A Sort of Anniversary ... It Was 30 Years Ago Today.

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The morning of March 1, 1980, having spent the night in Bakersfield, we arose, had waffles for breakfast, tucked our three cats into the cab of the rented truck filled with all our stuff and headed north on Interstate 5. It was pretty late in the day when we hit Livermore, but we decided to push on.

And thus on the evening of March 1, 1980, we arrived in the Bay Area. We thought it would be temporary, two or three years at the most. I had gotten a job at the San Francisco Chronicle, and that (I thought) would give me the out-of-town glitter that would get me a job at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution somewhere down the line. E. was pretty sure in a year or two she would pass her architect's licensing exams, which would sent her up for a return to Atlanta, where I had been Executive Editor of Atlanta Magazine and E. had just got her degree from Georgia Tech.

Why I was looking for work rather than staying put is a long colorful story that over the years has come to bore even me. Let me just say that my only hope of staying at Atlanta Magazine was a willingness to stab my boss Larry Woods in the back -- to replace him; to become bitch of the bosses. And, having declined that, I knew I was doomed (for bosses love their bitches) and I threw a wide loose net, trying newspapers all over the country (and Time-Life Books, and various government agencies).

A job offer in San Francisco! Wondrous strange and a way station, a footnote, a byway, nothing serious and no commitment, the vocational equivalent of a one night stand -- just the kind of long bomb (a football term, only indirectly militant) that would give me the sheen you got from abandoning the South and then coming back.

Let me divest myself of that participle. It shaded into "going back." And so we never did. And now, somewhat weak, palsied and beaten down, I work on at the university simply so that we can stay right where we are, rather than cashing in our home equity and buying a mountain in western Virginia, from whence I came originally.

Ah. We went on an adventure, and it turned into a life. Ah old California friend who back in the day used to give me merry hell when I refused to call myself a Californian. Now he don't give a damn -- what you learn late is that you shed friends (or they shed you) as a snake season by season.

But I guess I am a Californian, if I am anything.

(To celebrate we went to the Chez Panisse Cafe. Not bad.)

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I Ask the Chron's Michael Bauer a Question about Restaurant Reviewing

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I love teaching my Arts Reviewing class because I haven't taught it over and over again, and it's not an area of expertise, only of interest, so it's a voyage of discovery for me and for the students.

I am, perhaps, a little unconventional in that the first review assigned is a restaurant review. I see it as a kind of bridge between feature writing and conventional review writing. A kind of "inexpertness" is acceptable because for most people it is the whole theatrical dining experience that matters, the mood as much as the meal. Remembering past meals and paying close attention to this meal really is enough for a clever person to write a readable restaurant review.

Is the readable review also useful? That's the question that hangs over every critique, since I enjoy reading reviewers whose recommendations I am not inclined to follow. It is the operation of the mind that draws you.

But at the end of the day I must evaluate the students' reviews: I must give them a grade. And one of the areas where I feel a responsibility to have an opinion -- that is, where an opinion might be useful in helping students improve, or at least learn how to satisfy my expectations -- is structure.

Thus:

Michael Bauer:

My arts reviewing class is doing a restaurant review, and I was knocking together my thoughts on structuring reviews and I wondered WWBS: What Would Bauer Say?

My thoughts:

Key point: structure in restaurant reviews

Chronological method is effective in that it’s easy for the reader to follow, but it always seems a little amateurish, at least to me. One of the disadvantages in the method is that it encourages clutter – “and then the hostesss showed us to our table.” That is, you fall into storytelling mode and include bits that really don’t tell you useful information about the restaurant. Better reviewers usually focus on the points they want to make and don’t present them chronologically because that can waste valuable space and fog the emphasis of the review.

Of course, once chronological order is abandoned, it can result in an “elusive” structure. That is, we aren’t quite sure why the information is presented in the order it’s presented. Some reviews do seem to be exercises in “nut graf” structure. There’s the lead that grabs us by the nose, and then there’s the nut graf making several key points, which are developed in that order. And some reviews do have the feel of the old inverted pyramid structure, as if the points of criticism were presented in order of descending importance. And in other instances, the structure seems purely associational, which does give such reviews a kind of casual, conversational quality.

Bottom line:

Understand what sort of structure you are using or – having “jumped into” writing and having come up with a structure that works – be able to explain why you think it works.

The Nigerian Newspaper Scam

LAGOS, NIGERIA.

