In case you missed it, amidst Tom Brady’s Superbowl triumph and the upcoming second impeachment trial, The New York Times has posted some extraordinary revenue and subscription numbers for 2020 that point the way to a prosperous 21st century for some newspapers.

Yes, newspapers. Some newspapers. The venerable Grey Lady’s earnings report documents 7.5 million digital and print subscriptions at the end of 2020. The paper is well on its way to its stated goal of 10 million total subscriptions by 2020 and at this rate, could even exceed it. Further proof of the old adage that bad news is good news for news organizations and a disastrous year like 2020 can be a bonanza.

(Of that 7.5 million, a paltry 833,000 are print subscriptions purchased by ancients like me who still enjoy the tactile pleasure delivered to my door each morning.)

This subscription boom took place as total NYT digital and print advertising revenue for 2020 fell by a perilous 26 per cent to just under $400 million. Most of that loss was in print advertising, which declined 38 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2020. In a role reversal, 65 per cent of ad revenue came from digital. The tail is now wagging the dog.

So, the broader pattern is clear: subscription revenue up, advertising revenue down. Since the days of the penny press, the income publishers received from subscriptions was almost an afterthought. Now digital subscribers appear to be a key to economic survival.

Of course, this lifeline is only available to papers like The Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and others that have built their websites into rich, reliable, appealing smorgasbords of news and features. The Times does especially well with a variety of stand-alone digital offerings like cooking and crossword apps, podcasts and video. The Washington Post has added live interviews with newsmakers and panels to its regular fare.

Bottom line for newspapers in 2021: Digital is the present and future; print is fading fast. Something gained, something lost.

It has been a relief, frankly, to be spared during the past 10 days or so the obsessive coverage of Donald J. Trump that dominated American media for the last four years. We’ve done quite well, thank you, without breathless reporting of nonsensical tweets, wall-to-wall broadcasting of his rallies and penetrating analyses of White House infighting. We don’t even know what Jared and Ivanka have been up to.

This respite will be brief, of course. Once the Senate begins arguments in the trial spawned by Trump’s second impeachment, the headlines will again focus on the 45th President and his actions around January 6. And, no doubt, Maggie Haberman or some other well-sourced observer of the Trump phenomenon will soon give us an inside look at the mood and manners at Mar-a-Lago since January 20. (The most memorable so far: the small plane that flew up and down the beach that day trailing a sign that read: “World’s Worst President!”)

That’s all well and good and as it should be. But I am waiting for the kind of revealing, in-depth reporting of what actually went on during the four-year nightmare known as The Trump Presidency. The best early example is the two-column lead of the January 31 st edition of The New York Times: “As Far-Right Peril Brewed, U.S. Eyed Threat Left.” The subhead explained: “Trump’s insistence on Danger of Antifa Led Federal Officials to Shift Resources.”

Read it and you’ll discover how Trump’s all-out assault on the so-called Radical Left caused boot-licking federal law enforcement officers to look left when the genuine threats were rising on the right. You’ll read how Federal prosecutors and agents felt pressure from the top to uncover a left-wing extremist conspiracy that never materialized. And – no surprise – you’ll learn that Attorney General William P. Barr enthusiastically endorsed the president’s politically inspired attack on the left.

In the coming days and weeks, I expect we’ll read more such shocking inside stories of the behind-the-scene activities of the Trump Administration. The accounts will come out and be confirmed as liberated senior officials and aides feel free to tell us all what really happened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The stories may not come as a total surprise, but they are history and they are important.

The kerfuffle over The New York Times parting company with journalist Lauren Wolfe after her tweet describing the “chills” she felt as President-elect Biden’s plane landed at Andrews on the eve of the inauguration misses the point. (For the record, The Times maintains that the separation was not the result of her tweet, implying that it had other problems with her performance.)
The problem with her tweet is that her “chills” do not meet the minimum standard of news. The reader doesn’t care about her chills. If another bystander professed to feel chills, that might qualify as a modest bit of color. But Lauren’s chills were beside the point.
The controversy, to the degree it is one, underscores the thorny problems posed by journalists tweeting on the job. First Amendment protections should and do apply, but spare us your chills, Lauren.

   “Disloyal, a Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump,” by Michael Cohen is a trashy book, written in prison in a trashy, Brooklynese style, by  a convicted felon.  And yet, especially in its early chapters, it tells the reader a great deal about President Trump.

