Coming Downtown: Bumblebee-Costumed Minimum-Wage City Hosts
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So the word on the street is that come July 1, an out-of-state company will hire a dozen or so city hosts, dress them up like bumblebees and have them patrol Pacific Ave. daily. Seriously.
Their mission is to thwart illegal, annoying and disruptive activity on the strip in hopes of rejuvenating the bottom line for local businesses.
Their price tag is a jaw-dropping $130,000, which will be paid out to Service Group Inc., a company based in Pennsylvania, by the Downtown Management Corp.
Euphemistically known as “city hosts,” these ridiculously dressed employees — they will wear yellow polos and black pants “in such a way that is clearly visible and attractively displayed” (direct quote from the company’s website) — will patrol downtown and report loiterers and panhandlers to the police.
And if precedent has any bearing, this idealistically Orwellian plot to scrub our city clean of what the local businesses deem as “undesirables” will flop. And flop big time.
The idea of a city host program is by no means a new one. In 1994, the Downtown Association funded a similar and cheaper program that within a few months succumbed to failure. Some of their problems included high employee turnover because of low wages, disorganization and ineffectiveness.
Earlier this year, the city jumped in the mix by passing a set of controversial ordinances that required jail time for repeat loitering and panhandling offenders, increased fines for the same charges and implemented laughable restrictions on the time someone could sit on a bench downtown. These changes were overwhelmingly supported by local businesses. Obviously, they feel they’ve failed.
Even more recently, the bus station downtown began playing classical music through cheap, plastic speakers in front of the station in hopes of spurning panhandling. I guess it was infeasible for the city to install speakers for the length of the strip that would give justice to Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Or maybe local businesses owners just don’t dig the Romantics.
Worse yet, Service Group Inc. hasn’t proven they’re worth a dime. The company has run several similar programs in cities like San Jose, Denver and Camden, N.J. Most of us know what San Jose looks like — for those locals claiming downtown isn’t even worth seeing here in Santa Cruz, I suggest you take a brisk walk through downtown San Jose at night. I also suggest you bring mace, knives and a gun. As for Camden, N.J., one research firm named Camden the second most dangerous city in America last year. That dubious award came three years after Service Group Inc. was hired to reduce crime in the city.
Most importantly, what are we supposed to make of this price tag? As most people realize by now, we’re in the midst of a severe economic crisis. The state of California is about to hijack over a million dollars from the city of Santa Cruz. On top of that, the city is facing the largest deficit since Santa Cruz’s birth as an American town in 1876. There are hundreds of other programs and organizations that are more deserving of $130,000 in this climate. Obviously, the Downtown Management Corp., which is funded by local business owners, can do what it wants with its money. But it seems overly simplistic and irrational to assume that dumping well over $100,000 into a Orwellian snitch program can really reignite sales downtown.
If we really want the homeless off the streets of downtown, and that’s what this program really intends to do, then we need to invest that $130,000 in cheap housing, medical and psychiatric care and job reeducation programs.
Increasing the police force — something many people have suggested — and hiring goons in bumblebee outfits will do nothing to reduce loitering and panhandling, and certainly will not lead to an explosion of sales downtown in this economic environment.
I’m afraid that in hopes of making a few extra dollars, the city and local business owners are forgetting what Santa Cruz is about. We’re here together in this tiny speck on the map, whether we like it or not, so let’s make it work together.
Rather than invest huge sums of cash in programs that are destined to fail or at best bandaid an aging wound, the Downtown Management Corp. should invest in a working cure.
Click here to read more of Daniel’s writing at his blog.
Local Duo Launch Graphic Design Biz
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Young & Talented is a new monthly series that will spotlight some of the exciting things young entrepreneurs, artists and musicians are doing here in Santa Cruz.
SANTA CRUZ — As many people try to weather the economic storm that’s been blowing full force for months now, a young local duo are heading straight into the winds with the launch of their inaugural business. Earlier this month, Davy Reynolds, 26, and Ruby Anaya, 23, launched Parachute Creative, a graphic design firm that creates everything from band posters to candy packaging.
As Anaya puts it, “If we don’t know how to make something right off the bat, we find a way.”
