Howard Owens

Greg Harman of Belden posted the following to the Feds-DigitalMedia list, and with his permission I'm reposting here, just because I think it's fun.

Once upon a time newspapers were oh-so-au-courant -- we used the very latest technology to get up to the minute news & our names reflected that "technology forward" attitude we had back in 1863.  So we called our newspapers "The Telegraph" or "The Telegram" or some such thing.

But, 150 years have passed -- perhaps we should envision new brandsâ -- here's some ideas.

The New York Modem
The Chicago Link
The Ypsilanti Keyboard
Altoona Mash-Up
Santa Fe New Internet
The Seattle HyperText

Anyway, just dreaming…..somebody wake me!

It looks like the latest edition of PressTime is hitting industry inboxes this week. (It hasn't appeared online yet. I assume it will eventually appear here.)

If you're visiting howardowens.com because of my "BackTalk" piece on disruptive video strategy, here's some related links:

• Online video strategy is not about getting GAS
• Key points in a disruptive newspaper video strategy
• More on video as a disruptive strategy
• A round up of my thoughts on newspaper video
• Taking a disruptive path with video

This post will seem counter-intuitive to long-time readers of this blog.

It's a message to the average newspaper.com, and the message is simple: Stop posting all of your newspaper content online.

When I ran VenturaCountyStar.com, I did a very fuzzy calculation. I looked at our circulation declines, our web traffic gains, our registration data and came to a best-guess conclusion that the web site was contributing about two points to circulation declines.

When I look at a chart like this, I think my calculations can't be too far off. It seems safe to conclude that some switching is taking place.

Back when I did that initial calculation, and for a long-time after, losing some print audience to the web seemed like an acceptable price to pay. We simply MUST grow our web audiences. If we have to eat our own to do it, well that's just battling against the innovator's dilemma. And besides, if we didn't get those local eyeballs on our sites, somebody else would.

I considered getting that whole paper online a necessary evil, without stopping to consider that in reality, building a great local web site was is in no-way dependent on putting the entire paper online.

The flip side, of course, is that it's hard not to rely on that daily dump of shovelware if your newsroom isn't engaged in your web operation. That is still a problem today, but it was a much bigger problem in 2004 and earlier.

Putting the entire paper online every day (most papers do a daily dump between midnight and 5 a.m.), causes several problems for the average newspaper company:

1. It retards organizational growth. Journalists simply must learn to take the web more seriously, and the daily dump is a crutch that makes it easier for newsroom personnel to ignore the web.
2. It gets in the way of building a truly robust web site. That "we're a newspaper" feel is never shaken from the site structure and it makes it harder to draw attention to the real web features of your site.
3. It entrenches core readers into the notion of "I'm reading my newspaper online" instead of getting them to see your site as something different and maybe better than what you do in print.
4. It encourages too many people to think, "why should I pay for this when I can get it for free online."
5. We're in a tough situation with circulation anyway, and encouraging people to switch only hastens the migration away from print. It may be inevitable, but our web sites aren't ready yet to shoulder the load.

The good news is, there is a better way.

If, and that's a big if, we can get our newsrooms to take the web absolutely seriously, and make doing web stuff a vital part of the daily routine, we can eliminate the daily dump.

What would a community news site look like that doesn't overly rely on the entire paper online every day?

It would include:

• A continuous flow of news. Reporters would be active in web-first publishing, publishing what we know when we know it, and letting the community know what is going on now.
• There would be lots of opportunities for user participation and contribution -- everything from comments on stories to UGC video and blogs.
• The mindset would be, we're part of the flow of the conversation, not the whole conversation, and there would be lots of links out to related community content.
• Video (and other multimedia, but primarily video), and lots of it. The primary strategies would be a point-and-shoot video camera in the hands of every reporter, some better cameras for staff with the appropriate time and training, and some well-honed webcasts.
• Lots of utility pieces, such as calendars, movie listings, and strong advertising tie-ins for classifieds and internet yellow pages.
• Strong search. Almost no newspaper.com right now has really good search. We need good search. And it's not about providing search for just our own web site, but serving the whole community.
• Blogs. This is part of being about conversation (see above), but it's also about creating original web content, more web content and developing staff literacy about online culture. Of course, not all site-affiliated blogs should be staff-written blogs. Many should be from community members.
• Databases. Lots and lots of databases. If it's data, and it's relevant to our community and we can make it searchable and/or sortable, we should have it on our web sites.
• We should also make sure our articles, our videos, our databases -- pretty much everything on our web sites -- is easy to share. We create individually-addressable links for discreet pieces of content, we use embed tags, we certainly have RSS feeds and e-mail links, and we also create widgets where it makes sense.
• We have user profiles/social networking and the ability for users to customize their local online experience, including saving favorite stories, creating custom SMS and e-mail alerts.

If we can do all those things we will certainly have a community site that stands apart from the print-package newspaper. It compliments it rather than competes against it. It helps us serve our journalistic obligations better on so many levels. It helps us put out better newspapers (because we're more engaged with our community and producing more content than we could ever use in print, so the print edition becomes our greatest hits).

Our web sites should be web sites, not newspaper sites. The daily dump doesn't help us either in print or online and probably hurts us a lot more than we realize.

Will this strategy slow circulation declines? I don't know. But I also think it's conceivable it could lead to small gains. Who knows? It hasn't been tried yet as far as I know. But it certainly can't hurt, at least not the way current newspaper.com strategies are hurting. And I'm quite sure building better web sites is our number one mission.

It's always fun when other people link to one of your posts. It's a nice endorsement.

It's cool when somebody adds a bit of information, debates or agrees, makes that link back to your post with some additional bit of conversation.

One thing that my posts have rarely inspired is a longer, more thoughtful examination of the same issue. This Web Pro News piece by Jason Lee Miller does that. It's in reaction to my post on 12 things journalists can do to save journalism (probably the most linked-to piece I've had in five years of blogging).

