News

It’s that time of month again: Carnival of Journalism! And this month’s question (a tough one, by Greg Linch) is: “What’s the best way, or ways, to measure journalism and how?” … To define it a little better, the real question is: How do we best measure the impact of journalism.

OK, it’s going to take someone smarter than me to give a good direct answer to that. I’m sure one or more of my fellow Carnival-goers will rise to the challenge.

When I look at the question, I can’t help but get sidetracked into thinking how social media (i.e., “the crowd” utilizing digital social tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Change.org, among others, to amplify their voices) in a growing number of cases is having more impact than the traditional news media can achieve themselves — or is driving the mainstream news media to pay attention to stories that their editors fail to recognize as important.

It’s the public leveraging social media that keeps taking hold of stories where professional journalists either misjudge the importance or just miss because of lack of resources, and then amplify those stories to the point where mainstream news organizations have no choice but to pump up their coverage (and thus look “out to lunch” to those already aware of the story from the social-media uproar). [...article continues below the video]

Twitter’s Twitter Stories website features stories of tweets that made an impact, such as this tale of a son’s tweet that saved his mother’s Portland bookstore from going out of business. In the past, perhaps a newspaper reporter’s story on the store’s plight would have generated the community support to achieve the same result.

The way I see it, traditional news organizations are seeing their “gatekeeper” roles usurped increasingly more often by the public’s use of social media. In other words, when editors do a lousy job of gatekeeping and keep important stories locked behind the gate, the public now has the power to become the gatekeepers and unlock an overlooked story. It’s not that news media don’t have the power to have an impact; it’s that now an outraged public can use social-media tools to have an impact, sometimes bypassing the news media and sometimes manipulating news organizations to join the fight.

Here are just a few recent examples:

• The Trayvon Martin killing in Florida. It took several weeks for news organizations to pay due attention to this racially charged incident of a neighborhood watch volunteer shooting an unarmed black teenager; initial news reports treated it as a routine crime story. The story truly picked up thanks to a petition on Change.org, which as I write this has gathered 1.75 million signatures asking for prosecution of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, who was not arrested. At Poynter.org, Kelly McBride has a good write-up about the Martin case and how social media drove the news media coverage to eventually turn it into a national story: “Trayvon Martin story reveals new tools of media power, justice.”
   
• The Susan B. Komen Foundation dropping Planned Parenthood funding. Komen, the breast-cancer charity famous for its “Komen Walks for the Cure,” succumbed to right-wing pressure to stop giving funds to Planned Parenthood for breast screenings. This action created a huge firestorm on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social-media sites. Komen officials tried to ride out the controversy, but the furor online (including online petitions and the online threats of many women who had been Komen supporters to stop giving to the foundation) forced them to overturn their decision. By the time mainstream news media were paying serious attention to the Komen story, the social-media-led furor already had made an impact; news reports merely added to the already intense pressure on the organization to back down.
   
• The UC-Davis pepper-spray incident. Who can forget the university police officer pepper-spraying a line of peaceful students sitting in a line on the ground during an Occupy protest on the Davis, California, campus? I first noticed this on Twitter and began following the story there and on Facebook. I remember early on looking for coverage by mainstream news organizations, but finding very little. It took a couple days, as I recall, for this outrageous act by a law-enforcement officer to hit its stride in the traditional news media. By then, calls for the firing of the officer and the removal of UC-Davis’ chancellor were already at fever pitch across social-media channels.

This is not to suggest that news media have been neutered by social media’s power. News organizations that still have a strong investigative-journalism mission and the resources to conduct this kind of reporting can have an impact and effect change on their own. Propublica offers a great example: The non-profit news organization’s major investigation into the oil and gas industry’s practice of “fracking” and the environmental threat posed to groundwater supplies has been a four-year effort, with tangible impact.

Another example of a traditional news organization’s journalism having an impact is the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of corruption in the small city of Bell, California, for which the Times won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and which led to corrective action and criminal prosecutions.

Of course, the LA Times’ Bell-corruption investigation points to the reason that journalism has less impact today than a few years ago, before thousands of journalists across the U.S. took buyouts or were laid off. Municipal officials’ corruption in Bell had been going on for years, but a weakened press and no strong local news organizations allowed it to continue uncovered for a good long time.

To circle back to Greg Linch’s question, we need to figure out how to measure the impact of journalism, and track how it fares in the years ahead. Measurement will be how we know that we’ve climbed out of the hole left by the departure of so many professional journalists from traditional news organizations.

