Here’s a competitive advantage, if you can harness it: Be ready for change.

• There are newspaper companies that either don’t believe things are really going to change, aren’t changing that much, or change won’t effect their businesses.
• There are newspaper companies that believe things are changing, and believe they are embracing change, but they are still chained to tradition or fixed mindsets.
• There are newspaper companies that understand change and are ready.

By change, I don’t just mean things will be different. I mean change as a constant state.

In 1900, the power of information technology doubled every three years, according to Ray Kurzweil. Today, it doubles every year. Note the exponential rate of increase. The more our computing power increases, the faster the pace of change, the more change is poured into the pipeline. Change is no longer an event. Change is now part of the human condition.

It’s not enough just to adopt new information technology; you need to know what’s coming and predicatively adapt elastic content and business models.

I first started thinking about rapid change when I read a piece in an airline magazine about Kurzeweil. I was reminded of his theories in another article from an old Inc. magazine I just read. There is a lot about his theory of the singularity that demands more study and is beyond this simple blog post, but I think we all have observed the rapid pace of information technology advancement. We’ve noticed it, but have we really thought about what it means for how we run our news organizations, both as businesses and content providers? Whether the singularity is soon or a long way off (or just a crock), there’s a lot of change to get through just to keep going.

Mindy McAdams offers a short course on what it means to be entrepreneurial.

Here’s what I say:

• Be resourceful: I’m amazed to meet reporters who are not resourceful. From my earliest days in the business, I’ve known reporters who can’t get beyond what is handed to them. This isn’t good. If you’re resourceful, you know how to make one more phone call, or where to look for the document that some government flak says you can’t have. When you’re resourceful as a person, you will figure out how to do things, to learn things, to make things happen, even when circumstances say, “no you can’t.”
• Think forward: What’s happening today and what does it tell you about tomorrow? Always be ready for change.
• Take initiative: Don’t wait for the perfect time, or for all the pieces to fall into place. Just find a way to get the job done. Find, know and use free resources on the web to help you get the job done, if necessary.
• Be an optimist: Don’t complain, don’t whine, believe that tomorrow will be better. No successful entrepreneur ever let temporary set backs determine his fate.
• Have a sense of urgency. This goes hand-in-hand with “take initiative.” There’s no time to sit around and wait. Try to make every minute count. Be organized, have a plan, follow through and get things done — things that matter. “Time’s wing’d chariot is always hurrying near.” Carpe diem.
• Be goal oriented. Have an idea what you want to do, why you want to do it, and how you’re going to measure success or completion.
• Don’t let the bastards get you down. Sometimes, your critics are right, but many times people, even well intentioned people, will just create roadblocks because they don’t understand. They will assault you with negative, deflating comments or try to counter your moves. Instead of giving in, move on.
• Be a realist. Sometimes your critics are right. Sometimes, you need to listen to the voices in your head. Sometimes moving on means dropping a project because circumstances have changed, your initial assumptions were wrong or things simply aren’t going to work out.
• Failure is your friend. This is a companion to “be a realist.” Not everything you are going to try is going to work out. This is often why smaller projects are preferable to bigger projects. It allows you to fail fast. Learn from failure and move on. One advantage of failure is that it allows you to say you tried it and it didn’t work, freeing you to try something else.
• Think different. Apple is right. If you want to bring about change, you can’t follow the pack. Develop the discipline to think critically about what you see and hear. Are other people’s assumptions correct?
• Be a self-learner. You should never stop learning, and the most efficient way to learn is to teach yourself. Try new things, read lots of books, be curious, ask questions, read blogs, set learning goals, be resourceful about what you learn and how you learn it. Among the things you should be learning, even if you’re purely a content person, is business, especially strategy. It will help you come up with better ideas.
• Aim for perfection, but never expect it. Perfect never happens. On the web, the job is never done. It’s great to always do your best and expect your best, but perfectionism leads paralysis.
• Be kind. You’ll get more done with people on your side.

To me, that’s being entrepreneurial.

The new eye track study says that online readers will read a longer news story more in depth.

Be careful not to read too much into that. It merely says that once a reader decides to read a longer story online, he will spend more time with it than a print reader.

It doesn’t say longer stories will get more readers, or that longer stories will help you grow online audience.

The web is intention driven. It’s a pull medium. So, when a user make a decision to spend some time with a story, of course he is going to read it more in depth.

In several years of watch news site web stats, I’ve observed that shorter is better. Long, in-depth stories rarely drive the number of page views that easy to digest pieces do. Frequent updates and of short items will grow audience. Long stories, not so much.

It’s not always easy finding free, non-DRM MP3s to post on MP3Caravan, but I’ve been pretty amazed at all of the good, independent music I have found. A good deal of it — though probably less than half — comes right from artists’ sites.

So far, my iTunes playlist of these downloads is up to 90 songs. And I love everyone.
I haven’t used my eMusic account in a couple of months. I’m busy with the free stuff I’m downloading.

