Howard Owens

Here's the best thing you can do with the next 51 minutes of your life. The video below is Google CIO Douglas Merrill on Innovation at Google. If you are thinking about search, as I am, the beginning provides some nice food for thought. If you're interested in business strategy and innovation, as I am, the entire video is worthwhile.

And if you're not interested in these things, you should be -- just about every person who reads this blog is involved in the online news game at some level, and we all have a responsibility to care about business strategy and innovation, whether you're a first-year reporter, a classified ad rep, or a top executive.

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There is lots of goodness here. Here's a couple of things I noted:

Merrill on the need for fast loading pages: "We can loose 15 percent of our traffic just by slowing down 200 milliseconds. ... We've done a lot of work to answer any question in the world in 400 milliseconds"

Put that in your usability pipe and smoke it. Maybe you'll figure out how to kill about 1,000 links on your home page.

The big issue of search: Deliver the right results. It's not enough just to have a big database. If the results don't match exactly what the user wants and they're not delivered in the way the user wants, you've failed. "Search is still not solved."

Merrill then went on at some length about transformational innovation and incremental innovation. My thought is newspapers have been caught up in trying to push transformational innovation ever sense Innovator's Dilemma came out, and that's what the API's Newspaper Next project was all about, but incremental innovation is important, too, and we don't spend enough time thinking and talking about that.

On the other hand, things like getting more news online faster, which has proven to be a big traffic driver for many sites in the past couple of years, is really just an incremental innovation.

"Innovation based on what users need is likely to create economic value, so whatever you do, start innovating with the user. And obviously what you should do is ask users what they want, right Mr. Ford? Yeah, right. Won't work. 'If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.'"

"Users don't know what they want, but they might know what problems they have."

Merrill then goes into a lengthy discussion of news and what users want ... it's not all happy news for traditional media companies, but this section of the talk did remind me of something I did at the Ventura County Star that transformed the way I look at local news sites, and I followed an approach, I think Merrill would appreciate.

In my mind, based on the Merrill model, I listened to the users. I looked at about two years of user stats and noticed something interesting. When we had a big local story, such as a flood or a fire, where we put breaking news on the site and followed the story closely and solicited user content, we had huge spikes in visitors. That's no big surprise, necessarily, but what was most interesting, was that when there was a big national or international story, even when we covered it with great gusto, such as the invasion of Iraq, our site traffic took a dive.

That told me, our local news site wasn't a brand to users for nation/world coverage. For nation and world, they thought of the CNNs and the NYTs first, and us hardly at all.

From that I learned, regular updates of local news is what our users want. It's something I still believe today, especially since so many local sites are now finding success with that model.

Merrill used the example of an earthquake in California. When it happened, Google graphed a quick spike in traffic -- people googling "earthquakes," and the site they were hitting was the first link, the link to the USGS site (highlight for those who don't quite get the import of this result -- it wasn't a traditional news site).

Merrill: "Why is this interesting? This is interesting because fundamentally the news sites are in this spike, too. The news sites don't have data yet. They're still trying to figure out. They're scrambling reporters, trying to understand what's going on, whereas a lot of the people those news sites want to reach, people who care about what just happened, already know. So the democratization of information is in some sense working against traditional news creation, because a lot of the people you want to talk to about news know the answer already. The people you are talking to are the people who weren't that interested in the first place."

You might need to re-read that statement. It's fundamental to understanding how the news game has changed -- our best customers often know more than we do before we even get a chance to tell them what we know.

Merrill: "If you're a content creator, that graph makes you think hard about 'what is my value in this ecosystem?'"

The last 10 minutes should be required for any executive looking to create a culture of innovation. It should make a few executives in our industry squirm a bit. The news industry hasn't done a great job of allowing people to make mistakes or hiring for diverse ideas. A lot of people lament our industry's ability to "innovate," but it isn't necessarily the lack of big innovations that has hurt the most (there is no reason to believe that we really needed to create Google, or MySpace, or YouTube first) -- we haven't been willing to fail fast and innovate incrementally. If we had, we would be much further along today.

Over the past 18 to 24 months, there has been a mini-boom in people blogging about new media, newspapers online and such.  I've come to know a lot of smart and dedicated people whom I didn't know 10+ years ago. Some of these people are clearly new to our industry.

I just wonder how many of them ever stop and think that before they started contributing their expertise that there were a lot of smart people already doing this online newspaper stuff?

There's nothing new under the sun, as they say, and there are damn few new ideas coming out in blogs today that weren't floated on e-mail discussion lists such as Online-News, Online-Newspapers, the New Media Feds list or the ONA list before there were blogs. The perscriptions and solutions of 2007 aren't much different from what a lot of smart people in our industry were saying in 1997.

Among those people who has been more often right than wrong over the years is Vin Crosbie, but since he doesn't make blogging his vocation, a lot of media bloggers don't seem know who he is or appreciate how important he is to our industry.

Today, Vin celebrates his 5,000th day in newspaper new media. He's posted an excellent retrospective of his career.

And there's this:

I've not seen the up and down phases of the Internet bust and boom that the popular and trade press are fond of seeing since 1993. What I've seen is a straight line continually rising. The ups and downs, booms and busts, and other gyrations were investors' and traditional media companies' helical movements rotating around that upward line. When in 2000 investors lost their shirts in the Internet bust and quite a few traditional media company executives were saying, 'I told you this online thing was just a fad,' consumers' use of that 'online thing' was rising as steadily as it had during the Internet boom, no matter if investors had lost shirts and wingtips.

I agree. Internet growth has been a straight line for all practical purposes. And when the dot com bust came, a lot of newspaper company top executives pulled back the reigns on new media development. It wasn't like we were doing all that great of a job on putting our ideas into place anyway (newspaper new media operations were always bootstrap efforts), but whatever momentum we had going in 2001 was lost. If newspaper companies do not survive the transition to digital media, then 2001 to 2004 can be considered the black pit that sucked all the life out of efforts.

It was stupid to pull back and we're still paying the price.

That three year period should have been the years we doubled down and tried to get out in front of the audience. It wasn't like we couldn't predict that social networks (what we then called virtual communities) and niche interests and participation would be big things. Some of us, in fact, were saying exactly that. With the first emergence of broadband, how hard was it to see that video would some day be a big thing?
Or what about this: Why couldn't we have made our online classified efforts more robust back then? Interestingly, it was during this dark age that that NAA's Horizon Watching committee release a report on "web centric classifieds" that was largely ignored by the industry. In fact, to this day, I think most newspaper sites are far, far, far away from implementing a web centric classified strategy.

Of course, people like Vin were warning us ...

... sometimes when I've written something particularly controversial about the news or newspaper business (such as during 1999 when I'd write about how printed edition circulation would in a few years begin to plunge), some newspaper industry executives would dismiss off-hand what I wrote because I was only 'a consultant' and not someone actually 'employed by the newspaper industry.'

Vin may not be saying, "I told you so" -- I think he's more just in a reflective mood -- but, well, he did. If only the suits had listened.

This Blivings Report on the "top 10 newspaper sites" has been getting a lot of attention, but I think it's rather weak, and not just because Bakersfield.com isn't on it (though that is part of it). It over looks a number of good better sites, and inexplicably includes the ugly and tanking USAToday.com and the link-bloated Chron.com (gorgeous site with lots of blogs and such, but the home page is about 1,000 links too big).

So, I'll do my own Top 10 list. This time, I will ignore my conflict of interest and include Bakersfield.

