Howard Owens

Nick Carr was interviewed by WSJ recently about his notion that some companies have made a religion out of innovation, and that isn’t a good thing. The WSJ piece isn’t online in a free form, but Nick discusses it a bit in this post.

I’ve been a big fan of the whole Innovator’s Dilemma/Innovator’s Solution camp since I first discovered it in 2004, but I’ve also never bought into it whole hog. I’ve always seen a place, especially in the newspaper business, for sustaining business models. For example, newspapers have tremendous market strengths that can be used profitably in pushing classifieds to the Web and up selling print advertising. That revenue can serve as powerful seed funding for more innovative projects, so why not grab it?

In a recent piece in E&P, former Knight-Ridder Interactive executive Tom Mohr (who shares with me a common Bakersfield lineage) issued some pointed criticism of the newspaper industry about the lack of innovation, the over reliance on the local advantage, and the need for development of a common content platform.

I’m not sure he’s right on all his points. Reading the Carr interview helped me formulate some thoughts about where he’s wrong.

First, as Carr says, breakthrough innovation is not always the ticket to long-term success. Dell has done very well in innovating the consumer experience and fulfillment process, but that hasn’t prevented a recent decline in the company’s fortunes. Apple has always been a leader in product development, but hasn’t always been a market leader. When Dell was at its best, though, it innovated in process and copied Apple in product development. In recent times, Apple has been a monster in product innovation, but its success has also been fueled by what it’s been able to learn from Dell about process.

In both cases, these two tech innovators figured out where they had competitive advantage and then persuade innovation where they already led the pack.

So what are a newspaper’s advantages:

• Local information
• Local advertiser relationships
• The ability to gather and disseminate massive amounts of information on a daily basis

If newspaper companies copy wisely from market leaders in search, social networks, user-generated content and multimedia while concentrating its R&D efforts on information delivery, then there is no reason to believe newspaper journalism on the Web is doomed.

As Carr points out: Being first is not necessarily a competitive advantage. Being a smart second or third can be better.

I’ve heard one or two colleagues brag about how they don’t look to other newspaper industry leaders for ideas. They make a point of dissing various industry confabs (but never turning down a speaking invitation, of course) while claiming that their best ideas come from outside of the industry. I’m not sure that’s an accurate claim, but when I look around the industry, I find a lot of smart people working very hard to solve industry-wide issues. I never miss an opportunity to pay attention to what they have to say. Sure, we should know all we can about what else is going on in cyberspace, but you pretty much have to be a dunce to miss the biggest (and even minor) innovations. So, why can’t all of these smart people come up with good and appropriate facsimiles? Some companies, in fact, are doing it. More need to. There is reason to hope. I’m not sure Mohr’s Switzerland Inc. is our salvation.

Sept 11, 2001 -- It changed a lot of things. It certainly changed media.

From Wired:

"Back in 2001, blogs were still very much the geek toy of the Slashdot set," he said. "(But) this collective tragedy demanded a forum to be shared by people all around the world who wanted to talk about what happened with anyone because it was the only way of making any sense of it. Were it to happen again, blogs and social networks would play an enormously cathartic role."

Prior to 9/11, I thought blogs were kind of interesting, but I didn't start to see their potential until after 9/11.

Scott Riley pushed me start blogging, with an assist from Ken Layne. I began building my own blogging application at the end of March 2002 and launched in early April 2002.

I can't link to Scott's blog ... it's disappeared. I can find hide nor hair of Scott online anywhere. The last e-mail I sent to him bounced. I haven't heard from him in two or three years. Scott and I went to college together. He was editor of The Point the year before I was editor. Of course, you all know Ken, or should. Follow the link above -- it sure looks like he's threatening to start blogging again. This would be good news for the blogosphere.

Newsweek's editor Jon Meacham thinks news weeklies are better positioned to survive than newspapers.

I don't know.

For news, timeliness is vital. Newspapers are better positioned to become continuous news sources (mere daily updates don't cut it). For perspective, variety is the key, and multiple blogs do that better than any one publication.

I'd actually be very nervous about my immediate future if I worked for a news weekly.

Here's a great idea for TV news programs: Put your bloopers online. It's an absolute gift: Inexpensive, exclusive, unique content that can draw visitors.

Be sure to tease it regularly on your broadcast. And upload at least some of them to YouTube.

