The Dinosaur on the Lawn

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 pile, 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

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 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. He wasn't the only one.

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 capital The. The blacks were just Rev. He also reported living in Baltimore Row in the "historic district." Where is this 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.

Oral Sex, Organic Blueberries and Social Media

Members of the Social Media Club are an amazingly handsome group of people (and pretty much white). If they had an age contest, I could easily win Oldest Woman. And who said nerdy girls weren’t good looking? They are.

One 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 media people 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.

Everyone claimed they get 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.

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.

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.

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. 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 even slighty uncivil thing all evening. Maybe he was still smarting from his O’Reilly/Limbaugh audience smackdown.

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 to the end. (At home later,  I review the tweets from people who were also there and discover most of them tweeted about needing to pee.)