[print] It's Always February in Lake Charles, Louisiana

3281.

Circulating on Facebook right now, courtesy of the auspices of one Lelan J. LaBorde, is this following picture:

There is a newspaper in Lake Charles, the Lake Charles American Press, and, apparently, at least one press run of the paper of March 1st, 2016 cheerfully wished Lake Charlesians good morning on a happy Tuesday, February 30th.

Truthfully, the jury's still out on this one. It's too early to say for sure if it's been 'shopped; after all, despite getting to just the edge of virality on Facebook it still hasn't broke through in the news or in trending topics there. As a matter of fact, the comment thread itself has a split of opinion, with more than one reader posting versions of the American Press's front page that say both Feb. 30 and March 1st. The suspect pictures don't seem to have been 'shopped, or if they are … we have a true pro on the job.

Check it out yourself. Here's the FB post: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1263148297034687&set=gm.480900548774338

In the meantime we wish everyone in Lake Charles, LA a happy Wednesday, Feb 31st.

[pdx] When Soylent News™ Stops Consuming People, It Will Eat Itself

3083.

This just in, via Randy Stapilus, blogmaster at the Ridenbaugh Press:

Post by Randy Stapilus.

Ai, yi, and and an ever lovin' yi. If Randy's source is correct then the circulation at The Formerly Big O is now about 63 percent of what it was … six months ago? 

Six months? 

Holy moly.

I make a lot of fun of the decline of The O. I do it basically to keep from crying and dying inside. Portland, Oregon is the 26th largest city in the fourth most populous country in the history of countries. Our 'daily' (not if you get it delivered any more, it ain't, of course), in its new 'fun size', once had bigger ambitions than the number of clicks it could get on a story at the website. It hurts, so I wiggle my ears and stick my tongue out and remind you all that Tuesday is Soylent News™ day, but I'm not happy about this. Not really. I daren't think they care, either; they stopped caring about my level of the socio-economic strata some time ago.

For a time, I delivered the pape, when I was a younger dude. True story.

A great American city deserves a great American newspaper. Sadly, The Oregonian is no longer that paper. Gone are the voices that used to make it great, and I see no Margie Boulét, no Phil Stanford, and certianly no Jonathan Nicholas (remember him, folks?), no 'appointment column reading'.

But the comics are in color, at least. Yay.

Maybe The Columbian can speak for us? They seem to still publish a newspaper intended for grownups, 7 days a week. The Statesman-Journal's looking better and better, all of a sudden, and at least it's published in the state capital. That ought to count for something.

In the meantime, the readership of Soylent News™ is apparently precipitously dwindling … but, don't think of it as deserting the paper.

We're just conciously decoupling.

Remember, Tuesday is Soylent News™ day.

[pdx] Meet The New "Fun-Size" Oregonian

3045.

Welcome to the new era. The Oregonian has gone post-newspaper.

They still publish one, mind, in a sense of the word. Newsprint is reeled off rolls, run through presses, and ink deposited in patters resembling letters, words, pictures, and such, in parseable array.

I had an idea of what I was in for when The Wife™ and myself stopped by the Jackson's Shell station at 122nd and Division before our weekly bout of Library time (you should all have a weekly Library day, by the way. Some sort of intellectual life. It's free. It won't kill you). Seeing those little The Sunday Oregonian early editions had generated an emotion that I don't think I'll ever be able to put into words.

Finally arriving out our branch and setting up for an afternoon of browsing, reading, and writing, we found several of The New Breed racked up where the should be. And, actually, that was rather odd. Since we no longer (for a bunch of reasons both practical and intellectual) subscribe to the pape, we catch up over the week at the Library. Typically, it was tough to find the week's editions; they were out around the building, all being read. Today, they were all in position, with no competition for reading them.

"They're all there," Wife™ says. "Nobody else is reading them."

And that is strange. Maybe it isn't a thing. Time will tell.

Left: a traditional broadsheet. Right: The Oregonian, "Fun-Size" edition.

 To be honest, I was having trouble visualizing such a small paper. The tabloid "Fun-Size" format has been identified with newspapers that are thought of as newspapers because they can't adequately be described as something else (e.g., National Enquirer), or major city dailies who were redesigned by people who were more interested in money than news (the post-Murdoch Chicago Sun-Times comes to mind).

Well, on the upside, my brain didn't burst into flames and I didn't cry and die inside when looking at this stunted little thing. World didn't halt spinning on its axis and career into the Sun. So, there's that.

