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Walt Disney vs. the news industry: How bad management is killing newspapers and their websites

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:24:46 MST

By Robert Niles: I've attended many journalism conferences over the years, but our industry offers nothing like the event I attended this week. As many of you might know, my primary job these days is running a theme park news website that I founded nearly a decade ago. So this week I drove up to Las Vegas for the theme park industry's largest annual event, the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions' Expo.

What does this have to do with journalism, you ask? Nothing.

Which is everything. (Hang with me, okay?)

Wednesday afternoon, a source I've had a good relationship with introduced me to several former Walt Disney Co. employees who are now legends within the theme park industry. Each worked with Walt Disney himself, and had gathered for a panel discussion about Walt's management style. The question they were to answer was... what could Walt Disney's approach toward management teach today's industry leaders?

Plenty. And not just in the amusement business. Walt Disney's management philosophy contrasts sharply with contemporary management practices in the news industry, especially within "legacy" media companies. Might I suggest that difference in long-standing management tradition helps explain the sharp contrast between the recent financial performance of the Walt Disney Company and the newspaper industry? Disney today enjoys a market capitalization of nearly $55 billion, and its share price is up 13% over the past five years.

How many newspaper companies can report that?

So let's look at how Walt did things, and compare that with how things are done in the news business. (Full disclosure: My first full-time job was with the Walt Disney Co., and my mother, sister and wife have worked for Disney in the past, though none of us do now.)

Yes, if....

Harrison 'Buzz' Price, the consultant who suggested that Walt build Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. and Walt Disney World south of Orlando, Fla., described the difference between responding to an employee suggestion with a "No, because..." and a "Yes, if...."

Walt was a "Yes, if..." type of manager, Price said. Walt wouldn't shoot down anyone's idea with an immediate dismissal, but would challenge that employee to improve upon his idea.

Richard Sherman, the composer who, with his brother, wrote many of the Disney Co.'s most famous tunes, including "It's a Small World After All," told a story about a studio executive who disapproved of a gag in a movie the studio was making. The criticism made Walt furious, Sherman recalled.

"'I don't care if you don't like it,' Walt said. 'Tell me what we can do to make it better.'"

Walt created an environment where his employees ("cast members" in Disney lingo) felt welcomed, and empowered, to speak freely - to Walt and to co-workers. "You were one of the members of the team and were free to talk," Sherman said.

Ideas - the lifeblood of a creative business - could come from anyone in the company. And Walt often challenged employees to perform in areas where they'd had little or no formal training.

"You never know what you might find when you give someone an opportunity," said Marty Sklar, the UCLA journalism student Walt hired to write a newspaper for distribution in the Disneyland who ended up becoming president of Walt Disney Imagineering, the design company that oversees the development of Disney's theme park attractions.

There is no Walt Disney managing today's legacy news businesses. (Yes, ABC News is part of the Disney Co., but Disney acquired it long after Walt's death, and the news division does not share the same management tradition as the other divisions of the company which once reported to Walt.) Disney's management style has nothing to do with today's news business. Which I see as a huge problem for us.

Walt's management style empowered the company to cultivate fresh ideas. Yet management practice within today's news business has smothered creativity.

As a newspaper online producer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I'm quite familiar with the "No, because..." speech, especially on projects relating to editorial coverage and social media. Newspapers blew millions on new products designed to replicate print advertising models online ("Bona Fide Classifieds" anyone?), but actively kept employees from pursuing truly innovate online models, ones that engaged readers as active participants in online communities. To many legacy news managers today, "social media" means little more than flame wars in poorly designed and managed comments sections, appended to news articles that were republished from a print edition.

Ugh.

How many online news pioneers have left newspaper companies, either to work for online giants such as Yahoo! or to strike out on their own? Anthony Moor today spends his last day at the Dallas Morning News before leaving for Yahoo!, becoming the latest in a long line of pioneers to depart legacy media companies.

Consider Walt's amazing reaction to that critical studio executive. Rather than indulge the employee's negativity, Walt challenged him to do better. I've worked with too many editors who equated managing with dishing out abuse. Walt showed that a more positive management style didn't have to gloss over flaws. It simply demanded focus on what could be done better in the future, rather than looking back to place blame.

For the past decade, legacy news managers have indulged in the blame game. First, it was parasitic bloggers, then thieving search engines. But it was always someone else's fault that revenue was tanking and readers were finding alternate sources for information. The only time most news industry managers look to the future is to envision a way to bring back the past - with its information monopolies and fat profit margins.

"The one thing that [Walt] never let is forget was it is all about the audience," Sklar said. Yet following discussions within the industry today I hear much talk about the industry's bottom-line needs.

The audience doesn't care about saving newsroom jobs or keeping journalists in journalism. Nor should it. The people who provide true value to the audience will be the ones who will be able to earn money from that audience. That was true in Walt's day and remains true today. If people won't pay for your content online, maybe that should tell you the content you're delivering doesn't provide enough value to the audience.

Cutting back on producing better content won't make them more likely to pay, either. (The Disney Co. strayed from its traditional philosophy tried that approach in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and, ultimately, it cost then-CEO Michael Eisner his job.)

Losing money with a negative approach, and cutting back to preserve the bottom line in response has put the legacy news industry into a death spiral. And it can't find its way out, in part because managers never learned to see beyond defined models and roles. Newspapers segregated online staffs from their print reporters for nearly a decade, too rarely allowing employees to develop into the multi-talented programmer/reporters and journalist/entrepreneurs who power today's online news start-ups. By waiting too late to unleash their reporters as online community leaders, legacy news managers squandered their employer's market power in the new medium.

So... can legacy news organizations survive?

Well, I wouldn't be a very good follower of Walt's philosophy if I answered "no," would I?

Can legacy news organizations thrive online? Yes... if:

They diversify. The consolidation of the news industry has left it in the hands of too few managers - many of whom are simply too rich, and too near retirement, to feel the desperate need to do something creative that their former employees now feel. News companies should raise cash by selling many of their titles to new, local owners. With more owners in the industry, we have a better chance of finding innovative managers who can provide leadership to all.

New owners reconnect with the industry's pioneers. The news industry doesn't need to discover how to profit from social media. Or how to better use online publishing tools to crowdsource reports from within a community. Plenty of individuals have figured out those, and other, problems. Many of those successful publishers once worked for legacy news outfits. It's past time to call them home, and work together to find creative new models for journalism, the way Walt worked with his employees and contacts to build a new industry (with theme parks).

They put the audience's needs above all. It's tough to hear... but no one cares about us. It's our job to care about them, though. If we can find ways to deliver news and cultivate communities that engage, inspire and inform readers, they will find real value in spending their time and attention with us. And when value is delivered, value is received, whether that be through subscriptions, advertising, event admissions, donations or other forms.

