My recent Editor & Publisher Online column about hyper-local news websites contained a call for a new model, one that relies on professional journalists working closer with “citizen” (non-journalist) experts more so than being just open to submissions from non-paid community members (aka, “citizen journalists”). I followed that up with a blog item here suggesting that to succeed, a hyper-local strategy needs to have a way to target specialized news and information to people who care about it (since it’s “boring” to everyone else) and good personalization technology.

Mark Potts, one of the founders of Backfence.com, a defunct network of citizen-journalism websites, objected to my reasoning, and suggested that the quality of content on Backfence sites had nothing to do with the company’s demise. You can read his response in a guest column on E&P Online.

Here’s my response to Potts. I’ll start with a few excerpts from his critique of my column:

“On a hyperlocal site, the end result may be something that really can’t be defined as ‘journalism,’ but that is intensely interesting and important to the people who visit and contribute to the site.” …

“It’s also unfair to suggest that hyperlocal content is ‘of low quality and boring,’ as Steve does in his column. Low quality? To a professional editor, maybe, but the fact is that most participants in user-generated sites can communicate very well. It may not be ‘journalism,’ but it’s still quite readable and interesting.”

“And ‘boring’ is in the eye of the beholder. To an outsider, any hyperlocal information is probably boring. It may be to a transient resident, too. But to someone with a stake in the community, kids in the schools, paying taxes, dealing with community services, patronizing local merchants, etc., those arcane town council meetings, zoning disputes, tips on finding good pizza and kids’ sports scores are incredibly important — more so than just about anything a lot of us think of as journalism.”

“Let’s not go making flat statements about what doesn’t work, or what’s ‘boring’ about hyperlocal sites. It’s way too early in the game to even begin to know what the successful formula will be. Let’s celebrate those of us who are working hard, inside and outside newspapers, to crack the code.”

Let’s address the “boring” issue. What I wrote and believe is that hyper-local content, most often written by community members, is often “boring” to people who don’t care about the topic. BUT, when targeted to the right person (and this is where personalization technology comes in), it’s incredibly powerful and important. Ergo, sites that present a citizen-powered collection of news items (which inevitably include lots of press releases from community groups and others) need an overhaul.

For example, here’s a list of the “Featured” stories on July 2, 2008, from the Boulder, Colorado, section of Yourhub.com, a citizen journalism site operated by E.W. Scripps and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. (Boulder is where I live, and I do care about local news and information. I’ve lived in Boulder for about 13 years, and I lived here once before in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ergo, I’m pretty well rooted in this community.) Presumably, since these are included in the Featured block on the home page, these are the best submitted stories covering Boulder. By Potts’ reasoning, I should be interested in these stories.

1. Hop on the biodiesel bus, don’t forget your bike. A 1-paragraph press release report about how Bike to Work day was a success; published 2 weeks ago.
2. Annual festival ‘a circus’. 1-paragraph press release about a Boulder juggling festival, including a bunch of photos of the jugglers; published 16 days ago.
3. A Little Light Music. An event description (press release) for a musical theater production at the University of Colorado; published 9 days ago.
4. Boulder Creek Festival Kick-Off Concert! Press release about the Boulder Creek Festival, which was held over Memorial Day; published over a month ago.
5. Congratulations to Boulder-area graduates. Yourhub.com staff put this together; it’s a compilation of links to lists of Boulder County high school graduates. Published over a month ago.

So those are the Featured stories for Boulder on Yourhub.com on July 2, the day I’m writing this. I also clicked on the list of all stories submitted to Yourhub under the Boulder category. For July 2, there are 7 stories in the list:

1. Poorly written essay by Boulder guy about he and his buddies skiing all 28 California resorts.
2. Press release for community theater of nearby town (Louisville).
3. Press release about traveling presidential memorabilia visiting Denver. (No Boulder connection.)
4. Story about the second anniversary of the Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act. (I think this is a press release from the Smoke Free Colorado organization; no Boulder connection.)
5. Story (or maybe it’s a press release; I can’t really tell) about teens raising money for Alzheimer’s Disease research. (No Boulder connection that I could discern.)
6. An Arvada resident reminisces about an old Denver-area restaurant chain, The Drumstick. (No Boulder connection.)
7. Girl Scout press release about a promotion with Dairy Queen. (No Boulder connection.)

