Howard Owens

I'm in Santa Clara waiting for the Kelsey conference to start. For lunch, I went to the hotel bar, where I met Dawn Paduganan, VP sales and marketing for Freedom Communications.

Among the many topics we discussed was local video, which prompted her to mention the Shelby Star in North Carolina. It's a 15K circ in an under performing market, so Freedom decided to turn the paper into a lab. It is a place to experiment.

For example, they have reporters shooting and editing video with inexpensive cameras.

Visit the site -- it's not going to win design awards, but they're doing some interesting things.

• No lead photo, but video links to AP and local video dominate the top content area.
• Lots of blogs, but not with fancy "brand" names such as "The City Beat" or "Sports Corner," but just people names.
• Obits -- more than a week's worth of obits linked right from the home page by date.
• Search nice and big and at the top of the page

And they are posting a lot of video.

Dawn tells me web site traffic is way up since they started posting video and made other changes to their content and coverage, and reader feedback has been strongly positive. The video has been a big hit, she said.

I don't usually do quotes of the day, but this bit from Jeff Jarvis deserves to stand on its own with no commentary from me:

I talked about Yahoo as the last old media company to look at the world this way (along with all the older media companies): ‘We control content. We market to get you to come to us. Then we feed you as much advertising as we can, until you leave.’ That’s the centralized model of media. I contrasted this with the decentralized, distributed model embodied by nobody better than Google: ‘We go to where you are and put service and advertising there. Your pageview is then our pageview. And we have enabled you to do what you want to do. And we can all do more of it.’ I argued that media companies should ask WWGD — ‘what would Google do?’ (and, yes, Google is the new God).

OK, one comment: I want a bumper sticker -- it would be the only bumper sticker I'd put on my car: "What would Google do?"

The New York Times reports on the economics of the web. It takes a lot of work to make lots of money. It takes audience, and lots of it.

But to make $50 million with a big staff-produced content-rich guitar site, sponsored by, say, Fender and Gibson, a site would have to generate more than 200 million page views a month, Mr. Liew estimated.

A site aimed at a specific demographic, like teenagers or Asian-Americans, would need to generate 800 million page views a month, by Mr. Liew’s reckoning.

And for a general-interest site, the ad rates go even lower, so traffic would need to be much higher to generate $50 million — about four billion page views a month, which would put it in the top 10 of all the sites on the Web.

That $50 million figure is about the current revenue of a 60K to 80K daily newspaper. Think about that for a moment.

This reminds me of an old post from Vin Crosbie.

... as print edition circulation declines, the average newspaper will need between 20 to 100 website users to replace the revenues lost from each former print edition user.

Unless ways can be found to increase the per user revenues generated from newspaper websites, newspapers need to gain fantastic numbers of Web site users just to replace the declines in print edition revenues. A 50,000 circulation daily would need to gain a million to 50 million Web site users to postpone the time when it's no longer economically feasible to produce its printed edition!

The average daily newspaper is never going to pull an audience that big. So do we throw up our hands in defeat, or try to figure out if we can grow audience sufficiently enough to start generating revenue that really matters? It's the big, daunting, unanswered question of our industry.

Within current local news site economics, the answer is, "no." However, we don't really know what happens when a local news web site really starts to dominate its market.

In theory, such dominance should make possible:

• Increase rate to local advertisers;
• Deliver better value at current rates (helping to retain and bring in new local advertisers);
• Create more ad inventory and leverage the long tail;
• Create and diversify revenue-generating products.

In the global market place, dominance has paid off for the likes of Google and Yahoo! I'm not sure the model scales down to local DMAs, but I think we need to try and find out. It's our best chance for survival.

Also from the Times piece:

He (Tim O'Reilly) noted how outfits like Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media create multiple sites, “publishing blogs like they were books, with some expected to succeed and others to fail.”

This reminds me of something Steve Outing wrote about a few times a decade or so ago: Newspapers need to generate multiple revenue streams. No one advertising stream, no single revenue model, is going to be our ambrosia.

We also need to create multiple content streams. The more types of content, the more ways we can present and deliver it, the more benefits we'll realize. More content and more types means bigger audiences and more revenue opportunities.

