Howard Owens

Matt Welch finds six minutes and fifty-five seconds on YouTube that he says changed his life.

For me, the video music moment that changed my life happened in 1987.

I was house sitting at my ex-girlfriends while she was on tour in Japan. She didn't have cable TV. For the most part, TV was limited to four local stations (San Diego), but once in a while, when the sunspots were right, or something, you could pick up stations from Los Angeles. I was flipping the dial and picked up the signal of Channel 5.

Channel 5 was playing a music video for some reason.

For months prior, I had been saying, "I wish I could find a modern Hank Williams -- somebody with all the twang, but some rock/punk influence ... not rockabilly, and not cowpunk, but pure country."

That night, Channel 5 introduced me to Dwight Yoakam.

You know, in watching that video I realized -- I hadn't seen it since 1987.

Matt inspired me to check out a couple of other forgotten music TV gems.

One is Ricky Martin on the Grammys. There is also a back story here. The night of this performance, Billie and I were only half watching the awards show. We were also going through a spate of interest in Latin music. When Ricky came on, I was standing behind the couch. Billie was in the kitchen. From the moment the performance started, I was speechless. I kept hoping Billie would come into the room, but didn't want to utter a word in the middle of such showmanship. Billie came in right at the tail end. Man, was she pissed that I didn't call her in. I heard about it for another year or more. Well, just now, she finally got to see the video. She said she got chills. As far as I'm concerned, that single performance is about the only worthwhile think Martin ever did.

Then there is Fantasia Barrino singing Summertime on Idol. That remains, probably, the single greatest performance in Idol history.

Going back aways -- when I was in high school, Elvis Costello had the whole school buzzing a couple of times. One was when a history of rock and roll came on television and the segment on new wave included this video. Everybody wanted to know if I'd seen Elvis walking on his ankles. The other was EC on SNL, which surprisingly is not on YouTube. But I did find this cool Top of the Pops performance of Watching the Detectives, which I'd never seen before.

Oh, I've got to add this first televised performance of Elvis -- a completely
solo version of Allison.

So, I just did this post on music videos on YouTube.

Before that, I did a post on music and the Long Tail.

And there was this post on YouTube's new user license.

And now you can trace the tracks of my tears. YouTube is on my mind a lot recently. I wish I had invented YouTube.

YouTube is the ultimate Long Tail invention. It has no inventory and it exists purely to serve markets of one a billion of times over.

Except for one niggling little problem: It has no revenue model.

Well, it could serve banner ads, but when you're engaged in a good video, you're not likely to click on a banner. I suppose in-stream ads might work, but those could also become annoying and eventually damaging to audience retention. The technology doesn't seem to exist yet for contextual text ads related to video. I guess that leaves selling P2P content (as the new license agreement seems to hint at).

But if the lack of revenue doesn't kill YouTube, I think Big Media just might. There's already been one copyright lawsuit. Peer media is great, but there is a legitimate question around "where would YouTube be without copyrighted material?"

Will we look back on this as the golden age of YouTube?

In YouTube's favor is that social media is growing in both abundance and quality, while big media is waking up to the value of peer-driven viral marketing. That may help YouTube avoid the fate of Napster, if it can just figure out how to make money.

Before social networking, there were virtual communities. When virtual communities were hot and new, I found myself unemployed, so I launched RVClub.com.

For a couple of years, I made an okay living off of RVC, but the hoped-for financing never came through, the bubble burst, and revenues slid quickly.

But I kept RVC alive if for no other reason than the core group of long-time loyal members who loved it so much.

Now, I'm unemployed again -- so it seemed like a good time to revamp the site and fix long-lingering problems.

Of course, in fixing it, I could very well have broken other things (that's how these things go), but for now I think it's a better site. I still need to get the SSL going again. And I have lots of ideas for new features. But here it is: The new RVClub.com.

There are only a few singers who would be worth seeing solo -- by solo, I mean just the singer and his guitar.

Nick Lowe would be one of my first choices.

I figure I'm about 1 of 500 or so Nick Lowe fans in the world.

Thanks to the long tail of YouTube, tonight, I had my own mini-Nick Lowe concert (warning, low quality bootleg videos):

• When I Write the Book
• So It Goes
• Heart
• Geisha Girl
• The Rose of England
• So It Goes (a different performance)
• Bo Bo Skediddle
• From Now On
• Cruel to be Kind
• Jumbo Ark (on bass guitar, no less)
• I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)

If you're in Bakersfield and would like a cutting from my silver dollar cactus, let me know. I've got a part of this plant spilling onto the lawn and another few paddles fell off two days ago. I hate to just throw them out. This plant propagates easily.

