Through this video, I learned about The Myth of Innovation, by Scott Berkun, so I bought the book.

The first chapter is about the myth of the epiphany. It’s a subject covered in the video, and I’m only half way through the chapter, but the theme started me thinking about epiphanies I’ve had over the years. I’m going to share them because I think they both show the importance of epiphanies and how none are all that big, but might also demonstrate how small insights can lead to important business model changes.

• When I first joined the online world, I signed up for SPJ-L, then moderated by Jack Lail. Jack constantly struggled to keep the list on target. From that experience, I learned how important it was to manage virtual communities and guide members toward mutual respect and staying on topic for the sake of a healthy community. But the main thing I learned, as I did from Steve Outing’s Online-News, is how powerful a community could be that is organized around a passionately shared interest.
• When I created RV-Talk for AGI (essentially the seeds of my later business, RVClub.com), I learned that shared passion wasn’t limited to a certain net-friendly demographic. The average age of RVClub.com in 1997 was 55. I learned it was more about people with a shared interest than it was technology.
• When I became serious about blogging in 2002, it seemed obvious early on that what made us all smarter wasn’t the Big-J news story, but the conversation that went on around the story — all of the smart, informed, experienced people who could extend the story with their expertise. From there, it wasn’t big leap to buy into Dan Gillmor’s “journalism as a conversation.”
• When Hollywood came to Ventura to shoot Swordfish, we decided to buy a bunch of disposable cameras (digital cameras were still rarely owned) and hand them out to movie fans. The resulting slide shows were quite popular. I realized then that something that would later become known as UGC had a place in journalism. This realization would be confirmed again after the advent of digital cameras when there was a large fire in Ventura County, a flood in Ventura County and our use of Buzznet for photo sharing.
• One day in early 2004, right after I became director of the Star’s web site, I was running various web site traffic reports. I noticed that there were two big spikes and a couple of small, but noticeably more pronounced, dips in traffic. The spikes were two big local stories, and the dips coincided with the dates of large national stories (one was the invasion of Iraq, which we covered heavily on the web, including using blogs). It was then that I realized that local newspaper web sites had no brand for national news. When the big stories hit, people go to CNN or NYT or WaPo, but not 100K newspaper sites, even local people. From that lesson, I devised the strategy of pushing down generic AP stories and promoting regular updates of local news. At the time, it was pretty much an unheard of strategy for the average newspaper.com.
• Also in 2004, we introduced comments on stories on VCS.com. At the time, no newspaper sites I knew of had comments on stories — though it had been tried before. In an effort to “just get it done,” I supplied an online editor with some JavaScript from HaloScan and we launched comments. Within a few days, we had some great comments on stories about the mother of a murder suspect and a tiger prowling Simi Valley. The comments extended the story and helped make us all better informed. This truly was “journalism as a conversation.” This was the real power of participation. Of course, we would also soon discover the dark side of an open commenting system (racial idiots spewing hate, for example), but that reminded me of the value of community controls, which helped create the system now in place on Bakersfield.com (the primary reason I moved to Bakersfield was to launch a true community site welded to a newspaper site).
• Discovering Clayton Christensen and his ideas behind disruption and innovation greatly influenced much of my approach to just try things, get things launched, don’t wait around for the perfect moment to do the perfect thing. This was a radical change of attitude for me, and one that took me a year to really embrace.
• Two books read closely together welled up into an epiphany about how people use the web. First was The Search by John Battelle, and the second was Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. Everything I’ve been involved with related to newspaper.com design since has been informed by the ideas of the “intention-driven web” and keeping navigation simple and obvious.
• The first-time that I saw the Numa Numa Dance, and knew that millions of people had already watched it, I realized that broadband penetration was sufficient to make video an important strategic consideration. It seems quint now, doesn’t it?
• The first time I watched a video from an online producer for a newspaper (Anthony Placencia, for VCS.com), and I sat there thinking, “this is no good because it’s not like TV,” and then the gentle, slowly set up moment of a boat’s keel touching the water, and really giving the story its gentle climatic moment, I realized, “web video SHOULD NOT be like TV.” The video was far more powerful than anything I could imagine a TV producer putting together.
• When we started rolling out video in the VCS newsroom and reporters became more engaged in the web site than they had been before, I realized video was the gateway drug for journalists that we needed to care about keeping our web site updated. Everybody loves video and the idea of producing video themselves, because we all grew up with it.
• When Jack Lail first shared with me Random This and the power of the Sony Cybershot, I realized that video need not be overly produced to be highly effective.
• After I arrived in Bakersfield and started supplying those same Sony Cybershots to reporters and the feedback from the news room was, “these are great because they’re not bulky like camcorders” I saw the path toward getting reporters involved in video.

Everything else I’ve done in the past 24 months or so have really been epilogue. They’ve been about coalescing and refining these insights.

Maybe Mr. Berkun wouldn’t consider those moments epiphanies, but they were all moments in my career that shape my strategic thinking today.

Here’s a suggestion for other media bloggers: Post your own string of epiphanies and how they’ve shaped your current media thinking.

My friend Tim Gallagher is stepping down as publisher of the Ventura County Star.

I really enjoyed working with Tim — decent, honest, loyal, hard working, great newsman, and a strong leader. I learned a lot from him.

The thing I will always most appreciate about Tim is that when I told the newsroom that the days posting non-local news stories on the top of the VCS.com home page were over, and that we were going to start updating more often with local stories, Tim backed the strategy.

It was a courageous move on his part. All he had at the time was my word that it would work. There were no newspaper sites that we knew of at the time that were being that aggressive about pushing local-only updates. It wasn’t a uniformly popular decision at VCS.

