Nine summers ago, I left a job running a 75-person newsroom to become the sixth employee at an Internet startup. That was the thing to do in the late 90s, when stock options were plentiful and the Internet promised boundless reward. By 2002, that had all changed, and many dot-com entrepreneurs were slinking back to their old employers, asking if they could have their jobs back.

That didn’t happen to me, though. The media startup I joined, TechTarget, actually grew through the technology nuclear winter. It went public last year (although the stock has recently been sucked down by the media stock malaise) and now employs about 600 people.

One thing we did early on that challenged conventional wisdom was to tear down walls between advertising and editorial. At previous employers, it was accepted that sales people and editors not only never talked, they were often openly hostile toward each other. My new organization didn’t have cultural barriers like that, so we experimented with a more collegial process.

Ad sales and editorial people sat together in biweekly meetings to discuss story budgets and the sales climate. Things got pretty testy sometimes, but the debate was open and honest. Instead of calling people names behind their backs, each side shared stories about its successes and challenges. Over time, the relationships grew to be, if not chummy, at least respectful.

Once people respected each other, they began to work collaboratively. Management urged along the process by putting in place a bonus plan that rewarded everyone for a business unit’s financial success. Sales reps and editors openly batted around ideas for products that would have both advertiser and reader appeal. They came up with a lot of innovations. It turned out that collaborating didn’t mean infringing. Boundaries were still respected, but conversation wasn’t prohibited. Imagine that.

It was my job as chief editor to insure that the quality and integrity of the editorial product weren’t compromised. In five years in that role, I never once felt that my principles were violated. If ever there was a challenge, I appealed to the CEO, who always came down on the side of editorial quality.

Incidentally, a handful of people switched groups over these five years, including a few editors who realized their true calling was in sales.

This experience came to mind today reading Chris O’Brien’s Five Steps to Foster Innovation in the Newsroom. Among them: “Find new ways to get people from different areas to work together. This includes editorial and business side (Sorry, but it’s long past time to kill this sacred cow).”

Amen to that. Stick a fork in that well-done bovine. Building moats between the revenue side and the product side was excusable when profits were healthy, but now is the time to discard assumptions. Ad sales people aren’t contagious and talking with them won’t make you compromise your principles. If it does, then you have bigger problems.

Traditionalists are still resistant. Over at the San Francisco Chronicle, whose future is probably less secure than any major metro daily’s, “real journalists” are appalled about the decision to give former mayor Willie Brown a column because of Brown’s history of alleged self-dealing. People who aren’t disgusted by Brown’s column “are people who don’t put journalism first,” says one insider.

Puh-leeze. Giving a popular ex-mayor a column sounds like a pretty interesting way to spur circulation. And if the purists have a problem with that, have it out in public. Let the Chron columnists and bloggers debate the issue in front of everyone instead of grousing in the men’s room. Too many editors continue to use the shield of journalistic integrity to duck new ideas and then complain to each other instead of airing their opinions in public.

Newspapers need strong chief editors who support collaboration. They also need publishers who will rally to the side of quality journalism when a dispute occurs. Reporters and editors need to get over the old biases that never made much sense to begin with. I can’t think of another industry in which the people who sell the product are at such odds with the people who make the product. If you can make a persuasive case for maintaining this rigid separation, please contribute to the comments section. I just don’t see it.

The Futility of Corporate Secrecy

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the Gannett Blog. On Wednesday, Editor Jim Hopkins picked up on an item in one of the Gannett titles that said corporate finance and accounting operations were being consolidated and moved to Indianapolis. He suggested that recent cutbacks at other Gannett holdings point to layoffs of as many as 2,300 people, or about 5% of Gannett’s workforce.

Blogs are a petrie dish for speculation, so when Hopkins asked reader for input, they responded. Gannett folk from Asheville, Detroit, Louisville and elsewhere are jumping in with their local version of layoff rumors. It sounds like something’s coming, and it isn’t good. Absent from the discussion is Gannett, which certainly should be aware of this popular site. If the rumors are false, why isn’t someone from corporate stepping in and correcting them? Perhaps it’s because the rumors are true. Absent Gannett’s voice, people will tend to believe that silence is confirmation.

Go East, Young Journo

Media markets in India are booming, thanks to the surging economy and the growing middle class, and some discouraged US journalists are picking up and moving east. New dailies and magazines are popping up every week and they’re hiring. Some TV stations are paying ex-print reporters up to $180,000 to go on-air, and that kind of money goes a long way in India. Five recent graduates of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism recently joined the Hindustan Times and say the experience has been great and the opportunity is greater. One expat says he turns down two or three assignments a month. “I’d like to see more freelancers move to India. There are too many stories to cover and just not enough time to get to them all.’

