Howard Owens

If you missed the live stream yesterday, and you care, the archive of my interview with Mel Taylor on BlogTalkRadio yesterday can be found here. 

More interviews from the NAA conference can be found here.

UPDATE: My coworker Shannon Dunnigan also interviewed. I also just finished listening to my friend Bob Benz, who has some interesting things to say about his new venture.

Three top newspaper executives -- including my boss, Mike Reed, CEO of GateHouse Media -- spoke to a general session of the NAA Connections conference this morning. 

I didn't take close notes, but I'll share a few points.

The best quotes of the morning came from Dean Singleton, CEO of Media News.

Dean: "If you read Romenesko every day and you hear our people in newsrooms whine -- they whine and whine and whine wishing for the old days to come back. Damn it, I wish the old days would come back, too, but wishing for it isn't going to make it happen. You must be focused on the future."

And: "When we had to make cuts at one of our larger papers somebody in one of our unions put out a letter that said, 'Well, we won't be able to put out the same newspaper we have over the past 30 years.' I said, 'Precisely. Our readers don't wnat the same newspaper we've been putting out over the past 30 years.'"

Brian Tierney's strongest point as also about how the newsroom responds to change.

He noted that when he took over in Philadelphia, his team had to make the painful decision to cut 60 people, but today, he said, his papers are better journalistically than they were before the cuts. He gave credit to executive editor Bill Marimow. "Bill is a better leader. It's about leadership, not numbers."

Mike Reed's primary points were about investing in sales -- hiring more sales reps and training them better to sell more products. He said online is the biggest opportunity for newspapers and that is were most of the future revenue growth is going to come from. He also exhorted newspaper companies to spend 98 percent of their time on doing and only 2 percent of their time on talking.

Reminder: I'm on BlogTalkRadio from the convention at 1 p.m. today.

There's lots of blather all over the web about the New York Times piece on John McCain.  

I could link to something, but you've all seen it. Here are my own four comments:

First, the priestly class of reporters and editors in America have forever heaped spite on blogs for being cesspools of rumor and innuendo. So what's so different about the Times piece? The opening concentration on McCain's implied sexual affair is nothing but gossip from either unnamed sources or pure speculation. There isn't a shred of direct evidence to support it, and as Dan Kennedy notes, its probably nobody's business.

Second, the priestly class of reporters and editors in America routinely bemoan the dumbing down of journalism because of the innumerable stories about Britney Spears. How is the Times piece any different than celebrity gossip? The next time a guy like Jim O'Shea complains about Britney Spears coverage, just point him to the NYT McCain piece. 

Third, anonymous sources. If there is a more cowardly way of reporting than using anonymous sources to create smear articles, I don't know what it is. If you're going to use anonymous sources, use them for real scandal -- you know, like Watergate.

Fourth, I  chuckled when I read the opening graphs of the story.  The spin reminds me of this piece from the Onion.  You can sensationalize anything if you want a story bad enough.  

Folks, journalism is in serious need of reinvention, if this is what America's finest paper thinks is news.

I'll be in Orlando, Fla. for the next few day attending the NAA's Connections conference.

Beth Lawton was kind enough to schedule me for an interview with BlogTalkRadio while I'm there.  

Her post on it can be found here. 

What I didn't realize is that people -- people like you -- can ask questions live during the interviews.

There's a pretty impressive cast of industry leaders among those slated for interviews throughout the conference. Check Beth's post for a line up.

The BlotTalkRadio page for the conference is here. 

My interview is scheduled for Monday at 1 p.m.  I have no idea what I'm going we're talk about or be asked, so it should be terrifyingly entertaining.

If you're attending Connections and want to meet for drinks or coffee, drop me a line at howard owens (oneword) at gmail dot com. 

It is a reasonable question: Why isn't there a Google News for news video?

And the answer is: An entrepreneur in Norway has launched NewsClipper (via TechCrunch).

In light of my previous post on innovation, it's fair to ask, why didn't a newspaper company come up with this idea.

It's a simple idea -- take the example of an existing product (in this case, Google News), and imagine a new use for the same concept using available tools and build a product that is just good enough to launch.

So nobody is confused: I'm not saying this is the kind of idea that should necessarily come out of a newsroom (again, in light of some comments on the previous post), but that if newspaper executives freed up their programming talent to work on innovative ideas, then maybe they would come up with sites like these. The talent and staff is out there, and some of newspaper programmers are doing innovative work. But there's an aspect to this NewsClipper idea that is, "duh!"

The good news is, NewsClipper isn't fully developed. It's only scraping a few top news sites. It's a nice proof of concept, but it needs work. It needs more content. It needs more meta data. It needs a better UI. And it's going to run afoul of major media legal teams because it strips ads from the content.

A product that can get to market first that over comes those limitations could stand a chance at success. Building it won't be easy, but NewsClipper provides an example of where and how to start.

Bryan Murley and Angela Grant touch on the idea that innovation is incremental, not driven by sudden flashes on insight.

Murley:

It’s tempting to get focused on a solution that you think will help your online efforts (let’s give everyone a video camera! Let’s give everyone a blog!), when experience says that real innovation is built over time.

Grant:

He thinks professional media organizations have fewer challenges because they have dedicated web staffs.

I’m not 100 percent sure about that. Online staff members are really busy keeping up with the job responsibilities associated with the same old same old. Put the stories online. Organize the stories online. Put in a picture if you have time. These backbreaking duties significantly decrease the time available for stacking the building blocks of innovation.

These posts both reminded me of Scott Berkun's book, The Myths of Innovation, which I previously wrote about in the context of the newspaper industry.

There are some false assumption going on, IMHO, in both Bryan's and Angela's posts.

Innovation can come from any where. You don't need dedicated staff driving innovation. Creative people are innovators. It doesn't matter what their job descriptions are. It's a cop out to say, "I don't have time to be an innovator."

The important thing for a manager to do is to recognize this and give creative staff members room to roam -- don't just turn down every idea they present, or deny them the tools to try new things. The creative ones, the ambitious ones, will naturally come up with new and interesting ideas.

