Headlines! Daily newspaper cuts own throat!

Our daily newspaper here in Rochester, the Democrat & Chronicle, is getting thinner and thinner as the weeks go by. Getting thinner as it loses readers and advertisers to electronic news sources.

I’ve watched the newspaper try to attract younger readers with stories about bars and nightclubs. I’ve watched it try to reel in minority readers. It’s no secret they have a “minority photograph ratio” requirement for each issue; an article about this appeared in City, the area’s “alternative” weekly newspaper.

I’ve got news for the people at the newspaper. Older white people read newspapers. Young white people and minorities do not. I used to own a double house in the inner city. The street was 95% black and Hispanic. On trash pick-up day, for the entire length of the street, there were no newspapers in the recycling bins sitting by the curb.

Not only is our daily newspaper wooing uninterested readers, in reducing their page count they recently removed one thing - an edge they have over electronic news media - a crossword puzzle. A puzzle is interactive. The reader can spend all day with the paper doing the puzzle. A crossword is so important, not only shouldn’t it be cut, there should be three different ones in each issue with one on the front page.

Breakfast

I’m enjoying an artichoke omelet for breakfast at Gitsis. Sitting at the counter I’m in the midst of three waitresses as they place orders and hurry meals out to their booths. A nearby menu is continually flipped open – with cursing – for a price check. The waitresses are seasoned pros, but a new menu was recently printed with new pricing.

The phone rings; likely a Greek-speaking food disitributor or the teen-aged developmentally disabled son of K, my waitress. It’s a Greek. George, Gitsis’ Greek proprietor, gets on the phone and fires off his order, mixing English food items and Greek quantities: “fish fry – dodeka!”  He hangs up and it rings again – K’s son looking for his lunch money.

“It should be right there on the kitchen table, honey,” she says, rolling her eyes in my direction.

Busy as she is, D reaches in her purse behind the counter and slides me the latest photos of her two toddler grandchildren. I can never remember their names, and I’ve never met them, but I’ve seen their pictures so many times I could pick them out of a crowd.

George’s 26-year-old daughter, the third waitress, stops to tell me about her new job. She wants to break out of the restaurant business. I wrote her resume when she finished beautician school six months ago; she finally landed a part-time position.

I’m enjoying an artichoke omelet. With a side of life.

What’s Mike hauling over-the-road this month?

My buddy, Mike, has been driving tractor trailer cross-country since high school and he’s hauled just about anything you can think of.

Ironically, his loads seem not to reflect the economy, but social trends. One day, maybe ten years ago, my office phone rang. While most acquaintances assume you’ll recognize their voice, Mike always launches into: “This is D. Michael Saunders. I’m just down the road delivering 48,000 pounds of popcorn. Wanna meet for lunch?”

We enjoyed lunch in his air conditioned, studio-sized Peterbilt cab. He’d once hauled steel for the auto industry but lost that contract to a more union-friendly carrier. Then he went to hauling general freight. A load to Atlanta; pick up another load there and bring it to Denver; another load from there to wherever. Once or twice a month he made it home to his wife in Phoenix.

A real estate boom in Arizona caused him to sell his rig and buy a dump truck. He was psyched. “I’m home every night at 5:30 and they’re moving enough square miles of dirt down here to last me a lifetime!”

A big slump in land development put him back on the road. He got a new rig and worked his way back up through hauling general freight, to where he is today: working for the entertainment industry. He hauls Ice Capades and Disney stages and props from city-to-city. He sits it out at full pay for the three-or-four day duration of the shows.

It’s ironic how this choice work – a manifestation of how much people spend on entertainment – is occurring the middle of a serious recession.

Tele-professions #3

I am a professional resume writer. When I started my business 20 years ago clients came to my office, I interviewed them, wrote their resumes on a word processor, and provided them with packages of 25 or 50 hard copies.

This has changed significantly, thanks to the computer, the phone and the internet. I now interview people all over the world, from California to China, and e-mail them their completed resumes.

These may be clients who have relocated, or people referred to me by other clients. In today’s mobile world it is not unusual for someone to have a relative or friend in another country. As a result, I interviewed one client’s father who works for the Oil Ministry in Qatar, another client’s fiancee who is a prison guard in Ontario, Canada, and another client’s brother who is an engineer in the Philippines.

Interestingly, with all the credit card scams and identity theft I hear about, I am always impressed by the fact that these people, many of whom I’ve never met, will give me their credit card number over the phone, in advance. I am delighted to be one of many businesses that conduct credible business and monetary transactions over the phone.

Internet piracy

I am in mild shock.

Prior to starting this blog, I launched another blog, in February 2005: www.rochesterblog.com, about life in Rochester, NY. I pay to have the blog hosted. It has enjoyed measurable success, racking up 350,000 hits to date, even though I actually stopped posting on it a year ago.

All that changed around January 1, 2009. I was steamrollered over by another www.rochesterblog.com. It appears to be for Rochester, Minnesota, not Rochester, NY. But it has eliminated my blog from the field.

