Howard Owens

In response to a post by Greg Sterling about teens reading more books, I left this comment:

Before the web, you sat in front the TV and passively consumed media.

In the Internet era, one must be literate, even if your communication consists largely of "brb" and "ltr," etc.

The web demands more reading.

It demands, like a good book, more active participation.

While this report is surprising, I think it's understandable.

And I'll add, once you discover the joys of reading and writing, it's hard to stop.

Good column from Steve Outing for E&P on the importance of putting the "distributed" in your distributed media strategies, but not one mention of Creative Commons.

Chuck Fadely is asking people to submit examples of good newspaper video. It's a noble task that so far has produced only a few examples. I submitted a couple of ideas via e-mail, but I didn't submit any examples from the award-winning Bakersfield.com because I know Chuck would never accept those, even though there are some great examples of great news site video coming out of Bakersfield (and notice, I didn't say just "newspaper video" -- but news site video, because it's the kind of video ALL news sites should be doing, whether newspaper, TV, radio or web only). And I didn't submit any examples from the Ventura County Star, even though I know they produce video even Chuck would like, because their best video is too hard to find on the site. What I'm saying is, I did my part, are you doing yours? If not, submit examples to Chuck.The request from Chuck arose primarily because of comments by Lenslinger and others asking for examples of good newspaper video. It was a perfectly reasonable request. And it's a great idea to extend a real dialogue, a dialogue we can all learn from, not just bicker.

But I think the knowledge exchange should go two ways, so here's my request for the TV shooters: Where's your examples of great online video? What have you done that we on the print-background side can learn from? I'm not talking about repurposed TV spots, but video shot specifically for the web with every bit of understanding that the web is different and demands a different voice, different pacing, different style?

I fully get that most TV shooters are outstanding at their craft. Nobody has ever disputed that. But the question I still have is, are they ready for the web?

Clearly, newspaper shooters have a lot to learn. Nobody disputes that. But I think newspaper video producers are getting a lot closer in spirit to getting the web than what I see from TV folks, which as far as I can tell is just repurposed TV video -- even if it's outtakes and extended quotes, it's still TV video and not web video.

It's March 12, 2007. What exists on the web right now that is an example of great web video shot by a TV shooter? I'd love to see it, as I'm sure many of my print-side colleagues would to see ti, because I'm sure we could learn from it.

I already know about Cyndy Green's great piece on the cattle drive, so what else is there?

I just got an e-mail from a blogging buddy. This blogger loves YouTube and finds a variety of interesting entertainment on the site -- old music videos and TV shows, mainly -- rarely anything current or widely popular.

Lately, he's been getting frustrated because so much of what he's previously embedded on his site has disappeared from YouTube because of the increasingly vigilant IP police. He wonders if he should just delete every embedded post he's ever done and stop with the YT video.

My take: Why stop. Your posts that are more than a week old are way down the long tail by now, so I wouldn't worry about them, and if you find something interesting and get a week's worth of traffic out of it, that's a good ROI.

As background, my position on YouTube has never been that it is popular for just one reason. I've heard people say that YT would falter once it lost all its pirated video. Not true, I've said, because underneath all the IP content is a vibrant community of original content creators and social networkers. There is a lot of value in YT even without clips of Rockford Files and Sly and Family Stone.

But my bet is that most of the bloggers who embed YT video pick stuff that is IP and is subject to eventual takedown.

Which raises the question -- how long before the viral value of YT's content model is stymied? Sharing won't stop, and some original YT content is going to have a, "hey, Martha, take a look at this" appeal, but not a lot of it.

Where I'm going with this is: YouTube is changing. Competitors are lining up to try and kill it, IP owners are getting aggressive, and its core competitive advantages are easy to replicate. YouTube is a great brand, but brand may not be enough to protect Google's $1.6 billion investment.

As users become more disenchanted with YouTube (through no real fault of YT), the more dispersed and distributed (less aggregated) video model I see emerging will become more powerful.

I don't think Howard Weaver set out to present a trio of inspiring posts, but taken together, they give us something to think about:

• We need everybody's “A” game now
• Mac Ad - think different - apple
• 'Think different' about design

Cyndy Green explains the thought process behind Think News.

“Videojournalism” was launched to educate folks who want to know what news photogs really do or who want to learn how to become videojournalists. It also allows me to look at a media that has to completely reinvent itself for an audience that is dissatisfied with traditional media. Working on this blog has allowed me time to explore and rethink my perceptions of news and what people - the audience - deserve. Kathy and I have spent hours talking and emailing each other, whistfully dreaming about how a news program might look if we were in charge. A news site that would examine issues/stories from a reflective, thoughtful stance rather than using hype and personality to attract an audience. So we’re working on our baby - our dream now.

Most of us have seen the cattle drive video by now. I look forward to seeing more work along these lines from Cyndy and Kathy.

The first two of 10 reports commissioned by the Digital Media Federation's Audience Development Committee have been released.

Spotted:

In October, Spotted generated 12.2 percent of all page views on Morris’ newspaper sites, according to data provided by Coyle. In some markets, such as Yankton, S.D., Spotted generates more than a quarter of all page views.

And each visitor to Spotted generates an average of 27 page views per month, compared to 5.5 page views per month for each visitor to Morris’ online news sites, Coyle said.

That's impressive. Spotted is one of my favorite newspaper.com initiatives. It was the right product at the right time and well executed.

