Recovering Journalist

The Facebook Revolution

When did you first become aware of personal computers? In 1983, 1984, as the IBM PC and then the Macintosh happened? Truth is, they'd been around for years at that point. What about the Web? It was probably the mid-90s before you started using it regularly, even though pioneers had been on it for a couple of years. How about Google? Tell the truth--you used Alta Vista until Google was two or three years old. These are all examples of killer technologies and businesses whose power most of us only really became aware of once they became established in the marketplace. In many ways, they sort of snuck up on us.

But we're getting to watch the growth of the Facebook economy in real time, with full awareness of what's happening. You might not have caught onto the power of Facebook itself until it had a few million college-age users, but the rise of Facebook as an open platform for application and business development--through widgets--has happened right before our eyes. No need to play catch-up: It started in May when Facebook opened its platform to widget development, and now it's maturing in full view. Five months, total. Amazing.

It's fascinating to watch, as goofy virtual pet widgets and soical gaming apps are joined by more serious widgets that turn Facebook into even more of a useful destination site. Echoing the rise of the Web a decade or so ago, the widget game is moving from hobbyists into a serious business, with significant investment dollars chasing successful widget development, and business models starting to emerge. I know a company whose Facebook widget (a game) is doing 10 million page views a day. Ten million! Not too shabby. And that's up 50 percent from last week.

It's an exciting time--unlike the other breakthroughs I mentioned, widgets aren't sneaking up on us. They're already part of everyday life and we can closely follow their development. It's fascinating to watch. Over time, I think, widgets and other Facebook attributes will turn the platform into the ultimate personalized home page--a MyYahoo that really is yours, with info about friends and colleagues supplementing news, weather, stock quotes, RSS feeds and other staples of personalized sites. Those are the widgets being developed now, the serious ones that move Facebook from curiosity into an essential element of daily life.

Think that $15 billion valuation was excessive? Check back in a year or two. And if you're a news organization not looking hard at Facebook as a development and distribution platform, get with the programming, now. Or else you'll get left behind.

Covering a Hot Story

The horrible fires in Southern California are providing a good test of what the media learned in covering Hurricane Katrina, especially in providing a place for readers to exchange information and get the latest updates on what's happening to their communities. So far, traditional media seem to be doing an OK--if not great--job of meeting the challenge.

The Web 2.0 features that a lot of media sites have begun experimenting with are incredible tools in a situation like this, and news sites based in the fire areas are getting a crash course in their power. SignOnSanDiego, the San Diego Union-Tribune's site, is effectively using a news blog to quickly publish the latest information; the site is also replete with video and up-to-date maps (this is a story that, frankly, can't have enough maps).

The Los Angeles Times site is not as Web 2.0-powered, with maps, photos and some video; there's no sign of a running news blog. Unfortunately, the Times.com home page is still full of non-fire stories, even though this is by far the biggest story in SoCal and the nation right now. I'm not real sure why the debate over Harry Potter's Dumbledore's sexuality--a story that's four days old, btw--is at the top of the LA Times home page, for instance. (I suspect it has something to do with rigid page-design templates--a real problem on the Web if really big news breaks out.)

Similarly, the Orange County Register site's layout is straining to highlight fire coverage; a special Fire Central page helps, but most of the content is standard journalism fare, without many Web 2.0 bells and whistles. (The featured discussion in the Register's "Publish Your Stuff" user-generated section is, ugh, "Are you over Britney Spears.")

Among TV stations, KFMB, the CBS affiliate in San Diego, has given over its home page almost completely to the fire, with maps, videos (natch) and a news blog. KGTV, the ABC affiliate, is doing a lot with video and maps, but can't get away from the usual promotional drivel that always seems to overwhelm local TV sites (do we really need to see a picture of the station's anchors?). KSND, the NBC affiliate, seems stuck in the same trap as the LA Times site--their strict page format apparently won't let them give full coverage to the fire (LostRemote has more on this). In Los Angeles, KCAL, the CBS affiliate, is promoting Dr. Phil's show at about the same level as the fire coverage; KABC, KNBC and the Tribune-owned L.A. Fox affiliate, KTLA, aren't much better.

What there isn't nearly enough of in any of these packages is something that this story absolutely lends itself to: User-generated content. Residents of Southern California have a better handle on what's going on around them than any overworked reporter, and these sites should be harvesting and featuring this valuable input from the audience--with fires burning neighborhood to neighborhood and block to block, this story couldn't be more hyperlocal. This also is an instance when social networking capabilities, to link people together, could be very valuable.