Back to the Crosbie piece:

They (newspaper sites) are profitable mainly because they are subsidiaries of the printed editions. The print operation generated almost all of those Web sites' news content and most of their classified advertising revenues. Borrell's recent survey showed that 75 percent of the sites' revenues come from 'upsells' of the traditional 'Big Three' printed classified advertising categories of real estate, automotive, and recruitment.

In his piece, Crosbie sees newspaper.coms as subsidiaries of print editions as a negative. I'm not so sure. Newspapers have a tremendous advantage over your average start up. As the Times article notes, it either takes lots of venture capital to create a large scale start up, or you need to start very small and hope and pray your idea catches on and you can incrementally grow audience and revenue.

Our advantage is that up sells can be our venture capital. We also have the most powerful marketing tool in our markets: The print editions.

Unfortunately, too many newspapers are making three fundamental mistakes. Either they aren't generating enough rate revenue (up sells to print ads); or, if they are, they're not applying most of that revenue to audience growth initiatives, and/or they aren't using their print edition aggressively enough to drive audience to their web sites. (See what Chris Hendricks said previously about using print to promote online).

The average newspaper should be able to easily generate at least 5 percent of its revenue from online. Ten percent is pretty easy, too. That's nice revenue to fund an online operation. A 50K circ paper or larger could do a lot of sweet stuff with an additional $2 million annually added to its online investment portfolio.

For publicly traded companies over the past eight or nine years, when rate revenue really started to grow, standard operating procedure was roll that revneue overall profitability, hoping to off set print loses.

It was a vain effort. Wall Street was not impressed. The revenue hasn't been big enough to "move the needle" or really off set print declines (getting close recently, though).

Hindsight is 20/20, but we all would be so much better off today if that revenue had been treated as venture capital and aggressively reinvested in online operations. Those investments could have paid off in new revenue programs, but more importantly, we could have been doing more to grow online audience.

If we're going to bridge the gap between print and online revenue, we simply must do a better job of pulling more people to our web sites. If we do that, we might find the path to sustainable business models.

UPDATE: Greg Sterling, my panel mate at Kelsey on Wednesday, as a related post.

Do you have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? Before answering the question, go read this post from Guy Kawasaki.

Now go read this post I did earlier that touches journalists thinking that just because they provide a valuable civic service, that's enough reason for their businesses to thrive.

Do you have a fixed mindset about journalism, or a growth mindset?

As I get ready to leave for Keley's Drilling Down on Local conference, these are the things on my mind.

1. Craigslist is not the problem. A lot of people in newspapers still fixate on Craigslist. Craigslist is more emblematic than it is the major threat. Craigslist has its own problems (I'll cover some of this in a future post dealing with some of my own recent experiences with Craigslist). I don't believe there is yet the definitive online classifieds model. There is still room and opportunity here for newspapers. Ebay is part of the clue, as is craiglist, as is Google, but I believe newspapers, with their local advantage, can still develop the right online classified model.
2. IYP. A big opportunity for newspapers, but as yet inchoate. In this space, along with video, newspapers have their best opportunity for replacing lost print revenue.
3. Hyperlocal journalism. This involves lots of databases as well as distributed media tools. Rob Curley has come the closest to getting this right, but most newspapers are still struggling to get beyond shovelware online. Unlike classifieds or IYP, the path here is clear and has been since 1995. The big problem is newspapers have been unwilling to make the necessary investments. That's starting to change.
4. Video. Video is always on my mind. It will win us audience and make us money. It is an opportunity in each of the three previous thoughts.

UPDATE: The other thing I wanted to mention -- in commodity products such as IYP or classifieds, can one model or one brand really win the day in a distributed media environment?

So, you want to be a rock and roll star?

[youtube]5JHN5HaUg28[/youtube]

I saw the following headline and expected some treatise on why newspapers are still going strong and have nothing to fear but fear itself, something along the lines of Mark Twain's famous line, "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

Writing off newspapers is premature, irresponsible

But J. McGuire never quite gets around to assuring us that newspapers won't die eventually. He notes some positive signs and some negative trends, but draws no real conclusion.

