Now THIS is my kind of stuff: bleak, fatalistic, and, regrettably, right on target. People say the internet will replace newspapers. I say it's just going to kill them, chop the corpses into little piece, and then feed on the remains. I don't know if you saw it, but there was a story in your old magazine this month about journalism school and the future (fate?) of the profession. The writer made the point that in decoupling advertising from newsgathering, the internet was permanently altering the nature of the American press. "There's no news on Craigslist," the story said. Well, maybe there should be. Why not? How about if Google and Ebay and Twitter et al launch news divisions? More to the point, do you think there's a book idea in this and could it be written in a Phoenix Starbucks?

LAMBERT: I prefer the term, "realistic", or at least "considering the worst case scenarios" ... since they keep piling up. And yes I saw that story, and by the look of any coffee house, in Phoenix or St. Paul, there are 15 crime novels and 10 visionary business guru tomes being written in every room at any given moment.

The economic reorganization is going to take a lot of the familiar touchstones of the past 20 years down with it. I walked through a Home Depot yesterday, the one big box that was more likely to have been put on steroids by the mortgage banking shell game than any other. Everybody refinanced and bought home improvement stuff -- me included. All the small builders expanding the third rim filled up on materials there. But now it was like a stage set: front areas that once held massive displays of expensive tools and pumps and heaters and towering piles of marble and hot tubs now holds, like 30 yard long stretches of plastic packing tubs. It was as if they had this embarrassing capacity with not enough inventory to make the place look viable. Then there was the unheard of level of personal service. I was like one of less than ten shoppers in the gargantuan store (granted it was very early) and I was peppered with helpful offers of help. I remember when you couldn't find anyone to help you in that place. How are they ever going to return to the level of home building expansion and renovation that justified a hardware store the size of a stadium?

LAMBERT: If you think Home Depot looks empty, you should see some of the nicer suburbs of Phoenix.

Brian, I'm bummed. You mention Tim McGuire being intrigued by the war-games aspect of reinventing a daily newspaper on a blank piece of paper, but then there's no development of that angle. I'm curious to know what an old dead-trees guy would do, with his likely breakdown of local, national and international and an allocation between hard news & analysis vs. features, sports, business.

Or is that the stuff of some great academic think tank somewhere down the road?

LAMBERT: Like I said, he hadn't thought of that particular angle. But I think it'd make a pretty interesting classroom project. I've put the minimum number of reporters at around 50 -- sans, as I say, sports & foo-foo.

You forgot to answer one nagging question: What did you think of Lost?

LAMBERT: The show holds my interest like few others on network TV, but they're going to have to be careful with this time shifting business. I mean, if time is like a stream and you can't change anything ... well then you can't change anything.

Good news, bad news--2012 will be here before you know it.

Growth will return. Over the long term, it doesn't depend on cheap credit. Cheap energy, maybe.

Media will rise again, and it will be better than before.

Unfortunately for nearly all of the old media figures, like Mr. McGuire or the Strib, they won't survive the transition.

People in academics are fond of saying that railroads made the mistake of not realizing that they were in the transportation business, not the railroad business. (I bet McGuire has this on a slide for his classes.)

But actually the railroad guys didn't know jack about airplanes and in fact were just weighed down by their old business model and habits so they were the last guys that would have succeeded in the age of flight.

Everything you need to know about business you can learn from The Lion King. The old King has to die before the new King can lead us to a better place.

This is not meant to apply to writers who were always and will continue to be in the writing business.

LAMBERT: Well, writers have to learn that the "value" end of their business also involves attracting and holding an audience. The elements required for that are are hard to define.

"If the roots are intact...there will be growth in the Spring."

Chauncey Gardner

Hard to see if the roots are intact. The internet is more like an air plant - hanging on and living off the dying trees of the old media, "Blogging News" are parasitic comments spawned by paid mainstream coverage. How may local bloggers are going to take a jaunt to Pakistan...Washington..or even the Capitol in St,Paul to originate content ?
What's the new model..."Caribou Coffee's Brian Lambert brings you The Best Buy Blog of Rainbow Food's Lamp Chops to The Slaughter.Today's Tropical Tan Topic "A 25 year look back at 'Where The Streets Have No Name'-brought to you by Edina Realty. Looking for a Street you can Name Your Own from Over 85 Twin Cities Locations."
The horror...the horror....

LAMBERT: Would that mean I get a free latte after five purchases? A discount on Geek Squad services? And, uh, a hand-oiling every couple weeks?

If so, I'm down.

Tim McGuire's recounting of the Cowles family decision to sell the Strib in the face of the prediction that classified ad revenue would tank is fascinating.

I agree with Tim that the decision to sell to McClatchy was smart. But courageous? Hmm...not really, as I see it.

The sell decision, I suspect, was based at least in part on another major factor.

