Howard Owens

A while back, I did a blog post about bright people who have left the industry.  Here's a quick update (and I welcome further input from anybody who has other names to add).

• Chris Jennewein is back in, having gone to work for the Las Vegas Sun.
• Sean Polay has rejoined Ottaway.
• Lucas Grindley is now online managing editor at National Journal.
• Not included in the previous list, and I can't remember if this was an oversight, or if he left McClatchy after the post: Dick van Halsema is now consulting.
• Steve Smith, who traditionally would probably be classified more print side, but was long a forward-thinking new media leader -- he made a very public exist from Spokane this week.

Anybody else?

When, as a journalist, you possess information that will have some impact on society, will effect people's lives, or otherwise rises to some level of salient import, do you have an obligation to publish or broadcast that information immediately, or is it OK to hold it to serve the business needs of your newspaper or network?

I'm ruminating on this question in light of the past week's dribbling of the Katie Couric interviews with Sarah Palin.

Couric interviewed Palin prior to Sept. 24. The first two segments can be viewed and read here. I didn't think much about the two-part interview last week. After all, a TV news show has limited time. As much as I believe in web-first publishing, I could give a pass to CBS for holding the interviews for prime-time viewing first.

Then rumors began to circulate that there was more material not yet released. First, that Palin had not been able to name a Supreme Court case besides Roe vs. Wade. Then, yesterday, the video came out of Palin's inability to name a single newspaper -- not the Anchorage Daily News nor her hometown Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.

Thus, we learned that CBS had withheld newsworthy quotes from the public.

Ethically, is that acceptable?

I doubt a single reader would disagree with these two assertions: That Palin's answers to Couric were news, and that the answers could have an impact on both on the election and on public perceptions of Thursday night's VP debate.

So let's consider the consequences of how CBS handled these answers.

If CBS had released the full interview, either in broadcast or on the intertubes, on the first day the impact might have been:

• The shock of all the stupidity coming out at at once could have even more quickly torpedo people's opinions of Palin, McCain and the GOP; or,
• It would have given both sides more time to dissect what it all means prior to the Thursday night debates, thereby giving voters more time to draw more nuanced conclusions (if that's even possible in this case).

But the most important factor in a decision to hold the full interview or not is the impact it has on the politically important expectations game.

Experienced political observers know how it works: Lower expectations so that a candidate can rise to the occasion and look better than people believed he or she could. It's a tried, true and infallible political tactic.

But in dribbling segments of the interview, CBS is able to incrementally lower the expectation that Palin is anything other than a dimwit who is neither engaged nor informed enough to serve as VP.

Loyal GOP partisans, of course, will believe that CBS has handled the interview as it has merely to more broadly and deeply embarrass the governor.

Experienced journalists know that it is unlikely that CBS executives have any political motivation whatsoever. The decision to incrementally release the interview has only one motivation: Ratings.

Which brings us back to the central question: Is it OK for a journalist or a news organization to make decisions about newsworthy events based on business concerns?

Again, clearly, the Palin interview is full of information people need to know.  Is it OK to withhold that information for any reason other than a journalisticly sound reason?

Let's be clear: I'm not being inconsistent with things I've said in the past. The modern journalist cannot be completely divorced from concerns about ratings and readership, but that has more to do with story selection and presentation than what facts a reporter or editor chooses to release when.  My question is very narrow: When you know something to be true, what is your journalistic, ethical obligation to inform the public of that information?  Is it immediate, or can you hold it?

In a Twitter discussion about this topic today, Howard Weaver raised a challenging question about newspapers holding investigative packages for Sunday publication. In 140 chacters, what I think Howard was getting at, is it a business decision to hold for Sunday?

I guess it could be, but Sunday is also the day the most people take the most time with the printed word. If you have a significant issue that you want people to time with and think about, Sunday publication makes a lot of sense. It may be the ethically superior publication day for big-package stories (not so much on the web, though -- newspaper.com site traffic plunges on weekends).  You're also talking about a package that is designed to revolve around a coherent thesis.  The Palin interviews were chalk full of individual news nuggets. There was nothing investigative about it. It was good, probing questions by Katie Couric, but it produced news, not a deep and broad policy review.

Regular readers know, I believe in web-first publishing. I've always advocating web-first as an audience growth strategy, but it also has a journalistic component. Journalists should not withhold information from the public based on artificial deadlines.  When you know a fact that is newsworthy, you should tell people. To withhold the information is to rob readers and viewers of time to act on or ruminate over the news.

In the days prior today's bailout vote, you could surf through Google news and find any number of stories that told us that the U.S. economy is in a crisis, and that spending $700 billion to bail out Wall Street bankers was unavoidable.

Or you could turn on the television and watch just about any news show and hear the same thing.

What you rarely found or heard was any serious questioning of whether the crisis was anywhere near the proportion George W. Bush said it was, or if the bailout was really necessary, or if the bailout would work, or if, maybe, the bailout might make things actually worse.

All of these are legitimate, skeptical questions that at a time when the nation's attention was nearly focused solely on questions around the economy, the mass of mainstream media failed to cast a doubtful eye on anything government officials and elected representatives were telling them.

Oh, occasionally, Ron Paul got a little air time, but for the most part, if you wanted to find any commentary or reporting that was anything other than an Amen Chorus for Bush and Paulson, you had know where and how to look.

