Extry, extry, don’t read all about it

January 17, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Your Humble Narrator at The Arizona Daily Star, circa 1980. The Star was and is in a joint operating agreement with the Tucson Citizen, which will soon be history rather than news.

Another newspaper is circling the bowl — this time, the Tucson Citizen, the smaller of the two papers in that Arizona city. Gannett says it will croak the 139-year-old paper on March 21, just past the vernal equinox, if a buyer is not found. Good luck with that. On the block with the Citizen are the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and God knows how many other venerable fish-wrappers as the decline in circulation not only continues, but accelerates.

The Boston Globe is lopping off heads in the newsroom, as are the Casper Star-Tribune and Billings Gazette. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, meanwhile, has filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition.

New York Magazine is taking a different tack, informing its core writing staff that their paychecks will be getting a little skinnier, a concept that I expect to quickly gain traction with publishers nationwide, if it hasn’t already.

Interestingly, New York is also reducing its use of free-lancers like yours truly, a trend that will not please folks like Eric Butterman, who with JournalismJobs.com teaches an online course on free-lance pitching and writing. I find this tactic slightly surprising, considering what a bargain free-lancers are, providing as we do our own hardware and software, office space, health care and retirement accounts. But then I was shocked when my buddy Hal, another free-lancer, got the hook at The Pueblo Chieftain. Good and cheap do not always reside in the same person, but they did in his case.

Still, if you have any staff left, it must be cheaper to squeeze ’em like a nearly flat tube of toothpaste than it is to hire a free-lancer, no matter how reasonably priced he or she is. If the person thus squeezed runs completely dry, well, there’s a line of the poor sonsabitches stretching down the block and around the corner. Pick one, any one, if you have any budget left. Squeeze, discard, repeat.

Hal and I have been trying to figure out what the future of newspapers might look like, and Hal has suggested that a functional model might blend a frequently updated, hard-news website with a free, once-a-week hard-copy edition, perhaps published on Thursdays, focusing on opinion, analysis and what’s happening on the weekend. It sounds something like this vision of the upmarket newspaper from Philip Meyer, published last fall in American Journalism Review.

But then you’re still dealing with all that old-media dreck, like newsprint, printing presses and circulation, plus an online audience conditioned to getting everything for free. So I remain unconvinced, despite Bryan Appleyard’s witty take: “(T)he only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane.”

What’s your take on the Newspaper 2.0? Leave your thoughts in comments.

Another one bites the dust

January 10, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

Judas Priest, a guy can’t log onto Al Gore’s Intertubes any more without seeing a newspaper sinking into the tar pits. This time it’s the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which parent company The Hearst Corp. says is headed for a sale, web-only operation or closure in 60 days. To add insult to injury, the P-I was beaten on the story by a TV station.

The newspaper business can be a very small world. P-I managing editor David McCumber and I briefly worked together at The Arizona Daily Star, where he oversaw a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the University of Arizona football program and I was a copy editor (and not a very good one). He later worked with Hunter S. Thompson while at the San Francisco Examiner, if memory serves, editing “Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream.” And P-I editorial cartoonist David Horsey used to flog me in the annual SPJ awards when I worked for the Corvallis Gazette-Times as a slightly improved copy editor and occasional editorial cartoonist.

The G-T published my first cycling cartoon, way back in 1982. Interestingly, it was not a cyclist-friendly cartoon. I spent a lot of time strolling the Marys and Willamette river trails in various states of consciousness and considered the omnipresent speeding bike weenies to be a pain in the butt.

Twenty-seven years and three newspaper jobs later, they are the source of my beer and skittles. Here’s hoping McCumber, Horsey and the rest of the P-I staff prove equally fortunate and land on their feet in some other, better place where they can continue to practice their craft.

A lion in winter

January 9, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Everybody got out for a bit of sunshine yesterday, and a good thing, too, because the weather is taking a turn for the worse again today. Snow and big wind are in the forecast for this afternoon, and something wintry is already sliding down Pikes Peak and taking aim at Bibleburg.

Turkish, who lives for the great outdoors, often proves difficult to retrieve. He can dematerialize at will and reappear at a time and place of his own choosing, like Radar on “MASH.” Step out on the porch, you will see nothing. Call the cat, ditto. Turn around to go back inside and poof, there he is. But just try to catch him.

