Howard Owens

My friend and long-time colleague Joe Howry, editor of the Ventura County Star, notes that it is against the paper's policy to "argue" with readers when they are critical of the paper's coverage.

We generally don't rebut criticism for a number of reasons. For one, we simply can't afford an ombudsman. For another, arguing in print with a letter writer is most often unseemly and unfair. It makes us look overly sensitive and defensive and unfairly gives us the last word. That is not what the Opinion pages, and especially the letters to the editor, are about. Credibility depends on fairness.

I would also contend that credibility also depends on transparency.

Further, I wonder if it really serves our journalistic goal to seek and reveal truth and accuracy if we allow unrebutted letters to appear in print.

Here's my solution: Start a "criticism blog." Put all those questioning and critical letters in the blog, and like a blog quote and respond. Fisk the letters if necessary. Open up comments on each post. Encourage a dialogue about the issues raised by the letters.

The "we don't respond to critics" attitude seems like an extension of the packaged goods media paradigm of "here's the news, take it or leave it." I'm not sure that's how we win in the digital age.

For example, there's a criticism of the Star right on Joe's column. Somebody from the paper should offer a sound, level-headed, honest and fully transparent response right now, right in the next comment.

Jake Jarvis, son of media blogger Jeff Jarvis, has created something that is pretty amazing: Middio.

It's a search engine for legal music videos on YouTube.

Visually, it's perfect. Functionally, it's perfect. Conceptionally, it's perfect.

For months, I've been frustrated by how hard it is to find real music videos on YouTube. You have to weed through a lot of junk to get to what you want some times.

I love the fact that Jake is serving up the videos in a more attractive format. I also love the Top 100 feature. Random is cool, too.

This is my new favorite site.
Oh, btw, Jake is only 15.

Steve Safran looks at iTunes and sees some evidence of what people are looking for from media.

1. They'll watch commercials (you could learn that from YouTube, too)
2. It doesn't necessarily need to be like TV (you could learn that from YouTube, too)
3. There's a market for highbrow content (YouTube? Not so much)

I've been saying a lot recently that the pace of change is only going to increase -- everything is going to get faster.

Here's a story about how broadband will get faster.

If greater broadband penetration starting about four years ago helped increase the demand for online video to the levels we know today, what will speed that are 25 times faster mean?

I'm guessing, more video and better video and more live/streaming video.

And video that can easily go straight to the TV.

Seems like a great opportunity for newspapers.

The Kiowa County Signal now has an interactive map on its site where residents of the flattened Greensburg, Kansas can post memories of their town.

Stefan Dill is switching sides. He's leaving newspaper digital media for the television web.

On a personal level, I'm sad to see him leave the newspaper industry. While I've never met Stefan, I think he's been hanging out in the same online newspaper forums with me for more than a decade. He's a smart guy.

In his posts, he outlines some reasons for leaving. While I respect his decision and believe he'll be successful in his new gig, I disagree with some of what he writes.

Yes, the newspaper industry is in trouble. Yes, there are too many people too mired in old ways of thinking. Yes, it our newsrooms and sales staffs (especially sales staffs) are changing attitudes too slowly. But I'm not convinced things are any better on the TV side.

I mean, just go over some of the debates we've had about video on this blog and else where -- several TV types have weighed in with head-in-the-sand attitudes about change and innovation no different than what you'll find in many newsrooms. Based on my personal experience, I would say TV staffs have no more sense of urgency than our print colleagues.

TV station web sites tend to display a not-getting attitude that is at least five years behind newspaper attitudes.

Last summer, I looked at taking a job at a TV station. I was dissuaded by the station's seeming unwillingness to spend money. The attitude seemed much more tight-fisted than anything I've experienced at newspapers.

I don't mean this to be a TV vs. newspaper debate, or to be critical of Stefan's decision, but to say, TV and newspapers, as far as ability to change, are probably a lot more alike than they are different. Stefan is still going to have a challenge champion change. I'm sure he can do it, but my advice is to gird himself for some battles.

Sure, TV has its advantages (like big vaults of video and more legacy talent and training in video), but TV can't match a newspaper's ability to produce massive amounts of content, which is a competitive advantage on the web. And newspaper people can learn video. I don't see TV station managers hiring 10 or 20 more reporters.

Newspapers are also almost always the dominant medium in any market, which is why newspaper web sites tend to crush TV web sites in audience reach (in many markets, newspaper.coms beat the #1 TV station in reach).

As for cultural changes, I'm not giving up on newspapers or the people who run and produce them. I've seen how newspaper cultures and people can change when given the right tools and the right incentives.

