Labor Day, Capitalism and a Failure of Newspapers

I read an interesting article yesterday.

It was timed no doubt, as is this one, to coincide with Labor Day.

It's an old newspaper trope, tying an article to the calendar to increase it's relevance. Usually it works, that's why we do it.

This article was published by the Neiman Foundation at Harvard, which tracks trends in journalism, and it was adapted  from Christopher R. Martin’s 2019 book, “No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class," published by Cornell University Press.

The gist of it is that in the 1960s and 1970s, newspapers abandoned the idea of a mass audience and, driven by a desire to capture an audience most attractive to advertisers, began to target their content toward those more affluent audiences.

As a result, "newspapers pursued more upscale readers with workplace 'lifestyle' columns featuring the lives of young professionals and their concerns about office gossip, job interview strategy, expense accounts, and office party etiquette. Personal finance news also began its ascendancy in the 1970s. The focus was on individualism: people had to take care of themselves. Time Inc.’s launch of the magazine Money in 1972 helped to kick off a boom in personal finance stories, which assumed that every upscale reader had an investment portfolio," Martin wrote.

This trend away from covering the concerns of the working class also can be measured, in part, by the loss of reporters covering the "labor beat."

"Today there are just six full-time labor reporters in the top 25 newspapers across the U.S., none in network or cable news, none at NPR or PBS, and just a few at digital news organizations and magazines," according to Martin.

This new business trajectory  which changed the target news audience from mass to upscale, "altered the actual news narratives about the working class in US journalism," according to Martin.

Martin tells us, "the upscale focus of the news upset the status of labor unions and upended politics through the last third of the twentieth century and beyond. The mainstream news media’s write-off of the working class set the conditions for the decline of labor and working class news and the rise of a deeply partisan conservative media that hailed the abandoned white, working-class audience. (Working-class women and people of color had no similar emergent news media platform to pursue them as an audience.) The right wing then attacked the upscale-focused mainstream news media as 'elite' and ultimately as 'the enemy of the people.' Given this politicized media infrastructure, the 'surprise' of a Donald Trump presidency seems much less of one."

I think Martin is spot on.

Mercury file photo

Pottstown was once a town where work equaled wealth.

It's not much different than how the increased concentration of national media on the coasts creates what some  call "parachute coverage" of the "fly-over states" -- a New York Times or CNN reporter parachutes into St. Louis to report on unrest there using the same tone and methodology that they would to cover unrest in Kosovo -- and then beats a hasty retreat back to New York with a report on "what's happening over there."

There is little attempt to get a deeper understanding of the situation, get some context, understand the why; just report the what and get the hell out of Dodge.

Sunday's front page

Similarly, says Martin, the news media now "usually look at the working class only through the lens of a political news story, not through the lens of a labor or workplace story. Second, the news media typically consider the 'working class' not in its entirety, but just in the stereotypical white male form, which nicely serves the purposes of divisive politicians who seek to exploit this image and divide working-class people on every other dimension: race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and citizenship."

I often write in this space about the public service aspect of journalism, particularly the only kind I have ever practiced, local journalism.

But this pursuit of an "upscale" audience belies that claim.

You are not serving all the people, or even most of the people, if you are tailoring your coverage to appeal primarily to the wealthier segment of the country, the people with more money to spend on your advertisers' products.

But this was done because at the time, journalism was also a viable business and the decision to pursue a wealthy audience was a business decision, not a decision to practice better journalism.

To be sure, there are plenty of other factors contributing to the decline of newspapers.

Fat and complacent for decades, newspaper managers and publishers failed to see the threat, and potential promise, of the Internet and repeatedly failed to adapt to the assaults on longtime revenue sources, like classified ads. As Google and Facebook scooped up the lion's share of online advertising, there was little left to support the traditional newspaper business model.

But I'm left to ask if local newspapers might not have had more resilience, more time to adapt to those changes, had we continually sought to remain relevant to all the people, not just the ones with disposable income.

The business side of the business, the capitalists, not the journalists, made a business decision.

And, as it turns out, it was a pretty short-sighted one.

Perhaps that's because the late 60 and early 70s was also when local newspapers started getting bought up by chains, when Wall Street got involved.

Wall Street has ever been focused on the next quarter, not the next quarter century.

That's when making payroll, covering costs and serving your community was replaced with meeting profit projections, cutting costs and serving your shareholders.

We are now in the final, late-stage consequence of this choice.

