Whap! Whap!

A futurist once advised a group of newspaper folks to make themselves obsolete before somebody else does it for them.

Most newspapers have chosen to just let others do the work, but The Capital Times of Madison has decided make its own suicide leap. Or did it save itself by jumping out of a burning building?

Those are questions raised in a story from The Daily Page. The author of the piece says no one knows the answer to those questions, and I agree. The story does touch on some of the stereotypes that often go unchallenged.

Madison’s mayor, for example, says: “There’s something about a printed publication that gives a certain credibility that attracts people to look at stories on the web.” I don’t think anyone will argue that the printed product helps promote the web, but what exactly is it about a printed product that some people think is inherently credible? And is this view really widely held by the public? For better or worse, many people seem to think that newspapers are less credible than electronic media. I, for one, don’t believe that credibility is inherent in any medium, but rather in particular individuals and institutions.

It’s odd that many newspaper execs who cling to the inherent credibility of a print product think that those of us who rely the web for information are somehow gullible and less sophisticated than they are. I think the opposite is true.

The story also quotes several people talking about the death of the paper. In one sense that’s inarguably true. The daily printed product will cease to exist. That’s sad, even to a jaded web user. But it’s also exciting. I hope the journalists of the website will be energized by their new-found freedom. I think it was Bill Gates who envisioned the web as a medium free of both temporal and spatial constraints. If I’m wrong about that attribution, you can correct me by replying to this post.

Which leads to my final point. The interactivity and free-for-all of the web enhances credibility in my mind. It’s not that I’m so gullible and unsophisticated that I believe everything any website publisher or anonymous poster has to say. It’s that I love to hear the unfiltered views of all sides of an issue. I think that web publishers who put their ideas out there for anyone to pick apart are more credible than cowardly newspaper editors who hide behind carefully edited letters to the editor, not less.

So The Capital Times is dead. Long live http://www.madison.com/captimes.

(But please, folks, get a better institutional brand.)

It’s Earth Day, and all along the beautiful country roads that lead to my home you see hybrid cars, signs for organic farms … and miles of piles of soggy telephone directories.

The directories were “delivered,” or “dumped,” by the phone company about 10 days ago. The overwhelming majority are still sitting on the shoulders, in the ditches, or blowing in the fields. And this is just one of about five competing books that get dumped each year.

It’s an insane waste of paper in a time when most people find what they need online. The companies could solve this by delivering only to people who requested a book, but they don’t dare do that. If they did, advertisers might realize what a farce the books are.

Of course, seeing that you’re in the newspaper business, I don’t need to tell you that. Papers have been pulling the same trick with TMC products for years.

Do the directory publishers get it? No. In a recent story, one said it’s just “Wall Street” that doesn’t get it.

I’m not sure there’s a Wall Street in my neck of the woods, but none of the other streets seem to understand the situation, either.

p.s.: No trees were harmed in the making of this website.

This post from myrtlebeachonline.com repeats the same old fantasies that we’ve been hearing from journalists for years, including these gems:

“The irony, of course, is that Huffington Post, just as most independent Internet sites, relies on stories filed by newspaper and television reporters. Without them, Huffington Post is just blowing so much smoke.”

Really? I read the Huffington Post and other websites because they’re full of stories and perspectives I never see in newspapers.

“Anyone who thinks mainstream newspapers are biased has only to spend a little time with Huffington Post to understand what bias truly is.”

Of course the Huffington Post is biased. Who said it isn’t? Interesting, though, that he focuses on the Huffington Post and not the Drudge Report, etc. … The difference is that on the internet the biases are more readily apparent and we can jump from bias to bias, unlike newspapers, where we’re spoon-fed biases by editors who obviously are “objective.”

“That kind of partisanship recalls 18th and 19th century journalism, when newspapers existed to promote the agendas of political parties and made little attempt at objectivity.”

See! Proves my point: Editors are objective! Seriously, the historical reference fails to note that even in small towns in those days there were options newspaper readers don’t have today. Not to defend yellow journalism, but where there was a Republican paper you usually could pass it by for the Democratic paper. And who says those times ended in the 19th century? Papers proudly promote political agendas today, from shilling for the war to promoting local developers. If I disagree with the editors I can write a letter, which will be published (in a highly edited form) only if those same objective editors decide it’s an acceptable opinion. Promoting an agenda is not inherently bad. In fact it’s often what makes newspapers fun and worthwhile. But stop pretending that newspapers are objective.

None of this nonsense from a little faraway website is particularly important, except that I came across it only through links from sites designed for newspaper journalists. My concern is that this drivel continues to be considered insightful in the world of newspaper think tanks. It’s this kind of arrogant, delusional thinking that is destroying newspapers and pushing us to the internet for our news and information.

