Vulgarians

I was reading the Toronto Sun Family blog and discovered this link to a Harold Evans interview by John Barber of The Globe and Mail.

Evans was the brilliant editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981. What does he think of the present cutbacks throughout the newspaper industry? Let me quote a few lines from the interview:

. . . Mr. Evans is scathing about contemporary papers that “lose their nerve” in response to tough times, especially by cutting editorial content, “the most stupid thing you can do.”

That strategy helped to lead the once-mighty Tribune Company, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, into bankruptcy last year, part of a wave that has also immersed The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, The Orange County Register in California, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

Piecemeal cutting destroys integrity as surely as political interference, according to Mr. Evans. “There's no advertising to support the sports page,” he notes. “You won't dream of dropping the sports section, but they drop the book section. Why? Because they're vulgarians. Seriously. It's so shortsighted.”

Shortsighted? They're downright myopic in their lack of foresight.

And please note that "anonymous sub-editors (called copy editors in North America) merit long passages of lavish praise" in Evans' new book, My Paper Chase. These positions are some of the first to be slashed by today's newspaper owners.

Loss of jobs and lost way of life

“Anybody who reads history has to approach these things with some humility because you can’t know. Nobody knows what the last chapter ever looks like.” - United States Secretary of Defence Robert Gates

It's good advice, with lots of applications. As I write this I'm going to try and keep Gates' words in mind.

The layoff at the local paper hurts and it hurts more than just the affected workers; It hurts the community.

Layoffs are not about the disappearance of jobs but the moving. They may go to China, India, Mexico or, in the case of Sun Media and Quebecor, Barrie, Ottawa or Woodstock. Whether the jobs are moved half a world away or just half a province, the community still suffers.

Both Barrie and Woodstock are the locations of Sun Media Centres of Excellence. Ottawa is home to a Sun Media call centre. I'm not sure if it's another centre but from my contact with the Ottawa service, it isn't a centre of excellence in my book.

If I worked in any of those place, I would not be confident that I would have my job in ten years. Sun Media and Quebecor have shown a willingness to disrupt the lives of the workers in order to save money. The Third World beckons and I would not be surprised to see these companies respond to the sirens' call - a call heard around the country, "Cheap workers. Think China, India, Mexico . . . Barrie."

I call it, "Welcome to the Third World." You may have a good education: a degree in English. You may have a mortgage, a car, a child or two in college. You may have a job at a company bragging about increased profits. And you may be asked to take a paycut if you want to keep you job. If you refuse, thanks to the Internet, many jobs can be located just about anywhere.

Are we in a race to the bottom? Is this the beginning of, "Welcome to the Third World."

Allow me to quote Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, from her recent article in The Huffington Post:

"Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.


 

But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago -- for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance."

Yes, I know that Warren is talking about the States but a lot of what she says applies to varying degrees to Canada.

When Warren writes: "America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety." I believe you can replace America with Canada and the sentence still makes  sense.

As my mother used to say, "Something is rotten in Denmark." And the rot runs deep.

When the experts running the CPP can lose 17 percent of our retirement money and then pay themselves bonuses of a million plus for their good work, something is wildly out of alignment in our economic engine.

One does not have to look far to find examples of grossly overpaid executive royalty. The United States has the finest kingdoms but the fiefdoms in Canada are quite amazing.

Quebecor was once the biggest printer on the world stage. But partially under the guidance of Pierre Karl Peladeau the printing giant became a stuggling, severely financially-crippled concern. Maybe PKP should outsource his own job. I have some of my retirement money in China, some in Singapore, and all those stocks did much better than Quebecor's former printing division. 

[Since last writing about Quebecor World, Chicago-based printer RR Donnelley tendered an unsolicited bid to purchase Quebecor World, the insolvent (Sun Media's term) printer. This bid was rebuffed, but in June of this year (2009) Mark Angelson, a former RR Donnelley CEO was named chairman of the printer reorganized to "satisfy" bankruptcy code requirements. Quebecor World and Quebecor, the owner of Sun Media, are now totally separate companies with a shared past but unlinked future. I thank an alert reader for this clarification.]