1. Bakersfield.com. The site still has the best UGC/social networking platform of any newspaper site (we'll change that at GHS), and the best video strategy and does a great job at keeping the site constantly updated. The site wins for usability and overall design as well. The content marquee on the home page is a mistake, but perfection is always elusive. The page has gotten long, but at least the added links are pointing to web stuff, not print stuff.
2. NaplesNews.com. Blivings praised USAToday for their social networking, but both Bakersfield.com and NaplesNews.com have better social networking and participation. The new site design is gorgeous and quite usable. Flaws: Why "Latest News" and "Top Stories" on the home page. The top stories box screams, "We can't stop thinking of ourselves as a newspaper site." And Studio55 is well produced and slick, but that's part of its problem. It's trying too hard to be TV. But Studio55 is also a big part of what makes this a great site.
3. WashingtonPost.com. Combine great site design with great content and plenty of hooks for user participation and you've got a winner. It's no wonder that WaPo.com leads the industry in local audience reach. WaPo really doesn't do a great job of displaying its video though, and still hasn't broken too far from the "we're a newspaper site" mentality.
4. SignOnSanDiego.com. I've never been a fan of the home page design, but long before continuous updates or videos were all the rage in our industry, Ron James and his content team at SOSD have been doing it. They were also among the first to embrace participation through comments on stories and UGC photos. Under the hood are some great subsites, such as AmplifySD. We could all learn a lot by studying SOSD more closely.
5. KnoxNews.com. Jack Lail has long run one of the best newspaper web sites in the country, and its one of the few sites that has continued to improve with each iteration. The current site features a top half of the home page that is damn near perfect. The bottom half could almost be entirely lost and never missed, which would improve the home page greatly. The overall site architectures is outstanding. There's room for participation on Knoxnews.com, and blogs and a nice mix of video offerings.
6. LJWorld.com. The design has gotten a little sloppy and confusing, but it's still one of the most progressive newspaper sites in the world. It scores big points just for being more web focused than print focused.
7. NYTimes.com. Maybe the only newspaper site in the world that has stuck very close in look and tone to its print parent and actually pulled it off. It, too, suffers from link bloat, but you can't argue with the quality of the Times content, and it is among the industry leaders in online video.
8. SFGate.com. Here's a content-rich, regularly updated site with some great blogs, multimedia and user participation. Again, the home page is about twice as big as it should be, and I'm not overly impressed by the years-and-years old design, but there's lots of good stuff going on here.
9. TBO.com. The home page is a little cluttered, but at least they don't try to stuff every link they can imagine onto it. You can comment on stories, there is multimedia a good calendar and lots of information about the local area.
10. Chron.com. Of all the link-bloated home pages out there, Chron.com wears it the best. Chron scores well for blogging and multimedia.

So I'm sure some people will want to give me grief for making Bakersfield.com #1, but it's my list based on my criteria, which chief among them is to get as far away from being a newspaper site as possible, and be a platform for the local community. I still think Bakersfield is doing that best. On different criteria, it might score differently, but based on what I think -- with more than a decade of experience in this field -- is what news sites should be doing, it comes the closest to getting it right. It would seem unfair not to include it just because of my prior involvement with the site, and once it gets included, it needs to get its due.

If nothing else, this list should clearly demonstrate that the Blivings list was a lot of bunk. There were too many great newspaper web sites left off in favor of some lesser ones. Remix the list any way you like, I'm confident its a better reflection of who is doing what right in newspaper-associated web sites. Also, in comments, nominate your own ... I'm sure I'm forgetting some good ones.

Just for the record, I encourage my wife do point-and-shoot video, too. Here's one she did on a guy and his worms.

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The video goes with this story.

Note, we don't have our own video player yet. We're still using YouTube. We expect to launch our own video player in just a few more weeks. That will improve placement of the video on the story page.

How many times have you heard pro journalists complain that all this UGC is just a lot of talentless, ill-informed bunk. That in the end, readers are going to return to professional publications because they will miss the quality.

But according to a recent Deloitte & Touche study, UGC isn't going anywhere. Some 51 percent of the online audience is a UGC audience, and among younger users, the percentage is even higher. (It kind of makes you wonder why a UGC site would delete all of its UGC content, doesn't it, especially under the premise of "it just isn't working"?)

Meanwhile, there is a firehose of new content to keep up with every day, even if you just narrow your focus to a niche or two to follow.

Social aggregators like Digg help address the issue in the tech news world combining human intelligence computer power to filter content, but in the general news world, nothing like that has really worked yet.

And from the pro-journalist perspective, a high-falutin attitude would say, "I don't want no dang bunch of amateurs filtering my news for me."

So, if you believe that finding the best news reports on the web can be difficult and that trained, professional journalists have a role to play in helping people sort it all out, then Scott Karp's new venture should interest you. You can read more about it here.

If you're a pro journalist, go help out. This could get interesting.

Newspaper site search is broken.It's never been anything but broken.

Search is the primary way people navigate the web, and the way a lot of people (about 50 percent) do or want to navigate any given web site.

With all due respect to my friends at Planet Discover, PD has not fixed newspaper site search. The algorithms have never been great, and the way it is implemented on most newspaper sites isn't exactly user friendly.

Most people are used to search working the way Google works -- a simple interface with one set of results, but as Google is demonstrating, the web is no longer text based. It is a combination of text, databases and multimedia.

That is an issue, to its credit, that PD tried to address with its original "integrated search" solution, what Google calls "universal search."

For newspapers, you have discreet collections that people might want to search:

• Current articles
• Archives
• Classifieds
• Verticals (auto, real estate, jobs)
• Events/Calendar
• Local web sites
• Local businesses/Advertising

At a minimum.

If you're aware of the intention-driven way people use the web (think pull, rather than push), you'll understand why this can't all be shoved together in one neat search solution.

But I'm not aware of any newspaper site that has yet really figured out how to create a satisfying search experience within the context of a robust news and community web site.

Starting in Q4, this will be one of my projects. If you have any suggestions, want to brainstorm on this a bit, leave a comment or contact me through Facebook or LinkedIn.

Any John From Cincinnati fans out there? I mention JC because the phrase "big and huge" keeps popping into my head today (the day after the season, and probably series, finale).

There's a contingent with in the online newspaper community who think we should only do video if it's "big and huge."

The juxtaposition of pulling that phrase out of the air for a post on newspaper video is just about as odd as any dialogue in JC, so forgive me my JC moment. Except, we all know that the ones and zeros in Cass's camera contain the answer.
Ryan Sholin put it better in his post about the FasterMores vs. the BiggerBetters. Ryan pretty much nailed it.

For the BiggerBetters, consider the graph with this post. It represents YouTube.com audience growth as tracked by Compete.com. Consider that Viacom forced YouTube to remove all its "BiggerBetter" content in February. Up until that time you heard a lot from the BiggerBetters, within our industry and without, that YT only survives on stolen content. Yet, Viacom's takedown order has done nothing to slow YT's audience growth. And you know what, when I go to YT, I find lots of fresh, poorly produced, but highly trafficked UGC. For example, this piece picked somewhat at random, which has gotten more than 36,000 views in about 20 hours.

There's no shortage of video most BiggerBetters would find repulsive getting a lot of attention on YT.

Consider those observations along side this article that Angela Grant linked to about ManiaTV deleting 15,000 pages of UGC from its site.

"We decided that user-generated content is passé, and not a part of what we want to do in the future. We tried it, we didn't think it worked and we're getting rid of it," said Richard Ayoub, ManiaTV's vice president of programming and development.

So, some off-brand site generated 15,000 pages of UGC video, but "it didn't work." Ummm ... isn't that kind of insane?

Based on Angela's brief comment, I take it that she thinks this is evidence that the BiggerBetters are winning. But note what an industry analyst says later in the same article:

Sites focused on user-generated content also are finding it hard to compete with popular video-sharing site YouTube, said Josh Bernoff, principal analyst for Forrester Research. "The (reason for the) stampede of people moving away from user-gen is that it is difficult to make money off it and impossible to make money off of it if you're not YouTube," he said.

