Starting today, if you’re a blogger who uses Wordpress, (both hosted .com as well as .org) you can do precisely that.  Through a newly-launched partnership, Wordpress and SocialVibe (disclosure: I am on the board) are introducing a widget that will enable millions of bloggers that use Wordpress to support their charities of choice.

With the SocialVibe widget, bloggers can donate real money to their charities without the need to dip into their own pockets.  Instead, the money is generated from brand advertisers that the bloggers self-select as the sponsor (e.g. Showtime, Sprint, Colgate, Kraft Foods, etc.).  To be more specific, once bloggers install the SocialVibe sidebar widget on their Wordpress blog, money will be earned for charities every time readers engage with the widget (e.g. rating a Showtime video clip).  Bloggers can switch their cause and sponsor as often as they like, and receive regular updates from their charity about goal progress and impact.

Thus far, SocialVibe has enabled people to raise close to half a million dollars for charities in just over a year’s time.  Everyday, members are sharing their brand sponsors with millions of friends on social platforms such as MySpace, Facebook, and now WordPress to benefit one of more than 30 non-profit organizations, such as World Food Program, Children’s Miracle Network and charity: water.

What makes this partnership especially interesting is that WordPress has, up to this point, restricted any advertising on hosted accounts (with the exception of VIP accounts).  In the past they have expressed concern over advertising’s impact on spam and motivation for expression.  While these concerns no doubt still exist, there are a few facets of the SocialVibe platform that may make the advertising program more palatable:

•    The blogger can choose to engage with a brand partner or not.
•    The benefit to the blogger comes not in $ dollars (or a check), but rather in the form of a donation to a charity.
•    The ad unit, with charity graphics and links to relevant information, adds to the content of the site, rather than detracting from the experience as most advertising programs do.

So it is possible that the SocialVibe widget will motivate bloggers to create even better content and engage a larger audience, knowing that they now have a way to pool their individual influences to create positive change in the world.  And it’s important to realize that the Wordpress-SocialVibe partnership is designed to align such altruistic desires with the many corporations and brands that increasingly value social responsibility.  For the brands involved, this platform provides a golden opportunity to get unique endorsements in a highly engaging manner within social media.  It’s a win for all parties involved.

For more information about the SocialVibe-WordPress widget, check out the WordPress blog post.

Whenever I talk with news organizations of any size about linking to sources, resources and journalism that originated outside the walls of their newsroom, two questions come up: How and Why.

Well, conveniently enough, I work for Publish2, and we build tools that help answer the question of How. If your problem is that systems make adding links directly in the text of your story a difficult task, let’s solve that by adding links in widgets, sidebars, scrolling across the bottom of the browser window, blinking in 96pt red Helvetica, pushed to Twitter — wherever and however you want them.

My standing offer on How is that if the question comes up, you can talk to me and I’ll help you out.

So back to the question of Why.

Why we link: Five reasons your news organization should tie the Web together

1. Because we owe it to our readers to give them as much information as we have at our fingertips.

Don’t we? Of course we do.

If you’re a journalist, a huge part of your job is to filter all the information relevant to your community or your beat and pass along the important parts to your readers. Think about all the press releases you get by fax or e-mail, all the phone calls, voicemail, and messages that land on your desk, and think about how you act as a filter for that flood of information. Do the same thing with the Web.

Bring your readers the best links related to your story, and they will thank you. How? By treating you like a first-class citizen of the Internet, and coming back to your news site, which is no longer a dead end backwater in the river of news, but a point of connection where they can find other interesting streams.

Chris Amico took it one step further in a tip he submitted via the Publish2 Collaborative Reporting form I used to gather some ideas for this post. “Humility is healthy,” Chris wrote. “The more we get out of this mindset that we are the sole producers of useful content, the better off we’ll be in the long run.”

You might think your news organization is super-duper-Web-savvy because you put your stories online, have RSS feeds and push links to your own content out via social networks, including Twitter.

That’s Step One. And it’s a good first step.

But, if all you provide your readers is flat content that doesn’t take them anywhere else on the Web, or back up statements with direct sources, or provide resources for those who want to explore a topic beyond what you’ve been able to provide with original reporting, you’re just shoveling text into another bucket, one labeled “Web.”

If, on the other hand, you want to embrace the traits that make blogs, Twitter, and so many other online communication tools a vital part of the daily life of your readers, your news site shouldn’t feel like an endpoint in the conversation. It should feel like the beginning.

Asteris Masouras put it this way in a Twitter reply to my query about why we link:

If you’re writing about human beings, businesses, organizations, government institutions or any other life form with a presence on the Internet, linking to them in the stories you publish about them is the low-hanging fruit when it comes to participating in your local online community.

Skipping the link to the city council’s calendar when you mention the next meeting, leaving out the link to the Little League’s online scoreboard when you write a story about its resurgence or not bothering to link to the full database of restaurant inspections when you choose three to write about — these are all easy ways to miss an opportunity to connect with your community and your readers.

Start simple: If you mention a person or organization, link to them.

Many, many bonus points to be awarded if you dig deep enough into the local online community to link to relevant content created by the people in your story. Did that angry neighbor’s crusade for a new zoning law to govern branches that hang over someone else’s driveway start with an image posted to a photo-sharing site and a determined comment? Link to it.

There’s a huge upside to linking out to community members, of course. Sometimes they link back.

Wenatchee World Web Editor Brianne Pruitt dropped a tip in my form including the following statement: “The link economy is real, and important for anyone who wants to be a part of the Web ecology.” I’d translate that as: Give some, get some.

And here’s how Web developer Pete Karl answered the question of why news organizations should link to external sources:

The days of your news organization existing as a monopolistic source of local information are over, and your readers know it. They browse local, national, international, and topical news and commentary in more places than you call “news.” And if they don’t, they hear it from their friends on any one of a dozen social networks. They know that you don’t know it all. And so do you.

But you’re the journalist.

You’re the filter. You’re the person in town who knows everyone who knows everyone. You’ve got the sources, whether they’re people you talk to at the community center, the city council meeting, the police station, or their Live Journal page. Bring what they know to your readers as directly as possible: Link to them.

David Cohn of Spot.Us offered up the now-classic Jeff Jarvis line in my tip form: “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.”

I know, I know. Everyone is asking you to do more with less. It’s extremely easy to tell people like me that you just don’t have time for another toy, another tool, another camera, another social network or another task.

I’m here to tell you that bringing your readers the best of the Web can save you work.

How? By opening a two-way channel to let your readers tell you what you should link to next, you’ll cut down on the time you spend looking for that next thing. By maintaining a real presence in the local link economy, you’ll make it easier for sources who know the answers to your questions to find you, and you won’t spend as much time trying to find them.

By sending your readers to the best information available on the Web, you’ll keep them coming back for more, drawing more traffic to your news site. Last time I checked, more traffic is one way to make more money, and with any luck, that’s still how you get paid.

• Josh Korr, my colleague at Publish2, explores what happens when a group of news organizations collaborate to curate links when regional news breaks
• David Cohn from Spot.Us asks whether bookmarking links using social news services is an act of journalism
• Jeff Jarvis explores the ethic of the link economy

Thanks to everyone who replied on Twitter or in the Publish2 Tip Form when I asked for some of the best reasons to link out from your news site.

Steve observes:

On the Internet, we have no need of wire editors; if we wish to have wire content on our websites, we can plug in AP Hosted News, or run a full feed of AP Online or some similar product from another service. But with everything on the Internet just a click away, the value of such branded and hosted wire content is low (and measurable), and even that may go away before long, based on simple cost-benefit analysis. We may be better off sending users to CNN, MSNBC and NYtimes.

Feature editing faces the same problem:

But the job simply doesn’t transport to digital media. Again, everything on the planet is just a click away, much of it more interesting, entertaining and informative than can be found in the typical daily newspaper’s features.

Yet there is a HUGE opportunity in this shifting landscape. Just because there’s a wealth of content a click away doesn’t mean that news consumers know where to click in order to find it.

Instead, we have what Clay Shirky describes as “filter failure”:

Here’s what the Internet did: it introduced, for the first time, post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor. And so there’s no economic logic that says that you have to filter for quality before you publish…The filter for quality is now way downstream of the site of production.

What we’re dealing with now is not the problem of information overload, because we’re always dealing (and always have been dealing) with information overload…Thinking about information overload isn’t accurately describing the problem; thinking about filter failure is.

Local news sites may serve their readers much better by sending them to CNN, MSNBC, and NYT for non-local news, as Steve suggests. But they may also send them to local news sites in other regions for stories dealing with common issues. They may send them to local blogs and other non-MSM media sites.

There is a wealth of sources on the web. Helping readers find the best of the web could help local news sites remain daily destinations rather than just a host for content to be aggregated by someone else — which could help those news operations get back into the content distribution business, which is how they made money in print, and how they could make a lot more money on the web.

Wire and feature editors are already skilled content curators — they just need to adapt those skills to filtering the web. One challenge they can apply their news judgment to is discovering new sources of trusted information, something Google CEO Eric Schmidt admits alogirthms struggle with.

For general search, we’ve been careful not to bias it using our own judgment of trust because we’re never sure if we get it right. So we use complicated ranking signals, as they’re called, to determine rank and relevance. And we change them periodically, which drives everybody crazy, as or algorithms get better. There’s no question in my experience that the top brands represented in this room would, in fact, float to the top in our search ranking. The usual problem is you’ve got somebody who really is very trustworthy but they’re not as well-known and they compete against people who are better known, and they don’t, in their view, get high enough ranking. We have not come up with a way to algorithmically handle that in a coherent way.

Another skill that would help wire and feature editors take on the challenge of filtering the web, and make them hugely relevant in the web media era, is collaboration. They could learn a lot from the editors in Washington State who have been practicing collaborative curation, whether for a statewide flood or a flu outbreak.

Publish2’s Senior Editor Josh Korr wrote about this vision for re-inventing the wire function on the web in a recent Nieman Reports piece, “A 21st Century Newswire—Curating the Web With Links”

If I were a wire or feature editor in a newsroom, instead of waiting to become obsolete, I would start immediately learning how to be a top notch web curator. I’d ask myself — how can I become the Jim Romenesko or Matt Drudge for my community. I would start learning how to use the tools of web curation and learning how to collaborate with other web curators. I’d study how newsrooms like Chicago Tribune have created an editorial workflow for collaborating to curate the web (see Colonel Tribune Recommends on the Chicago Breaking News blog.)

And if I ran a newsroom, I’d look at how I could retrain and reassign talented to editors to be vital contributors to the web operation, even as their function becomes redundant for the print operation. (Or, I’d imagine a future where content from a diverse range of web sources could be licensed and curated for print — see this Josh Korr post.)

There’s still time for any journalist in the newsroom to become essential to the future of news, rather than being emblematic of the past.

Swine Flu.

Or, to put it in microblogging terms, #swineflu.

The wonderful thing about the ease of communication online is that anyone can start a discussion, carry it on, pass along information, retweet it, forward an e-mail, leave a comment on a blog post, or bookmark a page in a social way.

The problem, of course, is that when millions of people are desperately looking for solid, clear information, that’s when it can be the most difficult to find it.

The #swineflu hashtag on Twitter serves as a good point of reference for what Clay Shirky called “filter failure.” The problem is not that there’s a wild abundance of useful information, overloading us with detail, facts, and commentary; the problem is that we don’t have the proper filtering system set up to separate trusted sources and reliable resources from rumors, jokes, misinformation, and ephemera. If those seeking to provide links to reliable information started using a hashtag such as #therealswineflu, it would likely be overtaken — quickly — by tagged content with less value, whatever its source.

So how do we solve filter failure?

We depend on humans to serve as our filters. We do this all the time, when we ask a friend a question, or talk with someone we know who happens to be an expert on a given topic. (I imagine the world’s epidemeologists are fielding a huge number of Facebook messages from old friends this week.)

When it comes to reliable sources for news that breaks on a massive scale, our best sources are likely to be Wikipedia for facts, and journalists for explanation, clarification, context, and meaningful analysis.

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One way that journalists are bringing explanation, clarification, context, and meaningful analysis of the Swine Flu story to their readers today is through Publish2.

We’ve been actively encouraging journalists and news organizations using Publish2 to use the swineflu tag to mark the stories and resources they’re saving to help their readers understand what they need to know about this outbreak, put it in context, and quickly respond to it as necessary.

Look for the “Create Widget” link near the top of every topic page on the Publish2 site to embed any stream of links on your own news site or blog. The Knoxville News-Sentinel added the stream of all Publish2 links tagged with “swineflu” on a page to gather resources from around the Web.

So that’s one filter: Journalists sharing reliable information to serve their readers.

Want to drill down a little more? How about a regional group of journalists at different news organizations gathering information in a collaborative effort to serve local readers?

In the Pacific Northwest, #wanews has you covered. This group of reporters and editors in and around Washington State first came together to use Publish2 to aggregate news and information when flooding hit the area earlier this year.

It’s an innovative group, and this week has been no exception, as they’ve jumped in to form a Publish2 newsgroup where anyone they invite can post links and then embed the stream as a widget on their own site:

• The Wenatchee World embedded a “Northwest news links” stream in the sidebar of their stories about Swine Flu.
• The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin added the feed of links to a special topic page where they’re providing Swine Flu information to their readers.
• The Kitsap Sun did both, with a sidebar on story pages and a stream embedded on a topic page as well.

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Solving the problem of filter failure isn’t a small task.

Want to help out? Register for Publish2 if you’re a journalist who wants to pitch in by bringing the best of the Web to your readers.

• Ryan Sholin joins us next week as Director of News Innovation.
• Greg Linch is the winner of the Publish2 Future of Journalism Contest and will join us in the fall as our Producer.
• Howard Weaver has joined our Board of Directors.

Get the full scoop at the Publish2 Blog.

Google isn’t stealing content from newspapers and other media companies. It’s stealing their control over distribution, which has always been the engine of profits in media. Google makes more money than any other media company on the web because it has near monopoly control over content distribution (i.e. like a metro newspaper in the pre web era).

Those who argue that Google is a friend to content owners because it sends them traffic overlook the basic law of supply and demand. The value of “traffic” is entirely relative. The more content there is on the web, the less value that content has — because of the surfeit of ad inventory and abundance of free alternatives to paid content — and thus the less value “traffic” has.

The more content there is on the web, the less money every content creator makes, and the more money Google makes by taking a piece of that transaction.

Nick Carr sums up the problem well:

What Google doesn’t mention is that the billions of clicks and the millions of ad dollars are so fragmented among so many thousands of sites that no one site earns enough to have a decent online business. Where the real money ends up is at the one point in the system where traffic is concentrated: the Google search engine. Google’s overriding interest is to (a) maximize the amount and velocity of the traffic flowing through the web and (b) ensure that as large a percentage of that traffic as possible goes through its search engine and is exposed to its ads.

The debate over whether Google’s excerpting content on its search result pages is a violation of copyright law, i.e. whether Google is effectively stealing content, overlooks the much more valuable asset that Google is appropriating. Google makes money less by its ability to display that snipet of content and much more by its ability to know that snipet of content is relevant to what the content consumer is looking for — it makes money by its ability to efficiently distribute that content.

And just how does Google know what content is most relevant, trustworthy, and valuable? How does Google know where to send the traffic that yields such diminishing returns?

Everyone talks about Google’s algorithms as if it were some giant artificial intelligence that had its own ability to judge the value of content.

The greatest irony of the web content economy is that Google by itself doesn’t have a clue what content is good or bad. Google is able to deliver relevant search results only because every site on the web helps them figure it out.

Google’s algorithm is based on reading “links” as votes for content. Every time a website links to another website, Google reads that link as a vote. The brilliance of the Google algorithm is its ability to figure out which votes should count more.

But without those links, without those “votes,” Google has nothing.

What Google “steals” from every website isn’t the content — it’s the links.

It’s the links, stupid. And everyone gives Google their links to read — for free!!

Google doesn’t really need your content, because there’s plenty more where it came from. What Google really needs is your links, i.e. your votes for content — it needs your help separating the wheat from the chaff on the web.

The backlash against URL shorteners and site framing (e.g. DiggBar) is all about who controls the links, and which links Google is going to read and credit.

The key to Google’s monopoly control over content distribution on the web is its ability to judge what’s most relevant in an increasingly large sea of content.

If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to look at the source of its power — judging good content, which enables Google to be the most efficient and effective distributor of content. They also need to look at Google’s fundamental limitation — its judgment is dependent on OTHER people expressing their judgment of content in the form of links. Above all, they need to look at sources of content judgment that Google currently can’t access, because they are not yet expressed as links on the web.

The balance of power on the web can shift — but only by understanding what the real sources of power are.

UPDATE

Just to clarify,  the use of “steal” and “stole’ is in the sense of “stole the game.” The point of this post is to explain how Google won, and not at all to suggest that they didn’t deserve to win. Google’s success is a direct reflection of how much value they create, i.e. A LOT — they solved a problem in the market that nobody else figure out how to solve or even recognized as the huge opportunity in the market. This post is also intended to help media companies understand better how Google works so that they can better compete in the web content marketplace, not to justify any feelings of “sour grapes.”

But in addition to the key editorial question, Seattle has also now become a test case for one of the most important questions about the near-term future of the newspaper industry that is almost never asked:

What will happen to the print advertising when the newspaper stops publishing in print?

I asked this question a few months ago in theory, but now we get to see what happens in actuality.  Logically, one or a combination of the following will happen to the newspaper’s advertising dollars:

1. Vaporizes, i.e. the advertiser stops spending the money — given the economic crisis, this seems likely for some advertisers
2. Shifts to Seattlepi.com — which is hiring its own sales force following the dissolution of the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times
3. Shifts to another newspaper, i.e. Seattle Times — through the JOA, the same sales force sold ads for Seattle PI and Seattle Times, so it only makes sense that some advertisers will shift some or all of their spending to the Times
4. Shifts to competing local online media, e.g. The Stranger, West Seattle Blog
5. Shifts to non-local media that can target local audiences, e.g. Google, Craigslist

Anyone who runs a newspaper should be watching this experiment under a microscope. Someone should even go so far as to obtain copies of the last month of Seattle PI in print and call up every display advertiser and ask them what they plan to do.

This experiment has already been playing out in Denver since the Rocky Mountain News ceased publication, but since the Rocky ceased entirely, we didn’t get to see what happened with option #2 above — and that’s the BIG question for many newspaper companies looking at online-only publishing. (The experiment in Denver could be radically altered if a new publication is launched by former Rocky staff — it’s contingent on whether they can sell enough subscriptions, which I hope they do because that is another vital experiment.)

