America, America.

Hold the Mayo. It's a business, too. (Harold Pollack, New Republic)

Alec MacGillis had a nice Washington Post piece on the Mayo Clinic’s low provision of care to Medicaid patients and the even more dicey policies of Mayo’s Glendale, Arizona site to stop accepting Medicare primary care patients...Mayo and other flagship institutions provide excellent, sometimes surprisingly cost-effective care. Yet how should we think about these institutions in light of the reality that many choose in varying degrees to channel their services towards a relatively privileged slice of the American population?

Flagship institutions such as Mayo provide crucial models of best-practice innovation and care. [But] admirable as they are, they are not charities in the normal sense of that term. They are also economic animals that respond to business opportunities and imperatives.

Soon designers will bring an ecology state of mind to all their work - whether it's toys, shoes or furniture. (Allison Arieff, NYT)

“Let’s say the market needs a new bath toy. The [designer's] typical approach is to look at form, function and the market. But here, we’re leading with the material, and if the material doesn’t do exactly what we need we can go back to the chemists. Essentially, we’re trying to bring material science into the discussion.” This can pave the way toward our using more healthful products, made from renewable and/or recyclable resources, rather than the plethora on the market now that have a negative effect on our health and the environment.

The 2009 recovery was made in Washington. (John Cassidy, New Yorker)

The U.S. government has succeeded in getting the economy growing again much quicker than most people expected, myself included—and, from the end of last year onward, I was a relative optimist. Next time you hear somebody criticizing Washington for being incompetent, or railing about the evils of big government, you might remind them of that fact, or simply direct them to the Web site of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, which compiles the G.D.P. report. The numbers tell the story.

Too little of a good thing: A jobs recovery requires a Son of Stimulus. (Paul Krugman, NYT)

Suppose that the economy were to keep growing at 3.5 percent. If that happened, unemployment would eventually start falling — but very, very slowly. The experience of the Clinton era, when the economy grew at an average rate of 3.7 percent for eight years (did you know that?) suggests that at current growth rates we’d be lucky to see the unemployment rate fall by half a percentage point per year, meaning that it would take a decade to return to something like full employment.

Goodbye to the age of newspapers. (Hello to a new era of corruption.) (Paul Starr, New Republic.)

This is no time for Internet triumphalism: the stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and--particularly at the metropolitan, regional, and state levels--the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country...Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny...No online enterprise has yet generated a stream of revenue to support original reporting for the general public comparable to the revenue stream that newspapers have generated in print.

Rush Limbaugh's race obsession. (Jonathan Chait, New Republic)

Limbaugh has repeatedly cast Obama's agenda in racial terms. ("Obama's entire economic program is reparations.") Before Obama's election, some reporters found an undercurrent of fear among certain white voters that the election of a black president would usher in a wave of revenge against white America for its history of slavery and discrimination. Limbaugh has stoked those fears:

The days of them not having any power are over, and they are angry. And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That's what Obama's about, gang. He's angry, he's gonna cut this country down to size, he's gonna make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes that it has made, its mistreatment of minorities.

As the blogger Conor Friedersdorf has detailed, Limbaugh hurls charges of racism promiscuously. Obama? "[T]he greatest living example of a reverseracist." Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates? "[A]n angry racist." Sonia Sotomayor? "She's a bigot. She's a racist."

The Obamas' taste in art. (slide show) (James Gardner, New Republic)

So what do the Obamas' choices say about them? They may well be the first couple in the White House to prefer abstraction to representational art.

Nicolas De Stael, "Nice," 1964.

 

Should Obama let Afghanistan trample his domestic agenda? (E.J. Dionne, New Republic)

At a White House dinner with a group of historians at the beginning of the summer, Robert Dallek, a shrewd student of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, offered a chilling comment to President Obama.

"In my judgment," he recalls saying, "war kills off great reform movements."

Did Karzai play us for fools? (Jason Zengerle, New Republic)

How many "Friedman Units" for Afghanistan? (Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent)

Ah, the Friedman unit, that beloved Internet tradition denoting the six-month increment many pundits believe will prove decisive in any war, only to be subject to an endless addition of … Friedman units. [In a NYT article today, a White House official says]: “We’re going to know in the next three to six months whether [Karzai is] doing anything differently — whether he can seriously address the corruption, whether he can raise an army that ultimately can take over from us and that doesn’t lose troops as fast as we train them.”

Really? We’ll know in less than a Friedman Unit? That actually seems like a rather short period of time. And the quote seems dubious. If Obama orders an escalation of troops, as he’s likely to do, then the United States will effectively be reducing its leverage on Karzai. So the Friedmans will roll onward. Will Obama work around Karzai, focusing on sub-national governance? Will Karzai let that happen?

 

 

Cancel my subscription.

One of the great neo-con canards is that the New York Times is a liberal media outlet. That would be the Times that late in the day editorialized against an Iraq invasion in wooly prose easily mistaken for a review of Charlotte's Web. And the Times, lest it never be forgotten, that put the fabulism of an under-supervised, untouchable "reporter" Judith Miller's Pentagon-supplied stories of WMD in Saddam's Iraq on page one, just ahead of the critical Congressional vote on the Iraq-war ratifications sought by George Bush.

Today's Times contribution to progressivism is a Sunday piece on "Alan Grayson, The Liberals' Problem Child." Grayson is a newbie congressman (D-Florida), a Harvard Law grad who clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for conservatives Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia before going after war profiteers in Iraq. I recently praised Grayson here for not yet succumbing to D.C. politesse, and exposing the obstructionist, falsehood-spewing G.O.P. for what it is.

But according to the "liberal" Times, Grayson is a problem for the Dems, by sinking to the rhetorical depths of Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann and others.  

The Times in recent years has suffered an epidemic of non-stories, usually about supposed socio-cultural trends and generally showcased on page one or section fronts. These thinly sourced and too easily refuted confections have so come to define the Times that they have earned a humbling running critique from Slate media critic Jack Shafer.

Even a casual reader of the Grayson article finds the Times disproving its own thesis. Which is that "in recent weeks, Mr. Grayson has catapulted himself to national renown for outlandish rhetoric and a pugilistic political style that makes him seem less staid lawmaker than a character on the lam from one of his Orlando district’s theme parks."

The Times labels Grayson as "an oddball first-termer," in contrast with "the grown-up camp" of his peers. The grown-ups, we're to understand, are those who turn the other cheek, use greeting cards to exchange discordant views, and are a reliably dignified, witty presence at each other's Georgetown dinner parties. (D.C.'s a company town, where salon invites are as highly prized as co-sponsors for your legislation.)

Funny thing, but four of the six folks quoted in the NYT piece agree that Grayson is what the doctor ordered for a Democratic party that defaults to rolling over and playing dead. Even Bachmann of Minnesota (Obama has "anti-American values"; the Dems' healthcare reform proposals are "the crown jewel of socialism") won't speak ill of Grayson.

