Howard Owens

Lucas Grindley blogs about how citizen-driven, niche microlocal sites are a threat to newspaper franchises:

Letting a geographic niche site grow under your feet is what the Innovator's Dilemma warned against. An effective low-end competitor pushes the original business to focus on the high-end market. For newspapers, that means focusing on large advertisers and rich readers. Inevitably, the formerly low-end competitor makes headway into the high-end market. And the original business slowly loses all market share. Read the book. This exact plot has unfolded many times, in many industries.

I would add, it's not just local news blogs and blog-like sites that can slowly slice away bits of audience from newspapers, but blogs covering other topics beyond its own geographic borders. Don't buy the myth that blogs are just mindless rants of people with too much time to parse the latest political controversy. There are blogs about food, gardening, law, entertainment, and on and on, that are written by smart, informed experts. More and more bloggers are finding interesting and relevant revenue streams, but a blogger need not be in the money to steal your audience. And an expert blogger doesn't need your content as a cruch, either.

It's rarely just the one cut that kills you.

Here's more on hyperlocal news sites from NYT.

Interesting observation from Scott Karp: News is fundamentally a social and shared experience. Think of the water cooler, or what a publisher once said to me -- I want to walk into a coffee shop and hear people talking about what they just read in our paper. Technology doesn't change that, just makes it easier, more distributed and more obvious.

It's also worth considering Scott's other point: That news is niche. Rather than worry about customizing a general portal, figure out what niche you can serve with your site and then make that a social experience.

What niche might your newspaper serve? Your community, maybe?

I kind of jump on Perry Parks in the comments on this post. I don't take lightly, I guess, to accusations that I've given up on journalism. Everything I do is about trying to save journalism. Our only chance to ensure there are reporters performing watchdog roles twenty years from now is to ensure that we get the business and content models right in this turbulent, fast-changing media era. And in context of Perry's comment, on a post aimed squarely at encouraging journalists to learn and grow and better understand what is going on today, I can't help wonder what drives somebody to defend a mode of thinking that clearly isn't working.

Readership has been declining since the 1930s. Every generation of Americans reads newspapers less than the previous generation, and the current generation of young Americans is abandoning printed news faster than any previous generation. The best-funded, highest quality newspapers in the country are watching circulation plummet. Survey after survey, going back for decades, reveals that people trust media less and less. Studies have shown that newspapers often fail readers in areas of relevance and usable information.

Clearly, the Church of Journalism has failed us.

It's time for a change, and the first change needed is one of attitude. We need journalists ready, willing and prepared to create journalism for the 21st Century.

I believe that is journalism that is more conversational; with fewer pronouncements of omniscience; that involves the people formerly known as the audience more in the news gathering and editing process; that doesn't sniff at "citizen journalism" as something unholy; that seeks truth through all available tools and modes, without fear, favor or ego; that understands people have a right to know what we know when we know it; and that is willing to evolve as we learn more about how people use new technology. Finally, it is journalism that understands the value of community, that treats the small story with the same respect as the big and doesn't put winning prizes or feeding egos ahead of serving friends, family and neighbors with information that is relevant and helpful.

If you care about journalism, that is the kind of journalism you care about today.

Parks writes in the comments:

This post isn’t just a wake-up call to reality. It’s more like surrender. Once you abandon “a strategy of aiming for journalistic excellence” as unworkable, it doesn’t much matter what you do next. New technologies, platforms and business models only help journalism if journalism itself survives.

Of course journalists should understand modern business pressures and learn the myriad new ways of distributing information. But if they’re not telling important stories in engaging ways — if they’re just making videos of cute dogs and blogging about bacon — then they’re no longer journalists.

What Parks misses is that if we don't adapt to how media consumption is changing via new technologies, all the journalistic excellence in the world isn't going to save journalism. Putting journalistic excellence first -- a worthy consideration, but irrelevant in context -- is like editing a story before it's written.

