F SUNDAY 11.06.2005 baltimoresun.com/ideas

IDEASTRENDS • BOOI

DEMOCRACYAT LONG LAST?Liber it! ri voters promised a fair election onthe eve of Tuesday's presidential runoff.>»>PG2F

BOOKS

LINCOLN, WITHFEW SURPRISESDon's Keams Goodwin's tale reads well butlacks inspiration.»» PC 4F

BY THE NUMBERS

The federal government has been borrowingand spending at a record pace in recent years.Some experts say this trend is moving Ihe nationi nto dangerous waters, but others are relativelyunconcerned. Here is a look al both arguments.

Th* federal budget h» droppeddramatically Into deficit in recent yaws

Federal deficit* and turplu ic i, in billion:

$200

KM

0100200

300400500,

htali

1999 2000

im White H«» OMB, F«bru»r» 2005

THese deRcKi are funded with borrowedmoney, which hcruses our ration*! debt

U5. national debt, in bilboM

$8.000-

6000

1990 1995 2000 ;Drf* (ram Wtv!. Ham. OMB, F.bnury 2005

As of Oct. 31 the national debt was:

$8,027,123,404,214.36

Each eillien'sihareofthB debt Is:$27,041.44

Deficit spending could push

S3.9X

2015 CBOotimale Private estimate"

Publicly held debt SSJWIEw ilOAtriUion

Public debt U Xotgrou domestic 28.8Xproduct' Elteute from Coogreuio™! Budget Offio,

growing ctsti ol crtitlcnwit program «fcw*nj«J upnl

Foreign investors could slop lending

Top three foreign lenders at ol June 2004, in billion;Japan _

$164.8

United Kingdom

Some Hopeful Thoughts...

• The national debt an'l thai big when measured aia percentage ol grois domejlie produd. a Ley

IK indicator.

Gross National Debt

MOKO Intragovermnentdebl

Debt held by the public

•40 -50 '60 70 '80 -90 '00'CM

Higher economic growthCould art Ihe we at Ihe debt,« higher ta» receipt nanIhe budget doser to balance or even wrplus.We have grown ouraeH-ei out oliubrtanlial debt (roublebefore moil recently in the 1°90i and can do it again.

PUBLIC EDITOR // HARD HEADLINE CHOICES PG 2

* * * EXTRA

SPREADING

THENEWSMedia technologies still in theirinfancy are gaining fast ontraditional newspapers. The futurefor print looks bleak — unless theindustry can transform itself.BY ANDREW RATNER u

f ewton N. Minow says he faaj seen every side of the media elephant.He's been a board director of Tribune Co., which owns this newspaper.N

ei

He chaired the Rand Corp. as it helped develop the Internet —and says,"we didnl understand what it was all about at the time.* He was a direc-tor of CBS-TV and chaired the Public Broadcasting System. Most famous-

ly, he was head of the Federal Communications Commission when he told agathering of broadcasters in 1961 that television was a "vast wasteland"

The producer of Gifflgon's blond was so incensed, he named the shipwreckedboat In his TV comedy after Minow. But MlnoWs assessment, at a time whenAmericans were transfixed by the new, glowing cube in their living rooms, wasprescient. So when he frets about the future of newspapers as we know them,11* worth taking notice.

•Where it all ends up nobodyknows, but print, in my opinion, isnut going to recover. I think we knowthat," Minow said recently, speakingfrom his law office in Washington.•When the Senate was holding hear-ings about Judge Roberts,!! seems tome the most important questionsthey should have been asking wereabout the role of technology in thenext 25 years."

Minuw's Judgment might seemodd when profits are considered. Asthe Columbia Journalism Reviewnoted In an editorial agonizing overthe future of newspapers last week,the weighted average of profit mar-gins for the newspaper divisions of

major media companies as meas-ured by Morton Research Inc.climbed to nearly 20 percent lastyear — more than double the aver-age profit margin of the Fortune 500.

