Howard Owens

Newspapers started small, cheap and with different standards

Howard Owens — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:49:38 +0000

There are those in our industry who seem to assume that newspapers emerged in 1835 in full flower, that many of the elements of the newspaper world that were until recently taken for granted were all part of world of James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley.

An example of such thinking might be found in this post by Bill Doskoch.

The assumption, in my perception, is pervasive, and it colors the view of today's journalist toward development of online news; in fact, the assumption may have blinded many executives (including online executives, including myself for a time) in their expectations how to build an online news business.

For more than a decade, we expected to build online news organizations that could support a super structure of the modern newspaper newsroom -- with the all the reporters and editors and big story packages (look at all the emphasis we put on big Flash multimedia productions) and that we could keep doing journalism just the way we always did it.

While we bemoaned shovelware (taking the same exact print story and repurposing it for the Web), we took little time to really examine what might might be different about online publishing that should change the way news is gathered and presented.

That's why we were slow to embrace blogging, slow to recognize the power of social networking, and why, even today, most newspapers treat reader interaction (re: comments on stories) as a nuisance rather than an essential part of the business.

Look at the typical newspaper.com home page design -- the level of sophistication and attractiveness may have improved from five or six years ago, but these sites are still trying to recreate the newspaper experience, the packaged-goods experience, shoving everything possible into a single, wholistic collection of pixels.

From the in-the-trenches newspaper journalist perspective, today's surviving reporters and editors keep looking to paid content as some sort of savior, ill-equipment mentally to understand why it simply won't work, and unwilling to accept any online news model that looks different from the print world they've loved.

The seeming fact that no online news model has yet emerged to support their paradigm of journalism -- the large staffs, the watchdog journalism (at least to the level they expect), and the comfortable 9-to-5 work shifts -- is proof to them that online can't or won't work they way they expect.

Any experiment in online journalism that doesn't fit their paradigm is just folly.

These reporters and editors need to go back to J-school, and one that offers some history of newspapers rather than priestly pronouncements on religious tenants in the High Church of Journalism. Or at least reflect on what history they did learn.

James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, E.W. Scripps and Joseph Pulitzer were not just earlier versions of Woodward and Bernstein. They were entrepreneurs, visionaries and risk takers who experimented and explored the capabilities of new technologies with a goal of meeting readers needs and growing audience.

They put ads on their front pages. They ran straight murder trial transcripts. They sent row boats out in the harbor to meet incoming ships so they might be the first with the news Europe. They produced multiple editions in the race to build reader loyalty. With the penny press, they disrupted the incumbent six-penny newspapers. They pushed partisan positions. They crusaded, some times to the point of unjustly influencing the course of events.

These entrepreneurs competed fiercely, which led to an intense circulation war between Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. This war became so pitched, that both papers embarked on a short era of sensationalistic reporting that we now know as "yellow journalism."

Pulitzer, who also ushered in graphics and color comics, so regretted later his participation in this low-brow craft that he endowed the Columbia School of Journalism.

The early giants of journalism got much wrong and got much right, but little that they did would resemble journalism of the past 60 or 70 years.

They didn't, for example, do much in the way of investigative journalism. Nelly Bly worked for the New York World, but even her greatest public service reporting -- locking herself in an insane asylum -- isn't what many of today's newsroom pundits mean by high-cost investigative journalism. it was a stunt, just like her most expensive adventure, going around the world in 80 days. That really brought down a president, didn't it?

Most of the other muckrakers who set the stage for investigative journalism didn't even work for newspapers. They wrote for magazines and published books.

It took a long time for newspapers to build the cash flow to afford big time, expensive investigative journalism, and for publishers to recognize its value (and some of them still aren't convinced) in helping to retain readers.

So if it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?

There are a number of worthy experiments in online publishing going on out there. Maybe rather than scoff, some of these skeptics should stop yapping and try an experiment or two of their own. Maybe one of them will find the model that will one day employ a legion of highly paid investigators, at least until the next disruption comes along.

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Events that have contributed to the decline of newspapers

Howard Owens — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:34:55 +0000

The professionalization and creation of "objective" journalism in the 1920s
Movies, 1920s
Radio, 1930
Mass migrations caused by Great Depression and World War II, dislocating communities and families
Television, 1950s
Birth of suburbs, automobile, decline of mass transit, 1950s
Shoppers, i.e. PennySaver, (not sure when they started, but let's put them in the 1960s)
Unrest of 1960s, distrust of mainstream institutions, rise of alternative press
Watergate
Wal-Mart and other Big Box retailers in the 1980 and 1990s, putting out of business traditional newspaper advertisers (at higher margins than pre-prints from Big Boxes), often with help of government subsidies.
Cable television, and not just more news, but more choices.
Digital media and all that comes with it -- more choices, greater competition for attention, craigslist, more competition for advertising dollars, etc.

If you fail to look at the decline of newspapers in context of the historical arch of events, and you fail to see that the same forces driving down circulation are the same forces decreasing community involvement and civic engagement, then you'll never have a clue how to solve the problem. If you don't see the whole picture, you'll look for quick fixes like government aid or legislation, grants and annuities, paid content or just whine about "society can't function without us."

The solution lies in figuring out why increasingly society is deciding it doesn't need us and fixing that problem, not in hair-brained schemes that attempt to force journalism on the masses.

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Stop the insanity: The government has no business messing in the news business

Howard Owens — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:19:48 +0000

This tweet:

Why didn't I watch Senate hearing today? Because I'm busy working on journalism's future, not worrying about its past.

Proved quite popular this evening.

I posted it in light of news about the Senate Subcommittee Hearing today on the future of journalism. For months (years?) we've been assaulted with notions of "saving" newspapers -- should we give them non-profit status, issue some sort of taxpayer bailout, make Google pay, relax anti-trust laws ... etc.?

There's a whole host of proposals out there to "save" newspapers that any real capitalist should find not only laughable but horrifying.

Let's be clear: If a newspaper can't compete in the free market it's not worth saving. If a newspaper needs aid from the government to survive, it's not worth saving.

A newspaper is a business, just like any other business. It's not a church. It's not a social services agency. It's not a civic organization. It's a business.

When a business model is broken, or a strategy is flawed, or time has just passed it by, that business - even whole industries -- die. It's a process of evolution. It's necessary for the ecosystem of society.

Journalism will not die, though every newspaper might stop printing and some companies that now spew ink to tell the news will cease. Journalism will not die.

If businesses that support journalism are now are not able to compete in the free market, if they are unable to adapt to the changes in the market, they simply do not deserve to survive.

The only thing that will save journalism is the free market. Any other solution will lead to ossification and ultimately will greatly damage democracy, because citizens will become only more jaded and distrustful of a press that through government-backed monopoly power suppress entrepreneurial competitors.

I work my ass off every day -- 14, 15, 16 hours a day -- trying to create a sustainable online news site. Maybe I'm on the right track, maybe I'm not, but as an entrepreneur I feel I have a right to put forward my ideas, my business model in a free market and see if it works.

If it doesn't, fine, but I shouldn't have to compete against media companies that are given government favor through changing anti-trust laws or granted special privileges.

The free market should decide what journalism will be in the future, not some gray-haired Senator or government bureaucrat.

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If you're not doing comments right, you shouldn't do them at all

Howard Owens — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:54:27 +0000

Maybe it's time your newspaper reconsidered its Web site's commenting policy.

If the same group of people are dominating the discussion and ganging up on newcomers who aren't part of the clique, maybe it's time to reconsider your policy.

If flame wars are frequent, sock puppets obvious and informative discussions rare, maybe you need to reconsider your policy.

If you cringe every time you see a new comment has been posted on one of your stories, maybe it's time to reconsider your comment policy.

Those among you who have followed my career for any length know I'm an advocate for comments on news stories. I believe conversation and news are two great tastes that go great together, like beer and chocolate or peanut butter and apple.

And while I've noted that comments can help increase page views, I've never advocated comments purely as a cheap way to drive up banner impressions. To me, it's always been about building community.

Unfortunately, for many newspapers, comments are more like the mother-in-law who won't shut up at Thanksgiving dinner. She seems necessary, after all she brought the pie, but she really isn't very entertaining and sometimes offensive. And she's probably the main reason your sister and her family decided to stay with her husband's parents.

If you aren't managing your comments well, you're doing your newspaper more harm than good Your advertisers question the wisdom of associating their brand with yours -- at least the smart ones do -- and your readers are questioning your professionalism.

This issue came up on the Online-News discussion list this week, so I know many newspapers are struggling with comment management at the moment. It also came to a head this week in Batavia, where the Daily News was hit by a particularly ugly comment thread in which a socket puppet attacked fellow elected officials, one politician is posing as a defender of said politician, and a community activist brought to light unfounded allegations against a city councilman (I won't dignify the charge by repeating it here, and because I know these people, it's pretty easy to figure out who's who).

I don't bring this up to bash my competitor -- in fact, I rejected (so far) the idea of discussing this issue on The Batavian for fear it would come across as petty -- but the struggles the Daily News has with comments (and granted this is something new for them) illustrates a point that has implications across the industry.

If you allow behavior in your comments that would never fly in your news columns, even your letters to the editor, is your comment conduct really ethical?

Just because the law protects you from libel claims arising from comments on stories, should you really allow libelous statements to stand, especially when submitted anonymously?

