Howard Owens

Greg Sterling is skeptical about Jimmy Wales' new search engine. For some reason, I've been underwhelmed by Jimmy's announcement. I think Greg nails some of the reasons why the whole thing is uninspiring.

Also, I'm not one of those who says "search is broken." I think search could be better. I'm quoted anonymously in some NAA report from a year ago that I'm too lazy to go find right now** saying that "search is only about 10 percent (or was it 20?) good as it will be." I think search will get better, much better, and maybe a company other than Google (or Yahoo! or Microsoft) will make it better. Right now, however, search is good enough, and as long as it's good enough, it's going to be hard to get people to switch.

** OK, I can get you this far, the summary page. You need to be a NAA Digital Media Federation member to get the rest.

Jakob Nielsen has published his annual list of design mistakes. Read the whole thing, of course, but here's one to pay attention to:

7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement
Selective attention is very powerful, and Web users have learned to stop paying attention to any ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation. (The main exception being text-only search-engine ads.)Unfortunately, users also ignore legitimate design elements that look like prevalent forms of advertising. After all, when you ignore something, you don't study it in detail to find out what it is.

Therefore, it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements.

Davin's comment on the post below deserves to be elevated to its own post:

I will throw some gas on the fire. If you are willing to use video footage from point and shoot cameras online, I am not sure you need the high end, $4,000 camera at all. We have a pair of Canon XL2s in our newsroom and they are only rarely used. Even our most experienced shooters (including one fella with broadcast TV experience) favor our Casio Z850 cameras. They are quicker (no lengthy capturing process) and they have as good image as the Canon (once you compress the footage.)

It’s nice to have the Canon for long distance shots or internal video production. But for day-in-day-out use, we don’t need them.

As for reliability, we have used Sony and Casio consumer grade (point and shoot!) cameras for the past year without a single problem. To give you perspective how often they are used, we have shot 600+ videos this past year using those cameras.

In my own prejudiced view, there are few in any newspaper sites doing better video than Bakersfield. That said, I wouldn't want to have a newsroom of that size or larger without at least one $4,000 camera (plus required accessories). Things just come up ... and those cameras should get used, because eventually quality will matter more than it is now. A point-and-shoot looks a little silly mounted on a tripod, you know.

FreePress.net is an interesting site. It's an anti-corporate, anti-big media operation. Ironically, without big media, it wouldn't have any news. All of it is copied from professional media outlets. They run this disclaimer at the bottom of the lifted stories:

This article is copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Do you think that covers them?

Was Gerald Ford our first (and probably only) radically transparent president? Eat the Press has some amusing background.

Ford is probably best remembered as a klutz, even though he was in fact quite athletic. He has Chevy Chase to thank for the legacy, but Ford always played along.

He explained in his book, "I believe it is always better to err on the side of more exposure and access rather than less. At that time, the media and the general public still resented any hint of 'imperial' trappings in connection with the presidency or the White House."

Ford's best comeback to Chase came at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner in 1975.

When emcee Bob Hope introduced him, Ford got up from the table, "accidentally" caught the tablecloth in his trousers and dumped silverware in Chase's lap.

As he approached the podium, he pretended to trip, prompting the pages of the speech he was carrying to fly into the audience.

When he got to the microphone and the laughter began to diminish, Ford reached into his coat pocket, pulled out the real script and said, "Good evening. I'm Gerald Ford and you're not."

So did Ford's transparency help or hurt him?

My good friend and former co-worker Bradley Fikes is blogging now -- and I didn't know.  He leaves a comment on a post below, and then I know. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known. Maybe I didn't notice because he hasn't blog rolled me. The crumb.  Well, like it or not, he's now on my Buddy List.
Brad's one of the smartest guys I know, and it looks like he's writing a lot about media stuff, so you should check him out.

As much as he uses the internet, Howard Kurtz can't stop thinking like an old-fart media guy.

