Howard Owens

We fight a lot over the meaning of words. Often.

What is a journalist?

Must you ascribe to certain standards, have been trained in a particular fashion, receive a specific level of pay to be called a journalist?

Does it matter?

I've always liked the word "reporter." To me, it means a person who obtains facts either through research, interviews or observation and reports back to another group of people. The report is generally organized and may or may not contain a point of view (or opinion). But it always has meaning and is informative to its intended audience.

It seems to me absurd to suggest that any person who finds stuff out and tells other people about it isn't a reporter.

I've always considered the best bloggers reporters. Good bloggers gather a bunch of different links, do a little related research and then suffuse their blog posts (reports) with knowledge and experience. That's reporting to me.

To me, "Reporter" is a noble word, but you don't need a paycheck or a press pass to be a good and noble reporter.

There's always been a good deal of conversation in reporting, especially professional reporting. As any beat reporter knows, it's never about just the one story or the one meeting. It's about relationships and shared history between subjects, sources, reporter and the interested news organizations (the reporter's own and the competition).

They only thing new these days is that there are lot more people involved in the conversation.

I would like to associate myself with the following remarks from Scott Karp:

Many people in the news business seem to have a vested interest in separating journalism as it has traditionally been practiced, by employees of news organizations that controlled monopoly distribution channels, from “citizen journalism” or “crowdsourcing” or anything else that represents the evolution of journalism in a networked media world.

So we have “serious, traditional” journalism over HERE, and all this experimenting with “citizens” and “crowds” and whatnot over THERE.

Well, it’s time to call foul on this.

For a couple of years I've been saying it's about the conversation, not us and them.

The future of journalism depends on collaboration, not silos and fiefdoms. Journalism with a capital J needs to maintain standards but it also, desperately, needs to evolve in order to thrive as in a networked media age.

Exactly.

In OJR, Robin Miller has posted the recipe to save newspapers online.

Of course, I think it's brilliant stuff. There isn't a suggestion there I haven't made myself. I love the confirmation of the ideas.
A few highlights:

A website that can tell me about every upcoming meeting of the Bradenton City Council and every upcoming appearance of my favorite local bands and alert me to the next meeting of the Tamiami Trail Business Association is going to get a lot of visits from me -- and from a lot of other people, too.

It is now possible to outfit a reporter with a "backpack video" newsgathering rig, including a high-definition digital camcorder, all necessary sound equipment, and a compact tripod, for less than $3000. This equipment is nearly 100% "point and shoot," too. It doesn't take any great technical skill to operate.

Hell, you can do it for a lot less than $3,000 and not lose a damn thing in quality. (NOTE: I just notice in comments that Miller is including a laptop in his rig, in which case $3K is more like it, especially if you're going for the Canon HV20.)

Newspapers should be out scouting for successful local bloggers -- not the ones who do two-sentence links to stories published elsewhere, but those who do original reporting -- and offering them a chance to put their material on the newspapers' sites instead of their own. For pay.

Well, there's lots of ways to work with local bloggers better, and at this point, pay is optional. Let's get some revenue in first.

Coupons can make great ads on a newspaper website's pages, but a whole section devoted to coupons (possibly with an accompanying stringer-generated blog pointing to special deals noticed by readers) could become a reader draw on its own, not to mention a decent income-generator.

I haven't blogged about coupons before, but I've talked about it a lot. I think coupons are the under exploited print ad for the web. I'm not aware of a newspaper site that is doing coupons right, though for a short while many years ago, the Ventura County Star was close.

And Miller is right here, too:

The real question is not whether we will see the development of dominant local online news operations run by Web-hip publishers and editors, but whether those Web-hip publishers and editors will work for existing local newspapers or for new, Web-only publications that eventually replace newspapers as the dominant source of local news.

Cory Bergman pulls this quote from an interview with Len Brody, CEO of NowPublic.com:

"I'm not a believer in local anymore," he said. "I used to think that hyperlocal was what mattered to people, but for 35 and under especially, the concept of local is very different. Like Facebook publishing the news feed -- it's changed from hyperlocal to hyperpersonal." Brody said weather, traffic and crime are becoming commodities, and while local politics may have some differentiation, nobody cares about it anymore.

Now we can fight over what hyperlocal means.

(Reminds me of a panel I did for Kelsey with Greg Sterling a few months back. I uttered "hyperlocal" and Sterling said, "Please stop using that word." I said, "No." For the moment, it's a useful term because it describes a certain strategic philosophy that has been hot recently; however, I agree, it is ultimately meaningless -- the whole idea of hyperlocal is just what good community newspapers should be doing anyway. Hyperlocal only means anything if you've been falling down on your community news job.)

Brody is only right if you accept that hyperlocal has only two facets: Weather/traffic and politics.

To me, hyperlocal has never been about politics. In fact, politics is the antithesis of hyperlocal. Hyperlocal is about people. It's what people do, have done or can do (think, event calendars) where they live. Planning boards and city commissions have very little to do with it.

In fact, where newspapers have lost their way is in getting too wrapped up in the local political game. Too often, the local city hall becomes its own mini-beltway and all the players (including beat reporters) think their actions and their gossip is far more important than anything else in the community.

I'm not concerned that "hyperlocal" is the wrong strategy. I'm more worried about whether we can actually execute on it. Will our editors and reporters ever willingly forsake a few meetings at city hall in favor of a Eagle Scout promotion or volunteer fire department carnival? (And to reach younger readers, those are probably the wrong subjects of coverage, too.)

The other part of a hyperlocal strategy, which includes the hyperpersonal Brody mentions, is part technique and part programming. There's no reason we can't do that.

Be sure to read the rest of Brody's interview. It's otherwise worthwhile and pretty on track.

Apropos of nothing, I want to hit on the paid content debate one more time.

In many post, but particularly this one, I've listed a number of reasons why paid content for news is a bad idea.

Here is more of the same, but restated: People won't pay for information. Entertainment, yes; information, no.

If you accept the the premise that there are two types of content, informational content and entertainment content, it's clear that paid informational content -- such as news -- is facing a much harder go of it than paid entertainment content.