A bit of this debate is ridiculous. Of course, journalism is going to survive. But the question is, who's journalism? The journalism of the princely print reporter, or the journalism of unpaid volunteers doing catch-as-catch can reporting with little or no training. There will be journalism, because people will always want information, but if we don't understand the competitive dynamics of this new era, there will be no journalism as some pros define the word.

For Parks, understanding the new technologies is just a way of understanding new distribution channels. But the web isn't a distribution channel. It is a culture. It is an ecosystem. It is something far more dynamic than just another way of distributing prose. If you want to practice journalism, quality journalism, that is meaningful and relevant, you need to learn what that requires.

In context of my original post, my position is: Don't just be good journalists, be smart journalists. You should understand your business, your market and your milieu. Being good is not good enough. You need to know why circulation is declining, why ad revenue is slipping, where advertisers are going, and how people are using digital media. You need to learn all you can about what is working and why, and what isn't. This will inform the kind of decisions you make about coverage, what tools and techniques to use, and most importantly, the kind of training you'll seek to further your career. You'll also understand better why some of your bosses are doing the things they're doing, and if they're not doing the right things, give you a clue to look for a new job.

As for Perry's snark about dogs and bacon, it's just a red herring. It is a favorite tactic of the acolytes of Big-J Journalism: reduce citizen media to it's most trivial and ridiculous extreme. It is easier than examining the good and serious work non-professional contributors are making all over the world. Just as dangerously, it ignores the fact that for every minute a person spends watching videos of dogs dancing on bacon is one less minute that person spent reading your weighty report on the town council. You need to understand, maybe, why that person chose YouTube over your idea of news.
One last thought. In his own blog, Perry writes:

That new world is coming, and it certainly won't resemble the ink-smudged hegemony newspapers enjoyed for much of the 20th century. But people are also making predictions and assumptions about what modern news audiences need and desire that have yet to come true. Universal access and the ability for every person to write their own stories might be cool and useful, but demand for people to help package and organize the world -- that is, editors -- hasn't abated.

My first reaction was, blogs and reader participation are a far greater threat to the job security of editors than reporters. There is a far greater need for paid professionals to go out and gather and report information than there are to filter it. Bloggers are nothing more than distributed filters, distributed gateways. Current affairs bloggers rely on professional journalism, but in aggregate often do a better job of surfacing the most interesting and relevant bits (and putting it in context better) than any one news organization's small circle of editors. Anybody who has spent six or more months relying on blogs (especially while using an RSS reader) for primary news consumption knows this. Bloggers and blog readers often also make excellent copy editors and fact checkers. I'm NOT arguing that editors should be replaced by an army of bloggers, but professional journalists shouldn't get too comfortable in their assumptions about what is necessary and what isn't.

The other response-worthy note in Perry's quote above is "... people are also making predictions and assumptions about what modern news audiences need and desire that have yet to come true ..." Well, not exactly. It's not all predictions and assumptions. Information technologies have been part of media consumption for more than two decades now, and the web is more than a decade old. There is a wealth of literature available for anybody willing to dig in and learn what history tells us about how media has changed and is changing. We are well past the assumption stage, and our predictions are pretty well informed.

I'm still not over yesterday's loss. The Chargers have nobody to blame but themselves. Too many turnovers, too many dropped passes, too many stupid penalties, too seldom executing at critical times. You can't give Tom Brady a chance to win the game, and that's what the Chargers did. There's times you get beat, and times you lose. This time, the Chargers lost more than the Pat's won. Too bad New England showed so little class in victory.

I guess I'll have to find something else to do with my time Feb. 4.

UPDATE: I'm not the only one saying it.

Clearly, the better team lost. And, all things considered, it deserved to.

Dropped passes. A dropped interception. An interception that was later dropped.

What could be laid at the coaching staff's feet were two decisions – one, to forgo a field-goal try in the first quarter and two, to play a prevent defense at the end of the second quarter that prevented nothing (as it often does).

But the players knew they blew it. A team that didn't make big or multiple mistakes in closing out the season with 10 straight victories made them yesterday. In abundance.