Miscellany

San Diegans may have reason for cautious optimism. The owner of a local TV station says he may make a bid for the distressed Union-Tribune. Michael D. McKinnon was a print publisher back in the 50s and 60s and he doesn’t want to see a local institution in the hands of an outsider.

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Just because it’s user-generated, doesn’t mean it’s profitable. In May, we told you about Everywhere and JPG, two new magazines from 8020 Media that break the mold by deriving most of their content from readers. Well, it turns out that Everywhere wasn’t everywhere with advertisers, so 8020 has shuttered it after only four issues in order to focus on JPG. Management prefers to use the term “on hold” and said it’s still committed to the model. Interesting side note: only two editors lost their jobs.

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While owner Blethen Maine Newspapers continues to seek a buyer, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram bleeds. An unspecified number of people have been laid off in the fourth round of cuts in a year. The publisher is also adjusting trim size and consolidating some sections to save money on paper. Employee solidarity helped mitigate the pain; workers volunteered to take time off so that jobs wouldn’t be eliminated.

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Management at the Los Angeles Daily News apparently thought that one way to boost sagging morale would be to implement a dress code. Employees didn’t agree. The idea has been scotched.

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The McPherson (Kan.) Sentinel becomes the latest daily to eliminate its Monday edition. It will publish five days a week. Mondays are notoriously poor for ad sales.

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James Cogan says it’s a great time to get into the newspaper business because chaos is a good time for innovation. We wish there were more people with his positive attitude.

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Charles Apple has a practical, whimsical and uplifting essay on advice for the recently laid-off. Our favorite: “Your editor didn’t want to lay you off. Seriously. Make him/her a reference. Even if you have to apologize for throwing that potted plant during your HR interview.”

It’s the fourth week after the end of the quarter and you know what that means: earnings time. Quit now if you have a weak stomach. Here’s something fun to read instead. Otherwise, onward:

• McClatchy profits fell 50% on a 15.6% decline in revenue.  CEO Gary Pruitt highlighted gains in online advertising but said he doesn’t expect overall ad revenues to recover any time soon. The company expects to cut staff by 10% over the next year. Pruitt boasted that McClatchy realized two years ago that online advertising isn’t just an upsell to print advertising and that Web-only ads now make up 50% of the online business. We wonder why it took until 2006 for this stroke of brilliance to occur.
• The news was a little better at Lee Enterprises, which reported only a 10% drop in  print revenue.  More troubling, though, was that online revenue was off 9%. Although the decline in online business appears to be unique to Lee for the moment, other publishers have recently reported that online sales growth is slowing. Most forecasters still predict the overall online ad market to grow in the 20% to 25% range this year, so anything below that is lagging.
• Bringing up the rear, E.W. Scripps reported similar results: profits down 47.5% on a 13% revenue decline. The company set its broadcast and online division free three weeks ago so it wouldn’t be dragged down by the implosion of the newspaper business.

The continuing profit slide, along with a bleak outlook for the future, may force some big publishers to cut dividends, says The Wall Street Journal. This would be no trivial decision, since  some of the biggest companies are owned by families that depend on the dividends for income. But  publishers may have no choice. If there are no profits, there can be no dividends, and falling stock prices have made existing payouts an onerous burden.

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The San Diego Union-Tribune is for sale. Owner Copley press is “exploring strategic options” and we know what that means. The Union-Tribune hit the wall before most other major metro dailies, announcing a big layoff in January on the heels of nearly a 20% drop in circulation. the paper is the only asset Copley has. However, it’s a very big newspaper, the 21st largest in the US by circulation. The parent company claims its products reach almost 60% of area residents each week. But we suppose big doesn’t count for much these days. There’s speculation that A.H. Belo may find the Union-Tribune attractive and pick it up for pennies on the dollar if it can combine operations with another San Diego-area property it owns.

Miscellany

Writing in Editor & Publisher, Steve Outing issues a call for newspapers to start integrating user-submitted content into their products. Inviting reader comments isn’t enough, he says. Online coverage should include relevant photos, advice, observations and comments from interested and interesting parties. And we’re not talking Wikipedia here; editors need to separate the good stuff from the junk, but they still have to publish the junk somewhere in order to get get people to participate (TG for the “more…” link). The reason more newsrooms don’t do this already is that they’re culturally biased against involving non-journalists in the journalistic process, Outing says. But get over it; if you don’t interact with your readers, you’ll just isolate yourself. E&P, by the way, doesn’t allow reader comments on its site.

