The gum pole

Free, at what cost?

2012-01-13T12:26:00.001-07:00

Last week I received this disturbing email:

“Dear Roger,

“I advertise frequently in the Post Register to rent my apartments. I called to rent a vacancy as I always do but was not only asked for a minimum fee but also had to pay for it with a credit card instead of receiving a bill like I've done so many times in the past.

“I was frustrated and annoyed when a friend suggested I use Craigslist. After 2 days, my apartment rented. Craigslist didn't charge me anything, I can activate my ad on my own computer without talking to a person how (sic) puts my (sic) on hold and it's all fast and easy.

“I will not use the Post Register in the future to do my advertising and will encourage others to do the same.”

This was my response:

“I appreciate your frustration. Perhaps it would be fair to share mine with you.

“The Post Register takes very seriously its commitment to follow federal housing regulations and to generally ensure that our classified ads are accurate, appropriate and meet community standards. This requires people who are trained in these matters. Craigslist makes no such commitment, and if you look at your ad there, you'll find that it's on a web site that includes thinly disguised ads for prostitution, sexual hookups and other unsavory topics, plus a good many ads that are just plain false. As you know, murderers, thieves and rapists have used Craigslist to great advantage. I can't say it any plainer.

“We choose to maintain our classified section carefully, to much higher standards. We think having the assurance that your ad will be on such a site is worth a small investment of your money. I'm very sorry that you don't seem to agree.

“We'll never be able to compete with Craigslist in price. They'll never be able to compete with us in our commitment to high standards and serving our local community. We hope that matters to most of our readers and customers.”

Of all the changes to newspapers wrought by the digital era, Craigslist has been one of the most significant. Since its introduction, Craigslist has nearly single-handedly reduced classified advertising revenue at newspapers by about 75 percent. The loss is lower here at the Post Register, but still significant.

It’s completely understandable, of course – there’s no better deal than free, and many users report that the free ads work for them.

It’s also true, however, that people going onto Craigslist to look for your ad are entering some pretty unsavory territory. Go to the home page for Craigslist in eastern Idaho and within two clicks you, too, can be staring at pictures of genitalia (the cleverly named “casual encounters” category is particularly, well, unsubtle). Call me a prude, but I don’t want my business associated with that kind of environment. Do you?

In 2011, the Post Register published 20 stories about Craigslist being used to lure victims of various crimes, including murder and rape.

Yes, the Post Register still charges a modest fee for many of its classified ads (though they all can be viewed for free on our web site). We review them for compliance with state and federal regulations, taste and accuracy. We act quickly when we are made aware of an ad that might be fraudulent or simply questionable, because we have trained employees – real human beings – doing that work.

We’re also proud to say that we have the strongest classified section in the state of Idaho and that our customers tell us – over and over again – that it works, particularly if they are looking for customers who have a good income and are ready buyers. The profile of the typical newspaper reader is exactly who apartment managers are looking for.

Anyone can do free, and the allure is pretty obvious. But are we paying another kind of price?

Your indulgence, please

2012-01-11T11:11:00.002-07:00

What follows may come off a bit like braggadocio, but it seems in this Age of Entertainment that if we don’t explain the difference between real journalism and what passes for it in some circles, no one will. So, please indulge me.

The Post Register published approximately 3,000 local bylines in 2011, or about 9.5 per print edition.

Had I been asked to guess without knowing, my number would have been smaller. The nine-and-a-half figure doesn’t include all of the local material we print that doesn’t get a byline -- briefs, weddings, obituaries, anniversaries, calendars, letters to the editor, etc. Nor does it include the stories provided by the Associated Press. To me, it’s an astonishing achievement.

What it means is that, on average, we published 9.5 stories a day that rose to the level of deserving a byline, meaning that its writer -- usually a full-time reporter on our staff -- had researched and vetted the information in the story and two editors had reviewed it.

We’d love to double or triple the size of our reporting staff, but the quality and quantity of the work done by our 24 journalists (which includes reporters, editors, photographers, and sports writers) is substantial. Many of those stories took many hours to research write, edit, rewrite and otherwise prepare for publication.

This is why the concept of “citizen journalism” remains such a curious thing. Once you understand what it takes to produce a substantive local newspaper, you immediately grasp that it can’t be done by just anyone.

It’s certainly true that many of our story ideas come from readers and other members of our 10-county community. From there, however, the work is done by people who have training and experience in journalism, and that’s not a trivial matter.

Meanwhile, the 2012 Idaho Legislature is going to provide Idaho’s newspapers with the opportunity to showcase their collective journalism. Newspapers from Twin Falls, Boise, Nampa, Lewiston and Spokane, Washington -- plus Idaho Falls, of course -- have full-time reporters covering the session, in addition to one from the Associated Press. We’re pooling that coverage to get the most out of it. Each afternoon through each evening, those newspapers are coordinating their stories to ensure that our readers are getting the maximum benefit of our coverage.

Add to that the insightful and agreeable commentary from the likes of Corey Taule, Marty Trillhaase and Dan Popkey and the result is legislative coverage you can’t find anywhere else. Simply put, if you want to know what’s happening in the Idaho Legislature beyond sound bites, wrap-ups and partisan-tinged hyperbole, the Post Register is the place to go.

We thought you’d want to know.

We're no Angry Birds, but ...

2011-12-20T11:26:00.002-07:00

Having just finished Walter Isaacson’s unflinching biography of Steve Jobs, I’m reminded of the things I admired about the Apple co-founder and his lifelong rival, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Both Jobs and Gates essentially stole the software from Xerox that eventually became the windows-based operating systems for Job’s Apple and Macintosh lines and Gates’ Windows software suites. Beyond that, they took entirely different routes, with Jobs preferring tightly controlled end-to-end solutions, while Gates threw open the doors and let a thousand flowers blossom.

The choice between Apple and its competitors is playing out again in the mobile and smart phone world, only this time Apple’s main competitor is Google and its Android system.

Also, once again, this is changing the game in journalism, which is always particularly challenging for small, independent newspapers like the Post Register that lack the resources of a major corporation.

Some of our more tech-savvy readers want to know when we’ll make our paper available via mobile applications designed specifically for the iPad and the Android-based tablets and smart phones made by everyone from Sony to Amazon. Now, you can read our newspaper online from virtually any device, but it can be clunky and awkward when using a smart phone or tablet, so specific applications are called for.

We’re taking a multi-faceted approach to pursuing this opportunity.

First, we’re working internally on converting our existing web site to HTML5 and changing its dimensions slightly. This makes the site more compatible with nearly any mobile device, though it’s not a perfect solution.

There are, of course, existing applications we can use to improve your user experience with the Post Register online, whether you’re using an Apple or an Android device. (Unfortunately, Blackberry, with its excellent tactile pull-down keyboard – my personal favorite smart phone – has fallen well behind in this race and is in danger of become irrelevant). We’re looking at the best Apple and Android applications that will best fit the needs of our readers.

Our target is to have all of this ready to unveil no later than early spring, 2012. At that point, we plan to have a wide variety of options available to our readers,the ultimate result being be that the savvy technology user will be able to choose between reading the Post Register in print, on a PC, on their iPhone, iPad, Kindle or any other Android-based tablet or smart phone, with attractive pricing based on the options selected.

Want to provide us your thoughts as we work through the options? Just drop a note to: rplothow@postregister.com. We know we can't compete with Angry Birds, but we want to be your go-to source for local information on any device.

Minimizing harm

2011-12-07T12:42:00.001-07:00

One of the tenets we try to live by at the Post Register is to “minimize harm.”

Note that the objective isn’t to “do no harm.” We recognize that with every edition we are likely causing someone harm – the drunken driver whose name we publish, the crooked politician whose escapades are laid bare, etc.

This is not a straightforward process. Deciding when a story goes over the line is a matter of great debate in our newsroom on many days. Sometimes our decisions aren’t unanimous. This is how good newsrooms populated by thoughtful and passionate people should function.

We were particularly tested this week with a unique and awkward circumstance the likes of which I don’t recall in more than three decades of being a journalist.

On Tuesday we published what appeared to be an innocuous story featuring the owner of a local game store who was succeeding despite these turbulent economic times. He readily agreed to an interview and we featured him and his business on our front page.

As soon as the story appeared, however, we were notified by a number of people that the business owner is a known sex offender who was convicted of lewd conduct with a child under 16 in 2004. We hadn’t known. If we had, we would not have done the story. Truthfully, we probably wouldn’t have done a story about the fact that a convicted sex offender owned a business that catered to young people, either.

Now, however, we faced a real quandary. We’ve told a story that clearly lacked important background information. The business owner had the opportunity to suggest that maybe we should find someone else to do a story on – surely he had to anticipate that his record would come out.

You might rightly ask why we didn’t conduct a more thorough background check on the man. The truth is, we don’t routinely check on the background of everyone we write about unless there is a compelling reason to do so. None of us thought to do so in this case.

Once we were notified of the man’s background we learned that neighbors of the man’s business had posted fliers in the area warning that a sex offender owned the business. The YMCA, only a block from the business, increased staffing for its child care center.

