There’s nothing to this blog thing, right? It’s just a lot of blow hards spouting opinions.

Well, upstart HuffingtonPost.com has surpassed DrudgeReport.com (not a blog, but more of a big media headline aggregator, and so well established now as to be pretty MSM) in traffic, and according to compete.com, is gaining on the Chicago Tribune.

(via Lost Remote)

MediaGeeks.org is the media-specific search engine I created several weeks ago using Google Customer Search.

If you haven’t tried it yet, please do.

Personally, I’ve found it very useful for looking stuff I’ve read some place some time but forgotten where, or even if I can remember I read in in Romenesko or elsewhere, it’s a quick and convenient way to find the exact post I want.

Also, any bloggers who would be willing to add a link to their blog roll to MediaGeeks.org, that would be greatly appreciated.

Michael Arrington started TechCrunch in June, 2005. It’s now the second most popular blog in the world. According to Compete.com, it is read by at least 900,ooo people per month, but that wouldn’t include the reported 500,000 RSS feed subscribers.

As TechCrunch has risen, Business 2.0 has gone out of business, while CNet and Ziff-Davis have hit financial hard times.

Arrington, when asked about blogs taking page views away from traditional news media, had this to say on Charlie Rose the other night:

It’s a very raw, very quick form of journalism. It’s not editing, it’s not balanced, it’s opinionated. A lot of people really want that.

I read TechCrunch everyday. The blog, now a group blog, breaks a lot of tech news. But every news worthy item contains what some might call opinion. I call it informed insight. Arrington and his team know what the hell they’re talking about and I value and trust their point of view.

TechCrunch has become popular because it is credible. It’s credible to its readers because over time they’ve learned that TechCrunch gets right more than it gets wrong, and it’s never proven itself untruthful, and when they’ve made mistakes, they’ve corrected them quickly. TechCrunch readers don’t look for fair and balanced. They look for relevance and understanding.

Before TechCrunch became a go-to blog for tech news, it had no brand. Arrington, who was pretty much an unknown outside of small circle of Silicon Valley insiders before starting the blog, made it credible; he made it a brand.

The next time some journalist talks about how important their newspaper brand is, think about TechCrunch, which demonstrates that brand isn’t about what you’ve done over the past 100 years — it’s about what you’re doing today.

While talking about journalism and blogging, I need to quote this Romenesko post, because it’s lingered in my mind for several days:

Many bloggers see Josh Marshall’s Polk Award as vindication of their enterprise, writes Noam Cohen — “that anyone can assume the mantle of reporting on the pressing issues affecting the nation and the world, with the imprimatur of a mainstream media outlet or not.” Marshall says of bloggers: “I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging. We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”

Many times I’ve written about the need for journalists to blog because I think journalists need to get away from — at least online — from just repurposing what they do in print into the new kind of web journalism.

Web journalism is more raw, more conversational and makes immediacy and relevance more important than crafting the perfect, complete package.

Previously: Video can’t win on production quality alone (because of Chris Anderson’s quote about relevance vs. quality).

Howard Weaver linked to this post from Zac Echola before I saw it, but it’s an important map of how the wired get and filter news.

The following quote should be required reading in every newsroom in the U.S. tomorrow morning.

Shortly after polls closed last night, my wife got a text message from Obama’s campaign. He was the projected winner of the South Carolina primary.

A few minutes later I logged into Gmail, where Obama had already sent me an email about the victory and where I could watch his speech.
About a half an hour later a friend in Washington sent me a text with the percentage breakdowns.

This morning I logged on to Facebook to see a notification from Obama, a simple copy/paste job from the email sent earlier.

Sometime today, I’ll watch his speech and Clinton’s concession speech on YouTube, since I was busy playing Super Mario Galaxy while he actually gave the speech.

Except for a CNN breaking update I got via Twitter last night (after Obama’s text message), I knew who won the primary without ever seeing a newspaper or TV site.

Only today, when I checked CNN’s excellent primary elections section did I go to an MSM site. News that I care about comes to me, despite the source.

I, like many other people, only go looking for news (on my days off) if something has first come to me to pique my interest. Then I find a site with valuable, contextual information laid out in a way that I can explore the data (in this case, exit polls). I can passively receive information I’d like to know.

If you’re not actively seeking out your audience, you’re doing something wrong.

Media organizations should be doing the same thing Obama does. It should be everywhere I am and it should provide valuable, easy-to-use added context and content if and when I decide to hit their sites.

There’s obviously one point to be made here — that news organizations need to make it a practice to push out their content to every available channel.

