The newspaper 12-step program

An alcoholic in recovery gives up all the things that remind them of their past life. They throw out their "One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor!" t-shirts, they replace the Jim Beam medallion on their key ring with the serenity prayer and they don't ever risk getting the "taste for it" back by even trying a non-alcoholic beer or a piece of amaretto cheesecake. All these things perpetuate the idea that I'm still a drinker and so they cast off that skin as the first step to changing their lives.

Ah, but what are we going to do with newspapers? No wonder the newspaper can't find a new identity when even their name forces them to hold onto the past. Newspaper.

It's not surprising that the newspaper's identity is all wrapped up in the physical - that's our history, our roots, what made us great. It harkens back to patriots printing dissenting views and fomenting revolt against the British in small, dark colonial print shops. It's a glorious history, now tarnishing and trying, painfully, to survive.

But we're stuck with this moniker. We have newspaper companies, operating newspapers, selling newspaper advertising and, even more bizarrely, operating newspaper web sites.

Other transforming industries don't have this same problem.

The central product of the book publishing industry is a book - it may be a hard cover edition, a paper back, an ebook or a digital book. But it is still a book. If printed books went away tomorrow, the industry would not have to battle the identity crisis of losing its essence.

No industry has transformed quite as much in the just the past decade as the music industry. And it's a good thing that they knew their central product was the music and not the record, tape, or CD that the music was recorded onto. The loneliest places in the country today must be record stores. Are there even still record stores?

But then there are newspapers where even our name evokes the ink-on-paper albatross that is dragging the industry rather than allowing it to transform. A few years ago, Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper company, realigned and renamed its divisions. What had been the Newspaper Division was renamed to...

The Community Newspaper Division. Gannett missed an opportunity to rebrand its identity and jettison the paper. Some larger newspapers have tried to brand themselves as media groups made up of websites, magazines and newspapers. That's a step in the right direction, but it is more for show than actually a sea change in attitude.

So much of the industry's identity is wrapped up in the medium rather than the product that we can't really see past it. Bloggers say "Newspapers are Dying" and we need to "Save Newspapers". And we worry that journalism won't survive because it appears inexorably linked to the medium.

It's time for this industry to admit that it is spiraling out of control and needs to get in a program. So here's 12-step program for newspapers.

1. Admit that we are powerless over the changing market conditions and that holding onto the past has become unmanageable.

2. Believe that we are a dying industry because our customers have found us irrelevant. Honestly, that's the ultimate reason.

3. Make a decision to evolve not devolve. We will stop acting like the sky is falling!

4. Make a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves. Admit that we have completely given up most real journalism, that we are afraid to be hard hitting and that we have deeply buried all the greatness that made us indespensible. News flash: Readers have noticed this!

5. Admit to our readers that we have only given lipservice to involving them in the news gathering process. We have created forums so they could talk - to each other - not help us shape the direction of what we were covering. Most days we don't even look at that stuff.

6. We know that these defects in our character are a big part of what is dragging us down and we are ready - really ready - to change.

7. Time to remove the dead wood. We know that the future of news has a smaller footprint, so, yes, there are going to be reductions in the work force. In many cases, that dead wood sits at the top of the tree. Start hacking away - hack being the operative word here.

8. Make a list of the values that defined the news industry: inquisitiveness, skepticism, intelligence, public service, honesty, objectivity. And admit that most newspapers long ago traded those in for revenue, quick hit, easy, non-threatening, feature, good-news pap.

9. Recognize that failure to maintain Step 8 is why you are irrelevant today. That irrelevance is why readers are abandoning you in droves. That abandonment - as well as your greed - is why advertisers have slipped away. Quod erat demonstratum.

10. Accept the fact that greed is killing you. 40% profit margins are a thing of the past. Accept it and move on. If you can't get this step down, you may still be doomed!

11. Stop whining. Newspapers have been wringing their hands over lost readership since the end of World War II, when the decline started. And in the past 50 years have done very little to change the trend. In 2000, Gary Watson, then president of the Newspaper Division, told a NEXPO audience that we were not in the newspaper business; we are in the information business. Bold words repeated by executives over and over in meeting rooms and conference speeches from San Francisco to Manhattan. But words only have power when they empower action. Stop whining and start changing!