The locally focused, web-first strategy is now common place in the industry, and a proven traffic-growth driver, but in early 2004, it was still just a theory.

Tim has never been afraid to back entrepreneurial decisions, and that’s rare in our industry.

I wish him all the best in his new pursuits.

RRStar.com launched on a new site design last night.  We call this template the “Rockford template.” Previously, we launched a template on chicagosuburbannews.com that we now call the “Kiowa template.”

Next month, a third generation GateHouse Media template will hit the web.  I won’t tell you just when, where and what yet.
We will also continue to iterate on these templates.  We are especially eager to incorporate some upgrades to the Kiowa templates. Our plan is to have a series of highly modular, customizable and flexible templates for our newspaper sites to pick from.  We’re taking what I would call a very object-oriented approach with the idea that behind the scenes we have the benefits of being cookie cutter, but from a retail view (the side users see), no two sites really look the same. That will take time to develop and perfect, but we have a good foundation in place now.

There are, of course, issues with RRStar.com to tweak and fix, but as is our motto: “We’ll get there. It will be fine.”

We also have a long list of features and functionality to roll out that will help us archive our community-focused goals.  We’ll get there. It will be fine.

It hasn’t been my blogging style recently just to quote a post and link to it. I’ve decided just to post when I have something to say.

I’m making exception for this Steve Yelvington post, because the following quote is just too good, too pure and true not to highlight:

Newspapers like the Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Minneapolis Star Tribune are hurting not because they’re local, but because they’re not local enough. And as they try to figure out how to be local, they’re discovering they lack the proper tools. They have the wrong staff, the wrong processes, even the wrong presses.

Smaller newspapers are doing much better. The genuinely local, and even better yet, hyperlocal newspapers — the ones you can pick up and see your life reflected — are very strong.

Several years ago, when I was active in the online virtual community for guitarists, WholeNote, I learned an interesting term: Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS).

The symptoms of GAS? Every spare dime you get finds its way through the doors of the local guitar store. You might have stopped by after work for a set of strings and walked out with a new effects pedal and Monster Cable. You had to have all the latest and coolest stuff. You needed new and better toys.

I think about GAS when I read yet another videographer arguing that publishers should just shut up and buy them all the best equipment. Forget strategy. Forget other spending priorities. If you aren’t buying them Canon XH-A1s, then you just don’t get video.

I have the deepest respect for PF Bentley, whom I met while I worked in Ventura. I have no doubt that every aspiring videographer could learn a lot from the man, who is truly one of the icons of the field. But, memories of GAS came flooding back while reading his piece on DigitalJournalist, “Just Say … Wait A Second.” (Link via Doug Fisher)

So now you need to make the switch to video and the bosses are asking if you can do “that video stuff” on some ultra-mini DV camera and edit in iMovie. Ask them if you could shoot the big game with a digital point-and-shoot. Hey, cut costs more by only using Photoshop Elements. Finally, tell them you could further cut costs if they’d move out of their plush offices and sit in the newsroom with a plain, unfinished pine desk with a rotary phone with dial-up Internet.

Going back to another memory, I think of the first post I ever did encouraging newsrooms to equip reporters with point-and-shoot cameras. It was comical the level of hostility my old posts aroused among many otherwise level-headed journalists. I’ve gotten pretty hot under the collar writing about this topic, as have others. But the bottom line is, it still doesn’t make sense for newsrooms to get a case of GAS.

PF says IT shouldn’t be making video equipment purchase decisions. I agree, but I doubt any newspaper IT department in the country is making these decisions. Those decisions are usually made by the online editor or online director. The actual purchase order may be processed by IT, but only after getting clear direction from an experienced online professional.

And that experienced online professional isn’t making purchase decisions based on your case of GAS. He or she is making STRATEGIC decisions.

GAS is not a strategy.

Thinking about how best to grow audience through video, how best to leverage the strengths of the newsroom, and about where you want your newsroom to be in regards to video three to five years from now are all strategy questions. Once you answer those questions, then you can move onto finding the right equipment to suit your strategy.

I agree with PF that digital content is moving toward video and that there is a huge opportunity for newspaper web sites to grow video advertising revenue. But going out and spending $20,000 on just a couple of video kits is no way to ensure your newspaper.com will be well positioned to reap those advertising dollars. In fact, it’s damn near a sure fire way to ensure you’ll fail to get those dollars.

If you don’t widely develop video literacy within the newsroom, you will not have the resources to move rapidly with the changing video world; you will have too little talent concentrated in too few people. Most importantly, you won’t be producing enough video on a daily basis to grow audience.

Critics of the disruptive video strategy seem to think that buying smaller, more mobile cameras is all about cheaping out, as Bentley says above. But if you’re doing this strategy right, it’s not cheap. For example, our company has bought more than 140 (make that at least 280 — see note from Sarah Corbitt in the comments. Ed: Don’t you know how many cameras your company has bought? They’re breeding like rabbits. I can’t keep track.) point-and-shoot cameras with extra memory and carrying cases. That isn’t cheap. We’re also investing in training, and will invest more.

One of the interesting lessons of our video purchases is that not all photographers who want to do video want to be hobbled by the Canon XH-A1 (we’ve purchased some of these, too). Some photographers are asking for more nimble equipment, such as the Canon HV20. They have print obligations and the XH-A1 is too much equipment. Lugging it around and setting everything up slows them down.

Just to be clear, pursuing a disruptive video strategy isn’t about being cheap. It’s about being smart. It’s about taking limited resources — all newspapers have limited resources — and deploying them in the way that seems best to suit strategic needs. It’s about getting Return on Investment, not about saving money. In fact, if you’re doing it right, you’re spending just as much money on video as you would if you took PF Bentley’s advice.

