Beating the big guns on the Disney beat

Last week, the Walt Disney Company announced a $1 billion-plus revamp of its Disney’s California Adventure theme park, which has been plagued by low paid attendance and poor customer reviews since it opened in Anaheim in February 2001. The Los Angeles Times detailed the plans in a story the morning of Disney’s press conference, writing that the plans were “first reported on the Wall Street Journal’s website.”

Actually, the plans first had been reported months earlier, on a website called MiceAge, run by long-time Disney-watcher Al Lutz.

I’ve been covering theme parks, online and off, for more than a decade. But Lutz is the dean of theme park reporters on the Internet. A former music recording producer, Lutz started writing about Disneyland on USENET, then on a series of websites. For fans used to ever-positive coverage about Disney and its theme parks in the traditional press, Lutz provided a bracing splash of reality. His reports detailed an ugly side at the so-called Happiest Place on Earth, from chipped paint and burned-out lights to maintenance cutbacks that other critics charged endangered the public safety. Two fatal accidents at the park, later blamed on park personnel and mainentance failures, brought more attention to Lutz’s critical work.

In 2003, he left MousePlanet, a Disneyland news site founded by a group of USENET veterans, to go solo on MiceAge. Since then, he’s added other writers his site, where they’ve broken many stories about developments at Walt Disney theme parks, including the plans to revamp California Adventure.

Despite the fact that we’ve covered the same industry for years, I’d not had the chance to meet Lutz in person. So last week, I called and arranged a get-together, where we talked about how Lutz found his way into Web publishing, as well as how he’s managed to build a part-time interest into a news-breaking bully pulpit about a multi-billion-dollar industry. An edited transcript follows:

OJR: Tell us about your background and how you got into reporting news about Disney on the Web.

Lutz: It wasn’t anything that was planned. I used to work for RCA Records; spent 10 years there. When the problems started hitting in the music business, I got out. Then I got into helping with my family business, the [real estate] appraisal business, which isn’t going so good right now. [Smiles.] But I had started going on to USENET, because that had fascinated me when we’d started talking about it in the music business.

I started on alt.disney.disneyland. There was one guy handling the Disneyland FAQ at that point, and he’d kind of given up on it so I took it over because I got tired of answering the same questions all the time — what time is Fantasmic! this weekend?, you know. Then Werner Weiss from Yesterland [a website devoted to now-closed Disneyland attractions] contacted me and said ‘You really should have a website,’ and that was the start of the DIG [Disneyland Information Guide].

It just started as an FAQ, but then we developed it into a gossip column. I think having the viewpoint is what’s important to me. Because that’s one thing they’ll kill you for on the Web is not having one.

OJR: How often do you file a Disneyland update on MiceAge, and what goes into preparing each update?

Lutz: I don’t determine the timing. The timing is determined by when I confirm things and when there’s some news to report. To me, a press event is not news. News is finding out about a make-over of a park, or an attraction getting a new ride system.

OJR: What’s been Disney’s reaction to what you’ve done?

Lutz: It depends upon the arm of the company. The parks division; they’re not real happy. The other divisions, movies and music, they’re fine. They appreciate the coverage and we have a good working relationship with them.

Did you see the coverage on Finding Nemo [a new attraction at Disneyland] and what happened with that? They invited in all the media, but they put the bloggers in the walkway by the Matterhorn [a location many yards away from the Finding Nemo ride]. That’s what they think of the Web. They put them in Siberia. I feel badly that they don’t understand that we reach more people in one day than all of these podunk newspapers that they fly out to cover these events.

You have a culture there which is very secretive. So for employees, instead of getting information from their bosses, they are getting it from the Web. And it creates this hostile environment toward the Web. They could correct it by informing their own people about stuff. There was one time when someone told me that they’d walked through Team Disney Anaheim on a Tuesday after an update and all the computer screens were up and they were reading it to find out what was going on. What’s funny is that I’d taken that same walk through the Simpsons animation people and they had all their computer screens on MiceAge, too. It’s interesting the people it reaches to.

OJR: How long did it take for you to cultivate a network of sources within the Walt Disney Company?

Lutz: It just kind of happened. People wanted to get the word out about stuff. Particularly during the [former Disneyland president Paul] Pressler era. There were a lot of people who were concerned. Before the Columbia accident, before the Big Thunder accident [two fatal accidents involving rides at Disneyland], people were concerned and they started talking.

