Reviews come in slowly for an academic book.  Learned journals have leisurely publication schedules, and reviewers often have to wait until summer to do their reading. But now we have some for my memoir, whose primary audience is journalism historians.

My favorite is Paul Steinle’s one-paragraph comment on Amazon.com. I met Paul once, when he and Sara Brown dropped by for a 2010 interview in my living room.  Their project is called, “Who Needs Newspapers?”

Here’s what he said:

            Phil Meyer’s story is an unvarnished journey of growing up amid “The Silent Generation” and trying to give it a kick in the pants. His journey through journalism reflects the changes this profession has encountered and how he worked to identify the newspaper industry’s weaknesses and warn it about where it was going awry. This is an honest telling of the best and worst of the history of this business over his lifetime and a clear tale about one man’s life in a profession he clearly loves. It’s essential reading for journalists and those who care about this vital service industry.

The basic journal for journalism educators is Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.  Its book review editor, Edward Pease of Utah State University, assigned my memoir to himself. His review from the December 2012 issue is online but behind a  paywall for all but subscribers. However, the fair use doctrine allows me to quote a brief excerpt.  So here’s the nut graph:

            Meyer’s Paper Route, like himself, is low key and self-deprecating. But this is a lot more than a memoir; it traces an extraordinary career of a man whose early journalistic hero was Clark Kent, a thoughtful guy who is still out ahead of most of us, who developed a superpower that has the potential, at least, to change the way journalism is done, if only we’d use it.

Donna Lampkin Stephens, University of Central Arkansas, reviewed the book for American Journalism, the publication of the American Journalism Historian’s Association. Her conclusion:

            And, nearly fifty years since Meyer’s Nieman year, journalism continues to evolve. Today’s practitioners would do well to keep in mind his willingness to go beyond the status quo, to dig deeper, to look at the business in new and different ways. As he recalled, he learned his superpower—the scientific method—at Harvard and applied it to newspaper reporting. There are other such powers out there. Who will find them, and how can they be used for the good of journalism?

As far as I know, only one newspaper has reviewed Paper Route.  But it’s the most important one, the paper that I threw from a bicycle in my first newspaper job: The Clay Center Dispatch.  Because the Dispatch has not as of this writing put up a pay wall, I can give you access to the full review by Elby Adamson, contributing writer. I had a teacher named Adamson. I wonder if they are related?

Let’s see ….  If I live until the first quarter of 2043, I’ll be 112 years old.

Not likely, and that’s a good thing, because, as sure as I’m typing this, there is going to be a journalism historian somewhere publishing an article with a headline that will say something like this:

Meyer was wrong!

He or she will say this because, trust me, there will still be newspapers publishing in that year.  I’m sure of that.

I’m also sure that my obituary will describe me as the professor who predicted that the last newspaper would publish its last issue in 2043.

But it ain’t so. Here’s what really happened. In 2004, I published a book with the catchy title The Vanishing Newspaper. Its goal was to try to save the newspaper industry from itself, from its shortsighted owners and managers, and nudge it toward a path that would lead to sustainable journalism.

To emphasize the gravity of the problem, I used a statistical graphic. It was a line chart, showing the percentage of adults who told the National Opinion Research Center that they read a newspaper “every day.” The line starts in 1967, when NORC asked the question for Norman Nie and Sidney Verba’s Participation in America study. After that, NORC started repeating the question every few years in the General Social Survey. In the first edition of The Vanishing Newspaper in 2004, the chart looked like this:

Peer down that regression line, I wrote, and you will see it reaching zero in the year 2043. In April.  A lot of folks took that as a prediction. It’s not.

You see, nature doesn’t like straight lines. Neither do the people affected by them. Something always happens, sooner or later, to bend the line. Put your hands over the chart to focus your eye on the decade of the 1980s. The curve flattens out quite a bit. What happened was that newspaper owners got scared, and they started hiring more reporters. Maybe, they told themselves, if we make our product better, people will stick with us. And they did, and it worked.

