Howard Owens

NOTE: My goal with "MP3 of the Day" is to find great, free, non-DRM MP3 downloads. If you have a tip for a good source, leave a comment.

Over the past few days, I keep flashing back on a blog post by Pete Townshend titled "Open letter to David Lister." I've referenced it in conversations with colleagues, and I was thinking of it when I wrote this post on video and personal communication.

Townshend:

I think rock music is about to throw off some of its testosterone-driven defiance. I may be wrong, but wherever I look today I see younger musicians demanding a new level of intimacy from their audience. 'Unplugged' rock is not exactly what is happening. It is more a return to the traditions of Bert Jansch, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Ewan McColl, Dave Van Ronk, Big Bill Broonzy, Joan Baez and even early Bob Dylan. This is not entirely about Protest, rather about music performed gently that expresses a single idea along the single pathway of the conscience of an individual musician daring to speak up about something they might uniquely believe. Even anger is delivered gently.

Every where I turn today, I see media that is more intimate and more immediate taking root and growing strong. It's not just music, though I see it in Paste Magazine and hear it on XM Cafe. I read it in blogs, watch it in the best YouTube videos, vlogs and independent films. I view it in photo sharing sites. It's what drives social networking. People are reaching out to touch other people, not be impressed by concepts or ideologies, wowed by trends or gather just one more factoid. They want the human spirit and the human soul.

I tried to express this before: The personal computer, a mobile phone, an iPod, a DVR, etc. are all intimately personal devices. The radios and televisions we grew up with were shared experiences. They captured a transitory signal, and if we happened to tune in at the right moment, we knew what was seen and heard was being simultaneously seen and heard by others. When the signal was gone, the moment was gone. We could only recapture it in a personal way when we gathered around the water cooler.

A cassette or VHS tape made media somewhat more personal and shareable, but we still lacked a certain level of control.

Digital technology changes everything. Now, what we download, we own. When it arrives on our computer screen, it is ours to keep, if we want.

Once we own something, it changes our relationship with it. We want it to mean something to us. We want to interact with it, mix it or answer it.

For that segment of the web audience who has tuned into the power of blogs, I think this is what has energized their passion for blogging. The best bloggers write in individual voices. We know they're real people. We feel like we can engage in a conversation and get an answer.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the new journalism is Personal Journalism.

Personal Journalism is just as ethical as old-school public journalism. It still values facts, fairness, truth telling and good reporting. It's just that personal journalism is written differently. It is written from one person, a person we can identify and identify with, for one person. The byline is more than a name under a headline in Personal Journalism. It is the persona and the personality. Personal journalists do more than report the story. They let us see at least a little about who they are, what they believe, what drives them and what they find important. If a personal journalist has a bias, we know it. That is part of the truth-telling tradition all journalists should endorse, but only personal journalists make it a practice.

Personal Journalism is shareable because people like to share what has touched them in a direct, intimate way, be it a song, a video or a good story.

Personal Journalists let other people help with the fact gathering or putting the facts in context, because Personal Journalism is part of a conversation, not a proprietary, walled garden.

Personal journalists can be writers, recorders or picture takers, but for the sake of clarity, I've written the definition from a writer's point of view.

In the future, all journalists will be personal journalists. Within five to ten years, if you're not a personal journalist, you will be out of work, and if your news organization hasn't embraced personal journalism, it will be out of business. Well, that may be going a bit too far, because I'm not sure personal journalism is required of those who report for print or broadcast, but it is required of online journalists. So long as print survives, even in newsletters for the elderly and the elite, public journalism will survive. In the online world, personal journalism will be the only journalism people consistently seek.

In the past, I've struggled for the right words to describe where I see journalism going. I think with the term Personal Journalism and my proposed definition, I might be on to something.

UPDATE: Having slept on it a night, I think -- maybe this isn't something we adopt or impose, maybe it is just how we evolve. Maybe it's inevitable. But then I think, but if this is where the audience is going, and it's what our disruptors do (such as blogs), then if we don't consciously make the switch, can we survive?

Check out this picture taken by Bill Blevins.  This isn't your typical, idylic lighthouse photo.

