Howard Owens

So, for the first time I know of, a site I control has been hacked.

I got a message from Google today saying howardowens.com was being removed from the index for use of hidden text (in this case, links and text for viagra).

I'm like, WTF?

Sure enough, I checked the source code and there it was.

As near as I can tell, somebody managed to get FTP access to my server and modified the following files: classes.php, default-filters.php, functions.php, gettext.php, wp-db.php. The hacker also created a file called class-mail.php, and that file was encrypted.

I've restored backup files and changed the FTP passwords.

I'm posting this to warn other WP bloggers about the exploit. Check those files. Make sure you're FTP password is strong, disable anonymous FTP, and make sure there's no hidden text in your source code.

Hopefully, it won't be too much of a hassle to get re-indexed by Google.

UPDATE II: You don't see update I, because it wasn't part of my database back up, but it noted that after talking with my host, I learned that it wasn't likely an FTP hack, but a WordPress hack, because I hadn't upgraded WP. The upgrade is now complete ... fair less painless than I anticipated (which is why I hadn't done it before), and things seem back to normal.

The Shelby Star continues to pursue an interesting and aggressive online strategy.

Check out the Star Car.

Here's four reasons why newspaper can beat televison stations in online video.

1. More feet on the street:  In large markets, newspapers can equip more reporters with video-capable cameras, and you don't need expensive cameras to produce good online video; in small markets, TV isn't going to cover many local stories;
2. TV can't cover a story without sending out a "crew," which means they cover only stories that they've pre-screened as being video worthy, worthy of the time to send a crew out to a location, which means they miss a lot of good stuff that "print" reporters will naturally stumble across -- quantity means more choices for online video watchers, which is a distinct and huge advantage;
3. For newspaper reporters, there is no pre-conceived idea of perfect TV video, so any experiment goes;
4. Newspaper reporter shooters can give sources a chance to speak for themselves, making the video more personal and more meaningful than what TV will do with the same material.

Or maybe this isn't about newspapers beating television, but why newspapers should be confident about video, because in the age of disruption, newspapers can approach video with a mindset that the natural competitors won't see as a threat, and we've got to press our advantages where we can get them.

Any television people who read this post and don't get the point -- you're just proving my point.

So I visited mecca today, aka, Lawrence, Kansas.

You know, the place that gave us Lawrence.com and made Rob Curley famous.

Innovation in Lawrence hasn't stopped just because Rob left. Dan Cox and his team in Lawrence are doing a great things.

I learned stuff today about what they're planning and how they're working that left me truly impressed. These are smart guys who really get it. They are also realistic and not resting on the laurels of past Digital Edgies. Expect changes.

One of the things Dan and his team have launched recently is a product called Marketplace. I think it's just smart. Simple, elegant, functional, and built with the small market advertiser in mind.

If I wasn't impressed before, or not impressed with what Dan shared about the product's performance, here's a little transaction that knocked me off my feet:

My wife and I love mid-century modern furniture, so when I noticed a mid-century modern furniture store in town, I had to make time in my day to visit it.

After looking around, a woman approached me and I asked about a web site where I might be able to order stuff, and she gave me a card with a URL, www.blueheronfurniture.com. Then a gentleman approached me and we chatted a bit about my interest, and he handed me another card, saying something like, "rather than go to our web site, go here."

On the back of the card was scribbled, "ljworld.com, marketplace, search for 'furniture.'"

Can you imagine a local merchant recommending your IYP/directory product over their own web site?

To Dan and everybody in Lawrence, thanks for letting me poke around your shop today.

Just note the quote (via Lost Remote)

Both AOL and CBS are backing away from plans to offer high definition video online, reports NewTeeVee. “We are finding, generally speaking, people don’t care as much about the video quality. Right now, it damn well better work quick and fast,” said Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive.

Video needs to be interesting, engaging, informative ... you don't need HD cameras (or players) to do that.

Writing for E-Media Tidbits, Maryn McKenna says that many mid-career professionals are abandoning the trade.

The lean, quick, lower-cost jobs of "Journalism 2.0" don't make sense to many mid-career journalists. To be clear, the "don't make sense" part is not "I despise technology and resist it." Rather, it is: "I do not see opportunities to display my long-honed skills and expertise." And as a result, some newsrooms that are attempting the shift to the Web are losing substantial numbers of mid-career people.

In my travels around the industry, making my own observations, talking with other executives, the personnel/cultural adoption issues isn't with the veterans. The people I affectionately call the "gray hairs" (I have a few myself), are eager for new challenges and are excited by what they're learning online. They are more realistic about the challenges we face.

The cub reporters, not so much. The kids right out of college, they're the ones most likely to cling to a romanticism about being the crusading print reporter. When I talk about web-first publishing, they're the ones most likely to say, "but won't we scoop ourselves?"Â Or when handed a video camera, they say, "but I got in this business to be a writer."

I've heard from more than one fellow executive the tale of promising young reporters taking jobs in PR because that somehow seemed more palatable doing this online stuff.

Here's the part I agree with:

Web-based means of storytelling, and hyperlocal stories, do offer such opportunities. But my experience is that many writers don't believe it. Instead, they feel their work being squeezed into from-above templates that devalue the best skills they have to offer.

