Recovering Journalist

On the Whole, I'd Rather be in Philadelphia

My blogging activity has been light for the past few days, and that's probably going to continue for a while: I have a new gig. I'm doing a three-month stint as Acting Vice President-Editorial at Philly.com, the Web site for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News.

This is an extraordinary opportunity, even though I think it means the Recovering Journalist has technically fallen off the wagon. Despite its brevity, this is anything but a caretaker position, even though I've got a startup in the oven and I'm definitely not a candidate for the job long-term (if you're a senior Web editor who'd like to succeed me, please let me know. We're also looking for experienced Web producers).

I'm going to get to apply a lot of what I've been talking about in this blog (and for years) to a top-drawer newspaper Web site. I've been asked to use my brief time at Philly.com to be a change agent, to upgrade an already good site, to help to rethink everything the Web editorial operation does, to help more fully integrate the Web and print news operations, to help oversee a redesign of the site and to greatly accelerate the launch of many new initiatives. (Many, hell--there are more than 100 projects, large and small, already on my list!)

For confidentiality reasons, I can't talk in much detail about what we're doing, and I probably won't be able to blog much of it as we go along. But suffice it to say that we'll be aggressively deploying user-generated content (is there any other major newspaper—or news—site putting live user comments on the the home page? We've already started doing it on some lead stories at Philly.com, and there will be much more), experimenting with hyperlocal efforts and crowdsourcing, doing cool new things with video and audio, reaching out to Philadelphia's large network of bloggers and other third-party content sources, baking social networking into the new design, spreading our content far and wide across the net, and doing a lot of other things that every newspaper Web site should be doing.

Best of all, I get to work with the talented, incredibly hard-working staff of Philly.com. I'm also fortunate to be working for a couple of guys who have very lofty and creative ambitions for reinventing the Philadelphia newspapers and the Web site: CEO Brian Tierney and Philly.com President Eric Grilly. And I'm blessed, really blessed, to be able to work with a group of print newspaper editors who understand the importance of doing great, innovative things on the Web and aren't encumbered by the old ways of doing things: among others, Bill Marimow, Mike Leary and Vernon Loeb at the Inquirer and Mike Days and Wendy Warren at the Daily News. They really get it. It's amazing.

So that's where I'll be when I'm not here: applying everything I've learned over the past 15 years in the online world (and 15 years in print before that) to helping to build a world-class news Web site. It's put up or shut up time for this knowitall. I can't believe how lucky I am to get this chance!

5 Ws & an H 2.0

Paul Bradshaw of the U.K.'s Online Journalism Blog has a superb post contending that the old journalism-staple 5 Ws and an H (who, what, where, when, why and how, for those of you who napped during Journalism 101) should be updated to a new 5Ws and an H:

Who can I connect with? (Social networking) What did the journalist read to write this? (Social bookmarking) Where did this happen? (Mapping) When are events coming up that I need to be aware of? (Calendars) Why should I care? (Databases) How can I make a difference? (Automation)

Anybody working in news on the Web should keep these questions in mind when posting a story—not to mention how to augment that story with video, discussions, audio, interactivity and other Web goodness, as appropriate. It's not just about text and photos anymore. That seems obvious—but on far too many sites, it isn't.

Read Bradshaw's post and expand your thinking about journalism. Good stuff.

Crossing the Chasm: A White Paper

My three-part series on the chasm and challenges facing newspapers—and what they can do about them—received a great deal of attention and traffic last week. So I've repackaged it as a white paper, adding some charts, graphs and examples in the process. If you're interested in receiving a PDF copy of the "Crossing the Chasm" white paper, please drop me a note at recoveringjournalist(at)cox.net. Thanks!

Amending the Journal-Constitution

Everyone in newsroom and newspaper management should read and ponder the stories on the dramatic reorganization of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom in Columbia Journalism Review and American Journalism Review.

As the articles illustrate, the AJC has embarked on the most sweeping reorganization of its news operation of any major newspaper that I'm aware of. Separating news-gathering from Web and print production, shrinking to four departments, delineating between "pitchers" and "catchers," letting photo editors run the news desk—it's radical, dogs-and-cats-living-together sort of stuff.