Had the man been working on the manufacturing line at a widget company, that would be one thing. We also know that some readers perceive – wrongly – that when we publish a story about a business that we are providing our tacit endorsement.

All that considered, and since the man was running a business that caters to young people, I felt we had no choice but to do a follow-up story – we couldn’t let the original story stand on its own. I wish there had been another way, but I remain convinced there wasn’t.

So we ran the follow-up the next day, detailing the man’s conviction and explaining that he had followed all the rules when establishing his business. Clearly, this man has been harmed by our report, though it’s completely accurate.

Judging by the handful of angry calls and emails we’ve received about the follow-up story, more than a few of our readers think we made a bad decision. I respect and understand that perspective.

Naturally, we take a few lessons from this, including the inclination to Google the names of more people who will be featured in our stories. Beyond that, it’s just the latest reminder that what we do affects the lives of a lot of people. But we already knew that.

Reality-based reporting

2011-11-30T11:51:00.001-07:00

CNN is laying off 50 journalists and replacing them with just regular folks called “iReporters,” who apparently will provide compelling and probing journalism for free.

In other news, Disney has announced that it will no longer pay people to make movies for its film division, relying instead on YouTube videos spliced together in random sequence. And, book publisher Random House will stop paying authors to write for them -- it will republish free blogs.

Those last two, of course, are false. They make as much sense, however, as CNN’s “all in” move toward citizen journalism. There’s a trend here, of course -- journalism produced by the people about the people.

It’s tempting to get all “the First Amendment, blah, blah, blah” about this, but that would make me sound like an ivory tower, out-of-touch dinosaur of an old-fashioned journalist. Instead, let’s turn to satirist Stephen Colbert, whose riff on CNN’s move is both funny and unsparing.

Announcing his new project, “me Reporters” (remember, he’s a satirist), he says, “Why buy the cow when you can have it shakily videotape its own milk for free?”

Using unpaid “iReporters,” Colbert suggests, is like an internship: “If you work for free, put in your time, and your work is good enough, maybe one day you could be laid off by CNN.”

Colbert sums up his piece on “me Reporters” thusly: “Bravo, CNN, for getting rid of all those pesky professionals. Hopefully this bold move will help you get rid of your remaining viewers.”

Really, you should see the whole thing.

No, even now I’m not going to launch into a sermon on the importance of real journalism, the obvious dangers of “citizen journalism,” or the various directions journalism is headed in this, the Age of Entertainment. I leave it to you dear reader, to draw your own conclusions.

I will, however, make some predictions:

--This trend among legitimate and ostensible news organizations across the country will continue, if not increase in pace.

--For many people the changes will go unnoticed, as the line between YouTube “journalism” and the real thing has been obliterated for a lot of people. For an increasing number of the media, journalism is more closely related to reality TV than serious reporting of the news. This strategy appears to be highly profitable.

--There will be increasing instances of “news” that will turn out to be fiction, blatantly misleading or otherwise skewed by people who have a particular ax to grind or lack fundamental newsgathering skills. Whether this will compel a move away from citizen journalism remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, let’s just call it reality-based reporting.

SOPA is the wrong answer, but the question remains.

2011-11-28T13:25:00.002-07:00

Backed and prodded by the motion picture industry, Congress is trying, once again, to allow content providers to protect themselves and build sustainable online business models.

Unfortunately, like other past attempts, the Stop Online Piracy Act goes too far, giving the government unnecessary and unhealthy control of the Internet and otherwise putting too much power in the hands of too few people and corporations.

What the law is trying to get at are web sites that enable or assist in copyright infringement. One would think this is a good and obvious objective, but the law is breathlessly being called censorship by a lot of organizations. As written, the law’s critics might have a point.

But something must be done. As it now stands, if someone streams a copyrighted movie (or allows it to be done) on his or her web site, the process of trying to stop the theft (after all, isn’t that really what it is?) is cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive. In trying to streamline that process SOPA goes too far, giving the U.S. Department of Justice unnecessarily broad powers.

Some also convincingly argue that the law’s language circumvents the due process rights of the accused. Beyond that, there are compelling concerns that the bill has various technical flaws and is at odds with the fundamental architecture of the Internet.

So, SOPA isn’t the answer. But something needs to be done, and not every attempt to come to the aid of content providers can be seen as censorship. In the long run, the Internet will flourish if content providers, large and small, have free market incentives to produce content and make it available. That means they need to be able to make some money.

It’s not just Hollywood that has an interest in this. Newspapers like the Post Register have a stake in our country’s Internet laws.

The quality of content, more or less, often is proportionate to how much it costs to create. If a content provider – say, a newspaper – goes to significant expense to create some unique content (what we used to call “news”), it needs to have a way to earn that money back, plus a little (what we still call “profit”).

Advertising alone does not pay those sorts of bills. Subscriptions alone won’t do it, either (unless, of course, you have exceptionally high-quality or high-demand content – so far, only the pornography industry has succeeded there). Some kind of combined advertising/subscription model is the most likely.

Such a model, however, doesn’t work if anyone can take your content and post it for free as they wish. That’s what SOPA is trying to address. It’s the wrong answer, but the current situation isn’t sustainable.

The Romenesko affair

2011-11-11T22:44:00.002-07:00

Among journalists, Jim Romenesko's blog has been a go-to source for what's happening in our business, and there's been plenty to talk about.

This week, Romenesko resigned his post at the Poynter Institute about six weeks short of his previously announced his "semi-retirement." His crime was what appears to have been an increasing failure to use quotation marks when quoting directly from other sources, relying instead on the common practice of using links to imply the source. To many, the forced resignation was a spectacular over-reaction.

With regard to the resignation, I agree -- it was a spectacular over-reaction. With regard to how sourcing is handled on the Internet, I hope this is a watershed moment. There's no small irony in the fact that Romenesko's resignation comes the same week in which we learned that a Utah mayor has been publishing material on the Deseret News' "community journalism" site under a pen name (see my previous post for more outrage on that).

Romenesko worked at the Poynter Institute, as close to a think tank as there is in journalism. It's populated by experienced, smart, serious, thoughtful people. For those who want to dig into the guts of the Romenesko controversy, just Google his name and find a comfortable spot to rest with your laptop or other device of choice.

The larger issue is, what does journalism require of its adherents nowadays? To that, I answer; pretty much the same as it has for the past several generations. To me, it's more than a matter of ethics. It's a simple business proposition.

I've written about this ad nauseum on this blog and in the yellowing pages of the Post Register. The Age of Entertainment has not just blurred the lines between journalism and whatever else is going on in the name of journalism, it's obliterated them. Discerning facts from fiction is becoming increasingly difficult, if not darn near impossible.

Practitioners of journalism must differentiate themselves from the blogs, the talk shows and the rest. The only way to do that is to establish firm principles and unfailingly follow them. Romenesko, and most others who manage blogs that chiefly rely on aggregating other sources, haven't been hitting that standard. I wouldn't have known this about Romenesko's blog had it not for the reporting of the Columbia Journalism review. My own blog, this very one, includes a link to Romensko's work, and I've relied on it often. I'm supposed to be able to sniff this stuff out.

I don't know Jim Romenesko, but I know enough about him to be confident that he didn't need this job and his reputation will survive intact, which is easy for me to say from my seat well outside the fray. People who care about journalism need to take this as an opportunity to consider the fundamentals of our craft. We have plenty of issues to deal with, but none is more important than this one.

Newspapers will survive -- dare I say, thrive -- by holding fast to standards of journalism, even while embracing the new reporting techniques made possible by technology. If we do that, I cling to what may seem like the naive faith that thoughtful people will be drawn to our work. If they aren't, I fear greatly for all of us.

Journalism matters, and it has received a lot of black eyes lately. In the scheme of things, the Romenesko issue might seem pretty minor. It isn't. Our reporting and sourcing need to be more pristine than ever. The Internet hasn't made it less important -- just the opposite.

Another oxymoron is biting the dust

2011-11-07T09:28:00.011-07:00

UPDATED 11/11/11:

The mayor of a significant Utah city has admitted that he's been writing stories about his town under a "pen name" and submitting them to the Deseret News' citizen journalism site, where they've been published. Mayor Mike Winder's response goes something like this (I've taken some license): "What? Ben Franklin did it. Alexander Hamilton did it."

Mr. mayor, look around. Does it look like the turn of the 19th century to you? Do you want to bring duels back, too? (That didn't work out so well for Hamilton.)

While the mayor should be censured for this behavior -- perhaps tossed out of office -- the real fault lies with the Deseret News, which shirked its journalistic responsibility by not only not vetting the mayor's submissions, but for encouraging such submissions in the first place. The mayor himself concluded that, with 2,000 contributors, there are probably "some holes in the Deseret Connect system." Ya think?

The Deseret News, it can be hoped, is learning what other newspapers have already discovered -- that new journalism needs to look a whole lot like the old journalism.

