Coffee aficionados in Pittsburgh already know this: Aldo Coffee in Mt. Lebanon has closed. New ownership will carry on the practice of high quality coffee in the same venue.
Aldo's valedictory blog post is here. The store opened in 2004, and at the time it was in the vanguard of a lot of things in Pittsburgh: High quality coffee as an alternative to Starbucks. Explicit concern not just for the quality of the beans and the flavor in the cup, but for fair treatment of the people who grow and sell the beans. Aldo was an early adopter of broad-based social media strategies to support a small business. Today, outstanding coffee houses are flourishing all over Pittsburgh. Marketing via social media is the rule, not the exception.
Along the way, Aldo provoked. It made a lot of friends. It also alienated a few people. The real cost of a cup of coffee at Aldo reflected the real costs of making coffee. Was that honesty, or pretense?
Above all, and in the face of a lot of locals who thought (and perhaps still think) that Pittsburgh is fine just the way it is, Aldo unsettled the status quo. In this Pittsblog post, I linked to some Aldo comments about the future of localism and small business. Pittsburghers take enormous pride in their neighborhoods and in their small towns. They still buy an awful lot of coffee at 7-11 and Sheetz and Dunkin' Donuts, and when they go upscale, they are often spotted at Starbucks.
Thanks, Rich and Melanie, for giving us the love of your labors over the years.
They named the dog, "Aldo."
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Pittsburgh's Decline v. The Decline of Steel
Chris B. appears to be running out of patience with the conventional history of modern Pittsburgh, which blames the losses of jobs and wealth in steel towns such as Braddock squarely on the shoulders of the decline of the steel industry. As the data shows, and as Chris repeats over and over, the decline of places like Braddock is a complex tale. It got started long before steel started to slide, and it has all kinds of causes, some steel-related, some not.
Relevant posts:
The Blame Game (Nov. 22 2011)
Braddock mythos redux (Oct. 18 2009)
Speaking of real estate - Braddock (Dec. 1 2008)
Relevant posts:
The Blame Game (Nov. 22 2011)
Braddock mythos redux (Oct. 18 2009)
Speaking of real estate - Braddock (Dec. 1 2008)
Saturday, November 19, 2011
"The Cruel Lesson of Penn State"
This post is off-topic for Pittsblog. I am posting it -- a link to a piece at Slate about the sources and costs of childhood sexual abuse, written in the wake of the disclosures coming out of the Penn State football program -- because it is brilliant, moving, humbling, chilling, and in my opinion absolutely essential reading. The author is my friend, and I am moved beyond words by his courage.
Read "The Cruel Lesson of Penn State: How what happened in State College forced me to confront my own abuse."
Read "The Cruel Lesson of Penn State: How what happened in State College forced me to confront my own abuse."
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Innovation Practice Institute at Pop City
In connection with Global Entrepreneurship Week, now underway, Pop City has a nice feature on Pitt Law's Innovation Practice Institute, where I am the Faculty Director. Under the leadership of our Executive Director, Justine Kasznica, who is the focus of the piece, the IPI has really blossomed over the last ten months.
The Pop City story has links to current IPI events in Pittsburgh. The IPI's home page is here. Justine and I have big plans for additional IPI programming, including new courses for law students and a research program to complement the teaching and community engagement.
The Pop City story has links to current IPI events in Pittsburgh. The IPI's home page is here. Justine and I have big plans for additional IPI programming, including new courses for law students and a research program to complement the teaching and community engagement.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Fresh Eyes on Pittsburgh, Part 3
Here is the next, overdue, installment on my brief “Fresh Eyes on Pittsburgh” series. Read the first installment for the background and the premise.
Today's topic: arts and sports in Pittsburgh.
Well, sports. There's quite a bit going on in Pittsburgh's arts world - music, visual art, dance and theater and other performing arts, craft, writing and publishing -- but sports knit Pittsburgh together in public ways that the arts world, at least today, just can't. As to arts, there are the big public institutions: the Cultural District, the Carnegie Museums, the big performance stages Downtown and elsewhere. There is Pittsburgh's still-in-rediscovery arts history: jazz and blues, Teenie Harris, August Wilson, Andy Warhol, Hollywood legends like Gene Kelly and Shirley Jones, more recent they-come-and-then-they-go performance spaces (the Oakland Beehive, Club Laga), and undoubtedly other things that don't come immediately to my mind as I sit here typing. And there is Pittsburgh's emerging and increasingly robust contemporary avant-garde: hip hop stars Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller, Girl Talk, the gallery "scene" in Lawrenceville and whatever you call the cool stuff that's happening in East Liberty in and around the Waffle Shop and the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater. Pittsburgh is no New York and never will be, but there is a growing amount to be proud of and to be challenged by in Pittsburgh, and that's a great thing.
