Misc.

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.

Steve Yelvington blog-mused: “Are obituaries obsolete?” He argues that newspapers should have “living documents” cataloging and documenting people’s lives on an ongoing basis, rather than an obituary published just at the person’s death.

I want to take a slightly different angle. Many newspapers pre-write obituaries of notable people in their communities. Some staff journalist or perhaps a librarian is charged with writing or updating a canned obituary when a local big-wig goes into the hospital, for instance, so it can be pulled out when the time comes.

But why bother with that task at all? An argument can be made that when Mr/Ms Whomever checks out of the planet, the information about his/her life is but a Google- or Wikipedia-search away. Instead of writing an original obit, a link obit just may be a better way to present a notable life.

The modern obit writer may serve the subject better by amassing a collection of suitable links: to a biography, video interviews, best writings, most famous quotes, etc. Yelvington may be right: The traditional obituary is already in the grave.

I’ve been reading the classic science fiction novel Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, to my youngest daughter. It’s one of my favorite sci-fi books and I’m enjoying re-reading it. Here’s a quick synopsis from Wikipedia:

“Ender’s Game (1985) is one of the best-known novels by Orson Scott Card. It is set in Earth’s future where mankind has barely survived two invasions by the ‘buggers,’ an insectoid alien race, and the International Fleet is preparing for war. In order to find and train the eventual commander for the anticipated third invasion, the world’s most talented children, including the extraordinary Ender Wiggin, are taken into a training center known as the Battle School at a very young age.”

While Ender is the main subject of the book, his brother, Peter, and sister, Valentine, also play a role back on Earth. (All are child geniuses.) A sub-plot has Peter and Valentine pretending to be adults on “the nets” and posing as intellectuals capable of influencing masses of people. In Card’s world (the year is 2135), the great debates of the day take place on the nets.

While there’s plenty of time for Internet discussions to turn around, I suppose, I can’t help but think that Card wasn’t terribly prescient with this prediction. In Ender’s Game, “the nets” are democratic and participative — anyone can join them, as long as they have the intellect to keep up — but there’s no problem with too much noise, trolls, spammers, and plain old stupidity.

Maybe Card was looking well beyond 2008 with his prediction of worldwide networked discussions being meaningful and orderly. Perhaps by 2135 we’ll have really good spam filters. But from the vantage point of 2008, it’s hard to imagine the author’s optimism about online digital discourse playing out.

Interesting story on NPR’s All Things Considered this evening: “Libraries Shine In Tough Economic Times.” It’s about how in these economic tough times — with families and individuals struggling with high energy prices and resulting high everything-else prices — people are cutting back on non-essentials like buying books and subscribing to newspapers and magazines. They’re going to the library instead to read the paper and check out books, instead of buying.

Yes, it’s the perfect storm for the newspaper industry. They’d be hurting from the structural change going on in media consumption even with a good economy. Add the sucky economy and this likely puts some newspapers at the brink.

My wife, by the way, is back in school to become a (school) librarian. At least I know she’s going into a field that’s in demand!

With all the journalists getting laid off in the newspaper industry bloodletting, have you noticed them looking younger?

I ask because I had my hair cut this morning, and I had a conversation with my stylist about gray hair. He’s in his 30s, but DYES his hair gray because he likes how it looks. (Huh?! Most of us with real gray hair would prefer to go the other direction.) Anyway, he told me that with the bad economy and lots of people getting laid off, his shop is seeing a big wave of guys in their 40s and 50s come in to get their hair dyed darker. It’s because they think looking younger will help them find new jobs, of course.

Have you noticed this among your journalist friends who’ve been laid off recently? Have you done it yourself?

Me? I’m sticking with what nature and time have done with my hair. Can’t say I like the gray, but I can live with it.

Why would anyone reading WSJ.com give a hoot about what page in the print edition a story ran on? So they can go out and buy the print edition and get a hard copy of the story? Umm, no.

It’s a small thing, I know, but an indicator of editors stuck in old mindsets.