Recovering Journalist

Death of a Chronicle Foretold

If you want some idea why the San Francisco Chronicle is on the brink of extinction, just take a look at its Web site, SFGate.

It's a perfectly adequate newspaper Web site–and that's the problem. Newspapers have been fumbling their Web sites for years, and that's one reason why the future for the Chronicle, and many other large papers, may be bleak. They've failed to concentrate on building great, useful Web sites rather than merely adequate ones. Satisfied with pasting newspaper headlines and stories on a screen and trying to convince print display advertisers to run online banners, the Chronicle and other papers have been left behind by smarter thinking on the Web. Their cluttered designs are hard to navigate; many still labor under the misconception that readers come to their sites looking for foreign and national headlines rather than focusing on local news; and they've failed utterly to keep up with the latest trends in online advertising and content delivery.

Sure, they've got blogs, maybe a podcast or two (how 2005), possibly some online discussions with staffers, maybe, just maybe, a submit-your-photo feature, or story comments. But where's the aggregation of local content, the hyperlocal and niche sites, the local database maps, the sophisticated ad formats, the aggressive efforts to bring readers into the conversation and solicit user-generated content to augment and enhance expensive professional coverage? You find occasional examples of sophisticated Web work here and there around the industry, but almost unanimously, newspaper Web sites, like the Chronicle's, are adequate–at best. And don't get me started on the amateurish design of most newspaper sites, or the lack of search-engine optimization smarts, social media links, iPhone apps and other leading-edge thinking that's a staple of any good Web company. Newspapers just don't do that.

It's not like the Chronicle didn't have good local examples to follow, sitting as it does at the headlands of Silicon Valley. Yelp is just around the corner from the Chronicle's headquarters at Fifth and Mission. Craigslist is just a few blocks away. Google is just down Highway 101 in Silicon Valley. And so on. All of these were founded and thrived in the shadow of the Chronicle until they themselves cast their own shadows over the paper and its Web site, grabbing away local readers, shoppers, advertisers and others.

The Bay Area is the most fecund place in the world for the development of the Web ideas that have helped cripple the newspaper industry, but the Chronicle seems to have been all but oblivious to what was going on all around it. Like other newspapers, it's been unable to break free of its print shackles and think aggressively and wisely about how to compete–really, seriously compete–online. Hell, SFGate could have established itself as the leading, um, chronicler of and gathering place for all that was going on around it in the technology industry (you know, like neighbors CNet or TechCrunch). But it missed that boat, too.

The problem was, as it is at so many other newspapers, that nobody at the Chronicle or Hearst ever really took the paper's Web site seriously or devoted real management cycles to it. It never was given the proper resources to develop, and with the exception of a visionary or two like Bob Cauthorn, who ran SFGate for a while a few years ago, it never really had bold, imaginative leadership, at any level. (A smart friend who interviewed for a top job at SFGate a few years ago all but ran screaming from the building, astonished at the lack of sophistication he found.)

Corporate machinations multiplied the problem. A couple of years ago I had a fascinating and thought-provoking dinner with a group of high-ranking Chronicle and Hearst executives. We brainstormed way outside the box about how to rethink the paper's Web site as a revolutionary guide to the best of the Bay Area, tapping into myriad non-newspaper sources to create a compendium of local news, information and opinion. It was heady stuff, and then ... nothing. I heard later that the problem was that the Chronicle execs didn't really control the Web site; the Hearst execs in New York did that, and they had their own, different priorities. We had the right people at the dinner table, but between them, they were unable to make significant changes to reinvent the Chronicle's site in a way that might have made it a breakthrough Web product. Opportunity lost.

So now the Chronicle, and SFGate, are on the brink. Maybe Hearst can make the drastic cuts necessary to save its San Francisco operation, in what now looks like the best-case alternative to closing the paper. But it's hard to believe those cuts won't also gut the already thin SFGate Web operation. And so the Web site, which should have been a big part of the solution to the Chronicle's woes, will totter on, nothing better than adequate–if the whole shebang survives at all. What a pity.

PS: Jeff Jarvis offers a telling contrast between the Chronicle and Google. And Marc Matteo has an excellent overview of what's wrong with newspaper Web sites.

The Social Story

I hope you'll forward this post to someone.

