100 Years of The Daily Mississippian

An old boss of mine turned 100 years old this past weekend -- The Daily Mississippian, my college newspaper and the first place I earned my journalism "stripes," so to speak. Being on the other side of the world and all I couldn't exactly make the centennial events (but hopefully a drink or two was had on City Grocery's balcony on my behalf). But more than 15 years after I finished college, I've still got many a fond memory of the old DM, my training ground for a career that's been changing and shifting ever since. Since 1911, the DM has been the voice of debate and news at the University of Mississippi.

It's stunning to look back at my DM term - roughly 1992-1995 or so - and see how much has changed. The "Internet" was barely a notion then, the idea of computer layout of our pages was a shocking novelty (just a year or so before I came along, the paper was still using an ancient pre-desktop publishing system of pagination). The job I have today -- production editor for a major metropolitan newspaper website -- simply didn't exist then.

The DM was a terrific place to hang out in college, in the basement of Farley Hall and just across the hall from the hip campus radio station. Putting out a five-day-a-week newspaper felt like being in a club, where a variety of raconteurs, oddballs and iconoclasts were shoved together out of their shared love of the journalism dream. I held a variety of semi-official "titles" there -- opinion page editor, features writer, assistant entertainment editor or something like that, columnist, cartoonist -- and while I didn't live down there 24-7 in the basement like a lot of the staff, I felt the first tinglings of the familiar newsroom buzz that is still an intoxicant to any newshound. We alumni still fondly speak of "The Ice Storm of 1994" which closed down the campus and we scrambled to create an 8-page "EXTRA" edition to cover.

An awful lot of the newspaper's controversy revolved around Ole Miss' evolving place in the post-integration world -- this was a campus which was integrated by the government forcibly in 1962, just 30 years before I arrived, and the wounds were raw -- bullet marks still speckled the administration building columns. When I was there one of the editors was the great Jesse Holland, only the second African-American editor of the paper. I still remember the day some local redneck rang up and got Jesse on the phone and then angrily said, "I wanna speak to the WHITE editor!" Sorry, Mr. Cracker, the times have a-changed and Jesse's since gone on to be the Associated Press's US Supreme Court correspondent. Folks who haven't lived in Mississippi still give it a lot of scorn today, but I tell you, I was there to watch the world ever-so-gradually changing. I'd love to know how that redneck's mind was blown by President Obama.

I learned an awful lot at the DM -- I interviewed California's ex-governor (and once again governor today) Jerry Brown, I met Henry Kissinger, hung out with local writer-made-big John Grisham, and wrote vaguely pretentious newspaper columns about my first loves and the music I was listening to -- the kind of columns every 22-year-old writes and thinks nobody else has ever done.

But the biggest charge I ever got at the DM was doing my very own daily newspaper strip for a year or so -- "Jip," a kind of goofy pastiche of Martin Wagner's "Hepcats" with "Bloom County," "Peanuts" and "Doonesbury" that was like flying by the seat of my pants every day as I sat at the drawing board trying to come up with gags and one-liners and characters that seemed at least slightly real to me. It was a real stretch of the creative muscles and an utter blast to do.

These days I work in a "digitally active newsroom" where I do things like live-blog the Royal Wedding, a sentence which would've been half-incomprehensible in 1994. Unlike many of my old pals from the DM, I'm still hanging on in the journalism industry despite its many seismic changes and cutbacks -- and I'm always grateful to the ol' DM for helping get it all started for me. Happy birthday.

All the news that's fit to tweet

I've worked in journalism for 15+ years now, but rarely have I enjoyed the kind of immediacy I do with my new online job, where all it takes to disseminate your story to the world is a click of the button. This week has been a non-stop onslaught of breaking news -- the royal wedding, some Osama character you might've heard about, and an extraordinarily rare fatal tornado right here in Auckland yesterday.
 
For both the big global news stories of the last week I've been tasked with running a kind of NZ-centric Storify feed on the website of "vox populi," filtering Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more into a giant mass o' opinion that runs concurrently with the more hard-news stories. This sort of aggregation is a kind of reporting that would've been hard to imagine 10 years ago -- there's a massive, ever-sprawling pool now of rants and raves and viewpoints online, and it never ever stops. As I "live tweeted" the royal wedding I found it fascinating -- the flow of information is so fast on the Twitter/Facebook feeds that you literally have to just grab and run -- and it was also kind of dizzying, too. After 6 hours straight of reading the world's Tweets on Wills and Kate your brain does kind of turn into mush.
 
And then the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, met his logical end Monday and it was a whole other set of tweets and comments to gather up. This story was very different from the royal wedding and tended to arouse all kind of firm views. As a fence-straddler, I found myself kind of turned off both by the bloodthirsty patriotism and the sanctimonious moralizing from both extremes.

I agree, people who live in America have no idea how utterly awful the mobs shouting "USA! USA!" looks from overseas, but I also think that at this point in its history, America desperately needed a "win." It seems like dozens of my US Facebook friends are unemployed now, there's a cynicism in US society that never quite goes away, and this long-desired news gave the country something to celebrate, as tacky as some of the cheering may have seemed from afar. 
 
