PressThink: Two Letters in Reply to "A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com"

Two Letters in Reply to "A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com"

Mike Phillips, editorial development director at Scripps-Howard: "Many of our own newsrooms are in the early stages of the transformation. And at the New York Times? It's never gonna happen. They know it, too." Plus: Daily Peg Doubts About's Worth.

My recent post about the New York Times acquisition of About.com brought these two replies. One is from the offices of a traditional news provider, the Scripps-Howard chain. The second is from an upstart born on the Web, The Daily Peg: “I’m a Google junkie and I almost never land on an About site.”

Background: A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com to the New York Times.

Letter One from Mike Phillips, editorial development director for Scripps-Howard Newspapers, a division of the E.W. Scripps Company. Phillips oversees 21 newsrooms in the chain, which includes the Cincinnati Post, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, the Memphis Commercial-Appeal.

Scripps also owns the Ventura Country Star in California, where podcasting and blogging are just part of normal practice. See Mark on Media, Ventura Does It, for a good introduction to what they do already in “Webcentric” delivery. Phillips writes:

Some of us at Scripps have been talking today about PressThink’s Feb. 20 post about the New York Times and About.com.
The conversation started with “This sounds right, so should we rethink our archival policies?” and moved to “This sounds right for a national newspaper, but what about our newspapers, which are intensely local?”

That does change some things, but not everything. Intensely local newspapers operate outside the MSM as most media commentators think of it. Yet, they are being driven by many of the same forces driving the New York Times:

Print revenue is stagnant.

On-line revenue is growing rapidly (25-50% per year, depending on where you are).

And, just as the publisher wakes up, does a projection and sees where salvation is coming from, it appears that we are rapidly approaching a new pricing model: pay-by-the-click, instead of pay by the inventory unit.

So, to continue the online revenue growth rate and get it up to a third or a half of total ad revenues as rapidly as possible, the newspaper must grow web traffic as rapidly as possible. It’s the only way to make pay-by-the-click pay off.

That means shovelware needs some new friends.

So, is permalinking as much a no-brainer for intensely local newspapers as it is for the New York Times?

Well, maybe— in a limited way.

We don’t need to spider out and draw the search engines to us. That’s not how most people needing local information come to local newspaper web sites. They already live in the community and already know about the site. What will get them to use the site more, and tell their neighbors about it, is a better site.

Permalinking makes the site better, but a blanket permalinking policy would be wasteful.

As we talked about this, our online general manager, Bob Benz, said a lot of an intensely local newspaper’s content has no tail potential - that is, nobody’s ever going to want to access it again after the usual seven-day expiration date.

I counter proposed with what I dubbed the Phillips-Benz Continuum. At the right end of the continuum is obits— surely the example of local content with the longest tail. At the left end is a story about a proposed sewer project moving from one level of administrative review to another— surely a story with no tail at all. All the other content is in between. After a bit of rigorous measurement and discussion, surely a newspaper could calculate where on the continuum, on the average day, permalinking should start.

On the typical day at the typical newspaper, I’d say that point would indicate permalinks for no more than 15 percent of the content.

There are many implications to that guess, and yes, they all say something about the state of newspaper content.

And that’s where the conversation is today: “Why get excited about permalinking when so much of the content doesn’t deserve it?”

And so, though I started my day with a flutter of excitement about permalinks, I head into the afternoon back where I was last week:

We need to get serious about open source journalism.

We need to get serious about moderating local civic discourse rather than gate-keeping it under the old ed/op-ed model.

We need to get serious about Web-centricity. This is the big one. It means building deep, highly useful local data bases and floating on top of them local news and local conversations in whatever combination of online and print makes sense. That, in turn, calls for deep cultural and operational change in the newsroom.

That’s not easy, but intensely local newspapers can pull it off. They are influenced by the MSM, but they aren’t full members. They aren’t as bogged down by all that tradition and all that arrogance. Many of our own newsrooms are in the early stages of the transformation.

And at the New York Times? It’s never gonna happen. They know it, too. Must be why they had to buy a no-brainer.

— Mike Phillips

Letter Two is from the publisher of the Daily Peg, who also heads Pegasus News, a Web-based, hyper-local news company that plans to launch a beta version in Dallas some time this year, in direct competition with the major news providers there. The “for-now-anonymous” founder of Pegasus News has a day job in the industry; and at his request I have not used his name. But he can be reached here.

