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.

Things Are Bad For Newspapers

We subscribe to the Wall Street Journal (it's changed under News Corp.; we don't plan to renew) and our carrier just outright gives us the San Jose Mercury News every so often. I don't know if it's an articulated prime-the-pump marketing ploy or it's just easier for the carrier not to have to keep careful track, or something else.

But the Mercury News is pathetic compared to its former bulk. It's tiny--Saturday, October 17, 2009 was 61 pages in six sections: Local, 8 pages; Sports, 7 pages; Business, 5 pages.

Clay Shirky is back--he spoke at the Shorenstein Center September 22nd on the subject of newspapers. He considered various strategies for funding local reporting. The full transcript includes some very smart observations, as usual.

He talks about Craigslist and Monster, et. al., cutting into newspaper's ad model. His point is that you need to see it from the consumer's perspective, not the newspaper's. "If you want to list a job or sell a bike, you don't go to the place that's printing news from Antananarivo and the crossword puzzle. You go to the place that's good for listing jobs and selling bikes."

He predicts worse times ahead for newspapers before things get better. He said:

Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption. Without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they're shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.

I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.

Shirky describes the features of a "journalistic ecosystem" in order to achieve the kind of "accountability journalism" that we've grown accustomed to in the new world order.

The coherence of newspapers is not intellectual, it’s industrial. Which is to say, if you’re running a website and somebody’s on your website and they've just done a crossword puzzle and they seem to really like it, what’s the next thing you’re gonna show them? Is it news from Tegucigalpa? No. It’s another crossword puzzle, because that’s the only thing you can.

Shirky explains that this means, essentially, that "the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is [now] made by the consumer and...not by the producer." The problem is that everyone may choose to receive only things they already know that they agree with--Nicholas Negroponte's The Daily Me--and it devolves into an echo chamber. Shirky observes that it seems that readers get this concept and value expert editorial judgment and are interested in serendipity. But they are not buying into the idea of a single omnibus publication any longer.

"You don't go to the [New York] Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. ...the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience."

Shirky also says that "Syndication makes no sense in a world of URLs." (He knows how to coin a phrase, doesn't he?) Why should I sell you my content so you can build an audience for your site when I can more easily host my own content and build my own audience?

He says that any kind of paywall, micropayment, or pay per view scheme would make it "a violation of contract to make use of the news." You have to prevent the audience's ability to act as a publisher in order for that business model to work.

Shirky introduced the idea of people coming together for their own good, like open source software, rather than as a business at all. "Things in the market are created when revenues can reliably exceed expenses."

He ended his talk by agreeing with me :-). He said: "We should really be transferring our concern to the production of lots and lots of smaller, overlapping models of accountability journalism, knowing that we won’t get it right in the beginning and not knowing which experiments are going to pan out."

Dinosaur Publishers Have It All Wrong

The Wall Street Journal stands out among online news sites because it has a viable business model. Some articles are free on wsj.com, but others are only available to subscribers. The non-free articles sit behind a so-called "paywall."

Peter R. Kann, the former chairman of Dow Jones & Co. takes credit for the paywall. "Virtually alone, we chose to charge for our online content," Kann writes in "Quality Reporting Doesn't Come Cheap," an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal's Sept. 26-27, 2009 issue. I read this article in the print edition, and I learned that I disagree with Mr. Kann. Based on this one essay, I feel that Mr. Kann could symbolize the stupid, arrogant, unhelpful attitude of most news publishers. I'll elaborate.

Calling the decline of newspapers "a tragedy for democracy," Kann pins the blame on newspaper proprietors who failed to realize that customers "should be expected to pay for both" online and print news. He feels the "downward spiral" predated the Internet by decades and that it was wrong for publishers to rely on advertisers to subsidize readers. The readers should have to pay more, in his opinion. "While consumers expected to pay $1.50 or $2 (or more at Starbucks) for a mediocre cup of coffee, they were offered a quality newspaper for 50 cents, or sometimes even less."

Where I disagree most strongly with Mr. Kann and other traditional publishers is not that customers should pay for value received. The disconnect is whether an unwieldy, black and white, unsearchable jumble of yesterday's news that is 70% or more advertising offers any value to a busy consumer. Kann covers a lot of ground in his article--listing journalistic flaws such as "elitism" and "flea-like attention spans"--but he never discusses what consumers need.

In our hectic, wired environment, consumers need news integrated with other information flows. They need to stay informed by tweet, by SMS alert, and by web page. They need to be able to forward stories to others, to Digg them, to gather a set of links as part of research. Increasingly, holding the newsprint in your hand has become like lighting a wood fire in a fireplace or taking a horseback ride--nostalgic; a good change of pace, which is to say much slower.

Kann says that it was a mistake for publishers to give "young Web disciples" license to take their "preciously-crafted product" and "repackage it with all manner of bells and whistles from interactivity to instant updates to historical archives." The only mistake he sees is lack of profit, by the way, and he apparently sees no irony in calling dumb, dead-tree newspapers "preciously crafted."

His analysis of the Internet is hysterical. Noting that there are "hundreds upon hundreds" of online sites and blogs that "claim to provide news," he concludes that "virtually none of them even pretend to pursue the traditional news role of newspapers." The mission, in Kann's mind, is for professionals to "cover, analyze, and only then comment on, events."