Five or six years ago, the new thing that was going to "save journalism" was the use of "citizen journalists." The idea was pretty simple -- recruit just plain folks in neighborhoods all across the market, give them some basic tools (maybe a spell-check program and a new e-mail address), and have them report on the important goings-on in their world.

Of course, a few immediate issues come to mind:

1. This presents a perfect opportunity for people, companies, organizations and causes to get their own word out there, unfiltered and unedited, under the guise of "community journalism." (Mayor Winder, the floor is yours.)

2. Since these community journalists are unpaid, they aren't exactly consistent in sending material to the mother ship for uploading and dissemination.

3. Even the most well-meaning citizen journalist lacks the training and experience to pursue the "who, what, when, where, why and how" of basic reporting. They lack the basic writing skills to put that information into coherent form. They are not committed to even the most fundamental set of journalism ethics and principles.

Otherwise, it's a great idea. Except it doesn't -- can't -- work. Some updates from the cutting edge of citizen journalism, reported by Tom Grubisich in a column on the blog Street Fight:

“You can’t depend on citizen journalists. I’ve got 12 reliable contributors from a community of 60,000. I’m the mule, producing 80% of the editorial content. I’ve done 1,700 pieces in our two years, two months of existence, and my wife Jane has supplied a lot of the photos.” -- Patrick Boylan, Welles Park Bulldog (north Chicago)

“We have NEVER had a ‘pro-am’ strategy. I don’t believe in asking people to work for free and think it unconscionable that moneyed enterprises like some huge corporations do. WSB is a professional, commercial news organization." --Tracy Record, West Seattle Blog

“All of our news content is original reporting and is paid for. We have paid freelance reporters in each town who have a specific beat. These are all veteran journalists." Mike Shapiro, Alternative Press, New Jersey

“I think the rubric of ‘citizen journalism’ has become outdated. A lot of the new activity is coming from people who have some kind of journalistic background. And they bring some of those core values to their efforts … The fact is that reporting is hard work and is rarely undertaken consistently by citizen-journalism volunteering on an episodic basis.” -- Jan Schaffer, New Voices

The exception appears to be AOL's massive venture, "Patch," which is attempting to repeat a Microsoft experiment of the 1990s called "Sidewalk" by creating hyperlocal sites throughout the country, coordinated from a main office. Now at 890 sites, Patch is reducing ballooning costs by cutting back on freelancers, who back up multi-tasking editors. Each site also has a clutch of unpaid bloggers to provide "community flavor," Grubisich reports.

I've said it before -- citizen journalism isn't exactly like citizen rocket science, but not just anybody can "do" journalism, any more than any of us can fly to the moon. A better analogy might be teaching -- it takes four years of college and more years of experience, plus a good deal of hard work, to become a good teacher. Journalism is no different, except that a lot of journalists get paid less than teachers.

The Internet does a good many things, but it doesn't magically turn anyone with a computer into a journalist. The only hard thing to figure out is why that wasn't obvious from the start.

World peace is next

2011-11-01T11:49:00.001-06:00

The Post Register is partnering with the Eastern Idaho Entrepreneurial Center on a task so daunting that, should we succeed, we are contemplating taking on world peace as our next project.

Indeed, the name of the email group for this project is “whirledpeas” (“world peace,” get it?).

What could possibly be so fraught with peril? Essentially, EIEC’s assignment, in collaboration with our staff, is to find a business model for the Post Register that includes journalism, advertising, the Internet, people under the age of 35, and the potential for profit. So far, this combination has proven toxic. Our main attention will be to handheld devices.

“The brief history of the Internet,” writes British author and thinker John Lanchester, “is dominated by wishful thinking about turning internet traffic into revenue; companies that have managed to do it are vastly outnumbered by those who have learned the cruel new information era twist on ‘if you build it, they will come.’ The modern form of that now runs: ‘if you build it, they may well come, but only as long as it’s free.’ That is why, as Warren Buffett observed, the internet is probably a ‘net negative for capitalists’.”

Succinctly, here’s the problem:

1. With some exceptions, people pay precious little attention to most Internet advertising.

2. People under the age of 35 have grown up with the unfortunate and blatantly false assumption that real journalism can be delivered to their electronic devices for free.

3. Good journalism is expensive and can’t be done using “community journalists,” by rewriting press releases or by steam-of-consciousness blogging.

What you have here is a recipe for the ultimate disappearance of real journalism.

So far, there remains enough interest by readers and advertisers in the old-fashioned, printed-on-dead-trees form that it’s still profitable.

The Internet is the greatest, most efficient medium for exchanging data the world has ever seen, by an infinite factor. Unfortunately, as both Lanchester and Buffet make so clear, it’s not a great business tool. For every high-publicity success story, there are a thousand failures that go unnoticed.

Some newspapers have thrown in the towel when it comes to the Internet. In early 2011, the Newport (Rhode Island) Daily News set its annual price for print and online to $157, or a dollar a month above the print-only fee. But online-only access is $345 – a price that Publisher William Lucey III told Columbia University researchers “is more of a deterrent.” The amount was based on a scenario in which, “if everyone wanted only a digital product, this is what it would cost.”

Even Google loses money on every single venture (YouTube, owned by Google, loses $500 million a year), save one – targeted Internet advertising. This works not because Google’s ads are any better than others, but because there are, quite simply, so many of them. They scale on a global level – anything less than that doesn’t have the volume to work.

So newspapers have become hybrids, using the profits of print to subsidize experiments online. Based on current trends, at some point a good share of print readers will have quite literally died off, not to be replaced by the generation raised during the Age of Entertainment.

There are several potential outcomes:

1. Young readers will eventually migrate to print.

2. Young readers will be willing to pay some sort of reasonable but significant subscription fee for information provided by real journalism sources.

3. We will find a model that requires significantly less revenue to generate a profit than current models, and we’ll be able to generate enough revenue through a combination of advertising and subscriptions (or some heretofore unrecognized revenue source) to be sustainable.

4. Real journalism will become the realm of the non-profit and daily community newspapers will become a fond (or not so fond) memory.

To be clear, none of these scenarios is imminent. Predictions of the end of legacy media – newspapers, television and radio – have been wrong now for going on 20 years. They continue to be wrong. We’re talking about a transition that is likely to take anywhere from 10 to 25 years, maybe even longer.

Meanwhile, what to do? We hope to have the answer by the end of the winter term at Brigham Young University-Idaho and Idaho State University, whose students provide the resources for EIEC. If we’re successful, expect the end to all world conflict within six months of that.

Uriah Heep and the Internet

2011-10-22T21:11:00.003-06:00

"In a city cut off from all news from the outside, there were more newspapers being published than ever -- thirty-six or more -- and representing every shade of political opinion. Hungry for news of almost any kind, Parisians now read newspapers as they walked down the streets. Yet at the same time there seemed even less faith that much of anything published could be trusted for accuracy."
--David McCullough in his book, "The Greater Journey," writing about the siege of Paris, 1870-71

The Internet siege of the 21st Century bears marked resemblance to the siege of Paris by the Prussians, without the need to eat rats to survive the lack of food. Information surrounds us, permeates our environment, is read as we walk the streets. Yet, perhaps even more than in the Paris of 1870, the information we take in is often wholly unreliable, drawn through filters that provide only a small portion of the total and, worse still, often either completely false or at least skewed in one direction or another.

In a way, such easy access to information is worse than having none at all. Emails containing every manner of falsehood are forwarded without thought to the original source as if anything found on our computers is true. More often than not, it isn't.

As McCullough points out, there's nothing particularly new about this phenomenon, except for the the ubiquity of the perfidy. It's not just the fault of bloggers, political hacks or fake experts. The "news" media, in their attempt to get it first or lure increasingly distracted consumers, think nothing of putting garbage in front of us.

Discerning the waste stream from legitimate news is no easy task. I've written and spoken about this until my acquaintances have taken to rolling their eyes -- "there he goes again." But this is one of those issues that requires repetition, if for no other reason than to make the point in as many ways as possible.

It's to the point that our first assumption should be that anything we read or hear is wrong, because those are the odds.

"We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us," wrote English author Samuel Johnson -- in the middle of the 18th century! Worse yet, we seek to confirm our own biases instead of challenging them. This is called confirmatory bias and, again, it's hardly a new thing.

In some cases this is a conscious choice, but more often it happens more subtly, and no one is exempt from it. Charles Dickens' character Uriah Heep in his book David Copperfield is the quintessential example of this, as everything he experiences becomes a confirmation of the biases that came out of his humble upbringing. We all have something of Uriah Heep in our character.

The difference today is that there are so many sources so easily available that confirming our biases has become all too easy. Without constant, conscious effort, it's likely only to get worse.

DVRS and TV advertising

2011-09-28T14:03:00.001-06:00

Nearly one-third of American voters say they didn’t watch “live” TV in the last week.

We’re not talking about the broadcasting of live events. We’re talking about TV programming as it is aired by the various networks.

