Somewhere, they are still reading newspapers!

The National Newspaper Association (which generally represents weeklies and small dailies in the U.S.) claims that "community newspapers" are alive, well, and prospering. They've announced the results of a study done by the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute, which appears to indicate that in smaller markets, people are, possibly, actually increasing their newspaper reading.

NNA Executive Director Brian Steffens said that most of the news about the financial health of newspapers is coming from the largest 100 to 250 newspapers.

“That is just a small slice of the picture,” he said....

Steffens noted that in the most recent study, 77 percent of the respondents rated community newspaper local coverage good to excellent. Since 2005, NNA has had three studies done. Steffens said the results from all three are consistent....

The three studies sampled consecutively smaller markets. The first one tested markets with a population of 100,000, the second study sampled markets with a population of 50,000 and the third study looked at markets with a circulation of less than 25,000.

There's a graph showing "very often" readership increasing from about 40 percent to nearly 70 percent over the three studies. But of course, these studies are not consistent in the types of markets they examined. Furthermore, the study's details are not available to you and me; they're hidden behind the organization's membership firewall. (Although some details of the 2005 and 2007 studies are available at the Reynolds Institute site.)

It would be nice to look at those details, but I would suggest the reasons the graph trends upward over the three studies is simply that in the smallest markets, you find the oldest readers. If the NNA studied readership in the same markets over a period of time, they'd find the same overall readership decline the largest papers are seeing, especially among younger demographics.

Now (full disclosure here), I served briefly on the NNA board myself, and I know Brian Steffens and some of the current board members. In my interactions with the group, I often heard the mantra that "community newspapers" are doing quite well, thank you very much. And in fact, they probably are, because they tend to be more in tune with their communities and their readers than big dailies. It's possible this lulls some of them into complacency, as well—in fact, many weeklies and small dailies are still resistant to the idea of offering all, or even any, of their content free online.

There may be a delayed effect, but I believe these newspapers are just as vulnerable to such problems as the inroads of Craiglist on classified advertising and the decline of readership among younger readers as the big boys are, and they should be urgently pursuing solutions by becoming online-driven news organizations.

The good news is their size: small means nimble, and with that comes the ability to innovate, launch quickly, keep a finger on the pulse of the market, react rapidly, and keep things simple. The dinosaurs in big markets tend to have a bit of trouble with those things.

The Globe's new niche

Here's an interesting development: the Boston Globe has launched a new sports tab called OT (which stands for Our Town-Our Sports), kicking off with a press run of 20,000 copies to be sold for 50 cents a copy. The venture apparently has no real online component except a blog. So much for my theory that to succeed in the future, news ventures need to be built around an online-first presentation. But of course, the differences are that (a) Boston is a completely sports-crazy town, (b) the Globe has a fine, edgy sports team capable of doing more, and (c) we're talking about sports here, not news, and when it comes to sports, you can sell print, TV, online, T-shirts, videogames — hell, people will even pay to go to a live sports event. What we have here is a niche product. If it succeeds, and I think it will, I would not be surprised to see the Globe try out an entertainment tab, visitor guides, and even publications aimed at niche demographics like mothers, working women, the elderly, and singles. It's all part of the fracturing of the once-monolithic interests of the American public, which is demolishing the newspaper business while creating many other opportunities (as I expounded upon previously).

I want my Interface Agents, right now

At the risk of getting too Google-heavy in my posts here...

What the hell. You have to pay attention to the 800-pound Googrilla, even when they are just speculating. So Marissa Mayer, Google VP for "Search Products and User Experience" has posted to the Google Blog her thoughts on the Future of Search. Quoth Marissa:

The face of search will change dramatically over the next 10 years. Maybe it should contain even more videos and images, maybe it should sharply differentiate the relative weight and accuracy of the results more, maybe it should be more interactive in terms of refinements? We’re not sure yet, but we do know that the one thing that the search experience can’t be - especially in the face of the online media explosion we’re currently experiencing - is stagnant.

Actually, if you read the whole thing, she's not telling us much. But does it have something to do with how news will reach you in the future? Yes. Because that won't be stagnant, either.

This afternoon, at a certain moment, John McCain's campaign announced that he was pulling out of the planned Friday night presidential debate in order to attend to business in Washington. Within minutes, this news was on the Associated Press wire and atop the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post sites.

