HOUSEKEEPING, AND SEASON'S GREETINGS

Blogging has been pretty light this month as we at The Writers Group have been dealing with a flurry of breaking news -- much of it driven by the release of the Iraq Study Group report, but also by the continuing fallout from the midterm elections and, oh yeah, that thing that's set all of Washington atwitter, Barack fever.

Suffice to say there will be plenty more in 2007, which is why several of our writers are taking some R&R over the holidays, catching their breath from a news-packed 2006 before a news-packed new year is upon us. Writers out this week or next include: David S. Broder, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Cohen, Eugene Robinson, Marie Cocco, Kenneth R. Harney, Neal Peirce and Alvaro Vargas Llosa. Clients needing replacement columns can contact us at 800-879-9794, ext. 1. In addition, there will be no Newsweek News Service feed this week -- due to the double issue that moved on Sunday -- and no Sunday Book World Service next week.

On our home page we've put up a link to columnist E.J. Dionne's Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics delivered Nov. 16 at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. It's a delightful, well-thought-out speech on how new media and old media can live happily together and enhance public life. Here's another link.

Looking ahead: If you're a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the annual convention returns to Washington on March 27-30.  And if you are also a member of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, stick around over the weekend and take in the State Department Briefing, now scheduled for April 2 and 3. This is a tremendous opportunity for editorial writers to fill their notebooks with material from some of the leading newsmakers in the foreign policy field. See, for budgeting purposes, spring really is just around the corner.

And by the time our nation's birthday gets here, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists will also meet in Washington, from July 4-7.

That's about it for housecleaning. So let me sign off by saying that all of us at The Writers Group wish you joyous holidays and a most productive new year.

'INNOVATION' -- FOR WHAT, EXACTLY?

Another in our series by guest bloggers on innovations in opinion journalism.

If I may say so, we have done some nice things at the Dayton Daily News' opinion pages, things that we're proud of and that readers seem to like.

We've been producing "video editorials" -- conventional editorials appearing in the print edition that double as narrative scripts for videos we produce and simultaneously post online. We've used them to tackle subjects ranging from fire department diversity to death penalty clemency to local tax levies to middle school science competitions.

Mike Peters, our Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, participates in a cartoon caption-writing contest, called "Open Mike" which draws thousands of viewers and scores of contestants each week.

Our institutional editorials focus on a single issue each day. They are published as part of a package, with "our view" supplemented by art and at least one other view. The pages in our print edition have color, and our terrific designers make them pop. (Send me an e-mail, and I'll send you pdf files of some of my favorites.)

But I really wanted to use this posting to comment briefly on the changes in culture, technology and readership habits that supposedly are driving innovation at daily newspapers and their 24-hour online alter egos.

I'm not convinced that all the industry pressure to run from pillar to post is a question of keeping up with new things. I see a quiet constant in the news business, rather then frenetic market shifts, as the most compelling reason for newspaper transformation.

I'm a relative newcomer to newspapers. I joined the Dayton Daily News in 2002 at the age of 43, after spending nearly 20 years practicing law.

I first considered newspapers as a career possibility in the late 1980s, when I read "The Paper," Richard and Phyills Kluger's magisterial history of the New York Herald Tribune.

In the early pages of that book, the authors write of James Gordon Bennett -- publisher of the New York Herald and the original newspaper innovator.

They describe the conditions they believe are behind the changes brought by Bennett -- and the press barons that followed him:

"For all its teeming streets, New York induced loneliness, anxiety and sorrow over life's oppressions as well as delight in variety of pleasures. Family, church and neighborhood ties that bound men and women in other places and earlier times were of less importance to the new city dweller, caught up with occupational, logistical, fraternal, cultural, and political concerns. It was these new urbanites the Herald and its progeny served.

"Adrift in the urban vortex, people craved a sense of belonging, and Bennett was supplying the links. (Bennett's) varied, comprehensive, often provocative fare helped alleviate solitude, to reassure readers of the universality of their tribulations, to bring hope that adversity was not insurmountable -- to demonstrate that, however small a fraction of it, they were an integral part of the human drama enacted each day within a community so large and so diverse that they could not have perceived it without reading the New York Herald."

I think these conditions still prevail. I think "supplying the links" that create a "sense of belonging" and showing readers how they are part of the "human drama" is still what newspaper innovation is all about.

Eddie Roth is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News.

THE LANGUAGE FEINT

On Saturday, Dec. 2, "Pearls Before Swine" by Stephan Pastis included the phrase "bite me." An advisory went out with the strip, asking editors to call for a replacement strip if they didn't care to run it.