Here's the Times contradicting itself:

Some Democrats also say that Mr. Grayson fills a void, defying their party’s inferiority complex, the constant sense that liberals just are not tough enough. They say that as an attention-grabbing motivator of the party’s base, he could prove hugely useful in getting out the message for next year’s midterm elections.

And quoting an approving James Carville:

There is always a feeling among liberals, a psychology that we are too apologetic; we see six sides to the Pentagon. [Grayson is] smart; he’s not just a crank. He wanted to be anything but an apologetic, ‘if I said anything that offended anybody’ kind of liberal.” Mr. Carville added that party leaders will view Mr. Grayson as a “torpedo” they can deploy, especially if Democrats lose important governors’ races this week. “We need guys like that out there,” he said.

And Barney Frank:

I welcome Grayson's taking the fight to [the G.O.P.]. I think he has got to be a little more careful about his punches, but I am glad he is throwing them."

And of course Grayson:

A lot of people think a Democrat with guts is some kind of mythical creature like a unicorn, but it doesn’t need to be that way...Republicans were basically playing rope-a-dope with Democrats [on healthcare reform] for months. Now people know what’s at stake. It’s life and death.

What they have done on the right is make people fearful and make people divided. What I have done is call out the Republicans for having no solutions to American’s problems. There is a sort of core element of truth that makes what I do effective.

I only wish that could be said of the Times, whose financial fortunes, it feels, are pinned to not offending anyone. Yet it manages to be the convenient whipping boy of neo-cons just the same. Even without standing for anything. Thus, the worst of both worlds. Scant wonder with its pages so lacking in passion  that New York Times Co. is in trouble, reliant on a recent bailout from the unsavoury Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. And that goes for every major paper in America. Unlike Grayson, they're afraid of their own shadows. Consequently they're too tepid to be relevant. And accordingly their readership is in aparently permanent decline.

Yes, it's come to the point where an oddball first-termer is more effective in speaking truth to power than a 158-year-old national newspaper. Whose editor, Bill Keller, runs the place the way his father, George Keller, ran oil giant Chevron Corp. - with an abiding faith in free markets, and a distance from where real life happens. He is disinclined from upsetting a status quo no matter how dysfunctional.

Describing the editorial policy of Harold Ross's New Yorker, Thomas Griffith wrote: "Irony is the voice of people who regret things, but not urgently enough to change them." Under David Remnick, the New Yorker is among the few truth-tellers in the U.S. MSM. And the Times? I enjoy its Dining Out section.  

Related

Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? (Basic Books, 2003)

Illustration for the Times by Steve Brodner.

Death rattle?

"I don’t know which is a worse harbinger of the end of civilization as we know it, the fact that the Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau or the fact that I learned this news from the advertising-rich telescreen in our building’s elevator." -Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker blog, Oct. 29.

 

The Dem stinger. And may there be many more.

 
  
Whatever Alan Grayson's drinking, I wish more Dems would order some. The neophyte Orlando congressman, who toppled a Republican incumbent in a safe G.O.P. seat last year, riding the Obama wave, is a former attorney representing employees blowing the whistle on Halliburton, KBR and other contractors raping the U.S. taxpayer by hundreds of millions of dollars. Of them, Grayson said in 2006: "The development fund of Iraq was looted by war profiteers and war whores."

Grayson himself, as they say in broadcast news, is a "media whore," never shy in accepting an invitation to appear on the small screen. The difference is that, unlike longtime Washington habitues like his euphemistic fellow media whores John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Lindsay Graham or even the plainspoken John McCain, Grayson just takes off on the enemy. And if you're not a progessive, you're the enemy. Which is pretty much how Republicans have depicted Dems over the years, as spendthrift, traitorous, socialist morons. Newt Gingrich taught a generation of his fellows to be "bomb-throwers," and the supine Dems just took it. Over and over and over, under the mistaken impression that civil discourse wins arguments. Maybe at the Oxford Union, but not on Fox, CNN and MSNBC.

Grayson gets this.

Here he is on Dick Cheney, debaucher of the U.S. Constitution, architect of failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now nervily accusing Obama of "dithering" on Afghanistan:

Well, my response is - and by the way, I have trouble listening to what he says sometimes, because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he's talking. But my response is this: He's just angry because the president doesn't shoot old men in the face. But by the way, when he was done speaking, did he just then turn into a bat and fly away?

Notice how Grayson doesn't address the question. Instead, he just demonizes the source - the M.O. taught to the G.O.P's Class of '94, cult followers of incoming House speaker-progagandist-serial adulterer Newt Gingrich.

The G.O.P. didn't have a plan for jump-starting the economy, not wanting to "bankrupt the next generation of Americans," as McCain put it. They were content instead to bankrupt the current one that's driven to penury by job loss and skyrocketing healthcare premiums and tuition costs. So only a handful of them voted for the Obama stimulus bill that has already saved about 1 million jobs and accounts for probably all of the GDP growth the U.S. just reported for the 3Q - the first positive GDP growth since the recession began in December 2007.

The G.O.P. doesn't have a healthcare plan, either, of course, though it insists it does. Its real plan, and this is hardly some kind of secret, is to obstruct Dem reforms that hold promise of solidifying Dem popularity for generations to come, as Social Security did.

So Grayson baldy labels the G.O.P.'s ultra-minimalist health care plan, which it knows amounts to no reform at all, as "Don't Get Sick" and "Die Quickly." What the G.O.P. obstructionists - which is pretty much all of them on the Hill perhaps even including occasional accommodations of a self-interested Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Me.) - are talking about by way of constructive alternatives to the Dem healthcare reforms is "amorphous nonsense," Grayson says. "Do you really think that tort reform is going to take care of 47 million people?" (The G.O.P. has a decades-long hate on for the plaintiff's bar; the 47 million is an understated estimate of uninsured Americans - the number has surely grown since the recession set in.)

Grayson's first indirect brush with fame came earlier this year, when his "Pay for Performance Act" to rein in execessive executive pay gained House passage. (It's now languishing in the Senate.) Shilling for Wall Street, "objective" Fox News host Neil Cavuto went kinda nuts about this proposed Bolshevism. But then, he was provoked, took the bait and went delightfully apeshit. Grayson had, after all, said of his bill that:

You should not get rich off public money, and you should not get rich off of abject failure...This bill will show which Republicans are so much on the take they're willing to actually bless compensation that has no bearing on performance and is excessive and unreasonable. We'll find out who are the people who understand that the public's money needs to be protected, and who are the people who simply want to suck up to their patrons on Wall Street.

Which, you have to guess, was the entire G.O.P. House caucus, since it resolutely condemned a bill and a sponsor reminiscent of the firey populism of William Jennings Bryan - commodities sadly in short supply in the hour of the Republic's urgent need.

The G.O.P.'s only real policy - to say "no" to everything - is for Grayson a denial of what happened last Nov. 4, when Dems took the White House and strengthened their majorities in both houses of Congress. That was, for progressives, sufficient mandate for the reform agenda of Obama and electorally successful Dems. The G.O.P. simply won't accept reality:

They've been dragging their feet. These - these are foot dragging, knuckle dragging Neanderthals who think they can dictate policy to America by being stubborn. And I think it's - the time is over. We had an election. That's it. Now we have to move ahead in just the way the president wants us to."

