Bill Keller:

In other words, something is happening out there, and if we don’t understand it, it’s not just the newspaper business that is in peril.

And at this time of desperate need for reliable news reporting, the supply is dwindling.

That may sound like a strange thing to say in the age of ‘too much Information’. You turn on your computer and there is a media tsunami: blogs, Google News, RSS feeds, social sites like MySpace and file-sharing programs like YouTube. You can harvest it from around the world. You can customize it. You can have it delivered to your cell phone. You know where many thousands of younger readers go these days to follow breaking news stories? They go - or at least they are sent by search engines - to Wikipedia, an online, communal encyclopaedia written and edited by well, essentially written and edited by any passerby who wants to log on and contribute.

The Onion:

In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday. The landmark post, which updated nearly every member of the global online community on the shelf Tiedemann was building, was linked to by several thousand sites, including Daily Kos, Digg, and The New York Times. “Wow, what a special treat this was for all of us,” said Talking Points Memo head blogger Joshua Micah Marshal, who, along with all other bloggers, checks Tiedemann’s site every day just in case something monumental occurs.

Matt Taibbi:

If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days. My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism.

What journalism really needs is more people who are reporting who actually know something. Instead of having a bunch of liberal arts grads who’ve read Siddhartha 50 times writing about health care, it would be really nice if some of the people who are writing about health care were doctors.

People say the darnedest things, don’t they?

Listen, this is journalism 101. Bill Keller is an idiot (somebody put that in a textbook). The Onion hit the nail on the head here. The blogosphere isn’t some unified voice as the-media-would-have-us-believe. It’s a bazillion voices talking about a bazillion things. Which is why there are tools like social networks, RSS and search to help cut the signal from the noise. Why is this journalism 101?

Because, the whole idea of the Fourth Estate (the other three being the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of American government) is that journalism acts as the check on the government. It acts as the voice of the people who give democratic government its power. That the barriers to create and consume media have lowered, taking power from the media, means that voice has been passed to the rightful owners of the Fourth Estate: the people.

On an entirely philosophical level

I’d argue that, especially lately, and especially the New York Times, that the mainstream media hasn’t acted as a voice of the people. It hasn’t acted as a check on government. It’s been by and large the voice of the government instead. That Tiabbi interview I link to above makes some brilliant points about why the media is disconnected from the public. Read it.

Which, honestly, so be it. Let the mainstream media be the mouthpiece for government. The media as it once was is not as relevant as before. They are simply an increasingly small part of the head to the long tail of conversations happening in the world. More people are talking about more things through blogs, social networks emails and, hell, face to face conversations than the media can cover based on its rigid standards of “excellence.”

The truly excellent writing is happening on the network, all you have to do is filter the noise. And know what you care about. Someone else cares about it too. They’re probably an expert. Or, at the very least, not boring.

On an entirely business level

Mainstream media moron Bill Keller (I’m sure he’s a smart guy, but this smart guy missed the damn point) opines in his speech about how the media is mishandling coverage in Iraq. There are only 50 western reporters in Iraq. When Saddam was captured, there were 1,000. Do you know why this is? The media has a really, really hard time making news relevant to their readers. I guarantee you they were all pretty much writing the same stories over and over, hardly one of them relevant to their market.

So dump the overseas reporter and use wire copy. It’s expensive to send a reporter to the Mideast. And it’s more expensive when said reporter joins the chorus (or boys club or whatever you want to call it) and writes the same thing everybody else is writing instead of writing something interesting, poignant, beautiful and relevant. God, when put that way, the news media sound like “A-list” tech bloggers. Fuck.

Taibbi is right. Where are the news people who really know what they’re talking about? I’m sure those 50-some reporters in Iraq know what’s going on around them, but by the time it’s vetted by editors and wire monkeys who most likely don’t know what the hell is going on, we the readers are left with mindless, boring drivel, watered down and written for 12-year-olds. And even if a single great story somehow survives this process, there’s hardly ever context to what we’re reading. There’s no sense of history, of the characters and events leading up to the news item. And if there is it is trivial. “Today the stock market fell because a cow looked at a businessman in India.”

No, bring the reporters home and spend an eternity talking about Paris Hilton’s latest idiotic endeavor. It’s relevant to your readers, right? No, but at least it’s halfway interesting when faced with matter of fact city council reporting. It’s also cheap (literally and metaphorically)!

This is the cancer of the media. This is the bane of my existence. Why the hell did I ever think it would be any different? We should all just quit and go into advertising and marketing. At least there we’d be honest about being lazy scumbags.

