Bismarck Tribune editor John Irby writes ‘Civility now required in our Web site postings.’ As a fellow North Dakotan and as a fellow Web journalist, I know just how stupid and racist and childish people can be on the Web.

Still. That’s no excuse for these words:

Censorship is not a dirty word. It isn’t always desirable, but it is sometimes necessary to prevent overly disturbing, painful, uncivilized or inappropriate thoughts or feelings from reaching consciousness. Censorship claims are sometimes charged by readers when parts or all of what has been submitted or gleaned is killed.

Or these words:

“Comments are reviewed for taste, tone and language before posting.” That warning has long been posted online, and our pledge will continue. But a new posting will also appear that sets a higher standard for publication. “… comments must adhere to some basic principles of public conversation … comments will not be posted that contain potential libel and slander, personal insults and name calling or profanity. Posts must be issue-orientated and civil.”

First of all, we’re not talking about censorship, per se. We’re talking about moderation. Irby: please put that in your lexicon next time you go on a rant against your readers.

Secondly, this is a misuse of technology. Irby even quotes the reason why in-house moderation of comments is a misuse of technology (though he doesn’t know it, yet):

Chris Satullo, editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, said: “Newspapers are one of the four or five institutions in a community that help the community define itself. We’re part of the civic glue. We’re the place where the community thinks out loud.”

This is becoming increasingly less true as the Web forms clusters of like-minded people into communities about ideas, subjects, geographical location, among infinite other possibilities. Newspapers are shutting themselves out of the discourse.

Furthermore, top-down moderation (or ‘censorship’) is not the way to enforce community standards. You shouldn’t be the judge. The community should be.

If the community is getting unruly, let the community weed out the nonsense. Policing the chats will only eat away at your time and your sanity, particularly on hot-button issues.

There are other methods out there. Some are better than others, but all are better than inhibiting discussion.

• Ask your readers to use their real names.
• Ask your readers to provide you with an email address.
• Ask your readers to register an account.
• Moderate the users first post, then let the rest flow in.
• Add a ‘report this comment’ button to each comment.
• Create voting mechanisms similar to Digg or YouTube where crap falls below a viewing threshold.

But most importantly:

• Be a neighbor.
• Engage your community.
• Don’t dictate the rules of engagement.
• Don’t dictate the tone of the community.
• Don’t hinder your ability to let your community think out loud.

I know you’re trying to do what’s right for your site, but don’t do it under the thin veil of “community standards.”

Don’t be lazy.

Don’t be pompous.

Part one of this series can be found here. Part two, here.

Anecdotal evidence

A few of my colleagues in the journalism business refer to their jobs as “the paragraph factory.” These people are all under 30. Notice how, even though they’re gainfully employed by a newspaper, they don’t make reference to the printed product, rather their output.

Without knowing it, they’re starting to see the separation of content and form. Their job is to write words, they don’t really care about where those words are going to end up. So long as they get paid.

* * * I often spend lunch at a small Chicago-style deli about a block and a half from my office. There, I grab the local alt-weekly paper if I haven’t yet read it and sit down in front of the big screen TV that always has CNN on, unless there’s an afternoon Twins game. As I wait for my greasy, delicious food, I page through the paper, looking for something that interests me. I’ll listen to the TV, in hopes that some news comes up that I didn’t catch scanning the wires earlier that morning.

I imagine a lot of people in this field spend their lunches like this.

But there’s something new. I have a MotoQ. And I have a data plan through Sprint. And Google Reader has a mobile version.

When the alt-weekly, or CNN, or fails to provide anything to relevant to me, I turn to my phone and fire up my feed reader.

* * * As a freshman in J-school, I remember my Intro to Mass Communications professor talking about mobility.

You can’t easily carry a TV with you, he told us. Laptops are nice, but finding a Web connection is difficult. A newspaper is inherently the most mobile form of news media because you can fold it up, stick it under your arm and read it on the bus to work. You can read it at the table during breakfast, on in the afternoon on the crapper.

He might have been right then, but he’s not anymore.

* * * In the first part of this series, I talked about the synergy of the Web. Data and content are separate from form. Information on a newspaper page is stuck on a newspaper page. Information in a database can be output to a paper, to a Web site and to a mobile device.

When my journalist friends write news down, it ends up in a repository that gets put onto the Web, and into a paper. It is syndicated to readers via RSS and possibly picked up by other papers in our company.

When I’m at lunch, I can pull down any news I’m subscribed to via RSS. On a mobile device. Text, pictures and video come together on my phone. I can do the same on the bus…or on the crapper. And I’m engaging with the news. I’m sharing it like this.

As the technology gets better, so will my bathroom reading experience.

So it goes.

Howard Owens says something mobile could be the newspaper killer. I think mobile technologies in general are the newspaper killers. It is just a matter of time for smart phones with cheaper data plans and RSS and WiMax and whatever happens after the FCC’s 700 MHz auction to spread beyond the techy, business, and uber-user worlds into the hands of general consumers.

So it goes.

The game is changing…fast

This is bad news for news media, right? Wrong. It’s all opportunity to make money. It’s an expansion of reach. It’s the possibility of a wider aggregate audience.

This is a time of abundance of information. And want of information. Lots of want.

The news business has two purposes: 1) To provide information for its community. 2) To sell ads around that information.

Anybody who thinks this industry is more than that is greatly overreaching. Anybody who thinks this industry is less is vastly underestimating the business.