But for a final word, let’s get back to social media. I think it’s fair to say that social media will continue to grow in impact, as citizens spot outrageous things (say, Rush Limbaugh calling a college student advocating for birth control to be covered by all health insurance a “slut” and “prostitute”) and use the new tools at their disposal to accomplish goals (which occurred in the Limbaugh episode when well over 100 advertisers dropped the right-wing commentator’s radio show).

For news organizations to have impact (and not just report the news), they’ll need to get better at leveraging social media and incorporating it into the news process. For instance, if more newsrooms had editors who monitored social media sites routinely and deeply, they wouldn’t get blind-sided by a social-media firestorm because they’d know about it already. If those editors also curated the social-media chatter around breaking news events and exploding issues, they’d be part of the process instead of laggards catching up when it becomes obvious that they need to start paying attention to a story.

Social media and traditional news media both have the capacity to impact an issue and force change. At this point in time, I’d have to say that social media is gaining the edge. But news organizations have the ability to make an impact more often, as they’ve done in the past. Will they?

Here in Boulder, Colorado, our dominant newspaper is moving out of its long-time home in the heart of downtown. Next weekend, the Daily Camera is vacating its home at 11th and Pearl Streets — where it has been downtown’s longest-operating business — to an office in a business park in east Boulder.

The Daily Camera building on Pearl Street

It’s a sound business decision. The Camera building sits at the west end of the Pearl Street Mall, a four-block pedestrian-only shopping area that is the heart and soul of the city and a major tourist draw. The building afforded reporters close proximity to municipal government and the county courthouse, plus many of Boulder’s most prominent companies, including many in the city’s thriving tech start-up scene.

In other words, the land that the Camera’s building sits on is very valuable real estate, and with fewer employees and the paper’s printing presses long gone from the premises, it made sense to unload the property and move to smaller, less-expensive digs. The Camera and its owners, MediaNews Group of Denver, sold the building to Los Angeles-based Karlin Real Estate for $9 million last August. Now it’s time to move out.

But wait!…

Particularly for a city like Boulder, where the downtown area is more special than most (stated as an adoring resident of this college town), it is not a good thing that the primary news source no longer has a physical presence in the heart of town. This is a loss to the community.

I’m not going to gripe about the move, or suggest that the Camera’s executives reconsider their decision to move to an impersonal office park. Rather, here’s my suggestion to editor Kevin Kaufman and publisher Al Manzi — to turn a negative into a positive:

• Lease shop space on the Pearl Street Mall and open a coffee shop (or move in with an existing popular coffee shop as a partner).
• This might be an independent shop run by people in that business, in partnership with the Daily Camera. (Boulder has several tony coffee shops that are favorites of the tech crowd: Ozo’s, The Cup, Atlas Purveyors…)
• Or it could be a deal with a chain like Starbucks or Pete’s, where cohabitation of the space is negotiated.
• Brand the Pearl Street coffee shop with the Daily Camera name: e.g., Daily Camera’s The Cup, or Ozo’s at the Daily Camera.
• Expand the notion of a typical downtown coffee shop to include:
  • Plenty of comfortable furniture for casual work and reading while partaking on pricy coffee drinks and pastries.
  • Print editions of the Camera available (of course), as well as digital tablets that customers can check out (credit card imprint for deposit, please!) to read the Camera and other websites using free wi-fi.
  • Coffee shop loyalty programs or memberships, which give members special privileges (such as discounts on drinks and food, or hassle-free check-out of digital tablets).
  • Meeting/lecture space for periodic newsmaker lectures and public discussion events, with free events subsidized by sales of those expensive drinks. Or low admission prices but free admission to coffee shop members.
  • An editor (or two) stationed at the coffee shop, available to interact with the public but also physically positioned to respond quickly to report downtown news events. (And with a desk to perform normal newsroom duties.)
  • A couple public computers designed to solicit story ideas, news tips, and feedback for the office-park newsroom dwellers.

If I were in Manzi or Kaufman’s shoes, I’d worry that the Camera brand would suffer by the loss of a physical location in the heart of the action downtown. A trendy coffee shop co-branded with the Camera could alleviate that problem. And if the partners running the drink and food side of the business know what they’re doing, the co-branded business won’t cost the newspaper company anything — and might even bring in some new profits.

Old (left) and new (right) Daily Camera offices

View Daily Camera old and new locations in a larger map

In American Journalism Review, long-time newspaper analyst John Morton yet again has trotted out the tired argument that the newspaper industry made a colossal mistake years ago by giving its news away free on the web.