12. Take the paper out of newspaper. Change the moniker and really believe it. You are holding onto a past that is never coming back and good riddance. Step up and lead or get out of the way.

Oh, yeah, and throw out that "Journalists do it dirty" t-shirt.

Where have the facts gone?

Once they were the hallmark of American politics, literary society, art and literature. But today conversation, persuasion and debate are nearly a lost art - or at least their voices are barely heard above the din of the screaming.

We used to have "talking heads" or "news readers" on television; now we have all "commentators" and "analysts" who are so disinterested in discussion or other opinions that they shout over each other while the host-moderator stands by impotently like an NHL umpire watching a gloves-off fight.

Remember the idea of conversation or persuasion - you talk, I talk, you have facts, I have facts, we discuss them, potentially I change your mind or you change mine, but at the least, we each walk away with a little more information than we had before. We each are somewhat better informed. And we, most importantly, we did so with some respect.

There seem to be two reasons why this form of debate and discussion no longer exists: first, it requires intelligence and actual facts to pull it off; and second, the mass media finds it more profitable to air entertainment disguised as news - just as the NHL is a giant fist-fight disguised as sport.

As newspapers - the last bastion of verified and vetted factual information - begin their slide into the ooze, a lot of bloggers and media analysts are looking for the next generation of information. Where will it come from? How will it be delivered? Are bloggers journalists?

The question really seems to be at this point whether the public knows the difference between news and entertainment. I suspect the answer is no. The major component of news is actual verifiable fact which means that it was supported by more than one source or by a single incontrovertible source.

In the endless blathering about Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, I have heard various CNN "analysts" report that the New Haven firefighter's lawsuit that she ruled on - as a part of the US Circuit Court of Appeals - was brought by "white and hispanic firefighters" or by "white firefighters". So which is it? It's not all that hard to find out with a little digging.

I can already hear the voices of citizen journalism decrying the old "legacy media" obsession with facts rather than the bigger picture. Unfortunately, a bigger picture made up of inaccuracies is a surrealistic masterpiece. Facts matter. It's not the same as bad grammar - it's bad information. And because most people believe what they hear, it is all the more important that we get the information right.

There is a legitimate debate to have about the naming of any individual to the Supreme Court - to review their decisions, to evaluate their judicial preferences and temperament, and to assess whether the nominee has the mental and emotional stamina the job most certainly demands. But that debate has to be based on factual information - not innuendo, misrepresentations and hearsay. Consumers of news believe what the news outlets say and as such they have a responsibility to present fact, to ask questions of news sources that result in dredging up more facts and present fair information to the consumer so that each one can make an intelligent decision.

The new journalist is grasping onto tools like Twitter and Facebook as a way to facilitate crowd sourcing - using your readers to help you gather information. But crowd sourcing is an investigative tool that adds to reporting, not one that replaces it. All too often, journalists go all-in one way or another - a story is either nothing but the person on the street opinion or nothing but the dry recitation of facts. Whether they write for print, for blogs, or report for video outlets from YouTube to CNN, journalists/bloggers have - with few exceptions - yet to figure out how to merge the two. And it appears to be getting worse.

Why should you care? Because the burden falls on the consumer to find the facts amid the commentary and the shouting. It also falls to the consumer to demand better information from the prime news outlets whether they be blogs or TV networks or printed newspapers.

News - like everything else - is a product and if the consumer seems happy enough with the product they are getting, there's little incentive for the news and information outlets to do anything much different.

Demand your right to a fair and accurate information stream. Give it up and it may be far harder to get it back than it was to lose it in the first place.

How will we find the news nuggets?

Newspapers don't have a lot of advantages against the new media. They used to have portability ("When you can take a computer into the bathroom with you, then newspapers should worry," a newspaper designer remarked decades ago.). But with iPhones, Blackberrys, Mobile Web and Kindles, it seems newspapers have lost the portability battle.

But there's still the issue of nuggets. How many times do you find yourself just flipping through the paper and coming across a story that you would never have thought of reading. But the photos grab you or you stop to read the graphic and before you know it, you're smack in the middle of a good story. That's the beauty of the newspaper with its emphasis on photography and graphics, packaging and design.

