Up in smoke

Worth a minute or two of reading time:

http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article1013738.ece

This story would be no more or less sad if its subject had been a factory worker, or investment banker, or the dancer or actor she had originally wanted to be. It strikes me only because she had been a newspaper reporter before she had gone over the edge, and that’s the profession with which I most closely identify.

The story does not identify the reporter, nor the reasons she was let go from her newspaper. I don’t know if she had already been taking peeks behind the black door before she was fired.

It’s a reminder that society’s safety net can be awfully porous, especially these days, and becomes even more so when we as individuals actively make efforts to permeate it.

A letter to my hometown

OMAHA, Neb. — Dear Springfield, Mo.:

It’s been a while, certainly, since I found myself in the Ozarks. I’m in Nebraska on business for a couple of weeks, and I had a chance to drop by and see you for the first time since 2007. It’s always good to be in your familiar embrace, to watch familiar sights fill in as Missouri 13 becomes Kansas Expressway, to tune the radio to 94.7 and hear Need-to-Know News on the Ozarks’ Best, KTTS.

This trip was extra special because I was able to carve out time to hang out not only with family, but with some good friends with whom I share a lot of memories. That part warmed my heart almost enough to help me get past the sentiment I’m about to express.

Springfield, here’s the thing: You look like shit.

Time has not treated you well, at least not the part of you that’s north of Battlefield Road — which, despite all that southern prosperity, is still well more than half the city.

I have fond memories of hanging out on Kearney Street in the mid-1980s, and if I want to relive them, all I have to do is go back. You’ve changed nothing, certainly nothing for the better. A few of the businesses that were there in 1988 have closed, but their empty shells remain.

From your interminable traffic light at Glenstone Ave. and Battlefield Road, the mall — once your showpiece, the gleaming shopping palace that made downtown unnecessary all those years — looks like the set of a post-apocalypse thriller. The sign’s rusted, the parking lot is mostly empty at noon on a Saturday.

A few blocks to the north, Sunshine Street lay basically in ruins. Ever since U.S. 60 was re-routed to the James River freeway, the once-businesslike road has drifted into abandonment. I counted three title-loan establishments, two adult video stores, and a big pawn shop as I lurched from traffic light to traffic light. I remember listening to people gush about the downtown revival several years ago; to my jaded eye, it looked like little more than a row of coffee shops and bars. Coffee shop, bar, coffee shop, bar, little restaurant serving “down-home American food,” bar, coffee shop. Everybody in Springfield was thirsty. Now, apparently, everyone in Springfield is thirsty and broke.

My old neighborhood was on its way down from lower-middle-class when we left in 1987. Two decades later, its descent is complete. I wouldn’t want to be on Madison Street after dark. All the old ladies that had lived in their houses since the Depression are long since dead, and the current homeowners have probably never set their SUVs’ tires anywhere near Madison Street; they just wait for the rent checks to come in and send a maintenance person out, apparently very occasionally, to make sure their houses haven’t completely fallen down around the hapless tenants.

Commercial Street has been an embarrassment to you since 1970. There was an effort in the early ’90s to gentrify it, to at least contain and try to help the homeless population while preserving the area’s historic significance commemorating the city’s heyday as a railroad hub. You gave up.

I’ve been to a lot of cities since I left Springfield in 1993. I lived in one of the United States’ great cesspools, the Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati. Newport and Bellevue and Covington, Ky., have gone from gawdawful, sleazy blight to the pride of the Ohio River in a little more than 10 years, thanks to the efforts of preservationists and money from developers. I see places like Omaha, which has done a wonderful job preserving its history alongside an ultramodern downtown. I see places like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Rockford, Ill., two cities almost exactly your size, who have managed to not give their city over completely to TGI Friday’s and Chili’s and Target and Walgreen’s and neglect.

Springfield, you once had a thriving working class, powered by the Frisco railroad, Zenith, Dayco, Kraft Foods, Solo Cup, and other industries. They’re all gone now, or mostly gone, or shadows of their former selves. In their place you have Bass Pro Shops, credit-card call centers, and convenience stores. You ballyhoo the arrival of yet another credit-card call center offering hundreds of jobs, and leave out the fact that those jobs pay 60 percent or less, in today’s dollars, of what those factory jobs paid. That’s not progress, folks.

The city has many things to be proud of. Missouri State University is growing and thriving, even without the “Southwest” in front of its name. The neighborhoods around the university are mostly still beautiful. The crime rate has decreased somewhat since the peak of the meth years. Mexican Villa’s still there.

