In a piece about data portability, John Battelle shifts into a discussion about the difference between a business that competes on price vs. a business that competes on service. He says:

An example. My local market charges far more for a good bottle of wine than many shops that are nearby. But there’s a wine guy who works at that market who knows wine cold, and who I trust. Also, the market is close to my home, and I have a personal relationship with the fellow (OK, here’s the reference to the book I’m working on - I have a “conversation” going with this merchant). Those factors, combined with a certain ambiance at the store that I really like, all lead to one result: I buy my wine at the more expensive store. Why? Because the store competes on more than price.

Ironically, I just found a booze store near my house that not only has great prices, but also great service — an owner who knows his booze (not just wine) cold. But that’s beside the point.

Battelle is absolutely right. He’s talking about differentiation. He’s talking about competitive advantage.

The newspaper industry is awash in talk about disruption and innovation. I do it, too. It’s important. We’ve had API do NewspaperNext. But there’s more to saving this industry than coming up with new ideas. I want to know when API is going to do NewspaperBetter.

All of the evidence suggest that ever since the Woodstein era began, readership and circulation have been in decline. Now, there are lots of reasons for that (subject of a future post), but there’s also little doubt that there is something about American newspaper journalism since the 1970s that is turning people off.

We’re not even winning the content battle on the web, so it isn’t just about delivery, convenience or changing lifestyles. It’s also about something that we’re doing or not doing.

Through all of the debates we’ve had about video, there is a “quality crowd” that seems to think the only thing I care about is slapping up a bunch of crappy videos just to make video.

That totally misses the point.

The point is about reinventing newspaper journalism, and I believe video is going to be a big part of newspaper journalism from here on out, and reinvention is all about doing it better.

The quality crowd doesn’t seem to understand, or doesn’t seem to care, that quality isn’t about the camera you carry, the software you use or how much time you spend in an editing bay (if you’re using an editing bay, by the way, you’re in overkill mode). Quality is about the skill, knowledge, experience, understanding, talent and intuition that helps you get bits of interesting stuff — the stuff people really care about, want to read about, or want to see and hear.

It’s the content, not the presentation, that matters most.

Again, I point you to Ira Glass on getting good.

Getting good at any creative endeavor is hard work. It takes time. I don’t care how smart you are, it takes time. Getting good isn’t about equipment. It’s about heart and soul.

So the best thing to do to get good is to do it. Get started. Explore and discover and feel free to fail. You must make yourself create things and not be afraid of some of the crap you will create along the way.

That’s also what my posts encouraging journalists to dive deep into the online social life and conversation are all about.

To be a great modern journalist, you MUST be a wired journalist. You must GET online. That doesn’t mean you just know how to do a Google search, read a few blogs and send a few e-mails. It means you get the culture, the attitudes and the expectations of the online crowd.

Until you do it, you’ll never understand that there is a difference. That’s why I don’t take very seriously the critics who say this call to action is a lot of bunk. They haven’t done it. They don’t know what they’re talking about, or what we’re talking about.

During one of the football games I watched last week, the announcer referred to an interview he did that week with a first-year NFL coach. When asked what was different about the NFL than he expected, the coach said that what he expected to find in the NFL was a group of professional football players, and he was shocked to find just how few professionals there were in the league. Very few players in the NFL, he said, are professionals. They don’t go about their jobs and their routines the way a professional would.

I submit that if you’re a professional journalist, you’ve already done most of what I put in my suggested MBO plan. And if you don’t think you need to do those things, than I question whether you’re really a professional.

It is time for newspaper journalists to set up and start creating the competitive advantage that will help us win. Current newspaper journalism is pretty much a commodity. When what you produce becomes a commodity, you can no longer win on price (and some journalists think we should be charging a fee for what people are already telling us doesn’t much interest them). You can only win on a competitive advantage. For journalists that should be doing a better job of story selection, presentation and interaction with the people in their communities.

If you don’t believe me, go read Mindy McAdams. She’s got it exactly right. I wish I had written that post. It could be the primer for an API NewspaperBetter project.

Ten years after his death, Charles Bukowski has a new book of poems hitting the market. And according to this review, it’s better than some of the work released while he was alive. Unlike the reviewer, however, I prefer his prose to his poetry.

If there’s any romance about Los Angeles at all, it was largely created by Raymond Chandler.

No wonder — he lived all over — 30 different homes and appartments in 30 years.

This is a tour just waiting to happen.

