Becoming a news consumer, and a curmudgeon

Forgive me for a few minutes while I work on my curmudgeon merit badge today.

In my new life as a consumer rather than producer of news, I’ve been surprised to learn just how often the conventions of standard practice seem to run contrary to common sense.

EXHIBIT A: If you follow me on Twitter (@howardweaver) you’ll have seen my frequent laments about the AP’s moronic practice of attaching impressive-sounding labels to stories that that tend to be, at best, slightly better than average. These can be AP IMPACT or AP EXCLUSIVE or the like.

Here’s a recent example: “AP IMPACT: Grads face worries about money, future.”

Oh, please. Labeling your stories like that is just like using exclamation points everywhere. Like laughing at your own jokes, it’s not done in polite society.

EXHIBIT B: I also found myself chafing Sunday over an NYT story suggesting that the president's nuanced positions and willingness to re-calibrate earlier decisions might be viewed as “flip flopping.”

Here was the first sentence that struck me as both banal and self-referential: “In a sound bite culture, there are limits to how much nuance the public can absorb.”

Think about that. By definition, a “sound bite culture” is the product of people being fed sound bites. And who does the feeding? The press, mainly. And on what authority does this reporter get to say there are limits to how much nuance we can absorb? You really think anybody’s tested those limits lately? The only person who’s tried nuance in the last 10 years just got elected president, so maybe her pat little assertion isn’t true.

Later in the piece, the reporter resorts to a classic “no shit” observation to reinforce a questionable premise: “Americans’ patience may not last, and there may come a time when the public does not listen as closely or carefully to Mr. Obama as it does today.”

Oh yeah? It would be equally true (and equally unhelpful) to say, “Americans’ patience may well last, and there may never come a time when the public does not listen as closely or carefully to Mr. Obama as it does today.”

That kind of weaseling “no shit” generalization reminds me of the classic gag headline about a Carter speech that actually saw print: More Mush From the Wimp.

EXHIBIT C: Reading public editor Clark Hoyt in the same paper reminded me what a bad job the New York Times and the rest of the press did handling Maureen Dowd’s apparent plagiarism. Hoyt wrote “Dowd told me the passage in question was part of an e-mail conversation with her friend.”

Okay, then: she admits copying her friend but denies plagiarizing Josh Marshall. In either case, she passed somebody else’s words off as her own. That’s a sin in the newsrooms where I worked.

Perhaps the question of whether she should be fired remains open. The question of whether she should be trusted does not.

( The typically level-headed Hoyt also added, “I do not think Dowd plagiarized, but I also do not think what she did was right.”)

Exhibit D: One final peeve to end my apparently grumpy afternoon.

Most of the news reports I’ve seen and California's governor himself referred to recent election results on budget issues as an emphatic rejection by Californians. An article in the Sunday opinion section went so far as to call it a “resounding message” from voters.

That strikes me as an absurd characterization considering that it a verdict rendered by about eight percent of the state’s eligible voters. (The percentage of population is even smaller if you consider than less than three-fourths of those eligible to register bothered to do so).

What's more, here’s that troublesome word from Exhibit A, above: nuance.

Very few news stories or even commentaries on the election noted the 800-pounds of gorilla truth in the room: much of California’s budget crisis results from the profoundly anti-democratic fact that legislators here can’t enact a budget by majority vote.

Honestly, they can’t. The votes of those elected by the most people isn’t enough to govern in this instance. Owing to restrictions on majority rule adopted years ago, it takes a 67% yes vote to pass the budget. That’s right: 34% of the legislators can trump the other 56%.

Whether you think that’s a good idea or not, you have to admit it’s relevant information.

Good news on McClatchy debt

Today's news about McClatchy's deeply discounted debt swap is a big deal, for the company and the industry.

The story may seem a bit opaque to us non-financial types, but I read it as a move that significantly strengthens the company's ability to weather the recession and positions it well to continue transformation as economic activity resumes. Early returns from the market agreed; the stock's up nearly 20% as I write this early Thursday.

More as I learn more. Today I am celebrating a smart, innovative move by McClatchy management.

END OF THE DAY UPDATE: The market, at least, has made its opinion known. McClatchy stock (nyse:mni) was up 30% on 6.3 million shares, about eight times the average volume.

A short defense of daily publishing

Maybe Jeff Jarvis and I disagree so often because our view of journalism and the value it provides is just so different.

That’s the inference, at least, from his post today (The death of daily) berating “outmoded ... dailiness” as “staleness.”

“Once it’s out, it’s over,” Jeff writes.

That’s true, of course, but only if your view of value is restricted to event-driven facts. I’ve been arguing for years that newspapers – yes, printed, daily newspapers – have a good long horizon on the value curve if they shift their focus to the value they already do best: summary, briefings, orientation, authentication. If a printed product did that well, the fact that it’s a once-a-day product would be a strength: a starting point, presumably first thing in the morning, which helped readers orient their day and prepare to parse and interpret all the fact-clotted data that would wash over the ceaselessly for the rest of the day.

The newspaper thus becomes a tool for managing the rest of your information habit. It can help you sift and sort and filter the vast river of news that flows past constantly, effervescently through the day. Think of it as a cup, or instruction manual, for getting a drink of water from a firehose.

Society is not a mere assemblage of individuals each acting purely on self-interested motivation. We are a collectivist, social species, and we need a common vocabulary, a shared starting point, at least, from which to launch our individualist endeavors. We can’t all check the accuracy or authenticity of every data point that floats by. There is a robust, profitable business here for the entity that provides those services.

Remember, even in cities with great libraries, people still bought encyclopedias. You don’t always need the whole library; indeed, it can overwhelm or bewilder, and leave you more confused than when you started.

Data gets stale; insight doesn’t.

UPDATE:

I had a nagging feeling I'd said more or less this same thing once before. (That happens to me more and more these days.) I searched this blog and found this, from May 2006.

I'm reminded again that most choices facing us in this new era inolve AND rather than OR. We need to do everything Jarvis is talking about and sustain our central role in provising context, perspective and authentication:

Yes, we know you’re awash in data and information. You wake up to NPR, listen to talk radio on your commute, surf the web when you should be working and see CNN in the lunchroom. You’ve been titillated by blogs and email alerts all day; friends and coworkers have sent you IMs about the latest item to tickle their fancy. You’ve got books and podcasts cued oup on your iPod. So what can we possibly do for you?

How about this: I’ll ask a hundred of the smartest people I know to spend all day sorting through that information, figuring out which of the blog items you saw is accurate enough to deserve your attention, comparing what the Secretary of Defense said on TV with what he told you last month, figuring what’s likely to happen tomorrow on that big story that dominated CNN. They’ll organize it in concise and manageable dimensions, collect it all in one spot and deliver it to your doorstep first thing in the morning to help you organize and orient your coming day.

In the meantime, we’ll use all those other channels as well to keep you posted on what we learn about the latest developments, and to deliver the information – chiefly local – that we alone have bothered to check out and discover.

Government policies define all economics – including those for news

I’ve been arguing with good friends and others for a while now about why I don’t think charity or government subsidies are the right way to “save newspapers.” There are philosophical and policy reasons to argue about, but my main point has been that only success in the marketplace can ensure robust, independent journalism.

That said, there’s nothing to prevent charities, non-profits and government itself from helping news companies transform to match today's radically changing landscape and transition their skills and values into the new, more pluralistic arena.