But I digress.
Sports are the undisputed kings of Pittsburgh's cultural life. And when I say "sports," today I mean "football," and when I say "football," for almost all intents and purposes, I mean the Steelers. High school football rules Friday night social life in Western Pennsylvania to a degree that's matched only in Texas and parts of Ohio, I am told, and college teams in the region elicit passions of their own. I'm looking at you, Pitt and Duquesne, as well as programs like RMU, CMU, and smaller regional programs like Cal U., W&J, Slippery Rock, and IUP, among others. Moreover, Penn State and its alumni are massive presences in Pittsburgh, which is something that surprised me when I moved to Pittsburgh more than a decade ago. But today the PSU presence here makes sense -- Penn State counts several hundred thousand living alumni -- making it all the more disappointing that Pitt and Penn State haven't played each other in football in many, many years. I'll venture only one other comment here about Penn State: I have never encountered any other university anywhere where the identities of so many alumni and students are so directly bound up with the image and influence of one person -- Joe Paterno -- and the school's football program.
That observation regarding Penn State might be scaled up and over and applied to Pittsburgh's relationship with the Steelers:
The Steelers are Pittsburgh; Pittsburgh is the Steelers. More than a handful of people in Pittsburgh are not Steelers fans, or don't care about football at all, or don't pay attention to when and where the games are played. But it is impossible to live in Pittsburgh and not have a sense of the role that the team and its history occupy both in community culture and in defining the world-wide Pittsburgh "diaspora" of ex-pats and those who fancy themselves Pittsburghers just because they have that kind of imagination. Stuck in Reykavik on a Sunday afternoon? They have a Steelers bar for you. The place is called Bjarni Fel. Walk in wearing your Steelers jersey, and you'll be greeted like a hero. When I first moved to town, a colleague who had recently joined the Pitt faculty -- a woman, and an athlete but not a football fan -- told me that she had quickly decided to pick up a bit of Steelers trivia solely because she wanted to be able to keep up at parties. The line that she mastered, in 1998, was this: "How about that Immaculate Reception?"
I grew up rooting for the 49ers and the Raiders, and nothing like Steelers culture exists on the West Coast, or just about anywhere else, I am told, with the possible exception of Green Bay. And by "Steelers culture," and by the phrase "Steelers are Pittsburgh; Pittsburgh is the Steelers," I mean the sense that in Pittsburgh, the Steelers aren't just a team, and their fate isn't just a series of wins and losses, the Super Bowl or bust. If they play well and play honorably -- that second part is key -- then Pittsburghers internalize their success. There's a spring in their steps on Monday morning if Tomlin's crew does well, as if they -- the fans -- have done something swell. If a player or the team lets us down, on the field or (worse) off of it, then the hurt cuts deeply. A philandering quarterback or drug abusing wide receiver betrays the entire regional family, not just his teammates. The ownership family, the Rooneys, are lionized as patrons of Pittburgh; the family history -- the source of the money that helped the Chief (Art Rooney) acquire the team -- is well-known but rarely mentioned. It's a skeleton in our own closets. This isn't "12th Man" stuff; this is positively tribal, and medieval, or even ancient. Most modern sports franchises "represent" their cities in the sense that they are mercenaries, hired to do battle with rival cities in metaphorical substitutes for real wars fought between Greek city states. Pittsburgh's battles are still metaphorical, and our mercenaries are still mercenaries, but the city-state idea is pretty vivid here. The players are us; we are the players. The players get their cash from the team, but their spiritual and some financial subsidies from the whole place.