I am not going to try and tell the future; As Robert Gates pointed out, this is a fool's game. But I do have doubts about PKP's abilities and the manner in which he runs his companies. It is only a personal opinion, but I don't think PKP's approach is good for London or for Canada. I don't think it is even good for Barrie, Ottawa and Woodstock.

The London Free Press has December 2009 layoffs

I tried to Google the recent layoffs at The London Free Press in London, Ontario. No luck. I checked both The London Free Press site and the Canoe site; Nothing.

As I understand it, and this is just gossip, five in advertising have been pink slipped and as many as six may be leaving from editorial. The editorial staff members willing to accept a voluntary buyout have now submitted their names and the lucky winners of the buyout lottery will be announced early next week.

At one point it was thought that about twenty jobs in editorial would be lost. Word was that Sun Media / Quebecor wanted to gut the newsroom and move the work to the Barrie, Ontario, Centre of Excellence. Editor-in-chief Paul Berton, managing editor Joe Ruscitti and publisher Susan Muzak are credited by some staff for successfully lobbying against the suggested move.

As it is, I understand six pagination workers are being hired to assemble pages but without the editing responsibilities of the present staff. This will result in London losing some well-paid jobs and gaining a few poorly paid one -- it is rumored, the new jobs will pay possibly half of what the old positions paid. If these new workers get bumped up temporarily into a more traditional editing role, they would earn an acting pay premium of about $1.60 an hour. Sun Media / Quebecor gets a bargain both ways.

I understand that the Woodstock and St. Thomas papers are also being hit. How many other papers in the Sun Media chain are affected is still an open question. Maybe the Freeps will see fit to do an article on this latest round of layoffs by Canada's media giant, Sun Media / Quebecor.

This is worth a large, in-depth post. Someone should get the word out and possibly make the Freeps discuss openly their ongoing staffing cutbacks. I personally see more cutbacks in The Free Press future but that's just my guess.

Addendum:
I now have four names of editorial staff expected to leave. I also have four names from advertising. These changes at the London paper are no longer a rumour.

No signal detected!

Am I crazy or yesterday did I catch a glimpse into why newspapers are struggling? The answer, I believe, is yes I am crazy (and I like it) and yes I caught a frightening insight into the thinking, or none thinking, that is dragging newspapers down.

The speaker at the SMarts London Social Media Un-Conference was the online editor at The London Free Press. He started his presentation with a giant blue square image with the message, "No signal detected." The chap just assumed that his notebook would talk to the projection set-up at the art gallery. The two systems wouldn't talk and the audience wasn't seeing his show.

I used to run seminars at the local university and I, like the editor, am not a technical wizard. It is cable-out-to-cable-in and if there is no resulting signal out, I'm snookered. For that reason, I always went to the lecture theatre before the event and conducted a complete run-through of the system. At the end, I wasn't all that much smarter technically but I knew I could run the equipment that I would be up against during the conference.

After failing to get his presentation to run on the large screen, our speaker went on to tell us that he wasn't "into technical stuff." All of us had gathered that already.

One young woman who recently lost her job asked how one makes money blogging as it was billed as a talk on blogging basics and social media etiquette. "I can't tell you how to make money from blogging," was the response from newspaper's online editor. (One quick, easy answer is this: if you are blogging on Blogspot, owned by Google, you can easily set-up an Adsense account, also run by Google, and this can result in some income. It sounds great but be warned that one should not quit their day job to blog. And you will not see a cheque until you have earned at least $100.)

Also, there are sites that will share the income with the posters. It is, after all, the posts that attract folks to the site. He could have finished his answer by warning her not to share with The London Free Press. The paper and its owner Sun Media insist that you grant "Sun Media and its affiliated companies, a worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast and publish that Material for any purposes, on any material form and in perpetuity."

I know of Internet sites handling images that will not touch a picture once the photographer has entered into such an agreement. Sun Media not only does not pay you money for your work but agreeing to their terms will cut your chances of making money with your image in the future. Got a once-in-a-lifetime image and you want to get it into print, get a lawyer. But it had better be a truly important and totally unique image or you will not sell your picture and you will be out the legal fees.

If you were curious about the tools used in blogging, our speaker was as lucid on this as he had been on everything else. His answer was simple and to the point: "I don't know about the blogging tools."
So, how well is The London Free Press blogger doing? He has about 60,000 pageviews a year with from 40 to 60 comments a day. A hundred comments would be a "really good day." (I just checked the latest Google Analytics for this blog and this blog has 1.99 pageviews per visit with the average visit lasting just under four minutes.