Sites that are moving away from a UGC-centric content model (note, this says nothing about UGC as part of a broader content model) aren't doing so for lack of audience interest, but because they haven't figured out how to offset the high cost of storing and hosting the video with advertising revenue. This isn't an audience-growth decision; it's a cost-analysis decision.

That's a legitimate reason for moving away from UGC (though I think it shows a profound lack of imagination), but let's not be hoodwinked into thinking that it tells us anything about what audiences want from video.

I'm putting some polish on my strategy presentation and felt I needed to explain disruption a little better, especially in regards to newspaper video.

Here is my brief definition of disruption: "The basic idea of disruption is to start at the low end, fulfilling a job to be done, with a product that is just 'good enough.'"
Here are my key points for a disruptive video strategy:

• Jobs to be done
  • Provide readers with additional visual information about stories
  • Give them more visual news-related options than TV
  • Communicate in a direct, personal voice, not like TV
• Start at the low end
  • Point-and-shoot cameras
  • Inexpensive or installed (free) video editing software
  • Short, quick-to-produce videos
• Be good enough
  • Rely on current news room staff, who know news and story telling
  • Provide starter training, improving as we go
  • Don’t get bogged down in trying to be like TV

One of the statements I'm incorporating into my spiel (again, the focus is on crafting a disruptive newspaper video strategy) is that any newspaper video that takes more than an hour to produce isn't worth the ROI. Quantity is the key goal. The only quality goal is to be "good enough."

My plea to professional journalists: Don't drink the Kool-Aid.

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, calls his blog "The Great Seduction," but the real seduction here is the idea that UGC, amateur content, can and should be resisted, that somehow, if only professional news organizations would fight back -- not use UGC, charge for content, create walled gardens, not go online -- do something, anything that doesn't involving soiling our mastheads with UGC -- we can somehow beat back the hordes of Visigoths pounding on our gates.

That's magical thinking.

I know there are editors and reporters out there who fear the changes in their midst and think if only we would hold a stronger line, we would could save newspapers.

But if you're like me, and you believe that the reason you got into journalism in the first place was to help make society better, to help shine a light on truth, to serve communities and the afflicted, then I hope you'll recognize that intransigence does nothing to help the cause.

As I argued in my first post, amateur content has always had its place in the world, and in my second post I asserted that we are part of evolving ecosystem that will get better for content producers and consumers over time.

In this post, my metaphor is a fast moving train, at full steam, with no brakes. We're on it, baby, and there ain't no getting off. Jumping off is suicide, so we might as well figure out how to get along with all of the other passengers, some of whom we're guaranteed not to like.

It's adapt or die.

And by adapt, I mean, figure out how to play within the new rules, not by insisting the rest of riders follow our old rules – such as demanding that readers pay for our content or that we can be the only authoritative voice.

The media train is hurtling forward, but journalists are not driving. Even the biggest traditional media companies are not at the wheel. In fact, there is nobody making sure we stay on the rails. The train is propelled by collective action -- the action of ambitious entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and investors, technology researchers and engineers, computer programmers and amateur hackers and curious and demanding audiences, as well as some of us in the media, with our constant demands for new, different and better. All of these swirling forces create the turbulence that keeps the train on its collusion course with our collective destiny.

And I have no idea what that is, or if we'll ever really get there.

Scary stuff, to be sure, but that's the reality of the situation.

So it's adapt or die.

By adapt I mean, be part of the conversation. We can't back away from turning our web sites into platforms for community participation.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean we need to surrender to unmoderated, unfiltered, undifferentiated noise. We can play a role as conversation leaders and mediators. We can train ourselves to be guides and helpers. We can continue with our mission to help the public be better informed and more enlightened.

In fact, the cool thing is, we get to do it with a whole sheath of new tools that journalists never had before, and we can help design the tools and define how they are used in a professional media environment. We can be part of the evolution, if we're willing to embrace change.

I think it is in our best interest as people with economic responsibilities to our families, ethical responsibilities to our co-workers and employers, and social responsibilities to our communities to take an active role in defining what media looks like tomorrow.

Don't follow Andrew Keen off the back of the caboose. Follow your audience. Keep moving forward, even as the wind blows off your derby, with its jaunty press pass. This is our mission now.

In his post arguing that we should take seriously at least some of what Andrew Keen (author of Cult of the Amateur) has to say, Clay Shirky writes:

What Wikipedia (and Digg and eBay and craigslist) have shown us is that mature systems have more controls than immature ones, as the number of bad cases is identified and dealt with, and as these systems become more critical and more populous, the number of bad cases (and therefore the granularity and sophistication of the controls) will continue to increase.

In this Business Week video interview with Keen, Andrew keen postulates his primary thesis that amateur content is diluting the market for professional content, and that amateur content is, by default, unreliable. His solution seems to be, people need to be made aware of it and turn away from amateur content.

To me, this isn't an issue of pro vs. am; it's signal vs. noise. Unlike Keen, I don't believe that amateur content is intrinsically bad. Nor do I believe that pro content is always good. People get paid for lousy stuff all the time.

The point I think Keen misses is that digital media is an evolving ecosystem. Like all evolutionary processes, it begins as struggle and strife and perfects itself through increasingly complex solutions to problems. The net is barely out of the primordial soup phase. The amphibians are only now developing legs.

Keen, however, has sliced off a sliver in time and says, "we're all doomed if we don't do something."

Outside of "pay better attention," I haven't yet figured out what Keen thinks we should do. (If the solution is in his book, he didn't articulate it very well in the BW interview, nor have I seen it pop up elsewhere.)

Yes, we need to be more aware and more discerning. That's part of how this ecosystem will evolve. It is an obvious natural progression. In the BW interview, Keen says that there's already evidence that people are getting over "this internet fad" (my words/paraphrase). I don't buy it. UGC is not going to chase people away from the internet. People are not suddenly going to start switching off computers in favor of newspapers and network television (though some might). Kids are not going to stop using SMS out of fear and loathing. That's magical thinking. The technology is not going away.

But as the shine begins to dull on web 2.0 participation, people will naturally become more discerning. Nobody can consume all the media that is out there. Some where along the line you must make choices about what you like and don't like.

Individually-derived choices is part of the solution to the signal vs. noise problem, but the ecosystem will also evolve through technological improvements in tools that help us find, sort and filter content; and publishers will also engage in some social engineering and human power solutions, because helping people get better information is a good business practice.

In the BW interview, Keen asserts that if we don't do something, in 25 or 50 years, we will no longer have mainstream media.

I think he's wrong. First, if that were to happen, the time line is more like 10 or 15 years, or sooner, as rapidly as technology is evolving, but secondly, the economic models may change, and established players may disappear, but there will always be a market for good content (whether it be informational or entertainment).

There will always be a class of people who make their living producing content. They may be self employed, or part of pod-like collectives, or even now working for new startups that eventually become the big media of tomorrow, but rest assured I don't see professionalism dying so long as people feel the need for reliable information or good entertainment. Quality and reliability will always have value.

If Keen's point is that amateurism is going to kill professional content, thereby making us all dumber and less informed and not nearly as well entertained, I don't buy it. But let's just say, we reach a point where content producers can no longer get paid for their work, and all content is produced by amateurs, then my questions are:

1. Will audiences accept undifferentiated crap, or will they migrate toward the best stuff?
2. Can amateurs only produce crap, or will they get better?
3. If people stop getting paid for their good work, won't they be forced to find another line of work, meaning there will be less content produced, meaning the economic value of the best stuff that actually is produced will rise?