So much of the discussion of the future of the newspaper business seemes to assume only option #1 above will occur. But that’s unlikely.

Of course the big question is whether local media can find new ways to create value — and I say “create value” because that is the key to any new business (vs. “new business model,” because those discussions typically start with what the business needs, not what the market needs). I think there are tremendous opportunities for new value creation in emerging collaborative media ecosystems, but that’s for another post.

In the meantime, all eyes are on Seattle.

In particular, we aim to overcome what we believe is a limitation of many “citizen journalism” initiatives to date, i.e. viewing citizen journalism as an end in itself, where citizens are supposed to replace professional journalists, filling up community sites with reporting. We believe citizen journalism is part of a larger process where professional journalists still play the vital role they always have. The key is to enable dynamic and ongoing collaboration between citizens and professional journalists, where citizens can become a true practical extension of the newsroom.

It’s all about collaboration.

Collaboration has always been at the heart of the Publish2 vision, even before the crisis in the news industry made it clear that journalism would have to embrace the power of collaboration in order to survive and thrive in the digital age. Publish2 now has one of the largest communities of journalists practicing online journalism (i.e. link journalism). We have also witnessed some pioneering instances of collaboration among journalists and newsrooms using Publish2, all arising from big news events, e.g. floods in Washington state, Obama’s inauguration, the Blagojevich arrest.

With Digital Sunlight, we are realizing the full vision of a platform for collaborative journalism, which connects individual journalists, newsrooms, and citizens, and harnesses the web as a platform for enabling and distributing public service journalism.

We are fortunate at this inflection point to have the guidance of one of the great champions of public service journalism, Howard Weaver. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Howard was the VP of News for McClatchy through the end of last year. Howard shares our vision that the future of journalism will combine the power of digital and collaborative technologies with the enduring qualities of professional journalism.

Howard has been an informal advisor since Publish2 was just a proverbial scrawl on the back of a napkin. Here’s Digital Sunlight in Howard’s own words (from his blog):

Before long, hundreds of billions of dollars will flow out of Washington and wash across every community in the country. This stimulus spending represents an unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis, and defines one of the biggest stories of our generation.

How can today’s news organizations possibly cover it adequately? Even if news staffs were growing, they’d be hard-pressed to keep up with the dozens, perhaps hundreds of projects that will affect individual communities. Even knowing where to look will be bewildering.

I think the new web service for journalists called Publish2 can improve the coverage – and, in doing so, help journalism and the country.

Publish2 pioneered collaborative link journalism , and it’s rapidly being adapted to go a step farther: helping professional journalists enlist the eyes and ears of the audience in covering a huge story like this. The same system that now lets news organizations share links with with readers will soon enable them to ask readers to share tips, opinions and observations about how stimulus spending is working in their area.

Using Publish2’s free system, individual websites can easily let users submit information about projects. Some might be whistleblowers – imagine a Citibank secretary who didn’t think the company should be buying a new jet – while others will simply have questions they think should be asked. Sites can also solicit success stories, tales of stimulus spending that’s working.

Reporters will be able to search a sophisticated database of all the reader submissions – for instance, zeroing in on a particular region, or a certain company, or an individual government department. The system will let them query their readers to solicit feedback and information on specific stimulus topics.

Meanwhile, Publish2 will also provide an aggregated list of links to all the best stimulus journalism around the country, which can be used to augment and extend individual websites.

New features enabling broad collaboration among journalists and citizens will be available to Publish2 users very soon, and every newsroom ought to explore the system and consider participating. To me, the effort looks like a win-win from every angle, helping individual newsrooms cover a big, sprawling story in a time of declining resources, helping enable watchdog journalism on the biggest spending spree ever, and empowering citizens to help.

This could be a breakthrough project in the field of “citizen journalism” – more accurately, a way to let professionals tap into the power of the crowd to help inform and invigorate their reporting.

I’ve been an informal advisor at Publish2 since the idea emerged, and have watched with interest as it’s developed. I believe it’s poised to emerge as a powerful, essential tool for journalists, and its business model lets it do so without costing a dime. (By way of disclosure, I have been asked to think about joining Pub2’s board of directors and am considering that).

Journalists and technologists on the Publish2 team will stand behind this project to help news organizations participate as robustly as they want. I encourage you to explore the possibilities.

As to when the new Digital Sunlight functionality will be available on Publish2, we are baking as fast as we can and will have an update shortly.  In the meantime, check out our Stimulus Newswire — simply add the stimulus tag to links saved on Publish2 to collaborate on rounding up the best coverage of the stimulus act anywhere on the web.

Our goal for Digital Sunlight is to enable the largest collaborative reporting effort in history, and to demonstrate that collaboration is essential to the future of journalism.

The biggest danger with news aggregation is that instead of acting as a filter, it can sometimes add to readers’ information overload. I read Andrew Sullivan’s blog as much for his links as for his original posts, but some days his link-blogging is just too prolific for me. (As Howard Owens put it: “To all the bloggers in my RSS reader: You post too frequently. Stop it. Let me catch up, for a change.”)

Commenter Matthias Spielkamp worried that the Washington link project might have had this effect: “I don’t have the time to read through 25 different stories to get a picture of the situation.”

But we shouldn’t mistake a long list of links for confusing overload just because it looks like overload from afar. The closer readers are to a story or event, the more they want to know about it and the less overloaded they’ll feel.

Take a look at the headlines on the current Kitsap Sun flood widget: “W. Wash. flood clean-up information”; “Maple Valley firefighters rescue residents from flooded homes”; “Flooding, for the most part, misses Federal Way”; “At least 500 Snohomish County homes flooded, officials say”; “Flooding halts Whidbey sports action.”

Each of those is a unique story that’s going to be very useful to someone living in that area. None of them repeats the others. Chances are, someone who lives in Maple Valley has friends or relatives in Federal Way or Whidbey. What looks like two dozen versions of the same story to Matthias or me is vital information for people who live in the flooding area.

Jack Lail found the same level of interest for Knoxnews.com’s link roundups on the Tennessee Vols. To me, the roundups look like overload. But they get tons of page views, Jack noted, “because fans are passionate and can’t get enough information on their teams and games.”

It’s kind of counterintuitive, given the emerging consensus that Matthias noted in another comment about the importance of clean news sites that don’t overload the audience. What good human-powered local aggregation does is feed readers’ deep interest in such topics without overloading them with 50 versions of the same AP story.

Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers.

That’s how a quiet revolution began in Washington state Wednesday. Four journalists spontaneously launched one of the first experiments in collaborative (or networked) link journalism to cover a major local story.

But it gets better. Those four journalists weren’t in the same newsroom. In fact, they all work for different media companies. And here’s the best part: Some of them have never even met in person.

“The whole thing came together on Twitter yesterday morning,” Elaine Helm, new media editor at the Herald in Everett, said in an email Thursday.

The story was crazy rain in western Washington: evacuations, flooded and closed highways, avalanches, a breached levee, the whole deal. Elaine (@ehelm on Twitter), put a call out for local Twitterers to adopt a common hashtag for flooding coverage. Paul Balcerak (@paulbalcerak), assistant editor of dynamic media for Sound Publishing, suggested #waflood, which they agreed on and posted for their Twitter followers to see.

As Paul described it in an email, Brianne Pruitt (@briannepruitt, Wenatchee World web editor) and Angela Dice (@adice, Kitsap Sun web editor) picked up on the hashtag, “and it snowballed.”

That would have been innovation enough, but Paul went a step further: He saved links to flood coverage through Publish2, tagging each with “waflood,” and posted on Twitter that he was doing so. Soon Elaine, Angela, and Brianne were also adding links to Publish2 with a “waflood” tag.

They then put Publish2 widgets on their news organizations’ sites that displayed the links they were collaboratively gathering, greatly expanding their sites’ coverage of the flooding.

Here’s the Herald’s link roundup (which is also linked on the Herald’s homepage);

Kitsap Sun’s (inset in a story at left, linked on the homepage at right, and on this full page of links);

Wenatchee World’s (see inset box at left);

and the one at Sound Publishing’s pnwlocalnews.com (see “Washington state flooding” at the bottom).

Voila — instant collaborative link newswire!

The collaborative spirit of journalism’s future

This collaboration is remarkable in all kinds of ways.

First, you can tell by the Twitter timestamps how quickly everything came together. Second, with a link newswire fed by multiple news organizations, there’s a danger that everyone might add only their own stories to the mix. But this group added outside sources as well (including the News Tribune, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Seattle Times, Yakima Herald-Republic, the Daily Record, and more). Third, all four independently and instantly “got” what the others were doing, which shows how much the ideas of collaboration and link journalism (and even the term itself) have spread.

Lastly, did I mention the four journalists work for different media companies? The Herald is owned by the Washington Post Co., Kitsap Sun by Scripps, Sound Publishing by Black Press (of Victoria, B.C.), and Wenatchee World is independent/family-owned. Paul hasn’t met Angela or Brianne in person, and has met Elaine briefly once. Yet none of that was an obstacle.

I asked Angela in an email whether she knew the others in non-Twitter life. Here’s her wonderful answer:

I used to work with Elaine at the Sun and talk to her regularly, and she’s one of the reasons I joined Twitter. While I’d never done any project with Brianne before, she had made it a point to visit other papers around the region and introduce herself when she became the Wenatchee World web editor, which is how I started following her on Twitter. I met Seth Long [Sound Publishing's new media director] on Twitter, which is how I met Paul, neither of whom I’ve met in person. They both, however, work with a former co-worker and friend of mine. It’s a small, small online journalism world in Western Washington.

How refreshing is that? Forget walled gardens — this is the spirit of journalism’s future.

In some ways the networked linking process is an extension of how newsrooms collaborate with traditional wire services, but I think the Washington project is more than that. Papers using a traditional wire service aren’t really collaborating. They’re primarily trying to a) extend the reach of their stories, and b) get access to material they can’t afford to produce on their own.

The dynamic on display Wednesday, and the relationships Angela described in the quote above that allowed for this collaboration, seem more organic — a mental leap forward. They even emphasized the collaboration in the widget descriptions: Kitsap Sun’s says “Stories are chosen by news reporters and editors from Washington news organizations,” while the Herald’s says “Below are news stories that journalists around the state have selected to post using a service called Publish2.”

I asked Seth Long (@greenergrad) about a similar project he and Angela had worked on in December to round up links to snowstorm coverage. (For future Wikipedia articles on link journalism: To my knowledge, theirs was the first example of networked link journalism across media companies.)

He noted that “Her newspaper is a direct competitor with a group of our community weeklies.” In the old world, that would have made collaboration a non-starter. But today readers rightly come first. As Seth said, “My perspective is that our job is to serve our communities as best we can.”

Innovation that’s easy, popular, and cheap

The Washington link projects should serve as models for the entire news industry. They show that collaborative linking draws readers, is easy, and costs nothing more than time (and not even much of that).

Seth said the December snowstorm link roundup was on the homepage for three or four days — but it was the site’s most-trafficked story for the entire month. (This tracks with Knoxnews.com’s success with a popular football link roundup.)

Angela described some of the other benefits of collaborative linking:

I think it’s especially useful in situations like these, where events affect a large region. I can also see it being used as a way to track things like state government news, or any broad-reaching issue that your readers will be talking about.

Having a group of people adding the links just makes your job that much easier. As both a reader and a web editor, I can keep updated on what’s happening on a particular topic without opening and slogging through a dozen web sites.

This is the power of collaborative news networks. By forming a network, newsrooms can discover not just a greater volume of news, but a greater volume of relevant, high-quality news than one person, one newsroom, or one wire service could alone.

Compare the Washington group’s great waflood link roundup to a Google News search for “Washington flood” — I know which one I’d rather have as a resource if I lived in that area.

Doing this isn’t complicated. In an email, Brianne described the extent of her planning: “I follow the others on Twitter, and they had started a hashtag, #waflood, and then mentioned using the same tag for publish2 links.”

That’s it! Any group of news organizations can do this, even if they’re not Twitter-friends.

A good way to start is to set up a Publish2 newsgroup and invite other journalists (as Angela did with a Northwest News newsgroup in December). Collaboratively save links about a couple of non-breaking-news subjects to get a feel for it, and try publishing feeds of those links. Then when a big story breaks, it’s a simple matter of choosing a common tag and alerting everyone in the newsgroup.

Don’t get hung up on worries about sinking a lot of time or money into this. As Angela said, “There’s a perception that with some tools, it’s a lot of extra work, but — I’m specifically talking about the Publish2 model — when you realize how little time it really takes to bookmark a page you’re already reading, it’s a wonder you weren’t doing it before.”

As for money, when the technology is free all you need to invest in is smart journalists. Here’s what Paul had to say Wednesday:

I think it’s worth pointing out that everything we did today cost us $0.

That, too, is the spirit of journalism’s future. I can’t wait to see what this innovative crew cooks up next in that spirit — and who will be the first to follow their lead.

Last weekend, my wife and I wanted to watch Becoming Jane, because we’ve been on a Jane Austin kick. We watched Pride & Prejudice the night before (highly recommended). We subscribe to Netflix DVDs, but we hadn’t ordered the movie, and we didn’t feel like waiting. I went to iTunes, and it was available for purchase for $15, but not for renting (for $3 or $4). Amazon, same deal, not on their video on demand service, just the DVD for $15. I checked out Neflix’s Video on Demand offering and found that we don’t have the right hardware (nor do we have the required “unlimited” subscription). Hulu, well, they’re making progress on movies, but it’s mostly old stuff. Video store — the Hollywood video near us is an empty shell — and I can’t remember the last time we got into a car to rent a movie.

So here we were, ready to spend $4 even $5 dollars on content, and nobody would take our money. Seriously.

So that $5 stayed in my walled. No sale. No revenue. Nothing. We didn’t end up watching a movie.

Here’s another story.

Over the holiday, we helped some relatives post a listing for basement apartment on Craisglist. They had already listed the apartment in the newspaper, but they responses had been entirely from older people — 70s and even 80s. They had been looking for a young professional (it’s a steep staircase down to the apartment). And the responses had been coming in slowly. The apartment remained unrented.

We posted the apartment listing on Craigslist, and over the next few days they were flooded by phone calls, mostly people in their 20s. In less than a week they had rented the apartment to a public school teacher who had been living at home and was looking for her first place.

So they were able to achieve for free on Craigslist what they couldn’t achieve by spending money in the newspaper.

To me, these two incidents represent media value equations that have radically changed. It seems that most media companies still haven’t figured out how to adapt to or even understand the changes to the fundamental exchange of value in media.

Some of that stems from a failure to understand legacy media economics.

People ask why no one wants to pay for news anymore, referencing the decline in newspaper circulation, when in fact that misrepresents the value equation. People were paying for newsPAPERS, which contained a lot more than news, and they were also paying for newspaper delivery, which is a service.

For all those people searching for apartments on Craigslist, the value equation for their local newspaper has fundamentally changed. They may still value local news, but some of the highly valuable information that used to ride along with the news has been removed, which changes the equation.

It’s not that no one wants to pay for music or movies, it’s that increasingly we want to pay for content when, where, and however we want. We’re willing to pay for the convenience of video on demand, but the service isn’t always being offered. Digital technology has put content producers in the services business, but they don’t yet fully understand that value exchange.

New business models for media require entirely new exchanges of value — it’s not about finding new ways to balance the old equation.

We’ve gotten some great entries by journalists who are thinking creatively, passionately, and positively about the future. You can show your support for them by helping to rate the entries (some examples embedded below):

Most newspaper companies’ strategy right now is based on the assumption that you can’t shut down the print newspaper because it brings in 90% of the revenue, and you couldn’t possibly support the same news gathering operation with the 10% revenue slice that goes to the website. (The 10% problem)

There’s just one problem with this assumption. All of the ad dollars that the print newspaper gets are, by definition, ad dollars that the newspaper’s website does NOT get.

Think about that for a second. Newspapers know that they are competing with their websites for ad dollars. But newspapers are also essentially competing with their websites for survival.

So what WOULD happen to those millions of dollars in advertising if there were no longer a print newspaper to collect them? 

Some of it would simply vaporize due to one of the following factors: 

• Craigslist, Kijiji, or other free classified websites
• Businesses stop advertising altogether (never saw ROI)
• Businesses shut down entirely (e.g. retailers)
• Prolonged cyclical downturn (e.g. real estate)

But what would happen to the rest of it, to the ad dollars that businesses still want to spend?

Who would compete for those ad dollars? How much pricing power would they have with the old monopoly gone?  How would the value propositions and ROI (perceived or real) differ from that of newspaper advertising (e.g. search advertising vs. display advertising vs. new ad models). How would advertisers perceive these alternatives to print advertising?

Most importantly for newspapers, what share of these suddenly liberated ad dollars could their news brand (which used to be the name on the advertisers’ checks) capture with an online-only reincarnation, now that the brand was no longer competing with itself? (I’m following ASNE’s lead in calling it a news brand instead of a newspaper brand.) What kind of newsroom and journalism could those “reclaimed” ad dollars support?

If I were a newspaper executive, I would cancel all meetings, clear off my desk, get out a really sharp pencil, and start trying to answer these questions. You can be sure that many other companies are already working on figuring out the answers.

To be clear, I’m not saying that newspapers should shut down the print product. I’m saying that newspapers should make sure they think through what would actually happen to all that advertising revenue if they were forced to stop publishing in print (which increasingly looks like a real possibility for some newspapers). Figuring this out could, in some cases, make the difference between surviving in some form (or even thriving) and ceasing to exist.

P.S. Regarding circulation revenue, those dollars will likely vaporize if the newspaper stops publishing in print. Why pay for distribution when its free? (Yeah, newspaper subscriptions were mostly for the distribution, not for the content. Everyone understands printing the newspaper and delivering it to your door is costly. And everyone knows it’s not the case with bits. Which is not to say readers don’t value the content, but there’s a big difference between paying for news and paying for the delivered bundle of news and information that is a newspaper.)

If you’re the Chicago Tribune, you create a link journalism feature that dynamically tracks what “what others are saying“.

You create a continuously updating news aggregation page (using a Publish2 widget) and you get a team of producers and editors to collaborate on gathering links (using a Publish2 newsgroup).

Then, as everyone reacts to the story, you promote reactions from “Other sites, other voices” alongside reader reactions.