I like being able to click on newspapers from around the world, see bloggers smack each other around, Google any person or thing that pops into my brain, watch news videos (and some stupid stuff, too) on YouTube, and generally surf till I drop.

But while I hook up my laptop just about anywhere, IM my buddies and continually check my buzzing BlackBerry, one thing is missing: what I call Ed Sullivan moments.

This nostalgia for mass media is misplaced. Sure those Ed Sullivan moments were fun, but they were an anomaly. They were moments in time that only a Baby Boomer could love. Mass media is a relic of the 20th Century, the only period in human history in which it existed. For most of our history, communication was much more personal, often far closer to one-to-one than one-to-many. Now we're in the era of many-to-many, which has more in common with campfire media, is more of a deeply felt personal media, more in keeping with our nature. Mass media wasn't good for us. Distributed media is better.

But isn't something lost if you can wall yourself off from views and information that challenge what you already believe? If everything is ordered a la carte? If -- and this really dates me as an ink-stained wretch -- you like turning the pages of a newspaper because you might bump into an unexpected story you would never have found online? If you and your family and your co-workers are plugged into parallel media universes?

Something gained, something lost. Welcome to life, Howie. I'm not going to try and guess at how other people use the internet, but speaking for myself, I consume far more digital content these days than any other. I watch less and less TV with each passing week. I have very little time for newspapers. I still read books at about the same rate, but otherwise, my media life is almost entirely digital. And I still make serendipitous discoveries. The interconnected, networked nature of distributed media makes finding unexpected gems pretty darn near inevitable. For example, I discovered OK Go because another media blogger linked to the video on YouTube.

Let me be clear: I mostly only read media and technology blogs (the narrow focus Kurtz bemoans), and a blogger who does likewise linked to something slightly outside of his speciality, and because of that, I discovered it. And now I'm a huge OK Go fan. And it all happened by accident, and despite my narrow focus.

It's not exactly an Ed Sullivan moment, but I bet you even Howard Kurtz has seen "the treadmill video." And we all know about Lonelygirl15. But more importantly, we all know about YouTube. That is the Ed Sullivan moment in the many-to-many era.

It's a cacophony out there. Take the recent finding that there are 13 million blogs in America. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to read 13 million blogs. Writing one takes up enough of my life as it is.

You have to learn how to manage your media. I think that's something digital natives do naturally. It's old-media think to worry about consuming it all. You consume what interests you and what you happen to find by following links. You determine what is important (remember, you are Time's person of the year), what you need to know, and how best to find it.

Sure, Paris Hilton topped Google searches in 2006, but that doesn't mean there weren't more people staying abreast of Iraq. Iraq news, along with the other major headlines, is easy to find and plentiful, and while it might seem that the same could be said of Paris, but in reality, serious news organizations largely ignore her. If you want Paris news, you've got to search it out or know where to look. I know some serious-minded people who like celeb gossip, so gnashing of teeth on this point is rather snotty. The real question is, if people need to search for Paris Hilton, are MSM organizations really doing a good job of serving the needs readers and viewers? As for younger audiences, they seem to get the Daily Show jokes about Iraq as equally well as the ones about Paris Hilton.

How do we pick out the stories, sites, blogs, videos and info-shards that are worth our precious time? We can follow the electronic links from people and places we trust, but in an odd way, that's bringing back the old gatekeeper role, with popular portals granting admission to a selected few content creators.

First, it's not bringing back the gatekeeper role. The gatekeeper has always been with us, it's just that the job descriptions and qualifications have changed. It's no longer crusty city desk editors and executive producers. It's you and me. As to Howard's first question: You just do it. You figure it out. You are in control. You'll find some good stuff, and you'll also waste some time, but at least you aren't being forced to pay for the whole CD to get just one song, or buy the whole paper just to read the comics.

... awkward old Ed Sullivan would have a hard time making it today. Maybe he'd have to sell his best segments on iTunes.