“So what should the nation’s dailies have done to combat the Internet onslaught? Erecting paywalls to protect their most valuable resource – the information they gather – is obvious.”

(There’s more nuance in Morton’s argument, but read it yourself; I won’t waste your time repeating his other points.)

This has become a political argument within the media world . It reminds me of the politics of climate change:

• Climate-change debate:
  • Vast majority of scientists believe humankind is adversely affecting climate and that we are headed toward catastrophe, and must act quickly to implement solutions.
  • Vocal minority of entrenched interests (nearly all non-scientists) makes so much noise arguing that climate change is a myth that our political system is paralyzed and little progress is made toward changing public policy to support finding solutions.
  • We well may end up discovering that climate change is “real” when its effects are so detrimental that the deniers finally have to shut up.
• Newspapers’ mistake was free content on the web debate:
  • Most experts in digital media recognize that the web is different than “old media” (especially newspapers) and charging for commodity news content is fool-hardy when the environmental factors include a massive number of competitors and potential competitors, enabled by a very low barrier to entry. In other words, putting up newspaper-website paywalls early would have enabled a wave of online-only news entities that probably would have killed many more metro newspapers by now than has been the case.
  • Powerful and vocal old-media players like Rupert Murdoch have amped up the volume on a disproved notion (“newspapers should have charged all along for news on the web”), and a modest but growing number of old-media publishers now are trying paywalls online. This is happening despite numerous failures by metro newspapers trying web paywalls in the past, from the web’s earliest days to recent years (remember “TimesSelect”?).
  • My expectation is that we’ll find out soon enough that paywalls on general news by newspaper websites truly don’t work (except perhaps in some non-competitive small markets), but the result of some following Murdoch’s lead will be the death of more metro dailies.

Don’t mistake this for a “news wants to be free” screed. The right business model for news online very well may include as a component people paying for some content or services, and there are many possibilities other than Murdoch’s “hard paywall” as demonstrated by The Times/Sunday Times.

But resurrecting the “Original Sin” argument tends to get news people thinking in black-and-white, which won’t solve the problem.

I’m sticking to my predictions. Climate change will prove out. Newspaper website paywalls will not be the solution that saves old-media news organizations.

Over on the website of the Digital Media Test Kitchen (I’m director of that program at CU-Boulder), I’ve posted an update on one of our projects, called “Slices of Boulder,” which we’re working on with a technology partner, Toronto-based Eqentia, using its semantic publishing and distribution platform.

Work is happening over the summer, including building a taxonomy for the city of Boulder and surrounding communities, and identifying all of the local news and information digital sources currently in operation and serving Boulder’s residents. The latter is a fascinating, if big, task; the number of online sources of local, niche-local, hyper-local, and neighborhood news and information sources has grown significantly in the last year or two.

If you head on over to the Test Kitchen site at the link above, you’ll see a table I created of just some of the varied online sources available in the Boulder area today. The breadth and scope of the list (and what I published is just a small sample) is impressive. There’s a lot of diversity in the digital media-scape these days, even within a single mid-sized city. (Try this for a bigger city like Seattle, and you’ll be even more impressed by the growth of the “5th estate.”)

The reason for this, of course, is both the ease and low cost for anyone to publish in the digital age, and the decline in our local legacy news organizations, which just like in most other communities have seen editorial workforce reductions that leave holes in coverage of the Boulder area.

We expect to have a working website, a deep local-news-and-info aggregator, ready by the end of the summer or early fall.

I’ve installed The Guardian’s new Wordpress plug-in on this blog, and this is my first try at publishing a FULL Guardian article. Bravo to The Guardian for having the vision to push its content out in this way and leverage the power of letting go and turning the Web outside of its walled garden into a revenue opportunity. To the rest of the legacy news media: TAKE NOTE! -Steve

The content previously published here has been withdrawn. We apologise for any inconvenience.

I can’t say I’m surprised that Denver-based MediaNews Group (well, technically its holding company, Affiliated Media Inc.) has said that it will file for bankruptcy protection. The Wall Street Journal has a report on the latest newspaper-industry dour development, pointing out that the Hearst Corp. has $400 million in equity and debt tied to MediaNews, “and the investment will be wiped out by the bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the matter.”