But Google News, which is (allegedly) brought to us without human intervention by proprietary algorithms lodged deep in the bunkers of Mountain View, took at least 30 minutes to begin featuring the fairly momentous development. I suspect that's because the machinery at Google looks for a certain amount of momentum in a story (numbers of news sources publishing it, and the speed at which it is spreading) to decide that it must be important. Yet, earthshaking developments (not that McCain's decision was one of those) can easily be broken by one or two news organizations that will own them for a while before anyone else picks them up.

In a (future) world where news is brought to us instantaneously on portable electronic devices of some kind, we will expect someone or something to do the sorting-out for us. We don't want to have to glean, ourselves, the stuff that's of interest to us from a broad stream of news bulletins coming at us. We'll need a news search function that's tailored to our individual needs. And we'll want it to be instantaneous, just as basic search is today—not delayed by 30 minutes, or even 3 minutes.

In a way, this brings us back to the "interface agents" posited by Patti Maes back in the dark ages of 1993, described in my first post. As envisioned at the time, these "Knowbots" might roam the Internet on your behalf, finding information of interest to you. Given computer speeds and indexing algorithms at the time, this was not seen as an instantaneous function—the internet would be huge, so your agents would need some time, maybe days, to cover all that ground. But as it turns out, of course, no matter how vast vaster the internet gets, or how broad the bandwidth of news coming at us, we want instant delivery of crucial news and information.

Moreover, Maes's proposed agents had intelligence—they would learn, gradually, what your interests and priorities were, and taylor their deliveries accordingly. Aside from perhaps prioritizing stories according some keywords you've specified, that function is still somewhere past the horizon for all online news sites.

So, Marissa, back to the drawing board. The gap is down to 30 minutes, but that's an eternity. And, along with even more speed, start building some intelligence into my Google News—it should be able to figure out, without me telling it, that I'm interested (among other things) in any kind of news about the Red Sox, the island of Texel in the Netherlands, the politics of Vermont, and deep-sea archaeology.

Why not Wikify?—Updated 1

It turns out there is at least one other voice crying in the wilderness: "Wikify, wikify!" (See my recent post entitled "Why not Wikify?"

Matt Thompson, who blogs personally at Snarkmarket, is currently on a one-year fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute of the University of Missouri, where he is working on a research project entitled "Wikipedia-ing the News." (via Fimoculous) From his original proposal:

To paint a broad picture: Imagine if the work of the hundreds of reporters dispatched daily to cover a city didn’t merely fade into an obscure archive, but added day after day to the work that came before it. An online news site in the era of Wikipedia would be a living archive, adaptable to suit any context, growing to encompass all aspects of life in a community. Entries would be deeply and meaningfully interlinked to other entries, elegantly situating every news event in multiple larger contexts. The “latest news” on the site could be a kind of changelog, reflecting new additions or edits in the system. The site would be a news commons atop which other narrative presentations of the news — stories, blogs, videos, games — could sit.

He said it better than I did, but a couple of my paragraphs offer seamless elaboration:

And then, dare I suggest, why not allow readers to edit the wiki as well, with the reporter who "owns" the issue keeping an eye on it to prevent abuse? It works at Wikipedia itself, why would it not work at a local newspaper wiki?

Once established, readers could add new topics, including pages on the history and amenities of the area, on elected and appointed local officials and legislators, on businesses and non-profit organizations, on schools and churches, on clubs, bands, rivers, mountains, parks and what-have-you. Every new news story might come with a series of wiki references to allow readers to explore the backgrounds of not only the issues but also the personalities, buildings and organizations involved.

See also Matt's "elevator pitch," or capsule summary of what he's talking about.

As Matt points out, this whole notion was suggested in the American Press Institute's February 2008 report, "NewspaperNext 2.0—Making the Leap Beyond 'Newspaper Companies'" (PDF, page 13). I had read their idea and should have mentioned it, but at least as described in their report, API's notion of a "localpedia" sounded more descriptive than dynamic. It did not incorporate the "living archive" aspect Matt and I have envisioned, in which the local wiki follows all ongoing news stories and the "latest news" becomes the equivalent of a "changelog," which reflects the stories most recent incremental changes.

Matt's cubicle neighbor at Reynolds is my friend Bill Densmore, who is there working on another project worthy of extended mention (soon!), the Information Valet Project. I'll be keeping tabs on both Matt's and Bill's progress with interest!