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston put it this way:

Journalists, and specially Washington journalists, are generally behaving like lapdogs and generally only asking detail questions around the central premise. This should concern us all. This is the same kind of behavior that we saw during the run up to the War in Iraq, when there was no shortage of critical facts and skeptical sources, but only the usual stalwarts in journalism reported skeptically.

Johnston went on to note that when Tom Brokaw opened the previous Sunday's Meet the Press with, "Our issues this Sunday: The American financial system in deep crisis."  Not, "The president says," but rather a bald statement of fact.

Why, at a time of great decision -- just like the run up to the invasion in Iraq -- when America needs more, not fewer, skeptical voices, did U.S. journalism lap up whatever gruel they were fed?

I blame Walter Lippmann.

In the 1920s, Lippmann sought to weed out of journalism some of the excesses of jingoist reporting that he witnessed during World War I.  He elevated objectivity to a professional moral code, that reporting and writing should be neutral. It was not the role of the reporter to interpret.  He should merely regurgitate the facts as observed or offered up by official sources.  Lippmann did not trust a singular human to exercise critical thinking about complex issues.

His objectivity code smacks of a certain elitism -- that first, only official sources should be allowed to speak, and only specially trained professional journalists could be trusted to transmute their words and deeds to an easily led (or misled) public ("manufactured consent").

While Lippmann's formulation of objective journalism has not completely quashed advocacy journalism, or watchdog reporting, it has become the standard practice of the work-a-day reporter.

No where is it more insidious than inside the beltway.

Think back to the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Any number of White House and Pentagon officials could be found quoted -- often anonymously -- in the leading publications on the tactics, strategy, necessity and urgency of the war, but few contrarian voices were heard.  The arguments against the war were left to anti-war celebrities on television shout shows, lefty blogs and scattered protesters.  There was nothing like an expert calling bullshit on most administration assertions in mass media reporting.

Whether you supported the war or not, the complete lack of alternate voices in much of the reporting of America's newspapers should cause you concern.

Many critics of the war before and since have referred to Bush's push for invasion as "the rush to war."

That phrase echoed through my mind much the past week as Bush and Congressional Democrats hastily set to work on a $700 billion bailout of New York's financial institutions.  It is no stretch to call it a "rush to bailout."

The original proposal was a three-page document; Democrats had doubts, so they (working with likeminded Republicans) tried to fashion more complete legislation, but did so through secret meetings (some) and not a single public hearing. No expert witnesses were called, and no outside voices who distrusted the "rush to bailout" were called to testify.

Yes, the press just lapped it up.  In fact, you risked being labeled a crank if you even questioned the necessity of the bailout.

It smelled -- it smelled of politicians eagerly doing favors for some of their biggest donors, and for the elite press corps protecting their elite patrons.

Just as prior to the Iraq war, there were some lonely voices raising alternate view points. The McClatchy News Service did one story -- but only one, that I can find -- mildly doubtful of the Bush narrative.

"It's more hype than real risk," said James K. Galbraith, a University of Texas economist and son of the late economic historian John Kenneth Galbraith. "A nasty recession is possible, but the bailout will not cure that. So it's mainly relevant to the financial industry."

Unless you were either smart enough or engaged enough to seek out alternative versions of reality, you wouldn't know that economists such as Galbraith had serious doubts about the extent of the crisis, or that some experts doubted a bailout was necessary, or that a bailout would work, or that the bailout rush was smart (yes, that is a WaPo link, bless their souls -- one somewhat skeptical story), or that the bailout would profoundly change the role of government and private capital, or that the bailout might make matters worse.

You would think that a press corps that believed itself badly burned by Bush on Iraq would be a little more skeptical of the president now. It might demonstrate just how firmly entrenched Lippmann's brand of official source journalism is in most reporters' minds.

It should be asked, even, whether the dearth of skeptical reporting helped feed a sense of hysteria, even to the point of propelling today's 777-point DOW drop?

And has the reporting so far helped Americans better understand how the current financial conditions might directly effect them? I've had friends, closer to retirement than I am, express fear about losing value in their 401(k)s without a hint of recognition that the bailout may actually have caused those assets to lose more money and result in a slower recovery.

It could be argued that the American people, who pressured representatives to reject the bailout, saw through the clamor and clouds, but if you spend time reading comments on newspaper web sites, angry constituents reacted more viscerally than logically.  If you support the reform, you should be concerned that the lack of depth in news coverage also failed to clearly communicate why the bailout was necessary and wise.

Lippmann may have done the republic and a journalism a service by offering an antidote to the excesses of yellow journalism, but maybe its time for editors to recognize that their reporters are smart enough (or should be) and readers perceptive enough to allow those gathering the facts and doing the writing to provide context and meaning to events and what officials claim. That may not be objective, but it will lead to a better informed, more responsive public.

Some people think the web makes the world bigger. I say, it makes it smaller.  Some people say the web makes us neighbors with people in Kenya or the Ukraine.  I say it makes us better neighbors with the family next door.

There was a time in United States history when newspapers served as a centralizing force for drawing communities together -- and then came  television, and cable, and satellite -- all the forces that did nothing to humanize communication, but made mass communication more mass and less personal.

The Internet brings back the possibility of human-sized communication.

At a time when too many glass-eyed Americans turn to network TV for their "Heroes" and get "Lost" in whatever flimflam Hollywood is dishing out this season,  the Web opens up new possibilities for people, local people, people who share a common interest in a common community, to partake in conversation and pursue change with conviction.