Some have argued that the speaker is not truly a blogger because his platform is The London Free Press. I think, from his numbers, one can see that he is not taking advantage of his position with the paper. This blog, the one you are reading, recently tracked 152 hits. The other four associated Rockinon blogs also had their own separate hits, and of course Rockinon is on other sites as a participant. Using the last two weeks of October (my absolutely best two weeks), this blogger is running at annual rate of 174,000 pageviews a year.

One interesting thing about Brown's blog and his small but loyal group of followers is that most visit his site to "breakup the boredom at work." Because of this, he told us, Fridays are his slowest days. Apparently on Fridays his followers rush to finish all they put-off doing during the week.

So, what is his goal with his blogging: "There is no goal." And if you were wondering, his blogging "is not journalism."

As one person remarked after his talk, "You know what his presentation said to me? It said he doesn't like what he's doing. Am I right?"

I don't think so. I worked with this fellow and I really think he likes his job. It is just that, as he told us, "I'm out of ideas" by Friday. He gave his talk on Saturday. By Saturday, there's "no signal detected."
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If the above talk disappointed, the keynote speaker carried on with the theme - disappointment. The speaker was Brad Frenette, the online features editors for The National Post, and he brought along a show and tell video which The Post had uploaded to YouTube.

I looked at the woman sitting beside me and she looked back and we shook out heads. The video, posted a year ago, had had only 2,154 views. Sad.
The other videos from The National Post looked to have had 1302 hits and 3041 hits. Unbelievable. (If these videos are posted in more than one place under more than one name, the editor should have made this clear. As it is, it looks bad for The Post.

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But all is not lost at newspapers. Those who caught Steve Groves, director of Internet media at The London Free Press, were in for a treat. In fact, his opening was so dramatic — the man knows how to quickly grab a crowd's attention — that he got more applause right from the get-go than those other speakers received at their finishes.

Groves based the first part of his talk on the book groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li.

Groves said one result of the social media revolution is that today people are beginning to get information from other people rather than from organizations. And advertisers would be wise to understand that "people don't listen to marketers, they listen to the market." (I believe, I got that right but my writing hand was showing signs of fatigue by the time Groves hit the podium. Plus he was so interesting, one just wanted to listen.)

Groves gave the audience some insights into how the paper is taking advantage of social media tools such as Twitter. He talked very positively of reporter Kate Dubinski's use of Twitter to keep London Free Press followers up-to-date during the recent biker murder trial held in London.

He made it clear that the paper was not at all sloppy when it came to setting up their Twitter approach to covering the news. Almost everyone involved was consulted, including the presiding judge. The judge said O.K. And they learned from the experience and will include even more people in the loop the next time they pull the Twitter tool from the new media tool box.

When Groves was done, one young man was heard to exclaim, "Steve Groves rocks!" Actually, he said it with more enthusiasm and with stronger, more colourful, youthful language, but I have given it my best crack at an accurate translation. Other young people and older attendees were equally as positive if not as colourful with their praise.

Our online editor/journalist at the paper may have hung up his journalistic spikes when he started playing on the Net but I got the feeling that Steve Groves is just suiting up. With Groves on the Free Press news team, and a fine team it is, there may be hope yet for my hometown paper.

Another Take on Reusing Old Theatres

Recently London saved the exterior of two buildings in the downtown core. One was originally a theatre designed by the famous movie theatre architect Charles Howard Crane. The London developer razed the theatre auditorium and put in a parking lot.

I wondered what other communities have done with their old theatres as so many, if not most, have now been abandoned.

I found this: the Atrium Office Center in Lansing Michigan. It's in the former Strand Theatre. The interior was completely remodelled into first-class commercial office and retail space. It was done as part of the City of Lansing revitalization project.

The interior features a central atrium, a domed foyer with restored plaster detailing and decorative painting. New limestone detailed to match the original terracotta replaces damaged material. The grand central staircase was preserved and is now the focal point of the office centre.

Check out what was done in London. The frame-grab is from The London Free Press video.

Media Disinformation

I was sent this link by a regular reader. I'm posting it today as I think some of you might find it interesting.

