Fuck change
I'm working in Detroit in 1979.

For the last 30 years, we've been making cars the by-God American way. Big, lumbering cars, straight-line interstate gobblers, cars laden with steel and chrome and power windows. Cars that take up space and shut down gasoline, the purest reflection of the by-God American way: Consumption.

A weird thing is happening around me, though. All of a sudden, people aren't buying what we're making. Worse, they're making fun of what we're making. It could be argued they hate what we're making and what we represent.

People are making concessions to the fact that gasoline is no longer cheaper than tap water. Individuals are suddenly feeling a need to take up less space. Function is starting to overshadow form: People don't want chrome, they want a car they can drive 150,000 miles, just in case they get laid off from their job when President Carter finishes crashing the economy. It's becoming less important to one-up your neighbor with a bigger, chromier car; in fact, society is beginning to turn on people who do so.

But we're in Detroit in 1979. We remember 20 years ago, back in the '50s, when somebody said, "As goes General Motors, so goes the United States." We're not going let a bunch of Japanese people with a better idea stomp all over the by-God American way.

Here in Detroit in 1979, our answer to Japan is to build slightly smaller versions of the same cars we've been building for the last 30 years. So, instead of a big, roomy, comfortable rear-wheel-drive gas guzzler, we're making oddly designed, smaller, cramped rear-wheel-drive gas guzzlers. It's OK, too, that these cars are only good for about 75,000 miles. It wasn't all that long ago -- say, 1955 -- that the economy was roaring and people bought new cars every three years whether they needed to do so or not. Durability is pretty low on the priority list here in Detroit in 1979.

That's OK, because treating the employees well is becoming lower in the priority list, too. The companies react to a downturn in the economy the only way they know how, by passing the pain on to the workers. The workers react in turn by building even crappier cars. Doesn't matter; nobody's buying them anyway.

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We all know what happened next. The best-selling cars in the United States bore the names of Honda and Toyota, not Ford and Chevrolet. And these cars weren't being built in Tokyo or Hirsohima; they were being built in Maysville, Ohio, and Georgetown, Ky., by people who just wanted to be paid an honest day's pay for an honest day's work and who wanted to feel like they had a stake in the final product that rolled off the assembly line.

Suddenly, only idiots and old people drove American-made cars. The quintessentially American industry had been completely taken over and co-opted by people who had a better idea. The better idea was not to build a revolutionary new car that flew on air or magically jammed toll booths; the better idea was simply to listen to what the buyers wanted out of a car, and then building said car and offering it for sale.

I'm on the Edge of America in 2003. I don't work on an assembly line. I make newspapers.

But I'm in Detroit in 1979.

I work for an industry that doesn't really give a crap what its consumers want. We stick doggedly by tradition, remembering the glory days nearly 30 years ago, when a newspaper single-handedly brought down a president. We put out newspapers the way we want them to look, not the way that people want them.

We respond to readers who think that newspapers are a wasteful use of trees by making them bigger, packing in more sections and more stuff. Then we make them smaller, going to narrower page widths while telling people how we're "giving them more" and making them "easier to handle" and more "environmentally friendly".

We treat our workers like they're all white men from middle-class backgrounds, despite the fact that they're all different people with different approaches to life and different needs from life. We treat them like chess pieces, wedging them into a five-day, 40-hour work week because that's the way we've always done it, not because it's the best way to produce the best newspaper.

Meanwhile, much in the way Hudson and Nash and Studebaker and Kaiser and Frazier disappeared from the automotive menu in the 1950s, media choices are dwindling, not expanding. Media has its big three now, and you can kind of draw automotive-industry parallels there -- Gannett (General Motors, the big lumbering monolith with the best-known brand), Knight-Ridder (Chrysler, the financially shaky purveyor of products of inconsistent quality) and Tribune (Ford, the consistent, unexciting, tradition-bound conservative).

Better ideas are pooh-poohed. We give away our online products and charge people for the newspaper, despite the fact that people seem to want the former more and the latter less. The idea of putting interesting stuff in the newspaper is anathema to grizzled, ink-stained wretches who know what DBI stands for*. Too many people in charge of newspapers long for a lost time when we could simply write stories, and let the composing room handle the rest. They refuse to see there might be another way, and they defend their stance in the name of "traditionalism."

And the people in charge at the corporate headquarters will do whatever they need to do to ensure minimum profit margins that General Motors or Ford or Chrysler could only have dreamed of, even in the best of the tail-fin and chrome years.

The American automotive industry almost put itself out of business because of the mistakes it made in 1979. It took 15 years of irrelevance and one government bailout to save those millions of jobs.

Newspapers don't have 15 years to be irrelevant, and you can be damn sure the government won't bail us out. Now you know why I'm concerned about my future.

(oops, almost forgot: *- DBI = "dull but important," as in, "I have to find space in my section for a 40-inch DBI ... ")