For the Kids, June 24, 1990

My George Bailey moment

I had a George Bailey day yesterday.

George Bailey, of course, is the protagonist in the Frank Capra classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life” – a 1940s-era film set roughly during the Great Depression that makes an annual appearance on my television screen during the holidays.

A recap, for those who don’t know the story: George is a middle-aged businessman who’s led a less-than-exciting but responsible life and is suddenly, through no fault of his own, facing economic catastrophe and possible criminal charges for bank fraud. He starts thinking about ending it all – on Christmas no less. His guardian angel, Clarence, makes a sudden appearance and shows him what his town would have looked like if it hadn’t been for all his good deeds over many years.

The film ends with people from all across George’s life showing up at his home, offering donations to help cover the lost funds that were the source of his existential crisis, and everyone bursts into song.

Yes, it’s pretty sappy.

The coronavirus shutdown has made for a very weird end of my long teaching career. For six weeks now, I’ve been trying to deliver “distance learning,” and it’s not what I signed up for. As a younger colleague confided, it’s 10 times the work for one tenth of the satisfaction.

But despite the pandemic, my journalism students have been working hard to tell stories about what’s happening in our high school community, and our online news website has been abuzz with their words and photos. My journalism kids had been planning to put together one last hard-copy issue that would include a senior edition, an annual tradition in my program.

Unfortunately, we were out of cash.

I was planning to take 16 students to a national scholastic journalism convention in New York City right as the coronavirus crisis was ramping up. The convention was canceled, the school district banned travel, and my club account took a $10,000 hit for airfare and hotel expenses that we’re not getting back.

So in a Zoom meeting earlier this week, I finally had to deliver the bad news: I know you all want to produce one last issue, I said, but after I give out the refunds we owe to many of your families from the trip, the account balance is basically zero. That means – unless we figure out how to raise some money – we can’t print a final issue.

One student – only a sophomore but a young woman who is driven and focused and determined – said we should set up a GoFundMe fundraiser.

OK, I said, why not. It can’t hurt. But I wasn’t terribly hopeful.

I sent a memo to the principal and the English Department coordinator. You can have what’s left of the English budget, I was told, but it’s under $100. The principal said she’d see what she could do, but given the $12 million in pandemic-driven budget cuts my school district is considering, the odds weren’t good.

My sophomore sensation went ahead and set up the GoFundMe and sent me the link. I woke up the next morning and saw there had been a single $5 donation. I decided to donate, because I thought it was important to kick in if I was going to ask others to consider doing so. That got us to $105.

Then I shared it on my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and on the student newspaper and website social media accounts. I told my students to share it, so it went out on Tik Tok and Snapchat and who knows what else.

And then I spent the rest of the day in utter astonishment.

The donations just started to roll in – from old friends, from “newer” old friends, from former students, from the parents of former students, from journalism teacher colleagues sprinkled across the country, from journalist friends from my days of doing on-call copy editing at the Sacramento Bee, from parents of current students, from colleagues at my high school, from the spouses of colleagues, from people I don’t even know but who know the newspaper, the website and perhaps a kid or two who do the work to make it happen and wanted to support it.

And I just started crying. All day long, I’d go back and check the status of the GoFundMe account, see a name I recognized, and I’d start weeping again. (Yesterday was supposed to be a “grading day” for distance learning – not much of that got done.)

Part way through the day, I had a Zoom with Ria, the student who put this all together. We’d reached our initial goal of $2,000, and she asked if we should raise it.

I guess we should, I said. So we bumped it up by 50 percent. This morning, we’re almost there. We’ll be able to print a full issue, send it to every Granite Bay High School household and have a bit left over to renew some of our scholastic journalism memberships.

And I’m absolutely, utterly astonished.

Teaching is a funny business. It’s driven by content standards and curriculum goals and all kinds of other inside-baseball acronyms, but it’s ultimately about relationships. Yes, what you’re “doing” matters – can you shift those AP economics supply and demand curves the right direction? Can you gather sufficient sources and attribute them appropriately in that news-feature story? – but it’s really about the relationships between a teacher and his students.

So my job is to help students understand that it’s about more than just the content, the curriculum -- it’s about helping you realize I really do care about you and how you’re doing, and I’m in your corner to help you get there.

Which is George Bailey-level sappy, I know. But it’s why I’ve stuck around this business for almost 40 years.

