Are journalists psychopaths?

So says a British psychologist. He ranks journalism as the sixth-highest profession, in terms of percentage of psychopaths.

His overall take:

Although people tend to think of psychopaths as killers—indeed about 15-25% of people in prison are psychopaths—in fact many people with psychopathic tendencies are not criminals.
Here are some of the traits of psychopaths:

• Self-confident
• Cold-hearted
• Manipulative
• Fearless
• Charming
• Cool under pressure
• Egocentric
• Carefree

He also notes that the idea of a "successful psychopath is largely not true, saying they earn less money than average.

Hey, there's a newspaper trait!

More seriously, I can think of three former bosses who fit at least the cold-hearted, manipulative, egocentric and carefree portions of the description.

I hate papers that readvertise jobs

I know it happens in other job fields, too, but with a declining industry like newspapers, I'm sure more and more publishers and HR offices are more and more tempted to do it, simply because they can.

It's not the first time it's happened to me.

What I really don't like, as in the current case, is when the company does initial interviews with people it indicates it has culled down from the resumes to at least a semi-finalist list, with hints that the next step is in-person interviews for the last couple of candidates, then kind of says nothing on the first query or two about the "process," then finally, oh, about a month after that set of interviews, says ...

"Oh, hey, we went out for more resumes."

If I should actually make the cut for an in-person interview, I'll ask questions related to this.

Update, July 23: I didn't make the cut. The Cortez Journal hired somebody else.

Note to self: Next time a paper "readvertises," don't only mentally remove yourself from the running. Actually do so with the newspaper, especially if it's not only after an initial interview, but after some sort of dangling hint that I might make the cut for the next round, or whatever.

Adobe, cloudy reasoning, and the local paper

If you've heard the recent news about how Adobe is going to move all future releases of its Creative Suite software program bundle to the cloud, and you're also a newspaper fan, especially of smaller community newspapers, you should be concerned.

This will be an additional price burden for said community newspapers, and it's not yet clear how much.

Meanwhile, Adobe's InDesign desktop publishing program took off as quickly as it did, even though its predecessor, Pagemaker, was A: Pretty crappy; B: Designed to work best on PCs, not Macs, because the competition, Quark XPress, rightfully got a bad reputation, mainly in the customer service field. It didn't respond well, or quickly, to queries or complaints, first. Second, its updates didn't generally offer all new services customers wanted, even after InDesign started gaining ground. And today, Quark appears content to rest on its legacy background along with "trapped overhead costs" of many newspapers, hoping they don't want to spend the money to switch, if they haven't.

First, if you're a smaller newspaper, and you haven't switched, you shouldn't.

Second, if you're still running pre-Intel Macs, and you're realizing you're eventually going to have to face the upgrade wall, you have options.

That includes buying Windows 7 PCs while they're still around, but dirt-cheap. Quark 7 or 8 on Windoze works well. Depending on the size of your paper, you may be able to buy a couple of copies of older versions of Photoshop as a stand-alone and work with them.

Or, look at Photoshop Elements. Or a non-Adobe photo-editing program. Anything up to the size of a 7-day daily of less than 25K circ doesn't have to go hog-wild on the latest and greatest version of Photoshop. (Or the same for either Quark or InDesign.)

The latest edition of Publishers' Auxiliary, the monthly newspaper for the community newspaper industry from the National Newspaper Association, goes into this issue with a lot of detail. Here's their lede piece.

Anyway, if you have a small newspaper or small mag, explore your options.

And, this could lead more to consider other options.

Like finally making the transition to digital only. Of course, that will be digital in an HTML sense. Not an e-edition, as without either InDesign or Quark, you're not creating PDFs, unless you want to try to creatively downgrade to Microsoft Publisher. .

Seriously, this is another option for newspapers and magazines. Depending on what version of Creative Suite you have, how likely it is to get continued Abode debug support and for how long, and how long it's going to be able to handle files (like until Abode gets dickish and creates extensions like "tifx" or "inddx" to force your hand) you have a few years to plan details of a move to digital only.

And, if you have to have creative tools, there's alternatives. If not Photoshop Elements, there's GIMP,  the German photo editing program Photoscape and more. Anything halfway like Photoshop that has good work with layers and a decent filter set is an option. Illustrator? Corel Draw's the easy alternative. And, on InDesign? You can go back to Quark, or suck it up enough to figure out a way to do something with Publisher if you have to.

And, then, at some point, go web-only.

Plus, there's Abode's lie, I believe, of saying they're doing this for a more steady revenue stream. No, it's an anti-piracy measure, which will probably just up the piracy wars.

