January 2008 Archives

Just four days ago I got an email from Scott Karp suggesting that his Web startup might have some tools that could make covering an election interesting -- really interesting.

More emails ... phone calls ... more emails ... phone calls. The result: An idea to let some savvy political followers (except me) find links to the best stories out there and make a list of them that lets readers get the benefit of their foraging and expertise.

Who the hell is Scott Karp? Folio: mag tagged him as one of the 40 most influential people in publishing in 2007. He left his day job as director of digital strategy for the publisher of The Atlantic magazine last year to devote his full energies (and then some) to a startup called Publish2.com.

And he's widely known in journalism/media circles as one of the most thoughtful writers on technology and media with his Publishing 2.0 blog.

Karp laid out the election linking plan in a blog post today in which he also invited other media organizations to get in on the campaign.

Here's how it'll work at the Tennessee level. A group of excellent bloggers and a couple of journalists who should know better have started collecting links to interesting articles and blog postings on the Tennessee election. You'll soon see the results as a headline list of links that will update as new items are "bookmarked."

Think of it as a list of the best things people have found to read about the Tennessee primary because that's exactly what it is.

You'll find the list on knoxnews and on the sites of the participating bloggers soon.

News Sentinel reporter and blogger Michael Silence was tapped to find some folks that would be interested in doing the heavy lifting in the project. He found some good ones: Newscoma, R. Neal, Russ McBee, Joe Powell, Ben Cunningham, Bob Krumm, and Les Jones.

Silence and I will be aboard as well. How the ride will be is anybody's guess. It's an experiment and it's a bit out there as far as "news coverage" of an election. I hope you give it a look and give us some feedback on whether you find it useful.

Here's a quick take from a new online journaism credibility study: Editors are a lot more queasy about real names in Web site comments than users.

When asked "do you think it is a good idea or bad idea that a website does not require names?" 64% of the editors thought it was a bad idea, and 24% a good idea. Meanwhile, 45% of the public thought it was a good idea, and 40% a bad idea, showing more split on this issue than did the editors.

Regarding the likelihood of their posting a comment if they must provide their names, 27% of the public said "very likely," 20% "somewhat likely," 20% "somewhat unlikely," and 27% "very unlikely," suggesting that the public opinion was split.   

As someone who deals with some of the wild and crazy things commenters will write, I can tell you if I haven't seen it all, I don't want to. But I read into this that the public is fairly comfortable in sorting out what they think about comments and that about half wouldn't join the conversation if they had to sign their name to it.

The Online Journalism Credibility study was conducted by The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute in Missouri's School of Journalism in cooperation with the Associated Press Managing Editors in August and October 2007.

A number of the results look fascinating. I'll probably write more on this later.

Two of my News Sentinel co-workers are doing an interesting and historically significant project called "Songs of Appalachia." It is being done by online producer Lauren Spuhler and writer Morgan Simmons.

They're capturing the sounds and songs of the region in video and text.

Old-time, bluegrass, folk, just call it roots music in the mountains. It's the unique musical styles and songs that have survived on the back porches, at the Saturday night get-togethers and in the postage stamp communities of the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee and North Carolina.

The first installment is on fiddler Charlie Acuff. Each month will bring a new musician. Bookmark the page! Amazing stuff.

Last week an argument that won't seem to go away bubbled up again - save Big J journalism and newspapers with government aid, or at the very least some form of indirect relief.

Sort of clues you in on the state of industry. Course, it wouldn't be the first time. The industry still has a dozen or so remnants of an effort to save two newspaper towns, the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970.

The debate started anew perhaps on Jan. 21 when Ralph Whitehead Jr., a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst wrote a guest column on Boston.com that outlined the economic issues facing newspaper journalism as we've known it, but cautioned against government intervention.

What may be emerging today, however, is a serious case of market failure that can't be - and must not be - fixed by government intervention: the failure of the private sector to provide broadly inclusive journalism that is both comprehensive and reliable enough to meet the needs of a democracy.

Halfway around the globe in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum that idea was picked up on, but Columbia University president Lee Bollinger said government subsidy of journalism should be considered a viable solution.

