Ted Gup writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I teach a seminar called “Secrecy: Forbidden Knowledge.” I recently asked my class of 16 freshmen and sophomores, many of whom had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes and had dazzling SAT scores, how many had heard the word “rendition.”

Not one hand went up.

…

As a journalist, professor, and citizen, I find it profoundly discouraging to encounter such ignorance of critical issues. But it would be both unfair and inaccurate to hold those young people accountable for the moral and legal morass we now find ourselves in as a nation. They are earnest, readily educable, and, when informed, impassioned.

…

Then, too, there is the explosion of citizen journalism. An army of average Joes, equipped with cellphones, laptops, and video cameras, has commandeered our news media. The mantra of “We want to hear from you!” is all the rage, from CNN to NPR; but, although invigorating and democratizing, it has failed to supplant the provision of essential facts, generating more heat than light. Many of my students can report on the latest travails of celebrities or the sexual follies of politicos, and can be forgiven for thinking that such matters dominate the news — they do. Even those students whose home pages open onto news sites have tailored them to parochial interests — sports, entertainment, weather — that are a pale substitute for the scope and sweep of a good front page…

Obviously, I’m not so critical of technology, because it is only a tool and can go either way. But I question a few of the premises in the piece.

How can we add good context to news pieces? Do a Google News search for “Iraq.” Where do you even begin to understand the complexity of the past five years? It’s like trying to watch LOST in the middle of this season. Without that background information most of this information is useless. Click on most any story at Google News and you can’t continue to dig for more information about the subject, nearly every page is a dead end; You just get one article about one small piece of the larger picture. It’s incredibly disappointing. On the Web, we should always strive to leave a trail of bread crumbs with relevant links.

Compare news sites to Wikipedia where I can click for hours.

How can we make important information relevant to people that may not normally seek this kind of information out? Too often I feel like this industry throws dry but important information out there without linking it to real human concerns. People aren’t usually one trick ponies. They care about many different topics, some run parallel and some topics cross paths. We should find angles where multiple topics meet, wedge information about one important topic into the conversation about another. And make it relevant!

Citizen journalism and the “We want to hear from you!” aspect of it is kind of silly as an idea. But to assume that because people with cell phone cameras and such can’t commit acts of journalism is folly. This gets back to the broader picture. Gathering information people in our community collect, placed in a thoughtful, relevant context, only adds to the value of our own reporting. Obviously there is a lot of noise out there, but we should strive to act as the filter, to get to the signal that matters.

Just look through some of these photos from the N.D. Democratic convention to get an idea of what acts of journalism people in our communities are doing.

All of this feeds off itself. Broader context through citizen journalism adds more bread crumbs and helps humanize news. Continuity of the overall picture helps target news items to the right group(s) of people. Well informed people can provide more (and better) acts of journalism.

In order to compete you must cooperate

That statement seems counterintuitive, but hear me out.

Consider the prisoner’s dilemma, a classic study in game theory:

	I keep quiet	I snitch
You keep quiet	We both serve 1 year	I go free, you get 5 years
You snitch	You go free, I get 5 years	We both serve 3 years

Let’s say you and I rob a bank. We’re brought into separate interrogation rooms and the cops give us options: snitch on the other guy and go free or keep quiet and risk getting 3 years if we both snitch or 5 if only one of us snitches. Can you trust me? Can I trust you?

Obviously the matrix has arbitrary numbers. The worst case scenario for both of us is if we both snitch on each other, serving a total of 6 years, the best is if we both keep quiet, serving a total of 2 years.

What if we changed the matrix?

	I keep quiet	I snitch
You keep quiet	We both serve 3 years	I go free, you get 10 years
You snitch	You go free, I get 10 years	We both serve 4 years

Let’s assume we were terribly arrogant about our bank robbing prowess or just stupid like most criminals and didn’t come up with a contingency for this scenario. Since we don’t know what the other person will do, we have to base our decision on some simple logic.