“It was uncharacteristic,” center Nick Hardwick said. “ ... Our forte is not beating ourselves. And we ended up doing it.”

I've seen a lot of headlines saying "Scripps to sell newspapers" the past few days. At no time, however, has any executive with Scripps said there is a plan to sell the newspapers. What was said was that Scripps was looking at strategic options for separating the newspapers from SSP. That's very different from selling them. Romenesko has a copy of a memo from CEO Ken Lowe addressing these points. My experience with Mr. Lowe is that he's a cautious communicator, but honest and forthright. I think you can trust this memo is a fair representation of where Scripps is at in this process.

Bryan Murley was kind to interview me for his Innovation in College Media blog. You can read it here.

Andy Dickinson offers up some category types for newspaper video. Good idea and could be helpful. I'm not sure yet I'm in love with his categories or definitions, but I don't have anything better to propose at the moment.

I think there is a class of video that embeds in a story, that relies on quick, lo-fi production and is short and single-shot, but I'm not sure calling it "disruptive video" is quite right. I say that mainly because what Andy calls "channel video" can also be disruptive (and should be), such as Roanoke's TimesCast. How about "Attached Video"?

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.

Chuck Fadely offers up a good tutorial on encoding video into Flash (the only way you should be publishing video on the web).

If, for any reason, you don't have the software/hardware (it's takes some time and horsepower), the guerrilla tactic is to use Google or YouTube. You save your video in one of the supported formats (check the upload instructions on either site), and let Google pay the processing price. I prefer Google video because the quality is better and you don't get the "YouTube" watermark on your video. Google also offers an upload tool, so once your video is uploaded, you can walk away, shut off your computer and do something else. Google will e-mail you a link to your video after it's encoded. The one disadvantage of Google is there's a price for the better quality Flash -- it's a bigger download, so people will even a hint of a slower connection will find it harder to watch.

Again, that's a guerrilla tactic for those producers who have no other way of publishing in Flash. It is better to publish into your own player, but it is better to publish through Google than to subject users to a WMV or QT file, because with either format, you risk shutting out some portion of your audience.

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.

In the midst of this discussion with Andy Dickinson, I thought, maybe I need to do a post that rounds up, clarifies and even modifies my position on newspaper video. I don’t expect this will change any body's mind or end the debate. Maybe the only thing it will accomplish is helping me organize my own thoughts.

Spending Money – I’ve advocated buying lo-fi equipment because I have enough experience in the newspaper business to know that funds are always limited. Nobody is getting a blank check to do this stuff. Whether you have $10,000 or $100,000 at your disposal, you should get the most bang for your buck. And if you are a lone reporter with no money but your own, and no other way of doing video, you should buy whatever you can afford and start producing your own video. If you can’t post it on your newspaper.com, post it on your own blog (you do have a blog, don't you?) and start looking for a new job, because you’re working for a dying newspaper. In other words, don’t wait for some executive to sign a big check, just do what you can with whatever you can. Get started. Now.

Quantity vs. Quality – To me, this is a bit of a false dichotomy. I would never advocate accepting poor quality for the sake of convenience or laziness, but if you’re equating quality content with quality equipment, you’re setting yourself up to overspend on hardware and software, or unnecessarily delaying the launch of video for your site.

Quantity as a strategy – Concentrating on producing as much video as possible has two advantages. First, you’re getting your audience used to seeing video on your site because there is something new everyday if not more often. Rob Curley has said it takes 18 months to introduce something new to audience before you know if it's working. I agree. You are not going to get mass audience acceptance and grow audience with just one video, or fewer, a week. Second, the more you do, the more you’ll learn. Newsrooms need to be learning organizations, especially now, especially when it comes to video. If you buy only one reasonably expensive set up, you’re not going to be a learning organization. You’re going to concentrate the effort on just one or two people. Getting more people involved in video has all kinds of strategic benefits that have nothing to do with video. It helps change the culture from a print-centric environment to one that sees the whole media pictures.