Monetizing Google News

Google News, from the time of its launch in 2002 until January, 2006, carried a "Beta" label, meaning (presumably) that it was in a development stage. When "Beta" was finally dropped, with no other apparent changes to the site. To this day, Google News carries no ads, but it has about 20 fully-dedicated employees at the Googleplex.

Now, Google has plenty of revenue and can easily afford the non-revenue-producing employees in that unit, but you do have to ask, how does Google monetize Google News?

The conventional wisdom has been that Google doesn't want to put ads directly on Google News pages, because the content-providing news organizations would rebel. They like the fact that Google indexes their stories and drives traffic to them, but they might object if Google put AdWords on the site. And in fact, many of those news organizations carry Google AdWords on their own sites, so Google benefits by driving traffic to them (and that feeling is mutual, given the way AdWords revenue is split between Google and the carrying sites).

Moreover, Google displays News results on its Web Search pages, and depending on the search term, AdWords do appear there. For example, try doing a Google Web search on "stock market," and you'll see Google News results, AdWords, Google BlogSearch and GoogleBooks results all on the first search results page (at least, for me, right now), yielding multiple ways for Google to monetize that particular search. (Other searches might include also Google Shopping results, still in Beta after all these years, where Google makes money via Google Checkout, the availability of which is prominently indicated where appropriate).

All of which is preamble to Google's newly announced News Archive Search. In reality, this feature has been around for a couple of years as well, so it's a little puzzling why Google made a fuss about announcing it this month.

What seems to be new is that now, Google will be cooperating with newspapers in scanning their microfilm archives, and sharing AdWords revenue with them when served in conjunction with search results from their sites.

One editor, Andrew Smith of the Dallas Morning News, opines that "it's nice to know that the company that's putting us newspapers out of business will at least preserve our memory."
This kind of comment is perhaps to be expected from the legacy media, but the bottom line is that Google has figured out yet another way to monetize content it didn't create and doesn't own.

It's high time for the legacy media types to figure out how to do the same thing with content they did create and do own.

Why not Wikify?

Most news organizations, both online-only and traditional media with web sites, are keenly scanning the technological horizon for the latest trends to incorporate into their sites. As noted yesterday, Twittering is now in the news site toolkit, joining a host of features adopted earlier—including discussion boards, commenting, video and audio clips, blogs, personalized home pages, RSS feeds and site search, along with all manner of ad presentation techniques from pop-ups to contextual ads to Flash.

So, why haven't newsrooms noticed Wikipedia? And why haven't they considered what might be done in newsrooms with the freely-available, open source, MediaWiki software that drives Wikipedia and many other wiki sites?

Here's how a reporter approaches a story at a local paper. She gathers information about what's happening by going to the event, covering the meeting, and/or interviewing some sources. Then, back at the desk, she usually rummages through a bunch of files and notes, ransacks the morgue where clip files are kept, and/or searches through whatever electronic archive system the paper may possess, in order to add background to the story. This is important because most stories are part of a larger, ongoing local issue that may have years of background readers need to be continually reminded of, and even a fire or murder can benefit from some background on the building or the victim culled from the newspaper's records.

The thing is, this process must be repeated whenever there's a new development, and especially when there's a new reporter on the beat, which is frequently, these days. Similarly, readers interested in researching an issue need to delve into the paper's archives online or at the public library and potentially go through many stories to get the picture. Wouldn't it make sense to build all of the back story into a wiki on the topic, and to make it the responsibility of the reporter to update the wiki whenever something new happens? And once the wiki is created, why not make it available online, linked in the printed and online versions of the story, so a reader can get a summary of all the background the paper possesses, not just whatever the reporter considers relevant to the current story.

And then, dare I suggest, why not allow readers to edit the wiki as well, with the reporter who "owns" the issue keeping an eye on it to prevent abuse? It works at Wikipedia itself, why would it not work at a local newspaper wiki?

Once established, readers could add new topics, including pages on the history and amenities of the area, on elected and appointed local officials and legislators, on businesses and non-profit organizations, on schools and churches, on clubs, bands, rivers, mountains, parks and what-have-you. Every new news story might come with a series of wiki references to allow readers to explore the backgrounds of not only the issues but also the personalities, buildings and organizations involved.