Then at Forbes.com, Carl Lavin wondered what Nick Lemann, the dean of the prestigious Columbia School of Journalism, would think of that. He got in an email with several thoughtful arguments from Lemann of why government help could be considered. Among them:

One of the three or four finest and most ambitious news organizations in the world is a government agency -- the BBC. In the US, public radio and public television are not government operations per se, but they are partially funded by the government, and over the last generation or two they have clearly been a force for good in journalism. Then there is the indirect government subsidy represented by tax-deductible contributions to nonprofit journalistic enterprises -- everything from Harper's magazine to Frontline.

Lemann went on to say "Right now the mismatch between the social mission of journalism and the market support for that mission seems to be growing, so I think we should explore other means of support for serious journalism."

He got the problem right, but the answer wrong.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch couldn't disagree more with Bollinger and Lemann.

The idea is both dangerous and absurd. For Bollinger, who is a free speech advocate, to even consider the idea suggests he hasn't thought through the consequences of the government financing the press. Freedom of the press is one of the most important checks on government. If they're paying the bills, the press is no longer independent.

Print media is wonderful, and it would be a shame to ever see it fail. But these are businesses that need to sustain themselves in one way or another. Looking for a government handout to perpetuate a quaint but outdated way of life is the last resort of the desperate. It should be avoided at all costs.

While the stocks of traditional media empires, particularly newspapers companies, have undergone double digit declines in the last 12 months, the companies continue to have high profit margins although declining. The picture changes when you look at just revenue from online operations.

It's clear the revenue model at newspapers that allowed tens to hundreds of reporters at newspapers small and large just doesn't seem to be there when you're looking to an online only world -- or even a mostly online world.

Even the tumultuous marriage of convenience of journalism and advertising seems to lose it reason for being in the online world. In traditional media, journalism brings readers and that brings advertisers and that brings revenue that allows for journalism, executive bonuses and stock dividends among other things.

In the online world, it's not that simple. Did Monster cover the State of the Union address tonight in order to draw job searchers? Does AutoTrader cover the Legislature to find car buyers?

Yes content, including "real journalism," still can create environments that connect consumers and advertisers, but it's very different from the day when you had to buy an entire paper to get Saturday's garage sales. That's why Craigslist become an anathema to publishers.

Would the loss of good journalism negatively impact not only local communities, but democracy as a whole? I'd like to think so.

But government subsidies or aid would only tend to freeze a business model that won't work in the future, and -- much like the Newspaper Preservation Act -- are unlikely to accomplish their societal or economic purpose over the long haul.

Joint Operating Agreements formed under the Newspaper Preservation Act are declining and where dissolved, the result usually isn't two strong newspapers, but rather one. The change just happened years later than it would have under normal market forces.

But what about the digital future?

Dave Morgan, now with AOL, wrote in a Dec. 20, 2007, OnlineSpin column:  

Newspapers are generally pretty good at local news and news editing. The problem is, they can only leverage that capability in their print newspapers and on their Web sites, and the two together are not likely to be able to pay the bills required to run great newsrooms.

He suggested "freeing" newsrooms to market their content to all comers -- or more correctly to give them the opportunity to develop new markets for news beyonds the newspaper's own products and platforms.

Perhaps a possibility.

What I do know will happen is that journalism will survive and thrive. Economically viable models will emerge and those who see the opportunities or are able to adapt to the new models will be successful -- perhaps hugely so.

Paul Bradshaw in a blog post Sunday on "Making money from journalism: new media business models (A model for the 21st century newsroom pt5)" surveys the landscape of known possibilities and offers some sign posts.

It's a good read, but I think most observers would agree the ingredients for the perfect mix of commerce and journalism for online media haven't been found.

They will. News is an essential element of an information economy. Media companies don't need food stamps to survive.

Update: Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews weighs in the same topic and suggest bloggers will save journalism. "... the heart of the evolution. Low overhead, readership, and space to sell are the buds of new life on the tree of journalism."

My Sunday afternoon jogging music was a good one from 2004, "Films About Ghosts (The Best Of Counting Crows)."

I notice the band is offering a free "Digital 45" on its Web site. The MP3s are time stamped Jan. 11. The two "sides" are "When I Dream of Michelanglo" and "1492." They are from the coming March 2 release of the album "Saturday Nights & Sunday Morings." Get 'em.

Anyway, a track listing for "Films About Ghosts."

