The newspaper of the future...

..., according to the NY Times, is a small midwestern paper blurring the lines between their multiple media (print, tv and online) and staying true to their quality local content focus. If the accompanying graph is right, and most news consumers are turning away from newspapers for national news, then small regional papers could be in for a renaissance. TV can't profitably focus on small markets the way online and print news can, and interactive electronic formats allow custom tailoring like never before.

There's an unrelenting force from the internet reforming the way news works, and while the large national papers have seen that for some time, it is only now with increasing broadband penetration outside the major metropolises that smaller local papers are dealing with it as well. The 12% increase in unique visitors to newspaper websites would be fantastic news if it didn't correspond with a fall in the physical sales of the paper, but people aren't necessarily decreasing their consumption of news, especially local news. It's up to smart editors, journalists, owners and conumers to make that transition smooth.

The Lawrence editor seems to be on: a straight shooter, with no illusions or false glamour about the media business:

"I don't think of us as being in the newspaper business," said Mr. Simons, the editor and publisher of The Journal-World and the chairman of the World Company, the newspaper's parent. "Information is our business and we're trying to provide information, in one form or another, however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible." [...] Mr. Simons and his associates describe their overall goals as a shared belief in quality, a deep attachment to Lawrence as a community and a constant reinvention of their business's relationship with readers, viewers and advertisers.

The echos of 'mutli-tasking' for journalists can be heard this side of the pond as well:

Mr. Simons told his editors and reporters that they were going to do more than merely work shoulder to shoulder; they were going to share reporting assignments, tasks and scoops - whether they liked it or not. Many did not like it at all, and some World reporters say they sometimes still feel taken advantage of - when they are asked to squeeze multiple print, television and online duties into the course of a single day. Print reporters and their editors have, at times, been reluctant to share scoops or ideas with their television counterparts, and vice versa. But many reporters also said that, over time, they have adapted.

And even that problematic concept of free work experience. There's even a word for it in Lawrence KA... "internology".

About a third of the 18 employees in the online operation are interns, and their presence allows Mr. Curley to have data, video, photos and other material collected and uploaded at little cost, a process he grinningly refers to as "internology."

Whatever would Markham think?

The business of news

I recently had a fascinating conversation with a UK newspaper executive about the current state and probable future of newspapers in the UK. His way of understanding the industry is an interesting one: Two things are happening simultaneously to the newspaper business, and together these arguably represent the biggest challenge to the way receive and consume newspapers in the long and storied history of printed news. The implications, I think, are of interest to owners, producers and consumers of newspapers alike.

The first of the changes he sees is that the commercial businesses that support newspapers are becoming "vertically detached". He described how, in the Fleet Street sense, newspapers would have been vertically organized in a physcial way: printing presses in the basement, production and pre-press on the ground floor, a newsroom with reporters and editors on the 1st floor, advertising and marketing above them, and a board of management sitting at the top, so that copy could literally "flow down" and out the door to trucks waiting to distribute the papers to newsagents all over the city. This would have paralleled the business ownership model: whoever sat at the top owned the building and all the printing equipment, paid salaries to people to go and gather the news and sell advertising, and might have even owned the paper mills that brought in the raw newsprint and the trucks that carted the finished folded newspapers away.

This model is no longer required, though, and is fast becoming obsolete. "If we were setting up a newspaper from scratch today, there is no way we'd even consider this model, but that's what a lot of us are dealing with today," he tells me. At any step of the way there are now specialist who complete part of the chain as contractors and allow newspapers owners and publishers to focus on other things. Don't want to own bulky presses and have to keep engineers on staff to maintain them? Use a contract printer or find the spare capacity on magazine presses or the like. Don't want to keep an expensive staff of foreign correspondents or recognizable op-ed writers? Use copy from one of the many agencies (AFP, AP, PA, etc) or pick-and-choose syndicated columnists from a Chinese menu to create exactly the editorial you want. Ditto for ad sales -- any number of agencies will take the problem of buying and selling ad space off your hands, for a price. Publishers and newspaper owners, then, have the challenge to either do all these tasks as well as the specialists, or else re-shape their business to allow contractors to help finish the task.

The other major change in the news industry, my executive told me, is how the news is also "horizontally un-bundling". What he means by that is this: what we think of as a 'newspaper' is really a combination of quite a few products -- a 'news' product (Tony Blair said today...), an 'information' product (tonight at 8pm on Channel 4...), a 'prestige' product ("I read the Financial Times because I have an important, powerful job, and I want people on the train to recognize that"), an entertainment product, a job-search product, a property-sales product, a motor-sales product, and so forth.

Consumers, and most especially rich consumers as we have in the UK, Ireland and the US, now have the ability to obtain only the portions they want from other sources, and are no longer forced to buy the entire newspaper to get the pieces they actually want. Many, of course, still do, but almost none are obliged to. For the 'news' bits, 24-hour TV, radio and Internet sites often do a much better job of getting the facts out quickly. Mobile phones, always-on broadband, digital TV and countless other little digital innovations are chipping away at newspapers' hold on accessing raw information. Google alone has changed the way people look for information, and the full effects have not been realized. For the other products like job opportunites and property sales, there are now specialized, focused online services that allow more interactivity and better targeting than a mass market newspaper.

These two changes together, this "vertical detachment" and "horizontal un-bundling", together are sending the newspaper business literally into bits, or in his words, "atomization". The challenge for executives like him is to keep enough pieces together to keep the business running while at the same time keep the end product interesting enough for thousands and thousands of people to buy each day. It will be a combination of adapting to the times and doing more online services, adapting to The Times and keeping the physcial format sharp and interesting, enticing readers with quality editorial and snazzy promotion, and fighting tooth and nail to keep precious property and recruitment advertising away from competitiors of all stripes.