But Grayson's best shot at People's Choice award so far is his takedown of Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1% of what he wanted us to do, then we'd all need pain killers.

Limbaugh famously said earlier this year, when asked for his advice to Obama, only that he wanted Obama's presidency to fail.

Michael Steele, the hilariously gaffe-prone head of the Republican National Committee, actually demanded Grayson apologize to the Hate Radio yakker, who has a $58-million (U.S.) contract to be himself and whose mistake with hillbilly heroin was to not simply buy an outfit that cranks out a generic Oxycontin. Steele was possibly thinking of those Republicans elected officials who earlier this year did dutifully apologize to Rush, one by spineless one, after daring disagree even mildly with some hateful or ignorant thing he'd spewed. Which is how Rush, an entertainer, has come to be regarded as the de facto head of a party with an obvious leadership vacuum.

Grayson was quite pleased to also apologize, after a fashion:

I'm sorry Limbaugh called for harsh sentences for drug addicts while he was a drug addict. I'm also sorry that he's bent on seeing America fail. And I'm sorry that Limbaugh is one sorry excuse for a human being.

Of the Republicans who joined Steele in demanding an apology, Grayson said, "They should apologize to America."

The leftish Rude Pundit ("Proudly Lowering the Level of Political Discourse"), noting that "Republicans have never known how to deal with it when someone fights backs back with the same brutality they use," exhorts the Dems to use Grayson "as their point person, sending him out to take a wrecking ball to the stick houses of arguments Republicans keep constructing."

I'd go further. I'd finance a remote training centre, like the one the CAW has operated for decades in Port Elgin to train organizers. U.S. Senator Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.). Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, House finance committee chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass), James (Serpenthead) Carville and Paul Begala. Dems need basic training, and a drillmaster with the passion of Patton. ("And we're going to keep kicking those Hun bastards in the ass until we've kicked them all they way back to Berlin.") 

The Dems need more than one Grayson. They need a boot camp that turns out enough Graysons that almost every Dem talking head sought by broadcast bookers is a Grayson clone.

 

Related

Profile of Alan Grayson, anti-war profiteer, in Vanity Fair in 2007.

Photo of Alan Grayson: Gasper Tringale.

 

 

QuickLinx 01.11.09

IT'S GOD'S FAULT

Bad driver? Blame your genes. (Reuters)

House or workplace are cluttered? Blame your genes. (Reuters)

Ransom note's in here somewhere.
 

BOOM TO BUST

Bereaving Las Vegas, arguably N.A. hardest hit by housing-boom implosion. (Der Spiegel)

In slumping Dubai these days, one of four cheques bounces in real-estate collapse. (Times of London)

In glittering Dubai, $166 billion (U.S.) in planned real-estate development has been scrapped as property values plunged 41% in 1Q alone. Boom was built on debt and nosebleed oil prices. Global financial crisis and slumping wellhead prices put the brakes to that.

UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM

Why it makes no sense to lay off older workers. (Newsweek) 

It's not fun being king. Being boss is hard on your health. (Reuters)

Why helicopters are so crash-prone. Hint: they do things we don't ask of planes. (Slate)

Why websites are so confusing. Notes on navigating cyberspace. (Harvard Business Review)

Fox News isn't just bad. It's un-American. (Jacob Weisberg, Slate/Newsweek)

Why Canada's falling behind in clean-tech R&D. (Financial Post)

How MSM get sucked into believing political rumours that spread like wildfire on the Web. (New Yorker)

Newspapers just look dead. (Canadian Journalism Report)

Why it's sane for Kim Jong-il to be crazy. (Reuters)

Write your own caption. Remember that Gordon Brown, whom I'd also rather not see in the buff, has nukes too.
 

DEBATES

A Catholic balks at a thoroughly anti-woman Church of Rome. (Maureen Dowd, New York Times)

Charles Lewis responds to Maureen Dowd's "Nazi slur" on Pope Benedict, et al. (National Post)

Will California become America's first "failed state"? (U.K. Guardian)

California is thriving, despite setbacks. (Time)

California: Failed state. (John Judis, New Republic, Sept. 5, 2005)

End state: Is California finished? (John Judis, New Republic, Oct. 26, 2009)

BETTER LIVING CENTRE

Are you getting enough dopamine? An update on the motivator molecule. (New York Times)

Smile, already. You're depressing the economy. (Slate)

Seven tips if you're chronically late. (Slate)

Best-buy vehicles of latest model year, in 13 categories, starting at $21,000. (Toronto Star)

Review of the latest wave of smartphones, including BlackBerry Storm 2.0. (New York Times)

In defense of fast food: One man's unapologetic love affair with Burger King, Taco Bell, et al. (Newsweek)

In defense of candy: Meet a man who lives almost entirely on sweets. (New York Times)

Paul Rudner of New York's West Village: no veggies allowed.

PROGRESS

USDA push to get farmers markets' fresh groceries closer to you. (National Public Radio)

How new high-speed trains are making China smaller. (Newsweek)

Climate-change progress: Toshiba's new mini-nuclear reactors. (Reuters)

Electric cars are a step closer. (Euronews)

Put your dog on a diet, save the planet. (Toronto Star)

Deal with it: Biotech foods might be a cure world hunger. (New York Times)

The recession killed off grandiose "celebrity architecture." Good. (New York Times)

Centennial of Burnham's "Chicago Plan" - every city should all have been so lucky. (New Yorker)

The Magnificent Mile, the "front lawn" on Lake Michigan, these things don't happen by accident. It's called urban planning and Chicago's Daniel Burnham was one of history's best.
 

GETAWAYS, NEAR AND FAR

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York, Nov. 10 only. (Carnegie Hall)

Montreal's Oliver Jones, consummate jazz pianist, at Glenn Gould Studio, Nov. 14 only. (GGS)

Gordon Lightfoot, Massey Hall, Toronto, Nov. 18, 19, 20.

"The Magic Flute," Opera de Montreal, Place des Arts de Montreal, Nov. 19 only.

Marvellous "Paul Gaugin, Paris 1889" show at Cleveland Museum of Art, Oct. 4-Jan. 18. (CMA)

Paul Gaugin, "Breton Girls Dancing, Pont Aven," 1888. On loan from National Gallery of Art, Washington.

 

MADE YOU LAUGH

Who knew the oboes have it in for the violas? (Shouts & Murmurs, New Yorker)

The man with but a surname takes a mate with no name at all. (Shouts & Murmers, New Yorker) 

TV critic Matthew Gilbert's 14 most-annoying TV characters of all time. (Boston Globe)

She tops one reviewers' list of most annoying TV characters of all time.

 

QuickNews, Friday, Oct. 30.

THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE

BREAKTHROUGH | Europe on brink of superpower status. EU leaders agreed yesterday to holdout Czech Republic's remaining demands, opening way for ratification of sweeping reform Lisbon Treaty that would create post of EU presidency and more integrated foreign policy. Implications are enormous as a still more unified Europe - the ultimate realization of Jean Monnet's vision - will vie more effectively with U.S., China, India, Russia as a global powerhouse. As first pan-Europe president, Reuters analyst puts his money on Dutch Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende, "a centre-right Harry Potter look-alike devoid of charisma." Mr. B.'s advantage over fading frontrunner Tony Blair is that he has no enemies, while Blair is unfondly remembered as Bush's lap dog in an Iraq invasion deeply unpopular in Europe, especially with leading powers France and Germany.

U.S. RECESSION OFFICIALLY OVER | Reports 3.5% GDP growth in 3Q. Ends longest U.S. recession in 70 years. But end of downturn that began December 2007 is no relief for 15 million unemployed Americans, meaning a brace of new U.S. stimulus measures are in the offing ahead of next year's "off-year" elections. NA. recovery remains fragile: Canada today will post expected anemic GDP growth of just 0.3%.

CANADIAN MEDICAL ADVANCE | Docs pioneer gene therapy for lung transplants. Therapy developed by team at Toronto's University Health Network repairs lungs available for transplant, making more donor lungs available, and improves outcome prospects for transplant patients. Currently more than 80% of donor lungs are discarded because they aren't healthy enough for transplant use. (Photo: Dr. Marcelo Cypel, a surgical lung transplant fellow (left) and Dr. Shef Keshavjee, senior scientist in the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University Health Network. -CP.)

H1N1 PANDEMIC | U.S. says as many as 5.7 million Americans infected with swine flu virus. Number based on computer modelling. Officially, 1,000 U.S. deaths attributed to virus since outbreak began in April, but computer estimates put number of virus-related deaths closer to 1,600. About 6% of those hospitalized with the virus have died. Canadian officials warn Thursday of vaccine shortages. Ontario officials plea for patience.

AFGHAN QUAGMIRE | Obama to reject McChrystal 40,000-troop request, opt for "McChrystal Light." This either is stalling for time or a disaster. A viable counter-insurgency, a la Petraeus' handbook, requires 600,000 troops for a country the size of Afghanistan, compared with only about 100,000 ISAF troops there now. McChrystal's ask was already pitifully small by that standard, doomed to fail. (Not M's fault; he knows that's as much as could hope for, given unpopularity of war in U.S., plus additional troops Obama has already deployed early this year.) My guess is Obama wants out, will give McChrystal a fraction of the 40,000 to retreat to and protect major cities, surrendering rest of country to Taliban. Obama will try in short term to protect cities - although, good luck, as we've seen from killings of U.N. officials in Kabul this week - while establishing contacts with Taliban to strike a negotiated settlement.

WHO KNEW? | In "painful" memoir, Anne Murray deals with drugs, divorce and retirement. As with Lucy Maud Montgomery, the private-life Murray has not been the charmed existence of her public persona. (Photo: Murray in 1975 in Cambridge, Mass.)

THE INTERNET AT 40 | Pentagon-sponsored project, born Oct. 29, 1969 at 10:30 p.m.  Pacific Time, crashed on first try. And Net historians have been chuckling about that ever since. But then, the first photocopiers routinely caught fire as toner overheated. Amazing thing is that after four decades, cyberspace still seems bright, shiny and new - and only recently a threat to traditional mass media. A reminder about the slow pace of widespread adoption of new technologies. The internal combustion engine and television are other examples of innovations that took half a century to become pervasive. For practical purposes, the Net wasn't invented until 1990, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, assigning addresses to each of thousands, now billions of pages on the Net, making them easily retrievable. 

WE PREFER THE HUGELY FLAWED STATUS QUO | Obama's sweeping financial-market reforms get an initial thumbs-down in Congress. The remarkable scope of audacious proposed reforms was outlined here on Wednesday.

PREVIEW | B.C. Interior's real-estate bust chronicled in Globe's Report on Business Mag today.

MARS BECKONS | Russian space chief exhorts Kremlin to OK manned flights to red planet. You're thinking, don't the impoverished Russians have better things to spend limited funds on? But this could be our collective Plan B if efforts to curb global heating fail.

U.S. HEALTHCARE DRAMA | Pelosi (left) unveils ambitious House bill that includes "public option." Popular support for government insurer as alternative is high because the likes of Aetna, UnitedHealth and Wellpoint have so powerfully alienated Americans with skyhigh premiums and chronic reneging on claims obligations. And in epic P.R. blunder, they're now jacking up premiums at last minute to cash in before reform passes, further weakening their fierce lobbying effort to block the reforms. Reuters mocks heft of 1,990-page House bill, bigger than War and Peace (just shy of 1,500 pages.) You hear this all the time of supposedly overly detailed legislation. Well, guess what? The most trifling piece of proposed legislation clocks in at 200 to 400 pages. A a great deal of the contents are loopholes secured by lobbyists for special pleaders - among the first to complain the resulting bill is hopelessly complex - and in this case the legislation covers nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy. Yesterday's Tory data dump on Ottawa's stimulus spending is 4,476 pages. Deal with it.

CLIMATE CHANGE DRAMA | U.S. big business rejects own Chamber of Commerce's anti-reform stance. China, once leading denialist, now trying to take lead in progressive climate-change initiatives and global diplomacy. Scientific report out of Canadian North shows multiyear Arctic ice is now effectively gone. Solar power entrepreneurs upbeat about their profit prospects beyond 2010. Globe's Jeffrey Simpson nails it on the impractical climate-change goals Canada will present at Copenhagen summit. Actually, as Mr. S. says, the goals aren't impractical, it's Ottawa's do-nothing approach that ensures failure - and world leaders know it. Which means we'll be wallflowers in the Danish capital, as usual for these events. Meanwhile, Prentice (pictured) rips climate-change report by David Suzuki Foundation as "irresponsible." Can't imagine he's even read it yet. You see what I mean.

MSM'S ONE BRIGHT SPOT | It's cable. Cogeco Cable reports another strong quarter yesterday, following good numbers from Rogers earlier this week. More evidence that N.A. cable alone is thriving during post-Depression record ad drought. Why? Cable derives revenue not from advertisers but subscribers and the fees it charges networks to carry their signals.

NATIONAL POST R.I.P.? | Bankrupt CanWest threatens to close Post immediately if it can't transfer the loss-making paper to its healthier big-city papers division. Post has lost money in each of the 11 years since its founding in 1998 by Conrad Black. Observers expect bankruptcy court today to approve transfer, since creditors have already approved the request. CanWest argues Post is integral to operations of Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun and its other papers - a specious ploy given that in 2005 reorg CanWest removed struggling national daily from its newly formed newspaper division. 

PROFITS BAROMETER | Winners: Cogeco Inc., Cogeco Cable, Cott, Motorola. Losers: Barrick Gold (stunning $5.7 billion writedown), Imperial Oil, Sprint Nextel.

THEY NEVER LEARN | Accounting "irregularities" rise among small and big businesses. A coping mechanism during recession. This is the principal counter-argument to opponents of government-mandated reforms. Left to its own devices, business can't be trusted to do that right thing, just as Adam Smith said. Gresham's Law comes into play (bad money drives out good): Honest businesspeople are forced to adopt methods of unscruplous operators or risk being put out of business by them.