I can't stress this enough: the economic model of journalism is not broken. What is broken is current news managers' perception of the value that they're delivering to the public.

Refocus on the audience - reconnect with them through all the available tools online, and managers once again can enjoy an accurate view of what their audience is getting, and how well they value it.

That's what Walt would do. That's what we need to do, as well.

Can Bottled Water Save Journalism Online?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:44:00 MST

By Brian McDermott: The October 20 survey was depressing and unsurprising news. Approximately 1,820 Brits out of 2,000 - that's 91 percent - told Lightspeed Research that they would never pay for news online.

"Online it should be free," said 19-year-old Shauna O'Brien, an economics major at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In the fatalistic gloom of the news industry, Shauna's words and the British survey reinforce what a long string of failures, from Times Select to Salon Premium, have shown anecdotally: people just won't pay for Web news. Paired with stubbornly low online ad revenues and a high demand for news online, many news organizations find themselves cornered into a budgetary free-fall. The conventional wisdom is that changing this equation is impossible.

"This is the Google Generation," wrote Wired editor Chris Anderson in his book Free, "and they've grown up online simply assuming that everything digital is free."

"Nothing will work," blogged NYU adjunct professor Clay Shirky. "There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke."

Perhaps. But could there be a lesson from something Shauna O'Brien does pay for?

Shauna buys a five-dollar pack of bottled water every few weeks. "My family has been buying water forever," she said. In that the O'Briens have a lot of company: bottled water is a 12 billion dollar per year industry in 2009, double its size in 2000. Tap water, of course, is free, and available almost universally in the U.S. In taste tests, people often can't tell the bottled brand from the tap.

Does the bottled water industry have any lessons for online journalism?

So how are these companies making so much money? Skillful marketing, says Dr. Chiranjeev Kohli, a professor of marketing at Cal State Fullerton, has had a "dramatic, significant impact" on bottled water profits.

"When they start pumping money into advertising, that's when the consumers buy into the concept�� or, if that's your perspective, they get sucked into it," he said. "This is one of the most fascinating case studies in marketing. This is a product that used to be free."

Bottled water marketers, he said, have used a cascade of claims to grow their business, from health benefits to purity to convenience.

Carol Elder has co-owned Famous Mineral Water Company in Mineral Springs, Texas, since 1999. She combines a firm belief in the quality of her Crazy Water mineral water ("More healthy than regular bottled water," she said) with clever guerilla marketing. You can find a YouTube video of hockey player Mike Modano plunging into a dunk tank sponsored by Crazy Water.

"Our company is growing exponentially," Elder said. Two years ago her company had six wholesale outlets; today it has over 700. In fact, the company is doing so well that they plan on using a growing marketing budget to buy ads in print magazines.

Could the successful and lucrative branding of bottled water work for free online content? I asked Rob Frankel, a branding consultant in Los Angeles.

"Absolutely," he said.

"How?" I asked.

"I can give it to you in two words: hire me," he said. "Branding is about creating the perception that you're the only solution to your prospect's problems. I haven't run into a problem yet that couldn't be solved."

For bottled water, marketers have created that perception. They succeeded in branding bottled water as a healthy, pure alternative to the tap. (Plenty of people, including Dr. Kohli, are skeptical of some of those claims). In other cases, bottled water marketers act as if they're selling convenience, not water. That's worked too.

Undoubtedly, getting people to pay for news content online will be a rough slog. "If it started out charging, then this wouldn't have been as much of an issue, said Dr. Kohli, who believes news organizations "can't charge now for what they've already been giving away for free."

But that doesn't mean they can't charge for new add-on services. Dr. Kohli, who grew up in New Delhi, said he would pay a dollar or two per month to the New York Times if they customized his page to have news from India appear front and center.

Apple, after all, will sell 50 million iPods this year� a fact impossible to untangle from the financial success of iTunes. With an Apple reader rumored to be imminent, perhaps news content producers can maneuver towards earning revenue from the hardware. Shauna O'Brien pays for music online, too, although she's downloaded it for free in the past. She said she buys five or six iTunes songs every month because it's "easier to purchase instead of researching and trying to find [the music illegally]."

Can journalists make this marketing work while still following high ethical principles? Radiohead could give their album In Rainbows away for free but charge for customers to see them perform in person. However, the proposed Washington Post "Salons" last summer created an ethical uproar. It's one place where the parallels between the other free-to-pay industries and journalism begin break down.

Certainly those parallels are not perfect. From the point of view of even the most optimistic subscription or micropayment model online, the revenue generated could not support the large staffs of nearly every newspaper in America.

The fact remains, however, that bottled water proves that the American public will pay for a product that they used to contentedly get for free.

This article is a thought experiment, not a full prescription for the future financial stability of newspapers. But it's worth remembering that logic is on the side of those who charge, if not empirical success.

"It's strange to me that people will pay 44 cents to mail a letter, but everybody thinks that email should be free," said Cat Armstrong Soule, a marketing PhD student at the University of Oregon who studies why consumer's refuse to pay online.

And if organizations can find a more stable way to pay for their fixed newsgathering costs- the NPR donation model, or better online ad rates- the added upside of charging for content could be significant. Online, "once you meet your fixed costs, it's all profits after that," Soule said. "So if someone pays you 50 cents, then that's better than nothing, right?"

Starting your news website: How to get the most promotional value from Twitter

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:22:23 MST

By Robert Niles: Thank you to everyone who sent along comments about my last piece, Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners. In response to a few comments, today I'm going more in-depth on how to most effectively use a promotional channel for a news website - specifically, how to get the most from Twitter.

A Twitter feed provides one more forum for you to show the best of your site's work to an audience. Ideally, the Twitter feed should encourage people to click to your website, as well as to use their Twitter feeds to spread the word about your feed (and your website and brand), to other readers you haven't attracted yet.

Again, these tips are designed for beginners to social media - journalism students or mid-career legacy media journalists who are making the switch to online publishing. If you are an online news veteran, well... click the comment button and share your best advice, too!

Assign a person to Tweet

Some news organizations have chosen to automate their Twitter feeds, treating it like another form of RSS feed. While there are tools available to populate a Twitter feed from an RSS feed, you'll have the flexibility you need to maximize attention to your tweets by putting a real, live person behind your Twitter account.

You need retweets

The key to eliciting clicks through Twitter is to extend your tweets beyond the reach of your followers. That happens when the retweet your posts to their followers, and so on, and so on. Retweeting powers your links exponentially. So how do you elicit retweets?