How many Web stories do you forward a day? Several, probably. We do it all the time: Pasting a link (or an entire story) into e-mail, using a site's "send this to a friend" function, dropping a link into Twitter or Facebook. It's something that's much easier to do on the Web than it was in print–quickly share an item with somebody else. Call it the social story.

Each of us forwarding several stories a day–it adds up, for sure. I'm not sure anybody's able to measure it, but I'll bet that forwarded links account for a considerable chunk of the traffic to any given Web site. In many ways, it's the best promotion a site can get: A reader telling a friend or colleague or family member, in effect, "Read this. It's good stuff." (Or sometimes not so good, but still notable!)

So it behooves Web publishers to do anything they can to make it easy for readers to pass on these social stories: short URLs (long ones often break up in e-mail messages); easy to use "e-mail this to a friend" functionality; leveraging registration information, if you have it, to default to the sender's e-mail address (it's amazing how many registered sites miss this one); and the ability for the sender to include comments (again, often strangely missing from some story e-mail tools).

At the other end of this social transaction, sites need to take advantage of the readers receiving these forwarded stories. Hopefully there's advertising on these pages, as well as navigation to other parts of the site. This is a classic example of somebody entering a site on something other than the home page, and it's why story pages need as much horizontal navigation as possible to try to keep new visitors around, if possible.

The social story is an important part of the Web experience. Sites need to do everything they can to promote and exploit this everyday behavior by readers. Now go forward this to somebody else–I need the traffic!

Who's Doing Good Work in Online News? (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series, I took a look at what traditional news organizations are doing to push the envelope in online innovation. But not surprisingly, some of the more advanced work in this area is being done by small startups that can be more nimble and aggressive than their mainstream counterparts. Here's a look at some of the best of these efforts; again, feel free to point out more in the Comments.

• The 2008 Presidential campaign highlighted some of the best startup efforts in journalism. Politico took advantage of political-junkie voids left by The Washington Post and other traditional news organizations to quickly become a leading name in political news. While I'm concerned about the long-term viability of the high expense of Politico's news operation, it's done some smart things to spread its reach far and wide, including syndicating its coverage to other news organizations. The other notable political startup from the 2008 campaign was the marvelous FiveThirtyEight.com, whose proprietor, baseball stats geek Nate Silver, applied that same geekiness to handicapping the electoral college. Nobody did a more interesting job covering the election–or a better job of predicting the outcome, with startling state-by-state accuracy. Now Silver has to figure out if there's a second act in applying his statistical analysis to the political doings in between elections. Also good on the political/government beat: the wonky OpenCongress.org. 

• A lot has been said and written about the crop of startup online newspapers now covering cities around the country. I'm particularly fond of Voice of San Diego, which I think combines solid reporting and writing with a particularly attractive design that has a more personality and flair than your average news site. Pegasus News, covering Dallas, continues to grow as well. Both of these, as well as sites like Minneapolis' MinnPost, primarily rely on professional staffs and are, in effect, newspapers minus the paper. The business models for this are still up in the air, and some, like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost, are relying at least in part on a PBS/NPR-like user-supported model (Pegasus News is a for-profit commercial venture). Others, like Chicago's ChiTown Daily News, are largely funded by non-profit grants. I worry about the long-term viability of these non-commercial efforts as the initial money runs out. To sustain, they have to find workable business models and revenue streams, and non-commercial status doesn't always provide the right motivation to do that.

• Non-profit support of journalism is taking other forms. Pro Publica is a non-profit, independent investigative journalism project whose work appears on its site as well as in major publications and on TV networks. This is an interesting model for journalism largely disconnected from traditional journalism entities. I'm less sanguine about a couple of roughly similar experiments: Spot.us, which hopes to convince readers to make contributions to fund coverage of stories suggested by the audience (seems like a longshot to me); and Global Post, a commercial effort to establish a sort of international wire service (alas, at a time when newspapers are eschewing foreign news in favor of local coverage). But there will be other efforts to supplement what traditional news organizations do by tapping into non-profit sources to fund specialty reporting, I'm sure. The Kaiser Family Foundation already is moving in this direction with health coverage, an area that's faced significant cutbacks in many newsrooms.