Those are purely rhetorical, leading questions, because I think you know the answers. In a free, dynamic market, competing forces are always changing the equation, but money is always part of the equation. People will get paid. It just may not look like it does today.

In other words, I'm not buying Keen's main point: That UGC is ruining the world. There is no economic model I can imagine (not in a free society) where such an assertion makes sense. Things may change, established companies may die, new economic models may arise, but there will always be good stuff, and good stuff will always have an audience. I don't see how that point is rationally assailable.

I'm late to the Andrew Keen debate. His book (Cult of the Amateur) came out at a time when I was way behind in reading my RSS feeds, had a lot going on and didn't have much time to dig down into his arguments. I saw the sniping at his work, gleaned a general idea that he was broad-brushing user-generated content, and decided to leave the debate to others.

This morning, I'm nearing the end of a project to catch up on RSS and in the process, I hit upon a post by Jeff Howe defending the notion that rather than dismiss Keen as a troll, we should recognize that his ideas are going to resonate with enough people that we should offer a response.

The fact is, Keen's arguments will sound mightily persuasive to a significant constituency who do believe the Internet is primarily a repository of porn, spam and corrosive amateurism. Failing to recognize that the choir to which Keen preaches might just be larger than our own congregation is an arrogant, and potentially irreversible blunder. While Web 2.0 insiders might love to hate Keen, many in the world at large will love to love him.

Jeff directed me to Clay Shirky, who wrote a lengthy piece that argues that there are some parts of Keen's position that do deserve consideration, even if his case lacks substance and is purely anecdotal.

I recommend you read Clay's entire piece, because I'm just going to cherry pick two elements (one in this post, and one in a follow up) and offer a reaction.

On the primary contention that efficient distribution has made it much easier for lousy content produced by people without talent to find an audience:

More importantly, talent is unevenly distributed, and everyone knows it. Indeed, one of the many great things about the net is that talent can now express itself outside traditional frameworks; this extends to blogging, of course, but also to music, as Clive Thompson described in his great NY Times piece, or to software, as with Linus’ talent as an OS developer, and so on. The price of this, however, is that the amount of poorly written or produced material has expanded a million-fold. Increased failure is an inevitable byproduct of increased experimentation, and finding new filtering methods for dealing with an astonishingly adverse signal-to-noise ratio is the great engineering challenge of our age (c.f. Google.) Whatever we think of Keen or CotA, it would be insane to deny that.

Yup, there's a lot of crap out there.

But there are two things I know:

1. More good stuff is available, and easier to get, than ever before;
2. Many people who are now producing crap will eventually get better, if not become great, thanks to the new opportunities of a networked media world.

First, digital distribution and unmediated content channels have made it possible for many talented people to find audiences they might never otherwise reach. I'm thinking of people like those behind TheBurg.tv, or GeekBrief.tv, or Rocketboom. While these are arguably professional productions, it is hard to imagine them existing a decade ago. If not for the net, what would the exceptionally talented people behind these shows be doing today? Maybe some of them would eventually make their way in professional media, but would they be doing as well?

When I was playing around with MP3Caravan.com, I found about 100 great songs on the web -- all for free, and mostly by people you've never heard of and probably never will. These are still among some of my favorite songs on my iPod.

The explosion creativity that I see in music today (I say this as a fan of Paste Magazine and XM's XM-Cafe and The Loft and X-Country, where I hear great music all the time that will never make it to commercial radio) is great for music fans, but maybe it's not so great for people hoping to make a living in music. In a more fragmented market it's harder to make the volume of sales necessary to make a living.

Over time, I imagine the free market will sort this out and some sort of equilibrium will be reached.

But of course, there is going to be an ever increasing stream of talented content producers entering the market place, thanks to the complete destruction of any meaningful barrier to entry.

And this goes to my second point.

The thing about making it possible for more crap to get released is that some of the people producing that junk are pretty serious about it. I think back to the Ira Glass pieces on YouTube -- if you're a smart, observant person looking to produce media, you have good taste, and you know when you're putting out songs, video or writing that falls short. If you're ambitious and enterprising, you'll keep at it and keep trying to get better, and eventually you'll stop making crap. Some of what you make, in fact, might actually be brilliant.

Talent may be unevenly distributed, but in the old content-production model, opportunity was unevenly distributed. Now opportunity is less about who you know or happen to meet and more about taking advantage of the tools and channels available. Achieving success still carries an element of luck, but getting a chance to even spin the roulette wheel is no longer dependent on the right financial backing.

It's important to remember that we were all amateurs at one time. Walt Whitman was an amateur when he first self-published Leaves of Grass. Ralph Peer changed American music forever when he discovered amateurs the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Bristol, Tenn. Hollywood was the original cult of the amateur, and look how far it has evoled.

As I'll argue in my next piece, Andrew Keen has taken a rather myopic view of the current state of media and has failed to see that we are currently viewing only one point along a continuum of change.

UPDATE: While preparing my next post, it struck me: Keen is himself an amateur who has benefited from the digital distribution ecosystem. His blog posts and articles have been widely distributed through the net's efficiency. While he has apparently been paid for some of his articles, it's doubtful writing has ever been his sole source of income (as it would be for a professional writer), or that he has dedicated himself to the craft, the way a professional would. His academic and professional qualifications to be considered an expert in media seem fairly slim. It seems to me that Keen is what he hates.

Regular readers know I'm pretty much a zealot about keeping general circulation newspaper sites free. Going paid is pretty much a guaranteed disaster, at least at this stage of the game.

The blogosphere is abuzz with the potential -- floated by Rupert Murdoch when first talking about acquiring Dow Jones -- that the WSJ will go free.

I remain skeptical that this is a good move. I mean, you're talking about 900,000 people who have already ponied up a subscription fee, as since it's almost all corporate-expense subsidized, renewals are nearly automatic.

Bussinesspundit isn't too sure either and has this to say about advertising:

Secondly, the fact that ad rates are so closely tied to traffic numbers on the web is just stupid. It's a holdover from the old school days of advertising when gross numbers were all people knew. If I get a post on Reddit or Digg and get 5x my normal traffic, I don't get 5x my normal clicks on Google ads. In fact, it almost doesn't budge. Over time, web advertising will depend more on reader quality than reader quantity. I think a paid subscription model is a good way to filter out the riff-raff and keep a quality readership.

I'm taking his last sentence as specific to WSJ. Yeah, on a gen-circ newspaper.com, you'll filter out the riff-raff with a paid model, but you'll filter out a lot of other people, too. You'll be left with too small of an audience to make much money off. WSJ is in a different league.

This goes along, though, with my general thinking that newspaper sites tend to charge ridiculously low CPMs. We keep seeing our sites as undifferentiated blobs of content, but our core audience tends to be pretty specific and generally made up of highly attractive demographic targets. We're selling volume, not value.

It's time to reduce ad positions per page and raise CPM rates -- aggressively. Of course, it will take a motivated and trained sales force to sell value (anybody can sell volume), but I expect ROI to be there.

Of course, you still need plenty of CPC avails, too.

For a couple of years, I've been telling anybody who would listen that the correct measurement for local audience reach on a newspaper web site was percentage of daily unique visitors from the paper's DMA.

More importantly, that the "visited in the past 30 days" metric, which the industry has been using for a couple of years, was meaningless.

In it's latest integrated newspaper audience study, Scarobourgh takes a step in my direction -- it is now measuring DMA audience based on "past seven days visit." That's a hell of a lot better than 30 days reach.

So of the top 25 markets, who has the best local online reach?