No matter what I try, I cannot access my blog, www.rochesterblog.com. I’ve tried key words, phrases, and my name. I went to another blog that for four years has had a link to mine. I clicked on my link, which took me directly to the new Rochester blog. In fact, if you hold your cursor over the three different gray blog links in this body copy, the correct picture – of MY blog – appears. Yet when you click on it, it goes to the new Rochester blog.

Philosophically, I was ready to move on from this blog. Financially, I was only paid up through next month. But ethically, someone has taken away my blog. This has got to be a crime.

Tele-professions #2

My son is a help desk representative for a company that provides scheduling software to schools. There are approximately fifty help desk reps in the company.

Last month a management e-mail went out to all employees recognizing reps whose performance was exemplary. My son and two other reps were cited for having the highest first-call problem resolution. In other words, he didn’t rush customers off the phone, but spent enough time with them to resolve their problem so they wouldn’t have to call back later and say they still had a problem.

Ironically, he received an e-mail from his supervisor later in the month saying his per-call times were too high. Yes, he was spending too much time on the phone with callers.

Tele-professions #1

I share an office suite with a recruiter. She was having a problem with a special program on her computer so she called customer support. She waited on “hold” for thirty minutes before someone finally picked up the phone. But then they immediately hung up on her before she could even speak. She called again, was on hold for another thirty minutes, and again, someone picked up the phone and instantly hung up on her. This happened a third time. She was, of course, exasperated.

She and I discussed this and we arrived at a possible answer: the incoming call load at the call center must have been so heavy that the reps reduced the number of calls waiting by simply hangingup on callers. This implies irresponsibility on the part of the call center reps, but what other explanation is there?

She never did get through to customer support and wound up calling someone she knew who solved the problem for her.

Bad economy: attitude or reality?

You can’t make up stories like this one: The Bagel Bin, the place I just mentioned in my last post where I frequently enjoy fresh bagels and can blend my own cup of coffee, was shut down last week by the State of New York for failure to pay $47,000 in state sales taxes. They re-opened just this morning, Tuesday, December 23, at 6 A.M. Ironically, I was able to keep a lunch meeting there today - scheduled prior to the brief closing.

This is just one of several close-to-home signals that the bad economy is a reality, not simply a negative attitude. The Jiffy Lube across the street from my office building closed recently, along with the seven other Jiffy Lubes in the city owned by the same franchisee.

Even closer to home: my fellow business tenants and I have come to the realization that our landlord is not in good financial shape. This is tied directly to the mortgage failures; our landlord is in the mortgage business. I have become the unofficial designee to call Rochester Gas & Electric, monthly, to make sure he is paying the utilities for our building. If he isn’t, we may elect to pay them ourselves, versus pay our rent. That could prove to be a most interesting situation.

Back at my favorite diner, Gitsis, on Rochester’s southeast side, the owner, George, has put up thousands of Christmas lights, and is very much in business as usual.

Where does the money come from?

I am in the Bagel Bin, a sort of independent Starbucks located near my office. I’ve been stopping here for bagels (made from scratch on site) for fifteen years. In the beginning there were three workers: a bagel maker and two counter people. Now they’ve expanded their space and there are a dozen workers at any given time throughout the day. You’d think with the cost of everything going up that people would be looking to cut out unnecessary expenses…like a bagel and coffee for $4.00, when they could eat toast and coffee at home for a tenth that amount.

In fact, not only is the Bagel Bin doing a land office business, added to the adults who used to wait in line there are now children. Eleven- to-14-year-olds, buying bagels, bottled water, and juices. I can tell by the way they pull the folding money out of their pockets and handle it prior to giving it to the cashier that they didn’t earn it. They don’t have jobs or even paper routes. They barely know what money is, yet they’re packing enough to buy non-necessities alongside adults.

Where does the money come from?

Print versus electronic media

Rochester’s daily newspaper, the Democrat & Chronicle,  recently announced it was laying off fifty staff. These aren’t the first folks to leave and likely won’t be the last. Downsizing at newspapers is a national trend. The D&C attributed the work force cut to a dwindling advertising base and a loss of younger readers to competitive electronic media.

Art, a once-a-week diner patron, is a part-time professor of journalism and communication at the local community college. I ask him his thoughts about the future of printed newspapers. His answer surprises me. He doesn’t have to talk complex economics or abstract media theory to make his point.

“My students don’t even read newspapers. They have other sources…TV, the internet. There’s been a paradigm shift in how we get information and in what we actually perceive as valuable information.”

Abandoning print media in favor of electronic information isn’t occurring just in Art’s classroom; it’s everywhere. In fact, as I speak there is a stack of new phone books in the front foyer of my apartment building. They’ve been there for a month. None of the tenants have claimed them. I can recall a time when the new phone books came out and people grabbed them up; took extras; flat out stole their neighbors’ copies. Now, there sits the new yellow and white pages, ignored and unwanted, just like, well, spam.