From today’s Vin Crosbie’s post — a nugget related to why the BiggerBetter video strategy is a sputtering strategy:

The overabundance of suppliers of news and information, nonetheless the supply, leads to another corollary, one that might seem to be counter-intuitive: the ‘good enough’ beats perfect. The overabundance of suppliers leads to competition that actually lowers the threshold of acceptable quality. When there were few suppliers, they used higher quality content (i.e., ‘high production values’) as a competitive weapon against each other. But now that there is an overabundance of suppliers, their competition levers towards being the first to produce content that is at least of acceptable quality. Millions of videos are viewed billions of times each month on sites such as YouTube.com (+3 billion per month) not because of high production values, but because the videos are at least ‘good enough’ to watch. The production of higher quality delays distribution and widespread usage. This corollary runs against the grain of traditional Mass Media organizations, which tend to delay release of their content until it is perfect, but the effect of this corollary is an observable phenomenon.

Bold added.

Newspapers should have kickass web sites.

Take your typical major metro — a content producing staff that out paces in training, experience and numbers any rival.

A typical metro remains the best advertising buy in town, retail and classifieds.

The free cash a good metro site can through off on print up sells alone (let alone new, incremental advertising revenue) can fund an operations and specialty content staff that most start ups would envy.

With proper focus and strategy, there is no reason for a good-sized, well-run newspaper operation to repurpose its print product for online.

All of those resources should allow the online operation to feed off of, but not be a duplicate of, the print operations. It should allow a newspaper operation to avoid the soul-sucking, readership-killing repurposing of print content online and the aggressive pursuit of web-centric content practices.

So why, more than a decade into the web era, do most metro newspapers still largely reproduce the print edition online?

The consternation today over the Philadelphia Inquirer’s decision to withhold premium print content from Philly.com has the digital class all atwitter (pun intended).

In Twitter, my friend Scott Karp says:

You can’t coerce people into choosing one medium over another. All you can do is serve them as best you can in the medium they choose.

Wired Journalist partner Zac Echola says:

They did a pretty epic job opening the door for competition. I mean, it’s one thing in a small community to do this, but a major metro?

One on my followers, Kev097, reacts to my pro-decision tweets:

More likely bloggers will nicely summarize stories that aren’t online- their readers won’t bother to seek out print.

Predictably, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Outing are down on the idea.

Jarvis:

You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Outing:

What’s long held back the newspaper industry and gotten it in the current mess has been holding back online innovation that might impact the legacy product (print). The kind of serious innovation that might have avoided the turmoil we’re now seeing among newspapers (especially larger metros like the Inquirer) could only take place with an attitude of “Let’s completely forget about the print edition and just try to build the best damn online service possible.”

My concern is that the Philly effort doesn’t go far enough.

I say, never put those stories online, but still make sure every single reporter and editor is working hard to ensure a great online edition.

For how many years on Outing’s Online-News list did I read about the evils of shovelware? If the archives were available, I’m sure I could find quotes from Outing himself saying something along the lines of “stop reproducing the newspaper online.”

We were all right in saying that, so why is it wrong now to say “let print be print” and “let online be online.”

Your online product should focus on:

• Frequency. Plenty of updates. Web-first publishing. Tell me what is happening in my town right now.
• When there is a big story, hammer it. Own it. Frequent updates, a flood of information, video, blogs, forums, public documents, databases, maps, graphics.

On a pure news basis, those two approaches are proven audience growth winners.

Reproducing the print edition online, not so much.

Even better, make sure your kickass print reporters know how to write for the web, which means more of a blog style, more of a conversational style, maybe even a little opinion, when doing those web-first updates.

There are a ton of other web-centric things newspapers can and should do with their web sites, but none of them include publishing first online enterprise and investigative pieces, columnist, lengthy features, trend stories and even analysis pieces.

Techcrunch published today a poll that showed that on a typical day, 39 percent of the Internet audience went online to check the news. That’s 39 percent of the not quite 80 percent of Americans who even have Web access (75 percent in 2004(pdf), I assume it’s higher now, but maybe not).

That is a number that represents a boon of an opportunity for newspapers, but it also points out how far online must come to be an major news destination.

While the Philly papers have a market penetration below 35 percent (I think), many U.S. newspapers remain well above 50 percent.

More Americans still get their news in print than any other source. Yes, the number has been declining, but newspapers still remain a mammoth force in news media.

