According to the Unitarian Jihad Name Generator my name is The Cattle Prod of Mild Reason. Visit the site to find your own.
Hat tip to Lex "The Sword of Moderation" Alexander for pointing to the site.
Yesterday I took the Winston-Salem Journal to task for offering higher quality reprints of Wednesday's "Obama Wins" front page to people who bought the Thursday paper over the counter, but not to subscribers. I emailed managing editor Ken Otterbourg and he essentially replied with the same rationale he used in his blog post about the issue:
Several bloggers, including my friend Lucy Cash at Life in Forsyth, are criticizing the Journal for its decision on publishing a special reprint of our election results front page that is only available in single-copy sales, rather than in the papers that go to subscribers.
It’s still a free country, and they have the right to criticize. And it’s all well and good to have conversations and disagreements about what we should have and could have done. My personal belief is that it’s a bit of a tempest in a teapot. I wasn’t part of the decision on how to reprint, but from what I’ve been able to glean, the logic was as follows: Subscribers got the real thing, the actual paper printed on Nov. 5. Many folks who buy the paper one day at a time didn’t, because we sold out. So this was something for them. The subscribers’ anger is that they are loyal and they should be rewarded for their loyalty with the special reprint. That makes sense, too, although from my standpoint, the real thing is more valuable and intrinsically historical than a reprint.
My response to Ken was that subscribers wouldn't see this as an "either or" issue. If they were simply making another newsprint run of the front page then maybe a subscriber would buy the rationale that they got the real deal the first time around so there's no reason to send them the new copy. But that's not what the Journal said. Here's the text of their announcement:
A special souvenir reprint of today's front page, printed on high-quality paper, will be inserted tomorrow in all single-copy papers — those sold in racks and at retail outlets. Papers containing the souvenir front also will be on sale at the front counter of the Winston-Salem Journal at 418 N. Marshall Street.
They themselves call it a "special souvenir reprint." So as subscriber's we're not special? Also, they offer it free to anyone who buys the regular Thursday paper over the counter. Why wouldn't a subscriber expect to be treated as well as an over the counter buyer? Heck we're the ones who make a long term commitment to the paper, and we're the ones who agreed to pay a certain rate and actually had the product shrink in the meantime.
Now compare the Journal's approach to the Greensboro News & Record's announcement of their special extra run of their Wednesday edition:
The News & Record printed about 10,000 extra copies of Wednesday's front section.
The copies will be available Thursday for 50 cents at some stores and at the News & Record's office at 200 E. Market Street in downtown Greensboro.
The News & Record is also selling a commemorative copy of Wednesday's front page mounted on a marble or wood plaque for $75.
First of all the N&R reprint is simply a duplicate run of the original newsprint front section. Second, they are selling it separately so all readers are treated equally. Finally, they wisely promote their mounted copy service, which is similar to what the Journal does. Almost all major newspapers offer mounted high quality commemorative reprints of almost any page; where do you think all those plaques with newspaper reviews that you see at restaurant entrances come from?
Quite simply the Journal screwed the pooch in how they structured their reprint offer and how they communicated it. I'm sure from their perspective it seems like "no big deal" but I've worked in environments where businesses have had to reduce services due to budget constraints, asked their customers to hang with them and be pleasantly surprised when many do, and then face a surprising amount of criticism over a seemingly innocuous announcement. The scary part is you only hear from a small minority of the folks who are pissed, but in the following months you continually see the offending action offered by now-former-customers as one of the main reasons they are leaving.
They can pooh-pooh it all they want, but I'm telling you that the mere fact that the bloggers even paid attention is that the paper has made lots of moves that have irked and annoyed them (us). This was easy to criticize because it seemed so emblematic of how the paper seems to view its subscribers. Instead of pooh-poohing us they might want to consider us the canaries in the gold mine.