1. WashingtonPost.com, 20 percent
2. SignOnSanDiego.com, 16 percent
3. AJC.com, 15 percent
4. Boston.com, 14 percent
5. Azcentral.com, 14 percent

No surprises in the top 5. They've long been among the leaders in local audience reach, because they've been the longest among big metros at making that a priority. To reach a local audience, you've got to be local, think local, act local -- and you've got to do a heck of a lot of local marketing.
LATimes.com and tampabay.com are two sites that stand out as particularly lagging -- about 4 percent for each.

Here's a link to another version of the report with more markets covered. Some of the numbers vary by a percentage point from the link up above. I imagine that's a rounding issue since for my top five above, I added two percentage columns together (exclusive online and duplicated online).

The first link I saw to this study was from Robb Montgomery, who notes the finding that a newspaper.com generally reaches more young people than you might imagine.

Via Guy Kawasaki, I found MajikWidget, which offers a widget for online polls. This post is all about checking it out.

This is of interest to me because we don't have our own poll app in our CMS, and editors like putting polls on their sites, and most of the free poll tools produce polls that are pretty ugly. I saw a poll on Guy's site and it didn't suck.

So here's my first poll (I get 25 for free). Let's find out how many of howardowens.com readers have their own blog.

Previously, I wrote about how Nick Belardes is pushing a very web-centric, network-aware distributed media effort in his new job at KERO in Bakersfield.

We all know about the efforts of the Bakersfield Californian (Bakersfield.com, Bakotopia, NorthwestVoice.com, etc.) to be entreprenurial online.

Now comes news that Fisher Communications is buying two TV stations in Bakersfield, including Californian content partner KBAK (I'm not sure if KBAK and TBC still have a relationship or not).

That wouldn't be significant online news, except that Fisher recently acquired Pegasus News, which is run by Mike Orren, one of the smartest guys in the community UGC field. Pegasus is what Northwest Voice aspires to be.

The changing market in Bakersfield is going to put a couple of theories to the test: That being a first mover, as TBC has done, is a good defensive strategy against online competitors; and that a local media market can have only one clear winner (which I believe) in the online media realm.

The other aspect to this story: Bakersfield is becoming a test case for how newspapers survive in a turbulent media market (up until now, the San Francisco Chronicle has been the only canary in the coal mine).

As I've reported before, Craigslist seems to be pretty much a non-factor in Bakersfield, but in a fragmented market, as we see evolving in Bakersfield now, every competitor becomes a factor. They're all part of the "thousand cuts that kill you."

TBC is one of the most advanced newspaper companies in the nation at building online products designed to hold back current or future competitors, but the competition is coming anyway. This should be interesting to watch.

My advice: TBC, get more aggressive; KERO, get off that clunky IBS publishing system and build something very webby in Drupal and keep letting Nick be Nick; and, KGET, um, you better do something.

Disclosure: I think most readers know I was once ran Bakersfield.com, but just in case, there's the mention again. Also, my current employer owns two newspapers in Kern County, though both outside the core Bakersfield market. They're not part of this race right now.

A couple of years ago, there were pundits galore spouting non-sense about how much "local" advertising Google was taking from newspapers.

But for anybody who actually did a local search on Google, it was pretty clear that all of those "local" advertisers where actually national plays trying to reach a local audience, or aggregators, or arbitrage sites. They were not newspaper advertisers, except in the real estate category.

Up until today, there seemed like plenty of opportunity for newspapers to us its superior local resources to protect and expand local advertising online. But Google has some up with a plan to answer the "feet-on-the-street" challenge. It's kind of scary. They're paying freelancers to take pictures of local businesses to add to Google Local, bridging the gap between impersonal self-serve and an initial human contact to make the introduction.

Also interesting is the payment scheme, It’s a $10 rate per business - but, note, it’s $2 for the content and $8 AFTER the business has verified the accuracy. Read: after we have established a real contact connection with the potential advertiser.

This currently appears to only be a US program, fyi. For those of you out there who claim to “own the channel”, think about this. Smart college kids eagerly showing your local advertisers all about the chance to get featured in a prominent spot on Google Maps, for free.

Rachel Sklar Jason Linkins has an issue with video classifieds.

Uhm...okay. We are drawn to movement--and shiny things! But aren't classified ads supposed to be simple, and cost-effective? Once you factor in the expense of the video equipment, the matte paintings, the storyboards and craft services, hasn't the cost-to-benefit ratio been blown out of the box?

She's reacting to a piece in the LA Times that says, "Video classifieds are new ... "

Except they're not.

Video classifieds pre-date web 2.0 by a good couple of years. Digital Media Classifieds, now Digital Media Communications, started turning recruitment ads into video six or seven years ago, or further back.

When I first heard about DMC, I was skeptical, but then we instituted the program in Ventura and quickly learned three things -- Advertisers loved it, job hunters watched the videos, and the up sell created a significant revenue stream.

Video classifieds are a no-brainer, and letting users generate their own ads get in on the fun just makes a lot of sense.

Nick Belardes, a long-time Bakersfield blogger, gets the nature of networked media. He has long used MySpace to promote his blog and his various media projects (books, films, music). He was an early adopter of Bakotopia.com. He has been a champion of local bloggers for as long as I've known him.

Not long ago, he took an online job with one of the local TV stations.

Bakersfield.com has a content-driven social network on its site.

Nick is using Bakersfield.com to promote ABC23.

Kudos to Logan Molen and his team for not taking it down. After all, it's all about the conversation, and in a civil discussion, all media is welcome.

I hope Nick is reciprocating and linking back to Bakersfield.com where appropriate.

He also started a MySpace page for ABC23. He's also made his own blog a regular linkfest to Turnto23.com.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of newspapers creating "teen" sections or youth-oriented publications and web sites.

I say, if you want to reach a younger audience, make the things that interest them part of your daily routine.

Larry Atkins says we need to include their voices. (via Ypulse)

For a long time, newspaper editors comforted themselves with the false notion that "when they grow up," they'll become readers. Of course, that has turned out to be untrue. The untruth, however, led editors down the path of thinking they could keep on doing what they were doing, and everything would turn out fine. And what they were doing was concentrating on "serious journalism."

Lots of newspapers, especially small newspapers, hire lots of young writers, kids out of college just starting out. I say it's time that we turn them loose and let them write stories they find relevant to their lives, not just what is on their beats. In fact, maybe nobody under 25 should have a beat. They should all be GA and told, think about what you and your friends talk about and turn those topics into local stories.

This piece on a real-life Simpsons family comes to mind.

This isn't something you do on a part-time, catch-as-catch-can basis, though. To attract young readers, we need to put forth the concerted effort to include their voices, their perspectives and their interests.

The problem isn't that young people are uninterested in the world around them; They just are not necessarily interested in what mature journalists call news. Not yet at least, and maybe never (not in the way, say, the depression generation was).

We may never turn today's teens and young adults into newsPAPER readers, but if we want to have a future as local media organizations, we need to find a way to get today's younger audiences clued into our information products.

It isn't about launching the right web site with hip graphics, a little social networking and a tolerance for racy language. Those tactics have their place, but content is still king.

Ryan Sholin recently posted similar thoughts: Find yourself a nice comfortable niche and sell it like blueberry pancakes.

It's all fine and good if you're a newspaper and you're putting your news on a web site. Almost all newspapers do it now.

But if you want to build an online news business, there are a few extra things you must do.

One of them is to create a place where people in your community can communicate -- comment, participate, suggest stories and submit stories.

That's something a lot of larger newspapers are doing now, but many small papers have neglected.

Into that void has stepped Topix.

As Mark Glasser highlights, the long-struggling Topix is finding its audience in rural areas where online forums are few and local newspapers have neglected to create a platform for participation.

How did you get so many rural people involved with your site? Many of these areas are not as connected to the Net.