That's why making blogs and video-capable cameras available to every staff member -- and I mean every staff member, not just newsroom or online personnel, but advertising, production and circulation, too -- is a good idea. You never know what wide distribution of these easy, inexpensive tools might yield.

Furthermore, its important separate innovation from incrementally following the leader. The web staff making incremental changes to a CMS is not innovation, as Angela seems to suggest. We all know what a modern CMS should do, what tools it should have -- the fact that many newspaper lack these tools is more a matter of regret than R&D.

If you really want to be an innovator, it's important to understand what innovation is.

Primarily, it's standing on the shoulders of those who went before you. It's a matter of looking at what tools and technologies already exist and figuring out how they can be used differently, remixed and recombined, to solve the unmet needs of your target consumers.

There was a great post from a developer named Paul Ingram the last week: Six Principles for Making New Things. The nut graph:

I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

This pretty much defines using available technologies, finding unmet needs, getting them out the door quickly in a "good enough" fashion, and then incrementally improving the product or service as customer demand or opportunity dictates.

In other words, it fits in very well with The Innovator's Solution, a book every journalist with an inkling of interest in innovation or "saving the industry" should read.

When I started at the Ventura County Star in 1999, more than one manager told me that so long as I did my job, I didn't need to worry about losing my job. The Star had never laid off workers. E.W. Scripps, I was told, didn't believe in layoffs.

This week the Star announced seven people will lose their jobs as part of the Star's efforts to reduce expense.

This is how much the industry has changed in just a few short years.

I wonder how many journalists will get it that it's their own reporting conventions that are being mocked.

Yes, any mundane event can be turned into news if sufficiently hyped.  The only thing required is good writing.

I love how mundane quotes are given more dramatic context:

Ronald Jarrett, a professor of economics at George Washington University who left his office after darkness blanketed the D.C. metro area, summed up the fears of an entire nation, saying, "Look, it's dark outside. I want to go home," and ended the phone interview abruptly.

Previously: Ten things journalists can do to reinvent journalism, and also see the CEO story at the end of Maybe it’s journalism itself that is the problem.

This is a follow up post to Maybe it’s journalism itself that is the problem. It's another thought exercise in trying to figure out how to discover what journalism should be to better serve today's society.

• Stop writing for the front page. Too many journalists -- and I was this way as a reporter, too -- think that getting a story on the front page is the only viable confirmation of their worth as a journalist. On the web, of course, there is no front page -- only time stamps. It's better to get the story right than worry about where your editor is going to place it in print.
• Stop treating journalism like a competition. It's fun to beat the other news outlets, but that shouldn't be the only reason to pursue a story. Treating every story like a scoop leads to errors, both in reporting and thought process about how to handle the story. The economic value of beating the competition these days is arguably nil. The value of being a trusted source of a timely, reliable, steady stream of information is significant. These are not contradictory points, if you think them through.
• Stop submitting your stories to reporting and writing competitions. This only encourages you to write for other journalists, not for your readers.
• Listen more closely to your readers. Cherish every scrap of unsolicited praise. If it's in a letter or postcard, pin it to your bulletin board; if it's in an e-mail, print it out and pin it there, too. Make unsolicited reader praise your daily goal. Stop automatically writing off the criticism of the cranks who complain about everything your newspaper does.
• Put more people in your stories and fewer titles. I'm going to make up this rule of thumb, but ... for every title in your story, you should reference two people without titles. So, if you cover the city council and quote the mayor and a city council member, you need in your story four non-titled, real people, as well. Put the emphasis on how real people are affected, not just what talking heads say about an issue or event. See how many city council stories you can write in a month that never even mention an elected or appointed official.
• Don't cover process. Cover real stories. Real stories have real people in them, with real things to say about how real things effect their real lives.
• Be a subject-matter expert. You should know your beat better than any of your sources. This will help you avoid he-said, she-said stories, allowing you to write stories with real depth, and give you the confidence to add perspective. You will also uncover more and better stories.
• Forget the false-promise of objectivity. Instead, aim to be fair, honest, impartial and accurate.
• Be accurate. Always. Being accurate is more than just getting your facts right. It encompasses your entire approach to a story. Part of being accurate means you never sensationalize. Never. You never play up conflict for the sake of making a better page 1 story. You never trim a quote to make it more dramatic, or add modifiers to emphasize a point.
• Cover your community like it is your hometown -- and hopefully it is -- be invested in your community and care about its people. While reality may intrude, and you may have to move some day, at least for the time your covering a particular community, develop a mindset that says you're going to spend the rest of your life covering this town, or this beat, or this topic.

The issues facing journalism today are not a technology problem, but an audience problem.

Declining readership did not begin in 1994, when the web began to take hold.

Household penetration began to drop in the 1930s. Serious readership declines accelerated in the 1970s.

There is no one reason why newspaper dominance of media started its decline 7o years ago. There was the advent of broadcast media, and changes in society (more working women, depressions and wars, new societal attitudes, changing class structures and commute patterns), but during that same time, literacy and education levels rose, women entered professional and educated life, the leisure time available for citizens to get involved with their communities increased, and soaring revenue for newspaper publishers allowed them to greatly expand staffs during most of the 20th Century (it's one of the paradoxes of newspaper publishing that while readership declined, ad rates and linage went up).

In other words, one could reasonably conclude that newspapers should have benefited from circulation increases during the very time they were losing market share (for most of the 20th Century, actual subscriber numbers increased, while household penetration decreased at a faster pace).

From the 1970s through the close of the century, there were more newspaper journalists employed at all levels, and because of the explosion of journalism schools in the later half of the century, they were better trained than ever. And because of the likes of Woodward and Berntein, they were substantially motivated and inspired to do great, important work.

Yet, real readership declined.

Why?

Could it be, that journalism itself is at fault?

In the 1930s that the likes of of Walter Lippman began to agitate for a more professional journalism class, and journalism schools began to proliferate. Up until journalism became a profession rather than a trade, entrepreneurial publishers determined the tone and style of the journalism they published. Publishers paid attention to readers needs and wants, and hired and trained editors and reporters accordingly; whereas the professional journalist hues to a higher standard of story selection and presentation with considerations far removed from what readers might prefer.

