I’ve become Internet famous in the past few days.

I’d always hoped it would be because I pulled a really good internet prank. Turns out it was because I wrote a blog post.

So far, it’s be tweeted out or linked from Harvard’s Nieman Lab and included in their e mail newsletter, it made Neiman Labs’ Fuego, and has been shared by Commarts.com, NewsWhip, PBS Idea Lab, PBS Mediashift and by countless editors and designers. Tweets about the post have been linked to, favorited and retweeted more times than I can count. As of this writing, it’s going on 7,000 pageviews.

It’s by far most-read thing I’ve ever had on my site. Yet, I’m not sure how I feel about the post. It got a lot of hits, to be sure. And it’s something I’ve wanted to say for a good long while. That’s doesn’t mean I should say it, or necessarily say it in that fashion.

After a few day’s reflection I have some quick thoughts:

• If I had known that my post was going to go so wide, I’d have held it back and worked on it some more. Previous longer entries took me as long as a month to write and rewrite. To my eyes, the post reads graceless and choppy, like a rough second draft.
• I published it just after I’d pushed out a major site update. Almost very piece of the site had been altered, and the site javascript was a complete rewrite. I hadn’t ironed out the kinks, so my site had broken stuff all over it when the flood of visitors showed up.
• My webhost completely shat the bed. My site slowed to a crawl midday Monday. I ran a speed test that showed the web server was taking nine seconds just to send the first bit of data. I had to call them twice to get it fixed. Considering that my post argued about the importance of fast load times, the irony is not lost on me.
• I made a fact error, mistaking smart person Benedict Evans for other smart person Horace Dediu. In my college journalism class, a fact error in a story was an automatic F. If my former J-prof is reading this, I owe you a make-up story.

Those are only small takeaways. Something bigger has been eating at me. I have the creeping feeling that perhaps I was being just a smidge unfair. Not that what I wrote wasn’t true – many news sites do have terrible UX because they put stakeholder interest over reader needs.

Or, to put it in more pithy terms, readers don’t care about stakeholders or office politics or bullshit arguments made around a conference table. All they see is the site.

I suspect what I wrote resonated with so many in the industry because does contain fundamental truth. Anyone who’s ever dealt with a stakeholder riding a wrecking ball like [Miley Cyrus][11] as it destroys a project knows what I mean.

This sentiment was best summed up by a friend who described a colleague as someone who always seemed nice, but “I really only knew her as someone who showed up at meetings and made ridiculous demands.”

So why do I feel the way I do about my post?

The best I can do is try to explain it. In a past life as a [print designer][12], I attended a design conference session in which the speaker mainly made fun bad design from small newspapers – awkward photos of groundbreakings, pages jammed with ads, etc – while he and the audience laughed at it.

Once I thought about the session, even though everything he said was true, the session felt a little ugly. Most examples he showed were from small papers that were just doing the best that they could with limited resources and staffs. I worked at a [6,000-circ][13] paper once, so I know what it’s like.

But even more than being unfair, the session wasn’t enlightening. The takeaway was “let us laugh at bad stuff that is bad.”

What my post was doing mainly was letting fly with everything I’d bottled up and wanted to say through the years, something made significantly easier by disentangling myself from the news industry and its [omerta][14] against internal dissent. Here’s a helpful video of me publishing my blog post last week:

What I am not saying is that current and former media members should abstain from calling out bad decisions and their bad results.

But jumping around and shouting isn’t the way I’d like to go about it. [DaringFireball.net][15] blogger John Gruber sets the bar for what I’m trying to do here. His longform pieces are clearly reasoned and carefully stated, and even when I disagree with him, it’s still obvious he’s considered the topic in a deep and thoughtful fashion.

I also realize have also set up myself as a target. I have a paper trail of my [own work][16] that leaves me more than open to critique. Much of it is displayed on and linked from this site. That work also includes this site you’re reading now.

And, boy howdy are there some clangers in that portfolio. A couple things in particular that I argued vehemently for at the time I now look at and cringe. Someone steamrolling through a bad ideas goes both ways.

Poorly designed news sites aren’t necessarily the results of noble UX designers like [King Canute][17] at the seaside trying to stem the tide of bad stakeholder ideas. Bad UX could just as easily be the result of a designer failing to synthesize stakeholder wishes into something coherent.

My design work – and the design of this site – are the most real statement about how I think a site should be. The only true critique of bad UX or design is to try to do better oneself. That sentiment can be found in the unlikeliest of places, the movie [“Ratatouille”][18]:

“But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

Despite my misgivings, I would retract nothing. I’d just hope that the lesson from my post is that critique is as disposable as Kleenex. Trying every day to do better is far harder and more important.

Word of a new Bond movie is always welcome news.

The teaser trailer for Spectre premiered online this weekend, with Christoph Waltz in a role he was born to play: Bond villain.

Thus begins the cycle of getting excited about a new Bond movie all over again. 2013’s teaser for Skyfall was superb, with a line that distills the Bond franchise perfectly: “Some men are coming to kill us. We’re going to kill them first.”

The movie itself was a beautifully shot muddle, with Roger Deakins’ jaw-dropping cinematography – the fight in front of a giant video screen is a masterpiece. But it’s in service of a computer hacking plotline devised by someone who apparently learned how computers work by overhearing a drunk guy at a party.

