Always Special

Jean on vacation in Michigan, 1957

My mother was born in Detroit on the brink of the Great Depression. Her parents, Frank and Lily Sharley, met in the United States after emigrating from England. Jean and her elder brother, George, grew up in a house their father had built but couldn’t afford to finish once the darkness fell. You could see the tarpaper instead of siding. Frank found work as a hospital handyman. They had enough, but just barely.

You probably understand after hearing from Tom Johnson, my mom’s favorite boss ever, that Jean had a reporter’s ear for good stories and revealing details. She loved to tell people that her father, as a boy, once delivered a prescription to Buckingham Palace in the latter few years of Queen Victoria. Her mother’s family, from Lancashire, was about to sail for New York on the Titanic when the steamship company revoked their half-price tickets and resold them at full price to someone almost infinitely less lucky.

In her father’s case, a brush with greatness. In her mother’s, the touch of Providence. She loved her parents dearly, and their stories helped her understand, when life seemed grey, when poverty embarrassed her, that her life would always glitter in bright colors, that she would always be special.

With her mother, Lily

As a little girl, she went to church with her family and fell in love with the elegant language and cadences of the Book of Common Prayer. “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.” It can’t really be said of Jean! She couldn’t afford to go to college, but the prayer book, her natural gifts as a writer, and her compassion and curiosity amounted to a graduate degree in journalism.

Her vocation, which is now undergoing sometimes heartbreaking change, provides its practitioners with constant brushes with greatness in the form of the events and people journalists cover. As for Providence, the church and prayer book worked their more customary magic with Jean as well. She never doubted the loving, saving grace of heaven -- not once. I have a million things to thank my mother for, none more important than an eternal if sometimes reckless optimism and an innate trust in God.

Greatness eluded her, however, at Redford Union High School in Detroit. As a freshman, she entered a contest to pick the new school fight song. The judges told her she would’ve won if she’d written the three verses they asked for instead of just two. As dementia overtook her at 89 or 90, this injustice, this outrage was one of the last things she forgot.

A 1950s fashion assignment

As a fashion writer for the Detroit Free Press, she traveled to New York for the fall shows. Audrey Hepburn, Renoir, the novelist Colette, and all beautiful people and things captivated her. Soon her editors wanted her working as a general assignment reporter. At the Free Press, the newsroom was male-only territory -- until Jean got there. One old-timer muttered that lace curtains on the windows would be next.

Her victories for women came before feminism had a name. Sometimes it was just a matter of making do. Covering a Tigers-Yankees game during 1961’s AL pennant race, she was barred from the Yankee Stadium press box. She put her portable typewriter on top of an overturned trashcan, found a chair, and made her deadline.

Jean’s writing was economical and lively, whimsical, smart, and fresh, occasionally sentimental but never mawkish – always the right word, never a word out of place. In 1965, Detroit civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was murdered by a member of the Ku Klux Klan after the march from Selma to Montgomery. Jean visited the apartment Viola shared with her husband and children and described their small, neat bedroom and the family pictures, school books, and white-covered gold-leaf Bible that were arranged carefully on Viola’s desk. At the funeral in Detroit, Jean asked an African-American woman who didn’t know Viola why she was standing on the street in the rain, hoping to get into the church. “Because she died for me,” the woman said. These words ended Jean’s account of her city’s sad day in the next day’s paper.

She was a single working mother of a ten year old. Imagine how she felt when we received death threats after the Viola Liuzzo stories appeared. These callers deplored my mother’s sympathetic coverage of Viola’s murder and warned that they knew where I went to school. One evening, I noticed a police car by the curb outside our apartment. It came back the next night, and the next. My mother didn’t say why, because the last thing she ever wanted me or anyone to do was worry.

Harvey and Jean

But it was inevitable that I would worry, especially when my mother seemed lonely or sad. My father, Harvey, another brilliant newspaperperson, was the first love of Jean’s life. The only picture I have of them together, taken in the early 1950s, shows him in a blazer and tie, looking mischievously at the camera. Jean is sitting on the floor wearing a black cocktail dress and pearls, leaning on his knee and holding a drink, her happy face in profile, turned toward him.

