Howard Owens

Mindy McAdams has an interesting post on You Witness the News, the latest big media effort to bring into UGC.

She notes:

I'm just pondering the whole idea of motivation. If I thought I could get paid -- there's one kind of motivation. If I thought I would get some degree of fame or respect -- well, that's another motivation. But these videos have nothing more than a little credit line -- the shooter's first and last name. No link. No e-mail. Nada.

I left the following comments:

What do you get if you upload your Rodney King video to YouTube? You don't get your real name, unless it happens use that as your screen name; you don't get a link to your web site (though you can add the URL to your video or notes); you don't get a link to your e-mail, though you do get a message box.

What you do get is community and a chance to partake in conversation.

That seems to be what is missing from the Yahoo! site.

... and you're Rodney King video on YT, YT has the right to redistribute it with no additional compensation to you.

YouTube has added a "video toolbox" page full of tips and advice on making better videos.

Business Week takes a look at the future of long-form video on the Web.

Right now, what works best are short clips. Web surfers currently have short attention spans, want instant gratification, multitask, and can get frustrated by technology that is still buggy.

How consumer habits will change when the technology improves -- and trust me, it will improve -- is hard to gauge. I still suspect that quick-hit video will always be popular.

I do see a coming market for longer pieces, though, which is great for independent producers.

Huell Howser now offers a "podcast" of his show via iTunes. I downloaded my first full-length television show the other day, watched it all the way through and enjoyed it immensely. Aside from the technology, I think as more people discover the advantages of such downloads and how to work them into their media consumption habits, we'll see a growing popularity for longer-form video.

The BW article mentions that Lycos has launched a project called Cinema, which sounds interesting. Unfortunately, I can't check it out since they completely shut out the growing legion of Mac users. Bad move. Nothing like saying "I don't get the Internet" by going with a proprietary format when launching a new service.

In some ways, a merger between XM and Sirius seems inevitable -- two under performing companies in the same, cramped space. But as this Business Week piece points out, there are some big obstacles, such as anti-trust regulators and executive egos.

If a merger doesn't happen, I don't see how both companies can survive, and my favorite, XM, seems to be losing traction. I can't imagine another start up in satallite radio at this point, so if we're down to just one provider either through death of one or merger, it will be a bit of a shame. Competition is always good.

I'll be disappointed if through merger or death my favorite XM stations went away, such as Hank's Place (now Willie's Place), Frank's Placy, X-Country, The Loft, Fred, etc. The only on Sirius that I like so far is The Garage.

Remember Daryn Kagan? She was once one of CNN's stars. Now, thanks to the web, she's an independent journalist. Expect to see more of this.

UPDATE: It should be noted that Kagan is taking a pretty big media/packaged media approach. She and her cohorts slickly produce everything. It's a very structured approach. There's no blog. No UGC. At least she makes contacting her pretty easy (or appears so, I haven't actually tried) and wants feedback and story tips, but there's no sense that she's willing to enter into a conversation with her audience. You also can't grab some HTML from her site to embed her video into yours.

The other thing I wonder about -- the one segment I watched featured a guy who runs a relationship web site.  She plugged his URL a couple of times.  Is that product placement?  There's no disclosure if it is.  I don't see any other apparent business model on the site.

Up front disclosure -- Tony Pierce is a friend. However, he is only a friend because he blogs and I blog. Blogging brought us together. We've partied together and we've been to baseball games together and we've drank together. If he didn't blog, and I didn't blog, we would have never met.

And to me, Tony Pierce is a phenomenally good blogger -- a blogger to study and emulate if you need a tutor. He is a Bukowski of blogging. He's also been fabulously successful. It's now how he makes his living (at LAist.com) and he's been featured in much major media. According to Technorati, his blog is among the most popular in the world (anything better than a 10,000 ranking among the tens of millions of blogs tracked is pretty damn good). And despite all that, a group of hacks are suggesting that Tony Pierce doesn't deserve a Wikipedia entry.

His entry is here. The voting is here. You can track the vote count here (though Wikipedia voting is more subjective for editors than a pure tally -- though as I write, 71 percent of the votes are for delete). Information from and about the cretins who started this can be found here. It's part of an orchestrated effort to remove bloggers whom they consider unworthy of Wikipedia enshrinement. Obviously, they picked the wrong target here. It will be sad if they win. It would greatly diminish my trust in Wikipedia as an example of reliable crowdsourcing.

Knock David Geffen off the list of suitable buyers for the Los Angeles Times:

I would devote my resources to building a first-class national newspaper.

If you want to save the Los Angeles Times, you need to pay attention to the first two words in the paper's name.