Traditionalists will think it's crazy talk, and indeed, I'm not sure everything they're doing is right. But at least they're doing something, breaking the mold and trying to reinvent the newsroom for a very different time, when resources are constricted like never before and online distribution is rivaling print for primacy. The AJC's "serve it while it's hot" attitude toward news, regardless of whether it's printed or put online, is fundamentally right (regardless of some predictable bitching from old-timers).

It's heady stuff, and it should be an example to every news organization that the old ways of doing things simply have to change. Bravo to Publisher John Mellott and Editor Julia Wallace for their vision and daring. With similarly innovative leaders like John Robinson at the Greensboro News-Record and the change agents at Gannett, the people who run the Journal-Constitution are breaking out of the pack to try to create news operations that will survive and thrive amid the upheaval that's going on in the newspaper business.

Also worth looking at: NYU professor Jay Rosen's very interesting Beatblogging experiment, attempting to supercharge beat reporters using some of the tools of social networks. I've written about the success of Washington Post baseball writer Barry Svrluga in doing something similar by publishing in print, online, in a blog, discussions and podcast--and using the resulting feedback, in turn, to shape his coverage. Rosen is trying to institutionalize this behavior. Every newsroom should have multiple efforts going on along these lines.

Fishwrap and Birdcage Liners

Not everybody's down on newspapers. A blog called Frugal for Life cheerfully offers a list of Heloise-like helpful hints for using newspapers around the house. As far as I know, you can't do any of these things with a computer or a mobile phone. At least not comfortably or easily. But don't get too wrapped up in newspaper love—the kicker's a doozy!

Stick to the Facts, Please

It's amazing to watch the blogosphere jump on a story and advance it—maybe the better phrase is "inflate it"—beyond the available facts. It's even more amazing when the story is being hyped beyond recognition by blogging journalists who should know better—and when that story is about the very industry they work in.

Today's exhibit: Rupert Murdoch's supposed statement—originating in the Australian press, where direct quotes are sometimes fanciful to begin with—that he and News Corp. "expect" to transform the Wall Street Journal web site, WSJ.com, into a free site. He's hinted at this before, and the conversion has been much anticipated by members of the blogosphere who want WSJ.com to drop its subscription fees and join the rest of the free Web.

But it looks like that bias in favor of a free WSJ.com—and bias is what it is—has infected and inflated coverage of Murdoch's remarks. There are several blog posts out there stating as fact that WSJ.com is going free, as if an official announcement has been made by News Corp. and/or Dow Jones. Sample: "Wall St. Journal to Make Web Site Free" blares the headline on the Online News Association's CyberJournalist.net blog.

Well, no, not exactly. That's not what happened; there was no announcement like that. But here's a journalist-run blog, which you'd expect to have some professional standards, trumpeting it as a fait accompli.

In fact, the truth is a little more complicated than that. Indeed, it would appear that nothing's really been decided yet about WSJ.com—in fact, even Murdoch said, "We are studying it." And of course, he doesn't even own the Journal yet. "It is jumping the gun, people are jumping to conclusions here very quickly. We haven't even closed the deal yet," Michael Rooney, senior vice president and chief revenue officer for the Dow Jones media group, told Editor & Publisher. "Mr. Murdoch would like to have the largest, most robust site in business. Free is a way to look at that. But there is a lot of detail behind that. You have to work that out. You don't just flip the switch."

It is very much possible, indeed probably likely, that WSJ.com will go free. At some point. In some form. (You can bet it won't be entirely free—look for some sort of premium service, at minimum.) But nothing's been decided, and certainly nothing's been announced. Reporting anything else, as Rooney says, is "jumping the gun."

We hold bloggers to somewhat different standards than journalists, because the vast majority of them aren't, well, journalists. But is it too much to ask that journalist-bloggers retain a modicum of professional ethics about what they post and how they post it? Everybody who's been involved in stories that get caught up in the media blogosphere vortex seems to have a horror tale about a journalist-blogger posting something without checking facts or asking for comment—or jumping to conclusions based on personal biases. It happens way too often, and it's just sloppy. And when it comes from a journalist-blogger writing under the imprimatur of a journalism site, it's inexcusable.