People will pay to subscribe to HBO, but let's see CNN try that model. You and I both know, that if CNN wasn't bundled in with other channels, people wouldn't pay for it (not in significant numbers). People still pay to see movies in theaters (one of the top activities of young people), and games, of course, are a big deal. but every type of paid news service is suffering (though there are exceptions, such as the New York Daily News).

I've wondered how high-priced paid newsletters are doing this days. There was a time when I subscribed to the Kiplinger California Newsletter, but with blogs out there like Rough and Tumble, why would I need it now (not to mention that I no longer live in California!)?

Such premium newsletters used to be a big business, but I would like to know how they're doing now.

For example, within my own industry, with my corporate position, I would be the exact target audience for a $1,200-per-year newsletter subscription. But in a blog-driven, RSS-fed information world, why would I pay for media news and information? I get more for free (and high quality) than I have time to read now, so why pay for something that isn't likely to tell me anything I don't already know? I can tap into some of the smartest, best informed minds in the industry any time I want, and all for free.

The mixed bag in paid content trends: music, where CD sales fall and there is more free music than ever, but music still sells; and books, where informational books continue to sell.

With music, the greater diversity of choices and distribution outlets favor the consumer, driving down prices.

With books, we're still seeing ways in which digital distribution is disrupting traditional informational book channels, whether it be encyclopedias or computer programming reference books.

The only time I buy an information book now is either the author has struck on a great premise (exhibit A, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson); or online resources haven't yet caught up to the specialized interest I need. Here, my example would be a book on New York gardening I bought recently. I can find lots of online information about gardening, but more general that what I needed to start out my New York gardening experience.

Even with these variants and exceptions, the paid model for information content is on the wane.

Advocates of paid content can't be happy to know that the two big "success stories" of paid news are in jeopardy. If Murdoch succeeds in acquiring WSJ, expect the paid walls to come down. And rumors are the NYT is about to drop TimesSelect (which as we've discussed before isn't really working).

When I hear or read of newsroom types advocating paid content, it's clear that the main impetus isn't research or careful thought, but more, "we should force people to pay, damn it, because what we do is important and special"

But in looking at digital distribution trends, it's clear that the power to force people to do anything, especially with their money, is a pretty dumb business plan.

We need a well informed society. If we are going to continue in that mission its going to mean: Free content. It's going to mean free content that is easy to obtain through multiple platforms and channels (not just our own) and often in segments that are shorter, more digestible and linked to alternative view points than what newspapers have traditionally offered.
The future is free. It is distributed. Now we just need to figure out how to pay for it.

The next three years could be critical for the online news game. The timeline may be five years, but more likely, I think, we'll have a pretty good idea as to our fate (speaking of newspapers and their online properties) within three years.
By mid-2010, we won't necessarily be saying, "whew, we made it through that one," but we will be able to say whether our long-term prospects are good or poor.

I know there are those who would say the prospects are bleak now. I disagree. I remain hopeful. But I would say the trends now are neutral. Our fate hangs in the balance.

Within three years, we'll know:

• Whether CPM rates can be pushed much, much higher;
• Whether newspaper sites can band together to create a useful national advertising network;
• Whether there is any there there in behavioral advertising (this point independent of the first two items, but also related);
• Whether returns on contextual, CPC advertising can become a significant revenue stream for local news publishers;
• We will know if we can figure out a sustainable, significant video advertising model;
• We will know if we've figured out a way to not only protect, but expand our classified and vertical advertising revenue;
• We will know if we can really turn internet yellow pages into a strong, new revenue source;
• We will know if we've figured out how to grow audience significantly enough to better under gird all of these advertising models.

If we've succeed in all or most of these areas, I think we will have reason to celebrate our success. If we're still just treading water, or worse, falling behind, we will be justified in feeling quite panicked.

My prediction: Within three years, we will see a number of online news sites associated with newspapers that take in more than 30 percent of the revenue of the total media company operations -- all of the trends above will be robustly positive for those companies. And we'll see some newspapers failing miserably and on their way out of business.

Interesting new report out from Pew on online video.

It confirms what we already know: Video is hot and getting hotter.

It also confirms that sharing is a big part of the online video experience.

Good news for us: News video is important to many people.

I suspect a lot of people are going to key on on this finding:

Overall, 62% of online video viewers say that their favorite videos are those that are "professionally produced," while 19% of online video viewers express a preference for content "produced by amateurs." Another 11% say they enjoy both professionally-produced video and amateur online video equally.

I wonder how "professionally produced" is defined in the minds of Pew or the respondents? Is LonelyGirl15 or the OK Go treadmill video "professionally produced" even though the production quality of these videos would not meet the standards of many video professionals?

Does professionally produced mean using all the best equipment and meeting some pre-defined production value standards? Or does it mean somebody was paid to produce it?

There are some vloggers who do very good work and I don't think are making their living off their video. And their are vloggers who do make their living from video, but I bet the audience doesn't see them as professionals.

I just don't see how this question and response helps us understand: What type of video production actually appeals to an online audience?

The available evidence from what people are actually watching is very different from what the surface takeaway would be from this poll.

The other aspect of online video this poll did not address is: Advertising. I guess Pew might argue that they were focused on video as content, but advertising, especially in online video, is content. Melissa Worden points out in the comments that I missed the bit on advertising.

I just watched a Wallstrip interview with MyTrade.com CEO Andy Swan.

Near the end, Swan says he's short MySpace, long Facebook, because Facebook listens to users.

I completely endorse listening to users. It's something newspapers and newspaper.coms have not traditionally done well.

But here's the thing for newspaper web sites: Which users do you listen to?

If you listen too much to your current users, what sort of false feedback might you ingest?

I mean, your current users are predominately core newspaper users. Their expectations for how a newspaper.com should behave may be mired in the same Packaged Goods Media think that holds back many newsrooms. It's something less than a virtuous circle.

Whereas the users who can best help you envision the future may not be among your core users.

When you're Facebook or MyTrade.com, you're creating new users with new ways of thinking. But when you're legacy media, you're dealing with more legacy users.

