Monday marks the rollout of NYTimes.com’s “metered paywall,” which I wrote about (and criticized) here last week (before going on vacation for a week). Here are a few quick developments and additional thoughts about what is an important milestone in the digital-news space:

What do you think of the NYT paywall? Tell Columbia researchers!

Columbia University researchers Shahzeem Attari and Jonathan Cook are conducting a survey on attitudes about and intentions of using (or not) the new New York Times metered paywall. Take the survey here and help them get a good number of responses so that the results are meaningful. (They’ll also appreciate it if you share the link further.)

Can NYT lower the price after starting so high?

I’m sticking to my criticisms as expressed in my last blog post about the NYT paywall. One thing that absolutely confuses me is why Times executives would choose to begin the program at such a high price for digital access ($15 per 4 weeks for web + iPhone/smartphone app; $20 per 4 weeks for web + iPad/tablet app; and $35 per 4 weeks for web + iPhone/smartphone app + iPad/tablet app). Starting high will make it awfully difficult to lower the prices to levels that will work for more than the few NYT supporters willing to help out the company.

Last week, NYT’s David Carr wrote a defense of the program and pricing, and reading through the user comments is telling. Lots of commenters said that they would be willing to pay $4.99 a month; that number appeared often. Indeed, many indicated they’d sign up in a heartbeat for a digital plan (no print edition) that allowed access to NYT content on any device (PC, laptop, smartphone, tablet) at that price. But the vast majority in that comment stream balked at the Times’ high asking price. They’ll go elsewhere for quality free news online, or work around the paywall limits, which is pretty easy to do.

Let’s imagine that this is an accurate reading of public reaction to the Times’ pricing, and that NYT executives wake up to realize that $4.99 is the monthly price that will bring in the greatest success all-around, in terms of dollars incoming and number of paying subscribers. The people already paying the exorbitant rate will all have to get refunds based on the new rate, I guess — or feel like dummies for paying so much in the first place.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to start with a (pretty standard-model) charter rate that was very low, then raise rates later? Odd.

‘We need this to survive!’ … zzzzz

Catching up on reading after my vacation, I spotted David Winer’s March 17 piece, “Comments on NYT paywall announcement,” and he makes a strong point that I’m 100% in agreement on: The Times’ pitch for people to begin paying for news online is that “We need this to survive.” … Fail!

So much better, Winer wrote (and again, 100% concurrence here), would be an offering of value to consumers. “Wouldn’t it have been wise to, at this juncture, offer something to sweeten the deal. Something truly exciting and new that you get when you pay the money. Something that makes your palms sweat and your heart beat faster?”

This supports my notion that premium memberships are a smarter idea for most news companies that want to bring in more revenue online. Currently, the Times is asking for people to pay for something that they’ve received free online for many years; that’s a difficult sale, when other quality news providers continue to be free. To compound it, the Times offers nothing new to “sweeten the deal.” … Fail.

False charge: I say news should be free

My last blog item got tweeted and shared quite a bit, and I spotted some pushback like this tweet: “NYTimes’ new pay model: They blew it!, or Why I want to bitch about paying for stuff on the internet (Via @steveouting)”

I need to push back on that one. In the case of NYT, I do think they can succeed by charging. As explained in my last post, I believe that a larger success will come from asking a much, much lower monthly fee; I suggested 99 cents for web-only full access to NYT content, and $1.99 for all-device access. As noted above, David Carr’s commenters indicate that $4.99 a month might be a price point that fills the NYT Co.’s bank account nicely.

No, I’m not bitching about paying for stuff on the Internet. I’m criticizing a pricing model that reflects an old-media view of doing business on the Internet and fails to address the realities of the Internet (one of them being that under-30ies are extremely unlikely to pay for NYT content online, so the debut price structure completely writes off younger readers; how smart is that?). If NYT execs followed my advice on the 99-cent/$1.99 pricing, they might still have a chance at the younger audience. Apparently they don’t care, which I find appalling. I guess the younger crowd can continue getting their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Oh, and Arianna Huffington.

