Newpaper publishers–stop your whining and get to work!

A fundamental premise of business is that if you create and produce value, people will pay for it, yet today’s newspaper executives are convinced people won’t pay for online news, as if the value is in the ink and wood pulp.

For years, publishers complained about the cost of newsprint.  Now, with the opportunity to create and sell unlimited content, and to provide more creative ads with unlimited space –minus the newsprint expenses–they’re whining that nobody will buy it.

Where is the innovation? Where are the guts? We now have remarkable technology with the potential to surprise readers and advertisers with amazing features and opportunities. Yet all we hear is how the Internet is killing us. We hear about the death of local newspapers, how online news organizations aren’t making money. This should be no surprise, since they’re giving away their product.

We are kissing ad dollars goodbye when we should be remaking our entire offering, from top to bottom. Pull the plug and get on with it!

We hear endless blabber about the need for “new models” of “hyperlocal news.”  Isn’t that what a newspaper is?  We hear that people won’t pay for content they’ve been getting for free, but my 82-year-old father pays $100-plus monthly for cable TV.  The naysayers claim that’s only because cable offers more than broadcast did. Therein lies a clue:   Offer more!

In a high school sports story, let readers click on that photo of little Johnny Quarterback’s winning pass, and watch it come to life, with the crowds cheering in the stands, and sell downloads as family mementos. Let’s give our local news junkies some old-fashioned watchdog reporting, complete with ambush interviews and hidden cameras. Every market has crooked contractors; consumer reporters, where are you? Readers love you, need you, want you!

For advertisers, how about virtual tours of your stores and showrooms, complete with inventory you can click to purchase?

Feature local people, and make it interactive. Do man on street interviews every day–people love seeing themselves on video–Digi-see me?

There are so many ways to create value. Dump the printing press, give out Kindles or Notebooks or whatever will support this incredible technology, and use your imaginations.

What a bunch of sad sacks today’s journalism “leaders” are. If you can’t create value, move over. Someone else will.

Deborah Jacobs Welsh, Flight 93′s unsung hero

Debbie Welsh, who loved hats, one month before her death on Flight 93

On the anniversary weekend of 9/11 it seems appropriate to begin by introducing my old friend Debbie Jacobs Welsh, who was the chief purser, or  flight attendant, on Flight 93.

We’ve all heard about the heroes of Flight 93 who bravely prevented  the hijackers from flying  the plane into the White House, but Debbie wasn’t one of them.  That’s because she was already gone, having been murdered with a box cutter as she tried to protect the cockpit.

As Debbie was begging for her life, I was watching the terror unfold on TV and dialing her apartment in Manhattan, where all circuits were busy. Later that day I got a phone call from her husband, Patrick.   The next day, I wrote about Debbie, whom I’d known for 30 years, in an e-mail to a friend:

My friend Debbie Jacobs was here a few weeks ago. You probably met her at some point – 5’10″, stunningly beautiful. She is a friend from so far back, lived with me ‘in Jackson Heights in the ’70s, when we would listen to Carly Simon albums and know the words by heart. Those songs have always reminded me of Debbie, as does “Brown Sugar.”   She would qrab a hair dryer and use it as a mik as she lip-synched and did Mick Jagger better than Mick Jagger did.

She and I were born a day apart .  I had not seen her for a few years until last year, January 2000, when she came to Columbia University to watch me accept the duPont award. She’d been flying for United Airlines for three years or so. We spent that evening and the next together, having dinner and laughing our heads off.  I suddenly realized how precious she was to me, how wonderfully funny she was, how much I loved her.

We met again in New York in June 2000, we had pizza and ice cream and walked around Times Square. My sister, her kids and my daughter were with us. At the end of the evening Debbie said goodbye, and I stood and watched her back as she bopped around the corner of Broadway and 47th St.  And I got this terrible, eerie feeling. It was so powerful I told Connie and John about it.

So after that I really made an effort to stay in better touch. This year we made plans to meet around our birthdays, and we did, in New York, July 17. She had a Band-Aid on her arm because she had just had a malignant melanoma removed.  We were celebrating because her lymph nodes were clean, the margins were clean, and she’d caught it on time.  We went to the Sony Imax 3D Cinema and then haa pizza on 47th St. She said she’d come to see me for a week in August.

The week she was supposed to come, she called and said she couldn’t make it because she couldn’t leave Dylan, her 12-year-old arthritic Dalmation. But I felt this sense of urgency to get her up here, to spend time with her, to tell her how much I loved her, to make up for lost time. So I said, “Pack. I’m coming to get you.” And I did.  I drove 6 1/2 hours down to Manhattan that day, where she was waiting outside her apt. with her bags and Dylan, and we loaded up into my station wagon and drove right back to Maine.

We had a great week. She told side-splitting stories in various dialects, she gave my daughter a french manicure, and she restyled my hair and told me I looked 35.  We sat on my deck until late into the nights, watching shooting stars, talking about everything from God to astrology and swearing we saw UFOs. And I told her everything I wanted to say, and I tried to make amends-for thinqs I remembered doing over the past 30 years that hurt her. I made sure I got it all out. I don’t know why,  but I made sure I did that.

I drove her back to the city August 11th and dropped her off at her tiny Hell’s Kitchen apt. and said goodbye.  We’ve, talked on the phone a number of times since then — a week ago last Saturday she.called, and last Wednesday night she called me at about 11 from her roof in Manhattan, and we had this belly-laughing chat.

Yesterday morning, as I was watching the World. Trade Center blow up, I called Debbie’s cell phone and got busy circuits. I called her apartment; same thing.  At 2 p.m. I tried her apartment again and reached her husband Patrick, who said he wasn’t sure where she was. He said. she was on a trip, that she had left the apt at 5:30 a.m., and she should have landed by now.  He was worried; I told him to call me as soon as he heard something,

At about 4 p.m. Patrick called me. He was cryinq, distraught. Debbie was pn Flight 93, the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, the state where she was born.

And as I watch the video of the World Trade Towers blowing up, I think, this is the end of the world. The tall, beautiful, glittering World Trade Center, crumbling to the ground during the moments my tall, beautiful, glittering, old friend was falling like a shooting star. And the sonq that rings in my ears is Carly Simon’s “Share the End” — from one of those albums we used to know by heart:

“All of us are gathered here, to share the end, to watch the world go up in flames.”