History, theirs and ours

I love the historical aspects of tourism. It is hard for me to pass a museum, old edifice or monument without stopping. I’m the guy who irritates his children by holding up the whole family while I read every word of the historical marker.

But the history I enjoy most in my travels is the history that comes from experiencing the places and people we visit.

Cecile and I recently had a guided tour of the current exhibit at the Museum of the Press in Ljubljana. The exhibit - which coincides with the 60th anniversary of the national newspaper Delo -  displays a remarkable collection of newspaper front pages that reflect key events in recent history.  The front pages from the decades appealed  to my love of history. I could follow the headlines of the history of Slovenia from the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the socialist era as part of a cobbled-together Yugoslavia and on to modern independence as a small but intriguing country.

Because the exhibit's focus is international, I also rediscovered newspapers from the U.S. and beyond that I know well and stories that were part of my life both as a journalist and a citizen.

The joy of joys in our tour, however, was our reunion with the man who assembled the collection: Ali Žerdin.

In the U.S., we'd say Ali Žerdin and Tadeja Jelovšek are one of the power couples of Slovenia. Both have Ph.D.s and both are well-known in their professional circles. Tadeja is an appeals court judge, currently on special assignment directing the Slovenian Judicial Training Center, which offers continuing education for the country’s judges, prosecutors and court officials. Ali is an author, pundit and the well-known editor of the Saturday political and cultural special section of Delo, Slovenia’s leading newspaper. My students here are far more impressed that I know Ali than they are of any American journalistic notoriety I tried to brag upon.


But to us, they are just two of the most generous people you could call “friends.” We met Ali and Tadeja through her sister, Urska Jelovšek Lenart, who at the time was a student advisor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Urska introduced us to the you’ve-got-to-experience-it to-believe-it Slovenian tradition of all-out hospitality. We stayed with her parents when we visited in 2012, had an eager and knowledgeable tour guide in her brother, Martin, and of course quickly connected with Tadeja and Ali.

It was Ali who in turn introduced me to Marko Milosavljević at the University of Ljubljana’s journalism program, which - seven years later - led to my Fulbright fellowship here.

Ali and Tadeja came to our Columbia home during a visit to her sister, but you would think a friendship with minimal contact over thousands of miles and many years would be awkward. It isn’t. We recognized each other’s smiles, were equally excited by the fresh produce at the market and were eager to engage in the children-food-shopping banter of people who are comfortable with each other.

That’s exactly what I look for when I travel. I truly love ancient hunks of stone and cobbled streets from another era. But it is the people with whom we build our own histories who make travel, as Mark Twain said, “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

Information rich, media poor

I don’t think I can take any more news. Not in my brain, but in my pocketbook.

Like most Americans, I’ve been glumly looking at my bank accounts, retirement plan and other assets. The result is the realization that I would have done better with a coffee can buried in the backyard.

That search also led me to take a closer look at what I pay for information. I was surprised, but newspaper publishers should be terrified.

Let me preface this by noting that I am a proud member of the embattled middle class, with a professor’s paycheck that still hasn’t matched what I earned in the industry.

I am also a lover of newspapers. I subscribe to two and read others online. But it is not the newspapers that are taking the bite from my wallet. It is all those electronic services I consider basic utilities.

The National Cable and Television Association says the average price of expanded basic cable is about $44 a month and digital averages $60. I pay $84 for digital cable here in Columbia, MO. My wife and I have jobs that require an Internet connection that runs about twice the price of normal broadband in Columbia. We pay $140 a month.

Alas, it was Steve Jobs who finally did in my budget. I succumbed to those alluring Apple ads last Christmas and bought iPhones for my wife and me. Just $170 per month, paid with a nervous smile. That is not far from the national average of $60 per month – per cell phone user and a bargain since my son moved out of the house.

Hardware costs could make the total zoom much higher but the laptop, the wireless router and the cell phone handsets are not monthly charges. Yet.

I doubt that I am the only cost-conscious citizen who conducted a recession excavation of the bill basket. But, what I found surprised me. I pay nearly twice as much for digital media each month than I do for newspaper subscriptions in a year.

I also doubt that I am the only cheapskate who turned down the New York Times offer of $13.40 a week for arguably the finest journalism in the world. Too much money.

But though I could buy a sports car for the $394 I pay each month to look at passing electrons, I don’t think of it as a luxury. I put all that whizzbang technology in the same category as the light switch on the living room wall. The home wouldn’t be a home without it.

After thinking about my dependency on all this interconnectivity, I’ve come to believe that few of us even think of those technology services as “media” costs and instead lump them with our other utilities.” With apologies to my other colleagues trying desperately to monetize online news, I think we are on the wrong track. Americans only want news and information. But they value information delivery systems.

It may be time for journalists to bite the bullet and concede that content is priceless. As in without a price that the public will pay.

The television and movie industries figured this out long ago by demanding a lucrative cut of cable revenues. People are willing to pay for delivery, but not to buy a television program.

The anarchistic-by-design Internet laughs at Web-wide relief for newspapers. However, many Webheads concede that without newspapers and their reporters, there would be little news content to deliver. So there is a small chance content providers will some day be able to cut a deal with Internet Service Providers.

Perhaps, however, a better route would be to develop a valued delivery system for our legacy print editions. The Web is driving subscriptions down, but print editions still hold marketable appeal and generally outdraw newspaper Web sites.

If our problem is more in our circulation system than in our content, it may be time to blow up the tradition of kid-on-a-bike/motor route carrier/coin-fed news stand. Like cable and Internet, perhaps the newspaper should emphasize the value of an information stream rather than the content itself. Could print newspapers have a delivery structure like an ISP? For a single rate to a delivery company (Newspaper Service Provider/NSP), could I get any newspaper I wanted on whichever days I wanted?

Perhaps that “NSP” could even be the local ISP or cable company.

Far fetched, perhaps. But I once thought the idea of using my cell phone as a bubble level was beyond the pale.