Another newspaper to die

Denver was one of the few remaining big cities with two newspapers. It looks like that's about to end, with the Rocky Mountain News for sale and expected to close right around its 150th birthday. (Here are the stories from the Rocky and from the Post.)

Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Littwin found a bit of painful gallows humor in the topic of his debt-ridden paper's likely demise. He summed up Newspaperland's problems pretty well:

"The problem with newspapers is that technology is passing us by. We're too slow and bulky. You might as well have stone carvings delivered to your doorstep. And while suddenly hip newspapers may now know how to twitter, they have yet to figure out how to make enough money online to support a newsroom."

That's the trick exactly, to make enough money online to support a newsroom. We've got the supply and the demand, but so far we haven't found the dollars.

Twittering Mumbai - from Boston

So yes, Twitter posts did first report the news of the Mumbai attacks. (I realize I'm slow in getting to this, but I needed to think it through, which I realize is very old school in this day and age.)

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and others have been pointing out that the attacks demonstrated that Twitter has become a news source, with the first hints of the dreadful violence coming in Tweets, not cable news flashes.

Let's leave aside the fact that Twitter is a news source monitored -- at least at this point -- only by members of the digital intelligensia who, I guess, track the world's Twitterage to try stay on top of what's happening in real time. (I did monitor Twitter's election-related posts during Election Day and the day after and was rewarded with white noise and blather like "Gobama, LOL!")

My point is that within a short time, the Mumbai Twitterage also demonstrated the unreliability of unverified and anonymous text messages as an information source.

This came when a perhaps well-meaning Boston high school kid not afraid to make up the news started reporting on Twitter that the Indian government wanted people to stop Tweeting about the attacks because it was aiding the terrorists. That bogus report got picked up and parrotted as fact by Tweeters who were actually in Mumbai. (Thanks to Poynter's Amy Gahran for tracking this.)

OK so the fake news did get filtered out. Eventually. And maybe the government should have sent out such an alert on its own, I don't know enough about the tactical situation in Mumbai to say.

But let's look at this in a different light: It's been widely reported that these terrorists used not-that-high tech tools to plot and carry out the attacks, including Google Earth satellite pictures, GPS devices and cell phones. If they were really members of the digerati, they could have used Twitter to spread their message of hate-fueled revenge, to spread disinformation that would aid their carnage and hinder the commandos trying to hunt them down or just to send out fake assurances that all was well to encourage more victims to come out of hiding and be slaughtered.

"Govt says OK to come out. Situation under control." Bang!

So sure, I guess you can say Twitter is a news source. But consider the source: There's really no way to tell on the fly who is doing the Tweeting, a high school kid in Boston or a gunman standing in a puddle of blood in a hotel in Mumbai.

You might say I'm being a digital fuddy duddy. But I think it's a safe bet that the world's purveyors of terrorizing violence are taking notes on what to do next time, and, if they're as cunning as the bastards who shot up Mumbai, they should be factoring Twitter into their plans.

And I'm not saying Twitter is wicked or potentially complicit. Just that it's vulnerable to anyone with a phone and an agenda, like so many things are nowadays. And I'm just offering the reminder: Consider the source.

Moving from being gatekeepers to guides

One of my partners in change sent this Columbia Journalism Review story my way, "Overload!
Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information," saying he thought it was one of the smartest things he'd read in a while. He's right. It's an insightful and well thought-out piece and actually is a good follow to the post on Sam Zell, below.

An excerpt:

The greatest hope for a healthy news media rests as much on their ability to filter and interpret information as it does on their ability to gather and disseminate it. If they make snippets and sound bites the priority, they will fail. Attention-our most precious resource-is in increasingly short supply. To win the war for our attention, news organizations must make themselves indispensable by producing journalism that helps make sense of the flood of information that inundates us all.

How Sam Zell is right

Update: I didn't address whether Pulitzers sell papers. Here are takes on that from Steven A. Smith's blog and Alan Jacobsen's letter to Romenesko. I'd just add that, judging from my conversations with our readers, the U-T's Pulitzer for exposing Duke Cunningham's corruption enhanced our local reputation and was a great selling point but was not a circulation driver.

While it’s easy for any longtime newsroom hand like me to to find stuff to bristle over in Mr. Zell's remarks in that Portfolio, interview, from my vantage point, Zell was spot-on on the following points:

§ The newspaper business has to shake its monopolistic business thinking, its arcane rate cards being a good example.

§ "… the business must reflect the needs and demands of the customer. And to the extent that we don't do that, we will disappear."

§ "…somebody has to address the home-delivery question. Right now, if you go across the street and you buy a newspaper from a vendor, you will pay 50 cents. But if you get it home-delivered, which costs the company 10 times as much, you pay 30 cents. ... and it don't make any sense." (Though arguably there is a buying in bulk and advance defense to this practice. -tm)

§ "…when you do focus groups with people and you ask them, "What do you want from your newspaper?" they tell you, "local, local, local." And they say it over and over again, "I want to know what's going on locally because that's the only thing I can't find from 10 other sources." "

§" …we have to come up with a product that our customers want."

§ "... to the extent that you have journalists who are unwilling to listen and only want to talk, they really should give up journalism and become college professors."

§ "… Eighty-six percent of the cost of the newspaper business is print, paper, distribution, and promotion. That's untenable long-term and…short-term. ... Right now, that infrastructure sets the floor. That makes newspapers uncompetitive."

The words sting, perhaps because they’re on the mark.

Empowering Joe the Cobbler for automated profit

The dire straits our industry are rushing down have me thinking like a businessman, not just a "journalist." And one thing I keep coming back to is the need for us to master self-service, search-based advertising.