There's a great line from All the President's Men that applies perfectly here, as it does to all journalism: "If you're going to hype it, hype it with the facts."

Update: Cyberjournalist.net has since updated its post with the more temperate comments from Dow Jones' Rooney.

Cooking the Books

There's an old joke in the newspaper business about the publisher who decides it's time to retire, and decides to pick a successor from his senior staff. He calls each one of them in for an interview.

First up: The paper's accountant. The publisher says, "How much is two plus two?" The accountant looks at him quizzically, thinks about it for a second, and says, "Well, based on generally accepted accounting practices, two plus two equals four." The publisher thanks him and sends him out of the room.

Next up is the paper's lawyer. The publisher asks him, "How much is two plus two?" The lawyer thinks for a few seconds, and then makes his case, arguing that, based on a recent decision in the Third Circuit and other precedents, two plus two must equal four. The publisher thanks him and sends him away.

Finally, the publisher calls in the paper's circulation manager. Once again: "How much is two plus two?" The circulation manager gets up from his chair, closes the door, draws the blinds over the windows, moves close to the publisher and whispers, "How much do you want it to be?"

Which brings us to today's announcement that the Audit Bureau of Circulation is dramatically changing the way that newspaper circulation is calculated. With a nod to the circulation manager in the joke, let us count some of the ways:
* "A flexible pricing model where newspapers will be considered paid by ABC regardless of the price for which the copy was sold."
* "There will no longer have to be payment for third-party copies or Newspapers in Education for the circulation to count."
* "Hotel and employee copies, currently under other-paid, will be reclassified under a new paid-circulation category."

Phew. That's some creative accounting. Those papers given away to schools or left unread in front of hotel room doors just became big winners. What's next? Counting papers that are thrown away when the presses mess them up? Counting papers scattered around newsrooms? Counting any reader who looks at a paper over somebody's shoulder on the bus? (Oh, wait--I think the new "readership" numbers may actually count those!)

Newspaper circulation is dropping because customers are rejecting the product, not because papers are failing to count every freebie or near-freebie they're scattering to the winds. Cooking the books isn't going to solve the problems of relevancy, competition from the Web, and failure to truly innovate (except maybe in the circulation-accounting department, apparently).

Ironically, of course, the ABC recommendations come from a committee made up of both advertisers and publishers—so the advertisers, who want wider circulation for their ads, are complicit in this numbers game. In fact, rationalization for the ABC changes comes from the VP for advertising at Walgreen, Craig Sinclair, who explains, "Our aim was to streamline the audit process, clearly define important measurement standards, and improve overall communication between newspaper buyers and sellers."

Wow. This guy has real publisher potential!

Part 3: Building a Bridge to the Future

(Third of three parts)

Whenever I write a post suggesting things that newspapers can do to remain viable in their transition to an online-centric world, somebody pops up to say that it's pointless to give such prescriptions, because newspapers have already lost the war and there's no point in trying to save them.

And people say I'm pessimistic?

The future of the newspaper business doesn't look good, at least in the near term. As I wrote in the first part of this series, things look pretty bleak over the next few years, as newspaper companies navigate the gaping chasm between declining print revenue and the eventual rise of the online business to truly replace what's been lost in print. Moreover, as I said in the second part of this series, newspapers are making it even harder on themselves by falling behind their online competitors in the use of leading-edge technologies to attract and keep online readers. I'll say it again: In a Facebook and YouTube world, most newspaper sites look pretty stodgy.

It's not just the sites that are living in the past; so are many of the people who need to lead the industry into the future. Associated Press CEO Tom Curley nailed this very well in a recent speech: "Editors need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new one," he said. "The first thing that has to go is the attitude. Our institutional arrogance has done more to harm us than any portal." (It's no small irony, incidentally, that the head of the once-hidebound AP is now coming off as a news business visionary. Who'd have thunk it?)

You don't have to look hard to find examples of the "attitude" problems Curley is talking about: Just last week, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's short-sighted approach to handling political blogs provided yet another glaring piece of evidence that some newsroom people are trapped in the old ways and just don't get it. That's still a big problem, and it's not limited to newsroom folks—the business side of the house often isn't any better about truly understanding what needs to be done to cross the chasm.

