Well, it was buyout day at the paper, and I didn’t take one. I did note on Twitter that I had bought the take-out, which some took to mean I was leaving the Strib; not so. I am happy at the paper, to use an increasingly archaic term to describe a multi-platform news-aggregating and content-generating business, and if all goes well I’ll be doing even more in the coming years than I’ve done before. Yes, years, plural.

I think I’ll be around long enough to see the last paper roll off the presses, though. That’s okay! I’m a visionary! I love watching the sledgehammer of progress demolish old ways. Actually, no, but I’m not going to cling to print if it drags the brand into the grave. It’s amusing to think of the prototype I pitched to Knight-Ridder in ’87 or ’88 with Rich Leiby. I even designed an animated presentation in Hypercard. The idea was simple – store the customer’s news preferences on a card. Proportion of international-to-national-to-local, favorite comics, sports and weather from selected locales, features stories tailored to your interests, and a “serendipity factor” that determined the amount of content outside your parameters. Kiosks connected to the company’s mainframes would be set up in public locations. You’d insert your card, it would read your requests, and print out a custom paper. A small one, but enough to satisfy what you wanted at the moment – something to read over breakfast or lunch, or on the train.

It would have been a wonderful thing for print fans, but you know what would happen. The first units would malfunction constantly. The connections would be dropped. The printers would jam. The company would have to pay someone to stand by every unit in every location. Doonesbury would make fun of it. Millions would have been squandered in development. The installed base would be 70,0000 nationwide after two years.

The final version of the product would have been attractively laid out (they’d fixed all the bugs that crashed the kiosks when the layout program tried to jump a story to the inside), printed in color (the cost of color printers made it feasible) and delightful to read (access to all the smaller papers in the chain made the Serendipity Factor one of the most popular features – indeed, 16% of the users had an SF set at 53% or higher. And that would be the point where the company pulled the plug. That would also be the point where the web got going.

The papers would now be sold on eBay. But in bundles of 10.

Come to think of it, I had another visionary moment. I gave a “talk” at a meeting of Newhouse editorial page editors in Philly in ’95, I think, in which I talked about electronic delivery In The Future. Like many, I was besotted with the notion of cheap, disposable, “digital ink” displays you could roll up, leave on the bus without feeling like you’d just set fire to a $500 bill, and plug in to a phone jack for daily or hourly delivery. At the time, newspapers still had the advantage of portability, and this seemed to be an attribute we should keep. Again, I didn’t see the iPhone, or the Blackberry. But I had two blue-sky ideas under my belt, and the fact that neither came close to materialization shouldn’t diminish my credentials as a Visionary. In fact I’d say they enhance them. O foolish world!

I do remember the early versions of online newspapers; as Jack Shafer notes in this Salon piece, they suffered from “extreme suckage.” I used Interchange to get my beloved Washington Post, but aside from the logo it looked nothing like the Post at all. It looked AOL. You expected to hear Jason Robards say “Allright, you got mail.” Shafer notes that papers decamped to the web as soon as it got rolling, but he concludes:

"Newspapers deserve bragging rights for having homesteaded the Web long before most government agencies and major corporations knew what a URL was. Given the industry's early tenancy, deep pockets, and history of paranoid experimentation with new communication forms, one would expect to find plenty in the way of innovations and spinoffs.

"But that's not the case, and I think I know why: From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web."

I’d amend that somewhat. They didn’t invent the web in their own image, but in a new one unmoored from the traditional look-and-feel. Their own image was simple: big headline, big picture, four or five or six stories. The web version is like a core sample of the day, layer upon layer upon layer of factual sediment, dozens of headlines, dozens of subsets of topics and sections.

It’s the difference between this . . . and this.

Today’s update is mostly in the hotel site – 19 pages devoted to the Hotel Nicollet. 

Some details of the photographs. Find this fellow in the original. I don’t know what he’s doing in the picture – either a friend of the photographer who asked if he could just stand off to the side in the chance the photo was exceptionally good, and later someone came along and invented very smart electrico-mechanical brains that could convert pictures to holes in a card and reproduce them using the telephone wires. Yes, I know, Hank, it sounds far-fetched and all, but if I’m right I’ll be immortal, in a way.

Can’t see his face,  but the man had large shoes.  And so he will be remembered.

 

There’s something about this era that makes me think of toothaches. People must have had lots of them, a lot of the time. It’s possible that on some days, the overwhelming majority of people in town had a toothache.

From another shot of the same building: Drugs and sod? One stop shopping!

Thin windows; must have been a place for guys who'd taken it on the lam. Good windows for peering out of, looking for the heat. Or perhaps the thinness was a result of the construction technology; the walls had to bear the weight, and height meant thick walls. I like the lam-friendly theory better.

Another hotel was built on the spot; in its last attempt to be a grand hotel, it redid the suites in high Jet Age style.

It would be just as good if the room had actually been completely black and white. Here's the whole story: the Nicollet Hotel. (Or Hotel Nicollet.) If this site seems a bit large, well, wait until next week: the Leamington site, the last of the grand hotels, is gargantuan, and it's in living color.

Have a fine day! See you off and on at buzz.mn, and all day on Twitter.

 

 
 

 

 

   

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