In 1995, I started a web site in eastern San Diego County called East County Online.  At the time, I would tell any number of colleagues in the newspaper business: "Mark my words, the web is the best thing that ever happened to local news; all the fascination now is with global communication, but eventually, people will look homeward and want to use the web to build better communities."

I've never stopped believing that. I believe it to this day.

I've learned a lot about the Internet and how people use it since 1995, but the philosophy remains the same: Together, we can use digital communication to build better, stronger, more self-reliant communities.

A big reason I was excited to join GateHouse Media in Sept. 2006 was it would keep me involved in local journalism. The idea of building news web sites that help local communities prosper is still exciting to me.

With strong local web sites, maybe we can convince a few people to turn off the TV once or twice a week and visit a local art gallery, spend an evening  with the local theater group, or "root,root, root for the home team."

And that idea is a major philosophical underpinning of The Batavian.

In a recent E-Media Tidbits post, Amy Garhan writes:

However, I question the Commission's strong focus on geographically defined local communities. It seems to me that with the way the media landscape has been evolving, geographically defined local communities are becoming steadily less crucial from an information perspective. I suspect that defining communities by other kinds of commonalities (age, economic status/class, interests, social circles, etc.) would be far more relevant to more people -- although more complex to define.

I suspect that clinging reflexively to "local" as the paramount criteria for "relevant" reflects a newspaper perspective that was never a good fit for most people, and that never really served most people's information needs well.

I'm not convinced.  You can't -- as I have done -- sit in the stands of a Batavia Muckdogs game and say local is no longer relevant.  There is no stronger bond than the ones you have with people you've known for many years and seen at their best and their worst and shared with them a common cause in boosting youth football or arguing whether the town council should tear down the old bank building.

This isn't the first time I've come across the argument that "local no longer means geography," or "community is more about affinity," but the position ignores the major impact local events and decisions have on both individuals and national affairs.

The assumption that local is irrelevant in a wired world ignores both history and human nature.

Here's a question for you: Why do so many newspapers in foreign lands have much higher circulations and household penetrations than U.S. newspapers?

Here's a possible answer:  The communities those papers serve are more stable, less mobile. You still have grandchildren living in the same neighborhood as grandma, and parents who socialize with the same friends they've known since 1st grade.  These communities are just as assaulted by Hollywood and Madison Avenue dreck (or a locally produced alternative) that hypnotize Americans, but homogenized culture hasn't been as damaging to the local newspapers.

The big difference is mobility, or lack of it.

The United States has always had its Horace Greeleys exhorting its young men to go west, but true mobility -- the true dislocation of families and disruptions to small communities -- began with World War II, when troops were sent to coastal bases or abroad, and giant industrial war centers were built to employ those who stayed behind.

We've had now about 60 years of mobility, and over that time we've watched newspaper circulation fall of the shelf.

As I talk about in my "Reinventing Journalism" presentation (most recently given in Atlanta at SPJ's convention), newspapers thrived when they were run by publishers/editors who paid close attention to changes in society and fashioned their newspapers to fit with their communities needs.

But starting in the 1920s or so, and accelerating after WW II, the professionalization of journalism separated the newsroom from readership concerns. Newsrooms became insular sanctuaries where such tawdry worries as to what readers really wanted from their news pages was too venal to discuss.

So while society changed -- more mobile, more connected to electronic media -- newspapers followed a singular path whereby newsroom personnel were free to indulge in delusions of knowing what was best for readers while ignoring the real needs of their communities.

If local communities are less coherent today than 60 years ago, well certainly mobility and network television play a role, but so do newspapers that fired their community correspondents, stopped covering eagle scout promotions and tea socials, concerned themselves more with the process of local government than the community impact of its decisions, and tried to be the only indispensable source for all the news of all the world, instead of the one indispensable source of Little League news.

If newspapers had done a better job of adjusting to changes in society, maybe their circulation troubles today would be less troubling, and our communities -- and our democracy -- would be stronger.

As for the future -- I still believe in local.

Mobility is not the natural human trait. We are social creatures who crave connections with flesh-and-blood friends and family. Online communication is fun -- and greatly expands our reach of friends and associates -- but it's no substitute for running into an old friend or uncle at the local coffee shop.

As long as I've been involved in online communities -- approaching 14 years now -- I've observed the overwhelming desire for people to want to meet their digital friends at local bars or industry conferences.  It happens over and over.  We depend on those real connections.

Unfortunately, seeing an industry colleague once or twice a year -- no matter how brilliant he or she is, nor how much you like that person -- is no substitute for a weekly breakfast at the local diner or impromptu backyard bar-b-ques with a trusted friend.

And at it's heart, that is what local is all about. Those family bonds and friendly affiliations is what enables and enlivens a community's civic life.

And for 150 years, newspapers played a vital role in helping communities remain connected and strong, but then we lost focus. We no longer wanted to write about Mrs. Sterlings embroidery class or the 50-year-going bridge club. We wanted to win prizes by uncovering scandals at City Hall (that's not a knock against watch dog journalism, but a note about a loss of purpose) and dream of our bylines in the Washington Post or New York Times.

The beauty of the web for local news is not only does it give us a new chance to refocus on true local news, but it makes it easier to enable the strong civic engagement that only comes when people talk with each other. Through comments and blogs and UGC video, we have a chance to pull people away from "American Idol" and into a real dialogue about the issues that matter most to their home towns.

We see all the time on The Batavian people who have known each other for years (and we also see this in the comments on stories of GateHouse newspaper sites), who still meet up at social events, getting deeply engaged in conversations online.  An online news site extends the conversation. It doesn't replace it. And by putting it out in an open forum, it invites other people who may not have been as engaged previously to participate.

