Howard Owens

Guy Kawasaki says this is the best blog post ever. I say, what fun and interesting way to tell a story. And it's easy to do. All you need is your Mac (you do have a Mac, right?), which comes with a program called "Comic Life," and the right story and the right photos and enough creativity to pull it off (of course).

Jeff Howe posts an entire Gannett internal FAQ on its new information center initiative. There's some good information there, but here's an important bit:

Q. What is the purpose of the Information Center?
A. The Information Center will enable us to gather and disseminate multimedia news and information in a way more suited to the needs of our customers today. We will deliver the content our audiences want at any time, anywhere and to any device. As print newsrooms were geared to the scheduling demands of the daily newspaper, the Information Center will be geared to the 24/7 demands of our customers. We will provide more hyper-local information, more databases (restaurants, entertainment, schools, local sports, etc.), more interactive opportunities, more video and more breaking news than we ever have before.

...

Q. Why is it called the Information Center and not the newsroom?
A. Increasingly, we are realizing that our customers are interested in much more than news from our products. While news remains our preeminent mission, other information – especially local information – is increasingly in demand. Calendars, recommendations, lifestyle topics as well as neighborhood level stories are all new elements that will have ongoing coverage across platforms. We are also embracing community interactivity in our sites with increased involvement. Changing the name acknowledges this additional responsibility and emphasizes that we are gathering news and information for websites, mobile devices and other products as well as for our daily newspapers.

The Information Center concept gets at something that has been imperative for newspapers to do since the rise of the Web. It's been patently obvious that the Web presented a great opportunity for newspapers to transform themselves into the kind of total information hubs -- part local library and part town hall -- that puts them in a dominate position within the communities they serve. I've said this before: newspapers are real good at gathering reams of data and reporting only some of it. Now we can report all of it and more, and provide a better public service.

Newspapers haven't wanted to spend the money. Gannett seems to be saying, "We're not going to spend more money, but we are going to shift resources." We'll see if that works.

One resource that could help is the Mechanical Turk.

Previously:

• Gannett crowdsourcing journalism
• Mechanical Turk and crowdsourcing
  

[tags]crowdsourcing, gannett, journalism, newspapers, communities[/tags]

Scott Karp deals thoughtfully with the balance between publisher control and user control in participatory media. He calls it a delicate balance. I say there is nothing delicate about it. It is essential. For a particular virtual community to survive its success, there must be rules and lines of authority.

[tags]social media, user-generated content, virtual communities[/tags]

Frank Barnako thinks there are too many blogs and that there is a shake out coming.

Yes, there are too many blogs if you think of them in one of the following ways:

• You need to make money off of them, and mass appeal is important
• You just see blogs as another mass-market publication system
• You want to be a blog generalist and not focus on a topic
• You want to be a political blogger (there are way too many political bloggers)
• You don't see a blog as just being another voice in the conversation

If you're running a newspaper or other commercial media enterprise and you expect a blog (or blogs) to become cash cows, you need to rethink your strategy.

Blogs can help you grow readership, but more importantly, they can help you better with your readers (if done right). They can also teach your reporters to be better Web journalists.

If you're doing blogs, you need to understand why and you need to have a strategy. You damn well better understand blogging.

For non-commercial bloggers, as one of the comments on Barnako's post points out, the number of blogs doesn't really matter -- if you're under no commercial pressure and you only write for yourself and maybe a few friends, who cares? If, however, you need the ego feed of an audience or you think this is an easy path to financial independence (and who believes that?), you're likely to be disappointed. Successful blogging (as measured by traffic) takes work and there is a formula to follow. This is not a "build it and they will come" hobby. You've got to know what you're doing and be good at it. If you do that, and have reasonable goals, you will have a degree of satisfaction.

Bloggers who stop are probably of two types: Those with unrealistic expectations and those who found they just didn't like it or have the time (sort of the same reason -- if you like it, you're going to make the time).

For those setting up commercial blogs -- have a plan and know why you're doing what you're doing.

The question of whether there are too many blogs really boils down to what topic you're covering and who the established bloggers are within that niche. If you're planning on commercial success, look for the right opportunities.