Google and Yahoo are stealing and eating our lunch on this. It's the only way to get back any piece of the massive amount of classified advertising dollars that went to the C'list and some other Monsters.

Here's a post from Mark Glaser's MediaShift blog on the subject.

Mark interviews Stephen Gray, managing director of the American Press Institute's Newspaper Next project; who wisely points out that newspapers need to help local businesses reach customers at the moment they show interest in a product or service. (Searching for "shoe repair"? Here are the cobblers in your neighborhood.)

But the thing is, it doesn't pay to send sales reps out to service the contract of every cobbler in the county. Instead, we have to make it super easy for Joe the Cobbler (sorry) to select, pay for and post his own ads on our sites. The Orange County Register and its publications are doing it.

Look at it this way: Google doesn't employ commissioned ad salespeople. It has machines and code that perform that job. We're going to have to have the same capability to keep up.

Ah the pitfalls of the Wild West Web

Here's a couple obvious examples of how the World Wide Web remains a Wild West world:

1) On the one hand, I can think of a jillion ways that the resources available online have made covering the news easier. On the other, you can't believe everything someone sends you in an E-mail. (No!)

Apparently that shocker is news to an MSNBC newsgatherer, who caused the network to give credit for the leak about Sarah Palin's Africa continent-vs.-country confusion (Gafferica anyone?) to a clever hoaxer who's snared other journalists in his, um, web of deception. (See "A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence" in the New York Times.)

While it sounds careless, this fake expert is slick, an example of the lengths people will go to to game the news system. (A la Steve Jobs is sick.)

2) Did you know, as the New York Daily News reports, that "Drug dealers are doing a roaring trade on Craigslist?" I am shocked! On Craigslist? No way!

But a solution is at hand that actually makes money for the C'list.

Craigslist, the Daily News reports, could require drug dealers to do the same thing it did to "erotic services" providers so its ads aren't used to procure prostitutes or exploit children: to pay $10 for each listing paid with credit card, providing tracking data cops can then subpoena.

I see a new business model here. Wait. Bad idea. Never mind.

Keeping video from going bad

Micah Gelman , the former TV producer who runs AP's global video efforts, offered his thoughts this morning in a presentation for the CNPA on the good, bad and the ugly of video. (His "bad" examples were ugly, indeed.)

One of his key points was something that Debbi Baker, one of my newsbreakers, was making yesterday: The only way to get proficient at shooting and editing video is to do it a lot, that it's not something one can pick up without regular practice.

Better still, he said, "You really want someone focused on video, ... that's their day job."

Some of his other points were well-taken, but probably things this audience already knows: That the five-person local broadcast news crew is history. That bad lighting or bad audio can ruin good video. That it's not a mature business and requires a lot of "under-the-hood" work.

He spoke of how AP had recognized and deployed VJs in major cities around the country, and showed some of the creative work by overseas correspondents, including one China staffer subjecting his palate to fried scorpions and starfish at a sidewalk stand in Beijing; another narrating how China's efforts to clean up the city for the Olympics did away with a lot of the chaos and clutter that makes Beijing a great city.

He said one key to success is recognizing the people you already have on staff who would make for good characters online, people who are clever, creative and fun to watch on video. (Not everyone has those on-camera skills.)

What makes for good online video? Breaking news (yes!). Live streaming. Unique content. Different story angles. Digging deeper (not just duplicating the print story.)

"Breaking news is an incredible traffic driver. If you can be quick, you're going to establish that connection with your viewers and they're going to come back," Gelman said.

What doesn't work? Bad quality (lighting, audio, camera movements.) Talking heads going blah blah blah at a desk. Wallpaper video (non-specific images playing as a background but adding nothing to the story.) Raw video that is not compelling. Video that doesn't tell a story (with a beginning, a middle and an end.) Newscasts (That's what TV is for, not the Web.)

What does he recommend? Find an on-screen character, someone interesting to look at and listen to, either a staffer or a source. Tell a narrowly focused story. Use compelling pictures. Watch motion and emotion. Capture and use natural sounds. Tell a story.

He also mentioned some tools for live streaming of audio that I need to look into.

Dang! I missed the opera singers!

I'm in LA this week for the California Newspaper Publisher's Association conference. I'll be speaking tomorrow on covering breaking news online.

OK this is a nice room they got me, so perhaps I'm looking a gift group in the mouth, but last night, I'm told, they promised cutting-edge entertainment at a reception. The entertainment? Four opera singers. That kind of says a lot about the industry's, um, youthful vibrancy, or lack thereof.

Thank you for your comments

Sometimes engaging commenters is a you-can't-win-for-trying proposition. But we have to try.

On the story: A woman was arrested on suspicion of stabbing a man Wednesday night at a bar in an unincorporated area of El Cajon, ...

... the commenters of course ignored the rules:Comments containing threats, ethnic slurs, foul language or thinly disguised foul language will be deleted. Posters who harass others or joke about personal tragedies will be banned permanently from this service. Keep it civil, stay on topic and your posts will remain online.

Then, along with the usual silliness -- we deleted the comment that said: "Someone made fun of her tooth." -- someone commented, "I'm not a cub reporter, but, duh, you can get find her name on the Sheriff's web site," posting a link to her booking information.

I asked the moderator to take that comment down and posted a comment explaining why:

The question I'm asking is, Should we, A) have deleted such a comment? B) or deleted it? C) Not have engaged at all. (which would have likely led to her name getting published and people making fun of it if any puns were obvious or going into Build-A-Fence mode if it sounded Latino.)

Here's the article, with the debate in the comments area.