Previously: Eli Broad.

John Battelle has a pretty intriguing "thinking out loud" post on recent big-big media executive moves and what it all means. The world of CBS and AOL is a media world leagues above my career status, but it seems to me it's a little premature to start treating interactive like serious big business. It's still a pretty turbulent world in which some important revenue models haven't even been invented yet, and others may not work out after all, and there are a host of disruptions that are still just a gleam in the eye of some inventor. I wouldn't start shifting to status quo just yet.

That said, I love this formulation from Battelle:

There are two major forms of media these days. There is Packaged Goods Media, in which "content" is produced and packaged, then sent through traditional distribution channels like cable, newsstand, mail, and even the Internet. Remember when nearly every major media mogul claimed that the Internet was simply one more media distribution channel? They were right, but only in so far as it pertains to Packaged Goods Media. Over the past few decades, massive media conglomerates have built on the deep DNA of Packaged Goods Media.

The second major form of media, is far newer, and far less established. I've come to call it Conversational Media, though I also like to call it Performance Media. This is the kind of media that has been labeled, somewhat hastily and often derisively, as "User Generated Content," "Social Media," or "Consumer Content." And while the major media companies are unparalleled when it comes to running companies that live in the Packaged Goods Media world, running major companies in the Conversational Media field require quite a different set of skills, and consideration of radically different economic and business models - models which, to be perfectly frank, conflict directly with the models which support and protect Packaged Goods Media-based companies.

I love niche/vertical sites. Afterall, I'm the guy who created RVClub.com.  I don't need no study to tell me ads work better on niche sites, but now there is one.

Seth Ginter sends along this announcement:

Tomorrow, Dec. 8, marks the one-year anniversary of the official TimesCast launch.

There have been several big changes since its launch: The TimesCast moved from a confiscated small office to the studio in June; Daine Vineyard joined the team to be its producer in April; and on-location TimesCasts have included the woods on Mill Mountain, Steppin' Out in Blacksburg, Victory Stadium and Dr. Pain's Haunted Asylum, to name a few.

Like most anniversary shows, there'll be our fair share of clips and cameos of the past year since its debut. Be sure to watch at 3:30 p.m. for special appearances by past TimesCasters and other surprises. In the meantime, vote for who should be the TimesCast Santa and Santa's Helper by checking out the Holidays page on roanoke.com....

Regular readers know I'm a fan.

UPDATE: A blog post from John Jackson.

Alan Mutter argues that the 24-hour news desk is a mistake. (via Romenesko)

Okay, I agree. I'm not sure I see much value in staffing a news desk at 2 a.m. But everything else about his blog post is wrong, I think.

On one hand, the 24-hour new desk proves publishers can come up with a fresh idea every decade, whether they need to or not.

In a different time, a different era, was it a mistake to publish six editions a day? I would think a true newsosaur would long for those days, or the days when "busting the wire" really meant something. Online publishing brings those days back. (Check the old manual typewriter in the upper right of this blog -- it is the real deal. It came from the newsroom of the Pittsburgh Post. I'm a kind of newsosaur myself, I think.)

On the other, the concept is a disheartening strategic blunder with the potential to simultaneously degrade the print and online coverage at most newspapers for no discernible gain.

So on both hands, it's a bad idea. OK. In what way will it degrade journalism? In the way wire services have degraded journalism for the past 100 years? And I suppose audience growth isn't a discernible gain? I mean, if your audience is proving that their expectation from online news is that they get it as it happens, and if when you give it to them as it happens, more of them come to your site, isn't that a discernible gain?

The 24-hour news desk, which suddenly has been adopted everywhere from the New York Times to the Des Moines Register, dedicates groups of increasingly scarce reporters to continuously refreshing web sites with breaking news.

The assumption here is that reporters writing web updates also can't write cogent print stories. Tell that to an Associated Press reporter. As a former wire editor, it sure seems to me that writing stories in sequential releases isn't a journalisticly hard task to master.

But there’s no conceivable journalistic or economic reason for a company like Gannett to require its ever-dwindling number of reporters to continuously feed the web such routine stories as the eviction of mobile-home residents in Asheville, NC; a man attacking a game warden with a tree branch in Winneshiek County, IA, or an advance story on the inauguration of the governor of Hawaii that was posted 1 hour and 11 minutes before she was “expected” to take the oath of office.

I don't want to take the bait of addressing specific stories, because it's easy to pick apart any subjective decision on coverage in the absence of relevant data, but in general, it is just these KINDS of hyperlocal stories that drive local web traffic, especially when they are part of a continuous update process. In the previous graph, Mutter argues in favor of continuous coverage of large national and international stories, but the future of online news for local papers isn't in such commodity coverage. It is all about local. And local is more about people than grand consquences.

