Bad video is bad content

My friend, Ken Sands, has a very good post on Poynter today, High Cost, Low Quality Plague Newspaper Video Efforts, which I sent around to my colleagues as recommended reading.

Even at the Washington Post, where they hired skilled TV professionals and produced top-quality video, the return on investment has been elusive.

Let me more snarkily summarize the progression of the discussion over video that played out in newsrooms across the country:

1) "Hmm, this YouTube thing is catching on. Think we should be doing video?"

2) "Omigod, circulation is down! Everyone must shoot video of everything all the time."

3) "Geeze, cameras are kind of expensive. I never realized. And what's this button for?"

4) "We're getting flip cams for everyone on the staff. Video everything."

5) "Betty, um, you need to, um, hold the camera still when you're shooting. And please don't smack your gum, either."

6) "Who's going to edit all this video? And what's this button for?"

7) "Gee, you know, if we spend a day shooting video of a feature story, we're lucky if 80 people look at it. We write a story that says a truck overturned on state Route 100 and it gets 4,000 page views."

8) "We have to do live streaming video of every news conference the mayor holds!"

9) "Man this stuff takes time!"

10) "You know, one reason no one is watching this video is it, well, kinda sucks."

11) "Hey wait, how do we put advertising on here? We should have advertising on here."

12) "Hmm, why don't our advertisers want to pay to be on our video player?" (See Nos. 6 and 9, above.

13) "With all these staff reductions, we can't afford to do video anymore. No one watches it and we're not making any money at it."

14) (then back to:) "Hmm, this YouTube thing is catching on. Should we be doing video?"

Competition and collegial cooperation

Here's the list of ONA award winners. I'm always pleased for the winners being rewarded for their hard work and good journalism, but I was especially gratified to see the Chauncey Bailey Project take home two big awards. That project, in which news organizations and journalism schools around the Bay Area united to investigate the assassination of a crusading African-American columnist - with the significant result of, well, justice - is what we got into business to do: reveal the truth, no matter what.
But as always, I can't wait until our site is in the running for the big awards - OK so I'm competitive that way. (Though I don't want the county to have to catch fire again for us to be a contender.)
I do think our redesign is going to help distinguish us from the pack.
On a less competitive note, I really enjoyed talking with my counterparts around the country on the stuff I obsess about all the time.
Last night at the bar, after the awards banquet, one topic with new friends from SF Gate was the problems we all have with the sometimes horrible content in anonymous comments. We exchanged some ideas, reached no solution, but got to exchange our experiences and commisserate.
We're all it the same trench, fighting the same fight, and it's great to have this opportunity to share lessons - and battle plans.
Battle plans may be too strong a phrase because I know online news will ultimately prove to be a lucrative trade. We just have to keep working on the how.
The why - that society needs a healthy and free media, to do the sort of thing the Chauncey Bailey Project did - has long been crystal clear.

A usability expert's 12 lessons on news web design

What makes for good news website design? Jesse James Garrett of the user experience firm Adaptive Path, who has worked with CNN and other news sites and who comes from a news background, offers these lessons.
1) Know who you are. Don’t try to be all things to all people, know what your users your audience comes to you for. Example: NPR thought it was in the breaking news business online. But research on their audience showed that NPR readers did not come to the site for breaking news but instead wanted depth, background and analysis.
2) Be IN the web, not on the Web. Your site is not a delivery channel for your product but should be something that that is intrinsic to the value of the web. It needs to be interlinked with the web, just just a place on it.
3) The web is not the world. Lots of sites view their site as the only source that people use for the web. People actually turn to different sites for different reasons and tasks. You need to know why people come to your site
4) What people do with news a) absorb it b) want to apply it, put int into practice c) want to share it – social engagement, connections with others 5) consume it because it gives them enjoyment, because they have an emotional connection to it.
5) Support different modes of engagement. Some people snack, some people dine. You need to accommodate all of them on your site. Example: the story highlights box atop every news page on CNN enables the snackers who just want a short summary.
6) EVERY page is the home page. People don't go: Home page to section page to story page. They come in from all different paths and all different angles.
7) Navigation is dead, long live navigation People rarely use global navigation elements. They do when they are explicitly task switching. Otherwise don’t get used much. Contextually relevant, related to the task at hand in that moment.
8) Put the multi in multimedia – think about diversity of ways to tell stories. Don't just do multimedia to do it.
9) Headlines should tempt not tease. Tempt is to make someone want to know what’s on the other side of the link. Tease is it makes them wonder. Online head writing is an art that is rarely understood and has yet to be mastered
10) Think out side the blob. It's way more than disgorging blocks of text. Structure data in a way that allows readers to move through it.
11) It's an application, not a publication. People use it, not just read it. Make it usable, and fun to use.
12) Try things out and throw things out. Test and evaluate and constantly evolve.