The importance of quality – You should do everything you can to create quality video. It doesn’t take talent to create video worth viewing (though, obviously, it takes talent to produce great video), but it does take training and enough intelligence to think ahead about the video you need and how to get it. You must understand how your equipment works and its limitations (whatever the equipment is). You must be mindful of audio, lighting, framing, vocalizing during the shoot, subject, starts and stops and your shooting environment. You can get good enough video with any video camera if you know what you’re doing. Point-and-shoot doesn’t mean just point and shoot mindlessly. Be smart about it.

What to buy – I would rather see as many cameras in the hands of as many journalist as possible. So, if you only have $10,000 to spend, I’d try to outfit the entire newsroom with the best stuff you can afford in audio and video equipment rather than get only one decent kit. If you can afford lots of lo-fi cameras and one DV kit, then by all means, get the kit, too. Just don’t waste all your money on only one set up.

Video topics – I think many people, when they read me advocating lots of lo-fi equipment, they assume that I mean we should be using this equipment to produce stand alone stories – meaning, news segments that stand apart from any written words. That’s not what I’m saying at all. There is a place for story pieces in newsroom video production, but there is also tremendous value in just getting quick quotes from news subjects, or just a few seconds of an accident scene, or a little bit of a high school football game, and attaching it to a story. Done right, this kind of video adds tremendous value to a story and has high reader interest (if embedded in the story page for easy viewing).

Photographers shooting video – Previously, I’ve advocated the idea that photogs need to get more involved in video. I’m going to modify that. Great still photographers should spend most of their time shooting great stills. Stills have tremendous value online, but more importantly, you’ve got to have great stills for print, and print ain’t dead yet. Photographers are the one area of our newsrooms that still needs to be dedicated primarily to print. That said, if you can afford to get your photo department one quality video kit and convince them to rotate using it, and they produce just one kick-ass piece a week, it’s money well spent (provided, of course, you’ve taken my advice and also bought point-and-shoots or other lo-fi equipment for your reporters).

Video as disruption – When I talk about disruption, I mean this -- come in at the low end, figure out what job people are trying to get done, be good enough at that job, and start growing an audience. This is a fairly proven strategy. It is disruptive to television because the vast majority of TV news stations are still stuck shoveling segments of their news broadcast onto the web. Rather than trying to figure out how to make video more suitable to the web, TV news departments think the same glossy junk they put on TV is going to work on the web. I’m not seeing that model get any real traction. So while TV is stuck in a sustaining strategy, newspapers have an opportunity to use video in a fresh way, a low-cost way that gives them a great deal of flexibility to learn and grow and adapt to the audience.

Video blogging – video blogging is great. There are some great examples of newspaper.com vlogs, such as TimesCast in Roanoke and what the New York Times is doing. If you’re going to do a vlog, it is something you commit to, plan and do right. It takes more than one person to do well, and will require the support of management. To do right, you are going to need to invest more heavily in hardware and software. But it is something you should do when you’re ready for it.

The YouTube effect – There’s a lot of anti-YouTube bias out there, just as a few years ago, there was a lot of anti-blog bias (and I supposed still some residual anti-blog bias, but it’s melting away). Newsrooms have been painfully slow to adopt and adapt to blogging, much to our collective detriment. Now the same mistake is being repeated with YouTube and video sharing. It’s critical to really dig in and understand YouTube, rather than take positions on it based on cursory looks, faulty assumption, professional arrogance, other’s myth-making statements, and so on. YouTube can teach us a lot about what the audience wants and where it is going, but we’ll only learn those lessons if we invest time in understanding YouTube, the good and the bad about it. YouTube is complex and multifaceted. It’s more than just people dancing with cats, or fake porn, or clips from Comedy Central, or LonelyGirl15. It’s all of that and more. Do you really understand why YouTube is popular? Understanding YouTube is tremendously important for anybody with any role whatsoever in newspaper.com video strategy.

