Howard Owens

Here are three recent newspaper-related web site launches to note ...

McClatchy's new national/international news service site, news.mclatchy.com. Note the attempt to be the platform, not just a static news site. Sure, it's an aggregation of only McClatchy's stuff, but there is ample opportunity for conversation, including comments and blogs. It's a worthy experiment to highlight the substantial resources McClatchy puts into non-local news. Also worth noting, no advertising and no apparent plans for advertising (the design offers no obvious consideration for dropping in advertising later) . It's all about the news and the audience. UPDATE: I just noticed remnant advertising on section fronts ... off to the side. My recommendation: Drop remnant ads until real advertisers buy in. The CPMs of remnant aren't worth it. UPDATE II: BTW, we can expect, I'm sure, to see some of Mike Drummond's work on this site in the coming weeks and months.

From the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, RocMen.com, a site for men. I can't think of another newspaper company that has created a site catering to men, so that's unusual right there. There's lots of repurposed content here, but also a chance to build community. The main thing to note is that like iGoogle or NetVibes, you can redesign the page, moving content modules around at will.

From SignOnSanDiego.com comes AmplifySD.com, a local music site. I was familiar with AmplifySD, the online radio station featuring San Diego music and musicians, but became aware only today that SOSD had turned the site into a local music wiki. Great idea. The radio station lives on, but now local music fans can add and modify content. Given San Diego's strong local music scene, great move. I love the brand, too.

Two TV journalists have quit their day jobs and started an online video site, StoryBridge.tv.

From Lost Remote:

WISC news anchor Katy Sai and photographer Jay Olsen were tired of fighting for time to produce longer, relevant stories, so they quit and launched Storybridge.tv. It’s a showcase for in-depth pieces, but more than that, their goal is to create communities around great stories. “We found that communities of people were thirsty for information,” Olsen said. “When you do extended coverage, it allows people to gather around this story thread.”

I'm skeptical about the demand for longish video stories on the web, but on the other hand the idea of creating community around long stories is intriguing.

There's a story under Katy Chronicles called Team Picture that I would like to link to and comment on, but there's no permalink to that particular video.

Also, I can't find an RSS feed, nor is it possible (at least in an obvious, user-friendly way) to embed a video in your own blog post.
So much for community.

But at least the videos are well shot and well edited. I recommend the site to newspaper video shooters looking for tips and techniques.

My friend Mike Drummond, a pretty hard-core trad-J type, has started a blog. He includes pictures!

He's in Baghdad.

Drummond and I go way back ... competing against each other for front page play and who could write a 12-inch story the fastest back when we were the Woodword and Bernstein of The Daily Californian, where we both met our wives and stirred up trouble for mayors and city managers.

When he's not a reporter in Iraq, he's a reporter in Charlotte for the Observer.

I love it when there is some empirical evidence to support my own assumptions.

For quite a while, I've maintained that if your goal with a group of photos is to have people view the photos primarily for the content of the photos themselves, the best way to do that is in a photo gallery where the user drives.

I've said before that SoundSlides can be mighty boring. And by that, I mean the SoundSlides that are nothing but a bunch of pictures thrown up with some music.

If you have a real story to tell, and all the proper media to do it, SoundSlides can be a great tool for getting the job done.

But when you want people to look at pictures and get something out of the photography, a non-automated photo gallery works best.

Now there's an eyetrack study that supports that position. Of the 34 participants, 71 percent preferred to drive themselves rather than set the slide show on auto play (only 6 percent choose that option).

In terms of practical advice, this observation of navigational methods use makes clear that if you can only have one navigation method – the "next" method, moving linearly through the set of slides is the one to use. It was the primary choice of the majority of the participants and resulted in viewing the most slides.

However, if amount of time spent with the story package is your primary goal, people who clicked from slide to slide using the "arrow" spent almost a minute longer than the "next" users.

Google is making a fairly significant change to how AdSense works for advertisers.

In short, Google is dealing with what is known as the "blind network problem" - advertisers pour money into AdSense, and they get a sense of how the campaign performed in aggregate, but they have no idea which sites did great, and which sites did poorly, or often, even which sites they ended up on (unless they specified via the relatively new site specific buys on AdSense.) This new set of reporting addresses this issue, allowing advertisers to determine where their campaigns are doing best, and then they can optimize accordingly.