OK, I dare anyone to convince me that that collection of content is “interesting.” I’m a devoted, long-time Boulderite, and the only thing I found remotely of interest is the Yourhub staff compilation of high school graduates; I can look to see if any of my friends’ kids graduated. I sure have no desire to come back to check out the Boulder stuff on Yourhub after this exercise.

I chose to examine Yourhub Boulder, of course, to see if Potts is right that if you’re committed to a community, you do care about the kind of stuff that goes on sites like Yourhub, and that was carried by Backfence.com sites when they were still running. I can’t begin to describe how dull this collection of content is to me.

Now, I again will emphasize that I am not a critic of the concept of “citizen journalism.” To the contrary, I’m a believer in hyper-local! I just don’t think we’re doing it right yet.

Here’s what I’d suggest for a remodel of Yourhub, and what I think (in hindsight) that Backfence should have done. The user interface would look like this:

A user should be able to select from a list of topics, interests, organizations, etc. that he is interested in. This would generate a local-focused content stream of stuff over time that matches his interests. For example, I might select as my interests: mountain biking; cycling; running; “green”/environmental news; Boulder Open Space Department; trails news; Summit Middle School; University of Colorado School of Journalism; mosquito control; dogs; traffic delays/road construction; the Internet scene; venture capital community/investors; Boulder media; and news about my small neighborhood.

How would a hyper-local site serve up all that stuff? It would comb through various sources of news, events, and information that match those choices: newspaper staff; citizen contributors; local blogs (mostly external, but perhaps newspaper bloggers, too); websites and newsletters of community groups, schools, and government agencies; discussion lists (aka, listservs) and forums devoted to various topics (e.g., local mountain biking group) and run by various local organizations; local databases (police department, health department, Realtors’ groups). It would intelligently parse through a growing list of news, data, and information sources and deliver to me what I care most about. The hyper-local site ideally would become the place I look first for what I care about or need to know locally; Google serves that purpose now.

This gets close to what the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next 2.0 report suggests: the newspaper as “local information and connection utility.”

I’m standing by my criticism of much (NOT ALL!) hyper-local content as “boring.” I’ll stop saying that Yourhub Boulder’s content is boring when it starts including content from the school my daughter goes to, and when it also brings me news about my nearby neighbors, and so on.

What about other local news? Am I suggesting that I don’t care about that? Not at all. That’s what my traditional local newspaper website is for. Here in Boulder we have lots of fascinating stuff going on, from adverse possession controversies to naked bicyclists getting a pass while a naked jogging priest gets arrested. The newspaper site is great for that, and I’m devoted to reading it day-in and day-out. It’s the hyper-local sites covering Boulder with their dull content about minor local events and happenings that don’t interest me that I can live without (please).

Just give me the good hyper-local stuff! Then I’ll be happy, and the hyper-local publishers (be they newspapers or independents) will have a business.

This is a complex subject, and I’m glossing over some other possible solutions. For example, I think that having a strong and attractive personality at the center of a hyper-local website can be tremendously effective in gaining an audience and creating a strong community of users. And I think that some of the weaknesses of non-professional content can be dealt with by some professional editorial oversight or help (a pro-am approach). I also think it makes sense for newspapers playing in the hyper-local space to integrate that into the main news website, instead of putting it “over there” in a silo for the “non-professional” stuff. But this has gone on too long already, so I’ll leave those discussions for other days.

I write this with all due respect for my friend Mark Potts, who I’ve known for many years. I’m having a hard time remembering when we last disagreed on an issue. But we’ll have to disagree on this one.

I want to see hyper-local succeed. Who knows if I’m right in my thinking on this; we’ll see as hyper-local plays out. Lots of people are trying to make it work and “crack the code.” What I presented in my E&P column and in my earlier blog item is my attempt at that, and nothing more.

OK, I think I get it now. I feel like I understand what newspapers need to do. I wrote up some of this in my latest Editor & Publisher Online column, but subsequent to that I also ran across a significant blog entry from Dudernet: “Newspapers and why I’ve tired of reading (most of) them.” That blog is by “tball”; I have no idea who that is, but he/she works at a Tribune Co. newspaper and appears to blog anonymously.

The blog item discusses something that’s been bugging me for a while. Most newspapers are focusing on local news, since national and international coverage is a commodity online and they need to focus on what they can do best, and that’s local coverage. But the trouble is, for many people, local news is boring and not relevant to them. And hyper-local (aka, local-local) is even more so.