One last thought: Do you know what your newspaper’s video strategy is? Whether your company is buying pricey video kits or sending reporters out with Casios, have you made sure you understand the strategy? You should be asking the questions, for two reasons. First, you want to make sure the work you do aligns with a well articulated strategy, so you work efficiently and in concert with the other parts of your company. Second, if your company is spending money on video just because everybody else is, then your company is in trouble. You should know that. And if that is the case, it doesn’t matter how good your equipment is, or how poor, because your efforts will be without direction and soon peter out once people lose interest or think video just isn’t working.

Strategy is important. Make sure you have a strategy before spending a dime on video. Don’t get GAS.

UPDATE: Ryan Sholin can’t stop writing about this topic, either. He has a related post on video strategy as a long-tail strategy.

Shane Richards has performed a valuable public service for all of us who care about modern media and what some deep thinkers think about the current state of things: He’s compiled a list of recommended blog posts related to the topic.

I’m proud to have one of my posts considered worthy, but now I have a couple of posts to go read, cause there a some on the list I haven’t read yet.

Here’s the best thing you can do with the next 51 minutes of your life. The video below is Google CIO Douglas Merrill on Innovation at Google. If you are thinking about search, as I am, the beginning provides some nice food for thought. If you’re interested in business strategy and innovation, as I am, the entire video is worthwhile.

And if you’re not interested in these things, you should be — just about every person who reads this blog is involved in the online news game at some level, and we all have a responsibility to care about business strategy and innovation, whether you’re a first-year reporter, a classified ad rep, or a top executive.

[youtube]2GtgSkmDnbQ[/youtube]

There is lots of goodness here. Here’s a couple of things I noted:

Merrill on the need for fast loading pages: “We can loose 15 percent of our traffic just by slowing down 200 milliseconds. … We’ve done a lot of work to answer any question in the world in 400 milliseconds”

Put that in your usability pipe and smoke it. Maybe you’ll figure out how to kill about 1,000 links on your home page.

The big issue of search: Deliver the right results. It’s not enough just to have a big database. If the results don’t match exactly what the user wants and they’re not delivered in the way the user wants, you’ve failed. “Search is still not solved.”

Merrill then went on at some length about transformational innovation and incremental innovation. My thought is newspapers have been caught up in trying to push transformational innovation ever sense Innovator’s Dilemma came out, and that’s what the API’s Newspaper Next project was all about, but incremental innovation is important, too, and we don’t spend enough time thinking and talking about that.

On the other hand, things like getting more news online faster, which has proven to be a big traffic driver for many sites in the past couple of years, is really just an incremental innovation.

“Innovation based on what users need is likely to create economic value, so whatever you do, start innovating with the user. And obviously what you should do is ask users what they want, right Mr. Ford? Yeah, right. Won’t work. ‘If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.’”

“Users don’t know what they want, but they might know what problems they have.”

Merrill then goes into a lengthy discussion of news and what users want … it’s not all happy news for traditional media companies, but this section of the talk did remind me of something I did at the Ventura County Star that transformed the way I look at local news sites, and I followed an approach, I think Merrill would appreciate.

In my mind, based on the Merrill model, I listened to the users. I looked at about two years of user stats and noticed something interesting. When we had a big local story, such as a flood or a fire, where we put breaking news on the site and followed the story closely and solicited user content, we had huge spikes in visitors. That’s no big surprise, necessarily, but what was most interesting, was that when there was a big national or international story, even when we covered it with great gusto, such as the invasion of Iraq, our site traffic took a dive.

That told me, our local news site wasn’t a brand to users for nation/world coverage. For nation and world, they thought of the CNNs and the NYTs first, and us hardly at all.

From that I learned, regular updates of local news is what our users want. It’s something I still believe today, especially since so many local sites are now finding success with that model.

Merrill used the example of an earthquake in California. When it happened, Google graphed a quick spike in traffic — people googling “earthquakes,” and the site they were hitting was the first link, the link to the USGS site (highlight for those who don’t quite get the import of this result — it wasn’t a traditional news site).

Merrill: “Why is this interesting? This is interesting because fundamentally the news sites are in this spike, too. The news sites don’t have data yet. They’re still trying to figure out. They’re scrambling reporters, trying to understand what’s going on, whereas a lot of the people those news sites want to reach, people who care about what just happened, already know. So the democratization of information is in some sense working against traditional news creation, because a lot of the people you want to talk to about news know the answer already. The people you are talking to are the people who weren’t that interested in the first place.”

You might need to re-read that statement. It’s fundamental to understanding how the news game has changed — our best customers often know more than we do before we even get a chance to tell them what we know.

Merrill: “If you’re a content creator, that graph makes you think hard about ‘what is my value in this ecosystem?’”

The last 10 minutes should be required for any executive looking to create a culture of innovation. It should make a few executives in our industry squirm a bit. The news industry hasn’t done a great job of allowing people to make mistakes or hiring for diverse ideas. A lot of people lament our industry’s ability to “innovate,” but it isn’t necessarily the lack of big innovations that has hurt the most (there is no reason to believe that we really needed to create Google, or MySpace, or YouTube first) — we haven’t been willing to fail fast and innovate incrementally. If we had, we would be much further along today.

Over the past 18 to 24 months, there has been a mini-boom in people blogging about new media, newspapers online and such.  I’ve come to know a lot of smart and dedicated people whom I didn’t know 10+ years ago. Some of these people are clearly new to our industry.

I just wonder how many of them ever stop and think that before they started contributing their expertise that there were a lot of smart people already doing this online newspaper stuff?