ATTENTION: PUBLISHER SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

DEAR SIR,

CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL

HAVING CONSULTED WITH MY BOB WOODWARD AND CARL BERNSTEIN AND BASED ON THE INFORMATION GATHERED FROM THE NIGERIAN CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY THROUGH THE GOOGLE EARTH, I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO REQUEST FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE TO TRANSFER THE SUM OF $47,500,000.00 (FORTY SEVEN MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS) WORTH OF CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING INTO YOUR NEWSPAPER. THE ABOVE SUM RESULTED FROM AN OVER-INVOICED CONTRACT, EXECUTED COMMISSIONED AND PAID FOR ABOUT TWO YEARS (2) AGO BY A FOREIGN PERSON SELLING A USED CAMPING STOVE, A FUTON IN THE ORIGINAL PACKAGINGS AND 47,500,000 (FORTY SEVEN MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND) GRATEFUL DEAD T-SHIRTS, IN THE XXL. THIS ACTION WAS, HOWEVER, INTENTIONAL AND SINCE THEN THE CLASSIFIED ADS HAVE BEEN IN A SUSPENSE ACCOUNT AT THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA APEX BANK.

WE ARE NOW READY TO TRANSFER THE CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING OVERSEAS AND THAT IS WHERE YOU COME IN. IT IS IMPORTANT TO INFORM YOU THAT BECAUSE OF THE WALL BETWEEN AD SALES AND EDITORIAL, WE ARE FORBIDDEN TO MOVE THE CLASSIFIED ADS INTO OUR NEWSPAPER; (WE HAVE CHECKED THE GRATEFUL DEAD T-SHIRTS ARE STILL AVAILABLE. BUT NOT THE CAMPING STOVE OR THE FUTON IN ORIGINAL PACKAGINGS.) THAT IS WHY WE REQUIRE YOUR ASSISTANCE. THE TOTAL SUM WILL BE SHARED AS FOLLOWS: 70% CLASSIFIED ADS FOR SAN FRANCICO CHRONICLE, 25% FOR LOU DOBBS SUBSCRIPTION NEWSLETTER TO KEEP THIS QUIET, 5 % FOR LONELY GIRL LAGOS ON YOUTUBE BECAUSE SHE MAKES US SO SAD. ALSO, NEED TO KEEP OUT SIX OR SEVEN T-SHIRTS TO SPREAD AROUND TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE.

THE TRANSFER IS RISK FREE ON BOTH SIDES. I AM AN AD SALESMAN WITH THE NIGERIAN DAILY BEAST. IF YOU FIND THIS PROPOSAL ACCEPTABLE, WE SHALL REQUIRE THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENTS:

(A) YOUR BANKER'S NAME, TELEPHONE, ACCOUNT AND FAX NUMBERS. ALSO, SAME INFORMATION FOR YOUR PARENTS IF YOU HAVE HAD TO MOVE BACK IN WITH THEM IN MID CAREER WHILE YOU RETRAIN WHICH IS NOBODY’S FAULT NOT YOURS NOT THEIRS. THEY WANTED YOU TO GO INTO LAW SCHOOL BUT YOU SHOULD NOT TELL THEM TO SHUT UP THEY ARE YOUR PARENTS.

(B) YOUR PRIVATE TELEPHONE AND FAX NUMBERS. IF YOU HAVE I-PHONE WE WOULD LIKE TO BORROW THAT. WE HEAR THAT NEW BEST WAY NOW OF GETTING THE BREAKING NEWS.

(C) YOUR BUYOUT DATE. IF IT’S TOO NEAR IN FUTURE, WE DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO START THIS PROCESS ALL OVER WITH SOMEONE ELSE. YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE HOW OFTEN THAT HAPPENS.

PLEASE REPLY URGENTLY. THERE HAS BEEN A MAN FROM CRAIGSLIST COMING AROUND.

BEST REGARDS.

AARON EWADAFE

AD SALES MANAGER

DAILY BEAST

On the Runway with Today's San Francisco Chronicle

Image by BiggerPictureImages.com via Flickr

It rolled off the non-union presses for the first time today, color photos bright and appealing. It was very pretty and very thin, like a supermodel.

Kos Obscenities in the Mother's Milk of Newspapers and 'Sense of Community'

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I don't agree with him completely, since I think for some people -- and not only the rich and powerful -- newspapers provided a sense of local identity, if it was only Herb Caen nattering on about cool grey fog and local drink menus. Let us not deride the great middle class and its wish to know, to belong, to understand. To some degree, newspapers focus our interest on things local and do create some commonalities.

To which I imagine Kos might say bullcrap, because he does say:

That "sense of community" thing? It never existed. Newspapers have always served the wealthiest members of their communities -- the people that will buy the stuff that advertisers were peddling. So ethnic communities have always been underserved. In San Francisco, Asians make up over a third of the population -- the largest single ethnic group in the city -- yet the San Francisco Chronicle doesn't have a single Asian columnist in its stable. Do you think the Asian community sees the Chronicle as a member of its community? Of course not. And given they were traditionally a relatively poor immigrant community, the Chron had little interest in engaging that part of the city.