• Another foundation-based effort that has gotten a lot of attention is Adrian Holovaty's EveryBlock, which collates all sorts of local data, including news stories, crime logs, real estate sales, etc., and displays it in lists or plotted on a map. With his Knight Foundation grant running out, Holovaty is now looking for a longer-term business model. He's struck partnerships with The New York Times and other papers; that seems to be a good strategy, since EveryBlock seems to work best as the data support for a more well-rounded news product.

• More maps: Google has been tracking the spread of the flu this winter on its Flu Trends map, which cleverly plots Google searches for words like "flu" and "flu vaccine" and purports to be able to show the spread of flu around the country two weeks before health officials know about it. (The Centers for Disease Control is supporting the effort.) At the moment, it looks like Maine and Texas are particularly flu-prone. The flu map shows how Google maps are particularly useful for plotting breaking news about stories that spread over a geographic area. Google Australia, for instance, has created an interactive map showing the devastating bush fires outside Melbourne.

• Another excellent view of the Australian fire story comes from a somewhat unexpected source: Wikipedia, whose entry on the fires is voluminous, comprehensive and up-to-the-minute. A lot of journalists like to knock Wikipedia because it's user-generated and therefore vulnerable to inaccuracies; in fact, the site is surprisingly accurate for most purposes and is turning out to be a very underrated collector of breaking news coverage. Next time a big story on an obscure topic breaks, check Wikipedia–you'll likely find surprisingly complete and ongoing aggregated coverage of the story that's as good as, or better, than anything from a traditional media site.

• The most interesting non-traditional journalism efforts are those that are using technology in new and interesting ways to manage, display and interact with news stories. Check out NewsMixer, developed by a group of Medill School of Journalism students, using the Cedar Rapids Gazette site as a guinea pig. NewsMixer is like reader comments on acid. Partly reliant on tools developed by Facebook, NewsMixer lets readers comment on stories, ask (and answer) questions about stories and talk among themselves, in an interactive format that brings stories to life in whole new ways. Great stuff. Another interesting news technology is OneSpot, from a startup headed by my former colleague Matt Cohen. OneSpot allows Web publishers to create sophisticated newsfeeds using tools that aggregate and filter news from myriad sources to create smart collections of targeted content. The Wall Street Journal's site is using it, and the company just announced a $4.2 million round of financing–no small feat in the current economic environment. The VCs must think OneSpot is onto something. One more cool news technology: Aggregate Knowledge, which bolts onto news sites, analyzes user behavior and reading patterns, and suggests stories that similar visitors read. Look for it at the bottom of story pages on WashingtonPost.com and Philly.com. 

• Two of my favorite areas for news organizations to be exploring are aggregation and niche markets, and Alan Jacobson's Tween Tribune taps into both of these. The site brings together stories of interest to kids between 8 and 14 and invites them to comment on them. It's an interesting effort, and Jacobson is marketing it to newspapers and schools as an updated version of the old newspapers-in-education gambit. Like Gannett's MomsLikeMe, mentioned in Part 1, this is a good example of aiming an interactive news product directly at a particular demographic niche–something that general-interest news organizations have never quite figured out. There's lots of money in those niches if you can get them right.

• If news organizations are going to thrive online, they're going to have to find ways to inexpensively capture advertising from smaller local businesses. A quiet startup called PaperG has patent-pending technology in stealth mode called PlaceLocal that can instantly create online display ads by searching the Web for business information like photos, awards, and logos. Disclosure: I'm an advisor to and investor in the company, so I've seen the technology–and it's very cool. Not surprisingly, it's already attracting a lot of interest from publishers. PaperG also has another piece of advertising technology, FlyerBoard, already deployed at Boston.com and WeeklyDig.com, that can quickly turn any piece of printed advertising into a simple Web ad attached to a mini-site (you can see it in action on the upper right side of the WeeklyDig home page–it's the little bulletin board). Similarly, TurnHere is creating thousands of high-CPM video ads by deploying low-cost videographers to shoot short videos of local restaurants and other businesses.

That's a long list, but there are doubtless other first-rate examples of news (and advertising) innovation worth sharing. Again, please add other good efforts to the Comments. And thanks to Mark Stencel and Chris Krewson, who pointed a few of these examples out to me–Mark especially, who suggested the idea for these posts.