If you think it’s all about long-form enterprise stories, you’re mistaken, too. Unless you can show your readers by the time they read the headline and look at the photo why this story is important to them, they’re off to the funnies page. Or calling to cancel their subscription. You’re wasting space.

Relevance matters. It matters more than any other news attribute.

You have two options that I can think of: Cast a wider net or throw spears. Use your space to write about more things with the hope that a few or more articles will matter to people or go out, pick valuable segments of your population and cater to their proclivities.

As much as I hate to say it, it worked for FOX News. It works for professional blog networks. It works for the book publishing industry. It works for magazines. That isn’t to say the people are turned off to the idea of balance and fairness. It’s just that we’ve turned those ideals in the newsroom into bland and boring. We try to be everything to everybody. It’s stupid.

On an entirely personal level

It can be better.

We can drop the pompous, holier-than-thou act. We could start thinking in terms of neighbors instead of readers and eyeballs. We could remove the laziness from newsrooms across the country. We could stop hiding behind upside-down pyramids and passive voice. We could stop worrying about beating the competition; Nobody is comparing notes (scoops are illusory ego boosters). We could start serving segments of readers better. We could demand that J-schools get their heads out of their asses and pass only the students that didn’t just get into this business because they hate math. Then we could make our content interesting, poignant, beautiful and relevant.

To do that, we should diversify our media offerings. We should enable our audience to join the conversations. We should solicit the best voices of our communities. We should stop looking at blogs as a unified object out to destroy us. We should create and design tighter, better papers and Web sites. We should create tighter news packages. Dump the decisions by committee. Think outside your products and go where your readers are.

We should do more and talk less.

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 just went on a long rail in the comments over at multimediashooter.com. I think I just woke up too early this morning and I might be a little crabby, but I’m sick of seeing this line of thinking come from my (rather pretentious) colleagues in the Web news business:

Please tell me why these have seen the light of day? No dis-respect to photographers Chris and Jason, I know this is coming from above you, at least I hope, but WTF. Most of us in the industry are fighting not to do ‘video just because we can’ and you guys are doing this! Really, what is the point? I just have to know. Have they given the photo staff video quotas?
I am going to use these as examples of the wrong way to approach newspaper video.

And these from the comments:

I agree, what the heck were they thinking? This is the problem I think many people are facing, management that didn’t understand photojournalism before video, and really doesn’t understand the what multimedia storytelling can really do. This is the video equivalent of someone yelling out to go get a weather picture. Hopefully these two argued their case beforehand.

My guess is that these videos were tagged to a reporter’s online story. Just one more thing that the photo departments will have to deal with until reporters are trained to shoot these video tags themselves. These videos on there own don’t have much to say, but placed in the context of a written story they might give the viewer some added value. Is it what I want to shoot? Hell no.

And again from Richard:

it should read editors defend yourself. I’ve been In the business long enough to know this is beyond photogs. But when you work at a place that uses these pieces as examples of why we ahould be producing five staff videos a day, i feel the need to speak out and say no. This is not the kind of video journalism we should settle for. All eyes are on us as an industry and we have a responsibility to speak up. We should be fighting and talking about this kind of thing to death. I know i didnt become a photojournalist to be told to go shoot video of grass growing. Maybe its time for me to get out of newspapers. And, as for me splashing this out there….well dont forget any jerk with a blog can say what they want.
i think the time to always be nice is over. Its time for some tough love. Dont get too worked up about the spreading of negativity there is always a bad apple in the bunch, but because it looks so ugly and moldy and smells bad it makes the rest of the apples look good.

This was my long winded response:

As a Web producer for mid-sized group of papers, I’m all for tiered video on the Web. By this I mean having a mix of well produced video packages that can stand alone from a written story and short clips packaged with text, graphics and photos that certainly can’t stand alone very well.

Granted, those short clips should somehow enhance the story. And a reporter could just as easily shoot it as a photog.

But, the fact of the matter is that sending photographers out on extended video assignments doesn’t make much sense on deadline either. A photo is arguably easier to produce and it can be used in multiple media (the paper, the Web, cell phones, etc.), whereas video takes generally more time to create and can really only exist on the Web right now; Unless you have some kind of deal with a TV station, that video has a smaller audience than a series of photos. So it makes sense to spend more time on photos than video, thus producing more short clips and saving produced video packages for weekend centerpiece stories.

My argument extends further to text and photos. Why not put the “crap” on the Web, too? Storage and distribution costs may as well be zero and everything on the Web finds an audience regardless of how you perceive the quality. Write briefs about the little league game that will never make the paper, add those photos you don’t have space for in the paper, or that you think are unworthy of print. SOMEONE wants to see it.