Both stories were strange to watch as an American living in New Zealand -- one dealt with the British monarchy and the possible future king of New Zealand, while one offered a very US-centric kind of catharsis that I don't imagine as many New Zealanders might have felt.

The Twitter/Facebook beast is something wholly new in journalism -- a never-ceasing flow of quotes without having to pick up a notebook. During President Obama's speech on Monday 4,000 tweets came per second. This quoteflow is the sort of thing that has newspapers and journalists questioning their relevance -- although I fall on the side of good journalism still being firmly necessary, as a way to filter through the impossibly dense voice of humanity online these days. By night's end I had 15,000+ hits on the Osama Storify feed -- a kind of instant gratification journalists rarely get.

Once upon a time the question used to be, how do I get the information? It's then moved on to how fast can I get the information? But maybe as the world continues to change every millisecond, the new question might be, where does the information stop?

A change is gonna come

... So I haven't been blogging as much as I once did, because, well, blogging is on the wane, says The New York Times, so it must be true. After some initial trepidation, I have to admit I've been spending a bit of time on trendy Twitter, while Facebook is also one of my frequent haunts. But as I approach the end of year 7 (!!!) of blogging here, I don't imagine i'll entirely give it up in the near future. Twitter is specious, fluffy and highly short attention span -- but it's also a valuable news and networking tool, as I particularly noticed during the Christchurch earthquake down here last month. Yet I do like to ramble on for longer than 140 characters as well, so my aging Spatula Forum still has its place, even if I only get on here four or five times a month now. I don't see any need to give up one platform in favour of another. Part of the digital world these days is sorting out all the noise and figuring out what tools work best for you.

The landscape changes very, very fast online these days. What was hip a year ago can become forgotten overnight (hey, remember MySpace or LiveJournal?). I picked up my first iPhone the other day, and it is a fantastic, utterly addictive tool -- just 10 years ago it would've seemed something out of science fiction that I could download, say, the works of Shakespeare in an app for free and have it in my pocket. I'm a creaky old gent of nearly 40, and it's hard to imagine what tech will be considered everyday when little Peter is my age. My iPhone 4 will likely seem a charming antique (unless of course our ape overlords have taken over by then).

As a sign of the times I'm starting a new job next month too -- diving wholeheartedly into the digital journalism realm which is where an awful lot of my industry is going. I'll be working for NZ's biggest newspaper web site and am quite excited about the bold new realms I'll be exploring. There's still a lot that "dead tree" newspapers still have to offer, but any journalist or media company that is ducking its head in the sand over this Internet "fad" is going to be facing extinction. On to the brave new world!

Adios, Wizard: The slow fade of the comics magazine

I love comic books and have since age 11 or so, but if there's anything I love almost as much as reading comics it's reading about comics. The comic-focused magazine is a admittedly bit of a niche market, and this week we saw the death of what was once the field's heavy hitter, Wizard magazine.

Wizard was bloody huge in the 1990s, a comics magazine that took advantage of that whole speculator boom to become about as big as any comics mag ever did. They were glossy and enthusiastic but often juvenile, pandered shamelessly to what was hot and rarely engaged in any serious criticism, but if you read comics for a while there it was pretty much impossible not to give them a read, even if you shook your fist at how idiotic the mag could be. I often felt vaguely unclean reading Wizard. But then amidst the dross you'd occasionally find some sterling pieces; I still remember my old small-press bud Troy Hickman getting a nice shout in there. Wizard lost ground to the Internet as a source for breaking news and their over-reliance on price guides and comics as investment doomed them -- the last time I picked up a Wizard a few years ago I was stunned how small it was. It was a mercy killing.

Fortunately, the excellent TwoMorrows publications are still turning out their magazines Back Issue and Alter Ego which focus more narrowly on comics' rich history -- I absolutely love Back Issue, which sticks entirely to comics of the 1970s and 1980s with exhaustive articles on things like Daredevil's relationship with Black Widow or the Japanese Spider-Man TV show. It's basically in spirit a fanzine done up nice and fancy but Back Issue is such a rewarding read every month or two that it pretty much fills my comics 'zine needs. TwoMorrows is smart, too, how their publications basically avoid breaking news, focusing on lengthy homages and analysis of days gone by.

There have been a lot of comics mags over the years. One of my all-time favorites was the old Amazing Heroes which during the 1980s was like a more mature, thoughtful Wizard, combining solid journalism with great historical pieces, mixing coverage of both superheroes and then-"alternative" comics skillfully. I picked up a ton of these on eBay about 10 years back and was sorry to have to leave many of them behind when we moved to New Zealand. You can still read an Amazing Heroes about American Flagg and Secret Wars II from 1985 and enjoy it if you're a big enough comics geek. I also loved the old weekly newspaper Comics Buyer's Guide, which I subscribed to for years. It started in 1971 and it's still going as a monthly magazine, albeit probably struggling -- but I admit I haven't really read it in a while either, as the last time I looked it seems geared at an older version of the Wizard fan, and is a bit of a shadow of its old self.