Rounding up the brands

This is very interesting. PaidContent.org reports, "The New York Times will be getting a more international flavor as the website for the International Herald Tribune is shut down and its content is moved over blends with NYTimes.com for a co-branded global edition in the spring."

Forbes had said the Times was shuttering the brand.

It's a good step toward brand focus, capitalizing on the news brand worldwide.

Must be nice

Asked by I Want Media, "How will Twitter make money?", Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey basically said he doesn't know:

"Twitter has potential for different monetization paths. We think the best one is something that emerges organically. We listen to how people use Twitter and establish patterns around that. By considering that we can make those patterns more convenient and potentially charge for those.

"We have noticed that Twitter has a lot of commercial usage. That's very interesting to us. Twitter has a lot of people asking questions, which is also very interesting. Twitter also has a lot of people providing answers, some of which are commercially driven. So these are all things that we take into consideration.

"But we don't want to force any particular model onto the user base until we feel comfortable doing that. We don't want to do it too soon -- and we definitely don't want to do it too late. But the time is not right now."

These are tough times, indeed, but it does show how the Buzz Thing of The Moment has a ways to go toward real viability.

Bringing viewers home

So CBS' Katie Couric hit it big with her Sarah Palin interview. But, as Bill Carter of the New York Times reports, way more people saw that on YouTube than on CBS news, and that night's newscast was far from a hit.

In another sign of the reach of the Web, more than half the people who saw “Saturday Night Live’s” recent skits featuring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin watched the sketches saw them online.

The Times story notes that “SNL” skit was streamed more than 4 million times on NBC.com, and viewed in full more than 600,000 times on YouTube.

While there may be other factors at play, to me that shows that NBC web presence worked better than CBS' in drawing an audience, that NBC was better prepared to reap the gains from its content online.

More on those 60 sites

I went back over the 60 sites in 60 minutes presentation Ryan Pitts of Spokane presented here last week. (At Cragin's urging I am typing this out so you can peek at it at your discretion, rather than holding a meeting and making you listen to me go over/puzzle them.)
There are some very cool and free tools here. I put asterisks next to the ones that have some applications for us, things we might be able to use. Among them, something that would allow us to present live video from a cell phone, a tool we could use to for free to make our own desktop widgets and something that stitches together wide-angle photos into huge scrollable images.
But at the same time, this exercise underlined for me that we need one tool, or one set of tools, not a zillion things taped together that we have to remember how to use fresh each time. (See next post for the full list. I can't figure out how to attach the dang doc.)

Land o' links

From Ryan Pitts’ 60 links in 60 minutes:

Social networking
Personal
Virb A place that lets you put all of the things that make you you – photos, videos, blogs – in one place. So you can find friends (and friends can find you). More specifically, VIRB° is our vision of a social community - done right. A website that combines you, your interests, your friends and the things you like with music, art, fashion, film and more. Stay connected with your friends. Find new music. View and upload good videos, photos and more.
Topical
Newsvine
Dopplr online tool for frequent business travellers.
Cork'd The simple way to review and share wine.
Fuelly Fuelly is a site that lets you track, share, and compare your gas mileage. Simply sign up, add a car or motorcycle, and begin tracking your mileage. By recording and analyzing your mileage, you can see how much money you can save with small driving changes. You can also see how your mileage compares with EPA estimates and the mileage of other drivers using Fuelly. Tips and a discussion forum also offer ways to save. The site is free to use, so sign up to start tracking your miles today.

Make your own social networks
Ning
***Wiggio Tools for organizing a group; send mass text messages, voice messages and emails; keep a shared group calendar that will send you text message reminders; survey your entire group and get their responses as they answer; share folders; set up free conference calls and web chats; keep a shared favorites folder

Sharing/recommendation engines
Links
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Magnolia
Publish2 free journalist-vetted related links

Reviews
*** Yelp reader reviews of everything

Predictions
HubDub – make predictions on what the news will be

Music
Pandora
Last.fm (owned by CBS)
Muxtape (offline)

Self-publishing
Video

Vimeo Share videos in High Def
Viddler Share big video files, comment on individual frames
Jumpcut Edit your videos online

Photos

Slide make a slideshow (offers other social net apps. Created by PayPal founder)
Animoto turn your photos into MTV-style music videos
Mixed packages
Footnote (example)
VuVox (example) an easy to use production and instant sharing service that allows you to mix, create and blend your personal media – video, photos and music into rich personal expressions.
Widgets
Dipity (timelines) (example)
AdaptiveBlue makes customizable widgets
Grazr Merge and filter multiple feeds into a single stream.
****Sproutbuilder (example) create widgets for free. Great for news.
· Sites

Tumblr (example) Post anything. Tumblr makes it effortless to share text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or hosted publishing platform
Communication/conversation
SMS-style
Twitter
Twitter search (#hashtags, trending topics)
Twitpic
Twittervision (on a map)
Twitterific (desktop)
Tweetscan (automatic feed)
TwitterFeed (automated posting)
Link shorteners
(tinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd)
Utterli Utterli lets you share text, pics, video and audio with your friends, even from your mobile phone.
Pownce Pownce is a way to keep in touch with and share stuff with your friends. Send people files, links, events, and messages and then have real conversations with the recipients.
Yammer What's happening at your company? Share status updates with your co-workers.
Comments
Backtype BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. Whenever you fill out the "Website" or "URL" field in a comment form when you publish a comment on a blog or other website, BackType attributes it to you. We give comment authors a profile featuring all the comments they've written on the Internet. If you don't have a website to use when you fill out comment forms, sign up and use one of ours.