But the other lesson is: Your audience is also sharing what they know, either informally, or via special-interest sources.  The big question is, when your audience wants more and trusted information, are they going to find it on your web site as soon as they want it?

Web-first publishing needs to become a newsroom habit.  It’s the thing you do automatically, so that when any size story breaks, and your audience wants more and trusted information — and a place to discuss it — your site is ready for them.

For many months, I’ve wanted to play around with setting up a vertical search engine using Google Custom Search.

Today, I finally got around to it.

Here it is: MediaGeeks.org, a vertical search engine for media professionals.

The initial group of 140 URLs I’ve fed into the search engine are mostly from my blog roll along with obvious media sites (such as E&P and OJR).

If you know of a media site I should have included but didn’t, send me an e-mail to howard owens (one word) -at- gmail dot com.

Also, if you view the source of the home page, you can see how to add the MediaGeeks.org search widget to your blog or site.

The search engine is only useful to the media community uses it, so link to it. Tel your friends.

I’ve had a couple of reporters contact me to say they had already done things on the list, but were inspired to do more, including Stephanie.

One reporter has legitimately (no prior wiredness and included supervisor on e-mail to me) taken up the objectives (no blog yet).

And this Roving Reporter blog just appeared from an unnamed journalist at at daily in Mass.  Said reporter is also new to Twitter, judging from a note at the bottom of the blog.

We’ve discussed before that journalists need to get an RSS reader and read it.

Over on Back Channel, I offer a list of ten RSS feeds that should be in your feed reader.  I didn’t post it here, because the list isn’t intended to be just for journalists, but for anybody who values being a well-rounded person, which we would hope would apply to all journalists.

Wow. Amazing multimedia project from the journalism students at Ohio University. South of Athens. What a great way to tell a community’s story. (via John Temple).

I’m not a big fan of doing Flash just to do Flash, but when it’s done right, it’s a pretty amazing experience.

It’s been kind of a theme of my for some time now: If you want to grow revenue, grow audience first (most explicitly in this post and this post).

Terry Heaton finds this quote:

Google’s senior vice president, Engineering & Research Alan Eustace and vice president, Engineering Jeff Huber:

“(Google) accepts that some projects will never have an associated revenue stream.” (Link)

And Heaton writes:

That’s because revenue isn’t the problem; audience is the problem. And we need to fix the problem.

Exactly.

I happen to believe that if we can grow audience, revenue will grow exponentially. The more people who find our sites essential to their lives, the more we can charge for advertising.

(via Lost Remote).

Rich Gordon’s latest white paper on successful audience growth projects is now available. It’s on the Asbury Park Press’s DataUniverse.

In the five months from December 2006 to April 2007, DataUniverse has generated more than 25 million page views, D’Ambrosio said. That’s an average of more than 5 million page views per month – more than a quarter of the Web site’s total.

“I’ll be honest with you. I did not expect it would generate a huge amount of traffic,” Hidlay said. “What this really shows is that the public really wants access to the raw data. We have been amazed at what a traffic builder and audience builder this is.”

When a new database is published on DataUniverse, D’Ambrosio said, users don’t look at just that one. “They then start exploring all the databases – all the other databases explode with traffic.” Traffic also increases to the rest of the paper’s Web site, D’Ambrosio said.

It seems so obvious — newspapers are great at gathering data (when I was reporter, I remember having reams of data stuffed in my desk drawers), and the web makes publishing data in easy-access formats so relatively simple. Plus, newspapers online, in my view, have a journalistic obligation to be a repository for as much information about their communities as possible.

It’s great to see solid evidence in audience growth for a project like this.

My suggestion though: drop the current o-wrap, go with a simpler design, and run only contextually relevant advertising (such as AdSense).

Disclosure: Gordon’s project is brought to you by the Digital Media Federation’s (part of the NAA) audience development committee, which I chair.

One of my pet peeves is the misuse of the word “censor.”

To accuse a corporation or other private entity of “censorship” is to twist a vital distinction of the First Amendment.

A corporation, for example, has the same First Amendment rights as any private individual. Those rights include the rights not to publish.

YouTube, for example, is within its rights to remove videos it finds, at its sole discretion, violates its terms of service. That is not censorship.

When the GOVERNMENT forces YouTube to remove a video, or threatens a journalist with jail for publishing anything, THAT is censorship.

The government has the power to censor. Private entities do not.

Another slice of difference: If a corporation tells you not to publish something through its distribution channel, you have the right to take your content elsewhere. If the government says don’t publish, you risk jail even if you release that content to another country.

