News

My latest column is up over at Editor & Publisher Online: “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.”

I’m very curious to see the reaction to this one, as I think I’m hitting some significant new ground. And if anyone can point me to examples of the global-to-micro-personal news service that I’m imagining, please do.

Since John McCain has stated that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, his campaign’s reaction to someone hacking into running mate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account and spreading the contents around the web should come as no surprise. (It appears that the e-mails are legit.) His campaign manager, Rick Davis, appears to be as equally clueless about “the Internets.”

In this Gawker report on the hijacked e-mails, Davis is quoted:

“The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them.”

Oy! Perhaps they still use typewriters over at McCain campaign HQ. Davis must be thinking we still live back in the day when the news media could be persuaded to squelch something like this. If the media decided to hold back (because, after all, this was an illegal act committed by someone, and old media probably wouldn’t touch a story that’s so ethically and legally challenged), then the public wouldn’t see the e-mails.

Sorry, Mr. Davis, but we don’t live in that era anymore. Even if your lawyers convinced Gawker to take them down (unlikely), there are copies popping up on websites all over the place, and all over the world. Any attempt at playing digital whack-a-mole with Palin’s personal e-mails would be fruitless. Many Internet users will take it as a challenge to spread the e-mails even further if you try to (pointlessly) tamp this down.

I’m not saying that I condone someone breaking into Palin’s Yahoo account. What I am saying is that now that this has happened, the McCain camp is basically screwed.

My advice to the campaign: You’ll look foolish and demonstrate your lack of understanding of the Internet if you try to get everyone to take down those purloined e-mails. You’re in a lousy place, so put your focus on dealing with the content of the e-mails, and explaining why it was OK (if you can) that Palin was conducting official business using Yahoo.

The other dilemma here is for traditional news organizations. Will they publish the e-mails? I doubt it, and I certainly wouldn’t encourage them to. But they should report on the brouhaha taking place online about Palin’s e-mail account, and can address the personal account used for official business controversy.

This morning, on NPR’s Morning Edition, host Steve Inskeep interviewed former New York mayor and Republican presidential candidate Rudy Guiliani, who has been in Denver to offer an anti-Democratic presence to media gathered there for the Democratic convention. Guiliani made the suggestion that Hillary Clinton is helping Republican candidate John McCain, since in the primary campaign she pointed out how inexperienced Barack Obama is — which of course he agreed with.

Inskeep did the “objective journalist” thing and politely pointed out to Guiliani that he had some strong criticisms of McCain during the Republican primary campaign. Ergo, why should we take Clinton’s (recanted) statements seriously now when Guiliani doesn’t want us to take his previous criticisms of McCain seriously? Guiliani gave the typical slippery-politician response to brush off that past criticism, and Inskeep let it drop.

The interview annoyed me, because Inskeep basically let Guiliani get away with being hypocritical. Inskeep was too polite and deferential, and Guiliani got away with something unfair and unseemly.

Now imagine how Jon Stewart would handle that interview. Guiliani would have come across looking like the hypocrite he is in this instance.

Ah, but in the “real” journalism world, we have to be “fair and balanced” (unless we work for Fox News). Things like this make me sad for my profession. (But I still love you, NPR!)

There are a few things that local newspapers and other news outlets (TV, radio) don’t do well, and I’m always on the lookout for solutions. Here’s one that’s come up for me many times over the years:

Something happens locally, like, say, a fire; there’s a lot of smoke in the distance, and I want to know what’s going on. But I visit my local newspaper’s website, and there’s nothing. Ditto for other local news outlets’ websites. Eventually (but not always), a reporter will get around to writing up something and it’ll be posted online.

It’s especially vexing when there’s never any report. Maybe the fire is not big enough to warrant coverage by the newspaper. But I’m still curious what happened. Where do I turn?

Now we have the solution: Twitter.

This has been staring me in the face for a while now, but it just hit me. Twitter solves this problem, because often when something happens the local “Twittersphere” will be abuzz about it, before a reporter has had a chance to write it up and publish something (or even knows about it).