Here’s the thing, though – students graduate. Off they go, launched into their futures, and for nearly 40 years I’ve quickly turned on a dime and refocused on the next batch of students coming my way. But yesterday, I finally understood why the tears were flowing down George Bailey’s face at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

I certainly wasn’t facing an existential crisis like George – yes, we’re in a pandemic, but I’m still working, I’m getting groceries delivered and I’m healthy. My problem was just figuring out how to gently let my students know the coronavirus crisis was going to keep us from producing one last issue of their newspaper.

Coronavirus 1, Gazette 0. You’ll get ‘em next time.

But then, just like in the movie, a whole bunch of people showed up and said we’ll help.

And I realized more clearly than I ever have before that – just like George Bailey – the work I’ve been doing for nearly 40 years has mattered. It’s been important. People are thankful for it.

And that is an astonishing gift.

It's not just students who are missing out because of the coronavirus ... it's also teachers

Like almost every other teacher across the country, I've been thrust into delivering "online learning" while we shelter in place to try to reduce the ferociousness of a nasty, stubborn virus that strikes with vicious indiscretion. 

So I sit at a comfy chair in my living room, my laptop fired up, camera on, a Zoom meeting zooming -- and I do what I can to make Advanced Placement economics and journalism interesting and engaging and important for 165 students sitting in 165 different living rooms and bedrooms and dens and kitchens who would much rather be sitting in Rooms 811 and 514.

My students keep telling me it's going great. I don't know if that's because they're telling me the truth, or they're just incredibly nice and respectful and don't think I can handle the truth. You'll forgive me if my vanity results in me going with Option No. 1 – but, despite their encouragement, it's just not the same.

I got an email from an econ student tonight. I'd assigned an online quiz, and I put a clock on it -- students had 15 minutes to complete 10 quick multiple-choice questions.

Easy.

But this particular student, a terrific young woman who epitomizes responsibility, sort of nervously explained that she'd gone over the time limit because she'd opened the quiz earlier in the day but hadn't actually started it until later. She just wanted me to know in case her quiz came up invalid.

She politely thanked me, and she apologized for the confusion.

And then, before concluding her note, she wrote: "Also, miss you," with a little sad-faced emoji at the end of the sentence ... :(

No worries on the quiz, I replied, and then I added: "I miss you guys too. Tons."

My students have lost so much already, and there's more stuff being scratched off the list every day.

But I've lost out too. I was looking forward to spring break, of course, but the home stretch of every school year is a wonderful, crazy rush of youthful determination and joy. Students cranking up to get ready for AP exams, and exhilaration when they're over. The excitement and celebration of prom. Senior picnic. Finishing off the last issue of the student newspaper, and distributing it with pride. Grad practice. Senior breakfast. Graduation.

Every school year, when I walk off the football field after the end of our Saturday morning commencement ceremony, I experience a wistful sense of satisfaction combined with relief at the imminent arrival of a summer break and a wee bit of anticipation for the chance to meet and work with the next group of rising seniors who will soon enough be filling the seats in my classroom.

I'm supposed to retire in 10 weeks, so things were going to be different this spring -- but I had embraced it, and I'd told my seniors I was one of them. I'm graduating with you! Class of 2020 rocks!

Now, we just wave at each other over the internet.

Although I enjoy seeing the friendly faces of my "econ crew" and the newspaper "Gazette gang" on Zoom every couple of days, it's just not the same.

I'll carry on, however, and so will they.

But I still miss them.

Tons.

My life in the journalism teaching trenches ...

I never thought I’d spend more than 30 years teaching, and more than 20 years as a scholastic journalism adviser.

But here I am.

I was on my yearbook staff in high school, and I enjoyed it. But the writing process was laborious – anyone out there remember electric typewriters, whiteout and rubber cement? – and I wasn’t terribly fond of doing multiple drafts. In college, I fell in love with history, economics and political science and found a major – social science – that let me do a little of all three. When I finished, I decided to pursue a teaching credential. I hadn’t grown up thinking I’d necessarily be a teacher, but I enjoyed the classroom as a student, and after being invited to speak to a large group of peers in my senior year of high school, I knew I enjoyed public speaking. So … teaching could work for a while. But I thought I might eventually go to law school and work in public policy or politics or for the state.

