Peter Krasilovsky reports on Zillow:

Another challenge has been to ensure the quality of Zillow’s Real Estate data. Most of the data comes from county courthouses, and accuracy is very high. More than 62 percent of house prices are within 10 percent of their “Zestimate,” said Rascoff.

I’ve often wondered if Zillow isn’t the Alexa of real estate pricing: Interesting, but ultimately not business-decision worthy. Today, however, I’m ready to believe IT IS VERY ACCURATE. I just checked the estimate on our house, which we’re still desperately trying to sell, and Zillow says our value has increased $15,000 in the past 30 days! Eeee-Haw!

I linked yesterday to William Bulkeley’s piece on forcing people to buy what they don’t want, and today Jack Shafer expands on the theme related to newspapers.

Bulkeley could have easily applied the wisdom of his lesson more broadly to newspapers. It’s not that the complete gestalt of local, state, national, and international news plus sports, comics, classified, opinion, and hints on fashion, home, entertainment, and food isn’t still useful. It is. But given a choice, and the economic means to make a choice, many buyers prefer to make an unbundled purchase. Unbundling the news they want from the news they don’t want is what the Web allows readers to do now.

We all thought it was great when Comedy Central added an “embed” tag to its online video clips. Cool. They get it.

But Lost Remote just discovered damning evidence that Viacom is still just another big media empire that is as clueless as the next. Clips expire.

Adrian Holovaty is a rock star, according to American Journalism Review.

Holovaty is quick to say that he’s not doing anything akin to rocket science; it’s just that very few of the people who know how to do what he does are in journalism. They tend to be in the computer industry, working on Internet search engines or e-commerce sites, or even in the music industry, where the concept of “mashing” data (music and vocals from multiple songs) originated. People with Web development expertise aren’t usually drawn to news, Holovaty says, because they don’t think it’s a technologically savvy field.

Here’s some interesting criticism of newspapers doing citizen journalism:

As papers increase local coverage, they’ll simply have that many more people out reporting–and that many more potential mistakes.

In fact, citizen journalism is not new. Back in the 90s, when it was the nation’s largest newspaper chain, Thomson Newspapers tried it and found it totally unworkable.

If citizen journalism didn’t work for Thomson, what makes Gannett think it’s going to work now, asks Dr. Frank Fee Jr., associate professor and director of UNC’s master’s program School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

“It goes back to the days of country correspondents or stringers. They are limited in what they can do, and newspapers have never been very good about training those people,” says Fee, who has 35 years of daily newspaper experience.

Fee sees myriad problems. “There are all sorts of disruptions, including the fact that it’s going to be that much more difficult to find a citizen journalist if you have a question on deadline.”

But what Fee sees as the big issue is one of credibility, and the need of papers to protect their credibility.

“I have seen some horrendous mistakes made by people who don’t know what they are doing,” he says. “There is every opportunity for lots of things to fall through the cracks. I would be interested in seeing where we are with this in six months.”

You will never get far with me arguing that we shouldn’t do something because there is risk associated with it. The last thing we should do is be risk averse. People who make this argument don’t, I think, understand disruption. The logical question is, if we don’t make a place for citizen content, who will? The answer, somebody, and they’ll beat us in the long run (in fact, already are).

I got this link through Lucas Grindley, who writes:

Too often we assume that everyone in the newspaper understands its slow march toward bankruptcy. But the truth is reporters and editors need constant reminding that things aren’t going well financially.

I read a great essay from Harvard Business Review a year ago about managing in times of change, which includes the need to communicate a sense of urgency. I recommend it to newsroom managers. In this day and age, if you work at a newspaper and value your career, you need to understand business and how things are changing. Again, I refer you to these five books.

UPDATE: Steve Yelvington has another take on Dr. Frank Fee’s comments.

USC-Annenberg School of Journalism has released it’s annual survey of internet usage.

• Frank Barnako: User-generated content is not a fad
• GigaOM: Internet Getting More Social
• Metrics 2.0: Online world now as important as real world

In almost every aspect where the internet is growing, newspapers are falling behind, such as UGC and social networking (video isn’t part of the summary, which is all I read — but digital photography is (an aspect of UGC), and it’s growing, too). Here’s the summary.

Somewhat unrelated, but also from Barnako: Newspapers will feel the pain for five more years. It’s interesting to note that homes with broadband are more likely to cancel their newspaper subscriptions.

Pay-per-click, contextual advertising will be around for a long time and make some people very rich, but where I see a lot of untapped potential for publishers is in video advertising.  Lost Remote has more.

Just don’t do prerolll ….

Here’s a good story for newspaper people to read: Mistakes Made on the Road to Innovation, from Bussiness Week. It’s mainly about Kodak, but the lessons could be applied to newspapers.