While Harvey was an alcoholic, I don’t believe Jean ever uttered that word and his name in the same paragraph. The marriage essentially ended when I was two, though for the next ten years, Harvey came over for dinner almost every Saturday night. He sat at the end of the couch, drank martinis, smoked Chesterfields, laughed quietly at the conversation, and occasionally got up and went to the piano to massacre Beethoven sonatas.

In her office in Phoenix

In 1967, Jean and 12-year-old John headed to Phoenix so she could go to work on the Arizona Republic as women’s editor. Her brilliance as a journalist and her courage persisted. Her editor in Arizona was J. Edward Murray. Their publisher was Eugene Pulliam, uncle of a future vice president, Dan Quayle. One day, Mr. Pulliam told Mr. Murray that he had written an editorial in support of President Nixon’s actions in Vietnam and wanted it published on the front page. When Ed Murray told the owner of the newspaper that editorials went on the editorial page, Pulliam fired him. Learning of this during a meeting, Jean stood up and said, “A paper that has no room for Ed Murray has no room for me!” and walked out into 110 degrees of Phoenix unemployment – which didn’t last long, thanks to offers from the Timeses of New York and Los Angeles.

Tom has spoken beautifully of Jean’s years at the Los Angeles Times, Christle equally so about their adventures. Christle and my mother’s other close friends – Bobbie and Ed Justice, Bette Gillespie, George Mair, Miv and Alfred Schaaf, Frank Wylie and Judy Babcock, Sister Jenny, so many others – were all gifts to her.

In 1978, Jean married that gracious gentleman Dick Lescoe, who lent her his three daughters, Linda, Donna, and Debbie. In retirement, with Tomasa’s help, Jean helped Debbie with her children, Stephanie and Ricky, and was a devoted grandmother to my children, Valerie and Lindsay, and to my wife Kathy’s children, Dan and Meaghan.

Jean at the LA Times

The most important thing to know about my mother is that she believed she was called to reflect God’s grace, make the world better, see ways forward that others couldn’t, and never stop striving, even unto exhaustion. She took in tenants for free and took Thanksgiving turkeys and green beans to Union Station here in Pasadena. She helped build the columbarium in this beautiful church where she and Dick will cohabitate. She sacrificed her comfort and security to take care of those she loved, especially her parents and then Dick when he was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. If you had a problem, she had an answer or an idea, and always an encouraging smile.

It made these gestures no less worthy or holy that Jean, even as she acted in love and justice, was observing and chronicling herself in the process. She was, after all, a reporter. She could have invented Facebook. I don’t know whether I’m curious or terrified about what might have happened if she had been healthy enough to establish an account. If my family and friends ever wonder why her son is a selfie junkie, now you know.

Jean could be stubborn. Tom has mentioned my time as an aide to Mr. Nixon. Jean and he were a formidable combination. They first met in Washington in 1985. She was in town to hear his talk to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and he asked me to invite her up to his suite so he could say hello.

She told him that she had covered a stop he had made in upper Michigan during his reelection campaign in 1972. The record is abundantly clear that neither my mother nor the 37th president got anywhere near upper Michigan in 1972. But Jean held her ground. Looking around frantically, Nixon saw a large box of Godiva chocolates that the hotel had given him. Pat Nixon preferred See’s. So he had suggested I take them home to the mother of my children. In the face of Jean’s intransigence, he grabbed Marcia’s chocolates, handed them to my mother, and bolted from the room. Nixon was less flummoxed by Mao and Khrushchev.

With Elizabeth, May 2015

Jean’s willfulness and my immature frustration sometimes made our relationship difficult. But not so our last two years. Dementia is terrible. But for my mother, it was also a kind of gift. It took away her need to try so hard to help. For the first time in the 60 years I’d know her, she was content. In the home in Yorba Linda where Elizabeth and Linda took such good care of her, Jean sat in the garden with the sun on her face and arms without feeling that she should be doing something historic instead.

