Archive for September, 2006

My latest Editor & Publisher Online column has generated a lot of e-mail, mostly pro, some con (and as noted in my previous blog item, lots of right-wing “down with the liberal media” crap). While I’m ignoring the political stuff, it’s been fascinating to watch the e-mails and blog comments from people in the news industry.

By far my favorite and most astute reader comment came from Enrique Gonzales, who is user experience analyst for NPR Digital Media. He wrote to me (and I’m quoting with his permission):

I’m reading Dealing with Darwin; How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution. My biggest take away so far is that incremental innovation doesn’t pass muster. But that’s exactly the kind of innovation our industry has prided itself in so far — the nice protect the status quo kind of innovation. You have to go bold or go home; creating a breakaway product with a clear value proposition that cannot be beat. The IPOD and Motorola Razor are the latest example. The last time anyone in the newspaper industry did this was with the launch of USATODAY.

Nail hit square on head.

My monthly Editor & Publisher Online column was published today, “Why Aren’t Newspapers Breaking Out of the Box.” It’s a look at what online editors and managers think (when speaking behind the veil) needs to be done to save the newspaper industry. (One radical idea: Put them in charge of the whole shebang — including the print edition, which would be in a subservient role to 24/7 news — or else watch the industry go down the tubes while still guided by executives afraid to make drastic and necessary corporate-wide changes.)

Oddly, my mailbox started filling up shortly after the column was posted with people commenting on it, and all saying pretty much the same thing: “We don’t read newspapers any more because the industry is so dominated by liberal journalists and editors!” Instead, I was told repeatedly, “we rely on Fox News for the real news.”

Okie-dokie. … That seems a bit bizarre, since the column doesn’t even come close to touching on politics. But the Fox News crowd filling up my inbox seems to miss the irony of complaining about alleged mainstream press bias while relying on the most blatantly biased “news” outfit on the planet. Whatever…

Anyway, I figured out that my column riled up the readers of Lucianne.com, which highlighted my column as one of the day’s discussion points. Here’s a discussion thread on the site about my column.

I haven’t been writing as much as I used to since I left the Poynter Institute early this year and began focusing my energies on my start-up company, but I do still write a monthly E&P column. So once a month, at least, I get to experience the great columnist’s joy of being called “clueless.”

I have an idea for my next Editor & Publisher Online column, but need the help of newspaper new media folks. This was also posted today on the Online-News discussion list:

I have some simple questions for you: WHAT IS IT THAT YOUR NEWSPAPER SHOULD BE DOING, BUT ISN’T? AND WHY IS THAT? (Institutional intertia? Executives still holding on to old business models? or …?)

What I’m hoping for is that some of you will look at your newspaper operations and tell me what you think is wrong with it, and what the executives at your company are failing at. I’m really hoping for some FRANK responses.

I’ll guarantee you anonymity and won’t identify your newspaper — unless you specifically tell me you would like your name and/or newspaper used.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think there are plenty of people in the newspaper industry who have great ideas and have strong opinions about what their companies should be doing — but are stymied by less creative thinking (or perhaps rather unwillingness to go out on a limb) at the corporate level.

I’d love to hear your uncensored thoughts — and I bet the rest of the industry would benefit from reading them.

What say you?

It feels like the spammers are winning today. For the last couple days, Gmail has been letting lots of spam into my in-box — whereas typically it works great at keeping the junk in my spam folder. Have the spammers figured out how to outfox Gmail and Google hasn’t adjusted yet?

Also in the last 24 hours, one of my company’s sites, YourMTB.com, has been hammered by a comment spammer who’s figured out how to get past what I thought was a pretty solid system for dealing with comment spam. The crap from this person showed up for only a short while before we got it and the onslaught out of public view. But it’s wasted our time dealing with it. Yuck.

Today is a personally significant one. You see, I’m moving out of my home office into a real office for the first time since December 1993! That was when I left my last “traditional” office job (at the San Francisco Chronicle). The only other time I spent in an actual office was on my several-time-a-year, week-long trips to Florida during the several years that I worked for the Poynter Institute. (Poynter let me work mostly from my home in Colorado.)

But today my company, the Enthusiast Group, moves into some sublease space just off Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall (and across the street from another office building I worked in many years ago, that of the Boulder Daily Camera).

