October 21st, 2008 03:28pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
Memo to Congress and President Bush: Stop encouraging Americans to buy stuff. Profligate spending at our favorite stores got us part way into this economic morass. You should not have done those rebate checks earlier this year (lot of good that did), and you certainly ought not do it again.
That “send ‘em another check so they can spend it” philosophy is bad government, bad economics and just plain bad karma. President Bush said Monday he’s “open” to hearing about another round of rebate checks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and some Congressional Democrats, along with others looking greedily at retail cash, are trying to figure out a way to send rebates to our pocketbooks. Estimates range from $150 billion to $300 billion. Egads, are they nuts?
I remain a supporter of the various economic recovery plans that fall loosely under the “big bailout” umbrella. I think they were the absolute only thing that could have been done on a very short time frame to soften the landing as the global economy catapults off the cliff.
But, we do not need more cash in our pockets to buy stuff. We need jobs. Jobs, you hear? Help our companies make our jobs safe. Make new jobs, including public works jobs. (How about a plan to fix our infrastructure?)
With a job, we stand a decent chance we can keep paying the rent, the mortgage, the doctor’s bills, the groceries and the utilities. If we can do that, we can scrape by for the next couple of years as the global economy rights itself. We might even have some of our own cash left over to spend. It won’t be pretty, and we probably won’t be buying another smart phone, but we’ll be OK. If there’s $300 billion lying around, make — and help companies protect — jobs.
This rebate thing is tantamount to “let them eat cake if they have no bread.” Jobs. Bread. Not one dime for cake.
October 16th, 2008 09:07am
Linda Grist Cunningham
The online wizards in the News Tower created a new feature a few days ago that is a news junkie’s delight. Called “My AP News,” the simple program gives you the tools to feed just about any news hunger you have — from a trusted and credible source, the Associated Press. A couple of clicks and you can set up constantly updated feeds for news from world to weird — and a couple dozen specialized feeds for sports, business and entertainment.
I customized mine for business to follow the news on stocks and bailouts, top headlines so I don’t miss stuff and politics because I’m a junkie this time of year. We’ll continue to add feeds from which you can choose.
My AP News means I can make one click (or bookmark the page) and the news I most want and need is right there. And, since it doesn’t pull from blogs and oddball — or partisan — sources, I get just what I want — news.
Click here to build your own page.
October 15th, 2008 05:55pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
The definition of “geezer” is fluid, depending on where one is in the birthday count, so cut me a break, and think about this: Everyone knows youngsters are Web savvy; everyone thinks geezers are not — and therefore newspapers can continue to do news on printed pages until the current crop of geezers-in-’60s-bell bottoms is replaced with geezers-with-tongue-studs.
I’ve believe that, for at least 15 years, we’ll be printing a daily “something” from the News Tower and delivering it to your door. I believe that today’s geezers (baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964) will read newspapers into their graves. My generation will remain a print-reading group — not exclusively print, but we’ll be far more likely than our children to include a steady diet of newsprint in our media menu.
We will turn to our newspaper for advertising content, news content — especially local — and general information right up to choosing our caskets. We will, however, make ourselves connect digitally. Not because it’s “us,” but because we have to, it’s efficient and we can get the dumpsters-full of information we crave. That’s very different from our children who connect digitally because, well, that’s the way they’ve always done it.
For boomers it will be print-plus-digital. For our kids and their kids, it will be digital with maybe some specialty print thrown in for good measure.
So, what’s the next newspaper going to look like? I do not believe the “print thingy” we’ll be delivering will look like today’s Register Star. As newspapers make the turn on the road to transformation, and as multiple platform access to information becomes the customer standard, the big format newspaper with multiple sections will give way to a smaller, perhaps single section, daily digest of the best of around-the-world news with an even stronger local news report.
We’ve been thinking about and prototyping something like that in the News Tower for a couple years. For now I call it the “stealth paper” because it’s totally concept. I just want to see what a different kind of print thingy might look like. When might you see it? You might see prototypes early next year. On your doorstep? Could be months, years, or never. But, what we’re seeing so far is pretty cool.