In other words, 31 percent of voters surveyed in recent research said they essentially watch all their TV from a digital video recorder at a time of their choosing instead of when the shows are originally broadcast. If you make the logical assumption that this means most of these folks aren’t watching the commercials, you’d be right.

Eighty-eight percent of DVR owners say they skip commercials all or at least three-quarters of the time. Another 7 percent say it’s about half the time. That’s a total of 95 percent of DVR owners. Nearly 40 percent of those surveyed own a DVR, which is how you get to a total of 31 percent who basically do all their TV watching from a digital recorder.

It gets worse. People between 18 and 44 years of age spend more time watching video content via DVRs, DVDs, computers, live streaming or mobile devices (11.7 hours a week) than they do watching “live” TV (6.5 hours). People of all ages say they are watching less live TV this year than last year.

The purpose of the survey was to help political parties and candidates decide how to reach voters with their message.

"People live very complex lives with media coming to them from many sources, and the big take-away here is that advertisers need to communicate in any way they can to the audience that matters to them," Matt Rosenberg, vice president of Internet marketing company SAY Media, told National Public Radio.

TV ads – particularly political ones – aren’t going away soon. For one thing, people don’t necessarily need to see that ad on live TV to eventually hear its message. Particularly nasty or compelling ads end up on YouTube and elsewhere, so they are seen one way or the other.

"It is one of the chief things that reporters love to cover, which is the television ad war," said Kenneth Goldstein, head of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, told NPR. "So you get an added buzz after that."

Of course, we ink-stained wretches in the print/online business aren’t above wondering out loud how results like this translate to the broader TV-viewing audience. Are local audiences tuning out TV commercials as much as we think?

It’s hard to say for certain, but the logical conclusion is that commercials on live TV are not as valuable as they were even five years ago. It’s another example of how the fragmentation of the media is changing the whole playing field.

If only they could do something about it ...

2011-09-26T14:50:00.002-06:00

If we want to know about the weather, television is the place we turn.

Traffic? We turn on the radio.

But if our interests run to community events, crime, taxes, arts and culture, social services or zoning and development, the local newspaper is where we go.

This information is part of the latest survey by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Of the 16 topics surveyed by Pew, respondents were most likely to rely on local newspapers for 11 of them (and newspapers tied with the Internet or television on four others). In addition to weather, TV was the top choice for breaking news.

“This sense from the public that newspapers are a place where they can turn to for information on a wide range of local topics, more so than other sources, confirms findings from other Pew Research Center studies, particularly a report on which news organizations tend to break new information in local news reporting conducted in Baltimore and research on what news is available from different sources produced as part of the State of the News Media 2006 report,” the study concluded.

The younger the respondent, the more likely he or she is to rely more on the Internet than more traditional information sources. No surprise there. Among all age groups, however, the Internet was a distant second to newspapers in terms of use and value.

Interestingly, these young information consumers believe they are turning to web-only sources when they seek news online. What they likely don’t know is that most news – including that found online – originates with newspapers (this was the finding of another Pew survey a few years ago).

To be fair, the survey also shows that more Americans watch TV news than read newspapers. However, they rely on TV for just a handful of topics – weather being at the top of the list. People who are serious about specific types of news, from crime to culture and most things in-between, are most likely to be newspaper readers.

There’s nothing particularly startling about any of these findings, unless you’ve been listening to those who continue to say that newspapers are dead or dying (though that drumbeat seems to be growing fainter).

One portion of the study offers a particular challenge to all media – nearly half of all adults, the survey found, use some type of mobile device to get some of their local news and information. Weather, again, is the most common, but nearly a third use a mobile device to find local businesses or restaurants and a quarter use one to get local news.

The challenge is this – how do information providers support this trend and still stay in business?

The Big Lie is alive and well

2011-09-11T12:45:00.002-06:00

"Since the MS press has its' (sic) feet forever planted in the corner of the unions they aren't about to throw gasoline on the fire of union thuggery. I have however seen reports of the Washington ruckus on the FNC - no surprise there - as they generally report all the news no matter who it impacts." Post on Sept. 11, 2011, on the Post Register's message board regarding reporting on illegal activities of union members at the Longview, Washington grain terminal

"All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods." Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

No, I am not comparing the person who posted on the Post Register's web site to Adolph Hitler. I am noting, however, that the strategies they employ are strikingly similar. In the case of the Post Register poster, I'm quite sure the use of the strategy is completely incidental. It's become so commonplace to buy into and pass along the latest Big Lie that we don't even recognize when it's being done.

In this case, there are two Big Lies. The first is that there was precious little reporting on the outrageous actions by union members in Longview. It's simply not so -- all major news outlets covered it thoroughly, led by the newspapers in the Longview area.

The second is that the "mainstream media" (who are these people, anyway?) are so in lockstep with unions that they'll never report on them negatively. This is utter nonsense that lacks any shred of evidence. This Big Lie is perpetuated mostly by people who have heard it from elsewhere and chosen to believe it because it conforms nicely to their world view.

I did a series of searches on the Longview story. Most of the coverage started with local newspapers and was picked up by the Associated Press. Reuters did its own reporting on the story, as did a number of regional TV stations and Oregon Public Broadcasting. From there, every major national/world news outlet picked up it, save two: NBC and CNN. Ironically, however, that "liberal" bastion, MSNBC, had the story.

To be fair, the story did not appear in the Post Register. I think this was an oversight, but we simply don't publish much national and world news -- that's not what we're about. You want to know what's happening in eastern Idaho, we're all over it. Elsewhere, there are myriad other sources that do a far better job. That tendency will only increase in the future.

The Internet is the perfect place for spreading Big Lies among the intellectually lazy. On the other hand, for those willing to do a little effort (and who understand how to use search engines and select credible information sources), the Internet can kill any Big Lie.

The question is, do we want to know the truth or simply live within our version of reality? It's a damn good thing Hitler didn't have the Internet.

Here we go again

2011-09-09T14:42:00.000-06:00

Most newspapers have a Facebook page, and many use the page to post news updates.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why.

This issue goes way back to the start of the Internet. In those days, newspapers were in the enviable position of having a 100 percent paid readership that provided roughly 20 percent of their revenue. Enter the Internet, and newspapers managers panicked, creating web sites and dumping that precious news on the sites for free.

It’s an old story now – most newspapers have some sort of online subscription model nowadays, but it took 15 years to get there. Incredibly, some newspapers are now making the same mistake with Facebook.

I was reminded of this today when one of the Post Register’s Facebook friends asked for a news update about smoke in the air. I have “Liked” all of the Idaho newspapers with Facebook pages, and I’m astounded at how many of them use this social medium to deliver news updates.

What’s the upside to the newspaper? The implied message is, “Don’t subscribe to our newspaper; just ‘like’ our Facebook page and we’ll keep you up to date on breaking news.”

That’s just as crazy as giving their news away on their own home pages. Why is it that newspapers are so likely to fumble with new technology?

Many of us jumped on the Groupon bandwagon when it was the latest great thing, even though it was our competitor and brought nothing to our table. The same was true of deals with Google, Yahoo, Monster and other online operations that scared us to death. Rather than competing, we made like President Obama and cut a deal.

Most of those deals turned out to be very bad for newspapers and very good for the “partners.” Some are now openly speculating that Groupon is headed for big trouble. Still, newspapers swoon with every new suitor.

I propose, as I have in the past, that part of the problem is that we’re afraid to be seen as old-fashioned if we don’t embrace every new technology or online-based product that comes down the pike. Rather than allowing ourselves to be smeared as technophobes, we abandon common sense and hop in bed with every enemy that emerges from the shadows. Many of us are still sending reporters out with video cameras to post online video versions of stories – lousy ones, at that.

Technology has disrupted the newspaper business model in a big way. The huge profits of the second half of the 20^th Century are gone forever. But the core of the model still works – do local news and advertising better than anyone else, demand a fair price for your product, run an efficient, imaginative business, and you’ll succeed.

AP's uncertain future at the PR

2011-09-08T14:28:00.000-06:00

In these tumultuous times in the newspaper business, some transitions happen seemingly overnight, while others take a little more time.

We’re about to embark on the latter. We think.

Nearly all of the national and world news you read in the Post Register comes from the Associated Press, a non-profit cooperative of member newspapers and the largest collection of fine journalists on the planet. Some AP articles originate with the association’s staff journalists, while many others come from member newspapers.

One of the jolting changes in the news business has been the availability of national and world news for free on the Internet and cable TV. Community newspapers like the Post Register, once the main sources of local, national and world news, have found that their role has changed. That change boils down to one word: local.

We are best in the world at providing news and advertising information about eastern Idaho. As a source for national and world news, we’re way down the list and dropping.

This focus on local shows itself on our front page, which is dominated nearly every day by local news generated by our reporters and photographers or from other newspapers in our region with whom we have a story-sharing agreement. News from the Associated Press is increasingly relegated to inside pages.

While the AP continues to be an impeccable source of journalism, we’re frustrated by its slow pace of change, particularly in how it charges for its services. With a little more than a year left on our current contract, we’re going to figure out whether we – and our readers – can live without the AP.

