Archive for July, 2007

No sooner had I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows tonight than I received this photo of my youngest daughter being magical. She picked up her flying skill in a digital photography class; this was today’s project.

That’s how my latest Editor & Publisher Online column is rated by 11 reviewers (as I write this) on Newstrust. The column is about the larger issue of the proliferation of alternative news sources online (blogs, grassroots media, et al), and the lack of any competent guidance in telling consumers whether those sources are credible or not — and it discusses the NewsTrust non-profit initiative as one specific approach to alleviating the problem.

I don’t feel like it was a brilliant column by any means, so 3.9 ain’t such a bad score. Editor & Publisher itself is rated as an overall source as 3.7 currently on NewsTrust, so I guess I’m a bit ahead of the game. Still, the score feels a little like getting a “B” on a writing assignment in college.

You can read the column yourself if you want to learn more about the online source-credibility issue and NewsTrust in particular.

But seeing NewsTrust in action and my own work reviewed, a few other thoughts are worth dissecting here (and weren’t covered in my column):

1. Journalists will need to get used to this public grading. Sure, we all get reader feedback: letters to the editor, private e-mail praise and rants, bloggers opining on the quality and/or content of our reporting, etc. But this statistical public assessment of what we write is another thing altogether. I do think that it will allow journalists willing to take in criticism to learn how to do better. It’s a good thing, but it could make some journalists uncomfortable.

2. I suspect that NewsTrust will turn into a useful hiring tool. The reporter candidate who talks a good game but whose NewsTrust-ranked stories consistently get ranked in the 2 out of 5 range may have trouble getting hired. Handy tool for hiring editors. Maybe not so great for average reporters who want to find a new job.

3. If NewsTrust does have an effect on individual careers, I can envision some journalists trying to game the system.

I like Facebook … a lot. Since it opened up to everyone (not just college students), and since it opened up to third-party applications, the site has become enormously useful. It even seems to be usurping the much more business-like social networking site LinkedIn. In the last couple weeks — through a combination of business colleagues “friending” me and me reaching out to “friend” people I know in my industry — my Facebook friends list has overtaken my LinkedIn friends list, by about double. (It’s less of a social friends thing for me, and more of a business tool.)

I think what I prefer about Facebook over LinkedIn is that it does combine business and personal. You can find out some personal things about me on my Facebook profile, such as my political bent, and find photos from family vacations. Some people I know dislike Facebook exactly because of this, not wanting to mix their personal and business lives. It’s probably not for everyone, but I like this aspect of Facebook.

But while Facebook is great (IMHO), it’s not good for everything, and I think there’s a place for niche social networks in our lives as well. My company is in that business, so of course I believe that. I just noticed this quote from Sheila Lennon’s Subterranean Homepage News blog, which I think points to the opportunity that companies like mine are addressing:

Facebook is the opposite of what I’m looking for

Somewhere, I like to think, there is or will be a network comprising only those who can find it. And when I finally stumble in there, they’ll say, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

It’s not Facebook, a “social network” of 30 million or so.

I have a feeling that this week may be an unproductive one at a lot of companies. Why? Harry Potter, of course.

I stopped in the camera store today to pick up something, and the sales clerk complained about being sleepy. He stayed up really, really late to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, he said, and plans to do so again tonight. (Saturday was the first day you could buy the book.)

His rush is to get to the end before someone blurts out the ending to him, or he hears or reads about it in the media or online. Ergo, late nights ahead.

Not surprisingly, this guy said he does not have kids. You don’t have to be a kid to enjoy reading about Harry — and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m as addicted as are my daughters.

Perhaps this is happening to you, too. … I’ve been getting a lot of Facebook friend notification/requests lately. I used to get lots of friend requests on LinkedIn, the business social networking site — but those have really tapered off. I still have many more “friends” on my LinkedIn account than on Facebook, but Facebook will catch up at this rate.

Why is this happening? Well, of course there’s the fact that Facebook was hugely successful in its campus-only phase, and now that it’s opened up to everyone else, folks are starting to see for themselves why it was so popular with the college crowd.

More importantly, in my view, Facebook has been really smart by opening itself up to third-party widgets. A wave of people are creating them, and they make Facebook fun and more useful than the original Facebook. The new open nature of Facebook is more appealing than the closed nature of sites like LinkedIn.

In a comment to an earlier blog item, I got the following question from Larry. (I’ll answer in a new blog item, so that it’s more likely to be seen.)

As the new media guy for a couple alt-weeklies and long-time reader of your columns, in response to your post here, I am coming to you with this question: What do you think of the opinion of Mr. Walter Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, that the newspaper industry is, in fact, sinking itself through the distribution of free content on the web (How to Sink a Newspaper)? The “if you can get it free on the web, why get the paper” mindset is driving loss in circulation, loss in advertising revenue, the death spiral of the news industry. The answer then, get it off the web, don’t give it all away, bring back/force the return of value to the print product and its content.

