Howard Owens

Jeremy Mayes participated in a test of Google print ads and found the results less than impressive, and concludes:

I will say that based on the results form the test the newspaper ads would have to be pretty inexpensive for this model to work in certain markets, and, tracking results at the level in which PPC managers are accustomed too isn't there - or it least it wasn't there for me.

I think overall there is potential for this program - pricing, trackability and ease of setup/scheduling will be three of the biggest issues from what I can tell.

(Via The Praized Blog)

I've been aware of this for a while -- there are people out there who believe that newspapers made a mistake by giving away content online. "Gee, if only we hadn't done that, we would be better off today," goes this bit of magical thinking.

Here's the latest, via Romenesko:

"I am very concerned that many other publishers with high-quality news brands have devalued their brands by trying to charge in one medium (print) while giving away access to brands and content in another medium (online)," he says. "But I understand that it’s very hard to change strategies."

The Wall Street Journal can get away with charging for content online because it's very specialized content, specialized to an audience that has either personal disposable income or corporate credit cards. Few other publishers can match that combo.

For the rest of us, we must deal with the reality of two perceptions by readers. One is that the price of a newspaper subscription is really to cover the cost of the service of delivery. They aren't really paying for the content of the paper, but the pulp and delivery itself. And second is that on the web, the reader pays for deliver via paying for all his own equipment and net connection, while the practical cost of delivery for the publisher is near nil. Readers expect advertisers to actually pay for content creation, and if we can't sell enough advertising, well that's just our problem, not theirs.

We devalued quality content with the penny press, and low subscription fees for the past 100 plus years has only fueled the perception that content isn't worth paying for. It isn't just a web thing.

When I was with Scripps, some of us often worried about this -- that the newspapers would be sold in favor of the higher margin cable networks. We comforted ourselves with the knowledge that the Scripps family trust wouldn't allow it. Today is probably not a happy day in Scripps newspaperland.

UPDATE: Word is now that Scripps isn't looking at a sale, but splitting off the newspaper division into a separate company. Presumably, a prviate company. That would be very good news, especially for the online division, imho, because all of the great, talented and intelligent people driving online strategy, making Scripps one of the very best online newspaper companies, would maybe have more latitude for innovation (not that they don't already have a bunch of it).

UPDATE II: Jon Fine posts on the topic. Which prompts me to this thought: What if the Scripps family bought the newspaper division and took it private?

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 has a number of fantastic tips for journalists shooting video for the first time.  Many of these, such as not vocalizing during an interview, not stepping on a subject talking, and holding shots for extra time, take practice.  Today's journalist should be learning these tricks of the trade with any video equipment available.

Here's a lesson for journalists everywhere: Be fair, considerate and humble when dealing with sources and subjects, or you will be humbled. The people formerly known as subjects and sources are now publishers, too, and they have quite powerful tools at their disposal. That doesn't mean cower, of course, but arrogance has no place in modern journalism, if it ever did.

Yes, Virginia, there may be a Santa Claus, but Lucas Grindley begs to differ:

The moral of the story is always: Invest in good journalism and magic just happens.

It’s like Santa Claus. Be good and you’ll get presents. Be bad and you get coal, or layoffs. Editors who listen to this story are taught it’s heroic to cocoon into their newsrooms and block out the influences of declining revenue and circulation numbers. Report more or edit cleaner and then, magically, world peace.

To a large degree, I agree with Lucas. My impression is that most of the newsroom advocates who decry cuts, beg for money and believe that cutting profit margins to protect current staffing levels can save newspapers are those who believe that Big-J journalism has big mo-jo with readers.

If that were true, how do you explain the Los Angeles Times? Here's a paper that consistently wins Pulitzers and just as consistently watches its circulation decline (in a growth market, no less). If great journalism sells papers, it ain't seling the Times. Meanwhile, the tabloids in New York, which serious journalists scorn, were among the only papers in the most recent Fas-Fax reporting circulation increases.

The spend-on-journalism evangelists miss a key point, as Grindley alludes: There is more ailing print journalism than just the quality of the news coverage.