Recent careful observation has led me to two of his hidey-holes. The first is underneath the front porch, where a previous owner overlaid the original concrete stoop with boards for a decklike feel. There’s a Turk’-sized space underneath, camouflaged by shrubbery.

That’s his low sentry post. I found the high one yesterday after watching him stalk a squirrel for practice, in case he needed to bring down something more challenging, like a mule deer or perhaps a moose. Turk’ hopped onto the back fence and then stepped onto the garage, briefly vanishing from sight before reappearing on a perch near the neighbor’s tree, scanning the horizon for the Enemy.

Meanwhile, my friend Hal has weighed in regarding his layoff. We spoke briefly last night, and he’s choosing to look at this as an opportunity rather than a setback. I was laid off in the mid-1980s and was briefly furious before realizing that I should’ve left the paper on my own six months earlier. I spent the next six months hunting work, cashing unemployment checks and riding my bike before something finally popped up on the copy desk at The New Mexican in Santa Fe, two weeks before the public sugar tit was due to run dry.

That would be my last newspaper job. And I think The Chieftain was Hal’s.

20 and counting

January 8, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

It's not all strip malls, fast-food joints and Focus on the Family here in Bibleburg.

It struck me today that most of my recent photos have been of cats, various foodstuffs and other items found ’round the house, and as a consequence you may think I never leave the place. Not true.

For example, instead of hewing strictly to my deadlines, today I broke out a mud-encrusted Steelman Eurocross and went for a short ride in the sunshine, up to around Mesa and 31st, where the bike path gives some spectacular views of the Garden of the Gods and Pikes Peak.

Then I rolled back to the ranch and whipped out the cartoon marking my 20th anniversary of drawing same for VeloNews. And no, you can’t see it. Not unless you’re a subscriber, a buyer of newsstand copies, or patient.

Back in 1989, I was running out of rope at The New Mexican in Santa Fe and less interested in cartooning than in the VeloNews managing editor’s job. I applied for it, got an interview, and was turned down for my lack of magazine experience (12 years of newspapering as a reporter and editor was worth exactly jack shit).

But the Trio — the troika of owners, which then included Felix Magowan, John Wilcockson and David Walls — said they would have no objection to my banging out some editorial cartoons for the mag. That worked out pretty well for all of us, “us” not counting the advertisers, various functionaries at cycling’s governing bodies and anyone else with an impacted sense of humor. The Trio hired Tim Johnson as ME, and a fine job he did, too, before they airbrushed him out of the company portrait. And I got to poke fun at people for 20 years.

I wouldn’t have lasted 20 months in that ME’s job. Too much like work, don’t you know. And I’ve always been much better than Tim at pissing people off.

Late update: Speaking of work, as I reached one milestone an old friend and colleague reached another — fellow writer and copy editor Hal Walter learned today that two weeks hence his services will no longer be required at The Pueblo Chieftain. The job was beneath him, true — The Chieftain should be printed on soft, perforated rolls of tissue and hung in toilet stalls so that it may be put to the use for which it is best suited — but nevertheless it paid in American money, so Hal will be examining his options, as he has a wife, son and several dogs, cats and burros to support. You can keep up with his doings via his blog, Hardscrabble Times. Indeed they are.

Two for two

January 2, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

Mia Sopaipilla has resolved to quit decking the holiday ornaments, in no small measure because we're putting them away.

It’s the first Friday of the New Year, and while I ordinarily loathe and despise resolutions (mostly because I can’t keep them), I’m going to try very, very hard in 2009 to (a) ride the bike more, and (2) write more online columns for VeloNews.com.

So far, so good. I rode yesterday and today, and banged out a New Year’s Dog Breath for the VeloSnoozers. You needn’t bother looking it up, unless you’re interested in seeing how a blog post (yesterday’s) metastasizes into a column. No, I take that back. We need the eyeballs. Click on over there straight away and then report back to me.

(Intermission)

Back so soon? Damn, that one must’ve really sucked. Of course, you’d already seen most of the good bits in the trailer, but still, damn. Whaddaya want for free? Next time you’re in the neighborhood, buy some Fat Guy jerseys, f’chrissakes. Scotch isn’t getting any cheaper, y’know.