In my mind, the pearl in your post is: “Times journalism, like the content of other Big Media firms, is created primarily for offline use, and then re-purposed on the Web. (When that cycle is reversed, the Web era in journalism truly begins.)”
I think that one shift in mindset will be what really turns things around. Sometimes I fear I’m counting on it too much — but in our early days, I think this will be our most noticeable differentiator.

As far as our model, we intend to be fully searchable, but think that there is a middle ground between freely available and walled off. We’re still working it out, but our thought is that you can Google us and read any story you want for free and without registering, but you’re limited to x number of stories a day at that level (“x” being something greater than one and less than the whole site.)

The idea is that registration, and maybe even subscription is crucial to our ad model. But, the ads are primarily local — and its locals that will primarily use us every day multiple times per day. (We hope!) So why should I hassle you in New York with registration in order to monetize serving up an ad for a Chinese restaurant in East Dallas that does neither you nor the restaurateur any good. I can’t imagine a lot of folks out of market wanting to read more than a couple things a day on our site — and if they do, that’s another business altogether.

Of course, the New York Times is in a different business than we are— they are a “national” site. We’re all local, all the time.

Another reason to let anyone read a few stories a day without playing the registration game is so that we can be “part of the conversation” on blogs etc.

A key, we think, to registration is really delivering a reward for registering, something that most sites don’t do. At the NYT, registration doesn’t enhance the site— it’s just a ticket to the fair. If you register with us, we’ll customize your homepage with both implicit and explicit preferences based on where you live and what you like to read. And, if you shop at our advertisers who are in our pay-for-performance program, you’ll get cash rebates. (Real, effortless rebates — not the silly shopper programs a lot of papers are trying.)

To the original question. I don’t think the About purchase was a great
deal. Two things I’ve come to realize from my close watching of this world the past year are that:

1.) Previously sci-fi technology is now insanely commoditized and cheap. My original budget to build our site? $3 million. (Admittedly guessing high.) Now, it’s less than $100k for stuff that, as one of my compatriots says, is “just barely distinguishable from magic.”

2.) A really great idea can now build critical mass in a frighteningly short time. See Bloglines. See podcasting.

The upshot? The New York Times, if it had really wanted to, and would break free from bureaucracy, could have built something way cooler and more trafficked than About in ninety days.

One ancillary thought on why I question the About deal. Search engine
placement is primarily in the hands of the people who make search engines. If Google changes its algorithm tomorrow, that whole rationalization for the purchase is moot. And anecdotally, I don’t buy that they get such great placement. I’m a Google junkie and I almost never land on an About site.

— Daily Peg

From the Daily Peg: Core Principles.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

My NYU colleague Adam Pennenberg in Wired News takes on the Wall Street Journal’s online edition with its subscriber fees and closed archive:

The Journal should take the bold step of jettisoning its subscriber model and open up its archive to the public. In the end, it would make up the loss of subscriber revenue with money from advertising, which has been growing briskly. Sure, it might take a while — perhaps many years — but this is the only way for it to ensure its long-term survival.
A radical move like this would also send shivers down the spines of competitors like Forbes.com, which doesn’t charge for content and got rid of registration requirements when it discovered they drove away traffic. One reason Forbes.com was able to get off the ground was that it offered free content while the Journal made people pay. If the Journal hadn’t done that, Forbes.com might not have become the online power it is.

Wanna know what citizen journalism looks like as it unfolds on the Web? Click here. “Contributing reader” hits it dead on. The name explains the idea. Via Ed Cone.

Lex Alexander announces it at his News & Record blog: Citizen journalism is here.

Told you yesterday I hoped to have some Public Square-related news to report today, and I do.
The News & Record’s YourNews has gone live. You can now write and submit your own news stories for publication on our site.

John Robinson, the blogging editor, says the path chosen by the News & Record is greater transparency, more interaction with the community and further dissolution of the barrier between the producers and consumers of news. (Commenting on Tim Porter’s advice.)

Lex Alexander has his own site, Blog on the Run. See his Political-blogging burnout … or something else? I found a lot to think about in that one.

Paul Maidment at Forbes.com, Stop the Presses:

Publishers have long gained from the economic inefficiency of the advertising market. As Lord Leverhulme, the soap baron, is reputed to have said, “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.”
Not so on the Internet. Advertisers can be sure every ad they buy is seen and track its effectiveness. The measurability of Internet advertising keeps money firmly in the pockets of advertisers that in the past went to publishers and supported shareholder profits or good journalism.

For newspapers unable to adapt to this world, the only business model available is to grow by acquisition and cost-cut to profitability.