This is significant for publishers, too. If you care at all about how much money you make from AdSense, you will want to figure out how to ensure your site is one of the better performing sites.

I also think it will help knock down some of the made-for-AdSense sites ... assuming they're not among the better performing sites, and/or advertisers have more control to ensure their ads don't appear on smarmy-appearing sites.

OK, more from J.D. Lasic -- a video interview with Mike Orren of Pegasus News.

Player

There are only two people I know who first studied journalism at the feet of Spiderman-worshiping high school journalism teacher Geoff Anderson at Grossmont High School who are still working professionally in journalism.

There's me and Daniel Weintraub, who was at GHS (wow, the same initials as my current employer's stock symbol -- I just realized that) before me.

Weintraub is one of the better journalist bloggers. J.D. Lasica interviews him.

Player.

If J.D. Lasica is blogging about Paris Hilton going back to jail, it must be real news.

And it's strange to me how much I also care about this story.

Now, haven't I been saying this all along:

"In the online video syndication space, the largest video owners will not be the broadcasters. It's going to be the newspapers." That prediction from Critical Mention CEO Sean Morgan ...

"When we see these newspapers turn the corner by adopting new technologies that allow them to put a braodcast voice on their text news, the market is going to erupt."

New England media blogger Dan Kennedy takes issue with Ryan Sholin over this bit from Ryan's now famous list of myths newspaper people believe:

It's not Craig's fault. Newspaper classifieds suck and they have for years. Either develop simple database applications with photos and maps to let your users actually find what they're looking for, or partner with a good third-party vertical who can. Anything less is a waste of your time.

And Dan writes:

Uh, actually, it is Craig's fault. Not in the sense that Craig Newmark did anything anything wrong or evil when he created Craigslist. Rather, I'm talking about a simple reality — he and newspapers are in two different businesses, and his business has caused serious damage to the news business.

And I'm here to say, actually, it's not Craig's fault. It's our own damn fault, and I may very well be one to share the blame as much as anybody. I've been around long enough to remember what things were like before Craigslist, and while back then I may not have had sufficient power to make a difference, I certainly remember how much newspaper classifieds sucked.

Let's see, pre-craigslist:

• The only way to place a classified on a newspaper web site was to CALL the newspaper call center and talk with a live person. Forget about 7/24 online ordering.
• If you did place an ad, it wouldn't appear online until the next day, after the print edition was out.
• The browse and search features initially sucked.
• While I personally don't quibble with charging more for the online ad, you did have to pay more, which differentiates newspaper classifieds from Craigslist enough to be a factor (but as you can see from this list, just one of many, and I don't think the deciding factor).
• You couldn't add a picture, let alone expanded text.
• You couldn't prefer to have people contact you via e-mail or a blind web form.
• You couldn't place a risque ad.
• You couldn't put the ad online for any longer than the print ad ran.
• If you were placing a help wanted ad, newspapers did little or nothing to help you reach qualified job candidates (that actually changed rather quickly in the newspaper game, but initially, it was pretty difficult, and then when it was possible, the additional charge was not competitive with Craigslist or even Monster)
• You couldn't place your related web URL in the ad.
• Newspaper web sites were not reaching the young audience that was more interested in the kinds of things Craigslist made its name from, like rooms for rent and free stuff.
• You couldn't place an online-only ad, either paid or, more importantly, for free.
• There has never been a social network associated with placing a classified ad on a newspaper web site (except for a couple of recent exceptions, such as Bakersfield.com).

So there were lots and lots of mistakes newspapers made in the early days of classifieds online, and then when Craigslist began to show some disruptive power, newspapers were slow to react.

That said, Craigslist is not the sum total of the newspaper industry problems. Criagslist actually fills a market need that was not being met at all by newspapers, and only where Craigslist is really, really popular, has it cost newspapers any significant revenue (such as San Francisco). For the most part, Craigslit has expanded the classified market place, not taken a slice of pie from newspapers.

So, sorry, Dan, it's not Craig's fault.

Here's an ironic juxtaposition.

Lost Remote has this post about a swimsuit model filling in as a TV newscast anchor as part of a reality TV series.

A few doors down is this post about newspaper vlogs not having sufficient talent to compete with TV. The quote:

A lot of what goes into a TV newscast is the appeal of the presenters because of their communication skills…. If you don't have credible presenters, [the user] can just click on the stories. (Allan Horlick, president and GM of Gannett's WUSA)

I guess there's talent, and then there is TALENT.  You know, the kind of talent you need during sweeps.

