Quite a title eh? It is, in short, my answer to this month’s Carnival of Journalism post, whose prompt is:

“What emerging technology or digital trend do you think will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead? And how do you see it playing out in terms of application by journalists, and impact?”

For quite some time we have seen data journalism produce interesting stories, that are compelling and engaging. From early tech mashups like the Chicago crime map to really cool data driven projects from the NY Times, unique forms of telling stories and informing the public have gained increasing momentum. 

While most traditional media companies haven’t vastly increased the resources to help explore these new technologies, the tech itself has become so prolific and accessible that even if there isn’t an increased staff to tackle new data driven projects there’s an increased capacity to do so. Facilitating this increased pace is a vast array of new free tools that make building new products as simple as assembling Legos. This really dawned on me as I recently embarked on my first programming project in some time. Did it used to be this easy? No.

I could use an off the shelf language parsing technology, combined with my publication’s recently launched API and the increasingly simple to use Rails programming platform to produce something slick in no time.

The journalists are getting more savvy and the tools are getting more simple. Journo-nerds everywhere seem to be experiencing this same eye-opening reaction to technology. Many people I know who have never thought of themselves as coders, are for the first time savvy enough to jump into the fray. It’s this type of anecdotal evidence that leads me to believe we are on the cusp of something exponential.

This year and the next reminds me of the year that the iPhone came out. In the early part of the last decade, cell phones were common, but they weren’t quite ubiquitous, especially not smart phones. Then the iPhone came along and really changed the game in a few short years. Journalism and technology is at that same point now. What’s exciting is the sheer number of interesting journalism related projects that are underway. I doubt there have ever been more concurrent tech/journalism projects than there are now. Each passing day seems to illuminate a new one.

Not too long ago I wrote about how little innovation I saw in our industry, but in a very short time that has turned on a dime and I am excited to see where it goes in the next 1-2 years.

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This month's Carnival of Journalism prompt asks if journalists can be good capitalists.

Journalists start off with a significant disadvantage. They see the world through journalism colored glasses. Everyone starts with what they know, but what journalists know about how news has worked in the past is not especially relevant to the journalism of the future. Not every problem is resolved by good research, sharp interviews or well written prose.

Journalism basics are important, just not essential to innovation or entrepreneurship.

This is not just a problem with the media industry, or the news industry but any industry. You have to understand what business you are really in in order to think in the appropriate terms. As Mike Masnick points out in an eloquent post and video on the innovator's dilemma, the horse drawn carriage industry needed to realize that it wasn't in the carriage business but the transportation business. The benefit it provided its customers was transportation, but just the product of carriages.

Journalists need to think about and understand what value they are actually providing. Many in the news business are indoctrinated with the principle that media is the 4th estate and indispensable to our democracy. While debatably true in principle, principles rarely explain the basic functioning of a business. Netwon's laws are indispensable to the automotive industry, but they don't tell you how to build an engine.

What journalism provides people with is useful information to understand the world around them and take action. It can also provide entertainment. Whomever provides a person with information that has the most value to the average consumer is on a good path to be successful in the business of news.

The most read stories on our site are almost always the most useful: articles about new businesses opening, articles about businesses closing and articles about events. Why? Because they provide information that is directly actionable to people, i.e. it's really damn useful.

What ways are there to disseminate business openings and closures to your community? A journalist sees this as a problem that is solved by making a phone call or perhaps visiting the business. But is that most efficient way to find that out?

So, *can* journalists be good capitalists? Yes, but they need to overcome the disadvantage of not seeing what service they are really providing to their communities.

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When I walk around my neighborhood it's rare that I come back without several questions. Why are they digging that trench? There are trucks without city marks on them, but some of the gear seems to have an AT&T logo on it, are they making infrastructure upgrades in my neighborhood? All over my city? There's a new sign that went up claiming an intersection is now "Photo Enforced", but I don't see a camera, what's going on here?

Why do I ask why? I guess it's just my nature. It's why I like being involved with journalism and the news business in general. When I was a little kid it took longer to walk with me than the dog.

So my request is for journalists to be far more curious. Isn't that why you got into this field (I'm sure it wasn't for the pay.)?

My ideal journalist is the person that never stops asking why. She doesn’t sit at her desk and just make phone calls. She doesn’t clock out and turn off her curiosity. Every walk, every lunch, car ride, or gaze out the window should open the floodgates of curiosity.

A nagging curiosity leads to discovery, to breaking stories, to exposing corruption and inevitably making our communities, whether they are neighborhoods, states or countries, a better place.

Both journalists and developers are on the forefront of what’s new and changing. Curiosity is a key driver in both our fields, it’s why I’m so thrilled to be at the intersection of both. Good journalism leads to change, but that doesn’t happen unless you ask –why?