Exactly, old Mr. Kurtz. Now you get it. Assuming Mr. Sullivan produced content worth buying and mastered promoting himself and his content on YouTube, his own blog and MySpace. I think Topo Gigio would be a big hit on YouTube, unless Mr. Sullivan tried to make it all too slick.

(hat tip to Romenesko)

UPDATE: Welcome Romenekso readers.  This blog is mostly about media (from the perspective of a guy who has worked most of his life for newspaper companies), so feel free to look around. Here's the RSS feed.

Ron Bloom has a long piece about how social media is changing the advertising game. He predicts that within five years, 50 percent of all content consumed will be produced by the consumers. That's going to have powerful impact on how advertisers reach audience.

As user-generated media networks continue to grow, we are seeing the emergence of a "Mash-up Economy," where creation and consumption of content is a part of a new language of the commerce that is already evident in every element of our social and media landscape. Make no mistake about it, the impact of the Big Shift is already proving to be far greater socially and economically than the introduction of the web, and potentially even more fundamental than the impact of Gutenberg's press. Are you ready for the change?

Over the past 10 years, audiences have been steadfastly and dramatically deserting traditional media channels, not because of the availability of new media, but rather because of the simple lack of quality and social value to be found over conventional media channels. There are virtually no traditional media channels that can report parallels of the unprecedented growth of new media over the last 10 years. They are simply churning customers from an ever-diluting pot, in the process of eliminating whatever brand goodwill they had created.

Bloom also introduces Fart's Law:

With the pace of technology and social evolution increasing so dramatically, we are at a point where the technology innovation described in Moore's Law will be consumed by a series of fundamental changes in our media ecosystem, leaving slow adopters in the dust. Fart's Law states simply: The possibility that any new innovation will succeed increases exponentially over the number of old farts who refuse to endorse it.

In my experience, there a lot of twentysomething Old Farts out there, especially in the newspaper business -- recent college grads desperately trying to hold onto the romanticized values propagandized into them by J-school professors who barely know how to turn on a computer. Trying to turn the web into a digital newspaper is, simply put, the path to destruction. I come across enough young Old Farts to make me think this tendency isn't limited to just the grey hairs.

UPDATE: Speaking of twentysomethings thinking like old farts, meet Joe Rago.

I saw James Brown at the Del Mar Fair once many years ago. He was an old then, and he wore me out just watching. The music was great, too, of course. Thank you for the music.

If you watched any of the World Cup this year, you've heard Jim Noir's "Eanie Meanie." It was used in this Adidias commercial (full-lenght version, there, which I don't recall seeing on TV). Here's Noir's retro-8mm video for the dreamy Brit-pop hit (warning: some crap code on his video page will resize your browser window). Noir is some body's music whom I'm just starting to explore. He's presenting a nice update to the power pop tradition.

Merry Christmas. Here's some happy entertainment for you on Christmas Day: Dan Zanes, the coolest family entertainer I've come across. He's sort of got the Nick Lowe, power-pop, rockabilly thing going on, matching his grey hair on top of a long, gangly frame. I had no idea Zanes (formerly of the Del Fuegos) was out there  pushing pure-pop for hip families until I spotted his CD in Starbucks. And this is big time stuff -- he's with Disney.

Check out House Party Time and All Around the Kitchen. It's cool to see all the parents rocking with their kids in this live performance of Polly Wally Doodle. So often, music is segmented between kids and adults, but Zanes has hit on formula for entertaining the whole family.

Just think, there's a whole segment of the youngest generation getting turned onto rockabilly and roots rock. That's like a bonus Christmas present for me.

Tom Abate attended this year's Knight seminar on multimedia at UC Berkeley Gratudate School of Journalism (where I was the keynote speaker last year) and four of my former colleagues from the Ventura County Star spoke about multimedia and video work at the Star. The program has grown a lot in the past three years.

Abate writes:

I love that sense of experimentation. I’ve covered Silicon Valley as a reporter since 1992. This same freedom to make honest mistakes is a prime characteristic of the region’s startup culture. In Silicon Valley, if you’re not reaching then you’re resting — and one of your competitors will stumble past you.

