Corrections or additions?
These column by Richard K. Rein was prepared for the November 5,
2003 issue of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Richard K. Rein: Between the Lines Anniversary Column
It’s that time of year: The first Wednesday in November,
a decided pause between the seasons, but an ominous edge of change in
the air. As it has done every year since November, 1984, U.S. 1 on
this occasion sends forth its most callow youth into service,
thrusting him or her into the editor’s cluttered — always cluttered
— office.
The assignment: Get an interview with the Boss, ask the most
impertinent questions you dare, and then escape from the clutter to
write about it and fill this space. Herewith the 19th anniversary
exercise:
So how does it feel — the Big 1-9?Stop right there, kid. Who says it’s 19? I could easily make the casethat this is the 20th anniversary — the beginning of the 20th yearand the occasion for all sorts of special issues and other gimmicksthat publishers use to suck in advertisers who otherwise would neverthink of placing an ad in a 19th anniversary or 21st anniversarypublication. But we aren’t doing that.Why not?Because we still think that you can do an OK business by simplydelivering a reasonable publication at a reasonable cost to areasonable group of people. So we aren’t going to give you a 20thanniversary issue this week. We are just going to tell you what’shappening on Friday night (when you might want to impress the littlewoman — or little man — in your life) as well as what’s cooking onSaturday morning (when you’re trying to buy some points from the kidsin your life), and we will tell the story of the amazing Nakashimafurniture collection of Arthur and Evelyn Krosnick and what willhappen to it when they retire to Arizona.If this newspaper ever goes up for sale in my lifetime (and there’s noguarantee that will happen, given my health and the current economicclimate), I will make this argument to any potential buyer: Sure thepaper made X in the past year, but remember that the true profitpotential is X + BS — BS being all the marketing crap that publisherscan throw on the table whenever they want to drive up their bottomline, even if it won’t last long.So how is X anyhow? We hear that business is still down.X is not as big as it was in 1998 or 1999 or even 2000 and it’spossible that it never will be again. If you think about it, theprofit of those years rode on two principal things:1.) An economy and world political climate that were running inpicture-perfect form; and2.) A business enterprise headed by an 80-hour a week,52-week-a-year CEO who minimized overhead by handling virtually everymanagement and operational detail he could.Maybe point No. 1 could repeat itself in our lifetime. But pointNo. 2 just won’t ever happen again, given that the “CEO” is now 56,afflicted with coronary heart disease, and also spending half his timeas the single father of two growing boys, now almost 12 and almost 10,who need more attention rather than less.So how is your health and the company’s — should we beracing to the bank if we hear you seizing up on the production roomfloor?If I were you I’d sure as hell wouldn’t want to be last one in thatline. But before you get too nervous keep in mind some simple facts.First, while it’s true that CHD (coronary heart disease) is the No. 1killer in our land, remember that lots of those future victims arepeople walking around with s–t-eating grins on their faces and noclue as to what CHD even means. In other words they are people justlike I was before I got lucky and discovered a 90 percent cloggedartery.But having dodged that bullet, I’m living a more healthy lifestyle(did you walk two and a half miles this morning in 30 minutes, kid?);monitoring my health more frequently than ever (what’s yourlipo-protein (a) count?); and taking enough drugs to keep a streetcorner alive for a month in Haight-Ashbury during the ’60s (wanna trysome Plavix, kid?).Alright, alright, I get it. But the economy for sure hashada major heart attack. Are we alright?Good transition, kid. Sure, the economy is down. But the importantfact is that we are still in business. I think the savings grace wasthe reasonable business, at a reasonable price, aimed at a reasonableaudience. Back in 1998 or 1999 we probably could have made a temporaryfortune by creating an Internet model of U.S. 1. I hate to think wherewe would be today. I’d probably be selling those drugs on the streetcorner.But we didn’t do that, we’re still in business, we have expanded ourbusiness opportunities (by starting the West Windsor-Plainsboro News);we have beefed up our information processing infrastructure (sheddingNovell in favor of Windows 2000 as our network operating system); andwe paved the way for making our production 100 percent digital (bydumping our 1980s vintage desktop publishing program in favor ofQuarkExpress). That’s a lot of positive change occurring in a badeconomic climate.Meanwhile, like a lot of other people we do business with, we keepfeeling signs of a rebound in the economy. In this past month,October, every issue of both U.S. 1 and the WW-P News ran ahead insales compared to the same period a year ago. Of course, kid, I haveto remind you that roughly the same thing happened about six monthsago, and then we had a succession of issues with advertising evenworse than in 2002. And of course we have more overhead today than wehad a year ago — thanks to my continued efforts to shift portions ofmy load onto other shoulders. So you have to take it all with a grainof salt.Forgetting the economy for a minute, what’s the biggestchallenge facing U.S. 1?That’s easy to answer: Shifting U.S. 1 from an owner-operatedbusinessto a staff-operated business.But it’s harder to do than I ever imagined. The first thing you hearin business after you make your first penny is that you had betterstart delegating. The failure to do so is always laid at the feet ofthe owner. The staff views the owner’s unwillingness to delegate assome sort of cosmic flaw — how could a guy so smart to start asuccessful business be so stupid about delegating.Let me tell you, kid: You learn a lot about people when you startasking them to do things they were not hired to do. You discover thatsome people who are great at doing a job are not great at supervisingothers; some people don’t want the extra responsibility; others areafraid to make a mistake and the one thing that surely will happenwhen you run a business like this is that you will make mistakes —typically about one a day.So that’s the biggest mistake you made in the pastyear?Where should I begin. How about thinking that we could cobbletogethera home page for our sister newspaper and then end up sinking countlessof hours of staff time into it without ever getting it right? Or notinsisting that we all use the same E-mail, the same E-mail software,and sign every one of our articles and sections with an E-mailaddress?What’s the smartest thing you did in the past year?Nothing comes to mind.Surely there’s one little thing.Since you’ve pressed me (and there will be something extra in yournext check for that) I might say it was going ahead with the infamous”finger” cover when several key people around here challenged thewisdom of that decision. The argument was that it was rude and thatU.S. 1 could and should play a role in making the world a kinder andgentler place.I’m a little leery of journalists who suddenly think they can set thestandard for what’s polite and what’s rude. It surely wasn’t polite ofWoodward and Bernstein to knock on people’s front doors at night toget the Watergate story. It wasn’t polite of Roger Mudd to grill TeddyKennedy about Chappaquiddick. And it was downright rude of the mediato pry into the sex life of Bill Clinton. But that’s the job.Sometimes in this business you need a little edge to break through theclutter and make your point. See this finger, kid?Yeah.That signifies a one. See these? That’s a nine. It’s 1-9, kid. Not2-0, not yet. Have fun and we’ll see you next year.Previous StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