Stories are where you find them, and looking back at the best-read stories I ever wrote, they weren't found in state capitols or city halls.

So, you would think that a site that is so clearly aimed at a younger audience wouldn't need to create a tutorial on how to use the site and participate, but that's what Current.com has done.

It would be easy to assume that Current is just being condescending, but it's not like the people behind Current are inexperienced. There's some smart people running the site.

So, the next question might be -- if Current thinks it's net-savvy audience needs some pointers, why wouldn't a newspaper.com?

As for the site itself: The first thing that jumps out at me is the navigation. The "explore," "connect," "contribute" and "watch tv" nav elements make it very obvious what this site is about. From a usability standpoint, Current.com is doing a lot of things right -- there's multiple ways to find content and people, and every piece of content is clearly identified by type (thumbnails have little icons in the upper right).

The FAQ is one of the most useful ones I've come across.

Current has also provided a place for uses to share tips on production and gear.

There's no real point to this post ... I just landed on the site and noticed some interesting things.

From Melissa Worden:

>> Don't count newspapers out, says Richard Siklos, Fortune editor-at-large: "What is often overlooked is where newspapers rank, at least for now, in overall spending in the pantheon of media industries fighting for dollars from consumers and advertisers. They are number one, ahead of TV networks, magazines, billboards, you name it. And it's instructive that no legacy medium has been obliterated by a new technology: consumers simply adjust and adapt. In the era of DVDs and downloads, we still go the movies and listen to the radio."

Two reactions:

First, if technology were to remain static, meaning nothing would change from what it is today, half of the challenge to newspaper survival would be solved. (The second problem is that we're not creating new readers and eventually current readers will all die). There is no doubt that newspapers today are in much better shape than conventional wisdom says, but this isn't a static world.

Second, the assertion that new media doesn't replace old is a shallow evaluation of history of media. Previous challengers to newspapers were more like newspapers than non like newspapers -- they were all mass media, packaged goods media. Digital media is distributed media, it's social media, it is personal media. It's the opposite of mass media.

It's important not to get too comfortable in our assumptions.

Building on the success of AmplifySD radio, SignOnSanDiego.com launched a new online radio station during the wild fires.

Here's what Ron James, content manager, told me about it:

SignOn radio has proven to be a powerful new channel to reach a group in a way that newspaper sites couldn't do. During the first week we had over 60,000 streams from around the world and callers from as far away as Australia, Guam, Sweden, Germany and England. We found callers helping other callers, some who were in other states who had friends and information we couldn't have gathered as a news organization. The radio also provided a very human and personal way to reach a new audience.

During the biggest regional story in a decade or more, SOSD also launched a home page redesign that follows many of the best practices being established by many other newspaper sites. It's nothing ground breaking, but a big improvement over the previous page, which I found cluttered, and they're definitely doing many things right.

SOSD's fire coverage has been outstanding. The new design has helped there, a lot. If you click through to other sections, however, you'll see the rest of the site hasn't been changed. Ron says they started the redesign three weeks before the fire with no plans to launch it so quickly. The rest of the site probably won't change until a new CMS is in place.

Scott Karp tackles "the myth of UGC."

The reality is that "average people" don't create a lot of content -- at least not the commercially viable kind. Most people are too busy. Those that do "create content" -- and who do it well -- are those who are predisposed to being content creators. The have some relevant skills, training, raw talent, motivation, something.

"User-generated content" sites like YouTube are much less a platform for armies of average people to create mountains of content and much more a platform for real talent to be discovered.

I think this is far too complex and nuanced a subject to generalize into "the myth of UGC."

I long ago realized that YouTube was a great outlet for aspiring media producers. I found there a community of people with aspirations to audience and discovery. They were developing either segmented productions or mini-documentaries.

I also saw a lot of conversational video (there are people who seem to do nothing but record video responses) and random bits of cheaply and hastily produce video, some of it entertaining, most of it horrible.

There's more going on at YouTube than obvious assumptions reveal -- more than aspiring professionals, more than random UGC, more than stolen content, more than viral productions -- it's more stone soup than Cesar salad.

And there is a whole community of video and audio content producers, let alone bloggers, who operate outside of YouTube or other aggregation platforms.

The motivations for why people do what they do are as diverse as the human psych and vagaries of natural talent. There are people who can produce slick video with no aspirations to quit their day jobs, and people devoid of charm and wit who think they might become the next Jon Stewart.

Then there are people who amuse themselves cruising around the net dropping their insights and opinions where they seem to fit, and they would not think of themselves as content producers at all.
There is a myth that publishers think of UGC as something they can get for cheap/free to replace/supplement staff-derived content, but I've never met one of those publishers (and I've met dozens and dozens).

We are developing a "ugc platform," but we call it that not because we've bought into some UGC myth, but because we believe in the democratization of digital media, the lower barriers to entry, the idea that good stuff can come from anywhere, that community engagement is a win-win for society and our business, and because if we don't, somebody else will.

There is tendency among some pundits to speculate whether YouTube or Facebook or MySpace are just fads.