So how do you know when you're getting the kind of feedback that will help you grow and build a great business?

One of the traps far too many newspaper.com sites fall into when redesigning is viewing the site as a newspaper.com site and not a news/community.com site.

Not so, mainetoday.com.

Clean and not overloaded with links. Joe Michaud and his team have put together a site that resists the temptation to put EVERYTHING on the home page. Compare it, for example. with Chron.com.

It's a tough call for most news sites, because there is just so much important information to point people towards. As wonderful as the new CNN.com is, it's still a pretty long home page.

The first thing a newspaper.com can do is drop all the section boxes on the home page -- those long lists of headlines by sections. You've got your section nav. That's good enough. Next, just be really disciplined about what you allow on the home page. This is more of a internal political issue than anything. Everybody in the organization thinks he deserves some representation on the home page. That's just not good design or usability. Site managers need to enforce some clear guidelines. Finally, dump some ad positions. Besides text ads, more than two ad positions is way too much. One is ideal. Your advertising will be more valuable on an uncluttered page. (Yes, MainToday.com has three ad positions. Oh, well.)

This is what we're after at GateHouse Media with our first round of templates. We'll fill out this look with some more content modules next month. We also have two new sets of templates we'll unveil in five or six weeks. Again, we're going after a cleaner look.

Of course, it was also the design style I championed in Bakersfield. That was nearly two years ago, and it's still an uncommon approach, which is why I find MainToday.com's redesign noteworthy.

Another thing Michaud is doing that I think is smart is they're rolling out the redesign over a period of time. Today is the home page. Subsequent sections will follow. A complete site relaunch is a bear and bound to lead to headaches. A slow roll out makes it less stressful to uncover unforeseen issues. Unfortunately, with the site launches we have coming up in August, we have no choice but to do a complete makeover. I envy Joe his more leisurely pace.

UPDATE: So I dashed this off quickly this morning after a first-blush take on the new site, seeing instantly that this wasn't your typical newspaper site. On closer look, the site is even more of a portal site. It's very much a community site. There is plenty of good stuff going on here with UGC, blogs and calendar. Mouse over the horizontal navigation. I'm not usually a fan of roll-over navigation, but this is an very interesting take on the concept. It strikes me as a pretty original concept. Given its context-driven nature, I can actually see it working.

Back in 2004, I would do a blog post about IPTV (or TVIP), by which I meant video delivered over IP. I said someday TV over IP would radically change television. People would watch all kinds of programs that weren't available from networks, and a lot of traditional TV and movies would be available, too. A critic said I was crazy. The pipe would never be big enough. I said the pipe didn't matter because everything would be time-shifted. We're not talking about watching streaming TV the way cable delivers it (and what Microsoft and PacBell meant by IPTV), but downloads for later viewing.
And now we have the likes of Joost and AppleTV and Netflix and gobs of quality vlogs along with plenty of other IP video offerings. It's still early in the revolution, but things are changing fast.

Also in 2004, I spoke at an API conference on mobile and said "someday you'll get broadband to your mobile device -- anywhere, anytime." I didn't know how this would happen, but it only seemed logical that it would. And it would radically change the way people consume news and entertainment. People in the room far smarter than me about technology said it would never happen. It was an awkward moment, because I only had my belief and a few examples of radical experiments to make it happen (like big balloons beaming down IP signals to the ground).
Well, the FCC is getting ready to license 700 MHz spectrum, and if it is a truly open system, I think John Battelle is right: "This could mean we get the Internet in the air. I mean, the real Internet. Wow."

Wow, indeed.

It's hard to imagine, fully, how that will change things.

But video will be a big part of the mobile broadband future.

The iPhone is already a pretty incredible mobile video device.

Somebody recently reminded me about this post on change.

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

...

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

Are you ready for change?

Speaking of trips down memory lane, check out this Digital video about the internet in 1994. It's exceptionally prescient about how things will change.

The other day I listed eight mistakes newspapers made in the past. I tried to sound a hopeful note even while bemoaning the lost opportunities because I’m not a pessimist at all about the state of our industry.

Maybe we’ve made mistakes, but as I said, the game is not lost … yet.

• Advertising revenue will improve. Advertising models will become refined. Advertisers will increasingly see the value of the local newspaper.com reach, and we’ll figure out how better to apply the network effect to appeal to national advertisers, and just like the early days of cable TV, our rates will only go up.
• People still want and need reliable news sources. And by reliable, I don’t mean that only professional reporters can get the right information (professionals, as we well know by now, hold no special dispensation here); by reliable I mean, the day-in-day-out information gathering and dissemination that seems to go hand –in-hand with a steady paycheck. Volunteers are great, but volunteers have lives and few can afford to devote the kind of sustained dedication to a topic area that communities need. Volunteers are hard to replace. There are lots of people in need of a regular paycheck.
• We know community. I’ve said it many times, community is in our DNA. So when it comes to creating online communities – web 2.0, virtual communities, platforms for participation – we know how to do this. It’s a natural fit for what we’ve always done. We just need to build better tools and a more web-native infrastructure. I believe we’ll get there. Social networks and newspaper organizations are a natural fit. Long term, I have more hope for newspaper networks than Facebook and MySpace. Frankly. And I think we can learn from their mistakes as well as their successes.
• Classifieds. I still believe we can get classifieds right. There may be lots of free classified sites now, but free classifieds won’t be around forever. Whether free or paid, in order for classifieds to succeed for a publisher, you need mass. In most communities, even in many where craigslist is strong, newspapers retain and maintain mass dominance. Classifieds are a natural fit for the web and I believe classified revenue will start to grow again, and dramatically. Just give it some time.
• Resources. Even after cut backs, most newspapers have good-sized news staffs. Newspaper staffs are never as big as in-newsroom personnel believe they should be (we always want to do more than we can, being the kind of people we are), but we can still gather, sort and disseminate a boat load of information in a amazingly short amount of time. That is and will remain a competitive advantage, especially against other media trying to transition to the web (think, TV).
• Reach. Almost every local newspaper in the country is by far the #1 medium in its DMA. In most markets, it usually takes all three of the top TV stations combined to reach as many people as the newspaper reaches, even after all recent readership declines. That’s incredible marketing power for the newspaper.com. Most newspapers are not yet fully exploiting that power, but they should.
• Video. I’ve long believed that video presents a substantial audience and revenue opportunity for newspaper sites. When you combine our reach, resources and our fresh outlook on video, you have an opportunity to dominate local web video in a way TV will struggle to match. Here is our chance to be the disruptor rather than the disruptee.
• Trust and brand equity. In most communities, newspapers are seen not just as big media, but as part of the community. This is especially true in smaller communities, but even in large metros, the love/hate relationship that is sometimes displayed by readers for the local rag is still brand equity. So long as we are around, large segments of our communities well need what we do, and turn to us first for not just the big stories, but the small stories other media ignores. We don’t need to reach everybody, just enough (and we can always develop other products to reach the people not interested in general purpose news).