RISKY TRICK-OR-TREATING | Candy collectors in Churchill, Man. on guard against polar bears. Hallowe'en coincides with predatory bears' season of restless wandering until ice floes freeze into solid plain they migrate to. Children in "polar bear capital of the world" taught not to follow bear tracks and not to dress as polar bears or any white blob that could be mistaken for one.

QUOTE OF THE DAY | "Those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals which might endanger the security of the whole society are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments." -Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).

Courtesy The New Yorker, Nov. 2 edition. 

QuickNews, Tuesday, Oct. 27.

CARNEY READS RIOT ACT TO BANKS, UNVEILS NEW GLOBAL REGULATORY ORDER.

* BoC governor rips bankers as guilty of "hubris" in lavish bonuses and denialism about causing crisis.

* Intolerable legacy of bailouts: "We are awash in moral hazard" - the bankers' belief that governments will rescue banks deemed "too big to fail." That's an incentive for banks to embark on acquisition sprees to make themselves even bigger and more disaster-prone. Think again, says Bank of Canada governor. Brunt of future failures will be borne by executives and shareholders, not taxpayer.   

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada. Photo by Christinne Musch, Reuters. 

* World governments to impose higher reserve requirements and lower leverage ratios on global banks. To prepare for that, banks shouldn't be squandering windfall profits from bailouts and low interest rates on lavish bonuses, but bulking up their reserves.

* Banks will be forced to adopt "living wills," so troubled banks are quickly dismantled, isolating solid operations from troubled ones that threaten entire bank and the financial system.

* Risky derivatives should be openly traded, just like stocks and bonds. Drag these "weapons of mass wealth destruction," as Buffett calls them, out of the shadow economy where they can be accurately priced and subjected to the same transparency as other bank assets and liabilities. 

* Carney deflates bankers' self-importance, saying they must return to being "servant of the real economy."

Carney's blueprint for sweeping reform, unveiled yesterday in Montreal speech, echoes concerns of heads of state and regulators worldwide. Much if not most of it will be adopted by world economies over the next year or so, with many of the final touches applied at next G-20 summit in Muskoka next year. Carney says reformed global system will, in some key respects, adopt long-standing Canadian regulatory practices that resulted in our status as a rare major economy that didn't need a state rescue of its banks.

EUROPE ALREADY FORCING BANK BREAK-UPS | Prefers "too-small-to-worry-about" model. Dutch giant ING (above), among few remaining bancassurance colossi, stuns market yesterday saying it will shed insurance ops, become a pure retail bank. EU regulators are pushing for asset sales at other bailout recipients, including RBS, Lloyds, Barclays. This will amount to shedding 30% to 50% of total assets. New era of incredibly shrinking bank has arrived in Europe. U.S. not yet convinced banks need to shrink. Could happen, though, given multitude of U.S. regulators and economists also wary of "systemic risk" posed by over-sized financial institutions.

PROFITS TURNAROUND | Corporate profits, as earlier reported here, signalling economic upturn.

TORIES REFORM 1 | Ottawa to toughen parole rules for while-collar and other non-violent criminals. Fraudsters to serve longer stretches before parole eligibility. Response to spate of high-profile fraud cases, notably in Montreal and B.C.

TORIES REFORM 2 | Flaherty vows "comprehensive reform" on pensions soon. Will affect federally regulated firms, such as banks, transport sector, telecommunications. Meanwhile, Quebec moves to backstop pension guarantees for 3,000+ Nortel retirees in province. Leaves no excuse for QP not to follow suit.

BIG HURT | Fiscal basket case Toronto preparing across-the-board 5% cut in budget outlays. "Everything is on the table," official says - social services, rec centres, snow clearance...

THAT DIDN'T TAKE LONG | New U.S. ambassdor to Canada makes early stop in Alberta. Talks oil with premier and conservationists, following in Cheney's footsteps. U.S. administrations come and go. But Athabasca, world's second-largest oil reserves after Saudi, will forever be regarded stateside as integral to U.S. energy security.

HUH? | John Kerry describes Hamid Karzai as a "patriot." Massachusetts U.S. senator, close to WH, either is delusional about corrupt Afghan president (left) or is setting the table for a Karzai role in negotiated settlement with Taliban. Bet on the latter. Obama repeats he won't be rushed in his rethink of current, failing counterinsurgency mission. Contrast with LBJ, who believed his generals' sanguine reports of Vietnam "progress" to the end.

HUGE U.S HEALTHCARE BREAKTHROUGH | Senate bill will include new government insurer. So-called "public option" had met stiffest opposition in senate. So in conference with pro-public option House to forge a final bill for president's signature, Canadian-style single payer element likely to survive, with provision permitting states to opt out. Just weeks ago public option was given up for dead, by me, among others.

WASTE RAMPANT IN U.S. HEALTHCARE | Tab is put at staggering $700-billion-plus (U.S.) a year. "That's one-third of the nation's healthcare bill," official at Thomson Reuters, author of report, says. "The good news is that by attacking waste we can reduce healthcare costs without adversely affecting the quality of care or access to care." Obama has been widely dismissed in asserting that the cost of covering the uninsured can be defrayed by cutting waste.

NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION PLUNGE CONTINUES | Papers cutting "unprofitable" circulation. Slumping ad revenues no longer support free copies distributed at hotels and the like by USA Today, LA Times, et al. Also ttrimming distribution to suburbs in effort to reduce newsprint, printing costs. Papers claim readership numbers are holding up - more people reading each copy. Still, hardly what you'd call a sign of health.

UNEXPECTED HEALTH BOOST FOR ICELAND | McDonald's quits the insolvent country. Cites 80% plunge in local currency. Watch for reheated McNuggets imported from Norway to become Reykjavik dorm delicacy.

CRASH TEST DUMMY | Director Paul Haggis quits Scientology on discovering it's homophobic. Director missed the memoes all these years.

THE COST OF A WELL EDUCATED BABY | Getting that toddler through university will cost $137,013. So start investing now. This assumes no scholarships, no student grant assistance, no student summer jobs. True, tuition and related costs have soared. But you have to wonder about the self-interest in this report from TD Financial - which, BTW, is emphatic that a cape-and-gown is essential to your kids' future. Obviously, TD has a strong interest in selling mutual funds and other fee-laden savings products.

QUOTE OF THE DAY | "Let's face it, the most important innovation in banking for most people in the last 20 years is the automatic teller machine." -Paul Volcker, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, in an interview with Rotman Magazine, the U of T business school publication, on the bankers' current fear of over-regulation that might restrain them in "innovating" new products to replace past hits like subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations and credit-default swaps. And don't we miss those already?

Courtesy The New Yorker, Oct. 12 edition.

  

QuickNews, Thursday, Oct. 22.

TAKEOFF | Windows 7 launches today, hoping to erase memories of glitch-prone Vista. Windows 7 reviews by NYT and Globe and Mail. Warning: Windows 7 is winning raves, but so did Vista when it launched.

