Howard Owens

Alan Jacobson has been at the forefront of modern newspaper design recently, pushing for designs that publishers hope will increase readership. Here's a list of his recent redesigns, topped by my former employer, The Bakersfield Californian ("the most dramatic and innovative design in America," according to Alan).

The news is everywhere today: Circulation is down across the nation.

I'd like to know how Alan's redesigned papers are doing? Did they decline, too? If so, how much, and now did they compare to the averages in their circ category? Did any show a circ gain? If so, why?

If I can get my hands on the full Fas-Fax report, I'll share.

Interesting observation from Steve Yelvington:

I think it's significant that the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe and other traditionally "great" supermetro newspapers are at the top of the list of those suffering major circulation declines. Newspapers that are clearly local, or clearly national, are less affected.

The New York Times has picked up on the rumor that YouTube is yanking Comedy Central video. And to me, it's still just a rumor, because the same "colbert" search that I've been running for the past several (several is an overstatement -- I first heard about this on the morning of the 28th ... I don't know why I wrote "several") days as a spot check still returns the same well-populated results.

UPDATE: Mark Glaser writes an open letter to Steve Colbert and invites readers to make their own response videos.

To re-emphasize my previous point: Here's another YouTube search of Comedy Central videos.

It should be noted that the apparent original source for the story is Jeff Reifman, who operates NewsCloud, which appears to me to be a somewhat competitive user-generated content site. His claim is that he an e-mail from DMCA Complaints, a YouTube department.

Doesn't that sound fishy to anyone?

Possible explanations for the disconnect between what I'm seeing on YT and what the news reports are telling us:

• Google attorneys are studying the matter without further action
• The mass removal of video from YT is far more difficult than I can imagine (and I imagine it's pretty damn easy, knowing what I know about web programming)
• Reifman jumped to an incorrect conclusion about the meaning of the e-mail, since it references only one specific video
• That specific video contained an interview with Steve Wozniak, and Wozniak or an associate didn't want the video on YT, and that's the mysterious third party involved here

At any rate, I see a lot of big and independent media jumping all over this story without one bit of confirmation that Reifman's report is accurate or that he has drawn the correct conclusions from the e-mail he received. I still say it's a rumor.

UPDATE II: Other blogs publishing unskeptical accounts of the story:

• Huffington Post
• BoingBoing
• BlogWorks
• Media Law Professor Blog
• Lost Remote
• Wise Law Blog
• The No-Fact Zone
• John Battelle

On the flip side, here's a copy of another letter to another user about another clip (an interview with Al Franken (somebody should check on whether Franken and Woz have the same agent).

UPDATE III: I just found this YT video that speculates that only clips longer than five minutes have been removed, but here's a guy called "colbert clips" that has uploaded many longer-than-five-minutes clips in the past week (the videos preroll a plug for colbertclips.com). Here's a long one uploaded by another user. Then again, here's somebody reporting that a bunch of CC clips from a favorite list have disappeared. As for the classics, there's a couple of versions of "Truthiness" and "Wikiality."

UPDATE IV: Lost Remote goes along with Glaser's update to his post above that maybe this is a negotiating ploy by Viacom.
[tags]youtube, google, comedy central, daily show, colbert report, south park, viacom, copyright[/tags]

Danah Boyd at Corant calls into question reports (powered by comScore data) that MySpace is growing grey.

They have found that the unique VISITORS have gotten older. This is not the same thing as USERS. A year ago, most adults hadn’t heard about MySpace. The moral panic has made it such that many US adults have now heard of it. This means that they visit the site. Do they all have accounts? Probably not. Furthermore, MySpace has attracted numerous bands in the last year. If you Google most bands, their MySpace page is either first or second; you can visit these without an account. People of all ages look for bands through search.

Jim Romenesko links to this article by Edward Wasserman for this graph:

I don't think I ever met an owner, no matter how rich, who would pony up a nickel of his own money to cover shortfalls in the operations of a company he owned unless somebody was holding a gun to his head, and even then, not before he'd had a moment to think it over.

But I think the next is equally insightful:

True, Wall Street can be tough. Stupid, too. But generally, public investors aren't buying today's profits, they're buying tomorrow's promise. That's what the newspaper industry has so dismally failed to articulate -- and that failure will be no less vexing for hometown rich guys than it has been for stock portfolio managers.