I'm still in the middle of reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, but in tripping through it I came across a bit of musical history as it relates to DIY media that I think is a bit inaccurate.

Anderson writes:

But punk rock changed the game. Punk rock said: "Okay, you have your guitar, but you don't have to do it right. You can do it wrong! It doesn't matter one bit if you're a skilled musician; it just matters if you have something to day."

There is no doubt that punk rock was a significant social force, and it taught a whole new generation that all you needed was "a red guitar, three chords and the truth," but the DIY spirit has been part of the American music heritage since their were pilgrims at Plymouth. Granted, prior to punk, the American and British music scenes were pretty dismal, with a long list of vapid, overly hyped and over-produced stars, but the bad stuff wasn't the only music in the world at the time. Before the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and the Clash, there was the New York Dolls, Iggy and the Stooges, and the MC5.

And before the proto punks, there were garage bands such as the Kingsmen, the Troggs and the Standells. And much of their inspiration was drawn from such early rockabilly artists as the Rock'N'Roll Trio, Charlie Feathers and Dale Hawkins.

Rockabilly, of course, was the product of the most DIY'ish music of the 20th Century: Blues and Hillbilly.

Need I go on?

DIY is just part of the American music character -- it's why we have jazz, blues and country and all the genres in between. DIY didn't start with punk, and punk isn't why DIY media is exploding today.

Music has evolved as the technology of music making has evolved. With each new advancement, new generations have found new ways to express themselves. The history of music proves that if you give people the tools to create and share, they will create and they will share. Better and more accessible tools just means the tail gets longer and longer and longer.

Peer-created media is a powerful force. It is a force of nature.

For all those in big media hoping P2P is just a fad: It isn't. Hisotry proves it.

If I'm correctly reading the changes in YouTube's license, they can make all the money they want off your original productions if you upload them to YouTube, and you can't do a damn thing about it.

It's always interesting to see the disruptors get disrupted. Apple disrupted the music industry with iPods and iTunes. But for music consumers, the model still stinks. It places too many limits on what you can do with YOUR music.

Now Yahoo! is experimenting with music downloads that do not include piracy protection.

If that works and grows, if consumers can safely download straight MP3s from a trusted source at a reasonable price, it could provide serious competition to Apple.

The main reason I don't buy music from iTunes or any other similar service is I can't do what I want with the music. When I own a song, I like to have it on my hard drive, my iPod and on a CD I can play in my car. The best format for me is MP3. I want all my music in MP3 (I know there are some formats now that provide "better" sound quality, but MP3 seems good enough for me). I don't buy many CDs any more simply because I own so much music already (500 or so LPs, 300 or so CDs, plus XM radio ... I have a lot of stuff to listen to that I haven't gotten tired of yet ... but if I could legally download a single song here and there and then do with it as I pleased, I would be happy.)

Morris Digital works has launched a user-generated content site around celebrity gossip.

Another good idea from Moris.

I've become convinced that celebrity news on the Web is big. Here's why: I do a post about Rick Sutcliffe showing up drunk on television, and I start attracting people searching for "Rick Sutcliffe drunk." Lately, I've been getting a lot of searchers looking for news about Xavier Nady and his wife (and my only mention of Nady ever was a couple of years ago when he was on my fantasy baseball team). Many moons ago, I did a post about Connie Chung that Dave Barry linked to ... I still get plenty of Connie Chung traffic. Two weeks ago so, I was getting a steady stream of people searching for "Connie Chung fired."

And I'm just a little micro-traffic blog (though, with the unusually high Google page rank of 7).

Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but still, I think there is opportunity for news sites with celebrity gossip.

Bakersfield.com took second place in its circulation category in the annual CNPA Best Newspapers Contest.

Congratulations to the Bakersfield.com team.

I've played a role in Web sites that have won these awards before. During my six years in Ventura, we garnered three CNPA best Web site awards, including a first place.

Also in Ventura, we won awards from E&P and NAA for best Web site, and our verticals won a few awards, and in 2004, the Online News Association presented VenturaCountyStar.com with its general excellence award.

From Charles Arthur here is the 1 percent rule:

It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

Mindy McAdams has more.

I've been involved in user-generated content for a decade at least, and while I've never had hard stats, what Arthur presents rings true. Most e-mail discussion lists, forums, virtual communities are populated primarily by lurkers. There is usually a core of heavy contributors, a second tier of people who react to the contributors, and a large group of everybody else. Roles may change over time or from time to time, but the tiers of participation remain fairly consistent.