As a film, it’s visually arresting but strangely inert. Sam Mendes, a theater director, stages his scenes formally like entries and exits under a proscenium arch. And, wait a minute – did this MI6 guy follow Bond from room to room as he trained to deliver one line of exposition in each?

Most troublingly, we were treated to yet another swishy gay villain stereotype that seems retrograde for 2013. Or at least should have been.

And while we are on the topic of gender politics, the movie – spoiler alert – kills off its female M – the great Judi Dench – and established that Moneypenny isn’t suited for field work so she can ride a desk. The boys are back in charge of MI6 now.

None of this is really enough to cause worry. If Casino Royale proves anything, a truly great modern Bond movie can still be made. It isn’t just the best Bond movie since the overrated Goldfinger, as some claim. It’s the best Bond movie, period.

The movies’ most enduring franchise doesn’t seem to get tired. Or, at least tired permanently.

Bond is a unique franchise. Star Wars and Star Trek have to deal with considerable sprawling backstory and fans with a Taliban-like intolerance for the slightest continuity error. The 2009 Star Trek reboot dealt with this by bulldozing 50 years of Star Trek legacy out of existence through a time-travel conceit.

Just deal with it, fanboys.

The Bond franchise deals with its decades of backstory by not really caring. Bond lives in the eternal present. Surely Pierce Brosnan’s ’90s Bond wasn’t the same guy who defeated Auric Goldfinger, but who really knows?

Relics of past movies showed up in Q’s laboratory in Die Another Day, but forget about any explanation of how they fit into Brosnan-era Bond’s past.

Casino Royale tried to deal with this by sending Bond on his first mission, but it put him back in his iconic 1964 Aston Martin spy car, which also returns in Skyfall, complete with its ejector seat button on the gear lever.

All this fits nicely with the fan theory that “James Bond” is just a code name, but that’s just fan guesswork.

Regardless of how the Bond movie universe works out its legacy, the end result is that every era gets a Bond it deserves.

You have sleek ’60s Bond as a icon of cool wearing Don Draper suits and driving one of the most beautiful cars ever made. We get ’70s Bond in wide lapels and a raised eyebrow as he slides through camptastic crap like Moonraker or, heaven forbid, wears a clown costume in Octopussy.

The ’90s saw an all-business Bond becoming yet another person to kill Sean Bean before kite surfing his way across a fake CGI wave and back into full-on camp status.

Let’s just be honest. For a beloved character, much legacy Bond hasn’t aged well at all. The corkscrew car jump of The Man With the Golden Gun is one of the great car stunts in all of movies. But Bond is driving … good lord, that’s an AMC Hornet! And the chase includes a terbacky-chewing cracker sheriff, Bond doing a Southern accent and a slide-whistle sound effect.

It’s painful to watch. So please, let’s.

Other aspects have aged even worse. The entire plot of Live and Let Die comes across as irredeemably racist. Some Bond seduction scenes seem borderline rapey now.

Thanks to some amazing 1960’s era modernist set design and avoidance of excess, Connery’s Bond fares best in avoiding some of the more embarrassing aspects, despite an occasional poor choice by the wardrobe department or silly attempts to murder Bond on a back-stretching machine in Thunderball.

He even acquits himself in unofficial Bond movie Never Say Never Again, which avoids most of the camp and outright silliness that weighed down Bond in the ’80s.

But none of this matters, not really, because the Bond franchise keeps moving forward. That Bond drove an amphibious gondola through the streets of Venice as a pigeon – sigh – did a double take didn’t stop the producers from returning there for the third act showdown and tragedy of Casino Royale.

As long as EON productions doesn’t worry about Bond’s past, they probably won’t have to worry about his future.

I got a text message a few hours ago from a longtime friend.

“Denis just turned in his resignation”

It wasn’t a surprise. It was still a gut punch.

The text referred to Denis Finley, editor of The Virginian-Pilot, a man I worked for most of my professional career, a man I admire, faults and all.

I first met him in 1999, when he was design team leader. He’d just been named DME for presentation, and I was to interview with him for a spot on The Pilot’s design team. He was tall, nicely dressed, and – my gearhead self quickly noticed – was driving a Taurus SHO, one of the best cars of the 1990s.

He told me over dinner that night he was going to hire me. I was overjoyed. I ended up staying 14 years, resigning on the same date I started.

The Pilot was the only place I wanted to work. In that era, a handful of papers were on the forefront of design, and The Pilot was the leader.

Denis helped put it there and for nearly two decades kept it there.

He was a rare newspaper leader. Before getting into news, he worked as a pastry chef. He switched to journalism and was hired at The Pilot as a photographer. He once said that when he was looking at options on where to work, the only place he wanted to go was The Pilot.

He rose up the ranks, was features editor, design team leader, DME of presentation, managing editor and finally editor.

He was an immaculate dresser, with tailored suits and colorful ties. He was fastidiously neat, his pens lined up and his business cards in a perfect stack on a tray. He kept a bottle of Windex in his office credenza to clean fingerprints off his table after every meeting.

But the well-groomed exterior didn’t always match the man. With his Philly accent and straight-talking demeanor, he lacked the slick corporate polish of other company officials.

When he had to recite company talking points, you could tell he didn’t really mean it.

