Howard Owens

Susan Mernit posted this quote:

"People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network, but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet." -- Gary McGraw

Steve Yelvington, meanwhile, reports that an Illinois lawmaker wants to ban social networking sites in schools and libraries.

A blog is a social network. Think about it -- every good blog has a robust blog roll, and what is a blog roll but a construct of socially relating to other bloggers? So, howardowens.com could be banned. I've never been banned before, as far as I know ... well, maybe in Iran or China, but I'm not sure.  You know, all that free speech stuff I advocate doesn't go over too well in those countries.
These days, any good web site is working to become more social, more relevant, more conversational. What are links if not socially contructed networking?
You might as well ban the Internet if you're going to ban social networks.

I feel somewhat vindicated this morning. There have been a few people who scoffed at my suggestions that newspapers can use video to disrupt local TV on the web. Mostly, my comments have been in context of news content, but I've also realized there is a lot of money to be made from video advertising. I've seen first hand how popular and profitable video advertising can be for a local newspaper site.

Borrell and Associates now confirms: Newspapers are winning. They are generating more revenue from video than local TV stations.

What's doing it for newspapers is not pre-roll on content, but infomercial presentations that people actually choose to watch (yes, people will actively choose to watch advertising if it suits their interests).

Here's an example of such a kind of advertising: classified job ads turned into video.

I would look for local newspapers to get more innovative over the next couple of years about the kind of video advertising it produces for local businesses. As site managers see where the money is, they're going to keep pushing in that direction.

There is both money and audience in video. And you don't need to start at the high end, you don't need to try to be like TV, to get there.

Earlier today, in response from a comment by David Johnson on this post bemoaning the lack of a clear revenue model to OnBeing, I wrote:

We simply must, must grow audience much more dramatically than we are if we expect to make money, so the fact that there is no clear revenue model with OnBeing doesn’t bother me. It’s an important experiment in audience growth.

Having talked with Rob about this recently, I think that’s always been his approach, and it’s now an approach I endorse: Think audience first.

Let’s face it, the smartest, most innovative advertising programs in the world are doomed to fail without audience.

Ironically, at about the same time, Curley was leaving a comment on Melissa Worden's blog:

As for Patrick's question as to how we're going to monetize "onBeing," I'm going to say something that I've never said in my 10 years as an online journalist: I don't care how it's monetized.

Radical words.

In my organization, I'm glad there are smart people who are charged with pushing online revenue growth. I will do everything to support them. But these days, I've become a bit of a zealot about audience growth. I sincerely believe that newspaper.com sites are not growing fast enough, are too small now, and need to do much, much better if we are going to generate sufficient revenue to support quality journalism. The urgency of the matter is even greater because newspaper companies have spent the past decade or so putting the cart before the horse, worrying more about revenue than audience.

It makes a lot of sense for Associated Press to become a conduit and distributor of citizen journalism (verified, accurate and relevant), but at what point does paid UGC become just another method to gather free-lance content?

The Internet is a very efficient way for free-lance contributors to hook up with publishers (or can be) and get paid for the effort. More publishers should take advantage of this efficiency.

Citizen journalism has been used as an umbrella term to cover all kinds of UGC.

I think there is certainly a class of content that has sufficient journalistic standing to be called citizen journalism, and real journalism deserves some sort of compensation. That compensation is not always necessarily monetary.

But I view the bulk of UGC as contributions to the conversation, not necessarily journalism (in the strictest sense of the word).

In other words, for any pundits who suggest that AP's move to paid UGC raises the bar for media companies to start paying for UGC, I don't see it that way. Not all UGC is created equal, and some of it would despoil the value if it were created for monetary reward.

I firmly believe that many people just want to have their say and make their contribution because they feel compelled to share what they know. I think this is good for society.

I think there is real value in protecting, extending, expanding and nurturing the conversation.

I just wanted to say that.

UPDATE: Mark Glaser asks a question that is essentially related to this post: What would motivate you to contribute CitJ? Me? I'd contribute where I found it convenient and I felt like I was already part of the community. Right now, that's pretty much my blog.