And already things are moving quickly. Reynold’s eccentric band posters have become ubiquitous in store windows downtown in the last few weeks. He now does poster designs for upcoming performances at The Red and 515. Parachute Creative also designed HappySantaCruz.com, a site co-founded by city councilmember Ryan Coonerty.
In the month since they launched, Parachute Creative has done work for local bands, real estate agents, the Santa Cruz Design & Innovation Center and Ashby Confections, a local chocolatier.
Reynolds, who looks like a clean Russel Brand (he was born in England as well), brings an out-of-the-box illustration talent that always starts with a pencil and paper. Anaya, who graduated from UC Santa Cruz last spring with a degree in biology, handles the administrative side of business making appointments, talking to prospective clients and giving Reynolds her frank opinion on his work before he sends it out.
“She’s ridiculously and annoyingly intelligent,” Reynolds said. “Whenever I get really stressed, Ruby helps me figure out a solution.”
In a few short weeks, they’ve managed to build a client base that’s increasing everyday. While I was interviewing them in their office, a new client called to setup a project.
“We’re getting more and more referrals every day,” Reynolds said.
But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Before they launched, they were broke, had just left their previous job and didn’t even have a proper computer.
So armed with a $5,000 small business loan — they had hoped for $10,000 — and Anaya’s brother’s computer, they opened up shop in NextSpace, a collaborative downtown office home to freelancers and small business owners, keeping the thought of failure out of their head.
“Failure pretty much wasn’t an option,” Reynolds said. “I figured there was no way I could lose considering the amount of sweat we put into this.”
But the stakes were high. Just last week, Reynold’s credit card was declined when he tried to purchase a coffee at Lulu’s.
In light of this, things are pretty bare bones at the home office. But you can still tell there’s a designer in house. Reynold’s sits at a desk made of cinder blocks and wood. On it sits the company’s first and only major purchase — a brand new 24-inch iMac. The mainstay of the business.
Other items include skateboard decks that he designed himself and a black and white TV that plays two blurry channels throughout the workday. It serves as an good-luck omen for Parachute Creative. Reynolds found it on the side of the road while driving home from his final day at his last design firm. Anaya and he had discussed how cool it’d be to have a vintage TV that played skateboarding videos in their new office all day. A few minutes later, on his way home, he found exactly what he was looking for on the side of Seabright Avenue. A tiny 13-inch black and white TV. And it worked.
“It seemed like a real clear sign,” Reynolds said. “I knew I was ready to take the risk.”
Creative Parachute’s launch comes in the midst of a number of burgeoning campaigns like Keep Santa Cruz Weird, NextSpace and cheap housing for artists at the Tannery Arts Center to keep local talent and encourage new talent to come to Santa Cruz. It finally seems to be working.
“The economy is moving more and more towards design,” Coonerty said. “Manufacturing can be outsourced, but communities that can attract companies in need of good design and innovation or, even better, grow our own companies, will be the sustainable communities of the future.”
As for the future, Anaya and Reynolds hope to branch off and do design work in the industries that interest them. Most notably, action sports like surfing, skateboarding and snowboarding and t-shirt design.
“We’re going to start an apparel line with limited runs,” Reynolds said. “We’re going to try to get consignment in O’Neill’s, Pacific Wave and Krate.”
But really, they just want to provide quality illustrations with a personal connection and beat an economic storm that had them up to their heads just a month ago.
“For us, it’s not just another paycheck,” Reynolds said. “And I genuinely mean that. Two hundred dollars or $10,000, they’re going to get the same level of personal attention.”
New Game Memorializes a Life Lost
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SANTA CRUZ — In a lot of ways, Sofia Wardle was like most 7-year-old kids. She loved to sing and dance to Hannah Montana, Hilary Duff and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. She dreamed of becoming a professional singer one day. She often flashed a toothy grin and showed off her big hazel-brown eyes for her parents’ camera just like her favorite artists do.
She loved the color pink. She collected pink clothes, stickers, even a pink sheepskin rug from England. Sometimes you could catch her in pink t-shirt, hat and sunglasses.
She was a typical kid who wanted a typical life.