I think that it is important to put a light on some of this stuff.

OJR: Compare and contrast what you do in covering Disney with what’s happening at local newspapers and TV?

Lutz: I like to sit down with a newspaper and learn something. I don’t learn anything from most of the reporting that’s going on nowadays. They tell you something that’s happened, but they don’t give you analysis or insight. The political area still maintains that, but the business area, in particular, has been lacking.

The other things that gets me is that they don’t do more alliances with the Web. Saying ‘hey, we can’t have a specialist reporter, so why don’t we put you on and make you exclusive to us for so much a month. So don’t talk to the other guys; talk to us first when anything breaks and you’ll be our stringer at a lower cost than maintaining a full-priced person.’

Everything’s in transition right now. I think the future is quite bright for the Web. But it’s very painful getting there.

The good thing is that we’re reaching a point traffic-wise where the numbers are finally starting to make some sense.

OJR: Tell me a little about the business side of MiceAge.

Lutz: There’s nothing formal. All the alliances we have are informal. It’s not a real business per se because we haven’t reached those levels where I can pay my rent with it, though it is certainly a lot better than it used to be.

OJR: Are you doing a revenue split with the other writers?

Lutz: They all benefit is some way or another. Alain [Littaye, who covers Disneyland Paris], for example, sells books. And he sells quite a few. At ninety bucks a pop, seventy bucks, he does pretty good. Kevin [Yee, who covers Walt Disney World,] sells a lot of books and he gets coverage from other areas for what he does. For Sue [Kruse], it’s pretty simple. She likes covering the press events and doing all that fun stuff. She runs an antique store, normally. So there’s a trade-off for everybody.

What they do is they submit a story then I handle all the layout, design and pick the graphics and do all that stuff. I’m a real big believer in a magazine-type of layout. I like blogs, but I don’t think they have a soul, or a life like a magazine does.

OJR: What advice would you give to someone who wanted to start their own “MiceAge”-style site, covering some other topic?

Lutz: Two words: Be honest. Have a viewpoint and be honest. People respond to opinion. They might not like what you have to say, but they will respond to it.

OJR: Some traditional journalists might find that statement a bit contradictory.

Lutz: Well, I’m not a newspaper. I think that in a balanced world, you’d have both, just like a newspaper has a columnist. If I’m telling you something and giving you my opinion on it then I expect you to be smart enough to know what the facts are and what my opinion is about the facts.

When you say theme parks or Disney, people just don’t take you seriously. What’s funny is that when Eisner and Wells came in, they had a plan to sell all the parks. Then they looked at the books and said ‘my God, these Disney brothers knew what they were doing.’ Whenever they had a bad period, the parks fueled everything. It just happened with NBC Universal. They were going to sell everything, then they looked at the books and said ‘my God, this is a cash cow.’ I don’t think that even the business reporting elite in the mainstream media understand what the theme park business is.

Dick Cook and John Lasseter are former theme park people. All the people at Disney who are involved in films are former theme park people. There’s going to be an even tighter integration now, then ever before between these properties, because it works. It brings in cold, hard cash that they don’t have to split with anyone, like they have to do in a theater.

And why not a wiki?: Blogosphere lights up over 'wikitorials'

[Let’s get to the disclaimers right away, rather than burying them at the end, after you’ve read the piece: OJR Editor Robert Niles is a former member of the National Conference of Editorial Writers and newspaper editorial writer. He also has worked as a Senior Producer at latimes.com and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times.]

Let’s back off Michael Kinsley, okay?

The L.A. Times Opinion Editor and his staff have been catching heck from some writers after Editorial Page Editor Andrés Martinez announced last week that The Times would introduce “‘wikitorials’ — an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editorials.”

“This week The Los Angeles Times announced its intention to exile the square and stodgy voice of authority farther yet,” The New York Times’ Stacy Schiff declared. “Let’s hope the interactive editorial will lead directly to the interactive tax return. On the other hand, I hope we might stop short before we get to structural engineering and brain surgery. Some of us like our truth the way we like our martinis: dry and straight up.”

Cute, but Schiff’s dig assumes the pros always get it right. Let’s just say that if structural engineers showed the same skepticism toward their work as many professional editorial writers showed toward the U.S. administration’s claims about Iraq, I’d be choosing the ferry instead of the bridge whenever I needed to cross a river.