And while algorithms deliver commodity aggregation from limited sources, your editors apply human judgment to create a unique mix from local sources (including your rivals!), national sources, blogs, social media, and even humor (because only humans know when a scandal is so over the top that it’s laughable).

And what if you’re in a nearby city in a neighboring state? Well, not to be outdone, you link to “what bloggers are saying.”

You hand pick from the sea of blog coverage the most interesting perspectives, bloggers shining the spotlight on key issues. You again distinguish your link journalism from commodity algorithm-driven news aggregation by introducing readers to hugely interesting sites like FiveThirtyEight. And you dynamically update with new links across the day (using a Publish2 widget).

All in all, you feel contented that the news roundup was quick and easy to set up with a free service, easy to update dynamically, and provided a solid complement to your original reporting. You feel contented that you served well your readers who were hungry to read about a mind-blowing scandal, and kept them from having to go to an aggregation site for a range of coverage and views.

You can also take satisfaction in having inspired others to try their hand at link journalism:

Like I said in my last post, Gov. Blagojevich’s arrest (and apparent release) is burning up newsrooms across the country today. I was pretty impressed by the Tribune’s page aggregating Blago coverage, so I asked @ColonelTribune how they did it and was introduced to the wonderful world of Publish2.com. It’s kind of like Digg, but only for journalists. And I was able to make this really cool widget on it…

Either that or you ask yourself… why aren’t we doing breaking news link journalism?

It’s easy. The technology is free. And it makes your site a more vital destination for breaking news.

Seriously, why aren’t you doing it?

One reason mainstream news organizations haven’t embraced the concepts may be that the spirit (if not the letter) of the cit-j discussion tends to focus on the people involved rather than the news being covered. That is, the tonal takeaway is often something like “Who needs professional journalists? Throw the useless bums out of their tower!”

These ideas might get a better reception if the discussion instead focused on which kinds of news are best suited to coverage by people outside the newsroom.

Scrapbook news offers an interesting example. Matt Waite wrote a great comment about this kind of news on my previous post:

When I was a kid — the 80s — when I or a group I was part of did something scrapbook worthy, my mom would type up a little announcement about it and bring it to the local twice weekly. Next edition, there it was, almost unchanged. Scrapbooking would ensue. Far from an experiment in crowdsourcing, this is the way it’s done in small towns across the country. The only experiment is how to scale it from a community of 6,000 to 60,000 to 600,000.

In the past, my cynical response to news items like that would have been “What’s this doing here?!? It’s not news!!” But to many people, it is news. For most readers, seeing their name in the paper is worth more years of goodwill and subscriptions than any blockbuster investigative story.

A more appropriate response (for cynics and non-cynics alike) would be: “Why are we spending time on this when readers could do just as good a job, and in doing so become more engaged with the paper?”

The truth is, scrapbook news written by journalists is effectively the same as scrapbook news submitted by the would-be scrapbookers. If the story is “Megan won the 4-H award at the fair,” how much of a difference does it make to have a journalist write the story rather than Megan’s mom? (Though you’d probably still want some minimal level of editing so every item didn’t say “Goooo, Megan!” Or maybe that would be ok too.)

The key would be to acknowledge that while scrapbook news is news, certain kinds of news might not carry the same burden of expertise, professionalism, polish or “objectivity” (if you believe in that sort of thing) as city council coverage might.

Come to think of it, even some city council coverage could fall under this category. As more governing bodies stream their meetings online and provide downloadable transcripts and video, why couldn’t gadflies and other interested people cover some meetings, with full-time journalists focusing on follow-up reporting? (For a contrary view, see Daniel Victor’s excellent series of posts on crowdsourcing.)

Similarly — though on a subject of less civic importance — why couldn’t sports fans provide some game coverage? Are readers really that much better served by a journalist giving a play-by-play rundown of a game that anyone with the right satellite-TV package can see, topped off with a handful of clichéd quotes?

I’m not suggesting sports reporters never do serious reporting. But fans are so immersed and educated in sports minutiae that they could point out key plays and strategies just as well as a journalist can, which would free up sports reporters for more non-game reporting. And the world would be a much better place if there were fewer quotes about wanting it the most, winning it in the trenches, doing what we came to do which was to win, just taking it one day at a time.

Letting outsiders cover some of these topics doesn’t have to mean abandoning editorial standards. Newsrooms could require that any contributors attend a session about journalism and editorial standards. Once it’s contributors’ name on the story and readers start lobbing criticism at them, they’ll realize that adhering to those standards is the best defense.

So let’s review: Reader-contributors get as excited about seeing their names in the paper as li’l Matt Waite’s mom was back in the day. Strained newsrooms are relieved of some of their burden without stinting on certain coverage. Journalists stop hearing that Random Person #72 could do their job better, because the journos now have more time to focus on the reporting that no random person could do.

What newsroom would say no to that deal?

UPDATE: This is linked via trackback in the comments, but be sure to read John Zhu’s tour de force response post. He raises lots of good questions. I’ll try to respond once I’ve had a chance to process all of it.

But there’s an equally important conceptual aspect of journalism innovation. Newsrooms have to rethink the kind of stories they cover and the way they tell those stories, or all the new technologies could be wasted on news that readers don’t find relevant or interesting.

To do this, they have to practice innovation-by-omission. That is, they need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written.

Newsrooms no longer have the luxury of wasting resources on non-stories — on “the journalism of filling space and time,” as Jeff Jarvis put it. They no longer have the luxury, in an information-overload world, of wasting readers’ time with non-stories or information readers already know. Readers will simply go somewhere else.

Jarvis offers a mental checklist for journalists to consider before publishing a possible non-story:

if you can’t imagine anyone linking to your coverage — if you can’t imagine anyone saying “this was new,” “this is good,” “this was valuable,” “go here for more,” “I didn’t know this,” or “you should know this” — then chances are, it’s not worth saying and in the link economy it won’t get audience, and so it’s not worth making.

Filler news can take many forms. Jarvis singles out reporting on election and post-holiday-shopping days. John McIntyre flags another persistent form of filler — stories based on dubious surveys — in this post. Jack Shafer never tires of exposing bogus trend pieces.

I would add: many stories based on (or directly lifted from) press releases; one-sentence news like stock market updates, shuttle takeoffs, and incremental updates of previous stories; many politics-as-process stories. Even “important” news can become filler. Crime briefs become monotonous after so many days; the fifth front-page story on the Russia-Georgia conflict isn’t likely to resonate.

Most of these story approaches are so ingrained that it’ll take conscious effort to stop and come up with more effective alternatives. But it can be done.

My favorite recent example of innovation-by-omission is a blog post by Daniel Victor, a reporter at The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa. Back in August, Victor was assigned to cover a campaign “event” that the state Democratic Party had touted in a press release: “local residents would ‘welcome John McCain to Harrisburg by unveiling a new video called ‘Jobs’ at a press event.’ ”

Victor discovered — surprise! — that the event was a news-free attempt to manufacture free publicity for the campaign. (His must-read post recounts the details of this discovery.) So he told his editor there was no story. Here’s how Victor describes the “newsroom tango” that followed:

I argued that there was no story, editor argues it’s worth a short story. I write a short story focusing on the similarities with the DNC news release, and the fact the event was pitched to media as an unveiling but really wasn’t at all. Editor quickly wonders if it shouldn’t be recast as a straight “Dems respond to Mccain” story. I argue phony news events don’t deserve real news coverage. Editor finally sees it my way, the story is spiked, and you won’t read about it in my newspaper.

Thank goodness for that. We in the media can do our part to actually aid the discussion by checking these events out, then promptly ignoring them when they turn out to be duds.

Just because local politicians are speaking, and just because a reporter spent an hour listening to them speak, doesn’t mean we need to report on it.

Sometimes it’s impossible to know if a story is worthwhile without doing some digging, as Victor did. The definition of “filler” will vary from newsroom to newsroom; my idea of filler could be another person’s scrapbook keepsake. What’s important is that newsrooms at least have this discussion.

Once newsrooms better define their idea of filler, it’ll be easier to stop those stories before they start. It’ll also make it easier to come up with better ways of treating certain subjects.

For example, “scrapbook news” — county fairs, local events, awards — could be a place to start experimenting with crowdsourcing. National or world news that has become filler because of the nature of wire coverage could be made relevant through linking. Local political coverage could focus more on how policies will affect readers and less on news-free campaign events. And crime coverage could become more data-driven and be integrated “into a health & safety site, because violence is a public health issue,” as Jane Stevens suggests.

There are many things newsrooms need to do differently to survive the coming years. But one of the foundational changes they must make is to listen to Daniel Victor. Sometimes there’s just no story.

Here’s the text of Daniel’s entry:

There are three important themes I’d like to convey with my response, if they aren’t already apparent in the video. I consider myself a “journalist of the future” (with moon boots and everything) because, even though I’m still a student, I focus on these principles.

First: innovation. Those who come before me were fortunate or unfortunate (depending on how you look at it) in that they were stuck with limited tools with which to be a journalist. Today, we’ve got a growing arsenal of technology to tell the important stories with, let it be livestreaming on Qik, microblogging with Twitter, or practicing link journalism with Facebook. Contrary to the popular paradigm that we’ll settle on one format, this is just the beginning of tool fragmentation. By playing and experimenting with the tools, I position myself to take advantage of what they offer.

Second: the untold stories. Using a combination of emerging tools and traditional formats, my goal is to cover the under reported, most troubling issues we face as a globally connected society. Examples include water access exploitation in India, deforestation and the climate in Haiti, and homelessness in the big cities of Latin America. Being a journalist of the future means using the tools to expand your capacity to tell the word’s most important stories.

Third: collaboration. I began this fall as the Online Editor for the Oregon Daily Emerald wanting to push the publication to innovate with technology. Given the limited resources at hand, I realised that the only way I could achieve anything significant would be to work collaboratively with my peers across the nation. From that vision, CoPress (http://www.copress.org/) was formed. Contributing to the network is an increasingly successful method of innovation.

Onward and forward. Let’s use these strategies to grow our abilities to be journalists and provide the information needed to create a better world.

Go rate Daniel’s entry and show your support. If you don’t want to enter the contest, you can be part of the future of journalism by voting.

Full disclosure: Daniel is an intern with Publish2, so he’s not qualified to win the prize of a job with Publish2. But he is qualified to get a whole lot of attention and praise for having an fantastic vision of the future of journalism. That’s purpose of this contest. You can post an entry to get attention from other companies looking for journalists who can help them evolve into the future (many of whom read this blog and use Publish2).

To all you media execs and editors reading this, we best make sure that Daniel ends up with a sweet job when he graduates. (Here’s Daniel’s blog.)

The future of journalism and news depends on the jobs that we do have being in the hands of journalists like Daniel.

So who’s next to be in the spotlight? We’ve heard from a journalism student. How about a veteran journalist?

The future of journalism is going to require that journalists know how to promote themselves and their work. This is a great way to learn. Don’t aim for high production values. Be earnest. Be creative. Be brave.

Want to promote yourself outside of the contest? Get a Publish2 profile and link to your best work. Your profile will rank high for your name in search (especially if you don’t have a blog or your own site).

The winner of the “I Am The Future Of Journalism” Contest receives a prize that we know is increasingly valuable in journalism due to shrinking supply — a job.

It’s a job with Publish2, a start-up focused on helping journalism thrive in the digital age. We already employ two incredibly talented journalists, Tammi Marcoullier and Josh Korr, and we want to expand our team. Included in the offer is a $1,000 signing bonus.

But since we can only hire one journalist, we’re going to promote all entries to news organizations and media companies that are looking for journalists who are focused on the future and who want to help journalism evolve.

To enter the contest, you can submit a video, a slide show, or a written statement (or all three) about why you believe you are the future of journalism.

“I am the future of journalism because…”

That’s all the direction we’re giving. We want you to define the future and how you want to be a part of it.

Get all the details and enter the contest.

The contest finalists — and those who get the most attention from other prospective employers — will be chosen by you. Please lend your fellow journalists a hand by rating their entries.

The contest is open to submissions until December 30, and entries can be rated up until January 9.

Why are we running this contest? Well, we wanted to do a promotion. We thought about giving away a laptop or something. But we thought this contest would mean a lot more.

Journalism right now needs to focus positively on the future.  That’s what Publish2 is all about.

This was a lot more work, but we think it will be worth it.

Enter now. Tell a friend. Spread the word.

You are the future of journalism — get inspired, get noticed, get hired.

What’s notable about this article is that it is almost entirely LINKS:

We’re out to give GoVolsXtra readers the latest in coach sightings right up until the press conference to announce the next head coach of the Volunteers no matter who has the story. Check this list often; we’ll be adding to it.

And check back often they have.

Everyday the article is updated with a fresh roundup of links (saved on Publish2) to coverage of the search for a new coach, including links sent in by readers:

And everyday, fans keep coming back for more.

So you’ve got consistent engagement. You’ve got an article that consistently generates more page views than any other on the site.

What more could you ask for?

As Jack Lail put it in his article on Link Journalism in the latest APME News.

Why this works with sports is because fans are passionate and can’t get enough information on their teams and games. And there is plenty of external coverage from other media, some thousands of miles away, to local bloggers looking to build up their audience.

Here’s perhaps the most important lesson about the success of this effort at link journalism — it didn’t happen over night.

Link-driven coverage roundup articles have been appearing on GoVolsXtra for months, and readers have learned to like them. They’ve come to see GoVolsXtra not just as a source for Knox News Sentinel’s own original reporting on the Tennessee Vols, but for ALL the best reporting and commentary on the Vols.

Most news sites don’t do aggregation, they don’t help their readers find the best content on the topics that interest them. So when they start doing so, it may take readers a while to discover this new dimension of news value.

But once they do, there’s a good chance that they are going to love it. Just like web users have been deeply engaged with news aggregation for years.

If you want to make an investment in growing your page views, audience, and engagement through link journalism, NOW is the time to start.

That proposal is similar to one put forth for newspaper companies by API’s Newspaper Next project. Says managing director Stephen Gray:

“[Newspapers] should become the leading local Internet ad agency, which goes against ancient newspaper instinct of not ever helping anyone who is your competitor,” he said. “But the fact is that audiences have split in a million directions, so here we are in a local market and our job is to help businesses in our local market succeed. If that means we are placing ads on Google and Facebook for local businesses, so what? That’s what it takes to succeed and ad agencies have been making a living off doing that for some time.”

It’s a actually not a bad idea (and I’ve seen some newspapers do it successfully). Except it seems to be tantamount to recommending that newspapers get out of the newspaper business. And if they become ad agencies, then newspapers really aren’t newspapers anymore, are they? And then there isn’t really a need for all that expensive journalism anymore, is there?

This is the problem with the idea of coming up with a “new business model” for newspapers. If you have a new business model, then you’re not in the same business anymore. But you hear it discussed as if newspapers and journalism can remain fundamentally what they are, just with a new “business model” plugged in. Like a toy car that just needs new batteries to keep running.

It’s the same type of thinking that leads to statements like this from the API CEO Summit:

The summit conference was a constructive dialog among senior industry leaders, serving as a catalyst for continuing conversation and efforts at reversing declining revenue and profit trends.

“Reversing declining revenue and profit trends” — I just love that phrase. To continue the car analogy: Is your business going in the wrong direction? Oops, you must have it in the wrong gear. Just throw it into reverse.

Look, I’m not saying that media companies shouldn’t offer marketing services — they’ve been doing so for decades (e.g. custom publishing). And as brands increasingly want to provide content directly to consumers, marketing services may be a big growth area for media companies.

The problem is that once you cross the line to selling other companies’ media because it’s more valuable than your own, then you face a fundamental question about why you’re going to the expense of producing your own.

Follow the logic here:

What’s not being done is realizing that in your community — say, a 50,000 person community, you have 1,500 or 2,000 active advertisers but there are 8,000 businesses that serve consumers in your market. So three-quarters of them are not your customer. The difficult part is helping newspapers understand that if they want new business they need to get a new job done for businesses that they’re not serving.

It’s not that we don’t know what that is. Some of what they want is: a one-to-one relationship with customers; a way to respond to what’s going on in customers’ lives; make sure they hear about me when they make a choice. The traditional product built on that job is the Yellow Pages, but I just read an article saying the Yellow Pages are expected to lose 39% of revenues in the next four years. Increasingly if we want to find something, we don’t go to the Yellow Pages, we go online, and Google doesn’t always work well.

Google isn’t doing it all that well yet, and the Yellow Pages aren’t doing it that well, so we’re saying, ‘Look this is where you [newspapers] should be.’ It’s very hard for ad staffs and management at newspapers to get their minds around the fact that not everyone wants mass reach, and once you understand the needs, you take the technology available today and use them to get the job done.

So newspaper should sell ads on Google because there is more value there for more businesses. That makes sense on the face of it. But what happens when those 1,500-2,000 newspaper advertisers also decide there’s more value on a highly targeted Google search result page then in the mass medium of the newspaper?

Again, I’m not saying that newspaper companies shouldn’t try to transform their businesses — most of them will have to in order to survive.  But companies that reinvent their business models typically find themselves in very different businesses, with very different products.

Just look at IBM. They used to sell mainframe computers — big pieces of enterprise hardware. Now they sell “solutions.” IBM transformed itself into a services company. Their business is no longer principally about hardware.

Newspaper companies could conceivably transform into local marketing services companies.

But if that happens, will their business still be principally about newspapers?

Will there be a place for journalism in a local ad agency?

Here, in no particular order, are ten observations you could make from this data, which speak to the the future of media:

1. Professional content still has A LOT more value than “user-generated content.”
2. Legal content still has A LOT more value than illegal content.
3. Professional content produced for analogue media is worth pennies on the dollar when distributed in the web’s commoditizing content marketplace.
4. It probably costs a lot more than $180 million to produce the content on Hulu, which means that it’s not a standalone business.
5. Ads inserted into online video are about 1,000 times more annoying than TV ads (I say this having watched many shows on Hulu) — losing control of your content is not a web-native experience. This suppresses advertising value.
6. TV/Video will likely follow the path of music and newspapers in suffering a dramatic decline in content value on the web.
7. Video is probably not a panacea for newspapers trying to reinvent their businesses on the web.
8. Most analogue media businesses, when fully transitioned to the web, will likely bear little resemblance to the original businesses.
9. Google isn’t doing any better than anyone else at solving the content commoditization problem on the web.
10. Six years after Google perfected search advertising, there has been no innovation in online advertising that even comes close to the same scale.