Even while penetration/circulation declines have been beguiling to the industry, they didn’t begin with the internet. There is something larger, sociological, or potentially a problem with journalism itself (as I’ve said before), that’s going on.

It might be foolish indeed to expect online to save American journalism, given those trends. So why insist now that a metro newspaper must, must put its entire edition online?

Furthermore, let’s face it, while a well-run newspaper website operation can throw off lots of cash, it’s largely dependent on the newspaper success itself, and the cash flow is still insufficient to support a metro newsroom.

As much as it pains me to say it, we still haven’t found the business model that can support and sustain current newsroom operations.

Meanwhile, as the Readership Institute has pointed out, a lot of people still read print.

So why shouldn’t the Philadelphia Inquirer, or any other print operation, take steps to further differentiate the print and the online products, especially if such steps can potentially stem any tide, any contribution that shovelware/repurposing of print content makes to circulation declines.

Face it, we still need print to pay the bills, that is, if we want to maintain news operations that at all resemble traditional newspaper newsrooms (and whether we don’t or not is a completely different discussion).

UPDATE: Zac Echola makes the point in a blog post that I may be giving Philly too much credit. And he could be right. So let’s just say, differentiation is the model I advocate, and let’s hope that is the direction Philly can be smart enough to take this in. I had not given enough consideration to the part of the memo that prevents staff bloggers from trying out ideas in blog posts first. That’s not smart. And it is a bad sign that the curmudgeons are winning in Philly. On the other hand, the memo does say, “This does not mean that we will put the brakes on the immediate posting of breaking news that puts us first in a competitive Web marketplace.”  Mixed message? I guess we’ll see.  It’s important to remember Philly.com is run by Eric Grilly and Mark Potts has been involved with the site, and they’re no slouches.

From Beet.tv:

Online videos have a short shelf life, getting a quarter of their views within four days of being published, Brett Wilson, CEO of video distribution site TubeMogul, says. Content creators who publish a lot of video will have a better shot at success.

He suggests that content creators promote their videos hard for the first few days as attention will drop quickly.

Is your site producing enough video, or are you still doing hours-long productions praying for a hit?

Reporters who own their jobs with an entrepreneurial spirit and energy will also own each story they do. What does story ownership mean?

• You generate your own story ideas.
• You decide the angle, who to talk to, where to gather information and what you do with it.
• As you gather information, you find and save any relevant links.
• You decide what other assets the story needs — video? a map? a pdf? a database? a graphic? pictures? You then either create or get created those assets.
• When you write the story, you include appropriate links (to names, locations, documents, previous stories, blogs and previous coverage).
• You gather all of the assets, publish the story in draft form and let an editor know it’s ready (with the expectation that the story will be live on the web within 10 minutes).
• When the story is published, you socially bookmark the story as appropriate; you send the link to bloggers you know who might be interested; you e-mail the link to sources or readers you know would be interested.
• After the story is published, you follow and participate as appropriate in the online conversation, either via comments on the story or on other sites (blogs and forums).
• You take everything you’ve learned and repurpose the story for print.
• If the conversation brings to light any new significant information, you plan a new story and the process starts over.

Editors, are you writing this into your job descriptions?

Nick Sergeant has completed his first Django project. It’s called Finisht.com.  It’s really for developers who want a quick and easy way to track finished projects.

In an era when journalists are asked to do more and more, I can see reporters and editors using this for their own personal tracking of completed projects.  It can be quite rewarding to see a list of everything you’ve completed in a day, a week or a month.

When I posted about journalists setting their own 2008 MBOs, A couple of executive editors like the idea of the program and instituted something like it in their own newsrooms.  Today, John Robinson reports that his wallet is $100 lighter.

Among other things, designer Mel Umbarger created a copy desk wiki for a style book, schedules and more; created personal profiles on several social networking sites, learned Soundslides and Flash; blogged; and posted all sorts of content to the Web site.

Congratulations to Mel.  Good job.

Jack Lail sent me this link. It’s an interview in the aftermath of a church shooting in Knoxville.  It’s a pretty compelling bit of evidence why every journalist should carry at all times an inexpensive and easy to use video camera.

Blogging has been light here for some time.

I’m tired of arguing with curmudgeons and the class hearty souls who discovered the web in 2004 and now has all the answers (many of them tried by online news veterans 10 years ago).