This doesn’t mean we’ll abandon national and world news and sports. There are other sources available to us, particularly the worldwide news company, Reuters. We’ll have to cobble together other sources for sports and some other types of information, but we think it can be done. We looked seriously at this option a couple of years ago and found that alternative sources to the AP were lacking. We think that has changed.

If we can do it, we’ll take the money we save and invest it in local newsgathering. That feels like a win-win deal to us.

We’re also considering other changes, like moving all our local news content (except for sports, features and opinion) into the A section. Barring a major event outside our readership area, our front page would be entirely local every day, and the rest of the front section would contain local news.

We have a little more than a year to make a final decision, but we wanted you to know what we’re thinking. We’ll keep you posted.

Troglodytes unite

2011-08-19T21:59:00.004-06:00

I have been accused, rather often, of being a media troglodyte.

I protest. The argument has gone that printed media are inferior to the digital form for any number of reasons. It's old-fashioned. It's slow. It requires dead trees. It is favored among the old and decrepit. These are all true. They are also essentially irrelevant.

The greater issue is, what is the best way to learn, to become informed, to be engaged? Smart media managers say they are "agnostic" when it comes to the particular medium they want to use. What they mean is that anyone who still clings to print is a troglodyte.

As a newspaper publisher, I find many things about digital distribution quite enticing. The most compelling is that it's extraordinarily cheap. Many of us in the newspaper business, despite our reputations to the contrary, would love nothing more than to shed our images as ink-stained wretches and go all in when it comes to new media.

For better or worse, the Internet business models stink and, it turns out, printed media are still pretty darned effective -- both as a business and as a way to convey information. We now have some academic support.

Three doctoral candidates at the University of Oregon, people clearly way smarter (and younger) than I, have concluded that people who use new media tend to ignore their multimedia aspects. Moreover, they found that "...print subjects remembered more news stories than online subjects and suggest that the
development of dynamic online story forms in the past decade have had little effect toward making them more impressionable than print stories."

In other words, all of the effort we've all made toward utilizing the many bells and whistles of new technology are of less import than we had thought. I am not making this up.

In a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Mass Communication and Journalism, researchers Arthur D. Santana, Randall Livingstone and Yoon Cho. This research does nothing to counter studies that have shown that more people now get their news from the Internet than print, a process that took a mere 15 years.

However, the Oregon smarties cited research concluding that "print newsreaders remembered significantly more topics than online newsreaders. Part of why online readers tend to scan stories while print readers tend to be more methodical might be explained by research that found newspapers offer news stories with more depth and breadth than online stories."

Not only are print sources more extensive, but Internet sources are "more opinionated" than print sources, they report.

There is nothing inherently superior to one medium over another, of course, and that's the point. The mere fact that information is distributed using the latest technology doesn't automatically make it inferior or superior to other methods. The current bias seems to be that the last 15 years portend the next 15. That isn't necessarily so.

News consumed in print is "more impressionable" than information found on the Internet. The researchers found that "online newspapers are apt to give fewer cues about the news story’s importance, thus giving readers more control over story selection. In this way, part of the agenda-setting function of the newspaper is lost in the online version. Online readers are apt to acquire less information about national, international and political events than print newsreaders because of the lack of salience cues; they generally are not being told what to read via story placement and prominence — an enduring feature of the print product." In fact, “... what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation."

Of course, none of this suggests that either newspapers or readers should forsake the Internet. That would be stupid. However, as the Oregon researchers conclude, "The implications of the research should inform the resource priorities of newspapers as they continue to undergo sweeping changes in the readership habits of their print and online audience."

In other words, let's not rush toward embracing technology because it's there. Let's use it where it makes sense, but let's not be so quick to abandon methods that work.

Information junk food and bubble filters

2011-08-11T08:57:00.002-06:00

It’s entirely possible that the more you use the Internet, the less you’ll really know about the world.

What happens over time is that algorithms used by Google, Facebook and other applications set up a “filter bubble” that constricts what you see online. In short, these applications keep track of what you search or talk about and start limiting what you see based on your use of the application.

Yahoo News does it. Some large newspaper web sites are doing. Over time, this is shrinking your world.

At a recent Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, speaker Eli Pariser referred to this phenomenon as the emergence of “filter bubbles.”

When you use Google and other search engines, your results may differ vastly from those of others Googling the very same thing. What’s happening is that Google is filtering your results based on your previous searches.

Yahoo News uses 57 -- 57! -- different pieces of information to determine how it responds to your queries. These include everything from your previous searches to what kind of computer you use and where you live.

“This moves us very quickly toward a world where the Internet shows us what it thinks we need to see, but not necessarily what we need to see,” said Pariser.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said it more bluntly: “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

In the world of filter bubbles, “You don’t decide what gets in, and, more importantly, you don’t see what gets edited out,” Pariser says. “Instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food.”

“What we’re seeing is more of a passing of the torch, from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. The thing is that the algorithmic ones don’t have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did.”

This happens despite our best efforts to avoid it. You may think you’re really digging through the Internet in search of answers and information. But your search is only as good as the algorithm that drives it, and those algorithms are keeping you in a box.

One of the most valuable and enjoyable parts of consuming information -- from newspapers, magazines, television, books, and, yes, the Internet -- is a sense of serendipity. We often learn things we hadn’t set out to search for. That is largely lost on the Internet, despite the sense of the Internet's vastness.

“We need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility (followed by newspaper editors before the Internet) into the code that they’re writing,” said Pariser, to a standing ovation.

(Thanks to reader Robert Wright for alerting me to this presentation.)

Criticizing journalism, one cartoon panel at a time

2011-08-10T12:04:00.008-06:00

Eight or nine years ago, Brooke Gladstone interviewed me for her National Public Radio show, "On the Media."

Back then, the Post Register was one of a handful of daily newspapers in the U.S. charging for access to its online content, and this was her topic. I must have been boring or lacked insight, because the segment never aired, so far as I know. It’s moot, of course, because nowadays most small newspapers charge in one way or another for online access to their news.

Gladstone has written a new book, “The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media,” (W.W. Norton, $23.95) and it’s getting a lot of buzz. Well, “written” is too strong a word. It’s essentially a comic book, or “graphic” book, consisting mostly of pages of cartoons by Josh Neufeld and cartoon bubbles with commentary by Gladstone. Presumably she did this to attract a broader audience – people who don’t like to read, in other words.

This is an important segment of our population, so Gladstone gets kudos there. However, the book is neither profound nor important on a larger scale. That said, she makes some relevant points – not that I agree with all of them.

For example, she suggests that objective journalism is an impossible goal and should be thrown over in favor of transparency and disclosure.

“The question isn’t whether (journalists) hold opinions, but whether they suppress those opinions – to the extent they can – when they do their work,” she writes in one particularly eloquent cartoon bubble.

Here, of course, she states the obvious. No one believes that journalists are automatons devoid of opinion or life experience that colors their world view. But just because pure objectivity can’t be achieved doesn’t mean that we should dump it as the ideal. Truth is, we should strive to be objective AND be utterly transparent in our process.

The ideal of objectivity came about as a business decision, not an ethical one, as Gladstone points out. Early in our country’s history, newspapers openly supported one agenda or another. Eventually, however, publishers learned they could sell more papers by providing a product that appealed to the broadest possible audience. It was well into the 20^th century before this became an ethical ideal.

Gladstone uses up a good share of her cartoon panels trying to make the point that “media” is a plural noun and that there can be no monolithic “mainstream media” that wields powerful, coordinated influence. This would seem to be slap-yourself-on-the-forehead obvious, but perhaps it takes seeing it in graphical form to drive home the point.

If you have some time between dinner and bed time one evening and hate the idea of tracking footnotes, grab up the book and give it a read. Meanwhile, I’m going to drop her an email to suggest that I’m available to revisit the paid content issue.

Have another link, won't you?

2011-08-03T11:27:00.005-06:00

“The goal of the site is aggregation, not news generation. We’re chasing traffic and there isn’t always time to make sure that everything is accurate. We're really just a factory for links." – Staff member of the Huffington Post web site

Give the HuffPo person credit for honesty (and, probably a severance check if his or her identity is discovered).

Folks, this is how the Internet works. The last real research on Internet “news” found that web sites generate about 4 percent of the original news content floating around out there. The rest of it originates with newspapers, TV stations and magazines, mostly.

So when people spout questionable information supported by the claim, “I Googled it,” I usually consider the information bogus. You must do more than just Google something to learn about it.

The situation at HuffPo that led to the rare confession above was a post on the web site alleging that a certain video clip making the Internet rounds had been altered. Turns out, it hadn’t – HuffPo simply lifted the claim from a column in the New Republic. It did no vetting of the claim, as it simply doesn’t have the staff (or inclination) to do so. HuffPo ultimately issued a retraction and an apology.

Of course, it will now change course and insist on only quality journalism for its site. Riiiiggghht. And the moon is made of cheese, etc., etc.

