Howard Owens

My brothers and their families are all in town this week. Yesterday, Thanksgiving, was our mother's 80th birthday. As my oldest brother, Don, observed: "Nobody would have believed you if you had said twenty years ago we would all be in Bakersfield for today."

But I guess life works out the way it's supposed to be.

In honor of my mother, and for the enjoyment of my family, I gathered some family snapshots and created the slideshow below. Three or four friends might find it interesting. Other readers will probably careless. I like the way it turned out though, and it's my blog, and I enjoy this media stuff. This was created in iMovie.
[googlevideo]6793878635944306460[/googlevideo]

The video above is only Part I. I left Part II off because I'm going to remake it. I'll probably post that, too, once its done.

[dels]family, video, birthday, thanksgiving[/dels]

ROSE: As you try to make sure you handle all that and you can never be prepared for it. Are there rules about what you shoot and don’t shoot. Have you turned to your camera man and said, ‘turn your camera off’?

WILLIAMS: Yes. I still call it ‘the dinner hour,’ Charlie. I grew up in a kind of classic Henry Luce American two-bedroom ranch with an add-on bedroom and a one-car garage and we subscribed to Time, Life and Look, and so that formed my sensibility as a cold-war kid in America. We called it, ‘the dinner hour,’ and we couldn’t eat until Cronkite said, ‘that’s the way it is.’ And I remember propriety and the Vietnam war and pictures that would make my mother shudder. And why would I shoot video tape that be so revolting as to get in the way of the larger story that we’re trying to tell. We have YouTube for that, you know. This great new frontier where you can look at a tape of cat juggling or you can see what are basically kind of mini snuff films. The depth of human depravity. It’s all on the unregulated wild west universe.

ROSE: But people have to go there to get it.

WILLIAMS: Yes.

ROSE: Not just turning on their television.

WILLIAMS: We have a certain responsibility. We have an an audience of kind of rock-ribbed Americans who for a lot of them, this is the traditional broadcasting. I have a bound with them. I have a compact. And they expect a certain standard.

And Williams says he blogs on his Blackberry from the field:

ROSE: With all the new architecture, it changes what you do in what way other than helping you reach a larger audience and having you say, ‘if you’d like to see my interview with the president, here it is on NBC.com’

WILLIAMS: Absolutely. That’s right. I was covering this last war in Isreal. I remember this like it was yesterday. Below me in the valley the place where Jesus met St. Peter as he was tending his net. In my hand is my Blackberry. I was curious as to how the Yankees did the night before back home, how A-Rod and Jeter were doing on their race to become MVPs ...

ROSE: Jeter was doing fine and A-Rod was having some problems.

WILLIAMS: That’s exactly the story I found, Charlie. And I just finished an essay for the Web that I was hitting send on that I had written with both thumbs on this little keyboard. That’s how the architecture has changed my work, but also you referenced this – more content. We no longer just have to slice off the part of the interview with the president that deals with the Fed. That now finds an airing and I can direct viewers interested in the Fed to the Web site.

I don't think Williams is a very good blogger (though, at least, he apparently writes his own stuff), but I do like the image of him in the Holy Land with his mobile device beaming his own thoughts to his web site.

The full show is available on Google Video.

[dels]brian williams, nbc nightly news, television, news, journalism, blogging[/dels]

Matt Waite writes about using databases to bring a story to a level even below the hyperlocal, but to the personal.

Too often, journalism is about five or six anecdotes that broadly interest a reader in a topic. Through analytic journalism, I say we ditch the anecdotes and give people the power to find themselves in the information — something you can only hope to do with anecdotes. Does this mean we ditch journalism for databases? No. There is still a great need for stories to explain on a human level in ways a database just can’t do. But this isn’t an either/or. Use the story to educate and inform and broadly interest, use the data to specifically and personally interest every reader in ways a story can never dream of doing. Apart, they’re okay but ultimately unsatisfiying. Together, and you’ve got a package that sells papers and draws eyeballs to your website.

I'm glad Waite didn't go too far down the path of "use data not anecdotes," or at least pulled back a little from that line of thinking. Stories (a.k.a. anecdotes) are very important. Stories are what binds humanity. Stories are what we told around the first village fires in order to impart important information about survival. Stories are in our DNA. But when you can give people data that is directly relevant to their lives, then you are providing a necessary and valuable service.