SignOnSanDiego does have very active old-fashioned discussion forums about the fires, but it's all but hidden on the home page. It would be great if the site was featuring some of the best and most interesting posts from the forums, rather than forcing readers to comb through them for information. LATImes.com doesn't have any sort of user-generated content, as far as I can see, except for weak "Share your thoughts/photos" sections. Some of the TV stations are showing user-generated video or photos, but that's about it. That's a missed opportunity.

Into these breaches come competitors: As was the case in New Orleans, craigslist spontaneously has become a major forum for ordinary people trading information about the fires, looking for lost relatives, and asking for and providing help. This is the kind of civic service that a newspaper site should be providing and highlighting for its affected readers. Update: Topix.com also is serving as a clearinghouse for information for and by local residents.

And for a fascinating look at how the community can provide coverage of an event of this magnitude, check out the Wikipedia entry on California Wildfires of October 2007. With maps, timelines, charts and detailed coverage, it demonstrates how Wikipedia can be as much of a site for news coverage as it is a (user-generated) reference source. This detailed Wikipedia entry provides a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute overview of the situation that's unmatched in any news site I've seen.

On the other hand, an upstart competitor of traditional media in the fire area is lagging badly on all counts: San Diego civic site Voice of San Diego is covering the fires very traditionally and scantily, using its own staff, and not tapping into its audience at all, as far as I can tell. Apparently to have a voice in San Diego you need to actually work for the Voice of San Diego.

Widespread community tragedies like the Southern California fires are a perfect place for aggressive Web 2.0 technologies to come to the fore. Tapping into the community to tell its story, share its experiences and create connections among victims is very powerful. Nobody knows more details than the people directly affected by the fire. In addition to maps, video and other features, the Southern California media should be providing the community with a place to get the word out.

Update, courtesy of the PressGazette.co.uk blog:

Both the Los Angles Times and San Diego’s public broadcasting station KPBS are using Twitter to provide rapid, rolling updates of the fires.

That's a terrific use of Twitter!

Update: In the comments, Josh Lucas points out an LA Times news blog on the fires. And on the Poynter site, Julie Moos has an excellent roundup of fire coverage that echoes many of my points.

Goin' Mobile

Just as we learned a decade or so ago that we couldn't paste a newspaper page onto a computer screen (OK, there are still a lot of newspapers that haven't quite learned that), it's time to learn that you can't paste a Web page onto a mobile phone or PDA screen.

It's no secret that mobile devices are on the rise as a medium for the publishing of news and information. But most news sites have been very slow to understand this—or if they have, they've done so clumsily. Every news site should be providing its readers the ability to get updates, at the least, via mobile devices; few do, at least in any way that's easy to use (or to find on the site).

And even though wondrous new devices like Apple's iPhone provide fullblown Web access, traditional Web pages aren't necessarily well suited—they're too dense in content and full of images to be conveniently viewed on a small screen.

Newspapers and other news providers should be looking closely at what smart companies Web like Amazon and Facebook are doing for visitors with iPhones and other devices: providing customized, "lightweight" Web interfaces that are better viewed on these small but ubiquitous devices. By detecting that a visitor is using iPhone's Safari browser, these sites provide quick-to-load, easy-to-view versions for mobile customers. Indeed, I've taken to standing in bookstores and ordering books from Amazon through my iPhone—it's faster than waiting in the bookstore checkout line!

The point is that these smart Web outfits are matching their content and interfaces to the devices that an increasing number of customers are using to go online. News sites should be doing the same thing—before somebody else takes away the mobile news and info business, too.

Was That Rupert Murdoch on the Grassy Knoll in Times Square?

OK, conspiracy theorists: Chew on this one a while:

Morgan Stanley got even by selling their [New York Times Co.] stake in the Sulzberger family game. But to whom? I’ll bet Rupert Murdoch secretly bought it. Why Murdoch? Think about it: 1) He obviously believes newspapers should be kept alive as a family-owned business. 2) He obviously believes that it’s OK for a newspaper to be a non-profit organization—he’s supporting NY Post losses to the unharmonious tune of over $40 million a year. 3) But he’s smart enough to know he can never wrestle control of the NY Times away from the stubborn Sulzbergers like he did with the feckless Wall Street Journal’s Bancrofts, so he secretly bought Times stock so he could greenmail the Sulzbergers.

