Papers May Be Using Web 2.0 Tools, but they Still Don't Get That everyone Else is Using them too, Building Their Own Mousetraps.

USA Today has a piece declaring that newspapers are finally waking up to the fact that the media world is changing around them and nostalgia for reading the morning paper over coffee will sustain them only so long.

Headlined, "Papers take a leap forward, opening up to new ideas," the piece contains this quote from a guy from the American Press Institute:

"Across the industry the message I pick up is, 'Oh my God. It's slipping away. What can I do?' " says Stephen Gray, managing director of the initiative, called Newspaper Next. The answer, he says, will require "a shift of thought from, 'How do we get people to read more newspapers?' to 'What problems are people trying to solve in their lives, and how can we help?'"

I disagree. Kudos to the papers for finally embracing the things that many of their readers have been well aware of for years. But these are just tools. What the people who run the newspaper business will never get their minds around is that, unlike those multi-million dollar presses whirling away in their printing plants, these tools are available to just about anyone. So, while newspapers may ultimately have a fighting chance at staying relevant and profitable enough to exist (I, for one, hope they do), they will never again command the kind of authority or dominate the market for (especially local) news as they did in the past.

That's a good thing for the public. It could even be a good thing for papers. If they were willing to accept it. But so far, they aren't.

Is There a Seahawks Baby Out There?

I don't have any insight into who will win the Super Bowl, but I gotta believe that having fans like Steeler Baby gives Pittsburgh a leg up.

I was glad to see this piece (free reg. req'd) Mark Patinkin in the Providence Journal. It begins:

It was a journalistic turning point for me. I went to Newport to interview a man who had just sailed alone across the Atlantic. It was going to be a dramatic story about boldly facing down nature's fury. I asked him to tell me the most spectacular moments of his trip.

He said there weren't any. It was boring and lonely, and half the time, he was sick below deck.

But didn't he feel like a conqueror?

No, he still felt sick.

It didn't stop me. I kept pumping him for details I could turn into drama.

Then it hit me. I didn't have to. There was an even more compelling angle here: A feature about how crossing the ocean alone isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

That's how I wrote it. It made for great reading. And it had the added advantage of being accurate.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with my editor at the last paper I worked at. This editor prided himself on being a real "story teller" who cared for narrative more than the inverted pyramid.

Of course reporters, who all tend to fancy themselves the next Hemingway, ate this up (myslef included). Trouble was (and is with too much "narrative journalism") that there followed a willingness to pick one compelling theme/hook and make all the facts serve it.

In this case, we were going over a story I was doing on an old, disabled woman who was being threatened with eviction for having taken in her daughter's family after they themselves lost their home as the result of the son-in-law being injured at work and having no income.

My editor picked his theme, something along the lines of the poor "falling" through the cracks (Zero points for originality, I know). Without asking me how the son-in-law was injured, he started playing with a lead that had the guy falling off a ladder. Trouble was, that's not how it happened.

I'm not saying my editor wanted to deliberately insert errors in the story. But you can see how this mindset could produce dangerous results, particularly in the form of reporters who put the telling of the story first and the facts of the story second, with tacit consent from the powers that be. Did this happen at this paper? You bet. Reporters feared having their stories called boring far more than they worried about being called out for playing fast and loose with the facts.

"Music that Makes You Homesick for a Home You Never Had."


I've found a lot of great music on blogs, especially Fred Wilson, who like to talk about music at least as much as the venture capital game (if not more so) and Aquarium Drunkard, a name which all Wilco fans probably wish they'd thought of first.

So I thought I'd give back a little (very little since, so far, this blog's audience seems to consist solely of its humble author) and try and point people to a great California band called Billy Midnight. I first came across them a The Ivy Room in Albany, CA (just over the Berkeley line) several years ago and was a fan from the first chord. I especially like to listen to them when the weather is behaving the way East Coast weather tends to and I'm missing California. Give 'em a listen.

Billy Midnight web site

Billy Midnight - Ocean Floor

White Hat Marketers

Yesterday, regarding this post, I asked Tara this question:

"...What kind of (community) involvement do you have in mind? I used to be a newspaper reporter so I've seen every kind of cynical, lame "look-at-us-giving-back-to-the-community" BS corporate PR stunt out there. Is there really another way?"

She responded with this helpful post, which the ever-hilarious Hugh MacLeod links to here. Cool.

Great advice. Good conversation. Marketing doesn't have to be evil.

My my, aren't we all looking Googley today!