That sort of engagement can and should have a powerful impact in a democracy. If our local communities are ever going to disentangle themselves from the tendrils of federal unfunded mandates and overarching intrusions to homes and businesses, then it's going to take more people, people who care about such things, involved at a local level.

And here's my prediction: Rather than increase mobility, digital communication will increase stability. Over the next couple of decades, we're going to see more and more people seeking out small towns -- good places to raise families (even some families returning to their ancestral rural communities), live less hectic lives, escape crime and smog, and control living expenses. And the same communities that are so perfect for families are also the best places to start or relocate businesses, for all the same reasons.

Digital makes this easier, but concerns over the environment and oil consumption will also play a role.  In rural communities, you consume fewer natural resources, can get better -- locally grown -- food and can more readily help others in need.

Smart people, and smart companies, are going to move out of the big cities -- necessary in an age when cooperative communication, information dissemination and physical commerce was hard -- and back to mid-west and rust-belt towns.

It will take time, but as these once-displaced people settle down, they will put down roots as surely as they plant tomatoes and apple trees and invite neighbors over for some pie, coffee and conversation.

The future is local, and that should be good news for anybody looking to build local news businesses.

Soon after our launch, we owed Philip Anselmo a vacation (he transferred from another GateHouse paper), so I got to be The Batavian's reporter for four of five days (Ryan Sholin filled in for a day, too).

During that week, there were two fire in Genesee County -- one was a fatal.

The first fire was in Corfu and no people were harmed, but three cats died.  I had the Canon HV20 and a Tripod with me, but no lav mic.  Time on scene was about 45 minutes (mostly waiting for the fire chief to grant an interview, during which I shot my B-roll).  Editing time was also about 45 minutes (I shot way more B-roll than I needed)

NOTE: I can't get the embed code to work right in this version of WP and I don't want to spend a lot of time figuring out (eventually, I'll convert this blog to Drupal), so I'm just linking to the video.

Corfu Fire.

The very next day, a teen-age boy was killed in a fire.  Unfortunately, I couldn't get to the scene in the morning because of meetings at our corporate office.  I didn't get there until about 3 p.m.  It was looking dismal for getting a worthwhile video.  Plus, stupidly, I had forgotten to recharge the battery for the HV20 and discovered it was dead.  I had to use the Flip Ultra.  The result is below (on scene for 30 minutes (mostly BS'ing with film crews from local TV stations, which is how I got the high school photo of the deceased) and less than 30 minutes to edit).

Fatal Fire.

I'm proud of this video. Check the comments on YouTube.  I think it shows you can do something worthwhile if all you have is a $150 camera.

Not directly related to Batavia, but we did a train-the-trainers video course recently, and I like this video I did about my hometown dairy (half a mile from my house).

Pittsford Dairy.

You can check out the videos Philip has been shooting for The Batavian on our YouTube channel.

On May 1, we launched a project in Batavia, NY to work out how to build an online-only, local news business. We wanted to go to a town where we didn't have a newspaper so that we could have the freedom to experiment without concerns about disrupting one of our own publications.  We picked Batavia because it's a neat, vibrant town; it's close to our home office; and the daily newspaper there was doing nothing on the web.  Scott Karp has been aware of the project almost from its inception and after a couple of regional bloggers uncovered it as a GHS project, Scott nudged me about doing a post himself.  Here's his post.

The Fighting 29th did an earlier post about the site. Rochester Turning also picked up on it.

The site is still very young, still under development (we're working on a new design and adding additional features as we speak), but the local reception has been pleasantly strong so far.

From today's Vin Crosbie's post -- a nugget related to why the BiggerBetter video strategy is a sputtering strategy:

The overabundance of suppliers of news and information, nonetheless the supply, leads to another corollary, one that might seem to be counter-intuitive: the 'good enough' beats perfect. The overabundance of suppliers leads to competition that actually lowers the threshold of acceptable quality. When there were few suppliers, they used higher quality content (i.e., 'high production values') as a competitive weapon against each other. But now that there is an overabundance of suppliers, their competition levers towards being the first to produce content that is at least of acceptable quality. Millions of videos are viewed billions of times each month on sites such as YouTube.com (+3 billion per month) not because of high production values, but because the videos are at least 'good enough' to watch. The production of higher quality delays distribution and widespread usage. This corollary runs against the grain of traditional Mass Media organizations, which tend to delay release of their content until it is perfect, but the effect of this corollary is an observable phenomenon.

Bold added.

Newspapers should have kickass web sites.

Take your typical major metro -- a content producing staff that out paces in training, experience and numbers any rival.

A typical metro remains the best advertising buy in town, retail and classifieds.

The free cash a good metro site can through off on print up sells alone (let alone new, incremental advertising revenue) can fund an operations and specialty content staff that most start ups would envy.

With proper focus and strategy, there is no reason for a good-sized, well-run newspaper operation to repurpose its print product for online.

All of those resources should allow the online operation to feed off of, but not be a duplicate of, the print operations. It should allow a newspaper operation to avoid the soul-sucking, readership-killing repurposing of print content online and the aggressive pursuit of web-centric content practices.

So why, more than a decade into the web era, do most metro newspapers still largely reproduce the print edition online?

The consternation today over the Philadelphia Inquirer's decision to withhold premium print content from Philly.com has the digital class all atwitter (pun intended).