[dels]stories, journalism, data, news writing, journalism[/dels]

Rich Gordon reviews the Newspaper Next project report. He agrees with many of the basic concepts, but finds the report falls short of pointing newspapers toward a secure future.

I agree with a couple of his points:

• The report doesn't deal with the need to compete with yourself. If you really want to be disruptive, find an aspect of your business that is profitable, but isn't yet being disrupted (if something like that exists), now figure out how to disrupt it and go do it. Gordon correctly points out that newspapers never could have created Craigslist, but they should have.
• It's too late for incremental change. We've tried incremental change, and have had some small success, but we're still falling behind.
• It's the people, stupid. We need to focus on people more, both internal and external customers.

Gordon, like many observers, nicks newspapers for a lack of big ideas, that we have a tradition of poor R&D. But look at Google -- one big innovation followed by many acquisitions. Innovative companies usually start with a disruptive splash, but don't survive solely on new ideas -- when and where they can, they acquire them. Just look at how well Shopzilla has done for E.W. Scripps. There is a model of growth, and one that wasn't addressed by Newspaper Next at all.

[dels]innovation, newspapers[/dels]

Andrew Grant-Adamson argues that newspaper reporters don't have time to be bad bloggers. If you're going to blog, or have reporters blog, he seems to be saying, make sure they're good blogs, or don't blog at all.

I agree.

But all reporters must learn to become good bloggers.

If you're smart enough to be a good reporter, you should be smart enough to figure out how to become a good blogger. The trick, of course, is to set aside your ego and preconceived notion about what journalism is so that you can see what blogging is.

It's not your city editor's journalism.

We're used to doing journalism. It's a product we provide consumers. Blogging isn't something you do. It's something you are. It's how you relate to people who share your interest. And you need to be interested in what you write about. You can't just take your dreary beat and turn it into a blog.

Here's how to get better blogs:

• Let reporters pick blog topics that interest them. This isn't a bad idea because we need to get our sites beyond just traditional news coverage anyway. There needs to be some guidelines, of course, because some topics are already saturated (say, politics and pop culture), and others are a little too niche (collecting old Ralph Nader campaign buttons, for example).
• Reporters need to become passionate about their beats (if they're not already) and become true topic-area experts. The beat needs to become more than a job. It needs to be a vocation. If you cover sewer and water, learn everything you can about treatment facilities and aquifers and monitor all the related resources on the web.
• Editors can reassign staff to areas that more closely align with personal interests or predilections. This is obviously more complex (and impossible on really small papers, maybe), but will ultimately lead to better journalism and better blogging. Some reporters are lucky enough to cover what they love, or have learned to love what they cover, but there are also a lot of reporters doing nothing more than filling empty chairs. This might be a good time for editors to decide if it's better to cover a beat just because we've always covered it, or create new beats that better fit the strengths of available staff.

[tags]newspapers, newsrooms, news coverage, blogging, blogs[/tags]

TechCrunch points us to six new developments in chat. My favorites are in-browser chat and contextual chat.  Both of these could have news site implementations.

In this post by Nick Carr about Google's threat to Microsoft Office, I found this quote from Eric Schmidt that is wise, correct and something news site managers should know:

Today we live in the clouds ... Simplicity is triumphing over complexity. Accessibility is beating exclusivity.

In other words, keep your sites simple, and make your content easy to access and to share.

If there are 1,000 newspaper.com sites, at least 999 of them -- the one exception linked below -- present users with way too many choices. For example, as pretty as the Houston Chronicle site is, it's overloaded and bloated with links. WashingtonPost.com is a great web site, but suffers from an explosion of home page links.

Joel Spolsky writes about simplicity in software -- keeping choices to a minimum, specifically avoiding redundancy, but his points should be considered by news site designers, as well.

Newspaper.com sites need to be less confusing, offer more direct choices, and recognize that the home page isn't the only gateway into a web site (in other words, we don't need to cram every last link onto that single, beleaguered default index page).

That said, I think SavannahNow is a little severe.

Are you publishing Thanksgiving-themed recipes on your newspaper.com site? People are searching for them.