I've said before, the pace of change is accelerating. Bill Gates says we're not far from the day when most people will do most of their reading online.

I tend to think video will become the dominant online content model.

Bill Gates sees online completely disrupting the broadcast television model.

Media is changing quickly.

With technology changes comes changes in audience demands, expectations and needs.

When online becomes the dominant content delivery mechanism, the media world will be very different.

Are you ready?

(via Romenesko)

Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, wrote a piece a while back about what idiots we all are for making our news available for free online. It's been passing around the industry for several weeks. I've wanted to blog about it, but have been too darn busy.

The same column just appeared on the WSJ site. Ironically, you can't read it unless you're subscriber.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an e-mail for somebody responding to the column. Here's a portion of that e-mail.

Newspapers have historically not been willing to invest in online strategies. It was cheaper to just repurpose content and when newspapers found that such a simple thing could create sufficient traffic to justify forced buys on classifieds, the revenue bump was intoxicating. Unfortunately, few news companies reinvested that new revenue. So today, many newspaper companies are hitting a plateau on revenue growth and have seen online audience growth go flat if not decline. I think that’s part of what is driving so many newspaper companies into the arms of Yahoo! They’ve run out of imagination and are unsure what to do next.

The newspaper industry did make a critical mistake when AP started selling content to Internet pure plays. It did devalue the content. But some slide toward content as a commodity was inevitable. You already had TV and radio getting the content, with a 1,000+ newspaper sites putting AP content online, the ease with which readers could get that news was going to drive the value down anyway. That cow has left the barn and it’s not coming back.

But AP is really beside the point. The real issue is and has been, is local news content a unique enough value that people will pay for it. So far, the evidence is no. No general-interest, local-content-for-paid strategy has worked yet.

I’ve argued this point many times. The pundits and publishers who say newspapers should stop giving away its content for free online miss a very fundamental and important point: Newspapers have always given their content away for free to readers. Readers don’t pay for content. They pay for delivery. They know it. We know it. Newsstand and subscription prices are set at a level to offset delivery expenses. With digital delivery, our delivery costs on a per-user basis are next to nothing. Whereas, the user is already paying for the device to read the news and the cost of the last-mile infrastructure to deliver it.

The "readers should pay" argument also ignores the fact that not only are we competing with an increasingly fragmented media world for people’s attention, we are competing for their money in a way that wasn’t an issue 50 years ago. Today, most of us have multiple phone bills, ISP bills, cable and satellite bills, other entertainment bills, more magazine subscription bills than before, and so on and on.

Now some people think we should tack on an online-subscription fee on top of that? It’s going to be a hard sell.

Mr. Hussman offers as an argument in favor of his strategy that his circulation declined only .4 percent. My question is, how would he explain the fact that the New York Post and New York Daily News, which both have sites with all free (not even registration) content both INCREASED circulation in the Sept. 06 Fas-Fax? The Post was up a whooping 5.1 percent.

The problem with looking just at his numbers, or just at the Post and Daily News, is that they are small sample sizes. They don’t tell the whole story. I suspect there are other market dynamics at work between Columbus and Little Rock besides just how content is handled.

Mr. Hussman notes that newspaper web sites generated 78 percent of its revenue from classifieds in 2006, saying this was “not from news.” But how much revenue does a newspaper generate from news to begin with? Most print revenue is classifieds, then from retail, then from circulation (which is not people paying for news, as we discussed). I don’t know any print general circulation newspaper that has ever generated (directly) revenue from news.

As for the Washington Post generating 8.4 percent of its revenue from online. Yes, and they’re one of the few papers in the nation that going back as far as 10 years ago didn’t just try to recreate the print paper online. The Post was one of the first to get into video, and to offer robust interactive features and to break news online without concern about “scooping” the print edition. The Post also did something few other newspapers have been willing to do: Invest real dollars in out-of-paper promotion and marketing. WashingtonPost.com has the largest local audience of any newspaper.com site in America. Of course it’s making more money.

Again, Mr. Hussman is very close to getting right the best online strategy. He’s still missing some pieces, but has the general outline of the right idea.

The main point is: Don’t see your web site as just another publishing channel. It’s a platform. It is the hub of your community. It is the place people are pulled to because it has the latest news, the most complete local data and the best place to meet and talk with other people in the community.

I’m a fan of John Hagel, a smart business consultant who has written some good books. The following quote comes from this post on this blog:

From my experience, if you want to transition from a content business to customer relationship business in the media industry, you need to start focusing on content platforms. In a traditional content business, you rely on professionals to deliver content that is meant to be experienced exactly as produced. Content platforms still rely on professionals, but the role of professionals in a platform business is to catalyze further contributions by a growing range of third parties, including audience members. A platform is meant to be built on and will rapidly evolve over time. A product, once produced, never changes.