 

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, in Toronto yesterday talking up Windows 7. Photo: Mark Blinch, Reuters.

POPULIST PAYBACK  | Obama to slash pay 50% to 90% at bailout recipients. Pay-cuts plans, leaked yesterday, rumoured to affect top 25 executives at each of Citigroup, Bank of America, General Motors, Chrysler, American International Group (AIG) and financing arms of GM and Chrysler.

BANK PAY FURORE IN U.K. | Government enraged over persistent lavish bank pay. Alistair Darling, finance minister, angry with Goldman Sachs payouts: "I've spoken to all our banks and none of them would be standing here today if the taxpayer hadn't put their hand into their pocket."

 

REVELATION | Alice Munro reveals at Toronto authors festival last night that she has battled cancer. Author did not say when. Earlier this year, Munro, 78, received Man Booker International Prize honouring her life's work.

NEW CHAPTER FOR JOHN RALSTON SAUL | Voted president of International PEN yesterday. Novelist is first Canadian in PEN's 88-year history to head organization fighting for freedom of repressed and imprisoned writers worldwide.

CBC MAKEOVER | Management claims program shakeup biggest in CBC history. CBC Newsworld becomes CBC News Network, "The National" goes to 7 days a week, head honcho Stursberg claims all shows and hosts will change. Rumours have CBC trimming world coverage to tell more stories from Canadian regions. I can hear you yawning.

MODIFY CROPS OR STARVE | U.K. science academy says GM foods needed to cope with hunger. Warns global food shortages loom if genetically modified crops aren't more widely accepted.

MORAL ARGUMENT AGAINST TAKEOVER | Cadbury says hostile bidder Kraft would upend its values. Company whose "values" are selling candy and soft drinks (Schweppes) that figure prominently in obesity crisis says it was founded with a humanitarian ethic that cheesemaker launched by Canadian J.L. Kraft would somehow disturb. A novel way of demanding a higher takeover price, if a little galling.

WHAT RECESSION? | Chinese GDP accelerates to stunning 8.9%. Could have something to do with Beijing's monster stimulus jolts since last year - first off the mark among major economies. Chinese consumer spending is strong, while Bernanke and Harper warn North American recovery will be gradual at best.

U.S. and EU have long called on China to nurture an internal consumer economy. Emergence of Chinese shopaholics is beginning to augment export-driven prosperity.  

OH, JUST FOLD ALREADY | Playboy plans "Women of Wall Street" pictorial. “When the news gets bad, then maybe that's a chance to make people smile by coming up with something that puts a different twist on it,” says Gary Cole, Playboy's photo editor. No, when the news gets bad - meaning mass layoffs - jobless women become available to be exploited in their hope of catching the attention of a reality-show talent scout. Thus "The Women of Enron," etc. etc. C'mon Hef, your 15 years were up 41 years ago.

QUOTE OF THE DAY | "Eleven - a banker's dozen." -George Fetherling, Toronto poet and author, in 1996.

 

 

 

 

Courtesy The New Yorker, Oct. 19 edition.
 
 

QuickLinx 10.21.09

THINK AGAIN

S.A. World Cup 2010 stadiums are beauties, but huge cost overruns, transport are worries. (UK Times)

Maybe the best argument ever for high-speed passenger rail in N.A. (Chris Nelder, Business Insider)

The Afghan war is all about local politics. Not grasping that means certain mission failure. (New Yorker)

Five technologies that could change how we generate and use energy. (Wall Street Journal)

Obama's not the enemy of free-market choice, it's the insurers and banks from whom he and Congress are demanding transparency and genuine competition. (Harold Meyerson, Washington Post)

Earth's most successful species? 1. Earthworms. 2. Algae. 6. Homo sapiens. (Daily Telegraph)

Canada slips to 19th from 13th in annual free-press ranking, U.S. jumps to 20 from 40. (CP)

HIGH & LOW FINANCE

FDA to crack down on misleading "Smart Choices" labelling of nutrition-deficient foods. (USA Today)

Buffett-controlled Moody's shameful role in the epic financial crisis. (McClatchy)

U.S. health insurers thinking about premium surtaxes on obese clients. (Slate)

Don't sweat the debt. And don't use it as a rationale to cut essential social spending. (Economist)

Brand loyalty has disappeared among car buyers. Only 20% of buyers trade for same brand. (NYT)

A&E

Maurice Sendak (below) says parents who fret Wild Things will scare kids can "go to hell." (UK Guardian)

Francesca Simon's 10 literary anti-hero faves, from Scarlett O'Hara to Tom Ripley. (UK Guardian)

Harry Potter rules, but Hannah Montana beats out Cinderella and Pooh among kids' faves. (UK Guardian)

Nobel laureate writer Jose Saragamo says Bible is a "handbook of bad morals." (Agence France Presse)

Berlin concert review: Diana Krall "has ascended to summit of showbusiness mountain." (UK Times)

THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY

Avocado, ginger, pomegranate and 7 other foods to get you in the mood. (UK Family Health Guide)

If we're told it's a grand cru, it tastes like one, even if it's plonk. (Frontal Cortex)

The must-have updated Larousse Gastronomique is here, bigger than ever. (Daily Telegraph)

I have a life. There's no time in it for Facebook "friends." (Boston Globe)

Save the Deli, David Lax's tribute to the endangered Jewish deli experience. (Barnes & Noble Review)  

Jim Kenzie's 10 dumbest vehicle options, from fog lights to leather. (Toronto Star)

Recession, clean-tech, has Americans emulating Europeans as cyclist commuters. (NYT)

The real story of Monopoly's origins are murkier than Hasbro lets on. (Wall Street Journal)

 

My stubborn faith in newspapers.

1. The traditional newspaper industry only looks dead.

As is commonly known, the crisis in N.A. papers has mostly to do with unsustainable debt taken on by media moguls who acquired dailies and newspaper groups at the top of the market in 2000, and the subsequent purchasers who also vastly overpaid. Examples include the CanWest purchase of the Hollinger big-city papers in 2000; the Knight Ridder chain's purchase by the McClatchy chain, now a penny stock; and Chicago real estate developer Sam Zell's leveraged buyout of Tribune Co. (which earlier had acquired Times Mirror, owner of the LA Times and Baltimore Sun). Tribune, also owner of the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel, filed for bankruptcy protection only a year after Zell took control of it.

Rupert Murdoch's outlandishly priced $5-billion purchase of the Wall Street Journal last year already has triggered a significant writedown on that investment. Murdoch is conspicuous as a poor operator of newspapers. Both his flagship Times of London and New York Post are chronic moneylosers, their losses long pre-dating the Internet era. He's underwater with MySpace, as well, but that's another story. All worth keeping in mind as Murdoch wails about how newspaper readers must, must, must be made to pay for online content. Or he'll, I dunno, hold his breath until we do.  