I’d love your take on this. You may have answered before. If so, please point me in the right direction.

The short answer: Mr. Hussman appears to be living in the past, and his idea is impractical.

Longer answer: It should be obvious by now that reading habits — especially among younger people but certainly not limited to them — lead away from print. I have 2 daughters, and I just can’t imagine them ever reading a print edition. It won’t happen, and no amount of newspaper industry marketing is going to convince the younger generation that reading dated news on a dead-tree edition is the way to go.

The Apple iPhone, I think, points out the inevitable doom for print newspapers. While reading news on a desktop PC or laptop isn’t always practical — we don’t carry our laptops everywhere we go — at the point that most people are carrying around phones as capable as (or more so than) the iPhone, that will be our source of continuously updated news, along with more traditional computing devices like the laptop. A printed newspaper with news that’s 12-24 hours old is just pathetic by comparison.

The only hope for print is that lots of older people retain the habit, and they’ll keep printed newspapers alive for a while longer.

So, newspapers have to present their product (news coverage) online and to mobile devices — and of course make money from that to support the news-gathering operation.

Can they charge for it? Good luck with that. Only if they have content that’s truly unique and valuable is that going to work. Putting all of a newspaper’s content behind a pay wall is just nuts, unless everything in your paper fits the description of the previous sentence. NYTimes.com is a good example of what may be possible for some newspapers: It charges for a select slice of premium content, like its best op-ed columnists. The Times’ bet is that its columnists are so good and so much better than what else is available for free online that a decent segment of the online population will pay for that.

There’s simply too much available online that can substitute for what a newspaper produces. If I cancelled my subscription to my local paper and ignored its website (pretending that it was behind a pay wall), the only thing that would be difficult to find for free online is good local news coverage. I’d still easily find wire-service stories from my community; I’d find stories about Boulder (where I live) from other news organizations that don’t charge; I’d find news from “placebloggers” who cover my city or slices of it; and I’d use Outside.in as a view of all the stuff that various organizations and individuals are producing about Boulder. I’d also find local classifieds in abundance (Craigslist), as well as local advertising and discount deals on a variety of websites.

Yes, my local paper does a great job of covering local news and issues. Maybe as an old guy, I’m still willing to pay for that. But the younger generation? With pretty-darn-good free alternatives, I don’t see them being motivated to pay.

Should the newspaper industry band together and stop posting its content for free access? 1) That’ll never happen; the industry is divided, and there’s just no way that publishers will en masse do that. 2) Those few who may try it may as well resign themselves to a future of slow decline, as traditional newspaper readers die off. Because they will be removing themselves from opportunity to take advantage of what the Internet offers — an amazingly efficient vehicle for reaching audiences.

Viewpoints like Mr. Hussman’s suggest that Google is the enemy, because people use it to find whatever it is they want — for free. Google should be taken advantage of. People use Google, et al to seek out what newspapers have (among other things!). So newspapers need to figure out how to monetize that gift. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as slapping a price tag on the news. When the new competition is offering a price of zero, there’s no motivation to pay.

I hope the newspaper industry isn’t taking Hussman’s suggestions seriously.

Wow, it’s getting depressing for the newspaper industry. Scripps just announced it’s shutting down the Cincinnati Post and the Kentucky Post. My Columbia Journalism Review came in the mail the other day, and there was this article about the serious troubles of the Dallas Morning News. And of course there are the continually released reports citing the latest circulation losses of American newspapers.

It’s really starting to feel like the industry is in the beginnings of a death spiral. Just as Philip Meyer suggested.

I’m having a hard time justifying my own newspaper reading habit. Perhaps it’s my age (50, yikes!), but I still pay for a subscription to have the dead-tree edition tossed on my driveway every morning. But I’m close to saving the money and cancelling, because I can get everything I need online now. And I’d feel less guilty about the trees used to feed my paper habit.

Any more, I think it’s just a comfort thing for me; it feels comfortable and, yes, nostalgic to still get the printed newspaper. I know if I was 30, I wouldn’t be paying for the print edition.

That has nothing to do with the news, of course. I’m as much of a news junkie as ever — but I get so much more online than my local newspaper could ever deliver.

I’ll stop the print edition. I just don’t know yet when that will come.

On the front page of my local paper (Boulder Daily Camera) this morning was something I’ve never seen before. This note, with a red headline:

Don’t unfold the page, yet

An apparent assassination attempt on our governor left one man dead in the hallway of one of the most public places in our state Monday.

We worked hard to find a picture that captured the scene but was not too sensational. I believe this photo accomplishes that, but I want you to be forewarned in case you’d rather just turn the page.

