Whap! Whap!

Why are the mainstream media so focused on whether George Bush was referring to Barack Obama when he made his “appeasement” remarks in the Knesset? Isn’t the real story that he just went to a foreign country and slandered many millions of patriotic Americans by calling them appeasers?

Personifying the comment could be just more of the lazy, horse-race reporting we’ve seen through the campaign. It could be that once again the media is picking up the GOP’s playbook, pinning a label on a Democrat.

And it’s true that Obama created some of the distraction himself by assuming it was a slap at him. That still doesn’t excuse the pundits for not exploring the deeper slander.

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.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy is based entirely on liberal fantasy, according to Michael Goodwin in the New York Daily News.

If he’s right, then other liberals include Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and the entire Iraq Study Group. Obama’s crime is calling for diplomacy with countries such as Iran. Did the conservative press label Reagan a liberal for negotiating with the Iranians who took Americans hostage?

There’s something even more sinister in many of the attacks on Obama, and Goodwin’s piece is a prime example. Obama’s comments about negotiating with our “enemies” included folks like Hugo Chavez, yet Goodwin consistently portrays Obama has being soft on Muslims. Last time I looked, Chavez wasn’t Muslim. Neither are the leaders of South Korea or many other countries we’re not friendly with.

Last time I looked, most Muslims weren’t enemies of the United States. By all accounts, some of our best friends are Muslim, even those who despise George Bush’s policies.

So why twist this into religion? Is it to continue the insinuation that Obama is Muslim? Is it to cast Muslims in a bad light to illustrate why it would be such a bad thing if he were Muslim? Venezuela is overwhelmingly Catholics, but I haven’t heard the President or anyone else suggest that negotiating with Chavez would be wrong because it would be appeasing Christians (to these unreconstructed Cold Warriors, that’s bad because it appeases communists).

Goodwin also dismisses the economic problems that are fueling anger among some Muslims. The conservatives have to dismiss these concerns so people will go on believing that their belief in Islam is the only reason some Muslims want change.

So get ready for the storyline this summer and fall: Obama is Muslim. Oh wait, no he isn’t; he’s a radical Christian who listens to his minister. Oh wait, he disavowed that minister, so maybe he’s a Muslim sympathizer after all.

Since the press obviously isn’t going to drop this story, I hope we continue to read it for the next eight years as the establishment press attacks President Barack Obama.

That’s my liberal fantasy.

I’m going to guess that most of you coming here from the Black Star News aren’t looking for stories about newspaper technology. The more political posts are here. My musings on the coverage of Barack Obama are here. Thanks for visiting!

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 …”

James Burnett of the Miami Herald makes a great point. Barack Obama is half-black, half-white, yet the mainstream media (and alas yes, I too) call him black. Mr. Burnett suggests that he’s going to start calling Mr. Obama the white candidate because, after all, he’s half white. You really should read this. Why can’t newspapers (instead of their blogs) make this kind of point more often?

You might have no idea who Charles is, but thousands of copy editors do. He’s an editor at the New York Times now, but when I knew him he was at Newsday. He was a legend. I was an intern.

But Charles spent an enormous amount of time mentoring me, and he and his lovely wife (and accomplished author), Janet, hosted me on a couple of return trips to New York over the years.

Among other things, Charles has won numerous national awards for his headlines, and an editor at the Times calls him perhaps the greatest headline writer ever. He is.

Anyway, I just read a story from the Times on Charles’ retirement.

Here’s the kicker: Charles was the greatest headline writer ever at Newsday. But I beat him for headline of the month. The awards were announced after I left the paper, and I never would have known I had won … except that Charles made sure I found out.

Charles is a giant. He’s not famous to you, but he is to me. He represents everything good newspapers claim to be, but rarely are.

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.