And it will be vexing for our readers, too, as we slip further and further behind serving their needs in the manner they demand. We need to build a future that serves readers and investors (both public and private), because in reality, they have an equal stake in our future.

My wife has a problem, and the problem is, too many clerks and waiters seem to think serving her is a problem. Billie explains.

Bob Benz is in London at a media conference and he spoke there on innovation and shared a little about the E.W. Scripps Entrepreneur's Fund, which is $1.5 million pile of cash available to any entrepreneur with in Scripps willing to make a pitch for a project or business model.

"Let’s stop being prey, let’s start being predators," he says. "Think like a venture capitalist, think like a start-up. There are opportunities here but if you look at Craigslist and Yahoo and Google and cry in your beer, you won’t get anywhere. Start looking for opportunities to attack and start looking for opportunities to do it in a calculated way, in a business-like way."

I've been excited by this idea since I first heard of it a few months ago. I think it's an idea more newspaper companies should emulate.

[tags]scripps, newspapers, new media, innovation[/tags]

Good advice via Danny Sanchez for young multimedia staffers: Don't be a cut-and-paste expert.

If your job is to repurpose print content online, and that's all you know, you're in trouble. Increasingly those jobs will vanish. As news operations become more Web centric, the days of some graveyard shift guy uploading all the content will close (frankly, they should already be gone, but I know they are not). The future is reporters writing directly into a Web-based CMS that can publish straight to the Web (some times without an editor's prior intervention!) and repurpose the story for print.

Beyond that: have some ambition. You shouldn't be in the news game if you don't have ambition. Regardless of your current position, you should be doing more, learning more, and on your own time if necessary, and it probably is necessary.

And just to pound on my new favorite dead horse these days: You should blog. Everybody should blog.

[tags]journalism, career[/tags]

I finally opened a Flickr account.

I've always resisted Flickr because I felt locked in to Buzznet. I think Buzznet has a superior design and I like the way social networking works on the site. That said, Flickr is where the action is, so I thought I should give it a try.

Given that there is a monthly limit on how many photos I can upload, and I don't have that limit on Buzznet, I think Buzznet will remain my primary photo sharing service. My best shots will go on both Flickr and Buzznet.

Speaking of trying out social networking sites -- a week or two ago, I finally set up a MySpace page, just to try it out, but I haven't done much with it.

This morning, I was up early for some odd reason. At 6 a.m., I'm sitting in my living room with my laptop and I look up and see Fiona sitting on the hi-fi, gazing up at the light in the ceiling. "Damn, I wish I had my camera, I thought." As she sat motionless, I thought, "Maybe I can creep into the other room and get my camera without alarming her?" (she gets jumpy sometimes). I did, and she didn't move. I made it back to my chair without her moving. I was able to snap off six pictures before she jumped down. This is the best of them.

Unfortunately, I didn't notice the poor positioning of the clock behind her. It should be either fully visible or fully hidden, I think. I'm not sure I could have done much about it, but I might have tried had I been more mindful. I was more concerned about exposure and focus.

Also, check out my long, long rose stems.

[tags]cats, kittens, roses, photography[/tags]

OJR has set up a wiki page for tools for multimedia journalists. It is already a great page. I expect it will get better as more people contribute.

[tags]journalism, multimedia[/tags]

I haven't downloaded and installed Firefox 2.0 yet. After reading this Slashdot post, I'm glad I haven't. I think I'll wait.

Wouldn't it be ironic, and wouldn't it shake up the open source community a bit, if Firefox 2.0 turns out to be the buggy, security-plagued browser and IE 7.0 was stable and secure? I'm not saying that's the case, just saying ...

[tags]browsers, firefox[/tags]

Great idea from Greg Yardley: You read a story, figure there will be follow ups, so you should be able to right click the headline and subscribe to subsequent stories.

NYTimes.com used to offer a service some what similar, but it vanished long ago (you could "subscribe" to topics").

When a journalist as renowned and respected as Geneva Overholser writes a paper boldly titled, “A Manifesto for Change,” an optimistic guy like me desperately wants to read a authentic call for innovation and reinvention.

Unfortunately, Overholser, one of the true red-robed cardinals of the Church of Journalism, seems to merely restate the same old orthodoxy.