But unlike most kids her age, Sofia battled a rare and malignant blood disease called histiocytosis that left her painfully ill and with huge blistering lesions on her hands and feet. Some mornings her parents would find her crying on the floor of her room and battling to get dressed for school but unable to because of the piercing pain.
“Even when she was feeling pretty crappy, she was determined to go to school and learn with her friends,” said Dave Wardle, her father.
Tragically the disease, which affects one in 200,000 children, took her life late last year.
But she battled until the end. Before she passed away, her father and she began work on SofiaMaze, an online game that takes players on a maze from Sofia’s home in Aptos to Lucile Packard’s Children Hospital in Palo Alto.
“It’s a fun game that we hoped would raise awareness and funds for histiocytosis research,” Wardle said.
On April 24, in honor of what would have been Sofia’s eighth birthday, her father released the game as a memorial to her life.
“Sofia never got to see it finished, so it’s turned into a celebration of her life,” Wardle said. “She wanted to do something to make sure no one else had to go through what she was going through.”
In the game, which takes about 30 minutes to finish, players are taken on detours to Sofia’s favorite places on the way to the hospital. A typical detour has you choose whether Sofia wants to take her wheelie backpack, pink backpack or bike helmet. Each one takes you down a different route, but only one ultimately leads to the hospital.
Sofia’s toothy grin leads players through the maze.
She also left her aesthetic touch on the game. All of the colors — the pinks and pale blues — fonts and many of the detours were chosen by Sofia.
Her 5-year-old brother, Quinn, also chipped in by approving all the photos of himself in the maze.
“I made sure he’s OK with all his pictures,” Wardle said with a smile.
Quinn still struggles to understand why his big sister is gone though, much like the rest of Sofia’s family, friends and community.
Sofia’s struggles actually began five years before her passing when she was diagnosed with Leukemia at age 2. It was a gut-wrenching diagnosis, but there were good treatments available locally. Beyond the odds, the family stayed optimistic.
After a few years of chemotherapy, things were looking up. Sofia was putting weight back on, and she was more energetic. Her hair grew back and she was regularly attending Rio del Mar Elementary School with her peers.
“She turned into this really bouncy kid,” Wardle said.
But then bumps began to appear on her hands and feet. Dermatologists initially dismissed them as warts, a common side effect of chemotherapy. They changed their minds when the lesions grew larger than quarters and became unbearably painful. Often times, it hurt too much to walk.
Sofia was diagnosed with histiocytosis.
A few weeks later, while he drove to work, Wardle came up with the idea to create a site of some sort.
“Initially, I thought we’d put up some pictures and talk about her disease,” he said.
It quickly became more than that. Because histiocytosis is an orphan disease, one which the government doesn’t fund research for because of its rarity, he thought it’d be great to create a site that raised money to research a cure.
That idea soon became SofiaMaze. For the next few months, father, mother, daughter and brother bounced around town taking pictures in the places that would eventually become the backbone of the game.
“I enlisted a bunch of different friends and family to chauffeur us around so I could focus on taking pictures,” he said.
Being the 7-year-old girl she was, Sofia sometimes wanted to go for ice cream or a visit to the park instead of finish the shoot, so it took longer than expected.
As they finished their shoots, Sofia’s condition dramatically worsened. By June, doctors suggested placing her in a hospice.
“It was shocking how quickly it went south,” said Rich Mundell, a close family friend and office colleague. “It seemed to be going in the right direction and then it just took a turn for the worst.”
Until the end, Sofia fought for a normal life. The weekend before her death she made a trip to Claire’s, a jewelry store popular with young girls, in the local mall with her best friend.
Her memory shines on through SofiaMaze.
In the week it’s been up, the site has already raised over $10,000. Over 50 percent of the donations have come from people Sofia never met. Her father hopes to eventually raise a $1 million to donate towards research for a cure.
“The reaction has been very positive,” Wardle said. “You’d expect family and friends to be enthusiastic, and they’ve been fantastic. But people have reached out from across the states and the globe. It’s really wonderful.”
For more information or to donate visit SophiaMaze.com or join the Facebook group.
Contact the author at daniel@cournalist.com. Photos provided by Dave Wardle.