But he tended toward an open, positive newsroom – a “no assholes policy.” I recall when he got the ME job, he moved into an office previously occupied by a deputy managing editor, a disapproving, unapproachable woman whose face was twisted into a permanent scowl.

A person whose desk was outside the office – noting the light now streaming through the office windows – commented to me, “That’s the first time that I’ve seen those blinds open in years.” That was Denis. He didn’t cage himself in an office with hermetically sealed window dressings. Every night before he went home – usually pretty late – he would walk through the newsroom and say good night to people.

One night, after putting an especially large commemorative issue together, the night crew – copy editors, designers, photos editors – and Denis sat at our desks and passed around a bottle of Knob Creek.

Denis always urged me to do my best work. I felt like phoning it in wasn’t an option. He made sure designers were included in the process from the outset and were real journalists, not just windowdressers.

“Communicate, don’t decorate,” was the philosophy. Denis, the former chef, used to say “Presentation, in food and in news, is important.”

And he did some ballsy shit. I had the chance to work on this gutwrenching series about a Navy hospital in Afghanistan. The stories and photography featured in it are not for the faint-hearted. It was a Pulitzer finalist.

But Denis had the misfortune of reaching his goal just in time to oversee the decline of the paper he loved. He leaves with a newsroom half the size as when he started, and he had to make the cuts and deliver the news to people.

And the coverage is diminished, too. A new publisher didn’t back the newsroom when it really counted.

Denis lived and breathed The Pilot like no one else. But it was taking its toll. The last time I saw him he looked tired, as if the job stopped being fun a long time ago.

No one wants to leave a place worse off then when they found it, but it seems as if Denis is. Though not by his own hand. He tried to stem the tide, keep the paper strong. But the whole news industry is in irreversible decline.

It’s sad, but just the way things worked out for him.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

1950s futurism was hopelessly – even deliriously – optimistic, all flying cars and atomic space ovens and glamorous jet travel. Instead, I spent most of Friday in the worst travel experience of my life.

I left my home in Boston at 4:15 a.m. bound for Norfolk, Va. I was to change planes at LaGuardia and arrive in Virginia at about 11:30 am. My goal was to attend a going-away party for a longtime, dear friend of mine at 4 p.m.

Somehow this became an 18-hour journey of the damned.

After rushing about trying to get ready in 15 minutes, I fired up my iPhone and called an UberX. Surge pricing of 1.9 percent was in effect, so I would pay more than $50 for a trip to the airport.

The flight into New York City was fine, despite my having to land next to a plane-crash scene at LaGuardia. After deplaning, I couldn’t find my flight on the board.

Finally, I asked a US Airways gate agent. The second leg of my trip was actually booked on American. Nothing in the US Airways app, my boarding pass or confirmation e mail noted this. I was supposed to just know.

With the clock ticking, I was taken by shuttle bus to the American terminal.

A line was already forming for boarding. But before calling the flight, the gate agent paused. She picked up a phone and talked to someone. Then she announced our flight was canceled “due to weather.” The weather in Norfolk that day was sunny, 28 degrees with no precip and 10-mile visibility.

People waiting in line immediately began jeering the gate agent. One of the passengers in line suggested that maybe we should calm down, and it was suggested by a few people in line that maybe she should just shut the hell up.

After more than half an hour on the phone trying to make alternate plans, a US Airways rep gave me some options: Wait until Sunday afternoon for the first flight to Norfolk or take a connection to Washington D.C. that was leaving in a half hour. From there, I figured, I could take the train on to my destination.

I got in line for the shuttle back to the terminal where I had landed. And then waited. And waited. Past the time my flight was supposed to be taking off.

After a meandering ride across the ice-covered taxiway, the shuttle finally deposited me at the terminal. I raced to my gate and found that the DC flight would be delayed by an hour and a half. But, this turned out to be wrong.

It ended up being delayed by more than two hours. No worries, though. The gate agent told us that when the plane arrived they’d hustle the passengers off as quickly as possible and then hustle us on and possibly do a vertical takeoff right from the gate to save time.

Once we were on the plane, it sat at the gate for 45 minutes. To thank us for our patience, they gave us pretzels. There was no drink service on the flight.

At some point when I was over New Jersey, my train ticket expired. A 3:55 train would still be possible, but would push my arrival in Norfolk to almost 9 p.m.

After a 40-minute crosstown ride on the DC Metro to Union Station, I quickly bought a sandwich at the food court and rushed to my gate. The board said my train was running two and a half hours late.

Fuck it, I’m renting a car.

The only available car was a “luxury” tier, which cost $179 a day plus a $200 deposit, which doesn’t seem like enough money to replace a car should something happen to it. The rental agent ran my card and it was declined.

A nice call center employee of my bank told me that my card was blocked for “suspicious activity.” I should have received a text message informing me of this. Did you not get the text message, she asked? Could I check if I got the text massage? “Just unblock the damn card,” I said.

The car turned out to be a Kia Cadenza, which I had always thought was a type office furniture. Either way, I was once again moving toward my destination. Well, sorta. It was D.C. rush hour.

While waiting in traffic somewhere in suburban Arlington, I received a text message from my bank warning me of suspicious activity on my debit card.

After a four-hour drive, I arrived in Norfolk just short of 9 pm.