As an aside, Kann observes that a Martian business analyst "logically might question why an unwieldy newsprint product, stale as soon as it rolls off the press and not updated till another sun rises, should not be free whereas the new Internet product, offering all the same news plus more and evolving as does the news around the clock, should not be worth a pretty price?" So, he glimpses how the Internet may offer a better future, but he quickly returns to his main focus--how businessmen can return to charging for their product.

"The decision to charge for an online edition was less courageous than it was consistent," he writes of his bold insistence on pay-for-play over ten years ago. "Why should we give all our valuable content and more away for free in some new distribution channel while charging several hundred dollars a year for it in another?"

There is the problem for dinosaurs like Mr. Kann--they think online is simply a new distribution channel. And "the online editions with growing audiences...rely on the poor print editions for almost all the news they give away. Sadly, there is less and less of that, and the ultimate loser, of course, is the public."

Yes, without journalists to "cover, analyze and only then comment on, events," we might have to rely on access to the actual documents, video of the newsmaker actually speaking, and the combined wisdom of crowds of commentators. It'll be a "tragedy for democracy."

Transparency is the New Objectivity

This phrase, attributable to David Cohn's blog post in Media Shift Idea Lab, strikes a chord in me. It labels a complex idea handily. When we were growing up, the media would report stories based on "high White House sources." It was okay that we had to take the information on faith, because the stories were "objective," meaning that they would be careful to say "Congressman Loser denies these charges." Readers could rest assured that every claim had at least two sources, principals would be reached for comment, and opposing views would be at least mentioned.

But that traditional journalistic contract has broken down in recent years, probably reflecting news media's dire economic straits more than anything. 24-hour news cycles and infotainment have turned the typical story into something of a farce.

After more than a few reporters were found to be making things up, media outlets began explaining why sources were anonymous--"because the investigation is ongoing, because she is not authorized to speak to the media." Baby steps toward transparency.

It is so ubiquitous it's hard to summon outrage, but isn't it infuriating when the TV news says President Obama spoke and shows us mute video of him speaking, but then has the gall to tell us what he said? I understand that one of the finest orators of our time needs to be summarized for a short news show, but the reporters are not only selective in their topics, they can and do add significant spin. "The president said he was confident health care reform would pass," can be given a range of nuance from sarcasm to derision.

Journalists were never objective, but the old forms made us all complicit in a charade that worked, more or less. But it's time for a better approach before all the eyeballs the media is aching to monetize are glazed over. Transparency means a link to the video of the full speech, or the PDF of the actual document. If the story is about a new website, give readers the link even though it means they might (gasp) click away from your site.

Where's Clay Shirky?

Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU, among other things, understands the coming news media better than anyone I know. He sees things clearly from the point of view of readers', communities', and civilization's needs, as opposed to most bloggers on this subject who keep trying to see how the web and the changes it brings will affect existing news media.

So, I enjoy Clay Shirky's blog (http://www.shirky.com/weblog/). But it hasn't had a post since May 31 (and the last from Mr. Shirky was April 15). I took the summer off, too, but I miss Shirky's insight.

Shirky, C. Why Micropayments Don't Work, Sept. 2003

______. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, Mar. 2009

Changes are coming

Google feels the newspaper industry's pain. Ten days ago, Google proposed a micro-payment system that would allow news publishing sites to charge their readers without burdening those readers with the need to set up payment accounts with each source they would like to read.

In a written response to the Newspaper Association of America, Google offered a single sign-on approach that would allow a reader to create an account and pay Google to visit paid news sites.

"We envision the typical scenario to be where a user pays a monthly fee for access to a wide-ranging package of premium content. One example of a "package" might be full access to the WSJ; another "package" might include the top 10 business publications. Google believes that there is real power and benefit to publishers in providing these sorts of broad, multi-publication access passes."

The same section of the document explains that Google doesn't think micro-payments would be norm for accessing content. Sure, people might pay a dime to read a specific one-off article, but more typically, people would subscribe to bundles like cable TV. My instinct says they're wrong--Everyone chafes under the cable TV industry's inflexibility--your package includes the Golf Channel whether you want it or not. I think micro-payment will skyrocket like Facebook as soon as a viable exchange is available.

Either way, this is a good development for hyper-local, community news. Your "package," if it's done right, might include the WSJ and some business sites, plus electives like your hobby and your community. You get access to premium content on TennisPro.com and the SantaMonicaObserver.com, while your neighbor's package includes CatFancy.com instead.

Google was very helpful to the Los Gatos Observer. I had to jump through some hoops (updating the sitemap for each posting, using four-digit identifiers for articles) and bug the Google News team by e-mail for a while, but once we got in the rotation, our stories were at the top or near it on any search for 'Los Gatos' and we were tied in with the Google Alerts feature. Scott Seaman, our police chief, told me his Google Alert on 'Los Gatos' had introduced him to our paper.

Google also announced AdExchange, a mechanism that elects Google as broker between ad buyers and news publishers. Again, good for publishers--it makes ad revenues easier to attract and track.

Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh designers, is now "thinking about new ways to search for the news," according to Google Labs. Perhaps one of these ways is FastFlip, a clever use of page images (similar to Amazon's SearchInside) that allows readers to browse news articles by page. Made public this week, everyone is invited to check it out.