More positive signs - from a pretty smart guy and a really smart guy

I'm going to tie two of yesterday's sessions together here with a similar theme, not only because I couldn't possibly do justice here to either presentation in this space but also because I heard reasons for a bit of optimism from both guys.
The first was Leo Laporte, who told a bland chicken-anchored luncheon crowd (a reporter actually used that "anchored luncheon" phrase in a story once and I can't resist using it here) about his trials and machinations in creating an audience around tech news for tech geeks. He noted how services like Google and Facebook serve up pre-selected audiences for advertisers,  how pod casts are lame because they really are too much work (which I have been saying for years and I'm not even that smart) and how journalism is a holy calling - thank you, Leo - essential to a healthy democracy.
But the point he made that resounded with me is something  I've been telling my colleagues and cohorts for years to keep their spirits up. As he put it: "There is always going to be a need for storytellers, people who can gather facts and explain them."
At the end of the day, we heard from Paul Saffo, who is a scary smart futurist from Stanford who advises the world's rich and powerful. His presentation, which I will be reviewing and following up on for some time, centered on the creative destruction technological change wreaks on economic systems, how people initially overestimate the impact of new technology then, when it starts to take off, drastically underestimate the impact. It was insightful, and funny as heck.
Saffo noted how the media world is in a time of many great uncertainties in which breaking news bulletins about earthquakes are being instantly delivered by machines and the power of the press is being replaced by the ability everyone now has to publish whatever they want.
The positive message: "Don't worry, we'll figure it out." What he meant by that is that if we as an industry can embrace uncertainty, learn from our failures, understand that change is never a linear process and realize that, to succeed, we need to learn how to harness the smallest creative act of our audiences - see Google 411, below - we will prevail and again thrive. That it will take some time, but the business model will work itself out.
As I've been telling my colleagues: Society has always needed scribes, as long as there's been crops and kings and culture, and that's never going to go away.