That night, as I found myself sitting in a seedy Virginia Beach karaoke bar with a group of old friends listening to someone murder “Music of the Night,” all the frustration and anger melted away.

Just kidding. I want to burn US Airways’ headquarters to the ground.

Winter creates a magic moment every time it snows. The world falls silent. The landscape is transformed by a blanket of white. The mundane and grimy is suddenly covered in sparkles and beauty.

Spring and summer rarely see that type of sudden transformation. You can feel it perhaps in the golden hour or just after a summer shower. But you don’t get the feeling of entering a different, magical world.

Except for one special day.

Boston had a terrible long, – seemingly endless – winter. Even last week jackets and coats were the norm. The mercury said it should be warm, but a stiff, chilly wind made sure temps were cold enough to be not actually warm.

Yesterday the weather turned, and with it gray of winter has suddenly been swept away. For several days I could tell that everything was just about to bloom. Trees were budding and bits of green could be seen, building-up energy and about to burst forth.

Today was that magical day when the line was crossed and stark, barren winter is finally gone. Leaves on the trees, flowers blooming everywhere – it has that same world-transformed feel of a winter snowfall, but awash in color and life.

Today was that special day. That first true spring day. It’s my favorite day of the year.

Let’s face it, Star Trek is an objectively silly show. Kitschy, low budget, often poorly acted and on occasion downright terrible.

But I love it dearly, madly and irrationally.

This irrational fan love is probably one reason Leonard Nimoy had a notoriously difficult relationship with his best-known character.

He famously denounced the role in his memoir I Am Not Spock and even asked to be killed off in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But not even Spock could stay dead for long.

Nimoy later came to embrace the role in the book I Am Spock and finally lived long enough to become the beloved elder statesman of Trek in a way that William Shatner couldn’t.

My memory of “Star Trek” resides in the fuzzy nostalgia of youth, but not some idealized Leave It To Beaver happy times. I was a depressed, unhappy, outcast teen.

Watching “Star Trek” was one of the few things that made me happy. Every day after school at 4 p.m. It’s a cliche, I know, for the nerd to get lost in outer space. But it did.

If you were to ask me what the best movie ever made was, I’d say 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s what I say to show off. If you were to ask me what my favorite movie is, I’d say without pause Star Trek II. I’ve watched it probably 100 times or more and never get tired of it.

My irrational love of Star Trek is woven into my being.

That’s where my thoughts turn to Nimoy. We’re often burdened with a role that others want us to play, and that was something that Nimoy bristled against.

But even if he didn’t want to be subsumed by his role, it was the one he played most of his life. And he was beloved in ways the few people ever are.

I hope he knew what he really meant for people like me. RIP.

I’ve been through four hurricanes and countless Nor’easters.

I spent my first day in Boston sitting inside an apartment watching “Law & Order” reruns as Superstorm Sandy blew through. In 2009, a strong three-day Nor’easter left several feet of water in the basement of my co-op. That was a pain.

But I’ve never seen anything quite like the past few weeks in Boston.

Those other storms showed up to plague people for a few hours or even a day, but they moved on. Boston’s insane weather the past few weeks has given us snow every weekend. And sometimes during the week. I can’t even keep the snowstorms straight any more.

It’s more like a slow-motion disaster. Well, that’s maybe a tad too melodramatic.

Granted, nine people have died, and some poor sap was buried in an avalanche when snow slid off a roof. But for most the weather is more like an unrelenting annoyance of middling proportions.

For one, it’s cold. Really cold. As I write this it is -8 degrees outside.

And there’s snow. So, so much snow. And they’re running out of places to put it. They may dump it into the harbor alongside some Colonial-era tea crates.

A snowpile right outside the window is as tall as the city bus sitting next to it.

And this excess of snow is a strangely Boston problem. The heaviest snow has fallen pretty much on Boston proper, with snow totals dropping off the farther you get out of the city limits.

At this point I should probably be describing the resilience of the human spirit, the flinty New England character and the like. The reality is that everyone is just grumpy about the weather and wants it to end.

Before the first big snowfall, I headed off for some panic shopping. The store was packed and the shelves were stripped bare of bread, eggs and milk. The French Toast index was clearly at Defcon 1.

Last week before the lastest storm, no one could be bothered to panic or really care. The store was calm.

Trying to get places is mainly fraying people’s nerves these days.

Some people’s cars just seem lost to the snow forever, left for some future generation to finally chip out of the grip of our unending frozen hell. For others, a Hobbesian “if I dug out my car out of a space, I own the space” spirit rules.

Space-saver wars have become increasingly ugly or resulted in vandalism. Some guy parked in a spot and later emerged to find the claimant, filled with righteous anger, had gone to the trouble to shovel the interloper’s car back in. Other cars have been vandalized.

Commuters without cars can opt for the repeated indignities of mass transit. Attempting to take Boston’s creaking, underfunded trains and buses to work is a veritable journey of the damned.

The passengers in “Snowpiercer” likely had a better time on a train.

Last weekend they MBTA decided that the problem of overcrowded, late trolleys that break down all the time is best solved by just not having trolleys any more. My line was replaced with a bus.