We started small in Ventura. The program continues to grow and the quality continues to improve.

I keep arguing in favor of starting small and inexpensive so you can build something worthwhile -- a position that gets a surprising amount of pushback from readers of this blog and other media bloggers -- but the strategy is working in Ventura and elsewhere. Of course, 2007 is probably the last year that newspapers can afford to start a video program with a start-up attitude and still keep pace with competitive demands. The longer they wait, the high the price of entry. Newspapers ignore video at their own peril.
(via Jack Lail)

UPDATE: You can find a QT vid of the Star staff talking about the multimedia newsroom on the seminar's site.  I'll have to go back and watch that presentation and  the others later.

I'm just now reading my December issue of Quill (the SPJ magazine), and there's an interesting article titled "The Ever Evolving Newspaper." The story is ostensibly about changes at newspapers, but The Bakersfield Californian is weaved so tightly into the story, it's really about Bakersfield.com.

Logan Molen, VP of Interactive for TBC, is quoted and paraphrased heavily, and he says many of the things I might have said if I were in his place (emphasis added throughout).

Reprinting some of the Web-first content in the newspaper brings a whole new dimension to news coverage, Molen said, making it lively and conversational.

It also drives readers back and forth between the Web and the newspaper.

“Online, it’s telling people we want them to be part of the conversation and we are giving you these tools to bring you one step closer to the sources. We want you to share in the mission of the site and our products,” Molen said.

At the Bakersfield newspaper, editors decided to get serious about multimedia, even though no money was allotted for additional employees. Editors evaluated the beats and made tough decisions about what to stop covering and created a department-head-level position for the new products. That sent a strong message that Web was going to be a priority, Molen said.

Bakersfield hasn’t done a lot of in-depth multimedia projects that take a lot of time and effort to build. While that work is important, the newspaper is starting with what Molen called low-hanging fruit that is easier to produce, rather than spending two months on something that might get minimal traffic.

Don’t hesitate to swallow your pride when a new feature isn’t working. Rely on the metrics of the Web that show how many readers visited a certain feature. But ask yourself if it was promoted appropriately too, Molen said.

“Is this a true picture of if readers care about this subject?” Molen said. “If you go through all that and nobody is looking, swallow your pride and move on.”

At Bakersfield, new employees are hired to be journalists, not print reporters. They are expected to write Web bulletins and shoot audio and video. They’re also told they may be working on some new technology that is just around the corner.

“We’re telling our journalists that the world is changing and we need to change with our market,” Molen said.

That doesn’t mean that the time and energy spent honing the craft of storytelling is for naught. The newspaper still values the written word.

At Bakersfield, reporters carry $300 Cybershot cameras that capture lo-fi video but is better than you might think, Molen said.

The downside to video is that most stories don’t have video angles.

Logan probably says it all prettier and nicer than I would, but regular readers of this blog will recognize the sentiment. There are enough commenters here and elsewhere who disagree with this approach, but it's hard to argue against Bakersfield's success.

I do quibble with Logan on one point: That print isn't dying. Specifically, there is this:

The features (mobile editions) haven’t brought an increase in print subscribers, but circulation erosion is not nearly as great as it has been at other newspapers, Molen said.

The graph on this page sort of contradicts that claim.

The question is why has TBC's circ declined so steeply? Is it because of the print redesign, the superior job Bakersfield is doing online, or some local hidden variable?

Logan talks about driving traffic back and forth between print and web, but I don't think that is possible. If you've already read something published web-first, why would you buy the print edition to read it again? I think taking the best of the digital-first copy, especially the UGC, and printing it enhances the value of the print copy to print-preference readers (for as long as we have them), but I don't think it creates new readers. But that's just my guess. I don't yet have any metrics on that.

This is a post mostly for my Bakersfield buddies.