So how does journalism survive itself in the age of New Media? The way it has in ages past, the way everything survives: it adapts. In Owen’s aforementioned post, he recommends journalists become, or at least mirror their greatest threat.

Think, behave, report like a blogger – while, somehow, keeping with your standards and practices, your professional pedigree, your certifications, your piece of paper that says you know what you’re doing. Adopt, understand, and use the new technology before you. But above all, you must engage the audience where the audience is, and come down from your marble hill.

GateHouse Media New England launched a new Wicked Local last night.

For those not familiar the Wicked Local project, it was launched as a small-town "hyperlocal" experiment in 2006, before GateHouse acquired Enterprise Media.

Because of the success of the initial sites, we wanted to expand it to all of GHMNE.

That said, we also wanted to move the sites onto a unified platform of our own conception and redesign and restructure the sites.

Here's a typical Wicked Local site today.

I think the design, by Nick Sergeant, is gorgeous.

Admittedly, the sites still need some polish. We didn't finish "submit an article" and "submit an event" in time for launch (for business reasons, we had a hard deadline to meet), so these are mailto links. The UGC platform is also in early beta stages. We have a lot of tweaks, changes and additions planned.

One of the interesting discussions we had is what to do with www.wickedlocal.com. In the old TownOnline.com model (now completely replaced by WL), the home page was a collection of top headlines from all of the weeklies in the GHMNE group. This did not prove to be a terribily effective traffic driver. Since WL is a collection of 160 sites, not just one newspaper, the typical home page strategy of a newspaper.com seemed inappropriate.

So, what to do?

Hey! How about turn the home page into a blog?

Great idea!

I wish I could take credit for it, but that credit goes to Anne Eisenmenger, VP of Interactive for GHMNE.

The blog, too, needs some spit and polish yet. We're also going to make video a key feature of the page once we work out some issues with that implementation.

I've only mentioned by name two key people involved in this project, but there were dozens and dozens of people involved in the planning and execution of this launch. Many, many people put in extra hours. Everybody's hard work is greatly appreciated.

Via Romenesko, John Carroll praises the St. Petersburg model because it doesn't push for 20 percent profile margins.

A few thoughts:

• Not every report I've heard about St. Pete leads one to believe its a particularly well run business and its online efforts are particularly uninspiring, nor is it out there winning Pulitzers at a greater rate than other papers, so I can't say the model is working out all that well.
• Not all public companies put the emphasis on profit margins.
• There was a time, within my lifetime even, when profit margins were 35 percent or higher, and even as profit margins sank, newspaper stock prices soared ... just about every stock I've looked at hit all time peaks around 2004. What concerns investors now isn't lack of sufficient profits, but lack of a plan to survive the current transition to digital media.
• Many privately held newspapers work hard to maintain 20 percent or better profit margins. Go research how many privately held newspapers have instituted hiring freezes and eliminated newsroom jobs.

The point for journalists is, stop worrying and profit margins and start figuring out how to grow online audience. It will take online audience growth to grow top-line revenue, and without that we can neither protect nor save jobs as print continues to decline.

Begin with this premise: Newspaper journalism is structured around the packaged goods nature of news on print.

We have developed "news judgement" (how important a story is) based on our need to order news within the confines of a certain package size and design.

We developed inverted pyramids both to fit wire service needs and because the nature of the print package sometimes required stories to jump, so we wanted to get the news up top.

We developed certain professional standards related to the content of the story because with mass production, we essentially had only one chance to get the story right. We had to put a premium on accuracy and fair mindedness.

Because we had to reproduce the same package every day at a specific time, we developed highly structured organizations full of rules and rulers.

Because our product was write once, read everywhere, it was essential for us to acquire mass appeal, meaning we had to determine what the news was with little input from individual readers. Editors made decisions based on training and experience with the goal of producing a package that appealed to as many people as possible at one time.
Digital, distributed media, of course, changes all that. The new rules of the game are:

• The user is in control. They decided what, when, why, where and how to consume media.
• Users aren't interested in our deadlines and desire to make sure we have the full story before publishing what we know. They want to know what we know when we know it. They want their news now.
• People want to participate. They want to talk back. They want to add to our stories, correct us and just spout off as need be with their own opinions.

We have decades and decades invested in doing things based on old rules. Now, the rules have changed, and newsrooms need to change as well. We need new attitudes and new cultures. This will only happen if individual journalists put forward the effort to change their minds about what their jobs are and how they do them

Here are twelve things journalist can do to help us recreate journalism for the 21st Century.

• Become a blogger. By this, I don't necessarily mean "start a blog," but that is never a bad idea. More importantly, become an avid blog reader. Blogs should be a daily routine for every dedicated journalist. They should read every blog related to their beats. They should read blogs about their own interests and hobbies. They should read blogs about their profession. To get blogging is to get how things have changed.
• Become a producer. Pick up a digital recorder, a point-and-shoot camera or a video camera and start producing content beyond text. Do this as part of your job, fine, or do it on your personal time. The goal is to understand DIY. Post stuff on YouTube, Flickr or any number of other UGC sites.
• Participate. As you read blogs, leave comments. If your newspaper.com has comments on stories, read the comments and add your own. Become known as somebody who converses on the Internet.
• Build a web site. It will greatly expand your mind about how the web works if you go a bit beyond just setting up an account on Blogger or WordPress. Learn a little HTML. Better yet, learn some PHP, Cold Fusion, JavaScript or other web development language. You should own your own domain, anyway.
• Become web literate. You should know what Flash is, and how it differs from AJAX. You should know the meaning of things like HTML, RSS, XML, IP, HTTP and FTP. You should understand at least how people use applications and tools to build web sites. You should know the potential and the limitations of each.
• Use RSS. You need an RSS reader and lots of RSS feeds to consume. This will help you better grok distributed media.
• Shop online. Part of your goal is to become immersed in the digital lifestyle. You will learn stuff about the digital life if you shop on Amazon, Ebay and other ecommerce sites. As you do, think about how these sites work and why they're set up as they are.
• Buy mobile devices. Get a video iPod. Get a smart phone (an iPhone, Treo, Helio Ocean or Nokia N-series are all good places to start). Learn about distributed, take-it with-you-anywhere content. Buy a laptop and tap into some free wi-fi while you're out and about. Learn what digital life is like when you're not shackled to a desktop machine.
• Become an avid consumer of digital content. Watch videos on YouTube. Download video and audio podcasts (take them with you on your iPod). Visit the best newspaper sites in the world and watch what they're doing. Turn on your TV less and your computer more.
• Be a learner. Technology and culture is changing fast. You can't keep up unless you're dedicated to learning. I love this quote from Eric Hoffer because it is so appropriate to what our industry is going through now: "In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
• Talk about what you're learning with your co-workers. Be a change agent. Get other journalists excited about the new digital communication/media tools.
• Finally, read Journalism 2.0 (PDF) by Mark Briggs. You'll learn about the stuff covered above and how it is changing modern journalism. Brigg's book is the best primer on the topic you will find.