I told her the stories, since she’d forgotten it all. I told her about Harvey and Dick and her grandchildren and about my godfather, Louis Cook, another handsome newspaperman who had loved her desperately. Hearing it all again, brand new each time, she’d always smile, and her blue eyes would gleam. And on a sunny Saturday morning last October – because she loved Saturday mornings best of all – she slipped peacefully into glory.

A Celebration of the Life of Jean Taylor Lescoe was held on April 16, 2016 at my mother's home parish, All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. My fellow eulogists were Jean's friends Christle Balvin and former LA Times publisher Tom Johnson.

If You Love Your Country, Pay For Content

As newspapers struggle to find a financial model to replace display and classified ads, they've had to cut editorial staffs to the bone. Some stories aren't getting covered as well as before or covered at all. Believing the prevailing digital ethos, readers think they're entitled to get the news for free, as though good reporting sprang immaculately from Google's servers or gifted journalists would get themselves trained and then risk their lives in Kabul strictly as volunteers. It's also the fault of publishers failing to anticipate the change and of the old model itself, where revenue from department store ads was used to underwrite coverage of city hall, the Supreme Court, and power shifts in Beijing.

Someday internet advertising may generate the same revenue that print did. Until then, the responsible reading citizen must learn to pay for the production of professional editorial content the same way she pays for dry cleaning, groceries, and legal advice. Without trained reporters and editors, we're guaranteed to suffer more abuses of power. Cable TV zealots and the Starbucks-based hackosphere will fill the vacuum left by facts with twice their weight in opinions. Our media will be deaf, blind, and insufferably loud.

One recent example of the indispensability of old-fashioned journalism. At 9 a.m. this morning in New York City, someone opened fire. I heard about it on the radio and checked Huffington Post, but there were few details. So I went to the New York Times on my iPhone (for which I gladly pay a monthly fee) and found this article, posted within four hours of the event. Written with precision and terse eloquence, it's a masterpiece of team reporting, an everyday example of the fine but dying art of good newspapering, painstaking and often dangerous work that no one will or should have to do for free:

[The suspect] lived on the third floor of a six-story walk-up on East 82nd Street for about 18 months, said Guillermo Suarez, 72, the super of the building.

Every morning he had the same routine. He would leave the apartment between 7:30 and 8 a.m., say good morning and head to the McDonald’s on Third Avenue and 84th Street.

After about 20 minutes, he would come back carrying a McDonald’s bag. He would nearly always wear the same thing — a tannish brown suit, sometimes with a tie. Then he would generally stay in the apartment the rest of the day.

He did the same thing on Friday morning, but this time he did not come back.

If you love your country, and if you really want to know what's going on in the world, pay for content.

The Remembrance Of Them Is Grievous Unto Us

The Huffington Post (which has the best and most coverage of spirituality and religion of any mainstream publication) on the 350th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer, which was yesterday. They used to say a properly educated newspaperman knew Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. My newspaperwoman mother would add the prayer book, which she said taught her the glorious cadences of the English language (making May 2 the birthday of her composition professor). This bit of the General Confession is from the 1928 edition, which she gave me when I was confirmed on April 30, 1967 at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit.

Watergate And Factional Journalism

At Salon, Jefferson Morley reviews Max Holland's Leak:

Portraying [Mark] Felt/Deep Throat as a factional power player, not a high-minded voice of truth, is a public service. But Holland goes too far in deprecating the accomplishments of Woodward and Carl Bernstein. He develops the argument first made by Edward Jay Epstein that the Post got too much credit for exposing the criminal conspiracy emanating from Nixon’s White House.

“Contrary to widely held perception that the Post uncovered Watergate,” Holland writes, “the newspaper essentially tracked the progress of the FBI’s investigation with a time delay ranging from weeks to days, and published elements of the prosecutor’s case well in advance of the trial.” From the leisurely perspective of a historian that may be convincing. For working journalists, the publication of a story days or weeks in advance of the government is the whole point.