Quickie web coverage seriously imperils the print product, because these down-and-dirty stories deprive reporters and editors of the time they need to consider – and report on – the major issues affecting their communities. If news staffs thinned by continuing economic cutbacks are stretched even thinner with busy work, who will write the compelling stories that merit the continued patronage of the print product by readers and advertisers?

One word: Competition. What imperils the print product is the disruptive competition unleashed by the web. If we don't adapt to the web, we die. If we don't learn to compete in the digital world, we die. This isn't my quote, and I forget who said it, and it's paraphrase, but: Somebody is going to eat our lunch, so we might as well eat it ourselves.

The industry inadvertently undermined the value of the newspaper by making the decision more than a decade ago to give it away for free on the web.

It's a common red herring: We shouldn't have put our content online for free a decade ago. Blame the pioneers who were publishing online when you were still muttering 'the web is a fad.' The problem is, if we hadn't published news for free, we would be in even worse shape today. We would have no online audience and no way of building one, because there would be even more disruptors finding success. It's a conceit of journalistic ego that our stories have greater economic value than they do. Unfortunately, too many readers think they can live without local news. If local news -- at least as we have been producing it -- had significant economic value, we wouldn't have been losing subscribers in droves even before the digital age. Furthermore, we've trained readers to believe that subscription fees pay for delivery, while advertising pays for reporters. It doesn't take a MBA in business practices to understand that absent the pulp, poly bags, trucks and adult carriers, our delivery costs drop to nil. Readers would only resent being asked to pay for something that costs us next to nothing to deliver, especially when they intuitively understand that they're already paying for our delivery costs (computer, software, modem, ISP or broadband). The idea of charging readers for general news is a non-starter.

Quickie online coverage of inconsequential news won’t please traditional newspaper readers or attract the young, restless and wired consumers that newspapers need to sustain and build their multimedia franchises.

Who defines "inconsequential?" The journalist? That's the kind of thinking that has gotten us into so much trouble -- believing that we could dictate to readers what they should see and read. The proof is in the pudding, or the page views. Users are voting with their clicks about what interests them, and what doesn't, and it's rarely the 1,200 blow-by-blow of last night's city council meeting. The fact is, web stats speak for themselves -- what journalists often consider inconsequential are quite important to readers. And in my view, it's not important for the sensational reasons newsoseaurs might suspect, but because it is local enough to mean something to their lives.

Early in his post, Alan said he had a solution for newspapers on how to better use its scarce resources, and here it is:

If you are wondering what might attract both traditional and new readers to newspaper web sites, take a look at the new city sites just launched by Ask.Com.

So, Mr. Cutter's solution is to shift hard news reporters from covering the community to collecting directory listing data? There is no doubt that newspaper.com sites have dropped the ball on calendar and directory opportunities, both as readership and revenue projects, but there isn't a one-to-one relationship between web-first publishing and listings. They are different departments, different skill sets, and different products.

Newspapers shouldn’t have been beaten at their own game by Ask, the No. 4 search engine. But they were.

Are directory listings our game, or the yellow pages? I'm all for more robust directories on online news sites (we can be the disruptors, going after directory companies), but you would think that a self-described newsoseaur would understand the difference between finding a good Italian restaurant and getting the scoop on an apartment fire.

Rick Edmonds sums up the current state of newspaper ownership and is pretty balanced about it.

Related article from Business Week.

If you're a New Media Federation member, you should have received an e-mail about voting for the Online Innovator Award. There are two deserving nominees this year -- Dave Morgan and Steve Yelvington.  Please be sure to vote.  You should have received an e-mail with a link to the ballot site.

Time posts an item about the future of newspapers -- a series of quotes/predictions from people in the industry. Here are a few highlights.

Andrew Davis, President of the American Press Institute:

Newspapers have three attributes that will for a time, make them still relevant. They are low-cost or no cost, they are highly portable, and you can scan through more bits of information on a printed news page faster than you can on a PC, online, on a PDA or on a cell phone. So it's a very efficient means of presenting information.

Bob Mong, Editor of the Dallas Morning News:

I'm 57. When I was 21, about 70% of people my age read a newspaper regularly. For people my age now, it's still about the same percentage. But in the Dallas market today, only about 30% of people between 18 and 24 look at a newspaper fairly regularly. That's a 40% gap. That's not good news for the newspaper in the bag.

Alexia Quadrani, Media Analyst, Bear Stearns:

There is a significant pricing gap between new media and old media. The cost to reach 1,000 people is $20 for newspapers, but just $5 for those online.

Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California:

Today, teens don't read newspapers and they never will. If there were a newspaper strike across America today, almost no one under the age of 30 would notice.

John Janedis, Senior Media Analyst, Wachovia Securities:

Earning a Pulitzer Prize for excellent journalism doesn't translate into sales of newspapers in this environment.

Karen Dunlap, President of the Poynter Journalism Institute:

I disagree with the assumption that newspapers will die. But we need to train journalists for multimedia reporting. They need to move from being just print reporters to being comfortable taking photos and doing audio and video.

I bought my first New York Dolls LP (Too Much, Too Soon -- there are only two) in 1978 for half a buck in a thrift store. I knew nothing about the Dolls, but I was just into punk, and I saw this album cover of a group of guys looking completely outrageous -- it had to be some punk band I'd never heard of -- why not buy it?Too Much Too Soon quickly became, and remains, one of my all-time favorite LPs. And it didn't take me long to figure out that the Dolls influenced pretty much everything I was listening to. Not only did the Dolls influence punk and new wave, they influenced every brand of hard rock and heavy metal, and especially the hair bands, that came after. Yet, chances are, you never heard of them. The average rock fan has never heard of the New York Dolls.

Tonight I finished watching a DVD called New York Doll. It is an unusually good documentary about a rock and roll band. More than the history of a band, it is the history of a person -- Arthur "Killer" Kane, the Dolls' bass player. Unlike the other members of the Dolls (David Johansen (aka Buster Poindexter), Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, Kane had no musical career after the Dolls broke up. He drifted into alcoholism and obscurity, embittered by the success of his former band mates and all the posers who got rich borrowing from the Dolls' style. The Dolls didn't make a dime off their music, and you can't trademark style.

Kane eventually wound up in Los Angeles taking bit parts in movies and barely getting by. His wife makes a comment in the film about marrying a rock star but never getting to enjoy any of the trappings. Eventually, Kane hits bottom, beating up his wife and jumping out of a third floor window. While recovering from his injuries, he requests a copy of the Book of Mormon, and two missionaries arrive at his front door. Kane converts and takes a job in the family research library and the Los Angeles temple.

As a now devout man, Arthur has one and only one pray he wants God to answer -- he wants the New York Dolls to get back together. Kane, as becomes clear from watching the bonus material, had two religions in life -- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the New York Dolls. His apartment was a shrine to the Dolls. He never stopped believing, and then one day, the call comes. The Dolls are going to reunite for one show in London.

This gentle, kind, humble and sweet man makes an oddly perfect vehicle for recounting the history and reunion of one of rock's most important and outrageously bacchanalian bands. The story arc is compelling from beginning to end (spoiler alert), as sad as the ending is. A mere twenty-two days after that reunion in London, after Kane has returned to his white shirt and blue tie and his job with the old ladies in the library, he is diagnosed with leukemia. Two hours later, he is dead.

Central to the film is Kane's faith, but rather than be a distraction, it is one of the films strengths. In these cynical days, it is so easy to make fun of a religion like Mormonisms, but New York Doll never goes there. Instead, Kane's faith is allowed to speak for itself. There is nothing about this film that will make you feel like a couple of missionaries are camping out on your door jam, yet you'll get a good sense of what Mormonism meant to Kane. You can draw your own conclusions about it.

Interestingly, Johansen takes Kane's beliefs in stride, with a wry humor and endearing acceptance (these two men hadn't spoken in 30 years). Johansen contributes a couple of acoustic hymns to the sound track and at the end of the reunion concert refers to Kane as one of God's miracles. It all makes for a very human story.

Obviously, I'm recommending you buy or rent the move, even if you're not a Dolls fan.

I've never been one to say, "Bloggers are going to take over the world." In fact, I don't know too many if any bloggers who seriously believe that blogging, or any kind of user-generated content, will replace traditional journalism. If traditional journalism dies, I tend to believe that it will be because we haven't figured out the digital revenue model, not because blogging buried us. It takes a lot of work, dedication and financial resources to do quality journalism. Those are prerequisites some bloggers and other types of citizen journalists possess, but rarely, and certainly not yet in numbers sufficient enough to replace newspaper journalism.

But then I read about sites like the New Haven Independent and I think, here is a publishing model that is truly disruptive (and therefore a real threat to newspapers). Editor's Web Log has a lengthy post about the online-only publication.

Although he is an old media reporter, Bass finds that journalism on the Web is “definitely” more efficient than print journalism. For starters, the Independent doesn’t have an office. “Our reporters are out reporting all the time instead of talking in the newsroom,” explained Bass. If he meets with his staff to discuss stories, they do so in a local coffee shop. Secondly, Bass doesn’t have to wait until stories go to press; as soon as an article is ready, it is posted on the Independent’s site.