You don't have a 140-character limit

It's actually 135 characters, minus however many characters are in your Twitter handle. Why? Because that's the most characters you can use while still allowing someone to prepend "RT @yourhandle " to your post. Yes, Twitter's rolling out a more automatic retweet feature, but it won't be supported on the many clients and mobile applications through which many people access Twitter. So, for now, keep your tweets under your shorter character limits.

Retweet, to be retweeted

In order to be retweeted, your posts must first be seen. In addition to posting sharp, useful tweets, encourage influential Twitters to follow you by following them and retweeting their best posts. Don't get spammy, because that will only damage your reputation. Nor should you retweet posts that have been retweeted umpteen times already. But don't keep a great fresh post to yourself. Share it.

Follow those who retweet you

By watching what others who retweet choose to feature, you'll have a better idea what retweeters are looking for. That should help you sharpen your posts.

Never wait to tweet

As soon as a story hits your site, tweet the link. If people can get your news faster through other sources, such as e-mail alerts, Facebook pages or even others' Twitter feeds, they'll use those sources instead of your Twitter feed.

Do the TV tease

If you've ever taken a broadcast writing class, here's another place to apply what you learned. Write your tweets to encourage readers to click the links for more detail. Make your tweet a question, with an implication that the answer lies behind the included link. Strike passive voice and state-of-being verbs from your Twitter vocabulary. Use imperatives. Want people to click your Twitter links? Make them want to click.

Break news

Sometimes, you need to be so quick to tweet that you don't have time to get a post on the website first. Don't stress. Go ahead and post what you know in a tweet, then tweet again later with the link, when you have it. ("Here's the latest we've learned on today's blah, blah: http://bit.ly/....)

A picture is worth... another 140 characters

Arm yourself (or your staff) with Twitter-enabled camera phones. Then post photos to your tweets, when appropriate. Photos help place your readers at the scene and enable you to engage in visual storytelling. You can play some great verbal/visual games with cryptic Twitter captions, leading readers to click a photo link where the image will explain the original tweet.

Ask questions

The more ways you initiate engagement with your readers, the more likely they are to engage with you. Ask them questions through your Twitter feed. Elicit their eyewitness reports. Quiz them on the news. Ask them about their interests. Heck, you can even play games for prizes. (Think radio call-in contests here. It is a great way to build a followers list, fast.)

So, then, I will close this post with a question of my own: How are you using Twitter to drive traffic to and interest in your publication?

No revenue model for news? Labor steps up

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:44:00 MST

By David Westphal: At the recent Harvard session on new business models for news, I offered an off-the-beaten-path idea to the question of who will pay for the news. One answer, I said, was non-news organizations: NGOs, trade associations, businesses, governments and labor unions.

Yes, labor unions. There are indications of a back-to-the-future trend in labor funding for the news. Just in the last several months, two labor unions in southern California have provided six-figure funding for very different kinds of operations - Voice of Orange County, an independent news site working toward a January launch, and Accountable California, a direct arm of Local 721, Service Employees International Union.

The idea that legitimate journalism might flow from "special-interest" labor money would have seemed a non-starter to many of us not long ago. How could journalists provide fair and unfettered accounts when their paychecks were the product of an organization with a clear political agenda? In fact, though, Voice of Orange County and Accountable California are simply a revival of a kind of journalism that permeated American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - labor-backed newspapers.

A few months ago I stumbled on a website kept by the Kansas State Historical Society that listed labor newspapers published in Kansas during that period. There were 95 of them, going by names like Anti-Monopolist, Labor Champion, People's Vindicator and Vox Populi. Theirs was an era when local markets often had many newspapers, not just one, and each reflected a constituency like labor or business, or one political party or the other, that provided audience and sustenance.

There were plenty of arguments then about what constituted journalism, what was accurate, what was fair. We're certainly headed for more of them now now, with a likely proliferation of news hybrids that may make the previous era look monolithic by comparison. But don't discount the potential of newsgathering backed by labor (or myriad other interests) to be the essence of journalism. There's already powerful evidence that the two can happily coincide, and it's hard to see why the trend won't continue.

When I posted notes from my Harvard remarks last week, NYU's Jay Rosen pointed me to David Beers, editor of The Tyee of Vancouver, British Columbia. I hadn't realized how long Beers has been toiling in the world of investigative reporting backed in part by labor. He started The Tyee in 2003, with $190,000 in initial funding provided by labor. Quite quickly, he diversified his revenue stream, which now also includes philanthropy, advertising, audience contributions and small grants from the government.

The result is an award-winning nonprofit that's investigative and progressive at heart, and focuses on the civic life of Western Canada. Beers' budget this year is about $550,000, and his site last month reached more than 160,000 unique visitors.

"It's a fantastically hopeful story," said Beers. "And no, we haven't solved the business-model problem. But we do terrific journalism that has impact and that journalists can take heart from."

Beers, in fact, thinks labor won't be the only special interest that will be funding news gathering in the future. "There are thousands of debates going on that people, institutions can't afford to lose. They need venues for these debates. They have money. And they need journalism and journalists."

(Note: I'll write more about The Tyee in a subsequent post.)

THE VOICE OF ORANGE COUNTY
The business model for the nonprofit Voice of Orange County is fundamentally the same as The Tyee's: Start with seed money from a labor union, add other revenue streams, and produce independent reporting. In the case of the Voice, though, supporters want to ramp up immediately. Norberto Santana, the Voice's editor, said the $140,000 contributed by the Orange County Employees Association will be supplemented by private donations that could put the first-year budget north of $600,000. (Eventually, Santana said, the site hopes to diversify through advertising, foundation grants, NPR-style memberships and perhaps premium content).

Santana said the Voice of Orange County will differ from The Tyee in one other respect: Unlike The Tyee's progressive orientation, Voice will be neutral ideologically. However, he acknowledged that the mission of doing strong accountability reporting in an overwhelmingly Republican area like Orange County may make it look like Voice leans solidly left.

In any case, Santana isn't concerned that the labor money baked into the Voice's business plan will skew its coverage. "My only orientation is aggressive watchdog coverage of the local scene," he said. "What does labor get out of it? Only the guarantee that city hall's feet will be held to the fire, the same way we'll hold their fee to the fire. But they know they're not getting a labor shill out of me."

The Voice will begin with a staff of 6-8, Santana said, and plans to partner extensively - with public broadcasting, with local and topic-based bloggers and with NGOs like the League of Women Voters. Current plans are to translate significant pieces of the site into Spanish and Vietnamese.

ACCOUNTABLE CALIFORNIA
What do you call investigative work that is written by a union staffer and is part of the union's strategic agenda? Can that be journalism? Is the writer a journalist?