Skrenta: It’s been a big surprise for us. We’ve looked at it, and one factor is that in major markets there are a lot of places for you to communicate. If you’re in San Francisco, you’re pretty wired, you can go to Craigslist and you have a hundred places to go online and communicate. There are 1,500 newspapers but we identified 35,000 places in the country where people actually live. Already most places don’t even have a newspaper, and if you get out of the top 100 newspapers, most of them don’t have a very sophisticated online presence at all. They don’t have sophisticated forums.

We found that in most places in this country, we are the only high-end news site. What happens is this odd pattern where a news event happens, and they find our site online and they like it and stick. One of the more dramatic cases was when two tornadoes struck Caruthersville, Mo. Up to that point, we had a little activity there but it was pretty low. That day we had 600 posts about the tornadoes , and it was astonishing, there were first-hand accounts and people were asking if so-and-so was OK. People in the town were responding and saying, ‘yes, they’re OK.’ A few months later, a lot of the people had stayed in the forums.

You can see the same explosion of participation in Greensburg, KS, where GHS owns a newspaper, and where we made a special effort to update the web site after a tornado destroyed that town, but we still didn't have available all of the participation tools we would like.

Publishers get quite worked up about Google and Yahoo "stealing" their news, but for the most part, and especially in the case of Google, those sites are just redirecting traffic to publishers' sites. In the case of Topix, Topix is taking publishers headlines and photos and giving very little in return (check your referrer logs). Topix is truly building a business on the back of newspaper publishers, and the site is owned by a trio of newspaper companies.

Skrenta: Prior to the forum launch, the major problem with the site was we weren’t getting user involvement. We had a decent number of unique users, but a very low number of page views per visit, and they wouldn’t visit very often. They would visit a couple times a month and didn’t get passionately involved in our site or our brand. When we launched the forums, that immediately took off in a pretty substantial way. When we got people to get off of just consuming our old read-only site to posting in a forum or reading a forum, they were much more involved. The page views went up 10 times, from two page views a visit to 20 page views on average. And you know why: It sucks you in a lot more.

Topix didn't just stumble into this model. It's well thought out. The company is engaging volunteer editors (about 1,000 so far) and employing some well thought out software to help moderate the forums.

Skrenta: Well, 95% of our moderation is done by software. There’s a lot of tricks in it. For instance, if you are banned from the forums, you can actually still post, and see your own posts, but other people don’t see them. That’s a neat social trick, because if you know you’ve been banned, most people will work around that. They’ll clear their cookies and work to figure out how to get around the block; but if they don’t know they’ve been banned, and they seem to be able to post, it won’t do any harm to the environment. We can do 95% of the moderation through software, but we also have three full-time staff to do moderation as community editors that respond to user-generated flags.

If you're a newspaper publisher who isn't part of Gannett, McClathcy or Tribune, you should be concerned about Topix.

The good news is, Topix proves that if you build the platform, you can transform your web sites into community participation hubs.

Here's a news tidbit that hasn't gotten much attention: Independent Newspapers, a group of 30 or so papers in Arizona, Delaware and Florida is closing five of it's Arizona editions.

McKeand cited a combination of factors for the decision: residential sprawl, competition and shifting advertising trends.

"It was becoming more and more difficult to define 'community' in these markets," McKeand said.

"We're better off just taking these resources and really putting them toward the nine products we think are strong."

No employee will be laid off but will be transferred to other newspapers.

I think there's more to the story. For one thing, what the hell does "more difficult to define 'community' in these markets" mean? That sounds like utter non-sense to me. I done a lot of community journalism and lived in a lot of communities. The statement makes no sense. It sounds like somebody wasn't trying very hard.

You get more nonsense from a story published by one of the closing papers:

The growth that has changed the Valley over the last 10 years has an unintended victim: the Chandler Independent.

Most newspaper companies would KILL to be in growth markets.

Newspaper employees who have fretted over the possibility that publishers would eliminate jobs and turn to "citizen journalists" instead, won't find any comfort here:

Instead, Independent is encouraging residents to continue to use the community website at http://www.newszap.com/ to disseminate news for their neighborhoods, including school briefs, sports items, and community group announcements.

INI has an unusual business model. Company directors aren't allowed to personally benefit from their directorships. The company claims to reinvest its profits in its products, judging from its web sites, there's no evidence of aggressively pursuing profits in order to improve the business. They just haven't put many resources into the web, from what I can see.

I'm also skeptical of the no "lay offs" remark.

Like I said, I think there's more to the story.

Not too long ago, Shane Richmond did a post asking media bloggers to call out their favorite media-related articles and blog posts.

I'm quite proud that Shane included one of my posts in his list.

Several other people have responded to the request and I'm going to throw my links into the stew myself.

I'm trying to avoid including links I've seen show up elsewhere, so if your favorite post isn't here, maybe that's why. Or I just forgot. Feel free to add your favorite links in comments either here or on Shane's blog.

• Vin Crosbie on TimesSelect
• Vin Crosbie: A Date with the butcher
• Steve Yelvington on dead deer
• John Hagel on the unbundling of media
• Tim Porter, the mood of the newsroom
• Steve Outing: What journalists can learn from bloggers
• Jay Rosen (just the title alone is great): The people formerly known as the audience
• Rich Gordon on building a network, not a destination
• Guy Kawasaki on the effort effect

Outing's post above deserves an extra hat tip. It inspired this post, which has been the basis of my primary content strategy ever since.

Good idea from Shane. I hope he compiles the results.

Shane didn't ask for this, but there have been some good old fashioned dead-tree books that are ongoing mental references for me:

• The Search, by John Battelle
• We the Media, by Dan Gillmor
• Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug
• Net Gain, by John Hagel
• The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson
• First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham
• The Vanishing Newspaper, by Philip Meyer
• Innovator's Solution, by Clayton Christensen
• Competitive Advantage, by Michael E. Porter

It sounds like the San Francisco Chronicle is about to embark on an interesting change of direction (I hesitate to call it an experiment, because it's too overarching not be a make-or-break gambit): The Chron is going to take up the cause of its community.

Details are a little vague, but essentially the new slogan is: "Journalism of Action." Call it the ChronicleWatch-ification of the Chron: Bronstein reportedly envisions a paper whose staff will not simply report, but seek to effect positive change in the community and drive public policy.

... tech writer Tom Abate, who attended the meeting, described Bronstein's goal as taking the paper "back to the future," bringing journalism back to it's historic roots of being useful to people. The Internet, Abate says, would be central to this goal.

Compare this with the hue-and-cry over Murdoch's acquisition of Dow Jones.

For many, Mr Murdoch is a threat to the whole American journalistic tradition. Jim Ottaway, a former vice-president of Dow Jones, argues that there is a sharp difference between the Anglo-Australian model of media ownership and the American one. Anglo-Australian bosses are in the habit of expressing their various biases through their newspapers and TV channels. The American journalistic tradition depends on a ’strict separation between political opinions expressed vigorously on editorial pages and news reported with as much factual objectivity as possible.’ Mr Murdoch is a barbarian at the gates indeed.

Will Murdoch's critics in the industry be as upset with Mr. Bronstein's advocacy journalism as they are with Fox News?

The Chron has been at the jagged edge of the crisis bearing down on the industry. The paper felt the first sock from Craigslist and its market has migrated to digital nativism much faster than the rest of country. It's the canary in the coal mine. It's in dire straits and is faced with tough decisions. Such situations can either breed change and innovation, or a bunker mentality retreat.

It sounds like Bronstein has decided that the Chron won't go down without a fight.

On the ONA list, a discussion has sprung about about ethics and user participation. I made a brief comment about the ethics around real identity, which prompted my friend and mentor Steve Yelvington to post a link to an article he wrote last year on the topic.