And then there's the Comics Journal, which I've always had a complex relationship with. At its peak it's the most vital, insightful mag ever done about comics. Fantagraphics is a priceless company in the comics industry, both for its championing of artists like the Hernandez brothers, Daniel Clowes and Peter Bagge and for its fantastic reprinting of classic comics and comics strips. But the Journal often was a bit schizophrenic for me, often hugely entertaining but sometimes a bit too sneering and mean-spirited for me. I love both Spider-Man and Clowes, and a fan like me sometimes felt excluded by their tone. The unreadably pretentious essays by Kenneth Smith sum up what turned me off about the Journal; space-wasters geared at showing how intellectual the mag could be. I usually cherry-picked the Journal, picking up issues only with subjects that particularly interested me, and they did depth like nobody else could. A big Comics Journal interview remains the definitive statement of any comics creator's work. Sadly the 'print' Comics Journal has more or less died too, down to semiannual publication -- it's been a year and a half since #300 came out, but Fantagraphics promises a gigantic 600-page #301 is coming soon. I'll definitely pick that up just to see what they come up with, as I do love a good comics magazine read.

It's a shame, though, that the glory days of the comic-book magazine seem to be over. I doubt any publication will come along to equal Wizard's mainstream success, even though I won't particularly miss the magazine myself.

Brevity is the soul of something or other

...Sorry, not a real post, but a few of you might find this other blog post interesting as it talks a bit about what I'm doing in my day job, as a visiting US journalism professor interviewed me and visited my workplace:
A visit to New Zealand’s biggest sub-hub

...Which is why I will never believe anything on the Internet ever again.

So for about five minutes there, it seemed David Bowie was going to be playing New Zealand and Australia's Big Day Out festival next year, and all was good in the world. I knew it was a fact because the Internet told me so. Why, Stuff said he was "expected to be announced" as the headliner for the music festival. Of course, it was bollocks -- no Bowie in the final Big Day Out lineup, sigh. I'm actually a bit relieved as while I did have a fantastic time in 2008 and in 2009 at the Big Day Out, I wasn't really planning on going a third year in a row unless the lineup dazzled my innards. This year's crew -- Muse, Lily Allen, Kasabian, Mars Volta, Dizzee Rascal -- well, it just makes me actually feel my age a bit as the only one I'm even slightly familiar with is Lily Allen. Anyway, that's about $300 we can save for more grown-up pursuits. Like seeing The Pixies when they come here in March! But y'know, it was amazing to see how quickly this Bowie rumour became fact on the Internets as so many others do these days. Even though Bowie hasn't gone on tour or released an album in nearly 6 years, apparently it was a given that he was going to be making his big comeback at age 62 in New Zealand. The meme even actually overtook the actual lineup as the festival organiser had to make a statement about the non-appearance of Bowie.
* Had to steal the art above from here. Which is a real website.

• I heartily recommend Nick Hornby's latest novel "Juliet, Naked," which is a nice return to his "High Fidelity/About A Boy" form after a few lesser books. "Juliet, Naked" is almost "High Fidelity 2" in how it digs into that strange world of music obsessives (um, not that I know anything about that), spinning a tale of fixated fans, reclusive musicians and lovelorn museum curators that's a real brisk, good-hearted and enjoyable read. I like how Hornby integrates online fan communities and even Wikipedia into his story without it seeming like a pandering attempt to be "hip," and his portrayal of has-been '80s musican Tucker Crowe is one of his strongest characters to date. If you haven't checked out Hornby's books in a while, this is one to go to.

• Also a fine if incredibly trippy read is "Batman: The Black Casebook," a way-out collection of utterly bizarre 1950s Batman stories reprinted to tie in with writer Grant Morrison's recent "Batman R.I.P." storyline, which was heavily inspired by this. I know everyone's into Batman the Dark Knight who stalks Gotham City and never smiles, and I like that guy too, but I have to admit I really have a soft spot for the incredibly strange Batman stories of the 1950s, when Bats would be as likely to be fighting aliens, go back in time or hire a dog to be his crimefighting companion. This "Black Casebook" is a very affordable survey of the era, which hasn't really been explored in reprints as much as it should be – apparently it reminds too many of the time when Batman was, well, a bit goofy. But Grant Morrison in his excellent introduction looks at these stories with an eye for just how odd and unsettling they are – such as when Batman stumbles into the parallel dimension of Zur-En-Arrh and meets an alternate, bizarrely coloured Batman, and the story has the passionate madness of a fever dream. There's also the introduction of magical elf Bat-Mite (who rapidly became annoying, but was indeed a funny little fellow in his first appearance), the "Batmen of All Nations" (meet the Italian Batman, the Legionary!), and much more. What I think I love the most about this era of comics is that anything could happen without the menace of "continuity" without pandering to a small and demanding fan community. Whatever worked -- if it meant turning Batman and Robin into leaves or zebras. The surreal appeal of these stories is like a Salvador Dalí painting. "The Black Casebook" is terrific nostalgic fun and a nice tonic for endless "gritty" stories featuring the Joker slaughtering people. Bring on "Black Casebook II" and reprint more of these lost gems.

The incredible shrinking newspaper

So a friend who visited the US recently brought me back a copy of the good ol' San Francisco Chronicle and, when I put it side-by-side with the local product -- well, news sure is shrinking in the US, isn't it? I mean, New Zealand papers are quite big and wide – the first time I saw the Herald I thought it was a bedsheet! – but US papers have also been shrinking quite a lot in recent years, in order to save paper costs. The Chronicle has diminished quite a bit just in the year or so since I've been in the States – it's like a napkin or something now, and the oddly elongated format isn't as satisfying as a square tabloid might be.