Quality journalism, and the news organizations that finance it, needs individual journalists to become personally responsible for their own role in changing newsroom cultures and practices. The smartest publishers with the greatest strategic plans (even if they had bottomless buckets of cash to execute on all the best ideas) can't save news organizations without the concerted support of individual journalists.

One last bit of advice: Don't wait for a boss to tell you to become a learner and an explorer. Your job is just where you collect your paycheck. You career is what you do. Your boss isn't responsible for your career. You are. Solely. Don't wait on others to make changes. Start making changes now for your own benefit. It's great if your employer benefits from your growth, but you will benefit more.

File this under "content wants to be free:" TechCrunch reports that Yahoo! is moving away from premium services.

Nothing will be shut down; however, people and money (marketing dollars) are moving to other areas of Yahoo. The company will focus on free content over premium services, which are not performing well (music subscription sales in particular are said to be lagging).

While I applauded NYT's dismantling of TimesSelect as a paid service, I have thought some premium services make sense, such as WSJ.com and ConsumerReports.com. The nature of the businesses lent themselves to subscription models.

However, if Yahoo! can't make a go of it selling music online and sees little future in paid content, you have to wonder if eventually free just wins completely.

The drive for users to control their personal media experience is relentless.

Consider the iPhone -- despite Apple's every efforts to control user experience, people are hacking it and customizing it. Here's a good video from David Pogue on how to hack your iPhone.

Apple is fighting back, unfortunately, with software updates, and as TechCrunch points out, Steve Jobs needs to take his own advice and "think different" rather than aspire to a telecomm command and control model.

Because, as he has so elegantly demonstrated with the iPhone, these devices are finally becoming little computers. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that consumers will expect them to act like computers. They will want to modify them to their exact, quirky predilections. They will want to use them any way they want, as a general-purpose device.

... You don’t ask Apple permission to download software off the Web for your Mac. And you would never agree to buy a laptop that only worked with only one broadband provider. Why should the iPhone be any different?

As this NYT blog post points out, Apple is fighting a losing battle against customization.

Since the iPhone is a very sleek, capable handheld computer, people are going to want to run programs on it. They are going to want to hack and see what they can build. It’s a law of nature. And Apple might as well be fighting gravity.

...

Apple essentially has two choices. Either it exposes most of the iPhone’s capabilities to developers. Or it will have to gird for an ever escalating war in which it will have to send ever more electronic brick-bombs to its best customers who don’t follow its strict rules.

It is foolish for any company to think that command and control is a long-term winning strategy.

And what does this have to do with the newspaper.com world? Go back to my posts on personal journalism and campfire media. All of the power now resides with the end user. The sooner newspaper organizations accept that fact, the quicker we will be successful.

We need to be organizing our news gathering and dissemination operations around the power of the end user, not the old command and control model of the editor. The modern news operation is participatory and open. People talk with people, not at them. Digital devices have created if not the expectation of a personal experience with media, at least end result that a personal experience resonates at a higher frequency with users.

Steve Yelvington says "it's not about the technology."

He's right, of course.

One thing I've been thinking about recently is that to some extent, technology is a commodity.

What I mean by that if you laid out a web site strategy, chances are every piece of technology you would need -- a CMS, participation tools, multimedia -- already exists, and it's available for free.

Why write code from scratch when you can download everything you need all ready to install?

At GateHouse Media, we have two online businesses to run. We have our core, enterprise business (meaning the primary newspaper.com) and we have lots of side projects that we want to pursue.

For the core, we use Zope4Media from Zope Corp. For a company the size of GHS, we simply must have enterprise level software that scales to our scope, and the world class development team that Zope Corp delivers. Zope is building great products for us and it's a great relationship.

We keep Zope very busy developing new tools for Z4M.

That means, of course, that their developers aren't available to chase down every wild idea we might want to let loose on the web. And for some site ideas, it just makes more sense to run those projects as an independent skunk works.

Recently, we told the handful of developers working for GateHouse that we want them to learn Drupal. This was a significant policy change for us. Our original development policy put the emphasis on developers working in whatever environment they knew best.

After further thought, that simply didn't make sense. It would be unwieldy to support over the long term multiple and diverse projects written in an alphabet soup of languages.

And what if some project, written by one lone coder, became a big hit, and then that coder left, and nobody else in the company knew either his language or his methodology?

By centralizing on Drupal, we solve that problem. We also tap into a robust open source community, with a lot of newspaper industry support already, and our own developers can more easily share code.

