Some still depend on convenient wristwatches

It has been reported that sales of wristwatches are down because younger consumers who spend much of their days staring at their smartphones don't feel a need for another device that will tell them what time it is — that will ONLY tell them the time.

I obviously am not a member of that generation. Since I retired from daily work in an office, I had put aside the dressy analog watch with hour and minute hands and even a day and date window and a metal wristband. These days, I strap on a digital watch with a stopwatch function (to time my running and other occasional needs). The watch would be on my wrist before I went downstairs for breakfast every morning.

Two days ago, I picked up my watch to strap it on my wrist and realized the view screen on the watch was blank. After thinking for a moment that the watch must be broken, I realized it was probably only a dead battery. There was no point in keeping on my wrist a useless watch with no numerals on its face. I put the watch aside and went about my business.

Within minutes, I found myself turning my left wrist clockwise to see what time it was. I continued working outside for another half hour or so before looking at my bare wrist again. In the next 10 hours, I probably glanced at my bare wrist another dozen times. I wanted to know how long I had been outside, how long before I could break for lunch, how long before a basketball game I was interested in would be on television. I wanted to be on top of time.

Yes, I could do as the millennials do and look at my phone, which always displays the correct time on its screen. But I found that action — digging the phone out of my pocket, "waking up" the phone and seeing the time — was much less efficient that merely turning my wrist 45 degrees to show the digital watch's face.

This problem became more acute when I decided to go for a short run. I could not switch my watch to stopwatch function and could not press the button that starts the timer with a simple turn of the wrist. My intention was to run four minutes, walk two minutes, run four, walk two, etc. as a way of working my way back into some near-septuagenerian physical condition. Keeping track of those running/walking times was easy on my wristwatch, a little more complicated with a phone in my pocket.

As I write this, I am wearing my "formal" watch with its analog face and metal band, and I am frequently glancing at it to see how much time I've spent on this task. I could glance instead at the corner of my computer screen to see the time, but the habit of turning my left wrist is deeply embedded, and I am more likely to look at my watch than to glance at the computer screen.

It's hard to believe that wristwatches will go away, replaced by smart phones, but I've found it hard to believe GPS devices have replaced paper maps, email has largely replaced letters and faxes, and websites have replaced encyclopedia and phone books. The wristwatch was a 20th century advancement, which gradually replaced pocket watches. My father carried a pocket watch most of his life but did begin wearing a wristwatch (a gift) occasionally in his elder years. (That pocket watch, which I remember his holding to my ear to hear its ticking, is now one of my most cherished possessions, displayed in a glass case on my mantel.)

Getting my first wristwatch (a Christmas gift) was a milestone of my development. The cheap mechanical watches of 60 years ago were not very durable or reliable. I must have worn and discarded several over a few years. The invention of battery-driven wristwatches was a huge leap forward and soon evolved into digital watches with multiple functions.

Today, I will replace the battery on my digital watch, and I will wear it most of my waking hours because lifelong habits die hard.

Newspaper design aims at wrong audience

It seems fitting that this one-thousandth post to this blog should be about newspapers. After all, this blog grew out of a newspapering career. I began writing a blog at the urging of one of the many consultants who worked their way through the newspaper I edited. After being laid off, blog and all, by the newspaper, I began blogging on my own.

The newspaper I read every day, the News & Observer of Raleigh, has redesigned itself, and my initial reaction was, "please don't." Although the N&O had famed newspaper designer Mario Garcia create the redesign, it includes most of the flaws I complained about each time in my 33-year newspaper career that we went through a redesign. My complaint with newspaper designers is that they are more concerned with creating a pretty design than with communicating information to readers. Although it's nice to impress readers with the beauty of your design, what readers want is information. If they want art, they can go to a museum. Great photos used well attract readers and can tell a story visually. Many of the great news events of our history are remembered in photos — Neil Armstrong standing on the moon; Jackie Kennedy reaching back to pull a Secret Service agent aboard as the presidential limousine rushed a fatally wounded president to a Dallas hospital; the World Trade Center collapsing into rubbish — but a newspaper is both visual and linguistic.

The bright colors on section fronts serve no useful purpose while wasting space. The full-column photos of columnists also waste space. For generations, newspapers have relied on half-column mugs to identify columnists (and newsmakers). The N&O redesign changes the standard "head and shoulders shot" to a "head and elbows shot."

The bigger pictures and bright colors, along with multiple subheads and pull-outs, are aimed at attracting the youngest audience, the millennials, who every survey shows are not readers and won't be readers of print. As one of the first newspapers to get aboard the digital bandwagon, the N&O has succeeded in building a digital audience, and I use the web edition of the N&O when I'm out of town or the paper is late. I like the digital edition. Trying to make the print edition more like the web I don't like.

An earlier redesign of the N&O also turned me off. Instead of a standard four sections per day — front (main news section), Triangle/State, Sports, and Feature — the N&O merged the local section with the main news section, with the result that some clearly second-tier news made the front page. For subscribers who don't live in the Triangle but depend on the N&O for state and national news, this is distressing. It also leaves just three sections to the paper, and the section size is widely skewed. The Features section is now barely large enough to carry the comics. What is at stake here is not some effort to better serve readers; it's a simple means of saving costs, regardless of the readers' preferences.

I expect to be a newspaper reader until I die, but it appears I'll have to settle for newspapers designed for generations other than my own, despite the fact that the 65+ demographic is the fasted growing segment of the population.