Scott Karp thinks that Viacom pulling its videos from YouTube makes strategic sense.

If I were YouTube, I’d think long and hard about a business model based on cats flushing toilets and flatulence flambe. Anyone with any kind of professional interest in their video content will soon realize that YouTube’s platform is increasingly a commodity, and that if your content is 1) really good, and 2) embedable, you’re pretty much good to go, regardless of which platform you use.

There's also a line of thinking that aggregators like YouTube have tremendous power to draw and retain an audience and that if you're not visible through the most popular aggregation brand then you're not really visible at all. For content, if Google can't see you, you might as well not be on the web. YouTube is the video platform with the reach closest to that kind of power.

That said, Viacom owns some popular brands. Maybe the exposure won't equal what it could get through YouTube, but maybe its solution is good enough. It's not like Viacom is just throwing up walls and saying it won't share. At least Viacom has gotten that much right. And it wouldn't be bad for the web if distribution was less centralized, more dispersed.

The Wasington Post's new OnBeing feature has gotten a lot of people talking. I thought it was interesting, but I also thought it would be good to prod Rob Curley into talking a little bit about what it takes to pull off a project like this. Much has been made about the high quality of the project, but when I saw it was not how slick it was, but how smart it was -- it's about content, not equipment or technology.

I asked questions, and Rob was gracious enough to answer them.

For me, the money quote:

The bigger question to me is not whether a smaller newspaper could do it, but would a smaller newspaper want to do it? It seems to me that when organizations (regardless of size) really want to do something, it gets done.

What would it take?

An inexpensive point-and-shoot camera from Best Buy, or even a pawn shop. A tripod. A non-distracting place to shoot. iMovie (which is free on Macs.) A simple index page for the project on your web site that has links to the video and maybe some thumbnails and a short description.

And then the real key: an interesting person who is OK with talking about his or her life.

User generated content isn't really something that began with the internet. In one form or another, it's probably always been with us. When I think of this history of modern media and communications, I think back to the 1920s and Ralph Peer, who traveled the back roads of the south making acetate records of country and blues players, or John Lomax, who also sought out obscure folk songs. Peer uncovered two of the early giants of country music -- Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family. In a way, the Bristol Sessions were the UGC of the day.

In the 1940s and 1950s, just about anybody could walk into a record shop, enter a sound-proof booth and record a record.

Elvis Presley first entered Sun Studios in Memphis to record two songs as a birthday present for his mother (or so goes one version of the story).

The other night I watched A Face in the Crowd, which is the story of a hobo who is discovered by a radio reporter making her living recording on-the-street vignettes of everyday people. The 1957 movie may be Andy Griffith's finest acting performance, but the main reason watch the movie is what it says about media.

Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes is discovered right about the time TV is becoming a powerful force in shaping pop culture. In fact, one of the charters in the film says, "Let's not forget that in TV we have one of the greatest vehicles for mass persuasion in history."

The initial public appeal that makes Rhodes famous is his natural, one-of-the-people manner. He uses radio to speak directly to his audience and is natural and uninhibited. At one point, he says, "back where I come from if a fella looks too dignified, we figure he's fixin' to steal your watch."

As the story progresses though, the public persona of Lonesome Rhodes is just an act. He becomes mass media.

The movie got me to thinking: Right now, the internet still seems very democratic. We all have a voice. But you've got to know that big media would love to reign in this anarchy and exert control in order to make revenue and profits more predictable. Is the internet entrancingly democratic, and big corporations and governments can't change it, or will the rich and powerful eventually use the internet to exert the same influence over our decisions and buying as it once did?

Sp that's my musing brought on by a 50-year-old movie. I think it's a point to ponder.

Jimmie Rodgers was never corrupted, nor the Carter Family, but they paved the way for Faith Hill and Tim McGraw.

People like Steve Yelvington and Vin Crosbie often share their speaking schedule, so I guess I should, too (actually, these groups often like speakers to help publicize these events).

• Inland Press Association, Key Executives Conference, March 4 - 7.
• Drilling Down on Local, March 19 - 21, sponsored by the Kelsey Group. (Check the link -- impressive line up of speakers).
• April 7, New England News Forum.