His main point seems to be that if newspapers die, you'll get more celebrity gossip in your media.

If you are disgusted about the obsession with Anna Nicole and Britney, reflect for a minute on how much coverage of those two stories you saw in The Arizona Republic, the East Valley Tribune and the New York Times. The answer is not much.

No matter how much you enjoy beating up the print media, and no matter how many times the newspaper industry shoots itself in the foot with plagiarism, fabrication and conflict-of-interest scandals, for the past 50 years, American newspapers have been our newsgathering stalwarts.

No reasonable person is arguing that newspapers are unimportant to society. But some of the best newspapers in the country are being hammered by circulation slides and declining revenue. So if people no longer feel compelled to pick up newspapers, what do we do to protect newspaper-style journalism?

One answer might be to build better newspaper web sites, so we can increase audience enough to generate enough revenue so we can keep the whole thing going.

If we collectively put more effort into the web, I see these potential outcomes:

1. We figure out a way to make enough money (currently, no newspaper.com does) online to pay for our current news operations and then those news operations have a safe place to land once the print product dies;
2. The print product never dies, though maybe declines, but our robust and money-generating web operations help offset print loses, even to the point of boosting overall revenue, making investors (and all for-profit papers have investors) happy and providing for additional news-operations resources;
3. We're doomed. Because of the efficiencies of web advertising, downward price pressure continues to suck the life out of ad-based revenue models and we can never generate enough revenue, in which case newspapers will die with or without robust web operations.

So, two out of three ain't bad. In other words, we have nothing to lose by building innovative, aggressive, locally-focused web operations, and everything to gain.

I hope a lot of newsroom people read this, because it's on your shoulders, too. You need to be part of the solution, not a member of the complainers' choir.

Bill Blevins has been consumed with an interesting side project the past week or so. He's been making the ultimate Little League team web page for the Carolina Tigers (his sister's family).

It leads with a blog, has player profile videos (the coolest part) and game-day slide shows.

Apparently, all the teams in the league are having a bit of a competition over who can develop the best web site. Here's the rest.

Outside of Lawrence, where does this kind of hyperlocal journalism exist in the newspaper world? Not many places, I don't think. So the question is, will more and more community members do it for themselves because newspapers aren't doing it for them, or if newspapers did it (no matter how well), would people still want to do it for themselves -- the inevitable result of egalitarian digital tools. If they're doing it because newspapers aren't, then only newspapers have themselves to blame for the missed opportunity. If they would do it anyway, then we're in a lot more trouble than we think.

Disclosure for those who don't know: Bill's my boss.

Mindy McAdams found this quote from Clay Shirky and it's well worth repeat, even if you've already read it.

Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

This post from Rafat Ali is important on at least two levels.

1. It was shot with a camera phone. It is camera phone journalism. The audio is clear and the picture clear enough. It gets the job done. If reporters aren't carrying point & shoot cameras, shouldn't they carry a device like this? Why would any reporter today not want to be always armed with a video capture device of any kind? And why would a news ite publisher not want to post it?
2. In it, you get to hear Martin Neisenholtz reveal just how little he understands blogs, and how trapped he remains in Big-J thinking about what blogging is and its role in the mediascape. It's a little surprising that a major media leader would still hold those views. Martin seems fully invested in the false dichotomy that there is a bloggers vs. journalist competition, rather than seeing the ecosystem as it exists. The telling point is his comment to Jeff Jarvis that "there is absolutely no check on you." At least Carolyn Little gets it. "Bloggers help keep us honest," she says. And the message Neisenholtz needs to hear from that is that bloggers keep each other honest, too. In distributed media, there is no us and them; it's all we.

This is about the coolest thing I've heard about from a newspaper site in a long time: The Morning Call has a content database that can be shared, meaning anybody can copy the widget code and drop it on a web page (Danny Sanchez post).

Newspaper sites need to embrace sharing and find more ways to make their content and applications shareable.

The online world is all atwitter about twitter (sorry, obvious turn of phrase that is probably already a cliche though I haven't seen it used elsewhere).