[T]he market and the internet don’t care if you make money. That’s important to say. You have no right to make money from every development in media, and the humility that comes from approaching the market that way matters. It’s not “how can the market make me money” it’s “how can I do things for this market.”

and

The market doesn’t care a whit about maintaining your industry. The lesson from Napster and iTunes is that there’s even MORE music than there was before. What got hurt was Tower and the guys in the suits and the unlimited budgets for groupies and drugs. The music will keep coming. Same thing is true with books.

When I read this, I thought immediately of many assumptions the newspaper industry is making as the decline of its business model accelerates:

• There has to be a new business model to support journalism with the same profit margins as newspapers have enjoyed in recent decades.
• There has to be a way for newspapers to “reverse” the declines.
• Newspapers will eventually find a way to make their web operations as large and profitable as their print operations once were.
• Newspapers can’t be permitted to die, because then journalism will die.

But the reality is that all of these assumptions may be wrong.

Why? Because the web and the market don’t care. The web is the most disruptive force in the history of media, by many orders of magnitude, destroying every assumption on which traditional media businesses are based.

But the market should care, you say. What would happen if we didn’t have the newspapers playing their Fourth Estate watch dog role?

Here’s the bitter truth — the feared loss of civic value is not the basis for a BUSINESS.

The problem with the newspaper industry, as with the music industry before it, is the sense of ENTITLEMENT. What we do is valuable. Therefore we have the right to make money.

Nobody has the right to a business model.

Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market.

Every conversation about reinventing a business model for newspapers begins, it seems, with a question about how to find a way to pay for what we value in the current product. In other words, how do we find a way to keep doing what we’ve always done and make as much money as we’ve always made?

I’ve rarely heard anyone start by asking what the market values. Where are the pain points in the market? How can we solve problems for people?

You know, business 101.

At Jeff Jarvis’ conference last month on new business models for news, I heard more out-of-the-box thinking in one day than I’ve had in the probably past year. But everyone had to constantly shoo the sacred cows out of the room.

I’ve been accused in recent months of Google worship, because I keep coming back again, and again, and AGAIN to Google’s business model.

Why? Because it’s the most successful media business on the web, by many orders of magnitude.

Why? Because Google solves a big problem for consumers. It helps them find stuff on the web they could never find on their own. And it solves a big problem for advertisers. It lets them buy traffic.

So what’s a problem in the market that newspaper companies could solve? When I know what I’m looking for, Google helps me find it. But when it comes to news, I don’t always know what I’m looking for, because, well, it’s NEW. And I want the best of what’s on the WHOLE web, not just what one news brand has to offer.

That problem is still largely unsolved.

And it’s just one example (and you can disagree about whether its a problem).

But Google as an icon is a double-edged sword. Google gave birth to the most destructive, soul-sucking, innovation-destroying notion in media today: monetization.

Nobody thought search was a business, until Google found a way to “monetize” it. Now everyone with something big, e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc., assumes there must be a way to monetize it, like Google did.

Newspapers and other traditional media put their content online and try to “monetize” it. We have it, therefore it must be worth something.

We’ve got lots of page views, therefore they must be worth something. We’ve got lots of ad impressions, therefore they must be worth something.

But here’s the problem — so does everyone else.

Everyone is chasing more TRAFFIC.

You know, just like everyone wanted “eyeballs” in the 90s.

We’ve got some traffic, let’s monetize it.

But, frankly, the market doesn’t give a shit about your traffic.

So what does the market care about?

Networks.

The web media market is a giant network. Google figured out how to harness the network. But nobody else has yet.

That’s not surprising. Media companies can only think about their own properties, their own content. They can’t let go of the monopoly control business which the web has already destroyed.

Since you made it this far in this post, I’ll tell you a secret, since this post was not meant to be defeatist, but rather a swift kick in the head.

So here’s the secret. Legacy media companies can’t create a new business model for news and journalism by themselves.

They have to work TOGETHER, to build a network — a giant network of much smaller pieces, loosely joined.

I’ve said this before. And I’ll surely say it again.

But most of the media company executives who read this blog will shrug and go back to trying to figure how to prop up their monopolies.

And those monopolies will continue to crumble faster every day.

I’ll write more about networks and media company collaboration in another post. In the meantime, I’m going to watch the the web’s disruption continue to blow up everyone’s assumptions (including whatever assumptions I still have left).

Newspaper CEOs are meeting for a closed-door summit this week. Maybe someone will forward them this post. Or print it out and set it on fire in the middle of the conference table. Whatever works.

And as for Journalism, I’m less worried.

I’ll repeat Seth: The lesson from Napster and iTunes is that there’s even MORE music than there was before.

We’ve got highly entrepreneurial, creative, and driven people like David Cohn — who’s launching spot.us this week — working hard outside of newspaper company walls to invent new models for journalism

Journalism will find a way. Even if the industries that once supported it do not.

It took the ruination of the Bush Administration to create the right conditions for electing Barack Obama. Sometimes it has to all be torn down before you can begin to build it back up again.

Each editor has a profile on the page with photo, email, Twitter, and links to what they are reading (courtesy of Publish2 widgets). For example, assistant news editor Karen Miller shares interesting links on money and investing, adding her own perspective as context.

Readers can find more of Karen’s great links here. Contributing to this group link blog are Reading’s editor, managing editor, assistant metro editor, web designer, and internet copy editor, so it’s a great cross section of the edit staff’s interests and perspective. Administrative Editor John Boor was one of the catalysts of this initiative:

John explained in an email the thinking behind the What We’re Reading feature, what they have planned, and how they are going about it:

The idea of linking to other news sources and providing a constantly updated list of linked-to stories is one of the goals. We’re hoping to increase our site traffic in our own, smaller way, using the model of “The Drudge Report,” and others who, essentially, create success by being mega-aggregators.

Secondly, we see it as an opportunity to inject more personality into the site. We’re hoping that people will connect with staffers’ faces or names they’ve seen, and maybe keep checking back to see what one of their favorites thinks is important enough to share.

Third, it’s been a while now since I’ve seen the importance of social networking tools, such as Twitter, Facebook, etc., not only to aid journalists, but to engage readers and, basically, cast wide, digital nets in an effort to build a sense of community with our news site as the hub. We’d like to encourage a much greater buy-in by those who visit our site, and by using these tools. Publish2 has come along just in time to help us with that. Now, with our “What we’re reading” page(s), we’re not just passing down our own material from our ivory towers. We’re no longer the gatekeepers. We’re stepping out onto the public square and sharing stories that are important to us and hoping they may help others.

Publish2 has given us a way to accomplish this project very easily. We can populate the page dynamically, using the widget you provide on each user’s links page. We just have our staffers register with Publish2 and the rest is pretty much a piece of cake. It is so easy to link from the browser toolbar widget that it takes very little additional time for our staffers to share what they’re reading. In addition to this functionality, we really like the way Publish2 encourages the sharing of links, whether to our own news site or to others’. It’s exciting to me to consider the possibilities. I appreciate your efforts to provide this venue, allowing news organizations to cooperate in mutually beneficial ways, for the public good. It doesn’t hurt, either, that it provides an alternative to the more traditional and expensive ways to procure and disseminate news and other worthwhile information.

There’s so much I love about what Reading is doing. First, that they want to “inject more personality” into their site and build brands around their editorial staff. They are breaking free of the constraints of the newsprint medium, where journalists were faceless, inpersonal bylines. Their edit staff are real people with real interests, who can step “out onto the public square.” And they are taking a truly web-native approach, which has proven successful for publications born on the web — it’s about people and connections.

It’s notable that Reading isn’t spending precious dollars trying to develop their own technology, and they aren’t paying for an algorithm to provide impersonal, semi-relevant links.  They are using a free web application to tap into what their journalists are ALREADY reading, adding comments and perspective, and sharing that with their readers. And that’s how they can connect with their readers in a way that no algorithm can — it’s people sharing on the web.

And that gets to another idea I love — using social networking tools to “cast wide, digital nets in an effort to build a sense of community with our news site as the hub” — for example, John is taking the links he contributes to What We’re Reading and simultaneous sharing them on Twitter.

I’m also excited that they see the potential for “an alternative to the more traditional and expensive ways to procure and disseminate news and other worthwhile information.” There is a huge potential for Reading and other newsrooms to collaborate on creating a new newswire for the web, one based on links instead of licensing fees. Imagine the possibilities as more newsrooms join Reading.

This is just the first step for Reading in incorporating link journalism and news aggregation into what they do, as a complement to their own original reporting (and they read that, too!). What’s essential is that they STARTED and have given themselves a basis for learning and innovating. I’m looking forward to seeing what else they come up with.

Reading also shows that the ambition to innovate and the ability to harness technology for editorial innovation is not just the province of the big national newspapers. In fact, Reading is making better use of technology to easily and collaboratively scale up their news aggregation efforts than some big media companies that are still using some rather old-fashioned editorial processes for link journalism.

My post about the success of the Drudge Report was widely read, but here’s a newsroom that didn’t just read about harnessing the power of news aggregation on the web — they are actually going to DO it.

So why aren’t you doing it?

Some newsrooms are slightly better in that there is an actual human being who uses the Twitter feed to let followers know about new content on the newsroom’s site, in a conversational tone. Still, it’s all about sharing OUR content.

Is it any wonder why so many newsrooms have fewer Twitter followers than many individuals on Twitter — especially when these newsrooms have print and web audiences numbering in the hundreds of thousands or millions — a lot more people than the average individual knows. In fact, if you look at the numbers, individual journalists typically have a lot more followers than their newsrooms.

This is a perfect example of how mainstream news orgs got so far behind on the web — they see the web as just another distribution channel for their own content. Open the chute and shovel the content in.

Can you think of any PERSON that you follow on Twitter who does nothing but link to their own blog posts? That’s not how real people use Twitter, and not how Twitter became so popular.

For me, Twitter has become one of the most interesting sources of links — to news, resources, funny stuff. Twtitter has become a primary platform for link blogging, in the classic sense.

For example, Jay Rosen, who has 10 times as many followers as most newsrooms, is prolific source of interesting links on Twitter.

Instead of seeing Twitter as another place to dump their content, newsrooms should see it as a way to create a whole new dimension of value under their editorial brand.

Many newsrooms are doing this through “live Tweeting” everything from ball games to trials. Tweeting while watching is certainty a popular use of Twitter, so this is promising.

But there’s another dimension to Twitter that newsrooms are entirely missing — sharing interesting stuff. As newsrooms increasingly look to link journalism and news aggregation as a way to create value for their readers, they should look to their Twitter accounts as an easy platform for sharing links.

If newsrooms want more Twitter followers, they need to be INTERESTING. And since they can’t as easily be quirky interesting, i.e. sharing random thoughts and experiences, and obvious way to be interesting is to share links.

The magic of Twitter is that users have invented so many different new ways to use it.

Newsrooms should make Twitter into a platform for link journalism. Local news orgs should set up Twitter feeds where they link to interesting non-local news (i.e. NOT AP!).

And of course it’s fine to mix in links to your own content — just don’t be a dull Tweeter by making it ALL about your content.

And shameless plug — using Twitter for link journalism is now super easy with the new Publish2 connection to Twitter. Save a link on Publish2 and send it simultaneously to Twitter (and delicious, and soon Facebook, Movable Type, and Wordpress). With Publish2, newsrooms can use the same links that they share on Twitter to create news aggregation features on their sites (a bit of efficiency for newsrooms with limited resources). Check out the details on the Publish2 blog. (You can register for Publish2 here.)

There’s already evidence that newsrooms that shut off the Twitterfeed auto-shovel significantly increase their followers.

So shut off that Twitterfeed. Link to interesting stuff and grow your Twitter audience.

Then, when you publish something that’s really special or important, you’ll have a bigger audience to share it with.

And who knows — maybe your Twitter followers will share interesting links with you.

But neither Matt nor I could find any examples. How unbelievably sad.

But not for The Guardian — they get to be the first media company to actually take RSS seriously, to actually make the offering something users would want to USE.

In fact, I think The Guardian holds the distinction of being the first mainstream media company not to actively SUPPRESS RSS adoption by publishing abbreviated feeds.

What every other mainstream media company does with their RSS feeds is publish a brief excerpt of the content, forcing readers to click on the headline and visit the publisher’s site in order to actually read the content.

Why? So the publisher can serve ads.

And the problem with this? It defeats the entire purpose of RSS!

The value of using an RSS reader is that you can read content from dozens (or more) sites all in one place without having to visit all of those sites.

But if all the RSS feeds you subscribe to have only an excerpt, and you have to click through to read anything, you spend your entire time clicking to other sites. Which is completely annoying!

And that’s why most people who use RSS readers don’t bother to subscribe to partial content feeds.

And… I think this is one of the reasons why RSS adoption has not gone mainstream.

Mainstream media is still mainstream because that’s what that largest number of people consume. Can you imagine sitting an average web media consumer down and trying to convince them to use an RSS reader with partial feeds from all their favorite mainstream media sites?

FAIL!

Every mainstream media company will argue that they need to use partial RSS feeds to MANIPULATE their users into coming to their sites so they can serve ads.

Which makes sense, if you believe that manipulating users is the best way to build brand loyalty.

The only problem with that argument is… you can serve ads in RSS feeds! That’s what The Guardian plans to do.

The Google Reader blog reported The Guardian is the “first major newspaper in the world” to have full text RSS feeds.

I’d argue that The Guardian is the first major media company in the world to have RSS feeds AT ALL.

All of the others with partial feeds — it’s a joke. It’s something that they bury at the bottom of the site so they can claim to have fully embraced web technology.

But they haven’t. They are supressing web technology. And they are surpressing the potential both for mainstream adoption and for advertisers to take feeds seriously as a channel for advertising.

I hope for The Guardian’s sake that they are able to build a sizable RSS audience that is appealing to their advertisers, and that they are able to profit while everyone else sits on the sidelines.

If news orgs like the NYT, Washington Post, and hundreds of newspaper sites start linking to news and other content around the web in a big way, on their front pages (as the NYT plans) and across their sites, it will have a HUGE impact on the web’s link economy. These news orgs may have been slow to realize how linking drives content distribution and allocates attention and advertising wealth. But now that they’ve figured it out, they can completely disrupt the balance of power.

Yahoo became a huge force for driving traffic when it started featuring links from Yahoo Buzz on its homepage. Imagine the NYT, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and all of the mainstream news sites that still dominate news on the web all getting into the linking game.

Imagine the NYTimes.com homepage, like Digg, driving server-crashing volumes of traffic.

And imagine the impact on Google. Bloggers and other independent publishers determine so much of Google’s ranking because for the longest time they were the only ones who linked to anything — so those were the only links Google had to read.

But no more.

Here’s another major factor in this disruption of the web content ecosystem — the unwinding of the Associated Press. Today, Tribune became the first major newspaper chain to give notice to AP that they are canceling their contract.

Now imagine that instead of publishing commodity AP articles on their sites, every Tribune newspaper linked to national and international news from sources all over the web.

And now imagine that the audiences of these newspaper sites, many of whom may have little or no experience with news aggregation a la Digg, start clicking on all of these links.

Imagine if aggregation sites like Drudge and Digg, which remain locked in their niches, started to have competition from mainstream brands who put continuously updated news aggregations on their homepages.

Imagine the Washington Post’s Political Browser with a bigger audience than Drudge. (It’s no wonder that after the Post launched Political Browser their phone started ringing off the hook from people interested in receiving those links.)

It doesn’t matter if the 800 pound gorilla is late to the party — he’s still going to shake things up.

And for all the news orgs whose monopoly distribution business is rapidly declining, there’s a highly profitable distribution business on the web, driven by links, which has largely been conceded to one player. Time to steal some market share in the online content distribution market.

(Hint: Forget display ads, which are lame reproducitons of print display ads — that market is going nowhere. Focus on new models that align with the value of news aggregation.)

Last bit of imagining — imagine mainstream news organizations realize that economic power on the web is in networks, not the the monolithic monopolies that defined their analogu businesses, and that to build successful business on the web, they need to COLLABORATE. Yeah, I know that one is hard to imagine. But with the amount of disruption the media business is facing, news orgs may start figuring it out a lot faster.

First, news orgs typically act as though other news orgs don’t exist (blame long-standing notions of “owning” the news, and more recent unjustified fears of sending readers away). Second, news orgs had few mechanisms for breaking out of that walled-garden mentality online — for finding good stories among the web’s reaches, and delivering those stories to readers — even if they wanted to.

But there’s a third, more fundamental, barrier to linking: Many journalists worry about the wild wild web.

As Carolyn Washburn commented on my post about a link-based newswire,

We need to ensure a process by which we understand the sources of the content, the understanding that not all links are created equal. We need to guarantee the expertise. The standards those sources apply for balance and news judgment.

Robert Fisk was blunter in a recent lecture:

“To hell with the web, it’s got no responsibility.”

It’s true that there’s lots of unverifiable garbage online (which journalists’ networked editorial judgment can nonetheless help filter from the good stuff). What many people tend to forget is that the web also makes accessible basically every reputable news outlet and thinker on the planet. Think of all that as the Internet’s natural spring — the total-information flipside to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s “cesspool.”

A typical newspaper may draw from two or three dozen sources, depending on which wire services it uses. In contrast, there are conservatively more than 2,000 newspapers, magazines, and web sites (e.g. Slate, Talking Points Memo, Washington Independent, journalists’ blogs) in the U.S. alone that newspapers could link to without worry.

Add blogs written by academics (e.g. Balkinization on law, Language Log on language, Marginal Revolution on economics) and think-tankers, and that number is probably more like 2,500 to 3,000.

Nervous news organizations can embrace link journalism by tapping the spring — they don’t have to dip even one editorial toe into the cesspool. (Hooray for stretched metaphors!)

Don’t think that’s worth it? Consider Talking Points Memo: Josh Marshall and his crew didn’t own the U.S. Attorney story (and win a George Polk award) by linking to cranks and anonymous message boards. They did it by supplementing their own reporting with links to other mainstream news organizations and to documents, legislators’ letters, etc.

Yes, we need to encourage ethics, trust, and transparency on the web. These standards are what turn linking into link journalism, and they will become ever more important as the power of the press spreads among millions of citizens.

But the cesspool isn’t all-consuming. And it shouldn’t discourage journalists from linking today.