CoComment coComment is a service for managing, powering and researching conversations online. When using coComment, you can keep track of your comments across any site, share them with friends, and get notified when you get a response. Have you ever posted comments or questions on articles and blogs and then forgotten where you've left them? By tracking your conversation with coComment, you can see all your comments on one page and get notified. You will never miss a response, and will always be part of your online conversations! If you're blogger or site owner, you can integrate coComment to power or track your conversations, while becoming part of the growing coComment community.
Video
Seesmic Join the video conversation (video blogs & comments)
Audio
Cinch Create your own live talk show which can be heard around the world without the need for fancy equipment or downloads.
Live
uStream Experience live video. In just minutes, you can broadcast and chat online with a global audience. Completely free, all it takes is a camera and Internet connection.
*** Qik (mobile) lets you broadcast video live on any website.
Mogulus Create live, scheduled or on-demand television in a single player widget. Mix multiple live cameras, video clips and overlay graphics in the Mogulus Studio. Get your own branded channel page with chat on mogulus.com.
Live.Yahoo.com It's easy to go live, all you need is a webcam.
CoverItLive (demo video) What SignOn uses for real-time moderated comments. Requires pre-pub approval.
Meebo merges top instant messaging services into one interface
Aggregation
Personal network
FriendFeed See the web pages, videos, photos, and music your friends are sharing from around the web. FriendFeed automatically picks up the stuff you share on over 40 web sites, like YouTube and Flickr. Discuss that great new TV show, that political editorial, or that hilarious cat video with the people you know.
Personalized topics
iGoogle Create your own homepage in under 30 seconds
Netvibes Netvibes is a free web service that brings together your favorite media sources and online services. Everything that matters to you — blogs, news, weather, videos, photos, social networks, email and much more — is automatically updated every time you visit your page.
Google Reader Get all your news and blogs in one place with Google Reader. With Google Reader, keeping up with your favorite websites is as easy as checking your email.
Bloglines browse your favorite websites on one page
Topical
Knox'd The latest headlines from the best of Knoxville. This is interesting, an example of a startup that could take a bite out of our business.
Hype Machine Follows music blogs
Search
Technorati Blogs and news presented by popularity.
Icerocket Blog searching tool (good for MySpace searches, too)
Odeo Odeo makes it easy to find, play and enjoy the latest audio & video from around the web. Discover great shows, subscribe to favorites, create playlists and share with friends. From comedy to cooking, entertainment to education, if it's online, it's on Odeo.
*** Spokeo Want to see something juicy? Spokeo searches deep within 40 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and colleagues.
Spock The world's most accurate people search

Services
FeedBurner FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web. FeedBurner also offers the largest feed and blog advertising network
OhDon'tForget Send text messages through the web timed to release
RememberTheMilk An online to-do list, uses email, sms alerts, allows sharing
UmbrellaToday sends you a text message if you need to bring an umbrella
OpenCalais (Example) Adds tags to news stories to be used in semantic web apps. Bought by Thompson–Reuters.
GrandCentral (in Beta) GrandCentral doesn't replace your phones; we just link them together and help them do more. How do we do that? We give people One Number...for LifeTM - a number that's not tied to a phone or a location - but tied to you. With GrandCentral, you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, and even know whether a call is important before you take it. Check your messages by phone, email, or online. Keep all your messages online for eternity. Record and store your phone calls (just like voicemail). Quickly (and secretly) block an annoying caller. Click-to-dial from your address book. Surprise your callers with a custom voicemail greeting. Forward, download, and add notes to your messages.
*** Cooliris (example, if Cooliris is installed) Allows you to sort a story by images. Transform your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for online photos and videos.
Location-based/mobile
· Where you are
FireEagle Fire Eagle looks after information about your location. You can use web sites and applications to update your location, and then use that information all over the Internet. Tracks your current location. I don’t know why.
BrightKite Brightkite is a location-based social network. In real time you can see where your friends are and what they're up to. Depending on your privacy settings you can also meet others nearby.
Zonetag adds locations to photos taken and posted on Flikr
· Information about where you are
*** EveryBlock Adrian Holovaty’s new thing.
Mapquest Local
Outside.in Tracking news, views, and conversations in 11,860 towns and neighborhoods. You enter your location, it sorts out content related to that spot
"Where" app for phones WHERE™ is a location-based application chock-full of widgets that deliver essential information about what's around you. Are you looking for the hottest restaurants, jonesing for your next coffee fix, or running dangerously low on gas and need a cheap fill-up? Maybe you just want to connect with some friends. Whatever you're after, WHERE delivers the best in local information from Eventful, Yelp, GasBuddy, Zipcar, ShopLocal, Starbucks, Buddy Beacon® and more. See your places on a map, get directions and share locations with friends.

Further reading
· Pew Report overview: Key news audiences now blend online and traditional sources
· Porn passed over as Web users become social
· Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming
· Chicago Tribune does social media right
· Newspapers that Twitter: August numbers
· Current TV to Integrate Twitter into Presidential Debate Coverage
· Drudge Report: News Site That Sends Readers Away With Links Has Highest Engagement

60 sites in 60 minutes

Ryan Pitts, the web boss at the Spokane Spokesman-Review, gave a presentation at the U-T yesterday as part of the News Train traveling training program. 

He zipped through a plethora - a myraid, a bunch, a blizzard -- of free sites that do everything from rate the news to turn voice memos into text messages and tons in between. Vimeo, Viddler VoVox and Meebo were enough to make some of the attendees Yelp (which was another site.)

Here's his list. It's worth clicking through if you have time, as it's always amazing to see all that's out there.

On the one hand, it showed how a clever amateur has access to tools that do very cool things in transmitting and presenting information that are more state of the art than those a big old media company like the U-T has in-house.  (I can hear the digerati saying, "Well, yeah, duh.") 