[tags]blogs, blogging, media[/tags]

Business Week's Jon Fine:

On a slightly cheerier note, expect an even quicker SPRINT TO DIGITAL. The calculus is brutal, but it liberates companies from both quarterly expectations and traditional thinking.

Newsdesigner.com obtained some of the circ numbers I couldn't (previous post) and does some comparison charts on newspapers that have undergone major redesigns.

It's not pretty.

The Bakersfield Californian tops the charts and shows a pretty significant drop off in circulation since the March 1, 2006 redesign.

[tags]newspapers, circulation, redesign, bakersfield[/tags]

We used to call it user-generated content, or citizen journalism/media. Now, it's crowdsourcing, and Gannett is stepping to the front of the field, or so it is according to news reports.

Gannett has announced a companywide initiative to change the way it gathers news. Newsrooms are no longer newsrooms. They are now information centers. Reporters no longer work on print deadlines. They report information as they get it. And they no longer work isolated from the people they cover or read their stories. They now work in tandem with the community to cover the community.

Or at least that's the goal.

Wired has more, which will introduce you to the term crowdsourcing, a word coined by Jeff Howe (previous post).

None of the concepts behind Gannett's initiative are new -- a lot of us have been talking about the need for digital-first publishing for a long time, and the need for reporters to become more multimedia savvy, and the need to involve the community more in our reporting -- but Gannett is making the most public and transforming commitment yet to 21st Century Journalism. Call it whatever you like, but if Gannett is true to its word, then good, because this is the way it should be.

UPDATE: Doug Fisher has more on Gannett blowing up the newsroom.

UPDATE II: Leonard Witt has a related post.

UPDATE III: Greg Yardley wonders if cloudsourced journalism can't be gamed by bad actors.  I say, depends on how good the editors are at the head of the cloudsourcing tail.

[tags]crowdsourcing, gannett, journalism[/tags]

From now on, the most successful marketers will be those who create advertising as content. You can call it viral, if you like, the be key will be to package a branding message inside of something that informs or entertains, or both. The target audience will need to find it relevant.

Relevance applies to more than text ads attached to search. It applies to everything.

Here's an AdAge piece about Dove's success with a YouTube video. You can watch the video here.

Via Romenesko, we learn that Rick Edmonds at the Project for Excellence in Journalism takes a closer look at newspaper circulation drops and find the news is worse than widely reported. Newspapers are boosting circ with a lot of discounted offers.

Then he turns his attention to claims by the NAA that online readership is refilling the bucket:

According to Nielsen/Net Ratings research numbers, 58 million people visited newspaper web sites in September and that led to a total audience increase of 8 percent over the previous year. The Nielsen study also estimates that the average visitor spent 41 minutes at newspaper websites—that is all sites, not those of a single local newspaper.

A closer look at those numbers, however, underscores the difficulty of the industry’s current business dilemma. If you divide that monthly total into a daily one, there were roughly 1.9 million people visiting newspaper web sites each day in September. By the same calculation, the average time spent online would be about 1.4 minutes per day. (A recent NAA/Scarborough study estimated that the typical reader spends a little less than 30 minutes with the daily edition of the printed newspaper and more than 45 minutes on Sunday.)

I'm no fan of the "visited in the past 30 days" metric. It's a meaningless stat. But Rick's math is no better. You can't just simply take the "visited in September" number and divide it by 30. Site visitation is not that evenly distributed. Hidden within that 30-day number are people who visit every day (or multiple times per day), and people who visit once per week, and everything in between. I also wonder if it accounts for people consuming RSS feeds, or mobile audience?

Right now, there is no established metric for a newspaper.com to measure loyal, consistent audience. I believe it should be a number I call "audience market share," which is the number of wired adults in a DMA divided by the number of local unique visitors on a daily basis. Generally, newspapers do about 2 to 4 percent of AMS, from what I can glean from available data and spot checking (a very unscientific method). I believe the goal should be between 12 and 15 percent.

A week or so ago, I discovered this Web log by business writers about business writing, so I added it to the blog roll and started consuming its RSS feed.