In time, I believe Drupal will give us the ability to more rapidly deploy web sites. My dream is that on a Monday morning, a publisher will call us and say he's launching a new woman's magazine in his market and he needs a web site ASAP. And he wants all the bells and whistles, such as user blogs, video and comments. Instead of saying, "We'll get to that in three or four months," we'll be able to say, "Great. We'll have that up for your launch." How will we do that? Because we'll have established a standard Drupal installation for that scope of project, so we'll make a couple of localized changes and deploy it.

Drupal, with all it's modules, will allow us to adjust the content strategy for such sites as needed.

The other advantage is that we make better use of the development talent in the company. Only our larger newspapers -- and not all of them -- have local developers. Our smaller newspapers will never have developers. With everyone working on Drupal projects, we can more readily deploy and support one-off sites for the smaller publications.

If we get to where we need to be (with both Zope and Drupal), we'll be in a place were we're innovating around content and advertising ideas instead of trying to invent new technological solutions. We can iterate off of what already exists and move quickly to solve problems and create opportunities.

We're then treating technology as a commodity and concentrating on what we do best -- delivering content to users and results to advertisers.

Pop on over to Ryan Sholin's blog. He has some big news. I'm pretty happy about it.

I'm pretty amazed at the team we're putting together.

I'm seeing lots of links around the blogosphere to John Dvorak's column on the state of newspapers.

The column is full of sweeping statements, generalizations and contradictions.

For example, he complains that a search in Google for any hot topic uncovers a bounty of stories that are all the same. Of course, Mr. I'm-Going-to-Lecture-You-on-the-Web fails to provide a link to support his assertion.

If he had, you might have found coverage like this. Follow that link and you'll find thousands of stories on the same topic, but over the first two screen fulls, you'll find mostly stories from different writers at different news organizations, and not all from newspapers.

That might be a good thing.

It doesn't necessarily help newspapers, but if you're a news junkie, that's pretty cool. But it also doesn't support Mr. Dvorak's claim that they're all the same AP story.

On the other hand, he thinks newspapers have made a mistake by eliminating foreign reporting jobs. He complains that there are too few reporters these days at the scene of big, breaking stories.

Here's the contradiction: Either we have bloated news organizations with too many people chasing the same story, or we don't. Mr. Dvorak seems to want it both ways -- don't carry the coverage everybody else has, but be sure you're swimming in right school of fish.

In Ventura in 2004, we started a trend by depreciating AP content, so I agree that commodity news is bad for the average newspaper.com, but the fact is, I see damn few newspaper sites trying to limp along on wire content instead of pushing unique, locally produced, original content. Mr. Dvorak states otherwise, but provides no evidence. Me, I'll direct you to MPNNow.com, Knoxnews.com, SFGate.com ... just to pick three, and there are hundreds more.

The fact is, most newspapers still have robust local staffs covering their core markets.

I doubt Mr. Dvorak looked at a single local newspaper site before blasting out his link-baiting column.

That said, he did get one thing right -- too many news sites are still, still, relying on just one or two daily updates rather than publishing a continuing flow of news updates (Mr. Dvorak calls it breaking news, but if you're doing this right -- there is nothing breaking about it; it's just what you do).

One paragraph right out of 16. That's not a good average.

There's no doubt our industry faces many challenges, but listening to the kind of tripe Mr. Dvorak is offering up won't help us solve them.

Mark Potts seems to confuse the idea that believing paid content models are a bad idea with some sort of romanticism about journalism.

Never mind, that expecting people to pay for general news is, simply put: A bad idea.

Ironically, it's the journalistic romantics who most often scream, "oh content is worth something! People should pay for it, damn it!"

It reminds me of the homeless man on the street corner asking passersby for spare change. He has no more leverage over their pocketbooks than the journalists whining about free content. They used to say, "You can't get blood from a turnip." You can't pry open a pocketbook that is determined to stay closed, no matter how much you might wish otherwise.

Wishing has never made for good business plans.

Look, it's a tough reality, but either we figure out how to make our online revenue through advertising or we're screwed. Paid content is just not an alternative. Mr. Potts sites examples of seemingly successful paid content sites, but all prove how hard it is to make paid content work, because all are specialized verticals with little competition (possible exception, ESPN, and I question the level of their success). They are also sites that are national in scope.

There is no evidence that local online news drives the kind of broad based passion needed to convince substantial numbers of people to subscribe it.

Sure, people subscribe to the print edition in substantial numbers, but as we've discussed before, they're really only paying for delivery, not the content. Users do pay for delivery online, just not to the newspaper company. They pay it their broadband provider.

Like Mr. Potts, journalism long ago lost it's romantic grip on my soul. To me, this is a simple business calculation.

Previously: Reasons why paid content is a bad idea

Steve Safran, writing about the predictable demise of TimesSelect, has this to say about news brands:

But here’s another conclusion: we think our brands are bigger than they really are.

This is a harder one to accept. But I have to tell you that nearly every news outlet believes they are the brand in their area for news. And they can’t all be. Or maybe they are — and it’s not news that people are looking for online. Does it matter if you’re the brand for news when I’m searching for reliable restaurant listings?

Times Select believed that people would pay for its writers because it is “The Times.” CNN believed people would subscribe to its video service because it’s “CNN.” This is no different from stations and newspapers believing that people will visit their sites because they are “the news channel” or they have “the brand” for trust. The fact is that the information rules.

This is something I've been spending a little time thinking about recently, but in a different way.

I'm starting to think that the success of brands such as Google, Amazon and Ebay really mask the weakness of online brands.

These sites are successful not only because they have cool names and cool domains, that are also exceptionally useful. In the end, the web is all about utility. People will come to your site if it suits their needs. If not, another site is a mere click away.

If a competitor ever really did manage to build a truly better search engine or a better ecommerce site, I wouldn't be surprised if Google and Amazon started losing market share precipitously. Either of those giants getting beat at their own game is highly unlikely, but it's a mistake to think that it is brand that sustains their advantage.