It’s now most beneficial for both of us to take our chances and point the finger. At best we go free, at worst we serve only 8 years total. This disparity in this fictional legal system gives us a positive expectation value to snitch. By snitching we can expect to only spend 2 years prison or a total of 4 years divided by 2 outcomes. By not snitching, we expect 6.5 years in prison or a total of 13 years divided by two outcomes. Obviously, we have to assume these options would be given to us ad infinitum to beat variation to get these numbers, but in the short term it makes sense.

Mathematically it looks like this:

Snitching = 0 + 4 years / 2 possibilities = 2 years.

Not snitching = 10 + 3 years / 2 possibilities = 6.5 years.

Without worrying too much about silly math games, the point is that the matrix changed in our favor (insert obvious The Matrix reference here). Duh. Change happens. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. No matter which way it breaks, you have to adapt.

Change happened to our industry and now we can’t continue making the same decisions. If we continue to keep quiet, we’re making a bad decision in the long run. We have to adapt our way of thinking to a new world model. We shouldn’t ask how change happened or what we could have done to stop it–the world we live in is a much more mathematically complex place than these games–we should ask how we can leverage our situation now.

Now consider the Tragedy of the Commons.

I have a cow. You have a cow. We all have cows. And we all live in a community where we raise our cows on our own lawns. We drink their milk and what we don’t use, we turn into cheese and trade for other items like bread, meat, Wii consoles and Diaper Genies.

But one day, I get the bright idea that I can take my cow out to pasture in the common park. I do this at night, in secret, while the rest of you play Wii and raise babies. My cow does much better than your cows and starts producing more and more excess milk, which I sell to buy cooler Wii games and expensive meats. As long as I can keep this secret to myself, I’m going to do better than you.

But then one day someone I like, say, Howard Owens, comes over to my house. He asks, “Hey man, how do you afford all these delicious meats?” I decide to let Howard in on my secret and he starts producing more cheese and eventually buys some sweet gold chains. He tells Ryan Sholin and Ryan blogs about it, spilling the beans to everybody. The common park fills up with all kinds of people and their cows. It has been democratized and we’re back to where we started, except now we ruined the park. You ruined everything, Ryan…

That’s the old way to think of media. We had a few people hogging the park, dominating communication and most of us were stuck there watching from our homes. The park had certain barriers to entry (like broadcast licenses or high costs of production). That’s just not the case with the Web.

We live in a post scarcity economy (a.k.a. abundance economy) now. Now, grass that’s already been eaten by some cows still has value to cows, forever. The grass never goes away and grass grows every day. It’s always green for the cows that want it, so long as you don’t put up a fence (which is futile). But this new world gets crazier, your cows can now occupy more space faster. They can be two places at once. Your patch of grass can also be your neighbors’ patches at the same time. These cows can teleport, man. It’s nuts out there.

Ground Zero

The old investment edict “buy land because they’re not making it anymore” no longer applies to our community. All because of a little number: Zero.

Gone are the days of false scarcity (i.e. airwaves, static parks) and expensive resources (i.e. ink, paper and shipping) where the prices continue to rise. The falling costs of technology make distribution easier. Chris Anderson recently wrote about this phenomena in this Wired article and he’s been working through the problem for quite some time on his blog. As bandwidth, storage and processing power drop in price, they approach zero in cost and we’re free to waste it by giving away free email, free video hosting, free content, free software, free everything. Obviously the cost of bandwidth, storage and processors isn’t technically zero, but because of the shear volume of it there’s an economy of scale where it’s more valuable to give one product away in exchange for market share and (this is the tricky part) find something else of value to profit from.

If you want to learn more about how free economies work, Mike Masnick covers free in a fun series here.

Free works best in the aggregate for companies like Google who don’t need to worry about how to create content. They just sort data and make it easier to find. For those of us in the paragraph factories, we must find a way to make our content easier to find. But it goes beyond search engine optimization and findability once you’ve got people on your site. You must control a niche (i.e. local news, or regional farming, gadgets, anything). To do that, you must cull the best from others, be where you’re readers are and help your readers help you. That means being a part of a community.