NOTE: This post is in (very late) reply to this month’s Carnival of Journalism.

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Rupert Murdoch has many ideas that I believe to be wrong-headed about the direction of news publishing. From paywalls to paper products to iPad apps that fail to take advantage of the medium.

Shackled by those constraints he expects his organization to grow readership and revenues at the rates that his organization once did. It seems to me to be a reasonable hypothesis then, that to achieve these ends in a down global economy with backward looking vision you have to resort to nefarious methods.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) European ciculation scandal is a pretty excellent candidate for this hypthesis' further examination. Circulation numbers are the key drivers of the price that a publication can charge advertisers. The bigger the circulation the higher the cost of advertising. As a young consumer, using a bevy of forward looking tech products why would you choose a News Corporation product? WSJ can't make aggressive changes to how they do things and so they must resort to cheating and lying to make things work.

This same logic applies just as well to the phone "hacking" scandal that has recently rocked the Murdoch empire via the News of the World publication. The phone hacking seems to be a symptom of the need to be more sensationalist, to get the newest and most intimate stories about famous people. Few would argue that this is anything but a play for more readers. Many publications have a strong push toward growing their readership, the question is, why do Murdoch publications seem to go further than anyone else?

Undoubtedly there are many reasons for the recent controversies at News Corporation, but I submit that another, and possibly underlying reason, is that Murdoch's myopic view of media's future has forced his publications into questionable tactics in order to achieve his view of success.

Photo Credit: World Economic Forum

Used with a Creative Commons Licence

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This post is an answer to this month's Carnival of Journalism.

Video is not and end in and of itself. Video is a means to an end, that end is telling a story.

This has always been true, it's just never been as easy as it is today to implement that truth. Today's newsroom, whether it's in a local TV station, radio station, local newspaper  or local online news site needs to tell stories with all the tools at its disposal. The story is the only complete entity.

Beyond just in theory we are also starting to see the notion that video is only a part of a greater presentation in code and web standards. HTML5 helps video integrate far more seamlessly into a rich media website. HTML5 is an implementation of the thesis of this post, that video is simply a means to an end, at least when it comes to the story telling behind the news.

In practice that means that some types of media will have to produce more video and some will have to produce more of everything else. In the case of online news sites more video is likely necessary to tell a community's stories.

The difficulty is that small local and hyper-local sites still don't have the capacity for video and can more efficiently cover their communities without it. The Sacramento Press has gotten by for some time without a significant amount of video. However that has started to change. As the barriers to entry for video lower in terms of both technology and process, video becomes more of an option for those publishers with a smaller budget (both in terms of money and time).

In order to continue to increase both the quality and quantity of video we need to build tools that imagine all types of media as one piece of the storytelling puzzle. By doing so we will significantly diminish the barriers to entry for the creation of video and that has the potential to better inform and engage our various communities.

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Note: This is response to this month's Carnival of Journalism prompt, which asks what the criteria should be for this years Online Journalism Awards (OJA).

In math to most students’ annoyance, writing down the correct answer is only good for partial credit, how you got there is really what matters. That principle should be true when it comes to judging criteria for the OJA.

The OJAs should focus on journalism that expands the boundaries of journalism and does so online, the final frontier.

The Pulitzer Prize rewards amazing journalism. Knight-Batten, News Challenge and other events award and grant funds for amazing technological advances in the field of journalism. OJA should award people doing brilliant journalism with the most amazing technology.

Twitter doesn’t win for creating it’s product which helps journalists so much. Nor does Twitter win for creating Twitter for newsrooms. Those are great things, but they are just tech that enables good journalism. At the same time The Los Angeles Times wouldn’t win for the same story that the they won their pulitzer, simply because they used some new tech along the way.

Both technology and journalism have to be at work here. In this way I am defining journalism as informing citizenry in order to affect change.

I think Carrie Brown-Smith and Lisa Williams both already did an excellent job answering this post and their sentiments closely match my own so I try and add another concept; the Internet is the newsroom.

The connections, research and filtering potential of the Internet provides an even more rich experience for an enterprising reporter. I’ve always found that the reporters I most respected were barely in the newsroom at all. If the Internet is your newsroom then you can simultaneously be in the newsroom and the field at the same time. It is this capability that will enable some really impressive journalism.

Steve Fox points out two people that are at the forefront of this idea, Andy Carvin and Nick Kristoff, specifically their coverage of the Arab Spring. I agree, but what I also see is two people just starting to see the potential that lies ahead.

Recently, on the way to the Knight Civic Media Conference I had the pleasure of passing through Chicago’s infamous O’Hare airport. As is common for that airport we encountered horrific weather and had our flight cancelled. Looking at the massive line of people trying to rebook with United, a line that was in the many hundreds, Ben Ilfeld and I decided to grab food and a beer.