This whole thing had me thinking about the newspaper folks in general last night, and what I've begun to understand is that alot of the people in the business have deluded themselves. Sure, they know they're business is in trouble but I seriously doubt that they truly understand how much of it is actually within their control. Yes ad revenue is down and classifieds are in the tank thanks to large industry shifts, but they are the ones who didn't foresee the changes and have been too slow to react. They are also the ones who cut back on editorial staff which resulted in a diminished capacity to generate local, original content. So guess why we can now turn to the intenet and get essentially the same product we used to get from the paper? Finally, they still control the relationship with their customers. They have every opportunity to take advantage of new media outlets and expand and deepen their relationship with their customers, but they take half-ass measures like enabling comments on their website and then offer zero moderation or discussion. Essentially they speak down to us and then say "shout among yourselves, we're above the fray."
I'm pretty sure Journal folks don't see things this way, but as a customer I can tell them that I do see their attitude this way and I know that I'm not alone. If they're wise they'll take this kerfluffle as an object lesson and vow that from now on they'll look at things from their customers' perspective in the decisions that they make. They need to remember that perceptions matter and that in situations like this the customers' perceptions matter more than their own. If we feel like we've been screwed then we have, whether the wise men at the Journal agree or not.
Here's the scenario: You're running a business, the local monopolistic newspaper, that by all accounts is struggling mightily against the tide of alternative media. Lucky for you the first black American has just been elected President of the United States which leads to an incredible demand for your issue that documents the historic occasion. So here's the question: What do you do to celebrate? Do you:
Thanks to Esbee we know that our friends at the Journal opted for the third choice. With management decisions like that is it any wonder they're struggling?
I'm waiting to hear the justification, probably something to do with logistics making it near impossible to get the insert into all subscribers' hands. Of course that would be BS, and I think we can all discern the real logic behind the decision: keep the print costs down, and juice the single copy sales. But why? Why risk alienating subscribers?
Here's another question for the Journal's management: why not sell a special sponsorship for the piece? Surely you'd make more money by producing the piece for 100,000 readers and selling a sponsorship based on that volume than by producing a few thousand pieces for a couple of percentage points bump in single copy sales.
So how many subscribers will the Journal lose over this? Probably not many in the near term, but these are exactly the kind of things that customers remember and as the newspaper continues to diminish in size, and as subscribers continue to struggle to find reasons to continue their subscriptions, I can guarantee you that many will be saying to themselves, "They've completely eliminated half the things I care about, they barely cover any local news, and there was that time they screwed us subscribers on the Obama cover. Why would I write a check for that?"
If the paper had an ombudsman it would be interesting to hear what he has to say about this, but alas they don't have one. Maybe Ken Otterbourg will address it on his blog.
Update 11:10: I could swear that when I first visited the Journal page with the announcement that there was at least one negative comment there. I went back to check the language of the announcement and it said that the page had been updated five minutes earlier and there wasn't a comment anywhere to be found. Actually there isn't any way to leave a comment now. Hmmm. Can someone else visit the page and let me know if it's just my browser or has the comments function (been) disappeared for everyone?
After double checking it looks like I'm not crazy. The screen shots below show:
In other words from my browser it looks like that's the only page you can't comment on. I'm guessing it's coincidental, but I feel like being a conspiracy theorist today. So here goes: The Journal's scared of us! They don't want us to spread poisonous verbiage about their lame customer service!
Okay, I feel better.
Winston-Salem's first lady, uber-blogger Esbee, has been on hiatus for about 10 days and I have to say it's like having a friend you talk to every day leave town. It's funny because she's interested in things that, quite frankly, I wouldn't do in five lifetimes, but at the same time it's fun to read her dispatches from around town. Since I rarely venture far from the confines of my home office she's been my lifeline to all things Winston-Salem. I have a feeling that she's filled the same role for the thousands of people who visit her blog every day so I'm guessing that she's received hundreds of emails from readers suffering Esbeedrawals asking her what's up and when she'll be back. The sign on her blog says she'll be back November 5-ish and I'm hoping that the -ish is closer to five than to nine or ten.
Until she's back you should check out the profile that Winston-Salem Monthly did on Esbee, aka Lucy Cash.
This is my third election since moving to North Carolina and I still find it weird that my polling place is a church, and coincidentally it's my church. Obviously it doesn't bother me in the least; I'm quite comfortable there, but I wonder how it feels for anyone in my voting district who may be Atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Agnostic or some other -ish/-ist/-ic? I'm not sure how I'd feel if the polling place was in a pagan temple, but I'm pretty sure I'd rather be in a school or library.