Last week I met Bret McCormick, the new VP of Web Enterprises for the Tyler Morning Telegraph. He told me Spotted has been a huge success for his site. I've been meaning to drop him an e-mail so I can get more details. (BTW: I happened to check out the Tyler site last summer and it was a real dog. Bret has done a great job of advancing a small-paper site. I'm not sure it's an award winner yet, but Brett's making great progress).

Spokesman-Review blogs:

Because the Spokesman-Review changed its traffic-analysis systems in 2006, it is not possible to compare audience data earlier than April of 2006. But data provided by Sands for April and November 2006 shows dramatic growth in traffic for the paper’s blogs. During that period -- page views for the rest of the paper’s Web presence increased 17 percent -- blog page views increased 73 percent. In November, blogs received almost 500,000 page views, about a sixth of total Web traffic.

The paper’s audience data does not indicate the extent to which the blogs are attracting people not already visiting other parts of the subscriber-only Web site. But since traffic to both is growing, and blog traffic is growing faster, there is at least circumstantial evidence the blogs are finding a following among people who don’t use the paper’s main Web site.

The evidence is mounting that blogging drives traffic to newspaper sites.

Rich Gordon is doing a great job on these reports. The goal is to find the best audience growth practices and share with the industry what is working and why. To be considered for a case study, the site managers must be able to share hard data that demonstrates real growth. If you know of or involved in a qualifying project, you should contact me (I'm chair of the committee), the NAA or Rich Gordon.

I've been concerned for a while that newspaper.com publishers can be lulled into a false sense of security by their current audience size. The industry makes hay over increased reach of online and the 30-day audience metric, but I worry that many of the prevailing measurements mask some real weakness in daily numbers.

Either way, I think we need to spend more time and effort on audience growth.

Nick Carr points us to new research on the value of "non-paying" customers and how the network effect makes intangible customers more valuable than in previous models.

In an interview about the study, Gupta notes that the model applies only to fairly simple two-sided markets. But on the Net today, of course, nonpaying, "free" customers are also critical to other businesses with more complex network structures, from YouTube to MySpace to Skype to an open-source software company like Red Hat or MySQL. If you have a "community," you likely have "free customers." Gupta says that he's currently

working on understanding and modeling complex network structures such as those of MySpace. Here the issue that we are grappling with is the tangible and intangible value of customers. In other words, customers provide tangible value to a firm through direct purchases but they also provide intangible value through network effects or word of mouth. It is quite possible that some customers have low tangible but high intangible value. Traditional models would label such customers as low value and would miss a huge opportunity for a firm.

This also says something about why paid-content models are a bad idea. A pay wall inhibits audience growth; it means you miss out on the networked opportunity. Publishers have much more to gain by continually growing audience than they do by squeezing a few dollars from a restricted and constrained group of people.

Harken back to Robert Niles on bloggers as parasites.

I hear the frustration behind the comment. You bust your rear to get stories in the paper, then watch bloggers grab traffic talking about your work. All the while your bosses are laying off other reporters, citing circulation declines, as analysts talk about newspapers losing audience to the Web. It's not hard to understand why many newspaper journalists would come to view blogs as parasites, sucking the life from their newsrooms.

Still, the charge riles me every time I hear it. To me, it's a poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work. And by dismissing blogs as "parasitic," newspaper journalists make themselves blind to the opportunities that blogging, as well as independent Web publishing in general, offer to both the newspaper industry and newspaper journalists.

And my response.

The best way to understand blogging is to blog. That’s why I say: All journalists should blog. You can’t get modern media without understanding blogs, and you can’t understand blogs unless you do it.

Now comes Nick Carr who says, not only are bloggers parasites, but it's an honorable appellative.

Bloggers blog for a whole lot of reasons, of course, but what I think sets blogs apart, as a literary rather than a technical form, is that they offer the opportunity for a writer to document his immediate responses to his day-to-day reading. The continuous flow of text through the eye and mind is a characteristic of many people's lives, but the experience has never been able to be captured in the way it can through blogging.

As a young writer, I kept a journal, and I did so off and on for many, many years. Since I started blogging, I haven't been tempted to start again. While my blog isn't personal, I really have no interest in documenting my life in the way one would with a journal. It's much more interesting to have an outlet for frequent "thinking out loud" and reacting to items and issues I find important. The process is improved by the fact that other people can read and respond. Comparing journal writing to blogging is like comparing Pong to World of Warcraft.

The process of blogging has taught me more -- both about the world around me and about myself -- than I ever gained through a private diary.

Carr's post is one of those tightly crafted essays that is hard to quote only in part and capture the true import of the message. You must read the whole thing, especially the bit about old London. That's the essence of why he thinks being a parasite in the world of media is a good thing, and journalists should be happy the parasites are out there.

If you love music, you owe yourself a viewing of the new U2 video for "Window in the Skies."

In the midst of a very busy schedule this past week, Doc Searls did me the honor of linking to one of my posts as part of a longer essay about the web being a giant zero.

Only now have I had the time necessary to devote to a full reading of the post. I wanted to give it some time, because of who Doc is and the fact this was obviously an important post.

The Net is a giant zero. It puts everybody zero distance from everybody and everything else. And it supports publishing and broadcasting at costs that round to zero as well.

Regular readers know I agree with the sentiment here, but it's worth parsing this statement a little bit to see how well it holds up.

Yes, Doc is zero distance from me and I am zero from him (if you count one or two clicks as zero distance), but how often do we read each other? He as much as admits he doesn't read me, and his blog hasn't been a part of my regular information diet for a few years. So, are we really a zero distance apart? In an era when even for the most rabid media consumer, there is wide and torrid fire hose of information (if not a literal Niagara Falls) to consume, one person can't possibly get to it all. We all need to make choices.

