Danny explains the new feature here. Cool, uh?

Ryan Sholin introduces me to the word “freemium.”

It means, it seems, giving stuff away for free and then taking on up sells.

His example is his recent decision to upgrade his Flickr account.

Up sells are easy in classifieds, as Ryan notes, but not so easy in content.

But I’d take the lesson of Flickr and Feedburner and WordPress and apply them not to content, but to services. What services can newspaper companies create that have free uses but paid upgrades can be bolted on?

Or, how can the relationship a newspaper.com has with members of its community be leveraged to entice the most loyal users to buy services from the paper? What would those services be? What jobs-to-be-done can we help our readers solve?

Free content isn’t just about generating page views to boost advertising revenue. It’s also about building relationships with the people who are attracted to that content.

After signing my name exactly 80 times this morning and handing over a hefty (for us) check, I was given the keys to our new house today.

It’s cool, of course. It was built in 1959, has 3,100 square feet, which includes a basement with a fireplace and wet bar (this will be my room, meaning all of my music stuff, as well as (eventually) a poker table) will go here). The lot is .61 acres with more than a dozen mature trees and not much else in landscaping, so it’s kind of a blank canvas. First order of business is planting some rose bushes so I can learn how to grow them in New York.

We’re very happy in Western New York. We have barely missed California. There’s lots to do and see here.

Compare and contrast: When we moved to Bakersfield, it was a month before the first neighbor introduced himself, and no other neighbor ever did. Within six hours after closing escrow, the three closest neighbors had all walked over to say, “hello.”

I’ll have a video of the house available later. If you have any interest in seeing it, send an e-mail to howard owens (oneword) (at) gmail (dot) com.

From Rob Curley, I learn that Facebook has an API.

That’s pretty cool.

The Washington Post, of course, has a new Facebook API app, and since it came from Curley an his team, it is of course well thought out and executed. Except … I’m not sure I want to map my politics against my friends. My politics, these days, are my own.
But then, I’m long past young and hip.  Maybe the Facebook crowd will go for it.

I do have a Facebook account, finely.

Remember the paid vs. free debate? My blog wasn’t the only place at the time I was writing about it.

There was also a very lively discussion going on in the Digital Media Federation’s e-mail discussion list.

The NAA has made the entire thread available to members (You need an NAA member ID to access). It’s well worth the time to read if you missed the original debate. Several people made excellent points. (Via Beth Lawton).

(In case the disclosure is needed, I’m on the DMF’s board.)

UPDATE: Do you need more proof that pay for content won’t work.  CNN is giving up on its SECOND try at the model.

I still can’t believe that there are people who argue in favor of paid content. It just boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

Broadband makes a big difference in how people use the internet. In other words, they use it more.

Video didn’t really start to take off until broadband started getting serious in-home penetration.

To me, the net doesn’t even feel like the same environment as it did in pre-broadband days.

Clearly, advertising still lags way behind audience habits.

When you do the math, broadband users spend 48% of their spare time online in a typical weekday. “Currently, the proportion of advertising resources devoted to the Internet (about seven percent according to ZenithOptimedia) is nominal relative to the value it generates,” says Josh Crandall, managing director of Media-Screen.

We should expect advertising revenue for all media to increase, both in actual dollars and the amount spent per ad. Online advertising is going to get more expensive.

That’s good news for newspaper web sites.

But there are still a ton of disruptive threats out there, so it’s not all good news.  Lot’s of startups will come a long that will erode newspaper.com oppertunity, especially for media companies that are not already aggressive online.
Meanwhile, online TV news is gaining on us.

Why is that a concern? Because in some markets (all?), there will be a limited revenue pie for the near- to mid-term in local online advertising. It remains to be seen how well users will traverse across multiple local news site sources. Newspaper sites should be striving to be the local dominate news source online.

We should assume we are still early in the digital revolution and online audiences will continue to grow, and consumption habits will change, especially as broadband rolls into more homes and the infrastructure improves (and it will). In five years, broadband technology could be very different. More so for mobile.

I’ve said it many times, many ways, including in this blog: Every journalist should blog.

I’ve said it for completely selfish reasons. I want print journalists to GET the web. I want them to understand how the web is different. I want to cure them of their tone deafness to the conversation going on around them.

If you blog in the way blogging is meant to be done, you’ll realize these benefits.

The more journalists who get the web, the better our chance, as an industry, at survival.

So, my reasons, you see, are really selfish, because I want to survive.

Scott Karp makes a very good case for another reason you should blog: To save your own skin. He also offers some good tips on getting started.

UPDATE: In comments, Angela Grant points us to an opposing view.

While journalists have lots to gain from blogging, there’s also the fact that a lot of them suck without an editor bringing out the best.

Well, yes. But blogging is a very sink-or-swim ocean. Either you make it or you get drowned with the rest of the guppies, and journalists need to learn that lesson, too. In a distributed media world, you can’t afford to hide behind your editor.

I’m sure I’ve never been as popular of a blogger as I might because A) I’m not a very good copy editor and I make too many mistakes I don’t catch; B) I’m sure I’ve put up a few too many lame posts that could have been improved or trashed by an editor. That said, I’ve learned far more about the new media world because of blogging. These are lessons available in no a book nor taught by any teacher. Whatever embarrassment I may have caused myself has been a relatively small price to pay for all I’ve gained.

