To be an effective media executive today, you’ve got to read, read, read.

AdAge offers up a column on what several top media and marketing leaders do to stay atop the rapidly changing digital world.

Here’s a promising idea — a news search engine publishers can integrate into their sites.

One one hand, I think something like this should be used to help users find related stories on competing local news sites. My concern is that the product isn’t focused enough on local news.

On the other hand, something like this could help add stickiness to a site for those users now in the habit of going elsewhere for national and world news.

Either way, it’s all in the implementation, and based on Craig Sterling’s comments in the story, I’m not sure the product is flexible enough to allow site managers to launch independent strategies.

I’d like to see a demo to understand better how this tool might be used on a local news site.

CNN is creating a citizen video site. They are looking specifically for regional video.

This, of course, puts CNN in more direct competition for local news.

Local news sites need to be more aggressive about soliciting citizen contributions. Submission should be easy, integrated with the primary news site, and allow for unfiltered contributions (editors, of course, decide what gets promoted to more prominent display, and inappropriate submissions are deleted — but users shouldn’t need to wait on an editor to see their submission on the site. This only serves to discourage submissions.

Such a strategy, I think, will help with lagging audience growth.

One of the smartest people in American business, Guy Kawasaki, offers his advice on the art of firing people.

Bakersfield’s official motto is: “Life as it should be.”

While I’m weird enough to actually like living in Bakersfield, I’m also honest enough to admit — it ain’t San Diego. It’s one thing for SD to declare itself “America’s Finest City.” At worst, its unsupportable hyperbole, but at least San Diego is one hell of a fine town.

Bakersfield? It’s unbearably hot in the summer, sooted by filthy air and more than two-thirds of the city is either filled with oil derricks, or is blighted by urban rot — old, dilapidated buildings, graffiti, piles of trash and glassy-eyed homeless wrecks.

If this is life as it should be, I’d like to see what the city thinks is life as it shouldn’t’ be.

At any rate, its not just big media that gets skewered by citizen media — it’s city leaders, too. Here’s a song by a local musician that makes the point: “This Ain’t Life as it Should Be.” (via Matildakay).

Logan Molen, VP of interactive media for the Bakersfield Californian, just sent an e-mail to the NAA’s New Media Federation e-mail list announcing that Bakersfield.com has hired a push technology specialist.

Good idea.

Here’s Logan’s description of the job:

… we’ve just hired our first “push technology specialist” whose job is to create strategic email newsletters, SMS and RSS services, and other mobile strategies.

I think responsibility for e-mail, SMS and RSS all fit together neatly. A specialist can keep abreast of trends and technology and ensure these key areas of present and future growth receive appropriate attention.

Steve Outing’s column asks: Have we come far enough?

Outing’s question is prompted by a sliver of archive from a mailing list he started in 1995 1994 called online-news. Steve is nice enough to credit me with unearthing this archive through Google, and it’s true I had been on a quest to find this archive, but really — this find was purely accidental.

But my motivation in looking for the archive is tied very much to the subject matter of Steve’s latest column: Have we come far enough.

I’m not sure, however, the online-news archive is really needed to answer the question.

If you look at the newspaper industry as a whole, most newspaper sites are under performing. In some things, some sites are doing well while other sites do well in other areas, but after more than a decade of trying to get up to speed, newspapers still lag behind.

Here’s where I see newspaper.com sites failing to fully tap the power of the Web, or properly react to the competitive threat:

• They are not online hub of their community. Resources and information remain sketchy if they exist at all.
• Classified sites are not often rich, compelling, community-driven experiences.
• Classified verticals lack the depth to engage and meet consumer needs.
• Newspaper.com sites are not engaging place for local citizens to meet, discuss, debate and contribute.
• Newspaper journalists are too seldom fully developing their stories for online, by skipping over multimedia opportunities.
• Where are the niche products to reach the long tail of local audience interest?
• Newspapers have more than just a commitment to citizens and readers: They owe it to local businesses to help them succeed in a digital world. So where are the compelling ecommerce sites and the full service of advertising options? Where is self-service retail advertising?
• Too few newspapers even spend a dime on outside promotion so that local readers know that the newspaper.com should be a habit.
• Too few newsrooms have grasped the basic fundamental need to keep content fresh and that all news should go on the Web first and frequently.
• And almost no newspaper has realized the need to create virtual community to serve the real community.