We could debate which model is "better" in the academic sense, but my only real concern here is what's better in the business, real-world sense. Being academically correct when it comes to marketplace competition doesn't put food on the table. All of the high-minded ideals in the world don't mean a thing if nobody reads your stories.

Previously, I said the issue for newspaper journalism is not a technology problem, but an audience problem.

Technology does play a role, however. It is the accelerator, the starter fluid that is putting both heat and light on the short comings of present-day journalism.

Consider again that while readership declined, newspaper revenue growth could only be slowed by recessions. Every decline or stagnation of revenue growth was merely a cyclical nuisance, not a harbinger of death. But up until the start of the current recession, newspaper revenue in recent years, especially in classified categories, was under constant downward pressure, while the overall economy continued to grow. That was a historical first.

The only way to save journalism, then, is to figure out how to spark audience growth.

My humble proposal, then, is that individual journalists start paying attention to what readers want. That was the point behind my reader satisfaction post. The goal is to find some meaningful measure of reader satisfaction and fashion a new journalism that meets reader needs.

I'm not saying I have the answer, just saying -- we need to find measurements that help us discover a path forward.

A point to stress, however: This is not a puppie dogs vs. Iraq debate (see video of Sam Zell in Orlando), or a Britney Spears vs. election coverage argument (see Jim O'Shea's farewell address). The focus on specific content subjects misses the larger point. The straw man of such supposed pandering evades the key issue.

The issue is, the current way important news is gathered, reported and written isn't working. It hasn't been working for several decades. It's only now becoming a crisis, thanks to the likes of Craig Newmark, Realtor.com, AutoTrader.com and Monster.com.

As we examine what journalism should look like in the 21st Century, we should also look hard at just how professional supposed professional journalism is. Today I heard a CEO of a large insurance firm talk about the day his company eliminated 200 jobs -- 200 out of 40,000. He talked about how he prepared his employees for the media onslaught he knew was coming, with anchors bellowing and headlines screaming about the downturn of the company's fortunes. These weren't even layoffs, but merely the elimination of unfilled positions.

There is something wrong with a journalism that can't honestly put the context of events in an accurate light, but must play up the most sensational angle. We all know the CEO's story is not an isolated incident, and it isn't merely a TV-journalism condition, but something endemic to present-day journalism, print and broadcast.

If our readers so easily recognize that what we do isn't trustworthy for its accuracy both in fact and spirit, then how can we expect to retain them as readers?

Something needs to change.

Discovering a journalism that does what journalism should do -- match the needs of society rather than dictate to society what people should want from journalism -- will be real hard work, and it will challenge assumptions and afflict comfortable mind sets.

I would like to think that journalists who entered this career with high minded ideals are up to the challenge.

UPDATE: Josh Korr is doing some ruminating on this top. Click here for some interesting reading (and follow the links).

In writing about NewzJunky the other day, I think I buried the lede.

It's only deep into the post that I get to the point that NewzJunky.com has trounced, both in audience and volume of advertising (I have no idea what the actual revenue is) the local newspaper site.

That's no small feat. I don't know of any comparable event in online media.

I'm not sure that point has sunk in for many people.

If any readers know about another local newspaper getting beat by a direct local competitor, I would like to know about it.

As Jack Lail points out in the comments to the previous post, this is more than a pay-vs.-free story. It's much more than that.

• It demonstrates what a one-man operation, or small-staff in a small market, can do. A small staff is more nimble and usually comprised of people with an ownership stake in the venture (talk about motivation!).
• It shows that you don't need a big news staff to win the local market online. Many journalists take too much comfort in the notion that, "we have a big staff, so we have an advantage." Have you seen the news about layoffs recently -- a big staff in the future is by no means guaranteed. The other side, of course, is that a small, nimble, hard working staff can beat a bigger, more institutional, bureaucratic staff.
• It shows that traditional local advertisers will defect to viable local online competitors, and it shows there is a greater hunger for local advertisers to reach a local audience than many local sales staffs can admit. I've heard from many small publishers who say, "Our advertisers are not yet interested in online." Bunk.
• It shows that users will flock to a site where they can make their own local news contributions, and they value the contributions of other users.
• It challenges traditional notions about design and usability -- what matters is content, both in width (not necessarily depth, which is not the competitive advantage many editors assume it is) and frequency.
• There are a lot of people in our communities who hate our guts -- read some of the comments on the previous post ... they will sound strangely familiar to people who have been in the business a while. Give those people an under-dog outlet to rally around, and they might just become the instigators of an inflection point.
• It demonstrates perfectly how disruption works -- delivering a product that is just good enough to take customers away from incumbent players, and that disruption can come in many forms.

While in the NewzJunky.com vs. WatertownDailyTimes.com race, the newspaper's former pay wall may have been a huge help to NewzJunky winning the race (for now -- the race, of course, is not over), but newspaper.com publishers should not take too much comfort in the fact that they offer their content for free. There is an element of the NewzJunky story that demonstrates that any newspaper.com is susceptible to disruptive competition.

On the other hand -- this is just one event. Currently, I'm reading Fooled by Randomness. The lesson of that book is just about any outcome in inevitable. Warren Buffet, the guy who gets all of his trades right, is inevitable, given the millions of traders who have tried, and it is probably inevitable that at least one local start-up will beat an incumbent media leader.

Still, I'm not sure newspapers can afford to take too much comfort in the vagaries of randomness.

This is a much bigger story than just a couple of blog posts. Is the sort of thing the trade press should examine more fully. Let's see if they do.

UPDATE: I stumbled across Quantcast months and months ago, and then lost the link and couldn't remember the name of the site ... thanks to a friend, I just found it again. Relevance here, some confirming evidence that NewzJunky.com is indeed trouncing WatertownDailyTimes.com.  Again, NewzJunky's audience is twice the size of the Daily Times. Amazing.

Long ago, I disavowed my former praise of TimesCast.