And then computers showed up. I bought a used KayPro … a huge, clunky device that had a four-inch screen with phosphorescent green glowing letters. And suddenly, with the genius and magic of the cut-and-paste function, doing rewrites and revisions of manuscripts was dramatically easier than in the old days. I put together an opinion piece about my early teaching experience and sent it to the San Jose Mercury News – and the editors there bought it. That was it – I was a writer. I started crafting magazine story pitches, and soon I was hired by the local newspaper in Santa Cruz County as a sports stringer, a freelancer, to cover high school football and other sports. Twenty-five bucks a game, plus $5 for compiling the game statistics. Eventually, the Sentinel’s sports editors let me write about pretty much anything I wanted – they’d pitch me an idea, and I would grab it. I’d pitch them an idea, and they’d grab it. It was lots of fun – I ended up doing features and game stories on the local community college’s football, men’s and women’s basketball and baseball teams; some Cal and Stanford football; and even some San Francisco 49ers football (yes, I’ve seen Joe Montana naked in the 49ers’ locker room). 

All the while, I was still teaching and still enjoying it. I’d even gotten my first taste of journalism advising at the junior high where I taught – including one year in which the newspaper and yearbook were produced in my classroom during the same period and by the same group of students. But I was considering leaving the teaching profession to pursue my own love for writing and journalism. I applied to a bunch of graduate journalism schools and eventually ended up at the University of Missouri as a teaching editor – my sportswriting and education experience helped me snag a job as the assistant sports editor of the Columbia Missourian, a small daily newspaper that’s linked to the M.U. School of Journalism and serves as a print newspaper laboratory for undergraduate and graduate students. I was still working with students, editing and refining their work, but I also helped manage a sports section that tried to watchdog the M.U. athletics department as well as cover two smaller colleges, two high schools and various other community sports and activities.

In 1991, after my daughter was born, my wife and I decided to return to Northern California. I took a teaching job at a middle school – and I had a chance to advise a middle school newspaper (a newsletter, really) for which the “staff” of students completely changed every six weeks as part of a rotating elective. The Seahawk Sentinel was my second taste of advising, but for the first time I began to think I might have a bit of a knack for this kind of work, and I had lots of fun with it – despite the fact that we had exactly one computer in my classroom.

After being pink-slipped, I spent the next year at a different middle school, and I helped advise a simple newspaper at that school. I was also interviewing for journalism jobs – the Fresno Bee almost hired me, then held off because of budget restrictions. I interviewed in Connecticut and was offered a job as a sports editor at a mid-sized daily, but I decided that was too far from my family in Northern California. Then in 1993, I accepted a job at Oak Ridge High in the Sacramento suburbs to teach U.S. history, government and economics. Three years later, I was named the newspaper adviser there – and my first-ever high school newspaper won a Pacemaker Award. The next year, we were finalists.

In 1998, I came to Granite Bay High specifically to take on the newspaper adviser’s position, plus some government and economics classes to fill out my schedule. Since then, my students have won tons of individual and staff awards, and the Gazette has consistently competed for the most prestigious scholastic journalism prizes in the nation – Crowns, Pacemakers and Gallups. I’ve been honored along the way as well.

But in the back of my mind, I’ve sometimes wondered whether I made the right choice. On tough days, part of me has wondered if I should have gone ahead and sent in those law school applications, or taken that journalism gig in Connecticut.

A few years ago, I posted a status update on my Facebook page announcing that the Gazette had won a  Pacemaker Award at the national convention in San Antonio. I gave a shout-out to my former editors, and I thanked the students on that year’s staff, as well as other staffs who came before them. Almost immediately, there was lots of celebratory banter from current and former staffers, and then an old friend of mine from Santa Cruz, where I started my teaching and journalism careers, added a comment that brought me to tears. She said in part:

“Karl, I remember when we were all younger and searching out what we felt led to pursue. You were so torn between teaching and journalism. I love that the balance of the two has been such a great fit for you and you have excelled in a way that either without the other would have been so much less.”

That’s just exactly right.

I find so much joy and satisfaction in giving bright, talented students the opportunity to produce meaningful, important work for an audience of hundreds or thousands instead of just one teacher, or one set of classmates. I’ve seen it so often now that I have to force myself to not take it for granted, but the pride students have when they distribute the newspaper with their first-ever byline in it is utterly palpable.