Look at how quickly AOL and Yahoo collapsed. Both in their day seemed like strong unbeatable brands. They were undone by better functionality from competitors.

On the web, it's a mistake, I think, to rely on brand. Brand, in fact, may be absolutely meaningless. What is more important is A) utility; B) an easy to remember and type domain name. Get those things right and success is much easier to obtain.

Unfortunately for most MSM sites, they still don't have the utility part down right.

I've had the pleasure of hearing Bob Cauthorn speak twice. Both times, I learned stuff.

The first time was in 2002 or 2003 at USC and Cauthorn convinced me to think about online advertising from the small business owner perspective, which remains quite different from how most advertising sales managers think about advertising.

The second time was this past Saturday in Phoenix and Cauthorn had me looking at some industry trends in a different light -- not pretty, but not without hope. What he shared has already become a part of my standard strategy presentation.

Robert Niles has an interesting Q&A with Bob. Most of it is about his new CityTools platform.

It's an interesting concept, and I like the general thrust of creating new syndication channels, but even though he first demo'd it for me several months ago, I still don't grok it. I think I'm still not sure it will get critical mass to be really useful, though his growing emphasis on looking outside the newspaper business for early adapters makes sense.

Bob is especially geeked out about the new multilingual aspect of CityTools. That could be a competitive advantage, but I'm still wondering if multilingual people really want to get news in all the languages they speak, especially if some of those translations are automatic (see corrective message from Bob Cauthorn below).

There's no doubt Bob is smarter than me, so whatever I'm missing about this must be my own fault. It certainly doesn't help that I speak only one language. I certainly want to keep an eye on his experiment and see if it really does lead to something.

UPDATE:Â Bob sends along this correction ... I apologize for the false assumption:

... just to be clear, stories are posted in their native languages as written by humans (often media sources in the case of shared news-- think multilingual digg).

We DO use machine translation for some one word prompts while prototyping, but the we go back and have humans refine the prompts too. NO stories are machine translated. And because we go back over the prompts eventually everything is human translated.

If the Google-AP deal means that national and international stories favor the AP site in the Google News search, that's OK. Those stories never meant much for local news sites anyway.

But if Google is serving up local news stories on top of the original local-market story, that's a problem. According to this Lost Remote post, that appears to be the case.

Local news sites should raise a ruckus with AP.

What, you think this video thing is just a fad?

Well, there were 9 billion videos viewed by US media consumers in July.

Three-four users watched video. That's up four percentage points from the previous month.

Dude, and you're telling me your newspaper isn't trying to get as much video online as possible?

Online video is long-tail content. The money will be in producing a lot of it, not in spending hours crafting Emmy-worthy productions.

Congratulations to all of the finalist in the Online News Association Awards, but especially to the Ventura County Star for it's General Excellence node.

I think I offended some people at ONA when I failed to attend the 2004 conference in Los Angeles, the year VCS.com won the GE award (I was online director at the time). Nobody from the Star was there to pick up the award.

Ironically, or not, I have no direct affiliation with VCS now, but I'm just as close to Toronto now as I was to LA back then, and I still haven't committed to being in Toronto later this month for the ONA conference.

But hey, if the Star would like me to pick up their award for them, that could be arranged :-).

The average journalist resisted the idea for a long time that blogs posed a threat to their trade. Some still believe it.

But the world is changing.

Consider, the majority of early bloggers were tech bloggers. Some tech blogs have gone on to become significant businesses in their own right. Consider GigaOm and TechCrunch as two examples.

Now consider that Business 2.0, once a top business/tech magazine is ceasing publication. This is a print-centric publication that tried bold experiments with blogging, but in the end it wasn't enough.

Newspaper journalism is being disrupted in many ways, large and small. Sites like HuffingtonPost, DailyKos and Instapundit make the idea of paid-punditry seem quaint and obsolete.

On a local news level, there are all kinds interesting experiments going on in local blogging/news gathering, such as the NewHavenIndependent and VillageSoup.

It isn't enough to just say, "oh, but blogs couldn't exist without the work we produce." That isn't entirely true. More and more blogs are turning out original reporting. It may not always be about the same stuff newspapers cover, but the proliferation of blogs add to the media smorgasbored offered to information consumers. They compete in the attention economy if not in the revenue economy. Besides, if your journalism went away, you don't think the information economy wouldn't adjust, like all healthy ecosystems?

Consider this post from Dave Morgan -- in 2020, your major metro as we now know it won't exist. Media will be very different when everything is digital -- and it will be.

There is still resistance in some corners of the journalism world to the turning tide. Too many journalists cling to outmoded ideas of what their jobs should be like and what they should be doing with their time on the job. While I remain hopeful that most newspaper companies will be able to transform themselves into 21st Century media companies, the clock is ticking, and responsibility for making the transformation doesn't rest solely on the shoulders of publishers. Every person who accepts a paycheck from a newspaper company shares the responsibility.

Innovation is not about doing the next great thing. It is about doing the next thing.

Sometimes the next thing will be the next great thing, but more likely it will lead to another thing, and that next thing might be the next great thing. Or it may lead to nowhere.

Failure is always an option.

Innovation is in the doing and trying, not in the dreaming and waiting.

You all know your business is changing.

You know all about lost readers and lost revenue.

You know that if you don't do something differently, you're business isn't likely to survive.

But let's say that something different turns out to be the right thing. You don't make any major mistakes on your way to transforming your business. You survive. Whew!

Now what?

I suspect that many journalists and media executives expect that some day all of this disruptive change will stop, and they can take a collective sigh and start basking in some well deserved profits and stability.

I say, think again.

Change is now our permanent state. Change has probably been a permanent state for at least 100, if not 200 years, it's just that change happened slow enough that we could walk rather than run to keep up. The difference is that now we need to sprint.

I've written about these thoughts before, but the question is important, and came to mind again while reading the latest post from John Hagel.