The Domino Effect
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DOES THE DEATH OF PRINT JOURNALISM MEAN THE END OF SMALL BUSINESS?
Earlier this week, my father passed on a poignant article asking the same question that’s been on the minds of thousands of small business owners across the country — Does the death of the newspaper mean the death of small business?
The stipulation being that without local dailies local businesses don’t have a place to advertise, announce job openings or spotlight their community involvement.
No doubt it’s a real threat. Newspapers in their current incarnation are fast becoming an ephemeral memory of the bygone days. Two-daily cities are dropping to one and many economists predict it won’t be long before a major city is paperless. Even more papers are now in talks to ditch the physical product for an online-only version.
Small business owners argue that without a local daily they won’t be able to reach their clients. They won’t be able to update the community on sales, the most recent addition to their menu or a community fundraiser.
But they’re wrong. Rather than a death sentence, the fall of the print paper is actually a blessing in disguise if small businesses are willing to make the necessary adjustments to the Internet.
Over 75 percent of Americans use the Internet, according to a recent poll by the PEW Internet & American Life Project. I’d bet a lot of money that not that many people are reading their local daily across the country.
Here in Santa Cruz, the Sentinel’s circulation has dropped below 25,000 countywide. That’s in a county of 250,000. I’ll be generous with the statistics. Let’s say only half of the county is using the Internet. That still means there are 100,000 more people in Santa Cruz County on the Internet than reading the Sentinel. Yikes!
If anything, small businesses will benefit by switching to the Internet. They’ll reach a larger and broader base (I know my little brother isn’t reading the paper, but he’s spending hours on the Internet every week). And it’s cheaper. An ad that costs thousands of dollars in the print edition of the Sentinel costs a fraction of that it in their online edition.
As for posting job openings, Craigslist, Monster and Santacruzjobs.com have all proven their value. They’re cheaper than posting in print classifieds and you can vet potential candidates electronically, which saves time and allows you to quickly eliminate erroneous applications. Again, using the Internet is easier, quicker and cheaper.
And there’s no reason that the Internet can’t provide a platform to organize and mobilize the community. Facebook, Myspace and other social networking tools have more than proven their usefulness around the globe. And it’s not like journalism is going away. If anything, it’s exploding. New startups are appearing across the country.
Non-profits, citizen journalism publications like the Cournalist and traditional companies who’ve made the move to the Internet will all still exist. They will still write about local events, companies and fundraisers. And they’re all going to be looking for advertising revenue in one way or another.
And opportunities for broader audiences and novel ways of reaching them will continue to expand on the Internet. No longer will advertising have to be one dimensional. Direct interaction between businesses and their consumers will soon be the norm. And it’s for the better. If a customer doesn’t like your ad or thinks it’s ineffective, he or she will have the ability to tell you immediately. No more guessing games for small business owners. They’ll be able to know exactly how many people their ads get in front of, and they’ll be able to follow it live.
Rather than write a requiem for small businesses, we should embrace the powerful opportunities the Internet provides. I sense the real issue is whether small businesses are willing to become more creative in their efforts to reach a broader community, because the tools for reaching them are here and they aren’t going anywhere.
Read more of Daniel Wilkinson’s work at his blog.
The Legend of Captain Groggy Swagger
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SANTA CRUZ — Captain Groggy Swagger was visible through a break in the metal fencing at the Santa Cruz North Harbor parking lot. He stood at the helm of a sailboat with Rock and Roll painted in block letters across the stern. He wore a floppy hat, loose breeches and a crimson coat that reached around his healthy paunch. By his side were two men — one dressed in a white button-up that fell to his knees and the other in an “I workout” t-shirt that had a picture of a Wii controller. His motley crew.
He barked orders at the two. “Grab that line,” he said. “Pull it this way.”
The two stumbled around the 27-foot sailboat trying to keep up with his orders. Together the men had logged only a couple of hours at sea.
“Keep pulling,” Swagger continued with a matter-of-fact look on his face.
Little did I know that for the next four hours I would join this disjointed crew as we raced and sometimes inched along the California coast on one of the first beautiful spring days of the year.