Nevertheless, “All the President’s Men” embellished Woodward’s and Bernstein’s fine job to an act of moral heroism. The film reassured viewers that the good guys could win with the help of a wise man on the inside. Any young person who is inspired to do journalism by “All the President’s Men” should also read Leak. The romantic myth of journalism is dead and that’s a good thing.

Actually, We'd Rather Not

The LA Times, which folded its Orange County edition several years ago as it and every other newspaper in the country downsized, is reinvigorating its local bureau with new personnel -- and here's why:

[W]hen news breaks – whether it be a salon massacre, a homeless killing spree or the all-too-familiar wildfires, we’ll be better equipped than ever to cover it.

Been here, done that. Let's be a little more optimistic.

Commie Girl Acquires Means Of Production

Rebecca Schoenkopf, who wrote the "Commie Girl" column at OC Weekly until 2007, has taken over from Ken Layne as editor, publisher, and owner of the sassy Washington, D.C. blog Wonkette. On Feb. 27 St. John's men's group speaker-turned-law student Frank Mickadeit devoted his Orange County Register column to Schoenkopf and hinted that the deal was in the works:

She's had spotty writing and editing employment over the last three years. She went back for a master's degree, though, and she's negotiating to acquire a very well-branded national blog, which, if she pulls it off, everyone will remark, Oh, this was what she was meant to do! To which I will say: No, this is what she's always done, better than anybody.

Maybe, but while the blog's subtitled "the D.C. gossip," Schoenkopf's first two posts were based on stories that appeared in the LA Times (about Gov. Jerry Brown, pictured here with rock stars, when he was cooler) and LA Weekly. She'd better move to Washington quick! To celebrate one of the nation's reddest county's new toehold in one of its bluest cities (and in the probably misguided hope that the new editor will discontinue her blog's tradition of sometimes putting swear words in headlines), I'm finally adding Wonkette to my blog roll.

Higher Powers, In And Out Of The Newsroom

David Carr is media columnist for the New York Times and author of a harrowing drug addiction memoir, Night Of The Gun. On Dec. 28 NPR rebroadcast an October Carr interview by "Fresh Air"'s Terry Gross. Re-listening to a Carr interview is almost as good as a repeat of "Dexter." While his voice, injured by smoking, radiation treatments, and possibly exposure to toxins while he covered the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a little rough, he speaks about my parents' beloved business in smooth, graceful cadences. Transcript here, podcast here.

Excerpt one, on the omniscient and indispensable elite editorial intelligence behind daily newspapers:

When I wake up in the morning and the gun goes off, I'm checking Twitter. I'm checking RSS feeds, and I get four newspapers at my house every day. I get the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Star Ledger - because I live in New Jersey - and, of course, the New York Times.

And the reason I do is because the day before this, all this stuff has gone whizzing past me, and I seem to know a lot. But I don't really know what part of it is important. And I used to think it was so silly that newspapers would - like, I'd go to our page one meeting, and they'd be organizing the hierarchy of the six or seven most important stories in Western civilization. Meanwhile, the Web is above them, pivoting and eliding, and all these stories are morphing and changing. And I thought: Well, how silly is this?

But you know what? I came to want that resting place, where someone yelled "stop" and decided, "Look, this is stuff you need to know about going forward." Newspapers have become a kind of magazine experience for me, where they're - where it's a way to look back at what has happened.

And on his faith life and the great mystery of altruism:

I am a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of - it's good to stand with my family. It's good that I didn't have to come up with my own creation myth for my children.

It's a wonderful group of people that I go to church with, and it's community. It's not really where I find God. And sort of what the accommodation I've reached is a very jerry-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in recovery, I've been helped - without getting into the names of specific groups - by all of these strangers, you know, who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life.

And one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. And not only is that not a general human impulse, but it's not an impulse of mine. And yet I found myself doing that over and over again.

So, am I underneath all things, just a really wonderful, giving person? Or is there a force greater than myself that is leading me to act in ways that are altruistic and not self-interested and lead to the greater good?