Great, mournful attention has been paid to recent newspaper deaths in Seattle, San Francisco and Denver. (The media loves to cover itself.) The dailies that perished were in each case runner-ups to a dominant paper. The death of the two-daily town is a trend that was well advanced prior to the current downturn, and already had claimed the "second" paper in Toronto (the Telegram, in 1971), the Washington Star, the Chicago Daily News, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, the Courier-Express in Buffalo, the Ottawa Journal, Montreal Star, Calgary Albertan, Winnipeg Tribune and so on. The real story of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Denver's Rocky Mountain News is that they hung as long as they did. 

Meanwhile, the fundamentals of the newspaper "habit" remain surprisingly strong, at least relative to the many obituaries written for Gutenberg's spawn. The financiers messed up, big time. But editors generally continue to serve their markets quite well. Most dailies today are losing money or at best are marginally profitable. That is almost entirely due to the biggest plunge in ad revenue since the Great Depression, amid a global economic downturn also worse than conditions since the Depression.

By most estimates, about two-thirds of the lost ad revenue will return when the economy is fully recovered. Because newspaper publishing luxuriated in some of the highest profit margins of any industry for the past century, it will be comfortably profitable again despite not returning to the peak ad revenue earlier this decade. And that does not include that average 6% to 8% of total ad revenue that papers now garner from online ads. Ads on newspaper websites continue to be heavily discounted. Newspaper advertising sales forces are still figuring out how most effectively to sell the new medium. And potential ad clients haven't yet learned how an innovative online ad can drive sales of their products.

Thus there is a tremendous upside in online ad revenues - for the reasons above, and because online newspaper reading is nowhere near as prevalent yet as is commonly assumed. In Canada in 2008, just 4% of adults 18+ read online newspaper editions exclusively. Many Canadians read both the print and online editions of their favourite dailies. Which suggests (a) a very strong hunger for news, and (b) that there are attributes unique to each of the print and online experiences that readers seek.

News and entertainment consumers have never had such a wide choice of alternatives to traditional daily newspapers. Yet, in Canada, 73% of adults 18+, or 13.7 million people, continue to read at least one "dead-tree" edition of a daily newspaper each week. Amost half of adults (48%) have read yesterday's paper; 69% have read at least one weekday paper in a given week; and 77% have read a paper's print or online edition in the past week including weekend editions.

Conditions in the U.S. are similar, with a decline in newspaper readership of just 7% since the 2002 peak, compared with a 10% drop for prime-time television in 2007 alone. About one-third of Americans, or more than 104 million adults, read the print edition of a newspaper every day, according to the Newspaper Association of America, and more than 115 million read a Sunday paper. Papers remain popular enough with the young, 65% of the 18-24 and 25-34 demographics having read a print or online newspaper edition at least once each week in 2008. The audience for U.S. newspaper websites has soared 75% since 2004, to 73 million unique visitors a month.

2. Panic.

The "death of newspapers" story line is unique to N.A. European papers continue to flourish. True, the reading habit is stronger in Europe, where half a dozen "quality" dailies and another half dozen tabloids  duke it out in London alone. It is not uncommon for Greek consumers to read three or four dailies each day, and for Parisians to take three papers daily. Why? Because European papers are more opinionated, they stand for something, they often are strongly aligned with a political party or political philosophy. I am leaving out here sports and other specialized dailies, such as the ethnic press. Polish and Russian expatriates in Munich and Chinese-born adults in Toronto make time to read a local metro daily as well as a local daily in their mother tongue.

You have to wonder about the death of newspapers when Toronto has six English-language dailies. (Again I'm leaving out a vibrant local ethnic press). Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver each support two local dailies plus the Globe and Mail and National Post. The two-daily town survives in Quebec and Winnipeg,  

The decline in N.A. of the two-paper town accompanied an undeniable gradual drop in newspaper penetration rates. Again, why? Because the remaining, monopoly paper, eager to keep the dead paper's readers it had effortlessly inherited, became determined not to offend them. The monopoly papers that have now dominated our industry for decades stopped having a forceful point of view. They stopped being interesting.

The crusading ethic or gutter-press instincts of competing papers disappeared, replaced by a monopoly paper whose quest for increased readership no longer took the form of "scoops" or investigative journalism or even pandering to the lowest common denominator. (That was the Toronto Sun's remarkably successful formula, of immigrant and gay bashing and a Page 2 "Sunshine Girl" before it was neutered by new owner Quebecor, making the paper irrelevant to its former audience. This is one case that does not bring me to tears.)

The new key to success has been to not alienate anyone. To not be controversial. Combine that with the "objectivity" doctrine drilled into J-school students beginning in the 1960s. Which was compounded by the media's inflated sense of its power after Watergate, and accompanying self-imposed mandate of being extraordinarily fair. The result has been the "one-the-one-hand, on-the-other" journalism of today. Today, any newspaper article describing what is blatently true must include in equal measure the views of nutbars holding the opposite view. "These things we hold to be self-evident" would not pass muster with contemporary newsroom managers. Instead, the operating principle is: "This story's not balanced, everyone you quote says water is wet. Go back and get the other side."

Coincident with this trend was the curse of chain ownership, which usually if not always imposed a sameness in content and design across papers often spanning the continent. An integral part of this "absentee ownership" was the revolving door of newspaper management, as publishers and editors in chief were constantly reassigned within the chain to different cities. The tradition of a publisher and chief editor having roots in the community perished. Chain-wide "templates" for everythng from story selection and article length to human resources techniques and front-page layout methods gave the Tampa Tribune and Cleveland Plain Dealer so similar an appearance that readers were primed for a radical alternative - which ulitmately arrived in the form of Internet newsites and "blogs." (To see how enduring is the lookalike reality in newspapers, click here.)

It is striking that not one major newspaper in America objected to the "war of choice" in Iraq in 2003, with the exception of a desultory editorial-page skepticism in the New York Times. (Which the Times made up for with reporter Judith Miller's fraudulent, front-page Times stories about phantom WMD in Saddam's Iraq, just ahead of the crucial U.S. Senate vote that greenlighted America's worst foreign-policy blunder since Vietnam.)

Canadian papers were no different. Only the Toronto Star opposed the war in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion; the Globe and Mail and the CanWest papers were in lockstep support of the Bush administration's delusional vision of a reinvented pro-Israel, pro-West Mideast with Saddam out of the way. That was hardly an isolated incident. N.A. dailies have been afflicted by groupthink, afraid of their own shadows, for so long that it is something of a miracle they retain the substantial audiences they still command. The reason they do is the overriding importance to readers of local news, which only the hometown paper covers in anything approaching comprehensive detail.

Newsrooms once were grumpy places, a curmudgeon sitting at every third desk. Long acquaintance with fires, floods, layoffs and municipal and corporate corruption will do that to you. But now they're morose places, hangdog expressions all around as we've come to believe our own exhaustive reporting on the supposed decline of our industry. There have been repeated waves of layoffs at major N.A. papers. These have been due partly to the advertising drought, but mostly to the struggle of feckless owners to make monthly payments to banks and bondholders.