Learn, learn, learn – everything about your organization’s, or your own, video strategy should be about learning and getting better. You need training material, training sessions, critiques and a steady demand to get better with each and every video. Learning and teaching needs to be a key component of your video strategy.

No options – newspaper video is not optional, just as newspaper blogging is not optional. These are things newspapers must do and learn through and grow if they want to survive as news organizations.

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.

Legitimate small businesses are starting to sour on paid search, according to this Business Week piece.

My guess is that so many made-for-paid-search businesses, with ads that lead to sites users aren't really looking for, has depressed clicks. Blame Google's lack of quality control.

The good news for newspaper.com sites is that there is a crack in the business model. The bad news is that if potential advertisers have one more reason not to trust online advertising, they are going to be harder to sell.

Robert Niles has the best take yet on the trouble at Backfence: Fake grassroots don't grow.

You can't have community without staffing, and that staffing must be as passionate about the community as you hope your participants will be.

A bunch of people concerned about the state of journalism are in Memphis debating (Leonard Witt says there's a lot of yelling) the future of reporting. I wish I could be there. A key document inspiring the discussion is Geneva Overholser's white paper, "On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change."

A few months ago, I wrote a critique of the paper. This seems like a good time to link to it.

It's hard to summarize this post from Andrew Grant-Adamson on local news, but his stream-of-conscience essay is well worth the read. There are lot of reasons we have gotten away from the strong local news coverage that build newspaper franchises. It's not just penny-pinching publishers, nor is it ego-driven reporters refusing to cover the new church organist, but a combination of bad decisions over the years. Now, with the web, and it's unlimited space, multiple entries, and the nature of distributed media, give us an opportunity to get back to the basics.

This is one of those ideas that I wish I'd launched myself: TVJersey (via Mindy McAdams).

It's all about coming in at the low end with easily available tools and seeing how it works. The CMS is MoveableType, the video player is YouTube, but no word on the video equipment, except that they're automatically snarfing UGC from YouTube. And that TVJersey-tagged feed is maybe the most brilliant and original idea -- other newspapers have consumed YouTube feeds via tags, but this is the first time I know of a newspaper site advertising a specific tag word for CitJ producers to use so the content appears on the site.

Ryan Sholin has a nice wrap up of some of the recent posts around our corner of the blogosphere on newspaper video, along with a few additional comments.

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.

Quote from Gordon Borrell:

For newspapers, their aggressive approach to the Internet will only slow the overall deterioration of the company. It really depends on whether the newspaper company gets it, and understands that this is a completely new medium that has very little to do with their core product.

Newspapers need to start doing more than being on the web. They need to get the web.

I've said it before, and even though every time I say it, it draws criticism, I will keep banging out the same note: newspaper video cannot and should not be TV.

Here's Beet.TV on the video efforts of the New York Times, and specifically on David Carr's video blog.

Andy Pleaser in his set up:

It's indicative of an opportunity to create a new kind of video. It's not slick. It's not broadcast TV. It's just good, fun, solid video reporting.

Carr:

The idea of what looks good now has changed. People want what looks real. I'm obviously not a television person either by voice or by look. I look more like a homeless guy in Times Square than I do a TV star. At the beginning of the year we started talking what we would do the Carpetbagger. We talked about two cameras, more production, and I said, 'You improve this at your peril.' It has to look natural. It has to look fresh.

Lucas Grindley notes that craigslist is failing to listen to a specific segment of its users -- small businesses.

But Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster are such socialists, are so hostile to business, that it's hard to believe they care about the needs of business owners in their own community.

I've said it before, in the end, craigslist socialism will be their undoing.

Mindy McAdams is kicking up a fine video glossary for newspaper video producers. It's the start of another good training aid.

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.

Slashdot: "Do you tell a job candidate how badly they did?"