Real writers write because they enjoy the process, the exploration, the way words sound when strung together, and the chance to memorialize their own ideas. If anybody reads their words, great. If not, that’s fine, too. Real writers write with an audience in mind, and love to know their words connect with other people, but they write first for themselves. Let’s get this straight: Real writers love to write. Hack writers think “writing is tiresome.” (via Instapundit).

My friend Scott Riley is a very good story teller. Go read this piece if you’ve got some time (though, I’ve never heard of this Pamela).

Happy Birthday Charles Bukowski.

My friends who are friends and fans of Roger L. Simon probably won’t like David Kipen’s review of his latest novel.

I don’t want to oversell this poem, but I think it’s pretty good.

For a long time, I’ve thought it’s the best poem I’ve ever written, but maybe that’s a myth I just built in my own mind.

I wrote it in 1986, when I was still in college, and dating an older woman, and the relationship was running its course. I was somewhat tied down because I was living with this lady and had few financially viable options for an alternative residence.

I wrote the poem and showed it to a few friends. They all immediately recognized what the real meaning was, and they praised it. Repeatedly, they praised it.

Lacking judgment, and filled with ego, I showed it to my girlfriend. She immediately recognized herself in the poem, and was (probably rightfully so) was offended. She demanded I destroy the poem. Lacking courage in the face of homelessness, I destroyed the copy I had in hand. I neglected to mention a trusted friend had a copy.

For years, that copy was the only copy. I never got around to making another copy or putting it on disk.

A while back, when I started putting my poems on this blog, it was the first poem that sprung to mind for publication. But I couldn’t find that single copy. I knew it had to be in my house somewhere, but without it in hand, I was worried that it was gone forever.

Yesterday, I found a box of old computer catalogs. Stuck in the middle was a folder of my poems, including this one — which I present to you now: Helen Wasn’t Worth Fighting For.

I’m not blogging because my DSL is totally DOA.  Won’t be fixed until tomorrow evening at the earliest.

And here I uncovered evidence that aliens stole all of the WMD. Guess I’ll have to blog about that some other day.

Bob Benz asks — what was your first literary-sex encounter? (This post should drive Google wild).

I don’t think enough people read this post back when I wrote it. I expected Ken Layne to praise it as a damn fine piece of writing, but I don’t think he read it. Later, I learned he was down in South America some where doing some dirty deed for the CIA or something at the time I posted the story originally.

Of course, I have more regular readers now, when I’m past 1180 posts, then I was at 271 posts. So why not repost something.

Especially when I finally get a picture of the truck that proves it’s all true.

It’s posts like this that keep me going back to Ken Layne’s site … damn, wish I could write this good. Somebody should like this guy run a newspaper or something.

At that LA bloggy thingy last Saturday, I met many interesting people and saw many blogging buddies, but there is one person I met that I haven’t written about yet: David Kipen, book editor for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Kipen struck me immediately as a man of devilish charm and understated intelligence, meaning he struck me as humble, but possibly only because he let me dominate the conversation. I tend to get overly excited when I meet book people who share my passion for words about California. I opened up immediately when Kipen told me that he what he reviews mostly are books about California.

This evening I’ve spent a little time reading some of Kipen’s work. He’s a damn fine writer, and I’m adding him to my permalinks so I can keep tabs on what he has to say.

The man can flat out write. Consider these first three graphs from his review of Marc Reisner’s final book:

What if the pioneers had settled America from west to east — from California toward the Atlantic — instead of the other way around? Just for starters, we’d probably see way more statistics calculating the economic destructiveness of nature’s most underestimated act of God: winter.

Most Californians have had a bellyful of hearing how unnatural it is to live here, coming as it usually does from people who spend half the year putting on six layers of clothing just to fetch the morning paper. But a sobering new book has just arrived that should scare every living Californian silly — and it was written by one of our own.

“A Dangerous Place” is the last public testament of the late Marc Reisner, whose landmark book “Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water” should continue to shape debate about the West’s future for as long as people are fool enough to live here. Reisner died of cancer 2 1/2 years ago, but he left behind “A Dangerous Place,” a cruelly truncated stump of a book that nevertheless helps explain the seismic haymaker slowly gathering strength enough to floor us all.

Reisner’s Cadillac Desert is one of the best books ever written about California, and I didn’t even know he was dead. David has me thinking I need to go out and pick up his new book.

Kipen’s California tends to skew northward, but what should we expect from a reviewer writing for a Bay Area paper? One thing about him, at least he’s honest. He isn’t afraid point out what’s shabby about a particular book … in fact, one refreshing aspect of Kipen’s reviews is that he actually writes about the book, instead of trying to impress the reader with his erudition, which is what you find in most LAT reviews.