Steve Outing at Editor and Publisher, whose column is called Stop the Presses: “Too many people at leadership positions of major news organizations are in a defensive posture when it comes to citizen or participatory journalism. They’re in denial— and that spells trouble for their organizations.”

Writers, bloggers: send me your interesting About.com related links. Anyone who works there have something… you know, challenging and original to say? Reply to something you heard. E-mail PressThink.

My favorite photo of The Gates in Central Park.

Terry Heaton, The Devaluation of Information, on the overturned hierachies strewn about.

The Internet — with its Postmodern, deconstructionist architechture — makes it seem that all knowledge is “public” knowledge and all information is “public” information. It was built without a centralized command and control mechanism, and, therefore, the ability to tap unlimited databases is available to everybody. This is what makes Google so powerful. Absent any top-down structure, Google (anybody) is able to search and retrieve from those databases at any level, which, among other things, renders the portal Website concept irrelevant.

Forbes on the About deal: “The New York Times Co. just bought the world’s biggest blog.”

OK, About.com isn’t technically a blog, but it is a massive collection of content produced by non-journalist experts. For a small salary, 500 About.com guides produce myriad Web pages that the company turns into cash by selling ads. Together the guides have amassed 1 million pages covering 55,000 topics, from fly-fishing to cross-stitching.

Richard MacManus, Blog Branding: About.com and Kottke. “As a writer whose goal is to (very soon) earn a decent living via blogging, I wonder how viable the ‘work for peanuts’ approach of About.com is nowadays.”

“Isn’t that what blogs resurrect: the cacophony of the town square?” Jeff Jarvis, media man and blogger, and Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, continue their exchange of letters.

If you’re not reading Memeorandum you’re missing an interesting cut on the news and the weblogger’s ways with it. Good for sampling the pulses and waves that cross the blog world.

Posted by Jay Rosen at February 23, 2005 12:13 PM Print

The People Formerly Known as the Audience: "You don't own the eyeballs. You don't own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us." More...

Migration Point for the Press Tribe: "Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable." More...

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?" "It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?'" More...

National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. More...

The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: "I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think." More...

Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

Mike's discussion begins with the assumption that everything a newspaper does belongs on the Web. This is a problem that requires another discussion. If he and others could bring themselves to reinvent the whole newspaper/Web thing, they might that all Web publishing will be based in sophisticated blog form. Then, the permalink machine will just hum in the background.

Posted by: Terry Heaton at February 23, 2005 12:42 PM | Permalink

"We don't need to spider out and draw the search engines to us."

Believe it or not, I find most of my local news with google news because of the horrible search interface on the local news site. If the local media monopoly model is going to break down, search engines are going to become even more important. Maybe something like a hybrid of Google Local and Google News will emerge.

Posted by: Kirk House at February 23, 2005 2:51 PM | Permalink

Mike Phillips' example of a "short tail" article (that need not be permalinked) brought a smile to me.

"At the left end is a story about a proposed sewer project moving from one level of administrative review to another-- surely a story with no tail at all."

While that story might not hold much lasting interest to the casual, skimming, recreational browser, That is precisely the sort of story that professionals try and dig-up, sometimes years after it has appeared "in print". Administrative review is a notoriously bumpy and illusive process, and one which frequently leads to litigation. Disputes arise over a sparse record that often has to be supplemented by local news stories that often are the only extemporaneous record of events, other than the sometimes deliberately obscure "official record". I'm sure journalists appreciate the ability to go back in time and chronologically track a story, and its often the case that a story grows surprising legs. So don't be too quick to cut them off. Mr. Phillips' example is to me a great illustration of an essential aspect of the Internet: no one knows exactly how it is used and how it will be used. So many people are using it in their own unique and unpredictable ways, that it is hard to follow, let alone predict.

This topic is of unusual interest to me, because it touches on a wider area than just the news business. I have been conducting my own, anecdotal "google watch" ever since the fabulous coming out on Wall Street. For years google has been too good to be true, but now it is quickly becoming too commercial to be true.

What started out as a logical search engine -- one in which the results bore a readily apparent relation to the preciseness of the search phrasing, is quickly becoming more "nuanced" or perhaps more influenced by factors other than the relation of the potential targets to the subjects the searcher was aiming for. Some of this may be pure cyber-physics, but why do I have the feeling that the skids are being greased in an increasingly commercial way? While these new developments may not pose a problem to a site such as this, which is social and topical in nature, what does it say for the more pedestrian and permanent presences on the web? Sites for small businesses, for example, who may have come grudgingly into the cyber-age, and who have neither the expertise or the resources to tease out reasonable results from the search engines. When you gain an advantage through purchased-trickery or by an association with a company financially associated with the search engine entities, the bidding war is on, and the informational race is rigged and essentially called off. Not only is an important utilitarian aspect of the web seriously compromised (results may vary, depending on who pays what to whom), but the potential for mischief is surely out there. I'm not whining over the prospect of commerical Dawinism; I'm lamenting the rapid bastardization of the most useful aspects of the web.