But in the 1990s, the competition from Internet advertising kicked in, publishers started slashing costs, and the regression line resumed its downward trek. But please remember this: the line shows the proportion of adults who read a newspaper every day. The less frequent readers are important, too, and they are not represented in the chart. You might still make a sustainable business by holding on to those who read only two or three times a week.

Or, perhaps – and this seems more likely — publishers will follow what some call the “harvesting” model where they squeeze the money out of the newspaper operation as rapidly as they can and then just let it die. That could happen to many of them well before 2043.

A key reason that the theme, “Newspapers are gonna die in 2043,” took hold is that it is easy to remember. And remembering that dramatic line is easier than reading the book, which is an academic tome meant for a specialized audience.  “Dry as dirt,” said one Amazon reviewer.

I tried to take advantage of this phenomenon in a luncheon speech to Canadian journalists last year. I showed them the chart, gave the dramatic interpretation of the regression line, mentioned 2043, and paused to let it sink in.

Then I said, in effect, “not gonna happen.” We professors call this “bait and switch.” It’s an attention-getting device. While I had their attention (I thought), I explained the part about nature not liking straight lines. Sooner or later, it will bend, I said. When, and how, is up to you.

Later, my hosts sent me a log of the tweets during my talk. “The last newspaper will be printed in 2043” was the most tweeted message. In fact, they were so busy tweeting the bait that they missed the switch. Apparently nobody was listening when I explained the ain’t-gonna-happen part.

A few days ago, I got a call from an Italian journalist. She works for a “daily Web magazine,” and its name is Lettera43. And, yes, the name of the magazine was inspired by my spurious “prediction.”

“We were the first entirely digital media in Italy and picked our name out of your prediction of 2043,” said the reporter, Gea Scancarello.

The vagaries of Google translation make it hard to tell what I said in that interview, but it is interesting that the prediction has morphed again: now it is the New York Times, not newspapers in general, that will die in 2043. I have no idea where that came from. Perhaps I speculated that the Times, bless its heart, would be the last newspaper standing.

But I am not complaining. They always spell my name right. And in my mind’s eye, I see a really great excuse for a newspaper staff party. In 2043, preferably in April. Maybe it could be held in an old Miami Herald building. My ghost will be there. Think of it, and turn down an empty glass.

Of late, there has been renewed discussion of the seeming conflict between academic and practical research in the field of journalism.

This discussion is worthwhile, but it sounds a lot like one that the Newhouse School sponsored at Syracuse in 1985.  Have things really changed so little since then?

From my remote perch, it appears that the Web has created all sorts of new research questions that ought to interest practitioners and academics alike. A few right off the top of the head:

– Under what circumstances do bloggers become agenda setters?

– What happened to Mr. Gates? Can the concept of gatekeeper be refitted to apply in cyberspace?

– If, as Knight Ridder’s Hal Jurgensmeyer claimed, influence is a marketable commodity, how can digital news media package and sell it?

– How is the Web affecting the minimum efficient scale for a news business?

–Is the enabling of issue publics by the Web a cause of what social psychologists call “risky shift” in decision making? Is that the source of group polarization that we see today?

When newspapers thought they were in a steady state, the conflict between academics and practitioners was mostly one of time scale. The academy’s time horizon was long, practitioners wanted information they could use right now. That won’t change, nor will the fact that the best short-term results depend on some long-range theory to provide context and justification.

Nancy Weatherly Sharp edited a report of that Syracuse meeting into a nice book:  “Communications Research: The Challenge of the Information Age,” Syracuse University Press, 1988. If you can find it, check out my brief chapter, “On the impracticality of applied research.” I argue that the best research is cumulative, and it requires the long attention span of the academy as we strive to construct useful theories for which practical value might eventually be found.

Has the newspaper business hit bottom?  Could be.

One encouraging sign came in April when a group of Philadelphia business leaders bought the Inquirer and Daily News for $55 million.  Just six years ago, the same two papers sold for $515 million.

Newspapers still make money – not as much as they did before the Internet started giving them competition for advertising, but enough to be attractive investments if the price is right.