I know papers have to cut costs (boy do I ever) and it is good to save the trees, but at some point a newspaper sure starts to look small if it keeps on shrinking, doesn't it? Sign of the times, I guess, but the traditionalist in me sure likes the tactile sense of a newspaper to have a bit of weight to it.

Oh well. Could be worse!

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

Good god, what a morning to work in a newsroom. There was a lot of last-minute shuffling, rearranging and shock as there is only when the biggest news stories happen. There is no charge like it and despite my occasional grumblings about the state of journalism in 2009, it's a hell of a place to be when big things drop. Michael Jackson is one of those stories, and while we'll all get well and truly sick of the endless tributes, analyses and blathering over the coming days, his sudden death is an event, capital "E."

I'm still processing the fact of Jacko's sudden death -- but my first instinct is to call it a tragedy in the big old broad Shakespearean sense. He may have been a freaky creep, and I can't say I was a gigantic fan, but he was a creature warped and created by many others, by greed and by abuse and in the end I can't help but feel a little sorry for the guy, who hadn't really had the chance of a normal life since his bullying dad heard him sing for the first time. Like Elvis, who he will be compared to a lot, he was chewed up, and weak, and was no innocent, but his story is still a sad and all-too-common one. He mutated long ago into a carnival freak, and while the actual death is a shock, can anyone say they really expected this eternal boy to make it to his 60s and 70s?

Like pretty much any pre-teen in 1982, I listened to "Thriller" a heck of a lot, and have to admit that even now when I hear the familiar thump-thump of "Billie Jean" or the unfaltering drive of "Beat It," it gets my pulse up a bit. Jackson's early chipmunk-voiced boy rock didn't do much for me, and around the time of "Bad" he fell victim to believing he was some kind of twisted messiah, but "Thriller" -- well, despite all that's happened since there is a reason it sold a bazillion copies. For someone with such a big, universal voice and sound once upon a time, it's sad to see him ending so very small.

Random thoughts on Borg, Jedi and Twitti

When you start off a Monday morning with a migraine so bad you think your eyeballs are going to explode, it's never a good sign.

Ah well. Random links and short musings then:
• A nice profile appeared in the Sunday Star-Times of my father-in-law Peter Siddell and his ongoing experience with a brain tumour. I'm inclined to bag on my fellow journalists more often than not but other than a few errors this story is pretty good, I think it captures his voice well. And they managed to spell my wife's name correctly, which is always a plus.

• I have rediscovered the joy of "Star Trek" thanks to the new movie, and the swell "Fan Collective" series of DVD box sets which are perfect for the non-obsessive fan like me, offering a nice sampler of 20 or so episodes spread amongst the five series and organized by themes such as "Borg," "Time Travel" and "Klingons." I like a lot of "Trek" but freely admit even the best of series had its share of duds and am not interested in mammoth 7-season box sets, so these "Fan Collectives" are an awesome way to get my "Trek" fix without breaking the budget. Heck, I even found an episode of the hugely mediocre "Enterprise" on there that wasn't half-bad!

• ...I am sad to see that it seems like a lot of blogs I like to read have gone dark in favour of Twitter apparently. I don't want to be the grouchy old guy going on about the newfangled technology, but I have to admit I'm just not into Twitter. The forced minimalism doesn't appeal to me. Hell, I can barely keep my blog posts below 1400 words, let alone 140 characters! Anyway, although there's little reward sometimes in this bloggin', I guess I'll keep bloggin' away in the old media for a while... "Follow" me if you will! (And yeah, that's why I'll soon have Google Ads on the site.)

• So it was 10 years ago today that "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" (whew!) opened. Hard to believe, harder still that a movie went from being so hugely anticipated to so hugely maligned in just a decade. I admit it's not a great flick, although curiously 5-year-old Peter digs all the prequels (except "Episode III" which is a little intense for him). We stood in line up at Lake Tahoe to watch it on opening day and according to my journal entry of the time, "fantastic movie." I guess the disappointment took a while to set in, or perhaps it's the nature of fan obsessions to curdle a bit in the light of time. I wonder if part of the failure of the prequels to take is that they were viewed by 20- and 30-somethings who watched the originals as kids and who couldn't get into the same mindset again? But then I remember Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd and pidgin-Asian speaking aliens and think again. It did have Liam Neeson and Darth Maul going for it, though, and 10 years on I still remember the thrill when Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon zip on their lightsabers for the first time. Give Lucas another few years, maybe he'll release a "reimagined" "Phantom Menace" that cuts down on the flaws.

This week in an assortment of random things...

