Media

My latest Editor & Publisher Online column is up: “When Journalists Aren’t Happy, the Industry Isn’t Happy.” It’s about what we can learn from the rants that are filling up the new website, AngryJournalist.com. Enjoy.

(This is actually my February column, delayed because of a weird e-mail problem where my messages to E&P editors didn’t get through for the space of a week.)

The flamboyant new owner of the Tribune Co., billionaire Sam Zell, visited one of his properties in Virginia, the Daily Press, yesterday, and (according to this report) told employees this:

Tribune’s smaller newspapers, including the Daily Press, would serve as a ‘petri dish’ of innovation, where new ideas would be tested and incubated before being passed along to the company’s big three: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Newsday of Long Island, N.Y.”

I have to say, while I think Zell is on the right track with trying to shake things up at Tribune, he’s got this backward. Letting the smaller properties in a chain try the innovations and then passing them along to the flagship papers is something the newspaper industry has already been doing — and I think that’s part of the reason the industry is still in such a mess. It’s not bold eough.

Some of the largest newspapers are bleeding badly; layoffs and buyouts are the order of the day, and quality of the product is deteriorating. (My local paper keeps getting thinner; the day is very near when it’s no longer worth it to renew my subscription.) Zell should be telling his flagship papers to stop stalling and start innovating big-time. Waiting for experiments from the hinterlands to pan out before implementing them in Chicago, LA and Long Island is a going-too-slow approach.

Zell is known for being a change agent. So why doesn’t he demand that every paper in the Tribune chain innovate like there’s no tomorrow? Tomorrow is going to suck if they don’t.

Look, pure-play Internet companies have demonstrated that there are billions of dollars to be made from innovating. I’m sure that Zell believes the newspaper industry can reinvent itself and take part. So why would he take such a conservative approach? How odd.

What do you think?

I’ve just debuted a new website/blog designed to be a resource for ideas, tips and advice for online news publishers. It’s called GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com, and it’s NOT another industry news blog. The focus is exclusively on advice. I hope you’ll find it useful.

I soft-launched the site yesterday, so hardly anyone knows about it. I’d love it if a few of you checked it out and maybe commented on the early posts. My intent is to post a tip a day. There will be ideas on how to increase traffic and earn more money, primarily. I’m aiming for actionable tips and advice.

Obviously I don’t know it all, so I’ve made the site open to everyone to participate in and contribute to. Comment on the posts. Submit an idea of your own if you’d like me to write it up for you (and credit you). Create an account and blog to the site directly. (I will be moderating submissions.)

I’m also looking for sponsors, so give me a shout if it looks like that might be useful to you.

Does your news organization have a YouTube video channel featuring a fresh stream of originally produced videos? It should. And it wouldn’t be that hard to do, nor expensive.

So that idea came to me after having watched a couple great videos on The Official Google Channel on YouTube. (I’ve attached one of those videos, a talk on the Google campus by Getting Things Done guru Dave Allen, to the end of this blog item.)

Google, being a great place to work, apparently has a stream of guest speakers coming through giving workshops and lectures. The company, smartly, videotapes the talks and puts them on YouTube. Being a smart company, they don’t keep this great information to themselves and restrict access just to their employees — even though Google paid for the speakers. Google is, after all, all about sharing the world’s knowledge, so it’s a fit with the company’s mission and ethics.

You know, of course, what organizations also are well positioned to have their own channels: newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, magazines, and online news sites. Nearly all news organizations have a steady stream of politicians, celebrities, athletes, experts, etc. coming through their doors — for interviews with reporters, with the editorial board, and so on.

So here’s a simple notion that’ll amp up your presence on YouTube and other channels (such as Facebook, MySpace, et al): Create your own channel, a la Google, and post raw video of interviews with some of those people. Record editorial board meetings where there are guests and post the video. This requires a change in mindset, from those interviews being a part of the reporting process not meant for outside consumption, to the interviews actually being content.

This would be relatively cheap to do. The only thing holding you back is clinging to the old ways.

Now here’s the Dave Allen lecture. As not of the most organized people in the world, I’m trying hard to learn from Allen. His Google lecture is worth a viewing.

Many of us watch Romenesko to keep tabs of the news business. The venerable media blog, which is published by the Poynter Institute, is great for giving a sense of where the industry is at.

I’ve yet to see anyone use Romenesko for research. (Have I missed it?) But I wonder if a careful analysis of all the media news that gets pumped through Jim Romenesko’s filters would turn up some trends. One I would expect to find is an increasing pessimism by traditional news organizations, and an increase in stories about news company cutbacks, layoffs, stock price falls, circulation dips, etc. — increasing over time.