Still tentative, though I'll certainly be attending, is NAA's Growing Audience Seminar, June 5-6 in New Orleans (I'm now a member of NAA's new audience development committee and continue on as chair of the Digital Media Federation's (NAA) audience development committee).

Scripps won't sell or spin off newspapers, according to CEO Lowe.

There was a big fire in Knoxville. Jack Lail suggests that it is a "9/11 moment" in how media coverage has changed, at least for Knoxville. I just want to add: If your media organization isn't ready for the UGC this sort of event will generate, then you'll simply be left out of the conversation.

You don't want to be left out of the conversation.

Being left out of the conversation equal irrelevance in an era when anybody with a blog or a camera can make a contribution.

Does your newspaper.com violate Guy Kawasaki's top 10 stupid things to hinder market adoption? I know some that do.

When I see surveys about self-reported web usage, I see fuzzy numbers rather than actionable precision.  That said, it's clear that the uptake for web video is growing. Newspapers that haven't started on the video track yet need to take note.

Today, I read Dan Kennedy blast media companies for apparently trying to rip off people who contribute UGC. I watched a very interesting video about Web 2.0. And I read Marc Glaser's report on We Media.

There's a book end of attitudes about big media companies and distributed media. On one end is the suggestion that MSM's only interest in UGC is as free content, and on the other end, the meme that MSM is just big, dumb media that somehow stands apart from social media instead of a part of we media.

Glaser's report indicates that many of the participates in We Media do in fact see UGC as a ticket to "taking back control" of the means and methods of publication, but that doesn't mean MSM publisher is looking for UGC as a way to save costs on content production.

Take Bakersfield.com, for example. Visit and invest some time to dig into the community building effort there. Adding that functionality wasn't cheap, but more importantly, there is a real effort there to build community, not just generate free content. TBC does actively solicit user-submitted news and feature articles for the web and print editions, but most of the UGC that comes in through Bakersfield.com is never even surfaced in any meaningful way. It survives purely as part of conversation, not content aimed at replacing paid staff. In fact, TBC has three or four people on staff just to handle the load of all that UGC.

Is that cheaping out on free content?

To do UGC right is far from cheap. It takes good people and good software.

Look at this post from Amy Gahran about YourHub, if you don't believe me. YourHub Denver now employs a staff of 25 people, or so. Granted, many of them produce staff content to supplement the UGC, not just manage it, but without that effort, there would be less UGC.

Kennedy isn't the first media pundit to put forth the meme that media companies are just exploiting contributors with UGC efforts, but the attitude ignores one important fact: If people didn't get something out of their contributions, they wouldn't write, shoot and submit. Not all compensation is monetary. MSM companies that make available a distribution channel for UGC assume the financial risk associated with the effort (a risk not shared by contributors), and provide a valuable service to contributors looking to reach a wider audience than might be available to a solo act. Yes, MSM getting into UGC are hoping that the effort will generate audience, and hence revenue, but it's a complete misunderstanding of the economics of the matter to say the whole process is just a rip off. You've got to start some place, and maybe some day UGC will generate sufficient revenue to justify monetary compensation for contributors, but for most newspapers still incubating UGC, that just isn't possible right now.

Of course, I'm one of those corporate MSM guys who believes in UGC, so you might think I have a conflict of interest here.

Here's the thing though: As I watched the Web 2.0 video, I revisited a thought: "We are the media." And by We, I don't just mean the so-called citizens of citizen journalism. We also includes the MSM. Like it or not, every MSM outlet is part of the conversation. Some are reluctant or even resistant contributors to the conversation, but every report in MSM is ripe for citizens to expand on, comment on or react to.

Those of us who work on the MSM side of the conversation also believe that in building the means of participation we aren't just looking for free content -- we believe in the conversation. That should mean something.