In the Rock River Valley, where the Rockford Register Star reached 78 percent of the adults this week, the traditional daily and Sunday newspaper rules the market. That’s a giant footprint and it means no other medium — not television, not radio, not even my beloved rrstar.com — comes close. No matter how challenged the economy, no matter how chaotic the newspaper industry, the newspaper on your doorstep is going to be there for a while.
But, I am writing this first for the Web on Wednesday; a lot of you are reading it for the first time in Sunday’s paper. The Web — or some yet-to-come digital medium — is pushing hard and perhaps sooner than traditionalists would like, the Web dog will own the yard.
Here’s a link to a delightful blog post that asks and answers this question: How will geezers adapt to “web mobile for news.” Enjoy.
October 13th, 2008 02:03pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
One of our Register Star readers posed this question in a recent e-mail: Why aren’t you covering the results of the presidential campaign polls done by the conservative media like Fox News?
The question is fascinating on two fronts: First, there was in the e-mail an assumption that the polls done by “conservative” media (Fox) would somehow have different results than polls done by “liberal” media (supposedly the Associated Press and CNN). And, second, there was an underlying position that the actual reporting would then be different.
Horse race polls are pretty standard fare. Ask someone who will win. Ask for whom they will vote. While one can slant survey questions to get desired results, there’s not much one can do when asking the question “are you voting for McCain or Obama”?
For instance, I pulled this from the Fox News Website just after lunch today: “New Marist Poll out today showing that Obama has a narrow lead in Ohio and is pulling away in PA with 9 percentage points among registered voters.” There’s not much one can do with the numbers, though one could write: McCain barely behind Obama in Ohio and is within nine percentage points in Pennsylvania.
There would be opportunities for a writer to take quotes, events and interviews and “spin” them to the tune of a political slant. So, I went looking this morning for how Fox News and The Washington Times are phrasing today’s campaign news. Did the same for Associated Press, which is the primary supplier of national campaign content for the mainstream media (including the Washington Times), and for CNN, which conservatives say is the liberal media’s voice, just as Fox is supposedly the conservative media’s voice.
You can do the same comparisons just by clicking on Foxnews.com and CNN.com
I took this straight off Fox News: “McCain appealed to voters about his electability during campaign stops Monday. A mix of polls out at the start of the week showed him down from Obama by anywhere from 4 to 11 points.
” ‘Let me give you the state of the race today, and some straight talk. We have 22 days to go. We’re 6 points down,” McCain said Monday. “The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes, and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections, and … concede defeat in Iraq.
” ‘But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them,” he said. The Obama campaign was quick to respond to McCain’s speech.
” ‘Less than twelve hours after his campaign announced that Senator McCain would finally have some new ideas on the economy, he decided that it was more important to give a new political speech about where he is in the polls,’ said Obama Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, who noted that Obama is talking Monday “about his new plan to provide immediate relief to struggling families and homeowners, jump start job creation in America and ease the credit crisis that’s hurting too many businesses.”
“In fact, Obama has proposed tax cuts for those making less than $250,000 and has called for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq.”
That was Fox News, folks. There’s plenty more where that came from. And, it all proves a simple point: When journalists – mainstream or otherwise — do their reporting and writing, there’s hardly a dime’s difference in how they approach the story. They stick with the facts, quote accurately and in context, and pretty much provide accurate, full, contextual coverage.
Reporters for the Washington Times (so-called right) and the Washington Post (so-called left) covering the same event and the same polls report the same ways. That’s what they are trained and expected to do.
So, where’s all the famed conservative and liberal stuff coming from? Check the blogs and editorials and commentaries. Which is exactly what they are supposed to do.
October 8th, 2008 05:12pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
Well, I watched the debate last night, watched the commentary, took a look at those cute CNN meter readers and headed for bed. Snuggled down and tried to sleep. No such luck, so I decided, what the heck, check my Facebook account (amazing what friends are up past midnight with nothing better to do) and post some notes on the blog.
It must have been the cuppa English tea I had during the debate — not to mention the nicotine patch. I ditched the cigarettes again on Oct. 1. We shall see how it goes. As I tell friends, I am simply “not smoking at the moment…”
OK, so back to the debate. I’ve tried; honestly, I have tried to think that McCain and Palin might make a good team. After the VP debate last week and tonight’s showing, I give up. She insults me and he bores me.