1. Angels Of The Silences 3:38
2. Round Here 5:31
3. Rain King 4:15
4. A Long December 4:57
5. Hanginaround 4:14
6. Mrs. Potters Lullaby 7:45
7. Mr. Jones 4:32
8. Recovering The Satellites 5:23
9. American Girls 4:33
10. Big Yellow Taxi 3:45
11. Omaha 3:39
12. Friend Of The Devil 4:35
13. Einstein On The Beach (For An Eggman) 3:52
14. Anna Begins 4:31
15. Holiday In Spain 3:48
16. She Don't Want Nobody Near 3:08
17. Accidentally In Love
    

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I guess you'd better throw away those photos of the White House and the Washington Monument and maybe Mount Rushmore just to be safe.

Here's an experience of a Knoxville photographer taking photos at the John J. Duncan building downtown::

When I got to to the building, I stood across the street with my wide angle (to fit the huge structure in the frame) and put the camera to my face. And after a few clicks of the shutter, I hear this man yelling at me, "Ma'am! Ma'am! You can't photos here!!!" It was the security guard, and he was running down the stairs towards me. I immediately put my camera down by my side and ran across the street to the guard. I asked him what the problem was, and he suddenly went into a tirade about post 9/11 laws prohibiting the photography and videography of any federal properties. He went off about terrorism and national security and then threatened me with two years in the penitentiary for possessing images of federal property. I had to delete my photographs or else I would get two years in jail.

Read the whole blog post here.

I don't think they managed to come up with that even in the Patriot Act.

It's outrageous.

One of the delightful things about innovation and technology changes is seeing the unintended impacts. While delightful to find, they are vexing to predict.

This is not a particularly new one, but I noticed it in an article today at SignOnSanDiego:

Wristwatch sales have slowed - down 25 percent for Timex between 2003 and 2005 - as teens and young adults tell time by their phones.

The effect on landline phones, the rise of text messaging, and even to some extend, the impact on cameras were all foreseen as cell phones became ubiquitous and feature-laden models became cheap.

But who predicted watch sales wouldn't keep on ticking apace?

What was predicted turned out backwards. In the 1940s, the comic strip Dick Tracy had the detective talking into a wristwatch -- not telling time on a phone.

Innovations -- large and small -- produce unintended, or unplanned, side effects.

A small example. Being a math-challenged journalist makes a calculator a handy tool. I couldn't find one today in desk if I had to. It's buried deep in some drawer. Google's search box makes it dead simple to do 6,853 / 17 = 403.117647 without one.

Has Google hurt the calculator business ... well, yes, at least by one customer. Yet, no one I recall envisioned "search' as a replacement for the calculator.

Identifying early these unplanned side effects is where opportunity lies. It takes a sort of peripheral thinking to see them and it's a talent I haven't developed.

Have you? Do you see examples of social and use patterns changing in an unplanned way? I'd love some more examples or tips on how to spot them?

(via Steve Rubel)

We're trying some new things on knoxnews for the Tennessee primary on Feb. 5.

You can sign up for text messages for election results or follow the results on our Twitter page (log into Twitter and click "follow" on our page). We'll also be doing continous updates all day on election day on knoxnews.

If you're an East Tennessee blogger who's blogging the election or photgraphing it or something else interesting, let us know; we'll link to it.

We're also asking people to send us photos from a polling place with a digital camera or your cell phone. We'll post them online. Just email your photo(s) to shareonline@knews.com.

I think this is going to be fun!

Journalism pundit/pioneer/heavyweight Jeff Jarvis is having fun at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with Pure Digital's FlipVideo cameras as well as a Rueters Mojo toolkit, which is centered around a Nokia N95 cell phone.

We've been using FlipVideo and its predecessor models (the early version from Pure Digital wasn't called that) at the Knoxville News Sentinel since October 2006.

It's the most disruptive tool we've introduced in the newsroom in years. Every reporter can potentially create video -- most of our reporters have shot at least one video since October 2006; several have done many, many more.

Are they award-winning pieces? Nope. Are there times to use better equipment? Definitely.

But for spot news or the short clip, its small size, ease of use and darned good video quality make it an unassuming game changer.

(What's the field take on using the Reuters kit, or just the N95 by itself, for news video?)

Jarvis' idea of giving them to non-journalists to create content is also intriguing. Hand them to a high school student at a football game and say: "Be our reporter." At just over a hundred bucks, it beats a lot of alternatives. Crazy?

Nashville ex-patriate and pioneering Tennessee blogger Brittney Gilbert's new work gig blog "Eye on Blogs" officially launched Thursday at KPIX in San Francisco. She got some pub in the trade press earlier in the week.