Many of the complaints I hear and read about money moving from newspaper and television advertising to the Web is that the dollar amount for a Web advertisement is substantially smaller than the dollar amount for a newspaper or TV spot.

I think the problem arises because newspaper types are still hung up on treating the Web as a digital copy of the paper; It is treated as another place for yesterdays news or an up-sell for print advertisers.

The Web is a wholly new product. Therefore it is a wholly new way to generate revenue.

The paragraphs and photos (and in the case of TV, the video) are the same in both products, yes. But the Web offers more opportunity than that.

“But there’s 80 billion things on there,” Larry King said of the Internet. That’s exactly why advertising is cheaper on the Web than in print. Resources aren’t scarce. Space is a commodity. Web ad inventory is determined by the size of your audience, not space or time.

Another point: because “there’s 80 billion things on there,” one Web site doesn’t cut it in the overall picture of the Web. Think about your local news providers. In your geographical region, there’s only a few sources for media. Scarcity necessitates top-down control of information.

But on the Web, we, meaning your former newspaper community, can fragment into communities bound by interest, not necessarily by location.

Hyperlocal news is an attempt rebuild communities, but don’t get hung up on the word local. It has little to do with physical location, and everything to do with relevance of a subject to a potential reader.

You’re no longer a part of your community

The news business has two purposes: 1) To provide information for its community. 2) To sell ads around that information.

Market fragmentation means that your former readers are looking more and more to other sources for information, because you do not provide the information they want or because you are no longer a member of their community.

These two issues are related. First, not providing information that people want makes you irrelevant to their community. Second, if you are providing information that is relevant to their community you are not where they are on the Web.

One Web site doesn’t cut it in the overall picture of the Web. You need to get out there and actively engage with your communities:

That means full text RSS feeds, active Facebook profiles maintained by real live staffers who drive discussions and answer questions, full-fledged mobile versions of newspaper.coms, Flickr accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts and videoblogs formatted for iTunes, and paying close attention to whatever’s next. (Ryan Sholin)

Bringing it all together

The paragraph factory mentality serves to coldly separate content from form. This is a good way to move forward by technically providing content across multiple platforms. But it feels top-down, megaphone, WE ARE MEDIA AND YOU ARE AUDIENCE. We need to move beyond this.

As reporters, producers, editors and publishers, we need to actively engage with our communities–our readership–on as much of a personal level as we can.

We, as news consumers, are also reporters, producers, editors and publishers. Give us a platform to share our content and information with you, as well as tools to share your content with others in our communities. We know our communities interests better than you do, so let us share easily. Let us be your megaphone.

This is how you grow an audience. And yes, it will be hard to meet our second purpose (to sell ads) on some platforms (like youtube or facebook) because we do not own those sites. But we’ll be engaging our communities, building relationships, and giving people opportunity to discover our products that pay our bills.

In that same Intro to Mass Comm class, my professor spent a large chunk of time one day talking about the letters to the editor section of the newspaper. It serves as a community bulletin board, he said.

Now, I think, all our content is a conversation.

You can find the first part of this series here. In it, we looked at what convergence really is. It is a synergy of previous media. It is how we interact with the web, either overtly through IM, email, polls, and blog comments, or implied through our usage of the Web’s technologies.

We can use the Web how we see fit. This is the key difference between the traditional (old) media and online (new) media. The technologies that combine to create the Web give the end-user as much control over the Web’s outcome as the original creator of a Web page.

Wait, what?

Think about it. New media bloggers, like those at Media 2.0 workgroup and Cluetrain fanatics, like to talk about the Web as a conversation. The Web ebbs and flows in reaction to itself. Since the we are the Web (loosely speaking the Web is a network of people as much as a network of computers), we create and build the Web every day, through our personal blogs, our Amazon wish lists, our craigslist listings and our email forwards.

The Web is full of conversations. Conversations from corporations to clients, from retailers to customers, friends to friends, bloggers to like-minded readers and insane people to anyone who will listen.

I remember watching Larry King a while back. He was talking to Rosanne Barr about the Internet. It was painful to watch. King said he wouldn’t like it, there’s “80 billion things on there.” And surprisingly, Barr hit the nail on the head. You can watch the video here.

She doesn’t know she’s talking about filters, per se, but she’s describing the single most important idea on the Web. The internet is noise. Constant noise. The ebb and flow of the Web means that it is constantly changing. And growing. If any single person tried to keep up with everything on the Web, they’d explode. Thank god smart people built robots to crawl the web, to give us the ability to search for whatever we wish. Thanks Google.

“But there’s 80 billion things on there.” King is right. But there’s also lots on books in a library. That’s why libraries are organized so that one person can dig out information relevant to their search.

The problem with libraries, though, is that we can’t easily add meta-data to the books we find in a library. All the information in a card catalog is meticulously entered by a librarian, god bless ‘em. However, that information is not extensible. We cannot add to the catalog.

Scarcity necessitates top-down control

Let’s step back and think about how we interact with “old” media.

Television, as I stated before, is locked into time. So is radio. There are only 24 hours in a day so a select few people decide what goes on air, much like librarians decide how to create filters for library catalogs. A librarian is a curator of filters, and an editor is a curator of content. But in doing their jobs, they both act as filters, leaving the the final users of the products out of the process.

And then step back even further to the technology that makes TV work. Previously, there were only a few stations over the air. Those stations are still the only few that exist on the air waves. Spectrum is a form of space, so the government had to allocate that spectrum to certain groups.

