Howard Owens

An article in the Daily Nexus, the college paper, reveals that the atmosphere in the newsroom is stressful and edgy, somebody placed an R.I.P. wreath on the door of the building, and a community rally is planned to protest what is happening at the paper.

Also, there is an unpublished News-Press article about what happened, which contains this bit of new information:

... Todd said that, for him, the final straw happened last week when Armstrong told a reporter to slant a news article to a certain angle. The article was about a Carpenteria city councilwoman who was resigning after 16 years. He said Armstrong told the writer to focus on two issues his editorials had previously attacked the councilwoman for.

(via Romenesko)

Romenesko linked to HowardOwens.com today.

The link generated about 600 visits. Via LAObserved, I learn that Romenesko gets about 80,000 visitors per day. That means, less than 1 percent of Romenesko's traffic was diverted this way.

Here's the entire E&P article about the king of media bloggers.

There was a time if top-level management of a newspaper mistreated staff, acted capriciously, or unethically, or otherwise made employment at said paper professionally or personally unbearable, there might be a bit of a local stink when a group of reporters and/or editors quit, and maybe a story in E&P, but the issue would die quickly and many potential replacement hires would never even know about the dust up.

Today, you have the Internet, where the story lives on in blogs for days afterwards. These blogs are archived and indexed by search engines.

The Santa Barbara News-Press has posted four job openings on JournalismJobs.com -- Here's a sample.

I can't imagine taking a job at the NP under the current ownership. And I have to wonder who would:

• Someone who doesn't follow media news.
• Someone who has such limited job prospects, he doesn't care
• Someone not using a search engine to research a potential employer

A reporter or editor who is that dense isn't likely to make a significant contribution to quality journalism.

The NP will a long time recovering from this, if ever, and probably only if Wendy McCaw sells the paper.

Remember PointCast?

I don't know if this is the same company/people, but pointcast.com is all about what appears to be a fancy RSS reader. (I just stumbled upon this). However, it's still about push -- so it's gotta be the same people, right?

Justin Fox is the latest commentator to use the News-Press fiasco to suggest that public ownership of newspapers might, after all, have some advantages.

And here's the thing: If you had to pick the one governance model best equipped to reconcile the conflicting priorities of owners, employees and customers over time, it is that of the publicly traded corporation.

Jay Small says that local papers should own local niche markets. Of course, they should.

In any category of traditional newspapering -- local news, sports, business, events, jobs, cars, homes, retail, services -- niche opportunities remain for the picking specifically because individual local newspapers do not have to compete on a national scale. Those niches live in two long tails: they're local, and they're narrow verticals.

If newspapers don't do it, then TV will, or some local entrepreneurs.

U2 produced by Rick Rubin. I like the idea.

Rick gives off some really confusing vibes, but then so does his work. Here's a man that can't and won't be stereotyped as anything other than eclectic. However there are a few things that can be said about Rick Rubin. Like how he seems very capable at bringing bands back to basics, cutting all the crap and producing a very clean, stripped down sound instead. Or how he seems to be able to breathe new life into a band's sound and career, like he did with Cash or the Peppers. Another trademark has been having artists cover unexpected material in their own style, of which Johnny Cash's cover of One is but one example.

Innovation is fun. Innovation is important. But is innovation the solution to every company's problems?

Ever since I first read Clayton Christensen, I've wondered: Where do newspaper companies draw the line between sustaining growth and disruption?

It is tempting to think that newspapers are being sliced by a thousand cuts and its either innovate for die, either disrupt yourself or die. The risk of putting all your chips in the innovation pot, however, is that you may be making the wrong bet. There may be things about your core that adapt very well to new business environment and the best thing you can do for your company is shift or drift with the market -- innovate around the core, rather than jettison your 150-year-old business in favor of the flavor of the month. Innovation and disruption is far more risky -- most innovations, most new ideas, fail.

These thoughts come after reading Business Pundit's post on a potential Google weakness: innovating too much, too fast and not concentrating enough on the core business, which is search.