Coaching students as they learn everything they need to know to make it happen – reporting, writing, editing, design, photography, ethics, press law and so much more – and then watching them as they go out and do it … it’s one of my life’s great joys.

I have a collection of little notes my newspaper students have written to me over the years. When I get irritated at the bureaucratic requirements of life in a public school, or when I get demoralized by the aspersions cast at teachers by opportunistic politicians and an ill-informed public, I sometimes pull out that file and read through a few of them. And they never fail to change my attitude, for they are full of youthful expressions of hope and joy and gratitude for the opportunity to do real, significant work even when they were still “just” high school students.

It turns out journalism advising sort of snuck up on me, almost by default and certainly with plenty of serendipity along the way. And yet here I am, more than 30 years into my teaching career, and with almost 25 years under my belt as a newspaper adviser, and I think my greatest contribution to student journalism is that I’m still here, that – as well as I know how – I’m still helping student journalists learn what it means to “go out and do good journalism.”

Every day, just like my friend Lorrie said on my Facebook page, I get to forge a balance between teaching and journalism – because either without the other would be so much less.

And that’s what makes teaching journalism and advising a high school newspaper the best thing I do.

Do What You Love

One of the joys of being a teacher at the same school for a few years is that former students reach out from time to time to say hello, to update you on their journey and occasionally to ask for advice.

I got a note a few days ago from a former student I'll call Grant. He's about to be a senior, he's rocking the classroom, he's working an internship this summer ... and he's torn.

On the one hand, he loves teaching and tutoring: helping friends with economics and math is "without exception the resounding highlight of my day," he wrote in his note to me. "I feel I'm actually making an impact in people's lives." 

He's also done a ton of analysis and coding, in internships and for professors. While "on paper this looks great," he wrote, "to no avail I've tried convincing myself I actually enjoy it."

He's considered a PhD in economics ... but the focus at the PhD level is coding and analytics, the very things that have been the least meaningful in his academic career. He's looked into Teach for America or the New York City Teaching Fellows program ... but he fears he'll get bored after a few years of teaching the same thing over and over again.

So ... he asked for my advice. Here's what I shared with him:

Hi Grant,

Sorry for the slow reply ... summer and all. :) Great to hear from you, and great to hear you're doing so well.

So here's my take ... 

Do what you love. 

If the coding/analytics stuff doesn't fire you up now, it certainly won't in 10 years when you have a mortgage and other obligations to contend with. And if you go a route you're unhappy with, if you wait 10 years to pull the plug, that's a 10-year investment of time and energy that's much more onerous and more difficult to justify walking away from than if you pull the plug now.

That said, there are lots of ways to teach even if you end up still doing some of the coding/analytics stuff for now. There's not one path to the classroom, and there are lots of classrooms. 

I have a former student, for example, who has been teaching math at Folsom Lake College for 15 or so years now (she was at American River before that). She went to UC Davis, loved math, loved teaching/tutoring, but like you she wasn't sure that made sense and feared it might shut off all kinds of other interesting possibilities.

She ended up sticking around at UCD long enough to get her MA in math, and that was her ticket into the community college teaching ranks, initially as an adjunct/freeway flyer, but she quickly landed a real gig with benefits and the salary schedule and the whole shooting match. Early in her career she considered leaving the community college scene to pursue a PhD, but she ended up enjoying the experience so much that she put the PhD idea on the shelf. 

Does she ever have any regrets, any nagging thoughts that she shoulda/coulda done it differently? I'm sure. (Me too, on my somewhat different path.) But she enjoys what she does, she makes a decent living and it all works for her.

Perhaps the toughest thing for bright, talented students to deal with, in my opinion, is the incredible set of choices you have in front of you. You've worked your ass off, and the entire world is wide open and right in front of you. But that comes with a downside ... because choosing one path means you aren't choosing another.

However, I think that's a false dichotomy. 

Because you can always make a new choice. What it will look like will be different (pursuing a PhD after teaching for 5 years in a K-12 or community college setting is different than pursuing a PhD immediately after you get your BA), but you will always have fresh, new opportunities in your life.

In my case, I did a teaching credential program right after my BA, but I never thought I'd be a career teacher. I figured I'd do 5 years, then go to law school or pursue a PhD in history or journalism or political science. I started the law school application process, but I realized that if you go to law school, you'll probably end up being ... a lawyer. And I figured out that wasn't something I wanted to do.