What I like most about the Steelers, though, is that the team reciprocates. The current ownership, the coaches, and the players all "get" the fact that they are accountable to the fans in a way that directly reflects the region's sense of itself. The Steelers are not simply supposed to win, and to win a lot, and to win more Super Bowls than any other NFL franchise. They are supposed to win honorably, and when they lose, if they play dishonorably, then they deserve to lose. After the Steelers lost to the Baltimore Ravens a week ago on the final Ravens drive of the game, I listened to a lot of fans, and read a lot of commentary, that concluded that the Steelers simply didn't deserve to win. That was said in sadness, not in anger. On that day, on that field, the other team was simply better. Pittsburghers like to think that they respect the superiority of those who vanquish us, when that superiority is justly earned. It is almost tangibly Homeric, not in the "epic" sense, but in the "narrative of morality and virtue" sense.
I suspect that this cultural meaning of the Steelers, more than the brilliant 1970s history of the team or the anachronistic name of the franchise, accounts for its stunning popularity among women. I don't have the statistic handy, but I believe that it is common knowledge that the Steelers count more women among their fan base than almost all other NFL teams -- and that the team maintains this edge in an era when female NFL fandom is on the rise. I like to think that women "get" the culture of civic and communal virtue that surrounds of the Steelers precisely and explicitly in a way that men, stereotypically, only "get" implicitly. What happens on the Steelers field and what happens off the Steelers field are virtually equivalent.
That's my theory, anyway. [I wrote a little more about the Steelers, here.]
It turns out, if you're a newcomer to Pittsburgh, that there are other professional sports in town. The Penguins, in the National Hockey League, have had a remarkable run of success in the last 20 years (well, two runs, really, one called "Mario" and the second called "Sid") and Pens fans are as passionate as they come in ice hockey. In some quarters, Pens fans may be more fanatic about the team and the sport, as a team and sport, than many Steelers fans are about the Steelers. I am not a hockey fan, although I have cheered when watching Game 7 of a certain Stanley Cup final. My status aside, though, ice hockey simply doesn't have the resonance across the entire region that football does.
There is baseball. The Pittsburgh Pirates play in a stadium that is as lovely and inexpensive to attend as any in Major League Baseball. The whole world knows that the team has not had a winning record in close to 20 years, a record of futility for high-level sports that is unmatched on the planet. That's a shame, because underneath Pittsburgh's hard-edged football and ice hockey helmets is the soul of a baseball town: a place filled with community and family and children following in their parents' sporting footsteps, a town with a blue-collar and working class ethos (despite the visible presence of a long-standing and supremely wealthy upper-class crust) that is perfectly suited to a game that here and there recalls its blue-collar, working class origins.
And that note leads me, finally, to the sport that I care most about, which is the other football, soccer. Soccer, like baseball, was once a blue-collar, working class sport, and in many countries around the world, and in some communities in the US, it remains the sport of the people, rather than the sport of kings. Soccer in Pittsburgh moves along quietly, below the radar. Youth soccer here is booming, as it is booming everywhere. There is a semi-pro team in town, the Pittsburgh Riverhounds, that refuses to go away despite modest attendance and modest performance success, but that has been doing the right thing for a decade -- working and teaching in the community -- and may yet re-emerge as a publicly successful sports franchise. The most interesting thing about soccer in Pittsburgh is just how long the sport has been played here. Organized soccer in Pittsburgh goes back roughly as far (about 100 years) as organized American football. The men who worked in the coal mines in Beadling back then -- Italians -- founded an athletic club that is still, today, one of the top youth soccer clubs in the United States.
In the end, I think that's the thing that Fresh Eyes see in Pittsburgh. Underneath the contemporary performance and community connections are decades of history, waiting to be excavated.
Enough for today. Next in the series: Politics and government. The last post in the series will look at the environment. And then I'll be done.
Today's topic: arts and sports in Pittsburgh.
Well, sports. There's quite a bit going on in Pittsburgh's arts world - music, visual art, dance and theater and other performing arts, craft, writing and publishing -- but sports knit Pittsburgh together in public ways that the arts world, at least today, just can't. As to arts, there are the big public institutions: the Cultural District, the Carnegie Museums, the big performance stages Downtown and elsewhere. There is Pittsburgh's still-in-rediscovery arts history: jazz and blues, Teenie Harris, August Wilson, Andy Warhol, Hollywood legends like Gene Kelly and Shirley Jones, more recent they-come-and-then-they-go performance spaces (the Oakland Beehive, Club Laga), and undoubtedly other things that don't come immediately to my mind as I sit here typing. And there is Pittsburgh's emerging and increasingly robust contemporary avant-garde: hip hop stars Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller, Girl Talk, the gallery "scene" in Lawrenceville and whatever you call the cool stuff that's happening in East Liberty in and around the Waffle Shop and the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater. Pittsburgh is no New York and never will be, but there is a growing amount to be proud of and to be challenged by in Pittsburgh, and that's a great thing.