As I have written before:

Products are designed to be used on a standalone basis – you buy it and you view it or listen to it in the specific way the content creator intended. Platforms are designed to be built upon – they create opportunities for the original creator, third parties or the customers themselves to extend, enhance and tailor the content in ways that the original creator never anticipated. Offered as a platform, content can create far more value than any equivalent standalone product.

What do content platforms include? They may start with content produced by the platform owner, but that is just the beginning. Content platforms point to other content and resources available anywhere on the net that are relevant to the focus of the platform – a key role of a content platform is to "curate" content, helping audience members to connect with high quality and relevant resources. Platforms also provide tools for participants to comment on and add to content that is already available – everything from tagging to discussion boards to content production tools. In the process, they provide environments for complex webs of relationships to be built among people who share an interest in the content, whether they are participating in its production or simply experiencing it.

If done well, content platforms provide a natural transition to audience platforms. It’s a subtle shift, but an important one. In content platforms, the primary focus is still on the content. In audience platforms, the primary focus is on understanding the needs and interests of a specific audience segment and using that understanding to help audience members increase their "return on attention."

In our zeal Saturday to get some content on KiowaCountySignal.com while we waited for stories from our local staff, I spent a good deal of time surfing blogs, YouTube and Flickr. I wanted to write a story reflecting how members of the distributed media were covering the event.

Among the blogs I found was one by Allan Detrich. I soon discovered Detrich was a storm chaser, former newspaper photographer, and had several photos from Greensburg immediately after the tornado hit. I forwarded the link to a member of my staff and asked that we get permission to use a photo or two.

We used a photo on this story and this one.

Today, Editor and Publisher did a story about the great job the Greensburg staff has done on getting a web site up and getting stories online despite having its offices destroyed.

Well down in the story, writer Joe Strupp includes:

Among the photos posted is at least one by Allan Detrich, a former photographer for The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, who was fired several weeks ago after it was found he had altered numerous photos. Anderson said he was not aware of Detrich's past problems, but said he believed Detrich had approached the Tribune with the photos, apparently at no charge. Easterday could not be reached for comment on Detrich.

The former Blade photographer, who is also an avid "storm chaser," said he offered the images at no charge because "I didn't want to make money on the hometown paper." As for his past problems in Toledo, he declared in an e-mail, "I learned my lesson, and I am moving forward with my career with honesty and integrity."

I actually first knew this was an issue because of this post, which takes GateHouse Media to task for not recognizing Detrich's name.

I'm sorry, this one is my fault. I had not seen the coverage of Detrich's doctored photos (I don't think it made Romenesko, but if it did, I missed it).

If I had known about Detrich, would I have still have used the photos? I don't know. It would be good for me to say, "of course not," but that is 20-20 hindsight. As I think about it, I have no reason now to believe the photos are doctored.

Contrary to the implication of the E&P story, Detrich did not approach us. We contacted him. Everything about his web site indicated (in the realm of common sense) that he is who he says he is and does what he says he does. I would have to believe he was and is on the scene and the photos are real.

If you look at the links to our stories, you'll see that the caption I wrote are carefully worded to note that these were non-staff contributions.

We didn't pay for these photos.

It would be hard to believe that Detrich created a fiction in this case. There isn't a terribly big self-promotion angle for him to play here. He had no idea at the time he posted his photos that we would call on him. He maybe has an angle to get back into professional journalism, but at the time, I'm not sure I would have seen his coverage as angle shooting. I think he is doing something he has an obvious passion for.

Am I justifying? I'm trying not to. Just explain. Just be honest.

Another aspect of this is: To me, I saw this as citizen contributed content. My approach to CitJ is to treat it as honest until proven otherwise. Using CitJ in MSM coverage is a high-wire act. You're going to get burned some times. But to me, the benefits far outweigh the dangers. Again, note how I carefully worded the caption to give the source of the photos. Some, I know, would now argue: "See, don't use CitJ." To me, that's not an option. Use it, but use it with caution, and note the source.

Meanwhile, we have our own news service staff on the ground in Greensburg now and we are posting their stuff with more to come. I haven't seen it yet, but I hear it's good. Check it out.

Much of today has been spent working on Greensburg stuff -- taking care of the KiowaCountySignal.com web site.