Newspaper readership has been declining since the 1930s, accelerating in 1970s, and again recently. Each new generation of Americans read newspapers less than the previous generation, and they never stop reading less, from 18 to 80. This isn't really a chicken-or-egg argument, because it's clear that circulation declines did not begin with staff reductions. Circulation declines begin with people finding newspapers less useful and less relevant and less convenient.

Sure, we need to do better journalism, but that isn't necessarily your grizzled city editor's journalism. It is journalism that fits better into people's lives, either because of topic, delivery or presentation. It is journalism that includes conversation, makes no pretense to omniscience and exudes personality. There is still a place for traditional enterprise reporting, but we also need to reinvent journalism for the 21st Century. We need to think differently about how we do our jobs, how we prioritize our time and what we consider important.

Until we think differently about journalism, all of the money on Wall Street won't save newspapers. Once print journalists stop thinking like print journalists, then we can better discuss how best to invest in the new journalism.

UPDATE: Related, Andrew Grant-Adamson takes on a CJR editorial calling on billionaires to take over big newspapers. He notes that rich owners want to make money, too, and are just as likely to make staff cuts as publicly traded companies. He also suggests that newspapers have fallen out of favor with Wall Street because of flat revenue, but I think the lack of confidence has more to do with the inability of newspaper companies to articular a clear vision of the future. We have been clinging to a dying business model (including how we report and present news). Related to that thought is Alan Mutter on newspaper valuation.

In his post about Apple's new iPhone, Scott Karp writes:

And DESIGN is now a key differentiator at the convergence of media and technology. That’s why Google, with its elegant and obsessively copied search interface design, and Apple, with the virtuoso design of everything it touches, are the dominant forces.

That’s why Jason Calacanis is searching for the top web designers.

Design. Elegance. Simplicity. Innovation. That’s where it’s at.

Davin McHenry offers some quick tips on getting a newspaper newsroom to embrace video, and make it better.

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.

Publishers all over the US singing hosanna this morning with news from Gallop that 44 percent of Americans still rely on print for news, while half that amount turn to the web first.

The danger lurking in the stat is that it doesn't address ongoing advances in technology and how that will alter readership and revenue.

When I was a beat reporter, I worried about getting too close to my sources. It's hard not to be friends with people you speak with often on a cordial and sometimes informal basis. It's hard to not feel like you owe people favors because they feed you tips or good quotes. Every newspaper's code of ethics talks about accepting freebies, but what about the gifts of good information?

I can't ever remember pulling punches out of friendship, but it would be legitimate to ask if I ever unconsciously altered the tone or tenor of my coverage because of a personal relationship with a public figure.

I know a former reporter who saw an elected official hit a parked car once and then walk off without leaving a note. The reporter didn't tell a soul for years, and eventually confessed to me as an act of contrition. Small incident, but under the circumstances (law and order type of politico), was newsworthy. The reporter dealt with this official everyday and needed that pipeline of easy access. It's hard for me to pass judgment on my friend, because I knew and liked the same politician.
The beat system is what creates these kinds of relationships. Edward Wasserman says beats need to go.

In an age when there are no deadlines, and everything should be published to the web first, and reporters must move adroitly and quickly, beats make very little sense.

As Wasserman alludes, the no-beat system puts more pressure on editors to make smart decisions about assignments, putting the right people on the right stories, and giving the go ahead to the right enterprise pieces, but journalism is moving at a pace now that demands efficiency and high level functions. Beats are bureaucratic and cumbersome.

(via Romenesko)

UPDATE: Follow from Romenesko:

Steve Brill adds to the discussion of beats: ... "I always found that sources would still cooperate after a 'bad" story' -- and respect you more -- if you didn’t suck up to them or compromise for them, as long as you also made sure to treat them fairly, which includes giving them a real, explicit shot to rebut anything negative you might be writing."

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.