My interview process goes like this:

• Sort through resumes and pick the five or six most qualified candidates
• Phone interview, with questions aimed at determining skill and experience level and hone in on whether the candidate has the right stuff for the job
• For those who make the cut, usually no more than three, an in-person interview, where my questions are designed to determine talents and tendencies

On step one, resumes that don't make the cut go back to HR with no further action on my part. On step two, candidates who won't get called in for an in-person interview will be told why. I try to be nice, but I also want to be fair and honest. If there is something a candidate can do to improve, he or she deserves to know what my evaluation is. I may be wrong, but it's up to the candidate to decide whether to take my advice or feedback. On step three, if the candidate is ruled out in that interview, I'll give some feedback on improvements, unless something has come up that makes me think the person is of a personality type not to care or listen. The hardest call to make is to the guy whom I like, but just got beat out.

In every case where I think the person has a bright future, but just isn't right for the job I need to fill, I want to be as helpful as I can be. I've been around long enough to know that the person I don't hire today, might be the perfect hire for something else tomorrow. I don't know if it's realistic to hire somebody you've previously turned down -- I've never had that opportunity -- but you never know. At least, I think people deserve an opportunity learn and grow, and if I can do one small thing to help in that regard, then maybe the process has been worthwhile.

If you're not using LinkedIn, you're not really serving your professional life very well.

Guy Kawasaki offers ten tips for getting the most out of LinkedIn. I think I've used every tip to some degree at one time or another. LinkedIn proved especially useful during my most recent job search, and I realized if I had put it to better use a year earlier, I would have been better off all the way around.

But LinkedIn isn't just for finding jobs or finding potential hires. It's also for keeping abreast of colleagues and your industry. For example, I always find it interesting to read new connections of other newspaper executives -- they're often to non-newspaper people I've never heard of before working at interesting companies, which might give a clue about new ideas about to surface.

My LinkedIn profile is linked under "pages" in the right nav.

My previous post on boring slideshows generated a fair amount of comment and a good deal of disagreement.  In this Poynter interview with Joe Weiss, the inventor of SoundSlides, Weiss seems to imply that yes, there are a lot of boring slideshows on newspaper sites, and he offers an antidote.

The most important thing is not your photojournalism. The most important thing is not your audio journalism. The most important thing, overall, above anything else, amen, to the end of it, is the story and how well you communicate that to the human being who's on the other side of that computer.

Of course, if you're thinking of the best way to tell the story, the best way to make it meaningful for a site visitor, you're knee-jerk reaction won't necessarily be an audio slideshow. If you're thinking about all of the options, you will also consider video.

All of you journalists at big, unstable metros hoping for a multi-billionaire to save your ass, please read this Michael Wolff column. It should scare the crap out of you.

(via Frank Barnako)

A couple of interesting thoughts on hyperlocal community.

First, Susan Mernit:

One thing it's hard not to mention when we get into this hyperlocal, sustainable business question is the issue of scale. Most of the really good--and viable--hyperlocal sites--are small businesses that serve a focused audience, with decent ad revenues but nothing like the big numbers VCs need for their $5 to $13 MM investments. Sites like Jonathan Weber's New West Network, George Johnson's Buffalo Rising, Jarah Euston's recently sold Fresno Famous and Deb Galant's Baristanet--as well as Lisa William's H20town--work because they are small and focused, because they have the same focus and value as hand-crafted cigars--they're not meant to be big networks creating tons of shareholder value--they're services for a specific time and place--built by a participant.

Fred Wilson:

We believe the big opportunity in user generated content is aggregation. My blog will only generate $30k per year in revenue. But Techmeme, which occasionally links to my blog, can generate a lot more. Because they aggregate the content of hundreds, maybe thousands of blogs.

So where does this leave newspaper sites? I still believe that there is a place for newspapers to provide a community platform for participation, but newspaper.coms cannot forget their roles as aggregators and deeply involved participation leaders.

Eat the Press has a few theories about why the media is fascinated with Second Life, and none of them have anything to do with the business value of SL.

I still say SL is a nice toy, a fun place to play (or looks like it, as I've never done it), but makes is a horrible place to spend R&D resouces, no matter how liberal your R&D policy or how innovative you think you are.