NOTE: My goal with "MP3 of the Day" is to find great, free, non-DRM MP3 downloads. If you have a tip for a good source, leave a comment.

Those of you who long for private ownership of newspapers, it's time to revisit Wendy McCaw.

For all you video producers in need of royalty-free music, I just found Sonic Imagery.

So Seth Gitner doesn't like my "MP3 of the Day" feature.

I'm starting to think the idea has enough merit, and that I can continue to find MP3s for some period of time.

Also, people do like it. I'm having fun with it.
I'd kind of like to keep it going.

One lesson of the web: Whether it's an e-mail discussion list, a forum thread, a blog, or any sort of web site, people generally like you to stay on topic. And while I tend to broadly define howardowens.com as a "media blog" of my media interests, it's also clear I most often groove in one particular niche (online newspapers) and that is probably why post people come here (or consume the feed), and the whole MP3 thing is really kind of a specialized niche all its own.

Also, I flashed on Jim Romenesko, who is best known for his Romenesko blog, but also runs Romenesko's Obscure Store and Starbucks Gossip. He's not mixing topics, and he's not a bad guy to pattern your blogging after.

So, I just registered MP3Caravan.com. I've installed WordPress. That's as far as I've gotten.

It will be some work to move all my previous posts over. It will be some work to move all my draft posts over (I create the posts well in advance, usually in blocks when I have time, so I don't risk running out). The blog needs a template (any volunteers?). It needs some plugins.

In other words, there's a lot of work to do before it's a proper MP3 blog.

I may finish it in a week, a month, or never. In the meantime, I'll keep posting my picks on howardowens.com, because the vote in favor so far is about 3-1 with lots of abstentions.

I'm taking the motto for MP3 Caravan (at least initial thought here): "We're on a quest to find the best Non-DRM MP3s on the web." Quite a mouth full, but it sums up the idea nicely, I think.

That doesn't mean I won't go off topic here ever again. It is my blog. It's supposed to be a place of personal expression.

UPDATE: I successfully imported the previous posts. And I have a working RSS feed.

Ryan Sholin hits the nail on the head:

Instead of giving us a site focused on OUR TOWN, YourHub and Backfence and now American Towns (Fremont edition here) give us a site focused on THEIR BRAND.

Ever since YourHub was introduced two or three years ago (and I worked for an E.W. Scripps newspaper at the time, so I knew it was coming even before launch), I've been struggling with the words to explain why I disliked it. I talked about it being too corporate. Too top-down. Too big media. It isn't really about creating community. It's about creating a place to drop advertisements. And it shows. It shows in spades. But in one clear sentence, Ryan sums up the problem with a lot of these "citizen journalism" sites, and explains why they're failing to take root.

Ryan then writes, "I can’t emphasize this enough. No one wants to connect with your brand, they want to connect with their town," but I would say people don't want to connect with a town. They want to connect with their friends (and potential friends) and neighbors so they can talk about their town and their lives.

Lucas Grindley is worried: Newspapers are not ready to shift to the digital world.

Readers first started moving online in a trickle. It was like a small crack in a dam, leaking water. Then the crack got larger and people started moving online more quickly. What’s about to happen is that dam is so weak it’s going to break. Readership and revenues are going to move online in a rush.

Sadly, newspapers don’t have enough online infrastructure to catch the impending flood. If the dam breaks now, they will be largely passed by.

I've been talking for a couple of years about the coming tsunami, the tipping point, the day the walls come crashing down. I'm not predicting it, or saying when it will happen, or if it will ever happen, but I believe newspapers need to operate as if its inevitable and will occur soon. You can call the potential seismic shift of readership whatever you like, but there is a very high likelihood that one day a lot of people will wake up and say, "You know, ever since I got my broadband connection, and learned about RSS, and started to read blogs, and found craigslist, and got hooked into YouTube," I don't read my newspaper. I need to cancel that subscription today."

What if 20 percent of your newspapers' subscribers woke up to that same realization within the span of one or two months? That sounds like carnage to me. There is no amount of Fas-Fax spin that can explain that kind of drop to advertisers, especially if a mass of newspapers are reporting similar sudden drops.

