The Offline Report

From Friday's San Francisco Chronicle. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Paper books are seen in greater frequency on public transit these days. I have to write more about this another time, but the Washington Post ran a story on a conglomerate's plans to find $250 to $300 million in savings by cutting "duplicate" jobs such as local sportswriters . Cutting a local sportswriter is not cutting the fat out of a news operation, instead cutting a local sportswriter is cutting the bone and removing part of the heart. Another way they plan to save money is to cut into the print costs. Yikes. It turns out, according to one commenter , a newspaper chain in Arkansas is handing iPads out to customers so they can eliminate their paper editions: "Here’s another approach that’s being pursued by a family-owned newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazzette. The paper has been shutting down its print editions across the state and is giving all its subscribers a free iPad so they can use a digital subscription. If they don't know how to use an iPad the p...

Paper media is terrestrially social. No smartphone backside shows to fellow commuters what its owner is reading. But May 2019 was a mixed turning point in the Paper Media Poll. The debut of spring showed a nadir of paper periodicals seen "in the wild" by the Paper Pollster team, tallying just one copy of The Economist for the entire month. With heavy hearts we pressed on. Belatedly, only in hindsight, our team noticed an undeniable climb of paper books seen in the hands of public transit commuters and coffee shop denizens, which included many a GenZ pedestrian. But that same sad month for periodicals that was May showed something else we weren't looking for: UC Berkeley students' posture straightened considerably from mere weeks before when, en masse, they walked hunched over their phones through the end of April. Now they stand straight, look where they're walking and make eye contact. What happened? A late GenZ/early Millenial eastbound commuter spotted rea...

The LATimes just hired a hot sports columnist who will write about sports, and its influence on fashion culture and politics . The columnist, named LA Granderson, first got the idea to become a writer by sifting through waste in search of words assembled just so: Granderson has nothing against traditional sports columns. Growing up in Michigan and sifting through garbage cans as a kid to find copies of the Detroit Free Press to read the legendary Mitch Albom, Granderson always wanted to be a sports columnist for a newspaper. But his career has carried him — quite successfully, it should be noted — to other things: television (mostly on ESPN), some newspaper work, radio, websites and even a little acting. Paper news is now expensive. Friends in L.A. who get the Sunday paper, please litter benevolently! The rich who can afford it should take care to not dispose of it all into the recycling bin. Leave gems on public transit seats. In laundromats, on dentist coffee tables. Make it terr...

News may be a hellscape but the humans who assemble "an issue" hide pockets of relief within. To wit, the erudite Harper's, August issue, under the auspicious title 'Flight Log': ( From the cockpit transcript of a Navy training flight near Seattle, in 2017. The exchange was released in May, following an investigation. Excerpts from the transcript were first published by the Navy Times. ) ELECTRONIC WARFARE OFFICER: Draw a giant penis. That would be awesome. PILOT: “What’d you do on your flight?” “Oh, we turned dinosaurs into sky penises.” E.W.O.: They would be like, “What the fu?” PILOT: I could basically draw a figure eight, and turn around and come back. I’m gonna go down, grab some speed, and hopefully get out of the contrail layer, so they are not connected to each other. That would be so funny, airliners coming back on their way into Seattle. Just this big fu--- Do they get it done? Relieve your curiosity at Harpers.org . People expend effort with you ...

Two members of Generation Z were spotted at a cafe in the S.F. Bay Area one day this month of April. One of the two GenZers stacked a print newsweekly atop his college textbooks. "They have to bring back print," the other GenZer told the paper pollster. The GenZer did not explain why "they" had to revive circulation of paper versions of print media publications. The GenZer asked how long the sidewalk paper-distributing racks had "been broken." The group pedmount newsracks were not broken, the pollster replied. "The slots are all empty" the GenZer said. Fact check: nearly all slots of the dark-green barely-visible pedmount newsracks were empty. But one was full of Alt Newsweeklies ready for the taking. The GenZer hadn't noticed those. Former Nonreader 'Rick' Now Itches For His Kindle at Lunch | Paper Media Poll: Books' Uptick Crosses Periodicals' Decline --> This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Crea...

"Rick" came of age delivering the Atlanta's afternoon paper, the Journal ("now the Atlanta Journal-Constitution," he said,) from his bicycle after school. He's a computer programmer who no longer buys the San Jose Mercury News. His two laptops and phone are strictly for coding and work. But Rick associates his $50 Kindle Fire with prose during lunch. "I didn't have it the other day and I was really irritated." Rick admits he'd sometimes spend a year without completing a book." " I just had no habit of reading. But I do have a habit of eating lunch!" He now completes several books. "I just finished 'Lab Rats'," he told the paper pollster. He likes that the hardcovers and paperbacks no longer hold space on his shelves. "It was especially painful having to see all of those books that I never finished!" Rick does not consume newspapers on his Kindle, he said. Lay Readers Follow Bylines | Pape...

