The cover story in the current issue of Time, “Who Needs Marriage? A Changing Institution,” shares the results of a new Pew Research Center study on how, as a nation, our attitudes toward marriage have changed over the past fifty years.
There are a lot of statistics in the article that cannot be broken down to the local level, but there was one question I knew I could answer: What percentage of adults in Lancaster County were married in 1960, compared to 2008?
I asked this question because it was surprising to me to learn that, nationwide, only about half of all adults are currently married, down from more than two thirds in 1960. (We’re counting adults as individuals 20 years of age or older.) I was curious to know what those numbers were for Lancaster County, to compare how we stack up to the nation as a whole. Here’s the answer.
Table: Percentage of Adults Who Are Currently Married
United States
Lancaster Co.
1960
68%
78%
2008
52%
62%
It’s uncanny how Lancaster County has remained exactly ten percent higher in this regard over the past half-century. We may be moving slower, but we’re following the same trend as the nation as a whole.
This leads me to a reader poll: Is marriage obsolete? When Time asked this question in 1978, “when the divorce rate was much higher than it is today,” 28% said it was. In this new study, that number has grown to 40%. What do you say?
This month’s First Friday showed that Lancaster still has plenty of surprises in store, and that the city is still attracting talented people from around the region.
Garrett Faber at the Keppel Building
The show I absolutely had to get to was Garrett Faber’s show of photographs. It was on the fourth floor of the Keppel Building, little publicized, but amazing. The guy is a visionary. An extremely talented, incredibly humble visionary.
I arrived a little after six and he was still hanging photos with his friends. There were hundreds of them–digital photos printed then cut to look like Polaroids.
You know all those hipstamatic and instagram photos you wish people would stop sharing? Garrett Faber’s photos are the excellence those photos knock off.
I’ve been following Garrett online for years now, but this was the first time I had a chance to meet him and see his work in person. Seriously, this guy is an artist not to be missed.
Creative Reuse and Hodge Podgery at the Stahr Center
In the Stahr Center, I finally had the chance to peek in at Lancaster Creative Reuse. It wasn’t at all what I expected. Instead of chaotic piles of large objects, the shop is an intricately-organized presentation of highly useful arts and crafts supplies.
November 5th also marked the opening of a satellite location in the Stahr Center for the Harrisburg shop Hodge Podgery. They’re referring to the Lancaster shop as HoPoLanCo.
New Play Readings at the Fulton Clubhouse
The final highlight of my First Friday night out was a set of readings of four new plays by members of the Lancaster Dramatists’ Platform. It was the first time Creative Works of Lancaster (I guard their bank account, as treasurer) sponsored the event, which is held on a near-monthly basis. The plays were great, and it’s awesome to be a part of theater when it’s at this raw and early of a stage. The readings largely give the playwrights an opportunity to see how actors and audience respond to their new work, so they can make revisions.
A lot going on in Lancaster in the artistic underground!
I know some people read this blog to get a sense of the major topics of conversation in Lancaster. I hardly provide day-by-day coverage, but at the same time when something dominates our ongoing “community conversation,” I want to share that. In most cases, I’m forthright with my opinions. In this case, I don’t have strong ones, so I’d like to focus on recapping the current situation.
The sequence of events in this public conversation
The "official" jpg of the logo is now this version which features a red, rather than orange, version of the rose. The tag line is "A city authentic."
As best I can piece together, three weeks ago, on August 11, a mass e-mail went out (from Lancaster Arts, someone suggested, but it’s not on their newsletters archive), with the subject line, “Exciting news for downtown Lancaster!” It contained an announcement of key branding elements to be used in an official capacity by Lancaster city. The guts of this e-mail were shared on LancTalk.com, a privately-run forum site that serves as the replacement for the TalkBack forums on LancasterOnline.com, which were closed earlier this year, by a 46 year-old male who reveals himself only under the code name “Citydweller.” He posted a jpg of the logo and shared that the new tag line was “A city authentic.” The overwhelming tone of the active discussion thread which followed was negative. Early on, someone even remarked that her neighbor thought it looked like a Nazi swastika. (LancTalk.com has mockingly adopted “A forum authentic” as its new tag line.)