Who's Doing Good Work in Online News? (Part 1)

There's a lot of time being spent these days chasing old ideas for the online news business that seem new to some people. Meanwhile, lots of smart folks are doing some very good work in truly inventing the future of online news.

Some of these innovators work for traditional news organizations; others work for startups or Web-only operations. These are people who really do have good ideas for the future of news and advertising. Over the next couple of posts, I'm going to take a look at some of the efforts I've seen that seem to be the most interesting. 

I'm going to skim over a few things, like Twitter, that have quickly become mainstream, and try to concentrate on products and projects that are breaking new ground–and hopefully can become examples for others to replicate. Some are fairly well-known; others have been too obscure, in my view. But all of them should be more widely adopted. Just about every news site should be doing versions of every one of these, and more.

We're at a point where the news business really needs some bold, imaginative thinking in everything from news presentation to business models. These examples are some of the best of breed. (If you know of others, please add them in the Comments.) 

First, from traditional organizations, in no particular order:

• Maps are a powerful way to illustrate lots of information at a glance, and given the Google maps API, it's surprising that they're not used more by news sites to explain stories that literally cover a lot of ground. And not just stories: CinciNavigator, from Cincinnati.com, does a nice job of plotting local information ranging from news stories to crime to business listings to gas prices, all in one place. Obviously, this builds on the great work being done by Adrian Holovaty, first on ChicagoCrime.org and then on EveryBlock (more on that in the next post). But it's surprising that more news organizations haven't provided their readers with this service. Another example: WashingtonPost.com's LocalExplorer, which launched about the same time as the overhyped and disappointing LoudounExtra, and is actually much more useful–albeit more limited than CinciNavigator.  

• Another interesting use of maps: the Newseum's Today's Front Pages feature, which plots newspaper front pages on a map (a map with a weird East Coast bias, for some reason). WashingtonPost.com comes at something similar in a very different way with TimeSpace: World, a somewhat confusing mashup of news stories and photos overlaid over a world map. Both of these are actually riffs on work that was done at the MIT Media Lab in the early '90s on world news maps; it's nice to see a good idea finally making the mainstream of journalism!

• Stuck in a traditional one-size-fits-all mentality, many news organizations have had problems thinking about creating great niche sites to target specific audience segments. Gannett, however, has quietly built a network of local sites aimed at mothers that now has dozens of outposts under the MomsLikeMe banner. A recent redesign–which brought the initial sites onto a new platform under one banner–unfortunately cost the sites a lot of their personality. But the MomsLikeMe sites still do a great job of providing a forum where mothers can exchange information, tips, stories, whatever–and where advertisers can reach those moms. The format is much more like a community bulletin board than a traditional news site, with lots of user-generated content. That's a very good thing, because it means authenticity, participation, engagement–and inexpensive content.

• There was a time a few years ago when news sites went a little Flash-happy, creating all sorts of overdone interactive features that seemed to serve their designers' portfolios more than they did readers. Flashmania has calmed down a bit, thank God, and now multimedia presentations are deployed a little more judiciously. A great one is the Please Touch Museum site the Philadelphia Inquirer built to feature the city's new museum for children. Put together by a team led by Frank Wiese, the Inquirer's online projects editor, the site perfectly fits its subject: you want to touch it and find out what's going on. Nice work.

• A lot of print news sites have leapt into video, inspired by YouTube's success into thinking it's the Next Big Thing online. It may be, but not the way most news sites do it. Sure, it's great to put up video of news events, but too many sites try to emulate television and create high-production-value video reports that replicate TV news. Usually, these are boring, and readers avoid them like the plague. And then there's The New York Times' David Pogue, the tech reporter who's made a science out of creating witty, guerilla-style videos that trade overproduction for humor, substance and personality. The results are videos that, like the best of YouTube, get forwarded all over the place and viewed by literally millions of people. Rather than trying to out-TV TV, every print news organization should be showcasing newsroom personalities (and newsrooms always have their share of personalities!) in videos that will entertain as well as inform.