Having abandoned the working class, they, quite understandably, have abandoned us.

And, ironically, that fickle up-scale audience we chased has as well.

They're all now getting their news digitally without realizing (or caring) that much of the digital news they read  is the re-written work product of a newspaper reporter. Or, if not, that it has not been verified for accuracy or made much of an attempt at fairness.

All too often its primary characteristic is what faux conservative talk show host Stephen Colbert comedically, but prophetically, coined as "truthiness."

Dictionary.com formally defines truthiness as: "the quality of seeming to be true according to one's intuition, opinion, or perception without regard to logic, factual evidence, or the like."

Further, the increasingly fractured news audience remain largely united in one aspect, they are outraged at the idea that they should be asked to pay for news "when it's free on the Internet."

What should we expect from an audience that has never purchased a newspaper?

The bottom line here is when you let the money men make the decisions, they make decisions about money, not journalism, and certainly not community.

Hedge funds and technology have brought us from full newsrooms,

at left in the good old days, to no newsrooms and reporters who work

at home. No, my view is not nearly so dramatic.

And when the money dries up because of the decisions they've made, or failed to make, they take their stock options and put the business up for a fire sale.

And that's when the parasites show up.

Just like in the natural world, the financial world has bottom feeders, those who take what is left, what is perceived to have little value -- financial value at least -- and strip it for parts to extract what' profit they can, a process made infinitely easier if you have no intention of making that businesses sustainable for the long haul.

They sell the real estate to a shell company, and charge the company rent to occupy a building it once owned. Eventually, they put the building up for sale too, particularly if the rent payments have covered the original purchase price.

They cut staff and run articles from other newspapers they own in the area, filling the pages with less relevant content than readers used to enjoy; thus giving readers less reason to buy that newspaper again.

The Aug. 6 edition of The Vindicator, almost its last,
comes off the press.

The practice has become so common it even has a name: "ghost newspapers."

And Youngstown, Ohio is about to- find out what that's like.

When Youngstown's newspaper, The Vindicator, failed to find a buyer, a neighboring company bought the name, the masthead and the subscription list after it went under.

The Vindicator's final edition.

They certainly won't employ any of the journalists who know the town best.

Instead, they will continue to publish a "Vindicator" that is filled with stories about other towns, not Youngstown.

Yesterday, the day after the final Vindicator was published, the Tribune Chronicle took over publishing The Vindicator in Mahoning County.

“It’s going to be The Vindicator edition of the Tribune Chronicle,” Charles Jarvin, publisher of the Trib told WKBN News. “It will have The Vindicator masthead on it. It will be of the style of the Tribune Chronicle, however, as we go forward but it will be the Vindicator edition of the Tribune Chronicle.”

For a time, The Mercury was somewhat insulated from this trend.

The front page of the Aug. 13, 1948 edition.

Pottstown was always a working town.

Whether it was Bethlehem Steel, Firestone, Flagg Brass, Doehler-Jarvis, Gudebrod, Dana or Mrs. Smith's Pies, the business of Pottstown required labor.

Lots of it.

So covering Pottstown meant covering the lives of the people who worked at those plants.

When I arrived here from New York in 1997, I was amazed at how much Pottstown still resembled a community from the 50s or the 60s.

And like those communities, the local newspaper was still a vital part of life here.

But about a year after I arrived, word came that Mrs. Smith's Pies had been sold. It was only the latest in a long string of closures.

The Bethlehem Steel plant had been closed for years and the Doehler-Jarvis, Stanley Flagg Brass  and Gudebrod plants soon followed suit.

As the paying jobs fled for lower-paying shores, local businesses fell one by one to the national chains who could sell it for less. Never mind that the money spent there did not re-circulate in the community like with a locally owned business.

The Mercury building at 24 N. Hanover St., Pottstown

It was only a matter of time before Pottstown's local newspaper got caught up in what is happening all across the country.

According to Montgomery County property records, Goodson Holding Company sold The Mercury building at 24 N. Hanover St. on April 2, 2013 for $1.2 million.

The buyer was a company called 24 N. Hanover St. LLC whose address is 885 Third Ave. in Manhattan.

By no small coincidence, that is the address of Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that owns MediaNews Group, which owns The Mercury and all the other newspapers in the 50-mile radius.

So the company that bought the newspaper, purchased the newspaper building through a shell company with the same address, and extracted the value of the real estate by charging itself rent which, as many know, did not go into maintaining or repairing the venerable, but leaky old building.