But as badly as they're doing at transitioning into the online products and business model that is their only hope for a future, I don't think you can count newspapers out yet. They have some amazing advantages that, if properly leveraged and exploited, could make an enormous difference in how the next few years play out. Newspapers are still the No. 1 source of local news in their markets; nothing else even comes close. They have deep relationships with local advertisers that competitors would kill for. They're full of people who excel at gathering information and telling stories. They've got brand names that are solid gold in their local markets. They've got sprawling distribution networks that, arguably, are underused.

The trick is in separating those considerable assets from the industry's non-trivial liabilities, many of which are more intangible and psychological than tangible: too much attachment to old business and distribution models; increasing distance from the audience and its needs; a horrific tendency to want to control every interaction with and among readers; a constitutional aversion to change; overinvestment in capital-intensive production and distribution facilities; a lack of imagination about new ways of doing things; and an almost total failure to understand that the future is online, not in print, and to do more than pay lip service to quickly accepting and adapting to that change.

But change is what the newspaper industry must do, quickly, to avoid falling so deeply into the chasm that it can't climb out (and truth be told, some newspapers aren't going to survive this transition).

So what's the prescription for survival? Aside from shaking off all of those attitude problems, there are many things that newspapers should be doing right now, as aggressively as possible. Not all of these will work. But tiptoeing into these changes out of fear of failure will only guarantee more failure. The building is on fire; drastic measures are needed. Chances must be taken.

With all that as preamble, here's what newspapers should be doing to ensure that they make it to the other side of the chasm and successfully transition from print to online. If you're a newspaper executive or editor, consider this a call to arms—I'm talking to you:

• Think Outside the Box. I mean this as more than a cliched metaphor, though that's critical as well. The box that newspapers should be thinking outside is the computer screen that's got a Web site with the newspaper pasted onto it. Newspapers should be boldly experimenting with distribution via Facebook widgets, RSS, mobile phones, Twitter, social bookmark sites and anything else they can find. Your core competence is reporting the news; distribution on paper is just one option. You should be getting your content out to audiences as many ways as you can. Don't just be prolific—be promiscuous.

• Engage Your Audience. Newspapers are discovering, sometimes to their horror, that their audience has something to say—and wants to say it. Don't fight this—embrace it. Celebrate it. Newspapers have historically been pillars of their community; now, they can be the gathering place for the community. Enlist them in your reporting, aka crowdsourcing.Provide readers as many tools and venues as you can to communicate with you and, especially, amongst themselves (and for God's sake, don't be afraid of what they'll say!). Know that a lot of upstart companies and technologies are targeting precisely this niche of becoming the ultimate social community bulletin board. To maintain your historic position, you need to beat them to it.

• Don't Just Create Content—Aggregate It. Dive into the blogosphere and the worlds of Yahoo groups, social networks and listservs and you'll discover that you're hardly alone anymore in covering what's going on around you. Not by a long shot. In fact, passionate bloggers and online conversationalists are covering your local market and topics better than the newspaper could ever hope to (especially in a time of shrinking newsrooms). Example: If you've got a professional or major college sports team in your town, it's a mortal lock that there are a host of blogs devoted to passionately dissecting everything that team does, in far more detail than your beat writer or columnists ever could. What to do? Bring them into the tent! Harness that passion. Make your sites the central point for the aggregation of the best local writing from all of these amateur sources. Blend it--properly identified--with your professional journalism. And then sell advertising against it, perhaps sharing some of the proceeds with the bloggers.

• Embrace the Competition. While you're gathering outside content, knock down that old brick wall that separates you from your print and broadcast competitors and aggregate their content, as well. Result: Readers will come to see you as the place to go to find out everything that's going on around town, from any source. Fighting competitors tooth and nail, to the point of ignoring what they do if you don't do it first? Outdated thinking. Linking to competitors? Heresy. Being the No. 1 information source in town? Priceless. And Profitable.