At one time, I speculated that lurkers were mostly newbies and would learn to be participants and contributors. But more than a decade of the Web has passed, and the proportion of lurkers to contributors remains consistent. Obviously, this isn't a matter of newness or technical savvy. It's an issue of personality. Some people will always be lurkers.

That doesn't mean that all lurkers are always lurkers, or that contributors don't change roles in other venues, but that experience does not necessarily change habits.

The big challenge for any would-be social network, or virtual community, or participation-based initiative (you pick), is how you entice the 1 percent to get the ball rolling, because without the 1 percent, you don't get the 10 percent, and hence there is nothing there for the 89 percent.

There is some knowledge and skill involved, but also a lot of luck.

Let me be among the first to welcome Steve Yelvington to the wonderful world of the MacBook.

Tips for Steve: install Parallels before installing Windows (wish I had -- now I'm screwed on that front). Also, watch for the exploding power chord.

Turtle necks are optional.

But you do have an iPod, right?

For years, I've been preaching the concepts behind continually updated news sites, telling reporters and editors -- get the news on the Web quickly, don't try to polish or perfect, just publish and update as you learn more. There is time later to write your literary lede and your new journalism narrative, but right now, keep the Web site fresh and relevant.

That was a mighty long winded way of saying what an E&P editor said today in six words: Web for 'News' -- Print for 'Stories'

Elegant in its simplicity. Indispensable in its truth.

The Web is perfect for distilled news -- just give the readers the facts and let them move on to the next click. Write headlines to be skimmed, stories to be scanned. Save the literary gems for print -- and for the sake of print subscriptions, make those stories sing.

From the E&P column by Greg Bowers:

The truth is, newspapers are in a particularly good position to play this new game. They just haven't realized it yet.

Newspaper staffs continue to be the largest newsgathering organizations in their communities. But they also have another unique feature: They have real writers, writers who can tell the stories, interpret the stories and put the stories into context. They have the columnists who can cajole and entertain.

Transforming print news means getting away from commodity news. It means making our writing more engaging. It should mean more craft and less fact churning.

On the Web, however, speed and ease rule.

Drawing from revenue numbers reported by Google, Peter Krasilovsky estimates that local search revenue currently resides in the $1.3 billion range.

That got me thinking, how much is that per local market? I can't find a stat on how many DMA's there are in the U.S., so let's assume that every DMA has at least one daily newspaper. Going off this chart, I'm going to guess that there are 900 markets with daily newspapers.

That makes each local market worth about $1.4 million.

You can't run a daily newspaper, even in the smallest markets, on $1.4 million.

And of course, no newspaper is EVER going to capture all of the local search ad dollars.

We all assume local search revenue is going to grow, but will it? And if so, what is the potential for local news sites? It's a very competitive, dynamic market comprised of many more pennies than dollars.

First, what is local search? I take it to mean search or directory browsing meant to find local goods and services.

Second, who advertises around local search right now? My answer is, not too many local businesses. Do a search on Google for something like "Stockton plumbers." Currently, no local businesses turn up in that search. A similar search in the online versions of phone books turns up what look like more paid advertisers, but I suspect those are either forced buys or value adds.

This is important because you'll eat up margins if local search advertising is anything but self-serve.

And I'm just not seeing a lot of small, local businesses rushing to use online self-serve advertising.

I'm not saying that won't happen, but I'm skeptical that it will.

The only local advertisers using self-serve advertising with any frequency and consistency are Realtors. And "any town real estate" also happens to be one of the most popular search terms in just about every market.

The problem with most self-serve advertising is that it takes real work to do it right. It takes time and knowledge to craft the right campaign and match it to your web site (and most businesses either don't have a Web site or have a very poor Web site). Then you must monitor your campaigns, tweak your bids and buys, and track your ROI.

When you own your own business and work 14-hour days just to keep the doors open, do you really want to learn how to manage your own self-serve advertising?

As newspapers cast about for new ways to grow revenue in these turbulent times, it is tempting to cast a longing eye at the $1.3 billion in local search revenue and think, "How do I get a piece of that?"

First, don't fall into the trap to thinking CPC or self-serve retail is the easy road to riches. There's money there for newspaper.coms, but it ain't easy money. And your slice of the pie is going to be pretty small if you're only getting two percent of the local unique users on any given day.

Second, remember that the $1.3 billion you see going to other companies was never your money. It's money being generated by new markets that were never were your markets. And chances are, your slice isn't going to come from existing markets. You need to create new markets in your local areas.

UPDATE: Jack Lail responds.

At some point, you have to wonder if Home Depot is even going to need newspapers any longer. They already have a robust and effective e-mail marketing program that could supplant their circulars someday. They produce their own content. Now they're accepting advertising on their Web site from suppliers. And it sounds like the kind of advertising program newspapers should be offering their best customers.