Google is trying to organize and search different things. I think they would be better off finding new ways to search the same thing.** I've taken to using different search engines for different needs. I use Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Del.icio.us at least as much as I use Google. When I think of Google, I think of something that will give me the most popular web pages about a topic, which isn't usually what I want since I have esoteric interests. Why can't Google give me different ways to search based on the way I plan to use the information I am looking for? Instead of ranking a page higher because lots of other pages link to it, how about giving me the pages lots of other people like me read, or the pages experts in the field of my search topic read, or pages in a hierarchical format the way I might make an outline? I think Google is too focused on innovating into totally new areas and not focused enough on improving search and presenting the results in better formats. It still sucks. It's too easy to game the system. Calendars and payment systems and online spreadsheets and all that are just a distraction.

The key problem for many newspaper companies isn't that they aren't innovating fast enough. It's that they aren't adopting their core fast enough to the new environment. Surf around newspaper sites and look at how many have drab real estate sites, or predictable auto sites or classifieds that haven't moved beyond the basic listing stage.

Those newspaper companies that have developed, or are developing R&D departments are doing the right thing. I would love an R&D job, myself. But there also needs to be more attention paid to the digital core.

One of the most interesting cats in the local blogosphere, or the Bakosphere, is N.L. Belardes, raconteur, critic (music, art, theater, literature, etc.), media gadfly (especially in reference to TBC), novelist, publisher, podcaster and full-on conspiracy theorist. I'm sure he thinks Oswald did not act alone, the moon landing was filmed in Hollywood, and the Kennedys killed Marilyn.

His novel "Lords: Part One," is all about conspiracy. It is loosely based on the what may be a real conspiracy, the Lords of Bakersfield.

When I first landed in Bako, I wanted to make friends with N.L. I had found his blog while still in Ventura and recognized that he was sort of the center of the blogging universe in Kern County. If you're running a local media site, I think the local bloggers should be your friends, if possible.

I tried with N.L., but I think my association with TBC made him distrust me. I was just another MSM robot trying to rape the poor, innocent local writers, or something like that.

Even so, I keep N.L. in my RSS feed and check out his blog nearly every day. Once in a while, I even leave a comment. One of those comments drew him over here yesterday, and N.L. wrote this really overly flattering post.

I don't always agree with N.L., but his is probably the most important blog in Bako right now. I'm sure a lot of younger, local influentials read it. N.L.'s posts usually generate a fair number of comments, and other local bloggers often link to him. He may be a pain in the butt to TBC from time to time, but love him or hate him, he's firmly entrenched in the local online media scene.

UPDATE: This is funny. N.L.
posted his article to Bakotopia, the TBC-owned
social networking site. My picture is currently on the Bakotopia home page.

I just ran into Nick at Dagny's and we had a nice chat. He gave me the pointer
to Bakotopia.

It's time for the another News-Press update.

Via LAObserved, I get directed to this press release announcing the promotion of three staffers to new editorial roles.

I actually have great admiration for one of the people promoted, Charles Bucher. He's an exceptionally talented designer.

But so is George Foulsham, one of the editors who quit, so I wonder if Bucher actually said the following, or if the words were put in his mouth (this is a press release, after all) as a clear slap at George:

"As assistant managing editor, my first priority is to improve the sophistication of the paper's design," said Bucher. "I am also committed to strengthening newsroom planning, improving newsroom communication and increasing web site partnerships." (emphasis. added)

Real estate is big on the Web, and getting bigger.

While impressive, that’s a far cry from the 40 percent share of Real Estate advertising that newspapers command in print today. Borrell expects newspapers to lose an additional 33 percent of their market share in real estate advertising by 2010. Borrell notes that the size of the increase in Real Estate’s overall online advertising doesn’t begin to gauge the Internet’s huge impact on the business since it is so much cheaper and more efficient.

But there is no reason that newspaper Web sites shouldn't be the big winners with this vertical. Of all the verticals, its the one that lends itself best to all the things newspaper Web sites can do well: localization, multimedia, Web 2.0 stuff, and promotion.

Lots of lovely press for Chris Anderson's much anticipated new book, The Long Tail.