   Cohen’s central thesis, reinforced again and again over its 300-plus pages, is that the craven, narcissistic, grifter that he worked for on the 26^th floor of the Trump Tower is the exact same person that occupies the Oval Office today. Trump, he argues, is Trump, then and now. 

   He is the same Trump that maneuvered endlessly in his Trump Tower days to promote himself in the tabloids and on talk radio and TV. Cohen illustrates his theory with all sorts of inside accounts of the shady “deals” Trump promoted over the years. “Disloyal,” is certainly not literature, but it has the ring of truth. Cohen’s book probably will not change your view of Donald J. Trump; more likely it will reinforce it.

Terence Smith: Sailing through Annapolis’ season of racing interruptus in a 16-foot boat

By Terence Smith

Capital Gazette |

Oct 03, 2020 at 1:00 PM 

It was a tiny victory, in a tiny sailboat, against a tiny fleet, but a satisfying victory, nonetheless.

But the fact that the informal and admittedly insignificant race was being held on a Wednesday afternoon just off the Annapolis Yacht Club and was not organized by the club as part of its longstanding and popular Wednesday Night Racing series tells you something about the impact of the pandemic — and this year’s capricious weather — on the maddeningly frustrating 2020 sailing season.

At its best, this season was Racing Interruptus. Mostly, it didn’t happen at all.

Now, how tiny is tiny? Well, the “fleet” on this afternoon consisted of three Herreshoff 12.5s. They are lovely, 16-foot, gaff-rigged boats originally designed by the great Nathaniel Herreshoff in 1913. His design of an open-cockpit, full-keel sailboat was — and is — perfect. As a result, it has not been changed in 100-plus years. There are scores of them racing up and down the East Coast and a fleet of nine 12.5s that regularly competes in Annapolis.

How tiny was the victory? Well, here’s how it went: with Jana Davis, executive director of The Chesapeake Bay Trust, calling tactics, I steered Dear Prudence, my 1994 Herreshoff 12.5, to a good start just off AYC and pulled well ahead of the other two boats in the race on the first leg. As we approached the turning mark near the far shore, I said to Jana, “Look at that current, it’s rushing past the mark.”

Did I do anything to compensate for the current? No, instead I cut the mark too close to port and was promptly caught in the current and pushed within an arm’s length of the mark. Poor Dear Prudence got caught in the current and spun around 360-degrees while the other boats passed us and turned for home. We rounded the mark a second time and followed in the wake of the others. For a life-long sailor, it was a mortifying moment.

A spirited tacking duel followed as we beat to windward on the long leg to the finish. We slowly caught the other boats and matched them tack-for-tack. At the very last moment, in a classic example of dumb luck, we shot across the finish line first! We won by half a boat length.

That is what I mean by a satisfying victory: pulling it from the jaws of defeat after a boneheaded blunder at the turning mark.

A “normal” Wednesday Night Race series offers two dozen weekly races between April and September and turns out 100-plus boats in various classes and sizes from the little Herreshoffs to big, powerful racing yachts. On a nice evening with a decent breeze, it is a gorgeous spectacle that often concludes at the bar in the yacht club or the Boatyard Bar and Grill where videos of the race are run repeatedly.

But there was nothing normal about this year. Thanks to the pandemic and restrictions imposed by the governor, the whole season started six weeks late and even then most classes initially raced every other week to avoid congestion. In addition, the hot, sticky weather in July and August produced threatening thunderstorms on Wednesday evenings with uncanny regularity. The race committee had no choice but to cancel at the last hour again and again.

When the season concluded on Sept. 2, the Herreshoff class, for example, managed only seven races instead of 24. Bummer.

Pandemics and the weather are obviously beyond the control of the AYC Race Committee. Given the continuing threat of COVID 19, and the heat and humidity intensified by climate change, the 2021 season may be no better than the sadly unsatisfying 2020 debacle.

So, here is my suggestion: why not extend the season and schedule make-up races on weekends? The Herreshoff class has been holding its informal races, on Wednesdays during September, with makeups on Thursdays and may soon schedule them on weekends in October.

The Annapolis Yacht Club Race Committee could do something similar and the beautiful waters off Annapolis would once again look as Annapolis should look, pandemic or no.

Terence Smith, journalist and sailor, lives in Annapolis. His website is terencefsmith.com He can be reached at terencefsmith2@gmail.com

The beleaguered, diminished editorial staff of The Annapolis Capital Gazette – a daily so old that it printed the Declaration of Independence – observed Labor Day with a cavalcade and rally protesting the decision of its publisher, The Tribune Company, to close its newsroom permanently.

