Random Mumblings

Engel Stadium: Down in the last inning

2010-03-13T00:12:37Z

It is great to see a group of people are trying to save Chattanooga's historic Engel Stadium, the second oldest minor league baseball stadiums in America and one that is on the National Register of Historic Places.

It's an 80-year-old, 5,997-seat monument to baseball history that seems to be locked in a "Twilight Zone" episode of ownership.

I was there in 2008 and took the above HRD photos. It was in bad shape then; I can only imagine what it's like with two more years of no maintenance and being a haunt of the homeless.

A story in the Chattanooga Times Free Press today offers a glimmer of hope of saving the park. Its supporters need to be wearing their rally caps.

Gabe's gaze into media

2010-03-12T20:45:07Z

Image by Thomas Hawk
via Flickr

I'm finding mediagazer really useful. It launched March 8 from Techmeme creator Gabe Rivera.

Thoughts?

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Knoxville video has gone viral

2010-03-12T00:39:51Z

TV reporter Gordon Boyd's unfortunate "technical difficulties" have gone "randomly viral" on YouTube.

The big social media blog Mashable linked to it today and the YouTube video has topped 137,000 views since being posted on March 5, 2010. Here is the take of the News Sentinel's Terry Morrow and also of Metro Pulse.

Make it a talker

2010-03-10T09:55:38Z

I want to give you more, not less. I don't think McDonalds will assume that as long as you keep it in a yellow box, people will buy a smaller, drier Big Mac. Yet our industry seems to think people are so obligated to buy it, we can make something smaller and drier and people will still buy it. It's crazy. You have to create something that, whatever's in it, people in town are all going to be talking about. That's the edge that we've lost.
Newspapers used to be seen as a utility. People used to ask, "Do you take the newspaper?" What we have to produce now is a product backed by marketing strategies that compels people to buy the product. It has to be of great value.

-- E.W. Scripps CEO Rich Boehne

That's from an interview in a Northern Kentucky University publication (hat tip to David Oatney). Boehne, who runs the company I work for, also talks about journalism stenography vs. storytelling and says that the traditional media of newspapers, radio and television were just the warm up for the connected electronic grid of information that is really just at its beginnings.

To those who have been listening to what Boehne has been saying, his emphasis on journalism that creates compelling content and embracing multiple platforms to deliver that information is not a new message, but it bears noting. To extend his fast food restaurant analogy a bit further, he's asking publishers and editors to upsize their committment to serving communities.

If we could only get you to screw off more at work

2010-03-10T02:29:28Z

... and at home, too, for that matter.

However, visitors to online newspaper sites don't spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day. Not surprisingly, advertisers are willing to pay more for their share of readers' attention during that 25 minutes of offline reading than during the 70 seconds of online reading. So even though online advertising has grown rapidly in the last five years, it appears that somewhat less than 5% of newspapers' ad revenue comes from their internet editions, according to the most recent Newspaper Association of America data.

There's a reason for the relatively short time readers spend on online news: a disproportionate amount of online news reading occurs during working hours. The good news is that newspapers can now reach readers at work, which was difficult prior to the internet. The bad news is that readers don't have a lot of time to devote to news when they are supposed to be working. Online news reading is predominately a labor time activity while offline news reading is primarily a leisure time activity. One of the big challenges facing the news industry is increasing involvement with the news during leisure hours, when readers have more time to look at both news content and ads.

-- Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist

What to do next

2010-03-09T16:43:10Z

Just got a copy of Mark Briggs' latest book Journalism Next: A Practical Guide to Digital Reporting and Publishing.

Some of efforts we have been doing at the Knoxville News Sentinel are highlighted.

He visited Knoxville during his research for the book. In fact, the book has a bit of a Knoxville flavor. In addition to some people at the News Sentinel, Briggs recognizes Patrick Beeson of the Knoxville-based E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group (SING) and Jim Stovall of the University of Tennessee in the acknowledgments.

Briggs is a frequent presenter at journalism and media conferences and previously wrote "Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive."

In this book, a cookbook of sorts of journalism and technology, Briggs tries to help readers connect the dots between technology and digital concepts and tools to the core principles of good journalism.

He does a good job. Give it a read.

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Burn the boats?

2010-03-08T14:55:14Z

Here are some excerpts from an Eric Schonfeld post on TechCrunch about an interview with Marc Andreessen.

Andreessen is the guy who co-authored the early Web browser, Mosaic, which later became the Netscape browser. He co-founded Ning.com and is investor in a slew of other Internet companies, including Digg and Twitter.

The "burn the boats" reference refers to an action Hernando Cortes ordered when he came to the New World. Andreessen's advice to traditional media companies, ironically, comes at a time when their boats are floating higher. The stocks of several have been on the rise, a few are at 52-week highs, driven by cost-cutting and an improvement in what had been anticipated in the ad market. But the view isn't particularly new for him; he's said as much a year ago.

From Schonfeld:

We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. "You gotta burn the boats," he told me, "you gotta commit." His point is that if traditional media companies don't burn their own boats, somebody else will.