• Get Local. Very Local. Hyperlocal. Under attack from all sides, newspapers have one absolutely defensible franchise: local coverage. National news, international news, classifieds—they're all being done better elsewhere. But local news, information and advertising are what makes newspapers unique. Focus on that, preferably to the exclusion of most anything else. That's what your readers really care about—and they can't get it elsewhere. (Yet.) And be sure to involve the readers in the coverage—user-generated content is what makes a hyperlocal strategy work. They know more about what's going on in their neighborhoods than your reporters ever can. Take advantage of that knowledge and create ways for the readers to share what they know about what's going on around them.

• Stop Covering the World. This is the flip side of Get Local. There is absolutely zero reason, in this day and age, why any newspaper—except a handful of national papers—should be devoting any resources to national or international news or generic entertainment coverage, especially online. There are just too many other places to get it. (Exception: Uniquely relevant content—and that's very rare.) Get over the egomaniacal conceit that your editors have a unique take on the presentation of national or international wire copy, or that you have to be "of record" for your readers on news from around the world. Those days are over. Instead, use your ever-tightening resources—plus contributions from the audience—to concentrate on covering your local market to the nth degree. You should be looking ruthlessly at everything in the paper and throwing over the side anything that doesn't support the local focus. Zero-base your news operation.

• Let Your Stars Shine. That columnist, critic or beat reporter you see as a rumpled hack (or more, hopefully) may be a celebrity to his or her readers. Take advantage of that. Build communities around core newsroom beats and columns—the restaurant critic, the city hall reporter, the sports columnist. Think of them as the community's guide, or host. Augment their reporting and writing with user comments and conversations, online discussions, regular blogging, podcasts, video, etc. This binds your content even more closely to your readers and creates strong franchises in particular subjects. And the writers will find that the feedback from their fans in the audience even makes the journalism better.

• Video: It's Not Just for TV Stations Anymore. Video on the Web is exploding; the cost of producing video is plummeting. Coincidence? I think not. With the proliferation of broadband access and cheap, easy tools, video is becoming as important to the Web as text—and even more so to younger audience members that have always proven so elusive. Newspaper sites should be aggressively adding video every which way they can—coverage of news events, interviews with newsmakers, talking-head videos by columnists and reporters. It doesn't have to be network quality; a little effort goes a long way. Everyone on your staff should be video-savvy. Former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll once half-jokingly proposed giving all of his reporters "helmet cams." A few years later, that actually looks like a pretty good idea.

• Use the Technology. Not just on your site; use it yourself! Everybody thinking about the future of newspapers should be on Facebook, spending time with YouTube, trying Twitter, getting information via mobile phone, etc. In talking to newspaper people about change, it's always disturbing to discover how many people don't actually use the latest technologies themselves. Nobody looks dumber than an executive talking about building Facebook widgets who clearly isn't even a member of Facebook.

• Dig Into the Data Mines. An increasing amount of public information is online in the form of data. This ranges from crime reports to economic data to event calendars. Find ways to mine this data and create new, interesting forms of journalism (hint: plot it on a map). These sorts of data mashups are appearing all over the Web, but rarely on newspaper sites. Don't be left behind. And data-mining isn't just for the editorial side. Your paper owns amazing information on subscribers and advertisers. Within the bounds of propriety and privacy, find new ways to take advantage of it.

• Put Your Sales Force to Work. Yes, they already work hard—hopefully. But you can give them even more to do. Your feet on the street in the local market are an amazing asset that a lot of other companies would love to have. Put those two notions together: Your sales reps could be using their relationships with local advertisers to also sell ads for Google, Yahoo, Yellow Page companies and others that want in on the local market. Are these competitors? Yes. Wouldn't you like a piece of their business and a chance to keep tabs on them? You should. Otherwise, they're just going to come into your market anyway, if they're not already there. Might as well take a cut.

• Educate Advertisers. As slow as newspapers have been to fully embrace the Web and other online media, advertisers have been worse—especially local advertisers. Help your advertisers understand how the Web can help them promote and grow their businesses. Give them better tools to reach consumers. Don't just take orders—evangelize. Will this shift advertisers from print to online? Of course. But you're going to get cannibalized anyway. Better you should cannibalize your own business.

