Whap! Whap!

A while back I wrote about the Albany Times Union’s decision to spend a fortune on a new building and presses. Now it’s buying out 30 newsroom employees. All this, we learn from Editor M. Monica Bartoszek (via Editor and Publisher), is consistent with a plan “to accelerate our transition from a traditional newspaper to a multimedia company.”

Big fancy new presses for the print product. Fewer journalists to create multimedia. Sounds like a solid plan.

How many of your papers have established wikis to compile local and institutional history? Even if it’s behind a firewall, it’s great resource for your staffers. Papers throwing out … er, I mean buying out … their old timers, think of all the knowledge that’s walking out the door almost every day …

Number 1: A local historian. Reporters who have been around forever are great, but not enough. Hire a history wonk obsessed with your local area.

Number 2: A librarian. A real, dedicated professional who can catalog and archive your paper’s assets, such as reporters’ notes and unpublished correspondence. Sadly, you can hire a good librarian for a ridiculously low salary.

Why these positions in a time of cutbacks?

First, long-time residents are turned off by reporters and editors who know and care little about their communities. Aggressive historians and librarians can be invaluable as resources for reporters and as watchdogs for when you screw up.

Second, these positions can generate revenue and goodwill with your customers. Newspaper editors claim to be the best (and sometimes only) source of information about their towns or cities. They are delusional. Papers are usually unable or unwilling to provide any information beyond what they choose to print on a given day or leave online.

A case in point: I’m researching the history of a famous Native American in the Detroit area, Chief Sashabaw. The Sashabaw name is everywhere in Oakland County, on highways, schools, cemeteries, and more. Yet no one at any of the papers I have contacted back there knows, or cares, a thing about this man whose name they see or hear almost daily. They can’t find old stories they ran about incidents involving him. I would happily pay for information, but they have none to offer me.

OK, these positions probably won’t generate enough revenue to cover their cost, but then neither do reporters, photographers, etc. But when you add in the value they provide to your staff and the goodwill they can generate with your customers, they can be invaluable. Add to that the books and special sections they could contribute, and the proposition looks pretty attractive.

If newspapers don’t start investing in knowledge and the technology necessary to support it, their claim to being a source of information, rather than simply manufacturers of a paper product, will be laughed at by customers.

Made you look! You thought this was another post about race.

I’m actually back to technology. Specifically CBS’s purchase of CNET for $1.8 billion.

From an investor’s perspective, this looks like insanity. After reading CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves’ rationale for the takeover, it looks more like just plain old ignorance. Here’s from a New York Times story:

“We are not going to spend $1.6 billion on YouTube,” he told The New York Times, referring to the video-sharing site that Google had recently bought. “We are looking for the next YouTube and Quincy knows all the players.”

Mr. Moonves now appears to have decided that CBS needs to spend at least that much to build out its Internet presence and make it attractive to advertisers.

“There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNET Networks,” he said in a press release Thursday. “Together, CBS and CNET Networks will have significant additional exposure to the fastest-growing advertising sector and can accelerate our growth through a number of new content, promotion and advertising initiatives.”

How, exactly, is CNET “the next YouTube,” other than that they’re both accessible via the internet? No offense to CNET, but for the most part it would be just at home on paper as online. It’s a content site. To some extent YouTube is, too, but it’s of a form that couldn’t exist without the internet.

The most successful internet companies - eBay, MySpace, Facebook, CraigsList, Google, etc. - all harness the power of the medium. There are great content sites online, but for the most part they aren’t financially successful without the backing of a print, cable or broadcast entity.

Too many Old Media execs still cling to the hope that by putting up a website they’ll be the same as YouTube. Toss in some animated graphics and one of those blog thingies and we’re all set. Yahoo, among others, has taught us that if you create a front door that harnesses the power of the medium, people will come … and then stay for the content.

Newspaper execs stubbornly cling to their old model, time after time building websites that lead with flat content, hoping that maybe somehow people will search out the interactive elements and stay for a while.

Simply having a website doesn’t make CBS or the Washington Post or anyone else an internet company. Until the Old Media execs see this, they’ll continue to fail online and say “See, I told you, there’s no money to be made online.”

Now back to the discussion of race. I’m working a post called “They all look alike to Old Media …”

I said I hope the site grows on me as I use it more. It hasn’t.

Instead of being a bold leap forward for the newspaper industry, it’s a step back. The unique web content has been buried even deeper under the recycled newspaper stuff. There’s nothing to invite current readers to enjoy both the paper and the site, only an invitation to choose between the two, which is at best a zero-sum strategy.

Worse, there’s nothing to entice people who don’t read the paper to use the site. It’s another failure on the part of newspaper editors to understand why people are turning away from paper and to the web. It’s like the hideous Olive Software trend of simply digitizing the print product. That works for a tiny sliver of a site’s potential audience but misses the point of why people don’t read the paper.

Newspapers are designed for a strict and largely antiquated manufacturing process. The content is highly constrained, both temporally and spatially, and let’s face it: Much of what is printed is there just to fill the gaps around the ads. The result is a dull, flat experience for the reader.

A well-designed website allows editors to guide readers, but also allows readers to create their own experience. I like Google because the front door allows me total freedom to find only what I want, or to click on news for an editor’s judgment. Philly.com is all about editors guiding me through an experience of their creation.

And philly.com doesn’t even do that well. Navigation is confusing, and not just because it’s a change. Where is Attytood? I’ll find it, but I shouldn’t have to go searching down dead-end alleys.

Cross-browser functionality is a mess. I understand that most people use Explorer, folks, but some of us prefer Firefox, Safari, etc. In fact, Explorer is now a minority platform on WhapWhap, for example, if you exclude spiders. Yet the drop-down “Marketplace” menu and the top of philly.com doesn’t work in Firefox or Safari, as far as I can tell. That kind of mistake is common for us amateur developers, but an enterprise with the resources of philly.com can and should do better.

And for an editor-driven experience,  philly.com is pretty aimless. Here, for example, is my brother’s experience with the movie listings:

“I discovered that the old “find a movie — by neighborhood” function no longer existed. Instead, you need to write in your own search terms. By writing in “Center City,” I was able to pull up the schedules for the Ritz theaters — but not the Franklin Institute, nor I believe the small indie where I saw the excellent “Michael Clayton.” It also pulled up theaters in several, to me, far-flung suburbs. When I entered “University City” (my neighborhood), I got the schedules for several of the same suburban theaters, but not The Bridge, 5 blocks away from me.”

Not the end of the world, to be sure. But again, the editors miss the point. They brag that images of Philadelphia landmarks leave no doubt the site is local. But movie listings that feel like they were designed by someone who has never visited the city leave plenty of doubt.

I’m done piling on now. But the clock is ticking on newspapers’ chance to reclaim local web markets, and a retreat into the past like this one isn’t helping anyone.

I’ve been playing around with philly.com after reading Mark Potts’ impassioned promotion of the redesign.

I really wanted to get excited about the redesign. I’m not. I don’t hate it, I just don’t see any innovation. The comments are integrated with the stories, which is great, but the blogs are hidden somewhere, as are most of the things people love the internet for.

Oh, and there are polls. Very innovative. For 1994.

It feels like just about every other newspaper site out there. I’ll take more time with the site because I have family in Philadelphia and I visit philly.com from time to time. I hope it grows on me.

In the meantime: Anyone want to tell me why this redesign is newsworthy?

Newspaper editors love to rail against anonymous postings on the internet.

Here, for example, is what Tim McGuire of Arizona State University said this week: “It’s time for newspapers and every other adult working on the web to realize and admit that we are not fostering democracy when we encourage and enable vicious, anonymous comments.”

It’s a small excerpt from a lengthy article that makes many fine points. You can read it here. But making other good points can’t erase this very bad one.

I truly wish people would be civil on the web, talk radio and everywhere else. But anonymous speech is still speech. It still has value… I truly wish people would be civil on the web, talk radio and everywhere else. But anonymous speech is still speech. It still has value and it still deserves protection.

The argument also is deeply hypocritical coming from newspaper editors, who every day hide behind anonymous editorials and a barrage of anonymous sources. Freedom of the press, A.J. Liebling is said to have written, belongs to those who own one. Editors such as Mr. McGuire want to keep it that way. We’ll decide, they say, who gets to express an opinion and whether or not they can do so anonymously.

Demanding that people identify their opinions publicly is a form of intimidation. Nothing more. It’s why we hold anonymous voting so sacred.

I am glad that the internet allows me to be read the unfiltered hate speech of groups I detest (many of who hide behind anonymity). Those people are acting on their hateful opinions anonymously every time they walk into a voting booth. I like having them out in the open so I can try to understand where the hatred is coming from.

Having run anonymous forums at a newspaper for many years, I definitely did not like the sometimes vicious comments people sometimes posted about me. At the same time, I found it educational to know that things I did or said, however innocently, could be interpreted as being malicious. Had I demanded identification I might have protected myself from these slurs, but I wouldn’t have done anything to prevent people from being angry at me and I wouldn’t have learned anything from their anger.

I wrote a column about these anonymous postings at the time, because the paper’s editor was demanding names be made public. In it, I pointed out that the vast majority of postings were not hateful, and some were very uplifting. In the column, I asked if anyone knew the original author of the Golden Rule. I got dozens of responses, almost every one citing a different source.

Nearly everyone agreed, however, that what people say is more important than who says it.

p.s. Soon after that column, the paper got burned by a frequent letter writer who often espoused what I considered to be offensive ideas. He was published because he didn’t so anonymously.  He had a name, which made it OK. Only it turns out the name he was using wasn’t his own. He was in reality the top aide of a Republican legislator. A top aide who was sometimes quoted anonymously in news columns. So much for accountability.

The St. Petersburg Times is redesigning its print product. Some of the changes , such as dropping stock listings, are inevitable. Some, such as merging metro and business are trendy, if misguided.

Some, to me, are just baffling. Why, for example, bring back color weather? The article says people asked for it. Readers want many things, but papers are trying to prioritize those wants. Why weather? Will anyone drop their subscription because the package shrinks or even disappears? I’m a weather fanatic, with a computerized weather station on one of my sheds, but I haven’t looked at a newspaper weather section in years. More than almost any other subject, weather is an arena in which papers can’t compete against TV, radio and the internet. Why to one of your weaknesses at the expense of things papers excel at (or could), such as local business coverage?

Why not drop weather and greatly expand business? It doesn’t even have to be expensive coverage. Lists of new businesses, property sales, promotions, etc., are valuable to people, can add dozens of local names to the paper and can be compiled by clerks. TV stations aren’t going to do that, but they’ll happily kick your butt with their weather coverage, so papers lose in both regards.

And if times are as bad as newspapers suggest, maybe it’s time for some radical ideas. Here’s the most radical I can think of: What about eliminating some print classified content? When you think about, papers are already “benefiting” if you can call it that, from reduced newsprint costs because classified sections are shrinking.

Why not try to turn that to your advantage? Why not convert large chunks of classifieds to free, online only ads? Why not fight back against CraigsList instead of meekly letting it claw you to death? You can still charge for upsells to print, perhaps at a hefty premium if you’re lucky. Maybe you can print all classifieds twice a week, for example, instead of every day, or print all car ads one day, all real estate another, all garage sales another, etc.

Rethinking classifieds might well seem like potential suicide for a newspaper.

But doing the same old same old is guaranteed suicide.

The Portland Tribune is cutting its print edition to weekly and expanding its presence on the web.

Its announcement of the changes takes a positive tone and touches on many of the themes I’ve been advocating for here on WhapWhap. I should be excited. But …

It’s a tough announcement for me to read, because I know so many of the people who started the paper or worked there. I spent hours in meetings with the founders back in 2000 and 2001 talking about the role of the internet in the launch of the paper. Several of the top execs got it more than most newspaper people I know, but the folks at the top were skeptical, and consciously toned down the web presence.

I can’t help but wonder if this transition would be smoother had everyone embraced a robust web presence right from the start.

Still, I hope the Trib makes it. And if it does fail, I hope people don’t point to the failure and say “See, the web doesn’t work!” Like the Capitol Times before it, The Trib was failing in print, too, so it’s not the best test of a mostly online presence.

Anyway, good luck Trib. I hope you pull it off.

I’m going to take a breather from bashing newspapers to salute one: The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The paper’s launch of sdBackyard is intriguing. The allows customers to network, generate news and receive targeted news. The paper even plans to convert some of the content generated to print for its community papers.

My early review of the site is mixed, but at tleast the folks in San Diego are trying to use technology rather than fight it.

My primary concern is that the site isn’t very edgy. It looks and feels more like eons.com than it does Facebook, Craigslist, etc. That’s safer for the paper and makes it more likely that traditional newspaper readers will feel comfortable using the site. Therein lies the rub: It feels like an adjunct to the existing product more than an aggressive attempt to expand the company’s audience to non-traditional customers. I think other efforts, including Seattle’s NWSource do a better job of targeting a younger, more active audience, but without some of the tools sdBackyard employs.

Having said that, the best social-networking sites take on a life of their own and develop personalities shaped by users, so if editors and marketers can relinquish a good deal of control the site could be incredible.

Unfortunately, newspaper folks are not good at relinquishing control. There are complex concerns about credibility and civility that every social-networking site wrestles with (or should). Too often, however, newspaper execs’ concerns about the web take on an ethereal tone. Vague references to “quality” and “integrity” sound noble, but unless we let consumers take the lead in defining what those terms mean to them there’s more fear and arrogance than substance to the concerns.

Similarly, fear of losing control can keep smaller publishers from trying similar experiments. To keep complete control over a site like sdBackyard, from proprietary programming to maintenance to content, is expensive. Free, open-source platforms such as Drupal and Joomla are more than capable of doing the job for a small or mid-sized paper. For example, I have a little Drupal site for my family that allows users to create blogs, post photo galleries and videos, participate in forums and polls and more, and I’m no programming genius.

Using these tools does result in the loss of some control over the look and functionality of the site, because unless you are a programming genius you’re at the mercy of diffuse international band of developers for enhancements, upgrades, etc. Still, I gave up that control, and I invite smaller papers to do the same.

I think it’s a small price to pay for the survival of your company.