Even if by contract, the private corporation has the right to sue you for violating a contract, that is not censorship, because you agreed to the contract in the first place. The government, however, has the sanction of physical coercion to compel your compliance. Jail, torture and murder (if the government is really out of control) is a more menacing threat then a civil suit.
That last distinction explains, I think, why refraining from a cavalier use of “censorship” is important. We want the word remain as frightening as it actually is. It is not merely a synonym for violating journalistic independence or stifling free speech.

In this blog post from SFWeekly, Matt Smith is all over the word “censorship” as it relates to former jailed journalist Josh Wolf accepting a paid-for-blogging gig. His sponsor is an unnamed tech company and the contract allows that company to have some control over the content of the blog.

In the accompanying video, Smith even goes so far as to use the hilarious anachronism “the corporate man.”

However, when you have to private parties entering into a contract that specifies the terms of publication before hand, and both sides agree to the language, that is not censorship. It may not be the right thing to do, but it is not censorship.

What’s more disturbing from an ethical standpoint is that Wolf is apparently prohibited from EVER revealing who his sponsor is. I find that hard to believe, but that’s what I hear him saying in the video. If that’s true, that violates what I believe to be standard blogger ethics: to disclose your potential conflicts of interest.

Such an arrangement, if true, should cause any readers of Wolf’s blog to distrust everything he writes, because how are they to discern which words passed through third-party oversight for approval and which didn’t, and just who is this overlord anyway?

That’s not a good thing, I think.

UPDATE: Josh Wolf left a comment on this post and says it will be clear who the tech company is — the blog will be hosted on the company’s domain.

If journalism dies, it won’t be because of Google or Yahoo!, or even craigslist, it will be because of people like Neil Henry — members of the cranky old journalist brigade who whine about the state of online affairs while insisting on remaining blithely ignorant of what’s really going on online.

Jay Rosen has a nice round up of blogger response’s to Henry’s column, which I didn’t have time to deal with when it came out last week.

If you’re one of those people who think, “Gosh, darn it, Google should give us some money.” Or, “Gosh darn it, if only we didn’t give our content away for free,” then I have a suggestion for you: educate yourself before you start lecturing others on how modern journalism should work.

You’re obviously smart (I mean, geez, you’ve survived in the journalism world since Ernie Pyle first used an ink well, so you gotta have some grey matter), and modern journalism can use your brains, but you’re doing none of us any good with shallow conclusions and misinformed diatribes.

Educate yourself about online. The best place to start is by creating an account here. I also recommend accounts here, here and here.

We’re back to to discussion Walter Hussman’s diatribe against free content. This time it’s Gordon Borrell taking apart Mr. Hussman’s thesis.

Mr. Hussman is correct that daily circulation at The Columbus Dispatch has fallen 5.8 percent since it dropped its subscription model for content on its Web site. What he did not state, however, was that The Dispatch’s Web reach went from five percent under the subscription model to more than 25 percent under the free model, according to Nielsen data. According to Gerry Barker, general manager of the company’s digital operations, “The resulting growth in online revenue dwarfs anything we could ever generate as a paid site. This is about building a sustainable business model and positioning our company for the future.”

I didn’t know this:

By 2006, newspapers operated the largest-grossing Web sites in 95% of all U.S. markets. And 60% of those Web sites were generating more cash flow for their companies than the largest-grossing terrestrial radio station in those markets.

Tell me again how we should charge for access online?

Previously: Reasons why the paid content model for general circ dailies is a bad idea

Paul Farhi, writing in AJR, wonders if hyperlocal journalism can pay.

Easy answer: Of course it can.

Hyperlocal journalism is just a fad term for what good community papers have been doing for hundreds of years. It’s a fad term for the kind of nuts-and-bolts community coverage many daily newspapers abandoned in the wake of Woodward and Bernstein. It’s a fad term for building sites enhanced with granular databases and user-generated content (Remember the days when every newspaper ran every obit for free, every police and fire call, and had the ladies’ social committee chairwoman writing a regular column?).

Hyperlocal journalism is nothing new. It’s just a new word. It’s paid before. It will pay again. The web presents new revenue challenges, but history proves, the market is there. We just need to figure out how to get there from here.

Farhi sounds a far more skeptical tone in his piece. His pessimism is based largely on the failure of Backfence. But Backfence failed for multiple reasons, none of which are in any way related to a number of other business strategies that can be built around hyperlocal, especially the kinds that newspaper companies should pursue.

And while Farhi doesn’t see much to celebrate in the current state of many other small, non-newspaper affiliated hyperlocal operations, he only lightly touches on the theme that success for these sites should be measured on completely different terms than what a large company might try to accomplish. An independent hyperlocal site can survive with much more modest goals and still serve as an exceptionally pesky disruptive force for established media companies.