And now Warren Buffett has entered the game on a large scale by acquiring 63 papers from Media General, including the Winston-Salem Journal and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

In The Vanishing Newspaper (p. 43 of the second edition), I suggested that a newspaper earning a 6 or 7 percent operating margin could be just as socially useful as one earning the traditional 20-40 percent. The problem, I said, is that there is no smooth way to get from double-digit margins down to less than 10 percent. But now it’s happening.

There would be publishers willing to operate at that level, I predicted, if their investment is low enough. With the right price, they can get the same return on investment that previous owners enjoyed from much larger investments.

I illustrated the point with a parable about a goose that lays a golden egg every day. A buyer would pay a price for that goosed based on its production.

Now imagine a buyer who acquires such a goose only to find that its production drops to one golden egg per week. That person is going to be disappointed, but it’s still a pretty good goose. And this second owner can find a third person who will happily pay a much smaller price based on the lower production rate: a happy publisher with a normal retail-level margin.

Warren Buffet is that third owner. He has access to more data than I do, and it looks like he is betting that the slide in newspaper earning power has leveled out. The Internet has done all the damage it can, and papers still make money. His return on investment will enable him to cheerfully support product improvement and the public service functions of a good newspaper.  Let’s hope he’s right.

(Remarks to a UNC J-School faculty reception, May 8, 2012)

The last decade of my academic career was spent worrying about the disruptive effects of new technology on the newspaper business.  The publication of this memoir has forced me to think about technology’s effects on academic publishing.

Like newspaper journalism, academic publishing was constrained by the economies of scale obtained through mass production. To pay for a journal or a book, you had to make a lot of copies. The gatekeepers in academic publishing had two concerns: enough interest in the topic to yield sales that would make the break-even point, and  the value of the work’s contribution to knowledge.

Now technology has undermined both forms of gatekeeping. There is at least one advantage: it saves a lot of time. When I wrote my first book, it took three years from completion to seeing it in print. (The series of rejections that I endured is documented in the memoir.) Precision journalism merged two fields, social science and journalism, and reviewers in neither field could see enough demand for it to create the necessary economy of scale. If on-demand printing technology had been available in 1970, I would have been well-advised to self-publish and get it to market much sooner.

There are now at least 50 book stores that provide on-demand publishing – from Harvard Square to the campus of North Carolina State University. They use a machine that lets students convert their honors theses or dissertations into perfect-bound hard-cover or paperback books at the same cost per copy and with the same production values as a mass-produced book.

You see what this does to the gatekeepers?  It gets them out of the way in favor of the direct effects of the marketplace. This can be good or bad, and therein are some interesting research questions for you.

Until those questions are answered, I choose to rely on the judgment of Peter Osnos, founding editor of a traditional publisher, PublicAffairs Books, and an old newspaperman himself. He describes the present situation in just eight words: “Good books. Any way you want them. Now.”

If he is right, it provides some freedom for us academics who have something to say, but it puts a burden on us. We have to become entrepreneurs. Self-publishing requires self-marketing. And the mere fact of publishing will count less in tenure decisions than acceptance of the work as measured by the reviews and the citations that it generates. Welcome to this brave new world.

Looking at the New York Times Book Review for May 6, I found the kind of viewpoint that makes me sit up and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Lizzie Collingham, in The Taste of War, argues that the events leading up to World War II were based on food shortages. Germany needed the fertile lands of Eastern Europe to feed its people, and Japan’s land area was too small to provide enough food for its population.

The technology advances sparked by the war led to the reverse problem in the USA by making food so plentiful that overeating, not hunger, became our main health problem.

This history would have made a great narrative theme for my memoir. I grew up in a midwestern farm economy, and the major events in my life could be linked to food and its production.  I mentioned the connection several times, but without the drama that more detail could have provided.

Collingham’s work provides a historical frame for the innovative work being done in Boston by Yaneer Bar-Yam and his New England Complex Systems Institute. Bar-Yam uses investor behavior to model worldwide food prices and relate them to social disruption.