The Internet is kind of like a chain letter that gets sent around the globe, regardless of what the letter actually says. It’s the world’s most spectacular distribution vehicle. It is agnostic to truth or lies – it cannot distinguish one from another. Humans must do that.

When you are confronted with anything from a snippet of information to the full-blown telling of a major scandal, ask a few questions:

1. Who or what is the original source of the information? If you can't find that answer, you can stop right there.

2. Once the source is determined, learn about it. Who is behind it? What are their objectives? What ethical standards do they espouse and uphold? How did they discover and confirm the information? Is the information presented in its full and appropriate context, or pulled out of context and, therefore, misleading?

I like the term “factory of links” used by the HuffPo staffer. That’s what most sites are – link factories, and we can continue the sausage metaphor further yet. Do you really want to know what’s inside that yummy link?

The problem is that most of us love to get our hands on a juicy link and don’t want to be bothered to read the nutritional facts. It’s well past time that we started.

(Thanks to Kathy Stanger for the news tip on this one.)

Breaking news ain't what it used to be

2011-08-03T08:58:00.002-06:00

Not all breaking news is created equal.

Usually, in fact, it’s nearly all “breaking” and nearly no “news.”

Because the media outlets (particularly local media) have the technology to do it, they like to take whatever information is fed to them by local law enforcement, or even information gleaned over police scanners, package it as “breaking news” and send out an e-mail blast.

While this might create the impression that a news organization has its finger on the pulse of a community, the truth is that it results in a lot of e-mail traffic that is less than newsworthy. The favorite thing lately is to send out breathless breaking news updates whenever someone is reported missing.

The result very often is a follow-up e-mail -- often within a matter of minutes -- saying that person has been found. This is what happens within law enforcement agencies 24/7. Reports are received, a good share of which turn out to be nothing at all -- maybe something like a dude walking around in a bunny costume.

Increasingly, news organizations make no attempt to vet this information -- to commit journalism. Because the technology allows it, they put it out there.

It’s no big deal, right? Isn’t more information a good thing? To be fair, I’ve talked to some cops who do like the idea that every, single missing person report becomes a breaking news, because sometimes that leads to tips. But there’s a problem here, too.

At what point do we stop paying attention to breaking news alerts after finding that the last two dozen were either nothing at all or were followed almost immediately with a “they’ve found her” e-mail. (Most recently, the time between the “missing” e-mail and the “found” e-mail was 19 minutes.)

Police reports, even when released through a trained information officer, are almost always incomplete at best. Journalists are trained to take the information and begin asking questions, getting answers and making decisions -- is this information that needs to go public right now, or do we need additional details? Is putting this information out now going to do more harm than good?

You might say that we should leave those decisions to the police, to which I’d respond that they have their areas of expertise and we have ours. We want to have a track record that allows our readers to trust that we’ll do some legwork before sending them a “breaking news” e-mail.

So, the Post Register releases precious few local “breaking news” reports on its web site and sends out even fewer breaking news e-mails. I can’t tell you how often, during our routine review of information, we learn that the details have changed or the person has been found. That’s just how it happens.

Bunnies on parade

2011-08-02T15:13:00.003-06:00

The lead news on local TV last night was about a guy walking around his neighborhood in a bunny suit.

No kidding. When we first saw the police report we thought, “that’s not news,” but our intrepid cops reporter decided to check it out anyway. She knocked on the man’s door. No answer. She knocked on a neighbor’s door. The neighbor answered and said to our reporter, “Why aren’t you doing a story about the drug dealers down the street?”

That was enough for us. No bunny story. The reporter said, "If he starts shooting people, we'll do a story." We’ll see if we can chase down the drug dealers.

Yes, it’s another moment in the Age of Entertainment, and it’s funny only for awhile.

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, writing for the Rutherford Institute (a civil liberties non-profit organization), wonders if the continuing deterioration of TV news is resulting in our “amusing ourselves to death.”

“In our media-dominated age, news personalities such as Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, and Rachel Maddow, among others, dispense the news with power and certainty like preachers used to dispense religion and boast vast viewerships that hang on their every word,” he writes. “Yet these talking heads are little more than Wizard of Oz-like front men for the powers-that-be, the mega corporations whose sphere of influence extends from the newsroom to the nexus of political power, Washington, DC.”

He rightly places a good share of the blame where it belongs – with the information consumer.

“… and as long as the television sets remain aglow (in an average household, the television set is on over seven hours a day), the blabbering of talking heads and overbearing advertising will continue.”

I’m gratified that Whitehead and I agree on another issue, too – local newspapers are one of the last outposts of real journalism.

“Local papers are most important because all political involvement begins at the local level,” writes Whitehead. “Understanding the issues facing your town and responding to them via letters to the editor is an effective way to start participating in society. It's certainly more effective than sitting on your couch and watching TV.”

This isn’t to say that journalism has to be grim or that newspapers can't have a little fun. Journalism should encompass all that a community is, including its whimsy (perhaps including a dude in a bunny suit). Unfortunately, more often than not that’s the stuff that leads a newscast, and information consumers should demand better.

Over time, when information consumption is limited to cable or local TV, celebrity magazines and shallow web sites, one’s view of the world begins to tilt. We begin to believe that everyone’s wearing a bunny suit, that our president was born in Kenya and that we must shout to be heard.

Boots on the ground

2011-07-31T21:56:00.000-06:00

One of the oddly refreshing outcomes of the downturn in newspaper profits over the past decades has been, in some cases, the separation of the true believers from the poseurs.

While companies like Gannett strip their newspapers almost mercilessly to maintain profits (and as Gannett executives get paid big bonuses to do it), the family that controls the New York Times has stopped paying itself dividends and this year introduced a subscription model for its web sites.

The move was belated (the Wall Street Journal did it 10 years ago, as did the Post Register), it was still bold in a business that has eschewed paywalls.

How’s that working for them? The New York Times now has 400,000 paying online subscribers, plus another 756,000 print subscribers who have requested and received an online password at no additional cost. More important, the Times is repaying its debt quicker than expected and appears to be on the financial mend. But there’s more

Here’s writer Seth Mnookin in New York Magazine:

“The bottom line for the paywall is more than the bottom line: The Times has taken a do-or-die stand for hard-core, boots-on-the-ground journalism, for earnest civic purpose, for the primacy of content creators over aggregators, and has brought itself back from the precipice.”

The battle may be look promising, but the war is not over, of course. It never is. The Internet is remaking the newspaper business, and it’s a grinding process. The high -- some would say obscene -- newspaper profit margins of the latter half of the 20th Century are gone forever. But there’s good reason to believe that enough Americans still care about “boots-on-the-ground journalism” to keep it a sustainable business.

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the Times’ often-maligned publisher and chairman, is the first to admit that there’s much left to do.

“Let’s be clear—we’re three months into this,” he told Mnookin. “It proves that we’re on a good track, better than we had imagined, but we’ve got to continue to invest. We’ve got to continue to change and adapt and grow from this experience. And we will.”

There are still a lot of naysayers when it comes to the future of newspapers generally and online subscriptions specifically. But so far, all of those naysayers have been wrong about nearly everything. They expected newspapers to disappear (there are 1,450 daily newspapers in the U.S., but the news about them seems to focus on the very few that have failed).

The truth is that the Internet’s wrecking of the tried-and-true newspaper business model was then exacerbated by the worst recession in four generations. In some ways, it’s remarkable that newspapers still have so many boots on the ground.

A week in the life of Post Talk

2011-07-27T09:46:00.000-06:00

Followers of this column (thanks, sweetie) know that from time to time I provide an update on Post Talk, the Post Register’s ugly online stepchild where readers make comments on the issues of the day.

More correctly, they mostly make comments about each other. Despite our attempts to either enforce a civility standard or cajole participants into playing nice, it hasn’t worked. Lately, Corey Taule and I -- Post Talk’s sole monitors -- have more or less thrown in the towel and stopped trying to require good behavior.

We’d like to try a new tack -- let’s see, we thought, if we can broaden the participation in Post Talk in the hopes that it creates a more diverse and thoughtful debate.

One morning last week I decided to draw some statistical data from a week in the life of Post Talk to get an idea of where we are today so we have a better idea of what we’d like PT to look like. Here are some of my findings:

--Thirty different people posted at least once on PT.

--There were 306 posts in seven days, for an average of 44 per day.

--One person (PT regulars will know of whom I write) accounted for 26 percent of all posts. Another (also known to other participants) accounted for another 17 percent, and a third accounted for 10 percent. So, three posters made more than half the posts. A relative handful accounts for 90 percent of the total.

We require that Post Talk participants identify themselves by name and place of residence, and this has dramatically reduced the number of people willing to participate. We’re not going to change that -- being willing to stand behind what you say is a fundamental part of participatory democracy.

The quality and diversity of the posts are simply not very good. The same people tend to say the same things over and over again in one way or another, and nearly every thread eventually devolves into name-calling. I could look at most posts with the author’s name redacted and guess with very high accuracy who wrote it.

