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As the story of the shareholder revolt at Knight Ridder has unfolded in recent months, more and more Knight Ridder employees (and former employees) have relied on e-mail from Lou Alexander to keep them current on the story. As former colleague of Lou's at the Mercury News -- and as a recipient of his e-mail alerts -- I wondered how he found his niche as a news aggregator and what lessons he's learned along the way. A 1971 journalism graduate of Indiana University, Lou has spent most of his career on the ad side. In the following account, he describes his return to news in a new media age, typing away in his family room on the laptop he received as a retirement gift from his bosses and colleagues at the Mercury News
.
-- Bill Mitchell
Imagine if you will an old (58) ad guy who writes from San Jose, functioning as an accidental, one-man news aggregator and commentator on the business of the newspaper business, with a special focus on the Knight Ridder story.
That's me, Lou Alexander, a 21-year
San Jose Mercury News ad division employee who retired in July 2003. At various times I was retail manager, classified manager, display director and advertising operations director. I rode the Silicon Valley rollercoaster up and down more than once. It was a spectacular time.
After I retired I kept an eye on what was happening in the newspaper world by reading
Romenesko,
Editor & Publisher and
AJR. I sent an occasional comment to Romenesko and then, last March, I had a
longer letter posted there. I connected with John McManus of
GradetheNews.org last summer and posted
a commentary on his site that generated a lot of interest.
During the first two years after I retired, I used e-mail to pass along bits of news to a couple dozen people. These were mostly former co-workers who I knew would be interested in the goings-on at the Mercury News and elsewhere in Knight Ridder. People rarely wrote back, but I knew most of them were still working, with busy lives.
Then the Bruce bomb fell. On Nov. 1, 2005, Bruce Sherman of
Private Capital Management sent the board of Knight Ridder a
letter urging them to "aggressively pursue the competitive sale of the Company." Over the next couple of days I pulled together a copy of the letter, some stories about what was going on and sent it to my list of "newspaper people," which totaled about 50 people.
This time they wrote back. They asked me to explain what was going on. They wanted me to reassure them that their pensions were safe or to tell them when they would stop receiving checks. They wanted me to tell them how and when they would get the proceeds from the sale of their stock.
Two things have surprised me about this experience. First, the media coverage of this has been enormous. I have kept a Word file with a digital copy of every story I have passed along. This file is over 500 pages long. Also, this story has been posted on web sites all over the world in many places where I am surprised anyone cares. Second, I get a steady stream of thanks from people who love getting my emails. They are intensely interested but just do not have time to track down all the stories I find.
I'm not sure what project I might pursue once the transfer of KR ownership takes place. I maintain a website for my high school class and I have been promising my classmates a major revision for a couple of months. Also, I was in the middle of a big family history project when this started (over 800 images scanned) and I need to finish it.
So this brings me to the lessons I have learned in my unpaid career as a Knight Ridder commentator/aggregator:
1.) If you know a bit about a subject, some people think you know everything.
This is dangerous for a guy like me. I am not an expert. I do not have special knowledge about what is happening with
KRI stock or what will happen to people's pensions. I have time to read just about everything that is written about Knight Ridder. I try my best not to give advice. If I can find published material that answers someone's question, I send it along, but I remind them that "I'm just an old ad guy who writes from San Jose. Do not make decisions about buying/selling stock or anything else based on what I say."
I'm just an old ad guy who writes from San Jose. Do not make decisions about buying/selling stock or anything else based on what I say.Fortunately, just passing along the published information seems to be good enough. Over that last four months, my initial list of e-mail recipients has grown to over 190 addresses. Most of these folks have been added one or two at a time, as my daily musings have been forwarded around the Internet. I have had fewer requests to add people since
GradeTheNews set up a blog for me on its site, but I still get a couple a week.
Although I do not give advice, I do comment on what I send. People seem to like this. The current struggles of Knight Ridder are pretty strange for people in the newspaper business, and they appreciate someone putting things in context.
I write to these folks just about daily, generally in the evening, and sometimes follow up with an "early edition" when there is something in the morning newspapers about Knight Ridder. Only one person has asked to be taken off my list. I was not offended.
2.) It's not just about Knight Ridder.My list is a random gathering of different kinds of people, and their interests in what I write can vary a great deal. Many are only interested in what is going on with the sale of Knight Ridder.
But about half the people on the list are one-time employees of the ad department of the
Mercury News. They are interested in what is going on with their former co-workers. So when former co-workers have died, I have made their obits the first items in my mailing. This means that people who have never heard of Jack Quinton, one-time
Mercury News ad manager and San Jose State University professor, had to read through (or at least scroll through) his obit before they could get to the info about Knight Ridder.
3.) Citizen journalism takes a lot of time, if what I am doing counts as citizen journalism.
Although I offer brief comments daily and longer commentary as the occasion requires, I have done little new reporting. Despite this, it is easy for me to spend a couple of hours a day gathering information, pulling it together into a single message and sending it out.
4.) Not all searches -- or search engines -- are created equal.
A search for
"Knight Ridder" + Bruce Sherman sometimes will yield different results on a Google search than it will on a Yahoo! search. Also, changing the order of the words in a search will yield different results. Things get even stranger when you use the various blog search engines.