I'm well past the age in which I seek out information on my favorite rock stars and ravenously read every I can (like I did in high school with Elvis Costello).

But Jack White fascinates me.

He is maybe the most complex and interesting musician on rock today.

So I don't mind that Eat the Press broke format and gave us a scoop on Jack, who I know no is really John Gillis.

Interesting reading for White Stripes fans (and if you're a true music fan, the only reason you wouldn't be a White Stripes fan is you haven't really listened yet).

I'm still digging out from an incredible backlog of unread RSS posts, the consequence of an incredibility busy past eight or nine weeks.

Buzzing all around me has been this debate over whether journalists should learn to write code. Robert Andrews has a nice little round up here. Matt Waite has worthwhile posts here and here.

It may be beating a dead deer at this point, as a former reporter who learned to write a little code, I feel compelled to weigh in.

First, I did have something to say on this topic once before.

I'm glad I learned to write code. It made my career.

I didn't write anything as cool as Adrian Holovaty, but I did help one of my previous employers make a lot of money.

To me, writing code was something that didn't feel that different from writing a news story. There is an essential creative element to both, and both take a certain level of discipline and common sense.

That said, should you, my hypothetical-reporter friend, learn to write code?

Maybe.

Take a look at your current circumstance. Would coding help you get ahead (if that's what you want)? Would it be appreciated by your current employer? Would you be given the chance and resources to do anything that made a difference? (Of course, until you actually prove you can code, you will find it hard to get the attention of your bosses as a coder.)

There is an endless debate in my end of the industry: Build vs. buy. There are already a lot of cool and useful applications out there. So can you build us something that we wouldn't be better off buying?

Ask yourself, what would you do with your skill? And will it be more valuable in the future than the skills you already have (I still think reporting and writing will remain employable skills no matter what happens with newspapers).

Even if you think you'll need to go solo some day, the tools you'll need to do your job are only getting better, being built by programmers that are years ahead of you in experience (and in programming, experience exponentially valuable when it comes to writing great applications).

It should also be noted that if you're suffering from Holovaty envy, Adrian is more than just an incredibly smart guy (are you that smart? I know I'm not), he is also a special breed: an entrepreneur. Are you an entrepreneur?

Here's the question you need to ask yourself: What skill set do I need in the 21st Century?

I said reporting and writing is valuable, but I didn't say that's the only thing you need to know or do.

You should definitely expand your skills set, but you should add skills that compliment who you are, not just do something because some bloggers say you should. Your strength might be closer to graphics, or info architecture, or video, or community managing -- these are all valuable skills today. Or maybe you should just become an incredible adapt journalist, being able to span multiple media.

Programming isn't the only alternative for journalists feeling pressured by the turbulent media environment.

UPDATE: On reflection, I'm concerned by "figure out if you're employer can use you as a programmer" might be misunderstood.

What I'm suggesting is figure out the niche your employer needs filled, and fill it. That might be as a programmer. It might be as something else. All news operations are short staffed (always have been, even before the past two years of layoffs), so there is no shortage of vital jobs to be done == read, opportunity.

It will be the rare journalist who can't carve out a new career for himself or herself who doesn't figure out what opportunities exist in a newsroom and then goes about becoming a specialist to serve that need.

The flip side is, if what you want to do isn't currently a skill needed or valued by your current employer, learn the new skill set on your own time, on your own terms, and start looking for new opportunities. They're out there.

But your best opportunity for career advancement is probably right within your current organization. Just about all of my peers in our industry are former reporters and editors who saw an opportunity and made a career for themselves -- self-taught and self-motivated.

Coincidently, how you can best help yourself is also how you can best help your employer and our industry.

Back in the day, I remember Eric Meyer on the Online-News e-mail discussion list predicting doom for newspapers online. OK, maybe he wasn't that dramatic, but he said we had a big problem to over come.

The problem was push vs. pull.

Newspapers are largely push. You get people to subscribe, and you deliver it to them, or you put it out on a street corner where it is easy to pick up. You're not making people come to you.

The web is entirely pull.

The only way you get a visitor to your site is if you give them a reason to visit. They have to remember there is a reason to visit. There is no "newspaper on the door step" reminder.

RSS and e-mail help, but for a large segment of the audience, people have to remember.