But I digress.
Sports are the undisputed kings of Pittsburgh's cultural life. And when I say "sports," today I mean "football," and when I say "football," for almost all intents and purposes, I mean the Steelers. High school football rules Friday night social life in Western Pennsylvania to a degree that's matched only in Texas and parts of Ohio, I am told, and college teams in the region elicit passions of their own. I'm looking at you, Pitt and Duquesne, as well as programs like RMU, CMU, and smaller regional programs like Cal U., W&J, Slippery Rock, and IUP, among others. Moreover, Penn State and its alumni are massive presences in Pittsburgh, which is something that surprised me when I moved to Pittsburgh more than a decade ago. But today the PSU presence here makes sense -- Penn State counts several hundred thousand living alumni -- making it all the more disappointing that Pitt and Penn State haven't played each other in football in many, many years. I'll venture only one other comment here about Penn State: I have never encountered any other university anywhere where the identities of so many alumni and students are so directly bound up with the image and influence of one person -- Joe Paterno -- and the school's football program.
That observation regarding Penn State might be scaled up and over and applied to Pittsburgh's relationship with the Steelers:
The Steelers are Pittsburgh; Pittsburgh is the Steelers. More than a handful of people in Pittsburgh are not Steelers fans, or don't care about football at all, or don't pay attention to when and where the games are played. But it is impossible to live in Pittsburgh and not have a sense of the role that the team and its history occupy both in community culture and in defining the world-wide Pittsburgh "diaspora" of ex-pats and those who fancy themselves Pittsburghers just because they have that kind of imagination. Stuck in Reykavik on a Sunday afternoon? They have a Steelers bar for you. The place is called Bjarni Fel. Walk in wearing your Steelers jersey, and you'll be greeted like a hero. When I first moved to town, a colleague who had recently joined the Pitt faculty -- a woman, and an athlete but not a football fan -- told me that she had quickly decided to pick up a bit of Steelers trivia solely because she wanted to be able to keep up at parties. The line that she mastered, in 1998, was this: "How about that Immaculate Reception?"
I grew up rooting for the 49ers and the Raiders, and nothing like Steelers culture exists on the West Coast, or just about anywhere else, I am told, with the possible exception of Green Bay. And by "Steelers culture," and by the phrase "Steelers are Pittsburgh; Pittsburgh is the Steelers," I mean the sense that in Pittsburgh, the Steelers aren't just a team, and their fate isn't just a series of wins and losses, the Super Bowl or bust. If they play well and play honorably -- that second part is key -- then Pittsburghers internalize their success. There's a spring in their steps on Monday morning if Tomlin's crew does well, as if they -- the fans -- have done something swell. If a player or the team lets us down, on the field or (worse) off of it, then the hurt cuts deeply. A philandering quarterback or drug abusing wide receiver betrays the entire regional family, not just his teammates. The ownership family, the Rooneys, are lionized as patrons of Pittburgh; the family history -- the source of the money that helped the Chief (Art Rooney) acquire the team -- is well-known but rarely mentioned. It's a skeleton in our own closets. This isn't "12th Man" stuff; this is positively tribal, and medieval, or even ancient. Most modern sports franchises "represent" their cities in the sense that they are mercenaries, hired to do battle with rival cities in metaphorical substitutes for real wars fought between Greek city states. Pittsburgh's battles are still metaphorical, and our mercenaries are still mercenaries, but the city-state idea is pretty vivid here. The players are us; we are the players. The players get their cash from the team, but their spiritual and some financial subsidies from the whole place.