Monday, I waited 35 minutes in sub-zero temperatures as three buses packed with passengers whizzed past our stop. When an empty bus arrived, three dozen people at our stop jammed into it. Now we were the ones on the bus whizzing past stops where people had been waiting as long or longer than us.

When we stopped for a light at Packard’s Corner, several dozen people were waiting there. When our driver told them the bus was full, some of the people there just completely lost it.

A woman began shouting profanities at the driver through the bus door, demanding to be let on board. One twentysomething woman at the stop was crying. We got flipped off when we pulled away.

I arrived at Kenmore Station to wait another 20 minutes on a freezing platform to repeat the sardines-in-a-can trip on a Green Line train. At least sardines’ fates are already decided before they are sealed in.

From leaving my house to stumbling into the office, it took me a little more than two hours to get to work Monday, about the length of time it takes to fly from Boston to Detroit.

But my train is supposed to be working on Monday. A front-end loader is currently trying to chip a layer of snow off the tracks in front of my building. That is, unless weather intervenes. And it will.

Right now it’s a lovely sunshine day, but snow and then freezing rain is in the forecast for this afternoon and tomorrow.

At some point it has to stop. Maybe by July. August at the latest.

This week, some asshole picked my MacBook up off a table at a Starbucks and walked out the door with it.

I’d stepped outside to take a call – not a smart move in retrospect – but I didn’t want to be that guy shouting into a cell phone. As I was standing in the doorway talking on my phone, whoever stole my computer probably walked right past me.

Logic suggests this would be a high-risk crime.

The shop was crowded – packed even – with dozens of customers. All it would take would be one person saying “Hey, wait a minute …”

The store has several cameras monitoring both front doors, so the crime and the criminal were sure to be caught on video. He had to have known that.

In addition, my computer was running Find My Mac, which would immediately ping me if the machine was connected to the Internet and show me its location on a map.

Despite all this, what has happened since has given me a sinking feeling that the computer will never be found again.

This is how we imagine we will be if a crime is ever perpetrated against us.

What I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long IT career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my laptop go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

As much as I’d like to run around punching members of an international laptop-stealing ring in the throat like Liam Neeson, I really just sat down at my table and wondered if I was going to be fired.

I texted my friend

um, so my work laptop was just stolen.

What?!

I’m so screwed.

It was/is a $2,500 machine, only a month old, which is how long I’d been at my job. It was a job that I loved. I hoped they’d understand.

I was now going to be “that guy” the one they told stories about after getting drunk at the office Christmas party. “Remember that guy we hired and then like three weeks later he let his new laptop get stolen … “

I called 911, and the dispatcher told me to come down to the station and fill out a report. I told her I had two witnesses and video, so could she send an officer? She said one would be by, but she didn’t know when.

“An hour? Two hours? Tonight?” I asked.

“One will be by sometime.”

The officer who did show up was a jovial fellow who told me a hilarious story about a hooker trying to pick him up when he was on plainclothes patrol. He also told me that he could only take a report.

Only a detective can view the video and interview witnesses, he explained. “It’s a union thing. In other states police can investigate, but in Boston it has to be a detective.”

I’d pictured a valiant cop showing up and tracking the perp through the freshly fallen snow and and then sweating a confession out of him. “You’re going up the river,” he’d say, before muttering, “Filthy criminal.”

Clearly this wasn’t going to happen. He gave me a case number and left.

A detective has yet to call me. My case likely landed on his desk with a few dozen others that day. The laptop is worth enough that it is felony theft, but it’s still not important enough to be treated as a priority. Or even hardly at all.

What would seem to be a risky crime with solid evidence against the perpetrator is in reality a fairly safe one.

My employers took the theft in stride. They’re filing an insurance claim and I’m taking some ribbing. I’ve set up Find My Mac to ping me if it should be connected to the Internet. But there’s something deeply angering just picturing some guy doing what he did and getting away with it. Or even thinking he got away with it for a few days.

I’m still hopeful. The officer said they enjoy pulling up to people’s houses, knocking on the door and asking “Where did you get that laptop?”

And then throat-punch them like Liam Neeson.

I was in an uncomfortable chair sitting through another boring quarterly meeting led by our publisher and his PowerPoint deck.

Some astute member of the newsroom had coined the nickname “Mojo” for him, partly as a play on his name, but more as a comment on his dreary lack of charisma. It was all EBITAs and P&Ls.

Well, not so much Ps as Ls.

He showed a 10-year chart of company earnings and it looked like an EKG right before the nurse called for a crash cart. I returned from the meeting, and a newsroom friend asked how it went.

“I basically sat in the back carving ‘No fate’ into a tabletop with a survival knife,” I replied.

Such was life in newspapers in the past decade.

Life at newspapers isn’t going to get any better soon.

NeimanLab looked at the state of the industry last month. It’s quite appropriately illustrated with a photo of the Door to Hell, an eternal flaming pit of despair in Turkmenistan.

The industry, as a whole, is far away from getting to any new stability. Growth that matches inflation would be very difficult; growth that matches the growth of the overall economy even tougher.

The 2008 recession had roughly the same effect on newspapers as the bus did on Regina in “Mean Girls.”

Somehow despite eroding conditions, the newspaper business in the United States made $37.5 billion in revenue in 2013. I find this figure amazing – unreal even. I marvel that newspapers make any money at all. It’s like finding out MySpace is still around or Abe Vigoda is still alive.