That's one reason it is so hard to develop a large segment of a newspaper.com audience who are daily or more frequent visitors.

But I believe that is where the money is. When we can get 12 to 15 percent of our DMA adults hitting our site at a least daily basis, we'll be a long way toward making enough money to pay for quality journalism, regardless of how healthy, or not, the print partner is.

So, if the web is pull, how do we do a better job at pulling?

As a thought exercise, here are my "Seven Be's of Pull."

• Be relevant
  • For most newspapers, that means, be local, even hyperlocal.
• Be frequent
  • The daily dump doesn't cut it. You need a steady flow of news and information from roughly 6 a.m. to midnight. People need to be rewarded for stopping by often. That happens when there is new stuff every time they visit.
• Be complete
  • It isn't just about the headlines. It's also about school lunch menus, crime stats, real estate sales, deans' lists and dead fish.
• Be diverse
  • Get beyond the City Council and crime reports, because people have other interests, and some of those interests are as local as they are national, such as gardening, chess clubs and child rearing. Let 1,000 niches bloom.
• Be easy
  • Make search good and effective; make sure your navigation is smart and obvious; don't clutter your home page, but make it easy for people to find stuff.
• Be friendly
  • It's not just your site. It's your community's site, too. Let them participate in it. Let them make friends with you and their neighbors.
• Be reliable
  • Don't forget the traditional journalistic values of fairness, honesty, diligence and looking out for the interests of everybody in the community. One of the key findings of the Readership Institute is that people want to know their news source "looks out for my interests." These things are a big part of your brand, and brand is a big part of pull.

I should add that one reason paid content won't work for general circulation newspapers online is the pull nature of the web. Until people know a site is something the are going to remember to visit everyday, they are reluctant to pay for it. That's a corollary to my contention that people pay for delivery, not for content.

Nice write up about newspapers getting into video, especially video news shows (sometimes called vlogs), from trade pub Broadcast & Cable.

I love it when I read head-in-the-sand thinking for TV executives.

But station managers, for the most part, don't see the newspaper Webcasts as stiff competition. Allan Horlick, president/general manager of Gannett-owned WUSA Washington, says newspaper anchors have a way to go before they’re considered “talent.”

“A lot of what goes into a TV newscast is the appeal of the presenters because of their communication skills,  Horlick says.  "If you don't have credible presenters, [the user] can just click on the stories. I'm not terribly concerned with newspapers as competition with their newscasts."

Another station general manager, who asked not to be named, also zeroes in on the talent issue. "What people want is better personalities, and the [newspaper anchors] are really bad. You have to deliver content in an entertaining way."

Nothing like completely missing the point. Gordon Borrell, however, gets it, and he does a lot of consulting for TV stations, so don't expect station managers to remain dumb forever (though getting it and doing something about it are two different things, as some newspaper execs have learned).

And many industry insiders applaud the newspapers’ efforts as a clever move. “It’ll take a long time to beat stations at their game, but at least they’re experimenting,” says Gordon Borrell, CEO of media- research firm Borrell Associates. “Newspapers are tired of being the disruptee, so they’re trying to be the disruptor.”

Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.
- Peter Ustinov

That is the quote I got today on my iGoogle page.

It immediately struck me as true -- at one time.

Back in olden times, most people grew up in the same town, followed in Dad's career foot steps (or close to it), and everybody you met did pretty much the same thing. So the friends you made early tended to be the people you hung with throughout your life. Chances were, you even met your spouse at a young age.

Throughout much of my life, society hasn't been that stable. I've lived in nine or ten different towns, attend 3 different colleges, spent 4 years in the Air Force, and held at least a dozen different jobs.

I've known a lot of people over the years.

When I think back to some of the friends I've had, first as a child and teen, then as a young adult, and I remember the good times and how I felt -- I thought we would be friends forever.

Most of those people are completely out of my life now.

Today, I have friendships with people all over the United States, and some of these friendships go back more than a decade. In many cases, none of these friendships have been as deep, as personal or even as full of "the good times" that marked previous friendships, but yet they persist.

Why?

One word: Internet.

I started thinking about this when looking at the "friends" I have on Facebook. Facebook has a great feature that lets you view your friends on a timeline. I have Facebook friends I've known since 1995.

I have Facebook friends whom I've had those good times with, and shared deep, personal conversations, and I have friends I've only met in cyberspace. There are friends I've worked with and friends who I met at parties. There are people I may never work with or party with again, but they're all important to me.