The blogosphere is going gaga over news reports that two Washington Post reporters have quit and will start producing content for another media company. The typical angle is "print reporters defect to web" (see: Romenesko).

From the Times:

The Washington Post, which has long prided itself on the depth and breadth of its coverage of national politics, lost two of its top political reporters yesterday to a fledgling multiplatform news organization, albeit one with deep pockets.

John Harris, The Post’s political editor, and Jim VandeHei, a national political reporter, said yesterday that they were leaving The Post to join Allbritton Communications to create an Internet-focused news organization, as yet unnamed, that will include a politics-only Web site. It will be affiliated with the company’s new newspaper in Washington, The Capitol Leader, which is to start print publication in January.

Note the bit I put in bold. Also note that this "web start up," as some have called it, is the product of Allbritton, which operates six television stations, including one in Washington. The new Web site will also reportedly be affiliated with broadcast television.

So, it seems to me, that far from being further evidence that old media is dead (and note, I am among those who believe it is deeply troubled, if not dying -- though I'm more about web opportunity than threat), this story is more about how quality journalism STILL relies old media for its subsidy.

This is just another big media play. I wouldn't expect anything disruptive or innovative. I wonder if they'll even have comments on stories?

It's probably more important to note that the competition for experienced and trained journalists will only intensify as the media universe continues to expand.

[tags]journalism, web, online news, washington post, politics[/tags]

Yesterday, I heard about Michael Richards' racist tirade at the Laugh Factory. Of course, I knew it would be on YouTube. Today, LAObserved told me he apologized on Letterman. Kevin links to the CBS site so we can see the clip. Unfortunately, CBS, being clueless about the current state of video (it's all about Flash), requires some unknown plugin I don't have. So, it was back to YouTube, where the apology is (currently) available. You Tube makes it easier to find important stuff and view it, too.

Lost Remote shares a press release from CBS claiming that YouTube is helping ratings.

Tom Grubisich reviews the major hyperlocal citizen journalism efforts and finds them wanting. None of them seem to be doing a great job of generating interesting, useful content. Some are worse than others.

For my local friends and neighbors, here's what Tom writes about the Northwest Voice, the hyperlocal site that started it all here in Bakersfield (disclosure for those who don't know -- I used to work for The Bakersfield Californian, but I was not involved with this product at all):

NorthwestVoice.com has been one of the mostly frequently, and favorably, cited examples of how grassroots journalism can transform the Web on the community level. But reality doesn't match the PR. Most of NorthwestVoice's hard news is written by paid reporters for the companion print product, while most of the soft stuff (some of it very soft) comes from volunteers.

Even after nearly two and a half years of operation, and a steady stream of positive media mentions, NorthwestVoice.com still struggles to attract traffic and generate productive conversations among users. It ranks 1,107,759 in reach on Alexa, which means it barely registers a traffic pulse. In one of the site's featured "Discussions," someone asked, on July 13: "Who's responsible for providing public facilities, i.e. a post office, library, etc. for the Northwest?" Three months later, the question remains unanswered. Ten of the 17 discussion articles, dating back to November 2005, had no comments.

I've always been a little uneasy with these pure-play citizen journalism sites. I've wanted to see them work, and would have gladly given (and may still give) one of them a try, but as comments at the end of Tom's article mention these sites fall easy prey to the 1-percent rule, which I've written about before. It is just going to be damn hard to generate enough local content, especially quality local content, from a small user base.

None of the newspaper-affiliated sites come off well in Tom's report.

I do have to say, however, if you want an example of how to do citizen journalism right from a newspaper perspective, take a look at Bakersfield.com and the Your Words* section. And see also my previous post about Steve Swenson*. Integration, not segregation.

*I'm not taking any sort of credit for Your Words or the great job Steve Swenson is doing.

P.S. Nick, I still say you should contribute local music scene articles to Your Words.

[tags]citizen journalism, hyperlocal, newspapers, bakersfield[/tags]

It really shouldn't surprise anybody who thinks a few minutes about it that Google believes it needs to move into print ad sales.

For all of the Internets stunning growth and advantages, print is still relatively strong, and newspapers tend to dominate local markets.

On the flip side, the efficiencies of online marketing will always make it a lot cheaper to advertiser online than in print. This means, Google's revenue growth will eventually slow and there will be fewer opportunities for new growth markets. Since Google is GOOG, then its executives have a fiduciary responsibility to start scouting now for other areas of growth.