How is this possible, seriously? I see someone buying a print newspaper and I think “why would you do that?”

The newspaper business is shrinking and will continue to do so, as Neiman Lab lays out. Yet, the reaction to newsroom cuts and a smaller newshole is righteous outrage without acknowledging the realities causing both to shrink. This seems to be the favored reaction amongst journalistic types.

It’s also fashionable to note that newspapers “still don’t get the internet.” I’ve said it often enough myself through the years.

In the past 25 years or so I’ve worked on the print side – I was even cofounder of a small daily paper, now folded, alas – and the online side, where I was a content producer and later a UX designer and front-end developer of several news verticals.

A question I’ve thought about often is what exactly would a newspaper company that “gets it” look like? How would it work? What would it be?

My answer is right in front of us. And it means they would look not all that much like they do today, and more troublingly, not at all like something many current newspaper staffers would want.

When thinking about the news industry, an old joke comes to mind: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change. But the fact is newspapers aren’t just going to have to want to change, they are going to have to change or die. But will they?

Newspapers are managing their decline and transition to digital as well as a Toonces the Driving Cat managed the decline of a car rolling down a cliff.

Just as AOL can’t let go of its profitable dial-up business because that’s where the money is, newspapers can’t let print and its advertising revenue go.

Maintaining this print legacy keeps alive a false premise. Newspaper employees like to lament that people “paid for news” for decades, but then the Internet came along and ruined everything. Now everybody just wants news for free now.

“What we do has value and people should be willing to pay for it,” I’ve heard an editor I like and admire say more than once.

That’s not a business model, it’s pique. It’s wishful.

Price is just a measuring device. People will pay only if they want to, not just because the seller desires them to pay.

Besides, no one paid for news. The 50 cents readers gave the scruffy moppet shouting “extry, extry” on the street corner or the $20 a month they sent to the circulation department mainly covered distribution and production costs.

Newspapers always have and continue to make the bulk of their revenue the same way Google or Facebook does: By delivering content and selling ads against it. It’s just that Google or Facebook are smart enough to let others pay the cost of creating the content.

This delivery of ads – namely a local monopoly on the delivery of ads and its attendant rates – was what the internet disrupted, not “paying for news.”

Newspapers actually sold the same thing that grocery stores and Google and a neighborhood coffee shop all sell: convenience. You don’t have to travel all the way to Colombia to get your artisanal shade-grown, cold-brewed, small-batch coffee. You walk down to the corner.

Newspapers were the best – or really – the only way many readers could get news, local and national ads, “Dear Abby”, classifieds, “Calvin & Hobbes”, a crossword, movie reviews, etc. News broadcasts, weekly magazines and the like were competition, but newspapers generally owned the market they’d staked out.

As business analyst Benedict Evans points out, newspapers are not, by strict definition, media companies. They are organized and operate more like light manufacturing companies.

The internet disrupted the newspaper industry’s monopoly by removing manufacturing as a barrier to entry. Previously, to have the influence and reach of a major media company would cost tens of millions of dollars for a printing plant, paper and ink, a fleet of trucks, bribes for union officials, etc.

To cite Clayton Christiansen’s disruption theory, new technology makes something previously unreachable by most suddenly cheap and simple enough that anyone can have it.

I was at a news hackathon last month and the fresh-eyed youths kept prattling on about making platforms to “democratize the news.” Finally, I said “That has already been done a long time ago.” Anyone can publish, usually for free, on Blogger, Tumblr, YouTube, Vimeo, Squarespace, Flickr, Wordpress, Twitter, etc.

That is the degree the news business has been disrupted. One guy with skill and savvy – Daring Fireball proprietor John Gruber comes to mind – can make a more interesting tech site than a staff and earn a lot more money than if he worked for an establishment publication.

Newspapers are full of information readers can easily find all over the place in better, easier, quicker formats that don’t leave ink on your hands or get thrown into a puddle by a spiteful delivery driver. And those sources don’t jam a paywall dialog box in readers’ faces every time they click a link.

Local newspapers continue to operate as if their monopoly is still in place, as if people still have to come to them for news. They remain general-interest in an era of ever-growing specificity and choice.

Have an urge to listen to a particular song? Go to Spotify and play it. Or Grooveshark. Or Rdio. That really great moment from a movie? Chances are it’s on YouTube. That great Onion story from 10 years ago? It’s a Google search away. And it’s all free.

In the face of all of this change, newspapers have taken their sprawling coverage model and transferred it online.

And they’re charging for it. After all, locking down the product worked so well for the music industry.

And the younger generation, the ones who live on social networks and Snapchat, see news as something that is everywhere, practically in the air. They care about the story not the source.

Going to a single website and paying to get in? That’s like getting a newspaper thrown onto your porch every morning.

Economic pressures alone should make a newspaper organization built for the future radically different than the sprawling operations we see now.

It’s not hard to find a suggested model to transform newspapers because it already exists: Look at any successful, growing online news operation.

You’ll generally find three things:

• The bulk of their staff is mainly devoted to the creation of content or the technology to deliver that content.
• They are built around topics that are more specific than general.
• Larger headcounts don’t result in higher hit counts.