This morning, I'm a little disappointed in it. The Talking Biz News response to a CEO's complaint about a local paper misusing the word "fired" in a headline is fairly shocking.  Here's Talking Biz News' conclusion:

No matter how a company lets go of its workers, whether they are part of an “elimination” or a “reduction in force” or a “rightsizing” or a “downsizing” or any of the other euphemisms and corporate speak that companies use to make what they’ve done sound better, it’s still a firing or a “termination.”

A newspaper’s job is not to sugarcoat but to tell the truth. Get over it.

When an employee is fired, it is for a specific reason related to that employee's work or the employer's belief that said employee's work is not up to standards. An employee is fired for cause (whether real or imagined). When positions are eliminated, it is a layoff and the presumption is the employees lost their jobs through no fault of their own.

This is just basic stuff, I'm surprised it needs to be explained to business writers -- to any journalists, for that matter.

The headline in question was not only wrong, it was libelous. The Racine Journal Times should count itself lucky if the worst that happens is a polite op-ed from the CEO who eliminated the jobs.

The headline is also poor journalism because it misleads the public about what is going on in the local job market. The employees were not "fired" because they screwed up, and therefore will be replaced. The jobs were eliminated and now there are 50 fewer jobs in the local employment market, and 50 neighbors looking for new careers.

[tags]business, journalism, ethics, accuracy[/tags]

Here's a post I've been meaning to write for a while: YouTube needs to go mobile.

I first thought of it during my last East Coast trip when I discovered how cool it was to have mobile video on my Treo. The available video was cool, but I really wanted my YouTube.

Now GigaOm reports, YouTube mobile is coming.

Much of YouTube is perfect for mobile -- short and to the point clips.

The biggest drawback might be is that if unless you know exactly what you're looking for, you might have to wade through a lot of crap to get to the good stuff. This isn't a big deal when you're on a desktop or laptop with broadband and a full screen, but on the tiny screen at slower speeds ... could get frustrating.

Well, that didn't take long -- Black Dog's abandoned blog has already been cybersquated by a black hat SEO/SEM outfit looking to leech of his link backs.

If you're linking to the old blog, do the world a favor and stop. This will help knock the old URL out of Google.

Meanwhile, the real John Jones, the former Black Dog, is now Blackie Jones.

Terry Heaton writes about Media 2.0, which is increasingly about local media with lots of pure-play entrants. He warns that they will disrupt local broadcasters (Heaton focuses on television).

Everywhere I look, I see new businesses springing up that are built to appeal to people at the local level, and this is a very dangerous proposition for incumbent local media players -- many of whom think we have time to sort all of this out. We don't.

Heaton notes that sites like Outside.In have a lot of ground to make up to establish themselves.

However, the aggregate of all these players could siphon local ad dollars. Of course, they will also create new markets, which creates new opportunities for incumbents.

Heaton's right that the time to act is now.

And keep in mind, Heaton is writing for station owners. On the Web there is no such thing as broadcast and print. It's all digital. So however big the local dollar pie might be, TV, radio, newspapers and the start ups are all going after the same market. Where broadcast used to compete in a complimentary way (some advertising works better in print, other in broadcast), now local media companies either need to realize it's a vicious competition with little room for mariginal success, or find ways to cooperate. Co-existence may be hard in the long run.

Forrester Research reports that viewers don't like preroll video.

The Audit Bureau of Circulation released it's bi-annual Fas-Fax report within the past week, and there have been plenty of headlines about big declines at big newspapers.

In a previous post, I suggested that Alan Jacobson talk about how circ is doing at newspapers he's redesigned. In concert with that post, I wrote to E&P reporter Jennifer Saba and suggested she acquire the full Fas-Fax report, or at least the top 150 markets, and publish it. Her response: Request the report yourself. She referred me to the Fas-Fax Web site.

Interestingly, the ABC will only release the report to "accredited press," whatever that means. And by that, I mean, there is no agency that credentials members of the press (unless you count local law enforcement, which hardly seems relevant to an ABC report).

I've only assumed so far, and maybe it's a false assumption, that a blogger working independently would not rise to the level of credentialed in the eyes of ABC.

I have no idea why E&P wouldn't want to request the entire report, but it bugs me that they won't. Maybe there is some logical explanation.

Meanwhile, E&P has posted a story about small papers with circulation gains -- it seems to be a largely self-reporting effort (newspapers telling E&P of their own circulation gains). Still, it's an interesting list -- circ is looking good at many small papers.

