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.

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.