We enjoyed the crazy weather, the tornado warnings, mediocre sushi, and some pretty excellent beer and did so quite peacefully. Soon afterwards we plopped down next to the giant line for United customer service, which had grown even longer, and opened our laptops. We tethered them to our phones and in five minutes we had booked ourselves on the 6am flight to Boston on Southwest. We also booked ourself a super cheap motel. We did this in about 5 minutes. While waiting on the cab line to our motel we heard of all the horror stories of the United passengers who had been through the line. Most of them got rebooked, but rebooked 1-2 days later, the earliest United could re-route them. For us that would have meant missing nearly the entire conference.

I see the same thing with journalism now. Innovative technology used at the right time in the right way can enable fantastic things. For us, we got to Boston to see some amazing people win Challenge grants, for journalism it is making the world a better place.

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Where the hell is the innovation in journalism?

(And I will give the Center for Civic media some credit here, you + Knight are on fire this year)

Start by blaming me. I’m a technologist working on technology for journalism. I have not changed nearly enough.

But lots of people talk a lot in our budding new media space; not a lot of people are creating really innovative stuff.

One of the big problems is not taking a big enough step back from the daily grind of reporting, writing and interacting with communities. What is it all about? The nice thing about tumultuous periods in an industry and no standard definitions is that you can create them.

So…

Stop worrying about the past and what you “should” worry about, and think about what would be amazing for humanity and for journalism in particular.

Here is what I see.

…

No understanding about our own publications. Who reads them? Why do people read them? What do they expect to get out of reading the news? What do you want people to get out of your publication? And please no canned J-School BS answers, think about this seriously.

It is not essential that everyone read the news all the time. Nope, sorry, it just isn’t. What each American, let alone what each human should know is not obvious. Let’s stop pretending that if we all just read The New York Times the world would operate fluidly. But when an issue really effects you and you don’t know about it, that’s a problem. Which means it is a problem that we should be focused on solving.

We need more complex interaction than comments. Using the same tools we have been using for a decade is not going to move us forward quickly. Much as Jeff Jarvis and my co-founder have written recently about the anachronistic nature of the article in the modern media landscape it can be said that our current tools for interaction are starting to feel just as out of place. None of this interaction is revolutionary. We tell stories and have conversations in real life. What can the internet and modern telecommunication technology do to evolve this, or revolutionize it?

Online to offline is more than just for coupons. People read the news at work, that’s just how people behave currently. Does this mean that news is inherently tied to a desk in an office? That could be the case, but I doubt it. What online innovations will make consuming news outside the office more useful and prevalent. And more than that what will news sites offer that pushes people to interact and offline with their communities more. Informing your audience is just not enough.

…

There are lots of great innovations finally starting to emerge, but I want to stoke the flames of the fire. I know the Knight foundation does, with its continued refocusing on innovation.

So think big and keep changing, because it will be a long time before we figure it all out.

Image Credit: Chris Murpy (via Flickr)

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LulzSec called it quits today. I’m not sure that this was good for humanity. Owning a business myself I understand that someone hijacking your website, even with the best of intentions can cost you money, but catching security issues sooner rather than later will likely save you even more than an outage costs you.

One of my favorite nerdy movies of all-time has this same basic premise. It’s better to have nice people hack you then malicious people.

What I do know is that these for-the-good-of-humanity type hackers are a tiny fraction of the hacking community and one that should probably be left alone. Depending on who you ask Anonymous probably falls into this category of noble hackers as well.

You might say that the definition of hacking for all these folks is, "curiosity with a purpose."

In that vein I am curious what would happen if Anonymous hacked Twitter and left the very ominous ICE domain seizure logo featured below on Twitter’s homepage.

It would demonstrate a not too hyperbolic example of what the content industry backed Protect IP Act might do if enacted.

I say not too hyperbolic because of recent attempts by ICE to remove websites who only link to copyrighted content. The whole process then gets even more Kafkaesque when companies have tried to fight these seizures. 

The real point here is that there is little to no exposure of the current government abuse when it comes to trampling constitutional rights. And as our rights erode the Protect IP Act is looking to grow that control and abuse by leaps and bounds. All in the name of piracy; take my first amendment, but make sure no one pirates the new Pirates movie.

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Being a scrappy bootstrapped startup has its advantages. That's where we started, a scrappy no money operation. Unfortunately we were a little too lean, we couldn't get off the ground with our site.

Then we decided to put a fair amount of our money where our collective mouths were.

Unfortunatey this led to an unexpected series of failures and here's why.