And the bonus ninth reason: I believe the sleeping giant is awake. For the past year or more, we’ve seen newspaper companies giving the web more attention and more money. A concentrated effort by lots of smart people working the same problems, and with some money to make things happen, is bound to pay dividends.

Interesting think piece from Matt McAlister on media as a platform. A theme we've touched on before.

It's not about stopping bad behavior or even embracing good behavior. It's about investing in an architecture that promotes growth for an entire ecosystem. If you do it right, you will watch network effects take hold naturally. And then everyone wins.

Like Matt, my thinking along these lines goes back a long way, but I have yet to perfect the language for designing what I see. I remember one of the first things I read (probably in 1995) about the value of links, and how linking in and linking out "raises all boats." Time and time again, I think we've seen how that works in a networked world.

I like what Matt says about investing in an architecture that promotes growth for the entire ecosystem.

And while we work toward implementing something like that for the newspaper.com, I'm not sure the vision has been perfected yet -- not for the newspaper.com, because there is some intrinsic value of a newspaper.com brand, resources and position in the community that can probably be leveraged in unique ways.

For me, in my present job, there is so much to do just to establish a baseline. Building and nourishing an entire ecosystem is a longer-term project.

Nielsen/NetRatings needs you to care about audited metrics. That's how they make their money.

I've just never been convinced online advertisers care about audited metrics. In more than a decade of doing online publishing, I've never had an advertiser ask me or one of my reps for audited traffic numbers. I've only heard tall tales of national advertisers asking for such numbers.

Online advertising -- and maybe all advertising -- is about performance. Whether you're selling CPC or CPM-based advertising, if you can't deliver results commensurate to your characterization of your site's performance, you won't retain advertisers.

The trend in online advertising is more toward performance metrics every day.

That's why Nielsen swamping out the imprecise page view measurement for the equally imprecise time-spent metric seems so very unimportant.

For Nielsen, it's all about revenue -- their revenue, not yours.

UPDATE: BTW, how meaningful is "time spent" in the age of tabbed browsing? I might leave a tab open for hours before going back to a page and re-engaging in whatever I was doing earlier.

The Sacrament Bee now requires commenters to comment with real names.

Look for this to become the norm MSM news sites.

For the past few years, I've advocated a position that basically allowed public anonimity so long as the newspaper.com was collecting real names and contact information.

My position now is: Require real names and take reasonable measures to enforce it (absolute compliance is impossible).
It's just the right thing to do.

The wild-web 2.0 has advantages, and normally I advocate be as much like the unfettered web as possible, and even though it contradicts my "stop thinking like big media" advocacy, there are some journalistic standards worth maintaining. One of them is truthfulness and transparancy. People should stand behind their opinons and assertions with their real identity.

There are trade offs. Some people won't participate. Some people will lie (hopefully we can catch most of them eventually). The nature of participation will change in subtle, unknown ways. Some people who might be willing to offer up anonymous news tips or useful background information will be afraid to participate.

The trade offs, in the interest, of a more civil civic discussion and maintaining some journalistic integrity in this regard, are negligible, imho.

Facebook has demonstrated that anonymity is not a web 2.0 requirement.

I just hope the Bee doesn't think that requiring names (while ending moderation) will end their "rudeness and crudeness" problem. There is still no substitute for staff involvement in the conversation.

Jeff Jarvis appeared on Reliable Sources and posted the segment on Facebook.  The topic? Facebook.

It's a good discussion.

Items that stand out:

• The mini-feed isn't a news feed, which for some makes it less interesting, but Jarvis sees it as a wisdom-of-the-crowds way of endorsing what's good in Facebook.
• Ana-Marie Cox struggles through an explanation of the "elitist" background of Facebook, but her underlying point is good. Facebook started as a social network for a limited number of people, so it's always maintained an "in-the-know" sort of vibe. Meanwhile, MySpace has been completely open, which encourages people who are more open to experimenting with their persona.
• Age and status, according to Jarvis, define how you use Facebook. If you're in high school and college, you accept all friends requests, but old folks, like us, are more selective, because our friends are people we "endorse" and will respect their online opinions.

Speaking of web 2.0 stuff (this is a real tangent, but I don't want to take time for a separate post on this): Check out ABC's new iCaught.  It's an interesting spin on UGC. Or you could see it as an other example of how packaged goods media wants to turn distributed media into PGM.

Every once in a while, I think -- if only newspapers had done things differently way back when.

The race isn't over yet, but there are mistakes newspapers have made that I think will have lasting consequences. We need to think through the impact of these mistakes and what we'll do about them. There are plentiful opportunities, but we'll pay for these mistakes for a long time.

My list of mistakes are things, I think, that are beyond hindsight. These are things we knew, or should have known. Obvious things that were obvious years ago.