Physical distances are removed in a distributed media world, but the price to be paid in the attention economy remains high, and gets higher all the time.

As for the second half of his statement, the net supports zero cost production, but it doesn't necessarily reward it. Let's face it, the vast majority of non-professional content is utter crap (and some portion of professional content as well).

While quality content can be produced on a near zero-cost basis (nothing is entirely free), it is no accident that the majority of the best content is produced by people who get paid to create it. There is a high volume (at least high enough that it remains impossible to keep up with all of it) of quality coming from non-paid producers, but professionals or aspiring professionals create the majority of the best content.

Because of MP3Caravan.com, I surf around a lot looking for free MP3s. There is an amazing number of great songs available in the digital world. The vast majority of it is obscure and probably only ever heard by (at best) a hundred people or so. This is stuff that is obscure as it gets. It couldn't possibly be even more obscure in a world without the web. These songs mostly remain hidden little treasures tucked away in forgotten corners of the digital world. I bet for every good song I find, there are 10 I'll never find, just because the web is so sprawling and some of great stuff remains buried deep in the vast Milky Way of 1s and 0s.

That is not, I think, a zero-distance existence.

Part of the reason I created MP3Caravan.com is because I saw some value in a reasonably well versed music consumer like myself acting as a filter to help other people find worthwhile music.

So much content, so little time.

An then there is the free stuff.

As Scott Karp alludes, there is no evidence that there is mass demand for people to create their own content. I bet if you added up all the people who regularly create unpaid content on the Web, it would amount to about 1 percent of the total web audience. Now, that's a huge number, and I think quite sufficient to justify all the hoopla about participatory content creation, and enough of an audience to justify MSM sites getting into "social media," but there remains a large part of the web audience who remain and always will be lurkers.

(I'd say this about the lurkers -- probably 50/50 between those who value contributions from participants and those who don't, and I would further lay money that the 50/50 split skews along age lines, with younger users preferring personal-voice participation and older generations longing for the good old days of packaged goods media. That's all just a guess based on experience and observation in this realm.)

At even 1 percent, with maybe 1 percent of the 1 percent being worthwhile, that is a lot of content to sift through and deal with.

The next strand in the thought process here is a quote from Chris Hendricks: "Everbody loves an editor." What I think Chris meant by that statement is the same thing I'm getting around to saying: There's so much content to consume, people who filter it for you provide a valuable service.

Sure, with RSS and TiVo and other distributed media tools, along with an army of bloggers, it's never been easier to consumer filtered information without the aide of a professional editor, but that doesn't mean paid editors don't have a role in distributed media.

In fact, I'm rather hopeful (as an MSM guy) that over time the value of filtering content for consumers only increases.

In my media world, there is no one way or one right way to filter content. Filtering is a distributed process, and just as i wrote in "We Are the Media," professional editors are as much a part of the filtering process as volunteers.

Doc's right when he says "UGC" is an ugly term.

Framing is a huge issue here. We have readers and viewers, not just "audiences" and "consumers". We write articles and essays and posts, not just "generate content". "User-generated content", or UGC, is an ugly, insulting and misleading label.

"Content" is inert. It isn't alive. It doesn't grow, or catch fire, or go viral. Ideas and insights do that. Interesting facts do that. "Audiences" are passive. They sit still, clap and leave. That might be what happened with newspapers and radio and TV in the old MSM-controlled world, but it's not what happens on The Giant Zero. It's not what happens with blogging, or with citizen journalism. Here it's all about contribution, participation. It involves conversation, but it goes beyond that into relationship — with readers, with viewers, with the larger ecosystem by which we all inform each other.

In the end, I think Doc and I are saying the same thing: It's all a conversation, and MSM is as much a part of it (both in creation and in filtering) as anybody else, and MSM managers need to get that.

I guess my concern is that Doc makes it all sound so easy and so obvious. I don't think it is. I think it's a very complex ecosystem where the paid side stands on equal footing with the free side. For the MSM, I think we need to build content models that breathe deeply the air of that ecosystem, but on the flip side, the non-paid producers and editors would do well to see themselves not as something apart from the MSM, but as fellow travelers.

God, how egalitarian of me.

Matt Waite's blog post headline really caught my attention: Stop trying to find the next Adrian Holovaty.

Sorry, I almost never rant on this blog, but I can’t take it anymore: Stop trying to find the next Adrian Holovaty. You won’t find him, like you won’t find the next Michael Jordan or the next Wayne Gretsky. He is one in a million.

I don't really know Adrian. I've never met him. We've exchanged friendly e-mails a couple of times, and that's about it. I know his work. His work is impressive. If I met him, maybe I'd put him in league with Jordan or Gretsky. Right now , I don't. I put Page and Brin in that league, but not Adrian.

Having said that, hope I don't offend him with this post.

Adrian's work stands out more for the opportunities he's had more than the fact it is really anything truly innovative. Mashups, for example, where nothing new when he launched ChicagoCrime.org (NOTE: Adrian corrects the record in the comments -- ChicagoCrime.org wasn't the first map mashup, but it was very early in the game). The project caught the eye of newspaper people because it was new to them, but it wasn't new to people familiar with the Google Map API (NOTE: Adrian corrects the record in the comments: The Google API didn't exist when he created ChicagoCrime.org). The work Adrian did in Lawrence is truly remarkable by newspaper standards, but it stands on the shoulders of a lot of other developers from outside the industry.