Here’s two interesting bits:

Smith points out that most of the weeklies have larger editorial and sales staffs than the Post in Loudoun (the Times-Mirror has 15 full- and part-time newsroom employees). What’s more, the weeklies have an unquantifiable advantage over the big-city paper: local brand names and strong ties to the community. The Times-Mirror, for one, can trace its founding to 1798.

“Where we fell down was getting the initial traffic in,” he (Mark Potts) says. “When it works, it’s mind-blowing. But it takes time to build, and it’s difficult if you don’t have a big media organization behind you.”

So, what happens when you take those small, well-branded institutions that have been covering their communities for a long time combined with the resources of a big media organization, and you put that together with the tools and ideas behind hyperlocal journalism? Well, I think we’re going to find out.

Our team in Rockford has put together a great multimedia package to entice talented people to join the staff there.

I like it because it involves real people from the newsroom, which gives job candidates a great sense of who they might be working with, and it contains great information about what it might be like to live and work in Rockford.

Current openings include photographer, multimedia editor, and copy editor.

There are openings elsewhere at GateHouse, and many of them are listed on our corporate site. You’ll note that several openings are in online. Most of those jobs are based in Fairport, NY, but we’re also looking for regional sales managers.

At GateHouse, we’re intent on building a great local media company. If you are the best and want a better job, we would like to hear from you.

Sean Blanda has pulled together a collection of articles and blog posts on newspaper.com design.

He’s right, it is a topic of too limited coverage, so his collection of links is useful.

One of the more innovative newspaper web sites is the SpokesmanReview.com. Ken Sands has been online publisher there for two years (according to his LinkedIn profile, but it seems he’s been with the paper longer).

Sands is moving on.

I got a LinkedIn notification today that he’s starting a new job in August. He’ll be executive editor at Congressional Quarterly.

Congratulations, Ken.

UPDATE: Romenesko has more.

If you’re a good reporter, you’ve never had time enough to report and write all the stories you wanted. You never had time to cultivate all the sources you should. You constantly worried about not getting enough time to go in-depth on the biggest stories, and at most papers, you’ve fretted about the lack of news hole for your Pulitzer-worthy material.

The complaints certainly pre-date the web.

When I was a reporter at The Daily Californian we used to laugh at the San Diego Union and Evening Tribune reporters who complained about being overworked when they had to produce a whooping two by-lined stories per week, while we cranked out two or three a day, plus briefs, plus rotated obits and police and fire logs, and wrote for special sections and weekly features.

Our newsroom could have transitioned to the web easily because you couldn’t produce that much copy without learning to write and report efficiently and quickly.

And we still won our fair share of awards.

In today’s news rooms, you’ve got all the same complaints of twenty and thirty years ago about too many stories and not enough time, but you also have increased competition for your time and attention from the online edition. Editor and Publisher has a long piece on how news rooms are dealing with the changes in coverage.

There’s no doubt that journalists have more work to do and need to work more efficiently. And I’m sure there are more stories that don’t get done, or don’t get the knee-deep treatment they might have gotten in the past. But you know what, what else are we going to do?

There’s two aspects to an increased focus on the web. First, we may be fighting for our very survival; and, second, the web represents our single best opportunity to grow readership and grow revenue. If we want to get through this transition time, we better produce stellar web sites.

And that’s going to take all of us working together. It’s not going to be easy. But for those of us we care about protecting quality journalism, I don’t think we have any other choice. This isn’t the time to raise the white flag.

If you care, I think you will put far more effort into figuring out how to win in a turbulent media environment and far less time resisting the changes. But then, I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy anyway.

My optimism is spurred by the continuing double-digit growth of online revenue.

We’ll get there. It will be fine.

Danny explains the new feature here. Cool, uh?

Ryan Sholin introduces me to the word “freemium.”

It means, it seems, giving stuff away for free and then taking on up sells.

His example is his recent decision to upgrade his Flickr account.

Up sells are easy in classifieds, as Ryan notes, but not so easy in content.

But I’d take the lesson of Flickr and Feedburner and WordPress and apply them not to content, but to services. What services can newspaper companies create that have free uses but paid upgrades can be bolted on?

Or, how can the relationship a newspaper.com has with members of its community be leveraged to entice the most loyal users to buy services from the paper? What would those services be? What jobs-to-be-done can we help our readers solve?

Free content isn’t just about generating page views to boost advertising revenue. It’s also about building relationships with the people who are attracted to that content.