• Newspapers were slow to embrace blogging. Newsrooms dismissed blogging as a fad, and unprofessional and ladened with rumor and misinformation. Meanwhile, audience flocked to blogs. Isn't it logical that what is arguably the first web-native publishing model would provide the template for how its done? I fear now that too many newsrooms are looking at online video through the same big-media view finder instead of seeing online video the way web natives see video. (Solution: Embrace blogging. Encourage large swaths of newsroom bloggers and hire (meaning, pay) experts in the community to blog for you. Make blogging a central feature of your content strategy.)
• The failure to develop a web-centric classified model before the advent of Craigslist. Newspapers were slow to put classifieds online, and when they did, they were hard to search, didn't include e-mail addresses, didn't have web enhancements and you couldn't easily place an ad online (or even online only). Today's classified struggles have less to do with Craig's free model, and more to do with the fact that newspapers didn't act aggressively to establish market dominance online before the disruptors came along. (Solution: Fix your classifieds. Make online free, with pay-for-print up sells and enhanced classifieds; make classifieds a social networking opportunity; promote the hell out of the fact that your classifieds still reach more people than any other local alternative.)
• Failure to protect vertical categories, especially auto and real estate, by building robust, content-centric, user-centric vertical sites. A lot of newspaper sites really struggle with one or both vertical, and few newspaper sites have established a strong enough position to guarantee the retention of auto and real estate advertisers, who find it easy to go their own way online. (Solution: Invest in your verticals. Use the best-of-breed solutions and create original content and utility.)
• The failure to invest in search. Right from the beginning, when Yahoo! was still an HTML 1.0 site, it was clear that people needed help finding stuff. Newspapers have been slow to build robust search engines on their own sites, but more importantly, the best thing to come out of the New Century Network was NCN's Topix-like (only better) newspaper content search engine. If NCN could have done nothing else but keep that search engine going, we would all be better off. (Solution: Put a great universal search engine on your site, and crawl all content (not just your own site) related to your coverage area.)
• It was a mistake to view content as something we do and audiences read, take it or leave it. Fear kept newsrooms from allowing comments on stories for years -- fear of the "graffiti on the bathroom wall" effect. Newspapers tried forums, found they quickly devolved into ghettos of banality, spam and hate, so they shut them down. But forum failure wasn't the fault of the community or the software. It was the fault of management for its lack of management. Before there was a web 2.0, we called participation "virtual communities." That's a term that pre-dates the web and it was clear more than a decade ago that audience engagement was tied to participation. (Solution: Create a robust UGC community for your newspaper.com. Engage local bloggers as part of the local civics discussion. Be the platform, not the media package.)
• The newspaper web operations that did discover how to get five percent or more of newspaper revenue from up sells and forced buys should have been reinvesting that money in online operations, instead of trying to juice the bottom line. That money could have been used to pay community bloggers, create community and develop software that would be helping us today. (Solution: Invest more of your online revenue in content operations and application development.)
• Newspapers did not want to believe that the web was pull rather than push, so simply dumping each days edition of the newspaper online seemed like a good idea. But with pull publishing, you need to give a reason for people to remember to visit frequently, and the same old content isn't going to do that. You need frequent updates and you need to barter in links. You need to be as engaged in your community as it is in you. (Solution: Be the platform. Update frequently, encourage participation, add more and broader levels of content, converse with your site visitors.)
• Newspaper sites have long suffered from a lack of utility. Community calendars, if they exist at all, are too often incomplete and hard to navigate. There is also a lack of broad and rich community data. We don't do a good enough job, even today, of turning our web sites into an information resource for our communities. About 8 years ago, newspaper companies got hot on the portal idea, but that fizzled out when it turned out it cost money. Newspaper sites should be the community information hub. (Solution: Add robust calendars, get into community database publishing, and gather all the community content you can and publish it (or link to it). Make all kinds of community content easy to find through your site.)

The good news is that in none of these eight points is the game completely lost yet. There is still time and opportunity, and newspapers still have tremendous advantages in content resources and community brand and good will. But these are eight things that need fixed in a hurry.

The flip side of this last bit of tempered optimism is that technology is moving fast. The release of the iPhone is a big leap forward for mobile content and most newspapers haven't really even contemplated mobile-native content strategies.

Since becoming online director in Ventura in 2004, I've included a slide in all my presentations on web content strategy called, "What We've Learned From Blogs."

Typical bullet points:

• Post often
• Post irregularly
• Stay on topic
• Post chronologically
• Engage in conversation

These are things that the most popular blogs do.

Frequent updates, unfettered by deadlines, and coming in reverse chronological order are proven traffic drivers.

Blogs are also about conversation -- even bloggers who don't allow comments on their sites, still engage in conversation by linking to and commenting on posts from other bloggers, or MSM articles.

Most popular bloggers also focus on a particular theme, be it politics or culture or sports, etc.

Blogs are arguably the first web-native publishing model, so it only makes sense that blogs would provide a template for how to publish online.

Howard Kurtz writes this week about the breakout success of HuffingtonPost.

Is it any surprise that one of the fastest growing online publishing operations is powered by frequent updates, lots of content and lots of links?

This is a formula that works. I've seen it work first hand, and continue to see it work.

The significant variation for HuffPost is the broad range of topics the site covers.
Too many newspaper web sites are still focused on being the newspaper online. That's a mistake. Newsrooms should focus on making their sites a community news platform. That's how you grow traffic.

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There's a quote I read from Rupert Murdoch (I'm pretty sure) that I wished I had saved. He said it right around the time News Corp acquired MySpace. It went something like "I've never known a publication that didn't aggregate a large audience that didn't make money on advertising."

In other words: Grow audience = Make money.

I think that's his thinking behind this quote:

What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but went global — a great, great newspaper with big, iconic names, outstanding writers, reporters, experts. And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you'd make ... a little bit of money. Then again, the Journal and the Times make very little money now.

Say what you will about Murdoch, he has a history of concentrating on audience growth, and he's made a lot of money doing it.

This post by Scott Karp on how industries change is multilayered.

He seems to be suggesting the print will die completely.

I'll bet that in ten, maybe even five years, that warehouse on the river will be storing something other than newsprint ” or it will be demolished entirely.

But his comparison between shipping and newsprint doesn't suggest that print will die so much as it will change.

