No idea is really new

I couldn’t help but be amused Monday morning when Robin Meade (the one-time WMAQ-TV reporter-type who now anchors the morning news on CNN’s headline news service) sounded so perky in telling us that IKEA is now in the business of selling us actual houses.

The Ideabox pre-fab home ...



Now, one can not only go to IKEA to buy a batch of build-it-yourself furniture, you can even plunk down some $86,000 and buy a build-it-yourself house.

ACTUALLY, A KIT with all the pieces needed. What a new innovation! How clever!

Except for a couple of things.

First off, it seems that the prefab houses are not actually an IKEA product. They were designed (and the kits put together) by an Oregon-based company called Ideabox.

Although, Ideabox got input in the design of the kits from IKEA officials in Portland. So naturally, everybody was quick to give IKEA the credit. The company had to go so far as issuing a statement last week to clarify the situation.

YET THERE IS another, more important, reason why this particular “story” amuses me. The idea of buying a prefab house is so NOT a new concept.

Anybody who thinks that buying one of these kits and putting together a residence puts them at the forefront of the 21^st Century will be depressed to learn that they’re, “So last century!”

Because we all either remember, or have heard the stories about, the days when Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck & Co. was in the business of selling pre-fabricated houses – many of which are still standing even though it has been just over seven decades since Sears got out of the house business.

... and its century-old Sears predecessor



In fact, the concept is so similar that a part of me wonders if it is possible for the Sears types to sue Ideabox for stealing their idea. (It probably isn’t, but I’m sure Sears officials are feeling so desperate these days that they’d consider just about any concept that didn’t involve closing more stores).

THE IDEABOX HOUSES are in kit form, with all the pieces needed to put together a house. You have to figure out how to buy a plot of land to build it on and pay for the connections to electricity and other utilities (otherwise the structure becomes nothing more than an overly-elaborate outhouse).

But it’s literally a build-it-yourself project. Invite a few friends over, particularly if you have friends who actually have some skills when it comes to construction or repair projects.

Which sounds so virtually identical to the concept of the old Sears Modern Homes that I have to wonder who ripped off whom.

Those homes were also sold through the catalog (you couldn’t go to an actual Sears store to pick out a “house”) between 1908 and 1940 – with the company estimating that some 70,000 kits were sold during those 32 years.

THE KITS WERE shipped literally in railroad box cars, with every single piece labeled properly so that (if you were capable of following instructions) you could put it together yourself.

Or perhaps invite the friends and neighbors over to help – almost like the days of old when this was still the frontier and you might literally turn a home construction into a “barn-raising” party.

These Ideabox people have literally resurrected an idea with origins in the early days of this nation (the 18^th and early 19^th centuries) as we are now one decade into the 21^st.

And just as the Ideabox houses are advertised as having all of the equipment needed for modern technology (it won’t be a primitive shack), the Sears houses of old incorporated the now-standard ideas of central heating, indoor plumbing and electricity.

IN FACT, I can only think of one real difference between the two ideas.

The Sears Modern Homes idea ultimately died with the Great Depression, which caused many people to default on the mortgages that Sears offered to help people pay for such a financially-substantial purchase – which ultimately made the idea of a new home purchase too expensive for enough people to buy for Sears to keep the product in their inventory of goods for sale.

MEADE: Told us about it



Whereas it seems the Ideabox houses are being marketed in part as a cheaper alternative to a more conventionally-constructed residence; although Meade on Monday morning quipped that the prefab houses could be a cheap way to have a small, “vacation house” on an isolated plot of land.

I suppose anything is possible, particularly in these times that many people feel economically-strapped, and some think it is the worst downtown SINCE the Great Depression.

SO SINCE THIS Ideabox concept seems to be a Portland-based concept for the time being, it may be some time before we start seeing such structures being erected here.

Which means it remains to be seen whether they will take on the lasting character of the Sears Modern Homes. Will we someday see clusters of Ideabox/IKEA houses being boasted of – similar to how places like Elgin think it adds to their historic character because their roughly 200 Sears homes are the largest-known collection of such houses anywhere in the world.

And for those of you wondering why I'd write up something on this trivial topic, would you really rather read yet another piece of commentary about "Super Tuesday?" I didn't think so.

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Elgin publishing schedule could become the norm for Chicago newspapers

I’m not a regular reader of the Courier News newspaper of Elgin. But I will be paying attention to the publication in the Kane County suburbs of Chicago because it is planning on a couple of changes that I have long thought were inevitable for newspapers.

The newspaper is giving up on the idea of publishing a distinct edition for Saturday. Some of the features that now appear in the Saturday paper will turn up a day earlier on Friday, while more attention will be put into making the Sunday paper (the one that pretends to be fat and substantial in content) more worthwhile.

THE NEWSPAPER’S PUBLISHERS also plan to turn their broadsheet format newspaper into a tabloid (think of Tribune-sized pages being converted into Sun-Times size).

Neither of these changes bothers me. In fact, I can’t help but think that the newspaper industry has been moving in this direction for quite awhile. So making these changes is just a matter of accepting modern reality.