But while are a  lot of very useful tools on his list, the presentation drove home to me our dire need for modern technology that would enable us -- i.e. a big legacy (ew) newsroom -- to do all that stuff with one system, not a cobbled-together contraption of dot.this for this function and dot.that for that one.  We already have trouble shifting from one application to the next. ("Dang it, what's this site's password again? And where's that stupid button?") 

We should have a better and more efficient and effective publication tool than what a 14-year-old kid can piece together from free apps available online. The fact is, though, that we don't.

I'm still optimistic

OK, business sucks. The economy tanked even worse in the last few days. Mrs. Peterson and the rest of our longtime print customers are dying off. And online news doesn't bring in the bacon like the cash cow has for so long. (Plus this news outfit is for sale.)

So why am I still optimistic about the U-T's prospects?

Because we're just getting started.

We have yet to build a modern newssite (I am coining that word for lack of a better one) that properly showcases our wares. We have barely begun soliciting and using content created by average folks. There are countless lucrative partnerships out there we could be taking advantage of. And there is a huge amount of money waiting us in self-service advertising, oodles of small businesses that would each pay a little for a little advertising; tons of little transactions that would add up to a lot. We're developing niche products around customer demands and our expertise which will attract and retain new audiences, and those audiences will also add up to a critical mass.
Not only that: We still own the news in this county. We still have the largest news-gathering staff in town, and remain San Diego's most reliable and thoughtful and enterprising news source. Rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated.

If we did a halfway decent job of aggressively selling our wares , marketing our content outside the paper and the newssite (that word again), we could reach scads of customers we're not reaching now.

Granted, the challenges are huge. Along with the major downer factors listed above, we just went through our third round of buyouts. We're operating with Rube Goldberg-like technology. And there's no telling whether who'll buy us, whether it will be a penny-pinching Simon Legree or a visionary Steve Jobs.

But the economy will turn around, advertisers are going to follow readers online, we'll get better tools and the online news world is bound to grow and blossom. We're well-positioned in a highly enviable market, and we know what we need to do.

This brand has meant news in this county since 1868, and I -- for one, at least -- am not willing to give up that important role just because things have changed. Things always change. They always have.

And we can't give up; having a independent enterprising news source like the U-T to cover the news of the county is too important .We have to make this work. We have got to prevail.

Some good ideas -- and one not-so-good one

The case study presented to this year's Super Panel was a once-thriving newspaper in Trenton, N.J., that had fallen on the same hard times we're all in right now. The question: Can this media company be saved?

The panelists were Eduardo A. Hauser, the CEO of DailyMe.com; Lauren Rich Fine, a media analyst at Kent State University; Thomas Brew; deputy editor at MSNBC.com (who was channelling his boss, Charlie Tillinghast, the top news site's top boss); and Wendy Warren, editor and VP at the Philadelphia papers' site, Phillly.com.

Their responses were all over the map. But they had a common theme: Strip away what the mythical paper used to do but can no longer do best to focus on what is unique to the outfit, local news coverage and local investigative reporting.

Here are some of the better ideas, copied from a book-length PowerPoint presentation:

Hauser:
- Separate journalism from such functions as printing and delivering the paper.
- Develop diverse revenue streams for the content, not just home delivery.
- Slowly and carefully increase price for home delivery.
- Don't bother investing in trying to attract younger subscribers. "Very few newspapers retain a new reader within a year."
- Cut the D.C., New York and L.A. bureaus to focus on local news
- It could be cheaper to give away Kindles than to print and deliver the paper every day. (Fine also mentioned this. I include it because it is innovative thinking, but not because I think it's a particularly good idea.)

Fine:
- Redesign front page to be highly local, with just short summaries of top international, national stories.
- Reduce number of days classifieds are put in print and heavily promote them online.
- Heavily promote ability to contribute news and comments online. Use as much as possible in print with real names of contributors.

Brew:
- Spend resources only for reporting local news and information. For any other category, rely on syndicated content.
- Combine print and online newsrooms, with functions separated by type of media (text, video, images).
- Use flexible online templates as much as possible. Automate story assembly and layout for all but the top stories and special features.
- Either spin off printing as a separate business or shut it down and contract it out to other papers.
- Sell the trucks. Use a local freight company, which probably has trucks sitting idle at that time of the early morning.
- Provide comprehensive local reporting, particularly sophisticated investigative journalism.
- Embrace local bloggers and aggregate your content on your site. (We have got to do this.)
- Push reader comments and publish best ones in the paper.
- Partner with classified ad providers and share the revenue.
- Enable self-service advertising for both print and online to reach small businesses that want to advertise locally but are not profitable to service directly. (Another must-do.)
- Use the paper's brand strength to host events and conferences on local news issues, such as small business, technology or consulting; and make them a money-making enterprise.

Warren
- Split company into a content-generation business and a distribution business.
- The content-generation business would be much smaller than current newsroom and will not only produce products but aggressively and strategically sell its wares to other companies as well. (Think U-T headlines in elevators around town.)
- A news-filled constantly updated free website is crucial. (Hey, at least we have that.)
- Develop targeted microsites, some of which could be for paying customers only. (A third must-do for us.)
- Create a unified production desk that copy-edits and serves both print and online.
- Create a community and syndication desks that aggressively markets newsroom content to outside customers.
- Offer ad-agency services such as creative and campaign design.

Restructuring in a city up the road from us

The LA Times is doing what we need to do: Create one newsroom out of print and online.

Here are highlights from a presentation on their efforts delivered by Meredith Artley, exec editor LA Times.com; Aaron Curtis, the paper's innovation editor (with whom I competed in chasing sirens in the Valley when we were young bucks); and Russ Stanton, the paper's relatively new editor.