Anyhow, there was literally no line when Celeste and I entered the church, nor when we left. I was the 907th voter tallied by the voting machine some time after 2:00 this afternoon. Back in '04 I stood in line for 45 minutes to register/sign in and another 45 minutes to actually cast my vote. You may remember that was a slightly contentious election too. Me thinks the heavy early voting really helped keep the crowds down. I didn't blog my '06 voting experience, but I remember it going smoothly, which is no surprise since it was one of those 'tweener elections that get about 20% turnout.
BTW, I split the ticket as always. Some Democrats, some Republicans and one Libertarian. It felt good to spread the wealth.
I heard about this site called Typealizer that gives you a Myers-Brigg type score by analyzing your blog. So I tested it and apparently I'm a "Doer" or in the Myers-Brigg vernacular I'm an ESTP. Click on the image to the left to see the results.
While most of the description does seem to accurately depict me, I think that anyone who knows me would disagree with the whole "doer" moniker. I'm more of a "think about doing" kind of guy, unless of course the doing helps me avoid real work. I'm great at doing things like avoiding yard work, avoiding chores, avoiding washing the car, etc. If that's what they mean then they're dead on.
Below is a fascinating presentation by Dr. Hans Rosling at the TED conference in 2006. It's fascinating for two reasons: First, it debunks a lot of the pre-held notions most of us have about the third world. Second, his presentation of the data is absolutely mind blowing. Not a lot of bells and whistles, just really compelling and easy to grasp. It's worth the 20 minutes to watch it.
I've had a Google Alert set up for "jon lowder" for a while now, and usually it doesn't return anything other than a blog post I've written or something related to work. Every once in a while I do get alerts that cause me to sit up and pay attention. One came last year when I apparently hit a home run in a high school baseball game in Oklahoma or some such place. Ends up there's a high school kid who's a pretty good athlete that shares my name.
This morning I got an alert that I'd lost my job. Of course that perked me right up and I quickly clicked through to the article referenced in the alert. It appears that there's another fella with my name who's about five years younger than me and living in Colorado. He lost his job over the summer and he was being interviewed on CNN about the presidential election. So, while I feel for my namesake I'm glad to know that I have my job for at least another day.
I have jury duty today and it's just a bucket of laughs. Interesting thing, though, is that the Winston-Salem Journal's local columnist Scott Sexton is in the same jury pool with me. There are two cases today and a bunch of us got called into the courtroom for a drug trafficking case. Luckily my name wasn't one of the 18-ish that were called to fill the 12 spots on the jury. Sexton's was, though, and it offered a little comic relief when the assistant DA asked everyone questions like, "Do you know anyone in law enforcement?" or "Do you know anyone in the District Attorney's office." FYI, the DA accepted Sexton but the defense attorney dismissed him. What a surprise, huh?
Now I'm back in the jury waiting room. We won't be excused until either the second case has it's jury selected or 5:00, whichever comes first. At least they have free wi-fi here.
While walking back from lunch I ran into an older gentleman who was looking for the early voting location. It's a couple of blocks from the courthouse, but I couldn't really help him because I still don't know downtown Winston-Salem like a native. We ended up asking a street vendor and he pointed the gentleman in the right direction, but during our stroll the gentleman and I figured out that we both spent the majority of our lives in the metropolitan DC area. He'd mentioned that even though he'd grown up in Winston everything had changed during the 50+ years he'd lived in DC. We compared notes about our neighborhoods (he lived in NW DC, and I lived in Northern Virginia) and agreed that it had changed for the worse.
I thought it was kind of cool that two people with a common background (if you negate the 30 years difference in age) met each other in the course of fulfilling their various civic duties. It really made my day.
Below is a video I created to show how many robocalls and direct mailers we've gotten from various politicians over the last few weeks. The vast majority of calls came from or on behalf of Elizabeth Dole, and they're all negative. I have no idea what she's like as a person, but after the last two weeks I can tell you that I hate her guts as a politician. What's interesting to me is that we haven't received one robocall from a Democrat, but a lot of the mail came from Democrats. Anyway, enjoy:
Befuddled 