MediaNews is likely to survive, but not without some unfortunate consequences for its newspapers. From the WSJ article:

“(MediaNews Group CEO Dean) Singleton also said cleaning up the company’s debt load allows him to help lead newspaper-industry consolidation, which some people in the industry say would help publishers stay afloat by creating stronger, more efficiently run groups of papers. Others are less sanguine about the benefits of consolidation.

“People in the industry have pointed to MediaNews’ paper in St. Paul and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis as potential candidates for a combination, as well as to adjacent papers in Southern California published by MediaNews, Tribune Co. and Freedom Communications Inc.”

In other words, yet another newspaper-company bankruptcy means that more muscle will be cut from newsrooms (the fat’s already gone) and communities will be more poorly served in the consolidation that’s necessary for industry survival.

We’ve seen plenty of awful things happen to newsrooms, and now we’re seeing things like copy editors being considered for elimination to save money. (E.g., Star Tribune.)

The newsroom cuts keep coming, and as newspaper companies emerge from bankruptcy owned largely by the banks that held their debt, a return to strong staffing levels and higher quality is unlikely anytime soon. (And why would advertisers return to that?)

So, it looks to me like now is a great time to be in journalism!

I’ve said that a few times recently when speaking to groups of college journalism students, and while I’ve gotten some nods of agreement, I’ve seen more heads shaking and puzzled expressions. But here’s what I mean:

Newspapers across the land are declining in quality, and lacking in coverage of their communities. A retired university journalism department head just today wrote this to me in a private e-mail about his local paper, owned by one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S.:

“Today’s [newspaper name redacted] is a bulletin board of one-paragraph meeting and event announcements, with canned features from other [corporate parent redacted] papers, local columns by city and county functionaries, booster pieces by c-of-c officials, religious claptrap by evangelists, columns on how and why to clean up your garage, pet care, etc. People who want to announce weddings and funerals are charged by the column inch, and the practice of depth reporting is a distant memory.”

I don’t see a way out of this for local and regional newspapers owned by large media companies. Do you? So newspapers will likely continue to decline, while simultaneously, new digital news entities (for- and non-profit) will continue to increase in quality. After all, the newcomers don’t have massive debt to worry about or expensive presses to maintain; digital publishing is cheap in comparison.

And, of course, many of the new news entities emerging are run by the talented journalists laid off by the once-great newspaper companies. So new news providers’ quality will continue to improve.

The problem for all the new-comers to the (reinvented) news game is the lack of a clear business model to support quality journalism in sufficient quantity. But I’m more confident that they can figure that out than I am in the newspaper industry figuring out the digital business model while also handling the collapse of their legacy business.

“New” news media rises as the old falls. MediaNews Group’s troubles are only the latest to open up more opportunities for the new news eco-system to develop.

It’s an exciting time to be a journalist, if you can stomach the chaotic environment. It’s a lousy time to own an established news media business if you’re still in love with its outdated business model.

Throughout much of my nearly 15-year gig as a freelance columnist for Editor & Publisher Online, I’ve cringed at its website. Now that E&P is shutting down (though with some hope of a last-minute save) and my “Stop The Presses!” column has ended its run, I’m free to stop the self-censorship.

Actually, I don’t really need to say that much, since (now former) E&P editor Greg Mitchell acknowledged the obvious in an interview published yesterday:

“At E&P, overly frugal ownership forced the publication to scrape by with an antiquated Web site — even though E&P advocated since the mid-1990s that newspapers and magazines embrace the Internet, or else suffer the consequences.

“‘For four years we were pushing our owners to update our site, and we couldn’t do it,’ Mitchell said. ‘As a result, we have this dinosaur of a Web site. It hasn’t been updated in five years; we can’t do video, you can’t leave comments.’”

Thank you, Greg!

For me, not a month has gone by over the last, oh, 5 years or more that, following publication of my monthly column, I didn’t get reader e-mails complaining about not being able to leave a public comment responding to what I’d written. I often resorted to using this, my personal blog, as the place for E&P readers to leave feedback or have a public discussion.

The worst were my (many) columns advocating that news websites be more interactive and participatory. Readers couldn’t resist the opportunity to point out the irony, though of course they had to do it either in a “letter to the editor” sent to EditorandPublisher.com, or to my personal e-mail address (or sometimes with a phone call).

That said, that’s a hit only on E&P’s penny-pinching overlords, not the E&P staff. My column tenure lasted through several editors before Mitchell, and each faced the same problem. Whenever I repeated my request that comments be added to my column, I got the same frustrated response: We want to do it but we can’t get corporate to allow it!