It seems a lot of journalists try to comfort themselves with the thought: They need us. If we don't cover government, who will? My question back is, then how do you explain the roughly 50 percent of the population that has discovered that they can get along just fine without you? It's fine and dandy to pat yourself on the back for doing a good deed, but if that good deed ceases to be economically viable, then what? I wouldn't count on people subscribing to newspapers because they feel some civic obligation to keep reporters on the City Hall beat.

Newspaper people have a vital and urgent need to figure out the digital revenue model. I doubt there is a single newspaper.com generating enough unleveraged revenue (meaning, totally independent of the print product) to support current news operations. That being the case at this late date, about 12 or so years after the first newspaper.com was established, is scary.

But we also haven't nailed down the content model. For too long, and with too much surety, newspapers have been trying to reproduce the print edition online, instead of figuring out what is unique about the web and building a new content model. I still sense there are too many people -- including people tasked with overseeing or producing content for online -- who are still trying to reproduce the newspaper on the web. This is a blunder of potentially unrecoverable consequences.

By the time the tsunami hits, it's going to be too late to get a clue. Now is the time to take a blogger to lunch, start steering the newsroom ship toward open waters, and figuring out what you really need to be doing online instead of what you're doing now.

Of all the billionaires lining up to buy metro newspapers, Jack Welch is the first one I've heard say something actually intelligent about the local news business.

"You've got to make the newsroom not control the world," Welch told the cable show's host Carl Quintanilla and Michael Wolff, a media critic for Vanity Fair magazine."I'm not sure local papers need to cover Iraq, need to cover global events," Welch said. "They can be real local papers. And franchise, purchase from people very willing to sell to you their wire services that will give you coverage."

NOTE: My goal with "MP3 of the Day" is to find great, free, non-DRM MP3 downloads. If you have a tip for a good source, leave a comment.

There is so much goodness in this Poynter essay by Keith Jenkins about how newspapers are failing, it's hard to pick just one quote to pull.

What our newsrooms do have are decision-makers who have never built a Web page by hand, watched Rocketboom, or listened to a podcast. They don't 'get' YouTube and have never heard of Flickr or del.icio.us or Boing Boing. They think viewing a 30-inch story on a cell phone is cutting-edge and don't understand that I would rather spend 10 minutes downloading littleloca videos or hanging out in Second Life, than reading their newspapers -- even the online version. They are not innovators, they are caretakers.

Read the whole thing.

Here's a piece from Kate Kaye that says the Yahoo! consortium is planning a display ad network.

I had a good talk with Eric van Miltenburg, the new GM of Yahoo's Newspaper Consortium Group, which added Morris Publishing's 27 daily papers to its partner roster earlier this month. Now the group is up to 9 publishers and over 200 paper sites.

I was interested to learn about the progress of HotJobs integration with the new partners, and whether the rumors of that classifieds network becoming a display ad network were true. "There are no specific timelines to share at this point," said van Miltenburg. "There are lot of details and a lot of opportunities that need to be vetted."

Still, he did confirm that the consortium is definitely discussing the display ad possibility, in which case Yahoo would serve the ads and both the papers and Yahoo probably would have the ability to cross-sell.

"Display Ad" usually means a retail ad in print, but some people use the term interchangeably with "banner ad," so I'm not sure exactly what the proposal is here.

That said, the whole Yahoo! deal is a fiasco -- exactly the wrong move for newspapers companies to take at the wrong time and with the wrong partner.

The smarter move, and the one GMT is trying to keep alive, is for a newspaper-company-driven consortium that has established plans, procedures and standards in place before signing on with an outside partner. And the better partner would be Google.
That's just one man's personal opinion on his personal blog.

NOTE: My goal with "MP3 of the Day" is to find great, free, non-DRM MP3 downloads. If you have a tip for a good source, leave a comment.

Rob Curley posts the transcript of an interview he did with an Italian news paper. Here's something to ponder:

One of my favorite quotes about the future of journalism was said nearly 75 years ago by the publisher of small daily newspaper in rural Kansas. His name was William Allen White, and he was hugely influential publisher in the United States during his time ...