Wendy McCaw, owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press, has reportedly hired a crisis PR expert.

I'm not sure McCaw is ready to taste the bitter medicine necessary to cure this mess.

I'm guessing this new expert will merely try to help white wash the situation, not try to fix it.

That said, the crisis can be fixed. I'm just not sure McCaw is ready to do what is necessary to repair her damaged reputation, the reputation of the News-Press and set the company back on proper footing.

She should:

• Admit she's in over her head. She knows nothing about journalism or running a newspaper. She should admit it.
• Admit mistakes where made. Admit those mistakes in exact detail.
• Announce that she is stepping away from daily operations of the newspaper, that she is forming a board of directors, composed of four or five local business leaders, to help her guide the paper, but that she is going to hire a professional, experienced publisher. She will provide the general strategic oversight, enjoy the perks of local media ownership, but daily operations will be handled by a trained and professional staff.
• Announce that the new publisher will make all future personnel decisions, including whether to rehire any staff who resigned during the crisis.
• Publish all of this in her newspaper, apologize to the readers for how she handled the situation (including, what appears to be lying to the community), and promise that from now how, under her stewardship, the News-Press will aim only at the highest journalistic standards with a goal toward serving both readers and advertisers better.

Ten bucks she won't do it.

Writing for GigaOM, Robert Young advices Google to buy a Hollywood studio and disrupt the current film and TV business model.

It's not as crazy as it sounds.

Read the whole thing.

The other day, I posted something about stumbling across an old Online-News e-mail discussion list archive.

Proud Papa Steve Outing linked to the post.

Scott Anderson saw that link and spent some time digging through the archive and found an e-mail by Joe Shea listing the top news sites of 1995, the results of a survey by Wired.

There are some big media names on that list, and a few smaller papers that were ahead of the curve and doing great work, such as the Raleigh News and Observer (NandO), the Casper Star Tribune, Akron Beacon Journal, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, etc.

I don't remember the list at all. I was a subscriber to Online-News at the time, but I must have missed the post, because this is one post I think I would have remembered.

Here's the bottom of the list:

60. Tampa Tribune (Tampa)
61. London Free Press (London
62. MIT The Tech
63. Digital Missourian
64. OC Register
65. Orlando Sentinel America Online
66. East County Online(San Diego)
67. Evansville Courier (Evansville)
68. Newsday Direct Prodigy
69. Capital Gazette (Annapolis)
70. On Wisconsin Milwaukee Journal Prodigy  

Holy crap! East County Online, the site I started on a shoe string (thanks to Ron James) and a beginner's HTML book was, in 1995, among the Top 70 most popular news and information sites according to Wired.

I had no idea. Or I had forgotten.

Of course, Jeff Perlman had to rain on our parade ... but good ol' Joe Shea rides to the rescue ... (and the exchange demonstrates, somewhat, what the list culture was like back in the day, and maybe why I didn't follow this thread (and read this one, too).

I still think it's amazing that ECO made the list.

Also,
due credit to Steve Saint, who owned Forum Publications at the time and provided ECO with most of its content.

A while back, I had a conversation with Steve Outing about the old Online-News archives. I wondered if they still existed (the current Poynter-hosted list has archives going back to 2002). I'm interested in recalling what some of us said about our emerging business back in 1995-96. How many predictions have come true? How many good ideas stuck? What ideas were floated ahead of their time? What should never have been floated in the first place?

Outing suspected the old archives were either lost or buried on an old zip disk he no longer has the technology to read (but I do - maybe).

By complete accident tonight, while doing a completely different search, I found this old archive page. One of the posts is the results of a survey about who was using the list back in 1996.

There's a few interesting posts there (and a lot of chatter), but it's an incomplete archive. In following the chain of the URL upstream, I found more limited archives. The site appears to belong to Rex Ballard, a former list member and the postings are retrieved from his personal e-mail folders. Some of the messages are organized by topic.

There's a lot of familiar names in those archives, and quite a few people who seem to have disappeared from the industry.

This little discovery sent me on a further Google quest to find more information related to the old Online-News list, and found this historical link: Important New Media Names, circa 1998. (Included only because it's interesting to me,
not because it's directly related to online-news, though a few ON names appear on it.)

More searching: For a while, Steve Outing experimented with Online-News being mirrored in a news group, which is why this limited 1997 era archive exists.

Well, I just killed two hours of my unemployed life on this topic.

John Burke, writing on Editors Weblog, discusses the
proposed
deal between
Yahoo! and newspapers, and at a couple of points, I have some responses.