Again, I hope I'm not offending Adrian, but my guess is, he would largely agree. Most programmers I've known over the years are quick to acknowledge their predecessors. To me, that's part and parcel of the open source community.

There is a real poetry in what Adrian does and it takes a truly creative mind to see the potential of various parts, various technologies and bring them together in a different environment in a way that is unique and useful, but I also think there are a lot of people in our business who can, given the opportunity, do the same. Really good reporters do that every day.

Those of us who have followed Rob Curley's steller career know that one of his bits of magic is to find really good, energetic, passionate people and then turn them loose. That is why Curley and Holovaty stand apart from the newspaper crowd. It's not that their ideas are so much better than the ideas of a 100 other smart people in the newspaper business -- it's because they've been given the freedom to pursue those ideas, and given the freedom, they haven't dropped the ball.

Contrary to Waite, I believe newspaper publishers can find the next Holovaty. In fact, I bet every newspaper of 50K circ or better probably has a potential Holovaty already on staff, and those people have been on newspaper staffs for 10+ years. But because most publishers are risk averse, tight-fisted and clueless about innovation (or have been), the best and the brightest haven't been given a real opportunity -- in fact, I bet there are dozens of potential Holovaty-like programmers out there who don't even know themselves what they are capable of, because they've never been given the opportunity to learn and explore.

If publishers want the next Holovaty, they need to tap the right person on the shoulder, then say, "here's a computer, come back in six months and show me a prototype of something fabulous." The nature of creativity being what it is, there would probably be more misses than hits, but some publishers would truly strike it rich.

Again, I'm not trying to slight Holovaty and his accomplishments. But I think publishers need to realize that the secret sauce of Lawrence and its spinoffs isn't one or two individuals, but it goes hand-in-hand with a culture of innovation.

The flip side is that thanks to Holovaty, Curley, among others -- there is already a pretty clear road map of what needs to be done, and there is plenty of work to do just getting up to speed. That work can be done by any number of capable programmers. The trick is to hire them, pay them, tell them what to do, and then get busy.

Interesting note from Scott Karp:

- CBS has a “team of lawyers” who issues daily takedown notices to YouTube for pirated videos — Betsy Morgan emphasized that every pirated video taken down is replaced by a legitimate copy, so as not to be hostile to consumers by depriving them of content they want.

Is that really the best use of CBS's resources? How many reporters (I'm just saying) could CBS hire instead of that "team of lawyers"? It's great and all that they're not "hostile to consumers" (that is, if you fail to see that keeping your best customers from sharing your stuff is hostile), but why not just embrace Creative Commons and let your fans spread your best stuff around? Even if it doesn't help generate revenue (and I believe in the long run it will), it certainly is a lot cheaper.

Melissa Worden uncovers an interesting series of videos on YouTube of Ira Glass on storytelling. She quotes at length Glass on how practice is the only way to get better, and it sometimes takes years to get from not-so-good to good.

Here's the four videos:

• Ira Glass #1
• Ira Glass #2
• Ira Glass #3
• Ira Glass #4

Even if you think you know storytelling, the pieces are worth reviewing. Videos #2 and #4 especially contain some interesting stuff. Two on entropy and #4 on using your own voice to tell a story.

When I was a reporter with the now defunct Daily Californian in El Cajon, Calif., I had a couple of occasions to dig deep into our archives. I looked at many editions of the paper from the 30s through the 70s. It was a very different paper from the one I worked at.

I was proud of the paper I worked for. We had a great staff. We filled the paper every day with important news, or so we thought. We worked hard to be enterprising and hard hitting. We worked hard to get good clips that would impress future employers and win contests.

Those old papers were full of stories about people in the community doing ordinary things -- running their businesses, giving and receiving awards, going off to serve in the military, getting married, etc. There was some hard news, mostly from wire services. The local political coverage -- I specifically read some stories about the 1934 governor's race -- was chatty and informal and laden with opinion.

It wasn't what we would call professional journalism.

In the midst of all my hard news reporting, I got an assignment to visit a lady's home in Spring Valley. We had just been through a major rain storm and the hill behind her house was slowly sliding into her dining room. Very slowly. She was a Vietnamese immigrant, recently divorced, with three small children and her only asset was this house. I wrote the story.

It was the first story people ever stopped me in the street to ask me about. They wanted to know how the lady was doing, if the hill was still sliding, was anybody helping. The story generated phone calls. My sources from other beats asked about the lady. This simple story of a woman and her sliding hill was probably the best read thing I ever wrote.

So I did follow ups. Many of them. For two weeks, I wrote about the lady, her hill, and her attempts to get help from her insurance company. It was, as one reader put it, "better than watching a soap opera." It was real life. It was about a neighbor.

The stories didn't win me any awards (though I submitted them to a couple of contests), but it was a winner with readers.

I'm reminded of that story because of this post from Steve Yelvington about small town newspapers.

Mary Lou Montgomery, who edits the Morris-owned Hannibal (Mo.) Courier-Post, had an insight last year: In a misguided attempt to be "professional," newspapers were losing touch with the kind of neighborhood news that people wanted. She wrote then:

We don’t do dead deer.
We don’t use Polaroid pictures
We don’t print long lists of names, such as those attending a reunion.

...

There's more to Mary Lou's list of things we don't do ...

So Steve asked how her experiment in getting less professional and more local was going.

"Have you seen Jack lately?" she asked, referring to publisher Jack Whitaker. "He's just a walkin' grin!"