Philanthropies, universities and other non-profits are doing a lot of this right now. Hats off to the Knight Foundation, Pew, Poynter et al. On the occasion of Sen. Kerry’s hearings in the Senate, let’s focus on government involvement for now.

Many of the instant commentators have proved predictably eager to jump in and simply rain on the whole idea. Typical was Alan Mutter’s initial reaction, under the headline “Why the feds can’t – and shouldn’t – rescue the press.” (Jeff Jarvis didn’t have to wait for the actual hearing to have an opinion about what should happen).

Government shouldn’t bail out the press? Well, no kidding . Who thinks it should? Many of the arguments about this issues across the blogosphere are a classic examples of the straw man or red herring schools of rhetoric: mis-frame or abbreviate the issues to make it easy to prove the point you believed all along.

It simply makes no sense to circumscribe the discussion, as Mutter does, to reject government supplying “cash bail outs,” or noting that news companies, unlike financial giants or automakers, are not “too big to fail.”

I happen to agree with him on both those points, but it’s silly to extrapolate from there that government has no role to play. It always has, it does now, and it always will. We’re only arguing what it should be, what’s fair, and what’s in the public interest.

Government policy defines economic viability for everything from oil companies to internet start-ups. Do you suppose eBay and Amazon would do as well as they do if the government hadn’t decided to protect online sales from local sales taxes paid by brick-and-mortar competitors? Do you think Comcast and Verizon would have been in the same broadband business with different government policies about spectrum sales and local utility monopolies? Does the music industry care about how the government defines copyright? Does Pfizer care about patents?

Every one of those subjects describes government influence on business and industry, and there are thousands of other examples. Governments can make rules to serve the public interest or because somebody got bribed, but either way, they make them.

Jarvis has no issue with spending billions on extending broadband (me neither) or government policies that encourage “innovation” in areas he’s interested in. Mutter, who reminds of his tenure as a “Silicon Valley CEO,” surely knows what a role government policy and government spending played in the development of all things digital.

Not all press critics and internet triumphalists will acknowledge it, but there is a hugely valuable reservoir of talent and expertise at risk as newspaper newsrooms disintegrate. Governments routinely pay to retrain workers for new economy jobs. Governments routinely create tax and investment policies to encourage specific industries to transition into new fields (think about clean energy, solar, hybrid cars).

Why would people argue that thoughtful government policies that recognize the public’s interest in experienced, skilled and ethical journalism are somehow out of bounds?

Post reporter gives us a view from inside his bubble

Asked in an online chat why the Washington Post calls Bush-era practices "harsh interrogation" rather than torture, reporter Paul Kane replied, in part:

KANE: You can’t call someone a convicted murderer until he/she has actually been convicted. Understand? Get it? The reason we say “alleged” murder and things like that is for our own legal protection. So we can’t be sued for libel.

No, Paul; you don't understand, and you don't get it. The reason we say "alleged" isn't to prevent libel; it's to be fair and honest.

If you see a person shoot and kill somebody else, you should say he killed him. It might be up to a jury to decide whether it's legally murder, but there's no question he's a killer.

And once we learn from official records of hundreds of waterboarding sessions with the same suspects, of boxing people up with insects, and other extreme actions, that's torture, by any fair and honest definition.

Props to the Post for hosting the chat, and to Kane for participating. But honestly, Paul: come out of that newsroom bubble and have a look around.

Thinking about innovations

A young multimedia journalist caught me in the hallway last week at the Bar Camp News Innovation session in Philadelphia. Her skillful editing makes me sound more coherent than I deserved, which is why I'm sharing it here.

There are links to other interviews by Jeanmarie Evelly and assorted blog posts and stories available here.

Howard Weaver from Jeanmarie Evelly on Vimeo.

BarCamp suggests our situation isn't beyond all repair

Turns out I’ve been going to the wrong kind of conferences. Sorry NAA, ASNE and SPJ: BarCamp is my new favorite.

I spent Saturday in the company of a few score others with an interest in the future of news and journalism. Gathered at Temple University in North Philadelphia, Bar Camp News Innovation was unlike any of the conferences I’ve attended on similar topics. The process is strikingly different, and I think that helped yield a different, valuable product as well.

Bar Camp got its name name as a spoof of the invitation-only Foo Camps in the tech world; see fubar for further illumination. It’s intentionally upside down, the the agenda driven by the participants and reconfigured on the fly. While most of the presentations I attended (several available in each hour from 10am-6pm) were obviously prepared in advance, others were added after the program had begun. You attend at your own invitation, and anybody can claim a room and host a sesison. Good use of open source, public tools helped sustain its rudimentary organization, though dedicated human volunteers were essential, as well. Twitter messages with hash codes, a mobile-friendly web presence and Temple’s good tech infrastructure all helped.

Most important was the fact that discussions, ideas and debates were open as well. The process was emergent and iterative, with a few key memes building from one session to the next as the day progressed. Of course some arguments were repeated from session to session, but just as often they had evolved or even been transformed.

I lost my notebook in the taxi afterward, so my specific notes aren’t as good as they would be. You can learn a great deal from searching #bcni and related threads on Twitter and going to the camp website. I’m sure others will be posting, as well. Let me leave you with two thoughts: a wholehearted endorsement of the bar camp process, applied on a local or regional level; and a renewed sense that there are answers and solutions within our grasp.

And one more: I sure love people who love journalism.

Navigating painfully through peril

An anonymous commenter sent me a message here late Tuesday wishing I was dead.

Not long afterward came a follow-up, likewise anonymous, saying it had been sent while “drunk and furious,” asking me not to publish it.

Honest to God, I understand: I’ve been there. Though I haven’t been drunk in a long time, I’ve spent a good bit of the recent past furious as well.

Tuesday, like too many days in recent history, was a horrible day at McClatchy. Talented, hard-working people who do their jobs as well as anybody in the country have been laid off. Those remaining at work often approach the future with despair, unsure about survival, much less the capacity to fulfill their missions. On the front lines (and, yes, the executive offices) people work heroically to chart a new course safely through peril.

In writing about all this I’ve too often failed to say plainly that I also feel just how awful it is. I suppose I was trying to avoid the old parent’s line, “This hurts me as much as it does you.” I know it doesn’t.

My only intention has been to introduce facts into the discussion and to tell you what this all looks like from my perspective. For a lot of this period I worked at the highest levels of the corporate structure, where responsibility lies. I’m sorry for the times I came off off as an apologist and, worse by far, to have seemed indifferent to the pain.

I don’t apologize for expressing the facts as I know them. It simply isn’t helpful to build mythologies based on anger and blame that don’t reflect reality. That won’t erase the pain or fix the changing business models. For example, those who argue that McClatchy took over a thriving N&O and greedily ran it into the ground are misinformed, and perpetuating that myth hurts the cause of reconstruction.

As I have for more than 40 years, I believe at my core that intellectual honesty, critical thinking and plain speaking are the best way to face and fix problems. I intend to keep adding whatever perspective I have to that process in the hope of helping navigate through a dark, painful time for our beloved profession. I also plan to acknowledge more often what I feel every day: this process has damaged a lot of talented people and valued institutions; like most of you, that makes me profoundly sad.