"If the concept can drive traffic in Nashville, which has a much smaller blogger community, it can certainly work here." The hope is to bring users to cbs5.com who might not ordinarily visit a station Web site.

-- Internet Operation Manager Jim Parker.

Her departure from WKRN was highly publicized.

Best of luck in the new project!

Ethan Kaplan and Chris Brogan have done some blog posts on thoughts on newspapers and traditional media. Kaplan pulls some thoughts he had years ago and Brogan's were cultivated from a recent panel discussion.

It is interesting Kaplan's thoughts from seven years ago and a decade ago are similar to Brogan's today.

Kind of tells you just how far mainstream media has moved, doesn't it?

Good tips on emergency planning for freelancers from Thursday Bram.

These would be applicable to bloggers as well who aren't writing, doing photography or doing other freelance work for others.

I think I have some planning to do.

The departure of Jim O'Shea from the L.A. Times shouldn't be construed as fighting the gallant battle for journalism. It was the battle for status quo and business as usual.

What's needed is creative thinking, new approaches and a reassessment of what newspapers do. O'Shea failed on all points. He needed to go.

Pulling last year's or four year's ago plans from the files and adjusting for inflation is not managing as an editor. Finding a way to do great journalism (big J and little J) despite the obstacles is.

I took an exercise holiday over the Christmas/New Year's period (not a good idea), but I'm trying to get back in the routine.  The chart below has last week's results.

I also looked at last year and was surprised by actually how much I had accomplished considering how easily I can miss my schedule. (I track this stuff at polarpersonaltrainer.com, which is great if you have a Polar "watch.")

So here is the picture for 2007: I logged 533.71 miles either jogging or walking (running would be euphemism) at the track or using an elliptical machine, treadmill or stationary bike. Not great, but not bad for someone as athletically disinclined as I. I averaged three exercise sessions a week and averaged 10.264 miles a week (not all the sessions are running; I loath weights, too).
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One thing I like about Mashable (despite Louis Gray's problems with it) are the list posts of resources, you know 10,000 PhotoShop links or Endless Firefox add-ons.  They're great.

But now comes Journerdism with a multimedia McGuyver toolset. A treat!

I am so definitely not an email ninja. Does anybody really do this stuff?

If you need a sound track for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, try Mavis Staples' "We'll Never Turn Back." The YouTube video is one of the tracks, "Eyes on the Prize."

Fantastic set of civil rights songs done by fantastic lady. (Ry Cooder's pretty good, too).

1. "Down In Mississippi"
2. "Eyes On The Prize"
3. "We Shall Not Be Moved"
4. "In The Mississippi River"
5. "On My Way"
6. "This Little Light"
7. "99 And A Half"
8. "My Own Eyes"
9. "Turn Me Around"
10. "We'll Never Turn Back"
11. "I'll Be Rested"
12. "Jesus Is On The Main Line"

It's also as good as time as any to remember one of the pivotal institutions in the Civil Rights Movement has its home in East Tennessee, the Highlander Institute.

Many of the influential figures in the Civil Rights Movement -- Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, Pete Seeger, among them -- visited the Highlander farm. It's teachers turned "We Shall Overcome" into a Movement anthem. (The Highlander continues to administer the "We Shall Overcome Fund," funded by the song's the royalties.

The Highlander Institute was started in Monteagle, Tenn., in 1932. It was moved to Knoxville in 1961 and moved to a more remote setting in nearby New Market in 1971. The photo above right is a Ku Klux Klan protest of the Highlander Institute in Knoxville in 1966.

It was clearly feared throughout the South for it was, a truly disruptive force on the status quo of segregated race relations and an economic system that strived mightily to the keep Southern poor poor. Its focus has shifted over the years and it now carries the struggle against the environment pollution, the ill effects of globalization, and for expanded social rights

Its remarkable history is here, but this NPR piece from last September about the Institute's 75th anniversary does a good job of putting it in perspective in a short amount of time.

Its history in song and photos is in the audio slide show below.

So crank up Mavis and remember what it's all about because, as she says, we're not done yet.

(Photo from Highlander)

Stewart Brand recaps a talk by futurist Paul Saffo, a Stanford University professor who has spent more than 20 years looking at technological change and it practical impacts. Saffe spoke at a Jan. 11, 2008, seminar put on by The Long Now Foundation.

He outlined eight rules for forecasting the future. But what I liked was his closer. He had a photograph from a San Francisco cafe that had this tapped to a tip jar beside the cash register: "If you fear change leave it in here."