I'd like to know more. I'd like to see the Fax-Fax for at least the top 150 markets.

UPDATE: Ms. Saba sends this e-mail:

I think there's a misunderstanding regarding my response. I *have* the full FAS-FAX report which includes 770 dailies. The report is organized alphabetically, by paper. It does not rank the papers in any order. ABC provided a separate list ranking the top 25 papers based on the FAS-FAX.

I get requests for lots of reports -- circulation and otherwise -- and I cannot pass them along. Reporters receive reports because of that caveat. I'm happy to send people directly to the source, which I did when you requested.

My question back, then, is why hasn't she published the 770 dailies numbers?

UPDATE II: Newsdesigner.com obtained some of the numbers I couldn't (maybe I didn't try hard enough, but it just seems reasonable to me that E&P would publish this data -- or have done the redesign story itself (and maybe it has by this point, but I haven't seen it)).

[tags]newspapers, redeisgn, circulation, abc[/tags]

My friends over at E.W. Scripps must be feeling a little pressure today -- Yahoo! launched a new food vertical. It is, of course, a direct competitor with FoodNetwork.com.

A quick review: Yahoo!'s site is smart and well executed product. They've aggregated lots of content from several sources, have some original content and packaged it in an attractive design with good navigation (I love the "buzz" nav under the main tabs). They've also included restaurants -- here's the Bakersfield page.

Why hasn't a local newspaper done a food vertical like this?

[tags]food, dining, local, yahoo, newspapers[/tags]

I've always believed in the "no asshole rule," though it isn't always easy to state in polite company. Still, there is no better way, in one sentence, to sum up a good management practice.

Now there is a book of that title, and Guy Kawasaki has a book review.

I've known a couple of executives in my past who would benefit from such a book. Of course, the people who really need 224 pages on this topic are the ones least likely to get the point. If you don't get the rule in one sentence, a book isn't going to help.

[tags]business, management, leadership[/tags]

Could the Los Angeles Times be up for grabs?  I know some people who hope so.

Jack Lail turns us on to Compete.com where you can punch in a domain name and get traffic stats, and even compare different domains.

Jack wonders if Compete is more accurate than Alexa.

Here's three domains from the Bakersfield market on Compete.com.

Here's the same comparison on Alexaholic.

One engine shows Bakersfield.com traffic growing the other shows it declining ... hard to say which is more accurate. I don't know.

[tags]compete.com, analytics, metrics, web traffic[/tags]

What if a newspaper bought a boatload of $100 computers and gave them away, maybe in the poorest neighborhoods. The outside would be branded and the default, unchangeable home page would be the paper's Web site ... what would that mean for the paper, the community, the culture? And would the ROI be worth it?  And throw in some free wi-fi hotspots, or maybe wi-max, in those same neighborhoods -- what about then?

[tags]newspapers, laptops, computers[/tags]

While newspaper circulation around the country is dropping, the New York Post and the Daily News are growing. Forbes tackles the issue of why:

Emphasize local coverage
Neither the Post nor the News provides much in the way of national or international news. And why should they? There are plenty of other places now where you can get your fill of national and foreign coverage ...

Offer stories you can't get anywhere else
Both the Post and the News know that to hook readers, they need to give them stuff they can't get elsewhere. ...

Keep it short
... many consumers would just as easily do with about 800 words or less ...

Pick a point of view
Journalism ethics experts would cry foul, but the success of News Corp.'s Fox News Channel, news blogs and even The Daily Show With Jon Stewart indicates that a large segment of the public doesn't mind having its news served up with attitude and a distinct point of view. ....

Keep serving up sports
Strong coverage of local sports teams--whether professional, college or high school--remains one of the most potent readership draws that newspapers have. ...

(via Romenesko)

[tags]newspapers, circulation[/tags]

In the comments on this post, Jeff Reifman, who does deserve credit for bringing this whole fascinating matter to the public's attention, mentions that he came up with an ingenious way to track missing Comedy Central video.

Tonight, using the Google Search API, I wrote a short PHP script to tabulate content from YouTube that is present or missing based on top search hits from Google’s search engine.