Also interesting is the NewsTimeline, a Google Labs project from last April. It shows a calendar-based view of a few articles. The week view only shows 3 articles per day, and the automated article tease doesn't work well. It's also slow. Click on Week (the default is Day) and it "thinks" for a long time. Automated front page layout is a known problem in this biz, and let's put it this way: If someone solves that difficult problem, NewsTimeline will benefit from that solution. Just stacking things by date is orthogonal to a satisfactory approach.

How Google Plans to Save Newspapers Niroj Chokshi, The Atlantic, 9/10/09

An iTunes for News?

David Carr, writing in the New York Times last January, suggested that someone should write an iTunes for News. The idea is related to Walter Isaacson's "How to Save Your Local Newspaper" in Time Magazine in February. Both think that Ted Nelson's mid-1960s "micro-payment" concept will fund online news dissemination, now that advertiser-supported print media seems dead.

I don't agree with this premise. When I want to possess a song, or a photo, or an e-Book, I appreciate a simple payment process like iTunes. I want; I buy. But not for news or community information.

Incoming e-mail from Aunt Sally. Click here to read the message for just .99¢.

That wouldn't work, right? Not just because you're used to free e-mail. Maybe Aunt Sally is a pain in the neck. You're not going to pay for her to nag at you. Many--maybe most--local news is someone you may not know informing you about an upcoming event, or a charity opportunity, or the latest happenings that you weren't involved in. Unless your family is participating, you wouldn't pay to read a season summary by the Little League coach, but you might read it if you came across it.

To stay generally informed, so that your life isn't constantly rocked by sudden changes, one keeps an ear to the ground. One day, you see the circus packing up and leaving town--why didn't I hear that they were coming? Because I didn't sign up for a Google alert on 'circus?' I don't like the circus that much. I don't care about circuses in general. I only care when they are coming to my town, or my hairdresser will be guest lion tamer for them. News is context-sensitive.

So, you scan that summary by the Little League coach, skimming over the long list of names you don't know. You get the gist--those kids two towns over were too much for our kids this year, but just wait. And then, near the end, the coach thanks the local electrician for putting in the new scoreboard for free, and you just paid him for work on your house, and you think, "Yeah, he's a good guy in town." You're incrementally more informed about what's going on.

That's how it works. Not for the New York Times or Time Magazine, but that's how it works at the local, community level. The way to pay for it is by assessing the local electrician and all the other businesses in town. They get the direct financial reward. Individual readers aren't going to click to pay for an article, not even two cents, and they shouldn't have to. The good news is that the cost of putting community news online is considerably cheaper than printing the New York Times. Divide it by the number of community-oriented local businesses, and the cost per business is iTunes-like.

Unlearning the past to understand the future

I'm not happy with that headline, but I wanted to summarize the key points in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, and particularly his conclusion that:

The future belongs to those who take the present for granted.

Shirky (who is 7 years younger than I am, by the way) says that older people's real-world experience is usually an advantage. Younger people, he says, "overestimate mere fads" and "make this kind of error a thousand times before they learn better." But in revolutionary times (such as after the invention of the printing press or, say, right now), experienced people make the opposite mistake.

"When a real, once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad." He recounts how grown-ups debated whether to allow high school students to use calculators in class when he was young. "The unspoken worry [of the grown-ups] was that, since calculators had appeared so suddenly, they might disappear just as suddenly. What none of [them] understood is that there would never again be a day when we needed to divide two seven-digit numbers on paper."

"I'm old enough to know a lot of things, just from life experience. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that music comes from stores. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. " Shirky says he has had to unlearn these things and many others, "because those things have stopped being true."

When I started the Los Gatos Observer, I was competing with the traditional local paper, the Los Gatos Weekly Times, which was delivered every Tuesday. I posted articles 24/7 and my competitor missed the "news" by ten days or more (until they made an effort to hold the presses for Friday news). I worked hard to make my site fresh and we posted new articles at all hours. But I was constantly asked, "When does it come out?"

I don't blame people for not rushing to change how they think of things, but when you focus on a particular aspect of it, such as how we, as citizens, are informed about incidents and events in our community, the obviousness of the future that the recent revolution in communications has wrought seems impossible to miss. "The newspaper is dying," people say, reading an article about it in the newspaper. "Too bad. I like my morning newspaper."

There's nothing like riding a horse, or camping under the stars, or a number of other things that progress has taken from daily life.

The question to ask, of course, is "How can I best stay informed about my community?" I think the answer is a local, community editor and contributing neighbors who compile and categorize items (articles, photos, videos) that might be of interest.

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.

You could e-mail these news items to everyone, or text them, but "push" media--you watch when I say you can watch--is being replaced by "pull"--opt-in marketing, TiVo, and so on. Better to post the news items on a web site and let subscribers visit when they want. Obvious, but not to some of my neighbors.

"I now spend more energy on weeding than planting," Clay Shirky writes. "Which is to say, more energy trying to forget the irrelevant than learning about the new."

Thinking about tagging

Tagging is a way to label articles and other information objects (such as events) for retrieval and clustering. A good community news web site will support searching articles, for example, and will find all articles that contain a word (or phrase). At their simplest, tags allow an article to be found even if it doesn't contain the search term.