Just about everything I have to say, I’ve said. I noticed some time ago, I was repeating myself too often. Different words. Same meanings.

I’m tired of Ground Hog Day.

I’m not going to stop blogging. I’m not going to stop posting totally.  Stay subscribed to the RSS feed.

Not everything I might have to say can be said in 140 characters.

I have been having fun with Twitter recently.  I’m howardowens there.

If the past is any indication, something will spark me out of my blogging funk and I’ll become prodigious again.  But not today and probably not tomorrow.

Tell Romenekso I said, “Hi.”

Which of these stories would you rather read?

After Fleeing Psychiatric Unit, Ex-Officer Is Killed in a Gunfight With Police

Carrying two handguns and a Bible, a retired city police officer was killed in a gunfight early Tuesday on a residential street in Staten Island by former colleagues who returned his fire, the authorities said.

When the shooting ended, the officer, Jason Aiello, 36, was slumped at the wheel of a cousin’s truck on the street in front of his home in the Rosebank neighborhood, with his wife, Rachel, sitting next to him, officials said. His three young children were in another family car across the street.

Or:

Unhinged ex-sergeant holding bible and gun is slain by cops in front of family

Suspected of setting up his best friend for a mob hit, a retired NYPD sergeant armed with a gun and a Bible went berserk Tuesday before cops killed him in front of his wife and kids.

The death of Jason Aiello in a blizzard of two dozen bullets capped a dramatic chain of events that began with a “crazed” visit to FBI headquarters and ended with his escape from a Staten Island psych ward.

The 36-year-old father of three apparently suffered an epic mental meltdown in which he spouted Scripture, tried to abduct his pajama-clad kids and then fired on police, authorities said. He fired eight shots; cops fired 19.

Both stories are factual an unbiased. One is just much easier and engaging to read. The first is the New York Times, the second, the Daily News. While the Daily News posted a decline in the latest Fas-Fax, it had been a steady climber prior to that. The Times has been on a down hill slide for some time.

Not all of the readership loss of newspapers can be blamed on the Internet (especially considering that the declines started before there was a commercial Web). Isn’t it fair to ask that some of the problem might be the journalism itself?

Doug Fisher covers similar territory this morning.

I’ll be attending two journalism conventions over the next couple of months to talk about digital-age journalism.

On August 8, I’ll be on the luncheon panel at the AEJMC convention in Chicago. The topic is Networked Journalism: The Changing Face of News. Also on the panel, Kate Marymont, a Gannett VP, and Dan Barkin, online editor for the News & Observer in Charlotte.

On Sept. 6, I’ll be in Atlanta for the national SPJ Convention.  It’ll be the first time I attended one of these since 1996, when I was president of the San Diego Chapter.  We’ll be reprising the AEJMC panel, and I’ll also  do an hour-long presentation on “Reinventing Journalism.”

Journalism.co.uk has an e-mail interview with me about starting MediaGeeks.org.

Here’s a quote for any online manager dealing with a newsroom of curmudgeons. It’s from Theodore Roosevelt. Blow it up big and post it for all to see.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

(via Tech Crunch in a totally different context)

The Ventura County Star’s Scott Hadly is reporting from Iraq.  I haven’t been following his coverage, but I met none of it matches the intimacy and immediacy of this letter he wrote to a fellow reporter.

In one short letter, I got a better idea of what’s going on in Iraq from 1,000 New York Times stories.

This is how you write for the modern reader.  Journalists need to learn the lesson.

I’m not saying profanity is required, but if you’re writing about something like what Scott went through and some profanity doesn’t at least cross your mind, then you’re probably not putting enough of yourself into the story.

FWIW: I don’t know Scott. He joined the staff after I left Ventura.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, many newly minted bloggers expressed frustration at the mainstream media’s (soon to be dubbed MSM) lack of attention to serious international news.

Case in point was cable news obsession with Chandra Levy’s death.  So, when on the E&P site today, I saw a link about the WaPo getting ready to launch a 12-part series on the forgotten cold case, it intrigued me.

But that’s not the point of this post.

The point is, this quote at the end of the article:

Throughout the series, this blog will feature a daily update and preview of the next chapter from the reporters. Stay tuned.

Uh? This blog?

