Content Bridges

In Akron, the Bloodletting Begins

In my Knight Ridder days, I was lucky to get a national tour of some interesting places -- Knight Ridder places -- that otherwise I would never have visited.  Aberdeen, South Dakota. Charlotte, North Carolina. Akron, Ohio.

Akron was once a rubber capital, when rubber meant money as Americans embraced the foreign road and before foreign competition changed the industry. By the time I visited in the '90s, it was just another surprisingly leafy Midwestern city, a place that had seen better economic days.

The paper though still had a sense of the strutting  journalism it once represented. It seems like almost all newspaper conference rooms are windowless, yellow or yellowed.  So was the Akron Beacon Journal's. On the walls though, you could see the pride fairly bursting. The Beacon Journal had been the flagship paper of the Knights before they merged their proud editorial holdings with the Ridders in 1974. Plaques, front pages, awards -- the works filled walls.

In that room, you wouldn't know that the paper was suffering in its competition with the bigger paper to the north, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, or that a succession of publishers and editors were continually trying to fend off budget pressures. In that room, you felt the out-sized pride of trying to serve a community well with reporters and newsprint.

By the time Knight Ridder collapsed and offered itself up to the market last year, Akron was the one paper that almost no one wanted. It was definitively not a high-growth market  high on McClatchy's list. Finally, Black Press, Ltd of Canada bought the paper, presumably at fire-sale rates. It was Black's biggest paper. Tonight the news came across the Web that it is getting a lot smaller -- soon. Black is taking out fully 25% of the newsroom staff -- 40 positions overall.

The Akron Beacon-Journal is on its way to becoming a suburban paper. While management had done its own cutting over the past five years, a cut of 40 will take the heart of the operation. The bloodletting is heartbreaking. If it were isolated, not to be repeated in other newsrooms to come, we could cry for Akron.

As it stands as a harbinger of things to come more widely, we can cry for a way of journalism that is rapidly becoming obsolescent. Yes, blog-powered community and citizen journalism is a wonder to behold; it can potentially add much to our community lives. But without solid professional reporting, much of what we know about how communities, power and the abuse of power in those communities works, will be lost.

 

 

 

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Copyright 2006 Content Bridges

Digital Diet: Just Say No to Papyrus

We in the Transitional Generation still find ourselves rummaging through piles of delivered newsprint, while toggling among laptops, desktops, Palms and iPods through often-extended workdays. But we know that the present won't hold; we're just comfortable as a sandwich information generation. Other humans, mainly the age-impaired, are clearly weening themselves off papyrus, which was clearly a transitional technology of its own.

Then there's the cold turkey approach. That's what Amy Webb undertook. Founder and editor of Dragonfire, a digital, multimedia mag out of Philly, Webb stopped reading print, listening to radio and watching TV. For 30 days. Kind of like Morgan Spurlock, without the massive cholesterol intake.

She consumed -- about 14 hours of day -- news and info from her computers only. Of course, much of what she took in originated at newspapers and broadcasters, but she ate it all online. Bloglines served as a home base, but she ventured out from there. She wandered across unexpected jewels, BBC reports and items from Greensboro, N.C.

Amy (right) missed the comfort, the sheer usability of the print newspaper at times like Sunday morning in bed.

Interesting, she found local information the hardest to get at:

Day 5: Tuesday, June 6

How to stay on top of local events? Do I need to check all the local news Web sites every day? I try a different tack: I subscribe to various RSS feeds from NBC10.com (http://www.nbc10.com). The feeds, oddly enough, come mainly from a national office and not from Philadelphia. I also add the WPVI-TV 6 site (http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/), the KYW NewsRadio 1060 site (http://www.kyw1060.com), and what I can find on Philly.com. For some reason, the RSS service isn't working today on WHYY (www.whyy.org/). (To be fair, if you checked today, you'd probably find dozens of RSS feeds available on local news from local Web sites - but still, it's clear that our local venues have some catching up to do where Web technology is concerned.)

