A little ways into the future

In the not distant future, I expect a scene like this:

A family gathers in the family room in front of a large flat screen. It is not connected to cable or satellite TV; it is just one of many computers on the family's wireless network. Perhaps a media server is connected to a content source such as Comcast or XM radio, but perhaps not.

It's Saturday evening around 7. The family finishes watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother from 2010, and now they're thinking about dinner. Pizza sounds good, so they open a browser and navigate to their community news site. The latest hyper-local headlines are available in the sidebar, but their focus now is on food.

The site manages the family's connection to their neighbors, remembering the stories they've shared (such as the photo essay they posted on their Yucatan vacation), the comments they have posted on issues and articles (just as Amazon records your product comments). So, naturally, the site knows this family's favorite pizza place.

The hungriest--the eldest son perhaps--uses the remote to land on the Pizza Place's community page and gets a personalized welcome back along with a special offer--3 pizza's for the price of 2, tonight only. Sibling rivalry appears and an argument ensues. We always go to Pizza Place. Where else could they go for pizza? The community site knows them all, knows which are open right now, and can even apply predetermined rules so the restaurants effectively "bid" for the family's business.

They settle on Salvatore's, where they've never dined before. They have a good introductory offer, and the YouTube video highlighting Salvatore and his pizza philosophy was compelling. To order, they click to a page that looks like a menu, but is also an order form. They'll pick it up. Salvatore's knows who is ordering, because the family is logged in to their community site.

Tomorrow, by e-mail, whoever ordered will receive a request to rate the experience (just as Amazon does today). Returning to Salvatore's page earns points either on the community system or just at Salvatore's.

Dad rates Salvatore's and checks the box that allows Salvatore's brag that they have one more happy local customer. He clicks through to the home page and sees that the beloved former mayor has passed. The service will be next week. Dad clicks that he will attend, adding his name to the event page, then pauses to offer his condolences on the guest book.

Dad's reaction to the event could be kept private, but he chooses to make his appreciation of the former mayor known to his neighbors. Random readers who are not members of the community site can visit and see the news and the business pages, but cannot see the messages or rsvps that members post for their neighbors' benefit.

While he's there, Dad remembers he wanted to research the word of mouth about an insurance broker in town. Every insurance broker is listed; most have nice encomiums on their pages. Dad posts a general query to his neighbors for their advice. Members comment on the query like they do on an article or an event or a business. Twenty-four hours later, there are 20 responses, including several from insurance brokers themselves.

"Meeting" New People

I discovered two people in this space this week: Steve Buttry and Khoi Vihn. They don't know me, but I know a lot about them now through their blogging.

I've long enjoyed The Onion, the font of satirical news, and I admire their web site--it feels like a newspaper, but its online. I don't know what it looked like before, but it was rewritten in August 2005 using Drupal by a Manhattan firm called Behavior. The principal of Behavior was then Khoi Vihn, one of the early advocates (with Mark Boulton) of grid-based web page design. Khoi graciously shared his Onion designs with the world and then explained the grid that makes it seem tidy.

In "Making New Fake News," Vihn says the challenge became "how to create a site that might pass for a legitimate news organization on the level of The New York Times or The Washington Post." Later, he writes, "If the results look suspiciously like a green [The Onion's signature color] version of The New York Times Online, it's because we spent a lot of time studying how the Gray Lady delivers news--but I like to think we were conscientious enough not to steal crassly."

I have also admired the design of the New York Times online for many years, and now I know why: four months after The Onion's new site debuted, Vihn became the Design Director for the NYTimes.com. He's been there since early 2006, as I learned from "Black, White and Read Online," an article from last June.

In an unrelated story, as they say, I also came across Steve Buttry, who is not a designer, but rather the former editor of the Cedar Rapids [Iowa] Gazette. He is still associated with that newspaper as C3 Innovation Coach. C3 is his term: Complete Community Connection. He described his vision in a blog post from April 27, 2009.

For readers, C3 is to be "their essential connection to community life--news, information, commerce, social life." C3 is intended to be essential to businesses, too, "often making the sale and collecting the money." Buttry's goal is to displace Google as the go to site for his community. Urging Gazette Communications to think grandly, he says "We need to change from producing new material for one-day consumption in the print product or half-hour consumption in the broadcast product."

Buttry gets it--news is important but it shouldn't limit a community site. He wants them to "add to our information storehouse daily with news and other information" while staying open to other opportunities. Cautioned by a professor that change is scary, Buttry says "I can think of nothing more scary for our industry than failure to reach far enough or change thoroughly enough."