But really: If it wasn’t for the wonderful people that I came to see this weekend, I wouldn’t have any reason to give you a second look, Springfield. You need a sprucing up. You need to find a way to get businesses that aren’t coffee shops or bars. You need to find a way to get the rusting hulk that was Springfield Lincoln-Mercury off of Glenstone Ave. Tear it down and replace it with a park, for Pete’s sake. Anything. Get the Country Club Plaza shopping center to either repaint or replace that sign. Get some life in areas that aren’t south of Battlefield or on campus. Restore the Tower Theatre the way you restored the Gillioz, or lose it. Some things are classic; some things, as Bob Walkenhorst once sang, are just old.

I loved my city once, Springfield. I don’t necessarily miss the way you were; I miss the way you could have been, back when we thought the population would pass 200,000 and the promise seemed infinite. You’re never going to be a metropolis, and that’s fine.

Find a way to be what you could be, the best city of your size in all the land.

Disappointing day in Denver

We all pretty much knew how the story was going to end. Those of us who observe the U.S. media industry know that two-newspaper towns are a thing of the past. We saw that trend start almost 20 years ago, when all the big cities in Texas lost their second newspapers.

The new round started Thursday in Denver, where the Rocky Mountain News is, as I type this, in the process of producing its final edition. More than 150 years and four Pulitzer Prizes weren’t enough to keep the E.W. Scripps Co. from shutting down the paper.

The Rocky was the “failing partner” in that strange concoction known as a Joint Operating Agreement — an exemption from the antitrust laws, created by the Nixon Administration in 1970, to “protect editorial voices” in communities. The act allows two competing newspapers to share business operations in order to keep publishing both newspapers.

The idea hasn’t been particularly successful; as these agreements have started to expire in the last few years, so have the papers they were meant to prop up. This little economic blip, of course, isn’t helping.

I fear this signals the beginning of a trend. Hearst Corp. has put the Seattle Post-Intelligencer up for sale. Nobody’s buying. It will likely cease to exist soon. Hearst has also threatened to close the San Francisco Chronicle. The McClatchy Co., whose stock has tumbled from $80 to 50 cents, give or take, over the last five years, has put the Miami Herald up for sale. Nobody’s buying.

The fact that we saw this coming doesn’t make it any easier to accept. I left newspapers five years ago, but my livelihood remains closely tied to the industry. It’s a scary thing to watch, wondering if my company is going to have any customers in a couple of years. I worry somewhat less about that; I think there’ll always be a market for news, and as such, there’ll be a market for technology to manage that content delivery.

I don’t think Nixon had any particular passion for journalism. He was a savvy politician who knew about keeping his friends close and his enemies closer, at least until he sent those guys over to that hotel in Foggy Bottom. He got the newspapers on his side by signing the Newspaper Preservation Act, and they helped him get re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

But somewhere underneath that devious heart, I’d like to think that Nixon understood the importance of strong oversight to a healthy democracy. That oversight is weakening. That weakness does not bode well for our society.

It’s been a while

ATLANTA — Far too long, it has been. I’ve been busying myself writing one sentence at a time (curse you, Facebook!) and trying to keep up with having been blown about a bit by the death-diving economy.

I am currently in the World’s Busiest Airport, awaiting a nearly 10-hour flight over to Denmark (wasn’t I just there? It certainly seems that way). I find myself with time on my hands. To be honest, “time on my hands” has been a fairly common occurrence lately; said time, however, has not been accompanied by the inclination to actually accomplish anything.

So: Let’s plan to change that in the coming weeks. Here are some topics I plan to address in the very near future, aided by some recent reading and research and having fully formed some opinions that were previously somewhat nebulous:

• The fraud that is higher education
• Why social policy matters (hint: it’s not why you would think)
• More anti-Baby Boomer invective
• The New Age of Responsibility, as seen from the eyes of a 14-year-old

Keep your RSS readers tuned right here. We’ll be right back.

(insert opening chords of some stadium song here)

… you know, something like “Start Me Up,” or “Crazy Train,” or “Enter Sandman.” Because I need something to get me fired up about heading back to work after a two-week hiatus.

In the absence of a stadium song cranked up to 11, I’m going through all the e-mail I received and ignored the last two weeks and hoping like hell I haven’t missed something urgent. There’s some interesting stuff there, some things that suggest I might have an intriguing next few months.

It was easy, and fun, hanging out with the family the last two weeks and accomplishing very little in measurable accomplishments. I accomplished a lot more, though, by having a helluva good time with the best people I know.

Now, back to real life. Happy New Year; here’s hoping it’s better in every way than the year we just rid ourselves of.

Confidential to the driver of a maroon F-150 with a Minnesota plate

BILOXI, Miss. — I’m guessing you have some trouble parking that large behemoth of a vehicle. I can understand that. Plus, you were in a hurry to get into that casino, ’cause you had your lucky boxers on, or whatever, and it was going to be a winning night. Between the sheer girth of your vehicle and your anxiety to start pulling the lever on those slots, you thought it was OK to park your truck in diagonal fashion, taking up all of your parking spot and a good portion of mine.