My point is that we’d like to see more people participate to get a wider set of views on the message board. I understand the reluctance -- it takes time, and you open yourself up to all sorts of nasty responses from people who aren’t interested in having a civil discussion.

However, our traffic counters tell us that Post Talk is populated mostly by “lurkers” -- people who want to watch train wreck but don’t want to be inside the train when it happens. That’s completely understandable.

We ask -- participate anyway.

Non-profit is no panacea

2011-07-19T09:15:00.010-06:00

As staffing in real news organizations has declined over the past decade (and entertainment TV disguised as news has proliferated), some serious-minded people have considered non-profit efforts as one way to maintain real journalism in the U.S.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, directed by the Pew Research Center, has released a study of non-profit journalism, which arrived at two general conclusions:

1. The journalism done by groups like ProPublica.com and the Texas Tribune is generally pretty good, but the combined resources of these groups are not enough to replace good, local investigative journalism.

2. A good share of these organizations (44 percent, to be exact) “produced news coverage that was clearly ideological in nature.” In other words, it’s not really journalism at all, but information designed to support a specific agenda.

Some have suggested that non-profits are inherently superior to commercial journalism operations because they are not beholden to advertisers or subscribers. In fact, non-profits can be more beholden to people and organizations with an agenda, since it’s the rare major donor who doesn’t want to have some say in how his or her money is used.

The takeaway from the Pew report is that there is no single solution to improving American journalism. People need to understand that they must get their information from a variety of sources, how that information is being prepared and by whom, and to keep an open mind as they attempt to interpret often wildly conflicting stories.

Fortunately, beyond just providing raw data from its study, Pew researchers suggest four steps for consumers to follow when determining the veracity of information from non-profit sources (most of which are found on the Internet):

1. Examine the website. Find and read through the "About" section. Look at what it says about its mission, the background of the staff and the source of funding. A site that explains these items in detail, provides links to its funders, lists its individual donors and reports its financials is more transparent.

2: Range of Viewpoints. While reading a story, readers can check how much effort a story makes to include relevant and competing viewpoints. The story theme can help consumers get a sense of whether the site has a particular point of view underlying its reporting and story selection. Evaluating this also involves reading through a number of stories.

3: Story Theme. The story theme can help consumers get a sense of whether the site has a particular point of view underlying its reporting and story selection. Evaluating this also involves reading through a number of stories.

4: Reporting Capacity. This study suggests that the non-profit news outlets that have the most robust news operations tend also to offer more balanced and diverse reporting. Information on the news staff can usually be found in the "About" section of the site. Look for the number of listed staff and contributors.

The demand for scandal

2011-07-12T13:42:00.011-06:00

"Sorry, sorry..." Rupert Murdoch's view of his media empire's role in society. (As only Monty Python can tell it.)

Oh, the horror; the horror, we all say, as the details continue to emerge from Rupert Murdoch’s journalism scandal in the United Kingdom.

Yes, the acts apparently committed by “journalists,” were heinous. Among the worst were hacking into private e-mail accounts, including that of a 13-year-old kidnapped girl later found dead. Already, one “red-top” tabloid, Murdoch’s 168-year-old News of the World, has closed over the scandal, and one of its former reporters and a whistle-blower has died, likely by his own hand in one way or another.

But the deeper issue is that the U.K.’s red-tops thrive because enough of the public demands scandal and sleaze. It’s equally true in the U.S., of course. Fortunately, there are still committed journalists who slog away at their craft, even when the trail is obstructed and incessantly uphill.

The Guardian newspaper’s Nick Davies is such a reporter. From his garage in a village in southern England, Davies has been unleashing scoop after scoop on the News of the Worlds’ misdeeds, often to the sound of silence. Instead of an English uprising against the scandal sheets, there was a collective yawn. There were payoffs by the newspaper to keep people quiet.

“ … the public seemed indifferent,” reports National Public Radio’s David Folkenflik. “Its hunger for gossip and scandal made News of the World the nation's top-selling paper.”

That finally changed just days ago when Davies revealed the News of the World had hacked into and erased the voice mail of a 13-year-old kidnapping victim, who was eventually found dead. At last, the outrage came and within days the News of the World announced it would be closing.

For Davies, however, it’s been a lonely and occasionally bitter years-long process during which he was often pilloried as someone who couldn’t move on.

“People kept on saying that I was obsessive, and maybe that's true,” he told NPR.

Without that obsession, however, News of the World likely would have continued its illegal, immoral and unethical practices and people would have continued buying and reading it.

News, like most other things in business, operates on supply and demand. Where there’s a demand for gossip, innuendo, skewed reporting, and misleading or downright false information, there will be a supply. Other tabloids will fill the vacuum left by News of the World.

Dwight Allman, a high school friend of mine, now a professor of political science at Baylor, put it better than I ever could:

“A free press presumes a polity which takes the office of the informed citizen seriously; recognizes and values honest reporting on issues that have real merit; and casts scorn on all who prostitute journalism to the prurient tastes, or the narrow self-interest, of those elements in society which have yet to rise to the level of a genuine citizenry.”

The journalism we deserve

2011-07-12T11:27:00.001-06:00

“The day of the 24-hour news cycle causes one to ponder and wonder ‘what is journalism anymore?’ … At some point in this nation we’re going to have to decide what is journalism – what is real journalism.” -- Judge Belvin Perry, Casey Anthony trial judge.

Judge Perry is right – we, the people, decide what journalism is. Put another way, we get the journalism we deserve.

At this stage of the Age of Entertainment, we’re not doing so great. Based on ratings and readership, we prefer outrageous commentary to thoughtful dialog, sound bites to thoroughly vetted and contextual information.

Don’t blame cable TV, the radio networks, tabloids or gossip magazines – this is all on us. Businesses provide what people consume, and people clearly want to consume this informational equivalent of fried food – it’s tasty, but ultimately bad for us. And we seem not to care.

The solution to the schlock that poses as news these days is simple, but requires a little effort. It can be laid out in two simple steps:

1. Consider the source. This gets us 90 percent of the way there. What is the track record of our information source? Does it espouse and adhere to a published code of ethics or conduct? Does it employ real journalists and make them accountable?

2. Rely on multiple sources, all of which meet the qualifications of No. 1. No single news source is going provide everything you need to be an informed citizen.

Here’s a simple example of how one small piece of information can get twisted beyond all recognition. We recent printed a letter to the editor that quoted a line from an interview with Michelle Obama that has the right-wing Internet and talk shows all frothed up. She said: “Fortunately, we have help from the media. I have to say this: I'm very grateful for the support and kindness that we've gotten.”

Outrageous, right? The smoking-gun evidence that the “mainstream media” is in the bag for the Obamas, right? Until you read the whole quote:

CNN reporter: "How's the family ready for this [the election]? It's going to be quite vicious, isn't it? How do you prepare for that?"

Michelle Obama: "You know, it's … we're ready, you know. Our children, you know, could care less about what we're doing. We work hard to do that. Fortunately, we have help from the media. I have to say this: I'm very grateful for the support and kindness that we've gotten. People have respected their privacy and in that way, I think, you know, no matter what people may feel about my husband's policies or what have you, they care about children and that's been good to see."

Oops.

Casey Anthony through the fun house

2011-07-06T11:53:00.006-06:00

Revised and updated July 7, 2011

"The day of the 24-hour news cycle causes people to ponder and wonder, 'what is journalism anymore?’” – Judge Belvin Perry of the Casey Anthony trial

Calling yourself a journalist doesn’t make you one. You have to walk the talk.

Coverage of the already infamous Casey Anthony trial is the latest case in point. While there were, indeed, journalists covering the trial, the major attention-getters were people like Nancy Grace, Jane Velez-Mitchell, Dr. Drew Pinskey and Greta Van Susteren. Eventually, nearly every major TV personality got in on the act including, yes, Geraldo Rivera.

In case you’ve been holed up in a bunker the past month, Anthony is the mother of two-and-a-half-year-old Caylee Anthony, whose body was found in an Orlando-area swamp three years ago. There is widespread shock and chagrin that Casey Anthony “got away with it.” The trial was a circus of Shakespearean proportions that included allegations of incest, lying, partying, weird Google searches and precious little direct evidence.

If folks covering major trials like this want to refer to themselves as journalists, they should be willing to abide by the Society of Professional Journalist’s code of ethics. Two tenets of that code particularly come to mind:

Journalists should: 1) Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity. 2) Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.

Anyone paying any attention at all to the coverage of this trial will know that most reporting and opining on the case ignored these principles, among many others.
Every day, bad people are tried, convicted and put away for hurting or killing children. There is an arrest, a thorough investigation, a trial and a judgment.

These are not followed by shouting heads and irresponsible nightly commentary. Of course, these cases don't generate millions in ad revenue dollars, so they are ignored by national media, but covered quietly and routinely by local media – mostly newspapers.

Our justice system isn't broken -- the Anthony prosecutors didn't have the goods. You can't judge a system based on a handful of high-profile cases. What's broken is our journalism in the Age of Entertainment.