And it’s not just Google — news sites are increasingly filled with links generated by algorithms that suggest to readers what else they ought to read. And that’s because most news site still see original content creation as their sole purpose — they don’t see the tremendous need, and the tremendous value in filtering the content that already exists. They don’t see that every link on their site is an important editorial judgment, not an afterthought, not an algorithmic process to set and forget (which often leads to algorithms making bad recommendations, as many news sites who use them will tell you).

Giving over the function of choosing links, of filtering the web, to an algorithm is an implicit devaluation of the quality of human judgment, of what makes an individual editor’s perspective so interesting. That’s why link bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall, and Matt Drudge have become such a powerful force on the web. They understood, even where traditional news orgs did not, the value of bringing their unique perspectives to filtering the web, of having a “linking voice.” They understood the editorial power of the link.

Handing over the editorial selection of links to an algorithm is also an implicit concession that human news judgment isn’t up to the task. It’s too overwhelming, too much work, so just let the machines take over.

And there are obviously times when you want a machine to take over — searching the billions of pages on the web for some obscure piece of information, and doing so comprehensively, is where algorithms are a godsend.

But while algorithms may excel at processing vast amounts of data by brute force, they are only as smart as the rules we give them. Algorithms can simulate human intelligence — but algorithms have no judgment — and certainly no news judgment. Algorithms can’t do link journalism.

That’s the brilliance of Google — it’s actually driven by human judgment, by the judgment that someone producing a website makes every time they link to something. Rather than replacing human judgment, Google is actually co-opting it.

But Google isn’t co-opting the judgment of most journalists and news orgs — because so many of them still don’t link to anything. (Notable exceptions notwithstanding.)

Still, the obvious question is how can human editors compete with the brute force of an algorithm, which never tires, never has a busy day, never gets distracted? (Cue Terminator music.)

Well, human editors aren’t going to compete very well with the old go it alone model of journalism.

But they can compete through COLLABORATION.

Digg has proven that collaborative human editorial effort can cover a massive amount of territory on the web.

Imagine if journalists and news orgs brought together their combined editorial intelligence, their combined news judgment.

Suddenly the advantage of an algorithm’s scale in filtering the web doesn’t seem so insurmountable.

It may be overwhelming for one editor to fact check what Google CEO Eric Schmidt called the “cesspool” of false information on the web. But imagine journalists collaborating to verify what they link to.

Even within a newsroom — and even for the many newsrooms grappling with shrinking resources — collaboration could yield a powerful editorial filter.

In fact, the more that resources shrink, the more essential collaboration becomes.

Yeah, I know, collaboration isn’t in the traditional journalism playbook. But insert here the almost cliched reference to swiftly declining business models, now aided by economic decline, and, well… do we really need to be having that conversation anymore?

Just look at where the most innovative, entrepreneurial minds in journalism have focused their efforts — it’s all about collaboration:

Ryan Sholin just launched ReportingOn, a site where journalists share in short Twitter-like messages what they are reporting on — with the aim of actually HELPING each other. With fewer journalists in newsrooms doing original reporting, doesn’t it make perfect sense that more and better reporting could get done collaboratively? Why should a beat be a solo effort?

That’s is also the idea behind Beat Blogging, the brainchild of Jay Rosen, with journalism iconoclast Patrick Thornton now leading the charge. The idea is for journalists to develop social networks to improve their beat reporting — by collaborating with people involved with and interested in the topics they cover, journalists can do better reporting. (Beat Blogging is even collaborating to find great examples of beat blogging.)

Speaking of collaborating with communities, Mark Briggs, of Journalism 2.0 fame, co-founded a company called Serra Media, whose first product Newsgarden is a map-based local news platform that allows news orgs to collaborate with their communities to publish hyperlocal news. And their bet is that journalists and community members all posting hyperlocal news as they come across it can do a better job than algorithm-based local sites in judging what news is important to the community.

And then there’s David Cohn, who will soon be launching Spot.us, where a community can collaborate to actually pay for the journalism that the community needs. A community brings money and interest in issues, journalists bring their reporting skills, and, collaboratively, journalism happens.

See the pattern here? It’s about how a group of people, empowered by technology to collaborate, can accomplish much more than one person can by themselves.

And the idea that news orgs can accomplish more together than they can by themselves isn’t so foreign to journalism — it’s the basis of the newswire. So it’s not that hard to imagine a collaborative newswire based on links, where journalists help each other filter the web.

It’s not that hard to imagine journalists, collaborating with each other and the communities they serve, becoming most powerful editorial intelligence on the web.

Thompson started a blog devoted to exploring an alternative. He writes in the introductory post:

Until recently, newspaper editors defined news as “important developments over the past 24 hours.” … My understanding of journalism is broader. To me, journalism is the constant effort to deliver a truer picture of the world as it is. The “latest developments” provide one lens through which to capture that picture. And as long as journalism was primarily delivered by static media, that lens made perfect sense.

The Web, however, makes possible other ways of delivering that picture of our evolving world. It allows us to shirk the tyranny of recency and place more emphasis on context – the information that often gets buried beneath the news.

Jarvis takes the idea further:

[A] discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative. Each instance is necessarily shallow. And when more big stories come — as they have lately! — in scarce time and space and with scarce resources, each becomes even shallower. We never catch up, we never get smarter. Articles perpetuate a Ground Hog Day kind of journalism.

[snip]

I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. … I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed.

I agree with both of them. (Disclosure: Matt’s a friend, and Jarvis is on the board of Publish2, where I’m an editor.) But there’s an ink-stained elephant in the room that needs to be faced if Thompson’s feeling that “we’re on the verge of an epochal advancement in journalism” is to come true.

I’m talking, of course, about the Associated Press.

The AP plays a major, but often unacknowledged, role in the modern news ecosystem. Aside from the handful of papers that can still afford a worldwide or national reporting staff, most papers’ non-local coverage draws heavily from the AP (sometimes supplemented by wire services from Washington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times, McClatchy, Bloomberg, Reuters, etc.).

This coverage is important — AP is usually the first to report on major stories, particularly in out-of-the-way places. But it has also contributed to the spread of what, in my work as a wire editor, I came to think of as AP’s house style: voiceless (the Ron Fournier Effect notwithstanding), incrementally updated, process-oriented, one sentence of “news” stretched to 12 paragraphs.

Such stories aren’t always engaging or interesting, nor are they effective in providing understanding. Without context, they can induce news overload. As Jay Rosen recently wrote:

In the normal hierarchy of journalistic achievement the most “basic” acts are reporting today’s news and providing current information, as with prices, weather reports and ball scores. We think of “analysis,” “interpretation,” and also “explanation” as higher order acts. They come after the news has been reported, building upon a base of factual information laid down by prior reports. … That’s the way it works… right?

Wrong! For there are some stories—and the mortgage crisis is a great example—where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of those updates because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop. I respond with indifference, even though I’ve picked up a blinking red light from the news system’s repeated placement of “subprime” items in front of me.

None of this is meant to denigrate individual AP journalists, who do tons of great and important work. The issue is institutional — as much a function of objectivity-era daily journalism as of house style.

Meanwhile, the Internet’s depth and variety have made newspapers’ pool of wire sources look increasingly shallow.

For any given story, the most interesting and informative takes often come from sources other than the traditional newswires. On any given day, the stuff that actually makes people smile (when was the last time a newspaper made that a goal?) is found not on the AP wire, but in viral videos, Cute Overload photos, and Best Week Ever posts.

The longer newsrooms ignore this amazing universe of content, the less relevant they are for readers. The longer the AP fails to help newsrooms find this content, the less useful it will be. A content-sharing service is a good start, but I think the AP — like other wire services — fundamentally misunderstands what a web-era newswire needs to offer. (Though in fairness, most AP member papers are still focused on print.)

Not just more in-house niche content, but more of the best content from all over the web, regardless of the source: More engaging one-off stories and ephemera, as well as more relevant and understandable analysis and context.

The AP’s not alone; no wire service covers papers large and small, blogs, magazines, and web sites. But on the web you don’t need to pay anyone to help you bring great stories to readers. All you have to do is link.

Finding all this material is another matter. Individual bloggers do their part each time they link, but there hasn’t been a good way to aggregate the blogosphere’s links.

That’s the real mission of a wire service for the web era: Not to provide full-text versions of a single source’s (or handful of sources’) news, but to offer links to the best stuff culled from ALL sources.

And since nobody’s doing that, we’re going to give it a shot. Call it the web’s newswire, version 1.0; Publish2 as the new AP.

I’ve created a Publish2 newsgroup called The Wire. Armed with a packed RSS reader, I’ll be saving links on all manner of topics from all kinds of sources. The goal is to provide a thorough, interesting, and engaging wire for news organizations that want to start moving beyond the AP or are forced to do so for budgetary reasons.

This link wire could be an answer for editors like Steve Buttry of The (Iowa) Gazette, who writes, in a recent cancellation letter to the AP, “I don’t know yet how The Gazette will operate without AP content.”

Imagine this scenario: The print edition of The Gazette becomes “an all-local newspaper” supplemented by content-sharing, as Buttry suggests in his letter. And every day the paper includes a note to readers:

“We’re still going to cover non-local stories, but in a new way. On our website, we’re linking to the best of these stories –- from many sources, not just the narrow range we used to print — to try to make the news more understandable, engaging, and interesting.”

Meanwhile, The Gazette has set up web sections of curated links to the best national, international, business, entertainment, sports, etc. news and commentary — links drawn initially from feeds of The Wire’s tag pages. The Gazette could even publish a Drudge Report-type page of The Wire’s links on all topics.

Voila: not just sustained but improved coverage, without having to pay a cent.

This is not an argument to kill the AP. Indeed, any thorough link wire would certainly include AP stories. This is an argument about the centrality of AP-type stories in the web-news mix, and the utility of the AP as a distribution mechanism for web-focused news organizations.

I realize that one person acting as editorial gatekeeper goes against any number of principles of web journalism. Ultimately, this newswire will be powered by the collective editorial judgment of thousands of journalists linking stories. (Anyone who would like to contribute or suggest links is welcome to ping me at josh [dot] korr [at] publish2 [dot] com.)

For that to happen, there needs to be a shift not only in the conception of a wire service, but also in the conception of the link itself.

Journalists need to understand that finding and curating links is as important to web journalism as original reporting. They need to understand once and for all that linking is journalism.

This is why algorithm-based link services are not the answer. It takes human intelligence and judgment to turn a flood of information into a coherent news story (i.e. reporting); it takes the same intelligence and judgment to turn a flood of news stories into a coherent body of links.

That’s the radical evolution Matt Thompson senses is at hand: Journalists using their expertise and judgment to filter the web and make the news make sense.

Links make context- and topic-focused journalism possible — not to mention journalism that’s surprising and fun instead of predictable and boring. All we need is a way to find those links and make them accessible to all news organizations.

So let’s get to it.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ll be fleshing out this vision further on the Publish2 blog.

It’s not. It’s a failure of open systems.

As Sarah Perez points out at ReadWriteWeb, ANYONE can become a citizen journalist on iReport:

Apparently, it’s as easy to become a citizen journalist on CNN as it is to sign up for a new web app from an internet startup, if not easier. The process involves nothing more than filling out a name, screen name, and email address. Adding a phone number is optional and only necessary if you want the story to be considered by CNN. There’s a CAPTCHA to prevent bots and an email confirmation link, but thanks to disposable email addresses, those are practically a waste of time these days.

“Citizens” — people who are not professional journalists — can use a platform like iReport to legitimately report news. Remember those eyewitness reports from the Minnesota bridge collapse?

The problem is — and this is something that advocates of citizen journalism typically overlook — that if a platform is open, and anyone can participate, that means not only can well-intentioned citizens participate but so can bad actors, spammers, liars, cheats, and thieves.

That’s the double-edged swords of open systems — you have to take the bad with the good. In fact, you have to EXPECT the bad with the good. The ideology of open participation has revolutionized media, but that same ideology is often quite naive.

Someone posts a false report to a citizen journalism platform — I’m shocked, SHOCKED to find that gambling is going on in here!

Ask Google or Digg about the problem with open systems — heaven help you if you’re successful, because you will be consigned to waging a nonstop battle again spam and every imaginable type of malicious behavior.

When we first conceived of Publish2 as a platform exclusively for journalists, we worried that we would take a lot of flack for trying to define who a journalist is at a time when that definition is expanding. But we realized that our “velvet rope” is really about what we want to keep OUT, i.e. covert PR, undisclosed marketing, and SPAM. That’s why rather than a definition we opted for a set of editorial standards.

The issue with citizen journalism is not about who is qualified or smart enough to be a journalist. It’s about TRUST and TRANSPARENCY. It may not be brain surgery, but (dis)information in the wrong hands does have the potential to do real harm. There’s a reason why journalism has developed standards for reporting, sourcing, fact checking, and accuracy.

It’s because these standards protect people.

New organizations like CNN that have rolled out completely open systems should think carefully about the potential harm that can be done when they toss out editorial standards in the name of open participation.

iReport’s tagline is “Unedited. Unfiltered. News.” Yeah, well, throw in lies and spam and anything else besides “news” that “the people” want to throw in.

Saying anyone can participate in journalism doesn’t mean there should be no standards. And launching an unpoliced open system doesn’t mean it will always be used for anything that can fairly be called journalism.

UPDATE

Instead of trying to host the citizen journalism, to OWN it, which is of course what traditional media organizations are designed to do, news sites should find the citizen journalism already being done on the ultimate open platform — the web. And when they find good reporting, and verify it according to journalistic standards, then they can LINK to it. So instead of creating an open spam platform, news sites will have created more connections on the web and elevated the link to form of news judgement.

But that actually requires a bit of effort. It’s so much easier to set up an open platform and let people run wild… until it blows up in your face and sucks value out of your news brand. Which is reckless, because trusted brands are news organization’s greatest assets.

Here’s an idea for news orgs — publish a how to video or screencast that teaches people in your community how to set up their own blog and report. And tell them that if they do good work, you’ll link to them and send them traffic. And guess what — they’ll link back to you. That’s the way the web works. That’s the beauty of the web.

Crazy? Well, actually it makes perfect sense.

I spoke with Eric Pianin, the Politics Editor for washingtonpost.com, who explained that The Washington Post sees an opportunity to extend their highly respected politic news brand to filtering the political web.

And filtering is a BIG opportunity on the web.

In fact, Political Browser was born of a determined effort by The Post to get into the news aggregation game. Eric told me that interest in news aggregation extends to the highest level of The Post’s senior leadership, including Katharine Weymouth — they have been “fascinated” by the success of aggregation sites like Drudge, Huffington Post, Hotline, and others.

Eric acknowledged that washingtonpost.com is “late to the party,” but in fact the Political Browser puts the Post way out ahead of many other news sites — while many have begun to recognize the value of aggregation and links, most have been slow to act.

As Eric points out, it’s “not just aggregation.” (Heck, any algorithm can do aggregation — that’s increasingly a commodity.) What Political Browser has set out to do, according to Eric, is put The Washington Post “stamp of approval” on the choice of stories, and to provide “insight” into what’s important in the sphere of political news on the web.

Also looking beyond commodity aggregation, The Post believes, with good reason, that a lot people who are interested in political news and in the Post’s political reporting would find it interesting to get “inside the heads” of Post journalists, to see what they are reading and what is informing their reporting.

One of Political Browser’s features is literally called “WHAT STAFF WRITER MICHAEL ABRAMOWITZ IS READING TODAY”

What are E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, and other Post journalists reading that’s informing their perspective? Political Browser is taking the Post down a path where we can find out.

Political Browser is about the “news judgment” of Post journalists — and isn’t that, at the end of the day, what reporting and editing have always been about?

And here’s the really intriguing news — Eric reports that Political Browser is generating a lot of interest among Washington Post editorial staff to take part in the news aggregation effort, to influence what stories get linked.

And it makes sense — what journalist wouldn’t want to tap into a new vehicle for influence? And The Post aims to make Political Browser a major influence in the political web.

Political Browser’s Required Reading section synthesizes the judgment of The Post’s politics staff about the most important political stories of the day:

An essential feature of the Required Reading section are the brief comments that accompany each link. While the choice of stories is the core value, it’s The Post’s comments, summing up the significance of the story or adding perspective, that make Required Reading a unique and valuable editorial feature. It’s like a mini link blog — something that every news site should be doing on all of their topic pages. (Something that every journalist, really, should be doing.)

Required Reading may include a link to a Post story, but not necessarily — and that makes the feature an honest broker, avoiding conflict of interest with The Post’s own original content.

There is a section, Best of The Post, that exclusively links to Post political stories, but even this feature is groundbreaking in its own way. Most topic pages on news sites display a laundry list of ALL content. Here, the Post applies the same filter to its own content, helping to prioritize your reading.

The anchor of the Political Browser is The Takeaway, written by Ben Pershing — as Eric describes it a “clever, breezy, irreverent, but highly informed” look at the most important stories and buzz on the campaign trail.

It’s a classic link blog, featuring plenty of links and attitude, and serves, as Eric points out, as a complement to the Post’s other successful political blogs.

Work on The Takeaway begins at 8 a.m. with a first post and extends throughout the day as political news evolves and breaks.

Political Browser has a further assortment of short, punchy link features, such as Trench Warfare, with links to stories and commentary from the left and right.

There’s also Blunder Box, i.e. “gotcha journalism” as Eric describes it with tongue in cheek — but it’s done with a link, so that means the blunder is already out there (e.g. this McCain ad declaring victory in the debate, which ran before the debate), so it’s not really a gotcha in the sense that journalists are typically accused.

The effort to compile links for Political Browser begins around 6 a.m. and by 8 a.m. a fresh page is up. Currently, the process involves emailing journalists to see if they have any additional links to contribute. It’s a tremendous step forward that The Post has begun developing an editorial workflow for links, which most newsrooms lack, so that they don’t lose the value of what reporters and editors are already finding in their daily reading.

And here’s where technology could give The Post a competitive advantage in the developing their editorial workflow. A web-based editorial system for links could optimize this workflow and make it easier for journalists in the newsroom to contribute links, and for Political Browser editors to edit and publish those links. Imagine getting the entire Post newsroom set up to do link journalism, to contribute dynamically to the news aggregation effort.

The big opportunity for The Post in leveraging web technology is efficiently tapping into the collective intelligence of ALL of their journalists. Sites like Digg have demonstrated what a powerful and dynamic filter can be created using social web technology to enable people to collaborate on filtering the web. Imagine dynamically connecting the news judgment of the entire Post newsroom — tapping into editorial network effects among journalists.