Because of this, I work my way through a number of different searches on
Google,
MSN,
Yahoo!,
Topix,
Dogpile,
Search.com and several different blog search engines as time permits.
Once I find a site that is useful, I add it to my list of daily checks, so I can continue to mine it for more information.
5.) As the type of people on my list change, the way I write has changed, too. I try harder to use good grammar, proper syntax and appropriate punctuation. I suspect I fail much of the time.
When I started sending out updates on Knight Ridder, my mailing list was made up of close friends and old co-workers. But that has changed over time, as people have asked to be added to the list. I have multiple former corporate vice presidents. There are journalists at about a half-dozen newspapers and very senior retired staffers.
When I was writing to my friends, I was pretty informal. I figured they would ignore my typos, bad grammar and lousy punctuation.
One source is good enough if the source is good enough.Now, when I add people to my list, I include this message: "Please be forgiving of my spelling, typos and syntax and grammar errors. I was the second-worst copy editor to ever graduate from the Indiana University journalism department (Class of 1971). The worst one was a woman, and they would never tell me who for fear we would get together and breed."
I hope they laugh, but I still feel much more of an obligation to get it right.
6.) I try to live by the "terms of service" of the sites I frequent.
Most of what I pass along is gleaned from the public media. If a story is freely available on the Web, I am comfortable passing it along to people on my list.
I do my best not to violate the "terms of service" on paid sites.But I do my best not to violate the "terms of service" on paid sites. I have a paid subscription to
Editor & Publisher and to
The Wall Street Journal online. That means I have access to content which is not free to the whole world. When I find a story on one of these sites, I pass along the URL, a summary and a paragraph or two of quotes. This sometimes leaves people wanting more
.
7.) My standards are more flexible than the MSM's.
Journalists at mainstream media organizations have complicated rules about sources. I don't. My rule is that I'll pass along anything "better than rumor." One source is good enough if the source is good enough. Some things I have written about have come to me from two or three sources, but one of the best came from only one source.
This allowed me to report on
Dec. 15 on GradeTheNews that
Gannett,
MediaNews and an equity fund were planning a coalition to buy Knight Ridder. At that point I had only one source for this information, but it was from way deep and way high in one of the companies.
8.) I am not a spammer.
When you send e-mail to more than 190 recipients at night, it is easy for anti-spam software to assume you are a bad person. Yahoo! frequently demands that I enter one of its secret codes to prove I am a human being.
If I send an attachment, especially a graphic, my messages sometimes get rejected by the filters that protect office e-mail systems.
None of this is a tragedy but it is a nuisance.
9.) Some newspapers have really struggled with how to handle this story.
Is the potential sale of Knight Ridder a business story? Is it fodder for columns about the "special" nature of newspapers and how they should be shielded from the pressures of the marketplace?
Do readers really care?
The
San Jose Mercury News and
The Philadelphia Inquirer have treated the potential sale of their corporate parent as a business story. Most of their stories have been less than a column long.
Is the potential sale of Knight Ridder a business story?... Do readers really care?The
Lexington Herald-Leader had
a very comprehensive package in the Sunday, Feb. 19 edition on the potential sale, changes in the media world which had put the company in play and the possible meaning to the communities served by Knight Ridder newspapers.
Although I highly recommend this package to people interested in the future of newspapers, I doubt that it was of great interest to the readers of the
Herald-Leader.
Some of the medium-sized Knight Ridder newspapers have carried multiple columns from reporters and editors that have dwelt on the way all of this is affecting them individually. Again, I am not really sure that their readers care.
10.) What goes on the Web stays on the Web.
I am not much given to regrets in my life. I have done some things right, some things wrong, and I hope they mostly balance out. But there are a couple of things I have written here and there on the Internet that I wish I could make disappear.
First, in a thoughtless moment, I posted a comment on a couple of public boards that was a cheap shot at a retired editor. This person is a lion of the journalism establishment and deserved better.
My comment did lead to an interesting e-mail exchange with a defender of this editor, who wrote to me: "…you don't have a soul. You are a wraith. I simply can't imagine how you can live with yourself -- how you can possibly look at yourself in the mirror, realize what it is that you stand for -- or, more accurately, don't stand for -- and not change."
I thought about pointing out that if I truly did not have a soul, and were a wraith, looking in a mirror would be no problem, since I would not have a reflection. But I decided I had thrown enough gasoline on the fire.
(This would be a stronger apology if I used the editor's name but that would make it easy for people track down the insult. If I am really lucky he never saw the posting. If he did, I hope this suffices. As to his defender, I do not have his name).
I am not much given to regrets in my life... But there are a couple of things I have written here and there on the Internet that I wish I could make disappear.The second item is a bit more complicated. Just before Thanksgiving, I sent a message to my e-mail list explaining that I could make a case that the sale of Knight Ridder was close. Then, I worked with John McManus to do a posting for GradeTheNews with the same information.
I wrote this piece because I thought there was a chance the Knight Ridder board already had a buyer lined up before they announced the company was for sale. This was how I remember the Times Mirror/Tribune Company deal.
Also, Knight Ridder had minimized press coverage of a couple controversial events by making Friday-afternoon announcements in the weeks before Thanksgiving. How better to keep the world from freaking out over the sale of Knight Ridder to somebody awful than to make the announcement the Friday after Thanksgiving?
Obviously, I was very wrong.