As I dove deeper into web casts, I found a number that were stunningly good, and realized the bar was much higher for episodic video than daily news video. If you want people to watch the same show every day or every week, it better be good. An audience will forgive less technical and product quality for something they'll watch only once for a minute or two, but to keep them coming back for an episodic show of three-to-six minutes, it needs to be good.

Webcasts are something where good enough isn't good enough. They need to be good. Period.

Examples of good:

• GeekBrief.TV
  
• WallStrip
• Boing Boing TV
• Epic Fu
• Rocketboom

What do the good have in common:

• Great production values
• A well defined, and consistently followed theme (focus)
• Interesting content
• Great on-screen talent that delivers the content in a personal, engaging manner (not like TV's robotic anchors)

So far, I don't know of any newspaper webcast production that hits on all four attributes -- many hit on none of them. The best of the lot, Miami Herald's What the Five and Naples News Studio55 suffer from less-than-personal on-screen talent. The hosts on What the Five come across as a morning radio team dropped unexpectedly in a video studio, and Studio55 tries too hard to be TV.

And if I wanted to take the time -- and be that insulting -- I could surf around and find links to many truly horrid newspaper webcasts.

The most common fault is either trying to be like TV, or trying to shoehorn the newspaper ("Let's read the headlines and ledes on camera!") onto video. There is also the problem of putting people on camera who have no business on camera, or at least need a lot more training and coaching before they should be doing this professionally.

(I should mention, there is another class of webcasts -- the lone reporter who has camera and access to YouTube and one day goes, "I'm going to make a news cast!"  These productions rarely make it past the third episode before the reporter loses interest, but I applaud the entrepreneurial, willing-to-experiment-and-learn attitude. We need more of that in our industry.)

It's not just newspapers that get it wrong, either. There are supposedly professional video companies trying to enter the webcast/video podcast space, and their results can be just as bad.

Consider Fountain Head Studios -- supposedly a serious effort to produce great webcasts, and every one of their efforts so far fail miserably (hat tip to NewTeeVee). Compare Stock Rockets, for example, to WallStrip ... clearly a ripoff attempt, but it suffers painfully from bad writing and bad talent and lacks WallStrip's defined theme, except in a broad, unfocused way (it's about stocks, not about stocks with an interesting story to tell in an interesting way). All of Fountain Head's shows demonstrate the same lack of clear focus, plus poor writing and less than stellar hosts.

Let that be a lesson to you.

If you're going to do a webcast, you should spend the money and take the time to get it right. You may get only one shot at getting right -- and as music and television producers will tell you, it may take hundreds of shots to find one hit -- this is tough stuff.

Here's what little I know about David Sullivan -- he's a journalist in Philadelphia -- I believe a copy editor -- and primarily a person of print lineage -- and new to blogging.

And in his first week of blogging about the newspaper business -- and keep in mind, Sullivan is a newsroom guy, not a business-side guy -- he's pretty much nailed the very issues we're all grappling with, such has how do we really measure audience, what is our real online audience size, what is our audience worth, how do we compete with free, and where our competitors come from and what they do.

And all of that in this one intelligent post.

Most importantly, he notes that a family-owned paper in Watertown, NY has dropped it's pay wall on its web site (a significant act to contemplate for the cranky old journalists who think everybody should pay for everything).

The Watertown Daily Times operates in an isolated market -- almost an hour north of Syracuse and hours away from anywhere else. Watertown, like most of outstate New York, has had hard times, but the Times as still managed to keep (in 2007 Year Book) a daily circulation near 29,000, down from 37,000 10 years ago -- not as hard a decline as a lot of papers, but still in the 2o-to-25-percentish range.

The Daily Times, being a family owned newspaper and thus having neither stock analysts nor corporate overseers, decided to put the Web content behind a wall. Last week it threw up its hands and dropped the wall. Victory for the Web!

In a way. The Times subscription Web site had 1,000 paid subscribers. Which means 29,000 households took the print paper and 1,000 took the Web site, meaning -- 7,000 of the circulation loss was people who simply had no use for paying for the Watertown Daily Times in any form.

David points us to a local news aggregation site that appears to be in direct competition with the Watertown paper, newzjunky.com. It's success (more on that below) is object lesson for newspaper sites that fail to take the web seriously.

Newzjunky.com dominates the WatertownDailyTimes.com both in audience and advertising. It has way more local information than most local newspaper web sites, and all of it free, and none of it coming from the Daily Times (not a single link to a Daily Times article).

Newsjunky.com has managed to secure obits direct from funeral homes as well as other hyperlocal information. From their it acts as a super aggregator of links to other news sites with stories it believes will interest its audience (not just local news).

As I said, NewsJunky.com dominates the WatertownDailyTimes.com. Look at this chart from compete.com:

Never before have I seen a newspaper.com get trounced in its own market by any competitor -- not even a TV station. NewsJunky.com has twice the traffic, and is growing faster, than the local daily's news site.

Sullivan notes that even with NewsJunky.com giving it all away, there are still 27,000 households in Watertown willing to pay for home delivery. Fine. But according to compete.com -- which I believe tends to under count audience, but is also measuring non-local audience (and one more caveat to that: numbers I've seen from Belden Associates suggests that 80 percent of a newspaper.com's traffic is local) -- more people visit NewsJunky.com on a monthly basis than subscribe to the newspaper.

If that doesn't put a nail in the coffin of the "people should pay for our news" argument, I can't imagine what will.

So if our only chance at survival is to give news away for free, how do we survive? Obviously, advertising is going to be a big part of it (though not necessarily advertising as packaged goods media has traditionally sold). Any such model requires much larger audiences than we're currently getting. And, so, again, I refer you to this piece by Kevin Kelly about unlocking true economic value online. And here again is my own post inspired by Kelly.

UPDATE: Additional thoughts immediately after posting.

First, I bet NewzJunky has a fraction of the staff -- lower overhead - than the Daily Times. It may, in fact, be a one-person operation.