Some sites do some of these things, as I said. Some are making good strides in some of these areas, but at this stage of the game, newspaper.coms should be a lot further along than they are. IMHO.

Lee Gomes, writing for the Wall Street Journal, says the Long Tail may not be so long after all.

Chris Anderson responds.

From my perspective, even if some of Chris’s details are off, the basic thesis of the long tail still rings true. Unlimited inventory does mean that a lot of stuff that had no chance of selling before can now find a market. Whether the misses ever really overtake the hits misses the point somewhat.

WSJ has an article on the Friendster patent.

The San Francisco nonprofit is running a “patent-busting” campaign to combat patents that it sees as illegitimate. “I don’t think they’ve really come up with an innovation for finding people you know,” he says.

But Mr. Lindstrom argues that Friendster’s founder, Mr. Abrams, who left the company and is preparing to launch a startup called Socializr, invented something original. Two and a half years ago, you’d never heard of a social network,” he says. “Jonathan Abrams did something, and suddenly this new thing existed. Maybe it doesn’t seem new now, but it certainly did at the time.”

When I first heard the term “social network,” my thought was, “yeah, right, it’s just the new buzzword for virtual community.” And when I first heard about this Friendster patent, I thought, “They can’t patent that. Virtual communities have been around for decades — before there was a Web even.”

But after I read the patent and understood that what they were really claiming as intellectual property was the ability to link friends together so that friends might follow a path to other or new friends, I couldn’t think of a pre-Friendster virtual community that had such a feature. If there was one out there, I would like to know about, because I can’t remember it or never saw it.

I think this patent has a chance to stand up.

The typical newspaper auto vertical is nothing more than re-purposed classifieds and maybe some dealer inventory.

One problem with that strategy is that the limited inventory of such a site is competing with national sites that have substantially more inventory (unless the newspaper is a Cars.com affiliate).

Now there is some research that says auto sites that are aggregators of inventory are essential to most online car shoppers.

Newspapers with auto sites that are lagging in their markets shouldn’t think, “if we could only get more inventory online.” They should be thinking, “how do we make our sites more engaging and useful to consumers?”

At any one time, only a small percentage of people are in the market for a new or used car, but everybody is in the market for something related to a car almost all the time — insurance, service, parts, etc., and a lot of people are often thinking two or three years ahead for their next car purchase. Auto sites that are nothing more then inventory don’t meet the needs of this audience, and therefore lose an opportunity to become a trusted brand to future auto buyers.

For all those media companies out there wondering if they should invest more in video — of course you should — but if you still need more evidence, here it is.

And notice I said “media companies.” It’s not just newspapers that are lagging on video — most television stations have exceptionally insufficient video offerings. They rely far too heavily on just re-purposing their news broadcasts instead of offering online-only features and additional footage.

It took a study to tell us!: “Newspapers That Attract Teens Retain Them as Adults.”

Philip Meyer already showed us how that trend works.

… the idea is that newspapers should have content aimed at teenagers. The foundation estimates that only 220 newspapers across the country have special teen sections, many written by teenagers. The study also noted that roughly 800 papers carry some sort of syndicated youth content for all ages.

I might have endorsed that idea of special teen sections 15 years ago. Now, where newspapers need to be concentrating their resources on growing young audiences is on the Web.

There are two reasons: That’s the media teens are adapting to, and most teens are the children of parents who never acquired the newspaper habit, which makes them much tougher to reach.

The Web opens a world of inexpensive opportunities to grow audience with a variety of products, some of which could appeal to teens very much.

In a previous post, I expressed my concern that this may be the golden age of YouTube, and that those days could be numbered.