These steps lead up from the Potomac River to the Lincoln Memorial and were designed by Washington’s architect and urban planner, Pierre Charles L'Enfant, to be a grand gateway to Washington, where dignitaries arriving by boat would be received and whisked off in carriages. But dignitaries stopped arriving by boat, and instead arrived by train and later by plane. Now the steps are used by runners for a stairmaster workout and by tourists sunning themselves near the river.

When those steps were built, there were obviously people in the shipping industry who thought shipping would always dominate commerce and transportation. Obviously, they were wrong. And there was probably already enough evidence available in changes being forged by the industrial revolution to suggest an alternative future.

Media is changing rapidly, but I think history shows that former dominant industries rarely die away completely. They just change.

We still have shipping and people still use big boats to get from one place to another, but the business models are different.

Digital media is indeed a threat to mass media, but mass media is not likely to die completely. And print media is likely to carry on in some form, because it retains intrinsic benefits that are hard to replace completely by digital devices (so far).

That isn't a guarantee or a promise, of course. Those of us in the newspaper industry still need to consider that digital media is a threat and we may not survive (hardly a far-fetched concern), but the correct response to the threat is probably to position it in our own minds, at least, as an opportunity.

How much stronger will our newspaper companies be when we have standing along side successful print products (and not just newspapers) a robust, revenue generating, successful digital business?

So what's up with USAToday's traffic?

Obviously, before it's big redesign, traffic was declining, but it's fallen off a cliff since the relaunch.

Is the problem the design, or is the UGC/participation model failing, or is it something else?

Before we jump to conclusions that its UGC/participation, look at the past 12 months of traffic for Bakersfield.com:

We (clarifying point: I'm no longer affiliated with Bakersfield.com) relaunched the site in March 2006, with the UGC/participation tools being added a month or so later. As the graph above shows, traffic has been steadily climbing.

Bakersfield.com's success could be related to improved site navigation, or boat loads of more video or the participation tools. The point is, it's hard to believe participation tools are hurting USAToday.

WashingtonPost.com, a constantly evolving site, but one that went through some significant home page tweaks in about the same time frame as USAToday's relaunch, is also showing steady growth:

WaPo is also heavy into user participation and conversation.

Based on just these couple of comparisons, either something is terribly wrong with the USAToday design, or there is some other unknown factor that is hurting USAToday's numbers.

For sake of one last comparison: NYTimes.com

Again, steady growth (so it's not an industrywide trend against national news sites).

Here's more evidence that people won't pay for online content: CNN is killing Pipeline as a paid site.

Over the years I've read various quotes from Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster defending craigslist's business practices.

Every time there is a phrase pops into my head: Master politicians. They are as good at spin as any inside-the-beltway veteran.

Let's parse this quote from Buckmaster:

“Walled garden” is a misnomer — this term arose to describe AOL’s attempts to keep their subscribers from accessing the internet at large — we do nothing of the sort, and in fact encourage users to go elsewhere

Here Buckmaster dodges the question by reframing the its intended meaning. Clearly, the intent is to use "walled garden" as a metaphor for craigslist's unwillingness to open its site to third-party aggregators. Whether or not the original meaning of the phrase is as Buckmaster says it is matters not. He's clearly spinning here. Instead of dealing with the criticism, he's recasting the phrase into terms he can easily dismiss.

Of course, craiglist users can go elsewhere. That's not the point. The real question is, are the people who supply the (mostly free) content that make craigslist what it is afforded the opportunity to benefit from wider distribution of their content? In that sense of "walled garden," craigslist is, in fact, a walled garden. No amount of spin changes that.

I don't mind that craigslist is a walled garden. I just think Newmark and Buckmaster should be honest about it.

Likewise, I have never before heard the term “proprietary” applied to craigslist, given our well-known near-exclusive reliance on free software.

Again, the question is being recast into a meaning that Buckmaster can wave off. Whether craigslist runs on open source software is irrelevant to the question of whether its business practices are proprietary. In fact, it's ironic that Buckmaster would proudly wave the open source flag while defending very Microsoft-like business practices.

Newmark and Buckmaster are free to pursue whatever business practices they like, but they should stop hiding behind the spin of "we're just here to serve the users."

While I've said before that newspapers should not blame Craig for their woes, and I've also said Craig gets far more blame than he should, craigslist is also clearly not a friend of local newspapers. The company is far from harmless; it's just that casting craigslist as the main villian is rather foolish.

That said, for all of Newmark's and Buckmaster's spin about how they're not greedy capitalist, how they exist to serve users, how they care about communities, how they regret the decline of journalism, and value solid journalism, etc. -- what have they done to help newspapers? Where are the partnerships that might benefit both a local paper and a craigslist site?

Newmark and Buckmaster owe newspapers nothing. They are under no obliation to seek partnership opportunities -- opportunities that could benefit local communities on multiple levels -- I'm just asking the question because I just don't buy the craigslist spin that the company is all that White Hat.

Greed isn't always about money. Sometimes it's about control and attention. I suspect that Craig Newmark and Bill Gates aren't all that different inside.

John Battelle shares an interesting new patent granted Local.com.

If you wanted to run a search of all the content on your newspaper.com and rank it by geographic location, Local.com might have something to say about it.

Cyndy Green sent me the link a few weeks back, and I finally just took the time to look through the blog of Kyle Majors, a video journalist back in my old stomping grounds.

While Kyle is working for a TV station, newspaper video journalists could certainly go to school on his site. He shares his work and experiences, and while his pieces drift toward a "shot for TV" style, they are generally more personal and interesting than straight TV news. He certainly comes up with some good topics to cover.

Also, check out his equipment list.

Oh, and I love his tag line:

It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change - Unknown

To what extent should your company -- your media company -- be blogging?

Consider the example of Microsoft.

A Microsoft (MSFT) Web site for uber-geeks went live in April 2004 and, according to Wired magazine, immediately it became clear "The fears of lawyers, marketers, and PR consultants would, in fact be realized - and it would be good for the company."

"The 71,000 employee company now has more than 4,500 bloggers posting on every imaginable tech topic," explained writer Fred Vogelstein. Some of them, like Mini-Microsoft, are anonymous, fearing reprisals from the bosses, while others like Larry Hryb are public and prolific.