When you have the cash to just sign checks you can fail in some exceptional ways. You can hire an advertising manager and employ that person for many months even when they don't make a single sale. You can have a marketing budget that balloons up with no accoutability for its efficacy. You can spend an enormous amount on a media kit before you have the sales team to use it, then find out that they hate using it and don't (we still have boxes of them). We used to joke that our company motto was, "Put the cart before the horse." And we really did, time and time again.

We of course learned valuable lessons from these experiences, but the real lesson we started to learn is that you can learn a lesson for a lot less money!

We started to embrace failing faster. By accelerating our pace, if and when we fail, it's not a long drawn out process. Obviously having a large budget is not inherently bad but once we combined our good financial position with efficient experimentation things started to work a lot better.

We landed a salesperson that grew our sales for 0$ a month to nearly $20,000 a month in a little over a year. We used media kits that were simply printed out by the sales team and we put a strict budget on our marketing department. We started by eliminating the  marketing department and incorporating it into sales (what kind of small online publisher has a marketing department anyway?).

When you are short of funds you have to fail fast because you can't afford to keep a failing project going. Much like Twitter's artificial limitiation on characters, we learned that an artificially limited budget (also known as having a budget) can be a big advantage. Imagine that you didn't have a lot of money at your disposal, would you do what you are doing the same way?

Sometimes I look back and cry over spilt milk. Big chunks of money went out the door and little but a life lesson came back in return. It felt a little like we were ripped off by Bernie Madoff, but even worse since we were both Madoff and his poor victims all in one.

But when you fail fast there's a lot less of this, because overall, there's just less failure.

EDIT: How about this for a #FAIL, no link to the damn prompt I was answering, whoops!

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This is round 3 of a continuing back and forth between Phillip Smith and myself.

Legacy media organizations are where brilliant news innovations go to die.

So I fear a fundamental flaw in the design of the Knight-Mozilla partnership. However, the media partners you have are rather progressive media organizations. If this idea works with anyone (and it may), these are the most likely people with whom it would work.

And though I originally wrote my blog post because I was interested in advising the Knight Foundation on how to advance journalism and reporting, I am happy to re-frame the debate around Mozilla’s mission of continuing to proliferate the open web. Personally I find Mozilla’s mission admirable, but I still don’t think that it is best served by your current plan, summarized in the following video.

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The Background

Recently I wrote a very short blog post in response to the 3rd Carnival of journalism prompt. The prompt was asking basically what should Knight do differently to drive innovation (if anything at all). In my short post I mentioned that the MoJo (Knight Mozilla Journalism Partnership) was not a good example of how Knight should spend its money.

And it should have been more obvious to me at the time, but this quite rightly piqued the interest of one Philip Smith, one of two people heading up MoJo. He asked for more details. I wrote more details in an email. Then I thought, in the interest of sharing our debate with the world (a.k.a. the 10-20 who read my blog), that I should adjust it and blog-i-fication-ize it. So below is that email in blog form (basically unchanged + more links).

The Point

Technology companies are very innovative. This is because they are in an industry that is fiercely competitive and innovation is considered a necessary element of survival. Media organizations are part of a well-established industry. Mature industries in practice are more interested in stability than innovation, such is the premise of the innovator's dilemma (continued below).

Large media organizations have long known that they might need to adapt to compete in the future. Several of the larger media organizations including and especially Knight-Ridder built impressive technology which they just as impressively abandoned when they felt it didn't threaten their current business models. An amazing, albeit academically dry, book that gives an account of this is a book called Digitizing the News. Digitizing the News can almost be looked at as empirical evidence of the innovator's dilemma in action.

So that is my basic concern, on a theoretical level, with giving money and technological help to long established media organizations. It basically fits under the category of how can we save newspapers, which is a terrible framing of the problem. The problem is really how can we proliferate accurate, engrossing and interactive news/reporting to keep the world better informed.

As for a more practical example of this I've seen this happen time and again. A newspaper pays lip service to innovation by including 3rd party applications such as comment systems, or Google Maps mash-ups into their sites. They also only half-heartedly embrace innovations in process, equally important to technological innovations. They send reporters to conferences, seminars and fellowships and when the reporters return they often have learned a great deal but get no support from their respective organizations when it comes to implementing newly learned techniques. With rare exception they very rarely attempt to modify the core practices of their organization and do-so company wide.

If Mozilla-Knight can nudge large media organizations toward the open web as you stated in a blog post earlier this year than that is commendable. The amount of influence these organizations have is, simply put, massive. In my opinion though you will only be pushing the large players forward an inch instead of pushing the industry forward a mile.

An Idea

Right, so enough being a critic, how about a bit of advocacy here; how about a tangible detailed suggestion?

Let's take the Techcrunch idea from my blog post and run with it. The Knight news Challenge as I recall was funded with up to $5 million dollars a year for 5 years, or something to that effect. So let's say we have a budget next year of $5 million.