Here's what's been going on:

• I woke up this morning to an e-mail from Matt Coen, CEO of MyCapture. GateHouse has several newspapers that use MyCapture for its print photo sales service. Matt had read on this blog about our efforts to get real web coverage up of the tragedy in Greensburg. He wanted to help. KiowaCountySignal.com already had a my capture account, but he wanted to make the UGC tools from his company were available to us, so he was upgrading our account for free. Thanks to MyCapture, we can now directly accept submissions from readers. The photo album is empty right now. If I get some time, I'll solicit some photos to seed the albums. Given the fact that the town is devestated and residents might find it hard to participate in photo sharing, we may not get anything, but I think it is very important we make this tool available -- important journalistically.
• The Greensburg paper is not a member of Associated Press, but this morning we were feeling frustrated that AP stories about Greensburg are all over the web, but we couldn't use them. I called my contact at AP and got permission to start using AP on the site. We want our coverage of this story to be complete as possible, and though we have our own staff, AP can still help in that goal.
• Our own staff is now filing stories online.
• The GateHouse Media news service is sending an editor and a reporter to Greensburg. Also, we're sending our multimedia editor there to shoot and edit video coverage. They will start arriving there tomorrow. Besides multimedia, they will also blog from Greensburg and Pratt. The reporter we're sending also covered Katrina, so she's got some good experience on these kinds of stories.
• Speaking of blogs, we did manage to get a blog launched today. It doesn't have the right skin on it yet, but it will. Since we don't have our UGC tools working in the CMS yet, we wanted a blog primarily so visitors could leave comments, but since the decision was made to send additional staff there, it makes even more sense to have a blog.

Enough of this post. I need to start getting some posts up on the Kiowa blog.

UPDATE: Well, I didn't do any blogging on the Kiowa blog.  At least not yet.  I just couldn't find anything new in citizen media of interest. All the blog posts I found were nothing more than "gee, isn't this a shame ... I knew someone from Greensburg," or "I once passed through Greensburg."  Not a lot of substance. And on YouTube, all the latest videos are just lifts from TV coverage.  Of course, since only MSM is allowed into Greensburg, there isn't much right now for the citizens to cover.

The site ain't great. The coverage ain't great. But my boss thinks I should blog about this.

We did pull off something today that a lot of newspaper staffs couldn't do.

It shows what great tools backed by a great staff can accomplish.

In the space of about six hours, we went from a decision to migrate a site from one CMS to another, as well as fill in for a very busy local staff to get some initial coverage up of a breaking news story.

If you missed the news, Greensburg, Kansas was destroyed by a massive tornado Friday night. GateHouse Media owns the weekly paper in Greensburg and the neighboring daily paper in Pratt.

Frankly, I didn't check any news this morning, so I didn't know about the tornado until Bill called me at 2 p.m. But even if I had seen the news, I'm not sure it would have registered that we owned the Greensburg paper.

As soon as I got the news, I called all three members of my staff and said, "we need to move this site right now and get some coverage up."

I just thought it would be an embarrassment for GateHouse to have such a major story in one of our own towns and have a web site that had no updates on it.

After talking to my own staff, I tracked down the name and number of our editor in Pratt. We had never talked before. He said they had staff already working on the story, but they were not set up to file stories remotely (this, he actually told to a member of my staff, not me directly). Also, the Greensburg office was destroyed and because of that, nobody had login information for the web site. This last bit of news confirmed that we needed to switch them over to Zope4Media right away.

The other limiting factor on coverage was the fact that state officials were not letting local media into Greensburg. The Pratt staff had no information beyond what we could get from Associated Press or the Weather Channel.

We got busy getting the templates ready, the DNS switched over, and writing what stories we could.

KiowaCountySignal.com is now live. The only stories are the five we produced today. If you go to any other section besides news, you'll find we're firing blanks. We haven't switched over classifieds yet, or anything else on the site. We don't even have the weather feed working yet (kind of ironic, isn't it?). The coverage will not be mistaken for Pulitzer entries, but at least it provides some useful information for area residents.

The main thing is that over the next few days and weeks, it will be much, much easier for the local news staff to keep their local readers informed on a timely basis.

Thankfully, every member of the GateHouse family in central Kansas is safe.

And thank you to my team for making this happen.

UPDATE: Heartbreaking. Check out these aerial photos from Kansas.com of Greensburg.

It's obviously still a work in progress, but check out this high school web site. That's right, high school.

I don't know whether to say, "this is your competition," or "it's a good sign for our industry that a high school news site would so closely mimic a lot of newspaper.com conventions." It might also provide a barometer for what high school students expect in a news site.

Note the point and shoot video and the blog-like presentation. Note, too, that they are explicitly not trying to be the print edition in pixels (though it looks like they plan to offer a PDF version of the print product).

I've got another speaking appearance coming up.