OPA commissioned a study of pre-roll advertising, and based on how the results are being presented, it would be very tempting to conclude that you know, what, pre-roll is OK after all.

OPA found pre-roll combined with a banner ad lifted brand awareness.

But here's the cautionary note: In the early days of pop-up ads, marketers considered them effective because they drove brand awareness and click-throughs.

But few legitimate publishers allow poppers on their sites these days. Why? Because they irritate the hell out users. And their irritation factor eventually meant they were ineffective.
Previous studies found that pre-roll is irritating to users.

Internet trends point toward non-disruptive advertising (such as relevant text ads) as the most effective means to bring businesses and consumers together, while disruptive models lose traction over time (consider the decline of the lowly rotating gif banner).

The danger of pre-roll is that it could create a disincentive for viewers to watch a publisher's video offerings. I know I've personally declined to watch some newspaper videos recently because I didn't want to be bother with the pre-roll.

Newspaper sites can't afford hinder audience growth. Using pre-roll is a risky proposition.

While other newspaper companies continue to announce layoffs, buyouts and hiring freezes, GateHouse Media has a robust pipeline of current openings.

Here's a JournalismJobs posting of more than two dozen full-time reporter and editor jobs in New England.

More openings listed here.

I've mentioned before about the recruitment site in Rockford. We're also looking for reporters in the Chicago area.

UPDATE: I forgot, more GateHouse jobs listed on the GateHouse Newsroom site. This page will show you journalism openings from papers all over the country.

One of the things I love about working at GateHouse Media is how many great, smart, talented, driven, passionate people I meet. There are a lot of such people with GateHouse.

Last week, I was sitting in office of Linda Grist Cunningham, our editor at the Rockford Register Star, talking about all of the work we have ahead of us and the transformations hitting our industry. The subject of Myers-Briggs came up and Linda made an interesting observation about the personality types you typically find in newsrooms and the kind of personality types best suited to our more turbulent media environment. They're very different people.

As we talked, I thought, "This would be a great topic for a blog post." But it was clear that Linda knew both more about Myers-Briggs than I do, and had far greater insight into the topic than I could muster.

So I asked Linda to write a guest post, and happily she agreed.

Here is her post:

Here's what we've got: Thorough, exacting journalists who are systematic, hardworking, careful with detail; who want things to be grounded in fact and analyzed logically. Journalists who can thrive in chaos -- as long as most of the things around them is structured and well-organized, preferably with deadlines. Journalists who can gather information steadily, then reach an assumption quickly. They're prone to being comfortable with one (or, maybe) two interpretations of an idea or event, and "two sides to a story" is a religion. They work best with others who are realistic and focused on facts and results.

Here's what we need: Journalists who are innovative, strategic, versatile, analytical and entrepreneurial. Journalists who enjoy working with others in start-up activities that require ingenuity and unusual resourcefulness; who create innovative, logical, organized and decisive strategic plans around valid concepts -- and who can get them done. Journalists who can see a dozen possibilities when others can see only "two sides of a story." Journalists who delight in a "slippery slope" just for the rush of the slide, and who then figure a way to bring it all together and get it done.

With apologies for a taking liberties with the Myers-Briggs personality type indicators, which I pretty much lifted verbatim above, the men and women whose styles and personalities have been the strong foundations of our print newsrooms struggle to meet the expectations of the "cyber-fiber" integrated newsroom.

I once heard the statistic that 80 percent of our newsrooms were ISTJs (that's Myers-Briggs shorthand for a version of the "what we've got" above.) I can't cite the stat, but after almost four decades in newsrooms, I happily accept it as true. The ISTJs fiercely uphold the First Amendment, get things spelled right, get the facts, send the bad guys to jail, get the press started on time, and don't screw up grandma's obit. They keep their own counsel and aren't particularly inclined to be openly enthusiastic.

(Think I'm kidding? Ever watched a roomful of journalists listening to a particularly rousing speaker? Nary a one nods, and heaven forbid that they applaud. I have watched 900 editors at an American Society of Newspaper Editors convention sit without a single clap of hands, not even a polite one, at the conclusion of a presidential -- that's U.S. president -- speech. When those same editors gave Richard Nixon a standing ovation -- years after he "retired" -- I was sure I was at a publishers meeting.)

That's who we are, and that made us a formidable force when we were exclusively about the two-dimensional print newspaper. That's not going to get us into the new media world. We need -- again apologies to Myers-Briggs -- a whole bunch of ENTJs and ENTPs (see description above.) Since we can't and shouldn't replace the ISTJs, which would be not only insane, but impossible, and since personality styles are non-transferable (we're born that way, folks), how do we go about building the newsroom staff we need?

Lobotomies are out. So, we do three things:

1. Capitalize on the strengths of those exacting, fact-driven "traditional" journalists' brains.
2. Hire the innovative brains when the openings occur so we move toward a diverse mix of thinking styles and personalities.
3. Teach new tricks.

*Capitalize: Just because they aren't the first ones to grab the wireless laptop and video camera doesn't mean our journalists can't or won't transform themselves into the new-fangled models. They will, and they'll do it well. But, we can't dump it all on them at once. Customize the explanation and the training; detail the facts and show the logic behind what we want them to do; explain the whys and the pros-and-cons. Develop realistic time lines and implementation plans. Create order and structure around the disruptions to the things they've been doing for years. Give them plenty of time to ponder and mull, read and research, ask questions, absorb and analyze. Challenge them to suggest other methods and solutions to arrive at similar goals. Give them plenty of time and room to let go of the past. They'll get to the same place as the innovators; it just takes longer.

* Hire: We shouldn't have to spend much time on this one since we've said it for decades. Let's just do it: Instead of filling positions with the same kinds of people and job descriptions as the ones who vacated them, decide what you need to get the new jobs done, and hire for that position, not the one that's open. None of us are going to get a bunch of additional bodies, so we have to hire smartly, and that may mean no more ISTJs for a while.