A more specific question might be: what are the institutional architectures required to operate in a world where there is no equilibrium? Early conventional wisdom suggest that these architectures should focus on agility and flexibility, but that misses the real opportunity – balancing agility with the persistence and stability required to build and deepen long-term trust based relationships. Being able to discern what needs to change and what needs to remain stable may be the greatest challenge of all.

My big question is, can newspaper companies become adaptive enough to adjust to a media world that has not even the semblance of equilibrium?

I'm not giving up hope, but creating a culture that embraces change rather than fights it isn't just the responsibility of media executives. It's up to all of us who believe in the value of the news business.

What would a change organization look like?

First, it is a learning organization. It employees smart, motivated people who never stop acquiring new skills and knowledge and shun getting bogged down in trying to become specialists.

Second, it spends as much time trying to anticipate what is coming next as it does serving today's needs. There is no time to get comfortable with today's world.

Third, it is an organization that isn't afraid of failure. When you're spending a good deal of time anticipating what's coming, you're going to have to try many ideas that will simply be wrong. You are going to guess wrong about change far more often than you guess right. Aiming for perfection is fatal for an organization that needs to change rapidly and constantly.

Fourth, measuring success won't be a matter of dollars and sense only. I think Hagel is right on this point: We need to develop metrics that help us gauge our ability to drive business decisions via leading indicators (audience engagement, say) than lagging indicators (revenue). The need for profits will never wane, but the best way to ensure growing revenue is to know think of the audience first.

UPDATE: I thought of a fifth attribute of a malleable news organization that was too obvious -- Don't fear change. An organization that is going to stay current must be willing to say, "Sure, that's how we used to do it, but now we need to try it this way." There can be no turf wars or "what is in it for me?" thinking.

Journalists are trained to think in terms of "the lead store." The lead story gets special treatment. It has it's own place on the page and a bigger headline, and on a good day, a great photo.

On the web, there is no lead story. There is only now.

In talking to journalists, I find it's hard to get them to drop their lifetime belief in the lead story. They never say it, but I know at some level they're thinking it, "We're supposed to tell readers what's important."

But on the web, readers decide what's important.

In a pull medium, the reader is in control. The reader decides how best to get news and when. You can't impose your idea of how news should be presented.

Because readers are using the web to find out what is happening now, they want to see what has happened between this now and the "now" when they last checked in.

What matters more than the story hierarchy of the printed page is the time line of now.

This is one of those things blogs have taught us.

Dale Dougherty writing for O'Reilly Radar grapples with how the web has changed news presentation in a post on the Burning Man arson.

It wasn't the subject of Scott's story that stood out; it was the way he was telling it on his LaughingSquid blog. He reported the story by updating the blog over time. ....

Having been on the road, I had not read much about the Burning Man story until I read Scott's story. Scott does a great job covering the story (and he doesn't cloud it with opinion.) This story on Scot's blog had a real beginning and I could follow it, having the sense of how it developed. I was able to catch up on what I missed and it was satisfying. If this story had been covered in today's newspaper, much of the detail would have been collapsed and summarized -- and that summary, if I want it, I'll be able to find in Wikipedia. While a newspaper is unable to give me a choice between a chronological view and a summary, the Web could.

Dale is wondering if there might be a better way to tell news stories on the web. Should the web page offer alternative views (story summary and time line)?

Maybe. Google news offers two sorts (relevance and date), and it's never a bad idea to ask yourself "what would Google do."

But one of the things Google would do is keep it simple, and the simplest, most straight forward online publishing tool is the blog, and Dale's post is really about the power of the lowly blog. Maybe that's all we need.

The main point, however, is that we journalists need to stop concerning ourselves with story hierarchy and starting thinking in terms of keeping news pages updated with what is news now. Reminder: The root of news is "new."

The revitalization of the Times Picayune post-Katrina is an amazing story. (via Sans Serif)
Editor Jim Amoss:

We're a relatively healthy business again in contrast to most newspapers in the country right now. It's counterintuitive. I figured within two or three months the adrenaline would be gone and we'd collapse from exhaustion. I am amazed to say this has not happened.

A privately held company, Newhouse doesn't release financial figures, but Newsweek reports that circulation is healthy and the community has rallied around the paper that has rallied around them.

In being loyal to its readers, the readers have apparently returned the favor. “You always see people with this paper,” says Editor & Publisher’s Fitzgerald, who was amazed by the extent to which he witnessed people reading it on a recent visit to the city. “That’s not a phenomenon you see in Chicago,” where he’s from.

One of the drivers of readership, according to the Readership Institute, is that readers want a paper that "looks out for my interests."

Notice that the Times Picayune didn't need to add FTEs to improve its coverage. It just needed the vigor of a motivated staff, spurred on by better hires for the positions it did replace post Katrina. And it made local coverage its focus. Invest in your readers and they will invest in you.

Thank you to J.D. Lasica for pointing us to FLVR, a Safari plug in that makes saving any FLV file a snap. At $15, it's a bargain.

I've tried several apps and sites over the past couple of years in my various attempts to save videos.

J.D.'s pointer is well timed, too. I have a presentation to prepare for an Inland Press Association gathering in Phoenix on Sept. 15.  It's going to be all about disruptive video strategy, and I wanted to show some exampes of video from various sites. This app will help a lot.

Through this video, I learned about The Myth of Innovation, by Scott Berkun, so I bought the book.

The first chapter is about the myth of the epiphany. It's a subject covered in the video, and I'm only half way through the chapter, but the theme started me thinking about epiphanies I've had over the years. I'm going to share them because I think they both show the importance of epiphanies and how none are all that big, but might also demonstrate how small insights can lead to important business model changes.