Amazing new stuff - Oh brave new world

In preparation for her presentation on the "Ten Top Tech Trends You've (Still) Never Heard Of," My friend Amy Webb of Webb Media Group set up a little contest, asking ONA members to list what they thought  the trends were. I didn't bite. I knew my responses would be too general, too non-specific. I was chicken.
And I was right. "Journalists need to think about tech in a granular way." She does. And she knows her stuff.
Here's a quick run through her mind-boggling list. She lists the tools she was referring to on her site. (Note, Amy - who twice threatened to kill a pushy photographer - was, as always, hilarious. Sorry, but this isn't.)
1) Real-time web. These are tools that publish online immediately, with no digital lag time. Now, now NOW. One example, Robo.to, with which people can publish soundless four-second video clips instantly. "Facebook and Twitter are changing cusomers expectations for how information is sent." with which you can email content to a blog and it posts. "The public expects that as soon as content gets created that they will be able to find it." I had this experience when I had a breaking news reporter going to some little fire. Our first blog post said only that firefighters were on their way to a fire. An impatient reader commented with a demand to know right then what burned, what caused it, what happened, etc. "Dude, the firefighters aren't even their yet!"
2) Light blogging. These are tools like Posterous with which you can email content to a blog and it posts.
She called this trend a "super game-changer." "Reporters can easiliy send text and mp3s and even video from mobile phones."
3) Personalization. Not customization but a web world offered up to suit your needs. Think Pandora, which knows your musical preferences and can even let you know when a band you might like is coming to your town. Among the most scary was a beta IE plug-in called Re:search, that searches through your hard drive (gasp!) o ascertain your preferences. For us, this would mean knowing that that guy wanted the immediate skinny on the fire product and letting him know, "Hey, we're working on it."
4) Interactive TV. This is TV on a screen alongside whatever else you're reading, working on, playing with, etc., bringing everything in one place. She noted this "could bring back local news" for the new generation of multi-digi-taskers.
5) Identity recognition. Apps like Picasa and Face.com are pretty much learning what everyone looks like so that they can tell you who they are. The WOW fact: 2.3 billion faces are already recognized in this manner. She also mentioned why Google is giving away voice-activated search on 1-800-411-GOOG (I love this tool): To learn how to accurately translate voices, everyone's voice. OK, that is a wee bit scary. "I know what you're doing, Hal."
6) Augmented reality. These are tools that, using your cell-phone's camera, give you an annotated view of the world, with "windows popping up showing you what you're looking at," little labels on buildings, mountains, viewpoints, what have you, telling you what they are. My favorite were the tools that help you navigate a subway station or a mall, as I NEVER get lost on city streets. (Um, yeah, right, sure.)
At dinner my wife made a good point on this, noting how some people already experience reality through a viewfinder, taking pictures of everything rather than actually experiencing it themselves. (OK who watches all that video anyway?) She's right, but she also agreed that a little annotation wouldn't hurt, as long as you turn it off once in a while.
7) User-generated sensor data. This was amazing. She showed a clip of little dots moving around San Francisco. Each dot was a person with an activated cell phone walking around. The result was a graphic showing where people go and where they congregate in bunches: Hard data extrapolated from the actions of people just going about their lives. I can't imagine yet how we would use this, but man, the potential.
8) Mobil life. She was referring to bar codes and codes on your phone that allow you to scan a symbol on a street sign to get more information on something, or to buy a mocha frappuccino with low-fat milk using your mobile phone to pay. (Great. Now when I lose my phone I'm really hosed.)
9) Geo location. Want a map on your phone showing you not only where you are but also where all the sex offenders are around you, and who they are and what they did. It's already available for you iPhone. Other apps show you what friends are nearby. And, of course, where the Starbucks are for that frappuccino.
10) The internet of things. Soon, we were told, all our appliances will have IP addresses and will be able to take actions without us doing things. Your refrigerator realizes you're out of milk and orders it for you. For us, with activated pages, we could tell who's reading the jumps of stories. But, I fear, things aren't that smart, so in the early years, we're going to end up with nine gallons of milk because someone pressed "Reset refrigerator."
Oh brave new world that has such applications. Now, how can we adopt these technologies to serve the news up to our customers? Or, more important, to enable them to serve the up news to us?

So that great branding? A lucky accident

The Q&A with Evan Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter - and formerly of Blogger, which I'm using right now, for that matter - kind of disappointed me, which is really unfair on my part.
That's because I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how Twitter and microblogging and other social networking tools have changed the world. How anyone can now spread the news of anything - John Q. Public but also newsman, marketers and maniacs. How dictators can no longer lock the foreign journalists up in their hotel to crack down on people protesting for democracy - as in Iran in recent months. How it was citizens who reported the dreadful violence in Mumbai - but also how users were misled by a kid in New Jersey that day, and how it could have been misused by the terrorists.
I was disappointed because Williams seemed like a clever businessman who helped create something - microblogging - without really realizing what he had made, how much potential it had, how it could change the world.
I'm sure he lays awake at night wondering how the service is ever going to turn a profit commensurate with its success, but I didn't get the impression he spends much time thinking about the deeper societal issues. Gutenberg talking about how nice the new printed bibles look.
Basically, the account he gave made it seem like the success of unintended consequences.
"We didn't start Twitter expecting it to be something really big. We stumbled into it and realized (later) it was a really big deal."
Even the name. He said the developers were talking about how getting a "status update," as they were initially called, from a cell phone in a pocket would make a user "twitch." Someone looked up twitch in the dictionary and "twitter"was the word just below it, meaning the sounds birds make. That led to the name, and the bird logo. And, he said, he has no idea what early user came up with Tweet.
He did say - other posters have already noted because I'm just now getting around to this - that Twitter is working on a feature that would list, or distinguish, reliable tweeters from the masses. And, he noted, speaking to us mainstream media types, "You shouldn't look on us as an example because no matter what we make less money than you do."
Another lesson for us. He noted starting Twitter was like planting seeds to see what grows. "Users taught us what Twitter should be." The lesson for us? "It's not up to you at that point."