For me, the ultimate irony — and there’s a lesson here, I think — is that when I switched this blog to the popular Wordpress open-source content management system (CMS) years ago, my personal website was in many ways more sophisticated and flexible than E&P’s! If I wanted a new feature, I just found a free Wordpress plug-in and added new functionality in a few minutes. E&P’s poor editors had to beg corporate IT for any new features to be added, which either took weeks or months, or never happened (like adding user comments).

Open-source platforms like Wordpress, Drupal, and others are now remarkably advanced. You have to wonder why companies like E&P owner Nielsen (and VNU before that) would cripple themselves using a proprietary CMS.

OK, I’ve got that off my chest. I’ll end with high praise for the editorial work of E&P’s staff over the years. E&P was around for 125 years, and deservedly so. I’m proud to have been associated with the E&P brand, and leave with great respect for everyone in the now-shuttered New York City office.

You can still find them on the new (temporary?) blog, E&P In Exile.

Oh, and feel free to leave a comment below.

After writing a column for Editor & Publisher Online for so long (it was my “Stop The Presses!” column that served as the website’s main original content at the very beginning), it feels weird to have the final one published.

But it’s online, “Goodbye, for Now: Looking Foward.” (My editors rejected my apparently too-controversial suggested headline: “Stop a Lot of the Presses! (Farewell, E&P).”

There’s no place for online discussion of the column on the E&P site, so I hope anyone with an opinion on it will use the Comments area below this blog item to react to what I’ve written.

I chose to go out with a two-part list.

• One is 20/20 hindsight fantasy: what the last 15 years should have looked like if only the newspaper industry’s leaders (and employees and outside analysists and pundits) had reacted to (and more effectively lobbied industry leaders on how to respond to) disruptive change properly.

• The other is prediction: based on the reality of what did happen over that time and the decisions made, what can the newspaper industry expect next and what will the news eco-system look like.

I’ll continue writing on the future of news — and yes, expressing my opinions — on this blog. You’ll also start to see me writing on a blog associated with my newest project, set to launch in January 2010: the Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More on that very soon.

To any and everyone who spent any time reading “Stop The Presses!” over the years, thank you for spending some of your valuable time pondering my words. To everyone I’ve interviewed, thank you for sharing your ideas and opinions — and educating me on what’s to become of media in the digital era. And to my editors at E&P (present and past), thanks for allowing me this venue, and for your support over the years. Good luck!

Writing a column (“Stop The Presses!“) for Editor & Publisher Online, where I’ve covered the intersection (perhaps I should call it a collision) of the Internet and newspapers since 1995, is the longest-running professional gig I’ve ever had. The only things in my life that have lasted longer are my marriage (21 years) and being a parent (17 years).

So it’s with sadness that I learned this morning that the Nielsen Co. is shutting down E&P after being unable to sell it along with its other publications. E&P’s roots go back to 1884 and it long was considered “the bible of the newspaper industry.” I can’t say that I’m surprised; indeed, the only surprise was that the magazine and website lasted this long, as did my monthly column. (Many other E&P columns by non-staff members were cut earlier on for budgetary reasons.)

If you’re expecting details from me, I don’t have many, since I am not nor ever have I been an E&P or Nielsen employee; my column has always been a freelance or contract arrangement, one of many things that I do around the digital-news space. So based here in Boulder, Colorado, I’ve seldom known the “inside dope” about what was happening in the New York office, and didn’t know in advance that this was coming. (Indeed, just yesterday I’d been faxed my contract to sign for next year, so my editors at E&P didn’t know, either. That’s one item to delete from my to-do list for today.)

I can tell you that things are up in the air in terms of what happens to the “Editor & Publisher” brand, but that its staff will be out of their offices by the end of the year. (“Happy Holidays, E&P gang! -Love, Nielsen Co.”)

I kept writing my E&P column for so long, I guess, because I came out of the newspaper business (from 1978 to 1993 I worked mostly at newspapers in Colorado and California) and maintained an affinity for newspapers and the brand of journalism they produce. In late 1993 when the Internet came onto the scene (that’s when the first web browser was introduced to the world), I viewed it as transformational — and expected that it could transform the newspaper industry; and with my prior experience and enthusiasm for the new online world I surmised that I might be able to help, by closing watching new online trends that could affect newspapers and identifying new technologies and trends that could be leveraged by newspapers.