The same goes for newspapers and magazines and books, which cannot feasibly produce 80 billion page volumes every day. Economics and usefulness outweigh the value of near infinite texts. Scarcity necessitates top-down control. Someone has to make a decision as to what stays and what goes. Someone must curate.

But the Web is so insanely different it doesn’t need top-down control. The reason it doesn’t need editors or librarians is, surprisingly, because there is so much stuff. We curate our own corner of the world and we tailor it to our sensibilities.

The cost of creating a Web page is fast approaching zero. Unlike paper, it isn’t trapped in spatial dimensions. You can have one giant page full of content or a billion pages with sparse content, it doesn’t matter. The device you use to access the internet doesn’t have to also grow in size because the amount of content is growing.

Content is separate from form.

What a concept.

Infinite content

I’m reminded of a Saturday Night Live skit. Watch it here. It’s fake commercial for a bank that bought the last Web domain available: clownpenis.fart.

It’s funny because people, when using the Web, don’t seem to give a shit what the name of a site is. They’re looking for content. They’re looking for usefulness. Brand isn’t a name anymore. Brand is interface. Flickr is a dumb name. So is Twitter. So is Google. But we’re not looking for a name. We’re looking for usefulness. We’re looking for content. We’re looking for what we want.

When we search, or click on a tag link, or drill down into a site, we’re looking for something that we want, that may be something general or something specific, but we want content and we want it now. We don’t want a name. If we don’t find something closely resembling what we’re looking for, we leave the page and try somewhere else.

The key for newspaper sites is simple. Make it easy for people to scan your pages. Make it easy to search for content. Don’t tell them what to look for. Help them find whatever it is they want.

If you don’t have it, or you make it hard to find, they will leave. We will leave. We’re not loyal customers anymore. Too bad, so sad. Deal with it. This is the main foundation for my argument for putting more “crap” on the Web.

Content everywhere

The Web is tearing down some ideals that existed in the past regarding ownership. The Web is a connection between people. A youtube video can appear somewhere other than youtube, which changes the videos context. RSS makes it hard to control where your content ends up. Hell, it could end up here. Or it could end up in my gmail account, my facebook profile and elsewhere as I’ve described here. Because we’re all curating our own corners of the Web, we’re getting flack from groups like RIAA, MPAA and overzealous editors who don’t see the value of their newspaper content anywhere else on the Web but their own Web sites.

Because content is separate from form, we can distribute it everywhere. I believe wholeheartedly, that distribution extends reach and increases content longevity.

Recently in our newsroom, we received an email from a professional photographer from the Twin Cities. He had taken a whole bunch of photos in a small town that was devastated by a massive tornado. They were great photos. Amazing photos. And he was giving them to us. All he wanted was credit and a link to his Flickr page.

This caused a stir that I hadn’t dealt with before. Why would this guy give away his great photos, members of the newsroom asked. Why wouldn’t he? It’s the Web. The guy makes his living from taking pictures (of weddings and such), not reselling his photos that were licensed under Creative Commons. The photographer wanted to use our site(s) to extend his reach. To get his name out there as a photographer. The photos are secondary to his ability to take them well.

And that’s exactly what newspapers need to do. Get your content in places where people will discover it. Think beyond your Web sites. You can’t expect thousands of people to just happen across clownpenis.fart on their own. You have to put yourself out there. Let your users stick your content in every nook and cranny on the Web. And then, once you’ve increased your market share, figure out how to profit off it. But we’ll talk more about distribution later.

What to make of this

The key points to take home here:

• Users want what they want, not necessarily what you have
• If what users want is not easily discoverable, they will get discover it somewhere else
• Many users want to do as they wish with your site, forcing them do anything else will only turn them away
• One way to achieve discoverablity is through distribution

Search is so important for newspaper sites. A newspaper.com is loaded with content, content that goes back years, if not decades. Hiding that from your users does nothing to help you. Give your users familiar tools to discover new content, and related content. You also can’t lay it all out there and expect them to know where it is.

Otherwise, expect them to leave as they (and the rest of the Web) get more sophisticated.

I’m often blown away by how outdated journalism awards are when it comes to the Web. The descriptions read like they haven’t been touched since 1999: They make reference to download times and layout, when those things are secondary to experience. There’s rarely talk about interface–meaning how you interact with the page. These awards, unfortunately, are geared towards thinking about the Web like you’d think about a newspaper. This is a sad byproduct of thinking of the Web as an extension of the print product (as a place to put things that can’t exist in print like audio and video), rather than thinking of it as a wholly new and largely separate product.

Without naming names, I’ve had the misfortune of trying to select special Web projects for these contests where the judges seem to simply look for a pages within your site that look different than the rest of your pages. It’s a process that’s extremely annoying. The content itself rarely seems to matter. Interface means nothing in these contests.

So, I’d like to talk about some things that may seem obvious–at least to many of us. I’d like to talk about what really makes the Web sing. This is the first of a multiple part series.

Information architecture

Broadcast. There are only 24 hours in a day. News, or rather, information can be made available as soon as a live truck can broadcast from a scene or an anchor can say a few words on air. But the information is fleeting because the medium is damned to time. The viewer must be watching at the moment the information becomes released or it is lost.

This is one reason, aside from the cost of producing news, why 24 hour news doesn’t fill it’s day with wholly new information every second of the day. Video, sound and information must be archived, selected and brought back to the surface periodically to cast a wide net on the audience. Broadcasters understand that people aren’t tuned in all the time, so they shoot for peak viewership. In a given 24-hour cycle, there’s hardly 24 hours of new information.