Google has established relationships with advertisers. It understands how to make ad buying more efficient. It has great technology and great minds to make great technology. So why not leverage those advantages in other media? Google has the power and reach to turn ad buying into just another commodity.

The print ad buy as a commodity will drive prices down, which on a per-ad basis, decrease margins for print publications, but print should also gain in volume and, in theory, help with the bottom line.

Google entering print is less of a threat to newspapers than it is to traditional ad agencies -- the middlemen of large ad buys. This New York Times piece talks about frayed nerves on Madison Avenue.

Of course, Google isn't the only player in the bid to streamline ad buying. Read the whole thing, as they say.

One of the great landmarks of Ventura County, the Wagon Wheel, is being bulldozed by progress.  Billie and I always wanted to stay there, but the last few years, it didn't look like a safe place to be. The Star has a little video (reg. req.) with a local historian.

Meet Brian Stelter. I'd never heard of him, but every TV executive has. His blog has become a must-read at the highest reaches of the TV news industry, according to the NYT.

Mr. Stelter’s blog (tvnewser.com), a seven-day-a-week, almost 24-hour-a-day newsfeed of gossip, anonymous tips, newspaper article links and program ratings, has become a virtual bulletin board for the industry.

It is read religiously by network presidents, media executives, producers and publicists, not for any stinging commentary from Mr. Stelter, whose style is usually described as earnest, but because it provides a quick snapshot of the industry on any given day. Habitués include Mr. Williams and Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN’s domestic operations, who long ago offered up his cellphone number to Mr. Stelter.

“The whole industry pays attention to his blog,” said Jeffrey W. Schneider, a senior vice president of ABC News. “It would not surprise me if I refreshed my browser 30 to 40 times a day.”

Hit for Mr. Schneider: Get an RSS reader. I'm adding Stelter to my blog roll and RSS reader.

[tags]television, news, media, tvnewswer[/tags]

Nothing from Billie in days ... and now she writes about soap.

Will Sullivan turned me onto this piece -- tips for shooting video. It's very good.

[tags]how-to, video[/tags]

A new study says that people would rather stream video than download it, and rarely watch the entire stream, and they want to be entertained. This is all stuff you could pretty much deduce from regular use of YouTube.I

question whether users will really tolerate much in the way of in-stream advertising, since this some what contradicts a Forrester study that says viewers don't like preroll.

While we can't expect newspaper sites to fill the demand for entertainment (though vlogs like TimesCast and Random This are pretty entertaining), we can learn to shoot more video, keep video short and too the point, stream it in Flash, and make sure it is interesting -- four easy takeaways from the new study.

[tags]video, newspapers[/tags]

Joe Murphy, a content developer for the Denver Post, has started a blog, and for the right reasons for a journalist -- practice and learning.

Once upon a time I was a newspaper reporter. I thought of myself as being above the mere pedestrian concerns of business. My job was to get scoops and tell stories. I passionately believed the better we did that, the more papers we would sell. The penny-pinches in the corner offices just didn't get it.

Of course, they probably didn't get it. The problem was, I didn't either.

Twenty years later, its pretty clear a strategy of aiming for journalistic excellence doesn't work. The best newspapers in the world are being hammered by declining circulation as our audience scatters across an ever expanding mediasphere.

It's time for journalists to break out of their insular worlds of Pulitzer chasing and bellyaching about shrinking newsroom budgets. The modern journalist needs to be part of the solution. The best way to do that is to gain a little business literacy. If journalists want to ensure there is a future for good journalism, and they want to understand what their roll should be in this brave new world, then they should study. They should learn about the forces shaping media today.