Saffo's eight rules of effective forecasting:

Rule: Wild cards sensitize us to surprise.

Rule: Change is never linear.

Rule: Look for indicators- things that don't fit.

Rule: Look back twice as far.

Rule: Cherish failure. Preferably other people's.

Rule: Be indifferent.

Rule: Assume you are wrong. And forecast often.

Rule: Embrace uncertainty.

(Steward Brand: Remember him ... among his many firsts is this one I spotted in his bio and hadn't heard before: first use of the term "personal computer" in a book, 1974. Seriously ahead of his time for decades!)

Photo via Mark & Marie Finnern's flickr photos

I've been reading about flickr and the Library of Congress' Commons Project and decided to take a look and see if there were any photos from Tennessee. There are. The photo above was taken in June 1942 at Douglas Dam of "Big Pete" Ramagos, a rigger.

There are several of Douglas Dam's construction, copper mining near Ducktown, Watts Bar Dam, various other TVA facilities. a corn field by a river in northeast Tennessee, and work on the "Vengeance" dive bomber at a Nashville plant. I wish there were more.

Rex Hammock writes about some of the details of the project and has some links to more info. This is a wonderful way of unlocking the rich-with-history collection of public domain photos at the Library of Congress. The flickr folks blog about it.

From a SearchEngineLand take on the 2008 Digital Future survey from the Center For The Digital Future at Southern Cal:

Would You Miss the Print Edition of Your Newspaper? -- In a new question, respondents who read print editions of newspapers were asked if they would miss the offline edition if it was no longer available. While more than half of respondents (52 percent) expressed some level of agreement with this question, 27 percent disagreed.

Another factoid of note from the highlights:

Eighty percent of Internet users age 17 and older consider the Internet to be an important source of information for them -- up from 66 percent in 2006 -- and higher than television (68 percent), radio (63 percent), and newspapers (63 percent).

More at the Center for the Digital Future.

Why journalists should use Twitter (Nico Luchsinger)

If you haven't "gotten" Twitter yet as a journalist, this might help. But I've found only using it for awhile really explains it. It's that game-changing.

If you don't know,  at knoxnews, we funnel local news headlines into Twitter. Not a bad place to start exploring it.

(via Twitter, of course, and "follow" me)

Free WiFi at Knoxville's airport, which is under consideration, would be a great idea.

I said in November it would be a leading edge idea and it looks like I'm not the only one who thinks that.

(Updated: Welcome Instapundit readers! Feel free to add this site to your feeds.)

The death of 25-year-old Brad Renfro was big news in KnoxVegas on Tuesday night and Wednesday. Two things struck me: how fast the Wikipedia entry was updated to reflect his death (very shortly after the story was broken TMZ.com) and how quickly videos appeared in YouTube.com

As the New York Times noted in July, in addition to being an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is doing breaking news, history as it happens.

While most of the celebrity and gossip news sties were regurgitating the same info, people were creating some pretty original content on YouTube.

And if you were looking for art of Renfro, flickr had much to offer.

Before is one of the tribute videos posted on YouTube.

There's been a bit of buzz in the news (and in blogs) today about E.W. Scripps' launch today of the RedBlueAmerica project, but the best post I've read is a sort of behind the scenes glimpse from Laura Scott at PingVision who said:

The traffic projections were such that we had to anticipate and prepare for some fairly robust traffic and posting activity on the site, so we spec'd out and configured an enterprise-level multi-server hosting setup. We did some additional benchmarking and performance tuning to bring the site performance up. (We'll be continuing to watch the site and make adjustments over the coming days and weeks.)

The not-quite-standard page layout, and targeted Doubleclick advertising placement requirements, led to some interesting challenges in theming, including separating the comments (labeled "thoughts" on the site) from the nodes (aka "posts" for readers not familiar with Drupal), which ordinarily would load in tandem, so as to pull them up in separate containers on the page. (We could only blame ourselves for any interesting challenges due to the design, since we did the design ourselves.)

There's more. Best of luck to all involved in the project!

News Sentinel Editor Jack McElroy notes the departures late next week of three long-time newsroom folks, Gerry Segroves, Lynn Lewis and Fred Brown.

Both Fred and Lynn had worked at the Memphis Press-Scimitar before it closed in 1983.