Have TechCrunch run a disrupt event (they're good at that), but ONLY for news/journalism/reporting startups. Have all the VC that are normally present for disrupt events there. The competition would be in two phases. Give $50k or perhaps $100k to not one but 10-20 participants. Those participants will be voted on by the, "biggest innovators, angels, VCs and influencers in the Tech community." Then they have a set period to implement and then launch their ideas. Six months post launch the remainder of the money will be given to the most successful organizations as judged by a similar panel. Perhaps 1-3 organizations then split the remaining 2-3 million. Participants can be required to abide by Mozilla designated openness standards and be given some development resources, advice and help from Mozilla. From pitching to receiving the check the process should be relatively short, say two months or less.

That is just one idea that is off the cuff.

The notion is don't waste resources getting established players to create models that will disrupt their current models.

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Stop giving money to old media, even individuals that are still in that mindset.

Hand the keys over to tech people. No need to be jealous of Silicon Valley innovation, just fund it. Seek out proposals from non-journalists and fund them.

The joint venture between Knight and Mozilla is a start, but it is also a start in the wrong direction. Why not just give Mozilla money to start a publication? Why not add a component to an established event such as a TechCrunch conference? There could be a pitch contest from entrepreneurs looking to fund really outside the box ideas. 

I feel like only a small percentage of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge money goes to breakthrough innovations, most of it goes to other large organizations to fund specific stories. Sometimes you get the feeling Knight is like the Federal Reserve lending to large banks.

Unfortunately (fortunately?) this is a very short contribution to this month’s Carnival, so I will leave you with the most distilled down version of this post’s ideas

Continue the challenge but take more risk. Give out more grants, smaller grants and ask different people to take that risk, people outside your comfort zone.

[NOTE: This is a response to March 2011's Carnival of Journalism prompt. ]

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I lead product development for Macer Media LLC, whose primary property is the news site, The Sacramento Press. It is in this capacity that I will address the February Carnival of Journalism topic:

Considering your unique circumstances what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?

I design new tools and features for the custom Content Management System (CMS) that runs sacramentopress.com.

We operate in large part by getting the community to contribute news, information, comments, photographs, tags, ratings and moderation to our site. We have gained a lot of qualitative insight as to why they do it. Now I want to develop more quantitative and analytical methods to expand our knowledge about why people contribute. In furthering our knowledge of this crucial question I believe we will be able to develop new tools and features to get a vastly more and varied contribution.

We have done many things to attract more contribution, from the digital to the tangible. We host free workshops open to the community to teach them more about our site, journalism and many related topics. We started a badge system to recognize individuals in our community for their hard work. And most importantly we hired a community manager to continue to build and grow relationships with the community, and to add new voices into the mix.

Despite the aim of these actions being in whole or in part to increase the level of community contribution on our site, we have taken few steps to measure the results of our actions in depth.

On top of all that, we are in a unique position to really advance the whole industry’s knowledge in this space, because we are a relatively large, funded, for profit news site that has the tech resources to research and develop new tools. My background in particular (web developer/programmer) puts me in a position to dramatically experiment with how we modify our website to achieve the goal of getting more community voices on our site.

This next cycle of development will be spent adding tools to our CMS that give each department insight into what drives site contribution. Beyond that information I have also spent the last week examining the contribution habits of our users when it comes to writing articles.

In many circles the concept of the 1-9-90 rule for user contributed content is accepted as near gospel. The basic principle is that 1% of your overall site viewers heavily contribute content to the site, 9% are light contributors and remaining 90% are what are known as “lurkers” or those that simply consume the content without interacting with it.

In our case we don’t even have the tools to measure this rule in an easy fashion, nor have we even defined what constitutes contribution. By merely flagging something, have I as a reader contributed to the site? Is tagging a contribution?

If we simply look at the number of people who write articles on our site (excluding staff and interns) we see that those unique people make up a tiny fraction of the unique people that view our website. In January of this year 0.14% of visitors to the site wrote an article, significantly less than 1%. Since January of 2010 we have seen that number head in a downward trend as you can see on the graph below. 

However during that time we have also seen site traffic increase substantially (see below graph), more than doubling during that period, yet the unique contribution rate did not halve. 

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Disclosure: To those of you who may be reading this and don't know me, I have a vested interest in this debate since I am one of the founders and current owners of sacramentopress.com a local online only newspaper whose content comes from a mix of paid professional journalists and unpaid community contributors. I am a staunch opponent of paywalls.

Below is a line by line refutation of an article by Tony Pederson claiming that newspapers are right to charge for content. His article is indented and block quoted. 

The announcement of a new digital strategy by The Dallas Morning News to charge for online and mobile access to content is welcome news for those wanting the daily newspaper to survive.