MediaNews CEO W. Dean Singleton has said previously, "The industry needs to
come together to find a search-engine model so that we begin to monetize news,"
while another newspaper
executive declared news search to be the "long-term future" of newspaper
revenues.

Here's the thing: Newspapers once had their own news search engine, run
by the New
Century Network, and it was a very fine search engine that
certainly could have evolved to compete with Yahoo! and Google News. In fact,
at the time, it really had no competition.

That, of course, is crying over spilt milk.

Yahoo's new local
news portal is impressive and shows promise for sending significant traffic
in the direction of local media Web sites.

I'm still not clear on what newspaper companies need to do with Yahoo!
besides make sure Yahoo! is consuming their RSS feeds?

Give Yahoo! their classifieds? I'm not sure I understand why. Get a cut
of Yahoo! banner advertising? But how much of a future does banner
advertising have? And if it has a future, can't media sites get
a higher CPM on their own sites? I mean, I'm assuming Yahoo!'s new site
is going to quite naturally help increase traffic.

I only know what's been covered in the press, but help wanted ads
are among the most valuable assets newspaper sites have. Banner ads,
even on Yahoo!, are worth less. Is it a fair trade?

So I've been scratching my head over this one. I know some smart
people at big media companies read this blog. If one or two of them
feel so inclined, maybe someone can explain this proposed deal.

It seems to me the smart thing to do in regard to Yahoo! is build stronger
local sites so that when Yahoo! readers interested in local news
inevitably click on one of your links and land on your site, give them
a reason to come back -- profiles, blogs and comments in exchange
for registration, e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds of interest,
personalized Web pages. And if you've done away with non-local
wire news, you might want to bring it back so that current
Yahoo! readers might become less frequent Yahoo! readers and favor you
with more clicks, especially through customized content.
Chances are, your target Yahoo! audience has
so far been infrequent local news readers, but have a strong
interest in the generic national and international news on
Yahoo! Here's your chance to give them what they're used to (including
lots of pictures and video from the wires).

But back to Burke, who concludes his post by suggesting, if I'm reading him right,
that the entire newspaper industry would be better of if Knight-Ridder hadn't
tried a one-size-fits-all strategy.

Would newspaper companies be negotiating with Yahoo today over whether or
not they can take a cut of the Internet giant's search revenues? Or would
newspapers already hold such a local Web audience that Yahoo
would be coming to them pleading to power the search on their sites and share
revenue?

I don't buy it because there have been hundreds of newspaper sites staffed by
intelligent, creative people, at companies both big and small, over the past 10
years or so, working on getting this stuff right. Not everything
newspaper.coms have done have been failures. Knight-Ridder
did some things right, and the company's demise is an issue more complex than
just the results of its new media strategy. I could create a list of four or five
things I wish newspaper sites had done five to 10 years ago, but that's probably another
post. There isn't much, however, that could have stopped the Yahoo! and Google
jaggernauts. The Web had to mature (and still is maturing) on a national
level first, which made these behemoths somewhat inevitable. The question
now is: What to do about it?

Melanie Colburn (filling in for John Battelle on SearchBlog) has a post on different kinds of music search services -- services to help match your tastes with music you might like but maybe have not heard before.

I've spent a good deal of time playing around with Pandora. So far, I'm not impressed. At least for my tastes. It's interesting that they can deduce that I might like a song with major tonality, mixed acoustic and electronic instrumentation and guitar pickin' and demanding instrumental part writing. But that still doesn't mean I'm going to like The Decemberists.

For all its efforts, Pandora has yet to introduce me to a worthwhile artist. The best stuff that fits my taste (I've set up channels for Dave Alvin, Nick Lowe, The Kinks and Johnny A), I've already heard.

I just tried MusicLens. All I can say is that any music search that recommends Kenny Rogers to me isn't likely to make me a loyal user.

Of course, some day, somebody is going to get music search recommendations right.

Friendster has been granted a patent on social networks.

This is surprising. It could be argued that social networks have around since BBS days.

Social networks is just the latest buzz word for virtual communities. Virtual communities surfaced in the mid 1990s as a common term for digital environments that allow users to gather around common interests and connect with each other.

So, is the RVClub.com, which I started years before there was a Friendster, in violation of the patent?

This is like granting Kodak a patent on digital cameras.

UPDATE: OK, so I flew off the handle. Here's the actual
patent abstract It really only describes the "link to a friend" aspect of many newer social networks:

A method and apparatus for calculating, displaying and acting upon relationships in a social network is described. A computer system collects descriptive data about various individuals and allows those individuals to indicate other individuals with whom they have a personal relationship. The descriptive data and the relationship data are integrated and processed to reveal the series of social relationships connecting any two individuals within a social network. The pathways connecting any two individuals can be displayed. Further, the social network itself can be displayed to any number of degrees of separation. A user of the system can determine the optimal relationship path (i.e., contact pathway) to reach desired individuals. A communications tool allows individuals in the system to be introduced (or introduce themselves) and initiate direct communication. (bold added)

At least that's the way I read it.