This week in television shows: We've finally gotten the HBO TV series "True Blood" on the air down here, starring New Zealand's very own Oscar-winning Anna Paquin, whom I must say has, er, filled out since "The Piano." I've only seen two episodes so far but I rather dig this new spin on the vampire mythology by "Six Feet Under" creator Alan Ball. Brief synopsis: thanks to the invention of a "blood substitute" drink, vamps have come out of the closet and are trying to integrate into human society, and "True Blood" focuses on one small Louisiana town's reaction to the vampires in their midst. Paquin is quite good, doing a decent Southern accent, and I like the way the very adults-only show straddles bloody Gothic camp and psychological depth. The satire of other minority movements is great ("God hates fangs" reads one sign). It really captures the relaxed, sultry yet tense feeling of the American South without descending into caricature. (The South is frequently larger than life, and "True Blood" is honest there.)

This week in upcoming cool music: Did I mention back when I saw them in January with Neil Finn that it turns out Wilco has recorded much of their upcoming new album down here in New Zealand? Actually just up the beach not too far from where the family bach is. I'm eager to hear how the land of the long white cloud has influenced Chicago's finest. One of my favorite bands and one of my favorite places = better than peanut butter and chocolate. Come on, June!

This week in music I've never heard before: I finally got around to checking out some of the famous Captain Beefheart, and good god the man is like Tom Waits' alcoholic eccentric older uncle or something. Madness but kind of compelling as well in a clattering fashion. Good for those 4.30am drives into work when my head is not awake yet. Urg.

This week in sad media cutbacks: Blender magazine folded, and with it went my last remaining US magazine subscription (I had a really good deal and did like a 5-year renewal long before we emigrated). But the magazine had really fallen off from its peak several years back, getting increasingly slim and trashy. At one point, though, it was quite a good music magazine with a nice cross-section of coverage (you might find Jay-Z, Metallica, T. Rex and Pavement all in the same issue), some snarky yet intelligent articles and some nice reviews. It was trying to be a kind of US answer to far superior UK mags like Q, Mojo and Uncut I think. But as sales slipped they tried to sex it up and dumb it down and so they died. The last year or so featured an increasing amount of near-naked non-talents on the cover, so I can't say I'll miss it as it is now, but it's a shame few US magazines can break the dull Rolling Stone/Spin monopoly of coverage.

This week in media voices who actually have something to say: I rather like Time magazine's Joe Klein, who perfectly captures the one-crisis-after-another-hysteria "Americans are outraged" meme of the week: "If you want to be angry about something, get pissed at a media culture that goes berserk about bonuses one week and forgets all about them the next." A whole bunch of journalists repeating something over and over doesn't always make it true. Another nice piece of sane perspective against hyperbole comes from NZ Herald writer Paul Thomas. Now, if you want true "outrage," go see how politics are typically conducted in places like Zimbabwe, Thailand or East Timor. The gap in the journo-sphere's perspective-less view of the Obama administration (he's up! he's down! he's all around!) contrasts mightily with the view of most average Americans I know whose ability to parse a thought can actually extend beyond one news cycle. Or as Obama put it himself, "One day I'm a genius, one day I'm a bum." A presidency is not made in weeks.

This week in frustration: Still nearly two weeks till my holiday from work.

Death and dying in the newspaper industry

...Another day, another slew of terrible news for the newspaper industry. The Seattle P-I joins the Rocky Mountain News in the papers who are no more pile, and according to a lot of folks, it's just getting started. The tipping point has been reached and it's all downhill from here.

The new 2009 report on the State of the News Media by Pew Research Centre's Project for Excellence in Journalism doesn't mince words: the first sentence is, "Some of the numbers are chilling."

Pretty much every journalist I know back in the US has been hit by this -- I know a half-dozen former co-workers who've been made redundant, or had to face salary cuts just to stay afloat. These are good folks who don't deserve this. NZ's journalism scene isn't faring a lot better, but it's smaller and more compact. You'll see newspapers morphing to the web model like the P-I, which is workable if done well (and an importance is put on solid, in-depth reporting as well as the breaking-news-by-the-second that websites excel at). A lot of small, crochety papers that are still debating whether to cut "Dear Abby" to four days a week will die. A lot of journalists will enter new careers. I am hopeful of my own job security in the industry, for now, but have to admit I'm uncertain too if journalism is where I'll be in 10, or even five years.

I've written before on the industry collapse (I don't think "slump" is quite the right word anymore) -- and I've said that I don't think newspapers are dying. But they are radically changing, rearranging and some of it is quite messy. And the human cost is enormous -- the industry lost at least 10 percent of newsroom jobs last year, and the toll is likely to just keep getting higher. One of the previous papers I worked at had 3 very talented full-time photographers. It now has one. It's a vicious circle; you cut staff to contain costs, quality plummets, and less people read the paper so you cut more staff. Until, like many a paper now faces, you close your doors. Two-newspaper towns are now a rarity in the US; it's a matter of time until some are no-newspaper towns.

News-gathering as a profession isn't going anywhere, but I do mourn the traditions of the past -- newspapering is a terribly romantic business in my mind, despite the often boring nitty-gritty of reality. I think of Cary Grant and "His Girl Friday," of HL Mencken and Herb Caen and Lewis Grizzard tapping out columns, of long days and nights and the rewarding roar of the press at the end of it all. Something of that is being lost.

Please. Just. Go. Away.

"I think media should be abolished from, you know, reporting,” Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher said. “You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, ‘well, look at this atrocity,’ well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.”