Here's how you fix your comment policy:

Assign one person on staff -- ideally, make this a full time job -- to be community site manager. This person will participate in the community, both online and off and be known as a person of authority and friend to the community.
Require every writer to read and respond to comments on his or her own stories. Journalism online is more than a "I publish and you read" job. Reporters need to be part of the conversation. This leads to more civil discussions and more fruitful discussions.
Require real names. This is hard to enforce perfectly, but not impossible to make a consistent feature of your site. The smaller the community - where reputations can be broken so quickly -- this is especially important. People will often say anonymously (you'll note none of the garbage in the Daily thread has appeared on The Batavian) won't they won't say when people know who they are. Real names also serve as a check against sock puppetry, which has no place in a local community site.
Act swiftly to remove libelous statements. The law doesn't require this, but journalism ethics does. This is also why you need a pro managing your comments. All kinds of grey areas arise when deciding what comments to delete, and even after more than a dozen years of managing online communities, I'm not sure I always get this right.
A subtext to all of this -- make sure the community knows you take the community conversation seriously and expect it to be productive.

If you're unwilling or unable to take these steps, you should seriously consider turning off comments. They are likely doing your newspaper more harm than good.

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The imperative of localism and local news

Howard Owens — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:27:30 +0000

"Hyperlocal" is an ugly word.

This fad coinage is meant to represent a new discovery, a new way of thinking about journalism: "Hey, gee, we should do some of this local stuff. People might actually like to read about their home towns."

"Hyperlocal" is ugly because it attempts to rewrite history, ignoring the noble, once-primary role of newspapers -- largely forgotten by journalists and publishers in the past several decades -- as the concourse for community life.

In the decades preceding the current "hyperlocal" fad, professional journalists, and the people who manage them, didn't seem to realize is that "local" is what newspapers did before the "professionals" took over and decided the local flower show was nothing more than a calendar item and real news mean combing over every council member's campaign contributions.

Now before I go too far in bashing "professional" journalists, let me clarify what I mean: When Walter Lippmann wrote Liberty and the News in 1922, with its indisputable and irrefutable call to eliminate the average newshound's careless handling of fact and his facile understanding of events, he correctly diagnosed the need for a better educated, less callow, more thoughtful kind of reporter. But what Lippmann meant by professionalism, and objectivity, is not the brand of professional journalist that eventually emerged.

Lippmann's conception of "professional" had nothing to do with learning the craft and tools of reportage so that one might demonstrate better news judgment or never forget a who, what or when; it had everything to do with applying a scientific, intellectual approach to gathering facts, weighing evidence and presenting reports.

Journalism has gone astray by giving us too much of the former and too little of the latter.

For the purpose of this post, I'm speaking of professionalization -- with its stenographic and reader-may-care approach to news -- as practiced, not as it should be. (I'll have more on Lippmann in a later post).

The Hyperlocal Fad
There would be no need for a word such as "hyperlocal" if there wasn't a void to fill in community news coverage. The bare existence of the term speaks to the unfocused and misplaced coverage of most newspapers over the past several decades. The advocates of "hyperlocal" needed a term to differentiate what most newsrooms did compared to what they should do; or for those outside of the industry who applied the word to their own Web start-ups, they used "hyperlocal" to describe the opportunity left gaping by newspapers.

But what we now call "hyperlocal" is what William Allen White called "locals." White saw no distinction between the role of a newspaper in its community and the community. The Emporia Gazette printed to be the community, not merely to deliver the news.

The narrative arch of the Gazette says something about what a community newspapers should be, and where local newspapers went wrong. As White grew older, achieved greater wealth, and settled into national prominence, he increasingly ceded editorial control of his newspaper to a J-school-educated, younger staff. In Home Town News, a biography of White, Sally Foreman Griffith writes:

The divergence between White's vision of journalism and his staff's reflected different conceptions of the Gazette's proper role. The divergence appeared most clearly in the continuing conflict over the paper's locals. According to Frank Clough, Lambert's successor as city editor, both William Allen and Sallie White constantly complained that their weren't enough locals in the paper. But the editors argued that the Gazette was no longer a local paper and should emphasize "its district news, its associated press reports, and its features rather than its strictly Emporia news." Clough told Mrs. White on one occasion, "the Gazette is just like a boy who is too big for short pants and his parents don't think he is big enough for long ones." ''Go along with you,' she retorted. 'Tell your reporters we need some more local items and don't let your pants get too big for you.'" The two generations finally compromised on a policy of publishing the locals that were brought to the Gazette but seeking out only items concerning "the town's more prominent citizens." From the point of view of White's earlier broader vision of community, such compromise amounted to defeat.

Newspapers and Democracy
There has been much consternation of late among the print set about newspapers dying and its effect on society, such as this column in the Seattle Times, which asks:

Who will tell the people what their institutions are doing? Who will ferret out the corruption? Who will fend off the legal challenges to public information? If no viable alternative emerges, what does that mean for our representative democracy?

Those are all fine questions, and certainly nobody is suggesting that a community should be without reporters who know how to hold government officials accountable, but there is also a trace of pretension in that line of thinking, that only newspaper journalists can do the job. and that's the only kind of journalistic job worth doing.

Newspapers abdicated their role as stalwarts of democracy in the mid-20th Century as they moved away from conveying community life to takers of minutes and recorders of controversy, more dedicated to the process of government and wire reports than what their friends and neighbors might be doing at the church on Wednesday night.

Once people could no longer pick up the local gazette and find out who was visiting from California and when Helen Carter was going to sell her famous peach pies, the papers became less relevant to their lives.

Without that relevancy, society and democracy suffered. People became not only less informed, but less involved in their communities.

Consider that 57 percent of Americans say that if their local newspaper went away, both online and in print, they wouldn't miss it and it wouldn't hurt the civic life of their towns. The numbers are just as dismal when the question is isolated just to regular newspaper readers. This is in keeping with an earlier Harris poll that found nearly two-thirds of Americans say their local newspaper doesn't serve its community well.

There is a nexus, I believe, between readership declines and less engaged communities that cannot be blamed entirely on the rise of radio and television nor on changes in urban-to-suburban lifestyles.

Readership Declines
It's not often discussed in newsrooms, but readership declines started at least fifty years before the introduction of Mosaic. Readership peaked in the late 1940s, more than a decade after radio became a commercial force, and years before television reached popular saturation.

And while U.S. newspapers are not alone in facing competition from new technology or changes in social habits, the readership slide is greater in the U.S. than any other industrialized nation, with American papers now ranking low on readership 1,000 adults.

There is certainly something going on with American newspaper readership that can't be blamed on radio, television, the Internet nor changes in lifestyles.

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam writes about Americans becoming increasingly disengaged from their communities in the final quarter of the 20th Century. People stopped joining bowling leagues, or the American Legion, or showing up for the big community fundraiser.

Putnam writes about social capital, the idea that interconnectedness among people is what sustains a community. Web 2.0 geeks like to talk about social networks, but social networks exist in the non-digital world as well. If you understand the importance of people learning about what's going on in the lives of their friends, family and neighbors, it's easy to see why a newspaper that carries such news is contributing to the social capital of its community.

When newspapers stopped making such deposits in the bank of community good will, they became increasingly disengaged and less relevant to their home towns.

By every measure, according to Putnam, civic engagement peaked in the mid-1960s, well after the rise of television and suburban flight.

It wouldn't be surprising however, that people stopped reading their local papers long before they stopped attending Rotary meetings. People are, after all, social animals. The long habit of social networking with people in their community would be less easily broken than a connection to a paid-circulation newspaper.

Circulation and readership declines are lagging indicators of a failure to contribute social capital. Declining community participation is a lagging indicator of less knowledge about friends and neighbors.

Both might be equally blamed on the turn from community news to more professionally produced political and process coverage by newspaper staffs. I call this "Castor oil" coverage, as in "we think this is important and we don't care whether you, dear reader, agree -- take it and don't whine about it."

(And note, too, readership declines started before newspaper chains became massive entities and were often publicly traded, so readership losses are not necessarily an ownership problem, either.)

Building Community on the Web
Sadly, its probably too late to save newspapers, and it's too late for newspapers to save their communities.

The Web won't save newspapers. The mere transference of newspaper journalism onto digital devices is a doomed business model.

But the Web can save and revitalize local communities.

I've spent my career in or around small newspapers. I've never worked for a big metro, and outside of once dreaming of an editorialist's job with the San Diego Evening Tribune, I've not aspired to life at a paper of more than 100K circulation. I'm a home town boy at heart, even though I've never really had a home town.

One of the great benefits of launching The Batavian is that it brought me into contact with Bill Kauffman, author and historian whose books include Dispatches from The Muckdog Gazette and Look Homeward, America.

Before I met Bill, I never heard the word "localist," but I know now, that's what I am (and I'm not alone; there is a movement in this country of localists/placists), and localism is at the core of my political philosophy. I believe strong communities make for a stronger democracy. Call me a Luddite in the face of digital globalization and international hyperlinks, I still believe in the importance and vitality of geographic communities (and I'm sure I'll get the comment or two calling me naive for not bowing down to the inevitable gods of a one-world community, or communities of interest replacing geographic connectedness).