Forget the unbearable lightness of being; our actions count

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt addressed the Newspaper Association of America’s annual convention on Monday. Here are his remarks, courtesy of the NAA.

Each year at McClatchy’s shareholders meeting, we conclude with a video highlighting the work of our photojournalists over the past year. I pick a song that I think speaks to the year and we set the photographs to the music. This year, I wasn’t sure which song to choose. I like the Rolling Stones, and they have several songs that fit our current economic environment:

“I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” of course. But also consider …
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”
“19th Nervous Breakdown”
“Shattered” and
“Gimme Shelter”

But I really don’t feel fatalistic. I speak to you this morning with a strong sense of resolve and hope. We have a serious fight on our hands, but I believe we are up to it. So I thought it more appropriate to select a battle song for this year’s video - the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to be specific - as we fight to ensure that truth does indeed go marching on. See what you think …. (Plays DVD)

Public Service Mandate

I came to newspapers not as a journalist or a businessman but as a First Amendment lawyer from Berkeley, California. So as you might expect, I’m passionate about free speech and a free press. I believe in the idea - and the ideal - that newspapers should provide high quality public service journalism so that the public can fully participate in democracy. This is not just some abstract concept. There is emerging empirical evidence to support the important relationship between democracy and the press.

A study published in The Journal of Law, Economics and Organization in 2003 looked at the per capita circulation of newspapers in different countries around the world and among the states in our own country. The study found that the lower the circulation, the greater the political corruption. Of course, the First Amendment isn’t a business model. Making the case that we’re important to society - proving it, even - does not guarantee our success. It just means the stakes are high. It is up to us to devise a business model that will sustain quality, public service journalism.

Our critics and the naysayers aren’t going to do it. This is the challenge before us. So while there were easier times to lead newspapers, there has never been a more important time.

Future generations will judge how we do. Or, as Abraham Lincoln said so eloquently in 1862 during an even more historic fight: “We can not escape history … The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”

Competitive History

I think history has much to teach us. As Mark Twain said, “History may not repeat itself but it does rhyme a lot.” Newspapering, for much of its history, was a fiercely competitive, rough-and-tumble, dog-eat-dog, low-margin business.

Consider The Sacramento Bee. In the first 30 years of its life, from 1857 to 1887, 80 newspapers came and went in the Sacramento market. That was a tough business. The number of daily newspapers in the United States peaked in the early part of the 20th century. There have never been more newspapers before or since.

Not coincidentally, that same time period witnessed the birth of a new medium — commercial radio. First radio and then television emerged, taking share from existing media, namely newspapers. Many people predicted newspapers would go out of business - and many did. So many, in fact, that by the second half of the 20th century, all but the largest cities in the United States had only one daily newspaper. And then a funny thing happened. Those successful, scrappy, surviving newspapers got rich because there was no other print or classified advertising competition. It’s a noteworthy paradox that the development of radio and TV ultimately led to the enrichment of newspapers.

For the first time in the history of newspapers, profit margins exploded and newspapering became an easy and lucrative business. Warren Buffett once said: “You want to invest in a business that even your stupid cousin could run, because one day he will.” That was the newspaper business in the second half of the 20th century. As newspapers’ profit margins grew, so did their cost structures. Ah, but we were so much older then; we’re younger than that now.

New Disruption

The Golden Age of newspapering wasn’t to last. With the maturation of the Internet over the past decade, a new medium has emerged, a virulent competitor again taking advertising share from all existing media, especially share of classified advertising. The Internet’s impact has been particularly disruptive at large metro papers with their higher cost structures and greater dependence on classified advertising.

Some of our critics seem to think newspapers were blindsided by the Internet’s potential impact. But we deserve credit for the considerable progress we’ve made online. The U.S. newspaper industry generated $3 billion in digital revenue last year. At McClatchy, 15% of our advertising revenue today comes from online.

McClatchy, a company founded before the advent of electric lights, will generate nearly $200 million dollars in digital revenue this year at a higher profit margin than our print business. Our digital revenue and online audience grew by double digits last year and, we operate the leading local internet business in each of our daily newspaper markets.

None of which is to say this transition is easy or that we haven’t made mistakes along the way. Secular transitions are always disruptive and painful for all media — what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the creative destruction of capitalism.”

Working On It

My point is that newspaper companies, to varying degrees, were working their way through it, difficult as it was. The game-changer was the arrival of the deepest and most painful recession in generations. It’s the combination of the secular shift and the cyclical downturn that has created a very real crisis for newspapers.

Many of our critics conflate the secular and the cyclical. They see the revenue declines brought about by the recession as proof we can’t weather the secular transition. This leads to the wrong, but increasingly popular conclusion, that there’s no viable future for newspaper companies.

Absolutely we’ve got a future. But just what does it look like and how do we hurry up and get there? Alan Kay, the visionary computer scientist, once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That’s where we are today. It’s up to us to invent that future.

There is no silver bullet. There are no easy answers. And, sadly, as we have seen already, not every newspaper will make it. But here is what I see going forward:

Reinvention

Print remains viable now and into the future. Most newspapers today are profitable even in the depths of this crippling recession. More than 100 million adults in the United States read a printed newspaper every day - more than watched the Super Bowl. As troubled as the U.S. economy is, if 100 million consumers want and use something, that product usually doesn’t go away.

Sixty-one percent of 18 to 34-year-olds read a newspaper in an average week. So much for the notion that younger people don’t read newspapers.

Despite all these positives, newspapers alone are not enough. Our future depends on becoming successful hybrid media companies - fully engaged and vested in digital publishing and digital platforms as we have been historically with print. This isn’t breaking news. In the month of January, 44 percent of all U.S. internet users visited a newspaper website. And audience growth at newspaper websites is outpacing overall U.S. internet audience growth.

So we’ve been moving in this digital direction for some time - but we need to accelerate the pace and sharpen our focus. We need to establish our brands and offer our services on many different platforms. We need to leverage social media, mobile technology and the web’s interactivity as our communities and customers change how they acquire and share information.

This economic downturn makes it difficult to take risks, but we need to experiment smartly and partner where it makes sense. We need to learn from our mistakes, adjust and move on. Let’s listen to our audience and our advertisers - not conventional wisdom.

Transform the Business

The same technology that challenges us on the revenue side offers savings on the expense side through centralization, collaboration and outsourcing. We must continue to shed those legacy, 20th century, monopoly cost structures that weigh us down, limit our flexibility, jeopardize our health.

Think of the newspaper company of the future as an athlete - lean, fit and trim, yet muscular where we need to be. We need to ensure strength in our newsrooms and advertising sales staffs - our two most powerful assets, our core competencies and our social responsibility. Even today, with all the downsizing across our industry, we have the largest newsgathering operations in our markets by far. No other local media outlet is as well equipped to produce and deliver the high value, premium local content that’s growing our total audience in print and online. And we know that audience growth remains the best predictor of long-term success for any medium.

While we’ve done a good job growing audience, we need to do a better job of leveraging our sales forces. We must empower our sales staffs to sell our full portfolio of print and digital products - giving them the right tools, training and incentives. Also, think of the possibilities of harnessing that large, local sales staff to sell on behalf of others and share revenues. The untapped potential of local digital advertising in each of our markets is why internet giants like Yahoo and Google seek partnerships with newspapers. We need to mine that local digital revenue stream. We can’t afford to fumble the opportunity.

Lastly, we need to accept the reality that we’re in a tougher, more competitive business, now and forever. Ours is a business that’s still viable and vital - just with a smaller margin for profits and a smaller margin for error. Let’s appreciate how lucky we are to work in the media business in this critical time of transition. Our actions count. No unbearable lightness of being here. The ball is in our hands and the game is on the line.


I’d like to leave you this morning with a bit of inspiration from Bob Dylan and his song “Silvio.” Although written more than 20 years ago now, I think Dylan’s lyrics speak to the newspaper industry today:

Stake my future on a hell of a past
Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast
Ain’t complaining ’bout what I got
Seen better times, but who has not?

Into the hemisphere of the unknown

Matt Thompson is onto something important.

His recent explorations into the notion of context as a key to journalism keep getting sharper and deeper. Looking at what happens when "news" moves beyond facts and events, he's charting a future territory for public service journalism with the promise of reasserting the role of skilled professionals.

You ought to be reading his field notes at Newsless.

Here is a taste from the latest post:

Journalism has long been described as a sort of cartography. But in news, local news especially, we almost never actually draw a map. Instead, we furnish a daily series of notable waypoints: at this intersection, you’ll find company layoffs; go down that road a stretch and you’ll bump into some public corruption ...

... Part of my goal is to help chart in ever-greater detail the former terrain – capturing the accumulated wisdom of our editors and reporters, our mayor and councilpersons, our developers, our activists, our supermarket clerks, our postal workers, our opera singers. And what I hope becomes the goal of my profession is to dispatch that body of explorers into the hemisphere of the unknown, toward the infinite task of claiming land from the wilderness

Grand theft

Maybe the best lesson I learned during the long newspaper war in Anchorage was this: if you come across a good idea elsewhere, consider stealing it. If the good idea shows up in the competition, steal it immediately.

I thought of this today when reading about Martin Brodeur, perhaps the best goalie of the modern era. Good advice:

Brodeur, 36, can eclipse Patrick Roy’s league record for career victories Tuesday at Prudential Center against Chicago, but he is never satisfied by the way he plays. He says he has a hybrid style that is still evolving, with techniques picked up from other goalies.

“Anything I think will be good for my game, I’ll steal from them,” Brodeur said. “It’s fair game.”

'Thinking the unthinkable'

I've been on the road for a while and I'm late pointing to this important piece by Clay Shirky. If you care at all about journalism or newspapers, you need to read it.

Here are a few key points:

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem...

... The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model...

... Any experiment ... designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from [reality], especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

More mush about paid content

News item: Hearst newspapers will start charging for some content online.

How much content? What price? How will it be collected? What effect will that have on online traffic, and thus revenue?

Hearst Newspapers President Steven Swartz says:

"Exactly how much paid content to hold back from our free sites will be a judgment call made daily by our management, whose mission should be to run the best free Web sites in our markets without compromising our ability to get a fair price from consumers for the expensive, unique reporting and writing that we produce each day."

I believe this is execuspeak for "I have no idea at all what I am talking about. I would like more money, though."

In fairness, there's some good sense elsewhere in the long memo this quote comes from. You can read the whole thing here.

You say you got a real solution, well you know, we'd all love to see the plan

Here's a new business model for news that makes more sense to me than most of what's under discussion these days: community ownership. Their model? The Green Bay Packers.

I saw this on The Stranger's SLOG blog, tipped by a tweet from Jay Rosen (jayrosen_nyu).

Community ownership seems preferable to the "endowed" newspaper folks seem to envision as an alternative to market-based enterprises. It would presumably have more standing in the community than an olympian, insulated non-profit (though what the community owns could itself be a non-profit, of course).

I doubt sufficient community support could be found for a second paper in a two newspaper town, but if San Francisco (for instance) lost its only daily, that might be different.

Here's a taste of The Stranger's suggestion:

One model under consideration is the so-called Packers Model—as in the Green Bay Packers, "the only non-profit, community-owned major league professional sports team in the United States." (A model that, I just realized, Jonathan Golob first floated here on Slog on January 9th, the same day that Hearst announced it would likely be shuttering the P-I's print edition.)

Beer: no longer what's for dinner?

To those of you who continue to profess the economic crisis in the newspaper business is solely the result of stupid executives, I offer the following:

(For text explanation and details, please click on image.)

How will smaller news staffs cover the giant stimulus story?

Before long, hundreds of billions of dollars will flow out of Washington and wash across every community in the country. This stimulus spending represents an unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis, and defines one of the biggest stories of our generation.

How can today's news organizations possibly cover it adequately? Even if news staffs were growing, they'd be hard-pressed to keep up with the dozens, perhaps hundreds of projects that will affect individual communities. Even knowing where to look will be bewildering.

I think the new web service for journalists called Publish2 can improve the coverage – and, in doing so, help journalism and the country.

Publish2 pioneered collaborative link journalism, and it's rapidly being adapted to go a step farther: helping professional journalists enlist the eyes and ears of the audience in covering a huge story like this. The same system that now lets news organizations share links with with readers will soon enable them to ask readers to share tips, opinions and observations about how stimulus spending is working in their area.

Using Publish2's free system, individual websites can easily let users submit information about projects. Some might be whistleblowers – imagine a Citibank secretary who didn't think the company should be buying a new jet – while others will simply have questions they think should be asked. Sites can also solicit success stories, tales of stimulus spending that's working.

Reporters will be able to search a sophisticated database of all the reader submissions – for instance, zeroing in on a particular region, or a certain company, or an individual government department. The system will let them query their readers to solicit feedback and information on specific stimulus topics.

Meanwhile, Publish2 will also provide an aggregated list of links to all the best stimulus journalism around the country, which can be used to augment and extend individual websites.

New features enabling broad collaboration among journalists and citizens will be available to Publish2 users very soon, and every newsroom ought to explore the system and consider participating. To me, the effort looks like a win-win from every angle, helping individual newsrooms cover a big, sprawling story in a time of declining resources, helping enable watchdog journalism on the biggest spending spree ever, and empowering citizens to help.

This could be a breakthrough project in the field of "citizen journalism" – more accurately, a way to let professionals tap into the power of the crowd to help inform and invigorate their reporting.

I've been an informal advisor at Publish2 since the idea emerged, and have watched with interest as it's developed. I believe it's poised to emerge as a powerful, essential tool for journalists, and its business model lets it do so without costing a dime. (By way of disclosure, I have been asked to think about joining Pub2's board of directors and am considering that).

Journalists and technologists on the Publish2 team will stand behind this project to help news organizations participate as robustly as they want. I encourage you to explore the possibilities.

Who knows where babies come from?

People who wish some billionaire would endow newsrooms so they don’t have to change – you know who you are – have the musty smell of the mausoleum all about them. They move through twilight, walking stiffly toward a setting sun. They will find no pot of gold there.

Yet the digitalistas who suggest those newsrooms can be readily duplicated or replaced act like willful children, unmindful that substance, craft and capacity matter in the real world, that no group of 10,000 monkeys has ever written Shakespeare, that 98 of the 100 most important pieces of public service journalism last year flowed from professionals in the newsrooms they recklessly disregard.

This is a fool’s game. It’s time for grown-ups to intervene, to end the debate and move beyond the empty calories of nostalgia and the masturbatory fantasies of a theory-based future. A long-deceased, much missed colleague often referred to people with mature judgment and a steady hand by saying, “She knows where babies come from.” Those are the folks we need on the case now.

Journalists in the main are ready now and, thank god, many are already engaged.

The future of public service journalism today rests with editors who are losing sleep trying to figure how to cover an increasingly complex world with fewer experienced reporters and shrinking budgets. It rests with reporters who found a way to learn new media techniques on their own when nobody in charge would train them. It relies on staffers whose love of the profession and devotion to the mission are more powerful than the lure of a public affairs office or law school.

Few reading this will believe it, but I know first-hand that it also depends on executives able to act with steely resolve married to correct intentions, even in the face of indictment by insinuation.

This is an ugly time that sorely tests all those decisions. Despite both the sloganeering (“Innovate your way out of this!”) and recriminations (“Greedy corporate bastards ruined our business.”) economic reality means there is relatively little to be done in the short term but optimize chances for survival. This chiefly involves the distinctly unglamorous activities of paying down debts, cutting expenses and maximizing revenues.

No matter what the mutterjarvisdoctor chorus chants on the sidelines, the hard work of ensuring tomorrow’s public service journalism is being done today in the bloody trenches of established news companies who have shouldered the burden of building a lasting foundation while sustaining a critical mass of talent and mission-driven performance. Many an important conference beckons in Dusseldorf, Davos and Dubai, no doubt, but the pain and the performance that matter today are found in Wichita, Anchorage and Miami.

And in those places, and dozens more I know directly, the right metamorphosis is underway today as newsrooms keep growing the audience for journalism rooted in tested traditions of honesty, fairness and verification and their colleagues learn to monetize it based on demographics, behavioral targeting and portfolio product mixes.

Illustration from Journalism That Matters.

Frustrated by Wasington coverage

Even from short remove – only about a month since I was actually engaged with a Washington bureau myself – I have to say that watching the Beltway press corps behave generally isn't pretty.

As a citizen trying to learn what matters in my government, it feels to me like too many of the reporters who ought to be finding out and telling me are instead obsessed with issues like whether pool reporters will always follow the president when he takes the girls for ice cream (who cares?), whether they should agree to anonymous briefings (no), and whether the latest entirely predictable Republican criticism spells the end of Obama's promised bipartisan approach (oh, please).

When they do get down to writing stories, the result too often feels like sushi – sliced so thin you can see through it. They focus on trivia and incrementalism, each tiny step reported new atop eight repetitious graphs of yesterday's incrementalism. They quote people anonymously praising their boss. Now and then you spot something labeled AP IMPACT (all caps), which is at least useful because it signals you to beware of a marginally interesting issue that has been trumped up beyond its worth because the AP got the report leaked first. And so on.

(It won't surprise you to hear that I find the McClatchy bureau reporting far superior in most regards, though there are some folks there inclined to follow the herd, too).

Does this sound harsh? Well, I'm frustrated.

May I remind you of something I told McClatchy newsrooms for years? Even if you think the way I feel about this is my fault, it's your problem. If you don't learn to satisfy changing needs and demands of the audience, somebody else will.

Journalists as curators

You hear a lot nowadays about how journalists can serve as curators of certain subjects, locales or topics, but not much discussion about just what that means or how to do it.

I happen to believe the concept is ripe with possibilities, harnessing skills and instincts good journalists already have in providing real value to audiences who are drowning in unfiltered information.

Now Mindy McAdams has posted a quick list of key concepts.
It's all worth reading. Here's a taste:

If a museum curator has access to 10,000 small clay tokens from ancient Iraq and Syria, how many — and which ones — should appear inside the glass case? If a journalist is going to provide links to reliable sources about planning for retirement (or breast cancer, or choosing a college), which are the best, clearest, and most up-to-date?

At the broadband trough

Unsurprisingly, Jeff Jarvis and a host of online media guys are mounting a call for government subsidies for broadband expansion. I think there's a place for that, but not nearly the place they want to carve out.

Public spending on infrastructure is generally a good thing in my book, one of the bedrock things government should do for people because it doesn't always happen on its own -- even in a free-market utopia. Honest libertarians excepted, I don't hear anybody making a principled call for private sector interstate highways, for instance.

That's why I agree that making broadband available where it's not now – rural areas, mainly, including much of Alaska – is a good thing. (Disclosure: I own a house without a good broadband source in the Sierra Nevada foothills; this would be good for me.)

But should the government be spending billions on delivering services that are already generally available and likely to get much better on their own?

Seth Hansell in the NYT Bits Blog makes a pretty good for why generic broadband subsidy is probably a bad, wasteful idea.

Here's a taste of the argument:

... as I look at it, the noise about a broadband gap is hooey. With new cable modem technology becoming available, 19 out of 20 American homes eventually will be able to have Internet service that is faster than any available now anywhere in the world. And that’s without one new cable being laid.

The new information gatekeepers

Wouldn't it be something if the vaunted promise of the world wide web to deliver diverse voices and robust competition of ideas actually ends up limiting choices and concentrating intellectual power in ever fewer hands?

Absurd, right? Well, maybe not.

Nicholas Carr argues here that things seem to be going just that way. Already, he asserts, the web has gone from being a "radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one ..." He describes a new information triumvirate – the web, Google and Wikipedia – as the most powerful arbiters of what we learn.

It’s hard to imagine that Wikipedia articles are actually the very best source of information for all of the many thousands of topics on which they now appear as the top Google search result. What’s much more likely is that the Web, through its links, and Google, through its search algorithms, have inadvertently set into motion a very strong feedback loop that amplifies popularity and, in the end, leads us all, lemminglike, down the same well-trod path - the path of least resistance.

I can think of lots of objections to that thesis. Despite some notable failures (China comes to mind) Google hasn't thus far demonstrated any overt or obvious bias in the way it sorts and displays information. (The bias could be there, of course; do you understand how the search algorithms work?)

And Wikipedia is the very essence of multi-source information, isn't it? Well, yes, I guess. Although Jimmy Wales is now talking about limiting the ways information gets added. He's a good guy, too, as far as I know – but do I want his judgment determining what ranks first on most Google searches?

More tellingly, what happens when Larry and Sergey aren't running Google? What happens after Jimmy Wales? Is a world grown ever more dependent on single-source information -- Just Google it. -- really a smarter, more intellectually independent place?

Growing hunger for information is good news for jounalism

Tonight the text of President Obama's inaugural address is the most popular highlight on Yahoo News, and doubtless that's true elsewhere, as well.

In an age of ubiquitous video, remixes, and 24/7 television, what makes a plain old text document so popular?

Here's my guess: people are desperate for reassurance, and they're willing to spend the energy it takes to read for themselves and look for the answers they're after.  This is good news for anybody in the business of public service journalism.

I don't mean to suggest the hunger is restricted to text, or certainly not to original source documents only. But you only have to look back to the astonishing numbers of people who watched online video of Obama's 40-minute speech on race to realize the depth of the appetite for substantive information.

Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats famously united the country in a shared information experience, bringing reassurance and hope to millions. I think this president will be working hard to use new tools in trying to do the same.

There is opportunity here for journalists.

SPECTRE over the news

Help. We're trapped in a James Bond movie.

In the last two days we've learned that a mysterious Mexican cellphone billionaire is investing hundreds of millions in the New York Times. Now I read that a former KGB agent has bought The Evening Standard in London.

I don't really know who is editing Newsday (or for how long), who really owns the Star Tribune, what's going to happen to the Rocky or the PI.

The clock is ticking, but 007 always gets to SPECTRE in time.

Link journalism in the Northwest

Publish2 editor Josh Knorr has an illuminating post of the p2 blog today describing how a handful of Washington State journalists quickly home-brewed a plan to share coverage and links to stories about the flooding there.

Working collaboratively, all were able to provide far broader coverage and more detail than any could on its own. This web page from the Kitsap Sun shows how some of the linking looked. I know the Tacoma News Tribune and Seattle Times were trading links in previously verboten ways, as well, though I don't know the details.

Tools for news

Tools for news

As the site instructs, "Don't be a tool. Use one."

Thanks, newsless.org for the pointer.

Bad news, good news -- in context

You may be interested in Jeff Jarvis' collection of "Bad news, good news" facts about the news business. As you might guess, his list is heavier on the bad news, so I tried to help by adding some good news in a comment, which I'm pasting in here:

I can’t speak for “the newspaper industry,” but I can report on the state of affairs at my former employer, McClatchy.

What these individualized statistics and measurements fail to show is that companies like McClatchy are already far down the road to transformation. (I write from memory and approximately; I am not a spokesman for the company).

In 2000, about 97% of McClatchy’s revenues came from daily newspapers. Today it’s less than 70%, with the remainder coming mainly from online and other digital operations, niche print and targeted marketing. While print advertising revenues are falling (at least partly due to economic conditions) online ad revenue at McClatchy continues to grow by double digits, even in recession.

In the larger cities where surveys are available, McClatchy’s total audience reach (print plus unduplicated online) often exceeds 70% of adults 18 and older each week. It’s likely higher in smaller markets, where the print component remains somewhat stronger. Indeed, the total audience for information produced in McClatchy newsrooms has never been larger. The company’s sales forces are being retrained and compensation structures changed to optimize their ability to sell that portfolio of audience reach, not just ads in daily papers.

Meanwhile, the company’s cost structure has been radically altered, reduced by more than $350 million in the past two years alone. Much of that has come from staff reduction, but a large and growing percentage represents efficiencies like out-sourced production work, accounting and billing, and even printing. This process will continue as technology continues to make further efficiencies available.

The company also enjoys productive relations with third parties, like CareerBuilder (of which it is a part owner), Classified Ventures (likewise), Yahoo (a strategic cross-selling and ad serving partner), aggregators like DayLife and Outside.In, and many others. These can work both to reduce operating costs and extend revenue opportunities into new realms.

In short, statistics about falling daily newspaper circulation and the like are by themselves of little value in projecting the future. You should use care in over-interpreting these.

You also should not ignore the fact that the economic collapse that has ruined many businesses has also hurt news company performance and obscured much of the progress outlined above. When conditions improve, even marginally, you will see dramatic reflection in the capacity of companies like McClatchy to move forward toward their historic mission: public service journalism.

Ten points aimed at better digital

In contrast with my hyperventilating post below, here's an example of Jeff Jarvis at his best: scanning a broad horizon and reeling in useful points of view and admonitions we should all be paying attention to.

In a post entitle simply Hope, he reproduces a ten-point list of excellent advice from Edward Roussel, head of digital the The Telegraph in London. All are worthwhile; let me highlight my two favorites here:

1. Narrow the focus. “…[M]edia companies need to invest more money in their premium content—editorial that is unavailable elsewhere but that is highly valued by readers. Go deep, not wide.”

5. Bottom up, not top down. “The reporters on the ground are closest to your readers. They are therefore best placed to conceive, create and nurture community Web sites….”

Talk is cheap, but here's my money

I suppose most people had better things to do Christmas Eve than read newspaper and journalism blogs. Sadly, I was not among them, and couldn't restrain myself today from posting a comment on one of the latest Jeff Jarvis postings about why those of us laboring in newspaper companies have no hope.

In fact, that's the title of the Buzzmachine musing: No hope. You can read it in full there, but here's the particularly smirky part about McClatchy:

* McClatchy shares hit 60 cents yesterday. As I write this, it’s up to a big 78 cents. Bubble! Gatehouse hit 4 cents (and I’d still short them given their current attitude); market cap: $2.3 million. See Alan Mutter’s excellent analysis of how debt did in papers. I’d say it’s more than that: It was misplaced optimism in the form and in the incumbents. If these papers had instead taken on debt to innovate and create or to buy innovates (a la the New York Times buying About), that might have been productive. Instead, they bought newspapers, which was only an indication of how snug their blinders were.

Sigh. We've been here so often before.

Here's what I said in the comments on Jeff's blog:

I get so fucking tired of correcting you, Jeff. Has it *ever* occurred to you to do some reporting — like asking questions of those involved — before pronouncing such apocalyptic conclusions?

It’s perhaps more than interesting that you so frequently refer to blinders; I’ve never read an analyst who is so consistently, persistently wrong about basic facts.

Yes, the stock price sucks. As you know (or should) that reflects Wall Streets’ analysis of our prospects. And we all know those are some smart guys who always get it right, huh? To cite stock price as a definitive measure of performance is as bad a sin as those who ran their companies mainly to maximize stock price.

This much is clear: When McClatchy demonstrates, as it will, that it is coming out of the the downturn/transformation challenge whole, that price will rise again.

Yes, debt is tough to manage when revenues fall. No shit. But I guess you refer to Alan Mutter’s analysis as “excellent” simply because it confirms your beliefs. It’s anything but excellent. It’s very thin soup, persuasive only to people who know less about these issues than he does.

He opens by lumping all the news companies together and saying “The details in each case may be different. But the story is the same.” Nothing could be more wrong. It’s *all* about the differences. To equate the Tribune’s debt with McClatchy’s KRI debt is simply looney. Stop repeating this trash; it makes you look stupid.

Your post is entitled “No hope.” Bullshit. McClatchy remains a strongly profitable company (you can look it up at the SEC). It’s never missed a payment and isn’t about to. Lehman Bros failed; GM is failing; even in the same economic climate, McClatchy is not. There is much hope.

Online sales and revenues continue to grow at double-digit rates. Our percentage of revenue from online leads the industry (excluding, perhaps, the national papers) and continues to grow. Perhaps more importantly, the company is so much more efficient now than two years ago (to the tune of some $350 million in reduced expenses) that it doesn’t have to return to anything like historic margins or revenues to be successful.

You know that I have long offered to wager $1,000 on McClatchy’s prospects with anybody who doesn’t believe me. Let’s make it personal, shall we? Show me your money, Jeff.


Because you’re wrong. Consistently, persistently wrong in a way that hurts thousands of McClatchy employees who are working hard every day to advance the interests you profess to believe in but routinely dismiss with a shrug and near-total disregard for facts or reporting.

Stop it.

\-\/\/

P.S. Re Pew: The internet IS NOT a source of news; it’s a delivery system.

Murder your darlings

Packing up your office yields many a trip down memory lane. This week I talked with newsroom staff at the Sacramento Bee and shared some notes I made in 1997 about newspapers and websites. (Yes, I tend to save stuff).

I had some decent insights back then, but perhaps none better than this one: "Newspapers are trapped by desire to own and control everything ..."

This resonated powerfully while reading this insightful post about how Apple handles change. After noting that "Most large and successful corporations are afraid of change," John Siracusa notes that "While other companies are paralyzed with indecision, or cling relentlessly to what has worked in the past, or are seduced by sentimentality, Apple is busy murdering its darlings."

I was at the think-tank session at Rand in 1987 that led to New Directions for News. It was the first time I'd ever worked with professional "facilitators," the first time really that I knew such things existed. I was fascinated by their contention that that could apply the same principles across many industries to foster innovation, and asked one how working with newspapers compared with other clients.

"Great question," he replied. "It's so different. Everybody else just wants us to help improve their widget. Thy want a better widget or a faster widget or a cheaper widget. But you newspaper people are in love with your widgets."

And indeed I was was. I loved pretty much everything about newspapers from the first time I walked into the Anchorage Daily News newsroom as a high-school sports stringer in 1967. I loved the smell and the mess, the sarcasm and the profanity. I took my future wife to watch the press run on our first date. I have a handle from the old letterpress on my desk today.

The letterpress didn't survive the offset era, typewriters gave way to CRTs and eventually we banned smoking. Widget Worship passes into its honored, venerated place in the pantheon of lost gods.

A further taste of Siracusa:

Over the past decade, Apple has been using a different playbook. In Apple's estimation, the best time to kill off a successful product or brand is "as soon as possible." Dropping a winner means creating a new winner to replace it, and that's exactly what Apple has decided it must do to be successful: create great new products again and again. Brand momentum, product inertia, and all the other naturally occurring forces in large corporations stand in the way of Apple's execution of this plan.

Thanks @base10 for the Siracusa pointer, via Twitter

Links going mainstream

Linking outside your own site and aggregating news from others is increasingly commonplace, and more and more McClatchy sites are already doing so. The Alaska Newsreader and Sac Bee's Capitol Alert are two examples.

In case you missed it, here's an article from the NYT that summarizes recent development. (Publish2, which is cited here, is a newspaper-friendly partner you can approach for free help in establishing a link process at your site.)

Embracing the hyperlink ethos of the Web to a degree not seen before, news organizations are becoming more comfortable linking to competitors — acting in effect like aggregators. The Washington Post recently introduced a political Web site that recommends rival sites. This week NBC will begin introducing Web sites for its local TV stations with links to local newspapers, radio stations, online videos and other sources. And The New York Times will soon offer its online readers an alternative home page with links to competitors.

These experiments exemplify “link journalism,” an idea that is gaining traction in other newsrooms across the country. “It is a fundamentally different mindset” for journalists, said Scott Karp, chief of the Web-based newswire Publish2, who coined the term.

Listening to Leila

The front page of the McClatchy Washington site features a video interview with Baghdad Bureau Chief Leila Fadel offering a nuanced assessment of the Iraq surge. You can find it here or click on the image below.

Too good to pass up

I'm well aware that iPhone tips won't be of interest to all the vast audience of this blog, but I likewise know some of you are lucky enough to have one.

This list of iPhone tips is fabulous (thanks, Daring Fireball). if you use the phone, you'll almost surely benefit from some or most of these tips.

Demonstrably inaccurate

If you're a regular reader of Jeff Jarvis' blog – and I hope you are – you may have seen this mention of McClatchy in today's version of newspapers-are-fucked:

McClatchy keeps arguing, with ear plugs well stuffed and blinders tight, that the problems in the industry are not fundamental but cyclical (as Dave Morgan said to that at my New Business Models for News Summit, “bullshit”).

That's just inaccurate, as I pointed out in a comment on buzzmachine this morning:

Stop saying this; it’s wrong:

“McClatchy keeps arguing, with ear plugs well stuffed and blinders tight, that the problems in the industry are not fundamental but cyclical (as Dave Morgan said to that at my New Business Models for News Summit, “bullshit”).”

As you know, I was there at your conference, and called Dave on his mischaracterization immediately after he spoke. The Pruitt quote he cited was taken wholly out of context (I know; I heard the whole earnings call). Pruitt was talking about many of the effects OF THE LAST YEAR being cyclical. Morgan acknowledged as much to me, but said he wanted to make the general point and Gary’s quote was freshest.

As recently as yesterday, Pruitt said on Wall Street, “”We recognize that part of our advertising decline is permanent — reflecting the secular shift to the Internet. Another part is temporary — reflecting the cyclical nature of our business in a recession,” Pruitt said.”

Your comments about earplugs and blinders are beyond cheap shots, Jeff. They’re becoming willful, hurtful lies. Facts matter, dammit.

I'll let you know what Jeff says when he replies. I hope he'll correct things.

UPDATE – Jeff replies:

I apologize then. i did not recall hearing you say that to Dave when I was there. But I have heard Pruitt say similar things at more than one event. I do think that he has at least been very late in recognizing the gravity of the situation.

Inlaid plastic, rubbery bits

Regular readers will have noticed my fascination with design, whether it's found on a newspaper page, book cover or ipod. But a toothbrush? Could design really improve a toothbrush?

Yes.

If everything in our lives were afforded the design attention that my toothbrush has, we would sit in chairs that floated while tickling our troubled backs, have tables that yielded at our aching elbows while remaining firm on top, walk on floors that tingled like active sand, and sleep on pillows that would never allow our ears to flatten against our heads.

(Thanks, Snarkmarket.)

Oh yeah? Says who?

Harper's Magazine has often used an "annotation" format to deconstruct a public document of one kind or another, offering marginal notes to explain what the material really means.

I haven't seen it used much in newspapers, and never as effectively as in this example from the New York Times. I've come to believe that newspapers too often let challenges and rebuttals go unchallenged; in this new age of boundless discussion and debate, we need to be in the middle of all the arguments. This side-by-side presentation seems especially appropriate to me, and I'd recommend it.

Links growing at NYT

Dan Gillmor notes, and offers a quick introduction to, a couple of noteworthy developments at the New York Times.

The most important by far is the decision to link and aggregate aggressively, including "links to coverage in other media — including bloggers and direct competitors."

Surely it's clear by now that our role as information curators mandates linking and aggregation. We've done some, but not enough. The good news is that it's getting easier to do; and that's the bad news too, of course, since it means others can do it to.

Turning the page ...

I have worked for newspapers for more than 40 years now, and since my younger brother’s death a year ago, I have known that I would leave my job at McClatchy before too long. I’ve always looked forward to having second phase of my career, to a chance to spend more time with my wife, and I am tenderly aware that none of us can command the calendar.

While awaiting the right opportunity to depart, I have discovered that there is no opportune time for such an announcement, and so I have simply set a date. I will leave at the end of the year.

As you would expect, it is painful to leave a company I love and a profession that has defined my life. I am acutely aware that this is a time of great challenge and uncertainty for our business, and the most poignant part of my decision is the feeling that I am abandoning shipmates left in peril. I feel bad about leaving when so many beloved colleagues and fine journalists are working through such difficult conditions to sustain and advance the crucial work we do.

Yet their good work and deep devotion also make it easier for me to depart, for I am wise enough to know that this mission will be in good hands without me, and this allows me to move on.

Some colleagues I’ve told about my plans warn that this will surely be interpreted as “Howard bailing out,” or some sign of impending disaster at McClatchy. Like so much you hear about our business nowadays, such thinking would reflect people who don’t know what they’re talking about saying things that don’t make sense.

