I am not offended if none of you are as interested in what ex-Strib publisher Joel Kramer will announce next week as the scurvy brother/sisterhood of newspaper wretches and I are. We are praying for a second coming of the written word, and hold out hope that the Denny Heckers, TCFs and Targets of the world will soon lavish Kramer et al with advertising that allows us to resume our grand, elitist lifestyles. The one with three lunches a week at Chipotle, happy hour at Bunny's and new tires for the '98 Corolla.
Until then ... I had an interesting chat this morning with Scott Lewis, co-editor of voiceofsandiego.org , the two and a half year-old non-profit on-line news"paper" that Kramer has mentioned as something of a model for his venture.
Lewis, 30, was riding in his car when we spoke. The key bits of information -- for those of us dreaming of barbacoa burritos -- is that Voice of San Diego does indeed have a full-time staff of nine ... with annual salaries ranging from $25,000 to $40,000. Both Lewis and his co-editor, Andy Donohue, 29 (or so Lewis believes), also write copy. The site has "one photo/video guy" and "one education/web guy" in addition to five full-time writers.
Here are photos of the good-looking staff.
Lewis comes off as a pretty bright guy. He talks about the value of good editing, story coaching and a lot of vital skills that sour bastards like me sneer at. He says Donohue and he took over in November '05, after a rocky first half year under other leadership. Somewhere along the line they quickly gave up on the idea of free-lancing out all their reporting -- and established investigative and enterprise reporting as editorial mission goals one and two. They ditched the idea of free-lancers because of all the quality control issues you get in to, although, Lewis says, occasionally they'll still dial someone up, "but the most we can throw at them is $150-$200."
He says their annual budget is $560,000 and that they've had something like 700 individual donors. "Every time we ask for money we get checks from everywhere from $35 to $100,000," but their well-being is still largely dependant on one guy, a San Diego venture capitalist named Buzz Woolley who co-founded the site. There's some ad support in PBS-style underwriting fashion, Lewis says, where pages are "sponsored by Lexus of San Diego" and a trickle of traditional display ads, but mainly its Woolley's money that makes it go.
Lewis says they occasionally consider expanding out into sure-fire traffic drivers like sports and entertainment, but invariably their board reins them back, reminding them that their core mission is filling a void in aggressive coverage San Diego institutions that the major paper -- the frankly woeful San Diego Union Tribune -- has ignored. (The city of San Diego's near bankruptcy was the big story they rode hard in their launch phase.)
Based on what I know about Kramer's plan -- starting with his desire to use established journalists and not high-energy kids -- there are some clear differences.
We'll shall see what Monday brings.
Okay, I've had my fun with Kramer The Journalist, but the newspaper he's publishing isn't about journalism, it's about money an it is an extremely shrewd business move.
Look at the business model: the new Kramer is shepherding :an investment of $1 million dollars to develop a product to comepete head to head with the product that was formerly put together by the old Kramer and recently sold for $530 million.
In other words, he is going to duplicate the original product at 1/530 of the cost of his old product, with a new product which will resemble the old as much as possible, same old familiar faces grinding out the news and features,pissed off and energized by being giving a chance to even the score with the dummies who gave them the ax, no unions, no fixed costs for presses, trucks, paper, ink, no janitors, phone ladies. columnists and staff to hire and then fire, and, whose dimissals by the Strib rained down a firestorm of bad publicy, no useless, unproductive employees of which every large enterprise has scads of, no property taxes, no buiildings to maintain. Well, the list is endless,.
But that's not all he's got going for him. If anyone knows how to assemble a product that has the look and feel of the product he's competing with, it's a guy who spent twenty or so years developing the original.
IHis paper cost him and his investors $1 million. If they capture just one percent of the readership and advertising that their $530 million rival has got, then their paper should be worth at least one percent of $530 million or 5.3 million A five for one deal just by putting out a reasonable imitation of the big, lumbering elephant they are competing with. And if they capture 5%? 10%? Well, you can do the math. A ten bagger. A twenty bagger.
It's all there.