If Sarah Palin worked for me, we’d be having lessons in how NOT to conduct oneself in a professional setting. Winking is not an appropriate behavior. I keep waiting for her to smack her gum. McCain lost me tonight when he called upon Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as his heroes. Looking backward is not where we need to be. Give me hope anytime — and, if I can’t have the Billary Clintons again, Obama it will be.
’nuff on politics. How ’bout those Cubs? Well, not the Cubs. How ’bout that stock market? My 401k still has some cash in it — not much, but some — which these days, I guess, is about as positive as it’s going to get.
We’ve been pulling pages from the Rockford Register Star from back in 1929. It’s a fascinating exercise to see “live” coverage of the stock market crash and what the world was like that October and the years just following. History books don’t tell the story as well as reading this town’s newspaper from the days in which it was actually happening.
One thing for sure: You learn real fast that nothing much has changed, that people respond, well, as people, and that “life goes on.” The papers are filled with weddings, obituaries, church news, city council and school board, and all the things that are the glue that is life. Indeed, it’s reassuring and a reminder that we have faced tough times before and that we will, once again, muddle through.
Though after reading the story about the almost half million dollars AIG spent on an executive retreat the same week they took the $85 billion loan from the feds, I’m pretty much ready to suggest the jail for those who attended — after they pay back the half million. What were they thinking? Obviously, greed has no bounds, and certainly no scruples.
Well, I’m yawning so maybe that means I can get to sleep. Think I’ll read a bit first just to make doubly sure. Here I am in the middle of the night writing — sounds just like my mother. And, that’s pretty good.
September 29th, 2008 03:38pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
What was the U.S. House of Representatives thinking today as it voted against the $700 billion financial stabilization plan? Clearly, they were not thinking about your 401k, your job or your struggling company. Nope, instead of educating their constituents on what this whole thing really means, the Congressmen who voted against the bill were thinking of their own cushy careers.
Careers in which they get the best of all medical plans, great retirement benefits, connections to the world’s richest and most powerful (in case they want to work a bit or write a book after leaving office), and the overall wherewithal to live decently in two places, home and D.C. Not for them the worries about whether their employer will go belly up, their jobs disappear, their medical insurance sky rocket or vanish. Not for them the worries about how to pay the bills after retiring (they get a pension; something non-government employees said farewell to years ago.).
Nope, they were just thinking about getting back home to campaign to keep those cushy jobs. Heaven forbid, they lose a seat in Congress; they might actually have to find a far less secure posting back home.
The representatives who voted against this bill need to get their fannies back to D.C. and back to work. They need to squarely face their constituents and teach them the mathematics of what did happen and what’s about to happen. Don’t like this plan? Get another done — and fast. I do not want to see Don Manzullo’s face here in the district until he and his buddies in the House and Senate figure out how to keep the plug in the dike long enough for the financial markets and companies to stabilize — and that is likely to be 10 years.
This is NOT about handing a check over to a bunch of thieves, though there are plenty of thieves and dumb-cluck boards of directors out there who created this mess. The financial stabilization plan (I refuse to call it a bailout) is all that stands between the much celebrated and cliched Main Street and another Great Depression. Do I sound like the sky is falling? I mean to.
Anyone who thinks there’s an easy way out of this isn’t paying attention. Anyone who thinks this is the time for revenge, retribution, finger-pointing and punishment is wasting energy. Can I pick holes in the bill? Yep. Am I sure it’s the best it could be? Nope. Am I dead certain we need it? You bet.
Without implementation of a strong plan, within weeks, if not days, the regular guy — that’s you and I — can expect to see: few or no new home equity loans, which for some means farewell to paying the bills for higher education; stringent to the point of being impossible down payments and documentation for mortgages; higher credit card rates and lower limits; and, very likely, escalating unemployment.
We need this shakeout. We do. Our love affair with “now” made sure everyone could have a house, a couple of cars, a Wii and unlimited credit cards. We’re paying the price for “irrational exuberance,” as Alan Greenspan once called it. But that correction was already in play. Now, rather than a horrifically bumpy, frightening ride to the bottom, we are staring crash and burn in the face.