* Teach: Your "early adopters" and even your "early adapters" are going to be jazzed by the possibilities multiple platforms bring to "doing news." They'll be your leaders and drivers. But, give the ISTJ-type folks a chance. Grab a handful of the undesignated newsroom leaders -- those reporters, photographers and copy editors who toil over the traditional print newspaper and to whom everyone listens no matter what. Hold them close. Bring them into the first brainstorming sessions. Give them the cool, new, expensive equipment. Challenge them to try it. Tell them that you need them to help lead the newsroom into the future. Instead of lamenting their lack of enthusiasm, make it important that they be among the leaders -- and give them the opportunities to do some serious journalism with some nifty technology. It will work. And, once they find out that they can have fun and do serious stuff at the same time, they'll tell the rest of the newsroom. Think of it as "Mikey likes it…."

If you haven't taken Myers-Briggs before, I recommend it. It can be pretty insightful. It's best if you take it through a professional environment where experts can help you understand better what it means and how to apply what you learn. That said, you might be able to find a free Myers-Briggs test through Google, which can still give you a basic idea of your personality type.

FWIW: I'm an ENTP.

I'm confused by this post from Chuck Fadely.

On one hand, he has this gripe:

This video stuff ain't easy nor cheap. No matter how many well-intentioned bloggers tell you all you need is a $89 camera and the will to do it, the reality is far different.

It takes good audio gear, reasonable video gear, modern computers, and most of all, time, to produce intelligible video for the web.

But later he says this:

Video clips, on the other hand, can be done by almost anyone with a point-n-shoot. We're talking the video equivalent of a page 4B traffic accident brief. A video clip appeals to the 17 people who were affected by the wreck (unless it's a porn starlet).

So, let's suss this out. You're a "well-intentioned blogger" if you say low-end equipment is the way to go to get spot-news video, and um, this video stuff isn't easy and it takes dedicated staff and big, expensive cameras, but, um, that 4B traffic accident should be covered by a reporter with a point-and-shoot camera.

Isn't this a contradiction?

OK, I see his post is a rant against publishers who think video is cheap and easy and won't spend money on training, talent or equipment.

But he doesn't name any publishers who believe that, and I certainly don't know any publishers who believe that.

So we must be back to the well-intentioned bloggers.

But he doesn't name these bloggers, either.

I suspect a strawman.

The only bloggers I know who advocate putting inexpensive cameras in the hands of news staff are also experienced professional journalists.

After all, the father of inexpensive news site video is Jack Lail, one of my early online mentors. He runs one of the most respected news web sites in the country. His staff created Random This, which recently won a Digital Edgie award.

But KnoxNews.com isn't all point-and-shoot. The staff there also produces a lot of polished video shot with quality equipment.

So who is it out there advocating a cheap-only approach to video?

Here's what Chris Hendricks, VP of interactive for McClatchy, said at an Inland Press Association event earlier this year, which I blogged:

Hendricks on video: It’s part of the critical strategic path. “We need to be in the video business.” Some McClatchy sites have studios, but many just have $99 cameras and reporters are out shooting video. Chris endorsed the idea of doing whatever you need to do to get video on your site. It doesn’t need to be big, fancy or expensive.

So McClatchy is pursuing a duel video strategy: Expensive stuff and low-end stuff. McClatchy has video studios, but also believes in buying $99 cameras.

To me, it just seems smart to do both.

As news companies transitioning to the web we need to:

• Develop internal video literacy, so we can both produce better stuff with low-end equipment, and become better at shooting great stuff with higher end equipment, or however equipment might evolve;
• Condition our audience to think of our sites as a go-to place for video of multiple varieties, and the only way to produce a critical mass of video is to include easy-to-produce, reporter-shot video in the mix;
• Find our video voice, by that I mean figure out what works and what doesn't and go in the direction of what works, and this means shooting lots of video and getting a lot of people involved in the process;
• Get our newsroom more engaged in online, and video has some real magic in driving this transformation (I've watched it happen in multiple newsrooms now -- give reporters the power to shoot their own video and suddenly you have a lot of reporters caring a lot more about online).

Video is too important to our digital future to pursue with just a one-dimensional strategy.

And BTW: It's not cheap to buy a lot of inexpensive cameras to outfit an entire newsroom. And if you do that, you do need multimedia staff (meaning new FTEs, or reallocating FTEs) to help support the effort. It's a bit of a red herring to say that publishers are trying to cheap-out by investing in point-and-shoot cameras.

I'm still not sure what Chuck is really advocating, but a quick reading of his post would lead one to believe that he's slamming the use of low-end equipment for news video and preaching an exclusive high-end-only approach.

Obviously, I disagree.

Mark Glaser is doing one of his periodic "round up of opinions" post (great way to get two posts for the price of one idea, eh, Mark?). He wants to know, do we think the glass is half-full or half-empty.

It's been said that I'm a half-full kind of guy, and put in pretty good company in that regard.

But I think I want to fudge here and say, I think it's one-third full.

I'm pretty optimistic, and optimism defines how I run the business side of my life, but I'm full of empathy for the half-empty crowd, even as I bemoan their cranky-old-journalist whines.

The fact is, while there are bucket loads of reasons to be optimistic, nobody has yet proven how we win.

There are still lots of scary trends.

• Circulation is declining
• Revenue is declining
• Disruptors abound and breed like flees
• Every day, we read about more layoffs

On the other hand:

• Online does extend our reach and overall audience trends point upward
• Online gives us a chance to be the disruptor (think yellow pages and video)
• Revenue is growing rapidly online (though not fast enough) and new revenue models continue to emerge
• We bring many strengths to the table in community standing, journalistic experience and resources, and talent and drive

While no newspaper.com has won yet, I think if you could aggregate all of the winning plays in the newspaper.com game, you would have one hell of a good news/community site, and I believe it would score big time in audience growth and revenue. To me, the game plan is there, it just hasn't been executed right.

The big question is will enough of us execute it soon enough? We really don't know how much time we have before the final buzzer. If we don't get our act together quickly, we may find ourselves on the sidelines.

To me, that's the real danger, and why I say, "one-third full."

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near
Andrew Marvell