I'd try to write something but this buffoon's blathering really just kind of demands slackjawed silence. Or maybe a quote from Harlan Ellison is a better rejoinder:

"We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing."

You don't get the "whole story" without some form of media, whether it's a book, a TV or a podcast. This is what a steady diet of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter will get you -- a species so divorced from the concept of freedom of speech that they see it as an option rather than a necessity.

I read the news today, oh boy...

I don't talk an awful lot about behind-the-scenes stuff in newspapers, well, because I work in them and it's easy to turn the wrong head. But if you've been paying the least bit of attention, it's hard not to notice it's kind of grim days to be in the newspaper industry, no matter where in the world you live... Layoffs and "right-sizing" have been the trend in the industry through much of the '00s.

If you read websites like Poynter, it's been job slash after job slash (sorry, "buyout packages"). Papers I know or have worked for have just been chopping staff left and right. The tally according to one web site: More than 8,000 jobs. Just yesterday, Fairfax Media which owns like half the papers in Australia/New Zealand, announced massive cuts. Y'know, in the name of synergy and stuff like that.

Websites like angryjournalist.com thrive off the frustration in the industry these days. I'm better than I used to be, but I still get angry myself. I remember one paper I worked at where over the course of about a year I went from having 7 employees in my newsroom to having 2 1/2 (one part-timer). It sucked, to be honest, and left me worn-out and bedraggled at the end. But newspapers have problems, and for the bean-counters, cuts are often the way to effect change. Not always the right way, but a way. The problem is when staff is cut but management doesn't change the amount of work to reflect that – bodies are eliminated, but you also need to rethink how you're delivering news when you have a "leaner, meaner" staff. Instead too often the mentality is "less people, same work," which inevitably results in "burned-out staff, crappy, error-ridden and uninspired newspapers."

I keep seeing things about few people under 40 read papers any more, and it's hard to disagree. Newspaper audiences often seem fossilized to be mostly the 50+ age group, and well, when they're gone...

Still, I like to think positive. I firmly believe we're in the middle of big changes in the newspaper industry. Newspapers are not dying, merely transforming. It's truly impossible to see a massive shift when you're in the middle of it, but I think this whole decade has been about newspapers mutating. We're "old school" media but when you get down to it, newspapers are at their core the best-reported, best-produced and most influential kind of media there is. All others tend to follow our lead, not overtake it. We're changing into something smaller and tighter, but hopefully also of value. But anyone who thinks newsrooms are going to operate like it's 1988 still are living in a dream world.

But y'know, for a field that's all about being 'Next," newspapers are often very conservative, and yes, slow. Smaller papers in particular will happily putter along with things like old crusty "Alley Oop" comics because they don't want to offend the older readers by dumping 'em. And papers big and small alike often tend to be run inefficiently, either with excess staff, overpaid "marquee" journalists or just plain mismanagement. Owners often just start chopping away randomly because they do see some of the inefficencies embedded in the system. It adds up to the kind of journalistic "perfect storm" we're seeing these days.

It's all made for a fearful time to be a journalist. I like to think my own job is fairly secure, partly because I am part of a company that's looking ahead and rethinking the traditional way things are done. But you never know. Journalism is at its height a noble calling, producing great thinkers, great inspiration and great headlines. But when it comes to newspapers, it's also a calling that's rather hobbled, heartsick and uncertain right now. We are better than TV, and the best of the Internet follows our lead, I firmly believe.

I want to stay in this industry, but I recognize that print 'n' ink is just part of what we do now. It's exciting times. It's also kind of scary ones.

The campaign that never ends

Yeesh. Cheerful thought of the day: Can you believe it's still six months until the November presidential election?

...I've kept my yap shut about the primaries for a while now as, despite what the chattering pundits have been telling us, there really hasn't been much to say. In my eyes, Barack Obama basically won the race when he won Virginia back in February. Since then, it's been a whole lot of sound and noise about a result that was barely in doubt. Hillary Clinton is far too flawed and reviled a candidate to ever win the White House. Too much baggage despite her good intentions. Honestly, when the stupid stuff a guy's pastor has said becomes a major issue, you know they're reaching for ammo against a very good candidate. What's next -- Obama's dentist had a DUI?

And frankly, while no politician is ever going to be perfect, Hillary Clinton lost me for good the minute she accepted right-wing assassin Richard Mellon Scaife's endorsement of her in Pennsyvlania. Scaife is one of the major men behind the hunting of Bill Clinton for everything from Whitewater to Paula Jones, and a prime mover behind the impeachment. And then he endorsed Hillary over Obama in his newspaper. For Hillary not to basically stand up and tell him to stick his endorsement where the sun don't shine shows a lack of courage and principle on her part. Instead, she embraced it. Yeah, politics, strange bedfollows, et cetera, but y'know, I'd have more respect for her if she had refused it, or say, forcefully repudiated the idiots out there who still say Obama's a Muslim. I feel like she'll do anything to win, from a pandering, disavowed gas tax holiday to using tactics Karl Rove would love to go after Obama.