I don't find it welcome news, this strategy has failed many, many times before. I don't need the newspaper industry to survive, I need good local journalism to survive and the two are not intrinsically tied. Having said that I love our local paper and don't want to see it fail.

Dramatic circulation and advertising declines in the last decade have created serious questions about the survival of the industry.

Agreed, however more serious questions exist about why the executives at major newspaper chains refused to acknowledge this change and even still are not taking the required drastic steps to change what they do. The innovator's dilemma is almost certainly heavily at work here.

The history of newspaper companies and how they dealt with the Internet is hardly distinguished.

I agree yet again, but not for the reason Mr. Pederson is about to mention. When given the opportunity to tell the local stories and news in brilliant new ways, most daily papers only re-published their print editions online, often times refusing to link to any other relevant sources.

Virtually all newspapers made the decision in the 1990s to give away the news content.

True, but more importantly, false. There's a great little sleight of hand in this very meager but important sentence which lays the logical foundation for the rest of the article. So let's dissect it a little.

The implication of the above statement is that the newspapers gave the content away for free. This is not true in a very straightforward way (dozens of newspapers started with a paywall), and it remains untrue today in a less obvious way. It's less obvious to people that the true cost they incur by reading originally produced content is giving part of their attention to advertisers. That attention has always been what newspapers touted to advertisers and what resulted in the bulk of their revenue.

Where they really failed is by giving away their advertising space for free. They just added it along with their print advertising mostly at no additional cost.

Those were the days when circulation was steady and classified advertising sections were fat.

Sort of– the fact is that circulation numbers have always been questionably reported and the basic notion that a company could be trusted to be objective to advertisers about numbers that directly impacted how much a company could charge for ads is dubious at best. Plus take a look at any major newspaper chain's stock valuation and you will see that most of them peaked between 2000 and 2005.

In fact, it was assumed that the classified advertising would be a significant attraction for online users. Those were the days before Monster, eBay and Craigslist.

Again, the history is not quite right since eBay and Craigslist both started in 1995*, but they weren't initially prolific it did take a while, so let's say this statement is a wash.

And consumers remain interested in classified advertising online and there is little reason to think that a more compelling product than Monster, eBay or Craigslist couldn't have been created by the newspaper industry. Others who didn't have the tech muscle to build better platforms simply bought or partnered with them, capturing some of the lost revenue potential.

The larger miscalculation by newspaper companies, however, concerned an underestimation of what the Internet was. Newspaper executives thought the Internet was simply a new medium.

"Digitizing the news," by Pablo Boczkowski gives you a somewhat different perspective on what newspaper executives thought. Considering the massive amounts various large papers invested in digital distribution technology before the web was even around, you get the distinct feeling they thought of the Internet as more than just a new medium. 

Legacy media had always adjusted to new media such as radio and then television, and it was assumed that modifications in the way of doing business could produce continuing profits.

Legacy media, and by this I assume he means newspapers, had actually done a rather awful job adjusting to other new media. For many years before the internet existed the newspaper industry had been losing ground to other types of media. Even now, cable advertising is doing the more damage to newspaper revenues than the internet, and cable TV has been around for quite some time (Newspaper Economics, see slide 5).

In 1995 few foresaw what the Internet has become. MIT convergence scholar Henry Jenkins has correctly noted that the Internet has produced the first fundamental change in the relationship between the public and mass media since Gutenberg. The cultural shift has left newspapers struggling for revenue. The result has been staff layoffs and a significant reduction in print news content.

I agree that it has really been the cultural change that has been the hardest pill for the newspaper industry to swallow.

And I'm not familiar with Mr. Henry Jenkins (though I'm now intent on reading lots of his work), but at least in terms of being prolific, I first heard the comparison with the Gutenberg press made by Clay Shirky, not Jenkins, in his now famous blogpost regarding the fate of the newspaper industry.

Even so, newspapers currently have more readers than ever.

Yup, but why not link to a source on this one?

But the readers are online, and they're not paying.

Again, readers rarely ever paid for content directly, they paid with attention and they still do. Look at the digital advertising revenue growth at all the major newspaper chains in the last five years, it's actually fairly impressive (look at the corporate websites for Gannett and McClatchy, as well as the New York Times company).

Since the beginning of mass circulation newspapers in the 1830s, newspapers have essentially been manufacturing companies.

Yup.

A product is printed at a central printing facility and then distributed to customers. The costs of production, distribution and newsprint have historically been the majority of a newspaper company's expenses.

Again I agree, lots of good points made in this article. In fact production and distribution are so expensive their costs aren't even covered by the retail price of the paper.

Now, newspapers have a chance to become what they really have seen themselves as all along, which is an information company.