This is especially so for people who don’t have strong ties to the community in which they live. The U.S., especially, is a transitory society; people move around a lot for jobs, school, and other reasons, and they don’t always feel strongly attached to where they live. Lots of folks are more interested in niche topics and national events than local politics and local news headlines, or they want local news from where they’re from originally. These people are especially unimpressed by coverage of city council meetings and other mundane local happenings in the town or city where they live. It’s the people who don’t move around — who still live in the town where they grew up — that are appreciative of good local coverage.

Here’s a great excerpt from someone (”mccxxiii”) who commented on tball’s post. (This is good stuff.)

“I am fairly young, single, no kids, and no extended family in the large city where I live. I rent because I could never afford to buy here, and I’ll leave in the next couple of years because of it.

“I am concerned with exactly two items of ‘local news’ … when is the dog park in my neighborhood opening, and are there any train delays this morning. I get both of those things more quickly and efficiently from a source other than my local paper. (Dog park project listserv and text message alerts from the train people.)

“It pains me to say that, because I was a newspaper reporter for nearly a decade, and I like nothing more than to settle in for a good read with a bagel and juice in the morning. But pages upon pages of city council minutiae and youth baseball coverage say nothing to me except goodbye. Everything I read about ‘how to save newspapers’ includes the idea of hyper-local, but I can’t think of a better way to turn me OFF.”

Brilliant! This person is pointing you to the way to make hyper-local relevant.

If it’s not obvious to you, the local newspaper serving this individual should be the one serving up the information from the dog park listserv. And the train delays. That it’s not doing that, and is leaving it to others, is major oversight.

To see what newspapers must do to do hyper-local right, look to Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock.com, which digs out and filters real estate listings, crime, government data, news articles, blog entries, and a bunch of other stuff down to the city-block level. That’s stuff that reaches people at a personal level: the crime that happened 2 blocks from my house; the house that sold down the street, and for how much; the bus route change that affects the bus stop I use; etc.

Local newspapers need to figure out how to find the data and information like train delays and dog-park news, then deliver it to the people who care about it. That is the “hyper-local news” that will allow newspapers to renew themselves as important in people’s lives. Right now if you want to find out about train delays, you probably go directly to the train operator’s website; if you don’t know about that site, you go to Google and Google points you to the train schedule page. Local newspapers need to become known as the place to go for the hyper-local information and news that YOU want.

I think this will require several components to pull off:

1. Technology to automate some of the process of combing through public databases and information sources to find all the relevant hyper-local data and news that people within your community might care about. Every newspaper will want to be able to do what Everyblock.com is doing. (Holovaty will release the open-source code to Everyblock when his 2-year Knight Foundation grant period is over.)
2. Staffing at the newspaper that is constantly finding new sources of information, news, and data to feed into the system. These editorial workers should be not only looking for every local source of information to tap, but also finding out from readers and users what they want. “mccxxiii” said he/she wants dog-park news and train-delay schedules. What else do people want and need? Can you get it for them?
3. Personalization features for your website that allow users to specify what they want to know and how to receive it. The default may be news and other stuff that happens within a user-defined radius of a users’ home and/or office address. But the user also should be able to specify custom stuff that they want, such as news alerts about the new dog park. And of course they should be able to choose to receive news and information about topics of interest (e.g., stuff about the local rock climbing scene) that is not tied to a mapped area around their location.
4. Facebook-like features that let a newspaper’s readers what’s going on with their friends, a la Facebook’s Newsfeed. Reinventing Newsfeed-like functionality for a newspaper site may not make much sense, while tapping into Facebook on behalf of your users might.

None of this is meant to suggest that local news isn’t important. It is, and people really do care about significant news that happens in their communities. But when it comes to stuff that’s deeper into the community and of interest only to a small segment, there is a danger with hyper-local of boring your audience. Location, location, location is the Realtor’s mantra; I’m thinking that personalization, personalization, personalization should be local newspaper website editors’ mantra now.

I hope no one reads into this that I am not a believer in hyper-local. To the contrary, I’m a big fan, but I think that for it to gain an appreciative audience — and for it to turn into a business — we need to add the elements that I describe above.