It's ironic that the multimedia digital words dilutes the impact of images, graphics and design and puts the emphasis firmly on the words first. In a way, that takes us back to the days when newspaper design was 9 columns of dense type - every headline the same size, every story given the same weight. Now with RSS feeds and Twitter and Facebook links, it is the words and not the music that attract us into a story.

But the joy of the "unexpected nugget" - what a former editor of mine used to call the "Hey, Martha" story, may be being lost. Yes, once you are into a story, you may find a plethora of multimedia - video, photos, audio files, interactive maps and graphics. But you have to get into the story first.

This puts a new burden on journalists who will have to learn how to write headlines that stand alone and leads that actually tell the story - rather than the real people anecdotes that have come to define most current journalism. Scrolling through a list of headlines - all the same font and weight - is not the same as leafing through the pages of a newspaper. Rarely do you find the unique tidbit in the RSS feed - probably because your attention span fails after the first four or five screens scroll by.

In the Internet world, you can find anything you're looking for, but you have to know you're looking for it. This I fear can add another nail in the coffin of human inquisitiveness, quest for knowledge and understanding and learning for the sake of education yourself not with a specific monetary goal in mind.

Those things may be qualities from the past anyway, but it is a sad commentary on our society and our future that our individual vision is narrowing to a laser point - focused fully on our goals and area of interest, not wavering enough to see the nuggets all around us. The demise of a printed paper will likely only further this dissolution.

Does this mean we'll be less educated or less knowledgeable despite having the sum total of centuries of information, art, literature and history just a few keystrokes away? I guess that depends on your definition of an education person. As a professor once told me: "Education is knowing what you don't know."

Truth or consequences

Newspaper executives are in San Diego this week tilting at windmills, howling at the moon, thumping their chests and gathering around the fire in a man-circle getting in touch with their inner innovator.

Unfortunately, this is all too little, too late, and too much.

Gary Pruitt, CEO of McClatchy Newspapers, says "Our future depends on becoming successful hybrid media companies - fully engaged and vested in digital publishing and digital platforms as we have been historically with print." This is hardly news. Newspaper companies have been diddling around the digital media for decades without truly getting serious about a conversion to the "hybrid media company" Pruitt envisions. And they are still diddling around. They're still thinking and planning, wishing and hoping. That won't get you into our hearts. Certainly, they've done very little in a whole lot of time.

The World Wide Web entered our peripheral vision in 1991 when the first commercially available ISPs started up and early adapters began to see what could be possible. But not newspapers. Today newspaper executives are talking about the internet as "new" media and the digital transition as if it just snuck up on us along with the virulent recession and combined to engineer newspapers' destruction.

Covering the NAA conference for The Huffington Post, media observer Jeff Jarvis opines bluntly that the newspapers "blew it." Boy, nothing is more true. But the bigger question is why did it happen and how can companies avoid it in the future.

When I worked in the corporate headquarters for a Fortune 500 newspaper company, my boss asked all his managers to offer opinions on why we were not a "gold medal company." What characteristics, he wondered, prevented us from being great. My answer: Because we don't want to be great. We want to make money. Being great means taking some chances. Great companies step off the ledge and if they fail, they consider it a step toward an eventual success.

This is not the way of the mainstream media company. Their way - the McClatchy's, the Gannetts, - is to wait until all the issues have been resolved, the bugs have been worked out, and then jump in potentially improving on the prototypical models with a new product. This may have worked in the past - almost certainly did. But in the forward driven world of new media technologies and digital integrations this approach was a catastrophic failure.

Newspapers have always been willing to be silver medalists - so long as they got paid well for it - only in this competition, the came in dead last.

Now, having lost the race, newspaper executives are left whining about internet aggregators linking to their sites without paying for the privilege. Even now, as tens of thousands of press operators, designers, graphic artists, support staff, reporters, copy editors and photographers are spending their days waiting in the unemployment line, newspapers are still not acting. They are still talking about what we need to do, rather than doing it.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt today warned that newspapers risked alienating their readers by mixing it up with aggregators who conservatively bring about 50% of the hits into the newspaper web site. It is typical behavior, however, for newspapers to make decisions based on what editors and executives think people want without actually finding out for sure and then finding someone else to blame when it doesn't work

In fact, many newspaper decisions regarding the digital space have been driven by executives who neither use nor understand the technology. In large newspaper companies, executives often are given programs to roll out at their locations but they are ineffective at promoting them to either advertisers or readers because they are behind on the technology that drives them. And the problem drifts top down. For example: Up until 5 years ago, Gannett executives were forbidden to buy Blackberries without permission from the head of the newspaper division.