I just finished In Cold Blood and will start on Anderson's book tonight. I've been looking forward to it ever since I found out he was writing it. His theory just rings true and I want to learn more about it and try to figure out better how it effects online MSM.

I just left this comment on Contentious (a couple of edits here):

Modern reporters need to become digital natives. It's more than just the tools, it's the the attitudes. They need to stop thinking of the Web as just another way to publish, but rather, another way to participate. Most of what works best on the Web isn't finally crafted bits of prose and high production -- it's the quick takes, the dashed off observation, the instant communication. It's a conversation.

That's not to say there isn't a place for Big-J journalism, but we need more reporters who think digital first, and think like people who think digital first.

If you're wondering why social media is important, here's a good place to start:

When I talk to people about citizen journalism and other kinds of participatory media, often people who are above the age of 40 or who are print or broadcast media veterans contend, "Well, most people don't care about participatory media, so it doesn't matter. You're talking about a very small world."

...To which I generally respond, "Well, 'most people' would rather watch Wheel of Fortune or Days of Our Lives than World News Tonight. But then, quality journalism is rarely intended for indiscriminate, lowest-common-denominator audiences. Participatory media matters because it's where the most influential part of the mainstream media's audience is increasingly turning, now and in the near future. And the news business does -- and should -- should care very much about the influence it wields, directly and indirectly."

Former News-Press editor Jerry Roberts on working for a privately held newspaper:

"There is definitely a downside," Roberts, 57, told E&P late Sunday, just days after he quit the paper he had edited for four years. "When you have one owner who is very wealthy and used to getting their way, you have this conflict between the audience of the paper and the audience of one -- the owner."

The entire E&P piece (linked above) is worth reading, if you've been following this story.

Who's the best blogger in Bakersfield? Well, I'm partial to Black Dog.

When my son was still in the crock pot my wife and I began the process of choosing a name. We kicked around all kinds of names for this boy and over and over again the name Indiana kept creeping its way in. Our last name is Jones so why not Indiana, I mean its perfect. The baddest dude ever to grace the silver screen was Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark but that's just my opinion. I have recently been informed that Raiders of the Lost Ark is a silly child's movie and no serious man would ever consider that film as being one of the greatest films of all time, hey to each his own, I still think its great.

Finally I put my foot down on naming our son and I said with great authority, "His name shall be Indiana Jones too bad if the throngs of empty faces don't like it."

Maybe it's just me, but I love this guy's voice. Damn good writer, I say. And he's just a guy. No special training. No apparent career aspirations to write. He just writes and usually knocks your socks off.

Read all of the post linked above to find out if there really is a 3-year-old Indiana Jones living in Bako.

Today a small brown package slid through the hole in the wall with the the usual collection of junk and bills. It fell with a plop and I tossed my MacBook aside to investigate.

Ripping the corrugated container to pieces, I grasp the latest audio treat from Ken Layne.

It's a preview copy. You can't buy it yet! Ha! You should be jealous! Ha! Ha!

You should buy it as soon as it becomes available, be it in the material world or the cyber world (iTunes, if you're listening, you need clear some room on your shelf).

I've listened to it no less than 25 times today.

This little gem will be quite comfortable next to my copy of Layne's "Fought Down," which is only one of my all-time favorite CDs.

And I'm not just saying all this cause Layne's a friend of some decade and a half or so -- the man is simply a great singer-songwriter.

Part of what makes "Transcontinental" so special is it possesses such an original, fresh voice. Even as great as "Fought Down" was, Layne's influences were starkly exposed -- Gram Parsons and Rolling Stones, for instance. "Transcontinental" sounds like music of a man who has found his own universe.

So, I'm sitting in Dagny's, listening to Ken Layne, and two people approach me.

"Excuse me, but do you own the Mustang," the young lady said, pointing to my yellow pony out the front window.

The gentleman then spoke with a German accent, "We're looking for a car just like that for a short film we're shooting, and you can't rent them in that color. You can only get red."

They offered me $300 to show up in Castaic at 5 a.m., and then spend the all of the next day in LA while they turned my car into a star.

My decision isn't final, but I think I have to say no.

For an unemployed guy, I'm pretty damn busy and the notice is too short.