Meanwhile, if it's smart, Corel bundles PaintShop, Draw, and Word Perfect, and looks at creating its own desktop publishing program to bundle with that. It could aim at the lower end of the market, say something about as bells-and-whistles as Quark version 3. A lot of non-daily papers would find that whole suite fine if they've not upgraded to Office 2007 or later on the Windoze side. Add in that Corel has basic-level video editing software and more, per its Wiki page and its home page,  and there's potential indeed. Or it could buy Quark; after all, Corel itself is a "built-up" company; all of its main products were acquired by acquiring companies.

In short, Corel could become a new "player" in multiple software games, and also give a lot of people a new way to say "Eff you" to Adobe (and a bit of sideswipe "eff you" to Microsoft in the process, and to Apple in a way, as well).

Do you really want to work for for People Newspapers in Dallas?

Creative help wanted ad in the newspaper biz, or a ME who's stuck on himself? Could be some of both, but you rookie reporters, beyond doing the research for the application, I'd also research WHY somebody left this guy a profane voicemail. Here's the ad:

People Newspapers, an affiliate of D Magazine, is looking for a reporter to join its team covering Dallas' most affluent neighborhoods. This is a great opportunity for a recent college graduate or a rookie reporter who's itching to move up to the big city. Prove your reporting chops to managing editor Dan Koller by telling him in your cover letter where he went to high school, what TV show he once appeared on, and the name of the maniac who recently left him a profane voicemail. Your cover letter should be written in the body of an email sent to editor@peoplenewspapers.com. Your resume should be attached as a Word document, and your three best clips should be attached as PDFs. If you can't follow these simple instructions, you will have taken yourself out of the running.

Teh Google tells me the profane voicemail was not at all deserved. But, that's besides the point.

And teh Google also tells me that, two weeks ago, Koller was listed as a reporter at D Mag, not ME at People Newspapers. So, rookie would-be reporters, you're working for somebody new.

As for high school, who cares? But it probably was Highland Park. And, hellz yes, teh Google tells me I'm right. Lucky guess? No. Having lived in Dallas long enough, and already having a feeling about this guy, it was a well-intuitioned guess.

So, we're batting 2-for-2 on snobby and stuck up on himself, even if the voicemail he got from Sheridan was undeserved.

And, the first two took about 30 secs of Google time. 

Three minutes didn't give me a hit on what TV gig he did, but I'm sure it's at least as self-centered as the first two. The whole announcement drips with a fine drizzle of condescension.

Anyway, he was AME at People Snoozepapers before going to D. So, he won't be totally new.

That said, he will be new to a new level of power, authority and control, and stuck on himself. And, that AME title at People didn't mean a whole lot, I'm venturing, based on my own experience in suburban weekly newspaper groups. And, I'm venturing you'll be underpaid at People, compared to the $$$ of the most affluent neighborhoods" you'll cover.

Maybe you can commute from ... Cowtown!!!

So, "rooks," here's your real research.

Find out why the previous ME left People Newspapers.

Find out why Koller was hired as the replacement.

Find out why he's so stuck on himself. (Other than him being bred and born in Highland Park.)

Will established newspaper owners be as honest as Buffett?

Warren Buffet said he expects the group of smaller daily and weekly papers he bought recently to have a 10 percent profit margin.

Sounds fair enough, doesn't it? After all, before the rise of the Net, smaller papers had smaller margins than the big dailies, but many still ran at 20 percent.

Of course, 10 percent may not sound like enough for owners of other smaller newspapers. Like a CNHI, still under a mound of debt but not declaring Chapter 11.

That said, that's only half of his honesty.

Buffett added that he expects those profit margins to continue to decline. (And, let's not forget, he's indicated paywalls are coming to most of these newspapers.)

And, one larger Australian chain expect to trump Advance and be out of print papers entirely within 10 years. If not sooner.

“Print revenues have been going down and are going down faster now,” Greg Hywood recently told the annual World Congress of the International News Media Association in New York. To the extent print newspapers have a future, he said, they will be “expensive, bespoke and narrowly distributed.”

That said, Hywood says papers need to cut, cut, cut further on "legacy" costs before making this move. And, since his Fairfax Media owns Australia's flagship paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, Hywood probably has some background whence he speaks.

So, are established newspaper owners willing to practice some degree of "acceptance"?

Meanwhile, while going digital first means cutting legacy costs, Internet readers' continually-growing expectations means expanding digital costs on a regular basis, if larger daily papers are serious about this.

Light at end of tunnel for papers, and more new ideas for smart paywalls

Earlier this week, I blogged about how Matthew Ingram at GigaOm appears to have a Jeff Jarvis/Clay Shirky/Jay Rosen paywall-hating burr up his ass.