Thus beginning my introduction to modern day piracy. No Somalis, hostages, tankers or ransoms though. Only a lot of booze, bad pirate jokes and inexperienced sailing.
But let me back up for a second. Swagger the pirate is actually a 33-year-old native Santa Cruzan named Aaron Rhodes. By day he hovers over a computer and consults for an IT company on the East Coast. But when he’s on his boat, he’s a pirate. And so is everyone else. As he wrote on his blog in January, “The first rule on my boat is, if we go sailing you must be in full pirate regalia.”
Luckily, he made an exception for this unprepared reporter.
A Schooling in Modern Day Piracy
Rhodes didn’t seriously adopt his ulterior identity, Captain Groggy Swagger, until last November when he bought and began living on the sailboat. He founded the Santa Cruz Pirate Fest, an annual celebration of everything pirate, earlier that summer, but had never given serious thought to living at sea.
Back then, he didn’t have any clue that he’d like sailing or that he’d live on a sailboat one day. He knew almost nothing about it. He was hoping to buy a home at the time, but couldn’t find a banker who’d give him a reasonable loan.
“I made more than a lot of couples combined, but that didn’t matter to them,” he said. “They didn’t want to take a risk with someone who is single.”
So in an odd way, one might say he has the mortgage crisis to thank for his current living situation.
Regardless, one day while driving by the North Harbor after weeks of failed attempts to get a loan, he got an idea.
“I realized I could just live on a boat,” he said. “No rent.”
Thus began a serious journey to do exactly that. He started by reading books on the basics of sailing and shopping around for a boat. He had absolutely no experience, so he had to learn everything from scratch. Think learning where the stern, bow, starboard and port sides of a boat are.
“I setup an appointment with some guy who was going to teach me the basics, but he never showed up,” Rhodes said. “So I decided to just learn it all on my own.”
When he got word from a broker that a sailboat in his price range was available, he jumped on the opportunity. Before he knew it, he was the proud owner of a 1982 Catalina 27.
“I like it,” he said with a grin. “It’s my first boat.”
And the first home he’s ever owned. His mortgage on the sea.
He gave up his studio apartment and most his furniture and moved onto the $17,000 sailboat in November. He traded a bed for a mattress stuffed in a closet-sized room at the front end of the sailboat.
He was obviously willing to give up a lot of the luxuries of living on land, but he wasn’t about to leave behind his technology. He might be the only pirate in the history of the world to have his schooner outfitted with a flat screen TV, Xbox 360 and wireless Internet.
Beyond technology, the living side of the bargain has been a breeze.
“There have been no major issues,” he said about the transition.
During the winter months when temperatures can dip into the 40s at night he just hooks up a space heater. Electric and water access are included in a $500 a month slip fee (the rent to keep his boat in the harbor). Slip fee and a $250 loan payment for his boat means his monthly living expenses amount to $750. That’s dramatically lower than before when his studio apartment alone cost him $1,200 a month.
The sailboat is setup for cooking as well. “I eat lots of shish kabobs,” he said. “They’re easy.”
He showers and gets his laundry done at NextSpace, a co-working office space in downtown Santa Cruz where he also telecommutes for work. It also provides him with a mailing address. They allow him to use the office address as his home address when necessary.
“NextSpace filled in all the missing pieces,” Rhodes said.
Though the transition was seemingly easy, he hadn’t overcome his largest hurdle.
Learning to Sail
Rhodes bought his sailboat without knowing how to use it.
“I couldn’t get the boat home on my own,” he admitted.
Though he had spent hours reading books on sailing, he still didn’t feel confident enough to dive into by himself. Luckily his grandfather had owned a sailboat years earlier and volunteered to guide him for his first sailing trip.
“He answered all the questions I couldn’t answer with books,” he said.
In return, he allowed his grandparents on the boat without sporting the required pirate attire.
“My grandmother wouldn’t have been happy if I had asked her to dress like a wench,” he said.
After that inaugural trip, he has slowly been getting a feel for proper sailing. He still insists on having other people with him. He made one trip out on his own, but was a bit overwhelmed.
“I don’t want to do that again anytime soon,” he said.