Talk of wikis inevitably elicit rants about Wikipedia, the free-for-all dictionary where users can create and revise entries, even to the point of rewriting history. Neither Martinez nor Kinsley have publicly revealed details of how their “wikitorials” will work. But the Wikipedia model need not be the only one to guide wiki publishers.

  • At OJR, we restrict editing access on our wikis to our registered users, who must provide a working e-mail address to register.
  • A news publisher could limit write access on the wiki to an invited group of readers with first-hand experience on a topic.
  • Or, a publisher could adopt an “open source journalism” model, opening a wiki to revision for a limited time, with an editor stitching together the best evidence and arguments from its versions for later print publication.

    “We are no longer couch potatoes absorbing whatever mass media many funnel our way,” OJR Senior Editor J.D. Lasica writes in his new book, “Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation.” “We make our own media. In many ways, we are our own media.”

    So why not try something different to engage the digital generation?

    Despite the protests, what The Times has proposed is not all that radical a change. On a limited scale, newspaper editorial writing shares much in common with wikis. Both are collective efforts, reflecting the view of a group of writers, rather than that of an individual. And both strive to report an enduring truth that rises encompasses more than just a single point of view.

    While Schiff lambasted reader participation in the editorial process, Timothy Noah at Kinsley’s old site, Slate, suggested that Kinsley abolish editorials at The Times altogether, arguing that papers ought to expand op-ed columns into the editorial page space.

    “The genre has certain built-in defects,” Noah wrote. “One is that editorials typically lack sufficient length to marshal evidence and lay out a satisfactory argument. Instead, they tend toward either timidity, at one extreme, or posturing, at the other. Almost every editorial I’ve ever read in my life has fallen into one of two categories: boring or irresponsible.”

    Having spent a few years’ of my life on an editorial page staff, I will not dispute Noah’s pessimistic view of the craft. Too many editorials stink. But a great many columns and traditional news stories die on the page, too.

    Too much traditional journalism amounts to little more than stenography. If a source fails to provide an appropriate conclusion, the reporter will not draw it – even if all necessary supporting evidence is there.

    Editorial writing not only allows conclusions, it demands them. Great editorial writers work like appellate court judges, weighing available evidence in the context of past decisions. Yet they must write for more than attorneys and scholars. Their words must engage and inspire an entire community to appropriate action.

    Yes, most editorial writers fail by those standards. That’s because too many publishers treat the editorial page as a dumping ground for aging reporters, or, worse, a private forum to do favors for or settle scores with the paper’s sources. Either way, readers don’t matter.

    Trashing the editorial page to give newshole to columnists won’t change that attitude. Nor will it give journalists, including opinion writers, additional resources to do more reporting.

    News publishers would do better to refresh their editorial pages with innovations that draw more readers into the process of crafting this institutional voice. Why rely on the limited knowledge and reporting resources of a handful of editorial writers when you could ask your entire community to gather and examine evidence?

    Sure, some papers ask established community leaders to sit in on an editorial board meeting now and then. Yawn. Declining readership and diminished influence demand a more aggressive response.

    What news publishers need is a tool that will allow any interested readers a seat at the table, with the ability to help direct what ought to be their community’s most powerful voice.

    Something like, oh, say, a wiki.

  • Can the Internet rejuvenate editorial cartooning?

    Cartoon
    Dale Neseman

    Cartoon
    Daryl Cagle

    Cartoon
    Don Asmussen

    Dale Neseman is the local editorial cartoonist for the Hamburg (NY) Sun. He’s also the local editorial cartoonist for the Voice News in New Baltimore, Michigan. And at the Jupiter (Fla.) Courier, as well as about 20 other small newspapers around the country. How does he stay local without being local?

    Neseman had a brainstorm in 1997 to start drawing cartoons based on local issues just by reading newspaper stories online and e-mailing submissions. To his surprise, small newspapers jumped at the chance to get local-issue cartoons from a freelancer living elsewhere rather than to pay a full-time staffer.

    The Internet has changed the way editorial cartoonists distribute their work and compete with others, while also allowing them to broaden their ideas into brief animations. Though the initial dot-com boom for animations (remember Mondo Media and Shockwave?) waned long ago, the current rebound in online advertising and political satire (think “The Daily Show” and JibJab) might bring another wave of interest to the old art form of political cartoons.

    Neseman, for his part, has succeeded even as a low-tech guy, with a dial-up connection and without a Web site to showcase his work. He has won awards in states outside of his hometown of Hamburg, New York, and gets paid about $25 to $40 per cartoon.