• Speaking of The New York Times, the paper's much-touted team of experimental web developers is doing work that's always interesting, if not always clearly useful. But that's what cutting-edge innovation often is. Two good examples: The enhanced New York Times Extra home page (to get there, click on the green Extra link below the logo; it's oddly not bookmarkable) and a map that tracked popular Twitter words during the Super Bowl. The latter was an interesting thought piece with no real utility, though one can imagine it being more useful for some other fast-breaking Twitter-led story. But the Times Extra home page, which adds related third-party links to Times headlines, is a very interesting example of moving outside the traditional walled garden of news sources and showing visitors what others are writing about the same subjects. Also worth a look: Blogrunner's Annotated New York Times, which takes the enhancement/aggregation idea a big step further. Update: The Times developers have added a blog with links to interesting projects and prototypes they're working on. Well worth a look.

• I'm a big fan of news aggregation; even as traditional editors are complaining about being linked to by Google or competitors, I think it's something every news organization should be doing to establish its site as a one-stop destination for everything on a topic, especially local news. Leverage your brand, local knowledge and editing skills to present readers with an aggregated package of stories and information from all sorts of sources–yes, even your competitors–and you'll be performing a service that goes far beyond whatever you can do with your own content. The NBC owned-and-operated stations have figured this out, and while I'd quibble a bit with the execution–they seem shy about giving source credit where credit is due–efforts like NBCWashington.com site are excellent examples of the power of aggregated local news. Honorable mention: Examiner.com, which has built sites in 60 cities to aggregate local news and supplement it with blog-like reports on specific topics from local "examiners." Examiner.com (on which I did some early strategic consulting) is a bit too tentative about taking advantage of third-party sources and a bit too overreliant on its "examiners" for content, but it's still building unique local franchises that compete directly with local newspaper sites.

• Tribune Co. has taken a lot of heat for some of its management's wacky ideas, but a couple of the Chicago Tribune's ongoing projects are real pathbreakers. TribLocal is probably the strongest effort yet at creating a hyperlocal site that combines professional and user-generated content; as a co-founder of Backfence and close follower of all things hyperlocal, I've watched TribLocal closely and with much admiration. It's expanded to more than 40 Chicago suburbs and seems to be getting traction with readers and advertisers. Tribune's other interesting endeavor is Colonel Tribune, maybe the single must unusual thing being done online by any major newspaper. Col. Tribune is a fictional character created by the Tribune as a sort of host of and guide to the newspaper site and, more significantly, a participant in social networks like Facebook and Twitter (where the colonel has 5,400 followers). If nothing else, the colonel gives a somewhat drab news site a touch of personality.  

• Somewhere between hyperlocal and aggregation is GateHouse Media's TheBatavian, an online-only local publication started from scratch in a small community in New York state. TheBatavian brings together a small professional staff, community-contributed content, links to other local media, user forums, a blog-like layout and aggressive pursuit of local advertisers to create a next-generation community news product that's well worth watching. GateHouse digital smart guy Howard Owens has said he's using just about everything he knows in creating and running TheBatavian, and that's a lot of horsepower. It's a good model for what might replace print newspapers in the months and years to come.

• We saw a lot of good Web work come out of the recent election; much of the best of it, like Politico and FiveThirtyEight.com, came from outside traditional news organizations (and will be covered in my next post). But the St. Petersburg Times fact-checked candidates during the campaign with its Politifact site, and has kept up the momentum with an ambitious project to track President Obama's campaign promises. The Obameter is keeping its eye on more than 500 promises, and grading the president on his ability to keep them–or not. Smart bonus: The Obameter is being syndicated as a widget that other news sites and blogs can add to their pages. This sort of thing should be the rule, not the exception, for interesting online efforts.

• The action in news and information innovation is not limited to the Web. The iPhone has quickly become an important delivery platform, and the smarter media companies have built iPhone apps that extend their product and brand to the palms of people's hands. There are a lot of news-related apps for the iPhone, and a lot of them are sadly mundane. But the Weather Channel–whose Web site has never dazzled–has a fantastic (and free) iPhone app that includes forecasts, videos, radar and just about anything else a weather junkie (or even a normal person) could want. Another great iPhone app from a sort of traditional media outfit is Major League Baseball's MLB.com AtBat, which combines scores, stats, video and other goodies into an essential tool for baseball fans; this season's version is said to add live radio broadcasts of games, too. Note to those who would like to see people pay for content: MLB gets $4.99 for AtBat, and it's worth it for such a well-done, useful product.