There’s still so much untapped potential in news aggregation, and The Post is ideally positioned to realize that potential.

Political Browser is only about a week into its new life, so it’s too early to talk about traffic or other such measures of success. But the Post is committed to testing how well they can build an audience for news aggregation and link journalism. And the commitment to experiment is one of the most notable features of Political Browser. These days, all innovation in the news business is experimental by definition. Eric says that they don’t know yet now Political Browser will evolve, which actually increases the chances that it will evolve into an even greater innovation.

Still, attempting to build an audience for a page of links, as an influential destination, feels like a good bet to be making on the web.

One immediate response The Post has seen is other news sites getting in touch to discuss reciprocal linking deals. Of course, linking in the form of “deal” drains a good deal of the editorial value — in fact, you might argue that such arrangements compromise the editorial independence of the link journalism. If Political Browser links to Politico, you want to know it’s because the Browser’s editors think the story is worth reading… not because Politico is linking back.

What would be much more interesting is an open editorial system for exchanging links, where sites could get links to their content on other sites based on editorial merit rather than deal making. Think of it like a newswire for links.

What’s most radical about Political Browser is that the Washington Post has committed to creating significant value with their editorial brand beyond their core mission of original reporting.

But how better to unlock the value of The Post’s brand on the web than to apply human editorial judgment to the challenge of filtering the web? Algorithms can beat humans at comprehensive web search, but humans should be able to beat algorithms at news aggregation.

And I would argue that the links on Political Browser are a form of journalism — and that news aggregation and filtering the web will be an essential function of news organizations going forward.

As Philip Meyer observed in AJR:

The old hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Now that information is so plentiful, we don’t need new information so much as help in processing what’s already available. Just as the development of modern agriculture led to a demand for varieties of processed food, the information age has created a demand for processed information. We need someone to put it into context, give it theoretical framing and suggest ways to act on it.

“we don’t need new information so much as help in processing what’s already available”

It’s a radical idea, still, for many news organizations. But not for The Washington Post — they are aiming to excel at BOTH, at the original reporting that surfaces essential new information AND at processing the information that’s already available.

Of course, filtering the web with links is not really a radical idea for the thousands of journalists who read Romensko every day or who chase after links on Drudge.

They just need the courage to try it themselves.

This roundup of links to coverage and commentary on the Vols’ loss to Florida was the MOST VIEWED article today on GoVolsXtra.com.

You could explain the page view count in one of two ways (or both). First, lots of fans like these roundups, and seek them out when they appear as a story on the homepage. Or, people clicked on a link, then came back for more, generating more page views.

Either way, a win.

But what about ENGAGEMENT?

Well, last time I looked there were 168 comments!

And the article was on the most commented list for the site. (The coverage roundup story is the only one on the most commented list published today — the rest are from the weekend.)

So what does that mean?

By rounding up all of the coverage from around the web using LINKS, Knoxnews created a DESTINATION for fans to discuss the game.

And not just that… GoVolsXtra had more comments than any of the other sites the roundup articled linked to (combined, it appears).

So, linking works.

And you’re not doing it… why?

And yet with 100 MILLION users, Facebook’s 2008 revenue was only projected to be $300 million. (The number may higher, haven’t seen, but it would be big news if it was much higher.)

Can you imagine a traditional media company with 100 MILLION viewers/readers/subscribers and only $300 million in revenue?

Which leads to the question that should be on the mind of every media executive, from startups to big legacy players:

Why isn’t Facebook making more money?

Thinking about that question, I went over to Google’s Advertising Solutions page to compare the way AdWords is described to the way Facebook’s offerings are described.

So let’s compare Google’s value proposition with Facebook’s:

Google says:

Reach people actively looking for information about your products and services online

Facebook says:

Promote your website or Facebook Page with highly-targeted advertising. Make your ads even more effective by attaching them to News Feed stories about the users’ friends.

Allow your customers to share with their friends the actions they take on your website.

Connect with your customers on Facebook similar to the way they connect with their friends.

With Google you can reach people who are looking for precisely what you have to offer.

With Facebook you can insert your ad into news about peoples’ friends. You can let people share their shopping habits with their friends. And you can, as a company/brand, be “friends” with your consumers.

What’s the key difference between Google’s value proposition and Facebook’s?

With Google, the value to users and the value to advertisers is perfectly aligned. Everybody wins.

With Facebook, if you read between the lines, it’s really the same value proposition as traditional advertising — advertisers forcing themselves on users, in a way that creates little or no value for the users.

How many Facebook users have a burning need to find ads in their friends’ newsfeeds? Or share their shopping habits? Or make friends with brands?

On Google, when you search for something, the adds are a form of search result — i.e. something you asked for, that you opted in to receive.

On Facebook, the ads, despite all the innovation, still aren’t something users are really asking for.

Is it possible on the web to have a more perfect alignment between advertiser and user value than search advertising?

I don’t know, but it seems a pretty safe bet that Facebook’s ad formats aren’t it.

(And pre-roll video advertising sure as heck ain’t it.  Could there be anything more antithetical to the fundamental web experience in the broadband era than having to wait 15 seconds to access the content you’re trying to load?)

If you’re in media in the web era, you’d better be working on a business model that creates huge value for users. Either that, or be content to have a small business by traditional media standards.

So who sets the news agenda now? One significant influence is a guy with nothing but a page full of links (you know, the kind that “send people away”).

In a post the other day, Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza called Drudge “the single most influential source for how the presidential campaign is covered in the country.”

That’s quite a claim. Chris adds in a parenthetical:

A quick note to preempt the inevitable argument that Drudge’s influence is overblown. Tomorrow morning, take a minute to look at the stories Drudge is highlighting. Then, later in the day, watch a few cable channels to see what stories they are talking about. It will open your eyes.

As to the particulars:

The increase in positive McCain stories featured on Drudge has coincided with more skeptical coverage of Obama’s candidacy. In recent weeks, Drudge has featured in his center well spot: A picture of Obama shooting at a far off basketball hoop with a subtitle asking “Will he get his groove back?”; an image of Obama sweating on stage at the Democratic National Convention during the Illinois senator’s acceptance speech; and heavy coverage of the “lipstick on a pig” comments.

Interestingly, Greg Sargent over at Talking Points Memo took issue with Chris’ example of Drudge’s influence:

This strikes us as an unfortunate example, particularly in a column arguing (as Cillizza does) that the source of Drudge’s power lies in his influence over the cable networks. Because one of the stories ignored by Drudge actually got a whole lot more coverage on cable yesterday than the one Drudge pushed all day in that supposedly hypnotic banner headline of his.

But Greg’s push back is on the particulars, not the question of whether Drudge influences the news agenda at all:

Look, far be it from me to question the notion that Drudge has influence over network producers. Of course he does. But if we’re really going to devote so much time to flacking Drudge’s influence, how about a real and nuanced discussion of it?

And he adds at the end:

If Drudge is going to consume our attention, how about a real discussion of Drudge and what the Drudge phenomenon says about the journalism profession — one that goes beyond the narrow question of how influential he is?

Indeed, I agree the pertinent question is not the magnitude of Drudge’s influence. The real question is: WHY is Drudge influential at all, when all he does is link to news?

The answer is that Drudge, along with Google, figured out that in the web media era, when all news content is accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world, and no news brands no longer have a monopoly over news distribution, the power of influence lies in the ability to FILTER the vast sea of news.

Newspapers were once THE most important filters for news. But they gave up this role on the web, because they didn’t see that the web analogue to what they did on the front page in print was NOT taking the same content and putting it on a website front page. In fact, you could argue that this is the single biggest mistake that newspapers have made on the web.

What they failed to see is that the web analogue to the newspaper front page is LINKS to where the news IS. That’s Drudge.

The web is about CONNECTIONS, and newspaper website front pages don’t connect anything to anything. That’s why they have so little influence.

And here’s a hard truth about the current newspaper web strategy: Focusing exclusively on local isn’t going to bring back the influence of the newspaper front page.

Newspapers can’t just set the local news agenda. They have to set the WEB news agenda.

So while newspapers focus on new modes of content — video, audio, photos, interactive graphics — they are missing the BIG opportunity on the web.  The opportunity to regain their position of influence.

And newspapers won’t regain that position of influence by hosting more content, whether it’s multimedia or user-generated.

Yes, any one piece of content can be very influential, but systemically, content is not the source of influence on the web.  (Think about that for a while.)

LINKS = Influence on the web.

If newspapers want to regain their influence, they have to focus on LINKS.

The web, after all, isn’t really about content. It’s about connections between content, people, and ideas.

So before anyone in the newsroom gets trained on Flash or databases or digital video, they should receive the most fundamental training that anyone who works on the web MUST understand:

How to link.

You know, <a href=”WHERE THE NEWS IS

Is there ANY newsroom out there that trains their staff how to link? (If so, please get in touch.)

The lessons of how to be influential on the web have been around for a decade.

Isn’t it finally time to learn them?

A print ad offered as added value for online advertising. Now THAT’S a reversal.

Here’s more:

NYT is trying to reverse the economic polarity of its business.

Is this kind of offer a trend?

For example, you might have noticed that the U.S. financial system seems to be — how to put this delicately? — collapsing. Most readers (and, um, journalists) probably have only the faintest idea of what the heck is going on. Yet this is one case where many people would love some broccoli news, if only it made sense to them.

News sites could help explain the crisis by putting up a continuously updated aggregation of links to the best reporting and commentary. Some sites may already have bloggers linking to these stories, but why not put the links right on the front page? With things as tense and confusing as they are, we shouldn’t make readers hunt for context.

Journalists could find these stories individually, or they could leverage the power of a network to find and share links with other journalists and newsrooms.

I’ve created a Financial Crisis Newsgroup on Publish2 to do just that. Any journalist on Publish2 can join the group (email me at josh dot korr [at] publish2 dot com if you’re interested), and any news organization can publish those links on its site.

Here are some links from the Newsgroup:

This doesn’t require days of planning or hours of overtime. When Scott wrote about the pace of innovation in journalism earlier this year, he mentioned a 48-hour experiment. That’s horse-and-buggy speed by now.

You could set up a Newsgroup, seed it with some links, and publish the links on your site in 15 minutes (okay — maybe add an hour to get a few colleagues to join in). Adding subsequent links takes all of two mouse clicks.

News sites should of course experiment with more general-topic aggregation, a la Drudge. But when stories unfold as jarringly fast as the Wall Street meltdown, continuously updated aggregation could be a huge help for readers who are grasping for understanding.

And if you do this for a couple of major stories, the next time a big one breaks they’ll know where to turn for answers first.

That said, a number of commenters took issue with the conclusion that Drudge’s engagement metrics are meaningful, and that there are any useful lessons for other news sites.

I’m going to respond by upping the ante — I think the lesson of Drudge is that every news site should put a continuously updated aggregation of links on their homepage.

Here’s how the argument to my original post went. Several commenters, including  Ian Lamont from The Industry Standard pointed out:

The auto-refresh rate (about once every three minutes, I believe) throws a wrench into comparisons with other sites that don’t auto-refresh. Some advertisers and outsiders may be impressed by Drudge’s high pv/visit numbers, but those are inflated by people who keep their Drudge window open while visiting links in other tabs.

To which I responded:

What news site wouldn’t want to be open in a reader’s browser being refreshed all day?

And then I asked:

Why can’t news sites be a destination for original content AND links?”

To which Tim Buden responded:

Because they perform two essentially different functions. One is a destination, one is a starting point. You’re simply not going to get the same behaviour.

People go to a story page on some news content site after having found the link on some aggregator or portal. They do not hang around on the news site’s front page, refreshing the page and hoping for new links.

And while outbound links on the story page may well be useful, they’re not going to hang out on that page hoping for new links on the story either. That’s a job for aggregators.

And that’s when the lightbulb went on.

Most new sites are at the wrong end of the value chain.

Most news site are just a bunch of individual content pages that people land on FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE and where they quickly leave to go SOMEWHERE ELSE.

That’s why Google derives more economic value on the web than any other media company — because Google figured out how to be the starting point. And they did it by offering the WHOLE web, not just a tiny slice of it.

Most news sites offer a tiny slice of the web, which consists of their own content.

Aggregators offer the WHOLE web.

Most news sites — in fact, most content sites — are just a brief stopping point as users surf the web, neither a beginning nor an end.

I read NYTimes.come every day, but I only visit it once or twice a day, because unless there is breaking news, the homepage doesn’t really change much. There’s no reason to go back.

But just because NYTimes.com has no new content on its homepage doesn’t mean news on the web is standing still.

In contrast, I visit Techmeme multiple times per day, because there is ALWAYS new news. In fact, I visit NYTimnes.com more often via a link on Techmeme than I do going to NYTimes.com directly.

And then there are the hundreds of news sites that I visit ONLY when a site like Techmeme or Google sends me there. But I won’t go back to these sites until I get sent there again. But I’ll ALWAYS go back to Techmeme or Google.

OK, so here comes the really counterintuitive part — a news site does NOT have to choose between being a pass-through content publisher and a starting point aggregator.

A news site can be BOTH.

Imagine if the NYTimes.com put above the fold on its homepage a continously updated list of links to breaking news around the web — and then set the homepage to auto-refresh, like Drudge and Techmeme.

Instead of checking NYTimes.com once or twice a day, I’d probably start checking it constantly… obsessively.

And each time I came… I’d notice any new NYT content, along with new links.

Or what if WashingtonPost.com did the same thing? Instead of going to NYTimes.com by default, I’d probably go to WashingtonPost.com… and NYTimes.com would become just one of the many places that WashingtonPost.com sent me.

Or… what if, Newsweek.com, for example, created this destination for links to news of what’s going in the world? Maybe I’d stop going to either the Post or the Times, because Newsweek would send me to the best stories from both sites… and many more.

Or… what if the Post’s LoudounExtra local site did the national/international news aggregation. Then I could find out what’s going on in the world — from ALL the best sources on the web — AND find out what’s going on in my community, all in one place.

Bottom line is… I’ll ALWAYS go back to the site that constantly updates with links. It’s the way I can derive the most value from the web as a news source.

New sites need to ask themselves — how can we create the most value for news consumers on the web? The evidence is pretty darn clear.

So is anybody going to take my advice? The problem is what I’m suggesting runs so completely counter to traditional publishing that many editors would literally have to put their heads on backwards in order to devote a portion of their homepages to news aggregation.

But I still hold out hope the newspaper editors, for example, will come to the realization that in print they are already in the aggregation business — but on the web, they are merely in the content business.

And on the web, as in print, all the economic value is in the aggregation business.

The tools exist for newsrooms to collaborate in creating a continuously updated news aggregation on the homepage — all that’s required is for a news site to decide it makes both editorial and economic sense to be in the aggregation business, to be a starting point for news.

P.S. Just for kicks, here’s the latest Hitwise ranking for news sites — check out Drudge’s market share:

P. P. S. It just occurred to me after posting this why Drudge has such a huge audience — because Drudge has NO COMPETITION!

Geesh. You’d think some highly trusted traditional news brand would roll up their sleaves and take on Drudge.

But if you actually look at the data, both of these assumptions are completely wrong.

Here’s a list of the top 30 news sites for May 2008, ranked by sessions per person (source: Nielsen Online):

And here’s a list of top news sites for June 2008, ranked by time per person (source: Nielsen Online):

What do you notice about the top site on both lists?

First, the top site has twice as many sessions per person. Second, the top site has nearly twice as much time spent per person. So users of this site find it indispensible, and they are highly engaged.

But the most important difference between the top site and all the other sites, is that this top site — Drudge — has nothing but LINKS.

That’s right folks. Drudge beats every original content news site by a two to one margin.

Drudge is also one of the largest news sites that isn’t built on an offline brand or a communications portal.

Still thinks sending people away with links is not a good strategy online?

Ask Google. They do pretty well.

Oh, and here’s a dirty little secret of sites like NYTimes.com — you would think their high quality, in-depth content would yield engagement numbers that could beat Drudge. But these metrics are averages of all site visitors, and the averages of the original content sites are being dragged down because many of the unique visitors come from sites like… Drudge and Google — and those visitors are not devoted users.

Drudge, on the other hand, is probably close to 100% devoted users.

What kind of users do you want your site to have?

And here’s another dirty little secret — Drudge is one of (if not the) largest referrer of traffic to most of the newspapers on these lists.

But all of these sites are content (pun intended) just to chase traffic from Drudge.

Here’s one last bit of data — from Drudge’s media kit:

Page view statistics
500 million page views monthly
1.95 billion ad impressions monthly
12 million unique visitors monthly
1.75 million daily unique visitors (weekday)
1 million daily unique visitors (weekend day)

Assuming 60% sell-through at $4 CPM… that’s $56 million annual revenue.

One guy. Linking.

Why was it again that your news site doesn’t link out?

UPDATE

Some commenters are taking issue with the data:

Drudge’s session numbers are worthless. Unlike every site on the list, Drudge has an artificially high auto-refresh rate of something under 3 minutes, I think it might even be as low as 2 minutes. The conclusions are fairly obvious– every person who leaves Drudge’s page open in a new tab, or leaves their desk for lunch created dozens or even hundreds of “new” sessions.

I find it ironic that most of these commenters came here from Techmeme, a site that has nothing but links and that auto-refreshes. Techmeme, like Drudge, is INDISPENSIBLE for its users, something any news site should want to claim. And Techmeme has found the key to unlokcing value for advertisiers (hint: it’s not display ads) — sponsorships in the form of content links, just like Techeme’s editorial content.

And really, what news site wouldn’t want to be open in a reader’s browser being refreshed all day, instead of hoping for drive-by referrals from aggregators?

Spinewatch is a newsgroup and link bank for campaign 2008 stories of a certain narrowly-defined type. Here, we keep track of reporting from the mainstream media where the press can be seen going further than it has traditionally been willing to go in describing untruths, calling out lies, and reporting clearly on statements at odds with well established facts. Even at the risk of saying that one side is worse than the other or one candidate is actually lying. A good spinewatch story is often marked by the absence of qualification, a boldness in categorization (”out of bounds!”) and a refusal to artificially balance the account when the facts themselves point one way.

Here are some examples from the Spinewatch Newsgroup:

The Associated Press: Analysis: McCain’s claims skirt facts, test voters
“Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain’s skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama’s campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.”