Throughout a day, information ebbs and flows and changes. It never feels complete, because with speed comes inaccuracy (or at the very least, incomplete information). It’s all regurgitated until someone in an office decides we’ve had enough or something new comes along.

Without sounding too much like Steven Hawking, time and space are the same thing to broadcasters.

Which brings me to print. Newspapers and magazines are far more doomed to time than broadcasters. Where broadcast has flexibility of seconds, newspapers must make decisions within hours of press time (and often, magazines must lock their pages months in advance). Print journalists spend their days gathering as much information as they can fit into a page and then, at press time, release it into the world. This is why when you pick up a newspaper or a magazine, it feels outdated compared to television or radio, yet it feels much, much more complete.

While print media gives the illusion of spending more time gathering news, it still has the absurd problem and blessing of physical space. You can only put so much information on a page and make it useful for readers.

Here’s the problem: Putting words and images on physical space makes it difficult for a media consumer to get news quickly. Where broadcasters flourish in time-sensitive or crisis news, print media struggles.

Here’s the blessing: Unlike broadcast, where the viewer is doomed to watch whatever information is available at the moment they’re watching, print readers can scan the headlines and select the news they wish to read, at a time of their choosing.

The great thing about magazines is that there’s a permanent record. You can start your own personal archive of each issue. (You can do this with newspapers, too, but you’ll look like a crazy person after a week or two of papers, without the aid of microfiche. The same goes if you tape 24 hour news). The not-so-great thing about this is you’d have to have the patience of a librarian to index, catalog and sort all the information held within those pages.

So to refresh:

• Broadcasts overlying advantage is speed, but with that advantage, it locks its audience into predetermined time slots. The viewer must be in sync with the time the content airs.
• Print gives audience the advantage to escape predetermination, but cannot offer speed of information that broadcast affords.The content therein can be read separately from the order it has been delivered (read sports first, if you wish). It is asynchronous.
• Both media are difficult for the end user to organize, to keep a record of all the information contained within. They are not extensible. You can’t inject meta data into the media, without the aid of another medium (i.e. a card catalog).

And to add a few quick thoughts:

• DVRs like Tivo have exploded the first point that broadcast be locked into time…for the end user. The content creators still only have a set amount of time to work with in a day. Television broadcasters are still primarily geared towards casual viewers, not those recording television. Furthermore, the act of recording live news defeats the advantage of speed somewhat.
• Print offers portability to readers, but portability is hardly exclusive to print. Now, you can buy portable televisions and access the Web from a variety of mobile devices. Note the word device, however, the newspaper is as much content as it is also device. I’ll delve into this more shortly.

Words on convergence

When I was in college, and still even today, the word “convergence” flies around newsrooms and J-schools. 99% of the people I’ve met who’ve exerted the breath to describe the meaning of convergence take the line that it is a convergence of content: Audio, video, text, pictures and interactive elements can coexist on a Web page. While that’s certainly true, I think we’re missing the point. Your Website should not be thought of as an extension of your broadcast or paper product. It is a wholly new product. It just happens to make good business sense that the content overlaps.

Convergence is a synergy of the advantages I’ve explained above. The Web is asynchronous and it is fast. You can deliver content quickly and your audience can peruse at their leisure. But there is so much more. Because a Web site is a singular element, as opposed to a moment in time (broadcast) or a periodical device (print), past news can be archived and retrieved easily.

That’s the beauty of hypertext. You can link to anything that exists on the Web, including your own content.

What does this mean?

It means newspapers and broadcasters need to take advantage of this synergy on the Web. A newspaper.com should not be mostly a digital version of your print product. It should be a new product.

We’re starting to see a lot of newspapers take on a Web-first mentality towards news; Breaking it as it happens throughout the day. This is good for newspapers, since they’re taking on their broadcast rivals territory. Broadcasters need to step up their game, too. They need to figure out how to use the Web to break out of the time-sync rut. And everybody needs to figure out the mobility of content.

What’s next?

I’d say stay tuned, but that phrase is fast becoming outdated. Check back whenever you’d like, I suppose.

• In the next installment of this series, I’ll take ask you to take a hard look at interface. How can we take advantage of convergence? And what are the pitfalls?
• After that, I’m going to talk much more about extensibility and the rise of serendipity on the Web.
• Lastly, we’ll look at the Web as a distributor. We’re all cyborgs.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and piss some people off by saying news is stupid. It has to be stupid because people are stupid (not you, of course; people in general).

Here’s how a modern newsroom generally works:

Step 1

A news tip is given to a producer, reporter, editor, or a monkey at a typewriter. These tips come from the public, PR firms, organizations, police blotters, general news releases and (increasingly) other news organizations. BIG SECRET: There’s not a ton of digging going on in America’s newsrooms.

Step 2

Some well meaning person in a suit decides if that tip will lead to an article, you, the reader needs to know about. Generally, news has to fit into one or more of these categories:

1. Timeliness Is this THE BIG SCOOP?
2. Prominence How many other well-meaning people in suits are involved?
3. Proximity How close to home is the news? (Note: only about a dozen newspaper journalists are in Iraq right now, probably because its so far away.
4. Conflict Could this be a big fight?
5. Magnitude Could it blow your mind or face off?
6. Impact Does it hit hard, or like a little girl?
7. Oddity Does it involve Anna Nicole Smith, a cruise ship, or a squirrel that can water ski?