I take my leave feeling sure about two things.

First, that the challenge faced by McClatchy and its newsrooms is immense and fundamental. Navigating to success through the coming months will be painful, sometimes torturous work.
Secondly, that the mission of public service journalism will emerge from this transformation in tact, and that McClatchy will remain in control of its own destiny. I have deep faith in McClatchy’s ownership, in its leadership, and in its journalists.

You may recall that I offered six months ago to wager $1,000 with anybody who thinks differently. I haven’t had any takers yet, but I hope I will; I could use the money.

I have spent too much of my life in newsrooms simply to pronounce some Pollyanna forecast. My confidence is grounded in an intimate, 30-year history with McClatchy. The forecast represents a distillation of everything I know and believe and have figured out about the profound changes unfolding around us. My insights and credentials are far from perfect, but they are not inconsequential. My prediction of success is rooted in deep thought and nuanced study.

At the heart of my analysis rests a simple but potent realization I made many years ago: honest, high quality news is far more powerful and more valuable than raw data, sloppy reporting or partisan propaganda. No institution is even remotely as well equipped as we to deliver this public service information to the civic sphere. We are hurting too badly for me to say that glibly or to underestimate how hard is will be to prove, but I have bedrock faith that we will do so.

Unlike so many of our poorly informed critics, I do not believe our current circumstances are primarily the result of mistakes. They are, rather, the simple and inevitable result of being in a mature business that has been overtaken by transformational change that would have turned us inside-out no matter what we had done.

You will hear digital triumphalists and grave dancers hurl charges like “Why didn’t newspapers invent Google?” or “Why didn’t newspapers start Craigslist?” Many of them look to the enormous power and promise of the networked world and admonish us to abandon print publishing altogether, a nonsensical notion that illustrates both the depth of their ignorance and shallowness of their analysis.

Just for the record, Google didn’t even invent Google. Larry and Sergei, brilliant as they are, didn’t know what they had created when they started indexing web pages. Their company would have gone broke if Yahoo has not licensed its search capacity in early years, and they didn’t start to make real money until they purchased and incorporated somebody else’s system for selling contextual search advertising.

As for Craigslist, think about that for a moment. How on earth would creating free classified listings have saved the profitable classified advertising whose loss we feel so painfully today? Craig Newmark, a smart and unassuming nerd, is perfectly happy to charge a pittance on a tiny fraction of his ads to subsidize the majority of the free listings. There’s no way we could have stopped him from his philanthropic endeavor, and no way that duplicating his service would save us.

And think about this, as well: printed newspapers continue to reach about half the adults in the country every day, and to generate billions of dollars in annual revenue. Only a person who has never enjoyed that kind of base would be foolish enough to advise that we abandon it. This is the foundation upon which we are building the success of our increasingly digital future.

Though it is under great stress, there is so much right about our company and our prospects that I have no hesitation in forecasting success. All around us, legendary banks and auto companies are failing. Housing has crashed and consumer confidence plummets. But consider this: in the midst of the greatest economic calamity in generations, already deep in the throes of transformational secular change, the McClatchy Company is operating multimedia publishing companies in 29 American cities from Miami to Anchorage – and all are profitable. Thousands of skilled and dedicated journalists went to work this morning in these McClatchy cities, ready and able to practice public service journalism.

There’s no denying we have been gravely wounded by the end of our industry’s monopoly advantages, and those wounds are deeper still on account of the devastating condition of the national economy today. I certainly have not always reacted correctly or with due speed to the nature of the changes, and our whole industry has – to varying degrees – been overtaken by the speed and scope of changing consumer habits; we need to move faster in reshaping some of what we do.

And while it's true that ensuring our future requires sophisticated selling, steadfast, adaptive management and steely resolve, the future is really all about the newsrooms.
Nothing else we do as a company means much if we fail to sustain our public service journalism. The McClatchy family has not persevered into the seventh generation in order to publish successful brides magazines, or websites with comprehensive nightclub listings. We labor not to ensure we can create new blogs for pet owners, or rich vertical online sites devoted to vacation properties. All of these and much more are essential, of course, because public service journalism is an expensive proposition, but we must not take for granted the capacity or elasticity of our newsrooms.

Let me close and say farewell in gratitude.

I am grateful that C.K. McClatchy saved the Anchorage Daily News and then hired me to write editorials there 30 years ago. I am grateful for the unwavering guidance and support I got for practicing the kind of journalism that won us the Pulitzer Prize for Pubic Service just a few weeks before his death. That precious commitment has been true here at McClatchy every day of my career. I am grateful to the family owners, to the board of directors, and of course to my colleagues, in newsrooms and on editorial boards and in the executive suite.

But most of all, as I close the book on my contributions to the company, I am grateful that Gary Pruitt is young enough, smart enough and tough enough to keep leading McClatchy through this perilous time. We’ve worked together since the early 1980s, when I was a young editor and he an even younger First Amendment lawyer, and I’m well positioned to bear witness to the remarkable consistency of character he brings to the challenges at hand. McClatchy could not have better hands on the tiller.

McClatchy to share some coverage with Christian Science Monitor

From a press release on mcclatchy.com

Dec. 1, 2008 – Today, the Christian Science Monitor and The McClatchy Company are initiating a content-sharing agreement that will offer print and online readers of the Monitor and of McClatchy's 30 daily newspapers more timely, top-notch foreign reporting.

The Monitor and McClatchy will make edited stories by Monitor foreign correspondents Mark Sappenfield, based in New Delhi, and Sara Miller Llana, based in Mexico City, and McClatchy foreign correspondents Shashank Bengali, based in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tyler Bridges, based in Caracas, Venezuela, available to one another when they're ready for publication.

"At a time when America's economy, national security, environment and even health are bound more closely than ever to the rest of the world, we're pleased to be able to give McClatchy readers access to some of the world-class foreign reporting for which the Monitor is famous," said McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief John Walcott, who oversees McClatchy's seven foreign bureaus.

"Cooperation between McClatchy and the Monitor supports the continued professional coverage of international news," said Monitor Editor John Yemma. "That’s important because readers need independent and trustworthy sources of news to understand complex issues around the globe."

The agreement will run for three months, at which time both parties will evaluate it and decide whether to continue the sharing agreement, to terminate it or to expand it.

Designing covers

Perhaps I'm simply feeling disagreeable, but I didn't find this survey of the best book cover design from 2008 particularly inspiring. A surprising number are simply jumbled displays of bad type. Others seem predictable or clichéd.

But there are some dandies, too. This is my favorite, and I'd also recommend "All the Sad Young Literary Men," and "Against Happiness," among a handful of others.

There's a poll and you can vote, too. What did you think?

Thanks, kottke.org for the pointer.

Liveblogging as regular coverage

I'm impressed with the way the NYT has turned Kit Seelye into a one-woman liveblogging machine. She regularly provides the first coverage I read on developing events like press conferences or speeches – and, quite often, her report is all I need.

Is anybody in McClatchy doing this on a regular basis?

WTF?

In my experience, it's impossible to keep up with all the developments on the web and in media nowadays, though you can learn to decipher the jargon. But you will need help.

Here's some. I haven't vetted the whole list and can't vouch for every entry, but this seems like a good, journalist-accessible compendium in plain English.