So, maybe the patent does describe something that didn't exist prior to> Friendster. I can't think of an old-school virtual community that had friends lists.

Steve Rubel points to the "suggest" feature of Google News as a tool for marketers looking to spot trends.

I think site managers can also use it as a tool to aide in search engine optimization.

For example, let's look at a search for "stockton real estate bubble" (one of the top searches right now for Stockton, Calif. The Stockton Record does well in this search -- on Google News. But Google News isn't nearly as popular as Google's main search. Using the same search terms, Recordnet.com does not show up until the bottom of the second page. This points to an opportunity for SEO.

Part of the SEO process is to look for those same search terms in your server logs. If those keywords are not showing up, or showing up low, in your referrer logs, you're may not be getting all the traffic you should.

Another good tool offered by Google is the keyword tracker. Type in the name of your city and find out what search phrases are being used in Google to find information related to your area. Compare that keywords in your own logs. How do you stack up?

An even more powerful tool is the Keyword Suggestion Tool from Digital Point. This tool uses data from WordTracker and Overture to tell how how many times per day a particular keyword is used. If you see a disparity between frequency of use and infrequency of traffic for a particular keyword, you've got a problem to fix.

I know some large news organizations have staff members dedicated to SEO, but I suspect a lot of smaller media sites never even think about it. Search engines are the number one method people use to arrive at your site. It only makes sense that you would want to ensure you attracted all the SE clicks you could. After all, not all of that potential traffic is out of market. Some of it is potential new loyal readers.

I haven't surfed YouTube for local video in a while. Today I did. The links below might serve as a taste of life in Bako.

• A Bakersfield Documentary by Marcus Mulick.
• If you love trains, Bakersfield to Caliente, including what looks like a small section of the Tehachapi Loop.
• Lots of dust, as Bakersfield skaters ride their boards in a ditch.
• This ain't exactly "Streets of Bakersfield", but it is a song about Bakersfield.'
• Peta bikini protest at KFC.
• Some Bako rap, "Motivation"
• A drag queen outside the Oildale honky tonk, Trout's.
• Citizen media at its finest: The King of Poontang.
• amateurs film makers making a film about making an amateur movie ...
• Local punk favorites, the Filthies. This one's pretty good.
• Another local punk band, Midnight Panic, with a good video.
• The animated piece, Methheads Living in Bakersfield.
• This is interesting: It's a tribute to Travis Baldwin, a local youth killed while riding his skateboard. The video is a mash up, using footage shot by the local newspaper and family photos of Travis.
• Too kids torture a snowman.

Three guys at Sonic Burger (I hate foot cramps).

• This video wasn't approved by the Chamber of Commerce: Life As It Should Be.
• Another documentary about Bakersfield set to music.
• And, of course, for those who haven't seen it yet, the classic Armpit of the State.

Hey, kids, News Corp is watching you.

They want to know what you like, when you like it, why you like it, and what you'll like next. And if they have their way, what you'll like next is what they tell you to like next.

And they'll use MySpace to do it.

"You'll see us morphing from a content company into a marketing company," Levinsohn says, "a youth marketing company especially, because that's where everything starts. No one is going to be able to control the flow of content the way we used to. MySpace gives us the ability to look inside and understand how hits get created" -- that is, to spot micro-niches, track early breakouts, and identify hot IM buzzwords as they bubble up.

And kids, your worst nightmare is coming: "OMG!!! Mom has a MySpace profile!!!!!"

MySpace is going to be interesting watch. As the Wired article points out, participation feeds on itself. It may be impossible for many to become unglued from MySpace. On the other hand, if the kids become hip to the fact, and it is a fact at this point, that MySpace is just another tool of The Man, then will they head off to the next trendy thing? How much longer, if ever, before MySpace becomes uncool? (link via Terry Heaton).

I've stepped into the middle of an argument on Jay Rosen's blog, and Jay calls me out, so I might as well respond to Jay here.

Rosen takes Justin Fox to task for suggesting that newspapers might be better off remaining in public ownership.

Relevant quote from Fox:

Now that Wendy McCaw has driven away most of the editors from the newspaper she owns, the Santa Barbara News-Press, a lot of people in journalism are beginning to question what had become accepted wisdom in the past year or so - that independent, local ownership is the salvation of the ailing newspaper industry.