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he's an investor in the Business Insider) are either. ""All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about."

Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, "We know where the market is and we are not going to go there." Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats--billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. "At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount," Andreessen acknowledges, "but shift happens." You'd have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.

I'm thinking Andreessen doesn't have a large investment position in any traditional media company.

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The Social Media thing

2010-03-07T18:50:35Z

I have done this post in awhile!

Be sociable:

Yahoo! at 15

2010-03-07T14:45:11Z

Image via CrunchBase

Missed the company's birthday by a few days, but Yahoo! was incorporated on March 1, 1995.

If you had bought in at the opening $24.50 back then and kept the stock through the 5 splits you would have 24 shares for each initial one. So you would have $377.52 as of close of trading today (3/2/2010) - given the current value of $15.73. Interestingly this would be a little over 15 times your initial investment. (Search Engine Land)

The years other Internet companies were started.

Amazon was founded in 1994.
Yahoo! was founded in 1995.
eBay was founded in 1995.
Craigslist was started in 1995 and incorporated in 1999.
Google was founded in 1998.
Flickr was founded in 2002.
MySpace was founded in 2003.
Skype was founded in 2003
Facebook was founded in 2004.
YouTube was founded in 2005.
Twitter was founded in 2006.
Fourquare.com was founded in 2009

I seem to enjoy marking Yahoo's birthdays. Here is what its home page looked like in 1996 from the WayBackMachine archive.

.

Letter from the epicenter

2010-03-06T16:39:16Z

Editor & Publisher Editor Mark Fitzgerald notes that with the departure of Rusty Coats from E.W. Scripps and the newspaper industry, "that's two Internet thinkers gone from the business in this young year. E&P's current Editor of the Year departed Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for a digital startup in D.C."

The Editor of the Year, of course, is Steve Buttry, whose wife, Mimi Johnson, perhaps, wrote the best account of his journey to the exit door.

If you add just more weeks to Fritzgerald's timeline, you also get to Rusty Coats' spouse, Janet Coats, who left her job as executive editor of the Tampa Tribune in December to move to Knoxville to be with her husband. She was an innovative and forward-thinking editor who guided the newspaper through a brutal reorganization.

The departures of these three and those that came before them may be a clue of the upheaval and human stress at the epicenters of change in the newspaper business, those stress points where the traditional business print model and what must be the future digital-based business model most forcibly collide.

The three are part of a growing list of people I've drawn inspiration and copied "best dish" recipes from for years who have exited the newspaper business. Most have retained their love of the news business or journalism, but have moved on from "the paper." They were the pioneers pushing, pulling, cajoling their organizations and the entire industry to move into the uncharteed future. For example, Rusty Coats' colleagues in the Newspaper Association of America's Digital Media Federation voted him their "Online Innovator" in 2005.

These, like those before them, began as print journalists and who became leading digital news thinkers and leaders and doers before moving on. They will be missed from an industry that badly needs them. Yes, there are young people in the newspaper industry with energy and drive and ideas and optimism for its future. There are a handful I could name in my own newsroom and several more scattered about the building, which houses both the Knoxville News Sentinel and the E.W. Scripps' newspaper division's corporate interactive group. Smart, talented, and committed people seeing a future.

But there's a grim reality as well. In a recent NewsU.org seminar Mark Briggs, who himself left newspapers for a news related startup, noted "culture eats strategy for lunch" and "when you bring change back to an organization, the organization's first instinct is to crush the change."

Many interesting things are happening at newspapers and they are evolving, but the incubators for the news forms of the future seem to be occurring outside the walls of traditional media companies. The really interesting things in digital news and information are happening everywhere from behemoth Google to small startups like Dave Cohn's Spot.Us or Michael van Poppel's BNOnews. It's harder to find truly innovative efforts at traditional media companies, particularly their flagship nameplates.

Among the start-ups, some of the innovation is ironically being nurtured from fortunes made in traditional media, like the Knight Foundation's initiatives. Janet Coats' new role is developing a program to fund innovative New Media journalism for the Patterson Foundation in Sarasota, Fla., which recently received a fresh $200 million in an estate settlement.

It will be interesting to see where these pioneers cut new trails. Best of luck to them. All us journalists need it.

(Update: Welcome Instapundit readers! If you like this blog, consider subscribing.)

Just another crazy reason for newspapers

2010-03-05T23:33:26Z

How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?
Click on the text link if the embedded video doesn't seem to want to play.

Collaborating with Pablo

2010-03-05T22:14:10Z

I've been using a project collaboration Web service called Teambox for several weeks. I was drawn to it, frankly, because it was free and seemed to meet my needs for a Web site relaunch project involving a committee of several people all in different cities.

The Twitter-like design is intuitive for me.

One night I sent an email about a minor bug and got nearly an immediate reply from a real person who signs his emails merely as "Pablo." Eventually, I learned more about Pable and his Teambox.

I discovered from reading the site's blog that it is not a Silicon Valley or New York startup, but is based in Barcelona, Spain. Yes, Barcelona.

The company just launched a pay plan, but continues to use a freemium model of a free level of service and various paid plans.