If anyone is doing something even remotely like this, I'd like to know. I'm aware only of one stab taken toward this in Brattleboro, VT, where a "Brattleboro Community Brain Trust" in wiki format is slowly accumulating content. Very slowly. It's mostly historical stuff and it's not updated with current events. The latest news on it seems to be Brattleboro's resolution against a war with Iran, passed in March 2008, which is published without background or other context. The site's timeline for Vermont Yankee, a nuclear plant that's the hottest issue in town, ends in 2007, even though there have been almost daily developments this year in the plant's effort to be relicensed for another 20 years of operation.

Elsewhere, Wikispot is trying to foment the creation of local wikis, not in association with news media (have they tried, though?). The most successful of these appears to be in Davis, CA. You'll find a lot of information about Davis there, but the most recent news on it is dated June 23, 2008. And it features no effort to wikify issues rather than individual news events.

Keith Buchanan, a McClatchy staffer, posted a brief thought this summer about newspaper-sponsored local wikis on the McClatchy blog, but the idea seems to have landed with a very soft thud there. Wikipedia itself has a page on local wikis around the world, which demonstrates that not many of them have gained any traction, and none of them are sponsored by a news organization. The definition there of "city wiki" does not even include the idea of using the wiki to track ongoing issues and other news stories.

It's often said that newspapers are the first draft of history. (Today, Twitter is, but that was yesterday's news.) With wiki technology, newspapers can write the next draft, and continue to update and refine it, assisted by their readers. And it can help them "monetize" the Web, by getting more mileage out of the content they create, attracting more site users, generating more page views, and selling more ad exposures.

Tweet

So, back in June I was at a conference in California, when the organizer asked the group (of 125 or so attendees, most of them under 45) "How many of you are on Twitter?"

"Twitter" had entered my consciousness, peripherally, but I had not the foggiest idea what it really was. About half the group (probably the youngest half) raised their hands. The organizer told them he had set up a Twitter group for the conference, so that people could Tweet one another about what was going on. Then someone explained Twitter to the rest of us. Basically, it's microblogging—Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters, and the idea is to post them as you go about your business so that your friends will know what your doing, how you're feeling, where you are, whatever you want them to know about you at that very moment. Twitter feeds can arrive on your cell phone or on your computer.

Getting an explanation of Twitter doesn't really tell you what it is, however. The usual reaction is, "Why would I want to know exactly what everyone is doing all the time?" Adherents say that you probably need to use it for while to get it. If you're not inclined, or equipped, to do that, well, Clive Thompson of the New York Times Magazine was brave enough to give it a try, and to explain it to us last Sunday in a piece entitled "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy."

He explains that living with a constant stream of Twitter and Facebook updates from a cloud of friends provides "ambient awareness":

Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.... The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life....

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.

What does this have to do with news? Well, various media are starting to cover news via Twitter. (On occasion they're getting in trouble for it, for example by Tweeting the funeral of a 3-year old in Denver.)

Many sports reporters (who are often on the cutting edge of journalism) have started live-blogging by posting 10 or 15 times during games, and some are micro-blogging via Twitter. I don't think this kind of unidirectional microblogging is the best use for the technology, however. Twitter is by its nature a group awareness system.

So, soon, you might find Twitter groups forming at sports events, allowing fans to comment on the plays not only with their immediate neighbors in the stands, but with people seated throughout the stadium, or watching at home. Twitter also makes sense at other crowd events such as the recent political conventions, which were highly Twittered (or is it Tweeted?—whatever). But those were individual feeds (for example), not groups. The real potential is for a constant flow of messages from a posse of reporters, bloggers and even rank-and-file attendees at such an event creating a sense of the ambient flow and mood of the gathering. I'm not sure that spontaneous Twitter groups of this kind are happening*, yet, but it makes sense that they would develop. They would help reporters cover an event by providing another way to capture the mood, while at the same time providing an instant "ambient awareness" flow for anyone tuned in.

*(Steve Meyers at Poynter did set up a group called DNCJournalists for the Democratic Convention, which still has a bit of chatter on it, but it seems to have picked up only a miniscule following)

Niche media and objectivity

In my discussion the other day of whether newspapers are doomed, I set forth my theory that rather than the internet, it's the fracturing of America's once-monolithic set of interests and concerns that's sinking newspapers that are still trying to be mass media.