Joining the Crew for the Day
When I joined the crew for the day, it was Captain Groggy Swagger’s sixth outing. We found ourselves trying to escape the choppiest waters he’d ever been in (about 5-foot waves), caught in a kelp field, making absurdly slow and clumsy maneuvers and caught deep in the wallows of inebriation. Swagger never lost his composure, but at points it was questionable whether any of us knew what we were doing.
At one point, we found ourselves with dwindling rum supplies — “A captain’s worst nightmare,” Swagger proclaimed with an empty bottle in his hand — caught in a kelp field with no wind. As other sailboats raced by riding on an ostensibly endless supply of wind, we inched closer and closer towards the shore.
“What did pirates do in the past when there was no wind,” asked one of the shipmates.
“They waited and they got drunk,” Swagger said.
In response, another shipmate popped his head out from within the hull of the boat and brandished a fresh bottle of red wine. Soon enough, we found ourselves back in the grace of the wind. Excluding a close call involving the main sail and a low bridge, we eventually found ourselves back at the dock.
After a few remaining orders from Groggy to clean up the deck and a quick dinner, the crew returned to their cars to trek back to their terrestrial lives. But Captain Groggy Swagger disappeared back towards the dock — a modern day pirate.
Read more of Daniel Wilkinson’s work at his blog.
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
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Required reading for anyone who has ever read a newspaper.
Originally published by Clay Shirky on his blog at Shirky.com.
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.
As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
* * *The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
* * *Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.
What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
* * *If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage — a breaking story, a key interview — at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.
For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.
The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.
The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.
* * *Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.
In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
Writing Contest Reminder
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Just a friendly reminder that entries for the Cournalist’s first writing contest are due on March 31. We’ve had some solid submissions, but there is still plenty of opportunity for competition.
Here’s a snippet from the original announcement detailing some of the rules -
On March 31, Graham and I will take the day off and begin sorting through all of the submissions. On April 1, we’ll announce the top three articles. First place will receive $100. Second place will receive $50. Third place will receive $25. Also, as an added bonus to everyone, we’ll buy a set of business cards for any cournalist who submits more than three articles over 400 words this month.
You can also read the original entry here.
Best and good luck!
Local artist transforms junk into guitars
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Robbie Schoen doesn’t play guitar. Like most people, he’d never made one either. But a few years ago, as he raced down Highway 1, the glint of a rusty catalytic converter on the side of the road caught his eye.
“It was saying take me home and string me up,” said Schoen, a Santa Cruz sculptor whose exhibit “Spare Guitars” is currently being shown at the Felix Kulpa Gallery & Sculpture Garden.
And that’s exactly what he did. With the help of a friend, who’s been repairing guitars for 30 years, Schoen fashioned that rusty piece of metal, once belonging to a GM car or truck, into a fully functioning electric guitar.
The first guitar, “Wreck & Roll,” was sold and a series was born. Of the 13 guitars he’s currently working on or finished, he has used shovels, skateboards, shredded tires, a parking sign, a satellite dish, an Ouija board and other objects.
“Probably the most popular is the Millennium Fender,” he said. It is furnished with a Star Wars Millennium Falcon toy he found in an antique shop. “It really captures peoples’ imaginations. People come in and say, ‘I had that toy when I was little.’”
These days, friends bring odd knickknacks that they’ve found in their home or in antique stores to him. His toilet seat guitar was made out of a toilet seat a friend who owns a secondhand material builder’s yard gave him. But he still keeps his eye out for just the right object for his next project.
“I’m constantly keeping my eye out for something that I can use,” Schoen said. “You just wait and eventually you’ll find something that fits right in.”
He has previously showcased his “Spare Guitars” series in San Francisco at The Dark Room. He has sold two for $2,400 a piece. One of these new owners, Isaac Frankle, who purchased a shovel guitar, has become something of a local sensation playing the shovel guitar on the Internet and at local venues.
“As sculptures they’re great, but when you find out they’re fully functioning guitars it’s really exciting,” he said. “You can go on YouTube and actually see the ‘shovel guitar guy.’”
Schoen hopes by recycling discarded objects into functioning guitars that he’ll enlighten peoples’ lives.