Look at this quote from him that he wrote in a personal letter back in 1931:

“Of course as long as man lives someone will have to fill the herald’s place. Someone will have to do the bellringer’s work. Someone will have to tell the story of the day’s news and the year’s happenings. A reporter is perennial under many names and will persist with humanity. But whether the reporter’s story will be printed in types upon a press, I don’t know. I seriously doubt it. I think most of the machinery now employed in printing the day’s, the week’s, or the month’s doings will be junked by the end of this century and will be as archaic as the bellringer’s bell, or the herald’s trumpet. New methods of communication I think will supercede the old.”

What that quote from William Allen White shows me is that a publisher from generations ago knew more precisely what our industry is about then many of his modern counterparts.

Steve Yelvington, who works for a privately held newspaper company, emphasizes the exceptionally true point that many journalists who blame about Wall Street for the industry's woes misunderstand the Street's expections.

Writing for the Winter issue of Nieman Reports, economist Robert Picard says:

"In many instances, management, journalists and industry critics appear to have a skewed vision of what it is that investors expect. ... Although those who are critics of public ownership often accuse these institutions of only being interested in short-term profits, the truth actually lies somewhere else. What these investors are looking for is a good return on their money; to get that they are willing to trade short-term profit for long-term growth and stability. But most publicly traded newspaper companies offer no credible plans (or a vision) for anything beyond the delivery of higher-than-average quarterly profits. With this mentality in place, investors pressure boards and managers for high returns so that they can recoup their investments in a shorter period of time."

(Emphasis added.)

I said journalism students should blog. Mia, a second-year journalism major at Kingston University, has taken up the challenge.

Previously I had heard of blogs in passing but dismissed them as trivial online diaries most commonly used by teenagers discussing their angst. This is obviously not the case. Those on the highest ranks of the journalistic ladder are blogging. Senior broadcast journalist at the BBC, Robin Hammon, says “I think that everyone who works in industry, journalism or academia needs to blog to stay relevant and informed these days.”

I've written a bit about TimesCast, the Roanoke.com vLog. Regular readers know I'm a fan. I haven't written so much about the DelawareOnline news casts, which really pioneered video news updates from newspapers.

I've struggled with finding the language to explain why TimesCast is good, while newspaper efforts to be more TV-news-like is bad. I've used words like "more real" and "authentic," which are really vague concepts.

This morning, doing a little training with one of our editors, it struck me as we bounced between the two videos. TimesCast speaks directly to me (to you, and you, and you, and you). TV news is broadcast and speaks to an audience, the mass of humanity who has access to the particular signal. Vlogs speak to one person, which is as it should be, because the web, and web video, is about one-to-one communication. You are viewing this content -- be it vlogs or blogs -- on a personal computer. There is more of an implicit sense for the user that this is something on his or her personal machine, not the box in the living room pulling stuff off the airwaves that lots of people are watching simultaneously. When you're watching a video on the web, you may be, and probably are, the only person in the world watching that exact byte of video at that exact moment.

Video, all web communications, really, works best when it is personal and direct. That's one reason, blogs continue to grow in popularity.

Here is the essensence of the web: one-to-one communication, even as your drop your content onto a server that can potentially be accessed by billions of people.

Mike Orren, founder of PegasusNews, writes of some of the lessons he's learned for OJR. Several good nuggets:

The concept of “citizen journalism,” at least in a pure dogmatic form, is a myth. Myths, however, are critical to our understanding our world. We are often lumped in with the “citizen journalism” movement, and based on that movement’s ideals, I am honored we are mentioned in that context. However, after much reading, arguing and reflection, I’m done with that moniker. There are journalists – people who regularly utilize a set of commonly agreed upon rules to ensure that information is communicated in a fair and truthful way. Some get paychecks for that work and some don’t. And there are human beings who aren’t worried so much about rules or frequency or consistency, but who like telling stories, both visually and verbally. The Venn diagram of the latter completely encompasses the former. Journalists of any stripe are a relatively small portion of the population. They people tell stories with high frequency and are surrounded with others who tell interesting stories when they feel like it. They are a much smaller group, and you can’t count on them day in and out unless you hire them.