• When I first joined the online world, I signed up for SPJ-L, then moderated by Jack Lail. Jack constantly struggled to keep the list on target. From that experience, I learned how important it was to manage virtual communities and guide members toward mutual respect and staying on topic for the sake of a healthy community. But the main thing I learned, as I did from Steve Outing's Online-News, is how powerful a community could be that is organized around a passionately shared interest.
• When I created RV-Talk for AGI (essentially the seeds of my later business, RVClub.com), I learned that shared passion wasn't limited to a certain net-friendly demographic. The average age of RVClub.com in 1997 was 55. I learned it was more about people with a shared interest than it was technology.
• When I became serious about blogging in 2002, it seemed obvious early on that what made us all smarter wasn't the Big-J news story, but the conversation that went on around the story -- all of the smart, informed, experienced people who could extend the story with their expertise. From there, it wasn't big leap to buy into Dan Gillmor's "journalism as a conversation."
• When Hollywood came to Ventura to shoot Swordfish, we decided to buy a bunch of disposable cameras (digital cameras were still rarely owned) and hand them out to movie fans. The resulting slide shows were quite popular. I realized then that something that would later become known as UGC had a place in journalism. This realization would be confirmed again after the advent of digital cameras when there was a large fire in Ventura County, a flood in Ventura County and our use of Buzznet for photo sharing.
• One day in early 2004, right after I became director of the Star's web site, I was running various web site traffic reports. I noticed that there were two big spikes and a couple of small, but noticeably more pronounced, dips in traffic. The spikes were two big local stories, and the dips coincided with the dates of large national stories (one was the invasion of Iraq, which we covered heavily on the web, including using blogs). It was then that I realized that local newspaper web sites had no brand for national news. When the big stories hit, people go to CNN or NYT or WaPo, but not 100K newspaper sites, even local people. From that lesson, I devised the strategy of pushing down generic AP stories and promoting regular updates of local news. At the time, it was pretty much an unheard of strategy for the average newspaper.com.
• Also in 2004, we introduced comments on stories on VCS.com. At the time, no newspaper sites I knew of had comments on stories -- though it had been tried before. In an effort to "just get it done," I supplied an online editor with some JavaScript from HaloScan and we launched comments. Within a few days, we had some great comments on stories about the mother of a murder suspect and a tiger prowling Simi Valley. The comments extended the story and helped make us all better informed. This truly was "journalism as a conversation." This was the real power of participation. Of course, we would also soon discover the dark side of an open commenting system (racial idiots spewing hate, for example), but that reminded me of the value of community controls, which helped create the system now in place on Bakersfield.com (the primary reason I moved to Bakersfield was to launch a true community site welded to a newspaper site).
• Discovering Clayton Christensen and his ideas behind disruption and innovation greatly influenced much of my approach to just try things, get things launched, don't wait around for the perfect moment to do the perfect thing. This was a radical change of attitude for me, and one that took me a year to really embrace.
• Two books read closely together welled up into an epiphany about how people use the web. First was The Search by John Battelle, and the second was Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. Everything I've been involved with related to newspaper.com design since has been informed by the ideas of the "intention-driven web" and keeping navigation simple and obvious.
• The first-time that I saw the Numa Numa Dance, and knew that millions of people had already watched it, I realized that broadband penetration was sufficient to make video an important strategic consideration. It seems quint now, doesn't it?
• The first time I watched a video from an online producer for a newspaper (Anthony Placencia, for VCS.com), and I sat there thinking, "this is no good because it's not like TV," and then the gentle, slowly set up moment of a boat's keel touching the water, and really giving the story its gentle climatic moment, I realized, "web video SHOULD NOT be like TV." The video was far more powerful than anything I could imagine a TV producer putting together.
• When we started rolling out video in the VCS newsroom and reporters became more engaged in the web site than they had been before, I realized video was the gateway drug for journalists that we needed to care about keeping our web site updated. Everybody loves video and the idea of producing video themselves, because we all grew up with it.
• When Jack Lail first shared with me Random This and the power of the Sony Cybershot, I realized that video need not be overly produced to be highly effective.
• After I arrived in Bakersfield and started supplying those same Sony Cybershots to reporters and the feedback from the news room was, "these are great because they're not bulky like camcorders" I saw the path toward getting reporters involved in video.

Everything else I've done in the past 24 months or so have really been epilogue. They've been about coalescing and refining these insights.

Maybe Mr. Berkun wouldn't consider those moments epiphanies, but they were all moments in my career that shape my strategic thinking today.

Here's a suggestion for other media bloggers: Post your own string of epiphanies and how they've shaped your current media thinking.

My friend Tim Gallagher is stepping down as publisher of the Ventura County Star.

I really enjoyed working with Tim -- decent, honest, loyal, hard working, great newsman, and a strong leader. I learned a lot from him.

The thing I will always most appreciate about Tim is that when I told the newsroom that the days posting non-local news stories on the top of the VCS.com home page were over, and that we were going to start updating more often with local stories, Tim backed the strategy.

It was a courageous move on his part. All he had at the time was my word that it would work. There were no newspaper sites that we knew of at the time that were being that aggressive about pushing local-only updates. It wasn't a uniformly popular decision at VCS.

The locally focused, web-first strategy is now common place in the industry, and a proven traffic-growth driver, but in early 2004, it was still just a theory.

Tim has never been afraid to back entrepreneurial decisions, and that's rare in our industry.

I wish him all the best in his new pursuits.

RRStar.com launched on a new site design last night.  We call this template the "Rockford template." Previously, we launched a template on chicagosuburbannews.com that we now call the "Kiowa template."

Next month, a third generation GateHouse Media template will hit the web.  I won't tell you just when, where and what yet.
We will also continue to iterate on these templates.  We are especially eager to incorporate some upgrades to the Kiowa templates. Our plan is to have a series of highly modular, customizable and flexible templates for our newspaper sites to pick from.  We're taking what I would call a very object-oriented approach with the idea that behind the scenes we have the benefits of being cookie cutter, but from a retail view (the side users see), no two sites really look the same. That will take time to develop and perfect, but we have a good foundation in place now.