Ah, if I’d only known then. … If only I’d realized that the newspaper culture was too mired in the muck of its own long history, and that its leaders would, for the most part, resist-resist-resist the rapid changes required by the evolving digital culture to do what needed to be done to survive. I might have taken the new route rather than trying to repave the old one with new materials, transforming a sleepy two-lane into a sleek new super-highway.

That’s not meant as a criticism of the digital-media folks that have toiled in the newspaper industry this last decade and a half, with the same mission as I had. Those fine and smart people on the inside, and people like me on the outside offering advice and ideas for surviving the digital revolution, generally saw the direction things should go. Alas, so often it was the top leaders who held back the digital pioneers and their crazy ideas for fear of hurting the cash cow that was the printed newspaper.

Indeed, that attitude still holds true at the top of many companies, it seems. A profound moment of disappointment — when I think my mind finally lost the last tiny shread of hope for the newspaper industry — was this summer, when during a reinveinting-news conference I had a few minutes for a private conversation with the CEO of one of the largest U.S. newspaper companies. He told me that his firm’s intention of putting up pay-walls at most of its newspaper websites was meant primarily as a strategy to drive more print revenues. He said he didn’t expect to earn much from the web side with the pay-wall strategy.

That same company (I’ll be polite and refrain from naming it) early this year had me do a small consulting job, to do some research on social-media directors at other news companies and determine if it was worth it for the company to create such a position at the corporate level. I came back with estimates of how other news companies had fared with a person in that position, including estimates of increased website traffic and additional revenues from increased social-media activity and initiatives. I also made the case that ignoring social media would be a huge mistake, because it is a huge part of the future of news.

You guessed it. I later heard from the interactive-division VP who hired me that it was decided (above his level) that the social-media position would not be created, because management couldn’t see enough of a ROI in the short term, and of course money was tight for creating new positions. I just shook my head in disbelief. But, again, I wasn’t surprised.

Writing my E&P column for so long, I’ve received plenty of accolades for identifying breaking trends and alerting newspaper digital managers of technologies that they should deploy and business models they should investigate. I’ve also gotten plenty of criticisms from journalists and publishers who I describe as “old school,” who thought that my ideas would hurt the industry by hurting print revenues.

I’ve also been asked, a lot lately, why I continue to “preach to people who obviously won’t listen to what you have to say?” That’s crossed my mind for quite a while, and in that respect it’s a bit of a relief to stop writing a column that’s targeted to newspaper leaders to offer them ideas for evolving into digital creatures. This “opportunity” of losing my column aimed at a newspaper-industry audience will allow me to write more broadly about the future of news and journalism, and the new news eco-system that is evolving to fill in the gaps left by dwindling old news media.

As many others have said, journalism isn’t in danger of extinction, but newspaper print editions are. That the industry could lose its dominant and oldest trade journal is another signal itself of many more newspapers’ demise or slide into irrelevancy.

I’ll keep covering the news industry and news digital trends in this blog. But you’ll see less of me cheerleading a newspaper industry that seems bent on self-destruction. If every newspaper would take digital opportunities as seriously as does the New York Times, which has a large technology staff to go along with its still-large editorial staff, then there’d be hope. But it’s the rare few newspapers in larger markets that will survive long term because they will adapt and innovate sufficiently, like the NYT. (Small-town papers have much more of a cushion against extinction.)

Finally, lest I appear to put all the blame on newspaper industry CEOs for their myopic vision, I feel that I let the newspaper industry down, as did E&P. I and they were not strident enough with our criticisms, apparently, or strong enough with our arguments, to convince newspapers’ top leaders that they needed to get on the digital path more quickly and more solidly. I end my E&P column thinking that I could and should have done more. But at the same time, I thoroughly enjoyed the many people I met in the newspaper industry, many of them innovators and visionaries.

I’ll be continuing to guide the news industry with my latest project, which is founding the Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I don’t even have a finished website to point you to yet, but we’ll debut soon.

My latest Editor & Publisher Online column has been posted:

Some (Unasked-for) Advice for Smaller, Non-Metro Newspapers

While it’s the metro newspapers, and any paper owned by an over-leveraged parent corporation needing to pay off debt, that are the most challenged by the digital transition, newspapers in small towns away from metro areas also need (different) advice. They have less pressure and a bit longer to come to terms with the Internet and mobile revolution and how they impact their print business and historic business model. But many could do a better job of taking advantage of digital trends.

I focus on two small papers in Idaho and Montana, and I’ve invited the editors to respond here if they’d like. I hope you’ll share your ideas for what small-town newspapers should do, too. (Comment area below.)