Kauffman writes of himself in Look Homeward, America:

I am an American patriot. A Jeffersonian decentralist. A fanatical localist. And I am an anarchist. Not a sallow garret-rat translating Proudhon by pirated kilowatt, nor a militiaman catechized by the Classic Comics version of The Turner Diaries; rather, I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived amidst the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York autumn.

Like so many of the subjects of this book, I am also a reactionary radical, which is to say I believe in peace and justice but I do not believe in smart bombs, daycare centers, Wal-Mart, television, or Melissa Etheridge's test-tube baby.

You may not agree with all of Kauffman's politics, but there is something to be said for finding fervor and valor in cherishing your home town and the unique individuals that give it vitality.

As journalists, we've gotten away from cherishing community -- that isn't objective enough -- and it's hurt not only democracy, but our business model.

Strong local communities are important to the education of our children, the safety of our streets, the growth of our businesses, the employment of our neighbors and the quality of our parks. By every measure, our well being depends on the quality of life were we live.

There's nothing wrong with leading a digital life, but in the end you still need a life beyond the walls of your dwelling, and the kind of life you live in your community depends on the quantity of social capital you build.

It's impossible to squander social capital and expect a community to thrive. We still share in the responsibility for potholes and clean parks, whether or not we drive or walk a dog. We are all part of a geographic community, whether we admit it or hide behind our Facebook friend feed.

And journalists, most of all, and publishers, and even the ad sales reps, can't escape from social responsibility. If communities are to become vital again, journalism is going to either provide the bonds and lead the conversation, or cease even its current tenuous hold on relevance.

It's ironic, given what I hoped to accomplish with The Batavian, that I picked Bill Kauffman's community before I ever read a sentence of his work. The mission of The Batavian was never, in my mind, merely to fix the local news business model, but also to revitalize community journalism. Of course, to me, the business model and the journalism model are one and the same. Revenue declines are closely related to readership declines, so we must fix readership before we can fix revenue.

The early results of The Batavian drawing together a community and creating a more engaged readership is promising. I do believe the digital tools of instant publishing, unlimited space, conversation and connection can re-energize the kind of community journalism that inspired William Allen White to grow the Gazette into a great local institution.

If this approach works -- whether it be The Batavian or similar ventures -- we can reverse the trend of "bowling alone" and bring back the kind of community life that best serves a vibrant democracy.

But to make this approach work, it's going to take people -- including many of today's trained journalists -- to rethink everything they've learned about community journalism as practiced over the past half century or so. Merely promoting the "hyperlocal" fad isn't going to get the job done. We need to bring back locals, and bring back the direct connection and involvement in the community by the people covering the community. This isn't the detachment taught in J-schools. It's participatory and social. But it will work. It must.

Books to Buy:

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Louis Prima and Keely Smith: 'Hey Boy! Hey Girl!'

Howard Owens — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 01:45:04 +0000

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Reactions to VC-backed 'scalable' local news sites

Howard Owens — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 01:37:02 +0000

I've received almost universal positive feedback on my "hyperlocal" post (well, from everybody but Jeff Jarvis).

I think the only people who would disagree are those at least maginally connected to the New York VC bubble, where the cocktail chatter is always about "scale." It's never about building a sustainable business model.

Lucas Grindley put up a very smart post, comparing the SUNY/Times approach to a get-rich-quick-scheme. I think he's dead on.

Why would anyone build a site targeted toward a small group of people and then worry about whether it can "scale" to serve a large group? That smacks of a confused business strategy. A hyperlocal business must first be able to make money by standing on its own -- even if it never becomes a franchise.

That's real scalability. Quite frankly, it's dumb to start any business that can't break a profit unless it rapidly expands. I'd be leery of anyone pitching such an idea, which isn't much sounder in strategy than a Ponzi scheme.

Lucas also writes:

There is no shortcut to online success. Media companies look at their competitors from the technology world and see only what exists now, conveniently overlooking the immense effort and sacrifice it took the founders of Facebook or MySpace to attain.

Unfortunately, newspapers continue to look for the quick fix. Reality check: There isn't one. It takes hard work to create new business, and the fact is, most businesses fail. I think Lucas is on to something -- these VC-backed "scalable" local news sites are really just a ploy to huckster some money, not build a sustainable business model.

The question VC's should be asking is, "is it sustainable?" Not, "Is it scalable."

Nathan Walls also takes a smart look at the issue and concludes:

Maybe there is a way to abstract a platform and aggregate neighborhood sites, but, just as mountains have their own weather, neighborhoods are unique and not taking the time to dive into them and understand them is a mistake. The large, monolithic approach is not the workable one. There’s no rule saying there must be a way to build and sustain a larger business out of “hyperlocal” content.

Finally, in comments, Jane Stevens points us to Brownstoner.com, a Brooklyn-based independent news site that will now face some SUNY-backed competition.

In looking at Brownstoner, it struck me what the SUNY-Times sites are, it turns out, are socialistic efforts. Brownstoner is now facing competition from a government backed agency (SUNY) using essentially free labor. How is that a fair competitive situation?

Government should let free enterprise thrive, not try to kill it.

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VCs chasing fool's gold in funding 'hyperlocal' projects that 'scale'

Howard Owens — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:16:56 +0000

Over the past three days or so, I've had a few conversations about "scale."

If you haven't dealt much with the IT side of the online world, you may not be too familiar with the meaning of the word in context. For years, the only time I heard the word "scale" was when applied to server architecture. You need software and hardware to scale, meaning grow, in order to handle increased traffic demands. That's the simplest way to put it.

Now scale is being applied to "hyperlocal" start ups. And the meaning in this context, as I take it, is that a "hyperlocal" business needs to have the capability to expand in multiple towns and neighborhoods rapidly at a very low cost.

I woke up this morning to this tweet from Jeff Jarvis:

jeffjarvis @howardowens But there's no way to afford one full-time pro from an organization per town or neighborhood. Doesn't scale.

He was referencing a debate we had on his blog about a new Times/CUNY "hyperlocal" project. In comments, I offered up a critique of the approach.

In his post, Jarvis wrote:

The Times is working in two neighborhoods in Brooklyn — Fort Greene and Clinton Hill — and three towns in New Jersey — Maplewood, Millburn, and South Orange. In each of these two pilots, they’ll have one journalist reporting but also working with the community in new ways. The Times’ goal, like ours, is to create a scalable platform (not just in terms of technology but in terms of support) to help communities organize their own news and knowledge. The Times needs this to be scalable; it can’t afford to - no metro paper can or has ever been able to afford to - pay for staff in every neighborhood and town. (emphasis added)

In response to my comments, I received a private e-mail from somebody quite familiar with the "hyperlocal" space and funding such projects and he too raised the issue of scale. A couple of days ago, I had a phone conversation with another expert in the field, and he expressed concern that no venture capitalist would fund a "hyperlocal" play that didn't "scale."

Now, granted, I have an apparent conflict of interest on this topic because I now run a local news project that from the beginning has faced criticism that it will never scale.

Still, I'm convinced The Batavian approach is the only option if you want to build strong positive-margin local online news businesses.

It may be a bitch to "scale," but it's the best approach to the problem.

The "hyperlocal" approaches that supposedly "scale" don't scale in one very important aspect: building new audience for community news.

Sure, they might appeal to a segment of the population that is already involved in a community, but they're not tackling the "Bowling Alone" problem.

In order to build a high-margin business with local online news, a sad fact must be addressed: that local community news is currently only a niche product. Entrepreneurs need to think about not only "how am I going to appeal to the people who care now, but how am I going to get more people to care about their community so I can grow my audience?"

It's an exceptionally hard question, but I'm convinced we're making progress with The Batavian. Increasingly, we're seeing people involved with the site who were not previously activists in the community, and I've heard from some who were not previously regular newspaper readers.

There's no way around it: Local news is a high-touch proposition. You need professionals in the community who champion the community and act as evangelists for the Web site. The job involves more than just covering stories or even asking civic leaders to post their own items (and that in itself is significantly hard, continuous work).

The "it's got to scale" approach is merely repeating the mistakes of local newspapers from the past half-century or more. It's creating a sterile and disengaged product that does nothing to solve the problems chipping at the foundation of the newspaper business.

The mistake newspapers have made -- and Jarvis hits on it in his own post when he says newspapers never had a correspondent in every neighborhood -- is that newspapers have becoming increasingly detached from their communities.

As newspapers became more cookie-cutter (and this isn't just a chain newspaper problem, but it has befallen family-owned papers as well) and the craft of journalism was transformed into a profession, newspapers have simply become less interesting to many of the people they purport to serve. Editors and reporters are often just passing through a newsroom, stepping along their career paths, blwoing into town with attitudes that maginalize real local news in favor of "hard news" and a "take it or leave it" attitude when readers don't like what they do.

There's no involvement, no conversation, no agenda for nourishing the community.

(Caveat: I've met some publishers, editors and reporters who very much care about and are involved in their communities, but these are exceptional people.)

Meanwhile, increasingly, we're getting what we're after in Batavia -- people who know our site LOVE our site. It's a thrill to walk around town, meet people and have them excited to meet me because of what we've done with The Batavian. I had a little fan base when I was a young reporter, but it was nothing like the response I sometimes get in Batavia.

And that's the excitement and engagement you want (and I'll say, I think we're only half way to where we need to be in Batavia) if you plan to grow your audience beyond a niche concern.