The question is, is twitter (somehow, I can't bring myself to capitalize it as a proper noun) is just a fad or an online cultural shift that both reflects and feeds the ADD nature of digital, distributed, self-focused media?

Scott Karp has more.

Personally, I'm not sure I want you to know where I am and what I'm doing at any given moment, even if I were vain enough to think you would care. I certainly don't have time to consume the minutia of your day. But like Scott, I squatted my name.

Beet.TV interviews Ilana Donna Arazie, who does a vlog for Associated Press called Reel City Tales.

What I find interesting here isn't the interview, or Ilana, or the videos or even that it comes from AP. What's important to note is that the idea did not originate in a news organizations newsroom. It began with somebody working on the business side.

In the era of personal journalism, of UGC/CitJ, there's no reason not to look to other parts of our news organizations to help us find the best content.

Good Lost Remote post for TV people. But here's the important quote for all us concerned with online video:

Another trap: stations will put people “on camera” for web-only video when those people are absolutely not ready to be on camera. Sometimes, that’s charming. The wonderful thing about the web is that we don’t demand perfection. We don’t even want it. We like quirky. We like real. But there is a difference between “real and quirky” and “bad delivery.” A person is either ready for an audience or they’re not. I find that some people who are uncomfortable doing web video are charming people who are smart about the web - but they’re trying too much to be like television people. Tell them to be themselves and that may help.

There's been a few stories on the web recently about newspaper industry revenue, including online. This Phil Rosenthal piece sums up the situation best.

Here's the math problem confronting newspapers:

If online advertising goes up 31.5 percent in 2006 while print advertising falls 1.7 percent, is it a good year?

The answer: Almost.

.... The $637 million increase from the Internet couldn't offset the $797 million decrease on the print side, which left a $160 million shortfall in 2006.

This WaPo story on how presidential candidates are using YouTube is interesting for what it says about online video.

Several times a week, Kotecki, a self-described "political geek" turned YouTube celebrity, advises presidential candidates on their campaign videos -- from his dorm room at Georgetown University. Equipped with a three-year-old laptop, a $60 Web camera and a $30 microphone -- and a small, dusty desk lamp as a light source -- the 21-year-old dishes out free, unsolicited suggestions (and the occasional compliment) to the candidates.

Kotecki has one recurring message to the candidates and their expensive media advisers: "The Web isn't TV." As in, Web viewers don't expect to be spoken to, they expect to be spoken with. It's a passive experience vs. an interactive one.

Other students of the genre have similar advice.

"Look at how the candidates are talking in their videos. With a few exceptions, they're mostly looking sideways, not talking directly to the camera," said Jeff Jarvis, who heads the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism and started PrezVid.com, a blog dedicated to watching the campaign through YouTube. "The important thing about this medium is it's very human and intimate. A voter comes across and clicks on you. You should talk to that voter and look at him in the eye."

Micah Sifry, co-founder of TechPresident.com, another blog that looks at how the candidates are campaigning on the Web, also makes a distinction between video online and ads on television. "There's something fundamentally different about video online," he said. "Viewers are looking for that rare, unscripted, revealing moment, to get a little sense of who these candidates really are."

All of this goes right along with what I've said many times about the digital media being more personal. Content producers, whether they're entertainers or news producers, should approach the medium as one-to-one communication, with a voice and a mindset that is direct, casual and has a sense of "I want to have a conversation with you." That word "unscripted" is important.

Everybody loves OnBeing and most of it's fans on the professional side talk glowingly about its production values (which are fantastic). But what makes it great isn't the technology. What makes it compelling and engaging is the personal voice, the unscripted nature, the way it's edited to enhance the spontaneous feel. The interactive navigation helps underscore the personal, interactive nature of the project. It isn't just slick. It's purposeful.

Web video isn't about the equipment or even the storytelling (stories are great, but not the key point). What matters is the voice.

You've heard of crowdsourcing. Introducing crowdshopping.

It started in China, where sharing information is tightly controlled, but apparently you can shop without restriction. And there's lots of people.