    “Fortunately, in a lot of cases, different small towns — and even larger towns — have a lot of the same issues, maybe school taxes or plowing roads, or general taxes,” Neseman told me. “So a lot of these places have a lot of the same problems. So I can tweak a cartoon that I’ve done in the past, and I don’t have to reinvent the wheel with each cartoon.”

    Neseman’s editor at the Voice News, Donna Remer, doesn’t mind a whit that he doesn’t live in southeast Michigan. She said that one cartoon that dealt with water problems in New Haven, Michigan, led to a citizens’ group using it on T-shirts they wore to village council meetings.

    “I’m sure they didn’t realize he lives out of state,” Remer said via e-mail. “The Internet and e-mail are changing the way all journalists work, and cartoonists are no exception. The trick is to use the efficiencies these technologies offer without compromising our very basic commitment to local content, relevant to our readers.”

    Economies of scale

    Despite Neseman’s modest success, he still works part-time as a graphic designer. These are the worst of times and the best of times for editorial cartoonists. Newspapers have been cutting full-time editorial cartoonist jobs down to the bone, and prices paid in syndication seem to drop by the minute. But the Web has brought new business opportunities for popular cartoonists, with global distribution and the chance for self-syndication.

    Veteran cartoonist Daryl Cagle has been in the eye of the storm for online cartoons. His Cagle.com Pro Cartoonists Index was once lavishly funded by Slate and MSN, even allowing him to pay cartoonists for featuring their work online. That hub has allowed cartoonists to see each other’s work, exposing repeated or clichéd ideas to fellow colleagues.

    After drastic cuts at Slate a few years ago, Cagle was on the verge of shuttering the site before Slate and the participating cartoonists agreed to a more austere budget. Slate continues to prize its collection of editorial cartoons, with Cagle’s index and Doonesbury.com. The site, now owned by the Washington Post Co., would even consider adding more cartoons or political animations in the future, according to its new publisher, Cliff Sloan.

    And Cagle has built a thriving syndication service of his own called Cagle Cartoons, where he hawks custom cartoons and sells subscription packages to some 800 newspapers from his stable of cartoonists. He has four employees for the syndication business, but he doesn’t think major syndicates take political cartoonists that seriously as a business.

    “In the eyes of the major syndicates, editorial cartoons are like the retarded stepchilds of the comic strips,” Cagle said. “The big syndicates are interested in selling comic strips because you can get the plush Garfield and Opus and Snoopy, which you don’t get with political cartoons. There isn’t a lot of money in political cartoons, and it isn’t something that big syndicates are interested in, but they still like to offer a broad range of services.”

    And while the Net offers a way for cartoonists to sell merchandise such as books through online stores directly to readers, it’s tough to break into the business and establish new talent with so much competition for attention online and a low barrier to entry.

    “It’s a tough market for political cartoonists to try to make a living,” Cagle said. “I get unsolicited submissions from a gazillion cartoonists and it’s sad. ‘Where can I get a job as a political cartoonist?’ I don’t know. It’s a big lake, and the lake is receding, and the fish are flopping on the shore. … What I tell college kids and aspiring cartoonists is that there are 85 cartoonists with full-time jobs, and it’s a much better plan for your career to count on getting into the NBA or NFL.”

    Chris Pizey is CEO of UClick, the online arm of Andrews McMeel Universal, the largest independent newspaper syndicator. Pizey has seen the boom and bust cycle for comics online, including the more political Doonesbury.com and the fuzzy Garfield.com. When ad money dried up, Slate picked up Doonesbury online, and Pizey helped launch a subscription service called MyComics.com and even a wireless service, GoComics.com.

    Pizey told me that business has improved on newspaper sites after the bust.

    “We saw a lot of attrition on the non-newspaper sites [during the bust], but on the newspaper sites, it’s stayed pretty consistent, and it’s starting to grow nicely again over the past year as the ad market has picked up,” he said. “They’re looking at how to engage new users, and comics and puzzles are a great way to do that. They’ve been working in newspapers for 100 years, and they work just as well on news sites.”

    UClick has even tried an online incubator site for newbies called ComicsSherpa, where they charge aspiring cartoonists for space on the site. Pizey says UClick is now offering four or five of the best ones in syndication online, while United Media picked up one in print. But he’s not overzealous about an online cartooning career.

