Pivoting away from a cliché

The cliché of the 2008 campaign is “pivot,” as in: When will Hillary Clinton drop out so that Barack Obama can pivot to the race against John McCain? Of course, Clinton has now pivoted back to her Senate seat, allowing the media to pivot on to the next story.

According to a LexisNexis search of U.S. newspapers and wire services, the word “pivot” appeared 370 times between Jan. 1 and today in stories that also included the words “Obama” or “McCain.” In the same period during 2004, “pivot” popped up only 147 times alongside “Kerry” or “Bush.” Granted, there’s much more interest this time around, and much more pivoting to be done. But that’s still a lot of pivots.

The New York Times strikes me as a particularly egregious offender. In just the past week, Jodi Kantor has asked whether Clinton would “pivot millions of supporters in the direction of Mr. Obama”; Frank Rich has written of Clinton and McCain’s alleged “inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest”; Maureen Dowd has snickered that Obama had “been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now”; and David Brooks has opined that neither Obama nor McCain “is planning a major pivot for the fall.”

A quick search of Google News shows that the Times is hardly alone.

Enough.

Wolves at the GateHouse

I read a GateHouse paper. You probably do, too. Maybe even two: the chain owns good-size dailies such as The Patriot Ledger (Quincy), The Enterprise (Brockton), The Daily News Tribune (Waltham) and The MetroWest Daily News (Framingham), in addition to 100 or so weeklies in Eastern Massachusetts.

Anyway, sorry to bury the lede. GateHouse Media may be in deep trouble. According to the blog 247WallSt.com, the chain — based in suburban Rochester, N.Y. — is doing so badly that you might be able to get some furniture and computers cheap in a few months. After turning itself into a publicly traded company several years ago, the stock price has tanked, falling 80 percent over the past year.

247’s Douglas McIntyre writes: “Watch for GHS to be broken up before the end of the year or to enter Chapter 11.” (GHS is GateHouse’s symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.) Wow.

What’s more, the Motley Fool recently listed GateHouse as one of “5 Deathbed Stocks.”

GateHouse does some interesting things, but it has clearly been hampered by a lack of resources. Its Wicked Local sites were supposed to be a model of hyperlocal and citizen journalism, but they have yet to achieve critical mass. The company also pushes its reporters to shoot and edit low-end video, which is pretty smart. Earlier this year I wrote a post on Cathryn O’Hare, editor of the Danvers Herald, after I followed her through the process.

Mostly, though, the GateHouse papers in Massachusetts are good, solid community papers that have suffered under revolving-door ownership for many years.

During the 1980s, they were owned by a half-dozen or so regional groups, some based in Massachusetts, some out of state. Then, in the 1990s, most of them were combined by Fidelity into a chain that was dubbed Community Newspaper Co. Fidelity sold CNC to Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell for a reported $150 million in 2001.

Purcell did one thing wrong and one thing right. On the one hand, he took the Herald downscale, which made his purported flagship a weird fit with the affluent, well-educated readership he had just acquired.

On the other hand, Purcell unloaded CNC for $225 million just five years later, making him one of the few people to turn a profit on a newspaper deal in the 21st century. The money, many insiders believe, has allowed him to keep the Herald afloat. The CNC deal was part of a larger, $400 million purchase by Liberty Group Publishing, which renamed itself GateHouse, moved to New York State and went public.

GateHouse may or may not survive, but its papers should probably be all right in the long run. Community newspapers are in a better market position than major metros these days. Providers of quality local news don’t face a lot of competition either from other papers or, with a few exceptions, from the Internet.

The problem is that chains amass huge amounts of debt when they buy papers ($1.2 billion at GateHouse, according to McIntyre), and need to turn an unrealistically high profit in order to pay down that debt and satisfy their investors.

If the economy were rocking along, maybe GateHouse could pull out of this. But it’s not. Unfortunately, McIntyre’s post is an indication that things are going to get worse both for those of us who read GateHouse papers and the people who work for them.

School official blasts blogs

You’ve got to see this. John Ritchie, superintendent of the Lincoln-Sudbury school system, tells newly minted high-school graduates that blogs are nasty things, even as he admits that he’s never actually read any. Kids, if you want to succeed, get away from this man as quickly as possible.

To be fair, Ritchie makes a reasonable point about commenters who take advantage of anonymity to launch personal attacks. But he wraps it in so much ignorance and hyperbole that it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Howie being Howie

Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr’s snide attack on state Sen. Jim Marzilli today is by the numbers, but it’s worth reading all the way to the last two lines. No, he hasn’t gotten over it. Will Carr get chewed out when he shows up at work this afternoon at WRKO Radio (AM 680), or will this just be waved off as Howie being Howie?

Meanwhile, good Jon Keller commentary on WBZ Radio (AM 1030) this morning on Marzilli’s lawyer, who’s gone way, way beyond the call of duty. While Marzilli himself has made it clear that he’s got some serious problems by checking in to a psychiatric hospital, his lawyer, Terrence Kennedy, has dismissed the charges against Marzilli as “ridiculous.”

That’s pretty offensive. What ever happened to “my client has pleaded not guilty, and beyond that we have no comment”?

Big media and hyperlocal journalism

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Washington Post’s big bet on hyperlocal, online journalism — LoudounExtra.com — has been a flop.

According to Journal reporter Russell Adams, there have been a number of problems, from a failure to commit sufficient resources to an odd strategic decision not to link to the site from WashingtonPost.com. But I wonder if there’s something larger going on.

To an extent, the Post’s woes strike me as similar to those of Microsoft. For years, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and company acted as though they knew someone was going to come along and steal their lunch money someday. And so they moved aggressively, most memorably destroying Netscape and earning themselves a massive antitrust suit in the process.

But, in the end, Microsoft couldn’t overcome the tendency of huge, established companies not to be able to anticipate what’s next. And so Google slipped onto the scene, making a ton of money with online advertising and slowly but surely developing free, Web-based applications that may someday make a program like Microsoft Office (or at least the idea of paying for it) obsolete.

Likewise, when it comes to hyperlocal online journalism, I think it’s more likely that community-based bloggers will start doing real journalism, and embrace professional standards, than it is that big papers like the Post will be able to dominate that turf.

At least the Post has a national and international audience. What about big regional metros such as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Denver Post and the like? If there’s no longer a market for such papers doing international and national coverage, don’t they have to embrace the hyperlocal model?

Not necessarily. It could be that what they really need to do is find the sweet spot — completely dominate regional coverage of state and local politics, business, sports, health and the arts, while leaving the national and international coverage to the Post and the New York Times, and the Little League banquets to community papers and bloggers.

In Massachusetts, Web sites tied to local weeklies (such as GateHouse Media’s Wicked Local project) and dailies (such as the Cape Cod Times and the Eagle-Tribune papers) strike me as being more connected at the local level than the Globe’s site, Boston.com. Local blogs are proliferating; here are a few, covering Brighton, Arlington and Newton.

It will be a tough trick for big papers to pull off. The Post’s failures thus far in Loudoun County are specific enough that it’s hard to generalize from them. But I find it difficult to imagine that the Globe will ever be the first place you’ll want to go to find out what the lunch menu is in your child’s elementary school.

It’s over

Hillary Clinton will drop out of the race on Friday and endorse Barack Obama, the New York Times reports. (ABC News had it first, but the Times version strikes me as a bit more definitive.)

Not surprisingly, Charlie Rangel has the best line: “We pledged to support her to the end. Our problem is not being able to determine when the hell the end is.”