Jay Small, a new-media and newspaper veteran for whom I have great respect, has responded to my recent blog post about individuated news: “Individuate Me!.” In it, he challenges the wisdom of making personalized news a priority. Here’s my response:

First, Jay noted that “the conference title muddles the theme: personal news. (Really, isn’t ‘Global Individuated’ somewhat like ‘Jumbo Shrimp’?)” That’s my fault, actually; I mangled the conference name in my original blog post (since corrected). The actual name is “Global Conference on the Individuated Newspaper.” Sorry about that!

Here’s Small’s view:

“I have consistently held an alternative view about investing to personalize news on the level of an individual news site. Unless you’re CNN, it isn’t worth it. Every shred of user research I have conducted, observed or studied tells me consumers do want a personal Web experience — but not just for news, not just for one news Web site at a time, and not always based on the same selection criteria.”

Actually, a few minutes ago I fired off my June Editor & Publisher Online column to my editors; it will probably be published either later today or Monday. That piece will go far in explaining why I think personalized news is important (though the column isn’t on personalized news, per se).

The short version is that I believe newspapers need to go well outside their staffs and become much better at pulling in new content and new people from the community. Add that to the traditional news reporting, and follow a strategy of using professional journalists to filter and enhance content from those exterior sources, and you end up with a big mass of content that begs to be delivered on a personalized basis; in fact, there’s no other way to do it.

If we expand our notion of the local news report to include not just newspaper reporters’ output, but also a wide mix of content from all segments of the community — and add data as news, a la Everyblock.com — then consumption requires good personal filtering services.

The other thing that sways me — and this point was made in one of the presentations at the conference yesterday — is the behavior of young people. I see this in my own household. I’d say 90% of my daughters’ media consumption is “individuated.” That is, they watch TV shows on their schedule via TiVo; music is via iPod/iTunes/LimeWire, with only occasional FM radio in the car (with incessant channel changing); movies are Netflix and Amazon Unbox, with occasional trips to a Blockbuster store; news consumption (very little) is online. For kids today, non-individuated media is outside the norm.

Ergo, I don’t believe as today’s young generation gets older that they will accept anything less than personalized, individuated news.

And to quickly address the age-old argument about personalized news, I think that most news consumers will receive and want both a “Daily Me” and a “Daily We,” where the latter is news and information that everyone wants and needs to know to live in this society.

I spent today at the Global Conference on the Individuated Newspaper, hosted by MediaNews Group and run by MN’s VP of targeted products, Peter Vandevanter, who is a long-time student and fan of personalized news. Forty or so people gathered in the auditorium of the Denver Newspaper Agency building — an interesting mix of technologists, entrepreneurs, and newspaper folks. Editors and publishers were in the minority at this gathering, though I wish more of them could have heard the message of this conference.

While the organizers chose the term “individuated” for this event, that’s not the best choice. While everyone in the room understands that term, it’s a bit geeky and I don’t think it’ll resonate with media consumers. As the industry rolls out “individuated newspapers” in the future, we’ll have to come up with a more approachable name. (And by individuated newspapers, I of course don’t mean just personalized print editions; delivery platforms also include home printing, phones and mobile devices, PDFs, etc.)

Here’s a really brief description of the key messages that came out of this conference (the ones I want more news executives to hear):

• The technology to provide news consumers with individuated (personal) news is here now. Other industries consider delivering personalized content to be routine, but newspapers have little to show but a handful of experiments. What’s needed is a newspaper company to take the risk and take personalized news seriously. We really have yet to move much beyond the old MIT “Fishwrap” personalized-news project that started the individuated-news trend way back in 1994.
• Young people today have individuated experiences with most of their media: TiVo, Netflix, iTunes/iPod, Facebook, MySpace, Amazon.com, Netflix, computer games, cell phones, etc. It’s their way of life. No wonder, then, that they don’t take to newspapers that want to deliver content on the publisher’s terms, not the consumer’s.
• Individuated news is the inevitable evolution of newspapers. Adapt to it or die. Tomorrow’s consumers will settle for nothing less if they are to remain your customers.

A heartening signal of the industry starting to take personalized news seriously was MediaNews CEO (and chairman of the Associated Press board of directors) Dean Singleton, who presented a (taped) speech about how important he believes individuated news is to his company. That sends a signal to the rest of the industry.

I’ve been thinking more about the Tribune Co.’s “radical” print newspaper redesigns, which started with its Orlando Sentinel last Sunday. I’ve checked out the print edition each day this week.

