Q-What do you call the obituary pages of the newspaper?

A- subscriber countdown

That was a joke tweeted live during the Online News Association convention this past weekend in San Francisco. Great time.

One small note- I saw this guy David LaFontaine talk at ONA, he has a nice recurring summary of news about the state of the industry on his blog like this.

I may actually download this mp3 of Clay Shirky in a talk on accountability journalism in the age of newspaper's steady decline

Obama video

Some breaking news video I shot election night 2008:



I had caught a cold that day, after hanging out at several voting stations, a victory party for the newly elected mayor of Richmond, and this late-breaking news. Thousands of college students spontaneously took to the streets after Barack Obama won the election. There was such energy in the crowd, I've never seen anything like it. Had to shot/edit this one fast to cap off a 13 or 14 hour day.

Homeless soccer team

No, the team isn't looking for a place to play. The players in the Richmond Rebels are all homeless themselves. They're part of a national league called Street Soccer USA. This is what they look like and what they do.

Video: "never give up"

I recently did a video story on a high school senior with cerebral palsy who beat the odds and did what few can do: graduate with a regular diploma and go to a four-year college. Thomas Allen's remarkable personality showed through the reverence of everyone who knew him.

Interesting report on podcasts and consumers

This archived audio/slide presentation with PDF is very interesting, it gives some numbers on usage of downloadable media by consumers. It's by Edison Research.
Just skimming it, I was struck that 57 % of Americans haven't heard of podcasting. That's based off a phone survey done this January of 1858 random Americans. And 22 percent of people have listened to at least one podcast in their lives. The presenter, Edison's Vice President of Strategy and Marketing, Tom Webster, said this number was an indication that podcasting has hit the mainstream. To me one out of five people is not mainstream, but maybe I need a lesson in relativity.
Anyway, the slides are very interesting and I'll try to take an hour, maybe at lunch breaks at my desk, to listen in.

Map mashups

I'd really like to see mashups of public-interest databases with mobile devices with mapping and geolocating. For instance, you've got the standard state sex offender databases online.

This application has wanted sex offenders with mug shots and info on each person, including a Google map where the person lives. Now what's needed, (and this may be out there but I don't have an iPhone or Blackberry to test it,) is a iPhone app that determines the user's location, queries the sex offender database, and displays "hits" of sex offenders within a given distance of the user's iPhone.

It's about taking databases and making them useful to people. By itself, the sex offender Web site is nice, but I'm guessing a parent would actually pay money for getting that intelligence in a user-friendly medium.

Another app would be a restaurant review database. I'd love to make one of these but don't quite know how yet. Say you're in an unfamiliar city and you're hungry. You take your iPhone or G1 or whatever and geolocate yourself with an app, then the app searches the local news outlet's database of unbiased restaurant reviews, letting you pick one by cuisine, rating, price, whatever. You could incorporate user reviews too thru google or yahoo or citysearch or the news outlet's own site. I see some programs out there but this is an opportunity for news outlets to get more mileage out of their own content, in a program that is optimized for mobile devices.

Now if only I could program...

Test Dabble DB - Swine Flu

This is a test-
an embedded map of Swine Flu lab-confirmed cases in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control.




The data is screen-scraped off the CDC swine flu Web site by Dabble DB and visualized in a Dabble DB page.

More Facebook apps but less Facebook?

Last week Facebook announced it's opening the stream to developers here.
The stream is the core experience of Facebook, giving users info on the activities of their friends. Every update, picture upload, photo tag, wall-to-wall exchange, status change, etc., is atomized and beamed to your homepage. It's sortable, I think, if you categorize your friends into groups.
Here is Mark Zuckerberg's blog post on the stream and latest redesign, which users invariably seem to hate.

Anyway, with Facebook's Open Stream API, developers can program new widgets and Web sites to allow people to see their Facebook content without logging into Facebook.

The NYTimes gives an imperfect analogy of a corner grocery store giving away all its merchandise to anybody to sell for themselves, in exchange for the extra foot traffic that would propel the store to the social nexus of the neighborhood.

Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop are two applications (using the cloud-computing-esque Adobe Air) that let people control their Facebook and Twitter info without logging into those sites every time. I haven't tried these two products because my five-year-old Powerbook doesn't work with Air. But over a million people use Seesmic alone, and these sites are gaining in popularity.

