I'll Mature When I'm Dead (17 page)

What the heck happened?

Again I hear the wiseacres: “What happened was, you rented a monkey suit
and
a helicopter.”

True, but that’s not the whole story. Another big factor was the Internet, which is an important trend that the newspaper industry discovered in approximately 1998. The Internet posed an unprecedented challenge to our business. We had long thought of ourselves as the ultimate collectors and distributors of timely information; suddenly we were being confronted with competition in the form of the most revolutionary, powerful, complex, fluid, cost-effective, and far-reaching information-technology development in human history. Fortunately, to meet this challenge, the newspaper industry had . . .

English majors!

They swung boldly into action, forming teams, holding many, many brainstorming meetings in conference rooms, and coming up with a variety of strategies for dealing with the Internet challenge. In the early going, the main two newspaper strategies were:

Unfortunately, neither of these strategies succeeded in defeating the Internet challenge. So newspapers switched, reluctantly, to a strategy of actually putting their stories on the Internet. At first the plan was to charge money for this content, but the public was not willing to pay for it. It turns out that the public is nowhere near as convinced of the value of journalism as journalists are.

So newspapers came up with a bold new plan:
not
charging money for their Internet content. This is the strategy we employ today, and it has been highly successful from a purely marketing standpoint. The public is very receptive to the idea of being able to read newspaper stories without paying for them. In fact, many people have canceled their subscriptions and read newspaper content exclusively online. This makes sense, from a consumer standpoint: If you went to a gas station, and they offered you two pricing plans—Plan A, in which you paid for your gas, or Plan B, in which you got exactly the same gas for free—you would have to have the economic IQ of a rutabaga
³⁰
to choose Plan A.

So the good news is that, thanks to our current strategy, lots of people are reading newspaper stories. We know this because we can measure “hits,” which indicate how many people have looked at a story online. Newspaper people these days get very excited about “hits.” Unfortunately, all these “hits” produce very little “money.” So newspapers have been laying off people, including many of the reporters who produce the actual stories. At the same time, newspaper editors are ordering the dwindling number of reporters to spend more and more of their time engaging in non-journalism, non-revenue-producing Internet activities such as Facebooking, making videos, podcasting, blogging, tweeting, fwirping,
³¹
etc. The strategic thinking here is: “Hey,
other
people are doing these things on the Internet, so we should, too! We might get ‘hits’!”

So to sum up the situation: Newspapers are not making money on the Internet, and have decided that the solution is to do more things on the Internet that do not make money. Everybody hopes that somehow—nobody can say how—this will enable newspapers to survive. It’s like the classic 1998 episode of
South Park
in which the boys discover that gnomes are sneaking into people’s homes and stealing their underpants. The boys visit the gnomes’ secret underground lair and find a huge mound of underpants. The boys ask why, and the gnomes explain that they have a three-phase business plan, which is:

This is basically the current newspaper plan, except with the Internet instead of underpants. We have NO idea what’s supposed to happen in Phase 2. But if things keep going the way they are, in a few years the newspaper industry will be down to one reporter, who will sit in the middle of the newsroom watching cable-TV news and frantically cranking out 140-character news tweets under the supervision of two or three dozen editors.

That’s the bleak future of newspaper journalism unless somebody can come up with a plan to save it. Fortunately, I have such a plan. Unfortunately, it involves using time travel to go back to 1971.

So we’re doomed. Within the next decade or so, newspaper journalism, as we know it, is essentially going to disappear.
Then
the public will be sorry! Unless there’s something else to read on the Internet or watch on TV, in which case the public won’t care.

Either way, it’s over.

This makes me sad. For one thing, it was a
lot
of fun. For another thing, the newspaper business, despite its many flaws, managed to do a lot of good. And it employed, in its newsrooms, the smartest, hardest-working, funniest, quirkiest, most cynical and at the same time idealistic group of borderline insane people I’ve ever known. As newspapers fade away, I raise my glass in a farewell toast to all those wonderful colleagues, and in memory of the glory years.

Speaking of which, my glass is actually a foam commode.

M
y wife is Jewish, and I am not. Most of the time this is not a problem, because neither of us is what I would call strongly religious. Especially not me. If I had a religion, it would be called jokeatarianism. We jokeatarians believe it’s
possible
that an all-powerful, all-knowing God created the Earth and all its creatures, but if He did, He was obviously kidding.

I was, however, raised in a Christian household, and sometimes I feel the influence of my upbringing. This happens mainly at Christmas, when I engage in traditional rituals such as making a series of frantic, nearly random retail purchases; overeating; buying a Christmas tree; complaining about how much the Christmas tree costs; getting sap in my hair while wrestling with the tree in a futile effort to make it stand up straight even though it has some kind of tree scoliosis; and spending the better part of an evening untangling the five-thousand-bulb string of lights that has, using its natural defense mechanism, wadded itself into a dense snarl the size of a croquet ball.

Also at Christmas I like to engage in “wassailing.” This sounds like a kind of violent assault (“Fred wassailed Herb upside his head”) but is actually an old English word meaning to drink a festive beverage and sing traditional Christmas carols such as “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” verse two of which goes:

This carol dates back to seventeenth-century England, when groups of carolers would go from house to house demanding figgy puddings. If they didn’t get one, they would break down the front door (using a fruitcake), then barge inside and wassail on the occupants. This was the origin of both Halloween and soccer.