And so that's - that's sort of as far as I've gotten with a higher power thing, is I'm - you know, I'm kind of a pirate, kind of a thug. I mean, I've done a bunch of terrible things, and yet I'm able to, for the most part, be a decent person. How is that? Do I have some inner strength of character? I think not. I think something else is working on me.

You know, I think it's okay to sort of like have a superstitious belief in God and not really have thought it through. I think it's okay to just - I think there's freedom in allowing for the possibility of it. Like, I don't have a presence. I don't have some idea in my mind of a woman or a man figure or anything like that.

But I find the spaces between people, whether I'm making a newspaper with them or in recovery or living with them as family or friends or - I find something really godly in that. I don't have trouble acknowledging that.

Interviewing Each Other

James Hohmann is a 24-year-old Politico reporter who covered last night's Bob Woodward-Ben Bradlee appearance at the Nixon library. He majored in U.S. history at Stanford and gets assigned stories that require a bit of historical perspective.

As he labored on his laptop, I pestered him with questions about the dramatic changes afoot in the newspaper business (my parents' field and briefly my own) and the role of his scrappy news organization, which prints five issues a week when Congress is in session but seems to be better known for its web site. The president and CEO is former Reagan aide Fred Ryan.

Hohmann smiled ruefully and nodded when I observed that Politico reporters appear to file a lot of copy, as they used to say in the business. From his lengthy report, which he filed within three hours of the end of the event:

In the crowd was John Taylor, the longtime director of the museum and a former chief of staff to Nixon after his presidency.

“Mr. Woodward is the most famous journalist in the world, not an ideological figure by any means, and someone who is integrally, along with his editor Mr. Bradlee, part of the story of those times,” he said beforehand. “And eventually it would look strange if the library didn’t invite people like Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bradlee because, again, the visiting public understands that they’re part of the story.”

Taylor approached Woodward after the event.

Woodward told him that he didn’t want to sugarcoat his message — that Nixon loyalists tried to manipulate history — just because he was speaking at the Nixon Library.

Taylor, who stepped down in 2009 from his museum post and now serves full-time as an Episcopal priest, indicated that he understood and joked with his wife [Kathy O'Connor, Nixon's last chief of staff] about the two of them being “field marshals in the war against history.”

“History will work it out,” he said, expressing confidence that Nixon will be judged better with the passage of time.

My own take on the evening here.

Youse Control The Media

James Fallows does his best arguing that the collapse of the traditional financial model for elite news reporting isn't a disaster for democracy and Western civilization. He hung out at "Gawker" and learned the virtues of people getting (new school) the news they want (“How Good Is Charlie Sheen for a Porn Star’s Career?”) instead of the (old school) news they need (coverage of the Supreme Court, succession crises in Moscow and Beijing, government and financial corruption at every level, economic, military, diplomatic, educational, social, nutritional, scientific, medical, and cultural issues -- you know, everything that actually matters but you almost always have to pay reporters to cover because it's complicated sometimes).

In his long "Atlantic" cover story, Fallows offers a one-sentence plan for making sure those things don't fall through the cracks:

Rather than worry about a general collapse of the press, perhaps we should watch carefully for specific failures of local, statehouse, or investigative coverage, and start experimenting now with ways to correct them—through nonprofit coverage or other means that new technologies make possible.

But who's "we," and how will they know when the failures have actually occurred? City officials had been stealing for years in Bell, California before the old-school LA Times, though bloodied by massive editorial staff layoffs, finally broke the story. In the "Gawker" era, I guess allegedly corrupt city managers will be safe unless they do something reckless, like go on "Dancing With The Stars."

Internet=Information?

Historian Maarja Krusten gently chides Watergate reporter Bob Woodward (who's coming to the Nixon library on April 18, or, as we say at St. John's, the Monday in Holy Week) for his confused and curmudgeonly critique of Google and Facebook:

Google and Facebook just aren’t the problems Woodward seems to paint them as being. And it isn’t Google that killed newspapers. The problem is in the newspapers providing free content at the start of the Internet age and then having no way to go paywall once everyone was accustomed to reading what they wanted. As Bob Haldeman once observed, there’s no point in trying to put the toothpase back into the tube once you squeezed it out. Ain’t gonna work.