Circulation is up. Complaints are down. Relationships with people in the community are the best they've ever been. "A local gasoline distributor told me the newspaper is more fun to read now. A retired secretary said she feels like she has her paper back. When the weather was still warm, people were literally chasing me down the street to offer story ideas and to tell me they liked what we were doing."

I told my story about what I learned from old newspaper archives to an API conference a few years ago and I put it like this: "We can do this stuff. We know how to cover our communities and connect with our readers. It's in our DNA."

Mary Lou Montgomery is proving it.

Nice post from Mark Glaser about the growing number of newsroom programmers. I'll respond to this quote:

“A huge number of journalism students select that major because they are math-phobic and they think they will get away from numbers,” Bentley said. “You don’t have to be a mathematician to program, but you can’t be afraid of math.”

Some might dispute that I was ever a programmer, but I learned a thing or two along those lines, wrote some worthwhile applications, etc.

For years, I avoided programming and only got into it out of economic necessity. For several years, it's how I made my living, and if I hadn't, I wouldn't be where I am today.

The thing that kept me from programming in my younger years was the math thing. Numbers and I are not friends. You could say I'm afraid of math.

When I got into programming, though, I found numbers (unless you were writing an app specifically to calculate something) had nothing to do with it.

Programming is more about grammar and punctuation than math formulas. It's also about logic, and the disciplined mind that is usually the math mind helps, but logic is also something that can be learned.

Great programmers, I've learned, are great at math. I wasn't a great programmer.

But I was good enough for a newsroom.

Most of what is needed in newsrooms is pretty basic at this stage. What's needed for most newspaper business apps is pretty basic. This isn't rocket science.

The point here is that if you're a journalist and have an opportunity to make a contribution to your career, your company or to our industry through programming, don't let the math thing scare you. You can do it. Eighty percent of programming (if my math is right) is easy. If I can do it, you can.

I've never written about Josh Wolf previously, but every time I see his name, my blood boils a bit.

There's no reason this guy should be in jail.

There shouldn't even be a debate over whether he's a journalist.

There's no license to be a journalist. You don't need the government's approval to be a journalist. You don't need a paycheck to be a journalist. You just need the consitituion and a means to report what you know.

When the Josh Wolfs of the world can be jailed for exercising his or her constitutional rights, we're all in trouble, especially those of us who, as paid professionals, believe in the public right to know.

I just wanted to say that.

I'm sorry to say it, but my buddies in Ventura should be nervous. Scripps will stay in the newspaper business, but sell off some properties, according to this report.

The problem for the Ventura County Star is that it is in a slow-growth market, with a high cost of living (higher staff costs) and it is fairly isolated from other Scripp's assets.

While I was there, I was an advocate of using some land Scripps owned there to build employee housing, which would have made a lot of economic sense. I believe that land has now been sold off.

But hey, they do have (or are soon getting -- I'm not up to speed on this lately -- a great new office building with a video studio.

Bryan Murley has a great, perfect little video interview with Roanoke's Seth Gitner (complete with green screen).  It's good stuff and a quick easy download. You should check it out.
Interesting to hear Seth say it's not about the technology, but about the story telling.

Like many conference sponsors, the Kelsey Group likes it when speakers mention upcoming events ... I mentioned this one before, but I was just looking at the line up for the panel I'm on, and it's pretty cool:

3:15 pm - 4:00 pm

Closing Panel: The Big Thinkers

Local’s top thinkers weigh in on the local online and mobile r/evolution, and what they’ve learned from Drilling Down on Local ’07. What are the lessons for this booming business?
Ken Doctor, Affiliate Analyst, Outsell
Howard Owens, Director of Digital Media, Gatehouse Media Inc.
Barry Parr, Media Analyst, Jupiter Research
Amy Rabinovitz, Writer/Analyst, Classified Intelligence
Greg Sterling, Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

That's on March 21 (Drilling Down on Local is March 19-21).

One thing that has me excited about this conference is all of the non-newspaper people involved. It should be a great time to dig into some different perspectives.

Here's something interesting for anybody looking to improve his or her video editing chops: Film School in a Box.

The product is aimed primarily at would-be feature film editors, but it sounds like the sort of thing any visual story teller could us as a learning and practice workshop.

Their (Dave Kebo and Rudi Liden) work on the black and white mystery/noir, "The Confession",  produced several hours of footage which would allow them to develop different angles during the editorial process.  Several lipstick cameras were placed throughout the set to record the actors simultaneously.  Because there is so much footage to work with, overlapping storylines and nonlinear shooting, you can cut the story into several different pictures easily.

The tool kit provides a shooting script, Camera reference map, Quad split, FCP project and over 15 hours of original footage.

The whole "noir" thing interests me ... wish I had time for it.

Smart move by MTV -- distributed branding:

The network, which already has 150 Web sites in 162 countries, plans to build literally thousands more, hoping to draw viewers by letting them watch, contribute and even re-edit its television shows.

"People tend to find content on the Internet through thousands of front doors as opposed to one," said Mika Salmi, the new digital president of MTV Networks, a unit of Viacom Inc..

Not so much distributed branding, but distributed media, for sure. Rather than trying to be all things to all people in one place, MTV is reorganizing around the reality of the web -- that niches play well and people don't usually drill down into deep, broad web sites.

I'm at the Inland Press Association Key Executives conference in Tucson.