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Two views on Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell: The maniacal Tell Zell blog is now hawking anti-Sam merchandise like the adorable, hate-spewing bear at left. You can even buy a 50-pack of “Zell  Hell” bumper stickers for only $97 and  you know the holidays aren’t that far away.  However, Recovering Journalist Mark Potts plays spoilsport. He derides the constant Zell-bashing within Tribune Co. as childish and counter-productive, particularly since the owner is actually trying to innovate as fast as he can. We have to admit he’s right, although we might pick up one of the teddy bears, anyway.

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In a folksy editorial laced with jabs at the Bush administration, the editor of the Reno News & Review announces that his paper is going to do its part to save the planet by putting the staff on a four-day, 10-hour work week. It’s also folding its Theatre section as a stand-alone, but that probably won’ t have much of a carbon footprint. We wonder if readers could care less about the staff’s work hours.

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When all else fails, eat. To celebrate its 30th anniversary, The Cheesecake Factory chain of restaurants will sell every slice of cheesecake at the 1978 price of $1.50 on July 30. We know where you can find us that day.

Does print still have value? The people at neighborsgo.com would argue that it does. This website, which is a spinoff of the Dallas Morning News, is using a social network to anchor a community journalism initiative. Local residents create profiles and post information about their interests.

Every week, editors dig through content submitted by citizens and produce 18 local print editions. Here’s a description of how it works. The opportunity to be featured in print is a major impetus for local residents to contribute, says managing editor Oscar Marti­nez (left). And it may actually be a jump start for careers. One journalism student has used her trip to Beijing to contribute a series of articles on the preparations for the Olympics. The visibility she’s received has been worth more than any internship could offer.

Marti­nez is a career newspaper guy who made the switch to online media eight years ago. He understands the difficulties that print journalists are experiencing in moving to a new medium. In this audio interview, he talks about the innovations that are working for neighborsgo and how journalists can find their distinct value in a new world of consumer-generated media.

To play the interview, click on the button below. To download, right-click here and save to a local file. Playing time: 49:53

[audio:Neighborsgo.mp3]

As more newspapers and startups experiment with the notion of citizen journalism, feedback has been consistent on at least one thing: a lot of the stuff ordinary citizens write is trash.

Stories that come in to citizen news sites are usually poorly conceived, badly organized and/or horribly written, editors report. That’s not surprising; few people are schooled in inverted pyramid style or taught how to write a lead.

Sites like Digg and Wikinews approach this problem by applying human volunteers to the effort. However, neither has emerged as a major source of credible news. Digg specializes in the snarky and offbeat while Wikinews has failed to gain the critical mass of contributors to establish it as a principal destination.

Now a new venture has come along that’s attempting to apply technology to the problem. Allvoices, which formally launched last week, is a notable citizen journalism effort in that it employs no editors. Its executive team is composed of computer scientists, engineers and software developers. The company is led by Amra Tareen (left), a former venture capitalist whose background is in telecommunications.

Tareen said her venture is motivated by altruism: she believes the world would be a better place if everyone could share stories openly with each other. She was also moved by a visit to the remote area of Pakistan that was ravaged by an earthquake in 2005. There she saw stories of suffering, resilience and courage that she knew would never be shared with the world because there was no one there to report them.

Taking the Editors Out

The Allvoices team has conceived of an approach to citizen news that lets anyone publish a story immediately. Its technology takes editors entirely out of the picture. If successful, it could be a valuable proof of concept for news organizations that are struggling to manage a crush of questionable information.

Here’s how Allvoices works: Anyone can register to submit a story. Submissions aren’t edited, but they first pass through a filter that mines them for topic and context and then attempts to find similar information on the Internet. The story contributed by the citizen is posted along with links to that other information, which can range from blog posts to video on mainstream news sites.

The location of the contributor is pinpointed via geolocation using IP addresses and cell phone numbers. Anyone can comment on anyone else’s contribution, but they can’t edit each other’s work. “I want people’s emotions to come through; I want it to be raw,” Tareen said. As third-party reports and comments grow, the story gains more importance and credibility on Allvoices, sending it higher in the stack.

In theory, Allvoices can work entirely without human intervention. This is important because it greatly speeds up the process of publishing news while also wrapping stories in useful context and background.

In Imperfect Solution

However, there are significant limitations to this approach, most notably how to guarantee accuracy and credibility without sacrificing exclusivity. Because it is an open network, Allvoices could be a magnet for spammers, mischief-makers and people with an agenda. The algorithmic approach to news filtering provides some protection by searching for other streams of information that validate stories submitted by its members.