Quigo has been a popular choice for media companies looking to serve up CPC advertising without simultaneously enriching Google or Yahoo!. Quigo just scored a big deal: ESPN.

Good post from TechCrunch on recent headlines involving Digg, YouTube and MySpace.

The point: Take care of your users.

Steve Colbert has either been reading my mind, or reading my blog.

First, I posted this OK Go video.

Then I did a post about the death of mass culture.

Now Colbert comes out with this.

The garage sale yesterday went just fine. We made a little money and sold about half of what we set out. The rest is now in local charity bins. The highlight of the day was a visit from John Jones, memorialized in a photo here.

During the first couple of hours, I queried many shoppers about how they found out about the garage sale. Our newspaper ad brought in one person. Internet posting brought in no people (unless you count John, who came later in the day) and our yard signs were the big winner.

After the garage sale, I went to the Wasco Rose Festival. Pictures here.

Old media still has it charms and advantages, so I'm not surprised when somebody decided to launch a new magazine for the blogging industry, they would turn to paper.

I signed up.

I find it hard to believe that Donald Trump fired Carolyn Kepcher.

I'm with Business Pundit. She got a better offer (very likely) and Trump thought it would make for more public drama to say she was fired. I also agree with BP that The Apprentice has become nothing more than a personality clash/drama queen show.

Microsoft is going to go head-to-head with YouTube with a site called Soapbox.

It will be interesting to see if YouTube's dominance can be diminished, and whether a fragmented market (including Google Video) changes anything. Of course, Microsoft is going to need to be more concerned out of the box about copyrighted material getting uploaded.

Hey, Bakersfield buddies, stop by 1200 Shattuck Ave. tomorrow morning about 9 a.m. and buy my crap.

We've got my wife's vintage clothing, CDs, books, two boxes of guitar magazines, various household items.

Think of it this way: We unloaded the real crap in Ventura more than a year ago in two different garage sales and two trips to donation centers. Then we had a garage sale once we moved hear and got rid of even better crap. Now only the best crap is left. That's right, we're now selling only quality crap. Come buy it.

Emily Sweeney offers sound advice for reporters looking to improve their reportorial multimedia skills -- quick, cheap (often free), easy things for journalists to do that will help them become digital citizens, if not digital natives.

Sweeney, a multimedia reporter for the Boston Globe, practices what she preaches. Check out her personal Web site, which is a good example of what a reporter's personal space can be. She's spent some time giving it personal flair, incorporated a blog, background info, and links to her own work.

She also uncovered this very cool old video on YouTube telling high school students all about how great newspaper work is.

N.L. Breaks the news: Bakesfield's only alternative newspaper is shutting down.

If any town could use a good alternative weekly, it's Bakersfield. Not that the Blackboard was it (it wasn't even weekly), but at least it was something.

I guess that leaves the torch for local alternative journalism firmly in the hands of local bloggers, with Nick being the primary mover there.

Here's a proposal for Belardes and other local bloggers: Form a group blog, maybe even acquire the old Blackboard domain; establish some tight editorial guidelines about keeping things local; come up with a clear editorial plan; solicit other contributors ... and create something special.

Cyberjournalists.net says that Scarborough has a new report saying that more people are reading newspaper content, thanks to the Web.

I'll need to dive into the report later and see what I think, but based purely on my own subjective experience, I would grant there might be a grain of truth in the report. My question is, is it enough? And what does it mean for small and mid circ papers?

I was down at Dagney's a little while ago for some tea and blogging. While there, an art show was setting up. As I was leaving, I stopped and to look at a local photographer's work. As I was leaving, he handed me his card and invited me to his Web site to check out more of his work. There's some nice local/regional photos in his collection. The Flash presentation is pretty slick, though I'm not a fan of forced audio. It is, however, quick loading and easy to navigate.

Bakersfield is a noir town. It is a hard, bitter town. It is the kind of town where any crime is possible, and with enough of a good-old-boys essence that cover-ups and conspiracies are easy to believe.

There are at least 400,000 noir stories to tell in this Kern-river city, but there's really only one that has to be told: The Lords of Bakersfield.

The Lords mythology, set in a hot, isolated valley town just hours from Hollywood cesspools, defines Bakersfield almost as much as the music of Buck Owens or Merle Haggard. If N.L. Belardes hadn't given Bakersfield the noir novel it richly deserves, then who would have done it? The only way to write this book is to believe in the conspiracy, fear the conspiracy, and then write it anyway. You're only bound to make as many enemies as you are to gain readers.