He says that, but he quickly reverts, in the same blog post, to "We will serve other people...[by] producing and delivering their morning paper and their evening newscast..." Sigh. Has he not read (or read and not believed) Clay Shirky? I'm sure he hasn't read my blog, such as this from last June:

The next question, "What is the best way to communicate these items to everyone in town?" has an obvious answer. Who in their right mind would suggest printing thousands of copies of the items on literally tons of paper, then hiring people to deposit them on every doorstep? A bundle of newspapers on the curb waiting to be distributed may evoke nostalgia, but it also represents a significant and needless environmental impact from depleted forests to burgeoning landfills.

Save the trees, save the landfill, and serve the community first and Gazette Communications will survive, Mr. Buttry. He is focused on not missing opportunities, particularly in mobile and email, RSS, Twitter, social media, iPod, game device, GPS, or some other device--he sounds like he's writing a patent application, trying to cover everything he can think of and more.

A good community news site can introduce people to their neighbors, and a blog by, for example, a past mayor, might draw a sizable audience. But when Buttry says it, it sounds forced and commercial: "The C3 will help people form personal connections with our staff and each other similar to the personal connections they feel to Beth Malicki, Bruce Aune and other KCRG anchors. They will feel as if they know people they have never met, ranging from the bloggers they follow to moms or sports fans they connect with through our network."

My problem with that is that I've watched my share of local news on television. I'd rather hear from a Realtor. TV's talking heads aren't really in the community doing things--no offense to Beth and Bruce, et al. A good editor is vital, highlighting important news with a compelling headline, or moving the boring detail lower to improve a story's scan. Talking heads are not editors.

News in the time of the iPad

Both the Kindle and the Nook--two e-Readers from book sellers--are black and white. The new iPad is about the size of the larger Kindle DX, but slightly heavier. And full color. I think heavy might be better--I like that my iPhone is heavier than a piece of plastic--but I know color is absolutely superior. News isn't just words, it's also the images that go with the text.

Here's a table that I haven't seen before:

Device	Width	Height	Thk.	Weight	Color?
Kindle	5.3"	8"	0.36"	10.2 oz.	No
Kindle DX	7.2"	10.4"	0.38"	18.9 oz.	No
Nook	4.9"	7.7"	0.5"	12.1 oz.	Lame color cover picker
Apple iPad	7.47"	9.56"	0.5"	24 oz.	Beautiful

I stumbled across an article about some physical considerations regarding newspapers, "Forget Blogs, Print Needs Its Own iPod" by David Carr, from the Oct. 10, 2005 New York Times.

Carr points out that you can't read a newspaper while you're driving, but that it is, as a medium, even more portable than, say, a laptop. You can't have a newspaper on in the background while you do other things. By contrast, the web seems to be what Carr calls "companion" media--"a pet platform that sits in the corner and pays attention to you when you pay attention to it."

"There are all sorts of devices coming along," said Dick Brass, who built the first spelling checker that worked and a format for e-books for Microsoft. "When something is good enough and close enough to paper for people to say, 'I want to use this,' then things will change quickly as they have with the iPod."

What if I offered you a magic tablet that connected you to your immediate community? Upcoming events, a traffic accident that just happened, a sale at the local new-age pharmacy, your neighbor's concerns about the planning commission, a new business opening, and a profile of the new elementary school principal. The device would give you access to the latest, as well as to the archives of the minutia of your community. You could share your opinions with your neighbors, participate in polls about the community's priorities, and so on.

The iPad isn't required for this scenario, but it certainly puts the stylish new device to useful work.

Exploring Local Newspapers

On a recent drive from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, I made a point of picking up an example of many small town's local newspapers. I now have a pile of nine that includes the 46-cent Redding Record Searchlight and the free Williams Pioneer Review. I made a list of the cities and looked up their populations. I was curious, for one thing, whether their sponsoring advertisers were led, as is true in my Los Gatos weekly, by Realtors.

I found, first of all, that five and six-digit population numbers are hard to digest at a glance. I reduced each community's population to number in scientific notation x 10⁴. Thus, a number 2 town has between 15,000 and 25,000 people. Los Gatos, where I live, is a number 3. Redding is an 8, while Williams is a 0 (less than 5,000--3,670 to be precise).

Every one of the papers I collected has a web site. The free Williams paper, for example, uses a technology called Issuu Pro. The whole printed page is available, ads and all, in a web browser, along with the ability to zoom in and out and move around the page. When you "turn" the page, it almost seems like you are turning the page (that is, it is animated).