If you love California, go read Kipen — you’ll find some new treasures.

A another post on war poetry. A good one. You should read it. It’s from Aaron Haspel.

Joseph Duemer has actually posted something I can largely agree with, and it’s about poetry and politics, even.

Politics and war are valid topics of poetry. If poets of the past were somehow prevented from covering such topics, we wouldn’t have Homer to read today. Of course, there’s probably been more bad poetry penned in the an effort to advance some political cause than any other subject, but that doesn’t mean that a true poet can’t touch the sublime nature of the human condition through mere words on paper. War, after all, is not that far removed from love. The depth of human emotion it engenders is as profound, soul stirring and revealing as any other subject a poet might touch.

I tried to find Laura Bush’s exact words about the subject, and can’t. But if she said politics has no place in American literature, she’s wrong. She’s obviously never read Twain, or Hemingway or Irving. In poetry, as has been noted, Whitman and Dickinson both touched on the political, especially so Whitman. Whitman was a man of profound political passion. So much so that he wrote one of the most famous poems about any president, a Republican president, ever written (though I’m not sure it really qualifies as an example of  great American literature).

Where I disagree with Duemer — and I can’t do a whole post agreeing with him, can I — is in this phrase: ” … their alienation is my alienation.”

I invite Mr. Duemer to counter me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. Their alienation (I’m speaking primarily of Whitman and Dickinson, as I’m too unfamiliar with Hughes to comment) was not an alienation against political America as they knew it. Whitman would love America today as much as he loved it 150 years ago — because we remain a vibrant land full of possibilities that gives each individual soul room to expand and celebrate itself — Whitman’s alienation had more to do with his own struggles with his homosexuality, and his general sense of not fitting in with proper society. For Dickinson, she just wasn’t comfortable around people. She had no quarrel with her government, nor with the social structure of her day. What I read of Mr. Duemer to date is an alienation against the government, against our values, and with our ambitions. Those are concepts, I would argue, that Mr. Whitman and Ms. Dickerson would find strange and hard to fathom. I’m not trying to speak for the dead, merely offer a counter viewpoint.

Yeah, what he said.

Author Garrett Soden send along the following note:

I just discovered a new blog which I think you might want to check out, if you’re not familiar with it. It’s BookLinker at http://booklinker.blogspot.com, run by Dean Hamilton. This isn’t a free-ranging blog; Dean focuses only on books, posting his own book reviews that are not only well-written but are also filled with links to material that enriches whatever the book is about. Check it out.

I did. The site is exactly what Garrett says it is. I just want to know how Dean gets time to read all of those books???

A while back I did this interview with Garrett Soden about his book “Falling.” To me, it’s a fascinating topic. If you haven’t read the interview yet, I recommend it.

The book is now available through Amazon.

The office of The Point, the student newspaper of Point Loma Nazarene Colege, was in an old building on campus called Cabrillo Hall. The building was once the home of Madame Kathrine Tingley, who built a campus for the theosophical society on a beautiful stretch of the Point Loma peninsula in 1900. Eventually this property was acquired by the Nazarenes and turned into a Christian liberal arts college. I attended college there from 1985 to 1987. During my second year there, I became editor of the paper.

I spent many late nights in Cabrillo Hall that year. Usually, I was with fellow staffers, but quite often I was alone.

Cabrillo Hall was a beautiful old building and I cherished it. It hadn’t been treated well by administrators or students, but it was still a building of sturdy character and elagant design. With age, it seemed to take on its own personality. And, reportedly, it was haunted by Madame Tingley herself.

My year as editor wasn’t always easy. I certainly had some good times, but there are also many emotional lows. I had also had a few run-ins with the school administration. By the end of the year, I was a bit disallusioned with my PLNC experience.

One night in Cabrillo Hall, I decided to pay poetic tribute to a building I felt certain would some day be torn down to make way for the school’s progress. The poem is called “Cabrillo Hall.”

Cabrillo Hall still stands, but in a different location on campus. Also, the wing that contained the newspaper’s office has been stripped away, so future historians will not be able to place a sign there that reads “Howard Owens slept here,” and many a night I did.

When you read:

O to be lifted forever
in the resonant ark,
your salt-stung aria!

you know you are not reading a po-mo poet. Thank you to Joseph Duemer for first turning me on to Henry Gould. It’s been a long time since I found a living poet I could admire.

I’ve just added his book Way Stations: Poems 1985-1997 to my recommended reading list, even though I do not own it yet myself. But I want it very badly. Next pay check, maybe.