It will be very interesting if Facebook's "altruism" can make it money. As the Times writes:

And if the developers somehow find a profitable niche, that would pose another concern. These companies might actually end up inadvertently asphyxiating Facebook and Twitter, both currently unprofitable, by drawing users and advertisers away from those sites.

If you give the content away, such that customers come to expect it, doesn't that limit your options to charge later? Facebook is starting to do what the AP and news outlets already do - give access to their content for free. But I don't think the news outlets make money off this, or else media execs wouldn't complain about Google making money off ads on its Google News aggregator.

Maybe Facebook will succeed in this game, either through advertising or by becoming the ultimate one-stop shop for social networking on the Internet. If so, news outlets should take note and copy Facebook's success.

Egads Google does everything

Well, in addition to providing:

• the best search algorithm on the Internet for content, hands down, in text, pictures and video
  
• free email
• context-driven advertising
• aggregated news from over a thousand news outlets
  
• interactive mapping technology
• word processing and number crunching
• cloud computing
• personal syndication of any content you want
• photo-sharing communities
• API's to let developers harness Google's technology for their own uses
  
• and most of the above offered on mobile platforms in addition to desktop platforms
• not to mention free hosting of this very blog and thousands of others;

Google is introducing yet another interesting and free product: visualization of public data, vis a vis interactive graphs of unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census. So Google's taking publicly available data and visualizing it using technology from Trendalyzer, a firm it acquired two years ago.

To see one of the new graphs, and there's one for each county and many cities in the nation I'm pretty sure, just type "unemployment rate" and a city or county and state into Google's search box. The graph appears at the top of the search results. Pretty cool.

In its blog entry announcing the new feature, Google says: "We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations."

Sounds like Google is taking a cue straight from the mission statements of newspapers. Of course, this is something newspapers and their Web sites don't readily do. So it's only fitting Google is going to eat our lunch.

Test database

Click here to load this Caspio Bridge DataPage.

Can you charge for content?

A trio of big-name media execs think you can. This NYTimes article is a little vague on the details but that makes sense.

Journalism Online L.L.C., their company, will have an automated system for news outlet to charge for content. After reading a certain amount of a story, a teaser, the user is prompted to pay for more.

The names, straight from the story, are:

Steven Brill, creator of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, among other ventures; L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers to charge online; and Leo Hindery Jr., who has headed communications companies like Tele-Communications Inc., Global Crossing and the YES Network, and now runs InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in media.

This would only work, I imagine, if every news outlet in a given market area or reader demographic group only distributed through this company. Obviously if you could get an AP feed from Google or somewhere with the same info, that would negate the need to pay for access. So would a country-wide media conglomerate be allowed to exist? Isn't there an anti-trust problem here?

Visualization test

This is a test graph using Many Eyes, a social visualization site. Many Eyes lets you upload data and play with different ways of showing it via graphs, charts, maps, and eye-popping crazy variants of these. You can share them and discuss others' work on the site. It's free. The researchers at IBM, who run this Web site, tell me they have no plans to add advertising to the site. They do, however, use the site for their own research.

Below is a bar graph of high school graduation and dropout rates for all Virginia school districts. This uses data from the Virginia Dept. of Education web site, which has all sorts of stuff on it, organized pretty cleanly. I just pulled out the graduation and dropout rates.



I may use this on timesdispatch.com if I can get the right results. As far as I can tell Many Eyes works best on data sets with only two columns. It doesn't work so great if you have multiple variables or (what would be on excel) a pivot table. By that I mean it doesn't let you drill down through multiple sets of linked data very easily. Still, there are tons of possibilities for this, and you can't beat free.

Video: rat basketball

Well yes this post is just self-promotion, but who can resist rats of the sewer variety jumping through hoops with a little ball?
A video I did at the Science Museum of Virginia, the week before the Final Four:

Wordle test

I've never used the free wordle Web site before, it looks pretty neat. No login necessary.
It makes a text frequency map in an artistic way and shares it online. Cut and paste any text into the site and it analyzes each word, then displays a jumble of the words. The size of each word is relative to its frequency in your text. I just wish it had interactivity where the user could click on each buzzword in the Wordle and see the context of each instance of the word.