Many times, articles will talk around a subject--the elephant in the living room. When we talk about cutting services and increasing public sector revenue, it is understood that we are talking about "budget," "city finances," and "Bud Conway," the city finance manager, even though those words might not be in the article (let's pretend). The extra words become tags so that the article can be retrieved for a searcher who would likely care.

In searching, you have precision and recall. Precision says that all search results will match the query--there will be no irrelevant articles. Recall says that all articles that match the query, even at the fuzzy edges, will be in the search results, along with a percentage of irrelevant ones. For most applications when we are searching a database of community articles, we want high recall, and tags help with that.

Tags also cluster information. The author of an article can tag it with "News" and readers can browse the News category and find the article, along with other news stories. If the author tags the article with two tags--"News" and "Schools," say--then the article appears in both categories (high recall in the browsing scenario).

Then, there is the notion of readers tagging the stories, the way Flickr lets viewers tag photos. It's a little different with photos, obviously, because the photos can't be searched without captions or tags. With articles, tagging not only potentially helps searching, but it's also a way of interacting with the article--it's a measure of popularity, or interest in an article. Both articles were viewed 1000 times, but this one had a lot more tags proposed. But do we really want readers deciding that something is "News?"

Ed Chi and Todd Mytkowicz of Xerox PARC wrote about aspects of tags recently. They explored the basic mystery of why uncontrolled reader tagging generally works. Users can tag articles with any combination of letters and numbers. Anarchy. Chaos. But, by most measures, the tag system achieves its goals. "Social tagging...[is] attempting to solve a mapping problem," they write. Users are collectively creating a map that will enable them and others like them to navigate the territory efficiently in the future.

One reason I think the potential for anarchy isn't realized is that griefers--vandals--like their mischief to be visible. If I tag a gossip story as "News" and it now appears on the Front Page, it's like spray-painting a mustache on a billboard--everyone can see how clever I am. But if I tag an article as "asdf," it is easily ignored.

Col Needham, the creator of the Internet Movie Database (imdb), has written that a few fairly basic ad hoc tweaks to the search interface greatly improved the searchability of the very large database. Finding a movie like "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" would be difficult without synonyms like "Twenty Thousand," "20 Thousand," "20000," and so on.

Mindful of Needham's experience, I think a community news web site will need both an anarchic reader tag system alongside a more controlled tag vocabulary used by authors and editors. We'll want to suggest tags for use by authors that perhaps come pre-synonymized. One selection by an author from a drop-down list might add 3 tags. For the reader: "Propose a tag. Type it here. We'll let you know."

By the way, Chi and Mytkowicz found that entropy makes tag systems work less efficiently as they grow. Tags become less descriptive over time and "tags are becoming less meaningful in regards to providing salient navigability."

"Even with a tagging system, the navigability of the document set is becoming more challenging over time. One way for users to respond to this evolutionary pressure is to increase the number of tags they use to specify a document."

Chi and Mytkowicz find that, as the number of articles grows, users are increasing the number of tags they apply, and searchers are using more search terms. They report that Yahoo!'s average query length was 1.2 words in 1998, 2.5 words in 2004, and 3.3 words in May 2006.

Forbes.com offers a working example

Wednesday, Forbes.com posted a near-perfect example of the difference between local news and remote, national, mega-news. They posted Matt Woolsey's Home of the Week, a $6.7 million estate on 20 acres, apparently in Santa Clara County. It's not clear where the home of the week is because the headline says Los Altos, but the article says Los Gatos. I live in Los Gatos, and the photo looks like Los Altos to me.

I pointed out the error in an e-mail to Forbes yesterday, they haven't fixed it, so I think they're fair game. (I have had my suggested corrections implemented by several national news sites; Forbes is just lame.) The trouble is, Mr. Woolsey's text describes Los Gatos--he mentions the zip code, the proximity to the redwoods and the ocean, and the Spanish translation of the name. The url is http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/20/los-gatos-home-lifestyle-real-estate-home-of-the-week.html--the name Los Gatos is embedded in the url. How embarrassing if the home is really somewhere else, which I suspect it is, since I wrote a book on Los Gatos architecture and the home doesn't look familiar.

From Wikipedia, we learn that Mr. Woolsey is 28 and was born in San Francisco. He writes for Forbes (limiting himself to real estate, lifestyle, labor, baseball, transportation, and small business) but he has also appeared on CNN, CNBC, NPR, Fox News and others.

Mr. Woolsey is on the Steve Lopez track--journalists who get so big they can't respond to an e-mail and who don't stay in one place long enough to understand what they're talking about. At least Lopez still only covers Los Angeles. Woolsey is trying to cover six desks nationally.

I'm whining about this because I believe the future needs journalists, but that they must be embedded in their beat. This shoddy "Home of the Week" nonsense only works in national printed media. On the web, his story about California real estate that does such a great job filling space between Breitling ads in Forbes in Manhattan instantly reaches a guy who wrote a book about architecture in Los Gatos and he's busted.

The web keeps journalists--anyone who tries to tell the rest of us how it is--honest. I've written many wrong things in thousands of Los Gatos stories, but I corrected them as soon as I was told they were wrong. When the facts were in dispute, reader's comments presented alternative viewpoints. The articles are part of the archival record, and because they were corrected and responded to, the archives are more valuable. I'm guessing Matt Woolsey and Forbes don't think that way with respect to left-coast "Home of the Week" fluff.