Much to the dismay of some people, I’m regularly pushing the value of low end video for newspapers.

While I’m a firm believer in the strategy, it’s not my idea originally. That credit should go to Jack Lail at Knoxnews.com. His site’s Random This feature gave me the idea (the feature won a Digital Edgie this year).

Knoxnews.com continues to find success with low end cameras. In his blog, Jack tells the tale of the site’s popular video interview with a Knoxville-based porn star who got pulled over for speeding and wound up giving a state trooper an “oral favor.”

The sound quality is a little scratchy, but not at all irritating. Picturewise, you’d be hard pressed to do better with a high end camera. Certainly, the picture is good enough.

This video is pretty good evidence is what matters most is the content, the news value or interest value of the video itself, not the price of the camera.

In an article on newspaper.com redesigns, WashingtonPost.com editor Jim Brady says an important consideration his site’s redesign was how to play video.

“Video is going to continue to become a bigger and bigger deal,” Brady says, “and so we’re trying to generate more video to put up. Some is shooting our own stuff or using stuff from partners. We’ve done some in jobs and real estate, as well as feature stuff around local music.”

Every newspaper web site should do this: Start a blog about local blogs.

In Bakersfield, we started Bakosphere. After I left, it died (though, I see by a note, it’s been resurrected here … inexplicably, it still doesn’t reside under the wonderful bakosphere.com domain).

If newspaper sites don’t start such blogs, the local TV stations will, as Cory Bergman is proving in Seattle.

Cory’s doing a great job with this blog.

Nick Carr takes on the notion that digital has liberated music fans from the enslavement of the LP record.

Writing about a passage in a new book by Dave Weinberger in which Weinberger trumpets the virtues of the unbundled song, Carr responds:

Weinberger does do a good job, though, of condensing into a few sentences what might be called the liberation mythology of the internet. This mythology is founded on a sweeping historical revisionism that conjures up an imaginary predigital world - a world of profound physical and economic constraints - from which the web is now liberating us. We were enslaved, and now we are saved.

Carr offers up some meaty history on how LP records were developed and concludes that the LP was an autistic boon and a great advancement for consumers of music.

I love LPs. I own several hundred of them. LPs have great cover art and great audio quality. On an artistic level, as Carr notes, an LP is a better canvas for a great long playing composition than even a compact disc. The whole package — think Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side of the Moon — becomes the artistic expression. CDs, with their small jewel cases and lack of the tactile joy that goes with cardboard, ink, paper and vinyl can’t match the LP.

But there is something to be said for the notion that some times, even in the hey day of LPs, you just wanted the one song. Rock and roll is a very expressive and expansive art form. It allows for every thing from Tommy to “Sugar, Sugar.” The three-minute pop song has a value all its own, and some bands didn’t make very good LPs, but they recorded great songs. Their LPs (Elvis Presley comes to mind) were moments of bliss punctuated with fillers of boredom.

One of the main ideas behind my now neglected MP3Caravan.com project was to celebrate the three minute song.

I found a lot of great songs in that project — a lot more than I’ve found wading through “albums” of music on iTunes or eMusic. I think there is an explosion of great song writing going on now, thanks to the liberating values of the digital age.

That doesn’t make today’s formats better. They’re just different. I love songs. I love LPs. No contradiction there.

This is crazy.

My wife just bought a dinette table from Sears.com.

By happenstance, she found the same table for sale on the Montgomery Wards online store. It was $20 cheaper.

Billie called Sears.com to see if they would price match.

No, because MW doesn’t have a physical store in our neck of the woods (not in your neighborhood either, since they’re strictly at catalog business now).

The table in question is not available in a Sears store — it’s only available online.  Yet, Sears won’t price match with another online retailer.

Isn’t that crazy?

This post from Matt Waite titled “Stop waiting for them to save you” is interesting on a couple of levels. It’s built around the notion that newspapers have never really invested in training as much as they should, but that doesn’t relieve individuals of taking responsibility for their own training.

Here’s the sad truth, as I see it: how flush was your training budget when times were good? Most places, not very. So how flush do you think it’s going to be now, when circulation is going down, down down, and ad revenue is going elsewhere? Here’s a hint: You probably don’t have a training budget anymore.

So, to quote Shawshank Redemption, get busy living, or get busy dying.

What drives me nuts is that I’m almost completely self taught, so I get especially agitated by people who wait around to be saved.

These two quotes juxtapose my own unique position. On one side, it’s part of my job to make sure people get adequate training. On the other side, pretty much everything I know about the web (whether dealing with business issues or development technology) I taught myself.

It is frustrating to watch people sit around and wait for somebody to teach them.

Of course, I don’t think that lets me off the hook when it comes to ensuring our own staff is adequately trained. If we’re going to ask people to do all of these new things, and we expect them to do it well, we have an obligation to ensure they are trained.

Even so, I think its important for all journalists to take responsibility for their own careers and learn all they can about online content production.

Matt asks this rhetorical question:.