• Ready, Aim, Fire. That's the new advertising paradigm. In the old model, you could fire without aiming, knowing that your audience was a broad enough target that any given ad plastered across the newspaper would be relevant to some reader or another. No more. The golden age of mass advertising is over. The future is targeted, delivering specific customers to specific advertisers. That's a major change in thinking, but that's what the new technology allows and encourages. Mass-market advertising was an inefficient gravy train. Targeted advertising is far more efficient—and should be just as profitable, if not more so.

• Stop Pasting Display Ads Onto the Screen (Or Worse, Popping Them Up). Just because display ads were the lifeblood of the print business for a century doesn't mean they work online. Banners, skyscrapers, etc.—those are print forms adapted to the Web. Do you ever actually click one? Do you think your customers do? Look for other forms: Video ads, interactive ads, embedded links, contextual advertising, search-based advertising, ads on RSS feeds and mobile devices. Google, by the way, is already doing all of this. Seen its market value lately? Yep, bigger than all the U.S. media companies combined. Maybe there's something to these newfangled forms of advertising!

• Explore New Revenue Streams. Circulation revenue aside, what percentage of newspaper revenue comes from advertising? All of it! Broaden your horizons. Find other ways to help your advertisers do business besides selling them ads. Can you create directories around local businesses? Can you help them with business administrative tasks like database management, resume review and collation, or tracking their customers? Can you hire out your distribution trucks to help them make deliveries? Use some imagination and see how you can increase your value to your local business customers.

• Experiment and Innovate As If Your Life Depended on It. Because it does. There are too many newspapers that still think of their Web site as something of a novelty, stuck in a room down the hall and populated by castoffs and kids. That's just wrong. Your online operation is the future of the business, and it needs significant investment, attention and top-of-mind prioritization in every aspect of planning and operations. And that's not all. Newspapers should be placing bets on all sorts of innovative products, on and offline. Reach out to audiences any way you can. You have no idea what will work. But you know what doesn't work: Doing nothing, aka what you're doing now. You should be encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship in every corner of your operation. The industry's poster child for this is the Bakersfield Californian, which has thriving hyperlocal, social network, magazine-publishing, entertainment, classifieds and who-knows-what-else experiments going. Superb work. Unfortunately, I'm hard-pressed to think of any other newspaper organization that comes close to that level and variety of innovation.

• Kill the Print Edition. Seriously. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next week. Maybe not next year. But you should be looking very hard at how the existing product and business model are sustaining themselves and be prepared to make a hard choice sooner rather than later. Yes, it's still a cash cow. But it's expensive to produce and distribute, advertising and circulation are declining, and its audience is aging literally to death. Hang on too long and you risk bankruptcy—and you may never make it to the other side of the chasm.

• Get Some Guts. Change is messy. Change is scary. You've got to have guts to initiate and go through with the kinds of changes that are necessary to get to the other side of the chasm. This industry has suffered too long from editors and business executives who are timid and afraid of offending anybody. That's no longer an option. The things that need to be done are not safe, they're not easy, and they're going to move a lot of people out of their comfort zones. Deal with it—it's better than unemployment.

I'll say it again: Some people, and some newspapers, and some newspaper companies, aren't going to make it to the other side of the chasm between print and online. Remember the old first-year law school gimmick that goes, "Look to your left. Look to your right. One of the three of you isn't going to make it"? Well, that's how it is in the newspaper industry right now. Survival—and success—will go to the bold, the courageous, the innovative. All others need not apply. This is a gut check. Before you head across the chasm, make sure you and your organization have what it takes to make the transition.

Incidentally, a year ago I wrote a similarly detailed prescription post—and a year later not much has changed in the way newspapers are operated (I mean fundamental change, not random cost-cutting, which is arguably doing more damage than it's preventing). Meanwhile, the newspaper business continues to spiral downward. What does it take to get managements to make the aggressive, innovative moves needed to survive?

Or, as Tom Curley said: "We—the news industry—have come to that fork in the road. We must take bold, decisive steps to secure the audiences and funding to support journalism’s essential role in both our economy and democracy, or find ourselves on an ugly path to obscurity."

Exactly. Now get to work!