A cookie-cutter "hyperlocal" play, with no paid staff in the commmunity and some regional or national brand, just isn't to get you that level of engagement.

The Web is all about people. Because the Net is based on technology, many people tend to think that technology alone can solve any problem. But besides Google, what pure technology company has really been successful? Every other success I can think of has been about people, from the personal voice of blog writing, to the real people who power YouTube, to the stunning success of social networks such as Facebook. People come to the Web to make connections with real people. A faceless technological approach leaves them cold.

The VCs who are funding these supposedly scalable "hyperlocal" solutions are chasing fools gold. They would be better off pouring their money into today's stock market, or maybe buying a bank. They are investing in products that will never be better than low-margin businesses, even on a national basis -- in part because "scale" also means their easily replicatable, which means low-barrier to entry, which means lots of competition and even low margins and more likely no profits at all.

If you want profits, invest in people, not technology.

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Why nobody clicks on your home page links

Howard Owens — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 05:17:01 +0000

During my last trip to Boston, I asked a friend: "When is the last time you picked up the Boston Globe and read it cover to cover, every story?"

He starred at me blankly, not comprehending the question.

It was a stupid question, because pretty much nobody ever reads a newspaper cover to cover, not even a small newspaper.

We all read a newspaper the same way -- we scan, looking for interesting headlines, skimming the leads, looking for something interesting.

Once we find something interesting, we will start to read and maybe even follow the story past the jump, but the vast majority of headlines that pass before our eyes are merely a blur as we hunt and peck for a useful nugget or two.

Yet, some people seem to think that just because a link on a home page exists, it gets clicked.

If you run a newspaper web site and are under the false impression that just because you put a story link up, people will follow the link, I invite you to open your login to Ominture and study the Paths report. You'll be disappointed in what you will find.

What you will find, unless some sensational story hit that defies the rule, is that not a single story link is among the top-10 paths followed.

What you will find is the vast, vast majority of visitors hit the home page and left. They didn't click a single link. The next most frequent path, at between 4 percent and 8 percent of your visitors, will be home page to obituaries. The third most popular path will be home page, obituaries, home page and then exit.

The rest of your top 10 paths will round out with home page to another section front and then exit -- meaning, still not a top 10 path that leads to a story click, not even home page, sports section, story link.

When you do get to a home page-to-story-link path, that path will represent little more than 1 percent of your site traffic.

Before you start blaming your site design for this lack of story traffic, stop again and think about how you read a newspaper.

People go to your home page not to find stories to read, but to harvest headlines on the off chance one or two of them will be of sufficient interest for a click.

That's one reason newspaper.coms are foolish to let aggregation sites such as Topix display all of their headlines and leads.

Topix is in the business of creating a substitute home page for your community news.

By aggregating all of your content, as well as other media covering your town, they are aiming to create an experience for users that says, "You don't need to visit all of these other sites. We're all you need. We've got all of the headlines (which you will only scan) and free classifieds, to boot (not that Topix free classifieds seem to get much traction).

At GateHouse Media we asked Topix to stop aggregating our content because we couldn't figure out what value we derived from Topix trying to steal our audience. It would have been different if Topix actually generated traffic for our sites, but referrers from Topix never rose much above 1 percent of our overall traffic.

Some would argue that Topix is paying for its headlines and leads by the traffic it generates, but if it's not generating much traffic how do you measure whether it's hurting more than helping?

Compare Topix, however, to a site like Google News.

Google News drives a significant amount of traffic to news sites. Why? Because it has one primary purpose: to drive traffic to news sites. It's a click-away site, meaning Google believes the greatest value it provides its users is to serve up links worthy of a click.

My bet is that most of the clicks driven by Google News are derived from search, not from the automated aggregation pages. People click on headlines when they express a specific intention through search to find a particular story.

As I've said before, the web is intention driven. If your home page is designed to meet the intention of headline skimmers, that's going to be the majority of your audience. But if your home page is designed to get people into your stories, like a blog does, then you will design your site accordingly.

Think of how you read a newspaper and don't be surprised that few people click on your headline links. Think about how you want people to use your web site, what intention-driven mindset you want to satisfy, and design your web site accordingly.

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Why home page ads may be more valuable than story page ads

Howard Owens — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:02:45 +0000

All web activity is intention driven.

People visit web pages, whether arriving via search, a link or a bookmark with a specific intention. That intention might be to read a specific story, see what's on sale, scan headlines or connect with a friend.

How well a web page helps a user satisfy that intention determines whether a user will return to that page or recommend it to others.

The page may not efficiently satisfy a user's intention -- the web world is full of poorly designed pages that survive by providing a marginal benefit to users, newspaper.com sites chief among them -- but so long as the user is free to focus on that intention devoid of distractions or unexpected interruptions, the user experience will be OK.

Much has been made of eye track studies that demonstrate banner blindness. What's interesting is the only "banner blindness" eye track reports I've been able to find demonstrate banner blindness on story pages.

I've never seen such a study -- and if you have, please let me know -- on a newspaper.com home page.

The banner blindness studies support, I think, the proposition that user behavior on the web is intention driven. When a user clicks on a link -- whether from aggregator, search engine, blog or newspaper.com home page, the user has expressed an intention to read a particular story or post. The user is solely focused on that task, so she ignores the banners.

But what is the intention of a user visiting a newspaper.com home page?

I do not have available to me an eye track study to support my theory, but I do have years of experience studying heat maps of user behavior on home pages in Ventura, Bakersfield and GateHouse Media, and I believe the user intention is to scan the newspaper.com home page looking for something interesting.

Notice, I didn't say "something interesting to click on." Just "something interesting."

Users visit a newspaper.com home page not so much because they want to dive deeper into the site, but because they want to see what is new.

We can debate whether the typical newspaper.com is doing well at satisfying that intention, or more importantly, whether that is the right intention to meet, but I believe that is the typical user intention.

Most such well-intentioned users are most likely looking for the latest news, or other new content, but I would contend that a scanning user is a user who is more likely to take in the full breadth of the home page -- they'll see your top nav links, your promos for your special features and, most importantly, your home page advertising.

This is why it's probably a mistake for newspapers not to put more advertising on their home pages. The home page audience is more likely to notice a home page ad than an story page audience. (I know there are studies that contradict this theory, that more ads on the home page lead to less effective ads, but I don't believe this proposition has been fully and fairly studied at the community news level, where local ads tend to be highly relevant to local users.)

And it's also why newspaper publishers should think about how to get more visitors to the home page. That's where the money is, and that's best vehicle for generating audience growth.

Conversely, story pages need to be parred down to the essentials. Banner ads on story pages are a waste. Contextual ads might have some value, but the best move a publisher can make with story pages is use single-focus pages as a vehicle for promoting other content.

By visiting a story page, a user has expressed at least a marginal interest in the content you have available. Use the story page to present more content, be it top headlines, most e-mailed stories or "related stories."

I've seen page views increased by 10 percent with the introduction of a pretty low-tech "related content" widget.

Giving users more content choices on a content page works -- more advertising choices, not so much.

Your goal as a newspaper.com publisher is to increase user loyalty. Your ideal user visits multiple times per day, ideally by constantly refreshing your home page to see what is new. The more you can entice the occasional visitor into reading your content, the more likely that user is to become a frequent home page visitor.

If your advertising is highly relevant to that user, he is more like to take notice and also be inclined to support the businesses that support your news operations. It becomes a virtuous circle.

When designing your web strategy, think constantly of user intention. Ask, how are people going to use this page? Then design your page strategy around that intention so that both the user's consumer needs and your business needs are satisfied.

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The myth of the deep link

Howard Owens — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:37:01 +0000

Not all links are created equal.

Not all links generate traffic.

Some links are downright harmful.

Yet, to a large class of digerati, the link is a fetish.

Woe to he who questions the value of a link.

I'm sorry to state the truth, but just because you create a link doesn't mean a single user will click on it.

Even Google doesn't treat all links equally. Internal and external links appear to get weighted differently, and the better the Page Rank of a site, the more valuable are its external links. For Google, too, the words associated with a link play a role in how its algorithm evaluates the link.

Not all links are created equal.

And some links can be downright harmful.

The first time my blog was hacked, some spammer filled it with redirects and then linked to it from a hundred other blogs. Google immediately punished my site by lowering its Page Rank. HowardOwens.com went from the first search result for "Howard Owens" to a single interior story link on the fifth page of search results. I was dead to Google for about three days. (Thanks to Matt Cutts for resurrecting me.)

Needless to say, I wasn't happy with those 100 unwanted links.

A link can also be harmful when it is associated with words that misrepresent the content of a site. This can harm search results or leave people with a false impression of the site being linked to.

A link from a mega site like Fark might be fun, but it isn't necessarily helpful to a local publisher. Some publishers will complain about the non-monetizable traffic, but bandwidth sucking links isn't the real harm. The real harm is for publishers who sell ads on a CPM basis.

A local advertiser, on a CPM model, can see an entire month's worth of bought-and-paid-for inventory served up to a non-local audience in a matter of hours based on a Fark link. And the Publisher is left serving up less valuable remnant ads for the balance of the month, and the advertiser is left wondering why his ad stopped appearing on the site.