What I like most about the Steelers, though, is that the team reciprocates. The current ownership, the coaches, and the players all "get" the fact that they are accountable to the fans in a way that directly reflects the region's sense of itself. The Steelers are not simply supposed to win, and to win a lot, and to win more Super Bowls than any other NFL franchise. They are supposed to win honorably, and when they lose, if they play dishonorably, then they deserve to lose. After the Steelers lost to the Baltimore Ravens a week ago on the final Ravens drive of the game, I listened to a lot of fans, and read a lot of commentary, that concluded that the Steelers simply didn't deserve to win. That was said in sadness, not in anger. On that day, on that field, the other team was simply better. Pittsburghers like to think that they respect the superiority of those who vanquish us, when that superiority is justly earned. It is almost tangibly Homeric, not in the "epic" sense, but in the "narrative of morality and virtue" sense.
I suspect that this cultural meaning of the Steelers, more than the brilliant 1970s history of the team or the anachronistic name of the franchise, accounts for its stunning popularity among women. I don't have the statistic handy, but I believe that it is common knowledge that the Steelers count more women among their fan base than almost all other NFL teams -- and that the team maintains this edge in an era when female NFL fandom is on the rise. I like to think that women "get" the culture of civic and communal virtue that surrounds of the Steelers precisely and explicitly in a way that men, stereotypically, only "get" implicitly. What happens on the Steelers field and what happens off the Steelers field are virtually equivalent.
That's my theory, anyway. [I wrote a little more about the Steelers, here.]
It turns out, if you're a newcomer to Pittsburgh, that there are other professional sports in town. The Penguins, in the National Hockey League, have had a remarkable run of success in the last 20 years (well, two runs, really, one called "Mario" and the second called "Sid") and Pens fans are as passionate as they come in ice hockey. In some quarters, Pens fans may be more fanatic about the team and the sport, as a team and sport, than many Steelers fans are about the Steelers. I am not a hockey fan, although I have cheered when watching Game 7 of a certain Stanley Cup final. My status aside, though, ice hockey simply doesn't have the resonance across the entire region that football does.
There is baseball. The Pittsburgh Pirates play in a stadium that is as lovely and inexpensive to attend as any in Major League Baseball. The whole world knows that the team has not had a winning record in close to 20 years, a record of futility for high-level sports that is unmatched on the planet. That's a shame, because underneath Pittsburgh's hard-edged football and ice hockey helmets is the soul of a baseball town: a place filled with community and family and children following in their parents' sporting footsteps, a town with a blue-collar and working class ethos (despite the visible presence of a long-standing and supremely wealthy upper-class crust) that is perfectly suited to a game that here and there recalls its blue-collar, working class origins.
And that note leads me, finally, to the sport that I care most about, which is the other football, soccer. Soccer, like baseball, was once a blue-collar, working class sport, and in many countries around the world, and in some communities in the US, it remains the sport of the people, rather than the sport of kings. Soccer in Pittsburgh moves along quietly, below the radar. Youth soccer here is booming, as it is booming everywhere. There is a semi-pro team in town, the Pittsburgh Riverhounds, that refuses to go away despite modest attendance and modest performance success, but that has been doing the right thing for a decade -- working and teaching in the community -- and may yet re-emerge as a publicly successful sports franchise. The most interesting thing about soccer in Pittsburgh is just how long the sport has been played here. Organized soccer in Pittsburgh goes back roughly as far (about 100 years) as organized American football. The men who worked in the coal mines in Beadling back then -- Italians -- founded an athletic club that is still, today, one of the top youth soccer clubs in the United States.
In the end, I think that's the thing that Fresh Eyes see in Pittsburgh. Underneath the contemporary performance and community connections are decades of history, waiting to be excavated.
Enough for today. Next in the series: Politics and government. The last post in the series will look at the environment. And then I'll be done.
Lawyers for Innovators
When Pittsburgh tech incubator Alpha Lab announced last Spring its "Alpha Law" partnership with local lawyers Cohen & Grigsby, I cheered, here. The region desperately needs more high quality, reasonably-priced legal services for entrepreneurs. What's more, I said, I hoped that other lawyers would challenge Cohen & Grigsby's lead:
Last week, the sharp-eyed Malia Spencer at the Pittsburgh Business Times wrote that the Lynch Weis law firm is rolling out a menu of low-cost, fixed-fee legal services for entrepreneurs.
In the immortal words of my long-ago Geometry teacher, Mr. Rupinder Sekhon, "we're cooking on the front burner now, baby!"
You can find Cohen & Grigsby here.
You can find Lynch Weis here.