For those interested in web video, social networking and indie film, Four Eyed Monsters is getting a lot of buzz. Here's the the trailer, which will show that significant bits were shot with low-grade equipment. Here's the NYT review. I haven't seen the movie yet, but it seems worth seeing.

Eliot Van Buskirk, writing for Wired, lists seven reason DRM is toast and iTunes is in trouble.

Think of iTunes as the Mac of 1984 and MP3 as the Windows of the same era -- who won? The OS locked down to specific hardware, or the OS that could run on just about any machine?

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.

Sometimes, Nick Carr can be so damn funny, and so subtle in his satire that it takes a few graphs to catch his drift. This piece on "Instant Jouralism" is classic.

ShopLocal gets it. They've created a new vLog that is both creative and useful content and has a revenue model.

Disruptive advertising models are doomed on the web. To succeed, media companies must find ways to make revenue generation a seamless part of the user experience. Of course, the advertising and retail practices must be ethical and transparent (which only serves to make them more effective anyway), but traditional disruptive advertising just won't work in the long run.

Greg Sterling likes it, too.

Kudos to ShopLocal for being innovative. The challenge here will be to reference ShopLocal enough to achieve the desired objective but not so much that the show appears to be pimping the site. That’s a tough line to walk.

It will be interesting to see where Jeff Jarvis and his cohorts take DayLife. It's an attractive site and looks like it could be a useful way to consumer big media news -- but that's just it, it's big media. From Jarvis, I was expecting something more social and more networked. It's not revolutionary, from what I can see, but certainly evolutionary. The TK API is a smart move.

Some consumers are turning the tables on the record business -- suing over DRM, which prevents people from legally shifting music from one device to another.

DRM is why I don't purchase music from iTunes.

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.

One of the darlings of hyperlocal citizen journalism in 2005 was Backfence. Well, 2007 kicks off with news that there are huge fissures in the facade. The question is, does this bode ill for the content model, or is it just poor execution by Backfence?

Previously, we talked about the poor content performance of many of these citJ sites.

Frank Barnako writes:

The concept of local, local blogs is wonderful. But it has problems.

• No news operation can rely on part time volunteer reporters.
• Hyper local blogs have a long way to go to get the respect, authority, and credibility that existing media have, as flawed as the "placebloggers" may think MSM is.
• Advertisers can't be bothered wondering whether local blogger's small audiences will make the registers ring. And they don't trust bloggers, either.

Blogs that do work are driven by strong personalities, either as writers or publishers. Think Calacanis' Weblogsinc or Denton's Gawker group, Arianna's Huffingtonpost.com (and soon more) or Scoble, Mark Cuban, Daily Koz, and so on. Backfence's Potts could be one of them. He is a guy with lots of opinions. Too bad Backfence editorial content didn't seem to have any.

The stories on Backfence sites are mostly objective, and certainly not provocative. They are almost "corporate." No feathers ruffled by these postings. Yawn!

Meanwhile, in the comments of Peter Krasilovsky's post (link above), David Chase shares:

We’re always appreciative of feedback if you want to check out the site at sunvalleyonline.com. The thing I’m proudest of is how we’ve ignited the community to contribute news, pictures, personal stories, classifieds, etc so 80-90% of our content is created by the community.

Chase admits the site isn't a cash cow just yet, but participation must certainly proceed revenue, so maybe Chase has found the model.

UPDATE: More from Greg Sterling.

Local is really about getting good data (including from users) and getting to scale in a cost effective way, recognizing that building a successful brand in local and the usage and monetization that implies takes not only the right vision, but tremendous persistence and lots of patience.

More from Beet.TV:  Anil Dash talks about blogs and "Google juice."

The system, he says, rewards frequent updates.  It's just about getting linky love from Google, but people find sites valuable and relevant when they are updated frequently. As for links, the more you give, the more you get.

Good lessons for blogs, but more importantly, good lessons for newspaper web sites.

Build your newspaper.com. Think like a blogger.

Beet.tv says that in 2007, web video is moving to the big screen in a big way.

As that happens, the need for quality video from newspapers will only grow.  The window of opportunity to come in low and learn and experiment is closing quickly.