Listen to your mother: share

I know I keep harping about this, but we have to get in front of the conversations going on out there. The whole damn point of the Internet is share media and to “create copies,” as Kevin Kelly puts it; Content can be two–or two million–places at once. Be where your readers are. Unbundle your media. Separate it from your site. Ignore copyright. It sounds like heresy. Creating and controlling information has always been our bread and butter. It still is, but the game has changed. Distribution pipes no longer work and any attempt to fake them on the Web only obfuscates our inevitable failure.

The number one thing you can do to increase readership on your Web site is to make all your content freely available. Get rid of the pay walls tomorrow and I’ll personally guarantee you double digit growth within 18 months. You don’t have to change any processes in your organization. You don’t need to rewrite for the Web. There’s no corporate philosophy shift that needs to happen. Keep posting items at midnight, don’t do video, do absolutely nothing more than open your archives to Google’s and your readers eyes. Just stop trying the transaction model. It worked for old situations, but now it harms your bottom line. Give your site away and they will come in droves. They will find you.

The second thing you need to do: Ignore copyright. No this doesn’t mean letting your competition post your stories without crediting you. Don’t let the local high school post your photos without crediting you. Don’t let Yahoo! News take your content unless they provide a link to you. Give it to them on the condition they provide links back to you. Free of any other charges. Links, in the eyes of search engines, are points. The more sites that link to you, the higher your points, the more relevant Google sees your page. When someone searches for content you can provide, you show up first or second or third and they will come.

The third thing you need to do: Give it away. Unbundle your media. Put it on other sites. Right now, take your content and feed it out to people. Let other sites syndicate your content. Let people find it where they are. Those that don’t find you in searches can find you other places. All links should lead to Rome. They will come.

Lastly, you need to take what others offer you. Pull in the headlines from your competition. Scrape craigslist for classifieds. Syndicate local bloggers. Pull event listings from Upcoming.org. Link to anything and everything you can. Every day. If you don’t have content, link to someone else’s content. If you only do original reporting, you’re doing your site and your community a disservice. Look at how popular blogs like BoingBoing and Kottke constantly link other sites. Hell, look at Drudge right now. What do you see? Links upon links upon links. Sending people away secures page views for yourself. You just have to curate links for your target community.

B-b-but that not journalism! Correct. Journalism isn’t dead, far from it, but the game has changed. We still need to produce content. But we are in the media business. Journalism is just a part of that. Sorry to break it to you. This is good in ways not many people can comprehend yet, though, and we’re on the cusp of some very interesting times in the years ahead.

If you want to really secure your future as a leader in whatever content you provide, start by being a good neighbor.

End game

When I reply to someone on twitter, in public view, the message is meant for the recipient, but others can listen in. One-to-one conversation can also be a one-to-many conversation at the same time. I haven’t read Clay Shirky’s new book yet, but from what I gather this is part of his thesis. This is what I mean when I say the game has changed. We don’t broadcast or have conversation over a few drinks. We do both at the same time. And boy does it sometimes lead to awkward social situations.

But fear of doing something wrong or fear of losing control of the conversation shouldn’t detract us. We’ve already done something wrong. We’ve already lost control. We’ve been trying to play a new game with an old set of rules.

Now, I know so much of this just sounds silly. We should curate conversations?! We talk a lot about attention economies and jostling for eyeballs because on the Web, every site potentially competes for the same people. True to a point. We need to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Yes, people spend a certain amount of time on the Web per day/week/month and what they find is usually all they get. If they’ve found someone else’s content, then they probably aren’t looking at yours. I get that. But we should ask a different question than “How do I get the people looking at site A to look at my site, site B?” We should ask how site A and site B can complement each other, distribute the workload, maximize audience and share in the benefits.

Before we look at a couple examples, I want to get back to ground zero: Free. Giving your content away doesn’t mean you’re going to lose the value of that information. If an article is worth one dollar and you give it away for free, you have to make that dollar back somehow to break even. This is the trade-off. Market share has no business value if you can’t convert size and type of community into dollars.