While it's possible that any one of those sites might blow up under the weight of trendy backlash, by concentrating on the spikes in popularity, or hipness of particular brands, critics miss the fundamental truth that for the past four decades of digital history, networked communication consistently gravitates toward community, collaboration and communication.

Communities of the moment (the Well, CompuServ, AOL) come and go, but the conversation endures.

That's why I think wedding community and conversation tools to established media brands, such as our small community newspapers, is a long-term EV+ bet. The UGC/community tools mesh with what people clearly want, and the established brands lend stability and trust.

It's really a rather obvious thing to do.

A couple of weeks ago, we brought Cyndy Green into Canton to train photographers and reporters on video basics.

The photographers were working with Canon HV20s, and the reporters with Casios.

The staff in Canton continues to consult with Cyndy, and Cyndy is sharing some of the things the staff is learning and dealing with. Here's her latest post.

I know that a lot of journalists object to the video strategy I advocate, because it doesn't stress "quality." But as I told the Canton staff when I met with them a week or so before Cyndy's training -- you're not going to be like TV, don't even try, especially since that isn't what the online audience wants or expects. You've got to learn video before you're ever going to produce quality video, and we've got to start at whatever level we start at, so we're embracing the low end (inexpensive equipment and quick-to-produce videos) with a commitment to grow.

Cyndy did a great job and it's going to be fun to watch Canton grow as an online video team.

I haven't had time to follow the news of the fires in my native Southern California as closely as I would like, but it's a major story.

On the time scale, I need to rush through this post, so just some random things.

First, I found this list of structures destroyed on SignOnSanDiego.com and wondered why it wasn't a map. So in about five minutes, I made one: San Diego Fires Map.

Tools used: A Google Spreadsheet; This batch geocoder; This map generation wizard. These tools are pretty much self-explanatory.

My friends at SignOnSanDiego.com, LATimes.com and VenturaCountyStar.com are all doing a great job. Each site has their strengths. I'm particularly impressed with the 10K + views some of Ventura's videos have received.

I was going to comment on why the newspaper sites weren't blowing out their home page to fire-only coverage, like CBS 8 in SanDiego did, but within the past 15 minutes, SOSD has done just that.

For ongoing coverage of the media coverage, check out Lost Remote.

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Recently I tried experimenting with some point-and-shoot cameras to see if we wanted to use something besides the Casios.

Kodak seemed like a good choice to experiment with, since it's a local company.

Problems: The QuickTime video is harder to convert to Flash than Casio's AVI format, and you can't (and this is just insane) get the pictures or video off the camera unless you install Kodak's EasyShare software.

At least the video is entertaining.

And think about this -- it cost Kodak very little to produce this "commercial" and it's already been viewed by more than 300,000 people ... all without buying space or time in traditional media.

Yesterday at the closing panel of the Online News Association conference, Anil Dash and Josh Cohn of Google talked about the newspaper industry's failure to embrace change.

Anil made this astute observation, "Journalism is the culture of infallibility."

Josh said, "The fear of failure can stall innovation."

Recently, the online-news e-mail discussion list sprang back to vibrancy after years of near dormancy. Some of us made the public observation that, "wow, there hasn't been this much activity on online-news in nearly a decade."

And this prompted the question, "so what have we accomplished in the last ten years."

It's easy to conclude, not much.

Sure, there are newspaper companies out there who have tried many interesting things, and some ideas have helped grow both audience and revenue.

But there are two areas of concern. On one hand, those innovations remain relatively isolated instead of widespread, and second, it's still legitimate to ask, "Where's the break-through?"

Even the most innovative newspaper companies can't point to a product or project that is such a huge success it would be stupid for other newspapers not to try it.

As I've said before, game-changing ideas may not be required. We can do a lot with a little, but I can also look back at a decade or so of insider experience and see how entrepreneurial thinking is often resisted by otherwise forward-looking people.

There are online leaders who think every project requires a business plan, or a clear path to revenue or some other guarantee of success.

But true innovation doesn't require a "can't miss" plan.

Most ideas fail. Entrepreneurs know this, and realize that the true path to success is often strewn with mistakes big and small, many changes in direction and few missed opportunities.

On the other hand, even if you're the most entrepreneurial person running an online operation, if there isn't an understanding of innovation at all levels of the organization, it's very hard to propose ideas that are unproven or have no obvious return on investment.

Seat-of-the-pants ideas lack gravitas and therefore rarely get prioritized or funded, even if the necessary expenditure is $100 and a day's worth of staff time.

Too many "let's try this" ideas get strangled by the minutia of metrics and measurements.

There's a tendency to see the forest and not the trees in strategic planning sessions. We're so busy concentrating on thinking big, that we miss the small-ball opportunities. And even if the idea has the potential to produce a home run, we fail to take the big swing because we think the circumstances aren't perfectly aligned.

I've been guilty of this myself.

Somehow, we need to get around the culture of infallibility and find ways to move faster and do more.

If true innovation means a willingness to risk failure, then we'll produce more mistakes than successes, which means if we want to guarantee the survival of this industry, we better get busy. We need big ideas. We need small ideas. We need to try all we can, then change, discard or embrace them as required.