I did take two years to go to grad school at the U. of Missouri, where I was a low-level faculty member (asst. instructor) while I pursued an MA in journalism. I had two or three faculty members pestering me to go for a PhD, and I was considering it, but my wife got pregnant with our first child, and a vow of poverty for another 3-5 years just wasn't something I wanted to endure. 

So I moved back to California, and back into a K-12 classroom. Middle school for a couple of years, Oak Ridge High for five years, then Granite Bay High for nearly two decades now.

Since coming back to the west coast, I've had a job offer from a newspaper in Connecticut to be the sports editor, and an offer from the Bee to be a full-time copy editor. But I like teaching very much (who knew I'd do it for 30-plus years!), and I liked Oak Ridge and especially GBHS ... and so I turned those offers down.

Along the way, I've also been able to do some part-time and freelance work that I've enjoyed – on-call copy editing at the Bee, writing supplementary materials for a college textbook publisher, freelancing for a couple of magazines, doing some work as a teacher trainer, editor and writer for a couple of educational publishers ... all stuff I've enjoyed doing, stuff that's kept me fresh and engaged, and stuff that my teaching schedule allows me to pursue without giving up my full-time gig in the classroom.

All to say ... you will never run out of opportunities. Say yes to the ones you'll love, not just the ones that will burnish your reputation or fatten your wallet. ... 

Because in my experience, pursuing your passions will ALSO burnish your reputation and fatten (to some degree) your wallet. But doing things that make you miserable BECAUSE they'll burnish your reputation or fatten your wallet will leave you perhaps well-regarded and possibly rich ... but you'll be one miserable SOB.

Hope this at least sparks some thoughts for you.

Warmly,

Grubaugh

Learning by failure

So I failed pretty badly Saturday. But I'll come back to that in a minute.

I just finished reading a friend's post on a journalism teacher/adviser listserve about how we're all expected to be experts at EVERYTHING, and that the impossible nature of that expectation is chasing talented folks from journalism classrooms, and in some cases from teaching altogether.

This is something I'm guilty of over the years. I have a graduate degree in journalism, and I know what good journalism needs to look and feel like. And yet I let myself, earlier in my advising career, get pulled into more hours in the lab, later deadline nights, more issues of the paper, more special coverage, more ... of everything. And it was taking a toll on me, and on my family. Not to the point of total dysfunction, but I had a nagging sense that I was putting my job and other people's children before my wife and my own children.

And so I finally decided, a few years ago, to start saying no. Nope, deadline isn't midnight anymore. Nope, we're not making an exception for pages that "only need a little more time." Sorry, a special edition isn't in the annual budget, and it's too late now to try to add it into the mix. 

And what I've learned (which took me a while, because I can be a little slow about some things), is that students will go over the bars we set for them. And the whining lasts about a year at the very most, because the generational cycle of the mostly juniors and seniors on my staff is ... duh ... two years. A change inevitably meets resistance from some seniors ("we've never done it that way!"), shoulder shrugs the next year ("I guess we did it that way last year") and acceptance after that ("we've always done it this way!"). 

The online and print news program I advise still manages to do mostly good journalism. We win some awards. I take kids to conventions from time to time. My students write me lovely notes at the end of the year, reflecting on their journalism experience.

Much more importantly, I'm still married (to the same woman!) and my own kids seem to think I'm worth their time and attention now and then. (Even Garrett, my 18-year-old high school senior, doesn't mind hanging with the old man from time to time, even though he's swamped this year with all the college application and financial aid stuff that seniors have to deal with. But I get it – that's what high school seniors have to do. I've been teaching them for almost 30 years, so I kind of know the drill.)

Oh, my Saturday failure? 

I'm a word guy. I've never learned all that much about photography, and I've never taken the time to really learn the mechanics of shooting a digital camera that's not set on "automatic." I can tell you when I'm staring at a good picture, and I can run down the list of some of the basics (rule of thirds, framing the shot, leading lines, get closer, change your angle, etc.) ... but I'm not really a photo teacher. I try to find a couple of kids who are already good photographers, and then I share a couple of my basic nuggets with them and let them run with the process. We get some pretty good results that way.

On Saturday, however, I was the designated photographer for my son Garrett's high school baseball team. I was shooting for myself and for the team, but also for Garrett's school yearbook. (It was the only game the team was playing before the page deadline, it was an away game an hour from home, and I was going to be there anyway. Hey, the dad who's the big-dog journalism teacher/adviser at the school across town can shoot a few pics. How hard can it be?)