I put those questions to Ted Rohrlich, former award-winning investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times who now is research coordinator for the SEIU local's research arm. Six months ago it launched a website called Accountable California, whose aim is to produce investigative reporting about the government and its contractors.

Here's Rohrlich's answer: "I still think of myself as a journalist," he said. "But I also think of myself as a staff member of a labor union with strategic goals. So I think skepticism of my work is not inappropriate. But this exercise is pointless if it doesn't have credibility."

Here's one way in which his role is different. Rohrlich's initial investigation was about the nonprofit Tarzana Treatment Center, which gets 85 percent of its money from the government. According to his reporting, the treatment center spent $22 million in government funds over the last 11 years on inappropriate benefits for company insiders. Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times ended up beating Rohrlich on some of the story. But here's the difference. Rohrlich's story wasn't just for public discussion; it was a dossier that the union took to the attorney general's office, where it's demanding action.

"The Los Angeles Times would have the chips fall where they may," said Steve Askin, who hired Rohrlich and heads the union's overall research effort. "What we did was a detailed report that says to the government: This money should be paid back."

Askin said part of the rationale for Accountable California is to respond to the vacuum that's developed in coverage of labor issues. Labor beats used to be standard fare at metropolitan newspapers; today they're almost non-existent. But he said the SEIU local has two other more specific goals: putting a face on public employees more favorable than the one people normally see, and acting as a counter-weight against the government.

Mixing journalism and an agenda like that would be in the realm of high treason at the Los Angeles Times, but Rohrlich said he's perfectly at home with his role, and comfortable in asking the public to buy it.

That's not journalism as I practiced it, but that doesn't mean it won't have its own validity. We're almost certain to see more of it.

Update: Josh Kalven has flagged me about the Progress Illinois site he edits. The site launched in 2008 under sponsorship of the SEIU Illinois State Council.

Time for newspapers choose between the DEC or IBM model

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:12:00 MST

By Dave Chase: It is painful to watch the steady decline of newspapers. For some, I expect we're about to see the dead cat bounce as the economy turns around. This will only delay the inevitable. The challenge they face at this late date is immense but surmountable.

Their near death experience is similar to what Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) and IBM faced. Only IBM remains a blue chip market leader. However, IBM completely reinvented itself from a "big iron" mainframe and minicomputer driven company to the market leader in I.T. related services. There were some valuable assets that they were able to leverage but it took an outsider like Lou Gerstner to make that wholesale change happen.

Meanwhile, the vanguard company of the minicomputer era (DEC) wasn't able to make that shift and sold at a deep discount to Compaq (who in turn was bought by HP). It's important to recognize that IBM and DEC were in highly competitive markets. DEC along with countless other mainframe and minicomputer companies were unable to transform themselves and are mere footnotes of history. In contrast, the newspapers have largely operated in non-competitive markets by comparison. It will take a true newspaper leader and visionary to make this happen as opposed to someone just milking the cash cow until it withers and dies.

The "good news" for newspapers is their stocks are so far in the tank that there's relatively little risk (easy for me to say!) in them taking some calculated risks. I didn't work for IBM but my impression is they allowed the services group to have true independence from the legacy businesses IBM had. I was closer to a couple similar situations -- how Microsoft handled Xbox and Expedia -- so I will expand on those examples. I would argue that Microsoft's only had two real new, stand-alone successes in the last 10 years - Xbox and Expedia.

While Microsoft has yet to fully recoup its investment, few would argue that Xbox hasn't been a commercial success. In the meantime, it is generating a year by year profit and more importantly from Microsoft's vantage point is having a coveted spot in millions of consumers' living rooms.

In roughly a parallel timeframe, Expedia was incubated inside Microsoft but was running into some issues being inside of Microsoft. Rich Barton was trying to run Expedia as a company 100% focused on achieving success within the travel sector, however periodically would run into stumbling blocks. For example, organizations like United Airlines, Hilton Hotels, and countless other travel companies didn't like what Expedia was doing to the travel market. The problem for Microsoft was that these companies were big customers of Microsoft's software and it created internal conflict. Eventually, Rich made a compelling case why Expedia should spin out of the company and they did so. Microsoft made a nice return by selling its stock in Expedia in the public market. Unfortunately, there have been virtually no Rich Bartons in the newspaper industry.

How did they do it and what can newspaper companies learn from this?

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were smart enough to accede to the request of the leaders of Xbox and Expedia to have separation from the main company. That had three main dimensions:

Physical separation. Both the Xbox and Expedia teams were located several miles from Microsoft's main campus.
Brand separation. Other than very light branding (e.g., in the footer of their website in a subtle gray font), you see little or no mention of Microsoft in Xbox. Expedia became a fully independent brand.
Technology separation. A pivotal early decision was to not tie Xbox to the Windows platform which is a general purpose operating system rather than something that is focused purely on gaming. I wasn't privy to Expedia's development details but I don't think the technology platform was a big factor one way or another.

Smartly, both organizations did leverage at least three things from the parent.

They hired in great talent in to their teams. Just as important, they weren't forced to bring people on to their teams.
They utilized the company's capital to build big new businesses.
They leveraged the distribution capability of the parent. In Xbox's case, they didn't have to establish all new channels of distribution. In Expedia's case, they had a carriage agreement with MSN that gave them a huge infusion of traffic to build their business.

Is it too late for newspapers? No more than it was for IBM in the early 90's when many wrote them off. Will their leadership and investors have the guts to do it? I'm hearing rumblings from a few. Most are half-hearted attempts. Fortunately, there are some capital efficient ways of doing this. For example, with as many as 20,000 hyperlocal sites having formed in the last few years, a smart partnering strategy, limited capital and a distribution partnership would be a way to start.

TwitterTim.es: Personalized news done right?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:05:00 MST

By Eric Ulken: I'm not ashamed to admit it: The first time I saw Twitter, I thought, "What's the point?" Maybe you did too, or maybe you're just more perceptive than I am. Even Twitter's founders have said they didn't know exactly what it was when they started working on it. (Biz Stone: "If anything we sort of thought it a waste of time.")

For every Twitter enthusiast, there was, I suspect, a point of realization that this thing could actually be incredibly useful. Some have cited the plane-in-the-Hudson story as their aha! moment. For me, it was less of a moment and more of a gradual understanding. I began to see its potential as a real-time information source when I first learned of a few important news items -- both big international stories and news of a more personal nature -- through Twitter.

I began following like-minded people for the interesting links they would post. Before long, information overload took hold. I tried to cull my follow list so I could read everything. I worried I would miss something. Finally, I learned to embrace the firehose and not try to process the whole stream.