So, with that in mind, this post from Chris Anderson is interesting (he’s quoting Bob Lefsetz):

I’m positively stunned at the blowback from business regulars about that chap [I actually don’t know which chap he’s referring to–maybe this one?] giving his music away for free. Oldsters can’t understand the economics!

I’ll clue you in, THERE ARE NONE!

This is your worst nightmare. People who can follow their dream on sweat equity. Who with their computer and the money from their day job or mommy and daddy can compete with you. It’s like the North Vietnamese, all our military might couldn’t defeat individuals who would fight to the death. Same deal in Iraq.

It’s an eye-opener. That your model is IRRELEVANT!

YOU need to pay the mortgage. YOU need to go on vacation to the Caribbean. But the new musicians? They’re willing to sleep on the floor and eat ramen. Hell, they’re in their twenties, they’re not on the corporate track, they’ve got different ambitions!

This is a level of disruption the newspaper industry has not yet faced. Yes, there are isolated examples of people doing hyperlocal journalism on a low-cost/no-cost basis, but no serious person believes bloggers are going to take over the world.

Songs, though. Songs are different. One good song can last for quite a while, if not forever, and the free ones can crowd out the ones that might cost you money. There are a lot of good musicians and songwriters out there. If every one of the good ones, and a few of the mediocre ones, produce just one song worth keeping, that’s a helluva lot of music. Even an avid music fan couldn’t keep up.

News, being disposable, must constantly be replaced. There’s a harder pace for the amateur newshound to keep up. Obviously, I’m a big fan of amateur journalism, but when you consider the disposable nature of the news story vs. the permanence of a good song, you can see, I think, that the news business isn’t likely to face the same level of disruption (though the disruption we’re dealing with on the revenue side is a concern).

Of course, this difference creates an advantage for newspapers: The web site can become a platform for encouraging, collecting, aggregating and distributing non-staff-generated stories. The lack of permanence means that you need a structure and a process to cycle contributions, which is a structure and process newspaper people know well. As a matter of brand position, our community relationships make it an magnetic place for amateurs to gather and participate.

As for the music business, for guys like me, who basically has no respect for the music industry (the business side of making records), it’s just a matter of helping those independent artists and hobbyists find an audience. That’s part of what MP3Caravan.com is all about.

The Victorville Daily Press, a Freedom paper, is doing a lot of video.

More from Tim Porter:

Mossberg says he’s doing low-tech videos to go with his columns. No production values, he says, no editing, but a recent one gets 60,000 plays. He’s astonished, but Diller’s not. “You are the production value, he tells Mossberg. His point: Name matters, content matters, brand matters. Everything else is frosting.

I disagree that name and brand matter all that much.  It might help, but it doesn’t matter.  Just look at all of the non-brand, non-name lo-tech stuff on YouTube that gets way more than 60,000 plays.

Via Tim Porter, great quote from Jay Small:

“We tend to treat the internet as an information and distribution medium. Most consumers treat it as a communication medium.”

Previously: Get out of the content business; become the platform.

We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of my friend Buddy Blue’s death within the next week. Quite by accident I found a treasure trove of Beat Farmers videos on YouTube, including this classic:

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RIP, Buddy and Country Dick.

This is my last post from Shattuck Avenue, and possibly my last post from Bakersfield (the land of a million white pick up trucks and endless oil derricks).

Over the past two months, I’ve been often cagey about my exact location. It just felt a little uncomfortable revealing that information when Billie was home alone in Bakersfield. Because of that, I wasn’t posting pictures of my travels on Buzznet. Last night, I made amends. There’s lots of pictures now.

Some 60 of the pictures are from the cross country drive Billie and I took in January. Here we are at the Grand Canyon. Here we are standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. From new Winslow, where the meteorite fell several centuries ago, is a picture old newshounds should love. We also stopped in Clovis, New Mexico and I took a picture of Norman Petty’s studio, where Buddy Holly recorded his biggest hits.

During the two months, I also took a few weather-related pictures in and around Canandaigua, New York, so as this ice fisherman outside my apartment. Then there is my car covered in ice and snow.

I think I’ll like New York. My first winter there wasn’t bad. I actually enjoyed it (but ask me how I feel about it in four or five years). Canandaigua certainly is a lot prettier than Bakersfield.

Bakersfield was a nice little transition to a new job and a new adventure. I think I leave behind some things better than I found them. I like where I’m going both personally and professionally. Thank you to all my friends who have been supportive and helpful over the past year or so.

To my Bakersfield buddies — if we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, I’m sure I’ll be back. I still have family here.

Fischer Communications is claiming that it will become the first company to allow citizen journalism video on an established news site.

Anybody care to dispute that?

McClatchy and Yahoo! are going to partner on a new content initiative called “Trusted Voices.” It will feature the foreign correspondents of the McClatchy news service using their original reporting and blogs running on the Yahoo! platform.

In an era when foreign news has largely become a commodity, this seems like a great way to extend the value of McClatchy’s investment in foreign coverage and differentiate it from the pack.

Rather than scale back, McClatchy is finding a way to breath new life into its efforts.