A positive indicator

It was nice to hear Jonathan Dube, president of the Online News Associaton, note this morning as our annual gathering began that while many journalists associations are canceling conferences -- actually some are scaling them back or combining conferences -- the ONA shindig is again a sell-out.
Obviously it's because newshounds know this is where our future will lie.
And it was heartening that Robert Niles noted this morning that the woe-is-us "whining" that prevailed at many previous conferences is now being replaced by a more hopeful and practical tone. (I heard Jay Rosen made the same point on Twitter but "Older posts are now unavailable.") I volunteered to steward my second ONA conference at after going to one and finding it - OK, I'm sorry - a mourning session, almost a wake, with presenters offering up chart after chart about declining print readership and increasing online use.
I wanted to shout out, "Hey! We're still strong, we still have huge audiences that respect what we do and we have time to fix what we need to fix." It was good that most of what was offered up today was practical, positive and focused on what we can - and have to do - to survive and thrive.

Unbundling the content

I read a thing Bill Gates said once that really stuck in my mind, and it's relevant now as we're redesigning our site to make it do a better job of packaging our wares.

He was touring the Seattle Times -- and this was years ago -- and was being shown its website when he looked perplexed. I'm paraphrasing here, because I can't find the piece now, but I recall he said he didn't understand why the newspaper's content went online in the same basic order it went in the paper.

"You make all this stuff and put it where it belongs in the newspaper, but then you don't unbundle it to put it where it should go on the web," and again, I'm paraphrasing from memory here.

Let me put this a different way. If you were coming to our site to find a place to go hiking, you would never think to click on News, and then Metro and then North County to find the "Take a Hike" feature. But that's where we put such things when we base decisions about where things go online on where the material goes in the paper.

Obviously, any experienced web crawler would say, Hikes should go under Things to do.

There's other things that need to be unnewspaperized to be effective online. Names of newspaper sections in particular, a "Scene" section, for example, don't translate online. "Scene" = "Lifestyle." "Explore" = "Science." "Out & About" = "Entertainment."

The moral is that what works well in print may very well not work at all online. And the bottom line, as it is in all good design, is "don't make me think."

Just because we can, doesn't mean we should

Yahoo! won a round today in a lawsuit in which a woman blamed it for nude photos and a bogus profile of her that were posted on the Web site without her knowledge by her (crummy) ex-boyfriend, who went to pains to make it appear she was looking for sex online. (The facts of the story can be found on SignOnSanDiego and elsewhere. ) It troubled me that Yahoo, after the material was pointed out, took months to take the material down, and then only after a lawsuit, but Yahoo's a huge company and these things can be hard to control.

The court ruled that Yahoo wasn't to blame, citing the federal law that doesn't hold Internet operators responsible for material people post material on their sites. The argument is that such Internet postings are communications like the words exchanged in a phone call, not edited material like what appears in, say, the newspaper.

My point is, so what? I mean it's great not to have that legal exposure, but, well, just because you can publish something, doesn't mean you should.

This comes up in my work life in the form of anonymous comments by readers. Some are poignant memorials to the recently departed. Some helpfully offer information or insights or point out errors. But a lot are just plain nasty: Vicious, racist, intolerant, threatening, you name it.

Our publication of such comments is protected by the same law cited in the Yahoo case. In fact, the more we edit the material, the more liable we make the company, the more we are exposed to a lawsuit. Deleting comments is OK. (Overly empowered commenters call that "censoring.") Editing? Nope.

Now a site like the one I work for probably has to allow comments. There's no good way short of demanding credit card numbers to force people to use their real names. And, while I'd prefer to have ever single comment that appears on the site moderated before publication by a responsible adult, I know that's probably unrealistic, given staffing limitations.