In Twitter, my friend Scott Karp says:

You can't coerce people into choosing one medium over another. All you can do is serve them as best you can in the medium they choose.

Wired Journalist partner Zac Echola says:

They did a pretty epic job opening the door for competition. I mean, it's one thing in a small community to do this, but a major metro?

One on my followers, Kev097, reacts to my pro-decision tweets:

More likely bloggers will nicely summarize stories that aren't online- their readers won't bother to seek out print.

Predictably, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Outing are down on the idea.

Jarvis:

You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Outing:

What’s long held back the newspaper industry and gotten it in the current mess has been holding back online innovation that might impact the legacy product (print). The kind of serious innovation that might have avoided the turmoil we’re now seeing among newspapers (especially larger metros like the Inquirer) could only take place with an attitude of “Let’s completely forget about the print edition and just try to build the best damn online service possible.”

My concern is that the Philly effort doesn't go far enough.

I say, never put those stories online, but still make sure every single reporter and editor is working hard to ensure a great online edition.

For how many years on Outing's Online-News list did I read about the evils of shovelware? If the archives were available, I'm sure I could find quotes from Outing himself saying something along the lines of "stop reproducing the newspaper online."

We were all right in saying that, so why is it wrong now to say "let print be print" and "let online be online."

Your online product should focus on:

• Frequency. Plenty of updates. Web-first publishing. Tell me what is happening in my town right now.
• When there is a big story, hammer it. Own it. Frequent updates, a flood of information, video, blogs, forums, public documents, databases, maps, graphics.

On a pure news basis, those two approaches are proven audience growth winners.

Reproducing the print edition online, not so much.

Even better, make sure your kickass print reporters know how to write for the web, which means more of a blog style, more of a conversational style, maybe even a little opinion, when doing those web-first updates.

There are a ton of other web-centric things newspapers can and should do with their web sites, but none of them include publishing first online enterprise and investigative pieces, columnist, lengthy features, trend stories and even analysis pieces.

Techcrunch published today a poll that showed that on a typical day, 39 percent of the Internet audience went online to check the news. That's 39 percent of the not quite 80 percent of Americans who even have Web access (75 percent in 2004(pdf), I assume it's higher now, but maybe not).

That is a number that represents a boon of an opportunity for newspapers, but it also points out how far online must come to be an major news destination.

While the Philly papers have a market penetration below 35 percent (I think), many U.S. newspapers remain well above 50 percent.

More Americans still get their news in print than any other source. Yes, the number has been declining, but newspapers still remain a mammoth force in news media.

Even while penetration/circulation declines have been beguiling to the industry, they didn't begin with the internet. There is something larger, sociological, or potentially a problem with journalism itself (as I've said before), that's going on.

It might be foolish indeed to expect online to save American journalism, given those trends. So why insist now that a metro newspaper must, must put its entire edition online?

Furthermore, let's face it, while a well-run newspaper website operation can throw off lots of cash, it's largely dependent on the newspaper success itself, and the cash flow is still insufficient to support a metro newsroom.

As much as it pains me to say it, we still haven't found the business model that can support and sustain current newsroom operations.

Meanwhile, as the Readership Institute has pointed out, a lot of people still read print.

So why shouldn't the Philadelphia Inquirer, or any other print operation, take steps to further differentiate the print and the online products, especially if such steps can potentially stem any tide, any contribution that shovelware/repurposing of print content makes to circulation declines.

Face it, we still need print to pay the bills, that is, if we want to maintain news operations that at all resemble traditional newspaper newsrooms (and whether we don't or not is a completely different discussion).

UPDATE: Zac Echola makes the point in a blog post that I may be giving Philly too much credit. And he could be right. So let's just say, differentiation is the model I advocate, and let's hope that is the direction Philly can be smart enough to take this in. I had not given enough consideration to the part of the memo that prevents staff bloggers from trying out ideas in blog posts first. That's not smart. And it is a bad sign that the curmudgeons are winning in Philly. On the other hand, the memo does say, "This does not mean that we will put the brakes on the immediate posting of breaking news that puts us first in a competitive Web marketplace."  Mixed message? I guess we'll see.  It's important to remember Philly.com is run by Eric Grilly and Mark Potts has been involved with the site, and they're no slouches.

From Beet.tv:

Online videos have a short shelf life, getting a quarter of their views within four days of being published, Brett Wilson, CEO of video distribution site TubeMogul, says. Content creators who publish a lot of video will have a better shot at success.

He suggests that content creators promote their videos hard for the first few days as attention will drop quickly.

Is your site producing enough video, or are you still doing hours-long productions praying for a hit?

Reporters who own their jobs with an entrepreneurial spirit and energy will also own each story they do. What does story ownership mean?

• You generate your own story ideas.
• You decide the angle, who to talk to, where to gather information and what you do with it.
• As you gather information, you find and save any relevant links.
• You decide what other assets the story needs -- video? a map? a pdf? a database? a graphic? pictures? You then either create or get created those assets.
• When you write the story, you include appropriate links (to names, locations, documents, previous stories, blogs and previous coverage).
• You gather all of the assets, publish the story in draft form and let an editor know it's ready (with the expectation that the story will be live on the web within 10 minutes).
• When the story is published, you socially bookmark the story as appropriate; you send the link to bloggers you know who might be interested; you e-mail the link to sources or readers you know would be interested.
• After the story is published, you follow and participate as appropriate in the online conversation, either via comments on the story or on other sites (blogs and forums).
• You take everything you've learned and repurpose the story for print.
• If the conversation brings to light any new significant information, you plan a new story and the process starts over.