I read David Lazarus's column yesterday and immediately wanted to fisk it, but I had some real work to do and never got to it. Fortunately, Michael Bazeley is on the job and has the appropriate takedown of Lazarus's complete misconception of the online news business.

Repeat after me: People do not pay for news in print. They pay for delivery.

Readers have never paid for newspaper content and they're not going to start now that they know our delivery costs are almost nil.

There's four or five points of wisdom in this short post by Steve Duke, but in the interest of driving home a single point, I'll pull just one quote:

The world is changing fast, as my cabbie demonstrated. While we worry about losing the tech-savvy young adult audience, we're losing the tech-savvy middle-aged audience. Research by media consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates cited in Broadcasting & Cable shows that nearly half of people 35 to 54 turn to the Internet first for weather information and sports scores. This is no longer a young person's medium.

I'm 45. I started thinking about this four years ago: I pretty much live my life online. I watch a lot less TV. I hardly ever read printed products -- even fewer books these days. I'm about as digital as you can get. But I've always been kind of an early adopter. Going back a few years ago when I saw my life transforming in this way, I thought, "if I can figure out how great this digital life is, my cohorts who are otherwise busy with their non-digital careers and families (after all, I do this for a living) will eventually catch on, too. We're really the ones who can afford all the toys -- not the college kids and recent graduates. So what happens when the mass migration of this key newspaper demographic starts toward the web? What happens if we don't have the right online offerings for them? Do we really want to risk losing them both as print subscribers and online users?

As Duke says, "wake up and smell the coffee." And I would add, "it's later than you think."

(via Will Sullivan)

Here's an interesting e-mail I just got from FreeConference.com, a service I regularly use:

Dear FreeConference User:

AT&T/Cingular, Sprint, and Qwest Are Blocking Your Conference Calling

As of Friday, March 9, it's come to our attention that Cingular Wireless has begun blocking all conference calls made from Cingular handsets to selected conference numbers. If you call our service, you receive a recording that says, "This call is not allowed from this number. Please dial 611 for customer service".

Earlier this week, Sprint and Qwest joined in this action, blocking cellular and land line calls to these same numbers. This appears to be a coordinated effort to force you to use the paid services they provide, eliminating competition and blocking your right to use the conferencing services that work best for you.

Don't Let AT&T/Cingular, Sprint, or Qwest Take Away Your Right to Use the Conference Service of Your Choice!

We Need Your Help! Please Take the Actions Below:

Whether you are one of their customers, or an organizer who is being impacted by these uncompetitive actions, please file a complaint with the FCC or send an email to your State Attorney General to complain about this monopolistic practice to limit the choices of consumers.

You can also let these companies know how you feel about their attempt to block competitive services:

Sprint Customers can click here or dial *2 from their Sprint Phone

Cingular Customers can click here or call 1-888-333-6651

Qwest Customers can click here or call 1-800-860-2255

Your FreeConference Team remains steadfastly committed to bringing you simple, convenient and reliable conferencing services at the lowest cost possible. We appreciate your support in this endeavor.

Your FreeConference Team

I'm a Sprint customer and the way I read this, Sprint isn't blocking now (nor Qwest). I called Sprint's tech support and they're not aware of this service being blocked.

My guess is, however, the providers would like to block these calls because conference calls eat up a lot of minutes -- it's not necessarily aimed at getting users to buy the paid service from the provider. But still, minutes are minutes and the providers shouldn't be able to restrict how they're used.

UPDATE: GigaOm has done some real reporting on this (and who says blogs can't do journalism?)

I'm no IP or libel lawyer, but I play one on my blog.

Greg Sterling has a post that pulls key quotes from a WSJ on the Viacom vs. Google/YouTube lawsuit.

This suit is important to all of us because it cuts to key parts of the DMCA. The DMCA gives us web publishers a good deal of protection related to UGC, especially related to copyright infringement and libel.

If Google loses, we're all in trouble.

Now, about Viacom being run by idiots ...

One of my all-time favorite media bloggers is Tim Porter. He's inspired me to think differently about journalism, and inspired me to encourage my colleagues to think differently -- to challenge our comfortable assumptions about who we are and what we do.