In a series of emails with the founder, I learned his name is Pablo Villalba and that the company has six employees with open source developers scattered about the world Spain, Canada, Germany, France, Russia and the United States.

"We started developing Teambox two years ago, when we needed a tool to manage our own projects as a startup," Villalba said. "At the beginning it was only an internal tool, and then it was released in Spanish. We're now the number 1 tool in Spain for project collaboration.

"Then we did a complete re-write to target twitter-like communication. So far, we've been funded by local Business Angels and we're planning to move to San Francisco to keep the startup running and growing."

Here's a brief Q&A:

Yours is a familiar story. Company starts on one idea and along the way a side idea before the product (like Twitter's development for example). How did you come to realize that the internal tool was really the more viable product?

In order to start a real business and stop selling our time and skills, we needed to have a product. We realized the moment somebody saw what we had and said, "I just paid 6000 euros for something worse than this". At that moment, we started learning about marketing and adapting what we had for the public.

How have your been marketing your product?

So far, simply word-of-mouth. Our users have been responsible for most of its success, blogging and tweeting about it.

Recommendations from trusted sources can do wonders!

If someone asks, 'How is this different from Basecamp?,' what is your answer?

Teambox is like Twitter for project management. It brings your team together in a horizontal communication structure.

Tools like Basecamp are great for client work, having a place where you can share results with them. Teambox is meant for ongoing projects, that evolve with time and where daily communication is important.

We offer some more features (auto-refresh, activity feeds, email notifications), and multi-language support.

Teambox is also developed under an open-source license, meaning you can download and host your own copy.

Who is the target market?

Developers, designers, consultants and marketers. From any country.

Is this your first startup?

First one was an e-learning academy. It's still profitable, but I'm not running it anymore.

Second one has to do with sustainable field work for power lines. We deploy cable for power towers with green helicopters. It reached break-even two months ago, and it's still growing. I only own 50% of this company, and I don't run it anymore.

Teambox is taking all my time now.

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A Pirate should take home Oscar booty

2010-03-05T17:07:39Z

I don't do Hollywood as a blog topic, but here's an exception. I do want Sandra Bullock to win an Oscar on Sunday. I really do.

Image by fabbriciuse via Flickr
Competing against Bullock for the best actress Oscar this year will be perennial favorite Meryl Streep, who won kudos for her portrayal of chef Julia Child in "Julie & Julia."

"If Meryl wins," Walters asked, "what will you say to her?"

"I'm gonna beat the s*** out of her!" exclaimed Bullock, without missing a beat. "No, I'm just kidding. Um, you know that."

"And thank you, censor," said Walters. (ABC News)

Why do I want Bullock to win? Blind Side is a great movie, of course, and ehe is superb, but Bullock is also another East Carolina University alum, so there you go. From Wikipedia:

She left East Carolina during her senior year in the spring of 1986, only three credits short of graduating, to pursue an acting career. She moved to Manhattan to pursue auditions and supported herself with a variety of odd jobs (bartender, cocktail waitress, coat checker, etc.)

Bullock (class of '86) later completed her course requirements. She was quoted in a 1990 university publication as saying: "At ECU I could go through everything a kid should go through in college. Some of my best memories are of East Carolina."

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Traveling between Rockefellers and rural North Carolina byways

2010-03-04T14:00:36Z

The remarkable story of Nancy Sweezy, the woman who may have just saved pottery making in Seagrove, N.C.

I had talked to her a couple of times, but knew little of her amazing life.

The National Endowment of the Arts named her a "national treasure" in 2006.

(Family photo via The New York Times)

Freeze-frame of the race for change

2010-03-04T10:29:29Z

Here is a link to a piece I wrote for the "Convergence Newsletter" of the Newsplex at the University of South Carolina. in the issue introduction, editor Matt McColl writes:

In looking at the newsrooms of 10 or 20 years ago and those of today, the comparisons are staggering. The process of making, gathering, buying and selling the news has changed dramatically, with everything from massive layoffs to totally integrated newsrooms.
This month, Jack Lail, the Knoxville News Sentinel's news innovation director, gives a firsthand account of his newsroom's evolution and the mental and emotional strains that came with it. Lail also analyzes how the Sentinel's staff has measured the effectiveness of its efforts.

Deadlines being what they are, this was written a few months ago; it's very much a freeze-frame of the race for change some miles back. We thought the transformation we began more than three years ago was gut-wrenching. It did involve tears and turmoil and topsy-turvy.

The changes unfolding just now under the moniker of Scripps 3.0, however, are larger in scope (organizing around four content types and centralizing copy editing and desk design functions for groups of newspapers) and more far-reaching (affecting not just our newsroom and newspaper, but all of Scripps' newspapers).

But one of the collective understandings gained from the process begun more than three years ago is that change is continuous and, by definition, different.

And easier said than accomplished.

(The photo above by phhotographer J. Miles Cary is of the Knoxville News Sentinel newsroom Visual Communication Center, or VCC, where metrics are posted every day. Our increase in the use of metrics in the newsroom and their impact is highlighted in the piece.)