Overall, my impressions are big-time negative — not so much from a how-it-looks perspective (the design is nice enough), but rather from a corporate strategy perspective.

1. It’s not that radical of a redesign. I wrote last week after viewing the online preview of the print redesign that it didn’t seem that much different from a USA Today-like revamping. After looking over its pages this week, I just can’t see that this is something that is going to “save” printed newspapers. It’s hardly a “reinvention” of the print medium.
2. It’s not going to win over younger people. To the Internet-savvy young person for whom newspapers are another generation’s relic media, this revamping of the printed newspaper won’t even register. Instead, the abrupt change in how the paper looks will annoy established readers who still value the print edition. My prediction: 6 months from now the Sentinel will have fewer print subscribers.
3. The redesign is flash disguising editorial cutbacks. I get a strong sense from this redesign that it is an attempt to win over people with short, Internet-fueled attention spans by using flash and splash to cover up the fact that there’s less to the paper. It feels like a TV or radio mentality applied to newspapers, and it won’t work, IMHO. Look at the negative reactions in Hartford, Connecticut from readers who are hearing about Tribune owner Sam Zell’s instructions to the Courant’s publisher to reduce editorial content to a 50/50 editorial/ad split. The redesign in Orlando is meant to cover that up (Zell’s edict applies in Orlando, too), but I’m confident that Orlandoans will see this as a ploy and reject it.
4. The redesign goes in the wrong direction. I think Zell is misguided to think that putting a corporate team of TV and radio people in charge of reinventing the company’s printed newspapers is the way to go. They seem to be steering it to in-your-face visuals and make-it-shorter articles. But people still willing to read printed papers tend to be older and more thoughtful, so that’s the wrong direction. Orlando’s paper would do better to aim for New York Times instead of New York Post.
5. Redesigning print won’t save the company. This is the key point. A good, smart print redesign could go far in retaining existing readers who like reading on paper; it will hold on to them a bit longer. (A badly conceived one, as I view Orlando’s, will result in readers fleeing.) But a redesign is not going to bring new readers to print. The Tribune Co. needs to put all its creativity and crazy ideas into Internet strategy, which is what is going to save the company.

One reason for my sense of Tribune Co. doom is employee morale, which must be pretty low right now. An indicator of that is this video of a speech by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who insults his Tribune Co. bosses at a Los Angeles Press Club awards event (to hearty laughter from the crowd). I don’t know how an effective turnaround is going to happen in an atmosphere of employee disdain and disrespect for company leaders. (If I’m wrong on this, perhaps some folks inside Tribune newspapers will set me straight.)

My prediction: Zell, famous for his expletives, will be doing a lot more cursing before Tribune starts to go down in flames after not making its debt payments within the next year or two.

I let most celebrity deaths pass without commenting on them, because they usually don’t hit me. I’ve never been much into celebrity worship. But I do feel the loss of George Carlin. He’s among the select few who I am comfortable using the term “comic genius.” I’ll miss his irreverent and smart brand of humor.

Here’s one of my favorite stand-up routines from Carlin, about religion. It will offend lots of people, no doubt, but to me it’s f***ing hilarious. …

Farewell, George Carlin, from a fellow sun worshiper.

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.

This Sunday, the Orlando Sentinel will debut a significant redesign of the print edition (prompted, of course, by Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell’s company-wide call to go crazy and reinvent newspapers). While I’m writing this in advance of seeing the actual paper, there is a nice multimedia presentation that shows what’s coming. So I’m commenting on what’s being shown there.

The Orlando Sentinel’s new design debuts on Sunday.

This feels very much like the introduction of USA Today so many years ago. Lots of the innovations feel the same: Let’s assume that readers don’t have much of an attention span and that we have to hit them over the head with a 2×4. Shorter. Punchier. Flashier. Perkier writing. Big photos and art. Bigger and better digests showing what’s inside.

What’s new here that USA Today didn’t do years ago? Bringing in more outside voices — reader comments, bloggers — is the main difference I spotted. Am I missing anything?

Personally, I think I’d prefer this newly designed paper over an older and more traditionally designed one. I’m not one who gets freaked out by drastic overnight changes in my media. But I wonder if older readers who still cling to reading print editions will freak out, and feel like the new paper is dumbed down (despite the editor’s assurance that it’s not).