Second, to those who object the idea that sites like this can only exist thanks to MSM (look at all the links to other news sources), well, then, yeah, and your point? Not all local information requires reporters (look at Everyblock) to gather. Even if the MSM sources all go out of business, sites like NewzJunky still have a sustainable business model. And when MSM sites go out of business (if they do), all the more audience and advertising for sites like NewzJunky. More revenue means more staff for original reporting. Even if such a site isn't staff as well as the daily newspaper it put out of business, the daily newspaper is still out of business. This is how disruption works.

The point is -- ignore the concept of sites like newzjunky at your own peril. Feel free to marginalize the threat in your own mind, and say, "it can't happen here." Tell that to the publisher in Watertown.

UPDATE: In an e-mail, Jim Romenesko passes this along: "NewzJunky was founded by one of my early tipsters (starting 1999), a guy named Stephen Smith. He *is* in fact a news junkie who, I believe, runs the site on his own. I don't hear from him as often these days probably because of his increased workload and success."

If you're on Digg, you can find me here.

A few weeks ago, I finally decided to start trying out Digg.  There is a perception out there that Digg isn't as good as it used to be, since it got away from its tech roots.  I actually find it more interesting now.  It does surface some pretty amazing stuff that I might otherwise miss.

It's a little difficult to submit items (Scott Karp did right with Publish2 by creating a tool bar), but I've been making a submission here and there (and not just my own stuff).  But with only three or four friends, and not much of a reputation, my original submissions get little notice.

Maybe if I had more friends ... I don't know ... my participation in Digg is still in the "experiment" stage ... so next step is to see if having more friends does anything for me.

I just stumbled across this post from Kevin Kelly on the dangers of anonymity.

However in every system that I have seen where anonymity becomes common, the system fails. The recent taint in the honor of Wikipedia stems from the extreme ease which anonymous declarations can be put into a very visible public record. Communities infected with anonymity will either collapse, or shift the anonymous to pseudo-anonymous, as in eBay, where you have a traceable identity behind an invented nickname. Or voting, where you can authenticate an identity without tagging it to a vote.

Anonymity is like a rare earth metal. These elements are a necessary ingredient in keeping a cell alive, but the amount needed is a mere hard-to-measure trace. In larger does these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They kill. Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishingly small doses, it's good for the system by enabling the occasional whistleblower, or persecuted fringe. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system.

There's a dangerous idea circulating that the option of anonymity should always be at hand, and that it is a noble antidote to technologies of control. This is like pumping up the levels of heavy metals in your body into to make it stronger.

For the newspaper.com, it's not enough just to confirm an e-mail address -- identity is important. Even if you will not require (or try to) real identity, there should be a mechanism for enforcing some sort of identity, even if it's persona-identity, but even then, it should be traceable to a real-world person.

Communities built around anonymity eventually lack cohesion.

I started down the Kevin Kelly path this morning because of this post on "Better than Free."  Kelly's point is that in a world where free copies are abundant, economic value is derived from other factors.  In context of this issue, a newspaper.com that makes trust/transparency, authenticity/authority part of its brand promise (which goes hand-in-hand with requiring identity from contributors), then it is building value -- a competitive advantage into its online efforts.

More on Keven Kelly here. His personal site starts here.

Previously: Real identity helps foster healthy communities.

Interesting bit of news related to podcasting this morning.

eMarketer announced that the 2007 podcast audience reached 18.5 million active users. It's good to take any projection with an ounce of skepticism, but the same study estimates the 2112 podcast audience at 25 million.

When you start segmenting that audience, however, it's hard to see how the average newspaper podcast garners enough regular listeners to drive sufficient revenue.

That's no reason not to try, however, but more on that below.

One question not answered by eMarketer is how they define podcast. To many people, podcasts are more than audio shows, but include episodic video as well.

Could video be driving podcast growth?

I know I prefer video "podcasts" to audio, but that could be just me.

Video, however, seems to represent great revenue opportunity because of the larger overall audience for online video and the visual nature of video advertising.

Either way, newspapers should tread lightly here. It's one thing to take the lo-fi approach with illustrative video, or even periodic story video. It's an entirely different matter with episodic audio or video.

Any time you expect an audience to develop a habit for a regularly scheduled shows, quality is paramount -- and it's not just production quality. The content must be engaging and the talent behind it must be finely honed. The demand for top-notch on-air audio and video talent will only grow as podcasting grows.

That talent isn't likely to come from traditional broadcast, because of the more informal nature of online media, which is a mystery to highly trained professionals from traditional media.

In other words, these growth numbers, if true and they hold, represent opportunity for newspaper companies and journalists willing to try new things.

Remember back in the 1990s when Microsoft seemed unbeatable? That was a time when worries about anti-trust violations began to surface and most pundits figured Apple Computer would soon be out of business. Windows ruled the world.

Remember circa 2001 when just about every newspaper company in the world was trying to figure out how to turn its web site into a portal? The goal was to be the one web site anybody ever really needed. We talked about being sticky and keeping people on our site as long as possible. Where did the idea, and the buzzword, come from? We all wanted to be the local Yahoo!

This week, Microsoft, battered by declining market share and slowing profit growth decided that its best bet to survive was to buy Yahoo! -- but not the Yahoo! of 2001, which was worth an estimated $90 billion back then, but a Yahoo! whose fortunes have sunk so deeply, its market cap was about a quarter that price (Microsoft is offering a 62 percent premium on Friday's share price).

In a little more than a single decade, what happened to these two once seemingly invulnerable companies?

Change happened. Markets shifted. New competitors arose. New ways of doing business and making money were invented.

The names and business models of the competitors doesn't really matter, because competitive turbulence is inevitable for any business.

Except, of course, newspapers.

No, wait. Newspapers are in trouble now, too.

Twelve years ago, who could blame a newspaper publisher for looking back on nearly 300 years of newspaper industry dominance in the media and think, "we will live forever."

When you haven't seen any real change in your lifetime, or whatever change came along (radio and TV, say), made only a marginal difference ("hey, we're still running at 35 percent profit margins!), why worry?

We now realize, of course, that the same laws of business that change markets and make ensured survival impossible, can kill newspapers, too.

I've just finished a great book: The Halo Effect.

It's a good book to cause a little further reflection on what business survival means.