The Internet is so fascinating an invention, by now its ubiquity informing a journalist's thoughts so thoroughly, that a great many newspaper managers have become panic-stricken about the imminent demise of their businesses. One hears constantly this singular refrain: "We need a new business model, and no one has a clue what that might be." Too many publishers imagine themselves to be buggy-whip makers at the turn of the last century, just waiting for the last few customers to straggle out and then close the doors for the last time on a business that has no future.

We are experimenting with all manner of innovations, from "repurposing" reporters to also write blogs or become videographers to devising newspaper websites with a so many new, so-called "user-friendly" applications that they are, in fact, becoming ever more difficult to find your way around - or "navigate," as we say. Most newspaper websites are good or very good,. But most also have at least some features that no journalist would come up with. There's one major paper with a new website that now enables you to view the day's news in traditional newspaper format, or, at the click of your mouse, have all those same stories arranged in rows of blocks without photos or illustrations, or a third option in which all these stories are arranged in the form of pictures that one clicks on to get the text. I'm told that, at least in the early going, many online readers enjoy this novelty. To me it looks like a newspaper that can't make up its mind about that most essential of functions, ordering the news so the reader see what the editors consider most important for them to know.

Such novelties arise because newspaper websites are not designed by journalists, but by computer software writers, the two groups speaking languages largely incomprehensible to the other. There's no stopping applications like the one I just described, because the "techies" are in charge, and techies are prone to do whatever technology enables them to do, whether it's useful to the "end-user" or not. This is what Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, calls "geek sex." At Microsoft meetings on prototypes with far too many bells and whistles, Ballmer asks his programmers, "Is this truly useful to our customer or is it just geek sex?" Usually it's the latter and it's removed.

One of the great truisms that disturbs our sleep is that young people are no longer taking up the newspaper habit. They are, presumably, defectors to the Internet. And yet, the average age of readers of CanWest's 11 big-city papers is only 47. Which means that while a lot of 60-somethings are reading the Victoria Times Colonist and the Ottawa Citizen, so are a lot of people in their 30s and late 20s.

In my 30 years in business journalism, a year hasn't gone by when I didn't hear about the growing crisis of our industry's failure to capture young readers. The CBC periodically tears up its entire programming schedule in pursuit of young viewers and listeners, killing off shows with large loyal audiences of relatively high-income earners in order to experiment with programs aimed at kids with scant disposable income and which usually fail. Chasing after audiences with the attention span of a gnat is lunacy. I wanted to be a journalist since Grade Six, but I didn't acquire the habit of reading a newspaper each day until my 20s. Young people have too much frantic growing up to do, and dense textbooks to master and essays to write, to spend half and hour each day with a newspaper, It was ever thus.

Newspaper managers are fretting over smartphones and Facebook and Twittering. They're in a panic that somehow a communication device that enables me to send a maximum 141-character message is some kind of threat to the knowledge disseminated by newspapers and magazines, with their in-depth coverage of the why and how of events and what's to be done about solving the world's problems.

Newspapers have survived magazines, the telegraph, radio and television. They will not only survive but exploit the Internet, which already has exploded the size of my newspaper's audience from one million to close to two million, and transformed my metro daily into a paper that reaches the entire planet. I could never have imagined, stepping out of the Ryerson journalism school for the last time in 1979, that someday the columns and features I write for a Toronto newspaper would be read by people in Singapore, London and Fort Worth, Texas. But every small-town paper with a website - and almost every paper and magazine has one - can now be read worldwide, on the date of publication. Our I should say the hour of publication, since newspaper websites are updated constantly through the day. In that sense - and this is a very big deal - these are the greatest days in the history of newspapers, which have never commanded such a vast, global audience.

Which raises the question of whether we actually need a new business model. I see newspaper executives with their hair on fire, and they're trying to put it out with a hammer. Yes, we must evolve. We must, in the same competitive spirit of old, strive to put out the best newspapers, online and print, in the world. Because the flipside of Londoners being able to read the Star in real time is that the Star's audience now reads the Guardian and the Washington Post.

It strikes me that our business model of the pre-one-paper town is the one that will ensure our survival and prosperity. We simply have to be the most interesting paper, online and in print, that our potential readers can choose from. There's no rocket science to this. We have to go back to scooping the competition - and Lord knows we've never had more competition than today. We have to describe gang violence and offer solutions to it that we have learned work in other places. We have to expose scoundrels and celebrate heroes. We have to employ columnists so good that they each command audiences of 40,000 to 100,000 readers all on their own - who, by definition, have a strong point of view. We must rediscover our dormant crusading instinct.  And, of course, if you're a metro paper, nothing happens in your city without you knowing about it and covering it with as many resouces as required.

3. The competitive advantage of newspapers.

The CanWest big-city papers have been around, on average, for 122 years. CanWest's Montreal Gazette dates from 1778. In every city in N.A., the oldest medium, most deeply knowledgeable about the community, and with a reputation for that knowledge, is the local daily newspaper. The strongest media brand name in any city is that of its dominant newspaper.

A few years back, the folks at Procter & Gamble decided that the American consumer needed a new type of dust mop. Instead of dipping your mop repeatedly in a pail of soapy water, this new mop would have the cleaning agent embedded in the slab of foam at the business end of the mop. P&G had to come up with a cleaning agent that wouldn't drip or evaporate in transit to the stores. The compound had to be strong enough to clean your floor but not so strong that it left scratches on it. P&G had to come up with winsome name name for this thing. It had to test-market what seemed a quite unnecessary invention. And to decide how to price it. And design it, everything from the packaging to the fit of the handle in your hand. They then had to convince millions of North Americans that they must have this product. 

When I first heard of the Swiffer mop I thought it was idiotic, unable to imagine sensible people shelling out a premium price for a dust mop. But I also thought, this is Procter & Gamble, one of the greatest marketers in history. An enterprise that's been around since 1837, and has such long-established relationships with Wal-Mart, Loblaws and every other national retailer that, basically, P&G is able to force products onto the market on the strength of its reputation and marketing prowess. The local grocer is thinking, I've made a fortune over the years on sales of Tide, Pampers and Crest toothpaste, I'll certainly give this new P&G product a try. And you know the rest. Swiffer - I still think it's a ridiculous concept - generates sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars for Procter & Gamble.

In my business, we also have been around a long time, for at least a century in the case of most papers. Like P&G, we have immense resources, more than our non-newspaper media rivals. Unlike P&G and its Swiffer, we don't have to explain what news is, and why it's valuable to our existing and potential customers. All my colleagues and I have to do is be better journalists than our rivals, just as P&G has to stay a few steps ahead of Colgate and Unilever. We need simply to go back to what we once did so well - being the first to tell you about Marilyn Bell's extraordinary feat in swimming the width of Lake Ontario, and crusading for an end to child poverty and gang violence in our community. And expressing a strong point of view about the things we believe will make our readers healthier and more prosperous - whether it's a new industrial policy to revive our Southern Ontario economy, or championing more research dollars for breast cancer. We have to surprise and entertain. We have to be willing to offend, in causes we know to be right.

It's really quite simple. We need to be essential.