Backstory: For a few weeks, I've been thinking that I should buy a cheap-o guitar to knock around. A beater. Something that I don't care if it only lasts a year or two. A disposable guitar. I've read that inexpensive guitars, thanks to modern computer technology, are not as badly made as they used to be, and that they've also come down even further in price. The last time I was in New York, I was looking at some strat knockoffs for $120.

Yesterday, while out running my errands, I drove down Chester and spotted a music store I'd never seen before. It's called the Music Zone (2808 Chester Avenue). I walked in and immediately asked how long they had been there -- since May was the answer. I'd never seen the store before.

I needed guitar strings, and that was all I intended to buy, but I can't walk into a guitar store without looking at the guitars. I noticed a rack of cheap-o guitars, so I walked over ... noticed the Strat knock-off was $140. That's more than I wanted to spend. I was curious if the blond Tele hanging a little higher up was cheaper (I'm much more interested in a cheap-o Tele than a Strat ... and we're talking strictly imitation here, just to be clear), so I asked. It too was $140, but the shop owner said, "I can let you have it for $89."

My first reaction was, let's plug it in to a cheap amp and try it out.

Long story short, I bought the guitar -- Way too good of a bargain to pass up. And Billy and his partner were exceptionally friendly and helpful. I was pretty amazed, frankly, that on an $89 guitar, they would take the time to do a quick set up for me (adjust the neck, check the intonation, etc.).

So, my Bako buddies, if you haven't checked out Music Zone yet, I suggest you give it a try. It's not just cheap-o guitars either ... they also carry all of the top line stuff, including Gibson and Fender, as well as selling some pretty sweet looking used equipment.

As for the guitar, it's made by Johnson. Some rave reviews from players over at Harmoney Central. I'm not ready to give eight or nine stars yet. The neck isn't quite as smoothly playable as a real Tele, but it does sound very much like a real Tele (got it home and plugged it into a real amp and was very happy with the tone). The real test, though, is how well it stays in tune and maintains its intonation after it's broken in. My past experience with cheap-o guitars is that's the main point of failure ... that and shorts in knobs and jacks ... again, only time will tell. But for $89, if I can get a year's life out of it, I'll be happy.

Billie and I were talking about a song and misunderstanding the lyrics. In this case, "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy," which I heard for much of my life as "Mersy dotes and doesy dotes and little lamsy divey.**" That reminded her of the time she was driving her son and a friend down the road and singing along with the radio, "Broadwalk to the alps ... boardwalk to the alps," which made both teen-agers roll on the floor, because it should have been "more bounce to the ounce."

All that reminded me (and her) of an article years ago about misheard lyrics. I believe the title was, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy."

If you leave a comment below saying that never in your life heard Jimi Hendrix sing, "excuse me while I kiss this guy" instead of "excuse me while I kiss the sky," I won't believe you. I'll tell you right now. I won't believe you.
So, I googled "excuse me while I kiss this guy" to see if I could find that old article. What I found was kissthisguy.com, a repository of misheard lyrics. What a great idea for a web site. And that link is the entire point of this post.

(**Here's a real mind binder -- read the Wikipedia entry on "Mairzy Doats."  I got it all wrong. )

Nicholas Kristof is trying an interesting experiment: he's letting people remix his reporting.

Previously, I written about the ethical obligation of not explicitly allowing news content remix because of the risk of changes that alter facts or context. Kristof's experiment strikes me as a bit different though.

First, he's starting with a body of work on a single subject. There is a lot of material available for would-be editors to choose from. Second, it's a specific project with potentially many editors, so readers/viewers can sort out later what is authentic and what is propaganda (if any comes out of it), and along with that, the original material is still easily accessible.

Jarvis recommends that the NYTimes take down the pay wall to really make this experiment work. He's right of course, but I also think Kristof should go a step further, and make the best of his unpublished material available.

I was wondering just yesterday, I wonder how much longer J.D. Lasica is going to keep his blog "New Media Musings." Calling all this digital stuff new media is rather outdated now. Well, Lasica's a smart guy and he's decided to update his image. He's changing the name and URL of his blog. It's now SocialMedia.biz.