Editors, are you writing this into your job descriptions?

Nick Sergeant has completed his first Django project. It's called Finisht.com.  It's really for developers who want a quick and easy way to track finished projects.

In an era when journalists are asked to do more and more, I can see reporters and editors using this for their own personal tracking of completed projects.  It can be quite rewarding to see a list of everything you've completed in a day, a week or a month.

When I posted about journalists setting their own 2008 MBOs, A couple of executive editors like the idea of the program and instituted something like it in their own newsrooms.  Today, John Robinson reports that his wallet is $100 lighter.

Among other things, designer Mel Umbarger created a copy desk wiki for a style book, schedules and more; created personal profiles on several social networking sites, learned Soundslides and Flash; blogged; and posted all sorts of content to the Web site.

Congratulations to Mel.  Good job.

Jack Lail sent me this link. It's an interview in the aftermath of a church shooting in Knoxville.  It's a pretty compelling bit of evidence why every journalist should carry at all times an inexpensive and easy to use video camera.

Blogging has been light here for some time.

I'm tired of arguing with curmudgeons and the class hearty souls who discovered the web in 2004 and now has all the answers (many of them tried by online news veterans 10 years ago).

Just about everything I have to say, I've said. I noticed some time ago, I was repeating myself too often. Different words. Same meanings.

I'm tired of Ground Hog Day.

I'm not going to stop blogging. I'm not going to stop posting totally.  Stay subscribed to the RSS feed.

Not everything I might have to say can be said in 140 characters.

I have been having fun with Twitter recently.  I'm howardowens there.

If the past is any indication, something will spark me out of my blogging funk and I'll become prodigious again.  But not today and probably not tomorrow.

Tell Romenekso I said, "Hi."

Which of these stories would you rather read?

After Fleeing Psychiatric Unit, Ex-Officer Is Killed in a Gunfight With Police

Carrying two handguns and a Bible, a retired city police officer was killed in a gunfight early Tuesday on a residential street in Staten Island by former colleagues who returned his fire, the authorities said.

When the shooting ended, the officer, Jason Aiello, 36, was slumped at the wheel of a cousin’s truck on the street in front of his home in the Rosebank neighborhood, with his wife, Rachel, sitting next to him, officials said. His three young children were in another family car across the street.

Or:

Unhinged ex-sergeant holding bible and gun is slain by cops in front of family

Suspected of setting up his best friend for a mob hit, a retired NYPD sergeant armed with a gun and a Bible went berserk Tuesday before cops killed him in front of his wife and kids.

The death of Jason Aiello in a blizzard of two dozen bullets capped a dramatic chain of events that began with a "crazed" visit to FBI headquarters and ended with his escape from a Staten Island psych ward.

The 36-year-old father of three apparently suffered an epic mental meltdown in which he spouted Scripture, tried to abduct his pajama-clad kids and then fired on police, authorities said. He fired eight shots; cops fired 19.

Both stories are factual an unbiased. One is just much easier and engaging to read. The first is the New York Times, the second, the Daily News. While the Daily News posted a decline in the latest Fas-Fax, it had been a steady climber prior to that. The Times has been on a down hill slide for some time.

Not all of the readership loss of newspapers can be blamed on the Internet (especially considering that the declines started before there was a commercial Web). Isn't it fair to ask that some of the problem might be the journalism itself?

Doug Fisher covers similar territory this morning.

I'll be attending two journalism conventions over the next couple of months to talk about digital-age journalism.

On August 8, I'll be on the luncheon panel at the AEJMC convention in Chicago. The topic is Networked Journalism: The Changing Face of News. Also on the panel, Kate Marymont, a Gannett VP, and Dan Barkin, online editor for the News & Observer in Charlotte.

On Sept. 6, I'll be in Atlanta for the national SPJ Convention.  It'll be the first time I attended one of these since 1996, when I was president of the San Diego Chapter.  We'll be reprising the AEJMC panel, and I'll also  do an hour-long presentation on "Reinventing Journalism."

Journalism.co.uk has an e-mail interview with me about starting MediaGeeks.org.

Here's a quote for any online manager dealing with a newsroom of curmudgeons. It's from Theodore Roosevelt. Blow it up big and post it for all to see.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

(via Tech Crunch in a totally different context)

The Ventura County Star's Scott Hadly is reporting from Iraq.  I haven't been following his coverage, but I met none of it matches the intimacy and immediacy of this letter he wrote to a fellow reporter.

In one short letter, I got a better idea of what's going on in Iraq from 1,000 New York Times stories.

This is how you write for the modern reader.  Journalists need to learn the lesson.

I'm not saying profanity is required, but if you're writing about something like what Scott went through and some profanity doesn't at least cross your mind, then you're probably not putting enough of yourself into the story.

FWIW: I don't know Scott. He joined the staff after I left Ventura.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, many newly minted bloggers expressed frustration at the mainstream media's (soon to be dubbed MSM) lack of attention to serious international news.

Case in point was cable news obsession with Chandra Levy's death.  So, when on the E&P site today, I saw a link about the WaPo getting ready to launch a 12-part series on the forgotten cold case, it intrigued me.

But that's not the point of this post.

The point is, this quote at the end of the article:

Throughout the series, this blog will feature a daily update and preview of the next chapter from the reporters. Stay tuned.

Uh? This blog?

