The story behind a ‘Newsboy’ image I’ve been using

When I was visiting Toni Momberger‘s office at the Redlands Daily Facts (one of my favorite newspaper names) in California a few years ago, Toni had to be out of town. But I got to use her office briefly. This cartoon, on display in her office, fit well into the slides I was using that day, so I shot a quick photo and added it to the slides (below).

I’ve used it in some other slides since, and I had been meaning to ask Toni (Digital First Media’s Journalist of the Year for 2013) the story behind the picture.

When I used the cartoon in a recent blog post about newspaper carriers (and Facebook), I wrote her asking the origin, because I wanted to credit it appropriately (and use with retroactive permission).

Toni connected me with Al Hernandez, owner of Citrograph Printing Co. in Redlands, who provided this explanation:

The original crate label is from our archive of crate label images.  If you notice the newsboy is carrying copies of the Citrograph Newspaper under his arm.  The Citrograph is the oldest continuously operating Print shop in California and it was the original newspaper in Redlands.

As far as we know, the original label is now in the public domain.  This piece was created in celebration of our 125th Anniversary in 2012.

Thanks to Toni and Al for that help in identifying an image I really enjoy.

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Lots of precedent for media dependence on Facebook, including cautionary tales

I blame Facebook’s crappy iPad app for this blog post.

I actually thought of the topic for this post before falling asleep around 11 p.m. That’s when I read the New York Times story about the Times and other news organizations considering and negotiating a deal to publish content on Facebook rather than on their own sites.

I have a busy day planned today (even if I am stuck in the hospital, I’m working and I have class today, plus many other chores awaiting me). So that post might have gone unwritten.

But something woke me up around 2 a.m. If you’ve spent much time in the hospital, you understand. And before trying to get back to sleep, I tried to answer a question on my iPad in a Facebook discussion. And Facebook’s iPad sucks so bad that I had to abandon the iPad, then redo and finish my answer on the laptop. And then, I had to blog about Facebook. Piss me off in the middle of the night when I’d rather be sleeping, and I will blog about you, even if I have to finish grumpy in the daylight.

Part of my initial response to skepticism about the wisdom of getting into bed with Facebook would have been to note that newspapers have been dependent on (at the mercy of?) other businesses my whole career. Other media are dependent, too, but I will focus here mostly on newspapers. Part of my argument would have noted that the dependency on Facebook was likely to cause problems (as it has before), but I was probably going to come down on the side of saying I might be exploring or testing such a relationship myself if I were the New York Times, BuzzFeed or National Geographic, the companies apparently in such discussions with Facebook.

But then I got pissed off at the Facebook app in the middle of the night, and thought of how dependence on external carriers was a bad decision for the Kansas City Star and Times decades ago, and I had to start blogging in the middle of the night about why publishers should be cautious about increasing their dependence on Facebook.

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