Fred's an example of a vet who has adapted over the years. He blogs, he's done audio for online, he's shot video. I'm sure he'd say it's been an learning experience. There was a recent training session in which he said he had once shot a video with the front of the camera pointing at himself instead of the subject, but, hey, he did it. Fred is not one of those veterans that blogger and consultant Paul Conley says to forget training.

Lynn is the master of detail and organization. He has helped the online staff immensely in figuring out what was coming from the features and entertainment sections, repairing the translation errors that too often occur in throwing stories across the abyss between the print computer system and the online system, and in finding online homes for stories that just couldn't quite be squeezed into the paper.

Gerry or the night online producer is the last person out of the newsroom in the early morning hours. I've turned the lights out on him more than once (he's at the extreme other end of the newsroom). He often brought to the online producer's attention late stories that he couldn't get more than a couple graphs in somewhere deep in the paper that deserved better. And he let us know of fixes made that we might have missed.

Good folks all and to be missed.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
   - Paul Valery

And the trouble with the present is it's so much like the past.

As we leave 2007, I decided to turn back and see what was being said about newspapers and journalism a decade ago.

Some context for 1997: There was a big newspaper company called Knight-Ridder. It was before Cragslist was feared (it started in 1995). It was the year the domain name "google.com" was registered, but before the Google, the company, was started. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter? No one would have guessed.

There was a lot of buzz about AOL's Digital Cities, which started was started in 1995, and Microsoft Sidewalk, which started the next year. Both were local online guides that were the Googleman, I mean bogeyman, of the day for newspapers, who were deciding whether to partner up with the enemy or entrench on the front lines of local.

So what were America's editors focusing on in 1997? At the April gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, there was a fascinating panel discussion on online media, journalism and newspapering called "It's still the content, stupid: 1997-2010."

The 1997-2010 part of the title was meant, I suppose, to be a look to a bright future, but it actually describes a coma for journalism as practiced by newspapers. For other than pockets here and there, not much has really seemed to have changed in the past 10 years.

Who was on the panel? It was an all-star cast (names and companies at that time). Ted Leonsis of AOL, Bill Bass of Forrester Research, Diane H. McFarlin of the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune, George Berge of the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, Ind., Ron Martin of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Mary Jo Meisner. between jobs, but former editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Regina Joseph of Think New Ideas, and Farai Chideya of CNN.

What follows are some quotes from the transcript of the panel:

Ron Martin: "Part of newspapers' challenge is to define what part of that content we do best -- what's the best for us to focus on -- and leave the chat rooms, perhaps, to others."

Mary Jo Meisner: "As newspaper people, we've really seen it in the context of news -- covering events, reacting to them, trying to tell them passionately, but also objectively and fairly. What we've been perplexed by in the last couple of years as editors, is widening that definition and seeing it in new ways. We're always talking about the local news context. Now, we're starting to see it in terms of getting our readers to write for us, stories from the very low levels of our community where they're providing the content for our newspapers, removing us as the filters."

Ted Leonsis: "One of the issues the industry faces is that we think of things in discrete buckets as content: There is chat, there is advertising. I don't think you're going to break out of the smallness of that and think of how big a new business this really is, unless you start thinking of new brands and new businesses."

Diane McFarin: "We're crazy if we sit still and wait for AOL and Microsoft to come to town and set up city sites to deal with what we have the expertise in. We have the critics. We have the history and understanding of all these things. These folks don't know anything at all about our communities."

Ted Leoniss: "We're more in line with some of the traditional ethos of newspapers -- providing local information and context -- than some of the big newspaper companies are."

George Benge: "While I certainly appreciate all the wonderful things that the online world has brought to our business and our culture and our personal lives, ... There is something about what we do as journalists that is unique, and it always will be unique. So long as we are willing and able to change tools and to discuss new idioms and new ways of presenting what we uniquely do to different and new markets, I think there will always be a wonderful future for newspapers."

Ron Martin: "We've tried and need to be a mass deliverer of information in our communities. That's a challenge for us, and one that we can't easily give up. To say let's just adopt an attitude -- turn our baseball cap on backwards and wear baggy pants -- that's not us."

Bill Bass: "It's interesting you talk about newspapers presenting a complete package but, if I go through about any of your newspapers and start looking for what was created locally and how much is packaged from other people, the amount of local stuff is vanishingly small. You take out the wire stories, you take out the stock tables, you take out the classified ads, real estate and things like that, and what is left that you people in this room deliver is really a small part of the entire package."

