I sometimes hear: “Why should we shoot a video for the Web, seen by only a few thousand people, when a picture in the paper will be seen by tens of thousands of people?”

That’s making three fatal assumptions: 1) People actually look at the photo in print. 2) The photo and the video are the same thing to the news consumer. 3) A photo and a video are of equal value.

First, a photo has illustrative value. It’s very hard to tell an entire story in a single photograph (though not impossible, let’s try to avoid this argument, please). Photos are best used when packaged with text. As such, we can often “read” photos, online or off, with only a quick glance.

Simply because the photo on the front page of the paper, doesn’t mean anyone bothered to look at it on their way to the coupons and funny pages. Don’t confuse the purchase of an entire newspaper with the granular metrics of the Web.

Second, while videos are still generally passive experiences, they require much more effort to view than a photo. Obviously, putting more time into a video makes sense on some kind of Marxian level I’m too tired to articulate right now.

The point remains that a news video can be a complete package, without the need for other items. A good video can tell a story in 15 to 30 seconds, which may be longer than readers attention span with a comparable article and photo package.

Third, a photo in the paper (or online) doesn’t open up new opportunity for a new type of revenue stream (video ads).  If videos require more energy to view than a photo, they also command more attention, which is lucrative to advertisers.

While I’m not advocating doing video instead of photos, videos should be used as an editorial tool where appropriate. Use the right brush for the right painting. A constant stream and decently sized video archive will also give your advertising staff something new to sell.

Maghound, already hilariously misnamed the “Netflix for magazines” from Time, Inc., wants to give you an easy way to subscribe to magazines, in one central location, with the ability to swap out subscriptions from one magazine to another on a whim. The service will enable subscribers to explore magazines at the subscription price, rather than paying news stand prices.

But, from early reports of what the service will offer, I think they’re already heading into murky territory.

The price point stinks. According to USA Today, “users will pay about $5 a month for three magazines, $8 for five, $10 for seven and $1 for each additional. About 10% of titles, including some weeklies, will cost more.” That’s 3 magazines for $60 per year. What? Quick grab some subscription cards from your favorite magazines. Most cost less than $20 per year, right?

Let’s look at some numbers:

The best selling fashion and style magazines on Amazon are as follows:

1. GQ - $12/year
2. Vanity Fair - $15/year
3. Glamour - $12/year
4. Marie Claire - $8/year
5. Lucky - $12/year

The price for these subscriptions totals $59. That’s two extra magazines for a dollar less than what Maghound will offer. In other words, with Maghound, you’d pay a 35% premium for the top three magazines, with the option of picking up one of the other two magazines in place of one of three you’ve already subscribed to.

At the $8 price point, or $96 per year, you’re in worse shape with those five magazines, paying a 38% premium on the subscription price. If I just went ahead and subscribed to the top five, that’s $37 I could spend on impulse magazine buys on the news stand.

To be fair, if you move further down the tail into more boutique subscriptions like Metro.Pop ($23 from their Web site), Gay Parent ($32 from Amazon) and Foreign Affairs ($44 from Amazon), you can save some serious cash. But you can save some serious cash by reading magazines that post their content online already (Atlantic, Wired and more magazines already do this. And many magazines have some of the most interesting bloggers on the net, so why bother with with the print product at all?)

Is the tail of any value without the head to drive large subscriber numbers? Time will tell.

There are more points I’d elaborate on, but Stephen J. Dubner has them all covered at the Freakonomics blog.

Note: This is cross-posted from my other blog, It’s Randomonium.

Best class ever. Get famous on the Internet, get a better grade.

Think this is a stupid waste of time? Think again. Having a good grip on how to manipulate their digital footprint will be key for these kids come time to get jobs.

People (prospective employers, prospective girlfriends/boyfriends, teachers and just about everybody who knows you in real life) will eventually Google you. Internet stalking is a reality. I’ve done it and so have you. Let’s just admit it already.

Ultimately, we all want Google to reflect the real us—or at least, the very best parts of the real us.

This is why I have a Linkedin resume, two blogs, twitter and a public-facing Facebook profile among other sites plastered with my name that I control. Ultimately, if you Google me I want you to see me as I want you to see me. Not as I was posting on forum boards and IRC years ago.

Online image literacy is going to be one of the most imporant things coming up as Gen Y hits college and the workforce. We’ve only scratched the surface at what Google can do to affect our personal lives.

From a professional/creative standpoint, you want to make a good impression while having as few barriers to entry as possible. The Internet is all about communication and lowering the barriers (and with it, many of the old guard standards) of obtaining audience share.