As I looked at that timeline page, I found myself wishing I could get all of my friends on Facebook, including those handful from high school or college that I'm still in contact with.

What a great tool for keeping up with my friends' lives.

Sure, the Facebook mini-feed is more superficial than a late night phone call, or a weekly session at the corner pub. But we all know those rituals peter out over time. We all move on with our lives and develop new priorities.

But it's still good to know that your friends are a-ok and doing interesting stuff. And it's also nice to know they are easily reachable when needed, or when they need you.

Facebook strikes me as a something in between LinkedIn and MySpace. LinkedIn is all about professional connections. MySpace is all about making social connections.

MySpace has never interested me as much as LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is decidedly limited in keeping me informed on what my friends are up to. Facebook is feeling very much like a place where I can manage both my professional and personal relationships.

That's coolly convenient.

The final point to all of this: When people tell you social networks are just a fad, feel free to laugh in their faces. Social networks have existed since at least the BBS days. The desire of people to make and maintain relationships online is deeply ingrained in our base instincts. It all goes back to the campfire. We want to share, and we want to know we're part of a group, accepted and liked, because it's part of the survival instinct.

If you're newspaper.com isn't helping people in your community make connections and feel connected, you're falling down on your job.

How much of the buzz about the iPhone is hype? Will the iPhone really deliver on its pre-release publicity.

Well, it is coming from Apple.

It sure looks cool and sounds like it has great functionality.

I love the commercial.

If it is as good as all that, it's going to be a game changer.

It's going to change how people consume news and entertainment.

It could very well mean that all of our best laid plans to build great newspaper.com sites get laid to waste, or at least we'll need to realign our priorities.

Steve Yelvington touches on this a bit in a post titled, "How the iPhone threatens newspapers."

Thoughts worth pondering.

One last thought: great mobile media access is one reason why I'm such a strong proponent of newspapers doing video. Mobile and video seem like a perfect match, once the technology catches up, and it will catch up very soon. Among those "jobs to be done" Yelvington talks about, news and entertainment video sure could fill a lot of those roles quite often.

I used to say, "All journalists should blog."

I still say that, but I also say now, "You should be on Facebook."

It's another great tool for absorbing the culture of online, for learning what it is to be part of a networked world.

If you're interested in online video, you should pay attention to Truveo, from AOL (of all people!).

It's a video search engine, but of particular interest are the developer APIs.

You can also submit your own feeds.

Smart stuff from a company most recently resembling a dinosaur.

One of the first things I learned about the Internet was that it was designed so that information could route around trouble spots.

That is more than a technological marvel, it has significant cultural implications.

I believe there are more libertarians today simply because by its very nature, the Internet encourages low barriers, transparency and fewer restrictions. Because of that a mindset of openness naturally follows for long-time netizens (you don't see that word much any more, do you?)

Here's an example of information routing around trouble: A TV station that was taken off the air by the Venezuelan government has re-emerged on YouTube. (via e-Media Tidbits).

Governments that attempt censorship in the networked age engage in folly.

At 10,000-plus subscribers, the channel is already the most popular on YT, beating out #2 by more than 6,000 subscribers.

I can say, I knew him when ... I think I was one of the first media bloggers to link to Ryan's blog.

Now he's getting interviewed by Bryan Murley, getting links from the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Lost Remote ... It seems like everywhere I turn over the past week, Ryan's name is showing up. His Tecnorati rank is now in the lofty 13,000 range.

Ryan's only been on the professional side of our business since October, and he's already becoming one of the thought leaders. That's pretty impressive.

Other young bloggers to watch:

• Angela Grant
• Melissa Worden
• Meranda Watling

John Temple addresses the issue of different standards between letters to the editor (for print) and comments on stories (on the web).

Here's my quick take: Print is a one-time deal of some permanence. There is something canonical about putting a letter in the paper. The standards for publication should be higher.

On the web, it's all about the conversation, and the conversation can evolve quickly. On the web, if somebody says something stupid or wrong, there is a quick and easy correction process: The other people who can or might participate in the conversation.

While I'm no fan of falsified registration, or anonymous posting, I think the content of the conversation is more important than the identity of the poster (except in rare circumstances).

Wow. Amazing multimedia project from the journalism students at Ohio University. South of Athens. What a great way to tell a community's story. (via John Temple).

