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Saturday, March 24, 2007
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 Saturday, March 24, 2007
started 3/24/2007; 4:14:23 PM - last post 3/25/2007; 8:36:12 PM
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Doc Searls - Saturday, March 24, 2007 
3/24/2007; 8:14:23 PM (reads: 30301, responses: 4)
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How to Save Newspapers 
| | Tim O'Reilly: I'm hearing rumors that the San Francisco Chronicle is in big trouble. Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent "emergency meeting" that the news business "is broken, and no one knows how to fix it." ("And if any other paper says they do, they're lying.") Tim's bottom lines: |
| | We talk about creative destruction, and celebrate the rise of blogging as citizen journalism and Craigslist as self-service advertising, but there are times when something that seemed great in theory arrives in reality, and you understand the downsides. I have faith both in the future and in free markets as a way to get there, but sometimes the road is hard. If your local newspaper were to go out of business, would you miss it? What kinds of jobs that current newspapers do would go undone? |
| | First, reform journalism school. It's too late to be training new journalists in the classic mode. Instead, journalism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every graduate. Why? Because journalism like everything else that used to be centralized is in the process of being distributed. In the future, every educated person will be a journalist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers. The reporters have been acting as middlemen, connecting sources with readers, who in many cases are sources themselves. As with all middlemen, something is lost in translation, an inefficiency is added. So what we're doing now, in journalism, as with all other intermediated professions, is decentralizing. So it pays to make an investment now and teach the educated people of the future the basic principles of journalism. Permalink to this paragraph |
| | Second, embrace the best bloggers. How? Easy -- every time someone is quoted in your publication, offer them a blog hosted on your domain. This has a couple of advantages: 1. It gives the reporters the ultimate say on who gets to share some of your authority, who gets a chance to be the next amateur star. 2. It gives the reporters an incentive to only use sources that are qualified, it would improve the quality of your reporting. It also has a third benefit, as you expand the number of people writing under your banner, you also expand the reach of your publication, into school boards, local government, sports teams and businesses. It's also important because it's how you decentralize, aligning your interests with the "grain" of the web, as opposed to the current positioning, against it. |
| | Great suggestions. These enlarge on some of the points I made a few months back (specifically, #s 5 and 6 below), all which I'll repeat here, with a few very minor edits (to add linkage and make a couple of points current): |
| | 1) Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There's advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow's fishwrap behind paywalls. (Dean Landsman was the first to call this a "fishwrap fee".) Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it. Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisilble. If you open the archives, and make them crawlable by search engine spiders, your authority in your commmunity will increase immeasurably. (This point is proven by Santa Barbara vs. Fort Myers, both with papers called News-Press, one with contents behind a paywall and the other wide open.) Plus, you'll open all that inventory to advertising possibilities. And I'll betcha you'll make more money with advertising than you ever made selling stale editorial to readers who hate paying for it. (And please, let's not talk about Times Select. Your paper's not the NY Times, and the jury is waaay out on that thing.) |
| | 2) Start featuring archived stuff on the paper's website. Link back to as many of your archives as you can. Get writers in the habit of sourcing and linking to archival editorial. This will provide paths for search engine spiders to follow back in those archives as well. Result: more readers, more authority, more respect, higher PageRank and higher-level results in searches. In fact, it would be a good idea to have one page on the paper's website that has links (or links to links, in an outline) back to every archived item. |
| | 3) Link outside the paper. Encourage reporters and editors to write linky text. This will encourage reciprocity on the part of readers and writers who appreciate the social gesture that a link also performs. Over time this will bring back enormous benefits through increased visits, higher respect, more authority and the rest of it. |
| | 4) Start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies). You're not the only game in town anymore, and haven't been for some time. Instead you're the biggest fish in your pond's ecosystem. Learn to get along and support each other, and everybody will benefit. |
| | 5) Start looking toward the best of those bloggers as potential stringers. Or at least as partners in shared job of informing the community about What's Going On and What Matters Around Here. The blogosphere is thick with obsessives who write (often with more authority than anybody inside the paper) on topics like water quality, politics, road improvement, historical preservation, performing artisty and a zillion other topics. These people, these writers, are potentially huge resources for you. They are not competitors. The whole "bloggers vs. journalism" thing is a red herring, and a rotten one at that. There's a symbiosis that needs to happen, and it's barely beginning. Get in front of it, and everybody will benefit. |