Go look at that link — in what was does it look any different from a typical E&P story? How is it written any different? Not only does the “post” lack the personal voice, insight and perspective of a good blog, it lacks a person — it’s just a generic “E&P staff” byline.  Nor can you leave comments on it, nor can you get to, from that post, any sort of blog home page.

If E&P is running any blogs, there’s no evidence of it on their navigation or from their home page. (Hey, but they do have a podcast).

So if the biggest trade publication in the industry is so clueless about the web, what hope do we have for the rest of the industry?

Or am I just missing something? Is it just bad site design?

There are three main points from the new report from the Readership Institute (via Romenesko):

• Your newspaper is doing a better job at retaining readers than you might expect;
• Your web site is doing a worse job at attracting readers than you might believe;
• Young readers ain’t reading newspapers, and they’re not likely to start.

Mary Nesbitt writes:

Why aren’t they (print readership numbers) much worse, when the imminent demise of newspapers seems to be all we ever hear about? The short answer is that reading customers aren’t deserting newspapers at anything approaching the rate that advertising customers are. That is no consolation for newspaper company employees who are losing their jobs.

One word: Recession.

Come on people, the main issue facing newspapers right now is recession. Advertisers (to their own detriment) advertise less during a recession.

Yes, there is a ton of secular pressure on newspapers right now, especially in classifieds. We’ve lost billions of revenue to the Internet. But the problem there isn’t our lack of innovation, as some espouse. It’s actually something more basic than that: Sales.

We’ve been slow to motivate and migrate our classified sales staffs away from order takers to sales professionals. With greater competition, and disruptive competition, came the need for our staffs to actually sell. It’s not like they didn’t, and don’t, have value to to sell. Newspaper, even today, in their dominant local markets, are still the best classified buy around. But we haven’t done a very good job of telling our customers that. And to whatever degree our online products help, and they help a lot, we don’t do a very good job of telling our advertisers how much value we actually deliver.

The flip side of the good news about print readership is how poorly local newspaper web sites are performing and how poorly we’re doing with young readers.

These are trends that should have no immediate impact, but the long-term consequences are horrendous.

Which is why getting online right and doing it now, and being news organizations that can move comfortably between both (all?) worlds is essential.

Newspaper staffs can and should take comfort in the readership numbers for print, but if they go no further with their thinking than, “see, I told you this web stuff was bunk,” they they are threatening the very survival of the institutions they claim to love.

While maintaining our print products as vital center pieces of our communities is important, we must concentrate on developing online literacy, which means:

• Learning how to develop content that is web centric (writing more conversationally, adding more related material (databases, PDFs, video, links, etc.);
• Learning better how to present our material online for a culture that is more diverse in its interest, has more options and makes quicker mental jumps;
• Ensuring that our online products are differentiated from print products — the publication cycle is different, the mentality is different, the presentation is different, the push/pull aspect is different;
• Stop seeing online as a threat and embrace it as an opportunity — recession or not, print is not a growth medium; the growth opportunity, the chance to create new streams of revenue, and the opportunity to create great new journalistic products that serve present and future generations better is online;

There is so much we could be doing with our web sites that we’re not getting done. The online readership numbers should be really sobering to newsrooms across America — the strategy of repurposing newspaper journalism — no matter how great you think it is — just isn’t working.

Every time some curmudgeon complains about online news sites not making any money, I’ve had the same response I’ve had for years: That’s because we don’t have enough audience. It isn’t that online can’t make money — we make good money now, and deliver a great value to the advertisers who do buy our products now — it’s that we don’t have the loyal concentration of readership we need online to maximize the revenue opportunities that are there.

I believe as strongly as I ever have — going back to East County Online in 1995 — that local online community news sites can build audience and grow sustaining, high-dollar revenue. I still believe we can get there, but not if we don’t make the effort.

The fact that newspaper readership has remained relatively stable over recent years (the long-term trend isn’t hopeful), is good news — it buys us time to get online right. The caveat there, of course, is there are lots of disruptive competitors rising up to beat us to the punch. We don’t want to miss out because we’re too wedded to a print way of thinking. Let’s continue to push for differentiated online community news and information products.

UPDATE: Simon Owens expands the story by talking directly with Mary Nesbitt a little more.