But that's only one piece of thestory.[Please ue MEDIA, page 6F]

PROFILE //DR. SOLOMON SNYDER

T R O Y M C C U L L O U G H O N B L O G S V I E W F 1 N D E R

Dr. Solomon Snyder believes scientific and artisticpursuits are closely related.MONICA LOPOSSAT [SLINI'MtJKJGHAI'HFK]

GettinginsideyourheadWhen Dr. Solomon Snyder isntunlocking the brain's secrets —like how drug addiction occurs— you can find him playingclassical guitar or collectingart. Now the chairman ofHopkins' renownedneuroscience department ispreparing to step down.

BY JONATHAN BOH [™:i IEFOITENJ

Most great discoveries start with greatIdeal. And few people in biomedlcal sci-ence have hatched as many great ideas

as Dr. Solomon Snyder, who will soon step downas chief of the Johns Hopkins University neuro-sdence department he created 25 years ago.

Perhaps more than anyone else in the lastquarter-century, Snyder opened up the world ofcommunication that exists in the tiny space —called the synapse — where messages travelfrom one brain cell to the next

By studying the neurotransmltters that canythose messages and the proteins that receivethem, he helped explain how the brain directssensations, movement and thought — andwhat lies at the basis of drug addiction andmental illness.

His discoveries have helped explain how drugsused to treat schizophrenia, depression andother mental diseases work. Perhaps moreImportant is what many In the field predict willhappen in the next quarter-century: the cre-ation of new drugs that will target the brainprocesses that Snyder and his colleagues haveIdentified.

•For both the psychiatric and neurologic dis-eases, I think the next couple decades are goingto be the ones for really targeted therapies,"said DC Anne Young, a former Snyder under-study who has since become chief of neurologyat the prestigious Massachusetts GeneralHospital. 'I dont think it would be possiblewithout the work he's done-

Ask Snyder where he gets his ideas, and getready for an unlikely answer.

The best way to have good ideas is to try notto have them," said Snyder, 66, a slight man whospeaks softly but with precise, carefully chosenwords. "One way to do that Is to be interested meverything."

"Everything' may be an overstatement but itis close. He keeps abreast of the top medicaljournals but is just as likely lo become Intriguedwith developments outside his field as within.He's a past president of Beth Am synagogue andchants from the Torah. He collects art, sits onthe board of the Baltimore SymphonyOrchestra and leads a committee that helpschoose the BSO's repertoire and commissionsnew works.

He plays classical guitar so well that as ateenager he seriously considered becoming amusician rather than a scientist. He adores folkmusic and tunes from the American songbook,and has recently discovered a knack for com-posing funny songs for his three grandchildren.

"It's all part of creativity," Snyder said."Getting ideas for doing experiments is likecomposing a symphony. You're always testingan idea."[Please see SNYDER, page 3FJ

/ A C H I E V E R S 3 F

6F SUNDAY 11.06.2005

A llrrllNv^rUlm rUKAntKIOANNtWbPAPcRS

Gross domestic product, retail sales and newspaper advertising revenues tracked together until 2000,* when the pace of growth in ad revenues dropped away.

he tint quarter ol 1995-100.

Yesterday's news, tomorrow's challenges/From page IF]

Newspaper readership has been In decline foryears, and the pace of decline Is accelerating,according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.Advertising revenues are stagnant, and newspaperprofits and stock prices are being propped up bycost cutting and stock buybacks.

Angst about the future or newspapers has swirledfor a long time, but concerns gained strength thisfall after a succession of job cuts at several large,respected publications, including The New YorkTimes, The Boston Globe, Tlie Philadelphia Inquirerand U.S. News & World Report

Last week, three large Institutional investors that,together, hold more than 36 percent of the stock oTKnlght-Ridder, one of the nation's largest newspaperchains, expressed dissatisfaction with the price ofthat company's stock. They suggested that a salemight be necessary far Knight Rldder shareholdersto realize a fair return on their Investments.

The three — Private Capital Management, South-eastern Asset Management and Harris AssociatesIP — sent letters to the Knight Ridder board ofdirectors urging talks.