If you have kids, subscribe to the paper paper. Paper is technology ! Get your kids started with the gateway drug that is the comics. Next get them hooked on a favorite columnist. Then they can read the sports section, or business and or the arts and entertainment section. Next get them into reading the letters to the editor. From the letters to the editor move to the OpEds and editorials. In 1791, Madison wrote that newspapers were needed to counteract “passionate, ignorant and irrational men who had been led to hold ‘counterfeit’ opinions by persuasive men,” according to “These Truths,” Jill Lepore’s outstanding new history of the United States pic.twitter.com/IoSoDFXZX1 — Joseph Lichterman (@ylichterman) December 29, 2018 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

It's forming in bars, dinner parties and sixth grade quads. Emily Post called it the "social cut." A history.com article, 'Cutting' Was the Brutal Victorian Version of Throwing Shade , said it was used judiciously, "a weapon to be wielded with extreme care, preferably in situations of dire social peril." With no more aggression intended in the digital era than the Victorian, the social cut has resurfaced, and it's a move many now struggle to abstain from. "Etiquette guides warned against the practice , advising gentlemen to 'slow fade,' or gradually ghost someone, instead of using a full-blown cut, which 'is not only very harsh, but is often attended with dangerous consequences,'" Erin Blakemore, the history.com author wrote. Blakemore's 2004 article is worth revisiting in 2018. Without knowing it, we all who adopted early and dutifully the smartphone -- an expanding recursion on 2007's iPhone wave -- dropped ...

A collection of Disney shorts played on Netflix last month, and before each was a DVD-like easter egg: interviews with the animators. This viewer was surprised to learn two-dimensional line drawings enhance the theme and texture of love story CG short "Paperman." Why would lines make this film ... more? We love the sound of this flat medium. It won Disney the 2012 Oscar for Best Animated Short. "Paperman"'s head of animation, Patrick Osborn, and producer Kristina Reed: PATRICK OSBORN:    "Paperman" looks a little bit different than most CG animation. John Kahrs, the director, was inspired by coming to Disney as the head of animation on "Tangled" and seeing all of the hand-drawn artwork around all the line work, all the design. And thinking, "could we get some of that into our CG animation somehow?" KRISTINA REED:    What's incredible to me how the experiments you and Jeff (Turley) were doing, and the line work th...

Technologies declared dead make an under-radar U-turn. A thread on the virtues of newspaper erupts on twitter. #paperistechnology I bought a newspaper this morning. It’s really great. Tons of information. Portable. Browsing friendly. No pop up ads, autostart videos or surveys about how many tractors you own. — Mike Sisak (@mikesisak) October 4, 2018 Subtweets: We started getting a print paper last year. My kids fight over it! — Susan Thibeault (@SusanFThibeault) October 4, 2018 Comprehensive reading is difficult online: With a newspaper you know you've physically scanned every single item, and not missed something that sits on an unseen tab, buried in another story or link. fwiw I can never feel 100% certain I've seen everything in a digital edition unless I've clicked thru pages multiple times. — LA Resident Tourist (@LA_Res_Tourist) October 4, 2018 Coda: And you feel good for reading them instead of being guilty for staring at your phone all d...

Paper is technology. Cassette Store Day is October 13th. Paper’s not a bad technology. It is really a good technology for the storage and retrieval of information. After 500 years, we still can turn the pages of Leonardo’s notebooks. From the 1990s, Steve Jobs had some memos on a NeXT Computer in his house. Even with his tech [abilities], we couldn’t retrieve that, because the NeXT operating system no longer can retrieve the documents that well. So every now and then, one of the lessons I learned is take notes on paper in a notebook. They’ll be around 50 years... --Walter Isaacson, Leonardo Da Vinci biographer, as told to Kara Swisher on Recode We all keep notes digitally these days. When I tried to do Steve Jobs’ period in the 1990s — when he was in the wilderness between his stints at Apple, he worked at NeXT Computer — we went back to try to get all the emails and memos. He couldn’t get them out of his machine. The operating system couldn’t retrieve them anymore. But paper is a...

A textbook for college Magazine Production classes explains that a magazine brings the reader, temporarily, into its world. Through its masthead, artwork, article tone, advertisers, even weight and glossiness of paper, a magazine creates an atmosphere. A media producer wanting repeat business is smart to heed this point. "Television," Jerry Seinfeld tells Norm MacDonald in the latter's video podcast, "is a place medium." MacDonald was probing the motive behind a tv set backdrop piece for the long-running CNN show "Larry King Live." Adapted for the digital era, "peak TV" and beyond, some are calling strides to create place experiences the "Be Here Now 2.0" movement. In the first hours and days of a personal digital detox quest and its concurrent activity, intentional attention span lengthening (IASL,) it can be a struggle to read or peruse within the bounds of even your favorite magazine or newspaper without clicking away. The Ea...

If you're fighting screen addiction, paper is a tool in your favor, why? Paper: activates touch, offers finishability, relieves cognitive load , heightens presence, lengthens attention spans, biodegrades , and is sourced from recycled feedstocks. The San Francisco Examiner comes out every day online but is in print only on Wednesday Thursday and Sunday. The Examiner is a smaller paper with a variety of voices, most with a middle-class vantage point and wonderful sense of humor. It's the perfect paper to read over lunch. It tears you away from your screen. Please support local media and pick up a copy to boost their circulation - newspapers make more from their print ads than their online ads. Consume paper without guilt , recycle and please spread the word! Consume it in public with the masthead visible to passersby. "I couldn't ask for a better advertisement than someone reading my book on a subway." - David Sedaris. ---------------- Further Reading: Tru...