Step 3

Somebody writes a story about the news tip. They ask a few questions here and there. They write the most general part first and the most specific stuff last. An editor checks it over for any glaringly factual errors or typos and then it’s off the whatever medium it belongs in: radio, TV, Internet, or newspaper.

Rinse and repeat ad infinitum, with the occasional wacky idea or investigative piece.

Step 4

The final piece, or at least a truncated version of it, gets shipped off to a consortium like the Associated Press, where other news organizations pilfer the news, possibly rewrite it and pretty much claim it as their own ad infinitum. Without ever giving credit to the originator of the piece, mind you.

Why this system sucks eggs

The outcome of news orgs using the above system to decide what is news and what isn’t news, and what happens when news orgs share news with the like of the Associated Press, is that they create an echo chamber of information.

And, since the news is a business competing for eyeballs, whoever beats a hot news item into your face the longest and hardest seems to garner the highest ratings. Gross.

It’s basically digg with suits in offices instead of nerds in basements.

The problem with echo chambers is that they say the same thing over and over and over and over again. The message itself because less valuable because it’s become a mass-produced commodity. One hundred people saying the exact same thing is much less valuable than one person saying something else, because once I’ve already gleaned the information I need from one or two sources, the rest of the sources become irrelevant to me.

Few people wish to read basically the same news article over and over and over again, unless that information is extremely important to them. Diminishing returns applies to news as much as it applies to business economics.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the majority of news found in newspapers contains such valuable information to most people they’re willing to face the echo chamber for long periods of time.

News is not an island, but it should be

Here’s a problem with journalism. If you were to hand me a newspaper and strip away all the datelines and the masthead, I’d have a tough time telling you where the paper was from. I wouldn’t have a tough time because of the lack of datelines and mastheads. I’d have a tough time because almost all newspapers are identical in the way they report the news.

Hardly a paper exists that accurately reflects the place it’s located, the people that read it and the values of their community.

What newspapers should be doing: reporting more news, not less. What they should be doing: reporting the same thing that the competition is reporting. And while they’re at it, they should just plain dump the AP.

If I live in Minneapolis, Minn., my newspaper should provide as much local news to me as possible. The national news shouldn’t be the same stuff that I can read or see anywhere else. That isn’t to say there only needs to be one reporter in Iraq for all of news media, rather the news that comes out of Iraq should affect me as a Minnesotan from Minneapolis if I’m reading the Minneapolis newspaper.

Since most newspapers aren’t in the national news game anyway, beyond AP coverage, there’s no differentiation between the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Bumfuck, Nowhere Daily News. Which means that the AP coverage the paper is paying for becomes much, much less valuable on the Web, since it’s EVERYWHERE.

If newspapers want to strengthen their product, they need to report more news from their circulation area than ever before. And yes, that means covering the kid soccer games and all the other shit that is traditionally “beneath” the newspaper. The news might not be valuable to America-as-a-whole, but you know what, it’s highly valuable to the people who your advertisers want to sell to and, who, quite frankly, aren’t America-as-a-whole.

The simple fact is, people are not as stupid as we’d like to believe. If they were, they’d stare at the same stupid content all day and newspapers, TV stations, et. al would be seeing huge upturns in their audiences. Not slow declines.

General Council for Viacom, Michael Fricklas, wrote a column about the suit which has no digestible name. In it, he calls YouTube a media company, not a Web company, thereby negating YouTube’s DMCA protections:

YouTube has described itself as the place to go for video. It is far more than the kind of passive Web host or e-mail service the DMCA protects — it is an entertainment destination. The public at large is not attracted to YouTube’s storage facility or technical functionality — people are attracted to the entertainment value of what’s on the site.

Among many arguments, Viacom claims that YouTube “induces” users to upload copyrighted material, which looks like an argument out of MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.
which holds that software companies can be sued for copyright infringement by their users (by taking away safe harbor protections from Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios) and that these companies must take steps to stop copyright infringement through labeling, according to Judge Souter:

We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.

YouTube does this all over the site, and tries to nip the bud right at initial upload, (on both upload pages):

Clearly, that angle isn’t going to cut it in court. YouTube goes above and beyond the labeling requirements all over the site. So like any good lawyering, Fricklas and Viacom manufacture other arguments, like saying not only does YouTube not fall under protections from the Betamax and Grokster cases, it doesn’t even fall under the DMCA.

They claim that YouTube isn’t a service provider, it’s an “entertainment destination” as if it were one or the other. Even if for every 5 million videos watched, only 50 are uploaded, YouTube is still an “entertainment destination” and a service provider because it does both.

This is where things get murky. Some tech lawyers have rallied behind Google and YouTube:

To try to treat it like a media company, denying it the protections of the DMCA, would be like treating eBay as a full-fledged product company, said Gregory Rutchik, a partner at The Arts and Technology Law Group. (link)

The problem with that logic is that, on eBay, you buy products directly from other sellers and eBay simply facillitates the transaction, they don’t house the products. YouTube does house the products, so to speak.

Viacom should enforce its copyright protections, and it may have a partial case here. But the whining needs to stop:

Is it fair to burden YouTube with finding content on its site that infringes others’ copyright? Putting the burden on the owners of creative works would require every copyright owner, big and small, to patrol the Web continually on an ever-burgeoning number of sites. That’s hardly a workable or equitable solution. And it would tend to disadvantage ventures such as the one recently announced by NBC Universal and News Corp. that are built on respect for copyright. Under the law, the obligation is right where it belongs: on the people who derive a benefit from the creative works and are in the position to keep infringement out of their businesses.