It is taking time for Kodak to understand that it is an image company, not a film or camera company. Perhaps it should take lessons from Western Union. (WU ) Founded in 1851, the company has managed to ride each successive wave of change in its history rather than getting swamped. (A bankruptcy protection filing in the early 1990s was caused by management mistakes rather than external threats.) After handling the first transcontinental telegram in 1861, it spotted the opportunity to transfer money by wire 10 years later. Then, a series of firsts: a city-to-city facsimile service, a microwave communications system, a commercial satellite network, and online money transfer.

Why has Western Union been able to adapt to severe disruptions and survive over so many years? It never confused the business it was in with the way it conducted its business. At its core, Western Union was about facilitating person-to-person communications and money transfers — whether via telegraph, wireless networks, phone, or the Internet. “We always saw ourselves as a communications company,” says president Christina Gold.

I’ve heard it said that newspapers need to learn they are not in the news business, but the information business. I disagree. I think we’re in the community business.

Previous: The Telegraph is Dead. Long Live the Telegraph

The housing market may have cooled, but the demand for real estate blogging hasn’t.  Mark Glaser has the scoop.

Chris Anderson is picking up a new theme — radical transparency.

Perhaps the most interesting of these is the shift from secrecy to transparency. The default communications mode of companies has traditionally been top-down, with only executives and official spokespeople permitted to discuss company business in public. The standard rule, explicit or not, was “That which we choose not to announce is not to be spoken about.” Aside from some special exemptions, such as conferences where those employees trusted enough to go chatted guardedly with outsiders, employees were cautioned that what happened at work should stay at work. Loose lips sink ships, etc.

But over the past few years, a new breed of executive has emerged, and with them a new attitude toward controlling the corporate narrative. From Microsoft to Yahoo!, the public face of the company is increasingly employee bloggers who are trusted both internally (allowed to blog without legal or PR review) and externally (they’re just regular folk like us!). The consequence is that much that was once hidden is now open for all. These rarely include big disclosures (the real secrets stay secret), but instead tend to be about routine issues that dominate the day-to-day life of engineers and project managers. The small cost of some competitor getting early wind of a new feature is more than outweighed by the good will generated among customers by candid insights into product development. So far, so Naked Conversations.

What really interests me, however, is when this goes even further. Not just transparency, but Radical Transparency. The whole product development process laid bare, and opened to customer input. Management in public, via blog. CEOs venting, without benefit of legal counsel, in late-night postings.

I’d like to think that I’ve always been a pretty honest guy, but starting in about 2002, when I started blogging, I really took up the torch of transparency. I make a conscience effort in all aspects of my life to be as open and honest as I can be, and even in a place as public as my blog. That said, it isn’t always easy. After posting something, I I sometimes question whether I should “give that much away” about my thinking or plans. And there are also certain restrictions that I’m under that have nothing to do with my present employer, but still limit what I can say (even without a signed piece of paper, for example, I feel it’s not my place to reveal things I might know about, say, Scripps). I also have to be careful what I write when posting it might be detrimental to a former co-worker or friend. Transparency isn’t easy, but I still think it’s necessary. One of the benefits for me has been, however, that by sharing so many of my thoughts, I often get challenged by very smart people. That makes me smarter. That, I think, is a good thing.

Am I radically transparent? You tell me.

So there is a secret Google advertising network and only elite publisher get to play, according to John Chow.

The Google Display Advertising Network was created so Google can go after Fortune 1000 companies, which buy advertising to build a brand more than to sell a product. Google already dominates text and CPC ads so going after display and video ads is the next logical step. Google offers display and video ads to AdSense publishers on CPC and CPM format already. However, the formation of the Display Advertising Network is a clear signal that Google really want to push this forward.

This is how disruption works — start at the low end and work your way up. Google is just doing it at hyper speed.

Link via Search Engine Journal

Lucas Grindley asks a good question: On Black Friday, how did your shopping site do?

Driven by the allure of new revenue, most of the largest newspaper sites have launched comprehensive “shopping” sections. Readers had a lot of time to get acquainted with these new services during the past year. But I doubt they are very interested.

Check your shopping stats. If there isn’t a spike in usage, the section is failing. If there is a spike, the section is on the right track.

It would be interesting to know if any newspaper.com sites have gotten the shopping site right, or how well (or poorly) the best of them are doing?

William Bulkeley has a very simple observation: Old media survived on a business model of forcing people to buy things they didn’t want.

Photography and publishing companies shouldn’t be surprised when digital technology upends their industries. After all, their business success relied on forcing customers to buy things they didn’t want.

Photo companies made customers pay for 24 shots in a roll of film to get a handful of good pictures. Music publishers made customers buy full CDs to get a single hit song. Encyclopedia publishers made parents spend thousands of dollars on multiple volumes when all they wanted was to help their kid do one homework paper. The business models required customers to pay for detritus to get the good stuff.

