Daniel Klotz

Another national news story is brewing in our town. This time it’s about a news agency itself—the (take a long breath) Intelligencer Journal–Lancaster New Era. Yesterday they rolled out a new online paywall they believe will net them $10,000 to $500,000 a year.

What’s this paywall, and who will it affect? It’s a $20/year charge to out-of-towners who read Lancaster obituaries like they’re going out of style.

As reported by Bill Mitchell of the Pointer Institute:

Monday morning, the website for a midsized paper in southeastern Pennsylvania became the first to go public with the paid content system of Journalism Online, the startup engineered by Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and others.

LancasterOnline, which serves the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, began informing people who live outside Lancaster County and read its online obituary listings that visiting the obits page will cost $1.99 a month after they’ve viewed seven pages each month. Annual subscriptions cost $19.99.

Screenshot of the notice all obituary readers now see when they visit LancasterOnline.com

Media analysts seem to think this is one of the most ridiculous ideas they’ve heard when it comes to online revenue models. For instance, Mark Potts writes:

Are they serious? Are there really that many people people visiting the Lancaster site to read obits? Really?

The folks in Lancaster claim to have done the math that proves there’s a substantial out of town audience for obits, though it’s based on a lot of guesswork (and probably proves, once again, that journalists really aren’t that good at math). Notably, Lancaster seems to base its projections on traffic numbers from the not-so-reliable Google Analytics rather than on data from the site’s internal logs, which would be much more precise. That seems odd.

According to Mitchell’s story, LancasterOnline estimates that 100,000 out-of-market visitors to the site read obits each year. And the site reckons that more than 10 percent of them do it—yes, read obits—several times a week. Okaaaay. Taking the math further, Lancaster estimates that nearly 90,000 visitors to the site read the obits at least once a week, and 17,692 visitors read the obits four times a week.

These numbers are preposterous. Remember, this is little LancasterOnline, not NewYorkTimes.com or WashingtonPost.com. I find it hard to believe that Lancaster has that sort of constant, repeat traffic to its obits—or else it’s got an audience with a truly obsessive fascination with grazing news about local deaths.

He’s joined by Steve Buttry, who writes:

If I were seeking to kill off newspapers (I’m not), I would try to persuade them to charge people to read obituaries online. Apparently that’s the plan of Journalism Online, a profiteer seeking to cash in not only on newspapers’ death wish but on the deaths of their readers.

Journalism Online’s sucker in this fantasy-based paywall experiment is the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era (oh, the irony in that name; I will call it the Old Era for purposes of this blog).

David Brauer joins in:

Laugh if you want — and I’ll admit, I’m tittering — but any small-town newspaper publisher will tell you obits are a pretty big deal for readers. In this case, LancasterOnline is making money coming and going (if you’ll pardon the pun): they charge survivors to place death notices, and now they’ll charge out-of-towners to read them.

(When the younger generations start dying, we’ll just inform everyone via social networks.)

This sure sounds like a low-revenue road test to me, but Lancaster Online’s editor thinks they can squeeze $100,000 out of the oldster demographic that keeps up regularly with far-flung deaths.

All I have to say is that the people who came up with this scheme are nothing like the cultural creatives who are engineering Lancaster’s future. This is preservationist, reactionary, and, I suspect, based on data that is (excuse the pun) dead wrong.

Amanda and I bought our first house together, here in Lancaster city, just over a year ago. This season we were eager to spruce up our backyard and use the space to do some urban gardening (if it qualifies as that—it’s an unusually large yard for a city property).

Here are some photos of the color that has emerged and that we’re enjoying today.

Asiatic Dayflower, officially dismissed as an invasive weed

The entire flower of the Asiatic Dayflower is just larger than my thumbnail

As a plant, the Asiatic Dayflower reaches one to three feet in height

A beautiful blue wildflower

An orange chrysanthemum

The orange boom of a chrysanthemum

Orange petals on a chrysanthemum

A yellow chrysanthemum

A delicate white wildflower

Tiny white wildflower

Another wildflower from our backyard flower bed

Yellow summer squash growing quickly

Thanks for allowing me to share some of the natural beauty of our Lancaster backyard!

Laura Duran, the Lancaster County Convention Center’s PR consultant, reports today on her blog that the convention center will be celebrating its one-year anniversary on Friday.

Since the official ribbon cutting on June 18, 2009, the integrated facility has been host to more than 850 events by more than 300 different organizations. More than 300,000 people have been through its doors to attend events or stay at the hotel. Additionally, two dozen new restaurant, retail, and service businesses have opened in the Downtown core and Northwest quadrant of the city since the opening.

Which events have you attended at the convention center, and what was your experience? At the one-year mark, does it seem to you that downtown Lancaster is better off now that it has this facility and these events?

If BP is truly going to foot the bill to cover all the damages its inconceivably massive oil spill is causing, won’t that cost so much money that BP will go out of business?

I’m not an expert in economics, but the monetary liability here for BP is going to be gigantic. If they stay in business, it’s hard for me to envision them making a profit for decades, because their expenses will be so high from paying off the debt this disaster is going to incur for them.

It seems to me that there are three possible outcomes here for BP:

1. BP attempts to pay for all the damage is has caused, and doing so puts BP out of business forever.
2. BP pays for all of the damage it has caused by taking on a large loan, and doing so is so expensive that BP will not turn a profit for more than a decade.
3. BP does not pay for all the damage it has caused.

I’m a betting man, and my money goes on outcome No. 3.

Am I being too cynical? Am I missing a possible outcome for BP?

Tell me how I’m wrong.

The cultural significance of Congress’ move to overturn “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is so great that I think the comparison with Brown v. Board of Education is warranted. This should be a moment of great pride for many good Americans who have worked hard to move the national attitude so far so fast.

Just seventeen years ago, in 1993, a majority of U.S. citizens opposed gays serving in the military, Mark Shields recently pointed out in his recent appearance on the PBS NewsHour. Today, there is a three-to-one margin supporting gays openly serving—75% of Americans. Among women, the support is 80%.

Certainly that kind of sea change in America and in our cultural thought is gigantic and something we don’t often see. It’s positive and profound.

Much of the credit goes to the small but very determined efforts of a lot of individuals and groups on the local and personal level. The courage of many individuals who do not stay in the closet but instead come out and say who they are and that they have just as many rights as any other person does has earned the respect of their neighbors. Also groups like Lancaster Pride and their annual festivals have made an impact by going far beyond saying, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” have instead sent a message of unity and love and acceptance. Their message has been that it’s important that we learn to live and work together and not just tolerate each other but love each other and respect each other.

I hope that some of us straights, including straight Christians like me, have had some small and humble role in this shift. I was, for instance, deeply touched by the scenes of an Evangelical Christian man confessing the sins of the church to gay men and women at a pride festival in the excellent documentary Lord, Deliver Us From Your Followers.

This kind of cultural change does not come easily and is not to be taken lightly. The cultural impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1950s to overturn the segregation of public schools was gigantic by simply allowing and in fact forcing children to interact with one another. Just as the military has been a force in a similar way, creating brothers out of blacks and whites who served together, I think we’ll see a similar impact of gays and straights who serve together, and see a breakdown of this idea that manliness and homosexuality are opposing forces.

One Lancaster resident whose efforts on this front I would like to single out and celebrate is Mark Stoner, who was recently recognized in the Central Penn Business Journal‘s twenty-fifth anniversary issue as one of the most influential minorities from the midstate from the past twenty-five years.