In what is perhaps the most efficient characteristic of Internet reporting, Bass and his staff have their stories proofread and fact-checked by readers. The Independent has even started a contest through which the reader who catches the most typos wins Independent paraphernalia.

If I were the publisher in New Haven, I'd be very, very nervous.

It's  worth noting, though, that Bass is a professional journalist.  He may represent the kind of hybrid pro/citizen journalist who is the biggest threat to traditional publishing and broadcasting.

Here are more reasons for newspapers to be diving heavily into video -- the channel as we know it is going to disappear, or at least become essentially irrelevant.

From the Washington Posle:

So far, Brightcove customers have built online video programming networks dedicated to topics as varied as pet care and Miami night life. The channels are available only on computers, but Berrey hopes to soon offer viewers a way to watch on their TV sets.

One way Brightcove is trying to get on TV screens is to work with products connected to TV sets, such as the TiVo digital video recorder. Together, Brightcove and TiVo are creating a video portal that allows TiVo subscribers to upload homemade video clips and create unique channels -- a lineup of shows from various sources on TiVo's Now Playing list -- that friends and family members can watch through their own TiVo boxes.

"It's the democratization of video content," Berrey said. "People are going to get away from Channel 9 or Channel 10."

Brightcover isn't the only company out there working to figure out how to get IP-delivered video onto the big box in the living room. The day is coming when you'll build your own channels and master all of your own programming choices, it will consist in large measure of content created independently of any of today's traditional producers.

Previously, Taking the disruptive path with video, and just for the fun of it, here's a post I wrote in 2004 on IPTV when I was still calling it TVIP.

Lucas Grindley doesn't like the Roanoke TimesCast very much. Regular readers know I do. Yesterday, I even gave it an award (which prompted Mr. Grindley's response).

Lucas says:

For me, the TimesCast is an elaborate teaser fest. It’s a lot of effort to repackage the day’s news with what should be witty repartee. Except, it’s rarely witty. So what’s left is a nice looking, and superficial, video project.

For me, TimesCast isn't funny or even witty. It's goofy. Every time I pop over, usually just to link to it because I'm blogging about it, I get caught up watching it. It's engaging. I can't help myself. It has authentic personality. It is what works on the web. It is what people on the web seem to be saying they want.

Lucas makes a salient point in his comments:

But are lots of people watching the TimesCast every day?

Regardless of what I might think or the awards might say, if the section gets mounds of traffic, then that determines its success.

That is the most important question, and I would love for somebody from Roanoke to jump on one of our blogs and be completely transparent about TimesCast viewership. That would be a valuable service to those of us working hard to build great newspaper.com sites (BTW: I think Lucas is very much one of those people. I've only been reading his blog a few weeks, but he's obviously one of the white hats in our industry, even though we disagree on TimesCast).

I think our disagreement is somewhat related to the Flash vs. Video debate of a couple of weeks ago. Since it's my blog, I get to frame the debate a little bit (kind of hard not to do if I'm going to write about it), and how I see it is an argument over the definition of quality, and an argument over whether we respond to the audience or make some sort of journalistic ideal of quality paramount to what people seem to respond to.

One premise I must begin with, and regular readers probably already know this, is that my position in this debate is very much filtered through Clayton Christensen's work (Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution). I define disruption and "jobs to do" along those lines.

I've also gotten over any Church of Journalism attitudes I used to have about giving people the castor oil they need rather than the candy they want. Castor oil only worked when people's choices were limited. In the good old days, we could force people to buy a bunch of stuff they didn't want because there was at least one thing in the newspaper they did want. Now, people have infinite choices, and more and more people are waking up to the power of those choices. If it means being a little less well informed, well, so be it. They would rather control their own relationship with media (see also, The Long Tail).

To paraphrase Dr. Phil: Would you rather be right, or would you rather have a relationship with your audience?

Where is the audience going? It's not going toward quality, that's for sure.

A lot of media people seem to totally misunderstand YouTube. They think that without the copyrighted material of big media, YouTube would have no audience. The only people I can imagine believing that are people who haven't spent a lot of time on YouTube.