And the beauty part for them is not only that this is terrific investment but they will make it look like a major contribution to the civic welfare, and to this crowd, looking like they have taken the moral high road is an important element
A few details I see in the offiing. Grow doing columns interviewing the Strib phone ladies and the janitors who were canned . Won't the Stribmucky mucks love that one. A penetrating look at how the Strib managed to get beat on the Larry Craig story. (Are those so called journalists on Portland Avenue covering up for Republicans now?)
You won't read that story in Nancy Parry's column that's billed as providing Strib readers with access to the workings of the Strib newsroom.
So Kramer's paper is a non-profit? Well, I'm no tax-expert, but doesn't that still leave his investment group room to turn it into a profit making enterprise and eventually sell it? And just one percent, one percent of what the Strib has got is all will take to give Kramer and company a handsome profit.
I don't much like him. I don't like his goofy politics and I know I won't like what the new paper's politics are.Politics are irrelevant when it comes to investing Making money is what is what makes the mare go. Not ideology.
What this whole episode demonstrates is the efficiency of free market capitalism. Pay too much for a property and you set yourself up for more efficient, less costly comepetion. It is obvious is that the Avista group were idiots to pay $530 million for the Sribl.Not only overpaid, but are incompetently maaging it. They are now about tobe faced with a formidable competitor, lean and mean, ready to take advantage of all the ill will that the Strib has built up among its customers over the years for acting like the unregulated monopoly they once were.
There's still plenty of room on the right of the ideological spectrum to sheer off readers from the Strib. But Kramer has already set to pick off the low hanging fruit by getting thre first, ,
I wish I was in on the fun.
Dan Cohen
LAMBERT: Dan, we gotta get you over to the copy desk. With all the dough you took out of the Strib can't you hire a proof-reader?
It was so good I said it twice. Just kidding. I impulsively hit submit twice, you may feel to erase a post.
I am serious, high income earners pay most of the income tax burden. Liberals don't and can't dispute that, they just obsess that the tax / share of income metric doesnt impact larger income payers more.
LAMBERT: The sleight-of-hand here is in gross receipts as opposed to percentage of income. Middle class citizens have not enjoyed anything close to the kind of relief enjoyed by higher -- and the very highest -- incomes, much of whose wealth accrues and expands outside of income tax wage scales.
Mythology alert:
The lumpen are more reliably Democrats. Marx explains this all. Also...
Lowering tax rates generates high revenue: you're using Heller out of context (or else Heller is wrong to have said that, I'm not aware of it). The Laffer Curve or 'supply side economics' is consistently misconstrued by Democrats. Indeed, Kennedy / Heller relied on it, but that's forgotten when its needed to bash Reaganomics.
Everyone should be able to acknowledge, because its an economic priciniple not in dispute, that there is a point in rates between 0% and 100% that generates max tax revenue. Both 0% and 100% will generate no revenue for the government. At 0%, no tax revenue is captured, and at 100% no goods, services, or taxable transactions are engaged. So good tax policy finds a reasonably low rate to generate a substantial and stable tax source. The Laffer Curve applies always, not just when coming out of a recession.
Reagan lowered all rates. The top specifically was lowered from 70% to 50% to 28% and then raised back into the 30's. In addition a lot of deductions were eliminated, the last time we really had tax simplification take place. Government income tax revenues exploded within 3 years. There was a lingering depression from the Carter years, and that was gone by say 1985. The tax cuts ended the recession, did not exacerbate it.
So then, you would have maintained a 70% rate in the 80's? Thats not a defensible position, althought I'd be happy to hear it. Its too high a rate. Do you have similar misgivings about Carter and Kennedy's tax cuts, when the top rate exceeded 70%?
My own suspician is that out current tax structure, with the lowest rate at 15% and the highest at 40%, probably is close to an optimum revenue model. Its plenty progressive and maintains the most tax burden on high incomes.
LAMBERT: 108. Are you posting as yourself or "Anonymous" or both? I mean, you're brilliant and you're welcome. But once is enough.
Mythology alert:
The lumpen are more reliably Democrats. Marx explains this all. Also...
Lowering tax rates generates high revenue: you're using Heller out of context (or else Heller is wrong to have said that, I'm not aware of it). The Laffer Curve or 'supply side economics' is consistently misconstrued by Democrats. Indeed, Kennedy / Heller relied on it, but that's forgotten when its needed to bash Reaganomics.