It’s a nice virtuous thing that Meranda Watling is proud to work for a newspaper. But that’s not the reason I’m linking to her post. This is:

That story that broke at 4:30? It came in via an e-mail tip. I actually “broke” the news about 4:40 p.m. I had quickly confirmed the gist of it and wrote two paragraphs to post immediately. Because the editors were in the daily budget meeting, I had another reporter read over it, and then I had a copy editor post it asap so I could begin chasing the sources who were leaving their offices at or before 5 p.m. After I reached those sources, I wrote into the online version and updated. When my editor got back he swapped it out and posted it in the No. 1 spot online.

I went to my board meetings armed with notebook and pen — AND a laptop, Internet card and my Blackberry. I continued to report and write during the meetings. On my drive between the two meetings? I made calls on the A1 story.

When I got back to the newsroom around 8:45 p.m., I made a few more calls and banged out the A1 story and then two more about the meetings I’d covered. All before the 10:30 print deadline. I made cop calls, and half-way down the 10-county list we heard a shooting over the scanner. I went there and called in a Web update from the scene.

That is a sampling of what “newspaper” reporters are expected to do today, at least at my newspaper.

Now that’s a fine description of what today’s news reporter needs to do to help keep his or her community completely informed. Too often we hear, “but we don’t have time.”

Well, you only don’t have time if you don’t know how to weave the digital responsibilities in with your traditional duties. Reporting for online is A) more efficient than reporting for print; B) really doesn’t add that much extra time or work.

It can be done. Meranda just proved it.

There continues to be lots of chatter about the closing of Online Journalism Review.

I used to work with Robert Niles at E.W. Scripps.  He’s a fine person and did an admirable job with OJR given the resources he was given.  So no slight intended here …

I’ve been an OJR reader long enough to remember what it was like under the stewardship of my friends Matt Welch and Ken Layne.  Now there’s an era of OJR that is bygone and worth lamenting. (Lots of history in this Google search link.)

Too bad Annenberg couldn’t stomach an online journalism review that was lively and provocative.

I just had to say that because in all the hoopla about OJR closing, the great work of Welch, Layne and the other writers of that era seem sadly to have been forgotten.  It’s an angle in Mark Glaser’s piece that seems to be missing.  If OJR is worth saving, it’s worth remembering what it was like in the Welch-Layne era and maybe trying to recapture that spirit.  Online journalism could use some free-spirited iconoclasts now more than ever.

I don’t think Niles was ever given the opportunity or the resources to continue on in the tradition of Layne and Welch, which makes it all the more vital to remember the golden era of OJR if there’s going to be any talk of bringing back.

I’m seriously behind in my gmail inbox … can’t sleep tonight for some reason, so thought I would try to widdle the pile down a bit …

Found an e-mail from John Solomon, who wrote to say he was inspired by the wired journalist MBO post, which led him to start a blog, In Case of Emergency Blog.

While John said he’s completed 7 of the 10 objectives, he said he was just wired enough prior to the post that he doesn’t qualify for the gift card.

But here’s the interesting thing — to me at least — there is a direct connection, I think, from this post of mine to this post of his.  Let’s just say, it’s nice to see the Department of Homeland Security have such a keen interest in blogs.

I’m with Yelvington and Sholin on this one.

I’ve set up my work phone to forward to my iPhone.  I never touch my desk phone except for conference calls.

Unfortunately, if a call forwards to my iPhone, if I don’t get it by the third ring, for some odd reason, the call reverts to my desk phone.  This leads to either A) people calling me twice (second time to my mobile number) or B) people leaving me a voice mail I probably won’t listen to for weeks.

I felt guilt about that until I read this TechCrunch post.

But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

“Outside the work flow …” That pretty much sums it up.

Now with iPhone’s visual voicemail, it’s a little easier to handle, but it’s still not as good as e-mail.  An e-mail in my inbox can be saved as a tickler to remind me to respond at at a time better suited to my work flow.  And I’ll usually respond via e-mail so as not to interrupt your work flow.

For any vendors reading this: Please e-mail me, don’t call.  I would rather get an unsolicited e-mail from a vendor than an unsolicited phone call.  Then, if I’m interested, we can arrange a time to talk.  And if I’m not interested, I’ll tell you, and please believe me. (Of course, my “vendor” friends whom we do business  with, that’s something different altogether, but then, you already have my mobile number).

When I get into the office Monday, after reading the TechCrunch post, I think I’ll take my phone off call forwarding, and set up a voice mail suggesting “send me an e-mail, please.”

Now here’s the journalism question for reporters: Would you rather have sources call or e-mail?