As shown by the mixed reaction the New York Times received last week when it decided to charge non-subscribers for more than 20 visits a month to its web site. Hundreds wrote and said that they'd just get their content at Yahoo, as if they don't understand what would happen to the content (also the top source of information for the networks and ten thousand bloggers whose shoe leather carries them no further than Starbucks) if the Times went broke.

You'd think Woodward, famous for his deliberate, ingratiating methods, would be the first to say, "Google can't find it if I don't report it, and I'm not going to report it for free." Yet people, especially younger people, have gotten it into their heads that Internet=Information. Last night, rewatching Roman Polanski's flawed anti-Tony Blair thriller "The Ghost Writer," I laughed out loud when the hero broke the case wide open by Googling another character's name and uncovering his status as a CIA agent. As if.

The Nixodemus Factor

Watergate reporter Bob Woodward to journalism students:

“You get the truth at night, the lies during the day,” Woodward said.

The perfect time to visit someone, he told students, is after 8 p.m. “They’ve eaten. And if they’re home, they probably haven’t gone to bed.”

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Kindled Kuriosity

Starting March 28, The New York Times will charge frequent visitors to its web site. That's good, since well-reported journalism can't survive in the post-print era without people paying for content. Print subscribers will get unlimited access. What's unclear is whether we Kindle subscribers (who pay $20 a month for daily downloads to our e-readers) will get the same benefits as dead tree readers. Today's announcement just says this:

All subscribers who receive the paper through home delivery will have free and unlimited access across all Times digital platforms except, for now, e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook.

Which doesn't answer the question. This is the second time the Times has tried to charge web users. I hope it succeeds. Too bad it overlooked this detail.

Turn Up Your Radio

NPR is failing politically but succeeding journalistically.

Dead Air At The Top

Regardless of political bias, which is unavoidable in the media, NPR is responsible for some of the best programming and broadcast journalism in the country. Too bad its reporters and producers have been so poorly served by management just as the right has decided to make a federal case out of the network's measly appropriation.

Getting The Facts? No Big Deal

The source of the widely reported allegation today that Fox News chief Roger Ailes was about to be indicted for allegedly telling one of his executives to lie during a federal probe? According to "Salon," a blogger met some guy in an airport and published what he said without checking the facts. If it turns out to be wrong, the blogger says, "no big deal." That's the hackosphere for you -- until someone wins a libel suit against a blogger.

Time For You To Subscribe To The "Times," Hosni

I agree with my Facebook and Andover buddy and Phillipian better David Schwartz that, as first drafts of history go, this New York Times analysis of the Egyptian revolution is one of the best. If the so-called new media have produced anything in the last two weeks to match this exercise in careful reporting by trained professionals, I haven't seen it.

Until they do, long live the old media. If you're not subscribing, whether in print or digitally, to the Times or some other newspaper that is still committed to this kind of journalism, you might want to get on that. I think I read on a blog somewhere that Thomas Paine said it best: A free people will be a well-informed people only so long as they pay for content.

As for the lavish White House spin embedded in the article, extolling President Obama's Lincolnian vision over the horizon, we have no reason to doubt it:

[Obama] made the point early on, a senior official said, that “this was a trend” that could spread to other authoritarian governments in the region, including in Iran. By the end of the 18-day uprising, by a White House count, there were 38 meetings with the president about Egypt. Mr. Obama said that this was a chance to create an alternative to “the Al Qaeda narrative” of Western interference.

American officials had seen no evidence of overtly anti-American or anti-Western sentiment. “When we saw people bringing their children to Tahrir Square, wanting to see history being made, we knew this was something different,” one official said....

By Feb. 1, when Mr. Mubarak broadcast a speech pledging that he would not run again and that elections would be held in September, Mr. Obama concluded that the Egyptian president still had not gotten the message.