The 'board takes its fiduciary duties seriously andwill respond In due course," said Knight Bidder

Industry analysts said the Knight Ridder investorsare triggering a showdown that could test the valueof local media, where newspapers still dominate.

While investors fret, the traditional media's self-image Is Increasingly shaped through blogs andWeb sites — pieces of the new media that theyworry about. Dire signs appear so doubtless, gallowshumor has set fit The Society for News DesignIncluded 3-D glasses In Its recent journal aboutideas for survival.

Radio and television, print's old challengers, arefacing their own struggles and are trying to reinventthemselves in satellite and high-definition form.Traditional broadcast television viewershlp is

down, and so are advertising revenues, as the age ofthe typical viewer moves up and out of the desir-able young-adult demographic zone.

Broadcast radio ratings and profits also have beensharply lower in recent quarters as growing num-bers of listeners turn to satellite radio and catchtheir entertainment and news on iPods and cellphones. Cable television, satellite radio, DVD movies,video games and the Internet are all divertingyounger viewers away from their favorite sitcoms.

Most threatening for traditional media companieslong-term Is an array of huge and well-financedcompanies in telecommunications and technologywith radically different approaches to news andinformation.

The Wall street Journal suggested last week thatnew media companies with local designs — includ-ing Yahoo, Google or eBay—might be interested inKnight Ridder. Yahoo 'has moved increasingly intooriginal content and would like to develop its localreach," said the paper. 'Meanwhile, Google Inc. hasexpressed interest in entering the classified-ad mar-ket, where newspapers have deep relationships andcontinue to play a dominant role."

Yahoo recently hired a war correspondent todescribe his visits to the world's military 'hot spots"on its Web site and promoted it like a Via Dieselaction movie.

Sprint-Nextel is promoting itself as an entertain-ment platform, not just a phone network. Lastweek, it joined with cable giant Comcast, TimeWarner Cable, Cox and Advance/Newhouse toannounce a Joint venture to develop technologiesthat would enable cable subscribers to use cellphones to watch live TV shows, program digitalvideo recorders, and check home e-mail.

EBay, the online auction phenomenon, bought anInternet telephony service in Europe. Phone giantVerizon Is offering cable TV, and Comcast and oth-ers are preparing cell phone service that combinesInternet and TV—all growing markets for advertis-ing and news. Perhaps the iPod will someday deliv-er news and cook dinnerNewspapers continue to hold significant advan-

tages. When the number of eyes on newspaperInternet news sites Is added to the number of tradi-tional newspaper readers, effective readershiplooms over other media. But, thus far, Internetadvertising provides newspapers with only a frac-tion of the ad revenue they receive from advertisersin the actual paper.Still, with nearly SSO billion in advertising rev-

enue, newspapers make up the second-biggest±unk of the S260 billion U.S. advertising market,alter direct mail But the diverging trend lines areno secret: While newspaper advertising has grownby a meager 10 percent since 1997, Internet adver-tising — though still a fraction of ad spending —has mushroomed tenfold to more than sio billion.Cable TV advertising also doubled during that span,to about $20 billion.A Toronto media consultant, Kubas, pinpointed

print's Waterloo as the spring of 2000, the peak ofthe dot-corn stock boom. That's when US. newspa-per ad revenues stopped tracking with the growthif national retail sales and gross domestic productmd began to resemble the flight of a woundedcluck.Since then, newspapers have been hurt by the two

ieflning Ws of our age: Wal-Mart, which spends lit-de on newspaper ads, grew at the expense ofdepartment stores, a major print client. And theWeb helped erode newspaper classified advertising,which plummeted to $44 billion in 2002 from J8.7billion in 2000 as the job market chilled, Kubas said.Newspapers are becoming less of a habit for peo-

ple for a wide range of reasons, some sociological,some self-inflicted. On any given day, more adultsare still more likely to read a newspaper — about110 million — than use the Internet — 75 million.But again, the trend lines ore bleak: Newspaperreadership has fallen by one-third during the pastW years and faster—by roughly one-half— amongmime adults face 25-W accnrdlne to various mar-