But I was using my son's camera (he's also a yearbook staffer at his school and shoots with a pretty nice Canon), and I didn't know how to change his settings. Turns out his manual settings were for indoor baskeball in a dim gymnasium, and I was shooting in fog and then sunshine. I probably took 400 shots, and the ISO setting was at 1600 ... which means the photos were wildly overexposed and were essentially worthless. I was a little ticked at myself for making some of the same mistakes I try to tell my newspaper students to avoid. But then I remembered it's OK to not be an expert at everything. 

So the photo shoot was a failure. But I learned a few things, and next time will be better. 

It was an important reminder that we can only do what we can do today, and that needs to be good enough until tomorrow, when we'll be able to be a little better than we were yesterday.

So Why Did They Mess/Miss With My Sacramento Bee?

So the student of a journalism teacher friend of mine asked me to be a source for her research paper about the re-design of the Sacramento Bee, the major-metro daily I read religiously and where I do some (increasingly rare) on-call copy editing. The Bee didn't ask for my input on its recent print redesign, but for what it's worth, here it is ...  

Did the Sacramento Bee serve as inspiration for the Granite Bay Gazette's design?  What did you like most about the previous design and organization of the Bee?  

Not really. I have a long history with broadsheet newspapers as a designer and editor. I'd say most of the inspiration came from the Columbia Missourian, where I was the assistant sports editor and sports editor back in the dark ages about 25 years ago. But we've taken inspiration from the Bee, the Reno Gazette-Journal, the Fresno Bee and lots of other broadsheets over the years. 

And here's the thing about design. People get used to whatever you throw at them. Soon, they don't notice the design, except for when some kind of design glitch makes it more difficult for them to access content. So what I liked about the old Bee was what all Bee readers liked about the old Bee -- it was familiar, I knew where things were, the only surprises tended to be pleasant ones ... a spiffy cover page, for example, or an amazing photo.

If the Bee was an inspiration for your paper, do you plan on updating your paper?  

Nope. We're always considering small tweaks, but nothing major. Like I said, readers like what's familiar. Plus, I'm an old fart, and I'm pretty set in my ways.

How do you feel about the new changes to the Bee?  (For example:  How do you like the use of white space?  The length of the news stories?  The toplines/summaries at the beginning?  The new approach to reporting?)  Are there any specific changes you really like or don't like?

So far, I'm more of a critic than a fan. (But like I said, ask me in six months and see if I actually can distinguish more than a couple of changes without pulling out this old email.) I think the white space is creative, if jarring. My teacher friends who are not journalists and yet still read the printed version of the Bee (maybe three people, total -- a different story there altogether) feel like they're getting ripped off. The page is already super narrow, reduced a few years ago to save paper costs. And now they're running a bunch of "empty space," in the vernacular of my non-journalist friends, that means they're getting even less news than before. They hate that. 

I totally understand the concept of "breathing space" in design, using "nothing" to create "something." But the fact that the Bee is doing this on every story now takes away the potential for white space to powerfully attract the attention of readers. So ... too much white space, IMHO. 

Length of stories is probably something readers notice least. Most readers don't finish stories anyway. The research is quite clear, for example, that only a small minority of readers complete stories that jump to a new page. (But we're jumping stories anyway on the Gazette, because not doing so will kill design creativity faster than almost anything else you can do.) I haven't been especially bothered by shorter stories. I see they're shorter on the inside A-section pages, in particular, but the whole A section, after page A3, was a skim for me and most readers anyway. So now, the Bee editors are doing my skimming for me and actually getting more short summaries into the paper than they did before. So you can actually argue that there is more news in the A section than there used to be, although it's more summaries and fewer full stories. 

Toplines and summaries aren't a big problem for me, although as a copy editor, I can tell you they're a pain in the butt to have to create. I haven't worked any Bee copy desk shifts since the design changes went into effect, but I'm expecting my summer shifts at the Bee will be filled with a certain amount of dread over having to write the equivalent of five or six headlines/deckheads/subheads per story instead of the two or three we used to write.