Within an hour, Mr. Obama called Mr. Mubarak again in the toughest, and last, of their conversations. “He said if this transition process drags out for months, the protests will, too,” one of Mr. Obama’s aides said.

Mr. Mubarak told Mr. Obama that the protests would be over in a few days.

Mr. Obama ended the call, the official said, with these words: “I respect my elders. And you have been in politics for a very long time, Mr. President. But there are moments in history when just because things were the same way in the past doesn’t mean they will be that way in the future.”

God Said, "I Sent You A Kindle, Nook, and iPad"

E-readers such as the Kindle are making reading books more fashionable with children. Too bad newspapers never figured out how to get on board.

iPadding The Books

Apple may understand the way people like to buy music these days, but it doesn't understand readers. When reading this excerpt from a recent New York Times article, remember that from Amazon you can get a monthly Kindle subscription to "The New Yorker" (four issues) for $2.99:

Many applications cost almost as much as a printed copy of a magazine, a difficult concept for consumers to get their heads around considering that a paper product is more expensive to assemble and distribute than an electronic version of a magazine. The New Yorker, for example, costs $4.99 an issue in Apple’s App Store but $5.99 on the newsstand. Esquire is also $4.99 an issue, the same as the cover price on the newsstand.

Subscriptions are another sticking point. A vast majority of magazines available on the iPad must be bought per copy. Customers cannot subscribe and have it delivered as they can with other publications available on the iPad like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal or The Daily, the News Corporation’s new iPad-only venture that is to begin within the next few weeks. That means if consumers want to receive the magazine regularly, they would have to pay far above normal subscription rates.

“Sheer highway robbery,” read one recent comment about The New Yorker in the App Store. “I’ll keep with my paper subscription. I will never pay $250 per year for an app."

"It's A Mess/Meets The Test"

Thanks to the good people at "Paste," whose print edition is struggling along with almost everyone else's, ten songs about print journalism, including a snippet of "The Newspaperman" as performed by Pete Seeger.

While he's at it, playlist compiler and journalist Mark Kemp sings this discouraging tune:

Today, journalism is a skeleton of its once-authoritative self. Newspapers have laid off all but a few copy-pushers and overworked editors who want complex information reduced to concise (and don’t forget, entertaining!) capsules. And the “reading” public doesn’t ask for more than that. Americans seem blissfully content getting their information from the pundits—those TV talking heads who shout angry diatribes and smirk out witty one-liners in lieu of facts—or from Internet pseudo-journalists who offer up wild conspiracy fantasies on websites run by potential Unibombers.

Cable News. Not.

Hat tip to my Facebook buddy David Schwartz for this Washington Post op-ed by Ted Koppel, who bemoans the rise of TV niche journalism (much of which, isn't). David learned about it from our fellow former Andover journalist Gary Lee. Two excerpts:

Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

And:

The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. Legions of new media present a vista of unrelenting competition. Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from abroad. This is felicitous, since covering overseas news is very expensive. On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they say, is cheap.

As Koppel makes clear, because they make relatively little (if any) money, news divisions have always had a tenuous hold on the loyalty of network executives. So it probably should've been predictable that network news would be further eroded when someone figured out how to make money offering news (or "news") on cable.

There's an imperfect analogy with our dying newspapers, whose display and classified ad revenues have been sapped by the Internet, which in turn still offers most newspapers' hard-won and well-reported content for free. That can't be sustained much longer. How much does it cost the New York Times to keep a bureau in Beijing? A million dollars a year? More? And they'll pay for that with my free page views of the coverage? Not for long. After that, for fact-based insights about what the word's newest superpower is up to, we'll be relying on the Hackosphere, whose own overhead has been dramatically reduced thanks to free wireless at Starbucks.

Koppel argues that the market is now in control of the news business. If that's the case, I'd bet that three-quarters of the American people still want, and may even be willing to pay for, solid, unbiased, well-reported journalism. So there's some hope. On the other hand, we also want pragmatic politicians.