Consider this from Andrew Grant-Adamson:

At this time of year I ask new students about their primary sources of news — where they normally look first. Is it radio, TV, newspapers or the web? Over the years the web has grown to be the first choice but last week newspapers did not feature at all among a group of around 20 students. It is the first time that has happened, not one hand went up.

I tend to be amazed by newspaper journalists who still seem to think they have a job for life -- "newspapers won't die in my lifetime."

You may conclude, like Andrew's students, that newspapers will live until the last reader dies, but business economics doesn't work like that. At some point, it is no longer economically viable to keep a dying business alive -- and that point is long before you lose all of your customers.

Let's say you operate a 250K circ paper, and you lose 10,000 subscribers in a year, you might be able to sustain that lose and keep advertisers, but what about 20K, or 30K or 50K ... in one year, or 50K or more over two years.

At some point, the slide becomes impossible to stem and advertisers won't be happy.

I don't care who owns the newspaper -- a publicly traded company, a family, a non-profit -- a newspaper that can't turn a profit has no future.

Right now, profit margins are slipping but still potentially acceptable, and maybe at some point, the slide stops, but I wouldn't count on it.

If your core customers are dying and you're not creating new ones, how do you stay in business?

I'm not predicting that newspapers will die -- I love newspapers (though I no longer regularly read any paper), and hope they're always around, but it just seems insane to me that if you're journalist that you organize your work day around putting out a print product. You should organize around the web and squeeze in enough time to keep the print product alive. The future is almost certainly digital. If we don't figure out how to make money online (which begins with audience growth), then the future of quality journalism is in doubt.

In an e-mail to Poynter's Online-News list, Philip Meyer alerts us this post on objectivity in journalism.

Meyer makes the valid points:

• In the pre-digital age, information was scarce, so reporters were fact gathers and objectivity was based on "getting both sides." This is an attempt to make objectivity a result, not a process.
• Today, information is abundant and easy to get, so what we need are subject matter experts who can distill information and provide an informed, objective analysis of the facts. This is a methodology, like science.

Meyer:

In the age of the Internet, mere transmission no longer adds value to information. The way to add value to the surplus of data is to process it to help the reader select it and make sense of it. That requires interpretation, and interpretation requires objectivity in the scientific sense. I call this objectivity of method as opposed to the he-said/she-said objectivity of result. In other words, journalists should act more like scientists: collect information, look for patterns, construct a theory, and then provide an objective test of the theory. Objectivity in this sense means asking a question of the data in a way that will protect you from being fooled by the answer.

Journalism, like science, is tentative in its conclusions. It should be as transparent as science, leaving a paper trail of data that other investigators can retrace and arrive at the same or better conclusions.

To me, it's clear that journalism needs to evolve rapidly into a profession that values subject matter expertise over generalization. The real value a journalist can deliver to a reader is being fully immersed in the subjects he or she writes about, and that isn't something the average beat reporter really does. If you're a crime reporter, for example, you should really be an expert in police practices and procedures and relevant law, theory and application. If you cover city hall, you should know everything there is to know about municipal governance. And rather than cozy up to sources to get stories, possess the expertise to get behind the story so that sources diss you at their own peril (general beat reporters tend to overly rely on getting along with sources, which tends to warp their ability to remain detached from the subject matter).

There is a great deal of consternation in some circles that the newspaper industry has failed to innovate, and by innovate they mean -- didn't invent Google first, didn't invent Ebay first, didn't invent MySpace first.

There have been multiple failures by the newspaper industry in the R&D realm, but the problem hasn't been the lack of big, break-through ideas (even if one of us thought of "page rank" first, could we really have built Google?). Our problem has been one more of lack of imagination about available technology than inventing whole new products. I mean, as far back as at least 1997, it made sense for newspapers to add community to their news sites, but nobody did it.

As others have pointed out, newspapers didn't invent printing presses, SLR cameras, computer pagination or wire transmission, but we sure figured out how to put those tools to good use.

We don't need the next big idea. We need to put available ideas to better use.

Consider how well the US companies have done in building businesses around technologies invented elsewhere:

• HTML (the Web) in Europe
• MP3 in Europe
• Linux in Europe
• PHP in Europe
• Python in Europe
• MySQL in Europe

In other words, a good portion of what drives the web was not invented here, but these technologies sure have been great for the US economy.

Why can't newspaper companies learn from the likes of Facebook, Google, Craigslist, Ebay, as well as what lots of smart people are doing with HTML, PHP, Python and MySQL? We don't need to invent it. We just need to make it better to meet our core mission: serving our communities (both of interest and of geography).

This post inspired by this TechCrunch post.

For those of you in the north east, the New England New Media Association is holding its fall convention in Quincy, Mass. on Wednesday (Oct. 24). Steve Yelvington is the keynote speaker. I'll be on a panel about community building. More info here.

I think I may extend my Boston visit through Friday and attend this event at BU, too, which looks pretty interesting.

Meet Anne-Marie Nichols, professional blogger.

To read the comments of many journalists on blogging, you would think the only kind of bloggers out there are arm-chair pundits trafficking in rumor and speculation, political bloggers who rant and rave and usually get it wrong.

Never mind that the characterization of even political blogging is wildly innaccurate, it also sells short what is really going on in blogging.

It's a huge blogging world out there, and blogs present far bigger competitive challenge to traditional content channels than most professional journalists have the courage to acknowledge.