The author laments that young people don’t read newspapers. He should consider himself lucky they don’t, because if they did they would shake their heads and laugh at the silly old men who write for them.

When is a website really a newspaper? Whenever it’s the offshoot of a paper, according to most ink-stained veterans.

I hate to keep piling on Steven Pearlstein, but he compounded his inane column about local news by chastizing a reader for calling washingtonpost.com a website. Then today I read that the Toronto Star has laid off its entire online staff because it’s redundant.

We all know the story of WGN in Chicago. WGN is the World’s Greatest Newspaper. That’s what the founders in the Trib tower thought. But not even Mr. Pearlstein would call it a newspaper today. And, as I pointed out in a previous post, if I create a newspaper as an offshoot of this website, I’m pretty sure no one would call it a website. (more…)

I was going to write a post about how a publisher I worked with for 24 years, Scott Campbell of The Columbian, used the analogy of a boiled frog to warn against complacency. A frog, Scott would say, doesn’t realize that if the water he’s sitting in is being slowly warmed, it soon will come to a boil, killing the unsuspecting little guy.

My post was to be how ironic that is, considering the state of newspapers today. In doing a little research, however, I found that the analogy isn’t true. Slowly boiling frogs, it seems, do know that the water is starting to boil and act to save themselves. So there’s no similarity to newspaper publishers after all.

I decided to go ahead and post anyway, because of the funny way I came upon this research. The link to the story was from a post by Matt Mullenweg, which, by coincidence, he had written just hours earlier. Among other things, Matt was a developer of WordPress, the software platform for WhapWhap.com. I guess in some weird twist, that makes him my new publisher.

I think I’ll listen to his version of the story from here on out …

A new report says that the internet soon will overtake newspapers in the race for ad dollars in Britain. How soon? Next year.

This is both a technology and political story on several fronts. Broadband penetration is far higher over there than over here. In fact, the U.S. is falling behind a number of countries in broadband. Seems many American phone companies have followed the same disastrous path that newspapers find themselves on: heaps of debt from acquisitions and paltry R and D budgets.

(more…)

Sorry. I just can’t get that line from my previous post out of my head. I think it’s the perfect marketing slogan for a daily newspaper. It certainly represents the business philosophy of newspaper execs.

Imagine, for a moment, this scenario: Instead of racking up debt buying fading newspapers in the early 1990s, what if the big chains had gone into debt buying companies such as eBay, Yahoo and Google? Shoot, they might not have had to go into debt. Petty cash might have handled it back then.

(more…)

I wrote this for the employee newsletter at The Columbian six or seven years ago. At the time, few people found it appropriate or helpful. Not much has changed in the ensuing six or seven years:

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My wife, Kris, comes from a family that owns a cabin on the shores of Lake Chelan.

I thought about the cabin yesterday when I read the e-mail about stress and change, but not because it conjured an image of its serene beauty. I thought about it because earlier this summer a wildfire ravaged the area, causing the entire family to worry about the beloved house.

The fire came at a time when I was staying awake nights worrying about stagnant websites and how to re-invent New Media to cope with a 50 percent cut in resources. (more…)

I run a company that carries people and freight to Hawaii.
Way back when, people used boats to haul all this cargo. But then came a new-fangled invention called railroads. Back then, hauling people and cargo to Hawaii was so lucrative that my grandfather and some of the other cargo companies bought railroad trains and even built bridges to Hawaii to haul stuff over there.
Now railroads are expensive to run, and very capital-intensive, so soon most of our competitors failed, leaving us with all the business.
Our customer base became very diverse. There were the people. They wanted to be entertained and kept informed of events back home on their way to Hawaii, so we hired people to report the news. We also hired entertainers. Mostly comics.
We carried freight of various classifications. So many classifications in fact that eventually we came to call the freight “Classifieds”
We also carried chickens, because Hawaiians wanted eggs and livestock. We built tables for the livestock to perch on so we could collect the eggs without bending over. We eventually came to refer to these as livestock tables, and then simply as “stock tables.” (more…)

To cut costs, The Seattle Times is laying off 200 people. Most of the carnage for the newsroom will be in the Eastside zoned editions, which will cease publication. Gotta save the core product, you know.

I have what I think is a much wiser strategy: Save the zones and gut the core product.

From the time I entered journalism in an era long ago, newspapers have looked for ways to zone the news. They just haven’t looked very hard. Oh, they’ve spent money on the effort. Lots of it, mostly on technology - presses, inserters, microwaves, fiber-optics - all designed in part to make zoning easier. The Times even built a huge new plant on the booming Eastside, giving it the ability to print more generic papers faster and deliver them more conveniently to the fewer and fewer people who want them. I guess it all seemed like a good idea at the time. (more…)