But still I thought there must be a better way to separate signal from noise. And then I noticed that the most interesting and important items were appearing maybe three or four times in my Twitter feed. Since then, I've wished for a way to mine my feed for those links.

Last week I heard about TwitterTim.es and was thrilled to find it does exactly what I wanted. I spoke with Maxim Grinev, the project's technical lead, about TwitterTim.es and where it's headed.

How does TwitterTim.es work?

We look at the tweets that your friends send, and also tweets that friends of your friends send. So, first circle and second circle. And then we extract links from those tweets. Usually links are shortened, so we get the long versions. Then we group by links and calculate how many times each link is posted by your friends and friends of friends to built your personalized "newspaper". (NB: Links posted by friends get more weight than links posted by friends of friends.) Right now, every "newspaper" is updated about every half an hour. It can be updated more frequently, but we don't want to stress Twitter.

How did the project start?

As usual, it was a side project. We had been working on some semantic search technology. It's about using semantic relationships extracted from Wikipedia to organize other data (blogs, news, etc.). As we were working on this, we started using Twitter. We didn't have any idea in advance of what we wanted to build. We just analyzed how people used Twitter, what information could be detected. We understood that Twitter is not only good for spreading news, but it's also a good voting system. So we can collect and analyze how many times links are voted on in Twitter. Analyzing this data, we can understand how important this link or this event is.

Who is working on the project, and what's your business model?

We have 5 people working on this project: 4 developers located in Moscow, and one business guy in San Francisco. We are computer scientists, and we specialize in data management. We are self-funded; there are no external investors. As concerns the business model, we are considering various partnership schemes and selling advertising on TwitterTim.es but we have not decided on anything yet. Now we are mainly focusing on attracting users.

Will TwitterTim.es take advantage of Twitter's new lists feature?

Right now we don't do anything with lists. We are thinking about how to incorporate this. One of the options could be to generate newspapers based on some list. So if you have a list of people, you can collect the second-circle friend-of-friend information and build a newspaper for a list.

What other things are in the offing for TwitterTim.es?

We are currently collecting feedback from users. Usually our users request relatively small features -- for example, they want to improve the retweet feature. We are going to handle this feedback and add features. In addition to that, we are planning to extend the system in two ways: First, we want to extend the sources that are processed -- so, in addition to Twitter, we are thinking about collecting posts and links from Facebook, mainly, and maybe Friendfeed. Second, we are going to allow ranking of news by global popularity. So you would have two different tabs: The first tab is personal news. The second tab is global news. In this sense we will compete with Tweetmeme.

What are your thoughts on the future of news?

I can't say how it will be. I can just share my own experience, and I think it's typical: Since I started using Twitter, I've nearly stopped collecting news from other sources. Before, for example, I watched news on TV and read more magazines. Now I get nearly all my news from Twitter. I'm quite confident that if I read Twitter, I will not miss some important piece of news. So if a war has started, or there's some disaster, it will be mentioned at least once in my Twitter timeline.
I have heard a lot of discussion about media sources dying -- The New York Times has problems, etcetera. Of course, I think that all these major newspapers and magazines are very important, because journalists have the ability to travel places and work at this full-time. But with regard to selecting what I will read, I'm not going to visit The New York Times website, for example. If there's some interesting and important article posted there, I will find it in my Twitter timeline.
Also, by the way, there's an interesting idea we're looking at: When you visit The New York Times website, for example, you might be interested in getting all the links published there, but ranked according to the judgment of your friends and friends of friends. So it's the same as TwitterTim.es, but restricted to a single source -- The New York Times, in this case. We are talking to one major newspaper about this.

Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:54:00 MST

By Robert Niles: My post today is intended for students, mid-career journalists or anyone else thinking about starting an online news site, but without the faintest idea of how to start.

Here is your guide and checklist.

Now, I'm assuming that you already know how to report and how to write. I'm not covering that. Nor will I be getting into more advanced issues surrounding how to manage a business that includes contractors, freelancers and employees. Those are topics for other days. Today's post simply provides a check-list of technical tools that you'll need to get a basic, one-person news site on the Web, to lay a foundation for future expansion and success.

A domain

Before you do anything else, establish your brand. The Internet domain you select and register will be the brand of your website, so it should be something that:

Accurately describes or echoes the site's content
Is easy to remember, and to spell

If this is going to be a one-person website, or a website driven by you and your personality, make it yourname.com. Or, if you want a little extra flexibility, something like, oh, yourlastnamepost.com.

The most popular domain name registrar is GoDaddy.com. I've used them, without problems. Register the domain, but don't opt for any extras, such as hosting or an e-mail account. You can find sources for those later.

A blogging tool

Start with a blog. Not an online newspaper, or a discussion forum, or a wiki or any other potential form of online content. Go with the blog. It's the easiest way to start, and requires the least amount of tech knowledge, as well as minimal change to your writing style.

(At least initially. Over time, you'll find that you use a very different voice for blogging than for traditional newsroom writing. But I will address that topic in a couple weeks. Let's leave it aside, for now.)

The comments that readers submit to your blog will provide your first steps toward building an all-important community of readers. But, at first, you must be their leader, eliciting their input through the posts of your blog.

Here is your first choice: I'm giving two free, and fine, blogging tools to choose from: Blogger and WordPress.com. For what it's worth, WordPress also offers a more powerful publishing platform, a piece of software that would need to be installed on the server that hosts your website. You're not at that level yet, but if you're looking toward the future, that WordPress tool provides one option for developing a more robust website than a simple blog.

Blogger, on the other hand, is part of Google, and hooked into the many services and widgets that the search engine giant now provides.

Again, I've used both. I like the simplicity of Blogger, but appreciate many of WordPress' features as well.

One important point. The account name that you select for your blog on either of these services must be the same as your domain name (without the .com part). If you can't get that account name on one service, you need to go with the other. If you can't get it on either, you should select a different domain name. (As soon as you can, you will need to arrange to have your blog publish to your domain name, but that's not necessary to start. You just need to have control of the domain name.)

A promotional channel

Now that you have a brand and a blog, you'll need a way to promote them, and to start connecting with your emerging community of readers. Create a Twitter account for your website (ideally, using that same brand name), then a Facebook "fan page" for the site. You'll use the Twitter account and posts to the Facebook page's wall to let followers and fans know about new posts to your blog.

But don't limit yourself to only posting when you have something new on the blog. Use these services to engage in thoughtful banter and conversation with your readers, and for short observations that don't merit a complete blog post. Twitter's also a great service to use when breaking news or covering a live news event.

A way to track promotional clicks

When posting URLs to Twitter and Facebook, first convert them to shorter URLs using the bit.ly service. First, it will save you valuable characters in trying to stay under Twitter's 140-character limit. Even more importantly, bit.ly provides data on how many people clicked your link, and what other Twitter users "retweeted" it. You'll find that information wonderfully valuable in evaluating how well individual posts resonated (or didn't) with your readers.