Here are five books I think will help:

1. Innovator's Solution, by Clayton Christensen. You could read the Newspaper Next report for free, but the book is better. You need to learn what disruption is (i.e., user-generated content sites, blogs and low-end media production) and why it tends to eventually crush top-of-market businesses. You need to learn about jobs to be done and to think about what audiences really want.
2. The Search, by John Battelle. Google dominates the media today. This book will teach you a lot about how people really use the Web. You will learn about the database of intentions and the power of search and why it is hard to hold people's attention.
3. Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. Even if you don't design Web sites or Flash user interfaces, this book will help you understand the power of simplicity. You will understand better why Google and Apple are so successful. You will think differently about how you produce content.
4. The Vanishing Newspaper, by Philip Meyer. For spot-on business literacy about newspapers, there isn't a better book. You will better understand the competitive pressures and strategic decisions that we all need to think about. This book will also scare the hell out of you, or should.
5. The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson. This book is essential to understanding modern media consumption and how it effects us all. The competition for people's attention is fierce and the alternatives for readers and viewers is only growing. We don't just compete against our cross-town rival, or the evening news broadcast. We compete against the entire universe of choices.

If you take my advice, I guarantee you, you will think differently about your job and you'll be a better journalist because of it.

UPDATE: When I made this list, I was thinking most about business books journalists should read. You'll note that the only book on the list directly related to newspapers is Meyers book, which says some real important things about the business side of newspapers. The goal was to stretch print journalists to think about newspapers beyond content. That said, there is a very important book about modern journalism and about content, a book that speaks directly to many of the strategic challenges we face, and that is Dan Gillmor's We the Media. This is one of the most important journalism books of the past decade or so.
[tags]newspapers, journalism, business[/tags]

Wired has a lengthy and fascinating account about Lonelygirl15. It's a story of 21st media, how to make a hit and what works on the web.

It's the story of two aspiring and inspired filemakers who wanted to do a different kind of storytelling.

When he got to college, Flinders dreamed up an alter ego -- an awkward, geeky homeschooled girl. As a camp counselor, he told fireside tales about her experiences. He wrote short stories about her, and when he tried to make it as a writer in Hollywood, he put her in his screenplays.

But nobody bought his scripts: Agents and producers didn't think much of the character he had created.

How Lonelygirl15 became a hit is instructive for those interested in viral marketing. It is all about linking, answering e-mail and being interactive.

There is also a bit about how big media doesn't get it.

SO FAR, HOLLYWOOD HAS NOT EXACTLY EMBRACED Beckett and Flinders. With CAA's help, they landed meetings with studios and TV networks. But their first sit-down with a major broadcaster was, Goodfried says, an "exercise in futility." Beckett tried to explain to the executive that the central theme of online entertainment was interactivity, as opposed to the passivity of television. He wanted to create shows in which the line between reality and fiction is blurred, where viewers can correspond with the characters and actually become involved in the story by posting their own videos. The exec responded by walking them through his fall lineup and pointing out that the network's Web site had great supplemental video material for the season's upcoming shows.

Beckett is clearly frustrated. "The Web isn't just a support system for hit TV shows," he says. "It's a new medium. It requires new storytelling techniques. The way the networks look at the Internet now is like the early days of TV, when announcers would just read radio scripts on camera. It was boring in the same way all this supplemental material is boring."

What's needed, he says, is content that's built specifically for the Web. It doesn't need to be lit like a film -- that would make it feel less real. The camera work should be simple. There shouldn't be a disembodied third-person camera -- a character is always filming the action. Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. "You wouldn't show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?" Beckett says. "You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That's the lesson of Lonelygirl15."

There is so much in those three paragraphs that newspaper online editors need to think about. It isn't just about fiction.

[tags]lonelygirl15, media, youtube, video[/tags]

[googlevideo]4104012635085137463[/googlevideo]

Here is the revised video of our house for sale. We shortened it up and took out the narration, along the lines of advice from Jason Gillies. Not that we are feeling too optimistic about selling it any time soon.

We'd love to leave this butt-ugly town and put behind us all that it represents, but we're stuck. We could get real creative on financing for a qualified buyer, but nobody is stepping forward to say, "help me buy the home I never thought I could afford."

Meanwhile, we've discovered Canandaigua, New York. Billie and I have decided whenever we can finally move, this is where we'll move to. The housing prices are cheaper and the taxes are lower than the Rochester/Fairport area. Here's a picture of the lake I took during my last visit.

[tags]bakersfield, canadaigua, real estate, house for sale[/tags]

This BBC story is about ecommerce sites, but my guess the same rules apply to information sites -- users give you four seconds to get them their page. And then your site better be easy to navigate. I could point to newspaper.com sites that violate these rules, but that would be the old fish, barrel, gun trick.