The weakness of this approach is that it undermines exclusivity. For example, if a citizen reporter is the sole witness to report abuses at a refugee camp, her story could be buried for lack of corroboration. Allvoices deals with this issue by assigning credibility points to frequent contributors, which passes their stories through more quickly. This helps, but hierarchy works against the goal of a completely open network. Geolocation provides somewhat of a safety net, but IP addresses are easy to spoof or hide.

Tareen has raised $4.5 million for AllVoices and is now transitioning the content model from paid contributors to a network of registered members. At this point, however, most of the news is still syndicated from mainstream media sites. Tareen cheerfully dodged repeated questions about how many contributors Allvoices has, other than to say it’s “not many.” Her goal is six billion, so there’s a lot of room for growth.

Tareen said the decision to launch without any journalists on staff was intentional. “We want the community and algorithms to help build this thing,” she said. “We may hire journalists at some point, but at this point, we don’t feel we need them.”

If Allvoices is to become an important news destination, it will probably need editorial oversight at some point. The complexity of mining unstructured text for useful information has vexed some of the best minds in computing for decades. Variations in language, culture and personal style only make this problem harder.

However, Allvoices’ contribution to journalism may ultimately be its technology, not its news service. If the company’s language processing engine can automate tasks that now require human editors, it could become a staple of newsrooms around the world. At the moment, it’s an innovative experiment that deserves attention and funding.

Here’s a new ad campaign being run by the Newspaper Association of America. We have some questions:

• If the Internet is the best thing since the paperboy, what is the worst thing to happen?
• What on earth is this a picture of? And what is that thing doing?
• Did you know that “Internet” is a proper noun?

The ad links to an over-engineered Flash-animated landing page that has no apparent relevance to the message in the ad and that gave us a headache. Furthermore, Flash is invisible to search engines, which is why most websites ditched it as a home-page platform years ago. Update: Adobe is partnering with Google to solve this problem.

If the Internet is such a great thing for newspapers, we wonder by the organization that supposedly represents their interests is so clueless about using the Internet as a promotional medium.

What do you think? Is this campaign in your best interests?

I was a guest on a webcast about social software yesterday (you can watch it here; it’s free)  and the question came up about what publications can do to build community. I responded that they can’t do much and they shouldn’t even try because, with few exceptions, readers aren’t a community.
Then I checked my RSS reader this morning and noticed this item from Content Ninja that makes the very same point: “You cannot build a community around content.”
“Community” is a poorly understood term (just look at the variety of definitions in online reference sources) and, like many buzzwords, it is being overused right now. Publishers trying to escape their sinking  businesses are clinging to the community life raft, hoping that it offers hope for a future. For some it does, but that’s not a good prospect for most newspapers.
Newspapers have historically defined their communities geographically because that’s the business model that worked. While people who share a common space on the planet are technically  a community, they’re the least cohesive kind of community. Outside of a shared interest in certain issues like public safety or schools, residents of a city or town have little in common. They may occasionally form strong communities around common interests like a school bond or tax increase, but those groups invariably dissolve as the issue goes away.
There are readership communities that work. Readers of a special interest magazine about needlepoint or scuba diving are a type of community. Those people have intense shared interests and they are much more likely to bond together in an online forum that serves those interests. Publishers of special-interest magazines have the best chance of turning their readership into self-sustaining online communities.
Newspapers, however, don’t. Their strength is creating content and their best chance of building community involves giving people a chance to discuss, comment upon and contribute to their content. USA Today does about the best of any major newspaper at encouraging this kind of reader participation. But USA Today isn’t trying to become a community. Its management knows better than that.

Miscellany

• Jeff Jarvis suggests that it’s crazy for newspapers to operate their own websites and they should just hand over the back-end work to Google.  Newspapers should focus on what they do best: journalism and local ad sales. All the staff time and money spent building technology infrastructures is basically reinventing the wheel. He’s got a point.
• The Daily Telegram of Superior, Wisconsin will cut back from six to two print issues a week beginning this fall. The 6,000-circulation afternoon daily has been publishing for 118 years. A BusinessWeek account notes that theDaily Telegram competes vigorously with the Duluth News Tribune, which is only about five miles away and which is owned by the same publisher. We’re wondering if combining, rather than competing, might be a more practical approach.
• Washington State’s The Columbian laid off 20 people – eight of them in the editorial group – in the second round of cutbacks this year. The paper cut 30 positions back in February. Editor Lou Brancaccio told the Portland Business Journal that early retirements could trim the current staff of 306 even further.
• The delightfully vicious Tell Zell site gives Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell a performance review using the company’s own performance management form.  The world is a better place because of anonymous blogs.
• Rev. Jesse Jackson’s stated desire to remove Barack Obama’s testicles apparently caused a minor uproar on copy desks around the country. In a bold bid to produce the most trivial news story of the week, the Columbia Journalism Review sends in a reporter to analyze how major titles dealt with the “nuts” crisis. Could anyone be less interested?