Readership metrics

You will need to know how many people are reading your blog, as well as where they are coming from and how they are using your site. Readership metrics are essential. Blogger can hook you up with Google Analytics and WordPress.com includes its own traffic-tracking tool. But I would sign up for Google Analytics using either service, and for Quantcast's tool as well. You'll post a tracking code into your site's template which will allow these services to count your readers, and gather a bunch of other useful information that will help you gauge the power of the content on your site.

Quantcast provides somewhat simplistic demographic data to publishers using its tracking code that, when combined with Google Analytics data, can give you a helpful first look at the makeup of your audience.

An advertising network

Now that you have a place to publish, a way to reach people, and a method of tracking them, it's time to think about money.

Join an ad network so that someone else can sell ads into designated spaces on your website, so that you won't have to worry about this important step initially. In the future, ad networks will fill space that you (or an ad rep) do not sell directly to advertisers.

Your options here are Google AdSense and Microsoft's pubCenter. AdSense should come as an easy plug-in option if you are running a Blogger blog. Otherwise, you'll need to sign up and add the code yourself. Microsoft's stirring up the market with its new Bing search engine and might yet develop some lucrative market share.

You'll need to watch your analytics with a sharp eye to optimize your content for these services, if you want to make any significant amount of money from them. But it can be done. (Full disclosure: I make about mid-five figures annually from AdSense income. I stopped using pubCenter before Microsoft introduced Bing, but am keeping my eye on trying it again in the future. Still, I did make several hundred dollars a month from Microsoft when I used its network.)

Business cards

Now, we go offline. You'll need a handful of business cards - with your name, brand, e-mail address, phone number and URL - to hand out to sources, readers and potential advertisers. (You won't necessarily know which of those categories the folks you meet will fit in, by the way.) You can go with a freebie or low-cost online service such as VistaPrint (beware of its attempts to sign you up for extras and subscription services you don't want or need), but if you're starting a local news website, you'll do far better for building your community relationships if you go with a local printer.

Ideally, with one who might want to advertise with you at some point in the future. ;-)

Bookmarked production widgets

Your site, and your business, is up and publishing now. So let's start adding some functionality to the site. Here are some handy services and widgets to bookmark, which will help you produce more engaging content for your website.

Photo editing: Picnik or Photoshop.com
Photo hosting: Picasa
Video hosting: YouTube
Quick reader vote polls: Twiigs

An ad server

An ad network will get you started, but if you want long-term viability (and you are not going the non-profit route), you'll need to sell ads directly to advertisers. And when you sell an ad, you'll need a way to display it on your site, tracks its impressions and its click-throughs.

Google AdManager is a free ad server that runs on Google's servers, so there's little tech work involved in set-up. You can even use it to have AdSense sell your remnant inventory, so you can replace the AdSense code in your site's templates with AdManager's.

A rate card

Of course, to sell ads, you need to know how much to charge. A simple rate card is a PDF or .doc file that lists the ad sizes your site's design supports and how much you charge for each 1,000 impressions (called a "CPM") in those slots. Make it easy on your advertisers my offering simple packages in round dollar amounts (e.g. 10,000 impressions for $50, 20,000 impressions for $100, etc.)

What to charge? Take a look at the CPM you are earning from AdSense or pubCenter (the "eCPM"). Go with the higher figure. Then assume that Google or Microsoft is taking about a third of what they charged the advertisers for those ads. So multiply your eCPM by 1.5, then round up to the next dollar. That's a solid starting point for how much you should charge. Many publishers charge more on the rate card, then discount down to whatever level then need to to make the sale.

Your first rate card sheet also should include a few nuggets of positive information about your website, such as its monthly readership, whatever demographics you have and a testimonial or two. That information can help sell potential advertisers on the value of running ads on your site.

For the future: A more advanced development platform

If all goes well, the quality of your reporting, your writing and your engagement with your readers will result in traffic swelling and readers clamoring for new ways to interact with you, and with each other, on the website.

At that point, you'll need a more sophisticated publishing system than a simple blog. You'll need to move your site off Blogger's or WordPress.com's servers, onto another Web host, where you can run a more advanced content management system ("CMS") such as Drupal or the more newsroom-specific Django.

Nothing to worry about now, but something to keep in mind.

For the future: An advisory board

Ultimately, your success as an online publish will be measured by your success as a community organizer and leader. Great community leaders do not try to go it alone. When you've made some loyal friends on the site, it's time to start thinking about formalizing those relationships by asking a select few to become an advisory board.

Lean on those board members for feedback on your vision for the site, as well as for leadership within the site's community, by posting to the site, setting an example for other readers and referring you to potential story sources and advertisers.

You might start this effort on your own, but if it is to succeed, you will need the help of many others. Plan for that day, so that you will be ready when it comes.

Does your site really need to be in Google News?

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:23:11 MST

By Robert Niles: With print newspaper circulations crashing faster than the reality-TV hopes of Balloon Boy's family, you could forgive newsroom managers for chasing every available source of new readers. For many online publishers, affiliated with newspapers or not, the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the Google News index.

Get in Google News, and links to your stories will be e-mailed to millions of Google's news alert subscribers, whenever your stories hit the right keywords. Post a hot story quickly, and you could end up on Google News' highly clicked front page.

But is inclusion in that index or other search engines' news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I'm going to argue... no. (Well, at least it's not worth making a fuss over.)

Why on Earth wouldn't a news site want the higher public profile and increased traffic that inclusion in Google News could bring? Look, if your site's goal is to appeal to a global audience, especially ones looking for news related to specific keywords and phrases, you need to be in Google News and should do everything you can to get included. If you are CNN, or the New York Times, you need to be in Google News and optimizing your pages to perform well within it.

But what if you aren't looking to reach a global audience? What if your site's focus is local, as are the readers your advertisers want to reach? What if you are trying to build an online community, cultivating ongoing relationships with a core of contributing readers?

"Drive-by" visitors from search engines inflate your site's traffic stats, but they don't help you reach those goals. Worse, traffic numbers plumped by infrequent visitors clicking news alerts create a distorted picture of your website's health and viability.

Many newspaper executives might take some comfort in the large number of readers visiting their newsrooms' websites. But let's look at how engaged those visitors are with these websites.

Or, more accurately, how they are not.

An Editor & Publisher report on September 2009's Nielsen Online report on the United States' top 30 online newspaper websites (by most most unique visitors) showed that the mean amount of time spent for that month on one of those websites was just nine minutes and 22 seconds.