Questions for Rob Curley about OnBeing:

• Is this something you think the average daily newspaper can copy? If you didn't have the resources of WaPo, how would you do it? Can a small paper do it?
• How important do you think the format is -- studio environment, HD format, etc? to the impact of the content?
• How big of a role does the name and resources of the WaPo play in being able to convince interesting people to participate?
• How much time and effort does it take to find people interesting enough to profile in this manner?
• How much talent is involved from the journalist in bringing forth the person-behind-the-person aspect of the pieces -- the real personality?
• How much of an audience do you project will get hooked into OnBeing? How much of the ability to grow audience for this is dependent on it being a product of WaPo?
• What is more important in retaining audience, format and formula or the ability to find compelling people to profile? Can you build a trusted brand for OnBeing that will allow for a few pieces that don't resonate with the audience because this or that person turned out to be not that interesting?
• Or is the idea that a talented journalist can draw something interesting out from any person you put in front of a camera?
• Do you wind up with profiles that simply fall to the cutting room floor?
• How much time and effort goes into finding the right people, and do you prescreen, preshoot as a sort of audition?
• If there were imitators from other papers, would that help or hurt the concept -- would all boats rise because of the spreading meme, or all boats sink because of a saturated market?

Rob, should you choose to answer -- in the comments or on your blog is fine -- the questions need not be answered sequential or in total.  The main thing I'm trying to get at is beyond the cool factor, is this really something the average newspaper in America could or can copy, and should local news producers even try, or if they do try, is the high end approach of the WaPo required?

Quote this:

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care, either."
— Arthur Sulzberger in Haaretz (via Gawker)

Eat The Press also notes:

In the interview, Sulzberger also confirms that after its official launch, Times Reader, the paper's internet edition for newspaper traditionalists, will be a pay service. Right now, it's in beta, and free.

To quote myself:

Here’s when newspapers will stop rolling presses: When digital delivery has become so much more efficient that the cost savings will entice publishers to essentially force subscribers to give up print. Revenue will have to get better of course, but what I’m saying is that the killer of print won’t be so much lost revenue or increased revenue opportunity, but cost savings — eliminate the press, the press men, the trucks, the drivers, the newsracks … all of those polluting, environmentally wasteful inefficiencies of print delivery. Some day, that will very much tempt publishers. But we’re still years away from that … say two to five years. But when mobile devices get better, or digital ink arrives, or households become widely wired at 10mb, then publishers might have the efficiencies needed to kill print.

Two caveats to begin.

First, I didn't attend Tom Mohr's presentation at NAA/Connections. I didn't make a conscience effort avoid it, but it also wasn't a priority. I pretty much wrote off Tom Mohr based on his E&P column a few months ago (off line now, but bits can be found through this TechMeme link).

Second, I have an obvious prejudice in favor local journalism. It's what I've done all my l journalistic life.

Here's a bit from E-Media Tidbits:

... moderator Tom Mohr (founding director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University) broached the thesis of the death of local as an organizing principle in an interactive world.

"People flock to task sites like MySpace, and today all 'locals' meet at the task," he said. "'Local' is indefensible online."

Mohr believes that newspapers can't perform the same functions online as in print due to the lack of network effects, no scaled platform, missing bargaining power and no favored status at the key gates. His suggestion -- that only a newspaper consortium that joins forces with big allies could survive on the Internet -- wasn't discussed in depth.

There's why too much generalizing here to grasp, but let's talk about the future of local and why, based on this and Mohr's previous writing, that Mohr is wrong (and just as it's worth noting Mohr's present affiliation, it's also worth noting that Mohr was an online executive with Knight-Ridder, not exactly the best example of a newspaper company that got it right online, and KR's primary failure was its lack of respect for local).

To believe Mohr is to believe that local news has no value. This is demonstrably not the case, because well executed local news sites do bring in traffic -- not as much as I like or want, but there is an audience there. And there is every reason to be believe that local news will continue to have value. Long before there was digital, local news ceased to be a dominating force (but there's a line of thinking that blames post-Watergate newspaper attitudes for this, not changes in the wider culture), but local news is still vital to any community you care to name.

But the real illogic of Mohr's thesis is that local will have value if we all just join the Borg Collective and publish on a common platform and in a common location. Suddenly, all of the local content newspapers produce will be attractive to people because it's aggregated in one spot. Somehow, this equals scale and because it "scales" people will flock to it. In other words, people who won't go to the local newspaper.com will go to the national newspaper.com to find the same news they could have gotten from the newspaper.com in their community, if it existed.