Subversion (SVN) and Git track computer source code changes, and iPhone 4s denotes an older model than an iPhone 6s plus. In an information overload age, we could use version control for online news stories or storylines to combat two-hour nostalgia plaguing news consumer brains. Paper news already uses version control and most people don't realize it. The unsolved trick facing news publishers and consumers, is how to port this user-friendly system used in offline dead-tree newspaper sections, to individual internet news stories, and general news storylines. First the backstory: Before the internet and especially before television, a regular edition of a newspaper or radio program would seldom be the last edition of that show (or paper) for that day. As tvtropes.org explains in Extra! Extra! Read all about it! : In the old days before TV, radio, and the Internet, most people who followed the news got their information from the newspapers, which were (and still are) norma...

Continuing from yesterday's post excerpting a podcast interview with " Paper " author Mark Kurlansky. There it was revealed Kurlansky, while researching this book, changed his original view that "paper is dying." Kurlansky calls it a "technological fallacy" that the disrupting tech always replaces entirely the disrupted. "It's my 20th book. I don't think I've ever written a book where I've so changed my thinking as I did on this book." The conversation wanders the continents as literacy surfaces then falls in the Far East, Southeast Asia, Middle East, before paper finds its way to Europe through Italy. Its predecessor, parchment, is made from animal skin. Papyrus is made from the plant and another strain is made from North African grass. Later paper is made from cloth fiber, what is still today called "rag paper." Literacy was expanding, someone finally mechanizes paper making with a conveyor belt machi...

Mark Kurlansky has authored several bestselling deep-dive books such as one on salt . Recently, since he thought paper was a heading for obsolescence, it's the topic he chronicled in "Paper: Paging Through History." Kurlansky described the journeys of paper and its predecessors, papyrus and animal-skin parchment, and what he describes as the "technological fallacy" on the Lapham's Quarterly podcast The World in Time . Partial transcript selections: LL: Today I'm talking to Mark Kurlansky about his new book, "Paper". Mark, you've written best-selling books about history of the codfish and the oyster. Why now write about paper and printing? And why do you begin in the prologue talking about what you call the "technological fallacy"? MK: That's because I kind of went through kind of an evolution working on this book. It's my 20th book. I don't think I've ever written a book where I've so changed my thi...

A quick followup to yesterday's post about newsracks : I since found a New York Press article from 2003 that buttresses the argument group corporate pedmount newsracks injured newspaper 1) circulation and 2) profits long before smartphones.  Pedmounts hurt circulation when cities installed them and replaced colorful individual newsracks. The three arguments for individual newsracks against group pedpoints are: Individual colorful newsracks displayed three facets (back, left and right side) to the public to advertise their brand, their logo and colors that differentiate themselves from competitors. Group grayscaled "pedmount" newsracks erase this branding . At most, the grayscaled pedmount newsracks print the masthead font on the cubby face and back. And a pedmount slot only displays the masthead on the back on some units (more on that in point #3.) Individual newsrack placement around town allowed a newspaper to refine and again, differentiate its individual...

Things You Can't Google (TYCG): Convenience from digital advancements has atrophied our search muscles. In 2007, perhaps 2006 or 2008, Matt Taibbi wrote about newsracks. Yes he's a hard-hitting journalist covering the great vampire squids of global predatory finance but first and foremost he's a newsman. The Offline Report (TOR) wants the city to bring back the lively colorful metal newsracks. The ones replaced by the grayscale "clean" Clear Channel newsracks in 2007. Tristan Harris, the digital addiction apostate formerly employed by Google and Facebook, advises three actions to people trying to cut the frequency with which they check their smartphone. Action one is to grayscale your phone. "Warm colors attract your attention," says the narration of Vox's interview with Harris . This is why print media needs those warm colors from the pre-Clear Channel metal newsracks. Next Harris advises people disable push notifications on their phones t...

The What Now We fight the urge to *share* a story with a textpad interrupt "want-to-tweet" list. Some stories pull us in past the first sentence. The cartoons capture much in a one-panel drawing. We don't smell newsprint. Note the irritation anxiety having left our bodies. Is that ... traction? The news won't slip around on the screen? Letters to the editor, nobody we know. Viewpoints we do. (Are they all really old? The Silent Generation, that still writes in? Some are witty.) OpEds and editorials, we recognize that guest contributor's name. Business section, cryptocurrency speculators, optimism, Dilbert still funny. Sports. Fewer wire stories in Sports. Human optimism. The 1981 roster flies in to lunch with ALS-stricken Dwight Clark ? Cowboys too ? Flip. Skim: story-hed lede sentence story-hed lede. Flip. Unconsciously growing happy closer to accomplishment "arrival". End target is the jumble puzzle on penultimate page embedded in comics. Rea...