There’s nothing new under the sun, as they say, and there are damn few new ideas coming out in blogs today that weren’t floated on e-mail discussion lists such as Online-News, Online-Newspapers, the New Media Feds list or the ONA list before there were blogs. The perscriptions and solutions of 2007 aren’t much different from what a lot of smart people in our industry were saying in 1997.

Among those people who has been more often right than wrong over the years is Vin Crosbie, but since he doesn’t make blogging his vocation, a lot of media bloggers don’t seem know who he is or appreciate how important he is to our industry.

Today, Vin celebrates his 5,000th day in newspaper new media. He’s posted an excellent retrospective of his career.

And there’s this:

I’ve not seen the up and down phases of the Internet bust and boom that the popular and trade press are fond of seeing since 1993. What I’ve seen is a straight line continually rising. The ups and downs, booms and busts, and other gyrations were investors’ and traditional media companies’ helical movements rotating around that upward line. When in 2000 investors lost their shirts in the Internet bust and quite a few traditional media company executives were saying, ‘I told you this online thing was just a fad,’ consumers’ use of that ‘online thing’ was rising as steadily as it had during the Internet boom, no matter if investors had lost shirts and wingtips.

I agree. Internet growth has been a straight line for all practical purposes. And when the dot com bust came, a lot of newspaper company top executives pulled back the reigns on new media development. It wasn’t like we were doing all that great of a job on putting our ideas into place anyway (newspaper new media operations were always bootstrap efforts), but whatever momentum we had going in 2001 was lost. If newspaper companies do not survive the transition to digital media, then 2001 to 2004 can be considered the black pit that sucked all the life out of efforts.

It was stupid to pull back and we’re still paying the price.

That three year period should have been the years we doubled down and tried to get out in front of the audience. It wasn’t like we couldn’t predict that social networks (what we then called virtual communities) and niche interests and participation would be big things. Some of us, in fact, were saying exactly that. With the first emergence of broadband, how hard was it to see that video would some day be a big thing?
Or what about this: Why couldn’t we have made our online classified efforts more robust back then? Interestingly, it was during this dark age that that NAA’s Horizon Watching committee release a report on “web centric classifieds” that was largely ignored by the industry. In fact, to this day, I think most newspaper sites are far, far, far away from implementing a web centric classified strategy.

Of course, people like Vin were warning us …

… sometimes when I’ve written something particularly controversial about the news or newspaper business (such as during 1999 when I’d write about how printed edition circulation would in a few years begin to plunge), some newspaper industry executives would dismiss off-hand what I wrote because I was only ‘a consultant’ and not someone actually ‘employed by the newspaper industry.’

Vin may not be saying, “I told you so” — I think he’s more just in a reflective mood — but, well, he did. If only the suits had listened.

This Blivings Report on the “top 10 newspaper sites” has been getting a lot of attention, but I think it’s rather weak, and not just because Bakersfield.com isn’t on it (though that is part of it). It over looks a number of good better sites, and inexplicably includes the ugly and tanking USAToday.com and the link-bloated Chron.com (gorgeous site with lots of blogs and such, but the home page is about 1,000 links too big).

So, I’ll do my own Top 10 list. This time, I will ignore my conflict of interest and include Bakersfield.

1. Bakersfield.com. The site still has the best UGC/social networking platform of any newspaper site (we’ll change that at GHS), and the best video strategy and does a great job at keeping the site constantly updated. The site wins for usability and overall design as well. The content marquee on the home page is a mistake, but perfection is always elusive. The page has gotten long, but at least the added links are pointing to web stuff, not print stuff.
2. NaplesNews.com. Blivings praised USAToday for their social networking, but both Bakersfield.com and NaplesNews.com have better social networking and participation. The new site design is gorgeous and quite usable. Flaws: Why “Latest News” and “Top Stories” on the home page. The top stories box screams, “We can’t stop thinking of ourselves as a newspaper site.” And Studio55 is well produced and slick, but that’s part of its problem. It’s trying too hard to be TV. But Studio55 is also a big part of what makes this a great site.
3. WashingtonPost.com. Combine great site design with great content and plenty of hooks for user participation and you’ve got a winner. It’s no wonder that WaPo.com leads the industry in local audience reach. WaPo really doesn’t do a great job of displaying its video though, and still hasn’t broken too far from the “we’re a newspaper site” mentality.
4. SignOnSanDiego.com. I’ve never been a fan of the home page design, but long before continuous updates or videos were all the rage in our industry, Ron James and his content team at SOSD have been doing it. They were also among the first to embrace participation through comments on stories and UGC photos. Under the hood are some great subsites, such as AmplifySD. We could all learn a lot by studying SOSD more closely.
5. KnoxNews.com. Jack Lail has long run one of the best newspaper web sites in the country, and its one of the few sites that has continued to improve with each iteration. The current site features a top half of the home page that is damn near perfect. The bottom half could almost be entirely lost and never missed, which would improve the home page greatly. The overall site architectures is outstanding. There’s room for participation on Knoxnews.com, and blogs and a nice mix of video offerings.
6. LJWorld.com. The design has gotten a little sloppy and confusing, but it’s still one of the most progressive newspaper sites in the world. It scores big points just for being more web focused than print focused.
7. NYTimes.com. Maybe the only newspaper site in the world that has stuck very close in look and tone to its print parent and actually pulled it off. It, too, suffers from link bloat, but you can’t argue with the quality of the Times content, and it is among the industry leaders in online video.
8. SFGate.com. Here’s a content-rich, regularly updated site with some great blogs, multimedia and user participation. Again, the home page is about twice as big as it should be, and I’m not overly impressed by the years-and-years old design, but there’s lots of good stuff going on here.
9. TBO.com. The home page is a little cluttered, but at least they don’t try to stuff every link they can imagine onto it. You can comment on stories, there is multimedia a good calendar and lots of information about the local area.
10. Chron.com. Of all the link-bloated home pages out there, Chron.com wears it the best. Chron scores well for blogging and multimedia.