They do have a chance, but do they really want to become that, or are they better off becoming the next great ad agencies? I'm not sure, but it is a great opportunity not to be manufacturing companies anymore.

The Dallas Morning News is in the vanguard of the change.

I pretty strongly disagree, I think pay-wall-pushing-papers are among the technological Luddites of the industry. But this guy is more likely in the vanguard as is his company, which last year proposed this shift in how the company is run.

The New York Times has announced it will make a similar move in the coming months. Other newspaper companies will follow.

Different pay wall system, but just as ill-advised. And while a few others may follow, when these pay walls fail as nearly every other similar one has (including a previous pay wall from the NY Times), I doubt we will see many more (at least for a while).

The Wall Street Journal, obviously a different type of newspaper, has successfully charged for online access for years.

Oft quoted, infrequently (or never?) quantified, this is a statement that may be true, but I have never seen detailed numbers with my own eyes. I hear this a lot, I have even parroted this statement, but I can few numbers to support it. In this YouTube video Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton mentions just under 1.1 million subscribers," but questions still remain about what that means. Are these 1.1 million online only subscribers? How many are corporate subscriptions versus individuals which the Wall Street Journal is hoping to attract these days.

The paper's iPad application is smooth, efficient and highly portable. There are the hard-core print addicts who will insist on holding a newspaper in their hands, but the iPad application is in fact easier to use and read. Finding stories is a snap, and there will be more and more converts, even among older readers.

I don't own an iPad and have never tried the app. The reviews for the app on the iTunes app store though are less than favorable, for whatever that is worth.

Newspaper companies as recently as two years ago resisted the idea of charging for online access.

This statement is not entirely accurate. Many, several dozen metro dailies in fact, started out charging and slowly came around in the 90's to not charging for their content. And even now, many such as McClatchy's Gary Pruitt, still see paywalls as experimental at best. 

The current move is a risk, but it's one newspapers have to take to survive.

Paywalls are less a risk and more like jumping off a bridge hoping you will figure out how to fly on the way down. Newspapers can survive in lots of ways that don't involve erecting paywalls, because they are surviving currently, albeit with some difficulty.

There are many media naysayers, insisting that Internet content always has been and must continue to be free. That's not entirely true; users have always been willing to pay for some types of content. Pornography was the original killer app for the Internet, and still is.

I don't insist that content has to be free, but news content, since it's readily available and free to distribute widely is a hard sell when it comes to charging for it. And of course, as I have stated over and over, internet content isn't free, it requires you to give some of your attention to advertisements.

Funny also that Mr. Pederson should mention porn, since free online pornographic video sites have been destroying traditional porn industries revenues. Look at Alexa and see if you find Playboy, Hustler or a big pornographic video company among the top 100 sites (hint: you won't but you will find dozens of free online pornographic video sites). 

If newspapers can provide content that is relevant and easily accessible and usable, people will pay. People will not pay for such common news elements as stock quotes, sports scores, traffic and weather. But specific, essential content not available elsewhere is another matter.

Two questions, is local content essential? I would argue that it is since I run a local news website, but it's a bit of an uphill battle convincing younger people that it matters. And secondly is local news not available elsewhere? A quick look at placeblogger.com will reveal that 1000's of individuals around the country are blogging about local news and events.

The question for newspapers is understanding what content readers will find essential. And how much readers are willing to pay for the access.

A fair question, and as much as I must accept that the answer may be some amount above zero, paywall advocates need to accept the fact that the answer may indeed be zero.

The Internet has produced a cacophony of news and information. Some of the content is highly relevant and useful. See The Huffington Post and even the Drudge Report. But much of the content is ridiculous and even dangerous. See WikiLeaks as an example of the dangerous.

This sounds like the problem is an overwhelming amount of data that is unsorted and badly curated. But things are getting better and they will continue to. I think saying that the internet is dangerous and citing Wikileaks as an example is quite the straw man argument. You could easily argue that unchecked extremes in current mainstream media cause as much or more harm to society than Wikileaks. Besides what exactly did Wikileaks due to harm anything? Robert Gates recanted his early statements about their harm to informants and Hillary Clinton in her speech on the subject stated no specific harm done. But that's a whole separate blog post.

We should all hope the experiment to charge for online access works. We need the daily newspaper to sort out fact from absurdity. The newspaper has never been more essential to a vibrant democracy.

A vibrant democracy informs as many people as possible about the society in which they live not just the million plus affluent subscribers of WSJ.com. So for the sake of this country I hope we can find a way to keep content produced by journalists simultaneously free and paid for.

* Craigslist actually started as an email list and wasn't on the interwebs until 1996.

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My posts may be rubbish, but on the off chance that they are nuggets of pure wisdom, what happens when no one sees them?

This had previously led me to think about witholding a very good (ahem, in my opinion) post because it wouldn't be well read.