Mark Potts counts the ads in his Sunday paper and finds just 14 pages of them in 102 pages of news. And the previous week’s pre-holiday issue wasn’t much better. What happens when papers start following Sam Zell’s lead and tightening ad/edit ratios to 50:50, he asks?

Good question. It’s one that the Zellenistas have conveniently overlooked in their campaign to clamp down on spending. The more you squeeze ad/edit ratios, the smaller the paper gets and the more questionable the value proposition becomes for Mr. and Mrs. Commuter who are deciding whether to pay $1 for a product that has almost nothing in it or pick up a copy of Metro for free. Or, for that matter, just get their news on their Blackberry.

The risks of cutting the news hole and the news staff is that the value of the product becomes more questionable. Readership declines, which leads to advertiser flight, which makes issues even smaller. It’s called a death spiral, and Sam Zell and his associates are boldly leading the industry into the vortex.

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Speaking of spirals, Muckety has an interesting insight on the skyrocketing cost of dividends for major newspaper companies. As their stock prices sink, the cost of these quarterly payouts is going out of sight. Gatehouse is currently obligated to pay 32% of its stock value as a dividend, for example, which would be a crushing burden for most companies. If the company does what is probably has to do and eliminates the dividend, it makes its stock less appealing to the widow-and-orphan investors who have traditionally bought reliable newspaper shares. When they sell, share prices go down, which means that dividend yields go up, which makes for more financial misery. And so on and so on… (via Fading to Black).

New Models of Journalism

Steve Outing is a veteran journalist who gets it. Early this year, he stuck his neck out and wrote in Editor & Publisher about his decision to cancel his newspaper subscription. This drew howls of anger and derision from loyal E&P readers, but Outing was trying to make a point: If someone like me is lost to you, what does that say about the rest of your audience?

In this latest E&P epic, the loquacious Outing looks at new approaches to journalism emerging online. One of them is Examiner.com, a network of local websites in which professional journalists partner with citizens and local experts to blanket a topic. “Local” in this context is about topic rather than geography. The experiment forces the reporter to be a relationship manager as much as a writer. Fortunately, most good reporters do pretty well at managing relationships.

Outing also writes about geotagging, which is a growing standard to labeling information with geographic coordinates. Learn to do it, he says, because people will increasingly turn to services that deliver local information and your stuff won’t be included if you don’t tag it.

Outing makes an essential point: there is and always will be a need for professional journalists, but their role will evolve to encompass more of a managing editor role. Journalists will have to excel not only at reporting the news but also at managing the networks of resources that bring in information from other sources.

Miscellany

• In an act of, well, we’re not sure just what, the Miami Herald has hired back a laid-off reporter to blog about being unemployed. Don’t get excited, though. It’s only a one-month gig.
• Editors Weblog reports that three of the 10 most circulated newspapers in the US are now free. Note that circulation is difficult to measure when there are no paying subscribers. Metro International has had a hard time monetizing this model, but there’s no question the reader demand is growing. (via Fading to Black)
• Last week we wrote about a young intern at the Tampa Tribune who blogged about the editor-in-chief’s provocative remarks about making the newspaper secondary to the website. It turns out that intern Jessica DaSilva kicked up quite a storm, as the 160+ comments on her blog demonstrate. Out unscientific analysis has comments running about 3:1 in her favor, but some of the critics are their own worst enemies. Their petty sniping at her occasional spelling errors and random random personal attacks make them look shallow and vindictive. Someone hire this young lady.

An intern at the Tampa Tribune has posted excerpts from a remarkable speech by Editor in Chief Janet Coats to her newsroom the other day. The newspaper had just announced plans to cut its newsroom staff by about 10% or 21 people. Coats said some politically unpopular things. ““People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add-on to the Tampa Tribune,” intern Jessica DaSilva quotes Coats as saying. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add-on to TBO.”

Coats went on to compare the newspaper industry to the music industry, which is in a death spiral of its own right now. Demand for music has never been higher, but the record industry is hemorrhaging because its business model is tied to a distribution system that is now irrelevant. Newspapers will enter a death spiral of their own if they don’t change their thinking, Coats said.

Janet Coats is one smart editor, and let’s hope her staff responds to her rallying cry: “It’s worth fighting for.” While they’re at it, find a full-time job for Jessica DaSilva, who turns in a nice piece of reporting here.