CAN YOD HFARTvlFNOW?The current Internet media revolution re (led! breakthroughs and conflicts In the early days of radio. A look:

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY DISPUTES1952 // On KL1F in Dallas, GordonMcLcndon, right, recreate!broadcasts ol Major League BascbaPgames. A huge appetite lor the gamesexists In the west, with no team beyondSt Louis, but the league suesMcLcndon for pirating the contentand his operation goes bankrupt

2001 // Nailer, begun by collegestudent Shawn Fanning, is one ol severalservices lhat enables line swapping ofmusic lilcs on ihc Internet After therccoring industry brings suit, the federalcourt orders Napster shut down.

PUBLIC DEFENSE1937 //As a nominee for theSupreme Court. Hugo Black, right,uses radio to dclcnd himself againstcriticism ol his earlier membership inIhc&iKkmKlan.

BREAKING SEXUAL BOUNDARIES1937 // AHerMaeVfcst.rignt.aslaCrarfic McCarthy "Why don't you comeup and play in my woodpile;" and latertrades sexual innuendo with Don Amcchcon Ihc OajcflndSanDomHbur, clergyand federal regulators arc outraged.

FUNDRAISING1944 // In round-the-clockappeals on CBS radio, Kale Smithhelps raise more than 5600million in bonds !o finance the war.

SEARCH ENGINES

with host Clilton Fadiman,right, becomes a hit onradio, with people sitting ala table answering triviaquestions sent In bylisteners. Imitators such asSo fcuTMift ten/GlowMusic? and TnaQuura/sfollow.

SLOGGING1934 //Wilh unsold lime Infill, radiocompanies provide lime for dramaticprograms to be put on by the NBCRad« Guild, Columbia Workshop andothers. Their cutting-edge dramas,typically heard by small audiences,lade as radio becomes big business.

PAID OR FREE1922 // Nearly 30 years alter the birthol radio, Ihc phone company AT&Tcreates WEAF, the first radio stationestablished for the purpose of sdting limelo advertisers.

FEMALE PIONEERS

1941 // Mary Margaret McBride. right,a veteran journalist and author,convenes writers, politicians andcelebrities in a popular talk show thatexplores issues ol the day.

SOUHD EFFECTS FOR A NEW AGE1940//The squeaky opening ol ahall closet becomes a nationalinstitution „„ the Fibber McGeesnd

Maty show, right.

DISASTER STRIKES1941 //The day alter someone alNBCs Honolulu affiliateannounces This is no jokd This bwarl" record audiences tune In toPresident Franklin Q Roosevelt'smessage to Congress alter Japan'sattack on FtaH Harbor.

2004-O5 // Michael Jacksonand Martha Stewart appealdiredtytolhcirlansthroughthcir |Web sites before their separateand widely followed criminal trials.

2003 //AsexvtdcoolParisHilton,right, with her then-boyfriendcirculates on the Interne! and vaults thehold heiress into a pop culture starwith TV shows and commercials.

2003 // Howard Dean's presidentialcampaign is astonishingly cllcdivc atraising money online, generating £75million in the second quarter of 2003, |twice what he had previously raised,and propelling the Internet as a forcein political fund raising.

1994-96 //YahooandGoogferiseasseparatoprojccts ̂ fKHOOfotgraduale students at Stanford *

University Jerry Yang and David (*f\r \Tlff*>FSobegina-GuidetolheVvbrld VjOfJglC

Wide Vfcb" lo keep track ol their

favorite Web sites and later name it >ahoo, short for Tel

AnothcrHicrarchical Ollidous Oracle." Google cvofvcs

from a technology caBcd BackRub that leads users to

"back links* olV&b sites, begun by Larry Rsge and SonjeyBn̂ a Urevcrsfty of Maryland undcrgrad. Their companyname is a play on the malhcrtaljcs term "googoT lor ihc

numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

1999 //Internet sites likeBloggers and Groksoup allowpeople to create W:b logs -"blogs" — lo include writings andlinks to other sllc-,. Thousands of ' ~such journals sprout - some professionally managed andwidely read, some obscure and very personal diaries.