Also, a high rate charged by ONE news provider damages the rest of the industry. If I as a typical consumer decide I love the Times so much that I’ll fork over $15, $20, or $35 every 4 weeks for access, I am extremely unlikely to add any other paid news sources that also demand payment, including my local newspaper website, should it charge. The more general-interest news sites that charge for access to non-premium content, the amount any one can attract will dwindle over time. There are too many quality news sources available online for site-specific charging to work over the long term among news websites.

Back to the premium-membership model: I think that for general-interest newspapers that are NOT the New York Times, free general-news content and a fee for premium “stuff” is the strongest option. What that stuff is I’ll address at a later date, after some research by a few of us at CU-Boulder is completed or at least further along.

Thanks, Lincoln, for the free NYT subscription

Finally, here’s another NYT-paywall development that has me scratching my head. Lincoln (the car brand) sent out e-mails to (I’m assuming) frequent-visiting NYTimes.com registered users, including me, offering a free NYT web + iPhone/smartphone account for the remainder of 2011. Yes, I accepted the offer; presumably I’ll be getting e-mails from Lincoln marketing a car I’ll never buy.

I don’t grok the logic of this, other than that Lincoln probably waved some nice cash in front of the Times. For those who pay $15/$20/$35 per 4 weeks, won’t they feel like chumps if they didn’t receive this offer and learn about it?

I don’t know NYT execs’ logic on this; perhaps they’ll let me know. Perhaps the e-mail went out to long-time registered NYTimes.com users. If that was the case, that would be a group of people long used to free access and difficult to transition into paying a high monthly fee. So this offer could be a way to ease them toward paying later on. … Perhaps the e-mail offers only went to older registered users — the target market for a brand like Lincoln. Though the problem with that is that older NYT readers are the most likely to pay a high monthly NYT subscription fee! … What’s your analysis of this move?

If any non-niche, general-interest news organization could successfully pull off a digital “metered paywall” model, I thought it would be the New York Times. Alas, today the Times announced its plans and pricing, beginning March 28 in the U.S. (and being tested first in Canada).

I’m disappointed. This is really a bad move that shows how Times management thinking remains stuck in the past. (Or perhaps it’s classic “decision by committee” dysfunction.)

First, the details:

• Home subscribers (to print edition) get full access to NYT digital content across all platforms, no limitations: website, tablet access, smartphone access. No extra charge.
• Non-print subscribers:
  • Using website: 20 free articles per month on NYTimes.com before hitting the paywall. Articles reached via an inbound link (blog, Twitter, Facebook, search, etc.) will not be counted against the 20.
  • Using NYT smartphone or tablet app: “Top News” sections free; accessing anything else will hit the paywall.
  • Digital subscription package #1: $15 every 4 weeks. Full access to website and smartphone app.
  • Digital subscription package #2: $20 every 4 weeks. Full access to website and tablet app.
  • Digital subscription package #3: $35 every 4 weeks. Full access to website, smartphone app, and tablet app.

Wow, there are so many flaws in that strategy. Let me count them:

1. 20 articles a month free, or 1 article every weekday for the 4-week subscription period. This means that nearly everyone who visits NYTimes.com regularly and directly will hit the paywall — and the majority will turn away. What this will do is ensure that an increasing amount of NYTimes.com traffic will come via social-media links and search. The NYT homepage will become much less of a draw to many people. …
   I would have set this much higher if the monthly fee had to be as high as it is. Many casual users who will not pay will hit the paywall with the announced plan; it would have been better to limit paywall exposure to only NYT’s most-frequent web users; i.e., those most likely to pay.
    

2. Pricing is absurdly high. Yes, the New York Times is a great news organization producing the best journalism in the world. But faced with those fees when there are so many other quality news websites a click away, a small percentage of NYTimes.com visitors will pay. …
   My suggestion for smarter pricing: 99 cents every 4 weeks using the 20-free-articles-per-month model. $1.99 per 4 weeks for full website access plus smartphone AND tablet app full access. Here’s why: NYT has not learned from the Apple experience. Apparently, NYT executives would rather have a small number of elite digital readers pay a high monthly fee than millions of people paying iTunes- or App Store-like fees. What the high price point will do — because of the low limit on monthly free articles — is dramatically diminish the Times’ importance as a global news organization, ceding its longtime lead to other credible news organizations that choose not to charge online. A 99-cent price point would be a “no-brainer” for many people who like the NYT brand, just as paying 99 cents for a song on iTunes or an iPhone/iPad app is an easy impulse buy: “Why the hell not?! It’s only 99 cents!”
    