So I’m sure some people will want to give me grief for making Bakersfield.com #1, but it’s my list based on my criteria, which chief among them is to get as far away from being a newspaper site as possible, and be a platform for the local community. I still think Bakersfield is doing that best. On different criteria, it might score differently, but based on what I think — with more than a decade of experience in this field — is what news sites should be doing, it comes the closest to getting it right. It would seem unfair not to include it just because of my prior involvement with the site, and once it gets included, it needs to get its due.

If nothing else, this list should clearly demonstrate that the Blivings list was a lot of bunk. There were too many great newspaper web sites left off in favor of some lesser ones. Remix the list any way you like, I’m confident its a better reflection of who is doing what right in newspaper-associated web sites. Also, in comments, nominate your own … I’m sure I’m forgetting some good ones.

Just for the record, I encourage my wife do point-and-shoot video, too. Here’s one she did on a guy and his worms.

[youtube]ZsFMRsiSzHM[/youtube]

The video goes with this story.

Note, we don’t have our own video player yet. We’re still using YouTube. We expect to launch our own video player in just a few more weeks. That will improve placement of the video on the story page.

How many times have you heard pro journalists complain that all this UGC is just a lot of talentless, ill-informed bunk. That in the end, readers are going to return to professional publications because they will miss the quality.

But according to a recent Deloitte & Touche study, UGC isn’t going anywhere. Some 51 percent of the online audience is a UGC audience, and among younger users, the percentage is even higher. (It kind of makes you wonder why a UGC site would delete all of its UGC content, doesn’t it, especially under the premise of “it just isn’t working”?)

Meanwhile, there is a firehose of new content to keep up with every day, even if you just narrow your focus to a niche or two to follow.

Social aggregators like Digg help address the issue in the tech news world combining human intelligence computer power to filter content, but in the general news world, nothing like that has really worked yet.

And from the pro-journalist perspective, a high-falutin attitude would say, “I don’t want no dang bunch of amateurs filtering my news for me.”

So, if you believe that finding the best news reports on the web can be difficult and that trained, professional journalists have a role to play in helping people sort it all out, then Scott Karp’s new venture should interest you. You can read more about it here.

If you’re a pro journalist, go help out. This could get interesting.

Newspaper site search is broken.It’s never been anything but broken.

Search is the primary way people navigate the web, and the way a lot of people (about 50 percent) do or want to navigate any given web site.

With all due respect to my friends at Planet Discover, PD has not fixed newspaper site search. The algorithms have never been great, and the way it is implemented on most newspaper sites isn’t exactly user friendly.

Most people are used to search working the way Google works — a simple interface with one set of results, but as Google is demonstrating, the web is no longer text based. It is a combination of text, databases and multimedia.

That is an issue, to its credit, that PD tried to address with its original “integrated search” solution, what Google calls “universal search.”

For newspapers, you have discreet collections that people might want to search:

• Current articles
• Archives
• Classifieds
• Verticals (auto, real estate, jobs)
• Events/Calendar
• Local web sites
• Local businesses/Advertising

At a minimum.

If you’re aware of the intention-driven way people use the web (think pull, rather than push), you’ll understand why this can’t all be shoved together in one neat search solution.

But I’m not aware of any newspaper site that has yet really figured out how to create a satisfying search experience within the context of a robust news and community web site.

Starting in Q4, this will be one of my projects. If you have any suggestions, want to brainstorm on this a bit, leave a comment or contact me through Facebook or LinkedIn.

Any John From Cincinnati fans out there? I mention JC because the phrase “big and huge” keeps popping into my head today (the day after the season, and probably series, finale).

There’s a contingent with in the online newspaper community who think we should only do video if it’s “big and huge.”

The juxtaposition of pulling that phrase out of the air for a post on newspaper video is just about as odd as any dialogue in JC, so forgive me my JC moment. Except, we all know that the ones and zeros in Cass’s camera contain the answer.
Ryan Sholin put it better in his post about the FasterMores vs. the BiggerBetters. Ryan pretty much nailed it.

For the BiggerBetters, consider the graph with this post. It represents YouTube.com audience growth as tracked by Compete.com. Consider that Viacom forced YouTube to remove all its “BiggerBetter” content in February. Up until that time you heard a lot from the BiggerBetters, within our industry and without, that YT only survives on stolen content. Yet, Viacom’s takedown order has done nothing to slow YT’s audience growth. And you know what, when I go to YT, I find lots of fresh, poorly produced, but highly trafficked UGC. For example, this piece picked somewhat at random, which has gotten more than 36,000 views in about 20 hours.

There’s no shortage of video most BiggerBetters would find repulsive getting a lot of attention on YT.

Consider those observations along side this article that Angela Grant linked to about ManiaTV deleting 15,000 pages of UGC from its site.

“We decided that user-generated content is passé, and not a part of what we want to do in the future. We tried it, we didn’t think it worked and we’re getting rid of it,” said Richard Ayoub, ManiaTV’s vice president of programming and development.

So, some off-brand site generated 15,000 pages of UGC video, but “it didn’t work.” Ummm … isn’t that kind of insane?