Lancaster city held an event this past Wednesday (August 25) at the failed Pennsylvania Academy of Music building to announce officially the new brand identity. Larry Alexander reported on the event for the Intelligencer-Journal. The reaction to the story on LancTalk.com was typical stuff—grumpy and eager to move off-topic.
On or near August 11, Lancaster County resident Shelley Castetter, an independent journalist who runs LancasterExpress.com, began researching what led up to this announcement of the city’s rebranding. This research culminated in an article headlined “City Authentic, Logo Not So Much,” which she published on August 28 as the start of a new thread on the LancTalk forums. This article revealed that the logo is a near-exact reproduction of an early-twentieth-century rose design by Dard Hunter, a key figure in the American Arts and Crafts art movement.
Just yesterday, however, the official jpg of the logo featured an orange version of the rose.
The next day, someone operating under the code name “lilmissmoxieful” posted a video to YouTube demonstrating that the city’s new logo is an exact duplicate of Hunter’s design, simply turned 180 degrees and given a different color. The video cast all the blame on Moxie House, a two-person Lancaster Township-based design/marketing firm that helped the city develop its new brand and codify its new brand standards. Shelley’s article made clear, however, that Moxie House did not create the logo itself.
Instead, Bernie Harris reported for the Intelligencer-Journal yesterday, the logo design was given to Moxie House by city officials. The article made no reference to the earlier work of Larry Alexander, Shelley Castetter, or the response in the LancTalk.com forums. It did, however, include a direct quote from an interview the reporter had with Dard Hunter III, the artist’s grandson:
“I don’t remember anybody asking. Had they done so, I certainly would have given my blessing,” said Hunter, who has previously given permission for the rose’s use for non-commercial purposes.
There was a little reaction to the story on LancTalk.com. Shelley Castetter is clearly offended that her reporting was not cited in the Intelligencer-Journal article.
The original rose designed by Dard Hunter
Where’d the logo come from?
So how did the logo get in the hands of Lancaster city officials? A sign company suggested and provided it for certain signs and banners that have been around town for at least a year. City officials first filed to register a copyright on the image with the U.S. Copyright Office, then opted to instruct Moxie House to use that as the city’s new logo. Even though a trademark on the image (flipped 180 degrees) is held by Dard Hunter Studio, the copyright office apparently approved the city’s request to register its copyright of the image. (I can only assume that if it went to court, the court would view this as an error on the part of the copyright office and overturn Lancaster city’s claim to owning any rights related to the image.)
I poked fun at the situation last night by uploading to Facebook an version of the full logo where the words “The City of Lancaster: A City Authentic” remained in tact but the logo had been replaced by an orange Nike swoosh turned 180 degrees.
Kelly Watson (soon to be Kelly Kautz) posted a thoughtful blog entry on the subject this morning, followed by a post this afternoon including quotes from her conversation with Deb Brant of Moxie House.
The city has now added a PDF to the brand page of its site declaring, “The rose graphic was created by artist Dard Hunter and is used with permission.”
What I’m finding most interesting and inspirational is this bit from the city’s “brand toolbox“(pdf) which advocates the use of particular terms that are seen as brand-consistent. One of the terms is “civic dialogue,” and here’s what the “toolkit” says about it: “An aspirational trait, civic dialogue is an exciting opportunity for our city. Generally defned, ‘Civic dialogue creates conditions for people to participate in shaping their environment. It is intentional and purposeful. Civic dialogue explores the dimensions of the civic or social issue, working toward common understanding in an open-ended discussion. It engages multiple perspectives on an issue, including potentially conficting and unpopular ones rather than promoting a single point of view.'” The quotes is attributed to Ruth J. Abram, founder of New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
So, a) what did I miss or get wrong, and b) what do you make of all this?
Edit: Oh, and apparently there’s a song to go with this brand identity.
