Ryan Sholin posed an interesting question on twitter, and it will take me more than 140 characters to respond.

He says:

Hypothesis: Newspapers in blog form are more pleasant to read than blogs in newspaper form. Discuss.

It all goes back to the signal vs. noise issue. Newspapers write about a lot of stuff I don’t care about. At least I don’t care about anything more than just a general overview.

Scenario: Sometimes a court case will break in the morning and a paper (or a blog, for that matter) will write through the story several times through the day. This is a good thing to do, but if I’m subscribed to that papers feed, I really don’t want my feed reader cluttered with constant updates, when a single story will suffice. It’s just a personal preference. Noise is the number one reason I unsubscribe from blogs, too.

This is why it’s so important to explode categories of news. On a newspaper.com, I should be able to get granular news items. I don’t necessarily just want entertainment news, I want news relating to movies and TV. I don’t want local news, I want news about local crime or city hall. The sports section is a terribly boring section to me, but I love baseball, so I’d like to just follow baseball related stories. See where I’m going?

As for reading blogs in print form? I don’t know. I’d rather not. Unless it was a newspaper from boingboing or Silicon Alley Insider. Can you imagine how infuriating it would be to read kottke.org without the links?

I do have to say that blogs tend to have more readable designs than newspapers and most certainly better designs than newspaper Web sites.

Shortly after writing my last post about an email I just sent off to Rep. George Miller, I see this in my feed reader (the comments are a hoot!):

In response to a mass email from the staff of Ward 8 Council member Marion Barry, which was sent to Page apparently by mistake, the irritated classical critic fired back an off-the-cuff response. Danger! Danger! As everyone should know by now, when you send an email you should just assume that everyone in the world is going to read it.

…

Barry and his staff are demanding that the Post fire Page, and the paper has actually placed him on leave.

Here’s the email Page sent:

Must we hear about it every time this Crack Addict attempts to rehabilitate himself with some new — and typically half-witted — political grandstanding? I’d be grateful if you would take me off your mailing list. I cannot think of anything the useless Marion Barry could do that would interest me in the slightest, up to and including overdose. Sincerely, Tim Page.

Really? Page was placed on leave for this?

Really?

I have been wrong for a while now, I guess. Newpapers aren’t becoming irrelevent because of lackluster design, pompous editorial attitudes, laziness, inability to adapt to technology, boring news, boring writing and boring graphics.

brass, gall, nerve, spine, rocks, cajones

They are becoming irrelevent because they lack balls.

This is the god damned Washington Post and they’re caving because an off-the-cuff email. Please.

I could understand if it was a political reporter. The relationships there are important for WaPo. I could undertand if it was what was said in the email was untrue (it’s not, Barry has been busted for coccaine several times). I could understand if the email Barry’s staff sent out wasn’t a mass email (read: spam, bacn, news release, it’s all the same).

But this was a response to an inadvertant email meant to fly into an abyss like every other take-me-the-fuck-off-your-fucking-list emails millions of American send out every day. Excuse my French, but I think I’m painting an accurate portrayal of the digital culture we live in.

Back to newspapers: Grow some. Try harder. Stop whining. Stop making bland decisions by committee.

Stop being wimps. Do something.

The Associated Press: AP Urges News Industry to Embrace Online

I’ve put a lot of thought into this in my young journalism career.

The methods of gathering news hardly change. Only the delivery mechanisms. We still go out and engage the community, ask questions. But we now have amazing opportunity to really listen to our audience. That’s the “institutional arrogance” that Curley is talking about. I’m saying this at my own risk: This entire industry may not really be listening while we communicate.

As aggregators and producers of information (news or otherwise), we can only benefit by being closer to our communities, online or off. The Web is most valuable when it provides a gathering point for discussion. That discussion can be about products (Amazon and eBay), humorous news (Fark.com) or video (YouTube, Vimeo, and a million other sites). The Web is just another bar, another softball field, another book club.

The beauty of the Web, in my eyes, is that it lowers the bar for anyone to produce media, to share their thoughts and expertise on any topic with anyone who happens across their site. That isn’t competition, that’s opportunity to listen to and engage our audience, on a one-to-one level and on a global scale at the same time.

The best we can do is facilitate and become a part of the discussions going on in our communities.

Same as always.

40 Downloadable Open Source Social Software Applications by Max Kiesler:

While large scale social sites like Flickr, Digg, Youtube and Myspace have predominated the web-o-sphere over the past few years there still is a need for narrow content verticals in this arena. This list will give you links to 40 open source resources to get you started building your own social bookmarking, networking, filesharing or search application. The following is a list of what I consider the be the best open source social software that Ive found over the past year.

Newspapers.com, you have no excuse.

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.