Part 1: The Chasm
Part 2: Digging a Deeper Hole

Interlude: The Cleveland Kerfuffle

I assume that everybody who reads this blog also reads Jeff Jarvis' excellent Buzzmachine, probably long before they get here. But for anyone who doesn't, Jeff has a terrific post on the fiasco in Cleveland in which the Plain Dealer hired some partisan bloggers (good idea) and then fired one when he got a bit too partisan (bad idea).

The resulting fallout, as well-documented and analyzed by Jeff, is amusing and sad—a classic case of a newspaper so stuck in the old ways of doing things that it shoots itself in the foot when it ventures into something new. The paper's management has rolled itself into a defensive ball over something that shouldn't have been an issue in the first place, making things worse in the process, and naturally, the controversy is rife with hypocrisy and ignorance on the part of the paper's leaders.

Anyway, go read Jeff's post. I'll get back to my series on what newspapers should be doing to survive in a couple of days. But suffice it to say that what the Plain Dealer is doing is an object lesson on what not to do.

Update: See also McClatchy top editor Howard Weaver's terrific take on things that make newsrooms uncomfortable. Along similar lines, I recently heard Gannett VP for New Media Content Jennifer Carroll say something very, very smart: If there's discomforting language and conversations going on in story comments and discussions, look hard at whether that reflects something in the community that the newspaper should be reporting on, not trying to squelch. In other words, think like a news person, not like a control freak. Dead on.

Part 2: Digging an Even Deeper Hole

(Second of three parts)

In my previous post, I discussed the chasm that exists between the newspaper industry's current state and its future, when the business becomes primarily about online revenue rather than print. The optimistic view is that that transition will take five to eight years, at least.

But just as the industry is heading off the edge of the cliff into this chasm, there are indications that the online side of the business, so important to the future, is having problems of its own. There is increasing evidence that newspaper online traffic has plateaued at many papers—or worse, is declining—and that online ad revenue, after years of robust curly-number double-digit percentage growth, is slowing.

There is anecdotal evidence of this if you talk to people inside the industry; a somewhat more empirical take can be found in a little-covered study released in August by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. The study found that while major national newspaper Web sites are enjoying traffic growth, "those of many local papers are not." At the same time, the growth in online newspaper advertising, as measured by the Newspaper Association of America's quarterly online advertising tallies, has slowed to 20 percent this year after several years at 30 percent. It's hard to sustain 30 percent growth, of course, but again, anecdotes confirm the numbers—things seem to be slowing down.

The news just keeps getting sunnier and sunnier, doesn't it? That chasm is looking wider and deeper.

Why are newspaper Web sites hitting the wall in traffic and revenue growth? Alas, for some of the same reasons that their print counterparts have been declining for years: lack of innovation and relevance.

Let's be blunt: Most newspaper Web sites really aren't very good. Yeah, they post the daily news online, many of them now are updated throughout the day, and hey! We've now got blogs and podcasts and video! Oh my!

That's great—if it's 2003. Unfortunately, that's the year most newspaper sites still are stuck in—at best. Meantime, the rest of the online world has continued to evolve and aggressively adopt new technologies and forms of presentation, and newspaper sites are being left in the digital dust. Newspaper Web site readers visit these other sites, too, and newspaper sites pale in comparison.

We're living in the era of Facebook and YouTube, and newspaper sites, for the most part, still are one-dimensional--newspapers pasted on a screen. While the bar for Web quality is being raised every day, newspaper sites look stodgy and outdated by comparison (much like their print counterparts, alas). Don't even get me started on the state of the art in newspaper Web site design—overstuffed, overcluttered pages make that Nascar's sponsor-festooned cars look clean and orderly, to borrow a line from the great print and Web designer Roger Black.