Well, per Ken Doctor at Nieman Labs, that’s a good description, because Ingram, a blind follower of the Three Musketeers of Gnu Journalism (deliberately ripped off, with same snarky intent, from Gnu Atheism) details several specific ways in which he and they are wrong.

First, especially at non-daily papers, the light is not only apparently at the end of the tunnel, but profits may actually pick up next year. As a result of that, newspaper stock prices (albeit from in-the-toilet lows) are soaring.

And, yes, even some non-dailies have paywalls. The light for dailies, definitely for smaller ones, and possibly for mid-sized ones, is at least probably getting near to a flattening out point.

Second, and directly related, Doctor details the economics of paywalls. There’s a variety of ways to skin the paywall cat. Most new adopters are going with fewer freebie reads than, say, the New York Times, and also a lot less leakiness. That includes not just small companies but as big a boy as Gannett. Doctor says opt-out provisions, in which hardcopy subscribers are automatically charged at least a nominal fee for digital access, are also growing. (I hate opt-out provisions in general, including this one, but … the idea is, nonetheless, growing.)

Third, the truth is what the Three Musketeers and hangers-on won’t tell you: paywalls are growing internationally, too.

But, even there, Doctor starts with the US side of the equation:

By the end of this year, figure that about 20 percent of the U.S.’s 1,400-plus dailies will be charging for digital access. Gannett’s February announcement that it’s going paywall at all its 80 newspapers galvanized attention; when the third largest U.S. newspaper site, the Los Angeles Times, went paid (in March), more nodding was seen in publishers’ suites.

But, that’s his takeoff point to note that (as of March) more than a dozen European dailies also had paywalls.

That, then, leads to the more significant issue. Doctor notes most paywalls are neither flaming successes nor flaming failures. So, why?

So if charging for digital access — a too long phrase, but one that’s most accurate than paywall — is neither a panacea nor a tombstone on the way to the inevitable, what is it? It’s a building block, and it’s a way to re-envision the business.

And, that’s a good point. 

Isn’t that type of creative thinking and re-envisioning what the Three Musketeers laud?

Short answer? Yes, as long as it’s done for free online.

That’s because they deliberately practice a selective quoting of only one of two sentences from Stewart Brand’s famous “Information wants to be free” comment:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Note carefully that first sentence.

Then, also per Wiki, and partially reflected on its original link, there’s the question about whether Brand meant free in terms of cost, or free in terms of access.

That, then, gets back to many critics of the Three Musketeers noting that two (Jarvis and Rosen) are paid academics, and at public, taxpayer-funded universities, no less, and therefore can easily afford to tell newspapers to let people be online leeches. Until 2010, Shirky was at the public Hunter University, so ditto on him. Let’s also not forget Shirky’s consulting for Libya’s former strongman Moammar Gadhafi, and his naivete about how autocrats could use social media to their own ends when queried about that consulting.

Update, May 3, 2013: I probably spoke too soon. 1Q 2013 numbers for most major papers show that hardcopy advertising continues to slump, and that digital advertising isn't (yet? ever?) offsetting it. Paywalls are adding some money, but they may be not much more than digital dimes, until (ever?) AP (and Reuters, and AFP) up their rates to Google et al, enough to force wire service news to be paywalled, too. And, Saint Warren of Omaha expects newspaper revenues to continue to decline, even though he became a buyer last year.

When a sales proposal is laughably wrong

OK, I'm in publisher, not editor, mode, right now, at my small town paper.

Somebody from corporate drafted (for my predecessor, actually) details for a sales proposal presentation to one of the two new car dealers here in town.

It said that, if you the dealer bought X amount of advertising, you'd need just one new car sale to more than pay for the ad campaign.

What was wrong?

It assumed that the dealer gets 100 percent of the car sales price.

And the dealer ain't looking at it that way, of course.

He's looking at his net. Smaller community, fewer luxury vehicles sold, with the partial exception of a "loaded" SUV or truck, and we'll say his average margin is 6 percent.

That means he's got to sell 15-16 vehicles or so to pay for that ad campaign -- 15 or 16 that he's reasonably sure he wouldn't have sold without it. (This doesn't count any increased volume in used cars, service contracts, etc., so I may be skewing things a bit heavy his way.)

That said, you get the general picture.

And, this is coming from somebody from higher up my food chain.

Sorry, even if coupons aren't great, and people don't always bring them in, I can see how, on a higher-dollar product, especially, a business is looking for some way to track metrics. And, if I use one of those lines as a sales line, that people sometimes forget coupons, or don't always remember where they saw a special, and use it too openly, then I'm actually discounting our newspaper's potential ad reach even more.