It is the norm in the world of American business to place an emphasis on profitability – an emphasis that has grown across most sectors of the economy in recent years. But journalism is not just another business. As Hutchins said to the National Conference of Editorial Writers in 1948, "The sole test of the success of a steel business or a cracker business may be, for all I care, its ability to make money, but the public concern with the large elements in the newspaper business suggests that, though a newspaper must make money to stay in business, it should meet a further test; it is proper to ask whether it is discharging its responsibility for public enlightenment."

And here’s the crux of my differing opinion: If we had been doing a good job of informing the public and taking seriously the call to civic enlightenment, we wouldn’t be in the pickle we find ourselves in today.

If we had been doing our jobs instead of feeding our egos, we would have readers and we would be relevant, and we would be much further along in building the kind of Web sites that people want to visit. In the marketplace of trust, we would be winning.

Our chief problem isn’t technology. Our chief problem is attitude.

Leonard Witt, who gets credit for pointing me to Overholser’s PDF (a PDF with no ability for feedback, comment or links, in itself a rather obvious blunder in the age of conversation), is also unhappy with Overholser’s manifesto.

This week at the Huffington Post she fairly begs for citizen help, but read my italicized sentence to understand why she and the mainstream media folks are adrift:

Please meet me there, oh fellow citizen of this unsettling time, at my immodestly named Manifesto, and check out those Action Steps. Typical of us legacy-media types, we haven't quite gotten our site interactive yet, but we will, very soon. We'll be posting progress along these various paths. We'll need your views on the action steps we've thought of, and your suggestions for others. I hope you'll join us.

Geneva, the problem isn't that the legacy-media types haven't quite gotten their site interactive yet, but that they have not gotten their minds interactive yet. And I am afraid your manifesto is in some ways clueless.

I took the time to carefully read Geneva’s manifesto today, and as much as I wanted something revolutionary, I came away paragraph after paragraph feeling that I was reading a call to arms for business as usual.

First off, Overholser spends way too many words consumed with the state of newspaper ownership. Ownership isn’t the problem. Knight-Ridder didn’t fail because of public ownership. KR failed because its basic new media strategy was fatally flawed and it lacked any true vision for 21st Century media. Journalism isn’t in trouble because of public ownership. There are plenty of bad privately owned newspapers. Journalism is in trouble because we’ve lost connection with the people we believe we serve (that, and the multitude of choices available now). There isn’t one privately held company that is doing any better at meeting the business and journalistic challenges of today than any of the best publicly held corporations.

But that’s only part of the problem within Overholser’s manifesto.

Her entire premise is built on the notion that big-J journalism is needed, a necessity, like water and air

Sorry, but it’s not.

The first step to healing is honesty. We need to be honest: journalism as traditionally defined is not needed. There is a sizable minority of people today (from what I know of various ratings/readership studies, I'd guess in the 30 to 40 percent range) who get along fine without journalism. We all know people who don't read newspapers or news magazines, or watch TV news, or listen to the radio (even something as uninformative as talk radio). Sure, journalism should play a watchdog role in a free society (ideally), but that doesn't mean people perceive the need for journalism. It doesn't matter how much we want them to perceive it -- if they don't, they don't. Add to the lack of interest, the fact that more and more people without pedigree or training think they can do it for themselves, and you wind up with a world where traditional journalism is left without mooring or direction. So you can't say, in all honesty, that big-J journalism is needed. It's a good to have, but needed, it ain't.

Of course, there will always be a need for people who ask questions and publish answers, and I call that journalism (though not within the orthodoxy of the Church of Journalism), but it doesn’t take training, it doesn’t require editors, and it certainly shouldn’t be credentialed, as Overholser suggests.

One of the most detrimental and dangerous thoughts we can hold is that professional journalism is necessary. That is the path to destruction.

As media organizations are learning, citizens want to be part of their media. The media no longer exercise the control they once did but, through embracing interactivity and engaging the readers, they are coming up with new kinds of power ...

Here is a fatally flawed assumption: that citizens want to be part of our media organizations. Actually, people want a voice, and they aren’t looking at it as our media or their media. That’s why Dan Gillmor’s book title was so apt: It’s “we the media.” To Overholser, apparently, interactivity is just another path to power and control. But in a true conversation, there is no position of power. There can be no true communication where one person dominates the patter and jive. The true power is in the network, and networks are a path to the truth journalists supposedly regard so highly. Networks are more powerful than the omnipotent voice of a journalism organization.