Every once in a while, I stumble across some corner of the blogosphere that reminds me the blogging ecosystem is truly diverse and complex. Hearing from Anne-Marie last night is just one more of those moments.

Anne-Marie blogs for a couple of different blogging networks, such as 451 Press, which she reports is now the largest blogging network. I had never heard of it before. You can find a list of Anne-Marie's blogs here. She's primarily a mommy blogger (kind of a big blogging field these days) and a food blogger. Here's an interesting post about an educational course on blogging, which I can imagine being quite useful for new bloggers.

How did I find about Nichols? Last night I got a LinkedIn invitation from Anne-Marie. I didn't recognize her name at first, because I last knew her as Anne-Marie Barrett.

Anne-Marie was part of my primary circle of friends in high school. The last time we talked, I was a reporter at The Daily Californian and she worked for her father's business upstairs from our newsroom.

It's pretty cool to hear from an old friend who has adapted entirely to digital media.

When something isn't working, you have one of two choices -- figure out why and fix it, or pull the plug.

Roanoke is ending the two-year run of TimesCast. It's the end of a show, but not the end of webcasts for Roanoke, and that's the important thing.

I was a fan of TimesCast, but over the past couple of months I've been concerned about it's failure to evolve. As I dug deeper into the world of webcasts, I found many great vlogs from non-newspaper producers and started to get a stronger idea of what works on the web (this will be the topic of a future post).

Previously, I've praised TimesCast for being a "good enough" disruptive strategy. My thinking on this idea has evolved.

It's one thing to produce short videos to illustrate a story that is "good enough" because the viewership of these are going to be impulse views, people captured by the topic of the video. The availability of lots of video on a news site will make the site more sticky, but you're not asking people to make a habit of any one video program.

Disruptive video is a long-tail strategy. Episodic video is a head-of-the-tail strategy. Your goal is to grow a significant audience around a specific program, not just make many video options available to a news audience.

Programmed video, video that you expect people to watch episodically, either daily or weekly, must simply be very good.

The elements of a good webcast are:

• A theme/topic of interest to lots of people;
• Great talent;
• Creative production values;
• It isn't like TV in style or substance.

TimesCast had some nice themed elements, and while the on-screen talent was quirky and interesting and could be entertaining, few of the news casters were powerful personalities (some talent coaching would have helped). The production values were good enough, but not necessarily creative.

You need a powerful hook if you expect people to make a habit out of watching your episodic webcast or vlog. TimesCast just wasn't quite there.

I realize this is a stark departure from my previous posts in support of TimesCast, but live and learn.

Great comment from Sean Polay that deserves greater visibility as it's own post:

Here's the other necessary step I think is required for wholesale change, both to improve our products and to streamline the work flow:

Our copy desks and night news editors == with the help of a reporter or two -- should start their shifts by reading the Web site. Then based on their own intuition and news judgement, combined with the behavior of our readers (most commented stories, most viewed stories, most viewed slideshows, etc.) build a newspaper -- daily or weekly -- that contains the best of that day's Web output.

And do not shovel it back online at the end of the night. Start each day anew on the Web, with a heavy dose of links back to original stories or ongoing series of stories (aggregated on landing pages) should you be working on a follow-up.

Serve the audience. Respond to the audience. Engage the audience. If ALL of our products are not doing that, then we are doomed.

The first electric light bulb illuminated the first room in 1809. It wasn't until 1879 that Thomas Edison improved on the design, producing a light bulb that would burn for 40 hours (a year later, 1,200 hours).

But inventing the light bulb was only half the problem. You could place a million light bulbs in a million homes, and they would all be as useful as a phonograph with no records.

Edison also had to invent a way to distribute electricity. That took time to roll out and perfect, but the vast superiority of electric light bulbs over candles and gas lamps must have seemed obvious to any objective observer during those nascent days of virtual light.

Can you imagine a professor of waxology in 1890 saying, "It is your duty as a candle maker and a citizen to read the newspaper only by candle light -- emphasis on wicks, not filaments"?

That's essentially what Roy Peter Clark is saying: Embrace the darkness over the light; look to the past, not the future.

The problem for news web sites isn't lack of revenue opportunities. It is lack of audience. We are not yet producing news sites that engage audiences in sustainable, repeatable, habit-forming ways.

And I fear we're not going to get there in time if print journalists keep clinging to nostalgia for The Front Page rather than concentrating their remarkable intelligence and creativity on producing better news web sites.

The Daily Californian in El Cajon, Calif. was a 25,000-circ suburban newspaper with a market penetration of about 15 percent.

In other words, it was struggling.

Landmark Communications hired Paul Zindell as a consultant and later made him publisher (and eventually sold the newspaper to Kendell Communications, his company) in an effort to save it.

I told Paul once, "if you want to save the paper, improve the quality. Hire more reporters. Look at how the Los Angeles Times became a great newspaper" (or words to that effect).

That wasn't Paul's shtick, however. Paul wanted quantity, not quality. This is the same guy who looked at me in a staff meeting once and said very pointedly, "We don't need any Woodwards and Bernsteins here. We can get any mother off the street and teach her how to write."