I've sat through a day and a half of presentations (and made one of my own). All of them interesting and informative. I took notes during a few of them.
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Great tip from Susan Patterson Plant, vp of marketing and digital development at Des Moines Register: You can tell your ad director that he should know about online, and you can tell her editor that he should know about online, but if you really want to change culture, get the finance director to ask questions they should know about online, such as revenue and audience size. That will get their attention a way that the online director can't do quite as well.

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Ad sales tips from Greg Swanson, CEO Itz Publishing:

• Sell using spec ads
• Change ad creatives frequently
• Know the metrics of your audience and target advertisers accordingly
• Keep ad units on a page to a minimum and sell rich media ads in those spots
• Sponsorship model works better than CPM-based banner rotation
• Set realistic expectations

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Chris Hendricks, VP/Interactive for McClatchy:

Newsrooms need to produce content specifically for the web site. It's hard to create a compelling digital product when all you get is a dump of the newspaper. If you're producing first for the web, then the print product becomes the greatest hits of the newsroom.

Online is not growing audience fast enough: 70 percent of print audience never touches the web site in a 30 period. That's not acceptable. We need to do a better job of driving print readers to our web sites and make better web sites. The untouched print audience represents a huge opportunity for online. (I found this an interesting twist on the audience growth paradigm -- most publishers and site managers talk about using the web to reach a new audience, but Chris was clear that we need to convert more of our print readers into regular newspaper.com users.) Chris said, we need to tell people we have more content of interest on our web sites. "Why would you let them go someplace else?"

Comments on stories mean that frequency, time spent on the site and unique visitors all go up. Comments bring readers back to see what other people are saying, and they encourage readers to forward the story to friends.

Here's an interesting McClatchy requirement: Executive editors must blog. For everybody else, it's an encouraged option.

Here's a UGC idea: Create a way for local businesses to submit their press releases, and publish them ALL online. One McClatchy site received 150 submissions its first week with this program.

More UGC: The Anchorage site has a UGC-photo featured called Nice catch. Hundreds and hundreds of people have submitted pictures of their fish.

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

Chris introduced me to MiamiHerald.com's What the 5, a great take on the video blog format. I'm already a fan. The concept: What are the five stories each day that people will be talking about, though today's segment contains only two stories and three house ads.

In response to a question, Hendricks said newspapers don't do a good job of directing its web audience to other good things on the internet. Why not, for example, tell people about the best things on YouTube? "Everybody loves an editor," he said. (If you believe, as I do, in distributed editing, there's no reason that the paid, professional, experienced editors of a newsroom can be part of the "we media" distributed editing process as well.)

The emphasis in the company is on growth opportunity, which is online, and manage the decline of print.

As he was running out of time, Chris hit the portion of his presentation about partnerships (such as with Google and Yahoo!). The benefits of partnerships include distribution -- they have enormous distribution; Great products that we'll probably never have; They have technology and we don't do technology well; Finally, national revenue through an online ad network. "You can't look at these people as enemies, because they are the environment."

He was asked, what are the worries about partnerships? "That it will accelerate the end." After a little laughter, Chris explained that Google and Yahoo! may accelerate the end of what was once a great business, but it won't be the end of great journalism. Journalism will endure, and that is what matters. Somebody asked if the Yahoo! and Google offers of partnership weren't just a Trojan Horse: "No. If they wanted to own our industry, they could just roll it up and buy it." Hendricks said the executives of Google and Yahoo! have tremendous respect for newspapers and want to be a part of helping us find success.

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Bob Kempf, VP of product development for Boston.com.

Kempf said their research shows that in the Boston DMA the potential exists for Boston.com to be the #1 source for local information (point of disclosure: my employer is a direct competitor of Boston.com and we aim to derail this particular ambition; Bob used to also work for my employer and last fall took me to my first Red Sox game and Fenway.)

More from the research: Only 1 in 3 users and 1 of 5 are non-user currently happy with their current options for finding local information. Research: Access to local information doubles the likelihood that non-users will visit Boston.com.

Research: About 50 percent of users like the idea of getting all their local information one place.

Based on the response, Bob feels Boston.com can compete with technology savvy of search engine portal sites (i.e. Google and Yahoo!)

Here's an interesting editorial initiative around search: Rather than rely entirely on algorithmic search, Boston.com is using staff librarians to keep abreast of what people are searching for and highlighting ("content spotlights") the best of the current articles on Boston.com.

Boston.com plans to build deep and rich hyperlocal databases and used entry-level staff to go out into the community to gather the data to populate those databases.

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Chris Jennewein, VP of Interactive for the San Diego Union-Tribune, spoke primarily about SignOnSanDiego.com's video efforts.

Newspapers have a tremendous advantage over television because we have the largest news staffs in our DMAs. Even if small portion of those staffs carried cameas, we would by far surpass TV in local video content.

The goal should be to give readers the straight story, which we can do with minimal requirements in equipment and software. "Consumer cameras are just fine." He noted that Bakersfield uses just point and shoot cameras.

It might be helpful to remember, Jennewein said, that in the early days of TV news, reporters worked alone and carried hand-cranked cameras. The video journalists in Vietnam carried a notebook and windup camera and captured very high quality TV journalism. Once electronic equipment came along, and sound trucks and satellites and TV news became a big production, it changed the face of TV news (and clearly, Chris believes not for the better). "I think what we're doing in our newsrooms is going back to the early days of TV."

A newspaper.com with a strong video effort is going to attract a bigger audience, Chris said, and that's going to mean more revenue. For one thing, TV advertisers who have grown frustrated with the fragmenting TV audience are going to turn to newspaper.com sites to get their video message out to the local audience.