In reality, a page view has a cost of only a tiny fraction of a cent. Thousands of eyes on an article costs basically nothing to distribute, so charging anything more than a micro-payment flies in the face of market wisdom. And micro-payments don’t work for most products. They create a psychological hangup many people can’t or won’t accept.

So then, who takes on the costs of production and distribution? Advertisers.

Because the cost of producing a page costs so little, you can sell ads for huge returns. But, unfortunately we’re hung up on an old model that involves selling banners or tile ads or large formats to larger companies in our communities. We put ad reps feet to pavement and we go looking for big dollars.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Well, not so dumb. Yes, do that for your high profile, network-wide advertising or vertical sales, but think smaller. Every Tom, Dick and Harry sells their stuff on eBay and craigslist. There’s about bajillion craft shows all over the Midwest in the summer. These people have things to sell and they can’t afford TV or newspaper spots. They have local goods they want to sell locally. So they go to Google. They go to Yahoo! They go to Facebook. They fill out a form and drop $5-$20. The simple, highly-targeted ads direct people to sites where these merchants sell their products using freely available Web tools and you get none of that money. Web forms don’t need a commission. Nearly pure profit slips out of your grasp every second you delay.

There’s a new game in town. Your advertising needs to be as granular and as unbundled as your content. It needs context. Impressions are great, but advertisers are catching on. They want click-throughs and conversions, so make it easier for them to tap your communities. If you target your ads right, your users might actually find advertising useful rather than a nuisance.

Once you have the hang of that, seriously consider sharing your business model. Let other sites handle your advertising. Google does it. Amazon does it. There’s no reason you shouldn’t figure out how to share advertising, too. Build a relationship with your community to keep it healthy. This one really flies in the face of common sense and may not even work for smaller communities. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Tying everything together

Ok, I think this has been the longest post I’ve written yet. So let’s take a second and breathe deep. In a nice digestible list, here’s what we’ve covered so far:

• Pick a community. It can be a geographical region, like North Dakota or it can be a theme like Tech news.
• Start creating content. Make it evergreen. Let people into your archives.
• Start curating content when it is relevant to your community.
• Give others in your chosen community opportunity to share what you’ve got. This is how you build a relationship within the network.
• Once you’ve built up a large enough community of readers, you need to fill space with advertising that favors the content.
• Keep your community healthy by creating advertising markets to stimulate its growth.

Does curating work? Compare Drudge to the NYTimes.com. Last July Drudge had one-third as many readers as New York Times. Love him or hate him, He’s Just One Man.

Does opening up your archives work? Hell yeah it does. See that bump in people on the graph linked above? I bet you can guess when they opened their archives.

I want to talk about some sites that embody many of these principles.

The Hype Machine aggregates music posted to music blogs. It does nothing more, really. Just hit play on a song on the main page and listen to music bloggers post. But the site does some awesome stuff. Firstly it links to every blog it culls music from. Giving exposure to some great music blogs in a very, very crowded niche. Secondly, it supports itself financially through music sales at iTunes, Amazon and eMusic, as part of their ad networks. Lots of songs have links to where you can buy the tune.

Exposure to music blogs, so they benefit with link juice and spill over from click throughs. Exposure to music merchants, so they benefit through sales which also have kickbacks to the They Hype Machine. The whole site is a sharing machine. Just turn it on and let it do magic.

Everyblock aggregates data on a local level, breaking it down to the street level. The site culls information from official government sources as well as craigslist, Upcoming.org, flickr and others to give you a picture of what’s going on in your neighborhood. Throw in some story-based news and locally targeted advertising and you have a whole new way to think about news Web sites.

Lastly, this one is small potatoes, but it’s worth noting, because we’re going to start seeing more of it. There’s a small group of papers in Minnesota that started Minnesota Reader. Using only Drupal and some freely available feeds from newspapers across the state (including papers from Forum Communications, my employer), they’ve started aggregating Minnesota news. It’s basically the Google Reader OPML file we’ve set up for our editors in the state turned to face the public. It’s a bit clunky right now, but I think the concept has some interesting potential.

