has emptied out because everyone scooted down to the Coliseum to try to see Barack Obama. I was paging through Style and was startled to see in an article about local theater awards that Liz Marks, the cabaret singer and talent booker, had died. Back in July! I guess that's the problem with not subscribing to the newspaper regularly, although I don't want to be one of those people who reads the obits every day looking for people I know.

I really didn't know Liz anyway. I worked for her for a week, sent over by a temp agency to her house where she kept her office. This was sometime in the early 1990s. It was an awkward situation since we all sat in the same room at three desks with our backs to each other, she and her husband, Billy, and me. They were on the phone a lot. I was alphabetizing photos and making file folders. The files of the actors they represented were a mess, and when I left at the end of the week, it was all organized. That's the one thing I'm good at. I cannot recollect any memory now of whether I liked her or not.

So I was googling Liz Marks to see what had happened (breast cancer recurrence, and Billy didn't seem to be in the picture anymore), when I heard police sirens and looked out the window and here comes Obama's entourage down 8th Street. Police cars, then two identical silver SUVs, one of which he's probably in and the other a decoy? More cars, then two buses, which are probably the press buses. The crowd waving on the street is sparse, but obviously enough people knew his route to get out there and wait. In a way, it was kind of exciting. I didn't even know he was coming today, much less sailing under my very window. I guess that's another drawback of not keeping up with the news.

He probably had some lunch and chatted with local officials for awhile once he arrived at the Coliseum because when I saw him go by, he was literally minutes away, and yet he didn't appear to speak for quite awhile. Nice of Channel 12 to broadcast it.

My Insight: You Must Be Nuts

2008-10-18T09:31:00.002-04:00

The Times-Dispatch wants me to pay an extra $1 week on my subscription to get a special section they've invented called Insight: An In-Depth Look at Our World. That's $52 a year. I can get a high-class weekly magazine subscription for that amount. If you don't ordinarily get the Saturday paper, it's $2 extra per week ($104 a year!!), and if you want it mailed, it's $3 a week ($156 a year!!!! You can get two or three really great magazines for that amount, and they're easier to carry on the bus or read in the bathroom.)

What does Insight have going for it? Nothing! There's no local stories. It's all features pulled out of Los Angeles or Chicago Tribune syndicate packages. They all have the same size headline, so the section has the monotonous look of an advertising section. This week's sample edition had no ads in it, which makes me suspect that the commercials for goods and services may be subtlely embedded in the stories, like the American Idol judges sitting in front of their bright red Coca-Cola cups. The stories that looked suspicious to me this week were one about dental implants and another about acai berries, which are used in a new liquor called Veev, and yet are healthy or wonderful in some way.

This week will be the last time I look at this section, and now I have to do battle with the subscription department again to get out of the weekend package of Friday-Saturday-Sunday so I'm not paying $52 extra a year for this piece of worthlessness. I would much rather sustain my subscription to The New Yorker, and I even decided to give Rolling Stone a try again now that they're resizing themselves to traditional magazine-size.

New Ways to Cheat

2008-10-14T12:10:00.006-04:00

I was stuck in a Hoth battle. Most of the time Legos Star Wars is easy to play. Death is forgiven with instant reincarnation, usually in the same spot where you died so you don't have to keep doing parts of a level over. When there's no obvious ways to exit a level, you start looking for all possibilities and the solutions are seldom too mentally taxing, or as in some games, something you would have never thought to do in a million years.

But the Hoth battle was proving perplexing. I had circled those walking mechanical things with tow ropes and brought them down and then shot them up, and they just kept coming. I dragged bombs out of a bomb house and dragged them on tow ropes, hurling them against various walls and enemies, and nothing changed. I did notice the big red wall had a flashing emblem of a tiefighter on it. I was not flying a tiefighter, so I had a suspicion this wall was not going to yield. I had also noticed a slit in a cave that had bars across it, but my efforts to shoot through the bars had produced nothing. I paused the game and went to the Internet to research "Legos Hoth battle."

As usual, I found message boards full of other frustrated people and obscenely cursing kids, various suggestions offered and complaints that the suggestions didn't work. Then I saw a link to a YouTube video. I clicked it and there was a video of the whole level played out, nearly perfectly. Yes, you must tow a bomb to that cave and hurl it at the bars. Within minutes, I was through the cave and combating bigger mechanical walkers on other levels and finally reaching a save point so I could quit for the night.

YouTube is saving my butt on video game after game. We pushed through the mind-twisting puzzles of Nintendo DS' "Professor Layton and the Curious Village" by watching videos kids had made of puzzle solutions. It's the new way to cheat. Or maybe it's just working as a team, which is always a good thing. I'll put it on my resume. "Excels at team work."

My Life with Paul Newman

2008-09-28T08:49:00.003-04:00

As a little girl growing up in the 1950s, Paul Newman, or the movie roles he played anyway, infused my understanding of what a man was. He was the romantic ideal, despite the fact he was usually quite a rogue. This turned out not to be a good thing.