But yes, we moderate comments. Yes, we delete problematic ones as swiftly as we can and yes, we expel problem children. And we no longer allow anonymous comments below photo galleries, especially those lacking captions, as commenters, like nature, abhor a vacuum.

I ask commenters to imagine it was their loved one in the story about the crash, or in that photo from Mardi Gras, or being charged with that crime. How would they feel then? It doesn't always work.

I know that commenters are faithful readers who contribute material and attract other readers to our site, an important editorial and business consideration. But we don't have to allow their worst impulses to drag down the tone and quality of our site, or to use our pages to hurt people with words they probably wouldn't say in public or with their names attached.

Sure, we can publish whatever they write. The law says we can. That doesn't mean we should.

We can do this

RevenueTwoPointZero, a research project put together by Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design and Matt Mansfield of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, has proposed some really solid ideas for how newspaper.com can find its lucrative future online.

Their work provides, I think, a checklist for what we should be doing.

The project offer solutions for how a home page can be redesigned to push people toward story pages, where the real money lies; how we need to beat CraigsList at its own game while providing the reliability of traditional Classified ads; and how a local news website can better serve small businesses without big advertising budgets.

This is exactly the kind of thinking we need, much more productive than the gloom.doom.com hand-wringing that really isn't getting us anywhere.

Regaining our premium

In a post outlining its "Simple model for online journalism," one of its founders, Jonathan Weber, bore out one of the themes I've been writing about in this blog. Specifically (emphasis mine):

"On the business side, we’ve found that the conventional wisdom about plunging display ad rates is simply wrong. If you have a quality site, with good editorial that drives meaningful traffic, and you work closely with advertisers and offer them flash ads, video ads, good stats reporting, and the opportunity to help understand a new medium, they will pay a premium. A critical thing we have learned is that selling online advertising is more different from selling print or broadcast than mostly people think. I’d suggest that the difficulties traditional media outlets have in getting good prices for online advertising have to do not with the medium itself, but with the learning curve involved in figuring out how to sell it properly. It took us a couple of years, and we didn’t have any legacy issues to deal with."

It's going to take a while. But I still think it's inevitable.

Wishing doesn't make it so

Note: An unfinished and unsightly version of this post was posted in error. (Everyone needs an editor.) My apologies.

More than a few times recently, I've had colleagues channel their laments over the state of the industry into plaintive calls to demand readers pay for our online product.

The topic's been hot lately, sparked by Walter Isaacson's essay in Time, How to Save Your Newspaper; and fueled by subsequent remarks by the New York Times' Martin Nisenholtz and then, his boss, Arthur Sulzberger. Most recently, the call was picked up by Time Inc. CEO Ann S. Moore, who said, "Who started this rumor that all information should be free and why didn't we challenge this when it first came out?", and longtime Time editor-in-chief boss James Kelly, who chimed in with "Paid content in some fashion is just inevitable."

My colleagues generally get the need to move the news online to meet the growing demands of our audience. But for many of them, despite growing online audiences, it just doesn't seem right to be giving it away for free. As one newsroom friend wrote to me recently,

"Honestly, I don't get it. How can we survive when we continue to offer so much free info without the web advertising revenue to support a news operation? ... I'm all for the web and see how vital it is and will be for our survival, but more and more I dislike the idea of posting so much free info on sites that don't earn the bucks."

OK, I can see that. And it works for some news shops. The Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports offer content unique and proprietary enough that they can demand payment. I don't mind paying $4.95 a month for Consumer Reports' authoritative product reviews. But (confession) it took only two Google searches this morning to find a Journal story online that I was supposed to cough up American money to read. (Or euros. They probably take euros.)

But - and I hope I am wrong on this, it's not unheard of - people just won't pay to read most stuff online. Including news.

The other day I spoke to seven college students visiting the newsroom. How many read the news in print? Zero. How many read news every day online? Everyone. Would they pay to read the news online? Back to zero. I got pretty much the same response when I tried that with a university journalism class.