YouTube is well within its rights (assuming its protected under Title II of theDMCA):

(1) In general.—A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, if the service provider—

“(A)(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;

“(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or

“(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;

So, please, Viacom, stop telling us how much you hate having to manage your own copyrights and (boo hoo) have to pay someone else to manage them for you. Obstructing markets is costly and hardly works (see the black market for guns and drugs if you need a reference point). Figure out how to go with the flow.

Around the Web: Related reading

Analysis of the Viacom/YouTube Showdown: Google’s Site May Have “Safe Harbor,” But Still Needs Media Allies for Suc (sic)
Viacom vs. YouTube: The Billion Dollar Question
PBS Analysis: Viacom Sues YouTube for Copyright Infringement
Viacom lawsuit could imperil Internet models

Okay, so my last few posts have been pretty negative. Sorry, I’ve been grumpy lately. I’ve tried to balance my grumpiness with fun, cool stuff I’ve been reading about in my read feed.

I know my legions of fans don’t click around my site out of fear of and respect for me. So, I’ll just tell you about a neato article I read recently.

MediaShift, one of my favorite blogs in the whole of the blogosphere had a wonderful write up on the 7th about newspapers who hire editorial programmers (editorial say what?):

The big hurdles are pay differential and the culture clash between computer science and journalism. Most programmers — even at the entry level — get paid more than most seasoned journalists. And most editors and journalists have no experience working closely with computer programmers on editorial work. Conversely, programmers aren’t knocking down the doors of newspapers for development jobs, when they can get stock options and more in Silicon Valley-type startup settings.

The article follows the path of well-known J-school programmer Adrian Holovaty, creator of ChicagoCrime.org, and other journo-programmers, through the trials of being programmers and a journalists at the same time.

I’ve learned programmers speak in riddles when you ask them if they’ll finish a project on deadline, they seem to have a God-complex when speaking to non-techies about technical stuff and they rarely, if ever, dress like the professionals they are.

These are all horrible traits for a newsroom setting.

Journalists, on the other hand, want straight answers, generally want to understand what the hell people are talking about in as few words as possible and tend to dress above their means.

These are all horrible traits for a development setting.

Here is a few generalities that programmers and journalism-types can think about to better understand each other, and someday work together more closely:

Math is hard

Journalists tend to hate math. It seems counter-intuitive to what they do with regards to massive heaps of government data some of them sift through, but it’s ingrained in their culture.

At my J-School, there was one class nearly every mass communications student took to fulfill their math requirement: Contemporary Math, meaning, filing out tax forms and balancing checkbooks and figuring out when the next bus will arrive. Hardly calculus. Many (I’m guess most) of my classmates went into journalism, simply to avoid math, not because they’re passionate for the Fourth Estate.

Programmers, though, don’t fear math. They may not like it, but it’s a challenge they’re willing to take.

The fact is, there’s not a ton of math involved in programming for the Web, especially for news Web sites. It’s more like how a musician understands math intuitively, because the nature of his or her job involves thinking in a language with an entirely different syntax than English.

You don’t need to know what the bleep a cosine is, or have a clue what all those funny mathematical shapes mean to talk about the Web. Start with what you know, flat maps or graphs, for example, and work towards ways you’d like to play with the information behind those graphical elements found in newspapers.

Deadlines suck

The news cycle is simple. In any given amount of time, say 24 hours, shit happens. Some of that shit falls under the heading of news because it is information that is, or should be, important to a community.

Once journalists have covered the important shit, they find more shit that is, or should be, important to their community. Yesterday’s shit is mostly forgotten unless it has some relation to tomorrow’s shit.

Deadlines occur because someone in a big office somewhere (probably New York City) decided that newspaper presses have to run sometime late at night to get out to as many people as possible in the mornings. Same goes for TV, where the networks say, “you have X amount of time for your news, or reruns of Andromeda or Wild About Animals and that’s all you get.” That time hole almost never changes.

With the Web, some things are different.

First, there really isn’t a hole. If tomorrow’s shit isn’t ready for publication, yesterday’s shit just hangs out in its place. It’s not like you’ll suddenly hit black for a half an hour after the most riveting episode E.R. ever, or drop a pile of blank pages at doorsteps all around town.

People will come to the site as they please and if they don’t see new information they’ll probably come back later. Probably. Okay, you’d like for them to come back. Fact: the more often you add content to the site in a day, the more often people come back to the site during the day.

See, the Internet is always a work-in-progress. Nothing is really done and put to bed. And nothing really has a deadline. When its ready its ready, when its not, well, that’s where journalists and programmers run into problems.

The key is to start small. A programmer needs time to build the most amazing thing on the Internet and journalists don’t have that time to spare. So, start with little things that will be useful for journalists over and over again. You can always add and modify applications later.

And in the case interactive-fun-pieces, as I like to call them, where the whole application is designed for one story, those applications should be connected to stories with longevity, because it can and will literally just hang out on the Web site forever and eventually surpass those original stories to become a standalone tool for readers.

If it’s a big interactive-fun-piece about yesterdays water commission hearing, at which they didn’t do much that will affect people in the future, the interactive-fun-piece won’t be very fun for very long and you’ve wasted a lot of time making something without traction.

