All Posts Tagged With: "cleveland plain dealer"

Here’s the video promised by Cleveland Plain Dealer Impact Editor John Kroll (representing the paper’s online/digital side) having a follow-up debate with Reader Representative Ted Diadiun about some disparaging comments Diadiun made toward bloggers and Internet news sites during a previous video chat, which generated quite a bit of heat. (Original link on Cleveland.com.)

This is not one of Diadiun’s normal video web chats, but rather a debate between an Internet-savvy Kroll and Diadiun (appearing on his day off!), who while contrite about some of the things he said previously, still strikes me as in need of some education about the media transformation we’re experiencing. Since Diadiun didn’t exactly back off his use of the word “pipsqueaks,” I’ll refrain from backing off my earlier blog-item description of him as a news “curmudgeon” in need of some further education.

See for yourself. (BTW, the headline below in the embedded video is part of the video; I didn’t write it, a Cleveland.com staff member did.)

Kroll makes the point that Diadiun’s rant last week represents only one opinion of many in the Plain Dealer’s newsroom of 240, and that many other staffers there have opinions that differ from either of the two men in this video. I’m glad he emphasized that.

However, from my point of view, the Plain Dealer can’t afford to have too many people on staff with views similar to Diadiun’s. For newspapers to get through the transition to profiting in the digital world, they need to pull together as a team and figure out how best to play in the digital landscape. If there are too many folks in that newsroom with views like Diadiun’s that the newspaper is best and other media are inconsequential in comparison, the Plain Dealer doesn’t have a rosy future.

I won’t go so far as to opine that Diadiun or any other “curmudgeons” in the newsroom need to be removed, but they do need some remedial education on what’s actually happening to modern media.

In my previous blog item, I piled on to the large number of critics of Cleveland Plain Dealer “Reader Rep” Ted Diadiun, who sounded quite curmudgeonly during a video interview posted earlier this week. An old-media guy calling bloggers “a bunch of pipsqueaks” tends to get the blogosphere riled up.

Plain Dealer “News Impact Editor” John Kroll informs me that on Monday he’ll release a follow-up video discussion with Diadiun. Writes Kroll:

“Ted Diadiun and I have debated the squeakiness of the online world in a video that we’ll be posting this Monday around 11 a.m. (EDT) in his usual spot, cleveland.com/news-videos.

“Proving that neither one of us has the talent God gave Vanna White, it’s a mind-numbing 20 minutes long, filled with monotonous babble (and Ted gets to talk, too). But we go over several points you and others mentioned.”

OK, sounds intriguing. I’ll be watching.

(I know I’m piling on here, but I can’t help it. This requires lots of rebuttals.)

The video below is of Cleveland Plain Dealer “reader representative” Ted Diadiun commenting on the controversy created by one of the paper’s columnists advocating rewriting copyright law to protect newspapers from those who might “steal” (a.k.a., link and publish “fair use” snippets to direct online users to newspaper website articles) newspapers’ expensively produced content that sits online unprotected.

Diadiun is definitely a contender for Newspaper Industry Curmudgeon of the Year, with comments like calling bloggers “a bunch of pipsqueaks” during his video interview. Watch and decide for yourself, but his comments sickened me, as someone who would like to see the newspaper industry survive and reinvent itself. (It won’t with people who think like him aboard.)

What is so profoundly disturbing about Diadiun’s rant is that he, like too many other older newspaper veterans, get the Internet completely backward! They continue to think that their brand — well-respected as it may have been over the years — can maintain its full power in the digital and mobile era. Not a chance. That’s history.

Erecting walls around your news content and expecting people to come to you is exactly the worst possible strategy a newspaper management team could come up with. The only way I can see that newspaper companies can survive is to do the opposite: Get their content everywhere, on every device, on every competitor’s and aggregator’s websites, on every blog and Twitter and Facebook post possible.

The challenge — and this is where creativity and technical ability come into play — is to make money from your content no matter where it lands. Of course, having your content land in various places in the form of headline links and fair-use sized excerpts that direct people back to your website is the obvious way, but as has been pointed out ad nauseam, the revenues just aren’t enough to support a sizable newsroom.

I’ve written a bit lately about Payyattention, an upcoming voluntary-payment system for free online content that adds a one-click donation box to every article or other content on your website. Readers who like a story are invited to click once to donate a default 10 cents to the author (or the money could go to the publisher, or be split by both), or they can donate more with a couple clicks.

I had a fascinating conversation recently with the developer of Payyattention, and we talked about the possibility of a Payyattention contribution box following a story around, so that the author could be (voluntarily) paid by a reader even when the story was not residing on the original publisher’s website. That feature won’t be available when Payyattention launches officially later this year, but founder Steve Farrell thinks it may be possible. I hope he can pull it off.

Imagine if you’re a cartoonist, say. You could syndicate your comics and distribute them freely to any and every website and blog, and post it to every social-network site, and your Payyattention contribution box would always be there to send you money from appreciative readers.

Where the work really needs to be done is in figuring out other, similar ways that a news publisher’s content can be published far and wide, and revenue generators travel embedded with the content. That’s the future. Changing copyright law or otherwise putting up walled gardens is the past.

(Oh, and Mr. Diadiun: I am a newspaper veteran, having spent the first half of my career on the print side — and that’s the case for many other bloggers who opine on media matters, who you disparaged in your video interview.)