Everyone should be able to acknowledge, because its an economic priciniple not in dispute, that there is a point in rates between 0% and 100% that generates max tax revenue. Both 0% and 100% will generate no revenue for the government. At 0%, no tax revenue is captured, and at 100% no goods, services, or taxable transactions are engaged. So good tax policy finds a reasonably low rate to generate a substantial and stable tax source. The Laffer Curve applies always, not just when coming out of a recession.
Reagan lowered all rates. The top specifically was lowered from 70% to 50% to 28% and then raised back into the 30's. In addition a lot of deductions were eliminated, the last time we really had tax simplification take place. Government income tax revenues exploded within 3 years. There was a lingering depression from the Carter years, and that was gone by say 1985. The tax cuts ended the recession, did not exacerbate it.
So then, you would have maintained a 70% rate in the 80's? Thats not a defensible position, althought I'd be happy to hear it. Its too high a rate. Do you have similar misgivings about Carter and Kennedy's tax cuts, when the top rate exceeded 70%?
My own suspician is that out current tax structure, with the lowest rate at 15% and the highest at 40%, probably is close to an optimum revenue model. Its plenty progressive and maintains the most tax burden on high incomes.
LAMBERT: "Most tax burden on high incomes"? You can't be serious.
//lowering tax rates generates higher government revenue
That whole scheme was discovered by Walter Heller, U of M Economics professor and adviser to John Kennedy. What Cohen and his Republican cohorts forget is that Heller said tax revenue only goes up if the TIMING of the tax cut is proper, i.e., just as the economy is coming out of a recession. Reagan did it as the country was going into a recession, and made it much worse.
LAMBERT: Tell that to Bill Cooper.
The "call," Mr. Cohen, is for FAIRER taxes, not higher taxes, per se. Would that the revenues from taxes on the wealthy had risen at the same rate as their share of total wealth.
Mitt "the contortionist" Romney, when he holds his "ask Mit anything" Eddie Haskelesque confabs in Iowa says he's going to increase sending on the military, make the Bush tax cuts permanent, eliminate the "death" tax, and "stop taxing savings" (code for unearned income, the kind Mitt lives off of). He gets applause from the lumpen, shambling rabble who come with their wild-eyed conspiracy questions about making all of North and South America a single country and a road from Mexico to Canada that will have no customs over sight. It doesn't occur to them that what Mitt leaves out is the only thing left to tax--their pay checks. So you needn't worry, there are patsies aplenty for you and yours to fleece.
Figures don't lie. But liars can always figure.
I want to correct a couple of minor typos in my latest.
I referred to IIRS data as a source. That should be IRS data.
Later in the piece I wrote of lower taxes on income as generatingi"income." That should be "revenue," not "income."
Dan Cohen
LAMBERT: I'll start running your stuff through the Strib copy desk. THEY'LL clean it up.
As George H.W. Bush once famously said, facts are stubborn things. They can't be dislodged by politcal rhetoric.
The fact is, counterintuitive as may seem, that lowering tax rates generates higher government revenue, particularly from taxpayers in top brackets. What follows are direct quotes from the Wall Street Journal (8/24/07) which uses IIRS data as its source :
"For the Bush tax cuts to have been a give away to the rich, people paying the higher marginal tax rates whould have to be carrying a smaller share of the income tax load. But the IRS data indicate that they are not paying less. Instead, they are paying more--lots more. More surpirsingly, the richest 1%, 5% and 10% of the taxpazyers are shouldering a larger percentage of the income tax burden at the federal level than the tax estiimators said they would had the Bush tax cuts never materialized. ..Over the past 25 years tax payments by the wealthy have continually risen almost in inverse proportion to the tax rates...The real bite on the middle class comes from payroll and states taxes; include them and their tax share rises relative to the wealthy. So, yes, cut those taxes, too.The supply side revenue effects on the rich are remarkable: Tax rates on higher incomes have been halved, but the federal tax share of the top 1% has nearly doubled. And the budget deficit has fallen. That's what happens when tax policy gets the incentives right."