Time is money

Programmers need time to build stuff they haven’t built before. So when you ask them if they can make deadline, and they say they don’t know they probably don’t know, or even if they say it can be done, they still might not be able to, since they have no reference for how long it will take.

This needs to be kept in mind at all times (with any project, really).

With cool, shiny new Web applications, what you see is not all of what you get. There’s all sorts of weird things going on in the background that need to be built and tested.

Web developers do things just like journalists, they start with the raw information they’re given and then turn it into something useful for people. The big difference is that they sometimes have to create the tools they use from scratch (what if a reporter was asked to build a word processor before they could start writing?) or use a kit (use existing code from other projects to piece together a new product). Then, those tools need to be optimized for different browsers (there’s no single type of “paper” on the web, there’s IE, Firefox, Safari and a plethora of other browsers with their own quirks) and sometimes different platforms (browsers vs. cell phone vs. iPod, etc.).

And after all that, it still might turn to a heaping pile of junk. There’s quite a few things that can go wrong from database to browser. The bigger the project, the more things that can go wrong.

I was at a conference were Vint Cerf, one of the “founders of the Internet” said he’s “always surprised when computers work more than zero per cent of the time.” Murphy’s Law must always be remembered.

Again, picking big Web projects wisely means that you can always go back and tweak the application for minor bugs and modifications after the deadline has long since passed. Start small and build up from there as time passes (and as time allows the programmer!).

Those are just words

Many journalists, schooled in Associated Press-style, tend to think in terms of an upside down pyramid when they write. They write that way to tell the most general part of the story first and then get more and more specific until their bosses tell them to stop at the end.

The reason for this is two-fold: One, it helps readers get the gist of it quickly without having to read deep into the article and two, it helps copy editors make room for the article on the page, by allowing them to chop out the crap at the bottom. Efficiencies for everyone!

But with the Web, you can hand out information like candy at Halloween, in yummy, chocolaty bite sizes, full of delicious flavor. Break your story out of linear story telling and use the power of links. Or better yet, don’t even use words to tell your story.

Let’s say a reporter wanted to write a 5-10 inch story on how gas prices are destroying the financial lives of hard-working American citizens. On the Web, you can just ask your programmer and probably a web-savvy designer to build something like this little flash dude at the top of the page here.

Food for thought.

And with that, I’ll shut up for now.

I came across Sasha Abramsky’s horribly misguided treatise against the Internet by way of Romenesko today, and I have to say he is blatantly, patently, unequivocally and stupendously wrong:

Too many people are now ditching their newspaper subscriptions, relying more heavily on internet publications and online clipping services. If these organisations were recreating their own news-gathering infrastructures, that wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. The flaw in the model, however, is that businesses like Yahoo rely on news bureaus run by newspapers and other traditional news organisations, in order to reap their own headlines. They then cull these stories for audiences to whom they distribute the information free of charge.

The model works well if people use Yahoo as a secondary source - to, say, get a quick glimpse at the latest news as a supplement to their morning paper - or if only a select few use it as a primary source for news. It works terribly if a critical mass of readers cancels their newspaper subscriptions and relies exclusively on the freebies available via the web. For at that point, the financial viability of the news organisations comes into question - as it has at the LA Times - and the possibility grows of a news-gathering infrastructure breakdown. If the LA Times doesn’t generate news from places like Iraq, how will Yahoo, which doesn’t operate its own bureaus, maintain a reliable stream of professional quality reporting? In a very real way, the internet risks killing off the goose that keeps laying its golden eggs.

At the fundemental level, the thing that separates the Internet from a newspaper is links. One Web site can link to another just as easily as it can refer to itself. These links are hypertext, or simply a way for one piece of text to link to another piece of text. Because of this fundamental pillar of the Internet, I can easily travel from one document to the next with ease, bypassing the homepage of a site and move directly to the content I’d like to read.

It’s much easier than guessing at and typing in the exact address for the content I’d like to reach.

With a newspaper, you’re stuck within the confines of the medium in your hands, if you wish to leave that medium at breakfast on a Sunday morning, your best bet is to look up at the cereal ingredients on Marshmallow Mateys box on the kitchen table. But there’s no connection between the two sources of information, no link between them, if you will.

Earth shattering, I know, but hear me out.

Yahoo! primarily gets its news from services like Associated Press and Reuters, unfortunately like too many newspapers are getting much of their news now.

But Yahoo! takes their news aggregation a step further. A year ago, Yahoo! realized that much of their news came off the backs of newspaper beat journalists pounding the pavement, so they launched something similar to what Google news had been doing all along: They began providing links to these news gathering sources.

Hardly seems like a parasitic proposition to me. Do you see why?

Also note that when the balls don’t touch, Yahoo! doesn’t get any content from your Web site, either. When they do touch–or rather, overlap–Yahoo! gets content (in effect, they get reporters overseas and at the local water commission hearings all over the country) and the news sources tap into a huge, HUGE audience which drives traffic and ultimately increases ad sales for “free” content. That’s symbiosis, baby!

In other words, the Internet makes sweet love to the golden goose and together they lay magic golden eggs and wrap them with a silk bow.

B-b-b-but where are the greyhairs dictating the order of our reporters’ news? Ha ha, my dear friends, please recall hypertext, that wonderful thing that led me from Google to Romenesko to Abramsky: I bypassed all that dictation nonesense, following a network of trust. The news isn’t linear anymore. I can come and go as I please, which is something I imagine people do when averting their eyes from the Sunday metro section to cereal box, anyway. Only with the Web, we follow relevent paths to relevent information.