John Battelle gives fans of YouTube hope by pointing out that YouTube is basically a company nobody with deep pockets could ever buy. All of that copyrighted material on YouTube is something of a poison pill, however unintentional.

So who might buy YouTube? A major entertainment company, like the ones mentioned in the Post piece? No way. That’s buying a lawsuit or ten - if Time Warner bought YouTube, how long do you t hink it’d be before competitors sued to get their copyrighted stuff off TW’s new service? . . . What about a new media giant buying YouTube - Yahoo, say, or Google? Or Microsoft? Nope, nope, nope. Yahoo is a media company, and acts like one. Google doesn’t have it in its DNA to run a service like YouTube (though Google, with its Switzerland like approach to content, is the best fit, in my opinion). And Microsoft? They don’t need any more legal headaches over in Redmond right now.

YouTube is a great idea without a business model, which is okay if the only people it needs to support are its owners and a few employees (if that many people), along with enough servers and bandwidth to power the thing (which isn’t all that expensive). At this point, they could probably throw up a PayPal donation button to cover all that.

I’m guessing, however, that YouTube does have some initial investors who would like to see a return, plus the current owners (if they’re normal human beings) don’t want to pass up a unique opportunity to become filthy rich.

There are only a few singers who would be worth seeing solo — by solo, I mean just the singer and his guitar.

Nick Lowe would be one of my first choices.

I figure I’m about 1 of 500 or so Nick Lowe fans in the world.

Thanks to the long tail of YouTube, tonight, I had my own mini-Nick Lowe concert (warning, low quality bootleg videos):

• When I Write the Book
• So It Goes
• Heart
• Geisha Girl
• The Rose of England
• So It Goes (a different performance)
• Bo Bo Skediddle
• From Now On
• Cruel to be Kind
• Jumbo Ark (on bass guitar, no less)
• I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)

Before social networking, there were virtual communities. When virtual communities were hot and new, I found myself unemployed, so I launched RVClub.com.

For a couple of years, I made an okay living off of RVC, but the hoped-for financing never came through, the bubble burst, and revenues slid quickly.

But I kept RVC alive if for no other reason than the core group of long-time loyal members who loved it so much.

Now, I’m unemployed again — so it seemed like a good time to revamp the site and fix long-lingering problems.

Of course, in fixing it, I could very well have broken other things (that’s how these things go), but for now I think it’s a better site. I still need to get the SSL going again. And I have lots of ideas for new features. But here it is: The new RVClub.com.

So, I just did this post on music videos on YouTube.

Before that, I did a post on music and the Long Tail.

And there was this post on YouTube’s new user license.

And now you can trace the tracks of my tears. YouTube is on my mind a lot recently. I wish I had invented YouTube.

YouTube is the ultimate Long Tail invention. It has no inventory and it exists purely to serve markets of one a billion of times over.

Except for one niggling little problem: It has no revenue model.

Well, it could serve banner ads, but when you’re engaged in a good video, you’re not likely to click on a banner. I suppose in-stream ads might work, but those could also become annoying and eventually damaging to audience retention. The technology doesn’t seem to exist yet for contextual text ads related to video. I guess that leaves selling P2P content (as the new license agreement seems to hint at).

But if the lack of revenue doesn’t kill YouTube, I think Big Media just might. There’s already been one copyright lawsuit. Peer media is great, but there is a legitimate question around “where would YouTube be without copyrighted material?“

Will we look back on this as the golden age of YouTube?

In YouTube’s favor is that social media is growing in both abundance and quality, while big media is waking up to the value of peer-driven viral marketing. That may help YouTube avoid the fate of Napster, if it can just figure out how to make money.

Matt Welch finds six minutes and fifty-five seconds on YouTube that he says changed his life.

For me, the video music moment that changed my life happened in 1987.

I was house sitting at my ex-girlfriends while she was on tour in Japan. She didn’t have cable TV. For the most part, TV was limited to four local stations (San Diego), but once in a while, when the sunspots were right, or something, you could pick up stations from Los Angeles. I was flipping the dial and picked up the signal of Channel 5.