I grew up outside of Manhattan, which even in the 1950s, had more broadcast channels than most places, and those channels, for lack of programming, showed movies, so I saw "Somebody Up There Likes Me," (1956) and "The Long Hot Summer," (1958) repeatedly before I was old enough to actually go to cinemas and see his classics like "Cool Hand Luke," (1967) (not a favorite because it is so grim and masculine), "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," (1969) (again, a great film but not a favorite because once you make that trip to the grim ending, you're reluctant to make it again). My last odd favorite was "Sometimes a Great Notion." (1971)

My favorite Newman persona was the bad boy who is ultimately redeemed by the long-suffering love of a good and pure woman, although all through my life, as I try to duplicate that scenario, it doesn't turn out the way it did in the movies. My first husband, who I met when I was 15, was the personification of rogue and actually resembled Paul Newman back then, and that relationship impacted and damaged my future permanently. And I followed it up with yet another bad choice, based on the Frank Sinatra movie model of rogue lover who is redeemed by the love of a good and pure woman.

Not.

Newman did one Hollywood stunt, abandoning the wife and family of his youth to fall in love with an actress, and he paid the karmic debt for it when his only son died of drug and alcohol abuse. And then he redeemed himself by staying in that second marriage, despite it being a union of two actors, until he died. My hyper-religious sister used to insist that the secret of their success was they were both gay and the marriage was only a sham cover. Possible, but probably not. They had daughters, but stranger things have happened, and they stayed way under the radar. Even Newman's long, long battle with cancer was kept quiet. It was a very dignified way to have a sucessful Hollywood career.

Still, those early movies put a warp on my tender sensibilities, but I won't hold it against him. And some ancient quote of his about the success of his marriage is worth recalling, something about why grab hamburger when you have steak at home.

I Tivoed Newman this morning to celebrate his passing with a wallow through past performances and found only one film scheduled anywhere this week, 1998's "Twilight." I've never seen it, so I'll try it.

Lying to the Pollsters

2008-09-03T22:31:00.002-04:00

This weekend I did what political analysts claim many of us do and lied to pollster. I didn't plan to do it. The guy came to the door with Obama/Warner flyers and asked if I was going to vote. I am, I said. And would you vote for Obama? Oh, I probably will, I said, mostly because I didn't want to get into a debate. I was right in the middle of trying to make lasagna. And Warner? Oh, definitely I'll vote for Warner. I've always liked him. So the pollster beamed at me and handed me a flyer and went away.

But you know, I don't feel Obama. I certainly don't feel Biden. I don't feel McCain, but I like this lady from Alaska.

It's all Bush's Fault

2008-08-25T21:33:00.004-04:00

With the conventions about to explode, I suddenly remember why and when I stopped reading the paper. It was when George W. Bush was first elected. Not that I was a big Al Gore supporter, but I knew for a fact I did not want to see Bush's smirking, stupid face on my TV for the next four years (and it turned into eight), or read about anything he had done. I couldn't even watch anymore 9/11 coverage after he appeared at Ground Zero and made his pathetic little speech that people thought was really powerful at the time, but truly wasn't. There was no true emotion there. We were just so desperate for something that he became Our President. Well, never mine.

Maybe when he's finally gone, I'll get the paper again, although neither McCain or Obama do much for me, and Biden with his gray hair implants really doesn't. I'm excited about Mark Warner running for President in some future time, if I live to see it.

Meanwhile, I am REALLY HATING that Segway ad that blocks my view of the T-D website and I can't click it off or make it go away until it is darn good and ready to unblock my view. That is just mean and hateful advertising.

Best TV shows this summer were "Wipe Out" (pictured) and "Saving Grace."

After watching "Survivor Australia" just to see how that annoying Elizabeth from "The View" got her start, I then decided I had to see "Survivor All-Stars" to see how Rob and Amber fell in love on the Pearl Islands. Where do Survivor cast members go to the bathroom? So that's what I'm doing this summer, watching reruns of Survivor from Netflix. (Do not rent "My Mom's New Boyfriend," even if you like Meg Ryan. It's terrible and she did something to her face and doesn't look like herself, and Colin Hanks has the exact same voice as his father, Tom Hanks. Do rent "In Bruges," even though it's difficult to follow with those English accents. And it's odd having Mad-Eye Moody and Voldemort facing off, but not as those characters.

For a Minute There, I Felt Encouraged

2008-08-20T08:30:00.003-04:00

The text headline on inRich website this morning said "Richmond, say sayonara to the 90s," and I thought, wow, we're leaving the '90s? I didn't know we had made it that far already. Maybe we aren't still stuck in 1880, but I thought we had only progressed to the Eisenhower era at the very least. So I was excited to see what had happened culturally that had catapulted us right into the 21st century, and it turned out the story was about the temperature.

Shoot.