How many people out there really know why "bite me" is considered vulgar? I thought I knew, but a quick Internet search showed me that other people have other ideas that sound just as plausible as mine. (One reputable site says it seems to derive from the late '40s and was originally "bite it," the implication being that "it" is a particular male body part. Score one for me.)

A year or so ago my boss, Writers Group editorial director Alan Shearer, and I had a discussion about the word "blows." I contended it's short for "blow chow" or "blow chunks." Needless to say, I am a few years younger than him (sorry, Alan), and he was quite certain it was a reference to a certain sexual act that shall not be mentioned by this editor. (It wasn't mentioned by Alan, either, which made for a sometimes cryptic conversation.) In the end, we asked a newspaper editor how she felt about it. Since it was slotted to run on a Sunday, the client said she didn't think they'd run it. (Score one for Alan.)

How DO newspapers compete with other forms of entertainment that are attracting the very audience they want -- younger readers -- while using least-common-denominator, older-than-the-hills, uninspired language? Well, most of the time, they don't compete. They are stuck in a time warp, and the only way out seems to be to slip speech under the radar of the "old" folks -- when Aaron McGruder used a slang spelling of "bitch," apparently nobody batted an eyelash. Those who would be offended had no idea what he was saying. Both Aaron and Candorville cartoonist Darrin Bell have used the n-word, to both complaints AND praise. Go figure that one.

Here's the thing, though: The cleverest cartoonists (sorry, Stephan) are adept at what I call a "language feint." A number of years ago, Scott Adams replaced the word "crap" with "carp." "Oh, carp" never caught on, but it was brilliant. Everybody understood what Adams meant, but those who would choose to be offended -- "If my child reads that word in the newspaper, he's going to think it's OK to say, and it's not!" -- couldn't be, because Adams hadn't used it.

That's not to say that Pastis isn't clever. He's one of the cleverest new cartoonists out there. And perhaps this is his gambit to engage editors in this discussion -- attract readers by using language they use.

Or maybe he's just being a pain in the a$$. (Score one for Stephan.)

Amy Lago is comics editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

WHITHER NEWSPAPERS?

There was a time when journalists used to head for the local watering hole to discuss the decline of their profession (although I think we most often referred to it as a trade), and what could be done to reverse the rot.

Now, watering holes having fallen out of favor, we go to the Web and hit our bookmark for Romenesko, the Poynter Institute's site for "Your daily fix of media industry news, commentary, and memos."

It rarely disappoints. Throughout the day, the site is updated with juicy tidbits about an editor fired, a reporter accused of plagiarism, a newspaper on the ropes, an entire media empire collapsing -- you get the picture. During the last couple of years, however, Romenesko has also become a sort of journalistic psychiatric couch, exploring the "big" issues that perhaps foretell the rapidly approaching end of an era.

I grant, newspaper types from executives on down to copy aides should be worried over declining numbers in circulation and advertising revenue, the two trends propelling so much of today's angst. And let's face it, what's happening at the Los Angeles Times has become an industry tragedy as that still-great newspaper faces long odds on whether it can ever reclaim its faded glory (see "The Best of Times, the Worst of Times" by The Washington Post's John Pomfret to be brought up to speed). Disclosure: I worked at The Times from 1979-1990.

Yet I still get the feeling that all of this discussion started back around the time I was in journalism school -- a sort of "Groundhog Day" for the Fourth Estate. And now Jack Shafer, media critic for the online journal Slate, makes a pretty compelling case that indeed, this has exactly been the case, for at least a good three decades.

Shafer (hat tip, Romenesko, naturally) looks back at the Newspaper Readership Project, which was a mid-1970s attempt by the American Newspaper Publishers Association and the Newspaper Advertising Bureau (the groups have since merged) to discover why readership -- and therefore circulation and advertising -- seemed to be going in the tank.

Shafer includes lots of suggestions of what, in the present environment, could be done, but he concludes with the depressing thought that what publishers will probably do is "form a new intra-industry Newspaper Readership Project."

I'm not that cynical, but I do think Shafer has a valuable point. We've been analyzing this situation seemingly forever, and no doubt will continue our introspections -- forever.

Perhaps though it's now time to assess what we do right, and how we can do it better. Some of this is already under way, at individual newspapers such as The Washington Post and in professional associations such as the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the National Conference of Editorial Writers. But it's only a beginning.

Too often, I've come across colleagues who throw up their hands and say it's above their pay grade to find these solutions. That's wrongheaded. Editors should know what makes their product appealing -- or, conversely, unappealing. If they don't, then perhaps they need to return to the watering hole. I'm sure the folks one table over will be more than happy to give them an earful.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.