All around the country, you see the major metro dailies completely ignore entire chunks of their cities. Why do you think the New York Times writes story after story after story talking about those poor unemployed Wall Street types no longer able to buy caviar or $800 doll houses for their daughters?

The reason alternate media has taken off was because the traditional media didn't deliver a product people wanted. If people felt a "sense of community" from their newspaper, perhaps they may have stuck with the product. But they don't, hence it's easy to toss it aside for the countless alternatives at the public's disposal.

The Chronicle Tour: Yes, There Were Neutron Bomb Jokes

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I thought the Chronicle tour yesterday was a success, if only because the students must have thought, "With all these empty cubicles, there must be room for me."

Actually, the nightmare vision of holes in the fabric of the newsroom was a little misleading. We showed up at 11 a.m., and things are busier 3p-11p, when the business of putting the paper together gets serious. But a lot of familiar faces were absent -- Rubenstein, Rubin, Carl Hall, Bonnie Lemon, Tom Meyer, plus all those who came after I left in '91 who have since moved on.

The highlight of the tour was an impromptu rant from living legend Carl Nolte (USF, class of Cambrian Era) who more or less told the kids that, lacking a business model, journalism was something they needed to put in their rear view mirrors. Our guide, the wonderful Nanette Asimov, listened for a bit and then gently disagreed, suggesting quality journalism would find its way -- e-paper, anyone? -- and that people would want it, that some "monetized" delivery method would emerge. She told the kids not to give up, not just yet, not if journalism was something for which they had Passion.

The ever cheerful Kevin Fagan wandered over and shared his impatience with the self-styled "journalists" who cluttered the weird press conference he'd covered the day before at which a woman announced her dad was the Zodiac killer. But covering the various loonies was so much fun, he manifested, and God knows he's done enough good grim work to justify his pleasure in the occasional loon-fest.

His contribution to the discussion was more one of mood: Who knows the future but so much fun in the job today.

I don't know what the kids thought. They'll tell me on Tuesday. If they show up.

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Tomorrow the Reporting Class Tours the Chronicle

We've been doing this for nearly 20 years, since I came over to the university for all sorts of reasons, one of which was that I had spent six years (three of them full time) getting the darn Ph.D. back in the day, and it chapped me that it had all been a waste.

Other than self development, of course. I really did enjoy reading all those books.

In one way, taking the kids to the Chron was a little like returning to Duke, having the sense that here was something that had existed before me, that did more good than harm, that would go on doing more-good-than-harm long after I had passed.

Oh yes, the hallowed halls -- actually an open-office newsroom -- of the Chronicle. I liked to imagine a student of mine somewhere down the line working at the Chron and finding some relic of my days there, and thinking of the old man suddenly (for the first time in years really) and in some vague way being grateful -- for me, for the paper, for whatever I said that did no permanent harm.

This is not going to happen, or if it happens, it will be in a contracted space and radically altered platform laboring under a different vision and little patience for what we used to do when the Chron was a great mosaic of the good, the bad and the foolish-by-design.

The Chron was a pretty good newspaper, you know, with lots of goofy where everyone else went for stuffy and, in my opinion, all the better for the playfulness.

Then, it got serious and now it's getting steamrolled, which has nothing to do with all the rethinking that went into calming it down, which change was well underway before I left.

I used to miss the Old Chronicle, but now it looks as if I'm going to be missing the Chronicle Period. A man should not outlive his nostalgia. I think that's what I'm saying.

Postscript: Hey, look! An interactive map of newspaper woe.

This Morning the SF Chronicle's Own Don Asmussen Made Me Laugh Out Loud

Here's the whole panel.

I Repurpose a Comment Left at 'Reflections of a Newsosaur'

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[Reflections of a Newsosaur] New comment on SF Chron plan: Web fees, job cuts, givebacks.

....J.Michael Robertson

....J.Michael Robertson has left a new comment on the post "SF Chron plan: We...

12:51 AM (13 hours ago)

Reply

....J.Michael Robertson has left a new comment on the post "SF Chron plan: Web fees, job cuts, givebacks":

Here's an unpleasant thought. If you assume that what is precious and must be preserved is the paper's content -- and thus its content makers -- the Guild members who take this sacred trust seriously now have a responsibility to throw all the other newspaper unions under the bus. Perhaps, back in the day union solidarity maintained wages and benefits for all -- though during my time at the Chronicle the Teamsters were really the only union that mattered and when they cut their own separate deals we all fell in line. But today under the theory that any and all must be sacrificed to the preservation of editors and reporters .... You remember the movie Lifeboat. Put the weak over the side and let them drift away.

Has it come to this? It really is a question of where the greater loyalty lies, and how serious you think the loss to the community will be if the Chron dies or shrinks back into only an online presence.