There are, of course, issues with RRStar.com to tweak and fix, but as is our motto: "We'll get there. It will be fine."

We also have a long list of features and functionality to roll out that will help us archive our community-focused goals.  We'll get there. It will be fine.

It hasn't been my blogging style recently just to quote a post and link to it. I've decided just to post when I have something to say.

I'm making exception for this Steve Yelvington post, because the following quote is just too good, too pure and true not to highlight:

Newspapers like the Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Minneapolis Star Tribune are hurting not because they're local, but because they're not local enough. And as they try to figure out how to be local, they're discovering they lack the proper tools. They have the wrong staff, the wrong processes, even the wrong presses.

Smaller newspapers are doing much better. The genuinely local, and even better yet, hyperlocal newspapers -- the ones you can pick up and see your life reflected -- are very strong.

Several years ago, when I was active in the online virtual community for guitarists, WholeNote, I learned an interesting term: Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS).

The symptoms of GAS? Every spare dime you get finds its way through the doors of the local guitar store. You might have stopped by after work for a set of strings and walked out with a new effects pedal and Monster Cable. You had to have all the latest and coolest stuff. You needed new and better toys.

I think about GAS when I read yet another videographer arguing that publishers should just shut up and buy them all the best equipment. Forget strategy. Forget other spending priorities. If you aren't buying them Canon XH-A1s, then you just don't get video.

I have the deepest respect for PF Bentley, whom I met while I worked in Ventura. I have no doubt that every aspiring videographer could learn a lot from the man, who is truly one of the icons of the field. But, memories of GAS came flooding back while reading his piece on DigitalJournalist, "Just Say ... Wait A Second." (Link via Doug Fisher)

So now you need to make the switch to video and the bosses are asking if you can do "that video stuff" on some ultra-mini DV camera and edit in iMovie. Ask them if you could shoot the big game with a digital point-and-shoot. Hey, cut costs more by only using Photoshop Elements. Finally, tell them you could further cut costs if they'd move out of their plush offices and sit in the newsroom with a plain, unfinished pine desk with a rotary phone with dial-up Internet.

Going back to another memory, I think of the first post I ever did encouraging newsrooms to equip reporters with point-and-shoot cameras. It was comical the level of hostility my old posts aroused among many otherwise level-headed journalists. I've gotten pretty hot under the collar writing about this topic, as have others. But the bottom line is, it still doesn't make sense for newsrooms to get a case of GAS.

PF says IT shouldn't be making video equipment purchase decisions. I agree, but I doubt any newspaper IT department in the country is making these decisions. Those decisions are usually made by the online editor or online director. The actual purchase order may be processed by IT, but only after getting clear direction from an experienced online professional.

And that experienced online professional isn't making purchase decisions based on your case of GAS. He or she is making STRATEGIC decisions.

GAS is not a strategy.

Thinking about how best to grow audience through video, how best to leverage the strengths of the newsroom, and about where you want your newsroom to be in regards to video three to five years from now are all strategy questions. Once you answer those questions, then you can move onto finding the right equipment to suit your strategy.

I agree with PF that digital content is moving toward video and that there is a huge opportunity for newspaper web sites to grow video advertising revenue. But going out and spending $20,000 on just a couple of video kits is no way to ensure your newspaper.com will be well positioned to reap those advertising dollars. In fact, it's damn near a sure fire way to ensure you'll fail to get those dollars.

If you don't widely develop video literacy within the newsroom, you will not have the resources to move rapidly with the changing video world; you will have too little talent concentrated in too few people. Most importantly, you won't be producing enough video on a daily basis to grow audience.

Critics of the disruptive video strategy seem to think that buying smaller, more mobile cameras is all about cheaping out, as Bentley says above. But if you're doing this strategy right, it's not cheap. For example, our company has bought more than 140 (make that at least 280 -- see note from Sarah Corbitt in the comments. Ed: Don't you know how many cameras your company has bought? They're breeding like rabbits. I can't keep track.) point-and-shoot cameras with extra memory and carrying cases. That isn't cheap. We're also investing in training, and will invest more.

One of the interesting lessons of our video purchases is that not all photographers who want to do video want to be hobbled by the Canon XH-A1 (we've purchased some of these, too). Some photographers are asking for more nimble equipment, such as the Canon HV20. They have print obligations and the XH-A1 is too much equipment. Lugging it around and setting everything up slows them down.

Just to be clear, pursuing a disruptive video strategy isn't about being cheap. It's about being smart. It's about taking limited resources -- all newspapers have limited resources -- and deploying them in the way that seems best to suit strategic needs. It's about getting Return on Investment, not about saving money. In fact, if you're doing it right, you're spending just as much money on video as you would if you took PF Bentley's advice.

One last thought: Do you know what your newspaper's video strategy is? Whether your company is buying pricey video kits or sending reporters out with Casios, have you made sure you understand the strategy? You should be asking the questions, for two reasons. First, you want to make sure the work you do aligns with a well articulated strategy, so you work efficiently and in concert with the other parts of your company. Second, if your company is spending money on video just because everybody else is, then your company is in trouble. You should know that. And if that is the case, it doesn't matter how good your equipment is, or how poor, because your efforts will be without direction and soon peter out once people lose interest or think video just isn't working.

Strategy is important. Make sure you have a strategy before spending a dime on video. Don't get GAS.

UPDATE: Ryan Sholin can't stop writing about this topic, either. He has a related post on video strategy as a long-tail strategy.

Shane Richards has performed a valuable public service for all of us who care about modern media and what some deep thinkers think about the current state of things: He's compiled a list of recommended blog posts related to the topic.

I'm proud to have one of my posts considered worthy, but now I have a couple of posts to go read, cause there a some on the list I haven't read yet.