• And finally, so that we're not completely wallowing in editorial efforts, here's one from the revenue side. Cox has been launching Kudzu business directory sites around the country, and this is exactly the sort of thing that every media company should be building in its local market to tap into small-business advertising. (Disclosure: I did some consulting for Kudzu several years ago.) It's the tried-and-true Yellow Pages business model, with free basic listings plus upsells for enhanced information; readers can add business reviews, as well. But the coolest thing about Kudzu is its alternate Kudzu Virtual House interface, which provides a striking visual navigation of business categories in addition to the usual search and browse access. Again, multimedia used intelligently–with a revenue model, no less!

Coming in Part 2: Good work being done outside the traditional news organization mainstream. And again, please add to the Comments anything else that you think is particularly good and worth emulating. We need all the smart ideas we can get right now to move journalism forward, make it more attractive to more people and find business models to support it.

To be sure you see Part 2 of this special report, and other future Recovering Journalist posts, be sure to sign up in the upper right corner of this page for e-mail notification of updates to the blog. Thanks!

Looking Forward

In a comment on an earlier post here, Pat Thornton nails the challenge for news organizations:

I would really like the discussion to move to ways to create products, services and tools that people would be willing to pay for, rather than trying to get people to pay for content we know they don't value enough to pay for.

That's exactly the issue. There are a lot of people outside of the traditional news business thinking about this. But there aren't nearly enough on the inside thinking the same thoughts–and creating new products. They're still trying to defend the old models. The old models are broken. We have to move forward and create new kinds of products that will attract audiences–and ways to monetize those new audiences.

GateHouseGate: A Smoking Gun?

A lot of us have wondered why the estimable Howard Owens, who runs the digital side of GateHouse Media, has been so quiet about his company's ridiculous copyright suit against The New York Times Co. over the excerpting and linking to GateHouse stories by Boston.com's hyperlocal/local aggregation site, YourTown. Howard's once-active blog has been all but dormant lately, and his silence on the issue has been deafening–especially since he's the brains behind GateHouse's own hyperlocal/aggregation site, The Batavian.

Well, maybe we now know why Howard has been keeping quiet: He's smart enough to know that GateHouse' suit makes no sense. The Times Co., in responding to GateHouse' suit, has unearthed an internal e-mail written by Owens last fall that seems to support the exact sort of linking that GateHouse is trying to block.

In the e-mail, writing about links to GateHouse content from another site, Owens wrote:

Note that [a] headline, a few graphs and a link back to our site isn't a Creative Commons issue, but a fair use issue, and they would probably win on that one.

Compare what we do with thebatavian.com.

Ouch–if you're one of GateHouse' lawyers. Of course, Owens isn't a top officer of the company, and his e-mail could be dismissed as the personal opinion of someone without real authority to make corporate policy. But Owens is one of the top digital thinkers in the news business, so his opinion on this matter should carry a lot of weight. 

Moreover, at least one other e-mail from October obtained by the Times Co. shows another GateHouse digital executive telling the operator of Famboogle, another site aggregating GateHouse content, "We have no objection to Famboogle–or any other website–posting a headline and a line or two of text from a GateHouse story, so long as it is properly credited and links back to our site for the complete story." That, of course, was exactly what Boston.com was doing.

The e-mails in the Times's legal filings seem to support the supposition that there's internal division within GateHouse–possibly between the digital folks and the more traditional print executives–over this business of linking to and from other sites on the Internets. You know, the basic building block of the Web. The GateHouse printies don't seem to understand that this evil linking actually increases their traffic (and ad revenue), rather than stealing anything from them. 

I also have a feeling that GateHouse's legal action is, at its heart, an old-fashioned attempt to screw with a competitor, rather than a true attempt to establish some sort of legal precedent–though that may be an unfortunate outcome of the case. Interestingly, The New York Times Co. has countersued GateHouse, alleging that The Batavian has done the same thing with New York Times content, but that seems to be a defensive move designed to try to checkmate GateHouse. 

The case goes to trial soon; it probably would be preferable for the two sides to reach a face-saving settlement that allows linking, so that Howard Owens and the rest of us can go on trying to build the future, rather than stupidly trying to defend the past.