Take a look at the all-time most viewed YouTube videos. There isn't a lot of ripped-from-TV video there. There are a couple of mash ups, such as this clip of two Israeli girls lipsynching to a Pixies song, which some would argue isn't real user-generated content because it's built on the backs of pros. I think that misses the point. People haven't watched this video 11 million times because it's just a fabulous song (which it is). The sisters are the stars here. And while the video is well cut, it isn't exactly ready-for-MTV fare. It's amateurish and goofy, but it is also engaging and full of personality. It's authentic. Here's a video of girls dancing that isn't nearly as well done, but has been viewed more than seven million times. You can't argue that the interest in these two videos is purient, because they don't really show a lot. Besides, the most popular video is of a guy dancing. It's now gotten more than 36 million views. On any given day lately, the ripped-from-TV stuff is quite popular (thanks largely to YouTube's new partnership with CBS), but amateur video continues to draw in viewers. The most popular video of the past month is of a baby laughing (5.7 million views). If very smart marketers, such as Nike, can get it and produce hand-held videos (eight million views) for YouTube, why can't newspapers learn a lesson and do something like TimesCast or what Bakersfield and IndyStar are doing with video?

This is disruption, people. This is building Toyota Corollas in the hope that some day you'll be making a Lexus, even though tomorrow's video Lexus may not necessarily look like today's TV. We don't know what the future holds, but we won't be able to compete in the future if we aren't building Corollas today.
Disruption is about coming in at the low end, being quick, nimble and good enough. Quality is fine -- be as good as you can be -- but don't spend so much time perfecting your production that you are slow to post, or you post less than you should.

Also, don't miss the importance of being authentic and full of personality. That's something TimesCast gets, and why I like it so much. TimesCast was almost certainly inspired by RocketBoom and the examples set by YouTube. People obviously want a sense that they're dealing with real people. Look at the soaring popularity of American Idol as a big media example. Blogging's continuing boom (does anybody still believe it's just a fad?) is another example. Or consider OK Go, who's recent success can be attributed to its intelligent use of inexpensive video production and YouTube. If you haven't seen it, watch The Treadmill Video, or "A Million Ways," the video that started it all for OK Go (probably the most imitated video on YouTube). Here is a band with big-label backing using very disruptive techniques to sell records and build relationships with fans. Investigate, newspaper people, and learn.

The web isn't television, nor is it newspapers. We make a mistake if we try to apply the standards of either world to web publishing.

The lessons of disruption: Start at the low end, be good enough, be nimble (learn from your customers/audience/people -- what are the jobs they're trying to get done?). That is the approach, I think, newspapers should take with video.

(OK Go! Photo by David L. Coen)

I just happened across this post from Gil Asakawa about ReelRadio.com, a repository of AM radio history -- Top 40 radio to you and me, at least if you grew up in the 60s and 70s.

Then I found the Reel Top 40 Repository, a treasure-trove of airchecks (recordings, often made by the DJs as part of their career “portfolios”). Many of the airchecks are “scoped,” so that only the DJ’s breaks and commercials are included, and you only hear the beginning and end of the songs. But some are full-length airchecks with all the songs. The site costs $12 a year (you can donate more), which is just $1 a month, to be able to listen to the airchecks, and for any boomer music fan or fan of radio as an industry, that’s a terrific price of admission to so much history.

You can search the repository for wonderful audio time-machines from major and minor radio stations from the early ‘60s to the ‘80s. You can search by city, year, DJ name, radio station call letters.

One of the most amazing recordings that I’ve found is a two-hour recording from July 20, 1969, of WPGC-FM, an FM station that at the time still played a Top-40 format. It was a Sunday morning broadcast featuring one of the station’s stalwart jocks, “Tiger” Bob Raleigh, riffing his way through the hits and also reading the news (in a much more subdued, serious voice and calling himself “Bob Raleigh, WPGC news”).

History buffs will recall that July 20, 1969 was just a couple of weeks off from Woodstock in August, but more important, that July 20 was the night that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

I grew up on Top 40 radio and listened to it until the day I bought my first Elvis Costello LP in 1977. Then the world changed and I realized there was a whole universe of music that was better and more interesting. I pretty much haven't been much of a radio listener since (today, it's my own MP3s on CD or iPod and the occasional tune-in to XM Radio). But ReelRadio.com looks like it will be a fun, nostalgic trip back, so I'm going to spend some time there when I get some time.

Also, note the user-contributed nature of the site -- and how vast the collection it is. Most of the recordings seem to have been contributed by collectors, not the original DJs or radio stations. This should, I think, give you more appreciation for the nature of user-controlled sites and the power of the long tail.

BTW: Gil's got a great blog. I need to add it to my blog roll.

This looks like something I should read: The Future of Web Video. (via J.D. Lasica)

AJR has a reasonably good and long story on newspaper blogging.  For those who don't usually follow the issue, it provides a good overview of current trends and practices.  It also provides some hope that there are editors out there who get it.