Overholser extols the virtues of professionalization, but it is professionalization, created by early 20th Century publishers to satisfy advertisers, that has separated us from our communities. In the age of networked communication, professionalization is irrelevant. In the age of networks, conversation will create the standards, transparency and accountability Overholser seeks.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said: "I think there is a really poisonous atmosphere out there. What those Times people are reacting to are the attacks by partisans and bloggers. The environment is really pretty tough, and you have to be prepared to make your case."

What Kohut calls poisonous, I call healthy. What Kohut is defending is a New York Times that is arrogant and insulated -- two characteristic anathema to truth. That isn't to say all media critics are right or accurate, but within the cacophony of voices, intelligent people can sort out relevance and meaning.

Near the end, Overholser notes that bloggers are beginning to see themselves as journalists and are getting "more and more obsessed with accuracy." Beginning? As far back as at least 2001 Ken Layne was noting that "we can fact check your ass." I know many bloggers who would argue that over the past six or seven years, bloggers have been far more obsessed with ethics and accuracy than many MSM journalists.

It is this disparity between reality and perception that separates Overholer's manifesto from a true call to arms.

One last observation to lament: Overholser’s paper opens with nine propositions – propositions drafted by a panel of industry experts, with no opportunity for others outside that clique to weigh in, or for the public to comment. So what we’re given is a manifesto for change that fails to recognize the true change going on – that small groups of elite insiders no longer dictate what media is. A better approach would have been to publish the propositions in a blog or wiki and seek a broad range of input – what should journalism be in the 21st Century?

While I applaud the effort to find a way to grapple with the changing role of journalism, I think Overholser and her group still have a lot of work to do, and attitudes to change.

Newspapers are very concerned about competitors getting in between them and their customers -- competitors like Craigslist or Google, but what happens if some of the biggest advertisers for advertisers go out of business because of the Internet. Michael Arrington shares his experience in buying a car from CarsDirect.

On Monday evening I called two local Honda dealers, told them I was going to buy through CarsDirect but would get it from them instead if they would match the price. Both said no. One laughed at me before saying no.

Dealers and classified managers across the nation should cringe.

[tags]classifieds, newspapers, car dealers, car buying[/tags]

I keep preaching -- everybody should blog!  But in my own house, I've been the only blogger for years.  Today, this minute, that changes.  Billie Owens has a blog.

It was a shock to my system a couple of weeks ago when Billie came to me and said, "Will you register cockamame.com for me?"

"Why?"

"Because I think I want to start a blog."

Wow. Cool.

The need to create a blog for Billie is part of the impetus to switch to WordPress.

Read her first post. It's pure Billie and a good example of her superior writing talent.

Reporters and editors should blog. To help the cause, I'm offering three newspaper journalists the chance to start a blog with their own domain practically for free -- they have to buy the domain, but I'll host it for free. This hosting account I have now allows me to run a total of six domains. I have one and I've already promised two to other people (more on that later). That leaves three accounts available.

If you are a newspaper reporter or editor and your company does not offer you a place to blog, and you don't currently have a blog of any kind, you qualify for one of these accounts.

If you would like an account, please post your request in the comments to this post. Please share a little about yourself, your background and current journalistic status, and why you want to blog. If there are more than three requests, I'll need to use what you say and my intuition as to who gets one of the three accounts. It's not a contest, but if there are more than three requests, I can't fill them all.

Sure, you don't need me to host your free blog, but this is a chance to do so under your own domain, which for some people is a barrier to entry. I hope this offer spurs a couple of people to jump into blogging.

photo by Laineys Repertoire
[tags]newspapers, blogging, journalists[/tags]

Speaking of people blogging, Ken Layne is back. He's made three posts in the past month. He needs to post more frequently. He needs comments on his posts. He needs to be the old Ken Layne (or so I say, but I'm just selfish -- I want to read the Ken Layne I used to read so often ... hell, you can't even get to his old archives any longer).

My boss, Bill Blevins has a blog.  He just launched it. There is something to be said for bosses with blogs.  Bob Benz has a blog, and I've always liked Bob. Bad bosses don't have blogs. (Or maybe it's just bosses with the initials B.B. who blog that are good bosses. (Ed., aren't you forgetting about Steve Dana, who doesn't have a blog and isn't a B.B?  Hey, don't confuse a good supposition with facts!)).