In response, I wrote this lengthy post -- so long, that I think I should get the benefit of all that work by dual posting it here:

Great article Steve ... It conjures up lots of thoughts.

At GateHouse Media, I think we're going to "require" real identities. We're still building our system to “enforce” this, and are months away yet, so I suppose this policy is subject to change, but I'm pretty set on it.

Some background that figures into my thinking:

Members of this list who have been part of the newspaper-online community for a number of years, such as Steve, will recall that I was out of newspapers for a few years and ran a site called RVClub.com (still around, but floundering). I learned a lot about "virtual communities" (we now call them social networks) running that business.

One important lesson: Moderation works. A strong moderator who sets the tone and lays down the ground rules makes for better participation. The fact that our e-mail discussion list, RV-Talk, is still going strong, is strong evidence of this, I think. These days, it requires almost no moderator intervention because the culture is so well established.

But the other lesson I've only recently come to realize is that: Real identity is important. Because RV-Talk started at a time when most people had only one e-mail account, and that account almost invariably was tied to real identity, our members didn't think twice about revealing real identity. In fact, after a year or so, when I rebuilt the site and tired to introduce AOL-like handles, the core membership rejected it and complained about it. They wanted to know who they were dealing with.

At the Ventura County Star, we instituted comments on stories in early 2004 when almost no newspapers were doing it (I think some had done it before, but as far as I know, all had stopped before we started doing it again). Because I was eager to get started and didn't want to wait on Scirpps to provide proper commenting software, I just went to Haloscan, grabbed some JavaScript and dropped it into our story templates. And suddenly, we had very blog-like comments on stories (and trackbacks).

But we also had no verification of identity, no way to ban users -- it was a completely open system. And it wasn't long before the racist came out.

That got quite a bit of negative coverage in the trade press. People like Vin Crosbie, whom I respect as much as Steve, were critical of our decision to allow unmoderated, unfiltered, anonymous comments. A college professor, whom I forget who it was, likened our comments to allowing bathroom graffiti on our journalistically-pristine stories.

We removed comments, but with the intention of bring them back within days (this was widely misreported as "VCS.com decides not to allow comments ever again."

Nathan Ashby Kuhlman, now with the New York Times, but then with one of our sister publications, figured out how to hack together Haloscan, JavaScript and Cold Fusion to tie comments into our registration system. Because people had registered, generally, with their real names, we started publishing real names with comments. We also had greater power to moderate, ban and cajole good behavior.

The tone of discourse immediately improved.

We still had people using false identity, but most people just stuck with their real names.

And it was easier to ban the false identity (registered users had to hassle with creating new e-mail accounts once banned, and some people were nearly indefatigable in this regard, but we also discovered a very simple trick that should not work, but did: once a person was banned, when they came back, we set a "banned" cookie -- easy to defeat, but as far as I know, nobody ever did -- it was too drop dead stupid, I think, for people to even suspect that's what we were doing .. Or the bad actor types are too stupid to figure it out).

But that was a clue that real identity was a gateway to better behavior. We still had problems, but it helped.

So my goal became then: We need social networking. We need the ability to tie identity to profiles, to history, to a sense of belonging to the site. That's a big part of what motivated me (unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) to move to Bakersfield, where they had Bakotopia already built and I realized that here was an engine to tie to participation on a mainstream newspaper site. This really excited me and I'm proud of what Bakersfield.com has in place today.

We decided there, however, to believe that "persona" was acceptable, so long as behind the scenes, we stored real identity in our database.

And I stuck for a long time to the idea that it was journalistically responsible enough to be able to identify people behind the scenes, even if publicly they had handles.

(I should interject: One thing I learned about registration systems both in Ventura and Bakersfield is that most people are honest and they give you real identity. People who don't like registration systems never believe me, but I know with 100 percent certainty that it's true. I've done the checks and tests and know that contrary to myth, most local users give real information when registering on a local news site, and by most, I mean 94 to 98 percent).

Now we come to Facebook: When I joined Facebook, a light went on. I remembered the lessons for RVClub.com and realized that if you build the right environment, real identity is not a problem. I decided right then and there that for GateHouse, we should require real identity. It is so important to responsible behavior. It is so important to journalistic integrity, and as much as, like Steve, I want to build web sites that are more web like and less newspaper like, I still believe that journalistically we have some responsibilities to truth and honesty and transparency and to the communities we serve, and we should require no less of the people we invite to participate in our news web sites than we require of ourselves in this regard.

In Steve's article, he presents some pretty compelling evidence about how computer-network culture changed from real identity to hidden identity, but to me that's just a case for why newspaper sites can and should evole toward requiring real identity. We should believe and communicate to our users that it is important, and why. Sure, we'll lose some participation, but I think we can gain so much more in trust with the communities we serve that the sacrifice is worth it.

The one pro-anonymous participation argument that I haven't satisfactorily overcome yet is the idea that some news tipsters will shy away from participation if people, particularly bosses, are able to identify who they are. The only thing I can say is that A) I think we gain more than we lose; B) there's other avenues for whistling blowing than just our forums and blogs and comments. That doesn't feel like the most satisfactory answer to me, but it's an answer. I still think we gain more than we lose.

So that's what we plan on instituting on GateHouse web sites (when we have all the programming complete to make it work), unless Steve or somebody else can make such a compelling case that I should change my mind.

Jay Small is one of the smarter guys in our industry, which is why it's pretty generous on his part to post four of his Power Point presentations on his blog.

They would undoubtably be more valuable with his companion narration, but there's plenty of good thought-provoking information in the slides themselves.

Some slides are duplicative, but that's OK. The most valuable may be on product development and on usability.

Via Jack Lail, this very insightful quote from Roger Black:

Newspapers will not pull out of this mortal glidepath until they get a lot more interesting. This is something that Rupert (Murdoch) has understood, presumably from birth. His attitude has always been to damn the institutions and give people what they like. This is what worked for Hearst and Pulitizer, and for Paley and Sarnoff. But today the traditional media polar bears (in newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, music, movies and books) seldom blame the product for their shrinking habitat.

I spend a good part of my life worrying about things like usability and strategy -- sort of the scaffolding of the online news business, but in the end, all that really matters is the content, and what matters most when it comes to content is what people want.

Give the people what they want.

One thing Murdoch does exceptionally well is figure out where the market opportunity is, and then goes after that opportunity with a narrow, focused strategy. He concerns himself first with building audience.

Related, read this insightful post from Alan Mutter about Murdoch.

UPDATE: Right after I posted this, Jack Lail had another post with this quote from Vin Crosbie:

The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on.

My vote for newspaper opinion piece of the year goes to this video from Kansas.com, which is creative and witty satire -- the kind of stuff that demonstrates a savvy undersanding of the web and especially web video.

Via Howard Weaver, who writes:

"As I mentioned to you when you were here, I think that to be worth a viewer's time, an editorial page video needs to be funny or kick ass," Brownlee reports. Mission accomplished.

My co-worker Melinda Gipson is guest blogging for the NAA at the Stanford AlwaysOn conference.

Melinda is smart and savvy, so this should be interesting.