Lords: Part 1 is a good book. It's not great, and I'll tell you why shortly, but it is still a book people with an interest in the darker side of Bakersfield should read.

Belardes might like to think of himself as the Bukowski of Bakersfield, but judging by Lords: Part 1, a better comparison might be another Southern California writer: Raymond Chandler. Like Chandler, Lords wallows in psychosis and shadows. Like Chandler, Belardes aims at prose lyricism. To say Belardes is no Chandler would sound like an unfair and cruel overstatement. He's no Chandler, but his descriptive passages still ring with enough poetry to keep them effective. He is never callow nor maudlin. He is at his best descriptive powers when writing about the winter fog or the dust storm of 1977. The dust storm descriptions are, from a literary perspective, the creative height of the book.

Lords is based on a series of stories by writer Bob Price and published a couple of years ago in the local paper. The alleged lords were (and maybe still are) a group of perverted, powerful local men who lust for little boys and use their positions in the community to protect each other. Belardes takes liberties with the basic story to create what he calls a fantasy novel on the topic.

The book has scenes of hallucinations and dreams that pull in local Native American legends, but mostly it reads like a straight mystery novel.

The Lords myth seems a little too real to allow the reader, or at least this reader, to get taken in too much by the fantasy passages.

Are the Lords real? It's hard to say. Based on my short life in Bakersfield, I would say that this town breeds enough paranoia to make conspiracy seem plausible. The sun shines brightly in Bakersfield, but always through a haze of smog. Winter fogs make it hard to get around town. In 1977, as Belardes accurately retells the story, Bakersfield was blighted by a dust storm that obscured all sight. Such an environment seems to only invite deception.

This is a town were you see few smiles on the streets or in the stores. The isolation of the town seems to be reflected in many of its citizens. It's hard not to suspect hidden agendas and secret lives.

My friends thought I was crazy to move to Bakersfield. Now I understand why. I also understand better, especially after reading Belardes' book, why the streets are littered with glassy-eyed, stringy-haired, leather-skinned homeless wretches. Bakersfield seems to breed those kinds of lives the way canine breeders breed dogs. They are all victims of a hard town that promises more than it gives. That, apparently, is "Life as It Should Be."

So while Belardes has accurately captured the essence of the town, not all of his characters are equally compelling or reflective of the citizenry.

The major flaw of Lords is one the story's main characters: Simon Sundale.

Sundale is the publisher of the local daily newspaper, the Tule Reader. He is a murderous megalomaniac who believes he exercises absolute mind control through his paper over the entire population of Kern County. He is pure evil.

Unfortunately, there is not a single thing about him that is believable. This makes passages about Sundale unbearable to read at times.

It just isn't possible that man such as Sundale could exist in real life. His criminal intent, his unethical practices, his boasting about his omnipotence are so exposed that he simply could not exist.

Unlike what I suspect the real Lords to be like, if they exist, he isn't even driven by lust. Sure, he has an unusual interest in Joey Minstrel, who is openly a sex toy for the the Lords, but lust never enters into the equation for Sundale. It is all about control and power.

That's not to say that characters can't be motivated by control and power, but that is all Sundale is.

A far more compelling character, and more believable, would be a publisher who in most of his working, daylight hours, believes in good journalism, cares about ethics, wants to do right by the community, weeps when people succumb to choking dust, but struggles against his own lusts and his own need to keep even his own reporters from uncovering his secret life and must protect the other Lords in order to also protect himself. Such a character would find that one deception only leads to another, and eventually to murder. He can be lost enough to swing the bat, but guilty enough to be tortured by his lack of self control. Such a character is far more freighting than pure evil, because he's proven he will do anything to protect his secret perversions.

What makes Lords worth reading is Belardes strong sense of plot, his descriptive powers, his easy to follow prose, and the fully drawn characters of Minstrel, Carol and Ricky Rollins. What keeps Lords from being a great book is Sundale. And that's a shame, because clearly, Belardes is a good enough writer to have a great novel in him. I hope some day I get to read it.

Peter Zollman reports on a local editor who did a little comparison between craigslist and his own paper when it came to giving away puppies.

In selling our house, the response from craiglist in Bakersfield has not been impressive. The post generated one e-mail: from a real estate agent wanting my listing. There have been no phone calls, and about two dozen referrer links. Most of the traffic to the Web page has come from links from other bloggers and search engine optimization. I haven't tried the newspaper yet.