UPDATE: It took my wife, Peggy, five minutes to determine that the house is in Los Gatos, after all. It's on the hillside west of Highway 17, just south of Wood Rd. She found it on realtor Michael Nevis' web page. This means that the only correction Forbes needs to make is to the headline. Oh, and the "gated community" comment has to go unless two or three homes sharing a gate qualifies as a gated community.

FURTHER UPDATE: 9/22/09 It's been 3 months. The article is still online and the headline still says Los Altos.

The Wisdom of Crowds In Reverse

An article in this morning's Wall Street Journal caught my eye. Although it is not the point of the article, I was intrigued by the results of a study led by social influence researcher Robert Cialdini.

When hotels left a message asking guests to please reuse their towels to help the hotel save energy, 84% of the guests refused. When the message was, instead, "Partner with us to help the environment," almost twice as many guests, 31%, reused their towels.

When the message was changed to "Almost 75% of guests reuse towels," 44% of guests responded by reusing their towels. And when the message became even more local and specific--"75% of the guests who stayed in this room reuse towels"--49% of guests began reusing their towels.

Local and specific. "Dine out more often" or "Denny's: Real Breakfast 24/7"--these messages are easy to tune out. But to a local audience: "New desserts at the Cup & Saucer," or "Cup & Saucer Sponsors Little League" may sound corny, but unless you're just passing through, they are important stories that you want to know about. "Considering retirement, Smith may close Cup & Saucer" is a grabber.

I suspect these local messages are sticky for the same reason we want to know what guests who stayed in our hotel room did with their towels. Local people, specific places where we go or could go to spend our money--these are a degree of magnitude more important to us than some international chain's ads. National advertisers are so used to the automatic multiplier of media like television that they don't seem to realize the impact that the web will have on community, localcast, advertising.

It's a new, over-wired world

The Onion News Network reports that police were able to figure out what caused a fire at a fictional crowded college party because there were 43,000 photos taken and twittered at the party. My wife points out that this is not just funny, it's a glimpse of the future:


Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire

Update 5/20: The morning news featured the preliminary murder trial of Johannes Mehserle, in which the witnesses were called to testify about their camera and cell phone videos of the shooting. The gunshot could be heard on some of the video and the victim's relatives reportedly reacted each time the sound was played from another viewpoint.

Dean Singleton: Dawn Breaks Over Marblehead

Dean Singleton, the news aggregator who bought up dozens of once-great newspapers in the fin-de-siecle of their existence, wrote a memo to his editors on May 8. He just figured out that the web is important, too, but he has decided that giving away news articles online devalues his dead-tree newspapers. This may sound sarcastic and hyperbolic, but it is no more than the truth.

...we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free. Not only does this erode our print circulation, it devalues the core of our business - the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily basis.

Judging by the San Jose Mercury News, it is a stretch to call it "great local journalism" these days. Singleton says it's time to end the free ride, time to tell

our online audience (who don’t buy the print edition), that if you want access to all online content, you are going to have to register, and/or pay. If a non-subscriber wants the newspaper content in its entirety online, they will be directed to some sort of registration or pay vehicle (and if they are a print subscriber, they will have full access at no charge). To be clear, the brand value proposition to the consumer is that the newspaper is a product, whether in print or online, which must be paid for.

Singleton clearly thinks, in the Internet age, that the best way to disseminate news or communicate with an audience is to print the message on paper and place it on doorsteps. Wow.

To reach a younger audience, he proposes a new kind of regional news web site that will include some user-generated news and be "actively managed" to present breaking news. The key will be to differentiate from the existing newspaper.com kind of site and not just present printed newspaper content. He calls the new vision "news.com."

The most interesting proposal is a local site:

We will build a new local utility site (Local.com), which is an ecosystem of local information, resources, user content, shopping guides, and marketplaces. This site will be focused on a younger audience as well as other targeted audiences based on demographics which are attractive to our current and potential advertisers. We have the advantage of being the trusted source of for news and information in our communities and have a large base of traffic to feed into Local.com.

Local.com will leverage existing newspaper content and existing traffic, and we will add new content (such as Entertainment/Lifestyle) to target a younger audience. Central to this local site will be an aggregation of city or community sites (in the YourHub model) and marketplaces.

Local.com will be the ultimate site for people to find stuff, do stuff, and get stuff done in their local market.

This sounds okay, except that we've had the YourHub model off the San Jose Mercury News website for two years now, and it stinks. Go to the mothership web site, click on "Your City" and find the name of your city in the list. Then upload your photos and comment in the forums. Go on. What are you waiting for? You don't find this compelling in the slightest? Well, what's wrong with you?

Thanks to fellow blogger and former newspaperman Gary Scott for posting the entire memo.

Closer to the Source

I just realized why I tend to stiffen when I hear someone who has been a professional journalist for decades talk about the web as a media platform. It's odd, because I have a great respect for journalists and their profession. I seem to find myself quoting Clay Shirky at every turn these days, but I agree with him. He says we don't need newspapers any longer, but we have an urgent need for journalism.