PS: The Nieman Journalism Lab and the Citizen Media Law Project have excellent overviews of the case.

The New Media Audience

Tim Windsor posts a shout-out to Don Tapscott's book about the new generation of digital natives, Grown Up Digital, along with a telling photograph to illustrate that audience and why it's different from the audience that most of us are familiar with (and members of). As Tapscott writes:

If Wonder bread builds strong bodies in 12 ways, this generation is different from its parents in 8 ways. 

To wit:

• They want freedom in everything they do, from freedom of choice to freedom of expression.
• They love to customize, personalize.
• They are the new scrutinizers.
• They look for corporate integrity and openness when deciding what to buy and where to work.
• The Net Gen wants entertainment and play in their work, education and social life.
• They are the collaboration and relationship generation.
• The Net Gen has a need for speed–and not just in video games.
• They are the innovators.

That last point is critical. Those of us of the older generation (can't believe I'm typing that!) are really from a different age these days. We're have media and business behaviors and desires that are radically different from this new generation. We're a bunch of old fogeys, horse-and-buggy drivers in an era of supersonic vehicles.

Th members of that new generation are not only the new audience–they'll be building the new successful products (they already are, in fact). When I talk to journalism classes, I tell them to go out and create and build things that they and their friends will like and use–not what our generation wants. We're dinosaurs, and the way we consume media is fading fast. 

Everybody in the media business needs to be looking hard at this new generation's values and targeting products to them–and letting that generation take the driver's seat in deciding what those products will be. Seems obvious–but too many of us are still clinging to what is increasingly clearly past.

Gathering Lots of Moss

Hot news from the magazine world: Wenner Media, publisher of venerable music/culture magazine Rolling Stone, has just hired its first-ever executive with responsibility for all things digital.

Oh. My. God. What decade are we in?

Let's face it, Rolling Stone, once the hippest magazine on the planet, hasn't been anything like hip for decades. Dislocated hip, maybe, or broken hip. Something elderly-sounding. But even that's no excuse for how badly the magazine has missed the digital zeitgeist. This probably shouldn't be surprising, since it never really caught up with the music video revolution a generation ago, either, and is still largely stuck in the '60s and '70s in its view of music and culture. 

Its Web site is abominable, the worst sort of cut-and-paste print repurposing job, and founder and CEO Jann Wenner still openly worries about cannibalizing print readers by putting content online. (Good news, though: He's started reading the New York Times online! Far out, man!) Turns out, in fact, that RollingStone.com has basically been outsourced to Real Networks (another happening sort of outfit) for the past few years. Sheesh.

Now, finally, Rolling Stone is going to try to get with this digital thing all the kids are talking about–you know, that social networking stuff and those mp3s and iPod thingies they seem to be using to play music instead of vinyl LPs and 45s. What a concept. The magazine must be all-a-Twitter. Better (or worse) yet, the company's new chief digital officer comes from no less a cutting-edge publisher than...Readers Digest.

Best of luck to them, but this is just more proof that, when it comes to the online realm, magazines make even newspapers look forward-thinking. In the end, the lesson here may be, to twist a phrase on which Rolling Stone all but based its founding philosophy back in 1967: Never trust any magazine over 30.

60/60/24/7

After struggling mightily with the concept of updating their Web sites more than once a day, newspapers are finally figuring out what cable news networks and all-news radio stations have known for years: There's an audience for constantly updated news. It may not be a huge audience, but it's there--and keeping the news fresh keeps the site looking fresh for every site visitor.

Using news blogs, Twitter and other tools, an increasing number of sites are providing visitors with ever-more-frequent and in some cases real-time updates of breaking news. You've heard of the 24/7 news cycle? This is the 60/60/24/7 cycle, where every second of every minute of every hour counts. Publish or perish (or is it tweet or be tweeted?).