To monitor this, lately I’ve been using Twinkle on the iPhone, an application that works with Twitter. A Twinkle feature is to identify where I am using the iPhone location (GPS) feature, and show me Twitter posts (tweets) from within a specified radius.

So, next time I see a big smoke cloud in the distance, I’ll launch Twinkle and check out tweets from Twitter users in Boulder. Odds are that folks will be talking about it, and someone near the blaze will have posted something more than conjecture.

Applications like Twinkle are also great journalistic tools, of course. In the old days, newspaper reporters had the TV on in the background, in case TV news had something that they should know about. Today, someone in the newsroom should be monitoring local tweets; it’s the new early warning system for news, with an army of witnesses feeding you information.

Earlier this afternoon I tossed off a Twitter post that needs more than 140 characters to explain what I’m thinking. … What raised my disgust was this memo posted on Romenesko by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s managing editor, explaining a new policy to stop posting “signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts” on the Philly.com website first. (Breaking news still goes to the website right away.)

OK, I understand the thinking: The print product is suffering and this is a way to give it an edge — to encourage people to think that there’s some good stuff that you’ll get first by sticking with print.

But this is an argument that has been decided (or so I thought), so it’s disheartening to see a major newspaper go backward.

Jeff Jarvis said it nicely and succinctly in a Twitter post: “Insanely, suicidally stupid. If we keep out the gas stations, we’ll force them to ride horses, damnit.”

What’s long held back the newspaper industry and gotten it in the current mess has been holding back online innovation that might impact the legacy product (print). The kind of serious innovation that might have avoided the turmoil we’re now seeing among newspapers (especially larger metros like the Inquirer) could only take place with an attitude of “Let’s completely forget about the print edition and just try to build the best damn online service possible.”

But the industry didn’t do that, for the most part, instead settling for incremental innovation that wouldn’t upset things too much on the legacy side. That’s exactly the thinking that’s in this Inquirer memo.

I find this memo so discouraging.

Over the many years I’ve been writing my column for Editor & Publisher Online, I’ve managed to make a few enemies, it seems. As with any columnist, there are those that disagree with my opinions, and that’s to be expected. I also have pissed off a few newspaper editors. From their perspective, I suppose that I’ve promoted some ideas that they consider to be dangerous to the newspaper industry. From my point of view, some editors with traditional media mindsets get threatened when presented with ideas that they perceive as damaging the traditional business model of newspapers, even though they may be ideas that must be implemented if the newspaper industry is to survive the transition to digital.

Today I received the July 2008 edition of Editor & Publisher’s monthly print edition, and it included this letter:

Outing Mr. Outing

“Steve Outing bit the hand that feeds him a couple months ago when he wrote a column bragging that he’s so hip he’s cancelling his local newspaper subscription. Now he’s gnawing on that same hand (‘Stop The Presses,’ E&P Online, May 28).

“‘Recently I learned about a large tornado that was forming not far from where I live through an e-mail news alert from my local newspaper,’ he wrote Presumably, this is the same newspaper he cancelled his subscription to. In other words, he happily allowed those who didn’t cancel their subscriptions, and the paper’s advertisers, to subsidize a service that warned him of impending danger to him and his family.

“But he wasn’t writing to thank them. In fact, he complained that they should have called him on the telephone, and then went on endlessly about ways in which newspapers might better serve people like him, who contribute exactly zero to those papers’ revenue streams.

“Why Editor & Publisher continues to publish his work is beyond me.”

Mike Hudson
Editor, Niagara Falls Reporter

I am imagining Hudson reading my columns (though I’m not sure why he subjects himself to my thoughts) with clenched teeth, and not really absorbing what I wrote. When I stopped taking and paying for the print edition of my local paper, I noted that such actions will soon become mainstream. And I suggested that publishers should be thinking about how to serve non-print-edition news consumers, because just because you’ve lost a print customer doesn’t mean you’ve lost them; they’re merely switching formats from old (paper) to new (online and mobile). I further suggested that offering digital news services that offer convenience may be something that can carry a price tag.