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives rolled the dice and bet your house, your job and your 401k on a gamble that things really aren’t so bad, on a gamble that someone will white-knight this implosion. All so its members could go home and campaign for another term. We lost.
September 19th, 2008 12:33pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
I’m a “little d” Democrat and normally that means I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative. So, when the federal government starts taking over private businesses — nationalizing, so to speak — I get a tad perturbed. I am no fan of too much government.
For a journalist — and for you – too much government can translate into local elected officials and government employees circumventing the Freedom of Information Act by withholding public records. It can translate into public-private organizations that take taxpayer funds but stay outside public oversight because they are “private.”
So, when the federal government nationalizes the financial industry (Thursday’s announcement of a major “systemic” takeover of failing financial institutions), loans staggering sums to a private insurer (AIG), and takes over the mortgage lending market (that’s Freddie and Fannie), I all but hyperventilate.Then, I take a deep breath and I am glad, very, very glad for this government takeover. Friday’s Wall Street Journal nailed the headline: “Worst crisis since the ’30s; no end yet in sight.”
It’s a headline guaranteed to scare the checkbook right out of your pocket, not because of what it said, but because of who said it: the conservative, hard-to-fluster, pro-business Wall Street Journal. Yes, it really is that bad. (You might enjoy this column from Columbia Journalism Review.)
There is, however, one resounding difference between the crash of ‘29, and today. The federal government — indeed, governments around the world — is stepping in quickly to plug the holes through which the world’s major corporations will plunge. Make no mistake. Some of the bad guys will escape with their cash firmly in hand. I wish that were not so, but I am more than happy to trade that bit of unfairness for assurance that freefall and meltdown may not be permanent fixtures in my headlines.
The weekend’s upcoming news will overtake my column I am sure. Still, sitting at my kitchen table Thursday night and seeing the warring Congressional parties come to the same podium committed to shoring up our country’s economic foundation was reassuring. This is, for now, government’s appropriate role: protect and defend. This time with cash not guns.
September 11th, 2008 06:06pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
A couple months ago, the Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch stopped delivering its newspaper to Harrisonburg, VA, about two hours away. Delivery stopped because gas prices, newsprint prices, a bad economy and alternative sources of information all combined to make it unreasonably expensive to keep delivering the newspaper to readers that far away.
My mother and dad, long-time RTD readers, were not happy, nor were thousands of other southwestern Virginians who had relied on the RTD for generations. The editor of the RTD is one of my “friendly acquaintances,” so I gave him a heads up to expect some nasty correspondence from my mother. I told her she wasn’t going to win and explained why. “Don’t care,” she said. “I understand why. I’m just mad and they need to know their decision completely upsets what I and hundreds more like me start our days with.”
Thank God for the loyal newspaper reader. They are my mother and my mortgage payment. In the Rock River Valley there are an unusual number of loyal readers (more today than at any time in our history) and we reach almost 80 percent of the adults who live in Winnebago and Boone counties. We are not, contrary to popular wisdom, dying or disappearing. We are, however, smack in the middle of a technological change not seen since Gutenberg invented moveable type back around 1440. Newsprint prices are at record levels and climbing. Add to that the every-100-years-or-so, global economic “adjustment,” and it is a wildly wicked time in the information business.
So, we’re adjusting, and, if we do it right, we’re transforming. And all that change is making readers unhappy. Thanks to decisions we made 10 years ago (news on the Web), the new press (narrower and shorter pages) and a deep commitment to local news, the Register Star, at least for now, isn’t in the survival throes like the ones in the big cities. Do you know that the Chicago Tribune could be, somewhere around the end of the month, a three-section newspaper with a strikingly different design? Did you know the Trib eliminated its print help-wanted sections? Did you know the New York Times shortly will be four sections instead of double that? Did you know that this week the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., the state’s largest newspaper and a family-owned one, completely stopped using news from the Associated Press?
Those are just a smattering of what’s happening. There will be news forever. There will be newspapers for almost that long. But, it’s rapidly becoming a very different model and readers — like you and my mother — don’t care. You’re just mad.