Some examples:

• Twitter, of course, is the current flavor of the month for quick-news junkies, and has been useful for on-the-spot reports–many from onlookers rather than journalists–on fast-moving stories like the Mumbai terror attacks and the recent California wildfires. In my view, Twitter is still a blunt instrument, with a horrible signal-to-noise ratio and a following that may be too insular among newsies (very few "regular" readers know what it is). And it has no visible business model, as Valleywag recently pointed out. But used properly, it's a very interesting reporting and publishing tool for breaking news. 
• Philly.com is one of several newspaper sites using a breaking news blog to quickly push stories onto the site. On a developing story, this can be a bit like reading wire-service updates and writethrus, which can be oddly entertaining as the story comes together, not to mention informative and newsy. In any event, it provides rapid updates to the site and keeps things fresh. It would be nice to have more than a simple list of headlines, but it's the right idea. (Oh, and hello, old Philly.com pals: Why is the breaking news blog not clearly labeled or featured on Philly.com's News page?) The Philadelphia Inquirer–part of Philly.com–also has its own Twitter-distributed news feed.
• Politico, on its new Politico44 offshoot that tracks the Obama administration, is publishing brief, Twitter-like dispatches at the top of the page in a space called, for some reason, The Whiteboard. Unfortunately, these news flashes don't seem to be archived anywhere, at least not obviously, so if you don't see them as they pass by, you miss them.

The concept of constantly streaming news is a real sea change for most, if not all newsrooms, accustomed as they were to publishing no story before its time, which invariably was whenever the evening deadline occurred. Now reporters are learning to push tidbits of news online quickly for a voracious, news-hungry audience segment–sometimes tweeting just a few words at a time. If legendary Washington Post Publisher Philip L. Graham's famous view of journalism as the "rough first draft of history" is still valid, then these are the notes for the first draft.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, though I know it discomfits a lot of print journalists to be filing news in real time. Wire services and broadcasters have done that for years, and all the usual concerns about accuracy and context and quality should still apply. But we're living in a 60/60/24/7 world now, and there are a lot of competitors–formal and informal–who are pushing news to readers as fast as it comes in. Newspaper Web sites have to learn to keep up with the pace of the news–not the slow, artificial cycles of print production.

Follow the Audience

While you're done breathing a sigh of relief at the lower price of gas next time you fill up your car, take a glance above the pump–you might see a video screen running news, weather and advertising from your local NBC station.

Kelsey Group reports that it's part of a concerted effort by NBC to get its content out in front of as many audiences as possible, in as many ways as possible. That means putting content and advertising in such non-traditional media as online gaming, taxis, supermarkets and others. According to the same report from the Kelsey Group, cable giant Comcast is doing something similar by gobbling up niche sites and services like movie-ticket seller Fandango and networked personal organizer Plaxo. 

This is smart thinking, and something that all media companies should be emulating. It's just not enough to merely have a Web site. In fact, a Web site is not nearly enough, because it means you're essentially sitting around waiting for customers to come to you. Instead, news organizations should be working to push their content and advertising out through multiple channels and to get it in front of readers and viewers any way they can. 

It doesn't have to be something as non-traditional as gas pump video screens or the back of taxi seats. There are many other more standard–but underutilized–media that every news organization should be exploiting with smart, tailored products, such as:

• E-mail newsletters
• RSS feeds
• Facebook and social networks
• Widgets for blogs and social sites
• iPhone apps
• Mobile distribution
• Syndication to other sites (and its mirror image, aggregation of content from other sites–even competitors)
• Brand-extending partnerships with other sites, such as co-produced videos
• Niche products–not distribution per se, but sites and other products that target specific audience segments, both demographic and geographic

These all should be standard elements of a news organization's playbook for success. But way too often they're given lip service–if they're pursued at all. Major parts of your audience are gravitating to these venues to get their news and information (and to communicate with their friends), and you need to be there to reach them. It's essential to growing traffic, eyeballs and advertising opportunities. (Checked out the CPMs on e-mail newsletters lately? They're often lip-smackingly good.)

Back in the earliest days of planning The Washington Post's online strategy, 15-plus years ago, we talked a lot about our intentions to "be promiscuous"–placing as many bets as possible on as many different technologies and strategies as we could. 

That philosophy kind of went by the wayside over the years at The Post and other publishers as they put almost all of their chips on building up their Web sites. But as it turned out, the audience was promiscuous, adopting all sorts of online media and devices that publishers never fully appreciated. 

"Be promiscuous" is still a sound strategy, perhaps more so than ever. You've got to put your news, information and advertising in front of the audience wherever it decides to alight–even if that's in front of somebody who's pumping gas into their car. Otherwise, somebody else will.