The building has been on the market for more than a year, although several local sources have told me it has been sold. The transaction has not yet appeared in the county's property records so the final entry in that particular account book remains blank.

What should we do?

It would be nice to suggest that this Labor Day we newspaper people re-dedicate ourselves to covering all of our communities, not just our advertisers' customers, but I think it is already too late for that.

No one likes being taken for granted.

It is also probably too late for the wave of unionization that is sweeping those decimated newsrooms that remain as we try desperately to hold our ground against the final parasitical flood of hedge funds, mergers and buy-outs.

When Hurricane Agnes struck in 1972, we were there to tell the story.

I remain a proud member of the Newspaper Guild. I know I would not have earned a living wage all these years without them, and that allowed me to raise my son, buy a home for him to live in, send him to college and become a stakeholder in the community I cover. 

And I believe that unionizing will provide some protection to those newsroom employees who remain.

But unless there is a major shift in the local news business (should it even be a business?) and a sustainable model for paying us a living wage can be found, it won't be nearly enough.

The writing's on the wall. And then who will tell Pottstown's story?

-- 30 --

Enjoy the Joys (and Boys) of Summer With the Colebrookdale Railroad, No Labor Required

Colebrookdale Railroad will sponsor two vintage baseball games in Memorial Park on Sept. 9.

As Labor Day approaches, so too does the traditional end of summer.

But the Colebrookdale Railroad is offering you a chance to hold on to summer for just a little bit longer.

On Sunday and Monday, Sept. 3 and 4th, you can have your barbecue without having to cook. The railroad will do it for you.

"The sweet aroma of early fall will mix with the mouthwatering scent of hot dogs and hamburgers

The Colebrookdale will be grilling in the open car Sunday and Monday.

cooked on our open car's grill," the railroad wrote on its web site.."  Enjoy the beautiful scenery, relax with the family and let us take care of the grilling."

Both rides are at 1 p.m. and tickets range from $5 to $35 for most seats.

And if that ain't enough, consider watching a Vintage Baseball game on Saturday, Sept. 9. After all, they don't call them "the Boys of Summer" for nothing.

"It's a game like you’ll see in few places, played with rules from the 19th century. This is an experience for every baseball lover," according to a promotional email from the railroad.

Vintage players will ride with passengers on the train from Boyertown to Pottstown for the game in Memorial Park.

The Philadelphia Athletic BBC and the Harrisburg BBC will play  for two games of late 1800's vintage baseball.

Ticket Includes: One round-trip train ride, one baseball game ticket, a hot dog and an old-fashioned Reading Draft Company soda. Walk-up game tickets in Memorial Park are also available for $10.

The first game starts at noon, click here for tickets, which range from $5 to $70.

We Will Have to Fight for It

I have a confession to make.

Shortly after I started at The Mercury in 1997, we were purchased by a corporation that no longer exists -- The Journal Register Company.

And when it came time to vote on a new labor contract, I cast my vote for the new contract, because as a new employee who could not afford to go without pay, I just wanted to make sure I still had a job.

I had never worked at a union paper before, and was unsure what it meant.

I knew I was a hard worker and wasn't sure why I needed a union to make sure the company knew that.

I was young(er).

And I was stupid.

Because in voting for that contract we accepted the seeds of our own destruction.

And we were too greedy and too selfish to see it, or, at the very least, to acknowledge it.

I apologize to all of the people who work at The Mercury who were hired after me, because as things stand now, they will never be paid as much as I am.

You see that contract created something called the two-tier pay scale.

People who worked at The Mercury at the time the contract was approved would continue to enjoy their relatively high pay and benefits.

But everyone who came after?

They would be paid on a lower pay scale and have been ever since.

I have spent the last 12 years at the negotiating table to trying to undo the damage I did with that vote. I have yet to succeed.

At the time, the newspaper business was not in the kind of dire straits that it now finds itself, although you would not have known it from what the company lawyer was saying.

Returns for the stockholders had dropped below double digits!

The horror.

Of course that was just the beginning of the fall for the newspaper business and those of us who are members of The Newspaper Guild have engaged in a fighting retreat ever since, struggling to eke out some kind of raise at contract time, a raise inevitably consumed in its entirety by another hike in health care premiums.

We are fighting to tread water, not to gain ground, but not to lose too much of it.