CBS is claiming that connected households watch more prime time TV.

I don't believe it, but that's based entirely on my singular anecdotal experience.

I watch less and less TV all the time. I get almost all the entertainment and news I need from the web. I find now that I can survive just fine with out a TV. Just give me a laptop and a broadband connection and I'm happy.

Lawrence has a new site called BoomerGirl.

First impression: It's well thought out, great target demo, attractive and well executed.

So does this prove that Lawrence can thrive in the post-Rob-Curley era, or that Rob left behind a talented and well trained staff? Or both?

Visit DailyCamera.com and pass your mouse over a headline -- you get more information about the story. Do you think this helps readers or annoys them?

Good usability practice is, don't hide navigation information. Does this break that rule?

Amy Gahran uses the practice as a jump off for a post about good web headlines.

Online headlines should be intuitive, not cryptic, vague, or leading. That is, simply by reading a headline you should be able to grasp what a story's about. A well-crafted online headline provides the reader with sufficient information and incentive to decide whether to click a link to read the story.

Recently, I was thinking about subheads. Subheads are used in newspapers to help explain headlines that are creatively written to fit and sometimes, therefore, vague. On the web, there should be no need for subheads. Every headline should tell the story, and any headline that requires a subhead or a story summary is a bad, bad headline. The practice of just shoveling print headlines onto the simply must stop.

If you want to know why I do what I do, read this article by Danny Westneat. I was once that local reporter, too. I believe what local reporters do is important, every bit as important as any inside-the-beltway scribbler.

Though I think Westneat sets up a false dichotomy here:

That kind of small-town newspapering is considered boring today. Unhip. Supposedly we're all too globalized or tuned into Web video clips to want such provincial news.

So-called serious journalists turned their noses up at hyperlocal newspapering long before the web. It was never considered glamorous enough or at all important. If you want to know why newspapers are struggling, you can't blame it all on publishers and bean counters. A good deal of the fault lies with reporters and editors who declined to take local news seriously, unless it involved scandal and malfeasance, or consisted merely of dull recitations of city council meetings.

I was guilty, at times, too.

Next graph:

My own view is the opposite. I think intensely local, professionally gathered news is due for a comeback. It's the one thing you can't get anywhere else. The story of the death of the Valley Daily News is that it blew it when it combined with its partner, the Bellevue Journal-American, into one amorphous, suburban blob.

The problem was: The paper was no longer local enough.

And here, I think, Westneat is saying essentially the same thing. Local papers lost their way, not just because of a craven lust for profits, but because the newsroom lost its focus. You can blame smaller staffs, if you want, but you also have to ask how well these smaller newsrooms have used the resources they have.

My fellow journalists: The ball is in our court now. The web is ours to take. Are we going to just try to reproduce the same irrelevant and boring journalism that helped kill print, or create a new model of journalism for a new medium that is both engaging and relevant?

Via Romenesko.

I'm a huge Rodney Crowell fan. His three most recent albums have been among the best country music ever recorded. He's a poet and a master of melody.

Vince Gill, not so much. I give him his due, though, he's an exceptionally talented musician. Some of his early stuff is actually good.

Last week, Billie and I were driving through Boron listening to X-Country on XM when a line in a song caused us both to crack up: "It's Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night that Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long."

The XM display said the band was the Cherry Bombs. Never heard of them.

I just a little googling. It turns out, they are the Notorious Cherry Bombs, a country super group first formed before either Gill or Crowell were stars. They recently put out a CD together.

Here's the video for the song.

From another newspaper owned by my company, a SoundSlide that is smart: An inauguration speech with supporting photos. I like this because it's more interesting than just an audio of the speech, and it is the kind of journalistic value we still need to keep in mind. It's not going to drive traffic, but it does serve the current audience well. It provides a public service for those people who really do want to hear the speech and may have otherwise have missed it. It's also the right choice of technology because capturing a speech on video in a way that is interesting and compelling and not ugly requires more equipment and more time than I generally advocate for multimedia.