I've known a few business leaders in the industry who have sworn by Good to Great or In Search of Excellence or other business books that promise some step-by-step formula for success.

The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig, makes a great case that following the management principles in those books is really like chasing unicorns.

For example, the research in Good to Great is faulty and incomplete. Jim Collins and his team failed to account for, among other things, the Halo Effect, which is what you get when you measure performance by post hoc evaluations. Because the performance was good, than the management must have been good, and if the management was good, then the leader must have been good, and if the leader was good, then he created a good work culture, etc. Those attributes add up to a cascade of halos.

Collins also failed to look for companies that did all the things his "good to great" companies did but still failed.

In other words, the book lacked scientific rigor.

The fact of the matter is, the real research, the boring research (not the good story weaved by Collins) is that all of the management rules in the world, if well implemented, can at best only achieve a 10 percent improvement in performance (or so cites Rosenzweig). At best.

And none of that matters if market forces change and the company does nothing to respond. That's when sticking to what you know best becomes a liability rather than a good business practice.

What's more important than "having the right people on the bus" and "level five leadership"? How about strategy and understanding competitive advantage, not to mention simply getting the job done once you know what to do?

Of course, When your business is essentially a monopoly, as newspapers were for many, many decades, who needs to worry about strategy?

Our industry hasn't (collectively) done strategy well, and the worst part is, strategy is scary stuff.

The problem: You never really know if a strategy is going to work. If you know a business plan will work, it isn't really strategy. Then, it's merely tactics. Strategy is about taking risk and trying the untried.

We all know how willing newspapers have been to try new things.

That habit is changing, but there is still a big tendency among some industry managers to buy into the "Good to Great" hedgehog theory (which Rosenzeig notes Collins got completely wrong both in mythology and application).

Newspapers can't simply just "stick to the core business," as a Collins-like hedgehog would do. Newspaper managers must be more fox like -- more nimble, more willing to seek and seize opportunities.

Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether we have the right people on the bus?

Probably at some companies and not at others.

It's a hopeful sign that many managers have been willing to explore, if not embrace, the API NewspaperNext initiative, which at least attempts to get newspaper executives to dive deep into strategic thinking.

My question is: Are newsrooms willing to learn the lessons of business history and allow the news/journalism industry to evolve. Or will they insist that nothing at all needs changed. That seems to have been Jim O'Shea's answer, and the journalism world applauded his "principled stand."

I'm not sure, however, that taking a stand constitutes a well conceived business strategy.

When I started this video of the week thing, I said it would be hit and miss ... as time permits and I think about it, sort of thing.

To make up for several weeks of not doing it, here's three videos.

[youtube ueAOBzHMH28 nolink]

[youtube cjh2PmZf3Ss nolink]

[youtube GbaIqpbSv6c nolink]

Local music: It's a logical avenue into reaching a younger audience. It helps reflect what's really going on in the community you're sworn to cover. It ads depth of coverage to your newspaper.com.

And who doesn't love a good music video? I've long suspected that the reason many reporters get excited about shooting video is they've watched a lot of MTV.

But you don't see many music videos on newspaper sites.

The reason is simple, really. To do music video well takes time, and lots of it, good equipment, and costs can add up quickly, as well as real talent.

What you're really looking at is significant expense and time away from doing the core business of covering news.

Yeah, but wouldn't it be fun to make a music video?

The Canton Repository (a GateHouse Media paper) found a great lo-fi approach. During the photo shoot for its upcoming Battle of the Bands (a competition open only to bands comprised of high school students), the Rep filmed band members milling about the newspaper building, and in the photo studio.

The results are simple, elegant and engaging. The keys to success are good editing and well-composed shots of kids aspiring to the spotlight. All the videos are a reminiscent of Hard Day's Night.

Some of the music ain't bad, either.

Here's my favorite:

[youtube ZykpCuFCBT8 Ya Dig? by PJ & The Whistlers]

Ya Dig? by PJ & The Whistlers

If you need something to spice up your Super Tuesday, why not help cover it socially? Check out the Publish2 Super Tuesday project.

There’s a huge opportunity to help voters find the best election coverage in the sea of election content. Yeah, you can do it by yourself — but on the web, the larger the network, the more influential the linking — time to break down those traditional media silos.

Great chance to learn and experiment with journalists using web 2.0 tools to engage audience.

UPDATE: More on Super Tuesday ... a regular reader from the Chicago Tribune dropped sends along word that they'll be doing interactive video chats tomorrow.

When I read things like the following quote from Paul Conley, I despair for the future of our industry.

A few months ago I sat on a panel with two recruiters from mid-sized newspaper chains. They were both lovely people. But I think it's safe to say that they didn't share my beliefs about how to recruit or what to look for in a new hire.

One of them was asked "what would make you throw out a resume?" And she replied that she wouldn't hire anyone with a resume that said "multimedia reporter." She went on to say that she was looking for "newspaper people." But then, a few minutes later, she mentioned that the reporters at her chain were now being trained to carry video cameras.

The other woman, when asked about how she looks through applications, said she doesn't look at electronic resumes and won't follow links to Web stories, multimedia packages or other online examples of work. The reason? She said she didn't have the time, and preferred to look at things on paper.

Need I say more?

Sad, isn't it?

We've spent many words recently debating the best way for newspapers to manage user participation, particular comments on stories and forum posts.

Most journalists value quality communication and are distressed to see rants, insults, cursing, lies and innuendo pass for online commentary, especially on their own newspaper.com.

It's an understandable position.

There are a number of strategies to try an elevate the nature of the discourse on a newspaper.com, such as enforcing real identity, or using a Slashdot/Digg-style reputation system, or pre-screening comments (my least favorite), to outsourcing the entire headache to Topix.

But have you ever stopped to wonder why quality blogs usually have quality discussions?

Consider, for a minute, how quickly a discussion on your newspaper.com would spin out of control if you allowed comments on a story about butts on TV.  Now look at the interesting discussion on this Lost Remote post (maybe not the best example I could find of a great conversation, but it is a logical contrast to what might happen on a typical newspaper.com).