And sad to say we counted ourselves lucky; lucky to extend existing contracts with no raise while other guild units suffered severe pay cuts, lay-offs and buy outs.

We've since had our share here too.

These are phrases familiar to the people of Pottstown.

Once a booming industrial town that made the steel for the Golden Gate, George Washington and Bear Mountain bridges, Pottstown enjoyed prosperity because the people who worked in its plants made a decent wage.

A decent wage that was spent in local stores; paid for a modest home and the occasional vacation.

A living wage that allowed for savings, a pension and, sometimes, a college education for their children.

They had unions to thank for that.

We owe a lot to the labor movement.

Overtime.

The eight-hour work day.

Paid vacations, although Americans take (or have) fewer than the rest of the west.

Sadly, it is also how our health care is delivered.

Interesting note, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was mulling over how to enact Social Security, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins urged the government to provide universal health care as well.

But because the factories were having trouble holding on to the workers building the "Arsenal of Democracy" he acquiesced to their desire to offer health care through work as an added benefit.

(Yes, back then, industry was clamoring to offer health care.)

But the chance for a health care system that works as well as Social Security seems lost forever, and we are forced to be thankful for Obamacare, a warmed over Republican plan that Republicans turned against once a Democrat proposed it.

None of these things in our work place we now take for granted came easily.

Unions had to fight and, in many cases, die for them.

Those who did, like so many of the veterans who died in wars that made corporations richer, deserve our thanks and our respect.

But really, who am I kidding?

You've read all these platitudes before at this time of year, about everything we owe the labor movement, that its more than just a barbecue, blah, blah blah.

And tomorrow is the day we all pretend to agree with its goals.

But the truth is, we have abandoned the labor movement.

Fully half the states in the U.S. are "right to work" states, meaning that you cannot be compelled to join a union and, most importantly, pay dues to a union as a condition of employment.

That sounds pretty good when you put it that way.

But missing from most of those laws is the provision that if you want to be free to skip union dues, you should also work outside the union contract that those dues paying members, through their joint action, negotiated to build a better lives for themselves and their families.

After all, the contract is with the UNION, not the people who work there and are not part of the union.

But that's not how it works. It works exactly the opposite. Workers in right to work states get all the salary and benefits and, if they are abused by their employer, see if you can guess who MUST take their case -- the very same people they refused to pay.

The elected officials bought by campaign contributions and cushy consulting jobs after they retire, made sure of that, more as a way to undermine unions than to protect workers rights to a free ride.

And we let it happen

Because we have allowed unions and "big labor" to be vilified as if it is the same thing as "big pharma" or "big oil."

Truth be told, some unions, like the corporations that faced them across the table, fell victim to the same thing that happens to any organization that tastes power. It abused it.

Not all of them certainly, but there were enough high-profile falls from grace to allow those who opposed them to exploit their excesses and build a narrative of corruption and greed.

Greed is the expertise of corporations and Wall Street, and anyone who thinks unions can compete in that arena is a fool.

What is not foolish is the primary goal of most union members.

What most of those of us who still belong to unions want is what every American who isn't already rich wants.

We want a living wage, one that allows you to raise a family, buy a house and send your children to college without taking on a crushing burden of debt.

We want some semblance of retirement security that is not dependent on the vagaries of a consequence-free stock market still drunk on derivatives and credit default swaps.

We want to take vacations with our families and to know that if we get sick, and we ALL get sick, that the decisions about our health care will not be based on how many co-pays we can afford that week.

If you wonder why Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls look no further than those simple wants and the slowly dawning recognition that none of the dozens of other presidential candidates in the field have any interest in fighting for those things regular Americans want.

It doesn't seem like much to ask for, but if you think the corporations that own and run this country are going to give it to us because we ask nicely, than you haven't been paying attention.

The only way we will get it, is the only way we ever have.

We will have to fight for it.

And if you have a better way of fighting multi-millionaires and their insatiable greed than with multi-millions of workers standing together, I'd like to hear it.

In the meantime, I have to get ready for the next negotiation with the hedge fund that owns The Mercury and try once again to undo the damage I did with a vote rooted in fear.

Love's Labors Lost?

Are we witnessing
print's final days?

It's Labor Day and I'm writing today about a group of people the media usually does not lump in with labor.

The media.

Or at least the newspaper portion of it, the foundation on which the rest of most newsgathering is built.

In case you don't know, no different from the steel mills and other plants that once dotted the landscape, local and national, the newspaper industry is another employer staggering through tough times.