Rubicon Project - next gen ad placement

Another high tech company poised to eat newspapers' lunch - the Rubicon Project, talked about here by the LA Times.
By using this dot com's technology, clients get much more relevant ad placements on their web sites, better tied to the content on the sites.

The heart of it is here:

The firm specializes in an arcane technology called ad optimization, which addresses a major leak in the online rowboat: About three-quarters of ad inventory (places where ads could go on Web pages) goes unsold by publishers. To fill those spaces, publishers turn to ad networks, whose automated systems try to approximate the right kind of ad for the particular audience, based on the page content -- fishing-boat ads for "Field and Stream," for instance -- the viewer's geographic or demographic information, or his or her previous online behavior, what's called the click-stream. The more cogent and relevant the ads are to the user, the better the return on investment for the advertiser.

Rubicon does this ad optimization really well, and thus they're ranked the 3rd largest advertising company in the world in terms of reach, behind only Google and Yahoo!, according to this story.

The best thing papers can do, perhaps, is index their content as best as possible to let the machine intelligence of Rubicon Project, news aggregators, and other whizz-bang Internet companies associate the content with the audience that seeks it.

Layoffs through the eyes of a craftsman

Yesterday I posted a video on TimesDispatch.com about a man, Eric Flail, who was laid off from a local tech company called Qimonda recently. Now he has to move out of his house - a three-story commercial building in Petersburg that he's renovated by hand - and sell everything. He has a glass-half-full take on it though, which I thought was really interesting. After all, he's planning to move to Hawaii where his brother lives and work as a maintenance man for a resort/yoga retreat. So it could be worse I suppose.
It's also a chance to see how well this embedded link feature works from my company's web site.

Clay Shirky: 'You're gonna miss us when we're gone!' has never been much of a business model

Internet consultant Clay Shirky wrote a great summary of why newspapers are in this financial dilemma and can't dig their way out.

To quote directly:

"Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke.

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

He then goes to say that though newspapers serve a useful civic purpose, that of the governmental watchdog, that benefit won't prompt millions of people to step forward and subscribe, or be a sustainable business model.

"Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to District Attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. "


I agree with him. Newspapers long ago lost the opportunity to become the online news aggregators that Google, Yahoo, Newsvine, and myriad other sites have become. The fact that Google is serving ads on its Google News site, making money without paying the content creators it is displaying, shows that this distribution model could work. But as Shirky notes, the newspaper industry chose to build walls around its content rather than experiment with the brave new world of the Internet.

Here's what newspapers fail to acknowledge: the maxim "If you build it they will come" does not apply to the online world. They relaxed in their hegemony. They had a lock on the print medium. Buy a multimillion dollar printing plant, feed it dead trees all day, and create a spidery web of delivery routes - that's an expensive endeavor. Only a few folks in any media market could afford to set this up. It's why newspapers had enjoyed such high profit margins. But surprise surprise, the Internet comes around and lets anyone publish multimedia content - for zero cost in some cases - and destroyed the hegemony enjoyed by newspapers.

The newspapers execs needs to remember that they deal with two things: the creation of content (stories, photographs, graphics, etc) and the vehicle for delivering that content (the processed dead trees that arrives at your doorstep each day). When we say newspapers are dying, it's really the vehicle that's on the operating table. But the jobs that create the stories can - and must - survive. A bunch of journalists need to learn how to tell their stories in ways beyond text on a page. And then someone needs to figure a way to pay them sustainably. How? As Shirky says, nobody knows.

Seattle without a newspaper

NPR affiliate KPLU in Seattle has an article that nicely summarizes the quandary we're seeing in print media.
With the Post-Intelligencer on the brink of extinction, this article talks about the revenue model for the generic newspaper, subsizided heavily via advertising, and the fact it's unsustainable.

It makes the point that the legwork for the stories that matter (in a civic sense, the capital J journalism stuff) is done by reporters, sitting in council meetings, sifting through the back hallway chatter, following facts and sources over time, and bringing to light some story.