Why should I do something that costs me time and maybe even money to benefit my employer when I don’t get paid for it?

Matthew’s response to me tracks a little more to the negative side: self-investment is a hedge against layoffs or the complete collapse of newspapers. From my own experience, I think there are more positive reasons to invest in yourself: It’s a chance to advance your career.

I spent six years with Scripps. During that time Scripps did buy me some useful books, but I took no classes and went to no seminars. Everything I learned, I taught myself. What I taught myself enabled me to do cool things and things that helped my company make money. That got me noticed. That got me promoted. One thing led to another and I’m no longer with Scripps, but I have a hell of a great job working for a great company living in a great community.

None of that would have been possible if I hadn’t invested in myself.

And nothing about where I am is planned. I just believed that if I invested in myself, good things would happen. And they did.

In the short term, Scipps benefited greatly by the things I taught myself. In the long run, I benefited more.

But back to the yen/yang of this issue.

There’s only so much you can learn about web stuff in a classroom. You can’t really learn how to shoot and edit video well or how to create Flash animations or even how to build a simple HTML page without investing a lot of your own elbow grease.

So, my question is, is it worth it for a company to invest time and money to train people who aren’t willing to train themselves?

I mean, the people who invest in themselves are the ones most likely to master the skills necessary to do great work.

To paraphrase Rob Curley, it’s mindset that matters most.

UPDATE: Catching up on my blog reading and came across this post by Danny Sanchez on a related topic: Don’t read, do.

SPJ President Christine Tatum has been getting a little taste of what it’s like to be covered by the media, not be the one getting the quotes and writing the story. The results haven’t always been pretty.

One of the most interesting and invaluable aspects of serving as SPJ’s president is to experience what it’s like to be written about by other journalists.

Boy, have I seen some shoddy reporting and unfair stories that not only have appalled me but have made me even more determined to ensure my work is accurate, honest and fair.

I’ve been in a couple of positions where I’ve either been directly involved in something that was covered by the media, or closely enough involved to know the truth. The results have rarely been pretty.

I’ve walked away from my encounters with other reporters shaking my head thinking, “Man, I wonder if all reporters are this inaccurate or this unfair. No wonder so many people hate the media.”

And like Christine, it redoubled my own commitment to fairness and accuracy.

I’m concerned that too many reporters are more interested in getting a good story, getting a good clip, or getting on the front page than they are about getting it right.

Ms. Tatum offers up a list of tips and reminders for reporters on how be fair and accurate. It’s worth a read.

I’m an omnivore, according to this Pew test/survey. (Via Beth Lawton)

Sitting on my desktop, waiting to be read, is Kathy Schwartz’s report on Smart Strategies for newspaper web sites.

In the meantime, Beth Lawton provide 10 key takeaways.

I like hearing about newspapers experimenting with user-generated content when the experiment involves mixing the am content with the pro content and/or putting it into the daily print edition.

The News and Observer is giving it a try now.

Howard Weaver rightly observes:

I have few illusions about this. As a guy who’s edited thousands of letters to the editor over the past 40 years, I know that the quality of both prose and accuracy will vary hugely, that reliability will be uneven at best, that many of the contributions will be self-serving and some may be unfair or simply wrong.

So what? We’ll learn to handle that, adding value by applying editing skills that a typical community news site won’t have. We’ll learn directly from readers what matters to them, helping us broaden horizons and be more genuinely responsive. It will breach some of the walls we thought were protecting “journalism” from the Visigoths, but really were just separating us from the audience.

I know there are a lot of people in the newspaper business who hope that someday there will be an electronic device that saves the day — that somehow we can replace paper and all its associated inconveniences and inefficiencies with a device that is a closed enough system that news remains a push experience rather than a pull — in other words, skip the uncomfortable truth that old publishing models don’t work on the web.

But as I’ve said before, any digital device is likely to be as fraught with as many challenges to publishers as the web browser.

Steve Yelvington points out many of the problems with the latest tablet reader experiment.

I’m just saying, don’t expect technology to save your outmoded model. Instead, figure out how to succeed in the new world.

If I still haven’t convinced you that paid content is a dumb idea, go read Vin Crosbie.

In the midst of a debate about free vs. paid for online content, here’s an interesting column to read: Look Mom, No Ads!

Scripps came up with the idea of the ad-free paper while in semi-retirement in California. He reasoned that a paper without advertising could give a “more honest account” of the news, the author says, and that if he could figure out a successful business model, it would be imitated by other publishers.

“He thought this was the greatest experiment that could be carried out in the history of journalism,” Stoltzfus adds.

One of my main themes in this debate has been: Readers have always paid for distribution, not content. But here was an attempt to get readers to pay for the whole shebang.

At a penny a pop.

And 22,000 papers, at most, we sold on any given day.

No word on whether the paper ever made any money, but given its short lifespan, it’s doubtful, but bless E.W. Scripps for trying.

This century-ago experiment, I don’t think, shed any light on whether readers will pay for general circulation news. This penny paper never caught on, but was because of the short staffing, the lack of promotion, or the poor circulation area. It’s probably all three, and more, but it’s hard to judge from this distance (and without reading the book).