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