McCain Barbs Stirring Outcry as Distortions – NYTimes.com
“Senator John McCain has drawn an avalanche of criticism this week from Democrats, independent groups and even some Republicans for regularly stretching the truth in attacking Senator Barack Obama’s record and positions.”

McCain Wraps Distortions Around One Truth – washingtonpost.com
Critiques a McCain ad and calls out two distortions.

Scales. Eyes. McCain.
Andrew Sullivan issues a stirring call to “tell the truth as fearlessly and as relentlessly and as continuously as we can until November 4,” despite the McCain campaigns serial lies.

To the Ladies of ‘The View,’ McCain Misrepresents Palin’s Earmark Record
Jake Tapper calls out McCain for saying on The View that Palin never took earmarks as governor (a lie, needless to say).

When covering politics and campaigns, traditional “objective” journalism often reduces to he said/she said, where each side has a say, even if one side has no facts. Journalism is supposed to be about fact gathering, but facts are often a secondary concern when aiming for “fair and balanced” political reporting.

Can Spinewatch lead to more media outlets and journalists clearly and directly assessing the veracity of statements made by the candidates and their campaigns, and using the “L” word to describe a statement that is not true? Can more Americans have a more informed understanding of whether the candidates for President and Vice President of the United States tell the truth?

We can find out, by publishing and distributing links to Spinewatch stories.

If you have a Publish2 account (register here), ping me and I’ll add you to the Spinewatch Newsgroup. Or, you can add “spinewatch” as a tag on your links. Here’s the Spinewatch Newsgroup RSS feed, if you want to follow.

Want to take it a step further? Here’s some code to publish Spinewatch links on your news site:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.publish2.com/syndicate/widget/?feed=newsgroups/spinewatch/json"></script><a href="http://www.publish2.com/newsgroups/spinewatch" title="More Spinewatch Links">More Spinewatch Links</a>

The widget will pick up the formatting of your site. (You can also customize the code if you’re on Publish2.)

If you don’t want the entire Spinewatch feed, you can add links from the Spinewatch Newsgroup to your own election feed on Publish2.

Of course, there are many other ways to get contribute to the Spinewatch meme. Use the #spinewatch tag on Twitter, or on other social bookmarking services. (Steve Outing has a great post on using Twitter for spinewatch, although he ends with a caution on using open systems, because spammers can “invade channels with unwanted information”)

Whatever you do, the key is to LINK — practice link journalism by linking to reporting that is breaking with tradition by boldly calling a fact, a fact, and a lie, a lie.

The intent of Spinewatch is nonpartisan — the ideal would be to have links to coverage of lies from both campaigns. And if anyone finds it to be partisan, than they should start a similar meme to balance it out… just focus on the facts.

The old syndication model in the old content economy just won’t work today when all the world needs is one copy of a story up in the cloud with links to it. Today, the more links that article can get, the more valuable it is. So sharing value with those who send links to it only makes sense.

An AP representative commented:

We believe AP news is a critical ingredient for all news reports, both directly and as a foundation for many other sources of news. Breaking news from AP journalists around the world and in the United States, for example, serves as the origin for stories pursued by both AP members and many other news organizations.

AP still plays an important role in producing original reporting, but it’s now just one of many sources of original reporting that newspapers can tap into, as the Star Ledger did:

New Jersey’s Star-Ledger today put out an entire edition without anything from the Associated Press within. The sharp-eyed reader will notice lots of local news by staff plus articles from other papers–Washington Post, LA Times, McClatchy, the Glouceseter County Times–and content from online services such as Sportsticker.

AP publishes all of their original content on Google and Yahoo — on the web, any news site can link to that content, without having to license it. AND, they are not limited to linking to AP — they can link to any original reporting on the web.

A commenter on responded to the AP rep:

But Paul, how will the AP retain it’s value when
1. The web is a pretty good newswire and it’s free.
2. When, like Jeff said, you only need one copy of a story online and everyone else can just link to it.
3. When, even if the shared content model works in print, it is actually worse than useless online – and everyone’s moving online?

The web is already a “pretty good newswire” — and with collaborative tools that enable newsrooms to discover, share, and publish links to the best content, it can be even better.

But what if a newspaper company were to launch a website in a market where they didn’t publish a print newspaper?

That’s exactly what Gatehouse Media is doing in Batavia, NY.

Back in April, I visited GateHouse’s corporate headquarters in Fairport, NY and took a ride with Howard Owens and Ryan Sholin on a “secret mission” to Batavia, NY. They were scoping out office space for a website that GateHouse was about to launch, The Batavian.

Why was this a secret mission? Because GateHouse does not publish a print newspaper in Batavia, NY. And the family-owned incumbent newspaper, The Daily News, has no content on its website (the site is barely a brochure).

So the strategy is to launch an innovative news and community site that will eat the lunch of an incumbent newspaper that has ignored the web.

The Batavaian practices what Howard preaches — the site is anchored by a blog and has a full suite of community features (powered by Drupal), including blogs for registered users. The homepage features blog posts from community members.

Many of the posts have generated lively discussions in comments, such as this post by a reader about the local mall, which many residents would like to see torn down. The comments discussion features none other than the city council president.

The Bavatian set up an office on Main Street, and editor/lead blogger Philip Anselmo is in town everyday, connecting with the community.

The Batavian is an experiment in whether a new web-native journalism can better serve a community. Here’s Howard on “Exploring the complexity of community issues as a community”

Digital communication allows all members of the public — the press, the politicians, the government agents and the citizens — to discuss choices, consequences and conditions as equals.  Reporters need no longer be bound by the limitations of print and present just the so-called objective report, but rather explore, examine, raise and answer questions, and start conversations.

We saw an example of this style of journalism played out last week in The Batavian.  Editor Philip Anselmo interviewed Councilman Bob Bialkowski.  Mr. Bialkowski said that one of the problems facing Batavia is declining neighborhoods.

He says that “entire neighborhoods are a problem — trash all over, abandoned cars in the back yard.” Head over to the southside of the city, to Jackson Street, over near Watson and Thorpe streets, State Street, and you’ll see what he’s talking about.

So, Philip took his advice, drove around those neighborhoods and didn’t find a lot of evidence of decline.  Philip, who is well traveled and has covered such small cities as Canandaigua, where there are some pretty sub par neighborhoods, did a follow up post saying he couldn’t find the decline.

This prompted a rejoinder post from Council President Charlie Mallow, who wrote:

There have been a few postings about the state of our neighborhoods and people’s opinions of the rate of decline. From someone new to the area or familiar with big city living, some missing paint and a little litter are not anything to be concerned about. People in big cities have had to live with falling property values, absentee landlords and drug activity for years. The obvious question is, why wouldn’t the people of Batavia point to the precursors of decline and pull together to keep the quality of life we have always enjoyed?

Notice a trend here? Same set of facts, different perceptions.  And if you follow the conversation in the comments as well as the related blog posts, a clearer picture emerges of the goals and aspiration of the City Council to clean up the city before things get too far gone.

Traditional, print journalism could never achieve this depth of coverage of a single issue.

In just the four months since its launch, The Batavian already has 5,000 unique visitors per month, out of 15,000 who live in Batavia and 60,000 live in Genesee County.

Here’s a radio commercial for TheBatavian.com

The plan is for Philip to jump start the site, and then hire a staff locally — The Batavian has already hired an experienced sports reporter from the region, who will start on Wednesday.  Here is some of The Batavian’s coverage of the Muckdogs.

It’s still too early to know whether the site will succeed as a business, but they’ve already started talking to local advertisers. And they are giving away classifieds for free to residents.

With no print operation — no paper, ink, presses or delivery trucks — The Batavian will obviously be able to operate with a much lower cost structure. The vast majority of operating expense will be staff.

The Batavian may is one of the most disruptive efforts I’ve seen coming from an incumbent in an industry where many still take a conservative approach despite rapidly deteriorating economic conditions. It’s a newspaper company thinking and acting like a startup — which is what every media company needs to do to survive the digital transition.

(Disclosure: Howard Owens is an advisor to Publish2.)

Newswires have traditionally been based on a number of assumptions: good news content is scarce; wire copy is an effective way of engaging readers; and newspapers can all publish the same wire content in their own limited-distribution regions without making it a commodity.

All these assumptions go out the window on the web.

So reinventing the newswire requires fundamental shifts in mindset: From the limitations of scarcity in print to the opportunities of abundance on the web. From a walled-garden approach — “if we don’t create a story or get it from the wires, then it doesn’t exist” — to one that embraces the web, where consumers have access to every publication in the world and the most interesting and informative takes often come from sources other than the traditional wires.

The current mindset of most newsrooms, as they face shrinking budgets, is that they may need to forgo the broad coverage that they traditionally provided through wire content in order to afford staff for original local reporting. Several newspapers have in fact announced their intention to cancel their wire subscriptions.

But newspaper web sites can tap into this wealth of web content without expensive licensing agreements — they just need to LINK to it.

A web newswire can distribute links instead of full content, driving traffic to the sites that originally published the news, instead of creating a commodity out of the news by publishing the same content on hundreds of sites.

A web newswire can distribute links to a newspaper’s own content, giving it national distribution (think Alaska newspapers’ reporting on Sarah Palin) but where all the attention comes back to the newspaper’s site.

A web newswire can also distribute links to great blog content, magazine articles, and content created by people in their communities.

The most successful web-native news destinations are all about links — so by publishing newswire links to the best content on the web, newspapers can enhance their positions as daily news destinations.

Think Google, Drudge Report, Yahoo, Digg, and Fark. These sites constantly send readers away by linking to the best content, and readers keep coming back for more.

Instead of chasing links from Drudge, for example, as many newspaper sites do, they should focus on BEING a destination for finding links. Imagine a web newswire where the collective linking of newspapers’ sites could actually compete with sites like Drudge in driving traffic to newspaper content and other high quality journalism.

Instead of abandoning broad coverage in favor of pure local, newspaper sites can still be a destination to find out what’s going on in the world, in a way that complements their local reporting and integrates into their local community. Why shouldn’t readers discuss national issues on a newspaper site, given that they share the bond of living in the same community?

A web newswire can also solve the problem of how newsrooms with increasingly limited resources can find links to the best content on the web. If all newsrooms contribute links to the newswire and share their daily “link news budgets,” they can tap into the collective editorial intelligence of hundreds of newsrooms.

If consumers can vote up the best content together, why not newsrooms? This is the same cooperative approach that gave birth to the traditional newswires, but one that harnesses the “network effects” of the web — the same network effects that power sites like Google, Digg, and Twitter.

And… it can all be done for free.

Publish2 has built a platform for newspapers to create a new web-native newswire — and we’re offering it to newspapers (and all journalists) at no cost.

The opportunity to serve readers more effectively and deploy resources more efficiently has a huge upside in and of itself for newsrooms faced with shrinking budgets. We are also developing a way for marketers to tap into the distribution power of a new web-based wire service, and provide a way for every newsroom that participates in the Publish2 Newswire to create a new source of revenue.

Imagine turning the newswire from a cost center into a profit center.

Interested? Register for a Publish2 journalist account, or contact us at newswire@publish2.com.

Want some proof that readers value these links to reference material? Nick Carr has been getting requests for links to all of the interesting source material he used in his Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” — enough to prompt him to post those reference links on his blog.

The question is, why now, only after readers made their interest known, and why on his blog and not at TheAtlantic.com, where the article is published?

I’ve heard of journalists whose practice is to research a story on the web, print out the source material, reference that source material in the article, and then literally throw that printed source material away after they’ve filed the story.

How can newsrooms, in an age of swiftly declining editorial resources, afford to throw valuable material away? And this is material that they PAID FOR by paying a journalist to research a story. Editors should be demanding that journalists provide links to source material to include with the web version of a story.

Of course, “web version” hints at the problem, because most editorial workflows are still built around print publishing and so are blind to all of the web value being figuratively left on the cutting room floor or literally tossed in the trash.

The other issue here is the “ethic of the link.”

The Atlantic created economic value for itself by Nick’s effort to synthesize a great many sources. In fact, Nick’s article on TheAtlantic.com has an astounding 38,000+ inbound links. But they’ve given very little value back to the web ecosystem, with only a handful of links in the article. I managed to get a link to Publishing 2.0 by being a squeaky wheel, but that shouldn’t be necessary.

That said, I still think the larger problem here is one of process rather than web sensibility. I know that Nick and the Atlantic editors understand the value of links. Nick is a prolific linker on his blog, and his latest book, The Big Switch, is packed with interesting reference notes and URLs at the end.

The problem is that the editorial workflow for most newsrooms doesn’t include a process whereby journalists can collect source links as part of their research process and provide them as work product to be published on the web along with the article.

(Shameless plug + disclosure: We’ve built just such a system into Publish2, to integrate the gathering and publishing of links into existing editorial workflows — and it’s free to journalists and news organizations, so there’s no “we can’t afford it” barrier.)

As Jay Rosen explains in this video, understanding the value of links, and how they connect content, ideas, and people, is fundamental to understanding the value of the web. And understanding the value of the web is the key to unlocking the new business models that journalism needs to survive and thrive in the digital age:

Most media types probably thought Nick Carr’s article in the July/August Issue of The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” was the most interesting and relevant to media. But Jonathan Rausch’s piece on GM’s last ditch effort to transform itself by producing the world’s first mainstream electric car ( after it failed to do so in the 90s), is a tale of do or die innovation that everyone in the newspaper industry — and media generally — must read.

Here are some of the key passages:

When one of the world’s mightiest corporations throws everything it’s got at a project, and when it shreds its rule book in the process, the results are likely to be impressive. Still, even for General Motors, the Volt is a reach. If it meets specifications, it will charge up overnight from any standard electrical socket. It will go 40 miles on a charge. Then a small gasoline engine will ignite. The engine’s sole job will be to drive a generator, whose sole job will be to maintain the battery’s charge—not to drive the wheels, which will never see anything but electricity. In generator mode, the car will drive hundreds of miles on a tank of gas, at about 50 miles per gallon. But about three-fourths of Americans commute less than 40 miles a day, so on most days most Volt drivers would use no gas at all.

That March, the group laid its conclusions before Rick Wagoner and the rest of the top leadership. Preuss and Larry Burns, who runs the company’s research operations and is regarded in the industry as something of a visionary, did not pull punches. GM had to show a real change of mind on the environment and sustainability or remain Toyota’s doormat. It had to lead on plug-ins or get left behind in yet another new market. It had to restore credibility damaged by the mishandling of the EV1, the abdication on hybrids, and the repeated failure to deliver on promises. It needed not just one more in a long series of research programs and concept cars but a real-world product, one ambitious enough to impress even the cynics.

The group proposed a plug-in that would drive at least 10 miles on a charge. It would be a cool, stylish, high-tech car, marketed to trendsetters. They called it the iCar.

The company then made a series of decisions that look, in hindsight, startlingly audacious. Instead of becoming a safer bet as it ran the internal slalom, the iCar became more ambitious. Its target range on a single charge increased from “at least” 10 miles to 40—the outer limit of what seemed possible. Not a few outsiders think this decision was misguided; a 20-mile battery, say, would still allow many commuters to drive gas-free most days, and it would be easier and cheaper to build. But Lauckner, always pushing, insisted on a car that the public would perceive not just as saving gasoline (that was Prius territory) but as replacing gasoline. The Volt, as the iCar was eventually renamed, had to be perceived as severing the umbilical cord between the car and the gas pump, and nothing less than the longest feasible gas-free range, he believed, would accomplish that.

Perhaps most audacious of all was a decision to allow unusual public access to the Volt program. The industry’s standard procedure is to develop new products, especially risky ones, out of sight, unveiling them only when proven. GM decided to do exactly the opposite. The PR department flung open the doors. GM executives discuss the program’s progress as publicly as if it were a bill in Congress. They show off photos of batteries under development. They promise to let reporters ride in test cars. They lead them through the labs and design centers and even into the wind tunnel. They run ads, for instance in this magazine, touting the Volt in the present tense, as if it already existed. By earlier this year, expectations were so high that President Bush was commending the car, and it had developed a national grassroots following. This article is itself a product of the fishbowl strategy.

All the talk about “saving newspapers” is focused on finding new business models to keep doing what they’ve always done — which is like GM looking for a new business model to sell the kinds of cars they made in the 50s and 60s. What the newspaper industry, if it is to survive as such, must find is a radical new value proposition for news — something so audacious, so self-evidently valuable that, if they can find a way to deliver it, would lead to the rebirth of newspaper journalism.

Is this a panacea? Of course, not. Nor is it for GM:

On the other hand, if it fails, it will fail in full view. GM will have given its critics the most spectacular example yet of a broken promise, and Toyota will look prudent instead of timid.

Despite its head start, GM will have to fight to be first. In January, after a year of watching GM bask in the Volt’s publicity, Toyota reacted. At the 2008 Detroit auto show, Katsuaki Watanabe, the president, announced that Toyota would produce a lithium-ion plug-in car of its own, and would have it on the street in test fleets “not at the end of 2010, but earlier than that.” Toyota was talking about a few hundred experimental cars in a controlled setting, not tens of thousands of cars in dealer showrooms, a much less ambitious goal than GM’s. But Toyota is famous for under-promising and over-delivering.

In February, Tesla, the Silicon Valley company, announced plans for an electric sedan with a gasoline-powered generator, like the Volt—but set to arrive a year earlier, in late 2009. In March, BMW said it might produce an electric car for the U.S. market, and in May, Nissan said it would have one in test fleets in 2010. The drumbeat seems likely to continue. Simply by announcing the Volt, GM has attracted a bevy of competitors, bringing the electric car’s mass-market advent from over the horizon to around the corner.

A bold new vision won’t immediately turn the economic tide, but it could turn the tide of defeatism.

GM is using the publicity to excite the public, of course. It is also using the publicity to push itself. “We thought it would be a motivating thing to do,” Wagoner says. “Certainly it gets everybody aligned”—not always easy in a giant corporation. And GM wants credit for trying, which it never received for the EV1. “If it fails,” Harris says of the Volt, “we want people to know exactly why it failed. It wasn’t lack of commitment or passion on our part; we hit a hard point we couldn’t get around.”

GM’s leaders, needless to say, do not particularly welcome the competition from a business point of view. But they relish it from a psychological one. When I asked Larry Burns, the R&D vice president, how he felt about Toyota’s plans, he said, “Paranoid, because they’re good.” But the real answer was the grin that spread across his face as he recalled Watanabe’s announcement and said, savoring each syllable, “He was a follower.”