This of course created great difficulty for me, a man of fairly small size, to get into his Chevy Cobalt, a vehicle of fairly small size. And I’m guessing that you, in your big stompin’ F-150ness, probably didn’t consider that the humble-looking Cobalt that you had just hemmed in was a rental. Which means that its driver thought nothing of banging its door into the side of your truck, repeatedly, in his effort to squeeze his way into his humble little Cobalt.

Thankfully, after a few minutes of maneuvering, I was able to get the blessedly tiny car out of what remained of my parking spot without further damage to your vehicle, but it wasn’t because I was being particularly careful to avoid same.

So: If you find it odd that your maroon Ford now has chips of General Motors blue embedded in its right side, you might consider parking your GODDAMN TRUCK IN YOUR OWN SPOT next time.

Good karma request

If you search this blog for the term “Favorite Co-Worker,” you’ll come up with four posts referring to the person who, six years after we last worked together, still is my Favorite Co-Worker.

Her husband, 40, has been struggling with cancer. He’s been kicking its ass, but it gave a nasty kick back in the last few days.

I’d appreciate it greatly if you could send a few prayers or good thoughts, in whatever way you send such things, to a family in Texas who needs them a whole bunch.

Wow, it’s just getting worse

You’ve heard of USA Today. It’s published by a company called Gannett Co. Inc., which owns 100 or so newspapers, give or take, across the United States, Guam, and a smattering of publications in the United Kingdom. They also own a few TV stations and other media interests.

It’s been a black week at the Gannett newspapers, as a massive reduction-in-force has spread across the chain. Word is that when it’s all done, 3,000 people are going to be celebrating Christmas by not having to go to work.

My first two newspaper jobs were at Gannett newspapers. I left the first in 1993. I received word this evening of four people from that newspaper who were let go.

I worked with ALL FOUR of them — and remember, I left 15 years ago.

Between these four, they had a combined 96 years of service for the Anytown Daily Bugle. Not 96 years with Gannett, as is typical for many Gannett employees who hop from paper to paper within the chain; these four had 96 years with Gannett AT THIS ONE NEWSPAPER. That’s a lot of institutional memory. It’s a lot of skill. Plus, they’re all great people. Now they’re unemployed.

I think that sucks. Not just for them, but for the readers of the Anytown newspaper.

I know it’s not just newspapers. The unemployment lines are teeming with investment bankers, auto workers, folks whose jobs were outsourced to India and China, mortgage brokers (although I’m having a hard time feeling sorry for most of them) … the list goes on and on and on.

Surely, somewhere, these corporate Boards of Directors and Wall Street will figure out that you don’t cut companies into prosperity. Or maybe they won’t, and it won’t matter, because when most of these directors and CEOs and traders are themselves unemployed, they’ll be unemployed with a shit-ton of money socked away.

I hate that we as a nation are just sitting by and letting this happen. I just don’t know WTF to do about it.

Oops, forgot something

Interesting, sad story from The New York Times on how the decline of the domestic automobile companies is torching local economies. Dealerships are failing left and right, and more will fail next year. The story cites Big 3 mismanagement, and it makes note of the fact that there were too many dealers nationwide anyway, based on the sales volume.

What it failed to mention was the dealerships’ own awful business practices. As much as it sucks for their employees, I have no sympathy at all when a Bill Heard shuts down after fleecing its customers for years.

(And yeah, the part in the story linked above about the “deceptive marketing practices” that led to Bill Heard’s demise is in the very last graf. The media, particularly print media, are reluctant to bite the hand that provides a large portion of the advertising budget. Oops! I’m blaming the media again. Sorry.)

If this shakeout leaves us only with dealers who just sell cars and hold the bullshit, that’s not such a bad thing.

“But, you know, cleaning up the mess through law enforcement after the fact, while important, is not ideal.”

Your job is in jeopardy. Your 401(k) is in the toilet. Your family’s financial stability is in danger.

Why?

Because of bullshit like this.

The St. Petersburg Times took an in-depth look at how one real estate market was gamed by a tattoo parlor owner and his small-time criminal buddies, with the help of Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, et al. In a stunning development, few people were willing to comment on the record.

The quote above is from Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He’s reluctant to prosecute his banker buddies. I say prosecution isn’t good enough.

Yep, that’s your tax money, going to bail out banks who gave loans to car-wash employees who claimed to make $480,000 a year. Those banks are too big to fail. They’re run by people who are too stupid to receive yet more of my money. But they’re going to get it anyway.

We must start demanding accountability. The press has stood by too long and allowed this to continue. (Yes, I’m blaming the media.) Until the People start holding some feet to the fire (and, perhaps, stop handing over their money to banks and investment firms who brazenly risk it on stupidity), nothing is going to change. At this point, I’d feel safer giving my money to a poker player.