Edit 2: You’ll notice I prefer to use “Lacaster city” rather than “the City of Lancaster.” I’m unlikely to get brand-consistent on that one.
The entire team at the Internet marketing agency where I work as the social media strategist is an active member of Agencyside, a Phoenix-based source of professional development for advertising, marketing, and PR agencies. I’m pleased to be contributing a monthly article to their blog, where I share insight with other agencies. Given the audience, this isn’t beginner-level material, and it’s aimed at consultants rather than implementers. Still, if you’re interested, this month I explain how to make social media strategy maps more powerful by separating structure maps and process maps.
As for Lancaster-related material, you havesubscribed to The Lancast, the weekly podcast I co-host, haven’t you?
Another national news story is brewing in our town. This time it’s about a news agency itself—the (take a long breath) Intelligencer Journal–Lancaster New Era. Yesterday they rolled out a new online paywall they believe will net them $10,000 to $500,000 a year.
What’s this paywall, and who will it affect? It’s a $20/year charge to out-of-towners who read Lancaster obituaries like they’re going out of style.
Monday morning, the website for a midsized paper in southeastern Pennsylvania became the first to go public with the paid content system of Journalism Online, the startup engineered by Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and others.
LancasterOnline, which serves the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, began informing people who live outside Lancaster County and read its online obituary listings that visiting the obits page will cost $1.99 a month after they’ve viewed seven pages each month. Annual subscriptions cost $19.99.
Screenshot of the notice all obituary readers now see when they visit LancasterOnline.com
Media analysts seem to think this is one of the most ridiculous ideas they’ve heard when it comes to online revenue models. For instance, Mark Potts writes:
Are they serious? Are there really that many people people visiting the Lancaster site to read obits? Really?
The folks in Lancaster claim to have done the math that proves there’s a substantial out of town audience for obits, though it’s based on a lot of guesswork (and probably proves, once again, that journalists really aren’t that good at math). Notably, Lancaster seems to base its projections on traffic numbers from the not-so-reliable Google Analytics rather than on data from the site’s internal logs, which would be much more precise. That seems odd.
According to Mitchell’s story, LancasterOnline estimates that 100,000 out-of-market visitors to the site read obits each year. And the site reckons that more than 10 percent of them do it—yes, read obits—several times a week. Okaaaay. Taking the math further, Lancaster estimates that nearly 90,000 visitors to the site read the obits at least once a week, and 17,692 visitors read the obits four times a week.
These numbers are preposterous. Remember, this is little LancasterOnline, not NewYorkTimes.com or WashingtonPost.com. I find it hard to believe that Lancaster has that sort of constant, repeat traffic to its obits—or else it’s got an audience with a truly obsessive fascination with grazing news about local deaths.
If I were seeking to kill off newspapers (I’m not), I would try to persuade them to charge people to read obituaries online. Apparently that’s the plan of Journalism Online, a profiteer seeking to cash in not only on newspapers’ death wish but on the deaths of their readers.
Journalism Online’s sucker in this fantasy-based paywall experiment is the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era (oh, the irony in that name; I will call it the Old Era for purposes of this blog).
Laugh if you want — and I’ll admit, I’m tittering — but any small-town newspaper publisher will tell you obits are a pretty big deal for readers. In this case, LancasterOnline is making money coming and going (if you’ll pardon the pun): they charge survivors to place death notices, and now they’ll charge out-of-towners to read them.
(When the younger generations start dying, we’ll just inform everyone via social networks.)
This sure sounds like a low-revenue road test to me, but Lancaster Online’s editor thinks they can squeeze $100,000 out of the oldster demographic that keeps up regularly with far-flung deaths.
All I have to say is that the people who came up with this scheme are nothing like the cultural creatives who are engineering Lancaster’s future. This is preservationist, reactionary, and, I suspect, based on data that is (excuse the pun) dead wrong.
The cover story in the current issue of Time, “Who Needs Marriage? A Changing Institution,” shares the results of a new Pew Research Center study on how, as a nation, our attitudes toward marriage have changed over the past fifty years.