After months of no new posts from Porter, I called him late one night (probably too late) a few weeks ago to find out what was up -- why no new posts? It turns out, he was busy writing a book. We had a great hour-long conversation and it reminded me just how much we need Porter's point of view in the media blogosphere.

It looks like Porter's back, and one of his first posts goes right to the heart of challenging traditional journalism thinking. The simple title is "The Real Heroes of Newspapers."

Newsroom budget cuts are routine these days (and will remain so for some time). It's also routine for top editors to resign before, or amid, these reductions, throwing their careers on the swords of journalistic quality.

These martyred journalists - Dean Baquet, late of the L.A. Times and now relocated in the N.Y. Times Washington bureau, is the poster child for them - are hailed as heroes by their colleagues (whom they've left behind in the trenches) and some of their peers (who perhaps see a similar fate in store for them).

What hogwash. Journalists are celebrating the wrong heroes.

The real heroes of newspapers are those journalists who stay. The real heroes are the editors (from large papers like Atlanta or small ones like Bloomington) who are reconfiguring their newsrooms. The real heroes are reporters like those in Bakersfield who are shooting video while reporting. The real heroes are photographers like Fred Larson of the San Francisco Chronicle who using a blog to teach his readers how to make extraordinary photos like his.

...

Only one certainty exists: That future will belong to those who build it. Walking away isn't the answer. Staying, working the problem, finding solutions, making hard choices, learning to think differently - those are the answers. And the people who do that are the real heroes of journalism.

Tim, as usual, says it better than I could. Read the whole thing.

Mike Orren of Pegasus News thought he had a content sharing deal worked out with a Fox affiliate only to have the whole thing blow up in his face at the 11th hour. He shares the whole painful story:

Late Wednesday afternoon, my phone rang with Saunders and Mahaney on the other end. A vigorously unnamed FOX exec, who it was now admitted had been against the deal happening at all on the conference call about the press release had visited our site and seen that the requested text change had not yet gone into effect and unilaterally called off the whole deal. Yes, no one told us that the request was critical. No, there was no explaining that. No, there was no chance of reasoning, discussing or even learning who had cut the deal off at the nub. No, no part of the partnership could be salvaged. Everything Fox needed to come off our site and we wouldn't be working together on hyperlocal news.

Those corporate suits can be such idiots, uh?

(via Local Onliner)

Who says sport stars can't blog? Here's 38 Pitches from Curt Schilling. For personal journal blogging, it's darn good. I get no sense that it's ghost written. What is spectacularly cool for a media star of his stature is comments are enabled.

Maybe Schilling will start a trend of baseball stars blogging -- and they'll start to have a conversation among themselves, the way like-minded bloggers do ... which, I imagine, would be quite enlightening, both about the lives of these men, but also the game they play. One can dream ...

(hat tip: Steve Smith)

From Cnet:

If any figure from the world of mainstream journalism could be forgiven for nursing a grudge toward new media, Dan Rather comes to mind.

Yet, he holds a surprisingly balanced view.

Anybody who blogs, who does real reporting, which is to say, make telephone calls, go interview people, go talk to people, in a spirit of independence...and (tries) to do journalism with integrity, I would consider a journalist.

Of course there are an increasing number of bloggers now who by any definition are reporters, or journalists. There are some others who in my opinion would fit into a gray area. They may do good reporting, but they mix in their own opinion, their own point of view, without clearly signifying the difference. Now that's not a kind of journalism that I practice. It's not one that I'm going to damn either.

One of the interesting experiments in citizen journalism is Orato. Orato isn't blogging -- it's first person reporting by non-credentialed people. Here's an interview with editor and publisher Paul Sullivan.

8) What do you think makes Orato unique?

Sullivan: Orato is unique in that it's a collaboration between professional and amateur journalists --we want to provide a way for those without a voice to participate in the public discussion and we want to bring completely new, unmediated voices to that discussion. We want to support citizen journalism in new ways -- such as hiring sex trade writers to cover a trial of a man accused of preying on sex trade workers. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, but no one has ever done it before. We want to bring citizen journalism into the mainstream.