Inevitably, their industry revenues are shrinking now that consumers can use digital technology and the Internet to select only what they want.

This is just another variation on the Innovator’s Solution: Figure out the job consumers will hire you to do and then do the job.

What do people want from newspapers? Well, they want a lot of different things, but most people don’t want it all all of the time. And often they don’t want ink on their fingers or a stuffed recycling bin to get it. Advantage digital.

When I first announced my new job, a friend who grew up near Rochester immediately raved about Nick’s and the “Garbage Plate.”  I still haven’t tried it, but at least I’ve seen the video.

The NAA finally has a blog. Beth Lawton is blogging for the Digital Edge.

Today’s entry, following up on Steve Outing’s E&P column, how do you grade newspaper.com sites?

Disclosure: I’m on the New Media Federation board of directors (an NAA-sponsored group).

One of the reasons I wanted us to aggressively pursue video in Ventura was video seemed like an opportunity. When you consider all the ways that newspapers are being disrupted, why not spend a little time to try and figure out who newspapers can disrupt — among the chief candidates: Local television.

I don’t think it’s yet too late for newspapers to get aggressive about video, but time is running short. Other disruptors are already established. Michael Arrington is now recommending that we just go ahead and declare television dead and move on.

Rob Curley wants to make newspaper video more like television video. I say, let’s make it different. Let’s make it more like the web. Studio55 vs. TimesCast. At least to start, and when we get to Curley’s magic three years out, and we’re streaming directly to the big device in the living room, then we can evolve from Toyota Corolla stage to the Lexus LX model. By then, we should understand what that model should look like. We don’t know that today, but I bet it ain’t like broadcast television.

UPDATE: Jack Lail gets it.

If innovation and disruption come from small startups (or startup-like operations) who come out of nowhere with a product that is good enough to meet a need, then operate like they do.

Two guys in a garage or dorm room didn’t create a behemoth Internet portal with mail, maps, movies and more; they created a collection of links. It grew into a behemoth. Craig Newmark started with an email to friends and grew it into Craigslist. Start with what you can do and make it better. Just do.

UPDATE II: A poster at B-Roll.net takes a swipe at my “mypoic arrogance” and notes, fairly, that not all TV news coverage is bad. That’s true of course, but the opening is in the fact that most of it is bad, which the poster cops to.

Bold words from an industry hemorrhaging market share. Honestly, I wish them all the luck in the world, for the amalgamation of our two mediums would greatly improve the information stream - and where better to showcase it than on-line? Trouble is, too many in the print realm dismiss local TV efforts as entirely without merit. They gleefully point to the lowest common denominators, the “Killer Dust-Bunnies Hiding Under Your Child’s Bed” series-piece syndrome. Granted, the worst of my lot is guilty of such tripe, but I for one don’t deal in this bottom-feeding and neither do those who share my logo. Print folk would do themselves a huge favor by putting aside their contempt and taking a long hard look at the very best of broadcast news, starting with the NPPA reels readily available on-line.

In my own defense, I just want to say that I’ve always said newspaper video needs to evolve and get better, and I’ve sent videographers to study with TV shooters — we have a lot we can learn. Also, this isn’t about individuals. It’s about instiutions. Television news as an institution as a lot to answer for when it reaches the pearly gates. Of course, print journalists have their own sins to atone for. So, it’s about instiutions and opportunities. I see opportunity in another institutions weakness. See ya at the lunch table, Lenslinger (why is that handle familiar to me?)

UPDATE III: Lenslinger also has a blog and his post is also available here.

UPDATE IV: A TV photoguy who goes by the charming handle “Turdpolisher” responds. I left a comment along the lines of, “You’re so busy being defensive that you miss the point.”

The Praized Blog presents 16 Rules for Social Media.

I think 16 over complicates things. Here’s how I would edit down the list (I’ve also changed wording).

1. Keep content fresh, which leads to more in-bound links.
2. Make tagging and social bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links (i.e., trackbacks)
4. Make your content portable so it can easily be added to other sites
5. Be a resource — link to anybody and everybody (including competitors) so that your visitors always find your site valuable
6. Reward frequent users (promote their work, develop a ranking system)
7. Participate (join the conversation as an equal)

And that, my friends, is what all newspaper.com sites should be doing.

This is too funny — Chris Prillo arguing with himself over competiting video services using the video services. (via Steve Outing)

Journalists love awards. A Pulitzer, of course, is the granddaddy of all media awards. So today’s announcement, that the board will now consider a range of online initiatives, will probably do more to drive online innovation in content than any range of API studies. Besides accepting submissions related to online databases, interactive media and video, the board is also putting an emphasis on local reporting. These are key strategic targets for the online newspaper industry, so this is welcome news.

Steve Yelvington shares three Pew graphs that show participation sites are dominating audience growth over more tradition-bound rivals. This pretty much mirrors my much less scientific look at traffic in August using Alexa.