Here's the Web site for the film.

Of course, maybe I should be concerned ... I just read this:

A gun dealership in a hot, humid, dark city: A revolver spends another sleepless night waiting for a lover. It feels lonely, unwanted. Suddenly a crash...

A crash? With my car?

It's probably a different crash, but still ...

And in reading the above, I can see why they're in Bako on a 104-degree day.

They told me they're shooting in a pawn shop just around the corner.

Speaking of hanging out in Dagny's -- this is weird ... I can't search Google from here. If I do, I get this error (staff confirmed, this is a legitimate error.) Weirdness.

Jeff Jarvis says the Tribune closing two foreign bureaus is a good thing.

Local newspapers are shrinking and have to find efficiencies. But more important, they need to focus on their key value, and that is serving their local communities and put their resources there. ... The news industry is wasting a tremendous share of its ever-sparser resources on bylines: They have their own movie critics, though there’s nothing local about movies; they send their golf writers to the latest televised tournaments, though it is covered better and quicker on TV; they send their own team to the political conventions along with 15,000 more, in full knowledge that nothing would happen there and that they likely would not report anything that wasn’t reported elsewhere.

Makes sense to me.

My favorite headline on Steve Greenberg's cartoon for the Ventura County Star about the situation at the Santa Barbara News-Press: Every top editor quits this paper: No idea why; we guess people are just fussy.

Mindy McAdams quotes Chris Anderson on the impressive number of links to the New York Times in Technorati vs. all of the other links combined and then makes this observation:

What's really cool about the whole concept of "the long tail" is that it matches what a lot of critics of news Web sites have long observed: All the attention and time lavished on the home page is kind of pointless, because the way you really attract traffic and page views is through search. And search requires you to lavish attention on the back end, the structure of stories and individual pieces of the site -- the meat and potatoes, instead of merely the menu.

Sites that don't have integrated search, haven't optimized the entire site for search engines, don't see every page as a gateway -- they are kind of blowing it.

Also, archives should be free and registration should not be an impenetrable wall, but porous and flexible.

Of course, local is still important, but these changes enhance efforts to draw and retain local users, too.

UPDATE: Only just now did I actually read Chris' original post. Every card
carrying member of the MSM who thinks "without us, blogs are nothing," should
read the post. Anderson has that stats to prove
that if every MSM outlet shut down tomorrow, the blogosphere would go
on just fine. The political blogosphere, which I suspect is just
about the only blogs anybody in the MSM reads, might be hit hard, but the
blogosphere is huge -- a very long tail, indeed.

My friend Matt Welch posted a lengthy, thoughtful contrarian view to journalistic consternation over Wendy McCaw's management of the News-Press.

I think Matt makes good points about the mythical wall of separation between editorial and business (I've made the same points myself before), but I think he misses an essential rule of management: Don't micromanage.

You can say whatever you want about McCaw's right as an owner to set the editorial and business policies of the paper, but when you start dictating "blonde" instead of "blond," you've crossed a line. And crossing that line puts you on the side of insulting professionals.

The editors who quit the News-Press may express their complaints in terms of journalistic purity, but the real issue is that they weren't treated (if the reports are true) as professionals.

Effective executives hire the best people they can and then let them do their jobs. They don't micromanage.

Of course, McCaw has the right to run her newspaper in any manner she likes. She can lose all of her money doing it, if that's her desire, but that doesn't mean she isn't a fair target for critics of her management style.

The two former Knight-Ridder papers in Philly are going to be redesigned -- by an advertising professional.

On one hand that's an interesting idea, and I'm certainly willing to see what somebody from supposedly outside the newsroom comes up with, but some newspaper designers, such as Alan Jacobson, aren't afraid to push the bleeding edge.

Even so, the Philadelphia redesign deserves watching.

C.W. Nevius has more on the turmoil in Santa Barbara. The conclusion:

McCaw and the News-Press look like small time operators, who think they can turn a public trust into a country club newsletter. Roberts and the editors come across as paragons of journalism, standing up to bad bosses, censorship, and dumb editing. And everyone else around the country gets a good laugh.