Some blogs get more and better reader discussion than others, but you rarely hear any more about bloggers debating whether to disable comments and wondering if this whole commenting thing is really worth it (as you do from some editors).

Sure, blogs use some form of pre-screen (first-time commenters on howardowens.com, for example, go into a moderation queue), but any filters on blog comments these days have more to do with trying to block spam than worries over the content of reader comments.

Why is that?

I would say, primarily because blogs get the close attention of their owners. There is little opportunity for trolls to get a foothold on a well-run blog.  Most blog owners apply high standards for the conduct they will allow.  They monitor closely. They participate in the conversation.  In other words, they are actively engaged and involved.  They are owners.

How involved are reporters and editors involved in participation on their web sites?

Not much.

And until we fix that weak link in our participation strategy, we will continue to struggle with developing the kind of online community our newspaper communities deserve.

Newsrooms need to develop an ownership attitude about participation on their web sites.  Only then will the technology solutions really work.  There is simply no substitute for real, sustained, dedicated participation in the conversation by editors and reporters.  Without it, newspaper sites will continue to struggle to grow and retain audience.

There was a time when I considered CNet the go-to place for technology news.

It's been three years at least since CNet was a habit.

And I'm not alone in concluding that CNet is now largely irrelevant.

"There are other sites now where you can get serious technology news," says CNET user Alan Wilensky, a San Mateo, Calif., analyst who advises companies on their Internet strategies. He used to read CNET.com daily but is now more likely to go to rival tech sites such as TechCrunch and Engadget. "I've gone totally cold on CNET," says Mr. Wilensky, who has no link with CNET or the dissident investors.

What's killing CNet: Blogs.

You could even make the case that blogs killed Business 2.0 (link to historical artifact -- note no updates since October, decades ago in Internet years).

The tech sector was the first media sector where we saw blogging really take hold -- in pre 9/11 days, which spurred political blogging. Since then, we've seen an explosion in blog growth, both in shear numbers and in the large volume of quality blogs covering a wide range of topics.

Local blogging has been growing. Some of it is very good.

Journalists shouldn't be too quick to conclude that blogs are not a threat to their local newspaper monopolies.

Yet, we continue to hear from MSM journalists who dismiss blogging, such as this from a reader calling himself Tito:

A blog is no more than an online journal or column, if you want to use an industry term. A blog doesn’t make me a better journalist nor does a blog make you a journalist and blogging is certainly not where the industry is headed.

Such a narrow view of blogs is to completely fail to understand blogs.

And to so easily dismiss blogs as a competitive threat is to fall on the wrong sword in the name of "quality journalism" (whatever you may mean by that).

And as the WSJ link above notes, more and more bloggers are figuring out how to generate handsome revenue to off set their low overhead.

If you don't know Dan Kennedy, you should.  He's a former media critic and current journalism professor in the Boston area.

He runs a great blog called Media Nation.  Mostly, he blogs about New England politics and civic affairs, but he also covers local media.

Today, he did a post about a GateHouse Media reporter, Cathryn Keefe O'Hare.

He tagged along with this modern journalist as she covered an MLK-day event. She took notes, shot video and stills with her Casio, and posted story and video to her site.

Dan writes about the process.

Is it a great video? No. Does it help get names and faces online? Yes.  Does it help provide some context to the story? Of course. In other words, it does its job.

Dan's concludes:

"The thing that remains true, whether it's in print journalism or the Internet or video, you have to tell a story," says O'Hare. "And you have to tell it as true as you can make it. And you have to try to speak for those people who can't tell their story."

The modern journalist just gets the job done.

And, most importantly, learns along the way.

Howard Weaver linked to this post from Zac Echola before I saw it, but it's an important map of how the wired get and filter news.

The following quote should be required reading in every newsroom in the U.S. tomorrow morning.

Shortly after polls closed last night, my wife got a text message from Obama’s campaign. He was the projected winner of the South Carolina primary.

A few minutes later I logged into Gmail, where Obama had already sent me an email about the victory and where I could watch his speech.
About a half an hour later a friend in Washington sent me a text with the percentage breakdowns.

This morning I logged on to Facebook to see a notification from Obama, a simple copy/paste job from the email sent earlier.

Sometime today, I’ll watch his speech and Clinton’s concession speech on YouTube, since I was busy playing Super Mario Galaxy while he actually gave the speech.

Except for a CNN breaking update I got via Twitter last night (after Obama’s text message), I knew who won the primary without ever seeing a newspaper or TV site.

Only today, when I checked CNN’s excellent primary elections section did I go to an MSM site. News that I care about comes to me, despite the source.

I, like many other people, only go looking for news (on my days off) if something has first come to me to pique my interest. Then I find a site with valuable, contextual information laid out in a way that I can explore the data (in this case, exit polls). I can passively receive information I’d like to know.

If you’re not actively seeking out your audience, you’re doing something wrong.

Media organizations should be doing the same thing Obama does. It should be everywhere I am and it should provide valuable, easy-to-use added context and content if and when I decide to hit their sites.

There's obviously one point to be made here -- that news organizations need to make it a practice to push out their content to every available channel.

But the other lesson is: Your audience is also sharing what they know, either informally, or via special-interest sources.  The big question is, when your audience wants more and trusted information, are they going to find it on your web site as soon as they want it?

Web-first publishing needs to become a newsroom habit.  It's the thing you do automatically, so that when any size story breaks, and your audience wants more and trusted information -- and a place to discuss it -- your site is ready for them.

For many months, I've wanted to play around with setting up a vertical search engine using Google Custom Search.

Today, I finally got around to it.

Here it is: MediaGeeks.org, a vertical search engine for media professionals.

The initial group of 140 URLs I've fed into the search engine are mostly from my blog roll along with obvious media sites (such as E&P and OJR).

If you know of a media site I should have included but didn't, send me an e-mail to howard owens (one word) -at- gmail dot com.

Also, if you view the source of the home page, you can see how to add the MediaGeeks.org search widget to your blog or site.

The search engine is only useful to the media community uses it, so link to it. Tel your friends.