Channel 5 was playing a music video for some reason.

For months prior, I had been saying, “I wish I could find a modern Hank Williams — somebody with all the twang, but some rock/punk influence … not rockabilly, and not cowpunk, but pure country.”

That night, Channel 5 introduced me to Dwight Yoakam.

You know, in watching that video I realized — I hadn’t seen it since 1987.

Matt inspired me to check out a couple of other forgotten music TV gems.

One is Ricky Martin on the Grammys. There is also a back story here. The night of this performance, Billie and I were only half watching the awards show. We were also going through a spate of interest in Latin music. When Ricky came on, I was standing behind the couch. Billie was in the kitchen. From the moment the performance started, I was speechless. I kept hoping Billie would come into the room, but didn’t want to utter a word in the middle of such showmanship. Billie came in right at the tail end. Man, was she pissed that I didn’t call her in. I heard about it for another year or more. Well, just now, she finally got to see the video. She said she got chills. As far as I’m concerned, that single performance is about the only worthwhile think Martin ever did.

Then there is Fantasia Barrino singing Summertime on Idol. That remains, probably, the single greatest performance in Idol history.

Going back aways — when I was in high school, Elvis Costello had the whole school buzzing a couple of times. One was when a history of rock and roll came on television and the segment on new wave included this video. Everybody wanted to know if I’d seen Elvis walking on his ankles. The other was EC on SNL, which surprisingly is not on YouTube. But I did find this cool Top of the Pops performance of Watching the Detectives, which I’d never seen before.

Oh, I’ve got to add this first televised performance of Elvis — a completely
solo version of Allison.

Online real estate advertising, is growing faster than print. The trend is bleak and irreversible.

I still believe newspaper.coms can win in their local markets, however. It will take more than porting classifieds to the Web or even striking deals with local MLS boards. It will take full-featured portal-like sites with deep content.

Newspaper sites also need to start paying closer attention to FSBOs. Just like the net enables peer-created content, it also makes it easier to do things like sell your own house.

I’m still in the middle of reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, but in tripping through it I came across a bit of musical history as it relates to DIY media that I think is a bit inaccurate.

Anderson writes:

But punk rock changed the game. Punk rock said: “Okay, you have your guitar, but you don’t have to do it right. You can do it wrong! It doesn’t matter one bit if you’re a skilled musician; it just matters if you have something to day.”

There is no doubt that punk rock was a significant social force, and it taught a whole new generation that all you needed was “a red guitar, three chords and the truth,” but the DIY spirit has been part of the American music heritage since their were pilgrims at Plymouth. Granted, prior to punk, the American and British music scenes were pretty dismal, with a long list of vapid, overly hyped and over-produced stars, but the bad stuff wasn’t the only music in the world at the time. Before the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and the Clash, there was the New York Dolls, Iggy and the Stooges, and the MC5.

And before the proto punks, there were garage bands such as the Kingsmen, the Troggs and the Standells. And much of their inspiration was drawn from such early rockabilly artists as the Rock’N'Roll Trio, Charlie Feathers and Dale Hawkins.

Rockabilly, of course, was the product of the most DIY’ish music of the 20th Century: Blues and Hillbilly.

Need I go on?

DIY is just part of the American music character — it’s why we have jazz, blues and country and all the genres in between. DIY didn’t start with punk, and punk isn’t why DIY media is exploding today.

Music has evolved as the technology of music making has evolved. With each new advancement, new generations have found new ways to express themselves. The history of music proves that if you give people the tools to create and share, they will create and they will share. Better and more accessible tools just means the tail gets longer and longer and longer.

Peer-created media is a powerful force. It is a force of nature.

For all those in big media hoping P2P is just a fad: It isn’t. Hisotry proves it.

If you’re in Bakersfield and would like a cutting from my silver dollar cactus, let me know. I’ve got a part of this plant spilling onto the lawn and another few paddles fell off two days ago. I hate to just throw them out. This plant propagates easily.