My suggestion to Tom Mohr: Rent the move Tron. The MCP will not save newspapers.

Or to put it another way, socialism will not save newspapers. The Switzerland Mohr dreams of would kill innovation, would kill the ability of journalists to serve their communities and would alienate broad swatches of audience. Local needs local brands serving local communities to succeed.

The whole Web 2.0 crowd would like us to think that we all just sing Kumbaya together, but then you have supposed Web 2.0 companies acting like nothing more than packaged good media thugs. Latest example: MySpace.

The Ask a Ninja vlog isn't happy with MySpace. On Friday, the popular videobloggers posted a note expressing their displeasure with MySpace's policy of deleting links to other video-sharing sites.

"Right now if you link to anything at a site like "http://revver . com" (remove the spaces)," the videobloggers write, "Myspace will delete the link. Try it. That sucks right?"

This quote found via Online News Squared:

"Students do not relate to newspapers at all, any more than they would to vinyl record."

-- A teacher in a Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education study that found teachers are using newspapers less and less in the classroom. Here.

It reminds me of a garage sale I had a few years ago. We had some LP records in a box (we collect them, being the Luddites that we are), and a little girl took one out of the bin and said, "Daddy, what's this?"

Someday, a little girl will come to my garage sale and pick up an old historical-headline newspaper I'll be selling and she'll ask, "Daddy, what's this?" And when daddy says, "That's a newspaper, like granddad used to read," she will get a puzzled look and say, "but I read a newspaper on the computer."

"Where's the news media at," is a good question in this video shot by a homeless person with P&S camera.

Via Matt Waite, who observes:

What caught my attention is that a homeless woman — who lives in a tent on the side of the road and has more worries than I can comprehend — can take a point-and-shoot camera and with no training, put together a short, compelling video clip and publish it for the world to see. How many college educated, regular-paycheck-getting reporters in your newsroom can do the same?

What she did isn’t high art. It isn’t going to win an Emmy, but go here, watch the video and tell me you wouldn’t do cartwheels if reporters in your newsroom were bringing that kind of content to put on your site.

It wouldn't take much training to get better video from a reporter with the same equipment. Your competition is doing it, why aren't you? (Note: Your competition now includes homeless citizen journalists).

The remaking of the L.A. Times internet efforts continue, including an Internet 101 class for all staffers (I'd love to be a fly on that wall).

I don't get putting a break on blogs:

Blogs: Effective today, there's a moratorium on new blogs on latimes.com. We're going to take several weeks to analyze the two-dozen or so ones we have, how they're performing and if we have the right mix. During this period, Betty Rinehart and her crew will provide supplemental training for the existing bloggers and develop the criteria and a process for adding new ones.

I think they should be encouraging people to dive right in. Fail fast. Learn and move on. In this era, you don't have several weeks to stop moving forward, especially in an area as important as blogging.

Insightful piece from CJR on the state of newspaper journalism. A few quotes:

We are still very early in the evolution of the form, but surely industrious bloggers won’t always need reporters to package such materials before they commence picking them apart. Mainstream journalists are making a mistake if they believe their ability to collect and organize facts will continue to make them indispensable.

This fits in with my recent post on blogging and disruption.

But the extra value our quality news organizations can and must regularly add is analysis: thoughtful, incisive attempts to divine the significance of events — insights, not just information. What is required — if journalism is to move beyond selling cheap, widely available, staler-than-your-muffin news — is, to choose a not very journalistic-sounding word, wisdom.

In order for journalists to impart wisdom, they must become personally invested in their coverage. This is part of personal journalism.

The CJR piece advocates something I've shied away from in my own writing on personal journalism: Do it in print.

Combine what Mitchell Stephens is saying, that print cannot survive without bringing forth more informed insight from reporters, and what I'm saying, that online news cannot succeed without a personal voice, and have bookend predictions that definitive-voice journalism is about dead.