Rosen responds:

Fox told me something I didn’t know, but don’t for a moment believe. No one believes it. Newspaper people, known to be struggling with big problems for a long time, have at last found The Answer? Fox says so. It’s conventional wisdom, he says, that local independent ownership is their salvation.

The statement is bull. What conventional wisdom says (maybe) is that local independent ownership is worth a try again, and might work out better than corporate chains have. Why would a journalist describe prevailing wisdom in his own business as way dumber than it really is? Because it’s the cheapest way there is to sound smart: defy the conventional wisdom that you just spent $0.0 and zero man hours compiling.

In the comments, in response to a comment I had left earlier, here's what Jay addresses to me:

And I would say to Howard Owens: Go ahead, Howard, show me some samples of all the talk going around claiming that "private ownership will save newspaper journalism" that doesn't acknowledge "private has its pitfalls" too. I don't believe you can.

OK, let's start with Editor's Weblog:

The news business shouldn’t be about business, many journalists argue. Yes, ideally, journalism is about facts and clarity, education and explanation, everything good and true in this wayward world — ideally. But that’s a Utopian vision, and journalists who ground themselves in the principle of gritty, tell-it-like-it-is reporting often foolishly refuse to acknowledge the financial needs of their newspaper.

Those needs cannot be denied. However, they might be lessened if Wall Street wasn’t such an imposing force. Private ownership may prove itself this struggling industry’s saving grace.

No equivocation there.

How about, the Washington Post.

Morton has become a convert to the return-to-private thinking, which he said has its journalistic benefits.

"The fact is, Wall Street is so short-nosed and is so dedicated to maximizing return on investment to the exclusion of almost everything else, you're going to have situations where, basically, you have a lot of public shareholders who have interests that are inimical to good journalism," he said.

Yes, there's a note of caution in the next graph -- the even private equity owners expect a return on investment. But this isn't the same as warning, as is the issue Fox is writing about, that private owners might be more prone to put personal interests ahead of journalistic standards.

Then there's this piece from Ohio.com where even Laura Rich Fine is praising local ownership. In the entire piece, I don't see much in the way of caution or concern.

The fact is, there has been a good deal of talk in journalistic circles about how advantageous it would be for newspapers to get away from public ownership. "Conventional wisdom" may be an overstatement, but it's still a train of thought worth addressing before we all rush headlong into this new utopia.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all privately held newspapers or newspaper chains are poorly run. Most are just fine. If I wanted get even more long winded, I could rattle off an impressive list of good, privately held newspapers and newspaper chains (and a few that aren't doing any better of a job of dealing with the new competitive pressures than public companies). What is happening in Santa Barbara is far from the norm. But this whole debate sprung up because of the alleged antics of Wendy McCaw. Those events should give journalists pause. That's all.

The Washington Post's experiment with comments on stories is one of the most interesting to watch -- because they have such a huge audience.

They're about to add comments to political stories. That could be an inferno in a matchbox.

Jim Brady is a smart man and I know he's been working on this issue for many months, so I'm sure he's ready for what might happen.

On the flip side of size is that the WaPo might avoid one of the key vexations smaller papers face with comments -- just a handful of people dominating conversations. I imagine that it will be harder for a coterie of frequent posters to form a clique, as sometimes happens with smaller publications.

What an ugly mess in Santa Barbara.

The newsroom has organized union representation. Another reporter has quit. More may follow. The latest slap in the face, as they see it, is Wendy McCaw's front page note containing what they see as lies about the situation. The newsroom staff has presented a letter to the publisher demanding a return to journalistic ethics, separation of powers, and an invitation to the editors who quit to return.

For those staffers who haven't resigned yet, I can't blame them. Very few journalists have enough money in the bank or adequate family support to just quit their jobs, no matter how miserable those jobs might be.

I faced a similar situation when I was a 26-year-old reporter at the Daily Californian in San Diego. Our publisher threatened to fire a reporter, and a very good reporter, for pissing off the local mayor. The stories that upset her were all journalistically sound stories. She just didn't like negative news about her or her town. But it was legitimate news.

We had a big newsroom pow-wow and thought we might just go ahead and contact the parent company (Landmark) and let them know what was going on. Before we could Paul Zindell (the publisher) called a meeting and threatened to fire us all.

We backed down. Mike Drummond lost his job (the day he returned from his honeymoon) and the Columbia Journalism Review gave the Californian a dart.

