Misc.

An alert listener of Colorado Public Radio heard my interview last week on the “Colorado Matters” program, and noted that I erred in citing ProPublica, the independent investigative reporting website, as “ProPublica.com.” Well, I can’t very well fix my recorded radio voice to the correct ProPublica.org, but I’ll at least note it here.

But ProPublica also gets a bit of blame. “.org” sites frequently get misquoted as “.com” sites, so it would make sense for the site to have acquired “ProPublica.com” and then redirected it to ProPublica.org. A domain search reveals that someone else owns ProPublica.com, and going to that URL just turns up a “not found” error.

If ProPublica.org gets the opportunity to buy the ProPublica.com domain, it should. Then little mistakes like mine won’t really matter.

But I’ll cite it correctly next time.

I have a new, complimentary subscription to Field & Stream magazine (print edition). Why is that? Since I don’t fish or hunt, or have any interest whatsoever in reading about either, publisher Bonnier is wasting money by granting me an unasked-for 1-year subscription.

I’m thinking this started with my paid subscriptions to a couple printed cycling and mountain biking magazines, which apparently generated an unasked-for complimentary subscription to Outside magazine. I was fine with that, since I enjoy Outside, though I won’t pay to renew when my 1-year free trial ends (assuming it does). So my guess is that as an Outside “subscriber,” it was assumed I must also be into fishing and hunting.

This must signal signs of desperation among magazine publishers. But receiving my “free gift” annoyed me, thinking about the wasted paper and downed trees represented by a print product I don’t want. At least when I get an unasked-for online subscription (which happens occasionally), I can easily unsubscribe with a click or two and no birds lose their homes.

Now I’m curious what magazine will turn up in my mailbox unannounced next. If mountain biking leads to assumption that I like the outdoors, and that leads to another assumption that I must enjoy fishing and hunting, then what’s coming next? Perhaps Soldier of Fortune?

Yeah, I’ve been playing hooky quite a bit lately. In the previous couple weeks I’ve mountain biked 4 days on Utah’s famed White Rim Trail, then succumbed to an invitation from a friend to drive to southwestern Colorado and ride some great trails near Cortez and Durango for 2 days. (Fellow mountain bikers: You have got to check out the Phil’s World trail system which is near the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park. Stellar!) It’s a “benefit” of being temporarily underemployed to take time off, but my legs are feeling tired.

While I was away, Colorado Public Radio current affairs program “Colorado Matters” aired a 13-minute interview with me by host Ryan Warner. Here’s the archived version if you care to listen to the discussion about the future of news in an era when the newspaper industry is falling apart.

Newspapers’ Digital Future

A reader of one of my recent Editor & Publisher Online columns takes me to task for using “digital” rather than “online” to describe what we used to call “new media.” He prefers “online” as more accurate.

Actually, I’ve shifted my word usage to “digital media” on purpose, and think I’m correct in doing so.

“New media” is on its way out, for obvious reasons. Publishing online really took off in the early to mid 1990s, and that term was appropriate perhaps through the ’90s. I’ll admit to using it into the 2000s but probably should have given up on the term a long time ago.

The trouble with “online media” is that it, to my mind, implies the state of your PC constantly connected to the Internet via an ethernet cable or wi-fi. But it doesn’t really work to describe mobile devices like phones or e-readers (e.g., Amazon’s Kindle), which increasingly are supplementing or even replacing the PC as Internet access devices and retrieve data from the Internet on-demand.

Can a mobile phone used for e-mail, instant messaging, web browsing and search, etc. really be called “online”? I don’t think so, unless I’m sitting with my iPhone and picking up a wi-fi signal. When I’m traveling on the highway and my phone only has access to the cell network, can you call that “online”?

So for now I’m sticking to “digital media,” with the belief that it’s a broad enough term to cover most everything that we now publish to (other than print and remaining analog TV and radio).

What do you think?

Take heart, newspaper aficionados and media curmudgeons. You’ll still have the comfort of the printed newspaper as you travel in space in the year 2259! (Well, that assumes you’ll be getting cryogenically frozen and are revived in a couple centuries.)

Credit my friend and colleague Christopher Ryan for spotting this look into the future. Chris was viewing old TV shows on Hulu.com and came across a 1995 episode of the cheesy sci-fi show Babylon 5. In this episode, “Divided Loyalties,” the writers envision newspaper reading onboard spaceships in the distant future.