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Finally, tonight Inland is announcing the winners of its first-ever online awards. The big winner, Bakersfield.com (beating out Naples News -- so eat your heart out Rob Curley!). I loved the judges comments:

The Bakersfield Californian site is newsy - not just "hard" news or "breaking news," though there's plenty of that, but also news about the community, its people and how to get more out of life in Bakersfield, Calif. - and it's easy to read, because of both the writing and the design. The design is clean and uncluttered, and the eye knows where to go, though the homepage is chock full of stuff - news, yes, plus the stuff that's unique to the Web site: video and interactivity (why have a Web site, asks one judge, if you don't offer video and interactivity?). This is a site, unlike many others, where the advertising doesn't interfere with or detract from the editorial content. How often do you see that? Also, said one judge: "This is one sweet site to navigate. Try it via the tabbed menu at the top." The site's blogs, and its Most Read and Most E-Mailed stories give a sense of what people are talking about and what they care about. All in all, it's a winner - and it's our Inland winner. (emphasis mine)

Congratulations to my buddies at Bakersfield.com. We built a great site.

When I heard Warren Buffett on Charlie Rose a few months ago, he seemed pretty bullish on well run newspapers, particularly the Washington Post.

This week, he has struck a decidedly pessimistic tone.

We are likely therefore to see non-economic individual buyers of newspapers emerge, just as we have seen such buyers acquire major sports franchises. Aspiring press lords should be careful, however: There’s no rule that says a newspaper’s revenues can’t fall below its expenses and that losses can’t mushroom. Fixed costs are high in the newspaper business, and that’s bad news when unit volume heads south. As the importance of newspapers diminishes, moreover, the “psychic” value of possessing one will wane, whereas owning a sports franchise will likely retain its cachet.

Me, I remain quite optimistic about the future of newspaper journalism. We have our challenges and along way to go, but I think we're finally moving in the right direction online. And Buffett isn't really giving up either. He's just saying the future will be very different for investors.

Unless we face an irreversible cash drain, we will stick with the News, just as we’ve said that we would. (Read economic principle 11, on page 76.) Charlie and I love newspapers – we each read five a day – and believe that a free and energetic press is a key ingredient for maintaining a great democracy. We hope that some combination of print and online will ward off economic doomsday for newspapers, and we will work hard in Buffalo to develop a sustainable business model. I think we will be successful. But the days of lush profits from our newspaper are over.

Doug Fisher is wondering how online video should be judged. His post is in response to one by Al Tompkins on Poynter. Doug pulls this quote:

"The category itself is in its infancy, and it showed," judge Erica Simpson, a photojournalist from KGTV San Diego, said. "It is obvious these were people who came mostly from newspapers and were trying to learn a craft. They were making basic mistakes in telling stories with pictures. Since we have no bar set, since this is the first year NPPA has offered these categories, we didn't want to set the bar too low and say this is what national award-winning online video looks like. We chose the best of the lot, but this is not where the bar of excellence should be." The judges said the most common mistakes they saw were backlit interviews, sound bites that lasted far too long, jump cuts that were jarring to the eye and stories that were overwritten. The judges also said some stories used too many special effects. The best surprises were sometimes buried deep in the story, and while many of the entries were heavy on useful facts and information, they lacked memorable central characters. The judges also are put off by natural sound "pops" that constantly and unnecessarily interrupt the storytelling.

In the absence of specific examples, it's hard to respond with Simpon's remarks. Obviously, online video that is marred by basic mistakes, such as backlighting, jarring cuts, etc. should not win awards. But online video is different from TV. Online, long sound bites might actually be a feature not a bug. Whether something is overwritten is in the ear of the listener. It's hard to believe that all the entries in a national contest were so fatally flawed by basic shooting and editing mistakes that they weren't worthy of honor. I suspect, more to the point, is that the judges were unwilling or unable to come to terms with the changing face of video news. The flaws were not necessarily in frames of the video, but in the eyes of the judges.

Lisa Snedeker writes in MediaLife about newspaper audience metrics and near the end hits on a key point:

... the other problem newspapers face is coming up with a metric to replace circulation that combines print and online readership in a manner that advertisers can understand and work with.

That raises fundamental questions. Is the online visitor of the same value as the print reader?

One approach has been to weight a month of web traffic to a week's worth of print circulation, according to Philip Meyer, the Knight chair of Journalism at the University of North Carolina and author of "The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age."

But Meyer sees this as an apple-and-oranges formula. "I don't see any logical reason to do it that way."

Meo agrees that comparing the past seven days in print to the past 30-day internet traffic is goofy. "You wouldn’t do that with any other media," he says. "We think comparing the past seven days' print audience to the past seven days internet audience makes sense."

The visited-in-last-30 day metric makes no sense to me. It never has. It tells you nothing about an engaged, loyal audience.

I just finished watching Frontline’s News War online.

This isn't exactly live blogging -- in fact, many people have already commented on Part III and I'm late to the party -- but I took some notes while I watched.
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I found it interesting to watch Lowell Bergman lecture Dave Westin on what news is. Bergman is so sure of himself as he inserts himself into the story, which is something a true traditional journalist would never do. Ironic, isn't it?
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There’s a great deal of discussion about the importance of hard news. Ted Koppel talks about the Radio Act of 1927 that requires license holders to operate in a manner that serves the "public interest, convenience and necessity” and concludes from that only hard news can meet that charge.