I'm not a big fan of doing Flash just to do Flash, but when it's done right, it's a pretty amazing experience.

It's been kind of a theme of my for some time now: If you want to grow revenue, grow audience first (most explicitly in this post and this post).

Terry Heaton finds this quote:

Google’s senior vice president, Engineering & Research Alan Eustace and vice president, Engineering Jeff Huber:

“(Google) accepts that some projects will never have an associated revenue stream.” (Link)

And Heaton writes:

That’s because revenue isn’t the problem; audience is the problem. And we need to fix the problem.

Exactly.

I happen to believe that if we can grow audience, revenue will grow exponentially. The more people who find our sites essential to their lives, the more we can charge for advertising.

(via Lost Remote).

Rich Gordon's latest white paper on successful audience growth projects is now available. It's on the Asbury Park Press's DataUniverse.

In the five months from December 2006 to April 2007, DataUniverse has generated more than 25 million page views, D’Ambrosio said. That’s an average of more than 5 million page views per month – more than a quarter of the Web site’s total.

“I’ll be honest with you. I did not expect it would generate a huge amount of traffic,” Hidlay said. “What this really shows is that the public really wants access to the raw data. We have been amazed at what a traffic builder and audience builder this is.”

When a new database is published on DataUniverse, D’Ambrosio said, users don’t look at just that one. “They then start exploring all the databases – all the other databases explode with traffic.” Traffic also increases to the rest of the paper’s Web site, D’Ambrosio said.

It seems so obvious -- newspapers are great at gathering data (when I was reporter, I remember having reams of data stuffed in my desk drawers), and the web makes publishing data in easy-access formats so relatively simple. Plus, newspapers online, in my view, have a journalistic obligation to be a repository for as much information about their communities as possible.

It's great to see solid evidence in audience growth for a project like this.

My suggestion though: drop the current o-wrap, go with a simpler design, and run only contextually relevant advertising (such as AdSense).

Disclosure: Gordon's project is brought to you by the Digital Media Federation's (part of the NAA) audience development committee, which I chair.

One of my pet peeves is the misuse of the word "censor."

To accuse a corporation or other private entity of "censorship" is to twist a vital distinction of the First Amendment.

A corporation, for example, has the same First Amendment rights as any private individual. Those rights include the rights not to publish.

YouTube, for example, is within its rights to remove videos it finds, at its sole discretion, violates its terms of service. That is not censorship.

When the GOVERNMENT forces YouTube to remove a video, or threatens a journalist with jail for publishing anything, THAT is censorship.

The government has the power to censor. Private entities do not.

Another slice of difference: If a corporation tells you not to publish something through its distribution channel, you have the right to take your content elsewhere. If the government says don't publish, you risk jail even if you release that content to another country.

Even if by contract, the private corporation has the right to sue you for violating a contract, that is not censorship, because you agreed to the contract in the first place. The government, however, has the sanction of physical coercion to compel your compliance. Jail, torture and murder (if the government is really out of control) is a more menacing threat then a civil suit.
That last distinction explains, I think, why refraining from a cavalier use of "censorship" is important. We want the word remain as frightening as it actually is. It is not merely a synonym for violating journalistic independence or stifling free speech.

In this blog post from SFWeekly, Matt Smith is all over the word "censorship" as it relates to former jailed journalist Josh Wolf accepting a paid-for-blogging gig. His sponsor is an unnamed tech company and the contract allows that company to have some control over the content of the blog.

In the accompanying video, Smith even goes so far as to use the hilarious anachronism "the corporate man."

However, when you have to private parties entering into a contract that specifies the terms of publication before hand, and both sides agree to the language, that is not censorship. It may not be the right thing to do, but it is not censorship.

What's more disturbing from an ethical standpoint is that Wolf is apparently prohibited from EVER revealing who his sponsor is. I find that hard to believe, but that's what I hear him saying in the video. If that's true, that violates what I believe to be standard blogger ethics: to disclose your potential conflicts of interest.

Such an arrangement, if true, should cause any readers of Wolf's blog to distrust everything he writes, because how are they to discern which words passed through third-party oversight for approval and which didn't, and just who is this overlord anyway?

That's not a good thing, I think.

UPDATE: Josh Wolf left a comment on this post and says it will be clear who the tech company is -- the blog will be hosted on the company's domain.