I think Bruce Bochy has been a good Padres manager. I think stability of management is a good thing in baseball. But it probably was time for Bochy to move on. The Padres have only been able to get so far under Bochy and it's time to try something different. While it's not a black and white issue, there is something to the knock against Bochy that he favors veterans over rookies. Xavier Nady and Ben Davis were never given a fair chance to prove themselves, and it probably screwed up their careers. One has to wonder if Jason Bay wouldn't be a Padre today if not for Bochy, but then maybe under Bochy Bay never would have become the star he is. But then, Khalil Greene, Jake Peavy and Adrian Gonzalez did all right under Bochy.

Photo By Ewen and Donabel.

[tags]padres, bruce bochy, baseball[/tags]

I used to to use the Google personalized page as my home page, and then I discovered NetVibes. Both do two very important things: The let me add content from any RSS source, and they let me position content according to my priorities. ESPN, as noted in a great post by Steve Rubel, has applied those lessons to a big media site. We've reached the point where it's not a personalized page if users can't control the entire experience.

Robert Young has what I think is a very important post over at GigaOm about the disconnect between what social media is vs. what some business people want it to be.

At the risk of getting it wrong (because he doesn't really have a nut graph that does this), I'm going to summarize what I think his point is: There are people constructing business models based on the idea that social networking/media can make them rich (or save their businesses), but that isn't what social media is good at. The point of social media is to empower the user, not to drive the business success. If we focus on the user, we'll evolve a very different business than what we might expect.

Even if that isn't a correct summation, I think it's a good point; and, his entire post is interesting reading and thought provoking, so read it.

[tags]social media, social networking[/tags]

Scott Karp raises a good point: That just like content creators, advertisers don't need to pay to play, either.

He doesn't think paid advertising will vanish soon, but he doesn't raise the point of how many big retailers are discovering the power of disintermediation, such as Home Depot and Target, among others. But then, maybe Home Depot's a bad example, since advertisers are now paying them.

One thing in favor of publishers is that it's a lot easier to buy a portion of somebody else's audience than it is to be compelling enough to build your own.

[tags]advertising[/tags]

The wit and wisdom of Steve Jobs as revealed by Wired. A sample:

"I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."

"Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it."

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

"The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament."

"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."

I think the last two quotes could be applied to the newspaper industry. (via Susan Mernit)

[tags]apple, steve jobs, quotes[/tags]

Mindy McAdams posts some tips for blogging. Every editor and reporter who plans to or is starting a blog, should read them, which means EVERY reporter and editor should read them.

[tags]blogging, journalism, reporters, editors[/tags]

Google is fighting the good fight to protect Google as a trademark, but I think it's a losing battle, especially in the age of user-generated content. Back in the day when there were only  a few media outlets, it was easy to send a cease and desist letter to a newspaper or magazine.  Now there are tens of millions of publishers, and not all of them show up in Google, or Yahoo! or Live Search, but they're all connected in some way. If elevator couldn't protect its trademark back in the day, how is Google going to do it today? (via John Battelle)

OK, I'm a hypocrite.  Previously, I said RSS should be full text.  One of my commenters on that post (those old Haloscan hosted comments did not move over to the new blog) suggested I was full of beans.  So, as an experiment I have RSS set up on this blog as short intros.  I welcome feed back from any of you subscribing to the feed.

Lost Remote reports that an undisclosed third party has demanded that YouTube remove video of Comedy Central shows, such as the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.  Something doesn't computer.  While it's obvious that some videos have been removed, there is still (for example) Steve Colbert on YouTube. I think YouTube has been a great promo tool for Comedy Central, and certainly for Colbert, who has repaid the favor through many on-air references to YouTube.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out -- legitimate demand for removal, or misunderstanding, or back-tracking by Viacom when they realize they're really hurting themselves.

[tags]youtube, google, colbert, daily show, viacom[/tags]

Greg Sterling has some good insights on brand names and the valuation of domains.  THe most obvious domain isn't always the best performing domain.  Amazon.com is the Web's largest shopping not, not Shop.com.  Yet, some bread-and-butter domain names have sold for millions.

brands resonate with users, like Amazon and or Google.  It's probably hard to get the same resonance from straight-forward domain names.   A good brand name is like a great poem, with multiple levels of meaning.  That doesn't mean there isn't a place for the straight-forward domain name (such as your newspaper name as URL), but in creating subsidiary businesses, brand is vital to success.

It looks like Nick has a new camera phone that does video, and he's on an East Coast trip, and providing vid coverage, here, here and here he visits Poe's grave.

[tags]Baltimore, video, blogging, mobile[/tags]