As of 9:23 a.m., here's all I know about Philadelphia: (1) police are looking for a deliveryman missing on the Schuylkill Expressway; (2) a New Jersey woman, Erica Tonsberg of Collingswood, made Stuff magazine's 101 Sexiest Women online; (3) the Newtown Theater has refused to show the film United 93.

It's clear that I can rely on RSS for national news, but the local media haven't caught up on the technology yet.

Very polite of her to say it that way. 10 years into the Internet, newspapers online look much too much like newspaper in print. And are working their way into obsolescence. Amy found that by turning to local blogs and podcasts....and found that her local information quotient rose appreciably.

What's it take to pull off the experiment, to replace a paper. Here's her equipment list:

Equipment

• Fifteen-inch PowerBook G4 (Mac).

• G5 with 20-inch cinema display (Mac).

• BlackBerry.

• iPod (30 gigabytes of memory).

• Wi-Fi sniffer (to find open wireless networks).

• DSL connection at home.

• T-1 connection at the office.

A short list, and one that's becoming quite common in many Americans' lives.

Check out her experiment, either with the Op-Ed she wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer or by listening to her "Talk of the Nation" interview yesterday.

The experiment of course obscures the fact that what's endangered here is the resources to produce the reporting and writing that are journalism  -- whether consumed traditionally or online. Webb knows that, and yet her clarity about the meaning of her experiment is clear:

...the way we gather and distribute information will increasingly rely on digital technologies. Teenagers don't know a world without computers, so they've been socialized to accept rapid human-machine interactions. For the rest of us, the transition won't be easy. But it is inevitable

 

 

 

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Copyright 2006 Content Bridges

Topix’ Not-So-Wayback-Machine

We’ve all used the The Wayback Machine, the hieroglyphics of early web pages. Sometimes joyful in spirits, often embarrassing in execution. Now Topix gives us the Not-So-Wayback-Machine. It’s cool, useful and based on more than a dollop of commonsense.

Most of the stuff we want to find is recent stuff. But recent to the human memory doesn’t mean the recency of a Google News, which returns hundreds of too-similar results on major news events. Tool through the results, and you appreciate speed; so many results just hours old. But you don’t appreciate the duplication, the AP stories embedded in so many other stories, and on so many websites, with differing headlines giving you a brief sense that fresh content may lay a click away. 

You can of course try the one alternative to recency, relevance. That toggle, defaulted to recency, is a part of our web consciousness. Pick recency though and what you gain is offset by finding stuff from 1996 or 2003 that’s usually on-topic but outdated. 

Topix's new widget finally offers an improvement. 

First off, Topix is now indexing and displaying 52 weeks of content from its 10,000 indexed sources. That’s about 48 weeks more than we can easily get to on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Making the content available is one thing; making it relatively easy to get to is one what I like most about Topix’ new move.  Its Click-o-Gram (the Not-So-Wayback-Machine) makes easier to marry these elusive notions of relevance and recency, and find more of what we want. The Click-o-Gram lets users click on any of the last 12 months and then presents results from that month first, followed by previous months. It comes in handy when you have a sense of finding something that happened a few months ago.

A bonus: on each search result, the Click-o-Gram also graphs the volume of hits on the search term(s). It’s a quick popularity index, dynamic metadata on top of search data. And indexes are always fun to play with. 

This Topix innovation comes packaged with two others. One, a right top-of-the-page option allows you to choose to de-dupe results.  Good idea; how much different it makes I'm not yet sure of.  Second, it has added some smarts – making good use of log analysis, I assume –to deal with case. Topix notes that the difference from the word “it” and IT.

I tried ERA and got the raft of baseball results I wanted, without the clutter of bygone eras.

Look at the innovations in news search as a smartening-up. Free news search has clearly been first-generation – as is news aggregation. The time is overripe for great leaps. The tech tools we have in the culture -- delicate wirecutters as compared to the chainsaws of early Net -- should now enable much greater shading and higher-quality results. 