Along comes Farhad Manjoo, ex-Cornell-Sun editor, ex-Salon writer and currently Slate technology columnist, with a similar view and a corollary conclusion:

The mainstream is drying up. In some ways, we are returning to the freewheeling days before radio and television launched the very idea of mass media—the era of partisan newspapers and pamphleteers. But our niches, now, are more niche than ever before. We are entering what you might call the trillion-channel universe: over the last two decades, advances in technology—the digital recording and distribution of text, images, and sound over information networks, a.k.a., the modern world—have helped to turn each of us into producers, distributors, and editors of our own media diet. Now we collect the news firsthand through digital cameras, we send our accounts and opinions to the world over blogs, and we use Google, TiVo, the iPod, and a raft of other tools to carefully screen what we consume.

As I said. Manjoo then suggests this is leading also to an increase in bias:

Studies of the media and of human psychology, some conducted recently but many long before the digital revolution, provide compelling insight into the consequences of a fragmented media. Although information now flows more freely than it did in the past—and this is certainly a salutary development—today's news landscape will also, inevitably, help us to indulge our biases and pre-existing beliefs.

On my list to explore in this blog is one of those many niche media, so-called "citizen journalism" sites, which usually come with an activist-inspired stated mission of serving democracy but which in reality often have more of a slant than the "legacy media" they seek to supplant or augment. More on that soon.

Meanwhile, it seems to me the real opportunity in developing new media outlets is to find ways to be scrupulously objective, whether the reporting is being done by citizen journalists or "real" journalists. More on how that might come about soon, as well.

New entrant in the e-newspaper reader field

Just as we're discussing the Kindle and other existing e-book readers as newspaper reading devices, along comes word (in a New York Times story today) of a new entrant in the field, an e-reader as yet without a brand name, from the firm Plastic Logic of (where else?) Mountain View, CA. The screen is about 8.5 by 11 inches, around twice the size of the Kindle, Sony and Iliad screens, and its E-Ink screen is backed by a new plastic substrate developed at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. It'll be on sale early next year at a price not yet announced.

It's good news that this "space" is getting more crowded—this will drive more newspaper publishers (and other news content producers) to get serious about publishing for e-readers, and price competition will attract more buyers.

Also, this will apparently be Plastic Logic's first and principal product, making the company a "pure play." (See the company's products page for links to video demos.) Their real aim is to get to market with a flexible screen, which has been the holy grail of e-paper—reusable electronic paper you can "roll up and put in your pocket." The Cavendish substrate will have this capability in future editions.

Kindle—any promise as a news delivery tool?

Can Kindle become the iPod of news?

It's got a lot going for it, but probably not, in its present incarnation. The Kindle was introduced a little less than a year ago by Amazon. The company won't say how many units it has sold, or how many e-books have been purchased by Kindle owners, or how many newspaper subscriptions. There's plenty of content available—currently 160,000 book titles, newspapers, magazines, and blogs, according to Amazon. But what concerns us here is news: right now, there are exactly 25 newspapers available, which is not a lot. They include the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, London Times, Le Monde, and Shanghai Daily, at prices ranging from $5.99 to $14.99 a month.

So, for well under the newsstand or home delivery price, you can be reading your favorite paper on an e-book reader, but the gadget will cost you $359. This is progress? Oh, you can also get your choice of a couple of dozen blogs like Huffington Post, Slashdot, Boing Boing, or The Onion for $1.99 a month, or one of 17 magazines for a $1.25 to $3.49.

Now, the trouble is, (a) no color, (b) most of this content is available for free online, wherever you can connect to the internet on your desk- or laptop. My normal morning surfing would add up to $100 or more a month, and a lot of other things I look at online are simply not reachable via Kindle.

But hold on, there's a solution. Via Feedbooks, you can create your own personalized newspaper from multiple RSS feeds. (The trouble with this is, of course, that while you can get the news mix you want, you're doing the kind of personal aggregation possible also at sites like DailyMe, for which the media creating the content get little or no revenue. But still, from a publisher's point of view, perhaps eyeballs are better than no eyeballs.)

The Kindle may well be the best-selling e-book reader around (allegedly 280,000 units sold), although there's no way to know for sure. What's next for Kindle? Several sources are rumoring an imminent 2.0 version: one with a larger, better screen, thinner body, and more streamlining in general. And Amazon also seems to be eyeing a truly logical market: e-textbooks.

A bigger user base is probably a prerequisite for more news dissemination via the Kindle, or any other e-book reader. So improvements in the Kindle's functionality features are steps in the right direction. But along with major and minor tweaks, it will take some major cost reductions to turn it into a more widely used tool for reading news.