Latest Cutbacks May Not Go Far Enough

Alan Mutter has a fascinating analysis of newspaper industry layoffs. He counts up all the cuts announced this year, compares them to previous downturns and concludes that publishers are cutting back far too little. In previous slowdowns, Mutter demonstrates, publishers cut headcount roughly in line with ad declines. This time around, though, they’ve trimmed less aggressively. It could be that publishers’ decisions to cut expenses in 2005, when business was good, made them think they were ahead of the game, but they’re actually falling further and further behind as the ad business spirals downward.

This is depressing news, and it further supports the likelihood that a death spiral is beginning. Death spirals happen when revenues decline faster than expenses. Companies avoid tough decisions about cost cuts, figuring that things will get better and they want to retain their best people. When things don’t get better, they find themselves scrambling to shed workers as quickly as possible. They take a hatchet to their workforce, which scares employees and spooks investors. The best people leave and the remaining employees cower in a corner, getting little done and mostly speculating about the next round of cost cuts. This happens every time a big corporation goes off a cliff, and the same scenario is ominously forming in newspapers today.

In light of Mutter’s analysis, the Tribune Co.’s recent aggressive cost-cutting measures may be smart business. Yesterday’s 250-person layoff at the Los Angeles Times, for example, was more than 8% of the total workforce. Nevertheless, with revenues falling at a 14% clip in the first quarter, it still may not be enough. Which sucks.

• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will cut 130 people, or about 10% of its workforce. Management is hoping to use buyouts and attrition, but will resort to layoffs to meet the number. The Journal Sentinel just won a Pulitzer.

Getting on the Hyper-local Train…Or Not

The Santa Cruz Sentinel is the latest paper to joint the reader-generated content trend. But instead of celebrating the addition of community-contributed articles to the new “Perspectives” section, an editorial presumably written by EIC Don Miller under the dour headline of “More changes at the Sentinel” makes it clear that this was not a popular decision. “I try to keep all these changes in … perspective. Because change is what is happening,” says the writer. “And for newspapers, in whatever form they will be published and delivered, to survive, change is what we have to do.” Wow, that oughta rally the community! (via Editors Weblog)

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Steve Outing vamps on an earlier opinion he wrote with the controversial position that local news can be boring. Outing, who is an unabashed supporter of the “hyper-local” concept, uses his hometown newspaper as an example. The section devoted to reader-contributed items is full of uninteresting, poorly written and marginally relevant content. “I’m a believer in hyper-local! I just don’t think we’re doing it right yet,” he writes. Good point. Hyper-local doesn’t mean publishing every 4-H Club meeting announcement and blog entry citizens that citizens contribute. It’s about constructing a new kind of news service that targets specific interests. The prolific Outing offers some of his own ideas.

Miscellany

A columnist for the Rocky Mountain News proposes a novel idea: shut down his newspaper. Or maybe close the Denver Post. Either/or. The current business model isn’t working, says David Milstead. Denver has a been a joint operating agreement town for eight years, but the uneasy alliance between owners E.W. Scripps and Media General hasn’t led to sustained profitability for either of Denver’s two papers. Perhaps the best course of action is to shutter the weaker paper and the weaker website. Milstead suggests that this could result in the News continuing in print while the Post serves Denver online.

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If you want to see heartening examples of the innovative things newspapers are doing, subscribe to Editor & Publisher’s Best of the Web feed.

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McClatchy Vice President of News, Howard Weaver, has set up a wiki to seek ideas from staff members and really anyone who wants to weigh in. It’s lightly trafficked so far, but it’s still early. Advice to Weaver: the vast majority of wikis go nowhere. There seem to be two elements of success: 1) People have no other other way (like e-mail) to express their opinions; and 2) One or more people are actively tending the fires, responding to comments and posting new material. Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.

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The Review-Atlas of Galesburg-Monmouth, IL will drop its Monday edition, following the lead of several small papers that have scaled back frequency in the same of cost savings. Monday is the smallest issue of the week for most newspapers and frequently loses money.

And Finally…

If the industry’s troubles have got you in a bad mood and you want to blog off some steam, change the routine a bit. Find an insult that’s  more offensive that the usual F-bomb and use language that won’t make a bad impression on the 4-year-old is in the back seat. Brush up on your scurrilous vernacular with the Shakespeare insult kit. Take it from the Bard himself and don’t be a qualling hedge-born moldwarp.

 

One frequent criticism I hear from readers is that the Death Watch is too negative. While the title of this blog betrays a certain tongue-in-cheek pessimism, my intent is also to highlight the many new and innovative approaches to journalism that are emerging in an information-empowered world. Today I’ll begin a series of periodic essays about how changes in the media landscape are reshaping journalism into a much richer, more responsible and more credible profession.