“In 2008 and 2011, increases in global food prices triggered hunger, food riots and social unrest in North Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, at a cost to global stability which policy makers can no longer ignore,” he says in a press release.

Bar-Yam ‘s model predicts the next bubble in food prices in 2013, along with a high risk of major social disruption.

If I were still a working journalist, I would try to synthesize the precision of the Bar-Yam model and the drama of Collingham’s narrative.  Theory and narrative, working together, can illuminate the dizzying cloud of facts with which we are increasingly confronted.

The obituaries for computer pioneer Jack Tramiel emphasized his Commodore 64 as a pivotal product in bringing home computing to the mass market. I don’t remember much about that one, probably because I never used it to write a book.

I do remember the machines on which I produced each of my books. The first was a previously owned standard manual Royal typewriter that I bought at the student store at Chapel Hill when I started my M.A. thesis in 1958. I was still using that sturdy device when I began work on Precision Journalism in the fall of 1969.

For my second book, begun in 1973, McGraw-Hill got me a discount on a new Smith-Corona portable electric. I did the first draft of To Keep the Republic, a textbook written with David Olson, with that machine set on triple-spacing to make the inevitable revisions easier. I adjusted easily to the electric’s light touch, and thought I was in technology heaven.

When I joined the faculty at Chapel Hill, the Kenan professorship came with funds that allowed me to buy a state-of-the-art, standard-size electric typewriter with a built-in correction ribbon. Make a mistake, and it would remember the errant keystrokes. One touch of a key made it back it up to white them out. Soon after that, I found out about Tramiel’s Commodore 8032.

The 80 stood for the character width of the screen, 32 was for its 32 kilobytes of core memory. That was enough to store about a page and a half of typing. For longer documents, you had to save the takes to external memory and create links to unite them into a single finished product. I wrote The Newspaper Survival Book on that machine and bought its identical twin for home use.

I liked the Commodore so much that I took it with me to New York when Everette Dennis made me a Gannett Media Studies Fellow at Columbia University for the summer of 1985. The first chapters of Ethical Journalism were written there.

The fifth book was The Vanishing Newspaper, and I wrote its first edition on an IBM PC at school and a generic equivalent at home. And then I became an Apple convert, doing the second edition of The Vanishing Newspaper and then Paper Route on a 4-gig iMac.

I’ll always be grateful to Jack Tramiel for producing the first machine that freed me from the typewriter. But I’m not letting go entirely. I still have a couple of old manual portables carefully stored. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe they will come in handy if there is a power failure.

In 1996, I lived a few blocks from a retail news store. I often described its richly diverse inventory in my teaching to illustrate a point in about the increasing specialization of media. The store sold magazines for people who hunt deer with bows and arrows, for example. Also several for tattoo fans and many different kinds of aviation magazines, including one about the restoration of vintage military craft.

It offered Harvard Business Review, and when I saw the September-October 1996 issue on display, I found Richard B. Freeman’s “Toward An Apartheid Economy?” It was a warning about the possible social and political consequences of growing income inequality in the United States. If the B-School was worried, I thought, we all should be worried.

I filed the magazine away and added other pieces on inequality as the years went by. Writers call this process “saving string.” Eventually I had enough for the USA Today op-ed piece that appeared today (March 28). To read it, click on the headline above.

The news store went away years ago, to be replaced by DVD movie rentals. Now that business is undergoing disruption by technology. I wonder what that space will be used for next and where my next idea will come from.

Daniela Kraus runs a Poynter-like think tank in Vienna that promotes higher standards of journalism. She recently posted a bit of history to show that precision journalism has been around for a while. “Experience has shown that a historical perspective helps fight vanity,” she explains, presenting a clip from my Detroit riot reporting 45 years ago. The link is behind the headline above, and if you open it in Chrome, Google will give you a rough English translation.

Harvard went out in the first round, but it was an honor just to be there.

North Carolina could go all the way, nothing unusual about that.

But the one I’m proudest of today is Kansas State, the only university that I attended for four years. Click on the headline above to see what the New York Times had to say this morning about “the melting pot on the plains.”