But I do note that the Fun-Size edition debuted on the 2nd of April. I can only conclude that this is because if they rolled it out on the 1st, they would send the mother of all mixed messages.

The difference in layout is striking. The pre-April 2nd Oregonian carried the classic banner black-letter announcing the paper's title, a touch this old-fashioned mind always liked. In the stripe below the title, the wording Always On Oregonlive.com can be seen. There was a time they boasted of the Pulitzer they won there. We've come so far.

The current version shrinks the proud title to a minisculeness above the new-look Oregonian Media Group logo, a redesign which amounted to filling in the right side of the blackletter capital O.

The section heading. 'Memba when you could get the Living section or the Opinion section? Not no more, chum. Takes a sharp eye to deduce where one section takes up and the other leaves off.

The new Fun Size's section are all stapled together, a practice they are most proud of, ciding that they are the only daily in America to use stapled sections. They do it Europe, you know. The Fun Size's sections are nested within one another. The above it Saturdays. Tuesday, April 2nd's, was arranged thusly:

If you didn't pay attention to the table of contents, here's how you know you've stumbled into the Metro section of Saturday's paper, which is subsumed into the Main section:

The comics are all in color. This is a mixed blessing. Yay, because color comics, but, you know, some of the more richly-colored comics tend to look muddy when printed on newsprint. So, points for style here, but I actually preferred them in black and white a little more.

I will concede points for solid, sensible design as far as it goes, though. This Business section front page is a good example. Each new section has a signature color, and the front page's upper left ear is a square of that color. The boundaries of this square, extended out, give solid spines along which to organize and arrange the rest of the content. If the page layout of the Fun Size edition is based on modules, I'm betting that the single modular unit is the size of that square. So, solid layout logic, good.

Like I said, they redesigned The Oregonian,  and the world didn't end. Still, after watching the trajectory of the paper since the changes at the top, I can't say I'm encouraged.

Change doesn't happen in a vacuum. The Oregonian, a paper that once promised everyone who worked at it their jobs for life as long as they continued to do them well, has been hollowing itself out from the inside, as far as I'm concerned. The massive layoffs last year were just an inflection point in a path that began when the paper decided that on Mondays, Opinion would no longer be a separate section, and went through points on the curve that included Jack Ohman's departure for the Sacramento Bee, where he shines just as fiercely and funnily as he ever did here in Oregon, and the recently released news about compensation and performance standards that accentuate posting stories to OregonLive.com over everything else suggest that the West's largest daily is going to a place where I, bluntly, don't think we're going to be well-served from.

It doesn't signify, to me, courage in changing our idea of what a newspaper is and can do so much as it signifies, in the final view, a narrowing of perspective, and a stunting of horizons. Finding itself under too much pressure to aspire to greatness, The Oregonian is willing to settle for chasing clicks on a computer, web impressions on a smartphone.

The Fun-Size O's managment call it a 'digital-first' policy.

That's also the same policy my doctor has for prostate exams. 

[print] Can A Non-Daily Print Newspaper Be A Paper Of Record?

2828.File this under the rubric The Death Of Print.

The news broke today, via Poynter, that the daily newspaper of Louisiana's largest city, the Times-Picayune, will be cutting back to a three-day-per-week publishing schedule, and doubling down on its online presence and digital media efforts:

Times-Picayune publisher Ashton Phelps Jr. has confirmed that the newspaper will cease daily publication, moving to three days a week in the fall: Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. He also confirmed staff cuts, though he didn’t say how large they will be. The New York Times’ David Carr reported Wednesday night that the paper likely would cease daily publication and that the two managing editors would leave.
This would make New Orleans the largest U.S. city without a daily newspaper. The Times-Picayune, with a circulation of about 155,000 on Sundays and 134,000 weekdays, would be the largest paper in the U.S. to shift to non-daily publication. Its circulation in March 2005, before Hurricane Katrina flooded the city and shrank the city’s population: about 285,000 on Sundays and 257,000 weekdays.

To give some conception of how that compares, the Times-Picayune (serving a city of about 350,000 in the 46th largest metropolitan area in the US) is just about to adopt a similar publishing schedule to the News-Register in McMinnville (population about 35,000, less than one-tenth the size). Picayune, indeed … Times? Not so much.

Not only does this not bode will for print communications, nor does it contain good news for those who don't care to be required to be wired in order to stay informed, this carries implications for the paper's status as New Orelans' 'paper of record'.