For a little while there back in January/February, I was actually really pleased with press coverage of the campaign, when there were a dozen or so viable candidates running and nobody knew what would happen. Maybe this time we in the media would live up to the job, rather than lower down to it. But once it settled into an Obama/Clinton/McCain round robin, we pretty much gave up on substance and settled for trivia and personality coverage – which has its place, but not dominating endless news cycle after news cycle like it has. When was the last time we saw a series of stories on the candidates and the issues?

Despite what you've read, disputed primary seasons are nothing new. Parties used to battle "all the way to the convention" quite often, even as recently as Carter/Kennedy in 1980 and Reagan/Ford in 1976. The last 20 years or so, it's been more of a coronation than a fight for most nominees after the first few weeks. But what's new is the never-ending news cycle, 24 hours a day of cable news and infinite terrabytes of Internet to fill. Newsmakers hate, hate dead air and blank copy, so we've had endless somersaults of logic and hyperbole trying to fill the air in a period of the campaign which, when you get down to it, hasn't really been all that much hard news.

Anyway. Clinton is finished, whether she accepts it with grace or with a gasping death rattle – there is no way for her to win without using every dirty trick and procedural twist in the book. Deep down she knows it – look at the footage of her after the win-that-was-really-a-loss in Indiana. She gave Obama a hell of a fight, but in the end his message - solipitisic though some might find it - meant more than hers. Now it's on to November, and maybe the press corps can take a wee break after Clinton makes her final speech.

30 Days of Bloggery: Questions Answered

Well, Roger gave me a few questions to answer the other day, so here we go:

Where do you get your news about the the US? Do you find yourself interested, at arm's length, what?

99% of it from online or from local coverage (which is mostly picked up from British papers like The Independent, which has an amusing slant to their coverage of the current administration. I'm still very interested in what goes on "at home" and still spend a lot of time reading US websites like The New York Times, Washington Post and SF Gate, as well as papers I used to work for. I am totally up to date on the Britney Spears beat.

Where do you get your NZ news?
From work, really - I work with APN Media which owns much of the biggest papers in the country, and am a regional chief editor for the Napier paper and work with several others. So I'm pretty plugged in to "the system" so to speak.

What is the nature of NZ news anyway? Is it as good as most countries in covering the world (something the US does poorly unless it affects us directly)?

This is kind of a tricky one to answer as I work in the industry here and don't want to "bite the hand" I feed so to speak. I find that from my perspective, often the papers are far bolder (or biased) than I'm used to seeing in their political views, and NZ's small size often means teacup-sized issues get blown up into armageddons. (For instance when David Beckham came to Wellington for a one-day visit last year, from the hysterical press coverage you would've thought the Pope came to town and sang the theme from "Cats" naked. In the US it's like, eh, Beckham, OK, what's Paris doing?) Generally it's a little higher on hyperbole than US papers but not quite as tabloidy as British papers, somewhere in between. I think any American journalist would be surprised by how small an industry it is here.

As for world coverage, I do think we have a nice variety of global coverage -- the US still takes a big chunk of it, but we have a lot more coverage of Indonesia, such as events in Burma recently, or Australian politics. Much of it is picked up from British papers but there's still a decent amount of foreign correspondents. In fact I'd say as a whole NZ papers show a "wider view" of the world than too many American papers do, where you have to struggle to find more than the latest bombings.

Of newspapers, vampires and the Tardis

Random thoughts:

• Work, work, work, work. It's been good but extraordinarily busy these last couple of weeks as we constantly add new publications and magazines to the roster of those we're dealing with, which means learning whole new styles and designs pretty much every week. At some point by the end of the year it will settle down into more of a routine but until then, very hectic but mostly enjoyable. I've been busily designing many of the pages and sections in the NZ Herald, which is pretty nifty – a year ago I'd worried what I would do once I left my job in Oregon, but I've ended up working with the country's biggest newspaper and seeing my fingerprints in there daily. ("Whole lotta love for Zeppelin fans" – oh yeah, that's my headline, baby!). And next month it looks like I'll get to do a little traveling around NZ to some of the smaller regional newspapers we're also adding to the roster.

• But when I haven't been working, I've been slaying. Vampire slaying, that is. One or two of you may recall way back before we emigrated I mentioned that I had never watched the famed "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" TV show before, and having sampled it, was determined to catch the entire 7 seasons worth of DVDs from start to finish. So how's that ambitious project going? Well, the wife and I have been zipping along renting DVDs in Buffy-land lately, due largely to the fact NZ Television's five or six channels have next to nothing to watch. We're about midway through Season 3, and it's been some of the best TV I've watched in eons. I missed "Buffy" first time 'round as by the time I noticed it the mythology seemed too daunting – and the main character was named Buffy, so I figured it was Beverly Hills 90210 with fangs. But really, as a zillion others have pointed out before me, "Buffy" has a rich subtext using horror as a metaphor for high school and life in general. The second season found the show settling into a wonderful groove combining angst, romance and monster-of-the-week kung fu with flair, and the great tragic Buffy/Angel love affair packs a real sting. Joss Whedon's characters are so great that I sometimes find the marquee violence and kung fu distracting to the quieter scenes. I can't wait to see what happens next (Spike came back in the latest one we watched – hurray!), and it's cool to know I've got 3 1/2 seasons to go. (The hard part is avoiding spoilers on the Internets about the future of Buffy.)