Kudos to the Topix team on the work. The Topix Blog notes the contributions of Robert Torres, Topix’ new creative director. Robert, a KRD alumnus, may be enjoying the freedom of being unshackled by the Knight Ridder Digital templates, and we hope to see more great work from him.

Think of all the shadings that we as news consumers could use, in addition to the recency/relevance one Topix provides and the free search/paid search that’s become an accepted model:

• Current/archival: Topix now begins to do this. The divide though is still a chasm and plainly consumers want the contextual past to the present now and the present now from the contextual past.
• Geo/vertical: Topix’ founders were shrewd in positioning their company as a local play – and won outsized    Tribune/Gannett/Knight Ridder investment ($45-50 million)– based on it. They’ve also positioned the company as the ultimate topical (vertical) search engine, saying they’ve created 360,000    categories. It’s never been easy to understand what that means. Now merge the geo and the vertical in ways that make sense to consumers – we all live our lives in the physical here and in the topical there – and you may have something revolutionary.
• News/opinion: The Internet cries out for better sourcing and disclosure, better differentiation between factual reporting and commentary. Sure, the web should be a free-for-all of ideas, but labeling what’s what – not an easy task – is something a lot of readers would like.
• Text/audio/video: All sites are still struggling to get these content type metaphors properly presented and associated with each other, de-duped, in ways that make sense to the consumer.
• Journalist/blogger: In the both/and universe of the web, everyone’s got a place. As with news/opinion, disclosure – understanding the writer’s intent and affiliation – is key. The Topixs of the world can help bring some new order to this fascinating Wild West.     

 

 

 

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Lotto Won’t Save the Newspaper Business

I love a good salesman, and it sounds like Ed Mahlman’s a good one. His last job was selling hopeless dreams, where he pumped up revenues for the Pennsylvania Lottery by some 16% in a year’s time. You know, the lottery, a dollar store for those who would rather trade their buck for a temporary vision of life on the perfect island than take home six more pencils, another Tupperware knockoff piece or flip-flops recycled from dubious substances.

Before his lottery stint, Mahlman worked for Brian Tierney. Now Tierney is CEO of the Philadelphia Media Holdings, the local company that picked the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. He has tapped his friend to bring some lottery panache to the papers, naming Mahlman CMO. Maybe Mahlman’s fresh approach – he apparently hasn't marketed media – will give birth to some new ideas, though Philly’s never been short on cool marketing, witness the Philly.com cabtops that adorned city cabs in the ‘90s. I’m sure he’s going to go beyond the Northeast staple of lotto that has sold millions of tab newspapers over the decades, but now seems tired. 

Mahlman faces several basic truths of this age of info marketing: 

• Selling paid print is an increasingly uphill battle. It’s not like there’s not enough sales pressure to push subscriptions or even coinboxes, newsstands or hawkers. It’s that almost all those who are happy to buy and read print already are doing it.

• Free print is another thing entirely. It’s something daily newspaper publishers are learning about slowly and fitfully.  Alternative weekly publishers learned it 25 years ago, saving their businesses. Traders and shoppers of all kind have built great businesses on free. Metro (in Philly, Boston and New York City in the U.S., and 66 others around the world). Clarity Media (the Examiners in San Francisco and Baltimore) and the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye and the Washington Post’s Express are proving it anew.

• Web marketing has its own set of evolving rules: While in print, it’s all about Page One, many daily publishers are learning too slowly, that on the web it’s not all about the home page.  It’s not a browse medium; it’s a search medium. And that means getting      deeply educated about search engine optimization and search engine  marketing. Publishers have dabbled in SEO and SEM, often bringing in one or two smart newly-minted MBAs who get it. One or two don’t cut it though.  Web marketing in SEO, SEM, virality in general, is whole other mindset and needs to be embedded deeply into news marketing.

 

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