The announcement at C&G's site doesn't say whether or not the arrangement is exclusive; I hope that it is not. Pittsburgh not only needs more of this sort of thing, but Pittsburgh -- and the client companies and employees that ultimately benefit from these and related professional services -- also needs some lively competition.
Last week, the sharp-eyed Malia Spencer at the Pittsburgh Business Times wrote that the Lynch Weis law firm is rolling out a menu of low-cost, fixed-fee legal services for entrepreneurs.
In the immortal words of my long-ago Geometry teacher, Mr. Rupinder Sekhon, "we're cooking on the front burner now, baby!"
You can find Cohen & Grigsby here.
You can find Lynch Weis here.
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
New to the Blogosphere
Welcome to the blogosphere to a new blog from the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD), titled "Imagine Pittsburgh Online." Six years have passed since I caused a very minor stir with this post about the ACCD's future (later reprinted, in modified form, in the Post-Gazette), and more or less five years have passed since the ACCD responded to that post and others by sending someone to ask me to write positive things at Pittsblog about the ACCD and its good works. Finally, the Conference has decided to take its own advice, and mine (I said: If the ACCD doesn't like what I write, then it should write its own news), and now offers its own echo chamber for all things positive about Pittsburgh -- and only things positive about Pittsburgh. In a region that doesn't lack for upbeat news about business, Pop City Media has been covering that beat for some time. It isn't clear whether the so-called "IPO" blog has any value to add.
For a new-ish blog that conveys a much better sense of the good local news on the small company / entrepreneurship front, take a look at Babs Carryer's New Venturist. Babs includes a lot of upbeat stuff and perhaps not enough about just how difficult it is to start and grow a business in Pittsburgh, but she does avoid the self-congratulatory, celebratory tone that is the curse of all things that come out of the Conference and its affiliates. Babs is writing the stories of successful entrepreneurs. Those often make for inspirational reading. Once in a while, at the very least, I'd like to read a story about a new venture in Pittsburgh that crashed and burned. Like, say, this one.
For a new-ish blog that conveys a much better sense of the good local news on the small company / entrepreneurship front, take a look at Babs Carryer's New Venturist. Babs includes a lot of upbeat stuff and perhaps not enough about just how difficult it is to start and grow a business in Pittsburgh, but she does avoid the self-congratulatory, celebratory tone that is the curse of all things that come out of the Conference and its affiliates. Babs is writing the stories of successful entrepreneurs. Those often make for inspirational reading. Once in a while, at the very least, I'd like to read a story about a new venture in Pittsburgh that crashed and burned. Like, say, this one.
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
Newsy News
The idea of PublicSource, the Pittsburgh "community journalism" initiative modeled (sort of) on Pro Publica, got its first public airing last Summer in the wake of the end of "News.Jazz.NPR" WDUQ and the beginning of its successor, "Essential Public Media." We'll lose the broadcast jazz, went the argument, but we'll get a new robust resource for publicly-minded journalism about Western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh Filmmakers honcho Charlie Humphreys and two major foundations, the Pittsburgh Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, teamed up with local a murderer's row of local print and broadcast publishers, including both Essential Public Media and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, to launch PublicSource. (The full list is here. Among many other things, Public Source is all about transparency.) PublicSource goes live this coming Saturday.
Anyone interested in the retrenchment of journalism in Pittsburgh and elsewhere over the last five years (and counting) has to be pleased by this. Thoughtful journalism is part of the lifeblood of the community, yet no single publication or broadcaster in Pittsburgh has the resources these days to it both well and consistently. The editorial roster of the Post-Gazette is so thin that the paper is consistently adequate (maybe) and great only once in a while. Even the PG's sports pages, long among its strongest departments, are looking pretty long in the tooth these days. And don't get me started on the Editorial Board. How will PublicSource improve the PG, or anyone or anything else? It's hard to know, exactly, but that's no reason to be skeptical. Something must be done to liven things up and bring more spotlights to bear. So PublicSource is ... something.
Yet deep in the background there is a modest voice that should be heard, and its lessons remembered. That voice is the shadow of the Pittsburgh Press.
If you're young enough or new enough to Pittsburgh that my recent "Fresh Eyes" series appeals to you, then you may not know anything about the Pittsburgh Press. But for many years the Pittsburgh Press was the big, dominant paper in Pittsburgh. Many of the senior members of what's left of the Post-Gazette's editorial side are, in fact, veterans of the Press. What happened to the Press?