While not entirely scientific or entirely representative, my top line results show that 349 of 764 or 46 percent of the top Daily Show clips in Google search results are missing and broken, 190 of 537 or 35 percent of the Colbert Report results and 138 of 594 or 23 percent of South Park results. So, while you can still find 2,723 videos at YouTube.com of the Daily Show, 881 videos of the Colbert Report and 6,660 of South Park, the percentage of broken links from Google’s top results show that there either has been an ongoing take down or a large recent takedown effort at YouTube.

More here.

Mathew Ingram has more on speculation that Viacom has been playing hardball to get a favorable deal from YT.

A while back, I started a long-tail project of linking to some great rockabilly videos on YouTube. I never finished.

When I switched from my home-grown blogging app to WordPress, all my "embed" tags for some of those videos were stripped from my posts. Tonight, I embarked on a project to re-embed some of that video (which in WP ain't easy -- it takes a special plugin).

In the process, I discovered several of the rockabilly videos I first tried to turn you on to have disappeared. If you follow some of the links in the original posts (below), you'll find several have been removed.

• Buddy Holly
• Eddie Cochran
• Gene Vincent
• Collins Kids

Fortunately, all of the Collins kids remain. I was also please to find all my favorite Nick Lowe bootlegs in tact.

Some over zealous attorney is very, very, very foolish. Removing these videos benefits no one, and certainly not the copyright holders who could stand to substantially increase revenue from the copyrights by increased exposure and availability to these classic performances leveraged by the power of the long tail.

Previously

• The most egregiously wrong YouTube story yet
• Following Comedy Central vs. YouTube
• YouTube still running Comedy Central video

[tags]rockabilly, music, youtube, riaa[/tags]

The fall is Billie's favorite time of year. She loves Halloween and Thanksgiving.

In Spring Valley and Ventura, we never had many trick-or-treaters. It had me thinking, Halloween was dead as a children's adventure night. Every year, I would witness Billie's disappointment when we had much left over candy and few little goblins and ghosts.

This year was our first year in our Bakersfield house (and almost certainly our last).

Billie got all costumed up as a court jester for tonight, not knowing what to expect. She had bought two big bags of candy, and I chided her for her extravagance.

The first tricksters showed up at 6:15. By 7, I was jumping in my car to rush off to the store and buy two more bags (large bags) of candy. By 8, we were out of candy and turning off the porch light.

In our 13 years of marriage, it is the first year Billie ever got to enjoy an seemingly endless stream of candy seekers. She had a blast.

The picture is of the jack-o-lantern she made. Here's her blog post on Halloween.

[tags]halloween, pumpkin, bakersfield[/tags]

Inga Barks is talk show host on KERN here in Bakersfield. I don't know much about her, her politics or her background. I met her once and she definitely a type-A extrovert, but I have never listened to her show (pretty much despising talk radio as I do). She interviewed Donald Rumsfeld Romenesko linked to it, so I found out about. Now you know, too.
[tags]rumsfeld, romenesko, bakersfield , iraq. inga barks, iraq[/tags]

How could a reporter get this so wrong?

After a brief moratorium, YouTube is once again a leading source for fake news.

Thousands of clips from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report reappeared on the video site Tuesday after being yanked over the weekend due to a copyright complaint from Viacom, Comedy Central's parent company.

It would just not be very hard to do a search and find sources that point out that thousands of CC video was never removed from the site at all. And a little basic reporting would also uncover that the videos that were removed have not reappeared.

The article does contain this Viacom statement I hadn't see before (if the reporter can be trusted):

In a statement Monday, Viacom clarified that it was trying to strike a balance between protecting its content and pleasing its audience.

"Like our peers in the media industry, we are focused on finding the right business model for professionally created content to be legally distributed on the Internet," the statement read.

"We want our audiences to be able to access our programming on every platform and we're interested in having it live on all forms of distribution in ways that protect our talented artists, our loyal customers and our passionate audiences."

Followed by this whopper of a paragraph:

The media conglomerate originally put YouTube on notice Friday, with a letter requesting that the site purge all Comedy Central content, as well as programming from VHI, MTV, BET and Nickelodeon.

All? Try some, and nobody knows for sure how many.