Modern ad serving software has methods to help account for such spikes in traffic, but such balancing isn't perfect and some impressions are wasted. Mainly, the example still demonstrates that not all links are created equal.

And depending on the context, a link might act as a substitute for actually visiting the site receiving the link.

If a headline and lead, for example, tells a user all he or she needs to know about a particular news story, why would that person click on that link? In that scenario, you can drew one of two conclusions: Either the story wasn't sufficiently compelling that the non-visiting user probably wouldn't have gone to your site to find such a story anyway, or the user will decide, "well, now I don't need to visit that site because I already know all I want to know about the news."

One result is neutral, the other result is harmful.

None of this is to say I don't believe in and support deep linking, or linking of any kind.

Back in 1996 or so when the first arguments over deep linking emerged, somebody on Steve Outing's old Online-News e-mail discussion list pointed out the value of linking, of networked sharing, by using this metaphor: when the water level increases, all boats rise.

I still believe in all boats rising, but I'm also not interested in making a fetish out of the link.

Any professional charged with growing a web business needs to make calculated observations about the benefit or harm of any web practice and decide for himself whether a particular practice or belief is going to benefit the long-term viability of the business.

When you blindly follow the herd, you're not doing your job. I'm sure a guy like Eric Schmidt at Google would agree. That's "What Google Would Do" -- encourage you to make your own evaluations and observations.

Linking is one of those issues that should be carefully considered so that you ensure your linking practices and policies are a benefit to your business organization and not a detriment.

Not all links are created equal.

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The myth of multiple gateways into a news site

Howard Owens — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:01:43 +0000

If you run a small town, local community newspaper site, the most important page on your server is your home page.

Take a look at your stats: More than 50 percent, and maybe as much 70 percent of your Web traffic flows to your home page.

Now, some people who think they understand SEO might step forward and say, "Well, you're just not correctly optimizing your content for Google."

I say, those people don't know what the hell they're talking about.

It takes a little thought, but if you look at the typical small town newspaper web site, you'll understand that the content of such sites serves a narrowly focused audience -- people who live in that town (and a few stragglers who once lived there).

Now, the occasional story might arise that generates global interest, but on a day-in, day-out basis the content a local newsroom produces is of merely parochial interest.

No matter how well your site is optimized, if few people are searching for Joe Bubba's DUI arrest, that story isn't going to show up in Google. It's the "tree falling in the forest problem." Even if your story is indexed and highly optimized, if nobody ever enters search terms that brings the story to the surface, the story might as well not exist in Google.

And being a small town site, there are likely few if any bloggers who are likely to link to the Joe Bubba story. I'm sorry, but unless Joe Bubba is somehow tied to Newt Gingrich, neither Instapundit nor Daily Kos is going to link to his arrest, no matter how shocking it is back home.

SEO has its place, but it doesn't negate the importance of a newspaper.com's home page.

I don't have the documents in front of me (and it's not online as far as I know), but Greg Harmon of Belden once showed me research that indicated about 70 percent of the traffic of a small-circ newspaper.com came from visitors within that paper's DMA. In my own observations of traffic patterns in Ventura, Bakersfield, with GateHouse Media and running The Batavian, I would say that's roughly true.

And it makes sense. Again, the vast majority of content produced by a local newspaper is of purely parochial interest. If your in Los Angeles, you are not going to have much cause to visit the Web site for the Freeport Journal-Standard, unless you were from Freeport, Ill. or had family there.

Local news sites live or die on how well they meet the needs of a local audience.

The same cannot be said for major metro sites, and perhaps this is where some of the confusion comes from on this topic. The bigger the newspaper, the more bloggers there are who follow it's content, the more often it covers stories of a googable interest, and the bigger its global audience.

This is certainly true of sites such as the New York Times, CNN, Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune, for example. I've heard, but have not seen the actual stats, that as much as 70 percent of a major metro's traffic flows to interior pages.

Expecting that much interior traffic for a small town site is like hoping a banker will turn down his bonus. It's just not going to happen.

This is why small-circ newspaper publishers need to protect their home pages like Obama clings to his Blackberry. It is the key to revenue and audience growth.

Most local publishers have piss-poor home pages, but that's an issue for another blog post. But even the worst newspaper.com home page is more valuable than the aggregate of all the internal story pages. In part, that's true, because the home page is the only page most of that 70 percent local audience will typically visit. But, again, that's a topic for another blog post.

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Four Types of Online Aggregation

Howard Owens — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:09:05 +0000

Aggregation is the Internet term for harvesting information from a variety of sources and repurposing it into a single presentation.

There are four types of aggregation sites:
•    Human edited
•    Algorithmic selection
•    Social bookmarking
•    Automatic scraping or ingestion

Almost all forms of aggregation mean acquiring content without paying for it. The best kinds of aggregation add value for the reader.

Human Edited
Human-culled headline aggregation sites, such as Drudge Report and NewzJunky.com, are quite popular.

The Drudge Report, operated by Matt Drudge and one assistant, attracts nearly 7 million viewers per month. NewzJunky.com is run by a single former newspaper employee in Watertown, NY and over the past two years has become the number one online news site for that region of the state, reaching about 67,000 people per month.

These popular aggregation sites do a tremendous job of driving traffic to originating news sources. A link from Drudge can take down servers. Newspaper Web sites within NewzJuny's coverage area report a handsome surge of traffic based on a NJ link.

Quirky and idiosyncratic, human-edited aggregation sites give users a sense that somebody who is smart, or shares their beliefs, or is just zealous about the news, is out there looking for interesting links.

In the case of Drudge, especially, his audience is very curious about what he’s linking to, how he’s re-writing headlines, what he chooses to feature where. His loyalists try to read the tea leaves to discern what message he's sending. Some critics have even accused Drudge – because of his choice of links and how he rewrites headlines – of conspiring with political campaigns and Fox News.

Scott Karp notes that Drudge, “a site that sends people away with links,” has the highest engagement of any site on the web.

But the most important difference between the top site and all the other sites, is that this top site — Drudge — has nothing but LINKS. … Drudge beats every original content news site by a two to one margin.

Here’s what ReadWriteWeb says about Drudge:

It sends people away to keep them coming back

There’s actually no content on the Drudge Report. Well, sometimes he will post an email or a memo on his site, but it’s 99% links out to other news sources. His site is designed to send you away to bring you back. The more often you hit his site to go somewhere else the more often you’ll return to go somewhere else again. You visit the Drudge Report more because you leave the Drudge Report more. This is one of the secrets to building traffic: The more you send people away the more they’ll come back.

37Signals has called DrudgeReport.com one of the best designed web sites on the web.

To clarify, my definition of design goes beyond aesthetic qualities and into areas of maintenance, cost, profitability, speed, and purpose. However, I still think that the Drudge Report is an aesthetic masterpiece even though I also consider it ugly. Can good design also be ugly? I think Drudge proves it can.

Algorithmic Selection
Some sites – most notably Google News and Techmeme – attempt to mimic human decision-making through computer programming. Such algorithmic programs make computational decisions based on such factors as popularity of a site, how many external sites link to a particular story, and the popularity of the sites embedding those links.

It’s unclear if this approach is a clear winner in news aggregation.

Google News reached 5.6 million people in January, far below Yahoo! News’s 20 million. However, even though Yahoo!’s news audience is three times the size of Google’s, Google is a sends nearly as much traffic to a typical low circulation news site.

Part of Google’s value to both reader and publisher is that the news search engine makes it easy to find headlines around defined search terms (the grouping of related headlines is also useful). Author John Battelle coined the phrase “database of intentions” to describe how people use Google – searchers have an intention to find specific information at defined times. In a news context, when people are looking for coverage of events, they do so with that intention-driven mindset. In that mindset, they are much more likely to click on a relevant link (much as they would click on an AdSense text ad in Google’s organic search). This delivers value to readers and benefits publishers.

The Yahoo! News approach to aggregation, however, more closely satisfies the intention of the headline grazer, the person just looking for a quick glance at what is going on in the world or her home town. The grazer is already in a mindset of “too little time to read too many stories.”

These intention-driven differences likely explains the disparity of click-throughs from Yahoo! News vs. Google News.

Earlier this year, Google launched a localized news service, allowing users to define a headline feed based on zip code. While it would be tempting to compare Google local to Yahoo! local, the two presentations are very different approaches. Google remains a click-away site, while Yahoo!'s primary mission is to be sticky, offering up users many options to remain on the site rather than follow a link.

Social Bookmarking
Digg is the most popular social bookmarking site on the web. In January, Digg.com reached 24 million people.

Generally, social bookmarking involves site members saving links to a database and then allows other members vote on whether the bookmark is worthwhile. Links are then ranked with the most popular ones making its way to the top of the home page.

Top placement on Digg can bring an avalanche of traffic.

Other social bookmarking sites include Yahoo! Buzz, StumbleUpon, ReddIt, Mixx, Slashdot, Newsvine and Publish2.

Automated Aggregation
Computers can be used to aggregate headlines and links through two methods: Scraping (using a robot server to crawl news web pages) and RSS ingest (grabbing a site’s RSS feed and republishing it).

The most popular automated aggregator is Yahoo! News, which as we discussed earlier, reaches more than 20 million people. Yahoo! uses a combination of site crawling and RSS/XML ingestion (XML ingestion for Consortium member sites) (Also, note, the main Yahoo! News page is compiled by human editors).