- LAT.com has 20 million uniques a month. Page views are 106% year over year. It has 50 staff-written blogs. One of them, Top of the Ticket, is the 72nd most-read blog in the world

- Artley said you need an experimental approach, need to not be overly scared of making mistakes. Need to have a broader reach in the local audience, more local than national, because
local spends more time on the site and is more engaged.

- We have a chance to create one news operation, a lot of folks wanting to help but don't know how. Need to be organized and tactical: focused on internal training/education. Stressing visual journalism. Need to have clear goals and tracking progress. Need to get he right people in right spots.

- Stanton: breaking down silos, increasing communication, identifying legacy practices and assumptions no longer needed.

On training:
- Times is rolling out 40 in-house courses, including 360-degree storytelling, search engine-friendly headline writing, using the blogging software, video training, web graphics, copyediting for the Web and online legal issues. The basic class for everyone is on how the web works, what is changing.

- Times has 800 people in newsroom, and they don't want to give everyone same training. Different classes are required for different skills.

- Web-friendly headlines have been behind burst in traffic.

- LAT has a morning meeting talking about only the web. They look for story ideas on Google trends to kick off the day.

- Blog editor tells folks that if they have a good post to tell at least five people about it to get word out. Artley: "We do everything we can to get the word out in guerrilla marketing."

On restructuring:
- one visual desk photo + video, trained photos on flash and video.,

- one data desk : print and web database and print and web graphics guys.

- KTLA will have assign desk in our newsroom.

- now hiring more specialists , as we already have a lot of journalists who can be generalists

- Hope to set up more topic-oriented teams.

- Artley said it's alright to say, "We're don't know yet, and that's OK. And you have to live with ambiguity. Were tyring so many things we don't want to lock it down and say this is the end."

- The dirty word is "control," Curtis said.

Rally the troops:

- Send out a daily email stats blast, widely distributed, showing what's doing well.

- Set monthly goals. "Let's set something high and see if they can reach it," Artley said.

- Pay attention to top search terms on the site, what are people searching for? They noticed it was immigraton, and set up a topic page in response.

I asked what tanked, what didn't work well. Artley said some blogs just didn't take off, that they give a blog three months to prove itself and then pull the plug if it doesn't draw an audience.

Them eyes don't lie

What do readers look at when they look when they look at a news site? This presentation by Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota; and Laura Ruel, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, covered the latest findings of their ongoing eye-tracking studies. It provided some good insights that we need to keep in mind in our redesign efforts.

Some lessons:
- Tight images of faces draw eyeballs.

- With slideshows, having the forward/backward command above the image works best, then left. The least effective is having the thumbs on the right.

- With carousels, people think the first story they see is the top story on the site, even if it's just one of several rotating through randomly.

- They tested pages with 22, 44 and 58 links on the homepage. People actually spent more time on the page with the fewest links, though they viewed more stories on the page with more links. The middle number seemed to be optimum. (Not our 450+.)

- List of top headlines was almost the most viewed. They want us to tell them what's most important.

- Which got more clicks, a headline, a headline and a photo? Surprise: the one with just the headline.

- Big blurbs discourage exploration. They give people enough on the homepage and they don't venture in for more. (Another flaw of our current page.)

- When the image on the page is larger, people tend to look at headlines more.

- Fewer images on the homepage actually resulted in the greatest user satisfaction.

- Evidence supports the theory that a story page is just as or perhaps even more important than the homepage, as that is the front door for many visitors.

- Seattle Times has copyeditors write two headlines for each story, one for web, maxed out for search; the other for the paper.

- Slideshows with both a timer and chapter tags were most viewed, hence most effective.

- Users spend more time on a site they view to be more interactive. More opportunities for feedback result in more engagement.

- The eyeball tracking clearly, and painfully, showed: Users read right around display ads even if they are embedded in the type. They studiously avoid it, skirting around it, even though they noticed news graphics.

- Text works better than display boxes. People notice things more when they don't look like ads but editorial.

- People don't waste much time looking at mastheads, though they do tend to notice banner ads.

- Top-of-page navigation clearly works best, better than side-nav menus.

As promised, here's one of the videos. (Thanks, Nora.) This one shows how people someone skirting right around an ad embedded in the story but then diving into a graphic in the same position.

Some new ways to cash in

Here's the ONA story on kind of a commercial panel on ways to make money online, which is a good thing.

All the ONA's student-provided coverage can be found on this conference page.

A Webb star's great presentation

My good friend Amy Webb just gave a fabulous presentation titled Ten Tech Trends You've Never Heard Of. I really can't do it justice here -- she could give lessons on how to give an effective and engaging PowerPoint presentation -- so here is a summary of the talk.

This is a must-read, folks. While the keynote speaker this morning (Robert Scoble, an innovative and influential tech video blogger who does Scobleizer.tv) gave kind of a geeky talk about how he uses a wide range of free sites to reach his geeky audience, her presentation focused on up-and-coming technologies likely to have big impacts on the news business, offering practical examples of how each technology could be applied to the news biz.

(She had a wonderfully entertaining PowerPoint presentation but she's too smart to cough it up.)

MSNBC's latest cool thing

I did not attend the session on MSNBC.com's Bridge Tracker tool, but here is the ONA's story on the cool web app they built.

Also a correction: I told some of you that MSNBC was using the Microsoft video player Silverlight. I found out today that the news site actually developed its own video player, and that it's holding readers on the player like glue.

Witness to history

My friend Phil took me for beers at the Natonal Press Club last night and we ended up chatting for a long time with a longtime member, John Cosgrove, who came to DC in 1937 and has met every president since Herbert Hoover. He even swore JFK into the Press Club.