This Atlantic article reminded me of how poorly I can think at times. The article takes a good look at the propagation of content on the web and the simultaneous rise in status of people along with their newly discovered but previously written posts. It focuses on Aaron Bady and his blog zunguzungu, but also notes several other individuals who have been through a similar rise to prominence.

The bottom line from the article is summarized by this quote:

…it shows that in today's media landscape, an act of journalism can spread quickly to the very highest levels of the culture and news industry, no matter where it comes from.

Isn't that energizing! It does more to perk me up than 10 cups of coffee, plus 10 cups of coffee makes me dizzy and nauseous.

What I take from that quote and article in a broader sense is that our world is becoming more of a meritocracy than it has ever been before and that gives me great optimism about the future of humanity. This is a theme that I think has been echoed for sometime online including another great article recently about the rise of a sports blogger.

So not only is the web and the blogging community a huge meritocracy, it is also a place where discovery is more likely to occur due to the permanence of content on the Internet.

As an American, and an entrepreneur who has had his foot in the publishing door for sometime now, I am re-energized and truly excited about the possibilities of online publishing, a long overdue epiphany. It's good to be practicing what I preach.

(Post Script)

I do realize that my title is a wee bit too punny, but something about running an online paper for a few years compels me to pun-ify my titles. I may be hanging around too many journalists.

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Everybody uses these terms.

People use them interchangeably.

But in my mind they have distinct meanings.

First of all what unites them is that they all are subcategories of the greater category of social ineptness. All three terms have that common trait, some to a greater degree. But that is where the commonality ends.

Geeks are simply people who are defined by their obsession with particular activity, to the point where it causes harm to a more balanced social life. Nothing about being a geek means someone is inherently intelligent, nor are their pursuits generally intellectual in nature.

Nerds are a close relative of geeks, to make a geeky reference, nerds are to geeks, as Vulcans are to Romulans (if you are a male that wants to have sex, please don't repeat that phrase unless you are at an event that ends in -con). But seriously folks, nerds by my definition are people that are extremely curious and spend much of their time excessively exploring an intellectual pursuit. In my mind an appropriate synonym would be a bookworm.

In summary so far, you would definitely want to cheat off a nerd's exam in high school, but not a geek's. If you were a stereotypical high school bully you want to punch both, which you could accomplish by going to the library. The former would be reading a book about the latest IEEE specification (look it up non-engineers), while the latter would be holding a 20 sided die, playing D&D.

And last (and also least) onward to dorkiness…

A simple definition of a dork is someone who is goofy, silly or quirky. An example of a dork might be the most socially inept person in an otherwise popular group of people. They may say inappropriate things, make bad or odd attempts at humor, but still have affable personalities. They like being social, they just suck at it. Dorks are also people who do not specialize in one particular activity. The other interesting thing about the term "dork" is that it is used more often to describe a type of activity as opposed to holistically labeling a person.

More recently, the terms "geek" and "nerd" have gained increasingly positive connotations, and have thus become more popular and a part of the mainstream, with the term "geek" becoming the most popular. There are now many variants of the term that have found their way into pop culture, such as the term "geek chic" referring to geeky clothing styles being incorporated into hip clothing brands and trends. But really the term has blossomed into describing a person as having a real passion for a particular activity. For instance phrases like, "I'm a real photography geek," have come to mean that a person is passionate about a hobby but perhaps not a master of that hobby yet.

This is simply my take based on my generational and cultural influences. As with any word there can be many interpretations or connotations that vary by region and by person. I'd love to update this post, or write another in the future based on other people's thoughts on the subject.

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This web log is aimed squarely at nothing in particular.

It is a jack of all subjects and a master of none (everyone always leaves off the second part of that idiom).

After languishing in internet obscurity for years now it was time geoffsamek.com had *something* on it. It was also time that I played around with Posterous, which I have heard good things about. Plus the indie/hipster buried deep inside me wanted to use a more obscure platform than the obvious Blogger, or the trendy and up and comer, Tumblr.

This is to be my catch-all for anything I write anywhere, from this point in time forwards. For anything previous to this blog see the appendix of my never to be posthumously published autobiography, “I Wish I Were the Most Misunderstood Man in the World.”

Both Adam Leff and Lee McMullen were big sources of inspiration for me when I thought about starting this blog. The former showed me that you can start out an okay writer and with practice blow people’s minds with clever well written observations. The latter inspired me with both her innately brilliant writing and an unfortunate and equally brilliant ability to squander that talent through not writing.

So here I sit wondering why any one person would read all my blog entries. I will take this space to indulge my curiosity in the form of writing.

So it goes.

*Can you think of one thing labeled an introduction that isn’t immensely boring? At least this one was short.

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