Some staffers have taken to the new medium with gusto, blogging so madly that they began to slack on other responsibilities, Willey says. Others have had to be guided into the habit, grumbling that they don't know how to fit blogging into an already heavy workload. But the experiment is considered a success: The blog's traffic is up, and the number of page views doubled from 2004 to 2005. The editorial board now gets far more e-mail from readers. And all of this was accomplished without any promotion or marketing effort.

Link via Steve Rubel.

Based on this quote, I think one of the worst things that could happen in Los Angeles is for Eli Broad to buy the Los Angeles Times.

It's important that [LAT] be considered one of the four most important newspapers in America and that we as Angelinos ought to have a paper of that quality.

Nation and world news is a commodity. There are too many companies doing it, it's too easy to get, and the New York Times and Washington Post have cornered the market on quality. It's not fool hardy to compete on quality, but why, when LA so badly needs great local coverage? LA is such a huge market with so much potential for great local coverage, and big revenue, -- why not focus on that? Why worry about being a great journalistic institution on the world stage when you can just own your monster local market?

These are the first-ever Howard Owens Media Blog Awards.

Why should I give awards? Why not? Besides, I just wanted to highlight at the end of 2006 some of the best work of the newspaper industry online. If you don't like my awards, give your own. If you do, let me know and I'll link to your post. If enough bloggers give these awards, maybe we'll arrive at some sort of consensus awards.

I'm making up my own categories and my own rules. I'm ignoring circulation categories and generally only naming one winner per category. Because of my conflict of interest, sites associated with my present employer as well as Bakersfield.com and VenturaCountyStar.com are not eligible.

The Awards:

Best Overall News Site -- WashingtonPost.com. While the WaPo's home page, like pretty much all newspaper.com sites, is over cluttered with links, the Post is doing a lot of t hings right online -- lots of multimedia, blogs, chats, trackbacks, tagging and good story-level navigation, not to mention the generally high quality of the Post's journalism. Close second is KnoxNews.com. I love KnoxNews video and the great site design, but the site still lacks the level of interactivity on WaPo.com.

Best Site Design -- TCPalm.com. It's pretty much impossible to find a newspaper site that doesn't try to shove too much on its home page, so we'll overlook that flaw on the TCPalm site and recognize it's general excellence at providing a lot of information at the top of the page in a clean, well organized manner. The site is both attractive and functional. It's easy to navigate and highlights news, what's inside and the local communities well.

Best Video -- IndyStar.com. The site uses the standard Gannett video player page, but more than any Gannett site I've seen yet, they do a lot of local video. They find a wide range of interesting topics to cover and keep personalities well in focus. I especially appreciate their emphasis on nightlife and sports.

Best Vlog or Web Newscast -- TimesCast from Roanoke.com. Roanoke serves up a nice recap of the news in a well-done, professional manner that makes no conscience attempt to be like a television broadcast. It's fun and full of personality. Roanoke's player is also well conceived, with the ability to share related links in a side pane.

Best Blogs -- Chron.com. The Houston Chronicle offers up a full slate of staff-written blogs, and also invites outsiders into its blog realm. The quality of the blogs is mostly pretty good, and readers can leave comments.

Best User Participation -- Spotted. The web is a visual medium. Spotted makes it easy for users to share photos and view photos. It's a natural fit with the visual nature of the web and the desire of content contributors to see themselves in the content. Spotted is an application of Morris Digital Works and runs on several sites, and in some cases under different brand names. (Disclosure: I do have a business relationship with Spotted/Morris.)

Best Entertainment Site -- Lawrence.com. Still king of the hill after all these years. The site Rob Curley started still can't be beat for its local focus, edgy style and functional content.

Best Calendar Site -- Vita.MN. Rumor has it that much of the credit for Vita.MN goes to whiz-kid Matt Thompson (co-creator of Epic2014). This site, not even a month old, is smart and hip and filled with events. It's also on its way to being a contender for best user-participation site and best entertainment site.

Best Classified Site -- WashingtonPost.com/Jobs. This award can go to either a general classified site, or a traditional vertical. In this case, I'm selecting WaPo's job site because not only is it functionally pure, it has a range of high quality content that make it exceptionally useful for job seekers and those seeking career advice. It shows what a newspaper vertical can be and should be.

Best Vertical Site -- Hartford Courant Pets. If newspapers are going to succeed at creating new revenue streams, they need to break away from traditional ways of viewing their customers and concentrate on people's interest and advertiser needs. The pets category is a natural fit. Hartford has done a great job and leveraging existing advertising against great content and user participation.

Best Contest -- CourierPress.com with Karaoke Idol. What a great idea. Here's a contest that plays off one of the hottest shows on television, people's natural desire to show of their talent (or lack of it), user-generated content and bring forward the names and faces of people in the local community. Smash hit with a bullet.