May 9 in Indianapolis, Indiana at the Inland Press Foundation's Small Newspaper Workshop. My topic: "A Step-By-Step Approach to Building a Future in New Media."

My description: An overview of how to run a newspaper web site for the new to intermediate site manager at a small- to medium- circulation newspaper.

Topics I'll cover:

• Business strategies (innovation and competitive advantage)
• Usability, site structure, design
• Audience Development
• Revenue
• Sales and Negotiating
• Personnel (hiring and staffing)
• Vendor Relations
• Changing Technology
• Metrics
• Budgets
• Marketing
• Project management
• Leadership

Doug Fisher riled up a group of copy editors. How? By suggesting they blog.

Wow.

Objections ranged from "nobody will read it" to "competitors will learn our copy editing secrets."

Objections, in other words, that to anybody who really understands the web are utterly nonsensical.

Doug refutes them all in an update to his post.

The thread reminds me of an observation some of us interactive veterans have shared over the past few months: There is a growing number of journalists who just woke up to the web and think they have all the answers.

A newspaper executive at another company recently said to me, "The newsroom just discovered the internet in January and suddenly they're all geniuses."

He then added, "Be careful what you wish for," to which he refers to how for years those of us on the interactive side have begged our newsroom colleagues to take an interest in the web. Now they are and they want to drive before they've even looked at a map.

You know what, it's great that newsrooms are seeing the importance of the web. We need it. It's the only way we're going to survive, but before making judgments and strategic decisions about content and audiences, it would be helpful if newsroom types would spend a little time absorbing what the web is about.

Blogging is a big part of doing that.

Of course, taking up a blog and using it to learn and get the web only works if you jettison everything you think you know about newspapering.

The web isn't about control, or ownership or one-way communication. It's about participation, collaboration, sharing and communication.

Web publishing is very different from putting out a print product. You're not trying to reach a mass audience with a single message, and you're not limited to only one chance each day to get it right. The web is more fluid and more dynamic. You can publish any time, will probably reach only a slice of any given audience, and can fix it later if needed.

This is a more profound difference than you might think. It changes more than just what you publish. It changes how you work.

For any one who might think I'm complaining. I'm not. I'm just sharing what I find to be an interesting observation.

One clear advantage of this shift in interest is that it does force those of us who have been doing online for a while to constantly re-evaluate some of our assumptions. That is never a bad thing.

It looks like Angela Grant is moving her blog: News Videographer. Good, smart move.

News Videographer is meant to fill the gap in training and provide a robust feedback forum. The main service of this blog is to provide honest critiques of online news videos and related multimedia content. These critiques will be blunt, but they will always be constructive. Such feedback can help the videographer improve his or her work and can also help others develop their own shooting, editing and storytelling skills.

My advice would be concentrate on making better web video, not on trying to shoehorn old video conventions and traditions into web video. It's about producing video that people watch, not the equipment or the time spent on it.

Will Sullivan links to a post by Vanessa Fox who says newspapers are investing too much in video and not enough, apparently in podcasts.

Here's the problem with her argument: Nobody listens to podcasts.

Any news site manager who has tried podcasts and video need only look at the download stats. Video wins. Podcasts snooze.

Fox argues that podcasts work better in a our multitasking lives. I think the opposite is true. To really absorb a podcast, you must LISTEN. Personally, if I'm going to multitask, I want music blasting out of my iPod, not some pundit pontificating. I'll save that for when I have time to listen, and I never have time to listen.

Sure, video demands my attention. It isn't as conducive to multitasking, which is why I save video for those times I have time and want to take the time for just video.

If a podcast is on, I find it hard to sit still and just listen. Video can engage me more fully and quiet my compulsion to multitask.

Video, as I've discovered, is great on an iPod, and I subscribe to several vodcasts now, because it becomes video entertainment I can carry with me and use in airports, on planes, while waiting on things when there is otherwise nothing else to do but wait.

The other advantage of video is that it is more portable -- it can be watched on computers, televisions and moble devices. The same could be said of a podcast, but it doesn't work quite as well on TV, and getting IP video on TV is a pretty significant step forward for online video.

No, video is definitely where newspapers need to be investing multimedia resources.

All my life in California, I met people who moved from other parts of the country and they would say, "I miss the four seasons."

To me, what I heard them saying is, "I miss fall. I miss the change of colors. I miss the leaves."

I never thought about spring.

In California, spring is just another time of the year. Not much happens. Sure, some flowers that only bloom in April and May add some color, and baseball starts, and you might get a little more sun without it being too hot, but in Southern California, spring isn't too much from winter.

This weekend, spring came to Western New York.