Go look at that link -- in what was does it look any different from a typical E&P story? How is it written any different? Not only does the "post" lack the personal voice, insight and perspective of a good blog, it lacks a person -- it's just a generic "E&P staff" byline.  Nor can you leave comments on it, nor can you get to, from that post, any sort of blog home page.

If E&P is running any blogs, there's no evidence of it on their navigation or from their home page. (Hey, but they do have a podcast).

So if the biggest trade publication in the industry is so clueless about the web, what hope do we have for the rest of the industry?

Or am I just missing something? Is it just bad site design?

There are three main points from the new report from the Readership Institute (via Romenesko):

• Your newspaper is doing a better job at retaining readers than you might expect;
• Your web site is doing a worse job at attracting readers than you might believe;
• Young readers ain't reading newspapers, and they're not likely to start.

Mary Nesbitt writes:

Why aren't they (print readership numbers) much worse, when the imminent demise of newspapers seems to be all we ever hear about? The short answer is that reading customers aren't deserting newspapers at anything approaching the rate that advertising customers are. That is no consolation for newspaper company employees who are losing their jobs.

One word: Recession.

Come on people, the main issue facing newspapers right now is recession. Advertisers (to their own detriment) advertise less during a recession.

Yes, there is a ton of secular pressure on newspapers right now, especially in classifieds. We've lost billions of revenue to the Internet. But the problem there isn't our lack of innovation, as some espouse. It's actually something more basic than that: Sales.

We've been slow to motivate and migrate our classified sales staffs away from order takers to sales professionals. With greater competition, and disruptive competition, came the need for our staffs to actually sell. It's not like they didn't, and don't, have value to to sell. Newspaper, even today, in their dominant local markets, are still the best classified buy around. But we haven't done a very good job of telling our customers that. And to whatever degree our online products help, and they help a lot, we don't do a very good job of telling our advertisers how much value we actually deliver.

The flip side of the good news about print readership is how poorly local newspaper web sites are performing and how poorly we're doing with young readers.

These are trends that should have no immediate impact, but the long-term consequences are horrendous.

Which is why getting online right and doing it now, and being news organizations that can move comfortably between both (all?) worlds is essential.

Newspaper staffs can and should take comfort in the readership numbers for print, but if they go no further with their thinking than, "see, I told you this web stuff was bunk," they they are threatening the very survival of the institutions they claim to love.

While maintaining our print products as vital center pieces of our communities is important, we must concentrate on developing online literacy, which means:

• Learning how to develop content that is web centric (writing more conversationally, adding more related material (databases, PDFs, video, links, etc.);
• Learning better how to present our material online for a culture that is more diverse in its interest, has more options and makes quicker mental jumps;
• Ensuring that our online products are differentiated from print products -- the publication cycle is different, the mentality is different, the presentation is different, the push/pull aspect is different;
• Stop seeing online as a threat and embrace it as an opportunity -- recession or not, print is not a growth medium; the growth opportunity, the chance to create new streams of revenue, and the opportunity to create great new journalistic products that serve present and future generations better is online;

There is so much we could be doing with our web sites that we're not getting done. The online readership numbers should be really sobering to newsrooms across America -- the strategy of repurposing newspaper journalism -- no matter how great you think it is -- just isn't working.

Every time some curmudgeon complains about online news sites not making any money, I've had the same response I've had for years: That's because we don't have enough audience. It isn't that online can't make money -- we make good money now, and deliver a great value to the advertisers who do buy our products now -- it's that we don't have the loyal concentration of readership we need online to maximize the revenue opportunities that are there.

I believe as strongly as I ever have -- going back to East County Online in 1995 -- that local online community news sites can build audience and grow sustaining, high-dollar revenue. I still believe we can get there, but not if we don't make the effort.

The fact that newspaper readership has remained relatively stable over recent years (the long-term trend isn't hopeful), is good news -- it buys us time to get online right. The caveat there, of course, is there are lots of disruptive competitors rising up to beat us to the punch. We don't want to miss out because we're too wedded to a print way of thinking. Let's continue to push for differentiated online community news and information products.

UPDATE: Simon Owens expands the story by talking directly with Mary Nesbitt a little more.

It's a nice virtuous thing that Meranda Watling is proud to work for a newspaper. But that's not the reason I'm linking to her post. This is:

That story that broke at 4:30? It came in via an e-mail tip. I actually “broke” the news about 4:40 p.m. I had quickly confirmed the gist of it and wrote two paragraphs to post immediately. Because the editors were in the daily budget meeting, I had another reporter read over it, and then I had a copy editor post it asap so I could begin chasing the sources who were leaving their offices at or before 5 p.m. After I reached those sources, I wrote into the online version and updated. When my editor got back he swapped it out and posted it in the No. 1 spot online.

I went to my board meetings armed with notebook and pen — AND a laptop, Internet card and my Blackberry. I continued to report and write during the meetings. On my drive between the two meetings? I made calls on the A1 story.

When I got back to the newsroom around 8:45 p.m., I made a few more calls and banged out the A1 story and then two more about the meetings I’d covered. All before the 10:30 print deadline. I made cop calls, and half-way down the 10-county list we heard a shooting over the scanner. I went there and called in a Web update from the scene.

That is a sampling of what “newspaper” reporters are expected to do today, at least at my newspaper.

Now that's a fine description of what today's news reporter needs to do to help keep his or her community completely informed. Too often we hear, "but we don't have time."

Well, you only don't have time if you don't know how to weave the digital responsibilities in with your traditional duties. Reporting for online is A) more efficient than reporting for print; B) really doesn't add that much extra time or work.