[tags]usability, site design[/tags]

After writing that RSS should be full-text feeds previously, I decided when I switched to WordPress to give summaries a try and see if it made any difference in traffic. I can't say that it has, though maybe my audience size is too small to give a meaningful sample size. At any rate, since the idea of summary RSS breaks one of my rules about user control, and Sean Polay's (comment #4), I've ended the experiment.

I only discovered Lucus Grindley's blog a few days ago, but so far, I sure like the way he thinks. He has a sold grasp, it seems, on the realities of our business.

Today (or maybe it was yesterday ... I'm a little behind on my blogs), he notes that reporters who  cover beats that can easily be replaced by the wire, find a way to become a local reporter. If your job can be outsourced to AP or a syndication service, your career expectancy is just about zilch in all local markets. Smart editors are either going to look to your beat first to trim the budget, or redeploy your position to someplace more likely to benefit the business, like, maybe, say, the Web.

Really, all journalists should be doing some deep soul searching (even those feeling comfy in local beats). They should ask themselves, "Am I part of the problem, or part of the solution?" If you want career stability, figure out where your newsroom is going and get there first.

[tags]newspapers, reporters, careers, beats[/tags]

OK, this is interesting in a couple of different ways.

First, Backfence has struck a partnership deal with a community newspaper.

That community paper has been around for only 9 months, according to this page.

It's home page is a splash page that morphs into a page of nothing but title ads and an entry button. Once inside, the site attempts to use Flash to complete preserve the print metaphor (warning -- slow load, but at least you can be entertained by a typewriter typing, if you find that entertaining).

So Backfence, a pretty darn progressive new media company is partnering with a publisher who apparently doesn't get the Web at all?

It looks like Google is experimenting with the next logical step in crowdsourcing search results (the basic page rank is also a crowdsourcing device) by asking a searcher to rate a specific result.

I haven't been able to duplicate the behavior, but the idea makes a lot of sense.

This is a "if you can't beat them, join them" strategy: Comedy Central is going to copy YouTube's model of letting users redistribute content via Flash players.

Smart move.

Three interesting things to watch:

• Whereas YouTube has a universality and market leadership regarding its reach, can CC's smaller reach still give its video viral legs;
• Will this make Viacom more eager to stop redistribution through YT?
• Will the inclusion of video ads limit users willingness to redistribute?

This move could tell us a lot about viral syndication.

[tags]video, comedy central, youtube, viral video[/tags]

Doug Fisher has some stats about TV news and the "if it bleeds it leads" philosophy of some stations.

I once wrote a profile of Sig Mickelson for the San Diego Business Journal. He was no fan of local TV news. His explanation for how TV news evolved was enlightening. In the beginning of television, local stations were required to carry a certain amount of local community interest programming. The cheapest way to do this was have somebody read that day's paper. Then somebody discovered that it was pretty cheap, and got better ratings, to monitor the police scanner and send a camera crew out to the latest crime. It was then that a habit was formed and "if it bleeds it leads" was born. My own theory is that in those early days, any crime/accident story was exciting stuff for a variety of reasons -- less common, less jaded public, the novelty of getting such news before the morning paper came out -- so TV stations got hooked.

Once one was hooked, they were all hooked; it become a competition among pioneer stations to take the same scanner-reporting and grab viewer attention. And how best to grab a person's attention but to yell? The reporting became more breathless and louder.

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.

-- David Brinkley

The other thing Doug's post reminds me of is the common reaction among newsroom staffers the first time an online editor sends out the list of the 10-most-read stories of the week. It's all crime and accidents. "My, God," the jurnos sing out, "people only care about the sensational stuff."

I then explain: Not really. What they care about is unusual things going on in their community. The town council arguing over budget numbers and zoning laws are not unusual. A crime or an accident that could dramatically alter the lives of people they might know -- that gets their attention. People tend to believe that they are much more likely to be impacted by the crime or accident story than they are the umpteenth government information story. It isn't the sensation that draws them in. It is the community. In fact, I think one of the great advantages newspaper journalism has now is that we can break that news, whether with words or moving pictures, in a way that is decidedly not sensationalistic and far more informative than traditional TV news.

[tags]news, television, sig mickelson, cbs[/tags]