I was slightly surprised that even small-town papers, like the Red Bluff Daily News or the Roseburg News-Review, charged 50-cents or more. (Both cities are 2s, by the way.) My sister lives near Hillsboro, Oregon--a 9--and the Hillsboro Argus was 75-cents.

Above the fold on the front page, 7 of the 9 papers featured only articles by their reporters. The Redding paper and the Vacaville Reporter, sadly, had stories from the Associated Press right up front.

Some of the papers look just awful--"desktop publishing" has made the tools available to everyone for 20 years now, but the Siskiyou Daily News (covering Yreka, Weed, and Dunsmuir, among other communities in Siskiyou County, CA) badly botched their front-page coverage of after-holiday shopping. Uninspired, amateur photos of unrelated sizes were squeezed together with a caption block that had 20-pt top and bottom margins and 2-pt left and right. The headline, "Black Friday," was set in an Arial knockoff font, and the descender on the "y" ran into the photo.

I was particularly impressed by the layout and design of the Eugene Register-Guard. Very nice use of whitespace and fonts. The national news sidebar in column one has a colored background and apparently teases AP stories inside, but that fact isn't emphasized. Very readable and well-designed. The lead stories are by Register-Guard reporters, with professional photos placed appropriately. Horizontal rules are thick-over-thin. Of course, Eugene is a 15 on the population scale. The population of Siskiyou County is a 4.

The Register-Guard seems to make good use of their web site, as well, reminding readers at the top of page one: "Breaking news throughout the day: registerguard.com." The web site is as good as the best major daily newspaper web sites, in my rather cursory estimation.

Another example of good layout and design comes from the 2-on-the-population-scale Roseburg News-Review. Someone tacked on some small-caps headlines that really don't work (the capitals are not proportional to the lowercase letters in weight), but they have a great photo of kids in a cart above the headline "Ready, set shop!" that's very appealing. Of four stories on the front page, however, two are AP. Like several of the papers, the News-Review has two sections and the second section is Sports. They are online at nrtoday.com and it's a well-done web site.

The Hillsboro Argus includes a 12-page insert, "A Look Inside Hillsboro Schools," that seems to be an advertising supplement by the school district, but it is not labeled as such and uses the same fonts and footer as the main paper. Obvious ads are also inserted: Fred Meyer (something like Target), Dick's Sporting Goods (local chain), and Coastal Farm & Ranch (local chain).

While a few of the papers feature paid real estate listings, none were as dominated by Realtors as the Los Gatos paper. The Roseburg paper has ads for local jewelers, a book and stationery store, a plumber, a professional organizer, the local Dish Network installer, a medical center, a chiropractor. Nearly every display ad was for a local, non-chain retail business. A large ad by MorganStanley welcomed their new local financial advisor. Page 9 was a full-page ad by Sherm's Discount Thunderbird Market on 60 specific items.

I'm rethinking how fast dead-tree newspapers will disappear. The market ad in the Roseburg News-Review--Brussel Sprouts 99 cents a pound, no kidding--could have been copied from a 1940s newspaper, except for the prices. How many people in Roseburg have access to the Internet? From my perspective, zooming by at 65 mph, it seems that the News-Review is covering the town of 21,050 pretty darned well.

Newspeak

We're all sorry to see newspapers leave the scene, even as we admire and hope that journalism flourishes in the future toward which we hurtle.

I am moved to write this entry by one of those odd eddies that a venerable profession can find itself in. The Associated Press, clearly one of the leading journalism providers of our time, appears to be systematic in its misuse of the language.

First, the New York Times decided in the 1960s that "people" meant only what Chairman Mao said it meant--the people of a country. They invented "persons" to mean more than one person. This annoying decree has thankfully faded over the decades, but now we have other assaults.

"Three troops were killed in Iraq." A troop is a group of soldiers (or Boy Scouts) according to Webster's. Troop is not a synonym for soldier. In fact, in the U. S. Army, a troop refers to 70 to 200 persons...uh, people. "Two troops were attacked today, but fortunately only one troop died." "Soldier, pick up that troop's helmet, will you?"

The AP Stylebook says "when [troops] appears with a large number, it is understood to mean individuals: There were an estimated 150,000 troops in Iraq. But not: Three troops were injured." So, for you keeping score at home, that's Stylebook 1, AP usage 0.

"The car bomb in Peshawar killed 105, making it the deadliest attack since 2007." An attack that kills someone is a deadly attack. One attack cannot be deadlier than another, because a person cannot be deader than another. We're told, likewise, that a day can be the deadliest in memory. It can't.