For fun, I did a quick and completely unscientific survey of what was in the latest Romenesko e-mail, which covers the last 4 days of blog entries. Here’s what I found. (Note: If you tried this, you might categorize things differently. But here’s my attempt. Some stories got counted in more than one category.)

• 26 – News personnel (announcements, awards, changes, deaths, profiles, etc.)
• 13 – Demise/decline of newspapers
• 10 – Ethics-related
• 9 – Bad news about industry stock prices, real estate sales, acquisitions
• 6 – Transition of media, online trends, user interaction, etc.
• 6 – “Inside baseball” stuff (that only true industry geeks care about)
• 6 – Journalism craft news
• 5 – News about the news business (excluding the “The End Is Near” coverage)
• 4 – College journalism, academia, research
• 4 – Oddball stuff
• 3 – Labor news
• 3 – New publications, websites, programs announced
• 2 – Stories with mixed good-bad news about news industry
• 2 – Credentials and access issues
• 2 – Objectivity in journalism
• 2 – Gossip
• 2 – Events, conferences
• 1 – Negative stories about Internet, blogs, user content, etc.
• 1 – Media law
• 1 – Audience, circulation news

Perhaps someone with more time on their hands than me can find interesting Romenesko trends over time.

New column from me for Editor & Publisher Online:

This Should Be Your Mantra: Be Everywhere

I think that the theme of this column will be something that we in the news business (well, broader media, too) will be talking about and dealing with a lot this year.

Although, comments and e-mails on this column, which was released this week, have been minimal. I guess everyone agrees with me.

In Melanie McFarland’s farewell column as TV critic of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (she’s taking a web job with Amazon.com’s IMDB.com), she writes:

Although I won’t be under the globe anymore, a number of talented reader bloggers and regularly updated articles from TVGuide.com will continue to make this one of the best places for couch potatoes to camp out.”

I’m not sure whether that means she’s not being replaced, but it sounds like not. That’ll be another sad indicator for newspapers. As more features and staffers are dropped and the quality of the product heads downhill, you have to worry that the snowball effect is already in place.

No sooner had I finished off a draft of my January Editor & Publisher Online column (probably to be published next week) on how news organizations must learn to share their content any- and everywhere, than did news of ESPN’s WidgetCenter arrive on my radar screen. (I think it launched last month, but I must’ve missed it then. I’ve added it in to the column.) It nicely confirms the wisdom of my advice in the column.

Check this out. ESPN is now offering widgets that you can put on your blog, website, social network profile, or wherever. Here they are embedded in this blog item.

Back in the dark ages of my college years, I was a reporter and managing editor of the Rocky Mountain Collegian, the student newspaper at Colorado State University. (How dark? Reporters used electric typewriters and copy was taken to the composition department to be set into cold type.)

So it was with interest that I saw today that the Collegian might enter into a strategic partnership with Gannett’s The Coloradoan, Fort Collins’ commercial daily. According to this report in MediaDailyNews, “In effect, Gannett would be buying the paper. As the rest of the newspaper industry takes a beating, Gannett’s interest reflects the continued popularity of campus papers — and their importance to advertisers targeting young adults.”

Talks are preliminary, and a Collegian “takeover” is not imminent.
Here’s a report from the Collegian itself.

Perhaps that is a smart move by newspapers, though I see value in an independent student press, and worry that corporate interest would influence student media in a negative way. I remember my Collegian days as free-wheeling, where we sometimes took stupid or naive chances that most likely wouldn’t happen with corporate oversight. Those were great learning experiences. I’m not sure that the student-media culture is a proper fit with big corporate media.

I hadn’t taken a look at The Collegian’s website recently, but I see that it’s pretty standard and could be more innovative. This is the topic of another blog entry some day, but it’s unfortunate that student newspapers like The Collegian aren’t experimenting vigorously — and helping lead the newspaper industry to a new model that might work in the years ahead. One possible plus to corporate involvement could be to provide resources for more innovation — but I’d rather see the university’s journalism program (which I graduated from so long ago) be the one to push that.

I missed last night’s The Simpsons, but according to Mediabistro’s FishbowlDC blog, there was this funny scene:

“Did you watch last night’s ‘The Simpsons’? Like when Dan Rather introduced his panel of debate moderators, including ‘Ron Lehar, a print journalist from The Washington Post.’

“Prompting Nelson to point at him and say ‘Ha ha: Your medium is dying!’

“Rather: ‘Nelson!’ (Actually, it was Principal Skinner who says this.)

“Nelson: ‘But it is! There’s being right and there’s being nice.’”

A joke for we media geeks.

Addendum: Here’s the clip, found on DailyMotion.com: