Looking at the web through reality-colored glasses

Internet triumphalists love the Wikipedia. In their view, it demonstrates why professionalism is no longer essential. The crowd-sourced online fact-a-palooza is a superior encyclopedia, news source and all-around reference, they say – and all that with volunteer editors and no paid editorial writing staff.

I love Wikipedia, too, and often cite it in this blog and elsewhere. For a certain kind of information it is both comprehensive and comprehensible, a ready public domain source that everybody can turn to. But in truth, it’s a good bit less than its partisans like to claim.

For instance, when an article in the journal Nature reported that peer-reviewed fact-checking found Wikipedia with 4 errors in 42 articles and Britannica with 3 per 42, Wired’s headline called it “a toss up” and said Wikipedia “is about as accurate in covering scientific topics as Encyclopedia Britannica.”

Well, no.

What those numbers actually show is that Wikipedia had a much higher error rate than Britannica: 10 percent of Wikipedia articles had errors while 7 percent of Britannica’s did. If I’m wrong 10 times and you’re wrong 7 times, you whipped me pretty good.

Wikipedia is probably better by now. For one thing, its original Dodge City, anything-goes format has been changed to guard against bias or animus introduced by anonymous contributors. Some articles are now sealed against revision by what Wikipedia calls its “community,” because – as in all communities – some members are assholes.

And those who are not assholes nonetheless represent a narrow slice of humanity. Though triumphalists see the web and society as largely congruent, they’re not. When you look at activist internet users, the gap grows much wider.

For instance, who are the people who selflessly contribute all that information to Wikipedia? Their own data show more than 80 percent of them are male, more than 65 percent are single, more than 85 percent are childless and around 70 percent are under age 30. “We are mostly male computer geeks,” says founder Jimmy Wales.

Now comes news that non-profit Wikipedia is spending $600,000 on a handful of consultants, advertising executives and others to help it orient its operations for the future.

I think that’s great, and I hope all these changes make Wikipedia better. But it’s worth noting that restricting access, insisting on editing and engaging professionals is a lot like what other encyclopedias and media companies have been going for a long time.

UPDATE This just in: Wikipedia is exploring ways to flag the articles that are most trustworthy.

Government subsidy, public decisions?

In a world where cheap, infinite and perfect copies are now the norm in many creative realms, old laws about limiting access – protecting copyrights, we called them – bear scant relation to reality. The world has out run the law.

Robert Penn Warren has Boss Stark explain this is All The King's Men, generally acclaimed the best political novel in American literature:

[The law] is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone's to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind...'"

Thus did The Boss commend the virtues of unmitigated pragmatism, the imperative of getting things done, of doing good, and let the law stretch out to match that.

Gone with the day of scarce and limited copies is the monopoly capitalism that fueled American journalism since World War II. Today finds us in between that passing era and an uncertain future, and serious citizens are discussing all kinds of ways to bridge the gap.

Often these involve calls for government subsidy, philanthropy, permission for collusion and much more. Most, in my view, are freighted with problems.

But government inevitably puts its thumb on the scale in all kinds of situations. It's naive or disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Ben Franklin (as Tim Rutten paraenthetically reminded us last week) favored postal subsidies for transmission of news. 230 years later, Bush administration tax and energy policies subsidized the manufacture and sale of gas-guzzling SUVs. Tax policy decides what kind of non-profit contributions donors can write off, thereby directed untold millions away from public treasury and into largely unaccountable charities.

So what? Well, I mention all that to put the question of government policy on the table for legitimate discussion, and to suggest one avenue I haven't heard mentioned much: vouchers.

There's a short discussion of this idea on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog. Here is the nut graph:

[in] 2003, as the music industry was disintegrating, lefty economist Dean Baker floated an idea for government funding of journalists, artists and other creative workers that would keep media purse strings out of government hands. Instead, every adult in the country would get a transferable $100 “artistic freedom voucher” once a year, which could be cashed in only by someone putting new intellectual property — anything from databases to photos to drum solos — into the public domain.

Believe in your local transit blog? Send them some free money, courtesy Uncle Sam. Want to stick it to Keith Olbermann? Mail your voucher to Bill O’Reilly.

Asked what he'd do if he had a $100 voucher, Baker wasn't sure – but thought he might donate it to advance jazz music.

Let a thousand flowers bloom.

What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money?

Here's a suggestion I haven't heard before: somebody ought to figure out what kind of business will support journalism rather than focusing on why our old business won't.

Perhaps that's an oversimplification, but the whole argument is really pretty simple. Here's the nut graf from a discussion aimed at finding new journalism business models:

The reason newspapers and magazines are dying is that what they do is no longer related to how they make money from it ... So what will the content site of the future look like? And how will you make money from it? These questions turn out to be very closely related. Just as they were for print media, initially.

Scott Rosenberg takes that starting point and spins it out with a bit more subtlety than the Y Combinator post did. Neither view perfectly reflects what I think about the issue, but both perform the important – no, crucial – service of insisting that simply thinking about our new problems in old ways is certain to be inadequate.

I am increasingly convinced that filtering, selecting and verifying the news that matters most into an accessible package is a service that will make money – enough money to sustain sophisticated accountability journalism. I don't agree that the whole future of news rests with small, decentralized pro/am operations of increasing specialization and ever narrower niches.

But I know we need to explore all the options, and I certainly agree with Rosenberg on this point:

The old bundle of information services and advertising that supported print journalism is gone, Humpty-Dumpty style, and nobody’s going to glue it back together. A deeper rethinking is needed, and those of us who want to see journalism thrive ought to be working hard to come up with answers to Graham’s question.

One-book novelists and perpetual panelists

Apropos of "one-book novelists" wherever we find them, this note from one of the best American writers most people have never read:

... Creative Writers' Workshops, poetry seminars and Festivals of the Arts will materialize midst campus greenery. The Failure of Hemingway The Failure of Faulker The Failure of Whitman The Failure of Melville The Failure of Crane The Failure of Twain The Failure of London and The Failure of Wolfe will be revealed by one-book novelists embittered by the failure of David Suskind to invite them to a party where they might have met George Plimpton or even Alan Funt. Just anybody.

Perpetual panelists will clobber perpetually rejected novelists with symbolisms concealed in the work of other perpetual panelists. Manuscripts will be returned with the instruction: Insert more symbols. This can happen anywhere but chances are better in Vermont.

Hand In Hand Through the Greenery,

with the grabstand clowns of Arts & Letters

in The Last Carousel, by Nelson Algren, 1973

Why are newspaper doomsayers usually so sloppy?

I don’t know Bill Wyman from a posthole, and you probably never heard of him either. You might wonder why I’m sitting in the country on a sunny Saturday afternoon bothering to critque his analysis of Why Newspapers Are Failing. It’s certainly not like other people haven't plowed this ground before.

And besides, he actually seems like a pretty interesting guy. I agree with 75- or 80% of what he’s arguing and I’d love to have a guy who writes with his verve working for my newspaper. (Oh yeah; I did. Several of them.)

But I read so much ill-informed, sloppy criticism of the newspaper industry that I have to get this stuff out of my system once in a while or explode. What’s more, NYU prof Jay Rosen has cited this analysis approvingly; he said that it “explains very well why I'm not horrified that some daily newspapers may expire.”

Is this kind of analysis the alternative, Jay? If so, you’d better get your horrified on again.

As I said at the top, most of Wyman’s criticism is appropriate and largely correct. It’s a bit threadbare by now, more or less conventional wisdom. What Wyman has done is write it a bit nastier and with more bite than usual.

Please hear this: I am not rejecting criticism or even a lot of Wyman’s criticism. Lots of it is right. But we don’t need to concentrate on what’s right; let’s look at the rest of it.

Much of it is shockingly superficial, and some of the rest is wrong in ways that would have easy to check. It sure doesn’t add up to the kind of thing I’d expect a smart journalism professor to praise.

Wyman's main point is that newspaper companies failed to see or prepare for the epic transformation as it came. Well, who did? Salon? Microsoft? Yahoo?

I hear this all the time. Why didn’t newspapers start Craigslist? Why didn’t newspapers invent Google?

Well, Christ. For the same reason almost no established, highly profitable business ever makes radical changes in its business until it has to. That’s about the best-known truism in the disruption narrative. Why does Wyman figure it happened to airlines and car makers and steel mills and mainframe computer manufacturers? What about film and camera companies, or sailing ships? Why didn’t Western Union buy Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patents when they had a chance?

More to the point, perhaps: Why did Google stumble along unprofitably until AdWords, a technology invented elsewhere for which they had to pay Yahoo to settle a patent-infringement case?

Wymnan wryly acknowledges his career has been marked by coming in after the battles to shoot the wounded; this analysis of what went wrong at news companies shows he hasn’t stopped that yet.

The central point Wyman and many others miss is that the fate of newspaper companies is far from decided. They get written off every day by careless or ignorant or mean-spirited critics, but the fat lady certainly has not sung.

For those wondering whether an industry beset by disruptive technology can stumble and yet recover, I offer two words: IBM and Kodak.

As you may know, I’ve offered several times in the last year to bet $1,000 on McClatchy’s prospects. None of the doomsayers has put up yet.

Indulge me, please, with just a few specifics from Wyman’s piece so I can get this cathartic purge over with.

David Carr offers a public serrvice by summarizing the main points of Wyman’s 9,000 words here. One of the five main points was “Newspapers were monopolists who cravenly serviced advertisers and failed to remember their fundamental mission to be of service and use to readers.”

Here’s a specific Wyman cheapshot on that theme:

... vast swaths of a typical American daily is [sic] filled with news whose primary source is a press release of one form or another, from entities governmental, political, or corporate. It was part of an unspoken but implicit agreement the papers had with advertisers—that the vast majority of what the paper printed would be complementary with the advertising. (It would be complimentary too, of course.)

I’ve been directly enagged in newspapers for 40 years, Bill. You’re full of shit.

He also suggests that circulation revenue doesn’t mean anything to news companies. He’s right that advertising accounts for the lion’s share of revenue, but ignorant about the percentages. You could have checked, Bill: at McClatchy, for instance, circulation revenues will be something like $280 million dollars, extrapolating crudely from first-quarter reports. Paid circulation newspapers are not, as he claims, “high end shoppers.” Indeed, a key differentiation between newspapers and shoppers is that people want one of them enough to pay to have it delivered. That matters to advertisers.

After proving that he doesn’t grasp all the history, Wyman proceeds to offer his prescription for success. I can’t imagine why anybody would care, but in case somebody does, please take care with his first recommendation: “Go hyper local,” basically, go all-in on a single strategy.

Well, okay. Maybe. But to be clear, this is the one well-tested prescription in the list that has been repeatedly proven to be a loser. Just saying.

Is a journalist a brand?

So, what’s with the logo? I’m glad you asked.

A Twitter friend says it makes me look “corporate,” which I don’t think she meant as a compliment. It’s definitely a high-class design, done by my pal Peter Dunlap-Shohl in Anchorage. But it isn’t intended to signal a move back to the executive suites.

Instead, it’s part of an experiment on my part. Thinking about the notion that individual journalists are (and need to be) now brands in themselves, I wanted to use a striking logo to identify my work across many platforms. Instead of using cute photos or the avatar-de-jour on Twitter and Facebook, I will use the same logo on both – and on the two blogs where I regularly comment, and on my business cards (when I get some) and my email signature (when I can figure out the html for that).

It’s been seven months since I left my job as VP/News at McClatchy, and I’m involved in a number of different projects. I am writing fiction, serving on the Publish2 board and advising them, doing video columns/stories with a small Sacramento company, maintaining (kind of) two blogs and Tweeting actively. I just accepted the assignment of writing an occasional column explaining American politics and culture to Canadians in a small new newspaper there.

All these things are just me, the iteration I’m calling Howard 3.2 at the moment. I figure the first phase was all those wonderful years of newspaper journalism in Alaska; 2.0 was Sacramento, both at The Bee and in corporate. 3.0 started when I left the nest, and continues to iterate.

Meanwhile, the logo abides.

Nielsen numbers reported by Nieman don't support dire conclusions

The headline at the Nieman Journalism Lab website does sound apocalyptic, so of course it was quickly repeated and gained wide currency amongst folks who think the battles about journalism are already over.

It says, “NAA/Nielsen stats show newspapers own less than 1 percent of U.S. online audience page views, time spent.”

Less than one percent? We’re doomed.

Well, no we’re not. The measure Martin Langeveld uses as a base is “Active Digital Media Universe” – which means everybody who uses the web for anything.

I posted a comment at the Nieman site this morning to express my concern with that:

This is useful, and thanks for flagging it, but the important information is *not* what you’ve concluded.

“Active Digital Media Universe” is a meaningless point of comparison. That includes e-commerce, porn, news, MySpace, music, ad infinitum. A huge percentage of that use isn’t and won’t ever be even remotely about news. Never was, isn’t now. Bad comparison.

It’s also not true that the 65% who didn’t visit a news site “got their news elsewhere.” Chances are a lot of them didn’t get their news *anywhere* and weren’t interested. Again, t’was always thus. Not everybody who read the comics or classified got the paper looking for news, that that’s far less true today.

The important measurement, it seems to me, is how news sites do in serving people who are looking for news. Your interpretation of these figures sheds little light on that essential question.

I know news companies can do better at this, and have argued how, most recently proposing collaborative, mass scale aggregation of curated news. That can be hugely profitable -- but still won’t capture the porn audience.

Obviously, that number (percent of total audience) looks better as it gets higher, but it's not the key metric. Despite the assertions of critics, news sites like McClatchy's continue to grow audience and revenue. This new Nielsen report needs more study and thought, but it is not the bombshell it's been presented as.

A prejudice (and a prayer) for the power of the newsroom

Off the news ticker this week:

McClatchy and a number of other newspaper companies recently surprised and pleased Wall Street with first quarter earnings reports far better than predicted. One analyst (who’s invested in newspaper stocks) predicts that cost-cutting at the papers has taken hold just as the economy bottoms out, meaning that even modest improvement could mean “spectacular earnings growth” for several quarters.

By no coincidence at all, newspaper stocks – languishing in the cellar – rose dramatically. Their levels are still at or near historic lows, but after a long, steady plunge many are climbing again.

All of this relies on the economy getting better – people selling cars and houses, placing help-wanted ads, advertising clothing sales – and news on that front also brings tentative signs of improvement. Numbers involving home sales, earnings, declining unemployment claims and news from other sectors all gave hints that the bottom of the recession may be near.

On top of all that, beleaguered newspaper people must have taken some comfort from an article in Advertising Age that show public use of the internet is flattening, while traditional media have generally slowed or reversed their declines.

So it’s all good, right? Won’t be long ‘till everything is back to normal.

Well, no. There is no “normal” nowadays, and there’s no going back. But it is equally true that predictions of apocalytical change are overstated.

This is unquestionably a run of good news for those of us who don’t believe total, immediate digital transformation is the best scenario for journalism in America. Some do, and they argue their case tirelessly. No doubt they’ll find many reasons to dismiss my analysis of those development.

At least I’m consistent. I’ve argued for years that the shift from analog to digital is inevitable; on my first web page, in 1995, I wrote, “I’ve always been a storyteller, and I'm convinced the stories of the new millenium will be told digitally."

But I also argue, against a gale of internet triumphalism to the contrary, that the shift won’t (and shouldn’t) be immediate or total. Many of the people predicting the imminent death of printed news or counseling companies to shutter newspapers and spend all their money on the web are drinking their own bathwater. They have a vision – many times a clear and compelling vision – of what the shift to a digital, networked world will look like, but they’re in danger of leaping to conclusions that aren’t there.

I don’t believe untrained or unpaid volunteers alone can produce the kind of journalism on which democracy depends. I believe most people want and value good filters to separate signal from noise – and the best way we’ve ever found to do that is with professional journalists.

Of course I am deeply prejudiced on this subject. I love newsrooms and newsroom culture; for 40 years they’ve been my church, my job and my playground. You have to view my analysis with that in mind.

But those 40 years have also given me experience and insight I think come to play here. I know what a good newsroom can do, because I’ve been lucky enough to work in some. I have seen principle stand up against pressure, courage hold sway against expedience, ideals triumph over self-interest. I know what it takes to produce work like “A People In Peril,” the Anchorage Daily News’ 1989 Pulitzer for Public Service, when more than 30 talented professionals applied decades of skill and training and all their energy in the service of a singular public-spirited vision. I don’t think that will come from a volunteer collective.

But I neither am I terminally nostalgic about the past. A lot of things need to change, and others will change no matter what we think about it. Hierarchy has evaporated, the gatekeeper role has vanished and what was once inclined to become a sermon must now be a genuine conversation. “Objectivity” and distance – the “news voice” of our heritage – are dead. Transparency and fairness remain achievable goals; combined with the new plethora of views and opinions, that may be enough to support a consensus reality and common vocabulary for public affairs.

None of these things are the exclusive provence of professional journalism, certainly not exclusive to legacy newsrooms built to meet different needs. There are a handful of creditable “hyperlocal” news operations, there are examples of non-professional journalists making important contributions, and a few beacons that show us outlines of how newsrooms may evolve. All of these will grow stronger with experience.

But none of them now come close to the capacity of a good newspaper newsroom, which encompasses so much talent and experience and knowledge that it can produce a fountain of vital, important and compelling journalism where others are still producing trickles.

Talking Points Memo – a clear example of how journalism can evolve into new forms without forsaking heritage – did a fine job (along with McClatchy’s DC bureau) of exposing the politicization of the Department of Justice. And while it was doing that, traditional newsrooms opened our eyes to things like unauthorized wiretapping by the NSA, the CIA's secret "black site" prisons in Europe, illegal back-dated stock options at public companies, scandalous conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital, abuses at Guantanamo Bay, and much more.

Thus I come to my continuing prayer: that the potency and capacity of our best newsrooms will be preserved and once again nurtured, and that they will continue to rise to the challenge of embracing a new news paradigm and a new relationship with audiences. I am encouraged to believe this is happening.

From oration to conversation

Whatever happens, however we rearrange our marketplace of ideas - as sooner or later we certainly shall - our sense of what “publication” means is bound to change. We will be able to make our commentary part of the text, and weave an elaborate series of interlocked commentaries together. We will, that is, be moving from a series of orations to a continuing conversation, and, as we have always known, these two rhetorics differ fundamentally. It seems reasonable to assume that as the definition and nature of “publication” changes, our system of academic rewards and punishments will change as well. If we keep an eye on these changes, they may change for the better. Above all, we may be able to introduce our students to the scholarly conversation sooner than we do now, and in more realistic and effective ways. (emphasis added)

Richard Lanham
The Electronic Word:
Democracy, technology and the arts

University of Chicago Press 1993 p22

Stupid headline words: the readers speak

I asked folks on Twitter what stupid words in headlines bothered them most. Here are the initial responses:

Probed; spar; faces; linger; walks back; curb; spark; exec; inks; Solons; pokes (for the Dallas Cowboys); mull; nix; tapped kudo; eyed; inked; dissed; slay/slain

One person offered a three-fer: Moguls Ink Pact

Add to the list in comments below. There must be more stupid words than these ...

Scoring this round: McClatchy 1, critics/analysists 0

A Macintosh blogger I follow has a feature he calls "claim chowder" in which he delights in digging up and exposing old predictions and claims after they have been proven spectacularly wrong. It's a delightful dip in a pool of revenge and schadenfreude.

Michael Simonton, welcome to a hot, steaming bowl of claim chowder:

Fitch Ratings analyst Michael Simonton is among the camp that believes McClatchy will wind up in bankruptcy court at some point. "Default is imminent or inevitable," Simonton predicted after McClatchy's debt exchange flopped.

In fact, evidence at hand now suggests he was not just wrong, but stupid wrong. This from yesterday (AP):

The surprising profit raised hopes that McClatchy has shrunk down to a size that will enable it to remain in good graces with its lenders and avoid bankruptcy protection ... "'It's really remarkable,'' said newspaper analyst Edward Atorino of Benchmark Co. ''They have done a Herculean job in a difficult economy. Unless things get a lot worse real fast, they should be OK for the rest of 2009.''

Obviously, much remains uncertain and unpredictable in the middle of both economic meltdown and an epochal phase transition in the news business. Anything can happen. Your mileage may vary. Yada, yada.

I'm no longer at McClatchy, certainly not privy to any insider information. I'm sure the execs there, as always, will be cautious and deliberate about what they have to say.

But I don't have to be. In the end, you ought to place your bets on one side or the other or shut up.

Note to Simonton: You get paid for this kind of analysis, right? You're an expert? Put up or shut up.

A couple of drinks with Walter Cronkite

I was having drinks with Frank McCulloch at the bar in the Crow’s Nest in Anchorage one night in the early ‘80s. (We never went for “a drink” in those days; we went for “drinks”.)

Walter Cronkite, in town for a broadcasters’ shindig, spotted Frank across the room and came hustling over. A thirty-something journalist whose entire career had been in Anchorage couldn’t have dreamed of sitting at the table while they swapped trans-global war stories. My favorite was Cronkite’s recollection of “all we went through to get our folks out” of Saigon as the city was falling.

Cronkite left before we did. A waiter came over with some concern and told us he’d left his credit card behind.

Frank offered to deliver it. We all knew, in that time and age, that almost nowhere on earth could anyone else get away with using a card that said “Walter Cronkite” on it.

Feedback, push back and a final word

The feedback and push back I'm getting for suggesting that news companies compete by building a better news site has become too varied and detailed to handle in the comments section.

First, thanks to Scott, Dave, John and Chris for giving the idea respect enough to argue with it. (I haven't heard back yet from Jeff, whom I think misread my argument, but I hope to. I actually expected us to be on the same side on this one: compete, innovate, collaborate, link, fight back).

There are some straw men and some plain old mistakes in these criticisms. I'm sure there are valid points and gotchas, too, but I'm not highlighting them :)

Biggest straw man: Google News. Nobody is talking about Google News, which is a strange beast by any measure – and not a very useful aggregation page, in my view. We're talking about all the ways across all Google platforms in which people hunt for news or get back news results when they hunt for something from any source.

A news search can and does include ads, fellows. Click here, for instance. And when you search for topics generically, news results some up at the top of pages with ads. Try this one.

But this isn't my main point. This is:

I'm not suggesting we beat Google at search or "take away" their business. I am saying we can beat Google at a customer service they don't do well: filtering and displaying news content of relevance and utility for busy, overwhelmed consumers, pitting judgment vs algorithms.

"Leapfrogging," if you will, to a new game.

In my view, this has to be done at scale. Small new initiatives are essential and some will doubtless prove viable, but we're not talking about one problem and can't rely on one solution.

Finally, I have to tell Chris that his argument isn't at all persuasive to me. Topix is and pretty much always was the opposite of what I'm talking about. It may well have a place, and I hope they find it, but it isn't about judgment.

I understand lot of this is religion and not subject to ordinary debate, so I'll end my part of the back-and-forth here. I devoutly hope I get a chance to be proved right – or wrong. (It's all about mistakes, eh Jeff?)

Time for news to play offense: how David can attack Goliath (and win)

If you don’t think paid content can ever pay the freight for professional journalism – and I don’t – then what hope is there for news companies?

Well, the good news is that there’s plenty of money being made on content online. On the other hand, the news companies have to be willing to fight for it.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL are making more money from online content than the newspaper industry makes from everything. Many billions of those dollars are tied directly to the distribution of news and news searches, and that’s the money news companies must find a way to get.

Let’s say those online giants – call them GYMA – make $15 billion a year from news and news-related content (searches, archives, etc). I think that’s a conservative guess.

If we could find a way to get just 10 percent of that – $1.5 billion – pumped into American newsrooms, the impact would be direct, immediate and dramatic. The layoffs could stop, and owners would have breathing room to address strategic questions instead of constantly bailing water to keep the boats afloat. Newsrooms could start hiring the kind of people they need to create the journalism of the future.

Too often, executives and editors I talk with at news companies act like that’s impossible. You can’t compete with Google, they say, grasping instead for legislation or regulation to let them keep their content behind pay walls, away from GYMA altogether. They somehow think their content is valuable enough to charge readers for, but not valuable enough to compete in a marketplace that’s already proven extremely lucrative and attractive to consumers.

Say that again: valuable enough to sell to people who haven’t been willing to buy it so far, but not valuable enough to compete with GYMA? Not good enough to capture 10% of their ad revenue?

That’s a losing strategy. And it’s wrong.

I’m a real dinosaur in the news business in one respect, at least: I spent the first 20 years of my career in life-or-death competition for readers and revenues. The good guys won (that was us) and I’ve never flinched from a competitive fight since.

Not many news executives and editors nowadays were lucky enough to have that seasoning. The newspaper industry as a whole was monopolistic in many important ways over the last 40 or 50 years. Truth is, it was easy to make money for most of them.

I’ve often heard McClatchy’s Gary Pruitt say the news business in that era proved the wisdom of Warren Buffet’s admonition to “always invest in a company that can be run by a complete idiot – because sooner or later, it will be.” When the Anniston Star’s owner (Brandy Ayers) announced in 2003 that he was creating a foundation to keep the paper he inherited independent and reinvest profits in community and academic affairs, he told ASNE he had been raised in a great newspaper tradition with “the twin blessings of monopoly and nepotism.”

News companies no longer have either: few are nepotistic these days, and the notion of monopoly is a distant, dimming memory.

To win and survive in the future, they need to look back instead to a tradition that used to define the industry: competitive fire.

An old politician in Juneau once reminded me that “you can’t beat something with nothing.” Newspapers won’t beat Google or other aggregators by building pay walls and leaving the field of battle. To win, they need to provide something better than GYMA. That’s where the money is – that $15 billion isn’t theoretical – and besides, open competition is the only way to keep serving a mass audience, which is their mission.

The good news is that they already have a product that can beat even Google in the news business: curated, edited, verified, sorted news – not just an exhaustive list of stories, but the news that matters most. What they don’t have is any way to play on the same field as Google. They lack the scale and internet savvy to put that product in front of consumers who want it and for whom advertisers will pay. Google has proven that works; what news companies have to do is take some of that money away.

Google’s algorithims are a wonder of the world, by far the best at sorting and retrieving static information of all kinds. What they don’t do very well is sort through information on the basis of trustworthiness: which is best, most reliable, most accurate? “We have not come up with a way to algorithmically handle that in a coherent way,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the NAA last April.

Well, journalists can and do handle that in a coherent way, every minute of every day.

The problem for news companies is that Google spans the globe, and they individually can’t. Only by banding together to offer the collective judgment of thousands of journalists about hundreds of relevant stories and presenting that in web-savvy ways can they reach the scale necessary to win a share of the billions already flowing to Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN.

Disclosure: I am on the board of a company (Publish2) that is finalizing plans we think could do just that – and something Google never will: share 50% of the revenue with those who create the stories. Others are also looking at or thinking about ways to address the need for joint, competitive action. For any to succeed, the news companies will have to stop building walls and find the nerve to play offense again. They will have to work together and win by offering a better product. They will have to do it soon.

The Anchorage Daily News was just beginning to win its 40-year battle with the Anchorage Times when that once-dominant paper was sold to a rough-and-tumble oil millionaire with deep pockets and a reputation for ruthless competition. It seemed like everybody I talked to after that said something like, “You must be scared now that you have to compete with Bill Allen.”

Honestly, I wasn’t. “If I wanted to compete in the oilfield services business, I’d be terrified,” I told them. “But in the news business, Bill Allen ought to be terrified of us.”

After spending two years and a reported $40 million learning that, he folded the Anchorage Times.

I’d be terrified to think about competing with Google on anything involving algorithms. But when it comes to news judgment, they ought to be terrified of us.

How to compete with free

I've had some mean things to say about Chris Anderson's "Free" thesis, but beneath the book's overly simplified theme, he's done a lot of good thinking about what makes products competitive in a world where so much is, after all, free.

Good interview here; this is the quote I liked best:

You know, why do people buy music when you can download it for free? Why does iTunes exist. Because it's easier and safer and faster, not really because people feel some sort of moral obligation to pay for music. Ninety-nine cents doesn't matter as much as one-click simplicity. So they're not selling music. They're selling simplicity.

And that's what news sites must do: don't sell commodity news, sell what readers want: understandable, verified, trustworthy news that has been sorted and displayed in ways that can be digested by busy people.

Ancestor worship or fertility rites?

Jeff Jarvis makes an important, fundamental point about mistakes, failures and innovation over at Buzzmachine today.

He's thinking specifically about the issue in what I think is perhaps the toughest context: government. His point is that "government must be granted the license to fail ... so it can have the courage to innovate," and surely that's right in theory.

But it's probably tougher to tolerate failure in government than elsewhere because it is by definition pluralistic and needs to meet some consistent standard. Stakeholders are bound to question why their programs are always the ones that seem to fail.

In private life – business and commerce, the academy, creative endeavors – Jeff's point is fundamentally applicable. I was lucky enough to be taught as a young editor periodically to ask the folks I worked with, "When was the last time you made a good mistake?"

I'd stress, of course, that a "good mistake" didn't involve coming in drunk and misspelling all the names. A good mistake was one where we learned something we couldn't have learned otherwise, where we were better off afterward for what we learned, where we had a clearer vision of what to try next.

The real reason to ask them, though, was this: If a person can't think of a good mistake, that means he's been asleep. It's axiomatic that people who try new things will fail; the only people who don't aren't trying.

Jeff also cites Craig Newsmark's observation that England suffers widespread "failurephobia":

I was struck by the repeated comment that failure is stigmatized in UK business culture. In Silicon Valley, failure is just a normal phase of one’s career. You might succeed in your first endeavor, probably not, so you’re ready to persist in subsequent efforts…..

So true. I lived in England for a year in the early 90s, a period of widespread despair and discouragement for the Brits. I wrote an essay about feeling "suffocated" by the culture there. As an English columnist wrote in noting his countrymen's widespread criticism of Bill Clinton's inauguration, "Every public ceremony in England is ancestor worship; every public ceremony in the United States is a fertility rite."

Think about this also calls to mind the supposed motto of the French bureaucracy: "Nothing should ever be done for the first time."

The U.S. has a huge advantage over "old Europe" in these matters – but not, I think, over India, or China, or Brazil. Beware.

Malcolm Gladwell takes apart Chris Anderson's "Free"

Pondering the narrow topics John McPhee has explored in his career, a critic once wrote, “One day John McPhee is going to bite of less than he can chew.” I’ve had the same thought about the subjects of Malcolm Gladwell books, to tell the truth; like Thomas Friedman and others, he seems to specialize in taking a really good, interesting idea and expanding it far beyond anything I wanted to know.

I say this to introduce what I found a compelling Gladwell piece in which he takes apart another author – Chris Anderson, author and editor of Wired – for a much greater sin: failing to report (or perhaps even understand) several essential points that turn his thesis on its head.

The thesis in question is Anderson’s much-cited theory that “Free” is the news business model – certainly in the digital world and, increasingly, in meatspace as well. (As widely noted, neither Anderson's book nor magazine is free.) For both a citation of the Anderson ideal and Gladwell’s brutally effective rebuttal, this:

"Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information [from publishers] to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?

Having effectively dismissed the central idea in “Free,” Gladwell then happily proceeds to demolish a lot of the pseudo-factual evidence Anderson uses to support it.

For one, Anderson uses YouTube as a poster child for his point. ““Nobody is deciding whether a video is good enough to justify the scarce channel space it takes, because there is no scarce channel space,” he writes, and goes on:

Nobody is deciding whether a video is good enough to justify the scarce channel space it takes, because there is no scarce channel space. Distribution is now close enough to free to round down... which is why YouTube’s founders decided to give it away. . . . The result is both messy and runs counter to every instinct of a television professional, but this is what abundance both requires and demands.

Ooo. Bad choice, Anderson. As Gladwell telling points out, YouTube is a spectacular money loser. It costs its owners (Google) something like $360 million just for the bandwidth to serve up all those billions of videos. Even worse (for YouTube) was the discovery that advertisers don’t want their ads placed alongside most of the crap (skateboarding cats and bad dancers). In order to sell ads, YouTube pays roughly another $200 million to license quality commercial entertainment.

Gladwell:

To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

Finally, Gladwell demonstrates what shallow reasoning Anderson and so many techno-utopian evangelists employ. Take a famous example from the 1950s, when Lewis Strauss, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, predicted “our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy that is too cheap to meter.”

Well, we all know that didn’t happen; Gladwell shows why it couldn’t happen: Strauss made his prediction based on the assumption that nuclear energy, compared to coal or fossil fuel, would generate electricity so cheaply it could be given away. In the words of another AEC commissioner: “Even if coal were mined and distributed free to electric generating plants today, the reduction in your monthly electricity bill would amount to but twenty per cent, so great is the cost of the plant itself and the distribution system.”

Obviously I am quite taken with Gladwell’s analysis, and urge you to click through to the New Yorker and read the whole thing. Because thinking and writing like Gladwell’s, I can assure you, does not come free – or even cheaply.

U{DATE: Josh Young points me to an analysis that says Google's loss is much less than the Credit Suisse number Gladwell cites. In truth, nobody knows, but I am sure Google doesn't want it to be free.

More mush, fewer facts

Jeff Jarvis reminds us today that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently described the internet era as “more tumultuous than any previous economic or social revolution.”

Perhaps that isn't even worth correcting, but I believe it's dangerously ignorant. Too much of the debate about trends in media and communication nowadays is animated by similarly myopic and ignorant arguments. (I'd include Clay Shirky's claims about coverage of the 1968 Chicago riots, discussed here yesterday, in that group).

I mentioned this in a comment on Jeff's blog earlier today.

In just 35 years between 1844 and 1879, the world first experienced dependable electric lights, the telegraph, the telephone, a transatlantic telegraph cable, publication of the Communist manifesto, motion pictures, locomotives, the discovery of penicillin …and dozens more. Add a couple more years and we can throw in the Model T, locomotives, and AM radio.

I’m sure he’s right that better communication will [bring] changes in foreign policy. Good thing, too.

But the most tumultuous period ever? Such ignorance undermines the credibility of everybody who makes claims like that, certainly including the hugely unpopular PM Brown.

Come on, professor

In a valentine to Twitter on the TED blog, NYU Prof. Clay Shirky declares that social media (especially Twitter) have exposed developments following the Iranian elections as never before.

[T]his is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ...

I think it's fantastic that we have TWitter and outher sources, and like cellphones (and faxes before them) social media surely are wonderful tools for self-organizing response.

It takes nothing away from those facts to call "bullshit" on his contention, however.

The 1968 Chicago riots were carried live on all three American television networks for an audience of at least 50 million people in this country alone.

There are about a million Twitter users.

Come on, professor.

Not with a blog but a twitter

I'm posting much less often here than I did while working fulltime in journalism.

For starters, I know less about what's going on. I'm less engaged in the cut-and-thrust and don't feel entitled to comment on everything that floats by. I reject the Olympian, detached pronouncements of many critics and don't want to fall prey to that myself. I've always disdained those who "wait up in the hills until the battle is over and then come down to shoot the wounded."

I've also concluded that much of what passes for debate in the field nowadays is tired, threadbare and unproductive. There's little to be gained from pointing out the factual errors underlying some doomsayers' predictions, for example; it doesn't change their behavior. There's no point encouraging publishers worried about paying the rent to spend more time pondering the relative value of a newsriver versus a topics page.

I remain optimistic about the future of a professional journalism that follows standards and applies expertise to help people verify and filter their information overload. While tomorrow's journalism won't be a mirror of today's, neither is it likely to involve rejection of all today's institutions and standards.

And, in any case, the 140-character frame of Twitter seems to fit both my mood and my schedule better than longer blog posts most days. I am more active there, as @howardweaver, commenting on a range of topics, certainly including news and journalism. You might enjoy the occasional tweets of "AP Moron Watch" examples, or episodic terse exchanges with the gravedancers.

I'll continue to use this space for subjects where I think I have something valuable to add. And I remain eager to hear from you, here or at howard (dot) weaver (at) gmail dot com.

What if readers decide what to pay for news?

Want to turn the pay-for-content debate on its head?

Fine then; take a look at Doc Searls’ plan that envisions a world where creators do charge for content, but consumers determine what price to pay.

It’s easy to dismiss the notion as naive or inadequate, but consider please his observation that “Whatever readers decide to pay, the sum of it won’t be $0, which is what readers are paying [online] now.”

More importantly, this approach recognizes that we have no idea what a news story is worth, and never have. In the days of scarcity and monopoly, price was a function of how badly readers wanted any part of the package we sold. It came only in a one-size-fits-all unit with the cost of delivery built in. If they wanted sports, 50¢. If they wanted world news, 50¢. How about classified listings for a used car? 50¢.

In that world, we never had any idea what unbundled news content was worth; there was no way for readers to show us. It was a binary vote from them: I'll take it all at your price, or I won't take it at all.

In a today’s media economy of abundance and zero cost of copying, we need to find out what news is worth. Unlike many, I don’t believe the old revenue model – chiefly ad sales – is going away entirely, but it certainly will never be the same. Tomorrow’s business model will involve (among other things) less revenue from advertising but vastly lower cost of distribution. What would we charge for a news story if we didn’t have to print and deliver a paper?

What would we need to charge? In the days when I looked at McClatchy's numbers, newsrooms cost about $300 million a year and internet revenues were approaching $200 million. The newsrooms are obviously smaller now, and internet sales at McClatchy continue to climb.

Discussion about paying for professional newsgathering these days includes ideas about philanthropy, non-profit status, even financing like NPR. EmanciPay deserves to be part of the discussion.

Rather than describe what Searls has in mind, I'd ask you to read it, ponder it, and let me hear what you think.

Think of EmanciPay as a way to unburden sellers of the need to keep trying to control markets that are beyond their control anyway. Think of it as a way that “free market” can mean more than “your choice of captor.” Think of it as a way that “customer relationships” can be worthy of the label because both sides are carrying their ends of the relationship burden — rather than the sellers’ side carrying the whole thing (as CRM systems do today).

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.