Take a look at the page for Woodbury Bulletin, one of the Forum Comm papers. On some of the posts, our RSS ads show up. On their page, with links back to our marketplace product. Some people may feel very uneasy about something like this. I don’t. It’s our RSS feed, so we basically control our content on their site.

Go out and grow your audience. Expand your network. People will gather around your content. Some of those people will support you by clicking on ads, more will given the right ad in the right context (either on your product or from somewhere else in your network).

All links lead to Rome.

If you hope to beef up your Web staff this year and have big plans to build sweet, dynamic, ongoing projects, I have some helpful hints for your newspaper’s Human Resources departments:

What to Expect When You’re Expecting

Creating Web sites isn’t like journalism. You can’t have a curious mind, an ability to write well and expect to learn the Internet in two weeks. Look outside the journalism field. Seriously. Don’t send out an email to your staff asking if anybody wants to be the Web reporter/editor/producer/guy/girl with the full intention of hiring the person most interested. If you end up hiring someone who doesn’t know HTTP from FTP, you’re off to a bad start. If you want to do that, teach your staff how to use the Internet, not how to build it.

Don’t expect to find an Adrian Holovaty. People who know journalism and also know programming don’t exist in large numbers. And they’re expensive people anyway. Find someone who knows the Internet and teach them journalism.

Beware Online Journalism programs and Graphic Communication programs. In my experience, both of these fields of study rely too heavily on Flash, site design and video. You don’t necessarily want a page designer, a Flash expert or a videographer. You want someone who can do write in some or all of the following (and someone who knows many more acronyms than this short list): PHP, Javascript, mySQL, Python, XHTML, and CSS. You don’t just want someone who just knows HTTP and FTP, you want someone who knows how to write a Cron script or someone who can tap into an API. You want someone to solve problems. You want a developer.

That said, don’t hire the biggest nerd you can find. Someone with a basic grasp on design theory will go a lot further than someone who only lives and breathes code. Hiring a lopsided developer can lead to overly complex interfaces. Balance is key.

Look for a developer with the mind of a journalist. Developers are usually curious people anyway, but you want someone with a broad range of knowledge, too. Someone who can just as easily work with your crime reporter as he or she can work with your features or business editors.

Again. You don’t want a webmaster. You want a developer. Period. Make it a point to grab the best talent from your local tech schools.

What to do when he/she has arrived

You don’t want a knowledge hoarder. Make sure this person doesn’t become a gatekeeper. Someone else should have a grasp on the developer’s work. You don’t need to know computer languages to know how a Web site works and how to fix minor problems. Pair the developer up with someone like a producer, a videographer and/or a database reporter.

Give them projects that last. Don’t think in terms of a short series of articles. Think in terms of ongoing value. Give the developer some small problem to chew on and then build on it from there. Where do ongoing sources of data come from in your community?

Give the developer access to the police blotter. Have them output the list on the Web. Then have them map that data in useful ways. Then have them attach articles to certain pieces. Then photos. Then think of tools you can build on top of that platform. Next thing you know, you’ll have chicagocrime.org.

A developer is not a producer or a videographer, per se. Let them work on the bigger projects (solving problems like how to get video on the site efficiently and quickly). Teach your reporters and producers and editors how to do those other things. A developer should build the tools that your editorial staff uses on an ongoing basis.

Don’t talk in terms of design right off the bat. What the public sees is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more going on under the hood. Design talk should happen near the end of a project.

Lastly, give them every opportunity to tell you your idea sucks. They are the experts on the Web. Tell them the problem you want solved, not how to solve it. Let them question you. You may find you’ve been asking the wrong question, or that the problem you want solved is part of a bigger question.

Besides starting this blog this year (and this one and this one and this one), I have to say despite all my screaming and yelling and general frustration, I’m pretty pleased with what’s been going on over the last 12 months.