While Yahoo! sends newspaper sites a reasonable amount of traffic, as we discussed earlier when comparing Yahoo! News to Google News, Yahoo! appears to refer a mere fraction of its audience to outside sites. For an analysis of why, see the section on algorithmic aggregators.

Another popular automated aggregation site – reaching 11 million people – is Topix. Topix does have human editors in some of the communities it serves; however, it mostly relies on a robot to scrape sites. It then aggregates the headlines geographically, allows people to comment on the headlines and is also trying to break into local classifieds (An interesting side note: a new site, OurTown.com, is trying to do much the same thing by re-aggregating Topix links).

GateHouse Media sites received a minimal amount of referrer traffic, about 1/10th of 1 percent, from Topix before we demanded the company – owned by Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy – stop aggregating our content (which included at the time full republication of our photographs).

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Giving your newspaper content away for free online is foolish

Howard Owens — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 10:26:48 +0000

Giving your newspaper content away for free online is foolish.

It does indeed cannibalize your circulation.

Qualification: I'm speaking only for local newspapers who's community focused content is unique and generally valued by only a narrowly defined audience. For news organizations with national or international aspirations, different rules apply.

Here's the conundrum for local newspapers -- giving newspaper content away for free isn't a successful strategy, charging for it online won't work, and not using the web to grow your business is suicide.

That makes it seem, then, like newspaper publishers have no option. If they give their content away for free online, they're helping to kill their print business; if they don't have a news web site, they risk losing their entire local news franchise (to an online-only start up) and they also abandon the one avenue they have to generate new revenue and grow the business.

What no newspaper publisher has considered, as far as I know, and at least not in a long time, is a third way. Rather than giving away content, or charge for it or not even having a web site, the third way is create an entirely different web operation.

Let me state the obvious: The web is not print. Content publishers online require a completely different mindset from print journalists. The people who produce content for the web should not be the people who produce content for print. (Not that print people aren't smart enough to learn web publishing -- they certainly are, but they're too concentrated on print when that's their primary livelihood).

An online news site needs to comply with the following criteria:

Continuously updated
Use of multimedia
Personal-voice writing
Community building
User customization
Web strategy designed around pull rather than push
A separate, online-only sales staff with no constraints

There's a lot of money to be made for local news sites if they can build strong, loyal online audiences and generate a buzz among readers and advertisers about what they're doing, but unless and until newspaper publishers start seeing more clearly that the web is not print, their local news franchises are likely doomed.

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Real name policy on HowardOwens.com

Howard Owens — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 03:08:29 +0000

When I look at the names of the people who have already registered for the new HowardOwens.com, I see nothing but a list of friends.

And that's part of what I want for the resurrected HowardOwens.com. I want this to be a site where people feel safe to discuss whatever issue I happen to introduce in a blog post.

I'm done with trolls.

I'm done with anonymous posters.

On a web site where the expectation is we attract an audience of mature, professional adults, the notion that all participants contribute under the byline of his or her real name shouldn't seem obscene or unexpected.

As a matter of ethics, I believe anybody in the information business should never, under any circumstances, hide behind a pseudonym.

The real name policy was mocked in comments on Dan Kennedy's blog. I figure such derisive remarks come from people who somehow just managed to graduate from their AOL account 18 months ago. I've been running online communities for well more than a decade. I've learned a few things. As arrogant as it sounds, I'm not taking lessons from neophytes.

Of course, the question naturally arises: How will I enforce a real name policy? And my only answer is, as best I can.

Basically, if you're a troll, you won't last long on my new site. If you engage in personal attacks against me or other people leaving comments on the site, you will be blocked.

Fake names are generally pretty easy to detect, and since it's my site, I don't need proof. I only need suspicion.

Does that mean I'll delete comments just because a person disagrees with me? Of course not. I happen to love a good discussion over differing views. But I know it's also possible to disagree, as they say, without being disagreeable.

Basically, my expectation and what I intend to do enforce as best I an, is that discussions on howardowens.com stick to issues and aim at being instructive.

If my draconian rules mean fewer people will comment, I'm willing to live with that.

And if you think you should be able to spout off whatever bullshit you please without attaching your real name to your opinions, then howardowens.com isn't the place for you, and I don't care if you don't like it. There's always blogger.com where any person can rant to his chickenshit anonymous heart's content.

Ethical people, honest people, always use their real names.

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Making a go of it with The Batavian

Howard Owens — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:20:19 +0000

Yes, I'm no longer employed by GateHouse Media.

But I do have a big job ahead of me: running The Batavian.

I'm grateful to Mike Reed, CEO, Kirk Davis, COO and my boss Bill Blevins for all of the opportunities afford to me by GateHouse. I learned much, grew much and was given the freedom to do many interesting and worthwhile things.

I'm also very excited the opportunity with The Batavian.

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Requiem for the Rocky Mountain News

Howard Owens — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:22:15 +0000

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts

My father was born in Colorado. One of my brothers lived for years in Aspen. He now lives in the Denver area, as does another brother.

In my youth, I visited Colorado a handful of times. As an adult, a few more times still.

When I first settled on journalism as a career, I dreamed of writing for the Rocky Mountain News. I was captured by a faint romantic notion that I could find myself as the lone reporter for the Rocky in some remote Colorado town. I can't even say for sure if the Rocky had such bureaus back then.

I think I applied once for a job at the Rocky. I don't recall getting a response.

Years later, I wound up at the Ventura County Star, also an E.W. Scripps newspaper.

I'm proud of my time at Scripps. It was a great work environment. I was treated well and given every opportunity to grow, learn and advance my career.

I still feel part of the Scripps family and some of my best friends in the industry still work for Scripps.

While I was at the Star, a couple of reporters transferred from Ventura to Denver. It hardly seemed like a bad idea at the time. The Rocky was a big step up -- a larger paper in a bigger city and a national reputation. The Rocky seemed as venerable then as the mountains its named after.

I'm thinking of all my friends at Scripps today. I'm sorry to see the Rocky go. It's a loss for the company, for the communities it served for nearly 150 years and for the hardworking journalists past and present who worked dedicated themselves to producing a world class newspaper.

Previously: The Founding of the Rocky Mountain News

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Video: Howlin' Wolf, How Many More Years

Howard Owens — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 03:35:31 +0000

Maybe my favorite aspect of YouTube is its role as an archive of great, old music videos.

Here's Howlin' Wolf performing "How Many More Years."

*Note, this post represents to things: Testing video embedding on my new Drupal set up; second, demonstrating that my future blogging on this site may not be just about newspapers, online media, etc. I'm thinking -- once I get the Word Press transfer issue figured out -- that I'll import my posts from hbo3.com into this site as well.

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Registration on the new site

Howard Owens — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:55:04 +0000

I'm still working on putting this new site together (and I'm still looking for help on getting the archives set up), but a couple of people have already registered.

That's great, but I didn't have the registration form configured yet.

Now it is. So it seems like a good time to mention: I'm going to require real names to comment on my blog.

All of my participation on the Web is under my real name. I never leave anonymous comments.

There are places and times where anonymity is appropriate. I've decided that my blog is not such a place. As the owner, I figure that's my right.

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Setting up a new blog in Drupal

Howard Owens — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:03:07 +0000

I'm setting up a new blog in Drupal.

My biggest challenge is trying get my WordPress 2.5 blog archives converted to Drupal 6.

Apparently, none of the available scripts for such a conversion are up to speed with that migration path yet.

Anybody out there want to help? Meanwhile, I'm planning some blog posts ... not sure when or what I'll write about first -- but lots on my mind.

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The founding of the Kansas City Kansan

Howard Owens — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:32:27 +0000

In Google Books, I found some history on the Kansas City Kansan, which delivered its final print edition today. Which is drawn from the minutes of a meeting of something called the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Commercial Organization Secretaries. The group appears to be somehow related to chambers of commerce. The following speech by Mr. Gibbs was part of a competition for greatest accomplishment by a chamber. Mr. Gibb's beat out three other finalists (there were 119 entries overall).

MR. GIBBS: Imagine yourself without a newspaper! You sometimes want to cuss the newspaper, but imagine yourself without it.

Kansas City, Kansas, a city of 100,000, without a newspaper —the largest city in the State of Kansas without a newspaper— served by the newspapers of a neighboring city—Kansas City, Missouri.

Sometimes, in some of the issues of the Kansas City Star, the news of a city of 100,000 commanded 17 inches! We called upon them and asked them if they would not give us more space, and we were always received courteously but never received much results from our calls.

The problem was checked up with the Chamber of Commerce for the Chamber of Commerce to get us a newspaper.

Many had tried to get a newspaper; many failures had occurred, but none had been secured.

No suggestion was made as to how it might be done, except this: "No; we won't put a cent into a newspaper. There have been too many failures."

Analysis of the situation: We must get a man from outside to give us a newspaper. He must have qualifications. First, he must be a Kansan, a man who can speak the Kansas language. Second, he must be a thoroughgoing newspaper man, and third, he must have financial backing so he can take a loss for two or three years, if necessary, in getting the thing established.

Such a man was Arthur Capper, a big publisher.