I was raised on Time magazine and the CBS Evening News more than the daily newspaper. Walter Cronkite told us what happened, and Time followed up a few days later with a much more thorough report. We've been subscribing to the Wall Street Journal for many years now, and I read it nearly every morning, 24 hours late (we don't visit the mailbox before breakfast). I read the Los Angeles Times online edition often. But I get 100% of my news from Google News these days. I scan those headlines 10 times a day.

Through Google News, I am directed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, sometimes CNN and others. That's how I read my news--I don't know how others do it these days.

Have you ever noticed that the news is comprehensive and authoritative only to the degree that you don't know what they're talking about? I lived near Santa Monica Airport as a kid, and we saw a lot of light plane crashes. The TV news usually got some details wrong. I worked for the actor John Carradine's son, Chris, and when his father died, every news story seemed to think he had a different number of surviving children.

So, back to getting the news. When Mr. Ghanem was blown up in Beirut, I read the New York Times account and was glad that they got every detail, every nuance, exactly right. But during the time I covered the news in little Los Gatos, I watched the other media screw up details large and small. The Bay City News Service, which supplies many outlets in the area, is virtually unknown by locals. They have a source at the county fire department, because they put every call on the wire quickly. But they had no one on the scene--they were talking to a desk jockey who wasn't on the scene, either.

One story was an overturned truck just off Highway 17, in which the driver died. Every media source in the area was telling you that this accident was slowing traffic on Highway 17 because on the map it looked close. In fact, the accident occurred at a construction site 400' above the highway. I was there. Drivers had no idea it had happened; they could not glimpse so much as a Highway Patrol vehicle. Traffic was slow because it was a summer Saturday and people were heading to the beach.

This is a long-winded way to say that I like my news from people close to the source. If it's Beirut, the New York Times is close enough. But if I want to know about a crash at Santa Monica airport, now that I live 400 miles away, I'll look for a local Santa Monica news site before I'll visit the Los Angeles Times. If I can find an Ocean Park or a Mar Vista news site or blog, that will tell me more because they are adjacent to the airport, and Santa Monica is a big city, comparatively.

So, if there was a journalist who was covering the heck out of Ocean Park and Mar Vista, that would be ideal. I enjoy Steve Lopez' columns in the LA Times, but he's too big and far-ranging for a plane crash (and now he's an author and a movie character, too). When some journalists talk about the future of the news, they seem to see themselves as Steve Lopez one day. That's what bugs me.

I think the future of news will bring us closer to the source. There is no reason to pull back and let gods-gift-to-writing explain it from media central. The location-independent web lets us zoom in and find out from someone who was right there. Sometimes that might be too close--the person might not write well, or might assume more local knowledge than we have. That's when we zoom out a level--read about Ocean Park in the LA Times, for example. But we will want the capability of zooming in really, really close.

Re-reading my explanation of why a report might be too close, I realize why I respect journalists. I said we might zoom out if the on-the-scene report was poorly written or didn't know its audience. What I'm saying is that I want more journalism so that "even" local news will be reported well.

Community Garage Sale

Our town holds a Community Garage Sale every May, coordinated by the town's excellent Community Services Director, Regina Falkner, and the volunteer Community Services Commission. When I was first appointed to that commission, I assumed that the event was some sort of communal swap meet on town property. I have since learned that I'm not alone in that initial assumption, but it is wrong nonetheless.

What it is is a single day when everyone is encouraged to have a garage sale and to register their intentions with the town. The town gives sellers a kit of literature--a nice letter, selling tips, and a piece on valuing things for the IRS--and it prints a few thousand maps to the garage sales for buyers. The maps are printed on newsprint and include a table of addresses with an attempt at classification, such as "toys," "baby things," and so forth. There are usually 50 or 60 sales, so the map gets crowded.

The town has a nice website by CivicPlus, and I can't remember if they post a PDF there. But the town pays for an ad in the local weekly dead-tree newspaper to advertise the event. Costs for the town's involvement is about $6,000. We learned this because this year the event has been canceled, "for now." [Note, the 'canceled' link is to a San Jose Mercury News story, which means the link will break at some point in the future.]

Town staff--folks like energetic Volunteer Coordinator Monica Renn--enter garage sale registration information into a spreadsheet, presumably, to produce the table listing. I'm not sure how the map is done, but the town has an impressive geographic information system (GIS) and has cadastral maps of every parcel in town available online. I would bet money that the $6,000 budget for the event is simply what they pay to print the newsprint maps and what they pay for the newspaper advertisement.

I have belabored this point because it is typical of the last-century thinking that is in the process of changing. First, the town thinks it needs to be involved "coordinating" something that will coordinate itself. Second, although the town went out of its way to avoid any mention of or support for the online-only Los Gatos Observer, the annual garage sale ad represents a "gimme" to the weekly newspaper and the printer. They won't be happy at this loss of revenue--look for an editorial opposing some other town "event" in the near future.

But is this the most efficient way to do this? Of course not, and--short of legally restricting each household's sale items--it is probably the least efficient mechanism possible. We settle on one, arbitrary day, for the convenience of the organizers. The town tries to hand out the printed maps--stacks are left at the library and town offices--but most buyers just follow the (illegal) signs on telephone poles. Of course, there is no way to advertise specific items, so vague hints like "toys" are all a buyer gets.

There are garage sales here every weekend, just like everywhere else. The town's kit of information for sellers is a drop in the ocean of information available on the web. (Google returns 25 million links for "garage sale tips.")For buyers, following the signs works on any weekend.