The United States has shed one-fifth of its journalists since 2001, a figure that could rival any other moribund American enterprise.

Last Tuesday, The Harrisburg Patriot-News, the Pennsylvania newspaper  most others rely on for their news about doings in our Commonwealth's capitol, announced it will no longer be a daily newspaper.

Instead, the paper part of their operation, what most refer to as "print," will be published only three days a week.

Here's how the paper explained it to their readers:

Under the new company, The Patriot-News will change its print schedule to three days a week beginning in January 2013. At the same time, the organization will intensify its online and digital news-gathering efforts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The newspaper will continue to publish on Sundays. The other two days of publication will be determined after gathering input from readers and advertisers.

PA Media Group will offer larger newspapers on the three days it publishes — each on the scale of the current Sunday editions — and include many of the sections and features readers have come to expect from The Patriot-News. News. Sports. Entertainment. Go! PN Community. Even seven days of the comics will be run in full. 

Well at least the comics are still sacrosanct.

Only in the news business is your final duty
to cover your own lay-off.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I was not surprised.

It's happening to newspapers all over the country.

My surprise diminished even more when a friend with a better eye for detail than me pointed out the Patriot-News is owned by the Newhouse family, whose Advance company reduced the publication of the New Orleans Times-Picayune in June.

Of course, in New Orleans, with those reductions in publication came reductions in staff.

Whether the same will be true in Harrisburg, we can only guess but given that personnel is the second biggest expense in running a newspaper, I can't imagine the Patriot-News would have made this change without an eye toward those savings.

However, their promise to "intensify its online and digital news-gathering efforts," probably does not mean hiring more people. Rather, it more likely means running ragged the few people still luckily enough to work there when the dust settles.

The fact that the Patriot-News won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its coverage of the Joe Paterno scandal only emphasizes the fact that nothing can stop the market forces toppling once  mighty city dailies.

(The changing face of this industry is chronicled at the depressingly-named Newspaper Death Watch web site.)



I have some hope, laced, perhaps, with desperation, that the same thing will not happen to The Mercury, at least not any time soon.

The big city dailies grew as "aggregators." They collected news on a variety of subjects, from a variety of places, and put it all in one all-in-one package for easy consumption.

But one other thing the Internet has fragmented in America is the way we get our information. It is now possible to get our news from a pantheon of different sources, each specializing in a niche, or catering itself to our tastes, our timetable or, often enough, our politics.

Half-Off shampoo!!!

More and more, we find, people don't want a big package of six things they don't want, just to get two things they do want.

If they want coupons, they just go to coupons.com. And if they want sports news, they just go to sportsnews.com. The Internet has essentially turned the media landscape into an endless series of specialty magazines, once called "niche publications."

All of which is fine for the folks at macrame.com, but it leaves conventional journalism kind of twisting in the breeze.

You see, coverage of the news of the day is not always a great product to sell products: "Don't miss tomorrow's gripping report of the new zoning code!"

Is that stuff important? It is to the people whose property is about to get re-zoned. Does that stuff sell newspapers? Please.

But the journalism model now crumbling before our eyes requires that we sell newspapers. Its what allows us to stay independent of government influence so we can keep an eye on that government, at all levels.

The New Hampshire Gazette was one of the 38 newspapers being
published in the colonies when "the shot heard round the world"
occurred at Lexington and Concord and was one of the first newspapers
of the time to use a "headline." Thanks to the excellent Facebook
page, Reporting the Revolutionary War for this image and facts.

That is, after all, the responsibility we carry, the one that earns us the right to trumpet the First Amendment when we charge in, 60 Minutes Ambush Style, lights blazing, righteous indignation flying in every direction, and demand in the name of the people that a public official be held accountable to those who elected him or her.

Let's be honest.

It's not a responsibility we could claim to have upheld to the highest standard over the years. Sure, we did take down a corrupt president and numerous more local officials over the years, but more and more, that is the exception, not the rule.

And I tend to doubt the founders wanted to be sure that protection of our right to report car crashes, perp walks and news about Snookie's baby was enshrined in the Constitution.

If you didn't want to read this stuff, this
publication would not be in business.

But deny it if you will, its what sells papers and its what people want to read and that is what pays for coverage of the zoning meeting, or the government permit that may one day mean your water is polluted or your taxes go up.

Sadly, the balance between what we want to know and what we should want to know continues to tip in the wrong direction.