The time-honored way for newspapers to pretend they were getting input from "real people" on decisions and products is to have a focus group. These groups are usually small -- 10-20 people. Papers that do this right may have several focus groups so that they bring in over a few weeks more than 100 people. But most papers have one. A set of controlled questions is asked. Sometimes readers are left alone with the paper or a prototype to peruse the product while they are observed for their reactions.

But frequently after all the information gathering is done, the information would come up for discussion at the local, regional or enterprise level. And this is where newspaper executives showed their true colors. What normally ensued is a couple of hours of discussion about how the reader just didn't understand what we were trying to do, or didn't realize that we already had that feature (a sign that they couldn't find it or didn't like it), or why what the reader wanted was unrealistic or undesirable. In the end, the paper would go off and do whatever they wanted to in the first place, having managed to negate the opinions of their focus group.

In 1997, Gannett launched a program called News 2000. At it's core was the premise that newspapers should write for their readers. Wow. Eleven years later, we are still battling the same issue - a core selfishness and self-aggrandizing that will not permit the possibility that the best and brightest minds in the industry have been wrong all these years. That a group of 20 year olds who run Facebook could have twice as many "clients" as the newspaper industry - at least using Gary Pruitt's stat that 100 million adults read a printed newspaper every day. Although figures from the Pew Institute put newspaper readership at 33% daily and assuming children under 15 aren't snapping up the paper, that's roughly 85 million.

Meanwhile, Twitter is approaching 2 million users and LinkedIn, which is a very targeted business community, has 35 million.

The lesson is one of ego, fear and greed. Gold medal companies look the future in the eye. They take some chances, the make mistakes, they accept some losses as the cost of doing business. They find out what their customers want even if they have absolutely no idea why anyone would want that.

Look around, guys. You did blow it. And you can't fix it by trying to play catch up. You must leap ahead and find what's next and make it yours. And while you're trying to figure that out, better play nice with your new friends Google, Facebook, Digg, Slashdot and whatever else just launched in the time it's taken me to write this. If they pick up their balls and gloves and go home, newspapers are going to be left standing in an empty field with no one to kick dirt at.

Coming this weekend: What would the newspaper look like if you could build it yourself? Would love to hear your suggestions on this.

Is bad social networking better than none at all?

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the ?

A friend forwarded a blog post today that outlined the 10 reasons companies should not join Twitter (My favorite: If you have to wait for your legal department to vet your 140-character Tweet). The author makes great points - with humor. But it begs the question for me whether it is better to network badly than not to network at all? I think the question is yes, it's better to be out there.

Newspapers are going the way of the woolly mammoth for many reasons, but two of the big ones are that they a) waited too long to realize and capitalize on the power of the internet and b) now view social networking as something that goes on external to them - they host the party but don't actually attend.

In part, newspapers are hampered by their history. A bedrock principle has always been you don't mess with people's newspapers. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Any changes to columns or designs were - and still are - subject to vetting and testing procedures that would do the FDA proud. The process can take months - or longer for a major redesign - meaning reacting quickly to changing needs is all but impossible.

In 1999, the American Journalism Review wrote of the digital media revolution:

If newspaper executives haven't fully grasped the extent of changes in communication or the opportunity the Web represents, then the story of online newspapering is as much about culture as business. Executives often seem handicapped by an almost mythic fear that their Old Media franchises will be devoured by their dot-com offspring. They forget how much more pleasant it is to be eaten by your own child than by someone else's. Web-centric companies (or Net-native, as they are also called) are at home in the language of interactivity that Web-enabled companies are still stumbling to learn; many have corporate metabolisms that enable them to move more quickly and imaginatively than Old Media organizations.

In 2006, the same publication didn't find things much different:

Stephen Gray, managing director of Newspaper Next, says the newspaper industry is exhibiting classic signs of an industry shaken by seismic changes, often competition from new technologies. "The newspaper industry, like others that have experienced this problem, needs to learn some quite counterintuitive ways of responding," he says. "One of the things we need to be clear about in our project is the focus of Newspaper Next is how to create innovation outside of our core product. We have as an industry really little record of innovation."