No one is suggesting that reporters pontificate, spout, hazard a guess, or “tell” when it is indeed “too soon to tell.” No one is suggesting that they indulge in unsupported, shoot-from-the-hip tirades.

It remains one of my concerns that once most, or all, reporters are expected to bring more of themselves to the story, the less intelligent among them, the less insightful, the less mature, the less industrious, will in fact spout and rant and substitute shouting for wisdom. That is the slippery slope we're on, but I'm not sure we have any choice.

(link via: Tom Abate)

Alan Mutter on why political news is failing newspapers and a few thoughts on how to respond.

To be successful in the future, newspapers have to insinuate themselves into the lives of their readers by consistently delivering must-read, must-see, must-know information that makes them happy, sad, mad – and glad they're spending 20 magical minutes a day with the only thing left in the world that doesn’t require a power supply.

Trying to save print is a losing battle, of course, but print could use a little more life. Either way, the place for newspaper journalism to insinuate itself is back in communities, be they geographic defined or topically bound.

Writing print headlines is an art. They must accurately reflect the story, fit to space, and help sell papers off the news stand. I've known many copy editors who took great pride in their headline writing talent.

On the web, those same artful headlines are positively counter productive.

The new art, if you can call it that, is writing headlines that suit the needs of readers who scan quickly for information and also are spidered well by search engines. It's less glamorous, but certainly more important under the circumstances.

Cnet offers up a good article on newspaper.com SEO.

News organizations that generate revenue from advertising are keenly aware of the problem and are using coding techniques and training journalists to rewrite the print headlines, thinking about what the story is about and being as clear as possible. The science behind it is called SEO, or search engine optimization, and it has spawned a whole industry of companies dedicated to helping Web sites get noticed by Google's search engine.

It's clearly having an impact.

In November, Nielsen/NetRatings ranked Boston.com, the sister Web site of The Boston Globe, as the fourth-most trafficked newspaper Web site in the country, even though its print circulation is ranked 15th by one audit bureau. "We're regularly beating the bigger boys, like the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal...and part of the reason is SEO," said David Beard, editor of Boston.com and former assistant managing editor of its print sibling, The Boston Globe.

"We have Web 'heds.' We go into the newspaper (production) system to create a more literal Web headline," said Beard. "We've had training sessions with copy editors and the night desk for the newspaper. It's been a big education initiative."

That's how you do it.

Martin Stabe addresses the age old question of blogger vs. journalist (age old in Internet years!).

This is a reaction post, not so much a response post. I don't really have anything to add to Martin's excellent points, but it does prompt me, remind me that there are related topics to cover.

First, some preliminaries: Regular readers will know that I define blogging as a conversation. Good blogging isn't just spouting and not responding (i.e., definitive-voice journalism). Yes, the word blog covers both technology and a whole host of self-publishing paradigms that are unrelated to journalism. And every point that Martin makes about blogging not necessarily being parasitic to MSM is also true, but it's also true that linking to multiple sources and contributing a level of expertise to the conversation is also a form of journalism. Elitists in the profession fail to see this.

A common meme among Trad J's that Martin also touches on is that blogging won't destroy Trad J. The answer, of course, is "probably not." And as Martin says, blogging may be more of a threat to traditional publishing than it is to definitive-voice journalism. But don't count on it.

Here's why blogging is a threat:

• There's a lot of them. In the Attention Economy, there's only so much time. The more blogs to read, the less time people have for your publication. Add in YouTube, MySpace, craigslist ... you get the picture. Newspapers aren't competing just against TV, radio or cross-town rival any more. We are competing against everything. That may be one reason newspaper.com sites get so little traffic as they do, even as by traditional standards, they deserve more.
• Blogs can make self publishers money, and in the future more will make money, and they will make more money. It isn't just about Google AdSense or BlogAds any longer. Now you have Federated Media and targeted recruitment ads. We'll see new blog related revenue models spring up as people continue to innovate in this space.
• Blogs are now an accepted platform in the media space. This means more traditional advertising dollars will flow to blogs both in advertising and sponsorships. Marketers will especially recognize the value of specialized, quality, niche blogs and pay a premium to get sponsorship placement on those blogs. Independent journalism of all stripes will become more common.
• Every dollar that flows to a blog is one less dollar for newspapers (though this isn't necessarily a zero-sum economy), but more important than dollars is time, and that is zero sum.
• Self-published, community sites are going to continue to grow and the good ones will get traction. We're going to see more sites like the New Haven Independent and Colorado Confidential. These deep-in-the-community sites have a real chance to resonate with local audiences.