Who would have guessed? Newsprint is still around, even in space!

Sorry I can’t embed the video here (Hulu.com doesn’t support that; grrrr), but click the image or the link above and watch just the first scene for the 1995 view of news consumption in the centuries ahead.

Oh, there’s advanced technology involved with Babylon 5’s edition of “Universe Today.” You get to tell the computer to personalize your paper with extra news about whatever you want, then it spits out your personalized paper copy.

But won’t the spaceship fill up with stacks of old papers? Of course not, silly. They recycle in the future. Insert your previous edition into the recycling slot and get your updated paper edition. As near as I can tell from this scene, you still have to pay for your newspaper, so I guess they solved that troubling free-web-content issue decades ago.

Ah, won’t the future be wonderful?!

Increasingly of late, I’m seeing writers use the term “hits” when talking about webpage usage. I’ve lost count of how often this has assaulted my ex-copy editor eyes, but it happened again in this story. An excerpt:

“Thousands of Seattlites will miss their morning ‘fish wrapper.’ But as other newspapers saw fewer web ‘hits’ after the November election, the P-I website has climbed close to the three million mark.”

Ugh. As an Internet publishing veteran, I have to point out to the growing horde of misinformed writers that a “page-view” is the word they’re looking for. It indicates that a web user has seen a particular webpage. If the P-I website only got three million hits (the writer doesn’t says if that’s per day, but I assume so), that’s pretty poor because it represents far, far fewer page-views.

What’s a “hit”? I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

“A hit is a request to a web server for a file (web page, image, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheet, etc.). When a web page is uploaded from a server the number of ‘hits’ or ‘page hits’ is equal to the number of files requested. Therefore, one page load does not always equal one hit because often pages are made up of other images and other files which stack up the number of hits counted. Because one page load does not equal one hit it is an inaccurate measure of a website’s popularity or web traffic. A more accurate measure of web traffic is how many page views a web site has. Hits are useful when evaluating the requirements of your server, depending on the number and size of files which need to be transferred for one request. Servers should be tested to make sure they meet throughput targets (i.e. they should be capable of processing a certain amount of ‘hits’ per second).”

Sorry for nitpicking, but doing time as a copy editor at any time of your career will make you this way.

I’ve lost track of how many years I’ve blogged this, but it’s still good advice…

Remember to check your website or blog’s footer and change it to ©2009 tomorrow.

Sure, some systems are set to do this automatically, but MANY aren’t. I’m no longer shocked to see some website in June have the previous year’s copyright date published. (Actually, I occasionally spot some that haven’t been updated in years. It always makes me skeptical of a site’s content and quality when the bottom of the page says “©2005″.)

You’ve been reminded. I hope you have a great 2009. We have nowhere to go but up. Right?!

This morning I posted a few words to my Twitter account about PC Magazine’s decision to cease print publication…

My Twitter posts also get fed automatically to my Facebook account, where Tom Regan, a smart and talented journalist and media thinker I know, posted what I thought was a profound comment:

“I have a feeling that with the (Christian Science) Monitor and now PC Mag going in the online direction, it’s just the start of a tsunami over the next two years. The current economic situation, more than any other factor, will accomplish what a decade worth of net evangelism has failed to do.”

He’s so right. All the Editor & Publisher columns I’ve written over the years, all the blog posts, etc. perhaps pushed the needle a bit over the years. All the words and speeches from gurus like Jeff Jarvis, Mark Potts, JD Lasica, Amy Gahran, Vin Crosbie, and many others — all imploring traditional news company leaders to let go of their pasts and put online/digital first — mostly just set the stage.

It’s the sad economic situation that is finally going to force the old news companies to do what needs to be done.

I just got back from parents weekend at my 16-year-old daughter’s boarding school in New England. At the end of the program, the kids got kicked off campus for a couple days, so she and I traveled around the region until school reopened. It was a great opportunity to observe the media habits of a typical American teenager (not to mention a little father-daughter bonding).

In our hotel one evening, I observed her watching a DVD on her Macbook (The Return of the King). No full-screen view for her; she had the movie going in a window that took up only part of the screen. Also attracting her attention elsewhere on the screen were IM chat sessions with friends (multiple conversations), and sometimes Facebook or MySpace interactions. And then occasionally her iPhone would beep with an incoming text message.

