“The world in my pocket”

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Steve Mays

That’s how Mindy McAdams describes her iPhone:

“If someone has all the videos and quality radio news she could ever find time to listen to (or watch) right in her pocket, how can anything even remotely like the newspaper compete with that? The newspaper as it was, in the heyday of the 30 percent profit margins, had something for everyone. Now the Internet-enabled phone provides that.”

I’ve had that “iPhone = world in my pocket” thought while sitting at the counter of the Towne Grill, waiting form my biscuits and gravy. First the email, then the Twitter, then Google Reader.

Once upon a time, I bought a copy of USA Today to read with my grub. But eventually 75 cents for the few stories of interest seemed pricey. Then I started printing out stories the night before and making my own little newspaper. And then I got an iPhone.

I think Ms. McAdams really asks the good question:

“Will traditional print news organization come up with programming, instead of random and disconnected stories? I don’t mean it has to be audio and video, but it would be something with an identity, like a show or a series. The closest thing I can think of that’s not radio is David Pogue — a brand unto himself.”

“Random and disconnected stories.” Hmm. I need to think about this. More in the morning.

Next morning: I’m now wondering if our news networks have been too focused on “random and disconnected stories?” We’ve worked hard to put our news stories online with less thought and energy given to building identity. Well, that’s not entirely true. We’ve put a lot of our existing radio programs and features on our websites. But would we be better served to focus more podcasts?

Scott Adams: “Super-local news”

Posted on March 29, 2009 by Steve Mays

“It’s not just news about your community, but also about your homeowner’s association, your apartment building, your kids’ classrooms, and the sports teams they belong to. Every family would have their own online local newspaper, assembled electronically every day based on that family’s log-in information. Your personal and super-local news would include everything from world events to school lunch menus for that day. Eventually it might even include your child’s report card. Obviously the schools have to be partners in this, and I think that could happen. Most school information is online already or heading in that direction. It just needs to feed to the newspaper’s site for aggregation.

The key is for the super-local information to come to the newspapers from volunteers. For example, every youth sport team would have a parent with a digital camera and the willingness to upload some pictures and write a few lines about the game. A simple user interface would make it easy to integrate the news about little Becky’s soccer game with news of the Lakers. They would have equal billing.”

Where do former newspaper reporters go?

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Steve Mays

Rebekah Denn has posted links to blogs “and other online works” from other staff members from the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. The list included a number of photographers but the thing that caught my attention was the variety of “beats.”

Reporter, food writer, former restaurant critic
Features writer, children’s book reviewer
Art critic
Restaurant critic
Freelance classical music writer
Reporter, specializing in neighborhood sustainability
Lifestyles editor, former sports columnist and TV critic
Environmental reporter
Copy editor
Business reporter
Investigative reporter
Researcher and editor
Pop music critic
Photo Assignment Editor
Illustration, graphic artist
Aerospace reporter

And that’s probably not a complete list of the positions that went away when the paper folded. My guess is, these folks really knew their stuff. And are good reporters and writers. I hope they find good jobs.

Knowing absolutely nothing about the newspaper business, it’s difficult for me to imagine how any paper could afford have all these. Did the restaurant critic write one story/column a day? How can you make that math work? Is it heresy to suggest the “food writer” also be the “restaurant critic?” Why do you need a “pop music critic” AND a “freelance classical music writer?” “Environmental reporter” and “neighborhood sustainability” reporter?

And I DO understand the same sort of analysis could be done of our business. Or any media business.

I suspect they had all of these niche positions because they could. When the ad dollars were flowing in, why not. Let’s cover everything. But those days are gone.

One final thought. Rebekah’s blog is “Eat All About It: Food, journalism and recipes from the great Northwest.” It’s okay but I’m not sure it’s any better than this one by a former co-worker of mine, Lane McConnell. I suppose Lane is technically an amateur since she doesn’t get paid. And there must be thousands of of these. Probably hundreds in Seattle alone.

When such a wealth of information is just a Google search away, how does a newspaper make the case, “We have the best food stories, read us.”

I think it only worked when they could say, “We are one of only two sources of stories about food in Seattle.”

Old growth media and the future of news

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Steve Mays

I’ve never been worried about the future of news but I couldn’t quite imagine what it will look like as old business models stop working. Steve Berlin Johnson –speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin last week– sees today’s media as “…closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media.”

“So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports. Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce.”

And near the end of his speech, this warning:

“We’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone.”

Pew: State of News Media

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Steve Mays

TV consultant Terry Heaton offers his take on the latest “State of the News Media” report from Pew (Project for Excellence in Journalism) and offers a few predictions:

It’s gone and it’s not coming back. Acceptance of this is the beginning of reinvention.
Future revenue is about enabling commerce, not about serving advertising adjacent to or as an interruption of “content.”
Journalism will survive the death of its institutions.
Most journalists will be independent and work for whoever pays them the most, on a non-exclusive basis.
Journalists will develop and exploit niche specialties.
“The News” will be fast, transparent and authentic.
Anchors will become mostly obsolete, like other middlemen that the Web routes around. I simply can read faster than I can have it read to me. Those that remain will be live hubs that filter multiple content inputs.

From the reports intro:

“There are growing doubts within the business, indeed, about whether the generation in charge has the vision and the boldness to reinvent the industry. It is unclear, say some, who the innovative leaders are, and a good many well-known figures have left the business. Reinvention does not usually come from managers prudently charting course. It tends to come from risk takers trying the unreasonable, seeing what others cannot, imagining what is not there and creating it.”

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?”

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Steve Mays

In a post titled “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Clay Shirky provides some insight –and historical perspective– on what’s happening to newspapers. He starts with the question often asked by those committed to saving newspapers

“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.”

“When someone demands to be told how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

I think this is the first time I’ve fully understood that old models can be broken before new ones are there to take their place.

Tony Messenger (aka @tonymess)

Posted on March 2, 2009 by Steve Mays

I’m one of a few hundred (but growing fast) “followers” of Tony Mesenger’s Twitter feed. Tony’s a reporter and columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and covers the Missouri Legislature and state government. He clearly gets Twitter and blogging and makes great use of both.

Tony joined me at the Coffee Zone for an el grande mocha latte doodah where I got him to put down his cell phone for half an hour to talk about his life as a Twitter junkie.

AUDIO: Listen/Download interview MP3

Before going to work for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tony was a metro columnist and city editor for the Columbia Daily Tribune and the editorial page editor at the Springfield News-Leader.

UPDATE: Thanks to Will Sullivan (Interactive Director or Nerd-in-Chief) for pointing us to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Twitterama page.

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"We can think of technology as our extended body." — What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Category Archives: Journalism