There are two ways to interpret that term. A de jure, everyday way to look at it is that it's the paper everyone turns to to record the everyday history of the area. That is the function filled by the major daily papers in every city, which become the written record of the daily history of the area. In Portland this, of course, would be The Oregonian. 


The more formal de facto definition of a newspaper of record is the newspaper in which public records - births, deaths, legal dealings, etc - can be expected to be found. And this has put the T-P in a certain awkward spot.

Reacting to the announcement that The Times-Picayune will be moving from publishing a daily print version to three days a week in print while expanding its online product, Sens. J.P. Morrell and Edwin Murray, both D-New Orleans, said that a state law dealing with its status as the legal journal for state and local government entities in the New Orleans area will change.Murray said by state law legal notices -- such as council meeting minutes, meeting notices, court proceedings, foreclosures, successions, local bills and others -- have to be advertised in the "official journal" and in New Orleans that has been the daily newspaper.

This law will have to be changed plenty-quick or the paper could open itself to legal challenges, the article (amusingly, on the T-P's website Nola.com) notes. This website is mounted by Adavance Publications which, and we'll try not to worry here, also owns The Oregonian. Which has also reduced staff over the past few years.

It can happen, I suppose. After 174 years, The Ann Arbor News, the daily newspaper in the Michigan city (and thus the paper of record under our first definition) ended daily publication entirely back in 2009, replaced by a website. This digital media company has a twice-weekly print version, and is owned by a company who's owned by Advance Publications, who also owns The Oregonian.


Once again, we'll try not to worry.

But you'd better get yourself an iPad, Gramps, it's startin' to look like.

[print] The Gutenberg Wireless Media Player

2776.No monthly contracts? Infinite battery life, you say? Read in bright sunlight?



Well, hell's bells, sign me the tintype up!

[print] Physical Print On Demand At Powell's Books - Best Of Both Worlds?

2763.Just heard the news that Powell's Books is going to have something called an Espresso Book Machine installed at the flagship store.

You've heard of Print-on-Demand, of course. This machine - if I read the story right - will allow you to go online at Powell's Burnside store and have the book printed, finished, and bound for you right there.

And, of course, here's a video of an EBM



I'm conflicted about this, but on balance it might be a good thing. Simply going to Powell's, even if you don't have the money to buy anything just now, is just a invigorating experience; I hate the ideas that book stores may someday go away, if some of the more pessimistic ideas about print are correct. Bookstores are closing nationwide, and Borders, no matter what I thought of them, was a good place to get the mass market stuff.

The idea of combining POD with the Powell's experience has an intriguing side. As long as a book exists in a digital version, this suggests that the idea of a book ever truly being 'out of print' may become somewhat obsolete. That's always been POD's strength - keeping niche books available.

So, POD for books you can't find even at Powell's + Physically visting Powell's may just = a good thing, on the balance.

Via.

[pdx_liff] So Long, Just Out (1983-2011)

2735.Sad news for print publishing in the Portland area as Just Out, the alt-paper serving the LGBT community since 1983 has just now announced it has published its last.

It was a paper that could be enjoyed regardless of sexual orientation, however. It introduced my comic-readin' self to Dykes To Watch Out For, by the still-incredibly-underrated Alison Bechdel, whose soulful storytelling and rich-yet-simple style, reminiscent to me of ligne claire, told real, authentic human stories.

I suspect that the hole the loss of this media leaves in some lives will be larger than this, however.

The Corvallis Gazette-Times Gets a 1-Day History Rewrite

2128.Portland isn't the only native Oregonian whose name was decided by a coin-toss. In 1909, Corvallis' then-two dailies, the Corvallis Gazette and (naturally) the Covallis Times, decided to get married, and the coin toss said the Gazette's name should go first. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today is the 100th birthday of the Corvallis Gazette-Times, and the GT decided to celebrate a unique way; by pretending, just for one day, that the coin had flipped the other way. Today and today only the paper will be known as the Corvallis Times-Gazette, not unlike if the City of Portland decided to celebrate its 200th anniversary (on 8 Feb 2051, if you're curious) by renaming itself Boston, Oregon, for just one day (which would be kind of neat).

Oregon Media Central has a big version of the front page here, including links to all the nifty little birthday party sheenanigans that the GT did, including a video of a reenactment of the original coin-toss.

Technorati Tags: Oregon History, Oregon Print History, Corvallis Gazette-Times, Corvallis Times-Gazette