I don't really sense a huge change in the way the Bee is reporting stories. I actually asked two of my teacher friends this question at a dinner last night, and they also said they didn't sense any significant changes in story-telling technique. The exception is sports, because the whole shooting match is wrapping up earlier, so they can't get late games into the newspaper and they've decided to go with a much more feature-focus approach. Which frankly works. Everyone gets their results on ESPN anyway, so why waste ink on scores that are 12-15 hours old by the time I pick up my newspaper? Instead, tell me something I don't already know, in an engaging, interesting way.

On that note, my favorite change so far at the Bee (and it's not design, but it happened at about the same time) is Andy Furillo as the new Bee sports columnist. I used to love to copy edit Andy's crime stories, because he was a creative guy, and they gave him a lot of rein to be clever and compelling. Switching him to sports has been a breath of fresh air. He's a hell of a writer, and he's an excellent reporter. That's a combination the Bee has been missing since Mark Kriedler left nearly a decade ago. Since then, the Bee sports section has been boring me with Ailene Voison's overwrought prose, and with an occasional Marcos Breton return to sports that is inevitably designed to somehow make me feel guilty about something. 

Furillo, on the other hand, has just been terrific. Check out his piece today, for example, on Barry Zito -- a wonderul column highlighting Zito's struggles in his major-league baseball comeback attempt that is just beautifully constructed and executed. 

Sorry ... got sidetracked. The one design change I like least is the huge color splash, with reverse text for the name of the section. It reminds me of USA Today, and that product is one I hold in especially low regard. The color is disjointed, disconnected and distracting to me. I think it shouts "Seventh Grade Newsletter," not major metro for the capital of the largest state in the country. 

The sports coverage is a lot different than before.  What are your thoughts on that?   

I noted some of my sports thoughts above. I will say that my son, who is a varsity baseball player, is irritated by the lack of box scores for major-league baseball. But again, that's information you can get elsewhere. He's adjusting. So am I.

What do you think about the readability of the paper?  Is it harder or easier to navigate?  

It's probably harder for me and everyone now, because it's new. But we'll all get used to it. I told Joe Davidson, the prep writer for the Bee and a friend of mine, that newspaper redesigns result in lots of vocal opposition from a few critics, a smattering of vocal support ... and mostly silence. But ask readers six months from now what specifics they'll remember about the redesign, and they won't be able to come up with anything. (Except for the color. Because that really sucks.)

Do you think that the redesigned paper is geared toward a different readership than the original Bee?  (print vs online reader, younger vs older generations)

I know that's what they're trying to do. You youngsters don't pick up the printed version of the Bee. Maybe you'll get enticed by the color. It's sort of like Sunny the Wonderdog on my living room floor ... she's not paying much attention as I write this, but if something catches her eye -- "Squirrel!!!" -- she's up and at 'em. Maybe a giant splash of red spot color is your generation's "Squirrel!"

Do you think that these changes are going to be beneficial in the long run for the Bee?  

In terms of getting and keeping readers? No. The Bee, and all print newspapers, have a much bigger problem with readership that tweaking design is not going to solve. Readers are jumping overboard in droves, and the industry has not figured out how to monetize online content to the degree it needs to to be able to pay for the costs of serious newsgathering. I mean, it's nice that you get a byline in your school's newspaper, plus camaraderie with your peers, and academic credit, and the opportunity to exercise your critical-thinking skills in ways that are much more engaging than the typical five-paragraph literary analysis you are often asked to write. But some day, you're going to want to rent an apartment, make a car payment and eat something other than cat food for dinner. The Huntington Post model -- "Hey, people will write for us for FREE!" -- is unsustainable. But people are used to getting content for free online, and newspapers made the mistake of providing that content for free for many years. Now, as some newspapers try to get readers to pay for online access to help pay for the high costs of newsgathering, they're finding their readers simply won't take the bait. 

My best friend is a history teacher at Oak Ridge (where I used to teach a long time ago). Like me, he was a HUGE Bee reader. Every day he'd devour the newspaper, and we often had arcane but incredibly satisfying conversations about all kinds of topics because we'd both read the same stories in the Bee (and elsewhere).

Today, he's killed his subscription and only reads the Bee online, and he doesn't pay a dime for the privilege. He gets full access with a school-based subscription intended to get students to read the Bee online, but teachers can also take advantage of the deal. 

I told him last night at dinner that they'll have to pry my printed newspaper out of my cold, dead fingers ... and he just smiled. 

Because that's exactly what he used to say.