So, back to the TV book. Last Sunday, we replaced the “little book” with the bigger tabloid version. You hate the size. We accidentally left out the WGN listing. You were not amused. It will be back in next Sunday. We don’t have the late night listings and we have too much daytime. Half hated; half loved. We’ll try to figure a better balance. I hate that bigger book, too; the little one was ever so much handier. Though, I must admit, I stopped using the TV book a couple years ago when I went TIVO and Insight-cum-Comcast offered the TV Guide channel.
So, why annoy you loyal, little book fans? Because it was either the do the big book or dump three staffers. And, we need every journalist, ad rep, pre-press tech, online producer and general cook-and-bottle washer we can keep here in the News Tower if we are to come close to fulfilling our mission statement: To serve the Rock River Valley as the leading information source that empowers our community, while never compromising our principles.
People or paper? I’ll take people over paper any day.
September 9th, 2008 12:29pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
Be oh, so careful about believing what you read on the Web. Ditto for anything forwarded to you in an e-mail — even from a trusted friend or family member. And, as much as some folks love to hate the mainstream media, most of us live by this mantra: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.
United Airlines stockholders learned that lesson the hard way on Monday morning when their stocks tumbled 75 percent in just a few hours. UAL stock prices dropped to $3 per share from around $12 a share on “news” that the airline giant had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy — again. In a nutshell, here’s what happened: A researcher thought he/she had spotted a “breaking news” story on a Florida newspaper Web site. The story, which was about the 2002 bankruptcy, was reposted out of the newspaper’s archives by the researcher as a new story, and the Web world went “viral.” (That means information takes on a life of its own and is spread far and wide, either by individuals, or by mechanical things called “bots.” You don’t need to know the technical stuff; just think of it as neighbors gossiping until “everyone” knows a bunch of different versions of the facts. ChicagoTribune.com has a terrific explanation of exactly what happened if you’re interested.)
Less dramatic, but far more common, are the “I know it’s true because my brother sent it to me” stuff that anyone with an e-mail address gets. The most are two common kinds of “must be true” e-mails: (1) political stuff (Barack Obama has relatives in Africa who are terrorists; Sarah Palin faked her latest pregnancy and the child is really her daughter’s); and (2) sweetness-and-light (American soliders in Iraq tell it like it really is; David Letterman/Jay Leno celebrate the good things about America). I get dozens of these things forwarded to me by good-hearted — and not so — readers and family members who want me to be in the know.
A quick check of Snopes.com almost always shows these things to be just so much garbage, even the sweetness-and-light ones that bring a smile to your face and a warm fuzzy to your heart. Check ‘em out, even if they come from your mother.
So, how do you know it’s true? Three quick steps weed out the most egregious. First, check Snopes.com. It’s a great site for debunking or affirming most of the forwarded e-mails that purport to be the truth. Second, do some homework. Research multiple sources. While one source might be right, seeing if multiple sources say the same or similar things is best. That’s what we do at the News Tower; we need more than a single source for most everything we publish. And, third, swallow a healthy spoonful of skepticism. If it sounds too good, too off-the-wall, too bad, or simply too perfect or too awful, it probably is.
And, one last safety net: Don’t sell all your stock in a panic.
September 5th, 2008 01:32pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
One more reason I want to know how she’s thinking on the mom-first-job-first front: I could learn from her. Every mother I know — whether they work inside or outside — wants to know “best practices.” We share survival tips. Sarah Palin would be the first working mother to balance a public life and a private life at the top of the most visible pedestal in the world, and she’s going to be doing it with FIVE kids. Anyone who can balance all that I can learn from.
BTW: This column from Don Wycliff, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, is a must-read. This excerpt ought to whet your appetite: “But if Palin and her ardent GOP supporters have a real beef, it is less with the hated “mainstream media” than with the bandits and highwaymen of the information superhighway, the Internet. It was these lone strangers who drove the pregnancy story and whose increasingly lurid speculations created the pressure that, ultimately, led Palin and her husband to make their announcement. The mainstream media, at least, can be appealed to on ethical grounds—even if every member doesn’t always make the best decision. But for the verbal gunslingers of the blogosphere, there are no ethics, no rule of law. It’s the Wild West, a free-fire zone. And Palin’s daughter is just the latest of their victims.“
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