Some newspeople (we can't just be newspapermen anymore) are trying things that might pay off and prove me wrong and, if so, I won't complain. Newsday started charging for online news. Hearst is creating an e-reader. The iPhone offers a model for both display and payment. And I mentioned how the big cats are talking about it above.

But in a "will-readers-pay?" story on the issue in Advertising Age, one of the smartest guys I've ever met in this business summed up what I really believe to be the truth. The guy is Charlie Tillinghast, who runs MSNBC.com, ("Charlie is a stud," one of his editors told me, boasting about the biz boss.) What he said was,

"Consumers won't pay; it's just that simple. They'll read amateur blogs and everything else first before they pay for general news and information. Those are the physics of our business."

"Wait!" faithful readers say. "Tom, we thought you saw a lucrative future for us!" I do.

Newspapers, their newsrooms, lost classifieds, but we still own local news and information and listings and all that. Search advertising is big, but people are already learning to not click on the shaded, highlighted or advertising-labeled links. They prefer organic search results. And readers are also learning that the "Local" offered up by Goog-hoo-SN can be pretty random, often a scrape from second-tier news sources.

So, when the economy turns around, which is inevitable, the content that a traditional newsroom can assemble is bound to be more attractive to advertisers needing to reach local eyeballs.

But readers paying to read? I wish it could work for us, but I just don't think so. Besides, even in print, they never really paid for it before.

Update: Sulzberger and Isaacson on making money online - in 1995, and
A new report suggests some consumers may be willing to pay for online news content.

Well, I think it would be cool

This essay, by a honcho at Google writing about the future of the Internet, Google, and the challenges it faces, really irked some of my colleagues the way the Yankees irk the Mets.

Specifically, it was this passage:

The experience of consuming news on the web today fails to take full advantage of the power of technology. It doesn't understand what users want in order to give them what they need. When I go to a site like the New York Times or the San Jose Mercury, it should know what I am interested in and what has changed since my last visit. If I read the story on the US stimulus package only six hours ago, then just show me the updates the reporter has filed since then (and the most interesting responses from readers, bloggers, or other sources). If Thomas Friedman has filed a column since I last checked, tell me that on the front page. Beyond that, present to me a front page rich with interesting content selected by smart editors, customized based on my reading habits (tracked with my permission). Browsing a newspaper is rewarding and serendipitous, and doing it online should be even better. This will not by itself solve the newspapers' business problems, but our heritage suggests that creating a superior user experience is the best place to start.

What irked them is that, for those of us in the trenches at your average regional news source, a site that can actually do all that sounds beyond impossible, indeed, far-fetched. "Maybe the Yankees can field a team like that, but how can we?" They may be right. Damn Yankees.

But that doesn't mean we can't aspire to such technological prowess. Not trying was one of the things that got our business into this mess in the first place.

And, no one could take exception to the last phrase, which rang so true for one of my smart colleagues: "...creating a superior user experience is the best place to start."

A glass full of potential

As Mr. Glass-Half-Full, by both position and personality, I try to see the still-unrealized potential of Internet-delivered news even while reading about the perilous state of the traditional news business in general.

Recently, OK, for a while now, there's been an awful lot of bad news in the news biz. Other people can chronicle that better than I can. I still see a lot of promise.

Here's one example: In this post on Publicola, an online alternative news site in Washington state, on whether the likely doomed Seattle Post-Intelligencer could make a successful go at it as an online-only publication, Glenn Fleishman offered this very well-phrased statement of what a newsroom like ours can provide that Googhoosoft just can't.

Even today, Google has had a tough time selling local ads, because Google doesn’t have per se local content. It’s likely that by 2012, the company will have suffered significant reversals because of its inability to diversify revenue much beyond online advertising and providing search results. It may feed 10 times the search results its site does today, but their growth will have tapered off. All of this means that the store down the street or the national chain with local outlets will be desperately working on strategies that let them focus on customers just down the block or a few miles away. With radio unlistened to, TV unwatched, and newspapers shells of themselves, where will the money go? To whatever media is left online.

I believe that's true, indeed, inevitable.

But, the glass-is-empty crowd says, you can't make money online the way you could in print. I respond we aren't, but why can't we?