“When you come to a gallery, you’re pulled out of your routine then it [the art] hits you like a thunderbolt,” he said. “That’s what art is for.”
No word on whether a thunderbolt guitar is in the works, but donated junk continues to come in.
Check out “Spare Guitars” at the Felix Kulpa, located in downtown Santa Cruz on Elm Street. See the map below for the exact location.
This article was originally published in the Courant Times on Dec. 13, 2008. You can contact the author at daniel@cournalist.com.
Read more of Daniel Wilkinson’s work at his blog.
Outlook is Ominous for Watsonville Schools
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UPDATE: The PVUSD is currently in session at Aptos High School, and will vote on the final version of the proposed budget tonight.
WATSONVILLE — Hundreds of teachers, parents and students packed Ann Soldo Elementary School beyond capacity last night to hear the PVUSD’s latest budget proposal. Outside dozens more people barred from entering held up signs and chanted, “Open the doors!”
Hoping to close a $14 million deficit — reduced from $17 million earlier this week — the proposal called for the elimination of 227 jobs, a reduction of healthcare benefits by 12 percent and other cutbacks.
The cuts left almost no one untouched. They will impact 9 percent of teaching jobs, 10 percent of administrative jobs and 16 percent of classified worker jobs from the district. Many after school programs will be eliminated. Teachers will pay more for their health care as well. Co-pays, deductibles and prescription drug costs will all increase.
The proposal also will eliminate the few remaining nursing jobs in the district.
Last week, a similar meeting was postponed because of overcrowding. Last night, the problem was even worse.
“We told them we were going to pack the place,” said Don Brown, a veteran teacher at Watsonville High School. “As teachers, we have to prepare for class. These guys should have prepared with a larger venue.”
The situation grew tense at moments as the overflowing crowd banged on the doors and chanted over megaphones. The board of trustees threatened to close the meeting to the public at one point.
But as the meeting progressed, the crowd thinned.
Teachers dressed in “Got Future” t-shirts voiced outrage at the cuts saying administrators should suffer the same consequences as teachers. PVUSD administrators are among the highest paid in the county while their teachers juggle the lowest salaries. Many teachers emphasized this point.
“The top administrators just received an 8 percent raise last year,” said Annette Barity, a math teacher at Watsonville High School. “If they want us to take pay cuts then they should too.”
Many teachers also said that the district should close The Towers, the district’s administrative offices that housed a hospital prior to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. They said the offices could easily be housed in cheaper and more energy efficient facilities saving the district thousands of dollars a year.
The district argued that there was no available property in Watsonville that fit the bill.
Because of the drastic cuts, Pablo Barrick, a teacher at Watsonville High School, said he and his wife had debated moving to Texas where they could make nearly as much money but pay much less on a mortgage. “I grew up here,” he said. “I’m very much a product of this school district. I’d hate to have to leave.”
There were a few bright spots in an otherwise depressing budget. School libraries, which many people thought would be cut, were saved by the district. Also, teachers will enjoy a higher annual dental allowance in the coming year.
Still, the mood was ominous inside and outside the school as many teachers weighed their future.
“The district needs to recognize its most valuable asset – its people,” said Brown.
PVUSD Will Announce Cutbacks, Layoffs Tonight
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The PVUSD’s Board of Trustees will release the district’s budget at the Ann Soldo Elementary School’s Multipurpose Room at 7 p.m. tonight. Dozens of teaching jobs and other cutbacks are expected to be announced. If so, the district’s student-to-teacher ratio could jump as high as 30 to 1.
The meeting is open to the public and will include a public input session. Last week’s budget’s meeting was filled beyond capacity with over 300 people, so the district decided to move to a larger venue this week. I suggest you arrive early if you’re hoping for a seat.
The cutbacks come amid a $42 billion statewide deficit. Here are some articles from local papers regarding the issue:
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/education/ci_11823450
http://www.register-pajaronian.com/V2_news_articles.php?heading=0&story_id=6798&page=72
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FROM THE EDITORS » |
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Writing Contest Reminder PVUSD Will Announce Cutbacks, Layoffs Tonight Writing Contest! Experiments In Print Capitola Call to Service Meet-up