That's a tick under 19 seconds per day on average, if you considered each website visitor the equivalent of a daily subscriber. I doubt that even the speediest reader can get through many articles - much less any advertisements - in under 19 seconds.

So, clearly, online visitors are not as valuable to today's news websites as daily subscribers to the local newspaper were a generation ago. Diminishing engagement with their audiences, whether reflected in lower print circulation numbers or by less time spent on the website, is what's driving legacy news businesses' failure to hold on to their once-lucrative advertising market share. No one's going to pay top dollar to reach an audience which isn't there.

Start-up local news publishers must act smarter. Work to build your website by developing local community contacts, not fattening the visitor logs with out-of-market visitors driven in by search engines. Use social media to encourage current readers to invite new ones. Build content and report stories that local readers will want to recommend.

Looking over the metrics for the websites I manage, I see a clear pecking order in the amount of time spent on the site versus the way a visitor accessed the site. Here's that list, from most time to least:

People referred to the site via an e-mail forwarded by a friend or colleague
People searching for the site's name in a search engine
People accessing the site via bookmark or direct-typed URL
People accessing the site via a link in its e-mail newsletter
People accessing the site via its Facebook page or Twitter feed
People accessing the site via a direct link from another, non-search website
People accessing the site via a link on another social bookmarking site (i.e. Digg or StumbleUpon)
People clicking from Google News
People searching for a term in a search engine

For what it is worth, there's a cliff-like drop-off in time spent between the social bookmark links and the Google News and search engine referrals. In my experience with my websites, people whose initial visit to the site is driven by a referral from a friend or colleague, or from searching for the site's name in a search engine, spend far more time on the site and are far more likely to return than those referred by a search engine.

As an industry, we've got to develop a deeper reading relationship with our audience. From the data I've seen, the shortest route to that goal lies in building traffic through human connections, not search engines and their news pages.

Okay, so traffic from search engines isn't helping build a loyal audience for community-focused publications. But it can't hurt, right?

Maybe it can. Forgive me while I drift into speculation here, but I'll do this as an appeal to readers who might be more connected with the "dark arts" of Internet marketing than I am. Of the sites I've run over the years, the ones included in the Google News index have encountered a far, far greater incident of spam attempts in comments and other UGC features than those not included in the index.

And that's not explained simply by site popularity, either. My two biggest family-owned websites are not in the Google News index, but OJR is. And OJR elicits exponentially more comment spam submissions than the other two sites, despite the fact that those sites receive around five to 10 times the daily traffic of OJR. (It's gotten so bad that we now hold all comments not from site authors for approval before posting on OJR.)

If you're ready to dismiss that observation as a single data point (and you should be), allow to me suggest that others may be experiencing the same. Speaking with other Web publishers, I've heard those whose sites are in the Google News index report getting hit with platform-independent comment spam at a far higher rate than those whose sites are not. (This isn't to say that sites not in Google News don't suffer spam attacks. The highly popular sites not in the Google News index tend to be blogs and forums running off-the-shelf publishing software, which from time to time attract spam attacks targeted specifically at those publishing systems. But those attacks are aimed at the publishing platform more than at the individual websites.) These submissions are typically human-generated, and include link spam either in the comment itself, or on the reader's site profile page.

Are spammers targeting sites in the Google News index? I haven't spent enough time with the black hats of the 'net to know, despite my suspicion. Consider this my appeal to those who have to provide an answer.

In the meantime, from a system administration stand-point, I want my website to be well-known to people in its target community... and completely off the radar of spammers and search engine black hats. To me, that means:

selecting a publishing system with an enthusiastic support community that's aggressive about security,
making sure that my site's home page uses sound search engine optimization techniques to appear at the top of results pages for my site's name and its community name,
and spending my energy to cultivate connections within my target community, offline and on, staying clear of link swaps, black hat SEO and becoming a spammer myself.

Getting into Google News? (Or Yahoo! News or Bing's news page?) Meh. Put that at the bottom of your priority list. As an online news publisher, you have better ways of building your readership community. Focus on those, instead.

Wanted: Less rhetoric, more critical thinking about 'The Reconstruction of American Journalism'

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:27:00 MST

By Tom Grubisich: The new report "The Reconstruction of American Journalism" by Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson is one more example of what what's wrong with the debate about the future of journalism. The Columbia Journalism School-sponsored report shovels out overviews, conclusions and recommendations by the pound, but with barely a few grams' worth of critical thinking. Jan Schaffer, in her reaction to Downie and Schudson, said it best: "Darts for the mile-high, inch-deep reportage." Schaffer, who is executive director of American University's J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter and business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, zeroes in on the report's fatal weakness:

"If we really want to reconstruct American journalism, we need to look at more than the supply side; we need to explore the demand side, too. We need to start paying attention to the trail of clues in the new media ecosystem and follow those 'breadcrumbs.' What ailing industry would look for a fix that only thinks of 'us,' the news suppliers, and not 'them,' the news consumers? I don't hear from any of those consumers in this report."

Alan D. Mutter, whose Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, provides a good share of the small amount of rigorous, economic-centered thinking that's gone into the journalism crisis, also gave a mostly scathing review to "The Reconstruction of American Journalism."

Downie and Schudson come to their drastic recommendation of a "National Fund for Local News" using the kind of sleeves-rolled-up but shallow analysis that typically informs newspaper editorials on big issues (e.g., health care reform and the U.S. role in Afghanistan) A typical sentence from the report: "With appropriate safeguards, a Fund for Local News would play a significant role in the reconstruction of American journalism." What are "appropriate" safeguards? What are the con's as well as the pro's of letting the federal government, through funding decisions that are made by appointed "national boards" and "state councils," "play a significant role in the reconstruction of American journalism"?

Downie and Schudson focus, appropriately, on the threat of continued editorial staff downsizing to journalism's "'accountability reporting that often comes out of beat coverage and targets those who have power and influence in our lives�not only governmental bodies, but businesses and educational and cultural institutions.'" But creating a spider-web-like network of grant-dispensing boards sets the stage for all kinds of abuses that, ironically, would provide fodder for accountability reporting.

Missing from the Downie-Schudson report are the basic elements of critical thinking:

Digging for causes instead of reacting to symptoms.
Measuring as well as marshaling evidence.
Recognizing all the stakeholders.
Asking "why" questions.
Testing conclusions and recommendations.