After eight months of report, survey, turndown and comeback, Arthur Capper made us a proposition: "Get $200,000 in advertising contracts and 15,000 subscribers, showing the good faith of Kansas City, Kansas, and I will start the newspaper."

A campaign was laid out and all of the features used in all the war campaigns were put into that campaign, and the result was that on our quota of $200,000 in advertising contracts, we turned in $210,000; and on 15,000 subscriptions, we turned in 16,000. (Applause.)

The next step: Wait for the newspaper. Arthur Capper had to buy a building and remodel the building, get the machinery in, build the organization so we might start that organization up here (indicating the top), and not at the bottom and build up.

We gave him the subscription and advertising contracts to start the newspaper right off with 15,000 circulation.

Of course, he was equal to the task, and on January 31 of this year, we received the first issue of the "Kansas City Kansan."

If Irvin Cobb had been in Kansas City, Kansas, that day, he would have had a feature story for a magazine.

Imagine a city of 100,000 people waiting for this paper. Here is an instance of one newsboy who got his bundle of papers and started down the street toward his corner. He had gone about 10 feet from the office and he was literally mobbed, and when he woke up he had his hands full of money and money on the sidewalk— and no papers. (Laughter.)

5000 extra copies were taken that day.

And so, on we might go, but we had the thrill of seeing a city of 100,000 souls receiving their own daily newspaper for the first time.

What about the future of the paper? It has today a circulation of 21,000 and it is going strong. Here is the paper, last Friday's issue—a 24-page paper. Probably some of you would like to see it.

But what about the future of it? What is the future of it? Men, I want to give you Arthur Capper's creed, and this is the creed that is being followed by every man in that organization of 125 that is running that newspaper—and, by the way, the Kansas City Star now has 13 men in Kansas City, Kansas, instead of 4.

Here is the creed: To do the right thing in the right way at the right time; to do some things better than they were ever done before; to be honest and square in all dealings; to eliminate errors; to know both sides of the question; to be courteous; to be an example; to work for the love of work; to recognize no impediments; to master circumstances. (Applause.)

The founding of the Rocky Mountain News

Howard Owens — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:15:12 +0000

Found this history of the Rocky Mountain News via Google Books. The passage is from History of American Journalism, published in 1917.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN PAPERS OF COLORADO

In Denver The Rocky Mountain News has the distinction of being the oldest paper in Colorado. Its first issue was April 23, 1859, in a struggling, home-seekers' settlement which had not yet a definite name. The discovery of placer gold some months earlier had made a settlement at the junction of the Platte River and Cherry Creek. On each bank of the river there was a rival town site, so that William N. Byers very wisely dated his paper as published at Cherry Creek, Denver Territory. The first issue of The Rocky Mountain News was printed on brown wrapping-paper. At the start it was published weekly, but later it became a daily. It has been published uninterrupted since its establishment, with a single exception in the early sixties when a flood in Cherry Creek wiped its plant out of existence.

The day The Rocky Mountain News started was one of the most exciting in frontier journalism. When the news of the discovery of gold in the "Pike's Peak Region" had reached as far east as the Missouri, it promptly started two small newspaper plants which had for their motto, figuratively speaking, "A newspaper near Pike's Peak, or bust." One left Omaha and was owned by William N. Byers, Thomas Gibson, and John L. Bailey; the other set out from St. Joseph, Missouri, and consisted of the outfit which John L. Merrick had purchased from The St. Joseph Gazette. Both outfits had to cross the plains by ox teams.

Merrick was the first to arrive. Not knowing that competitors were on the way, he leisurely commenced preparing for the first issue of The Cherry Creek Pioneer. Ten days later the Omaha plant arrived and the competition for the honor of the first paper in Colorado began. The settlement offered a suitable prize to the winner and appointed a committee of citizens to referee the contest. Both The Rocky Mountain News and The Cherry Creek Pioneer announced their date of first publication April 23, 1859. At ten-thirty o'clock, on the evening of April 23, the first copy of The News, a four-page sheet, was pulled from the old Washington hand-press. Other copies soon circulated among the pioneers surrounding the log cabin print-shop. A little later The Pioneer also appeared on the streets. The decision of the committee, however, was that The News had won by twenty minutes.

Worn out by his efforts and depressed by defeat, Merrick the next morning offered to sell his plant to his rival upon terms which were later accepted. Merrick then set off for the mountains, not to hunt for news, but for gold.

As the pioneer settlement grew into a larger town, The News always led in a movement for law and regulation. In his attempts to clear the town of its rougher element, Editor Byers often wrote his editorials and news with a rifle across his knee while armed men guarded his printers. For nineteen years Byers conducted The News.

Under difficulties seldom equaled, and never surpassed, he brought out his paper. When the Indian outbreak caused an embargo on traffic over the Western plains in 1864-65, he frequently ran out of white paper, and in such emergencies he printed the news on wrapping-paper, gathered from Denver stores. That he might have the news before the mails from the East arrived in Denver, he established an overland pony express. By means of a relay of horseback riders he had brought the news from the nearest express lines with a speed which to-day almost seems incredible. Of course, it was expensive to run such a private pony express, but The News in those days cost forty-four dollars a year and single copies sold for one dollar and twenty-five cents apiece. In 1878 the paper was sold to the Rocky Mountain News Printing Company, with W. A. H. Laughlin as editor and principal owner.

Two papers were established in Denver in 1867: the first of these was The Daily Argus, begun on October 25; the second, The Rocky Mountain Star, begun on December 8. A third attempt was made by N. A. Baker, who, after bringing out a few issues of The Colorado Leader, left Denver, to go to Cheyenne, where he founded the first paper in Wyoming.

How wired have you become in the past year?

Howard Owens — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:24:01 +0000

It's been quite a year for journalism. It's been scary at times, aggrevating at times and there have been some glimmers of hope for future success. I don't feel like the same person who started 2008 and who ends it now, and I bet you don't either.

A year ago, I issued a call for ink-stained print journalists to put some effort into learning a little more about how the wired world works by immersing themselves in some of the tools and techniquest of the web.

The post stirred a lot of conversation, but I only heard from a couple of reporters who were taking on the MBO program. I've not heard back on progress from any of them in months.

Editors John Robinson in Greensboro and Linda Grist Cunningham in Rockford set up similar programs for their newsrooms. Robinson, I know, rewarded at least two staff members for completing his list of "get wired" goals.

Out of the post also came the birth of Wired Journalists, which has grown into a tremendous resource for journalists looking to hone their online skills. If you find Wired Journalists useful, be sure to thank Ryan Sholin and Zac Echola. They've done a great job with the site.

Just now I got an e-mail from Paula Froke at AP who did not contact me in January, but has done an admirable job of working through the list of tasks. Read her post on her accomplishments. Her progress report isn't a mere check list of items completed but show her to be an admirable type of person: She often went beyond the basic tasks and stretched herself to learn new skills.

Whether for the MBO program or not, feel free to leave a comment about what you learned about online journalism in 2008.

Tom Gish, a rural newspaper editor who made a difference

Howard Owens — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:59:30 +0000

I think this obit of Tom Gish came to me via Romenesko earlier today. I just now had time to read it. It's all worth reading, but here's the relevant hyperlocal/citizen journalism part:

The Gishes were city journalists when they published their first edition in January of 1957, and they decided to bring a city style to the Eagle. The newspaper they had purchased was filled with community columnists, mostly women, who wrote the news of their small towns — who was visiting, the successes of children, the illnesses of elders.

Tom and Pat concluded the Eagle’s columnists violated every rule taught in their university journalism classes. The columns (from places like Ice, Blackey and Millstone) weren’t written in “news style.” They weren’t “objective.” And often they weren’t even about what city journalists would define as news, unless you considered the bounty of somebody’s garden to be worthy of newsprint.

So the Gishes stripped the columnists from the Eagle…and the Eagle’s circulation dropped like a very heavy rock. Nobody wanted a weekly newspaper that didn’t have “the news.”

Tom and Pat quickly relented and resumed printing the columns from the little coal camps dotted up the creeks that ran between the mountains. They realized that the definition of “news” used by their sophisticated professors at the university was just plain wrong. What the columnists wrote about — the day-to-day life of a community — WAS news. It was the most important news the Eagle could ever publish.

Tom and Pat spent the next 50 years practicing the most democratic form of journalism the country has ever seen. Everybody and anybody could be a reporter for the Eagle. The paper wasn’t written FOR a community. The Eagle was written BY a community. In the ‘90s, Tom began collecting phone messages people would call into a special line at the Eagle. The messages were often silly, crude at times and they appeared in the paper unfiltered. Unless the messages were libelous, they went onto the page headlined “Speak Your Piece.”

Like the columns, Tom’s Speak Your Piece feature was filled with the life of the county and often with news by anyone’s definition. In the 1990s, state police used information that appeared there to aid a criminal investigation of county officials. Speak Your Piece helped indict a handful of local officials.

A while back I read a book titled Managing Newspaper Correspondents. In the defination of the book, a correspondent was a house wife or farmer or society lady who sent in a weekly column of "locals" to his or her newspaper. This 1941 book said there were 250,000 newspaper correspondents in America at the time. I often wonder, what happened to them all?

