The sequence of events in this public conversation

The "official" jpg of the logo is now this version which features a red, rather than orange, version of the rose. The tag line is "A city authentic."

As best I can piece together, three weeks ago, on August 11, a mass e-mail went out (from Lancaster Arts, someone suggested, but it’s not on their newsletters archive), with the subject line, “Exciting news for downtown Lancaster!” It contained an announcement of key branding elements to be used in an official capacity by Lancaster city. The guts of this e-mail were shared on LancTalk.com, a privately-run forum site that serves as the replacement for the TalkBack forums on LancasterOnline.com, which were closed earlier this year, by a 46 year-old male who reveals himself only under the code name “Citydweller.” He posted a jpg of the logo and shared that the new tag line was “A city authentic.” The overwhelming tone of the active discussion thread which followed was negative. Early on, someone even remarked that her neighbor thought it looked like a Nazi swastika. (LancTalk.com has mockingly adopted “A forum authentic” as its new tag line.)

Lancaster city held an event this past Wednesday (August 25) at the failed Pennsylvania Academy of Music building to announce officially the new brand identity. Larry Alexander reported on the event for the Intelligencer-Journal. The reaction to the story on LancTalk.com was typical stuff—grumpy and eager to move off-topic.

On or near August 11, Lancaster County resident Shelley Castetter, an independent journalist who runs LancasterExpress.com, began researching what led up to this announcement of the city’s rebranding. This research culminated in an article headlined “City Authentic, Logo Not So Much,” which she published on August 28 as the start of a new thread on the LancTalk forums. This article revealed that the logo is a near-exact reproduction of an early-twentieth-century rose design by Dard Hunter, a key figure in the American Arts and Crafts art movement.

Just yesterday, however, the official jpg of the logo featured an orange version of the rose.

The next day, someone operating under the code name “lilmissmoxieful” posted a video to YouTube demonstrating that the city’s new logo is an exact duplicate of Hunter’s design, simply turned 180 degrees and given a different color. The video cast all the blame on Moxie House, a two-person Lancaster Township-based design/marketing firm that helped the city develop its new brand and codify its new brand standards. Shelley’s article made clear, however, that Moxie House did not create the logo itself.

Instead, Bernie Harris reported for the Intelligencer-Journal yesterday, the logo design was given to Moxie House by city officials. The article made no reference to the earlier work of Larry Alexander, Shelley Castetter, or the response in the LancTalk.com forums. It did, however, include a direct quote from an interview the reporter had with Dard Hunter III, the artist’s grandson:

“I don’t remember anybody asking. Had they done so, I certainly would have given my blessing,” said Hunter, who has previously given permission for the rose’s use for non-commercial purposes.

There was a little reaction to the story on LancTalk.com. Shelley Castetter is clearly offended that her reporting was not cited in the Intelligencer-Journal article.

The original rose designed by Dard Hunter

Where’d the logo come from?

So how did the logo get in the hands of Lancaster city officials? A sign company suggested and provided it for certain signs and banners that have been around town for at least a year. City officials first filed to register a copyright on the image with the U.S. Copyright Office, then opted to instruct Moxie House to use that as the city’s new logo. Even though a trademark on the image (flipped 180 degrees) is held by Dard Hunter Studio, the copyright office apparently approved the city’s request to register its copyright of the image. (I can only assume that if it went to court, the court would view this as an error on the part of the copyright office and overturn Lancaster city’s claim to owning any rights related to the image.)

I poked fun at the situation last night by uploading to Facebook an version of the full logo where the words “The City of Lancaster: A City Authentic” remained in tact but the logo had been replaced by an orange Nike swoosh turned 180 degrees.

Kelly Watson (soon to be Kelly Kautz) posted a thoughtful blog entry on the subject this morning, followed by a post this afternoon including quotes from her conversation with Deb Brant of Moxie House.

The city has now added a PDF to the brand page of its site declaring, “The rose graphic was created by artist Dard Hunter and is  used with permission.”

What I’m finding most interesting and inspirational is this bit from the city’s “brand toolbox“(pdf) which advocates the use of particular terms that are seen as brand-consistent. One of the terms is “civic dialogue,” and here’s what the “toolkit” says about it: “An aspirational trait, civic dialogue is an exciting opportunity for our city. Generally defned, ‘Civic dialogue creates conditions for people to participate in shaping their environment. It is intentional and purposeful. Civic dialogue explores the dimensions of the civic or social issue, working toward common understanding in an open-ended discussion.  It engages multiple perspectives on an issue, including potentially conficting and unpopular ones rather than promoting a single point of view.’” The quotes is attributed to Ruth J. Abram, founder of New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

So, a) what did I miss or get wrong, and b) what do you make of all this?

Edit: Oh, and apparently there’s a song to go with this brand identity.

Edit 2: You’ll notice I prefer to use “Lacaster city” rather than “the City of Lancaster.” I’m unlikely to get brand-consistent on that one.

As for Lancaster-related material, you have subscribed to The Lancast, the weekly podcast I co-host, haven’t you?

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.

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!

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?

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.

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.

Ethan Demme is running for chair of the county Republican party

I’m heartened and excited by Ethan Demme’s announcement that he is running as a candidate for Chairman of the Lancaster County Republican Committee.

His announcement was covered first by Tom Murse of the Intelligencer Journal, and then Ethan himself wrote about it on his blog.

It was by looking at this LancasterOnline story that I came late to the news that Lancaster Newspapers has, at long last, completely taken down the cesspool of faux-conversation that was the TalkBack forum. I wanted to see what the reaction was from people who likely don’t know Ethan personally (as I do).

I’m a registered Democrat who puts a lot of priorities and allegiances ahead of my political party. A healthy degree of civil discourse in our community is one of those priorities for me, and I know that’s something Ethan will bring with his chairmanship.

As for TalkBack, the first impression is that it will make it harder to quickly get a finger on the pulse of a news story as it is being received by Lancaster County residents. The truth, however, is that the mood in the TalkBack forums rarely reflected the mood of the community at large. Where will those online conversations take place now?

This desire of mine to know more about where our community has come from came to a head this weekend when David Moulton and I interviewed my neighbor Christine Minnich on The Lancast. Late in the conversation, I made these remarks:

I’ve been thinking lately about how more and more of our focus right now culturally is about what’s local and what’s nearby. I watch the national political talk shows and read national magazines and I think this stuff is so detached from me and Washington is so screwed up, that I’m just happier focusing on Lancaster. But one of the things if you want to understand America or the current cultural scene or political scene is, you have to know the history. You have to understand the Civil War, you have to understand JFK’s assassination, how the political parties got to be where they are, and so on. But it seems like the awareness of our local history, if we really want to be l0cal and we really want to figure out what we’re dealing with and how to overcome it, or what to celebrate about what we’ve got, we have to understand our history. I think, for me, that’s something I definitely don’t understand.

I’m totally curious, and I think it would totally change my outlook on the world and our community, if I can just understand, how did we start with the Herr House in 1710, and then go through becoming our own county, our town that became a city, then we had all these men from our community go off to fight in the Civil War, many of them never returned, then we hit the mid-1900s and the city starts to become dilapidated and there’s this whole urban renewal project where they knock down lots of buildings and build Binns Park and the Lancaster Square area. So how did we start with the Hans Herr house and get to here, and what can we learn from that?

Any guidance or advice? Anyone else feeling this need for some history lately, or is it just me?

The ash plume from Eyjafjallajokull Volcano, Iceland is an amazing sight. This NASA photograph was taken on Saturday (May 8th).