Funeral Arrangements

Today is the 144th Anniversary of the San Francisco Chronicle, which I celebrated by taking part in a panel discussion about whether or not its print edition will see a 145th birthday. It was a lunchtime event at the University Club on Nob Hill across the cable car tracks from the Fairmont Hotel.

The club is old-fashioned elegant with dark wood-paneled walls, a horseshoe bar that gave me a bit of buzz just to contemplate and a couple or three elderly members dozing peacefully in leather chairs. You can't smoke in the bar any more, but you can smoke on the terrace, and a faint odor from the cigars drifts in, a smell that touches the memory an instant after it touches the olfactory nerve.

The panel was in the big dining room on the floor below, a room with a wall of windows and good light. I'd say the crowd approached 50, mostly folk of my vintage who love print but love it in that special San Francisco way, recalling Herb Caen and the Chronicle in the Sixties, Seventies and even Eighties (when it was my playpen) when the newspaper was a little silly, a little naughty and very well written.

It was also a good enough newspaper for the news of the world if you weren't the most godawful snob.

As I was saying, the audience was print-loving, and I tried to prod them by saying we were talking about the wrong thing, that it didn't matter when the print edition died since most experts say print is dead so get over it. What mattered -- the question as it should have been phrased -- was how soon the Chronicle's Internet presence will figure out how to attract enough ad dollars to pay the salaries of some generous fraction of the existing newsroom.

"Four newspapers hit my lawn every morning," I said. But the perpetuation of print is a diversion. It's the perpetuation of journalism that matters because real journalism is platform agnostic.

And so on. My fellow panelists Carl Nolte -- USF grad and living treasure -- and Ken Garcia, the Examiner columnist, talked about how the journalists on the inside feel about their future. Nolte and Garcia seemed optimistic enough. Garcia said the Examiner's free-tabloid model is working; it's making money. And that is one possible model for the survival of print, a free "hyper local" tab during the week, a subscription broadsheet on Sunday.

In retrospect, I think perhaps I talked too much. I had done some research. I had note cards. As a reporter I was a good listener. But now I have the lecturer's habit of filling any large space with the sound of my own voice. One thing I mentioned but did not elaborate on is a point raised in that recent story in the Atlantic predicting -- or at least raising the possibility -- that the New York Times could go under during the next few months. One of the provocations the writer presented, which I have also been thinking about, is what portion of contemporary newspaper content really matters? The absence of which stories would do damage to the republic?

I recall the writer in the Atlantic said only two percent of what is currently in the Times matters to the health of the body politic, the original and still the most powerful argument for a free press. That number strikes me as a little low, and I think he may undervalue routine local news that incrementally helps us know what is going on and can guide or prompt our community involvement. But I agree with his basic idea. It's the investigative journalism and a few think pieces that matter -- if anything in a newspaper matters.

But isn't it the froth that, since the advent of the penny press 175 years ago, has brought the great mass of newspaper readership into the garish and vulgar tent? Didn't the money the froth made raise all boats, including those of the investigative reporters, whose stories are so often NOT those to which first we turn?

And now the Internet is bright shining froth as far as the eye can Google. Perhaps, on that first morning there is no more print newspaper, and the newspaper website is thin as thin can be given the lack of a newsroom to back it up, the disappearance of certain kinds of journalism will focus the attention of those to whom it matters, and they will figure out some mechanism to pay for it.

Massive tax breaks? Direct government support, even? Non-profit foundations subsidizing the public good? Throwback Men of Wealth and Conscience who are willing to buy a "content generator" and "lose a million dollars this year and a million dollars next year," happy in the knowledge that they won't be out of money for 60 years? Simple subscription models that serious readers will finally accept in spite of our visceral notion that "information wants to be free" -- meaning *for* free? Virtuous amateurs who take vows of poverty and service and give their lives to journalism as fair and balanced as it is passionate and full of advocacy?

I have no idea. But today I kept talking anyway. I used to be a journalist. Now I'm a college professor!

Now, a look at the old religion of newspaper salvation.

Remembered

Steven Winn says goodbye to The Chronicle

Steven Winn

Monday, December 8, 2008

Shortly after I came to work at The Chronicle, near the end of the Carter administration, I spent six months in what was called the People section. It was the place where "women's stories" used to go, the human-interest features and pieces about fashion, debutante balls and lifestyle, whatever that meant. Armistead Maupin, Joan Chatfield-Taylor, Jon Carroll, Ruthe Stein, Michael Robertson and Sylvia Rubin were among the first-rate writers for that now long-gone section.

As I wrote Steve, it's one thing to be a dinosaur but it's another thing -- kind of an honor, really -- to be a dinosaur in the Year of the Asteroid.

Steve made a good boot. So did I.