“A Car is Not a Newsroom,” read one reporter’s sign, “We deserve better,” read another, “Save Local News” was a third.

“We’re not leaving without a fight,” said Selene San Felice, a Capital reporter, out on the street in front of her locked former office, conceding that there was no chance The Tribune Company would reverse its cost-conscious decision. Her concern, and that of other staffers, is that more cuts are coming.

When the Washington Post reported on the plans to close the newsrooms of the Capital and four other of Tribune’s local papers, the subhead asked an intriguing question: “What’s a Newspaper without a Newsroom?”

The Post piece noted that, in addition to The Tribune, the financially troubled McClatchy Company “took steps to close seven of its newspaper offices around the country.” Again, not temporarily because of the virus, but permanently.

The pattern is pretty hard to miss, and it certainly caught my eye. It was just the latest sign of the precipitous decline in advertising and revenue that has shuttered 2,100 newspapers across the country since 2005. It is also an example of the hard-headed, bottom line calculations imposed by the vulture capital firms that are acquiring and systematically bleeding the assets of scores of papers all over the country.

But still, the question: what is a newspaper without a newsroom?

In a nearly five-decade career in daily journalism I worked in three newspaper newsrooms and three network and public television newsrooms.

The first was a noisy, wooden-floored, high-ceilinged space on the second floor of The Stamford Advocate in Stamford, CT. There was a semi-circular news desk and the clatter of stand-up Remington typewriters.

The second and by far the most filthy and romantic, was the city room of The New York Herald Tribune on 41st Street. The vast room had no air conditioning, so the tall windows were left open night and day in the summer and the Manhattan grit crunched under your shoes as you arrived for work. But I loved it. And, look who labored at the desks near you: Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Charles Portis and a dozen other rising stars. You didn’t have to look far for inspiration.

The third was the sprawling newsroom of The New York Times, an imposing, block-wide space between 43rd and 44th Street in those days, filled with Pulitzer winners, veteran shoe-leather reporters and cranky editors. David Halberstam was just back from the jungles of Vietnam, Gay Talese was on his way to a celebrated literary career and Harrison Salisbury was headed to Moscow. In the newsroom, your colleagues shared stories, gossip, advice and got your competitive and creative juices flowing.

The Washington and New York newsrooms of CBS News were filled in the 1980’s and ‘90’s with bold-faced names like Cronkite and Rather. They were mostly open, but a glass-walled section was called the NUB, short for Next Up Broadcast. The pace inside the NUB was intense, bordering on frantic, especially as 6:30 p.m. approached, broadcast time for the live CBS Evening News. A young producer, Susan Zirinsky, was a human whirlwind. Today, she is president of CBS News. Again, the newsroom was a place where you could share ideas and subject your own story proposals to critical review by your colleagues.

My final newsroom, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, now simply The PBS NewsHour, was, like the broadcast itself, more low key, measured and serious. The news mattered here, not ratings. It was housed in a dreary, two-story building in Shirlington, Va, just across the Potomac from Washington. The quarters were cramped, but we put on a reliable, responsible, hour-long newscast that reached a million or more discerning viewers each night. (The self-deprecating slogan among the staff: “We Dare to be Dull.” Today’s PBS NewsHour, with Judy Woodruff at the helm, is brighter and better.) Once again, the newsroom was the womb from which it all sprang.

The five soon-to-be-homeless Tribune papers are The Annapolis Capital Gazette, The Carroll County Times of Westminster, MD, The Morning Call of Allentown, PA, the Orlando Sentinel and, believe it or not, The New York Daily News.

The Daily News was once the largest circulation newspaper in the country, selling 2.4 million copies every day in the 1960’s. It’s newsroom in The News Building on E. 42nd Street had a huge globe dominating its lobby. It was so iconic, so clearly big time, it was used as the set of the Daily Planet in the Superman films. Today: The Daily News sells 200,000 copies on a good day and the newsroom is gone.

All these papers were the product of the collaboration, cooperation and inspiration that emerged from the collective creation of their newsrooms. Now they will all be permanently “remote,” emerging online from the homes and computers and cellphones of their staffers. Reporters will be filing from their cars.

Can it work? Absolutely. The Capital and and others have demonstrated that during the pandemic shutdown, working remotely and delivering first rate work to their readers. The extraordinary reporting of The New York Times and Washington Post on the Trump foibles of the last six months has all been done remotely.

Will it save the companies money? Of course.

Will it be the same – and as good? Absolutely not.