This is the beauty of the Web, the crap and the masterpieces are the same value when it comes to serving up advertisements; two eyeballs equals on ad, regardless of what those eye are seeing. There isn’t the problem of limited space and time, like we have with newspapers and TV respectively.

The “archaic” line of thinking is that you only distribute what you think is the best content. You don’t speak for everybody in your audience.

I think it’s time for newspaper and TV people (I’ve worked in both areas) to start understanding the Long Tail of the Web. Google it.

That is all.

And now for another long rail:

To elaborate a little bit further via analogy: YouTube wouldn’t work if you cut off just the best videos on the site. First, deciding the “best” is such a subjective game. Second, cutting off all those videos with, say, fewer than a 1,000 views over the past month would artificially cut off thousands upon thousands of people who want to see these so-called “crap” videos.

YouTube would simply not grow. It would die because some competition would come along and aggregate all the content better.

The problem with we media types is we have a tendency to think we know what our audience wants and needs. Our view of quality is disproportionately higher than our audiences view of quality. We spend all day looking at media of all kinds, and then we either directly or indirectly (it doesn’t matter which) assume that our audience thinks like we do.

This is a confirmation bias and it is wrong! DO NOT purport to know who your audience is, because you are at the fringe of the audience yourself. You cannot see the forest for the trees.

For the most part they (our audiences) do not watch you and watch your competition! They do not necessarily read your newspaper and your Web site. They do not care about us!

They care about a variety of information. You may have a thousand readers who want to know about a city council meeting and one reader who wants to know what the fishing is like at some lake. It’s easy to give them all what they want because space is unlimited and the cost of producing the fishing information is probably much less than the cost of producing the city council information. Since ad space on a page is limited, you’ll get a higher return on eyeballs looking at the fishing information than the council information.

The point is people come to us in hopes that we have what they’re looking for. If they can’t find it, they look somewhere else.

This idea of “general” is dying off. It died in the magazine industry, and the content is flourishing because of it. It’s dying in television and the content is flourishing because of it.

We need to think about our audiences (yes plural). We need to think about niche content. We need to think like spaghetti sauce companies.

This was first meant to simply be a reply to Pramit Singh’s alarmist post, but it grew into something of it’s own.

Singh says:

Sometimes in future you are going to wonder at the amount of data you have left open online – your pictures which you realize must never have been brought in public, your contacts, your rants, abusive blog posts, silly incoherent writing - it is a long list.

You also realize that you spent most of your online time acting like a voyeur. There are footprints that you left behind.

The real voyeurs are those employers and companies that pry into our online lives unprovoked and unnecessarily.

Much of what is on the Internet is not intended for a mass audience and never reaches that–or any–audience.

It is delusional to think that everything that happens online has any relevance beyond its creator’s ego. In the case of drunken Facebook photos between friends, the intent is for other friends to view the photos, not anyone else.

It’s like doing something you wouldn’t want your employer to know about in front of a picture window in your home. About as many people would see it in the end. And let’s face it, you’re at home. On your free time. If you’re employer wants to control your personal life as well as your professional one, then I say they’re not worth working for.

But the Web is permanent, no? Those naughty photos and message board posts from high-school live on forever, right?

Sure, in a sense, but you have to know what you’re looking for. And if you find that someone under your employ is a fan of scat porn, so much a fan of shitting on their lovers that they (gasp) blog about it, what does it matter to your business if they don’t shit on your customers (either literally or figuratively)? Are people really so dumb that they can’t differentiate work from play on the Web? I think not. And I think there’s a generation of kids coming into the work force with a basic understanding of this.

We don’t change the way we act around our friends because our grandmother may be listening, unless we’re sure she may, in fact, be listening. Leaving the front door unlocked is not an invitation to my home. Speaking loudly at the bar does not make eavesdropping on my conversations ethical.

How is a conversation between two friends in a pub different than the same conversation on the Web? Who is the voyeur, really, if the message wasn’t meant for you (or worse yet, you pry the data out)?

The greatest flaw in thinking about the Internet, is thinking that bloggers (including me), Facebook users or people who post photos to flickr want mass attention and fame. We don’t (or at the very least, we don’t expect it). We target our message, whether it be photos of a night out with friends or posts about the Internet, to those few people who might perchance stumble across a slice of our digital selves (key word: slice). We are outliers. We are all Chris Anderson’s Tail.

15 minutes of fame has given way to being famous to 15 people. Mass media is dying, if it isn’t already dead. Get over yourselves.

Isn’t privacy a two-way street?

More thoughts on this to come soon.

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.