This is classic. You can file this under the category of "actions speak louder than words." While Time may say you are the person of the year, the reason you are person of the year is in no way evident on Time's web site. This is Mark Glaser's discovery. He scoops the world by pointing out that Time is still just one big, clueless packaged goods media company. You can't even leave a comment on their blogs!

Here's something for newspaper sales reps to turn into a one-sheeter: Newspaper.com readers spend more online.

While we're all transitioning to digital businesses, we should be helping the businesses in our communities compete by giving them a way to tap into this market.

Chuck Fadely has advice for you if you have $20,000 to spend on video equipment, but in his world, after the $20,000 is spent, you have no video camera.

I've outfitted newsrooms with two of these each, plus three or more inexpensive digital cameras, plus two each of the Marantz MP3 records and all the accessories for $18,000.

Now I favor the Sony HDR-FX1 for "high end" video, and as many Lumix DMC-TZ1s as you can stuff into the newsroom. In fact, I'd argue that if you've only got $10,000, buy only the Lumix cameras and give the leftovers to your readers.

Remember, you're shooting and editing video for the web, not television. Don't waste dollars on unnecessary fluff in the name of quality that will be completely lost in translation. Editing stations? Bah! Give me a laptop and iMovie (though, there's nothing wrong with Final Cut Pro if you can afford it).
Previously:

• Video, not Flash
• Continuing the debate

This morning's post about whining photographers at Gannett got me thinking today a bit how change is communicated.

Of course, no amount of communication is going to help some people cope with or accept change, but the photogs complaints seem to reflect a high level of misinformation and misunderstanding about what Gannett is doing and how our industry is changing. The thread is not the only example of out there of Gannett employees not getting it, but it is the topic of the moment.

Now, I've never worked for Gannett, but I've worked for large news organizations, so I imagine this initiative is going something like this: Top level executives get an idea, talk to some site-level executives, and they begin to experiment. The experiment gets some traction, and it gets communicated to managers throughout the organization as the new initiative. The managers, not wanting to buck management, and knowing just enough about industry trends (stuff they follow with but one eye while they do the real work of putting out a daily newspaper), enthusiastically jump on board. But they don't really understand everything, so they don't communicate the vision or tactics clearly. Staffers, as newspaper staffers often do, hear only what they want to hear. The miscommunication is compounded because if you've spent your life behind the lens of a camera or with your nose buried in a town council agenda, you've probably missed some important news about newspapers.

If that's the scenario, of course there's going to be some clueless comments on industry bulletin boards.

For upper management, we're the people who spend all day thinking about this stuff. We read all the industry reports, the hottest books, go to all the industry meetings and work our networks. We know what's going on and think about it all the time. The rest of our organizations don't do that. What might seem obvious to us strikes many editors, reporters and photographers as wacky and misguided. And for our part, maybe we've forgotten a thing our two about our salad days in newsrooms or sales offices.

For those of us who believe the industry must change radically and quickly, we need to communicate better -- and I don't just mean through our individual companies, but also through our professional organizations and industry publications.

Everybody in our news organizations, at every level, must get why change is necessary, what the strategy is, and why radical and urgent change is imperative.

Key points to communication:

• Circulation has been declining since the 1970s (really, since the 1930s), and nothing we can do with our print products is going to change that. As more people get broadband, more people are switching to the internet for news. Young people today will NEVER read a newspaper regularly. This isn't about driving our audience to the web (as some of the Gannett photogs seem to believe); it is about following our audience to the web, and maybe even taking a lead in giving them something worthwhile on our sites so we can keep them as readers.
• We need to explain disruption and innovation. We need to help staffers better understand why things are shaking out the way as they are, what it means to us, and what our options are for strategically intelligent responses.
• We need to show how the net is changing the way people consume information, how expectations of timeliness, quantity and quality are changing, and that the days of packaged goods media are over. We need to explain why and how we'll develop new products to meet the changing demands of the marketplace. We are no longer just news companies, but that doesn't mean we get out of the news business or abticate our responsibilities to the social welfare of our communities.
• We need to help people understand that the evolution of journalism to more participation and alternate methods of communication does not necessarily equal bad journalism. It's just different.
• We need to sooth fears that changes necessarily mean job cuts. In fact, the opposite could be true, if we do this right.
• The internet is not a fad. Go digital or go home. This is our future, like it or not. What we know of the internet today is maybe a twentieth of what it will be five years from now. You simply cannot rely on the notion that print has always survived and it will survive this too. The world is changing faster than we can really visualize, even as it goes on around us. Technology is guaranteed to overtake the need for print. We either figure out a new business model or die.

We can't assume any of those points are known in our newsrooms. Our communication needs to be more comprehensive and better sourced than what I've outlined here, but we need to make sure the feet on the street in our industry get the message and grok our sense of urgency.

Romenesko calls out this quote from an interview with

One of the most popular features among Dow Jones staff is the “Most Popular” stories list, where you can see what’s been read the most each day, week and month. People care deeply about whether their stories show up in the Top 10 or not. I think that’s not a bad thing. Obviously those statistics can be affected by story placement and blog outreach, but you can get a sense of what type of stories your readers care deeply about and you can try to formulate your coverage along the lines of what your readers want. And that’s not a bad thing for journalists to do.

To which Mark Glaser reasonably asks, "You don’t think there’s a danger in pandering to readers a little bit?"

I've been through this in a couple of newsrooms now -- the first few weeks reporters start seeing what the top 10 most read stories are is, for some, a shocker. It's crime, accidents and disasters. "What, my pearly prose on the county budget didn't make the top 10?" The first reaction is usually, "stupid readers only care about sensational stuff."

I think that is a misread of the audience. First, these stories are not sensationally written or presented. The reporting is pretty straightforward. Local newspaper writers rarely go in for salacious details or gossip. So there must be something else about these stories that draw reader interest.

I think it is a couple of things -- the immediacy of the reporting, and the hyperlocal nature of the events. We want to know if anybody we know is involved.

Print journalists tend to be turned off by the idea of paying attention to what interests readers for fear of pandering. I think they have in mind, when they talk about pandering, the "if it bleeds it leads" mentality of local TV news. To my mind, TV news only got the equation half right. Yes, readers want to know about accidents and murder, but you don't need to scream the news at them. You don't need to sex it up. There is no conflict between providing quality journalism and providing readers with those items they find newsworthy. It's about substance over style.

So I say, by all means, pay attention to your web stats and follow the readers where they want to go. That's how we beat craigslist. Just be good journalists.

This is really depressing. You wonder how our industry can survive with so many key people resistant to change. Follow the link to read a group of Gannett photographers (and probably some others) slam their papers' strategic changes.

Jeff Brehm: The photographers were especially happy to hear that their workload will double again, adding editing the video untrained reporters will bring back from all manner of assignments to their already stupid list of stills, sound bites and video stuff for the website that gets fewer hits than Ken Griffey, Jr. on IR.

The entire staff liked the idea so much that, so far, all but one has announced he or she is leaving before it starts in March.

Andrew Spearin : Hell, a newspaper that switches over to a full staff of mojos can sell their office building, buy a parking lot, and have everyone just sit in their cars in the mojo-lot (tm) while the Editor-in-Chief goes up to each one with the story-o-lotto (tm) to see who gets what story... and hopefully the one in the hot pink (with yellow racing stripe) Smart car doesn't draw the in-depth report on local biker gang violence.

Rob Ostermaier: The power on the still image is being pushed aside for the an internet fad. Still images will always mean more and have more impact in the long run than video. .... I'm really tired of the the issue of money. I can't speak for other papers but mine is doing quite well at an over 20% profit margin so I don't want to hear anything about revenue streams. What this comes down to is making sure the investors get paid even if it brings down the fourth estate!

