circles of CONFUSION – From hot type to bottom feeders:
Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, my great grandfather started a printing and publishing business in Philadelphia, which, for many, many years was one of the finest and most successful letterpress shops in that city. Nearly every male descendant of Charles Jefferson Armor, including my great uncle, my grandfather, and my father, worked there for most if not all of their lives. I recall with great fondness the occasional Saturday mornings when I would accompany my dad into work, stopping first at the Horn and Hardart automat at 8th and Market St. for cream donuts and hot chocolate. Incidentally, and an interesting tangent to my story here, H&H (as it was known for nearly a century) closed its doors in Philly forever in the late 70‘s. It was another victim of the fast food craze being led by more ubiquitous, lower cost chains like McDonald’s, whose shiny new franchise quickly occupied the automat’s former space at 8th and Market.
Randall Armor has written a great piece here. It could be about my family and my dad, except then it’d be about Kansas and SoCal, not Philly. My dad ran a newspaper and print shop when I was growing up. I was studying journalism in high school. The death of the newspaper was already in process and accelerating when my dad sold the paper and the print shop in the 70′s. The change in the newspaper industry, the consolidation into fewer-bigger until there were no small things to eat, followed by the long, slow decline into irrelevancy, was in full swing 40 years ago.
Like Randall, I grew up in a print shop. I’ve set type on a hot lead linotype. I’ve sorted type in those old wonderful funky type boxes the size of refrigerators. I’ve been way too close to presses with way too little safety gear for someone my age (shh. nobody tell OSHA. Oh, wait, anyone they could yell at is dead…). Here’s my dad’s press that used to put out the Placentia Courier once a week:
I come from a newspaper family. My dad took over the Courier from his dad. Before that, he founded a publication called Overseas Weekly, which if you know post WW II history, you’ve probably heard of.
My grandfather founded the Courier in Southern California. Before that, they were involved in a newspaper in Kansas, which was founded by my great-grandfather. Both my father and grandfather took terms as president of the California newspaper publisher’s association, and I grew up getting hauled to conventions and conferences and interacting with much of the publishing leaders of the state.
(weird-ass trivia of my life: I was once babysat by a US Senator – Alan Cranston – in our cabin at the Ahwahnee in Yosemite so mom and dad could get to a board meeting of the CNPA. How many people can claim this?)
Interesting that both Randall and I ended up involved with computers; he went through design and pagemaker, I went into programming, although people who remember OtherRealms know I did my side trip back to my roots and spent time with early versions of pagemaker, and before that I was cutting and waxing up page masters like the good old days… But in any event, we’re both refugees from the hot lead and ink gypsies who have integrated off into new societies, because the industries our families grew up in stopped existing.
So I’ve been watching the newspaper industry shrink and collapse for a long time before the internet noticed. the list of newspapers I worked for growing up is scary given how few still exist. I did stringer work for, or delivered papers for the Fullerton News-Tribune, Anaheim Bulletin, Santa Ana Register, the Orange County and LA versions of the Times, and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Of those, only the Times and the Register (now the OC Register) still exist in any real form, and the Times is this sad self-parody of itself that I wish they’d just kill and be done with.
So yeah, what he said. And to those of you who are talking about about how the internet is killing newspapers? Part of me wants to just say “oh, you finally noticed?” but mostly, I ultimately see what the internet did as accelerating what newspapers have been doing to themselves for a long time, and frankly, it’s a bit of a mercy killing. Which, FWIW, I feel no joy in saying, but it doesn’t make it less true.
(and what you see in newspapers is the same thing we’ve seen with on-air radio, and fast food chains, and the book publishing industry, and god knows how many other industries: at some point the growth stops and the markets start stagnating or shrinking. And rather than putting energy and investment into revitalizing the industry and stimulating new customers, the big companies buy the small companies and hide the problems in the industry by eating the smaller fish, until they hit the point where only big fish exist, and then they start trying to swallow each other. At which point some of them choke and die trying, but you continue to see increasingly fewer players trying to figure out how to survive in an increasingly smaller pond. Too bad nobody had the vision to try to fix the leak in the pond when it would have made a difference…)