One-man-operation sites like Daring Fireball or Drudge Report rack up hit counts that dwarf publications made by buildings full of people. As the scale increases – The Verge, Gawker, Politico, Vice, SBNation, Vox – these organizations are still mainly content operations with smallish staffs compared with their stratospheric traffic.

One of the first things a visitor to a major metro newspaper such as The Boston Globe – where I worked for a little more than two years – notices is the sheer scale of the place, not just in square feet but in manpower. What do all these people do?

An argument for each’s place on the org chart can be made, but that’s not really my point. Somewhere along the line the newspaper organizations that we see today are going to have to begin the process of looking more like online-focused news orgs.

Sure, the delivery trucks and drivers and the printing plants will eventually be gone. Everybody knows that. But much more change than that will be needed to find a way forward.

Newspapers will need a smaller staff with a laser-like focus on local and state news, local sports, local arts and culture. They’ll need to let the other stuff – national, international, technology, national arts – just go.

Someone else is already doing all those better anyway.

Newspapers have to change. Of course they do. Everybody knows that.

Projecting 50 years into the future it seems obvious that newspaper companies – if they survive at all – will be significantly different organizations than they are now.

The Google/Apple way of looking toward the future is to build it now. Someday we’ll have self-driving cars or all wear smartwatches, they reason, so let’s start working on that right now. The newspaper way is to jealously protect old models with ideas like paywalls that mainly extract money from an existing base.

Yet, some moves away from print to online-only have been tried – the New Orleans Times Picayune, Newsweek, The Christian Science Monitor, for instance – but they are often reported with a sad, end-of-an-era tone. Or misunderstood outright.

On Wednesday night, though, the Times’ David Carr reported that the Times-Picayune will go through a deep round of staff cuts and be published just two or three times a week. (Emphasis mine.) link

By moving content online, news was going to be published much more often, not less. Not being tied to a schedule mandated by a mechanical production and distribution process is a huge step forward to the future.

This is the same newspaper that, in the words of the New York Times’ David Carr, won a Pulitzer for its Hurricane Katrina coverage in part because

“The presses lost power, but the newspaper used its Web site to post updates throughout the storm.”

Imagine that. Being honored for news updates that appeared on a web site.

The assumption among longtime print veterans is that these organizations lose influence when they drop print and go online only.

In my online news producer days I would update editors on online hit counts. At one morning meeting, I cited hits in the high thousands for a news story.

Some editor laughed and said, “Well, at least we know 200,000 people read it in the paper.”

“What makes you think everyone who subscribes to the paper read it?” I said back.

My neighbors in my co-op often provided contrary evidence to this editor’s readership theory by dumping their unread papers into the recycling bin still in their plastic delivery bags.

On many mornings one of the first things I’d do in my producer shift was pull down that day’s print lead because it was performing dismally online. As one of my former online bosses used to say, “We know what people actually read.”

Print-centric thinking was seen in the wide praise that The Orange County Register got when it clamped down on its site with hard a paywall and doubled down on print. It also cut back its online posting and canceled an iPad news app. Neiman Lab quotes its then-editor

“It does, however, mean cutting back on ‘things that seem to be distracting the staff from the basic mission, which is to increase quality first in print.’”

This all inevitably went up like the Hindenburg last fall, with layoffs, lawsuits and greatly scaled back ambitions.

Print may be “where the money is,” but it is not the future and hasn’t been for a long time.

One problem facing newspapers is journalists.

I spent more than 20 years working in newsrooms, and have two gross generalizations to make:

• Newsrooms are tradition-bound and extremely resistant to change.
• Journalism draws a certain personality type that doesn’t do anything unless there’s a deadline.

Neither of these institutional personality traits lend themselves to radical remakes.

When billionaire Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post using money he found in his couch cushions, speculation immediately turned to “What will the genius behind Amazon do to reshape the news industry?”

If it includes anything like what he does at Amazon with logistics, organizational structures, efficiencies, staffing and cost-cutting, journalists aren’t going to like it.

There’s a bit of ego in that resistance, too.

“Don’t start a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” the saying goes. The implicit message is that the press has the power to ruin you.

People who work in the newspapers get a lot of prestige and power.

I found this out when I was a 22-year-old college student who two years earlier had been working as a janitor but was now getting the Illinois governor’s office to return my phone calls.

When at a party when someone would ask “What do you do?” and I would answer “I work at the Globe.” People would respond with “I bet that that’s cool” or “That’s awesome.”

I would typically sigh, “Well, you’d think …” But that’s for another chin-scratching thinkpiece.

Throw in heady First Amendment, truth-telling, Woodward-Bernstein, Edward R. Murrow crusader talk, and people who work in journalism have a high regard for what they do, something like tenured faculty.

Toward the end of my newspaper career it began to feel like newspaper journalism is an industry that’s spending an undue amount of time mourning its lost past.

This sounds, like criticism, but I get it. I do it too.

I love the romantic, bourbon and stogies “stop the presses” flavor of newspaper journalism with the presses, the inky smell and a bundle of newspapers landing with a thump on the ground.

In 2007 when we launched a new daily newspaper, we held a champagne toast and went to the plant to watch the papers come off the press. The joy of a holding those first papers – the two-story-tall press rumbling like an earthquake, the ink still sticky on my hands – has never been repeated by a half-dozen website launches I’ve done since.