3. Separate fees for smartphone and tablet app access goes against the trends in media. Increasingly, as consumers add more gadgets capable of consuming news, more people will be switching between viewing news on a laptop or PC, smartphone, and tablet. For that privilege, the Times wants $35 per 4 weeks. To separate pricing for smartphone and tablet apps flies in the face of where media consumption is heading. And that price will attract only a small, affluent customer base. $35 per 4 weeks for ONE NEWS SOURCE online? That is completely off the charts for non-niche news. …
   My solution is simple: one price across all platforms, to make it most convenient for today’s early adopters and tomorrow’s mainstream news audience. See my $1.99 suggestion above.
    

4. The high digital price point is obviously designed to retain high-paying print subscribers and extend the life of the print newspaper. After all, if the Times followed my low-pricing recommendation for digital, many print subscribers would be inclined to dump their expensive print home-delivery subscriptions. Fine, I understand that, but it’s a backward-looking strategy that hobbles the potential success of the digital side. I contend that no news organization — even the New York Times — can succeed long term when it makes decisions based on looking over its shoulder at the dying legacy product.
    

5. Finally, the Times overlooked offering, ALSO, a higher-priced “Times Premium” membership. Charging 99 cents or $1.99 per 4 weeks is probably the most they can get the majority of people to pay for their news alone. But NYT could also offer a higher-priced premium membership that included not only full access on web, tablets, and smartphones, but also other valuable benefits that make it worth paying more. (I won’t get into that now. It’s another blog post, and I’m running a research project at the University of Colorado Boulder looking at effective models for news premium memberships — so more on that another time.)

I hope someone from NY Times management will respond to my criticisms. If they do, I expect that the justification for this announced pricing model will be that they can’t do harm to the newspaper product. I guess that’s the way it is. But in my view, this over-priced metered-paywall mistaken strategy puts the “Gray Lady” a step closer to the grave rather than getting a chance at a new life.

Once again, the high grades go to the “new” digital media players. I’ll give the Times a “D.” (That at least gives me a tiny fudge factor in case the Times proves me wrong. But I really doubt it.)

So, it’s Carnival of Journalism time of the month again, and ringmaster David Cohn this time has posed the question, “Considering your unique circumstances, what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?”

OK, that’s an easy one when I apply my “unique circumstances,” which is that I live in Boulder, Colorado, and focus my career on digital media. You see, there’s this project at work that this question is tailored for, exactly. The result so far is the website SlicesofBoulder.com, which is a project that’s part of my Digital Media Test Kitchen program at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication (and utilizing technology and consulting from our Toronto friends at Eqentia).

SlicesofBoulder at this point addresses David’s question by not “increasing” the number of news sources serving Boulder, but rather by “finding” them, since so many exist online. Last summer, we (SJMC instructor Sandra Fish, master’s student researcher Jenny Dean, and I) attempted to find all the credible news and information sources in and around Boulder that send content about Boulder flowing onto the web. (If you want to know more, here’s an old blog post explaining the project.)

Here’s my first point: There’s no great need to increase the number of news sources, at least in our scenic college town of Boulder, nor in most cities. If you expand your definition of “news source” beyond its traditional meaning, Boulder and lots of other communities have hundreds or thousands of “news” sources online.

Where the need exists is not in “creating” more news sources, but rather in developing “online hubs” like SlicesofBoulder.com to track them all, intelligently sort and filter them, and provide a simple-to-use interface and personalization features so online users can find the flow of news and information they want from all the sources that now exist in this digital, everyone’s-a-publisher age.

I used the term “online hub” above because that was Recommendation #15 of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy’s Informing Communities report: “Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.”

Anyway, for Boulder, at least, the first pass at creating a community online hub has been accomplished. But the next step, I believe, is the most important: Developing systems to analyze and rate the many online news and information sources that serve a community like Boulder, so that a local resident who while using our online hub comes upon a never-seen-before website, or blog, or institutional news feed, or whatever is able to determine if this unknown digital-content entity provides credible information or not.