One of the reasons I had heard that people wanted to work in SB was the fact that Jerry Roberts was the editor. Not only is Roberts now gone, a whole swath of potential hires have reason to suspect quality journalism is apparently under valued at the News-Press. That seems like it might hurt recruitment, which can't really be good for the long-term health of the paper.

I once sat in a meeting with a publisher who told us that he could "get any mother off the street" to come in and write news stories. That newspaper is now out of business and, as far as I know, that publisher is out of newspapering.

The funny thing is, a lot of "mothers off the street" are part of media now, being part of that group we call the former audience, but I don't think my old publisher quite had citizen media in mind when he made that statement.

Newspapers are community trusts. I consider the owners, whether public or private, as temporary trustees. The real owner is the community. And if you break trust with the community, the community will turn on you, or worse, forget you.

Jay Small introduces us to Greg Sterling. Small calls the blog "a must-read for anyone following local search, directory and content businesses." The introduction is part of Small's post on the salient topic of new media advertising:

The space for ad messages online is cheap. Content adjacencies for ads online seem to add very little value compared to offline media. The distribution of ad messages online is cheap and getting cheaper. It's hard to make money if that's all you sell. Unfortunately, newspaper ad staffs are accustomed to selling space, adjacency and distribution. We must get past that.

I agree with Small that price points need not fall below sustainable levels, but the hard part is going to be to get there.

Follow the link above to Jay, read his post, then read Greg's post.

There are nine good bloggers in Bakersfield. Seven is is leaving.

Krugle is a new search engine for coders (via John Battelle). What's most interesting, is that rather than take you to a page where you're going to find the code and see it in action, the search results are the actual code itself. If you go there, try a search for "DHTML menu" and you'll see what I mean.

For hard core coders who can read JavaScript like the rest of us read Hemingway, this is probably need no big deal. Me, I want to see my code in action before I hassle with putting it on my own page. A site like Dynamic Drive does that.

The other item of interest is that the site frames all its search results, so I can't link to a search query for you. The actual sites are also framed, so you can't bookmark your newly acquired favorite page. A bit nicer feature is how anything you click on becomes part of a tabbed menu.

Code writers must like this sort of search engine, though. There's already Koders.com.

Kevin Roderick was kind enough to link over to this blog today. Part of his Friday Buzz.

That seems like as good a jumping off point as any to talk about Kevin's blog.

I would guess it's been three years since he launched it. It was immediately obvious that it was so good and Kevin was so dedicated to the task, and so well qualified for it, that it was part of the reason that Matt Welch and Ken Layne shut down the excellent LAExaminer.

Roderick's blog has become a must read for media types. It is often quoted in Romenesko (the gold-standard approval for media blogs, because Romenesko rarely links to other bloggers, and rarer yet, the same ones repeatedly).

Roderick has delivered some scoops on media in LA, but LAObserved is more than a media blog. Roderick covers local politics and Hollywood. He acts as a filter/editor for the important news, but what makes LAObserved so interesting is that Roderick knows the city so well. You read LAObserved because you believe Roderick knows LA better than any other writer and he's going to tell you both what's important and what's interesting. It's not what leads on the TV news or floats to the front page of the local newspapers: It is what is human and real.

Roderick's style is not news style. It's not the heavy writing of traditional journalism. It has the breezy zest of the best bloggers. Roderick's posts contain rare opinion, but prolific observations honed by years of knowing the city he covers.

Here's the buried lede: Roderick is a real journalist. His pedigree is impeccable. His 30 years in the business should qualify him for one of those doddering old goats who just doesn't get this newfangled media thing, but he understands it better than some in the MySpace generation.

Robert Niles did an excellent piece recently about reporters who blog. There is some good advice there, but Kevin Roderick also provides a good example. He is proof that somebody raised in the bowls of Big-J journalism can adopt to the new style and be successful at it, and not lose an ounce of integrity.

There should be an LAObserved in every city in this land, and I think the biggest media companies in each city should be launching them. Every staff should have at least one person who knows the city well and can learn to communicate like a blogger instead of a journalist. Those sites, when done right, will become popular.