| | 6) Start looking to citizen journalists (CJs) for coverage of hot breaking local news topics -- such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires and so on. There are plenty of people with digital cameras, camcorders, cell phones and other devices that can prove mighty handy for following stories up close and personally. Great example: what Sig Solares and his crew did during Katrina. |
| | 7) Stop calling everything "content". It's a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the '90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online. It's handy, but it masks and insults the true natures* of writing, journalism, photography, and the rest of what we still, blessedly (if adjectivally) call "editorial". Your job is journalism, not container cargo. |
| | 8) Uncomplicate your webistes. I can't find a single newspaper that doesn't have a slow-loading, hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive, confusing and often useless beyond endurance. Simplify the damn things. Quit trying to "drive traffic" into a maze where every link leads to another route through of the same mess. You have readers trying to learn something, not cars looking for places to park. And please, get rid of those lame registration systems. Quit trying to wring dollars out of every click. I guarantee you'll sell more advertising to more advertisers reaching more readers if you take down the barricades and (again) link outward more. And you'll save all kinds of time and hassle. |
| | 9) Get hip to the Live Web. That's the one with verbs such as write, read, update, post, author, subscribe, syndicate, feed and link. This is the part of the Web that's growing on top of the old Static Web of nouns such as site, address, location, traffic, architecure and construction. Nothing wrong with any of those static nouns (or their verb forms). They're the foundation, the bedrock. They are necessary but insufficient for what's needed on the Live Web, which is where your paper needs to live and grow and become more valuable to its communities (as well as Wall Street). |
| | Lemme unpack that a bit. The Static Web is what holds still long enough for Google and Yahoo to send out spiders to the entire universe and index what they find. The Live Web is is what's happening right now. It's dynamic. (Thank you, Virginia.) It includes all the stuff that's syndicated through RSS and searched by Google Blogsearch, IceRocket and Technorati. What I post here, and what others post about this post, will be found and indexed by Live Web search engines in a matter of minutes. For those who subscribe to feeds of this blog, and of other blogs, the notification is truly live. Your daily paper has pages, not sites. The difference is not "just semantic". It's fundamental. It's how you reclaim, and assert, your souls in the connected world. It's also how you shed dead conceptual weight, get light and nimble, and show Wall Street how you're not just ahead of the curve, but laying pavement beyond everybody else's horizon. It's how your leverage the advantages of history, of incumbency, and of already being in a going business. (The hard part will be raising your paper's heartbeat from once a day to once a second. But you can do it. Your own heart sets a good example.) |
| | 10) publish Rivers of News for readers who use Blackberries or Treos or Nokia 770s, or other handheld Web browsers. Your current home page, and all your editorial pages, are torture to read with those things. See the example Dave Winer provides with a from the NY Times. See what David Sifry did for the Day Fire here in California. Don't try to monetize it right away. Trust me, you'll make a lot more money — and get a lot more respect from Wall Street — because you've got news rivers, than you'll make with those rivers. |
| | 11) Remember the higher purpose behind the most informative writing — and therefore behind newspapers as well. To review, |
| | I don't think of my what I do here as production of "information" that others "consume". Nor do I think of it as "one-to-many" or "many-to-many". I thnk of it as writing that will hopefully inform readers. |
| | Informing is not the same as "delivering information". Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you. |
| | What we call "authority" is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us. |
| | The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about. Yeah, it's about other things. But it needs to be respected as an accessory to our humanity. And terms like "social media", forgive me, don't do that. (At least not for me.) |
| | Credit where due... That line, We are all authors of each other, first came up many years ago during a conversation between Tim O'Reilly and myself. |
| | Tim's right that newspapers have a hard road. But there are a lot of good people out there who want newspapers to adapt and thrive in a Giant Zero world. More, I'm sure, than ever before. |
| | They can only do it together. |
Quote du jour
Supply from de man
| | This is the funniest thing I've seen in years. By Yoram Bauman, Ph.D. "The world's first and only stand-up economist". Got pointed to it in an email from Bob Frankston, who was remarking on the statistics that scaffold the provocative and viral Did You Know? by Karl Fisch, whose blog bowls large pearls toward the swine of Thinking As Usual in education. (The swine in question are the thinkings, not the peoples... just want to get that straight before emailings from offense-takers come rolling in.) |
| | The PC/Mac/Linux videos here are pretty good too, even if they aren't haha funny. |
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Chris O'Connor - Re: Saturday, March 24, 2007
3/25/2007; 2:38:23 AM (reads: 897, responses: 0)
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Doc,
This is great stuff.