Some quick examples of smart and popular online technology and features on which newspaper sites are still playing catch-up, big-time: Popular and competitive news and sports sites like ESPN.com, CNN.com and MLB.com have video on practically every major page. Craigslist, Google and Wikipedia make searching for relevant and useful information a snap. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are bringing people together in innovative ways using social networking, augmented by gee-whiz presentation technologies like Ajax. Yelp, Flickr and neighborhood listservs and Yahoo Groups are becoming essential sources of local information, powered by shared community knowledge. Google and others are flat-out reinventing advertising. Bloggers by the tens of millions are redefining every type of news commentary and coverage. Widgets are the fastest-growing Web phenomenon we've seen in ages. Online games and kids-oriented sites are marvels of color, motion and interactivity. Myriad specialty sites are providing new sorts of focused information in new ways that make newspapers look even more like general-interest dinosaurs.

And those are just the tip of the iceberg. Web 2.0 sites of all varieties are using technology in ways that newspaper sites can't come within miles of matching. Creative mapping, simplified mobile device delivery, content aggregation, interactive database tools, innovative ways of gathering and republishing information (take a look at the very cool Tripit for one fascinating example)—this is the state of the Web, circa 2007. Even the best newspaper sites don't come up to these standards, and most aren't even close.

Suffering by comparison to the rest of the Web, newspaper sites are less and less attractive to online readers. Want proof? Look at comparisons of the amount of time people spend on newspaper sites versus how much time they spend on other major online sites. Alan Mutter has conveniently broken this down: Visitors to sites owned by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spend six times as much times—six times—as they do on major newspaper sites: 2 1/2 minutes a day versus 24 seconds a day.

And those are the best newspaper sites; the time comparisons for lesser sites are doubtlessly far worse. According to the Pew Research Center, readers spend about 15 minutes a day with the printed newspaper (a number that's in steady decline). Twenty-four seconds a day with a newspaper Web site? Ooh, that's a scintillating product.

We've seen this before; indeed, it's the history of newspapers on the Web. At best the online product has been just good enough; at worst, more often than not, failures to aggressively innovate have left newspapers way behind the curve as the likes of craigslist, Drudge, Google News and countless others have carved out large chunks of businesses that newspapers once monopolized. The Web is a fast-moving stream of innovation; you're can't just declare victory when you've gotten your newspaper online and added a few rudimentary features. But that seems to be what many newspapers have done.

Enough bad news. Let's look at the bright side: As newspapers move across the chasm and make truly significant changes in their business model (not merely rampant cross-cutting), the numbers may begin to break in their favor. One major change that's going to have to be made: Getting past lip service and truly understanding that the online product is the primary business, and that print is secondary. Once that obstacle to innovation has been crossed (and truly, nobody's there yet), newspapers will be better equipped to deal with the future. Publishing a print newspaper is a very expensive proposition (you know, presses, ink, paper, etc.); publishing an online edition is much cheaper.

What does that mean? That newspapers need to think hard about getting out of the "paper" business. That could mean drastically reducing the size and press run of the print edition; it could mean eliminating it entirely; it could mean outsourcing large chunks of production and distribution to reduce costs.

Radical stuff, but it has to happen; the audience for the print product is simply dwindling. And drastically reducing the costs of production can provide significant cost savings that will make it easier to swallow the decline in print revenue and get newspapers across the overall revenue chasm. For while online revenue, at least for the near future, won't cover the cost of creating and publishing a print newspaper, it will grow within a few years to fully cover the costs of producing an online edition (yes, including a full newsroom). That's a very different calculation, and it makes the ongoing shift in revenue slightly less painful. Enlightened newspaper companies should be running the numbers on this and thinking hard about taking the big step away from print.

Another reason for hope: Smarter advertisers. The advertising industry has been as slow to creatively embrace the Web as publishers have, but that's finally changing. More and more advertising budgets are being shifted online, and more and more creative advertising is taking advantage of the medium in ways that simple banner ads—the online equivalent of the newspaper display ad—could not. At the same time, small local advertisers are coming to the Web in force, and newspaper sites should be well-positioned, as local products with local ad sales forces, to capture that advertising. They just need to create products and advertising sales programs to seriously tap into the local online ad market.

So yes, there will be something worth getting to on the other side of the revenue chasm. But it will require radical changes in how newspapers do business. In my next post, I'll offer several prescriptions for how newspapers can successfully cross the chasm and emerge as successful news organizations—if not actual newspapers—on the other side.

Part 1: The Chasm
Part 3: Building a Bridge to the Future