If journalism dies, it won't be because of Google or Yahoo!, or even craigslist, it will be because of people like Neil Henry -- members of the cranky old journalist brigade who whine about the state of online affairs while insisting on remaining blithely ignorant of what's really going on online.

Jay Rosen has a nice round up of blogger response's to Henry's column, which I didn't have time to deal with when it came out last week.

If you're one of those people who think, "Gosh, darn it, Google should give us some money." Or, "Gosh darn it, if only we didn't give our content away for free," then I have a suggestion for you: educate yourself before you start lecturing others on how modern journalism should work.

You're obviously smart (I mean, geez, you've survived in the journalism world since Ernie Pyle first used an ink well, so you gotta have some grey matter), and modern journalism can use your brains, but you're doing none of us any good with shallow conclusions and misinformed diatribes.

Educate yourself about online. The best place to start is by creating an account here. I also recommend accounts here, here and here.

We're back to to discussion Walter Hussman's diatribe against free content. This time it's Gordon Borrell taking apart Mr. Hussman's thesis.

Mr. Hussman is correct that daily circulation at The Columbus Dispatch has fallen 5.8 percent since it dropped its subscription model for content on its Web site. What he did not state, however, was that The Dispatch’s Web reach went from five percent under the subscription model to more than 25 percent under the free model, according to Nielsen data. According to Gerry Barker, general manager of the company’s digital operations, “The resulting growth in online revenue dwarfs anything we could ever generate as a paid site. This is about building a sustainable business model and positioning our company for the future.”

I didn't know this:

By 2006, newspapers operated the largest-grossing Web sites in 95% of all U.S. markets. And 60% of those Web sites were generating more cash flow for their companies than the largest-grossing terrestrial radio station in those markets.

Tell me again how we should charge for access online?

Previously: Reasons why the paid content model for general circ dailies is a bad idea

Paul Farhi, writing in AJR, wonders if hyperlocal journalism can pay.

Easy answer: Of course it can.

Hyperlocal journalism is just a fad term for what good community papers have been doing for hundreds of years. It's a fad term for the kind of nuts-and-bolts community coverage many daily newspapers abandoned in the wake of Woodward and Bernstein. It's a fad term for building sites enhanced with granular databases and user-generated content (Remember the days when every newspaper ran every obit for free, every police and fire call, and had the ladies' social committee chairwoman writing a regular column?).

Hyperlocal journalism is nothing new. It's just a new word. It's paid before. It will pay again. The web presents new revenue challenges, but history proves, the market is there. We just need to figure out how to get there from here.

Farhi sounds a far more skeptical tone in his piece. His pessimism is based largely on the failure of Backfence. But Backfence failed for multiple reasons, none of which are in any way related to a number of other business strategies that can be built around hyperlocal, especially the kinds that newspaper companies should pursue.

And while Farhi doesn't see much to celebrate in the current state of many other small, non-newspaper affiliated hyperlocal operations, he only lightly touches on the theme that success for these sites should be measured on completely different terms than what a large company might try to accomplish. An independent hyperlocal site can survive with much more modest goals and still serve as an exceptionally pesky disruptive force for established media companies.

Here's two interesting bits:

Smith points out that most of the weeklies have larger editorial and sales staffs than the Post in Loudoun (the Times-Mirror has 15 full- and part-time newsroom employees). What's more, the weeklies have an unquantifiable advantage over the big-city paper: local brand names and strong ties to the community. The Times-Mirror, for one, can trace its founding to 1798.

"Where we fell down was getting the initial traffic in," he (Mark Potts) says. "When it works, it's mind-blowing. But it takes time to build, and it's difficult if you don't have a big media organization behind you."

So, what happens when you take those small, well-branded institutions that have been covering their communities for a long time combined with the resources of a big media organization, and you put that together with the tools and ideas behind hyperlocal journalism? Well, I think we're going to find out. :-)

Our team in Rockford has put together a great multimedia package to entice talented people to join the staff there.

I like it because it involves real people from the newsroom, which gives job candidates a great sense of who they might be working with, and it contains great information about what it might be like to live and work in Rockford.

Current openings include photographer, multimedia editor, and copy editor.

There are openings elsewhere at GateHouse, and many of them are listed on our corporate site. You'll note that several openings are in online. Most of those jobs are based in Fairport, NY, but we're also looking for regional sales managers.

At GateHouse, we're intent on building a great local media company. If you are the best and want a better job, we would like to hear from you.