It's very different. Within 48 hours we saw a dramatic shift from winter and death to spring and life. There are more birds, more bugs, more hum and buzz. In the harbor behind our apartment, the fish or jumping and the ducks are bobbing.

It's a real transformation.

My first winter in New York wasn't bad. The cold and the snow hardly bothered me.
I think I'll like it here. I better. I expect to be here for a while.

Speaking of staying, we're just entering into escrow on a house. It's another mid-century modern, built in 1959. It's on more than half an acre and offers good gardening opportunities. It has two fire places, including one in the basement, which also has a wet bar.

Tish Grier says some nice things about me, but that's not why I'm linking to her post. She makes some good points about not forcing the "journalist" label on independent content producers who are clearly uncomfortable being put into that category.

By tussling over who's a journalist and who isn't, both Newspapers and the Rabble get distracted and pulled into a useless argument that ends only in "I know what you are but what am I?"

Though I'm not sure if I totally agree with the second half of that same graph.

Newspapers should view the new media landscape like bloggers--choose who you want to link to, but don't insist they write the blogs *for* you. That's utter nonsense and to echo Owens' assessment, doomed to fail.

I see nothing wrong with a newspaper web site creating a blogging platform for the local community and allowing users to create and manage their own blogs. That's not "insisting" users create content for you. It's providing another tool for conversation. However, the other vital tool of conversation is not ignoring bloggers who are not on your platform. Newspaper sites need to surface the conversation of all bloggers relevant to the location, the story or the issue, no matter where the link leads.

Relevant to another of Tish's points: I probably shouldn't comment on Triblocal, since the product is a direct competitor with my company's web sites, but I will say, their model is not what I would do.

Jean Yves Chainon has produced a two-part blog post suggesting that e-paper may save the newspaper industry. Part 1. Part 2.

Well, the newspaper world could do with a glimpse of hope. And there it came: after all the signals of steady decline, at least in the industrialised world, digital paper finally offers a perspective for innovation and growth of the beleaguered sector. The digital paper technology combines the best of two worlds: the look and feel of the traditional paper and the versatility of the online editions (see 'E-Readers, Background'). The promise it offers is mind boggling: a newspaper era without newsprint, rotation presses and complicated distribution lines: all serious cost factors. The practice however is less convincing. The enabling e-ink technology is around for several years, but its application is still scarce and purely experimental. That is, until now.

While Chainon, in part 2, acknowledges that the best use of the new technology isn't necessarily a repurpose of current print approaches, and while I've previously been optimistic about the arrival of e-paper, I'm going to now play the part of the skeptic.

One of the first rules of innovation is to pay attention to the job people are trying to get done. The infamous Cue-Cat is a classic example of technology trying to solve a problem that doesn't seem to exist. While advertisers and publishers might have a problem with driving more consumers directly to advertisers' web sites, consumers didn't perceive the cue-cat as a solution. Heck, they weren't even convinced there was a problem.

So, is e-paper more about solving a problem for publishers than a problem for readers? What "job to be done" will e-paper help consumers solve?

Sure, there are benefits for consumers -- fewer trees killed, less pollution, no papers piling up or cluttering the house, an end to inky fingers, but none of those issues are necessarily the cause of circulation decline.

So what is the benefit to readers?

And why would readers choose e-paper over a good mobile device? Mobile content delivery and display gets better and more ubiquitous every year. I love mobile video now. I read a lot less when traveling than I used to, thanks to my video iPod. I'm sure others will like mobile video a lot, too. Can e-paper really find a market in a world increasingly saturated by mobile content?

And what about interactivity? Increasingly, users want to be part of the conversation. Will e-paper allow comments on stories? Easy access to blogs? Links to supplemental information? All of those things and more are now essential to the digital experience. How many consumers will chose a seemingly more static (unless I'm wrong about this) experience of e-paper over a computer or mobile browser?

Finally, what about the advertising? Consumers have repeatedly rejected disruptive advertising on the web and mobile. Will the same hold true with e-paper? Without a sustainable advertising model e-paper will do no better for newspapers than the web has done so far (and let me emphasize so far, because I believe online advertising models will improve and soon).

Presumably, e-paper will offer a more customizable experience for users, which means, potentially, advertising could be customized out or marginalized. Without that user control, e-paper might face a tougher adoption rate.

I've said before that publishers might drop print editions when the day comes where they could deliver the same product without the cost of printing and delivery, but I also wonder if that will work.

If consumers buy their own e-paper devices, then publishers are still faced with a pull rather than push delivery model, which means paid subscription isn't likely to work.

If publishers supply the devices (either for free, or for fee), consumers are likely to reject anything that allows them access to only one publication. They won't want to carry multiple devices. That puts publishers back in the pull business rather than push, because consumers will still own all the power for which publications, stories and ads they see.