Until we actually see the package online, it’s hard to pass judgment on its true value. I’m not a fan of the name, which sounds a bit too “we’re the journalists and we know better.” That’s not a great value proposition in the era of distributed media where truth is often sussed out among a multitude of voices, but there is value in placing all that content under a single platform.

Paul Conley has three tips for employers and potential employees — what employers should look for, and what people entering the work force should prepare for.

I especially like point number two: Be self-taught.

On resumes and interviews, for every position I’ve tried to fill over the past three or so years I’ve looked for this attribute consistently. In this day and age, you need to be a person who is always learning and knows how to learn without teachers or guidance. Teachers and guidance are great, and I am happy to mentor people, but if you have to be able to do it on your own, too.

Yet one more reason to believe Packaged Goods Media is doomed: We can now pass judgment on bad decisions by our network exec overlords. And the don’t like it.

Eventually, all series will start on the web first. The question is, well they stay on the web or “graduate” to broadcast. I mean, if you have AppleTV, who needs networks anyway?

The book Tim Porter co-authored and worked so hard on for months that he didn’t blog (much to my dismay) is out.

News, Improved (check the site — looks like some good companion resources to the book — I’ll have to circle back later and dig in).

Poynter piece here.

As Porter sees it, learning to embrace change — to work as a team, to take risks, to innovate — should be every journalist’s top priority.

“You have to be ready for anything,” he says. “You have to be out there playing and trying [new things]. … You set some goals. You work on them. Some of them are going to work, and some aren’t.”

Like Porter, McLellan concedes uncertainty about what the future will bring.

“Underlying this is that the industry needs a new business model,” McLellan says. “[The industry needs] to figure out how to make enough money to support all the reporting that’s being done. We don’t have a solution to that problem.”

A few bloggers do “Quote of the Day,” and it’s usually something insightful or inspiring.

Maybe somebody should do “Dumb Quote of the Day.” I have a nominee:

After a bit of silence, Lemann then offered this: “This might not be what you want to hear, but I guess getting more content from the community could ‘help’ a newspaper’s bottom line by allowing them to get rid of news staff.”

The “publishers just want free citizen journalism to save money” meme is a little played. It’s uninformed. It doesn’t match reality. It’s a red herring. Kill it already.

Here’s a counter intuative statement from Bob Woodword:

“We need more unnamed sources, because people who are on the record are lying.”

My position has always been, and will remain: The opposite is true. I don’t trust stories sourced with unnamed government officials. It’s much easier to lie when you know your name is going to be kept out of the story, and a journalist is probably willing to go to jail to protect your identity. That’s the perfect time spin.

Of course, much of what passes for unsourced journalism inside the beltway is just gossip and rumor anyway. It has nothing to do with fact or serving democracy.

I don’t often read long pieces on the web, but this profile starts with a lede from Citizen Kane, and it’s about Brian Tierney, who does come across as a complex and fascinating fellow, so over the course of the day, I digested this eight-link page turner.

Tierney seems to embody in one person the good and the bad of turning over metro papers to local, private owners. He’s a visionary and ambitious, but seemingly mercurial and maybe a tad less than honest.

As the article says, kind of like the press barons of bygone eras.

Here’s the Norg Wiki.

If you don’t know what a norg is, this should help:

On October 24, 2005 Will Bunch, of the Philadelphia Daily News, put out a call for conversation, on the future of newspaper journalism. He coined the term “Norg” to represent a new form of news organization that isn’t defined by the paper itself.

Karl Martino, of Philly Future, and a previous Knight Ridder software engineer, contacted technologists and writers, to participate, to share ideas, and build bridges between different points of view.

The discussion now comprises of assorted minds from the upper management of traditional news organizations to the trenches of independent media, from seasoned journalists to young news consumers, from personal bloggers to online community hosts, from software engineers, to media entrepreneurs.

Wendy Warren, of The Philadelphia Daily News, and Susie Madrak of Suburban Guerilla organized, managed and led an unconference, that took place March 25, 2006. A group of about 40 met at Penn’s Annenberg School. During the unconference a tone was struck for what is hoped will be a lasting, organic conversation about the necessary adaptations for journalism in the 21st century.

Not much new here if you’re already emmersed in this stuff, but some good resources. If this way of thinking about news is new to you, then the collection of resource links on this site is a good place to start.

I do have to wonder why a supposedly public service project like this is running Google AdWords.

Kyle Redinger summarizes a lot of what community newspapers should do online. Essentially, he’s saying, “be the platform.”

For several years now, we’ve been subjected to news media scare stories about how what you do online can stay online for a long time. Google never forgets. Those frat party pictures of you naked on the lawn might never disappear.

Here’s the new angle: Potential employers who can’t google you and find you might wonder how net savvy you are.

And it’s not just about technology, Bray says. “Most companies would rather have somebody who has demonstrated the propensity to contribute, and one [sign] of that is going out and getting involved, joining in the discussion.”

Still, says Nolan Bayliss, founder of Naymz, an online identity services provider in Chicago, “someone who has no information online might be perceived as not being as tech-savvy as someone else.”

My advice: Start a blog and use your real name.