In the era of Packaged Goods Media, the journalist played a command-and-control role. He or she determined the news of the day (news judgment), organized it around his or her own sense of importance (news value) and published it to a compliant audience.

The role was linear and uncomplicated.

In the era of distributed media, the relationship between journalist and audience is asymmetrical.

As "audience" transmutes to "community," and the level of communication and information increases exponentially, as news becomes less ecclesiastical and more egalitarian, the role of the professional journalist is changing.

Fortunately, there is still a role.

Here are six roles the modern journalist should serve:

• The Ethical Role. Yes, journalists get bashed about because of real and imagined lapses in ethics, but the challenge now is to raise the bar on professional ethics, and then provide ethical guidence to today's participatory audience. We should deal more swiftly and transparently with ethical errors within the profession, but we should also provide teaching tools on information ethics, what ethics means and why it's important, and how to spot compromised ethics.
• The Guide/Filter Role. Editors and reporters should assume some responsibility for providing their audiences with pointers to the best stuff on the web, be it the best-reported of the important news or the most interesting and entertaining articles and videos. In a command-and-control environment, we cared only about directing people to what we ourselves did. Now our role is to help audiences sift through the glut of information assaulting them daily by providing pointers. This is the value-add role, and if done right it can help overcome the digital-age tendency for people to focus too narrowly on their own interests. If done well, it will bring more people to your site or publication.
• The Understanding and Context Role. Why should the best bloggers get to have all the fun? The best journalists should become the best bloggers. I know many really, really smart reporters and editors. These people should have blogs, and they should serve readers better by taking the news of the day and putting it in context, combing articles for the tidbits that need to be weaved together to make a bigger whole, and explaining what it all means.
• The Conversation Leader Role. Already, our news reports start a lot of conversations with our without our consent. The conversation-starter role should become explicit in our job descriptions. Once started, we should guide it. We should thank and encourage the good contributors, and depreciate the bad contributors We should highlight the smartest things people say. We should provide our own insights and supplemental knowledge to any conversation we find. We should be full participants, not just the lurking overlords of top-down media.
• The Aggregator Role. We should aggressively gather data related to the communities we serve. We should make sure that anything that is knowable about a community we serve is findable through resources we provide. While in the Guide/Filter Role we might provide pointers, in the Aggregator Role, we make data available and let people find it for themselves. This is a role that serves the long tail of information, because we never know what other individuals might find useful, important or necessary.
• The Straight News Role. We cannot, even if we wanted to, and should not, cede our professional responsibilities to uncover news. We must know about everything important going on in the communities that we serve, and we should strive to be the first to tell our communities about the important news of the moment (note: no longer of the day, but of the moment). We must still be out in our communities gathering facts and organizing them in a way that is relevant and useful and then reporting the most important facts to our communities.

Previously: Journalism has evolved to fit society’s needs and demands

It's pretty cool to see so many people jumping on board with Wired Journalists.

There's a positive energy behind it that gets beyond any worries about a dying industry, the struggle to keep up or hand wringing about who is or isn't doing what?  The people signing up seem real eager to learn or to help others.

I like what Zac Echola said about the site in his post:

We’re done talking doom and gloom. We’re done making lists of what we should do to better serve our audiences. We’re going to start checking off items. We will better serve our audiences.
We want you to join us.

Like I said, a positive energy.

WiredJournalists.com is starting to feel like a petition drive -- people joining together to say, "I believe in the future of journalism, and I believe that future is wired."

Come join the fun.

For journalists just starting down the path of transforming their careers and doing the hard work of saving journalism ... there is now WiredJournalists.com, the social networking site where journalists help journalists get all this technology stuff and understand it's import and impact on society and media.

Nice list of digital journalism all stars have already joined, ready to help, along with some people just getting started.

Here's the mission statement:

WiredJournalists.com was created with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind.

Our goal is to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.

You don't need the best equipment, the biggest budget or even management support to accomplish worthy goals. The only requirement is a willingness to learn and a mind open to new ways of thinking about journalism.

We are here to help each other learn basic skills and learn how new technology and new societal expectations for media are changing journalism.

At WiredJournalists.com we are all teachers and we are all students. We help each other and learn together. Those who know more should help those who know less. Those with questions should never be afraid to ask them.

We don't set standards. We encourage you to set your own, but we don't judge each other's work based on a-priori, Big-J Journalism approaches.

We believe modern journalism is about self-reliance and a "just do it" attitude. We want to see you learn how to get things done quickly without prejudice over quality or worries about what other journalists might think.

The skills you learn at WiredJournalists.com should help you either serve your community better -- whether your publishers and editors recognize the value or not -- ­ or enable you to work independently as a self-contained, fully equipped modern journalist.

Pass the link around to your non-wired colleagues.  All of them.

Who needs day-time soap operas when you have journalism in California to follow.

Between Crazy Wendy and tribulations at the Times, there is plenty of entertainment in the Sunshine State.

This week's big news is the "force out" of LAT executive editor Jim O'Shea.

O'Shea reportedly told Tribune Co. employees,

One thing I want put on the record, though, is that I disagree completely with the way that this company allocates resources to its newsrooms, not just here but at Tribune newspapers all around the country. That system is at the core of my disagreements with David. I think the current system relies too heavily on voodoo economics and not enough on the creativity and resourcefulness of journalists....

WTF?

I mean, what the hell does that mean?

Look up "voodoo economics." Does that really describe the supposed strangling of the Times through staff reductions?

And if you believe journalists are creative and resourceful, don't you trust that if cuts are made, they will figure out a way to make it work?

I'm not passing judgment on anything related to Mr. O'Shea's situation, just saying -- WTF does he mean? His statement on its face is utter non-sense.

I don't think these quotes should be skimmed over or passed on without a little examination. They resonate with a nice journalistic militarism, but they sound more like self-justifying rhetoric than anything helpful.

UPDATE: Howard Weaver addresses O'Shea's one-percent solution. My additional comment would be: It seems like O'Shea forgot he was running a local newspaper.

UPDATE II:  What he said -- Jack Lail.  Newsrooms today need leadership. Jim O'Shea didn't provide it.