In the early 1960s, during the first great wave of public hand-wringing over the future of daily print journalism (yes, that was more than 40 years ago!), the Press and its junior rival, the Post-Gazette, entered into a Joint Operating Agreement, or JOA. The Pittsburgh JOA was one of more than two dozen of these deals around the US. Rival newspapers combined parts or all of their business and distribution sides, yet maintained separate newsrooms and published separate papers. Fifty years ago, the labor costs associated with newspaper independence in multi-newspaper towns were eating journalism alive. JOAs were the solution of that era, and they were so popular, at least among the men who owned newspapers, that Congress even passed a special law just to ensure that JOAs would not be ruled illegal antitrust conspiracies. JOA supporters in Congress and in the newspaper business crowed that the JOA solution preserved editorially independent "voices" -- rival newspapers -- while giving the relevant papers a form of Congressionally-blessed economic stability.
Well. The solution was less than it seemed, because as economists taught us long ago, there is no such thing as a free lunch. In Pittsburgh, a crippling newspaper strike in the early 1990s eventually put an end to the JOA here. When the dust from the strike settled, the Press was gone. Only the Post-Gazette survived. And diverse editorial "voices" emerged, over time, across a variety of media -- print, broadcast, and later the Internet.
Newspaper businesses are businesses, after all; they are subject to competitive pressures of all kinds, not just pressures from labor, or from rival papers. Today, the problem is not labor costs as such; today, print journalism has been eaten alive by the death of classified advertising and the vicissitudes of display advertising (big department stores no longer buy huge display ads all the time, because big department stores themselves got eaten alive by big box stores, which advertise in different ways). I'm not shedding tears for the Press, or for the Pittsburgh JOA. (I wrote a post here about conceptual problems with JOAs.) I'm only pointing out that the solution de jour -- PublicSource, in the present case -- may be nothing more than a stopgap, in large part because it makes such an effort to prop up the idea of the traditional institutions of journalism: newspapers, tabloids, radio stations, television stations. I'm a huge fan of those traditional institutions; I grew up with them, not just because of the era of my youth but because of what my family did for a living. I still collect two newspapers per day at the foot of my driveway. But those traditional institutions are dead and dying.
What PublicSource may supply and eventually truly become (I can only hope) is journalism, with all of the disciplinary focus and tradition and professional judgment that are embedded in that concept, but without the baggage of trying to squeeze journalism into the 20th century commodities that we still call "newspapers," even though they rarely contain anything that is new, or news. Print is great, and let us hope that the iPad does not finally kill print altogether. Radio is great, and let us hope that Pandora and Spotify and so forth do not kill radio altogether. But what happens to PublicSource when its partners are even weaker than they are now?
PublicSource is funded by foundations but derives its institutional legitimacy, at the moment, from those partners. (Why else highlight their commitment to the venture?) Those partners are, otherwise, rivals, and because of the collaboration among rivals, PublicSource reminds me of the antitrust problems that JOA newspaper publishers faced in the early 1970s. The problem of editorial independence was real, and the competitive problems were real, but publishers tried to solve both problems at once, by trying to have their editorially competitive cake and eating their commercially collaborative cake, too. (What made it worse, back then, was the idea that wealthy men were conspiring to do the right thing by local communities, when suspicions ran strong that they were just enriching themselves. Newspaper conglomerates have replaced wealthy publishers as the bête noires of journalism, although Pittsburgh has been spared their impact.) When the collaboration foundered, the editorial competition evaporated. Let us hope that Public Source has thought about and can dodge the antitrust concern, so that when the collaborative foundation crumbles, as it eventually will, the editorial side can still thrive.
Anyone interested in the retrenchment of journalism in Pittsburgh and elsewhere over the last five years (and counting) has to be pleased by this. Thoughtful journalism is part of the lifeblood of the community, yet no single publication or broadcaster in Pittsburgh has the resources these days to it both well and consistently. The editorial roster of the Post-Gazette is so thin that the paper is consistently adequate (maybe) and great only once in a while. Even the PG's sports pages, long among its strongest departments, are looking pretty long in the tooth these days. And don't get me started on the Editorial Board. How will PublicSource improve the PG, or anyone or anything else? It's hard to know, exactly, but that's no reason to be skeptical. Something must be done to liven things up and bring more spotlights to bear. So PublicSource is ... something.