News Photo Caption as Sales Pitch

	East Strand in Downtown Kingston became a river on Wednesday when the Rondout Creek overflowed its banks. Purchase a copy of this photo

I'd like to give proper credit to whoever took this photo for today's Daily Freeman in Kingston, NY. But the paper didn't think it relevant. I guess something had to go to make room for the nice sales pitch that wraps up the caption. Maybe that quaint old wall between editorial and advertising got breached in the floods.

Vacating MySpace

Amen, brother. I don't know why so many people (in addition to Rupert Murdoch) think MySpace is immune to the fickle nature and low barriers of the Internet. It's easy to get on MySpace. It's also easy to leave it. The social networks formed there are casual and easily transported/replicated. On top of all that, it's one ugly site. Tripod/Geocities looked this bad, but then they had the excuse of existing in the 90s.

"NotMe"Tube

From YouTube's Terms of Use:
"C. In connection with User Submissions, you further agree that you will not...(iii) submit material that is unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive or encourages conduct that would be considered a criminal offense..."

Considering that every other video is either kids fighting, webcam strippers or straight up hardcore porn clips, I'd say the folks at YouTube are falling down a bit on the job of enforcing their own terms. I can understand that with a large volume of submissions, there might be a lag between when stuff is posted and, where it violates terms, eventually removed. But so much of this stuff is on the top pages, having been posted hours earlier and viewed thousands of times. They need to act quicker.

I'm not a fan of watching people get beat up and since this is criminal activity, I won't hedge on calling for it to be pulled. As for the "adult" fare, let it flow, but keep it from unsuspecting eyes if you want to draw the general public to your site. Otherwise, don't pretend it's anything other than a place for people to indulge their tastes for sex and violence. I went looking for a clip of a Canadian MP talking about copyright issues. That's not the forum in which I want to see "Drunk Girls are Easy 2."

Way to go CNN!

And Gawker is supposed to be the frivolous one?

Michael Kinsley has a mildly amusing piece up on Slate about the quaint/absurd process of reading your news on dead trees. But while the pulping, printing and delivering those trees to your doorstep mor local deli might be papers' most obvious anachronism and thus the most vulnerable to parody, the insitence on sustaining this process isn't why papers are in trouble. It's a tradition that will die hard (and one I'll miss), but a new generation of managers won't cry as they shutter presses and instead send subscribers proprietary newsreader PC tablets or the like.

Still, it's what has changed at papers that's nonetheless proving the most resistent to the kind of change that's needed now, namely the content. Over the decades. papers have variously cut story length, narrowed and widened and narrowed again their range of coverage, added bylines, reporter head shots and bios, expanded sports coverage, shrunk foreign news coverage, closed bureaus, shifted from staffers to stringers or no one at all on some beats, done total redesigns, gone from broadsheet to tabloid, etc., etc. Newspapers are not resistent to change as long as it happens within the existing hierarchy of "We report, you listen." And that's the one change they're mostly unwilling to make. And it's that unwillingness, not an insistence on sticking with ink and paper, that's driving away readers.

Try and Identify the Carpetbaggers Trying to Capitalize on the Working Man's Woes

But for "60 Minutes", I don't watch any of the so-called news magazine shows because they tend to be offensively bad. They make you thankful that the 11 pm news folks only have 90 seconds to slather on the the false drama and phony "emotion." Case in point, last night's Primetime on the Sago Mine explosion. The show was an object lesson in all that's wrong with modern journalism (especially that of the TV variety).

Here's a story that, by itself, has more than it's share of tragedy and a ready-made good vs. evil dynamic. But rather than just telling those facts and letting them speak for themselves, Primetime pulls out every trick in the book that reporters learn to try and dress up otherwise dull stories. You had the cheesy music, the cheesy delivery from Chris Cuomo and perhaps worst of all, Brian Ross's shameful interview with mine owner Wilbur Ross. The guy owns a coal mine where a bunch of miners died, for Chrissake. 'Nuf said. You don't need to villify him any more than that! Instead, Brian Ross beats us over the head in a needless effort to draw a picture of Wilbur as a fat cat worthy of Thomas Nast. I kept waiting for Brian to stick a fat stogie in Wilbur's mouth and slip a top hat on his shining pate.

Yes, Wilbur has a house in the Hamptons and works out of a Manhattan skyscraper. (So does Brian, of course) But would he be any less responsible if he worked out of a suburban Georgia office park? This piece qualified as an "investigation"? Please...