Researcher Robin Donovan and I currently are working on this next phase of the SlicesofBoulder project. The idea is that a user of the site will be able to see credibility, accuracy, bias, popularity, and other ratings of any source that we track on the site.

My dream is that at some point in the near future, I’ll have a web-browser extension (or the functionality will be built into the browser) that will give me a wide range of ratings representing various and multiple parameters for whatever website I find myself on.

I don’t know that the need is so much that we need to create more news and information sources online, but rather that of the unfathomable number of sources that already exist on the web to provide us with news and information, that we have a way to know whether to trust them or not, or have some indication of their quality based on multiple layers of automated and human analysis.

I’ll be interested to read other contributions to this month’s Carnival of Journalism. Perhaps other writers will suggest that we do need more sources. If so, I’ll be especially interested in how they justify that when we already are faced as news/information consumers with major digital information overload.

Thanks to the enthusiasm of David Cohn, a.k.a DigiDave, the Carnival of Journalism has been resurrected. Somehow I missed participating the first time around several years ago, but with a name like that it must be fun, right? So I’m in this time.

The Carnival revolves around a monthly topic, with a bunch of smart people in the journalism field presenting varied points of view, usually on their own blogs, but republished and/or linked to on the Carnival site. David chose as this month’s topic: “The changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community.”

OK, I’ve got some strong opinions on that, especially now that I work at the University of Colorado Boulder running its fledgling Digital Media Test Kitchen program, which I founded.

David asked us to ponder a Knight Commission recommendation to “Increase the role of higher education … as hubs of journalistic activity.” (He also wrote: “No box here to write inside of.” … Good, otherwise I’d probably go outside of it.)

It’s all great that some university journalism programs are putting students to work as reporters in new forms of news media. Their work makes up for some of the journalism that’s been lost in recent years as mainstream news organizations laid off thousands upon thousands of professional journalists. And students get to learn in a dynamic, innovative new news environment, rather than a depressing old-media newsroom in decline.

Some students at UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, for instance, work as interns for the non-profit Bay Citizen news website in a joint partnership which also includes an innovation initiative. The City University of New York (CUNY) Journalism School is collaborating with the New York Times and has students producing neighborhood (or “hyper-local,” if you prefer) news for The Local. Fantastic.

However, I want my university and others to go further — or more specifically, to look further into the future.

My focus of late has been on identifying emerging technologies that will or might have significant impacts on journalism and the news industry. Actually, the most fun part of my current job is scanning the horizon, spotting some fledgling technology or oddball Internet or mobile start-up, and thinking, “That could be really useful as a journalistic tool!” or “There’s a business model that might work in the news field!” Often, the technologists and entrepreneurs I run across do not have news or solving the news crisis on their radar screens.

At CU, I’ve been lucky to have the student-run news website (nope, there’s no print edition) to work with in experimenting with new technologies on both the editorial and advertising sides. The CU Independent’s editors have been eager (or at least willing to be persuaded) to try new experiments. (Since they make the decisions, it’s the editors’ call whether or not to try what sometimes may seem like crazy new ideas.)

They’re trying things like website and mobile social gaming tied to news to increase reader engagement and news awareness. … The editor-in-chief is starting a video channel where she’ll answer student text questions with short video answers, as a way to better interact with the campus community and put a human face on the CU Independent brand. … A couple of graduate students are working with me to develop a premium membership model for collegiate media, and the CU Independent is going to try it out when it’s ready. … And more.

The student editors also are encouraged to innovate by their staff media advisor, Gil Asakawa, a news and new-media veteran who joined the CU Journalism School last fall after most recently working for MediaNews Group.

Gil and I talk and collaborate a lot, and he recently remarked to me how refreshing his new job has been in terms of trying new innovations. Where implementing a new technology at MNG more often than not took months of meetings and deliberation, in the university media environment, you just do it. Now.

I think that’s where university journalism programs — and especially student media — can push old news organizations forward. We can run with ideas that a prudent and more conservative newspaper publisher would put off. And in fairly short order, we can tell that publisher and the rest of the news industry how it turned out, and if others should follow our lead.