Previously:

• Following Comedy Central vs. YouTube
  
• YouTube still running Comedy Central video

[tags]youtube, viacom, comedy central, [/tags]

Last night, spurred on by e-mail questions from Mark Glaser, I dug a little more into "the Comedy Central yanks vids" from YouTube story kept adding to my original post. I'm raising questions about what's going on. Yes, videos have been removed, but is it a purge, or is it something else, a negotiating tactic, maybe?

Meanwhile, the No Fact Zone lives up to its name (which I realize is a satire, but ... ):

Look, here’s the deal: YouTube did two searches for TCR videos, from what I can tell: “Colbert Report” and “Stephen Colbert”. It’s almost impossible to find a decent video with those two tags. However, many of the “saved” videos have obscure tags, or simply say “Funny” or “Comedy”. Those videos are much harder to find in the system. You pretty much have to know they are there. Those are the videos that have survived, and the videos that are circulating among fans.

No Fact Zone doesn't link to search results for "Colbert Report" or "Stephen Colbert," but I do ... "Colbert Report," 859 videos (roughly what it has been the past three days; "Stephen Colbert", 1,149 videos (first time I've ever run that search). Pretty much all the video I'm seeing with those searches is "decent," and much of it has been up for months and months, and some of it is new. As far as I can tell, Comedy Central video (1,890 videos) isn't hard to find at all. YouTube is still the mother load.

More later, I presume.

UPDATE I: The Washington Post story this morning is balanced, and absent "the great purge" angle of most media coverage so far, adding some perspective.

UPDATE II: Scott Karp addresses the truth vs. rumor aspect of this story.

The blogosphere is a tremendous force for spreading rumors and, in some cases, disinformation — this story’s “truth” or lack thereof may well be surfaced by the blogosphere as well, given the countervailing force of self-correction.

Also read Dan Blank and Mathew Ingram. They are all addressing this post by Mark Cuban.

UPDATE III: Jeff Jarvis reports that NBC reports that Viacom is asking only for full programs be brought down. As comments on the post note, that doesn't make any sense either. He also links to a post from FishBowlNY that notes a lot of CC clips remain on YT.
[tags]comedy central, youtube, colbert report, stephen colbert[/tags]

Bakersfield District Attorney Ed Jagels has his latest sensational attack on The Bakersfield Californian posted.

As a matter of fact, the District Attorney's Office has been extraordinarily successful in its misdemeanor prosecutions. But your reporters couldn't know that, because they are too busy writing the "impact stories" you demand, i.e., inventing conspiracies and scandals.

You've got to love the ad hominem attacks and hyperbole. What a great way to show you're better than the guy you're tearing down.

Mike Jenner responds:

“I’m glad Ed Jagels is finding time to prosecute these misdemeanors,” Jenner said in response to Monday’s report. “That’s certainly not the impression I’ve gotten from his comments in the past about staffing issues, or from actions by the city of Bakersfield, which has hired its own prosecutors to press misdemeanor cases that Jagels’ office didn’t have time to pursue. We appreciate the story idea, and we’ll take a closer look.”

Previously:

• The DA’s lame attempt to become a citizen journalist
• TBC responds to Jagels

[tags]bakersfield, district attorney, law enforcement, newspapers, bakersfield californian[/tags]

Smart post from Terry Heaton.

In my presentations, I often use a slide featuring a picture of George Costanza from Seinfeld and a quote of George's from one of my favorite episodes, "The Opposite." In it, George has decided that his whole miserable life was built on bad decisions, and that if he'd just do the opposite of what he thought was right, he'd end up better off than his current state. The show is filled with hilarious lines built on the premise, but none is more memorable than the one repeated in the slide. In the diner, Jerry, Elaine and Kramer convince George to try his new theory on a beautiful woman sitting at the counter. He does, and she shocks him by agreeing to a date.

Leonard Witt:

I want our journalists to be wise, thoughtful members of the community, rather than cold and calculating distant observers. In this new participatory culture we will need information providers, aggregators, mediators and navigators, who are part of the community but who have status because of their wisdom and accomplishments, not because of their degree.

Amen, brother.

To take the religious metaphor a step further -- though switching faiths -- it's high time for a Reformation.

Previously: A manifesto for change that isn't.

[tags]journalism, media[/tags]