While EG remains a small enterprise, we have graduated to the founders needing more time together in the same place. Home offices are great, but sometimes even today’s technology isn’t enough to keep the lines of communication open enough to grow a company properly.

Yeah, I’ll miss my 50-foot commute, for sure. On the other hand, our new digs feature lots of cool restaurants just out the door, plus a spectacular view of Boulder’s Flatirons and the mountains. It’ll be OK.

I’ve been writing about the intersection of news media (and especially newspapers) and the Internet for many years, and there are some things that just drive me crazy. One is when a newspaper decides that it doesn’t want anyone linking to its content on the Web, yet it publishes the content freely on its website. Talk about dumb.

So here’s yet another example of such bone-headedness by a newspaper. The Santa Barbara News-Press had its lawyer send a cease and desist letter to a website that was linking to its paid obituaries — which it publishes in a free-access area of the site. The Santa Barbara website edhat.com was providing links to the obituaries (not copying them). In other words, it was steering traffic to the paper’s website.

First, so what if edhat.com is seen as a competitor to the News-Press. It’s Dumb with a capital D to turn away traffic that people want to give you.

Second, the threaten-them-with-a-lawyer approach is DUMB with all-caps. The reasonable way to prevent a competitor from linking to you (not that I can imagine a rational reason why you would want to do that on free-access online content) is to use technical means to block traffic that’s referred by the competitor’s domain. That’ll put an instant stop to them linking to you.

(Thanks to Amy Gahran for pointing this out.)

When Steve Irwin died from an encounter with a stingray recently, his death was caught on video. The video was not made public, and as far as we know, only law enforcement people involved have access to it. I hope it’s never made public — but I bet it will find its way onto the Internet eventually. His death was a major news event, and Irwin was a big celebrity, so it’s not unreasonable to expect that someone will leak it. At which point it will spread around the Internet at breakneck speed.

Remember the terrorist videos of beheadings a while back? Yep, those ended up online. All it takes is one sick individual to post something like that, then boom. It’s available for everyone to see.

In the old world of media, we’d never see something like the video recording of Steve Irwin’s actual death. Editors at news organizations around the world would exercise restraint and protect the public from such ugly content. In the world of Internet media, it’s almost inevitable that no matter how ugly or sick or shocking, video like this will be available for anyone with a desire to view it.

It’s only a matter of time before this happens with the Irwin death video. That’s the reality, no matter how much we wish it wasn’t so.

For a long time now, I’ve wondered why Rob Curley reserved his considerable talents as a new media guru and visionary for small newspapers. He led the new media operations at the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World for many years, then moved to a bigger company (Scripps) but worked for one of its small papers, the Naples Daily News.

Well, Curley has finally been lured to the “big time.” He’s accepted a position as vice president of product development for Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive. The press release about the appointment says, “He will lead a team dedicated to the rapid development and deployment of new tools for journalists and viewers.”

Curley joins former colleague Adrian Holovaty, a brilliant technologist/journalist who joined the company last year.

It’ll be interesting to see if Curley is able to move this big ship as quickly as he was able to with the smaller ones in Kansas and Florida. I’ve long thought that the stuff he’s done over the years — always pushing the envelope — should be implemented at bigger papers. It was a mystery to me why Scripps didn’t put him in charge of a flagship like the Rocky Mountain News but instead deployed him to a small Florida property.

Curley has told me in the past that there were advantages to working at a small paper and he thought he could influence the industry better by demonstrating his ideas in smaller markets. I don’t really buy that; I think Scripps was being conservative and should have put him to work on a big metro paper as soon as they hired him.

My “August” column for Editor & Publisher is online now: “Small Should Be ‘The New Big’ for Newspapers and the Web.”

Actually, the column is dated September 5, 2006, but it really is my August column. I was pretty late turning it in toward the end of the month, then E&P took a few days to get it posted. I’ll have a “second” September column before the end of the month.

Want to see some absolutely stunning, cutting edge news multimedia? Look here:

Rising From Ruin: Two Towns Rebuild After Katrina from MSNBC.com. Wow.

Comment from MSNBC.com executive producer for editorial experience Ashley Wells, which accompanied his pointer to me: “And it only took 9 months!”