I've written here before on the potential of self-service, search-based local advertising. And I've written how studies show readers' eyes are now trained to ignore the normal display advertising one finds online. This post, from the always insightful BrassTacksDesign, opened up my eyes to how ineffective online ads are now, and how much more effective online display advertising on the net could be if done well.

I'll jump to the chase, while encouraging you to read the whole post. Instead of confining our beloved advertisers to those little rectangles and squares our readers are now conditioned to avoid, why not create a page that is advertiser friendly but still editorially pure, like these or some of these? Those presentations don't scream "Sponsored/Brought to you by ..." but they are much more effective in delivering the advertiser's message, and they separate the news and the advertising, rather than jumbling them together.

This sort of display, combined with unique local content, would be worth top dollar, not just nickels and dimes.

New – cheaper – means of distribution

A former colleague called me today to kindly let me know that the student center at a major local university had a news ticker that was displaying headlines from the public radio station and Reuters, but none from SignOnSanDiego/the Union-Tribune. (Thanks, Ellen.)

Then I read that the New York Times has released an API that enables you to put a gizmo on your site that will search the entire Times' archive back to 1981, 2.8 million (pinky in mouth) articles. (Here's a post from the Times' developers' blog explaining it. And here's a post from VentureBeat offering some analysis.)

Then I recalled something I blogged from the Online News Association confab a while back, a suggestion that news organizations partner with elevator operators to offer news headline tickers to the poor souls held captive as they go up or down in those little boxes.

What connects these three items? All of them are alternate means of distributing the news that were not available a few years ago. All of them will bring readers to our sites. All of them are a lot cheaper than printing newspapers and driving those papers to people's homes. And all of them are examples of how we need to start thinking about circulation and increasing our readership – and continuing our businesses.

The question is no longer just how can we get people to buy more papers, though that will remain part of the equation for some time. Now we have to ask ourselves: What are other ways we can distribute our news products and information? (Mobile phones being the obvious primo target.) How can we reach people we are not reaching now? How can we make our brands and our products more ubiquitous? How do we spread the message: Get your news right here, hurry hurry hurry, step right up?

The news is no longer an appointment deal, as I've discussed here before, but a utility that is always available, you just turn the news faucet and out it comes, flip the switch and the news shines. We need to make that utility available almost everywhere.

And I need to call the student center folks at that local university and ask them to add our local news RSS feed to the text crawling across their news ticker. After all, it would be a shame to miss all those potential customers.

That Model T on your desk (Or, A hammer in every box)

I spent most of Saturday and a significant part of Sunday scraping clean my daughter's computer and reinstalling every bit of software she needed. I had to do this because the machine had gotten infected with spyware so sophisticated that it would not allow me to install or run any anti-spyware applications or even to go to sites offering such tools.

Let's put aside the point that whoever creates this stuff has earned a special place in hell. Or that they could get a real job and get benefits. (Or that I should have had a better firewall.) The thing is, what other appliance in our life works like this?

"Sorry the bagels are cold. The toaster crashed."

"No hot water today. The heater has another virus."

"The fridge went down and all your food was lost."

The fragility of computers -- that is, how this app won't work with that one, or how some bad code can change your search default to Yoog Search (See special place in hell, above) -- are a sign of how we really are enduring the early stages on this stuff.

I was relating the web to the Wild West a few posts back. Let me come up with another analogy for the early 21st Century computer: The Model T.

It wasn't the prettiest car, or the fastest or the most reliable. It was the car that got America on the road, like the affordable PC got us on the info highway. And it came with a couple tools to fix the tires that were expected to go flat and whatever else was likely to break. (I have such a tool set at home, handed down from my father-in-law who remembered using them to fix his Ford.)

That's where we are with computers today. Future generations will look at these drab boxes on our desktops, with their wires and cords and humming fans, as quaint relics of a bygone era. As Model Ts, ugly, unreliable and inefficient -- but world changers all the same.

A PC doesn't come with tools, however. Though maybe a sturdy ball-peen hammer would be a good thing to include in the box. Wait. Strike that. Another of my bad ideas.