These are all disruptive, innovative changes. Disruption works in two ways: It's death by a thousand cuts, and it's also new entrants starting out with good enough and getting better. Blogging -- be it text, audio or video -- is on a classic disruptive course, starting at the low end, where the incumbents don't see an opportunity, and building something of value.

The usual course of history is that once disruptors get a foot hold, the game is over. Disruptors win and sustainers lose. Reversing course is hard and expensive.
Sadly, I hear a lot of journalists on the web arguing in favor of sustaining the status quo instead of embracing innovation. Incumbents often lose not because the executives don't see the need for change. It's often the middle managers and staff on down who block change.

It looks like Yahoo! is in hot water with users. Again. This time, they're forcing Flickr users to switch to Yahoo! IDs.

Making users in a community change online identities is a really, really, really bad thing. It's bad business. It's bad user experience. It's bad customer service. It's bad PR.

Yahoo! did the same thing when they took over Launch, the once really cool music and video service.

Sure, I have a Yahoo! ID, and in the case of Flickr, for me, the switch wouldn't be that big of a deal. I hardly use the service. But I'm still a little irritated over the Launch thing. I put a good deal of effort into that virtual identity, and it was an identity already take by another Yahoo!, so I lost everything. In protest, I may just be done with Flickr now, too.

Yahoo! is really just another big packaged goods media company that doesn't really get the Internet.

Do you want to be a great journalist and have a great career? Well, Sans Serif offers up 12 rules to help you along. As for the half rule -- I broke it 14 years ago and am very glad I did.

Bob Stepno uncovers a list of writing tips by Janice Castro from years ago. I actually have that same list printed and saved in a folder some where. Reading it again, it still holds up. I could use to follow Castro's advice a little more closely.

One comment:

Castro rejected the advice of "so-called experts" who claim that online communication has to be done with attitude. "No," she said. "It has to be high quality. It has to be you. ... Voice, accuracy, reliability and trust matter more than ever."

I agree with everything, except I wouldn't mistake "attitude" for personal voice. Personality needs to shine through in good online writing. People need to have a sense that there is a real person talking to them. Attitude can actually be counter productive because attitude can seem affected and facile. A real, authentic voice is the voice of one-to-one communication.

A few years ago, day-parting was all the rage.  Web sites put a good deal of effort into creating special editions for evenings and weekends, when traffic is down.

The Orlando Sentinel is putting its resources behind an opposing strategy: Make the morning site stronger, hitting hard on the time period when the audience is the biggest.

Building on strength is generally a good idea.

Distributed media has given us all a voice. You know longer need to own a printing press to enjoy the freedom of reaching a wide audience. But those same tools are also in the hands of big media, and when employed, they can also expose crank readers to a little ridicule. Here's the original Chron podcast, and the hilarious YouTube mash up that resulted.

This is conversational media. It's not always pretty.

UPDATE: Poynter tackles the podcast and asks, ... "what does it actually do to further the mission of the newspaper?"

Well, it reflects concerns of real readers about coverage in the paper, whether right or wrong; it provides one more entry point into a conversation between the paper and the community; it gives people with complaints a wider audience to air their grievances; it removes one more brick in the wall between editorial decision making and community input -- notice all of these things that I list are about conversation, which should have always been the mission of the newspaper, but is now the imperative of the newspaper.

When Napster was busted by RIAA, I predicted (just in conversations with friends) that file sharing would just go underground.  I figured people would create private networks that would enable file sharing well below the radar of RIAA or any other industry agency.  I don't follow P2P closely at all, so Tubes might not be the only service of its kind, but it's the one I just found out about.  When people are sharing files through private, invitation-only, trusted networks, what is the RIAA going to do if they can't get in?  Tubes only runs on Windows.