Not for nothing, but that was a full 7 years after newspapers decided they needed to change the identification of their product from the platform it was delivered on to the information at its core.

The newspaper culture does not allow for trying something out and changing it or discarding it completely if it doesn't work out. But the digital information environments - from the web to the tweet - demand change and - more importantly - constant vigilance to identify changing needs quickly.

The digital consumer is an infant - we want what we want right now and if we don't get it, we're going to pee on that nice hand-made linen over there. This is in contrast to the newspaper reader who may have felt vaguely disappointed in the paper so he wrote a letter to the editor and then read the paper faithfully every day to see if his suggestions had been implemented yet.

Fortunately for the digital consumer (and unfortunately for newspapers) there are a lot of places to go out there that are going to pick you up and coddle you, catering to your immediate wants and needs. This isn't to say they're going to be the BEST mom, but they're going to be the most responsive.

In this regard, the blogger mentioned earlier is right. You cannot take a week to vet a message. But rather than use that as an reason NOT to be on Twitter, it's time to change the dynamic in the industry itself.

Newspaper tweets are (for the most part) like reading an index of the paper. The photo at right is the Twitter page of one of the nation's largest metro dailies. And this is not unusual. You find the exact same bland recitation of what we're writing about on the Twitter pages of most newspapers - large and small. Why is it that there's no real interactivity? Why is it we're not engaging our readers? Why aren't we asking our readers to be our eyes and ears out there?

The answer is pretty simple: because automated systems can't do that - at least not yet. It's easy to push headlines out the door to any different number of publishing platforms. But it is much harder to monitor web sites, blogs, Twitter and whatever is next to see what people are talking about, to gather information from a variety of sources, to decide what kinds of questions you want to stir the pot with. That takes thought; that takes effort.

In the constant rush to save money, newspapers are succeeding in accomplishing what no other competitor could actually have done. They are making themselves irrelevant. The industry waited too long to react to the changes in the mediascape. Some, like Gannett, waited far too long because the payback was not readily apparent. Now that the boat has all but sailed, the industry is trying desperately to catch up by giving lip service to user interaction, crowd sourcing and citizen journalism.

• Pumping out a tweet digest of headlines is not engaging.
• Creating blogs for moms, pets, artists, entertainment and then largely abandoning them to fend for themselves rather than mining them for the contacts, story ideas and news tips they would certainly produce is not interacting.
• Establishing a presence on YouTube and Facebook but not taking the time to update is not compelling. (A newspaper Facebook page I looked at today said in its status that it was "considering its endorsements in this election season.")
  
• Having a website that parrots the newspaper with little increased depth or interactivity to drive readership between the two is not working.

Unfortunately, there are more that look like this than are really using a world of new digital tools to build readers involvement with their products (note to newspapers: this is not the same thing as inviting readers to send in photos of their children and putting those on a community page!).

So to those who fail all 10 of the measures to determine if you should be a twit, it's time (maybe past time) to use your failure instead of hiding behind it.

• Listen to your readers. See what they are tweeting about. You might get some story ideas.
• Check out some of your local Facebook pages - what stories are they talking about, what issues are tripping their triggers. There's a real good bet that the sewer easement isn't among them.
• Generate buzz for your ideas and sources for stories by throwing them out on as many social media sites as you can. Why keep calling the same old contacts when there is an entire world of new voices just a few clicks away.
• Pay attention to what you get back. No one likes to be asked to contribute if those contributions are never used. Find ways to use the info you get back - chances are if you actually read it, you would want to anyway.
• Start updating your digital persona. Its embarassing for a newspaper site to have a six month old status on FB. Would there be any reason at all for your potential readers to go back there? Would you?
  

Newspapers: start wrapping your head around the fact that this is your new home. You haven't completely moved in yet, but if you want to land comfortably you'd better get busy getting to know your neighbors and making new friends.

And don't worry if each message, each tweet, each blog post isn't perfect the first time out. They won't be set in stone, but that's OK because 10 seconds from now no one will remember.

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NPs KO'd by tweets and teens: Who will write the obit?