Kevin Kaufman, Editor

The photo is of the assailant (a crazed man wearing a rented tuxedo) lying dead on the floor, with a police officer looking on. The top part of the photo is visible “above the fold,” but the man’s body is not until you open the page fully. I don’t find the photo particularly disturbing, though some people might. (We see much more graphic images every night on network news, from Iraq.)

Kaufman’s way of handling this spurs a few thoughts:

1. If the image is so disturbing, why not put it on an inside page, with a “don’t turn the page” warning? I doubt if even the most squeamish reader averted his/her eyes from the full view of the front page. It would be hard NOT to see.

2. Pre-Internet, perhaps this image wouldn’t have made page 1, or even in the newspaper itself – because it’s too “gruesome” (again, I don’t think it is). But important images like this do end up online and easy to find. So it strikes me as pointless to hide such photos from newspaper readers.

3. Perhaps Kaufman’s odd warning will spare him some predictable letters to the editor. (“How could you post that photo of a dead man lying on the Capitol floor?! Cancel my subscription to your sensationalist rag!”) It’ll be interesting to watch the letters page. My guess is that no one will complain.

Here’s the photo; decide for yourself…

The Redbook Faith Hill Photoshop incident is just too funny. After you finish laughing at how the retouchers turned her into a skinny younger fembot, be sure to check out the comments on the linked article (they’re half the fun).

I’ve been away from my personal blog for quite a while, but the demise of Backfence.com provides a good excuse to start up again…

Condolences to CEO Mark Potts (who had been trying valiantly to keep things going after the management shake-up that had co-founder and ex-CEO Susan DeFife depart the company) and the rest of the Backfence crew.

Because my own career has a big stake in grassroots media, I’m sad to see Backfence go. My company’s websites (YourClimbing.com, YourMTB.com, et al) share some similarities with Backfence — though where its communities were geographically focused but topic-broad, ours are geographically diverse and topic-narrow.

Lots of folks have been blogging about Backfence since the announcement, and at least with just a few exceptions, it’s not being painted as the “end of citizen journalism.” I don’t believe it is. Rather, it’s one of those inevitable setbacks on the way toward wherever our media future is headed.

One thing I think about a lot in my own business — and in thinking about Backfence — is passion. Our sites are all about bringing together people who are passionate about something specific. I think that for any grassroots media site, the only way it’s going to get significant, quality content submissions from an audience is if those people are truly passionate about … something. And on the other side, the audience needs to be passionate about what those passionate contributors are submitting.

To my view, that’s the problem with Backfence and other community “citJ” sites. They’re asking people in a community to write about things in their community that they’re passionate about. (Why else would anyone post something to a local citJ site — unless it’s just posting a press release for self-serving reasons.) But on the audience side, Backfence didn’t have a bunch of people who shared the poster’s passion.

Physical communities, obviously, are made up of people with wildly divergent interests and passions.

So with many community citJ sites, you have stuff like a flower enthusiast posting photos and a passionate report about a flower show — but the majority of site’s audience couldn’t give a hoot about the topic. So the reader experience is one of a bunch of dull content — except for the rare thing that crosses your personal passions.

I’m not sure what the answer is, though I do think that there’s a future for citizen community journalism. Perhaps (as I’ve seen some other bloggers suggest) it will fall to newspapers to carry the ball. My most recent Editor & Publisher Online column — written before the announcement about Backfence — suggests a big role for newspapers in just this.

The short version: Newspapers are cutting back editorial staffs (no end in site), and thus they can’t hope to ever cover news down to the hyper-local level. So newspapers should think about recruiting a new wave of “citizen stringers” to do that for them, by figuring out effective incentives.

A newspaper website doing this eliminates the “dullness” issue of pure community citJ sites. The grassroots hyper-local content augments and supplements high quality content from the professional journalists on staff. The newspaper online reader comes to the site looking for interesting stuff (including hyper-local content about his/her neighborhood, kid’s school, etc.) and finds a broad range of it. Compare that to the Backfence-like community citJ site that’s full of mostly less-compelling content.

Another idea that folks have been blogging about is the notion that no one website or news organization can possibly do it all when it comes to recruiting and publishing hyper-local content. Some hyper-local stuff comes from local bloggers and “placebloggers” operating independently. So, the argument goes, sites like Outside.in which attempt to aggregate all this diverse stuff from multiple sources on the web and then feed it out based on a user’s location stand a good chance of figuring out this hyper-local news thing.

I think that newspapers can play this game too. Why leave it to Outside.in to bring together all the local bloggers and other hyper-local content that’s being created about your community? Newspapers can do that within their coverage area, plus create incentive programs to get original hyper-local citizen coverage coming in. (The first part of this equation also could mean partnering with Outside.in to let them bring you all the stuff revolving around your community that’s online.)

The most compelling reason to me why citizen journalism is not dead is that there’s a need for hyper-local news and information — and newspapers’ cutbacks make it unlikely that they’ll figure out how to offer hyper-local without going to the grassroots.