The regime at the Daily Cal was for us to put our initials in parenthesis at the end of each item we produced for the paper (stories, briefs, obits, police blotters, weather reports, etc.) and each morning the clerk would count the items and report the results to Paul. Failure to meet quota could lead to termination.

Each week the paper would run a house ad boasting that the Daily Cal ran XXX number more local items than the San Diego Union and Evening Tribune combined.

It was all about quantity over quality.

The ironic thing is, even though the Daily Cal was a word mill, we still won awards. There were about five or six of us in the news room who worked our tails off and produced enough quality stories to win several regional journalism awards, and once during that time frame, the Daily Cal won a CNPA best newspaper award.

So, despite the best effort of Paul Zindell to out produce the competition, and our best efforts to put out a better newspaper, The Daily Californian still eventually went out of business (not technically true, but true enough -- it's court adjudication is now owned by a local weekly paper).

The real problem, I think, wasn't with the content (quantity or quality), but with the lousy customer service of the circulation department.

Enough of remembrances of things past. That was just delayed lede to the nut: the quantity vs. quality debate is nothing new to me. I get it.

Today, if you tell journalists to engage in web-first publishing or shoot lots of video or to engage in participation, you get accused of asking them to produce or condone crap.

There's two problems with this seemingly high-minded journalistic appraisal of the strategy. First, it's not accurate; second, it is ill-informed about the differences between distributed media and mass media.

In web-first publishing, for example, I say "publish what you know when you know it." No where in that statement can you find, "publish rumor or speculation," nor will you find, "don't run it past an editor first." Yet, that is how many self-righteous critics read it (so much for journalistic accuracy).

That's not to say that in a world of web-first publishing, there won't be mistakes directly attributable to a compressed production cycle, but the blessing of the web is that it's easier to fix mistakes as soon as they are discovered. Bloggers long ago discovered the beauty power of the strike-through. We should do the same.

There is nothing in the above graph that should be read as "settle for low quality standards." I'm saying, that as a strategic imperative, we need to concern ourselves with other priorities -- such as producing more content faster. That is a group effort. On the individual reporter or editor level, we should continue to strive for the highest obtainable quality. We simply can't afford, however, to equate "time spent" with quality. We must move faster and do more. There is no place for a slipshod, any old-crap will do attitude, but the bigger risk lies in turning supposed quality (how many Pulitzers have you won again?) into a sacred cow.

At the Daily Cal, Paul Zindell was pursuing a long-tail strategy before there was a long-tail opportunity. The long-tail makes no sense in a "limited shelf space" world, such as a print newspaper. But online, in distributed media, the long tail is power.

That is the strategic imperative behind web-first publishing, a disruptive video strategy or getting users to participate in our news production.

Journalists who get the distinction will thrive in the new distributed media world. Journalists who don't are merely turtles and are doing us more harm than good.

Quote of the week from Jack Lail:

One of the most consistent complaints through the years about newspapers has been they're too hard to do business with and newspapers artfully managed to reproduce that experience online.

I've never thought of this blog as having a name. It's just my blog.

When I added "media blog" to the tagline, that was meant as a description and a little SEO experience (to see if I could get any kind of audience from people looking for "media blogs" -- that hasn't really worked out). But lots of people refer to this blog as the "media blog," as if that's its title.

That's not the title.

If there is any title, it's howardowens.com.

So I've changed to the the tagline.

The tagline also reflects the evolution of this blog. When I started in 2002, my blog was intended just to be a personal journal. I've written a lot about things that interest me.

In 2005 or so, I decided I needed to focus on something, so I chose "media," with the idea that I would write about newspapers, TV, radio, music -- all things media that interested me.

But because what I know best is online newspapers, and because those seem to be the posts regular readers seem to care the most about, I've pretty much become narrowly focused on that topic.

My old "about" page, which was about all my eclectic interests, to reflect a time when this blog was mostly about me and my interests, has been seeming really stale as this blog as evolved into more of a professional blog, and less about what songs I'm listening to or which books I'm reading (unless they're work related). So I've updated the about page to reflect my professional biography.

This is also smart usability, I think -- I find lots of people click on the about link rather than the LinkedIn link to find out who I am. I imagine them scratching their head -- who is this idiot with all of these divergent interests who is telling us how to run online newspapers when he seems to have no professional qualifications at all> Maybe now, the bio will explain a little better that I'm not just "some blogger" ranting about the clueless MSM.

Interesting stuff from Vin Crosbie (when does Vin ever write something that isn't interesting and insightful?) on paid content:

People would be willing to pay a subscription fee for a service that delivers news to them online; but not for a service that doesn't exactly meet their needs and interests, that sends exactly the same package of news to everyone. Paid content isn't dead; just payment for the traditional 'one-to-many' package of content is.

While it isn't necessarily wise to base business decisions on individual experience, I can't imagine ever paying for a customized news service.  I can't keep up with all the free content I should keep up with now.  That said, I wouldn't want a service that whittled it down for me, cause I think I've whittled it down for myself as much as can be done intelligently.

But maybe more general news consumers would in fact appreciate such a service.

Can an existing media company provide it?

And read what Vin says about a major weakness of newspapers as a general interest product in the age of niche interests -- hint, just duplicating it online is a bad strategy (like I said before).