The web is already coordinating garage sales, thank you. It's called eBay, craigslist, and Freecycle. Clearly, it's not about spreading your junk on your driveway, it's about trading things you don't need or want anymore for a little money. Most of us have things we'd rather give away than throw away, even if we're not "save the landfill" environmentalists.

But there is a downside to existing web services. You can't sell your lawn mower on eBay, because you don't want to have to ship it somewhere. Craigslist is great, but you have to interact with strangers. I haven't used Freecycle yet--I think it's a cool concept, but Freecycle is about free, non-profit stuff, and some things are worth more than $0.

A good community news site would let neighbors post sales as events with a link to a Google map. I think members of a community should have the ability to post articles, like this blog post, with photographs. So, you should be able to associate an article about your sale that features some of the items you expect to sell. The community news site would be able to produce a map of all garage sale locations for a given date.

This works like the "self-organizing groups" that Clay Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody, currently on my nightstand. He explains that the organizational costs of some things of value are just not worth it--Hello? The town needs to save its $6,000?--but that a service can support self-organization. He cites Flickr, where people can share photos and tag them with labels like "Mermaid Parade." And just like that, you and I can find all photographs of the Mermaid Parade, without Flickr or the dozens of photographers doing any "coordinating." It's pretty obvious that's how used stuff should find a good home.

New Kindle has newspapers in mind

Amazon announced the new, larger, Kindle DX yesterday, and every mainstream media report included the fact that newspapers like the New York Times were part of the New York announcement. Detailed reports like the Huffington Post's revealed that the Times will be selling the gizmo for cheap if you sign up for a long-term subscription to the online NYT.

It all makes sense, but I have to admit to a pang of annoyance that old, dead-tree media gets insider treatment, when information you can only get online--the Huffington Post, say, or this humble blog--didn't get invited to the big press conference. But then I read the Amazon Kindle DX page.

This newest Kindle, which will be out June or later of this year, will read PDF files without translation, and Amazon specifically mentions that this feature allows you to read your "neighborhood newsletter." Why, yes, of course it does.

So the future of newspapers--neighborhood-specific localcasting--is included in Amazon's thinking after all. Amazon also announced a "WhisperNet" service that will let you--that is, everyone--push a PDF to your Kindle. Presumably (but never presume), this will allow small local news publishers to charge for pushing PDFs to your Kindle just like the New York Times.

San Diego News Network

The San Diego News Network is a promising experiment. Instead of a number of web sites focused on San Diego's various communities, the SDNN aggregates stories from 25 "media partners." The About Us page lists a lot of paid staff.

This short posting can't do the news site justice, but it occurs to me that "San Diego News" shouldn't have a Food and Drink Section Editor unless we're focused on local cuisine and restaurants. My first reaction was--I'll go to a food site for recipes and world-class restaurants.

But then I found editor Maria Hunt's manifesto and she does talk about area restaurants and recipes for seasonal produce. She also plans to reveal local markets and review local bars. Community News is about people, and Hunt seems to get it:

But the most important part of our Food + Drink section is you, the reader. So we want to know what you’re cooking at home, where you’re eating out and what you’re craving. Got a question on nutrition or dining? Ask us. We’ll post reader food photos and recipes and ideas on how to feed a family on a budget. If this whets your appetite, then I hope you’ll come be a part of our delicious discussion. So what do you feel like eating?

I'm also pleased that the editorial roster at SDNN includes an East County Editor and a North Inland Editor. If I lived in the East County, I think I'd be hitting that section and ignoring most of the others.

Defining 'Citizen Journalism'

Dan Gillmor produced a definition for 'Citizen Journalism', and Jay Rosen echoed it, along with providing a comprehensive overview of the term. He includes Steve Outing's 2005 article about 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism. If you ask me, the focus on "Citizen Journalism" is misguided.

Who can do journalism besides journalists? Well, I guess mere citizens could give it a try. Outing described layer 2, for example, as "recruit citizen add-on contributions for stories written by professional journalists."

Clay Shirky writes for a blog called Many 2 Many--I think that name is the right approach. When I worked on e-mail systems in 1990, we had to explain the idea of store-and-forward message communication. When we developed one of the more successful groupware packages, Collabra Share, we were very aware that while e-mail allowed one-to-one and one-to-many communication, groupware was many-to-many.

If everyone reads and many of the readers also write, a large archive quickly grows that captures community knowledge and zeitgeist. Some of it is quite ephemeral, some raw and unprocessed. Many-to-many effectively means quantity rather than quality--this devalues individual pieces of information somewhat. All things being equal, would we choose a few really well-produced thought pieces, or would we choose immediate, comprehensive news?

Comprehensive is important. Great coverage of the city council, but nothing about the school board doesn't work. When it comes to community news, you really don't want to leave anything out. But the old news media--metro newspapers, radio, and television--cover small communities sporadically.

Sharing the responsibility for reporting on your community binds you to your neighbors. That's why 'citizen' works for me--good citizens are naturally journalists in the sense that they are willing to report to the community when they observe things of interest. In this sense, we've had "citizen journalists" all along writing Letters to the Editor. But there are many, mostly professional journalists, who use the term to mean "amateur journalists."