Audience Size/Growth

• Nearly 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video per user during the month. (July 17, 2007 ComScore)
• The research found that online video viewing is a common activity for many Internet users. More than half of those surveyed (51%) indicated that they watch video online at least once a month, 27% watch at least once a week and five percent watch video online daily. (Feb. 8, 2005 OPA)
• A recent report from technology research firm In-Stat indicates that the potential market for online video content worldwide will grow from 13 million households in 2005 to 131 million households in 2010. (August 11, 2006, eMarketer)
• Young adults (those ages 18-29) are among the most voracious video viewers. Three-in-four young adult internet users (76%) report online consumption of video, compared with 57% of online adults ages 30-49. Less than half (46%) of internet users ages 50-64 watch or download video. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• 44% of the overall US population age 12 or older having ever streamed a digital video file off of the Internet – or approximately 100 million Americans. (April 2, 2007 IPSOS)
• Three in four of all teens age 12-17 and young adults age 18-24 in the US have streamed digital video content online. (April 2, 2007 IPSOS)

Broadband Penetration

• Three-quarters of broadband users (74%) who enjoy high-speed connections at both home and work watch or download video online. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• An estimated 81 million people, or 63% of the 129 million people who access the Internet over broadband in the U.S., watch broadband video at home or at work. (July 17, 2007 Nielsen)
• 47% of adults have high-speed internet connections at home as of early March 2007, up five percentage points from a year earlier. (July 3, 2007 Pew)
• Among individuals who use the internet at home, 70% have a broadband connection while 23% use dialup. (July 3, 2007 Pew)
• In-stat predicts that by 2010 there will be 413 million broadband households worldwide, up from 194 million in 2005. (August 11, 2006 eMarketer)

Audience Interests

• News content captures the attention of users across all generations, and is the most popular genre with every age group except for those ages 18-29. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• News clips, viewed by 66% of those surveyed, are the most commonly watched type of online video, followed by movie clips and trailers at 49%. However, sports highlights are watched most frequently, with 48% watching at least once a week, and 11% watching daily. (Feb. 8, 2005 OPA)
• Those with higher levels of income and education are more likely to report news video viewing. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• What are people watching? Short content pieces, according to the study. 77% watch movie trailers or clips, 75% watch clips of news, sports or commentary and 67% view user-generated clips/home movies. About 48% also click to view commercials that sponsor the clips. (April 16, 2007 BizReport)
• Three quarters of all digital video users have streamed short news or sports clips, (April 2, 2007 IPSOS)
• Overall, 62% of online video viewers say that their favorite videos are those that are "professionally produced," while 19% of online video viewers express a preference for content "produced by amateurs." (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• Two thirds have downloaded amateur or homemade video clips. (April 2, 2007 IPSOS)
• Users who post video are a much smaller group than those who watch; about one in twelve (8%) adult users say they have uploaded a video file online where others can watch it. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• Young adults also trump older users in their experience with posting video content; 15% of users ages 18-29 have uploaded videos, compared with 8% of those 30-49 and roughly 5% of users age 50 and older who have posted video for others to watch. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• Young adults are almost twice as likely to point to YouTube as a source for online video; 49% of video viewers ages 18-29 say they watch YouTube videos. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• Young adults are the most "contagious carriers" in the viral spread of online video. Two-in-three (67%) video viewers ages 18-29 send others links to videos they find online, compared with just half of video viewers ages 30 and older. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• Fully 57% of online video viewers share links to the videos they find online with others. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• Overall, 10% of video viewers say they share links with others by posting them to a website or blog. Again, younger users have a greater tendency to share what they find; while 22% of video viewers ages 18-29 post links to video online, just 7% of those ages 30-49 do so. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• 75% of video viewers say they have received links to online video content. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• Fully 57% of online video viewers share links to the videos they find online with others. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• 45 percent of people only view videos when they are recommended by a friend or colleague. (July 11, 2007 Kelton Research)
• 60 percent of Americans feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of online videos and 46 percent of these people do not watch more online videos because they dread the task of weeding through too many search results. (July 11, 2007 Kelton Research)
• 43% of all digital video downloaders express some level of interest in downloading full length movies in the near future, while 38% express interest in full length TV show downloads. (April 2, 2007 IPSOS)
• Based on respondent feedback, widespread consumer use of broadband video seems to be contingent on Internet platform video content becoming more easily accessible via home television sets. (July 17, 2007 Nielsen)
• Yet another sign of young adults’ mobile tech lifestyle, those ages 18-29 are more than twice as likely when compared with any other age group to watch online video from someplace other than home or work. (July 25, 2007 Pew)

Revenue/Advertising

• At the moment, few online video viewers are paying for any of the video they watch; just 7% say they have paid to access or download video online. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• The most common barriers to downloading (longer form video) are users’ unwillingness to pay for this content, as well as a perceived difficulty or inability to burn these files onto DVD (April 2, 2007 IPSOS)
• When asked if they ever use the internet to watch or download commercials or advertisements, 13% of internet users say “yes.” (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• Young adults are twice as likely as users age 50 and older to say they watch or download commercial videos online; 22% of those 18-29, 13% of users ages 30-49, 7% of users age 50-64 and 8% of those ages 65 and older say they consume commercial video content online. (July 25, 2007 Pew)
• More than half (56.3%) of online video viewers recall seeing advertisem content they have watched. Among respondents, one out of two (52.7%) say they typically continue watching video content once they encounter an advertising unit; 40.4% say they typically stop watching. Interestingly, one-quarter (27.9%) of respondents who stop watching video content once they encounter an advertisement also say they immediately leave the website (Dec. 1, 2006 BurstMedia)
• The data revealed that consumers have a strong positive reaction to online video ads. Seventy percent of respondents said they had seen a video advertisement online, and 44% said they had taken some action as a result of seeing that ad. Specifically, 34% checked out a Web site, 15% requested information and 14% went to a store to check out a product. Most significantly, 9% said they made a purchase and 3% said they bought a subscription as a result of viewing an online video ad. (Feb. 8, 2005 OPA)
• At 0.32 percent, consumers are roughly twice as likely to play (or replay if a video starts automatically) an online video ad unit, as they are to click through on a standard JPG or GIF ad (March 20, 2007 DoubleClick)
• Online video ads experience click-through rates ranging from 0.4 percent to 0.74 percent depending on the online video format. By comparison, the click-through rate for plain GIF or JPG image ads ranges between 0.1 and 0.2 percent, based on DoubleClick data. (March 20, 2007 DoubleClick)
• Last year rich media and video advertising accounted for roughly $1.5 billion in spending, for 9 percent of total online ad spending. It's projected to grow to $6.2 billion, or 17 percent of online advertising spending, by 2011. In other words, online video advertising will quadruple in five years. (March 29, 2007 ClickZ)
• Online video advertising outperforms other online formats for branding. Based on 106 campaigns, Dynamic Logic's Q3 2006 MarketNorms data shows online video ads delivered a 6.1 percentage point improvement in aided brand awareness; a 18.1 percentage point improvement in online ad awareness; and a 9.3 percentage point improvement in message association. (March 29, 2007 ClickZ)
• About 8 percent of the video ads, on average, generated some form of user interaction with the ad unit, including expansion, video control buttons, custom interactions, and clicks. The most frequent action was ad replay (0.32 percent), which occurred more often than clicking through a standard JPG or GIF ad (0.10 percent). (March 29, 2007 ClickZ)
• Online video ads had higher CTRs (define) (0.40-0.74 percent), about four times the rate for image ads (0.10-0.15 percent). (March 29, 2007 ClickZ)
• Pre-roll advertising is annoying to users, according to Forrester Research (Forrester Research)
• Borrell Associates is releasing a new report today that reveals that newspaper sites grossed $81 million in local video advertising in 2006, compared to $32 million for local TV sites. (Feb. 12, 2007 Lost Remote)
• The value of the total online-video market — both pay and ad supported — will be worth $15.6 billion by 2012. (July 12, 2007 Direct Marketing News)

Scott Karp said a major publication would go online only in 2007. Wired said a newspaper would stop publishing in print in 2007.

I was skeptical. Jeff Javis backed me up.

Jeff and I were wrong. The Weekly World News is going online only.

International Bat Boy coverage will never be the same.