Zollman says:

But isn't the point that the underpinning of community journalism, especially in local markets, is the advertising revenue that supports it? And if that advertising support is eaten away by new media -- venues which need not necessarily shoulder the costs of community journalism -- will there be a paycheck to support Dodero's column in a few years?

But is craigslist really cutting revenue from community journalism sites? Most of what craigslist, and some other new media sites, have done is create new markets. The bigger threat newspapers are facing, I think, is just the general erosion of interest in the printed product. It's not all craigslist.

In theory, I love the idea of Google indexing all of the newspaper content it can. And if that can help create a revenue stream for publishers, this is good, too.

It seems like a monumental task, but Google is going to try.

For smaller publishers, I think it's going to be hard to join in the fun. First, electronic archives for most newspaper publishers only go back a few years. Second, there isn't much ROI in digitizing old microfilm. On the other hand, there is a lot of content that could potentially be exposed to Google's crawl, if publishers will do it.

I'm wondering, who gets paid, though: If the publisher makes its content available, and Lexus-Nexis does the same -- which search result wins?

What would be really helpful is if Google offered free hosting of archives for smaller publishers (storing and effectively searching large databases of articles is expensive and somewhat difficult (right now) for smaller publishers, but it is cheap and easy for Google).

BTW: Here's the value of comments on stories: When it works, it leads to more valuable information. In the case of the BW story above, a lone comment helped me learn about Congoo, an aggregator of premium content that makes paid archives available for free. It's a toolbar, which isn't ideal, and when you hit their home page you get assaulted by unrequested audio, but I gave the search a try and it shows promise. It's far from complete, even in the publications it has deals with, and the search algorithm seems a little basic, but at least its an attempt to solve the problem of making one-time access to archives available.

UPDATE: When I posted this, I didn't realize the Google archive search
is
already available.

It's pretty good. Content availability is spotty, but it does include
some paid content (such as Editor and Publisher). I do think it makes
a company like Congoo somewhat unnecessary -- if paid content through
Google's search remains free. But then, is that what publishers want?

For months, I've been telling anyone who would listen – primarily my wife and cats – that the death of mass media is not necessarily a bad thing. Sure we lose that commonality of all knowing we saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or instantly know what "yada, yada, yada" means, but the whole mass media thing was just a blip in the time line of human history anyway. For far much longer, we've been discreet communities, tribes and guilds.

Steve Yelvington touches on turning around our assumptions in this post.

Journalism is changing. Personally, I think it is changing for the better.

The new MacBookPro rocks, according to Leander Kahney, writing for Wired.

I'm pretty happy with my plain vanilla MacBook.

For me, it's like two computers in one.

And it is pretty darn fast.

On the Windows side, it's not as stable as I would like. There is some quirkiness with keyboard mapping, but it's functional.

Yesterday, I bought my wife a new desktop -- a Compaq Persario, which I got on sale (after rebates) for $179. What a deal. It's a 1.8 Ghz AMD processor and more RAM and HD than the desktop I'm replacing for her (which was pretty near top of the line four years ago). All she does is e-mail, Web and MS Word. I also replaced our 10-year-old Dell monitor with a wide aspect (I LOVE wide aspect) Envision monitor for $159 (after rebates).

I saved so much on the computer and monitor, I bought a new HP printer/scanner, too. The printer will take every kind of memory card imaginable to print photos straight from the card to photo paper.

Billie's pretty happy. The old computer was just becoming too unstable and she was getting pretty frustrated with it. I wanted to wait until we moved, and I was even considering get her a MacBook, but there will be more peace in the house now ...

Jeff Jarvis on ABC trying to measure Web audience:

As it turned out, advertisers didn’t really care about auditing the audience of online sites — and thus publishers didn’t want to pay for the service. Advertisers care only about auditing their own flights of ads; the wanted to verify that they got what they paid for. And that makes sense. For in an online site, you don’t really care how big the whole site is; you care about how many people your ads reach how many times.

That's about the size of it.

In all the sites I've been involved with, I've never once been asked or heard of an advertiser asking for ABC audit information. Advertisers either want to know how impressions and click-throughs are measured, or want to use their own tracking code.

News sites need to pay close attention to a wide array of Web metrics, and pick some key performance indicators to target for growth, but audits are pretty unnecessary.