Further, I think it's fair to say, the founders did not reserve the right of the free press for just"professional journalists" either, so we should quit our bitchin' and get on with it. Believe me, we're trying.

I just hope people realize what they may lose when newspapers go away.

First of all, don't look to television. They're about 10 years behind us on the "your-model-is-no-longer-viable" curve and besides, there's very little a Philadelphia television station reports on in Pottstown that they haven't read about first in The Mercury.

Second of all, you will lose a professional standard under which we try to verify facts before reporting them.

I know, I know, the rush to be first and the Facebook frenzy and Twitter tremens, as filled with exclamation points as a 13-year-old girl's diary, that erupts anytime someone famous gets a hangnail leaves that standard in tatters as often as not.

This just in! Jersey Shore is Cancelled!!!!

And yes, people may think we're biased, or think we're lazy or unprincipled, but wait until they get a load of the information they will get from people who don't even have a standard to which they are supposed to rise.

Many of those folks aren't even getting paid. How long do you think they will sustain their "coverage?"

How many new digital alternatives to The Mercury have come and gone? I don't say that to crow, only to make the point out that reporting and publishing the news takes time and time is money and if you're not making money, eventually your interest wanes and you have to pay the mortgage.

Nobody gets into the newspaper business to get rich, unless you're on the owner side of the equation, and even they are cutting down on their private jets these days.

For many of us in the newsroom, I say with as little melodrama as I can, it is truly a calling. Like a defense attorney, we're not often loved, but we do have a crucial function to perform.

But even reporters have to eat.

The only new model I have seen come along that has proven sustainable is Joe Zlomek's Sanatoga Post. He tells me he's making money on the site and I have every reason to believe him. And that's why its been around as long as it has; that and the fact that Joe works under the same standard of reporting that most professionals do.

That's why people trust the site; that's why people come back to it; and that's why he can sell ads on it.

So where does that leave at The Mercury?

And today's Talking Point is....

Well, hopefully, in the right niche.


One of the things that makes The Mercury valuable, I tell myself at night while staring at the ceiling, is that it fills a niche too -- the local niche.

Much as they might try to convince you otherwise when they call in the middle of dinner, the Inquirer -- which these days staggers from one overly optimistic owner/savior to another, shedding staff all the while -- is not going to cover Pottstown, or Owen J. Roberts, or half a dozen other places, like The Mercury does.

And neither will that crocheting web site written out of a Wyoming basement; or the nattering nabobs reading from the Super PAC script on Fox News/MSNBC.

But things here certainly will change. If you've been paying attention, you will have noticed they've change quite a bit already.

For one thing, you are not reading this post, what would be called a "column" in the old days, on a piece of paper but on a screen.

And you can follow me on Twitter (@PottstownNews) or see questions I post on The Mercury's Facebook page(s) from which stories are often written.

Or maybe, you've had the misfortune of seeing my smiling face introducing a video, and discovered that even spiffy new technology can't make a DRBC hearing interesting.

Whether or not these digital efforts will pay off remains an open question.

In case you don't know, the name of our parent company is now Digital First Media, which at times can seem more like a goal than a description.

But we're trying.

Last year we were identified by Editor & Publisher magazine, itself struggling for survival, as one of 10 papers in the country that "does it right" when it comes to adapting to our digital world.

Research shows many of our videos get more views than many other papers in the entire company, which now includes newspapers from California to Connecticut and our Facebook page now approaches 6,000 "friends."

On Friday, the sports department launched an ambitious mostly digital project, "Mercury Sports Live," to cover high school football and we post pictures of area police departments' "most wanted" on our "Pinterist" page.

One Catch-22 we face is that many of our readers are not spring chickens any more. The benefit we get from that fact is that our print circulation remains steady.

Our long-time readers like to leave their news and information minute with ink on their fingers.

But that also means that while we run on the digital treadmill, finding and trying lots of things other papers eschew, our readers may not be following along.

Reaching that next generation, that keeps us sustainable, is crucial and, remains, elusive.

But if we're going to have something resembling professional, competent newsgathering -- and something which keeps me in the labor force -- we're going to have to keep at it and figure out something that works.

Maybe we'll have to start beaming the information straight into your head via Wi-Fi while you get your morning coffee.

But no matter what deliver method we end up using, I suspect it still may be a long time before I can convince a 20-something that he or she should care about next week's zoning meeting.

...Maybe if I put it on Twitter....