On the local level at least, data is what drives visitors. Stories bring additional pageviews, but more than 75% of our traffic is data – interactive calendar listings, band profiles, restaurant listings, political campaign contributions, drink specials and the like. Most of our listings aren’t found on the other local city guides – something for both traditional media and upstarts alike to think about. We’re always gratified when people dig deep into stories or blogs, but we know that the reason most people come in the door is to find out where to go and what to do. It’s our job to compel them to stay longer with good narrative content.

Local advertisers are hard to reach, but easily impressed. Local retailers, many of whom may not even have websites, are a huge class of business that is not flocking to pay-per-click ad services. And while that presents a huge opportunity, it means the hard work of picking up phones, knocking on doors and feet on the street – just like with traditional local media. However, once you get them on board, local advertisers are amazed at the precision, flexibility and business intelligence provided by online advertising. Restaurants used to paying a flat fee for ad space in a weekly are shocked that their bill is lower if you deliver fewer pageviews. Stores are aghast that you can change their sale ads every day. And entertainment venues love that you can tell them exactly which bands draw traffic on a site – and presumably to their venue.

The more obscure the content, the better. Once you’re playing on the local level, we’ve found (in general) that traffic to a piece of content is inversely proportional to how niche and obscure that content is. If we run an interview with a local band with a national audience, it’s no big deal. We’re lucky if they mention it in their blog. But, when we run an in-studio with a kid we found playing guitar in a coffee shop, he e-mails his friends and family who in turn do the same. He posts bulletins galore on MySpace. He links it in his e-mail signature. Good, but obscure content is great marketing.

Don’t fear user comments. Comments are the easiest, lowest-impact way to get users to participate and are the gateway drug to more prominent contributions. The trick is to really join the conversation and make clear what flies and what doesn’t. Most of the moderation comes on the user’s first comment, and by explaining why we’re moderating we’ve found that most of them reform themselves and become regular posters. We’ve had nearly 6,500 comments and have moderated fewer than 20. It isn’t a burden on our small staff to follow the comments – in fact, we find enough story leads in those comments that I can’t get folks who aren’t responsible for moderation to stop reading them.

NOTE: My goal with "MP3 of the Day" is to find great, free, non-DRM MP3 downloads. If you have a tip for a good source, leave a comment.

Chris Anderson writes in a short but interesting post on "the vanishing point" of news value: "The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn't relate to our lives. I'll start reading my "local" newspaper again when it covers my block."

NOTE: My goal with "MP3 of the Day" is to find great, free, non-DRM MP3 downloads. If you have a tip for a good source, leave a comment.

Yeah, you're right, this blogging thing is just a fad. It doesn't have any legs.

I guess the question needs to be asked: Why blogs at top 10 newspapers have grown so much?  At the moment, I don't have time to study up on that. Maybe more later.

NOTE: My goal with "MP3 of the Day" is to find great, free, non-DRM MP3 downloads. If you have a tip for a good source, leave a comment.

A Zogby poll confirms what is probably obvious -- most people do prefer professional journalism, especially on TV. I'm sure the Luddites will be jumping all over this one.

Careful, there.

The threat of disruption -- such as from citizen media or armature content -- isn't that it will totally replace professional content. The threat is that it will gain enough traction to make professional content unprofitable enough that people start losing jobs and some outlets go out of business.

The fact that one in two Americans like content from their peers should really be a headline in itself. That's a pretty significant number of people. It is certainly a large enough audience to take seriously. The poll doesn't address the question of age, is certainly an important consideration if you're making strategic decisions about UGC. We can guess that older people skew against UGC, and younger people are more accepting.
Me, I don't prefer one over the other. I want what gets the job done.

Besides, this poll is just a slice of time right now. It doesn't tell us about a year from now, two years from now or five years from now. It doesn't address how people's attitudes might change and how distributed media might evolve.

Think of it this way -- if Zogby had asked the same question two years ago (and maybe they did, but I don't know about it), wouldn't the results have been something like 3-1, 4-1 or even 10-1, if even one at all?