Can a wiki be infused with commercialism and be viable? Some people are giving it a shot.

I see some possibilities with a how-to wiki or a shopping wiki, but there's a lot of ground to traverse from good idea to a healthy ROI.

My big question: Is there a place for local wikis, and should local media sites be running them?

When I was in Rochester a little over a week ago, I was sure to snap lots of pictures to show my wife. Now you can see them, too.

I've posted five photos I've taken in the past few days on Buzznet. You can start with this desert photo taken near Palmdale this evening.

I'm watching Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources get worked up over the JonBenet media coverage. His basic premise seems to be that the coverage was out of control when it was clear pretty early that John Mark Karr was a kook.

To me, coverage was typical and maybe a little more warranted than some saturation-cover stories.

Here three examples of appropriate saturation coverage: 9/11, Katrina, the U.S. going to war. But TV news gives saturation coverage to just about every pretty white girl who gets kidnapped or killed, among other events that are less than world shaking.

In the case of JonBenet, it is a story that is already deeply implanted in our culture. It is the modern black Dahlia murder or the Lindbergh kidnapping. Any significant development in the story is major news. You can argue that JonBenet should never have become a major story to begin with, but that's history. The fact is, now it is a major story.

The fact that John Mark Karr was named as a suspect is significant movement in the case. The story had legs because almost immediately, there were a number of questions about Karr's obsession with the case and his ability to have actually committed it. There was plenty for the media to chew on. And people wanted to know.

Of all the non-major stories that have received major media coverage over the past several years, this one bothers me least.

Last week, I did a critique of the new design of Dayton Daily News site.

Mindy McAdams links to Juan Antonio Giner's brief critique of the Austin site: "The design of the web page is one of the best in the world."

It is a great site. Like Dayton, it's also a Cox site. Clearly, Cox is rolling out a standardized template across its sites. Like Dayton, it has its flaws.

Mindy is inviting nominations for the best news site.

My favorite remains Evansville.

Interesting throughts from Scott Karp on Web 2.0, or what he calls the Zen of Web 2.0.

As I'm reading his post, I think I can summerize it this way: The Web is inherently a social environtment. The Web changes the way we interact and the way media works. Web 2.0 is not the revolution. The Web is the revolution. We have shifted from pre-networked ways of thinking to interconnected information and interactions.

I haven't totally parsed this statement though:

Understanding how participation in the network enhances the value of the network is the Zen of 2.0.

I think he's making a sort of Metcalfe's Law statement, but that doesn't strike me as Zen. And I'm not sure it meshes with Scott's Zen formulation in this post on Google.

If there is a Zen here, I think it does revolve around pure and simple social and informational interactions made possible by networked technology. I'm just not sure if that's what Scott is saying.

UPDATE: Of course, not everybody embraces the Web 2.0 world, as noted in this
post
by Nick Carr. Most people just don't have time.

I started writing some thoughts along these lines in this post, but went in a different
direction. I did that primarily because I was feeling too lazy to look up
stats on current blog usage and social networking usage vs. the general net population,
but I pretty much know that the percentage of usage is relatively small -- though
growing fast. My thought, which is purely anecdotal, is that a lot of people
still view Web media as just traditional media. They surf sites and read or
view content, and that's it.

But that doesn't mean social media is a crock, just that it's not everything.

Jay Small responds to the Bivings Report on 10 Ways to make your news site better.

I'm still not sure tags are a big navigation alternative, but most of the list are worthwhile suggestions, but as Small response indicates, the issues are not necessarily simple.

For inserts and coupons, newspapers are still doing well. This NYT article speculates that print coupons are doomed, even though they still remain popular with consumers today.

"The paper coupon is the single most inefficient marketing tool you could imagine," said Peter Sealey, a former chief marketing officer at Coca-Cola who is a marketing consultant in Sausalito, Calif. "The traditional paper coupon is going to die. It can't survive in the Internet world."

But I'm not sure anybody has come up with a better digital alternaive yet, especially for manufacturer's coupons. Printing out coupons isn't necessarily more efficient than clipping them, and when you print them, they still generally need to be clipped. Mobile devices offer some potential, but the solution will need to seem simple and intuitive to consumers.

There are some potential options for online newspapers to leverage their local relationships, and even reach new advertisers who can't afford print, but this might be an area where a national disruptive play might find it hard to get traction -- at least until small business owners become more Net savvy.