The way I heard it, by 1997 the Cowles ownership was fragmented with a bunch of new-generation family members without an interest in newspapers wanting to protect their piece of the pie. They simply wanted to protect their money. And they wanted out so they could invest in more lucrative holdings.

There's another tangent that intrigues me about the prediction that classified ad sales would go away.

At a party I attended last summer of some former Strib types, one wise old head said that the Strib was more dependent on profits from classified ads than other large newspapers. Dunno if that is true (I wonder what Tim knows about that). But if that is true, the Cowles family would have a heightened alarm about the prediction that classified ads would disappear.

What would have been courageous in 1997 would be this: a decision to make people pay for Strib news on the internet. That's what the Wall Street Journal did.

And, for dessert, here's a little tidbit about the closing of the Strib's St. Paul news bureau, where I worked until leaving the newspaper in June, 2007.

We had been in office space a lot less expensive than the current quarters being vacated. That space was over the Pazzaluna restaurant on the corner of St. Peter and 5th.

That space, on the second floor of a major corner in downtown St. Paul, was selected so that the Strib could erect major lighted signage. An office and big billboard all in one.

Except for one thing: The Strib management never got around to putting up the signage.

That office space also had desks put in place from the get-go for another eight or so newspeople for a major weekly East Metro section staff. Needless to say, that staff was never hired. So that office had empty desks from the start, and no signs. But I had a hell of a view of Landmark Center and Rice Park for a few years.

One more thing, Brian. Your estimate of what a viable news operation would require, I believe, is off by a magnitude or 3 or 4. Fifty news people would do it? That's just another TV station, or Minn.Post, or MPR, even if you don't count soft news folks. That won't do to cover this metro region, or state, the way it should be.

LAMBERT: McGuire wasn't suggesting anything other than the family was protecting its primary asset. It sounds a lot like the Wall St. Journal story. I have no way of checking his figures, and I could be quoting him inaccurately here, but I believe he mentioned $128 million a year in classified revenue back then, as opposed to $9 million today.

I remember the Strib's St. Paul office. It was a little forlorn. Our guys in Minneapolis were practically on top of each other ... before there were no people to be on top of.

Also, I'm just trying to establish a minimum. I don't know what it is. But 50 professional salaried REPORTERS -- photographers, editors extra -- would at least be a presence. The key phrase there is "professional salaried". Cub reporter pay and/or freelance won't cut it.

Mr. Lambert: You do know how to "attract and hold" an audience. Where will you end up? Will you continue to blog here? Let us know.

LAMBERT: Thanks. For a little longer I'll be here.

With all due respect, Tim did use the word "courageous."

There's nothing courageous about protecting your economic interests. That's what the Cowles family did.

And, if Tim is going to defend the Cowles, let him also disclose his economic package when he left the Strib. That would be only fair and interesting, don't you think?

LAMBERT: Well, I gotta tell ya, if I believed that my business was going to be irreparably diminished within a half decade, I might start thinking about unloading it, too. Caveat emptor and all that. Basically, there is no way to save print.

The optimist in me says we're heading into another cycle. At the end of the 19th C. a bunch of slimy "malefactors of great wealth" routinely ran the economy into the toilet through greed and corruption, and the progressive era and unions bailed ordinary people out; the excesses of the 20's were redressed by the New Deal slowly and painfully; now we again have the problem of the stupidly greedy being given everything they want and then pissing it up against the fence post as everybody else gets crushed. If all goes reasonably well, we'll get a re-run of the "the great compression" which will redress the last decade by radically decreasing the enormous gap between the outrageously overpaid rulers of the world on Wall Street and in corporate management and the people who make or do things that actually work. We will also start exposing the financial assholery that got us in the soup and creating regulations to prevent more of it.

I hope we figure out a way to preserve at least the function of the papers because as Jefferson, Madison and most of the other old guys pointed out, democracy doesn't run very well on ignorance. Except for NPR radio is worthless, or given the tendency to syndicate the likes of Limbaugh less than worthless, ditto t.v. There are good magazines and blogs, but they complement, not supplant, a daily press. Somebody has to interview the next of kin, go to the water commission meeting and do all the other grimy stuff that allows us to figure out what is going on. One problem is that a lot of the people who do the chest thumping about the virtues of a free press do little to contribute to it; if Maureen Dowd became a bag lady tomorrow, the stock of public knowledge, wisdom or virtue would not go down a bit.

LAMBERT: Like Ann Coulter, I don't think Dowd would be where she is if she didn't create a stir whenever she walked in a room. She gets off some good lines, but I can give you a list of a dozen others who do as well, none of them as good-looking as her, however.

As to your larger point, I think Obama (and certainly Rahm Emanuel) knows that a crisis this deep and pervasive creates a very rare set of circumstances for doing serious corrective house-cleaning, beginning with adequate regulation and transparency of financial markets, which is another reason that we are not likely to see another bubble economy -- spurring "growth" as we knew it -- any time soon.