Also, the trend in consumer devices is toward small, mobile and multitasking -- web, video, e-mail, SMS, calendar, phone, etc. all in one device.  Where will e-paper fit in the mix?

I applaud publishers for experimenting with these devices, but I think the best chance for success to is think of the reader/user/consumer first -- what do they want, what problem can you solve for them, what job do they need to get done, and then design a content and revenue model that helps consumers first and foremost. If publishers put their own needs, wants and desires first, e-paper will do no better than the Cue-Cat.

I've said it before: Be the platform.

Rich Gordon has a lengthy, comprehensive essay that advises newspapers to be the network, not a destination. You must read the whole thing. It's full of the right ideas.

Same thing. Different words.

I'm going to suggest a different approach: Instead of trying to build the best destination, build the best network.

The kind of network I'm referring to is a web of interconnections -- links between content and between people. In essence, I'm arguing that on the Web, news organizations -- perhaps, all media -- should focus on building themselves "into the clickstream." The goal: make your Web site a network hub that connects content and conversations.

If you're not linking in, linking out, joining the conversation, telling people what's good on the web, you're making mistake.

Newspaper managers have traditionally believed they needed to build "sticky" sites and try to capture people and pretend the rest of the web doesn't exist. That is a strategy doomed to fail. Only by being part of the clickstream can you hope to succeed.

I just upload nine of my recent photos, starting with today's snap of my California Mustang getting its first taste of snow -- in April, no less. Burrrr!

Our cars finally arrived from California today (just in time for the big snow storm coming in tonight).

Bill took a picture of the Mustang. Click on the image for a high resolution version suitable for desktop wall paper.

Travel can be tiresome. It can also be interesting and fun. I travel a lot in my job.

The thing about travel is it gives you a chance to meet interesting people. I've met some pretty cool cats the past two trips.

Last week, I went to NYC. In leaving JFK I shared a cab with a guy who turned out to be a VP at a major e-mail marketing firm. It was a very cool and educational conversation about targeted e-mail.

Yesterday, however, I hit the trifecta of meeting cool and interesting people.

At Reagan National I shared a dinner table with a guy who works for a non-profit in DC that promotes religious freedom around the world. It's a pretty non-sectarian outfit and we had a pretty broad conversation about freedom, religion and the media.

On the plane, I sat next to a reasonably high ranking government staffer who works for a VIP with a very important government agency. We talked non-stop for the entire hour-plus flight. I was as curious about his job as he was about mine. I didn't get to ask as many as I wanted because he had his own coming at me rapid fire.

First, his questions were about newspapers and the state of the industry. Then we morphed into a conversation about blogging. He's very, very interested in seeing his agency establish a blog.

If this significant government agency starts a blog, I hope he takes my advice:

• Be totally transparent
• The blogger should be conversational, respected and establish credibility, and comment on and link to other blogs
• Comments should be open and only filtered for hate, spam and abuse of legally-vetted policies (unique situation here in that the government has to be much more careful about First Amendment issues than private bloggers); no censorship ... if there is criticism of the Bush Administration on this blog, it can't be deleted, but this also allows a chance to respond to criticism and clarify issues.
• Break news and share news and clarify news on the blog

We exchanged cards. I hope the conversation will be ongoing, which is why I'm being very vague about who this guy was and who he works for. If he ever gives me permission to share more, I will. If the blog is launched, I imagine can tell you more then. (Ironically, we are both of the opinion that Beltway journalists overuse and abuse anonymous sources, to the detriment of both journalism and to the public, and here I am not revealing the guy's identity! I'm such a hypocrite!:-))

I did tell him that once the blog is launched, it's going to be targeted by bad actors, people who want to abuse policies and be abusive. There will be days where he buries his head in his hands and says, "Why did I ever do this?" I told him, "stay the course." If you stick to your strategy and policies and manage things correctly, you'll get past the dark days and have something very worthwhile.

The third cool cat I met was a Wall Street private equity investor type. He thinks I work for a very cool company, but that's not why he's worth mentioning.

The most interesting thing we talked about is when and why he reads the New York Daily News. When he's in a public situation where he might be spotted by peers he wants to be seen with Wall Street Journal or New York Times in his hand, but his favorite paper is the Daily News. That's his guilty pleasure. He said the writing has verve and personality and reporters aren't afraid to tell you what they think. Forget the veneer of objectivity -- put some personality in that writing. He thinks my whole notion of "personal journalism" is right on. Money quote: "The Daily News is link a blog on paper."