Chuck Fadely sent this link to the newspaper video list -- the video work of Hillman Curtis. Short, gorgeous productions and some great storytelling. If you watch, pay attention to the details -- the lighting, the framing, the panning, and how those details are more than just technically good, but help move the story along.

In 1977, I discovered Elvis Costello, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Ramones and Devo. I cut my hair and started buying all my closes at the Salvation Army. Me and four friends, formed what we called a band and made a lot of racket in our drummer's garage. We were punks.

I think by 1978, there were eight punks in my high school.

Everybody else thought we were idiots. I heard all the time how our music sucked. The guitarists couldn't play, the singers couldn't sing and the songs were stupid.

In 1990, my class had it's ten year reunion. The music the DJ played was not the music of my class. It wasn't the Bee Gees and Journey and ELO. It was Costello, the Clash, the Talking Heads, the B52's and Devo. Everybody danced. Nobody complained.

In the late 1970s, if you picked up a copy of Rolling Stone you were as likely to read a glowing article about the punk revolution as you were to read some grizzled old rocker complaining about how the punks only knew three chords. It wasn't real music and it would never catch on. It would never be more popular than the Eagles or Jackson Browne.

Of course, about 15 years later, Nirvana would come along and become, for a short time, the biggest band in the world.

In the late 1970s, four lads from Dublin decided they wanted to be in a band. Only one of them, Dave Evans, had ever even played a musical instrument before. The first songs they played were those three-chord rippers of the Ramones. Eventually, of course, all four would all become accomplished musicians and master songwriters. Today, U2 is one of the biggest and greatest bands in history.

The DIY culture of punk transformed popular music and opened the door for countless musicians.

I see the same thing happening with the DIY culture of web video. The old guard doesn't understand the devil-may-care punks, and the punks are full of bluster and cocky self assurance well beyond their actual abilities.

Meanwhile, videos like this, are among the most popular on the web.

It's been three years since Vin Crosbie (one of the smartest people in our industry) released his renowned essay on what newspapers need to do to survive. The article had a profound impact on the industry. Even if not all of his recommendations were implemented, the article marked a dramatic shift in the industry from post-dot-com-bubble-bust retrenching to taking online more seriously.

Now Crosbie is promising an equally profound essay on why newspaper sites have failed to reach critical mass. Right now, he'll only tell us what is not wrong:

• The major problem isn't ownership of newspapers by publicly traded corporations. Wall Street isn't the problem. Newspaper readership has been steadily declining since the 1960s, well before most American newspapers were became owned by publicly traded companies. The layoffs and cutbacks that such companies are now making wouldn't be made if readership and circulation were increasing. In other words, the layoffs and cutbacks are in reaction to the problem, not the cause of the problem. Yes, cutting newsroom staff doesn't help increase readership and circulation, but it isn't the cause of the decreases in readership and circulation.
• The major problem isn't lack of 'Citizen Journalism.' It is true that most American newspapers lost touch with their readers and many also 'talk down' to the readers who remain. There are many worthwhile 'citizen journalism' experiments underway at some American newspapers, and the tools those use can be widely applied throughout the industry. However, American newspapers thrived for centuries without 'citizen journalism' and advocates of it should why and what changed.
• The major problem isn't print's lack of interactivity or multimedia. American newspapers thrived for centuries without interactivity or multimedia. Why and what changed?
• Nor is the major problem newsprint itself. People today aren't forsaking paper, just what newspaper companies print on it.

As usual, Crosbie's essay should make for interesting reading.

Praized Blog quotes an LA Times article:

News organizations confronted with declining revenue and increased competition are entering an era of more limited ambition in which they will drop a broad worldview for more narrowly focused reporting, according to an annual review of the news business being released today by a watchdog group.

Why does focusing on local equate to "reduced ambitions"?

I've spent my entire news career in what is now called "hyperlocal." I can't think of any higher journalistic calling. That's not to say it's higher than national or foreign coverage, but there is nothing especially golden about being a beltway reporter, except that we have perversely elevated these people to star status.