Newspapers seem to be getting it. It’s slow going, for sure, but many newspapers now see the power of the Web. The greatest coups for online staffs have come from breaking news situations like the Virginia Tech shooting and the California fires. This is good. I’m not one for predictions, but I expect to see some really awesome stuff happening in 2008. I expect TV sites will finally start to come around to the Web and I expect many of them to fail miserably again. I expect to see more sites fully embrace simple technologies like RSS and I expect them to figure out how to monetize them. I expect to see a large blog network or two purchased by a traditional media powerhouse.

We’ve seen some truly great things happen in the world of community journalism, the smuggled Myanmar videos being the prime example. We’ve seen many newspapers hand local TV stations their asses with online video (and we can still do better). New York Times tore down their pay wall and they’ve only begun to see the benefits. Reporters and editors, although still somewhat begrudgingly have taken blogs under their wing.

Declining print readership and online advertising sales not making up the loss continue to concern publishers. Eventually those streams will cross. But only if we do things right this time. The fact remains that I can find breaking news faster on twitter and Wikipedia than the papers that supposedly serve the markets where these events occur. Omaha.com was a disaster to never be repeated. Pay walls unfortunately still block thousands, possibly millions of readers from content. Papers still fail to understand search engines. Papers have no idea whatsoever how to turn print-comparable profit on the Web. It’s still being sold like the print product. Site designs must improve. We can do better.

Believe it or not, this was my first full year as a full-time “web guy.” My background is in TV and before that, alternative print. If I can jump head-first into this, so can you. I hope publishers start to take the time to understand their “web guys.” Let’s make 2008 awesome.

Fargo Star is back! from Zac Echola on Vimeo.

This is a little project we started last year at The Forum of Fargo Moorhead, one of my employer’s (Forum Communications) flagship papers. Without getting into too many details because of my blogging agreement with my employer, it was successful at bringing younger people to The Forum’s brand. More so, I’d say, than those stupid “For Teens” pages that were all the rage in the 90s. Seriously. When I was a teenager in the 90s, they made me feel like jumping off a cliff.

Anyway, I hate to pimp out my work, but it’s a pretty cool little idea. Basically. (I’m really not the target demo for this sort of thing. I am way too snarky).

Users create tapes of themselves singing a capella, upload them to a site like youtube or vimeo or whatever and then send us the link.

On in-forum.com, people can go online and vote for their favorite singers. The top 10 move on to a live concert a couple months later at a popular night club in town. The winner gets a few pretty sweet prizes. Last year we had about 1,500 people at the venue (with zero out of house ads, mind you) and we didn’t even think about how to monetize that.

This year, we’re planning to take things out beyond just our sites and papers. And this is really why I’m blogging about this.

First, we’re not just promoting on our sites. While we love that our current readers see the contest and follow it (really, we love you for reading!), the object is to also show outside readers that newspapers aren’t necessarily boring. We’ve set up a Facebook page for Fargo Star that will be monitored by real humans. Our YouTube channel will also be watched by real people. We don’t want these to fall stagnant, to become brochures. The idea is to get out there and do something instead of talking about it. The key word here, obviously, is real.

Also, I’ve kicked around the idea of helping users along with posting video to their myspace profiles and personal Web sites. We already have the embed code from youtube that we’re using to display the video, so why not point that back at the public? Give them a snippet of code of the video and a permalink back to the Fargo Star page (which is in the early stages of production, I’ll post a link when we launch).

Lastly, merchandising. Last year, the staff at the live event all wore these hideous pink shirts with the Fargo Star logo on it. They were horrible. I had at least 6 people from the public ask me where they could buy one. And I was behind the scenes in a video control room most of the night worrying about a live web cast!

The single most important part about this whole project, though, is getting Web, editorial and advertising staffs in the same room and keeping everybody focused on a singular goal: Promote The Brand To A Tough Demographic In A Way That Doesn’t Suck. Turn our readers (old and new) into cheerleaders for our products. Because these products aren’t just ours, and we’re starting to understand this. This is their videos, their votes and their comments. We’re just providing some tools and some prizes. Community.

We aren’t worrying so much if the people who watch Fargo Star videos also read city hall stories in the paper. We hope they do, but we understand that people want what they want. The technical and philosophical lessons we learn from this project vastly outweigh any other reason for doing it.