It notes that you can't just redirect the resources of the newsroom to the web site, because the web site doesn't make enough money for even 10 percent of the staffers as the legacy (dead tree) product.

Here's a quote from Seattle Times Director of Content Cory Haik on what people seek out online:
"Entertainment: tons of money," she says. "People click on those stories, those display ads are making money. Not so much necessarily for, say, something like the meat and potatoes like local news. People aren't necessarily that interested."

The article makes a point that journalists could do well as bloggers, investigating stories while sharing how the sausage is made during the reporting process, creating a transparent process that engages readers. That transparency and willingness to bring joe public into the action, are crucial ingredients of success.

I always thought news outlets would do well by partnering with local public schools, and I don't just mean giving them free newspapers. By engaging people when they're young, you hook them. You have to get people interested and involved in local politics, state politics, everything. Creating an attentive audience would do more for readership than paying them to read or watch.

Targeted content within websites and LinkedIn

After passing it off for the longest time, last week I made a profile on LinkedIn, the social networking site for professional networking.

On Linked In, I went to a group that I'm a member of, the Online News Association, and I followed a story link to a story page on the New York Times about AOL reformulating itself after realizing that being a dial-up portal wasn't going to cut it in the 21st century. I noticed that the right-hand content rail displayed a list of NYTimes stories tailored to my industry (media), and it said, "Powered by LinkedIn."

Pretty interesting. It's standard that those content areas (we call 'em content wells at the Times-Dispatch) dynamically call up related stories to the one you're reading in an effort to keep readers on the site and increase interaction and page views. But I haven't seen one that targets user demographics quite like this before.

The Times grabs a cookie that LinkedIn stored on my computer that lists my industry and job function. Then it displays an RSS feed linked to a category that the Times associated with my industry and job.

Here's a pretty page with the partnership outlined:


The FAQ says no personally identifiable info is transmitted or given to the Times, but who knows? They do allow you to opt out.

I don't know how long this feature has been active, but it's pretty interesting. Lots of issues here, like privacy, targeted advertising, and site stickiness.

You gotta hand it to the Times, though, for experimenting with new partnerships to make their sites more user-friendly and rich.

Hyperlocal websites - what newspapers should become?

Lost Remote, a TV-centric blog on new media, lists several hyperlocal web sites in New Jersey and Washington.
These hyperlocal sites (generally speaking) are the next-generation portal sites. Portal sites, as far as I can remember, were jumping-off points across the Internet with all the news and info you'd want all in one convenient place. AOL had one, Yahoo does, Google does, heck every newspaper in the U.S. has one.

It goes without saying that they don't really work. How could you possibly include everything every user wants? How much of it needs to be human-compiled versus aggregated by machine?

Google comes closest, IMHO, with its customizable homepage. Mine has news feeds from queries like "Richmond, VA."

Anyway, the hyperlocal web site hopes to gain readers and repeat visitors by offering info on specific communities or even city blocks. Local crime, local civic events, local sports, local restaurant reviews, local things to do, local weather, you get the idea. Content is submitted by Joe Sixpack in Internetland, and could be anything from a yard sale to a fundraiser to baby pictures. User interaction and feedback, in the form of "votes" on each story or item, comments, and posts, is ubiquitous.

The New York Times has started several of these, called The Local.
In contrast to some other sites, the Times has deployed actual reporters from its staff to add content, which you might assume boosts the quality of the reporting. (Assuming that even matters anymore)

How do these sites make money? Maybe they don't, but advertising from local businesses would make sense. My question is: how do you offer quality info without paying people for it? I've seen lots of sites where the entries or "stories" are basically PR pieces, self-advertisements. If you're encouraging user submission of content, but not giving people money for what they do, what incentive would they have to give it to you? How does the viewership grow?

Perhaps the delivery vehicle needs improvement. A lot of this hyperlocal stuff would be better on a mobile platform. I can see a good use for whipping out an iPhone and using an app to find restaurants near where I'm standing, with impartial reviews, and patron comments. It's so useful.

But that service is not a hyperlocal web site, it's a service that might tie into a hyperlocal site's database. I don't know how to make a hyperlocal site work right, but there's a good chance they do a better job at localizing things, or at least presenting them in a more accessible way, than the newspaper.