Big Brother is still watching

We take a lot for granted here in the 'West', and online anonymity is certainly one of them. But as far as the Chinese government is concerned, if you're saying something online, they want to know who you are. Big Brother indeed.

My other real scary Big Brother moment came when I saw recent ads for the UK television licence fee. In Ireland, they're trying to shame us into paying ("A fine and a court appearance ... is it worth the embarrasment?"), but the approach in the UK is distinctly different -- they're trying to scare them into paying in a spooky Matrix-style ad. They have a database of everyhousehold in the UK without a TV licence. They're not afraid to use their powers. The agents are after us.

[a frantic search for screen shots of the ads brought up nothing. I'll keep looking and post if I find anything]

And for the record, I've never watched more than 30 seconds of Channel 4's Big Brother. My fears are entirely Orwellian.

Scooped!

The Irish Times beat Markham and me to publication with this investigative piece on casino games in Ireland. Portions are almost word-for-word with what we wrote. Same quoted sources (Goodbody and Silk), same "grey-area" tagline. Damn, could be a few hundred euro richer if we would have pushed this sooner.

The only thing to fear is...

As far as David Brooks is concerned, for Europeans it's a lot more than fear itself. He thinks that the 'no' votes in France and Holland are symptomatic of a broader fear of the unknown in Western Europe. For all parties involved, across the political and social spectrum, 'no' meant clinging on to some certainty in a world they see changing more than they are willing to admit.

One line that really rang out in my mind:

Anybody who has lived in Europe knows how delicious European life can be. But it
is not the absolute standard of living that determines a people's
morale, but the momentum. It is happier to live in a poor country that is
moving forward - where expectations are high - than it is to live in an
affluent country that is looking back. [...] The core fact is that the European
model is foundering under the fact that billions of people are willing to work
harder than the Europeans are. Europeans clearly love their way of life, but
don't know how to sustain it.

That's equally true on both sides of the bond as well, Mr Brooks.

The little things count

Tom Friedman agrues that all the little changes since 9/11 may have a lasting effect on America's DNA. I think he's very right. I too was in London recently, and almost wanted to cry when I saw the US embassy. It's a barricaded fort, in the middle of a very upmarket area in the principle city of our principle world ally. I've heard friends here complain about visiting the US and jumping through hoops to get off of an airplane. Friedman's closing thought wouldn't be a bad motto for reconciliation policy:

where birds don't fly [caged off embassies], people don't mix, ideas don't get sparked, friendships don't get forged, stereotypes don't get broken, and freedom doesn't ring.

So it wasn't George Bush Snr...

The world's best-known anonymous source unmasks himself.

So is 'Deep Throat' a criminal or a hero? Depends where you stand. To Nixon and other governement officials, he violated his duties of office by violating confidentiality agreements. And in a Catch-22, he spoke to a journalist rather than a DA. Damned if he did, damned if he didn't. But wait, they (Nixon & Co.) were the criminals in the first place.

But to the rest of us, and journalists especially, Deep Throat is most certainly a hero. He sought the truth, facilitated transparency in government and put his own job on the line to do so. I'm glad he can rest happy knowing he did a good thing. Too bad he had to wait until 2005 at age 91 to get that peace.

Blogging is Slogging

He's right... Blogging is tough work. Or at least good blogging is. There's a reason I don't have a hit-counter here. It would show "4".

changing source of news

anecdotally, the Daily Show, a comedy satire of nightly news with some pretty scathing insight, is becoming a top source of real news. How can the newspapers respond? Onion supplements on Fridays?

journalism gone completely awry

when your trademark is repeating an inane question over and over again, you're bound to do some block headed things. This to me is disgraceful journalism, especially coming under the masthead of the supposedly holier-than-thou BBC. There is a place for this stuff, but it's not in professional news organizations but politically-affiliated action groups. But those groups don't have the access of the BBC, do they?

Read the feedback that follows the transcript as well. My gauge is about 8:1 against Paxman. Sack him. My favorites:

think that increasingly JP is becoming a parody of himself. He approaches interviews in an aggresive manner with apparently more interest in tripping people up than gaining insight to their politics. Regardless of what you think of Galloway the question was absurd and JP has embarassed himself.Niall Duncan, Dundee

Paxman is a disgraceful example of a celebrity newspresenter, more interested in his own hard-nosed image than actually doing his job. Paxman was far more sucessful inciting racial tension in that shameful interview than Galloway ever has and he should lose his position at the BBC as a result. What ever happened to unbiased
interview technique? Paxman should go work for Fox
News!Fred Nicolle, Cambridge, UK

Mr Galloway is one of the least likeable figures in politics and I would have loved to see him properly cut down to size by Paxman, instead i was left seeing a bitter squable in which Paxman asked a stupid question repeatedly and Galloway actually came off well for refusing to talk to him. Rob Green, Edinburgh

Is Paxman seriously suggesting that someone should be given a clear run because of their colour and sex? If so, that is sexist and racist. Is he suggesting that the only
candidate who can stand against a black woman is another black woman? Is
this some sort of crazy card game? I trump your black woman with a black gay
woman? I'm liberal, would probably be termed politically corrext, but I fear
Paxman is becoming a parody of himself. Paul, London

For Paxman to even imply that a white politician beating a black politican
is something in itself 'bad' is disgusting. Paxman should apologise immediately
to Galloway and to his viewersDavid, London