One day it’s sharing videos for a contest, the next it’s sharing news videos. One day it’s participating in the Fargo Star chats, the next day it’s posting a restaurant review with a rating and some photos. Same philosophy. Same technology.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Flat-footed in Omaha

It’s simply unacceptable. The site still takes upwards of 2 minutes to load today. It looks like the site’s been hit by digg.com or slashdot, but I don’t believe that traffic would sustain like that for this long when nothing is loading. There is probably some other mess going on behind the scenes.

TV stations in omaha had live video online all day there and was on top of both stories, so I don’t buy the argument that there wasn’t enough staff to cover the shooting. That they couldn’t shift from Bush coverage tells me something is wrong with their entire process. KETV (which isn’t even the market leader) nailed the shooting coverage and I can guarantee you they didn’t need 20 people on either story. I’m betting it’s because they’re simply more equipped to handle breaking news environment.

The blog they’re talking about was a free blogger.com blog that had a handful of nothing on it. One post, a few comments. Nothing… Makes me think they had no blogging strategy to begin with. http://omahaworld-herald.blogspot.com/

There are two shining examples of recent that I can think of on how to cover a huge local story on the Web: The Strib had a several stories, a video, graphics and maps all up within 2 hours of the bridge collapse and the Virginia Tech shooting coverage with its twitter.com-like fast updates on the Roanoke homepage.

Zac Echola talks #2 - Mobloging?

This just may be the future of breaking news.

Here’s a great thing about this whole Web 2.0 thing. You hardly have to program.I’m serious. This podcast used absolutely no programming, just free Web services. It’s unbundled media, too–meaning you can find the content where I want you to find the content (or where you want to find the content): On my site, in a widget, at twitter, iTunes, Facebook, wherever. It’s fed to all those places via RSS, and hell, you can sign up for that too if you’d like.I’m using a service called Gabcast, but there a bunch of other similar products out there. All you need is a phone. Magic makes the rest happen.

Stuff like this adds a whole ‘nother element to mobile journalism.

This is news as fast as you can say it. This is audio from an entire press conference or the sounds of a crowd at a rally. Sure the quality kinda sucks, but I guarantee you there isn’t a professional news organization within 400 miles of me that’s doing something like this.

And I’m just me. Just think about what kinds of awesome things an entire news organization could do with something like this.

Where’s the revenue come from? Who knows? Who cares. It didn’t cost me a dime. Try it out.

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.

Save and share links have cropped up all over on news sites this past year, especially from web services del.icio.us, digg and Facebook. Examples here, here and here.Some newspaper sites are displaying track backs from blogs. And you’d be hard pressed to find a news site that doesn’t offer XML syndication, even if it’s truncated to headlines only.

I’ve even heard rumblings from some news organizations planning to offer headline widgets for bloggers, in the hopes news sites can tap new audiences.

That’s all fine and good, but what invariably happens when someone follows a link to a web page is that they immediately leave it once they’re finished with it, especially when they come from digg, del.icio.us or Facebook.

So what’s a Web site to do once they attract an audience through these referrals? There’s always been talk about providing interactive news for online reader, through slide shows, video and Flash whatnots. Related content is nice, but who decides what’s related? Robots and producers, that’s who.

Jeff Jarvis got a look at the new USA Today where the site begins using machine generated tags. Jarvis ponders, “given the biorhythm of news, I wonder whether a folksonomy can take hold in time.” But that “biorhythm of news” is mostly a byproduct of traditional news media: TV and Newspapers, one with limited time, the other with limited space.

The Web has neither restraint. Articles and photo and video can sit on a server indefinitely. News becomes evergreen. Old news may be new news to someone and even if it’s not, that content may still be relevant to someone else.

So why not make the news itself interactive by letting users decide where it should go? Why not break free of the traditional categories (news, sports, business, features, etc.) and let readers create their own categories?

And then set your Web team loose on building XML feeds and headline widgets based around those categories, or blocks of categories, thus making those tools relevant to people looking to syndicate and share specific types of information.

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?