This commercial threat to the web isn't confined to search engines. Blogs are already being gobbled up and mutated into commercial link-engines. I'm sure there are fine minds at work already, trying to determine just how many links to "for pay" articles a blog can sustain before its readership strips it from their favorites. "The Daou Report" is a recent variant on this phenomenon. Just as its usefulness came to the attention of a wide readership, Salon scooped it up. What was a valuable resource to readers, was transformed into an annoying infomercial for a for-pay site. I'm not suggesting Salon isn't worth the subscription price, nor do I begrudge Daou his days to lounge in his luxury Salon, but I am questioning the wisdom of buying an "asset" only to strip of the very thing that give it value. Google built its following by producing satisfying search results keyed to the desires of those doing the searching. The new google is cashing in that following by transforming the relationship. If results are being skewed away from where people want to go, to re-direct them to where the money leads, they are liquidating google's capital for short term gain. If, on the other hand, the economic model is tied to results, as in a system where the most effective search engine brings the most traffic, which, in turn brings in the most ad revenue in the form of frame-ads that may irritate, but not obscure the essential information and essential purpose of a search engine, than reward follows function.

Posted by: Mark J. McPherson at February 23, 2005 11:58 PM | Permalink

While we're dreaming about permalinks and open archives and how individuals use the Web, here's my dream: Harper's magazine not only free and current, but all of H.L. Mencken's articles from the past , as just one example, there for research.

When one goes digging into an issue, whether it is for a national or local newspaper, yes it's possible to use a premium database search for some stuff back to the 1980s. I want it all there for easy access when I'm in a hurry on deadline, and it would seems the traffic would justify it.

Newspapers never profited much from subscriptions or rack sales anyway. That money always paid for distribution. There is no distribution cost online. No printing costs either, no paper, no ink. Is it worth a little bit of money from subscribers to lose all those ad dollars?

Posted by: gw at February 24, 2005 7:58 PM | Permalink

Michael Schaefer of DeepBlog.com e-mails:

Jay,

Wow, your "New York Times acquisition of About.com" piece and the reply letters have been so very interesting. What I would like to suggest to Mike Phillips is that we don't know what will play in the long tail so "Open it up." "Daily Peg" has it right: "Another reason to let anyone read a few stories a day without playing the registration game is so that we can be 'part of the conversation' on blogs, etc."

Mike's numbers might be reversed to permalink 85%; who knows who may be interested in a "proposed sewer project moving from one level of administrative review to another"? "Local News" is generally applicable in other ways: sewer projects happen all over the world and are probably searched for around the world, and local ads can be served by local residents who are more interested in a "web paper" that interacts with the World Wide Web. Adjust the permalink numbers once you have hard data (5-10years worth).

What I got from the pass few days at PressThink is: If you're a web paper--open up your articles to linkable achieves, learn how to optimize search engines, and you can't win at the game if you don't understand how it's played. It reminds me of the ancient wisdom of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: "Give it away, give it away, give it away, now."

And if not, local papers are going to have journalism veterans like Gordon Joseloff, editor and publisher of WestportNow.com, breathing down their locked-up necks.

Michael Schaefer

Posted by: Jay Rosenj at February 24, 2005 9:39 PM | Permalink

Take commerce out of the equation. Forget all about that stuff. This is a zen issue. This is about people working so intimately with their surroundings that the divider line is no longer there.

A large part of the problem the MSM is having is letters just like this one. The amount of myopia and book-smarts-only exhibited by this letter and by the MSM in general leads one to think that either you all are focusing on things that don't matter for a reason, mainly because you are too afraid of the powers that be to get into any real discussions of import, or your fancy colleges didn't really do what they were supposed to do.

I'm a self taught web designer who has built an entire search engine single-handedly. If you don't understand the genius of About.com and think it is merely about search engine positioning you are wrong.

Compare the bottom-up political approach with the bottom-up web approach. Follow Howard Dean's actions and you'll get a better understanding of where all the web will be heading.

How can the people most removed from reality, the one's at the top, have any clue as to what is really going on?

"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." - William S. Burroughs

Posted by: commonground at February 26, 2005 12:09 PM | Permalink