Somehow I doubt this, but it's intriguing. And we'll know soon enough: purchase of more than 5 percent of the stock in a public company has to be reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission. My guess is that Morgan Stanley dumped the stock on the open market. But maybe not!

Be Careful What You Wish For

You know, there are two ways to look at the news that Morgan Stanley is ending its siege of The New York Times Co. and selling its 7.2 percent stake in the company. One is that this takes some pressure off of the Sulzberger family, which has been feuding with Morgan Stanley Investment Management and its manager, Hassan Elmasry, for the past two years, with Emasry pushing for structural change in the Times Co. to increase shareholder value. Score one for the Sulzberger family and its control of the Times Co.

The other way to look at it is that Elmasry and Morgan Stanley finally decided that Times stock—trading at a 10-year low and one-third its value in 2002—simply is a lousy investment.

Update from the great minds dept.: Alan Mutter has further analysis under the same headline!

Wait, I've Got Another Idea—Let's Have a Bake Sale!

The newspaper business is abuzz about an essay by Poynter Institute Senior Scholar Roy Peter Clark, who proposes that a key step to saving the newspaper industry is to get journalists to actually read newspapers themselves. But wait, that's not all: Clark is very specific: "It is your duty as a journalist and a citizen to read the newspaper —emphasis on paper, not pixels."

Oh, please.

But it gets even worse. This preposterous suggestion has ignited a firestorm of comments on the usually placid Poynter site (more than 60, at last count, which is a lot for Poynter), and what's really scary is how many of the respondents actually agree with Clark. They even boast about their own print newspaper reading habits, including that old chestnut about how holding a newspaper is such a great experience that you can't replicate online, and thus somehow sacred.

Good lord. To borrow a great coinage from Howard Owens, the "newsroom turtles" are out in force here, clinging to the idea that newsprint is somehow the perfect way to present news, and stubbornly believing that the print product will survive if we just wish it to be so.

Reality is different, and Luddites like Clark are falling into the same classic trap--widely taught in business schools--that the railroads fell into a century ago: Faced with competiton from upstart airlines and automobiles, railroads clung to their romantic view of themselves as train operators, without understanding that they were actually in the transportation business, and that the mode of transportation was secondary. You know the rest of that story.

Those like Clark who confusedly and romantically think that newspapers are in the "paper" business, and not in the "news" business, are on the road to the same fate. Internet, RSS, video, iPhone, Flash, smoke signals, carrier pigeons—hell, it doesn't matter how you get the story out. Just make sure you know you're in the journalism business, not in the printing business, and accept that the printed newspaper may soon be a thing of the past.

There are terrific responses to Clark's piece from Steve Yelvington, Craig Stoltz, K. Paul Mallasch and many others, and don't miss Steve Outing's excellent response in the comments on Clark's post.

What's interesting about many of these responses is how many of these smart, middle-aged people reveal that they generally don't read print newspapers anymore themselves. I'm another—online is simply a better medium for most news and journalism, and it doesn't kill a few forests of trees every day to do it. Electronic news is becoming increasingly portable, and will be more so in the years to come, further eroding the one of the newspaper's last advantages.

Stop clinging to the printed newspaper and start thinking about how to work with new technologies to publish and distribute the news and journalism that is so important. Don't be a turtle!

Feet on the Street

ReachLocal, a company that sells local advertiisng on behalf of Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other national Web services, just raised another $55 million in venture financing for a nationwide expansion (they're already in the Top 10 U.S. markets).

Great idea, this notion of offering local feet on the street ad sales for national players, and I blogged about it last December. As I said then, this is exactly what newspapers should be doing: Unleashing their local Web sales teams on behalf of—perish the thought—potential competitors. What better way to leverage your assets, keep an eye on competitors and keep new competitors in check?

I talk a lot about local being the last defensible franchise for newspapers, and that's not just about news. Newspapers have longstanding, priceless relationships with their local advertisers, and they should be extending that advantage by being the one-stop shop for local advertising of all kinds. But nope; they're clinging to their print products, barely selling their own online products—and letting upstarts like ReachLocal build impressive businesses by taking the local advertising market right out from under them.