It's no wonder the Daily News is one of the few metro papers reporting circulation gains.

Mac Slocum has produced a trilogy of must read posts on what he wish he had learned in school.

• How to be a guide and a researcher
• How to grow audience
• How to lead communities

He's absolutely right on all three points.

Interestingly, if your school won't teach you these web essentials, or if you're out of school, there is an easy and free way to learn all three: Blog.

From the Onion: Most e-mailed list tearing NYT newsroom apart:

Nagourney, currently stuck covering Barak Obama's presidential campaign in Minnesota, said he's been trying to make his stories more e-mail-friendly. But so far, success has eluded him.

"I thought my Elizabeth Edwards breast cancer article the other week had a great chance, as it was at the intersection of politics, health, death, and family—and had the word 'breast' in the headline—but it didn't even make the top 10," Nagourney said. "Whatever."

I've seen first hand how much consternation the most-viewed and most e-mailed lists can cause among newsroom staffers. "What do you mean, my 40-inch think piece on the new county budget only had 10 page views?"

(via Romenesko)

On the Feds-NewMedia e-mail discussion list (run by the NAA), a discussion about nation and world news has come up -- should it be included, or how should it be played on a local newspaper.com site. Here's my most recent post to the thread:

The web isn’t about getting people to your web site and keeping them there. It’s about providing the best user experience possible so they keep coming back. If you’re including world/nation on your site under some false notion that you’re providing a reason for people not to go elsewhere, you’re doing it for the wrong reason.

You better have some unique user experience, or unique content if you want world/nation to contribute anything meaningful to your traffic stats. Even then, I think it’s an open question as to weather a local newspaper.com can win against the likes of Yahoo News, Google News, CNN, NYT, WaPo or several other sites that have greater pull (and the new McClatchy/Yahoo! Deal even strengthens Yahoo!’s unique value proposition).

If you’re including nation/world on your site out of some sense of journalistic obligation, you’re also making a mistake. While a noble intention, your user doesn’t care about your intentions. He or she wants out of your site what he or she came there for, which 98 percent of the time (for local users, which is all you should care about at a local newspaper.com) is local news and information. Including nation/world can be downright detrimental to that goal and to your brand as a local source of news and information. If you’re going to include nation/world, be careful how you play it. Never lede with it, unless there’s another 9/11 or some such “effects everyone’s lives” story.

The average newspaper.com is reaching way too small of a local audience. Most local newspaper.com sites need to see their daily unique count increase four or five times over present reach. Nation/world isn’t going to get you there and could in fact hurt. What is going to get you there is being a great local news and information site (along with a few other things).

Yes, if you totally drop nation/world, you will get a very few complaints (like five or six, all from older readers). Just tell them to go to CNN or Yahoo! You won’t lose them because they still need you for local, if you’re doing local right. What you give up in a few page views (and most of those page views are of little or no economic value because they’re generated by out-of-market search engine results) will be made up for in local unique visitor growth.

What if you could search pictures the same way you search text and find the exact picture you're looking for?

UCSD researchers are developing just such a search.

The UCSD system uses a clever image indexing technique that allows it to cover larger collections of images at a lower computational cost than was previously possible. While the current version would still choke on the Internet’s vast numbers of public images, there is room for improvement and many potential applications beyond the Internet, including the labeling of images in various private and commercial databases.

There's a new blog for those of us into local media: Evans Ink from Perry Evans. It's RSS worthy.  Check it out.

I've said for a long time that people who dismiss YouTube as just a big compilation of stolen content sell short the site and miss the real lesson of the revolution.

Now there's a study that says copyrighted material makes up only a fraction of the content of the site and a small percentage of the overall video views.

Vidmeter, which tracks the online video business, determined that the clips that were removed for copyright violations — most of them copyrighted by big media companies — comprise just 9 percent of all videos on the site. Even more surprising, the videos that have been removed make up just 6 percent of the total views (vidmeter.com).

There is criticism of the study.

But the consensus might not have been so far off after all, writes Adario Strange on the Epicenter blog at Wired News (blog.wired.com/business). The study is flawed because it examined only those videos that YouTube removed after receiving a complaint from a copyright holder, he writes. It “fails to take into account the vast number of copyrighted videos that slip under the radar daily, existing on YouTube sometimes for months before any removal request is made.”

I would counter that to anybody who has given YouTube more than a cursory glance would find some validity in vidmeter's claims.

From a newspaper video perspective, this issue is relevant because what is actually popular on YouTube (as opposed to the myth) is a good barometer of the kind, style and voice of the video we should be producing.

Sam Zell hasn't even closed the Tribune deal yet, and already he's interfering with news coverage.