It’s not easy to just let all that go.

It’s one thing to watch an industry be reshaped by forces out of your control and quite another to watch a romance whither away.

Perhaps this is is too pessimistic.

Newspaper journalism is still a vital, central part of public life and debate, as The Guardian and The Washington Post’s reporting on the Edward Snowden document leaks showed.

But the financial underpinnings of the entire industry are eroding further every year. It’s not going to stop. Billionaires such as Bezos at The Post and John Henry at the Boston Globe may buy some time, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals.

But more than that, I spent two decades in the news business. My gut tells me that it’s over. It’s a feeling I can’t quantify in a spreadsheet or a link to an industry financial report.

To quote “The Sun Also Rises”

“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

This is what the news business feels like. Gradually, then …

Perhaps it’s unimaginable that venerable news organizations could vanish. But because something has been doesn’t mean it always will be. In 1145 A.D., the largest city in the world was Merv, Turkmenistan, a major stop on the Silk Road. It’s now gone, except for ruins.

Newspaper leadership can content themselves by saying that people like and desire what newspapers do. But it’s worth noting that the world didn’t stop wanting silk and spices and perfumes from the East. It just stopped needing the Silk Road and the residents of Merv.

The ability to vanish from the landscape is much easier than it might seem.

An anguished tweet showed up in my timeline the other day said Trader Joe’s is no longer stocking poutine. Could poutine’s hipster star be fading?

Well, maybe not hipster. If I know about it, it’s not hipster any more. I prefer to say a food has been gentrified.

Many of the same rules apply in both neighborhood and food gentrification.

Something that is already upscale can’t be gentrified. This is why Park Slope can be but the Upper West Side can’t. Chicken and waffles can, but lamb chops can’t.

In addition, the dish or neighborhood has to be viewed as “authentic.” Or at least seem authentic when when presented with a [faux historical logo][9]. This is known in academic circles as the Old Crow Medicine Show Effect. For instance, the O.C.M.S.E. allows a charcuterie or a barbershop to be easily gentrified, but not video game store or a T.J. Maxx.

Although, in neighborhoods as in food, that “authenticity” needs to be chased away before the affluent hipsters can enjoy it safely while reveling in its amazing authenticity.

And third, food can only be gentrified if every incremental step of its production, preparation and consumption can be neurotically, obsessively fixated over. Beer, coffee and burgers have all been overtaken by this urge.

Right now, somewhere in America, a chef is shaving truffles over cave-aged gruyere atop a kobe beef patty simmered in squid ink and served with a side of rosemary duck fat fries.

When you order a beer you have to decide between and IPA with a flavor of a “hint of oaken timbers from Old Ironsides” or a trappist ale with “a smokey finish of a papal coronation.” Although sometimes existing brands get remade. It used to be that you drank PBR because you had shit taste in beer; now it’s a statement.

But now with poutine potentially on the wane, where does that leave us? Something has to take its place. Here are some ideas about what the next food fad could be:

###Lutefisk

Cod soaked in lye certainly has authenticity going for it. Also it has a little bit of “food you only eat on dare” vibe, which might also appeal to hipsters who generally prefer to keep their favorite items out of the mainstream.

But it can’t be made upscale easily. Is artisanal, hand-milled organic lye a thing? Also, we probably don’t want to get our next food fad from Minnesota. Poutine is from Canada, but Quebec is “the cool part of Canada.”

###Marmite

Marmite is old-timey British, so you can’t get more authentic than that. And like lutefisk, it’s something you trick younger siblings into eating while you laugh at the faces they make.

But it also has the potential to be a food that an entire a scene could be built around. Hipsters could sit in pubs wearing bowler hats while enjoying with some “authentic” British food like boiled sheep’s pancreas and sipping cocktails made from dry sherry and Bovril.

Unfortunately Marmite is the wrong kind of authentic. We Colonials still like to think of the Brits as superior to us. It’s why we like Simon Cowell to tell us we can’t sing or Gordon Ramsay to yell at us about our cooking.

###Cincinnati style-chilli

For those not in the know, Cincinnati style is made from classic chili ingredients – minus beans and any of the good spices – overcooked into watery glop and served over pasta.

It comes with a couple of downsides. It’s simple, so it can’t really be fussed over into endless variations, although the fact it can be made gluten free is certainly a bonus.

Also, it wasn’t designed to taste good so much as to look the same on a plate as when it’s vomited up by someone who had one too many at a Reds doubleheader.

###Garbage Plate

I’ve seen a Rochester, NY, resident become enraged over denigration of this local delicacy, so we get bravery points for proposing it. It’s served at Nick Tahou Hots, a restaurant that is a culinary house of horrors comparable to Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop.

The dish features meat – pulled pork, hamburger, sausage, etc – served with home fries, baked beans and macaroni salad heaped on flimsy paper plate. Diners then stir it all together and eat it blank-eyed while wondering what self-hatred has brought them to this dark reckoning.

On the one hand, hipsters might not want to eat something that one might feed a dog after cleaning up after a picnic. Then again, a Garbage Plate would lend itself to endless hipster variations, such as a plate of a kale salad, quinoa, roasted butternut squash and topped with tiki marsala.

I, of course, can only offer suggestions for food gentrification. Hipsters will have to take the ball and run with it.