1995 //SlalcandSalonemerge

Jownal is the first printed paper tocrcale a successful paid mode! for the Interne!.

2003 // A political blog begun by AnaMarie Cox, right, under the pen nameWonkette becomes a gossipy but much-quoted political journal in Washington.

1998 // AOli chimoy "You've GolMail' greets people logging onto theInternet and inspires a 1 lit movie

starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.

2001 // The Internet comes of agi

alter terrorists crash jets into the

Wodd Trade Center, the Ftnlagon

and a Pennsylvania field. Millionssearch for news and laved ones on

the medium that now reaches ithan hall the nation's households.

ket research.The Internet has stolen readers, goes the i

BUS, and yet the medium is an infant that's onlybegun to flex Its news muscles. 'Pam Anderson,""Pokemon" and "Britney Spears" top the list ofmost-searched terms since 1995, a reflection of amedium that's mostly been about entertainmentand commerce during its first decade as a commer-cial network. The Internet, which added more Websites this year, 17.5 million, than during the height ofthe dot-corn craze, is beginning to become more

The marketing world, too, has only begun toadjust. Consumers generally spend as much timeon the Internet—counting the time they spend onit at work — as they do watching TV each day, yetcompanies still spend six times as much advertisingon TV as online, analyst Charlene LI pointed out Ina recent report for Forrester Research Inc. ofCambridge. That will change, especially with newservices that improve advertisers' ability to monitortheir return on all ad spending.

What might be most threatening to the tradition-al media Is that their risk-adverse managers areabout to go up against Innovative and global playerswho aren't invested In the old models and who havealreadvmadeeobsormonevtnirisrormlne the wav

a [SUN HEWS GRAPHIC] 5

people communicate.In one sense, the newspaper companies are in a

predicament akin to that of General Motors andFord, United and Northwest, the very companieswhose troubles have dominated their businesspages in recent years: It's not that people havestopped consuming news, just as they haven'tstopped buying cars or flying in planes. Far from itIt's that the so-called legacy companies grew largein a different era and cant easily escape its econom-ic and social assumptions.

The number or smart people who left the news-paper Industry In the past 10 years is legion. Theycould not take banging their heads against theIndustry any more. The decision-making structureIs not set up In a way that can react to change,* saidMark Del Vecchlo, a former wire-service reporterwho now runs a Web site that deals in movie mem-orabilia.

Del Vecdiin, who covered the Tiananmen Squaremassacre In China for United Press Internationaland became the first editor for the Web site of'JlieHartford Cburant, had tried In 1997 to persuade theprevious owner of the Couranr (and of The Sun) tobuy then-little-known eBay. He had stumbled acrossthe Internet auction site In his movie-collectinghobhv. He and a colleaeue visited eBav and found Its

few employees struggling to open and record themall sacks of checks rolling in.

As described in the 2002 book The Perfect Store, theformer Times Mirror Corp. probably could have hadeBay for $40 million then, but the newspaper exec-utives declined to make an offer, mystified abouthow to value a business that owned no trucks,buildings or inventory. By spring 2000, whenTribune Co. bought Times Mirror for IS billion Inthe nation's largest newspaper merger, eBay's market capitalization was double that. It now generates$45 billion In annual sales.

"We've all heard that in every Industry there arefolks who say, 'It'll never happen. It's a lark. It* abunch of geeks.' Kbu heard every permutation,"recalls Del Vecchlo, from his New Hampshire com-pany, CineQuesLcom. "The biggest obstacle Is tryingto force every new thing into a traditional bureau-cracy. The guy at General Motors whose big moneyIs due to making big cars, he's going to spend timeeach day thinking about how to put himself out olwork? It doesn't work that way. The people In chargeof new ventures are really invested in the old ven-tures"

Historians even have a term for it — "technologi-cal momentum." From cars to personal computers,the powers that be have rarely produced the break-throughs that alter behavior and the marketplace.More often than not, they try to impede them polit-ically.