Michael R. Sisak: Do newspapers need new ideas? No. I'm sick of new ideas. Go back to old ideas. COVER THE NEWS. BREAK STORIES. KEEP A DECENT-SIZED STAFF. RUN GREAT PHOTOGRAPHS. Make your paper a MUST-READ everyday, not just an elaborate advertisement for the website. Don't co-opt the printed product because the internet is cool.

Mr. Publisher: I promise you, moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas will buy tons of copies of your newspaper when you COVER high school sports, instead of just tossing the scores on the website... I promise you people will buy the paper just to look up the movie times and the T.V. listings that you've exiled to the website... I promise you that people will buy the newspaper because you have a great local story that has an edge and maybe happens to be about people they don't know, or even people in the next town.

There is also this statement from Ostermaier, " I understand putting emphasis on the web but this sort of change seems really radical." All I can say is, "yes, it is. Thank God."

(via Will Sullivan)

There's a seen in the 1983 film War Games where all the generals aren't sure if the Russian nukes are really going to hit the U.S. The first nukes will hit, if they're real, Loring AFB in Maine.  In that scene, the generals call the command center up at the Strategic Air Command base, but none of the officers are there. They've all abandoned their posts.  The only person in the command center is a scared airman.  He had been the security guard outside the door.

In 1980-81, I was a cop stationed at Loring AFB. During Defcon alerts, cops pulled extra security duty.  More than once, I was that young airman guarding the door of the command center.

That's all a flashback after just learning that nearly 25 years later, there is finally going to be a War Games 2.

Loring AFB no longer exists, so which air base gets "nuked" this time?

I've only recently started using del.icio.us, but I'm starting to find it addictive.

If you like my blog, you might like my feed. There are lots of interesting things I come across that I don't feel inspired to write about, but it's mostly media related stuff.

One thing I'm really enjoying these days is digging much deeper into the content side of the online business. Because for the past several years I had to worry much more about making money, I haven't done some cool things like get into del.icio.us.

If you use del.icio.us and think I'd enjoy consuming your RSS feed, please leave the link in the comments of this post.

This is good news: Amazon will launch an MP3 download service April 1 (hopefully, this is no joke). The cool part is, no DRM. I'm jumping up and down as I write this.  DRM needs to die, and Amazon selling MP3 files should prove quite disruptive to iTunes.

Again with the Nick Carr ...

If you have a MySpace account, you're a sharecropper, according to Nick Carr. You are, apparently, enriching the landlords without sufficient economic benefit. I guess that's what he means.

What's being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It's a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial.

Carr calls this development unsettling. But doesn't explain why. And his contention that the sharecroppers are generally happy seems to belie that statement. If everybody is happy, what's the problem?

Nick Carr makes an interesting comparison in 2006 top search terms for Google, Yahoo! and AOL.

So if you're running a newspaper.com site, do you optimize for Google and try to reach younger dweebs because you need online to grow your young audience, or for AOL and score better with your natural, older audience?

Bill Blevins added a bunch of internet-based applications to his del.icio.us feed. Here's the ones that look the most interesting to me:

• HipCal
• gOffice
• LiTha-Paint
• Dropload
• Omnidrive (There's also Jungle Disk)
• Xmail Hard Drive
• Jinzora (there's also MP3Tunes)
• Zoho
• Gliffy
• Phixr

I also found out about AjaxPresents today.

Now I just need time to play with some of these.

UPDATE: Cool and related, Vixy, which allows you to save onto your hard drive video files from video sharing services, such as YouTube. As a test, I saved this Nick Lowe video. (via newteevee.com)

BrookfieldNow.com was created by Journal Interactive, carries the beta label, but seems incredibly well conceived and executed. I've yet to see it get any press or hear anybody talk about it. It seems to have an incredible amount of community-generated content. Great design, too.

UPDATE: Immediately after posting this, I did some more exploring and uncovered the hub site with links to more community sites.