    “Revenue on the Web is still difficult,” he said. “It’s still hard to generate enough revenues for an artist to produce a daily comic strip. We’re just getting to the point in the next 18 months, where that will start to be realistic. And we’ll be able to identify new talent and generate enough revenue and can provide a daily comic experience across the Web. And eventually we’ll have a new comic experience, whether that’s animated or whatever comes next.”

    Getting re-animated

    UClick dabbled in animated editorial cartoons before the dot-com bubble burst, and Pizey is keen to find an animated series. But right now, there’s only one prominent editorial cartoonist doing animation online as a full-time freelancer: Mark Fiore. Fiore started out doing static cartoons for the San Francisco Examiner, and even drew them from Boulder, Colorado, back in 1992 — without the benefit of the Web to follow San Francisco local news.

    “I got a print subscription to the Examiner, which cost an arm and a leg,” Fiore told me. “It was like $100 per month or more. I got the papers in paper bags about a week later, 5 to 7 days after they were published. I’d do a packet of cartoons on local San Francisco issues and FedEx them back to the Examiner. It was a very expensive, money-losing situation, but that’s how we had to do it in the old days.”

    Fiore eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he learned animation and tried to make the Hollywood scene. After giving up on that and moving north to San Francisco, Fiore freelanced for various California newspapers and got his dream job as staff cartoonist for the San Jose Mercury News. Unfortunately, that was right as the dot-com downturn started, and Fiore had grown accustomed to the freelance lifestyle. He left the Mercury News and started doing animations regularly for various news sites and e-zines.

    Now he’s been able to support himself doing one animation per week, and doing a small self-syndicated run to Working For Change, AOL, Village Voice, as well as SFGate and MotherJones.com. He charges about $300 per outlet per animation, and would like to add more outlets, without overexposing himself and having to lower his price.

    “If you’re drawing for a cartoon locally in Dubuque then there’s no problem if it also runs in Des Moines,” Fiore said. “But on the Web people can flip around so fast. I’m trying to keep up a level of scarcity, but I don’t want to be quite so scarce.”

    Fiore also started selling DVDs of his work, just as the duo at JibJab had done before the election. He sold 200 copies before he even had finished making the DVD. But despite his success at skewering every aspect of the Bush administration’s foibles, Fiore remains alone as a successful editorial animator online. “I’d rather be a pioneer than an anomaly,” he said. “I hope there’s other people that come along and do this.”

    Don Asmussen, the staff editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle, has experience doing political animations for dot-com startup Mondo Media. In fact, he held two full-time jobs in ’98-’99 as cartoonist for the Chronicle and animator for Mondo — doing one animation per week during that time. Asmussen’s animations are much longer, fuller productions — and he had the help of other animators and producers at Mondo. But the economics never worked out.

    Asmussen told me that banner ads weren’t working then and that no one would sit through an ad before or during a three-minute animation. Plus, the online audience at the time didn’t have an interest in political spoofs.

    “My biggest concern is that the people who are really into political satire tend to be a little older, and kids tend to be into social satire like ‘The Simpsons,'” Asmussen said. “With political satire, we got into this weird area where the audience isn’t really into computers, and the younger people who would access your stuff easily would be into a different type of humor. But that might have changed in the last couple of years, with ‘The Daily Show’ changing what people expect with political humor. The audience will be there, but I’m not sure if the money will be.”

    Asmussen’s popular “Bad Reporter” editorial strip in the Chronicle was just picked up by Universal Press Syndicate, and he’s hoping to start doing animations for SFGate. He sees animation as the wave of the future for editorial cartoonists, forever stuck in a one-frame, one-liner joke.

    Meanwhile, UClick’s new wireless service, GoComics.com, has carriage by Sprint, Verizon, and Orange so far. Though still in its infancy, the service had 2.5 million downloads of comics, cell wallpapers and ringtones in the past year, and UClick’s Pizey says it’s the fastest growing part of his business.

    But Cagle isn’t ready to jump on the cellular bandwagon yet, saying he was offered a wireless deal that wouldn’t pay him money for two years.

    Whether the Net can bring a renaissance to political cartooning or not, the time seems ripe for political spoofs, and the instant nature of e-mail and viral marketing remain a breeding ground for visual and animated satire. And as Neseman has proven, you don’t have to be a local to draw locally.

    “I’m thinking about doing six months in Florida,” Neseman told me. “That’s simple. I just have to put a computer under my arm and go south.”