As journalism leaves newspapers like a spirit floating skyward from a corpse, I hope the lack of central office dicta will spare us from this irrational newspeak. There will be ignorant abuse of language as the profession democratizes, of course, but somehow I find that preferable.

Online Newspapers

It is useful to me to have these links all in one place:

ABC News Abilene Reporter - black bg Akron Beacon Journal Atlanta Journal Constitution The Baltimore Sun Bangor Daily News Baton Rouge Today BBC News - Webby nom. Boston Globe CBS News Chicago Tribune Christian Science Monitor Cinncinnati Enquirer CNN The Daily Beast - Webby nom. Denver Post Detroit Free Press The Guardian - Webby nom. Houston Chronicle Indianapolis Star Kansas City Star

Las Vegas Sun London Independent - Webby nom. London Times - grid Los Angeles Daily News Los Angeles Times Memphis Commercial Appeal MSNBC New West The New York Observer - Webby nom. New York Times - grid The Oregonian Orlando Sentinel Phoenix New Times Philadelphia Inquirer Sacramento Bee San Diego Union-Tribune San Francisco Chronicle San Jose Mercury News Santa Barbara News-Press Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sydney Morning Herald Washington Post The Washington Times

Other sites:

The Huffington Post

The Onion - grid

Salon

SFStation - I like Kyu Kyung's design style

Think Journalism, Not Newspapers

I enjoyed an interesting panel this evening, assembled by Saratoga News columnist Carl F. Heintze and three other former San Jose Mercury News employees. Larry Jinks, currently on the board of McClatchy Newspapers, was editor 1977-81 and publisher 1989-94. Lou Calvert joined the Mercury News in 1967 and figures he spent 50 years in the newspaper business. And Ed Pope was 40 years at the Mercury, including a stint as city editor.


Lou Calvert, left, and Carl Heintze

"We're not dead yet," Calvert said in response to a man in the audience of less than three dozen who urged them to admit that print news was history. Jinks asked who in the audience read a print newspaper every day and nearly all hands went up, including young librarian Heidi Long. Jinks said that while there was no going back to the heyday, newspapers would still be around as long as there was a market.

Jinks quickly became my favorite of the group because he seemed the most realistic about just how dead the dead-tree newspaper industry truly is. Calvert, on the other hand, read a quote from Scott Bosley, executive director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors to the effect that "We'll continue to have newspapers in print because people appreciate the way they're organized and the tactile experience."

Larry Jinks

"Instead of asking what's going to happen to newspapers," Jinks said, "I think a better question is to ask what's going to happen to journalism." He said that he's always loved journalism, and that that subject just happened to overlap with newspapers for a while. This is a smart man. He retired, by the way, in 1994, the year the World Wide Web broke big.

"I can't imagine a world without newspapers," Ed Pope said, "so, in my mind, they have to survive."

The audience was salted with print news lovers. I spoke with Toni Blackstock before the panel and she mentioned how delightfully robust the Times of London is in print at 90-some-odd pages. Dale Hill rose in defense of print news during the question-and-answer portion and said, as I heard it, that newspapers would always be around because she likes them and they've always been around. That's a little unfair to Dale, but only a little. Then Dale said, "A newspaper is a communal thing. You read it and say, 'Oh, look what they're saying about so-and-so.'"

A man in the audience told the panel that he is 52 (me, too) and that he simply can't imagine a world without newspapers. But he held up his phone and said he looks at the Mercury News these days for local news, high school sports, but "for the world--I'd rather get it on my Blackberry." He said if he wants his son to read an article, he has to e-mail it or his son won't find the time.

A lot of the notes I took from the panelists discussing who put the Mercury online (and who decided that information wants to be free), apparently a man named Bob Ingle, along with specific numbers showing the decline in revenue, readers, and editorial staff, I found (online) in a two-year-old Business Week article.

Ed Pope told a good story about Mercury News publisher Joe Ridder pushing to develop every square foot of the valley in order to grow his business. Someone asked Ridder if he was sad to see all the orchards go, and supposedly he replied, "Trees don't read newspapers."

If anyone who attended the intimate panel should happen to see this report, please note that my observations were available worldwide within two hours of the evening's conclusion. I would also point out that these experienced newsmen failed to attract anyone from the Mercury News (or perhaps I didn't recognize them). Columnist Mary Ann Cook from the Weekly Times was there, but editor Dick Sparrer and reporter Judy Peterson were not. Silicon Valley Community Newspapers Executive Editor Dale Bryant wasn't there, nor was Metro Publisher Dan Pulcrano or his editor, Eric Johnson. They apparently have nothing to learn from a combined 200 years of 20th-century newspaper experience.