Bless university student journalists, but their work in covering their local communities is often not as good as that of experienced professional journalists (many now in other careers, unfortunately). That’s not an insult, just a fact.

But I think that beyond producing community journalism, where student journalists and Journalism Schools can best serve their communities is by innovating (dare I say) radically where the traditional media serving their cities or towns innovate too conservatively or hardly at all.

Communities need better information, as the Knight Commission has concluded. Journalism schools and journalism students can provide it, in a roundabout way, by teaching professional news organizations (old and new) how to leverage new and emerging technologies and techniques to create a better-informed citizenry (and perhaps make enough money to afford to cover their communities adequately).

The Knight Commission is correct in urging universities and their Journalism programs to do more for their communities in these tumultuous days of media transition.

(NOTE: I posted this at my Posterous blog, which I use exclusively for photos and for my iPhone Photo-a-Day project. Reposting here as few people have yet to discover http://steveouting.posterous.com!)

So, I’ve made it 15 days straight so far with posting (to my Posterous photo blog) a photograph a day, using only my iPhone4 and its built-in camera. As I’ve gone forward with this little side project, I’ve made some decisions about self-imposed “rules” for my daily photos:

• I will only post photos taken with my phone; no “real” cameras. (This presumes that I don’t lose my phone during the year, and that it doesn’t stop working and require an overnight visit to Apple for repairs! In that case, I’ll switch to my point-and-shoot camera temporarily.)
• I can use any number of iPhone photography and image-manipulation apps.
• Photos will be posted to Posterous from the iPhone and never will their pixels land on my Macbook laptop or any other device before landing on my Posterous blog.

Why am I doing this? Well, I remember giving a talk quite a few years ago to a group of journalism educators and touting the idea that the fledgling, low-quality cameras showing up on mobile phones at the time would, soon enough, become ubiquitous and that the phone-cameras’ quality would improve to be useful as journalistic tools. In those days, I was met with some incredulous looks.

But in 2011, we’re there. The iPhone4 that I carry does not have the best-quality camera among the smartphones on the market, but it’s decent. So I hope to prove that you can produce pretty-good photos with a phone-camera, aided by a number of photography apps that make manipulation and enhancement of photos possible and downright easy on the phone itself. So far, I’ve used these apps:

• Camera+
• ColorSplash
• ToonCamera
• PS Express

And I just purchased SlowShutter and am looking forward to experimenting with blurred-motion effects.

It’s been a worthwhile experiment. At the least, it’s reignited a long-ago interest in and passion for photography. And when I go about my daily activities, I now observe what’s around me looking for photo opportunities — dispensing with my too-often former obliviousness to my surroundings.

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

2010 was such an interesting, eventful year in the media business. But I expect that 2011 is going to bring even more change. Indeed, I hope for more change. Here are some of my wishes for the news and media worlds for the year ahead:

I wish… for Murdoch to fail, quickly

 

I wish… for NYTimes.com’s “metered” paywall to flounder

 

I wish… news publishers will wake up to the membership model, and learn to SELL

 

I wish… that Wikileaks and mainstream news providers learn to get along

 

I wish… that many newspaper executives will retire

 

I wish… that the cost of developing mobile apps will fall greatly

 

I wish… that non-profit investigative news organizations have a GREAT year

 
What are your media wishes for 2011?

Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder, during a Democracy Now interview:

“We have clearly stated motives, but they are not antiwar motives. We are not pacifists. We are transparency activists who understand that transparent government tends to produce just government. And that is our sort of modus operandi behind our whole organization, is to get out suppressed information into the public, where the press and the public and our nation’s politics can work on it to produce better outcomes.”

(Hat-tip to Peggy Holman of Journalism That Matters for pointing this out.)

Hmmm, a slight variation would sound like a worthy goal for … the news media!

As we begin another year of media transformation, I can’t help but feel a bit depressed about the state of the (mainstream) news media here in the U.S., and the American reaction to Wikileaks’ action is a big part of the problem. As the federal government and many politicians line up for the scalp of Julian Assange, support for Wikileaks seems to be coming mostly from overseas, and American journalists’ support is far weaker than I’d like to see.