People on HLN, CNN, Fox, and elsewhere have embarrassed themselves for the three years since the baby’s body was found, and it got worse during the trial. And yet, people watch, unable to look away – the Age of Entertainment in all its horrible glory.

Coverage of this case created a set of fun house mirrors by which the process was distorted beyond recognition. Had there been cameras and microphones only, that would have been one thing. But at every possible opportunity, “experts” of every sort filled momentary gaps in the action with all manner of speculation and theorizing, most of it relatively mindless sound bites.

That’s not journalism. It’s garish entertainment.

Bad journalism knows no partisan bounds

2011-06-29T14:06:00.005-06:00

My column last week on Fox News anchor Chris Wallace’s statement that the network sees itself as a “counterweight” to more liberal media outlets spurred some interesting feedback.

The main thrust was that I had been pretty hard on Fox News but not hard enough on the “liberal” media. That would be valid if my column were taken in isolation. The truth is, though, that I’ve been much tougher on so-called liberal media in the past few years than “conservative” outlets.

Here are some snippets from the past couple of years:

“Neither MSNBC nor its commentator, Keith Olbermann, would be considered a bastion of good journalism,” I wrote last November.

In another column, I wrote this:

"Perhaps understandably, we are all too eager to accept as gospel information or stories that conform to our personal politics or values, regardless of the veracity of the source. We tend to drift toward sources that skew toward our value set. Sources that want to be seen as credible all too often insert a particular political spin to their coverage include such TV networks and web sites as MSNBC, Fox, Huffington Post, and The Drudge Report.”

Two years ago I wrote: “What Keith Olbermann, Bill O'Reilly and Nancy Grace do is entertainment, not journalism.” How’s that for cutting across the whole spectrum?

It may or not be comforting to know that I’ve reserved some of my harshest criticism for Huffington Post, a web site that clearly attempts to advance a left-wing agenda.

Last summer, I wrote:

“Arianna Huffington clearly wants to be taken seriously. She is a regular on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, writes and speaks articulately and convincingly as a liberal advocate, and clearly has worked tirelessly on developing a highly successful web site with millions of monthly visits. And yet, Huffington Post is the best example of what's so wrong with ‘news’ on the Internet.”

Journalism is journalism, and very few cable TV networks or web site practice it. When I was asked at a Rotary Club speech a few months ago where I’d recommend people go for journalism, I revealed my true bias: “Newspapers,” I said. I say it again. Newspapers – most of them, anyway – are still abiding by ethical journalism standards that most other media don’t even know exist.

Do you really want to know whether an information source can be trusted? Start by looking for its code of conduct or ethics. If you don’t find one, take the information with a good dose of skepticism. If the outlet has such a code, hold it accountable to its standards. That’s a good start toward becoming a successful consumer of information in the Age of Entertainment.

Fox the counterweight

2011-06-22T08:33:00.001-06:00

Well, so much for “fair and balanced.”

Fox News’ Chris Wallace admitted what any objective viewer already knew: Fox News sees its job as providing a conservative alternative to the “liberal” media, most specifically, NBC.

Here’s part of an exchange between Wallace and Jon Stewart last Sunday morning:

Stewart asks Wallace if he truly believes that Fox is "exactly the ideological equivalent of NBC News."

Wallace: "I think we're the counterweight. I think they have a liberal agenda and we tell the other side of the story."

You have to give props to Wallace for speaking the truth, even if he didn’t exactly set out to do so. It appears that Fox intends to provide, from its point of view, one-half of the “fair and balanced” equation -- the conservative half. It is doing so, ostensibly, because other media are firmly ensconced in the liberal half.

There is, of course, some symmetry to this. There is no doubt that MSNBC airs a string of liberal commentary in its daily lineup (though there’s much less evidence that the parent network, NBC, is equally left-leaning). The business model on TV and radio “news” is to serve a political niche, and Fox has found a fairly broad one. It’s working.

But why pretend to provide journalism based on any definition of objectivity? Why cling to the “fair and balanced” slogan?

One of the problems with pretending to be a news organization instead of a “counterweight” is that a lot of people apparently buy into the idea that Fox is all they need to watch to get the news. People have every right to get their information from whatever sources they choose, but someone wishing to be well-informed will understand that no single source will do that on its own.

CNN has used “The Most Trusted Name in News,” for awhile now, and it clearly irritates Fox. (Fox has run print ads claiming IT is more trusted than CNN.) Given the self-selection of audience members, trust is probably over-rated.

So, I have a few suggestions for a new, more appropriate slogan for Fox News: “Counterweight to Lying Liberals.”

OK, that’s probably too heavy-handed and too long.

They could just go with “The Counterweight,” but that’s a little vague and some might confuse it with that great song by The Band from the Sixties. That is certainly not the image Fox wants to portray.

MSNBC is experimenting with a slogan that at least hints at its leftward tilt: “Lean Forward.” It’s too cute, but at least they’re trying. No, Fox should not go with “Lean Backward” as the counterweight slogan.

How about this: “We’re Right!” It’s cute, but not too cute; a pun with a message.

The news/information paradox

2011-06-09T16:53:00.000-06:00

The theory that easy access to more information does actual violence to the quantity and quality of journalism now has some research behind it.

“In many communities, we now face a shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting,” wrote Steve Waldman in a report for the Federal Communications Commission and reported last week in the New York Times. “The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism — going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy — is in some cases at risk at the local level.”

What began as a business issue – how newspapers can remain profitable in the Age of Entertainment – is now becoming a vastly more urgent one. It’s one thing for newspapers to shrink in size or even for a few of them to go out of business. It’s quite another when the result of less local reporting is the loss of accountability for local governments. Waldman, a former reporter himself, fears it’s already happening.

It may come as no surprise that I have a theory or two about this.

First, more and more people are turning to a narrower selection of information sources. This sounds initially like a contradiction, but think about it. A generation or two ago, there were fewer information sources but they tended to be broader in scope. Information consumers were exposed to a wider selection of ideas. Today, there’s reason to believe that Americans increasingly turn only to information sources that reinforce their already-held ideas.

So, liberals rely on MSNBC and Huffington Post, conservatives on Fox News and the Drudge Report. For every narrow niche there is a source of information that caters to it.

In turn, this has exploded the advertising options for businesses, many of which used to spend almost exclusively with newspapers and television stations. As revenues got tighter, newsrooms got smaller. The issue for newspaper isn’t reduced readership – most of us have more readers than ever. Advertising, however, is being split among more competitors. The Post Register has not been immune to this.

Our response has been to refocus our resources onto covering local news with a lesser emphasis on national and world news. We’d like to have more feet on the streets covering local stories, but we’re doing pretty well. If anything, the value of our local news has never been greater.

For newspapers, the challenge is to discover sustainable business models in a vastly more complex world. For information consumers, I offer this simple but heartfelt proposition: Love it or hate it, read your local newspaper. It’s where journalism starts, and journalism is a vastly different thing than most of what you read on your laptop, smart phone or TV screen.

Tips for the serious Post Talker

2011-06-07T16:37:00.001-06:00

More than a year now into our experiment of moderating Post Talk, it could hardly be labeled a rousing success -- though we have managed to drag the quality of the commentary from raw gutter level to something resembling a bar-room brawl.

Simply requiring people to use their real names and moderating the content to take out the very worst insults don’t result in an enlightening debate. More likely, each thread deteriorates into a conservative/liberal, Republican/Democratic, right/wrong thrashing about, more often than not targeting other people instead of ideas.

I personally take care of a good share of the moderating work, mostly because it’s such an unpleasant task that I don’t wish to foist it on other folks who are already overburdened with work and sorrow. This job has taught me some posting tips I wish to share with Post Talk’s participants and lurkers alike, in the hopes of raising the level of conversation even a smidge.

1. Before making a claim of fact, do your research. You may not be a journalist, but a simple combination of common sense, Google skills and some tenacity will usually lead you to accurate information. Don’t post something just because you want it to be true.

2. Don’t make accusations in the form of a question, like this: “Baby killer?” Putting the question mark on it doesn’t make it OK. If you want to make some sort of accusation, do it forthrightly, with the facts to back you up.

3. Don’t immediately dive into an Internet tête-à-tête with a person holding an opposing view that leaves the philosophical argument behind and gets right into issues of character or personality. These are painful to watch and don’t gain either participant any points.

4. Don’t use glittering generalities or loaded language. In the former, the writer either intentionally or unknowingly uses positive terms so broad in scope as to render them meaningless in an effort to further his case. In the latter, the writer tosses in emotional words with negative overtones, also in an attempt to persuade people to her side. Fortunately, most readers see right through these efforts.

5. Don’t feel like you need to comment on everything. If you don’t have anything thoughtful to add, don’t post. Some posters seem to think that short, meaningless posts on nearly every topic are pithy and display a broad range of knowledge. They are more likely to serve as distractions.

None of this is to say that Post Talk shouldn’t be a place for sharp disagreement; that is, after all, its main purpose. But somehow, when people debate on the faceless Internet, they are willing to type things they’d never dream of saying to someone’s face.