The newspaper business is being crippled by competition, which, like Toyota in the case of GM, is doing a better job of delivering what the market wants and needs. GM realized that to survive they couldn’t just catch up to the competition — they had to surpass it — and they had to do so by delivering the holy grail for consumers.

How can newspaper companies surpass the competition? How can they be better than Google? Those are the kind of questions that newspapers should be asking — and then pursuing bold answers.

Newspapers need to stop trying to save the old business or searching amorphously for new business models and instead figure out what needs are going unmet in the market for news — and then be first in the market to deliver breakthrough solutions.

And they need to do it FAST:

Moreover, improvements were being incorporated as fast as they could be conceived; the battery would be on its second generation in January, its third in June. “It’s incredible,” Turner said. “The design they’ve come up with for thermal changed 10 times before they delivered the first battery.” And all of this was before the arrival of a competing battery that might be as good or even better, designed jointly by the Massachusetts-based company A123 Systems and the German company Continental A.G. “We’re inventing and creating on the critical path,” Turner said. He was using the industry jargon for the countdown to production, when time is money and delays can cost millions. “I’ve got guys trying to release things before they’re actually invented.

Ever since Nick Carr’s Atlantic article appeared on the web (finally), there’s been a spike in Google alerts for my name. Prior to this quote in the Atlantic, whenever I checked out a site where my name was mentioned, it almost invariably had a link back to my site — because someone was quoting me from my blog and linked back. But The Atlantic article had no link to my blog, even though Nick lifted the quote verbatim from the site. So here are all these reproduction of this citation, but no links. And I’m getting a spike in traffic from people searching for “Scott Karp blog” because they’re looking for the source.

Something is very wrong on the internet.

Take a look at the way Nick quoted me:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

It’s very similar to the way journalists have traditionally quoted sources that they actually TALKED to. Substitute “he said” for “he wrote,” and you would think that this was a phone or in person interview. Even when articles with such quotes are published on the web, the source isn’t typically linked because it doesn’t exist on the web.

But in this case, the source did exist.

The traditional practice of journalism also requires that you ask a source’s permission to quote them. Nick never asked my permission — he assumed he didn’t have to, because I had already published what he was quoting. And yet he doesn’t cite the post or even name my blog. It’s like he’s quoting me, personally, yet also citing a published source. When I first saw the quote, my gut reaction was to feel annoyed that Nick didn’t ask my permission, although technically he didn’t have to. Sources have forever complained about journalists quoting them out of context, and that’s exactly how I felt — yet if there had been a link, or a URL in print, I don’t think I would have felt that way.

It’s like Nick and The Atlantic were trying to play by the old rules and the new rules, and yet not really adhering to either.

So what does this have to do with the AP?

If The Atlantic, with its top shelf editorial standards, can do this, then why can’t a blogger quote AP — almost as if the AP were a person?

What’s happened is that the lines between quoting a person and quoting a published source have blurred.

Bloggers aren’t really reacting to the copyright issue, although that’s what everyone is taking about. It’s more like AP is giving on the record interviews to bloggers with its stories, and then when bloggers quote them, the AP turns around and claims the interview was “off the record.”

The AP found itself deeper in the hole when a blogger discovered a page where the AP was asking payment per word for citations. Yet the AP quotes from blogs and other sites — as if they were abiding by interview standards. Which has led some bloggers to turn the tables and demand payment for all the times the AP quoted them.

Geesh.

Yesterday Jay Rosen wondered on Twitter how the AP could have so distanced itself from Tom Curley’s speech in 2004. Mathew Ingram expressed what so many are of us were thinking:

@jayrosen_nyu: i’d love to explain how they got here from there — i wish i knew do you think curley has been steered wrong by others?

It just defies comprehension.

Here’s why I think this is all such a mess, why the AP is cutting off their nose to spite their face, defying comprehension, why Nick Carr thinks access to more information and more connections between information is making us dumber (also defying comprehension).

Nobody has really been able to conceptualize yet just how dramatic the change is in our traditional systems of information, media, publishing, reading, writing, relating ideas, and thinking itself. Nick Carr has come close with his recent writing, and he’s brave enough to try, but he gets too distracted by his nostalgia for a simpler age.

Nick argues that we are losing our ability to “read deeply,” e.g. read a whole book and contemplate it, without “distraction.” The problem is he’s using an antiquated yardstick to measure the quality of thought.

Maybe I don’t need 250 page books anymore because the web enables me to connect ideas and create narratives that I used to depend on book authors to do for me, because I wasn’t able to access all the information and connect all the dots myself.

Maybe the reason why Nick and so many other literati are losing their patience with long form information is that it is so fundamentally inefficient and inferior to connected bits of information.

You look at a book, read a book, and you easily perceive a coherent whole. You look at all the information on that book’s topic on the web, all connected, and you can’t see the sum of the parts — but we are starting to get our minds around it. We can’t yet recognize the superiority of this networked thinking process because we’re measuring it against our old linear thought process.

Nick romanticizes the “contemplation” that comes with reading a book. But it’s possible that the output of our old contemplation can now be had in larger measure through a new entirely non-linear process.

Just look at this post. If there’s any insight here (which still remains to be seen), it didn’t come from a linear process of A to B to C. It came from all of these seemingly random nodes connecting, and all these bits of information coming together, and then suddenly I saw the whole. If you had watched me, tracked my reading and my thoughts, you would have judged me positively scatological by traditional standards.

But even in presenting my “aha,” I’m jumping all over the place because I’m still trying to figure out how to make sense of networked thought process. The end of this post may seem completely disconnected from the beginning, but it’s all deeply connected. (Although it makes choosing a pithy title difficult.)

So what’s the lesson for the AP and every other media business? We don’t “get it” yet — none of us do. We’re starting to connect the dots, slowly but surely, but we’re looking through a glass darkly at the change we’re immersed in.

As Jon Fine observed about all the Titans of Media speaking at the All Things D conference:

It is sobering when not even the smartest guys in the room have any plausible answers. But then, no one has the answers.

What is increasingly clear is that the thought processes, assumptions, and standards that governed analogue media, information, and thought are increasingly going to get us into trouble in a digital media world.

What I’m hoping is that we’re bumbling through a “period of stupid” before we realize that we’ve actually become a lot smarter.

The next media business to connect those dots will be the next Google.

UPDATE

TheAtlantic.com is now linking to this blog in Nick’s article, which I suppose proves the squeaky wheel maxim, but there still aren’t links to other quoted blogs, e.g.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me.

I’ve searched for this blog, but can’t find it (for shame, Google) — so a link isn’t just about principle, it’s about real utility.

Of course, Nick actually talked to Bruce, and also quoted him the old fashioned way. Ah, well.

Take the story of flooding in Iowa, for example. The AP is covering this story extensively, as you can see in this Google News search result. But local news media in Iowa is also covering the story extensively, as you can see in this search limited to Iowa sources — the story is happening in their own backyard, giving these local sources a unique perspective and knowledge.

So if a blogger wanted to discuss the Iowa floods and needed a source to cite, they can easily find an original local source instead of the AP story. And they can think of the link and the traffic they send as a contribution to the local news outlet’s original reporting, particularly the local newspapers struggling with new economic realities.

Or let’s take a national example. Britain and the EU have announced new sanctions against Iran. The AP covered this story, but so did national news sites like the Washington Post. Link to the Post instead, to support their original reporting.

To seize this opportunity, national and local news sites could get the word out to bloggers that they want the links and the traffic, if AP doesn’t. It’s up to them whether they agree with AP’s attempt to copyright the commodity of the news event itself (via Saul Hansell):

“The principal question is whether the excerpt is a substitute for the story, or some established adaptation of the story,” said Timothy Wu, a professor at the Columbia Law School. Mr. Wu said that the case is not clear-cut, but he believes that The A.P. is likely to lose a court case to assert a claim on that issue.

“It’s hard to see how the Drudge Retort ‘first few lines’ is a substitute for the story,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Kennedy argued, however, that The Associated Press believes that in some cases, the essence of an article can be encapsulated in very few words.

The problem with this argument is that, if the “essence of the article” is the fact of the event itself, e.g. floods in IA, and that is the entire value of the content, then the content is sorely lacking in value. If local and national news sites can create more value than just the commodity statement of the facts, which be “given away” in a snippet, then they can earn all of the links and traffic on the web for their original reporting. They should also look at how they allocate resources to creating original content that people want to and can link to vs. licensing content that nobody wants to or can link to (especially when that same licensed content appears on Google, Yahoo, and hundreds of other sites).

If local and national news sites really want to seize the opportunity, they won’t just leave it to bloggers to link to their original reporting — they will start linking to each other’s original reporting, and help each other capture that economic value, which they so clearly need.

Normally, you wouldn’t list a service that isn’t a partner, but in this case Google chose to list Facebook and let users know loud and clear that they can’t connect to their friends on Facebook because the feature has been DISABLED BY FACEBOOK.

This is subtle in some ways, but in others it’s as big a smack as Apple’s brilliant I’m a Mac, I’m a PC ads.

Google is betting that hell hath no fury like a user denied access.

Probably a good bet.

This time I’m going to pick on The Atlantic, which like the Washington Post is a publication I have a great deal of affection for (published by my former employer Atlantic Media), so this is not a general critique but rather a very specific example representative of a much larger industry-wide problem (i.e. I could find instances of the same problem on virtually any magazine website).

It started this past Saturday when a friend (also a former Atlantic employee) emailed me asking me why I hadn’t mentioned my quote in the Atlantic’s latest cover story by Nick Carr. I responded saying I had no idea I had been quoted.

I immediately when to TheAtlantic.com, where I discovered that the current issue was still the June issue, and that the July issue with Nick’s cover story still hadn’t been posted. This is a common practice among publishers who make early receipt of the new issue a benefit for print subscribers.

But by doing that the publisher basically thumbs their nose at web readers and violates a fundamental principle of the digital age — if a user knows your content exists, but can’t access it, the result will be frustration or worse.

The Atlantic already made a brave move by following NYTimes.com and removing their paid subscriber wall on the website.

But still in this instance the print subscriber had access to content that, despite the power of the web, I couldn’t access.

To make matter worse, I stopped by Borders on Sunday to see if they had the July issue — physically driving to a location to obtain content that already existed in digital form seemed ludicrous. But I was willing to pay for the print issue (and probably would have read more than Nick’s article once I had it in hand).

Sadly, on the rack I found the June issue, just like on the website.

I joked to my friend by email about the frustrations of being unable to access content in the digital age. He offered to fax over the article… or 8-track tape it.

So I resigned myself to waiting for it to go up online, which I knew it would shortly.

This afternoon, I saw on TechMeme a link to this CNET story about the Atlantic article. Great, I thought, it’s up online.

It’s not yet on the Web, but the July issue of The Atlantic has an exceptional and provocative article by Nick Carr, asking “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Being a web user on a mission, as most are, I didn’t bother to read the sentence — I just clicked on the link and found the same June issue.

This is ridiculous, I thought — here is a someone who has access to the article and wants to link to it, but can’t. And here I am, a consumer eager to read the article, and I can’t. Wall-to-wall frustration.

But guess who stepped in to save the day… can you guess?

This afternoon, I received a email from the Google alert ego feed for my name:

Another print publisher trumped by Google.

But it gets even worse.

I clicked on the link in the email which took me to the article, which is in fact online. Actually, the whole July/August issue is online.

It’s not linked on TheAtlantic.com homepage yet, as of this writing — and it’s not on the current issue page.

But Google knows it’s there. Google knows everything. And most importantly, Google gives me what I want, even when print publishers, still trying to balance demands of two entirely different modes of publishing, choose to prioritize print over web.

The web is Google’s first and only priority. That’s why they are beating the pants off of every legacy media company on the web.

But wait, there’s more.

I found the section of the article where I was quoted, unbeknown to me, because Nick lifted it from one of my blog post. In fact, it’s in a section about bloggers who have commented on the issue at hand.

But there’s no links to those posts. So readers have no opportunity to see my quote in context, which was a post called The Evolution From Linear Thought To Networked Thought.

There are other links in the online version, so additional links may be added before it goes live. But most print publishers have no editorial process in place for converting print content to web content, e.g. putting in links, which leads invariably to a frustrating web user experience.

If publishers want to maximize value on the web, they have to put the web first every time — that means you can’t just take what you create for print and dump it on the web, regardless of the cost efficiencies, because you’re destroying value for web users.

If a user can’t find what they want going straight to your site, the next time they are going to go straight to Google — and Google will capture the value of that content distribution.

But this story has one last delicious drip of irony. Nick agues in the Atlantic article, with his usual brilliance, that Google and digital media is actually changing the way we think — to our detriment.

I agree with Nick that the way we think is likely changing, which is what my post was about. But I don’t know that I agree with Nick’s pessimism that the change is for the worse. Yet the way I’m quote in the article, it leaves open the possibility that I agree with Nick that the change is negative.

When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

But if you read my whole post, you’d find the following:

What I’d be most curious to know is whether online reading actually has a positive impact on cognition — through ways that we perhaps cannot measure or even understand yet, particularly if we look at it with a bias towards linear thought.

If anything is making us dumber, it’s that we’re betwixt and between old modes and new modes of both information and thought.

The irony of The Atlantic’s print article is that by bounding the reader into a box where they can’t seek more context, and worse, by being the antithesis of the digital media experience that Nick describes, it becomes irrelevant to its own thesis.

Fortunately, if you take my quote from the print article and put it into Google, you can find my post — and the missing context.

I’d say in this instance, Google actually made me smarter.

If publishers followed Google’s example, they’d be smarter, too.

UPDATE

Lot’s of people are now discussing Nick’s article — although mostly they are discussing the CNET post ABOUT the article, because the article itself is not online — I’m guess Matt Asay is a print subscriber, who couldn’t wait for the article to get up on the web to start talking about it.

It’s great to give print subscribers an advance look at the magazine — except those subscribers have blogs, and they don’t really want to keep with the print-centric program. They want to talk about it NOW, not when it finally shows up on the web. Matt even scanned in the brilliant cover:

UPDATE #2

You can find all of The Atlantic’s July/August 2008 issue content indexed by Google News here, which is how I got the Google alert.

You can embargo the newsstand, but you can’t embargo Google, which is the new newsstand.

In print, a design flaw is unlikely to cause a reader to abandon a newspaper or magazine entirely — they are a largely captive audience. But it will cause them to abandon a website.

Google understands this better than any web company, which is why they are the most successful. Google is obsessed with making sure its users never fail, no matter how “stupid” they are. Google makes users feel smart. That’s why they keep coming back.

Invariably, when I write about a negative experience with a website, e.g. Twitter or WashingtonPost.com, someone puts forth what I call the “stupid user” argument — essentially, I failed because I’m a stupid user. And if I were a better user, I would have been more successful with the site.

For example, I discovered that WashingtonPost.com has a local version of its homepage, which it displays to logged in users. Creating different versions of a site for different users is web-savvy. If I had been logged in, I would have found the content I was looking for on the homepage. That’s all good, and much to their credit.

Unfortunately, I never log in to WashingtonPost.com, although I read it frequently. Therefore, the “stupid user” argument goes, the failure to find the content I wanted was my fault.

Here’s the problem — my failure to find the information I wanted is not MY problem, because I went to Google and found it. I succeeded. The failure is the site’s problem, because I abandoned it and went instead to a site that would help me succeed without having to be smarter.

WashingtonPost.com and, to be fair, most other sites that require registration assume that users will register to help the site achieve its goals, whether customizing content or targeting advertising.

But users don’t care about the site’s goals. They care about THEIR OWN goals.

Nowhere on WashingtonPost.com’s homepage do I see clear a message that registering or logging in will help me achieve MY goals. There’s a link to the Washington version of the homepage in the upper right corner, which has the best of intentions, but because I didn’t find it, it might as well not exist.

This is why Google rules the web. In Google’s world, the user is always right. Google knows that if users fail at their task, they will abandon Google in a heartbeat. Google’s dominance is EARNED, with every search, every click.

I saw Google’s Marissa Mayer give a talk at Web 2.0 a few years back about Google page load times — the talk had a narrowly focused, OCD quality to it. It was weird on the face of it. But this is how Google wins. By obsessing over user experience above all else.

This is also why Google punishes advertisers who try to trick users or provide a poor user experience. Because it reflects poorly on Google. And users don’t come back.

A commenter argued that I should have asked the Washington Post for a comment before publishing a critiquing of their site. My response was that in an analysis of a user experience with a web site, the publisher’s intent DOESN’T MATTER. Web users are utterly unforgiving. If it doesn’t work the way I want, I’m gone in a click. There is no other side to the story.

That’s brutal and, as the commenter asserted, rude and irresponsible. It just doesn’t seem fair.

But it’s also the reality of the web. Google understands this. If publishers want to compete, they need to accept this reality, swallow their pride, and realize that the user experience is EVERYTHING. Design on the web is not about ideals — all that matters is whether the user succeeds.

Before the web, having great content was enough. The irony of my critique of WashingtonPost.com is that it wasn’t a critique of content. They had GREAT content, when I actually found it — there weren’t really any editorial shortcomings. The critique had much more to do with software design than with editorial quality or judgment. News organizations need to add software user interface design to their core competencies.

Lesson for publishers: The web is more about applications than publications.

This is why it’s so damaging for news organizations to apply the standards of print publishing for design, content, and experience — they simply don’t apply on the web. The reality is that designers didn’t necessarily know if they were successful in print, because people kept subscribing to the newspaper anyway. But on the web, success or failure is evident with every click.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that user interface and user experience design are HARD. Even the best designer can’t always anticipate what users will do — or fail to do. Sites need to create a continuous feedback loop with users and improve their design and user experience over time.

WashingtonPost.com’s homepage has a far better design than many other newspaper websites, but its relative merits didn’t matter for my specific use case.

And to be clear, helping users succeed isn’t about pandering. My goal in going to WashingtonPost.com, as it frequently is, could be to find out what’s going on in the world. How I determine whether I’ve succeeded can be much more a function of the quality of editing and content. But when I want specific information, my criteria are far more narrow, and much more unforgiving.

According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, web users are actually getting MORE hyper-focused and. unforgiving

To remain relevant as a destination, news sites need to help me achieve ALL my objectives ALL of the time.

Just like Google.

UPDATE:

Google is inviting users to help them test out new features of Gmail. Can you imagine your average news site integrating users this deeply into their design process? I know that some have made meaningful efforts to test new designs, but Google keeps upping the ante on the embrace of users.