Let's see, your industry is dying.

All the trends are pointing against your survival.

And your response: We shouldn't change. We should keep doing what we're doing.

Or, your profession calls on you to keep an open mind and consider evidence over personal feelings.

So when somebody suggests maybe you should approach your job differently, your response: You retreat into a protective shell, say I'm not going to change and anybody who suggests otherwise doesn't know squat.

Or, maybe your industry isn't dying, just going through massive change, and maybe a little natural retraction, but the change still requires re-evaluation every aspect of your industry, and maybe if you can respond with some good ideas and innovation, you actually have a chance to grow business, create new revenue, protect and/or create jobs -- it's all good and all positive, but the best response you can muster is "there's no need to do things differently to fit the new opportunities." And you cling to that hunker-down-and-try-to-hang-on response even as your friends are losing their jobs.

Or, you've spent all of your career being an expert in doing what you do, so good for you.

Meanwhile the world around you has been changing, and you've been too buried in your work to even notice or care. Other people have made it their life and career passion to track and understand these changes. When they come forward with suggestions about how to IMPROVE what you do, you're response is to duck and cover. The last thing you want to do is change, no matter how much evidence mounts that change is vital to your professions survival.

Here's the thing: I'll listen to anybody who comes forward with new ideas. But if you're only response to suggestions for change is "I'm not going to change," you're not going to get anywhere with me. I respond better to people with positive attitudes than to people with negative attitudes.

I'm by nature a pretty conservative person. I don't believe in change for the sake of change. But if you don't believe change is necessary NOW, then you've had your head in your shell for the past decade.

I'm tired of newsroom turtles who would rather obstruct progress than contribute to it.

More of the same is not a constructive answer.

This little rant brought to you courtesy of the newsroom turtles who responded to this post and this post. You guys aren't impressing me with your intransigent response to change. I haven't yet heard an intelligent argument from the newsroom turtles on why we should settle for hunky-dory thinking.

And this post from Jack Lail is worth reading, too.

I'm not giving up. And I'm not going to stop fighting for better ways to do things.

It's adapt or die, and I'm not ready to see good journalism get killed off. If the newsroom turtles don't want to change, that's a shame, but we can't just give up without a fight. The value of journalism to society is just too important.

UPDATE: More evidence from Lucas Grindley of newsrooms getting in the way of change and progress. Lucas intelligently suggests that disruptive initiatives be taken out of the newsroom, but this concerns me on two fronts. First, we need our newsrooms to be part of the solution, because they are smart people with good values. Second, the content we produce is so important to building community. To me, we need to figure out a way to make it work, not reflectively work outside our strongest structure.

Also, check out the second comment on this Yelvington post from a veteran newsman who gets it -- gets that he doesn't know all there is to know about online, and is willing to listen to others for suggestions. My only contention -- it isn't about age. Look at the gray hair on that Yelvington mug shot. Steve is one of the smartest innovators in the business, inside or outside of newspapers. It isn't about age. I've conversed with many twentysomething reporters who have hard turtle shells. It isn't about age. It's about getting that online is different from print.

UPDATE II: Another thought: How can you spot a newsroom turtle? They characterize calls for posting stories online fast and frequent as something than less than quality journalism. The reality is, nobody who has ever called for more frequent updates has ever suggested that posted stories be anything less than well vetted. Newsroom turtles fear change, and anything that may lead to change is derided on the smallest of pretenses.

Brian Cubbison, who is just down the road from me at the Syracuse Post-Standard, found an interesting quote from Scott Adams.

"Dilbert" creator Scott Adams predicts that newspapers will die out within two upgrades of a cell phone.

"The iPhone, and its inevitable copycats, (let's call them iClones) are newspaper killers," he writes in the Dilbert Blog. "When you have a web browser in your pocket, a printed newspaper is redundant."

He admits that 10 years ago, he predicted newspapers would die out in five years. So maybe newspapers will last for at least four upgrades of a cell phone.

Technology is the biggest competitor news on paper faces.

I've said before, technology is changing fast and the speed of change is only accelerating.

If it isn't the iPhone, it will be something else that poses an even more serious challenge to news on paper than the web does today.

The threat isn't from all people making the leap. It's from just enough making the leap to turn newspapers from struggling but still profitable enterprises into money losing empty shells.

No newspaper owner, private or public, not even a "non-profit" one, is going to keep an enterprise going that is losing money and shows no hope of ever making money again.

We simply must get on top of this technology curve and figure out a profitable path.

And think about this -- if dumping the print edition on the web isn't a smart strategy, how much dumber will it be for mobile consumers, who are likely to be even more driven by "tell me what you know now" and "keep it short" than today's web audience?

Previously,

• Let's stop putting the entire newspaper online
• Twelve things journalists can do to save journalism

Steve Yelvington alerted me to this speech by Tim McGuire. My comment on Steve's blog, "McGuire obviously hasn't read The Myths of Innovation."

Even before I read Scott Berkun's great book, I was bothered by the common assertion that newspapers had failed in the internet arms race because we didn't invent a Google or a Yahoo!