It can be done. Meranda just proved it.

There continues to be lots of chatter about the closing of Online Journalism Review.

I used to work with Robert Niles at E.W. Scripps.  He's a fine person and did an admirable job with OJR given the resources he was given.  So no slight intended here ...

I've been an OJR reader long enough to remember what it was like under the stewardship of my friends Matt Welch and Ken Layne.  Now there's an era of OJR that is bygone and worth lamenting. (Lots of history in this Google search link.)

Too bad Annenberg couldn't stomach an online journalism review that was lively and provocative.

I just had to say that because in all the hoopla about OJR closing, the great work of Welch, Layne and the other writers of that era seem sadly to have been forgotten.  It's an angle in Mark Glaser's piece that seems to be missing.  If OJR is worth saving, it's worth remembering what it was like in the Welch-Layne era and maybe trying to recapture that spirit.  Online journalism could use some free-spirited iconoclasts now more than ever.

I don't think Niles was ever given the opportunity or the resources to continue on in the tradition of Layne and Welch, which makes it all the more vital to remember the golden era of OJR if there's going to be any talk of bringing back.

I'm seriously behind in my gmail inbox ... can't sleep tonight for some reason, so thought I would try to widdle the pile down a bit ...

Found an e-mail from John Solomon, who wrote to say he was inspired by the wired journalist MBO post, which led him to start a blog, In Case of Emergency Blog.

While John said he's completed 7 of the 10 objectives, he said he was just wired enough prior to the post that he doesn't qualify for the gift card.

But here's the interesting thing -- to me at least -- there is a direct connection, I think, from this post of mine to this post of his.  Let's just say, it's nice to see the Department of Homeland Security have such a keen interest in blogs.

I'm with Yelvington and Sholin on this one.

I've set up my work phone to forward to my iPhone.  I never touch my desk phone except for conference calls.

Unfortunately, if a call forwards to my iPhone, if I don't get it by the third ring, for some odd reason, the call reverts to my desk phone.  This leads to either A) people calling me twice (second time to my mobile number) or B) people leaving me a voice mail I probably won't listen to for weeks.

I felt guilt about that until I read this TechCrunch post.

But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments herehttp://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.37/theme/silver/palette.gif); background-color: transparent; visibility: visible; width: 14px; height: 12px; background-position: -1128px 0pt; background-repeat: no-repeat; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top; display: inline;" src="http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.37/t.gif" alt="" />, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

"Outside the work flow ..." That pretty much sums it up.

Now with iPhone's visual voicemail, it's a little easier to handle, but it's still not as good as e-mail.  An e-mail in my inbox can be saved as a tickler to remind me to respond at at a time better suited to my work flow.  And I'll usually respond via e-mail so as not to interrupt your work flow.

For any vendors reading this: Please e-mail me, don't call.  I would rather get an unsolicited e-mail from a vendor than an unsolicited phone call.  Then, if I'm interested, we can arrange a time to talk.  And if I'm not interested, I'll tell you, and please believe me. (Of course, my "vendor" friends whom we do business  with, that's something different altogether, but then, you already have my mobile number).

When I get into the office Monday, after reading the TechCrunch post, I think I'll take my phone off call forwarding, and set up a voice mail suggesting "send me an e-mail, please."

Now here's the journalism question for reporters: Would you rather have sources call or e-mail?

Sean Blanda is out to own Blanda.  I wish him well. It will be a tough task. (Note on those links: There's two of them.  The first to his post; the second to help his SEO by linking his root domain to the word he wants to own).

I've never set out to own "howard" or "owens" in Google.  I score very poorly in both (I gave up on each after going five pages deep, so I may not show up at all).  My friend Ken Layne used to be the #1 Ken on Google.  That's like, wow!.  Then he stopped blogging on his personal site for a long time, and even now his blogging is light on the links in and out to other bloggers.  Result: he's fallen to #6.

Previously: Owning your name in search, variations and nuances

John Wilpers is taking aim and taking names ... he goes hunting for the top newspapers in the industry and asks if they're really doing a good job at being the center of the local mediasphere.

And notice, I didn't say "blogosphere," because even though he concentrates on blogs in his post, the question really is -- are you directing traffic for ALL of the media in your coverage area.  Blogs are a big part of it, and you need to really get John's point if you want to get modern media, but we really need to think beyond blogs.

You should have policies, strategies and procedures in place to ensure you're linking to all of the local media ... TV, Radio, Blogs, wiki sites, craigslist ... why should a reader need to go to any of those other sites FIRST to get news or information. Should you be directing traffic?

How good of a job is your web site doing at being the center of the mediasphere?

Via Martin Stabe, comes this provocative post on the deconstruction of the story.

But here's the thing: journalists have always been far more entranced by 'the story' than audiences. Less than a quarter of newspaper readers claim to read to the end of a story, even one they're interested in ... and of those, over two thirds don't read every word.*

Word people -- and this seems to apply to many visual people, too -- love a good story. But news isn't always about story.

We get into this business because we want to tell a good story.

The readers -- or viewers -- don't always want that.

Storytelling, whether written or visual, then becomes something that is more about serving your own ego than serving your readers.

So check your ego, whether writing or shooting, and give people useful or entertaining information in an accessible package.  Save the storytelling for when you really have a story to tell.

*(A note about video -- I find on long video that hasn't totally engaged me, I tend to skip ahead in the player looking for a bit to interest me ... sort of the same way I read mediocre stories.)