"large organizations tend to favor inventions thaiimprove the existing product line," said Thomas P.Hughes, a renowned sociologist at the University ofPennsylvania who Is credited with defining the con-cept. They're reluctant to adopt a new technologythat completely changes the market.'

From Thomas Samuel Kuhn, who popularized theconcept of "paradigm shifts," to the urban plannerLewis Mumford, futurists and historians have longstudied the patterns by which one device succumbsto another. But even the best in the field acknowl-edge that predictions about technological revolu-tion are often wrong.

For every business or industry that died because Itcouldn't adjust and compete with new technologyor a better product Is another that somehow defiedcommon wisdom. TV didn't kill radio. The tele-phone didn't slow the use of mail service. We aredeep In more paper, not less, in the computer era.

While print's days might seem numbered, eventhe greatest of visionaries can be wildly off in pre-dicting the impact of technology, orville Wright pro-jected In 1917 that aviation would make warfareobsolete because the ability to see from the skywould negate surprise attacks, Richard Rhodesrecounted In his 1999 book Visions of Technology.Polaroid Inventor Edwin Land foresaw a postwartechnological economy that would eradicate urbanslums that had festered since Dickens. And someembraced radio In the 1920s as the deliverer ofInternational understanding, world peace and theremedy to, of all things, political demagoguery.

The most powerful effects are usually the unin-tended consequences," said Rhodes, who won thePulitzer Prize In 1988 for his writing on nuclearweapons — perhaps the cause of the greatest of allunintended consequences, he said, because theirawesome might curtailed world-scale wan

He anticipates that within a decade people willhave portable "roll-up" computer sheets able toreceive news — and will have lost all privacy with-in two decades as the Internet's ability to mine datasuch as medical records Increases.

Online newspapers will become more transparent— and compelling — by increasingly showing howthey researched a story, including posting originaldocuments and not Just presenting the final prod-uct, he said. The newspaper's bade structure, to goout there and dig out the stun; Is what people willalways need"

Newspapers will have to find a way to transformtheir business model, and staffing, over time fromprint to online. Internet advertising doesnt pro-duce nearly as much revenue as print, but the prof-it margins can be higher, said John Morton, the well-known newspaper analyst who runs MortonResearch Inc. In Silver Spring.

"Never underestimate an industry that's beenaround for 400 years," said Pablo I Boczkowskl, aNorthwestern University professor and author ofDigitizing the NEWS, this year's top book prize winnerfrom the scholarly International CommunicationAssociation. "Predictions tend to be wrong for themost part because the weight of the present contextIs too strong, and many of the most interesting andappealing trends are totally unforeseen."

•People assume that new media replace, whenthey more often than not displace, old media," saidJames L. Baughman, a mass communications pro-fessor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison."Life magazine circulation Initially went up after tel-evision. It wasn't until the late 1960s that Life beganto lose readers. Newspapers were not initially affect-ed by radio or television. A lot of things we doexpect to happen don't"

But if an obituary for newspapers Is premature,the signs of 111 health — not just short-term meas-ures of profit and circulation, but more structuralweaknesses — cant be dismissed. It's not just thatyoung people have drifted off; patterns or life haveevolved to the detriment of newspapers just as theydid for the 6 pan. network newscasts.

Last week, NBC announced that its evening news-cast, once the network's most influential and prof-itable news show, would be posted on Its Web site,available at any hour anywhere.

The afternoon newspaper—more dominant thanmorning papers by circulation until about 25 yearsago and by sheer number of publications until justa few years ago — mostly stopped working In aworld of two-Income households, long suburbancommutes and the service economy's longer hours.Now, families have less time to read in the morningtoo.

It would be Ironic (or maybe explanatory) that theInformation Age has been less kind to newspapersthan the Industrial Age. People say they no longerhave time for the product, but the length of the dayis the same as ever.

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