Here's a question: With ReachLocal now worth upwards of $300 million, would any big national newspaper company (Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy, etc.) be smart enough to write a check and bring them into the fold? Somehow I doubt it, alas. Three hundred million is a lot of money. Of course, as history teaches us, newspaper companies have punted these opportunities before. In a couple years, when ReachLocal is worth, oh, say, $3 billion, and chomping into the local advertising pie, today's valuation will look like a bargain.

Nothing But Readers

I know it's popular to criticize the New York Post, but I wonder if its critics ever actually read it. Pick it up next time you're in New York. Yes, it's lurid and sensational. But it's also a terrific read: The headlines are grabbers, the stories are punchy and entertaining, and the entire presentation is just inviting. You find yourself reading stories about subjects you never thought you'd go near--and that's a tribute to good newspapering. Yeah, some of it is tawdry. But it's fun and interesting. And this it's probably no coincidence that New York Post circulation has actually been rising while just about every other big newspaper's circ is falling. Hmmm.

Speaking of interesting newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch (probably another non-coincidence), blogger Stephanie Fierman wrote a nice paean over the weekend to the Saturday Wall Street Journal, which is always quirky, interesting and readable--especially since the section formerly known as Pursuits was converted into Weekend Journal, to match its just-as-interesting Friday counterpart.

People who don't read the Journal think it's a gray and boring collection of dry stories about business. People who do read the Journal know that its Marketplace and Personal Journal sections are the best daily sections in American newspapers today, consistently full of smart, interesting, diverse coverage of topics ranging from popular culture to marketing to technology.

You'd think the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post would represent opposite ends of the American journalistic spectrum. But these Murdoch newspapers have one big thing in common: They're edited and written to be interesting and entertaining to readers. Other papers should be striving to be as good.

Get With the Program

I'm speaking today at a University of Maryland J-Lab program on Citizens' Media that's being held in conjunction with the annual Associated Press Managing Editors' conference, and before going over there, I thought I'd check to see what's on the agenda of the APME meeting.

Um, what century are we in?

With all due respect, there seems to be a pretty significant disconnect between the APME program and the serious issues facing the journalism business that we read about on Romenesko every day. OK, maybe a panel on handling newsroom buyouts and layoffs would be too much to ask for, but that's at the top of the list of issues for just about every managing editor these days. So is competition from an ever-widening collection of online rivals, legal issues surrounding cutting-edge technologies, the ramifications of Web search, social networks and Facebook, online news business models, newsroom reorganization and reengineering and the need to ever more aggressively reach out to readers through something other than print. And it would be especially nice if the AP MEs were hearing from someone other than themselves.

Alas, there's not much of that on the APME conference agenda. Yes, there's today's citizens' media seminar, excellently put together by Jan Schaffer of the J-Lab, but it's being held a day or two before most of the APME participants even arrive. The actual APME program has some token panels on multimedia and online tools, and a way-too-short presentation by innovators Jim Brady of WashingtonPost.com and Jennifer Carroll of Gannett, but that's about it. This is an audience that needs to be challenged by smart practitioners in the online world, not lulled to sleep by evergreen panels like "Storytelling: Content is Key" (gee, really?) or extraneous--but well-promoted in the program--field trips to the Newseum and a wine-tasting party.

Newspapers are in trouble, and one of the main reasons they're in trouble is because their leaders are breathing their own fumes and having a great deal of difficulty breaking out of their comfortable old ways of doing things. There's a lot of great work being done inside of newspaper companies (and even more outside them) in redefining journalism online. The APME meeting ought to be chock full of presentations and discussions of this groundbreaking innovation, in ways that explode the attendees' heads and send them home full of shattered stereotypes and great ideas for change. This year's APME program ain't going to do that. And another year of inadequate response to industry challenges ticks by...

A Matter of Nuance

For some reason, the debate over paying for newspaper content online seems to always break down to a black and white, either-or argument: Make the whole site free, or charge for all the content. But there are a lot of interesting business models in between, and the Financial Times has hit on one: It's going to allow casual visitors up to 30 free page views a month; everybody else pays for a subscription. This is smart, and the answer to letting inevitable traffic from search engines through the pay wall. Similarly, StarTribune.com used to allow one or two free pages before asking for registration (that seems to be defunct). Again, the idea is to serve the casual readers—and maybe tease them into wanting to register or subscribe because they like what they see.

These are subtle differences, but they're huge—and they allow smart sites like FT.com to maximize both online subscription and advertising dollars.