A local TV station has started posting video to YouTube. That might actually be a good use of shovelware.

They could be tagging the posts more intelligently, such as something related to the content or the community, rather than just the station call letters.

I recommend posting at least of some, like your best, most entertaining or most important newspaper.com video to YouTube.

Cory Bergman issues a wake up call for local TV stations.

This will be the year that the portals, major national news sites and other pure plays aggressively expand into local content. It’s already underway. Yahoo News, the top news site on the web, has launched local news pages along with You Witness Video, a citizen video service. IAC just premiered AskCity, a local search, mapping and events portal for each of the major markets that’s integrated with CitySearch and Ticketmaster. Google has rolled out a free service that allows local companies to host their own business web pages with the ability to offer free, printable coupons and click-to-call functionality.

Interestingly, he doesn't mention newspapers, where video production is on the cusp of exploding, and more and more IYP efforts are underway. In every market I've ever looked at, the newspaper.com far outpaces all of the competing TV news sites combined. It's been most helpful to have TV station managers sleeping at their desks. Bergman screeching in their ears about the grave danger they are facing isn't helpful.

I've been saying for a couple of years now that TV can be disrupted because they don't understand web video. Bergman, who's focus and expertise is television, says much the same thing.

The key issue centers on what local broadcasters define as “core” in their markets. Despite the fact that many local TV stations now call themselves local media companies, they still see everything through a TV prism. They haven’t branched out online beyond repurposed TV news, self-promotion and TV-centric sales. And they still consider their competition to be local TV and newspaper sites.

I think TV stations are about two years behind newspapers (that's board, general statement) in "getting it," and newspapers are about two years behind the rest of the web. that doesn't mean they can't make up lost ground quickly, especially in specific, motivated markets.

Continuing the theme of lo-fi video as a disruptive strategy, Steve Yelvington calls it the "rebar of video."

For the last couple of months I've been carrying around a cheap Aiptek video camera and showing it off, describing it as "the rebar of video." That's a reference to one of the Innosight/Clayton Christensen stories about disruptive innovation. The big steel mills were brought down by mini-mills that initially could only produce low-quality rebar (reinforcement rods, typically embedded in concrete). Well, here's the rebar. Here's the entry level.

Rebar, Toyota Corollas, transistor radios -- whatever comparison you use, it's all about disruption.

Previously:

• A round up of my thoughts on newspaper video
• Taking a disruptive path with video

I wish I were as smart (and as rich) as Tom Friedman, but I'm not. I should be flattered, I guess, that Eat the Press thinks we were separated at birth. When I had a mustache many years ago, maybe we looked alike somewhat, in a very vague way. I'm not sure how they could have gotten his picture on an item that does not mention him at all.

Romenesko also linked to the Bryan Murley interview, and pulled this quote:

Journalism schools should design their curriculum and publication efforts accordingly [and] "be even more dismissive of print than mainstream pubs are right now," ...

I find myself not quite comfortable with the word "dismissive." While I believe digital is our inevitable future, I do not intend to demean print in anyway. I still get chills when I walk into a printing plant and watch the presses run. I'm reminded of the ending of Deadline U.S.A., when Bogart, over the roar of the plates slamming against cylinders yells into the phone delivering his defiant message to a soon-to-be exposed criminal:

Ed Hutcheson: That's the press, baby. The press! And there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing!

The point I was trying to make with Bryan is that all journalists, but especially college journalists, need to be immersed in the digital world and really try to understand it. I don't think anybody who hasn't done that can really make fair judgments about what modern journalism should or can be. Print may not be dying, but we can't afford to operate like it will last forever. There may be a tsunami coming that will destroy print journalism almost overnight, or nothing like it may ever come. Either way, we can't risk clinging to traditions that may not have served us very well. Online is still our best growth opportunity, both for business and for better content.  We need to get beyond print thinking and think of the web first. The web should be first in everything we do as journalists. Making the web core to our personal and our college curriculum seems terribly important.

We need to fully understand both where we've been and where we're going.

NOTE: My goal with "MP3 of the Day" is to find great, free, non-DRM MP3 downloads. If you have a tip for a good source, leave a comment.