Based on Angela’s brief comment, I take it that she thinks this is evidence that the BiggerBetters are winning. But note what an industry analyst says later in the same article:

Sites focused on user-generated content also are finding it hard to compete with popular video-sharing site YouTube, said Josh Bernoff, principal analyst for Forrester Research. “The (reason for the) stampede of people moving away from user-gen is that it is difficult to make money off it and impossible to make money off of it if you’re not YouTube,” he said.

Sites that are moving away from a UGC-centric content model (note, this says nothing about UGC as part of a broader content model) aren’t doing so for lack of audience interest, but because they haven’t figured out how to offset the high cost of storing and hosting the video with advertising revenue. This isn’t an audience-growth decision; it’s a cost-analysis decision.

That’s a legitimate reason for moving away from UGC (though I think it shows a profound lack of imagination), but let’s not be hoodwinked into thinking that it tells us anything about what audiences want from video.

I’m putting some polish on my strategy presentation and felt I needed to explain disruption a little better, especially in regards to newspaper video.

Here is my brief definition of disruption: “The basic idea of disruption is to start at the low end, fulfilling a job to be done, with a product that is just ‘good enough.’”
Here are my key points for a disruptive video strategy:

• Jobs to be done
  • Provide readers with additional visual information about stories
  • Give them more visual news-related options than TV
  • Communicate in a direct, personal voice, not like TV
• Start at the low end
  • Point-and-shoot cameras
  • Inexpensive or installed (free) video editing software
  • Short, quick-to-produce videos
• Be good enough
  • Rely on current news room staff, who know news and story telling
  • Provide starter training, improving as we go
  • Don’t get bogged down in trying to be like TV

One of the statements I’m incorporating into my spiel (again, the focus is on crafting a disruptive newspaper video strategy) is that any newspaper video that takes more than an hour to produce isn’t worth the ROI. Quantity is the key goal. The only quality goal is to be “good enough.”

My plea to professional journalists: Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, calls his blog “The Great Seduction,” but the real seduction here is the idea that UGC, amateur content, can and should be resisted, that somehow, if only professional news organizations would fight back — not use UGC, charge for content, create walled gardens, not go online — do something, anything that doesn’t involving soiling our mastheads with UGC — we can somehow beat back the hordes of Visigoths pounding on our gates.

That’s magical thinking.

I know there are editors and reporters out there who fear the changes in their midst and think if only we would hold a stronger line, we would could save newspapers.

But if you’re like me, and you believe that the reason you got into journalism in the first place was to help make society better, to help shine a light on truth, to serve communities and the afflicted, then I hope you’ll recognize that intransigence does nothing to help the cause.

As I argued in my first post, amateur content has always had its place in the world, and in my second post I asserted that we are part of evolving ecosystem that will get better for content producers and consumers over time.

In this post, my metaphor is a fast moving train, at full steam, with no brakes. We’re on it, baby, and there ain’t no getting off. Jumping off is suicide, so we might as well figure out how to get along with all of the other passengers, some of whom we’re guaranteed not to like.

It’s adapt or die.

And by adapt, I mean, figure out how to play within the new rules, not by insisting the rest of riders follow our old rules – such as demanding that readers pay for our content or that we can be the only authoritative voice.

The media train is hurtling forward, but journalists are not driving. Even the biggest traditional media companies are not at the wheel. In fact, there is nobody making sure we stay on the rails. The train is propelled by collective action — the action of ambitious entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and investors, technology researchers and engineers, computer programmers and amateur hackers and curious and demanding audiences, as well as some of us in the media, with our constant demands for new, different and better. All of these swirling forces create the turbulence that keeps the train on its collusion course with our collective destiny.

And I have no idea what that is, or if we’ll ever really get there.

Scary stuff, to be sure, but that’s the reality of the situation.

So it’s adapt or die.

By adapt I mean, be part of the conversation. We can’t back away from turning our web sites into platforms for community participation.

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean we need to surrender to unmoderated, unfiltered, undifferentiated noise. We can play a role as conversation leaders and mediators. We can train ourselves to be guides and helpers. We can continue with our mission to help the public be better informed and more enlightened.

In fact, the cool thing is, we get to do it with a whole sheath of new tools that journalists never had before, and we can help design the tools and define how they are used in a professional media environment. We can be part of the evolution, if we’re willing to embrace change.

I think it is in our best interest as people with economic responsibilities to our families, ethical responsibilities to our co-workers and employers, and social responsibilities to our communities to take an active role in defining what media looks like tomorrow.

Don’t follow Andrew Keen off the back of the caboose. Follow your audience. Keep moving forward, even as the wind blows off your derby, with its jaunty press pass. This is our mission now.

In his post arguing that we should take seriously at least some of what Andrew Keen (author of Cult of the Amateur) has to say, Clay Shirky writes:

What Wikipedia (and Digg and eBay and craigslist) have shown us is that mature systems have more controls than immature ones, as the number of bad cases is identified and dealt with, and as these systems become more critical and more populous, the number of bad cases (and therefore the granularity and sophistication of the controls) will continue to increase.

In this Business Week video interview with Keen, Andrew keen postulates his primary thesis that amateur content is diluting the market for professional content, and that amateur content is, by default, unreliable. His solution seems to be, people need to be made aware of it and turn away from amateur content.

To me, this isn’t an issue of pro vs. am; it’s signal vs. noise. Unlike Keen, I don’t believe that amateur content is intrinsically bad. Nor do I believe that pro content is always good. People get paid for lousy stuff all the time.

The point I think Keen misses is that digital media is an evolving ecosystem. Like all evolutionary processes, it begins as struggle and strife and perfects itself through increasingly complex solutions to problems. The net is barely out of the primordial soup phase. The amphibians are only now developing legs.