We are in a chaotic period of redefinition right now, and that breeds fear and cynicism. I am fundamentally optimistic about the future, though. I believe that the wreckage of the newspaper industry will yield a more open and enlightened era of journalism that will be shaped by the institutions that embrace the changes we are now experiencing. It’s going to be rocky getting there, but we will figure it out as we go along.

Many other people are writing about this topic, and I list some of them in the media blogs category. In particular, check out the Center for Citizen Media, Jeff Jarvis, Publishing 2.0, Shaping the Future of the Newspaper,  Steve Boriss, Mark Potts, Steve Outing and Editors Weblog. Please suggest others.

Discard Assumptions

So what does the journalism profession become when information is free and everyone is a publisher?

Start by discarding assumptions. This is hard for people to do, and it’s one of the main reasons so many journalists are struggling with change. Many of the practices and conventions of journalism today were actually invented to cope with an age when timely information was difficult and expensive to gather and deliver. Basically, we do what we do in large part because we’ve had to deal with plates and presses and trucks and news stands, all of which added time and cost. We don’t have to worry about that stuff any more. This should cause us to completely rethink our approach to the craft.

Here are the new realities:

• Today, everyone is potentially a journalist, even if only for a few minutes;

• Technology has made it possible for news to be reported in near real-time. People will come to expect this;

• The cost of reporting and publishing news is now effectively zero;

• Publishing is now a beginning, not an end. Once a “story” goes online, an update and refinement begins that may last for years or decades;

• Any person or institution with an interest in a story has the capacity to publish facts, commentary and updates without seeking anyone’s permission. Responsible journalists need to incorporate that information into their work as appropriate.

All of these realities reverse rules that have existed for thousands of years. This is why we need to rethink everything. Nearly everything has changed.

But some things haven’t. People still want trusted sources of information. They want clear distinctions between fact and conjecture. Institutions need to be monitored. We need to know whom to trust. These needs won’t change if newspapers go away, so someone will need to fill the void.

Traditional Reporting is Obsolete

How does journalism need to evolve? Let’s start with the role of the reporter, because that function is likely to change the most. The traditional function of reporter doesn’t make sense any more. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people in cities around the world put their faith in the hands of a small number of people to gather and deliver the news. For the most part, these people aren’t experts in their topics they cover. In fact, reporters get shifted to new beats all the time. Reporters are resourceful, however. Most of them are pretty good at learning on the fly, figuring out what’s important and presenting that information clearly and succinctly. These are important skills and they’ll be needed for a long time to come.

There’s an awful lot of waste in reporting, though. Most of what a reporter learns in the process of working a story is discarded. Even more waste occurs when a story is cut for space. In the end, a task that requires hours of information-gathering may be boiled down to a couple of hundred words on a page. This was necessary in a time- and space-limited world, but it isn’t necessary any more.

The traditional limitations of print and broadcast media have required reporters to make scores or even hundreds of value judgments during the reporting process. An hour-long interview may result in a single sentence of published information or a three-second sound bite. In essence, one trained person makes decisions affecting what hundreds of thousands of people may know. Reporters do a pretty good job of upholding the trust that readers put in them, but the rules are all different now. No one should be denied access to information just because there wasn’t enough space.

New Journalism is Transparent

Today, nearly every relevant fact about a story may be captured and shared with anyone who’s interested. This service may be provided by the reporter, participants, observers and commentators. This information doesn’t have to be part of the story that the reporter submits for publication, but it should be available to those who want to know. The reporter’s role expands to include not only making judgments about what information to include but also about were to link for more information. The “story” becomes an entry point to an archive of relevant content that may be of interest to different people. The ability to make these associations becomes a core journalism skill. The choice of where to link and what background to provide becomes part of editorial voice.

This new reality should be liberating for readers and journalists alike. No longer do journalists have to make difficult choices about what readers may know. No longer do readers have to regard media institutions with suspicion. Everyone is free to contribute, correct and weigh in on the story. Whatever the media entity chooses not to cite in its published account can be discovered through search. Journalists will be more accountable and readers will be more confident that they can trust the information they receive.

A lot of media veterans are uncomfortable with this idea, though. Their profession has long been shrouded in mystery. Editors are accountable only to a small group of higher-ups who share the same priorities as they do. A self-policing strategy rarely works. Very few readers understand what goes on in a newsroom, and this makes them suspicious. One of the reasons so few people trust the media is that so few people understand how the media works.

Bonds of Trust

We’re going to start opening that up. When readers and viewers have access to the source material for a reporter’s story, they feel more confident that  the account is accurate, even if they never consult that background. Ironically, I believe we will see less accuracy in reporting in the future, but that’s a topic for a future essay. The basic point is that the reporters will increasingly become aggregators and topic stewards. They will be obliged to present a variety of inputs and opinions because those opinion-makers will publish whether the reporter wants them to or not.