• The editor of Spanish newspaper El Pais has written a wonderful essay: “Editor Javier Moreno explains the decision to publish the State Department cables, which expose on an unprecedented scale the extent to which Western leaders lie to their electorates.” … A highlight: “The incompetence of Western governments, and their inability to deal with the economic crisis, climate change, corruption, or the illegal war in Iraq and other countries has been eloquently exposed in recent years. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we also know that our leaders are all too aware of their shameful fallibility, and that it is only thanks to the inertia of the machinery of power that they have been able to fulfill their democratic responsibility and answer to the electorate.”
• A Romanian news organization has given Assange a Press Freedom Award. Previously, he has won the Economist Index of Censorship Award (2008) and the Amnesty International UK Media Awards (2009). He also won the Sam Adams Award in 2010; that’s a U.S. award granted annually by retired CIA officers to honor an intelligence professional who has taken a stand for integrity and ethics (often awarded to whistleblowers).
• Le Monde (France) named Assange its “Person of the Year.” Meanwhile, U.S.-based Time magazine named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg its “Person of the Year,” despite Time’s own website reader poll coming out clearly in favor of Assange as the best choice. (Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel’s statement in an interview, “Assange might not even be on anybody’s radar six months from now,” is telling of how old-media journalists don’t seem to grasp the impact that Wikileaks and its successors have and will continue to have on altering their profession.)
• In Australia (Assange’s home), hundreds of journalists, lawyers, and academics loudly condemned the prime minister for calling the leaks “an illegal act” and suggesting that Assange’s Australian passport be revoked.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer, has been a stolid supporter of Wikileaks and Assange, but as a frequent TV guest on American news programs he’s complained, “From the start of the WikiLeaks controversy, the most striking aspect for me has been that the ones who are leading the crusade against the transparency brought about by WikiLeaks — the ones most enraged about the leaks and the subversion of government secrecy — have been … America’s intrepid Watchdog journalists. … It just never seems to dawn on them — even when you explain it — that the transparency and undermining of the secrecy regime against which they are angrily railing is supposed to be … what they do.” (Emphasis mine.)

And it’s not just that bizarre point of view that’s a problem. Many of America’s “finest” news organizations (and some global ones) have been guilty of laziness and/or carelessness in their reporting on Wikileaks. Normally, I love NPR, but the latest column from its ombudsman has me losing some faith. Alicia Shepard tells of how NPR was guilty over a prolonged period of misstating the number of diplomatic cables that Wikileaks had published — with multiple reporters and anchors stating that it had published or released “thousands” when the real number is 1,947 or less than 1% of what Wikileaks has in its possession. It took a dogged complainer weeks to get NPR to issue a correction.

Worse yet, Louisiana State graduate student Matthew Schafer has discovered the same mistake being made by the Associated Press, New York Times, Politico, UPI, The Economist, Mashable, BBC, Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. All of those news organizations have implied in their reporting that all 250,000-plus State Department documents obtained by WikiLeaks had been published or released.

What could explain this odd behavior by much of the mainstream news media? Certainly there are multiple forces at play, but I have to think that one of them is the overall decline in the quality of journalism in the last couple of years — a result of a horrible economic climate on top of the digital transition for news companies which has resulted in the loss of so many editorial jobs.

Could it be that those remaining in jobs with mainstream “big-media” companies tread lightly and seem more in tune with government and corporate interests than the “new whistleblowers” because they want to keep those jobs?

Whatever the reason, it’s pathetic.

Perhaps the hope for American news media in 2011 will be the newish wave of non-profit investigative reporting entities that don’t need to behave in such an obsequious manner to those in power.

I’m definitely intrigued by VYou.com, currently in beta, which allows you to set up your own video Q&A channel and have people ask you questions (short, in text) which you answer with a video response. In time, the system supposedly will automatically play responses from your archived video answers based on the question asked. If nothing from your answer archive matches, you’re prompted to record an original video answer.

I can see how this would be nice for online retail or customer support. But I’m most interested in potential news/journalism applications. This coming semester, the editor-in-chief of CUIndependent.com, Sara Morrey, will give VYou a try as a way to better interact with and answer questions of her site’s audience (CU-Boulder students, mostly). That should be interesting.

Meanwhile, I’ve created my own beta VYou profile page, and you can ask me a question, if you care to…