Keen, however, has sliced off a sliver in time and says, “we’re all doomed if we don’t do something.”

Outside of “pay better attention,” I haven’t yet figured out what Keen thinks we should do. (If the solution is in his book, he didn’t articulate it very well in the BW interview, nor have I seen it pop up elsewhere.)

Yes, we need to be more aware and more discerning. That’s part of how this ecosystem will evolve. It is an obvious natural progression. In the BW interview, Keen says that there’s already evidence that people are getting over “this internet fad” (my words/paraphrase). I don’t buy it. UGC is not going to chase people away from the internet. People are not suddenly going to start switching off computers in favor of newspapers and network television (though some might). Kids are not going to stop using SMS out of fear and loathing. That’s magical thinking. The technology is not going away.

But as the shine begins to dull on web 2.0 participation, people will naturally become more discerning. Nobody can consume all the media that is out there. Some where along the line you must make choices about what you like and don’t like.

Individually-derived choices is part of the solution to the signal vs. noise problem, but the ecosystem will also evolve through technological improvements in tools that help us find, sort and filter content; and publishers will also engage in some social engineering and human power solutions, because helping people get better information is a good business practice.

In the BW interview, Keen asserts that if we don’t do something, in 25 or 50 years, we will no longer have mainstream media.

I think he’s wrong. First, if that were to happen, the time line is more like 10 or 15 years, or sooner, as rapidly as technology is evolving, but secondly, the economic models may change, and established players may disappear, but there will always be a market for good content (whether it be informational or entertainment).

There will always be a class of people who make their living producing content. They may be self employed, or part of pod-like collectives, or even now working for new startups that eventually become the big media of tomorrow, but rest assured I don’t see professionalism dying so long as people feel the need for reliable information or good entertainment. Quality and reliability will always have value.

If Keen’s point is that amateurism is going to kill professional content, thereby making us all dumber and less informed and not nearly as well entertained, I don’t buy it. But let’s just say, we reach a point where content producers can no longer get paid for their work, and all content is produced by amateurs, then my questions are:

1. Will audiences accept undifferentiated crap, or will they migrate toward the best stuff?
2. Can amateurs only produce crap, or will they get better?
3. If people stop getting paid for their good work, won’t they be forced to find another line of work, meaning there will be less content produced, meaning the economic value of the best stuff that actually is produced will rise?

Those are purely rhetorical, leading questions, because I think you know the answers. In a free, dynamic market, competing forces are always changing the equation, but money is always part of the equation. People will get paid. It just may not look like it does today.

In other words, I’m not buying Keen’s main point: That UGC is ruining the world. There is no economic model I can imagine (not in a free society) where such an assertion makes sense. Things may change, established companies may die, new economic models may arise, but there will always be good stuff, and good stuff will always have an audience. I don’t see how that point is rationally assailable.

I’m late to the Andrew Keen debate. His book (Cult of the Amateur) came out at a time when I was way behind in reading my RSS feeds, had a lot going on and didn’t have much time to dig down into his arguments. I saw the sniping at his work, gleaned a general idea that he was broad-brushing user-generated content, and decided to leave the debate to others.

This morning, I’m nearing the end of a project to catch up on RSS and in the process, I hit upon a post by Jeff Howe defending the notion that rather than dismiss Keen as a troll, we should recognize that his ideas are going to resonate with enough people that we should offer a response.

The fact is, Keen’s arguments will sound mightily persuasive to a significant constituency who do believe the Internet is primarily a repository of porn, spam and corrosive amateurism. Failing to recognize that the choir to which Keen preaches might just be larger than our own congregation is an arrogant, and potentially irreversible blunder. While Web 2.0 insiders might love to hate Keen, many in the world at large will love to love him.

Jeff directed me to Clay Shirky, who wrote a lengthy piece that argues that there are some parts of Keen’s position that do deserve consideration, even if his case lacks substance and is purely anecdotal.

I recommend you read Clay’s entire piece, because I’m just going to cherry pick two elements (one in this post, and one in a follow up) and offer a reaction.

On the primary contention that efficient distribution has made it much easier for lousy content produced by people without talent to find an audience:

More importantly, talent is unevenly distributed, and everyone knows it. Indeed, one of the many great things about the net is that talent can now express itself outside traditional frameworks; this extends to blogging, of course, but also to music, as Clive Thompson described in his great NY Times piece, or to software, as with Linus’ talent as an OS developer, and so on. The price of this, however, is that the amount of poorly written or produced material has expanded a million-fold. Increased failure is an inevitable byproduct of increased experimentation, and finding new filtering methods for dealing with an astonishingly adverse signal-to-noise ratio is the great engineering challenge of our age (c.f. Google.) Whatever we think of Keen or CotA, it would be insane to deny that.

Yup, there’s a lot of crap out there.

But there are two things I know:

1. More good stuff is available, and easier to get, than ever before;
2. Many people who are now producing crap will eventually get better, if not become great, thanks to the new opportunities of a networked media world.

First, digital distribution and unmediated content channels have made it possible for many talented people to find audiences they might never otherwise reach. I’m thinking of people like those behind TheBurg.tv, or GeekBrief.tv, or Rocketboom. While these are arguably professional productions, it is hard to imagine them existing a decade ago. If not for the net, what would the exceptionally talented people behind these shows be doing today? Maybe some of them would eventually make their way in professional media, but would they be doing as well?

When I was playing around with MP3Caravan.com, I found about 100 great songs on the web — all for free, and mostly by people you’ve never heard of and probably never will. These are still among some of my favorite songs on my iPod.

