News alert: Fish wrap delivered only three days a week

Fish Rap Live! — the alternative humor paper at my undergraduate campus — might be my favorite newspaper name of all time. It’s brutally honest and spot-on descriptive as far as newspaper monikers go. In the newsrooms I worked in, reporters had no illusions about what the general public seemed to think of newspapers — great as fish wrap, birdcage liner, puppy house-training material. Other than that, newspapers were just the bearer of sensational headlines and the publication that got ink all over your hands. More of a nuisance than anything, really.

I thought about various disposal methods when the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News confirmed today that they plan on ending daily home delivery. It seemed almost anti-climatic, since news of the plan leaked last week and there had been rumors of this type of move well before that. The daily print editions of the papers will continue to be sold at newsstands and in newspaper boxes, but delivery will only happen on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays.

Everyone knows newspapers have no choice but to move toward digital delivery, though I readily admit that I was among the guilty who didn’t think it would happen this quickly. The Christian Science Monitor’s October announcement of its decision to end its print edition entirely had to convince even the most skeptical, however, that it’s just a matter of time.

I watched Detroit Media Partnership’s news conference online today (of course), and to my surprise, I wasn’t sad or even nostalgic. As I’ve written about recently, I am seriously concerned about the scale of layoffs and buyouts in the newspaper industry. But daily home delivery? Though I still like getting the paper, I actually get most of my news online. I always have.

Not too long from now, kids will react to the concept of daily delivery of morning and afternoon newspapers the way I reacted when I first heard about eight-track tapes. Lifestyles change, and the news industry has to roll with it.

Now, figuring out what to wrap those fish bones in when there isn’t any newspaper around — that might take a little more time.

Photo credit: The Horse’s Mouth blog

Music to someone else’s ears. (Really? Who?)

I’ve got Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown” stuck in my head. This is not good thing because it reminds me of his performance on Saturday Night Live last night, which in turns reminds me about how much I dislike hip-hop’s Auto-Tune trend.

I think there are times when using technology to bend, break and boost your vocals absolutely works and might even be necessary (Thom Yorke’s disfigured voice on the experimental and defiant Kid A comes to mind). Rappers who can’t sing but figure they can fudge it with Auto-Tune? That’s just brings the industry’s self-indulgence to new levels of obnoxiousness — and not in an entertaining way. Auto-Tune makes for bad studio albums and even worse live shows — I mean, I cringed every time Kanye took a pass on the high notes last night. Why would he do that to himself? (Lots and lots of people disagree with me. Check out these comments, for instance. What I will give Kanye’s SNL performance is that visually, it rocked. He rethought that drab SNL stage, and that backdrop was sweet.)

That said, I’ve still got that damn song looping through my head. Time to get rid of this earworm.

Shelter from the storm? Not for the newspaper industry as ‘a new front of trouble’ looms

I just received a New York Times news alert in my inbox reporting that Tribune, the Chicago-based media company that used to issue my paychecks, has just hired bankruptcy advisers to try to stay afloat. “It is only the latest — and biggest — sign of duress for the newspaper industry yet,” according to the Times’ DealBook blog. The Wall Street Journal says on its Web site that a possible bankruptcy-protection filing, which insiders believe could come as soon as this week, opens “a new front of trouble for the newspaper industry.”

When Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf Coast in September, I mainly followed developments through a @TrackingIke, a Twitter account constantly updated by reporters of the Austin American-Statesman. I found their updates to be more interesting, more informative, and more poignant than watching the same CNN reporters providing the same updates from the same exact spot hour after hour.

I’ve been tracking the devastation that’s touching down in newsrooms across the country in a similar way — through Twitter and Paper Cuts, a tremendous mashup that plots buyouts and layoffs, along with corresponding news stories and company memos, onto Google Maps.

As a J-School grad, it's painful to see this shifting landscape.

When I followed Hurricane Ike, it was in the way anyone does — out of general concern for the people (and the pets) involved. Tracking the severity and frequency of buyouts and layoffs in the news industry this year has been far more personal for me. Although I work in advocacy communications now, I started out my career in journalism, and spent seven years doing the daily grind in newsrooms in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The Hartford Courant, part of the Tribune chain and the last newspaper I worked at before moving to Michigan and switching careers, announced earlier this year that it needed to cut a quarter of the newsroom. I remember a friend e-mailing me a list of who had taken the buyouts. There were so many names. I just kept scrolling and scrolling, wondering who was left to put out the paper and keep the Web site humming.

The storm — which ended up including buyouts and layoffs — passed through, and The Courant, which likes to remind the public that it is the country’s oldest newspaper in continuous publication (“older than the nation,” as the line goes), kept on publishing. As with any community after a calamity, the people left had to rebuild and move on, and my friends there continue to do great journalism, whether it’s good old-fashioned Fourth Estate reporting or providing the public with data on demand.

In more recent weeks, it seems as if grim news is announced increasingly frequently. In Lansing, Mich., where I work now, the Lansing State Journal was forced to make the difficult decision to lay off a total of 31 employees this past week in response to a weak economy, and as part of parent company Gannett’s national directive to reduce payroll by 10 percent. These layoffs follow cuts at Booth newspapers around Michigan.

When Hurricane Ike did its damage, CrisisWire — an aggregator that pulls content about disasters from Flickr, Twitter, news sites, blogs and other sources — hadn’t been launched yet. But it’s here now, and recently covered the Santa Barbara fires. On some level, I think it would make sense for CrisisWire to expand its definition of crisis and cover the newspaper industry layoffs — it’s a cliché, but true, that good journalism strengthens and protects democracy. The scale of these cuts is should be seen for what they are — a loss to a community as devastating as any storm.

This is your Pownce on Twitter

How my Ping.fm dashboard will look on Dec. 15

A lot of people shot off tweets today in response to the announcement that Pownce will be shutting down on Dec. 15. I have a Pownce account, but I don’t know a single person who’s on it. That hasn’t stopped me from posting to it, though, since I use Ping.fm to post my updates.

In fact, Pownce is one of seven accounts I routinely post to but rarely, if ever, check out. Sometimes I wonder why I have an account on Rejaw (which I have no opinion on, really) or on Plurk (which I actually dislike) when Twitter is the only one that matters to me. Those sites make me feel like the social outcast in school’s who’s sitting alone at lunch — I mean, I look around and can’t get anyone to talk to me.

So why do I bother setting up accounts I never visit? I guess for a couple of reasons — the main one being curiosity. It’s the reporter in me. The only way to see how these sites work is to get inside, so when I read about YourAre in some random article I come across, I figure why not check it out.

The other reason is because I figure no one really knows which service will end up winning out in the long run. It’s all about Twitter these days — you know Twitter’s gone totally mainstream when The New York Times writes about it) — but I feel as if every few weeks there’s yet another story about Twitter’s business model (usually, it’s about its lack of one).

I’ve decided to try to pay off my all my loans rather than contribute to a 401(k) at work, but back when I used to put money in, I took a similar tact — just picked a little bit of everything. I figured I would never cash in, but I also wouldn’t ever lose it all. (Clearly, I need help on the investment front. But if I had been good about money in the front place, I would never have decided to become a journalist.)

At least social networks are free to join (at least they are now) — and the only thing you have to contribute are words.