These are maybe poor excuses, but there was a recession. There were no journalism jobs to be had. The San Diego Union and Evening Tribune had just merged and we all knew local journalists who were out of work. None of us could afford to be unemployed. We also had a sense that Landmark didn't really care about us or the newspaper. In fact, a short time later, Landmark would sell the rest of the paper to Zindell. From the day Zindell was appointed publisher, about six months after I started working there, he was pretty much the de facto single owner. His ultimate acquisition of the entire property didn't change a thing, it just meant he was around more (He bought a home in La Jolla).

In hindsight, I wish I had quit in the midst of that incident. It would have been the right thing to do: Make a principled stand. I had enough connections, so I could have made it as a free-lance reporter (as I would a couple of years later). Things would have worked out, but I couldn't see it at the time.

Interesting piece from Media Life on innovation at newspaper Web sites.

Here's an interesting tidbit:

In its study, Belden also found that newspaper site audiences have aged five years over the past five years, even though overall newspapers' online audience continues to grow. That, says Greg Harmon, Belden's director for interactive, "is pointing to the fact that newspaper web sites are drawing people who are already newspaper readers."

Harmon says publishers can change that by offering the right content on their sites. "The battle for 18-34s is by no means lost if publishers take advantage of the content-building opportunities that are available to them," says Harmon.

This overlaps with something I've been thinking about the past day or two.

In the past year or so that I've been reading N.L. Belardes, I've become distinctly aware that he and a contingent of his audience have absolutely no need for the MSM. They are downright hostile to it. In Belardes' case, it seems more a mixture of fascination and distrust. But his attitudes seem to feed and illuminate a deeper hostility among some of his readers.

The whole notion of "news as a conversation"? Forget it, if it includes MSM. They want their own news, their own way, from their own peers.

I haven't seen even the most radical of the new media gurus, such as Jarvis and Rosen, who think newspapers aren't doing enough to become digital natives, address the question of: What if younger audiences just don't want us? What if no matter how much we adapt to the MySpace world, there is just no place for us?

There are two points worth making. First, the "we hate everything MSM" may just be a minority view. I wouldn't go too far with the observations drawn from just one blog (but I also believe there is a whole Web universe that pulsates with life little nourished by MSM). And it may be a transient view, imbued by youth and fun to shout. Second, there still may be a large enough audience for many decades to come without attracting this particular segment of audience.

It's dangerous to fall into mass-media thinking. We don't have to appeal to everybody, nor should we try. There is no such thing as mass media on the Web.

I would also add that if we don't adapt to the new technology and ideas in a way that even our current, loyal audience finds useful and interesting, then we'll just lose that audience to those innovators who will.

More from the article:

But Sands says the key to attracting daily visitors is likely what the best blogs do well: aggregating information and linking outward and away. That's something newspaper people are loathe to do, but the irony, says Sands, is that sending users away may be the key to getting them to come back each day.

"I really think one of the biggest challenges for us in the newspaper industry is to figure out how to aggregate better, and that's really counter-intuitive for us old print guys. You have to make peoples' lives easier and more effective, and the only way to do that is to make web surfing easier and more effective for them. The sites that are most successful on the web are the ones that aggregate."

I agree. Newspaper Web sites, or TV sites, if they want to claim the crown of the biggest Web site in town, should be a central repository for every bit of local information they can field and serve. That includes linking to other sites and other publications. The link is a powerful, potent tool, too seldom used by MSM sites.

I'm watching Warren Buffett on Charlie Rose.

In 1973, Buffett started buying shares of the Washington Post Co. The stock started getting very cheap because the Nixon administration was challenging its television licenses. The stock went from $38 to $16 a share in a very short time. "When it got to around 20, we bought a few blocks and got about 10 percent of the company." At $20, the company was worth about $100 million. They owned the Post, Newsweek and four big network stations, and had no debt. If you had taken those separate parts, you could have sold them for about $500 million, according to Buffet.

Good buy by Buffett, right? It gets better.

Rose: "How come 95 people didn't see it?"

Buffett: "We were buying from big institutional investors, and they were bailing out of it, and if you asked any one of them what the pieces were worth, they would have said something close to what I would say. But they thought the stock was going to go down. So what?

"I'm looking at the stock, and I'm looking at the Graham family."

Here's the kicker: That $10 million investment in 1973 is worth $1.5 billion today.

Think about that: Newspaper circulation declines started in the 1920s, but really accelerated in the 1970s. For my entire life, I've heard about how the newspaper business is dying. That hasn't stopped Warren Buffett from making a mint off a company that at its core is a newspaper company.

Buffett: "They have not struck oil. They have not invented a cure for cancer. They have
just taken those properties and kept doing reasonably intelligent things, and
sometimes very intelligent things, with the money generated by it. ... They've been good stewards of the money, but there are no miracles involved."

Buffett now owns 18 percent of the Post.