She didn’t stop the movie to engage in the IM sessions. She’s comfortable doing multiple things at once in the digital environment, which is what I’ve noticed with her friends as well. Perhaps if this had been the first time she’d seen that movie, she would have focused intently on it.

I sometimes wonder if media executives who struggle with adapting to the new digital realities have spent much time watching young people use media. It doesn’t take long to understand a few simple truths about digital natives like my daughter:

1. They expect their media to allow them to interact and communicate, not be passive.
2. They are seldom loyal to one brand for very long.
3. If they do focus on a single brand, it likely will get only part of their attention.
4. The online content that they view is frequently found as a result of friends’ recommendations (e.g., by instant messages or phone text messages).
5. If your brand expects to reach them, it better be in lots of places online, and especially those places where young people hang out online.

So there’s this rumor starting to spread around the net: That GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin is not the mother of the infant Trig Palin as she claims; rather, the mother is actually her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol. It surfaced with this report on Daily Kos. (And there’s a follow-up with more “evidence.”)

Andrew Sullivan has blogged about it, and rightly, to my mind, suggests:

“There must be plenty of medical records and obstetricians and medical eye-witnesses prepared to testify to Sarah Palin’s giving birth to Trig. There must be a record of Bristol’s high school attendance for the past year. And surely, surely, the McCain camp did due diligence on this. But the noise around this story is now deafening, and the weirdness of the chronology sufficient to rise to the level of good faith questions. So please give us these answers — and provide medical records for Sarah Palin’s pregnancy — and put this to rest.”

As I write this, the mainstream media is staying away from this one (according to a quick Google News search). It is, after all, an outrageous charge. And it maligns a 17-year-old girl who deserves to be treated fairly and not dragged through the mud.

What should mainstream news organizations do with this? I think they have a responsibility to investigate it and discover the truth, and report it, whichever way this turns out. (If Palin were lying about this, it should disqualify her from holding the VP’s office, at least to my mind.)

This is seeming like it could turn out to be similar to the John Edwards affair case, where the National Enquirer was the media outlet correctly reporting that the presidential candidate indeed was having an affair. Some traditional news organizations chased the story, but couldn’t confirm it. It’s probably fair to say that most “real journalists” believed that the Enquirer was making it up. They ended up getting beat by a cheesy supermarket tabloid.

Now we have a left-leaning blog publishing an explosive story that most people probably don’t believe, because it sounds so absurd (and the author is hiding his name, which is an enormous red flag). But the mainstream press needs to make sure it doesn’t get caught again as with the Edwards affair.

Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor who writes a blog called Media Nation, thinks that while it may be worthwhile for the mainstream press to investigate and (most likely) debunk the rumor, if it indeed turns out to be false, it shouldn’t be published. He writes:

“The job of the press is to ask questions and then to present its findings to the public — or, in this case, if it found nothing, to do its best to make sure the story never saw the light of day. … This is the definition of a story that shouldn’t be hashed out publicly.”

Sorry, Dan, I totally disagree. Long gone are the days when “the press” had the power to keep stuff like this under wraps, taking a Father Knows Best approach and not sharing the “sordid” details with the public. This thing is already spreading like wildfire, without being mentioned by mainstream news organizations. It’s going to play out with or without the mainstream press taking part.

This is a strong rumor that’s already got legs. News organizations need to investigate, and if they can confirm that it’s false, they should report it. It doesn’t have to be a big deal or take up a 24-hour news cycle. A simple short story — Palin baby rumor has been debunked — would suffice.

It’s archaic media thinking that says the media needs to stifle this thing because it’s too unseemly for us to touch. We no longer live in the age when rumors were heard only by journalists, and those journalists decided whether to pass them along to the public. The public is in on this rumor, and they deserve to be served by professional journalists who are capable of debunking or confirming it.

One last point: I’ve seen arguments that the media must sit on this because it would hurt Bristol, who’s still a kid. The problem is, she’s already been tossed in the mud, and millions of people are finding out about this rumor this weekend. That cat’s out of the bag. Mainstream media would serve her interests best by turning up evidence that the DailyKos charges are false. And if the rumor is true, the American public certainly needs to know about Sarah Palin’s character.