Perhaps it's unfair to hammer the Downie-Schudson report too hard. It's symptomatic of what passes for analysis of the crisis in American journalism. We get too much rhetoric. The rhetoric is often well phrased � after all, it's usually written by journalists � but we don't need more rhetoric, however polished it may be. What we need is more case-method and other critical examination. Journalist/teacher/consultant Jane Stevens pointed the way with her studies of three community sites � CapitolSeattle.com, QuincyNews.org and WestSeattleBlog.com. Stevens and her co-author Mark Poepsel, a University of Missouri School of Journalism PhD candidate, take a close look at what the sites are doing on the journalistic, community and revenue fronts. The studies, if they are expanded to other websites, may lead to a flexible business model that can be tailored to work in a variety of communities � without federal money being doled out by national and state boards packed with patronage appointees.

(Stevens, by the way, gives Newsweek a well-deserved whack for its recent superficial take on the future of community journalism, which came to optimistic conclusions, but for the wrong reasons.)

Maybe the Downie-Schudson report will provoke enough tough reactions � on top of Schaffer's and Mutter's � that, cumulatively, will prod journalism's practitioners and thinkers finally to start thinking critically about a crisis that won't be solved with rhetoric, no matter how elegantly and urgently it's framed.

Where does news come from?

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:19:00 MST

By Nikki Usher: Time after time again, people who want to save newspapers claim that newspapers are the primary source of news. But is their claim actually founded on anything other than self-importance?

I love newspapers. I want them to survive, in some form, but it's important to investigate where the truth in one of the linchpins of the "newspapers need to survive argument" comes from.

Tom Rosenstiel explained this before the Joint Economic Committee hearing on "The Future of Newspapers: The Impact on the Economy and Democracy," on September 24, 2009:

In every community in America I have studied in 26 years as a press critic, the newspaper in town has more boots on the ground--more reporters and editors--than anyone else--usually than all others combined. A good deal of what is carried on radio, television, cable and wire services comes from newspaper newsrooms. These media then disseminate it to broader audiences.
When we imagine the news ecosystem in the 21st century, the newspaper is still the largest originating, gathering source.

Rosenstiel's not the only one to make the claim. It's a common one. John Carroll used to say that 80 percent of news came from newspapers. Len Downie and Robert Kaiser similarly claimed that newspapers were the originators of most content for most broadcast and cable news. And many studies of online blogs show that much of the linking originates from mainstream media, often newspapers.

But are newspapers where it all begins? In an online world, that's only sort of true.

A study coming out of USC Annenberg of 250 news websites looks at where these sites are bringing information from � whether they are citing the AP or citing their own journalists. Though the analysis isn't complete yet, initial results seem to suggest that wire services are providing the bulk of news online.

The study, as explained by Annenberg doctoral candidate and researcher Matthew Weber, takes a systems approach. This means that the researchers were taking a look at who was providing information for the network of news organizations, who was doing the filtering for the news organizations, who was collecting the information and from where � and how it was being passed on.

"If you take a systems approach to the news industry, the people who are providing the raw material are predominantly wire services," he said.

Weber did find that newspapers still are where consumers make their first stop. And while they add their own content, newspapers are also acting as filters - were also bringing in articles from the AP, Reuters, AFP and the like.

"The 'system' start with the wires, and ends with the aggregators. Newspapers are jammed in the middle, competing for air," Weber explained via e-mail.

But when it comes down to who is creating the content for news sites, the organizations providing information were "almost exclusively wire services," according to Weber.

So wires, in this case, seem to be increasing importance in the news architecture of the online world � and newspapers aren't the first stop that they used to be, though they do help sort information.

But in some sense, wires have always played an important role that has often been ignored by those who like to say that newspapers have set the news agenda and uncovered the most important stories.

When I was an intern covering cops at the Chicago Tribune in 2003, often my assignment came not from the scanners but from the now-defunct City News Service, a wire service owned by Tribune Co. that sold breaking news to the highest bidder in the local market. The City News Service in Los Angeles, not owned by Tribune, still serves a similar purpose.

Even if we disregard these pre-Internet wires that only operated in a handful of cities, it's still unfair to say that newspapers set the agenda for the rest of the media in a city. Certainly newspapers often did the rigorous work of providing a detailed account which was then recycled on local news, but television news has never aspired to be anything but a recycling of newspaper headlines even in its golden era.

Cronkite saw his viewers still reading a paper, and today, local news also doesn't kid itself about being entertainment. The two mediums work more complementary than as leader and follower than we might hope to suggest in our case for news survival.

But there's a whole other element to where news comes from that has also been ignored in an online context � the world of blogs and online communities � and how this then sets an agenda for newspapers to follow.

Chris W. Anderson, a Nieman blogger and assistant professor at the College of Staten Island � CUNY, has research that suggests that it's important to look not just at newspapers but at the whole news ecosystem- which includes everything from news to activist communities.

Anderson doesn't question the macro-level assumption that journalists report and bloggers comment. But he notes that it's a little more complicated when you look more closely at specific news instances.

Calling them news "blips," Anderson said, "You'll have an early period that most journalists wouldn't call reporting where information will be released in niche spheres of the blogosphere."

One example he gave was of reports of activists arrests. But it wasn't that reporters were reading these activist blogs that this news happened to make it into the mainstream newspaper or news media. Instead, journalists got their tips from "being good reporters," taking cues in the traditional way, perhaps from police or press releases or shoe-leather reporting.

From his observations at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, Anderson said, "It's a misnomer to think journalists are just sitting around reading blogs."

But once journalists did report on these news blips, these blips were then circulated into the larger blogosphere. But the blips required a certain level of bubbling up to the surface from the niche level of social media, something that happened in traditional ways.

Twitter might make a good case of how newspapers aren't the first and only source of news, especially on a hyperlocal level. Newspapers may be hoping to compete on the hyperlocal, but this strategy may be questionable especially in cities with actively wired bloggers and tweeters who may have the first claim on news.

My old neighborhood in LA is a Twitter neighborhood. Local stores and restaurants were on Twitter, as are many residents and more active bloggers. We all routinely kept the neighborhood hashtag #DTLA in our posts when commenting about our home. Sure, the bars marketed drink specials to us, but the #DTLA hashtag was the first source of news when the 2009 Lakers celebration got out of hand, then followed by TV and the LA Times. Twitter users provided great on-sight reportage of the Michael Jackson funeral at the Staples Center, often going beyond what mainstream media had to offer.

Did these events wind up back in the newspapers? Sure. But the most active concentration of rumors and new bits of information were coming from a niche community � in this case, the #DTLA one, and in Anderson's case, the activist community.

Perhaps, instead of staking the claim for newspaper survival on the fact that newspapers provide the first stop of news and set our agenda for what it is we care to talk about, those making the case might start to make a more nuanced argument.

Maybe it's not as compelling to say that newspapers are the great facilitators of democratic dialogue and discourse instead of the source of all that is news, but it seems to reflect the burgeoning reality of our digital era.