Please argue in support your favorite newspaper.com sites and efforts in the comments.

UPDATE: Lucas Grindley doesn't like TimesCast much.

Angela Grant draws our attention to inexpensive one-on-one training from Apple.

Peter Krasilovsky reports on Zillow:

Another challenge has been to ensure the quality of Zillow’s Real Estate data. Most of the data comes from county courthouses, and accuracy is very high. More than 62 percent of house prices are within 10 percent of their “Zestimate,” said Rascoff.

I've often wondered if Zillow isn't the Alexa of real estate pricing: Interesting, but ultimately not business-decision worthy. Today, however, I'm ready to believe IT IS VERY ACCURATE. I just checked the estimate on our house, which we're still desperately trying to sell, and Zillow says our value has increased $15,000 in the past 30 days! Eeee-Haw!

I linked yesterday to William Bulkeley's piece on forcing people to buy what they don't want, and today Jack Shafer expands on the theme related to newspapers.

Bulkeley could have easily applied the wisdom of his lesson more broadly to newspapers. It's not that the complete gestalt of local, state, national, and international news plus sports, comics, classified, opinion, and hints on fashion, home, entertainment, and food isn't still useful. It is. But given a choice, and the economic means to make a choice, many buyers prefer to make an unbundled purchase. Unbundling the news they want from the news they don't want is what the Web allows readers to do now.

We all thought it was great when Comedy Central added an "embed" tag to its online video clips. Cool. They get it.

But Lost Remote just discovered damning evidence that Viacom is still just another big media empire that is as clueless as the next. Clips expire.

Adrian Holovaty is a rock star, according to American Journalism Review.

Holovaty is quick to say that he's not doing anything akin to rocket science; it's just that very few of the people who know how to do what he does are in journalism. They tend to be in the computer industry, working on Internet search engines or e-commerce sites, or even in the music industry, where the concept of "mashing" data (music and vocals from multiple songs) originated. People with Web development expertise aren't usually drawn to news, Holovaty says, because they don't think it's a technologically savvy field.

Here's some interesting criticism of newspapers doing citizen journalism:

As papers increase local coverage, they'll simply have that many more people out reporting--and that many more potential mistakes.

In fact, citizen journalism is not new. Back in the 90s, when it was the nation's largest newspaper chain, Thomson Newspapers tried it and found it totally unworkable.

If citizen journalism didn’t work for Thomson, what makes Gannett think it’s going to work now, asks Dr. Frank Fee Jr., associate professor and director of UNC’s master’s program School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

"It goes back to the days of country correspondents or stringers. They are limited in what they can do, and newspapers have never been very good about training those people," says Fee, who has 35 years of daily newspaper experience.

Fee sees myriad problems. "There are all sorts of disruptions, including the fact that it’s going to be that much more difficult to find a citizen journalist if you have a question on deadline."

But what Fee sees as the big issue is one of credibility, and the need of papers to protect their credibility.

"I have seen some horrendous mistakes made by people who don’t know what they are doing," he says. "There is every opportunity for lots of things to fall through the cracks. I would be interested in seeing where we are with this in six months."

You will never get far with me arguing that we shouldn't do something because there is risk associated with it. The last thing we should do is be risk averse. People who make this argument don't, I think, understand disruption. The logical question is, if we don't make a place for citizen content, who will? The answer, somebody, and they'll beat us in the long run (in fact, already are).

I got this link through Lucas Grindley, who writes:

Too often we assume that everyone in the newspaper understands its slow march toward bankruptcy. But the truth is reporters and editors need constant reminding that things aren't going well financially.

I read a great essay from Harvard Business Review a year ago about managing in times of change, which includes the need to communicate a sense of urgency. I recommend it to newsroom managers. In this day and age, if you work at a newspaper and value your career, you need to understand business and how things are changing. Again, I refer you to these five books.

UPDATE: Steve Yelvington has another take on Dr. Frank Fee's comments.

USC-Annenberg School of Journalism has released it's annual survey of internet usage.

• Frank Barnako: User-generated content is not a fad
• GigaOM: Internet Getting More Social
• Metrics 2.0: Online world now as important as real world

In almost every aspect where the internet is growing, newspapers are falling behind, such as UGC and social networking (video isn't part of the summary, which is all I read -- but digital photography is (an aspect of UGC), and it's growing, too). Here's the summary.

Somewhat unrelated, but also from Barnako: Newspapers will feel the pain for five more years. It's interesting to note that homes with broadband are more likely to cancel their newspaper subscriptions.