The explosion creativity that I see in music today (I say this as a fan of Paste Magazine and XM’s XM-Cafe and The Loft and X-Country, where I hear great music all the time that will never make it to commercial radio) is great for music fans, but maybe it’s not so great for people hoping to make a living in music. In a more fragmented market it’s harder to make the volume of sales necessary to make a living.

Over time, I imagine the free market will sort this out and some sort of equilibrium will be reached.

But of course, there is going to be an ever increasing stream of talented content producers entering the market place, thanks to the complete destruction of any meaningful barrier to entry.

And this goes to my second point.

The thing about making it possible for more crap to get released is that some of the people producing that junk are pretty serious about it. I think back to the Ira Glass pieces on YouTube — if you’re a smart, observant person looking to produce media, you have good taste, and you know when you’re putting out songs, video or writing that falls short. If you’re ambitious and enterprising, you’ll keep at it and keep trying to get better, and eventually you’ll stop making crap. Some of what you make, in fact, might actually be brilliant.

Talent may be unevenly distributed, but in the old content-production model, opportunity was unevenly distributed. Now opportunity is less about who you know or happen to meet and more about taking advantage of the tools and channels available. Achieving success still carries an element of luck, but getting a chance to even spin the roulette wheel is no longer dependent on the right financial backing.

It’s important to remember that we were all amateurs at one time. Walt Whitman was an amateur when he first self-published Leaves of Grass. Ralph Peer changed American music forever when he discovered amateurs the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Bristol, Tenn. Hollywood was the original cult of the amateur, and look how far it has evoled.

As I’ll argue in my next piece, Andrew Keen has taken a rather myopic view of the current state of media and has failed to see that we are currently viewing only one point along a continuum of change.

UPDATE: While preparing my next post, it struck me: Keen is himself an amateur who has benefited from the digital distribution ecosystem. His blog posts and articles have been widely distributed through the net’s efficiency. While he has apparently been paid for some of his articles, it’s doubtful writing has ever been his sole source of income (as it would be for a professional writer), or that he has dedicated himself to the craft, the way a professional would. His academic and professional qualifications to be considered an expert in media seem fairly slim. It seems to me that Keen is what he hates.

Regular readers know I’m pretty much a zealot about keeping general circulation newspaper sites free. Going paid is pretty much a guaranteed disaster, at least at this stage of the game.

The blogosphere is abuzz with the potential — floated by Rupert Murdoch when first talking about acquiring Dow Jones — that the WSJ will go free.

I remain skeptical that this is a good move. I mean, you’re talking about 900,000 people who have already ponied up a subscription fee, as since it’s almost all corporate-expense subsidized, renewals are nearly automatic.

Bussinesspundit isn’t too sure either and has this to say about advertising:

Secondly, the fact that ad rates are so closely tied to traffic numbers on the web is just stupid. It’s a holdover from the old school days of advertising when gross numbers were all people knew. If I get a post on Reddit or Digg and get 5x my normal traffic, I don’t get 5x my normal clicks on Google ads. In fact, it almost doesn’t budge. Over time, web advertising will depend more on reader quality than reader quantity. I think a paid subscription model is a good way to filter out the riff-raff and keep a quality readership.

I’m taking his last sentence as specific to WSJ. Yeah, on a gen-circ newspaper.com, you’ll filter out the riff-raff with a paid model, but you’ll filter out a lot of other people, too. You’ll be left with too small of an audience to make much money off. WSJ is in a different league.

This goes along, though, with my general thinking that newspaper sites tend to charge ridiculously low CPMs. We keep seeing our sites as undifferentiated blobs of content, but our core audience tends to be pretty specific and generally made up of highly attractive demographic targets. We’re selling volume, not value.

It’s time to reduce ad positions per page and raise CPM rates — aggressively. Of course, it will take a motivated and trained sales force to sell value (anybody can sell volume), but I expect ROI to be there.

Of course, you still need plenty of CPC avails, too.

For a couple of years, I’ve been telling anybody who would listen that the correct measurement for local audience reach on a newspaper web site was percentage of daily unique visitors from the paper’s DMA.

More importantly, that the “visited in the past 30 days” metric, which the industry has been using for a couple of years, was meaningless.

In it’s latest integrated newspaper audience study, Scarobourgh takes a step in my direction — it is now measuring DMA audience based on “past seven days visit.” That’s a hell of a lot better than 30 days reach.

So of the top 25 markets, who has the best local online reach?

1. WashingtonPost.com, 20 percent
2. SignOnSanDiego.com, 16 percent
3. AJC.com, 15 percent
4. Boston.com, 14 percent
5. Azcentral.com, 14 percent

No surprises in the top 5. They’ve long been among the leaders in local audience reach, because they’ve been the longest among big metros at making that a priority. To reach a local audience, you’ve got to be local, think local, act local — and you’ve got to do a heck of a lot of local marketing.
LATimes.com and tampabay.com are two sites that stand out as particularly lagging — about 4 percent for each.

Here’s a link to another version of the report with more markets covered. Some of the numbers vary by a percentage point from the link up above. I imagine that’s a rounding issue since for my top five above, I added two percentage columns together (exclusive online and duplicated online).

The first link I saw to this study was from Robb Montgomery, who notes the finding that a newspaper.com generally reaches more young people than you might imagine.

Via Guy Kawasaki, I found MajikWidget, which offers a widget for online polls. This post is all about checking it out.

This is of interest to me because we don’t have our own poll app in our CMS, and editors like putting polls on their sites, and most of the free poll tools produce polls that are pretty ugly. I saw a poll on Guy’s site and it didn’t suck.

So here’s my first poll (I get 25 for free). Let’s find out how many of howardowens.com readers have their own blog.