Ted Leonsis: "I don't think about content. I don't think about newspapers. I think about talent, streams of information, context. In the future, editors are going to be bartenders. That's what I think. I know that's a terrible thing to say, but the role of an editor will be social media: "I'm bringing you into a place ... into a bar. I'm going to give you the news. I'm going to bring other people around who'll talk to you about the news. I'll find dissenting voices, and I'll package that up for you." That's a great new position in jobs."

Bill Bass: "Go to any newspaper and it has hundreds of years worth of papers up on the walls. Look at the ones from the 1890s and the ones from the 1990s. They look pretty much the same. Now, we have this irritant. Is it going to form a pearl? Papers haven't had to change for a hundred years. I question whether they'll be able to make this change -- the first really fundamental change in the way they have to do business in a hundred years."

And at least for a decade, sadly, Bass has proved right. Change a few company names, update the buzzwords and the adversaries, and this panel's dialogue is current for today. If you're in a newspaper, you may have heard some of this in the last week.

For the most part, the outsiders in the panel got the picture and America's editors, publishers and their organizations have -- like those on the panel -- spent the ensuring decade failing to heed the admonishment to move quickly to change.

Now in 2008, the squeeze of economic forces is undeniably pressuring for change. It's a fair question to ask if there is still time. For those who believe newspaper journalism and newspapers as institutions can continue to thrive and prosper -- or at least survive -- what are you doing about it?

As the saying goes: "If not you, who? If not now, when?"

(On with the Carnival of Journalism ...What's the Carnival of Journalism? Look here.)

New Web site: knoxvilledriverssuck.com

A "Star Wars" candidate guide

(via scottstead)

The newspaper industry's troubles have even stung the National Spelling Bee, where some schools seem to be struggling to come up with the money for a $99 entrance fee needed because newspaper sponsorships are down.

Gee, without the bee, how will we find those kids that can spell s-e-r-r-e-f-i-n-e and y-o-s-e-n-a-b-e.

Former Knoxville journalist turned California girl Kim Boatman has a soft spot for an East Tennessee spinach side dish.

What newspapers can do that most bloggers can't -- a blogger's (and reader's) view.

Eight things newspapers will do in 2008.

I may have to create a whole new category for compensation of online journalists.

Edward Wasserman, a veteran newsman and a journalism professor at Washington & Lee University, flattered me a bit by picking up on a blog post I wrote in late December; some thoughts on the same topic from Editor on the Verge Yoni Greenbaum; and a piece by Michael Hirschorn in Atlantic Monthly magazine that compares the most emailed stories list on the Web sites of the Washington Post, L.A. Times and New York Times to those newspapers' front pages. (If emailed stories are a proxy for reader interest, Hirschorn found readers and editors agree less than a fourth of the time. And he said the readers favored "noncommodified news," or unique content.)

Wasserman take on chasing page views (or readers) appeared in a column in the Miami Herald today. He characterizes paying more based on a writer's Web traffic as "popularity pay." The money graph:

The problem with online Popularity Pay is it that it mistakes journalism for a consumer product, and conflates value with sales volume. Journalists don't peddle goods, they offer a professional service, a relationship. The news audience renews that relationship to get information and insight on matters it trusts journalists to alert it to, even though the news may be disquieting or hard to grasp.

He continues:

What's more, the public routinely benefits mightily from stories that few people bother reading. Such is the power of exposure.

I agree with much of what Wasserman says, but the fact is reporters, editors and even distinguished journalism professors, I suspect, are paid widely different amounts, presumably based on their value to their employers and market forces. Using the razor precise metrics of the Web to help determine that value would seem inevitable -- and if done correctly. a positive change  I also believe that being focused on being relevant to readers is one key to the long term success of news organizations.

At my newspaper, we have been distributing daily top 10 lists of articles based on page views to the entire newsroom for a year or more. The lists are not used for compensation and do seem to provide instant market insights about what readers found interesting.

Wasserman did get a sharp rebuke from Lucas Grindley, who had a thoughtful piece on an ideal online compensation system, with a number of comments, here.

My previous posts (which include a number of links to others) are:

Incentivising is a very bad word, but maybe a good idea (1/2/2008)
Readership incentives (1/1/2008)
Pay 'em what they're worth? (12/31/2007)
Your writing's pretty good; how's your CPM? (12/30/2007)

Obviously, this has struck a nerve. What's your take?

Updated: Welcome Instapundit readers! Feel free to add this site to your feed readers.

Updated Again: Wow, lots of blogoshere react:

• Mindy McAdams: Pay per view? Make that get paid per view(er).
• mathewingram.com/work: The “pay for traffic” debate continues
• Online News Squared: You Say Whoring, I Say Calibrating
• The Constant Observer: Is it Blogging--or Chasing Popularity--that's Hazardous to Your Health?
• Jean Yves Chainon: When journalism is a consumer product
• And OMG, there's more

Spread the word:

Since 1953 the Scripps Howard Foundation has honored the best work in journalism through its National Journalism Awards program. The awards honor excellence in 17 categories, including one that you will find of interest. The Web Reporting Award carries a cash prize of $10,000. The postmark deadline is Jan. 31; winners will be announced March 7 and honored at an awards presentation April 18 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.  Here are details:

WEB REPORTING AWARD

Honors the news organization that demonstrates the best use of new media technologies and innovative techniques to report on a news story or news event while maintaining the highest journalistic standards.

Open to any news organization whose primary function is the gathering and disseminating of news information to the general public. The news story or event must have been originally published online in 2007. Also open to organizations that combine their traditional field with new media efforts or organizations that focus solely on online formats. No college news organization work is eligible.

Entries must provide a URL(s) for judges to view the news story or event. Entry must include a written narrative describing the organization’s efforts, a description of the news story or event and its components, original date published online, as well as justification of why the entry should be presented an award. $50 entry fee. Prize is $10,000 and a trophy. Entry form available at: http://foundation.scripps.com/foundation/programs/nja/nja.html  Questions: Sue Porter at 513-977-3030.

Also, the deadline is approaching for Inland's 2008 New Frontier Awards (deadline Jan. 14, 2008).

And for those in East Tnnnessee, there's The East Tennessee SPJ Golden Press Card Awards (deadline Feb. 1, 2008).

Scott Karp on 2008 as the year of 'change or die'.

Reading the Sidney Morning Herald's "Ten things that will change your future" reminded me that I hadn't mentioned Kiva lately.

But I'll get to that in a moment. The list is interesting in that the writer says the items might not individually change the world "but which taken together give a picture of where our brave new networked world may be heading." Now, that's interesting.

The newspaper's list of 10:

THE CHUMBY
MICROBLOGGING
EVERYBLOCK
23ANDME
PEER-TO-PEER LENDING
MOB RULES
GUERILLA WI-FI
WORLD COMMUNITY GRID
LOOPT
ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD

Maybe you have, but I hadn't heard of all these and there's some more info and links in the article.

Kiva is mentioned in peer-to-peer lending. Instead of a technology driven network idea, it's a human network encompassing the globe.

I got interested in Kiva after hearing a podcast with Permal Shah, its president.

I made a "donation" of $75 on December 23, 2006. (Yeah, I was intrigued by the idea, but my cynical journalist instincts was also at work.) In all, $18.9 million has been loaned and the default rate is .17 percent, according to Kiva.

My money was loaned to Jovcho Bakalov in Sliven, Bulgaria. He received a total loan of $2,000 through a Kiva lending partner for a special vacuum press used in a manufacturing process. So far, 79 percent of the loan has been repaid.

Course, I'm not the only one who loaned Bakalov. There's Lowell, an auto worker in Georgetown, Ky.; Belle, a real estate developer in Austin, Texas; Lori, a teacher in Madison, Wis.; Paul, an architect in Cambridge, Mass. and others. A network of people in different cities and places who chose to help this one businessman.

When the loan is repaid, I can either pocket my $75 (no interest is paid to "donors") or reinvest it in another microloan.

Kiva is not charity, the loaned money isn't tax deductible, and it's not a financial investment, but a people investment. At the risk of sounding a bit bleeding heart, I think it's kind of a cool way of people helping people.

Check it out. As the Sidney Morning Herald said, it's one of those ideas that could change the world. Maybe you could change the world.

At the blog, Knoxify, candidates are addressing the blog's three questions for hopeful officeholders (more details). For me, the first two are but warm-ups for the real question, No. 3, What 5 things could you not live without?

Ah, we can tell when you're faking it It's kind of fun. Give Knoxify a visit.

At knoxnews, we've been rolling out our series of candidate video interviews, about two minutes or so with a candidate. News Sentinel Editor Jack McElroy explains.