He thought at one point he was boring us with his stories but I assured him it was fascinating listening to his tales, to hear from someone who once worked for California Sen. Hiram Johnson and could remember when D.C. was, as Kennedy put it, a sleepy Southern town.

Also, god willing, I should be so lucid at the age of 90.

It's just semantics

The phrase sounds intriguing: the semantic Web. But really it just means an online world in which everything is consistently tagged so that it can be better sorted, arranged, linked, related and presented.

I missed the first part of this, in which a Thompson-Reuters exec unveiled the company's new Calais content integration program, a tagging initiative it's offering free for most users. I need to do more research on what this is, but it didn't sound like something we'd be needing and we'll never use Reuters as much as we use AP.

But I was extremely impressed with the other product discussed, Apture, which was the creation of this innovative software engineer Tristan Harris. This very cool application inserts just a line of code in a story page. But that line of code enables a non-techy user to very easily embed links to definitions, more information, documents, photos, audio, video, a PowerPoint, what have you, inside the text of the story, displayed by a small icon in the text.

Unlike a link in a sidebar, which then opens up a separate full window, this app opens up a small pop-up window that you could use to, in his example, tell readers more about the bonobo chimpanzee with an encyclopedia entry; or add a video from YouTube showing downtown Rangoon to a story about Burma.

It's really great for maps but could be used to add just about any context or auxiliary material in an extremely easy-to-use interface. This keeps people on your site rather than sending them elsewhere for more information.

It's set up to search a wide range of video sites. It lives on the company's servers and really serves as a second CMS in tying together related material and embedding it in stories.

The best part: It's largely free. You pay for it by sharing revenue from an ad you'd sell on the pop-ups.

We have to get this. It's very, very cool.

Optimize and monetize

These three online advertising experts -- Bob Benz, formerly of Scripps Newspapers and now a partner in a start-up called Maroon Ventures; Joe Apprendi, CEO, Collective Media; and Mark Rose, the Tribune Co’s director of sales strategy, -- talked about the sad advertising picture, in which the industry took in $3 billion less than the year before, in which the $387 billion spent on online audience was the lowest since 1996.

Their bottom line: High-branded niche content sells. (Which means we are on the right course, folks.)

Mark - We need more product, more higher quality audiences drawn by specific brands and targets. in veriticals like auto and horizontals like women. We have an oversupply of inventory, but not the niche products that can draw those desirable audiences.

Joe - What's needed is audience monetization, strong news brands and an audience-centric strategy.

Bob - Look at competitors as possible allies. (Can they do something you can't do, and how can you take advantage of that?)

What Rob Curley did for content someone needs to do for advertising. "The sales culture of newspapers ... is stil very much mired in old thinking."

Joe - Do everything you can to build out content in high display areas.

Behavioral (ad) targeting is helpful to shoppers. Bob gave example of when he was shopping for a kayak and started noticing kayak ads on yahoo news, even though he'd never looked for a kayak on there.

Newspapers are not getting their share of campaign advertising dollars.

Video advertising is a problem. Studies show people don't like preroll and dislike ads around the video. What to do? One guy suggested advertorials. But Benz countered who really watches that? It's like the car dealer with ads on in the middle of the night, it makes him feel good to see himself out there but who sees it? How effective is it really?

These are smart guys who obviously know their business. But they were too caught up in display advertising. As I see it, the real money for us is going to be in self-service advertising targeting small businesses we can't reach any other way. Also in search and business directories.

Not nearly as much drama as we have

This session, Merging Newsrooms, Managing Drama, offered some insights on the convergence struggles of other news shops – specifically, the BBC, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Gannett.

At Gannett, with the exception of USA Today, their newsrooms have always been merged, so the sturm und drang of us v. them never got a chance to get going.

At the BBC, they have 1,000 journalists and $500 million of guaranteed income every year and the difficulty of merging radio, TV and online.

In Philly, the issue is two print newsrooms – the Inquirer and the Daily News – sharing a Web site put out by a third entity, Philly.com.

The Inquirer guy, Chris Krewson, the shop’s executive editor for online news, was very amusing. He said much of his job was “ego surfing,” which certainly sounds familiar, eh?

Like us, Philadelphia does not have “voicey, attitudey” blogs, but newsbreaking blogs.

A few lessons:

- The Beeb: Moving the chairs was a crucial element in the reorganization. (Something we have got to do.)

- Philly: Shades of our pre-merger era, the papers share photo, copy and news desks, along with a Web site. Copy editors all write two headlines, one for print and one for online, and are being trained in writing headlines that work well for search optimization.,

- Gannett: Can’t sequester the web. Online guys cannot be considered second-class citizens.

The exec from Gannett, Anne Saul, News Systems Editor, and I chatted later and agreed: The issues of convergence are really unique from shop to shop, from place to place, with cultures and issues and personalities all creating their own little issues (or baggage, if you will).

One thing unique to us: The Newsroom is the agent of change, not the online crew, which is really the opposite of the way it is in most other news organizations.

A shiny Sun, but no shiny pennies

Two of the guys behind the innovative site the Las Vegas Sun -- where Rob Curley and Chris Jennewein have landed -- gave a presentation on some of the cool features of their site. The theme was how they had to, or perhaps better, were able to, build it from scratch.

Take a look at it. The masthead changes depending on the weather and the time of day, going dark at night, snowing when it snows and even shows the Las Vegas sign melting on particularly hot days. They have some state-of-the-art features: awesome video player, slideshow and audio slideshow gizmos they built from the scratch.

Among the projects they showed were this Flight Delay Calculator and Prescription Narcotic Indicator. I was most impressed by this package on the history of the strip, Gamble in the Sand, with its fun and iconic map of the hotels providing a fun interactive feature.