Sure newspapers have not invested in R&D sufficiently, nor have newspapers made a rich enough commitment to building online businesses, but to chastise newspapers for not inventing Google seems like a bit much. Google began with one great idea (search rank), and the odds of any one great idea evolving into a great business are nearly zero.

The notion also sells short a whole lot of smart people in the industry who have been working for years to find the right answer.

McGuire:

Innovation is big, bold and a little nuts. Starting an online website and putting video on it is not innovation. Kicking the stuffing out of old boundaries, now that’s innovation.

If McGuire had read Berkun, he couldn't make that statement. As Berkun stresses in his book -- there's never been a big, "kicking the stuffing out of the boundaries" innovation in the history of the world. All innovation is incremental and builds on and synthesizing previous advancements and ideas. The light bulb depended on filaments and advances in manufacturing (not to mention work in the same field that Edison borrowed from). The Wright Brothers get a lot of credit for the first manned flight, but there was a good deal of research and experimentation Orville and Wilbur could draw on.

Innovation is not safe. Innovation calls for risk. Look at the innovators of the last several years. Google, eBay, Auto Trader del.icio.us, Pay-Pal, Craigslist, Monster and thousand of others. Those innovators did not introduce incremental change, their changes were giant leaps forward.

Certainly, you must be willing to risk failure in order to build new business opportunities, but none of the examples McGuire cites were big leaps forward. How hard was it to figure out you could put classifieds online? Or that online auctions might be worth trying? Google didn't invent the search engine, nor did Google invent pay-per-click, auction-based advertising. They just did it better. All of these changes were incremental, not giant leaps forward. They just seem that way in retrospect because they were such huge successes that they make it easy to forget their predecessors and contemporary competitors.

Look at that list again. Any body missing? You don’t see a newspaper on it. Newspapers have shown themselves incapable of innovation for a couple of reasons: they are risk averse and want to keep the business they have even if it’s not going to grow or perhaps wither away; When revenues were pouring in, the industry decided to take 30 percent profits rather than invest in research and development. I have said before “ the paltry amount of dollars spent on genuine innovation and risk may turn out to be the greatest scandal when the decline of newspapers is chronicled by historians.”

Certainly, as I noted above, you'll get no argument from me that newspapers have failed to spend enough on R&D, but as I discuss below, I think part of the problem may stem from the kind of thinking McGuire perpetuates in his speech.

But there's also plenty of examples from the newspaper industry of experimentation and innovation. There's SFGates (and I would argue VenturaCountyStar.com gets some credit (selfishly) for Top Jobs; and in Ventura, we were the first newspaper in the US to try event auctions; there was all of the work of Rob Curley, and of course Yelvington himself didn't win last's years NAA Innovator award for merely pontificating on his blog -- he's done real work at Morris, one of the most innovative newspaper companies on the planet (Spotted was a great incremental innovation). There's also, of course, the Bakersfield Californian and Scripp's YourHub project (I'm not a big fan, but it was a substantial risk for Fran Wills and her team in Denver). If this paragraph weren't already so long, I'd go on.

Just because none of these ideas were as impactful as Google or Ebay doesn't mean they don't fit the criteria of innovation.

One last comment about innovation. It ain’t coming from anybody in this room. The chances of one of us here at the Scottsdale Chaparral going out of here an inventing a Google or even a viable innovation for newspapers is the same chance as all of us flying out of here on brooms. –None. So where is that innovation going to come from? Young people who, if we are smart, work for us. We don’t get the digital age and they do. And, that’s why its stupid, yes stupid for you to try to make every decision in your shop and act as if all wisdom resides in your office. It does not. If you want to foster true innovation in your organization involve your staff. Show them you trust them and build an environment which allows them to innovate.

Here's the rub, and why I think McGuire's assertions are dangerous: If you believe you can't innovate, you won't. And if you believe that innovation takes big blow-out expenses, you will never innovate.

Google was started on two computers in a garage. Craigslist was started by one guy sending out a few e-mails to friends. Yahoo! had the same humble beginnings.

All of these ideas began with an insight on how something might be done better, not with big budgets, bright-light epiphanies, or an understanding how available tools and previous advancements could be used to create a new opportunity.

As soon as you think you can't do something, you are already defeated.

Any member of McGuire's audience -- and any one of you reading this -- can be an innovator. It's self-defeating to think otherwise.

If you think you need more than a good incremental idea and nothing more than sufficient resources to pull it off, you will never innovate, and I think it's that fundamental misunderstanding of innovation that has encouraged publishers not to invest enough in R&D. If you think it will take a million dollars to come up with a good idea (that might fail anyway), why commitment even 100K to R&D? Again, I think McGuire perpetuates a false notion of innovation that can hold back the industry.

If you're waiting for the publisher to hand you a million dollar check, or for that big break-through thought, you'll never be an innovator. But if you get busy thinking about what problems need to be solved and what available resources you can use to solve those problems, then you have a chance to make a great contribution to our industry.

That's all innovation is.

Most ideas fail, some are merely modest successes, but once in a while, lightening strikes. It would be wonderful to have that one big, major break-through idea that makes billions for newspapers, but I wouldn't count on that happening. In the meantime, lots and lots of modest successes can serve us very well.

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.
- James F. Byrnes