Hudson chose to make his criticism personal, and suggested that I couldn’t afford the paper so that must be why I quit taking it. What BS. Newspaper readers are dropping print in growing numbers because there’s an alternative that works better for them. It’s not for everyone yet, but we’ll see growing numbers of people switching to digital news consumption in the upcoming years.

Editors like Hudson seem to have tunnel vision on this issue, believing that giving up on newspaper print editions is kicking the newspaper industry in the shins. What, news consumers are supposed to stick with a medium that is inferior to digital news formats just to shore up a dying business model? Dream on.

I don’t pretend to know the Niagara Falls market. Perhaps it’s a community that can sustain a healthy print newspaper for a while longer. Hudson must think so, since his paper has only a crude website. My community (Boulder, Colorado) is not like that; it has a highly educated and tech-savvy populace, and a thriving Internet industry. Its residents will need a good digital alternative.

I’m hoping that the editors of Boulder’s paper will not be as traditional-thinking as Hudson appears to be.

A long-running soap opera legal case here in Boulder involves the Midyettes, a couple whose 10-week-old baby died. Molly Midyette is serving a jail term for not preventing the death of her son, while Alex Midyette is set to stand trial for child abuse resulting in death.

This week, Alex Midyette was granted a change of venue for his trial, due to the intense publicity surrounding the case. Just as with the fabled Jonbenet Ramsey case (Boulder’s most notorious criminal mystery), it’s just about impossible to find anyone in Boulder without knowledge of the Midyette case — and probably an opinion about Alex’s guilt, given his wife’s conviction.

Daily Camera commenters haven’t been reticent in expressing their opinions

What’s interesting about this change of venue is that the court cited Internet comments on local news websites (mostly the Boulder Daily Camera) and blogs as a primary reason for moving proceedings out of Boulder County, along with traditional media coverage. This may be the first time a court has relied so heavily on online comments to news stories in such a decision; it certainly won’t be the last.

The Camera’s Zak Brown covered the issue in this story, which includes a short quote from me.

How to save newspapers … NOT!
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/socialstudies.php

Why does this idea persist? I realize that the “free content” model is not paying out as quickly as the newspaper industry wants it to — thus necessitating drastic cutbacks in response to the downward revenue spiral — but this author’s suggestion of newspaper publishers banding together and withholding news content unless consumers pay will just ACCELERATE the industry’s decline.

Fortunately, I don’t think the idea will ever get a serious try-out. (Past attempts over the last decade-plus have failed, other than for niche publishers with high-value, not easily found elsewhere content. Why beat a dead horse?)

I think the iPhone 3G is gonna be big. … D’uh! That’s a pretty safe statement. After today’s announcement, and after drooling over its new features on the Apple website, I tried to check my AT&T account to see when my 2-year contract is up, so I can upgrade to the new iPhone without paying an exorbitant price to do so, and check on data plan pricing. wireless.att.com was so overloaded I couldn’t log in even with repeated attempts.

Assuming Apple can produce enough of these things to satisfy demand, I’ve got to believe that there will be enough iPhones out there (1st-gen and 3G) to support development by news and media companies of services specifically for the iPhone platform. In fact, I’d say any publisher not getting ready to serve an onslaught of iPhone users should have his/her head examined.

I also think that the state of the new iPhone is such that it will cause a lot of its users to abandon reading print newspapers, if they haven’t stopped that already. Traditionalists can pooh-pooh the idea of a tiny phone replacing a print newspaper, but I have no doubt that for many people, it will.

My May column for Editor & Publisher Online is up: “Serving Those Who Don’t Read the Print Edition.”

It’s a riff on how newspapers need to figure out how to serve the increasing number of people who are dumping their print habit and halting subscriptions to the paper edition (and serve those for whom printed newspapers have never been a media choice).