They also have a good family of desktop widgets and a mobile site that is not just an RSS feed but more tailored to the experience. The company is big in TV, with four daily TV news broadcasts and an All In One Las Vegas sports scene show.

They do offer some lessons in building tools that allow for agile development and swift innovation, building tools once and using them for many applications. (They use Ellington as their CMS and Django as their development tool.) And they had a good organizational concept of three connected pods: production, editorial and programming.

But when asked if they were making money, the most specific response was "We're in start-up mode." And when I asked if they planned to try to capitalize on all the stuff they're putting on YouTube and Flikr, they said that would be up to Jennewein to figure out.

Major figure, not a major speech

The morning keynote address was offered by Tina Brown, who formerly ran The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and is now an online entrepeneur, with a new editor-driven web aggregator called The Daily Beast she's developing under Barry Diller's IAC.

Not much new in this. This gifted editor's basic message is that the cacaphony of news sources available online has renewed the need for editors to serve as curators of the news world, that people can obviously do better than algorythms in helping readers understand the world, that original thinking and quality editing matter more than ever.

Questioners tried to draw her out on what The Daily Beast would be, how it would work, what the business model would be. She declined to offer many details. It was clear she was still just learning about how online sites work, noting they are much more immediate than magazines and that their design is more limited than in print, not as easy to do radical design changes on the fly.

The funniest moment was when a student asked her how to get into journalism, saying she'd take any job in print or online. "Well you're an easy lay," Brown quipped.

(Here is the ONA's story on her presentation, if you want more.)

The few entertaining the many

Rule of user generated content: It's potentially valuable, but most people won't do it.

- Of 100 online users, 1 will create content, 10 will interact with it and the other 89 just look at it.

- Fifty percent of Wikipedia edits are done by .07% of its users.

- YouTube? 0.5% percent of viewers create the content.

What does this mean for us? We need to tap into that minority to create content that will attract the majority.

Some good ideas we should steal

I spent the afternoon in a workshop on best newspaper practices and, while having a wide-ranging group conversation with counterparts from across the world (OK, the US, Canada, Brazil and the Netherlands), I picked up some very good ideas we could emulate and some insights.

The session was introduced by my friend Anthony Moore from the Dallas Morning News, who had a well-conceived PowerPoint overview of the landscape that I'll add here as soon as it goes online. His bottom line: News is a feed, like electricity; and the story is just one point in the continuum. News sites are no longer final destinations, just another stop on the search.

The discussion was moderated by Jennifer Carroll, Gannett's VP of digital, and she and another Gannett exec offered a good list of innovations being done through the chain and elsewhere around the business.

Among the ideas and insights:

- Give readers desktop access to your Sports team blogs through a widget. Get on Facebook with your own applications.

- Cincy Moms - a very successful social networking site that has heavy traffic even, say, on a Sunday night. It draws a demographic very desirable to advertisers and users spend an average of 5-10 minutes on the site. Gannett is setting up similar sites in other cities.

- The value of beat blogging, creates a running conversation with readers that enhances the reporting, rather than detracting from it.

- Display advertising has plateaued - face it, it has. Video and search is where the growth is.

- Small spenders is where the big local dollars are. But it doesn't make sense to have ad salesmen contact every dry cleaner in town, so we have got to get self-service advertising (see Bakosphere's approach).

- Business directories have huge potential. Small dollars adding up to lots.

- Rearranging the furniture, who sits where, is crucial to restructuring.

The best lesson: Let readers do your work.

Example 1: Florida Today's watchdog page that urges readers: Blow the whistle!
Report waste, fraud, abuse to: Matt Reed, Investigations Editor.
E-mail here. (We have to do this.) Readers love it, generate a huge amount of tips and really appreciate the service. (that word again)

Example 2: The Rochester Press-Democrat got a huge database of police overtime. They put it online on a Thursday, allowing readers to see which officers in their precincts were claiming the most overtime and telling that the related story would be coming Sunday. Readers lapped it up. Even the cops, who crashed the department's servers looking up themselves and their colleagues. The Sunday paper had the highest single copy sales of the year. (More on that project here.)

John C. Calhoun looks as intense as he was said to be

Thanks to my buddy Phil, I got to tour the Capitol this morning. I was, of course, star struck. The art was amazing, the statues of men I've read about almost brought them alive for me and the rotunda really is an amazing thing to stand beneath. But I was also struck by what a remodeled and reremodeled labrynth the place is.

And one very old school thing: There's a cheap folding table next to the stairway up to the Capitol from the underground passage that leads from the Senate office buildings. It's the same sort of folding table you'd see at a church barbecue. That's where copies of any amendments are kept for the senators returning to the floor, just stacks of white Xeroxed papers sitting on a cheap table next to a handwritten note. Very old school, almost Third World.

Here we go again -- the conference, not the wildfires

Wow, it's been a year already.

When I wrote the last post on this blog, I had just gotten back from the Online News Association's conference in Toronto and just coming down from that amazing week of fire coverage.

Now, I'm on my way to this year's ONA conference, in D.C., hoping against the odds that I'll be bringing back a top award for our fire coverage. (If we win, will the company then pay for my travel expense?)

As I did last year, I'll be using this space to share my experiences and insights from the conference with you folks back home and anyone else interested. (But I hope without the hassles I found in getting online from Canada. It was nice so many people near my hotel had unsecured wireless accounts.)

The conference begins for me on Wednesday, with a workshop on ideas, insights, challenges and strategies from newspaper websites. I asked the moderator if we could focus on things that actually attract sizable audiences. Bells and whistles are nice, but we have a lot of mouths to feed.