It seems to me that there is more hard news available now than ever before – most of it supplied by newspapers online. There’s a greater demand for substantial news, fueled in no small part by bloggers. But there’s also a wide swath of the American public that doesn’t care about hard news, and even more people who drift in and out of interest. Is it really the job of a news organization to say, “you shall only get hard news”? Can we really force people to care? If we just say it loud enough and long enough, if we keep pushing hard news out the door with no consideration for what people really want, will we get our way? Will people start caring just because we want them to? And what if that one-way dictate is a turn off to the reading and viewing public? How is a news organization to survive without an audience?

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At one point, Ted Koppel says, “simply passing on rumors is not journalism.” I agree. Somebody should tell that to the political staffs of the Washington Post and New York Times.

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Eric Schmidt: “Being online is the future. Many, many organizations have talked and talked about these changes but the fact of the matter is the time is now. People who bet against the internet, who believe somehow this change is just a generational shift or something miss that it is a fundamental reorganizing of the power of the end user."

Exactly.

I laughed when they cut to Gary Brolsma’s “Numa Numa Dance.” A few years ago, I used the same video in my presentations to make much the same point about why newspapers should get into video. (i.e., if this video has become so hugely popular, there must be a demand for video made for online that isn't being met -- this was before there was a YouTube.)
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Frontline notes that Rocketboom used to get as many viewers as some cable news shows. Note to all the video advocates who think you can only do video with a lot of expense: Rocketboom started with one camera, one light and a pair scissors and tape. That’s called disruption.

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John Carroll notes that 85 percent of the original reporting committed in this country today is done by print journalists. I bet he’s right. He says, “I don’t think we can turn this whole thing over to bloggers and citizen journalists. They’re valuable, but there’s things they can’t do.” In part, he’s right. I think it’s more a matter of won’t do, or won’t do in sufficient numbers to fully protect the public interest. They won’t do it either from lack of sustainable interest, or lack of financial resources. But I think Carroll strikes the right balance in finding value in any non-professional journalism that contributes to the civic discourse.

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I’ve noted before that the Los Angeles Times has seen significant circulation drops even as it wins awards. This would seem to indicate that award-winning journalism doesn’t necessarily translate into solid readership. Frontline, however, tells me something I didn’t know before: Prior to making newsroom cuts, the Tribune Co. made budget cuts to its printing and circulation departments.

Back in the mid 1990s, I was the weekend editor for The Daily Californian in El Cajon, Calif. When I came in on a Saturday or Sunday at 1 or 2 p.m., I was usually the only person in the building for an hour or two. Almost every weekend, I would get a call from a customer who didn’t get his or her paper. I found it so frustrating that our circulation department closed down at noon. That seemed like bad customer service to me. I was frustrated enough that I would personally deliver a paper to the reader.

You can’t cheap out on customer service operations, like circulation, and expect to retain subscribers.

For me, this puts the Times’ circulation declines in a whole new light.

Not coincidentally, I think, The Daily Californian is out of business.

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Eli Broad says he’ll accept a 6 percent profit margin. The magical thinking for journalists, then, is confirmed: If only publishers would accept lower profit margins, then all would be right with the world.

But newspaper’s profits have been falling for a couple of decades. What makes anybody, especially Eli Broad, think those declines won’t continue. There may come a day when the only way to get a six percent profit margin is to make significant cuts to newsroom budgets. If Broad were to succeed in buying the Times, he might consider himself lucky to even squeeze out six percent.
This isn’t about profit margins or ownership. It’s about developing sustainable business models.

And it’s important, because as John Carroll notes, if we don’t do the kind of journalism we do, who will?

Long, interesting post from Jay Small on innovation. He gives a good outline about how to set up an innovation process, but while building fully-formed products is an important aspect of innovation, there are also lots of small things newspapers can do to be disruptive in their markets. Not everything is a project. Further, there isn't a single newspaper.com that has done all it can to be the best it can be. There are many, many good ones, but none is yet hitting all its marks. Look around at the best practices -- video, blogging, databases, calendars, sharing, participation, etc. -- and figure out how you can make your site better and more relevant to your local audience.

Innovation is important, but don't become so obsessed with innovation that you forget the fundamentals.  And if you can't get the funding to innovate the way you dream about, think about what you can do, and do it. There are a lot of smart people in our industry coming up with good ideas.  Find out what's working and what you can copy. It's often easier to get a publisher to buy into a project that is a proven success. Maybe your contribution, your innovation, will be to make a good idea better.

I'm working on a presentation I'm going to give next week. I wanted a quote for a slide to summarize where personal journalism is headed. None of my previous writing on the topic seems to contain an adequate quote, so I came up with this:

As digital devices make communication more direct, relevant and personal, media becomes an individual noun. In order to capture the interest of people, producers and publishers who deliver content in a personal voice will connect with a growing audience. In this media environment, people will find definitive-voice journalism less interesting and less trustworthy.

I, like Robert Niles, have always found it deeply irritating to hear reporters and editors refer to blogs as parasitic. Unlike me, Niles did something about it. He wrote a column that debunks the idea.

One of the problems, I think, is that many MSM types know only a handful of political blogs, or have seen only blogs that linked to their work, or have come across one or two personal journals, and subsequently jumped to the irrational conclusion that such a small sample size reflects the whole of the blogosphere. As they say, you can't see the forest for the trees, and you'll never see the whole ecosystem of the blogosphere by concentrating on just a species or two.

The best way to understand blogging is to blog. That's why I say: All journalists should blog. You can't get modern media without understanding blogs, and you can't understand blogs unless you do it.

UPDATE: John Robinson adds some worthwhile thoughts on his own blog.