Horace Greeley on 'hyperlocal' journalism

Howard Owens — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:50:58 +0000

Horace Greeley to "Friend Fletcher" in April, 1830:

Begin with a clear conception that the subject of deepest interest to an average human being is himself; next to that he is most concerned about his neighbors. Asia and the Tongo Islands stand a long way after these in his regard.... Do not let a new church be organized, or new members be added to one alrea! dy existing, a farm be sold, a new house raised, a mill set in motion, a store opened, nor anything of interest to a dozen families occur, without having the fact duly, though briefly, chronicled in your columns. If a farmer cuts a big tree, or grows a mammoth beet, or harvests a bounteous yield of wheat or corn, set forth the fact as concisely and unexceptionally as possible.

Is there a better description of what we now call hyperlocal journalism?

Walter Lippmann on a 'Free Press'

Howard Owens — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:27:06 +0000

The quote is from Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion. Keep in mind, he wrote this in 1922, not 2002.

This insistent and ancient belief that truth is not earned, but inspired, revealed, supplied gratis, comes out very plainly in our economic prejudices as readers of newspapers. We expect the newspaper to serve us with truth however unprofitable the truth may be. For this difficult and often dangerous service, which we recognize as fundamental, we expected to pay until recently the smallest coin turned out by the mint. We have accustomed ourselves now to paying two and even three cents on weekdays, and on Sundays, for an illustrated encyclopedia and vaudeville entertainment attached, we have screwed ourselves up to paying a nickel or even a dime. Nobody thinks for a moment that he ought to pay for his newspaper. He expects the fountains of truth to bubble, but he enters into no contract, legal or moral, involving any risk, cost or trouble to himself. He will pay a nominal price when it suits him, will stop paying whenever it suits him, will turn to another paper when that suits him.

Somebody has said quite aptly that the newspaper editor has to be re-elected every day.

This casual and one-sided relationship between readers and press is an anomaly of our civilization. There is nothing else quite like it, and it is, therefore, hard to compare the press with any other business or institution. It is not a business pure and simple, partly because the product is regularly sold below cost, but chiefly because the community applies one ethical measure to the press and another to trade or manufacture.

Ethically a newspaper is judged as if it were a church or a school. But if you try to compare it with these you fail; the taxpayer pays for the public school, the private school is endowed or supported by tuition fees, there are subsidies and collections for the church. You cannot compare journalism with law, medicine or engineering, for in every one of these professions the consumer pays for the service.

A free press, if you judge by the attitude of the readers, means newspapers that are virtually given away. Yet the critics of the press are merely voicing the moral standards of the community, when they expect such an institution to live on the same plane as that on which the school, the church, and the disinterested professions are supposed to live.

This illustrates again the concave character of democracy. No need for artificially acquired information is felt to exist. The information must come naturally, that is to say gratis, if not out of the heart of the citizen, then gratis out of the newspaper. The citizen will pay for his telephone, his railroad rides, his motor car, his entertainment. But he does not pay openly for his news.

Maybe we'll see each other in Lowell

Howard Owens — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 01:00:09 +0000

If you're in New England, I invite you to attend the New England New Media Associate fall conference.

NENMA gathering are always good events -- neat people to meet and talk with.

I want you to come Oct. 30 if you're in the area so you can hear my keynote presentation on "Reinventing Journalism."

Last year, the keynote was delivered by Steve Yelvington. The year before, by Rob Curley. So I'm honored to be in such good company as a keynote. I hope I can live up to the standards they set.

Also, if you happen to be in Albany on Nov. 13, you can catch me on a panel for the Women's Press Club of New York State on ethics in social media. The panel is at 7 p.m. at The College of Saint Rose.

McCain failed my job interview question technique

Howard Owens — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:01:06 +0000

If you asked me, what's the one thing you do well, I would say: Hire people.

Not every hire I've ever made has worked out (I can think of two that haven't out of about 15 I've made), but I've learned from my mistakes. Today, I'm quite confident that I have the best people in the business working for me. If I can be allowed to brag: I've hired very well over the past two years.

What's my secret? It's a book: First, Break All the Rules.

It taught me an important lesson: Ask interview questions designed to elicit specific answers, and design your questions to uncover the talents needed for the job you need to fill.

The key word there is talents. Hire for talents, not for skills. Skills can be taught, but talent is something either a person has on day one of a new job, or they don't. You can't hope that a new hire will at some later date develop the talent you want. People can improve in any number of ways, but there's no guarantee, so don't bet the future of your company on the hope that somebody will develop some hidden talent.

This post is not an endorsement of Barack Obama, but in watching CBS evening news tonight, I noticed that Barack Obama and John McCain answered a question from Katie Couric very differently. The answers illustrate perfectly the difference between answering a question with specificity versus answering with wiggle words designed to hide the fact the person being interviewed really doesn't have a good answer to the question.

People with the talent related to the question can readily offer up specifics, while people who are trying to bull shit you retreat to broad, general language.

The question Katie asked was simple and maybe not a great political interview question, but it's also the kind of question that can elicit very revealing answers. Katie asked, "When is the last time you cried?"

From a job interview perspective, it's a great question (merely, I mean in construction; I'm not suggesting you use this specific question in a job interview ... not in the least!), because an honest answer can lead to only a single, specific answer, and anybody who can't give a specific answer really doesn't have an answer.

Here's the start of Obama's answer:

Barack Obama: This one is actually easy. It was Malia, my 10-year-old daughter's, birthday party.

We were in Montana. And you know, she's a Fourth of July baby. So often times, during this campaign, we'd be traveling during birthdays. And so we were in this small hotel, I think a Holiday Inn, and we had this big public thing.

The staff organized for a smaller family party. And we were in this little, non-descript conference room, with Malia and Sasha, Michelle, me, my sister, my brother-in-law and my niece.

Read the rest, but take note of the clear memory, the specificity. Obama is talking about a clear event that answers the question exactly as asked. It tells a lot about his values.

Here's McCain's answer:

John McCain: I cry regularly.

Couric: You do?

McCain: Aw, yeah. You know, I'm very sentimental. When I see these young people who are serving. I met a woman at a town hall meeting the other day who had lost her son in Iraq. And, I was so touched, because she talked about how proud she was of his service.

And what a fine young person he was. And whenever you have that experience, obviously you think, how could I ever - how could I cope with such a tragedy, you know? And so you know, when I say cry, I get - my eyes well up, as they are right now thinking about these brave Americans and their families who have sacrificed so much for their country, especially recently.

Notice how McCain buys time with a very non-specific proclamation he believes is what the interviewer wants to hear, and then offers up an example that is neither all that specific and certainly not specific to him, but could be any body's experience. He is telling you what he wants you to believe he values, not necessarily what he really values.

If you put this in "talent" terms, the talent Couric's question would likely uncover would be related to emotional capacity. If that was a talent you needed for a job -- maybe you're hiring a sob-sister reporter -- then this would be a good question to ask. It's well constructed for that purpose because it asks a questioned with only one correct answer: An answer that offers a specific and very real example.

I'm not so sure "emotional capacity" is a required talent for president of the United States -- it could be a good thing or bad thing, depending on your view point. At least, the question was designed to elicit an explicit, revealing answer.

Again, I'm not endorsing Obama (I'm most likely to vote third party, if you must know), but if this were a job interview, with more questions to come, Obama would still be in the running and I'd be looking for a polite way to wrap up my meeting with McCain because there is no way I would hire him after that answer.

Berkeley Breathed not quite right on 'Reagan Sucks' memory

Howard Owens — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:17:02 +0000

I've just sent this e-mail to Berkeley Breathed in response his quote in this Salon piece.

Dear Mr. Breathed,

I was surprised to read in Salon:

'In 1986 I had a cockroach scream, "Reagan sucks!" in print size that took up the entire cartoon box. Nobody blinked -- 1,000 newspapers, quiet as a mouse.'

I remember quite a few papers upset by the cartoon, and the San Diego Union refused to run the strip. I wrote an editorial for my newspaper supporting your right to free speech. The editorial won an award from SPJ. I sent a copy of the paper to you, and you (without my even asking) sent it back autographed (still have it, though have never framed it as I've always intended).

In larger context -- I disagree with your sentiment that discourse is any more uncivil than its ever been -- American political discourse has ALWAYS been ruffian and course. Mean spiritedness is not an invention of cable news or bloggers. There's just more outlets now, and some blowhards have bigger bullhorns.

But there's also more outlets for civil discourse, and there is more than it than ever ... more fact checking, more chance for reasonable voices to be heard amongst the clutter and crap, more people interested in finding truth rather than lies.

Do what you will with your characters and your career, but in an age when we're ruled by a class of politicians best labeled Republocrats hell bent on Empire and Plutocracy, we need more independent voices, not fewer. It is a blow to freedom to see Opus silenced.

Update on bright new media leaders who have left newspapers

Howard Owens — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:42:24 +0000

A while back, I did a blog post about bright people who have left the industry. Here's a quick update (and I welcome further input from anybody who has other names to add).

Chris Jennewein is back in, having gone to work for the Las Vegas Sun.
Sean Polay has rejoined Ottaway.
Lucas Grindley is now online managing editor at National Journal.
Not included in the previous list, and I can't remember if this was an oversight, or if he left McClatchy after the post: Dick van Halsema is now consulting.
Steve Smith, who traditionally would probably be classified more print side, but was long a forward-thinking new media leader -- he made a very public exist from Spokane this week.

Anybody else?