It feels like the redesign is aimed at getting more younger readers. OK, that’s a rational goal. But I don’t think that’s achievable, because printed newspapers are simply not the medium of choice for today’s younger generation.

What I fear may happen is that this radical redesign will not attract significant numbers of new young readers. Rather, it will turn off the loyalists who still buy the print edition.

OK, that was rather negative. How about a more positive comment?

First off, I’ve been immersed in online for a long time; I left my last print newspaper job in late 1993. I’m not a big believer anymore in print newspapers, and I think they’ll continue to slowly wind down as the masses switch to digital and mobile means of consuming news. So from my (admittedly not mainstream) view, trying to improve the printed newspaper is a bit of a “putting lipstick on a pig” exercise. (Hmm… I’m still being pretty negative. )

If Zell wants his newspapers to truly innovate, perhaps he should get his people to do something truly innovative. (Flashy print redesigns don’t strike me as the best use of innovators’ brain cells. That’s not to say that they’re without merit; on the contrary, I think they are of value. I did spend several years working in a newspaper art department, and have affection for and appreciation of the value of newspaper design. No, I just think there are bigger fish to fry, and most of it involves figuring out a new business model for online and mobile, not trying to gussy up the print edition.)

I see a couple key issues that newspaper companies need to address: 1. news-on-demand, and 2. personalization. Print editions are anything but news-on-demand, so we can strike that; you can’t pick up a newspaper and go read or view something that’s not already on the printed page.

Personalization of the print edition, on the other hand, may be a good area to innovate. Next Thursday and Friday I’m attending the Conference on the Individuated Newspaper, which is being hosted by the folks at Denver-based MediaNews Group. The event’s focus is not just online but also on individualizing print editions, in recognition of printing technology advances that make it feasible. Perhaps some interesting ideas will come out of that, and I’ll share them.

I’m sure I’ll write in more depth after the conference, but just to give you an idea of what’s coming, think about a newspaper with a personalized section (or wrapper) that contains news happening in your neighborhood — which could be from sources beyond just the newspaper staff (local bloggers, school websites, etc.) — and that matches your recorded preferences (sports teams you like, specific industry news, etc.). That’s all stuff that you can do “fairly easily” online. True innovation offline would be adding some of this to the print edition.

I’m less of a print fan than many in the newspaper industry, but if I were to steer some of my thinking to print again, I wouldn’t expect even an excellent redesign to do much more than pretty up that pig.

I’ve gone back and forth in my mind about the chances of the beleaguered Tribune Co. in the Sam Zell era. On the one hand, I’ve applauded his (occasionally profane) approach of shaking things up and imploring the Tribune staff to think out of the box and start seriously innovating. There can be little argument that that’s what the newspaper industry needs.

But then this week Zell’s “chief innovation officer,” radio guy Lee Abrams, sent out a wake-up call memo to the company’s newspaper division, which was made public on Romenesko. Parts of it were (my opinion) laughable, and already parodies of the memo have turned up on Romenesko.

• Lee Abrams’ original “Think Piece: 15 Points That’ll Grow Newspapers” memo
• Parody No. 1
• Parody No. 2

No doubt Abrams has a difficult job, but he really blew it with such doozies as, “Before I joined Tribune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe reporting the news.” That alone probably caused every newspaper person in the company to not take him seriously.

I don’t know Abrams, but I question why a radio guru is put into the roll of reinventing the company’s newspapers. It’s not that a newspaper person must be the person to head up an innovation on the newspaper side of the company. But someone from a likewise-suffering industry, radio, seems like an odd choice. Yes, Abrams came most recently from satellite radio company XM; but I consider that to be a less innovative than such music innovations as Pandora, or the iPod, for that matter.

Zell might have made a wiser choice by bringing in a big-picture innovator, not tied to the newspaper industry but also not influenced by old and outdated media sectors. A futurist like Paul Saffo is the type of person Tribune probably needs; or grab a star analyst and forward thinker like Josh Bernoff or Charlene Li.

Yet another reason I’m suddenly sour on Tribune’s chances is having looked at the preview of Tribune’s Orlando Sentinel print edition redesign, to be released this Sunday. I’ll write up some thoughts on that one later.

Craig (who needs no last name to be recognized, but it’s Newmark) spoke to editors at the Washington Post this week. Here’s a video clip:

More thoughts over on ReinventingClassifieds.com.