Granted, Yahoo! News UK & Ireland doesn’t have this feature yet, so Abramsky may be simply looking in the wrong place, hardly an excuse to shake off the Internet as a parasitic money-grabber.

Andy Merrit at The Blog Herald, wonders if this Webomatica post isn’t wishful thinking; Webomatica suggests that reporters start blogging the news, instead of giving us yesterday’s news today.

They’re talking about the newspaper industry’s declining readership and, in particular, these comments from Steven Rattner:

The time that Americans spend reading newspapers has been dropping steadily (now down to 15 hours a month), with scant evidence that quality Internet time is taking its place. In September, the average visitor to newspaper Web sites spent only 41.5 minutes per month on those sites, up 10% from the previous year but not nearly enough to make up the loss.

Rattner argues that Americans care less about the news today than before; particularly younger readers, who seem to get hung up on tabloid news. He suggests, though somewhat indirectly, that this supposed change in reading and viewing habits is forcing newspapers to think differently about what should be considered news.

I think that sentiment couldn’t be further from the truth about what’s going on in the minds of readers. We live in a time where information is fractured, not dumb.

We live in an age where, if I care to, I could read only NASCAR news, or entertainment news, or news about Estonia, if I care to. With the Web, such coverage is as deep as it is wide if you know where to look. Never before could people get such a breadth of information about a single topic.

Magazines understand niche marketing, as do cable TV stations. You pick a topic and build a small audience around that topic, then, you start (or buy) another company geared towards another topic and so on and so forth until you become filthy rich. For some reason or another, newspapers still try to be everything to everybody.

Attention is a zero-sum game. People don’t like wasting their time with something they don’t want. People especially don’t like paying for a whole newspaper when all they want is the funnies. Look at the recording industry, working its way back to the single song model pre-rock operas.

Average visitors to newspaper Web sites only spend 41.5 minutes on those sites because that’s all they need to spend to get what they want.

So, instead of fracturing their products to various niche markets, newspapers, in an effort to reach as many people as possible, have been targeting the lowest common denominator of readers: idiots.

Anna Nichole Smith graced the cover of many local papers, as did Britney Spears, when she shaved her head this past week. In an effort to compete with round-clock-TV “news,” arguments for A1 placement abound. Matt Von Pinnon, editor of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead writes (registration required, and come Sunday, it’ll be in a pay for archive):

I could hear the groans even before the story hit Tuesday’s front page. “Britney Spears and her latest crazy escapades are not front-page news,” they would say. “Save it for the tabloids,” other readers would write.

Similar sentiments came from our newsroom, sprinkled between ongoing banter about what led one of America’s all-time top pop singers to shave her head after checking in and then quickly out of an off-shore substance abuse treatment center. (This in-and-out sequence would continue all week.)

So why the front page?

Because, admit it, you read it, and you’re talking about it.

Some of my readers will note that I work for the same company as Von Pinnon and I even sit in on the news budget meetings as an online representative. Our company blogging policy states that I can’t talk about work, so we’re going to have to leave it with what Von Pinnon publicly says.

But I’m not sure if Matt’s argument is what’s good for the public. We in journalism have always sat at high and decided what is news and what is not news, but the Internet, and before that, TV news, threw a wrench in our silly operation.

Romenesko gathered a few other sentiments about the whole ordeal:

There’s real news embedded in the ongoing soap operas involving Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith, says Eric Deggans. “And a media-weary public needs quality journalists like [NBC News anchor Brian] Williams to pull substance out of these tawdry messes.” || Walker Lundy: “TV went dead-on nuts” over the Anna Nicole story. || Bob Garfield: “Editors are like bartenders, who must serve up what’s ordered provided they know when to say, ‘Sorry, bub, you’ve had enough.’”

So now we’re stuck in the funny situation: do we give people what we think they want or do we give them what we think they need? And will either bring back readers?

If our audience is shrinking, so too should the paper. I’m not saying to cut the news staff and only run bland wire infotainment. There’s still a huge audience that would find it a damn shame if the news completely turned into this mess and dropped its obligation as the Fourth Estate.

I’m saying the papers should diversify with smaller products geared towards smaller, targeted audiences. If they want to survive, they should provide products (such as tabloids and guides) that make money AND products with hard-hitting news that garner peer respect and win pats on the back from colleagues. Instead of having one big business failure, have one little business failure and a few more little business successes.

I’m weary to say that bloggers are here to save us all from the top-down style of news that comes from gray-hairs in New York and Washington, D.C. They’re not. For the most part, bloggers are idiots, too. Sure, there are a few bloggers that fact check and a few traditional journalists that don’t, but that’s not the point.

The point is access. For the most part, bloggers don’t have access to contacts at the Pentagon. They don’t have access to White House press conferences. Bloggers aren’t on the front lines in Iraq.

That’s where newspapers, and to a lesser extent TV, shine. They have decades of experience as organizations dealing with governments, dealing with massive corporations and dealing with corruption and fighting at all levels of human existence.

Bloggers don’t have that kind of organization. At least not yet.

Because of this, I’m also hesitant to say that “crowd wisdom” aggregaters like Google News and Digg are going to solve anything. Google News at any given time can look like USA Today and Digg is full of, well I’ll just come out and say it at my own risk here: crap.

Thoughts?