The simple fact is that most Saturday newspapers are pointless. Many papers publish scrawny editions on that day whose sole purpose is to create the illusion that the publication comes out every single day.

But the fact is that readership of Saturday editions of newspapers has always been significantly lower than any other day, particularly compared to the Friday and Sunday editions that precede and follow it.

THE FACT IS that while I personally wait until Sunday before reading a Sunday newspaper, I am aware of the fact that many people prefer to buy those “early edition” copies that hit the newsstands by Saturday afternoon (I once bought a “Sunday” paper in downtown Chicago at 7 a.m. Saturday), then spend the whole weekend going through all those feature-y sections.

If one can accept the idea that the hard news in the front pages and in the sports section is NOT going to be the hot-breaking news from Saturday, but is instead some space-filling features that can be removed and replaced with real news for the Sunday “late final edition,” then this concept makes sense.

I could learn to accept this goal, if eliminating a Saturday paper meant more emphasis and more interesting publications on Friday and Sunday.

Besides, the part of me that is a political reporter knows one other reality – many government officials make a point of releasing statements on potentially negative (from their perspective) news late Friday afternoon.

THEY VIEW SUCH activity as a way of claiming they have nothing to hide, while also ensuring that the resulting stories will turn up in the sparsely read Saturday editions of newspapers.

If doing away with those Saturday editions meant that such stories would turn up in better-read Sunday papers, then that would be a plus for the general public. If such a practice also caused political people to realize that their cheap, pathetic attempts to manipulate news coverage were destined to fail, that would also be a plus for the general public.

Then, there’s the other change – the one that’s most likely to cause outrage among long-standing readers of the Courier News. Tabloid is not just a trashy type of reporting, it’s really a printed page format.

It is the one that the Sun-Times has used for more than six decades (the old Chicago Sun, and later, the Sun & Times, were broadsheets), and can allow for pages that give greater emphasis to the stories placed on them – because the pages are smaller and there are fewer elements per page.

A QUALITY TABLOID newspaper can almost be like a daily news magazine, and can be designed in ways that make for more interesting reading.

Now for those people who are about to argue with me that newspapers are meant to be broadsheet, with those big bulky pages that fold in half, I’d argue that the changes of recent years have already undercut the broadsheet format.

With the way that newspaper pages have become more and more narrow, the typical broadsheet newspaper is barely wider than a tabloid page. It’s not like the old days when tabloid pages were 15 or so inches wide – a page width that even the Wall Street Journal has abandoned.

Seriously, I took my ruler to the Friday editions of the Tribune and Sun-Times, and found that the latter paper’s pages of 11 ½ inches wide were close to the Tribune, at 12 inches.

AND WHEN ONE looks at the graphic elements that the Tribune is trying to do with its latest re-design, they usually consist of large pictures and bold type whose potential visual strength is lost by having to fill a full broadsheet page of 22 inches high (compared to 12 ½ inches for the Sun-Times).

In fact, what hurt the Tribune’s front page presentation from Nov. 5 (Barack Obama’s Election Day victory) was that most of the large photograph and all of the headline type turned up in the bottom half of the front page. Which means all those news boxes had papers with the bulk of the goods out of view of the potential buyer.

My honest attitude toward the Tribune’s attempt at a new format is that they’re trying to do tabloid style graphics (which can be attractive if done stylishly and with a touch of class) on pages far too large.

In fact, there are times if I wonder if the Tribune’s future is to become a collection of loosely affiliated themed publications along the lines of “RedEye” or “Hoy” – both of which are tabloid in format and in spirit.

SO I VIEW the Courier News management (which ultimately is the Sun-Times company management) as having a grasp on reality in accepting that the tabloid format makes sense.

It would be better than what I once saw during a trip to Indianapolis. On the way back home, we stopped for gasoline and something to eat in West Lafayette, Ind. Out of habit, I stopped at a local news box and picked up the local newspaper – the Journal & Courier – to go along with the Indianapolis Star I picked up earlier.

That newspaper was presented as a broadsheet with a fold in the middle. But its pages were the same width as the Chicago Sun-Times, and its page height was only about three inches more than the Sun-Times, or about seven inches less than a Tribune.

The Indiana paper was a tabloid pretending to be a broadsheet, which made the whole presentation (in my mind) look convoluted.

CONSIDERING THAT THE Courier News is a part of the whole Sun-Times News Group (which includes daily papers in outer cities such as Joliet, Waukegan, Tinley Park and Merrillville, Ind., to name a few), I would not be surprised if all that company’s newspapers wound up taking on such format changes. Elgin could very well become the laboratory for what Chicago-area newspapers will look like in coming years.

When one takes into account the fact that newspapers in other cities are talking about dropping daily publication on weekdays (telling their readers that those will be the days they will have to use the newspaper’s website if they want updated information), I view the whole Elgin experiment as far less radical than some people might try to portray it as.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: The end of January will be the beginning of a new format for one (http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081226005015&newsLang=en) of the daily newspapers that publishes on the fringe of the Chicago area.

The Courier News of Elgin is far from the only “daily” newspaper to decide “daily” isn’t (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003924707) worth the extra effort come the publisher's Pay Day.