But aside from that, I am not devout; I almost never attend church unless somebody I know is getting married or has expired. My wife, on the other hand, does go to services at the synagogue. But here’s one big difference between Christians and Jews: Whereas Christians break their worship time down into manageable chunks by attending services every Sunday throughout the year, many Jews, my wife among them, do
not
go to synagogue for most of the year, then compensate for this by worshipping for as many as fourteen thousand straight hours
in a single day
.

You may think this is impossible, but that’s because you are not, as far as I know, married to my wife. I am, and here’s what happens. Every few months she’ll say to me, out of the blue, “You remember that tomorrow is Harish Kadoma, right? ”

(She doesn’t actually say “Harish Kadoma.” I’m just using that as an example of what it
sounds
like she’s saying.)

And I’ll say, “Is it important? Because I have plans tomorrow.” (These plans typically involve watching old episodes of
Reno 911
on TiVo, but I do not say this.)

And she’ll get this exasperated look and say, “I told you to put it on your calendar. It’s the second most holy day in the Jewish year.”

(Sometimes she says it’s the third. As far as I can tell, every Jewish holy day ranks, holiness-wise, either second or third.)

When this happens, my heart sinks, because I know this means she’s going to go to services at the synagogue, which means
I’m
going to services at the synagogue. My wife always says: “If you really don’t want to go, you don’t have to.” But as you veteran married men know, this is Wife Code for: “If you really don’t want to go, you still have to.”

So the next day I put on my least comfortable suit and we drive to the synagogue. Actually we can’t drive all the way, because on Jewish holy days everybody goes to the synagogue, so we have to park in an adjacent state and walk from there. Usually when we arrive the service has been going on for several hours, which means it’s just getting started.

I’ve found that in many ways the Jewish worship service is similar to a Christian service. You sit down; you stand up; you sit back down; you remark frequently, as a group, on how great God is; you check your watch and note that it is 10:31 A.M. and vow not to keep checking because it only makes time go slower; you wonder if you could get away with very subtly checking your text messages and decide it is probably not worth incurring the wrath of God or, worse, your wife; you stand back up; you sit back down; you try to remember the name of the movie starring Kevin Bacon that has essentially the same plot as
Jaws
except it’s set in the Nevada desert and instead of a giant man-eating shark it has giant man-eating worms capable of underground speeds approaching fifty miles per hour; you stand back up; you finally think of a really clever comeback you could have used on the guy who was being a jerk at your daughter’s basketball game several months earlier; you sit back down; you mentally recite the lyrics to “Maybelline,” Chuck Berry’s masterpiece song about two fast cars and one unfaithful woman, including the greatest couplet ever written about automotive thermodynamics,
“Rainwater blowin’ all under my hood / I knew that was doin’ my motor good”
; you speculate on what the giant worms had supposedly been surviving on out there in the desert before they started eating movie actors; you stand back up; you sit back down; your leg falls asleep;
you
fall asleep; your wife elbows you awake because you are making a noise like a warthog with a nasal infection; you remember, with a feeling of triumph, that the Kevin Bacon movie was called
Tremors
; you decide to reward yourself by sneaking another peek at your watch; your mood turns to despair when you see that the time is
still
10:31 A.M. And so on.

Some Jewish holy day services are highlighted by a dramatic moment when a man gets up in front of everybody and blows on a “shofar,” which is the horn of a ram. As you can imagine, this really upsets the ram.

I’m kidding; the horn is no longer attached to the ram. The ram (and I envy it) is elsewhere, possibly watching old episodes of
Reno 911
on TiVo. But the blowing of the shofar is still considered a highlight because it means you have reached the climax of the service, which means there’s only about fourteen more hours to go.

After the service there is usually eating. Or sometimes there is fasting. Either way, there is a lot of thinking about food. Food is extremely important in the Jewish religion; the word “brisket” alone appears more than 950 times in the Torah. The food connection is especially strong on Passover, the second or third most holy holiday in the Jewish calendar, which commemorates the Exodus, when the Israelites escaped from Egypt, pursued by giant man-eating worms.

No, seriously, they were pursued by the Egyptians, and on Passover Jewish people hold a special meal called a seder, in which a lot of the food is symbolic. For example, when the Israelites were fleeing Egypt, they did not have time to let their bread rise, so at the seder you are served matzo, which is a very sturdy construction-grade unleavened cracker measuring about eighteen square feet, which you can either eat, sleep under, or break a sharp piece off of for use as a weapon against the Egyptians. Also you drink wine, which symbolizes the fact that, hey, there’s wine.

My favorite part of the seder is the reciting of the 10 Plagues of Egypt, which God used to convince Pharaoh to free the Israelites. This story illustrates one major difference between me and God. If I were an all-powerful supreme being, I would appear before Pharaoh and order him to let the Israelites go, and if he said no,
FWOOM
,
³²
there would be a lightning bolt, and when the smoke cleared, there would be a Pharaoh-shaped smear on the floor. Then I would look around the room in a casual yet menacing manner and ask to speak with the Vice Pharaoh. In other words, I would be an unsubtle, straight-ahead, Dick Cheney style of supreme being.