Can Science Fight Media Disinformation, by Lawrence M. Krauss in Scientific American.

Cheers,
Rockinon

Theatre gone; Facade saved! Sad...

The facades of two, fine downtown buildings — the former Capitol Theatre and the former Bowles Lunch building — have been spared. Well, at least that of the Capitol. Well, at least part of it.

Whatever, The London Free Press sees this as a win-win event for the city and the developer involved. According to the paper ". . . these buildings were originally written off, considered too expensive to restore."

As I recall, the naysayers said the cost to restore the Capitol Theatre auditorium would have been prohibitive. Well, the auditorium was not saved. Perhaps the naysayers were more right than wrong and perhaps that is the reason these two buildings seen more demolition than restoration.

The Free Press congratulates the developer and the City of London for saving "a key part of our history" and doing it in a truly imaginative manner. And what was this imaginative manner? It was the demolition of the key part of the heritage theatre — the auditorium, the theatre itself. Paul Berton, editor-in-chief of the Free Press, admits ". . . the back end of the Capitol theatre is gone" and then quickly adds "at least the facade is safe."

Today the paper often refers to the Capitol Theatre as just the Capitol. The theatre part, the part with the 1400 seats at its opening in 1920, is now a parking lot.

The loss of the Capitol Theatre is a huge blow to London, and not just the downtown. Originally called the Allen Theatre, it was designed by the renown theatre architect C. Howard Crane. Crane was responsible for the design of some 250 theatres across North America. When you think of the Fox Theatre in Detroit, think of Crane. And the United Artist Theatres in Detroit or Los Angeles, take your pick, think of Crane again. (Architect Charles Howard Crane shown)

The Fox has been described as Hindu-Siamese-Byzantine or Far Eastern-Indian-Egyptian in design. The lavish theatre cost about $12 million to build in 1928. It underwent an $8.1 million restoration in 1988. Detroit can be proud. London? I'm not so sure.

In 1988 $8.1 million U.S. was about $10 million Canadian. Using the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator, I learned that $10 million in 1988 would be $15.9 million in today's dollars. So, Detroit restored the entire Fox Theatre for just four times what it cost London to sort of save just two facades. (The restored Fox Theatre in Detroit is shown.)

According to The London Free Press, "the Bowles Lunch used to have a terracotta front, but 80% of the 400 tiles were damaged. The decision was made to demolish the original facade and rebuild it in carved stone.

Some descriptions of the Capitol Theatre mention its terracotta front and how the Bowles Lunch was made to match its neighbour. It is more accurate to say the Bowles Lunch facade was replaced — not restored.

The screen-grab is from The London Free Press story claiming "two side-by-side downtown London historic gems that came close to a date with the wrecker's ball have returned to their former glory." Oh? Look at the screen-grab. This is not the Fox Theatre restoration.

Berton tells us we are beginning to realize the potential in heritage buildings . . . "because they are unique and interesting . . ." Berton seems to have forgotten we are talking about facades here. There is nothing unique or interesting about the commercial space being swept by the construction worker.

Berton tells us that Londoners owe a debt of gratitude to the developer for showing his faith in these two structures. Faith in these two structures or a concern for the facades? The developer himself wrote in a letter to the city that some of the interior detailing in the old theatre was donated to the Park Theatre and some to the Aeolian Hall for use in renovation projects. (For that generosity we owe the developer a thank you.) Unfortunately this was done in preparation of the theatre's demolition, clearing the way for a long-planned parking lot.

According to the city, the developer's company acquired the Bowles Lunch building in August 2006 for $250,000 and the Capitol Theatre in June of 2006 for $890,000. From the city records posted online one learns an inquiry was made by the developer "with respect to possible demolition of the Capitol Theatre building" in late 2005. This was before the theatre had even been purchased. The developer ripped down the theatre three months after he gained control of the property.

Berton tells us, "If London is to thrive, these are the kinds of projects that will lead us into the future." I don't think so. Berton may not think much of "gargantuan movie theatres" but the old ones once found in downtown London did have some cool features — like screens and seats.
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You will notice that the developer's name has not been used in this post. The developer is not a bad person; the developer is a developer. He runs a profitable business and not a charity. And make no mistake, the facades were worth saving with the finished appearance actually quite good.