And which is why Kramer and Jimmy and Lambert have got it wrong. In my opinion, the call for higher taxes, particularly higher taxes on higher incomes, has little to do with generating income. How could it, when the facts show that it it exactly the opposite effect? It has more to do with seeking political advantage in "soak the rich" posturing. And with Kramer, and the elites he runs with, there is a certain sense of moral superiority that comes with the territory, much like those, who in a different place, and in the spirit of a different age, publicly flaggelate themselves with whips to demonstrate their religious piety.
Dan Cohen
LAMBERT: That wasn't a quote off the Journal's Op-Ed page now, was it? That would be disingenuous.
This whining from conservatives about this long unmet need for media for them is a little hard to take. People like this Cohen aren't readers or thinkers, to wit: his devotion to the canard that it's the low tax states that are prospering and providing for the highest standard of living for their citizens. The stats don't back them up. Never have. These I-got-mine-where's-yours people are consumers of reassuring propaganda, not news, not well thought out essays, not arts coverage, not humor. They consume the same boilerplate malarky like a dog chained to a post lapping up his own vomit. That sort of fetid stasis in thought and interest does not yield much, including newspapers or magazines that anyone but true believers the likes of Cohen would support with either a subscription or a donation. It gets you Mississippi.
That said, if Kramer's venture truckles to the brie and white wine crowd that MPR slavishly panders to then it will be of little value to the community. Find a third way, Mr. Kramer, and readers wil find you.
LAMBERT: Yeah, how that low-tax blather stands up amazes me. By almost every measure the states with the highest personal income tax also lead in almost every standard of living index.
Dan -
I've always wondered why the anti-Stribites couldn't get their own paper together. There are few barriers to entry now, other than a commitment to reporting and the sort of pluck Joel is putting in. Get on it!
LAMBERT: I'd like to see Dan front and center at Rybak's next press conference.
From a former San Diegan:
The pay range at Voice of San Diego isn't what you'd hope, and the "paper" doesn't cover everything, but the articles are typically depth than those at the big paper that is San Diego's local equivalent of the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press. They also do an interesting blog called Cafe San Diego that has different guest bloggers every few days--city council members, activists, prominent business people, artists, you name it. It's a wonderful way to get exposed to issues and points of views you'd never otherwise come across. I'd love to read something like it here.
I hope for the best, but reading Sandiego.com reveals a presentation quite characteristic of MPR--pleasant, professional but boring reading.
LAMBERT: You dialed up www.voiceofsandiego.org, right?
It is a good looking staff. And they're all young. Whats going to happen is they'll make fine names for themselves at Voices of San Diego, and use that prestige to get jobs in the media that pay real money. In so much as theres been lament over the extinction of the veteran reporter, this business model isnt going to fix that with these salaries.
Personally, I graduated from J school 15 years ago and promptly went into another field when the local shopper rag offered me $15 to cover a zoning board meeting.
I would find it fairly ironic if Kramer doesn't put some of his own fortune at risk for this. All I read, from you, is how he's 'fund raising'. He has the money to go a few years. These guys, they get their $10 million dollar pay outs, and subsequently structure that to generate good income and low taxes. Then they're ill inclined to unwind those assets for a business venture. There's some limosine liberal hypocrisy in there somewhere.
And...and...it doesn't strike me as hard going after the ads of the Heckers of the world.
You just have to hire a very good sales guy. Course, you have to pay those people. So if your ideologically inclined to not pay them, its not going to happen.
LAMBERT: The belief is that Kramer has in fact put his own money into the deal.
(C'mon Lambert, you got to tell me what a URL is. Unbelielvable Republicanj LIes? Underwear Rycycling Lab?
and what's an HTML? Hot Teenager Mail Link?)
Kramer? Just what we need, as if the Strib wasn't loony leftie enough, we get a guy whose signature position is raising state taxes to overcome the moral shame of having only the "seventh highest personal income tax rates among all states, the third highest corporate tax rate and the 10th highest taxes on workers." (Wall Street Jorurnal, August 18-19,2007, citing the Tax Foundation).. What we need is a paper for the rest of us, who are shut out from a voice in public affairs and have to depend on the likes of the Strib and soon Kramer for their slanted version of the news.
Dan Cohen