Reporters will also come to write not only the first draft of history, but subsequent drafts as well. A story will evolve the same way that an entry in Wikipedia begins as a one-sentence stub and evolves into a comprehensive account representing multiple sources and points of view. In a few cases, the public will participate in this process. Mostly, they will observe, but they will have confidence that the process by which the truth is reported is transparent and accessible if they so wish.

Next we’ll look at the role of editors

Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell must be relieved to be back on familiar territory in the real estate business. He’s just put the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower up for sale as well as Los Angeles Times property in historic Times Mirror Square. Technically, Zell says he’s only seeking ways to maximize the value of the properties, but it’s hard to imagine that his options would include making the investment required to redevelop the buildings for the long term. He’s putting them up for sale and potentially buying another year of life for his highly leveraged company. The Wall Street Journal quotes sources estimating the two properties could fetch $385 million.

So the man who said he was going to shake up the Tribune by challenging conventional thinking and breaking the mold is now going back to what he knows best: selling real estate. That kind of vision has got to inspire the troops, especially in the wake of major layoffs at two Tribune papers this week. Edward Padgett has Zell’s memo to employees urging them to keep their eye on the ball and not speculate about what’s up with the property sales.

Assume that more layoffs are on the way shortly. Edward Padgett has the text of a memo from Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller to his staff setting the stage for major cost cuts. We can assume there won’t be a lot of joy around the barbeque at LAT employee picnics this weekend.

The Atlantic has a Q&A with Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams in which he doesn’t come off sounding nearly as goofy as his memos make him out to be. Still, his comments are short on the kind of breakthrough insight that the Tribune probably needs right now.

In Other Layoff News…

• Gannett Co. is looking to cut 150 employees from the Detroit Free Press and the rival Detroit News. That’s about 7.5% of the total workforce, according to Gannett Blog. Management is hoping to make the cuts through buyouts rather than layoffs, but hasn’t ruled out the latter. Detroit is a joint operating agreement town, meaning that the two competing papers belong to the same corporate parent. That’s how bad the advertising climate is. (via Fading to Black)
• We noted yesterday that when the new round of layoffs at the Hartford Courant are complete, the news staff will have been reduced from 400 to 175, or 55%. That’s not the worst of it, though. Alan Mutter calculates following a small layoff just announced at the San Jose Mercury News, its staff will have been cut 63%. Commenters say that estimate might actually be on the low side.

The Future Takes Shape

Veteran journalists might scoff at the joint effort by MySpace and NBC to recruit citizen journalists to cover the upcoming political conventions, but we think it’s an innovative idea. Someone with a lot of talent but without a lot of connections is going to have the chance to gain a national audience for a few days this summer based solely on his or her creativity and hard work. And what the heck is wrong with that?

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Add the San Diego Union-Tribune to the growing list of newspapers that are republishing the best content submitted by users in print. The paper has launched a social network for residents of San Diego county. It’s got all the usual Facebook-like stuff, but editors will be monitoring the discussions and publishing good material in the company’s community weeklies.

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for information and some of the promise and challenge that presents. The NPR example is great.
Speaking of citizen journalism, the Guardian has been reporting on a conference about the future of journalism. Caitlin Fitzsimmons blogs a panel about how news organizations are tapping into crowds

Miscellany

Online Journalism blog has the first in a series of planned stories about semantic journalism. Nicolas Kayser-Bril kicks things off with a plain-English explanation of the semantic Web. Basically, if machines could do a better job of interpreting information, it would make all our lives a lot easier. And the Death Watch editor could catch another hour or two of sleep.

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We have intentionally avoided commenting on the pissing match between the Associated Press and a group of self-righteous bloggers over fair use of AP copy. We tend to side with the bloggers, but we think the AP also has a point. If you’re late to the party or haven’t been following it closely, Editors Weblog has done the legwork for you. This timeline of the dispute is full of links to relevant detail and covers the big issues succinctly.

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Alan Mutter has created the Default-O-Matic, a tool that rates the likelihood that various large newspaper companies will default on their debt. Journal Register Co., whose stock is almost literally not worth the paper it’s printed on, leads the funeral procession, while Washington Post Co. is the healthiest overall. Read this post if you want a quick tutorial on what “default” means. It’s more involved than we thought.

And Finally

LA Times Pressman Edward Padgett shares this gem: “A recent study conducted by Harvard University found that the average American walks about 900 miles a year. Another study by the American Medical Association found that Americans drink, on average, 22 gallons of alcohol per year. This means, on average, Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon!” Have a nice weekend everyone.