Wow. McGuire's "good anecdote" about Cowles Media and the consultants' report on the future of newspaper classifieds -- and the company's response -- was a peek into a key moment in the history of the newspaper business.

I'd always wondered whether the Cowles family had just lucked into a sale at that time (due to well-known family pressures) or had groomed the "property" for sale as part of an "exit strategy". Either way, they hit the top of the market.

Until I saw Tim's anecdote, I was inclined toward the dumb luck scenario, in part due to this quote I ran across from David Cox, the Cowles Media CEO, in a speech as president of the Newspaper Association of America on 2/1/1998:

"I wish to announce that henceforth, as a matter of policy, all of us will stop fretting about the future of print," Cox declared."Print is alive," he said, after pointing to 1997's 8.3 percent growth in advertising revenue and a national daily readership of 112 million adults.

To put this in a timeline:
- 11/13/1997: Sale agreement with McClatchy
- 2/1/1998: Cox speech
- 3/19/1998 Completion of sale to McClatchy

To be fair, this quote -- and certainly not the whole speech -- only seems to be available on cached Google pages, so it's quickly fading into history and I have no idea of the full context.

Nevertheless, it looks like we've got a smart seller and a clueless buyer -- at $1.4 billion -- for a property that now is literally decimated several times over (to something like $50 million, according to some estimates).

But that doesn't say a lot about either as an employer or as a steward of a local institution, which is what is bugging a lot of former and current Strib journalists (and other employees), given what's happened over the past 10 years.

The second insight from McGuire's anecdote -- and probably the critical one for journalists -- is that he did not buy into what the consultants were saying. If he did buy in (and share it with his staff) where would we -- and they -- be today?

LAMBERT: I'd love to hear the Cowles explanation of what elements of the consultants' scenario were most convincing. Professional skeptics like newspaper people have a bias to the center path, not too much Pollyanna, not too much gloom and doom. The Cowles reacted differently.

I believe the dis-vestment solution appeared to the Cowles in the midst of an interpretive nude dance...

LAMBERT: Are you still troubled by dreams of John Cowles naked?

You missed an opportunity to connect with another brilliant former Twin Towns news (sports) source while in Phoenix. Our own Mark Curtis is the NBC affiliate news anchor. You two have so much in common with your close relations with Tom Barnard. Does my memory serve me correctly that Curtis blamed Tommy B. for his failure to connect with the TC audience?

Another former Minneapolitan, Aaron Brown, is also teaching at the Cronkite School. Did you check on real estate while you were there? Your chair could be waiting.

LAMBERT: You can't miss the real estate "opportunities". Half the town is for sale. I have my eye on a nice little six bedroom, eight fountain personal clubhouse up against Lookout Mountain. By fall I should be able to score it for $175k.

Brian, don't move to Phoenix. We need your insight around here, somewhere and somehow. Paul Gustafson and Steve Poulter, I was there with you in the background in the 1980s and 1990s, on the news desk and the copy desk, fretting about the day-to-day crises and only vaguely aware of what was going on at the ownership level. Tim McGuire's revelations don't surprise me a bit. A lot of us knew that the third-generation Cowles heirs were worried about their nest eggs as far back as 1982, when there were rumblings (around and after the Star and Tribune merger) about Gannett buying the place. Gannett did buy the Des Moines papers, Cowles-owned cousins of the Star and Tribune, and eviscerated them. We made it for another 15 years. But now I'm old and out here in the Star and Tribune diaspora with both you guys, and sad about the surreal turn of events. Maybe it couldn't have been avoided -- Steve, I think you'd agree that management saw early on that our company was in the information -- not just newspaper -- business. You were the editor of a very early online, pre-Internet version of the Strib. I just wish now that John Cowles Jr. would put his pants back on and jump on a white horse and rescue the operation.

LAMBERT: I really can't remember the last time John Cowles said anything about the paper. What could he, I suppose? The irony is that everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Gannett passed on the Strib.

You know who else knows about this? Joel Kramer knows.

But he sayeth not. And, he also took a big bag of money out of the Strib when he left. But, at least, he has done good stewardship with that.

He has a journalistic alternative that he is trying to grow. And he is to be commended for that.

My guess is that Kramer is the fulcrum - or should be - of something else: a group looking to pick up the pieces of the Strib and PP for a hybred print-internet operation that would do a Sunday paper, a 2-3 days a week printed daily, and an internet operation. Like the new Detroit experiment.

And, that operation should cut the ties to AP, and force the TV/radio stations to pay for using their reporting product.

I believe it also has to make consumers pay for news on the internet.

Joel, you don't succeed until you find a way to pay journalists a living wage. I hope that is your goal. Otherwise, this is just a fleeting undertaking signifying nothing.

LAMBERT: TV stations paying royalty fees to the newspapers. Got any idea how to enforce that one?