I began following a Twitterer called "The Media Is Dying" today. One after one, a litany of failure scrolled across the screen.

Weeklies closing, dailies announcing layoffs, artists, cartoonists, reporters and even online journalists succumbing to the creeping crud that appears to be killing newspapers. With new sites cropping up each day to catalog the end of an industry, it's almost like sitting in a hospital room and watching someone die. It's heart-breaking, but you are helpless to change anything and helpless to look away. Will newspapers be heartened by the sadness so many feel watching their decline?

I doubt it. But here's another question. Who will write the obit for the industry?

Will it be Facebook: What's on my mind? I was so sad to see that newspapers died yesterday. So I took the quiz - which newspaper are you. I'm the New York Post (Straightforward and in-your-face! which one are u?).

Will it be Twitter: @replies Wht happend? None of the RSS fds on TW r working!

Will it be CNN: We have reports today that the newspaper industry has died. But, we caution, that those are unconfirmed reports. So we go to over to Don. Don, what do you know. Don: Well, not much yet. We are out here on the street and it appears that all the news boxes here in Atlanta are empty. We're also getting a lot of tweets on this. So as soon as we are done letting our listeners report the news for us, we'll get back to you.

However it is reported, it will be short and sweet and spread like jelly on tainted peanut butter. There certainly is no shortage of media pundits out there already circling -- groups, blogs and web sites dedicated to save newspapers, to catalog their demise, to predict their next incarnation. One thing that is certain, you may not have a physical newspaper to hold in your hands all that much longer. But you sure as hell will need their editors.

Web programmers are already scrambling to find ways to make the internet more like a newspaper. Consider Kosmix (Your guide to the web). This integration web site pulls together information based on meta tags (keywords). Of course, it's a computer doing it, which is why a search for the admittedly very broad topic of "newspapers" brought up a odd mix of items.

• A Wikipedia entry (A newspaper is a written publication containing news, information and advertising, usually printed on low-cost paper called newsprint. General-interest newspapers often feature articles on political events, crime, business, art/entertainment, society and sports. Most traditional papers also feature an editorial page containing columns which express the personal opinions of writers. Supplementary sections may contain advertising, comics, coupons, and other printed media. Newspapers are most often published on a daily or weekly basis, and they usually focus on one particular geographic area where most of their readers live. )
• An E-bay auction ($13.99 for an election day newspaper -- seems too cheap. I'd hold it for another 4 years!).
• And my favorite -- two You Tube videos. One on how to make bead jewelry out of newspapers and the other on using newspapers to start seedlings. And you thought there was no future!
  

For Twitterers, there's www.tweetdeck.com, which endeavors to pull together the diverse tweets the average twitter client receives and display them in a way to give them some cohesiveness. The company describes it:

In recent months there has been an explosion in social media with hundreds of services offering an abundance of information to the masses. TweetDeck is a realtime application that allows users to monitor that information in a single concise view. TweetDeck currently integrates services from Twitter, Twitscoop, 12seconds, Stocktwits and now Facebook.

New integrators pop up nearly daily -- Twitter applications on Facebook, ways to pull FB into Twitter, applications to get all social media and blogs on your iphone, -- and now more applications to seek out news and information throughout the web, pull it together and try to give you a picture of what's going on in areas you are interested in.

Hmmmm, sounds a lot like .. I know, a newspaper! Certainly, the ink and paper may go away - and along with it the gray smudges on white sofas and tan-colored outfits. The day may not be too far off when I won't have to run out in the rain to drag the soggy bag of decaying newsprint into the house and spread it out on the kitchen counter to dry.

But what we won't lose, what we can't lose is the product that journalists produce -- the information filtered through the expertise, the background, the credibility and vetted by an editor over the age of 12 who knows how to use their and there correctly. We will still need and value that product.

Yes, Twitter, Facebook, My Space, Kosmix, and Tweet Deck; You Tube and Flickr will all have a place in our new world of communication. I want to know what my friends are doing. I want to know what TV Hunk they most resemble. I want to see photos of their kids and share photos of my dogs. And I want to know what they think about what's going on in the world. But I don't expect them to report the news. We'll still need journalists for that - whatever the venue.

So, what about that obit? Maybe it's not an obit after all. Maybe it's a feature story:

News moves to web; computer industry sales to seniors soars!