In #9 you say: "Your daily paper has pages, not sites." Doesn't the paper really have "articles" not sites?
Is this related to the fact that your site has a permanent URL for dates but not for posts.
My vote is for articles or posts as the level of granularity.
Chris
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Dana Gardner - Silver lining for these papers is their great markets
3/25/2007; 3:45:43 PM (reads: 988, responses: 1)
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It's ironic that the newspapers that are suffering the most first from the online impacts and citizen journalism thing are in some of the most desirable markets for media and advertising. The flat lines are appearing where first? San Jose, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles.
The bad news is that the markets with high broadband use, mostly educated populations and a swift embrace of the new (Toffler ID'd such places 30 years ago), are where the papers are seeing readership and ad revenues trail off -- even as these places thrive economically.
The good news is that these are the markets with income, interest, and embrace of the new. They are vibrant, modern places where the information age dominates. These will be the places where the next breeds of localized and relevant media arise. The minor question is whether the current media ownership and structure will be the ones to create and sustain the newer models and methods, even as they bury the old. Or will they be replaced?
The role of the local and/or metro newspaper is alive and well. The Internet is now making serious impacts on politics (even via Twitter), after the massive impact of the past 10 years on commerce and media. A lot of the things in life stay local. Who will fill the shoes that combines all of these aspects for Fourth Estate virtue, profit and advancing productivity in a long tail world is the biggest question.
The right approach should do quite well in these types of markets. It's a matter of the right content aggregation and applicable new business models -- not to mention the most efficient way to capture and project news and commentaty since the Town Criers, as Dave Winer points out: bloggers.
Incidentally, years ago in 1986 as editor of a local weekly paper, The Gazette in Old Lyme, Conn., we competed against the The Day in nearby New London, and The Hartford Courant. The Day always seemed to be better than all the rest, an excellent paper.
And it was, I believe, because the paper was owned and operated by a self-sustaining, locally responsible, non-profit trust. The Courant was on its way into the maw of mega corporate ownership (Times-Mirror), which did not necessarily improve the paper over time. The Gazette was owned by Capital Cities, soon to be Capital Cities/ABC (now Disney). The Gazette was starved, folded, and the area coveraged instead by a weekly shopper. Before corporate ownership The Gazette thrived, and won many awards.
Perhaps the best new ownership for new media would be locally inspired and dedicated, online and therefore low cost, non-profit, and via a trust. Surely trust is a key word in all this. Perhaps mega-corporate ownership and the best news media are -- on a long-standing continuum -- parting ways.
As always, thanks, Doc
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Eric Norman - Newspapers can compete in a different arena
3/26/2007; 12:36:12 AM (reads: 971, responses: 0)
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If newpapers try to compete with the web in terms of speed of delivery and things like that, then they're going to lose. However, I think they can compete if they continue to do what they do best.
What's that, you ask? They sometimes provide in-depth exposure. investigative reporting, and analysis of what the public "really ought to know". I'm talking about the kind of stories where journalists get second sources for their stories. I'm talking about the kind of stories about people that they would rather not see published. I'm talking about the kind or stories where the joppurnalist won't get sued for libel because they have their facts right and can back them up. I'm talking about the kind of reporting that takes time.
The web really isn't very good at this (yet).
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Doc Searls - Re: Silver lining for these papers is their great markets
3/26/2007; 7:33:09 AM (reads: 1040, responses: 0)
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Thanks, Dana.
A few months back Tim Rutten of the LA Times had a great piece reporting (among other surprises) the fact that his paper actually makes good money. Just not enough to satisfy Wall Street.
The LA times that lands in my driveway every Sunday has the heft of a log. It could hardly be more fat with advertising as well as editorial.
So I have a problem with people (Scoble included) saying newspapers are dead. They're not. They're just getting old and need to adapt. Some are. Most aren't.
As for local ownership, it's great unless your owner isn't operating in reality, which is our problem here in Santa Barbara. But that's a whole 'nuther ball of worms.
Miss the Gillmor Gang, btw. Maybe Steve will reconvene us soon...
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