"Certain writers, of whom I am one, do not live, think or write on the range of the moment."--Ayn Rand.

"If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away."--Victor Hugo.

Citizen journalists are not writing like Rand and Hugo when they observe and report for their community. (They may or may not ever write like Rand or Hugo.) The question, in my mind, is how to define what it is professional journalists do.

Clay Shirky: Thinking the Unthinkable

Clay Shirky currently has 923 comments on his blog post (3/13/09). I read it as a manifesto, as important for community news sites as Berners-Lee's Semantic Web article. (The unthinkable, if you can't visit Shirky's site right now, is the thought that newspapers don't work anymore, now that we have the web.)

Benkoil: Rebuilding Media

Should community news sites should limit participation (commenting, etc.) to paid subscribers? In Rebuilding Media, Dorian Benkoil quotes Steve Outing: "free readers won’t have their voices heard," but paid subscribers can interact.

Outing then comments on the post to say that he hasn't formed a strong opinion whether charging for the right to interact is a good thing. He references Card's "Ender's Game," so I'll reference Heinlein's Methuselah's Children and the planet where a group mind makes living easy.

Benkoil is an award-winning journalist and editor and Outing writes a column for Editor & Publisher magazine. Outing quotes [Maureen Dowd quoting] Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "Incumbents very seldom invent the future," but I think a lot of smart old-school journalists are doing a good job of figuring out what comes next.

Replacing newspapers

I'm starting this blog because I'm pretty sure I know what comes after newspapers. I'll put my ideas out there and hope to hear from people who disagree, since I certainly don't know everything.

I put my home town--Los Gatos, California--on the web in early 2006 and spent three years being a journalist--media id, police scanner, the works--so I feel that I understand what it means to cover the news. I also wrote and administered the underlying content management system, which is my real strength--I've been creating software for nearly 30 years.

I'm reading The News Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott, but it's a refresher for me. The new rules are that intrusive, interrupt-driven, one-way advertising is dead, and that no one needs "the media" to help them reach an audience.

The web has meant the formation of thousands of virtual communities--bass fishermen around the world can now converse. But, for some reason, most actual, real communities--Wappingers Falls, New York, to pick an example--haven't used the web to full advantage. I'll pick on Wappingers Falls to make my point. The nearly 5,000 residents of the village work and shop in a wider ambit that runs from Fishkill to Poughkeepsie and as far east as Hopewell Junction. But Wappingers is a community, with various services and a vibrant downtown. Google Wappingers and you get:

Town Government
Wikipedia entry

The Wikipedia entry is first. The Poughkeepsie Journal covers Wappingers, and I'm sure it does a fine job (a search for Wappingers says "Did you mean Wappinger's?" No.). If a gasoline truck overturns or a man kills-his-family-before-turning-the-gun-on-himself in Wappingers, the Journal will be on top of it.

Fifty years ago, I'll bet Wappingers had a local newspaper. If you saw an ad for Friendly's Ice Cream in the local paper, you knew it wasn't the Friendly's in Beacon or Fishkill--it was the one in Wappingers, out on Route 9. If the Kiwanis club had an event planned for the day before Easter, you learned about it from the paper--maybe even the front page. You got to know the editor and his opinions. You could predict what his editorial might say each week, and you knew which folks would write a letter to the editor to disagree. The guy who owned the garage in town might write a Car Talk column (and might pay the paper to run it), and it was okay if his topic was the importance of a tune-up and he just happened to be running a tune-up special.

The local library kept every issue of the local paper. If you wanted to research an obituary from a few years back, you could. And if you did something noteworthy--got married, or enlisted in the army, your home town paper would print your picture. If you had a visitor staying with you and you needed to find out what time Catholic services would be held; the paper had that, too.

The web holds great promise to provide a lot of that kind of neighborly communication. We can certainly present round-the-clock news with the web, and we can maintain an event calendar. The problem is scope--what artificial intelligence researchers call "the world problem." When you say "Show me all weddings to be held this Saturday," the computer asks, conceptually, "What do you mean...in the world?" That's a lot of weddings. Usually, you want to set more reasonable boundaries--this county, or that village. "How big is your world?" And there's the problem with traditional news sites: the economics of newspapers encourage them to aggregate into big, metropolitan papers. They put that regional paper online and...well, that's a lot of weddings.

Put another way, a list of all 487 weddings to be held in the county this Saturday doesn't make me feel connected with my village. But--and this may or may not be a revelation to you--a picture of the eight young people tying the knot this weekend within walking distance of my house builds a sense of community. Now I've got something to talk about waiting in line at the post office--doesn't the Willis boy look too young to get married? Wasn't the Samuels kid the Valedictorian at the high school last year? Some call this "hyperlocal," but that term is already trite.

When you search the Poughkeepsie Journal for Wappingers, you land on localsearch.poughkeepsiejournal.com/. There are plenty of "hometown" and "smalltown" and other sobriquets on the web trying to create a single site that can pretend to be focused on your home town. Merchant Circle. Comedian: Where're you from? (without waiting) Oh? Me, too.

Newspapers and web software companies want one operation that reaches hundreds of thousands. Write once, read many. That's nice for them, but it doesn't put the web to work for individual communities. That's one of the "new rules" that David Scott writes about--the media companies don't get to decide how we do it.