• And did I mention I've never ever watched "Dr. Who" before either? Well, not until last weekend... Yep, I'm a failure as a geek. The next obsession lurks ahead in the Tardis, I guess!

So it begins...

First day tomorrow at the new gig. Excited but a bit jittery. Digging all the "work clothes" out of the dusty closet and polishing 'em up. Strange to return to the realm of wage earner after nearly a year off. First time since early 2004 both the wife and I have been working at the same time!

So anyway, wish me luck, I'll return sometime soon after I find my sea legs in the high-stakes world of New Zealand publication editing!

Meanwhile, in the world of paying journalism

...So if you're interested in seeing a sample of some of that freelancing I'm doing lately, here's a pretty decent-sized piece by yours truly that appears in today's Weekend Herald (New Zealand's largest newspaper) -- a profile of the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand. Cheers!

Chortle chortle chortle

Chortle chortle chortle

...My god, I leave America and the Democrats win Congress, Rumsfeld is axed and Britney Spears is finally back on the market! It's madness, I tell you, madness! ...It's been curious watching this election from across the pond and voting via fax as an absentee voter (although the corrupt toad in my home congressional district squeaked by with re-election despite the Democratic tide). Thanks to the Internets of course I can soak up all the media babble I wish, from CNN's Political Ticker to the Post's Media Notes, so it's not like I have to wait for the next steamship for news of the homeland.

But here in the local paper it's interesting because most of their international coverage is picked up from British papers like The Independent and Guardian, which needless to say are not particular fans of the current administration. There's a strong anti-Bush current to most stories, which tend to begin with lines like, "Leaving a thin trail of green slime behind him, U.S. President Bush oozed his way to the podium Wednesday..."

'Tis strange to watch it all happening overseas, and to finally feel like some of the Bush cowboy diplomacy methodology has been rebuked but not to be there to enjoy it. Ah well. At least hopefully I won't get quite as many complaints about "your" President from kiwis when they find out I'm an American. Trust me, GW Bush is about as popular as testicular cancer with 99% of the New Zealanders I've ever met.

Anyway, beside surfing the web we've actually been quite busy this week with milestones – (1. Finishing up the boy's long-delayed ooky toilet training (which went on hold most of September and October due to our traveling and difficulties of going diaper-free during that time); (2. The wife is diligently job-hunting here in Auckland; and ...

(3. We bought a new car! After several days of canvassing used-car lots and auto fairs we signed on the dotted line to buy a nice little 1997 Subaru Legacy wagon which we pick up tomorrow. I do love my Subarus and they're quite popular here. Curiously enough our car has actually spent most of its life in Japan - most used cars here are imported from the land of the rising sun, which is a bit dodgy but the way it goes, and it is kind of cool to have a car that used to zip around Tokyo or something. We'll cross our fingers that we didn't get ripped off and not have to impose upon my father-in-law to be our taxi cab quite so often as we explore the daring challenges of Auckland traffic. On the other side of the road. Eep.

LIFE: Adios, News-Review

LIFE: Adios, News-Review

So today's my last day at work as we begin the long and winding journey that takes us to New Zealand. It's a weird feeling – I've been working here 4 1/2 years, far longer than I've ever worked at one newspaper before. I didn't quite think I'd be here nearly 5 years when we drove up in March 2002 — I was just glad to flee the snow-bound hills of Lake Tahoe, which were utterly gorgeous but crammed with ice half the year, and tourists the other half, and impossibly expensive to live in. Plus, I really had gotten tired of political head games with my then-bosses.

So anyway, Roseburg looked nice, and I'd always wanted to live in Oregon. The paper was great, still part of the same company but quite autonomous, and a six-day daily as opposed to the mostly weekly papers I'd worked at up till then. I've learned a hell of a lot here, far more than I did at previous jobs. It's mostly been a great experience, some ups and downs, but I leave it with genuine regret rather than "Oh my god I can't wait to get out of here" feelings. Yeah, I've been ready to go for a year or so, but that's mostly because I'm an antsy restless personality. (Or to quote The Replacements, "Look me in the eye / and tell me that I'm satisfied.")

I figure I've been here for about 1,500 or so editions of The News-Review, edited countless stories, written 100 or so in-depth feature stories, about 350 movie, music and book reviews, a hundred or two editorials, won a dozen or so ONPA (Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association) awards and watched the newsroom staff roll over a couple times as it tends to do at small papers. I'm ready to move on. Thanks to everyone I've worked with here for making it a fun ride for nearly 5 years.

Giving up your job willingly is always an odd sensation, like diving into the deep end without a rope. I did this once before, in 1997 when I migrated from Mississippi to California without a plan other than "find a job," and I gave up a pretty fun job then too just to avoid staleness. Of course, then I didn't have a kid, wife etc. So there's a certain amount of crazy fear with doing this, of realizing we won't have a steady paycheck till November or December at earliest. But it's cool – we've got savings, and are ready to have adventures. God knows I don't want to be one of those people that spend 20, 30, 40 years at the same job at the same desk. Better to be a little uncertain and have stories worth telling, I figure.

We're going offline as we wrap up our preparations to move back down to California, so no blogging for the next week or so. If you want your fix, hey, buy my book!!