On the Web, we are all media entities.

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.

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.

Saw this via Romenesko this morning:

Journalists produce the news that search engines such as Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. seamlessly and freely make available to anyone with a computer, Zell said during a presentation on corporate governance at Stanford University. “If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do, and how profitable would Google be?” the Chicago real estate maverick mused.

His answer: Not very.

Steal?

Indexing is now theft? That’s a bit ridiculous. I’d like to see if news Web sites could survive without referral traffic from search engines. I’d speculate all newspapers get on average of 15% to 25% of their traffic from search engines. Which could result in huge losses in value of Web sites in the eyes of advertisers, if these sites were suddenly cut off from the traffic generator.

But to call links with headlines (which is all Google uses) and with briefs (like Topix or Yahoo!) stealing is beyond gall. It a blasphemous misunderstanding of Internet basics.

There’s been a lot of fawning chatter the past few days about how Zell is going to save the American newspaper. Well, with that kind of attitude I’m going to have to assume his plans are actually to run it into the ground.

Google Maps released a new feature Thursday, My Maps. The service lets you draw lines and shapes over the Google maps, add markers, add whatever HTML you want to the marker bubbles and then you can spit out into a KML file. You can then dump the
KML data into Google Earth or another Google Map for your Web site, with a little knowledge of the Google Map API.

My Maps makes drawing on a map dead easy, and as soon as Google adds features to let you easily geo-code tabular data and then embed My Maps into your Web site, it will be the killer map app for Web journalists.

This got me thinking about a few things.

First, programmers that understand journalism, and journalists that understand programming are few and far between, which causes a problem for news outlets looking to expand their Web operations.

Second, I’ve said it before, programming takes time and it’s never a finished product, which causes a fundamental problem for those who work on tight deadlines.

Lastly, where does the value of information lie for news gatherers?

First things first: Journo-programming

Ask a programmer to make something by a certain time and they’ll tell you it can be done. Eternal optimists, most of them, they often don’t know how long something will take to build. Building to a quality standard journalists need might not be an option on a Friday afternoon whim for an 12 p.m. deadline Sunday.

That’s a fact of life behind a computer.

The developers I work with like to ask “why build something new, when it has already been done?” They “steal” code from each other frequently, but they make a point on a grander scale.

Page designers don’t change their styles every week and they certainly don’t create their own fonts. So why should programmers start from scratch with every product?

The Internet does two things well: It organizes and displays data and it creates efficiencies.

When creating something that will only be used once or a few times by the news, why build it all from scratch if you don’t need to?

Time wasters

Obviously building something new and populating it with data takes longer than populating something already created with data.

There are hundreds–thousands even–of Web products out there. Many of them can be leveraged, for free, to suit journalistic needs without having to build the product from the ground up.

Check out the Bakersfield site. Their map section isn’t built from coders manipulating the Google API. They’re leveraging sites like Zeemaps and Quikmaps to quickly create their maps. They even use YouTube for video on occasion.

They hand over the information they gather to these services and in turn, basically wrap their sites around the embed codes or iframes the services kick out.

Which brings us to:

The catch

Just what the crunk is the value of journalism? Is controlling the final product and copyright or the actual news gathering process more important?

I’m starting to lean more towards the latter. Data is usually freely available to anyone with the motivation (or gall) to ask for it.

Journalists basically just gather information, parse it and put it in a relevant context for their readers. That’s why we read newspapers. That’s why we watch the 6 p.m. news. We’re not particularly interested in the fact that you control the information you gather. We care about the context and relevance of said information.

Traditional media has this weird fascination with controlling the information it gathers. News gathering organizations rarely offer full-text RSS feeds for this reason. They want eyeballs on their sites; Withholding all the information from your feed reader gives them some semblance of control.

So handing over data to third parties drives news business people up the wall. They see it as giving their property away.

I’d argue that information is hardly the property of news media. Their value is the context and analysis of the information. Many YouTube videos are pointless. Clicking around the site, many Zeemaps don’t make much sense either. But that’s because you’re not seeing them in the context of their creation. They are created with the mindset that context will be divvied somewhere else.

Sure, there’s the greater catch that third party Web services often fall by the wayside, which can hurt the value of archived news behind pay walls. I don’t think its enough of a problem, though, considering the money saved from having developers work more on projects with higher returns on investment than news.

News has a terribly short shelf life to spend working on projects that peak in views in a day or two.