We keep struggling with what to call the content produced by the people formerly known as the audience.

A while back, I wrote about my preference for "citizen's media." Recently, Jeff Jarvis suggested, "networked journalism." In response, Steve Yelvington writes this morning:

As they nurtured the idea that eventually became Bluffton Today, my friends in our newspaper division spent many months wrestling with basic questions about content, tone and especially civic processes. They didn't come up with a label, and they certainly didn't call it citizen journalism. But they did come up with a catchphrase: "A community in conversation with itself."

I like it. For too long, too many professionals have imagined journalism to be a one-way process. It isn't. It never has been. The Internet may amplify the community conversation so we can hear with our tin professionalized ears, but that conversation has been there all along.

A lot of this labeling strikes me at the moment to some how define content in two separate camps: the stuff done by people paid to do it and those who don't.

As digital media evolves, I think that distinction is going to become less and less relevant, which makes the whole labeling process somewhat misguided. It helps now as we try to shape our future and devise responses and strategies, but in the end, it's all just reporting.

To me, reporting is a far more noble word than journalism. People need information as much as they need food and water. The shape and source of the information is far more important as the source of the information. The need for information is part of our DNA, part of our survival instinct.

Reporting is all about gathering information, or observing events, and telling other people what you know. You can report about the city council, or you can report Little League scores. Reporting is not exclusively professional.

Professionals object that they are needed to sort and filter, gather and disseminate, and help make sense of it all.

The problem is, in a digital world, channels are prolific, filters abundant and context just a click away. As people become more savvy about the communications tools, and as they evolve, they become their own editors.

We need professionals to help feed the beast of participation and conversation. We need professionals to do that brand of enterprise/investigative reporting that only works well when its a full-time avocation. In the end, however, the digital world is just one big coffee shop filled with talk. Some of it is work-a-day reporting. The rest is just comments on reporting. Some comments add to the reporting, some comments help us understand the reporting, some of it is just noise.

The amazing thing is, we're all smart enough to sort it out.

So, at the moment, I'm having a hard time thinking of this in terms of labels. To me, it's just people talking.

A "community in conversation with itself" includes people paid to find stuff out and talk about it.

We in the media industry, if we want to continue to have jobs, need to figure out how to make our reporting fit better into the new conversational styles. We also need to figure out advertising as a conversation. That is, if we want to remain relevant to our friends and neighbors and the businesses in the communities we call home.

UPDATE: Rich Gordon, chair of newspapers and new media at the Medill School
of Journalism, sends along this relevant quote: "A good
newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself. -- Arthur Miller"

Romenesko links to this Boston.com piece about the Daily Kos kerfuffle and features this quote:

"This fight is saying `Welcome to the big leagues,' " said Richard Bradley , the former editor of George Magazine and a blogger himself. "If you want us to take you seriously, we're going to ask you the same questions that we ask anyone else who aspires to be a power-player in Democratic politics."

I say, "Welcome to the conversation."

There are some in the blogosphere who want to criticize the MSM, but never have the MSM talk back or question the blogs. Some, as Markos "Kos" Moulitsas is being, are embarrassingly shrill in their attempts to stifle it. But more and more, journalists in the MSM are getting beyond the broad brush, "all bloggers are hacks" mentality and bringing real scrutiny to what bloggers do. This, I think, is a good thing. This is what conversation looks like.

The B.com piece concludes with:

"I would say the loss of innocence moment probably came before," he said. "Look, when bloggers start getting hired as consultants at political campaigns and when Mark Warner spends $50,000 on a party for bloggers, the purity is already gone. That's it, it's over, it's history. The second that happens, self-consciousness has arrived. And that image of bloggers sitting at home, pouring out the unadulterated truth, freed from impurities from the outside world, is lost."

The blogosphere is not some lock-step entity that you can pigeon-hole with generalizations about loss of credibility -- for the whole blogosphere. That's old media thinking. The blogosphere is filled with individuals. Some bloggers are credible and some are, indeed, hacks. Some are honest and transparent. Some take money under the table. The fun part is, readers get to decide who is who -- maybe with a little help from MSM.