Yet deep in the background there is a modest voice that should be heard, and its lessons remembered. That voice is the shadow of the Pittsburgh Press.
If you're young enough or new enough to Pittsburgh that my recent "Fresh Eyes" series appeals to you, then you may not know anything about the Pittsburgh Press. But for many years the Pittsburgh Press was the big, dominant paper in Pittsburgh. Many of the senior members of what's left of the Post-Gazette's editorial side are, in fact, veterans of the Press. What happened to the Press?
In the early 1960s, during the first great wave of public hand-wringing over the future of daily print journalism (yes, that was more than 40 years ago!), the Press and its junior rival, the Post-Gazette, entered into a Joint Operating Agreement, or JOA. The Pittsburgh JOA was one of more than two dozen of these deals around the US. Rival newspapers combined parts or all of their business and distribution sides, yet maintained separate newsrooms and published separate papers. Fifty years ago, the labor costs associated with newspaper independence in multi-newspaper towns were eating journalism alive. JOAs were the solution of that era, and they were so popular, at least among the men who owned newspapers, that Congress even passed a special law just to ensure that JOAs would not be ruled illegal antitrust conspiracies. JOA supporters in Congress and in the newspaper business crowed that the JOA solution preserved editorially independent "voices" -- rival newspapers -- while giving the relevant papers a form of Congressionally-blessed economic stability.
Well. The solution was less than it seemed, because as economists taught us long ago, there is no such thing as a free lunch. In Pittsburgh, a crippling newspaper strike in the early 1990s eventually put an end to the JOA here. When the dust from the strike settled, the Press was gone. Only the Post-Gazette survived. And diverse editorial "voices" emerged, over time, across a variety of media -- print, broadcast, and later the Internet.
Newspaper businesses are businesses, after all; they are subject to competitive pressures of all kinds, not just pressures from labor, or from rival papers. Today, the problem is not labor costs as such; today, print journalism has been eaten alive by the death of classified advertising and the vicissitudes of display advertising (big department stores no longer buy huge display ads all the time, because big department stores themselves got eaten alive by big box stores, which advertise in different ways). I'm not shedding tears for the Press, or for the Pittsburgh JOA. (I wrote a post here about conceptual problems with JOAs.) I'm only pointing out that the solution de jour -- PublicSource, in the present case -- may be nothing more than a stopgap, in large part because it makes such an effort to prop up the idea of the traditional institutions of journalism: newspapers, tabloids, radio stations, television stations. I'm a huge fan of those traditional institutions; I grew up with them, not just because of the era of my youth but because of what my family did for a living. I still collect two newspapers per day at the foot of my driveway. But those traditional institutions are dead and dying.
What PublicSource may supply and eventually truly become (I can only hope) is journalism, with all of the disciplinary focus and tradition and professional judgment that are embedded in that concept, but without the baggage of trying to squeeze journalism into the 20th century commodities that we still call "newspapers," even though they rarely contain anything that is new, or news. Print is great, and let us hope that the iPad does not finally kill print altogether. Radio is great, and let us hope that Pandora and Spotify and so forth do not kill radio altogether. But what happens to PublicSource when its partners are even weaker than they are now?
PublicSource is funded by foundations but derives its institutional legitimacy, at the moment, from those partners. (Why else highlight their commitment to the venture?) Those partners are, otherwise, rivals, and because of the collaboration among rivals, PublicSource reminds me of the antitrust problems that JOA newspaper publishers faced in the early 1970s. The problem of editorial independence was real, and the competitive problems were real, but publishers tried to solve both problems at once, by trying to have their editorially competitive cake and eating their commercially collaborative cake, too. (What made it worse, back then, was the idea that wealthy men were conspiring to do the right thing by local communities, when suspicions ran strong that they were just enriching themselves. Newspaper conglomerates have replaced wealthy publishers as the bête noires of journalism, although Pittsburgh has been spared their impact.) When the collaboration foundered, the editorial competition evaporated. Let us hope that Public Source has thought about and can dodge the antitrust concern, so that when the collaborative foundation crumbles, as it eventually will, the editorial side can still thrive.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)